StickWithANose

Back in June, I noted that the growing un-popularity of D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty and D.C. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee among Fenty’s political base posed a serious risk to his re-election campaign, and I also noted that the oligarchs were weighing in with a threat to pull their funding from the DCPS experiment if their [...]

As the public hand-wringing over the slow pace of re-development in post-Katrina New Orleans reaches its crescendo with the five year anniversary of the disaster, the subject of public schooling in NOLA is again receiving a lot of attention from news media. EdWeek mirrors other major media outlets in constructing a he said/she said narrative [...]

As the luster has begun to fade on the Obama administration, the weight of a poor economy, the health care reform debacle, and the growing distaste for pointless land wars in Asia have been steadily grinding away at Team Obama’s poll numbers. One bright spot for Obama has been that he has polled well on [...]

Despite my propensity for publishing posts that take, let us say, a bleak view of education policy, economic issues, and politics, I really don’t consider myself to be all that cynical. [Although my friends might beg to differ...] I find joy in the small stuff like enjoying the roar of cicadas in the early evening [...]

One of the truly depressing characteristics of contemporary news media is its inability to call ‘bullshit’. In order to maintain the false appearance of neutrality, reporters and talking heads alike will allow all manner of patently false statements to be propagated without so much as offering a challenge to the ideologue being “interviewed” [with the [...]

Now that Tennessee has taken its bribe money the children of the urban poor are being set up for yet another un-controlled experiment in quasi-privatization and the intellectual bounty that is “drill and kill” test-prep academies. In my own little slice of the Southern Appalachians, the first institution to get the ax is a school [...]

Well, it looks like a “rob Peter to pay Paul” plan made its way through the sausage grinder. Considering the 38,000 local and state government jobs lost last month [most of which was education related], it is welcome news that Congress was able to actually do something to stem the bleeding at the local level. [...]

One of the big buzz words in education policy is ‘innovation’. It is a term most often mentioned in the context of market-oriented policies, and it rings just as hollow in the context of education as it does in the world of Wall Street from which it is borrowed. As with the public looting that [...]

Despite all the fawning coverage afforded Michelle Rhee the more we learn about the model of “reform” she and her edu-philanthropist backers are imposing on the DC school system the more we discover that the entire project is a fraud.
There’s no polite way to say this: The procedures described in the DCPS IMPACT Guidebook [...]

It was during the 1990’s that a convergence in education policy took place between the two American political parties. The Democrats made the biggest shift by adopting many of the policies and ideas traditionally associated with the Republicans. One of the driving forces behind this shift was the growing support of civil rights groups long [...]