Education Rebel @ Work

I might get a big head. :)

jobtalknj:

This morning I had the opportunity to speak with a lovely woman and career coach, Tracy Brisson. I “met” Tracy on Brazen Careerist, because she responded to one of my posts. Along with a few other career coaches that I’ve met online, Tracy has changed my opinion of career coaching.

Who…

This is a great read from Stephen Lazar, a NYC teacher whose Gotham Schools posts I like a lot. 

I am totally borrowing the I Used to Think… and Now I Think structure for a future post on education. 

Amazing. Wish we’d had this when I was in the classroom.

This caught my attention. Does Duncan not know what power he has on college costs? All he has to do, like Mark Cuban has pointed out, is make it harder to get outsized student loans. Colleges would be forced to adjust their costs to meet the new market.

Rant… Sometimes I am not sure why I still read the National Journal Online Education Experts blog because they don’t let people comment and their experts don’t always say much. Imagine what could be done if a real conversation happened around these issues. 

Must read article on a class of students that were offered guaranteed college scholarships when they were in the sixth grade and what happened to them over 23 years later. This insight from the program director sums up exactly what we must understand about the lure of “college for all” as a measure of “success” in 2011. Right, Mr. Obama?

“What Proctor learned, he says, is that Dreamers’ achievements cannot be defined by a diploma, an attitude that he says Pollin and Cohen eventually embraced. The doctor and the pharmacist are successes, for sure. But so are the UPS driver and the Prince George’s police officer. They may not have college degrees, Proctor says, but they have a sense of purpose and ambition.”

As usual, right sentiment.. worried about context. I meet so many 30-something teachers who are ready for the classroom and am not convinced they should be judged by how they did in school over ten years ago. That being said, they should have to demonstrate their content and that they have academic aptitude before they start their teacher training program. What might that look like that benefits the teacher and is affordable?

This information is alarming: “At UNI, 36 percent of Latino student teachers would be excluded under the proposal, vs. 21 percent of blacks and 18 percent of white students, officials said.”

Given the urgency of improving the US education system, we can no longer afford to shut out an entire group of providers. In a time of declining state and federal revenues, policymakers should be stimulating, not stifling, the influx of private capital to our education system. When it comes to other crucial national challenges, policymakers do not ask whether they should engage for-profit companies, but how they should. It is time for education policymakers to follow suit.

EDUCATION, I’D LIKE TO INTRODUCE YOU TO ENTREPRENEURS