34justice

Author: Ben Spielberg

  • Student Advocates Oppose Both Bad Teaching and Bad Lawsuit

    Note: A version of this piece originally appeared in Valerie Strauss’s column in The Washington Post. ————————————————————————————————- Vergara v. California, a lawsuit challenging three components of teacher employment law in California’s Ed Code that began on January 27, has garnered considerable media attention.  The plaintiffs’ legal team contends that due process…

  • Students Matter. Teachers Do, Too.

    Imagine reading the following statement on a website: We think it’s simple: reward…passionate, [successful students] and hold those accountable who are failing… [S]triking down the following laws…will create an opportunity for lawmakers, teachers, administrators and community leaders to design a system that’s good for teachers and students… [Law 1: As…

  • Vergara v. California: The Agendas, the Facts, and Recommendations for California Law

    Ted Boutros believes corporations that destroy lives with reckless policies should suffer minimal financial penalties in court.  Boutros’s partner, Marcellus McRae, proudly defends white-collar criminals.  Eli Broad pretended to support Proposition 30, a ballot initiative designed to prevent massive cuts to public education, while secretly funding the No on 30…

  • Starbucks’ Greed Versus San Jose’s Living Wage

    The San Jose City Council will soon decide whether to condone corporate greed and poverty-level wages for workers or apply city law to Starbucks and a large developer who want to lease property at the San Jose Convention Center.  San Jose would normally require businesses leasing the property to pay…

  • Financial Incentives and Social Good: Dan Pallotta’s Faulty Assumptions

    At the suggestion of WOVIN founder Darius Golkar, I recently watched Dan Pallotta’s TED Talk on the nonprofit sector.  Golkar recommended this video to me when I asked him why WOVIN donates only 50% of its profits to charitable causes. Golkar founded WOVIN because clothes we donate to Goodwill, The…

  • Approaching Education Data the Nate Silver Way

    My girlfriend’s very hospitable and generous family gave me some great gifts for the holidays when I stayed with them in upstate New York.  As I rocked my new Teach For America T-shirt in the Rochester airport on Christmas Eve, my cursory overview of Nate Silver’s new book, The Signal…

  • Working Together for Educational Equity: What’s Missing from the TFA Debate

    Teach For America (TFA) articles are all the rage right now.  Over the past month and a half, the four articles linked below have received particular attention: “I Quit Teach for[sic] America” by Olivia Blanchard (The Atlantic, September 23) “Remember the ‘I Quit Teach for[sic] America’ essay?  Here’s the counterpoint.…

  • The Shutdown: Blame Republicans but Watch the Democrats

    I wrote an email to my political mailing list on August 21, 2011 entitled “Does the White House have Power?”  At that time, many mainstream Democrats insisted that Barack Obama was an innocent victim of an intransigent Congress, that he ardently supported progressive priorities like a public health care option…

  • Voting with Our Dollars for Chipotle

    Vote with your dollars.  That’s the message Mike Levy, my tenth grade history and ethics teacher, delivered to Moorestown Friends School’s graduating class in 2004 (the same year 34justice author Jon Zaid delivered a convincing anti-war speech to that same class).  That idea – that I send a loud message…

  • TFA Effectiveness

    Several people have sent me articles discussing Mathematica’s recent research study that examined Teach For America (TFA) math teacher effectiveness.  This study is significant because, to my knowledge, it is the first large-scale study on TFA to randomly assign students to classrooms.  Its experimental design provides fairly convincing support for…