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Monday, February 25, 2013

UPDATE: IsSTEMbul (Not ConSTEMtinople) + Where Chahter Rhymes with Wicked Smahter | EduShyster

Where Chahter Rhymes with Wicked Smahter | EduShyster:



IsSTEMbul (Not ConSTEMtinople)

To prevent an anticipated gaping gap in STEM graduates, Massachusetts must lift the charter fez.
Can a burgeoning Turkish empire of science charters that is absolutely not affiliated with the Gulen movement solve our looming STEM emergency?
By the time you finish reading this sentence, our failing public schools will have failed to produce 1,283 engineers, 396 brain surgeons and four rocket scientists. (Chances are, if you are a product of our failing public schools you are still digesting the former sentence). To sum up: we have a crisis on our hands, people. It’s called the STEM crisis and it is more fiercely urgent than all of our other gaps and crises combined.
Fortunately this urgent crisis has an obvious solution, which just happens to be the same obvious solution to all of our other urgent crises: establish a fast-growing empire of excellence and expansion. In Massachusetts, the 





Where Chahter Rhymes with Wicked Smahter

In Massachusetts, we like our education debates like our turkeys: fact free and stuffed with excellence.
Greetings from the land of the Massholes, where chahter rhymes with wicked smahter and we like our debates about public education the old-fashioned way: fact free. Did you know, for example, that in the most recent round of international tests, African American students in Massachusetts outscored Finnish students in math? No? Chances are you missed this information—because you live in Massachusetts, where it went completely unreported.
The rubber stamp gang
To experience this fact-free environment in all of its glory, I’d suggest you fire up the family mini van and take a little road trip to Malden, where our esteemed edu-officials will soon engage in the yearly ritual known as ‘rubber stamping excellence.’ Members of the Board of Education will spend the next two days “deliberating,” “asking