Latest News and Comment from Education

Saturday, November 2, 2013

11-2-13 Schools Matter All Week

Schools Matter

 Schools Matter All Week




Anya Kamenentz, Beautiful Shill for Corporate Higher Ed, Pt. 1
A drastic shortage of college educated workers is the latest fabricated educational crisis by the hedge fund swindlers from Wall Street and the corporate foundations.  Here is the astonishing bullshit news as presented on the website from the diploma mill, College for America, which is the exploitative moneymaking scam for Southern New Hampshire University:In a city, a business opens a new plant.

Hedge Fund Operative Gordon Hendry Joins Indiana State Board of Education
by Doug MartinJennifer Wagner : "I've heard it's (Diane Ravitch's Reign of Error) a lovely piece of fiction." When Mind Trust board member and Bill Bennett operative David Shane (wife of former Eli Lilly Endowment’s education consultant) recently stepped down from the Indiana State Board of Education, I was not shocked when Mike Pence quickly picked Democrat Gordon Hendry to join the sta
"It's a madhouse! A madhouse!"
Valerie Strauss’s The Answer Sheet has a discussion of Common Core and text complexity that you must read:Common Core: How are books judged?Strauss ends with:Appendix A of the English Language Arts Common Core State Standards has a long and complicated explanation of “text complexity,” which you can read here, that reviews research said to show that the complexity of today’s reading demands for ad

OCT 31

Why I will not be speaking at Southeast TESOL next week
I will not be speaking at the Southeast TESOL Association Meeting to be held in Myrtle Beach next week, because of a disagreement about my keynote topic.  I learned only recently that the conference theme was supporting the common core, that it was  "dedicated entirely to providing teachers with strategies for working with common core and all of the states in attendance have adopted it.&quo
Eating the Golden Goose, or Corporate Consumption of Higher Ed
If the plutocrats at the corporate foundations can impose their loser strategies on higher education as they have on K12, the demise of the greatest university system in the world will then be assured.  Published at Alternet today.
TFA's PR Machine Lights It Up in Memphis with Front Page Stories of "Enchantment" and "Allure"
CorpEd bought Memphis City Schools with a 90 million dollar Gates Foundation grant in late 2009, and early in 2010 the TN Department of Education was gobbled up by a $501 million bribe from the Gates controlled US Dept. of Education's RTTT.  Thus began the slashing and burning of Memphis public schools in favor of corporate charters and the "surplussing," "excessing," and firin

OCT 30

The Facts, Not the Spin, about Washington D.C.'s IMPACT Evaluation System
As U.C.L.A. School of Management Professor Samuel Culbert explained, a performance evaluation is as much of, "an expression of the evaluator's self-interests as it is a subordinate's attributes." Culbert argued that the institution of professional performance reviews is, "as destructive and fraudulent as it is ubiquitous." It is not just in educational evaluations where "a
Chief for Change, Janet Barresi, Doubles Down on Meaningless School Grading System
Chief Barresi What if the scientific community reveals that a state school policy produces meaningless and misleading results that conceal deep inequalities and mask others?  If you are one of Jeb Bush's Chiefs, you smile, ignore the facts, and proceed as if nothing happened:News9.com - Oklahoma City, OK - News, Weather, Video and Sports |
Terry Grier Makes Houston Schools Awful Enough to Win the Broad Prize
The picture above is of Arne Duncan and Eli Broad having a swell time at Barack Obama's inauguration party in 2008.  The picture below is Arne and Eli in 2013, this time accompanied by the poster boy for CorpEd's model of segregated urban reform schools, Terry Grier.  With his systemwide No Excuses model in place in Houston, Grier has made life so miserable for teachers and students alike that it
Happy Halloween Ken Derstine PA Education Crisis Highlights
And this is just Philadelphia, scary stuff, I'm spookedPennsylvania Education Crisis Highlights - October 29th, 2013Pennsylvania Education Crisis Highlights is available online at http://www.defendpubliceducation.net/Blue text is a link to the full article.**************** Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools  | Save our Schools NJMonday

OCT 29

Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for Memphis Apartheid Corporate Charter Schools
Today's story in the Commercial Appeal makes it clear that Shelby County Schools (SCS)  are in a big hurry to close the deal to keep large numbers of County students from going to the municipal boutique districts that sprang into existence when the threat of consolidation made it clear that they, otherwise, would have been in the same school system as all the poor black kids in Memphis.   Hang
The Charlotte Danielson Who Is Getting Rich on the Misuse of Her Intellectual Property
Charlotte Danielson has built a fence between herself and the misuse of her teacher evaluation scholarship.   I call it scholarship rather than research because there is little hard evidence that her system works to improve teaching.  Even so, CorpEd has paid the Danielson Group millions to use her materials to create a ridiculous rubric for high stakes teacher evaluations, even as Danielson publi

OCT 28

Avoiding the toughest exam in the world .... so far.
A Sunday LA Times page one story had this headline: "China gives US schools budget help" (Oct 27). The subheadline: "Tuition-paying Chinese students are providing much needed money - and cultural exchange - to high schools here."Our schools would not have these budget problems if we didn't waste so much money on standardized testing. And the budget crisis will get worse because
Education Funders Sponsor a Great Study of NYC Small School Reforms but Will They Read It?
The Education Funders Research Initiative’s “New York City Schools: Following the Learning Trajectories of a Cohort," by Douglas Ready, Thomas Hatch, Miya Warner, and Elizabeth Chu, is excellent. It has the scholarly integrity of the research of the Consortium on Chicago School Research or Johns Hopkins’ Everyone Graduates. It also reads like a diplomatic call for New York City reformers to h

OCT 26

Shelby County Plans to Whiten Suburban Schools and to Drop Civil Rights Lawsuit
In a plan drawn up in the back rooms of the local political elites, Shelby County stands poised to do what most thought impossible: to make Shelby County Schools more segregated.  The plan calls for the County to hold on to three schools in Germantown and one in Millington, where significant numbers of  black non-municipal County children live who are now attending the four schools that are within