Ed Week takes a multi-pronged look at new education advocacy groups, solid overview of the landscape and more to come.  Pat McGuinn takes a look at the same, a breaks a bit of news.

After yesterday’s important speech by New York Chancellor Dennis Walcott you sure get the sense that resolution of the “absent teacher reserve” issue is now one of when and how, not if.

Where are they now?  Here’s the Renegade Ohio school choice mom Kelly Williams-Bolar edition.  No one wants to work in education?  Ed Pioneers hits 10K applicants.  Mark Nadel proposes a ‘rate my teacher’ style online approach – but one with a long view.

And June Kronholz takes a look at A-Net in Ed Next.

In case you missed it, student loans are a problem but there is a lot of hype, too.  And the weather is supposed to be great this weekend, so take a kid fishing.

Want to help raise money for cancer research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute?  Bill Phillips and I are working on that in our spare time by riding the Pan Mass Challenge and you can help us.

Disc - BW works with A-Net and I’m a board member for EP.

To understand what’s happening with student loans you need to keep two things in mind at once:  There is a problem, yes, but there is also a lot of hysteria. And increasingly lost in the hysteria are the students we should worry about most – those making poor choices based on bad information or attending for-profit colleges that are ripping them off.  But the focus on overall debt is obscuring much of what’s really happening – median debt for students who borrow is less than $13K, for instance.  That’s what I look at in this week’s TIME column.

Student debt is completely out of control, right? The more than $1 trillion in outstanding college loans is front-page news and is pretty much the only educational issue the presidential candidates are talking about. Yes, ballooning student debt is causing real hardship for some Americans. But as with many educational flare-ups, the public debate is giving us more noise than signal. So before you decide to skip college based on the hysteria, here are a few things to keep in mind.

The interest rate to read the entire column? 0% with no origination costs.  You can’t beat that.  Just click here.

The Times breaks the news this morning that David Coleman is taking the helm at College Board when Gaston Caperton retires this fall.  It’s an inspired and non-traditional choice but David’s background brings a lot to the iconic organization – especially at a time of a lot of change in its part of the sector.  Coleman was one of TIME’s 12 for 12 education activists.  And here’s a look at the SAT from a few months ago.

Bellwether helped the National Chamber of Commerce take a look at school boards around the country and discuss some key takeaways and ideas for how business can play a constructive role in school board issues.  You can read about the cities – including some off-the-beaten path in ND and WY and some that are more well known here (pdf).  It was released at an event in DC this morning, you can watch here.  And if you’re a parent, editorial board member, voter, etc…you can see a set of questions to ask prospective board members and candidates here (pdf). We chose the cities by geography and diversity so the stories ended up as mix of successful and struggling boards.

Not surprisingly the key inference here is that there is not a single best governance model but rather best habits for boards across various governance structures. There are also a number of constructive ways for business groups to get more involved than is often the case today.

If you want to see the conversation in 140 characters on Twitter you can at #icswschoolboard

We’re going to close the Bellwether feedback survey on Wednesday evening.  Many thanks to all those who have responded, if you’re not among them you can learn more and respond via this link.  Will just take a few minutes.

If you only read one thing today, this WaPo op-ed by Mississippi TFA’er Eli Hager is a pretty good bet.  Unfortunately, the consensus he describes isn’t a simple right – left issue.

Wondering what MOOC is and what it means for higher education?  Laura McKenna tells you.  Joel Rose discusses an ed tech revolution.  Brooklyn Bureau looks at a possible school closing through the eyes of one principal.  And Briggs, Davis, and Cheney on principals.

Best response to my ‘if you want to improve science scores take a kid fishing’ column on Friday in TIME came via a reax on Twitter, “if that was true I’d be Albert Einstein” David Kelso wrote.

Smart and serious look at the new teacher test from Stanford/Pearson via Hechinger.

And Sara Mead is profiling some of education’s up and comers.

Audrey Waters asks why Mathalicious is raising money on Kickstarter in the first place.

This week’s TIME column is about science teaching.  If you’re not happy with our science achievement there is something we can all do – get kids outside more.

It’s Teacher Appreciation Week, so let’s start this column with a nod to my 9^th-grade science teacher, Bruce Butler, who lit a spark in me by making geology and environmental science fun, interesting – and rigorous. I still think of him whenever I’m out hiking or fishing and come across some geological curiosity. He went on to a successful career as a principal and is retiring this summer, but would no doubt be happy to know that today’s science teachers seem to be having an impact on kids, too, according to science achievement-test data released yesterday…

…Ideas such as using innovative technology to simulate environmental experiences were touted, but perhaps the most promising way to improve science teaching and environmental education is also the simplest: get kids outside more. Children will learn more about the natural world by spending a few hours in it than days in front of a computer – and it’s healthier for them too…

The week started with video observations and as it ends a new Gates Foundation paper on teacher observations and improving reliability (pdf).

Next Tuesday the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is hosting a 1/2 day meeting on school boards and the role of business groups with them.  Speakers include:

Kelly Brough, President and CEO, Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, Anne Bryant, Executive Director, National School Board Association, Sandy Kress, Senior Counsel, Adkin Gump; Fellow, Education Policy, George W. Bush Institute, Don McAdams, Chairman and Founder, Center for Reform of School Systems, Cheryl Oldham, Vice President, Institute for a Competitive Workforce, Andrew Rotherham, Co-Founder, Bellwether Education Partners, Margaret Spellings, President, Institute for a Competitive Workforce; Senior Advisor, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Juan Williams, Journalist and Political Analyst, Fox News Channel.

Registration if free and is via this link.

Colin Powell talks with Harvard EdCast and puts host Matt Weber through the paces.  Well worth a listen all the way through.  Sandy Kress hops in the wayback machine to early 2002. Over at National Geographic they talk with John Hunter.  He was one of TIME’s 12 for 12 education activists.  And Robert Costrell takes a look at one transition issue on pension reform.

From the WSJ – Common Core, shaken or stirred? Significant politics there. And NYT checks in on CT outcomes.  You can go home again! Joe Williams takes on the UFT in the Daily News.

It got even harder to get anything done in Washington last night.

Students First is looking for Teacher Fellows. Deadline is 5/23.

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes that the House Budget Committee broke last summer’s budget deal by eliminating the automatic sequestration and cutting non-defense discretionary spending while sparing defense spending.  The inclusion of the defense cuts in the original package always seemed like the thing that would trigger its unraveling, especially because this package seems unlikely to become law absent a more balanced – read fewer cuts all around – approach.

Also, when OMB asked for ideas and comments about how to reduce the regulatory burden for federal grant recipients they received more than 350 comments.  But an informed source says fewer than 10 were from K-12 groups.  Another datapoint about just how big of an issue flexibility really is, as this report on NCLB flexibility asks.

Bellwether’s third fiscal year is coming to a close soon and we’re doing some strategic planning as we look toward the future and think about our growth.  In addition to a survey we’ve sent to many people in the field we’re hoping for a shorter – just a few minutes – response from blog readers about your take on the needs of the sector.  You can fill out the survey here, it’s anonymous, and we’re grateful in advance for your time and thoughts.  The survey will be open for one week.

Some education goings on at Maker Faire.  And Charter School Growth Fund and EdSurge are putting something together there, too.

The Times takes a look at Joel Klein, NewsCorp, and education. Reading between the lines what the story really shows is how much the personal becomes the political in education.

In the American Spectator RiShawn Biddle argues that Romney largely will continue the education policies of Bush and Obama – mainly because he has some moderates advising him and once was a moderate on the issue. But as a rule it’s always risky to conflate the policy apparatus of a presidential campaign with its political imperatives. So Biddle’s analysis would be more convincing (a) if many of these advisers were not privately saying that the politics of education are tough on the Republican side (b) if the candidate himself – who does seem prone to change his positions on this stuff – was not saying he’s going to pursue a more conservative federal role in education and (c) if we ignore that were he to win Romney would almost certainly be dealing with conservatives in Congress not favorably disposed to a strong federal role in education and eager to undo some Obama (and Bush) era policies and, of course, (d) if Biddle’s best evidence of Romney’s moderate education credentials were richer than supporting the D.C. voucher program and some pro-reform speeches from 2003. And of course President Bush himself hinted disapprovingly at what the Republican candidates were up to himself.  My take on current state of presidential education politics via TIME here.

In The Times Michael Winerip takes a look at resistance to a new teacher licensing system based on video that’s being jointly developed by Stanford and Pearson. It’s one of a few efforts to use video currently underway. As to the resistors, let’s just stipulate that when you think Stanford’s Graduate School of Education is too reformist, well…anyway…

Winerip seems most concerned that this new idea will lead to outsourcing and “corporatization” and denigrate teachers.  Perhaps, but teachers have to pass licensing tests now.  Absent subject matter tests for secondary teachers they’re mostly low-level and most people from the educational left to the educational right think a higher-bar would help elevate the profession – it’s one of the few points of pretty widespread agreement in today’s education debate. And probably worth nothing that today’s licensing tests are also developed and administered by the private and non-profit sector and then paid for by candidates and used by states.  It’s, well, outsourcing. Or, in other words, this is how it works today.  The only difference in this case is the technology.

A more serious objection might be the cost-effectiveness of this video approach relative to better hiring and human resources practices at the school level.  Rather than sparing people from making decisions should we be investing in capacity to make those decisions? And once there is more data a key question will be what the predictive leverage of this approach is relative to other – cheaper – licensing tests now in use? A second, related, issue is that for all the talk about value-added scores bouncing around it’s observations that are really noisy right now and have big reliability issues. The way to address that is more observations but that’s costly.

More generally, the idea of more observational protocols is obviously a good one.  It’s still entirely possible to get hired for a teaching job without anyone in the place where you are teaching having actually seen you teach. And the majority of teachers do not teach in subjects or grades where standardized tests are used, so other approaches are needed even if you think value-added data are useful.  But as with all things evaluation you can’t just go from zero to 60. In this case there is still a lot of work to be done to figure out how to norm the evaluators for greater consistency and more generally around how to most effectively use video. The Gates Foundation MET project is one important piece of that work (and is about to produce a large library of live teaching video for public use, the privacy issues are not the three ring circus they’re made out to be in this column). Other fields – particularly athletics of all things – are further ahead on using video in different ways. It’s an area where some innovation could lead to new ideas and methods.

Finally, higher-bar or no higher-bar, a big part of the problem here is the lack of accountability for schools of education (I say that as a board member of two of them – UVA and HGSE – and a former state official). Another area of broad-agreement in today’s education debates is that the country’s education schools need to step up their game, in many cases dramatically. How to do that and the politics of doing it are the flash points. That’s an issue of better policy, not better video.

Note – I’ve done a very small amount of consulting indirectly for Pearson and unrelated to this work.  Gates is a funder of BW.

If you want an on-the-ground (and fluid) example of the complicated politics of education and intraparty tensions for Democrats these days it’s hard to beat what’s happening in Connecticut right now around the governor’s reform proposals.  For the latest Courant take here and CT Mirror take is here.  Read both for full flavor.

In this week’s TIME column I take a look at PineappleGate.  In case you’ve been under a rock that’s the saga in New York over a question on the state’s ELA test. I trace the saga from the incorrect passage first published by the NY Daily News to the larger implications for our conversation about testing. The column includes an exclusive comment from Pearson – a deviation from their usual policy of not commenting on these issues – as well as a leaked memo outlining the background and use of the question.

When the New York Daily News posted an article about an Aesop-inspired fable that appeared on the standardized test eighth graders in New York state had to take last month — about a pineapple challenging a hare to a foot race through the forest — all hell broke loose because the passage was so poorly written and the questions about it so incomprehensible. The fable described several animals assuming that the pineapple must have a trick up its sleeve that would enable the immobile fruit to win the race, and when they discovered that it didn’t, they ate it. Test-takers were asked: Why did they eat the pineapple? The correct answer: because the animals were annoyed. And who was the wisest of the animals? An owl that was never mentioned in the passage. Anti-testing activists responded with fury that this set of questions showed why standardized testing is worthless. New York officials quickly turned tail and tossed out the pineapple passage, declaring that they would not count it on this year’s test and would not use it in the future.

There was just one problem: much of the uproar was based on bad information…

The questions following the pineapple/hare passage were multiple choice – in this case there is just one option: Click here to read the rest of the column.

Update:  More on the memo and Pearson’s response via NYT.

In August Bill Phillips of NYCSA and I are riding the Pan Mass Challenge to raise money for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.  We’ll ride from Sturbridge to Provincetown in Massachusetts.

Cancer touches all of us in various ways and impacts loved ones and colleagues.  If you’re interested in supporting our efforts – 100 percent of rider-raised revenue goes directly to Dana-Farber’s Jimmy Fund – then you can learn more and donate to my ride via this link and to Bill’s ride via this link.  Contributions are 100 percent tax deductible.

If cycling is not your thing you can run the NYC Marathon for LinkEd.  Last year several Eduwonk readers joined their team and you can, too.

Richard Whitmire returns to his old haunts with a provocative piece on black and Hispanic students in USAT.

Cleveland Plain Dealer takes a look at the evolution of charter schooling in that city.

A few odds and ends worth checking out:

They are still letting it all hang out in Douglas County, Colorado.  And contention around Common Core?

If you’re heading to NewSchools Summit don’t miss Bellwether’s Kim Smith leading a discussion on disruption and the public good at 11:30 and United States Senator Michael Bennet and Margaret Spellings at 3:30.

JoAnn Armao of the WaPo editorial board checks out New Orleans.  We did the same at an Askwith last week, at HGSE.

Insiders have been watching Virginia’s NCLB waiver request as a signal of the administration’s seriousness about holding the line on accountability.  Based on this response looks like they plan to do that.  Here’s my take from a few months ago in RTD.

New roll-up of data on NY charter schools.  And a throwdown on math here.

Last week it was teacher of the year, this week TNTP announces Fishman Prize winners.

Two to check out today:

David Brooks on learning and policy feedback.  Worth reading.  Although even where the lessons are obvious they’re not always heeded.

Rick Hess on philanthropy.

This week’s TIME column looks at education and the presidential election. Other than this week’s political sparring about student loan interest rates you’re not hearing a lot about education from the campaign trail.  There’s a reason for that but it means a lot is getting left on the table.

According to a recent poll, 67 percent of registered voters in swing states said education was “extremely important” to them in this year’s election. Parents of high schoolers and college students are particularly worried (or they should be) that the interest rate on federally backed student loans is set to double in July, from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. Meanwhile, only 8 percent of low-income students even make it out of college by age 24. Business leaders agree America needs to do a better job educating its kids if we want to remain competitive globally.  Yet despite all that, President Obama and Mr. Romney aren’t talking about education’s hard questions. They aren’t even talking up their own successes. Why? Because education reform doesn’t fit well with the overall argument either candidate is making about why he should get to sit in the Oval Office next January…

Want an easy fit?  Click here and you can read the entire column at TIME’s site.

Want to learn about and support a different way of teaching math?  Then click right here.

Times Magazine talks with Joel Klein.  And update on the debate in Connecticut.

Educating girls in Afghanistan in 2012 – a story that is at once inspiring and depressing.

We’ll be doing that tomorrow afternoon at an Askwith Forum.  No charge and open to all.

Over at The Atlantic I take a look at the issue of obsolete law and how it becomes so prevalent in education policy:

Last year, Adam Gray was named the Massachusetts Teacher of the Year. Despite the honor, Gray, who is in his twenties, was dismissed from his South Boston high school shortly thereafter because of rules that make seniority more important than performance when deciding layoffs. He now teaches at the prestigious Boston Latin.

Not surprisingly, follies like this are commonly cited as examples of how archaic practices persist in education. Yet focusing on these absurd examples to score some easy points — as is typical in the education debate — obscures the larger, far more serious systemic problems that underlie them.

You can read the entire op-ed looking at three big drivers of obsolete law – and others in the series – via this link.

At NY Daily News Richard Whitmire and RiShawn Biddle say the real casualty of the war on women is boys.

New report from Public Impact discusses the experience to date with student-based budgeting in Hartford, CT (pdf).