Teacher Tom: No Matter What Happened Tuesday

Teacher Tom: No Matter What Happened Tuesday:

No Matter What Happened Tuesday

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He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened on Tuesday. ~Stephen Colbert

Yesterday, I wrote about Diane Ravitch's important new book,Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools. Today I'm doing so again, as I will likely do tomorrow.

As I read Ravitch's surgeon-like dissection of the arguments made by those hell-bent upon privatizing our nation's public schools, I began to keep track of all the instances in which, when faced with stark evidence of failure, they have doubled down on their bad ideas, by writing the word, "Again!" in the margin. Flipping through the pages of my copy of the book it appears I've written it on almost every page.

Let's take, as our for instance, the concept of merit pay for teachers, the idea of providing financial incentives to teachers in exchange for motivating their students to achieve higher