By John Kuhn. The following is a speech delivered on March 5, 2017, to the Association of Texas Professional Educators Legislative Action Weekend. I have three older sisters who are all teachers. When I became a teacher too in 1997, the first advice they gave me was, “You need go join ATPE.” And …
By John Thompson. Rachel M. Cohen’s “The War on Public Schools” warns that “Charters, vouchers, and disposable teachers are Trump’s targets.” Cohen’s American Prospect article details both the president-elect’s agenda, and a political history that Democrats shouldn’t ignore. Trump has long …
By Lauren Anderson. Just last week in Cincinnati, the NAACP voted in favor of a moratorium on the creation of new charter schools and a ramping up of regulation on existing charter schools. A few days later in Philadelphia, the Relay Graduate School of Education proudly co-hosted its “Grit + Imagination” …
By John Thompson. The most serious criticism of my book, A Teacher’s Tale, is that it focuses on the harm done by No Child Left Behind and underemphasizes the threat of corporate school reform. During my fulltime teaching career, however, I saw just one overt example of national reformers trying to impose …
By Anthony Cody. Teacher retirement funds represent the largest amounts of money under the control of working educators. The California State Teacher Retirement System (CalSTRS) is the second wealthiest retirement fund in the nation, with $179.4 billion in assets. CalSTRS counts among its many investments a major …
By Anthony Cody. As the corporate reform project begins to fray around the edges, one of the main sponsors is resorting to more overtly political tactics. The Gates Foundation is ostensibly a charitable enterprise, and enjoys significant tax benefits as a result of this status. Bill Gates himself described the …
By Anthony Cody. For the past seven months, I have been holding my breath hoping that Bernie Sanders would follow the logic of his passionate defense of working people and willingness to confront hedge funders and financiers, and apply this thinking to K12 education policy. As we know, many of the most ardent …
By Anthony Cody. With her ill-informed remarks on school closures, Hillary Clinton set off a bit of a firestorm among education activists. Her full remarks have been posted by Valerie Strauss, so there is no question what she said, and as Peter Greene points out, context does not help much. She clearly thinks …
By Anthony Cody. I was recently invited to speak at a conference in another state. Since I could not make it there in person, I recorded my thoughts on this video. Here is the text of my remarks: Privateers and Profiteers: How and Why are they Undermining Public Education? As we near the end of the Obama …
By John Thompson. Perhaps because I’m an incorrigible supporter of President Obama on almost every non-education issue, I grasped at straws hoping that his and Arne Duncan’s staffing of the Education Department with former Gates Foundation true believers in market-driven reform would not create a mess. …
