The greatest obstacle to those who hope to reform American education is complacency.
What is happening to teachers now across this nation is a disgrace. The attacks on them are a blot on our nation. Teachers and students are not different interest groups. Anyone who demeans teachers demeans education and hurts children.
Accountability makes no sense when it undermines the larger goals of education.
American education has been littered with failed fads and foolish ideas for the past century.
When you realize that your history books and your science books and your literature books are not the result of experts sitting down and making it a wise decision, but of political pressure groups coming to the state textbook hearings, this is wrong.
We should totally ban for-profit charters. For-profit’s first obligation is to its stockholders, not to its children.
One of the persistent ironies of reform is the impossibility of predicting the full consequences of change...
Testing children until they cry is a bad idea. It is an educational malpractice.
We will continue to chase rainbows unless we recognize that they are rainbows and there is no pot of gold at the end of them.
An attack on Public Education is an attack on Democracy.
Of course, all students should learn African history, as they should learn the history of other continents and major civilizations. But this history should be taught accurately and based on the best scholarship, not ideology or politics.
Most people believe that schools were good enough when they were children and that they are good enough now. But the dynamic growth of our system of education has spawned serious problems of educational quality.
Research does not support any part of Race to the Top.
The foundations demand that public schools and teachers be held accountable for performance, but they themselves are accountable to no one. If their plans fail, no sanctions are levied against them. They are bastions of unaccountability.
You can’t lead your troops if your troops do not trust you.
Public education is not broken. It is not failing or declining. The diagnosis is wrong, and the solutions of the corporate reformers are wrong. Our urban schools are in trouble because of concentrated poverty and racial segregation. But public education is not ‘broken.’ Public education is in a crisis only so far as society is and only so far as this new narrative of crisis has destabilized it.
NAEP is central to any discussion of whether American students and the public schools they attend are doing well or badly. It has measured reading and math and other subjects over time. It is administered to samples of students; no one knows who will take it, no one can prepare to take it, no one takes the whole test. There are no stakes attached to NAEP; no student ever gets a test score.
Critics may find this hard to believe, but students in American public schools today are studying and mastering far more difficult topics in science and mathematics than their peers forty or fifty years ago. People who doubt this should review the textbooks in common use then and now or look at the tests then and now.
What I had come to understand was that the root cause of poor performance in schools is not ‘bad schools’ or ‘bad teachers’ but poverty. Closing schools and firing their teachers and principals does not help students. If anything, it introduces damaging instability into their lives. The privatizers hail disruption and call it ‘creative,’ but it is neither creative nor beneficial.
It defies reason to believe that Martin Luther King, Jr. would march arm in arm with Wall Street hedge fund managers and members of ALEC to lead a struggle for the privatization of public education, the crippling of unions, and the establishment of for-profit schools.