Is there a light at the end of the teach-to-the-test tunnel? A quirky pineapple that grabbed news headlines in the spring of 2012 may have marked a turning point in how much stock is given to a standardized test’s ability to accurately measure what children know. First, flickering sparks of discontent flashed up from parents […]
Archives for July 2012
AFT's Share My Lesson: Thumbs Up!
The American Federation of Teacher’s free/open-source archive of lesson plans and other teacher resources wisely uses the web to disintermediate textbook publishers and keep teachers at the forefront of designing and shaping classes tailored to their students’ needs. Share My Lesson was unveiled just recently, and is already available to teachers as they prepare for […]
First Lady Michelle Obama's Summer Appearance at a School Sends GOP Partisans Over the Cliff
Today, First Lady Michelle Obama appeared at a Get-Out-the-Vote and voter registration event that happens to take place at a Miami-area high school — and it’s sent some GOP partisans into high dudgeon. Mind you, it’s summer. The school facilities are empty. The campaign is paying for the use of the space, not the school […]
Vouchers Create a Split Between "Ed Reform" Conservatives: Accountability Bean-Counters and the Religious Right
The New Republic has an interesting analysis of Louisiana’s experiment in privatization of public schools: Ed Kilgore argues in “How the GOP’s New Education Policy Embraces the Market and Abandons Objective Standards” that vouchers pander to parents as the ultimate source of “accountability.” But this emphasis on parents’ subjective evaluation of a school’s worth (private […]
Los Angeles Unified School District, Proposition 39, Co-location Issues & Charter Schools
To my great surprise, LAUSD has pushed back on a judge’s ruling that the district give facilities to charter schools seeking more space in existing public schools. Of the judge’s order, which would affect up to 45 charter schools, Superintendent of Los Angeles public schools John Deasy and the LAUSD school board say … that […]
The Failed Microsoft Corporate Origins of "Value-Added" Teacher Rankings
Readers of the Vanity Fair piece highlighting Microsoft’s decade of failure to innovate and resulting loss of market share can’t help but notice the close parallels between that company’s decline and their corporate practice of “stack ranking.” “Stack ranking,” as described in “Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Software […]