Toby Price, an assistant principal of an elementary school in the Hinds County School District in Mississippi, was fired because he read a book to second graders on Zoom called I Need a New Butt! The school board did not approve. Nor did the superintendent.

The school was participating in “Read Across America” day to honor Dr. Seuss’s birthday and to encourage children to love reading. Mr. Price thought the children would find the book hilarious, and they did. But they also got a lesson in the power and danger of books when Mr. Price was fired a few days later. He’s trying to get his job back and has a GoFundMe to support his family and pay a lawyer.

When I first read this story, I sent it to Carol Burris, my friend and executive director of the Network for Public Education. She immediately responded that she must…

Bob Shepherd, a frequent contributor to the blog, is an education polymath. He has authored textbooks, written assessments, developed curriculum, and was most recently a classroom teacher in Florida. He has a long history in the education industry.

He explains here why standardized testing today is neither valid nor reliable.

He begins:

The dirty secret of the standardized testing industry is the breathtakingly low quality of the tests themselves. I worked in the educational publishing industry at very high levels for more than twenty years. I have produced materials for all the major textbook publishers and most of the standardized test publishers, and I know from experience that quality control processes in the standardized testing industry have dropped to such low levels that the tests, these days, are typically extraordinarily sloppy and neither reliable nor valid. They typically have not been subjected to anything like the validation and standardization procedures…

Pamela Lang, a parent of a child with special-needs in Arizona, wrote for Public Voices for Public Schools about her terrible experience finding a school for her son.

She writes:

I may not look like your typical public school advocate. I’m not opposed to private schools, and I even use a voucher for my son. I’ve also always loved public schools and advocated for our elected representatives to do a better job of funding and resourcing these valuable community institutions. Frustratingly, I’ve watched as morally-bankrupt radical special interests have spent decades undermining our public schools, chipping away at them year after year, until they start to buckle under the shear strain.

I would love to enroll my son at our local community public school. But I live in Arizona and my son has special needs, meaning the resources to educate my child here had already been stripped away through…

Tim Slekar, Director of the Educator Preparation Program, Muskingum University of Ohio. He insists we do not have a teacher shortage. We have a shortage of respect for teachers as professionals. He wrote the following:

Enough Already! It’s NOT a teacher shortage.

“The public is not begging for teachers yet, but districts are. At some point, if this pathway does not change, the public will also be begging for teachers.” Scott Klimek

It was 9:55 am and Mrs. Tichon’s kindergartners were focused on the literacy task at hand. Every Monday morning at 9:45 Mrs. Tichon’s 26 kindergartners had to spend 15 minutes completing a district mandated “literacy check.” And every Monday three of Mrs. Tichon’s children never finished at 10:00 am and had to miss recess. 

Not today though! Mrs. Tichon had had enough. At 10:00 am she announced to her class that it was time to turn in…

Donald Cohen is the executive director of “In the Public Interest” and co-author of an important new book The Privatization of Everything. He titled this column, which originally appeared in the Washington Post.

He writes:

Reforming public education with market-based reform is “like using a hammer to cook an omelet”

Trying to fix public education with market-based reform is like using a hammer to cook an omelet. It’s just the wrong tool.

That’s one of the main points in The Privatization of Everything, a new book that I co-authored with Allen Mikaelian, which explains why market rules don’t apply to every single aspect of human activity—including education.

The recent announcement by former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg that he’s investing $750 million to expand student enrollment in charter schools was a harsh reminder that the decades-long experiment with market-based education reform isn’t working. Charter schools have been in existence…

This message came from an educator who studies racial equity:

From: Being Blackatkipp <beingbipocatkipp@gmail.com>

Subject:Being Black at KIPP

To whom it may concern,

BeingblackatKIPP is an Instagram account that was created in the wake of the George Floyd social reckoning. During this time, I was empowered to also seek change in the KIPP network of public charter schools. I had witnessed first hands for many years how white supremacy culture and politics were deeply engrained in this network. I knew from my own experience how policies that aimed to police black and brown bodies and create distrust among the community re-traumatized the very groups of people KIPP claimed to serve.

Once the Instagram page launched the accounts of abuse, racism, and discrimination began to pour in from all corners of the country.

Most recently we have been covering a situation that took place in KIPP NYC. KIPP NYC has a…

Who is responsible for the widespread teaching exodus? Who demoralized America’s teachers, the professionals who work tirelessly for low wages in oftentimes poor working conditions? Who smeared and discouraged an entire profession, one of the noblest of professions?

Let’s see:

Federal legislation, including No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

George W. Bush; Margaret Spellings; Rod Paige (who likened the NEA to terrorists); the Congressional enablers of NCLB; Sandy Kress (the mastermind behind the harsh, punitive and ultimately failed NCLB).

Erik Hanushek, the economist who has long advocated for firing the teachers whose students get low test scores; the late William Sanders, the agricultural economist who created the methodology to rank teachers by their students’ scores; Raj Chetty, who produced a study with two other economists claiming that “one good teacher” would enhance the lifetime earnings of a class by more than $200,000; the reporters at the Los…

A reader whose nom de plume is quickwrit explained in a recent comment that there is no such thing as a “public charter school.” In addition to the evidence supplied, bear in mind that several federal courts and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not “state actors,” meaning not public schools. Even charter schools have sought to avoid accountability for their actions by insisting in court that they are not “state actors,” but private organizations with a government contract. If receiving public funds made your public agency, then every college and university that accepts federal funds would be public, not private, as would Lockheed Martin, Merck, and other corporations.

Quickwrit writes:

The impartial, non-political watchdog Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a report warning that so much taxpayer money is being skimmed away from America’s genuine public schools and…

The New York Times reports that the Proud Boys, the white nationalist group of the far-right, is now using its members to protest mask mandates at local school board meetings and other local events. Their presence will probably cause some people to leave their school board position or not to run. But their presence makes it all the more imperative that concerned parents and other citizens run for school board, show up for school board meetings, and support candidates who want to make local schools better.

They showed up last month outside the school board building in Beloit, Wis., to protest school masking requirements.

They turned up days later at a school board meeting in New Hanover County, N.C., before a vote on a mask mandate.

They also attended a gathering in Downers Grove, Ill., where parents were trying to remove a nonbinary author’s graphic novel from public school…