Obama revived Pell grants for prisoners, but the program faces a cloudy future.
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School policy ripped out of time and history: In many ways that is Arne Duncan’s gift to us. School policy focused on disparities in test scores instead of disparities in opportunity; a Department of Education obsessed with data-driven accountability for teachers but preferring “game-changing” innovation for itself and paying inadequate attention to oversight; ...
It’s been 20 years since federal Pell Grants were revoked from prisons during the tough-on-crime heyday of the 1990s, amid a bipartisan political fervor that helped transform U.S. prisons from a corrections system to a punishment business. Two decades later, mass incarceration is a runaway train, and America imprisons so many more people than any other country that it’s hard to even compare the thing in one chart.
How will the clash over education reform between neoliberal democrats and teachers unions play out in the presidential elections?
The decision, which was enthusiastically endorsed by Education Secretary Arne Duncan, brings a close to the first chapter of the case, Vergara v. California, in which a group of student plaintiffs backed by a Silicon Valley millionaire argued that state tenure laws had deprived them of a decent education by leaving bad teachers in place.
Parents, students, and teachers all over the country have joined the revolt to liberate our kids from a test-obsessed education system. As the number of government-mandated tests multiplies, anger is mounting over wasted school hours, “teaching to the test,” a shrinking focus on the arts, demoralized students, and perceptions that teachers are being unjustly blamed for deeply rooted socioeconomic problems.
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