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
Elizabeth Warren is the candidate with “a plan for everything,” including public education. There are some good ideas in there—such as ending zero-tolerance discipline policies and $100 billion in “Excellence Grants” for any public school (including charter schools, believe it or not.) But tucked away at the end is a poison pill under the subtitle: […] 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
On Thursday, the National Education Association released a video of an interview with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, one of the leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, in which she was asked about her position on charter schools. In her answer, Warren rejected the idea that charter schools are much-needed options for families (particularly low-income families […] 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
If you’re seeking balanced, nuanced reporting on U.S. education issues from professional journalists, you won’t find it in the pages of The Guardian these days. Even a cursory review of their recent output makes clear that the bulk of their education coverage is at best amateurish and at worst laughably biased, and largely comes from freelancers […] More
Investigators hired by the Portland Public Schools board released a damning 320-page report last week detailing how the district repeatedly failed to address allegations of serious sexual misconduct against Mitch Whitehurst, a former Portland Public Schools teacher who retired in 2015 after 32 years with the school system. Whitehurst’s misdeeds – and the district’s complacency in […] More
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Seth Saavedra
Peter Cook
