Kumon comes to Midtown

I've shot footage at several Kumon centers in NY and NJ and talked with a dozen or more parents whose children use the inexpensive, twice-weekly afterschool tutoring service. They uniformly believe Kumon is the greatest ally a parent can have; particularly in areas where the public schools are not great. Kumons hire active and retired teachers and supply them with materials that are definitely challenging but also fun; for me, the most interesting part of my shoots was seeing how much the kids were really into it.

I've checked out the materials and even purchased some for my own son, and I think it is a great service and a great value--particularly compared to the cost of private school or private tutoring.

Check them out at:

http://www.kumon.com/atlanta-piedmont-park

The address is:

1529 Piedmont Ave. Suite K; next to Ansley Mall

Atlanta 30324

Telephone: 404-736-6367

I don't know the folks who have set up this particular Kumon Center (it's a franchisee operation) but we will be getting to know them going forward.

Cecily, why did you run?

I'd like our elected school board rep Cecily Harsch-Kinnane to reply to this question publicly: why did you run for re-election, if you weren't going to at least try to show some leadership during what might be the most sudden, most complete meltdown of an urban school system ever seen in the U.S.?

You have been conspicuously silent on the issue of Beverly Hall's cover-up of the CRCT cheating scandal. When I questioned you on the phone about it, you literally stammered through a rambling, 20-minute monologue during which you questioned whether the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's reporting on the facts was accurate (blaming the media--a page straight out of the Shirley Franklin playbook) before going on to say that you "could understand" why Beverly Hall felt it was okay to hide the Porter CRCT cheating report from your Board and to lie to her Open Records clerk, Rebecca Kaye, so that Kaye could claim, in all innocence, that APS was not "in possession" of the document.

Your reasoning? You believe that because the hilariously misnamed "Blue Ribbon Panel" had received the Porter report, the Board did not also have to look at it, and that you agreed with Hall's reasoning that it might not be "the best idea" to release it to the public.

Well, guess what: you don't get to decide not to abide by the Open Records Act. The "furious five" APS BOE members, including the current BOE president Khaatim El, testified that the Blue Ribbon Panel kept them in the dark about its investigation, including the Porter report. That puts you in the position of supporting the employee---yes, Beverly Hall is your employee--who withheld an important document from your fellow BOE members. I'm sure they appreciate your deciding what they should and shouldn't be allowed to read.

Your other weak defense for Beverly Hall's conduct was that you felt the Porter report "wasn't all that important." Really? Of the two "investigations" arranged by Bev Hall in the immediate aftermath of the CRCT cheating allegations, one, a literal drive-by performed by a no-name hack, was proudly posted on the APS website. The other, the credible document executed by Mr. Porter, was deliberately hidden from BOE and public view.

And you're okay with that.

Parents, this kind of stuff is the best argument I could make for conversion charters. Not only is APS not set up or interested in running a high-ceiling school for your children, APS has as its willing accomplice BOE members like Cecily Look-The-Other-Way Harsch-Kinnane.

I cannot for the life of me understand why you ran for this post, Cecily. At the moment when leadership is most needed, you're quietly and meekly supporting the disgraced and soon to be displaced employee Beverly Hall. If and when parents wrestle control of their neighborhood schools away from your bickering, disfunctional BOE, you and your Board colleagues will only have yourselves to blame.

When you figure out what it is you really want to say about all of this, this forum is yours.

Why do we even need APS in Va-Hi?

This is a serious question: why do we need APS to run Springdale Park Elementary, Inman Middle School and Grady High School? It seems to me the only plausible reason for allowing APS administrators to run these schools is because we're too lazy (by "we," I mean the parents of the current and future students at those schools) to convert these schools to charter schools and do the job ourselves.

Could we do a better job than APS bureaucrats at running our schools? That's a silly question. Have you seen APS in action? But let's assume it's not a rhetorical question; that you really want to know why we should do the job instead of APS. Here's the answer: there is a definite need for something like APS in poor neighborhoods where parents use schools as free daycare. But in neighborhoods in which high-achieving parents who value education have decided to coalesce, APS has never demonstrated an ability or willingness to run a high-ceiling school. I believe that even if they wanted to, they wouldn't have the first clue how to do it.

When it comes to figuring out how to run a school, I'll take a team of motivated parents over a diploma-mill APS bureaucrat any day, and so would you. But it's a lot of work, and it requires admitting to yourself that the school you thought was good enough for your kid really isn't. That last leap is one many of my fellow parents are unwilling to take. They convince themselves that because our schools are pretty good compared to other APS schools and Georgia schools in general, they're good enough.

That's exactly like saying "hey, she's awfully good-looking, for a rural Alabamian."

Career Suicide: Data Driven!

One of the walls you bang your head into whenever you try to challenge someone inside the APS reality distortion field is the "Yes, but we're data-driven!" mantra the Bevvy Hall acolytes repeat like--well, a mantra--whenever they're challenged on any little thing.

Back when I was still covering technology for CNN my producers and I had a list of phrases we would ban from any report, because they were so hackneyed, cliched and (almost always) inaccurate. They were usually phrases that the PR folks or product reps would try to work into any soundbite they gave us about their products. My favorite one of these is this one:

"Our customers told us they wanted this feature."

When you heard that, you always knew there was a major bug with the product and they just couldn't figure out how to fix it.

I'll give you two examples: when the very first .mp3 players appeared on the market (long before the iPod came along and made everyone else irrelevant), one of the very first was a particularly difficult-to-use product that required the user to reboot their computer OUT of Windows and into the computer's BIOS (basic in-out system) in order to hack in some software that would allow the player to load music.

It was a catastrophically bad and user-unfriendly product, and yet when I challenged its marketing rep on the phone about this BIOS nonsense, he gave me exactly the sentence I was expecting:

"Our customers told us they wanted it this way."

A couple of years later, when I had to sign up for AOL service using my own credit card so we could report on some AOL story or other (this was long before AOL devoured Time Warner like a snake devouring a rat--exactly like a snake devouring a rat, actually)--I found myself having to call AOL a couple of weeks later to cancel the account, because our reporting was finished. Only they didn't let me leave. Oh, they told me my account was cancelled, but I kept getting billed. For months. And every time I spoke to a new rep, I was again reassured that my account was cancelled and my credit card charges were being refunded. Of course, as we all know now, AOL was engaged in a systematic campaign of retaining and charging customers who had tried to cancel their service, and I was among the many victims. When I finally lost patience and called AOL Corporate --this time as a CNN correspondent--and got into a yelling match with an absolute nightmare of a VP, she again used the magic words: "Our customers have told us they like to be sure about their decision to cancel before all of their accumulated information is deleted, so we like to give them some extra time, but we always honor their wishes."

(No, you didn't, and by the way, fuck you for destroying Time Warner and my 401 (k), you overrated, arrogant assholes).

But I digress.

The point I was making was how whenever you try to tell somebody in APS how utterly inadequate a job they're doing at something, the first words out of their mouth are likely to be:

"but we are using data-driven best practices."

Of all the frauds committed on the public while Bevvy Hall has been in office, she must be most proud of her ability to con so many smart people into believing that if you call something data-driven it's unassailable. Shame on all of you for buying into that crap as long as you did. Me? I snorted in derision the first time I heard it.

It's almost always uncool to point out instances where you were right about something and a whole lot of other people were wrong. That's bullshit. This wasn't hard to figure out. It was right there in front of you all along. I didn't have any trouble spotting it--I attended a few meetings with these laptop-toting "data specialists" and could tell right away they contributed nothing of value to the process. My wish for the new year is that these parasites will all be forcibly relocated to careers where they don't directly suck needed resources away from children.

Meltdown

It's like watching an old newsreel of the Hindenberg disaster frame by frame. You see it in front of you in super-slow-motion and yet you can't quite believe it's really happening; you can't get your head around the enormity of it all. Such is the experience of watching the Atlanta Public School System go down in flames. I'll have a lot more to say about that coming up in the next weeks.

It's been a good long while since I last posted. In that interval, two important things happened. We had a baby daughter, and we sued the Atlanta Public Schools for failing to provide a free and appropriate public education for our son Vance (about whom you can read elsewhere on this blog). I haven't had the stomach to write much about the lawsuit, frankly, because even though we obtained a settlement that was exactly what we wanted, I'm disgusted that we had to file it at all.

You can download the lawsuit PDF here, if you're interested. If you don't feel like wading through 58 pages of legalese, I'll break it down for you this way:

There were a bunch of things, none terribly difficult to figure out or to do, that APS was required by law to do for our autistic son. If they had the will or ability to do these things, it would not have been terribly difficult or expensive. But most of the people we encountered in the special ed program known as the APS PEC (Program for Exceptional Children) were either unwilling or unable to do what they were hired, trained and compensated to do, and as a result, the Atlanta Public School system is now paying for our child to attend a private school that costs a small fortune.

Now, you might think that as the parent of this child I would be happy that he is now enrolled in a very expensive private school requiring his own private carpool (for a 90-minute daily round trip), but you would be wrong. I couldn't possibly be more pissed off about it than I am. It didn't have to be this way. Vance could still be--and should be-- at his lovely brand-new neighborhood school (SPARK). As a taxpayer, as a libertarian, as a parent--I am outraged that the school system failed Vance so utterly that it must now squander a huge amount of money (I'm bound by the terms of the settlement not to discuss precise sums) correcting its own mistakes. And you should be too.

We interrupt this regularly scheduled ranting....

To announce the birth of Siena Vee Lockridge, born Sept. 7th, 2010, at about 1:40 in the afternoon at Northside Hospital in Atlanta. Debuting at 8 lbs, 4 oz and 22 inches long, and as of this writing (9-9) the baby is following her mom's example and exceeding all expectations in every way.

APS's Wall of Shame

Uh, maybe it's time to take this down...?

As recently as Aug. 20, 2010, this giant posterboard trumpeting APS's CRCT scores in the cheating-plagued 2008-2009 school year was still greeting visitors to APS headquarters downtown.

Do you think they still want visitors to believe that these scores were legit?

I think they still refuse to let go of the notion the scores were utterly fraudulent. They're determined to believe no cheating occurred. Or maybe they have no sense of irony. See more photos here.

Auditing the Program for Exceptional Children

I have obtained a draft of the "Self-Improvement Audit" of the Program for Exceptional Children. The audit is being done by a team of education professionals led by the Boston-based EDC, Inc. You can download the audit (minus the CVs of the auditors) here.

I'll be blogging about it in the days ahead.

My letter to Arne Duncan

Okay, so former Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin decides to take it upon herself as a private citizen to appeal to US Education Sec'y Arne Duncan (AKA "White Shaq") to help us with our APS problems.

I say that's a great idea, and here is mine to go with hers.

Dear Arne:

First of all, you are SO freaking tall. What is up with that? Could you bend over a little so I am not just looking up your gigantic tunnel-sized nostrils?

We have a problem. All the statistical gains our city school district claims to have made over the past few years are now turning up to be either fraudulent or doctored in some way. We stacked the chips to get a good NAEP score and then we got blindsided by a few educators who decided to cheat on the CRCTs.

OK, maybe not a few. OK, it was more like a hundred and nine.

But we can't get rid of our superintendent, because she's, like, really popular and won a bunch of awards and it would be embarrassing now to admit that none of the test-score gains or dropout-rate reductions she's claiming are actually valid. (Could we please just not talk any more about scores and data right now? It's kind of a sore spot).

All of us parents who are professionals in other fields know our school district is really screwed. We can't fix it unless we fire everybody who isn't a teacher or principal then fire the bottom ten percent of those, then ask everyone to reapply for their old jobs then turn away most of those who do. Then we have to go back and re-fire everyone who snuck back in via nepotism and "connections," then we have to re-re-fire anyone who got back in to a job where they only collect and sort PowerPoint data.

Because the thing about data collection is this: we were never really good at it. We fudged a lot of numbers and missed some big ones, like the ones that would have told us 58 of our schools had test-cheating issues. And we thought our dropout rate was dropping, but it was, like, exponentially rising.

Oops.

But because our school leaders made such a big whoop about data, it's kind of hard for them to now admit all those data-manipulation jobs were just siphoning away money from people who actually educate children.

Could you please fix all of this for us? After all, it's not fair to have to blame the boss when things go wrong. I mean, I know everyone blamed Obama for not handling the BP spill better, but that's different. Why? Because....well, it just is.

God, you are so unbelievably tall. Where do you buy your suits?

And I know they blamed Obama for all the other stuff that has gone wrong and that it's sort of the American Way to fire the manager when the ballplayers are on a big losing streak, but....well, I just think that is so unfair, because our super is such a nice lady and if you put her out of a job, what in the world is her $100k/year driver going to do to put food on the table? Have a HEART to match the size of your pituitary gland, would ya?

We want you to come down here and tell the local newspaper to stop being so mean. And stop publishing so many facts.

Oh, I forgot one other thing we'd like you to fix. Most of the kids in our system--well, their parents really suck. They're uninterested in helping educate their kids and think our schools are just daycare paid for by taxes paid by people who work and pay taxes (people not like them, in other words). Could you please fix all those parents?

We're counting on you!

Your pals,

The top 10% of APS parents (don't ask me how we got that percentage. Please).

"Tight" security for APS CRCT cheating--er, testing.

In the latest (summer 2010) issue of that must-read periodical "The Atlanta Educator" (you might not have received a copy, or used yours to line a bird cage, so I'll clue you in here), Bev Hall writes one slender paragraph addressing the massive, catastrophic CRCT cheating at APS (which, of course, she's in complete denial about):

"Let me also take time to note that the district anxiously awaits results of an investigation concerning excessive erasures on 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Test (CRCT) answer sheets. Headed up by a blue-ribbon panel of business and community leaders, the investigation is expected to be complete by mid- June. Initial reports have found that the district has “tight” testing security and is using many exemplary practices. To strengthen our processes, the panel made a number of recommendations that we implemented for the 2010 CRCT, which our students took in April."

Yup, that's it. That's all she has to say about it.

What "initial reports" is she talking about?

The only official investigation of the Atlanta Public Schools CRCT scandal is being conducted by the "Blue Ribbon Panel" (wow, what PR genius came up with THAT name?) and will be released Monday, Aug. 2, five months after it began and more than two and a half months later than it was due.

Cite your sources, Bev, then explain how your idea of "tight security" squares with the Panel's findings on Monday, when it becomes clear that the Atlanta Public Schools, under your direct supervision, have indeed set a new standard for cheating on standardized tests; a disgrace unequaled by any school district in U.S. history.

You can read the whole issue of "The Atlanta Educator" online, but I won't link to it here, on principle. Any publication that would print such garbage doesn't deserve a link.

Can I use this school-issued credit card to buy me some common sense?

Here's the text of an email I received today from "The Friends of Courtney English," who is our Seat 7 representative on the Atlanta Public Schools Board.

Dear Atlanta Community Member,

As an elected member of the Atlanta Board of Education, I've made a mistake and I hope you will accept my apology.

I did not fully understand the terms of use of a credit card issued to me by the Atlanta Public Schools. I misinterpreted a document that accompanied the credit card when it was issued to me. I mistakenly thought I could use the credit card for personal use as long as I immediately reimbursed the district for any charges incurred.

This is not the policy. I never should have made any personal purchases, period.

I am responsible for $855.83 of disallowed charges made to the credit card between May 29 and June 30, 2010. These charges included an airline ticket, food, gratuities, hotel charges, and other sundries. On July 14, 2010, I reimbursed the district in full for all disallowed charges.

I apologize for this mistake. I take seriously my responsibilities as an elected school board member. I will never make this mistake again.

Sincerely,

Courtney English

Board of Education Seat 7

friendsofCourtneyEnglish@gmail.com
.

And here's what I wrote back to him (corrected from earlier version, where I assumed Courtney was a "her"--rl):

Dear Courtney:

It takes character to admit you made a mistake. Now I hope you will insist on the people you supervise showing the same character.

It is a mistake to try to claim that the worst cheating scandal in the history of standardized testing was the result of some "poor disadvantaged children" trying hard to "correct their own mistakes," as YOUR Atlanta Public Schools spokesman Keith Browery put it when the cheating scandal broke.

To try to actually put this scandal on the backs on the children who were victimized--to, in essence, try to use those children as a shield to deflect criticism from the adults who perpetrated this fraud---now THAT is a mistake that makes yours seem trivial by comparison.

To take credit for being one of the top reformers in the country while in fact your success is largely based on fraudulent test scores (as Bev Hall has done, and is doing)--now THAT is a mistake. Yours is small potatoes compared to that.

When the cheating results are announced on Monday (with a healthy dollop of sugar-coating from the "Blue Ribbon" whatever-it-is, I'm sure), many of us will expect you, our elected leader, to correct some OTHER major mistakes that have been going on lately--like your unwillingness to insist on a permanent director for the Program for Exceptional Children for nearly THREE YEARS now.

Admitting you made a mistake because you're afraid some AJC reporter will find out about it using the Open Records Act is a small first step. (Someone gives you an Atlanta Public Schools credit card and you actually think it would be appropriate to use it for any personal purchases? Give me a break).

If you want forgiveness, show some real courage on Monday.

Let me just add this: does Courtney English not have a credit card of his own? How did it even enter his sphere of consciousness to use a taxpayer-funded credit card --provided for use to him as an elected official -- for personal use?

I think what really happened here is that Courtney English found out that someone from the AJC was sniffing around using the Open Records Act, and he (English) decided to cop a plea before the hammer fell.

How many other APS employees (including Board members) are wondering right now if their own credit card charges are going to be scrutinized now? (Hopefully, the answer is: all of them).

It's only a matter of time until....

Bev Hall and her cronies hear this.

Over/Under: Sept. 1, 2010. I'm feeling optimistic, so I'm going with before (under).

Leveraging the Chaos

In the next few weeks, there will be a tremendous amount of pressure on Bev Hall to step down. The CRCT cheating investigation report is just one reason. There's also the e-Rate scandal, and the news today that Atlanta leads the Metro (by a wide margin) in the percentage of elementary students who fail basic math. The PEC audit, which will also be released in the next couple of weeks, will be very damaging to Hall if it is an honest accounting of that disastrously dysfunctional program.

If you've been reading the AJC (particularly the Get Schooled blog) you see that anger over Hall's performance is rising, and it is now almost impossible to find anyone standing in support of her. This is not the sole gauge one would use to determine if she can survive these scandals, of course, but it is a gauge.

During the hunt for a new superintendent, I feel SPARK parents will have an opportunity to lobby--and obtain--some promises worth obtaining.

1. The Assistant Principal position at SPARK must be guaranteed and fully funded and parents must have the opportunity to participate in--and APPROVE THE HIRING OF--the permanent assistant principal.

This must not be like the principal-hiring process under Bev Hall, in which parents were invited to (under cloak of secrecy) give their opinions, but did not have any sway over the decision itself, which was entirely Bev Hall's to make.

SPARK parents must be allowed to veto any candidate they do not find suitable. The reason we need to ask for this, and the reason we should get it, are as follows:

We didn't get a say in the hiring of Yolonda Brown, who is an energetic principal, and who seems to be generally well-liked, but who was hired on the basis of test score improvements at her prior posting which are now going to be shown to have been fraudulent.

This does not mean Ms. Brown is a fraud. But it does mean that we hired someone who, by no fault of her own (I'm assuming), delivered a resume that was inaccurate.

So we really don't know what we have with Ms. Brown. Is she really a gifted principal, or just a Bev Hall loyalist who benefitted from the CRCT cheating that went on under her watch (if not with her participation)?

We deserve to be able to give her the support of a very capable fully vetted assistant principal and we should demand this. Not suggest it, not push for it, but absolutely demand it. Our leverage here would be to call for the ouster of Ms. Brown, and that's something the Hall administration (or its successor) would very much want to avoid.

2. The administration of SPARK and the key liaisons between SPARK personnel and the APS central office should be summoned to a meeting at which we, the parents, lay down some new rules of the road. SPARK parents should use this opportunity to make it clear that they (the parents) are going to be heavily involved in the day-to-day management of our community public school and that all APS employees had better get used to that way of doing business. The PTO should talk to parent members about what forms this new involvement would take, but it seems clear to me that parent oversight of school processes must be greatly ramped up. School employees resist this with all their might, but we must not be pushed back.

3. The current spokesman for the Atlanta Public Schools, Keith Bromery, must resign or be fired. He has been outrageously disingenuous with the parent/stakeholders of the Atlanta Public Schools. This cannot be tolerated. We must insist to the Board that it hire a spokesperson for the district who will accurately convey the truth, as unpleasant as it may sometimes be, to parents with children in the district. That is the spokesperson's responsibility--to tell the truth. Not to insist that the biggest cheating scandal in the history of standardized testing was due to a few disadvantaged kids who were just trying to correct their own answers "as they'd been instructed to do."

I had a conversation with Keith in late 2009 in which I called him out for his shameless playing of the race card, and I will be happy to talk to the parents about what I see as his dereliction of duty. As a journalist, I am offended by his lack of honesty in dealing with the press, but as a parent, I'm outraged at his willingness to lie to parents.

4. We need to tell our Board that we want the Superintendent selection process to be much more transparent and open to parental input than it has ever been before, and actually follow through by attending Board meetings and confronting our elected Board reps when necessary.

Go with your gut

I have been mulling over what to say about our recent 12-hour IEP marathon with the Atlanta Public Schools' Program for Exceptional Children team assigned to our little boy Vance. Since my mother taught me to always try to say something nice about someone, I'll say this: the 13 people assembled to try to figure out an appropriate way to educate our autistic son never once complained about the length of the meetings or the unconscionably hot temperature in the SPARK conference room. (Really? It's not enough to subject us to the Meetings That Never End; we also must have them in a sweatbox?)...

There is no question some (not all, but some) of the PEC people in that room are dedicated to jobs that provide many opportunities to receive criticism and few to receive praise. But as I often say, none of us is being graded on intentions. It's a given that we all really want to help special-needs children. Nobody gets extra credit for having a super-empathetic attitude.

We're being measured on performance and execution, and on that score, the PEC employees assigned to our child have performed poorly and in some cases disastrously so. I now count thirteen separate serious incidents (in three years) in which PEC employees have willfully failed to comply with the IDIEA law specifying what they're supposed to do for our child. I'm not talking about little missteps here--I'm talking about major screw-ups.

But this posting isn't going to be a rant about that. What I want to do now is talk directly to all of you parents whose children are in the PEC and who have a feeling in your gut that despite the pleasantries you've exchanged with your child's IEP team members and their many little speeches about how hard they're trying and how well they think they're doing by your child, you are still deeply anxious. Something doesn't feel right.

The answer, more than likely, is that your gut is telling you the truth. So trust your gut. Get an advocate. (Ours is the excellent Rachael Barron with the Zimring Law Firm). Rachael has quite literally plucked our child out of the Maelstrom and helped us put him in a private program, the Summit Learning Center, where he is now doing much better and un-learning some of the horrible behaviors he had adopted in the chaotic special-ed classroom at SPARK, under the supervision of an untrained, inexperienced young male paraprofessional who had no qualifications, skill or enthusiasm for the task at hand.

Either PEC employees will willfully try to steer you away from the resources your child needs because of their own budgetary targets, or they'll deny your reasonable, appropriate requests because they don't have adequate personnel (not enough speech therapists, for example) or they'll say no because they don't understand the IDIEA law requires them to say yes. It doesn't matter if their motives are pure or dirty. What matters is that you are not gonna get what you need for your child unless you bring muscle to the meeting. Trust me, going in there with a forceful attitude and with a binder full of research on IDIEA is not enough. I tried it.

Take my advice. Get an advocate for your child. You're going to be up against some really difficult obstacles (and again, I can only speak about the Atlanta Public Schools' special-ed folks; the people in your district may be more trustworthy).

Good luck, and stick with it.

When Educators Are Functionally Illiterate, Part 2

Click on the bingo card to expand it; it's worth it!

Below is an actual unedited email from our son's IEP coordinator at Morningside Elementary School last year. I won't further embarrass the poor guy (who now has reportedly completed his Ph.D) by mentioning his name here, but let's just say that his possession of a Ph.D. proves that some colleges will give sheepskins to any fool who will write them enough checks.

To set the scene: I had been writing and calling this guy for more than a month to pin him down on a summer education program for our son.

When he finally got back to me, weeks too late, this, in its entirety, is what he wrote.

Thank you for your patience regarding an answer for Vance to have Extended
School Year beyond the dates that have been established by the system.

recieved an answer on Friday, April 3rd, 2009.

Being that the program has been in place for the student and that there are no attendance issues, Vance will be offered the opportunity to participate in the ESY according to the dates that were provided to you in the previous e-mail.

due to the severity of his disability, the rate of progress on his goals and the skills that are emerging at this time.

I look forward in meeting with the team to create the Extended Year Plan for Vance.
Thank you,
(name withheld)

Now you tell me whether somebody who can't do better than that should be able to get a high school diploma, never mind a Ph.D.
Here's my point: Do you, my fellow parents, really and truly understand who is setting the standards for your child's education, or are you letting white liberal guilt interfere with your responsibility to demand the very best from our taxpayer-funded system?

When Educators Are Functionally Illiterate, Part 1

OMFG.