Two years into this misery just heightens the need for great gift giving. No longer can we get away with a set of hair rollers for her or “a Craftsman model 1019 Laboratory edition, signature series torque wrench” for him. No. We need something that says L-O-V-E. We need books. We pause for a commercial…
Category: Uncategorized
The Globe Keeps Missing a Huge Schools Issue. Why is That?
Suppose WalMart swept into Boston and spent millions to acquire Market Basket. The town would go ballistic. It would be covered every day in every media outlet, front page of the Boston Globe. But the Walton Family Foundation of Arkansas—the exact same heartless* mercenaries—spends millions of dollars to take over public schools and it gets…
Ugh. Another AstroTurf Fake Parents Group: Parents United
In a probably misguided and sadly irreversible decision five and a half years ago I started following the money behind AstroTurf education operations play acting as parent groups while fronting for billionaire privatizers. I’ve seen quite a few phony operations and the new right wing entry Parents United (not Massachusetts Parents United!) has a unique…
What Scot Lehigh Missed Today: The Waltons of Arkansas
If there was ever any doubt of the importance of the defeat of the charter school ballot question in 2016, Scot Lehigh’s frozen-in-time A Time for Real Education Change column in the Boston Globe today reminds us of its importance: a 62-38% shellacking of the billionaire backers of Question 2 by teachers unions. But the…
Koch Connections and Sham Grassroots of Parents Defending Education
Parents Defending Education is corporate school privatizers going hard right to attack school boards, superintendents, principals, and teachers. It’s a dirty game and it’s about as grassroots as say, a Koch political operation. Mercedes Schneider has figured out the grassroots angle in Parents Defending Education: Prefab “Grassroots”—PDE needs local connections to claim standing in law…
Radical Right Ramps Up War on School Boards, Superintendents, Principals, and Teachers
The following post first appeared on Diane Ravitch’s Blog, link here. A new professedly “grassroots” group called Parents Defending Education has joined the right wing assault on public education. It combines white supremacy with a vicious plan to launch personal attacks on elected officials, administrators, and teachers. Just another day in corporate education reform. This…
The Marketing of National Parents Union
National Parents Union isn’t national, isn’t about parents, and isn’t a union—so what is it? It’s a corporate-type marketing front, and a successful one at that. Let’s take a look at the backgrounds of the leadership touted on NPU’s website from about January 2020 through sometime late in August when co-founder Alma Marquez vanished amidst…
Massachusetts Parents United, National Parents Union, and the Christian Right
Two of the important props of the far right in America are Christian conservatives and economic royalists like the Waltons and Charles Koch. Those ties are becoming evident in school privatization including in financial support the Massachusetts Parents United has offered to a Christian right group and in National Parents Union’s funding from a Koch-Walton…
The Perfect Gift: Books
Once again it’s almost Christmas and you haven’t yet found that perfect gift for a loved on. The gift that will make their heart skip several beats, make them swoon and go weak at the knees, cause them to realize how lucky they are to have you, to end this awful year with the reassurance…
ProfessorU is not happy with changes to Route 6 on Cape Cod
Warning: the author is suffering from pandemic fatigue and seasonal disorder, which, for a Cape Codder, means missing the sun, sand between your toes, lobster stew, and sparking tonic with your gin. Still, as I recently travelled Route 6 on the Cape, I found myself shaking my head in resignation at the absurdity of our…