Anyway you slice it, last week was pretty disastrous for the education reform movement. On Election Day, two closely watched and fiercely contested ballot initiatives backed by reformers in Massachusetts and Georgia went down in defeat. The former was an effort to lift the Bay State’s charter school cap, while the latter was a proposition […] More
When Hillary Clinton decided to skip an education forum hosted by Campbell Brown last fall, I wrote a piece arguing that pro-reform Democrats shouldn’t read too much into it. I insisted it wasn’t a signal that she was distancing herself from the education policies embraced by the Obama Administration. Surely, I said, Clinton just wanted […] More
It’s been a nerve-rattling couple weeks for those of us who identify as pro-reform Democrats. It all started with Arne Duncan’s surprise announcement that he was stepping down as Secretary of Education at the end of the year. As President Obama noted, “Arne’s done more to bring our educational system — sometimes kicking and screaming […] More
Last week, the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), a virulently anti-education reform “research organization” at the University of Colorado, released issued a press release that called into question the significant academic improvement seen in New Orleans schools since Hurricane Katrina. While it’s not necessarily newsworthy that NEPC (a beneficiary of AFT & NEA funding and […] More
Peter Cook