Monday, March 31, 2014

Beware the Zombie Ideas


In Sunday's New York Times Paul Krugman talks about zombie ideas: "an idea that should have been killed by evidence, but refuses to die." While Krugman's op-ed is about an overstated skills gap in the American workforce, his point fits perfectly with CPS's current obsession with ideas that refuse to die. 

Some of these ideas are:

  • B3's insistence in her latest From the Desk of the CEO that the school closures over the past year have been successful, "Data is encouraging and trends are promising." As our Thought Partners are wont to demand, "Show us the day-ta!" B3's newsletter is a little spotty on the, ahem, numbers.
  • AUSL knows how to staff schools better than currently employed teachers, administrators, support staff, and maintenance crews. In fact, AUSL was just recommended to be the manager of three new turnarounds closings. This, despite a study from the organization Designs for Change which states that schools with democratically-led governing systems outperformed turnarounds. While we know Rahm and his ilk are likely to say, "Democracy, shmasocracy," this study shows how school-based democracies can be effective.
  • Teachers created the pension crisis. Wrong again. The CTU lays out some facts and figures which illustrate the consequences of "successive pension holidays" between 1995 and 2005.
Zombie ideas are everywhere, arm yourself properly!

1 comment:

  1. The idea of c!osing public schools with school boards and libraries and replacing them with state controled charter schools, in the case of Chicago we have elite UN UB schools and foreign Concept schools and AUSL training , "school to work" charters, is not a zombie. It is the communist system, charge schools is the Chinese and Soviet model. They also have class divided charters, elite and worker er slave. If the citizens could get past the left right paradigm and the brainwashing that comes with it, we could save our civilization. At the top as you see, there are only elites.

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