StickWithANose

Want to know how far down the road to serfdom [pun intended] we’ve travelled? Look no further than the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal! [proxy]
Those of us who live near the top of the income pyramid are doing very nicely, thank you. Yet our government keeps showering us with Christmas presents. [...]

This week’s theme jumped out at me from my computer monitor, so I feel compelled to share it with you.
First up, this public school is brought to you by… NYT
Facing another potential round of huge budget cuts, the Los Angeles school board unanimously approved a plan on Tuesday night to allow the district [...]

I’d like to apologize to readers [all 20-30 of you!] for my recent excursions beyond education policy and issues related to schooling [my areas of expertise], but this week’s news offers us some perspective on the Orwellian state of public discourse that impacts everything in our society, including debates over public education.
Yesterday, I posted on [...]

Today’s news offers yet more evidence to back up the central claim from yesterday’s post… The political machinery of think tanks, policy institutes, and foundations created by the Captains of the Universe over that past 30-40 years do not even rise to the title of intellectual frauds but are, instead, the propagandists of early 21st [...]

The very serious thinkers running our Banana Republic are all aflutter today over the AP/Stanford University poll which finds that a large majority of Americans think we should make it easier to fire ‘bad’ teachers and pay ‘good’ teachers better wages. Couple of points: First, the take away from this poll is that 30 years [...]

My own experience in the private education sector has provided me with a clear insight into the dark side of our increasingly corporate approach to education policy, but I have to say that this piece surprised even me. If this is a credible account of how standardized assessments are scored [and I'll admit that I [...]

The New York Times can surprise you every now and then by publishing informed debates on issues by informed observers [as opposed to a motley crew of think tank hacks] who can actually help readers understand a rather complex issue. As a follow up to a Room for Debate on China’s education model that I [...]

The pearl-clutching continues over the PISA assessment scores for 2009 as the public sphere both laments our educational failures and continues to argue for “more accountability dammit”! However, EdWeek posted a surprisingly good article on a rather unique global comparison of successful education systems that appears, by my reading, to have a rational kernel of [...]

Valerie Strauss poses what should be an obvious question emerging from the hoopla over the latest PISA scores… Since the nation has been on the assessment-based school reform bandwagon for over a decade now and our scores on standardized assessments such as PISA continue to go down shouldn’t we be re-thinking our approach to school [...]

One of the most frustrating elements of public discourse on education policy is the repeated referencing of how the US is falling behind in science and math. For the very serious thinkers, the fact that China is pumping out large numbers of college graduates and PhD’s every year is a sign that the US is [...]