Peter Greene read an unusually annoying article in the Detroit News that showed just out of touch the authors are.
Michigan is a state that went overboard for school choice, thanks to former Governor John Engler and the billionaire DeVos family.
Michigan has dropped down to the bottom of NAEP, as scores have collapsed for every group.
Jeb Bush arrives to tell Michigan what they need to do is double down on their failed strategies. More choice. More testing. More accountability. More threats. More punishments.
Bush claimed that these strategies worked in Florida but they didn’t.As Greene notes, fourth grade score went up only because the state holds back third graders who don’t pass the third grade reading test. By eighth grade, students in Florida are at the national average.
Who aspires to be average?
Things are so bad in Michigan that average looks good. It is not.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Just spitballin’ here: because they are paid to or profit from them? And using term “ideas” is a bit too generous, in my opinion.
Michigan is a disaster for a number of reasons. The biggest is the DeVos influence. Any Republican that hints at stepping out of line regarding any DeVos wish (Schools, RTW, etc.) is threatened with being primaried in the next election cycle.
Second, the Detroit News primary education opinion columnist is a DeVos lackey. She graduated from Hillsdale College which is hyperconservative. This columnist’s pieces are typically just rehashes of DeVos ideas or that of the Mackinac Center which is funded by the likes of DeVos and the Kochs.
On a near weekly basis, the Detroit News is ready to lap up whatever new “idea” comes from these quarters.
this is repeated in too many media markets across the country: whatever new game the deformers are ready to play, the media is already up there on the cheerleader bandwagon
Michigan is a disaster for a number of reasons. The biggest is the DeVos influence. Any Republican that hints at stepping out of line regarding any DeVos wish (Schools, RTW, etc.) is threatened with being primaried in the next election cycle.
Second, the Detroit News primary education opinion columnist is a DeVos lackey. She graduated from Hillsdale College which is hyperconservative. This columnist’s pieces are typically just rehashes of DeVos ideas or that of the Mackinac Center which is funded by the likes of DeVos and the Kochs.
On a near weekly basis, the Detroit News is ready to lap up whatever new “idea” comes from these quarters.
Nobody should listen to Jeb Bush, leader of “Chiefs for Cash.” Jeb has been the puppet master and manipulator of failed education policy in Florida for decades. Isn’t it time to investigate him and just lock him up? “Low energy Jeb” is only passionate about transferring public money out of the hands of the public and into private pockets. In fact, Jeb may be the lesser talented of the two Bush boys. At least George can paint!
If you call what he does painting
Give it up, Jeb. The testing and the puerile national “standards” and VAM and school grading DIDN’T WORK, and they did a LOT of damage. School in the US is not a place where anyone wants to be now because of this crap. And it didn’t improve outcomes or close achievement gaps. The results are in. These “reforms” UTTERLY FAILED. At some point, even VERY SLOW LEARNERS can GROK this.
Jeb is like some nineteenth-century phrenologist or proponent of the existence of the luminiferous aether, continuing to give talks propounding this crap long after science has shown it to be nonsense. It’s beginning to be comical–self-parodying.
What’s not comical is that our schools are still lost in the Bushes.
End the high-stakes standardized testing. End the Coring of curricula and pedagogy. End the school grading and VAM.
Teachers, take back your classrooms.
Bob (et al.)—
For us lowly non-accountability-area teachers—I only teach Latin—we DO have classroom autonomy. Still, we can still challenge the use of our time. Do taxpayers really want me to lose 10 days of instruction so that I can proctor tests? Are taxpayers happy to pay my salary (35 years & a doctorate ain’t cheap) so that I can read directions & walk up and down rows? Their little disruptive innovation has been anything but.
Fordham once ran a white paper about how little time was actually taken up by standardized testing, further proof of how completely clueless these people are about actual schools. Have they ever been inside one? In my recent school, we ran a testing schedule for the last two months of the school year. Classes were truncated. Students were often absent because they were testing. The media labs weren’t available at all during those months. But that’s wasn’t even the bulk of the opportunity cost. Teachers spent vast amounts of class time doing inane test prep and free test prep tutoring during their prep periods and before and after school. Throughout the year, we were forced to give pretests and benchmark tests. We were given textbooks that were heavily weighted toward test prep. My English Department chairperson said to me, “I do test prep until April, when the testing starts. Then I have a few weeks for teaching English.” And yes, I proctored and proctored and proctored. Well all did. My high-school kids had to take high-stakes tests in English, Algebra, Biology, and US History, in addition to the PSAT and the SAT and any AP tests they had on top of that. It was freaking insane. And the kids were completely stressed out, and NONE OF THIS had any pedagogical value whatsoever.
Please forgive, Kelley, the typos in that post! Ars longa, vita brevis!
The Mackinac Policy Conference is wholly ed reform. There are no other views permitted.
Jeb Bush is the perfect echo chamber spokesperson for what is a cheerleading session for ed reform. It’s all 100% miraculous success and the one and only option is always “double down!”
It’s amusing they hold it in Michigan. Michigan is a poster child for failed ed reforms. No matter! Double down! In fact, triple down! There’s never enough choice, enough deregulation, enough gimmicks and mandates and “secret sauce”. The answer is always “more”. Which ensures many, many Mackinac Policy Conferences to come.
This is what Noliwe Rooks Calls “Segrenomics.” Getting rich by saving the poor.
Some Ohio legislators promote Jeb’s failed ideas. When constituents ask whether a policy came from ALEC, they’ve been overheard to say more than once, “This law didn’t come from ALEC. It came from Florida.”
Dumb and dumber.
They listen to Jeb Bush on education for the same reason they listened to George w. Bush on the invasion of Iraq: dollar$. Billions of them.
The Bushes are great at proposing ideas that they know some groups will simply not refuse.
According to Wikipedia, the Detroit News self-describes as libertarian. One definition of libertarianism is a willingness to let people die in the gutter like feral dogs.
The Detroit News has never endorsed a Democrat for President.
NewsMatters reports a hedge fund-backed company is one of the layers of Detroit News ownership. The layers include MNG and Alden Global Capital. Reportedly, the latter has fewer than 10 investors, mostly from overseas.
Jennifer Granholm, one of Michigan’s Democrat governors, brought into Detroit destructive Robert Bobb and Teach for America. And current newly elected Democrat governor Gretchen Whitmer is closing the only high school in the impoverished area of Benton Harbor Michigan. She says low test scores but the school sits on highly desired waterfront property. Here both parties follow privatization agenda.