Schools Matter:
Schools Matter All Week
During the early years of the Reading First corporate feeding frenzy that dumped a cool billion dollars a year into worthless reading programs blessed by crackpot, Reid Lyon, and a handful of his corrupt cronies housed principally at the University of Oregon, a reading assessment called DIBELS became required if your state or city wanted a shot the Reading First grants. It is based, essentially,
Real Life Consequences of Corporate Education Deform
There's no shortage of education blogs and information about how utterly worthless and destructive current education policy is for the United States. There are mounds of factual, scientific evidence based on thousands of academic studies on the destructive education policies that continue to dumb down the nation's next generation. There are enough books and documents to fill the Capitol rotunda te
National Threat Alert: The Mind Trust’s CEE-Trust, George Bush, and Bill Gates
By Doug MartinThe Indianapolis-based Mind Trust plays a major part in my forthcoming book Hoosier School Heist,but many people don’t realize that the group founded by former Democratic mayor Bart Peterson and David Harris is a national leader in the school privatization movement through its CEE-Trust (Cities for Education Entrepeneurship). Loaded with Bill Gates/Joyce and Carnegie Foundation money
JAN 02
The common core ignores the evidence
Sent to the Los Angeles Times, Jan 2Al Austin, in his letter to the Times (Jan 2) notes that the common core calls for "a sharp reduction" in literature in schools in favor of increased exposure to informational text. This policy was created without any empirical evidence. The common core designers ignored (or were not aware of) not only studies showing that reading literature contribut
Do Teachers Matter?
I am seeking ways to address teachers and workers—and the conditions impacting all workers—as a focus of my public work in 2014.Recently, I came across a wonderful piece about Roberto Clemente: Common bond for uncommon men: Clemente and King shared a hatred for discrimination, by David Zirin.In part, this piece speaks to the importance of solidarity and community, the sense of empathy any one pers
Social Studies National Curriculum: Pearson and Gates Ready for Next Push
Even as 22 states are rethinking, restricting, or dropping prior commitments to national Common Core corporate standards for schools, this has not stopped the CorpEd machine from quietly pushing forward with another prong of its overreaching and lucrative exercise to increase testing, standardize thinking, and undercut diversity in American schools. On September 11, 2013, a group drunk with money
JAN 01
Schools Matter 2013 Awards
Most Unconvincing Ideologue In the Role as ScholarChester FinnMost Flagrant Political Organization Posing as a Legitimate Research AssociationAERALifetime Achievement AwardDeborah MeierSelf-Aggrandizement Award 2013 (tie)David ColemanMichelle RheeEducation Book of the YearThe Signal and the Noise by Nate SilverBiggest Corporate Losers of the YearWalmartFedExSubaruMost Dangerous Pseudo-Science Titl
DEC 31 2013
Public School Renewal 2014 and Beyond
Jim HornThe public education renewal agenda embraces the values of democracy, fair play, inclusion, equal opportunity, and public school governance structure and operations of the people, by the people, and for the people. The new public school agenda welcomes the participation of philanthropists, business, and industry to do what they are most capable of doing, which is to provide resources and
DEC 30 2013
Paul Wellstone More Prescient on Education in 2014
Nine years ago, New Year's Eve 2005, the year I started blogging at SchoolsMatter, I was a graduate student in education and I posted Paul Wellstone's speech from Teacher's College Columbia University in 2000. At the time, before No Child Left Behind became law, Wellstone was a lone voice in Congress, a lone voice in the wilderness in a sea of corruption and ignorance about education policy. Wells
Walmart's Walton Foundation Doubling Efforts to Privatize K-12 Education
The Walton Foundation remains the leader in the support of school voucher programs, which have consistently demonstrated their failure to provide quality education. What they do provide is consistent with Walmart's plan to offer cheap and shoddy products to the poor. If you have any option of buy anywhere else in 2014, exercise your option.From the Washington Post, a clip:The Walton Family Found
To Common Core Enablers: The Friend of My Enemy Is My Enemy
Common Corers talk of the need for internationally-benchmarked standards and curriculum. By this they pretend to mean relinquishing the wafer-thin, NCLB-inspired drive-by curriculums that demand that students ingest an endless stream of subject matter infobits that are later excreted or regurgitated on command, whereupon the remains are probed and dissected for signs of meaning among the digitize
TFA/KIPP Teacher Talks of Shame, Isolation, Burnout
From Cloaking Inequity:Graduating from college, I was energized and ready to take my place on the front line of education reform by becoming part of the Teach For America Corps. Many entering corps members are captured by the convincing sales pitch of TFA recruiters on campus. While I did meet with one of these recruiters who reinforced my decision to join, I had also spent time in my undergradua
DEC 29 2013
Haslam, Bush, WGU, and McGraw-Hill
In 2002 Stephen Metcalf documented the financially incestuous relationship between the Bush family and McGraw-Hill that resulted from a long-established familial system of mutual back-scratching and "cross-pollination and mutual admiration" between the the two fiefdoms. Today that system of good ole boy corruption, cronyism, and corporate welfare continues in State Houses and governors'
Use of Value-Added Is "Parochial and Ineffectual"
Tennessee is the test site for every crackpot, over-the-top corporate thought disorder that is translatable into an ed industry scheme that fronts as education policy. The state has TFA lawyer and the former Mr. Michelle Rhee, Kevin Huffman, running the schools from Nashville as Commissioner, and earlier this year Huffman and Jeb Bush's Chiefs for Change, a front organization for laundering corp
DEC 28 2013
Shelby County Accepts Hard Cash to Settle Civil Rights Lawsuit Brought Against Municipalities
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
What research really says about "explicit and structured" phonics
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