Education Radio Blog Launches!

Stay tuned for more information about upcoming shows...our debut show will focus on the issues, people and events of the July 2011 Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action.

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With Strings Attached: The Gates Foundation and Venture Philanthropy

 Download the program here: Internet Archive Audioport (podcast) In this week's program, we take a closer look at the role of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in funding and promoting corporate education reform. The Gates Foundation is one of a handful of venture philanthropists - along with the Broad and Walton Foundations - who have spent billions of dollars in the last decade to change the face of public education in the United States. Gates' agenda for reform is essentially identical to that of the U.S. Department of Education, namely increasing the use of high-stakes standardized tests at all levels, standardizing curriculum, creating a de-unionized system of merit-based pay for teachers tied to student test scores, and disinvesting in neighborhood public schools in favor of opening new charter schools. As we've explored in previous episodes of Education Radio, all of these reforms can be tied to a larger ideology of free-market competition and a c...
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Education Radio Program 3: Diane Ravitch: No Child Left Behind & Race to the Top

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This week's show features Diane Ravitch's keynote address from the Save Our Schools Conference that took place in Washington D.C. in July, 2011. In this keynote, Ravitch presents arguments against NCLB and Race to the Top, within a larger critique of federal education reform. You can download our show as a podcast via the following two links (Google Chrome users please use Internet Archive): Education Radio Program #3: Diane Ravitch: No Child Left Behind & Race to the Top at Internet Archive or Education Radio Program #3: Diane Ravitch: No Child Left Behind & Race to the Top at Audioport A Professor of Education at NYU and an education historian, Diane Ravitch is a former neoliberal education reform advocate and Bush I Assistant Secretary of Education who has since made a remarkable about face to become a leading critic of NCLB and RTTT. She is now an aggressive advocate for public education to be the primary engine for democratic citizenship. From 1991 to 1993, she wa...
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Criminalizing failure: How high stakes testing warps identities, opportunities and communities

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Download and podcast this program here: Audioport Internet Archive In this week’s program, we take a closer look at how high stakes testing is impacting what happens in classrooms, how teachers see students, how students see themselves, and the kinds of society we are building through how young people are being educated. The impact of high stakes tests is both broadly social and intimately personal. Socially, high stakes testing re-segregates our schools, marginalizes black and brown children, young people who live in poverty and children who do not learn in traditional ways. High stakes testing tells us who we will value, and who we will not value, and makes room for us to criminalize youth, especially black and brown youth, opening the path to the school to prison pipeline. It operates within and builds on white supremacy, and exploits long standing privileges and oppressions. And, as with any dominant discourse, high stakes testing enters our consciousness and begins to structure ...
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