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Its funny that Nicholas Kristof compares the education system to an escalator in his column in this weekends New York Times. We know a great deal about broken escalators here in DC — our subway system is full of them — and the reason theyre so often out of order has as much to do with bad management and absurd union rules as it does with resources. (Unsuck DC Metro had an illuminating post about this late last year.) As in public transit, so in public education: how we spend our education dollars is an important and widely ignored problem. Ins

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WASHINGTON – The District of Columbia Public Schools has notified 413 employees of their separation as the result of IMPACT evaluations, the DCPS said on Friday.

IMPACT evaluates teacher performance based on student achievement, instructional expertise, collaboration, and professionalism. Other employees are assessed based on criteria specific to their jobs.

The 413 represent just over 6 percent of the 6,500 total DCPS employees. D

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The Rockefeller Institute has some : state tax revenue collections were up 9.3% in the first quarter of 2011, recovering nearly to the level they were at in early 2008, prior to the financial crisis. The news is not all good, however. Local tax collections are down 0.6%, meaning school districts are still going to feel the pinch when it comes to local funding. Whats more, residential real estate markets in most places have not recovered — even when they do, tax collections will lag by a few years as property values are reassessed. Even at the state level, increases in collections dont mean happy days if legislators assumed even greater increases in revenue in order to balance budgets.

Economic recovery is not likely to bring an end to the stretching the school dollar era. A

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More than 200 experts will gather at the University of Texas at El Paso today and Saturday for a conference on education in times of violence.

Educators and researchers from the United States, Mexico and Central America will discuss research and best practices, particularly in culturally and linguistically diverse populations.

The theme of the conference is “Teaching, Learning, and Leadership in Times of Violence.”

“The conference seeks to touch on this broad theme,” said Judith Munter, associate dean of UTEP’s College of Education.

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Film Critic Roger Ebert penned a damning critique of the too-often-used practice of giving struggling students a retold version of a more complex literary classic. He talks in particular about The Great Gatsby. The entire article is worth reading, but his most salient point is this

“There is no purpose in ‘reading’ The Great Gatsby unless you actually read it. Fitzgeralds novel is not about a story. It is about how the story is told. Its poetry, its message, its evocation of Gatsbys lost American dream, is expressed in Fitzgeralds stylein the precise words he chose to write what some consider the great American novel. Unless

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