Dear Commons Community,

I arrived yesterday in New Orleans to attend the American Education Research Association Annual Conference.  It is one of the larger conferences ( more than 13,000 participants) that I ever attend.  A number of our students and faculty from the PhD Program in Urban Education are here as well as CUNY colleagues, most of whom are making presentations on topics such as  bilingual education, culturally-relevant mathematics instruction, teacher education policy, etc.    The highlight of the day was Carolyne Ali-Khan (one of our students)  receiving an award from Springer Publications for best article for 2010.

Congratulations to Carolyne.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Valerie Strauss has an excellent piece in The Washington Post on the departure of Cathie Black and what it means for education policymakers who have pushed for mayoral control of the public schools.  She comments that  “mayoral control of public schools and non-traditional school leaders are hardly the answer to the ills of urban education as some policymakers have portrayed them.”  Besides the “debacle” of Cathie Black, she also comments on the mediocre results of Black’s predecessor Joel Klein (NYS admitted dumbing down standardized test) and Michelle Rhee (widespread cheating on test scores) as evidence that mayoral control has not worked.  She concludes by quoting Diane Ravitch,  an outspoken critic of mayoral control an our colleague at New York University, that “the only thing that the mayoral model of school reform offers is zero accountability with all decision making vested in the office of the mayor.”

Tony