PA: Judge Cuts School Funding
by Peter Greene / 12min
Here in Pennsylvania, we've had a potentially game-changing ruling come down that could create all new problems for school districts and their funding. This story has many moving parts, so you'll have to stick with me for a bit here. The short version of the story is this. The Lower Merion School District raised taxes. Somebody sued them. The judge in the case ruled that the tax increase was unnec
YESTERDAY
Testing Still Incentivizing Cheating
20by Peter Greene / 1d
Yesterday out of Texas we have a new version of an old story-- a school that found a creative-ish new way to cheat on the Big Standardized Test. This is a predictable and, at this point, oft-noted phenomenon. If you take a bunch of numbers and tie them to high stakes, people will look for ways to manipulate those numbers. Which is kind of the point of making those numbers high stakes. But some peo
Leave Those Kids Alone
96by Peter Greene / 1d
Pre-K is the growth sector of the privatized school industry. There's no existing institutional structure to sweep aside, and there's near-universal agreement that a good Pre-K foundation is important for all future success, coupled with research indicating that many of our children are already behind on the first day of kindergarten. Unfortunately, "good Pre-K foundation" is a phrase th
SEP 08
Can Evidence Improve America's Schools?
40by Peter Greene / 2d
That's the question asked by Mike Petrilli (Fordham Institute) asks over at the Fordham blog. The piece harkens back to Chester Finn's 1986 book titled, unironically, What Works. And the piece also ties into Petrilli's ongoing series about how to drive change in education. After noting that nothing from Finn's work has ever really gotten traction, Petrilli bemoans our benighted edu-state. Educatio
SEP 07
Virtually Teaching
25by Peter Greene / 3d
"Teacher Shortage Crisis Forces Districts To Innovate" I get emails, often from folks who are thrusting their PR releases blindly into the blogosphere. Somebody or something told them I'm an education blogger, and so they add me to a mailing list, and mostly I don't pay attention. But the subject line that appears above caught my attention, and so I read my email from Shelly Smith, PR Ma
Mother Jones: Black Teachers Matter
55by Peter Greene / 3d
I usually save my reading recommendations for Sunday, but if you read one article this week, it must be " Black Teachers Matter " by Kristina Rizga at Mother Jones. Rizga addresses the all-important question of why we're missing so many black teachers in this country (and she does it far more thoughtfully than the folks at Brookings ) by focusing on one school in the Philadelphia distric
SEP 06
Chester Finn, the Death of Democracy, and Opposites Day
19by Peter Greene / 4d
So today, conservatives hate tradition, and democracy is increased by taking away the vote. Behind the paywall at Wall Street Journal, Chester Finn (honcho emeritus of the Thomas Fordham Institute), Bruno V. Manno (Walton Foundation), and Brandon Wright ( Fordham ) are happy to announce the death of one more piece of democracy in this country. The trio reports that charter schools are spearheading
Brown Goes To Boston
36by Peter Greene / 4d
Campbell Brown has decided to add her two cents to the sprawling debate about raising the charter cap in Massachusetts (and really, why not, because lord knows everyone else has added their two cents, or two million dollars). Brown's argument is the same basic one repeated by other charter school proponents: 1) We should do it for the poor children. 2) Unions suck 3) Boston charters have had amazi
SEP 05
FL: Still Stupidly Punishing Children
100+by Peter Greene / 5d
Sigh. So you will probably recall that some of Florida's educational leaders have lost their damned minds , having decided that the full force of districts and state powers must be brought to bear in order to beat a bunch of nine-year-old children into compliance. In some school districts, administrators had concluded that third grade children who opted out of the Big Standardized Test could not b
SEP 04
Why Charters Love "Public School"
100+by Peter Greene / 6d
The question is up for pseudo-debate once again because of the National Labor Relations Board decided in two separate cases that charter schools are private corporations . The decision is new, but the fact that charters are private businesses is not. While charter fans are trying to act shocked and surprised ., I'm just going to go ahead and link, for the six-zillionth time, to that special occasi
Brookings Fails at Teacher Diversity Research
14by Peter Greene / 6d
This is just exceptional. In mid-August, Brookings released a report looking at the huge inequity in the teacher force , specifically the question of how to get more teachers of color in the classroom. Their conclusion, loosely paraphrased, is that the problem just can't be solved . Which seems, I don't know-- counterintuitive? improbable? wrong? There are some red flags in this report. Right up f
SEP 03
ICYMI: Fall kick-off edition (9/4)
12by Peter Greene / 6d
As always, if you see something that really speaks to you, share it. Michigan Spends $1 Billion on Charter Schools But Fails To Hold Any Accountable Well, that headline for this Detroit Free press pretty well covers it. Schools Open, Schools Close-- Charter Schools and the Ties That Bind From Harvard, a thoughtful consideration of the real costs of school closures Rubric for the Rubric Concerning
Some Gates Charter Personalized Love
16by Peter Greene / 6d
Don Shalvey has been pushing charter schools for many, many years. He was serving a superintendent of the San Carlos School District when he launched the first charter school in California . That was 1992. In 1998 he joined with Reed " Elected Schools Boards Suck " Hastings (Netflix) to for Californians for Public School Excellence, an astroturf group created to push charter school legis
Is Poverty No Longer a Thing?
35by Peter Greene / 7d
Mike Petrilli was over at Campbell Brown's place this week where A) he was oddly billed as a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and a book author, but not as the head honcho of the Fordham Institute and B) suggesting