Who Will Vouchers Benefit in Louisiana?
As Mitt Romney continues his advocacy for vouchers, he should follow developments in Louisiana.
As I mentioned in a previous post, the New Living Word School has offered to nearly quadruple its student enrollment, from 122 to 437, even though it lacks the facilities or teachers for the new students. Millions of public dollars will flow to this small church school, where students spend most of their class time watching DVDs.
A reader alerted me that another little school that will reap the benefits from the voucher program is the Eternity Christian Academy in Calcasieu Parish. It currently enrolls 14 students. It has offered to take in 135 new
As I mentioned in a previous post, the New Living Word School has offered to nearly quadruple its student enrollment, from 122 to 437, even though it lacks the facilities or teachers for the new students. Millions of public dollars will flow to this small church school, where students spend most of their class time watching DVDs.
A reader alerted me that another little school that will reap the benefits from the voucher program is the Eternity Christian Academy in Calcasieu Parish. It currently enrolls 14 students. It has offered to take in 135 new
Will Public Education in Muskegon Heights Die?
According to the latest reports, the emergency manager in Muskegon Heights, Michigan, proposes to kill off public education and replace the public schools with charter schools. The reason for this is that Muskegon Heights has a debt of $12 million. So the emergency manager figures that it is best to replace all the public schools [...]
Who Did Thomas Friedman Talk to in Seattle?
In Sunday’s New York Times, celebrated columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that he had “a recent discussion in Seattle with a group of educators.” One of them surprised him by saying that “even though their state did not win President Obama’ education ‘Race to the Top,’ that program was critical in spurring educational reform in Washington [...]
Did John Adams Say That?
A reader sent me this quote from John Adams. I can’t verify it. Does anyone have the original source? “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in [...]
Kirp vs. Liebman on Integration & Reform
David L. Kirp asked in a recent article why our society has abandoned school integration since it is “the one tool that has been shown to work.” Kirp wrote: “To the current reformers, integration is at best an irrelevance and at worst an excuse to shift attention away from shoddy teaching. But a spate of [...]
Who Will Vouchers Benefit in Louisiana?
As Mitt Romney continues his advocacy for vouchers, he should follow developments in Louisiana. As I mentioned in a previous post, the New Living Word School has offered to nearly quadruple its student enrollment, from 122 to 437, even though it lacks the facilities or teachers for the new students. Millions of public dollars will [...]
NY State Ed Dept: Lie to Students
As you may know, there has been growing parent dissatisfaction about the amount of testing that their children are subjected to. initially, the tests and test prep increased because officials wanted to measure student growth on tests. Then, the testing increased because officials want to measure teacher quality. From the vantage of parents, the school [...]
Fahrenheit 451 in NYC
I read the other day that Occupy Wall Street and its librarians are suing the New York Police Department for destroying the OWS library of 3,600 books. The librarians had carefully catalogued every book they received. People checked them out and returned them, no questions asked. When the police destroyed the OWS encampment at Zuccotti [...]
How Charters Compete
A while back, I read a story in the New York Times that really bothered me. It explained that neighborhood public schools are now compelled to “market” themselves because of competition with charters. In Harlem, charters are omnipresent, and the city administration has closed many public schools to make way for charters. New York City [...]
When Charters Compete
I live in New York City, where charters are aggressively expanding. Many, perhaps most, of our charters have hedge fund managers on their board of directors. They want to win. They want higher test scores than the neighborhood public school. They compete with one another and they compete with the neighborhood school. The city government–which [...]
Does Public Education Matter?
Yesterday I wrote a blog about a tiny rural district in Idaho where the community did everything possible to support their school but it wasn’t good enough. The tax base was so meager that the school was in deficit, and budget cuts were putting the school in peril. A reader commented that this was an [...]
Animal Lover Alert
This is my blog, and there’s no rule that says I’m only allowed to write about education. Right now, I want to write about the animals I lost in the past three years. It’s been really hard because I miss them. I miss them every day. Molly, a Tibetan terrier, died in 2010 at the [...]
These Folks Love Their School
What happens to a small town in Idaho whose residents love their public school, support it, paint the building, fix it up, tax themselves to pay for it, but is suffering because of state budget cuts? Raise taxes? Well, they are already paying 17 times the rate of the state’s wealthy districts. Because of its [...]
Open Letter to Georgia Teachers
In my experience, if you want to find a sympathetic ear in the media for public education, find someone who has a relative who teaches. Jon Stewart never fell for the teacher-bashing mania because his mother was a teacher. I have been interviewed on several occasions by talk show hosts who confessed that their mother [...]
The Itty Bitty Voucher Plan
According to a story in today’s Alexandria (La.) “Daily Town Talk,” large parts of Louisiana have no private schools taking part in the voucher program. They prefer to wait and see or just keep their distance. Some say they have no seats available; in one case, a school principal said her board members were “philosophically [...]
Keep an Eye on Jindal’s Reforms
I just came across an interesting statistic about Louisiana that puts the Jindal education reform plan into context.* The majority of white children in Louisiana do not go to public school. The majority of white children go to private schools. Black children are the majority in the public schools of Louisiana. According to Census data, [...]
School Reform in Louisiana, As If
The State Education Department in Louisiana has given approval to the New Living Word School in Ruston, Louisiana, to accept 315 voucher students. The school currently has 122 students, so if it can enroll its full complement of voucher students, it will nearly quadruple in size. The New Living Word School will accept the largest [...]
Calling All Parents!
In an earlier post, I described how a parent organization called out Scantron, the testing company, for inserting a blatantly propagandistic item into its standardized tests. The reading passage was about the alleged superiority of charters as education reform and named a fictitious “multi-millionaire” who sends his own children to a charter. Public school students [...]