BY HANK REICHMAN Today, after nine days on an “illegal” and “unauthorized” strike, West Virginia teachers won a powerful victory when Republican Governor Jim Justice signed legislation passed earlier in the day that will raise salaries of not only teachers but also all state employees by 5%, the largest single pay hike for public employees…
BY HANK REICHMAN This is a big year for 50th anniversaries, especially in higher education. In fact, 1968 was such an extraordinary year that it’s difficult to keep up. Earlier this month, for instance, I missed the 50th anniversary of the Orangeburg Massacre at South Carolina State University, an HBCU. This was a critical event…
BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the abstract describing a report issued this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Do School Spending Cuts Matter? Evidence from the Great Recession,” by C. Kirabo Jackson, Cora Wigger, Heyu Xiong (bold face added): Audits of public school budgets routinely find evidence of waste. Also, recent evidence…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN It was a tale of two speeches. Yesterday, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos addressed the right-wing American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC) meeting in Denver, where she accused teacher unions of being “defenders of the status quo” who care only about “school systems” and not about individual children. Just hours earlier Randi…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is a partial transcript of Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis’ remarks at a news conference yesterday in response to the new Chicago Public Schools budget: I am Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union. I am joined by fellow officers, Vice President Jesse Sharkey and Financial Secretary…
BY HANK REICHMAN Up until Sen. Bernie Sanders’ endorsement of Hillary Clinton yesterday, it was common to view the main fault line dividing the Democratic Party as that between Sanders’ largely younger and definitely more radical supporters and a more cautious and aging party “establishment” represented by Clinton. But another fault line has been that…
This piece by Seton Hall professor Daniel Katz provides a thorough and devastating take on the bogus teacher evaluation program dismissed as “arbitrary and capricious” by a New York court, about which I blogged yesterday (https://academeblog.org/2016/05/12/an-important-decision-on-teacher-evaluation/)
BY HANK REICHMAN I grew up in the New York suburb of Great Neck, where last week a fourth-grade teacher won a landmark case against New York State’s “value-added modeling” (VAM) formula for teacher evaluation, an assessment system that was developed when John King, the current U.S. Secretary of Education, was the New York State…
BY HENRY REICHMAN On Monday, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) rejected the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) Board of Education’s latest contract offer “because it does not address the difficult conditions in the schools, the lack of services to our neediest students or address the long-term fiscal crisis that threatens to gut public education in the…
The following is the text of a press release issued January 11 by the Education Law Center: Judge James Wilson of the First Judicial District Court of Nevada (Carson City) has ruled in Lopez v. Schwartz that the state’s school voucher law (SB 302) enacted last summer by the Legislature violates two provisions of the…