Category Archives: Uncategorized

The ‘advertorial’ is, in my opinion, the lowest form of advertising.  Perhaps you’ve never heard this word before, but you have surely nearly fallen for this kind of deceit when reading what you think is a newspaper article with a flashy headline before noticing, in small print, the words ‘advertisement.’

An ‘Advertorial’

Education Week used to be the gold standard in education reporting.  I can remember how proud I was in October 1995 when, at just 25 years old, I got my first ‘published’ article in a ‘real’ publication, Education Week’s Teacher Magazine, for a piece I wrote called ‘Natural Born Teacher.’  Over the next six years, I was always so proud whenever I’d get a piece accepted into either Teacher Magazine or Education Week.

As the internet grew and Twitter gained popularity, I joined and of course followed Education Week.  Though I’ve found Education Week to be generally slanted…

Grace Davis is a sophomore at Ponderosa High School in Parker, Colorado. She was upset that so many teachers left every year, and she decided to hold a student protest to call attention to the issue. (I posted about this here on May 8). She got clearance from the school. She read about her First Amendment rights. She thought everything was set.

Colorado Public Radio told the story here.  

Two members of the school board asked to meet with her. One is the president of the board. Grace brought a recording device with her and taped the meeting. From her research, she knew it was legal to tape a conversation without the consent of all parties under Colorado law.

The meeting lasted an hour and a half. (Grace missed a class while she was harangued.) The board members warned her that her family would be liable  for any damages…

Today’s post was submitted by HiPointDem, a supporter of public education:

Lakeside School

Bill’s high school, Lakeside, is Seattle’s most elite private school. The current tuition is $28K (not including food, books, bus, laptop, and field trips).

A bargain, compared to some eastern private schools, but about equal to the median income of all US workers.

Lakeside has a lovely campus that looks kind of like a college campus:

– Faculty is nearly equally balanced between men & women (i.e. Lakeside pays well);
– 79% of faculty have advanced degrees;
– 17% are “faculty of color” (half the students are “students of color,” cough, Asian)
– Student/teacher ratio: 9 to 1
– Average class size: 16
– High school library = 20,000 volumes
– 24 varsity sports offered
– New sports facility offers cryotherapy & hydrotherapy spas
– Full arts program with drama, various choruses, various bands including…

After the recent PARCC tests were administered, a number of teachers went to social media to air their complaints about the quality and grade-level inappropriateness of the questions.

I posted one such article, which was originally on Celia Oyler’s blog. She is a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Yesterday I received an email from Laura Stover of PARCC, telling me that my post contained copyrighted material, and I must take it down. Actually, it didn’t contain any copyrighted material, only a description of a test item, not the item itself. She actually wanted me to remove the link to Oyler’s post. I didn’t because the link is not copyrighted. I removed the paragraph referring to the test item.

I subsequently learned that that the same person wrote to Professor Oyler and threatened her with legal action if she didn’t delete her post and reveal the name of the…

Rick Perlstein is a brilliant writer who usually writes about national politics. Since he lives in Chicago, he couldn’t help but notice the hostile takeover of the public schools by a small, interconnected corporate elite. He applies his journalistic and scholarly skills to unraveling this sordid story.

He begins with a story about an educator who was recently “reassigned” (fired) by the Mayor’s school board.

Perlstein writes:

“This past September, an award-winning Chicago Public Schools principal named Troy LaRaviere published a post on his blog that began, “Whenever I try to take a break from writing about CPS to focus on other aspects of my professional and personal life, CPS officials do something so profoundly unethical, incompetent and/or corrupt that my conscience calls me to pick up the pen once more.”

“What had Principal LaRaviere going this time? We’ll get there eventually. But first we have to back up…

Reformers are all about ‘outcomes’ and that’s why they love Success Academy charter schools. Year after year Success Academy students outperform the rest of the state on the 3-8 ELA and math tests.

For sure if there was a hospital out there that was claiming to have the ability to cure Cancer or something like that, there would be all kinds of independent investigations and different tests to see if their claims were for real. But when it comes to education, we don’t see this so much.

The oldest Success Academy students are now in 10th grade. They have had two different cohorts of 8th graders take the specialized high school test for admission into one of the 8 specialized New York City high schools. Amazingly, none of those students made it into any of the specialized schools. That is pretty unusual that a group of students does so…

While American elected officials continue to encourage market reforms like competition, charter schools, and vouchers, Swedish officials are now recognizing the damage these reforms have done to their society. Sweden abandoned its public system in the early 1990s and welcomed vouchers and privately managed schools.

“STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – When one of the biggest private education firms in Sweden went bankrupt earlier this year, it left 11,000 students in the lurch and made Stockholm rethink its pioneering market reform of the state schools system.

“School shutdowns and deteriorating results have taken the shine off an education model admired and emulated around the world, in Britain in particular.

“I think we have had too much blind faith in that more private schools would guarantee greater educational quality,” said Tomas Tobé, head of the parliament’s education committee and spokesman on education for the ruling Moderate party.

“In a country with the fastest growing…

It is arguable that the taxes that fund public sector services are being targeted and looted by private sector corporations.

In the corporate war to profit from public funds—the taxes everyone who works is supposed to pay—billionaire oligarchs like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Walton family, the Koch brothers and their allies among the wealthiest 1% are taking over teaching our children, profiting off publicly funded private sector prisons, profiting off publicly funded private sector military contractors, and the list goes on.

Most if not all workers pay income taxes, but did you know that many corporations and millionaires don’t.  According to Forbes, “More than 90% of US Businesses Don’t Pay The Corporate Income Tax, and CNBC reported that “20 big profitable US companies paid no taxes.” In fact, according to PoliticFact, the “Middle Class pays higher tax rates than millionaires,” and 7,000 millionaires “gaming the system