Category Archives: Uncategorized

There’s a new fad sweeping the nation.

It’s called “Educational Accountability.” Here’s how it works.

If your neighborhood school can’t afford to pay its bills, just close it.

That’s right. Don’t help. Don’t look for ways to save money. Don’t look for new revenue. Just lock the doors.

It’s fun! And everyone in the federal and state government is doing it!
It’s the saggy pants of United States education policy. It’s the virtual pet of pedagogical economics. It’s the cinnamon challenge of learning-centered legislating.

Sorry, poor urban folks. We’re closing your kids’ school. What? Your little tots are entitled to an education!? Fine! Take them to some fly-by-night charter or else they can get stuffed into a larger class at a traditional school miles away. It’s really none of my business.

Meanwhile, as government functionaries pat themselves on the back and give high fives all around, academic

I’ve heard these two words, American Exceptionalism, repeated for most of my life, and it is often used to support the claim that the United States is God’s country. In its classic forms, Ian Tyrrell says, “American exceptionalism refers to the special character of the United States as a uniquely free nation based on democratic ideals and personal liberty.”

What does American Exceptionalism mean when we take into account the following facts?

1. The United States has the largest prison population in the World. China, with almost five times the people, is ranked number two with 74% of the U.S. prison population. Russia is in third place with 29%. One industry where the U.S. is the number one producer in the world, according to Family Media.com, is pornography and 89% of the world’s pornography web pages are hosted in the United States. Germany is in second place with four percent…

A couple of weeks ago, I posted Addressing Teacher Quality Post-NCLB in order to examine the impact of ESSA on the growing “bad teachers” narrative found in political and media commentary on the state of education in the U.S.

My speculations have now been given credence, notably Stephen Sawchuk’s 50 Years of Research Show Good Teaching Matters. Now What? at his Teacher’s Beat blog for Education Week.

Sawchuk’s post confirmed for me that the “bad teachers” drumbeat will continue so I posted a comment, one that expressed my frustration and linked to my post above:

Please let’s stop the bad journalism on teacher quality.

https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2016/01/21/addressing-teacher-quality-post-nclb/

Please let’s stop treating Education Next as a credible publication.

First, we must note that the impact of teacher quality is dwarfed by out-of-school factors (http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/teachers-matter-so-do-words):

“But in the big picture, roughly 60 percent of achievement outcomes is explained by student and family background…

Revolution Rival Mao’s in Suffering and Loss?The only difference between the Cultural Revolution in the United States and Mao’s in China (1949 – 1976) is that this unique American Revolution is from the top down instead of the bottom up. In China the majority of the people supported the Chinese Communist Party against the Nationalist Party in a Civil War that raged for decades (1927 – 1950).

But in the United States, the revolution is being led by the wealthiest 0.1% of Americans: for instance, Bill Gates, two of the four Koch brothers, the Walton Walmart family, Rupert Murdock, Wall Street, Corporate America, Hedge Funds, recently Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, who was recruited into the Gates Cabal, and a few other poorer billionaires, for instance Eli Broad in California, a billionaire who made his money in real estate and who is currently funding a campaign to take half the children…

Lyndsey Layton has a terrific article in today’s Washington Post about the move by GOP governors to end local control when it suits them. They like to say that they are “saving” people or children. Think Flint. Think Detroit. Think Newark. As the late Derrick Bell said in the title of a book, “And They Are Not Saved.”

The GOP once made local control a  basic principle. Now it’s not. As Layton points out, Governor Kasich took over Youngstown schools in quiet coup. Governor Deal of Georgia wants to create a takeover district like the so-called “Achievement School District” in Tennessee. Governor Snyder in Michigan has taken over several cities and school districts. The GOP in Virginia wants to supersede local control.

The one thing that all these takeovers have in common is that none has succeeded. Not one. What they do best is to extinguish democracy and give the…

If labor unions were an animal, they’d be an old hound dog napping on the porch.

They’re slow to get up and chase away burglars but they do like to howl at night.

Most of the time you don’t even know they’re around until the dinner bell rings. Then that ancient mutt is first to bolt into the kitchen to find a place at the table.

It’s kind of sad really. That faithful old dog used to be really something in his youth.

He was fierce! He’d bark at trespassers even tearing them apart if they threatened his patch of land.

Old Uncle Sam used to yell at him and even threaten the pooch with a rolled up newspaper, but that dog didn’t care. He had a sense of right and wrong, and he didn’t mind getting into deep trouble fighting for what he thought was fair.

Today, however, the…

Reader Laura Chapman, retired consultant in arts education, often writes powerful comments. Here is her description of the Gates Foundation’s plans for teacher education.

Gates is not the only funder of specific content in EdWeek. Gates is also the major funder of the annual Quality Counts report in EdWeek, a report card.

Even more interesting is that Gates Foundation has recruited Lynn Olsen, a top EdWeek journalist, to replace Vicki Phillips whose farewell note included some self congratulations about getting the Common Core in place and so forth.

New initiatives for the Gates Foundation focus on getting rid of teacher education in higher education except as an authorizer of credentials, including a masters degree in “effective” teaching. More charter colleges of education are the next step. Relay is one model.
The aim is to dump scholarship in and about education within teacher preparation in favor of a bundle of “high…

Sandra Stotsky was deeply involved in the transformation of public education in Massachusetts from 1999-2003. As senior associate commissioner of education, she oversaw the development and implementation of curriculum frameworks and testing of entry-level teachers. Massachusetts rose to the top of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. As she explains here, the Bay State did not have annual testing.

She writes:

“K-12 schools have coped with an abundance of mandated testing since the early 1990s. Worse yet, under federal guidelines, the consequences of poor student performance have in the name of accountability come to fall more on teachers than students. The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) expanded the educational-level testing mandated in the 1994 authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), mandating annual testing for reading and mathematics in grades 3-8, once in high school, and at several grade levels in science.

“The 2015 re-authorization of…

After several years of being made to seem like another crazy “conspiracy theory” by corporate media coverage of teacher pension theft, the pension theft pattern has emerged into the open. There can no longer be a conspiracy (secret plan of destruction) theory when corporations and pension raiders have had laws passed to protect them from the open theft of our pensions via undisclosed fees for undisclosed investments to undisclosed sources.

Today the manner of theft is out in the open. Who has stolen how much? That is a (now) a legally protected “trade secret.”

The New York Times reports that New York City’s pensions are “hanging by a thread.”
Why? “Trade secrets.”

Fred Klonsky and David Sirota explain New York City’s and Illinois’ latest “trade secrets” that rip us off and endanger the length, size and existence of our pensions. Undisclosed fees – win or lose. High risk hedge and…