In reviewing the over 60 blogs I’ve posted in this past year on The Huffington Post, I wondered if there was a pattern in my series of observations that I could present as the “messages” for the year. If there are any, they would be in my critiques of some of the mistaken ideas about what constitutes “educational reform,” and the damage these ideas are doing to our public school system, particularly standardized testing, charter schooling and getting rid of “bad” teachers by magically producing “great teachers” as panaceas to the “crisis” in the schools. The reason I put quotation marks around the word “crisis” whenever I use it in connection to education is that I don’t believe there is a “crisis” in education nearly as much as there is in our economy which is moving the United States in the direction of a Third World economy as much of the Third World — as China, India and Brazil used to be — moves their citizens in the direction that we once occupied.
