Editor's note: blog stars is an occasional roundup of good reads from other ed blogs.

The EdFly Blog: Frivolous litigation earns dunce cap

As for Florida dumbing down education, as is alleged in the lawsuit, the state ranks first in the country in the percent of 2011 graduates who took an AP exam, sixth in the percent of graduates passing at least one AP exam, and fourth in improving the passing percentage since 2001.

An in-depth analysis by ProPublica last year praised Florida as being a leader in giving low-income students the same access to AP classes as affluent kids.

And while the state’s NAEP scores took a dip in 2011, it ranks second nationally in gains on the national assessments dating back to the 1990s.

In fact, by any measure, the state’s education system is light years ahead of the system that was in operation when Mills helped run Tallahassee. And the biggest beneficiaries have been the students who were routinely ignored back then. Full post here.

Sara Mead's Policy Notebook: This is why our current education debate is toxic

Richard Rothstein's American Prospect investigation into the details of Joel Klein's childhood (no, I'm not kidding here) is really not worth reading, but it unfortunately exemplifies two of the most toxic aspects of the current education reform conversation (fwiw it also contains some interesting information about the history of post-war public housing in NYC):

Personality over policy: The point of Rothstein's very long article seems to be that Joel Klein's education policy views are invalid because his childhood was less poor than it has sometimes been represented as being. At a surface level, this is idiotic. Whether Klein grew up in abject poverty or simply in circumstances much more humble than the financial and political status to which he has risen has absolutely nothing to do with whether the education policies he proposes work. Nor did Klein or anyone else ever claim himself as the sole data point for the power good teachers and schools can have on kids' lives. There's, um, actual research on this. (more…)

Editor's note: Here's our latest round-up of interesting stuff from other ed blogs.

Rick Hess Straight Up: Self-Pitying Tantrums Are Poor Way for Educators to Win Friends, Influence People

Fact 1: Teachers feel like they're getting a bad rap in the public discourse.

Fact 2: I've long since stopped reading the comments proffered on RHSU.

What in the world do these two statements have to do with each other? I think it's simple. Self-proclaimed advocates of educators and public education have become so vitriolic, mean-spirited, arrogant, and unreasoning that it's becoming inane to anyone who's not a fellow true believer. This means that they're poorly positioned to convince Americans, and painfully uninteresting to anyone who doesn't agree with them already. ...

I was enamored by the self-identified teacher who wrote, "I honestly wonder what you're doing, writing about a profession that you so clearly despise. I also wonder about the integrity of Education Week, since it keeps publishing more and more hit-pieces by people like you, who openly brandish his anti-union, anti-public education, and anti-public school teachers attitudes, just to satisfy the whims and expectations of sponsors such as the Gates foundation and others...Unlike hacks like you, we can not charge over time, or demand to be payed [sic] by the column, or the word. You sir, are the worst kind of demagogue, attacking a noble profession, while disguising your broadsides as concerns over our benefits." Another wrote, "Well, Rick anyone can blog on and on about the virtues of deceit. Pity the folks in Wisconsin who couldn't quite get it together to alter the lopsided equation." Truthfully, I'm not even sure what this means. Full post here.

Cato@Liberty: State Rep. Balks at Voucher Funding for Muslim School

Just as Louisiana’s legislative session was wrapping up earlier this month, state Rep. Kenneth Havard refused to vote for any voucher program that “will fund Islamic teaching.” According to the AP, the Islamic School of Greater New Orleans was on a list of schools approved by the state education department to accept as many as 38 voucher students. Havard declared: “I won’t go back home and explain to my people that I supported this.”

For unreported reasons, the Islamic school subsequently withdrew itself from participation in the program and the voucher funding was approved 51 to 49. With the program now enacted and funded, nothing appears to stand in the way of the Islamic school requesting that it be added back to the list, and it is hard to imagine a constitutionally sound basis for rejecting such a request.

This episode illustrates a fundamental flaw in government-funded voucher programs: they must either reject every controversial educational option from eligibility or they compel taxpayers to support types of education that violate their convictions. In either case, someone loses. Either poor Muslims in New Orleans are denied vouchers or taxpayers who don’t wish to support Muslim schools are compelled to do so.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Read post here. (more…)

Editor's note: In our third installment of "blog stars," we're shifting course slightly. We'll continue to highlight posts from ed blogs. But if we stumble on a thoughtful newspaper column now and then, we'll throw that in the mix, too.

Rick Hess Straight Up: The Culture of 'Can't' in American Schools

When it comes to reforming our nation's public schools, we hear a lot about what educational leaders can't do. Contracts, laws, and regulations assuredly handcuff school and system leaders. But the ardent drumbeat for "reform" has obscured the fact that school and system leaders can actually do much that they often complain they can't, if they have the persistence, knowledge, ingenuity, and motivation. In truth, it's tough to know how much blame should be apportioned to contracts and laws and how much to timid school boards and leaders who prize consensus and stakeholder buy-in ...

The problem is that in selecting, training, socializing, and rewarding leaders, we do not equip or encourage them to lead. Traditional educational leadership counsels tell leaders that they should rely wholly on coaching and consensus -- while placidly accepting contractual, bureaucratic, or policy barriers. Meanwhile, would-be reformers divert attention from lethargic leadership by rushing to blame "the union." Full post here.

Hartford Courant: A Eulogy For New London's St. Mary's School

That the school hung on until 2012 may be a minor miracle. The nuns are gone, but like other Catholic schools it managed to attract talented lay teachers willing to work for less than they would make at a public school. I chatted with the church's pastor, the Rev. Robert Washabaugh, who said a foundation called The Compass Fund has been a godsend to the school, helping many youngsters from low-income families — the traditional constituency of Catholic schools — make the $2,600 tuition. Alas, the recession caused the fund to cut back on its support.

What is particularly sad is that the school had come up with a good pedagogical plan. The school's 115 students today are 60 percent Latino, 30 percent African American and 10 percent Caucasian. Last year the school developed a dual language initiative, a plan that would make it the first Catholic school in the state to teach classes in English and Spanish. It was an excellent idea for 21st century America; sadly, the fiscal realities stopped it barely out of the gate.

In New London, where the public schools have struggled, St. Mary's was a great option for many families. At the risk of offending my friends at the ACLU, a situation such as this cries out for school vouchers. Religion and ethics aren't the worst problems these kids face. Full column here. (more…)

Over at the Education Next blog, Rick Hess has an interview with Liz Fagen, the superintendent of Douglas County schools in Colorado. We've written about Douglas County before because it's the district where, amazingly enough, the school board voted in a voucher program last year (though it's now tied up in court). The Hess interview is worth a read not only because it points out other ways Douglas County is pushing the envelope, but because of the contrast Fagen offers to other suburban superintendents.

Douglas isn't too different from, say, Seminole County in Florida. Douglas is a well-to-do district on the outskirts of Denver. Seminole is an affluent district outside Orlando. Both have about 60,000 students. Both have good reputations. Both have plenty of satisfied parents.

But when it comes to attitudes about school choice, the districts are night and day. (more…)

Is it fair to classify as "dopes" those parents who choose schools that report poor test performance? Not if we only focus on test performance, which may be a muddy measure of how kids are benefitting, Rick Hess writes. Hess directs readers to a recent paper by several economists who examined the open-enrollment initiative at Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools and found substantive long-term gains. The enrollment plan launched in 2001, yielding, according to the study, higher graduation rates with no cream skimming.

"Among applicants with low-quality neighborhood schools, lottery winners are more likely than lottery losers to graduate from high school, attend a four-year college, and earn a bachelor's degree," authors David Deming, Justine Hastings, Thomas Kane and Douglas Staiger conclude. "They are twice as likely to earn a degree from an elite university. The results suggest that school choice can improve students' longer-term life chances when they gain access to schools that are better on observed dimensions of quality."

Earlier today on this page, Alan Bonsteel, the president of California Parents for Educational Choice, urged school choice groups to embrace the argument that enhanced levels of school choice can yield higher graduation rates. Similarly, Hess writes:

Maybe parents aren't dopes. Maybe reading and math scores, at least on today's assessments, are actually muddy measures of how much kids are benefiting. Maybe parents who express high levels of satisfaction with choice see that their kids are better behaved and more focused, disciplined, and academically engaged. Maybe they judge that this gives their kids a much better shot at a bright future, even if their short-term reading and math scores aren't moving a lot ... 

... Now, let's be clear. I don't know that any of this is true. But it seems as viable as the "parents are dopes" hypothesis. Yet school choice researchers have been so focused for two decades on examining whether choice lifts test scores that they've not yet spent much time exploring just why it is that parental satisfaction seems to so dramatically exceed the test score evidence. On the bright side that just means there are huge opportunities ahead. So, guys, how about it?