Big Education Ape: KEEP UP/ CATCH UP WITH DIANE RAVITCH'S BLOG A site to discuss better education for all - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2020/08/keep-up-catch-up-with-diane-ravitchs.html
New York, like California, has a large cohort of billionaires. To be exact, there are 118 billionaire families in New York. Despite the desperate financial condition of the state, Andrew Cuomo refuses to raise the taxes on the top one-tenth of 1%. Cuomo says that if he raised taxes on the billionaires, they would move to another state. Walker Bragman and David Sirota explain another reason why Cu
Larry Cuban reposts here the best summary of the dilemmas of reopening the schools during a pandemic. Trump and DeVos think that they can sit in D.C. and order the schools to open up for in-person instruction or lose funding. An order is not a plan. School boards and superintendents have to figure out how, when, and whether to reopen, and how to pay for it. They know that in-person instruction is
The National Education Policy Center released a report recently by Kristen Buras, one of my favorite scholar-writers. It focuses on dramatic racial disparities in New Orleans as the COVID-19 pandemic spread in the city. Her earlier book about the privatization of the public schools of New Orleans is powerful and, aside from my review, did not get the attention it deserved. It is titled Charter Sc
Johann Neem, historian of education at Western Washington University, wrote an article in USA Today about the threat that COVID-19 poses to the future of public education. Affluent parents, he notes, are making their own arrangements. Some have created “learning pods” and hired their own teachers. Others will send their children to private schools, which have the resources to respond nimbly to th
Marla Kilfoyle, who used to be executive director of the BadAss Teachers Association, is now the Grassroots Coordinator for the Network for Public Education. She stays in touch with grassroots organizations of parents and teachers and other supporters of public schools across the nation. Here is her report for the month of September. The NPE Grassroots Education Network is a network of 150 grassr
According to WorldoMeter , the U.S. accounts for about one-quarter of all the coronavirus cases in the world, at 4.7 million cases out of a world total of 17.8 million. The U.S. has recorded over 157,000 deaths. That is 475 deaths for every one million people. It is not the highest death rate in the world, but it is among the highest. It is even worse in Peru, Chile, Spain, the UK, Italy, Sweden,
Nancy Flanagan, who taught music in Michigan public schools for more than three decades, notes that journalists are referring to 2020 as “the worst year ever” for schools. She poses a question: What if teachers used this time to take control of their work and make this the best year ever? She writes: What if this were the year that we–students, teachers, parents—got to try everything we ever cons
Democrats for Education Reform is a group of Wall Street hedge fund executives that decided that schools would improve if they were privatized and adhered to business principles, like pay for performance, no unions, testing, accountability, and private management. DFER likes mayoral control and state takeovers, not elected school boards. Above all, it is mad for charter schools, which honor the p
DFER (Democrats for Education Reform) is an organization founded by Wall Street hedge fund managers to support charter schools. They believe in privatization; they actively undermine public schools that belong to the community. They believe in high-stakes testing, and they strongly support evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students, although professional associations like the Americ
Two of the nation’s leading education experts ponder the implications of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Espinoza decision. Bruce D. Baker of Rutgers University is a school finance expert. Preston C. Green III of the University of Connecticut specializes in education law. I confess that I was relieved t
