Laurie H. Rogers – I’ve had a Eureka moment. We advocates for public education heroically argue against bad legislation, bad policy, and bad process. Ultimately, it’s a losing battle. We spend scarce time and energy fighting a single fire – watching numbly as 20 more erupt. And the fire we thought we’d extinguished flares up again.

The top 10 percent of charter schools in the U.S. serve 167,000 children annually. If just this elite subset of charter schools grew at the 40 percent rate we see in other sectors, they could serve some 26 million students every year by 2025. Even if only half of the nation’s best charter operators grew that quickly, they could collectively serve every low-income child in American in 15 years.

Valentine’s Day was a disaster. In all fairness, it’s a disaster every year. All the extra hormones flying through the air really affect a high school campus. Satisfied girls walk around with roses and teddy bears to the detriment of those without these things. Jealousy rears its green head amidst all the red and pink, and if you add that to a Monday, it simply means we’re all in for a long day.

Robert Oliphant – Is “The King’s Speech” meant to cheer up unemployed English teachers? Certainly our first view of the elocutionist declaiming the opening to Richard III (including its reference to a Duke of York) tells us tells we’re headed for High Style, in which “men do talk with kinges,” as Chaucer put it.

Joe Nathan – Dozens of raised hands, and a new report from Minnesota Commissioner of Education Brenda Cassellius reflect good news. More Minnesota high school students are taking and passing challenging college level classes. Cassellius wisely praised the progress, and stressed the significant work left to do.

John Jensen, Ph.D. – Last week, in response to a blog (“A Case for Memorization” in Edweek, I think), I explained briefly how to obtain solid recall of a piece of knowledge efficiently by gradually stretching the interval between recalls, starting at one minute. I offered to send further information (cf. offer at end of blog). Tom Burkard accepted my offer from the UK, and added:

Robert Holland – President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address illustrated just how much political duplicity has entered the debate about national education standards. While crowing about the success of his Race to the Top in purchasing states’ buy-in to the so-called Common Core math and English standards —

Joe Nathan – Several people surprised me last week. They were critical of a principal and a superintendent who changed their minds. I’ll say more about these specific situations in a minute. But today I want to talk about people, including me, who make mistakes, or are challenged by people who disagree with their ideas.

It is rare that a great social movement can be traced to one person, but it is hard for me to see how the excitement, distress and ferment revolving around public school innovation these days could ever have occurred without Wendy Kopp. So I was disappointed that in her new book she never discusses the failure of her most famous protege, former D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, to solve the problem of finding and supporting enough talented principals to get our schools on the right track.

Let's give Ronald Ferguson, Robert Schwartz and the other scholars behind the Harvard Graduate School of Education's defense of damning poor and minority kids with low expectations some credit: The report does have colorful graphics.

Jay Mathews laments the lack of educational content in hit television series about high schools. The snowstorm knocked out our electricity last week. It was hard to write the column without access to the Internet. My cellphone wasn’t working well, either. This seemed a perfect opportunity to discard any pretense of research and instead vent on a subject too insubstantial for a serious education writer, but engrossing all the same.

Robert Oliphant – With GM now selling more cars in China than in the USA (LA Times, Jan. 25), our Common Core educators deserve upscale kudos for their prescience in giving “oracy” (speaking and listening) equal status with literacy in their recent report.

Bill Costello, M.Ed. – Paul Krugman, columnist for the "New York Times," recently criticized those who “see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty” and who believe “that people have a right to keep what they earn.”

Joe Nathan – – U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was direct when he spoke in Minnesota last week at a meeting sponsored by the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce.

RiShawn Biddle – America's 15-year-olds ranked 25th in among nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on the 2009 PISA test of international student achievement. That ranking, however, is being kind. The score for the average American high school freshmen was 117 points behind the average for their peers in Shanghai and 75 points behind 15-year-olds in Singapore, the top-rated nation outside of China in math.

Barry Garelick – In Jay Greene’s recent blog post, “The Dead End of Scientific Progressivism,” he points out that Vicki Phillips, head of education at the Gates Foundation misread her Foundation’s own report. Jay’s point was that Vicki continued to see what she and others wanted to see: “‘Teaching to the test makes your students do worse on the tests.’

Joe Nathan – It’s pretty simple. Minnesota parents, families and students can save themselves thousands of dollars by paying attention to Getting Prepared, a recently-released report by the University of Minnesota and the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System

Dan Dempsey – Decisions are all politics, and have nothing to do with improving learning. The inferior district is currently planned to continue forever.

Matthew Amaral – I taught a seminar for seniors this week while their regular teacher was out having babies. It was a class full of low-income urban students trying to get into college. I decided to do three days on Identity, and get them thinking about who they are as urban students heading to higher education. I started with something very familiar to all of them: Ghettoness.

Tom Watkins – Is public education in Michigan and America the “same ole, same ole”? Are our elected leaders and educators capable of implementing change in our K-12 public school system to move us boldly into the 21st century?

Kenneth Bernstein – The superintendent of the school system in which I teach in Prince George's County, Maryland, according to the 2009 annual report, had a budget of $1.7 billion, serving more than 127,000 students, with roughly 18,300 employees, of whom about 9,000 were teachers.