Ed Deform Groups Congratulate Biden on Decision to TestReview the list of organizations that signed a letter thanking the Biden administration for insisting on tests this spring. Some outspoken enemies of public education are there. Some rightwing groups are there. Supporters of school choice are there. What do you make of this?
Leonie Haimson: Biden Should Focus on Vaccinating Teachers Instead of Forcing States to Give Pointless TestsLeonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, board member of the Network for Public Education, and expert on student privacy, pulls together some interesting threads in this post. If Biden wants schools to reopen soon, she says, he should make sure that every teacher gets vaccinated so schools can safely reopen. Instead, he has broken his promise to get rid of the federal testing man
Nancy Bailey: Is EdTrust Behind the Renewal of Standardized Testing?Nancy Bailey explains why we should worry about who is making the decisions at the U.S. Department of Education before any of its top officials have been confirmed. She suspects it is Education Trust, which favors charter schools and high-stakes testing. EdTrust is Gates-funded, and its leader is John King, who served briefly as Secretary of Education in the last year of the Obama administration.
Victoria E.M. Cain: A Brief and Sobering History of Technology in the ClassroomDuring the pandemic, most schools turned to remote learning as a matter of necessity. Some in the education biz think that the pandemic has created a new market for their products. Actually, most parents and students are eager for real schools with real teachers to open again. Contrary to popular myth, teachers too want schools to reopen, as soon as they are safe for staff and students. Historian
Jan Resseger: Eve Ewing Ignored the “Economic Catastrophe” That Charter Schools Create for Public SchoolsJan Resseger is one of our wisest commentators of issues of education, equity, and social justice. She devoted her professional life to these issues. In her latest blog post, she is critical of Eve Ewing for ignoring the “economic catastrophe” that charter schools impose on public schools. She has seen it up close and personal in Cleveland and other cities in Ohio, where public schools suffer as
Bob Shepherd on Standardized TestsBob Shepherd is a polymath who worked in the education industry for decades and was recently a teacher in Florida. He spent many years developing standardized tests. He has written often about their poor quality, their lack of reliability and validity. In this post, he explains why he has reached these conclusions: The dirty secret of the standardized testing industry is the breathtakingly low qu
My Review of Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door”I reviewed A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door in The New Republic. It is an important book that pulls together all the threads of the privatization movement and shows that their agenda is not to improve education or to advance equity but to destroy public education. The review is here. Tonight, I will join the authors at a town hall Zoom meeting in Seattle at 9 p.m. EST, 6 p.m. PST. Please join us! I
Let Ian Rosenblum Know What You Think about His Decision to Impose Standardized TestingMany of you have asked how to express your indignation and outage about the decision by Acting Assistant Secretary Ian Rosenblum to require all states to administer standardized testing this spring at a time of great stress on students, families, teachers, schools, and communities. I have repeatedly explained why the federally mandated tests are worthless. The teachers are not allowed to see the
Is the edTPA a Valid Measure of Teacher Quality?Three researchers published an article in the Kappan that is highly critical of the edTPA, a test used to assess whether teacher candidates are prepared to teach. Over the years, there have been many complaints about the edTPA, because it replaces the human judgment of teacher educators with a standardized instrument. It’s proponents claim that the instrument is more reliable and valid than human
Nora De La Cour: Abolish High-Stakes TestingTeacher Nora De La Cour writes on her blog that it is time to restore the joy of teaching and learning by abolishing high-stakes testing. She writes that candidate Joe Biden forcefully promised to get rid of standardized testing and restore teacher autonomy, but Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona seems unwilling to commit to granting states a waiver from the mandated federal testing. He did no
David Berliner: Why Religious Schools Should Never Receive a Dollar of Public FundingSince the 2020 election, when Republicans won many seats in state legislatures, there has been an explosion of proposed voucher laws, to allow people to get public money to pay for religious schools. David Berliner, one of
