The Week Gone By: Articles I Should Have Blogged

The right's education fantasy LAT
Conservatives' model for improving schools relies too much on high expectations, and not enough on money.

Outsider in the Locker Room EdWeek
In the current education reform movement, we try again to make bricks without straw. We pretend that schools and their students exist within a social and economic vacuum.

Teens try cough medicine for a high LA Times
About two-thirds of abusers now take Coricidin HBP Cough & Cold, whose candy-red tablets are nicknamed CCC, triple C and skittles. Robotripping takes its name from Robitussin, the second most abused cold medicine.

Turning Good Intentions Into Educational Capital Carnegie Perspectives via PEN
Education needs philanthropic foundations to enliven imagination, spur improvements and test solutions. Foundations need education to increase individual and collective capacity to act effectively in the world. The problem we face today is that these two cultures are spinning away from each other, particularly in the key arenas of teaching and learning.

Study says localities curb ed reform Boston Globe
The federal No Child Left Behind law has produced only limited educational improvement because local school officials have too much power to resist change, a nationwide series of studies has concluded.

The Real Value of Public Preschool NY Times (TS)
The State of Virginia is joining New York, Florida, Georgia and Oklahoma in attempting to bring free, voluntary preschool to all 4-year-olds, and in the case of Illinois, to 3-year-olds as well. That’s good news. But I am finding the rhetoric in the debate over universal preschool disheartening. [blogged here]