The choice of Education Secretary is the edublog equivalent of American Idol, and Chicago’s Arne Duncan is Fantasia. Lord, but I do love the blogs.
Fordham’s Checker Finn pronounces Duncan a “terrific pick….a proven and committed and inventive education reformer, not tethered to the public-school establishment and its infinite interest groups.” Joel Klein likes the pick, while Democrats for Education Reform reminds everyone they touted Duncan weeks ago. A-Rus at This Week in Education credits Duncan for longevity and being an early critic of NCLB testing, tutoring, and transfer requirements, while noting “Chicago has never been a finalist for the Broad education prize for urban school reform.” Eduwonk is happy. Fred Klonsky’s not, but says “we could have done better and worse.” Edweek’s Campaign K-12 points out what was almost certainly be the Tuesday morning spin: He makes everybody in the ongoing fight for Obama’s educational soul reasonably happy
Duncan may also help the bridge the divide over education in the Democratic Party. He was the recommended choice for education secretary of Democrats for Education Reform and has won praise from American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.
Obama has scheduled a press conference tomorrow morning at a Chicago school. It must mean Arne Duncan is the education secretary, no?
Update: The New York Times confirms it:
President-elect Barack Obama will name Arne Duncan, the superintendent of schools in Chicago, to be his Secretary of Education, a senior Democratic official and a second person close to the decision said.
The New York Times Magazine has issued its annual “Year in Ideas,” a sort of Time Magazine Man of the Year for people with pointy heads. Three education ideas make the eclectic list alongside Ecuador’s move to recognize plants’ rights, airbags to protect senior citizens from injuries in falls, spray-on condoms, and the Sean Avery Rule, which prohibits a hockey player from deliberately blocking the opposing goalie’s view.
A paper by a pair of economists, David Deming of Harvard’s Kennedy School and the University of Michigan’s Susan Dynarski, noted that the trend of kindergarten “redshirting,” holding childen out of school for a year, is accelerating. Economic ripple effects from redshirting could affect the long-term solvency of Social Security, the economists noted. The Aspirnaut Initiative, a pilot project to turn rural students’ long bus rides into learning time, also makes the list, as does Michelle Rhee’s proposal to create different pay tiers for Washington, DC teachers.
The basic deal: surrender some job security in exchange for the potential to earn a much higher salary. Under the pro-posed contract, each Washington teacher would choose between two alternatives. The red tier, the more cautious option, would require teachers to give up a few seniority protections in exchange for a considerable pay increase. Teachers choosing the riskier green tier would lose even more tenure and seniority rights. They would spend the first year of the new contract on probation, at the end of which they could be fired. But if they were good enough to survive, they would receive huge raises, before long earning as much as $131,000 a year in salary and performance bonuses, more than twice the average salary for an American public-school teacher.
Ideas that gained traction in 2008 that did not make the list: national standards, paying students for attendance and grades, and “new paternalism” schools.
Update: Jay Greene offers his list of Big Ideas here.
Pity poor Harvard. The Boston Globe notes that big losses in the university’s massive endowment have “blown in a new age of austerity across the campus.”
“The cuts are big and small. There are the hiring freezes that run to the core of the university’s mission. But there are also the cookies and soft drinks eliminated from small faculty gatherings. A noon-hour seminar series that used to provide catered lunches from local ethnic restaurants will now serve pizza. Faculty members, who are not slated for raises next year, will be expected to pitch in on clerical work.
Harvard’s faculty is worried about “losing out on a generation of young academic talent, as hiring has become virtually impossible,” the Globe notes. Reality check: Harvard’s endowment is still $30 billion, by far the largest of any university. If they can’t afford top talent, who can?
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