John King Gives Uncommon Schools a Free Pass on Teacher Evaluation Scheme
Before he was Commissioner of Ed in New York, John King ran the KIPP knock-off charter chain, Uncommon Schools, which depends upon the same forced winnowing techniques to run off low test scorers, ELLs, and special ed students.Now King is giving his former chain gang charters a pass on the Rube Goldberg teacher eval system based on the monstrous TN system. Story from the Daily News:State Education
Memphis Ready to Turn Over $23 Million Head Start Budget to Corporate Cronies at Porter-Leath
We posted on September 30 about Shelby County Mayor, Mark Luttrell, and his cozy relations with fellow corporate pol, Mark Threlkeld, who presides over the Board of Trustees of Porter-Leath, a non-profit corporation that is building an empire on backs of young victims of the Zero Tolerance Era. The former Orphan AsylumPorter-Leath's history goes back to the 19th Century, when it served as home of
Diane Ravitch's Balanced Appraisal of Charters
Diane Ravitch, in Reign of Error, argues that school reform heedlessly replaced the old-fashioned geographically-based system of public education with a competitive market-based system that includes traditional public schools, private schools, privately managed charter schools, for-profit providers, and virtual schools. The roots of this movement, she argues, are “fundamentally libertarian” but, t
Hess, Please Begin the Moratorium
I recently called for a moratorium on white men pontificating on race, class, and gender—prompted by a series of blogs by Michael Petrilli. So when I read Rick Hess's "Teachers Deserve (But Have to Earn) Their Seat at the Table," I immediately asked myself a few things: (1) Is this April 1?, (2) Has Hess finally become the unintentional self-parody I have predicted?, and finally, (3) Sho
10-14-13 Schools Matter
Schools Matter: Should Diane Ravitch Be More Careful to Not Hurt Reformers' Feelings?By now, I’m about the only slowpoke who hasn’t taken a stand on Diane Ravitch’s Reign of Error. Those who object to her indictment of “corporate reform” have had time to catch any possible error of fact or logic. If there is a rebuttal to Ravitch’s statement that “it is difficult to find education organizations th