Librarians Take Reading Level Stand

One of the weird little sideshows of modern ed reform has been an unhealthy preoccupation with reading levels. What lots of folks heard Common Core say was that we had to lock students in to their lexile reading score level (whether the Core said exactly that or not is another debate, That in turn has triggered a resurgence in programs like Renaissance Learning's dreadful Accelerated Reader incentive program. Read more books! Answer more quizzes! Learn more points! And always-- always-- pick books based on the reading level and not based on, say, whether or not you find it interesting.

Yes, please

There's a lot to argue about when it comes to reading levels. These generally based on mechanics, in keeping with the whole philosophy of reading and writing as a set of context-free "skills"-- it assumes that how well you read something has nothing at all to do with the content of what you're reading. Lexile scores, the type of analysis favored by the Core fans, works basically from vocabulary and sentence length. That has the advantage of being analysis that a machine can do. It has the disadvantage of providing ridiculous results. Ernest Hemmingway's novel The Sun Also Rises is at about the same lexile score as the classic Curious George Gets a Medal-- third gtrade-ish. Meanwhile, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse V may have PG-13 language and situations, but it also has a fourth grade-ish lexile score. And none of those works rank as high as Mr. Popper's Penguins.

So there's a great deal to dislike about the whole business of assessing reading levels, but the American Association of School Librarians (a subgroup of the American Library Association) has noted other undesirable trends related to leveling, and they have issued a statement about them.

Here's some bad news they note:

One of the realities some school librarians face in their jobs is pressure by administrators and classroom teachers to label and arrange library collections according to reading levels.

Yikes. As the AASL notes, this feeds into the practice of students scanning for slim books at the "correct" reading level so they can snatch up more of those reading program points. If you don't recognize how troubling that is, AASL would like to remind everyone what the point of the library is supposed to be:

School library collections are not merely extensions of classroom book collections or classroom teaching methods, but rather places where children can explore interests safely and without restrictions. A minor’s right to access resources freely and without restriction has long been and continues to be the position of the American Library Association and the American Association of School Librarians.

AASL also notes that spine-marking reading levels means that every child's reading level is on display to everyone else the moment she picks up a book. Arranging books this way also means that students are not learning how to locate materials in a "real" library out in the world, adding one more obstacle to their progress as college students and adults.

And AASL quietly (as librarians will) calls these sorts of leveled reading programs out for what they are-- not an attempt to build reading skills or open up the world for students, but actually to restrict their reading options. And that's not what America's librarians signed up for:

It is the responsibility of school librarians to promote free access for students and not to aid in restricting their library materials. School librarians should resist labeling and advocate for development of district policies regarding leveled reading programs that rely on library staff compliance with library book labeling and non-standard shelving requirements. These policies should address the concerns of privacy, student First Amendment Rights, behavior modification in both browsing and motivational reading attitudes, and related issues.

Nobody, least of all a librarian, should be saying, "Yes, Pat, I know you love dinosaurs, and this looks like a great book about dinosaurs, but it has a blue sticker and you're only allowed to get out red sticker books, so here, read this nice book about doilies."

Kudos to the librarians for remembering what their mission is supposed to be and not allowing themselves to be sidetracked by a bad idea.

NY: Warm Bodies for Charters

Travel with me to a board meeting at Giant Imaginary Hospital.

Board Member #1: We are still unable to fill several openings in the surgical department. What shall we do?

Board Member #2: We'll just have to offer a more competitive package, with better pay and better perks. I mean, that's how the free market works, right?  

Board Member #3: I have a better idea. Let's just promote Sven.

Board Member #2: Sven Svenberger? From the kitchen at the GIH cafeteria?

Board Member #3: Sure. He uses knives. Surgeon use knives.

Board Member #2: But we're talking about surgery on actual humans. He's a cook, Jim. Not a doctor.

Board Member #3: Fine. We'll give him a week of training.

Many starts have been having versions of this conversation as they pass their own version of warm body legislation, legislation that puts pretty much any warm body in the classroom.

But New York is considering a particularly special warm body rule that's especially for charter schools. The State University of New York (SUNY) is one of the main authorizers of charters in New York, and they've proposed that their charter schools be allowed to hire unqualified warm bodies for their schools. These warm bodies might have just thirty hours of classroom experience and training. That's almost a week.

Why do this? Because charters are too damn cheap to pay teachers a decent wage or offer them attractive working conditions. Or as Times-Union coverage of the story puts it:

Charter school advocates say the proposal would help schools that are struggling to find quality teachers who are certified in New York.

Okay, I could go up to $10.95

Sigh. Why do we have to keep explaining to free market fans how the free market works. If I can't buy a Lexus for $1.95, that doesn't suggest either an automobile shortage or that I "struggling to find quality automobiles." It suggests that I am offering an inadequate "bid" for the goods and services that I want.

Is that impossible to accomplish? Well, Success Academy (one of SUNY's chains) reportedly employed 1,000 staffers in 2014, and their boss, Eva Moscowitz makes almost $5 million  a year, which means taking a cut of $1 million would yield a $1K without having to cut anything but Moscowitz's personal fortune. SA has about 2700 seats, yet Moscowitz makes about twice the salary of NYC school chancellor Carmen Farina, who is responsible for many, many more students. In other words, charters could up the ante if they really wanted to.

But as writers and former charter teachers like Rann Miller suggest, charter staff turnover is significantly higher for a reason. Charter operators actually prefer to burn and churn their teachers, keeping their personnel costs low and their actual personnel more compliant and agreeable.

In other words, this warm body rule is being pursued as a solution to problems that charters created for themselves. On purpose.

Beyond the fact that there's no good reason for this charter warm body rule, it's a bad idea.

As Daniel Katz points out, these warm bodies will arrive in classrooms with significantly less training than real New York teachers. This is doubly problematic because 1) it's hugely insulting to professional teachers who actually get actual professional training and 2) it sets these warm bodies up for failure.

But Jersey Jazzman points out even more troubling implications. This sort of training is not so much about helping people switch careers as it is giving charters carte blanch to do their own training in house. In fact, the proposal seems to suggest that these warm body certificates will only be good in SUNY charters, making these warm body jobs the very definition of dead-end employment. There will be no getting a warm body charter teacher certificate and then moving on to other schools. And since these warm bodies will not have widely marketable skills, they will have even less bargaining power with their bosses. And if everything we've heard so far doesn't make us worry about the quality of these warm bodies, let's ask the other question-- what kind of dope would sign up for this in the first place?

As is often the case, we are looking at the kind of 'reform" that rich families will never tolerate. Proponents may say, "Look, some of the most prestigious private schools use teachers who aren't properly certified." I'm going to reply, "Yes, and those people at the top of their field are recruited by schools that offer great packages to make the job attractive, so that they always have their pick of top people. That is different from paying bottom dollar for a lousy job in order to recruit disposable warm bodies."

But then, these places aren't looking for top talent, because many of these charters don't believe in great teaching so much as they believe in content delivery units who follow the script and work through the approved materials in the charter-approved manner. That's one more reason this will look like a good idea to these charter operators-- instead of trained professional teachers whose heads are filled with ideas about good pedagogy and a variety of instructional techniques, you get to work with people who don't know anything about teaching except what they've been taught. Tired of hiring teachers who have been filled with nonsense about the importance of student voices in the classroom? Just hire people who have never heard about that, and don't tell them about it. You can talk about folded hands and speak when spoken to and eye contact and subservient obedience and instead of having staff make doubting faces or actually questioning you, in this happy magic world of warm body meat widgets, they'll just smile and nod and accept that what you say must be the truth about education.

You can see why many people have pushed back on this, and if you want to push, too, the Network for Public Education has a letter you can send, saying that the least that all students in New York deserve is an actual trained professional teacher in their classroom. Warm body rules do not serve students, and New York would do well not to had down this road.

A Very Special Busted Pencils

I find it extraordinary difficult to find time to take in podcasts. I'm a text guy; I want to consume information through words that I see (I say very Awful Things when a news site tries to make me watch a video).

But there are two education podcasts that I try to listen to regularly. Have You Heard I've plugged before, but I am also a fan of BustED Pencils, a podcast that has been around for a few years and which brings a decidedly rock and roll sensibility to its work. Host Tim Slekar started out as a classroom teacher and now holds down a college gig (and he has the added virtue of being familiar with my little corner of the world.

The podcast features some fun and quirky features, including a regular What Would Matt Damon's Mom Say feature, and they land some great interviews, including semi-regular appearances by Alfie Kohn. Working your way through the episodes gives you the chance to hear some of your favorite public ed advocates in their own voices (and yes, I was on the show once). The podcast is timely, peppy, and always on the current edge of what's going on.

But I want to draw extra attention to the most recent episode, which retains the usual sharp, energetic quality of BustED Pencils, but it looks at a deeper topic than usual-- mental health in schools. Dr. Slekar kicks the episode off with an honest an open discussion of his own struggles as a student, and then the episode goes on to deal with issues of suicide and fostering caring students.

The episode-- What Aren't We Talking About and Why-- is worth your time and attention. These are issues that are hugely important, albeit not always discussed. Slekar puts the issues in perspective right off the bat by questioning how we can possibly take a kid who's struggling with mental health issues and hit her with exercises to make her "de-stress" for the Big Standardized Test.

So if you're a podcast kind of person, this is my recommendation to you-- click on over and listen to this episode of BustED Pencils. It is worth your while.

Collective Freedom

The tension between individual freedom and collective action, between what the individual wants and what the community wants, between the needs of the many and the needs of the few-- that tension has been with us since Day One. Puritans came here to declare,"This will be a place where people are free to worship as they please-- as long as it's a form of worship we agree with." Southern colonists arrived declaring, "This will be a land in which every man's efforts can enrich him-- unless you're an indentured servant or a slave, in which case, your efforts are going to enrich me."

We have a Bill of Rights enumerating the rights possessed by every individual-- and a long and robust history of debate and case law determining where those rights actual stop in the name of the greater good (First Amendment does not cover yelling "fire" or even "elephant stampede" in a crowded theater, et al).

This, it should be noted, is not a tension limited to governance. To get married and become a part of a tiny family collective, you give up some of your personal freedom. That's how it works-- if you insist on acting as if you live in the land of Do As You Please, your little collective will fall apart (trust me on this). Membership in a group requires sacrifice of personal freedom.

As a nation we tend to lean toward individual freedom and away from collectivism. Even when we occasionally do Socialist things, we don't dare call it Socialism. Too much collective action and people start talking about the government "taking away my hard-earned money" or inflicting its will on our choices.

Some charter/voucher school fans like to frame the argument along these lines. The decry forcing students to go to "government" schools. Why shouldn't parents have the freedom to choose whatever school they like? Why be forced into some sort of collective (that, they claim, wastes a bunch of tax money anyway).


This framing is not accurate, and not just because no state has yet invested the kind of money or demanded the kind of accountability that would truly make all choices available to all parents. No, there's another reason this is a false characterization, a reason that charters and vouchers vs. public education is about the tension between freedom and society in a slightly different way.

There are areas of community life where we have decided to sacrifice individual freedom for the collective good (and thereby actually increase individual freedom).

Roadways. We could make every individual responsible for the roads that he personally uses-- building them, maintaining them-- but given the different resources the folks have and the interconnectedness required for roadways, we would end up with a higgledy-piggledy system that didn't really serve anyone particularly well. Back in the 19th century, folks in my community would get together and spend Saturday building a new road, a project nobody could have completed single-handedly. And it takes a national collective effort to create that marvel of the modern world-- the Interstate Highway System

Likewise, we could make every citizen form and hire her own personal army, but the resulting hodge-podge would not protect the country.

Education (surprise) is the other big example. Rather than just let each family locate their own personal tutor, communities decided that they had a stake in making sure that all children were educated (eg Puritans require a Godly community of Bible readers, therefor we need to teach everyone to read). Communities pooled resources and elected a board to manage those resources in response to community desires. The structure got stickier when we decided that since some communities didn't have sufficient resources, we would also pool resources on the state level.

As with roads and armies, the collective pooling of resources involved people who would rarely if ever use the items being produced. But their interested were still represented by their participation in the collective decision making. Even if you don't have a child in school, you can still run for school board, call board members, attend meetings and make a participatory nuisance of yourself. Everyone who helps pool the collective also has the option of participating in the collective decision-making.

Collectives require people to chip in, and they require some authority to decide how the various interests at play can be moderated so that everyone sort of gets something they kind of want. In some countries, that authority is some sort of emperor/beloved leader/tyrant. In our society, the idea is to elect folks for that job. Bottom line-- you put in some money, voice your opinion, and may or may not get exactly what you want.

Sometimes it takes the collective to get the job done. These decisions do not happen without debate. We're in the middle of an argument about whether or not health care should be such a collective effort or not. And there are always wealthy folks whose argument is something along the lines of, "We have no problem providing the roads and security that we need, and we provide it just the way we like it, so why should the government force us to be part of a collective effort by stealing our resources. And really, everybody should have the freedom to choose their own stuff the same way we do. What? They can't afford to? Well, wave this magic wand of free marketry at the problem; I'm sure those folks will be able to get what they deserve in no time at all."

Or to put it more succinctly, "I've got mine, Jack. Go pound sand."

There are several possible explanations for this. Rich folks are way hella rich. Super-rich. Buy your own city and run it the way you want rich. That and cooperation and compromise are taking a hit as shared values. Take music for a moment. Decades ago, we had to share air space. We listened to the radio station (one of only a few) we listened to music that the station believed the collective wanted. Decades ago when I chaperoned bus trips, negotiating the music we would all listen to was part of the challenge. Nowadays, we all curate our personal collection that we hear through our personal equipment. We get exactly what we personally want.

So is that all the charter/voucher revolution is? A bunch of parents just saying, "I want the school I want." And then just exercising their choice.

No, it's not. And here's why.

When it comes to bus ride music, we have done away with the collective. We don't pool resources or share decisions-- everyone just brings their own resources and makes do with that. No collective resources, no collective decisions.

But the charter/voucher revolution keeps the pooled resources part of public education. Everyone is still part of the collective resource pool. The collective decision-making is, however, gone.

Earlier this week I jumped off a post about Flat Earthers to ask charter/voucher fans how a charter/voucher system would deal with a school that was just wrong. I didn't get much of an answer. The public would never stand for it, one said-- but how exactly would the public's non-standing affect the charter school's existence? In a charter or voucher system, who steps in to say, "No, that can't be a school." I used the Flat Earth example because while we can all agree that the earth is not flat, we must also agree that there might be enough flat earthers out there to support a Flat Earth Charter school. Parents voting with their feet will not keep it from happening.

What charter/vouchers get us is collective resources managed in individual freedom mode (again, ignoring for the moment that the resources committed to such systems don't give parents anything remotely resembling the choices they are promised). By focusing on the individual parent decision, charteristas and voucherphiles try to make the argument that choice is super-democratic. It's not.

What is going on here is a bunch of parents saying, "I'm going to choose this private school for my kid, and you taxpayers have to pay for it whether you like it or not." Christian fundamentalists can spend tax dollars to send kids to a sharia law private school. Muslim taxpayers can pay to send students to a militantly anti-Islam private school. Black and brown taxpayers can pay to send white kids to a segregated private school.

Choice advocates have long made the point that education tax dollars don't belong to the public school-- they belong to the students. Neither of those is correct. The money belongs to the taxpayers. To distribute it without giving them any voice is literally taxation without representation. What charter/voucher systems continue to lack (well, one of the things they continue to lack) is accountability measures that insure taxpayers that their money is not being wasted. Is that conversation about what constitutes "waste" going to be difficult and contentious? Sure. And I wonder if part of the push behind charter/voucher systems is a desire to avoid that discussion ("I want to send my kid to a flat earth academy and I don't want to have to go through a bunch of crap to do it") But if you're going to be part of a community, city, state and nation, you can't just Do As You Please and maintain your membership.

Meet the New Boss

If there was one thing that was going to be a hallmark of the Betsy DeVos Depatrment of Education, it was going to be their studious hands-off approach. Previous departments may have used all manner of extra-legislative legerdemain to impose their will on the states (Common Core arm-twisting, Race to the Top bribery, waiver-based extortion). ESSA was born out of bipartisan grumpiness over USED's long, grabby arms, and yet, one of John King's final actions as secretary was to get himself spanked by Lamar Alexander for STILL trying to write laws from the USED offices.

"I will never do that kind of baloney," Betsy DeVos said.

"Easy to say until you have the wheel of power gripped tight in your own hand," said I. Here's a woman who has spent her whole adult life trying to impose her will on the education system. Now that she actually has the power, can she forgo actually using it?

Well, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

And I don't mean actually meet her, because DeVos rarely does press, and when she does, it's a big nothing sandwich. 

As reported by Erica Green in the New York Times, DeVos's department has decided they will be the arbiter of adjectives, the setters of standards, the commandants of state capitals. Folks have submitted their ESSA plans, and USED is feeling its oats:

...the Education Department’s feedback to states about their plans to put the new law into effect, it applied strict interpretations of statutes, required extensive detail and even deemed some state education goals lackluster.

The department has actually decided to dictate what "ambitious" means in state education plans, a move which Mike Petrilli (Fordham Institution and the first number in every ed reporters rolodex) called "mind-boggling."

Granted, "ambitious" is a fairly useless legislative weasel-word that in this context means almost nothing. But folks were reading DeVos's early signals to mean that states would get the benefit of the doubt in any fuzzy areas. The head of the Delaware branch of the state-spanning reformster advocacy group CAN gave DeVos a pass (and he's allowed, because, somehow, he was one of the co-authors of Delaware's plan) because he admits they had shied away from being "bold and aggressive," thereby tripling the number of meaningless words in the conversation.

The Leadership Conference, a group of education reformsters dressed up as a civil rights type group (it includes Stand for Children, Democrats for Education Reform and Teach Plus, groups that have been tireless in pushing the corporate reform of public education), sent a letter arguing for retention of a mass of Obama-era criteria for evaluating state plans,demanding that the department serves as "not simply a rubber stamp of state submissions." Their preferred adjectives are "aggressive, meaningful and achievable."

This is the kind of imprecise blather you get when education policy is hammered out by amateurs. It often gives me flashbacks to working with student teachers in my classroom and some variation of this conversation:

Me: So your plan for tomorrow is to have an "ambitious" discussion about Huck Finn. What does that actually mean?

ST: What do you mean? It'll be ambitious.

Me: But what is that going to look like? What questions are you going to ask that will be ambitious? How will you draw ambitious answers out of the students, and what themes and ideas will you be looking for and how will you draw them out and what will let you know that the students have been ambitious enough to meet your goals?

ST: I don't know. Ambitious, you know? Like hard and stuff.

There are two big problems with the policy discussion this has touched off. ESSA was written by education amateurs, and now state-level amateurs will design the plans which will in turn be evaluated by the amateurs at the department. I'm betting not one of the people involved in this process would be able to walk into a class and effectively teach and ambitious lesson. So problem number one is that none of the people involved in working with this policy knows what he is talking about.

Not that specifying would help, because that would require a specific one-size-fits-all answer, which would be an answer that was wrong in the majority of the cases. That, in fact, was what we got with Common Core-- an attempt to lay out specifically what an "ambitious" education would look like, and it was junk.

The further away from the classroom education policy is set, the worse that policy will be. It will either be too specific, and tie the hands of teachers who are far better positioned to decide what will work with a specific set of students than folks who have never met those students. Or it will be too vague, which will be useless-- and then someone will try to firm it up by making it specific anyway.

Brace yourself, because I am about to agree with Neal McCluskey of the hyper-libertarian CATO Institute:

And so we remain pretty much where we were under the Obama administration in education, and where we are with every law that leaves it to regulatory agencies to fill in the meaning of crucial terms: with states, localities, and the people at the mercy of bureaucrats and secretaries.

So USED will be defining "ambitious" and "challenging" and all sorts of other words that they don't really know the meaning of in the context of a classroom, states will dance around trying to make the department happy (and, I predict, in some cases pleading for a template to follow, which takes us right back to Common Core), and by the time it all filters down to a classroom, we teachers will be trying to just get our job done without tripping over it too much. My apologies to my many progressive friends, but every day I move closer to the opinion that the best thing to do with the Department of Education is pack it in mothballs and stick in the attic, next to Grandma's old trunk.

So meet the new boss, same as the old boss, still insistent on defining adjectives and policy and rules, regulations and laws. She doesn't show Arne Duncan's predilection for talking nonsense to the public, but she's still going to tell us how to do our jobs.

What About Flat Earthers?

This week the Denver Post ran an.... intriguing? unexpected? gob-smacking? piece about the Flat Earther community in the US, which is, for some reason, centered in Colorado. And these folks are committed.

You might think that this is some sort of hipster irony thing, like the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But take a stroll through just one flat earther youtube channel-- Globebusters-- and you'll realize that nobody means to be funny here. The international space station? A huge fake.The edge of the world? A barrier of ice. Why don't we feel the alleged speed at which we're supposed spinning with the earth's surface? And is NASA, as another flat earth-- well, I'd call it a group but it appears to be just one guy-- asserts, a secret arm of the Freemasons? And why do conspiracy theorists always have such bad spelling skills?

The Post piece offers a hint at the appeal:

“They want you to think you’re insignificant, a speck on the earth, a cosmic mistake,” Sargent says. “The flat earth says you are special, we are special, there is a creator, this isn’t some accident.”...

He and other Flat Earthers can only speculate why the global conspiracy has had such staying power for more than 500 years, or why “the top” — the uber-elite heads of governments, universities and major corporations that allegedly know “the truth” — would continue to uphold a scheme that offers little in the way of riches or strategic power.

But I'm not here to discuss the merits of Flat Earth Theory which is, after all, well-destroyed bunk.

My question is-- what do we do with these folks?

Sure, it's a free country and you can believe whatever dumb thing you want to believe. You can ignore all the scientific evidence and sense that you like, provided that you don't start clubbing people over te head or burning down buildings in the name of your beliefs. But for the world of education policy, we're going to need a better answer than that.

If flat earthers demand that their public school teach the (non-existent) controversy, should public school teachers be compelled to do so, or must they find (or rent) a sympathetic legislator first to make that happen?

What if they decide to set up their own Flat Earth Charter school? Should that be funded with public tax dollars, or even allowed/ Some charter supporters argue that whatever parents want to do should be allowed ("freedom!"), but does the society that funds education have a stake in making sure that education is not filled with falsehoods. Those Flat Earth Charter students would eventually be adults whose ability to contribute to society, function well in the workplace, and vote responsibly in elections may be compromised by the big slab of baloney rattling around in their heads. We can take the attitude that families that saddle their children with non-functional educations have made their own bed, but people who can't pull their own weight in society become a cost to it. We can say, "Let Pat try to be a Flat Earth Rocket Scientist-- if Pat can't support a family or make a living, that's Pat's problem" which is true right up until the point that Pat gets hit by a car and needs health care or collects a hundred other Pats and elects a Flat Earth city official.

I'm not going to argue that we need a system in which some government ministry decides which True Things are officially allowed to be taught. But one under-discussed issue with the charter/voucher of freeing parents to do whatever they want is that a certain percentage of parents believe Really Dumb Things and an increasing portion of our population is not so keen on things like "science" and "evidence."

So what accountability measures, what checks would we put in place so that a charter/voucher system didn't just become a patchwork mess of Teach Whatever The Hell You Feel Like? Because that can't be good for the health of the country or for the children whose education is sacrificed on the alter of the free market. The point of education, after all, is to elevate people to higher levels of understanding and skill, not to allow them to soak in the same old stew of ignorance.

My most cynical, least-charitable side says that some charter/voucher fans figure that bad people choose bad schools and get bad educations and end up poor and struggling as they should, and it doesn't matter because they'll be doing it on the other side of the big wall that separates the Betters in society from All Those Other People. But for those reformsters who truly believe that charters and choice are an important key to improving education in this country, my question remains-- what do we do about Flat Earth Charter School?

ICYMI: Stuff To Read Edition (7/9)

Yeah, I'm short a clever title this week, but I'm not short worthwhile pieces for you to read. Here we go.

On Global Teacher Prize Winner Maggie MacDonnell and What Humility Looks Like

Jose Luis Vilson talks to prize-winner MacDonnell, and we're all a little better for it. This will make you feel a little better about the work.  

Utica Charter School Allegedly Required Salary Tithe

How about yet another story about the Gulen charter chain, just in case you think this use of charter schools to funnel US tax dollars into the coffers of an exiled Turkish leader was old news. Nope. Still happening.

KIPP Schools Collected Millions in Unallowable Fees


The folks who run KIPP are millionaires, but the parents of KIPP students still get hit up for what turn out to be probably-illegal contributions. Tell me the part again about how charters do more with less.

Reform Lessons From Skeptical But Not Cynical Veterans

A winner from Larry Cuban

Has The Charter Movement Gone Awry

Apparently the discussion of the new "let's just get rid of charter accountability" book is going to drag on forever. Grab some popcorn.

The Lie; The Reply

I know you'll find this hard to believe, but there's a charter school operator in Ohio who is a big fat liar.

Beware of School Voucher Doublespeak

I'm not sure this is exactly doublespeak, but here's the NEA with an actually-useful explainer for certain voucher terminology

Charter School Refusal To Admit Students Lacking Uniforms Wasn't Its First

A NOLA charter decides that homeless students who don't come in their proper uniforms should be ejected. And they've apparently done it more than once  

CBS News Voucher Story

Yes, CBS news manages to actually catch the effect of the DeVosian voucher plan on rural schools.

Mayoral Control and Mayoral Responsibility

New York is looking at, well, the first of those again, and Daniel katz takes a look at the issues involved.

The History of Ed Tech: What Went Wrong

Audrey Watters answers the question. See what you think of her answer.

Chris Christie, The Beach, and Our Leaders' Massive School Funding Hypocrisy 

Jersey Jazzman attacks all three topics, and it's worth reading twice.

Why do we think poor people are poor because of their own bad choices?

Tip of the hat to Blue Cereal Education, a look at the psychological theorizing behind why we blame poor people for being poor.