Latest News and Comment from Education

Monday, May 26, 2014

5-26-14 Schools Matter - Jim Crow Rides Again

Schools Matter:






KIPP: ". . .it's almost like a cult"
Bill was an experienced urban teacher when he came to Memphis to teach at KIPP.  Like other teachers I have interviewed, he found himself so compromised and burned out that he did not last very long.  When he unexpectedly was offered an opportunity in another state, he bailed.  Here are a few excerpts from our conversation: INTERVIEWER: How do you think KIPP achieves its purpose and its aims?BI


KIPP Gets $20 Million in Tax Dollars As Nashville Continues to Delay Action on Public Housing Rebuild
Mayor Karl Dean started the money ball rolling toward KIPP, Inc. in 2010, even as Metro public schools were using garbage cans to catch rain water from leaky roofs and children were forced to have lunch in hallways.  Dean committed 10 percent of Metro's 4 year capital improvement funds for schools to this one project.Four years later, the new KIPP Academy is about to open after the City used over

Opposition the Common Core is More than Opposition to Testing
"Promoters of Common Core say that it is designed to make America’s children 'college and career ready.'  We instead judge Common Core to be a recipe for standardized workforce preparation." --132 Catholic ProfessorsWith the Chicago Teachers Union now officially in opposition to Common Core, Randi Weingarten is in a big PR push to do what she can to save the CC for her plutocratic po


Jim Crow Rides Again

The Supreme Court ruled 60 years ago this May 17 in Brown v. Board of Education that “segregation of white and Negro children in the public schools of a State solely on the basis of race, pursuant to state laws permitting or requiring such segregation,” is unconstitutional.
The ruling abolished the explicitly mandated segregation made infamous in the Deep South. But political reaction and larger structural shifts, such as white suburbanization, quickly overwhelmed tentative progress. Today, segregation — both racial and economic — remains the core organizational feature of American public education. In 1980, the typical black student attended a school where 36 percent of students were white. Today, the average black student attends a school where only 29 percent are. Many black and Latino students attend schools where nearly every other student is nonwhite — including in supposed liberal bastions such as New York and Chicago.
Indeed, New York state’s public schools are the most segregated in the nation, according to a March report from the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. In New York City, 19 of 32 community school districts are less than 10 percent white. That includes all of the Bronx, two-thirds of Brooklyn and half of Manhattan.
This is no time for an anniversary celebration.
“Black children are more racially and socioeconomically isolated today than at any time” since data became available in 1970, Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a recent report.
What’s more, schools attended primarily by nonwhite and poor children are often woefully underfunded.
Take Philadelphia, where, as a reporter for the Philadelphia City Paper, I cover a largely poor and nonwhite school district that, after years of underfunding, is going through a spectacular collapse in 






SKrashen: The problem is not a lack of technology. The problem is poverty.

SKrashen: The problem is not a lack of technology. The problem is poverty: Comment on " Education Needs to Change as Fast as Technology," by Zack Sims. Posted at http://www.forbes.c...


5-25-14 Schools Matter
Schools Matter: To Forbes: The problem is not a lack of technology. The problem is poverty.Comment on "Education Needs to Change as Fast as Technology," by Zack Sims. Posted athttp://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2014/05/23/education-needs-to-change-as-fast-as-technology/Mr. Sims hasn't done his homework. He points out that the "US is ranked by the Organization for Economic Coopera