Oh, Valerie!

Every day I check my fabulous blog roll. I look up and an hour (or more) has passed and the item I was going to blog about has turned to mush. So I often end up copying and pasting links.

Thus, my deterioration as a blogger with something of his own to say. Everybody else seems to be saying it first. And better.

Today, Valerie Strauss at The Answer Sheet, has such a delicious post that I have printed it out, shredded it and sprinkled the pieces all over my morning toast. Mmmm, Mmmm, Good!

Here are just a few tidbits from How billionaire donors harm public education to wet your appetite:

Today the foundation set up by billionaires Eli and Edythe Broad is giving away $2 million to an urban school district that has pursued education reform that they like. On Friday a Florida teacher is running 50 miles to raise money so that he and his fellow teachers don’t have to spend their own money to buy paper and pencils, binders (1- and 2-inch), spiral notebooks, composition books and printer ink.
Together the two events show the perverted way schools are funded in 2010.
-----
Very wealthy people are donating big private money to their own pet projects: charter schools, charter school management companies, teacher assessment systems.
-----
What this means is that these philanthropists -- and not local communities -- are determining the course of the country's school reform efforts and which education research projects get funded. As Buffalo Public Schools Superintendent James A. Williams said in an interview: "They should come out and tell the truth. If they want to privatize public education, they should say so.”
-----

That none of their projects is grounded in any research seems not to be a hindrance to these big donors. And they never try to explain why it is acceptable for them to donate to other causes -- the arts, medicine, etc. -- without telling doctors and artists what to do with the money. Only educators do they tell what to do.
-----
[$2 million] is the same amount of money that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave away earlier this year to a company simply to market the education film “Waiting for Superman,” which portrays a distorted idea of the root causes of the problems facing urban school districts as well as the solutions.
-----
Surely these philanthropists think they are helping. But they don't understand education and have been somehow led to believe that "the answer" is specific and around the corner: a longer school day; a longer school year; charter schools; technology; standardized tests in every subject; assessing teachers by standardized test scores; for-profit education; training new college graduates for five or six weeks as teachers and then sending them into the toughest schools in America.
The fact is that there is no strong research to show that any of those elements will do much to help education, and many will actually hurt.
-----
let’s not imagine for a minute that the millionaires and billionaires giving out all this money are doing anything other than making it harder to fix the public schools that America needs.

Now on get over there and read the whole thing.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/school-turnaroundsreform/how-billionaire-donors-are-har.html#more