At noon on Tuesday, June 1, freelance journalist and author Steven Brill will discuss his recent Education Week article looking at inconsistencies and soft spots in the judging process being used to allocate some $4 billion in economic-stimulus grants under the Race to the Top program.

Below is an excerpt from the article upon which Brill's chat is based (http://tinyurl.com/285oooy):

"In an article I wrote for The New York Times Magazine about Race to the Top...[see below], I only touch briefly on issues related to administering the contest. But readers ofEducation Week might be interested in more detail of what I discovered in finding, as the article puts it, that "good intentions can't guarantee perfect execution in a federal bureaucracy."

"When the federal government gives out billions of dollars in grants, it can't be done based on the gut feel of some policy wonks, however honest and well-meaning, that this state deserves it and that one doesn't. So before he left the government last fall, U.S. Department of Education adviser and Race to the Top architect Jon Schnur recruited Joanne Weiss, who has an impressive resumé in both the nonprofit and business sectors running education-related ventures, to create a rigorous process for giving out the money by using vetters who would be screened rigorously for conflicts of interest. Like jurors, they were also instructed, Ms. Weiss told me, "not to consider anything outside the actual four corners of what was submitted in the applications."

"A review of the vetters' score sheets and written comments juxtaposed against the applications they judged suggests that their standards were inconsistent, that some were naive about the difference between promises and the capacity to deliver, and that others fell victim to the propensity of many states to misstate the status of their programs and overstate the buy-in they had from key stakeholders, especially the teachers' unions..."

.......................

"Jon Schnur, who runs a Manhattan-based school-reform group called New Leaders for New Schools, sits informally at the center of a network of self-styled reformers dedicated to overhauling public education in the United States. They have been building in strength and numbers over the last two decades and now seem to be planted everywhere that counts. They are working in key positions in school districts and charter-school networks, legislating in state capitals, staffing city halls and statehouses for reform-minded mayors and governors, writing papers for policy groups and dispensing grants from billion-dollar philanthropies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. ...

"Over the last several months, Schnur and the well-positioned fellow travelers on his speed dial have seen the cause of their lives take center stage. Why the sudden shift from long-simmering wonk debate to political front burner? Because there is now a president who, when it comes to school reform, really does seem to be a new kind of Democrat--and because of a clever idea Schnur had last year to package what might otherwise have been just another federal grant program into a media-alluring, if cheesy-sounding, contest called Race to the Top...

"Schnur came up with the name and pushed the overall spin of the contest, and it was clear from conversations with people in the school-reform movement that he is the one person who seems to know everything happening on all fronts, from the White House to legislative chambers in Albany or Sacramento to charter schools in New OrleansŠ"

A plethora of news outlets reported on the recent death of Martin Gardner. Most were based on the same AP news release (below), but others were more unique in nature and may be of interest:

- NPR (All Things Considered): http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127095954

- Scientific American (article reprints):

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=profile-of-martin-gardner

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hermits-and-cranks-lesson

- Center for Inquiry: http://www.csicop.org/news/show/the_death_of_our_beloved_colleague_martin_gardner

- The Washington Post: http://tinyurl.com/2dc97r2

Excerpt: "Gardner was writing stories and poems for a children's magazine in the 1950s when he submitted an article about hexaflexagons--pieces of paper folded intricately to resemble, Gardner once said, "a budding flower"--to Scientific American. The editor, Dennis Flanagan, was so taken with the piece that he hired Gardner to produce a regular column on recreational mathematics.

"The resulting monthly feature, 'Mathematical Games,' ran from 1956 to 1981. It became one of Scientific American's most popular items, capturing the imagination of amateur and professional mathematicians and introducing a generation of young readers to the pleasures of problem-solving.

"The sharp-witted column, packed with cultural references, humor and accessible logic puzzles instead of academic jargon, featured the mathematical concepts behind fractals, Chinese tangram puzzles and the art of surrealist M.C. Escher. Widely read around the world, 'Mathematical Games' made Gardner--who never took a math class after high school--the beloved grandfather of recreational mathematics and the inspiration for countless young people to consider careers in math and science. [Note: M.C. Escher himself had no formal mathematics training beyond high school and once wrote that he "never got a passing mark in mathematics."]

"'Beyond calculus, I am lost,' [Gardner] once said. 'That was the secret of my column's success. It took me so long to understand what I was writing about that I knew how to write in a way most readers would understand.'"

..........................

Prolific mathematics and science writer Martin Gardner, known for popularizing recreational mathematics and debunking paranormal claims, died on May 22, 2010. He was 95.

Gardner died Saturday after a brief illness at Norman Regional Hospital, said his son James Gardner. He had been living at an assisted living facility in Norman, Okla.

Martin Gardner was born in 1914 in Tulsa, Okla., and earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy at the University of Chicago.

He became a freelance writer, and in the 1950s wrote features and stories for several children's magazines. His creation of paper-folding puzzles led to his publication in Scientific American magazine, where he wrote his "Mathematical Games" column for 25 years...

Allyn Jackson, deputy editor of Notices, a journal of the American Mathematical Society, wrote in 2005 that Gardner "opened the eyes of the general public to the beauty and fascination of mathematics and inspired many to go on to make the subject their life's work." [See http://www.ams.org/notices/200506/fea-gardner.pdf to read this in-depth and wide-ranging interview.]

Jackson said Gardner's "crystalline prose, always enlightening, never pedantic, set a new standard for high quality mathematical popularization." The mathematics society awarded him its Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition in 1987 for his work on math, particularly his Scientific American column.

"He was a renaissance man who built new ideas through words, numbers and puzzles," his son, a professor of special education at the University of Oklahoma, told The Associated Press.

Gardner also became known as a skeptic of the paranormal and wrote columns for Skeptical Inquirer magazine...[See http://www.csicop.org/si/]

Former magician James Randi, now a writer and investigator of paranormal claims, paid tribute to Gardner on his website (http://www.randi.org/), calling his colleague and longtime friend "a very bright spot in my firmament." [On his website, Randi also writes, "Martin Gardner's wishes--clearly expressed in his will--called for his immediate cremation and for no funeral service, a request to which his son James has of course acceded. At TAM in Las Vegas (http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/tam-8-registration.html) we will be have a joyous celebration of his career and his accomplishments, but certainly not any somber or sad observance. Martin was a straightforward, no-nonsense guy, and we won't be wailing and tearing our raiment--though that might bring him back just to scold usŠ"]

Gardner ended his Scientific American column in 1981 and retired to Hendersonville, N.C. Gardner continued to write, and in 2002 moved to Norman, where his son James lives...

Gardner was preceded in death by his wife, Charlotte. Besides James Gardner, he is survived by another son, Tom, of Asheville, N.C. [and three grandchildren].