CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Easter Edition (4/21)

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Easter Edition (4/21)

ICYMI: Easter Edition (4/21)

One of my favorite holidays is today, but whether you celebrate or not, here's some reading from the past week to feed your brain.

Against Metrics: How measuring performance by numbers backfires.

Not directly tied to education (though the subject comes up), this piece takes a look at the problems of people who think numbers are magical.

If we don't work on pedagogy, nothing else matters.

One of those "I'm not sure I'm 100% on board with this, but it's some food for thought" pieces.

Private Equity Pillage

The retail apocalypse is not about Amazon outselling bricks-and-mortar stores; it's about private equity funds draining the lifeblood out of the economy. This is not about education-- except that these are the same guys who want to get rich from privatizing education.

Why, yes, spending more money on schools does yield better results.

Every year in Pennsylvania, right tilted thinky tanks opine about how more money for schools won't yield results. Here's why they're full of it (and it probably applies to your state, too).

We're having the wrong conversation about the future of schools. 

A look at the broad picture of reform, and how it has done more harm than good.

Inside Maine's disastrous rollout of proficiency-based learning.

Maine tried to go all in on PBL and it was a freaking mess. Kelly Field writes the story for Hechinger.

Still Teaching   

The day of the Columbine shooting was his first day in the building. Now he's one of the thirteen teachers still there. A story of what it's like to work at That School, and safe spaces.

Florida Republicans choose guns over teachers. 

Florida. Again.

What Preschool Isn't 

Nancy Bailey looks at one of the stupidest ideas to refuse to die-- on-line preschool.

Austerity Comes to Canada

The Have You Heard podcast takes a look at some alarming ed reform trends (make all students take some courses on line?!) up Canada way.  


CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Easter Edition (4/21)

When Local Control Turns Toxic

59by Peter Greene / 23h

I am a fan of local control for school districts, but I'm not going to pretend that under the wrong circumstances it won't produce some terrible results. EdBuild has just issued a report on a troubling phenomenon-- the secession of wealthy communities from larger school districts . This issue has been reported on before , but this is a report that collects instances of attempts across the nation.

APR 19

KY: DeVos, Bevin, Loving Vouchers, Hating Teachers

79by Peter Greene / 1d

Betsy DeVos took her Education Freedom Voucher Tour to Kentucky, and things went just about as well as you could expect. Secretary of Education DeVos has been crisscrossing the country in an attempt to sell her $5 billion voucher plan . Her latest stop was Kentucky, a state that has achieved a sort of choice limbo ; there's a charter law on the books, but the legislature has so far refused to fund

Creating More Defective Children

100+by Peter Greene / 1d

This has always been a dangerous side effect of educational certainty. If I'm absolutely certain that my program is awesome, my pedagogy is flawless, my materials are on point, and classroom is just generally perfect-- and yet some students are not learning-- well, there's only one possible explanation. The student must be defective. The defect effect appears to be cropping up in a new place. As r

APR 18

Why DeVos Doesn't Care About Charter Closings

97by Peter Greene / 2d

During the recent House hearings, Betsy DeVos was confronted with some of the results of the Network for Public Education study of federal dollars going to charters, a huge number of which have closed or never even opened. She was unmoved : Let me first comment on the study you’re referring to. I’m not sure you can even call it a study. We’re looking more closely at it of course, and anything that

APR 17

The Charter Effect On Teachers

by Peter Greene / 3d

Unions, we have been told, have a deleterious effect on teachers, forcing them to accept lousier deals than they could get in a free market where they each negotiated their own deals. In such a market, schools would compete for teachers, bidding up the salary offers. Teachers could negotiate from a place of strength. No teacher would ever want a union ever gain. I confess that there was a time whe

APR 16

Guns Headed For The Classroom

27by Peter Greene / 4d

Of all the bad ideas. I know there are folks who believe in their heart of hearts that arming teachers will make schools safer, or that putting armed police in the building will be helpful. But there are so many bad signs. I want to believe that school resource officers can be helpful. Earlier this month, a school shooting was likely averted just up the road because students at the school felt com

Melinda Gates Achieves Peak Epic Cluelessness

500+by Peter Greene / 4d

Sigh. Melinda Gates seems like a nice lady who means well, but her recent interview at the New York Times Magazine is a master class in how living in a very wealthy bubble can leave you out of touch with the rest of the world and an understanding of your place in it. It starts in the very first paragraph. “There are absolutely different points of view about philanthropy,” says Melinda Gates, who,

APR 15

FL: Charter Thievery And The Worst Legislature In The USA

100+by Peter Greene / 5d

Imagine. You live on the 300 block of your city, and your neighborhood is starting to look kind of run down, mostly because the city has redirected a ton of your tax dollars to the neighborhood on the 400 block. You try to fight city hall, but that's futile, so instead, you get the neighborhood together, and you collect money from amongst yourselves to upgrade sidewalks, clean the streets, refurbi

Arne Duncan Makes Me Want To Punch Myself In The Brain

100+by Peter Greene / 5d

Arne Duncan still has a gift. I'm not talking about his ability to continually get bookings as an education, though that certainly counts as a gift in the sense that he has done nothing to earn it. No, I'm talking about his preternatural ability to raise my blood pressure. He still hasn't gone away. This morning, as the Board of Directors naps, I am scanning through a batch of edu-reporting that c

APR 14

ICYMI: Finish Those Taxes Edition (4/14)

by Peter Greene / 7d

Personally, mine are already mailed in. My circumstances changed so much this year I have no idea whether I took a bigger hit or not. But regardless of your tax status, here are some pieces from the week for your edification. Take a read, and support these writers by passing on their stuff. Remember-- when you amplify a news media piece about education and it garners more hits, you help convince e

APR 13

Obstacles To Building Better Writers

by Peter Greene / 7d

Writing well is one of the great uber-skills, a quality that will open an infinite number of doors in a student's life. Unfortunately, we are living through a golden age of bad writing instruction, driven by high stakes testing and shrunken, meager ideas about the very purpose of education. In 39 years, I had some success in teaching students to be better writers. If you are a teacher intent on b

APR 12

DeVos Pushes Questionable Charter Research

100+by Peter Greene / 8d

The New York Post headline is pretty definitive: " Case Closed: Charter schools deliver more education 'bang' for the buck. " Writers Patrick Wolf and Corey DeAngelis are plugging their new paper, and Betsy DeVos is on Facebook plugging it some more . DeAngelis we've met befor e. He's a Fellow for the Cato Institute , policy adviser for the Heartland Institute, and a Distinguished Working-on-his-P