Standardized Tests Are The Tail Of Education: they never could wag this...
As a young adult, which was by now many, many moons ago, I was drawn – goaded, really – into what was for me a very intense war of words (repeatedly) on the subject of SAT tests. My tormentor was a...
View ArticleChanneling Rosemary Woods: LAUSD Board Votes To Expunge One Year Old Emails
After just discovering that top ranking district administrators and private vendors effectively fixed a billion-dollar deal ahead of open bidding, this week our school board explicitly voted to thwart...
View ArticleSurviving Incumbency
In her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, Naomi Klein discerns an irresolvable conflict of diametrically opposed interests. She characterizes capitalism as a driving force...
View ArticleTriumph Of The Computer Nerd
Once upon a time computer nerds were stored in the basement, sometimes in the garage or in a forgotten meeting room at school; nowadays we store them in boardrooms and cabinet offices and among venture...
View ArticlePrivate giving and the insolvency of chaos
Last week Google announced it was funding all DonorsChoose requests posted for LAUSD classrooms. That’s good news, right? Well…. it’s complicated. Obviously, more money for our kids is good. But why...
View ArticleSame Race, Different Bat Channel
Do you have any idea what the State Superintendent of Public Instruction does? I know when I voted for this office last time I had absolutely no idea, just a vague notion of who was “my” candidate...
View ArticleWhy Can’t The LA Times Get It Right On Education?
Columnist Steve Lopez of the LATimes suggests that what most ails kids in public education is all the grown-up fighting going on at Beaudry, that all this turmoil is just so much politics. From the...
View ArticleHow Many Sufficient And Complete Reasons Are Required To Fire A Fraud?
Finally the LATimes is conceding at long last that John Deasy is Not Really Very Good For Children after all. This past weekend there was an editorial by their primary Education apologist for the...
View ArticleLower Class Sizes: Access To Teachers Is The Kernel Of Education
Batting the distractions away, today is a lovely day to advance a reformed outlook for Los Angeles’ schools. It’s time to leave jargon, hyperbole and spin aside and focus on the reality of any-child’s...
View ArticleFollow Those Checks Before Checking Off Your Ballot
Remember when $1.9 million dollars was spent to (unsuccessfully) unseat school board member Steve Zimmer? Remember when triumphant school board member Mónica Ratliff was outspent 28:1? How about when...
View ArticleQuick and Dirty Rule For Voting: Just Follow The Money
Sunday night and the guilt guillotine is in full swing: have you finished your homework? That booklet (two, actually) the CA Secretary of State mailed about what your ballot will look like is awfully...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tuck, Vanquished: Now Can We Please Have Some Real Reform By Eliminating Food...
With the public’s kibosh on Marshall Tuck despite formidable backing this Tuesday, 11/4/14 past, support for Ed Privateers has been vanquished 5 times for 5 in all five of LA’s past elections. It’s a...
View ArticleLet’s Throw Some Money At This
In grade school during the Nixon Reign in what could not have been as great a frequency as it seemed, all us little tykes clustered repeatedly onto the grubby carpet in a single classroom, craning our...
View ArticleJust Make It Stop
There is hardly a day that goes by in which I do not, as a public school parent, wish fervently for all this toil and tribulation surrounding our beleaguered public education just to end. Toil: as an...
View ArticleIt’s Not The Institutions, It’s The Way We Let Them Be Managed
Why do some people seem to hate public institutions so? I just don’t get it. They apparently want public services, but won’t pay for them or don’t want to, and in a twist of killing the messenger, seem...
View ArticleDiffuse Thanks, Specially Directed
Non-secularists lay no rightful claim to mediate ethical or moral behavior, and by the same token secularists ought to be careful to convey spiritual obligation in the absence of agency; it’s time for...
View ArticleConstipated Communications Within Beaudry And Beyond
I don’t think there is enough careful listening in the educational world. Perhaps this is just a Brave New World of Rudeness? As in, ‘no one listens, ever’? I hear a lot of adults complaining about...
View ArticleDon’t Confuse Children’s Needs With Adults’ Politics
The buzz about town is that UTLA might strike and I have been asked at least a dozen times what I think about it. I think these teachers should have struck (“striked”?) years ago. Years and years and...
View ArticleUnderstaffing LAUSD Is Behavioral Entrapment
Unless you’re living in a bubble of media-exclusion, you have heard and seen video by now regarding the arrest of a small coterie of adolescent males, removed from school this past Friday before their...
View ArticleRaising Pitchforks Against Our Own Best Interest
The 405 interstate scissors down Los Angeles’ westside, demarcating an archipelago of geopolitically distinct communities that all share one singular, contiguous malady: traffic. Transportation and...
View Article
