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Tuesday, October 23, 2012

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Bobby Jindal’s Little White Lies

Voters in one of Louisiana’s high-performing school districts are angry that their public schools will lose funding to pay for Governor Bobby Jindal’s harebrained voucher scheme, which sends students to backwoods fundamentalist schools that teach religious doctrine.
Jindal insisted that this could not possibly be true, that the vouchers were drawing money from someplace else, not from local taxes. Where does he think taxes come from? Is there a reserve fund in the bayou?
This blog calls him out for trying to hoodwink smart people. In fact, the schools of St. Tammany Parish stand to lose more than $2 million to satisfy the governor’s ideological wishes.
Apparently stung by a series of public meetings in St. Tammany Parish, during which school board members 


Will Andy Smarick Join the KIPP Challenge?

My friend Mike Petrilli at the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute recently sent me a post from the Institute’s daily blog called “Chartering the Future” by Andy Smarick. Mike sent it with a note, saying, “you won’ t like this.” He’s right, I didn’t like it at all. And yet, if you read to the end, you will see that Andy and I end up in agreeing on one important point.
The post is a summary of Smarick’s new book; he argues that urban school systems are so broken that they should be eliminated and replaced by charters, lots and lots of charters. In a previous article in the conservative 


Is Tom Luna the Worst State Superintendent?

If we had a race for the worst state superintendent in the nation, there would be many contenders. One thinks immediately, for example, of Tony Bennett in Louisiana or John White in Louisiana.
By worst, I mean someone who has done his best to destroy public education–which is a sacred trust in the hands of the chief state school officer–and to demoralize the teachers who do the daily work of teaching the kids.
One of the top contenders for that odious distinction is Tom Luna of Idaho. Idaho is a small state and it doesn’t 


EduShyster Is Seriously Worried about Tom Friedman’s Value-Added Rating?

Poor Tom Friedman! Everyone who knows anything at all about education knows that Tom has egg all over his face. They are either angry at him or laughing at thim. He made such a fool of himself with his over-the-top (the same one we are racing to) praise of Race to the Top. If he had ever talking to a real educator, he would have written about Libya or Syria instead. But, no, he chose to act like Arne Duncan’s PR flack, repeating Arne’s favorite lines and doing no fact-checking.
Fortunately we have EduShyster, who has done the fact-checking. The result of this laborious activity is that E.S. is worried that both Tom Friedman and Arne Duncan have extremely low value-added scores. Before long, both may be replaced by someone young, innovative, and data-driven.