Letter from AFT President Randi Weingarten to Arne Duncan Regarding His Response to the Vergara Ruling

June 12, 2014 Secretary Arne Duncan U.S. Department of Education 400 Maryland Ave. S.W. Washington, DC 20202 Dear Secretary Duncan, This week, we needed your leadership; to demonstrate that teacher and student interests are aligned; that we must press—60 years after Brown v. Board—for educational equity; that it takes more than a focus on teachers…

Arne Duncan’s Response to the Vergara Ruling: Absolutely Empty Assurances of “Respect” for Teachers—Causing One to Wonder What, Exactly a Romney Education Secretary Would Have Said Differently

“Drawing the Right Lessons from Vergara” Sometimes conflict is the starting point on the path to progress. That’s one of two possible ways events could play out in the wake ofVergara v. California, a court case that is driving enormous debate throughout the education world. Brought on behalf of nine public school students, the Vergara case…

Duncan: For-Profit College Chain Guilty of Lying to DoE about Deceptive Recruiting Practices but Students Not Deceived by Those Practices

As if anyone needed further proof that Arne Duncan could not care less about students, consider his logic on the settlement reached with Education Management, the for-profit college corporation. What follows is taken from a Huffington Post article by Shahien Nasiripour: “A trio of Senate Democrats on Monday sharply rebuked outgoing Education Secretary Arne Duncan…

Audrey Watters’ Ed-Tech Disasters of the Decade

BY HANK REICHMAN Over the past decade Audrey Watters has proven to be one of our most knowledgeable, insightful, critical, and, well, just plain entertaining commentators on educational technology.  Her Hack Education blog is a must-read for anyone who cares about teaching and learning at any level.  One terrific feature of that blog has been…

The Failures of Educational “Reform”

BY HANK REICHMAN “The educational reform landscape is littered with theories about what’s needed to improve low-performing schools. The Finnish model. The South Korean model. More money with more restrictions. More money with fewer restrictions. The answers are seldom so simple.” Those wise words come from a January 2017 Los Angeles Times editorial responding to…

Violence and Educational “Reform” in Chicago

BY HANK REICHMAN For some time now, despite the rash of school shootings and the growing number of accidental shootings associated with the unfettered dissemination of firearms, violent crime in most urban areas in the U.S. has been declining for decades.  According to the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, after peaking in 1991, “crime…

Former Ed Secretaries Address DACA Repeal

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Dear Speaker Ryan, Majority Leader McConnell, Democratic Leader Pelosi, and Democratic Leader Schumer: We write out of deep concern for approximately two million Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. Over the past five years, hundreds of thousands of these young people came forward in good…