Schools Matter:
Schools Matter All Week
Andre Agassi's New Passion: Corporate Welfare
Andre Agassi is touring the country checking out the 27 charter schools he has built with real estate tycoon, Bobby Turner. Agassi says its all worth the effort to make his millions from taxpayer dollars just to see children so "engaged in learning," as they are below in the East Nashville Rocketship charter school.Story from WSMV.
SEP 18
Textbooks and the Texas Taliban
a clip from Alternet:. . . .The latest battle in the ongoing war to turn public schools into propaganda machines for the right is being fought in the state of Texas. The state is often at the center of conservative-fomented education controversies, as right-wingers there keep trying to sneak creationism into the science classroom. Texas also continues to maintain its abysmally high teen pregnancy
Reprise: Re-Review of Paul Tough's Biggest Hit
When I looking this morning for the publication date of Paul Tough's neo-eugenics manifesto, How Children Succeed . . ., I saw that it is #1 at Amazon in the area of Educational Psychology. I felt the need to re-post this review, which appeared first at Substance News.Paul Tough, KIPP, and the Character Con: A Review of How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of CharacterWhen w
SEP 17
New Group Forms PAC to Fight Charter Takeover in Nashville
From the Tennessean:Parents in East Nashville are moving quickly to fight Director of Schools Jesse Register’s far-reaching plan to close low-performing schools, hand others to charter operators and let families in that area choose where their children will attend.Their request: Start over.Since Register unveiled his intentions last week, parents and other East Nashville residents have organized a
SEP 16
SEP 15
Will Dog the Bounty Hunter Save School Enrollment in a Dying City?
Every day brings a new reason to wonder why anyone would ever move to Memphis to teach. Salary schedules are a thing of the past, and pay raises are now bonuses that are based on test scores. Teachers are in constant fear of being surplussed or excessed or some other term to disguise the ugly truth of teacher firing. Pay for advanced degrees has been eliminated, and the oligarchs are pouring mil
SEP 14
Legal Rights of Linguistic Minorities
First submitted September 13, 2014 to Peoples College of Law "We therefore live in a period where the prevailing Zeitgeist is at least receptive to the notion that we do not have to be identical ethnically or linguistically." — Dr. Fernand de Varennes In an era where right-wing millionaires use their obscene wealth to finance arch-reactionary legal firms like Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher
Indy's John Harris Loflin and José Evans' Big Gig at International ED Conference
By Doug MartinBelow is, first, a press release from public school activist John Harris Loflin, director of education and youth issues at the Black and Latin@ Policy Institute. (Loflin's research has appeared here at Schools Matter in various forms, in my blogs, as well as a guest blog posted by Douglas Storm which was picked up by the Washington Post Answer Sheet.) Following Loflin's press relea
SEP 13
Common core doesn't fix the real problem of education– poverty.
PUBLISHED in the Christian Science Monitor Weekly Magazine, September 15, 2014Common core doesn't fix the real problem of education– poverty.Arguments for opposing the common core presented by Gov. Jindal ("Common Core: Bobby Jindal says Obama forcing a national curriculum," August 27) do not include the reasons many professional educators and researchers oppose it. A central argument