de Blasio’s legacy, the problems with ed tech, & please support our work for smaller classes going forward!

Sept. 28, 2021

• This Thursday Sept. 30 at noon, I will be speaking on de Blasio’s education record and legacy at a CUNY forum entitled A ‘Tale of Two Cities’ Revisited: The Social Democracy Experiments of the de Blasio Years. To check out the other speakers and issues to be discussed and to RSVP, please click here

 

• Last Saturday, on my WBAI radio show “Talk out of School,”  I gave a brief recap of the latest NYC education news and then interviewed Audrey Watters, author of an important new book called Teaching Machines, on the history and evolution of ed tech, and how erroneous and exaggerated claims have been made for decades about its potential to improve learning.  We also discussed how its continued expansion threatens to further undermine both student privacy and the quality of education in our public schools.  You can listen to the podcast here; I think it was one of the best interviews we’ve done.

 

• Finally, because of the pandemic, Class Size Matters has been unable to hold our regular fundraising Skinny Award dinner for the last two years.  If you’d like to help ensure our work continues for parent empowerment, budget transparency, student privacy, and most importantly, class size reduction, please consider making a tax-deductible donation here.

Some of my recent blog posts concerning the pandemic, class size, and testing are below.

Thanks, as always for your support,  Leonie

·  Risk of Covid worse in crowded lunchrooms; and in many schools lunch already starts at 9:30 AM

·  The uselessness of the interim assessments that the DOE purchased for $36M

·  US Dept. of Education “Blue Ribbon” NYC schools; as usual difficult to understand their choices

·  DOE still has not posted last year’s class size data, after repeated promises to do so.

·  Schools have reopened, as overcrowded as ever, with insufficient Covid screening