I’m kicking off your daily newsblitz with this classic clip in honor of filmmaker John Hughes. He reminded us all how awkward being a teenager really was, even if you were as cute as Molly Ringwald — and most of us were not. (Hat tip to schools blogger Alexander Russo for thinking of it first.)
Local education news is a little slow today. The exception is the North County Times, which reports that Vista schools are continuing a controversial reading program that teaches children to read using all of their senses.
At the state level, Dan Walters has an incisive column in the Sacramento Bee about the little paragraph that the governor signed off on years ago barring the state from using test scores to evaluate teachers — the same paragraph that is now deviling California as it tries to get more stimulus money. And a school board member in Long Beach resigned his post after failing to show up to meetings for three months and several clashes with the law, the Los Angeles Times reports.
And I don’t usually link to university news, but this is noteworthy: The University of California system approved raises for its top executives while undergoing budget cuts, the San Francisco Chronicle writes. “It’s really a story about cost savings,” one university spokeswoman said.
In national news, Jay Mathews at the Washington Post writes about a Los Angeles teacher he dubs the best in America, Rafe Esquith, and his unique take on classroom time. A writer at the Wall Street Journal opines that Obama is hypocritical for sending his kids to private school while denying public school kids vouchers that would give them the same option.
Another commentator, this one at Education Week, argues that the real scandal is that the kind of education that Malia and Sasha Obama are getting — a progressive, personalized school aimed at “educating the whole person” — should be available to all kids too. Instead the Obama Administration is driving “the command-and-control, modernist, factory model of production.”