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Lois Weiner's blog
Why our schools are broken - and how to fix them
| Lois Weiner | September 9, 2010 |
Almost all of what you'll read in the new, just off the press, education issue of the Brooklyn-based newspaper, The Indypendent, ("a free newspaper for a free people") contradicts the narrative of school failure and reform you read and hear in the press and media.
Getting rid of bad teachers
| Lois Weiner | September 4, 2010 |
As a parent who sent my child to New York City public schools, as a former teacher myself, I've seen my share of bad teachers. Great, good, mediocre, and awful teachers exist in every school. The same range of job performance describes the lawyers, doctors, customer service representatives - you name it - I deal with on a daily basis.
So what explains this hysteria, and it is a hysteria, about bad teachers?
Teachers' jobs, paid for by cuts to food stamps - a victory?
| Lois Weiner | August 10, 2010 |
The House of Representatives has passed a $26 billion jobs bill, engineered by Democrats, that is aimed to save jobs of public employees, mainly teachers and help states pay for Medicaid health insurance. Funding will come from taxes on multinational corporations– and from slashing money for food stamps. Congressional Republicans lament that this is a “giveaway” to teachers unions.
Obama's speech to the Urban League: Selling a toxic remedy
| Lois Weiner | August 1, 2010 |
President Obama’s speech to the Urban League about education July 29 didn’t cover any new ground, but there were some shifts worth noting. He tweaked his administration’s rhetorical stance towards teachers and teacher unions, adopting a less combative stance than his and Arne Duncan’s support for firing teachers in a “failing” Rhode Island school.
Sounding the alarm on "Race to the Top"
| Lois Weiner | April 25, 2010 |
How can we make neoliberalism’s project to destroy public education, captured in the Obama/Duncan “Race to the Top” proposal, more understandable? The subject is complex, but bloggers in the US are taking up the challenge, as we see in Susan Ohanian's excellent report on my work. (Thanks to all who have picked up the debate with Ravitch.)
What's right - and wrong - in Diane Ravitch's new take on school reform
| Lois Weiner | April 11, 2010 |
Five friends, none of them teachers, have called to tell me they heard about Diane Ravitch's new book and her change of heart about the school reforms she advocated for a decade. "Lo! She's saying what you've been telling us!"
The publicity for Ravitch's book has certainly put her incisive critique of the reforms (privatizing education; using standardized tests to measure everything; looking to "choice" and charter schools drive improvement) in the news.
Diane Ravitch
| Lois Weiner | March 24, 2010 |
You can hear Diane Ravitch's revised version of what's needed for school reform, as well as a very different perspective (my own), in a panel this Friday, March 26, 6:00 PM, at NYU, Silver Room 207.
Democrats for Education Reform?
| Lois Weiner | March 20, 2010 |
Anyone who doubts that the Democratic Party has morphed from “liberal” to “neoliberal” in regard to education policy should check out the Democrats for Education Reform (DER).
Zimbabwe and Rhode Island: The new exemplar for labor
| Lois Weiner | February 26, 2010 |
“Unions are killing the economy” says Henry Blodget at the Business Insider. He gleefully applauds the firing of every teacher in a Rhode Island school for their arrogance. How dare workers, teachers especially, think they have a voice in their working conditions or salaries? How uppity of teachers to sneer at the bosses’ absolutist control of the workplace. Let’s recall that Henry Blodget was indicated for insider trading.
Winds of change in US teacher unions
| Lois Weiner | February 18, 2010 |
Though you wouldn’t know it from the mass media, which focuses its attention on the way teacher unions impede “educational innovation,” (e.g., standardized testing’s stranglehold; privatization; cuts in funding), we are witnessing a growing swell of reform in teacher unions. Transformation of both national teacher unions is absolutely essential to turn back the neoliberal program that the Obama administration is pushing.