Not going to happen. If change comes, it will be from the outside. Mike Stryer is a former teacher and co-founder of NewTLA, a union reform group that came into being in 2010. One of its goals was to get the powerful United Teachers of Los Angeles to adopt a sweeping education reform agenda. Now...

… where conservatives demand change and many alleged progressives, including teacher union elites, are really reactionary. While this may be old news to some, it can’t be said enough: In our polarized times, education reform is the only truly bipartisan issue, whereas with other matters things invariably break down into Republican vs. Democrat, liberal vs....

CTA sponsors a resolution demonizing what it perceives to be faux Democrats. At last week’s California Democratic Party convention in Sacramento, the California Teachers Association went into attack mode, sponsoring a resolution suggesting that two organizations run by prominent Democrats are backed by dastardly corporate Republican types. WHEREAS, the so-called “reform” initiatives of Students First,...

Can you guess which special interest group influenced many of the resolutions approved at the California Democratic Party convention on April 14, 2013? That’s right, unions. Here’s my annotated collection of the 2013 resolutions and the clean version of the resolutions on the California Democratic Party web site. (As the party web site says, “Click...

Is it okay for a “parent advocate” to send her kids to a private school while maintaining that your kids remain in a failing government run school? Last week, via the blogosphere, we learned that education reform leader Michelle Rhee sends one of her two kids to a private school. One post asks the question,...

Latest temblor to hit the Golden State is a lawsuit that could result in a major tectonic shift in education. In September of 1975, due to New York City’s dire fiscal situation, I was laid off from my teaching position at P.S. 125 in Harlem. I lost my job not because I was a bad...

In addition to online learning, Democrat’s abandonment of their traditional union allies could put an end to the educational status quo and decimate the teachers unions. In my October 18th post, I wrote about Terry Moe’s book Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools. I specifically addressed that part of the book in which...