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Paul Horton is a history teacher at the University of Chicago Lab School.

He writes:

The Cure for the Common Core

The Common Core is like that insidious commercial that creeps into the darker recesses of our short-term memories: the jingle that we wake up hearing; the embarrassingly male enhancement ad that we wince at; or the little message that penetrates the space between the paragraphs of every online news story we read. It has become the unintentional trope of market driven education: the separation of learning from creative, non alienated interaction between two subjects: the teacher and the learner. The Common Core Standards seek to reify the learning and assessment processes into code intended to objectify and operate skilled 21^st century workers.

Stephen Pinker could not explain its staying power!

Readers of New York Times editorials who read nothing else about “The Core” tend to be down on…

Upstate New York has had its share of failed charter schools.

Some years back, Edison Schools had a charter school in Rochester, which was a disaster and later shuttered by its state authorizer.  Not far away another charter (acquired by Imagine Schools)  in Syracuse was shut down due to poor academic performance, and county bond holders were left holding the bag for the closed school.  In Buffalo, Stepping Stone Academy, another Edison school, across the street from one of the most toxic lead dumps in  the state, was shut down due to poor academic performance as was a former KIPP school, Sankofa.  (KIPP bailed out before closure to protect their “brand.”)

But here we go again.

The newly elected mayor of Rochester pledged to open more charter schools.

Hope springs eternal.

Does she know that the charters are likely to screen out students with disabilities (other than the mildest ones)…

For more than two decades, we have heard that charter schools will “save” poor kids from “failing public schools.”

Most comparisons show that charter schools and public schools get about the same test scores if they serve the same demographics. When charter schools exclude English learners and students with severe disabilities and push out students with low test scores, or exclude students with behavioral issues, it is likely to boost their test scores artificially.

Nicole Blalock, who holds a Ph.D. and is a postdoctoral scholar at Arizona State University, compared the performance of charter schools and public schools on NAEP 2013.

She acknowledged the problems inherent in comparing the two sectors. Both are diverse, and demographic controls are not available.

Nonetheless, she identified some states where charter performance is better, and some where public school performance is better.

The result, as you might expect: Mixed.

Bottom line: charters are no…

As a child—after my parents climbed out of poverty—I took Christmas for granted and expected a huge pile of wrapped gifts under the tree for me and my cousins the morning of December 25. And as I eagerly tore into the gifts revealing the latest popular toys and gadgets, I never asked what I had done to deserve them.

Decades later, as I reflect, I don’t think reluctantly dragging a trash can to the curb—rare for me as a child—or doing a half-ass job cutting the lawn or the one time I weeded my mother’s flower garden counts. And I never washed the dishes or helped clean the house. It was as if my parents had elected themselves to be my slaves and servants.

Then when I was 15 and wanted a part-time job washing dishes in a coffee shop, my father argued with me to stay home; focus on…

From the start, my plan for the series of mysteries set in Victorian San Francisco has been that each book should feature a different occupation held by women of that period. In Maids of Misfortune, my protagonist, Annie Fuller, goes undercover as a domestic servant, in Uneasy Spirits, she investigates a fraudulent trance medium, and in my short story, The Misses Moffet Mend a Marriage, the elderly seamstresses who live in Annie Fuller’s boarding house are on center stage. In Dandy Detects, it is another boarder, Barbara Hewett, who is the main protagonist.

And it was while I was developing her background story, including her work as a teacher at the city’s Girls’ High, that I decided that my next full-length book after Uneasy Spirits would be about the teaching profession. In less than two weeks, that book, Bloody Lessons, will be published, and for those who…

“We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”.

Justice Louis D. Brandeis

Bill Gates, a private citizen of obscene wealth obtained largely through his monopolistic cunning and ruthless hoarding of intellectual property rights, has spent the greater part of the last decade insidiously and extra-legislatively dictating public school policy. Mr. Gates has no experience whatsoever in education. This, however, has not stopped him from gaining infinitely more power over my child’s education than I have and infinitely more power over your child than you have. This power, given to him by spineless politicians across the country but especially by Barack Obama, has allowed Gates to perform foolish experiment after foolish experiment on America’s children and America’s educators. These experiments include but are by no means limited to the deceptively named and privately…

I’m tired, y’all.

Tired of not fully understanding my French reading. Tired of not having proper time to go the the Rec. Tired of my phone being broken.

Above all, dear reader, I am tired of being a Millennial.

Not because I’m ashamed of my Millennial brothers and sisters. Not because I wish I was born in another era (that’s a whole other story). But because I’m tired of being bashed in popular media.

I read anotherarticle the other day which sarcastically mocked 20-somethings. And it just might have been the straw that broke the 20-something’s back.

Hi, I’m an entitled and broke 20-something and today I’m here to share with you some tips and tricks to grocery shopping on a budget that I’ve picked up over the past year and a half. You see, I graduated college a year and a half ago and, without meal plans or…

First, the federal government forces Americans to choose between giving our hard-earned educational tax dollars to them –or going to jail. Next, they promise to give back some of that money –so we can stretch it tightly across our educational budgets– after the feds pay themselves most of it.

So far, so bad.

Then, the feds threaten that they will withhold even that little bit of our money if we don’t merrily skip to the illegitimate tune of Common Core.

Do the fact check.

The Department of Education in the Department’s Blueprint for Reform uses these sweet sounding words: “The goal for America’s educational system is clear: Every student should graduate from high school ready for college and a career…” Nice. (Note to self: whenever the government says something deafeningly obvious, to which nobody could raise any argument, beware: watch what the other hand is doing.)

And meanwhile– the Department…

It has become commonplace to hear the term “politically correct” tossed around in all sorts of circles.  The way I see it, non-PC statements are only a problem because they are indicative of a deeper problem in the way people think. But staying politically correct does not solve this or any problem.  In fact, by eliminating discussion and acknowledgment, we have created a bigger problem.

Enforcing political correctness is censorship. If we believe certain racist, sexist, and otherwise insensitive or discriminatory ideas and behaviors are bad, it makes sense that we want to stop them.  But by forcing people to use specific terminology or avoid certain conversation topics, we are going about it all wrong. Staying “politically correct” is not medicine for the problems that exist—it’s a band-aid to cover up the wounds.

In addition, its goals are all wrong. Political correctness doesn’t teach people to be mindful of problems…