According to Sir Michael, if you want a top tier education system, you recruit from your top tier of graduates:

“What have all the great school systems of the world got in common?” he said, ticking off four systems that he said deserved to be called great, in Finland, Singapore, South Korea and Alberta, Canada. “Four systems, three continents — what do they have in common?

“They all select their teachers from the top third of their college graduates, whereas the U.S. selects its teachers from the bottom third of graduates. This is one of the big challenges for the U.S. education system: What are you going to do over the next 15 to 20 years to recruit ever better people into teaching?”  (NYT)

Leslie Walker of the Post, a person I thought understood blogs, nevertheless writes of the increasing number of teachers blogging.

"I personally use blogs every day to keep up on what the newest thoughts are on education," said Scott E. Schopieray, assistant director of the Center for Teaching and Technology at Michigan State University. "I have my own research that I'm an expert in, but I can't be an expert in my domain and also be one in every other domain, so I use blogs posted by other educators in order to capitalize on their expertise."

"I have an idea, I put it on my blog," said David Warlick, of 2 Cents Worth ( http://davidwarlick.com/2cents ), who teaches teachers around the country how to use blogs. "I learn something as a result. This last year has been the most incredible learning year of my life because of this ongoing conversation of ideas through blogging."

John Seeley Brown, Director Emeritus of Xerox Parc, and Douglas Thomas of USC – type a short piece on how MMOG type games facilitate accurate worker training.  I particularly an intrigued by “accidental learning”:

Where traditional learning is based on the execution of carefully graded challenges, accidental learning relies on failure. Virtual environments are safe platforms for trial and error. The chance of failure is high, but the cost is low and the lessons learned are immediate.

This list of everything 2.0, found by Scoble.  Awesome

A friend of mine mentioned he uses my morning news clips to keep his class informed on legislative issues.  In fact, they are the source for information used to answer his exams…

Who says you have to use textbooks to teach government?

Analysis of how current construction of Computer Science degrees fail to address how CS can affect business and the world and instead treats the discipline as the solitary, individual pursuit of “making the box work.”

WordPress is coming along nicely. And, OPML creator Dave Winer seems to investing significant energy. This may be a worthwhile place to ’set a spell’

I thought I posted a post a minute ago

Rules by the Georgia Student Finance Commission, intending to save HOPE, are actually killing the original intent, according to a few editorials.

• Savannah
• Canton
• Macon
• Athens

These editorials fail to note another rule that penalized bright students.  If you take a college class while in high school, those hours count against the limit of 127 hours that HOPE will pay for…

Seems the pundits want to spend more time talking about the singular incidences of politically incorrect speech than the global incidences of poor education.

A Candy Cane incident has Mike Adams, and Neil Boortz burning such energy.

BTW, I bet none of these so-called conservative pundits have read Russell Kirk’s book “The Conservative Mind,” much less his treatise on “Academic Freedom“.  If they did, they wouldn’t be calling for political intervention on these matters.

Today, I predict the pundits will focus on the Florida Court decision striking down school vouchers