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Federal education policy

What should be the federal government’s role in public education?

I would like to hear opinions on this issue. What do you think must be done to improve public education using federal dollars? What priorities will you present to your congressional representatives when the education bill comes up for renewal? 

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Carnival of Education

This week’s Carnival of Education at An (aspiring) Educator’s Blog features last week’s TEN post on Academic Capital among many others. A few I found particularly interesting:

Bill Ferriter at The Tempered Radical wonders,

How can we, as educators, come to grips with the idea of a job well done, when “a job well done” inevitably includes failures in the form of children who we just didn’t wouldn’t decided not to couldn’t reach?

Lorem Ipsum wonders, with tongue in cheek, what would happen if we decided to solve the school budget crunch and silence the critics of teachers by just getting rid of all the teachers.

Firing teachers would solve so many problems.  No more problems with kids being given too much homework, no more problems with kids being taught evolution, no more problems with “unfairness” in general.

Right on the Left Coast shares a story of a teacher who taught a book despite being specifically forbidden to teach it and got suspended. Do you agree with his conclusion?

[I]t may not be smart for schools or districts to keep particular books out of classrooms, but it is legal. And since we teachers are public employees and not private contractors, we follow the instructions that are laid out by the elected school boards and implemented through the school administration. I’m sorry this teacher lost her job over this, but she defied specific instructions about curriculum.

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Academic capital

The Illinois Education Research Council is releasing a new study on the “Teacher Academic Capital Gap in Illinois.” (Download the full study or policy brief [pdf])

Teacher academic capital is a measurement combining the mean ACT score of teachers, the percentage of teachers who failed the IL Basic Skills Test on the first attempt, the percentage of teachers who were provisionally or emergency certified, and the mean Barron’s competitiveness ranking of the undergraduate institutions attended by teachers. It represents, according to the IERC, “a collection of intellectual resources and assets that are available to schools through their teachers.”

But, to be sure, there are challenges to focusing on academic capital, as the IERC reported last year…

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