Schools Matter

Guest Post: Why Reformers Misunderstand Their Own Research

2012-02-13T15:34:00.001-05:00

By John Thompson

According to the latest Gates Foundation study, "Gathering Feedback for Teaching," student surveys are more reliable than outside observers in evaluating teachers. I agree with the researchers that such a finding should be no surprise. Even though I trust my students' judgments more than those of principals, or even trained outside evaluators, however, I would think twice about incorporating those surveys into high-stakes evaluations. Do we want to institutionalize a conflict of interest on educators, tempting some to lower their standards in the hope that their students would reciprocate when evaluating them? Do we want to take the risk that popularity issues will undercut collaboration among teachers?

The New Teacher Project (TNTP) makes a big issue of the Gates finding that value-added results are the better predictor of future value-added results. Well duh! Since they are mostly studying the students' trajectories within their school, it is no surprise that "Gathering Feedback for Teaching" also concludes that 2/3rds of the variance it found was due to factors other than the teacher. (Emphasis is their's) But, why doesn't the TNTP recognize that such a finding contradicts its faith in teacher quality? The students current test score trajectories are based on the sum of their in-school and out-of-school experiences, not just that teacher's skill. The human observers are just trying to evaluate that teacher's instruction, and it constitutes only about 15 to 20% of the students' outcomes. The question which the TNTP should ask is whether the test score trajectories of students from the entire district provide evidence for evaluating the value-added of teachers in schools where it is harder to raise student performance.

Secondly, why would the TNTP think that such a finding has anything to do with the policies they advocate? The question is whether test score growth models are valid enough for high stakes decisions. More precisely, the question is how many teachers would be wrongly indicted as ineffective? Why would an educator commit to the toughest schools if he or she faced a 20% or a 10% or 25% chance EACH YEAR of being subject to humiliation, constant stress, and perhaps dismissal due to circumstances beyond their control? How many teachers per hall need to be inaccurately charged as ineffective before the morale of the entire building is compromised?

Why can the TNTP not see the three prime lessons of the new Gates research?

The MET's findings "suggest that the classroom practices of the majority of teachers, as many as 85 percent, are remarkably similar." If the goal is not the mass scapegoating of teachers, then stakes do not need to be attached to data for professional development.
Teachers score the lowest on the all-important factors of emotional connections, communication, and teaching analysis, problem-solving, and inquiry. But the MET does nothing but ask districts to stop imposing counter-productive test prep and abusive evaluations by untrained, overworked, stressed-out administrators.
The most "vexing question" is whether value-added experiments are biased due to the "infinite number of additional student and peer characteristics." The MET promises to address a few of the easiest of those issues in the next report.

Typically, I am less annoyed by Gates researchers than by the true believing teacher-bashers at the TNTP or extremists like it's founder, Michelle Rhee, but I want to challenge their single most illogical soundbite. As usual, "Gathering Feedback for Teaching" cites the TNTP's polemical "The Widget Effect," and concludes that it's expensive and dangerous experiment "significantly outperforms traditional measures." No! They outperform the NON-USE of traditional measures. Nowhere in the MET literature do they ask what it would take to reform more normative procedures or why principals have not even terminated ineffective probationary teachers who have no due process rights. The MET shows how easy it can be to identify the bottom performers, but it does not mention how hard it is to find qualified replacements.

The TNTP has done its damage, however, by starting the "teacher quality" movement down a disgusting road, so now we should concentrate on non-ideological educators, such as those who have advised the MET. We could then build on two other findings.

Firstly, both evaluations and professional development require the training of objective evaluators. We should make the investments necessary to nurture principals and others so they can gain the ability to recognize good teaching and mentor others. We should welcome dissent and heed the Gates' call for considering a robust variety of perceptions. Secondly, we must invest in creating learning cultures and professional development so that teachers can better communicate, challenge, engage, and nurture their students. The best way to do that, of course, is to use diagnostic data, which is more accurate because it has not been tarnished by gamesmanship created by high stakes.

Dr. John Thompson was an award-winning historian, lobbyist, and guerilla-gardener who became an award-winning inner city teacher after crack and gangs hit his neighborhood. He blogs at thisweekineducation.com, and huffingtonpost.com, and is writing a book on 18 years of idealistic politics in the classroom and realistic politics outside.

Simple Math

2012-02-13T09:02:00.004-05:00

Simple Math (coming to a state near you [1])

Common Core Standards adopted

+

Silence from teachers, professional organizations, parents

+

New tests, more tests, pre-tests, post-tests

+

Silence from teachers, professional organizations, parents

+

test-prep textbooks/ test-prep software aligned with CCS

+

Silence from teachers, professional organizations, parents

+

VAM teacher accountability, teacher merit pay

+

Silence from teachers, professional organizations, parents

+

Hiring TFA recruits, expanding corporate charter schools

+

Silence from teachers, professional organizations, parents

=

The end of universal public education*

*Hint: 1% wins again

[1] Like in South Carolina: Student testing to change (Charleston, SC, Post and Courier)

Charter Schools and Students with Disabilities by Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates (COPAA)

2012-02-12T22:23:00.003-05:00

"It is not legally or morally acceptable that these so-called “schools of choice” that are concentrated in urban communities and supported with public funds, should be permitted to operate as segregated learning environments where students are more isolated by race, socioeconomic class, disability, and language than the public school district from which they were drawn." — COPAA (Charter Schools and Students with Disabilities p. 42)

On the heels of the recent damning Southern Poverty Law Center report Special Education in New Orleans Public Schools, which further exposed the lucrative charter-voucher industry as a bastion of discrimination, comes this equally condemnatory paper from the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates (COPAA) illustrating how the "market model" of charters and vouchers abjectly and utterly fails the most vulnerable and disadvantaged of all students.

Charter Schools and Students With Disabilities Final

Mark Your Calendar: Occupy the DOE in DC March 30-April 2

2012-02-12T13:26:00.000-05:00

United Opt Out National endorses Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Together by creating ACTION in solidarity.

PLEASE READ THIS ENTIRE POST FOR ALL INFORMATION ON THE OCCUPATION. WE OPT OUT OF CORPORATE EDUCATION REFORM.

It is time to end Wall Street Occupation of Education.

We asked – they said NO. We wrote – they said NO. We sent them research – they said NO. We say NO. We opt out. We will put a screeching halt to corporate education by saying NO to the test.

We will occupy the Department of Education in DC from March 30^th to April 2^nd. On-going planning can be found at our Facebook Occupy the DOE page.

It’s time to put the public back in public education. Occupy the DOE and show them who education REALLY BELONGS to.

Join United Opt Out National & #OCCUPYDOE in Washington D.C.

April Fools!
No Child Left Behind – Fool Me Once.
Race to the Top – We Won’t be Fooled Again.

Join us. In solidarity with Occupy Movements everywhere.
See SCHEDULE.

Download summary of schedule.

Share this letter to promote Occupy the DOE in DC.

See here for Occupy the DOE in DC posters created by Jay Rivett from Occupy ART: Indiana.
Wondering where to stay? Check the map here for hotel locations and more.

See here for Occupy DOE Rules of Engagement

Professional Betrayal on the Heels of Political Betrayal

2012-02-10T20:26:00.010-05:00

All across the U.S., state after state is falling victim to the accountability juggernaut fueled by the Common Core standards movement.

The Obama administration, led by Secretary Duncan, has proven in the past three years that promises of hope and change were mere masks for increasing the very worst of No Child Left Behind (NCLB)—now manifesting themselves as Race to the Top and opting out of NCLB. Many of us, however, are not completely surprised by political betrayal, but we are more stunned by the growing professional betrayal we are witnessing in our professional organizations, such as the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

The most recent evidence of that failure is a message to NCTE's members from the Council's president, Keith Gilyard. This statement reminds many of us of Obama's and Duncan's ability to offer messages that address social equity and human agency while masking actions that work against them both.

Supporting Common Core standards sends messages that reinforce the current move to de-professionalize teachers, since the implicit point of adopting new standards suggests that somehow we have been teaching the wrong content, that we are unable to know what we should be teaching, and that some central authority must provide the core of our profession for us.

Nothing could be further from the truth, however.

Focusing on new standards also distracts education reform from the genuine problems facing schools. Education is not failing from a lack of quality standards, nor a lack of quality tests.

Education is struggling against the hurdles posed by impoverished children, persistent gaps in equity and outcomes for children of color, special needs students, and the rising population of English language learners—all of which correlate strongly with the inadequacies of high-stakes, standardized tests.

Standards and testing mask and will perpetuate education problems; they cannot and do not address them.

But the betrayal doesn't stop at the unpardonable mismatch of solutions to problems (and the insanity of doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results). The betrayal includes this comment from Gilyard:

"Of course, I am aware that the course we are on as we negotiate admittedly rugged educational terrain is unsatisfying to some bloggers and commentators who would prefer that our organization expressly condemn, for example, policies such as the common core standards. We have never endorsed those standards; neither do we profit financially from them. And I should hardly have to add that any accusation that we implicitly embrace them because we have not publicly opposed them is an obvious either-or fallacy. What we have done is to focus on what we are best equipped to do: support teachers in their work environments and make reasonable arguments about education to the stakeholders who are willing to listen to us in good faith."

It appears that once veteran teachers of English raise their voices against insane solutions, those teachers become "bloggers and commentators"—their professional autonomy not just denied, but obliterated.

And then, Gilyard makes a statistical claim that suggests only majority views are ethical views:

"A recent polling of a random selection of NCTE members indicates that about twenty percent of our members are moderately pessimistic or pessimistic regarding how new standards will influence their teaching or their students' learning. By contrast, fifty-nine percent reported that they were moderately optimistic or optimistic about the potential influence of new standards."

I have learned, however, from James Baldwin, Howard Zinn, and Martin Luther King, Jr., to name only a few, that being right is often a minority stance.

NCTE appears poised to view being right as a popularity contest, and the organization is blinded by its claim to be a part of the process, thus unable to see that the organization and its members' professionalism are not influencing the accountability/standards/testing process now underway but are being used by the political and corporate elite to serve their interests at the expense of American students.

Common Core standards and the maniacal testing process that history shows us is to follow feed the "bureaucratization of the mind" that Paulo Freire has warned us against. Any support of Common Core is indirect and direct support of children being held accountable for standardized tests still poisoned by racial, social, and gender bias; of teacher accountability for their students subjected to that inequity; and of the perverse swelling of profits for textbook and testing companies.

NCTE's members deserve professional support for professional autonomy. For now, that promise is dying.

Previous Pieces on NCTE:

-----. (2011, November 21). "[N]ot the time...to follow the line of least resistance." Daily Kos. Reposted at Schools Matter and truthout.

-----. (2011, April 5). A case against standards. The Answer Sheet/Washington Post.

Christie Goes After Education Law Center and NJEA Leader

2012-02-10T20:20:00.005-05:00

Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey is going head to head with the state's teacher union and the Education Law Center as part of his continued march towards school privatization and deep cuts in public education funding.

Who will resign first?

From the Asbury Park Press

Christie rebuffs NJEA’s request he resign, saying “Life isn’t fair”

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Michael Symons

Gov. Chris Christie, whose call for the New Jersey Education Association’s executive director to resign was met by a suggestion by the union that the governor step down, not surprisingly isn’t quitting.

In a Statehouse news conference today, Christie kept his answer succinct — at least at first — when asked to chime in on Vincent Giordano saying that Christie, not he, ought to be the one leaving.

“My reaction to Vince asking me to resign is: Life isn’t fair. I’m not going to resign,” Christie said.

Giordano’s not quitting, either.

Asked later if he was keeping his answer brief to put Wednesday’s brimstone behind him, Christie said that wasn’t the case — and then, to prove the point, spoke for five minutes reiterating his disgust that Giordano dismissed providing tuition aid to students to help them leave failing urban schools in part by saying “life’s not always fair.”

“No, I was just trying to be cute,” Christie said. “I was trying to broaden my portfolio.”

“People misspeak all the time. I’ve been known to do that once in a while. But, see, I think that’s what they really believe. I think they really believe that poor children and their families shouldn’t have the right to leave a failing school because it will affect their membership. It will affect the dues they collect. And it will affect his $500,000 in compensation,” Christie said.

The fight with the NJEA has widened into the latest in a years-long battle between Christie and labor unions.

Bob Master, District 1 legislative and political director of the Communications Workers of America, contrasted Christie’s condemnation of Giordano with his lack of a reaction to recent comments by presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who said he’s not concerned about the very poor because there are safety net programs in place.

“Where was Gov. Christie’s anger when his friend Mitt Romney said he does not care about poor people?” Master said. “The governor seems to be suffering from a case of selective outrage, and — surprise, surprise — it is hard working public employees that have made him mad again.”

Christie said Giordano’s comments differed from Romney’s in a few ways.

“They’re different because if Giordano’s remarks were inconsistent with his life’s conduct, then he could get the pass that Mitt Romney got. By the way, let’s remember that Mitt Romney apologized for those remarks, and Vince Giordano has not, to this point,” Christie said.

“But secondly, there’s nothing in Mitt Romney’s history to show that he has anything but great care and concern for the disadvantaged, giving millions and millions and millions of dollars to charity to help not only his church, who reaches out and helps the disadvantaged, but also other charities that help the disadvantaged across time,” he said. “Vince Giordano’s professional career has proven that he cares more about protecting a failed status quo that is undeniably failing urban children and their families than he cares about making real change.

“And so the difference is the conduct that underlies the comments. If the comments were inconsistent with what his professional record had been, then you just give a guy a pass, if he’s willing to apologize for them, for having misspoken,” Christie said. “But, one, he hasn’t apologized. And, two, in my opinion it’s not inconsistent with the conduct of him as executive director of the NJEA.”

Christie added the Education Law Center to his targets Thursday, saying the decades of litigation by the Newark-based law clinic has driven up spending on education while hurting results.

“That statement was so appalling and such a window into their philosophy about public education,” Christie said. “The biggest window was as a defense, he’s using it as a defense that he’s a founding member of the Education Law Center. I would hang my head in shame to say I was a founding member of the Education Law Center. That place has done more to ruin education in New Jersey than any single organization I’ve ever seen.”

The brave new tests

2012-02-09T11:03:00.000-05:00

Sent to the Baltimore Sun, Feb. 9

We should all “worry about overwhelming students, schools with tests” (2/7/12).

As the Sun points out, the new testing will be extremely time-consuming. There is no scientific evidence, however, that increasing the amount of testing done will increase student achievement.

As the Sun points out, the new tests need to be given online, and schools don’t have the technology needed to administer the tests. Not to worry, the test publishers and computer companies will be happy to sell it to them, as well as sell them costly new equipment as the old equipment rapidly becomes obsolete.

As the Sun points out, the tests will be used to evaluate teachers. Study after study, however, has shown that this kind of evaluation does not produce reliable results. It also encourages pumping up test scores without real learning.

We all understand the need to assess students and evaluate teachers, but the brave new online tests are not the way to do it.

Stephen Krashen

original article: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-tests-20120206,0,841535.story

Evolution (?) of Arne Duncan's position on the use of standardized tests for teacher evaluation

2012-02-07T13:30:00.001-05:00

Arne Duncan’s position on the use of value-added test scores seems to have changed in the last two years. In August, 2010, he seems to be saying that test score gains are a measure of teacher effectiveness. In May, 2011, he seems to want to use value-added measures as part of teacher evaluation, and in February, 2012 he seems to be against the whole idea.

August, 2010: Effectiveness = gains on tests (value-added)?
“U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Monday that parents have a right to know if their children's teachers are effective, endorsing the public release of information about how well individual teachers fare at raising their students' test scores.” (http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/16/local/la-me-0817-teachers-react-20100817)

May, 2011: Use both observations and value-added measures.
“Together with you (teachers), I want to develop a system of evaluation that draws on meaningful observations and input from your peers, as well as a sophisticated assessment that measures individual student growth, creativity, and critical thinking. States, with the help of teachers, are now developing better assessments so you will have useful information to guide instruction and show the positive impact you are having on our children.”
http://www.ed.gov/blog/2011/05/in-honor-of-teacher-appreciation-week-an-open-letter-from-arne-duncan-to-americas-teachers/

Feb, 2012: Don’t use value-added measures?
“Teacher evaluation should never, ever be based on test scores.” (Arne Duncan, http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/2/7/ed-school-arne-duncan-education/)

Note that if value-added measures are used even for just part of teacher evaluation, this means that we will have to test students in both the fall and spring, to control for gains and losses over the summer. This doubles the already massive amount of testing to be done.

Nobody objects to teachers being evaluated on their effectiveness. Using gains on standardized tests is a bad way to do it.

2012-02-07T02:20:00.002-05:00

Need for better evaluation system
Published in USA Today, Feb. 7, 2012
The article "States weaken tenure rights for teachers" emphasizes the importance of evaluating teacher effectiveness. A major problem is that these evaluations are often based on students' gains on standardized tests, called "value-added" measures.
A number of studies have shown that value-added measures are very unstable: Teachers' ratings based on previous years are weak predictors of test scores at the end of a year with new students. A teacher who succeeds in boosting scores with one group will not necessarily succeed with others. Different tests can result in different scores for the same teacher.
Value-added evaluations also ignore the huge impact of factors beyond the teachers' control. Finally, there are ways of pumping up test scores without student learning, including teaching test-taking strategies and making sure weak students don't take the test.
Nobody objects to teachers being evaluated on their effectiveness. Using gains on standardized tests is a bad way to do it.
Stephen Krashen, professor emeritus; University of Southern California; Los Angeles

Jeff McQuillan: Books before bytes

2012-02-05T22:34:00.000-05:00

Jeff McQuillan: "Books before bytes"
re (Michael Hiltzik)

Sent to the Los Angeles Times, Feb. 5, 2012
To the Editor:

Kudos to Michael Hiltzik for his column ("Hyping tech will not help students," February 5) criticizing federal officials for overselling the benefits of technology to K-12 schools. As co-producer of the most popular educational podcast in the world (ESLPod.com's English as a Second Language Podcast), I'm no enemy of new technology.

But our students need nutrition, health care, quality teachers and librarians, and (especially here in California) something to read in their near-empty school libraries, the worst in the nation. iPads, iPods, and Kindles are great, but first things first: books before bytes.

Jeff McQuillan, Ph.D.
Co-producer of English as a Second Language Podcast,
former Associate Professor of Education, California State University, Fullerton,
and author of The Literacy Crisis: False Claims, Real Solutions (1998)

Original article:http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20120205,0,639053.column
----------------

Wild Dreams about Anonymous and Testing

2012-02-05T10:36:00.000-05:00

Last night I was re-reading a terrific little book from 1976 by Don Martin, George Overholt, and Wayne Urban: Accountability in American Education: A Critique. The book brings so many elements of the current edu-mess into focus, while giving a long view of history. What is evident in re-reading this book is that the threats to democracy that the authors feared in 1976 from the encroaching accountability juggernaut have become much scarier and much more real since then. Some would say inevitable.

The book reminds us of some of the history behind the stealing of the language of learning by social control behaviorists and the takeover of the knowledge definition by epistemological thugs who define what knowledge is and how it is measured. These moves have had crushing effects on humane pedagogy and schooling, while strengthening and centralizing the administration of schools far beyond what are now the minor functionaries of principals, boards of education, and even superintendents.

The Texas Tribune story below, in fact, that includes the recent epiphany by the current Texas State Superintendent, indicates clearly that he is one of many who sees the writing on the wall, and it wasn't written by him. His years of loyalty to the accountability cause have simply worked to make his job insignificant or disposable as power is moved to the ultimate corporate level, which in the end in not national but international--corporate socialism without boundaries--a fascism beyond nation states.

The three main criticisms of education accountability in Accountability. . . are now evident on a steroidal level:

Based on abstracted, or radical empiricism. Not only has the distinction disappeared between knowledge and its poor proxy of a test score, but observable experience has been reduced down to a test score measurement that now is even used to predict future earning in adulthood by examining what adults earn who had high test scores. As if standardized tests were not designed to maintain power by the privileged whose families had money and test scores to begin with.

Elitist and conservative in nature. These standardized tests, even going back to the first IQ tests, have been used as "scientific" confirmation of elitist assumptions that even precede social Darwinism. History tells us that those who are in controlling power positions are there because of a divine, an evolutionary, or a psychometric reason, and the modern the testing system has been devised to reward the privileged and the elite and to punish everyone else by keeping them in their places. (The current value-added fad adds a balm for the liberal conscience by at least acknowledging that the poor who will always be behind can at least receive smiley faces for making "progress"). Oh yes, progress.

Based on maintaining inequality. Based on a hypocritical and self-serving notion of meritocracy that embraces institutional inequality, the most able are identified as those who have the resources from birth that are needed to grow or buy the highest scores through whatever means necessary, whether it is a 30k a year pre-school, a 40k a year private school, thousand dollar tutoring sessions for the SAT, or just daily doses of an unending supply of the cultural and social capital that provide the needed boost when occasion requires it.

Decisions now about school curriculum and student assessment are handled by national consortia composed of hired academic and technical guns paid by corporations and their foundations to shape what is taught in schools based on the stupid and arrogant conceptions of a handful of oligarchs and the CEOs of the Business Roundtable. To enforce the teaching of this emerging national curriculum and national test are teachers whose jobs will depend upon how well their charges do on these tests. This is called teacher evaluation, or half of it, anyway. The other half is based an instructional catechism designed and place in a rubric (scoring guide) to incentivize the creation of miniature and identical autocracies in every classroom of America, where learning to handle knowledge (test scores) is Job 1.

And so I was thinking about all this as I drifted off to sleep last night, and I had the craziest dream. I dreamed that the hacker group, Anonymous, had shut down every data port that handles test score data and had posted these demands on the Arne Duncan's Facebook page and on every state department of education webpage:

Stop using test data to keep students from receiving their diplomas or moving to the next grade
Stop using test data to evaluate teacher effectiveness in any way
Stop using test data to close down public schools
Stop using SAT or ACT test data to make admissions decisions for college
When students graduate from high school, all test scores and collected psychometric data will be handed to each student and all other records will be expunged from the data system.
If these demands are met, your data systems may continue to operate. If these demands are not met, your data systems will be made useless. You have until summer vacation to make these changes at state and national levels. Welcome back to the real world.

Wow, what a dream!

Oh yes, the piece from the Texas Tribune via NYTimes:

By MORGAN SMITH

When Christopher Chamness entered the third grade last year, he began to get stomach aches before school. His mother, Edy, said the fire had gone out of a child who she said had previously gone joyfully to his classes.

One day, when he was bored in class, Christopher broke a pencil eraser off in his ear canal. It was the tipping point for Ms. Chamness, a former teacher, and she asked to observe his Austin elementary school classroom. What she saw was a “work sheet distribution center” aimed at preparing students for the yearly assessments that they begin in third grade and that school districts depend upon for their accountability ratings.

Now, with Christopher in fourth grade, Ms. Chamness will take a more drastic step: She intends to pull him out of standardized testing altogether this spring, in protest of the system that she said had sapped her son’s love of learning.

Ms. Chamness’s approach is more radical than what most parents are willing to do — and district officials are quick to point out that school policy does not permit students to miss test days for any reason. But it is part of a budding backlash against standardized testing in the state that spawned No Child Left Behind and its assessment-driven accountability requirements.

It is a precarious time for Texas school districts. Faced with roughly $5.4 billion less in state financing, districts this year will administer new, more rigorous state exams called the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or Staar. And for the first time in high school, the assessments are linked to graduation requirements and final grades.

There is anxiety among school leaders, educators and parents about meeting the increased standards with fewer resources. In the Panhandle, the Hereford Independent School District superintendent may withhold her district’s test scores from the state. An Austin parent is considering a lawsuit to stop the rollout of the tests. Some legislators are mulling how to postpone some of the tests’ consequences for students.

In a high-level turnaround, Robert Scott, the commissioner of the Texas Education Agency, said Tuesday that student testing in the state had become a “perversion of its original intent” and that he looked forward to “reeling it back” in the future. Earning a standing ovation from an annual gathering of 4,000 educators that has given him chillier receptions in the past, Mr. Scott called for an accountability process that measured “every other day of a school’s life besides testing day.”

Many viewed the speech as a reversal for Mr. Scott, who has rarely spoken publicly against the role of standardized testing in public schools. He declined to talk about his remarks for this article.

“I think he sees that we are at a cusp of philosophical changes in the Legislature and across the state over what we’ve been doing the past few years with accountability and whether there’s been any worthwhile gain from all the testing we’ve done,” said Joe Smith, a former superintendent and an education community fixture who runs the Web site
TexasISD.com, a clearinghouse of school-related news.

Kelli Moulton, the superintendent of Hereford I.S.D., is considering an outright rebellion. She said that she was still exploring the repercussions of refusing to send her students’ test scores to the agency but that she was encouraged by Mr. Scott’s remarks.

“We talk a lot, but nobody’s stepped off to do anything really bold,” she said. “Clearly now as a state, at least with a leader who is willing to say testing has gone too far, when do we put a stick in a wheel and say, that’s enough, stop? Because we are going to spend the next 10 years trying to slow that wheel down, and we’ve got 10 years of kids that are suffering.”

It also may be a sign of shifting political tides. State Senator Florence Shapiro, the powerful chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee and a primary architect of the legislation that enacted the new assessment system, announced in September that she would not seek re-election. Ms. Shapiro, Republican of Plano, has been a staunch opponent of any retreat from the standards established by the 2009 bill. But her House colleagues, particularly Rob Eissler, the chairman of the Public Education Committee, have been more receptive to changing course.

During the last legislative session, Mr. Eissler, Republican of The Woodlands, attempted to ease some of the more stringent requirements of the new assessments, including how many exams high school students had to pass in order to graduate and how the tests had to count for 15 percent of their final grades. Mr. Eissler recently held a hearing on how school districts were fulfilling the requirements, and many parents and educators in attendance asked for a delay in the effects on students.

“I am very concerned about performance on the test. My expectation is for most students this would have the effect of lowering their grade,” said Dineen Majcher, a high school parent who has called on lawmakers and the education agency to find a way to waive the 15 percent rule for the first year of testing.

School districts have been given a one-year reprieve from having the test scores factor into their accountability ratings, and Ms. Majcher said it was “completely unreasonable and inappropriate” that the same was not happening for students and their grades. Ms. Majcher, an Austin lawyer, said she and other parents were considering a lawsuit, but she declined to elaborate on its grounds because she still hoped for a resolution outside the courtroom.

That may not come in time. Mr. Scott’s Tuesday speech, while popular with the state’s superintendents, inspired a flurry of reaction from members of the education community who favor moving forward with the new assessment system. Bill Hammond, the president of the Texas Association of Business and an accountability advocate, said he was disappointed in the commissioner’s remarks.

“It’s not going to be the end-of-the-world scenario,” he said. “The kids and educators in Texas are up for it. Every time we’ve gone through this, the standard has been met, and it’s resulted in a better-educated work force.”

Ms. Shapiro said that once the transition to the new exams occurred, students would be left with a much better assessment system, one that eliminated the need for educators to teach to the test because it was based on courses, not subjects. It was never lawmakers’ impression that they would have to change anything about the rollout of the exams, she said, because the planning had been in the works for the past five years.

She also questioned what Mr. Scott meant by calling the testing system a “perversion.”

“That’s a direction I’ve never heard him take,” she said. “He’s been the one that’s been talking about school accountability over the years. We’ve all been a part of this. School accountability is something we started many, many years ago, and we believe in it.”

Meanwhile, Ms. Chamness, who praised Mr. Scott’s remarks, said she has reached out to other parents at her elementary school about opting their children out of standardized testing — to mixed results.

“They are waiting to see what happens to us,” she said. “Nobody wants to get on the outside of the administration. I’m not excited about being out there alone, but that’s not going to dissuade me from doing what I know is right.”

msmith@texastribune.org

Texans Finally Waking Up to Perversion of Testing Abuse

2012-02-05T09:31:00.001-05:00

February 4, 2012

From the New York Times

In Texas, a Backlash Against Student Testing

By MORGAN SMITH

When Christopher Chamness entered the third grade last year, he began to get stomach aches before school. His mother, Edy, said the fire had gone out of a child who she said had previously gone joyfully to his classes.

One day, when he was bored in class, Christopher broke a pencil eraser off in his ear canal. It was the tipping point for Ms. Chamness, a former teacher, and she asked to observe his Austin elementary school classroom. What she saw was a “work sheet distribution center” aimed at preparing students for the yearly assessments that they begin in third grade and that school districts depend upon for their accountability ratings.

Now, with Christopher in fourth grade, Ms. Chamness will take a more drastic step: She intends to pull him out of standardized testing altogether this spring, in protest of the system that she said had sapped her son’s love of learning.

Ms. Chamness’s approach is more radical than what most parents are willing to do — and district officials are quick to point out that school policy does not permit students to miss test days for any reason. But it is part of a budding backlash against standardized testing in the state that spawned No Child Left Behind and its assessment-driven accountability requirements.

It is a precarious time for Texas school districts. Faced with roughly $5.4 billion less in state financing, districts this year will administer new, more rigorous state exams called the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or Staar. And for the first time in high school, the assessments are linked to graduation requirements and final grades.

There is anxiety among school leaders, educators and parents about meeting the increased standards with fewer resources. In the Panhandle, the Hereford Independent School District superintendent may withhold her district’s test scores from the state. An Austin parent is considering a lawsuit to stop the rollout of the tests. Some legislators are mulling how to postpone some of the tests’ consequences for students.

In a high-level turnaround, Robert Scott, the commissioner of the Texas Education Agency, said Tuesday that student testing in the state had become a “perversion of its original intent” and that he looked forward to “reeling it back” in the future. Earning a standing ovation from an annual gathering of 4,000 educators that has given him chillier receptions in the past, Mr. Scott called for an accountability process that measured “every other day of a school’s life besides testing day.”

Many viewed the speech as a reversal for Mr. Scott, who has rarely spoken publicly against the role of standardized testing in public schools. He declined to talk about his remarks for this article.

“I think he sees that we are at a cusp of philosophical changes in the Legislature and across the state over what we’ve been doing the past few years with accountability and whether there’s been any worthwhile gain from all the testing we’ve done,” said Joe Smith, a former superintendent and an education community fixture who runs the Web site
TexasISD.com, a clearinghouse of school-related news.

Kelli Moulton, the superintendent of Hereford I.S.D., is considering an outright rebellion. She said that she was still exploring the repercussions of refusing to send her students’ test scores to the agency but that she was encouraged by Mr. Scott’s remarks.

“We talk a lot, but nobody’s stepped off to do anything really bold,” she said. “Clearly now as a state, at least with a leader who is willing to say testing has gone too far, when do we put a stick in a wheel and say, that’s enough, stop? Because we are going to spend the next 10 years trying to slow that wheel down, and we’ve got 10 years of kids that are suffering.”

It also may be a sign of shifting political tides. State Senator Florence Shapiro, the powerful chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee and a primary architect of the legislation that enacted the new assessment system, announced in September that she would not seek re-election. Ms. Shapiro, Republican of Plano, has been a staunch opponent of any retreat from the standards established by the 2009 bill. But her House colleagues, particularly Rob Eissler, the chairman of the Public Education Committee, have been more receptive to changing course.

During the last legislative session, Mr. Eissler, Republican of The Woodlands, attempted to ease some of the more stringent requirements of the new assessments, including how many exams high school students had to pass in order to graduate and how the tests had to count for 15 percent of their final grades. Mr. Eissler recently held a hearing on how school districts were fulfilling the requirements, and many parents and educators in attendance asked for a delay in the effects on students.

“I am very concerned about performance on the test. My expectation is for most students this would have the effect of lowering their grade,” said Dineen Majcher, a high school parent who has called on lawmakers and the education agency to find a way to waive the 15 percent rule for the first year of testing.

School districts have been given a one-year reprieve from having the test scores factor into their accountability ratings, and Ms. Majcher said it was “completely unreasonable and inappropriate” that the same was not happening for students and their grades. Ms. Majcher, an Austin lawyer, said she and other parents were considering a lawsuit, but she declined to elaborate on its grounds because she still hoped for a resolution outside the courtroom.

That may not come in time. Mr. Scott’s Tuesday speech, while popular with the state’s superintendents, inspired a flurry of reaction from members of the education community who favor moving forward with the new assessment system. Bill Hammond, the president of the Texas Association of Business and an accountability advocate, said he was disappointed in the commissioner’s remarks.

“It’s not going to be the end-of-the-world scenario,” he said. “The kids and educators in Texas are up for it. Every time we’ve gone through this, the standard has been met, and it’s resulted in a better-educated work force.”

Ms. Shapiro said that once the transition to the new exams occurred, students would be left with a much better assessment system, one that eliminated the need for educators to teach to the test because it was based on courses, not subjects. It was never lawmakers’ impression that they would have to change anything about the rollout of the exams, she said, because the planning had been in the works for the past five years.

She also questioned what Mr. Scott meant by calling the testing system a “perversion.”

“That’s a direction I’ve never heard him take,” she said. “He’s been the one that’s been talking about school accountability over the years. We’ve all been a part of this. School accountability is something we started many, many years ago, and we believe in it.”

Meanwhile, Ms. Chamness, who praised Mr. Scott’s remarks, said she has reached out to other parents at her elementary school about opting their children out of standardized testing — to mixed results.

“They are waiting to see what happens to us,” she said. “Nobody wants to get on the outside of the administration. I’m not excited about being out there alone, but that’s not going to dissuade me from doing what I know is right.”

msmith@texastribune.org

Occupy the Unions

2012-02-04T17:39:00.007-05:00

Lois Weiner, a professor at New Jersey City University, has an excellent article in the Winter issue of NewPolitics titled Teacher Unionism Reborn, Weiner makes a case for occupying the unions.

If teachers unions are to continue to exist as a meaningful form of workers’ representation, members need to transform them — and fast. The future of the movement depends on activists realizing that they, not staff or officers on the state and national levels, have to be the catalysts for change. Just as there is no escape from building the union at the base, there is no getting around the hard work of developing authentic alliances with parents and community activists, coalitions that acknowledge historic inequalities and support communities in their needs, rather than being paper organizations that are dusted off when the union wants to display community support. Elected officials, from school boards to governors, are violating union contracts with impunity. Lawsuits, by themselves, the favored method of dealing with law-breaking officials, can’t stop this. What can is direct action undertaken with parents and community, as the CTU has done in combating school closings in Chicago.

Read entire article: http://newpol.org/node/579

Jacobs on Meier on KIPP

2012-02-04T10:41:00.000-05:00

Joanne Jacobs' post on Meier's recent comments on KIPP. My brief response follows:

KIPP = Nazi Germany?
In musing about democracy on Bridging Differences, Deborah Meier equates KIPP and other “no excuses” schools with Nazi Germany‘s schools.
What troubles me most about the KIPPs of the world are not issues of pedagogy or the public/private issue, but their “no excuses” ideology implemented by a code that rests on humiliating those less powerful than oneself and reinforcing a moral code that suggests that there’s a one-to-one connection between being good and not getting caught. It tries to create certainties in a field where it does not belong. . . . Life is never so simple that we can award points for “badness” on a fixed numerical scale of bad-to-good. As we once reminded colleagues, Nazi Germany had a successful school system—so what? I’d be fascinated to interview some KIPP graduates to learn how its work plays out in their lives.
KIPP schools don’t suspend students for misbehavior or send them out of class. Instead, they sit in a separate area with the school polo shirt inside out until they’ve apologized to their teacher and classmates and the apology has been accepted. I assume that’s what Meier means by humiliation.

The moral code that equates “being good and not getting caught” baffles me. What is she talking about?
Life is not simple, but surely it’s possible for teachers to award merit or demerit points to students for good or bad classroom behavior without turning into Nazis.

After all, very few schools try to operate as democracies.

KIPP is an extension of the “reform eugenics” that survived World War II, even if millions of the “unfit” did not. And although the biological determinism has been dropped as a central element of the ideology, there remains the core impetus to change the cultural memes, even though we can’t change the inherited genes.

KIPP and the No Excuses ideologues are out to protect the dominant culture from the defective cultural traits of defective cultures, and that is why these “defective” children are isolated, contained, segregated and culturally sterilized every day, all in the name of “social justice.”

And even if only half make it through these total compliance KIPP camps and the KIPP knock-offs, and if only a quarter of those end up going to college, and if only half of those finish, not to worry. The rest will have been KIPPnotized along the way, learning the most important lesson of all: if you don’t succeed, boys and girls, no one is to blame except yourself–you just did not work hard enough, and you were not nice enough.

There is a cold logic in Mike Feinberg’s admission that behavior at KIPP is more important than academics.

That is the tragic truth.

Recommended: Selden’s (1999) Inheriting Shame . . .

Educate to Organize, Organize to Educate

2012-02-01T20:04:00.000-05:00

Mark Warren, whose career at Harvard was cut short because his work was more aligned with Paulo Freire than Milton Friedman, became the first recipient of Cambridge College's annual Social Justice Award last Fall. In speaking to the gathering at the 2011 CC convocation, Dr. Warren's presentation focused on sharing his latest research that was published in 2011 by Oxford U. Press: A Match on Dry Grass: Community Organizing As a Catalyst for School Reform. His message is one of challenge and hope, and offers tangible examples of people at the neighborhood level gaining power over their schools through organizing and educating. Rated G for good stuff.

Texas Commissioner Robert Scott Takes on Testing-Industrial Complex--Gets Standing O

2012-02-01T16:46:00.000-05:00

By TASA's Jenny LaCoste-Caputo:

Commissioner Scott delivers no-holds-barred speech at Midwinter
Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott delivered a surprising speech to the thousands in attendance at TASA’s 2012 Midwinter Conference Tuesday afternoon, invoking a pull-no-punches tone and sharing his frank opinions on the state’s accountability program, his frustration with bureaucratic meddling – both the feds’ and the state’s - and even the names of a few folks who make him mad enough to want to stay in an incredibly difficult job that makes him lose sleep and miss meals.

Usually, Scott delivers a Power Point presentation full of AP participation rates, NAEP scores and graduation results to the crowd of district administrators. He started off by telling them he was dispensing with that today and instead told them about the book he’s reading: Carrots, Sticks, and the Bully Pulpit, a book critical of the role of federal involvement in K-12 education.

He said his frustration isn’t limited to the federal government, but also with himself for being complicit in the state’s overreaching influence in local school districts.

“I believe that testing is good for some things, but the system we have created has become a perversion of its original intent,” Scot said to applause. “The intent to improve teaching and learning has gone too far afield.”

He discussed the cuts made by the Legislature last year and said while he was glad that things didn’t end as badly as first projected – at one point lawmakers were considering a $10 billion cut to public education – he realizes that the cuts that were made were personal.

“They were personal to me as well,” Scott said. He had to lay off roughly a third of his staff at TEA because of cuts made to the agency. “For the fact that I was not able to get back every dollar, I apologize, but I did my best.”

Scott also said he’s completed a review of Education Service Centers – something districts have feared would be the target of massive cuts and potential closure – and he’s found them in a “remarkable” state. He said they remain vital and he’s very pleased to announce that none of them will be eliminated. He did say that boundary lines may be redrawn and he’ll be looking for input about ESCs and the services they provide from superintendents and other district leaders.

Scott addressed end-of-course exams and the 15 percent requirement that has stirred controversy of late. He said he’s met with his attorney to see if there’s any way he can waive the 15 percent requirement this year but he’s been advised he doesn’t have the authority.

“I would waive it if I could,” he said, to another round of applause.

Scot said he believes our system is on the cusp of change and the backlash to testing is reaching a boiling point. He talked about Senate Bill 1557, which will create the Texas High Performance Schools Consortium and give some districts the chance to design a new assessment system that is a more accurate portrayal of what’s going on in the classroom, and measures the skills important for a 21^st Century education. The bill is the result of work by TASA’s Visioning Network, which this week launched Mission: School Transformation as the work moves from vision to mission.

The goal of the mission: Student-center schools, future-ready students. Hundreds of conference attendees are sporting bright buttons with that message.

Scott said if he’s looking a little under-rested and under-fed these days, it’s because he’s been in “fight mode” for four and a half years, so much so that the thought of resigning crosses his mind.

“And then Arne Duncan says he feels sorry for the children in the state of Texas…and then the Irish in me comes out,” Scott told the crowd. “And I say not just ‘No’ but ‘Hell, No, I’m gonna fight.’”

The commissioner also called out Bill Hammond, president of the Texas Association of Business, who publicly criticized Scott last week saying that TEA has been “derelict” in not issuing uniform grading guidelines for the new accountability system. He also said school districts are “gaming the system” and that students will follow by “gaming the system.” Scott fired back with a news release that said that power rests with local school boards.

In the end, Scott said, he stays because he’s fighting for the children of Texas.

“We’ve got to keep climbing and we’ve got to keep fighting,” he said. The crowd gave him a standing ovation.

Sherman Alexie "Arizona has made our books sacred documents now."

2012-01-31T17:29:00.002-05:00

"A deepened consciousness of their situation leads people to apprehend that situation as an historical reality susceptible to transformation." — Paulo Freire

The Progressive has been compiling the responses of authors whose books were banned by Arizona bigots and arch-reactionaries Tom Horne and John Huppenthal's racist HB 2281, which, among other things, banned Ethnic Studies in Arizona schools. Of course Huppenthal and Horne's vicious legislative colonization didn't actually ban ethnic studies, it just limited Arizona's curriculum to the oppressive historical narrative of "wealthy white male studies."

Today former Schools Matter contributor Kenneth Libby tweeted the response from author Sherman Alexie, which is among the most brilliant I've seen in response to the cultural sterilization and oppression that is Arizona's pogrom against brown peoples:

Let's get one thing out of the way: Mexican immigration is an oxymoron. Mexicans are indigenous. So, in a strange way, I'm pleased that the racist folks of Arizona have officially declared, in banning me alongside Urrea, Baca, and Castillo, that their anti-immigration laws are also anti-Indian. I'm also strangely pleased that the folks of Arizona have officially announced their fear of an educated underclass. You give those brown kids some books about brown folks and what happens? Those brown kids change the world. In the effort to vanish our books, Arizona has actually given them enormous power. Arizona has made our books sacred documents now.

Sherman Alexie is a poet, short story writer, novelist, and filmmaker. His book "The Lone Ranger and Tonto's Fist Fight in Heaven," was on the banned curriculum of the Mexican American Studies Program.

New York Principal's Heroic Stand

2012-01-31T16:25:00.007-05:00

Zeppie said Gov. Andrew Cuomo's recent implementation of standardized testing reviews is unhealthy and wrong.

"I don’t believe in stressing kids out so that they have no childhood," Zeppie said. "Sooner or later it will trickle down and lead to more suicides in children."

RYE, N.Y. - Osborn School Principal Clarita Zeppie announced in a letter to schools Superintendent Ed Shine and the Osborn School staff that she would be retiring as principal at the end of the 2011-12 school year.

For most people, retirement signals an exit from the spotlight, but for Zeppie it's the exact opposite.

"It was a difficult decision because I really do love what I do, and I do love Osborn," Zeppie said. "But the actual reason I'm retiring is because I'm very disappointed in the direction of education, and I want to dedicate myself to fighting education reform."

Zeppie said Gov. Andrew Cuomo's recent implementation of standardized testing reviews is unhealthy and wrong.

"I don’t believe in stressing kids out so that they have no childhood," Zeppie said. "Sooner or later it will trickle down and lead to more suicides in children."

According to Zeppie, the increased emphasis on standardized testing for third, fourth, and fifth graders has forced the Osborn School to cut interesting and valuable programs.

"These children are going from nursery school to a rigorous academic program that allows for no growth," Zeppie said. "It's taking away the main purpose of education, which is learning."

Zeppie has been in touch with several advocacy groups around the country but has a special interest in getting involved with the advocacy campaign for "the Race to Nowhere", a film that attempts to expose the "silent epidemic in our schools."

According to Zeppie, there has been a large outpouring of community support for her decision.

"I have support from parents, from all of the teachers, and many of my colleagues who are administrators," Zeppie said. "Many people agree with me, but unfortunately many do not have the luxury to retire and pursue what they think is right, but ill be carrying the word for them."

Gray Continues in Fenty's Corrupt Tradition by Hiring Charter Loan Company to Research School Closures

2012-01-31T09:50:00.000-05:00

Last summer DC's Mayor Gray selected a real estate consulting and loan outfit from Illinois to "study" the public schools of DC to determine which will live and which will die. Yep, the pick to do the "research" was the non-profit Illinois Facilities Fund that funnels tax credited corporate cash to favorite charity ventures by the plutocrats.

For instance, the Walton kids have shoveled IFF $8.625 million to privatize education through voucher efforts and charter schools. In fact, the Waltons pitched in $100,000 to fund the "study" of which DC schools to close. We can only wonder how much they pitched into the Gray Re-election Fund.

Well, the "study" is done, and Chancellor Henderson has expressed her appreciation for this new data. Any guesses on the major findings?

You're right, the "research" by the charter loan company supports the conversion of 36 more public schools into, yes, charter schools. Bill Turque at WaPo:

A new study commissioned by D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray recommends that the city turn around or close more than three dozen traditional public schools in its poorest neighborhoods and expand the number of high-performing charter schools.

(Read the full text of “Quality Schools: Every Child, Every School, Every Neighborhood”)

The findings of the study by the Chicago-based IFF, to be made public Thursday, are likely to rekindle impassioned debate about possible school closures and the future of public education in the District. The study also signals the start of an unprecedented attempt to coordinate decision making between two school sectors that have operated independently and at times competed for funding and other resources.

More than 40 percent of the city’s 78,000 public students attend publicly funded, independently operated charter schools, the largest concentration in the nation outside of New Orleans. At current rates of growth, a majority of the city’s public enrollment could be in charters within three to four years.

Some advocates of traditional public schools have raised questions about possible bias in the study. IFF, which provides financial support and real estate consulting to nonprofit organizations, has made more than $57 million in loans to charter schools, according to information it provided the District. The study was underwritten by a $100,000 grant from the Walton Family Foundation, one of the nation’s leading benefactors of charter schools. Walton is also a major private donor to D.C. Public Schools. Company officials have said that their work looks at both school sectors objectively.

The study could also eventually serve as the basis for another major round of traditional public school closures, a politically and emotionally bruising process last undertaken by then-Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee during Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s administration. Although traditional public school enrollment has leveled off at about 46,000 after decades of decline, the system still has an excess of capacity. More than 40 schools have 300 or fewer students, many of them struggling academically.

City officials said that decisions about any major restructuring will not be made for at least a year and only after close consultation with affected communities.

Gray (D) said Wednesday that there is no basis for concerns that he will hand the city school system over to charter schools, especially given the hundreds of millions of dollars the District has invested in renovating and rebuilding traditional school campuses.

“It’s ludicrous,” he said. “I believe very strongly in both sectors, and I’m looking for the best education solutions."

De’Shawn Wright, the deputy mayor for education, said the plan is to meet with Chancellor Kaya Henderson, who heads the school system, and charter school leaders to map out a scenario for meeting the needs of underserved neighborhoods.

The report is organized as a supply-and-demand analysis that divided the city into 39 groups of neighborhoods.

Using a formula based on standardized test score trends and projections to 2016, it separated eligible public schools into quartiles, or four performance tiers. Schools without adequate test data were excluded from the study.

In schools designated Tier 1, anywhere from 60 to 100 percent of students tested at or above grade level and showed the steepest improvement curves.

Researchers then looked at student populations in each neighborhood cluster to determine which communities had the largest shortage of seats in top-tier schools.

The biggest shortage — about 27,000 seats — is concentrated within 10 neighborhood clusters, most of them south and east of the Anacostia River in wards 7 and 8 and others cutting across portions of wards 1 and 5 in Northeast and Northwest Washington. More than half of the shortfall is for kindergarten through fifth grade.

The bulk of IFF’s findings are not new, but they place in bolder relief than ever the dearth of good schools in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Of the 45 schools assessed by IFF as Tier 1, just six are in wards 7 and 8. All are public charter schools. Of the 39 schools in Tier 4 — the lowest rating — 22 are in wards 7 and 8. Eighteen are traditional public schools; four are public charters.

Among the areas identified by IFF as having the greatest need is the group of Ward 8 neighborhoods that includes Congress Heights, Bellevue, Washington Highlands and Bolling Air Force Base. Only two of the 14 schools studied in those neighborhoods are in Tier 1, and they are both charters: Achievement Prep and Friendship Tech Prep. The firm recommended attempting to turn around or close all four traditional public schools in Tier 4 — Simon, Patterson, Terrell-McGogney and Ferebee-Hope elementary — and closing two bottom-rung charter schools, Center City Congress Heights (pre-K to 8) and Imagine Southeast (pre-K to 5). It also suggested investing more resources into improving a Tier 2 charter, Friendship Southeast elementary.

The report says that any closures of traditional public schools should be offset by new charters or building new traditional schools.

Most of the other surveys of the 10 critical neighborhood clusters follow the pattern. In all, 38 traditional public schools and three charter schools were recommended for turnaround or closure.

In the report, IFF urges the city to consider expanding the footprint of charter schools in the 10 targeted neighborhood clusters. It calls for the D.C. Public Charter School Board to authorize about 6,500 new charter seats (current enrollment is about 32,000). It also recommends that the board “actively recruit the highest performing charter school operators and ask them to replicate their performing school model” in the top 10 clusters, using former public school buildings as incentives.

It’s virtually certain that city officials will tinker with IFF’s recommendations. The report lists for turnaround or possible closure, for example, schools that have received tens of millions of dollars in capital investment, including the new H.D. Woodson High School in Ward 7.

Wright said the IFF study would be just the beginning of a lengthy review requiring “lifting the hood” over each underserved area for a close look at its needs.

“This is complicated work,” he said, “and it’s got to be done on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis.”

Further Confessions of an Outlier

2012-01-30T08:48:00.001-05:00

Further Confessions of an Outlier

About five or so weeks ago, I made this confession:

"I graduated high school eighth in my class, and then proceeded through undergraduate and graduate school to achieve a doctorate, almost exclusively making As along the way and being regularly praised for my academic ability. But let me pause for a moment about those K-12 years.

"To this day, I cannot recall really trying in school—not time spent studying or finding anything asked of me being that difficult. In fact, especially when I took standardized tests, I always felt I was doing something wrong; it felt like cheating to zip through tests and score in that rarefied air of the 99th% percentile."

The point of that confession was to confront and reject the rugged individualism myth that drives much of the "No Excuses" Reformers' narratives about students, teachers, and schools; they suggest that those who succeed earn that success, and that those who fail also deserve that failure. The dividing line, for them, is simply effort.

This confession focuses on the role and influence of teachers since "No Excuses" Reformers and a whole host of politicians, including President Obama, are beating the teacher quality drum—notably citing a recent study on value-added methods for evaluating and rewarding teachers (linking teachers to student test scores) that has not been peer-reviewed and has been widely challenged for the conclusions drawn by the researchers and the media.

Teachers Matter: Beyond Measurement and Data

As I noted in my first confession, I was always a top student from first grade through earning a doctorate—always earning B+ and A-range grades in my classes and usually being identified as scoring in the 99th percentile on standardized tests. What I want to emphasize here is that over thirty years of being a student, my grades and standardized tests scores were amazingly stable despite my having a wide range of quality among my many teachers (yes, gasp, I had some bad teachers).

Teachers never impacted significantly my grades or tests scores for three decades, but the individual teachers greatly influenced my learning, my interests, and even my course in life—none of which can be found in any of the data linked to my learning.

I may be able to name every teacher I ever had, in fact. Ms. Landford, Ms. Townson, Ms. Westmoreland, Ms. Parks—these were the first teachers I had and I recall many moments from their classes to this day, although I began school in 1967 in the South where integration had just begun (the adjacent county to my childhood home did not fully integrate until the early 1970s).

And I vividly recall having had five African American teachers and administrators in my public school life: Ms. Parks (who confronted the entire class about racial slurs and planted an important seed in my young mind), Ms. Haywood, and Mr. Scipio (my high school science teacher who inspired me so deeply I left high school to major in physics) as teachers and Mr. Washington and Mr. Blackman as administrators.

But my high school English teacher, tenth and eleventh grades, Mr. Harrill, took the initiative to say to me, "Paul, you should think about being a teacher." Then, I laughed and even scoffed at this idea, but just six years later, I stood in the exact room Mr. Harrill left to move to the district office and was the English teacher. About a decade later, I entered the same EdD program Dr. Harrill completed, and by 2002, I was holding the tenure track position Dr. Harrill left to return to public education.

If someone wants to give credit to someone or something for my good grades and test scores, I have some clues: the accident of my mother and father conceiving and birthing me, the magnificently supportive and vibrant life and household my working-class parents provided me (this hint cannot be expressed here as much as it should be), and hundreds of books I consumed (including the 7000 comic books I collected throughout junior high and high school).

Grades and test scores, however, don't tell anyone much about my education, and about the dozens and dozens of wonderful, bright, kind, and compelling people who I am honored to have called "teacher"—Ms. Simpkins, Mr. Bailey, Ms. Dula, Ms. Olive, Ms. Neal, Mr. Kitchens...Dr. Moore, Dr. Predmore, Dr. Anderson, Dr. Kridel, Dr. Holt...

Teaching matters and teachers matter, but not in any ways we can measure and trap in data. For the many reformers who claim otherwise, they are insuring that we will soon ruin the very aspects of teacher that genuinely create high-quality teachers.

At the end of January 2012, I had a birthday and attended the annual conference for the South Carolina Council of Teachers of English (SCCTE). On my birthday, my Facebook wall was covered with happy birthday wishes—most of which came from former students. As I walked around the SCCTE convention, I realized about a dozen teachers there had at one time been students of mine (some of them, by the way, think I was wonderful, and a few, not so much).

These are the things of being a student and a teacher. Not VAM data, not merit pay, and not schemes to fire the bottom 25% each year while cramming 40 students in so-called top-teachers' classes.

Robert D. Skeels: How Administration Tries to Cow Teachers Into Submission

2012-01-30T02:43:00.001-05:00

Talk by PESJA/CEJ activist and District 2 LAUSD Trustee Candidate Robert D. Skeels at the Support Cadre Resisting Administrative Maltreatment (SCRAM) Caucus Meeting at CTA State Council of Education on January 29, 2012.

Special thanks to John Cromshow of KPFK and SCRAM for arranging the event.

21st Century Teachers: Easy to Hire, Easy to Fire

2012-01-29T08:03:00.006-05:00

21st Century Teachers: Easy to Hire, Easy to Fire

Detroit rises to the status of a major character in Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex. About a fifth of the way into the novel, the narrator, Calliope/Cal Stephanides makes this observation about the arrival of the automotive industry in the Motor City:

"Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

"But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine.

"...Part of the new production method's genius was its division of labor into unskilled tasks. That way you could hire anyone. And fire anyone."

This is a chilling passage about the dawning of the assembly line era of American manufacturing, but equally as chilling is that this passage offers a clue to where we now are heading in U.S. public education and the fate of the American teacher.

A Teacher Is a Teacher Is a Teacher...

Like Henry Ford, Bill Gates has ushered in a new era in U.S. public education, shifting the already robust accountability era that began in the early 1980s and accelerated in 2001 with the passing of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) from focusing on student accountability for standards and test scores to demanding that teachers be held accountable for student test scores addressing those standards. Gates has been assisted by Michelle Rhee and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan as the "No Excuses" Reformers have perpetuated narratives conjuring the myth of the "bad" teacher, which Adam Bessie has confronted by suggesting we hire hologram teachers in order to remove the greatest problem facing education: Humans.

Just as the assembly line rendered all workers interchangeable, and thus, easy to hire, and easy to fire, the current education reforms focusing on teacher accountability, value-added methods (VAM) of evaluating teachers, and the growing fascination with Teach for America (TFA) are seeking the same fact for teachers: A de-professionalized workforce of teaching as a service industry, easy to hire, and easy to fire.

All of the following are both key elements of the "No Excuses" Reformers' plans and steps to eradicating teaching as a profession in the U.S.:

• Secretary Duncan leads the chorus of "teachers are the most important factor in student achievement" despite ample evidence that teacher influence on measurable student outcomes, tests, is only about 10-20%. This refrain serves two purposes for the "No Excuses" Reformers: (1) Deflect attention from the 60-80% influence that out-of-school factors play in student achievement, and (2) insure that teachers are de-professionalized, thus creating a cheap labor force for a privatized education system.

• The propaganda continues to increase calling for TFA recruits to serve high-poverty schools. The evidence on TFA recruits is sparse, but what exists doesn't support using uncertified and inexperienced teachers to address the problem faced by many high-poverty schools: A lack of certified, experienced teachers. Thus, TFA recruits can only be attractive because they represent the Ford ideal of workers easy to hire and easy to fire (exceptionally easy to fire, in fact, because they leave of their own accord in a short time).

• From The New York Times to President Obama in his 2012 State of the Union Address, VAM propaganda remains powerful, calling for holding teachers accountable for their students' test scores. Yet, after careful examinations of the study, any claims that VAM is effective remain unfounded. Again, we must conclude that seeking ways to quickly hire and fire teachers is more important than if any method achieves the claimed goals of seeking higher student achievement. VAM is a terrible tool for identifying and rewarding excellent teaching, but, like the assembly line, it is an effective tool for reducing any worker to a cog.

• While 50 states have implemented accountability, standards, and testing without satisfactory results, "No Excuses" Reformers are committed to national standards, and the expected national tests to follow. While there is no national or international evidence that standards and testing improve education, this call for federalizing standards and testing proves to be an important lever for removing completely teacher autonomy and creating the platform upon which teachers are easily fired.

• And now a long-time mantra coming from self-proclaimed reformers wedded to school choice ideology—"All parents deserve the same choices as the wealthy" (a mask for their real intentions, privatizing schools, and a perverse idealizing of "choice"—is being bolstered by the rise of parent-trigger laws and legislation aimed at giving parents direct oversight of what is being taught: "The trouble with the consumer movement as embodied in the New Hampshire law is that it makes public schools vulnerable to the whims of fringe groups." The medical profession has already seen what happens when professionals abdicate their expertise to the consumer when the overuse of antibiotics created MRSA and other "superbugs." [1] But parental oversight, again, is not about doing what is best for students; it's about using free market rhetoric to create teaching as a service industry.

The ultimate evidence that "No Excuses" Reformers want to de-professionalize teaching, however, is the issue of professional autonomy. Accountability must be preceded by autonomy; otherwise, accountability is tyranny. Instead of creating professional autonomy for teachers, however, every aspect of the "No Excuses" Reform movement is bent on removing autonomy from teachers while reducing further all student achievement to tests so that teacher quality can be easily and quickly quantified as well.

In the wake of Obama's State of the Union speech and the prospect of where "No Excuses" Reform will go next, I think it isn't much of a stretch to consider the possibility of this sentence coming to pass:

Historical fact: teachers stopped being professionals in 2013.

It is the path we are on, and it is a path that must be avoided.

[1] DeBellis, R. J., & Zdanawicz, M. (2000, November). Bacteria battle back: Addressing antibiotic resistance. Boston: Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Science. Retrieved 13 September 2009 from http://www.tufts.edu/... ; Ong, S., et al. (2007, September). Antibiotic use for emergency department patients with upper respiratory infections: Prescribing practices, patient expectations, and patient satisfaction. Annals of Emergency Medicine, 50(3), 213-220.

Teachers Tired of Being Bullied to Death

2012-01-28T18:07:00.003-05:00

We're not going to take it!

The CPS Grind on Teachers by Katie Osgood

Recently, in Chicagoland, a story hit the papers about a teacher committing suicide. She wrote in her suicide note that the major reason for this drastic act was work-related. According to her colleagues, this woman took her own life because of the bullying and fear she experienced at her school.

As I discussed this event with a friend who is a current CPS teacher, he mentioned that in the comments section of the article many non-educators were shocked and horrified at this tragic happening but were also quick to assume that the woman must have been "soft" or had some kind of underlying mental health problem. But, he quipped, when many CPS teachers heard about the incident, they just shook their heads and said, "Yeah, I can see that happening."

Truth is, so could I. When I think back to my measly one year of teaching at a horribly-run CPS elementary school, I can very easily imagine that scenario unfolding with a number of my colleagues and yes, even with myself.

Did you all catch that? Suicide is not considered shocking in the realm of teaching in CPS.

And I don't think the general public understands the toll that years of working in an increasinlgly horrible environment coupled with the latest wave of teacher-bashing actually takes on the people who do the hard work of education.

Let me try and paint you a picture:

Imagine you've had one of the worst weeks of your life. You haven't slept in months, you have money troubles building, your relationships are failing, you feel unheard and unappreciated at home and at work, you worry daily about your future and whether or not you will have a job next year or even next week, and the idea of getting up to go to work the next day is practically unbearable. You need a moment to catch your breath, a moment to clear the clutter of worry, failure and fear from your clouded mind. But you don't get it. There is too much to get done. And all the while, you think, if I don't get it done, I am failing these kids. I have no choice but to keep pushing.

Now add onto that a vindictive, power-hungry boss who would fire you as soon as look at you, and colleagues at work who are themselves so tired, afraid and overwhelmed that they are one bad day from breakdown.

And then there are your students. God you love them. But some of them have problems you simply do not know how to fix. Or, even with the interventions you know to do through experience and training, you also know it will take all of your mental energy to implement them. You don't have that kind of energy left. Some of your kids are currently homeless and show up to school unbathed and with dirty clothes. Others have developed significant behavior problems and despite your best efforts, they continue to fight, curse, and act out in class. Some of them are so embarrassed they can't read that they throw books off their desks and rip up their hand-outs. You know deep down that most of the difficulties your children face arebeyond your control. But still, most days you come home and cry because of the guilt and helplessness.

You also know that your job is on the line if you don't get these kids to perform on some silly test. You know the tests are a joke, that they do not capture the intelligence, wit, humor and spark that live within your students. But still they hang there, always lurking in the shadows. Time is slowly marching until the day you must administer the dreaded test and seal your fate.

Now imagine turning on your TV or flipping through the Tribune or Sun-Times to see yet another story loudly proclaiming that the problem with America's schools is, well, you. "More teachers must be fired!" they scream. "Teachers are the ones failing the kids, we need to hold them accountable!" "Teachers are lazy and need to work longer, harder, for less pay!" "Teacher pensions are destroying our economy!" (Whoa, did I miss the part where newspapers yelled at the people who caused the financial crisis that is slashing education budgets around the country? Are the mortgage brokers, big banks and financial industries getting demeaned every five seconds? How about the corporations not paying their fair share of taxes which help schools? And don't forget the politicians and their horrible education policies. Surely no one reading the news is believing this baloney, are they?) And every time you hear the insults or name-calling you think to yourself, "Well what the heck are any of you doing to help these kids..." The unfairness of it all burns.

Now stretch that one terrible week into nine months. Welcome to CPS.

Of course, the great irony is that as the powers that be complain about "quality" teachers they create teaching environments where it becomes impossible to be great. Teachers at my old school started to look liked the walking dead as the stress and fear accumulated. The increased "accountability" robbed us all of the very qualities which would make us great teachers: our passion, kindness, drive, energy, camaraderie and humor.

And then there are people, like our lovely mayor, who seem to enjoy kicking you while you're down. Rahm would have us believe that something like extending the school day is so easy. Oh, that smurk on his face as he seems to say "How dare you expect to be paid for your extra time!" And "Sure, you've been working this whole year close to breakdown, barely scraping by, without any resources and with abnormally large class sizes, but I'm sure you can come up with 90 extra minutes of activities for your kids. Oh, and if you really cared, you'd do this willingly and for free. And stop asking for paper to make copies or books for them to read, you greedy teachers. And no, we are not going to fix your school building, give you the resources you say you need, or help you in any way, shape, or form. You suck, your school sucks, and we are just biding our time until we can shut the whole thing down."

Sigh...

Now, maybe not every school and every teacher has as bad a time as that, but I know I did. And I know too many other teachers out there who are experiencing that same fear, intimidation, and stress. Teaching under these unacceptable conditions has become the rule, not the exception. I recently came across a blog post which described something called "compassion fatigue" which is "a combination of physical, emotional, and spiritual depletion associated with caring for patients in significant emotional pain and physical distress." The author goes on to say:

Like nurses, teachers confronting these pathologies [such as abuse, abandonment and alienation] are forced to perform triage. But teachers still have to somehow find the time and energy afterward to teach the subject matter they were hired to do. The debilitating effects on them are cumulative. It's little wonder, therefore, that teachers in inner-city schools have a higher rate of absenteeism and turnover than their colleagues in the suburbs. It's also not at all surprising that teachers who are faced with the challenge often find themselves drawing away from their students. The same sadness and despair that nurses report also affect teachers.

Now, if you've been paying attention to the education reform debate at all in recent years, you will know that this is the place in the story where the corporate reformers of the nation, you know, the Michelle Rhees, Bill Gates, Arne Duncans, and yes, Rahm Emanuels, would jump in and say something ridiculous like "no excuses" or "poverty is not destiny." They will fill your ear with talk of "the soft bigotry of low expectations" while completely ignoring the hard bigotry of poverty, racism and crippling income inequality. Their ignorance of the reality of life for students and teachers alike in the inner cities is frankly, criminal.

No more I say.

This post is for all my teacher colleagues out there. It's time for us to fight back. It's time to take back our profession. Teachers, use your natural inclination to educate and start teaching your friends and families about the hard realities of our profession. And don't be afraid to sing our praises. What we do is good work and it needs to be protected and cherished.

And while you're at it, don't forget to teach as many people as possible about the true nature of corporate reform and how it's left behind entire neighborhoods. Let people know about the ridiculous goals of No Child Left Beind and the evils behind high-stakes testing. Tell the truth about charters, that they are not, in fact, miracles. Speak up about the reality of Teach for America -- how placing untrained novices in classrooms with the hardest to educate students is unjust and wrong. Make people start to at least question the hype!

More than anything, make the act of teacher-bashing unacceptable. We know that when we are overwhelmed, upset, fatigued, demoralized and stressed out beyond our limits, we will be no good for our students. Remember, fighting for teachers isfighting for students.

So fight for the kinds of teaching environments which benefit kids. Fight for workplaces where teachers do not flee, breakdown, or God forbid take their own lives. Fight for a steady and strong group of committed professionals who actually stick around long enough to bring the slow change that is needed in our schools. Fight for the respect we deserve. Fight for the autonomy to make decisions on curriculum, implementation, and assessment that help the kids sitting in front of us. Fight for equity in resources so we have the tools to acutally do the difficult job of teaching. Fight for the mental health that we need to be the excellent educators kids deserve.

By fighting, we can beat back some of the hopelessness and exhaustion. We need to stop blaming ourselves, alone and guilty, and instead get angry at the forces that are hurting us and the important work we do. And all you non-educators out there need to get angry right alongside us. So sing along with me:

~*~Katie Osgood is a special education teacher at a Psychiatric Hospital in Chicago. Before that, she taught in a Chicago Public School and in Japan.

GUEST BLOG: IDOE–Shrinking State Power to Expose Your Tender Underbelly (UPDATE)

2012-01-27T07:54:00.001-05:00

IDOE–Shrinking State Power to Expose Your Tender Underbelly (UPDATE)

by Douglas Storm

[UPDATE in the body of the text]

Indiana is at the forefront of a concerted and aggressive drive to weaken state power. That sounds good to so many of us, especially those who believe there is a libertarian with a good heart out there. But here’s the trick. The agents of the state of the terms of Mitch Daniels (at least) have worked to make the State itself an onerous body that commits one bad act after another. The government that hates government is in charge of the government. In turn, the people hate the state as well and scream for liberty and freedom and so approve of the measures the state offers for “choice” such as voucher systems and selling public schools to corporate charter groups.

All this does is diminish the capacity of the state as a protector against unequal wealth and power. While we scream about the .01% owning the world and screwing us we are letting our state sell us to those very folks and we are thanking them for it.

An example of the way this is happening:

Today a memo went out to all Indiana Public School District administrators. The memo, titled “Assessment Opt Out Guidance” was authored by the State General Counsel Matt Voors and sent out under the Office of the Chief for Assessment (a chief for change!), Wes Bruce.

The gist, don’t let parents opt their children out of state assessment tests. However, as the memo makes clear, the state has no policy on this particular option. Oddly, the lawyers treat this as if that alone creates the impetus to not allow it. Anyway, as there is no way to make the opting out illegal (currently–one assumes we should look for legislation asap) the tactic suggested by the state is to threaten parents, teachers and school communities with untoward ramifications. We can’t stop you, they say, but we’re going to make your life as hard for you as we can if you do this.

Here is the full text.

M E M O R A N D U M
TO:                 Indiana Superintendents and Principals
FROM:           Wes Bruce, Chief Assessment Officer
Matt Voors, General Counsel
DATE:          January 25, 2011
TOPIC:          Assessment Opt Out Guidance
In recent weeks, we have had several inquiries from schools and corporations about parents who have requested—or in some cases demanded—to opt out their students from participating in state assessments (ISTEP+, IMAST, IREAD-3, ECAs, LAS Links) . There are several social media sites that are promoting the idea of opting out in Indiana. These sites imply that parents may opt out their children from state testing. Indiana law has no such provision.
The following are points you may want to discuss with parents considering opting out their students:
Test scores provide a valid measure of how well students have mastered grade level standards.
ISTEP+ test scores allow us to estimate how much students have grown each school year     by comparing the achievement patterns of students with very similar patterns of content mastery.
At the high school level, opting out denies students the opportunities guaranteed to them by law to demonstrate the needed mastery of Algebra I and/or English 10 required to earn a high school diploma.
Below you will find our policy on the topic of opting out of state assessments, as well as important reminders for parents and for schools.

Indiana Standardized Testing Policy Regarding Opt-out and Absences
Unless a student falls within the very narrow exemptions for homebound instruction and/or medical necessity, Ind. Code 20-32-2 provides that all students enrolled in an Indiana-accredited school are required to participate in state assessments. Indiana does not have an opt-out policy. If a student is absent on the scheduled testing days but attends school on any other days in the test window, the school shall test the student as a “make up.”

Parent Reminders
Parents should be reminded of Indiana’s Compulsory School Attendance Laws, Ind. Code 20-33-2. Specifically, section 28 of the compulsory school attendance chapter provides that it is unlawful for a parent to fail, neglect, or refuse to send the parent’s child to school for the full term, and section 27 of the statute provides that it is unlawful for a parent to fail to ensure that his/her student attends school as required under the compulsory school attendance chapter and establishes the process of initiating an action against a parent for violation. Finally, section 44 provides that violation of the compulsory school attendance chapter is a Class B Misdemeanor. Any absence by a student on scheduled testing dates for the purpose of avoiding testing constitutes an unexcused absence and may constitute a violation of the compulsory school attendance laws.
School Reminders
Schools should be mindful that student participation in state assessments is part of the calculation for A-F category designations. Moreover, lack of participation by any subgroup may have particular negative consequences for accountability calculations.
For additional information, please contact the Office of Assessment at
317-232-2050.

UPDATE: This number in the document goes to FSSA, Revenue Recovery, NOT the Office of Assessment. One is unsure how to respond to this. If intentional it seems somewhat obscene as a prank. Either way, here is the Office of Assessment Chief’s contact information off the IDOE site:

ph: 317-232-9050
fx: 317-233-2196
email: wbruce@doe.in.gov

Let me suggest you call them in order to GIVE THEM additional information, not to get it. Unless the question is Where do you get off?

So, let’s recap: Opt Out and the school suffers, high school kids will have their diplomas withheld, parents can be thrown in jail for 60 days or fined $1k if they trespass the truancy laws.

Nice. That’s called the Bully Policy. But we expect nothing less from Indiana Government. Teachers, may I suggest when you give your mandatory anti-bullying workshops that you use the state as an example of the biggest bully (well next to the Military, the Banks and the federal government that serves them).

Yesterday, we received a newsletter from our school about the upcoming testing schedule. Among the Facts the Gradgrinds sent us was this:

The IREAD 3rd grade test is new this year. We’ve not seen the assessment piece and do not know what the cut scores will be. X discussed this at the family literacy night. 3rd graders who do not pass this test will be retained. They can be retained for up to two years.

What happens after those two years if they don’t pass? Is it like unemployment stats? You know they remove from the numbers anyone who’s “stopped” looking for work. (That keeps the stats lower than they are in reality, don’t you know–so that 9% unemployment is really close to 22%.)

More coercion. The primary goal of any of this is simply to amass data as a weapon.

The state is now corrupt in all ways and has only one intention–disbanding all public accountability. In what they must feel is a clever ruse they “pretend” testing and “measurable” assessment is about accountability. Rather, it’s a chance to weaken the ability of the state to protect its citizens. All the policy behind the education reforms create assessment standards that will automatically Fail as many as 1/3 of public schools. The state will “take-over” these schools and then sell them to corporations. Then corporations will be allowed to be, well, corporations. They will write the very rules that govern them and the state will passively approve.

This is the Corporate plan. The state that cannot protect its citizens–cannot fund its programs–will willingly sell itself to the corporation. Laws have already been passed to protect private property and not people so that one will not even be able to bring civil charges against these actions. The men and women in positions of power in the state now are not your representatives. They are servants of corporate power and they are destroying your one protection against the coercion of wealth and property (we call this a “market ideology”). The state’s agents are selling the state’s power out from under us.

This is and was a Long Con and it is nearing its end.

All of this puts me in mind of this scene in Blade Runner:

Leon: I kinda get nervous when I take tests.
Holden: Don’t move.
Leon: Sorry.
He tries to move, but finally his lips can’t help a sheepish smile.
Leon: I already had an I.Q. test this year… but I don’t think I ever had a…
Holden: Reaction time is a factor in this so please pay attention. Answer as quickly as you can.
Leon: Uh… sure…
Holden: One one eight seven at Hunterwasser…
Leon: Oh… that’s the hotel.
Holden: What?
Leon: Where I live.
Holden: Nice place?
Leon: Huh? Sure. Yeah. I guess. Is that…part of the test?
Holden smiles a patronizing smile.
Holden: Warming you up, that’s all.
Leon: Oh. it’s not fancy or anything.
Holden: You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand when…
Leon: Is this the test now?
Holden: Yes. You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a…
Leon: What one?
It was a timid interruption, hardly audible.
Holden: What?
Leon: What desert?
Holden: Doesn’t make any difference what desert… its completely hypothetical.
Leon: But how come I’d be there?
Holden: Maybe you’re fed up, maybe you want to be by yourself…who knows. So you look down and see a tortoise. It’s crawling toward you…
Leon: A tortoise. What’s that?
Holden: Know what a turtle is?
Leon: Of course.
Holden: Same thing.
Leon: I never seen a turtle.
He sees Holden’s patience is wearing thin.
Leon: But I understand what you mean.
Holden: You reach down and flip the tortoise over on its back, Leon.
Keeping an eye on his subject, Holden notes the dials in the Voight-Kampff. One of the needles quivers slightly.
Leon: You make up these questions, Mr. Holden, or do they write ‘em down for you?
Disregarding the question, Holden continues, picking up the pace.
Holden: The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over. But it can’t. Not with out your help. But you’re not helping.
Leon’s upper lip is quivering.
Leon: Whatya means, I’m not helping?
Holden: I mean you’re not helping! Why is that, Leon?
Holden looks hard at Leon, a hard piercing look. Leon is flushed with anger, breathing hard, it’s a bad moment, he might erupt. Suddenly Holden grins disarmingly.
Holden: They’re just questions, Leon. In answer to your query, they’re written down for me. It’s a test designed to provoke an emotional response.

Sure, Leon’s a replicant, a creature made by man, a lesser being (oh, wait) and he’s about to blow away Holden (the only recourse here available to the outlaw–the outsider to the law–the one the law turns out) and he’s definitely creepy, but the test will find him out and then he’s doomed…

How do you determine teacher effectiveness?

2012-01-27T01:11:00.000-05:00

How do you determine teacher effectiveness?
Sent to USA Today, Jan. 26, 2012

“States weaken tenure rights for teachers” (Jan. 25) emphasizes the importance of evaluating teacher effectiveness.
A major problem is that these evaluations are often based on students gains on standardized tests, called “value-added” measures.
A number of studies have shown that value-added measures are very unstable: Teachers' ratings based on previous years are weak predictors of test scores at the end of a year with new students. A teacher who succeeds in boosting scores with one group will not necessarily succeed with others. Different tests can result in different scores for the same teacher.
Value-added evaluations also ignore the huge impact of factors beyond the teachers’ control. Finally, there are ways of pumping up test scores without student learning, including teaching test-taking strategies and making sure weak students don't take the test.
Nobody objects to teachers being evaluated on their effectiveness. Using gains on standardized tests is a bad way to do it.

Stephen Krashen
Professor Emeritus, University of Southern California

Sources:
Not stable: Sass, T. 2008. The stability of value-added measures of teacher quality and implications for teacher compensation policy. Washington DC: CALDER. (National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Educational Research.) Kane, T. and Staiger, D. 2009. Estimating Teacher Impacts on Student Achievement: An Experimental Evaluation. NBER Working Paper No. 14607 http://www.nber.org/papers/w14607;
Different tests result in different value-added scores: Papay, J. 2010. Different tests, different answers: The stability of teacher value-added estimates across outcome measures. American Educational Research Journal 47,2.

Original article:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2012-01-25/teacher-tenure-rights-firings/

Tennessee State Board Set to Further Demoralize Teachers and Open the Floodgates to New Lawsuits

2012-01-26T19:55:00.000-05:00

Update 9:34 AM Jan. 27: Last evening the State Board of Education pulled the "Scarlet Letter" reprimand action item from today's agenda.

The commentary below was provided Knoxville, TN educators who prefer (for now) to remain anonymous:

In light of the planned action by the State Board of Education (download pdf from state website here complete with red ink), Knox County educators are bracing for the next shoe to fall from the Haslam/McIntyre(Broad)/Huffman nexus of destabilization, deprofessionalization, and corporatization of public education in the state of Tennessee.

Already, teachers in Knoxville schools administered by quislings from McIntyre’s Leadership Academy are reporting increasingly Orwellian levels of administrative surveillance regarding teacher activities both on and off the clock, with explicit threats of reprimand for any number of murky, undefined “unprofessional” or “unbecoming” activities.

Rumors abound regarding the intent and extent of McIntyre’s office, as well as what offenses might bring a reprimand. [Thus far the State has provided no list of offenses that might yield a public reprimand]. One version to have teacher’s driver’s licenses flagged in order to be informed of possible moving violations committed by KCS employees, as well as of intentions of certain administrators to rid the teaching pool of staff members whose personal, private life choices, or physical appearances may conflict with the values held by fear-fanning politicians or moneyed individuals in the larger community.

Not only do we have the punitive, unproven, critically-flawed, multi-million dollar Milken Brothers TEAM evaluation system (combined with Broad-Stooge McIntyre’s pet project of pay-for-performance APEX program) to marginalize, demoralize, deprofessionalize, and ultimately drive out seasoned, professional educators (those most likely to speak out against the wrongs currently being perpetrated against their students and communities in the name of “reform”), we now have the beginnings of a 19th-century throwback policy by which public school educators can be censured, publicly humiliated, and blacklisted without the benefit of due process for as yet unspecified indicators of “unprofessionalism” and “moral turpitude.”

By using that most dog-eared page from the reformer’s playbook of “getting tough on teachers.” while simultaneously pandering to the most intolerant and prejudiced segments of the local population with the hot-button, evangelical issue of “morality,” McIntyre has demonstrated his commitment to diligently promote the Business Roundtable’s agenda by any means necessary.

Which leaves the educators of Knox County to wonder: What will be the NEXT reason that some Knox County teachers--most likely tenured veterans near the top of the pay scale--will find themselves “out of alignment” with McIntyre’s “vision,” and acted against accordingly? A speeding ticket? A bankruptcy? Holding hands in public? Unsubstantiated allegations related to a divorce or custody dispute? Complaints from a disgruntled parent? Being seen consuming a glass of wine at a restauraunt?

Welcome to the New Dark Ages, brought to you by this generation's efficiency zealots and supporters of plutocracy.

Local story by WATE reporter, Hana Kim:

By HANA KIM
6 News Reporter

KNOXVILLE (WATE) - The State Board of Education could pass a new rule this week that would allow it to publicly reprimand a teacher for misconduct.

However, the initiative is creating some fear that teachers' personal rights would be infringed upon.

If the board passes the agenda on Friday, it will give the board the option to publicly reprimand a teacher for bad behavior. That reprimand will be on the teacher's record permanently so that every school district in Tennessee could find out about it.

School districts are required to turn over a teacher's case for evaluation if there's a misconduct problem.

The board can either suspend or even revoke a teacher's license, depending on the case. The state says a public reprimand would be something in the middle, given out for an offense that is not worth a suspension, but still frowned on.

General Counsel Dannelle Walker deals with most of the state's licensing cases and came up the initiative.

"We have pretty much a small hammer and a big hammer. We want to have like a screwdriver to make it a little bit better, and we are not pulling out the big hammer for such small offenses," Walker said.
However, the initiative is stirring a lot of confusion.

Sherry Morgan, president of the Knox County Teacher's Union, says there isn't a clear definition of what violations would warrant a public reprimand.

For example, could a bankruptcy, a domestic issue or a first time DUI offense be enough for a reprimand?

"They have their professional life. They have their personal life, and are they going to infringe on their personal lives? I honestly think it could ruin their careers," Morgan said.

"It's not going to be frivolous or arbitrary," Walker said. "It has to be in precedent of what we've done before."

Walker says teachers would not be unfairly targeted for bankruptcy or minor issues. . . .

Wanted: Computer of Apple Quality Not Made in Poisonous Factory by Slave Labor

2012-01-26T12:39:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I was at the gym watching on closed caption the story of Apple's cash problems. Seems they have almost a hundred billion bucks (more than most European countries) that they don't know what do with, except to hold it for the next inevitable bankster-inspired economic depression.

Looks like they could at least afford haz-mat suits for the Chinese peasants who get paid pennies to polish their expensive Apples in plants where suicide provides an attractive alternative to a life of hell.

I've been an Apple user for a long time, but I am definitely looking for another option that doesn't run on Gates.

A tiny clip from the NYTimes:

. . . . the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.

“If Apple was warned, and didn’t act, that’s reprehensible,” said Nicholas Ashford, a former chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a group that advises the United States Labor Department. “But what’s morally repugnant in one country is accepted business practices in another, and companies take advantage of that.”

Apple is not the only electronics company doing business within a troubling supply system. Bleak working conditions have been documented at factories manufacturing products for Dell, Hewlett-Packard, I.B.M., Lenovo, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Toshiba and others.

Current and former Apple executives, moreover, say the company has made significant strides in improving factories in recent years. Apple has a supplier code of conduct that details standards on labor issues, safety protections and other topics. The company has mounted a vigorous auditing campaign, and when abuses are discovered, Apple says, corrections are demanded.

And Apple’s annual supplier responsibility reports, in many cases, are the first to report abuses. This month, for the first time, the company released a list identifying many of its suppliers.

But significant problems remain. More than half of the suppliers audited by Apple have violated at least one aspect of the code of conduct every year since 2007, according to Apple’s reports, and in some instances have violated the law. While many violations involve working conditions, rather than safety hazards, troubling patterns persist.

“Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost,” said Li Mingqi, who until April worked in management at Foxconn Technology, one of Apple’s most important manufacturing partners. Mr. Li, who is suing Foxconn over his dismissal, helped manage the Chengdu factory where the explosion occurred.
“Workers’ welfare has nothing to do with their interests,” he said.. . . .

What the Hell Is the Tennessee State Board of Education Doing?

2012-01-26T10:22:00.001-05:00

First they came for the teachers. See below:

TennesseeState Board of Education Agenda January 27, 2012 Final Reading Item: IV. G.

LicenseDenial, Suspension, and Revocation Procedure Policy

TheBackground:

Pursuantto State Board of Education Rule 0520-2-4-.01(9)(b) the State Board ofEducation may revoke, suspend or refuse to issue or renew a license for severalreasons listed in the rule.

Currentlyunder the policy, there is no option for the State Board to issue a publicreprimand for a license holder who engages in conduct which may not rise to thelevel of a suspension, but should be discouraged nonetheless. Amending thepolicy to include public reprimand as an option would ensure that thoseinstances of misconduct are not only recorded with the State Board ofEducation, but are also reported to the National Association of State Directorsof Teacher Education and Certification (NASDTEC) Clearinghouse.

The Master Plan Connection:

This itemsupports the Board’s Master Plan principles of effective school leaders andeffective teachers by ensuring that varying levels of misconduct will beactionable.

TheRecommendation:

The SBE staff recommends adoption ofthis item on final reading.

Procedure for LicenseDenial, Public Reprimand, Suspension & Revocation

BoardRule 0520-2-4-.01(9) governs denial, public reprimand,suspension and revocation of a Tennessee teaching license. Reporting and recording of action takenon licenses is coordinated with the Department of Education’s Office of TeacherLicensing and local education agencies.

Belowis a general outline of the procedure followed in cases of possible licensedenial, public reprimand, suspension or revocation. Requests for restoration of suspendedor revoked licenses are handled in accordance with Board Policy 5.500, LicenseRestoration Requests.

Reporting

Board Rule0520-2-4-.01(9)(e) requires superintendents to report to the Office of TeacherLicensing whenever a teacher or administrator is “suspended or dismissed, or[has] resigned, following allegations of conduct which, if substantiated, wouldwarrant consideration for license suspension or revocation under” therule. Superintendents are alsorequired to report “felony convictions of licensed teachers or administrators.”These reports must be submitted “within thirty (30) days of the suspension,dismissal or resignation” or “within 30 days of receiving knowledge of the[felony] conviction.”

Procedure

Afterreceiving a report, the following procedure should be followed:

ForAutomatic Revocation

1. TheOffice of Teacher Licensing (OTL) flags the individual’s file (license orlicense application) on a databaseavailable to Tennessee LEAs. Before hiring new teachers, LEAs should check the potential employee’slicense status on this database to determine the reason for the flag.

2. TheOTL creates a file with the superintendent’s report and the teacher’s licenseinformation to Board counsel.

3. Boardcounsel obtains a certified copy of the criminal record showing the convictionfor one of the offenses at T.C.A. § 40-35-501(i)(2) or 39-17-417 (includingconviction on a plea of guilty or nolo contendere).

4. Followingreceipt of the certified record, Board counsel informs the individual thathis/her teaching license is subject to automatic revocation at the next Boardmeeting. Notification is sent atleast 30 days prior to the Board meeting at which the revocation is scheduledto occur.

For Denial, Public Reprimand,Suspension or Revocation

1. The Office of Teacher Licensing (OTL) flags thelicense file on a database available to Tennessee LEAs. Before hiring new teachers, LEAs shouldcheck the potential employee’s license status on this database to determine thereason for the flag.

2. The OTL prepares a file with the applicationmaterials or the superintendent’s report and transmits the file to Boardcounsel.

3. If another proceeding could affect the decision bythe Board, Board counsel may wait for:

a.The conclusion of any LEA investigation and/or termination proceeding or

b.Entry of a final order in any criminal or civil proceeding (including DCSfindings) related to the events giving rise to the report.

4. A three person panel of Board staff reviews thefile to determine whether disciplinary action (denial, public reprimand, suspension or revocation) should be pursued, or ifadditional investigation is necessary. This panel consists of the executive or deputy executive director,counsel to the Board, and at least one other staff member.

a.If the panel decides not to investigate further or pursue disciplinary action,counsel to the Board directs the OTL to unflag the file.

b.If the panel recommends that the Board impose disciplinary action, then

5. Board counsel then notifies the individual of theBoard’s intent and the individual’s right to a hearing. Counsel may alsoinclude a proposed agreed order.

a.If the individual waives the right to a hearing, Board counsel submits theproposed disciplinary action to the Board for roll-call vote at its nextmeeting. Counsel includes aproposed order for the Board to approve.

b.If the individual requests a hearing, then Board counsel schedules a hearingwith an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) from the Secretary of State’s office,sitting on behalf of the Board.

6. Board or ALJ action:

a.No disciplinary action:

i.If the Board votes not to impose discipline, Board counsel informs theindividual of the decision and directs the OTL to unflag the file.

ii.If the ALJ, sitting on behalf of the Board, finds that suspension or revocationis not warranted, Board counsel directs the OTL to unflag the file. The Board may, however, appeal theALJ’s decision at its discretion.

b.If the Board votes to impose discipline, counsel sends a copy of the order(signed by the Chair) to the individual, and copies the OTL.

c.OTL records the disciplinary action and the grounds on the nationalclearinghouse (NASDTEC).

NOTE:Suspended licenses are subject to expiration.

A visual representationof the procedure is included as an attachment to this policy.

Peas in a pod: Koret Foundation, The Hoover Institution, and Democrats for Education Reform

2012-01-26T07:36:00.004-05:00

"I tell you, my friends, the trouble with this whole country is that so many are selfish! Here's a hundred and twenty million people, with ninety-five per cent of 'em only thinking of self, instead of turning to and helping the responsible business men to bring back prosperity! All these corrupt and self-seeking labor unions! Money grubbers! Thinking only of how much wages they can extort out of their unfortunate employer, with all the responsibilities he has to bear!" ... "Then was revealed the New American Education, which, as Sarason so justly said, was to be ever so much newer than the New Educations of Germany, Italy, Poland, or even Turkey." — Sinclair Lewis [1]

It's no secret that the malicious types running Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) hold the same ideological positions as the furthest-right think-tanks around. Starting with their founder Whitney Tilson, [2] who channels American Enterprise Institute's (AEI) Andy Smarick at every opportunity, DFER is a bastion of right-wing thought that amounts to an enormous serving of Milton Freidman's free market fantasies finished with a healthy dollop of Ayn Rand's infantile insistence that "Big Business" is "America’s Persecuted Minority."

Much like Eli Broad's economic hit-men (and hit-women) trained at his various residencies and academies, DFER operatives have done astonishing damage to the public commons and undermine democracy at every opportunity. In Democrats for Neoliberal Education Reform I outlined the duplicitous underhanded craftiness DFER Colorado operatives Mike Johnston and his colleagues employed to "railroad the anti-community, anti-teacher, pro-corporate SB-191 through the Colorado Legislature." More importantly, we looked at the language of their own document which gleefully "discuss[es] students as mere commodities to be consumed by the owners of the means of production."

In the past right-wing Democrats like those comprising the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) pretended that they were somehow different than the John Birch Society inspired organizations that informed the DLC's policies. DFER, on the other hand, makes no attempts to mask their muses and ideological allies. Much like Arne Duncan's ballyhooed "education reform" tour with serial bigot (and philanderer) Newt Gingrich, DFER makes no bones about the fact that their natural allies are fringe-right creeps that would put children back to work. [3]

Case in point Gloria J. Romero, DFER California Director, just completed a panel entitled "School Choice, Special Interests and the Education of Our Children" along with arch-reactionaries Terry Moe of The Hoover Institution and Lance Izumi of Koret Foundation. The event, held in "honor" of deceptively named "school choice week," was moderated by teabagger and staunch anti-unionist Lary Sand, who some might recall as having moderated a school privatization event held by Ben Austin, Ben Boychuck, and Bruno Behrend. DFER's Romero, whose hatred of organized labor echoes that of the Brothers Koch, must have been very confortable on a panel with reactionaries whose views up ten years ago were considered extremist even by the mainstream GOP.

Any guesses as to who the panel considered "Special Interests?" It's safe to say that it wasn't The Broad Foundation, The Gates Foundation, or The Walton Family Foundation. Let's look briefly at our ideological peas in a pod.

Terry Moe, who writes with all of the authority of Philip Morris treatise on the health benefits of smoking, is a favorite in the Murdoch, Walton, DeVos, Bradley, Koch, and Scaife circles. The extreme right-wing Hoover Institution (named after the vile president who stood by and did nothing the last time the banksters and Wall Street swindlers crashed the economy) is wont to lionize right-wing monsters (and Milton Freidman acolytes) like the butchering murderer Generalissimo Augusto Pinochet.

Lance Izumi, who spends much of his time writing fallacious fact-frees texts trying to scamboozle middle class parents into accepting "school choice" and distance learning in order to bolster the burgeoning charter and online school sectors, is a senior fellow at the Koret Foundation. Koret, which unabashedly promotes Freidman's discredited ideas while simultaneously celebrating the Nakba, have their — in their own words — "free-market think tank, Pacific Research Institute" based at The Hoover Institution.

Gloria Romero is best known for her obsequious service to the lucrative charter school industry. While a California State Senator, she worked tirelessly to ensure Caprice Young, Jed Wallace, and other charter school tycoons would continue to dine voraciously at the public trough. Among her dubious accomplishments was SB-592 which handed public school property over to private corporations. Romero's most famous betrayal of the working class people of California was her collaboration with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ben Austin to create the vile corporate charter trigger, which allows well funded Charter Management Organizations to increase market share. Since her ignominious defeat in her bid to garner the California State Superintendent of Public Instruction seat on behalf of the California Charter Schools Association, Romero has worked harder to union bust and privatize public schools than all of the teabagger elected governors combined. Her shameless pandering to the right and constant opportunism was best summed up in 2009 by my friend and comrade Alvaro Maldonado when we were still trying to prevent the parent trigger law from passing:

For those harboring illusions about State Senator Gloria Romero, her ideology, and her intentions. Long time immigrant rights activist Alvaro Maldonado, who led the fight against the racist Prop 187, had this to say about State Senator and Privatization Pontiff Gloria Romero:

I just saw her the other day! She use to be a left liberal, now she's just a plain capitalist liberal! Gloria Romero was an 1970's activist turned Democratic politician just like Fabian Nunez. I think, it should be a good lesson to all that those liberals who tie themselves to the Democratic party are almost without exception, turn into promoters for the capitalist system; be they co-opted, sold out, or just believe that there is no alternative (I generally I don't buy the argument on practicality claimed by the "progressive" Democrats... Their excuses generally hide their opportunism). The UFW traditional leadership (Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, etc) gave us years of union and Democratic party opportunism in their stances on many an issue... but thats too long a story to get into on this comment page... it should suffice to be weary of "progressives" keeping close ties to the Democratic party.

On balance, there's no difference between education policies and philosophies of the Koret Foundation, The Hoover Institution, and Democrats for Education Reform — not even a nuanced difference. Indeed, this is why we are seeing more and more events at which the fringe-right is paired with right of center Democrats. This insidious pairing has several consequences, the first of which is that these right wing DFER types try to call their politics, adopted from the far-right, "progressive." They're not, and we must call them out on this each and every time they try to pass them off as such. We must name names, and remind everyone that reactionary ideas of free-markets and competition are the antithesis of equity and social justice.

"One result of 30 years of neoliberalism is the a widespread assumption that if you're unhappy dominating or exploiting your fellow human beings, it must be because you're stupid or incapable." — Mike Marqusee

_____
NOTES

[1] Lewis, Sinclair. It can't happen here; a novel, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1935.

[2] For some prime examples see Tilson's amateurish and spurious "Rebutting Ravitch" diatribe. He regurgitates Freidman/Rand balderdash with statements about how public education is "lacking in market mechanisms." Moreover Tilson's own unsuccessful attempts to rebut Professor Ravitch are augmented with likewise perfidy by some of his political idols; including The Hoover Institution's Chester Finn, arch-reactionary Andy Rotherham, and for good measure other assorted right wingers like Stuart Buck and Jay Greene.

As an aside, Tilson's prose leaves so much to be desired, which isn't too surprising for a child of privilege who went on to grow mummy and daddy's money by shorting housing derivatives. That said, don't the elite colleges these ruling class brats attend teach them to write? Tilson couldn't compose a cogent sentence if his life depended on it.

[3] In this age of standardized bubble tests and Fox News, it's easy to forget that "Child labor wasn't outlawed until the passage of the FLSA in 1938. Also read about Mother Jones 1903 "Children's Crusade," fight to limit child labor to 55 hours a week."

Save the University, Save the Republic

2012-01-25T12:35:00.000-05:00

As state legislatures purchased with unlimited corporate money continue to chop higher education funding, public colleges and universities become more susceptible to the Kochheads:

"A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty." Really?

2012-01-25T10:29:00.003-05:00

Using some of those Harvard econometrics from Raj Chetty, Obama precedes the ridiculous "escape from poverty" contention with this emerging statisti-meme:

We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000.

Even if this speculation could be practically demonstrated, which it can't, here's what it would mean.

So divide the $250,000 by 25 kids to a classroom (next year you can add 5 students to this number), then divide that by 45 years (next year add 5 years to that number), and you get a grand total of $222 per year per child. An "escape from poverty"? That won't even buy you an annual subway ride from the Bronx to Manhattan, much less an escape from poverty.

By the way, $222 is what Newt Romney made every 5 minutes last year from his interest income of $22 million. So yes, Mr. President, do say more about income inequality and how teachers offer an escape from poverty. We're all listening.

Testing Band and Music is on its Way

2012-01-24T13:46:00.002-05:00

If anyone thought for a moment music and band would be the one area that wouldn't be measured or tested, think again.

Michael Winerip of the New York Times once again brings us to the front line where teachers continue to do the "dirty work" of corporate reformers who are seeking new and creative ways to make a buck off of children and teachers:

The Education Department will spend about $5 billion on the program, and even if you’re thinking, hey, I could use $5 billion, consider this: New York won the largest federal grant, $700 million over the next four years. In that time, roughly $230 billion will be spent on public education in the state. By adding just one-third of one percent to state coffers, the feds get to implement their version of education reform.

That includes rating teachers and principals by their students’ scores on state tests; using those ratings to dismiss teachers with low scores and to pay bonuses to high scorers; and reducing local control of education.

Second, the secretary of education, Arne Duncan, and his education scientists do not have to do the dirty work. For teachers in subject areas and grades that do not have state tests (music, art, technology, kindergarten through third grade) or do not have enough state tests to measure growth (every high school subject), it is the state’s responsibility to create a system of alternative ratings.

In New York, that will have to cover 79 percent of all teachers, a total of 175,000 people. The only state tests for assessing teachers are for English and math, from fourth grade to eighth.

Third, federal officials don’t wind up looking like dictators telling states how to do their jobs. They’re happy to let state officials work out the details.

In New York, state officials have also decided not to be dictatorial. They’re happy to let the state’s 700 school districts figure out, individually, how to assess those 175,000 teachers.

Fourth, while President Harry S. Truman said the buck stops here, costing himself a lot of extra time and effort, President Obama can say the buck stops way down there, cutting his workload.

Of course, a buck whizzing downward has to land somewhere, and in this case it sits on the desk of Paul R. Infante, the director of fine and applied arts for the Commack School District on Long Island.

Mr. Infante is trying to figure out how to develop a test or an assessment system to rate band teachers.

Several weeks ago the state sent out a guide. The band teacher could listen to every child play at the start of the year and assign a score from 1 to 4.

“At the end of the year,” the state guide says, “the teacher re-evaluates their students.” (Someone needs to evaluate the state’s grammar.)

The teacher again grades students from 1 to 4, and the sum of the progress they have made during the year determines the teacher’s rating.

Our history of dissing high school grads

2012-01-23T15:15:00.001-05:00

Sent to the New York Post, Jan 23, 2012

The Post reports that nearly 80% of city high school grads are not prepared for college work (“Make-believe grads,” Jan. 22). Colleges have been complaining about the low quality of incoming students for over 100 years in the United States.

In the 1880’s Harvard introduced remedial writing classes because so many entering students failed the new entrance exams. In 1894, Harvard criticized high school writing teachers for the poor performance of students entering college. Note that these were the best students in the country attending the best university of its time.

In 1930, Thomas Biggs of Teachers College found that only half of the high school students he studied could find the area of a circle, after a year of ancient history students did not know who Solon was, after a year of American history students could not describe the Monroe Doctrine, and students’ written English was “shocking” and “inadequate.”

Either high schools have always been terrible or we have always been expecting too much.

Stephen Krashen

Original article: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/editorials/make_believe_grads_ZyIynJbktxBaANFE3wcV5N#ixzz1kJV3Z7PN

The Thrill is Gone

2012-01-22T14:13:00.001-05:00

From a look at today's Google Alert list, it would seem to indicate some pretty consistent concerns with the corporate welfare charter school movement, which shows signs of running out of steam everywhere, except on Wall Street.

Charter schools lose their magic

Gloucester County Times - NJ.com

By Milton W. Hinton Jr. I find it interesting that some very influential people have come out in support of the expansion of charter schools in our state, including Gov. Chris Christie, Mayor Corey Booker of Newark, and Reginald Jackson, ...

Charter school's shutdown shows need for review

DesMoinesRegister.com

Sigourney school leaders say they will shutter the district's charter school at the end of the academic year, after state officials threatened to shut it down. The problems in Sigourney shine a light on the need for better monitoring of Iowa's charter ...

Former CEO of Philadelphia charter school pleads guilty to theft, fraud ... Philadelphia Inquirer Ina Walker (left), CEO of New Media Charter School and Hugh Clark (right) president… (MICHAEL S. WIRTZ / Staff Photographer, file) The former chief executive officer of a charter school in Northwest Philadelphia pleaded guilty Friday to stealing more ...


Charter school foes gather to hear McAllen family's experience Austin American-Statesman Govalle Elementary School parent Vincent Tovar, who organized Saturday's gathering for opponents of the IDEA charter schools planned for East Austin, translates for some Spanish-only speakers at the rally. As part of a technology change, ...

New Somerville charter school debate echoes concerns in 1996

Wicked Local

Students in Laura Powers' 4th grade class at Prospect Hill Academy Charter School were asked to select a book for their summer reading during class on Wednesday. The debate over a newly proposed charter school in Somerville is reminiscent of the debate ...

Charter schools: Where's the beef?

Asbury Park Press

Chris Christie and his administration that our schools, and our teachers, are failing our children. He has hammered away at the need for a series of reforms, from dramatically expanding the number of charter schools, to expanding school choice, ...

Hawaii's Teachers Take a Stand: Take Your RTTT Bribe and Shove It

2012-01-22T09:36:00.000-05:00

From Valerie Strauss at WaPo:

Public school teachers in Hawaii have rejected a contract that called for a move to a performance-based evaluation and compensation system, as required by the Race to the Top grant that the state won from the Obama administration.

The rejection comes shortly after Hawaii was warned by the U.S. Education Department that its $75 million Race to the Top grant had been put on “high-risk status” — the first state to be so sanctioned — because it had not moved quickly enough to implement specific reforms.

Sixty-seven percent of about 9,000 teachers, counselors and others represented by the Hawaii State Teachers Association opposed the contract, which was seen as a way to move Race to the Top efforts forward and improve its status with Washington. It was the first time in the organization’s 44-year history that members rejected a contract that had been approved by its board, according to the Honolulu Civil Beat.

The Honolulu Civil Beat put this headline on a story it ran announcing the defeat of the contract proposal: “Hawaii Teachers Vote a Stunning Blow For Race to the Top”

Race to the Top is the administration’s signature education initiative, a $4 billion-plus contest in which states and districts have competed for a slice of the money in exchange for implementing school reform policies favored by the department. Those include expanding charter schools and evaluating teachers in part on the basis of students’ standardized test scores. Twenty-one states plus the District of Columbia have been awarded grants through several rounds of Race to the Top. Hawaii won $75 million but could lose its grant (a few million dollars have already been spent) if the department is not satisfied with the pace of reform there.

Education Department officials told Gov. Neil Abercrombie (D) in a recent letter that the progress the state had made in implementing reforms in the first 14 months of the grant had been “unsatisfactory.” Federal officials are planning to visit Hawaii early this year to do an on-site evaluation of Race to the Top compliance.

The proposed contract called for a new evaluation system for teachers that would be partly based on student growth, a controversial approach because there are many factors that influence a student’s academic performance and teasing out how much a teacher is responsible is very difficult. The formulas that are used to try to do this rely on standardized test scores earned by students and are not sophisticated enough to be valid or fair, assessment experts say, although policymakers have forged ahead with these systems anyway.

But the contract proposal, according to several Hawaii newspapers, did not actually spell out the details of how the new evaluation system would work. It would, however, have reversed a 5 percent pay reduction that went into effect last year.

Hawaii may be having the biggest trouble among Race to the Top recipients satisfying the Education Department, but it isn’t the only one; implementation in several states is slow.

The Associated Press reported earlier this month that reports issued by states detailing their progress in the first year of their Race to the Top grant showed that most of them were behind schedule with implementation. New York and Florida were having the most serious problems aside from Hawaii, the AP said.

Behind the "No Excuses" Mask: "Evidence Is Not Policy"

2012-01-21T09:23:00.005-05:00

The "No Excuses" Reformers have two refrains that drive their claims about schools and teachers as well as their arguments for reform policy: "Poverty is not an excuse" and "Poverty is not destiny." But behind these mantras is the real message from these self-appointed reformers: "Evidence is not policy."

The "No Excuses" Reformers have remained committed to several alternatives to what they call the status quo: Teach for America (TFA), charter schools, and school choice. What do all three have in common?

A lack of evidence for pursuing any of them as policy.

• The evidence against TFA.

• The mixed, at best, evidence about charter schools (and the reasons "no excuses" charters such as KIPP are inexcusable).

• The most recent failure of market forces/school choice in education reform.

Consider Diedrich's discussion of the two-decades of failure stemming from school choice in Minnesota (a pattern that also occurred in Milwaukee, and both have been essentially ignored by the "No Excuses" Reformers):

"After experimenting with market-based, competitive education initiatives for 20 years with little statewide education improvement, it’s time Minnesota returns to what works best: proper education investment and supporting our students and teachers.

"Minnesota is home to the nation’s oldest charter school law and has also implemented school choice initiatives, such as open enrollment. This simulated market experience has not supported the idea that increased competition drives improvement.

"Minnesota's national test scores in math have increased by less than seven percent since the introduction of a competitive system 20 years ago, and reading scores increased by less than one percent during the same time frame.

"The main problem, among many, is that school systems cannot function as free markets if we want to achieve universal post-secondary readiness. Free markets produce efficiency, not equity for all. Efficiency helps maximize profit, but what about students that aren’t profitable to educate? [emphasis added]

"Using the rules of economics, and assuming we must achieve universal post-secondary readiness, MN2020’s latest report, False Choices: Market-Driven Education Reform Doesn’t Work, demonstrates why free market thinking in education comes at a high price for students, parents and teachers.

"As a result of competition-based thinking, many schools have focused on teaching-to-tests and advertising instead of broad based cognitive development that will provide students with the necessary skills to be successful in a 21st century workforce.

"In moving Minnesota back toward a proven educational path, our latest report makes the following recommendations:
There is a place in education for efficiency, incentives, and innovation; however, policymakers must stop trying to achieve these competitive goals with a false, market-based approach.
Schools must adapt to achieve universal post-secondary readiness by focusing on initiatives that enhance teachers’ professional development and provide comprehensive teacher assessment and feedback.
Instead of using a false market-mentality as political cover to systematically defund schools, we must invest in education for the 21st century, using some of that investment to develop a comprehensive and fair teacher evaluation metric.
Charter schools have a place in the public education system as partners, not competitors, with traditional schools."

And the ignored conclusions from Milwaukee published in 2007?

"Taken as a whole, these numbers indicate significant limits on the capacity of public school choice and parental involvement to improve school quality and student performance within MPS. Parents simply do not appear sufficiently engaged in available choice opportunities or their children’s educational activities to ensure the desired outcomes.

"This may be just as well. Relying on public school choice and parental involvement to reclaim MPS may be a distraction from the hard work of fixing the district’s schools. Recognizing this, the question is whether the district, its schools, and its supporters in Madison are prepared to embrace more radical reforms. Given the high stakes involved, district parents should insist on nothing less."

As the evidence mounts against the claims and policies of the "No Excuses" Reformers, their entrenched refrains ring more and more hollow, and behind those refrains we hear the reality of their commitments: Evidence is not policy.

Joanne Barkan on How Billionaires Rule Our Schools

2012-01-21T04:32:00.002-05:00

False Choices: The Economic Argument Against Market-Driven Education Reform

2012-01-21T04:30:00.002-05:00

False Choices: The Economic Argument Against Market-Driven Education Reform

Tapping Out: The Underwhelming TAP Achievement of the Milken-McIntyre Schools

2012-01-20T22:17:00.001-05:00

A significant piece of the Broad corporate education plan in Knoxville, Tennessee involves turning over control of curriculum, professional development, and instruction in Knoxville's poorest schools to the phony-baloney corporate ed scam run by the corrupt Milken Brothers. Four schools have been TAP schools since 2006, and another 13 schools are in transition to TAP with the help of $26,500,000 in federal tax dollars going to the former swindlers of Wall Street who are now big time players in the corporate welfare education business.

Broad's toadie in Knoxville, Supt. Jim McIntyre (my bolds):

“This significant investment will enable us to move more rapidly toward implementing our vision for educator excellence and enhancing student achievement in our highest need schools,” said Dr. Jim McIntyre, Superintendent of the Knox County Schools. “TAP perfectly aligns with our strategic plan in terms of developing high quality teachers, improving collaboration, supporting high needs schools, and providing innovative and strategic compensation incentives for our educators.”

Well, you decide how much truth is in that statement. The following charts are from the State website, and it shows the CRT state test scores since 2009 (numbers were not available from 2007 due to testing changes that disallow comparisons). Knoxvillians may wonder what $26M in tax money could do for Knoxville children if it were not being handed over to corporate predators.

From the state website:

Note: The 2009 baseline provided a fixed transition point prior to the 2009-10 school year implementations of the new curriculum standards and assessments more reflective of national and international student performance in the 21st Century. The 2009 achievement scores and all grades connected with these scores are considered the new baseline for future public reporting. These converted achievement scores and grades are based on restructured calculations and a redefined grade scale that are updated to reflect the current status of educational attainment in the state in 2009. The 2009 change has prohibited comparisons to previous years’ data prior to 2009 for achievement reporting including state, district, and school-level scores and grades. For 2010, the most appropriate and meaningful comparsion would be to 2008-09 and the 2010 State level data.

Holston Middle School:

Grades 3-8: TCAP Criterion Referenced Academic Achievement									View Chart ?
(3 year average)	2009		2010		2011			2011 State
CRT	Score	Grade	Score	Grade	Score	Grade	Trend	Score	Grade	Trend
Math	48	C	48	C	49	C	NC	50	B	+
Reading/Language	49	C	49	C	50	B	+	49	C	NC
Social Studies	49	C	51	B	53	B	NC	52	B	NC
Science	47	C	48	C	48	C	NC	49	C	NC

Lonsdale Elementary:

Grades 3-8: TCAP Criterion Referenced Academic Achievement									View Chart ?
(3 year average)	2009		2010		2011			2011 State
CRT	Score	Grade	Score	Grade	Score	Grade	Trend	Score	Grade	Trend
Math	38	F	37	F	38	F	NC	50	B	+
Reading/Language	35	F	34	F	35	F	NC	49	C	NC
Social Studies	27	F	28	F	29	F	NC	52	B	NC
Science	28	F	29	F	29	F	NC	49	C	NC

Northwest Middle:

Grades 3-8: TCAP Criterion Referenced Academic Achievement									View Chart ?
(3 year average)	2009		2010		2011			2011 State
CRT	Score	Grade	Score	Grade	Score	Grade	Trend	Score	Grade	Trend
Math	42	D	41	D	41	D	NC	50	B	+
Reading/Language	42	D	41	D	40	D	NC	49	C	NC
Social Studies	43	D	43	D	43	D	NC	52	B	NC
Science	44	D	41	D	40	D	NC	49	C	NC

Pond Gap Elementary:

Grades 3-8: TCAP Criterion Referenced Academic Achievement									View Chart ?
(3 year average)	2009		2010		2011			2011 State
CRT	Score	Grade	Score	Grade	Score	Grade	Trend	Score	Grade	Trend
Math	40	D	39	F	39	F	NC	50	B	+
Reading/Language	41	D	40	D	42	D	NC	49	C	NC
Social Studies	38	F	38	F	40	D	+	52	B	NC
Science	37	F	37	F	38	F	NC	49	C	NC

Holston Middle:

Grades 3-8: TCAP Criterion Referenced Academic Achievement									View Chart ?
(3 year average)	2009		2010		2011			2011 State
CRT	Score	Grade	Score	Grade	Score	Grade	Trend	Score	Grade	Trend
Math	48	C	48	C	49	C	NC	50	B	+
Reading/Language	49	C	49	C	50	B	+	49	C	NC
Social Studies	49	C	51	B	53	B	NC	52	B	NC
Science	47	C	48	C	48	C	NC	49	C	NC

It's the Socioeconomic Segregation, Stupid

2012-01-19T18:50:00.000-05:00

The Common Dreams version:

In a piece for The Nation last week, Linda Darling-Hammond demolished most of the remaining chunks of any size within the crumbling structure of corporate education’'s most ironically-titled reform ever --No Child Left Behind. NCLB is now rubble, even though many unseen victims continue to be buried beneath its mammoth pile.

Darling-Hammond, who was recruited to get Team Obama up to speed on education issues following the 2008 election, entitled her piece, "Why Is Congress Redlining Our Schools?". It should be noted that as soon as Team Obama got a lay of the edu-land in early 2009, they dismissed Darling-Hammond and brought in corporate lackey, Arne Duncan, to serve as titular head of the Education Department while the corporate foundations run the show.

Now that I think about it, she might have more appropriately named her piece "Why are the White House and Congress Redlining Our Schools?”.

Just as red-lining was used for many years by the FHA to maintain racial purity and avoid ethnic mixing in housing, red-lining is a good description of what is going on today in urban public education to contain and isolate children of the poor in the new chain gang charter schools. Thanks to requirements of NCLB, residents of urban areas who send their children to public schools with their sub-par testing results must contend with the federal label of failure and high risk, with public monies often withheld because the poor children in these schools cannot pass tests whose pass rates are directly correlated to family income. And as the teachers and principals in these schools have been blamed, then, for the student failure that poverty has assured, these red-lined schools are labeled, shut down, or reconstituted per the NCLB plan.

The public school buildings, then, are often handed to corporate foundations in sweetheart deals enabled by new charter-embracing laws (try Indiana where charter corporations can buy an empty school for a dollar). Add some corporate, tax-sheltered venture funds and, bingo, a new intensely-segregated charter is born, complete with cheaper marginally prepared teachers (20% cheaper nationally), a chain gang instructional model, total compliance and constant surveillance, zero tolerance, no excuses, and little oversight (see what can happen when institutional safeguards are dangerously absent).

Standing to profit mightily from the urban containment and indoctrination model are growing numbers of self-serving and displaced Wall Street hacks, venture philanthropists, and hedge funders. In charge are the educational management organizations (EMOs) or the charter management organizations (CMOs), which often recruit as principals the former Teach for America Corps members who are schooled in the new corporate model of autocratic control of poor children, even down to the behavioral catechisms and the learned optimism strategies of the creepy positive psychologists with whom they consult.

In the process, then, of turning public schools into permanent corporate revenue streams, tax bills for the 1%ers get further reduced, the teachers unions are eviscerated, and the politicians collect from corporate coffers the unlimited funds they need to get re-elected and continue their support of corporate education reform. And the cycle is complete.

So Dr. Darling-Hammond, that is Why Congress AND the White House Are Redlining Our Schools.

In moving beyond No Child Left Behind in ways that are humane, effective, and efficient, we must implement education policies that challenge economic inequality rather than increasing it, which will require an about-face for most politicians on both sides of the aisle of the corporate jet. One thing that schools can do in this regard is to take seriously the research by James Coleman, which has been ignored or misused since it was published in 1966, just one year after Congressional approval of the first ESEA in 1965.

Coleman’s findings are here summarized by Coleman scholar, Gerald Grant (2009):

Simply put, Coleman found that the achievement of both poor and rich children was depressed by attending a school where most children came from low-income families. More important to the goal of achieving equal educational opportunity, he found that the achievement of poor children was raised by attending a predominantly middle-class school, while the achievement of affluent children in the school was not harmed. This was true even if per-pupil expenditures were the same at both schools. No research over the past forty years has overturned Coleman’s finding . . . (p. 159).

Coleman also found that the longer that poor black children were stuck in low SES schools, the lower their achievement moved in comparison to middle class children.

First up, we need to ditch federal charter school policy that actually calls for high poverty quotas of 60 percent minimum of poor children in order to win the federal grants for "successful"” charter expansion. If charter schools are going to continue at all, this kind of incentive for segregation is exactly the opposite of what needs to be done.

Charters or any other schools should, in fact, have a maximum of 40 percent low-income children, so that the social capital that James Coleman and hundreds of other scholars have shown to be so important in raising achievement can help to equalize the punishing effects of concentrated poverty. Ending socioeconomic segregation, of course, is only a partial solution, but it is one that would signal that we are at least aware of the problem, rather than continuing to ignore the problem as our solutions increasingly resemble what came to be the scourge of eugenics a hundred years ago.

California's high school exit exam: Abusive, antiquated (J. Behm)

2012-01-18T23:12:00.000-05:00

The California High School Exit Exam: Abusive and antiquated
By Jo Anne Behm, sent to the Sacramento Bee

The high school exit exam is a public policy disaster of epic proportions, costing taxpayers over $500 million annually, denying 35k-60k seniors their diplomas every June since 2006. Over 300,000 seniors who earned 230-270 graduation credits, passed 13 year-long courses required to graduate, persevered 13 years, 14,000 hours in k-12 classrooms, some accepted to two or more colleges---are forced to sacrifice college and scholarships, are no longer eligible for Cal Grants or other financial aid, cannot deliver packages for UPS, collect boarding passes for any airline, sell shoes at Sears, or qualify as an apprentice for over 70% of California trades because they have no high school diploma.

It is totally abusive, inhumane, and militaristic to claim these students are not qualified to graduate because of a flawed test based on mind-numbing memorization and a cold-turkey,surprise topic essay that prohibits technology, references, editing. Return to teaching vs. antiquated testing.

Jo Ann Rupert Behm, M.S., RN
State & Federal Public Policy Consultant
Environmental Health, Disabilities, Education

Save Ethnic Studies

2012-01-18T22:38:00.001-05:00

Amigos,

This information is being sent to you by Roger & Norma Cazares . . . PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY! If you want someone to address this issue further at any gathering, let us know.

As you may know, Arizona has banned the teaching of ethnic studies, specifically targeting Mexican-American Studies in the Tucson Unified School District. Eleven TUSD teachers, administrators and students are suing the state to bring back Ethnic Studies.

To fight blatant discrimination and the spread of this civil/human rights violation to other states, join us for a fundraiser ($10, but hope you can donate more!) for:

SAVE ETHNIC STUDIES
Saturday, February 25, 2012
2:00 p.m.
Lincoln High School
4777 Imperial Avenue
San Diego, 92113

Attached you'll find the flyer for the Save Ethnic Studies event.

Here's the link to the trailer for Precious Knowledge

Here's the link to the description of the ethnic studies program:

Please encourage everyone to register at Eventbrite. com for SAVE ETHNIC STUDIES Fundraiser at Lincoln High School.

Add Your Name to the Save Ethnic Studies Petition

The Mexican American Studies program in the Tucson Unified School District is facing the real threat of being shut down. The program successfully keeps otherwise-disengaged students motivated to learn and go on to college by using curriculum with which they culturally identify to teach critical thinking skills and empower the students to be strong leaders in their communities.

Despite all of the benefits of the program, in May 2010 Governor Jan Brewer signed a bill (HB 2281) into law that aimed to ban ethnic studies in Arizona schools. This law went into effect at the beginning of 2011 and prohibits schools from offering classes that are designed for students of a certain ethnic group. As a result, the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson, which has contributed to a 97% decrease in the dropout rate, is now facing a serious threat to its existence, while African American, Native American, and Asian American Studies programs are all allowed to continue.

An independent audit commissioned by the state found the program to be fully in compliance with Arizona’s ban, and recommended that the program be maintained as part of the core curriculum for high schools. Despite these findings, State Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal has threatened to withhold $15 million of state funding from the school district.

Join the 11 teachers and administrators from the Mexican American Studies program and two of its students to defend the program. Sign the Save Ethnic Studies petition below to show your support and we’ll keep you updated on the progress of the lawsuit against the Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction and the State Board of Education.

Learn more! Watch the trailer of Precious Knowledge, which documents the program and the battle to save it. The full program will be shown at the fundraiser.

We the undersigned support the effort to save ethnic studies in the Tucson Unified School District. The Mexican American Studies program poses no threat to the state of Arizona or its education system. On the contrary, it provides a proven-effective method to educate students and motivate them to stay in school and become productive leaders in their community.

We stand in opposition to State Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal’s attempt to withhold $15 million of state funding from the school district. This action is completely unwarranted given the results of the independent audit commissioned by the state, which found the program to be fully in compliance with Arizona's ethnic studies ban. In fact, the audit recommended that the program be maintained as part of the core curriculum for high schools in the district.

The Mexican American Studies program should be applauded and replicated for its success, not destroyed by a pointless ban.

Here's an interesting interview by Anderson Cooper interviewing Tom Horne and the great sociologist Michael Dyson.

Arizona Oppressors Ban Discussion of Oppression in Classrooms

2012-01-18T19:26:00.000-05:00

From Democracy Now:

Public school officials in Tucson, Arizona, have released a list of seven banned books that can no longer be used in classrooms following their suspension of the district’s acclaimed Mexican American Studies program. Last year, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal ruled the program violated a new state law, saying it "promote[s] resentment toward a race or class of people." "If all you’re teaching these students is one viewpoint, one dimension, we can readily see that it’s not an accurate history, it’s not an education at all. It’s not teaching these kids to think critically," Huppenthal says, "but instead it’s an indoctrination." We host a debate between Huppenthal and Richard Martinez, the attorney representing teachers and students trying to save the Mexican American Studies program. "What has occurred here is that [Huppenthal] has taken away from our entire community a curriculum that was adopted by our school board, that was developed by our school district, and that had successfully operated for well over 10 years," Martinez says. "It’s just part of the same kind of tactics that have been employed in Arizona reflected by [SB] 1070, the anti-immigrant perspective. It is the anti-Latino perspective that exists in this state." [includes rush transcript]

How California can save a half billion every year

2012-01-18T14:47:00.000-05:00

Sent to the Santa Monica Mirror, January 18, 2012

In his State of the State Address (January 18), Gov. Brown made the sensible suggestion that California should reduce the number of tests students have to take. Here is a place to start that will result in instant savings of about a half billion dollars a year: Eliminate the High School Leaving Exam. Analyst Jo Ann Behm has estimated that the combined state and local costs of California's high school exit exam exceed $500 million per year.

The most recent review of research on exit exams, done by researchers at the University of Texas, concluded that high school exit exams do not lead to more college attendance, increased student learning or higher employment.

In fact, researchers have yet to discover any benefits of having a High School Exit Exam.

Stephen Krashen
Professor Emeritus, University of Southern California

Most recent review: Holme, J., Richards, M., Jimerson, J., and Cohen, R. 2010. Assessing the effects of high school exit examinations. Review of Educational Research 80 (4): 476-526.

Universal Public Education Is Dead: The Rise of State Schools

2012-01-17T14:40:00.001-05:00

Universal Public Education Is Dead: The Rise of State Schools

Poet Adrienne Rich in Arts of the Possible made this claim on the cusp of No Child Left Behind (NCLB):

“Universal public education has two possible—and contradictory—missions. One is the development of a literate, articulate, and well-informed citizenry so that the democratic process can continue to evolve and the promise of radical equality can be brought closer to realization. The other is the perpetuation of a class system dividing an elite, nominally ‘gifted’ few, tracked from an early age, from a very large underclass essentially to be written off as alienated from language and science, from poetry and politics, from history and hope—toward low-wage temporary jobs. The second is the direction our society has taken. The results are devastating in terms of the betrayal of a generation of youth. The loss to the whole of society is incalculable.” (p. 162)

Starting with the politically corrupt A Nation in Risk in 1983 [1], political leaders partnered with the corporate elite to drive the public away from universal public education committed to democracy and human agency and toward "the perpetuation of a class system" that serves the state, a corporate state.

Today, a decade after the commitment was codified as NCLB, universal public education is dead [2] and what we have now is the rise of state schools

The Rise of State Schools

More than thirty years, however, before Rich's bold and accurate commentary on public education, Paulo Freire warned against the danger of authoritarian schooling:

"Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the 'banking' concept of education, in the which the scope of action allowed to the students extends as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits....For apart from inquiry, apart from praxis, individuals cannot be truly human....In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as process of inquiry."

Fulfilling fully Freire's warnings about banking education and ignoring his call for problem-posing education as individual empowerment and as essential for democracy, NCLB codified the accountability era, entrenching standards- and test-based state education to replace universal public education.

U.S. schools under the jurisdiction of state and federal governments are now scripted processes that view knowledge as static capital, students as passive and empty vessels, and teachers as compliant conduits for state-approved content.

The accountability paradigm is antithetical to human agency and autonomy and thus to democracy, but it serves the needs of the status quo and the ruling elite; in effect, accountability paradigms driving compulsory education are oppressive:

"Problem-posing education does not and cannot serve the interests if the oppressor. No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to begin to question: Why? While only a revolutionary society can carry out this education in systemic terms, the revolutionary leaders need not take full power before they can employ the method. In the revolutionary process, the leaders cannot utilize the banking methods as an interim measure, justified on grounds of expediency, with the intention of later behaving in a genuinely revolutionary fashion. They must be revolutionary—that is to say, dialogical—from the outset." (Freire, 1993)

If our commitments to education lie within our commitments to democracy and human autonomy, then we must set aside the accountability regime of scripted curriculum as "standards" and reducing all teaching and learning to outcomes as test data.

Instead, we should build schools that are problem-posing, as Freire explains, wherein students are student-teachers and teachers are teacher-students with both in dialogue and partnership in forming the questions and seeking the answers.

The accountability paradigm fixes knowledge as authoritarian capital, above even the possibility of being challenged. In problem-posing classrooms, students and teachers read and re-read the world as well as write and re-write the world.

To read and write the world is to unpack and examine the world as it is, bound by the context of time and place at the moment of the reading and writing. But this is mere observation; if we stop here—even if we are rejecting the banking concept of education—we are failing action, which requires re-reading and re-writing.

Re-reading and re-writing the world acknowledges that being as a human is always becoming, and these acts embrace the perpetual cycle of re-reading and re-writing as essential for both human agency and democracy. Teaching and learning are reciprocal and on-going, not hierarchical and ends to attain, possess.

A decade after enacting NCLB as federal education legislation and as we seek ways in which to intensify the accountability paradigm with national standards, to increase national testing, and to reduce teaching to simplistic metrics such as VAM, we are ringing the death knell for universal public education and embracing state schools that accomplish personal and social devastation, as Rich anticipated: "The second is the direction our society has taken. The results are devastating in terms of the betrayal of a generation of youth. The loss to the whole of society is incalculable."

[1] See Bracey, G. W. (2003). April foolishness: The 20th anniversary of A Nation at Risk. Phi Delta Kappan, 84(8), 616-621; Holton, G. (2003, April 25). An insider’s view of “A Nation at Risk” and why it still matters. The Chronicle Review, 49(33), B13.

[2] See Ravitch, D. (2010/2011). The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and choice are undermining education. New York: Basic Books.

Reference

Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.

New Jersey's Poorest Schools Literally Crumbling

2012-01-17T14:04:00.010-05:00

There's a battle brewing between David Sciarra of the Education Law Center and Governor Christie in New Jersey . It looks like when it comes to emergency repairs in poor school districts, the Christie administration needs improvement, has not made adequately yearly progress and has failed the most vulnerable children of his state.

The Abbott districts identified 700 emergent conditions in need of repair but the state only sees 300 of those as meeting the criteria. In a letter to the DOE office, ELC identifies hundreds of EMERGENCY projects that have not been fixed.

Politifact of the Newark Star Ledger says Sciarra, a civil rights attorney, has "crossed the line" because he said "nothing has been done" when in fact, a few projects left over from former Governor Corzine's term have been completed and a "few emergent" projects were completed over the past two years.

Politifact: Now, let’s mention some specific projects in Newark and Camden.
In Newark, construction was substantially completed in 2011 on nine SDA-managed emergent projects, according to Steve Morlino, executive director of facilities management for Newark Public Schools.

Those projects included roofing work at BRICK Avon Academy; Dr. William H. Horton School; and South Street School, according to a list provided by Morlino.

Wendy Kunz, Director of Abbott Facilities Construction for the Camden school district, also pointed to a few emergent projects completed during the past two years, including replacing the roof and Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning units in 2011 at R.C. Molina Elementary School.

But those and other former Abbott districts have not received approval for hundreds of other proposed emergency repairs. Newark school officials proposed work on more than 130 emergent conditions, but they have not been approved yet to go to construction, Morlino said.

Following site visits, state officials are reviewing 300 emergent conditions identified by the former Abbott districts, Pasquine said. The districts identified more than 700 emergent conditions, but 400 of them were preliminarily rejected by the state Department of Education for not meeting the established criteria, she said.

You're doing a heckuva job Christie!

"...education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. " Martin Luther King

2012-01-16T14:43:00.001-05:00

Onthis day when we remember the life and contributions of Dr. Martin LutherKing, it is fascinating to review his speeches and writings and realizes howtruly prophetic he was. His words are as fresh and relevant today as theywere when he delivered them. He was the moral compass of the country and hisloss was devastating to our future - the future that is the present we livetoday. Like so many prophets who called out the evils they saw insociety, he was killed. But the message of the true prophet cannot be killed,and Dr. Martin Luther King's message lives on in those of us in whom hismessage took root and became part of who we are.

It is appropriate on this day to read and remember Dr. King's essay oneducation. It is amazing to realize that he was just a junior at MoorehouseCollege when he published this essay in the college newspaperin 1947.

Click to read the full text of The Purpose Of Education

What would Dr. King have thought of thecurrent high stakes testing? I think his feelings are quite clear: "...educationwhich stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society."

The current obsession with accountability testing is all aboutefficiency as the pinnacle of school reform. I believe that if Dr. King hadlived, we would not be in this terrible state in education where efficiencydrives education. Dr. King was right. This obsession with efficiency at thecost of education's true purpose is a menace to society.

Every year on his birthday, I listen to Dr. Kingdeliver his “I Have a Dream Speech” I heard him deliver it on August 28, 1963.I was a child and not lucky enough to be there, but I watched the March startto finish on television. “This is history” my mother said. She certainly wasright! Take a few minutes to listen onceagain to this remarkable speech, which remains a manifesto for American socialjustice:

Dr. Marting Luther King "I Have A Dream" Speech (August 28, 1963)

Happy Birthday, Dr. King. Wish you were here.

Accountability without Autonomy Is Tyranny

2012-01-16T09:12:00.000-05:00

Accountability without Autonomy Is Tyranny

When educational research reaches the public through the corporate media, the consequences are often dire. Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff released "The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood" and immediately The New York Times pronounced in "Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gains":

"Elementary- and middle-school teachers who help raise their students’ standardized-test scores seem to have a wide-ranging, lasting positive effect on those students’ lives beyond academics, including lower teenage-pregnancy rates and greater college matriculation and adult earnings, according to a new study that tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years."

The simplistic and idealistic headline reflects the central failure of the media in the education reform debate, highlighted by careless reporting such as including this quote from one of the study's researchers:

“'The message is to fire people sooner rather than later,' Professor Friedman said."

This newest attempt to justify value-added methods for identifying, rewarding, and retaining high-quality teachers (as well as firing so-called weak teachers) has yet to be peer-reviewed, and two close examinations of the study—by Matthew Di Carlo and Bruce Baker—have praised the data but urged caution about conclusions drawn by the researchers and the media response:

"This appropriately cautious conclusion stands in stark contrast with the fact that most states have already decided to do so. It also indicates that those using the results of this paper to argue forcefully for specific policies are drawing unsupported conclusions from otherwise very important empirical findings." (Di Carlo)

"These are interesting findings. It’s a really cool academic study. It’s a freakin’ amazing data set! But these findings cannot be immediately translated into what the headlines have suggested – that immediate use of value-added metrics to reshape the teacher workforce can lift the economy, and increase wages across the board! The headlines and media spin have been dreadfully overstated and deceptive. Other headlines and editorial commentary has been simply ignorant and irresponsible. (No Mr. Moran, this one study did not, does not, cannot negate the vast array of concerns that have been raised about using value-added estimates as blunt, heavily weighted instruments in personnel policy in school systems.)" (Baker)

Despite these strong and careful cautions, Dana Goldstein has now followed up with a praising piece in The Nation that links to Di Carlo's work, but on balance accepts Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff's claims and suggests:

"Given the widespread, non-ideological worries about the reliability of standardized test scores when they are used in high-stakes ways, it makes good sense for reform-minded teachers’ unions to embrace value-added as one measure of teacher effectiveness, while simultaneously pushing for teachers’ rights to a fair-minded appeals process. What’s more, just because we know that teachers with high value-added ratings are better for children, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we should pay such teachers more for good evaluation scores alone. Why not use value-added to help identify the most effective teachers, but then require these professionals to mentor their peers in order to earn higher pay?"

Journalists, politicians, bureaucrats, and researchers are nearly uniform in failing to identify the central flaw in pursuing data as the holy grail of identifying and rewarding high-quality teachers, and the persistent positive response to Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff's study doesn't prove VAM works but does reveal that there is little hope we'll make any good decisions about teachers and schools any time soon.

Teaching in a Time of Tyranny

Ten years into the federalized accountability era designated as No Child Left Behind, one fact of education is rarely mentioned (except by people who do spend and have spent their lives actually teaching children day in and day out): Since 1983's A Nation at Risk, and intensified under NCLB, teachers have systematically been de-professionalized, forced by the weight of policy and bureaucracy to implement standards they did not create, to prepare students for tests they did not create (and cannot see, and likely do not support), and to be held accountable for policies and outcomes that are not within their control.

And this is the fact of the accountability era that has evolved from holding students accountable for test scores in the beginning to the more recent call to hold teachers accountable because, as media pundits claim, teachers and their protective unions are all that is wrong with the U.S.—at least according to Mort Zuckerman on CNN:

"I think there are huge problems in this country and a lot of it, in my judgment, stems not from capitalism [emphasis added] but from the government....

"Because the education is a government function. If there ever was a public function in this country from the days it started, it's public education and we've done a lousy job. Part of it is frankly because we have lousy teachers.

"Part of the reason we have lousy teachers is we have teachers union that say won't deal with those issues. So there are lots of reasons why education is not being properly handled in this country."

If U.S. public education is failing (and that is at least complicated, if not mostly inaccurate) and if teachers are the source of that failure (and that is demonstrably untrue since out-of-school factors represent at least two-thirds of the influence on measurable student outcomes), let's consider where the accountability should lie.

For the past ten years, teachers have been reduced to mere conduits of policy, curriculum, and tests that have nothing in common with what educators and researchers know to be best practice. Teacher have had little or no autonomy in these decisions and practices. To hold people accountable for implementing behaviors they do not control or support is, simply put, tyranny—not accountability.

The teacher quality debate is failing among political leaders, corporate elites, and the media because none of them are teachers, and as a consequence, they are controlling a debate about reform that they do not allow to start where it should—not at how to measure teacher quality, but at creating teaching and learning environments that honor the autonomy of children and teachers as professionals.

The ugly truth is that the leading elite do not truly respect children (especially children of color, children living in poverty, and children speaking home languages other than English), and they genuinely do not want professional teachers.

If children were treated with dignity in our schools and provided the environment they deserve to look critically at the world and if teachers were allowed their professional autonomy and held accountable for only that over which they have control, those children and teachers would likely notice and confront the tremendous inequity being controlled and perpetuated by the corporate leaders, corporate politicians, and corporate media—threatening the privilege that is being protected by calls for more testing, more data, and more accountability.

Hasty and misleading reactions to research that confirms the corporate narrative and even moderate pleas for compromise, such as Goldstein's, are equally inexcusable because they all fail to confront that accountability without autonomy is tyranny.

We are a people tragically enamored with data to the exclusion of humanity, dignity, and the very ideals we claim to be at center of our country—individual autonomy.

And we have sold our souls to capitalism, blind to the reality that the only thing free about the market is that our consumer culture is free of any ethics, free of any commitment to social justice.

Of course teacher quality matters, of course every child deserves a quality teacher. But that isn't something we can measure and force to happen as if students and teachers are cogs in a machine.

So ultimately every second spent crunching data about VAM is wasted time; every moment and penny spent on more standards and testing, also wasted time.

Teaching, learning, and human autonomy are complicated and beyond metrics, but they must become the ideals we put into practice. All else is tyranny

Schools Matter

Guest Post: Why Reformers Misunderstand Their Own Research

Simple Math

Charter Schools and Students with Disabilities by Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates (COPAA)

Mark Your Calendar: Occupy the DOE in DC March 30-April 2

Join United Opt Out National & #OCCUPYDOE in Washington D.C.

April Fools! No Child Left Behind – Fool Me Once. Race to the Top – We Won’t be Fooled Again.

Professional Betrayal on the Heels of Political Betrayal

Christie Goes After Education Law Center and NJEA Leader

From the Asbury Park Press

Christie rebuffs NJEA’s request he resign, saying “Life isn’t fair”

The brave new tests

Evolution (?) of Arne Duncan's position on the use of standardized tests for teacher evaluation

Nobody objects to teachers being evaluated on their effectiveness. Using gains on standardized tests is a bad way to do it.

Jeff McQuillan: Books before bytes

Wild Dreams about Anonymous and Testing

By MORGAN SMITH

Texans Finally Waking Up to Perversion of Testing Abuse

From the New York Times

In Texas, a Backlash Against Student Testing

By MORGAN SMITH

Occupy the Unions

Jacobs on Meier on KIPP

KIPP = Nazi Germany?

Educate to Organize, Organize to Educate

Texas Commissioner Robert Scott Takes on Testing-Industrial Complex--Gets Standing O

By TASA's Jenny LaCoste-Caputo:

Commissioner Scott delivers no-holds-barred speech at Midwinter

Sherman Alexie "Arizona has made our books sacred documents now."

New York Principal's Heroic Stand

Gray Continues in Fenty's Corrupt Tradition by Hiring Charter Loan Company to Research School Closures

Further Confessions of an Outlier

Robert D. Skeels: How Administration Tries to Cow Teachers Into Submission

21st Century Teachers: Easy to Hire, Easy to Fire

Teachers Tired of Being Bullied to Death

GUEST BLOG: IDOE–Shrinking State Power to Expose Your Tender Underbelly (UPDATE)

How do you determine teacher effectiveness?

Tennessee State Board Set to Further Demoralize Teachers and Open the Floodgates to New Lawsuits

Wanted: Computer of Apple Quality Not Made in Poisonous Factory by Slave Labor

What the Hell Is the Tennessee State Board of Education Doing?

Peas in a pod: Koret Foundation, The Hoover Institution, and Democrats for Education Reform

Save the University, Save the Republic

"A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty." Really?

Testing Band and Music is on its Way

Our history of dissing high school grads

The Thrill is Gone

Hawaii's Teachers Take a Stand: Take Your RTTT Bribe and Shove It

Behind the "No Excuses" Mask: "Evidence Is Not Policy"

Joanne Barkan on How Billionaires Rule Our Schools

False Choices: The Economic Argument Against Market-Driven Education Reform

Tapping Out: The Underwhelming TAP Achievement of the Milken-McIntyre Schools

It's the Socioeconomic Segregation, Stupid

California's high school exit exam: Abusive, antiquated (J. Behm)

Save Ethnic Studies

Arizona Oppressors Ban Discussion of Oppression in Classrooms

How California can save a half billion every year

Universal Public Education Is Dead: The Rise of State Schools

New Jersey's Poorest Schools Literally Crumbling

"...education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. " Martin Luther King

Accountability without Autonomy Is Tyranny

April Fools!
No Child Left Behind – Fool Me Once.
Race to the Top – We Won’t be Fooled Again.