SparkBlog

I'd like to call your attention to an excellent post from my friend Lee Wilson's Education Business Blog titled " A Broken Senate Fails America's Children ". Hie thee hence... Unless you've stopped believing that Government is of, by, and for the people, this debate needs to happen around every family dinner table (or pub or workplace if you don't have a family). In the end, we get the government we deserve. My comments (also submitted to Lee's blog) follow: It seems as if SLGs were asking for a bridge (to carry them over the chasm with level funding) or at least a parachute so they could land at a lower level with minimum damage. Unfortunately, like Wily E. Coyote, they've been handed an anvil. Given that 80% of the costs are labor - and a lot of that labor cost is biased towards the longest-serving teachers (whether or not they're the most-effective ones) - which of the options do you perceive as most likely? Are there other alternatives t...

This is a response (longer than their 4000 character limit could handle) to the posting at Education Week's TeachingNOW blog - see https://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2010/06/amid_teacher_layoffs_is_tfa_still_needed.html  for the original post. First, some observations about TFA: TFA has proven that you can take young grads from top schools with non-teaching degrees and make teachers out of them at least as good as new grads from teaching schools. The TFA program appeals to participants' idealism and provides them an opportunity to spend two years in some of the most challenging school environments in the country. After the initial two-year commitment, some fraction stay on because they want to devote themselves to making a difference from within the classroom. The real strength of TFA is that the bulk of their participants return to the "real world" where they are likely to become part of the next generation of leaders (they did come from top ...

Let's start by talking about scale - do you have an oil well in your backyard - with a refinery to crack your own gasoline? Why should every school district run its own data center or manage its own hardware to offer services? Even LAUSD or NYC don't have enough scale! Check out Cloud Computing Economies of Scale  for an excellent discussion on how really efficient data centers are built.  James Hamilton  - who is a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon is worth watching as he delivers an extremely accessible analysis of where efficiency arises. Share this with your favorite Physics, Math, or Economics teacher because the talk is clear and is a real-world example.

Hie thee hence...