US Department of Climate Education

Trump has taken the odd step of withdrawing from a voluntary agreement; the Paris Accord is non-binding and nations can set their own goals, and Trump's statement had almost nothing to say about the actual climate change concern of the accord, so other than declaring the international equivalent of, "You can't tell me what to do! You're not my real mom!" I'm not sure exactly what Trump was hoping for.

That made it all the more odd when a strong vote of support came from.... the Department of Education.

"The announcement made today by the President is one more example of his commitment to rolling back the unrealistic and overreaching regulatory actions by the previous Administration," said Secretary DeVos. "President Trump is making good on his promise to put America and American workers first."

So, withdrawing is good because it sticks it to Obama, and also because it's selfish. And it's about American workers and not at all about corporate chieftains. Kind of like ed reform is all bout the children.

But why, exactly, is the Secretary of Education issuing a statement about the Paris Accord? Will the Department of Education be issuing directives on how climate science should be taught? And will that mean a reversal of DeVos's stated preference for government inaction?

Of course, here's this-- the Heartland Institute is a right-tilted thinky tank that has recently decided to "educate" teachers across the country on the "controversy" of climate change. Because the Heartland Institute is pretty sure that the whole global warming thing is a leftist plot to raise money and grab political clout.

One of the financial backers of the Heartland Institute? That would be the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation, a foundation with the kind of deep, deep pockets you get when an heir to a fortune marries an heiress to another fortune.

So maybe DeVos was just trying to be a good cheerleader for Beloved Leader. Or maybe she sees her government job as primarily about the power to further push her personal policy ideas, educational or otherwise. Or (my most cynical possibility) we have arrived at the point where the content of every issue is meaningless nothing, and each issue exists only as a means of gaining or losing political advantage. So it doesn't matter what your job is or what the issue is-- just get in their and leverage it for your own tribe.

Whatever the case, it would be great if the Department of Education could go ahead and focus on educational issues. Let's do that, please.

DeVos, Democracy and Vouchers

First came the LA Times op-ed co-authored by Randi Weingarten (AFT) and Jonah Edelman (Stand for Children). This in itself is another troubling move by Weingarten (add it to the list) because astroturfist Edelman is no angel when it comes to support of public schools. The op-ed tweaked a lot of antennae because buried in the condemnation of vouchers was a ringing endorsement of charters. 

Almost instantly, a response came back from the American Federation for Children, a group founded and financed by Betsy DeVos. Kevin Chavous, the legal mouthpiece for the group broke out the high dudgeon.

But I want to skip past all of that for the moment and focus on one statement from the AFC response:

It is school choice–directly empowering parents to choose the best educational environment for their child–that is the most democratic of ideas.

Nope. Nope nope nopity nope. There are arguments to be made for parent choice, but "it's the essence of democracy" is not one of them.

Democracy, even the sort-of-democracy practiced by the USA, is not about saying, "I want to make this personal choice, and I want everyone else to pay for it."

Democracy is not saying you want a six-lane highway to run back the lane where only your house sits, so you get the rest of the taxpayers in your state to pay for it.

Democracy is not saying that since I want to have a police force that patrols my own house 24/7, I should have that police coverage and all local taxpayers should foot the bill.

Democracy is not "My fellow taxpayers have to pay for whatever I decide on my own that I want."

Choice fans often like to talk about the money following the child because "that money doesn't belong to the school system." And they have a point-- it is not the school's money. It is also not the family's money. It is the taxpayers' money, and the taxpayers have given it to support a system that will educate all students in the community through an institution managed by elected representatives of those taxpayers (when was the last time you saw a school board requirement that only parents can be elected).

Democracy is about coming together as a group to discuss, debate, (hopefully) compromise, and elect folks who will decide how best to manage our resources. Our version of democracy has some built-in protections so that the minority can be protected from a the majority.

But the "most democratic of ideas" is not that each individual gets to live in the Land of Do As You Please at public expense. Vouchers may be many things, but they are not remotely democratic.

Angry (tl;dr)

It's important to remember that America has seen angry, agitated times before. The Civil War, when politicians became so angry they left the country and raised armies to kill each other-- that was a fairly angry time. We've had Presidential campaigns that were hugely vicious and libelous, Hell, as we've all been musically reminded, once upon a time the Vice President of the United States killed a prominent political leader in a duel.

And yet, something feels different now. My stock explanation is that while we've always had anger and viciousness as part of our public and political life, we've at least agreed that civility was the ideal, the norm to be pursued, and now we don't. I'm not sure that's true, but it feels true. We have become outrage junkies; we are sold policy and products based on the outrage it will cause. "The Secret That [fill in the blank] Doesn't Want You To Know" which translates roughly to "This will really piss those bastards off." The GOP policy position on the ground has been largely reduced to "Do things that will enrage liberals" and political coverage in the second-hand full-bias media is usually framed in terms of who will be outraged. And damn-- progressives and liberals and anti-Trump's really have to stop publishing versions of "Trump has now done something that will totally end his run!" Sorry, but 2,437th time is not a charm.

Telling truth to power is important, hugely important. But truth is not measured by how enraged you can imagine somebody being about what's been written. And when you start steering by imagined outrage rather than truth, understanding and accuracy, you are headed for the weeds. Sometimes I find Samantha Bee funny; sometimes I think maybe we've found a progressive Ann Coulter.

I was talking about this on twitter (to the extent that anybody can talk about anything on twitter) and was called out for my own contributions to incivility in the education debates. Well, sir, that's just...um... fair. But I like to think I've made a bit of a journey in this regard, and I think it tells us a little something about the shape of these debates.

When I started blogging, my defining characteristic was anger. It had been growing for a few years. Having stupid policies, anti-education and anti-student policies, inflicted on my classroom was nothing new, but I was noticing that I was increasingly losing my power to defend my students from them. The idea of national standards backed up by a national standardized test that would be enforced by making it part of student grades all seemed like self-evident educational malpractice, and yet policy makers were talking about it, taking steps to inflict it. So I went to learn more, and I fell through a door into a world where I found all sorts of people whose policy ideas struck me as wildly insane and rather abusive-- and who seemed absolutely uninterested in paying any attention to what actual teachers had to say.

My colleagues at school were, by and large, not interested. They complained when we were gored by the tip of the iceberg that passed by us, but they had no particular interest in finding out what the tip was attached to, or how big and wide the iceberg really was. And I was turning into the staff crank. So I turned to the outlet that has always served me in the past-- writing-- and for a number of reasons (mostly admiration of the bloggers already out there) I turned to blogging.

It did not occur to me that anybody would read my stuff. My goal was to vent, to rail about policies and articles that struck me as foolish, destructive, blind, ignorant. And so I regularly broke Rule #1. I called people names-- some of them kind of mean. I broke one of my big rules of online discourse-- I said things about people online that I never would have said to their faces.

I was angry. And the more I read, the angrier I became. Not just the anger of seeing destructive and dangerous policies pushed, but the anger of seeing my own profession and the institution to which I devoted my adult life both under attack. And the anger that comes with being under attack and not being heard-- not just being unheard, but seeing no avenue whatsoever to say a word. Was it effective? Well, yes, in two ways. It was effective in giving me an outlet for what I was thinking and feeling, and it was effective in letting other people who felt angry and upset and isolated know that they weren't the only ones, that they weren't crazy, that somebody else could see what they saw. We teachers are a terribly isolated tribe, and in troubled times, that does not serve us well.

What has surprised me most about social media is the avenues of conversation that have opened up, not just with fellow teachers and supporters of public ed, but with thinky tankers and policy wonks on the other side of the debates. The mere fact of being actually able to be heard in, as they say, some of these spaces has made me more careful and less ragey over the past couple of years. That's not a bad thing.

In times like these, it behooves all of us to pay a little more attention to our rhetoric. There may be times when rhetorical flourishes like "I'd like to punch him in the face" or "She should just go die somewhere" may be harmless hyperbole; these are not those times. We have a civility problem these days, and every time you put out some words, you are either helping or hurting. It's no good arguing you are in the righteous right, so it's okay-- everyone thinks they're in the right.

At the same time, I believe firmly that you feel what you feel. Telling somebody, "Hey, you should have different feelings" is a waste of everyone's time. You feel what you feel.

And I still firmly believe that some people can be taken seriously, and some can not. Some people are using words in good faith, and some are just using words as a tool for leveraging whatever goal they have, and still some others in high office use words like magical incantations, intended to conjure lies into reality. There are good grown-up arguments for charter schools that I disagree with, but can recognize as serious arguments; there are also pro-charter arguments rooted in deliberate skewing of the facts and denial of reality. I am absolutely opposed to national standards, but I understand how people of sound mind and good faith can like the idea. On the other hand, there isn't a serious argument in the world for the retention of third graders who passed their classes but failed one standardized reading test. Civility does not mean letting someone piss on you and tell you it's raining while you cheerfully agree with their weather assessment.

In other words, during times of conflict and stress, it is hard to chart a path between civility and honesty, and anger can make a lousy GPS system.

People want to be heard, and if they can't be heard when they speak, they will keep raising their voice until they think they are heard. I've survived many tough meetings and tense classroom situations by holding onto that truth. But the flip side of it is that if you scream at people like they're stupid and evil, it's really hard to get them to hear you. Which doesn't mean that you couldn't be dealing with someone who is, in fact, stupid and evil.

On the one hand. On the other hand. But. So. However. You see the problem-- balancing the line between civility and honesty in contentious times defies easy answers. It's not as simple as "Everyone on that side of this line is an evil beast" or "Everyone on this side of the line is fully trustworthy" or even "People on both sides of the line are equally culpable." In fact, there is never a clear place to draw a line.

That may be the disease of our age-- not incivility or meanness or anger or viciousness, but just a fervent belief in easy answers that can divide everyone up into simply delineated tribes. Twisting our map of the world to accommodate our simplified view of the world is distorting everything, and the strain of doing the twisting is making most of us extra cranky. And while our leaders seem unwilling to engage in thoughtful introspection and reflection, that also means that "Just follow some leader I trust" is off the table as an operating procedure. It may be that we just have to be big boys and girls and think for ourselves.

5 Reasons I Oppose Vouchers

Honestly, I had thought that vouchers were pretty much dead and gone and living only in the hearts and minds of determined free market cult members. But since it looks like DeVouchers are on the fast track to Policytown, I want to just list, without a lot of fanfare or my usual gumflappery, the reasons I believe that vouchers are Really Bad Policy. So here's a quick list of five reasons to oppose the policy.

1. Church and State

Turns out that in practice, vouchers have mostly been a subsidy for people who send their children to private religious school. I think separation of church and state is a hugely good idea, and I think it's a good idea both for the state and for the church. Using public tax dollars to finance private religious schools violates that tremendously. That should bother those schools more than it bothers taxpayers, because in the long run it can't lead anywhere except to government oversight of religious practices. I don't want to pay tax dollars so some Religious Academy can teach the Bible as factual history and flat earth as science, and I also don't want to see the Federal Bureau of Religious Education set up to decide which religious schools pass muster (including the faux religious schools set up by profiteering oportunists.

2. School for All

If your school wants my tax dollars to pay for student tuition, you had damn well better take every student who applies and fits. No turning away students just because you don't want to be bothered with them or because they're the wrong race or the wrong creed or not properly abled or they just might cost too much to educate. That is one mighty messed-up part of voucher programs-- my tax dollars go to finance the same school that refused to admit my child.

3. Disenfranchised Taxpayers

A voucher system is taxation without representation. The idea is that the marketplace is supposed to sort these schools out or pressure them to do develop a good aquatics program or tiddly winks team. But that means only parents have a say. If you are an employer or a neighbor or a fellow voter and taxpayer or a citizen depending on educated professionals to take care of you later-- well, you have no say in a voucher system. You still get to pay taxes, but you have no say.

4. Accountability

It's not just the question of what is being taught in the schools. As a taxpayer, I'd like to know what my money is being spent on. So voucher schools had better be just as accountable as public schools. Public board meetings by known school directors. Transparent and fully open and available budgets and financial records.

5. Tell the Truth about Costs

It is amazing to me how rarely discussions and proposals about vouchers actually address the amount. Because that is everything. If the government announced that it was giving everybody automobile vouchers, folks would want to know whether the voucher was enough for a new Lexus or just a used Kia. It's pointless to discuss vouchers without discussing the dollar amount. If the voucher is one third the cost of tuition at a participating private school, it's pretty much useless as anything but a partial rebate to people who already send their students there. If it's a full-on, cover-the-cost-of-any-good-private-school voucher, then taxpayers might want to know how that voucher is going to be paid for.

A real voucher system would be expensive. Right off the bat, the day vouchers go into effect, a whole bunch of money moves even though not a single student leaves the public school. Where did that money come from? Did the public school just lose it, even though their expenses didn't change? Did the taxpayers just cough up a bunch of extra school tax money to pay for sending students to private school? Will the taxpayers pay more to fill the new gap in the public budget, or will they just be taxed for the vouchers directly? Were the vouchers underwritten by corporations who took a corresponding tax break, and now, because LexCorp directed a half million of its tax payment to voucher schools, taxpayers have to make up the difference in, say, road maintenance?

Vouchers, especially vouchers that are big enough to actually pay for some school, increase the total system cost for education. Where is that money coming from?

There's more to all this argument, most especially dealing with all the issues involved in privatizing one of our most important public institutions (yeah-- other than that, Mrs. Lincoln) but I promised myself I'd put up a short, clear listicle, so here it is. Vouchers are a huge mistake, even if they're being pushed at the federal level. Push back.

The End of May

My Memorial Day weekend generally contains two major features. One feature is the actual honoring of Memorial Day. Here's how I finished up my morning yesterday.

This is the park in my small town. On the left is a the Civil War Monument, one of the first couple put up in Pennsylvania. The large building in the back is our County Courthouse. And on the right, our band stand, where I have played summer concerts with our 161-year-old town band for almost fifty years. That band of course marched in the parade today; you can see a few members in our faux Union Army uniforms in this shot. Some are people I graduated from high school with, and others are former students. When I say I live and teach ins some of postcard small town, I am not kidding.

My other activity for the weekend is grading papers. This year finals were last week, and this weekend I graded all the final papers, final essays, final tests, and final Hey-Mr-Greene-is-it-too-late-to-turn-this-in? work. It's a big deal for me, partly because it's just a big mountain of paperwork and grading, but also because in reading through those last major efforts, I see who really pulled some things together, and who I perhaps failed to open up.

On the list of Things They Don't Really Tell You About Teaching, or the list of Ways This Job Is Different From Many Others is the part that is driven home this time of year, every year-- that every year of teaching has an end. We meet a new batch of students, we pick apart their strengths and weaknesses, figure out what makes them tick (the better to motivate them), we work to build them up, and then, hopefully, we look to see what strides and changes and growth they have developed by the end of the year.

And then we say goodbye.

It's like working in an office where every year every person who works there is fired or promoted or leaves to work at a new company. Every person except you.

These last weeks are often like school redux, gathering together stripped of the notion that we'll be at this for a while, that we have lots of time left to figure some things out. Routines fall away, culminating projects consume time, and the necessities of paperwork and report card processing dictate that "this could affect your grade" is no longer part of the landscape.The moment when they will no longer be your students is close enough to touch.

This can be an awesome time of year, or a terrible one. It's the time when as a teacher you either realize that you managed to craft a beautiful roomful of learning this year, and you and your students can all feel pretty good about it. It can also be the time when it comes slamming home just how much you came up short. It's point where your students sprint across the finish line powered by sheer glowing joy, or they drag across it, barely scraping forward.

And no matter what, it's a time when it's all over.

You've done what you can do. They are who they are, and in these last great days you can hope to see some of that. It's times like the end of May that make me laugh at the folks who try to measure Days of Learning. I don't know how you would ever measure a May 30th, and I really don't know how you would stack that up beside a September 4th. They're just different days.

Graduation for my school is coming up this Sunday. Weather permitting, the students will walk across that same stage in the picture above, surrounded by 150 years of history and under a canopy of cool green. After they get their diplomas, they'll disperse, run to their families, walk out into the world. They will never be together like this again. I will never see some of them ever again. And in three months or so, I'll start over again from scratch.

The park is about five blocks away from my house, so after Memorial Day programs and band concerts and graduation, I walk home, through tree-lined sidewalks like this one. In the fall, they'll be a range of golds and browns, and that will start a new year as well. But for right now, it's the last days of May.

Politics vs. Ed Reform

Derrell Bradford is the head of NYCAN (and some other CANs too), one of the reformy arms of 50CAN, a reliably reformy group. He turns up in many of the usual reformy places, including Campbell Brown's the74 site, where he recently wrapped up a three-part series about the state of the reform movement, adapted from his speech at the Yale School of Management’s Education Leadership Conference in April. It's the third piece that I found most interesting; in it, he addresses the growing partisan problems that the reform movement has faced ever since Donald Trump became President.

I know what I think I see-- reformsters who self-identified as Democrats faced a challenge in a President whose politics they opposed, but whose policies were pretty much in line with what they've been advocating all along. But I'm curious about how they see it, and Bradford has always been an articulate advocate for the reformy world.

Party allegiance is the new litmus test not just for political philosophy, but for personal belief and social inclusion. Answering the wrong way on the wrong question not just on reform — but on anything — carries the weight of possible ostracism from both the left and the right. 

Agreed. In fact, that fits the trend I've seen presented that we are entering an era of "tribal epistemology," where the truth of any proposition or observation is not tested by any objective means, but by whether or not the proposition is supported by the tribal leaders. This has the effect of turning everything political-- if Beloved Leader says the sky is green, to look up at the sky yourself becomes an act of political defiance. You must prove your allegiance to the tribe.

Bradford notes that the election was tough to navigate.

I ultimately supported Clinton despite my firm belief that she would appoint a secretary of education determined to make our lives harder, not easier. In the professional sense, I voted against my own interests because I thought it might be best for America.

Agreed. Pretty sure that's a broadly held position in the education world.

He notes that These Times have led to many reformers heading further into their hard right or hard left positions, and this would be the place where I'd like to see further explanation because it remains hard for me to see the "left" wing of the reform movement as being all that leftist. But here he offers a pretty simple encapsulation of the political split of reformsterism:

We don’t have an education reform movement because liberal Democrats believe in civil rights. And we don’t have one because conservative Republicans believe in market solutions, low regulation, and freedom. We have one because they could believe in them both, at the same time, together, and at the same table. The golden age of “reform” that folks associate with President Barack Obama exists only because of a history of this sort of collaboration.

Out here in the cheap seats, I'm not sure that's what I saw.

First of all, what's up with putting "freedom" on the GOP list, as if Democrats aren't interested in freedom?

Second, this model suggests that reformsters came together as equals in this coalition. I'm not sure this is true-- the charter movement (which is about all that's left when we talk about an "ed reform movement") has been almost exclusive a business-driven movement. Corporate and privatization interests have used a variety of ideas as protective cover, including progressive ideas about equity and civil rights, but after years of this, I remain unconvinced that the major players have any real political bent at all. But we're talking about the left because it's impossible under the current administration to pretend that ed reform policies are about social justice or equity. And it is telling that when the language of equity and social justice is stripped from ed reform policy, hardly anything about the actual policy actually has to change.

In other words, charter and choice policy that doesn't explicitly pursue equity and social justice looks almost exactly like charter and choice policy that claims to care about equity and social justice. Mostly you just have to change some language in the PR.

In fact, Bradford is very correct to put "low regulation" on the GOP list, because that is the one significant difference between reform policy that does or does not pursue equity. Regulation and accountability are a necessary element if you don't want the reform landscape to be clogged with fraudsters and scam artists, not to mention operators who are racist and classist. 

The golden age that Bradford speaks of could exist not because reform had protective cover on both flanks. Obama could not easily be accused of being anti-progressive, and yet his neoliberal leanings put him in perfect tune with the corporate privatization approach. 

Bradford recaps some reform history to underscore that it has been built on bipartisan deals. True enough. Dems and GOP politicians have put party aside for something else. Bradford suggests that something else has been, and should be, For The Children. My cynical sided suggests that the something else has been For The Money, or For the Deep-Pocketed Private Interests Driving So Much of Ed Reform. 

And Bradford offers an interesting example of working across lines of personal and political belief-- Martin Luther King, Jr., and his willingness to work with all manner of people (including the hugely racist LBJ) to achieve goals of social justice. 

"Keep your eye on the goal" seems like an excellent piece of advice (it's actually one of my rules), but it highlights exactly the problem that Bradford is trying to address. Bradford suggests that the goal to keep eyes on is the needs of 

 a boy on a corner in Bridgeport who just needs you to be on one side — and that side is his. He’s actually the last person who needs you to be a partisan — steeped in what you won’t do and closing off policy opportunities that make you uncomfortable because of your political beliefs — because in the end, it’s his life, not yours, that depends on it.

First, there are huge differences of opinion about how to serve that boy's needs.  

But more importantly, that boy's future is not the goal that all reformers have their eyes on. For some, choice for its own sake is what matters, and if a choice system leaves that boy in a lousy school, well omelets and eggs. For some others, the goal has always been to open up that billion-dollar marketplace so that they can get in there and compete for those sweet, sweet dollars. And some reformsters are in no hurry to help that boy on the corner until he proves himself to be worth the trouble, because it's possible he's not a striver and out on the corner is where he deserves to be left. 

On the most fundamental level, we have two philosophies of school operating-- one that sees education as a means of raising up every single child, and one that sees schools as part of a way to sort the deserving form the undeserving. The sorters thought they had to at least pretend to get along with the uplift crowd to get what they wanted, but now they are ascendant, in power, and damned sure they're not going to stop the bus to pick up some ragamuffin on the streetcorner who is just looking for a hand out paid for with some deserving wealthy person's tax dollars.

In any coalition, as the endgame approaches, the different views of what that end should look like become more evident as coalition members pull apart for their special. It's easy to carpool from Omaha to New York City for the first several hundred miles. But once you get to the city limits, if one car is headed for the Bronx and another is headed for Wall Street and another is headed for Long Island, your carpool is going to have problems.

The ed reform coalition was always going to fall apart. Well, unless you take a cynical view of the movement. Because maybe it was never a coalition at all, but a big solid core of pragmatic opportunistic corporate privatizers who surrounded themselves with just enough of people from different political viewpoints that they could protect that core. Maybe the "coalition" was just a thin candy shell, and now some parts of the shell are being sloughed off.

There is one other thing that always strikes me about these calls for cooperation within the ed reform community. I realize that Bradford's original material was a speech for a particular audience, but if we are talking about social justice activists working with racists and Democrats working with Republicans, couldn't we also talk about folks who want to remake the education system working with, talking to, even listening to the people who work in that system. Everyone should think about working side by side with everyone else-- except teachers. And I don't mean some carefully handpicked we-know-they-mostly-agree-with-us teachers. Bradford says that real progress is uncomfortable, and yet reformsters largely remain unwilling to suffer the discomfort of listening to actual working teachers who might disagree with them. 

 

ICYMI: Memorial Day Weekend Edition (5/28)

The best read of the week was actually an eight-part series at Slate about cyber schooling, and that's so important that I gave it its own post. So if you haven't caught that yet, you can find the posts laid out here. 

And for reasons to cast a careful eye on that series, read this piece from Wrench in the Gears.

In the meantime, here's the rest of your reading selections. Remember to post, tweet, promote and otherwise amplify the work of the writers you support. It's a way that everyone can help shape the conversation.

Trump Budget Would Abandon Public Education for Private Choice

How the Trump/DeVos education program looks to a law professor (spoiler alert: not good).

Five Startling Things Betsy DeVos Just Told Congress

There was a lot to process in the DeVos testimony at the top of the week. Here Valerie Strauss lays out the five most striking things that came out of DeVos's mouth.

Who Is Behind the Assault on Public Schools

Howard Ryan at the independent Socialist magazine takes a look at what, exactly, has been driving the assault on public education.

Don't Like Betsy DeVos? Blame the Democrats.

Diane Ravitch in the New Republic with a little history lesson to remind us how Democrats bear some of the blame for Betsy DeVos and her policies.

Why Do Billionaires Care So Much About Charter Schools

Harold Meyerson in the LA Times talking about why folks like Eli Broad just have to get their fingers in the charter pie. You have to love a piece that ends with this line:

Pure of heart though some of them may be, the charter billionaires have settled on a diagnosis, and a cure, that focuses on the deficiencies of the system’s victims, not the system itself. How very comforting for them.

Personalized Learning Pathways and the Gig Economy

How not really getting an education dovetails nicely with growing up to not really get a job.

What Betsy DeVos Calls Education Transformation Is Actually Public Theft

Jeff Bryant walks us through what DeVos is actually telling us, and what's she's telling us is that she's going to turn education over to privateers.

The TFA Top-Ten Listers: Where Are They Now?

Remember when ten TFA-ers went on Letterman to say why they became a teacher? That was four years ago. Gery Rubinstein checked to see how their teaching careers are coming along.

The Facts about Charter School Finances in Camden, NJ

Jersey Jazzman is actually continuing his series about how University of Arkansas screwed up its study, but this segment also has some larger implications.

The New York Times on the "Little-Known Statistician" Who Passed

Audrey Amslein-Beardsley on the passing of William Sanders, the inventor of VAAS. 

Screw-U

Betsy DeVos has brought Robert Eitel in to "right-size" the Department of Education. His previous experience is running a fraudulent for-profit university. Jennifer Berkshire and Christopher Crowley look at all the bad signs here.

Death by a Thousand Retirements

Marie Corfield passes on her speech from a retirement dinner that saw 800 years of educational experience head out the door. 


I Am Done-- I Hope Public Education Is Not

Thomas Ultican, friend of this blog, is retiring, and he offers some reflections on what he's been through in his career.