My New Band Is: The Indoctrinated Rich - My New Band Is

My New Band Is: The Indoctrinated Rich - My New Band Is

My New Band Is: The Indoctrinated Rich

On the Brearley dad, what indoctrination means in the context of education, and private schools that are segregation academies

If Bari Weiss has a post-New York Times “beat”, it’s defending rich white private school parents from the horrors of racial awareness. And credit where credit is due, she seems to have become the go-to writer on that beat for the aggrieved richies and kind of owns it now, which is what every niche reporter aspires to. 

That said, “reporter” is probably giving her too much credit since she seems willing to air the stories of her favored subjects without talking to any of the people on the other side of them. There are no comments from teachers, or administrators, or well, non-white parents. So really, it’s more like niche public relations, I suppose. But if you’re the kind of person who can afford to send your kid to a $54,000 a year school and have strong opinions about Critical Race Theory but have never read a single CRT text, Bari is the person you want to talk to. (I hope she’s willing to give me a commission on her new Substack subs for this endorsement.) 

But this column is not about Bari Weiss in particular; it’s about the parents whose grievances she’s presenting. They all have a problem with what they consider to be liberal overreach in schools, and particularly modern forms of addressing issues of race and equity, especially when they manifest in things like anti-racism training and deploy terminology that seems overly academic and abstract. 

The latest Mad Dad™ is a guy named Andrew Gutmann whose daughter went to Brearley, a famous all girls’ school in Manhattan. Gutmann wrote a letter to the entire school when he pulled her out of Brearley, because he thinks it exhibits the kind of CONTINUE READING: My New Band Is: The Indoctrinated Rich - My New Band Is

Jake Jacobs: End the Tax Breaks for Charter Schools and the Uber-Rich | Diane Ravitch's blog

Jake Jacobs: End the Tax Breaks for Charter Schools and the Uber-Rich | Diane Ravitch's blog

Jake Jacobs: End the Tax Breaks for Charter Schools and the Uber-Rich

Jake Jacobs is a middle school art teacher in New York. He is the national co-administrator of the BadAss Teachers Association, an organization of militant activist teachers.

He writes:

Joe Biden’s recent nomination of Miguel Cardona as a relatively lesser-known, less controversial selection for Secretary of Education was telling. It shows the incoming administration’s reticence to take a side in the ongoing battle over school choice and standardized testing, just like most members of Congress and the major U.S. media.

On the campaign trail, Biden drew cheers from teachers for his promise to end standardized testing, but he noticeably never added any such policy to his website. As was well known by teachers in those audiences, federally mandated tests provide no educational benefit but are the fuel in the engine driving charter school expansion.

President-Elect Biden did vow to cut federal funding to for-profit charter schools, however this affects only about 12% of charters (who could easily change their model while still enriching their for-profit management CONTINUE READING: Jake Jacobs: End the Tax Breaks for Charter Schools and the Uber-Rich | Diane Ravitch's blog