I have been writing this post in my head since at least Occupy the DOE, so it is not simply a direct reply to president of the American Educational Research Association Bill Tierney’s recent email in which he, I expect in anticipation of the protests planned for Arne Duncan’s invited talk at the AERA conference, […]
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SAY THE WORD SOLIDARITY SEVEN TIMES A DAY.
Today the people of Chicago take to the streets to let the plutocracy know that public schools are OUR schools and will not be shut down by fiat. Schools are being defended in Philadelphia and New York. Parents and students are saying no to high stakes testing and yes to opting out. Teachers boycott and […]
ARNE DUNCAN INVITED TO THE AERA: SHOCKING?
This is not a blog about being shocked, shocked to find out that the AERA has invited the state’s chief purveyor of the corporate takeover of public education to speak at its annual conference. There is nothing shocking about Arne Duncan speaking at the AERA, anymore than it is shocking that corporate think tanks get […]
Dangerous Talk
Talking is dangerous. Jesse Hagopian, a teacher leader from Garfield High School, says that their boycott, “began with a conversation in the teacher’s lounge.” In the fall of 2011 I found myself in many conversations with people I had never before met. Conversations about economic justice, about the possibilities for and nature of change, about […]
The emotional violence of the accountability regime: part two
You may say to yourself, my god, what have I done?- Talking Heads In the lead up to NCATE at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, I was given the job of helping to figure out how the various assessments could be fitted to the structures of the web-based data management system we had purchased. As […]
The emotional violence of the accountability regime: part one
You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?- Talking Heads When I came to education later in life, I had two pictures of the work in mind. One was of conversations with students about literature—poetry, novels, stories, essays and treatises. Works I selected. Works they selected. Our own writing. I had some sense […]
Pearson comes to teacher education, and we are supposed to be cool with that?
When I am not spitting mad at the calls for some kind of high stakes assessment for teacher education, I am flabbergasted and frightened. How can it be that at the same time that we are experiencing the full destructive impact on k12 education of the accountability regime, its high stakes testing, surveillance and privatization, […]
see something, say something–organize!
These are scary and exciting times to be an activist. Scary because the privatizing dehumanizing forces of neo-liberalism are wrecking havoc everywhere; from the climate, to endless wars, to health care, to outrageous income inequality, and, as readers of this blog know, to dismantling public education. The magnitude of this assault, its machine-like ability to […]
“your very existence is an act of rebellion”
We’ve been clanging the warning bells in higher education for years, maybe this story about computer scoring of essays as a way to improve students’ writing will get the attention of our colleagues in the academy. Like all of the data driven, computer based instruction that is being sold to us/imposed on us, this is […]