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By Monty Neill. I came to FairTest in October 1987 as a movement activist and an educator. Over the years I’d worked in anti-war and black liberation support campaigns, wrote for underground newspapers, engaged in community organizing, edited the newspaper of the New England Prisoners Association, and for …

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By John Thompson. An important result of the teacher walkouts in Oklahoma and elsewhere was unexpected, at least by this former inner city teacher. Even though the majority of Oklahoma students are low-income (eligible for Free and Reduced Lunch), only a small percentage of educators teach in high-poverty schools …

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By John Thompson. The morning presenters at the recent American Enterprise Institute’s conference, Bush-Obama School Reform: Lessons Learned, were scholars who mostly documented the failures of test-driven reform. The afternoon panelists were policy people for the Bush and Obama administrations and, as …

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By John Thompson. The morning presenters at the recent American Enterprise Institute’s conference, Bush-Obama School Reform: Lessons Learned, were scholars who mostly documented the failures of test-driven reform. The afternoon panelists were policy people for the Bush and Obama administrations, and they …

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By John Thompson. In the aftermath of the Trump election, and as our “post fact” politics becomes even worse, it will be interesting to see what school reformers do. Will they double down on their truth-challenged spin on charter schools, or will they become more circumspect in using evidence? The latest …

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By John Thompson. Author’s Note: This post was drafted before the election, but held until after the anticipated defeats of Donald Trump and Massachusetts’s State Question 2. The assumption was that the timing would be right for a balanced discussion of the actual record of choice-driven reforms. Now, both …

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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 …

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By John Thompson. The education sector is plagued by “astroturf” think tanks that issue “reports” that repeatedly conclude that (surprise!) reform is working. To do so, pro-reform scholars cherry-pick data in order to provide attractive, multi-colored graphics that show an upward trajectory, or at least …

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By Anthony Cody. This week leaders in the California Department of Education released a new system for “grading schools” that proposes to assign schools a set of colored indicators based on a variety of measurements. This system is intended to replace the old system of performance indicators which gave schools …

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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, …