Politicians in Texas may not have ever seen a high-stakes test that they didn’t like. We’ve seen unreliable and invalid uses of high-stakes testing pervade Texas since George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind was birthed in Texas in the early 1990s. I am now hearing from Texas that districts are now attempting to tie librarians to student test scores. The Dallas Independent School
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Home Rule is an emerging story currently flying under the radar in the national and statewide Texas media. Millionaires and billionaire(s) are quietly funding a “Home Rule” hostile takeover attempt of all public schools in Dallas, Texas. Yes, that’s right… ALL OF THEM. For those of you who are just now encountering Home Rule, the newest neoliberal assault on democratically-controlled public
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Every so often I get notes in my email from folks that have “skin in the game.” I received an email from Jim Schutze, a self-described “investigative columnist” who was annoyed by a report that I wrote for the Foundation for Community Empowerment (FCE). Wikipedia: A columnist is someone who writes for publication in a series, creating an article that usually offers
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What type of superintendent should your community hire? A Pedagogical leader/reformer or an Administrative leader/reformer? As discussed on Cloaking Inequity recently in the post Taylor v. Dewey: The 100-year Trickle-Down vs. Pedagogical Debate/Fight in Education Reform, there is a breed of educational policy leaders in the mold of Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee that prioritize entering urban school district administrative positions to execute educational
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Vasquez Heilig, J., Williams, A., McNeil, L & Lee, C. (2011). Is choice a panacea? An analysis of black secondary student attrition from KIPP, other private charters and urban districts. Berkeley Review of Education, 2(2), 153-178. Public concern about pervasive inequalities in traditional public schools, combined with growing political, parental, and corporate support, has created the expectation that charter schools are the solution
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