The school district was at the forefront of a public education model that is gaining national popularity—but its decision undercuts what the community appreciates about each school’s custom offerings that put students first.
The Oakland, California, school district touts itself as the nation’s first full-service community schools district, committing to a model of school improvement that, according to the model’s most prominent proponents, provides students with “well-rounded educational opportunities” and the “supports” they need to be successful. Community schools attend to the basic needs of the communities they serve, which often entails, according to news reports, such things as access to health and dental care, nutritious food, arts programs, sports and recreation, or after-school activities. But in February 2022, Oakland, despite its commitment to its districtwide reform plan, announced it is shutting down several of its community schools. Continue reading →
Digital products that monitor students’ online behavior raise concerns about how companies use that data for profit.
In June 2021, as students and teachers were finishing up a difficult school year, Priscilla Chan, wife of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, made a live virtual appearance on the “Today” show, announcing that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), along with its “partner” Gradient Learning, was launching Along, a new digital tool to help students and teachers create meaningful connections in the aftermath of the pandemic. Continue reading →
The Trump-led Republican Party has used its opposition to teaching the actual racial history of the United States in public schools to capture political power in Virginia and school boards across the nation. Using as a weapon the convenient but erroneous label of “critical race theory,” a niche college post-graduate level course not taught in any public school, the far-right is not stopping at banning outright or altering the teaching of European genocide of Native Americans; the Underground Railroad Emancipation, post-Civil War Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation laws, and the modern civil rights movement; and the era of McCarthyism. The right is also targeting the history of World War II and the almost universally-accepted justification for going to war against Nazi Germany. What the far-right is accomplishing with increased success is historical negationism, denialism, falsification, and revisionism. Legitimate educational institutions find themselves, quite needlessly, on the defensive. That has to change and fast. The right is not entitled to alter the historical record for its own racist, religious, and fascist purposes. Neither does the right possess license to promulgate nonsensical and easily debunked “alternate facts,” as Trump White House official Kellyanne Conway once put it to an astonished public. Continue reading →
Ronald Reagan knew that an educated populace was more progressive and more Democratic, and he was determined to stop the explosion of college educated Americans caused by both the 1944 GI Bill and free tuition at the University of California. Continue reading →
In school board meetings from the battleground county of Loudoun in Virginia to Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona, and other states the far-right is targeting public education in furtherance of a Nazification of school curricula. We have also seen the first moves to traditional de-legitimize institutions of higher learning in favor of universities and colleges, some only recently formed, that teach only far-right propaganda. Continue reading →
Republicans have placed the critical and factual teaching of history on the ballot of the Virginia gubernatorial race between Republican Glenn Youngkin, a Trump-supporter and former CEO of the sinister Carlyle Group, and Democratic former Governor Terry McAuliffe. Youngkin has vowed to eliminate the teaching of “critical race theory” (CRT) in Virginia schools. However, Virginia does not and never has taught the theory, which is found only in the graduate curriculum of select universities and colleges around the country. Emulating Senator Joe McCarthy, Youngkin has transformed the non-issue of CRT in Virginia schools into a rallying cry for Donald Trump’s base of ranting and raving whites across the commonwealth. Continue reading →
If you think elementary, middle, and high school students know too little history, geography, and government, try asking them about the corporations that command so many hours of their day, their attention, what they consume, and their personal horizons. Continue reading →
Wildly inaccurate accusations are flying all over the place right now. Don’t get sucked in—do this instead.
If you are worried about critical race theory in schools, here is some advice from someone who actually teaches it. Continue reading →
One House Democrat said he can't wait for January 20, "when this disgrace is pushed out the door and her bags are dropped at the curb."
After spending much of her nearly four-year tenure in government attacking public schools and pushing privatization schemes, outgoing Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is now reportedly encouraging career staffers at her department to obstruct President-elect Joe Biden’s policy agenda. Continue reading →
On November 2, Trump signed an executive order that aims to manipulate the minds of young children. Continue reading →
Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is heading the administration’s effort to force schools to reopen in the fall for in-person instruction. What’s her plan to reopen safely? She doesn’t have one. Continue reading →
MIAMI—Saying Florida’s mandate to reopen brick-and-mortar schools despite the coronavirus pandemic endangers students, teachers, and everybody else, the state’s teachers’ union is suing the GOP-run government to stop Florida’s unsafe school reopening plan. Continue reading →
‘With our country dealing with a pandemic, an economic recession, and structural racism, she's spied an opening to exploit this crisis to resuscitate her failed agenda.’
With the Trump administration planning to demand that Congress devote a large chunk of the state and local education funding in the next COVID-19 relief package to a new grant program for private and religious schools, the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers on Thursday accused Education Secretary Betsy DeVos of attempting to exploit the pandemic to advance her privatization agenda. Continue reading →
‘Today's ruling is perverse,’ Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday delivered a ruling civil liberties advocates warned could make taxpayers “underwrite religious education”—opening a massive crack in the bedrock principle of church and state separation. Continue reading →
Times of great adversity not only bring out the best and worst in society, but they also flush out some of the stinkiest and slimiest creatures. Think of war profiteers, hucksters who prey on poor hurricane victims, or Betsy DeVos. Continue reading →
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said he will use the COVID-19 virus as an opportunity to ‘revolutionize’ the state’s school system, inviting Bill Gates to implement his controversial ideas about education.
Taking time off from mismanaging a pandemic and turning lifesaving masks sent from all over the country into an art installation, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo declared yesterday that he would use the deadly COVID-19 virus as an opportunity to “revolutionize” the state’s school system, inviting Microsoft founder Bill Gates to implement his controversial ideas about education statewide. Cuomo did not divulge many details of what his imagined education revolution would look like but did mention virtual education and remote learning. However, Gates is best known for one thing in education: charter schools. Continue reading →
DeVos, Thiel, Phase 2 of Project BEST
In 1982, former Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement for the US Department of Education, Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, blew the whistle on the Reagan Administration’s Project BEST (Better Education Skills through Technology): a techno-fascist plan to privatize the American school system by selling it out to Big Tech corporations that deliver B. F. Skinner’s operant-conditioning method of “programmed instruction” through computerized “teaching machines.” Almost thirty years later, the “Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act” is primed to pump a flood of federal education funds into online charter school corporations, such as K12 Inc., KIPP, and Connections Academy, which deploy “adaptive learning” software that replace human teachers with artificial-intelligence courseware programmed with “Skinner-box” cognitive-behavioral algorithms geared to condition students for workforce training. Continue reading →
How community schools and charter schools are both public-private partnerships that medicalize workforce training through socioemotional learning
Democratic presidential candidates, such as Elizabeth Warren, have pledged to fix the American education system by replacing privatized charter schools with “community schools” that incorporate “socioemotional-learning (SEL)” programs. These “Democratic” community schools, which teach “social skills” and “emotional competencies,” might sound like “liberal” or “leftwing” education reforms. But don’t be fooled by the pathos of such leftist “social justice” rhetoric. The Democrats’ socioemotional community-learning centers are no more “progressive” than corporate-fascist charter schools. Continue reading →
I am a substitute teacher (grades K-12) in a public school system located in Virginia, a state on the eastern seaboard of the United States. For many years prior to becoming a substitute teacher, I also taught at a private school in Virginia. Tuition and fees at the private school are approximately $42,000 (USD), the public schools are, of course, tuition free. Continue reading →
‘I'm not sending anyone to jail yet, but it's good to know I have that ability.’
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Monday was told in no uncertain terms that her refusal to abide by a 2018 order stopping her department from collecting on student loans made to predatory for-profit Corinthian College had the potential to land her in jail, though Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim made clear that was, for now, an unlikely outcome. Continue reading →
This will come as no surprise to most sentient human beings but we have an education crisis in this country that begins with the Cheeto Benito in the White House and trickles down all the way to households in which a child has never had a storybook read to them. Continue reading →
The backstory to the showdown in Los Angeles between teachers and billionaires
Back during the 1960s and 1970s, in cities, suburbs, and small towns across the United States, teacher strikes made headlines on a fairly regular basis. Teachers in those years had a variety of reasons for walking out. They struck for the right to bargain. They struck for decent pay and benefits. They struck for professional dignity. Continue reading →
The lending business is heavily stacked against student borrowers. Bigger players can borrow for almost nothing, and if their investments don’t work out, they can put their corporate shells through bankruptcy and walk away. Not so with students. Their loan rates are high and if they cannot pay, their debts are not normally dischargeable in bankruptcy. Rather, the debts compound and can dog them for life, compromising not only their own futures but the economy itself. Continue reading →
Higher education has been financialized, transformed from a public service into a lucrative cash cow for private investors. Continue reading →
Student loan forgiveness: Don’t confuse policy with politics
Posted on April 20, 2022 by Thomas L. Knapp
A mismatch between the title and subtitle to Matt Lewis’s April 18 column at The Daily Beast—“Canceling Student Loan Debt Only Leaves a Broken System in Place,” and “Democrats are delusional if they think student loan debt forgiveness is going to save them and Biden at the ballot box”—perfectly illustrates the fallacy of mistaking bad policy for bad politics. Continue reading →