With A Brooklyn Accent:
With A Brooklyn Accent Go BATs All Week
When It Comes to Education Policy- It's All About the Benjamins
One question we have to ask ourselves is how many of the policies we are fighting, from Common Core, to test based teacher evaluation, to school closings and charter school preferences, would have gotten any traction were it not from the support they have gotten from a small group of people whose wealth has reached unprecedented proportions because of changes in tax laws, deregulation of the finan
Why Charters Can't Always Be Trusted to Serve Inner City Communities
Henry Louis Taylor · Buffalo, NY · This is about Betrayal The struggle to regenerate the East Side is a protracted fight, which requires tireless dedication. In the late 1980s, a group of Buffalo residents and concerned citizens saved the St. Mary of Sorrows Catholic Church from being turned down and transformed it into a community center, early learning school, and neighborhood anchor institution
MAR 13
Destroying Public Education: A Fourth Inner City Catastrophe?
One of the great ironies in contemporary American History is that top leaders of the Democratic Party are supporting the elimination of public education in Urban America - even though the public schools are the one institution in inner city neighborhoods that survived de-industrialization, the crack epidemic, and the war on drugs.Instead of treating schools in those communities, which certainly ha
MAR 11
Letter from a Los Angeles English Teacher to his Students:
A letter to my students of Los Angeles Unified: You have been failed. You have been failed not by the school or your teachers (or their boogeyman union), but by people far removed from the world you inhabit. These people in plush houses and all the creature comforts of life have tried to label the school you are now attending a failure, but the people who know only “of” you--who have never come d
A First Year Bronx Teacher Who Loves Her Kids Says "Enough"
There comes a point when you've been shoved around by your job so much that you stop caring. It's scary when that day is a Tuesday in March and you're a teacher. I've been bullied. I've been ignored. My kids IEPs are a catastrophe (I don't do them, we have a "team" for that). I've been told I can't do my EdTPA for my certification with my students because I can't record them when my sch
The Perils of "Grit"
Many proponents of Data Driven education reforms, including Arne Duncan,and NY Education Commissioner John King have spoken of the need to toughen up children to prepare them for the Global Marketplace- especially children growing up in poverty-and have claimed their policies were designed to impart characteristics like "Grit" and ability to perform under pressure.There is a certain crue
MAR 10
On the Misuse of Statistics in Testing by the NY State Department of Education: Anonymous Posting by a Friendly Statistician
The Common Core and Departments of Education: Lies, Darn Lies, Statistics and Education StatisticsNumbers have taken center stage in the discussion of education policy in the United States. Test score metrics have become a particularly critical set of numbers. They are seen as objective measuring devices, comparable across years, that provide a reliable evaluation of how students, teachers, school
MAR 09
Some Thoughts on Randi Weingarten and BATS
I have no problem with people on our page critiquing Randi Weintarten's leadership of the AFT. I have a HUGE problem with anyone asking to remove her from BATS. We only remove people from the organization for violating our posting policies- or for being persistently divisive on our pages- not for their actions outside of BATS. To do so would set a terrible precedent and turn us into intelligence o
MAR 08
America's Top Colleges and Teach for America
i wonder what future historians will say about the nation's top colleges- especially the Ivies, Duke and Stanford,and the top public univerisites- enthusiastically welcoming a program that systematically undermines the teaching profession and provides replacement labor for cities trying to weaken, if not destroy teachers unions and fire veteran union teachers. That organization is Teach for Ameri