Sunday links.
The Duncan, Sharpton, Gingrich love tour continued in Baltimore this week. They just gush love for those charter schools. And this morning they do a three-way on Meet the Press.
A judge ruled this week that nearly 7,000 New Orleans public school teachers can proceed with their class action suit against the school board. The teachers were fired following hurricane Katrina in a move to privatize and hand over NOLA’s schools to private management firms. This means that the attempt by the board to force teachers to file individual law suits has failed.
Downstate in Champaign, the University of Illinois wants to withdraw tuition waivers from its graduate assistants. “No way,” says the Graduate Employees Organization. They have voted to strike tomorrow morning at 8AM.
The fast and easy way to contact your Illinois and federal legislators on school funding and health insurance reform.
Bill Gates gives Bill Gates $350 million. Now that’s philanthropy!
Michigan’s Governor Granholm supports education funding cut protests. She op-eds that the cuts will undercut any economic recovery effort.
Two things are becoming clear to me: One, people who have an agenda will pursue that agenda regardless of evidence. They will tell you that conditions weren’t exactly right, that the bonus should have been larger, that the program should have been tweaked this way or that way. But the bottom line is that teachers got bonuses, and the impact on student achievement (using those same lousy measures that we complain about) was hard to quantify.
The other is that the Obama administration has an education plan that was written by corporate-style ideologues. They are determined to fasten a business plan on the schools and will not be deterred by arguments or evidence. If incentives and sanctions work in the business world, then by gum, they will work in education. If deregulation is what the corporate sector wants, then why not foist it on the schools as well.
So, the outline of the Obama education vision is emerging. It is a business plan, designed by people who know nothing about schools and care nothing about evidence.
The nation’s public schools are in for a rough ride. Diane Ravitch
