StickWithANose

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 [...]

Policy geeks are all abuzz today over the TFA data coming out of Tennessee. For the most part, the conclusions reached by the ‘report card’ on the effectiveness of TFAer’s appears to be an outlier in that most peer-reviewed studies have found that TFAer’s are [if we put the most positive face on the data [...]

I’ve been thinking about the hollow language of conservatism quite a lot these days. As someone who is interested in the politics of education policy and reform, I’m interested in thinking through a mode of politics capable of achieving the democratic mandate of public schooling within the context of an increasingly dysfunctional political system in [...]

There is perhaps no better measure of the absolute failure of elite journalism and the Fourth Estate than the career trajectory of New York Times pundit Thomas Friedman. From the now infamous Friedman Unit to his very serious prognostications on the federal budget, Friedman represents the pinnacle of absolute ignorance branded as elite wisdom as [...]

It’s hard not to draw parallels between the militarized charter schools being pushed by ‘progressives’ and ‘conservatives’ alike here in the early 21st century and the American Indian schools of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Of course, there are differences, but not as many as you might think. Both target[ed] subordinate groups with [...]