Care to Really Understand Federal Education Policy?

In my humble opinion, Jo Boaler's, recent Education Week column, Where Has All the Knowledge Gone?
The Movement to Keep Americans at the Bottom of the Class in Math, is one of the most important pieces of education journalism in some time.

Is this just a coincidence? Can President Bush really have been so badly advised as to ignore almost all of the research that could have informed the report, or was there something more deliberate at work? How acceptable is it for a government to control the forms of knowledge that are released to the public?

Dr. Boaler is a former Stanford University Mathematics Professor who clearly and succinctly documents how "science" and "research" are used as a blunt weapon by the United States Department of Education. Boaler describes how the President's National Mathematics Advisory Panel was constrained from publishing the best advice for improving mathematics education. Such ideological interference in mathematics education is consistent with the Reading First mess at the center of No Child Left Behind.

They Hate Me, They Really Really Hate Me!

Kevin Carey, of the "independent" and "innovative" Education Sector, didn't have the decency to defame me by name when he attacked the cover story, School Wars, I wrote for the current issue of Good Magazine.

It's ironic to be accused of "policy juvenalia" in a blog oh so cleverly entitled "Bad Magazine."

In a time when smart people of good faith occupy both sides of many heated and complex education debates, it makes sense occasionally to pause, take a deep breath, and denounce things like the incoherent mishmash of policy juvenalia, useless sentiment, and blatant lies found in this article, published by GOOD Magazine, in which we are told that NCLB "requires all of the nation’s schoolchildren to be above the mean on standardized tests," Bill Gates and Eli Broad are spearheading the corporate conspiracy to privatize K-12 education, and standardized tests come with instructions about what to do if students throw up on them. It's sort of a perfect distillation of woolly-minded HuffPost-type conventional education wisdom, and in that sense is oddly valuable, because you can read it and know everything that a not-inconsequential percentage of people know (or rather, don't know) about education.

It's not "useless sentiment" to care about children.

Ever since President Bush told me to "use the Google," I have found it to be an indispensable tool for learning all sorts of interesting things. One thing I learned when I clicked on the "Who We Are" link on the Education Sector web site was that the "independent" and "innovative" Education Sector is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as Eli Broad.

It is awfully refreshing to see such "independent" and "innovative" analysts strenuously defending their sugar daddies. It's kind of sweet.

For the record, my article was carefully fact-checked by Good Magazine. In fact, a good deal of my juiciest stuff about Eli Broad was left on the cutting-room floor. Stay tuned, keep reading and don't forget to follow the money!

Note: You may read the Quick and the Ed attack on my article here.