Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about K-12 Public Education...

...but were smart enough not to ask. Some links:

On Teachers and Teaching
...Malcolm Gladwell writes in The New Yorker about how hiring good teachers is a lot like...drafting an NFL quarterback? Which is to say it's almost impossible to get right -- or at least the job requires such a wide (and weird) assortment of skills, it's impossible to know who's going to be good at it until they're actually doing the job. A pull quote: "In teaching, the implications are even more profound [than in the NFL or other similar fields where it's difficult to predict a candidate's future success]. They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before."

On School Reform
...Here's an article in Slate about KIPP, which stands for Knowledge Is Power Program. KIPP is an ambitious school reform model that advocates higher standards and longer school days/weeks/years for economically disadvantaged kids in the public school system. Here's a link on the KIPP website to other articles about the program. The program is mostly lauded as a success but it has its detractors, who say its methods are harsh and that it can't be reproduced everywhere.

...Here's a Time article on Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of the notoriously underperforming Washington, D.C., public schools. Rhee's on a mission to reform that system -- primarily by weeding out bad teachers and paying good ones more money. Not surprisingly, teachers unions disapprove. (For what it's worth, here's an interesting little tidbit via the Washington Post on Rhee, uh, re: the Obama administration's approach to education policy. Let's just say she held her nose when she voted for Obama-Biden.)

...What's the common thread between these two reform models? The adminstrators involved are Teach for America vets. (They're also enamored of test scores as a primary determinant of school success.) Me, I'm a TFA skeptic. Most of my friends who've done it came away scarred from the experience (and that's to say nothing of the students involved!). Very young teachers with very little experience (teaching-wise or life-wise) or training + some of the nation's failingest schools = recipe for disaster. But that's just anecdotal. What do I know? I do think it's interesting how a group of young educational administrators seem to be cutting their teeth there (and in programs like it) and then using that dramatic/unique/harrowing experience to reimagine how we teach our kids. Good? Bad? Hrmmm. Both?

On No Child Left Behind
...A middle school administrator writes an op-ed on NCLB in the San Francisco Chronicle.

...What's NCLB, you ask? Why, it's this!

...And here's what the new Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, thinks of it (and more), via an interview with Newsweek.