Schools vs. Slogans

"Despite the administration's preference for "evidence-based" measures, however, ideology and favoritism rather than sound research appear to be the primary rationales for the policy direction it has prescribed.

This disconnect between the realities of public schools and the policy prescriptions coming from Washington is the crux of the problem. The policy wonks guiding the administration seem to think that the only thing wrong with No Child Left Behind—the law adopted by the Bush administration to guide education policy—is that the slogan got a bad name because it promised far more than it could deliver. Instead of developing a new strategy, they've merely devised a new slogan, Race to the Top, without really understanding what it might take to move the nation's schools forward."


http://www.thenation.com/article/154599/schools-vs-slogans

Reframing the Education Debate

"Instead of waiting for this administration to recognize that it should head in a new direction, those of us who know the importance of public education must initiate a campaign to defend and improve it. We need to organize parents, teachers unions, school board members and others around a reform agenda that calls for protecting public education while also calling for its renewal.

...Forcing a change in education policy and in our flawed but indispensable public schools, the only institutions that serve all children regardless of background, will be difficult and complicated—but it can be done. It will require the broad but disorganized popular base, which understands the importance of public education, to organize. The need for such an effort is clear. What is not clear is whether those who have the most at stake can muster the will to make it happen. "

http://www.thenation.com/article/156807/reframing-education-debate

Diane Ravitch Answers Bill Gates on Education

"In a paean to Bill Gates, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter calls Diane Ravitch the Microsoft founder's "chief adversary."

It's the world's richest (or second richest) man vs. an education historian and New York University research professor.

Gates, through his philanthropic foundation, has invested billions of dollars in education experiments and now has a pivotal role in reform efforts. Ravitch, the author of the bestselling The Death and Life of the Great American School System, has become the most vocal opponent of the Obama administration's education policy. She says Gates is backing the wrong initiatives and harming public schools.

In this Newsweek piece, Gates poses some questions aimed at Ravitch, and she was asked to answer them. Below are the questions Gates asked, in bold, and the answers, in italics, that Ravitch provided in an email."

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/diane-ravitch/ravitch-answers-gates.html

Why Teacher Bashing is Dangerous

"The increasingly polarized education policy debate is not just about whether teachers feel the sting of public criticism or whether school budgets suffer another round of cuts. It’s not even about the hot-button issues getting all the attention like merit pay or charter schools.

What’s at stake is more basic: Whether the right to a free public education for all children will survive as a fundamental democratic promise in our society, and whether the schools and districts needed to provide it are going to survive as public institutions.

Will they be collectively owned and democratically managed, however imperfectly, by all of us as citizens, or will they be privatized and commercialized by corporate interests that increasingly dominate our society"

This is an edited version of a commentary by Stan Karp, a teacher of English and journalism in Paterson, N.J., for 30 years. He is now the director of the Secondary Reform Project for New Jersey’s Education Law Center and an editor of Rethinking Schools magazine. The full version of the commentary, which Karp delivered last December before about 250 people at a Portland high school, can be found here, at the website called www.notwaitingforsuperman.org and the audio can be heard here.
 
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/teachers/why-teacher-bashing-is-dangero.html#more

Op-Ed: Rage Simmering Among American Teachers

This is a link to an interview conducted by NPR with Diane Ravitch. "Education historian Diane Ravitch says the teachers on the front lines of labor rallies in Wisconsin reflect growing anger among educators nationwide. Teachers are sick and tired, she says, of being blamed for the ills of America's public schools."

http://www.npr.org/2011/02/28/134134735/Op-Ed-Rage-Simmering-Among-American-Teachers

Parents Across America

Here is a link to Parents Across America. It contains some recent information about the debate on educational reform. There is a link to a clip of Matt Damon discussing education on CNN. I cannot say that Matt Damon is an expert on educational reform, but I appreciate that he is taking an active role in the discussion.

http://parentsacrossamerica.org/2011/03/this-was-the-week-that-the-real-reformers-finally-broke-through/

The Wages of Teaching

"A couple of years ago I (Anna Quindlen) spent the day at an elementary school in New Jersey. It was a nice average school, a square and solid building with that patented classroom aroma of disinfectant and chalk, chock-full of reasonably well-behaved kids from middle-class families. I handled three classes, and by the time I staggered out the door I wanted to lie down for the rest of the day.

...Since the corporate world is the greatest, and richest, beneficiary of well-educated workers, maybe a national brain trust might be set up that would turn a tax on corporate profits into an endowment to raise teacher salaries. Maybe states and communities could also pass regulations with this simple proviso: no school administrator should ever receive a percentage raise greater than the raise teachers get. Neither should state legislators.

In recent years teacher salaries have grown, if they've grown at all, at a far slower rate than those of other professionals, often lagging behind inflation. Yet teachers should have the most powerful group of advocates in the nation: not their union, but we the people, their former students. I am a writer because of the encouragement of teachers. Surely most Americans must feel the same, that there were women and men who helped them levitate just a little above the commonplace expectations they had for themselves."

http://www.newsweek.com/2005/11/27/the-wages-of-teaching.html