Latest News and Comment from Education

Monday, October 8, 2012

UPDATE: Diane in the Evening 10-8-12 Diane Ravitch's blog

Diane Ravitch's blog:



A Draft of a Parent’s Letter to President Obama

A parent in California drafted a letter to President Obama. This could serve as a template for other parents.
Some parents worry about the negative effects of high-stakes testing on their children. Others are upset that their community is being torn apart by battles with charter operators. Others are upset by class size or budget cuts.
Please send us your email by October 17.
Here are the instructions.
Write your views and join our campaign to collect the maximum number of emails and letters in the next 10 days. Anthony Cody will collect them, will combine them with emails to my blog, and submit them to the White House on October 18.





Can We Persuade President Obama to Listen?

Will he hear what teachers are saying?
Any chance he will hear us?
This reader thought of a novel approach.


Follow the Money, Again

Here’s a hard-hitting investigative report on the money pouring into California to beat the unions by cutting off dues collections. The face of this campaign is Gloria Omero, who flipped to the right and is now the face of Democrats for education Reform, the pro-privatization Wall Street hedge fund managers’ group.
Seems the Koch brothers tossed in a few million, which makes it hard to maintain the pretense that the anti-union campaign is warm, fuzzy and progressive.
The only error that I spotted is calling ALEC “neoconservative.” It is a reactionary organization pushing radical schemes to suppress voter rights, relax gun control, crush unions, relax environmental regulation, and privatize public education, among other things.


A Marketplace for Schools?

Corporate reform privatizers like Joel Klein, Jeb Bush, Michael Bloomberg, and Mitt Romney like to boast of the glories of a marketplace for schools. They want parents to be consumers, armed with test scores and school report cards and grades. In that great come-and-get-it-day, all schools will be excellent when they compete. That’s why all those programs on all those channels on your TV dial are excellent, and why every product in the marketplace is excellent. Ah, the glories of deregulation!
This teacher describes the new marketplace:
I just spent this past weekend in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. Visiting several Autumn festivals I noticed