NewsTrust - Education Reform - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Independent)

How the Young Are Indoctrinated to Obey

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Noam Chomsky - Apr. 06 (Opinion) - many measures have been taken to restore discipline. One is the crusade for privatization – placing control in reliable hands. Another is sharp increases in tuition, up nearly 600 percent since 1980. These produce a higher education system with "far more economic stratification than is true of any other country," according to Jane Wellman, former director of the Delta Cost Project, which monitors these issues. Tuition increases trap students into long-term debt and hence subordination to private power.

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The Finland Phenomenon -

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

In These Times - By David Sirota - Jul. 08 (Review) - though we already “test students in the United States more than any other nation,” our students “perform well below those of other industrialized countries in math and science.” Yet the Obama administration, backed by corporate foundations, is nonetheless intensifying testing at all levels, as if doing the same thing and expecting different results is innovative “reform” rather than what it’s always been: insanity. In light of this craziness, it’s no wonder we’re being out-educated by countries going in the opposite policy direction.

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Balance Your Budget by Cleaning House - Do Your Job Better

Tue, 03 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Michael J. Bugeja - May. 03 (Opinion) - As we approach the end of another academic term, some institutions are still living off of stimulus money that did little to inspire solutions to mammoth budget cuts looming for the 2012 academic year, which promises to be one of the most difficult in memory for higher education.

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Where Does Billionaire Monopolist Bill Gates Get Off Saying Bigger Class Size and Fewer Teachers Is the Education Solution?

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Scott Thill - Dec. 17 (Opinion) - Gates' short-changing of the nation's education system is just another strain of neoconservative austerity going viral in our global village. And it's just as short-sighted as the disaster capitalism that destroyed America's economic integrity: Increasing America's class sizes and downsizing its teachers could cost us more than it could save us.

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Juan Gonzalez: Controversial Evaluations System Will Unfairly Target New York Teachers

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Juan Gonzalez - Oct. 22 (Opinion) - In his latest column, _Democracy Now!_ co-host Juan Gonzalez says New York Schools Chancellor Joel Klein's plan to release 12,000 teacher data reports will unfairly tarnish city teachers. Klein's ratings system, Gonzalez writes, "is one dimensional, the raw data is unverified, and even the people who designed it warned against using it as a sole barometer of teacher performance."

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When Generosity Hurts: Bill Gates, Public School Teachers and the Politics of Humiliation

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Henry Giroux - Oct. 05 (Opinion) - His words reflect something of the all too evident brutish transformation of the revolutionary zeal that marked an earlier era's investment in substantive democratization to that which piously and patriotically calls itself revolutionary some 50 years later, and seeks nothing less than the total destruction of the democratic potential of American education.

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Education Reconsidered

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

truth-out.org - By Stanley Aronowitz - Sep. 17 (Opinion) - With the partial exception of elite, mostly private schools, philosophy has been excluded from US secondary schools. This omission is a tell-tale sign that we don't take critical thinking seriously as an educational goal. For, if philosophy has pedagogic value, it is to teach students the value of doubt, without which it is impossible to penetrate propaganda and discern the presence of particular interests within knowledge, a discernment that spans the realms of science, the humanities and social studies.

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First, Bash the Teachers

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - Sep. 10 - by Peter HartWriting on the Wall Street Journal editorial page (10/1/09) under the headline “How Teachers Unions Lost the Media,” two education writers praised the press for turning on teachers, showing a “new attitude” that is in sync with today’s politics: read more

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The child-driven education

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

TED - Sep. 07 (Speech) - Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education -- the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.

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Local DREAM Act Student Arrested in DC Today for Sit-In at C

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

ocweekly.com - By Gustavo Arellano - Jul. 20 (Opinion) - Despite the recent mockings of them by Orange County's so-called "liberal" poobahs, members of the Orange County Dream Team--the group of undocumented college students that are pushing for the passage of a citizenship path for young people who've lived here most of their lives save for their birth--continue their struggle, upping the ante beyond..

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Chartering Disaster: Why Duncan's Corporate-Based Schools Can't Deliver an Education That Matters

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Henry A.Girouux - Jun. 26 (Opinion) - In Arne Duncan's world, the language of educational reform is defined primarily through the modalities of competition, measurement and quantification. Competition is now one of the most important registers organizing and defining schools and classroom pedagogical practices - no doubt made obvious by the name of Obama's educational reform policy "Race to the Top," with its allusion to Wall Street values and casino capitalism. Within this discourse, there seems to be little understanding, as Stuart Hall has argued, "that there is a limit to the good that can be produced by individual competitiveness."[1] Of course, competition itself is not the problem since competition can be healthy in a number of areas. The real issue is when competition becomes, as Christopher Newfield points out, "the sole organizing principle of society."[2]

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Education Reform: An Ignored Problem, and a Proposal

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

truth-out.org - By Marion Brady - Jun. 25 (Opinion) - The "standards and accountability" education reform effort began in the 1980s at the urging of leaders of business and industry. The reform message preached by Democrats, Republicans, and the mainstream media is simple. 1. America's schools are, at best, mediocre. 2. Teachers deserve most of the blame. 3. As a corrective, rigorous subject-matter standards and tests are essential.read more

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Why I Changed My Mind | The Nation

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Diane Ravitch - Jun. 14 (Opinion) - None of the policies that involve testing and accountability—vouchers and charters, merit pay and closing schools—will give us the quantum improvement that we want for public education. They may even make matters worse.

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Dumbing Down Teachers: Attacking Colleges of Education in the Name of Reform

Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Henry A. Giroux - May. 25 (Opinion) - As the Obama administration's educational reform movement increasingly adopts the interests and values of a "free-market" culture, many students graduate public schooling and higher education with an impoverished political imagination, unable to recognize injustice and unfairness. They often find themselves invested in a notion of unattached individualism that severs them from any sense of moral and social responsibility to others or to a larger notion of the common good.

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From wars to education

Mon, 03 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

timesunion.com - By Helen Thomas - May. 03 (Opinion) - U.S. priorities are to spend billions every week for the unjustified and unexplained wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the maintenance of hundreds of U.S. military bases around the world. At the same time, we neglect the nation's schools when teachers affect eternity. It's a national disgrace. As Lyndon B. Johnson, a former school teacher, used to say: "Education is the passport to a better life."

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In Defense of Public School Teachers in a Time of Crisis

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Henry A. Giroux - Apr. 14 (Opinion) - There has been a long, though declining, tradition in the United States in which public school teaching was embraced as an important public service. It was assumed that teachers provided a crucial foundation for educating young people in the values, skills and knowledge that enabled them to be critical citizens capable of shaping and expanding democratic institutions. Since the 1980s, teachers have been under an unprecedented attack by those forces that view schools less as a public good than as a private right.

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Grading Race to the Top

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

schoolboardnews.nsba.org - Apr. 12 (Comment) - Grading the Race to the Top entries like Olympic gymnastics or figure skating would make more sense than using the arbitrary 500-point, 30-index system that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has devised, said Richard Rothstein, a research associate for the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. at a session today.

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A school is not a business

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

socialistworker.org - By Jeff Bale - Apr. 08 (Review) - "THE MOST dangerous potential effect of the 2014 goal [that 100 percent of students test proficient] is that it is a timetable for the demolition of public education in the United States." This critique of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is certainly not new. What is new, however, is the person making it. She had been one of the policy's staunchest supporters. In fact, she has been among the leading voices for the last 20 years calling for charter schools, privatization and accountability, and generally using the free market to "fix" our public schools.

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The Elephant in the Room: Curricular Glut

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Michael Bugeja - Mar. 28 (Opinion) - In our current recession, which has led to deep budget cuts, few public institutions are operating normally—except, perhaps, in an area that expands at the expense of faculty and staff members even in less straitened times: the curriculum.

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Leading Education Scholar Diane Ravitch: No Child Left Behind Has Left US Schools with Legacy of "Institutionalized Fraud"

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Diane Ravitch, Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez - Mar. 05 (Interview) - As the Obama administration touts No Child Left Behind and the "Race to the Top" competition for school grants, we speak to leading education scholar and former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch. She's long been known as an advocate of No Child Left Behind, charter schools, standardized testing, and using the free market to improve schools. But she's had a radical change of heart, as chronicled in her latest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Ravitch says, "The evidence says No Child Left Behind was a failure, and charter schools aren't going to be any better."

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Time for charter schools to replace chronically dysfunctional district schools

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 09:18:17 -0800

projo.com - By Julia Steiny - Feb. 25 (Opinion) - A golden opportunity knocks at Rhode Island’s door. No less than seven promising new charter schools have either been approved by the Department of Education’s rigorous vetting process or are in the pipeline for approval. And those seven don’t include the extension of Paul Cuffee to high school grades, which was approved long ago as part of the original charter for a K-12. This means that within the foreseeable future, the state could give its families eight schools’ worth of creative, responsive education. We can ill afford to turn down the opportunity.

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Improving Our Children's Health Starts Where They Learn and Play

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

rwjf.org - By James Marks - Feb. 08 (Comment) - It turns out that there's one place you can go to improve learning and health at the same time: the elementary school playground. A growing body of research suggests that playing games like kickball or four square at recess may be the secret to a successful school day and building a lifetime of health.

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The Prospects for No Child Left Behind

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

epi.org - By Richard Rothstein - Oct. 13 (Opinion) - Many critics of NCLB have been dismayed by Duncan’s apparent resolve. But they may be reacting too soon. The principles for re-authorization that Duncan has announced represent a radical departure from NCLB and open uncharted territory in education policy.

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The Evolution Of Technology In Schools

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - By Daniel Brusilovsky - Oct. 05 (Opinion) - Schools try to keep up with the current technology trends, especially in Silicon Valley, the home of technology innovation. You would think that schools in Silicon Valley would be the most up to date on technology—with the latest computers, projectors, drawing boards—but coming from a first hand perspective, as a student at a local school, it’s the complete opposite. I go to a high school where there are no technology classes that even teach students the basics of web development, or video production, or anything of that matter.

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Obama's View of Education Is Stuck in Reverse

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Henry A. Giroux - Jul. 24 (Opinion) - While President Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, have focused on public education, they have done so by largely embracing the Bush administration's view of educational reform, which includes more testing, more empirically based accountability measures, more charter schools, more military academies, defining the purpose of education in largely economic terms, and punishing public schools that don't measure up to high-stakes testing measures.

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