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ALEC Issues A Report Card, But Still Fails

41by Peter Greene / 1d

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is the corporate Match.com for wealthy mover-shakers and legislators looking for someone to do their homework together. Among their many favorite issues is education, and to that end, ALEC trots out a report card every year rating the states. It is not unlike a sort of businessperson's prospect overview, and it contains a mountain of thinly sliced b

Why Directing Community Theater Is Like Teaching

56by Peter Greene / 2d

Readers of this blog generally get a dose of whatever is on my mind, and what's on my mind at the moment is theater. I'm coming down to the wire on one more community theater production; The Music Man opens one week from tomorrow (by all means, feel free to stop by ). I've been doing this and school theater for thirty-some years, and yes, it's an awful lot like teaching. Once we get the obvious ou

SEP 18

PA: Zombie Board Says Charter Free To Do Whatever The Heck It Wants

56by Peter Greene / 3d

In education, as in most things, Philadelphia is its own little state-within-the-state. The public system has a long and messy history , including a state takeover. The district is often used as Exhibit A for pro-choice legislators ("But we must give the poor children of Philadelphia a way to escape their terrible school system even as we refuse to adequately fund that system!") and is consequentl

SEP 17

OH: Meaningless School Grades And Money

100+by Peter Greene / 4d

Over at Cleveland.com , Rich Exner has done yeoman's work taking Ohio's school ratings and connecting them with census information from the US Census Bureaus 2017 American Communities Survey. Ohio is another one of those states that believes it can reduce the entire issue of a school's quality to a single letter grade. This is a dumb idea, and there is no state that has ever implemented it in whi

Yes, Teachers Are Spending Money On Their Own Classrooms

33by Peter Greene / 4d

Like the cost of a romantic date at Valentine's Day or the price of the Twelve Days of Christmas, the amount of money that teachers spend on their own classroom has become a reliable seasonal story. This year the word is that o n average teachers spend, depending on your source, somewhere between $400 and $500. But that's not the whole story. The Economic Policy Institute has crunched the numbers

SEP 16

Chiefs For Change Would Like You To Shut Up

100+by Peter Greene / 5d

Chiefs For Change caused a brief flurry of attention by whinging a demand that people talk nicer about their pet projects . It's just one more sad episode for a group that was supposed to be Jeb Bush's Educational Justice League of America. It's been over three years since the last time I noticed they were headed downhill: That's how you glower! Pity the Chiefs for Change. They were destined to be

SEP 15

ICYMI: My Wife's Birthday Edition (9/15)

39by Peter Greene / 7d

Happy birthday to one of the best people ever to walk on the face of the earth! But you can have cake and read some worthwhile education pieces as well. So here you go-- AI in Education Hype John Warner takes a look at one more technological product in search of a problem to "solve." Effects of the Flipped Classroom An Annenberg working paper suggests that there are no big benefits to flipping, a

SEP 13

DeVos Saying The Quiet Parts Out Loud

500+by Peter Greene / 8d

Betsy DeVos will be kicking off her "Back To School" tour next week. And it will start by announcing loudly and clearly what her preferred goal for education is. No reading between the lines will be necessary. The announcement notes that she will head to Milwaukee, "home of the first-ever education freedom program that allowed parents, no matter their income, to select the school that was the best

Dammit, Chan-Zuckerberg! Not Elmo, Too! (And Not Philanthropy, Either.)

100+by Peter Greene / 9d

If you haven't been paying particularly close attention, you may have missed the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative slowly inserting its hyper-wealthy proboscis into a hundred different corners of modern life, using its not-quite-philanthropy LLC 

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