Shocker: NYC Education Board Rejects Mayor’s Plan to Test 4-Year-Olds for Gifted ProgramNew York City has a form of education governance called mayoral control, initiated by billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2002, in which the mayor appoints most of the school board members and selects the chancellor of the system. Bloomberg claimed at the time that he knew how to solve all the problems of education, and he appointed an attorney with no education experience (Joel Klein) as his
Iowa: Act NOW to Save Your Public Schools!Governor Kim Reynolds has proposed legislation to take money away from Ohio public schools and divert it to privately managed schools, vouchers for religious schools, charter schools, and home schooling. She is following in the footsteps of Betsy DeVos, who spent four years trying to eradicate public schools. If you live in Iowa, contact your legislator and Governor Reynolds! Speak up for your pu
John Merrow: The Choices We Should Make for “School Choice” WeekJohn Merrow, former PBS education correspondent, writes about the choices that we should make when the COVID is someday behind us. He offhandedly reminds us that “School Choice Week” was originally funded by right-wingers and charter school funders. ( SIDEBAR: In case you are curious, the ‘School Choice Week’ website does not list its funders , but, as Valerie Strauss reported in the Washington P
QAnon Cult Panicked by Biden’s InaugurationI don’t pretend to understand the QAnon cult, but it seems to believe that the federal government is controlled by satanic pedophiles and that Trump was the one who would root them out. They apparently held massive online events to watch the dramatic overturning of Joe Biden on Inauguration Day and the triumphant return of Trump. According to this article in Huffington Post , many in the cult exp
Mercedes Schneider: The Hoax of Online “Learning” in LouisianaMercedes Schneider reports here on the absurd class sizes assigned to teachers in Louisiana in virtual classes. The teachers are not “teachers,” they are in charge of case loads. They are using a canned curriculum called “Edgenuity,” and she says that it can easily be gamed by students to get higher marks. Education? Not really. She writes: Unlimited enrollment is particulary obvious in the virtu
Farewell to the SAT! We Hope.The SAT is in trouble. Its business model is threatened by the more than 1,000 colleges and universities that no longer require it for admission. Many more higher education institutions dropped the SAT due to the pandemic. The SAT is big business. It collects more than $1 billion each year in revenue. Its CEO, David Coleman, was architect of the Common Core standards, with a background at McKinse
What Happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Democratic Opponent?I posted this article last fall. It explains why QAnon Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene ran unopposed for election in Georgia. Her allies literally drove her opponent out of the race and out of the state with death threats. His life was destroyed. This is not the way democracy works. This is the way fascism works. The post starts like this: Stephanie McCrummen wrote this story in the Washington Post a
BREAKING NEWS! QAnon Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Appointed to House Education and Labor CommitteeThe House Republican conference just indulged in a sick joke: It assigned Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to the House Education and Labor Committee . Rep. Greene has identified with the bizarre QAnon conspiracy theorists who believe that Democrats and large sectors of the federal government are controlled by a Satanic ring of pedophiles. She has endorsed the vile claim that the massacres at Sandy Ho
Louisiana: Reading Scores in Early Grades Decline under Reformer John WhiteLouisiana has been firmly in the grip of “reformers” (i.e., believers in privatization, Teach for America, and high-stakes testing) for many years. The “reformers'” biggest coup was the complete demolition of public schools in New Orleans, in the years following the catastrophic Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Buoyed by funding from out-of-state billionaires, the proponents of disruption took control
Adam Laats: Betsy DeVos and the Politics of FearAdam Laats, a historian of education and history at Binghamton University, explains why Betsy DeVos was stunningly ignorant and indifferent to the nation’s public schools. She didn’t care about them and considered it to be a waste of time to learn about them. And he adds some lessons from America’s past that illustrate the dark fears that conservatives express about public schools as sinister pla
Matt Bai: Time for Teachers to Grow Up and Get Back into the ClassroomMatt Bai is an opinion writer for the Washington Post. He wrote recently that teachers should recognize that they are essential workers and get back into the classroom. He points out that remote learning is a disaster, that it is a horrible means of learning, and that students’ emotional health is damaged by not being in a physical classroom with a teacher. He blames “the teachers’ unions” for te
Steven Singer: How to Show Appreciation for Teachers: Vaccinate UsSteven Singer knows how often people speak of their appreciation for teachers, although that appreciation seldom translates into appropriate compensation. He has an idea: If you really appreciate teachers, vaccinate
