President John F. Kennedy, R.I.P.
I remember the day President Kennedy died. I was 25 years old. I was living on East 86th Street in Manhattan. I was walking home to my apartment. A shopkeeper ran out on the street and shouted, “They killed the President.” More people started coming out of shops, looking stunned, weeping and in shock. I ran home. My husband was at work, my one-year-old was napping. I told the babysitter to go home
@thechalkface: Here is Where You Learn about Education Today
Tim Slekar and his colleague Shaun Johnson have been recording interviews and frank talk about school reform for three years. Here is a roundup of some of their top conversations: Karen Lewis, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Peter DeWitt, and me. If you want to hear something different from the mainstream media, listen in.
Why Do We Rank and Rate Students, Teachers, and Schools?
I have been wondering lately why we are so obsessed with giving every student, every teacher, and every school a ranking, rating, and/or grade. It seems to me that we are thinking about children, teachers, and schools the same way we think about sports teams. In every league, there are winners and losers. But if we think about education as a culture that is very different from that of a competitiv
Financial Report: Charter Schools Strangling Public Schools in Michigan
Moody’s Investors Service downgraded the bond ratings of 53 school districts in Michigan. Public schools are losing enrollment to charter schools, and losing the ability to balance their budgets. More than 80% of the charter schools in Michigan are operated for-profit. According to the linked article, Justin Marlowe, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who has written about local
EduShyster: Exploitation of Cheap Tutors by Charters
EduShyster has a guest post written by a young college graduate who took a job as a teacher at a “no excuses” charter school in Boston. When you read it, you understand what it means to have no protections, no one to fight for you. The young people banded together, and the best they could get from their employer was minimum wage, barely covering their living expenses. The post exemplifies why many
How Do You Spell Disaster? A Round-Up of Bloggers on Duncan’s Gaffe About the Moms
Jonathan Pelto has collected a long list of posts by bloggers around the nation, reacting to Duncan’s amazing statement that “white suburban moms” are opposed to Common Core because they were disappointed to discover that their child is not so brilliant after all. This is one of those remarks that just don’t fade away and can’t be explained away as a misquotation or taken out of context. The meani
Steve Perry Loses a School and His Cool
Valerie Strauss here reports on the travails of Steve Perry in Hartford, Connecticut. Two bloggers, Jonathan Pelto of Connecticut and Jersey Jazzman of New Jersey, have investigated Perry’s boasts about the magnet school he runs and found that his school serves very small proportions of children who are poor, who have disabilities, and who are English language learners. Perry is a “reformer” of th
NY Times: Many College Graduates in Europe Are Unemployed
This is a sad story, and there is a warning here for us. College graduates in Europe are having a hard time finding jobs. The story in the New York Times begins like this: “Alba Méndez, a 24-year-old with a master’s degree in sociology, sprang out of bed nervously one recent morning, carefully put on makeup and styled her hair. Her thin hands trembled as she clutched her résumé on her way out of
LISTEN TO DIANE RAVITCH 11-21-13 Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all
Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all: Anthony Cody: Is Common Core a Fiasco?Another insightful essay about Common Core by Anthony Cody. His earlier essay–10 Reasons to Oppose Common Core–was widely reposted and tweeted. This is how a fiasco begins, he writes: “The fiasco begins with a grand idea, planned with a bold vision. People set their sights on a goal beyond any