Alexander Russo

San Bernardino shooter inspected school cafeterias before massacre KPCC: San Bernardino school officials tell KPCC that Syed Rizwan Farook visited eleven school sites to inspect cafeterias through his job as a San Bernardino County health inspector. Officials found out less than a day after the shootings that Farook had been at a high school campus two months […]

First things first: The Solutions Journalism Network is hosting an event for education journalists in Seattle in late January, according to this announcement: SJN’s workshop for education journalists. “The solutions approach helps journalists fulfill an important responsibility of the education beat: helping the public understand which ideas, plans and programs hold real promise for fixing the array […]

Washington Charter Schools Find Another Source Of Public Money Seattle Public Radio: Washington state’s charter schools are about to lose state funding, so they’re exploring an option that might allow them to stay open. See also Seattle Times. Montgomery County Group Educates Teachers About Sikh Culture WAMU: After a man who may have mistook Sikhs for Muslims attacked a […]

BEST OF THE WEEK Washington Post: At the Primary School, funded with Zuckerberg fortune, education will start before birth http://ow.ly/VqQHk WBUR: For Education Reform, Boston Activists Turn To Ballot Initiatives http://ow.ly/VuSte LA Times: PAC shielded $2.3 million in donations by LA charter school backers http://ow.ly/VuR7H EdWeek: Unique challenges for 1st-gen college students like Ayat Husseini  http://bit.ly/1Q58Zf6  NYT: Cuomo, in […]

Charter schools appealing to more diverse families as D.C. gentrifies Washington Post: Charter schools that serve the greatest mix of students tend to be in central parts of the city, in proximity to gentrified neighborhoods such as Columbia Heights and Brookland. They are in high demand, with an influx of higher-income families who are looking for alternatives […]

At first glance, there’s not much reason to pay attention to this recent Washington Post story about a new Harvard teacher preparation program: To build a better teacher, Harvard launches program aimed at quality. Published over the Thanksgiving weekend, the piece describes the new program, called Harvard Teacher Fellows, that the school of education “hopes will […]

ESEA Reauthorization Coasts Through House; Next Stop: U.S. Senate PK12: The House on Wednesday voted 359 to 64 to approve the Every Student Succeeds Act, which would scale back the federal role in education for the first time since the early 1980s. See also NYT, AP, Washington Post, NPR. Teachers’ strike vote set for next week, union says Tribune: he […]

Right before Thanksgiving, I wrote NYT’s Mass. Testing Story Contradicted By Other Outlets, pointing out that the Times story appeared to overstate what was happening substantively and perhaps even symbolically in MA. There are now a few letters to the editor in the New York Times about last week’s Massachusetts’s Common Core Path story, including this one […]

House to Vote on No Child Left Behind Rewrite AP: House members are expected to vote on a bill Wednesday, followed by a Senate vote next week.The bill would continue the requirement for annual testing of children in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school. But it would end federal efforts to tie scores to […]

I’m on the road today — apologies for the lack of new blog posts. Here’s something from last year you might not have seen that is still pretty timely: Think Tanks Bypassing Media: In case you hadn’t noticed, more and more think tanks are behaving in journalism-like ways: hiring journalists to write pleasant, engaging pieces as well […]