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Sunday, February 24, 2019

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: So Long, February Edition (2/24)

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: So Long, February Edition (2/24)

ICYMI: So Long, February Edition


 Well, that just flew by. Here's a good batch of reading from the week. Remember, if it speaks to you, help it speak to somebody else.

Betsy DeVos vs. Student Veterans

By easing up on predatory for-profit colleges, DeVos has really stuck it to veterans trying to get an education.

TFA Celebrates New Research That Suggests That Corps Members Are Ineffective Teacher

Gary Rubinstein takes a look at TFA's odd choice of research to get excited.

A Teacher's Student Loans Were Forgiven. Then FedLoan Wrecked His Credit

An infuriating tale that highlights just how screwed up this loan program is these days.

This Personalized Ed Program That Was Supposed To Boost Scores Didn't Work 

Teach To One was supposed to totally work the personalized [sic] education magic. A new study says no, not so much.

Oakland Public School Teachers Are Striking Against Billionaire Privatizers 

Jacobin takes a look at the Oakland strike and the real issues driving it.

Are Texas Kids Failing, or Is The Staar Test Rigged?

Yet another Big Standardized Test turns out to be written at inappropriate grade levels.

Boon Or Black Hole: PA Private School Scholarship Program Considers Expansion

PA has its own tax credit scholarship program that is either awesome or disastrous, depending on whether you ask someone benefiting from it or anyone else. Now the move is on to make it bigger.

Kentucky Charter Schools Funding Shelved For Another Year

A recap/update on Kentucky's unique charter compromise-- they've created a charter law, but they won't fund it. That tradition will continue in 2019.

Charter Takeover In Atlanta Struggled

For the gazzilionth time, some school takeover experts discover that it's not nearly as easy to turn schools around as they said it would be.

P&G's Partnership With Strive

What does Cincinnati have to do with building the cradle-to-career pipeline?

I'm a Loser Baby, So Why Don't You Kill Me

Think you've read the last word on Don Jr's teacher comment. Read what Nancy Flanagan has to say last.

John White Speaks At San Francisco TFA Board Meeting

Why is the guy who helped trash public education in Louisiana talking to TFA on the left coast? Mercedes Schneider has your answer.


 CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: So Long, February Edition (2/24)



TN: Market Forces Are Not Magical
by Peter Greene / 23h
Shelby County is running up against two of the fallacies embedded in most charter school policy. One is the modern charter policy lie-- the notion that you can run multiple parallel school systems with the same money that used to run one system. The other is that charter systems don't need a lot of regulation because the invisible hand of the market will take care of it all. Shelby County Schools
Charter Schools Are Not Public Schools
by Peter Greene / 1d
Modern charter schools prefer to attach the word "public" to their descriptions. Many of the charter advocacy groups include "public charter" in their title. And truthfully, there are no regulations attached to the term--any school can attach the word "public" to its title without having to worry about any sort of penalty. So technically, any charter school can call itself a public school. Heck,

FEB 22

OH: Lorain, HB 70, And A Reformy Attack
by Peter Greene / 2d
I began my career in Lorain, Ohio, so the ever-spinning mess there is of personal interest to me. But it is also a picture of much of the damage being inflicted on public education in the name of reform. This is going to be a really long read, the longest I've ever posted on this blog, but it's a story worth telling, because here we find most of the problems of ed reform on display. I: Lorain Back

FEB 20

What Is Your State's Grade For Data Privacy Protection?
by Peter Greene / 3d
If data is the new oil, then schools are the new Ghawar field . Nearly every single person in a generation passes through a school, and virtually all of them encounter computer-based technology. And everything that a computer assesses, measures, and facilitates, it can also record and store. You may think that such data is fiercely protected by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA

FEB 18

Wasting Time In School
by Peter Greene / 5d
It's tax season, so it's time for this sort of meme-- These are just another version the compliant that teachers hear all the time-- why are we learning this? When am I ever going to use it? Every discipline has its own version. English-- when will I ever need to know subjects and verbs? Math-- when will I ever need to know the quadratic equation? Phys ed-- when will I ever have to do a shuttle ru

FEB 17

ICYMI: Winter Is Forever Edition (2/17)
by Peter Greene / 7d
I do this every Sunday, so you can skip back week by week, or just search "ICYMI" in the search bar in the upper left to read some of the good stuff coming from other writers in the education world. Remember to share-- that's how this stuff gets around and finds the audience it should have. Rahm Emanuel's Non-Apolgy for Being School Privatization Cheerleader Rahm released an essay that was billed

FEB 15

PA: The Death of Cyber Charters (Maybe, Finally)
by Peter Greene / 8d
In the entire education ocean, cyber charters continue to be a festering garbage patch, and a recently proposed bill could clean them out of Pennsylvania. It is not that cyber charters could not be useful for a select group of students with special needs. But in the whole panoply of failed reform ideas, none have failed harder and more thoroughly than cyber charters. In fact, they have failed so h

FEB 14

Speedbumps on the Road to Curriculum's Golden Age
by Peter Greene / 10d
Among the recent shifts in reform thought is one to a focus on curriculum and content, and I don't hate it. One of the hugely screwed up features of the last two decades has been the content-stripped focus on hollow skills. Reading is not a set of skills that can somehow be taught and practiced in a content-free vacuum, but that's what we've been trying to do for most of the 21st century, so far.

FEB 12

NY: Parents Call For Charter Pause and Evaluation
by Peter Greene / 12d
NYC school district's parent board has come out in opposition to raising New York's charter school cap. Will Governor Cuomo hear them? The New York City schools are under mayoral control (never, ever, an ideal system), so they have no school boards. What they do have is thirty-six Community Education Councils composed of elected parents. Those CECs in turn have an Education Council Consortium, com

FEB 11

The Problem with "Monopoly."
by Peter Greene / 13d
A standard piece of charter/choice rhetoric is to refer to the public school monopoly, the suggestion being that school choice is needed in order to break the public school stranglehold. I'd argue that the term is not accurate, that it suggests a single nationwide education entity that imply doesn't exist. Can an enterprise be a monopoly if it's actually several thousand individual entities? But t

FEB 10

ICYMI: Valentine's Edition (2/10)
by Peter Greene / 14d
A handful of worthwhile reads this week. Remember to share! Defining High Quality Curriculum Nancy Flanagan wants to know why curriculum is supposed to be so hard for actual teachers. Charter Schools Are Pushing Public Education To The Brink Jeff Bryant looks at how badly charter schools squeeze public school finances. (Spoiler alert: pretty badly) Active Shooter Drills A reminder, if you need one

FEB 09

Field Guide To Strike Objectors
by Peter Greene / 14d
In my four decades of teaching, I went through a strike twice--once as a first year teacher, and once as the president of the local union. Writing about education, I have followed dozens more. No matter what kind of public support a strike is getting, there are always some familiar tunes you can expect to hear played in opposition to a teacher walkout. Here's your guide to all the classics. Don't

FEB 08

IA: Choice Is Taxation Without Representation
by Peter Greene / 15d
An Iowa state senator has caught on to one of the problematic side effects of many choice programs-- disenfranchised taxpayers. Or, as somebody put it a while ago, taxation without representation. Iowa has long allowed open enrollment; an Iowa family can enroll their student in any public school district, whether they live there or not. Currently the full per-pupil expenditure follows the student-

FEB 07

DC: Charter Leaders Make The Big Bucks
by Peter Greene / 17d
It's a phenomenon noted in many urban education-scapes. The leaders (CEO, Education Visionary, Grand High Muckity Muck, whatever) of a charter operation makes far more money than a) the local public school superintendent responsible for far more students and b) the teachers who work within the charter. But a recent Washington City Paper article by Rachel Cohen lays out some stark examples. The art
Count Them As They Go
by Peter Greene / 17d
I'm asked from time to time (mostly, I think, because some people are curious but reluctant to ask) what it's like to be in my particular spot in life. Retired from teaching, sixty-one years old, raising two babies about thirty years after I raised two other babies-- as my wife and I have said at various times over the last decade, we are kind of off the map here. So my honest answer is that I'm f

FEB 06

Portfolio School Management For Dummies
by Peter Greene / 18d
One of the issues that was hanging over the Los Angeles teacher strike is the idea of portfolio management; the UTLA asserts that Superintendent Austin Beutner already has a plan prepared for converting the LAUSD to a multi-portfolio model. In Denver, the model has already been rolled out, to less than stellar result . It's a challenging issue to discuss because so few people understand exactly h

FEB 05

Hammering the Littles: Are The Kids Really All Right?
by Peter Greene / 18d
The headline says " Kindergarten classes are getting more academic. New research says the kids are all right. " The news is that a big shiny new study shows that the increasingly academic approach to kindergarten is okee dokee. The quick take is that the study followed 20,000 kindergarten students and found that they both achieved academically and their social and emotional development was just fi

FEB 04

Reclaiming Choice
by Peter Greene / 19d
So we just froze our way through School Choice Week, the annual PR blitz in favor of privatizing public education, and I find myself troubled and annoyed by the word "choice." See, I favor choice. In all my years at our tiny small town/rural high school, we'v e graduated students who went on to become doctors, artists, teachers, welders, construction workers, lawyers, telephone linemen, and jobs y

FEB 03

ICYMI: Really Big List Edition (2/3)
by Peter Greene / 21d
Was it the cold? Did we all just have more time to wander the internet? I don't know, but it's a huge list this week. Remember to share-- that's how the word gets out. LA Strike: Charters Are An Existential Threat To Public Education The LA strike was extraordinary in that it addressed so much more than wages and benefits, but also addressed policy as well. Here's a good look at where the LA chart

FEB 01

Measuring Success: A Study in Contrasts
by Peter Greene / 23d
Two items tossed my feed this week that underline contrasting ideas about what constitutes success in education. First, let's go to the Jackson-Madison County school system of Tennessee. At JMCSS folks are pretty excited 


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