Schools Matter:
Schools Matter All Week
For my academic friends who are engaged in a new revisionism to write out effects of a hundred years of social efficiency domination in education policy, you may want to have a look at this. The OECD, the outfit that brings us PISA every so often, has taken to sub-contracting its nastier statistical tasks to other "research" firms. The latest example is the Efficiency Index, contracted
KIPP: Waiting for the Marshmallow While Getting the Fist
Educators have jumped on the bandwagon, hoping to teach the skills of delaying gratification to inner-city kids. Dave Levin, co-founder of KIPP (a network of charter schools) employs teaching these cognitive tricks to all his students, who also each wear T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Don’t eat the marshmallow!” SourceWhen you hear white middle class corporate reformers talking about the nee
SEP 04
Mother Jones Story on Gates Core
A clip from a big story in Mother Jones. How to Spend $200 million to buy what you want:
U.S. Teachers Need to Stand with Teachers in Canada
Haven't seen much info on the ongoing teacher strike in British Columbia on the evening news or even education blogs but it's happening.Vancouver teachersTeachers chose to go on strike and only teachers can end the job action, Premier Christy Clark said Wednesday in her first recent public comments about the strike.Clark was pressed by reporters on how long her government would allow the strike to
Ravitch Warms to Tuckerism: Can Randi Be Far Ahead?
I posted the other day on the new (old) Tuckerism that Joe Nocera was promoting (again) in the New York Times. Obviously, Tucker's THL (Testing Hysteria Lite) has resonated with the neolibs as a way to stave off the revolution against testing, while preserving its worst features and maintaining the attack on collective bargaining and due process. Here is a key Tucker conclusion tucked into his r
69 Hoops and No Appeal: Teacher Observation--Memphis Style
Point one that has to be remembered: half of Tennessee teacher evaluations are based on invalid, unreliable, and unfair test scores. The other half is based on observations. Teachers who worked for months on a new observation process last year were eventually dismissed when they disagreed with the two most outrageous aspects of CorpEd's recipe for disaster: 1) an observation checklist with 69 ite
SEP 03
Kevin Carey, Logically Adrift
Kevin Carey and the billionaire patrons of CorpEd who pay him to record his thought disorders in the New York Times are moving on from K-12 to more fertile education grounds to make money and to impose their idiocy. Watch out, higher ed. With more and more young adults graduating from college with fewer good jobs available to them and the next generation of workers, the new normal for college gra
SEP 02
Education Post: CorpEd's New Propaganda Sheet
Brought to you by Broad, Bloomberg, the Waltons, and an unnamed oligarch, the world's biggest edu-losers have hit upon a solution to prop up their self-serving and dysfunctional house of cards.From WaPo: By Lyndsey Layton September 1 Spend any time on Twitter or in the blogosphere and the national debate about public education quickly resembles a schoolyard brawl, complete with taunts, name-c
Weingarten Now Blames Membership for Supporting Her Tyrannical Promotion of Common Core
In another cowardly move to avoid more public ridicule, Randi now blames her own manufactured delegate manipulation at the Los Angeles convention for her undying support of the Gates Core.
Testing Hysteria Lite, by Marc Tucker
If you were to believe the spin in the New York Times the other day, you would think that Marc Tucker, who has long been Hillary Clinton's main man on education issues, had decided that high stakes testing was a thing of the past: "Tucker would not abolish tests, but he would have fewer of them. And they would have a different purpose." I downloaded Joe Nocera's new Tucker bible, Fixing
SEP 01
Durham Schools Cutting Ties with Teach for America
A day to celebrate! From the Herald-Sun:Aug. 30, 2014 @ 05:51 PM Gregory Childress DURHAM —The Durham school district will honor its current contract with Teach For America, but the national teacher training program’s future with Durham Public Schools is up in the air. The school board voted 6-1 last week to honor its commitment to TFA teachers, including five hired to work for DPS this school
AUG 31
Lee County Board Member, Mary Fischer, Wants to Change Her Vote at 8:30 AM Tuesday Morning
Clip from News-Press.com:Opt-out may be a thing of the past.Lee County School Board member Mary Fischer said Friday afternoon that she changed her mind about the benefits of opting out, calling for the board to rescind the motion at a special school board meeting.Fischer, who served as the tiebreaker at Wednesday's 3-2 vote, called for the meeting to discuss repealing the sweeping decision. The me
KIPP Must Get "Municipal Solid Waste Development Permit" Before Opening New School
In 2013 KIPP San Antonio bought a former sewing factory that was located on a solid waste disposal site as the venue for its next San Antonio corporate reform school. KIPP paid the company that owned the toxic site over $3 million in money that was funneled through a holding company in Delaware. Below are two pages from the agreement. Noteworthy is the bolded language on the second page, which r
Citizen Jack's compendium of teacher reviews of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy Empire
"They don't tolerate what we tolerate," she said several times. What is it HSA doesn't tolerate? According to my co-worker: disruptive children and parents who don't play an active role in their child's education. — Brian Jones"Jack," a frequent commenter on Professor Diane Ravitch's site, sent me the following compendium of reviews from a website that allows employees to rate
AUG 30
I Wish Richard Kahlenberg Could Be Right, But . . .
In the August 30 NYTimes, Richard Kahlenberg and Halley Potter offer us a pipe dream of a high performing charter school world, one with diverse student populations and unionized faculty, where pedagogical innovation and shared governance are realities of everyday life. Sadly, Kahlenberg and Potter offer a thinnest sprinkle of evidence that either integrated or unionized charter schools are anyt
Obama Awards Contract to Student Loan Predators Who Swindled 60,000 Veteran Families
Sallie Mae has a long, dirty history (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) of preying on those dependent upon student loans for a college education. Recently, the dirty bastards spun off a company, which according to Forbes, is really the old, rotten version of Sallie Mae that we have come to hate:The new company which is being spun out – Navient – is equivalent to the old Sallie Mae. It