By Anthony Cody. I am not sure who appointed Alexander Russo the chief scold of the education newsbeat, but he has made it his business to criticize reporting in the field from his supposedly objective perch. Somehow, he almost always seems to be playing defense for one reform project or another. In his latest …
By Anthony Cody. Across the nation, educators have awakened to the reality that charter schools are a threat to the health and even survival of public schools. For that reason, charters have become a major point of contention in teacher strikes, from Oakland to Los Angeles, and even in West Virginia. But at …
By John Thompson. Three cheers for Warren Buffett’s speech at the Democratic National Convention which borrowed from Joe Welch’s challenge to Joe McCarthy. Buffett said, “‘Have you no sense of decency, sir?’ I ask Donald Trump, have you no sense decency, sir?” After all, it is time for Democrats …
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 Anthony Cody. Here is where we stand with the revived controversy over the Los Angeles Times’ 2010 “investigation” into teacher effectiveness. In 2009, Teachers College, which sponsors The Hechinger Report, received a grant from the Gates Foundation in the amount of $652,493 in order “to support the …
By Anthony Cody. A fresh debate has emerged in the aftermath of the Los Angeles Times’ critique of the Gates Foundation’s education reform project. As I noted here, they seem to have forgotten their own role in promoting the Gates Foundation’s efforts – namely, their “Teachers investigation,” in which …
By Anthony Cody. This week the Los Angeles Times published an editorial chastising the Gates Foundation for their role in education reform. The editors wrote: …the Gates Foundation has spent so much money — more than $3 billion since 1999 — that it took on an unhealthy amount of power in the setting of …
By Anthony Cody. Will mainstream reporters take note of the following story? The testing giants behind the PARCC test are doing their best to squash any discussion of the content or quality of their all-powerful instruments. They have added an eleventh commandment to the tablets Moses brought down the mountain, …
By Anthony Cody. Alexander Russo is an unlikely ombudsman for education journalism, given that he is paid to blog by publishing giant Scholastic. But he has taken on the role, and in this column, he argues that the Broad Foundation sponsorship of education coverage at the Los Angeles Times is not worthy of the …
By Anthony Cody. Education professor Paul Thomas has raised a powerful challenge to the state of education journalism in two recent posts. The first post tackles an article by New York Times reporter Motoko Rich, focused on the latest supposed crisis in education, that not enough high schoolers graduate “college …
