arne duncan

I decided to spend my Friday afternoon reading through some Race to the Top applications. I focused on states where ABCTE is accepted as a TRUE alternative route to teacher certification and read through Pennsylvania, Florida and Oklahoma.

First - this was a TON OF WORK for these states and the people that put these together must have spent some very long hours getting it done.

Second - these states proudly mention ABCTE is a route to certification and they meet the point requirements of Race to the Top! Yay us!!

The great thing about the blogosphere right now for people like me who don't have a lot of time is that you can find quick summaries from great people like Steve Sawchuck at Teacher Beat on critical policies affecting teachers.

I was invited to attend the ARRA briefing over at the US DOE today. For us, the briefing actually provided a little more information than previous top line discussions. In times of great change, effective organizations over-communicate. With ARRA, the US DOE is definitely making sure that they do that and it is appreciated by many. This extra communication is certainly keeping people from finding things not to like about the recovery money (see – I didn’t call it stimulus so their communication plan is working).

If you heard a collective sigh of relief from the education reformers in the world, you heard correctly. Linda Darling-Hammond (LDH) will not be joining the US DOE citing family reasons. Her daughter is ill and, as a dad, I will keep them in my thoughts.

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.