Dropout Nation’s RiShawn Biddle on anti-intellectualism in our debate over education reform: For all the taxpayer-funded doctorates and graduate degrees that are found among the defenders of traditional public education, there is little going on among them other than closed-minded, sclerotic thinking. This lack of intellectual vigor — the ability[Read More…]
Tag: RiShawn Biddle
The federal role in education
Most barriers to innovation in education occur at the state and local level, Tom Vander Ark writes today at edReformer, but there are a few at the federal level. They include: 1. NCLB picked criterion-referenced testing over growth models; that probably set back competency-based learning a bit. Growth models are[Read More…]
One legend’s call to today’s civil rights leaders: Erase the lines we have drawn in the past
After listening recently to RiShawn Biddle’s podcast calling on civil rights leaders to change their approach to education reform, I was reminded of an unpublished column written by one Florida legend in the civil rights movement, the Rev. H.K. Matthews. Matthews shared the piece with me and others after several civil rights groups last summer demanded that President Obama reconsider the core elements of his education agenda, which included the expansion of charter schools and the closure of consistently low-performing schools. These iconic groups, which included the NAACP and the Urban League, had good intentions in presenting their education policy framework, but Matthews found their arguments irrelevant today. Their call for equal opportunity, he wrote, was “limited by some familiar boundaries of generations past — those of neighborhood and family income.”
Klein is close, but his call for choices falls short
Outgoing New York schools chancellor Joel Klein is right to identify that low-income families deserve to have the best educational options available to them, but he frames the argument for school choice in a way that stops short of advocating for equal opportunities for our most disadvantaged families.