The Progressive Magazine is revving up the movement to save our public schools. On this site, we are pulling together education experts, activists, bloggers, and concerned citizens around the country. Read more »
June 16, 2014 - 9:55 pm CDT
How making teaching a career no one wants will finally make our kids college and career ready…
The year was 2014 and, alas, all was not right with the world. Income inequality in these United States had both soared and skyrocketed to levels not seen since the 1920′s, and the middle classwas living just a little less large. Some pointed to the collapse of labor unions as part of the problem, but that explanation seemed too obvious. Then another, far more intriguing explanation began to gain currency, particularly among those who possessed a great deal of currency. The blame for the country’s slide lay with teachers who, coincidentally, happened to belong to one of the country’s few remaining unions. Could there be a connection?
June 11, 2014 - 3:55 pm CDT
Anyone who remembers the spectacle of the Obama Administration’s maneuvering on the Grand Bargain for solving the nation’s financial problems should feel in familiar territory watching how the current controversy over the Common Core State Standards is playing out.
June 11, 2014 - 3:16 pm CDT
The *kids* weren’t the only big winners in California’s Vergara ruling…
Reader: barely had the verdict been announced in the landmark legal case Vergara vs. Lemons when the verdict was reached. The Vergara verdict represents a huge win for the kids. My own favorite verdict came swiftly from value investor Whitney Tilson who *stopped the presses* an unprecedented quintuple times in order to announce that Vergara decision was a *grand slam for students* and a *grim day for the Blob.* (Note: if you are regular reader of this blog, you are a de facto Blob member.) Which got me to wondering. Might there be some other beneficiaries of the Vergara victory, besides the kids that is? I’m recommending an extra lemon twist to today’s featured quaff—you’ll need it.
June 10, 2014 - 7:28 am CDT
It's a fun thought experiment. If you could erase one aspect of the Reformy test-driven high-stakes privatizing Core-loving status quo, which would it be. If you had the political power to eliminate one head of the public-education-crushing hydra, which decapitation would lead your list?
June 10, 2014 - 7:25 am CDT
The Common Core Standards are the culmination of the wave of accountability-based school reform that has swept the country since the A Nation At Risk report in 1983. Like the other test-and-punish reforms, the Common Core Standards fail to address the deep and seemingly intractable problems in American public schooling—inequality—shocking and immoral opportunity gaps in a society that supposedly believes in equality of opportunity—high dropout rates among the poorest and most vulnerable adolescents. This blog focuses on these deeper issues, and you can read recent posts here on opportunity gaps, and here on reducing the dropout rate.
June 9, 2014 - 2:03 pm CDT
Welcome to New Orleans—America’s urban education laboratory
Do you dream of being part of our nation’s greatest experiment in urban education? I know I do—which I why I was thrilled to be the recipient of a recent Google ad inviting me toTeach, Live and Love New Orleans. Welcome to NOLA, reader, where you’ll find plenty of *that je ne sais quoi, that elan, that bon temps* but absolutely pas d’excuses. In other words, it’s time for us to button up our lab coats and get busy. We’ve got a city to colonize an achievement gap to crush.
June 9, 2014 - 1:55 pm CDT
In his blog last week, the Rev. John H. Thomas, formerly General Minister and President of the United Church of Christ and now a professor and administrator at Chicago Theological Seminary, sharply challenges the choice of mainline Protestant churches to remain silent about the injustices of today’s raging attack on urban public education in America. “How is it,” he wonders, “that the growing privatization of one of this country’s most venerable public institutions, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of school children due to public school closures, inadequate public financing, alleged ‘turn around’ strategies, or the growth of charter networks, and now pervasive influence of private wealth through foundations controlled by money from places like Microsoft and Walmart has not awakened mainline churches to the plight and peril faced by public education?”
June 9, 2014 - 1:51 pm CDT
Jeff Bryant, who writes a weekly column for the Educational Opportunity Network, recently discussed the difference between conceptualizing education reform around inputs and outcomes. Today our federal testing law, No Child Left Behind, and all the federal competitive grant programs like Race to the Top that prescribe punitive turnarounds for schools that can’t produce high test scores are designed to measure outcomes. The very concept of achievement gaps is defined by test scores—outcomes.