Inefficient, Ineffective, and Absolutely Necessary: The Case for Elected School Boards – Have You Heard

Inefficient, Ineffective, and Absolutely Necessary: The Case for Elected School Boards – Have You Heard

Inefficient, Ineffective, and Absolutely Necessary: The Case for Elected School Boards

Inefficient. Ineffective. Outdated. Outmoded. Unrepresentative. Sure, local school boards are deserving of all of these criticisms (and more), but they are also seedbeds of local democracy at a time when democracy is under attack. Special guests: school board member and scholar Rachel White, and school committee member Roberto Jiménez Rivera.

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Have You Heard · #112 Inefficient, Ineffective, and Absolutely Necessary: The Case for Elected School Boards

Inefficient, Ineffective, and Absolutely Necessary: The Case for Elected School Boards – Have You Heard

FLASH BACK: How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party | Jennifer C. Berkshire

How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party | Jennifer C. Berkshire

FLASH BACK: How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party

The Democrats and DeVos have more in common than they’d care to admit

IN A FACEBOOK POST THIS SUMMER, hedge fund billionaire Daniel Loeb took aim at the highest ranking Black woman in the New York legislator, Andrea Stewart-Cousins. “[H]ypocrites like Stewart-Cousins who pay fealty to powerful union thugs and bosses,” wrote Loeb, “do more damage to people of color than anyone who has ever donned a hood.” The rant, which had the exquisite misfortune of appearing just days before the actual KKK took to the streets of Charlottesville to menace nonwhite people and their allies, struck a familiar Loeb theme. In a previous post he implored his peer to take up the fight against the teachers union: “the biggest single force standing in the way of quality education and an organization that has done more to perpetuate poverty and discrimination against people of color than the KKK.”

It would be easy to dismiss all this frothing as just Loeb being Loeb. This is, after all, the same crusader for justice who once lambasted a CEO for his imperial lifestyle, not an easy charge to level from a ten-thousand-square-foot penthouse. But the NYC financier is not just any hedge fund billionaire. As the chair of the board of Success Academy, New York’s largest network of charter schools, he is a leading force within the nexus of big money and self-proclaimed school “reformers” within the Democratic party. While Loeb doesn’t limit his donations to Dems (as his profile on the married-but-looking dating site, Ashley Madison, indicated, he is not one to be tied down), he exerts the kind of outsized influence that $3.2 billion in net worth reliably commands these days.

There’s another reason why we can’t dismiss Loeb’s view that teachers unions promote income inequality and serve as a barrier to progress of any sort as just another crackpot rich-bro outburst. That’s because it’s now a key policy plank of responsible elite opinion almost everywhere. Flip back to The Economist—the bible of savvy, entrepreneurial-minded social criticism—circa 2012, and you’ll find Loeb’s screed rendered in assured magazine prose, minus the overt racist incitements. To wit: “no Wall Street financier has done as much damage to American social mobility as the teachers’ unions have.”

And where The Economist goes, influential “thought leaders” are sure to follow. So now, as America ponders the mounting economic disequilibriums that gave rise to the CONTINUE READING: How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party | Jennifer C. Berkshire

Andrea Gabor: We Need Civics Education! | Diane Ravitch's blog

Andrea Gabor: We Need Civics Education! | Diane Ravitch's blog

Andrea Gabor: We Need Civics Education!

Andrea Gabor, the Bloomberg Professor of Business Journalism at Baruch College of the City University of New York, writes here about the importance of civics education, especially in a time when democracy is under attack by a defeated president and the leadership of the Republican Party.

Put Civics Back in the Classroom, Right Now

Has there ever been a better time to resume lapsed efforts to teach young Americans the structure and purpose of U.S. democracy?

By Andrea Gabor

The presidential election seemed to mark a revival in American civic engagement. A record two-thirds of the electorate voted. Candidates raised at least $3 billion in small-dollar donations, and historic get-out-the-vote efforts had an impact in Nevada, Georgia and elsewhere.

Yet large numbers of Americans appear to believe President Donald Trump’s baseless charges of election fraud. Civic life and discourse have been eroded by the normalization of lying by elected leaders, the CONTINUE READING: Andrea Gabor: We Need Civics Education! | Diane Ravitch's blog 

CURMUDGUCATION: Schooling For Democracy (Or What Is Education For)

CURMUDGUCATION: Schooling For Democracy (Or What Is Education For)

Schooling For Democracy (Or What Is Education For)

I just read a piece that doesn't necessarily say anything new, but puts it all in a useful frame. Let me show you the first paragraph:

There’s no such thing as a “good school” in the abstract. Every school serves a particular community, in a particular time and place, with its own needs and desires. A good school in rural Montana might not be a good school in Midtown Manhattan, just as a good school in 1920 might not be a good school today. This doesn’t mean that we can’t define school quality. It does, however, mean that we can’t define quality without first considering the needs of a school’s time and place.

This is from the Phi Delta Kappan, a publication I don't always trust (hell, they give a platform to William Bennett), written by Jon Valant, a fellow at the Brooking Institution, a place that often demonstrates why economists should stay the heck away from education policy. "Good schools for a troubled democracy" has the hallmark of Brookings writings, a sort of odd atonality tied to the sensation that perhaps within Brookings they never actually read any of the mountains of prose about education policy. 

Valant's thesis is that "the school system we have today in the United States--and our conception of a good school--is mismatched to the needs of our time." This will make more sense if you don't think of yourself as included in "we" and "our." His basic framing of modern education history is what makes this piece worthwhile. 

Valant focuses on the 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, the infamous Reagan era hit job on public education. While Valant notes that the report did mention the needs for education to create better citizens, "the rhetoric of economic ruin and international competition drowned out the message." 

According to the logic of the times, the nation’s most pressing need — and, consequently, the most urgent task for our public CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Schooling For Democracy (Or What Is Education For)