EDUCATION TIPS

What We Talk About When We Talk About School Privatization

A variation of the post appears at Schools Matter.Before Bush II came to Washington with his Texas Mirage (TAAS) that would become the Nation’s Nightmare (NCLB), the Dems owned the education issue. In large part it was due to the work of another Texan, LBJ, whose policies eventually brought us face to face with the liberal (as in Enlightenment) delusion that for every social or economic problem, there is a schooling solution. That we continue to embrace the delusion is clearly evident in the continuing acceptance of a Bush education policy purportedly aimed...

Cicero in the 21st Century

In lieu of a profound post this morning, a bit of a lyric by Steve Savitzky:Times were bad two thousand years agoSaid Cicero, just take a look:Children don't obey their parentsAnd everyone is writing a book....Yes, these are terrible times that we live inSociety is going to the dogsChildren don't obey their parentsAnd everyone is writing blogs.Steve's voice is just fine, but something about the chorus makes me think that Bob Dylan's voice fits the last three lines....

“Doing better”in grammar school or middle school?

For the better part of a decade, urban districts (Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York – and my own Lancaster, Pa.) have been pondering, planning and, in some cases, implementing a shift back to the grammar school (K-8) model and away from the middle school that has become the educational home of choice for 6th, 7th and 8th graders since the early 80s. Into this policy playground comes a new study by respected Johns Hopkins middle school researchers Douglas and Martha MacIver that claims “No benefit to eliminating middle school,” according to the headline in my morning paper.I haven’t yet gotten...

Education and democracy (an historical perspective)

Today is the fifth anniversary of the No Child Left Behind Act. One of the rhetorical arguments in favor of it is the claim that it serves civil-rights purposes. That implies that education is a right attached to citizenship, a powerful concept, and the anniversary provides a reason to explore that a little, especially the way that the civil-rights arguments for accountability miss half of the political equation connecting democracy to education. Historically, we have connected education to democracy in two ways: Education is for democracy and education comes with democracy. The two ideas were...

Professor Schrag, Cong. Miller, NCLB, and the Nurturing of Despair

Posted at Schools Matter January 6, 2007:Peter Schrag recently did an op-ed in the Sacramento Bee calling for repairs, or a new "surge," for the failed war on the public schools known as NCLB. Below are Professor Schrag's remarks and my own interspersed as commentary on the commentary:Like many federal laws, the No Child Left Behind Act operates mostly on states and local agencies. Few ordinary citizens notice it in their private lives.But NCLB, the centerpiece of President Bush's compassionate conservatism, has had a deeper impact on the nation's schools...

Community Organizing and Urban Education VI: Education is a Tough Nut to Crack

[To read the entire series, go here.]"Although public education activism is hardly new in this country . . . , community organizing as a strategy for school improvement is barely a decade old."--Kavitha Mediratta, NYU Institute for Education and Social Policy“Organizing groups argue that education is more difficult to navigate than any other neighborhood issue because school systems are harder to penetrate and school leadership often is more insulated and unresponsive than the leadership of other public institutions.”--Mediratta, et. al.Since so much of the social action in the 1960s involved...

Danziger, Constructing the Subject, and accountability

Thanks to a trail of other readings, two of the last books I read in revising Accountability Frankenstein were Theodore Potter's Trust in Numbers (1995) and Kurt Danziger's Constructing the Subject (1990), both relatively dense books discussing topics on the edges of my concerns with testing and professional expertise. While reading the page proofs of a book that will be coming out in just a few months, I've already had one basic assumption rattled. Then I picked up Stephen Turner's Liberal Democracy 3.0 (2003), about whose provocative arguments about expertise and democratic political theory...