Seems the election is really heating up. Check out this story about a Kansas City charter school teacher who was suspended Monday after a video of his students chanting pro-Obama cheers in fatigues became a sensation on YouTube.

It is only once in a rare blue moon that we get news like this. The irony is almost palpable. Detractors jump up and down with glee. Latent metaphors abound. It’s simply... beautiful.

What has me roaring with laughter before lunch?

The funders of Ed in ‘08, also known as Strong American Schools, are cuttin’ the dough. Oh yes, that’s right, the Gates and Broad Foundations have decided Ed in ‘08 is kaput!

But with Nov. 4 looming, education appears to have relatively low visibility. And the Gates and Broad family foundations have stopped contributing to the [Ed in ‘08] campaign after putting in a total of about $24 million.

I hate to say “we told you so,” (actually, I have no problem saying this at all) but really, we did. And if killing the initiative wasn’t enough, the excuses are PRICELESS.

“If we spend less than the maximum, it is because it is a reflection of the strategies we are executing,” said Marie Groark, senior program officer with the Gates Foundation. She acknowledged that it’s a tough environment for the issue to gain traction. “We are aware that there are significant competing priorities on the agenda,” she said.

This is just too good. “[T]he strategies we are excuting”? That’s corporate mumbo-jumbo if I’ve ever heard it. And “significant competing priorities,” huh? You mean like the fiscal crisis, the two front war, the multiple hurricanes and the blossoming deficit? Those priorities?

Or this,

For its part, the education campaign, branded “Ed in ‘08,” says it has been successful in steering the direction of the presidential dialogue toward education - if only temporarily - and that the Republican and Democratic nominees have cited its policy positions, particularly in recent weeks.

“Policy positions”? What policy positions??! As the wise and venerable Judge Judy once said, “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”

Well, folks, what’s the lesson to be learned here? Fordham knows what they’re talking about, fo’ serious. 

(Thanks to Alyson Klein for brightening my morning.)

Check it out.

* And maybe even a religion.

GADFLY NEWS SERVICE: HUNTSALOOSA, TN. A fourth-grade class in this small town gained national attention yesterday when a group of students petitioned their teacher to postpone their spelling test scheduled for Friday in light of the financial crisis on Wall Street.

“Mrs. Smith is always talking about ‘teachable moments,’” said Brandon Johnson, one of the students leading the charge. “It just seems silly to focus on something mundane like spelling when we could be learning about macro-economics instead.”

The students’ teacher at first dismissed the postponement out of hand, saying “fourth graders need to be able to learn to spell and learn about current events, all at the same time.” But she backed down after her principal called for a meeting between the teacher, students, and their parents. This led to even greater controversy.

“We never like to see principals siding with students over teachers,” said Nancy Beaker, the president of the National Education Association’s local affiliate. “This is doubly unfair because Mr. Grady [the school's principal] is related to the boy who is in the middle of all of this.” (They are second cousins.)

It’s unclear whether the spelling test will proceed as scheduled, or whether the students will win the day. But one thing is for sure: Mrs. Smith is not happy about what she calls “a big distraction.”

“I don’t care what’s happening in New York City, Huntsaloosa’s children need to spell correctly.”

“Polygamous community school gets NCLB honors“

“Indiana girl clocked at 118 m.p.h. held on DUI”

She allegedly told cops she was late for school.

My doubts were unfounded. Kathy Cox, the state superintendent of Georgia, is officially smarter than a fifth grader and is $1 million richer to prove it. The money will go to three special needs schools in her home state.

Mike Lach is one of the most dynamic reformers you’ll ever meet, and has been working inside Chicago Public Schools for several years, helping to build its capacity around curriculum and instruction. Now he’s set his sights on history and the rest of the social sciences. But he needs a hand. Here’s how he states his problem:

I need to develop a K-12 social science plan for the Chicago Public Schools. I’ve decided that this is important because (1) social science is inherently worth knowing and (2) learning social science will help learning in other subjects (like reading).

I have the following constraints, that I suspect are true in most other districts.

- Metrics for success are hard to come by. We have no social science testing of any sort right now in Illinois, and I’m not sure that there are decent tests out there other than NAEP. Developing them will be expensive and complicated. Our kids are over tested probably, anyway.

- I don’t have enough money to fund mathematics and reading, much less science and social studies. Any solution needs to developed cheaply.

- We’re just taking baby-steps to think about our 600 schools as a portfolio of various options for various constituents. Creating some “global studies” focused schools is fine, but it’s probably not a sufficient solution.

- There’s lots of partners interested in this work (banks with their financial literacy programs, the Constitutional Rights Foundation, law departments who are running peer juries, local museums with community history stuff, etc.) who are well meaning but not very well coordinated. They have varying levels of capacity, but probably none are interested in running their own schools with this focus.

Might some sort of national alignment of resources or attention help solve this in ways that other initiatives haven’t been able to? What’s the pro-charter, pro-content and instruction, anti-establishment, pro-accountability solution to this situation?

Email me your suggestions (mpetrilli@edexcellence.net) or post them as a comment below. Whoever suggests the most promising idea will win a free copy of David Whitman’s latest book, Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism. The deadline is noon on Friday.

Since the blog has taken a more serious turn as of late, I proffer you this:

“Ga. Schools superintendent to appear on ‘5th grader’”

How we allowed ourselves to not immediately thank the anonymous blogger codenamed Eduwonkette for her delightful Photoshop work is beyond me. We were remiss. However, if she wishes to join us right-of-center think tank folk for cocktail hour, she would do well to jettison her visions of beer and embrace our right-of-center ritual, which involves sipping cognac from snifters and remarking about how this, that, and the other is really going to hell in a handbasket and what is to be done about it all.

Eduwonkette introduced her readers to some new blogs yesterday, including one chronicling the day-to-day life of “Mimi” the teacher. I know we’ve had some contentious back-and-forths about teachers on this site, but I think everyone can find some humor in this story from Mimi’s site. End-of-the-year “thanks, teach!” presents don’t get much better than this.

Chinese students are, overall, far more advanced in mathematics than their American peers. Which is probably why they can create Segway armies.

(Hat tip to The Big Picture.)

“Gambling addict gets 18 months for embezzling schools”

It started with small stuff, like overhead projectors. But when she bet the library in a game of high-stakes hold‘em, the clinic on red, and the playground on Federer, and lost them all, administrators suspected something was amiss.

Britain’s schools minister is Lord Adonis. Its schools secretary is Mr. Balls.

A reader (a teacher, it seems) writes to the St. Petersburg Times:

Did Jeb Bush really say “our education system is an eight-track system living in an iPod world”?

That proves he is frighteningly out of touch, and that he hasn’t set foot inside a classroom in at least 30 years: Nowhere have I ever seen one of those obsolete devices in any school I have been in as a student or teacher.

I can assure you our schools are more technologically current than most people’s homes. But Jeb Bush still envisions purple-inked dittos, green boards and yellow chalk, back when the teacher wore her hair in a severe bun and rapped knuckles with rulers.

The pressure high school students face to get into top colleges has intensified to the point that it’s susceptible to some hilarious satirizing.

Eduwonkette flatters us. Unfortunately, Mike can’t carry a tune, and he’s just too damn honest to lip-sync.

This Saturday A Nation at Risk turns twenty-five.

As with most birthdays after one’s twenty-first, the occasion is bittersweet. As Fordham president Checker Finn reflects in today’s Education Gadfly, the lessons of A Nation at Risk, despite the report’s landmark status for sounding “an overdue and much-needed alarum,” still struggle to be heard over the din of misguided deniers. That’s a shame, he says, for the “biggest single reason, I believe, that America’s education reform efforts of the past quarter century have yielded such meager returns is that we haven’t given them our all.”

Indeed, the country’s general failure to absorb A Nation at Risk has been the source of many a frustration for Checker:

Marvin’s and Mike’s mothers coordinated on the phone last night before laying out their sons’ outfits. (Click the photo for a bigger version.)

We at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute fight to improve K-12 schooling in America, but that doesn’t mean we’re ignoring the environment:

The quest to raise graduation rates is on (see here and here).

This should help.

“Carney releases education plan for Del.”

Step right up and get your new education plan! Public schools, private schools—everyone’s a winner!

“China Uses Heavy Hand Even With its Gadflies“

This headline needs work.

According to Inside Higher Ed, Luke Wilson will star in an upcoming film that producer Brendan McDonald says will “lampoon the tenure process” in colleges and universities.

Tenure 2: Back to K-12 would make a great sequel.