Archive for June, 2008

The Teach for America Support System

This is actually very sad.
Ed Notes has written a post about a situation that was reported by The New York Sun concerning a Teach for America member in the South Bronx. The TFA teacher was working for Principal John Hughes, a man who has been encouraging his staff to “help” students during standardized tests [...]

New York City Teaching Fellows-Biting the Hand that Feeds Them

I still have a problem with alternative teacher certification programs; I don’t feel that they address the real problems that face our schools and I have serious concerns about sending people with no training to work with our neediest students.
That being said, I’ve noticed something interesting about the New York City Teaching Fellows Program - [...]

Finally, An Insider Admits to the True Purpose of No Child Left Behind

Gerald Bracey of the Huffington Post provides a commentary on the June 8th issue of Time Magazine, in which Susan Neuman, who was an assistant secretary of education at the time that NCLB was being proposed admits that the law was looked at as a ‘Trojan horse” and that “There were a number of people [...]

Riddle Me This Bat Man…

If a couple is married by a priest who they later learn is not really a priest, are they still legally married?
If a child receives a degree from a school where the teachers are not really teachers, does the degree count?
What’s happening with alternative certification in Texas, anyway?
Read this Outrage from Susan Ohanian’s blog.

Treating Teachers Like Children

I have this theory that because administrators have always been teachers, they don’t know how to treat adults. Their only models for leadership have been those that they practice themselves. As a result, they treat teachers like they did their students. Granted, some teachers deserve to be treated like children, but most of [...]

A Voice Howls Out

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked,
locked away, forgotten and abused
in rubber rooms.
I saw their souls searching through overcrowded halls and disinterested stares
struggling to make promises reality.
Secretly knowing.
Reality has been forgotten long ago and the remnants of
truth have been kept sequestered
in the poorly edited pages of yet another [...]

Joel Klein Gives Himself an “A” for Effort

Despite protests by parents, students, and teachers and in the wake of the recent survey in which 80% of teachers cited him as doing a horrible job, Joel Klein has stated that he is giving himself an “A” for effort. According to the Staten Island Advance, Klein felt that this rating was reflected by [...]

They Howled And Now They’re Gone

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked, …
Force fed a pablum of dogmatic lies,
Their spirits were clipped and gilded through compulsory schooling and government sanctioned media.
Like a character in an Ayn Rand novel, they were shoved into the collective “we” -
Lashed for the indiscretion of possessing original [...]

Smellington Weighs in on the Joel Klein/Al Sharpton Alliance

I love this blog:
Click here for the newest post, This Sharpton Chap

A Bad Script

I think I might be psychic.
When I first read that DC Public School’s Chancellor, Michelle Rhee had fired the respected principal of the school that her children attend, I said to myself, “She’s going to put in a TFA crony.”
Actually, I’m not really psychic. I just put at a few factors together.
Firstly, Rhee has [...]