Correcting The Record On Education Reform
Reposted with permission from Philly’s 7th Ward. Growing up in the African-American community, one becomes intimately familiar with numerous time-honored phrases and colloquialisms. One such phrase was introduced to me as a teenager while walking to the corner bodega with a friend in East Camden. As we walked in the store, we saw (and heard) […] More
It’s an open secret; one that AFT, NEA, and their supporters are reticent to discuss: Public pensions, including those managed on behalf of educators, invest hundreds of millions of dollars into private prisons and immigrant detention centers. According to a two-part (part one & part two) series published by AFT last year, public pensions own […] More
This post originally appeared on Project Forever Free. This week, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and subsequent outcry over police brutality, the National Education Association and the American Federation Teachers took the unprecedented step of calling on Congress to take legislative action to significantly reform practices and policies in policing. They […] More
New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, put together an advisory council to help his state “reimagine” public education. Fearing Cuomo and his partner, the Gates Foundation, will produce a plan that creates accountability and expectations in their public school pension farm, the NYC teacher types pounced. “There’s no current classroom teacher on this list of advisors” they whined. […] More
Wednedsday, Phi Delta Kappan, the online “professional journal for educators”, published a hand-wringing piece asking an important if misguided question: How do increasingly unionized newsrooms complicate reporting? Titled “Covering Education in a Unionized Newsroom,” authorial reins are handed over to Rachel Cohen, a freelance writer who recently came on Retort’s radar by writing then deleting […] More
This is re-posted, with permission, from Project Forever Free. Ned Stanley works on National Communications, National Voices, and Media Relations for @FiftyCAN. Education historian turned anti-reform flamethrower Diane Ravitch is just out with a new book, Slaying Goliath, and the review by Annie Murphy Paul in the New York Times was hardly glowing. Some have […] More
Last week, NBC announced it will host a nationally-televised forum for Democratic presidential candidates on December 14th that will focus exclusively on public education issues. NBC’s Public Education Forum 2020, which is being held at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in downtown Pittsburgh, will be moderated by MSNBC Live host Ali Velshi and NBC […] More
Look, I know Diane Ravitch is no fan of school choice (anymore)—the educational cause that is my hill to die on. I suspect she disagrees with virtually every tweet I’ve put out, except maybe this one about excessive screen time in schools? But I was honestly concerned last week when she decided to respond to […] More
A few years ago, the St. Paul Federation of Educators was boasting about how it was “bargaining for the common good” by using contract negotiations to advocate for policies that benefitted not only teachers, but parents and community stakeholders. As then-SPFE president (and current Minnesota Commissioner of Education) Mary Cathryn Ricker explained in a piece […] More
The Council of the District of Columbia will consider legislation that could lead to the dismantling of IMPACT, the teacher evaluation system that has been used by D.C. Public Schools for the past decade. The bill, which was drafted by the Washington Teachers Union and introduced by Councilman Trayon White last week, would make evaluations […] More
The self-described mission of the Network for Public Education, the anti-education reform organization founded by Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris, centers on “building alliances with grassroots groups across the nation” that oppose all the usual boogeymen: standardized testing, charter schools, school and district accountability, teacher evaluation, etc. Who exactly are the groups in NPE’s coalition? […] More
Tens of thousands of teachers in Los Angeles returned to their classrooms yesterday following a six-day strike that disrupted the lives of over 467,000 students and cost the L.A. Unified School District over $151 million in lost revenue. Tuesday morning, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, flanked by LAUSD Supt. Austin Beutner and United Teachers of Los […] More
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