Friday, August 22, 2014

8-22-14 Schools Matter

Schools Matter:





Dumber and Then Huffman
Is dumberer a word?  TN's state ed chief and TFA cult member, Kevin Huffman, told the New York Times yesterday that TN would not back down on using invalid, unreliable, and unfair methods to evaluate teachers in Tennessee.  Do "the best interests of children" really require us to ignore science, common sense, and public opinion?  Some states will continue to use test results in teacher e

Arne Duncan: Just Sucking
As he watches Bill Gates' Common Core spinning quickly now before it heads down the toilet bowl, Arne Duncan has once again offered too little too late to save the latest miseducative boluses of the profiteers and privatizers at CorpEd. Trying to suck the air out of the Resistance by offering one year off from the high stakes part (for teachers) of the testing idiocy (which is half of what Bill Ga

Americans again rate local schools higher than schools of the nation
Groundhog Day: Americans Again Rate Local Schools Higher than Schools of the NationStephen KrashenAs is the case every year, the PDK/Gallup poll (September 2014) found that people rate their local schools much more positively than they do schools in the US in general.  The differences, as usual, were striking: Fifty percent of respondents said they would give the public schools in their neighbor

8-21-14 Schools Matter
Schools Matter: New PDK/Gallup Poll Shows 60 Percent of Public Opposed to Common CoreWe'll be posting from the new 2014 PDK/Gallup poll of public attitudes toward the public schools.  Here's the one that caught my eye first:by Jim Horn / 2min hide  //  saveNew York's High Stakes Test Data of "Diminished Usefulness" Due to Opt Out NumbersNew York parents and students who opted out of the