CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Stone Skipping Edition (8/22)
Stone Skipping Edition
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PA: Charter Operators Find Another Way To Take Over A DistrictChester Upland School District is located in the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania. It has been through the wringer. More specifically, it has been through just about every wringe r a school district can go through, from segregation through financial crises through an attack by charter interests. The full background can be found here, with following chapters here, here , and here . Short versio
NH: Prenda Just Hit The Jackpot. Who Are They?New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu just gave Prenda a whopping $6 million cut of the granite state's pandemic school relief. It's a relatively small slice (the full pile of money is $156 million), but it's notably a larger per-pupil amount than the state gives in normal "adequate aid." So who is Prenda, and what is the money for, exactly? Prenda is a company riding the new microschools wave. Mic
NH: New Voucher Boondoggle Under ExaminationNew Hampshire has weathered a variety of voucher proposals over the years, always turning them back, and the latest seemed like no exception. Having turned the legislature Republican, the voucher fans were hankering to finally get their way, but when over 3000 people showed up at hearings to explain how much they didn't like the idea, the GOP graciously yielded to the will of the electorate. Ha h
PA: A Different Tax Credit ApproachOne of the great voucher-promotion dodges is the Tax Credit Scholarship. In this, I give a bunch of money to a "scholarship organization," and they use the money to foot some student bills at the private school of their choice (in some states, "their" means both the parents and the donor). It's a great way to dodge any of those annoying (yet rapidly vanishing) separation of church and state rules
CurmudgubirthdayToday's the 8th birthday for this blog. Post #4114. It took a while to figure things out (please do NOT go back and read the posts from my first few weeks), but it has served as a handy way to scratch my writing itch. The best kinds of responses from readers have fallen into several categories. "Thanks for putting this into words, because I knew this but couldn't really find a great way to say it
Club For Growth Launches School Choice Push. What That Tells Us.Betsy DeVos is back, and we can learn a lot from the company she's keeping. Over the past many years, we've seen lots of groups direct their attention to school choice aka privatization. There have been groups like Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) that have built an argument around a social need--that choice was needed to get a better education for non-wealthy non-white students. There have
ICYMI: Not Out Of The Woods Yet Edition (8/15)Take a deep breath and push on. In the meantime, here's some reading from the week. Deep Divisions in Americans’ Views of Nation’s Racial History Yeah, you'd already figured this out on your own, but the Pew Research people have some survey results to show just how different we are on how to view, deal with, and teach about our racial history. ‘How Can I Follow a Law I Believe Endangers My Studen
Did We Get Anything Out Of NCLB Accountability?We're in the midst of the 20th anniversary of No Child Left Behind , a legislative offspring of bipartisan consensus that has itself been left behind by virtually everybody. The bill was proposed in March of 2001, spent the rest of the year wending its way through the process, to be signed into law at the very beginning of 2002. So pretty much any time this year is fair game for a 20 year retrosp
Speaking of Indoctrinatin' Literature: Ayn Rand in the ClassroomSo here comes the umpteenth set of protests/complaints/caterwauling over literature in schools "promoting critical race theory," aka "any books with Black people in them." The Northampton Area School District of Northampton, PA was offered a a stack of books by The Conscious Kid , an organization that plans to donate 120,000 books "that foster anti-racist conversations and action" to 3,000 school
Where Is A Teacher's Staff?I read about Penn State sports--not because I particularly care, and not even because my non-sporty daughter graduated from there, but because my nephew is a sports writer whose beat is mostly PSU. He's a good guy and the
