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The meltdown in New Jersey over its 11^th-place showing in the Race to the Top competition – one place out of the money — can not be good for education reform. 

As Jamie Davies O’Leary reported here last January the state’s new Commissioner of Education,  Bret Schundler, is “a supporter of charter schools, differentiated teacher pay, and tax credits to fund scholarships for K-12 private schools, reforms that the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) is sure to continue fighting tooth and nail.”

Unfortunately, it wasn’t the NJEA who did in Schundler. 

As the New York Times  had it, the Garden State’s Education Commissioner  fibbed to governor Chris Christie about what happened in the state’s recent presentation to the RTT reviewers. Schundler told his bos

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The irreplaceable and immensely talented Laura Pohl is moving on, following her passion for international relief work. So we’re looking to hire our next Director of New Media. This is an incredibly challenging but rewarding role; responsibilities include:

• • Producing and editing professional-quality video, photograph, and audio content for the web;
• • Widening the readership of The Education Gadfly, expanding our web traffic, implementing SEO best practices and identifying new media and social networking possibilities;
• • Envisioning and coordinating web campaigns for studies and other projects;
• • Maintaining and troubleshooting the Fordham Institute website, edexcellence.net, and its blog, Flypaper;
• • Maintaining Fordham’s database and leading upgrades/improvements;
• • Ensuring the content on our site and blog is consistently fresh, lively, and relevant;
• • Managing and overseeing contract work on new media projects.

In other words, we’re looking for a superhuman. Is that you? For mo

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The Obama administration awarded Maryland and the District $325 million Tuesday for efforts to improve schools, a surprising double victory for the Washington region in an education reform contest that could reverberate in the fall elections.

Eight other states, most of them on the East Coast, also won shares of more than $3.3 billion in President Obama’s Race to the Top grant competition. The initiative, which challenges labor unions and state and local leaders to upend the status quo in public education, has helped Obama foment innovation and test-drive ideas about performance pay and national standards that could lay the groundwork for a revision of the No Child Left Behind law.

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Back in July, I wrote a blog post about a change in accommodations for students in Delaware taking a high-stakes reading test. The state allowed fewer students with disabilities to have the reading test read aloud to them, and officials were attributing a drop in test scores to that change.

I know that I was left wondering how reading aloud a reading test could have ever been a valid test accommodation. Hearing the words ultimately changes the test in a fundamental way, doesn’t it?

Now I know the answer, which is: it depends.

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The VCU School of Nursing’s Women’s Health Nursing Group (WHNG) will kick off the semester with a general meeting on Monday, Aug. 30 at noon in the SON quiet study room. Participants should bring their lunch.

WHNG is an organization created for VCU nursing students, by VCU nursing students interested in women’s health. The group was created to educate nursing students and the public about women’s health issues; network with local healthcare providers, and volunteer locally.

If you have an interest in the upcoming education session at Fairfield and Whitcomb clinics please meet with us on Tuesday, Aug. 24 at 5 p.m.

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