Angie Sullivan: Restorative Justice Requires Funding to Help KidsAngie Sullivan teaches impoverished children in Las Vegas. She believes that restorative justice could help them, but only if it is funded. How do you kill a bill without voting against it? You take something important like restorative justice – which should be wraparound services and not give any funding. Wraparound services make a huge difference for students. This program is just buzzwords wit
Jan Resseger: Isn’t 25 Years of Failed Educational Policy in Ohio Enough?Jan Resseger always writes widely and deeply about education, especially in Ohio, where she lives. For 25 years, Ohio has spent billions of dollars on charters and vouchers while ignoring the needs of the states’s vast majority of schools and students. Legislators want more of the failed strategies. Ohio is akin to a carnival show where the card sharp distracts the crowd with tricks while ignorin
Texas: Charter Industry Goes for the Gold: PowerTexas has five million public school students. It has 356,000 charter school students. The latter matter far more to the Governor, the Legislature and the State Education Commissioner than the former. This report came to me from Austin, where officials are trying to remove any “barriers” to charter. The local school board has no say in whether a new charter should open in their district. Local fo
Samuel Abrams: Why Does the New York Times Repeatedly Exaggerate the Selectivity of NYC’s Top High schools?Samuel Abrams was a teacher at Beacon High Schools and is now a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. He wrote a few days ago in the Columbia Journalism Review about the insistence by the New York Times that admissions to schools like Beacon are even harder than they are. Anxiety among eighth-graders and their parents persists about the selectivity of the city’s screened high school
I’m Back, Almost!On April 8, I had open heart surgery to replace a heart that had a leaky valve and was regurgitating too much blood. I didn’t have any symptoms of heart failure, but the tests were clear. I needed a new heart valve. Given the nature and location of the ailment , there was no minimally invasive way to fix the problem. The doctor had to saw open my chest to get direct access to my heart. And so it
How Does Forbes Select Its “30 Under 30,” Who Are Considered Leaders in Education?This is a fascinating paper published in the peer-reviewed Education Policy Analysis and Archives in 2018. It explores the question of how Forbes magazine selects the “edu-preneurs” who are recognized as education leaders. It is quite a plum to receive this recognition, as it supposedly confers recognition on those young people who are “the best hope for revolutionizing and reforming education.”
Laura Chapman on Michael FullanI recently posted a long article by Michael Fullan that proposed a new paradigm for education reform. I found Fullan’s dismissal of the status quo persuasive, as well as his description of a forward-looking approach. Laura Chapman, inveterate researcher and loyal reader, reviewed Fullan’s recent work and was disappointed with what she found: If ever any paper needed close reading this is it, espe
Angie Sullivan: In the Nevada Charter Industry, Conflicts of Interest Are RampantAngie Sullivan teaches first-grade students in a Title I school in Las Vegas. She writes regularly to every member of the legislature and to journalists to tell them what it is like from a teacher’s perspective. She wrote this missive: Shannon Bilbray-Axelrod should recuse herself from charter school legislation. It is unethical for her to line her lobbying pocket and then work on charter legisla
“Are You Popular?” An Educational Film from the 1940sWhen you think of the late 1940s, do you think about President Truman? Here is an educational film from 1947: “Are You Popular?” The lesson: Don’t park in cars with boys. These short films were called “social guidance” films. They were shown to students in schools.
Ohio: Voucher Students Are Not Required to Take State ExamsApparently, the voucher schools were embarrassed by the Ohio study showing that kids who use vouchers lose ground academically. There were two ways to respond to that finding: 1) improve instruction in the voucher schools by requiring them to hire certified teachers; 2) obscure the data. The voucher lobby chose the second route. The Republican-dominated legislature is now vastly expanding the sta
An Important New Book About New Orleans and Its SchoolsThree scholars have recently published a very informative book about the history of education in New Orleans. The authors tell this story by scrutinizing one very important elementary school in the city, the one that was first to be desegregated with one black student in 1960. The book is titled William Frantz Public School: A Story of Race, Resistance, Resiliency, and Recovery in New Orleans (Pe
Steven Singer: Diversity is the Most Important Reason to Save Public SchoolsSteven Singer, a teacher in Pennsylvania, explains what is most important to him in public education: Diversity is the Most Important Reason to Save Public Schools Public schools are under attack. So what else is new? It’s been so since the first moment the institution was suggested in this c
