The pilot projects for growth models and differentiated accountability have gotten a lot of notice since Margaret Spellings became secretary in 2005. But Spellings also has been granting waivers regarding public school choice and supplemental educational services. She has given several districts permission to reverse the timetable for implementing those changes, allowing them to offer the SES one y...

Sen Barack Obama wasn't shy about taking on the National Education Association in his speech on Saturday. As in 2007, he endorsed performance pay to reward teachers who "consistently excel in the classroom." A few of the 10,000 NEA members booed, but most were silent, Vaishali Honawar reports in her blog on the convention. But Obama did give a nod to NEA's desire to increase federal K-12 funding. I...

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings loves Reading First. She says educators do, too. Here's what she told Greg Toppo of USA Today: "If I had a nickel for every person who said, 'Thank God for Reading First,' I'd be a millionaire." Let's do the math on that. At 20 nickels to a dollar, that would mean 20 million people would be singing the program's praises for Spellings to become a millionaire...

MM has assigned me the task of making sense of the National Education Association's new "Great Public Schools for Every Student by 2020." I read two pieces of NEA's six-point plan, and I saw dollar signs jumping off the page. The NEA wants Congress to guarantee full funding for NCLB's Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. (In federal budget terms, that would make those progra...

Why did only six states win approval to participate in the "differentiated accountability" pilot project? After all, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said she would let up to 10 states into the program. The answer comes in the Word document summarizing peer reviewers' perspectives on the proposals. The methods appeared largely to be based on methods of convenience rather than a focus on th...