When you think of charter schools, there are probably a few people and concepts that come to mind: Michelle Rhee, “grit,” Bill Gates, Eva Moskowitz, KIPP, etc. And if you happen to think of teachers unions at some point during this education policy reverie, you’ll probably have them in the role they’re traditionally assigned by the media — as anti-charter …
My Teacher By Chris Hedges
I drove to Hamilton, N.Y., last December to take part in the funeral service for the Rev. Coleman Brown. Coleman, who had taught at Colgate University, had the most profound impact of all my teachers on my education. I took seven courses as an undergraduate in religion. He taught six of them. But his teaching extended far beyond the classroom. The …
11 Things Other Countries Do Way Better Than America By Larry Schwartz
America! Land of the free, home of the brave, and the greatest country on the face of the planet, right? A country with seemingly limitless natural resources, and according to many politicians, anointed by God herself to lead the world out of the wilderness and into a bright new age of liberty and justice for all. Too bad the road …
Nearly 2,500 Bridges to Nowhere: Congress Considers Expanding Charter Program Despite Millions Wasted on Closed Schools – Jonas Persson
As both the House and the Senate consider separate bills that would reauthorize and expand the quarter-billion-dollar-a-year Charter Schools Program (CSP), the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has examined more than a decade of data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) as well as documentation from open records requests. The results are troubling. Between 2001 and 2013, 2,486 charter schools have …
Feds Awarded Colorado Charter Schools $46 Million Because of “Hiring and Firing” Rules By Jonas Persson
Between 2010 and 2015, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) awarded Colorado $46 million under the Charter Schools Program. Part of the reason the state landed the competitive grant was that charters are free to hire unlicensed teachers and then fire them at will, documents reviewed by CMD show. Designed to create and expand “high-quality” charter schools, the quarter-billion-dollar-a-year program …
Wave of homeschooling sweeps California: Public schools poison minds of children while SB 277 poisons their bodies by Jonathan Benson
California Governor Jerry Brown has reportedly signed into law the contentious Senate Bill 277, which eliminates the freedom of California parents to opt their children out of vaccinations for personal reasons. All school-age children without an approved medical exemption will now be forced to get vaccinated in order to attend public or private school, a tyrannous mandate that has already driven many …
Charter Schools Are Mired in Fraud and Failure By Paul Buchheit
The inadequacies of charter schools have been confirmed by many recent studies. Even CREDO [3], which is part of a conservative think tank funded by the pro-privatization Walton Foundation, recently found that in comparison to traditional public schools “students in Ohio charter schools perform worse in both reading and mathematics.” Another recent CREDO study [4] of California schools reached mixed results, with charters showing higher …
Church-run schools in Israel face ‘death sentence’ – Jonathan Cook
Israel is seeking to bring dozens of church-run schools under government control, a move that community leaders have warned will curb the last vestiges of educational freedom for the country’s large Palestinian minority. Most of the 47 schools, which are among the highest-achieving in Israel, were established by Christian orders more than 100 years ago, before Israel’s creation in 1948. …
Knowledge about alternative medicine connected to education, income
People with lower educational levels and incomes are less likely to know about yoga, acupuncture, natural products and chiropractic medicine, according to a new study from San Francisco State University. Studies on the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) have typically focused on learning more about who use these types of practices and why. Less is known about trends …
The College Bureaucracy: How Education Forgot the Students and Became A Business By Devon DB
Students attend college to pursue their interests, broaden their intellectual horizons and make headway toward a career. While this is made difficult due to the amount of debt that many must saddle in order to earn a degree, there is also another, much stealthier problem as well: the college bureaucracy. University bureaucracies absorb large amounts of funding and undermine the …