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This moving article by Steve Lopez of the Los Angeles Times is a tribute to Alan Kaplan, a high school teacher of the humanities, who died at the end of August.

Some 500 former students attended his funeral, driving or flying from wherever they were.

One week ago, very early Sunday morning, Harvard University graduate student Jimmy Biblarz boarded a plane and flew from Boston to Los Angeles to attend a memorial service.

He knew he would have to fly back to Boston later that evening, which made for a grueling day, but Biblarz never had a second thought about making the trip.

The provocative, maddening, abrasive, endearing, passionate, controversial Hamilton High School teacher who tormented, challenged and ultimately inspired him, had died. So Biblarz and hundreds of other students who got the same treatment from history and philosophy teacher Alan Kaplan crowded into the un-air-conditioned school auditorium on a…

Sometimes events happen that seem to be disconnected, but after a few days or weeks, the pattern emerges. Consider this: On October 2, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced that he was resigning and planned to return to Chicago. Former New York Commissioner of Education John King, who is a clone of Duncan in terms of his belief in testing and charter schools, was designated to take Duncan’s place. On October 23, the Obama administration held a surprise news conference to declare that testing was out of control and should be reduced to not more than 2% of classroom time. Actually, that wasn’t a true reduction, because 2% translates into between 18-24 hours of testing, which is a staggering amount of annual testing for children in grades 3-8 and not different from the status quo in most states.

Disconnected events?

Not at all. Here comes the pattern-maker: the federal tests…

Mercedes Schneider writes here about the latest campaign filings of funds received.

Four billionaires have donated huge sums to purchase seats on the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.

The board under Governor Bobby Jindal has avidly supported charters, vouchers, for-profit virtual charters, and attacks on teachers.

But the chairman of the board stepped down, and there are several highly credible candidates.

To make sure that the anti-public school, anti-teacher privatizers retain control, the following billionaires have funded a super-PAC to overwhelm the middle-class educators and other citizens who are running for the state board:

Michael Bloomberg (New York): $800,000

Eli Broad (California):$250,000

John Arnold (Texas): $625,000

Walton Family (Arkansas):$400,000

An ordinary person might be able to raise $40,000-60,000 to run for state board. The billionaires are destroying democracy with their obscene donations and their goal of buying control of a democratic institution.

You will note that none of…

Unicef.org says, “One of the most deplorable developments in recent years has been the increasing use of young children as soldiers. In one sense, this is not really new. For centuries children have been involved in military campaigns. What is frightening nowadays is the escalation in the use of children as fighters. Recently, in 25 countries, thousands of children under the age of 16 have fought in wars. In 1988 alone, they numbered as many as 200,000.”

The history of exploiting children is long, and child labor reached new extremes during the Industrial Revolution. Children often worked long hours in dangerous factory conditions for very little money. In fact, in 1900 when 40% of the U.S. population lived in poverty and less than 7% of children graduated from high school at age 17/18, eighteen percent of all American workers were under the age of 16. – History.com

Because of this history…

As the title of this post says, there are three things you must read if you want to understand the origins of Common Core.

First is this article that appeared in the Washington Post in June 2014. It was written by Lyndsey Layton of the Washington Post, and it is called “How Bill Gates Pulled Off the Swift Common Core Revolution” It is an amazing piece of reportage. Layton did her homework, then interviewed Bill Gates. She explains how he paid for everything required in the writing and development of the CC, then paid every major interest group in D.C. to support it, as well as groups across the nation. He couldn’t buy everyone, and that it why the CC has run into trouble.

Layton writes:

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t just bankroll the development of what became known as the Common Core State Standards. With more than…

This story is a bit more than a year old, but it remains relevant as an update on the education “reforms” favored by the mammoth Walton Family Foundation.

It has spent more than a billion on its far-right, free-market vision of school reform. The foundation estimates that it has provided funding for one of every four new charters in the country.

Make no mistake. The Waltons, beneficiaries of the Walmart stores, don’t like public schools. They like privately managed schools. They like vouchers. They believe that school choice is the answer to education equality and ultimately to eliminating poverty.

Note that the Walton-funded charters rely on Teach for America for a large chunk of their staff. That explains why the Waltons are the single biggest contributor to TFA.

Since Walmart is known for paying low wages, the Walton family knows a thing or two about poverty. Instead of opening…

None.

Null.

Nada.

That’s how many questions CNN anchors asked presidential hopefuls about America’s public schools at the first Democratic Debate.

Imagine if Anderson Cooper and company had been silent on Climate Change. The candidates would have brought it up anyway. Bernie Sanders actually did talk about the threat to the environment when asked a question about national defense.

Imagine if moderators had no questions about gun violence. Candidates competed with each other to demonstrate which took a stronger stance against the National Rifle Association.

Imagine if no one asked about finance reform. On that stage each candidate tried to position his or herself as the new sheriff of Wall Street.

But when it comes to one of the most important issues of the day – our children’s struggling schools – the media apparently thought it was of no interest to the viewing public.

Admittedly both Hillary Clinton and Sanders…

John Thompson, historian and teacher, explains why corporate reformers are in a bad mood. Nothing seems to be working out as planned. The word is getting out that Néw Orleans was not a miracle. Worse, black communities are angry at the white elites who took control of their schools.

Thompson writes:

“It has been quite a year for school reform anniversaries. This is the fifth year of the $500 million Tennessee Race to the Top, the prime funder of the $44 million Memphis Achievement School District, and the $200 million One Newark; the tenth anniversary of Katrina and the mass charterization of New Orleans; and the 15-year anniversary of the man-made Katrina launched by the Gates Foundation.

“The corporate reformers’ top-dollar public relations gurus must have anticipated a series of lavish celebrations of their market-driven reforms. But, reality intruded. It’s a safe bet there will not be ten-year and 15-year…