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By Anthony Cody. It is a strange commentary on the news media that the best portrait of what is happening in America comes to us from a former chef by the name of Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain’s show last week took him back to Massachusetts, where he first started working as a dishwasher and cook. He found much has …

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By Anthony Cody. When I visited the Gates Foundation a few years ago, one phrase stuck with me. “You can only manage what you can measure,” I was told. This is the underlying framework of our 21st century accountability paradigm. On the 2008 presidential primary campaign trail, candidates Obama and …

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By Anthony Cody. Returning from protesting the Gates Foundation’s funding of corporate education reform, I have been wrestling with some questions about the goals for their project. The Gates Foundation’s Vicki Phillips was interviewed the day of the protest, and had this to say about it: At the …

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By Anthony Cody. A basic question is emerging as our schools are urged to embrace the Common Core State Standards and the computer-based learning systems aligned to the standards. Are these digital devices becoming central to the classroom—and coming to dominate the way we teach and learn? And how will this …

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By Francesca Blueher. Six years ago, I administered a 12 hour, 100-page test that could not be read by a single student who was mandated to take it. This test, the New Mexico Standards Based Assessment (NMSBA), was composed of multiple choice questions; reading passages to be answered with short responses; …

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By Anthony Cody. The post I wrote a month ago, critiquing Marc Tucker’s “new accountability system” has opened up a long overdue discussion of the economic foundations and goals of 21st century education reform. In his two responses, to myself and Diane Ravitch, and to Yong Zhao, Tucker has chosen to only …

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By Denny Taylor. I have read with interest the dialogue between Marc Tucker, Diane Ravitch, Anthony Cody, and Yong Zhao on the establishment of an American test-based public education accountability system. Forty years of research on the impact of political structures on social systems,[1], [2] in particular …

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By Stephen Krashen Bill Nye (“The Science Guy”) is enthusiastic about the Common Core because he feels that there are some basic principles that students simply need to know: Everybody needs to learn “a little bit of physics, chemistry, mathematics and you got to learn some evolution. …