By Kaitlin Pennington Yesterday, my Bellwether Education Partners colleague Andy Rotherham wrote on this blog that “as long as the Democrats don’t burn the place down, it’s going to be hard for them to have a worse convention than the GOP just did.” Well, it came close. The Democratic National Convention delegates didn’t seem to get...

By Max Marchitello  Although it was light on ideas, the four days of the Republican National Convention were nevertheless exciting at times. A few states staged a walkout in an attempt to secure a roll call vote. From Florida to Washington, we debated what does or does not count as plagiarism. We pretended to be...

By Kirsten Schmitz Donald Trump has promised to make America great again. One thing he says he won’t look to change? Social Security. While maintaining the Social Security status quo might seem at the very least unobtrusive, it neglects an opportunity to extend coverage to the over 1 million teachers and 6.5 million government workers whose jobs...

By Peter Cunningham  In the spring of 2009, newly-elected President Barack Obama took a meeting in the Oval Office with civil rights leader Al Sharpton. Reverend Sharpton told the White House he wanted to talk about education so Education Secretary Arne Duncan also attended. Sharpton also brought along an unlikely guest: former House Speaker and GOP...

A new RNC dispatch from Peter Cunningham, executive director of Education Post: If Republican conservatives stand for one thing above all else when it comes to public education, it is local control. Just as some conservatives see tax cuts as the only answer to an ailing economy, some also see local control as the antidote to...

By Max Marchitello The Veep-stakes are over! The pick is in. Mike Pence, the sitting governor of Indiana, will run as Donald Trump’s vice president. Although he has only been governor for a few years, Pence also served in the U.S. House of Representatives. Putting those records together, Bellwether Education Partners’ Max Marchitello takes stock of what...

By Caroline Bermudez The great Joan Didion rose to literary fame chronicling her love-hate relationship with her native California. In Where I Was From, she unleashed a cool invective about the state’s less than firm grasp of reality that still applies today: “A good deal about California, in its own preferred terms, does not add...

By Peter Cunningham The Democratic Party has always stood for one thing: we fight for the little guy. In the field of education, the little guy is the student. He can’t vote. He doesn’t have much say about his school. He mostly has to do what he’s told. And he is trusting us to do...

By Lindsay Sturman The epic battle over how to improve public education in California grew more stratified last week when a bill to mildly reform California’s onerous teacher employment laws was gutted beyond recognition and quickly died. With it went the hope that our elected officials would finally decide the question which is at the...

By Ben Austin Last month, my organization, Students Matter, issued its support of California’s AB 934 – a state bill that, though imperfect, honestly attempted to address the grave defaults in the state’s teacher tenure, dismissal and layoff laws challenged by the student plaintiffs in Vergara v. California. (A 2014 ruling in that case sided...