Great News! EduShyster Selected to Lead Camden, NJ, Schools
No doubt reacting to the news that New Hersey has selected an inexperienced young man with no obvious qualifications to run the Camden, New Jersey, public schools, EduShyster has concocted a hilarious parody in which she is the one hired for the job. She acknowledges that she has no experience, has never run a school or a district, and has never set foot in Camden, but she insists that these are p
Jose Vilson: Stop and Frisk Those Test Scores
Jose Vilson is one of New York City’s best teacher bloggers. In this post, he notes that Mayor Bloomberg experienced two major setbacks within a matter of days: First, his education legacy collapsed along with the new state test scores showing that most students are “failing.” The Mayor felt compelled to defend the lower scores, calling them “very good news,” when he should have been calling foul
What Do Public Educators Do? They Educate the Public!
This reader responds to the findings of the PDK/Gallup poll, which showed a shift in public opinion against testing, against using test scores to evaluate teachers, and against public release of teacher personnel files and ratings. “We said last year that we had a lot of hard work to do, to inform and educate the parents we work with, to organize communities and form effective coalitions of resist
Is Experience Necessary to Be a “Great” Teacher?
The New York Times has a good debate this morning about the value of experience for teaching. The debate was prompted by a very controversial article last week in which charter leaders claimed that two or three years of teaching was good enough, and that they liked the constant turnover of bright inexperienced teachers. The title of the article actually referred teachers who had a “short career b
This Is What a Real Educator Sounds Like
Several months ago, I honored Tom Scarice, superintendent of schools in Madison, Connecticut, for his brave opposition to corporate reform and top-down mandates. Instead of letting Arne Duncan impose high-stakes testing on his students and staff, Scarice created a community study group to chart the district’s future. Please read what he told the community as school opened. No jargon. No reformer
Do Civil Rights Groups Want More High-Stakes Testing?
A group called the Campaign for High School Equity made news the other day when it criticized Arne Duncan’s NCLB waivers and complained that the waivers might reduce the amount of high-stakes testing for poor and minority students. Mike Petrilli at the conservative think tank Thomas B. Fordham Institute challenged me to admit that the civil rights groups were leading the charge to protect high-st
What He Learned at the “Worst School in Texas”
Education debates in D.C. and the media tend to be dominated by what economists and think tanks say. What is needed most and seldom heard is the voice of teachers. Here is a brilliant new voice that should get as much air time as Bill Gates, Joel Klein, and Arne Duncan. What are the chances? In this article at Salon, John Savage describes his experience teaching at J.E. Pearce Middle School in Aus
Diane in the Evening 8-28-13 Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all
Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all: Juan Gonzalez: Harlem Success Academy Suspends LosersIn this article in the New York Daily News, award-winning investigative journalist Juan Gonzales examines the high suspension rates at the Harlem Success Academy charter schools of Eva Moskowitz. Gonzales writes: “Success Academy, the charter school chain that boasts sky-high stu
