Latest News and Comment from Education

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Diane in the Evening 10-4-12 Diane Ravitch's blog

Diane Ravitch's blog:





Ideas for an archive?

Looks like we will get a sizable number of people to write letters to President Obama on October 17.
Tim Furman suggests we set up a place to collect copies and share them.
I don’t know how to do this. Anyone have an idea?


The Invisible Children, Left Out of the Obama-Romney Debate

Jersey Jazzman wonders how our two candidates for President spent two hours discussing domestic issues without noticing our nation’s greatest scandal: the nearly one in four children who live in poverty.



“High-Stakes Testing is Out of Control”

Peter DeWitt, principal of an elementary school in upstate New York, surveys the landscape and sees an educational system that is crushing principals, teachers and children with unreasonable mandates.
At the center of the mandates is the endless demands for test scores. Higher and higher…or die.
Complaints are rising. They are coming from all directions. The current course of “reform” is not sustainable when the object of the reforms reacts with sullen and suppressed rage. There is no joy in this Mudville.
Peter concludes:
“High stakes testing has gotten out of control. Policymakers, state and federal education departments aren’t on 



Teacher: Outraged by Attack on Pensions

In this post, Glen Brown asked me to set up a category called “pension reform,” so that teachers could exchange information about raids on their pensions. I decided to create a category called “pensions,” as what is happening doesn’t look like reform.
Many states think that the way to recover from the economic crisis of 2008 is to reduce teachers’ pension and benefits. As Glen points out, many teachers cannot collect social security, so a raid on their pension is a deadly blow to their retirement security.