Charter Schools Spend More on Administration and Less on Instruction
Charter Schools Spend More on Administration and Less on Instruction
From Michigan State U.: EAST LANSING, Mich. — While charter school advocates criticize public school bureaucracies as bloated and wasteful, it turns out that charters spend more on administration and less on instruction than traditional public schools, according to a new study led by a Michigan State University scholar. The study, which examines school spending in Michigan, found that charter schools spend nearly $800 more per pupil on administration and $1,100 less on instruction, said David Arsen, MSU professor of education and lead researcher on the project. The study controls f... more »
Duncan's ED: We Need to Double Down on Irrational and Unscientific Practices
An email from Monty Neill alerted me to the latest development by today's Corporate Stalinists at ED to judge teacher education programs on the basis value-added test scores of students who are taught by the graduates of these teacher ed programs. Got that? No, it's too late for April Fool's. To the credit of some sanity remaining in DC education circles, the "negotiations" for the new rule making by ED have broken down. Especially contentious were proposals to evaluate teacher education programs based in part on their graduates’ job placement rates, employers’ satisfaction with... more »
A revisionist view of literacy educaion
Revisionist view of the last decade in literacy research Submitted to Education Week, April 12 I was astounded to read Linda Diamond’s revisionist view of the last decade in literacy research (“Common-core standards in reading not ‘flawed,’” March 28). Ms. Diamond maintains that the National Reading Panel’s conclusions supporting explicit and systematic instruction “in the reading-foundation skills” is “well supported by research.” Either Ms. Diamond is not aware of the furious criticism that emerged after the Panel’s report was published, or is ignoring it. In a series of books, pap... more »
Ask Eli Broad's Jim McIntyre for His "research and experience" to Support Corporate School Reform Costs
While the local corporate media of Knoxville continues to print any kind of unsubstantiated charges or rumors against teachers, all the while ignoring the grassroots movement emerging against the corporate education reform schools tide from Eli Broad disciple, Supt. Jim McIntyre, the other local media outlets have picked up the slack with detailed stories about the growing pushback against McIntyre's unexplained 35 million dollar increase in the Knoxville Schools Budget. The Knoxville Focus (This Week's Issue in pdf), for instance, has more than one story this week critical of McIn... more »
How Do You Shut Down the Most Brutal and Corrupt Charter School in U. S. History? We Don't Know Yet
*If you follow our model, you'll be a winner. By the time these kids are in ninth grade, I don't have to call them idiots anymore.* --Ben Chavis, founder of AIPCS Ben Chavis is the foul-mouthed right wing thug turned schoolmaster, founder, and overseer (think plantation) of the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland (AIPCS). AIPCS openly disparagesmulticulturalism and openly advances the philosophy of Milton Friedman.Consider this teacher recruitment ad from the AIPCS website that became part ofa story in 2009 by Landsberg in the *Los Angeles * *Times*: “We are lo... more »
Cultural Genocide Wins in Arizona
As was evident last week in Washington DC when hundreds of protesters camped outside the Department of Education for four days, teachers across the country who speak out or don't comply with oppressive, racist policies find themselves out of a job or with their livelihood threatened unless they are complicit in the cultural sterilization and intellectual neutering of students. Today, we live in a country where public school teachers who are trying to do right by their students, who speak out against injustice, or find innovative and meaningful ways to engage students and broaden thei... more »
Schools Matter: Krash Course #6: Educators Know, Reformers Don't
Schools Matter: Krash Course #6: Educators Know, Reformers Don't
Krash Course #6: Educators Know, Reformers Don't
When Diane Ravitch asks "What do teachers want?" we must be diligent to clarify that educators know what reformers do not. As I have noted recently, education has been driven historically by non-educators, and the current self-identified crop of "reformers" have no expertise or experience as educators, resulting in an important inverse relationship between what educators identify as important education reform and what "deformers" claim is reform but is actually perpetuating and expanding the status quo. Two messages must come from the teacher survey so well examined by Ravitch: ... more »
The Teaching Profession?: Of License, Compulsion, and Autonomy
At Anthony Cody's Living in Dialogue blog (*Education Week*), Educators for Shared Accountability have issued a VAM report on Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in the context of the past nine Secretaries of Education. The results place each Secretary in one of four categories—superior, average, inferior, ineffective—and Duncan ranks "ineffective," 8 of 9. This important step in expanding the education accountability movement which started with holding students accountable throughout the 1980s and 1990s and then expanded to holding teachers accountable in the first and second decade... more »
Gates, ALEC, and Tennessee Miracles
Roll Call has a story this morning on the Plutocracy's attempts to crawl of out of sight from the Web spotlight that is now shining on their corporate coddling of the fascist outfit, ALEC. And yes, Gates is among those to look shocked and say wh. . .? This comes only after $375,000 was paid for lobbying and lawyering and bill writing in the area of anti-teacher and anti-public school activity in states like Tennessee, now Ground Zero in the war against public education. The foundation, run by the co-founder of Microsoft Corp. and his wife, contributed more than $375,000 to ALEC in... more »
Don't Miss This One: Stephen Krashen at Occupy the DOE
Stephen Krashen is the funniest, most entertaining, and most knowledgeable educator/researcher that the University of Southern California can brag about. If you have not heard Stephen make his case, brew up a cup of tea and check this out. Watch live streaming video from califather at livestream.com
Highs And Lows? More like a Year of Woe! Deasy has got to go.
*I was interested in the fact that the scandal over Deasy's PhD hit the headlines at the same time he was hired by Gates. His financial connections with Robert Felner date back to his Santa Monica days — Susan Ohanian* [image: Plutocratic priest of privatization, LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy]Last week the Los Angeles press was effusive with anniversary homages to Eli Broad and Bill Gates' personally selected poverty pimp, Superintendent John Deasy. Short on facts and long on neoliberal cheerleading, the articles paint the man who has shuttered libraries and killed programs depe... more »