Breaking News: Pearson Foundation Fined Millions for Violating Laws
New York state’s attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman won an agreement from the Pearson Foundation to pay $7.7 million in fines for using its charitable activities to advance its corporation’s profit-making arm. According to the story by Javier Hernandez in the New York Times, “An inquiry by Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York State attorney general, found that the foundation had helped develop
Last Night in Red Hook…
Last night I led a discussion of my book at P.S. 15 in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The community is right on the water facing Néw York harbor and the Statue of Liberty. It is cut off from the mainsream of Brooklyn by a major highway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. It has working docks, Ikea, and a gourmet supermarket called Fairway. It also has a large number of public housing projects and great ethnic
Washington State Court Ruling: Figure It Out Yourself
Charter opponents in Washington celebrated a court ruling that charter schools are not “common schools” and may not be funded as such. Charter advocates celebrated that the judge upheld the rest of the initiative. So the law may be implemented without public funding. Or something. Appeal on the way.
Breaking News: Court Declares Washington State Charter Law Unconstitutional
Last fall, there was a hard-fought election in Washington State over charter schools. Voters had turned them down three times but this time was different: Bill Gates, the Walton family, and a passel of super-rich people gathered $10 million or so to support the charter idea and their initiative passed by a small margin. However, today a judge ruled the law unconstitutional because the state consti
Some Questions About NYC’s Proposed School Without Walls
In a parting shot, the New York City Department of Education announced the launch of a “school without walls,” in collaboration with Microsoft. There would be no physical brick-and-mortar school. Microsoft would arrange internships for students. Questions: Who will teach the students such subjects as biology, chemistry, physics, algebra, geometry, and calculus? Will they learn history or read li
NYC School Officials Plan a School Without Walls
As the clock ticks on, and the days of the Bloomberg administration clears the desks, it it is still creating new schools. The latest innovation is called the School Without Walls. Kids will spend their high school years without a high school! Lisa Fleisher reports in the Wall Street Journal: “Microsoft will partner with New York City to create what schools officials describe as a high school w
Reader: How Cyber-Charters Crush Small School Districts
This reader reports fro Pennsylvania, which has 16 cyber-charters, all drawing money from local school districts. “We kind of know what happens. In PA, we have limited brick-and-mortar charters, but we’ve been dealing with cyber-charters for a few years now. “It is a crushing formula for reimbursement– the state gives the charter the per-capita cost for each student. That generally translates int
Tfa Expands Its Reach to mid-Career Professionals, Veterans
If Teach for America has its way, our nation’s schools will soon be filled with temporary teachers at the bottom of the salary scale, most of whom will leave after two-three years. Goodbye, expensive experienced teachers! If TFA teachers are as great as they say, why doesn’t TFA require a five-year commitment? Politico reports today: “TFA REACHES OUT TO DREAMERS: Teach for America has already exp
EduShyster: No More Conflict of Interest Rules!
EduShyster retains the capacity for astonishment and surprise. In this post, she identifies some seemingly blatant conflicts of interest on the part of big players in the education reform world. Yet no one cares. Ethics? What’s that? She calls it “carerruption.” I don’t feel like getting a lawyer’s letter today threatening to sue me for defamation, so I will ask you to read EduShyster yourself.
Charter Founder in Ohio Makes Large Political Contributions, Gets Rich
The blogger Plunderbund here documents the conditions in which certain major charter operators in Ohio become financially very successful. In this instance, he tells the story of William Lager, founder of ECOT (the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow), who has generously donated $1.3 million to the Ohio Republican Party in the last decade. His generosity has been amply repaid with generous state fu
Anthony Cody: Has ASCD Embraced Free-Market Reforms?
In this provocative post, Anthony Cody takes ASCD to task for its tilt toward market-based reforms and its advocacy for Common Core. Cody notes that ASCD has received more than $3 million from the Gates Foundation to promote Common Core. That disappoints him, as he thinks that ASCD should be an organization that debates so sweeping a change as Common Core. In its publications and conferences, say
This is What Real Tech Literacy Looks Like
Last Sunday, the Néw York Times had a lengthy editorial lamenting the sorry state of math education in the U.S. the editorial said that our kids find math boring, so they don’t major in math or become engineers. The Times barely mentioned the pernicious effects of standardized testing, which surely mars math tedious. But the Times writers should visit Pasadena, California, which has developed a m
Tom Loveless on Shanghai: The Scores Are Rigged, and OECD Doesn’t Care
Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution calls on the OECD and PISA to stop permitting China to present data that does not represent the full population of students. For one thing, only Shanghai is tested–and Shanghai is not representative of China. Loveless writes that Shanghai’s #1 ranking on all subjects is misleading because it excludes the children of migrant workers. He writes: Shanghai has
Wall Street’s Plans for the Future of K-12 Education
When Frank Bruni wrote a column saying that American students are too “coddled,” he added a gratuitous swipe at “leftwing paranoiacs” who ”imagine some conspiracy to ultimately privatize education and create a new frontier of profits for money-mad plutocrats.” Well, here is another point of view, called “Wall Street is Designing the Future of Public Education.” It appears on Salon.com. I think Bru
LISTEN TO DIANE RAVITCH 12-11-13 Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all
Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all: A Parent Reports on John King’s Stacked Forum in BrooklynNew York Commissioner John King held his first meeting in New York City on the rushed implementation of the Common Core and the tests whose cut score was set so high that only 31% of students across the state passed. Among English learners, only 3% passed. Among students with