Three decades after naming Michael Kirst and Bill Honig to the State Board of Education, Gov. Jerry Brown has turned to them again. Now, like Brown, in their early 70s, they will lead a new majority on the Board that he appointed Wednesday.
Brown moved with unusual speed in replacing five holdover State Board members, including President and fellow Democrat Ted Mitchell, and in appointing two others to replace two Board members whose terms expire Jan. 15. The appointments send a strong signal that Brown wants an experienced, less activist Board that will immediately focus on his priorities.
Five new Board members, all Democrats: Kirst; Honig, a controversial former three-term state Superintendent of Public Instruction; former Long Beach and San Diego Superintendent Carl Cohn; California Teachers Association lobbyist Patricia Ann Rucker; and James
In one of his first appointments, Gov. Jerry Brown has chosen Bill Honig, a once nationally acclaimed education leader who was effectively frozen out of the reform movement in the state for nearly 20 years, to serve on the State Board of Education.
Long before the era of term limits, Honig was elected to three four-year terms as state superintendent of public instruction, starting in 1983, but was forced to resign in 1993 as a result of one of the state's nastiest legal battles involving a statewide elected official – one that he and many supporters believed was politically motivated.
In an outcome that few expected, he was convicted on several conflict-of-interest felony charges and forced out of office. Those charges were later reduced to misdemeanors by the same judge who originally sentenced him.
A new report from a national free speech advocacy organization found most of the four-year universities it surveyed had speech codes that substantially limit students' freedom of speech, including dozens of colleges in California.
In its annual report, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education surveyed speech code policies at the top
Join me, Sue and other founders of Parents Across Americaalong with Diane Ravitch at the first annual Parents Across America Forum to be held in New York City on February 7, 2011.
Dr. Ravitch will critique the current direction of education reform, including privatization and high stakes testing, and will introduce our new national organization, Parents Across America, that is working for positive and
OMG, y'all, I just had an awesome idea. Have youever wanted to run your own school that can take in public money but not have to follow some/most/all of the public school rules? If you have, you've wanted to start a charter, right? Well, hang on to your hats, folks, because I found a way to make your charter school even better: Start one that doesn't serve meals! In California, you see, charter schools don't
Check out the presentation of the "Media Bullpen", the new project of the pro-charter school organization, Center for Education Reform, funded by Gates, along with the right-wing Bradleyand Walton Family Foundations, which will grade reporters and news articles as to whether they accept their pro-privatization, pro-testing 
Studies repeatedly and consistently show that a teacher’s influence is 20 times greater than any
Huckleberry Finn and Jim, Legos
“They’re doing that thing again,” racially underrepresented people in this country must have whispered to themselves (and tweeted). When news broke out that the more than 200 instances of the word “nigger” would be substituted by the word “slave” in Huckleberry Finn, most of us said, “Of the 100 things on our list that need improvement in this country for racial relations, you chose THAT?!”
Erasing the n-word from one of the literary canon’s biggest children’s books is akin to erasing the “3/5ths” in the US Constitution as it pertains to slaves. Books, whether biographical or fictional in nature, serve as documentation of a history. Because Mark Twain decided to use that language in the book, he too shone a light to the customs and history of the time, no matter how deplorable we consider it. Once we try and erase a
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How do I think about what I do? How do I gauge my professional success?
It seems like everything I do disappears…good or bad. I teach a lesson. It sucks. And it’s gone.
I teach a lesson. It’s awesome. And it’s gone.
What is a successful teacher? One who has simply survived 5, 10 or 30 years? One who writes kick-ass lesson plans and turns them in on time, every time? One who has become a principal? One who executes appropriate
Famed historian Diane Ravitch will critique the current direction of education reform, including privatization and high stakes testing, and will introduce a new national organization, Parents Across America, that is working for positive and progressive change in our schools.