For years, policy initiatives stemming from right-wing belief tanks have been wrapped in the rhetoric of positive outcomes that are, in fact, the complete opposite of what the measures are really intended to do. A bill called Clear Skies that called for more pollution. Another called Healthy Forests offered incentives for cutting down valuable trees. [...]
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A current debate raging among policy makers is whether America’s dysfunctional education system has created our sick economy – or whether the country’s sick economy has created widespread poverty with disadvantages that our education system can’t possibly overcome. In the former camp, there’s vast outrage about a so-called “skills gap” that’s been created by American [...]
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This post is republished from the Education Opportunity Network, a new online publication edited by Jeff Bryant. It’s a popular analogy among fans of the political game to call Republicans the “Daddy Party” and assign “Mommy Party” to Democratic folk. The source of this analogy is generally understood to be George Lakoff, a professor of [...]
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This post is republished from the Education Opportunity Network, a new online publication edited by Jeff Bryant. It’s a conventional wisdom among Democrats to write off the state of Texas as a land of gun wielding troglodytes who genuflect to Rush Limbaugh and swill Fox News Kool-Aid. (Full disclosure: I was born and raised in [...]
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This post is republished from the Education Opportunity Network, a new online publication edited by Jeff Bryant. After the horrendous slaughter of 20 school children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, a heartbroken President Obama implored the nation, “This is our first task – caring for our children. It’s our first job. If [...]
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Raising the alarm that “America has lost its place as a global leader in educational attainment,” a report issued today by an independent commission chartered by Congress to advise the U.S. Department of Education concludes that the “federal government must take more seriously its profoundly important responsibility” to address inequality in the nation’s K-12 public [...]
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Is it over yet? Michelle Rhee’s barnstorming of America this week, to hawk her new memoir, taxed the stamina of even the most ardent education wonk. It was a relentless PR campaign that would truly be the envy of any tobacco executive or gun manufacturer. In interview after interview Rhee recited a series of bullet [...]
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Events in the past week showed how market-driven education policies, deceivingly labeled as “reform,” are revealing their truly destructive effects on the streets and in the corridors of government. From the streets, we heard from civil rights and social justice activists from urban communities that school turnaround policies mandated by the Obama administration’s education agenda [...]
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It was hard for a progressive not to get a chocolate high from President Obama's inauguration speech. But hardly anyone in the education community had anything notable to say about it. Few if any prominent and outspoken critics of the administration's education policies, including and Randi Weingarten, have bothered to write anything of considerable substance (at least, so far).
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Last week, celebrated statistics guru Nate Silver laid a bugger on advocates for test-driven education, the current policy fad that enamors Republicans and Democrats alike who fancy themselves as “education reformers.” In an online conversation at the aggregator site Reddit, the man known for being the “Lord and God of Algorithms” was asked, “What are [...]
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