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Scholar's Notebook

  • NEA: tell us how you really feel

    In stark contrast to National Education Association (NEA) affiliate Education Minnesota's touchy-feely, warm-fuzzy, "it's for the children" public persona, the NEA's retiring general counsel made it perfectly clear in July that the NEA is a powerful union first, last, and always. Neal McClusky of the Cato Institute provides this transcript [...]
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    Posted: October 15, 2009, 12:18pm EDT

  • It was never about the speech

    "I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn." —President Barack Obama, address to schoolchildren, September 8, 2009President Obama's speech today and the revised Department of Education "engagement resources" do not change the federal government's ever-increasing control of education, [...]
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    Posted: September 08, 2009, 11:27am EDT

  • Why Obama is speaking directly to schoolchildren on September 8

    The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next generation.—Abraham Lincoln (attributed)Diffusion of authority among tens of thousands of school districts is a safeguard against centralized control and abuse of the educational system that must be maintained. —Dwight D. Eisenhower, New [...]
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    Posted: September 03, 2009, 11:42am EDT

  • How west metro schools stack up

    Now that the Minnesota Department of Education has released the 2009 Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments II results, I pored over the high school data to compare the test results among west metro school districts. I added per-pupil spending and enrollment data from School Data Direct to see if I could find [...]
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    Posted: August 11, 2009, 12:13pm EDT

  • Unalottment: don't let this crisis go to waste

    "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." —Rahm Emmanuel, Obama White House Chief of StaffIn his July unalottment, Tim Pawlenty has an opportunity to put a nice bow [...]
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    Posted: June 05, 2009, 11:58am EDT

  • House Ed Finance bill nixes Q Comp, Truth-In-Taxation meetings

    In an e-mail to constitutents, Rep. Sarah Anderson (R-Plymouth) alerts us to a few troubling provisions in the House Omnibus K-12 Education Finance bill (HF2):Cuts education funding $1.9 million (14 percent) when shifts and one-time federal aid are excluded. According to Anderson, all revenue sources considered, this bill is $185 [...]
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    Posted: May 01, 2009, 11:55am EDT

  • Under construction

    Pardon our mess while SCHOLAR'S NOTEBOOK is under construction. All of our content should be available throughout our redesign. Thanks for your interest in SCHOLAR'S NOTEBOOK, integrated math, education reform, and school choice! [...]
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    Posted: April 23, 2009, 7:47am EDT

  • Senate DFL moves to kill charter schools

    Over Republican minority objections, the Minnesota Senate Education Subcommittee on Charter Schools yesterday perverted Governor Pawlenty's charter school bill (S.F. 867) with several amendments that would strangle Minnesota's successful charter school movement. The bill passed out of the subcommittee and will be heard by the full Senate Education Committee.One of [...]
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    Posted: March 12, 2009, 8:07am EDT

  • Not only math is "integrated" in Wayzata district

    When I heard this year that the Wayzata School District had recently adopted the textbook, Vocabulary from Classical Roots by Norma Fifer and Nancy Flowers (Educators Publishing Service, Cambridge and Toronto), I was pleased.I am a technical writer by profession, I love language, and insist that my own children learn [...]
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    Posted: February 24, 2009, 11:54am EST

  • Beacon Academy "bursting at the seams"

    Beacon Academy, a Core Knowledge-based charter school, has outgrown its current building in Plymouth. I have been following the creation and evolution of this charter school since it was just an idea. Hearing about Beacon's growing pains and then growing successes from Beacon's director (and my friend), Jordan Ford, has [...]
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    Posted: February 13, 2009, 11:57am EST

  • Beacon Academy's success glossed over

    If you were looking for mention of the Beacon Academy charter school of Plymouth, Minnesota on a recent KSTP-TV "5 Eyewitness News Investigates" segment about charter schools, and if you blinked, you may have missed it.That's because the story focused on various charter schools that are violating Minnesota law, and' [...]
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    Posted: November 24, 2008, 11:35am EST

  • John McCain on school choice

    Education is the civil rights issue of this century. Equal access to public education has been gained. But what is the value of access to a failing school? We need to shake up failed school bureaucracies with competition, empower parents with choice, remove barriers to qualified instructors, attract and reward [...]
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    Posted: September 11, 2008, 12:42pm EDT

  • Minnesota Education Reform News (1999-2008)

    I have shut down Minnesota Education Reform News, the web site that existed at various URLs and on various web platforms since about 1999. I will continue to maintain this blog, but my main blog has been and will be North Star Liberty. Thanks to everyone for your support, particularly [...]
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    Posted: September 05, 2008, 9:19am EDT

  • Free speech, at least when we agree with it

    It's the end of the school year, and at high schools in America, teachers, administrators, and staff — God bless them all — are enduring Senior Prank Day. At Bloomington Kennedy High School, three senior boys were barred from participating in Class of 2008 commencement exercises for waving the so-called [...]
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    Posted: June 09, 2008, 8:10am EDT

  • Student journalists ready for mainstream media

    Liberals and conservatives differ on freedom of the press and speech. Conservatives call a newspaper story that presents both sides of an issue "fair and balanced." Liberals call the same newspaper story "biased."Some of the writers at the Wayzata High School newspaper, the Trojan Tribune, are already practicing "activist journalism," [...]
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    Posted: May 19, 2008, 12:27pm EDT

  • House votes unanimously to leave NCLB behind

    On Monday, April 28, the Minnesota House of Representatives voted 128-0 (see Journal page 10824) in favor of an amendment to the omnibus education bill, SF 3001/HF 3316, that would ask the U.S. Secretary of Education to relieve the state of Minnesota from the federal No Child Left Behind Act's [...]
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    Posted: May 07, 2008, 8:21am EDT

  • The state of integrated math at Wayzata High School

    Last week I attended an open forum, conducted by the PTSO, to hear about Wayzata High School's integrated math program. My son is a freshman at Wayzata, who is taking the "regular" integrated track, based on the Core Plus Mathematics Project (CPMP) from Western Michigan University. Wayzata also offers an [...]
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    Posted: March 04, 2008, 7:23am EST

  • NCLB: feds out of education in 2008

    Minnesota schools could emerge from the financial and administrative burdens of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) if conservatives in the state and in Congress have their way.In Minnesota, Sen. Geoff Michel (R-Edina) has announced that he will introduce a bill in the Senate to withdraw the state [...]
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    Posted: January 10, 2008, 12:36pm EST

  • Fred Thompson on education policy

    One of the good things about campaign season is that, if you look hard enough, you can uncover substantive debate on issues you care about.Presidential candidate Fred Thompson's white paper on education caught my eye. It sums up several points of the conservative position on education reform.The Tenth Amendment to' [...]
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    Posted: December 14, 2007, 8:15am EST

  • Texas pulls funding from Everyday Mathematics curriculum

    The State of Texas has pulled its funding for the third grade unit of the integrated math curriculum Everyday Mathematics (the University of Chicago School Mathematics Program, a.k.a. "Chicago Math," or just "fuzzy math"). The state board of education charged that the program leaves Texas public school graduates "unprepared" for [...]
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    Posted: December 06, 2007, 12:19pm EST

  • Merry Christmas from Scholar the Owl

    Thanks to all of you who read Scholar's Notebook now and then, subscribe to our RSS feed, or just find us by entering "integrated math" into Google. I have gone from continual blogging during the Profile of Learning repeal battle with my friends at EdWatch (who are still doing yeoman's [...]
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    Posted: December 06, 2007, 8:49am EST

  • Radical Math: like "integrated math" on, well, we're not sure what they're smoking

    At last, truth in advertising from the integrated math crowd.According to the movement's web site, "Radical Math Teachers was launched in April 2006 by Jonathan Osler who teaches Math and Community Organizing at El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice (www.elpuente.us), a public high school in Brooklyn, NY."Radical Math Teachers' [...]
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    Posted: June 21, 2007, 11:31am EDT
    by Scholar

  • Was choice of Everyday Math predetermined?

    The St. Michael-Albertville Schools (STMA) are currently in Year 1 of a several-year long curriculum review cycle for their math curriculum. As in many school districts, the process attempts to bring the various stakeholders together (teachers, the curriculum director, parents) to look at the current curriculum, assess needs, and select [...]
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    Posted: June 14, 2007, 12:36pm EDT
    by Scholar

  • The manufactured crisis in kindergarten readiness

    The good news is that the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) evaluated a random sample of children entering kindergarten in the fall of 2006, and found that only 3-10% of this cohort had not acquired a skill, knowledge, or behavior in a selected "developmental domain."The bad news is that the [...]
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    Posted: June 12, 2007, 11:58am EDT
    by Scholar

  • Minnesota: The Nanny $tate

    In “All-day kindergarten funding overdue (April 25),” Sun Newspapers Minnetonka Community Editor Joe Kieser chastises the state of Minnesota for falling “behind states like Mississippi, Alabama and most of our neighboring states in funding all-day kindergarten.” He says that “Minnesota is also in need of more special education and early [...]
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    Posted: May 04, 2007, 12:28pm EDT
    by Scholar

  • Newspapers acknowledge school choice

    The Star Tribune brightened my day with an editorial ("Charter school cap is unwarranted") endorsing charter schools, and by extension, school choice. "The door should remain open to create innovative schools for Minnesota students," said the Star Tribune.Charter schools do not represent the ultimate in local control. They are taxpayer-funded, [...]
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    Posted: May 02, 2007, 8:37am EDT
    by Scholar

  • Bill would dump No Child Left Behind in Minnesota

    No Child Left Behind is in my mind the largest intrusion of the federal government into state policy, and the biggest federal boondoggle, in my lifetime...They have actually created a cash subsidy to encourage states to lower standards. —David Jennings, as interim superintendent of the Minneapolis public schools, Star Tribune, [...]
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    Posted: March 16, 2007, 12:35pm EDT
    by Scholar

  • Instead of penalizing Wisconsin students, look to U, fiscal shell game

    Since 1968, a reciprocity agreement has enabled Minnesota college students to attend Wisconsin schools at Minnesota in-state tuition rates, and Wisconsin students to attend schools in the Gopher State at their home state's in-state tuition rates. While tuition rates stayed fairly close to each other, the agreement gave students in [...]
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    Posted: March 05, 2007, 9:45am EST
    by Scholar

  • History Day

    I have had the pleasure of serving as a History Day judge over at Wayzata East Middle School for the past few years. This year I also helped one of the seventh graders at Wayzata West Middle School, a family friend, with his project, which to our delight earned a [...]
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    Posted: March 01, 2007, 8:47am EST
    by Scholar

  • Missing from Pawlenty education plan: true reform

    Let's not allow nostalgia to limit our children's future. We owe our children their own future, not our past. —Gov. Tim Pawlenty, State of the State Address, January 16, 2007Governor Tim Pawlenty gave Minnesota plenty of the past in his education agenda, highlighted by a 7.7% increase ($986 million) to [...]
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    Posted: January 29, 2007, 8:44am EST
    by Scholar

  • The money quote

    Under a reciprocity agreement, Wisconsin students can attend the University of Minnesota for about what they would pay for in-state tuition at the University of Wisconsin. Unfortunately for the University of Minnesota, it costs much less to attend school in Wisconsin than it does in Minnesota.According to an article in [...]
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    Posted: January 26, 2007, 8:03am EST
    by Scholar

  • Integrated Math: An Inconvenient Truth

    Parents and educators from Washington state's Where's the Math? have produced a wonderful 15-minute video that shows why many parents and math educators believe that integrated math curricula like Chicago Math/Everyday Mathematics is a fundamentally flawed curriculum, in spite of what you might be hearing from your child's teacher or' [...]
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    Posted: January 25, 2007, 11:44am EST
    by Scholar

  • Pawently's education agenda preview

    Our approach when it comes to early childhood will be to focus on kids who are at risk and disadvantaged. —Gov. Tim PawlentyGovernor Tim Pawlenty gave a preview of his education agenda to Star Tribune columnist Lori Sturdevant in yesterday's Strib. Presumably, Pawlenty will give a more detailed overview in' [...]
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    Posted: January 15, 2007, 8:48am EST
    by Scholar

  • Pawlenty, community look to KIPP to bridge achievement gap

    The achievement gap is like the weather: everyone talks about it, but everyone has seemingly been powerless to do anything about it, until now.In a collaborative effort between community organizations, big business, and his administration, Governor Tim Pawlenty announced in a press release that they will try to bridge the [...]
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    Posted: November 29, 2006, 8:55am EST
    by Scholar

  • Fuzzy math revisited

    In her recent Star Tribune column, "Teachers group takes lint-remover to 'fuzzy math,'" (a.k.a. "integrated math") Katherine Kersten reports that the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics is taking a second look at fuzzy math. The "math wars" launched in 1989 are still playing out today. Now, probably thanks in [...]
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    Posted: November 27, 2006, 8:31am EST
    by Scholar

  • Where's Scholar?

    Scholar has been missing in action at this blog, due to heavy coverage of the 2006 elections at my "other blog," North Star Liberty (http://northstarliberty.blogspot.com). We now resume our regularly scheduled programming. [...]
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    Posted: November 27, 2006, 8:18am EST
    by Scholar

  • EdWatch education conference

    From our friends at EdWatch: A national education conference addressing what's dangerous about the International Baccalaureate curriculum, why universal preschool is a bad idea, and how mental health screening for all is being incorporated into education outcomes will be held Friday evening, October 13th, and Saturday, Saturday, October 14th until 4:00 [...]
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    Posted: October 02, 2006, 8:24am EDT
    by Scholar

  • Minnesota math standards to be reviewed

    This week, Minnesota Education Commissioner Alice Seagren announced that applications are now being accepted for the Minnesota Math Standards Revision Committee. The new committee will begin the process of analyzing and recommending changes to Minnesota's current math standards. "Minnesota took a big step forward when we eliminated the Profile of Learning [...]
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    Posted: September 21, 2006, 12:27pm EDT
    by Scholar

  • Let freedom ring

    Our ability to defend ? intelligently and thoughtfully ? what we as a nation hold dear depends on the knowledge and understanding of what we hold dear. ?Diane Ravitch The good news is that 5% of all the schools in the United States that officially celebrated Constitution Day on Monday were [...]
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    Posted: September 21, 2006, 12:11pm EDT
    by Scholar

  • 9/11 gag order in the schools

    The fifth anniversary of 9/11, one of the most significant events in history, was not discussed let alone commemorated in any way at my kids' middle school. Please let us know in the comments how 9/11 was commemorated at your local K-12 school. EDUCATION | 9-11 [...]
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    Posted: September 12, 2006, 3:42pm EDT
    by Scholar

  • Back to school special: Stupid in America

    Whether you missed it on the first time around in January, or want to review this eye-opening, unabashed program again, tune in to your local ABC affiliate for a rerun of John Stossel's 20/20 report, Stupid in America, in which Stossel reveals the schools we need, and why we don't [...]
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    Posted: August 29, 2006, 12:12pm EDT
    by Scholar

  • Three must-read posts on education policy

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    Posted: August 16, 2006, 8:34am EDT
    by Scholar

  • A people's heritage

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    Posted: August 04, 2006, 11:49am EDT
    by Scholar

  • Beacon Prep open house July 24

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    Posted: July 18, 2006, 12:07pm EDT
    by Scholar

  • Superficial treatment of IB and AP keeps public in the dark

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    Posted: July 03, 2006, 11:43am EDT
    by Scholar

  • Value of early childhood education challenged

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    Posted: June 27, 2006, 11:55am EDT
    by Scholar

  • Minnesota's achievement gap

    Minnesota educators, policymakers, and teachers are wringing their hands over an Education Week report on the state's high school graduation rates. According to the Star Tribune:Fewer than half of Minnesota's black high school students end up getting their high school diplomas, according to a new study by Education Week magazine. [...]
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    Posted: June 22, 2006, 11:57am EDT
    by Scholar
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