Category Archives: Uncategorized

Steve Zimmer, a 17-year-veteran teacher in Los Angeles (he began via Teach for America), was recently elected President of the LAUSD school board.

In this speech to the AFT, he describes the many millions spent to defeat him.

I have known Steve for a few years, and I have always thought of him as soft-spoken. He is definitely NOT soft-spoken in this video. He goes after the billionaires who hope to privatize public schools, and he fights back, with a roar.

He unapologetically defends teachers. He is a firebrand fighting for collaboration.

The hoax is at last coming to light. Vouchers were sold as a way to “save poor black and brown kids from failing schools,” but that was always a sleight of hand. Vouchers are about privatization.

ALEC has on its current agenda a presentation titled: “entitled: “Problems in Suburbia: Why Middle-Class Students Need School Choice, Digital Learning and Better Options.”

Jonas Perrson of PR Watch writes:

School vouchers were never about helping poor, at-risk or minority students. But selling them as social mobility tickets was a useful fiction that for some twenty-five years helped rightwing ideologues and corporate backers gain bipartisan support for an ideological scheme designed to privatize public schools.

But the times they are a-changin’. Wisconsin is well on its way toward limitless voucher schools, and last month, Nevada signed into law a universal “education savings account” allowing parents to send their kids to private or religious schools…

There is a very deceptive petition now being circulated by Care2, which customarily promotes worthy causes. This petition asks you to sign if you support education as a civil right.

When you open it, it asks you to support the punitive accountability measures of NCLB, and criticizes the Senate ESEA bill for not including the mandated tough accountability that closed public schools in poor communities, but did not close opportunity gaps.

It says:

“Keep Education Bill’s Civil Rights Promise

23,101 SIGNATURES BY:Loron HaysTARGET:Senate Majority and Minority Leadership and Education Committee Chairs

“The US Senate has passed Every Child Achieves without the equity provisions that are so central to equitable education opportunities for ALL children.

“Without access to educational resources and much needed Title 1 funding, many of America’s children will continue to slip through the cracks. This Ed Week article articulates the concern being raised by some advocacy groups that…

This is one of the enduring questions of our age. Arne Duncan attended the University of Chicago Lab School and so do his children, as well as the children of Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel. When he was tapped to be CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, why didn’t he strive to make public schools as rich in curriculum and opportunities as the Lab School? Why didn’t he take what he knew and experienced and carry that knowledge to the U.S. Department of Education? That would have been not just “reform,” it would have been revolutionary.

I earlier posted this article on a Chicago blog about Arne’s decision to send his children to the Lab School. This is a decision that I do not criticize, by the way, as I think parents should choose any school they wish, as long as they are willing to pay the price for a…

Gary Rubinstein has been following the results of the Tennessee “Achievement School District” since its inception. At the time, its founder Chris Barbic pledged that–in five years time– he would lift up the schools in the bottom 5% of the state to the top 25% in the state. His strategy: turn them into charters and let the charter magic do its work.

Barbic recently resigned, although the experiment has not reached the five year mark.

Gary Rubinstein here reports on the ASD’s failure to get anywhere near the goal of “top 25%.”

Although there are regular claims of dramatic progress, Gary has the results of three years of the experiment for the original six schools in the cohort.

Of the six, four are still in the bottom 5%; the other two are in the bottom 6%. Some scores went up, some went down. The strategy of converting schools to charter with…

Campbell Brown is going to help America understand what Common Core really is.

Campbell Brown

So she says as part of her July 28, 2015, interview with Jon Ward of Yahoo! Politics:

What we want to do with Common Core is explain it. Just put honesty and truth back into the debate….

I just published a book on the history, development, and promotion of Common Core, Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools? (TC Press, June 2015), and I have news for Campbell Brown:

Common Core did not begin in “honesty and truth,” and you cannot “put back” what was not present to begin with.

If Common Core was officially completed in June 2010, why would there be confusion in 2015 over what Common Core actually is?

Simple: Common Core is yet another top-down reform; it started years before it made its 2010 public appearance, and much of the planning…

Brian Malone, documentary film-maker, has self-funded a film about the corporate assault on public education.

His film is a MUST-SEE. It is titled EDUCATION, INC.

Malone is a parent of two children in the public schools of Douglas County, Colorado. He documents the well-funded effort to take control of the local school board. Grassroots activists running for school board raised $40,000. Corporate reform privatizers received over $1 million in funding, which they used for a slick propaganda campaign. They won control of the school board and immediately began implementing their plans for vouchers, charters, union-busting, and salary caps for teachers. The exodus of teachers from the district more than doubled. The district paid hired guns (including former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett) to praise its “reforms.” A commissioned study by Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute hailed DougCo as “the most interesting district” in the nation.

Malone crisscrosses the…