Links for 7/5/10

Eric Hanushek

The discussions of teacher layoffs have led Congressman Obey to try to find money to avert any dismissals of teachers. In order to be revenue neutral, however, he must come up with budgetary savings. Where does he look? Why, to reducing funds for Race to the Top, teacher incentives, and charter schools. In other words, a simple trade is proposed: sacrifice innovation and reform when there is a threat to maintaining the status quo of current hiring.

When push comes to shove, it is appears that it is not about the kids–it is about the adults. More charitably, we might conclude that just slowing down the pace of innovation is appropriate in the face of the potential job losses. But that brings us back to history. There never appears to be a time for real reform.

Doug Lederman

One of the country's six regional accrediting agencies risks losing its federal recognition if it is unable to alter its structure so that it is fully independent, financially and operationally, from its parent organization, the U.S. Education Department has warned…

Andrew J. Coulson

Yesterday, Bill Gates addressed 4,100 charter school leaders and activists and told them that their movement “is the only place innovation will come from.”...

Trying to reproduce the innovation, replication, dissemination cycle outside the free market system is like trying to make a wheel more round by increasing or decreasing the value of pi–and it’s just as unnecessary. We already have a system for accomplishing what Gates and the American public desire, why not use it?...

STEVEN ERLANGER

France imagines itself a country of “republican virtue,” a meritocracy run by a well-trained elite that emerges from a fiercely competitive educational system. At its apex are the grandes écoles, about 220 schools of varying specialties...

The result, critics say, is a self-perpetuating elite of the wealthy and white, who provide their own children the social skills, financial support and cultural knowledge to pass the entrance exams, known as the concours, which are normally taken after an extra two years of intensive study in expensive preparatory schools after high school...

But the schools fear that the government will undermine excellence in the name of social engineering and say the process has to begin further down the educational ladder...