The most bizarre moment, so far, of my foray into the ed reform wars happened yesterday. A few days ago I wrote a blog post called ‘The resistance grows exponentially’. My intent was to introduce a new blog exploring some of the same issues I’ve been working on. For me this relieved some of the pressure I feel as the most vocal alum upset with the direction TFA has chosen to move in. I said I was going to slow down on blogging a bit and maybe return in full force over the summer when, as I wrote, “I might be helping organize new TFA corps members to be ‘disrupting’ the institute if they are not getting properly trained or are feeling like they are being lied to in various ways—more to come on that in June.”
Much to my surprise, this thought was, the next day, the subject of one…
In December I wrote a post called Pro vs. Khan which sparked many angry comments. My intent was to critique the content on the famous Salman Khan Academy site and to demonstrate what I considered to be a more effective and interactive math video. I recently attended the NCTM math teacher’s conference, and I was…
read more »Five weeks ago, I wrote a post entitled ‘Fly My Pretties’ before taking somewhat of a break from blogging. The point of that post was to recruit more people, particularly TFA alums as they are considered most ‘credible’, to help me present the other side of the story of the corporate reform movement for which…
read more »This week, May 7th to 11th, is Teacher Appreciation Week 2012. In this current era of teacher bashing, I think all teachers don’t really need anything special — they’d be fine with a five day break. For this post, I’m going to reflect on the teachers in my life that I’ve appreciated. Some were great…
read more »When the leaders of the largest school district in the country decide to put all of their proverbial eggs in one basket, that basket had better be strong. In the case of New York City, this basket is the June 2010 ‘research’ report by MDRC entitled ‘Transforming the High School Experience: How New York City’s…
read more »The original purpose of TFA was to encourage the ‘best and brightest’ to learn, first hand, about what is going on in the American education system, and then use this knowledge to help improve it. I joined, as most people in TFA did, to ‘make a difference’ to ‘give back.’ Hopefully my inexperience in my…
read more »It’s all about the ‘error rate’ — or so, even I, used to think. Nearly everything I’ve read that questions the validity of the value-added metric mentions the astronomical ‘error rates.’ When the NYC Teacher Data Reports were first released, the New York Times website ran an article with some numbers that have been frequently…
read more »One year into the US Department Of Education’s 4 billion dollar School Improvement Grant (SIG) program, giving an average of half a million dollars to 800 ‘failing’ schools, the preliminary results are in. Anyone who understands school reform should know that looking at ‘test scores’ after one year doesn’t really tell you much. It is…
read more »This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form has been published in the Journal of School Choice © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC; the Journal of School Choice is available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15582159.2012.650106 Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools, by Steven Brill. (Simon and Schuster, 2011; 496…
read more »A recent post by one of the most thoughtful TFA bloggers on this site was called ‘Don’t Hate Me Because I’m TFA.’ In it, Tony B responds to another blogger that I think is great, Katie Osgood, from Chicago. What people who have just begun following the education debate in this country might be surprised…
read more »By a somewhat frustrated 1991 alum
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