Blog

The NYT Times had a piece on the variation in charter school quality over the weekend that is well worth reading. The premise is fairly well known – there is large variation in charter school quality, and nationally only a minority of charters outperform their traditional public school counterparts. The more interesting pieces of the story come in explaining why these schools seem to vary so much in quality, and what separates the great schools from the mediocre.

In reading the blogs and articles of those fighting to maintain the status quo in our public schools, a common argument arises: teacher evaluations are just too hard and too expensive to possibly implement in LAUSD. However, places like the New Haven are proposing school reform plans that have comprehensive ways to evaluate teachers. Often, opponents of this reform will argue that teachers are universally against evaluations, however, the New Haven Public School system found that 70% of teachers were in favor of an evaluation system.

I wanted to share this piece in Teacher Magazine by a California middle school teacher named Heather Wolpert-Gawron, which examines in detail whether a "last hired, last fired" seniority layoff system makes sense for either teachers or children. The whole thing is worth a read - here are a few key excerpts:

The following is a guest post from Fernando Espuelas, host of Cafe Espuelas on Univision radio. You can follow his blog daily at www.espuelas.com.

It's no secret that some of our fiercest international competitors have spent that better part of the last decade beefing up their education systems.

Both China and India, for example, graduate thousands more engineers than the United States.