The Wisdom of a Teacher
I have met so many teachers who are so wise about teaching, about students, and about what really needs to be done to make schools work better. One of them is Arthur Goldstein, an experienced English teacher in New York City. His students are mainly English language learners. As his longtime fans know, he teaches [...]
Save the Arts
When the budget cuts start, the first victim is usually the arts. The people who make the financial decisions think that the arts don’t matter. How wrong they are. Why do they prioritize the budget for assessment over the budget for singing, dancing, and the joyful activities associated with the arts? Do they think that [...]
The Silence of the Reformers
In district after district, budget cuts are decimating the curriculum. Teachers are laid off, programs are cut, class sizes are rising, libraries are closing. This is insane. We are supposed to be in the midst of a great education “reform” movement, but for reasons that are not obvious, the alleged reformers never say anything about [...]
The Ed Show
Last night, I appeared on the Ed Show. It was brief, possibly four or five minutes. But I have learned that in television, one minute is an eternity. Every minute is precious. Out there is a huge audience, maybe a million people. It is rare to be on any TV program where there is time [...]
A Reader Wants to Know
I get many thoughtful comments. I read them all because I learn from readers. This reader asks a very good question. Can you answer the question? “There is an observation regarding these high stakes tests that has been nagging me as I witnessed, another year of my 3rd through 8th grade students painfully struggle through [...]
A Solution to the Testing Mania
The popular rising against high-stakes testing grows larger every day. In Texas, more than 500 school boards have endorsed a resolution opposing high-stakes testing. A coalition of organizations and individuals prepared a national resolution against high-stakes testing. Hundreds of organizations and thousands of individuals have signed it. (Please add your name.) Florida parents are up [...]
Don’t Believe the Romney Hype
The Romney campaign released its education policy paper last week, which included a number of factual inaccuracies. One of them, which we are likely to hear more of during the course of the campaign, is that Romney presided over a dramatic improvement in academic achievement in Massachusetts while he was governor. In fact, during his [...]
Does Class Size Matter?
Mitt Romney launched his foray into education by visiting the Universal Bluford charter school in West Philadelphia, an impoverished, largely African-American neighborhood. He went to tout his plan for vouchers and charters as the new civil rights crusade of our era. While there, thinking he was in friendly territory, he made some unfortunate remarks. First, [...]
What a TFA Teacher Learned about Tenure
I liked a blog I read this morning. It was written by a TFA teacher who came into teaching with a low opinion of tenure. He (and I think it is a he because of the name of his blog) came into teaching sympathetic to the Michelle Rhee claim that tenure is only for the [...]
American Students Are Not Failing
It has recently become a humdrum narrative: Our schools are failing, we must reinvent the schools, we must fire the principals and the teachers and start over, we must race to the top, we must have vouchers and charters, we must turn public education over to the business people who tanked the economy in 2008, [...]
Test, Test, Test, Test: Another Day in Bridgeport
Paul Vallas has taken over as superintendent in Bridgeport, Connecticut, while running a consulting business on the side (he just won a $1 million contract to help fix the Illinois schools). He is concerned that students and teachers slack off after they take the state tests in March, so he has just imposed yet another [...]
We Are Number One!
A new report by UNICEF finds that the United States ranks second among the nation’s advanced nations in child poverty, with 23.1% of our children living in poverty. We are second to Romania, where the rate is 25.5%. Read the summary here. Forgive me, but I think we are really number one. Romania is a [...]
Does This Historical Analogy Make Sense? (Reposted)
I read an article last fall that compared our current education reform movement with Stalinist education policy. (A reader told me that the link didn’t work. Another reader sent me a different link. Thanks to all! The article is “Stalinizing American Education” by Lawrence Baines, Teachers College Record, September 16, 2011). There is a part [...]
Long Arm of Federal Control Reaches Districts
In what must be the most startling development of the past month, year, and perhaps decade, the U.S. Department of Education is now launching a Race to the Top competition for districts. It has nearly $400 million to award, but as we have seen in the state-level competition, the amount of money was sufficient to [...]
Did Arne Learn Anything in New Haven?
When Secretary of Education Arne Duncan visited New Haven’s first turnaround school, he asked what was needed to encourage more teachers to leave high-performing schools for low-performing schools. Everyone who responded to his question talked about the importance of preparing teachers better for the challenges of teaching students in urban schools. They spoke of a [...]
Louisiana Voucher Plan Draws Criticism
Louisiana legislators grilled Commissioner of Education John White about the state’s decision to approve the largest number of voucher students (315) for a small religious school that lacked facilities or teachers. Many questions were raised about the state’s failure to do any site visits to ascertain the readiness of the school to accept new students. [...]
Singapore Wants Creativity, not Cramming
Since “A Nation at Risk” in 1983, American policymakers (the ones who make decisions but never worked in a school) have looked with envy towards the Asian nations that get high test scores. It became a commonplace to complain that American students didn’t work hard enough and there had to be more “accountability” tied to [...]
Musical Chairs at DC Think Tanks
This may seem to be inside baseball for most of my regular readers, but it is nonetheless worth noting. The DC think tanks exercise undue influence on the national media, because they are located in our nation’s capitol, and the media assumes it is worth paying attention to people who spend full time thinking. Unfortunately, [...]
Vermont Stands Up for Its Children
Vermont decided not to apply for a waiver from NCLB. Not because it loves NCLB. No one does. But because Vermont education officials had their own ideas about how to help their schools. And they discovered that Arne Duncan’s offer to give them “flexibility” was phony. He did not want to hear Vermont’s ideas. Contrary [...]
Why the Gates Compact?
As I was researching the story about the closing of Allan elementary school in Austin, which will be replaced in the fall by an IDEA charter school, I came across this story about the Gates compact. What is the Gates compact? Austin was the 16th district to apply for $100,000 from the Gates Foundation to [...]
When a School Dies
This is what it looks like when a school dies.Read here. The Austin school board–at the urging of the district superintendent Meria Carstarphen–decided to hand over Allan elementary school to a charter chain called IDEA. She said that IDEA had the formula to raise the academic achievement of the children in that school. The new [...]
The Disturbing Connection between David Coleman and Michelle Rhee
If you are a reader of this blog, you saw earlier posts about the close connection between David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core standards, and Michelle Rhee. Stephen Sawchuk of Education Week confirms this here. I learned from Ken Libby–a graduate student at the University of Colorado who likes to read IRS filings by [...]
Who Are These New “Advocacy” Groups?
Education Week recently published a series of articles about the new “advocacy” groups that are reshaping education policy. The series is well worth reading. But do so, I suggest, by first reading Chapter 10 of my book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, as well as the update at the end [...]
Did Albert Shanker Say That?
When critics of teachers’ unions want to strike a blow against unions, they throw around something that they claim was said by the late Albert Shanker: ‘When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of children.’ ” Albert Shanker was the brilliant and much-admired and very outspoken president of the [...]
How Public Education Died in Muskegon Heights
Last year, the conservative Republican governor of Michigan Rick Snyder and the Republican-dominated legislature passed legislation strengthening the governor’s power to take over financially troubled municipalities and school districts. Michigan has had emergency manager legislation since 1990, but the 2011 law, Public Act 4, gave the governor additional powers to suspend democracy. Democratic groups are [...]
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 [...]
Undermining Special Education?
I thought I was done with blogging for the day but then I read a comment on an earlier post. It was very disturbing. If true, it’s frightening to think that the Obama administration plans to “monitor” special education by test scores and to reduce the number of people on the ground. “For-profit higher education [...]
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 [...]
