obama

I got a flurry of emails about President Obama’s Educate to Innovate program saying that ABCTE should be a big part of this. We should but the President has decided to pursue what Albert Einstein refers to as insanity – doing the same thing and hoping for a different result.

Over at Flypaper, Mike Petrilli is keeping the Obama Reform-O-Meter which he has pointing to a fairly neutral education agenda for the President and Secretary Duncan. He needs to point the arrow more to the left this week.

We got notice that the Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII) is beginning to release some of the $635 million they have to dole out under ARRA. They want to give out $143 million to 35 lucky groups to improve teacher quality. From the email:

Today in the Oklahoma House, Senate Bill 582 passed with a vote of 99 for and 0 against. A unanimous vote for the ABCTE alternative teacher certification program to be accepted in Oklahoma. This is pretty stunning as our program has, in the past, faced stiff opposition from the education establishment.

It is hard to fully understand everything that is going on in every state. So it came as a surprise to me yesterday when I was in Springfield Illinois that the demise of Governor Blagojevich was written in stone long before the unanimous vote was taken. As we walked around the capital, it became clear that the sin of selling Obama’s senate seat was the tip of the ice burg. Apparently, his approval rating had fallen to 18% before the indictment was made public.

It goes without saying that pop-culture has a dramatic impact on our youth and their studies. When LA Law became a hit show in the 80's, the number of people entering law school sky-rocketed. It was closely followed by ER which created a rush to get into med school. The CSI effect had universities scrambling to create CSI degree programs.

Last week, representatives from the McCain (Lisa Graham Keegan) and Obama (Linda Darling Hammond) campaigns met at Columbia University for a debate on education. Later in the week, in an open letter on The Huffington Post in response to the debate, Stanford University professor Martin Carnoy took issue with several of Senator McCain’s education policies, including his stance on teacher recruitment.

Tomorrow night there is an education debate between Lisa Graham-Keegan (McCain) and Linda Darling-Hammond (Obama). There have been a few debates between Lisa and various Obama representatives. The funny thing about these debates is that some of the Obama representatives support and believe very different things.