By John Thompson. Paul Tough’s Helping Children Succeed is a great corrective to the hubris that undermined the contemporary school reform movement. Tough volunteers a modest statement about his methodology, and in doing so he offers an alternative to corporate reform and its grand vision of “disruptive …
By Anthony Cody. This week leaders in the California Department of Education released a new system for “grading schools” that proposes to assign schools a set of colored indicators based on a variety of measurements. This system is intended to replace the old system of performance indicators which gave schools …
By Anthony Cody. Last week I shared the views of eleven different education activists, who reflected on the choices we face in the current presidential election. Several additional perspectives came in after I had posted, so I am sharing them here, to continue the discussion. Please join in the comments. The …
By Anthony Cody. The 2016 presidential election has generated equal portions of hope and frustration. The Democrats are likely to offer us Clinton, and with Trump as the chief rival, some feel we have little choice but to support her, even though she does not offer much evidence that she will take on the issues we …
By Anthony Cody. One week from today, on Friday, July 8, I will join thousands of activists from around the nation at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, to once again raise our voices for meaningful changes in our schools at a protest organized by the Save Our Schools Coalition. We will hear from Reverend …
By Anthony Cody. In my recent research into the 2010 LA Times series on “teacher effectiveness,” I learned that $15,000 was used to help pay for someone to generate the VAM analysis used to create thousands of teacher ratings that the newspaper published. These funds came from a 2010 grant from the …
By Wayne Ross, David Gabbard, Kathleen Kesson, Sandra Mathison, and Kevin D. Vinson. If public schools are to realize their democratizing potential, progressive activists must organize and act on an agenda that counters the neo-liberal view of education that currently dominates. We want to believe that public …
By John Thompson. A first post summarized the way that Paul Tough’s new article, previewing his new Helping Children Succeed, explains why we must celebrate the fact that “the much-criticized No Child Left Behind Act, which dominated federal education policy for the past decade and a half, was finally …
By John Thompson. Part One: (read Part Two here). I can’t wait to read and reread Paul Tough’s new book, Helping Children Succeed: What works and Why. Tough’s Atlantic Magazine preview mostly prompted unadulterated joy from reading such an excellent synthesis of scientific research. But it also serves as a …
By Anthony Cody. Many of us are in a state of deep frustration over the strong possibility that Bernie Sanders will not be the Democratic Party’s nominee in the presidential race this fall. Circumstances may yet occur to upset the presumptions that are now being made, so I think it is legitimate to wait until …
