By Anthony Cody. The last weekend of April I joined about 600 other history-makers in the great city of Chicago for the second annual conference of the Network for Public Education. It has been said that American attitudes towards education are like a pendulum, swinging from one side to another. If so, this was a …
By Anthony Cody. Poor John Oliver. After he did a segment on the insanity of our nation’s testing machine, the field of education’s only multi-million dollar blog, The Education Post, has taken after him with a vengeance. Oliver joins others with the nerve to question the nation’s obsession with standardized …
By Anthony Cody. Education blogger Alexander Russo has offered an analysis of recent education journalism in a piece entitled “Common problems with Common Core reporting.” Russo hosts a blog called This Week in Education, sponsored by Scholastic corporation. Russo reached out to me for input as he was …
By Anthony Cody. (Originally posted here, July 23, 2012. This essay is also included in my book, The Educator and the Oligarch, a Teacher Challenges the Gates Foundation.) In the summer of 2012 I traveled to Seattle and spent most of the day meeting with leaders of the Gates Foundation, discussing their work …
By Anthony Cody. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker made headlines recently when he tried to change the mission of the state university system there, removing the “search for truth.” In its place, the university’s mission was changed to “meet the state’s workforce needs.” This blatant attack …
By Joseph Ray Lavine. A co-founder of the Network for Public Education addressed the ineffectiveness of current U.S. standardized testing and teacher evaluation standards in a speech at the University Chapel, at the University of Georgia, in Athens, Georgia, last Wednesday. Anthony Cody, who also writes the …
By Anthony Cody. We are getting decidedly mixed signals from the Gates Foundation these days. From Bill Gates himself, we get a sense of frustration that education has not welcomed his central thesis that the “tools of science” — namely common standards and high stakes tests aligned to them, …
By Anthony Cody. Researchers Sarah Reckhow and Megan Tompkins-Stange have released a paper titled “Singing from the Same Hymnbook”: Education Policy Advocacy at Gates and Broad. The paper was shared last Thursday at a fascinating event hosted by the American Enterprise Institute. The event was a forum, …
