Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat checked to see what the billionaire philanthropists are doing in response to the coronavirus. The answer: Not much. When asked to underwrite charter schools, Teach for America, and wacky teacher-evaluation systems, they shell out hundreds of millions of dollars. When the nation’s schools are closed by a pandemic, and it’s clear that millions of children need food security
FOX New commentator s have been apologizing . Dr. Drew said on FOX News that the flu was far worse than the coronavirus. Dr. Anthony Fauci pointed out that the coronavirus has a mortality rate that is ten times worse than the flu. Dr. Drew apologized. Dr. Phil said that automobile crashes, swimming deaths, and smoking cause more deaths than COVID-19, yet we don’t close down the country for them.
Dana Milbank is a regular columnist for the Washington Post. He writes : “It would have been so easy to be truthful.” Thus spake President Trump this week on the very day he surpassed the milestone of uttering 18,000 falsehoods during his presidency, as tallied by the Post’s Fact Checker. But on this day, Trump was not admitting to losing his own struggle with the truth. He was accusing the World
Trump took to Twitter to encourage protestors in three states with Democratic governors, urging them to defy authority. Is he violating his oath of office? Trump tweets call to “LIBERATE” states where people are protesting virus restrictions. President Trump on Friday began openly fomenting right-wing protests of social distancing restrictions in states where groups of his conservative supporters
Please read the NPE Action endorsement of Joe Biden for President. We support public schools. Donald Trump and his Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, are hostile to the very idea of public schools. They have spent three years proposing deep cuts to public education and attempting to establish federally-funded vouchers for private and religious schools. In contrast, Joe Biden has proposed dramat
You won’t want to miss this great show! The celebrated acrobatic troupe Cirque du Soleil will be live-streaming a 60-minute performance TONIGHT o f a show called ZED. It was performed only in Tokyo. I have seen this group perform twice, and each time was thrilling. Their aesthetic is dazzling. Their physical grace is astonishing. If you tried to catch their show in Las Vegas, the ticket would cos
Trump would like everyone to forget what he said in January, February, and March to minimize the danger of the coronavirus. Other nations acted, we did not. He continually gave false assurances that the disease was no problem, that it was under control, that people should proceed with their lives as usual. Fintan O’Toole wrote in the New York Review of Books about the contradictory impulses of Tr
I have been thinking about writing a post about the uselessness of standardized tests as a measure of learning, which I may yet do, but then discovered Peter Greene had done his own take on this timeless question : What should we measure? How? Why? If you want a description on my dislike for standardized testing, read my latest book SLAYING GOLIATH. The tests are administered in the spring. The r
Jack Schneider, historian of education at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, says that the pandemic lays bare the fact that vast social inequality produces vast educational inequality. So-called reformers have argued that “fixing the schools” will “fix society.” Schneider shows that this is backwards. Readers, please send this article to the teacher-bashers and public-school-bashers at Ed
Our reader Laura Chapman explains what the phrase “the money follows the child” really means. It’s another way of saying that every child should have “a backpack full of cash” strapped on them, to be spent anywhere. Another way to see it is as a jackhammer to destroy our democratically-controlled system of public schools and turn children over to the tender mercies of the free market. The billion
The College Board relies on the revenues produced by its premier product, the SAT. What to do in a global pandemic? Normally the College Board is very obsessed with test security. But now it has decided students can take the SAT online at home. How will they know who is answering the questions?
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post peers into Trump’s erratic and self-aggrandizing behavior , as tests for coronavirus continue to be few in number and very difficult to obtain for ordinary citizens. Well blow me down and shiver me timbers. As our ship of state founders in tempest-tossed seas, our captain has just likened himself to one of the most reviled villains in maritime history. Presiden
Doctors in Arizona saved a Phoenix man With COVID 19, who was at death’s door, using a rare and risky procedure. This story, written by Alison Steinbach, appeared in The Arizona Republic. A Phoenix man is the first in Arizona to survive COVID-19 through a rare form of treatment called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) therapy. Enes Dedic, 53, was on the brink of death with a ventilator u
Stephen Dyer of Innovation Ohio points to the central hypocrisy of charters seeking Coronavirus Relief funds. Public schools are not eligible to request these funds. Thus, charter schools acknowledge that they are NOT public schools. They seek money reserved for small businesses. The squalid aspect of this maneuver is that any money they get is taken away from a business that was forced to close,
Veteran journalist Seth Sandronsky interviews Louisiana teacher and blogger a Mercedes Schneider about how the coronavirus affected state standardized testing. Schneider makes a bold prediction that states will cut their budgets for testing due to the economic stress caused by the virus. I hope she’s right. Up until now, state legislators have been willing to sacrifice the arts, recess, school nu
Lenore Skenazy wrote this article in the Washington Post . Her advice to helicopter parents: Give up! Relax! Let the children play and figure things out. It is a welcome antidote to the policy wonks who are predicting that American children need constant academic pressure, more testing, more worksheets, held back a grade, or face a life of failure. Skenazy is an advocate of “Free-Range Parenting.
David Deming, director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at the Kennedy School at Harvard, warns about the possibility of substituting online learning for real teachers . He writes in the New York Times: As the coronavirus pandemic forces schools and college campuses to go online, the delivery model of education — largely unchanged for centuries — has suddenly been disrupted. This ma
Can he do this? CNN reports that Trump threatens to invoke a “never-used” constitutional authority to adjourn Congress so he can appoint nominees without Congressional approval. President Donald Trump threatened Wednesday to apply a never-used provision of the US Constitution to allow himself to adjourn the US Congress and push through many of his nominees who typically require Senate confirmatio
I am sequestered in my son’s home on Long Island with Mary and our 100-pound mutt Mitzi. My son is sequestered in Los Angeles. Whenever the sun shines, we take long walks with Mitzi, and one of the happiest sights is the clumps of daffodils that have popped up. They are the symbol of spring, a token of the earth renewing itself as it does every year, a flower that celebrates the turning of the se
A few days ago, Trump opened his daily press briefing with a White House-made video intended to prove that he acted decisively to counter the coronavirus threat. The video was a response to a major story in the New York Times about his failure to take the virus seriously but to compare it to the common flu. Trump smiled smugly as the taxpayer-funded tribute to Trump played. As this story in the I
Bob Greenberg is a retired teacher who created a mission for himself: He interviews educators and makes short videos about their work. He also asks, in a separate video, which teachers made a difference in your life. He calls his archive the Brainwave Video Anthology. Here is a collection of more than 400 educators describing the teachers that mattered most to them. Scan the list. You will find p
This article was written by Jennifer Weiner , an education professor at the University of Connecticut. She explains why she refuses to follow the worksheets and detailed instructions for her twin sons. She recognizes that she is privileged as a person who has economic security, healthcare and is white. But there’s no reason to believe that children who lack her privileges need to be subjected to
Our blog poet reflects to wistfully on the fate of the $2 trillion appropriated by Congress as coronavirus relief for the American people: Where have all the trillion$ gone Long time pa$$ing Where have all the trillion$ gone Long time ago Where have all the trillion$ gone Gone to Wall Street every one When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?
Nancy Bailey warns us to keep watch for the vultures who want to use the pandemic to attack and control public schools and teachers. They see an opportunity, and they are ready to pounce. She writes: There’s a movement underfoot to end the way children learn. Look carefully at who says “we need to reimagine” or “this is the time to reassess” schools. These can be signals from those who’ve led the
An independent agency reported on a little known provision of the corona relief legislation, showing that Mitch McConnell took care of the Republican party’s big donors, again: More than 80 percent of the benefits of a tax change tucked into the coronavirus relief package Congress passed last month will go to those who earn more than $1 million annually, according to a report by a nonpartisan con
From Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac”: It was on this day in 1828 that Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language was published (books by this author). Webster put together the dictionary because he wanted Americans to have a national identity that wasn’t based on the language and ideas of England. And the problem wasn’t just that Americans were looking to England for the
Brazil halted a trial of the drug cocktail that Trump and Giuliani have endorsed: A small study in Brazil was halted early for safety reasons after coronavirus patients taking a higher dose of chloroquine developed irregular heart rates that increased their risk of a potentially fatal heart arrhythmia. Chloroquine is closely related to the more widely used drug hydroxychloroquine. President Trump
The governor of South Dakota is determined not to take any action to restrict individuals’ freedom of movement, like telling them to stay home, closing gatherings, or imposing any limits on freedom of action. Meanwhile the giant Smithfield pork processing plant has closed down because of the spread of the virus, and Sioux City has become a “hot spot.” But the Governor has a plan that she has work
The Washington Post Fact Checker has reviewed Trump’s relentless promotion of an anti-malaria drug and determined that his advocacy is misleading ungrounded in science. Trump received a four Pinocchio rating, the highest possible lie. But I think it could be, based on what I see, it could be a game changer.” — President Trump, at a White House news briefing, March 19, 2020 “ Hydroxychloroquine —
I was not familiar with the SGN Channel on YouTube and “Some Good News” with John Krasinski. He tells “good news” stories about people helping each other during these hard times. But in the segment noted here, he pulls off a magical experience. Billboard wrote about this amazing show where the host talks online to a little girl who was very disappointed when her trip to New York City to see “Hami
Our regular reader and diligent researcher Laura Chapman writes: It is not difficult to see who is busy publicizing and brokering ideas for federal action on pre-K-12 education and who is not. The active players are all in for school choice and they have a “perfect” opportunity to dismantle and starve brick and mortar public schools. Federal policies will jumpstart what happens in states, distric
Gary Rubinstein teaches high school mathematics in New York City. He is also a husband and a father of two young children. As he describes in his post , he and his wife must monitor their own children’s education at home while he is responsible for teaching his classes online. He is chagrined to see a new round of attacks on teachers in the midst of the pandemic. The teacher-bashers never take a
This is an essay I wrote for Education Week . I thank them for their close reading, fact-checking, and careful editing. The vast majority of the nation’s schoolchildren are out of school because of the deadly coronavirus. Parents are frantically trying to figure out how to keep their children engaged in learning, and many districts are providing online instruction or recommending resources for le
The crucial election in Wisconsin was not Biden vs. Sanders, but the decisive seat on the state Supreme Court. Governor Tony Evers wanted to postpone the election. The Republicans fought him and got his cancelation of the election overturned by the courts. Republicans blocked mail-in voting because they thought that fears of the virus would suppress turnout and help their candidate. Milwaukee usu
The IDEA act is on jeopardy. This is the act that protects students with disabilities and guarantees their right to a free and appropriate education. The pandemic crisis is a time when the Trump administration is taking radical steps to eliminate and cut back on programs they don’t like. It’s time to save IDEA. http://saveidea.org/ Signs this petition and make your voice heard on behalf of the ch
Happily, I’m on the mailing list of Frank Splitt, who sent me this Wall Street Journal article by George Gilder and his response to it. Gilder thinks that the nation should be grateful that we have a wise president like Trump to make decisions, and we should listen to Trump, not the scientists or medical professionals. Trump has said many times that he listens to his gut and that he knows more th
The Washington Post reports that education leaders are worried that students are falling behind due to school closures and extraordinary measures must be taken so they can “catch up.” Of course, there is good reason to worry about children who have experienced months without formal schooling. Many, however, do have access to emergency remote teaching. The children likeliest you have no educationa
Howard Blume of the Los Angeles Times reports that no student will get an F grade during the coronavirus closure, and schools will remain closed this summer. Blume writes: No student will receive a failing grade on their spring report card and Los Angeles campuses will be closed not only for the remainder of the academic year, but throughout the summer as well, the district announced Monday. The
Tom Ultican reports on a billionaire-funded paper that makes the strange claim that the most progressive cities are the most inequitable. The “study,” he points out, was not peer-reviewed nor was it written by scholars with academic credentials. Its central thesis is that progressive cities are less able to educate students of color than conservative cities. Since conservative cities spend less t
During her tenure as Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos has taught the public many lessons, most of which she did not intend. Her radical agenda educated the public about the privatization movement and its ambition to cripple public schools. She taught us that there really are people who put the profits of for-profit colleges above the students who were defrauded by them. PeterGreene says she ta
Vicki Cobb, a writer of science books for children, ponders the question that puzzles so many of us at this time: Why do so many people refuse to believe proven facts? Why do so many prefer to believe myths instead of facts? As Groucho Marx used to say, “Who are you gonna believe? Me or your own lying eyes?” She begins: Recent resistance by some people who refuse to believe the science that predi
I recently wrote an article that referred to charter schools that succeed by excluding students with disabilities, English learners, and others unlikely to get high scores. The editor questioned if this claim was accurate. I turned to several expert researchers to ask their view, and they all agreed with my assertion. David Berliner of Arizona State University—one of the nation’s pre-eminent rese
South Dakota is one of a very few states that has refused to take steps to protect their citizens from the pandemic. The governor said it’s a rural state and doesn’t need extraordinary measures. She was wrong. One of the nation’s largest meat processors is located in South Dakota and it is closing down because so many of its employees have the coronavirus. Smithfield employees account for half th
Trump and his merry band of budget cutters thought the federal government spent too much on public health. Year after year, they have slashed agencies whose mission was to protect the public from pandemics. The Los Angeles Times has the story: It’s an obscure U.S. government bureau with many missions, including this vital one: hunting down viral diseases like COVID-19 that spill over from animals
Johann Neem is the author of Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America , in which he describes the creation of public education between the American Revolution and the Civil War and recognizes public schools as an essential building block of a robust democracy. Neem’s family came to America from India when he was a. Dry young child. They settled in California and lived in a div
This is from Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac”: Today is the Christian holiday of Easter Sunday, the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead three days after his crucifixion. Easter is a moveable feast; in other words, it’s one of the few floating holidays in the calendar year, because it’s based on the cycles of the moon. Jesus was said to have risen from the dead on the first S
Chalkbeat reports that at least 40 NewYork City educators have died because of the coronavirus but the Department of Education refuses to release their names or to explain their reticence. Christina Veiga writes: Rosario Gonzalez, a 91-year-old paraprofessional who cared tenderly for children in an East Harlem special education program, rarely missed a day of work in more than three decades. Clau
This blog was started on April 12, 2012. Today is its 8th anniversary. During that time, you have been wonderful readers. Your support has kept me going. I’ve shared with you the news stories, posts by bloggers I respect, occasional humor, and even some personal advice. My goal for eight years has been to create a broad awareness of the failure of privatization and standardized testing to improve
Mayor Bill DeBlasio announced this morning that the city’s public schools would remain closed for the rest of the academic year, but lessons online would continue. Governor Andrew Cuomo promptly contradicted the mayor and asserted the decision was his, not the mayor’s. Parents were outraged by the childish food fight. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Natasha Capers, 347.610.2754, ncapers@nyccej.org
The Getty Museum in Los Angeles invited the public to select a favorite work of art and recreate it in their home, using familiar objects. The results are impressive.
Terri Michal is a member of the elected board of education in Birmingham, Alabama. She writes: I love public education employees. They are the most resourceful group of people you could ever meet. They have to be. These employees work in an atmosphere of politics and nepotism. They suffer through Legislators and administrators that create policies for them even though many of these policy makers
The standards and testing cabal wants to preserve the status quo ante and double down on accountability and NCLB-style measures after the pandemic. The choice crowd wants to push their agendas subsidizing anything and everything while slashing public schools. William Doyle and Pasi Sahlberg have a different vision. They want learning to be creative and joyful. They describe their ideas on Valerie
We have known for a long while that the worst scandals in the charter sector are intertwined with online learning and cyber charters. Consider the bankruptcy last year of ECOT (the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow) in Ohio, whose owner collected $1 billion from the state over nearly 20 years, but declared bankruptcy rather than pay the state $60 million for inflated enrollments. Then there is the
Dana Milbank, opinion writer for the Washington Post, says that the a Republican right wing finally have the helpless federal government they have longed for, and people are dying because of the government’s incompetence. Is this a polite way of saying that the Tea Party libertarians have blood on their hands? Note: there are only two areas where these people are eager and willing to lavish publi
Until recently, the World Bank has been a vocal supporter of for-profit privatized education such as that offered by Bridge International, which had been expanding rapidly in Africa. Thanks in large part to the work of Education International , a world confederation of teachers’ unions, the World Bank has changed its policy. In a sudden and far-reaching policy shift, World Bank President David Ma
Patrick O’Donnell is one of the best education journalists in the nation. He has covered charter and cyber charter scandals in Cleveland and in Ohio without fear or favor. Ohio, as you may have noticed, is awash in charter corruption. O’Donnell worked for the Cleveland Plain-Dealer until last weekend, when the newspaper pushed out its leading journalists and told them they could cover far-flung a
Wisconsin long ago scheduled its primaries for April 7. When the dimensions of the public health crisis became apparent, Governor Tony Evers tried to postpone the election and to encourage voting by mail. Evers’s order to postpone the election was overturned by the state court, and its ruling was sustained by the U.S. Supreme Court, voting along partisan lines. Hundreds of thousands of people wer
Professor Les Perelman, who taught writing at MIT , recently was honored by the New South Wales Teachers Federation for his successful effort to stop the “robo-grading” of tests in Australia. He demonstrated how easy it was to deceive the machines grading thousands of tests in only seconds. Perelman speaks here about the importance of public education, critical thinking, and the dangers posed by
G.F. Brandenburg wonders where the $2 trillion is going. A retired math teacher, he did the numbers. If every American gets $1,200, that’s $400 billion. That’s 20%. Who gets the other 80%? Politico reported on April 8 that
