greetings from babyland

hey everyone, i'm checking in from needham, massachusetts where i'm spending the week with my sister and her family, including her newborn boy matthew. so much has been going on that i wanted to put up a few links:

here is the controversial new york times article with the findings from nancy, bella, and howard's charter school study. too many blogs and newspapers have been weighing in for me to list them all, but eduwonk has been covering it pretty closely. you can also check into aft's closerlook, a weekly blog-like publication, and see if they publish anything else about it.

in other news: a court of appeals in florida ruled that its A-Plus voucher program is unconstitutional. key statement from Jeb:

"Today, thousands of children attend private schools, including hundreds of nonreligious schools, under Florida's choice programs," the governor said in a statement. "Their parents have chosen these schools, and we should honor that choice."

typical voucher strategy: create facts on the ground before the courts can rule on the program's constitutionality; then when the ruling inevitably comes down, you can say "are you really going to force parents to send these thousands of kids back to their awful, godless schools?"