Newark: Students Stand Up Again

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Posted by NJ Communities United on Friday, May 1, 2015

Yesterday the students of Newark took to the streets to register their displeasure with the newest round of New Jersey turnaround plans (and had the savvy to do it in front of the reporters already gathered for Bridgegate).

The students of Newark are a phenomenal group. I met three of them last weekend, and they are strong and smart and show a confidence and command in speaking up that many folks two or three times their age can envy. And they are also exactly like every teenager you've ever met.

The Newark Students Union has been a strong and relentless voice in Newark, one of the school districts of New Jersey that has had all of its democratic process stripped away in the name of reform (once again, the kind of public-silencing reform that most often seems targeted at a public that is mostly black). When superintendent Cami Anderson wouldn't talk to them, the students followed her to an AEI event in DC. And just a few months ago, they occupied her offices (using the insurgent strategy known as "walking through the open door").

Adult support for student activism isn't always great. "They're just kids. They don't really understand the issues. They have wacky, unrealistic demands. They get all caught up in drama. They create chaos and disorder."

And I'm sure that those objections are true sometimes. So what? We've seen that "responsible adults" with power and access make stupid terrible fact-less decisions and cement them as policy.

This is a democracy. Citizens and stakeholders are supposed to have a voice, and if students aren't stakeholders in schools, I don't know who else could be. I wish my students were this passionate about their school, their community, their right to speak up whether they have official permission or not.

Democracy is not about saying, "We will fix your schools (even if you didn't ask us to), but in exchange you will give up your right to have a voice in the governance of your own community." But that model, that model of silencing entire communities while using their schools to create revenue streams for folks who have no stake in that community-- that model is spreading from Newark to Philly to Chicago to Holyoke to Little Rock.

And so the students of Newark are standing up not just for their schools, but for the democratic heart of our nation. And they are not just standing up in Newark, but on the front lines of an incursion aimed at our entire country (well, except of course the rich parts). All of us who care about public education in this country owe the students of Newark our support and our thanks.

Choice: Real Problems, Fake Answers

By following link to link, I ended up at this piece by Derrell Bradford, executive director of NYCAN and experienced in the reform game (if not the school biz), part of the 50CAN network of choice-pushing charter fans. But his essay "I am your black friend who grew up in Sandtown-Winchester" is as raw and powerful an argument as I've ever heard from the Friends of Choice. And it crystallizes once again where the big, fat hole in the choice argument lies.

Bradford, it turns out, grew up in the same area as Freddie Gray. It was an earlier time, but it was still ugly. Bradford's personal story, which has fueled his reformster career, is the story of escaping that neighborhood.


I never thought things were rough in my neighborhood when I was a kid. I thought they just “were.” But the older I got the more my life became a focused square of activity because of those rough streets. School, sports, home at night, dinner, then the blue chair in my grandma’s Baker Street living room where I fought to stay awake and master the quadratic formula. In retrospect, a lifetime of dinner conversations and events make the haze of memories crystal clear. My grandma talked about redlining, a lot. My friend Stuart, a big redhead black kid a few years older than me that lived on Calhoun Street, was shot and killed. Grandma got mugged while walking home from church one morning. I'd been beat up and had my bike taken from me. All the streets around us-- Stricker, Presstman, Gilmore, Gold-- loomed with their own sort of eerie malevolence. In a city of neighborhoods, mine was exactly one square block.

Say what you like about Bradford-- the man can write.

He creates a compelling pictures-- as compelling as any of the many word pictures being crafted in the face of the Baltimore riots-- of a school and neighborhood that is a toxic, terrible trap for the young men and women who live there.

His point is simple. He escaped. He wants others to be able to do the same. And this is where I lose the thread of his argument.

Bradford had the fortune to land at a tony top-notch prep school. The kind of school that gets way more in money and resources than the school to which zip code would have consigned him. That's what got him out of the old neighborhood.

This is what I don't get about reformsters like Bradford. Why are they not saying, "We demand a school for our neighborhood that is every bit as good as that big, shiny prep school."

The problem of underfunded, under-supported, under-resourced schools is real. The choice solution is not real at all. It proposes to rescue some students and make things worse for the rest. It proposes to further cripple the neighborhood school that should be an anchor of the community (look at a twenty-year study of social capital and education done in Baltimore).

You find a group of children trapped on a sinking ship, so you rescue some by tearing boards out of the hull of the sinking ship to reinforce your lifeboat. And then you leave most of the children on the now-sinking-more-rapidly ship.

You find a group of children starving in a home, so you take some of them with you to feed, but on your way out you take all the pots and pans so you can cook for the kids you're taking, leaving the remaining children to starve even faster.

I absolutely get the dire nature of the problem that Bradford and others are describing. But please tell me how school choice helps? It rips resources away from the already-struggling school, making it that much harder to "fix" it. It "rescues" only a small percentage of the students.

Why why why WHY is this a better solution than moving heaven and earth to get that "failing" school the resources it needs? Why is it a better solution to move a handful of students to a bright, shiny school instead of doing everything in your power to turn the community school into a bright, shiny school for every student and family in the community? If you know how to create a magically awesome alternative to the failing public school, why can't the awesome alternative model be applied directly to the public school itself.

Don't tell me the bullshit about how money doesn't matter. Bradford has made the argument that failing public schools spend too much money on bells and whistles, but until you show me a highly respected private school that markets itself by saying, "We promise to spend next to nothing on your kid," or "Never mind the full voucher. Just send us the student with $500 and that's all we need to educate her," I'm not buying the money-doesn't-matter argument. And truly, neither is anybody else. Nobody believes that. Nobody.

This is what I have always found baffling about voucher proponents. It's not that I don't believe in the problems they cite. It's that their solutions strike me just like somebody who says, "I've had a terrible cold lately, so I'm going to jab myself in the gut with a steak knife and soak my head in kerosene." The voucher solution is non-sequitor, a solution that seems to hold no reasonable promise of help (and at this late date, no empirical or anecdotal support, either).

So I'm saying to Derrell Bradford-- I find your writing moving, your story moving, your picture of the problem compelling (and I am not using my trademark irony here-- I mean it). But I can not for the life of me see how school choice brings us the slightest step closer to a solution, nor in all the reading about choice that I've ever done, have I seen a clear and sensible explanation of how this non-solution solution can hope to solve a thing. I'm still listening.

Edushyster: Peter Cunningham's Woes

I have now met Jennifer "Edushyster" Berkshire, and I totally get it. I don't believe there is a human being on the planet who, upon sitting down with her, would not want to answer every question just to prolong the conversation and once you're talking, well, lying to the woman would be like kicking a puppy.

So it makes perfect sense that just about anybody would be willing to talk to her, even if she is on the Pro-Public Education side of the fence.

She's just put up an interview with Peter Cunningham, the former Arne Duncan wordifier who now runs Education Post, a pro-reformster political war room style rapid response operation (I knew I'd moved up in the blogging world when they took the time to spank me personally).

I don't imagine there are people who read this blog who do not also read Edushyster, but I'm going to keep linking/exhorting you to head over and check out this interview while I note a few of my own responses here.

There are a couple of eyebrow-raisers in the interview that really underline the differences between the reformsters and the pro-public ed side of these debates. In particular, Cunningham notes that many reformsters feel isolated and under attack. When explaining how Broad approached him about starting EP, Cunningham says

There was a broad feeling that the anti-reform community was very effective at piling on and that no one was organizing that on our side. 

Organized?! Organized!!?? It is possible that Broad et al have simply misdiagnosed their problem. Because I'm pretty sure that the pro-public ed advocate world, at least the part of it that I've seen, is not organized at all. But we believe what we are writing, so much so that the vast majority of us do it for free in our spare time (I am eating a bag lunch at my desk as I type this), and we pass on the things we read that we agree with. 

In fact, it occurs to me that contrary to what one might expect, we are the people using the Free Market version of distributing ideas-- we create, we put it out there, we let it sink or swim in the marketplace of ideas. Meanwhile, the reformsters try to mount some sort of Central Planning approach, where they pay people to come up with ideas, pay people to promote those ideas, pay people to write about those ideas, and try to buy the marketplace so that their products can be prominently displayed. 

It is the exact same mistake that they have brought to education reform-- the inability to distinguish between the appearance of success and actual success. If students look like they are succeeding (i.e. scoring high on tests they've been carefully prepped for), then they must be learning. If it looks like everybody is talking about our ideas (i.e. we bought lots of website space and hired cool writers and graphics), then we must be winning hearts and minds.

But what is Cunningham to do to save these poor beleaguered millionaires in their cushy offices (who are probably not eating a bag lunch at their desks as I type this-- isolated and alone in my classroom, I might add)?


I’ve created the ability to swarm, because everyone felt like they were being swarmed. We now have people who will, when asked, lean in on the debate, when people feel like they’re just under siege.

"Lean in" is a great way to put it. I've been "leaned in" upon. It just feels kind of mean, and definitely not like an attempt to create a better conversation. Which is, well, odd , because I've actually had some certainly fine conversations with people on the other side of the edu-fence. It's really not impossible, or even difficult. 

Cunningham himself has proven capable of critiquing the reformster party line. But he's been hired to do a job, and he's doing it. Which is perhaps part of the problem.

Mind you, I'm not by any stretch of the imagination claiming that I am extra-noble or super-swell because I toil away in unfunded obscurity. There are people (Jennifer is one of them) who do this as their main gig and ought to be getting deservedly rich for it; the fact that I'm not doesn't make me a better person.

But it tells us something about the two sides of the fence that the separate pastures are fertilized with such different-- yeah, let's drop that analogy. It says something that if all the money evaporated from the pro-public ed movement, things wouldn't change much at all. But take away Gates money and Broad money and Walton money, and we wouldn't be having these conversations. Reform has consistently side-stepped both the democratic process and the marketplace of ideas, adopting instead the corporate boss model of, "I'm paying your salary. Do as I say." Since democracy and the market place of ideas started fighting back, reformsters have been trying to adapt. But it's hard. And lonely.

Cunningham notes that by 2012-2013, pro-public ed was "very effectively calling a lot of reform ideas into question." Well, not exactly. They were effectively pointing out that a lot of reform ideas were crap. Marketing and PR do not necessarily beat actual substance. But Cunningham is a man who's been given a giant pile of money to hire swarms and bloggers and a big, shiny website, so he's going to spend it. for at least two more years. Read the edushyster interview.

Prager, Valdary, Understanding, and the Classroom

If you have a conservative Facebook friend, you have probably seen it. An intense and serious young black woman looks into the camera and describes, in a slickly produced five-ish-minute video why anyone who doesn't condemn the Baltimore riots is a racist.

The video is from Prager University. Prager University is non-brick, non-credit, non-coursework-- well, Prager University is a extra-fancy name for a growing library of video clips. It makes me realize that I really missed the boat by not launching this website as Curmudgucation Academy. (One more lesson I should have learned from Edushyster.)

The "University" was founded by Dennis Prager, a conservative writer and syndicated radio guy. The woman in the video is Chloe Valdary, who is best known as a zionist and pro-Israeli activist (as of 2014, she was senior in International Studies at the University of New Orleans.

The Pitch

Valdary argues that dealing with racism is difficult because progressives think they have to treat black folks with kid gloves, which she calls demeaning and condescending. She moves from there to a recent experience in an anthropology class in which a professor (one Valdary very much likes) says that in the shooting of Michale Brown, "ultimately the facts don't matter." It was another example of racism in a racist society, and therefor the riots that followed the non-indictment were a legitimate reaction of people who couldn't take any more.

The words of that last sentence are Valdary's; she does not attribute them to the professor or a classmate. That's important because it's exactly at that point that Valdary either makes a logical leap or just plain creates a straw man.

"Rioting and looting are acceptable forms of behavior because they have no other options?" Valdary asks incredulously. "In free democratic America? Really?" (This while her graphic shows black stick figures cheering the burning of a liquor store.)  She continues that this excuse is applied only to blacks (not other minorities) by "we, the enlightened ones." Worse, if it's white cop killing black teen, the facts don't matter. Well, not in Valdary's world. In her world, facts always matter.

Anyone who excuses bad behavior among blacks just because they're black is a racist, viewing blacks as children who can't play by grown-up rules. Valdary sets white supremicists and condescenders side by side and give the KKK-uniformed racist credit for being open and honest instead of the condescenders who "nod knowingly and say 'They couldn't take it any more. Who can blame them?'"

Valdary wants to convince the condescenders that "as a black human being, I want to be-- I must be-- judged by the same standards as everybody else." Her proposal-- treat everybody equally, all the time.     

The Problem    

I bolded some words above because I think they speak directly to why Valdary is off the mark here.

I don't actually disagree with the root of her argument-- that blacks (and women and folks with disabilities and short people etc etc etc) should be treated equally and not patronized or infantilized. But Valdary (and the conservatives who are happily sharing her because, hey, she's black so that means her words are more equal than others) is missing a large chunk of the point.

First, finding the behavior of rioters in Ferguson or Baltimore (or any of the other flashpoints of the last forever) acceptable or legitimate is not the same as finding it understandable. There's a long list of things that I don't find okay that I still understand. Valdary leans heavily on words of judgment, but in highly charged situations I find understanding far more powerful than judgment.

This stuff is basic classroom 101. Don't think I'm about to infantilize African-Americans by analogy-- I teach high schools students and Step 1 for me is to recognize them as grown humans, not children. But there is a power differential in my classroom, and if I want to (or if I'm too foolish to know better) I can drive my students to acts of misbehavior that get them sent to the office. It's not about judging or standards; it's about my understanding of my students and how that informs my use of power in the classroom. It's about respect and recognizing fundamental humanity. And I'm pretty sure I'm onto something, because my classroom is almost never a chaotic mess, but it has been years since the last time I sent a student to the office.

Valdary (and her amplifiers) want us to agree to condemn the rioters. It is not clear to me what that gets us. A warm glow of moral superiority? A justification to come down on the rioters like a ton of bricks? A free pass to ignore all contributing factors that led people to think there was nothing left but taking to the streets to lash out? What does any of that get us?

Is she afraid that there's a whole bunch of pro-riot folks out there, a bunch of people saying, "Yes, what this country needs is more riots. I'm hoping to organize a riot in my neighborhood." Maybe I'm naive, but I don't think a neighborhood riot appears on anybody's list of Things To Do except at the bottom. I don't imagine anybody saying, "Well, I can think of several actions we could try, but how about we just have a riot, instead?"

I won't deny for a second that condescenders exist. They always have. But many of the expressions of empathy and understanding have been the exact opposite. They have been a recognition that any human beings of any race living for years in such a state of systemic oppression would react with something less than calm decorum when the situation was goosed up by one more unnecessary and unjustified death.

And I should note somewhere in this piece that most of us could just wait on making any sort of judgment until we have enough information to know what the hell we're talking about. How can we all be so aware that the media are so untrustworthy and yet go right back to taking their word for it?

But whenever possible, I still believe that understanding is our best choice. Understanding does not mean approving, justifying or applauding rioting and violence. But in the long strong of violent urban outbursts running back decades upon decades upon decades, what we see is that attempts to understand and respond are far more useful than attempts to blame and punish.

Any good classroom teacher already know this truth: treating people with respect and understanding is not treating them like children; it's treating them like human beings. That truth does not change in the moments when they're acting out with anger and violence.

People want to be heard. They will keep raising their voices until they feel heard, and they will keep raising their voices until they are screaming. It's a basic rule in a classroom, in a board room, in any community-- if you don't want people to start screaming, you have to listen to them.

Note: I don't really recommend watching this video, but I will embed it so that you can check my work.

Yong Zhao at NPE: Must See Video

If you are going to view or pass along just one hour's worth of viewing to explain why the reformster testing mania is unsupportable, the panic over failing schools is manufactured, and the entire justification for stripping schools (particularly those with poor, non-white students) is bogus, this is the video for you.

We all have some Kardasshian. Out-of-basement readiness. Why Zhao didn't buy shampoo. Why America is still here. Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer. And why we need to stop trying to imitate China.

I especially recommend this to show your friends who are not fully immersed in the ongoing debate about US public schools. Highly accessible, very funny, clear and still full of facts-- this is well worth the 55 minutes you will need to watch it.


Yong Zhao (final) from Schoolhouse Live on Vimeo.

(Note: Updated to include the final cut of the speech, complete with slides)

New Teacher Attrition Report: Better Than You Thought

The USED National Center for Education Statistics today released a "first look" at a new report looking at public school teacher attrition and mobility (entitled, with typical bureaucratic poetry, "Public School Teacher Attrition and Mobility in the First Five Year")

Our data set is centered on around 155,000 teachers who began teaching in 2007-2008, looking at them through 2011-2012, so this is a data slice that shows us what has happened to the profession most recently, but not, it should be noted, since the CCSS test bomb dropped on classrooms all over the country.

The "first look" is brief and loaded with charts, so you should really go take a look at it yourself, but here are some highlights to whet your appetite.

The basic raw attrition rate is far better than the conventional wisdom about half of new teachers leaving within the first five years. NCES figures say that by year five, 17.3% of the Class of 07-08 has left the classroom.

When you break that attrition down by categories, you find

* men left in a higher percentage than women
* non-white teachers left in higher percentages than white
* teachers with a base pay of over $40K left at a vastly lesser rate than everyone else

A third of teachers with less than a bachelor degree left within the first year, but almost half of the teachers with "higher than a master's degree" left immediately.

Teachers who were not assigned mentors left at roughly twice the rate of teachers with mentors.

So if you're hiring teachers, a black man with a PhD who's going to be paid less than $40K is your worst bet for classroom longevity.

I'm not surprised to see that teachers with alternative certificates or no certificates at all were more likely to have left. Elementary teachers stuck around in greater percentages than secondary teachers (proving either high school jobs are harder or elementary teachers are tougher; as a high school teacher married to an elementary teacher, I am prepared to offer no theory on this matter).

But I was surprised to see that the attrition rate for city/suburban vs. town/rural was almost exactly the same. Town/rural starts out losing faster, but by year five had evened out.

Less surprising-- finding that schools with over 50% free and reduced lunch rates had higher attrition rates. But the difference was not as huge as you might have predicted (18.6% vs 15.7%)

Folks will poke through this data for a variety of purposes. For instance, this may be the place to ask if young teachers are fleeing or being pushed out. For this groups movers (changing to a new job), 2 in 5 were involuntary after five years. For leavers, it's more complicated. Involuntary departures varied from year to year, with a peak of 35.5% after the second year and a low of 19.9% after the fourth. I'd be curious to see if that means that pre-tenure departures through counseling or firing are actually happening out there, but it appears there's more number crunching and data diddling to do.

There's plenty of appendage regarding methodology and technical explanations that yield paragraphs like this one:

For the BTLS first wave, weights are obtained directly from the 2007–08 SASS, since all interviewed beginning teachers in SASS were eligible for BTLS. On the BTLS data file, the final weight for the first wave is called W1TFNLWGT, which is called TFNLWGT on the SASS data file. 

So I'll leave it to wiser data crunchers to pry this apart a bit more. This is data that appears to be worth a careful, considered look.

Did the rate get better after the former 50% rate was bandied about, or was that rate (which was always an estimate) just not right? Have the forces of reform changed the ebb and flow of the profession? And have attrition rates been changed by the past three years of test-and-punish? Does this mean that the fear of displaced young teachers is misplaced, or are we over-worried about chasing people away? And exactly how does this new data really supports or attacks any of the old arguments? I don't think we know any of these things yet, but now that we have actual hard data, we can start to figure them out and move past our "best guesses" of the past.

In the meantime, I would be pleased to find that my beloved profession is not hemorrhaging as badly as has been presumed. There are too few male and/or minority teachers-- that doesn't seem to have "changed." But I don't really care if this data make it easier or harder for reformsters or the rest of us to make our cases-- I want to see teaching be a stable, satisfying profession, and I want to deal with the issues that we actually have, and not the ones we imagine. Losing 1 in 5 teachers is nothing to brag about. So let the dissecting of this report begin.

Merryl Tisch Shows How Test Supporters Get It Wrong

New York Chancellor of the Board of Regents Meryl Tisch stopped by All In with Chris Hayes to avoid answering some pointed questions about high stakes testing and the opt out movement in New York. She had the additional disadvantage of sitting beside Diane Ravitch, who did answer questions and made Tisch look even slipperier by comparison, but I think Tisch's appearance is a quick, capsuled look at what promoters of high stakes testing get wrong.

After opening with some background (Atlanta convictions, rising parent opposition, left-and-right wing hatred for Big Standardized Tests), Hayes notes that New York's opt out numbers are huger than ever and turns to Tisch.

Hayes: When you see the reports of opting out, including the high strong numbers from some areas, do you think "People are crazy" or "We are doing something wrong"?

Tisch does not think people are crazy (phew!) and believes that people "should act in what they perceive to be the best interests of their children." That's an important construction because like many BS Test fans, Tisch is also a charter school fan, which puts her in the awkward position of believing that parents should opt out of public school, but not public school testing. Choice is only okay sometimes.

So why the push back? "Perhaps we have not been clear enough in describing the intent of the test." So, opt out is a PR problem, because if people disagree with us, it could only be because they don't understand how right we are. So what is the intent of the test?

"The intent of the test is to give a snapshot of performance and allow parents to know where their children are at any given point in their educational career as compared to their peers."

And there's your first problem, because that doesn't even make sense. "Snapshot" and "at any given point in time" do not go together. I can't see how my child is doing at any point in time because I only have a snapshot from one particular point in time.

Tisch moves on immediately to asserting that income inequality is directly tied to the achievement gap (which is actually the BS Test score gap) for our poor students, and she starts waving the Wait Let Me Speak hand at Hayes because he is completely ready to call her on that piece of baloney, so she squeezes in that poor students can't make more money unless they have access to high quality education. Hayes calls her on her correlation-causation fallacy, but I'd like to call her on her fallacious equating of high quality education and high stakes snapshot testing. What does taking the BS Test have to do with access to high quality education?

The reformster answer (which Tisch doesn't get to) is that BS Test results allow us to target the students who are struggling. The problem here is that 1) we already know where they are and 2) after years of targeting them with BS Testing, we have yet to actually get them additional resources to help them do better.

Ravitch gets her turn and uses it to point out that tests are not vaccinations and these tests are not useful because the results provide no useful information. "There is no diagnostic value to the test," somehow prompts Tisch to smirk, like she has caught the help trying to act like they know how caviar really tastes. Hayes notes that Tisch clearly has something she wants to share with the rest of the class, and she unveils Test Purpose #2.

The tests are a diagnostic tool for curriculum and instruction development on the state level, and a way of making sure the taxpayers get their money's worth.

In other words, a completely different purpose for the tests than the one she offered about two minutes earlier. It's now a snapshot of how our children, schools, and systems are doing-- for the taxpayers. So that business about info for the parents was, what-- just spitballing? Because if this is the actual purpose of the test then 1) what's wrong with the NAEP and 2) why is it necessary to test every child every year?

Hayes points out that Tisch gave a non-response to the observation that the tests are not diagnostically useful for students, parents or children, and she insists that she be allowed to insert a non-response to that point. When parents opt out it messes things up. Also, she was in a doctor's office where a parent wanted to compare their child to a growth chart. Like the vaccination analogy, this is bogus for many reasons. I'll just pick one: When I weigh my child, I get a full picture of how much my child weighs, but when my child takes a BS Test and I get just the score, I get only the tiniest sliver of a slice of how well my student is doing in school.

As for the diagnostic value of the tests, Tisch asserts (with her asserty hand waving before her) that school districts report "all the time" that they make decisions about curriculum around the test results. Which certainly proves that schools will teach to the test as best they can, particularly when threatened with punitive responses to the results. This does not prove that either test results or the following curriculum adjustments serve the educational interests of the students. She also says words about how the ability to glean specific info from these tests is really important, which is not remotely the same as proving that it can actually be done.

Hayes asks Ravitch if there's a right way to do test-driven accountability or if it's just the wrong tree at which to be woofing. "Wrong tree," says Ravitch. You can't do the wrong thing the right way. The model is wrong. We are the most overtested nation in the world.

What would Tisch like to say to parents?

Tisch would like parents to understand that this is all the union's fault, and that if teacher evals hadn't been linked to the tests, they would all be testing away happily. Children have just been trapped in a labor dispute between the governor and teacher.

In about six minutes, Tisch manages to showcase a full range of pro-test arguments, all specious.
If the goal is to give parents information about their student, why does the test return so little data? And what difference does it make if other students opt out?

If the goal is to give teachers and schools actionable data to inform instruction, why return so little data, so late?

If the goal is to give taxpayers and policymakers feedback about how the system is doing, testing every child every year is by far the least cost-effective method.

If the goal is to identify and diagnose troubled schools for intervention, why don't bad scores trigger a release of additional resources for the identified school?

And why do pro-testers never, ever provide solid data about how well the tests actually measure any of the things they supposedly measure?

Tisch can blame the opt out movement on the union and politics all she wants; the reality on the ground is that more and more parents have had enough. The BS Test boosters are going to need better talking points.

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats