Link: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/17/MN8N14P4LU.DTL

The announcement was expected and came during a news conference attended by Obama and Duncan in Chicago.

"Duncan has a solid record of working with educators across the ideological spectrum to create schools that work in the best interests of students," said Jack O'Connell, California's superintendent of public instruction.

School principals called the 44-year-old Harvard graduate a "champion." Charter school leaders pronounced him a "national leader" in innovation. And Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, chairman of the committee that will oversee reauthorization of No Child Left Behind next year, called his track record "bold" - the same word teachers and even a former Bush administration education official used to praise his work in Chicago.

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Link: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/199804/single-sex

All-female schools are "models of equivocation," the author, a Smith graduate, writes. They "reinforce regressive notions of sex difference" while at the same time helping women into the professions
by Wendy Kaminer

merican women won the opportunity to be educated nearly a hundred years before they won the right to vote, not coincidentally. In the beginning women were educated for the sake of family and society: the new republic needed educated mothers to produce reasonable, responsible male citizens. But although the first all-female academies, founded in the early 1800s, reflected a commitment to traditional gender roles, which reserved the public sphere for men, they reinforced a nascent view of women as potentially reasonable human beings -- endowed with the attributes of citizenship.

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Link: http://privateschool.about.com/cs/choosingaschool/a/singlesex.htm

The Pendulum Has Swung
By Robert Kennedy, About.com
The Issue
What are the advantages, if any, of single sex education? Is single sex education better than co-education? What does available research have to say about the subject?

Equality Of The Sexes

We have spent several generations advancing the equality of the sexes. Beginning with the women's suffrage movement and continuing through to the present day many legal and social barriers to women's equality with men have been removed. Much progress has been made.

With that in mind coeducation which is based on that laudable theme of equality seems like the right way to go. As a result most public schools use the coeducation model, even though it is a one size fits all approach which disregards the plain truth that boys and girls learn in different ways. Research shows that a girl's brain is different from a boy's brain. One size does not fit all. Coeducation does not work for every child. But it has the advantage of being politically acceptable. Fortunately public schools are revisiting the traditional notion of educating the sexes separately.

Now, I am not for a minute advocating that we reinforce traditional gender roles. For example, that girls should be nurses and teachers. Or that boys should be pilots and engineers, and so on. No, I view single sex education as an opportunity to capitalize on the learning differences inherent in boys and girls.

There are other considerations too. Many children thrive in a private single sex school. The social pressures are gentler. Your child can grow at his own pace. Gender stereotypes are not a major factor. The faculty at single sex schools understand how their students learn. They adapt their teaching styles to those specific needs. You and I will discover other advantages as well. A single sex school for your child is definitely an educational solution worth looking into.

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Link: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5918/

The intent of posting articles about education polices under the new administration is to educate parents on educational policies. Creative Tutors does not support any political action group.

A close look at Barack Obama’s education policies exposes the myth that the 44th president of the United States will point the country in a brand new direction

Reading Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s Plan for Lifetime Success Through Education, one well-worn word just about sums up their plans for education reform: ‘expand’ (1). They plan to take just about every education initiative and policy utilised by the Bush administration and do more of it. In essence, their plan for education will expand state intervention into school life, furthering trends towards marketisation, managerialism, standardisation and testing, external accountability, intervention in family life, and making education subservient to the needs of the economy.

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Link: http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/2008/03/social-promotion-go-blah.html

How does BloomKlein claim they empowered principals but then dictate from above decisions on who gets promoted or not? There are views on both sides on the part of teachers, who generally seem to come down on the side of using promotion as an arrow in their quiver (they have been left with precious few) to get kids who don't do much work to be motivated.

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