MI: Who's Paying To Force Vouchers?Betsy DeVos is feeling her oats these days, with a big push in Michigan to finally install education savings accounts --those neo-vouchers beloved by her crowd. Trouble is, her crowd hasn't been able to convince voters to share the love. But because of an odd quirk in Michigan law, the folks at Let MI Kids Learn have a shot at doing an end run around the voters and the governor. Just 8% of the pe
FL: Big $tandardized Te$ting Not Going AnywhereThere was a brief flurry of excitement last fall when Governor Ron DeSantis and his education sock puppet Richard Corcoran called for an end to Florida's most recent iteration of the Big Standardized Test, the FSA. Some folks were happy to hear the news. Others were looking suspiciously at the fine print . And now that springtime has rolled around, it's clear that the folks who were suspicious wer
Actors vs. Show StealersThis is one of those stories that isn't about education--at least not yet. In the UK, Equity, the actors trade union, is launching a campaign to " stop AI stealing the show ." They note a whole host of techy-created problems: Performers are having their image, voice or likeness reproduced without their consent. Or pay. Contractors are keeping performers in the dark about what, exactly, their righ
I'm Not Going To Defend SELSocial and Emotional Learning is the new target of the GOP attempt to set multiple education brushfires in hopes of stampeding voters towards a Republican victory (as well as one more way for the authoritarian crowd to hammer home their central point of "Trust nobody except Beloved Leader"). The attacks range from overblown to intellectually dishonest to giant piles of bovine fecal matter to the
ICYMI: An Actual Nice Weekend Edition (4/24)Well, looking out my window this weekend does not stink, so that's a plus. Now let's see what there is on the reading list for the week. If the Florida rejection of math textbooks did nothing else, it prompted plenty of mockery. Here are three of the top mocks of the week. Andy Borowitz in the New Yorker with "DeSantis Warns That Math Makes Children Gay" Carlos Greaves at McSweeney's with "Math C
FL: More Book Purging Includes-- Everywhere Babies??!! Seriously??!!Oh, Florida, what a crazy place you are. Currently in the news is the Walton County School District , which just pulled over 50 books from its library. The list, as noted in a district press release , was one that came from an unnamed "outside group" and included books that group "deemed inappropriate." It also notes it received the list "along with many other educational systems." The list was q
Amazon Has Some EdTech Trend IdeasThis week, EdSurge featured some "sponsored content" (aka advertising made to look like an article). The article was written by Katie Herritage (or at least one of her interns), currently the AWS Global Leader, Worldwide Customer Innovation and Acceleration Program, and is entitled " 7 Edtech Trends to Watch in 2022: A Startup Guide for Entrepreneurs ." AWS is the sponsor. AWS is Amazon Web Servi
AZ: An Even Worse Parental Rights BillAs more and more of these rear their heads across the country, the language gets sloppier and -- well, just bad. Recently approved by the Senate and previously okayed by the House, Arizona's HB 2161 throws a new verb into the mix-- usurp. As in, no political subdivision of the state or any other government entity or any official etc (because in this phrase, the bill's writer was exactingly detaile
VA: The Attack On Frederick County SchoolsHere's a story about another form that attacks on public education can take, and why local elections matter. It's not just state legislatures that can try to micromanage schools. When Glenn Youngkin won the race for Virginia governor , he swept along plenty of GOP conservatives into office with him. That included relatively small scale races like the race for Frederick County Board of Supervisors
PA: What would charter reform save your local taxpayers?School funding in Pennsylvania has a variety of problems, and the system of funding charter schools in the state exacerbates all of them. But there are some quick, simple reforms, long backed by Governor Tom Wolf (and opposed by a GOP controlled legislature) that would make a serious improvement for local taxpayers across the state. And now there's a handy resource for telling Pennsylvania taxpay
ICYMI: Easter Edition (4/17)Finally. We await Easter in my neck of the woods if for no other reason than spring isn't here until we have at least one snow after Easter. In the meantime, here's some reading from the week. Florida rejects math textbooks over ‘prohibited’ topics Yes, Florida threw out a bunch of math books because CRT and other Forbidden Things--things so forbidden that apparently the state isn't even going to
Teacher Job Satisfaction Hits BottomThat's the headline we're seeing all over , based on the results from an Education Week/Merrimack College teacher survey The survey was conducted between January 9 and February 23 of this year, with a sample of 1,324 teachers. And the chart that everyone keeps zooming in on is this one-- --which admittedly is pretty ugly, though it needs to be said that the Merrimack survey is in its first year,
MAGA And Social IsolationIt is easy to think of MAGA in terms of everything it hates, the many things it strikes out against. It's even easy to slip into the habit of making fun of it. Sure, MAGA, go ahead and call for a boycott of Disney, because I'm sure that will totally bring that gazillion-dollar multinational conglomerate to its knees. But I'd suggest we view the MAGA anti-ness through a different frame, another wa
Choice vs. Culture BattlesSome school choice fans are pretty steadfast in their belief in free market dynamics and in the need to let all parents choose as they see fit. But as the culture debates heat up, a whole group of choicers are turning out to be less committed to choice than to other things. Note these three stories. In New Hampshire ( in a story that we've looked at before ), the Croydon community had actually in
