Below are the main groups involved in destroying Indiana public education. Many of these outfits have a national reach, as well, and their main goal is to hand our schools over to for-profit companies. Vouchers…
Browsing Category Education
Academica Bought FBI Investigated Broward County School Board
(This is Doug Martin’s newest article detailing Florida charter school operators’ funding of school board members in Florida. The first article on Mavericks in Education Florida can be read here.) While the Miami-Herald recently noticed…
Stand from betwixt me and the Sun…Thoughts on Enclosure
I’m working on a longer piece intended to be about parallels between eighteenth century land enclosures in England as they became legalized via Parliamentary Acts at the behest of vested private interests and the current…
Virtual Schools: Setting Minds Adrift on Black Ships
Excerpted below is a report from the Texas Observer’s Abby Rapoport, “Virtual Schools, Virtually Unregulated?,” about how a “virtual school” has avoided accountability in order to avoid being a, well, school. At this point, the…
Frank Biden and Privatizers Buying Nation’s 11th-Largest School District
(UPDATED NOTE, 1/31/2012: Frank Barbieri, as promised, returned all checks from members of Mavericks on January 10, 2012.) (UPDATED NOTE: I recently discovered this statement by Frank Barbieri, posted on the facebook page “Testing is…
The Crony Corruption of the Indiana Charter School Board: Mining Kids for Cash
(The following is a letter Doug Martin recently sent to the Indiana Charter School Board, which is now taking comments concerning their corporate school reform agenda. Take the opportunity to email them and let them…
Claims on Belief: The Greatest Show on Earth
My son is studying James Whitcomb Riley for school. Hoosier Poet or Children’s Poet depending on which books you like of his. In reality he appears to have been a very amazing comedian and story-teller. …
VP Biden’s Brother Frank Shovels for Mavericks in Education
When Lisa Rab outed Joe Biden’s brother, Frank, as a major force behind a for-profit education management organization (EMO) dead set on building 100 new charter schools across Florida,* it came as no surprise to…
Fronting Intervention: Using Invisible Children to Sell War to Children
You know, don’t you, that you have to invite vampires into your home or they are not capable of entering, or better, they are forbidden to enter by some kind of law that governs the…
Radiating from Our Senses, Pedagogically Yours
The poet May Swenson, in her preface to a selection of Tomas Transtromer poems she had translated into English, offers what might be the perfect vision for public education: Signals and responses radiating from our…