First published on solidaridad on January 31, 2015 “I have also observed and experienced how these organizations, in order to protect their non-profit status and marketability to liberal foundations, actively self-police against members’ deviation from their essentially reformist agendas, while continuing to appropriate the language and imagery of historical revolutionaries.”—Professor Dylan Rodríguez Left to right: […]
Archives for January 2015
Sen. Alexander, No Child Left Behind’s High Stakes Tests Narrow the Curriculum
Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) is now chair of the education committee in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension committee, and has officially opened the door to reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB, also known as the ESEA, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act). He’s seeking emails and letters talking about testing and accountability […]
Leave At 3:00 PM? Hardly — Teachers Pay To Be Overworked
Guest blogger Susan DuFresne is an experienced teacher in Washington state. (She is not pictured.) This is part of a series called Voices From the Classroom. A teacher’s workload is impossible. Twenty-four hours is not enough. I worked a 15 1/2 hour day yesterday & the to-do list is still ridiculously long. After teaching […]
“Value-Added” for Teacher Preparation Programs? Your Comments Needed NOW on Proposed Regulation Changes
UPDATED February 2, 2015: We submitted the link to this post to the official regulations.gov site where it was recorded. At the time of sending, almost 3500 comments from teachers, faculty at GSEs (graduate schools of education), and others with an interest in the training of public school teachers had submitted comments. In our submission, […]
LA Times Report on Teacher Evaluations Incorrect
Heather Poland (A Teacher’s Perspective) is a teacher in California. This piece is part of a series called Voices From the Classroom. It’s reposted from A Teacher’s Perspective with permission. Recently, the LA Times reported that, “Major California school districts are failing to comply with a state law that requires them to evaluate teachers in […]
Los Angeles education politics roundup for late January 2015
A few items discussing school board and other races happening in Los Angeles… Statement on Gates and Broad Foundation funded United Way Greater Los Angeles running LAUSD forums Stop corporate charter school greed, stop Ref Rodriguez! Corporate education reform privatizer Tamar Galatzan’s greatest neoliberal hits at LAUSD A reader asks about Marqueece Harris-Dawson and Community […]
Join NPE’s letter writing campaign to Sen. Alexander and the HELP Committee
Friends, I wrote a letter for the Action Network letter campaign “Urge Senator Lamar Alexander and the members of Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee to put an end to annual standardized testing”. Network for Public Education (NPE) is calling on Congress to support the adoption of Option 1 in Senator Lamar Alexander’s “Every […]
People-Powered Public Education News: K-12 News Network Turns Four!
It’s January, 2015, and K-12 News Network has been doing ground-breaking, people-powered public education news covered from the classroom up for FOUR years now! Thank you, readers, bloggers, and activists, for being folks actively making a new kind of education news. Some highlights from our first four years: In August, 2010, when the LA Times […]
Fix Education Testing and Accountability to Reauthorize No Child Left Behind
Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) is now chair of the education committee in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension committee, and has officially opened the door to reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB, also known as the ESEA, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act). He’s seeking emails and letters talking about testing and accountability […]
Public Education Battles for Mexican American Studies Are A Free Speech and Intellectual Freedom Issue Too
Meet writer and professor Tony Diaz and find out why Arizona tried, and will likely fail, to ban Mexican American Studies and other Ethnic Studies classes in public schools. Diaz launched the Librotraficante (book smuggler) movement that pokes and prods the narrow-minded government officials who would really like to banish Latinos and declare their culture […]