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Video tutorial on how the stimulus spending works, particularly in regard to special education.

Some may be put off by Superintendant John Kuhn of Texas calling out politicians directly, and flipping the notion of "failure" on its head. But he is right, and his conviction is inspiring.  (See the VIDEO of his speech BELOW.) His points reveal in a timely way an inconvenient truth in education and politics right now. NCLB, Race to the Top, and other policies that use high stakes tests to assign value to students, teachers and administrators do one thing really well: they create an even stronger disincentive for teaching in high needs schools than do the difficult working conditions that have always existed in underresourced schools--the imminent threat of being labelled unacceptable or ineffective by one narrow standradized test given on one day in a year, the results of which correspond more closely nation-wide to socio-economic status than any other factor. They create the same disincentive to learn for such students.

Here's how Salman Khan thinks schools should work: Students should learn lessons online and do homework and projects in class. This "flipping" of the traditional classroom is the operating system espoused by Khan and his Khan Academy, a Web site whose popularity is exploding as millions tune into its free videos, practice exercises and assessment tools.

Video of Diane Ravitch's speech at SOS rally in Washington, DC July 30, 2011

A week ago, a friend shared a video with me of a school superintendent giving a fiery speech at a Save Texas Schools rally. That is how I met the superintendent of Perrin-Whitt School District, John Kuhn.

Anthony Cody recaps the SOS March on Washington July 30, 2011. Includes videos.

"There's an article in this month's Wired Magazine about Khan Academy. The headline speaks volumes - "How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education" - as do the responses I've seen to the article. As usual, there's plenty of praise for Sal Khan and his one-man-educational-video-making machine. But there's also push-back from some quarters, particularly from educators who are highly skeptical of what Khan Academy delivers and what it stands for."

This film and investigation connects the dots and reveals why the Koch brothers are trying to end public education and how their wealth winds up in the hands of Jim Crow. Watch the video, then call David Koch and tell him to stop funding school resegregation now. His number is 212-319-1100. 

MSNBC video. Where are the teachers?

If memory serves, the old TV show Hart to Hart used to begin with the narrator intoning, "And when they met, it was murder." Well, earlier this week AFT honcho Randi Weingarten and I engaged in a hard-hitting but genial debate at the Fordham Institute. Within a couple hours, we experienced the most severe East Coast earthquake in sixty-plus years. A coincidence? You decide. The Oprah-style affair, titled "When Reform Touches Teachers," was adeptly hosted by Fordham's Mike Petrilli. You can catch the video online here or when it shows on C-SPAN.

Kelly Fischer, one of the plaintiffs in a special-education discrimination lawsuit against the state of Louisiana, says last year she was discouraged by a number of charter schools from enrolling her now 10-year-old son Noah, who is blind, autistic and eats from a tube. While charters are free from many of the bureaucratic constraints of traditional districts, such as union contracts and limits on the length of school days, they must follow U.S. antidiscrimination laws, just like other public schools.

Video of remarks at AEI.

The week before schools opened in Miami-Dade County. As teachers scrambled to put last-minute finishing touches on their classrooms and tweak their lesson plans, and pored over their rosters of students (in many cases much longer than last year's), they were stopped cold in their tracks at faculty meetings across the county. Principals, with the aid of a video presentation produced and distributed by the school district, broke the bad news

There is a fierce battle over whether an Achievement First charter school will open in Providence. RI-Can and the other Astroturf groups funded by the Walton Foundation and the hedge fund crowd are pushing hard, promoting the spread of this chain of charter schools. As a public service, we are featuring the eloquent and stirring first-person accounts of two courageous and eloquent NYC parents, May Taliaferrow and Leslie-Ann Byfield, talking about what their children and other children endured at this charter school, known for its strict disciplinary policies and harsh treatment of students with disabilities. For more on Achievement First, see also this NY Post story, and this Facebook page. The following videos, taken by Norman Scott of GEM, are outtakes from the terrific movie, The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman.

As I previously posted in Stand for Children Stands for the Rich and Powerful, Stand for Children (SFC) has proudly declared by way of its' co-founder  and Chief Executive Officer, Jonah Edelman, that he was successful in busting the teachers' union in Chicago and he plans to do that again in the state of Washington. He has led the fight in other states by his own admonition in a video taped session during a seminar at the Aspen Institute, for "pension reform", meaning cutting back on pensions or eliminating them altogether, and a teacher's evaluation based on a student's test scores.

When people like Diane Ravitch talk about the billionaires taking over education policy, they are sometimes dismissed as being alarmist, or even of promoting conspiracy theories. But a recent video details exactly how this has been happening, in the state of Illinois. The video released last week of Jonah Edelman describing how he and his group, Stand For Children, managed to maneuver education "reform" legislation is still reverberating through the education blog world.

It's too bad there is not a transcript of the Aspen video of Stand For Children's Jonah Edelman's presentation. It could be studied in every Local and Region in the IEA. Edelman looks at SB7 as a major victory over the teachers unions. So do I. In fact, he believes it is a model for doing to schools and teachers in other states what they did in Wisconsin, without the mess.

Fred Klonsky blog readers: After watching the fourteen minute excerpt and then viewing the whole video of the hour-long session, I want to very sincerely apologize.

As Lisa Guisbond said, "this is an amazing video from the Aspen Ideas Festival in which Stand For Children's Jonah Edelman explains how he, with the support of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Arne Duncan's senior advisor Jo Anderson (former Executive Director of the IEA) out foxed the CTU, the IFT and the IEA's Ken Swanson and Audrey Soglin into agreeing to Senate Bill 7."

It's not often that we hear education reformers bragging in public about how they got the better of a teacher's union. But in the following remarkable video, Jonah Edelman, co-founder and chief executive officer of the Oregon-based nonprofit education reform organization Stand for Children, talks about how he and his organization maneuvered to get education reform legislation passed in Illinois this year, snookering union officials along the way.