The same day that the Globe was telling the story of 50 Harvard doctoral students protesting the takeover of the Graduate School of Education by technocrats, economists, and other corporate water carriers for the Oligarchs, the School warmly welcomed the nation’s most morbidly obese bully governor to belch his rapacious poison against his own teachers, […]
Diane Ravitch on NPR’s Fresh Air
April 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Listen or Download here. Interview Highlights On the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program “Race to the Top is an extension of No Child Left Behind. It contains all of the punitive features. It encourages states to have more charter schools. It said, when it invited proposals from states, that you needed to have […]
Rick Snyder Targets 23 Michigan School Districts for Privatization
April 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment
If you still know anyone who doubts that handing over our public schools to Wall Streetwalkers is a huge component of of the anti-democracy movement’s agenda in the U. S., send them this clip. No, Jerry Bracey was not a prophet, he had a helluva sense of smell. Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, […]
Weekend Readings
April 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Bruce Baker has an important post about using free and reduced lunch measures in education studies. Ed Fuller writes about the characteristics of students entering “high-performing” charter networks in Texas (KIPP, YES, IDEA). Bonus: he even follows Bruce’s advice (above) on disaggregating by free lunch and reduced lunch! Steve Hinnefeld covers the education happenings in Indiana in […]
On the Current Shame of the Nation: Donald Trump and His Supporters
April 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Against Evaluating Massachusetts Teachers Using Student Test Scores
April 27, 2011 By 2 Comments
I recently posted on the national push by the U. S. Chamber of Horrors put teacher evaluation by test score into every state, even the bluest states. Corporate control is a post-partisan issue simply because the SCOTUS decision allowing unlimited political spending by corporations makes them necessary to any politician. They own the game, and […]
New #Huffpo #education entry
April 26, 2011 By 1 Comment
#Pareto and the #plutocracy
April 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Pareto says the following about “demagogic plutocracies”: Forms of government are not to be compared by reference to constitutions but to their operative practice. All are oligarchies. All govern by force and/or consent. But they differ from one another first by the relative proportions in which force and consent are utilized to maintain rule, and […]
#Pedagogy of #poverty
April 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment
I could not agree more with this account of what it’s like to teach based on “results.” Although, I wonder: how “poor” do you have to be to get this kind of “education?” I think a lot of these methods are creeping up into middle-income schools. Perhaps resistance will only work when it reaches schools that […]
The new-new #INTASC #Standards
It’s interesting to see the new INTASC standards as I am currently reviewing student teaching portfolios using the “old” standards. Initially, standards are all well and good, but it depends on how they’re used. It’s great to have them out there as a guide, but when you begin making requirements out of them, hinging grades […]