Jeb Bush has developed a narrative that is by now familiar: our schools are failing; the nation is in danger because of our failing schools; competition, high-stakes testing, and accountability will spur innovation and achievement; we need choice, charters, vouchers, merit pay, an end to job security for teachers; tying teacher pay to student test scores.
No one in the mainstream media bothers to question any of these claims. Every one of them is patently false.
Paul Thomas rebukes the media for reporting instead of investigating. He fact-checks Bush.
Paul Thomas is fearless, articulate, and prolific. He has the advantage of 18 years experience as a high school teacher in South Carolina. He is now a professor at Furman University, which has the dubious distinction of being recognized by the National Council on Teacher Quality as one of the four best teacher education programs in the nation.
In my new book, “Reign of Error,” I demonstrate with graphs from the U.S. Department of Education and citations from research by independent scholars that every one of Bush’s assertions is demonstrably untrue.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Bad news for Los Angeles: http://www.scpr.org/blogs/education/2013/08/19/14539/garcetti-picks-up-mantle-from-villaraigosa-appoint/
This is how we make the case to support our public schools in Florida when the Foundation and the charter lobby and Step Up for Students tells us the sky is falling.
Karen
*Karen*
Karen Castor Dentel, PhD State Representative, District 30
* *
Choice, charter and voucher do the same thing that public is forced to do. Teach to an artificial test. No one knows what schools are good or bad b/c these tests require a different set of skills than real learning and proficiency means all kids are at the same place at the same time. This means that the highest scoring kids have been dragged away from real learning. How ignorant is that.
What kind of nut case would be crazy enough to even want all kids to be the same. Kids with low expectations will fail to learn, however, kids with too high expectations are put into the street. Of course the current goal of education is to put kids into the street so they won’t be counted on the success list. This is not only unethical, it is immoral.
It is time for teachers to take back their profession and design individualized schools. This will require you to ignore the test police. Some are afraid the test scores will slip if they don’t teach to the test. I say let the scores fall where they fall. They will anyway.
Read our books at http://www.wholechildreform.com to see how this can be done in your school, under the radar, without high priced consultants.
While I’m sure I agree with a lot of what your website says, it’s nearly impossible to actually read it. You really should simplify it with a uniform and reasonable font size and color. I don’t mean to be rude (although I realize I am), but the way your website currently looks, it’s hard to take it seriously as it looks like a lot of right-wing nutjob sites I’ve encountered.
My son looked at the site and said “that thing probably has hundreds of viruses in it.”
For what it’s worth, Cap.
Been enjoying reading it. Sorry you shelled out the money to Rosetta Stone when you could have gotten pretty much the same thing at a bookstore for a tenth of the cost.
I agree completely with those who say the press does not question JEB. I saw his interview on Piers Morgan about a year ago. Piers let JEB go on and on about how bad the unions are, how teachers with years are ineffective. The whole thing. Not once did Piers question anything JEB said. I can only guess that it was agreed before hand that JEB would run the show. I lost all respect for him as a journalist after that. I have been trying to find that complete interview and have been unable to. If any one knows how to get it, please let me know.
We, as a Democracy are in real danger if our journalist are unwilling or unable to ask the tough questions and dig for the truth.
One of the places we should picket is the “Journalism” schools. They no longer teach basic reporting, but a form of “he said/ she said” that allows entitled liars to get equal time with the facts. The most notorious example that American reporters finally noticed and debunked was the claim that “balance” on the “global warming” story required reporters to quote experts from the side that denied global warming. The facts were shunted aside, as the norm of reporting simplified the job enormously: all you needed was a Roladex with the phone numbers (and later email addresses) of titled personages, and you have your story. The rest was in clever “writing” which had nothing to do with the facts.
As the man said in the Fifth Season of “The Wire” (still the best contemporary critique of the crisis facing America in an era of corporate media) — “We need to highlight the Dickensian aspect.”
Leaving out the fact that once Dickens left his early job as a court reporter, he wrote fiction. Little Oliver (Twist) might be more “real” in the minds of millions than the children who tried to grow up in the typhus and cholera infested streets of London, but Oliver (and Fagan, one of those characters going back to Shylock in the long line of British anti-Semitism) was fictional.
Chicago has long been the victim of “He said, but she said” “reporting” as a component of corporate school reform. Although the infection began even before Illinois began mayoral dictatorship with the Amendatory Act of 1995, it has metastisized since. One reason is that the corporate people (including crazy randy billionaires like Sam Zell, who ruined the Chicago Tribune) are eliminating “personnel costs” as drastically as the school boards are trying to do. Why have two reporters covering a complex story when you can assign it to a “Report for America” novice who needs a GPS to find her way around Chicago’s West Side? The “dead wood” veterans may know more, but they can’t write with that “Dickensian” flair that makes for exciting copy.
Once upon a time…
Chicago had a boot camp for reporters, which ruthlessly drilled into all ingenues facts facts and the sourcing of facts. Reporting is not about “balance” but about accuracy.
Every day gives us another example of this nonsense. Someone who knows nothing but has the title repeats a bunch of scripted talking points and the facts are drowned in narrative. In Chicago, we have Barbara Byrd Bennett and Becky Carroll, both repeating Rahm’s version of reality (at least as noisome as Jeb’s) about the schools.
And the plan works.
A month ago, in a story that appeared on the front page of the national edition, America’s “newspaper of record,” The New York Times, reported a fiction created by Rahm Emanuel and his handlers. In their story about how desperate the fiscal problems facing the city’s schools were, the Times reporters doubled the future costs of teacher pensions, among other things. And doubled down on the mindless factless narrative by putting those numbers in a graph — on the front page!
Of course, going all the way for Rahm, the Times didn’t even bother to pick up the phone and call the Chicago Teachers Union or the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund. When I saw the story (we get the print edition; long habit), I called and asked both.
Nope, said the CTU communications chief. The Times hadn’t even called.
Nope, said the director of the ten billion dollar CTPF, the Times hadn’t talked to him.
Jeb Bush isn’t the only national “reform” person getting away with mendacious fact spinning. Rahm Emanuel has teams of fictionalists creating his version and placing it widely just about every day. I don’t know if they get a bonus for getting it on Page One, but the problem goes back to lazy reporting and those who train “journalists” to be “writers” instead of those who seek accuracy.