Three years ago, the Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale declared that the state’s charter law was the worst in the nation. The scandals and frauds were frequent, and many public school districts teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. But Republican Governor Tom Corbett and the Republican Legislature had no interest in reforming the charter law. A major charter owner was the single bigge
Texas Public Radio describes Betsy Devos’s audacious plan to overwhelm San Antonio with charters created by two corporate chains: IDEA and KIPP. Some of the new charters will open in middle-class areas with good public schools. Apparently, DeVos just wants to torpedo public schools in a major Texas city. Camille Phillips of TPR reports: San Antonio’s largest charter school network is gearing up f
Last night I watched Anthony Scaramucci on CNN, who said to Erin Burnett that Trump is “not a racist,” but is “transactional,” meaning that he will say or do anything to get elected, no matter how vile. I don’t agree. Only racists openly appeal to other racists for their support. Only racists stir up hatred toward others based on their race, ethnicity, or skin color. Anyone who appeals to racists
The New Orleans myth continues to crumble, despite efforts by privatizers to call it a miracle. The latest state scores (LEAP) were released, and the scores in New Orleans stalled or dipped . While the state average held steady from 2018 to 2019, the proportion of students who reached “mastery” on state tests dropped from 32% to 30%. New Orleans scores continue to rank significantly below state a
The parents of a student in New Orleans were dismayed when they realized that their daughter would graduate from high school even though she could neither count nor read. She was surely entitled under federal law to extra help but she never got it. Now she is a statistic: a graduate. A victory for the all-charter system that failed her. Dennis Lewis remembers the moment clearly. It was the beginn
Clifford Wallace and Leigh Wallace, a father-daughter team of professional educators, lambaste state officials for their relentless attacks on the state’s public school teachers. They begin: Leadership matters. It has the potential to influence student outcomes. Clearly, there is a lack of leadership in Frankfort. Kentucky State Education Commissioner Wayne Lewis is taking pages from the flawed a
A judge in Arkansas rejected the effort by Walmart (owned by the richest family in the nation, the Waltons) reduce their property taxes. Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times writes: County Judge Barry Hyde, sitting as the county court in considering appeals of appraisals of property for tax purposes, held that Walmart had failed to meet the burden of proof to reduce the assessor’s valuation of the
Bob Shepherd, all-around educator, assessment expert, curriculum expert, teacher, author, wrote a brilliant parody of a Trump rally. Read it here. Incoherent stream of consciousness. Fourth grade vocabulary. Boasting. Narcissism. Replaying moments of triumph over his enemies. Crowd size. The biggest. Bullying. Bob Shepherd also commented here about how Trump would act if he were a student in high
A few years ago, billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs pledged $100 million to launch 10 super new innovative schools, which she dubbed XQ schools. Each would get $10 million to show their stuff. She surrounded herself with veterans of the failed Race to the Top, like Arne Duncan and Russlyn Ali. What could possibly go wrong? I reported last week that two of the 10 had failed. The XQ school in Somervil
Bloomberg BusinessWeek posts this story about the rapidly escalating wealth divide : The Walton Family is the richest in the world. Its wealth grows by $4 million every hour of every day. Twenty-five families in the world control $1.4 trillion. In the magazine’s annual ranking of the world’s richest families, the Waltons are #1. The numbers are mind-boggling: $70,000 per minute, $4 million per ho
Jan Resseger writes here about the difference between Superintendents who understand the importance of collaborating with and respecting the community they serve, and the Superintendents connected to Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change, who believe in state takeovers and imposing their views on their communities. She might have added the Brodie’s to the latter category, those who are “graduates” of the
Teresa Hanafin writes a delightful daily feature for the Boston Globe called “Fast Forward,” where she summarizes the highlights of the day. There is no public schedule for the golfing Trump (although he will strictly adhere to his private insult-tweeting routine), so you can amuse yourself with this breathtaking yet accurate report from the pool reporter assigned to write an account of Trump’s s
In this post, Mercedes Schneider tries to untangle the mess created by lack of oversight in all-charter New Orleans. She begins: In all-charter New Orleans, New Beginnings Schools Foundation (NBSF) operates three charter schools in New Orleans, one of which is John F. Kennedy High School. Kennedy is in the throes of an astounding fraud which resulted in almost 50 percent of its Class of 2019 bein
Alyson Klein of Education Week writes about a bitter split between the for-profit K12 Inc. and the Georgia Cyber Academy, which it has run for 12 years. Students locked out of their school’s computer systems. Educators unable to get access to some students’ records. Parents receiving emails asking that they return their children’s laptops. That’s the state of play as K12 Inc., a major for-profit
Earlier this year, Ohio’s infamous Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) went into bankruptcy rather than pay the state money owed for “ghost” students. ECOT has collected over $1 billion since its opening nearly 20 years ago. It had the lowest graduation rate of any high school in the nation. Its owner regularly gave campaign contributions to state officials, which shielded him from accountabi
The charter bloom is fading. Legislators in Ohio are trying to prop up enrollments as public turns against charters. Good news: Charter enrollment and financial deductions from school districts are down—Bad news: HB 166 is very charter friendly The table shows that charter enrollment has dropped from 122,129.74 in FY 2014 to 106,216.73 in FY 2019 and is at 104,754.75 this fiscal year (curre
Pasi Sahlberg and William Doyle have written a wonderful new book about the importance of play for children. Play is important for the healthy development of all children, regardless of their socioeconomic status. It’s title is Let the Children Play. Since the passage of no Child Left Behind and the implementation of Race to the Top, the federal government and the states have done their best to s
A thought provoking essay in the Washington Post by Race Imboden, a champion in fencing. Three days ago in Lima, Peru, I stood at the top of an awards podium with my teammates and received a gold medal for fencing in the 2019 Pan American Games. The room wasn’t crowded, there weren’t all that many cameras flashing, and there certainly weren’t millions of fans tuned in to watch us from back home —
Ben Jackson, anti-NRA activist, writes that Trump and the NRA are lying when they say that mental illness is the primary cause of mass shootings. Easy access to deadly weapons is the main cause of mass shootings. He writes in the Boston Globe that Trump is just echoing the NRA line, at the same time that he is restricting access to treatment for mental illness! Depending on your definition of “ma
In a time of daily trauma, when the world is topsy-turvy, here is a sweet story. In Southold, New York, Superintendent David Gamberg started a garden at school. The students learn to garden. They grow vegetables and flowers. He instructed students about how to make bouquets and arrange flowers artfully. The flowers are in full bloom. The students are bringing beautiful bouquets to residents of a
Alabama needs to fund its public schools properly but instead it is opening dubious charters and now a for-profit K12 Inc. online virtual school. K12 makes a lot of profit but gets awful results. Low graduation rates, low participation, low teacher salaries. Just what a state would not want if it actually wanted to improve education. Online virtual for-profit charter schools are the bottom feeder
Stuart Egan is an NBCT High School Teacher in North Carolina. In this post, he notes that school boards and vigilantes often challenge Toni Morrison’s novels. Her writings are frequently banned. But he contends that the critics should read them and perhaps they will learn from them as he did. Toni Morrison passed this past week. She was the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize for
I have been copy editing and proofreading my new book ( Slaying Goliath ), which will be published by Knopf on January 21, 2020. On July 12, I received the full manuscript from the Knopf’s copy editors. They had gone through it carefully and questioned words, sentences, facts, footnotes. I spent a week reviewing their comments online, using track changes and answering their queries. They did a gr
Reed Hastings is the billionaire founder of Netflix. He is also one of the biggest funders of charters schools. Peter Greene found the phrase that explains Hastings’ philosophy of education: “Stars in every position.” Hastings has had his hand in many charter pies, from backing outfits like Rocketship and KIPP, as well as serving on the board of California Charter Academy, a chain that collapsed
A judge in San Diego ordered two charter schools in the district to close i n response to the school district’s complaint that they were operating without local authorization and could not be supervised. About 40,000 students attend Learn4Life centers statewide. The Learn4Life charters are appealing the decision. Judge David Danielsen on Monday granted a motion by San Diego Unified School Distric
The San Diego Union-Tribune featured a front-page top-of-the-fold story by Kristin Taketa about the deepening troubles of the “Inspire” charter chain, which is growing across the state despite academic and financial woes. The headline: “Inspire Charter Schools Grow As Results Lag.” The Inspire network of 12 home charter schools is quickly spreading its reach across California as some are calling
Mercedes Schneider has followed the fortunes of Kira Orange-Jones, executive director of Teach for America in Louisiana, who was elected to the State Board with a large infusion of campaign funds from out-of-state Reformers In 2011 and 2015. Schneider continues her scrutiny here . Schneider notes that Orange-Jones has failed to file required financial disclosures and that her actual physical resi
The house of cards and propaganda that sustained the charter industry is beginning to crumble. Despite the Obama-Duncan promotion of charters through the disastrous Race to the Top program, no Democrat in the crowded presidential race will openly endorse charter schools. Not even Cory Booker will support charters, despite two decades of fighting for them. Now, it is no longer cool for a Democrats
The times they are a’changing. PeterGreene reports what happened when Governor Tom Wolf really hurt the feelings of the charter lobby. He said that charter schools are NOT public schools. “When Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf trotted out his budget last month, he made it a point to note that he was raising money for public schools– and that he had some definite ideas about which schools are public
You may recall that Laurene Powell Jobs decided to reinvent the American high school by creating a design competition for new models. In 2026, she offered prizes of $10 million each to the ten best plans. Over 700 proposals came in. She called it the XQ competition. She hired leading lights from the Obama administration, including Arne Duncan and Russlyn Ali, to advise her. She bought airtime on
When I introduced Senator Sanders (virtually) at the UTLA Leadership Conference, I said that his K-12 education plan was the best one that any candidate had put forward. Here is his Thurgood Marshall Plan. Senator Sanders focuses on federal action to: 1. Reduce segregation. 2. Dramatically improve federal funding for the schools that enroll the neediest students. 3. Endorsed the NAACP call to ban
Senator Bernie Sanders addressed the United Teachers of Los Angeles Leadership Conference recently. I was invited to introduce him by video. I recorded a two-minute introduction on my iPhone, while in my home office. I talked about his Thurgood Marshall plan for education. To date, it is the most far-reaching proposal that any candidate has offered. It should be a template for all Democratic cand
Tom Ultican has written a series of posts about the Destroy Public Education Movement. His latest post analyzes the nefarious role of TNTP in that movement. This movement exists solely to disrupt public education and the teaching profession. TNTP is one of several organizations that only exist because billionaires have financed them. Wendy Kopp founded TNTP (originally called The New Teachers Pro
Jamie Gass writes often about classic literature and what it says to us today. In this post, he writes about the relevance of Moby Dick , which he thinks may be the greatest American novel ever written. The nature of a classic is that it is always timely. It speaks to us at different times in our life, and we understand it in relation to who we are. As we change, our perceptions of the classic ch
Jack Hassard writes about the excitement of the first day of school. The children in their best clothes, looking forward to meeting their new teacher. But when school is over, their parents are nowhere to be found. They were arrested by ICE. The mass arrest of 680 workers in Mississippi occurred only days after the slaughter in El Paso, where the killer targeted what he thought were Mexicans. The
Can Trump and Melanie sink any lower than this photograph? The discussion on Twitter is priceless. One person wrote that the PeePee tape in the Steele report is dignified compare to this. Another photoshopped the baby in a cage. Someone else posted a photo on Twitter of Trump at the Parkland hospital after the massacre of 17 students, smiling and giving a thumbs-up. These people are not normal.
Peter Irons, professor emeritus of political science at the University of California, San Diego, demonstrates that racism and extreme intemperance are impeachable offenses. He attempted “to bring into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach the Congress of the United States .” He delivered “with a loud voice, intemperate, inflammatory, and scandalous harangues, and has uttered loud thre
The Sausalito-Marin City school district is an outrage. Sausalito is a charming groovy traditionally bohemian (now ultra-wealthy) bayfront town. Unincorporated Marin City, adjacent to Sausalito, is largely public housing, built for WWII shipyard workers — traditionally almost all-black but now including some Latino and Pacific Islanders.. Sausalito right now has a lovely privileged darling adorab
Jeremy Mohler of the organization “In the Public Interest” wrote this reflection on the meaning of democracy: The word “democracy” either fires you up or makes your eyes roll. It’s so overused that even Donald Trump is wielding it to ramp up support for his administration’s meddling in Venezuela. There’s even a new documentary out called What is Democracy? by filmmaker and activist Astra Taylor,
Jonathan Burdick, a history teacher in Pennsylvania, wrote on Twitter about a new group called “Free to Teach,” which encourages teachers to abandon their union and form an “independent” union. He can be found @JonathanBurdick on Twitter. In case you are not on Twitter and can’t find the thread, Jonathan writes that the group’s ads are sponsored by an Oklahoma-based organization called “Americans
Cory Booker has a long and well-documented record of disparaging public schools and enthusiastically supporting charters, even vouch ers. Now, he says he will dedicate himself to public schools and stop privatization, as if he had not
