The Network for Public Education invites you to contact your local PBS station to protest the one-sided three-hour special “School Inc.” The letter in the link tells you how to contact your PBS affiliate. We urge two courses of action, for the sake
Michael Hynes is superintendent of the Patchogue-Medford public schools on Long Island in NewNew York. He writes: “Is hypernormalisation even a word? I didn’t believe so until recently. According to Wikipedia, (insert sarcasm), “The term … is taken from Alexei Yurchak’s 2006 book Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, about the paradoxes of life in the Soviet Un
Public education activists have pleaded with Governor Rick Scott to veto HB 7069, because it diverts public money to charters and religious schools. All to no avail. Scott will sign 7069 today in Orlando at Morning Star Catholic School. http://www.sunshinestatenews.com/story/rick-scott-sign-controversial-hb-7069-law
Let the pointless torture continue! New York’s Board of Regents has agreed to reduce the time devoted to state tests from three days for each subject (math and ELA) to two days for each subject. Pray tell, why does it take two days of
Wayne Gersen explains here why billionaires are willing to spend millions of dollars to privatize public schools and to keep their taxes low. Education is the most expensive item in every state’s budget. Teachers are the most expensive
When Sam Brownback became governor of Kansas, he was all fired up with a simple yet radical idea: Cut taxes and businesses will expand and the economy will grow. State revenues dropped dramatically. School funding suffered deep cuts. Social services of all kinds lost money. And now the legislature is repudiating Brownback’s tax cuts. They voted to increase taxes. Brownback, having learned nothing
Peter Greene read Betsy DeVos’s speech to the big privatization conference in D.C. and he figured out the DeVos doctrine. Remember the song from “Oklahoma,” about “the farmers and the ranchers can be friends?” Well, DeVos assured her allies in the privatization movement that voucher-lovers and charter-lovers are on the same team. They both want the money that now goes to public schools! Greene wr
Politico posted an excellent recap of the primaries in Virginia. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/14/virginia-gov-primary-northam-perriello-democratic-party-215258 Democrats are uniting behind their candidate, while Republicans are bitterly divided. Tom Perrielo urged his supporters to unite behind the victor, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam. Ed Gillespie was supposed to coast to victory but
The turbulence and instability in the charter industry continue. Four charter schools in Detroit closed their doors. You know, Betsy DeVos’s home state. Under the leadership of its aggressive new superintendent, Nikolai Vitti, Detroit Public Schools began a campaign to win back students from failing charter schools. “With a slew of charter schools closing and thousands of Detroit families expecti
The National Education Policy Center specializes in reviewing think tank reports, few of which are peer-reviewed. Many think tanks are advocacy organizations that use pseudo-scholarship to promote policy goals. NEPC’s latest review gives a thumbs down to a report that advises on ways to eliminate democratic control of public schools. None of its so-called “reforms” have worked in practice, and th
Valerie Strauss contacted PBS to ask why the public TV Network ran a one-sided three-hour documentary that lambastes public schools and celebrates vouchers, charters, and for-profit schools. PBS gave its response. It likes to air diverse views (clearly without fact-checking). It pays no attention to where the money comes from, even it is dark money funneled through Donors Trust, which bundles con
Arthur Camins writes in Huffington Post about the importance, the necessity of caring about the education of everyone’s children, not just our own. This is the basic premise of public education. We educate all children because it is our
