Update:  More from The Denver Post (with a big call-out to State Senator Mike Johnston.)

Depressing  Super Bowl stat:  None of the three cities involved in today’s game, Indianapolis, New Orleans, or Miami graduates more than six in ten high school students on-time.  Given the demographics of those cities you can see the magnitude and impact of these enormous dropout rates for minority and low-income students.

Update:  As you can tell from the now broken link it’s to Scholastic’s credit that they’ve removed the post.

Meanwhile in LA Macke Raymond (ES Board chair) with three smart reccomendations on policy, charters, and quality.*    And a new Brookings report on expanding choice and some levers for doing so.

There is also a new report from Gary Orfield moving this morning about charters and demographics. (Read the WaPo’s take here).   Less there than meets the eye, or more precisely than meets the rhetoric.  But one point that probably won’t get made in the back and forth:  In more diverse communities, for instance parts of D.C., an emerging problem is the efforts some really good charters have to make in order to have both a blind admissions process and a lot of low-income kids — because they’re generally mission-focused on low-income youngsters.  In other words some schools are starting to gentrify and are having to double-down on recruitment efforts.  In some juridsictions a school can weight low-income students extra in the lottery to improve their odds but that clashes with federal policy creating problems for schools receiving federal charter dollars.

*For more on ideas like these as well as others check out this paper (pdf).

Update:   Be sure to check out Will Marshall on all this.  He gets into the wayback machine.

Update II:  DFER is to the point.

Update III:   From The Economist, ouch!

But this episode is really an example of a deeper, more far-reaching, and more destructive problem in public education:  The almost complete absence in too many places of collegiality, professional decision- making and ability of professionals to solve day to day work challenges without resorting to fights over contractual rules.   Rhetorically the mantra is that teachers should be treated like professionals, and it’s true they certainly should as it’s professional work.   But this sort of thing is the very antithesis of how professionals conduct business and handle relations.   And that’s a problem that goes far beyond one grievance in NYC, it’s cultural.   And it’s going to take a new approach to contracts and organizing schools to get past it that meaningfully empowers teachers as professionals and establishes new norms for how a professional workplace operates.   There are some promising models in places like MN, Colorado, and some charter schools but a long way to go.

Update:   A related but different angle on this here.

But perhaps more than Kevin I think the education world can be delineated pretty well by viewpoints on two dimensions:  Choice and accountability.   Rhee, for example, is as Kevin says a big government reformer but she’s also very open to choice schemes and pluralism in the delivery of educational services so she’s not strictlya government reformer.   The simple 2 x 2 below looks at the two dimensions and you can see where various policy actors and interest groups fall along the two continuums.   And it’s the actors in the upper right corner combining choice and markets via ideas like charters with a strong dose of public oversight and accountability (Duncan, Rhee, etc…) who seem to be driving the agenda right now.