How Diane Ravitch's publisher is connected to Pearson, why we should care, and what we can do about it.

Maybe there is nothing to this but coincidence but I think we need to read Diane Ravitch's new book with caution.

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I created this video in response to the Texas School Board decision to radically rewrite the curriculum, a decision likely to have Sandy Kress' fingerprints all over it being that he is from Texas, is a lobbyist for the Texas Charter School Board Association and former School Board member for Dallas Schools (in a time when they misrepresented test scores so George W. Bush could claim success as an education governor). I think this applies to Ravitch's call for more and better curriculum.


Additionally, if this theory is correct, Ravitch's has been used as a Trojan horse for the teacher unions as well. I think every single AFT publication I have read this past year has had a piece by her or her protege Diane Senechal. You can read what my thoughts are with Senechal's involvement with the AFT here and here. You can also read more about what I think about Ravitch's call for more curriculum here. So, Scott McLeod asks, "Should we absolve Diane Ravitch of her earlier decisions?" I say NO NO NO NO NO. All of this is still screams of clever ruse. Buy testing materials or buy textbooks it all still drives money to Pearson.

Perhaps this is all post-fact. Perhaps what "The Death and Life of the Great American School System" is not a reversal of Diane Ravitch's thoughts on education reform but rather an opening up of the playbook after the game is over. Perhaps this agenda has already been enacted.

Twitter Book Club: S. Craig Watkins (2009) The Young & The Digital - Chapter 4

I believe Watkins is addressing what Henry Jenkins coined as the "Production Gap." Basically, a gap or difference between how rich and poor, white and black or Latino, privileged and underprivileged interact with the read/write/web. Watkins does a great job of arguing that we carry our racial and class biases to online social networks and thus this gap is very real.

I never really thought of Facebook in this light before. Is Facebook the equivalent of an online gated community? Have it's users really classified MySpace as the digital "Ghetto." It would appear so. Now that Facebook is open to anyone, will there be another wave of social network migration for the uber-elite? Has this already happened?

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Twitter Book Club: S. Craig Watkins (2009) The Young & The Digital - Chapter 3

I certainly have seen this in my own experience as a father. My 2 year old asked for an iPod for her birthday. Both her use of the iPod and my 5 year old's use of the computer (and the iPod) have expanded their access to just-in-time information indefinitely. It is amazing what they can do. I caught my 5 year old on the computer the other day looking up videos of her favorite show on YouTube. The browser wasn't even open before she sat down to the machine and I do not have YouTube set as a starting WebPage. Also, her response to me finding her at the computer was almost like I "Caught her in the act" of something she didn't want me to know she could do.

This, to me, has always been the main issue with technology and education. It is also the reason I am always on the verge of giving it all up and moving to the Mesa Desert to become a hermit. By now I probably already would have if I didn't have dependents I didn't want to impose such a choice upon.

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