(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
I’m not sure why Thrun is wearing a Borg occular implant, but if his point about about 85% of his Stanford students ditching traditional class in favor of watching him on video could be the canary dying in the higher education status-quo coal mine. Well worth watching:
Chronicle of Higher Education weighs in here.
3 Comments | 
Digital Learning | Tagged: Massive Online Open Courses, Sebastian Thrun | 
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Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
This is an early report from what is as far as I know the nation’s first Catholic school to incorporate blended learning. The results reported here are extremely encouraging. I hope that formal documentation of the figures presented will follow, but for now check it out:
24 Comments | Digital Learning | Tagged: Blended learning, Catholic schools, Mission Delores Academy, Scott W Hamilton, Seton Education Partners | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
I finally got the chance to read Steven Brill’s Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools. Brill, a noted journalist and entrepreneur, has written the first draft of recent ed-reform history, mostly from the perspective of the Cool Kids and those associated with Democrats for Education Reform.
Class Warfare is both interesting and readable. I did sometimes find myself wondering if there was much anything going on in education reform in the last few years outside of the Northeast corridor. I also suspect that some of the reforms praised in the book might struggle to maintain their reputations with a close reading of the fine print of the statutes.
Brill confesses his liberal leanings, and the epic battles over education reform in places like New York City and Washington DC deserve the level of detail they receive. Someone else will have to write the conservative version of this book, Brill’s book makes an important contribution by documenting the struggle going on in the American Left over education policy. Brill interviewed a long list of key players for this book, and his sympathies clearly lie with reform-minded Democrats. Very bold reforms led by Republicans after 2010 don’t receive the attention they deserve.
These however are quibbles. Brill provides a blow-by-blow of the struggle for power within the Democratic Party over K-12 policy between reformers and reactionaries. Brill’s account proves especially rich in documenting Joel Klein’s tenure in New York City. New York City won’t have an independent reform-minded billionaire as mayor forever, meaning that DFER and company will have their hands full going forward.
Barack Obama and Arne Duncan come across quite well in the book, so long as you are willing to mentally air-brush the shameful Washington Opportunity Scholarship episode out of your memory. The teacher unions went all-in for Hillary Clinton in 2008. President Obama came to office without owing the unions much, and he made use of this flexibility. If President Obama fails to win reelection, it seems clear that his “Nixon to China” leadership on teacher evaluation and support of charter schools will likely prove major elements of his legacy. This may be the case even if he wins relection in 2012.
Brill insightfully poses crucial questions towards the end regarding the maximum scale of reforms based upon the limited pool of idealistic Ivy leaguers going through the TFA pipeline. We are going to need new school models to overcome these challenges. We need to increase the opportunity for students to learn from our most effective instructors. We need to increase the attractiveness of the teaching profession to ambitious college students, and as Brill notes, we need to do this without burning our high achievers and making the average teacher more effective as well.
Ummm….not so much.
Some of Brill’s sources make reference to Randi Weingarten as a possible F.W. de Clerk figure. This is a bit rich after Brill documents a number demostrably false , hollow and deliberately deceitful Weingarten statements. Brill identifies Weingarten as his main source and expresses a grudging admiration for her, but I’m at a loss as to why. I hope she’ll prove me wrong, but it seems plausible to me that the “Randi as a secret reformer” story is simply a myth that serves emotional needs for both Democrats and the AFT.
Deeds, not words.
Class Warfare is too rich to attempt to summarize- read it for yourself and see what you think. I found it well worth the time.
1 Comment | teacher union | Tagged: Class Warfare, Steven Brill | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
A former Al award nominee once sagely informed us:
So here it is-the After Party. I have continued to receive congratulations from JPGB readers all week on my humbling (Get a Life)time Achievement Award from the NEPC. Reactions include:
This is just awesome!! I’m so impressed!!!
Congratulations Matt!
Such an honor!
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I couldn’t be more proud to know you!
I am so damn jealous – apparently we’ve all got to up our game to keep up with you!
The awards video is creepy. what a weird thing for them to do. congrats!
I have not been this vicariously proud since…..
Matt can die happy, knowing that he can never top this!!!
Our boy’s all growns up.
WELL DONE!
I think you are far from being able to ‘die happy’ as you said on Jay Greene’s blog as there are other awards to be earned. I’ve heard that you are in the running to be named in the Journal of Medicine as the leading cause of high blood pressure among NEA officials. Keep at it my friend…I know you can win this one.
Grand Prize Winner:
This is the equivalent of receiving the Bradley prize..just without the money.
Now this is a very perceptive comment indeed. The NEPC (Get a Life)time Achievement Award is in fact so profoundly opposite from the Bradley Prize in every way, so much so that they become strangely similar.
It goes without saying that we in the reformer tribe hold a deeply skeptical view of the policy preferences of teacher union leaders, but now comes word that their credibility has waned even among public school teachers and of course actions speak louder than words. This party just keeps getting better-when does Snoop Dog go on?
3 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: Matthew Ladner, NEPC | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
I feared that my career had peaked upon receiving a Bunkum Award from the NEA’s rent-a-reactionary academic shop, but today I learned that I can now die happy as the first recipient of a Lifetime Bunkum Award. The prestigious award reads as follows:
NEPC has never bestowed an individual with a Bunkum Award. But we’ve never before had someone campaign for one, and we’ve never before found someone with an individual record of Bunkum-worthy accomplishments that cries out for recognition. This year, however, we are honoring Matthew Ladner, an advisor to former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s advocacy organization, the “Foundation for Excellence in Education.”Dr. Ladner’s body of Bunk-work is focused on his shameless hawking of what he and the Governor call the “Florida Formula” for educational success. As our reviews have explained, they’d be less deceptive if they were selling prime Florida swampland. One cannot, however, deny Dr. Ladner’s salesmanship: gullible lawmakers throughout the nation have been pulling out their wallets and buying into his evidence-less pitch for flunking of low-scoring third graders and other policies likely to harm many more students than they help. See here and here for more analysis of Dr. Ladner’s body of bunk and its unfortunate reach.Our judges were particularly impressed recently, when Ladner attributed Florida’s “hitting the wall” drop in NAEP scores to a collapse in the housing bubble and other “impossible to say” factors. Bunkums have been awarded for far less impressive an accomplishment than this sort of “heads I win, tails you lose” use of evidence. So Matt Ladner – this Bunkum’s for you.You can watch NEPC’s award ceremony youtube here:
My reaction:
Honestly I can’t take credit for this great honor. It was Governor Bush and his team of fearless reformers who ignored the wailing howls of K-12 reactionaries and forced through a set of reforms that improved Florida education steadily over time. It is they who deserve credit for moving Florida from one of the worst performing states by ignoring the “expertise” of NEPC’s ideological tribe and drove their low-income literacy scores above statewide averages for all students.
My role in all of this has simply been to help document the progress, all of which happened over the howling objections of NEPC’s soul mates. NEPC has mounted a series of feeble attempts to muddy the water. Their first effort completely ignored a peer-reviewed article in the nation’s most influential education policy journal that fell directly on point to concerns raised in the article. Oh and it also contained an appendix that refuted its own central thesis. Undeterred, the next effort a “review” of a Powerpoint presentation that the critic didn’t see. All of this climaxed with sending out one of their scholars to claim that Harry Potter books may have caused the improvement in Florida reading scores. This is, you see, because Harry Potter books are seldom read outside of Florida, and no, I am not making this up. An audience of hundreds witnessed it with their own eyes.
I am thrilled to receive this Lifetime Achievement award. Reformers around the country have begun the process of making K-12 policy based upon things other than the political preferences of the special interests organized around the K-12 status-quo. If this grand undertaking were a play, I would have but a small role in it-this is far, far, far bigger than me and bigger than Florida. Notice for instance that both the Progressive Policy Institute and the Center for American Progress earned NEPC Bunkum Awards this year (congratulations!) which is a probable sign that those groups are doing good work and a certain sign of the political and intellectual isolation of the teacher union left.
I want to thank my family, my teachers and professors, my mentors and all the other people who helped me to win this unique and prestigious award. You know who you are and you hold my deepest appreciation. I want to thank those who fought so hard to produce the gains which NEPC is so desperate to obscure. Most of all I want to thank NEPC for revealing what they fear most, which we can infer from this year’s Bunkum ritual seems to be the success of reformers and their own isolation from their former allies in the morally and intellectually serious left, apparently in that order.
I will now redouble my efforts in the hope of becoming the first winner of a second lifetime Bunkum Award. Otherwise, I will have no worlds yet to conquer.
17 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: Jeb Bush, Kevin Welner, Matthew Ladner, NEPC, NEPC Bunkum Awards | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Some colorful language here….not sure about the numbers discussed….ummm….if anyone can find serious fault with the logic, let me know in the comment section. I’m struggling:
6 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: Penn Jillette, Penn Jillette drug policy rant | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(GuestPost by Matthew Ladner)
The New York Times published an overtly hostile front page story on tuition tax credits yesterday. Others will doubtlessly pick apart the story in terms of accuracy and there are a number of obvious distortions that I spotted in a single casual reading. It’s lazy journalism to quote a school choice opponent as suspecting malfeasance, for instance, when that same person could turn such an organization in to state authorities to face an organization death sentence. If that is of course if such person had any evidence rather than mere idle speculation.
But I digress. I find myself largely in agreement with John Kirtley’s reaction– which is to say that design features in a tax credit program are very important. I however wish to be a bit more direct than John. If school choice supporters don’t pay close attention to design features, especially regarding financial accountability and academic transparency, they leave enough dots lying around for someone to draw the following picture:
Whether this picture is “fair” or not (it certainly isn’t) is beside the point. The point is that parental choice supporters ought not to leave themselves open to such attack.
Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: John Kirtley, New York Times private school tax credits, tuition tax credits | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
The RedefinED team asked me to write a response to my friends Howard Fuller and Andrew Coulson regarding the means-tested vs. universal choice debate. Andrew and Howard, for different reasons, support a means-tested approach but I lay out my case as to why I think choice must be universal in scope and how we should approach equity and third-party payer concerns.
The issues raised by Howard and Andrew ultimately beg the question: just where is it that we are going with the parental choice movement? Success in passing some broad programs simply increases the stakes for being thoughtful about the details.
9 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: Andrew Coulson, Howard Fuller, Matthew Ladner, RedefinED blog, universal school choice | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
DC’s NAEP numbers allowed for some additional controls to be introduced when comparing charter and district schools than I was able to do with the Milwaukee comparison. The following chart shows the percentage of general education program students who qualify for a free or reduced lunch scoring “Basic or Better” on the 2011 NAEP exams. Special education students, ELL students and middle/high income students are not included in order to get a quick closer to apples to apples comparison.
Now of course for a real apples to apples you need a random assignment study, but those have been done and find results favorable to charter schools. This chart doesn’t address the topic of valid stastical significance, but rather whether the differences are meaningful.
Considering that charters get far less money that DCPS per pupil and show higher levels of academic achievement, this looks to be a success, albeit both the blue and the red columns leave much to be desired. The red columns leave much more to desired however, especially when you consider that that they are wallowing in money.
3 Comments | charter schools | Tagged: charter schools, DCPS, DCPS charter schools, NAEP | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed the expansion of the Education Savings Account program. The first year program provides students with 90% of the funds that would have gone to their public school into an account with multiple possible uses-including private school tuition, private tutoring, online program and saving for future college/university expenses, among other options.
The bill signed today expands eligibility to children attending D and F rated schools and school districts, the dependents of active duty military personnel and children that have been through the foster care system. The law also moves to a system of formula funding, making it one of the largest private choice laws in the nation with funded eligibility, behind only the new Indiana and Louisiana voucher laws on a percentage basis. The Arizona program now resembles an expanded combination of the Florida McKay and Opportunity Scholarship programs with the 21st Century twist of broadening the options of parents and requiring the consideration of opportunity costs (what you spend now cannot be saved for later).
I want to thank Rep. Debbie Lesko and Senator Rick Murphy for their steadfast and dedcated sponsorship of the bill and our in-state and national allies. Governor Brewer is building an impressive K-12 reform legacy that includes not only expanding parental choice, but also improving public school transparency, curbing social promotion and modernizing the teaching profession. In the not so distant future, we will be able to look at the trends in NAEP scores and identify Governor Brewer’s term and a half as a turning point for the better.
We have many miles to go in Arizona, but we are on our way!
8 Comments | Education Savings Accounts | Tagged: Governor Jan Brewer, Rep. Debbie Lesko, Senator Rick Murphy | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
Jay P. Greene's Blog 