Category Archives: Uncategorized

This teacher blogger has compiled a list of some of the most recent charter school scandals. It is not an exhaustive list; the scandals just keep coming. [For a more exhaustive summary, go to “charter school scandals,” a website maintained by Oakland, California, parent activist Sharon Higgins (with no subsidy from corporations,foundations, unions or anyone else.)

This teacher blogger memorably writes:

As I see it, “corporate” is to “education” as “cigarette manufacturer” is to “public health and well-being.

And then on to recent scandals, like charter schools inflating enrollment to pad their payments by the state.

He finds:

In other words, with stunning regularity, corporate education boiled down to one simple word. And that word was: Greed.

Why is anyone really surprised?

Many of us have written, for example, about the giant cesspool that is the for-profit college industry. It’s a great gig, after all, when five top…

There are times when a teacher needs to have the facts, simple or complex. For complex information, very often there are multiple facets that need to be examined from different points of view. Who can you turn to when faced with the overwhelming problems that surround you? Who has no personal power base or money to gain from the information? What group of people will offer you unbiased facts and their experienced perspectives for you to consider?

The EduBloggersNetwork, a group of over 200 individual bloggers with solid education backgrounds and unique perspectives from schools across the country, are respected for their varied experiences and focus. They do not march in lock-step nor are they paid by billionaires and their tax-free mega-wealthy foundations which are heavily invested (for profit) in corporate education reform.

During one of the online conversations that questioned each blogger’s reasoning for blogging in support of…

Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, is one of the few high-level policy thinkers who have noticed the attacks on public education. His concern is mainly with the rip-offs in for-profit institutions of higher education, which impoverish students and saddle them with debt.

But he does know that teachers are being scapegoated.

“Reich: Undoubtedly. Teachers have been scapegoated by those who don’t want to invest more in education. Who don’t want change. Who are personally happy with the status quo but feel that because the public is so unhappy with education, it’s easiest to scapegoat teachers. The fact of the matter is teachers are underpaid relative to other professions. The law of supply and demand in terms of wages is not repealed at the doors of our school houses. We are paying investment bankers and Wall Street traders, the people who are in charge of our financial capital, hundreds…

The Delaware Department of Justice recently answered a complaint surrounding a FOIA I submitted to the Delaware Department of Education on March 6th, 2015.  This FOIA asked for the following:

“– the Delaware Department of Education’s contracts (whether they are awarded contracts, cooperative contracts, set aside contracts, sole source contracts, or recently closed contracts, including any and all RFPs, addendums, award letters, and change orders) agreements, pacts, communications (whether in email or written correspondence, email should be in To: formats and cc: formats between any DOE employee with the below companies or consortiums) with the following companies or consortiums: American Institutes for Research (or if they are listed under AIR or Amer Institutes for Research), Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (or if they are listed under SBAC, SB, Smarter, Smarter Balanced, or Smarter Balanced Assessment), and Data Recognition Corporation. If available, I ask that this information be provided in a PDF…

You can download this e-book today. It is free today only. It was written by a Florida teacher using a pseudonym.

“This book is a way for me to come to some sense of understanding with the testing culture. I think parents, teachers, and students will relate to the experience of the characters in the book. It fully depicts the scenario of an opt out student and I wrote it geared to young adults (6th to 12th grade).

“Synopsis: In the story, a favorite teacher, Ms. Sandy, gets fed up during a state test and walks out of her classroom and career forever. The readers follow along with the students and fellow teachers as they try to make sense of Ms. Sandy’s actions, and as they discover her secret: she is a badass teacher with a ton of important information about testing. In the end, the community comes together to…

The College Board, which sponsors the SAT, is data mining students and selling their data.

This is unbelievable. Students think they are taking a college admissions test, nothing more. Are they asked to grant permission to sell their data?

Today I read a May 2014 post, Charter Schools’ Memory Hole, written by Adam Hubbard Johnson.

His piece opens as follows:

Pre-Katrina New Orleans graduation numbers are charter school advocates’ exhibit A for reform. One problem: The U.S. and Louisiana Departments of Education say they don’t exist.

What Johnson attempted to do was track the supposed pre-Katrina New Orleans graduation rate of 54.4% to a primary source by contacting those who have cited this stat, including NOLA.com reporter Danielle Dreilinger and former state board member Leslie Jacobs.

Even the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) communicated to him that they did not have “published graduation rates” that went back that far (Johnson asked for 2002-04).

No primary source available.

Well. I have some graduation data on Orleans Parish pre-Katrina, and it comes from LDOE data.

Here is the process that I followed:

In his post, Johnson noted that the url for…

The U.S. Department of Education has threatened to withhold funding from the state of Oregon if a bill passes allowing parents to opt out of Common Core testing.

“PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — The U.S. Department of Education has sent the state of Oregon a letter, threatening to pull federal funding if Oregon lawmakers pass a bill making it easier for parents to opt out their children from standardized tests.

“The state could lose more than $140-million a year if the bill passes, maybe up to $325-million. Representative Lew Frederick is a supporter of the bill. He says losing funding has always been a thought but he tells KOIN 6 News, Oregon isn’t the only state fighting standardized testing.

“The bill doesn’t say get rid of the test.” said Frederick. “The bill says simply, here is a procedure for opting out of the test if parents come forward and want to…

Christina Duncan Evans argues that the high-stakes testing opt-out movement “ignores a major function of testing,” which she identifies as: “A major reason we use standardized tests is to make the case that there’s large-scale educational injustice in our nation.”

As an advocate for educational equity and social justice, Evans explains:

States don’t have a very good track record of providing equitable access to education to all of their students, and the federal government should ensure that American school quality is consistent. This has made me an advocate of standardized testing, following the logic that we can’t solve achievement gaps unless we measure them first.

Before examining this commitment to standardized testing (also found among civil rights organizations), I want to highlight that public education and state government have had a long history, continuing today, of failing miserably black, brown, and poor children and adults.

The evidence of lingering…