Schools Matter: Karin Klein and Los Angeles Times still supplying snake oil

First published on Schools Matter on February 09, 2015

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"With the long-held popular notion that "private" schooling is better than "public" education, along with the conservative media assault on public education, parents were easily enticed to hitch their children onto the charter school bandwagon."—Professor Antonia Darder

The Los Angeles Times published their Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education endorsements for the March 3, 2015 primary election. I had the following to say:

You have to love the tenuous justifications behind those Los Angeles Times ‪#‎LAUSD‬ endorsements—particularly their repetition of the phrase "evidence based." Problem is that none of the policies that they and their endorsed candidates support are evidence based. Herein lies Karin Klein and company's most egregious fault, namely conflating policy papers with actual research. I recall two years ago during my LA Times LAUSD BOE interview when she said that VAM was research proven and I challenged her to produce a single juried (peer reviewed) paper demonstrating it was. All she could do is glare at me. What passes for research in neoliberal corporate reform circles is not recognized as such in academia. Since Klein and her ilk are little more than stenographers for the plutocrat class, I suppose it doesn't make much sense for me to get too riled up about this.