Natalie Hopkinson is a fellow of the Interactivity Foundation and the co-author of Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation. . . . .
. . . .Many D.C. parents are finding that, sure, there are plenty of choices — just not a lot of good, or even passable ones. When you mix corporate strategies with an ominous 2014 compliance deadline under the "No Child Left Behind" law, you often end up with scenes that look nothing like what most of us might recognize as a classroom.
"What once was an effort to improve the quality of education turned into an accounting strategy," the acclaimed education historian Diane Ravitch writes in her book The Death and Life of the Great American School System. "The strategy produced fear and obedience among educators. It often generated higher test scores. But it had nothing to do with education. It produced mountains of data, not educated citizens. Its advocates then treated that data as evidence of its success."
That strategy has grown even more intense as teachers and administrators are testing for their professional lives. Under "No Child Left Behind", 100 percent of schools must reach certain test-score targets by 2014; schools that fall short could lose federal funding, or be closed.
Even if the law is repealed, which is something the Obama administration has signaled it will do, education has been changed in this country forever. Obama's "Race to the Top" program continues to use the same sticks and carrots that require educators to teach to the test or else be fired or make less money.
The looming deadline is making people do crazy things: Like administrators pushing out low-performing students in North Carolina. Like teachers helping students cheat in Atlanta. Like officials producing math so fuzzy, it would make Wall Street CEOs blush. And, in the case of the Oprah-certified former D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, like importing shoddy private managers to take over a school.
Under this framework, "failing" schools are by definition the ones serving the most vulnerable populations — recent immigrants learning English, families battling poverty, children with trifling or MIA parents. The reformers say that even these students would produce better test scores if only they weren't sitting in front of "lazy" teachers collecting checks, a slight upgrade from Ronald Reagan's welfare queens.
Under this movement, teachers don't get better with practice. Instead they are installed and reinstalled like interchangeable parts. Teachers' unions, originally organized to protect the mostly female work force from capricious regulations of their marriages and lifestyles by mostly male administrators, are depicted as the enemies of progress. (Police unions somehow escaped blame for rising murder rates.)
I'm less concerned about the teachers and administrators than I am the children stuck in those classrooms. What it means to learn has been transformed for a generation of urban children. Education is acquiring a basic body of knowledge needed to competently vote and play Jeopardy, appreciate music and art, go to college and get a job, communicate and so on.
But in the name of reform, it's as if somehow the goalpost has been moved without our realizing it. Now education — for those "failing" urban kids, anyway — is about learning the rules and following directions. Not critical thinking. Not creativity. It's about how to correctly eliminate three out of four bubbles. The whole messy, thrilling, challenging work of shaping young minds has been reduced to a one or a zero. Pass or fail.
A decade of this language has taken its own toll. Kids attend "failing" schools. A majority of black boys are "failures." Whole communities are branded with a collective "F." Conservative California politicians liken Compton parents who demand the heads of school staff to modern-day versions of Rosa Parks.
So in cities such as New York, they bring in the number crunchers instead of real education experts — even if these privatization experiments can go horribly, tragically wrong. And even if choosing a charter school often means choosing to racially segregate.
Public schools that enjoy certain socioeconomic privileges (and a minimal number of needy kids) are thriving and will continue to be left alone. But for the "failing" communities and students, there will be no public system. Instead they are required to navigate the education marketplace, choosing between neighborhood schools that have been creamed of their best students and the new experimental start-ups that on average perform worse than traditional public schools. "This strategy plays a shell game with low-performing students, moving them out and dispersing them, pretending they don't exist," Ravitch wrote.
We have collectively decided that we are incapable as a society of honoring the social contract to own buildings and pay teachers in disadvantaged communities. How can a whole demographic of children need to be "fixed"? How can all of them be wrong?
As for his black son, Bridgers believed that there was something wrong with the medicine. "The teacher was too young," he says. "He couldn't handle the pressure." A week after Bridgers visited the school, his son told him that the young teacher had left and never come back. So Bridgers sent his son to live with his mother in Pennsylvania. "I coach football Little League," he told me. "This is what we talk about on the sidelines. It's terrible what they are doing to these schools."
Friday, January 07, 2011
More Attention to Segregated Charter Schools Without Real Teachers
From a piece for NPR by Natalie Hopkinson:
Seligman's Brainwashing Is Not Just for Captive KIPPsters Anymore
Jason Leopold has a great piece up at Truthout on the former CIA torture advisor and KIPP compliance guru, Martin Seligman, aka "Dr. Happy."
Seems that Seligman has leveraged his research on brainwashing poor schoolchildren into full-time happy scholars into a $30+ million dollar no-bid contract to pass the happiness bug to GIs who are coming back after multiple tours of duty with PTSD and worse.
Hey, if it can work in Philly to make children love their poverty and their abusive schooling, why can't it work in Kabul to make GIs unaffected by putting their comrades' pieces into bodybags? According to Seligman, "we're after creating an indomitable Army."
Now when GIs are done with being indomitable in the theaters of war, they can roll all that positivity into the Troops to Teachers movement--and the cycle can begin all over again.
. . . ."Learned Optimism"Seligman, a past president of the American Psychological Association (APA), began consulting with General Casey in September 2008 about applying the research he and his colleagues have conducted over the past decade to the benefits of his theories on "Learned Optimism" to all of the Army's active-duty soldiers. Seligman then met with Cornum in December 2008 to discuss creating the foundation for CSF as a way to decrease PTSD.
"Psychology has given us this whole language of pathology, so that a soldier in tears after seeing someone killed thinks, 'Something's wrong with me; I have post-traumatic stress,' or PTSD," Seligman said in August 2009. "The idea here is to give people a new vocabulary, to speak in terms of resilience. Most people who experience trauma don't end up with PTSD; many experience post-traumatic growth."
According to a report published in December 2009 in the APA Monitor, Seligman believes that positive thinking methods taught to schoolchildren who "were [conditioned] to think more realistically and flexibly about the problems they encounter every day" can also be taught to Army soldiers and the results will be the same.
Seligman said he is basing his theory on a series of 19 studies he conducted, which found that teachers who "emphasized the importance of slowing the problem-solving process down by helping students identify their goals, gather information and develop several possible ways to achieve those goals," increased students' optimism levels over the course of two years "and their risk for depression was cut in half."
But unlike studies conducted on schoolchildren, there is no research that exists that shows applying those same conditioning methods to the Army's active-duty soldiers will reduce PTSD. Seligman, however, seems to be aware that is the case. That may explain why he has referred to Army soldiers as his personal guinea pigs.
"This is the largest study - 1.1 million soldiers - psychology has ever been involved in and it will yield definitive data about whether or not [resiliency and psychological fitness training] works," Seligman said about the CSF program.
"We're after creating an indomitable Army," Seligman said.
Positive Psychology's CriticsWhile positive psychology, a term coined by Seligman, has its supporters who swear by its benefits, the movement also has its fair share of critics. Bryant Welch, who also served as APA president, said, "personally, I have not been able to find a meaningful distinction between [positive psychology] and Norman Vincent Peale's Power of Positive Thinking. Both emphasize substituting positive thoughts for unhappy or negative ones."
"And yet the US military has bought into this untested notion to the tune of [$125] million," Welch said. "This money, of course, could have been used to provide real mental health care to our troops. Instead, it is being used to tell military personnel that they can (and, thus, presumably should) overcome whatever happens to them on the battlefield with the dubious tools of Positive Psychology."
PTSD "is is not a mental state that can be treated by suggesting to the patient that he or she simply re-frame how they think about the situation, as Dr. Seligman suggests," Welch added.
Other notable critics include authors Chris Hedges and Barbara Ehrenreich, both of who say the practice has thrived in the corporate world where the refusal to consider negative outcomes resulted in the current economic crisis.
Hedges, author of the book "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle," wrote, "positive psychology, which claims to be able to engineer happiness and provides the psychological tools for enforcing corporate conformity, is to the corporate state what eugenics was to the Nazis."
"Positive psychology is a quack science that throws a smoke screen over corporate domination, abuse and greed," Hedges said. "Those who fail to exhibit positive attitudes, no matter the external reality, are seen as maladjusted and in need of assistance. Their attitudes need correction."
Hedges added that "academics who preach [the benefits of positive psychology] are awash in corporate grants."Indeed, Seligman's CV shows he has received tens of millions of dollars in foundation cash to conduct positive psychology research.
According to a report published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "People credit a large part of positive psychology's success to the solid reputations of the field's leaders - and Seligman's ability to get science-supporting agencies interested."
"The National Institute of Mental Health has given more than $226-million in grants to positive-psychology researchers in the past 10 years, beginning with just under $4-million in 1999 and reaching more than nine times that amount in 2008," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Seligman has equated his work for the Army to assisting the "second largest corporation in the world."
Multimillion-Dollar ContractSeligman's biggest payday came last year, when the Positive Psychology Center received a three-year, $31 million, no-bid, sole-source Army contract to continue developing the program.
According to Defense Department documents, "the contract action was accomplished using other than competitive procedure because there is only one responsible source and no other supplies or services will satisfy agency requirement[s]. Services can only be provided from the original source as this is a follow-on requirement for the continued provision of highly specialized services."
In 2009, several months after receiving the green light from Casey to develop the CSF program, the Army paid Seligman's Positive Psychology Center $1 million to begin training hundreds of drill sergeants to become Master Resilience Trainers (MRTs), "certified experts who will advise commanders in the field and design and facilitate unit-level resilience training across the Army."
More than 2,000 MRTs have been trained since CSF was rolled out in October 2009. The Army intends to certify thousands more MRTs.
The Defense Department's justification for the no-bid contract said Seligman's program "possesses unique capabilities, in that, [it is] the only established, broadly effective, evidence-based, train the trainer program currently available which meets the Army's minimum needs."
Seligman's program was "explicitly designed to train trainers (teachers) in how to impart resiliency and whole life fitness skills to others (their students)," the contracting documents state. "Other existent programs are designed to simply teach resiliency directly to participants. The long-term outcomes of [Seligman's program] have been examined in over 15 well documented studies."
"Without the Army's Resiliency Master Trainer Program [as taught by Seligman and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania] the exacerbated effects of multiple wars and other stressors result in a weakened corps and this directly impacts the Army's readiness and ultimately compromises the national security of our nation ... This program is vitally important to our forces deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan."
The contracting documents go on to say that "market research ... mostly through a thorough web search and networking with subject matter experts both within the Army, across services and in [academia] into other "positive psychology" programs was conducted between August and October 2008 before the Army decided to award the contract to Seligman because his program met the Army's immediate needs.
Cornum said in July 2009 that similar resiliency tests used by the University of Pennsylvania for the general public would be "militarized" by the Army.
A Difficult ChallengeBut according to Griffith, the atheist Army sergeant, the Army did not do enough to remove the religious connotatitions from the spiritual section of the test.
Even Seligman's colleagues acknowledge that attempting to separate spirituality from religion is a challenge."Mapping the conceptual distinctions between what we refer to as 'religion' and what we refer to as 'spirituality' can be difficult," wrote Ben Dean in an article published on the University of Pennsylvania's Authentic Happiness web site.
Griffith said there's a simple solution: "Scrap [the] spiritual aspect altogether."
Thursday, January 06, 2011
Media Bullpen; Gleason Family Foundation
Head on over to MediaBullpen.com to check out the new and (likely) obnoxious voice in the education realm. The Bullpen, a joint project between the Gates Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, an Gleason Family Foundation, will evaluate media coverage of education issues. It's run by the Center for Education Reform. The Gates Foundation invested $275,000 in the project; dollar amounts for the others are unknown.
In the edu-field, Gates and Walton are hardly unknown names, even for the casual observer. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation is well-known, too, but more for their involvement in funding conservative think tanks and other right-wing causes. The Gleason Family Foundation, the fourth funder in this attempt at "media accountability," was one I hadn't read much about before. For interested readers, here's a list of the edu-advocacy orgs they've supported over the years:
In the edu-field, Gates and Walton are hardly unknown names, even for the casual observer. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation is well-known, too, but more for their involvement in funding conservative think tanks and other right-wing causes. The Gleason Family Foundation, the fourth funder in this attempt at "media accountability," was one I hadn't read much about before. For interested readers, here's a list of the edu-advocacy orgs they've supported over the years:
Alliance for School ChoiceIt's not quite a "who's who" in right-wing edu circles (no Fordham?), but it's pretty close. Readers interested in specific donations can check the foundation's 990 tax forms. The best way to find them is search "Gleason foundation" through the Foundation Center's 990 finder (they're the Gleason Foundation from New York). That'll give you all 990s up through 2007. The foundation's newer 990s can be found here.
American Enterprise Institute
BAEO
Cato Institute
Center for Education Reform
Center for Union Facts
Coalition for Educational Freedom
Heartland Institute
Heritage Foundation
Institute for Justice (libertarian)
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation
NCTQ
Pacific Research Institute
Philanthropy Roundtable
School Choice Conference ($305,002 in 2006 - Cabo San Lucas, Mexico)
School Choice Wisconsin
High school exit exams: Who profits?
Two letters in the San Diego Union Tribune
Addressing state education issues
Jan 3, 2011
In “The ‘impossible’ challenges facing education” (Opinion, Dec. 26) the now-former California superintendent of public instruction, Jack O’Connell, points out that “California’s economic crisis has provided a too-easy excuse for slashing of children’s services ranging from child care to pre-K-12 education and more.”
Many of these cuts will be catastrophic. But there are some cuts the state should consider that can make things better. A clear example is eliminating the official High School Exit Exam. Analyst Jo Ann Behm has estimated that the combined state and local costs of California’s exit exam exceed $500 million per year.
The most recent review of research on exit exams, by the University of Texas, concluded that high school exit exams do not lead to more college attendance, increased student learning or higher employment. In fact, researchers have yet to discover any benefits of having a high school exit exam.
Stephen Krashen
Improving California’s state of education
Jan 5
In his letter (“Addressing state education issues,” Jan. 3), Stephen Krashen writes, “In fact, researchers have yet to discover any benefits of having a high school exit exam.” Let me suggest the beneficiaries of high school exit exams: the companies who write the tests, the companies who write and sell the test preparation guides, and the companies who analyze the test results. Oh, yes, and their lobbyists and the legislators who voted for the exams.
Peter Klein
Honig Appointed to State Board of Education: More Support for Excessive Phonics Teaching?
Submitted to the North County Times, January 6
Reports of Governor Brown's appointment of Bill Honig to the State Board of Education have focused on Honig's previous legal problems. More serious is Honig's stance on educational issues ("Brown names top advisers," 1/6).
After resigning as state superintendent, Honig became a dedicated supporter of intensive systematic phonics, the view that all children need phonics instruction that includes all major rules of phonics, presented in a strict order.
Some basic phonics instruction is helpful, but evidence refutes the extremist intensive systematic position: Studies show that intensive phonics makes no significant contribution to performance on tests in which children have to understand what they read.
Reading First, part of No Child Left Behind, is based on intensive systematic phonics. Reading First children performed no better on tests of reading comprehension than children taught by regular methods, even though Reading First children had more reading instruction.
Studies also show that California's low reading scores are not due to a lack of phonics, but are because of a lack of access to reading materials. California has failed to support its public and school libraries, and studies relate library quality to reading achievement.
Honig's misreading of research is more serious than his financial misdemeanor.
Stephen Krashen
Sources:
Studies of intensive phonics and reading comprehension: Garan, E. 2001. Beyond the smoke and mirrors: A critique of the National Reading Panel report on phonics. Phi Delta Kappan 82, no. 7 (March), 500-506; Krashen, S. 2009. Does Intensive Decoding Instruction Contribute to Reading Comprehension? Knowledge Quest 37 (4): 72-74.
Reading First: Gamse, B., R. Jacob, R., M. Horst, B. Boulay, and F. Unlu 2008. Reading First Impact Study Final Report (NCEE 2009-4038). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.
Low reading scores not the result of lack of phonics: McQuillan, J. 1997. The Literacy Crisis: False Claims and Real Solutions. Heinemann.
PISA Scores Show U.S. Should Export Poor Children
The following post, "It's the Poverty Not Stupid," from the Principal Difference should be required reading for every education writer in the country and every politician who is likely to be approached by one of the self-serving corporate leeches out to destroy public schools and get fat in the process.
The release of the 2009 PISA results this past week has created quite a stir and has provided ample fodder for public school bashers and doomsayers who further their own philosophical and profit-motivated agendas by painting all public schools as failing. For whatever reason, these so-called experts, many of whom have had little or no actual exposure to public schools, refuse to paint an accurate picture of the state of education.
Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, should be providing the nation with a proper vision and focus for public education. He knows our challenges all too well. He confirmed that he gets it when he recently wrote me saying, "We must build a culture nationally where great educators ... choose to work with children and communities who need the most help." I believe his message is sincere and heartfelt and it is spot on. However, overstating a problem in order to increase the sense of urgency around school improvement is just as bad as understating the problem.
This week, Duncan had a golden opportunity to use the PISA results to provide focus for our education efforts and to point us in the right direction. Instead, he dug himself deeper into the pseudo-reformers' hole--more charter schools, more reliance on competition and free-market strategies, more testing, more use of test scores to evaluate teachers, more firing of principals and teachers, more closing of low-scoring schools--when he said, "the PISA scores released this past Tuesday were "a massive wake-up call," because the scores show American students holding relatively steady in the middle of the pack of the developed nations taking the international exam.
There is, however, someone who recognizes that the data is being misinterpreted. NEAToday published remarks from National Association of Secondary School Principals Executive Director, Dr. Gerald N. Tirozzi, that have taken "a closer look at how the U.S. reading scores on PISA compared with the rest of the world’s, overlaying it with the statistics on how many of the tested students are in the government’s free and reduced lunch program for students below the poverty line." Tirozzi pointed out, “Once again, we’re reminded that students in poverty require intensive supports to break past a condition that formal schooling alone cannot overcome.” Tirozzi demonstrates the correlation between socio-economic status and reading by presenting the PISA scores in terms of individual American schools and poverty. While the overall PISA rankings ignore such differences in the tested schools, when groupings based on the rate of free and reduced lunch are created, a direct relationship is established.
With strong evidence that increased poverty results in lower PISA scores the next question to be asked is what are the poverty rates of the countries being tested? (Listed below are the countries that were tested by PISA along with available poverty rates. Some nations like Korea do not report poverty rates.)
Leveling the playing field
A more accurate assessment of the performance of U.S. students would be obtained by comparing the scores of American schools with comparable poverty rates to those of other countries.
Schools in the United States with less than a 10% poverty rate had a PISA score of 551. When compared to the ten countries with similar poverty numbers, that score ranked first.
In the next category (10-24.9%) the U.S. average of 527 placed first out of the ten comparable nations.
For the remaining U.S. schools, their poverty rates over 25% far exceed any other country tested. However, when the U.S. average of 502 for poverty rates between 25-49.9% is compared with other countries it is still in the upper half of the scores
Mathematically Speaking
The results of the latest PISA testing should raise serious concerns. However, the overall ranking of 14th in reading is not the reason to be concerned. The problem is not as much with our educational system as it is with our high poverty rates. The real crisis is the level of poverty in too many of our schools and the relationship between poverty and student achievement. Our lowest achieving schools are the most under-resourced schools with the highest number of disadvantaged students. We cannot treat these schools in the same way that we would schools in more advantaged neighborhoods or we will continue to get the same results. The PISA results point out that the U.S. is not alone in facing the challenge of raising the performance of disadvantaged students.
Additional observations from PISA results:· Shanghai, China topped the list with 556 but is not included in this analysis because Shanghai is a city not a country and because only 35% of Chinese students ever enter high school and because "when you spend all your time preparing for tests, and when students are selected based on their test-taking abilities, you get outstanding test scores."· Of all the nations participating in the PISA assessment, the U.S. has, by far, the largest number of students living in poverty--21.7%. The next closest nations in terms of poverty levels are the United Kingdom and New Zealand have poverty rates that are 75% of ours.· U.S. students in schools with 10% or less poverty are number one country in the world.· U.S. students in schools with 10-24.9% poverty are third behind Korea, and Finland.· U.S. students in schools with 25-50% poverty are tenth in the world.· U.S. students in schools with greater than 50% poverty are near the bottom.· There were other surprises. Germany with less than half our poverty, scored below the U.S. as did France with less than a third our poverty and Sweden with a low 3.6% poverty rate.· Having recently listened to Sir Michael Barber talk about the amazing progress of the reforms in the United Kingdom, I was absolutely shocked to see that the UK, with 25% less poverty, scored below the U.S. average.
The Real Meaning of PISA: It's Poverty Not Stupid
If the so-called experts would have honestly and responsibly reported the PISA results, we might now be on the road to responsible school improvement instead continuing down the road of "reform de jour."
President Bill Clinton is famous for his campaign slogan, "It's the economy stupid!" When it comes to student achievement and school improvement, it's poverty not stupid! Researchers report that perhaps the only true linear relationship in the social sciences is the relationship between poverty and student performance. While there is no relationship between poverty and ability, the relationship between poverty and achievement is almost foolproof. To deny that poverty is a factor to be overcome as opposed to an excuse is to deny the reality that all educators, human services workers, law enforcement officers, medical professionals and religious clergy know and have known for years.
PISA reports average scores. The problem is that the U.S. is not average. While the U.S. is the top country in global competitiveness, we also have the highest percentage of students living in poverty and, regretfully, poverty impacts test scores.
To Secretary Duncan, poverty is not an issue that educators must address. At least he won't admit it in public. Apparently, he wants to take away all the excuses from teachers and principals. When I met with Duncan, I asked him if he had read the book or seen the movie, Blind Side. He indicated that he had and that he had enjoyed it very much. I reminded him of the pride and sense of accomplishment felt by the teachers in the private school attended by Michael Oher. In their minds, they had performed a miracle. I pointed out that, in high-poverty schools, a Michael Oher is the average student. In schools like ours we have hundreds of students like Michael Oher who depend on our school for everything including food, clothing, and emotional support.
The Bottom LineSchool improvement is not an event. It is an ongoing process that has no end. As a principal, parents and community members would repeatedly ask me, "When can we stop our comprehensive school-wide literacy initiative? I would answer, "We will stop emphasizing reading, writing, thinking and speaking when our parents repeatedly complain that their children are reading too fast with comprehension that is too high and when our students' writing skills are so superior that they are regularly winning Pulitzers and other literary awards." Smiles would erupt throughout the audience. They got it. They understood that literacy skills can always be improved and so can our schools.There are three compelling reasons why we must improve our schools:
- We have a moral and ethical obligation to provide every student with the best education, the kind of education that we would want for our own children.
- In a knowledge economy, the country with the best-educated populace will have the highest standard of living.
- Every dropout as well as every graduate who is not prepared for at least some post-secondary education and training is and will continue to be an economic and social burden on their local community and on this nation for their entire life.
The challenge of ensuring that each and every student is a life-long learner prepared to contribute in a global community is daunting enough. We don't need more hyperbole, particularly from those education insiders who should know better. For those of us who are deeply committed to improving the performance of every student, this rhetoric is counterproductive because it seriously erodes our ability to hire teachers, obtain resources, and gain the confidence and support of our communities.
We count on our leaders to provide focus and direction. Sadly, our education leaders don't trust us enough to tell us the truth. The problem is that we will never solve a problem that our leaders refuse to admit even exists. The comparison of PISA scores by poverty clearly identifies our strengths and challenges as a nation. Our schools with less than 50% poverty) are some of the best in the world. Our extremely high-poverty schools, with over 50% poverty, are among the poorest performing internationally.
Instead of labeling all schools as failing, we must find a way to raise the performance of our students in under-resourced schools. Instead of looking to low-poverty countries like Finland for direction, we should be looking to take what we already know about educating students in high-performing, high-poverty schools like our Breakthrough Schools and scaling up their successes across the nation. We continually look for gold in other countries when, all along, we are sitting on Acres of Diamonds.
Truthfully, you and I know all too well that Secretary Duncan, who led schools in Chicago, is aware of the relationship between poverty and student achievement, but he doesn't trust us enough to tell us the truth. He is afraid that we will use poverty as an excuse and that we will forget about our disadvantaged students. Ironically, by not acknowledging poverty as a challenge to be overcome, Duncan is forgetting about our disadvantaged students. Duncan needs to deliver the message that all our students deserve not only access to an education, but access to an excellent education. He needs to repeatedly remind us that, when it comes to school improvement, it's poverty not stupid.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)