First Post

Hello, everybody,

This is my first attempt at putting up and maintaining a blog.

My main interests here will be education, public policy, math, astronomy, and science.

Recently retired from DC Public Schools, I have been doing some research on educational progress (or lack thereof) in that school system before and after the reign of our media-darling school Chancellor, Michelle Rhee. A lot of people have been throwing around a lot of rhetoric about how they are trying to put children first, but there has not been nearly enough in the way of actual facts. I have been trying to remedy this imbalance.

Some of my previous entries on this topic were sent as emails to various email list-serves made up of people interested in bettering the schools, but in a rather different way than Rhee. I will try to collect some of my previous posts and publish it here. One of those list-serves is http://groups.yahoo.com/group/concerned4DCPS/

I also posted on http://realeducationreformdc.blogspot.com/ which is a good resource as well.

Warning: since we have lots and lots of schools in DC, a good bit of my data will be in the form of huge spreadsheets comparing schools where Rhee replaced the previous administrations with the schools that did not experience such changes. The data take a while to wade through, and the arithmetic that I had to do was tedious in the extreme, but the results are quite informative. If you can compare, add, subtract, multiply and divide two decimals, and if you understand the meaning of percents and can read a graph, you should have no difficulty in understanding the results. (No algebra, geometry, or calculus is needed!)

I will have to learn how to post the spreadsheets and, in general, how to set up and maintain this blog.

I have another website that I put up about five years ago. Most of the things on it are still valid, but I imagine most of the links are probably broken. FWIW, here is the URL:

http://home.earthlink.net/~gfbranden/GFB_Home_Page.html

GFB