The day after the election that handed control of the Los Angeles school board to charter promoters, the head of a now-closed Los Angeles charter school was charged with embezzling $200,000. Kendra Okonkwo, 51, was charged with
Here is a new charter school trick. The Florida legislature, which has an unseemly number of members who are directly connected to the charter industry, passed legislation that will benefit charters and harm public schools. Parents of public school students have been writing Governor Rick Scott and
Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology at the University of California (Berkeley) who studies children. She wrote this article comparing Trump’s behavior to a four-year-old child. She thinks the typical child has far better
When Laura Chapman read Some DAMPoet’s poem, “Economists are Like Weathermen, ” she responded with an informative comment. I know Eric (Rick) well. We served together for years on the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on Education. I wrote a bit about Rick in “Reign of Error,” and pointed out that his work has long applied econometrics to education. He was featured as an expert voice in “Wait
Rita Moore, a pro-public education advocate, won a hotly contested seat on the Portland, Oregon, school board. Her son attended Portland public schools, and she has long been involved in support of public education. She holds a Ph.D. in political science. She ran against a candidate who was principal of a KIPP school in Houston and worked also for TFA. See here . In her response to a survey of ca
David Safier writes frequently about politics and education in Arizona. In this post, he shows how Governor Doug Ducey’s education plan is moving step by step to create a three-tier system of schools, thus abandoning the Supreme Court’s mandate to provide equal educational opportunity. He begins: Are you outraged at Governor Ducey’s “education budget”? You should be. After Prop. 123 passed, he pr
The New York State Education Department sent out the following notice to all principals in the state: The Department has learned that Edmodo, Inc., a learning platform used by many schools and districts across the State, has suffered a security incident that potentially affects the accounts of Edmodo users. Edmodo’s platform was hacked and the user names, email addresses, and hashed passwords of
The blog poet makes the assertion that economists are like weathermen, but in this case, I disagree respectfully. Economists of education express a certainty that no weatherman would. Weathermen (meteorologists) give you different scenarios, warn you that the track of the storm might shift, recognize that there are many uncertainties. Economists of education (not all of them! Think Helen Ladd of
Red Queen in L.A. reflects on the debacle in Los Angeles. Turnout for a consequential school board election was abysmal. She notes that Los Angelenos have participated in rallies in great numbers in recent months, but when it came time to vote, they were missing in action. In the school board election on Tuesday, only 9.3% of eligible voters bothered to vote. From a school district that is approx
Steven Singer finds it annoying when corporate reformers insist that “charter schools are public schools.” He insists in this post that the two are almost the same. Neither is a public school, and neither should be subsidized by public funding. He writes: The stark orange monolith that was Donald Trump is starting to crumble. And with it so are the dreams of corporate education reformers everywhe
The battle over Question 2 in Massachusetts was overshadowed by the national election, but it was an important bellwether in the fight against privatization. The amount of money spent was phenomenal. The usual billionaire suspects put up most of the money to promote the measure and the teachers’ union, spending the dues collected from individual teachers who work daily in the classrooms of the st
Valerie Strauss has created a useful guide to the major budget cuts in the U.S. Department of Education programs, in the budget proposed by the Trump administration. A total of $10.6 billion will be cut from existing programs, with a share of those “savings” invested in school choice. The rationale is given for each cut: Here are some details that aren’t in the story. First is a list in the budge
Fabiola Santiago has a stunning story in the Miami Herald about the deep corruption in the state’s charter industry. Several key legislators are financially connected to charter schools. He writes: Florida’s broad ethics laws are a joke. If
