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Don't give up pole position on standards!
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Common Core, Blog: Education, Jim Stergios, News, Related Education Blogs /byThere is little to add to today’s Globe editorial on academic standards other than to applaud the detail and effort that went into hearing out all sides and making the right, nuanced judgment. “Don’t let national ed reform push down standards in Mass.” is a strong piece: MASSACHUSETTS JUMPED wholeheartedly into the fight to raise academic standards when other states were content to maintain a low profile and low expectations. Now, the Obama administration and the National Governors’ Association are trying to prod those other states into action by setting national standards for achievement in English and math. If the federal government starts awarding grants for adopting those standards, Massachusetts could stand to gain — but not if it is […]
A world without public sector unions?
/0 Comments/in Blog, News /byThe Cato Institute just released a brief history of public-sector unionization and some recent data. The recommendation is as you might predict–a ban on collective bargaining in the public sector–but that is hardly an extreme position unless you think North Carolina and Virginia alien territory. After all, they do in fact ban it. Yeah, I know. But it is worth a read!
Let Them Eat Cake
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Better Government, News /byPlease, please, my friends at the Greenway — don’t get too precious about vetting what foods are healthy enough to be sold on the Greenway. You need to draw people, put whatever people want to come and eat. I’m all in favor of healthy, local options on my own dime but you need an infusion of people, not a monument. This quote gives me pause: “You can imagine people squeezing fresh lemons or fresh oranges,’’ said Nancy Brennan, executive director of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway Conservancy. “You can imagine high-end grilled cheese sandwiches with local cheese as the centerpiece of really good bread.’’ I can also imagine families and workers that would rather have something tasty and affordable. And […]
Border Tolls Are Coming
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Better Government, News /byI’m not sure how much of this is political theater or unrelated events, but both Connecticut and New Hampshire are pretty seriously considering border tolls. It seems pretty certain that Massachusetts would respond by putting up a border toll on I-93 (seeing as how the Pike tolls largely act like a border toll now on the short piece of I-84 in our state). Drivers are not going to like it, but it will leave each state with more transportation money. The last piece of the puzzle would be a move to open-road tolling, which seems to happening here.
Kudos to Anne Wass
/0 Comments/in Blog, News, Related Education Blogs /byJamie Vaznis leads the Globe with a story that really needs a lot of attention — no matter what your view is. We’ve said it many times before: High academic standards are the lifeblood of high student achievement in our public schools — all of our public schools. We love public charters because they are effective delivery mechanisms, but would we want charters without high academic standards? No thanks. That’s one of the principal reasons why charters in other states often are as ineffective as their district school peers. You’ve seen my view on standards in many a blog post, so let’s applaud others for theirs — and let’s hope they remain strong on this issue. First kudos go to […]
NY Times decades behind on standards
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Common Core, Blog: Education, Jim Stergios, News, Related Education Blogs /byThe editorial on the national standards in today’s New York Times is uninformed as to beggar belief. “National School Standards, At Last” argues that: The countries that have left the United States behind in math and science education have one thing in common: They offer the same high education standards — often the same curriculum — from one end of the nation to the other. The problem with the proposed national standards is not that they would be uniform, though there are good reasons to fear what they would mean for states like Massachusetts, which have used federalism to push ever higher. The principal problem is that the proposed standards are not high at all. The Times goes on to […]
MetroWest Daily: Not these national standards
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Common Core, Blog: Education, Jim Stergios, News, Related Education Blogs /byThe MetroWest Daily today also published a different op-ed piece by Ze’ev Wurman and Sandy Stotsky on the national standards. The piece makes the point that the standards effort started out as a voluntary for states. But President Obama just announced that signing on to once voluntary standards would be a condition for receipt of federal funding, even though the standards aren’t even complete and recent drafts are woefully deficient. In short, the “Common Core College Readiness” standards wouldn’t get you into college. Our review of a recent draft finds that they fail to meet the requirements of almost all the nation’s state colleges and universities. The standards are not benchmarked against those in high-achieving countries. As a result, requirements […]
Worcester T&G: Keep nat'l standards voluntary
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Common Core, Blog: Education, Jim Stergios, News, Related Education Blogs /byToday’s Worcester Telegram & Gazette editorial underscores that adoption of the national standards needs to remain voluntary. The core of the argument is that the federal government should not have “legal power” over the standards. Washington is pressing to command a greater role in dictating what American children should learn, and how they should be taught. The result could be a useful adjunct to local and state instruction, or a costly blunder into a thicket of bureaucracy that does real harm to taxpayers and students. A common set of education standards that draws upon the collective wisdom of educators could present underachieving states and school districts with successful models to emulate, such as those in Massachusetts. But such standards must […]
Wurman & Stotsky skewer the proposed national standards
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Common Core, Blog: Education, Jim Stergios, News, Related Education Blogs /byIn the past days, the announcements by Minnesota and Virginia that they are most likely not going to adopt the common core standards drove giant holes right through the wall of consensus that the CCSSO and NGA have tried to maintain. Ze’ev Wurman, a high-tech executive in Silicon Valley active in developing California’s standards and assessments in the mid-1990s, and Sandy Stotsky, one of the nation’s top experts on academic standards, authored our research, Race to the Middle?, chronicling the numerous weaknesses in previous drafts of the common core standards drafts, as well as the soft conceptual underpinning for the whole effort. In today’s Boston Globe, they come out swinging on the public comment drafts. This is a must read, […]
Our Stand on Standards
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Common Core, Blog: Education, Jim Stergios, News, Related Education Blogs /bySeems our report and the release of the common core standards draft have set off a lot of interest in Massachusetts’ view, and especially in Pioneer’s take on the national standards effort. See Jay Greene’s blog for a long string of comments. Here is a bit of a longish overview of some of the issues we see in this from the Massachusetts and the national perspective. First, the Mass perspective: 1. Standards are the lifeblood of student achievement in public schools; and that includes even those site-based managed schools that are based on parental choice. You all know the stories of charters and voucher programs that don’t deliver the kind of transformational improvement we all want. In MA, our charters […]
And now VA takes a pass on national standards
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Common Core, Blog: Education, Jim Stergios, News, Related Education Blogs /byBob Stuart of the News Virginian reports that now Virginia won’t jump onboard a push for national K-12 standards if it means dumping the state’s standardized test, the governor and other state officials said. … Some of the proposed English and math benchmarks already are partially embedded in Virginia’s standardized test, known as the Standards of Learning, or SOL, educators said. While Gov. Robert F. McDonnell supports the idea of international benchmarks, he said he does not want to substitute the core English and math standards for the SOL’s. “The commonwealth’s policies have demonstrated a significant commitment to accountability, benchmarks and positive education reform,’’ McDonnell said in a statement. “While we support the development of internationally benchmarked targets, we do […]
Wow, That's A Promotion
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Better Government, News /byMIT’s Professor Peter Diamond, a well-regarded authority on employee benefits, spent some quality time last year on the Commonwealth’s Special Commission on Pension Reform. I went to every meeting and attempted to chronicle that effort. One of the lowlights of those meetings was PERAC Executive Director Joseph Connarton’s crude mocking of the Professor at one point. It was all part of the odd dynamic in that room — the central conflict was between Connarton (who is appointed by a board that has several gubernatorial appointees) and Commission Chair Alicia Munnell and Professor Diamond (both appointed by the Governor). Well, it seems that Diamond is going to be ok. Obama is going to appoint him to the Federal Reserve.
Hole punched in national standards effort
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Common Core, Blog: Education, Jim Stergios, News, Related Education Blogs /byAs Sam Dillon of the New York Times noted our opposition to the national standards effort because it would weaken the Massachusetts standards. And now the opposition builds. Governor Pawlenty of Minnesota punched a hole in the life raft that the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association are drifting along on, together with all their fellow travelers, by refusing to join the national standards effort because it would entail weakening the state’s math standards: “The math portion of the draft K-12 education standards unveiled today would water down Minnesota’s rigorous standards that require students to take algebra by eighth grade. In a hypercompetitive world, Minnesota should not adopt less rigorous standards than we currently have […]
Closing time for some libraries
/1 Comment/in Blog, News /byThere is a reasonable accommodation that has to be made as regards the libraries in Boston. Here are a few facts that no one debates: More and more information, and more and more books, are being viewed online; There are specific areas and groups who have less access to online resources; The libraries are currently understaffed, and that will be more so if no changes are made; The library hours will need to be cut down if no changes are made. The mayor deserves praise for raising this issue and noting that we have to change with the times. Does that mean shuttering all the libraries. Heck no. We need libraries as physical spaces where children and moms, people who […]
How to cut health insurance costs by 18%
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Better Government, News /byGot your attention? The State has put a wealth of disclosure from health insurers and providers up on the web. I lack the time and, frankly, the chops to really get at all the good stuff but I did find a few interesting pieces of disclosure. In Partners’s disclosure, they note the rates they charge insurers could have been 18% lower in 2008, if government funded programs had covered their costs. (Yes, I am naively assuming that the insurers would pass that savings along to consumers.) Put another way, Partners had negative operating margins of -33% on Medicare and -44% on Medicaid in 2009. Also, floating around in the ether around the federal health care reform debate is a proposal […]