2008 Edublog Awards

My Nomination for The 2008 Edublog Awards is:

Best Group Blog: This Week in Education

Burr, Gregg Introduce No Child Left Behind and Reauthorization Bill

MAINTAINS STRONG ACCOUNTABILITY,

STRENGTHENS PARENTAL EMPOWERMENT

WASHINGTON– U.S. Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Judd Gregg (R-NH), members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee today introduced the first comprehensive reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act to be introduced in the 110th Congress. The proposal maintains strong accountability provisions in the bill and strengthens a number of teacher and parent initiatives.

Senator Gregg, one of the four authors of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act as then-Ranking Member of the Senate HELP Committee, stated, “The bill we are introducing today preserves the key tenets of the No Child Left Behind Act, while rightly responding to the legitimate concerns we’ve heard from parents, teachers and principals around the country. We maintain the accountability set forth in current law, which has contributed to historic increases in student achievement. In the 5 years since the passage of NCLB, student achievement has increased more than in the 30 years previous years combined. (This claim has been widely disputed.) While the bill preserves the NCLB accountability system, it also provides additional flexibility to help schools target resources and interventions to students and schools most in need of assistance

This from Alexander Russo & the Burr, Gregg press release.

The Hired Guns who move education legislation

This from Alexander Russo at This Week in Education:

Take a look at this overview of big-time DC lobbyists from Washingtonian and you'll not only see a lot of names that should be familiar to you (if you're in DC) -- Podesta, Boggs, Podesta, Weber -- but also learn a lot about how it all works -- the dark art of the earmark (a favorite of universities needing new buildings), the rivalry between private lobbying firms and law firms with lobbying practices, and the big money that's involved to get things done.

Find a client with an unmet need.

Grind out an earmark or a change in the law.

Mind it, to make sure it stays in there through committee, the floor, and the conference report.

Education insiders and Hill staff may have better day to day access know more about the issues in a general sense but they're often outmatched when it comes to specific interests, deep political knowledge, and legislative ins and outs.

Really, it's not fair. Funny that nearly all the firms are now owned by three big multinationals.

Spellings Pulls A Gonzales

Alexander Russo's blog commentary from This Week in Education was recently picked up by the Huffington Post. Here's his take on Spelling's Capitol Hill performance last week.

The only thing saving Education Secretary Margaret Spellings

from drifting into Alberto Gonzales territory

right now is, well, Alberto Gonzales.

If it weren't for the fact that everyone's attention is focused on him, more folks would notice that Spellings has been up to some very Gonzales-like things over at the Department of Education. (You can watch a video of the testimony here.)

In response to the growing litany of reports and investigations surrounding misdeeds in the multi-billion-dollar student lending industry, Spellings has, somewhat unbelievably, claimed that she lacked the authority to take on the lenders and universities who were manipulating the system for financial gain.

In response to the scandal surrounding an early literacy program called Reading First, which independent reports have found full of conflicts of interest and unwise if not illegal implementation, Spellings argues that she wasn't Secretary then and that everyone involved - former Secretary Rod Paige, former Assistant Secretary Gene Hickock, and others - has left.

True, Spellings wasn't Secretary back then when Reading First was headed off the rails. But it's not like she wasn't there. Before becoming the EdSec, Spellings was head of the Domestic Policy Council, which oversees education from the White House.

And yet, Spellings claims clean hands.

"It would have been impossible for me to have been intimately involved with oversight of all those programs," she said last week in Los Angeles about her responsibilities at the DPC. It's a response that comes awfully close to Gonzales infuriating claims to have not been involved in the Attorney General firings, and to not remember key events.

The Gonzales-Spellings similarities don't end there.

Like Gonzales, Spellings is continually vexed by a former employee who contradicts her account of events. For Gonzales, it's Kyle Sampson. For Spellings, it's Chris Doherty, the former head of the Reading First program, who was summarily dismissed when things started to heat up.

Doherty claims that the White House was intimately involved in every step of the implementation of the program, which allegedly violated federal statutes by excluding certain reading programs from being used. ("Four Officials Profited From Publishers, Report Finds," The Washington Post)

But none of this has led to the type of bipartisan piling-on that Gonzales has endured, nor the calls for her resignation...

For her part, Spellings has done her best to address the allegations against her management of these programs, and to divert attention when she can't. She announced the departure of one top student lending official on Tuesday, just before she was scheduled to testify. ("Federal Student Loan Official Is Resigning", The New York Times) She encouraged the House passage of a student lending "sunshine" law the day before she was to appear, which took much of the steam out of the Thursday proceedings. ("House Passes Ban on Gifts From Student Lenders", The New York Times)

This editorial from the New York Times underscores the point:

“It’s not our fault.” That’s what Education Secretary Margaret Spellings seemed to say while testifying before Congress last week about her department’s failure to halt the payoffs, kickbacks and general looting of the public treasury by a lending company that collected nearly $300 million in undeserved subsidies. But that doesn’t track with the federal Higher Education Act, which clearly authorizes the secretary to disqualify from federal programs lenders who employ payoffs, kickbacks and unethical practices like those that have been found to be commonplace in the college lending business.

Arrrgh..Matey. Cyber foolishness causes problems for "Drunken Pirate"

Millersville University: Protecting children from

once-drunken pirates since 2007.

A woman denied a teaching degree on the eve of graduation because of a MySpace photo has sued the university.

Millersville University instead granted Stacy Snyder a degree in English last year after learning of her Web-published picture, which bore the caption “Drunken Pirate.”

The photo, taken at a 2005 Halloween party, shows Snyder wearing a pirate hat while drinking from a plastic “Mr. Goodbar” cup. It was posted on her own MySpace site.

Although Snyder apologized, she learned the day before graduation that she would not be awarded an education degree or teaching certificate.

Jane S. Bray, dean of the School of Education, accused Snyder of promoting underage drinking, the suit states.

This from MSNBC, and This Week in Education.

This Week in ... Reading First

Alexander Russo's collection of quotes from the Reading First hearings.

“This hearing made it pretty clear that there was a very incestuous relationship among a small group of people in the Education Department and among contractors. They were very clearly using this program … for profit.”

"That sounds like a criminal enterprise to me," said Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House education committee, which held a five-hour investigative hearing. "You don't get to override the law," he angrily told a panel of Reading First officials. "But the fact of the matter is that you did."

"I'm very disappointed and saddened by the information that was provided at the hearing today," said former Bush reading advisor G. Reid Lyon, who had been a strong defender of Reading First. "The issues appear much more serious than I had been led to understand."

From This Week in Education.

And this from the Washington Post.

Vouchers and Charterization Not Off The Table... Yet

This Week in Education's Alexander Russo on NCLB reauthorization news:

Nobody who knows anything seems to think that voucher and charterization proposals like the ones in the Administration's NCLB 2 proposals stand a chance in Congress, but I continue not to be convinced. Specialized voucher proposals (for a geographic area, or a particular kind of student) are particularly hard to argue against, especially once you've already voted for them (as many in Congress have for Katrina and DC), and are in fact spreading at the state level (Vouchers Eyed for Students With Disabilities EdWeek).

It's nothing that a few good voucher abuse and ineffectiveness stories wouldn't erase. My current favorite is the one from Ohio about private school parents enrolling their kids in public schools for the last couple of days of the year in order to qualify for Ohio's voucher program.

Is the Average Photojournalist Smarter than a Fifth Grader?

This Week in Education Blogger Alexander Russo included a brief (4:13) video excerpt from This American Life. It will make perfect sense to those of you familiar with the 5th grade mindset.

This from Alexander.

"Once in a while, strange little crazes start in schools, often making adults crazy in the process. Showing his roots as an education reporter, This American Life's Ira Glass included a segment about a video-making craze that overtook one set of kids in the show's video premier, which aired last week. Not surprisingly, the craze turned out badly, and the grownups had to step in. It's shown here for free: Video: embedded. I think you can also watch the full segment online here."