Doug, a longtime science teacher in Alaska, makes this observation:

In mid-May, I attended two public meetings: Bernie Sanders called a
Town Meeting in Burlington to hear public concerns about federal
education policy and Department of Homeland Security/Customs &
Border Protection Agency held a meeting in Franklin on why the Army
Corps of Engineers needed to seize a farmer’s land.

The Free Press  reported (“Dinner at 1600", Feb. 23) that 
as President Barack Obama was offering a toast before a four-course
dinner at the White House,  he acknowledged a tuxedo-clad Governor
Douglas as “an extraordinary partner with this White House.”  He was
referring to the work of the National Governors Association  on the Common Core Standards in math and reading.

A recent column I wrote for the Washington Post received
such positive comment that I decided to expand one of the brief
anecdotes to give a broader picture of how children learn. Honoring
how children learn is a messy endeavor, something no longer allowed in

Schools intent on following the drumbeat of the Business Roundtable, the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and claiming to prepare students to be workers in the 21st Century Global Economy need to update their parent permission slips. Every parent should sign the clip before a child can be subjected to the standardized test prep curriculum that will result from Duncan's Race to the Top scheme.

I am a deep believer in the power of data to drive our
decisions. Data gives us the roadmap to reform. It tells us where we
are, where we need to go, and who is most at risk.

--Arne Duncan,
U. S. Secretary of Education
Speech to the Fourth Annual IES Research Conference

June 8, 2009

Data Recipes:

Al dente
Au juis
à la carte
à la king
à la mode
à la money

President Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are giving Bush a third term of education policy. Only now it's Bush on steroids.

In July and August, I've spent  my Fridays in Burlington trying to alert the public to the very real threat this administration offers public schools. Often I start by asking people to take the infamous DIBELS test, a test required of every child in a school receiving federal dollars. The object is to see how many nonsense words the child, starting in kindergarten, can pronounce in one minute.

Normal
0

false
false
false

MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

 Corporate-politico school reform is worse than stealing ice cream from children.

The May 11, 2009 New Yorker offers a profile of Green Dot founder Steve Barr by Douglas McGray. The technical aspects of accessing this article turn out to be of some import. New Yorker subscribers could obtain a digital version a few days before the magazine arrived in the mail, but this version had no cut-and-paste function, so to get parts up on my website I had to retype. Later, I discovered one can see the article online for free--and with cut-and-paste available--by going to the New American Foundation: