The report today draws on interviews with industry types and college professors. And it concludes that in most cases, what you need to, say, make the dean’s list and what you need to keep your job are pretty much the same. An example:

The expectation that high school graduates will be able to produce writing that is logical and coherent is found throughout the standards of top-performing countries and states. This ability is also valued highly by college faculty and employers. In response to such clear evidence, the work group included Writing student performance standard #5: “Create a logical progression of ideas or events and convey the relationships among them.”

But the authors did unearth at least one example of disagreement:

… there is not a consensus among college faculty about the need for incoming students to be able to comprehend graphs, charts, and tables and to integrate information in these data displays with the information in the accompanying text. Although some evidence suggests that this skill is critical in the workplace and in some entry-level courses, college faculties from the various disciplines disagree on its value (with science and economics faculty rating it more highly than English and humanities professors do). The work group ultimately included a standard on the integration of text and data because the preponderance of the evidence suggests the skill’s importance in meeting the demands of the twenty-first-century workplace and some college classrooms.

Since July 15, thousands of principals, assistant principals, and members of the central administration have had to prove that they send text messages for professional reasons. Then they can pay $20 a month to have the service reactivated, spokeswoman Ann Forte said. (Principals can subtract the charge from their school budgets, according to Forte.)

All parent coordinators have cell phones and will retain their text messaging capability, Forte said.

The department pledged in May to cut $20 million from its central administration budget. Eliminating text messaging could save some money, but the change was not meant as a cost-cutting measure, Forte said. Instead, she said, it was an attempt to curb excessive personal use of city-owned phones.

The department will reactivate the service for employees who prove that they text for professional reasons, Forte said. Those people will have to pay $20 a month for the service, Forte said, adding that a principal who uses text messages to communicate with his or her staff could take the monthly charge out of the school’s budget.

Because they are received faster than e-mail, text messages can be a useful tool for tech-savvy school leaders, according to Lynette Guastaferro, head of Teaching Matters, a nonprofit that helps teachers use technology. She said she was pleased to learn that principals and other employees who make good use of text messaging can restart the service.

The schools will be in the model of the NYCiSchool, a small, selective high school that opened in Tribeca last fall as the first school in the city’s NYC21C initiative. (The name refers to the “21st-century skills” that technology-infused schools teach.) Klein touted the iSchool at the small schools panel discussion he introduced last week, saying that the school provides an example of how technology can be used to ”tailor the instructional journey of the child to the child’s needs.”

In his column today, Klein writes that the iSchool is pioneering a new “technology ‘culture,’” one that more schools should emulate:

In the past three years, the New York City Department of Education has created a number of technologies that allow teachers, principals, and parents to better understand students’ strengths and weaknesses and create academic programs that are tailored to the students’ needs. …

For New York City, the next big change is to change our technology “culture,” so we begin using modern tools to rethink the way our schools and classrooms are organized to most effectively engage students and bolster their achievement.

An iSchool student, Angelica Modabber, wrote about getting accustomed to using technology in her classes on this site in December. And here’s a video about the iSchool produced by the city Department of Education:

People at Educon in Philadelphia (via Flickr)

Last week, I chronicled an academic discussion on the subject of where school reform should go under President Obama. Over the weekend, a bunch of tech geeks had a conference on the same subject — and their ideas will probably end up being just as important to the future of schooling.

The conference, called Educon, attracted members of the increasingly large but sorely underlooked education movement called Learning 2.0, the MySpace/Twitter-inspired approach to school, in which technology facilitates extra interaction between students and teachers (and students and students and teachers and teachers). Among the people gathered in Philadelphia was at least one group from New York City: 20 staff members at CIS 339 in the Bronx, a middle school whose approach to technology I profiled in the Village Voice a few months ago.

You can read 339 Principal Jason Levy’s takeaways from the conference at his Principal 2.0 blog, here, including notes from the panel he ran, on what to do if your principal says no to a new idea. (One apparently good consideration is “The ‘Media’ Test:  Where in the NY Post will this story end up?”)

David Warlick also provides good notes from a panel discussion on the direction President Obama should take education. The conference’s convener, Chris Lehmann, principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, made the case that “accountability has to be a richer more complex conversation.” Another person talked about making accountability more “intelligent” with tests that assess for deeper learning, not just memorization.

Naturally, Warlick communicated his own takeaway via Twitter:

I just twittered: “The point of ed reform is having classrooms where it just doesn’t matter if kids are getting tested — to them or the teachers.”

Yesterday when I wasn’t able to log on to the State Education Department’s Web site, I assumed the site’s server was as antiquated as its look and feel.

But today I learned that the downtime was actually the result of a makeover. In a video message, Commissioner Richard Mills says the department wants to have a “world-class, cutting-edge Web site” because “our society has embraced the Web as a powerful way to exchange information and ideas.”

Right now the new look doesn’t go much deeper than the front page. Further inside the site, many pages still look like they haven’t been updated since the 1990s. Changes to those pages will come over the next several months, Mills says, and the department will take into account public feedback sent by e-mail as it continues the redesign.

When the city Department of Education relaunched its site a year and a half ago, it added a number of new features such as a one-stop human resources shop and an intermittent question-and-answer feature. But some users have complained that the upgraded site is not user-friendly.

“His secretary prints out the emails he receives, he writes the response and the secretary responds. The man literally does not know how to use a computer.”

Not exactly, according to two spokesmen I just talked to at the Chicago public schools headquarters. It is true, they said, that Duncan sometimes has his assistant, a woman named Maribel, print out his e-mail messages for him. But he does have a computer, and he sometimes reads his own e-mail with it. He also carries a Blackberry.

Said spokesman Mike Vaughn:

“He’s out at schools all the time, meeting with principals and meeting with administrators, meeting with kids and teachers, various meetings throughout the city. He does not spend a whole lot of time at his desk. But there are times when he sits at his desk and reads his emails, there’s times that he responds to them with Maribel, there’s times that he responds with his Blackberry.”

Another spokesman, Malon Edwards, said Duncan has championed bringing technology to education. He pointed to two schools that opened recently, with his approval: a virtual school where students can choose to work entirely from home, the Chicago Virtual Charter School, and a new school that offers online lessons inside a school building, the Virtual Opportunities Inside a School Environment school, or VOISE.