Great, then the College Board can go back to a fully-academic Black American History course.
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An article criticizing the College Board as a less than fully transparent organization. This snippet is news to me (not being a parent etc,)
The great business opportunity at the time was to connect the SAT to Common Core. At last, it was believed, America would have a way of telling how well its students were learning. Never mind, of course, that all of this power and responsibility would be held in the boardroom of a private company that would have profited greatly from the connection to a national curriculum. (If one corporation could influence the curriculum and also create the tool used to measure achievement, school districts and states would have little choice but to use—and increase the use of—its products.) Alas, fate had other ideas, and Common Core quickly fell out of favor in the U.S. with both the left and the right—perhaps coincidentally, or perhaps because people had concerns about such intensely focused control in the hands of one company. Or, it might be said, in the hands of one man.
Common Core was and probably still is a conservative bugbear.
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“But but it’s the left that’s infiltrated academia…!”
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An email exchange in September 2016 about hiring associate professor Rachel Brand had Butler writing to Leo, “Unanimous. For bureaucratic reasons, we cannot formally offer the job until September 26. I have informed her of the vote.” “Great,” Leo responded.
Yikes. If we tell a candidate that faculty voted to offer the position, or that they will be offered the position, before the formal offer goes out, we’re in legal hot water and the search gets cancelled. HR drills that into our heads before each and every search.
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The thing about education is that any system will work for some of the kids some of the time. Montessori’s ideas about autonomy and self direction can be adapted to most classrooms, and the materials are great. This is a case of causation/=correlation.
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A great response for folks attacking education by promoting the idea that parents know better than trained, professional educators:
This seems a bit like a previous anti-science response, too:
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What worries me is that forcing good teachers out might be part of the GOP plan. They’ve made it clear that they want privatization. After attacking education funding, teachers’ salaries, and public pensions, they moved on to subject matter and anything they could label as “liberal.” They’ve also been promoting SROs, the school to prison pipeline, and now child labor.
They want education to be exclusive, not inclusive. The barrier to entry for lessons, tutors, higher education, and better paying jobs will be ever-increasing amounts of money. If they manage to disrupt and/or dismantle all but the most conservative, Evangelical institutions of higher “learning,” the have-nots will be struggling to make sure their kids learn the basics, avoid incarceration, and find a job outside of a factory.
We need more visceral examples of what kind of future the GOP is trying to create for other people’s children. Stories about teachers and HCWs quitting are too easy to spin into their “workers are too lazy/entitled” and 
narratives.
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Yes, it sure does sound like GOP SOP. Demonize and defund a publice service (like the USPS) until it overall works like shit, declare it another “government” disaster, then try to shut it down so your cronies and funders (and hopefully you too!) can make millions by replacing it with something that works far worse. Greedy assholes.
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Especially higher ed…
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That was truly depressing. I am certain she is being accurate and honest, but holy hell, what a mess!
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Look forward to watching, but, with a grain of salt? She’s long run a business to that effect.
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She even addresses that, actually. You should certainly still take her with a grain of salt, but she’s not wrong about how many of us are not being fairly compensated for our work. 
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I’m going to give her a lot of benefit of the doubt on that. That was her escape route; the tunnel she dug with a teaspoon to escape the cult compound.
What infuriates me is that - setting private colleges aside - Land Grant Universities were founded to provide advanced education for a negligible cost. That was the whole reason they were “granted” the “land” they operate on. Now they charge more per year for in-state students than Stanford cost 20 years ago. That money isn’t being spent on educators, as the data clearly shows. Less and less is spent on instruction (and instructors). And yet somehow, “nothing can be done.” Student loan forgiveness and free tuition for public universities is crazy talk.
There is even a parallel with the gun control and healthcare debates. We know that something can be done, and that the system can work much, much better for everyone - because almost every other G20 country gets better results with far less expense.
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No doubt! It is mostly an awful scam. “Cult” sounds sensationalist, but then, those lured into it are indeed similarly misled.
Hell to the yes!
Why isn’t the liberal media on this like white on rice like, every damn day? (Rhetorical q-- because it’s corporate media, run by the same kind of short-term profit minded greedheads that have been gutting education and circling its dying body like the vultures they are.)
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"In place of Lemon and the endorsement test, this Court has instructed that the Establishment Clause must be interpreted by ‘reference to historical practices and understandings.’” How that would apply to instruction in biology when the theory of evolution wasn’t even developed until the mid-1800s is anyone’s guess.
So, students can only be taught scientific principles accepted in the mid-18th century. No way that could go badly, eh?
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