What a Comcast technician taught me about Common Core

Sam Smith - For four days beginning last Friday, my Internet and TV system was a mess. Furthermore, I couldn't connect my new Tivo device to my television. I had approximately four hours of discussions with Comcast people on the phone. What struck me as time went on was that a number of these folks …

The war on education moves to the college campus

Sam Smith Barack Obama – the guy who gave us a hopelessly muddled health plan incomprehensibly comprised of the good, bad and indefinable and who has asserted more control over our public schools for no known good than any president in history - is now proposing to interfere significantly with college education. As the New …

Barack Obama: Our first Common Core president

Sam Smith As I was reading about Common Core standards I suddenly realized why Barack Obama likes this weird stuff so much: he is a Common Core exemplar, our first Common Core president. To play the Common Corista's game you need to handle facts, evaluate texts, achieve increased levels of complexity, have a progressive development …

Life without a predicate

Sam Smith I awoke this morning wondering what a predicate was. It was at first an embarrassing thought and then, when I remembered that I had lived my whole life as a writer never knowing what a predicate was (except briefly after I occasionally looked it up), I felt better. Maybe it really didn’t matter. …

Bush, Obama & Dr. George

 Sam Smith One of the greatest assaults on the Tenth Amendment was the federal takeover of local public education by the Bush Administration under the phony name of  No Child Left Behind. Now Barack Obama and Arne Duncan plan to alter NCLB with their own unconstitutional policy. There weren’t even any public schools when the …

Eternal fundamentals of leadership (Rev. 8/14/11)

Sam Smith I have been trying to understand the new eternal fundamentals of leadership according to the likes of Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan and others who see government and non-profits as badly in need of corporate principles. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far. Please copy it promptly as I may be laid off …

School “reform” is about class, not classrooms

SAM SMITH 2010 Unanswered in all the noise about "education reform" is why, over the past decade, America's establishment has become so obsessed with controlling public education, a complete reversal of two centuries of American faith in locally controlled schools. There are answers that the op-eds will give you, such as the need to compete …

What’s behind the assault on public education?

Sam Smith More and more the Bush-Obama public education deform is looking like a covert effort to make major cities more appealing predominantly to white parents and to ease poorer blacks and latinos out to the suburbs, which for reasons of lack of public transportation, ecological concerns, and weak construction, could easily become the slums …

PERSONAL TO THE LOS ANGELES TEACHERS UNION

Sam Smith The planned release by the Los Angles Times of the test score standings of individual teachers in your system is one of the worst acts of journalism I've run across in a half century in the trade. It's unfair, cheap and disgusting. It is a sort of yuppie version of the anti-gay, anti-Muslim …

Is the Gates Foundation involved in bribery?

Sam SmithAn online legal dictionary defines bribery this way:"The offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting of something of value for the purpose of influencing the action of an official in the discharge of his or her public or legal duties."When we think of bribery we usually envision a check or cash being passed on the sly …

PLC? WDYMBT?

SAM SMITH IN READING some education gobbledygook, I came across abbreviations with which I was not familiar - LEA and PLC - that the writers presumed any intelligent person would know. In pre-Duncan, pre-No Child America, it was generally thought that one should spell out a phrase before you used its initials. Then there came …

David Mallery

Sam Smith- Last May the Review received an email from a reader praising the work the editor and his wife had done in Washington as they prepared to move to Maine. He wrote: "It is so interesting and moving to hear the two of you reflecting on those years, being young and adventurous there at …

When test tyrants enter the firehouse

San Smith 2009 - The real problem in the Ricci v. DeStefano case* is neither the white nor the black firefighters but the law and its technocratic application. For the past six years - as the lawyers have had their fun - no one of either ethnicity has been promoted in the New Haven fire …

NO CHILD LEFT . . . .

Sam Smith If you're serious about teaching, the No Child Left Behind Law is the educational equivalent of creationism: faith parading as facts and blocking changes that recognition of the facts would require. It's not surprising given that the idea was shoved down the country's throat by George Bush because, like the perp's other policies, …

A STANDARDIZED TEST FOR YOUR SCHOOL

[From Sam Smith's Great American Political Repair Manual, WW Norton, 1997] Here are a few questions that may help you find out what's right and wrong with your community's schools. Add or subtract points for any statement that is true: 1. THE PRINCIPAL is seen regularly in classes finding out what's going on . . …