Friday, January 17, 2014

A couple of stubs, possibly for futher consideration

1.)  Last night at the State of the State address, Gov. Snyder talked about expanding access to Pre-K.  Good.  Can we just make it universal in Michigan already?  He also talked about expanding the length of the school year.  Good.  I'll have some thoughts on what that might look like later.

2.)  They did an interview on NPR's "All Things Considered" today with an education reporter from New Orleans.  After Hurricane Katrina, 7500 teachers were fired en masse from the New Orleans Public School district.  They sued the district for wrongful termination and won, and were awarded in the process 2-3 years in back pay.  The numeric total was estimated at $1.5 billion, which would clearly bankrupt the school district and everyone attached to it.  90% of New Orleans's student population now attends a charter school, so who would pay this 1.5 bn is unclear.  This story is fascinating to me.

3.) To follow more closely: the International Journal for the Teaching of Foreign Languages.  Although I'm a little concerned that it's little more than a vanity project for TPRS teachers, it still has some of the biggest names in language acquisition theory publishing articles in it.  Those two facts together lend credence to TPRS.

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