ICYMI: Endless Winter Edition (3/12)

As always, I encourage you to share and boost the signal of anything you read here. 

It's Testing Season. Ethics, Anyone?

Sarah Lahm highlights just two of the jaw-dropping abuses done in the name of the Big Standardized Test this year (so far).

Out There

Annie Tan with a short, simple, powerful meditation on putting yourself out there.

Dismantling Public Education: Turning Ideology into Gold

Alex Molnar at the Institute for New Economics takes a look at the big picture in the school privatization movement.

Charter Schools Do Not Equal Education Reform

Guest op-ed from David Hornbeck, who was the head of Philly schools when they first got themselves in deep trouble. The lede tells you why you want to read this:

As Philadelphia's Superintendent of Schools, I recommended the approval of more than 30 charter schools because I thought it would improve educational opportunity for our 215,000 students. The last 20 years make it clear I was wrong.

White Choice

Well, this is kind of depressing. Jennifer Berkshire looks at how segregation academies (private schools started so that white children wouldn't have to go to school with black classmates) are still alive and thriving in the South.

Betsy DeVos' Holy War

So this is where we are now-- Rolling Stone decides to go ahead and cover the Secretary of Education. Much of this will be familiar to those of us who have been studying up on DeVos, but Janet Reitman's piece connects all the dots and lays out the bigger, scarier picture.

A Tale of Two Betsy DeVoses

Between the Stone piece and this one in the Atlantic, it seems that journalists are finally ready to wrestle with he big questions-- how do you make "DeVos" plural or possessive? This profile focuses on the odd discontinuity between Betsy, the sweet-as-pie hometown girl making West Michigan a better place, and DeVos, the hard-knuckle, ball-busting political operative.

Inconceivable Conversations

Blue Cereal Education with a great piece about testing, and why not.

Why Can't Teachers Make Decisions on Their Own

And now for something else entirely-- Peter DeWitt provides a more formal framework for discussing how schools are set up to make sure that teachers can't make decisions.