Defending the Indefensible: KIPP
Ohanian Comment: Mostly, I ignore KIPP. I can't cover everything and I choose not to do much with charters and other entrepreneurial efforts. Not because they aren't important but just because I can't.
Schools Matter does a very good job with this.
Praise be.
That said, I decided to post Paul Thomas' ongoing fine challenge to KIPP here. And I've added a bit, something I think is critical to the argument.
Thomas links to a piece by Jonathan Schorr. Well, who's Jonathan Schoor? If you don't follow all this controversy as closely as a louse follows garbage, then you might not know that Jonathan Schorr was in the first cohort of Teach for America acolytes and then went on to become a partner in the San Francisco office of the NewSchools Venture Fund, where he oversees public relations, among other things.
It just seems like this is relevant to any word about public schools that leaves his mouth.
Educators Have No Political Party
Publication Date: 2012-08-28
This is from Daily Kos, Aug. 23, 2012. Anyone who thinks either political party supports public education hasn't been paying attention.
For about thirty years now, public education as well as its teachers and students have been the focus of an accountability era driven by recurring calls for and the implementation of so-called higher standards and incessant testing. At two points during this era, educators could blame Ronald Reagan's administration for feeding the media frenzy around the misleading A Nation at Risk and George W. Bush's administration for federalizing the accountability era with No Child Left Behind (NCLB)--both Republican administrations.
For those who argued that Republicans and Democrats were different sides of the same politica
