The Most Important Story of the Week
Wisconsin has a recall election on June 5. On that date, the voters of the state will decide whether they want Scott Walker to finish out his term or to leave Madison. There are also four Republican state senators on the same ballot. This article in the New York Times magazine explains the issues and [...]
The Philadelphia Story
These days, U.S. education is beginning to look like a slow-motion train wreck. In some places, it is fast motion, not slow motion. One of the places where the train seems to be speeding rapidly towards a wreck is Philadelphia. The wreck will There, the schools have been under state control for a decade, and [...]
A New Low in Standardized Testing
Scantron, the test publishing company, was compelled to delete a reading passage that was highly propagandistic after parent activists learned about it and called attention to it. The item was brought to the attention of the media by Parents United for Responsible Education. The Chicago Sun-Time wrote: “PURE executive director Julie Woestehoff said the passage, [...]
In Praise of Linda Darling-Hammond
One of the wisest and sanest voices in the nation on the subject of teacher quality, teaching quality and teacher evaluation is Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University. Linda has been involved for many years in studying these issues and working directly with teachers to improve practice. During the presidential campaign of 2008, she was Barack [...]
What Is Campbell’s Law?
Everyone interested in understanding how the ceaseless pressure to raise test scores can corrupt the tests should be familiar with Campbell’s Law. This is an adage written by social scientist Donald T. Campbell in a 1976 paper. It says: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to [...]
Profits, Not Better Education
An article in a publication called “The Financial Investigator” took a close look at K12, the for-profit online “education” corporation whose growth had made it a darling of Wall Street. The article paid particular attention to the “churn rate” at K12 online schools. That is, how many students left in a given year. In the [...]
Romney’s Absurd Claims
Mitt Romney is out on the campaign trail, pushing vouchers and charters and online learning and for-profit schools and larger class size as the answers to our “failing” public schools. I wish someone would give him some actual facts to work with. Are our schools failing? No, they are not. According to the latest federal [...]
Is School Retention Child Abuse?
When I spoke earlier this year to the National Association of School Psychologists, I listened to introductory remarks by Philip Lazarus, the president of the organization. In talking about the role of school psychologists and reviewing the many problems that students have today, he mentioned that there were three things that students feared most. Number [...]
The Charlie Rose Show: Reflections
I was on the Charlie Rose show last night. I was very excited to be there. Here is the interview. Over the past two years, as the debate about education has gotten more and more heated, I have had many opportunities to express my views on the radio, especially on NPR, but not so many [...]
What is NCTQ?
Several months ago, U.S. News & World Report announced that it planned to rank the nation’s schools of education and that it would do so with the assistance of the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ). Since then, many institutions announced that they would not collaborate. Some felt that they had already been evaluated by [...]
The Romney Education Agenda
What would education policy look like in a Mitt Romney administration? As the saying goes, people are policy. Romney’s list of campaign advisers was released this week and it is a re-run of the George W. Bush administration. There is Rod Paige, Nina Rees, Bill Hansen, Russ Whitehurst, Bill Evers, Carol D’Amico, and possibly others [...]
Stop the Campaign Against Public Schools!
My review of the Council on Foreign Relations’ report on US public schools as a “grave threat to national security” is now available online. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/07/do-our-public-schools-threaten-national-security/?page=1 I hope it is widely read. I urge everyone who reads it to send it to their friends and colleagues. The report I reviewed was written by a task force [...]
Enroute to Atlantic City
I woke up this morning thinking that today I would be unable to post on my blog. That would be a first, and I was not happy about it. Since I started this blog a month ago, I have posted–let’s see–I think this is blog #89. I didn’t want to miss even one day. I’m [...]
Will Vouchers Fizzle?
The Jindal education reforms include a huge voucher program that had rightwing choice advocates jumping for joy and supporters of public schools trembling. More than half the students in the state are eligible for vouchers, about 380,000 children. But not so fast. It turns out that there are only a few thousand seats available in [...]
Unneeded Charters
Stories like this one from Nashville (http://www.tennessean.com/article/20120509/NEWS04/305090116), or this one from Los Altos, California (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-15/taxpayers-billed-for-millionaires-kids-at-charter-school.html) remind me how far the charter idea has strayed from its origins. Parents in Nashville are fighting the Great Hearts charter because they know it is targeting children who are affluent and white; they know that it will cause their [...]
Corporate Reformers Love Lofty Goals
One of the favorite tactics of corporate reformers is to set lofty goals. We have learned over the past twenty years that you can’t have reform without goals. I remember back when No Child Left Behind was passed, and it included the goal (mandate, actually) that all students in grades 3-8 would be proficient by [...]
Charter Schools Vs. Catholic Schools
Charter schools contribute directly to the collapse of Catholic schools in the inner city, according to new research by Abraham Lackman, a scholar in residence at the Albany Law School in New York. With the help of a friend, I got an URL: https://sites.google.com/site/neifpe/home/pdffiles/120307Lackman.pdf. And here is a report of his findings in the New York [...]
Saving Poor Kids from Failing Schools?
Several people sent me a video of Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report skewering Corey Booker, the mayor of Newark, and Howard Fuller of Black Alliance for Educational Options as sell-outs for a rightwing agenda. See it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdPACwRgw04 I must say there was nothing in the video that surprised me. Back in the [...]
Enter the New Dallas Superintendent
The new superintendent of the Dallas public schools, Mike Miles, is off to a rousing start. He is a military man, and he thinks in terms of organizational goals, the mission, the beliefs. The story about Miles’ plan appears in the Dallas Morning News behind a paywall, so I can’t link to it. But here [...]
Why College-for-All is a Sham
The corporate reformers like to say that everyone must go to college if they want to have good jobs in the future. Now, let me be clear that I love education and I think everyone should get as much education as they want and should keep on getting better educated all their life. Thanks to [...]
Yuck: US DOE Supports For-profit Entrepreneurs
Yesterday I engaged in an unexpected exchange on Twitter with Justin Hamilton, who is press secretary to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. It started after I retweeted a blog by master-teacher Nancy Flanagan. Nancy’s blog took issue with a listing of the up-and-coming stars of American education, which focused heavily on the entrepreneurial sector and [...]
Why Do We Spend So Much on Testing?
A parent in Texas wrote to say that she couldn’t understand why the state was paying Pearson $100 million a year while laying off teachers. She’s right. This is crazy. She pointed out that in addition to the direct cost of the state testing, schools and districts now had to pay people whose sole job [...]
Why Does David Coleman Dislike Fiction?
The answer to the question posed in the title of this blog is: I don’t know. I can’t imagine. In fact, I don’t know how one develops imagination without reading fiction. I have been told by several people who attended David Coleman’s lectures that he speaks disparagingly of fiction. That’s why the Common Core standards [...]
