David Whitman, fresh off of being honored by the American Independent Writers, has now done an interview with EducationNews.org about his book, Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism. EdNews Senior Columnist Michael Shaughnessy asks David, among other things, why he wrote the book, why it has had broad-based appeal, and what paternalism has to do with education. Here’s a snippet of David describing the schools that he examined and wrote about:

When you spent time in the schools I studied, you couldn’t help but be struck by the fact that they were highly-prescriptive institutions—they meticulously supervised student behavior. They were not just academically demanding schools but schools that sought to relentlessly shape the character of their students. But I do want to be clear about one thing: The new paternalism works only when it is combined with intense caring and commitment—it is not just about the supervision of students. The students have to know that their teachers and principals care deeply about them and their future.

Who better to report on the “brain drain” than college students themselves?  Check out this story from FOX affiliate Palestra.net , aka The College Network, featuring such luminaries as West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin, III , and Fordham’s own Terry Ryan .

Just to let you know: the National Journal is launching the Education Expert Blog on Monday, June 29. Nat Journal folks will pose a different question at the beginning of each week to a group of education experts—including our own Checker Finn—and these connoisseurs will respond throughout the week. The dialogue is sure to be dynamite!

This week has provided a nice natural experiment about which kinds of studies the media finds newsworthy. Four major reports, each of which might normally lead the news in a typical week, battled it out for attention. And there were clear winners and losers.

First out of the gate was the CREDO charter school report, which garnered coverage on the U.S. News blog and in many local papers, including the Los Angeles Times. That’s pretty solid, though it was hardly the Diana Jean Schemo/NAEP fracas all over again.

Speaking of NAEP, results from the new arts assessment came out next. And this hit the big time: at least 200 articles, including in the New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today.

Then a very interesting new study by Gary Phillips of AIR, which “internationally benchmarked” state NAEP results against other countries’ TIMSS results, limped out of the gate and picked up just Education Week coverage.

Finally, Jack Jennings’s Center on Education Policy released its annual look at state test score results under No Child Left Behind, and got a spattering of stories in local papers, mostly in Florida it appears.

I see three lessons. First, never go up against NAEP, even if it’s just the arts assessment. Second, bad news (arts, charter schools) sells better than good news (NCLB hasn’t hurt scores at the advanced level, CEP claims) and non-news (our states’ student achievement doesn’t look so great compared to other countries’). Eduwonk makes this point too. And third, don’t be in such a rush to get news out before the end of school/beginning of the 4th of July vacation. A slow newsweek in the dead of summer beats a crammed news week in June, at least if you want a lot of coverage.

And yes, if you want analysis of the merits of these studies, and not just this thumb-sucking exercise, watch for that here on Flypaper and later today in Gadfly.

Photo credit: cursedthing

I didn’t. But the story’s true and Steele himself tells it to students at H.D. Woodson Senior High School in his native D.C. as part of C-Span’s “Students & Leaders” program. Ever the public speaker with his “hip” verbiage and unfortunate use of the verb “ain’t,” the chairman actually paints a compelling story about perseverance. Watch the video courtesy of DCist.com. (Don’t worry, I was confused too, since Steele holds a JHU degree. He got himself back in through persuasion, pressure from tough-love Mama Steele, and summer school.)

Hollywood loves to glamorize the heroic inner-city teacher, and occasionally celebrates the heroic inner-city principal . But it can’t be too long until it gives Big Screen treatment to the heroic inner-city charter school network leader. Jay Mathews surely hopes the KIPP guys will inspire such a movie (he successfully sold the rights to "Stand and Deliver ," and is no doubt trying to do the same for "Work Hard, Be Nice "). But put your hands on Douglas McGray’s New Yorker profile of Green Dot ’s Steve Barr , and tell me it doesn’t read like an inspirational, action-packed script with a likeable maverick as the lead.

For wonks, the story of Barr’s takeover of LA’s Locke High School won’t be new. But the colorful details (especially about Barr) are priceless. There’s Ted Mitchell, quoting Barr (slightly incorrectly, it turns out) calling the LA teachers union president a "pig f&#ker." There’s the story of him taking a group of Latino and black kids surfing, only to discover that half of them can’t swim. And there’s this:

[Barr] drives a decommissioned police car, a Crown Victoria with floodlights, which he bought from a friend, the former Fox executive who launched the network’s reality show "Cops." ("It’s faster than anything on the road," he told me, and when he wants to change lanes "people move out of the way.") He met his wife, an Alaskan radio reporter twenty years his junior, at a Burning Man festival seven years ago, and married her in Las Vegas three weeks later. And this is how he talks about working with what is arguably the country’s most troubled big-city school system: "You ever see that movie ‘Man on Fire,’ with Denzel Washington? There’s a scene in the movie where the police chief of Mexico City gets kidnapped by Denzel Washington. He wakes up, he’s on the hood of his car under the underpass, in his boxers, his hands tied. Denzel Washington starts asking him questions, he’s not getting the answers he wants, so he walks up away from him, and leaves a bomb stuck up his ass." Barr laughed. ‘I don’t want to blow up L.A.U.S.D.’s ass. But what will it take to get this system to serve who they need to serve? It’s going to take that kind of aggressiveness."

For free-market types, and even for charter school devotees, though, the narrative will disappoint, as Barr makes it clear that charters and choice are hardly the answer (they are merely a means to an end, the end being the transformation of big, lousy urban schools). Nor does he think real change can happen without the involvement of the unions. ("I don’t see how you tip a system with a hundred percent unionized labor without unionized labor.")

Barr is a revolutionary, but he might be going mainstream. The article reports on his conversations with Arne Duncan, who seems intent on steering a lot of stimulus cash Green Dot’s way.

Duncan asked Barr what it would take to break up and remake thousands of large failing schools. "One, you have to reconstitute," Barr told him—that is, fire everyone and make them reapply or transfer elsewhere in the district. "Arne didn’t seem to flinch at that," he said. "Second, if we can figure out a national union partnership, we can take away some of the opposition." Duncan asked Barr if he could persuade Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, to support the idea. "I’d love to do that," she told Barr, but she also expressed concerns. "She said, ‘I can’t be seen as coming in and firing all these teachers.’" So they talked about alternatives, like transferring teachers or using stimulus money for buyouts.

So watch out for Green Dot National in the near future, and Green Dot, The Movie just a few years after that.

Photograph of Jaime Escalante (left), the real-life math teacher from the movie "Stand and Deliver," from The Futures Channel; Photograph of Steve Barr (right) from Caltech website

It started at 9 am this morning and Jim Shelton is currently giving his remarks. Watch it live via webcast here.*

*The webcast is currently experiencing technical difficulties. Stay tuned for more information. A video of the event will also be available later this week.

The massacre at Columbine High School happened ten years ago, on April 20, 1999. Hard to believe it has been that long. It’s revisited, remembered and analyzed in several stories, including the Denver Post here and here, the Star Ledger, the Associated Press, a piece by MTV.com, and coverage by CNN and ABC.

Check out Mike’s recent appearance on FOX News. He discusses an issue that’s sure to raise heated debate around dinner tables across the nation: lengthening the school year! Arne Duncan favors it . Find out if Mike does.....

Eduwonk may have a (nationally-known) “rename NCLB” contest, but we’ve got something even more interactive: the Fix that Failing School video game! This is particularly cathartic (or, alternatively, maddening) for principals of schools “in need of improvement” under No Child Left Behind. Don’t worry about boosting those test scores—just put the whole school on a flatbed trailer and move it to Wisconsin! And presto, you’re A-OK! (Of course, you’ll still have six more weeks of winter.)

Join Fordham’s Checker Finn, Ed Sector’s Tom Toch, and CCSSO’s Gene Wilhoit tomorrow at 3 pm for a live online chat of Obama’s education plan. The chat is sponsored by Education Week and coincides with the release of Ed Week’s latest book, The Obama Education Plan: An Education Week Guide. Tune in here and submit questions in advance here.

Fordham experts (and our many studies) continue to garner excellent media hits. As previously mentioned, many journalists turned to Checker and Mike for comment on the nomination of Arne Duncan to be Ed Sec. To add to that list—Checker was quoted in the Economist and Mike was quoted in the Christian Science Monitor.

In this National Review Online piece, Checker and Mike discussed the current education policy landscape, what they see as the proper federal role in education and a possible basis for compromise (as detailed in Fordham’s letter to the President-elect Obama, Education Secretary-designate Duncan and the 111^th Congress).

Meanwhile, a Fordham study on Catholic schools is cited in this article in The Tennessean and this article in the Las Vegas Sun.

Fordham Fellow Laura A. Bornfreund discusses school choice in this Orlando Sentinel op-ed.

And Fordham’s Ohio point-man Terry Ryan discusses the problems with the current teacher pay system in this Columbus Dispatch article.

Nice work all!

In case you’re perusing Flypaper to gather some interesting, timely info with which to wow fellow party-goers tonight…… here are two interesting AP stories involving funding and schools:

The first piece discusses President-elect Obama’s plan to resuscitate/modernize schools across the nation as part of his economic stimulus plan. I’m pretty sure Fordham experts will have a lot more to say about it as days and weeks unfold! According to the AP story, Congress begins work on the economic recovery program on Wednesday.

The second is a story about one very lucky school. According to the piece, Oprah Winfrey recently donated  $365,000 to a private school in one of Atlanta’s poorest areas. The school is run by Ron Clark, who opened a letter from Winfrey last week and saw a piece of paper flutter to the ground. The gift was “incredible,” said Clark, whose school depends almost entirely on donations to operate. The gift money will likely go to scholarships for students, he said.

Happy New Year!

Greg Toppo takes a look back at education in 2008 in this morning’s USA Today. His verdict is bleak: slashed budgets, scant attention paid by campaigns, depressing report findings, and warring manifestos. But at least education made it into popular culture—on FOX’s King of the Hill.

Fordham President Checker Finn discusses Fordham’s Open Letter, new research, school funding, and more Bill Bennett’s Morning in America radio show this morning, December 30. You can listen to the interview here.

This must be a first: a New York Times blog post about a blog post about a phone call about a blog post.

The world has truly changed forever.

The usually sensible Washington Post editorial board sizes up the presidential candidates’ education platforms in today’s lead editorial, part of its “Ideas Primary” series, but shoots and misses. It’s not that its descriptions of Obama’s and McCain’s platforms were inaccurate; by and large, its analysis was fair. Obama wants more money and a litany of new programs; McCain seeks more parental choice, including online options, and more alternate routes to the classroom for teachers. I also have no complaint with the Post’s call for national standards and tests—of course “it is madness that there are 50 different definitions of what constitutes proficiency in math and reading or of what a high school graduate should know.”

Where the Post goes wrong is with its call for “something bolder.”

Would either [candidate] be willing to embrace the dramatic changes needed to shake up a system that fails far too many children?.... There’s a crisis in urban education. To significantly improve achievement levels among poor and minority children, scripted and predictable responses won’t do.

The Post hasn’t learned lesson number one of the No Child Left Behind era: what’s sorely lacking in Washington isn’t ambition, but hubris. The federal government (thankfully) doesn’t run our schools and has little knowledge about how or capacity to turn failing ones around. What it could do is provide greater transparancy about how schools are performing—yes, through said national standards and tests. But “significantly improving achievment levels among poor and minority children” is a job for governors and superintendents, not presidents and senators. It would be refreshing to see the Post explain that.

Update: This letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune, however, makes a whole lot of sense. (Consider the title, referring to education: “Washington has bigger fish to fry.”) Maybe the Post should bring him on staff.

No, it’s not Kati Haycock or George Miller or even Margaret Spellings. It’s Jo-Ann Armao, the education writer for the Washington Post editorial page. Consider today’s editorial on charter school facilities , or July 23rd’s piece blasting D.C.’s teachers union for playing games with its membership , or July 8th’s editorial praising Michele Rhee’s teacher pay proposal , or July 7th’s essay encouraging the candidates to make education a top-tier issue , or June 24th’s missive in support of the D.C. school voucher program .

Other editorial pages are good on education reform too , but not this good.

Mike and Stafford discuss Miley Cyrus’s new single, “Breakout,” which disparages school-going.

Some days our blog exhausts me. Not writing for it—I’m usually too busy—just reading it and thinking how I would have said something differently myself or would have bitten my tongue and said nothing at all. When we started it, I promised not to edit, just occasionally to point out what I take to be errors—and once in a while to pen items myself that can’t wait for next Thursday’s Gadfly or aren’t appropriate there.

In the past, these are the sorts of "corrections" I would have sought to make via quiet meetings in the office, but Mike insists that today’s fashion is to air our internal disagreements in public. So here are a few that cropped up today (which is just half over):

For reasons not clear to me, Liam wants to prove that the Democratic party is not anti-charter school or anti-merit pay. So he names a few worthy Democrats and Democrat-leaning organizations that themselves have advanced the charter and/or merit-pay cause. He’s right about the names. Indeed, there are more. But a few swallows do not prove that spring has come. Go to state capital after state capital around this broad land and anywhere that charter schools or some form of merit pay are on the table observe which legislators (with rare and honorable exception) are trying to make it happen and which (with rare and less honorable exception) are trying to kill it. Case closed. I’d love to see it reopened. But the ground is still mostly frozen.

Speaking of charter schools, I agree with our newest arrival, Stafford, that a two-hour-a-week high school is idiotic ; but far from being a charter school, I read that Los Angeles Times article to suggest that the school system is very likely going to shut down a (somewhat idiotic) charter and then create this bizarre inside-the-system alternative for the displaced kids (and to recapture more state dollars for itself). With a little more digging I’m sure that Stafford, who is very able, can find out what’s actually happening in LaLa land rather than simply commenting on two short and less-than-clear grafs in a newspaper article.

And then there’s Coby. He’s very able, too (as is Liam, by the way), but I surely wouldn’t have issued his vigorous defense of the NYC education department’s new "truth squad." He suggests therein that the poor mayor and chancellor don’t get nearly the media exposure that teacher union chief Weingarten gets (because she buys it) and that the poor, underappreciated bureaucracy thus doesn’t get its "sensible reforms" adequately noticed. Balderdash. Some of those reforms are sensible, some not, but I have rarely seen as overwhelming and relentless a governmental PR machine as the one that Joel Klein presides over—at least not in what we used to call the free world. Overexposure might be more accurate.

By the by, the Checker quote in the New York Sun that Coby tees off from, while accurately reprinted, originated in my own error. When Elizabeth Green called to ask what I thought of the "Department of Education’s new ‘truth squad’," I, like any self-respecting Beltway dweller, assumed she was referring to the FEDERAL Department of Education. That’s what I was referring to when I said they might better use their money for NCLB repair work or vouchers than to add media watchdogs and blog eagles. It was Margaret in my imagination, not Joel.

And now I’m truly pooped.