Education Roundup: Immigrants, Freeskools, Summits & Superman

There's a lot going on in the education world right now, and we wanted to point out just a couple of recent tasty tidbits:

The New York Times and other news outlets have been following the reintroduction of the DREAM Act into the congressional mix, as Senator Harry Reid has plans to try to attach the bill as an amendment to a military spending bill. The Dream Act would "open a path to eventual legal residency for illegal immigrants who arrived in the country before they were 16 years old, have been here for at least five years and have graduated from high school. It would require them to finish two years of college or military service before gaining legal status."

Yes! Magazine features an article about starting a freeskool in your community, an alternative to traditional education, which taps the wisdom and expertise of community members to teach others (usually for free or very low cost).

NBC plans to broadcast Education Nation, a national "summit" on education on September 26. It seems like a great opportunity for exploration and discussion, but, as a Daily Kos blog post notes, many people are angry that parents and teachers are largely absent from the list of confirmed speakers. (Something the post doesn't mention is the lack of students -- those supposedly being served by this educational system. Their voices are just as important -- if not more so.)

The hubbub about Waiting for Superman, the soon-to-premiere documentary by the creator of An Inconvenient Truth, has been bubbling to the media fore in recent weeks. The film skewers U.S. public education, following the trials of a handful of students as they try to succeed in a broken system. But Rethinking Schools (among other organizations) is taking exception to the superficial analysis the film gives to a system riddled with complex challenges, as well as to what RS considers a "corporate reform agenda." Rethinking Schools has created an alternative campaign, NOT Waiting for Superman, to counter what it sees as "misleading information and 'simplistic' solutions that will make it harder for those of us working to improve public education to succeed."

~ Marsha

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