Secretary of Education and Saturday Night Live fixture Betsy DeVos is fond of saying that picking a school should be as easy as choosing an Uber or a Lyft. She bases this belief on the economic theories that buttress much of the neo-liberal and conservative approach to education reform: As economist Milton Friedman had theorized decades earlier, Ohio legislators believed […]

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos made headlines this week at Harvard University. I’m still confused as to why Harvard invited her to speak at an event allegedly focused on public education–she never attended a public school, never sent her own children to a public school, never studied education, and has never taught anyone anything–and the reaction to her talk suggests […]

To save you from having to read this claptrap, I’m going to share the gist of a new “report” on teacher preparation programs from David Bergeron & Michael Dannenberg. Who the heck are these guys, you might ask? Well, our friend and Highly Effective Curmudgeon, Peter Greene, fills us in on their “credentials,” and it’s pretty much what we expected–they […]

The Hartford Courant recently published a stunningly uninformed editorial on the Connecticut State Board of Education’s decision to eliminate the use of student test scores in teacher evaluations–a move widely praised by most of the education community. The Courant’s position was clear–and a blend of equal parts ignorance and arrogance: The state Board of Education recently agreed not to include […]

As anyone watching the corporate education reform movement can attest to, Big Data and metrics have become the coin of the realm to the reform community. Let any conversation between reformers and defenders of public education go on long enough and the reformer will eventually blurt out the magic words: “But…accountability!” This worldview seems informed by the belief that any […]

The news broke on January 20, 2017 that as many as 38 schools could be closed in Michigan, 24 of those in Detroit, due to “poor academic performance.” Parents in the city, and throughout the state, were understandably stunned, as this announcement represented an abrupt change in the state’s previous position on school closings: Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration has switched […]

Jeb Bush has a Bush problem. He has a Mitt Romney problem. He has a Lehman Brothers problem. But his Jeb Bush problem may be his most telling problem of all. In The New Yorker, Alec MacGillis unravels Jeb’s adventures in education “reform,” which has increasingly become a euphemism for the right-wing’s conjoined agendas of siphoning taxpayer money into corporate […]