I’m not ready to let the Sesame Street anniversary end yet. Are you? I didn’t think so. Now for your newsblitz!
- Remember all the fuss about evaluating San Diego Unified principals using test scores? It isn’t going to happen after all. We blog that the school district dropped that part of the proposed new evaluation after Superintendent Terry Grier left.
- KPBS reports that Southwestern College hired an investigator to find out whether professors were inciting students to move outside the “free speech zone” at the college during a protest. The ACLU says the things the investigator reported the professors doing are all well within the definition of free speech.
- Vista students are raising money to build a school in India, the North County Times writes.
- The Sacramento Bee explains what the new, somewhat looser than expected rules for Race to the Top, a competition for more school stimulus dollars, might mean for California.
Education Week blogs that the state will need to get big school districts such as San Diego Unified on board to get a better chance at the bucks. And meanwhile, some pundits are questioning whether the feds gave too much ground with the new rules.
- Schools in San Jose are going solar, the Mercury News reports. They hope to save $12 million in electricity costs over 20 years.
- The Chico Enterprise Record writes that Chico schools are prodding teachers to take a pay cut.
- The Inland Valley Daily Bulletin writes about how a student thesis ended up pitting the ACLU against the Bureau of Prisons over the attempted removal of religious books from prison chapel libraries.
- Young teachers respond to a report on how Generation Y differs in its attitudes on merit pay and tenure than Generation X educators in the Oakland Tribune schools blog.
- Education Week reports that the Harlem Children’s Zone is closing the achievement gap between black and white students. The famed project combines a ton of social services, parenting workshops and health initiatives with a set of rigorous charter schools. The big question is whether the gains can be chalked up to the extra supports, the schools or both — and how it could be replicated, as Obama has talked up.
- NPR walks us through some of the kerfuffles over Sesame Street — or as they put it, “‘C’ is for Controversy.”
- News for wonks: The New York Times blogs that researchers are challenging a rosy report on New York charter schools, saying that it overestimated their effects. Check out the full report here. Another new study finds that the now unpopular strategy of integrating schools by voluntarily busing students of color into suburban, largely white schools helped close achievement gaps and improve racial attitudes. The study is available here.
- A D.C. middle school with rare success is worried about Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s plan to “turn” their school, the Washington Post reports. Rhee is walking a tightrope between diversifying the school system by “drawing in more white, middle-class families without compromising the interests of its predominantly poor and minority student population.”