Delusion and Negligence: The Two-Party System in the U.S.
With Twitter, texting, and hundreds of cable stations surrounding me, my goal last night was a Herculean one: Avoid at all costs the waste that was the so-called presidential debates.I've now crested...
View ArticleLance Armstrong: All-American Bull$#!@
DISCLAIMER AND SPOILER: If you are a Lance Armstrong advocate, please relax and read on. This isn't really about Lance, but it is about you, and you, and you, and the good ol' U.S. of A.In August, The...
View ArticleSave Unsuccessful Charter Schools (SUCS), Now!
Increasingly over the past decade, children and their parents all across the U.S. are choosing to enroll in or are being chosen to attend charter schools that are average or failing. Since these...
View ArticleThe Polonius Chronicles: The Invisible Hand and the King Imperative
PrologueLike Jane Goodall among the chimpanzees, I ventured briefly into the role of anthropologist several years ago, listening most days for extended periods of time to a national radio show host to...
View ArticleArmstrong's Invisible Hand: The Strong Arm of Corporate Sponsors
Professional cycling is a sport rich in tradition. One such tradition is personified by Bernard Hinault, known with equal parts respect and disdain as le Patron (the boss of the peloton). On the road,...
View ArticleThe MLK Imperative in an Era of "No Excuses"
My father was a hard-ass, a Southern version of the Red Forman-type made popular in That 70's Show. I grew up, then, in a "no excuses" environment rooted in the 1950s work ethic my father...
View ArticleTwo-Headed Dragon of Education Policy
Recently, I posted a chart highlighting that current “No Excuses” Reform (NER) claims and policies are no different than traditional problems and policies in public education.The great ironies of NER...
View ArticleThe “Naïve Expert” Problem in Market Paradigm and Education Reform
In a letter written to Charles Thompson in 1787, Thomas Jefferson stated: "The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees, in every object, only the traits which favor that theory." The...
View ArticleDivision of Labor: Conquering the "Public"
Anthony Cody, in his Living in Dialogue blog, has recently addressed the strategy common among "No Excuses" Reformers (NER) using a corporate playbook to render all that is public private: Cody...
View ArticleMisreading Customer Satisfaction, Compromise in Education Reform
I am sick for the second time in about a month—and I am rarely sick, having accumulated a rather robust immune system over almost thirty years of teaching.While sick, however, my rational self wilts...
View Article"Value Added" Offers No Value for Education Reform
U.S. public education has been mired in a technocratic paradigm—a narrow pursuit of efficiency through metrics-based science—since the early 1900s (Kliebard, 1995; Kincheloe, Steinberg, & Hinchey,...
View ArticleThe Etymology of "Miracle": On the Politics of Lies
My doctoral work was a trifecta of marginalized scholarship since I attained an EdD (shunned second cousin to the PhD) by preparing a qualitative dissertation (closeted step-cousin of the sainted...
View ArticleThe CCSS Stampede: Trampling Why, What, How We Teach
Officially yesterday, everyone I know even casually has now shared with me a video of Sir Ken Robinson or some very similar TED video. The sharing always includes, either directly or implicitly, the...
View ArticleThe Ignored Lessons of Education Reform
Michael Petrilli’s charge that the recent elections confirm “[t]eachers unions remain the Goliath to the school reformers’ David” is neither a brave claim to make in a paper serving a right-to-work...
View Article"Miracle" Schools Redux
Throughout the decade since the implementation of No Child Left Behind, the accountability reform movement has been driven by two powerful and connected narratives: claims of "miracle" schools posed as...
View ArticleClones, Assembly-line Capitalism, and Wage-Slaves
Beyond its flair for the fantastic, science fiction (SF) almost always offers the allegorical. In SF, humankind literally masters cloning and produces not quite human slaves, facilitating some sort of...
View ArticlePreaching for (Teach for) America
What do the following have in common?• Three high-quality teachers in a row can increase student achievement and even life-long earning. [1]• Teachers are the single-most important factor in student...
View ArticleMourn, Reflect, Act
I agree with Diane Ravitch who combines her intellect, her scholarship and her inspiring humanity in a blog today: "Today We Mourn."I have been a life-long teacher, and yesterday's killing of children...
View ArticleLife among the Ruins
Adrienne Rich's The School Among the Ruins [1] confronts the intersection of school and violence, poems written in the time designated as the turn of a century:"Rich cited another catalyst for 'The...
View ArticleFailing Children: "They're All Our Children"
It should not have taken the killing of 20 innocent children and 6 dedicated educators in a school, but I will not belabor that point.At a prayer vigil in Newtown, CT, on the evening of December 16,...
View ArticleNRA: America's Next Big Tobacco?
I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in a loving household with wonderful working class parents—who smoked in the house and the car with me and my sister breathing daily their second-hand smoke. My parents...
View ArticleProtecting Guns, Sacrificing (Some) Children
"In 2008, 2,947 children and teens died from guns in the United States and 2,793 died in 2009 for a total of 5,740," details Protect Children Not Guns 2012 (Children's Defense Fund), "—one child or...
View ArticleTests Fail South's Legacy of Inequity
Charlotte-Mecklenburg (NC) Superintendent Heath Morrison along with Montgomery County Schools (MD) Superintendent Joshua Starr has challenged the costs of pursuing once again new standards and (more)...
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CAUTION: Behind the Data and School Success
During her tenure as Secretary of Education (2005-2009), Margaret Spellings announced No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was proving to be a success based on a 7 point gain in NAEP reading scores from...
View ArticleLiving and Learning in Perpetual Crisis
What do the fiscal cliff and Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have in common?For the answer consider this scenario: An arsonist sets a home on fire, and then risks his life fighting the blaze—but the...
View ArticleEt tu, Liberal Media?
The erosion of support for the Commons is most distinct in the failure of foundational support for universal public education in favor of the more powerful interests of corporate America. Just as...
View Article"Breaking Away" from Inequity?
I have been a serious cyclist now for almost as long as I have been an educator, about thirty years. One of my favorite films, which I showed each year I taught high school English, is Breaking Away, a...
View ArticleArmstrong and Woods: Capitalism's Poster Boys
Between parts I and II of Oprah Winfrey's interview with Lance Armstrong, an ad ran on OWN that included a clip of Armstrong acknowledging losing 75 million dollars in one day due to sponsors...
View ArticleMLK Day Recommended Reading
"The Drum Major Instinct," Martin Luther King Jr. [AUDIO]"But this is why we are drifting. And we are drifting there because nations are caught up with the drum major instinct. 'I must be first.''I...
View ArticlePassive Radicals: The Manufactured Myth
With the annual and somewhat functional recognition of certain versions of the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. behind us in 2013, let me ask this: What do Jesus, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and...
View ArticleMisreading Teacher Evaluation and Retention
The League of Women Voters of South Carolina has released “How to Evaluate and Retain Effective Teachers” (2011-2013), but this report misreads the evidence on teacher evaluation and thus distracts...
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"Disaster Capitalism,""Kids in Prison Program" Justified?
Once the storm-surge waters receded after Hurricane Katrina plowed through New Orleans, the city has since experienced another flood, one that rushed in to fill the vacuum created by tragedy in order...
View ArticleConservative Leadership Poor Stewardship of Public Funds
In South Carolina and across the U.S., conservative leadership of education reform has failed to fulfill a foundational commitment to traditional values, good stewardship of public funds. [1]The...
View ArticleReview: "American Winter" (HBO)
Toward the end of HBO's documentary American Winter, Brandon is finally offered a job after viewers have watched him and his wife Pam struggle against Brandon losing his job, resulting in their being...
View ArticleAlternative Education Reform: Among the Invisible and "Preferably Unheard"
"I am an invisible man," announces the unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, adding:I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me....When they approach me they see...
View ArticleSC Infected with Florida Formula Flu
"Nearly 3,000 of South Carolina’s third-graders who struggle with reading could be held back if the state adopts a plan that would require students to read at or near grade level," Jamie Self reports...
View ArticleThe Rise of the Dogmatic Scholar
By oft repeating an untruth, men come to believe it themselves. Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Melish, Jan. 13, 1812The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees, in every object, only the...
View ArticleSC Considering Flawed Reading, Fiscal Policy
SC Senate Majority Leader Harvey Peeler, R-Cherokee, has introduced an education bill modeled on a third-grade retention policy widely promoted by Jeb Bush as one aspect of the larger so-called Florida...
View ArticleOpen Letter to Political Leaders: Action, Not Tributes and Rhetoric
To All Elected Local, State, and National Political Leadership:No American needs anymore to name specifically the tragedy or the media and political responses because all have become both commonplace...
View ArticleConsumed by Manufactured Demons: The "-ism's" that Blind
Science fiction and horror are two genres that often find themselves intersecting where some form of power reduces humans to mere cogs in the machine. Technology, the future, aliens, and the like, it...
View ArticleBeneath the Surface: More Public School Dismantling in SC
My home state of South Carolina is a poster child of disfunction, a self-loathing mutt of myopic bible-thumping, state-rights' libertarianism mated with historical and systemic poverty born out of...
View ArticleFirst Name and then Act
I have a piece at Truthout that places the accountability era of education reform inside Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow:Education Reform in the New Jim Crow EraI invite you to read that and then...
View Articlei2: Innovative Innovators!
ANNOUNCEMENT AND UPDATESi2: Innovative Innovators*FAQsWhat is i2?i2 is a venture designed to recruit and train educators without any experience or expertise in innovation, entrepreneurship, or...
View ArticleExit Exams Have Failed Students, Education
As the first decade of the twenty-first century drew to an end, Frederick Douglass High School (Maryland) stood as a contradiction of social history, education and racial promise, the claimed failures...
View ArticleInnovation Schools Nothing New
Emma Brown in The Washington Post offers an important window into school reform occurring (ad infinitum) in Washington DC:D.C. Council member David A. Catania plans to announce wide-ranging legislation...
View ArticleMerrow Is a Jolly Fellow (Not)
I hate even to acknowledge John Merrow's most recent venture into not having a clue, but his attempt at humor is yet more evidence that the evidence doesn't matter:The Common Core and the End of the...
View ArticleNCTQ Fails US, World
Some things are simply too complicated for public public consumption.Rankings are one such example. By their nature, rankings often send messages that are deeply distorted, but we persist in creating...
View ArticleCharter Schools, the Invisible Hand, and Gutless Political Leadership
Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy's experience introduces readers to Tralfamadorians:The creatures were friendly, and they could see in four...
View ArticleClass Grades: The Unintended Lessons from Florida
Since I am quick to criticize the media for its role in the failures of the current education reform movement—such as PBS, The Charleston Post and Courier, and Education Week—I must also recognize when...
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REVIEW: "Reign of Error," Ravitch 3.0
When faced with the many competing narratives of the religions of the world, comparative myth/religion scholar Joseph Campbell explained to Bill Moyers that Campbell did not reject religion, as some...
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