John Thompson is a historian and a retired teacher, who blogs often, here and on other blogs. He has keen insight into what’s happening in Oklahoma. He writes: Since 2015, the Tulsa Public Schools have cut $22 million from its budget, even dipping into its reserve fund to balance the books. Now it must cut another $20 million. Given the huge support for the TPS by local and national edu-philanthr
Audrey Watters may be our most articulate critic of tech obsession. I enjoy her regular posts, and her ability to connect birds with events. Open this link to see what I mean. She begins every post with a bird and finds a way to connect it to what she is thinking about. In this post, she begins with: This week’s Columbidae is the Gallicolumba luzonica — the Luzon Bleeding Heart Dove. The bird, wh
A gem from Garrison Keillor’s daily website “A Writer’s Almanac”: Today is the birthday of women’s rights reformer Lucretia (Coffin) Mott , born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, in 1793. She went to public school in Boston for two years, and then, when she was 13, she enrolled in a Quaker boarding school near Poughkeepsie, New York. After two years there, she was hired on as an assistant, and then a
Angie Sullivan teaches in a Title 1 elementary school in Carson County, Nevada. She teaches the children who were left behind. She sent this post to every legislator in Nevada: A small group of vocal teachers, parents, and activists have been publicly concerned about national public school privatization for two decades. Diane Ravitch is the leader of that pack. Her new book is coming out soon. He
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case called Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue that will determine whether the United States–or any state–may still respect a separation of church and state. In the wake of Donald Trump’s choice of two far-right Justices to the Supreme Court, this case might well be decided in a way that removes all prohibitions on the use of public funds for religious sc
The Network for Public Education has issued two reports documenting waste, fraud, and lack of oversight in the federal Charter Schools Program. The CSP was created by the Clinton administration in 1994 at a time when there were few charters; it was intended to give aid to start-ups. Over the years it has evolved into a slush fund for rapacious corporate charter chains and for the advocacy groups
The courts have become the arbiters of much that happens in American education. The U.S. Supreme Court now has a 5-4 conservative majority, due to Trump’s appointment of two Justices. This article summarizes the most important court cases of 2020. The country is three years deep into Donald Trump’s presidency, which has seen, among other changes, significant policy overhauls from the U.S. Departm
Jennifer Berkshire writes in The Nation about the quandary of Democratic candidates . For years, charter schools had bipartisan support. Clinton and Obama both supported charter schools, and joined with Republicans to expand the federal Charter Schools Program, which is now the single biggest source of funding for charter schools at $440 million annually (the second biggest source is the Walton F
Harold Meyerson adds a few reasons to believe that Michael Bloomberg is not the right candidate to beat Trump: January 2, 2020 Meyerson on TAP Bloomberg: The Manchurian Candidate. If there’s anyone out there who believes Michael Bloomberg would be a strong candidate to unseat Donald Trump, a very well-documented story in today’s Washington Post should tank any such delusions. Some of the particul
Last week, John Merrow posted his congratulations to readers for matching up with an algorithm that selected them to make a substantial contribution to a worthy organization. In this post, he cancels his congratulations and explains why he was in error–or just kidding around.
The following statement was released on New Year’s Day by Community Voices for Public Education, a coalition of parents and students in Houston. As their statement demonstrates, the state takeover is a fraud intended to strip the school district of its elected school board and to replace it with a hand-picked governing board selected by a non-educator who wants to privatize public education. It i
The public schools of Houston are going to be taken over by the incompetent State Education Department, which has never run a school district of any size and which has failed in its previous takeover efforts. The Houston Chronicle hailed the pending takeover, while noting that the Houston Independent School District has been acknowledged in the recent past as the best urban school district in the
Perhaps you have been confused by the proliferation of organizations that claim to be all about fixing schools and teachers. Perhaps you can’t figure out who is who in the galaxy of billionaire-funded world of fake reformers. Buy this reference book! I t names names! It is the glossary you have been waiting for! EDSPEAK AND DOUBLETALK: A Glossary to Decipher Hypocrisy and Save Public Schooling. I
Politico reports: TRUMP’S THURSDAY — The president has nothing on his public schedule. He could always go golfing. Or tweet all day. So much yo do. So little time.
G.F. Brandenburg posted a graph from a recent report of the OECD –the same organization that sponsors the PISA tests–which shows the number of hours that teachers work in every country tested. Teachers in the United States reported working an average of 46.2 hours a week, according to the Teaching and Learning International Survey , which was coordinated by the Organization for Economic Cooperati
Courtney Everts Mykytyn was a force of nature in Los Angeles, where she led the fight for racially integrated schools. She founded an organization called “Integrated Schools,” which posted on its Facebook page the news of her tragic death in an automobile accident on Monday. She was struck and killed in front of her home. Go to the website to read more about Integrated Schools and its mission. To
Today I did something I had never done before. I went to Coney Island, the fabled beach on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean in Brooklyn, to watch the Polar Bears Club take their annual New Year’s Day plunge. The Polar Bears have been doing this since 1903. The weather was pretty good. About 40 degrees, but a strong wind was occasionally gusting, making it seem colder. Thousands of people were ther
Over the past three years, Trump and Mitch McConnell have worked tirelessly to stuff the federal judiciary with extremists, libertarians, and lawyers who were unwilling to say that the Brown decision was correctly decided. Trump’s attack on the judiciary will outlast his time in office since federal judges have lifetime appointments. On the bright side, Chief Justice John Roberts has defended the
Thomas Ultican, retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics in California, has written the first review of my new book SLAYING GOLIATH: THE PASSIONATE RESISTANCE TO PRIVATIZATION AND THE FIGHT TO SAVE AMERICA’S SCHOOLS. He liked it! He calls it “spiritually uplifting” and describes it (accurately) as a “fight to save the commons.” Enjoy!
I seldom write New Year’s Resolutions because they tend to state all the things I haven’t been doing and want to do differently but probably won’t. So here is what I would like to do. Take better care of my health. Ride my indoor bike 20 minutes every day. Every day. Walk outdoors at least a mile a day (which I do by walking my 100-pound dog Mitzi). Read fiction. Spend less time blogging. Lose we
To everyone who reads this blog, I thank you and wish you a happy, healthy New Year! Thank you being part of this wonderful community of people who care passionately about children, education, and the common good. May you find many reasons for joy, many reasons to celebrate, many reasons to feel happiness in your work and your daily life! Look around you and find the goodness and the beauty in on
I just opened my email and discovered this brilliant post by Audrey Watters , whose critical voice on EdTech is indispensable. Watters lists the 100 biggest EdTech debacles of the past decade, and seeing them all in one place is astonishing. What strikes me is the combination of unadulterated arrogance (i.e., chutzpah), coupled with repeated failures. What is also impressive are the number of ent
I recently subscribed to Garrison Keillor’s daily “Writer’s Almanac.” He sends poems and interesting stories. Here is one from today’s missive: Today is New Year’s Eve , in which the old year is ushered out, and the new one welcomed in, with parties, socializing, and alcohol — often champagne. In the United States, we have a tradition of dropping, or raising, a large object exactly at midnight. T
Bob Shepherd writes, tongue in cheek: New Years Resolutions, 2020: A Report from Trumplandia Peace derives, of course, from within—from detachment of the kind I seek in my daily mindfulness meditation practice. But it’s not about me, never about me. For this reason I shall continue to engage in worldly affairs despite my instinctive, bookish reticence. Nothing’s really changed in my priorities fo
Thomas Ultican recommends Kochland as far and away the best book of 2019. He begins: This may be the finest book thus far in the twenty-first century. Kochland; The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America is the second book by former agribusiness reporter for the Associated Press, Christopher Leonard. His first book, The Meat Racket; The Secret Takeover of America’s Food
John Merrow writes here about the Governor’s Inaugural Address. It could be delivered in any state. It should be delivered in every state. It is about the importance of education to creating the future we all hope for. Read the entire address and email it to your governor. Perhaps he or she will crib a few lines. Let’s remind ourselves that public education serves an important public purpose . Ye
I have engaged in a heated exchange off line with people who are upset about taxing billionaires. They feel sure that taxing the 1% or the .00025% is a slippery slope, and soon enough we will all pay taxes so high that we will have to give up our homes. This is a good time, I think, to revisit Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union Address. FDR came from the landed gentry but he some
On a flight yesterday, I watched a documentary that was a biography of Roy Cohn. It is called “Where Is My Roy Cohn?,” a phrase uttered by Trump when he was disgusted by his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who apparently had some scruples about destroying the Justice Department on behalf of the man who appointed him. The biography is short. The story is compelling. It portrays a man who had abso
Mike Rose opined a few years back about “grit” and its limitations. This is one of those articles that is never dated. Rose, one of my favorite authors, writes: In a nutshell, I worry about the limited success of past attempts at character education and the danger in our pendulum-swing society that we will shift our attention from improving subject matter instruction. I also question the easy dis
The Education Law Center is one of the nation’s pre-eminent civil rights organizations committed to improving equality of educational opportunity. It points out in the following release that the charter schools have never signed the legally required contracts to participate in court-ordered universal pre-school programs in the state’s poorest districts, the “Abbott Districts.” About Us News D
California Sunday Magazine published interviews with teachers about their role in striking, walking out, negotiating, bargaining. It begins: On February 22, 2018, some 20,000 teachers in West Virginia — many of them wearing red in solidarity — walked out of their classrooms. That April saw strikes in Arizona, Colorado, and Oklahoma, as teachers vented their collective frustration in what became k
Matt Barnum and Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee wrote a provocative article a bout the way that a private school rating agency rates schools and steers patents toward white affluent schools and away from schools where children of color predominate. Larry Cuban reposted the article on his blog. GreatSchools ratings effectively penalize schools that serve largely low-income students and those serving largel
Kentucky passed a law authorizing charters but never provided funding for them. The new governor of Kentucky, Democrat Andy Beshears, was elected in part because of his strong support by teachers and his commitment to public schools. https://www.fox19.com/2019/12/28/latest-kentucky-news-sports-business-entertainment-am-est/ CHARTER SCHOOL-DENIED First charter school application in Kentucky reject
An anonymous reader left this comment about the SAT. Once upon a time, 25 years ago, I ‘offered’ SAT tutoring (at a rather high price of $50/hr.) to denizens of a tony private school. I could charge that much because I ‘got results’. But, it was rather easy to improve scores. First, there was the fact that almost all of my clients had scored ‘too low’ when they first took the test. The probabilit
This is a beautiful and powerful statement spoken in court by a young man on trial for “extremism” in a Russian court. It was translated by Masha Gessen and appears in The New Yorker online. it explains the power of Resistance to tyranny and the importance of individual responsibility and love. Gessen writes: A twenty-one-year-old university student named Yegor Zhukov stood accused of “extremism,
Robin Lithgow, former director of arts education in the Los Angeles school district, is writing a history of arts education for children. This the last of her installments about the boy choirs in England, and it is enthralling. “Let’s start with the tradition of the Boy Bishop, celebrated all over Europe, dating back to the the early years of Christianity. In English villages the Boy Bishop was t
Robin Lithgow, former director of arts education for the Los Angeles public schools, has been researching the history of children’s theater, in particular, the boys’ acting companies that were popular in England. This is Part 4 of her series. She begins: If you’ve been on the edge of your seat waiting for this final post on the boys’ companies active in the Tudor Age, you are probably alone, and
New Jersey is a corrupt state, whose Democratic leadership controls the state and patronage. The Democratic machine worked happily with Republican Governor Chris Christie. The Working Families Party is fighting to upend the Democratic establishment, whose titular head is boss George Norcross, who happens to be a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club and the Democratic National Committee. One WFP memb
Among rightwing think tanks, none has more intellectual firepower than the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, due to its leading thinker Chester E. Finn Jr., who has an Ed.D. from Harvard Graduate School of Education and worked in the administrations of Reagan and Nixon, as well as working for Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Lamar Alexander. The Institute, formerly a foundation, is based in Washington, D.C
John Merrow has good news for you! You have been selected as a winner by his crack marketing team to do a good deed!. Since he has selected the Network for Public Education as one of his honorees, I urge you to open his link.
The distinguished education researcher Gene Glass reads this blog and occasionally comments. Yesterday I quoted a short statement by Margaret Raymond, director of CREDO, the Walton-funded evaluator of charter schools, who stated publicly that markets don’t work well in schooling. We can speculate on why markets don’t work: parents don’t have enough information, information is distorted by marketi
Robin Lithgow, former director of arts education in Los Angeles, is researching the history of children’s theater. This is Part 3 of Lithgow’s series on boy actors . She begins: If Charles William Wallace, in The Evolution of the English Drama up to Shakespeare, is to be believed, it was at Blackfriars Theatre, in the early 1580s, that the Golden Age of Elizabethan Theatre was launched. He makes
