Education Links

"A conservative billionaire who opposes government meddling in business has bought a rare commodity: the right to interfere in faculty hiring at a publicly funded university. A foundation bankrolled by Libertarian businessman Charles G. Koch has pledged $1.5 million for positions in Florida State University's economics department. In return, his representatives get to screen and sign off on any hires for a new program promoting "political economy and free enterprise.""

"Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker continues to court national support for an extreme agenda of attacking public employees and public services while diminishing local democracy and shifting public money to private political allies. Despite the fact that Walker's moves have been widely condemned in his home state, the hyper-ambitious career politician has repeatedly suggested that he will not moderate his positions because he wants to shift the tenor of politics and policymaking far beyond Wisconsin."

"New Jersey's Acting Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf, while testifying before the State Senate Budget Committee on Monday, May 9, 2011, told Senator Barbara Buono that the New Jersey electorate should not have the opportunity to vote for Charter Schools or the monetary appropriations that support them. Senator Buono remarked that, given that charter schools are funded with public dollars, the decision to provide such funding should be made by taxpayers."

"...I worry about the one-sided treatment of education issues, not only in Rhode Island, but in the national media. The corporate reformers seem shocked when anyone questions their narrative. They see no downside to their dogmatic belief in closing schools and firing principals and teachers, nor to their dogmatic faith that higher test scores are the goal of education. They accuse critics of "defending the status quo," even though it is they who are the status quo, the champions of get-tough accountability. They don't understand that they might be wrong, that their critics deserve a hearing, and that disagreement is healthy..."

"During the recent debates over public employees' collective bargaining rights, especially around the Wisconsin protests, I heard a few people argue that Republican governors are intent on destroying public sector unions, at least in part, because union members are more likely to vote - and to vote Democratic."

"School safety depends far less on the poverty and crime surrounding the campus than on the academic achievement of its students and their relationships with adults in the building, according to a new study of Chicago public schools."

"It's deja vu all over again with the Los Angeles Times and its value-added scores that supposedly tell us how effective are the teachers in the nation's second-largest school system."

"Three years ago, in a New York Times article detailing her bid to become head of the American Federation of Teachers union, Randi Weingarten boasted that despite my calls for "radical reform" to New York City's school system, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and I had achieved only "incremental" change. It seemed like a strange thing to crow about, but she did have something of a point. New York over the past nine years has experienced what Robert Schwartz, the dean of Harvard's education school, has described as "the most dramatic and thoughtful set of large-scale reforms going on anywhere in the country," resulting in gains such as a nearly 20-point jump in graduation rates. But the city's school system is still not remotely where it needs to be. "

"If the former DC schools Chancellor, Michelle Rhee intends to reform education, the last people she would be aligning herself with would be governors Scott Walker and Tom Corbett, right? Yet that is exactly who she will be speaking along side at The American Federation for Children Annual Policy Conference, Monday May 9th, in Washington D.C."

"This was written by John Ewing, president of Math for America, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving mathematics education in U.S. public high schools by recruiting, training and retaining great teachers. This article originally appeared in the May Notices of the American Mathematics Society. It gives a comprehensive look at the history, current use and problems with the value-added model of assessing teachers. It is long but well worth your time."

"New York City high schools have been crazy for the 22 years of my employment as a school social worker. But recently, the convergence of No Child Left Behind, the continuing economic meltdown and "managerial fetishism" have plunged them to new depths of absurdity, despair and destruction of human potential. (Being open-mined and un-doctrinaire, I picked up the term "managerial fetishism" from an op ed by John Podhoretz in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, which is happily provided free at school to enrich everyone's intellectual development.)"

"Education historian and outspoken education policy analyst Diane Ravitch joined her Education Week blogging partner Deborah Meier, who is recognized as a leading advocate for personalized and intellectually-challenging schools for "Bridging Differences Live" on April 27, 2011 at Indiana University. Presented by the IU School of Education and the Meier Institute at Harmony Education Center in Bloomington, the event was a moderated discussion hosted by IU School of Education Communications and Media Relations Director Chuck Carney."

"The decades-long campaign to end public education is propelled by the super-wealthy, right-wing DeVos family. Betsy Prince DeVos is the sister of Erik Prince, founder of the notorious private military contractor Blackwater USA (now Xe), and wife of Dick DeVos, son of the co-founder of Amway, the multi-tiered home products business."

"...There is no empathy emergency because empathy is not valued in our culture today, which Harvard-based physician-researcher J. Wes Ulm describes in his 2010 essay for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, "Cache of the Cutthroat"..."