RealClearEd Today 05/15/2014: Data Mining Your Kids?
Good morning, it's Thursday May 15. This morning at RealClearEducation we have news, commentary, analysis, and reports from the top of the education world. Center for American Progress' Ulrich Boser and Max Marchitello write today about similarities in the Advanced Placement program and the Common Core -- but the disparities in how people respond to them. As we do each weekday we'll update the site throughout the day with new content - on our main page as well as sidebars that focus on specific parts of the education sector in depth. At the bottom of this email are just a few highlights of all the new material on our site this morning.
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Today is Dan Patrick's birthday. A native of Ohio, the popular sportscaster and longtime ESPN broadcaster is 58. Patrick, along with Keith Olbermann, helped define the style and impact of the all-sports network as it was gaining traction in the 1990s. Today he hosts his own sports show and appears on a variety of media.
ESPN is now an enormous and iconic brand worthy of its own send-ups (think Jason Batemen covering a dodgeball tournament in the 2004 film "Dodgeball"). Yet that was not predestined. There was a lot of skepticism that there was sufficient audience for a network just focused on sports when ESPN first went on the air in 1979. Sports were part of what the big networks did, the conventional media wisdom went, along with entertainment and news.
As it turns out, there is a lot to be said for specialization and focus, and ESPN has changed sports media - and changed sports. The benefits of specialization might be true in the education field as well. There are plenty of critiques of school districts, but perhaps the most salient one is that as they are charged with doing so many things, they end up doing none of them very well: complicated transportation systems, food services, large human resources operations, and that's before the, you know, instructional part. Reasonable people can disagree about how to most effectively unbundle some of those services - or not - but at a minimum it's worth asking if K-12 systems themselves are the optimal model?
In some communities, school districts are smaller and more compressed. There are high school districts and K-8 or even K-5 ones. It adds to administrative personnel but also allows for focus. The differences between what a high school student and a kindergarten student needs are vast. Delivering quality to such a diverse set of students is an enormous challenge. Perhaps specialization is a path to quality? It's probably not coincidental that most of the nation's top performing charter schools tend to specialize - they are very good elementary schools, middle schools, or outstanding college preparatory public schools. Few try to cover the waterfront.
On the air, Patrick would sometimes say that an athlete was "en fuego" when they really turned it on. You'd say that about few school districts today. It's worth asking if we're even setting districts up for success in the first place.
RealClearEducation May 15, 2014 Headlines:
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