Education Links

"Where can 12 billionaires turn if they want education laws changed? That's right, their checkbooks. Between late September and Election Day, a dozen hedge funders donated a combined $4.4 million to New York State politics, mainly to ensure that Governor Andrew Cuomo and his slimy associates will help publicly-funded, privately-run charter schools seep deeper into the state. Led by the likes Paul Tudor Jones II, who recently hosted an education "summit" featuring Cuomo and other corpses, the billionaires see charters as investment windfalls. After all, those pesky teachers unions and their due process rights won't be around to challenge every test and technology tonic sold to New York's taxpayers once the metastasis of charters quickens. "

"If you're a public school teacher in Kentucky, the state has a message for you: You have no right to know the details of the investments being made with your retirement savings. That was the crux of the declaration issued by state officials to a high school history teacher when he asked to see the terms of the agreements between the Kentucky Teachers' Retirement System and the Wall Street firms that are managing the system's money on behalf of him, his colleagues and thousands of retirees."

"Plans are under way for investment corporations to execute the biggest conversion - some call it theft - of public schools property in U.S. history. That is not hyperbole. Investment bankers themselves estimate that their taking over public schools is going to result in hundreds of billions of dollars in profit, if they can pull it off."

"The underlying conservative foundation of the charter school movement today has resulted in a variety of deep tensions linked to questions of racism and education, particularly with respect to the education of working-class students of color."

"Friday, a column in the New York Times cited research in genetic markers associated with resilience to advance what I believe would lead to the practice of Eugenics in our schools. Eugenics was quite popular in the 1920s. The basic idea was that society would benefit by encouraging reproduction of those most genetically "fit, and actively discouraging those determined to be unfit. The project was discredited when it became the foundation of Hitler's racist program to establish the "master race.""

"President Barack Obama pretends to be a friend of public education, but it just is not so. Sure, the White House offers a decorative promotional on K12 education; however, if one reads it closely, one sees that the Obama administration believes education (and, by extension, those educated) should serve the economy; that "higher standards and better assessments" and "turning around our lowest achieving schools" is No Child Left Behind (NCLB) leftover casserole, and that "keeping teachers in the classroom" can only elicit prolonged stares from those of us who know better. All of these anti-public-education truths noted, the deeper story in what the Obama administration values regarding American education lay in its selection of US Department of Education (USDOE) appointees. Their backgrounds tell the story, and it isn't a good one for the public school student, the community school and the career K12 teacher. In this post, I examine the backgrounds and priorities of eight key USDOE appointees. "

"The same billionaires who just bought the New York State Senate now want to own public education. It's starve, test, and destroy."

"The question that comes to mind is: "If these officials really cared about data, wouldn't they make sure that the data they are using to drive their decisions is accurate?" And this then leads me to a whole series of similar questions about the mighty agents of reform that are disrupting and transforming our schools from coast to coast and beyond. To be clear, the proponents of reform I am describing include the Gates Foundation, the Federal Department of Education, and their allies and grant recipients around the nation."

"Our district data coordinator, who is my assistant principal, brought me the SIRS report. It claimed that only 80 percent of our students from the cohort of 2008 (Class of 2012) were enrolled in college.   As soon as I saw the number, I knew it was not correct. Ninety-eight percent of the 2012 Class told us they were going to college and gave us the name of the college they would attend. Might some have left after one semester, or changed their minds? It's possible. But I found it difficult to believe that 18 percent had either not enrolled or quickly dropped out."

"This is the executive summary of the statement of the American Statistical Association on the use of value-added assessment to evaluate teachers. Please share it with other teachers, with principals, and school board members. Please share it with your legislators and other elected officials. Send it to your local news outlets. The words are clear: Teachers account for between 1 and 14% of the variation in test scores. And this is very important to remember: "Ranking teachers by their VAM scores can have unintended consequences that reduce quality.""

"Education policymakers have successfully framed the language of modern school reform to reflect specific values - "accountability," for example, means standardized test-based accountability, and "no excuses" means that teachers are to blame if students don't do well. The author of the following post argues that to move past this limiting reform model supporters of public education will have to reframe the debate with language that infuses their own values of shared responsibility and empathy.  This was written by Arthur H. Camins, director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J."

"...on October 20, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) unveiled a draconian proposal that would tie teacher performance, narrowly defined, to teacher licensing. Thousands of educators knew an unmitigated attack when they saw one, and responded accordingly."

"David Callahan wrote an insightful article in "Inside Philanthropy" about something that most of us have noticed: the growing power of foundations that use their money to impose their ideas and bypass democratic institutions. In effect, mega-foundations like Gates and Walton use their vast wealth to short circuit democracy."

"Over the last ten years, I have worked as a certified English teacher in a high school in Long Island, New York, a suburb of New York City.  I am in my seventeenth year working in public education.  I have taught various courses in four different school districts on Long Island that range from grades six to twelve.  Children and adolescents, whether they are school shooters or gangbangers, do not become violent without cause.  None of them were born violent. I tend to connect the rise in school violence in my suburban school district, 95% of which is African American and Hispanic, to the recent economic downturn and education policy insidiously devoted to teacher, principal and school evaluations tied to standardized testing of students.  These students have been exposed to school curriculum, said testing, and "raised" standards (Common Core) conceived by politicians, economists and billionaires, not professional and long-time education practitioners who would know much, much better how to make our public schools the envy of the world (again).  They have also been victimized by inflexible "zero tolerance" policies with mandatory minimum suspension periods, as well as increased in-school surveillance and security measures that prepare chocolate and caramel students much more for the realities of prison than they do a safe existence."

"Achievement gaps have also, however, taken on a very different role over the past 10 or so years. The sizes of gaps, and extent of "gap closing," are routinely used by reporters and advocates to judge the performance of schools, school districts, and states. In addition, gaps and gap trends are employed directly in formal accountability systems (e.g., states' school grading systems), in which they are conceptualized as performance measures. Although simple measures of the magnitude of or changes in achievement gaps are potentially very useful in several different contexts, they are poor gauges of school performance, and shouldn't be the basis for high-stakes rewards and punishments in any accountability system. Let's take a quick look at four problems with using gaps in the latter context."

"Improving education is not simple because the human beings who inhabit schools, their relationship with one another and the social system in which they live are complex and varied. While simple solutions to complex problems always fall short, the elements of effective systemic solutions in education are not so hard to imagine. In fact, they are well known."

"This is a GIF-loaded adaption of Giroux, H.A. (2012) "In Defense of Public School Teachers in a Time of Crisis in Education and the Crisis of Public Values" in Challenging the Assault on Teachers, Students, and Public Education. New York: Peter Lang Publishing."

"Dani Lea, a sophomore at Vanderbilt University, believes that Teach for America (TFA) teachers in her high school in Charlotte, North Carolina, were detrimental to her learning experience and for those around her. Lea claimed that her principal didn't even know which teachers were members of TFA and which weren't. Upon hearing this, TFA co-CEO Matthew Kramer said, "That's not our lived experience." Lea responded, "That was my lived experience.""

"The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel obituary on longtime state legislator Annette Polly Williams portrayed her as the "mother of school choice," who made common cause with conservatives to create this program. The story completely left out her change of heart - her increasing disenchantment with the school voucher movement."

"A few weeks ago, the Minneapolis Star Tribune published teacher evaluation results for the district's public school teachers in 2013-14. This decision generated a fair amount of controversy, but it's worth noting that the Tribune, unlike the Los Angeles Times and New York City newspapers a few years ago, did not publish scores for individual teachers, only totals by school. The data once again provide an opportunity to take a look at how results vary by student characteristics. This was indeed the focus of the Tribune's story, which included the following headline: "Minneapolis' worst teachers are in the poorest schools, data show." These types of conclusions, which simply take the results of new evaluations at face value, have characterized the discussion since the first new systems came online. Though understandable, they are also frustrating and a potential impediment to the policy process."