By John Thompson. Part Two of two. Diane Ravitch’s Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools is the history of the rise and fall of test-driven, competition-driven school reform. As in her two previous, ground-breaking books, Ravitch changes the …
By Anthony Cody. As reported on Diane Ravitch’s blog, the Fordham Institute and the Center for American Progress are offering a prize for proposals for a “Moonshot for Kids.” Here is what they want: By August 1, 2019, submit a brief application through our online portal. We are seeking ideas …
By John Thompson. Part One of Two. Read Part Two here. The theme of the Network for Public Education’s fifth annual conference was that corporate reformers have lost the “David versus Goliath” battle over public education. We public school supporters have defeated the privatization campaign known as …
By John Thompson. David Callahan’s The Givers begins with the first politicized think tanks of the 1960s and 1970s, such as the American Enterprise Institute. Callahan may be right and the AEI may have been one of the more intellectually honest of the conservative alternatives to academic research, but still it …
By John Thompson. David Callahan’s The Givers begins with the first politicized think tanks of the 1960s and 1970s, such as the American Enterprise Institute. At least these rightwing organizations were open about their desire to maximize profits. But as Callahan shows, they led the way to neo-liberal …
By John Thompson. As explained in this previous post, I began David Callahan’s The Givers with a commitment to avoid confirmation biases. As he notes, plenty of teachers (like me) detest corporate school reform. But, even if Callahan had concluded that education philanthropists produced significant gains in …
By John Thompson. I began David Callahan’s The Givers with a commitment to avoid three types of confirmation bias. As Callahan observes, plenty of teachers (like me) detest corporate school reform, but if he turned out to be supportive of accountability-driven, competition-driven policies, I shouldn’t let …
By John Thompson. I wish I didn’t have to write a positive review of Alex Molnar’s “Dismantling Public Education: Turning Ideology into Gold.” But, as Molnar explains, the toxic effect of neoliberal, market-driven school reform provides an exceptionally clear example of privatization’s …
By John Thompson. As test-driven, competition-driven school reform gets closer to scrap heap of history (at least in terms of improving schools), we will see more great journalists, such as Dana Goldstein, Dale Russakoff, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Paul Tough document its failures. We can expect more analyses where …
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 …
