Gates at Politico. Wrong. So Wrong.
Bill Gates popped up once again, spicing up a Politico interview with some of his standard educational wrongness.First, he proposes that Common Core is simply a technocratic solution for education. He then compares the standards to the standardized railroad gauge or standardized plugs for appliances. Let me take a deep breath and see if I can put in words (beyond the obvious "children are not
The Market Hates Losers
Fans of market forces for education simply don't understand how market forces actually work.What they like to say is that free market competition breeds excellence. It does not, and it never has.Free market competition breeds excellent marketing. McDonald's did not become successful by creating the most excellent food. Coke and Pepsi are not that outstandingly superior to RC or any store brand. Be
Data Dopiness Survives in Indiana
You may recall that back in the day, one of the items on our List of Terrible Things About Reformy Stuff was data mining. Featured in RttT and RttT Lite Waivers, the mandate to hoover up giant mounds of data was one of the great hated evils of reformsterdom, loathed by conservatives and liberals alike.The Leonie Haimson led a fight against InBloom in New York, and won.Since then, we've dialed back
9-28-14 Curmudgucation - One More Way To Kill Public Schools
CURMUDGUCATION: One More Way To Kill Public SchoolsAEI has a new video about education. It's slick and well-produced, featuring Muchael McShane walking through a school while telling us how things should be. He has a three-point program which features, among other things, school choice on steroids. It also has numbers and facts, and I'm not even going to address whether they're accurate or not, be