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The Problem with Choice

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2013 //
93

A reader from Oregon explains the destructive consequences of choice. School choice has been a goal of the right for decades and is now embraced by the Obama administration:

“For US education to thrive, charters must go.

“Some Win, Some Lose with Open Enrollment”. The headline in the Eugene, Oregon Register-Guard may seem like an occasion for joy to the winning school districts but, really, it is just terribly sad for all of us. Open enrollment across district lines is the latest and most extreme version of a school choice movement that is on a trajectory to split public education in two – one set of schools for the haves and the other for those left behind.

School choice is probably the most popular of the signature elements of the current school reform movement – and is there any reason why alternative and charter schools shouldn’t be popular? They house some of the best teachers and some of the most innovative programs; they have more opportunities for enrichment because they are exempt from many of the requirements faced by regular schools; and the parents are more involved and more able to donate time and money – the last not because they care more about their kids. Rather it is because the parents need to be able to provide transportation and often are required to agree to levels of involvement not possible for families without a car and a stay-at-home parent.

The result: one set of schools with wealthier, less diverse students and fewer kids with special needs; the other serving children more diverse in ethnicity, income and educational needs (with fewer resources and more requirements). Public education was supposed to be the great equalizer, an inclusive, welcoming place that gives all kids a chance to climb the ladder of success. But current trends create a de facto tracking system based on socioeconomic status.

Of course we’ve always had school choice. Through the 1960s the choice was public or private. Over the last few decades, however, public school districts created alternative and charter schools and encouraged them to draw their students from the surrounding neighborhood schools. In a Darwinian battle the schools would compete for students with the best schools thriving and good riddance to the losers. It is really hard to believe that school “reformers” didn’t foresee the result: the non-charters left with the most needy kids, fewer resources and, inevitably, failure.

The fact that public alternatives and charters have many good teachers and leaders and involved parents is, itself, the strongest argument against public charters and alternatives. Those are the very resources needed by neighborhood schools to make them what they need to be. And it isn’t even a zero-sum game – it’s negative-sum. Services are duplicated and shifting enrollments make long-range planning impossible.

The parents of students who choose schools outside their neighborhoods are not the problem – good parents will always look for the best available school for their children. The teachers and administrators in those schools are not the problem – many of them are among the best. The problem is the system that sends parents school shopping in the first place.

It is a system that takes advantage of the parental instinct to provide our children with the best possible education. You don’t have to be a public school hater to participate; school shopping has become a mark of good parenting for parents of all persuasions. “I can’t send my daughter to the neighborhood school,” said one mom recently. “Those parents aren’t involved.” And, sadly, what used to be a myth is creating a reality as parents like her opt out of their neighborhood schools.

If, as I suggest, we are to end most school choice, it is important to be sure that we are sending our kids to excellent neighborhood schools. To be honest, part of the reason parents have been so willing to drive their kids across town (or now to a different town) is that some neighborhood schools had become rigid, take-it-or-leave-it, hostile-to-change institutions. Parents with concerns or questions were considered pests. Though they can’t be all things to all people, our neighborhood schools need to be what many already are; nimble, responsive, welcoming neighborhood centers providing an outstanding education to all kids.

The successful innovations that charter and alternative schools have devised wouldn’t be wasted. They – including language immersion – can and should be applied in the neighborhood schools. And charters and alternatives that step up to meet the needs of high school students when regular high schools are unable to do so should be allowed to keep working with, rather than competing against, the mainstream schools.

It is a cliché that if you are attacked from both sides of an issue, you are probably correct. But school “reform” seems to call for a corollary: if there is agreement on an issue from both sides of the aisle, it must be wrong. It is truly mind-boggling that free-market educational policies – so obviously counterproductive, ineffective and unsustainable – are supported by both Democrats and Republicans. The deck may be stacked against us but if we are truly committed to equity, diversity and efficiency in our public schools we’ll need keep working to convince officials, parents and educators that it is essential that we stop this suicidal intra- and inter-district competition, phase out school shopping and bring back new and improved versions of the centers of our neighborhoods – our schools.

Jim Watson, Eugene, Oregon

Categories ALEC, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Federal Waiver, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top, US Education, Vouchers

Is Privatization of Public Schools a Good Idea?

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2013 //
89

I disagree with this post by a faithful reader. But I think it deserves discussion.

There are many reasons to object to privatization.

One is that there is no evidence that privately managed firms that operate public services provide more efficient or less costly service. Another is that privately managed firms, when operating for profit, extract public dollars for investors that taxpayers intended for children, for educational programs that directly benefit children, for reduced class sizes, —and not to enrich shareholders. Privately managed nonprofits often pay salaries that would be unacceptable in the public sector. Privately managed firms tend to exclude the costliest clients to minimize their own costs, thus leaving the hardest cases for the less well funded public sector agency. And last, to destroy public education, which is so inextricably linked to our notions of democracy and citizenship would be an assault on the commonweal. Let us not forget that public education has been the instrument of the great social movements for more than the past half century–desegregation, gender equality, disability rights, and the assimilation of immigrants. Once it is gone, it is gone, and that would be a crime against ourselves.

The reader writes:

“Ladd and Fiske correctly identify the four risks to the public education system of the privatization movement, but they assume that the public education system is an unqualified “good.” What if privatization produces different and better goods? Public education implements mainly a “progressive” philosophy of government. By the word “democracy” it means government control of education and almost everything else it can get its hands on. “Social justice” is the well-worn substitute term for ‘redistribute the wealth.’ I mean no name calling to point out that has been the communist agenda from the beginning and remains the communist agenda.

“The whole point of privatization, then, is to free American education from the statist agenda (which implies ‘community’ responsiblity for every individual and submission of every individual to the tyranny of the community). Most here see public education as an unmixed good. It’s opponents think otherwise, and their motives are clear.

“What is most surprising, however, is to find the Obama Education Department so staunchly behind the measures that we ALL agree are destroying the public school systems. NCLB? RTTT? CCSS? What true educator can support that testing to extinction? It baffles me why Obama/Duncan want to eliminate the public school systems when their objectives in every other area of life, especially health care, is anti individual freedom.

“Ladd and Fiske, then, are totally correct in saying that the privatization movement sees public goods as merely the sum of the individual goods arising from education. I say that is the way it should be in America. What are claimed as social goods lost by privatization are, in my view, really social “bads.” They are mainly accustoming citizens to acquiesce in state control of their lives. There’s been enough of that already.”

Categories Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization, US Education, Vouchers

The Best of 2012

By dianeravitch
January 1, 2013 //
54

2012 was a year in which supporters of public education–parents, educators and concerned citizens–won some huge victories against the privatization movement.

Let’s begin with the elections of 2012.

Reform idol Tony Bennett was booted out by the voters of Indiana, who elected veteran educator Glenda Ritz as State Superintendent of Education.

Idaho was a great victory for supporters of public education. Idaho voters decisively repealed the Luna laws, which would have committed the state to spend $180 million for laptops while imposing merit pay, crushing the unions and tying every educators’ evaluation to test scores.

Voters in Florida rejected an effort to amend the state constitution to permit vouchers.

Voters in Bridgeport, Connecticut, voted against the mayor’s effort to take control of their public schools by eliminating the elected board of education.

Voters in Santa Clara County, California, re-elected Anna Song, whose opponent outspent her by about 25-1. She was targeted for defeat by the California charter school lobby after she opposed a bid by Rocketship to open 20 new charters. Rocketship will get the charters but Anna Song proved that big money was not enough to beat a supporter of public education.

The big push for “parent trigger” laws ran into two stumbling blocks:

In Florida, Jeb Bush and Michelle Rhee put on a full-court press to persuade the state legislature to pass a law allowing parents to vote to hand their public school over to a charter operator. But they overlooked the parents of Florida! Every Florida parent group turned out in Tallahassee to oppose the “Parent Empowerment” bill. In reformese, when they talk “parent empowerment,” that means parents are about to lose their voice and their local neighborhood school. Florida PTAs, Fund Florida Now, Testing Is Not Teaching, 50th No More, and every other grassroots group spoke out against the “parent trigger.” A bloc of Republican state senators turned against the bill, and the bill died in the state senate on a tie vote of 20-20. It will be back this year, but so will Florida’s parents.

The billionaire libertarian Philip Anschutz, in league with billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch, released a film called “Won’t Back Down,” that was intended to teach the American public that the only way to save their children was to hand their public school over to a charter operator. The film was heavily promoted at NBC’s “Education Nation,” on the Ellen show, and at a “Teachers Rock” concert sponsored by CBS. Michelle Rhee sponsored free showings at both national political conventions, so that every Democrat and Republican could have a chance to see how important it is to turn public schools over to private management, whether for-profit or non-profit. But then Parents Across America sprung into action. They put out a fact sheet about who and what was behind the movie. A few of them actually demonstrated at the Democratic National Convention. When the film was released in late September, it was pegged as anti-teacher and anti-public education and anti-union. It got terrible reviews. It didn’t sell many tickets. It flopped. Within a month after its grand premiere, it had disappeared. The free market is not kind to idlers, even when the guy who produced the movie is one of the biggest theater owners in the nation.

The movement against high-stakes testing roared into high gear:

More than 80% of the local school boards in Texas passed resolutions opposing high-stakes testing. Prominent Texans like state board member Tom Ratliff spoke out against the misuse of tests.

Superintendent Joshua Starr of Montgomery County, Maryland, called for a three-year moratorium on high-stakes testing. He said that the schools were inundated with too many changes at the same time.

Superintendent Heath Morrison of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, said that the national obsession with high-stakes testing had to stop. He said, “we can teach to the top, but we can’t test to the top.” Last spring, Morrison was chosen as Superintendent of the Year by the American Association of School Administrators.

Superintendent John Kuhn of the Perrin-Whitt Independent School District in Texas continues to be an eloquent spokesman for children.

The voucher program in Louisiana became an international embarrassment and its funding was declared unconstitutional:

Earlier this year, Governor Bobby Jindal pushed through sweeping voucher legislation for Louisiana that would give vouchers for more than half the children in the state to attend private and religious schools with money taken from the public school budget. Because several of the voucher schools are religious schools that teach creationism, the Louisiana plan was mocked by media around the world, who laughed at the idea that children would be taught that men and dinosaurs co-existed and that the Loch Ness monster is real, and other nonsense. Just weeks ago, a Louisiana judge struck down the funding of the vouchers, because the state constitution says the money is dedicated to elementary and secondary public schools. The language is clear. The state may not raid the public school’s minimum foundation budget to pay for vouchers.

Oh, and the anti-voucher vote in Florida continued a longstanding tradition: No state has ever voted to approve vouchers.

Local school boards continue to support their public schools with vigilance:

In addition to the many local school boards in Texas and elsewhere that have passed high-stakes testing resolutions, school boards have fought off other intrusions.

In North Carolina, the school boards won a battle to keep the for-profit virtual charter corporation K12 Inc. out of their state.

The Austin Independent School Board, after an election that brought in new members representing the community, severed its contract with the IDEA charter chain.

In Nashville, the Metro Nashville school board turned down Great Hearts Academy four times because Great Hearts wanted to locate their charter in a mainly white neighborhood and had inadequate plans for diversity. The board stood firm despite the fulminations of the governor, the legislature, and the state commissioner of education, who are so determined to open the way for Great Hearts that 1) Commissioner Kevin Huffman withheld $3.4 million of public funds from the children of Nashville to punish the school board for its refusal to follow his orders; and 2) the legislature plans to authorize a state commission to override the local school boards’ wishes. This accords with ALEC legislation.

Bad news for ALEC:

For years, ALEC has been under the radar. The shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida made the public aware of ALEC’s “Stand Your Ground” legislation, invoked by the man who killed the teen. Then the media starting paying attention to ALEC and discovered its agenda of privatization (see ALEC Exposed) and learned about the model laws written by ALEC for charter schools, vouchers, online charter schools, union-busting, uncertified teachers, and an array of other corporate-friendly legislation.

The Chicago Teachers Union went on strike and said, “Enough is enough!”

Teachers have watched in dismay as state after state has whittled away or hacked away their right to bargain collectively, their tenure rights, their academic freedom, and their pensions. They have seen state after state pass legislation requiring merit pay (even though it has never worked anywhere) and tying their evaluations and their careers to student test scores (even though research says that value-added assessment is inaccurate and unstable and punishes teachers who teach children with high needs).

Teachers and principals alike have watched in dismay as rightwing legislatures and governors have slashed spending for public schools while paying more for testing.

Educators have been appalled by cuts in basic services to students.

And the CTU said, “No more.”

CTU was not allowed to strike about anything that mattered, but they made clear in their words and deeds that they were striking for their students. They were striking to protest the lack of teachers of the arts, of librarians and social workers, and of basic resources for students. They were protesting overcrowded classes. They were protesting school closings.

CTU had the support of parents of Chicago’s students. They had the support of police and firefighters.

The national media never understood what was at stake, but almost every educator in America did.

And to educators, CTU were heroes. Every educator wished they too had one of those cool red CTU tee-shirts.

2012 was the beginning.

Teachers, principals, superintendents, local and state school boards are speaking up.

Parents and students are speaking up.

The friends of public education dominate social media.

We dominate Twitter and Facebook because we have millions of supporters.

The corporate reformers have millions to buy TV ads and to buy media outlets.

But they don’t own us.

And they are failing. Everything they advocate is failing.

That is why we are winning.

2012 is the beginning.

We will take back public education for the public, not for profit, not for private interests.

For the public.

Pro publica.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Parent trigger, Privatization, Supporting public schools, Unions, US Education, Vouchers

A Gift for You: Why Education Matters

By dianeravitch
December 25, 2012 //
19

This article is a Christmas gift from me to you.

Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic has written one of the most eloquent explanations of why we need teachers, schools, and universities.

At a time when we hear hosannas to online learning, home-schooling, inexperienced teachers, the business model of schooling, for-profit schools, and the commodification of education, this is bracing reading.

Here is the way that Wieseltier’s wonderful article ends:

“THE PRESIDENT IS RIGHT that we should “out-educate” other countries, but he is wrong that we should do so only, or mainly, to “out-compete.” Surely the primary objectives of education are the formation of the self and the formation of the citizen. A political order based on the expression of opinion imposes an intellectual obligation upon the individual, who cannot acquit himself of his democratic duty without an ability to reason, a familiarity with argument, a historical memory. An ignorant citizen is a traitor to an open society. The demagoguery of the media, which is covertly structural when it is not overtly ideological, demands a countervailing force of knowledgeable reflection. (There are certainly too many unemployed young people in America, but not because they have read too many books.) And the schooling of inwardness matters even more in the lives of parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and lovers, where meanings are often ambiguous and interpretations determine fates. The equation of virtue with wealth, of enlightenment with success, is no less repulsive in a t-shirt than in a suit. How much about human existence can be inferred from a start-up? Shakespeare or Undrip: I should have thought that the choice was easy. Entrepreneurship is not a full human education, and living is never just succeeding, and the humanities are always pertinent. In pain or in sorrow, who needs a quant? There are enormities of experience, horrors, crimes, disasters, tragedies, which revive the appetite for wisdom, and for the old sources, however imprecise, of wisdom—a massacre of schoolchildren, for example.”

Categories Education Industry, For-Profit, Obama, On-Line Education, Teachers and Teaching, US Education

Privatization or Public Education?

By dianeravitch
December 22, 2012 //
26

Helen Ladd and her husband Edward Fiske are distinguished observers of American Education. Ladd is a Professor of Economics at Duke University. Fiske was education editor of the anew York Times.

Together they describe a fork in the road for our nation’s public school system.

Will we continue towards free-market privatization or will we revitalize public education?

This is what they see ahead as the risks in the privatization agenda:

“First, it severs the connection between public schools and the civic purposes for which they were established and that justify the use of taxpayer dollars to fund them. Implicit in this vision is the notion that the benefits of education accrue first and foremost to individuals and that public benefits are simply the sum of private ones.

“Second, it rejects the notion of an education system. Those who view education primarily as a collection of independent schools serving private interests have few incentives to assure that multiple stakeholders — students, teachers, administrators, policy makers, the business community and others — work together through democratic institutions in pursuit of common goals.

“Third, the private education vision leaves little room for principles of social justice and the commitment to equal educational opportunity for all children. By emphasizing privatization and competition rather than community and cooperation, it trivializes the whole notion of “public” education. Nor does it take responsibility for addressing the special challenges that disadvantaged children bring with them when they walk through the schoolhouse door.

“Public schools in the U.S. have always operated at the intersection of two sets of legitimate rights: those of individuals, including parents, to pursue their own best interests and those of society as a whole to perpetuate democratic values and to promote collective prosperity.

“By and large Americans have found ways to strike a balance between these two objectives. Public schools have served as engines of upward mobility for millions of individuals, including waves of immigrants, while driving economic growth by providing an educated workforce. By emphasizing private interests almost entirely at the expense of public ones, the private vision, with millions of dollars behind it, threatens to undermine this historical balance.”

Categories Education Industry, Privatization, US Education, Vouchers

Outlook for Common Core: Turmoil Ahead

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2012 //
11

Researchers usually find that students flourish where there is stability in the school, with an experienced staff, clear expectations, small classes, and a rich curriculum.

In Kentucky, first state to implement and test the Common Core, student scores fell and achievement gaps widened.

This teacher in Connecticut foresees rough weather ahead as the state and federal government launch a massive experiment:

I wonder about the impact specifically in Connecticut where we are rolling out a new comprehensive teacher evaluation system at the same time [as Common Core]….so we have teachers learning new standards, possibly new curriculum, new evaluation processes, new observational rubrics for lessons, teaching and then setting learning goals based on results of one type of test in 2014, and then another online, common core test in 2015…how many schools will fail? How many teachers will not make gains with their students? How many will be fired? How many schools will be taken over? How will the students handle all the stress and change in the schools? It sounds to me like a lot of people will benefit – private companies waiting to take over schools, publishers, trainers, RESCS, but the hands-down, biggest loser will be the students. It is going to be a rough ride in Connecticut for a few years as this experiment unfolds.

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Connecticut, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, Technology, Computers, Testing, US Education

Preparing Our Youth for the Military-Industrial Complex and Global Competition

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2012 //
32

On November 28, at a meeting of Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, Joel Klein and Condoleeza Rice discussed the report of a task force they chaired and the report they produced for the Council on Foreign Relations.

The central claim of the report was that American public education is so dreadful that it constitutes “a very grave threat to national security.” I thought that the findings and the recommendations of the report were far-fetched and predetermined by the makeup of the task force. I agreed with the panel’s dissenters and reviewed the report here.

I am happy to see that the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers has published a forum in which a group of scholars respond to the CFR report.
Several authors reacted with derision to the CFR’s warm embrace of the Common Core standards, especially to its recommendation That students need more “informational text” and less “narrative fiction.” The writers saw this as a direct challenge, if not an insult, to the humanities and to the development of creativity, imagination, moral judgment, and critical thinking.
Two of the essays note the similarity between the CFR report and the views of Mr. Gradgrind in Dickens’ “Hard Times.” Mr. Gradgrind memorably said,
“Now what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root everything else out.”
Most of the authors are disturbed by the narrow and cold utilitarianism of the report, the attitude that people are not individuals with their own purposes but “human capital” that must be shaped to serve the needs of industry, the military and global competition.
A sampling of the commentary:
Several of the authors, writes Rosanna Warren of the University of Chicago, share “a sinister political assumption floating in the CFR report but nowhere in it argued or defended, that the United States is from now on to be committed to the enterprise of global domination.” Not only does it implicitly raise questions about what kind of nation we should be but “One of the more repellent features of the CFR report is its persistent referring to human beings–students and teachers–as ‘human capital,’…terminology that may be fine for economic planners or those writing about corporate success, but as an educational vision it is chilling.” The writers of the CFR report, she says, “regard people as units of merely instrumental value in larger systems of corporate production and military defense.
Elizabeth D. Samet, who teaches at the U.S. Military Academy, defends the teaching of fiction. She writes, “Informational texts often invite a reader to answer a series of questions at the end of teach chapter; fiction demands that a reader figure out which questions to ask.” The security of our nation depends, she writes. “on citizens possessed of liberated cultural and political imaginations.”
Rachel Hadas of Rutgers asks, “What is an ‘informational text’—a textbook?…And what does “narrative fiction’ denote?” She finds, “Reflection and self-criticism, or indeed questioning of any sort, are not among the benefits the Report associates with education, or indeed with national security.” Without such questioning, there can be neither imagination nor creativity.
James Miller of the New School finds that the report is “preoccupied with staffing up the military-industrial complex” and thus disregards liberal education as a goal of education. Written in “wooden, barely literate prose,” the report is concerned only with immediate, utilitarian interests. “In the name of bolstering national security, they are offering an intellectual starvation diet for the vast majority of American students.”
Robert Alter, now emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, says that “the ruthless instrumentalization of the student population they [the CFR task force] envisage is quite likely to alienate young people rather than excite them about learning.” The Report’s neglect of language and literature, he writes, is “not merely dim but scandalous.” It neglects Greek or Latin “because you can’t cut a deal with a multinational in the language of Homer or Virgil. Literature itself is relegated in the Report to a distant and irrelevant memory because it has no utilitarian application.” It is important, of course, to read information text, but too much such text “is an excellent recipe for instilling a hatred of reading.”
David Bromwich of Yale University notes that since 2001, a “panic fear” about national security has grown. He asks, “Who should answer for the decline of American prestige in the world? This pamphlet renders a curious verdict. Not economists, not corporate heads, not generals or presidents or their advisers. No: public school teachers are to blame.” The Report, he writes, “takes the militarization of the motives for education to an unprecedented extreme.” Nowhere does it present “learning and wisdom” as good ends in themselves. He concludes, “…the intellectual bankruptcy of this enterprise suggests a corruption of mind more dangerous to a free society than any combination of military stalemates and diplomatic defeats.”
This short (67-page) pamphlet is a refreshing rejoinder to much of the cant and dogma that are in the air these days. There are several other excellent contributions by other authors, including John C. Briggs, James Engell, Virgil Nemoianu, Lee Oser, Michael B. Prince, Diana Senechal, and Helaine L. Smith. Every one of their short commentaries contain more wisdom than the CFR Report.
Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Curriculum, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, US Education

A Student Activist Joins the Honor Roll

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2012 //
9

Stephanie Rivera is a junior at Rutgers University preparing to become a teacher.

Stephanie was one of the leading forces in creating Students United for Public Education, a new organization in which students are joining to stand up against the privatizers, profiteers and naysayers now besieging our public schools.

She has her own blog, where she regularly debates other students who support corporate reform policies.

Stephanie is an activist on behalf of the teaching profession and on behalf of social and educational equity.

She joins our honor roll as a hero of public education because she has bravely taken on powerful forces and dared to ask hard questions.

She understands that teaching is hard work, and that it is a profession, not a pastime.

I admire her spunk, her willingness to debate, her energy, and her courage.

The future belongs to you, Stephanie, and to all the other students who understand that public education belongs to them as a democratic right to build their future.

It must not become a plaything for Wall Street and billionaires, nor a stepping stone for politicians, nor a profit center for entrepreneurs.

It belongs to you and your generation. Preserve and strengthen it for future generations, doors open to all by right.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Honor Roll, Students, Teach for America TFA, US Education

Parsing the Florida “Miracle”

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2012 //
17

Jeb Bush claims the mantle of King of Education Reform.

He touts the Florida Miracle.

His ingredients for success: testing, testing, testing, school report cards, privatization, charters, vouchers, and big investments in online learning.

Here is one careful review of the Florida “miracle.”

Here is yet anothergood analysis of the Florida Miracle.

Bush is pushing the digitization of schooling pretty hard. His Foundation is funded by technology companies. Tony Bennett of Indiana and Tom Luna of Idaho carried the Bush banner in the November elections, and both got whipped.

There is neither research nor any evidence that kids learn more or better if they are doing it online. But this was not mentioned this at the big Bush conference in DC (Arne Duncan was the keynote speaker, boosting Bush’s credibility as an education reformer and a candidate in 2016).

Question: Will Jeb Bush’s Florida Miracle go the way of George W. Bush’s Texas Miracle?

Can we survive another such miracle?

Hmmm. A nation of digitized children.

Categories Bush, Jeb, Duncan, Arne, Florida, For-Profit, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), On-Line Education, Privatization, US Education

Ohio Starts New Group to Support Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2012 //
16

Citizens of Ohio have launched a new organization to support strong public schools.

Is there an organization like this in your community or state?

Please let me know.

I will compile a list and circulate it to everyone.

From Ohio comes this good news:

Ohio’s Teachers, Parents, Superintendents, School Board members and Citizens have launched a new movement ~ Strong Schools / Strong Communities

Strong Schools Strong Communities is a non-partisan movement dedicated to informing and engaging Ohioans at the community level to understand, appreciate and support our system of common public schools.

Visit our website at http://www.strongschoolsohio.com
Friend us on Face Book at : http://www.strongschoolsohio.com

Categories Ohio, Parents, US Education
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