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This alarming article describes the destruction of the Highland Park, Michigan, school district.

Once a thriving community, Highland Park suffered as the automobile industry declined. Its schools declined as the community became poorer and blacker.

The Highland Park district is more than 90% black. That makes it just right for a state takeover because it does not have political power. So, get ready for the “civil rights movement of our time” to step in, take charge of the schools, and kill off the district.

Governor Rick Snyder thought he knew how to fix the ills of Highland Park: He appointed an emergency manager to set its financial house in order in 2012. The emergency manager was an accountant. He also had spent some time working for White Hat, the for-profit charter company in Ohio, which has perfected the extraction of funds from public money for private gain.

The first emergency…

Many parents and educators are outraged by the over-testing and misuse of testing that has been embedded in federal policy since the enactment of No Child Left Behind in 2002. No high-performing nation in the world tests every child every year in grades 3-8, as we have since the passage of NCLB.

Young children sit for exams that last up to 15 hours over two weeks. The fate of their teachers rests on their performance. Parents remember taking tests in school that lasted no more than one class period for each subject. Their tests were made by their teachers, not by a multinational corporation. Parents can’t understand how testing became an endurance trial and the goal of education.

Politicians claim that the tests are necessary to inform parents and teachers and the public how children in one state are doing as compared to their peers in other states. But this…

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education and retired New York State high school principal, reviews Samuel Abrams’ Education and the Commercial Mindset. To sum up, she loved it! It gives an important overview of today’s privatization movement, which attempts to make schools function like businesses.

Carol writes:

Kate Zernike of The New York Times recently wrote a scathing report of what school choice has done to the city of Detroit. The report, which appeared on June 28, tells the story of how an already strained public school system was further beaten down due to the influx of for-profit charter chains eager to grab a share of the market at any cost. Although the promise of choice was to improve all schools through competition, the outcome for Detroit has been a total collapse.

There is no better book to help explain the reasons why such a collapse…

Several members of the Democratic party’s platform committee sent me the draft of the platform. It is linked below so we can all reflect on what is being considered. This is a draft so it can be changed. Please read it and send your best ideas.

The section on education contains a lot of reformer lingo. Zip codes. Options. Accountability. The Democratic party favors “high academic standards.” Who favors “low academic standards?” The party opposes too much testing; who favors too much testing?

The rhetoric about “high academic standards” brings echoes of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Wouldn’t it have been refreshing to see a statement about meeting the needs of all children? Or ensuring that all schools have the staff and resources they need for the children they enroll?

And then there’s the section on charters. The party is against for-profit charters: so far, so…

I wrote a response to an editorial that appeared in the Boston Globe, which advocated for using test scores to judge teacher quality.

My response explained why that idea doesn’t work.

I cited evidence and experience.

But people who live in Massachusetts who don’t read the Globe online won’t see it.

Please forward to friends, elected officials, and policymakers.

Open the article to see the links to sources.

Here are some excerpts:

Evaluating teachers by test scores has not raised scores significantly anywhere. Good teachers have been fired by this flawed method. A New York judge ruled this method “arbitrary and capricious” after one of the state’s best teachers was judged ineffective.

Test-based evaluation has demoralized teachers because they know it is unfair to judge them by student scores. Many believe it has contributed to a growing national teacher shortage and declining enrollments in teacher education programs.

A major problem…

In 2012, Californians voted on Proposition 30, which raised taxes on the richest citizens in order to raise funding for public schools and charter schools. The measure passed, despite a well-funded effort to defeat it.

A group of unions and progressive activists released a list of nearly 80 wealthy Californians who secretly funded the campaign to defeat Proposition 30. One of them was billionaire Eli Broad, who publicly supported Prop 30 but donated either $500,000 or $1 million to the effort to defeat it.

The progressive activists–called California Hedge Clippers–dug into records to show where the money came from to fight the temporary tax to aid schools.

Individuals named in the group’s report include Silicon Valley tech and investment executive John H. Scully ($500,000), investor and Hyatt Hotel heir Anthony Pritzker ($100,000), developer Geoff Palmer ($100,000) and private equity investor Gerald Parsky ($50,000).

Donors, regulators concluded, contributed money to an…

This http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/us/for-detroits-children-more-school-choice-but-not-better-schools.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news confirms our worst fears about charters. Its conclusion: Detroit parents have many choices but education in that embattled city is in a state of collapse. The politicians, civic leaders, and big money bet on charters instead of focusing like a laser on improving the public schools and services for children and families. That bet turns out to be a disaster for the children of Detroit.

Detroit schools have long been in decline academically and financially. But over the past five years, divisive politics and educational ideology and a scramble for money have combined to produced a public education fiasco that is perhaps unparalleled in the United States.

While the idea was to foster academic competition, the unchecked growth of charters has created a glut of schools competing for some of the nation’s poorest students, enticing them to enroll with cash bonuses, laptops, raffle tickets for iPads and bicycles…

Jack Schneider, historian of education at the College of the Holy Cross, writes in The Atlantic that reformers have constructed a false narrative of educational failure. They say again and again that the “system is broken,” that it needs to be torn apart and built from scratch.

Schneider counters their claims one by one and shows that the system is working better today than it ever did, though it certainly needs to be better still.

Everything must be disrupted, say the reformers. Few of them have ever been teachers or even public school students or parents. But they seem certain that destruction is the right course for American public education.

Schneider marshals a good deal of evidence to show why they are wrong, but he never adequately explains how the reformers came to have these settled and wrongheaded beliefs. He suggests that they live in an echo chamber and only…

The Network for Public Education Action Fund released this statement, just minutes ago:

For Immediate Release: June 22, 2016

Media Contact:
Carol Burris 718-577-3276 carol@npeaction.org

The Network for Public Education Action Calls Upon the Democratic Party to Include a Pro-Public Education Agenda in its Platform Statement.

In response to the Democratic Party’s request for platform input, forty-six national and local grassroots groups join the Network for Public Education Action in its petition that five pro-public education principles be included in the party platform. The allied groups are united in their opposition to the privatization of public schools, which has been enabled by both political parties.

A corresponding statement will also be sent to the Republican Party.

New York, New York– Today, the Network for Public Education Action (NPE Action), a national nonprofit 501(c) (4) education advocacy organization with 22,000 supporters, released Strengthening K-12 Education: A Submission to the Democratic Party…

Ever wonder what it is like to teach at a Success Academy charter school in New York City? I have been contacted by several teachers who quit and told me their stories, but they were never willing to allow their name to be published. They were afraid that their future job prospects would be damaged. Here is a statement by a former SA teacher, Sasha Guiridongo, posted on her own blog and then shared with Mercedes Schneider.

What is unusual, of course, is that Sasha is not afraid to tell her story and give her name.

She didn’t last long at Success Academy. She explains why in her post. SA is known for teacher churn and burn out. That explains why Eva Moskowitz’s supporters in the Legislature were pushing hard to get a special exemption for charter teachers in the law, relieving them of the necessity of being certified…