Category Archives: Uncategorized

Howard Blume of The Los Angeles Times has done a remarkable job of reporting about Superintendent John Deasy’s huge problems in managing the school system, the most monumental of them being his decision to borrow from a construction bond issue to buy Apple iPads loaded with Pearson content for every student and staff member at a purported cost of $1.3 billion. Bad enough that he was raiding the bond issue funds for this project, but emails surfaced revealing that Deasy and his assistant Jaime Aquino (a former employee of Pearson) had discussions with both Apple and Pearson about the project before the bidding began. Along the way, we learned that Apple was charging above the market price for the iPads; the price dropped when this came out. The problems associated with this fiasco were unending.

Yet the Los Angeles Times editorial board apparently missed Blume’s excellent reporting. Today they published…

Stephen Dyer, education policy fellow at Innovation Ohio, has analyzed the latest state report cards. The state’s Governor, John Kasich, is pro-charter, pro-voucher, and pro-market forces. He is no friend to public education. The legislature is the same. They want more schools that are privately managed. As we saw in a post yesterday, Ohio has a parent trigger law, and (as I posted yesterday) the State Education Department has hired StudentsFirst (founded by Michelle Rhee) to inform parents in Columbus about their right to convert their low-performing public school to a charter or hand it over to a charter management organization. Given the statistics in this post, the odds are that the parents will turn their low-performing public school into an even lower-performing charter school, with no hope of escape.

Yet when the state report cards came out, public schools overwhelmingly received higher grades than charter schools. Dyer explains in…

From reader Chiara:

This is absolutely amazing. [Ed: read the story in the link]

The Ohio Department of Education has chosen a lobbying group. StudentsFirst, to direct efforts to “inform” parents on whether to turn over a bunch of public schools to private contractors under the Parent Trigger:

“Columbus Superintendent Dan Good said yesterday that the district is working to understand all the nuances of the law. On Tuesday, the school board is to hear a presentation by the Education Department and StudentsFirst, the group that the department chose to inform and organize parents”

Rules released by the department yesterday refer to StudentsFirst as a “neutral third party,” but Columbus Education Association President Tracey Johnson said the group is not neutral; it’s a school-reform lobbying organization.”

This is ridiculous. Our state Department of Education is completely captured by lobbyists.

They’re a joke. I resent paying these people. I think StudentsFirst…

The Peter Parker/Spider-Man myth—like most in the ever-reshaping and rebooting world of comic book superheroes—has spun a slightly inaccurate but powerful catch-phrase around Peter’s Uncle Ben: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

The original wording—“AND A LEAN, SILENT FIGURE SLOWLY FADES INTO THE GATHERING DARKNESS, AWARE AT LAST THAT IN THIS WORLD, WITH GREAT POWER THERE MUST ALSO COME —  GREAT RESPONSIBILITY!”—was not spoken by Uncle Ben, in fact, but by the narrative’s omniscient narrator penned by Stan Lee:

August 1962, Vol. 1, #15 Amazing Fantasy, Marvel Comics

And for Peter Parker, this truism, however phrased, reveals his ongoing battle with the responsibility inherent in his acquiring super powers, complicated by that occurring without his choice. The world of Peter Parker/Spider-Man has been manipulated in the Marvel Universe (even literally) as an internal battle between that responsibility and Parker’s own personal desires (personified often as love interests such as Gwen…

Bob Braun has been writing about the abusiveness and insensitivity of Cami Anderson’s “One Newark” plan. He has written that it has disrupted the lives of children and families, with no goal other than to sweep away neighborhood schools and impose charter schools. Newark has been under state control for nearly 20 years. In short, the people of Newark have had no say in the governance of their city’s schools, and now Chris Christie and Cami Anderson have decided to turn them over to private management.

Braun reports that the real heroes in this struggle for democracy are the high school students of Newark. While most of the adults seemed resigned and ready to bow to authority, the high school students went into the streets to protest. A group of them chained themselves together, sat down in the city’s main thoroughfare, and blocked traffic. The newly elected Mayor Ras Baraka…

Diane Ravitch expresses more in two sentences than most people can state in two chapters.

In the October issue of Harper’s Magazine a cover story, “PBS Self-Destructs: and what it means to viewers like you” by Eugenia Williamson, describes the full history of the takeover of Public Broadcasting by the Koch Brothers, Bloomberg, the Gates Foundation and other billionaire owned and controlled corporations and their tax-free foundations.

Diane Ravitch was asked about the lack of even-handed news coverage regarding the so-called education reform movement, in particular PBS coverage of charter schools which are invested in by these same billionaires and their tax-free foundations. (Yes, these tax-free foundations all have hedge funds and investments that make enormous profits that stay within the foundations. The appointed or board elected officers and trustees are paid enormous amounts of money and other compensation.)

“‘We’ve had public schools since the 1820’s,’ Ravitch added, ‘and we’ve…

Beverley Holden Johns, a nationally recognized expert in the field of disabilities, strongly disagrees with Arne Duncan. Duncan wants children with disabilities to be able to perform on the highest level of NAEP tests. She points out that NAEP was not designed for this purpose. Duncan unilaterally changed the requirements of the IDEA act, without Congressional authorization. Having changed NCLB without Congressional authorization, he must think that ignoring the law is routine. In Néw York, we learned how students with disabilities do when they took the Common Core test: 95% failed.

Beverley Holden Johns writes:

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NCLB required all students to be proficient on State tests by 2014.

Failure of the public schools to reach that goal has been widely
viewed as the failure of public education, requiring movement
to Charter Schools and even increasing the talk of Vouchers in the name of Choice.

Now Arne Duncan seeks to require…

Mercedes Schneider decided to analyze how the conservative journal “Ednext” gauges public opinion about one of its favorite reforms, charter schools.

She reviews the wording of the questions asked over several years.

She notes that Ednext never mentions charter school scandals, which are a hot topic in states like Michigan, Ohio, and Forida.

“There’s a lot of unregulated money to be made in “school choice”– so much so that the FBI is conducting investigations nationwide on criminal behavior rampant in America’s charter schools.

“That the gross negligence of states to regulate “choice” has yielded fertile ground for criminal activity appears to have escaped any survey question posed by EdNext.

“The hidden component of “choice” is the systematic dissolution of the traditional, local-school-board-run public school system. Indeed, EdNext is a corporate-reform-promoting nest that is especially fond of defunding traditional public education via under-regulated charter schools.”

She wonders about the wording of…

You may recall that Michelle Rhee promised that she would produce miracles in Washington DC’s public schools if she got the money from various foundations and the freedom to fire teachers as she pleased.

She and her hand-picked acolyte and successor, Kaya Henderson, certainly received all the money they asked for, and they stripped DCPS teachers of almost all protections from random firing.

But did those achievement gains actually work?

I’ll let you decide, by first letting you see the spreadsheet where Rhee et al. promised, in writing, what they would accomplish. Here is thelink to the original, so you can see I’m not making this up. It’s on page 22.

That’s a lot of promises!!

Notice the very last goal: for DCPS to be in the top half of all urban districts whose scores are included in something called the NAEP TUDA by 2012-13. (National Assessment of…

Billionaire Bill Gates funds the media.

This is no surprise to me.

What did surprise me is the discovery that he meets with the media he funds (and others) regularly behind closed doors.

Yep.

Gates Briefs a Media He Pays For (And Then Some)

In February 2013, journalist Tom Paulson wrote a piece on Gates’ private meetings with the media he funds. Paulson was not invited.

Notice some of the names:

I (Paulson) wasn’t actually allowed behind the scenes at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s recent meeting in Seattle entitled “Strategic Media Partnerships.”

The Gates Foundation funds a lot of media – more than $25 million in media grants for 2012 (but still less than 1% of the budget). 

I’m media but I wasn’t invited. I asked if I could come and report on it, but was told the meeting was off the record. Those attending…