United OPT OUT NATIONAL is organizing an Occupy the Department of Education (DOE) in Washington, D.C. March 30 – April 2, 2012. Anthony Cody, on his blog Living in Dialog, interviewed two education activists who are part of the leadership spearheading the Occupy the DOE next week. Anthony interviewed Ceresta Smith, a 23-year veteran teacher and National Board Certified teacher, and Timothy D. Slekar, founding member of United Opt Out and associate professor teacher...
Deja Vu In 1983, a panel of experts wrote the report: A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. In the report, the panel wrote: Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. This report is concerned with only one of the many causes and dimensions of the problem, but it is the one that undergirds American...
Teacher bashing has become a contact sport that is played out by many U.S. Governors. The rules of the game are staked against teachers by using measures that have not been substantiated scientifically. For many governors, and mayors it is fair play to release the names of every teacher in the city, and their Value-added score determined by analyzing student achievement test scores. None of the data that has been published has been scientifically...
There is an unrivaled assault on the teaching profession. It emerged and has sustained itself when education policy makers convinced themselves that public education should be based on standards driven accountability model, combined with high-stakes testing. The goal of this model of education is to improve student achievement test scores in mathematics, reading, and science. There is also a goal of decreasing the gap in achievement scores between white students and black and Hispanic...
Guest Post by Anthony Cody As the Simpson family prepared to travel south of the equator to Brazil, Homer revealed some misconceptions. In opposite land, according to Bart’s father, “warm snow falls up.” Reading the latest press releases and speeches from the Department of Education, sometimes I feel as if this is where we have arrived. For the past two years, the Department of Education policies have been roundly criticized by teachers. The latest response from...
In his 2012 State of the Union address, President Obama included a section of his speech that focused on education, not only K-12, but he also challenged colleges and universities to be more creative about how they work with students, and as well as the hundreds of thousands of young students who are not yet American citizens, and “live every day with the threat of deportation.” I want to focus on some of the...
I’ve started reading Corporations are not People by Jeffrey Clements and with a forward by Bill Moyers. On this post, and many other blogs (1,2,3 for example), the “reform” of education in the interests of corporations and private foundations has led to situation that many of refer to as the “corporate take-over of schooling” in America. It’s a serious situation, and one that is visible in the NCLB Act, vouchers, school choice, high-stakes testing,...
