I miss Howard Troxler, former columnist of the St. Pete Times who retired in June and moved out of the state. We have lost a good columnist here, which hurts us in two ways:
- Troxler was the last second-section public-affairs columnist for the St. Pete Times, which will be changing names to the Tampa Bay Times tomorrow. ((There are other wonderful columnists for the paper, such as Ernest Hooper and Daniel Ruth, but Howard Troxler has always been my favorite. And I am not happy with the name change, though I live on the Tampa side of the bay.))
- Troxler had a wonderful way of ending the year of always-biting columns, sometimes with fake carols and always with a fake year-in-review (see 2010 Part I and Part II).
Now that I have made staid, safe predictions, I will tweak Troxler’s idea a bit and predict 2012’s education news, week-by-week:
- January 3: The Republican Iowa caucuses. Newt Gingrich finishes third and (after screaming Dean-style) announces his bold plan to hire poor nine-year-old children to replace teachers as well as janitors in the nation’s schools.
- January 10: New Hampshire primary. Mitt Romney trounces all other candidates on the GOP side. Newt Gingrich announces his bold plan to hire poor nine-year-old children to replace principals as well as teachers and janitors in the nation’s schools.
- January 11: Republican activists wake up to realize (1) Mitt Romney is going to be their presidential nominee and (2) Newt Gingrich still isn’t going to stop talking in public.
- January 15: U.S. DOE officials get on a plane to visit Hawaii to check on Race to the Top progress. A complete coincidence: meteorologists forecast that a snowstorm will hit the mid-Atlantic region by the end of the week.
- January 16: Martin Luther King, Jr., federal holiday. At none of the official commemorations is there a mention of the extent of racial segregation in the country’s cities and schools.
- January 17: Wisconsin activists file more than 700,000 signatures on the petition forcing Governor Scott Walker to face a recall election later in 2012, partly motivated by his attacks on public-employee collective bargaining in 2011. A Wisconsin GOP press representative immediately asserts that most of the signatures are fake and blames UW-Madison historian Bill Cronon.
- January 18: Mayor Rahm Emmanuel swears at a teacher while on walkabout in Chicago. Chicago’s schoolchildren immediately start using “the Rahm standard” in arguing against discipline for cursing.
- January 20: Two inches of snow fall in the District of Columbia, and area schools close for the day.
- January 26: At a GOP presidential debate, Newt Gingrich announces his bold plan to hire poor nine-year-old children to replace superintendents, principals, teachers, and janitors in eleven states.
- January 31: Mitt Romney wins the Florida GOP presidential primary. Newt Gingrich announces his bold plan to hire poor nine-year-old children to replace all public-school employees and fifteen-year-old children to teach college history classes.
- February 1: The Eurozone collapses in a puddle of warm spit. Mike Petrilli says, “Well, I told you school districts have to get used to the new normal” and is immediately zapped by a bolt of lightning from Lake Superior State University.
- February 2: Groundhogs read the morning news and decide winter will last all of 2012.
- February 3: A quarter-inch of snow falls in the District of Columbia, and area schools close for the day.
- February 9: Retiring Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman announces he will run for president in the Democratic Party asserting the need to reform schools to continue a whining tradition in American politics. All seven reporters at his press conference fall asleep before he finishes talking.
- February 13: Twenty-nine states apply for NCLB waivers in the second round.
- February 16: In a major speech in the morning, Education Secretary Arne Duncan emphasizes the importance of the arts in education and how critical it is to prevent narrowing of the curriculum. In a major announcement in the afternoon, Education Secretary Arne Duncan congratulates all the February state applicants for NCLB waivers for making teacher raises essentially depend on student test scores in reading and math.
- February 17: A light dusting of snow falls in the District of Columbia, and area schools close for the day.
- February 22: In response to pleas by Palm Beach County, the Florida legislature repeals the requirement that school districts start the school year no later than two weeks before Labor Day, or three weeks for “high-performing districts.”
- February 29: The Eurozone is resuscitated after Mario Draghi recovers his wand made of holly with a phoenix feather at its core. At the recording of the Fordham Gadfly podcast, Mike Petrilli announces the importance of maintaining fiscal discipline “with the new normal, which is not going away!” Another lightning strike comes from Lake Superior State University.
- March 1: The American Association of Groundhogs issues a statement: “Oh, hell, we can’t fight global warming. Winter’s over.”
- March 2: Three snowflakes fall in the District of Columbia, and area schools close for the day.
- March 5: U.S. DOE announces that after an on-site review and promises made by the state of Hawaii, the federal government is not yanking Race to the Top funding, but off the record key department officials warn of the need for vigilance, probably with an on-site visit some months later — say, somewhere between mid-December 2012 and mid-February 2013.
- March 6: Romney mostly sweeps through Super Tuesday. Newt Gingrich announces his bold plan to hire poor nine-year-old children to replace all public-school employees, fifteen-year-old children to teach college history classes, and seventeen-year-olds to replace all employees in the U.S. Department of Education.
- March 12: A well-designed study is published concluding that the competition effects of vouchers make no significant difference in the test scores of elementary students in reading and a significant difference in math scores with an effect size between 0.01 and 0.05 standard deviations. On his blog, Jay Greene trumpets the study as proof that vouchers work and should be expanded to the whole country.
- March 29: Florida Governor Rick Scott signs a budget that keeps total state/local funding for K-12 steady for 2012-13, does not replace lost federal stimulus dollars, and makes up for declining state contributions by doubling the required local effort in county taxes. “No, I’m not worried about the constitutionality of this,” he tells dubious reporters.
- April 1: Rick Scott, Scott Walker, John Kasich, and Chris Christie hold a joint press conference apologizing for their previous arrogant attitudes towards teachers and collective bargaining and promising to reform their ways.
- April 3: Mitt Romney sweeps all four GOP primaries. The last of the non-Gingrich challengers, Rick Perry, suspends his campaign after a humiliating defeat in his own state. Newt Gingrich announces his bold plan to send five-year-olds into West Virginia coal mines: “These kids need a taste of work, and the country needs cheap energy!”
- April 11: The Springfield Board of Education approves a mandatory uniform policy, which the superintendent promises will decrease teacher turnover, increase student attendance, improve test scores and grades, reduce adolescent angst over clothing, and clear up acne.
- April 27: At the end of all the annual testing mandated by NCLB, a school official seals up the last of the nation’s 1,149 scannable test sheets put in a bag that year made specifically for cases where elementary school students vomit on the test sheet, right after the official erases two wrong answers and corrects them.
- April 30: Gary Orfield makes his lonely, annual pilgrimage to the middle of the woods in Michigan where he cries out at the fact that very few people in the country say or write anything about racial desegregation any more. In his D.C. office, Richard Kahlenberg hears Orfield’s cry and writes another op-ed about the benefits of socioeconomic integration.
- May 1: Newt Gingrich finally suspends his presidential campaign after Tiffany & Co. hires him as a spokesperson for their new “loud and proud” advertising campaign. The advertising firm managing the campaign denies Newt’s attempt to hire four-year-olds to run the cameras for the commercials.
- May 16: Arne Duncan predicts that by fall, 87% of all of the country’s schools would be declared to have failed to meet AYP standards under NCLB as written. “Aren’t you so glad we had the waiver program now?” he tells reporters.
- May 21: Pundits write a number of blogs pointing out that Duncan is wildly overestimating the number of schools dinged by the NCLB standards. “It’s only 55% of schools, which shows how reasonable NCLB was,” grumbles one defender of the 2002 law.
- May 25: Jerry Brown announces his 539th plan to save the state of California from immediate doom, or the state’s college students will begin to promise their first-born children as part of the state’s higher-ed fee structure.
- June 14: President Obama speaks at a high school in a state with electoral votes, urging students to ______ (c’mon, you can fill in the rest of the sentence!). He is immediately criticized for politicizing education and indoctrinating the graduating seniors in his weak, apologetic, Kenyan socialist dictatorial ideology.
- June 30: The 2011-12 fiscal year ends for the nation’s school districts, and the total carry-forward amount put into reserves nationwide is $3.14.
The rest of the year-in-preview coming up later today or early tomorrow…