Schools Matter:
Schools Matter All Week
Last year when Shelby County saw the lucrative Gates plan for turning over Memphis City schools to corporations melting away, the County filed a lawsuit against five suburban municipalities that were threatening to form their own school systems to avoid the Gates consolidation. The ostensible basis for the lawsuit was that the five new leafy suburban districts would exacerbate segregation in the
Sent to the West Australian (Dec. 28)"New reading rules for kids," (Dec. 27) states that " ...international research has found that explicit and structured teaching of phonics - the relationship between letters and sounds - is the most effective way to teach reading." Not so. What research says is that the impact of explicit and structured phonics is strong only on tests in whi
Mike Pence's Secret Santas
by Doug Martin As we enter an election year here in Indiana, it is time for all of us to start peering in on the campaign records of our beloved state politicians and the front groups that are their publically-secret Santas. So here are a few of Gov. Mike Pence’s, and they are many of the same people and corporations who funded former Indiana and Florida supt. of education Tony Bennett. ELI LILLY
No shortage of high-tech workers
Sent to the Los Angeles Times, Dec. 27, 2013.In "Its no sin to be rich," (Dec. 27), Richard Riordan and Eli Broad state that jobs that don't require higher education "have left the country" and the "good jobs" that will stay require technological know-how. They conclude that we must work harder at educating our workers in technology. It is not clear that there is a d
A College Rating System Designed to Benefit the Testing Industrial Complex and the Efficiency Zealots
In these days of casino capitalism, the corporate education losers look more like losers every day. If those of us who are determined to restore sanity to our schools and colleges keep pushing, the whole corrupt and cowardly con game known for decades now as "education reform" will continue to unravel in the coming year. They will not go easily, however, which means that the education
DEC 26
The Etymology of "Miracle": On the Politics of Lies
My doctoral work was a trifecta of marginalized scholarship since I attained an EdD (shunned second cousin to the PhD) by preparing a qualitative dissertation (closeted step-cousin of the sainted quantitative paradigm)—an educational biography (a mish-mash of a non-academic field, education, with a popular but lowly literary genre, biography) of Lou LaBrant (Thomas, 2001).My scholarship on biograp
DEC 23
Making Teachers Better by Using Someone Else's Bogus Scores for Evaluation
Beyond the idiocy of using unreliable, invalid, and unfair test score gains to evaluate teachers, there is the insanity of claiming the evaluations are about improving teachers by using scores that are someone else's. Is there any other profession that allows such treatment of its members? Where is Randi and her bullhorn, where is doddering Dennis?From the NYTimes:. . . .Proponents of the reform
DEC 22
New York Times Doesn't Just Bury the Lead, They Bury the Story
The Sunday New York Times has a front page story about ballooning class sizes with this headline: Subtract Teachers, Add Pupils: Math of Today’s Jammed SchoolsCOATESVILLE, Pa. — The recession may have ended, but many of the nation’s school districts that laid off teachers and other employees to cut payrolls in leaner times have not yet replenished their ranks. Now, despite the recovery, many scho
The Memphis Hopson Hustle
Unless the public stops the corrupt capitulation by Memphis politicians to the Gates agenda for privatizing American schools, the children of Memphis will soon become the educational property of corporate charter schools that receive public money to subject the poorest children to their cultural and behavioral neutering programs. Here is a telling chunk of a piece on the developments in New Orlea
DEC 21
Pearson's $300 Toll Road to Teaching
If you need some extra holiday cash, you might consider working part-time from home to help Pearson decide who will become teachers and who won't. It's easy--just complete a few online tutorials, and Pearson will send you a bunch of student teaching portfolios, complete with video clips of student teachers and classes with students whose parents have no idea that Pearson now has in their permanent