Sunday Reading: Around The Blogs

Great posts and useful links from around the edusphere - AWOL states, pushback against HEA accountability, postsecondary indoctrination, Chicano walkouts, KIPP findings pro and con.

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State help hasn't shown up Chalkboard
Struggling high schools were promised help from the state. But the teams of top-level educators haven't shown up in most of the targeted schools - including 12 in the Triad.

Exam idea is put to the test Boston Globe via Assorted Stuff
A parade of college presidents will appear before a federal higher-education commission meeting in Boston tomorrow, and early signs suggest it will be a lively, even contentious scene.

Kozol made him do it Instructivist
Sol Stern discusses how a quasi-official pedagogy permeating pre-collegiate education promotes political indoctrination: At least the higher education professoriate denies that it favors using the classroom as a political bully pulpit. By contrast, the K-12 public school establishment has adopted a quasi-official pedagogy that encourages the classroom teacher to shape students’ beliefs on controversial issues like race, gender, sexual preference, and American foreign policy

After the protest Joanne Jacobs
Edward James Olmos' Walkout dramatizes a 1968 protest by Mexican-American students in East Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the walkout led to years of dead-end bilingual education, writes Cathy Seipp on National Review Online.

Extry, Extry, Get yer KIPP findings here Ed Knows Policy
SRI just put out a study of 5 KIPP schools (Knowledge is Power Program) in the San Francisco area. It's a 90 pager, so brace yourself and your printer. I agree that they can't answer the question [which kids do better], but disagree on why. It's not "because the data are cross-sectional." It's because the comparisons are not really valid. You have self-selected students in schools of choice compared to the schools that those choosers abandoned.