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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...
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...
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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...
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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 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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