StickWithANose

After Beck and doughy pantload served up their own particular view of ‘Liberal Fascism’ this past Friday night, real historians are [at last] pushing back against this tragic re-writing of history. For those who aren’t politically active, this may all appear to be much ado about nothing, however it is deadly serious. The only real [...]

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 [...]

If you want to know how far down the path we’ve traveled toward the blissful joy of kleptocracy, then you need look no further than this “report” issued by the Center for American Progress, the Chamber of Commerce and the American Enterprise Institute that was “made possible” by funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates [...]

This piece of craptastic think tank hackery offers up way too many falsities and howlers for me to parse through every one… I’ve got articles to write! So, I’ll just point out one instance of hackery in action to point, yet again, toward the method of spreading corporate propaganda in the early 21st century. Case [...]

If you’re like me, you’ve been dying to know how former Senator Bill Frist has been ticking off the minutes of his retirement. Yesterday, we got word that Billy is still hard at it doing the bidding of his corporate masters the good people of Tennessee. God love ‘em!
It looks like Billy has been hard [...]

As part of my dissertation, I read every book produced by six national think tanks* between 1998-2008 that specifically address education policy. It was painful. Often disguised as academic research, the books these “policy institutes” produce is thinly veiled corporate propaganda that makes bold claims without the need of messy things like data. However, what [...]

Is it surprising that on the same day that the Obama administration announces the guidelines for its $4.5 billion gift to the for-profit education sector that the Gates, Dell, and Walton foundations made a $9.4 million donation to the National Association of Charter School Authorizers? Schools Matter:
NACSA overseas about half of the nation’s charter schools, [...]

I’m an advocate for reforming public schooling, and I do so frequently these days in academic venues. That said… the trajectory of education policy is truly frightening these days. Both of our political parties now pursue identical policy strategies with the intent of fostering the expansion of the education industry despite the lack of evidence [...]

In writing my dissertation, I had the painful privilege of reading scholarly tracts penned by two of the most useful corporate tools in the contemporary American school reform movement: Terry Moe and John Chubb. Written on a middle school reading level so as to ensure both easy consumption and a total lack of intellectual rigor, [...]

This NBC piece covering Arne Duncan’s “listening” tour of think-tank conferences and charter schools demonstrates the conflation of two educational concepts that have no necessary relation, except in a practical sense. Ostensibly, the article is about Arne’s use of his stimulus bribe money to push states to adopt a national set of tough academic standards, [...]