By Paul Horton. The Advanced Placement United States History course recently revised by the College Board has recently undergone a second major revision in response to critics from the right who argue that the first revision did not emphasize specific content and that it focused on social history and neglected …
By Paul Horton. A couple of years ago I had the privilege of listening to the late Nobel Economics laureate Gary Becker speak at my school. Professor Becker won the Nobel Prize for his book Human Capital that argued that the marketplace provides consumers with “rational choices” that rational people will …
By Anthony Cody. This week we have seen a renewed attempt to rehabilitate the beleaguered Common Core standards, just as the scores arrive in many states, largely meeting projections that they would yield increased failure rates and a wider “achievement gap.” These results are the most basic problem that the …
By Monty Neill. Testing resistance and reform activists can help determine the result of the House-Senate conference committee that will write a compromise bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, now named No Child Left Behind). Both houses of Congress took important steps to end …
By David Spring. On Saturday, August 1, 2015, KIRO News in Seattle Washington reported that the careers of nearly 200 highly qualified and highly experienced teachers in the Kent School District were being placed at risk due to a clerical error. Here is a link to their report. Keep in mind that teachers (and …
By Anthony Cody. The administrators of United Opt Out have published An Activist Handbook for the Education Revolution: United Opt Out’s Test of Courage. It should of high interest to advocates for real change in our schools. One of the benefits of the 2011 Save Our Schools march in Washington, DC, was the way …
An excerpt from Horace (Rog) Lucido’s new book, “Restoring Sanity to the Classroom: Eliminating the Testing Mania.” It seems like education is on a never ending quest to be ‘reformed’. The current trend began with the successful USSR’s orbiting of Sputnik on October 4, 1957 and reached a …
By Anthony Cody. For years teachers have heard about the crucial role parents have in supporting their children’s academic progress. Extensive research shows that increased parental involvement translates into success for students. However, the new Common Core approach to math is having a rather perverse effect. …
By John Thompson. The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof, in “Bill and Melinda Gates’s Pillow Talk,” writes: “It has been 15 years since Bill and Melinda Gates created what is now the largest foundation in the world. This milestone seemed the right moment to ask them what they have …
By Denny Taylor. The truth is that the fill-in-the-bubble, ranking and sorting, high stakes testing, political reform of public education is a total system failure “You have to be very cautious and careful about accepting claims by power systems,” Chomsky said to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, July 1, 2015. …
