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Gary Rubinstein was one of the earliest recruits to Teach for America. He was a corps members in Houston, class of 1991. Since then, he has become a high school math teacher in New York City and a persistent critic of TFA.

His major criticism of the organization is that it recruits smart, idealistic young people and gives them inadequate training for the challenges they will face. He is also not pleased with TFA’s alignment with the Corporate Reform machine that is devoted to destroying and privatizing public education.

In this post, he gives advice to new members of TFA in Houston. He watches videos in which they present their thoughts. He hears too much of the TFA can’t about how they have arrived to save poor children from lazy veteran teachers and a broken system. He knows they are being set up for failure. They don’t know it yet…

Have you every wondered what “Race to the Top” was supposed to accomplish? Did it mean that we would be first in the world if we opened more privately managed charter schools, closed down more public schools (especially in Black and Brown communities), evaluated all teachers by test scores, and adopted the Common Core standards? If so, that clearly didn’t happen. Did it mean that the states who followed Arne Duncan’s instructions most faithfully would surge to the top of the NAEP tables? That didn’t happen either.

Be it noted that a “Race to the Top” is a bizarre metaphor for education in a democratic society. In any race, only a few reach the top, while most are left behind in the dust. That would seem to be a repudiation of the principle of equality of educational opportunity. For sure, it throws the goal of equity away.

For those who…

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s children will attend the private University of Chicago Lab School, where his wife works.

Of course, everyone is free to send their children wherever they wish. What’s interesting about Duncan choosing this school is that it does not practice any of the policies that Duncan has promulgated. It is a progressive school, founded by John Dewey. No Common Core. No evaluation of teachers by test scores. No performance pay.

Duncan attended the prestigious University of Chicago Lab School. The teachers are unionized. President Obama sent his daughters there. Mayor Rahm Emanuel sends his children there.

Julie Vassilatos, a parent activist in Chicago, notes that Duncan has chosen a school that is free of any of Duncan’s influence. This is how she describes the Lab School:

Lab is an excellent, well-resourced private school with a rich arts curriculum, small classes, entire rooms devoted to holding musical…

Search no further than this article, “Ed Reform Experts Descend on Detroit,” to find the root issue with the so-called “ed reform” movement.

Who are these so-called educational “experts” pointed to in the headline? (And why do business leaders get the title of “expert,” while actual educational scholars are marginalized?) Upon just a little bit of research, it turns out their background is not in education, it is, surprise, in business.

Michael Petrelli is the CEO of The Fordham Institute, a right-wing, pro-charter think tank.  His background is business, not education.

Eric Chan is, as he describes himself in the article, “an investor.” He runs charter investment growth fund and has an MBA from Harvard. No educational background other than seeing education as a means of making money.

Why are these business leaders called educational “experts” in one of Michigan’s most prominent newspapers?

Actual educational expert and scholar Paul Thomas…

Bob Shepherd, a frequent commentator (I love his writing and wish he would write more often for the blog) had this to say about teaching:

For many years, I held various jobs as a publishing executive (in later years at very high levels). I thought that I worked very, very hard.

Then I returned to teaching.

Everything I did before was a vacation by comparison.

Teaching is relentless in its demands on one’s time and energy. I came to school this year and found that I had 190 students, 3 minutes between classes, no prep period on half my days, car line duty in the morning, 20 minutes for lunch, two extracurricular activities to coach (including plays to produce), administrative meetings one day a week after school, 20 detailed lesson plans to prepare each week (specifying the class, period, standards covered, lesson objectives, assessments used, bellwork, vocabulary covered, and ESOL…

Carol Burris, veteran principal of South Side High School in Rockville Center, Long Island, Néw York, retired this week, to the tears of students, parents, and staff. In this article, part of a blog debate at The Hechinger Report, she explains her negative view of Common Core.

She opposes the use of test scores to evaluate teachers, and she cites what is known as Campbell’s Law:

“When test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways.”

VAM is so unreliable that the Hillsborough Teacher of the Year in 2014 received a negative rating!

The Common Core is an integral part of a failed national strategy, she writes:

“Now back to the Common Core. I am not sure what you mean when you say that I “personified” the standards and that I…

A principal sent this account of a teacher’s experience to me:

“Common Core Training for ENCORE Teachers

“(ENCORE = subjects like Health, Physical Education, Art, Music, Technology, Home & Careers)

“The ENCORE subjects were assigned a period to meet with a Common Core Specialist. We were told to bring a sample lesson or activity that we use in class.

“I presented a project that I use at the end of my Violence Prevention Unit. This project allows students to research and bring in any article that interests them about Bullying. The article could represent facts about bullying, prevention tips, victim accounts or any other related material. The article could be from a magazine, a newspaper or an on-line source. Students then are asked to answer 5 questions based on the article they chose.

1. Summarize the Article

2. Personal Reaction to The Article

3. Victim’s Reaction – if you were…

Jonathan Pelto writes about this curious conundrum: Connecticut’s charter schools want more public money, but they object to public accountability. Their motto seems to be: give us money and get out of our way. In other states, like Néw York, charter operators have gone to court to block public audits of public funds (“trust us”).

In Connecticut, as Sarah Darer Littman wrote in a column Pelto quotes, charters testify before the Legislature that they should be excused from complying with Freedom of Information requests because it is burdensome. And their spokesman testified that they should not have to complete background tests on employees. They are in a hurry and can’t be expected to wait to find out if their new hires have criminal backgrounds.

Charter schools are special. Rules and regulations and state laws are for public schools, not for charter schools.

Didn’t Leona Helmsley, the billionaire queen of mean…

Emily Talmage of Save Maine Schools says goodby (and don’t come back) to the federally-funded Common Core assessments called SBAC (Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium).

It is not a fond farewell.

She writes:

“SBAC, you will not be missed – but rest assured that we will not forget you.

“We will not forget how many hours you took from children so that they could take part in your failed testing experiment.

“We will not forget the way you set our children up to fail – confusing them with strange, multi-part directions that even adults could not decipher; giving them reading passages written for students well beyond their grade level; requiring them to manipulate complicated computer interfaces to answer your questions…

“We will not forget how hard some parents had to fight to protect their children from your nonsense.

“We will not forget the way you hid your profit-seeking makers behind non-profit…

Ohio is a happy state for the for-profit charter industry. They make huge profits regardless of school performance.

Stephen Dyer reminds us of the great financial success of David Brennan of White Hat, the state’s largest charter chain.

“Now we know what White Hat Management is all about. There was always a pretty strong indication that White Hat was about making money, not educating children.

“After all, when you get exactly 1 A on a state report card and have 72 opportunities to get an A, you’re probably not in the game for the same reasons most educators are.

“When you’ve collected more than $1 billion in taxpayer money without having to make a single appearance before a legislative committee, as White Hat founder David Brennan has been able to do, you’re probably not in the game for the same reasons most educators are.

“When you contribute more than $4…