AERA 09 Wrap

Yeah, didn't get a chance to blog nearly as much as I had planned. I just got back to Lexington, so let me write up a few thoughts before I forget them and I will try to return to several of them in the next couple weeks:

1. Went to a wonderful session with Bill Koski, Kevin Welner, Mike Rebell and Anne Newman. Take away (which I hope to come back to in more detail) ... we may be a couple of years away from a pretty substantial push for due process hearing officers for all education law disputes (like the ones we have in special education).
2. I am not really sure yet of the whole empirical legal scholarship stuff. I know that Scott B. is a big fan and Mario Torres is doing a lot in this area related to education as well as Michael Heise (see this blog), but I still have some reservations. Maybe I will do more on this later.
3. I got the chance to meet William Trent and some of his students doing work at the University of Illinois. Impressive stuff. 
4. Nothing is private in my field of education leadership. Nothing. It is too small a group and rumors spread like wildfire. Everything is either impressive as hell or the end of the world. There is too much overreaction to the yearly ups and downs of programs.
5. The UCEA Taskforce on Evaluating Leadership Preparation Programs is showing some promising signs. Hope to have more details on that upcoming. 
6. That said, the use of longitudinal data sets to tie school leadership to students, or alternatively their preparation programs, is still a long, long way away. Maybe more on that later too.
7. Prezi is a cool new tool. Check it out. Here is the one I used for the presentation off the paper I did with Jon Becker & Scott McLeod. Jon had the great idea to use it.

Overall, this was a great conference. I enjoyed Scott B.'s company (and may have even convinced him to come along again). There is a lot of room for good legal scholars related to education issues still (the proposal deadline is very early is you are interested). I am still very early in my career, so I am hopeful that by the end of my career we will see a lot more development in this critical area for education reform.