Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Diane in the Evening 11-20-12 Diane Ravitch's blog

Diane Ravitch's blog:




More Charters Headed for Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C. Is about to get a bunch of additional charters.
Nexus Academy, part of Pearson’s Connections Academy, wants to open a school.
So does K12, which is traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Its stock price dropped this week after news 


Expose of Charter Corruption in The New Republic

Timothy Noah, a senior editor of The New Republichas written a stunning expose of charter school corruption. He begins with Arizona, where the laws are so lax that self-dealing by charter executives is the rule, not the exception. Noah points out that 90 percent of charter operators are exempt from state laws requiring competitive bidding. The state has never withdrawn an exemption.
Noah bases his observations about Arizona’s Wild West of charters on investigative reporting by Anne Ryman of the Arizona Republic.
He quotes from Ryman’s article:
“The schools’ purchases from their own officials,” Ryman writes, “range from curriculum and business consulting to land leases and transportation services. A handful of non-profit schools outsource most of their operations to a 


Please Vote: Was Portland, Oregon, Right to Pass Up Race to the Top?

A reader sent us a link to a poll in the Portland Oregonian.
The question is whether the Portland Public Schools were right to pass up applying to get the federal funding.
Good for Portland!
Maybe the school system figured out that the money is not discretionary and that the mandates that come with


America’s Favorite Parlour Game?

What is America’s favorite parlour game?
If you are talking about the average American, I don’t know though I would guess that parlour games have been replaced by watching TV.
However, if you are talking about the wonks in conservative think tanks, a rare breed to be sure, I will share their secret: they are obsessed with trying to understand how their idol, Tony Bennett, got beat at the polls.
He had everything going for him: the nation’s leading advocate of privatization. Chair of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs fo





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