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 data, the high school graduation rate is now at the highest point in our history for every group: for white students, black students, Hispanic students, low-income students, middle-income students, and high-income students.
According to the National Assessment of Education Progress, test scores in reading and math are at their highest point in our history. Forgive me if I quote an earlier blog from this site:
“Proficient [on NAEP] is akin to a solid A. In reading, the proportion who were proficient in fourth grade reading rose from 29% in 1992 to 34% in 2011. The proportion proficient in eighth grade also rose from 29% to 34% in
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 data, the high school graduation rate is now at the highest point in our history for every group: for white students, black students, Hispanic students, low-income students, middle-income students, and high-income students.
According to the National Assessment of Education Progress, test scores in reading and math are at their highest point in our history. Forgive me if I quote an earlier blog from this site:
“Proficient [on NAEP] is akin to a solid A. In reading, the proportion who were proficient in fourth grade reading rose from 29% in 1992 to 34% in 2011. The proportion proficient in eighth grade also rose from 29% to 34% in
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 [...]