Sunday, October 15, 2023

ICYMI: Bad Week For The World Edition (10/15)

As social media continues to demonstrate its brokenness, I encourage you to be hugely cautious about what you repost, amplify, or just plain believe. It's a bad time for fraud and fakery. Currently I'm testing the waters at Bluesky and Threads (I gave up on spoutible) and I'll be happy to see you there. It's just hard to spread the word these days, and there is so much word to be spread. Here's some reading from the past week.

Moms for Liberty: Where are they, and are they winning?

A bunch of people at Brokings did a truckload of data crunching to generate a picture of where M4L is busy, and how they're doing. Very worthwhile read.

Moms for Liberty attempt to remove books from Charlotte high school fails

Justin Parmenter reports on one attempt to ban some books, and how it was handled by the district.

Tennessee charter school commission takes marching orders from Lee in privatizing schools

In Tennessee, one more tool the governor uses to push charter schools over local objections.

Charter CEOs Collecting High Salaries, Benefits and Bonuses

Great piece that includes a breakdown of charter CEO salaries in Philly area (including how many students they are actually working with). So much for the whole "choice will save money because public schools spend too much money on administrators" argument.

Texas Took Over Its Largest School District, but Has Let Underperforming Charter Networks Expand

In Texas, public schools that underperform must be taken over, but charters are free to stink as much as they want to. From ProPublica

Charles Koch's audacious new $5 billion political scheme

Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria at Popular Information. When you're really rich, you can order up your own tax loopholes, and then use them. Makes it easier to keep pushing the privatization of public ed.

Nonprofit near Kansas City seeks to become ‘epicenter of the school-choice movement’

Annelise Hanshaw at the Missouri Independent writes about Stanley Herzog, one more rich guy who wants to retool the US, including expanding "Christ-centered K-12 education."

Mark Zuckerberg tried to revolutionize American education with technology. It didn’t go as planned.

Matt Barnum has moved on from Chalkbeat; he's taking a job as an ed reporter at the Wall Street Journal. I'll miss him, and I'll hope that he brings a little more quality to that operation. In the meantime, here's one of his last pieces, looking at the tale of Zuck's attempt to fix education, and how it didn't work.

A transgender student, her crusading mom — and an English teacher caught in the middle

"A teacher turned my child trans" says a parent. Not the story at all, says the child, the child's father, and the teacher. This is a gut punch of a story from a pair of reporters for NBC News, thoroughly reported.


Amanda Marcotte at Salon does a great job of pulling together the full story of the attempt by MAGA Moms to commandeer Pennridge Schools, and how that has energized an opposing group.

The Mystery of Ryan Walters: How a Beloved History Teacher Became Oklahoma’s Culture-Warrior-in-Chief

Linda Jacobson at The 74 digs into the mystery of how Ryan Walters transformed from a respected history teacher into Oklahoma's performative MAGA dudebro of education. 

Substitute teachers are in short supply, but many schools still don't pay them a living wage

Somebody at CBS noticed that there's a sub shortage, and they put Aubrey Gelpieryn on the story. 

Sylvia Allegretto Documents Large and Persistent Teacher Pay Penalty

Jan Resseger looks at the annual report on the teacher pay penalty, the amount of money teachers could have earned if they had used their college education in other fields.

Why what looked like good news for charter schools actually wasn’t

Last summer CREDO cranked out a report that "proved" that charter schools get better results than public schools. Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post has put together all the pieces that show how those conclusions were not really accurate.


Speaking of unwarranted conclusions, Paul Thomas writes about the latest round of chicken littling over ACT scores.

Larry Cuban takes a look at the world of dress codes, including some lowlights from, a GAO study.

A Shameful History, Part 3

Jess Piper's series on teaching the hard history looks at the lynching of Raymond Gunn. 

Of Clear Eyes and Pure Hearts

Tennessee is going to revamp its school evaluation system. TC Weber is skeptical.

Has F.A.S.T. Testing Lived Up to Its Promises


You may recall that Florida was going to fix the problems of time-consuming high stakes testing by using a new system, with more testing. How has this been working out? Sue Kingery Woltanski has the unsurprising results.

Everything I Need to Know, I Learned in My School Orchestra

John Bohlinger in Premier Guitar. He could just as easily have said band, but the idea is sound.

At Forbes, I wrote about the successful attempt in Nebraska to make the government put vouchers to a vote. 

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