StickWithANose

In previous posts, I’ve pointed toward the underlying motivation behind the charter school movement as being the colonization of a new marketplace funded by taxpayers, see here and here. However, it would be a mistake to believe that this trend is isolated to K-12 education. As this AP article details, the for-profit tertiary sector is [...]

One of the sadder realities of contemporary American society is the culture of hero worship that fills-up countless hours of television programming. Despite the exhortations of public intellectuals [who are themselves the object of hero worship] decrying the un-American “liberalism” being propagated by the “celebrity culture” of Hollywood, the thimble-deep discourse that dominates much of [...]

Cannibalizing the Other:
Hollow Signifier:

Historically, the large-scale introduction of a new communication technology goes through a predictable sequence of development. In the initial phase, the new technology is heralded as a democratizing tool offering individuals a public perspective and voice that was not previously possible. From there it moves into a golden age of relatively open media in which [...]

So, Lamar Alexander channels his inner bourgeois douche-baggery by equating the idea of offering health insurance to 15 million low-income Americans with condemning them to the ‘medical ghetto’ of medicaid.
And exactly who is this “us” of which you speak, senator? I am sure that the King is wicked displeased with you right about now…

To celebrate a day spent grading exams, I offer you this bit of truth telling from an evil little man:
Look out!

Higher education in the great state of California continues to swirl the bowl with the rest of the state government, and the possible repercussions for the future economy of California cannot be understated. However, with all of the media attention being focused on the People’s Republic, the rest of the nation is quietly headed full [...]

D.C. Public School Chancellor Michelle Rhee is the archetype of the modern education reform movement. She followed the pipeline from teaching for two years in Baltimore in the Teach for America program to the land of think tanks and advocacy organizations to becoming a useful tool for the corporate lobby. Just one big happy family [...]

Well, it looks like the education lobby is about to achieve another legislative victory. Despite there being no evidence that structured literacy programs, such as Reading First, have a “statistically significant impact on student reading comprehension test scores”, it is fait accompli that another structured literacy program is about to become codified in law.
As described [...]

Last month, I pointed readers toward a hack-tacular piece of research by noted Hoover Institute troll and Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby that purports to demonstrate that charter schools out-perform traditional public schools. I knew then that it was only a matter of time before somebody fact-checked her “research” and found the same old errors that [...]