Category Archives: Uncategorized

The school board in Burbank, California, is close to hiring Matthew Hill as its next superintendent. Hill currently works for the Los Angeles Unified School District, where he oversaw two disastrous technology programs: the $1 billion iPad fiasco, which was canceled after disclosure of emails showing possible collusion with Apple and Pearson; and the botched MISIS student tracking system, which left thousands of students without schedules.

Hill has never been a teacher or a principal. He is a graduate of the unaccredited Broad Academy, founded by billionaire Eli Broad. Its graduates are known for an autocratic management style and are taught to bring business methods to schools. Many have been ousted by angry parents.

There will be an informational public session this afternoon with Hill, where the public may ask questions.

Sara Stevenson, librarian at O. Henry Middle School in Austin and a member of the honor roll of this blog, is a relentless thinker and doer. She writes frequently to set the record straight when rightwing ideologues and reformers attack public education. In this post, she questions the rationale behind voucher legislation in Texas, which comes back session after session, a true zombie. Texas is a conservative state, for sure, but every time the subject of vouchers has come up, it has been beaten back by a coalition of rural representatives, mostly Republicans, who value their hometown schools, and urban representatives, mostly Democrats, who don’t want to drain money away from their underfunded public schools. The voucher proponents are back, and Stevenson says it is time to stop them again.

She writes:

Even though this latest version states that eligible students must
have attended a public school the previous year…

Mercedes Schneider has been reading the Senate bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (also known as No Child Left Behind). She has been reading it line by line. This is the fourth of five installments.

Mercedes finds that the statutory language is extremely supportive of “public” charter schools, which are public when they want the money but not “public” when it is time for an audit or accountability. The bill makes a few suggestions of reform, but none is strong enough to rein in the scandals that clutter the charter industry. If anything, the embrace of privately managed charters by Democrats shows the party’s abandonment of public education. We expect Republicans to advocate for school choice, but now Democrats are on the same side.

For the last few weeks, occasionally, the phone rings, and the call ends up being for one of the candidates running in a special election in California’s State Senate District 7 (where I live) that will be held on May 19.  There are two candidates in this runoff election, and both are Democrats, but I think one of them is a corporate loving, teacher bashing, union hating, corporate reformer pretending to be something he isn’t.

The two candidates are Steve Glazer and Susan Bonilla. Bonilla is in the state legislature and identities herself as an educator. Campaign literature for Glazer claims he is a mayor and a university trustee.

The phone rang a few days ago, and I ended up talking to someone working in Glazer’s campaign, who claimed this was a dirty campaign and inferred that Bonilla was responsible for the dirt and lies. Then this guy went…

Steve Nelson wrote a powerful case for opting out from state testing.

“”Opt-out” may be the most important political movement of this generation. It may seem, at first glance, a small ripple in the education reform debate — an understandable reaction to the frustration over increased testing and test-prep in America’s schools. I suggest that it is much more important than meets the eye.

That “first glance” is important in its own right. There is no reasonable argument in support of the tedious, stressful mess that education reform has made of the nation’s schools. Even within its own circular, self-fulfilling paradigm, the testing and accountability era has been a dismal failure. Test scores are essentially meaningless as a measure of real learning, but even by this empty standard, no progress is evident. For this analysis, let us just stipulate that it has not even achieved the limited objectives on which…

Joanne Yatvin, former teacher, principal and superintendent and literacy expert in Oregon, sent me the following email after reading the story in the New York Times about Success Academy and its regimented environment, focused on test scores:

Diane,

I read the New York Times article on the Success Academies around the same time that you did and came away shivering for the children who are being “educated” there. Here is my take on what those charters actually teach.

In my career as a teacher and principal I came to know a great deal about what children learn at school. It’s not only academics and proper school behavior, but also how to operate in personal relationships and the outside world. Reading the New York Times article about the Success Academy Charter Schools earlier this week, I saw some pretty tough demands being made of all kids and humiliating consequences for those…

This is my third post on contents of the Alexander-Murray, Senate reauthorization draft of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) scheduled to be presented to the Senate education committee on April 14, 2015.

(The first post is here, and the second, here.)

Alexander and Murray call their 601-page draft, Every Child Achieves Act of 2015.

This ESEA reauthorization draft is not light reading; however, I am trying to produce a digest that is as easy to “digest” as is possible.

Let us abruptly dive in from this legislative precipice from the point at which I ended my second installment: ESEA funding for eligible private school students.

Page 162: Private schools can receive funding for eligible students (see my second, April 9, 2015, post for categories of eligible students). The Alexander-Murray draft stipulates that the ESEA funding allotted for children attending private school must proportionally equal…

Civil rights groups, led by Kati Hatcock of Education Trust, assert that standardized testing is a civil right. Without it, they say, black and brown children would be overlooked, neglected, forgotten. No one would know about the achievement gaps.

Of course, we do know about the achievement gaps in the nation, states and major cities whose NAEP scores are reported every other year. It is not necessary to test every child every year to report what is already known.

Nonetheless:

““Removing the requirement for annual testing would be a devastating step backward, for it is very hard to make sure our education system is serving every child well when we don’t have reliable, comparable achievement data on every child every year,” Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, said in recent testimony before the Senate education panel. Her group joined 20 civil rights organizations to lobby Congress to keep the…

Of course, this all began with a bombshell announcement from the Reagan administration: A Nation at Risk.

So it started with a lie.

As governor of Texas, George W. Bush, and superintendent of education, Rod Paige, the Texas “miracle” led to the presidency of the U.S. and Secretary of Education.

But it was all a lie.

While Secretary of Education following Paige, Margaret Spellings proclaimed the federal legislation, NCLB, modeled on the Texas “miracle” a success.

But that too was a lie.

As the founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone, Geoffrey Canada was lionized as “Superman.”

But it was at best half-truth, if not a lie.

Creating a culture of fear herself, Michelle Rhee turned her role as Chancellor of DC public schools into a glorifying Time cover and story.

But it was all a lie, built on cheating no less.

Arne Duncan, credited with the Chicago “miracle”—see the Paige…

Pasi Sahlberg, the great Finnish educator who is teaching this year at Harvard Graduate School of Education, wrote recently to explain how Finnish universities select future teachers.

Finnish universities are famously selective,accepting only 10% of the high school graduates who want to become teachers. But how do they select? Sahlberg’s very bright niece was turned down when she first applied.

So what is the selection process?

Sahlberg writes:

“Who exactly are those who were chosen to become primary teachers in Finland ahead of my niece? Let’s take closer look at the academic profile of the first-year cohort selected at the University of Helsinki. The entrance test has two phases. All students must first take a national written test. The best performers in this are invited on to the second phase, to take the university’s specific aptitude test. At the University of Helsinki, 60% of the accepted 120 students were selected…