Just Sayin'

MEA - What Do You Get For Your Dues?

A Nice Story to Start the Year With

Her last day of teaching first grade.

Equal Protection Anyone?

I wonder if Michigan has a similar law? In Tennessee it may be unconstitutional to allow students to take their educational dollars to private institutions leaving the public schools with fixed costs they cannot meet. At the very least the state should provide for these costs so that the remaining students are more fully served.

Connecting The School Reform Dots

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett cut education funding and now claims that Philadelphia schools cannot manage their money (even though they have been under state control for 10 years). Teachers are under the gun to take massive pay cuts. Sound familiar?
Read more.

Tenure = Due Process, Not Lifetime Employment

Some might say that this battle is over. I'll go out on a limb and make a prediction. When beloved teachers start losing their jobs because the Smarter Balance / Common Core test scores force them out you will see a backlash against rating teachers based on student test scores and a move toward greater job security.

Student Data

Meet The New School Board

For those of you who do not know, ALEC is the American Legislative Exchange Council. It provides conservative legislators with model legislation in support of conservative priorities. Educationally speaking this means charters, online schools, Right To Work, testing, no tenure, evaluations tied to student test scores, etc. These reforms do not stand on their own as good ideas, but have the incentives of providing profit and/or power to their proponents.

David and Charles Koch fund this assault on public education out of their 50+ billion dollars in assets. Their foundations spend $200 million dollars annually promoting their agenda. This is less than one half of one percent, by the way.

The reason I bring this up now is an article that reveals the following:

They have also collaborated on the annual ALEC education “report card” that grades states’ allegiance to their policy agenda higher than actual student performance. That distorted report card also rewards states that push ALEC’s beloved union-busting measures while giving low grades to states with students who actually perform best on standardized knowledge tests.

They reward legislators who adhere to their agenda with funding and threaten them with more conservative primary challengers if they don't regardless of how students actually perform. This is about power. They don't need the money.

And The Walls Came Tumbling Down

Education reform is a house of cards or a mortarless brick wall. Pick your metaphor. The very data the reformers are counting on to kill public education will be their own undoing. Tony Bennett headed education for Indiana and then Florida until he resigned recently over a scandal from his time in Indiana. Specifically, inflating the scores of his flagship charter school in Indiana. Criticism based on the reality of school reform is coming from the left (middle really) and the right, but not about Michelle Rhee, yet.

Real Education Reform

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