Just TRY to Catch Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all

Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all:

Just TRY to Catch Diane Ravitch's blog

A site to discuss better education for all

GAO Report: U.S. Schools Are Resegregating, Kentucky About to Abandon Successful Program

by dianeravitch / 36min

This article was written a year ago, but there is no doubt that the trend lines towards resegregation are only getting worse. Just this week, we learned that the Republican legislature in Kentucky is about to eliminate one of the nation’s most successful programs of school desegregation. Last May, on the anniversary of the Brown decision, Emma Brown of the Washington Post wrote that public school

Alabama Has Its Own Tax Credit Program, Run by Floridians!

9by dianeravitch / 1h

Yesterday I ran a post about Florida’s tax credit program, which accepts contributions from corporations for vouchers; the corporations get tax credits. The Florida program has raised over $1 billion to provide vouchers for religious and private schools. This is money that the state did not spend on public schools. Call it a rightwing “starve the beast” strategy. Alabama has a similar program, ca

What Reformers Don’t Understand: “The Process of Little Things”

11by dianeravitch / 2h

Reformers have grand ideas for shaking up the system. Blowing it up. Changing everything. Blowing up teacher education. Imposing national standards overnight. Turning schools into teacher-proof institutions. Teaching children the habits of highly effective scholars (age 7). But, writes David Greene and Bernie Heller, teachers understand that real change is not in the Big Things. Real change happe

Kevin Carey Explains How Tax Credit Vouchers Enrich Their Sponsors

10by dianeravitch / 2h

Kevin Carey is doing a great job exposing the failure of vouchers to help the children who are allegedly supposed to be saved by them. In his latest article in the New York Times, he shows how slick politicians and entrepreneurs are cashing in to enrich themselves while administering tax credit programs. Trump and DeVos are likely to promote school choice through tax credits since it is the faste

Ohio: A Teacher Rebukes Governor Kasich: We Know What We Are Doing, Do You?

22by dianeravitch / 3h

Julie Rine, a teacher in Ohio, wrote a public letter to Governor John Kasich, rebuking him for his insulting proposal to require teachers to spend a day in a business to learn about how to prepare students. “Your proposal in the budget to require teachers to complete an “on-site work experience” with a local business as a condition of renewing our teaching licenses is baffling. Even the state leg

Los Angeles: Final Results of the Voting

12by dianeravitch / 4h

Final results are in for the LAUSD school board election , where the billionaires outspent everyone else in their attempt to grab control of the district and put at least half of the students into charter schools: Monica Garcia, chief charter cheerleader, defender of John Deasy and enabler of the $1 Billion iPad debacle, defeated Lisa Alva and Carl Petersen, with 57% of the vote. A big loss for p

Charter Advocates Slip Legislation Through Without Notice in Arkansas

20by dianeravitch / 4h

The Trump-DeVos privatization agenda is moving fast in the Deep South, where some people long for the good old days of segregated schools. In Arkansas, charter advocates said there would be no action on a bill to turn public facilities over to charters, then introduced the bill with no opponents present, and passed it without debate. Word is that the same legislation was introduced in Missouri, t

YESTERDAY

Mike Klonsky: How Chicago Preserves Inequality

11by dianeravitch / 14h

Mike Klonsky points out that the policies of Trump and DeVos will cement the segregation and inequality that is now baked into the two-tier system in Chicago. “Modern school reform has become nearly synonymous with racial re-segregation and two-tier education. There’s one tier for the elite and one big tier for the rest of us. Sociologists call it social-reproduction, wherein school systems becom

DeVos’ Official Who Shakes His Wife Resigns

29by dianeravitch / 18h

The leader of Betsy DeVos’ Great Lakes Education Project resigned after testifying that he wanted to “shake” a public official like he shakes his wife. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/03/07/head-of-devos-founded-group-resigns-after-he-said-he-wanted-to-shake-an-official-like-i-like-to-shake-my-wife/

Young Catholic School Teachers Speak Out Against Trump Using Catholic School and Students as Props for His Agenda

41by dianeravitch / 21h

When I visited Notre Dame a few years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting with a class of students preparing to become teachers in a program called ACE (Alliance for Catholic Education). ACE is considered the Catholic version of TFA, but it is far more serious and demanding than TFA. It is not a stepping stone to a job in finance, but a commitment to teach in difficult circumstances at low pay on

Mercedes Schneider: Why Did Trump Move HBCU Funding from US Ed to White House?

20by dianeravitch / 22h

Mercedes Schneider writes that someone at the White House transferred the funding and oversight of the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities from the U.S. Department of Education to the White House. When I first read this, I laughed out loud. First, because this happened the day after Betsy DeV pointed to HBCUs as a wonderful example of “choice,” when they were in fact created bec

SomeDAM Poet: Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

6by dianeravitch / 1d

The Good Old Days Don’t you miss the good old days? The days of school deforming ways? When Arne ruled with iron hand With Common Core and test and VAM? And Cuomo plotted night and day The way to make the schools obey? And Rhee was riding on her broom And closing schools and spreading doom? And charter schools in neighborhoods Were popping up like shrooms in woods And billionaires were here and t

Russ Walsh: Vouchers Are for the Rich, the Racists, and the Religious Right

23by dianeravitch / 1d

Russ Walsh, literacy expert, describes the Three are of vouchers: They are for the Rich, the Racists, and the Religious Right. http://russonreading.blogspot.com/2017/03/school-vouchers-welfare-for-rich-racist.html Russ writes: “Our new Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is rich, white, and a proselytizing supporter of the Christian religious right. DeVos is also an outspoken champion of school

Red Queen in LA: Why Can’t Public Schools and Charter Schools Get Along?

11by dianeravitch / 1d

Sara Roos, aka the Red Queen in LA, explains here why public schools and charter schools are bound to clash. To begin with, they are competing for a finite amount of public dollars and a finite number of students. It is a zero-sum competition. To make matters worse, the needs of both entities is not reciprocal, nor is the distribution of these commodities without impact on the other entity. That

The Florida Corporate Tax Credit Program: A Statewide Scam

29by dianeravitch / 1d

A nonprofit parent-led group called Fund Education Now created a fact sheet about Florida’s Corporate Tax Credit plan , which was designed to evade the state constitution’s explicit ban on using public money to fund religious or private education. In 2006, as governor, Jeb Bush pushed through a universal voucher plan, which was subsequently ruled unconstitutional by the Florida Supreme Court. In

Paul Thomas: Unpacking the Lies Behind the “Failing Schools” Narrative

50by dianeravitch / 1d

Paul Thomas of Furman University taught high school in rural South Carolina for 18 years before becoming a college professor. He happens to be one of the nation’s leading authorities on the effects of poverty on children and schooling. Recently, he has been writing about the flaws of education journalism. In this post , he unpacks the claim that public schools are “failing,” that (some) charter s

Mother Jones: Why Did Trump and DeVos Choose Florida as Their National Model for School Reform?

21by dianeravitch / 1d

Kristina Rizga, the veteran education journalist at Mother Jones, explains why Trump and DeVos love Florida. Although the state has a constitutional ban on the use of public money for private and religious schools, although the state’s 

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