Clairelise Rodriguez's blog

The 2012 Olympics kick off with the Opening Ceremonies today, and to celebrate we want to tip our hats to five inspiring athletes from each one of our states and share some lessons ed reformers should learn from them:

Michael Phelps, Baltimore, Maryland: It pays to believe in kids

Attention writers, bloggers, Internet lovers and education reform advocates: we want your talents! We're proud to announce our inaugural School Reform Blogging Fellowship, a new platform for teachers, principals, students and parents to tell their stories about how education reform policies are playing a role in their classrooms, schools and communities.

Ah, campaign season. 

The media is abuzz with presidential campaign news, shadowing the candidates as they duke it out in battleground states and present their plans to reboot American prosperity.

Here at 50CAN, we too are in full-fledged campaign mode, and we too have a plan to reboot American prosperity. The one big difference is that we're not campaigning for a presidential nomination. We're campaigning to pass four sets of education reforms into state law.

We're always proud of our state CAN executive directors, each of whom is building a movement of education reform advocates to give every child in their state a great public school. 

MarylandCAN recently blogged about what the findings of the Fordham Institute's new report, "The State of State Science Standards," tell us about the future of Maryland's job market.  But here at 50CAN national we've been too busy admiring the report's cover to open it. #WeLoveDinosaurs

January is prime launch season here at 50CAN. Earlier this month we welcomed two new CANs into the fold (NYCAN and MarylandCAN), and today we celebrated as MinnCAN: The Minnesota Campaign for Achievement Now launched it's 2012 legislative campaign, The Playbook for Education in Minnesota.

Last week we had the pleasure of officially welcoming NYCAN: The New York Campaign for Achievement Now into the CAN family. And this week another CAN opened its doors, this time in the Old Line State.

Ed reformers are often painted as optimists, people who expect too much of our public schools. Some say that the achievement gap, while tragic, is too big a problem to be solved by providing excellent public schools to all. Some say poor kids and kids of color just have too much to overcome, so they can’t be expected to learn at the same level as their wealthier peers.

Ed reformers say the opposite. We say every kid can—and should—achieve at a high level.

Happy Thanksgiving! All of us who write for GreatBigBlog are especially thankful for readers like you. We'll be taking a break next week, but we'll be up and running again on Monday, November 28. Have a great holiday!

--Clairelise

Photo via (cc) Flickr user jelene.

A new infographic by PublicAdministration.net paints a scary picture of the disparity between what America spends on its prison system versus what we spend on education. In New Jersey, for example, it’s cheaper to send someone to Princeton University for a year ($37,000) than to lock them up in a Trenton jail ($44,000).