Catch up with CURMUDGUCATION
PA: Charters Spend Less on Teaching
1by Peter Greene / 48min
This week the Pennsylvania School Boards Association released a report looking at what charter schools are doing with all that taxpayer money. Short answer-- spending a whole lot of it on administration, and not quite so much on actual instruction of students. But when have I ever settled for a short answer. Let's stroll through this report and check out the many highlights. Piercing the Charter C
YESTERDAY
Do Rock Star Teachers Really Need A Union???
2by Peter Greene / 1d
Raymond J. Ankrum, Sr., is a teacher-blogger who put in some years in the Baltimore school system and who now is working a charter gig. And in a recent post, he asks the question that lots of union critics think, but don't always have the nerve to articulate. The question often comes from people not working in public education-- why do you need a union or tenure or a lock-step pay grid? Isn't all
AUG 18
No, CAP-- CCSS Is Not the Path to Better Reading
2by Peter Greene / 2d
At this point, there is nobody-- absolutely nobody-- who can match the Center for American Progress in senseless devotion to the Common Core State [sic] Standards. CAP, the left-tilted thinky tank founded by Hillary Clinton's campaign chief John Podesta, has remained absolutely unflinching in their support of the standards, no matter how little sense they are making. For instance, yesterday we get
Post #2000
3by Peter Greene / 2d
This is the 2,000th post on this blog, which coincidentally goes up just two days after the three year birthday of this blog. I'm not a big fan of blogging about blogging, but it's good now and then to reflect on what you're doing. 2,000 posts are a big pile of posts, even if some of them are brief and/or not so special. Sometime today I'll also pass the 3,400,000 hits mark. It's humbling to imagi
AEI: Comparing Public and Charter Schools
2by Peter Greene / 2d
The folks at the American Enterprise Institute have released a study comparing charter schools to public schools. " Difference on Balance: National Comparisons of Charter and Traditional Public Schools " announces in its title that AEI continues to support the modern charter school industry (charter schools are not public schools in any meaningful way except their willingness to accept p
AUG 17
The Ledger: Lab Rat America
33by Peter Greene / 3d
Oh my God. Oh my effing God. If you want to see where Competency Based Education, data mining, the cradle to career pipeline, the gig economy, and the transformation into a master and servant class society all intersect-- boy, have I got a video for you. Spoiler alert: this is also one way that public education dies. I'm going to walk you through the video, embed it for your own viewing, and tell
AUG 16
Zephyr Teachout Is A Badass
66by Peter Greene / 4d
Zephyr Teachout is a badass. You may remember her from the last New York gubernatorial primary, when she humiliated Andrew Cuomo and stomped on his Presidential dreams by making him fight for his life in a primary race that was supposed to be a walk. The Vermont-born law professor is energetic, positive, and a strong voice for public education-- among other things. She's an old-school Democrat, by
AUG 15
Resolve To See
27by Peter Greene / 5d
For the next couple of weeks, as the beginning of my school year approaches. I'm going to write to renew my resolve to keep focus in my practice. This is one of that series of posts. I'm not sure that anybody has it harder in school than the invisible kids. Bullied students are a subset of the invisible students. Bullied students are seen-but-not-really. They are seen for the one characteristic f
AUG 14
Resolve To Listen
34by Peter Greene / 5d
For the next couple of weeks, as the beginning of my school year approaches. I'm going to write to renew my resolve to keep focus in my practice. This is one of that series of posts. It is easy to stop listening. Oh, it's easy to act like you're listening, to look like you're listening. People take management classes on how to fake listening (not that it's described in those terms), to pretend to
Born To Teach
71by Peter Greene / 6d
The romantic notion has always been there, and plenty of teachers feed into it-- some people are just born teachers. But the belief in born teachers has two seriously destructive side effects, one of which is becoming obvious and the other, perhaps less so. Training If teachers are born and not made, then teacher certification programs are a waste of time. A smart person with an ivy league degree
ICYMI for August 14
7by Peter Greene / 6d
Yeah, I don't have a clever way to tie all this together. These are just some worthwhile reads. Student Test Scores: How the Sausage Is Made and Why You Should Care How can I not feature a Brookings article when they finally manage to post something that's not complete baloney? This is a little technical, but
