CURMUDGUCATION:
Five Top Duncan Posts
The Ethan Rediske Act: Another Update
Five Top Duncan Posts
When I started blogging, I had no idea I would post so much so fast so often. But now more company is coming over and it turns out that I am "Below Basic" in curating. So my goal is to do some collection posts for folks who think they'd like to see some of the old stuff, but did not bring their cyber-wading boots.Nobody fires me up quite like our Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Here
The Ethan Rediske Act: Another Update
Andrea Pratt Rediske is taking a hard-earned weekend break, so this seems like a good time to update folks on where things stand.Ethan Rediske is the eleven year old boy who was required by the state of Florida to bring a note from his doctor proving he was profoundly disabled and dying before the state would excuse him from The Test. After Ethan's death. his mother Andrea thought it would be a go
WaPo Wastes Space on That Woman
Why? Just.... why??When the media need somebody to comment on modern surgical techniques, editors do not bark out, "Find me a surgeon with a super-high mortality rate who left the profession in disgrace!" ESPN bosses do not holler, "Find me a failed t-ball coach to do commentary for pro football!" And yet, time and again, media outlets call on the queen of mediocre mouth-taping
Social Media & Conservative CCSS Support
Have corporations learned how to make social media work for them yet? Well...... Last week we noted that Jeb Bush's FEE (Foundation for Excellence in Education) and the Higher States Standards Partnership (a group funded by the US Chamber of Commerce and a few others well explained here by Erin Osborne) were launching a shiny new Common Core promotional blitz. (And by "shiny" I mean &quo
APR 03
Five Ways the USDOE Is Full of Baloney
The US Dept of Education blog, Homeroom, recently published a piece by Sara Gast (Director of Strategic Communications at USDOE) entitled "Five Ways Race to the Top Supports Teachers and Students." I keep checking posts like this to see how the administration's level of connection to Planet Earth is doing these days. Let's just see.Ms. Gast is pretty excited. In the four years since RttT
Keeping up Appearances
The one thing we Americans like better than solving problems is to look like we're solving problems.Take, for example, our desire for air traffic safety. After 9/11, we had a national rational urge to beef up security, to do something so that we would never experience such a terrible assault on our nation again. But because every national security issue is also a political issue, we had to conside
APR 02
Mythbusting CCSS with the US Chamber
The US Chamber of Commerce is all in on the push for Common Core, and they throwing money at the push for the Core with unbridled enthusiasm. They have created an entire website (well, paid somebody to create, anyway) devoted to their devotion to CCSS. It has many nifty features, including links to some fine video production, today we're visiting the tab labeled "Myths vs. Facts" because
Five Myths About Tenure and FILO
There's plenty of discussion and argument to be had in the debate about doing away with tenure and FILO. But here are five points that don't need to be brought up any more, ever, because they are bunk. 1. Teachers want to protect bad teachers.The prevailing myth is that when a bad teacher hits a school, other teachers circle the wagons and do their best to protect that lousy teacher from any conse
Bubble Answers for an Essay World
I have had the same conversation multiple times in the last week. I have had it with elementary teachers, secondary teachers, someone who works with young teachers, someone who works with college students. The crux of the conversation is something like this:I do not know what to do with these [persons]. They do not want to understand. They do not want to discuss or explore. They just want to know
APR 01
Open Ended and Close Minded
We build cages for students to protect ourselves.Too many teachers (and others) are way too afraid of open-ended exploration for any number of reasons. Perhaps most commonly, the problem is not knowing the territory.If I want to allow my students true open-ended exploration of a novel, ten I have to know the territory. It's a big sprawling place, like a great forest, and if I'm going to let my stu
MAR 31
Re: Building the Machine
I have just watched the Home School Legal Defense association's documentary, Building the Machine.I must tell you that I approached this with some reservations. In my mind, there is an important distinction between different sorts of Common Core Testy Regime opponents. On one hand, we have people who are fighting the high stakes test-driven corporate agenda because they want to rescue the heart an
More Marketing By Poll
Want to see how pollsters can keep finding widespread support for the Common Core? Today we've got a perfect example to look at. I am not a statistics or polling guy. I cannot, with any shred of authority, discuss n-curves and sampling error and any of those fancy statsy stuff. But I am a language guy, and I know when language is being used to game a system. And when it comes to polling, asking th
MAR 30
Results! Right!! Now!!!
There has been a great deal written about the content of the current testing regime, concentrating on what The Test covers, and how little depth of complexity can be measured. But there's another dimension of The Test that deserves the same sort of attention and criticism.Time.The obvious issue is the time spent on the test itself. The weakness of writing components is often noted and the clearest
A Message from Andrea Rediske
It's a tough contest these days to determine which state legislature is most hostile to public education, but Florida legislators (motto "Finding New Ways To Make Things Worse") has been giving it the old college and career ready try.Nobody knows that better than the family of Ethan Rediske. His mother Andrea has been working tirelessly to insure that extraordinarily challenged children
MAR 29
Camp Philos! Take Me Away!!
You may have seen the ad for this. Maybe you even received an invitation (but I bet you didn't). It's Camp Philos, "a philospoher's camp on education reform," the first ever, and it looks absolutely awesome!! I have got to go to this thing! It says right here that it's just like in 1858, when Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Russell Lowes retreated to the mountains "for respite in kind
Van Roekel/NEA CCSS Update
It's been almost six whole weeks since Dennis Van Roekel stepped up to make the announcement that CCSS implementation has been botched, and to suggest some startling ideas for correcting course. It' a month and two days since he took to the US News debate club to issue a rewritten version of his statement about the botch that walked back most of the exciting parts.DVR called for all sorts of chang