Schools Matter:
Schools Matter All Week
KIPPCare Includes Child Doping Benefit
Since corporate school leader, Mike Feinberg, left his KIPP superintendent's duties in Houston for the full-time pursuit of national brand saturation, KIPP teachers report chaos at a number of the KIPP schools around Houston, with mass retentions, administrative meltdowns, faltering test scores, and en masse teacher resignations. What will it take to restore order? How about some meds?The KIPP m
The Charter School Takeover Cycle in Memphis Schools
The Gates business plan for Memphis schools requires public school closures and corporate charter start-ups to replace them. A dozen schools are on the hit list for the coming year, and the charter operators are lined up waiting for the buildings to become empty. Parents, however, are not nearly as uninformed as county officials who are doing the Gates dirty work believe. See video below:How the
No Excuses?: Giving Power a Pass
No Excuses?: Giving Power a Pass*"After several decades of rigorous effort, it is fair to say that the majority of our attention in political science has been given to interstate war and civil war," explains Christian Davenport, adding:I would say that it would be interesting to count the number of articles over the last five years on terrorism and compare it to the number of articles on
YESTERDAY
Part 4: Classroom Video Camera Project . . . Where The Cameras Are in Over 120 TN Schools
Part 4: Classroom Video Camera Project . . . Where The Cameras Are in Over 120 TN SchoolsDenise Wilburn and Jim HornAfter two weeks of waiting, the State of Tennessee today released the list of school districts and schools in the state that are participants in the video data gathering project sponsored by the Gates Foundation in the amount of $3.2 million. ThereNow.com, a Utah company with ties t
The Truth about Numbers
From DailyKos:Do not follow this troublemaker, @RubenBolling.And whatever you do, do not join the INNER HIVE, which is surely some kind of secret cabal of secular, humanist, moral-relativist, evolution-hugging mathe-manics who get comic strips emailed to them BEFORE publication, which is clearly unnatural.
Mark Weber on the Destructive NJ Ed Commish, Chris Cerf (Broad Academy '04)
from NJ Spotlight: The state education chief’s so-called reforms may have stirred up something more powerful than frustration and resignation Chris Cerf says he’s not leaving his post as New Jersey’s Commissioner of Education because of Bridgegate, and I believe him. When Cerf departs at the end of March, he’ll be continuing a pattern of sliding back and forth between the private and public se
FEB 13
Part 3: Classroom Video Camera Project Spending Millions to Extend Teacher and Student Surveillance
Part 3: Classroom Video Camera Project Spending Millions to Extend Teacher and Student SurveillanceJim Horn and Denise WilburnAs educators and parents,we must be diligent in protecting the democratic institutions that insure protections for children and human rights for all people. Currently, unelected billionaire power brokersare eroding the individual right to privacy, the public’s right to ste
Another Former KIPP Teacher Steps Forward
Posted at Edushyster:A former KIPP teacher in New Orleans finds her voiceI was never much of a champion [reference to Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov's exhausting checklist that serves as a bible for TFA and KIPP], to be honest. KIPP defines a successful teacher as someone who keeps children quiet, teaches children how to answer each question on a test composed of arbitrary questions, and then p
FEB 12
New York State's Meaningless Concessions Throw Out the Only Tests Worth Keeping
In New York, the teacher evaluation formula is based on 20 percent state mandated tests, 60 percent observation, and 20 percent local assessments. While canceling nary a state test or any of the planned implementation of the Corporate Core, the New York Board of Regents and their new panel of CorpEd advocates have have come up with a plan to shove local systems into dumping their own local assess
Embezzlement and Criminal Investigation at KIPP New Orleans
Story below from Times Picayune:Danielle Dreilinger, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune By Danielle Dreilinger, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune Email the author | Follow on Twitter on February 10, 2014 at 5:00 PMAn employee of New Orleans' second-largest charter schoolnetwork embezzled $69,840 in the 2012-13 academic year, according to an auditreleased Monday. The money has been recovered, the employee w
Standards as Political Footballs
In a piece published in a 2001 issue of English Journal, "Standards, Standards Everywhere, and Not a Spot to Think," I opened with a story about my daughter, then in middle school:[M]y eleven-year-old daughter, Jessica, made an observation: “All they care about is the PACT test; they don’t care if we learn anything.” She was speaking of the most recent statewide testing (in South Carolin
FEB 10
Want to Raise Achievement? End Socioeconomic Segregation.
Richard Kahlenberg in the NYTimes:Parental involvement in education is both critical for students and unequally distributed, with upper-middle class parents much more likely to be engaged. There are, however, important steps that policy makers can take to ensure that students in all schools have champions for higher standards and strong teaching.Lower-income parents can't get involved as easily. A
That Sucking Sound in Philadelphia
From Ken Derstine:DN Editorial: CONTROL ISSUES: Is the state using charter rules to help kill Philly's school district? | Philadelphia Daily NewsLast week, the School District of Philadelphia confirmed what it feared back in November: It is facing an extra $25 million in unbudgeted costs associated with increased enrollment in charter schools. Charters have enrolled 1,600 more students than allowe
Taking Down Dixie's Last Political Stand in North Carolina
North Carolina is so everything that the current covey of Koch Brothers stooges in charge of the state are not: temperate, reasonable, accommodating, caring, committed to fairness. And just as Wake County reclaimed its schools from the ideologues sent in to destroy socioeconomic integration of schools, the voters of North Carolina will do the same. From Alternet, a nice piece. A clip here:It was
FEB 09
The Party's Over
One of the great political feats of the late 20th Century was the manufacture by billionaires of a right-wing cabal of crackpots-under-contract so unabashedly fascist that anyone sane and still voting would be left with a single alternative, which, of course, is the now-familiar brand of corporate, anti-democratic dramaturgy known as the Democratic Party.It's time for something else, and in the sh
FEB 08
Oregon School District Hires 50 Security Guards at $35k a Day
Reports from Portland, Oregon:Portland is gearing up for a teacher strike. Susan Neilson, The Oregonian.Sam Wheeler of the Mail Tribune]Medford Oregon:Long said the school district has hired about 50 security guards through Action Security Inc. of Medford and San Diego-based Off Duty Officers Inc. of San Diego — costing the district about $35,000 per day."We have 24-hour security, because we
"All students are not equal; some are more profitable than others" --Parthenon Group
If you want to find some savvy teachers who are not afraid to speak out against their Broadie superintendent and corporate foundations that have bought Tennessee schools and the nation's schools at bargain basement prices, go to Knoxville. Here is special ed teacher, Robert Taylor, taking his five minutes at the Feb. 5 board meeting, and making it count. This is what free speech looks like--use
No child left unconnected?
No child left without basic resourcesPublished in the Washington Post, Feb. 7. 2014 Before we worry about no child left unconnected to the Internet [“Broadband in schools gets FCC push,” news, Feb. 3], how about no child left unfed, no child without adequate health care and no child without easy access to a good library? The rate of child poverty in the United States is 23 percent, the second-high
Alex Russo Concludes Opt Out Is Irrelevant Because There is No Testing Problem in America
The poodle of corporate education reformers, Alex Russo, has a puff piece in Atlantic aimed to disparage the Opt Out movement. Doing his best to present the growing opposition to psychometric insanity as a momentary flare-up in the steady march toward measuring badly what no longer matters while resegregating America, Alex takes a page from the Jay Mathews playbook of lazy reporting and unsupporte