Watch: Michael Mulgrew on Technology in Education, Fixing Middle Schools and No Child Reauthorization

Being Randi Weingarten’s successor as head of the American Federation of Teachers’ New York City local isn’t easy. But Michael Mulgrew has definitely earned the ire of charter school supporters, school reformers and others for his strident opposition to lifting New York State’s restrictions on charter school growth. The role he and his counterpart at the state AFT affliate played in torpedoing the Empire State’s Race to the Top plans, in particular, came up during yesterday’s Alliance for Excellent Education pow-wow on New York City’s school reform efforts courtesy of a New York Post reporter; predictably, Mulgrew denied he had anything to do with it. Mulgrew also spent time dodging questions and comments about D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s efforts, which he politely pointed out, had nothing to do with him or New York City.

Certainly, much of what Mulgrew is doing is mere posturing. The reality is that New York City taxpayers, long-tired of woeful public schools, are satisfied that schools chieftain Joel Klein and his boss, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, are on the right track. The growing pension burdens, along with the federal push for increasing charters and reforming the teaching profession, means that Mulgrew will eventually give in. If Klein can throw in another 43 percent increase in teachers salaries over time (as he did in the past decade), Mulgrew will cave in even more quickly.

At least one can say Mulgrew is thoughtful about the role of technology in education. In this clip, he says that testing and technology is as important in improving how teachers instruct their students as it is for holding schools (and teachers — though he won’t say this) accountable. He also briefly notes that middle schools must be as much a focus of the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act as high school reform.

The Read

It shouldn't take a cop to bring a kid back into school. We must all do our part to keep the kids in their seats and ready to learn.

Thinking — and writing — about the dropout nation. Updated throughout the day:

1. Figuring out ways to keep them in school: Or at least that is the plan for school districts in Montgomery, Ala., Skokie, Illinois, and California’s San Bernardino County. All the plans, however, seem like rehashes of earlier regimes of bringing in police officers to ticket students and charging parents with failure to send their children to school. Not to say it doesn’t have some value. But the plans really should address the lack of academic rigor, the achievement gap issues and the other underlying factors that result in chronic truancy and eventually, leaving school without a sheepskin.
2. How about raising expectations for special ed students: That’s the argument made by Lance Izumi of the Pacific Research Institute in his San Francisco Chronicle op-ed, in which he criticizes the Golden Gate City’s school officials for opposing a state requirement — dictated by the No Child Left Behind Act — that those students must take the state’s high school exit exam. Given that the test only quizzes students on 8th-grade math and need only to get 55-to-60 percent of the answers correct, all but the most developmentally-disabled special ed students can pass it with some extra tutoring and help from their teachers and schools. Given that 28 percent of special ed students eventually dropped out during the 2004-05 school year, according to the U.S. Department of Education, wouldn’t it make sense to figure out a way to keep those students in school?
3. A GI Bill for K-12 students? That’s what David Kirkpatrick suggests in his latest column at EducationNews.org. And he notes that not only did the original GI Bill plan work, it didn’t bring additional federal regulations as opponents of the idea feared at the time. Perhaps it is time to create a federal voucher program and expand the level of federal funding to public charter schools.
4. Are you kidding me? The College Board — the folks, along with Educational Testing Services, behind the Scholastic Aptitude Test — will roll out a version of the PSAT in 2010 designed to test 8th-graders and get them into college prep programs early. L.A. Unified may actually offer the new PSAT to all 8th-graders once it’s unveiled. That’s great news, especially for talented young black males and females, both nationwide and in the City of Angels, who often get shunted aside from such programs despite their high intelligence. But a few folks, according to the Los Angeles Times, think the tests should be given far earlier in 6th grade. They may be right, but 8th-grade testing is a start.
5. Sometimes, Sol Stern needs to put down his pen: Kevin Carey gives the education policy legend the business for misusing the phrase “Lake Woebegon Effect” in his piece on New York’s math scores. My big issue with Stern on this one is more of the put-up-or-shut-up variety: He doesn’t offer any evidence of whether the students are progressing over time, simply comparing scores of whole grades of students — in this case, grade 3-through-8 — instead of, say doing a value-added time series in which he compares 5th grade student scores to their scores as 8th graders three years later. This method would likely give a better picture of how much of the test score improvement relates to the lowering of standards, natural cognitive growth as students or more effective instruction.
6. Think before you speak?: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution takes a state education department official to task for declaring in a deposition that a school curriculum without a science component is an “adequate education.”
7. What do Cheech and Chong and Randi Weingarten and the American Federation of Teachers have in common: According to Matthew Ladner, both are, umm, up in smoke.