CURMUDGUCATION:
Curmudgucation Week
PA Newest State To Assault Teaching Profession
This week the PA House Education Committee pushed forward the latest assault on the teaching profession in Pennsylvania.Following the template pushed by StudentsFirst (a piece of naming genius right up there with "Peacekeeper Missile" and "jumbo Shrimp"), the bill proposes stripping teachers of most meaningful job protections and seeks to line PA up with North Carolina on the l
Data-Driven Discrimination
If you needed any more reason to be wary of the massive upsuck of student data from the education system, The Weekly Wonk offers more reason to fear our Data Overlords. Seeta Peña Gangadharan, and Samuel Woolley, a pair of data wonks, have written "Decoding Discrimination in the Digital Age," a brief overview of some of the concerns raised by the massive data mining going on all around
Louisiana Showcases Utter Failure of School "Reform"
The New Orleans Recovery School District has proven (again) that Reformsters cannot deliver on a single one of their promises.What I'm reporting today has been reported elsewhere-- in particular I recommend Michael Deshotels' report on his blog Louisiana Educator-- but there are some pieces of news that need to be repeated over and over and over again, and this is one of those. The grand experimen
JUN 05
The NEA Wants To Organize You
Over at EdWeek Seven Sawchuk writes about NEA's new push to reverse a steady decline in membership. It's about time. Membership is down a reported 230,000 teachers over the last three years. And that's before you even start counting the "reluctant" members. As far as I know, NEA doesn't keep track of this (and is probably happier not knowing), but not every NEA member actually wants to b
FEE: A Floridian Trip through the Reformster Swamp
In twenty-one short paragraphs, Patricia Levesque of FEE (Foundation for Excellence in Education) manages to set a new record for sheer Density of Wrong. This seems to be FEE's specialty; in the vast coal mine of Common Core Carbonized Crap, FEE demonstrates the Supermaniacal ability to squeeze the raw materials of wrong into a shining diamond of dopiness. Today's sweepstakes entry, "Student
An Open Letter To Michelle Labuski
It must have been some time yesterday that you and your colleagues discovered this post, taking you to task for your pro-Common Core post on engageNY. You responded on twitter with a simple "Not okay. And hurtful." A few of your colleagues responded in my comments section. You were all gentler, kinder, and more amenable to reason than I was in the original post. I understand how you migh
JUN 04
Why Your Evaluation Is Dumb
As you contemplate your end of the year evaluation paperwork, you are probably thinking (and not for the first time), "This doesn't make any sense." And you are correct. Current practices in teacher evaluation do not make sense-- if you assume that the purpose of these evals is to actually evaluate teachers accurately and effectively.A good evaluation system gives the employees clear and
JUN 03
The Least
I have a friend who posits a simple rule for relationships-- the person who has the least concern has the most power. The person who has less interest has more control.I'm not sure how useful the rule is for understanding romance, but it certainly does deconstruct plenty of other relationships. If dishes in the sink don't bother me, I can let them sit well past the science experimenty point at whi
JUN 02
When You're in a Hole...
Valerie Strauss covers the news from OK that one more state is Mighty Unhappy with Common Core. Unlike the pretend rejection of the Core happening in other states, the OK legislature has laid out a set of standards for how it shall be determined that the new standards do not resemble the Common Core Standards. They are rejecting both CCSS and the horse they rode in on.That piece of legislative leg
Civic Irresponsibility
For the true opponents of public education, these are heady times, because as the battle for public education heats up, these folks can see nothing but clear sailing. It's not a question of finding a path to victory-- it's just a matter of deciding which path of many they would like to follow and which allies they would like to invite to the after-party.On the one hand, they could continue to budd
Cato: Why Are Schools Too Expensive?
In 2005, David Salisbury published a paper for the Cato Institute entitled "Saving Money and Improving Education: How School Choice Can Help States Reduce Education Costs." As the title suggests, the paper supports school choice as the solution for a particular problem. I've considered the solution elsewhere, and so today I'm just looking at Cato's conception of the problem. Even though
JUN 01
School Choice Is UnAmerican
When I was busy listing reasons that conservatives should be opposed to school choice, I missed a biggy.School choice is taxation without representation.When some cranky old fart (crankier and older than I am, anyway) wants to complain about having to pay taxes for schools when his kids aren't even IN school any more, I have a standard answer. Schools are not a service for parents. The people who
School Choice Does Not Reduce the Cost of Education
Neal McClusky at the Cato Institute tweeted that I was wrong in my recent assertion that a school choice system costs more than a single public system. I asked him for an example of a place with a choice system that had lowered the cost of schooling, and he referred me to a couple of articles, the most thorough of which is a 2005 paper from Cato, "Saving Money and Improving Education: How Sch
MAY 31
Democrats: "We Suck Less Than That Other Guy"
Every election and primary cycle brings the same question back around-- do we support the lesser of two evils, or throw support to a non-viable third party candidate? This used to qualify as not-really-a-question. In 2012, lots of Democrats were super-unhappy with Obama's first term. Teachers were already being pretty open about feeling that Obama had implemented education policies that George Bus
Welcome to Common Core Hospital
Nurse Duncan: Welcome to Common Core Hospital. How may I assist you?Chris: My name's Chris Wobble. I was just in a car accident. My arms seems to be broken in about three places.Nurse Duncan: All righty, then. We just need to do some assessments here to see what shape you're in. As a major health care provider, your health data determines our success rate. Now first we're going to take your blood
Quarter Million Served
Some time this week, this blog passed the 250K mark. A quarter million.I've been up and running since August of last year, but it took me a couple of months to figure out what I was doing, and not till January of this year did my writer's gland really kick in. So I've done a huge amount of business in a short amount of time.There are several takeaways from this, I think. Because I don't think the