Tag Archive | "politics"
In the Set of All Factors, Money Wins
This chart pretty clearly illustrates the correlation between student performance and socio-economic status: I have no interest in defending ineffective teachers, but we also have to talk honestly about what schools can and can’t do to help students. I don’t doubt that the effectiveness of a teacher is the single largest factor in determining a [...]
Continue reading...The Meaning of Independence
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Morgan, Edumnd S. The Meaning of Independence. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1978. I think the brevity of the essays work against the purpose of the text. This is a thin volume, so it wouldn’t be fair for me to criticize it for a lack of depth. That said, I expected this to [...]
Continue reading...Apparently, Rhee lied about that deficit …
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
In the blink of an eye, Rhee’s budget deficit turns into a $34 million surplus. All this book-cooking so Rhee could violate the collective-bargaining agreement and fire 266 teachers at will. Mike Klonsky Here’s the WaPo article.
Continue reading...‘Jeb Bush’s Waterloo’–A Florida teacher speaks out
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Jeb Bush, dreaming about the end of public education: There will be no greater tribute to our maturity as a society than if we can make these buildings around us [public education buildings] empty of workers; as silent monuments to the time when government played a larger role than it deserved or could adequately fill. [...]
Continue reading...It’s All About Privateering
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
The charter movement began as an effort to strengthen public education, but it has turned into a movement to get rid of public sector unions and to turn public schools into private schools funded by public dollars. Obama and Duncan Launch NCLB 2.0
Continue reading...Rhee’s Plan
Sunday, September 20, 2009
I think Brown nails it: Step 1: Hire a lot of Teach For America rookies and people who agree with you. Step 2: Put in place impossible-to-meet standards for teacher performance to make anyone a target for sacking. Step 3: Announce there has been a budget shock and a reduction in force is unavoidable because [...]
Continue reading...Education and Citizenship
Friday, September 18, 2009
Good question: What kind of education would one need to make sense of the current health-care debate? As the U.S. rethinks its academic standards and international competitiveness, this is not a bad time to ask what American citizens, voters, and taxpayers need by way of knowledge and skills to form reasonable conclusions about the hottest [...]
Continue reading...Starve > Criticise > Punish > Privatize > Protest
Thursday, September 17, 2009
I sent this out in abbreviated form on Twitter the other day, but wanted to spell it out a bit and preserve it better here for myself. Here’s the pattern I’ve seen in conservative approaches to public services: 1) starve public services of necessary resources and support (because, you know, taxes are always bad and [...]
Continue reading...Privatization of Public Education
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Diane Ravitch: Is any charter school better than any public school? As we learned from the Stanford CREDO study of charters a few months ago, only 17 percent of charter schools are superior to comparable public schools; the rest were either no better or worse. Yet the Obama administration wants to open up the nation’s [...]
Continue reading...Recent Posts (view all)
-
In the Set of All Factors, Money Wins
This chart pretty clearly illustrates the correlation between student performance and socio-economic status: I have no interest in defending ineffective teachers, but we also have to talk honestly about what schools can and can’t do to help students. I don’t doubt that the effectiveness of a teacher is the single largest factor in determining a [...]
-
The Impermanence of Digital
Simon Winchester, commenting on the fact that the Oxford English Dictionary won’t be reprinted and future editions will only be available in digital formats: The printed book is about to vanish at extraordinary speed … Books are about to vanish; reading is about to expand as a pastime; these are inescapable realities. In practical and environmental [...]
-
It’s Popular because It’s Easy
Marion Brady presents two theories of learning and suggests that the one currently driving reform is based on the notion that learning is all about transferring information from books and teachers into the empty brains of students. No research says how much of what’s recalled at test time remains permanently in memory, nor to what [...]
The content of this site, written by Eric Hoefler, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Monday, August 30, 2010
0 Comments