Janresseger: States Persistently Fail to Invest Enough in Their Public Schools Janresseger: States Persistently Fail to Invest Enough in Their Public Schools What if education funding were not merely a budgetary residual? That term entered the lexicon in Ohio back in the 1990s as part of the Ohio Supreme Court’s series of decisions in the case for adequate and equitably distributed public school funding, DeRo…

Nancy Bailey’s Education Website: Reports Show How Phonics Crowds Out Quality Reading Like Picture Books Nancy Bailey’s Education Website: Reports Show How Phonics Crowds Out Quality Reading Like Picture Books In 2023, Science of Reading (SoR) supporters were offended by The Science of Reading and the Rejection of Picture Books. At that time, I included reports and observations showing an overfocus on phonics instead of reading for en…

Teacher in a Strange Land: Ignoring the Real World in the Classroom Teacher in a Strange Land: Ignoring the Real World in the Classroom Are you reading Jess Piper? If not—start now. Piper is a Missouri educator (among other things) whose commentary on teaching in a bright red state, and having been raised in a fundamentalist church, rings my chimes, again and again. She ran for a position in the MO…

Letters from the Future (of Learning) Letters from the Future (of Learning) Did you hear?  Starting this fall, Apple is upping its A.I. game — with a twist. In typical company fashion, A.I. will no longer stand for Artificial Intelligence, but Apple Intelligence, which the company will build into all your devices “to help you write, express yourself, and get things do…

Radical Eyes for Equity: The “Science Of” Era of Education Reform: Rearranging Chairs on the Deck of the Titanic (Again) Radical Eyes for Equity: The “Science Of” Era of Education Reform: Rearranging Chairs on the Deck of the Titanic (Again) The rhetoric of education reform over the past six or so years has embraced a now pervasive labeling, the “science of”—grounded in the “science of reading” (SOR) movement. Some of the defining features of the “sc…

Diane Ravitch’s Blog: Brookings Institution: Beware Voucher Advocacy Disguised as Research Diane Ravitch’s Blog: Brookings Institution: Beware Voucher Advocacy Disguised as Research Jon Valant and Nicolas Zerbino of the prestigious nonpartisan Brookings Institution examined the Arizona voucher program and were surprised to find that it was a giveaway to the richest families in the state. Voucher advocates did not like th…

Code Acts in Education: Oblongification of Education Code Acts in Education: Oblongification of Education According to Microsoft and Google, artificial intelligence is going to be fully integrated into teaching and learning in the very near future. In the space of just a few days, Google announced its LearnLM automated tutor running on the Gemini model, and Microsoft announced it was…

Critical Studies of Education & Technology: Start Where the Pain Is: Notes on Topic-Selection in Technology Studies (Vinsel 2024) Critical Studies of Education & Technology: Start Where the Pain Is: Notes on Topic-Selection in Technology Studies (Vinsel 2024) Lee Vinsel has written recently to lament the poor choice of topic selection by ‘critical’ tech researchers. In particular, he calls out the research choices of progressive academics who regularly make a…

10th Period: It’s Official: Ohio Leaders Hosing Public School Kids Today Worse Than Ever 10th Period: It’s Official: Ohio Leaders Hosing Public School Kids Today Worse Than Ever This is stunning, stunning data. But the Ohio General Assembly and Gov. Mike DeWine today are committing the smallest share of the state’s budget to educate Ohio’s public school kids in the last 50 years. And it’s not really close. What’s goin…

Naked Capitalism: Rising Talk of School Closures Fuels Expansion of the Community Schools Movement Naked Capitalism: Rising Talk of School Closures Fuels Expansion of the Community Schools Movement Yves here. Weirdly, there is apparently a perceived reduction in public school student attendance (this post questions the skimpy data) to the point that some communities of generating consideration of closing schools. It’s not unreas…

Education in Two Worlds: Class Notes: Relationship of Education Policy to Education Research and Social Science Education in Two Worlds: Class Notes: Relationship of Education Policy to Education Research and Social Science 2005 Notes to the Proseminar: Relationship of Education Policy to Education Research and Social Science These notes have two purposes: to disabuse naïve conceptions of the role of research in policy development (if you h…

Curmudgucation: Stop Calling It School Choice Curmudgucation: Stop Calling It School Choice When framing a debate, it helps to pick just the right names. Just ask the folks who decided to call their respective sides “pro-life” and “pro-choice.”  One of earliest victories for education privatizers was to coin the name “school choice.” I don’t know if somebody cleverly designed …

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: Can Historians Help School Reformers? Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: Can Historians Help School Reformers? Historians are divided over what can be learned from history. Some find that knowing the past can inform the present. Others say that the past has no lessons to teach those living now but it is nonetheless worthwhile to recapture what occurre…

Hullabaloo: Living History: Reggie Jackson Takes Sports Fans to School Hullabaloo: Living History: Reggie Jackson Takes Sports Fans to School “They pointed me out with the N-word…. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”Listen to “Mr. October” describe his experiences as a Black professional baseball player beginning in the mid-1960s after passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. As Elie Mystal twe…

David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing: The Winning Ways of a Losing Strategy: Educationalizing Social Problems in the US David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing: The Winning Ways of a Losing Strategy: Educationalizing Social Problems in the US This post is a paper I published Educational Theory in 2008.  Here’s a link to the original.  In is included as a chapter in my new book, The Ironies of Schooling. In this essay, I examine the paradox …

Janresseger: Seventy Years After “Brown v. Board” Decision, School Segregation Keeps Growing Janresseger: Seventy Years After “Brown v. Board” Decision, School Segregation Keeps Growing This coming Friday marks the 70th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. On May 17, 1954, writing for a unanimous court, Chief Justice Earl Warren declared: “Today, education is perhaps the most imp…

Nancy Bailey’s Education Website: Stuck on the Merry-Go-Round of Bad Ed. Policy for 40 Years! Nancy Bailey’s Education Website: Stuck on the Merry-Go-Round of Bad Ed. Policy for 40 Years! Can you imagine never being able to jump off a Merry Go Round? The fight over education policy is like that. It involves the same worn-out problems that could have been addressed years ago if Americans truly got behind their democratic pub…

Teacher in a Strange Land: The Return of the Tradteacher Teacher in a Strange Land: The Return of the Tradteacher Been reading about the tradwife lately? Although explicit definitions vary, the general gist is returning to a post-war conception of a stay-at-home wife, most likely with children (or planning for children), in relationships where men make all the family decisions, and contr…

Curmudgucation: Failing Charters Go Private Curmudgucation: Failing Charters Go Private Last month, Amelia Pak-Harvey at Chalkbeat Indiana ran a story about a failing charter school that had been approved for a new lease on life–as a private school. Ignite Achievement Academy was supposed to improve its “checkered academic record,” but instead the State Board of Education …

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: Every Tech Tool in Classrooms Needs Ruthless Scrutiny (Jessica Grose) (Guest post by Jessica Grose) Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: Every Tech Tool in Classrooms Needs Ruthless Scrutiny (Jessica Grose) (Guest post by Jessica Grose) Just as school boards and administrators evaluate carefully every item placed in classrooms from the size of windows to furniture to whiteboards to textbooks, so too should the ub…