KIPP Model Abuse Captured on Video at Success Academy--Again

Story and video from the New York Times:

Trailer for KILLING ED

Trailer for KILLING ED from Visual Truth Projects on Vimeo.

Profiteer Caprice Young, the secretive Gülen Cult, and California Charter Schools Association's worst nightmare is here.

Simon Newman: "stop thinking of freshmen as 'cuddly bunnies' .... You just have to drown the bunnies...put a Glock to their heads"

When former equities manager and first time college president, Simon Newman, found Mt. Saint Mary's college ranking disappointing, he decided to weed out some of the weak entering freshmen to improve overall retention and graduation rates. 

From the Washington Post:

Last month, a student newspaper published a shocking story: Reporters at the Mountain Echo wrote that the new president of Mount St. Mary’s University planned to cull 20 to 25 students from the freshman class deemed unlikely to succeed in the first weeks of school in order to improve the college’s retention numbers and thus its rankings.

And when discussing the plan with professors who objected to it, President Simon Newman told them — in a conversation that was independently confirmed by The Washington Post —  that they needed to stop thinking of freshmen as “cuddly bunnies,” adding: “You just have to drown the bunnies … put a Glock to their heads.” 

What happened to the "objecting" professors?  They were fired outright, just like a Bain underling might have been.  One of the professors was the advisor of the college paper that printed the story, and one was a full tenured professor of philosophy. 

What does Mr. Newman know about leading a institution of higher learning?  His bare-knuckled actions show that he knows nothing.  His bio:

Born in the United Kingdom, Mr. Newman, 51, holds a bachelor of arts degree (with honors) and an master of arts degree in natural sciences from Cambridge University, in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, Cambridge is the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world's third-oldest university. He also earned a master of business administration degree from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, in Palo Alto, California.

Mr. Newman has almost 30 years of experience working as an executive with a strong background in private equity, strategy consulting, and operations. He is the former managing director of the private equity fund JP Capital Partners, as well as president and CEO of Cornerstone Management Group, founded in 1997.

During his career he has started or co-founded four different businesses, completed more than $33 billion in transactions, and raised more than $3 billion in equity funding for ventures and bids he originated. He has led several business turnarounds and delivered more than $200 million in profit improvements.

He started his career in consulting working with Bain & Co and LEK Consulting where he managed the media and entertainment practice working with clients such as Warner Bros., Disney, and Universal Studios. He has also worked at Canal + International, Liberty Media and the investment bank, Wasserstein & Perella.

What should replace the STARR test? Nothing.

Sent to the Austin-American Statesman,. Feb 10.

Are those charged with deciding on a new test ("What should replace the STARR test?" Feb. 10) aware of research suggesting that teacher evaluations of students (grades) are an excellent measure of student achievement: high school grades in college prep courses are a very good predictor of college success. Standardized test scores (the SAT) do not provide much more information than grades alone.
There are good reasons to think teacher evaluation of students is better than a standardized test. The repeated judgments of professionals who are with students every day is probably more valid than a test created by distant strangers and given only once. Moreover, teacher evaluations of students are “multiple measures," done by different teachers in different subjects in different years, are closely aligned to the curriculum, and cover all subjects.
Any test proposed must be shown to do a better job than grades alone.

Original article: https://shar.es/146IQY


Note (from Wikipedia): The State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, commonly referred to as its acronym STAAR (star), are a series of state-mandated standardized tests used in Texas public primary and secondary schools to assess a student's achievements and knowledge learned in the grade level. It tests curriculum taught from the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, which in turn is taught by public schools. The test is developed by Pearson Education every school year, along with the close supervision of the Texas Education Agency.

Sources
Bowen, W., Chingos, M., and McPherson, M. 2009. Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Universities. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Geiser, S. and Santelices, M.V., 2007. Validity of high-school grades in predicting student success beyond the freshman year: High-school record vs. standardized tests as indicators of four-year college outcomes. Research and Occasional Papers Series: CSHE 6.07, University of California, Berkeley. http://cshe.berkeley.edu

A Rose is a Rose and For Some, a Digital Content Manager is a Literacy Expert

 by Susan Ohanian

After receiving the following announcement from Achieve the Core, I looked up the qualifications of their literacy expert (sic) offering the seminar.

No further comment seems necessary.

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What is "Text Complexity" and Why Does It Matter? Join us for a webinar Tuesday, February 16 from 7:00-8:00 PM EST

The Common Core State Standards require all students to engage meaningfully with complex texts on a regular basis. But what does the term "complex" actually mean in relation to the reading materials you use with your students? How does a Lexile score factor into the determination? Register to join literacy expert Silas Kulkarni on Tuesday, February 16 from 7-8 PM EST, as he discusses the three components of text complexity and how to analyze them.

Silas Kulkarni

Education Management Professional

Washington, District Of Columbia

Education Management

Previous	Student Achievement Partners, America Achieves, Harlem Village Academy
Education	Yale University

500+ connections

Summary

Education reform leader with classroom and policy experience

Experience

• 

  Digital Content Manager

  Student Achievement Partners

  2013 – 2014 (1 year)

• 

  Digital Content Manager

  Student Achievement Partners

  2013 – 2014 (1 year)

• Consultant

  America Achieves

  2013 – 2013 (less than a year)

• 8th Grade Math/Algebra I Teacher

  Harlem Village Academy

  August 2011 – July 2012 (1 year)
  Led low-income students in Harlem to 92% pass rate on the rigorous New York Regents Exam; collected best practices from excellent school visits and over 30 peer observations; presented model lesson at national conference on lesson study method of professional development

• 8th Grade Math Teacher, 5th Grade Teacher

  KIPP DC: KEY Academy

  August 2008 – June 2011 (2 years 11 months)
  Led low-income students in southeast Washington, DC to record-breaking 8th grade math scores: 100% Proficient or above, 62% Advanced (KIPP DC and Washington, DC all-time record); piloted use of SmartBoard technology, Infinite Algebra software, and Kahn Academy; served as Technology Coordinator; presented model lesson at KIPP National Math Teachers Conference 2011; collaborated to facilitate transition to the Common Core State Standards

• Research Analyst & Policy Associate

  The Education Trust

  January 2007 – August 2008 (1 year 8 months)
  Analyzed data using statistical software including SAS, SPSS, and advanced Excel functionality; researched and synthesized key information for “Education Watch” state reports; met with congressional staff, advocacy groups, and educators; wrote fact sheets for lobbying; drafted sample legislative language

• Research Fellow

  National Council on Teacher Quality

  September 2006 – January 2007 (5 months)
  Researched and designed website of teacher contracts in the 50 largest U.S. school districts; wrote for teacher quality newsletter, The TQ Bulletin; produced data analysis for conference paper, “Time in School: Opportunity to Learn”

Education

Yale University

B.A, Political Science

Concentration in American Government 2006
Peer-reviewed publication: “Election Controversy 2000: Media Coverage of Voter Purges in Florida.” Young Scholars in Writing, ed. Grobman, Laurie and Spigelman, Candace, Pennsylvania State University; President, Yale Political Union, largest undergraduate organization (300+ members); prize-winning public speaker (delivered over 100 public speeches)

Fiction: the hottest topic of all (Published in Literacy Today)

Published in Literacy Today, Jan/Feb 2015

The Sept/Oct, 2015 issue of Literacy Today contains somewhat contradictory messages: reading "informational texts" is considered "a hot topic" that "should be hot," a view that coincides with the common core's heavy focus on nonfiction ("What's hot in 2016").  Fiction is not mentioned.

But college student Brandon Dixon ("Literacy is the answer") tells us that fiction has made the difference in his life, contributing not only to his knowledge of the world but also to his ethical development and understanding of other people's views. 

Mr, Dixon is not alone. In a recent interview in the Guardian (October 28), President Obama gives fiction the credit for his understanding that "the world is complicated and full of grays ... (and that) it's possible to connect with someone else even though they're very different from you."

Research solidly supports both Mr. Dixon's and President Obama's conclusions:  Studies confirm that fiction readers develop high levels of literacy, a great deal of knowledge in many different areas, the capacity to empathize with others and a greater tolerance for vagueness. In a recent study from the University of London, fiction reading was a very strong predictor of adult vocabulary knowledge, stronger than reading non-fiction.

With these powerful testimonies, supported by empirical evidence,  fiction should be a hot topic in literacy, maybe the hottest one of all.

Stephen Krashen

Sources

Interview with President Obama: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/28/president-obama-says-novels-taught-him-citizen-marilynne-robinson?CMP=share_btn_tw

Fiction and literacy development: Krashen, S 2004. The Power of Reading. Heinemann and Libraries Unlimited.  Sullivan, A. & Brown, M. 2014. Vocabulary from Adolescence to Middle Age. Centre for Longitudinal Studies, University of London

Knowledge: Stanovich, K., and A. Cunningham. 1992. Studying the consequences of literacy within a literate society: the cognitive correlates of print exposure. Memory and Cognition 20(1): 51-68.
Stanovich, K. and A. Cunningham. 1993. Where does knowledge come from? Specific associations between print exposure and information acquisition. Journal of Educational Psychology, 85(2): 211-229. Stanovich, K., R. West, R., and M. Harrison. 1995. Knowledge growth and maintenance across the life span: The role of print exposure. Developmental Psychology, 31(5): 811-826. Sullivan, A. & Brown, M. (2014). Vocabulary from adolescence to middle age. London: Centre for Longitudinal Studies, University of London. West, R., and K. Stanovich. 1991. The incidental acquisition of information from reading. Psychological Science 2: 325-330. West, R., K. Stanovich, and H. Mitchell. 1993. Reading in the real world and its correlates. Reading Research Quarterly 28: 35-50.

The ability to empathize: Kidd, D. & Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science, 342 (6156), 377-380.

Tolerance for vagueness:  Djikic, M., Oatley, K. & Moldoveanu, M. (2013). Opening the closed mind: The effect of exposure to literature on the need for closure. Creativity Research Journal, 25(2), 149-154.

U.S. ED Gives Billions More for Segregation Than Diversity

After incentivizing segregation with billions in spending for charter schools over the past 7 years, Obama's 2017 proposed budget gives a one-time pittance ($120 million) in comparison to encourage socioeconomic diversity in schools.

Part C of the new states rights version of ESEA "includes federal funding for charter schools, which would increase the annual commitment from $253 million in 2015 to $300 million by 2020."  All of that comes on top of the $157 million that Arne Duncan arranged as his parting gift to the charter industry last September.

KIPP Model Unfair to Teachers and Students, Alike

Clip from Alternet's excerpts of Work Hard, Be Hard...:

The human impacts of implementing the KIPP Model ideology come out clearly in the accounts of former “no excuses” teachers who were interviewed for this book.  Their accounts are interspersed throughout the book, for reasons that include consideration for readers’ capacity to absorb all together the psychological brutality and physical stresses that are recounted.  Those former teachers who were able to revisit some of their painful remembrances provide disturbing insights into schools where the “no excuses” credo is in practice.

When asked why she stayed at KIPP after she found out what it was like there, one former teacher talked of how school leaders had convinced her and her fellow teachers of their unique importance to the children, and how their work at KIPP was saving children who, otherwise, would be lost to the public school bureaucracies that operated for the benefit of adults, not children.  As a result, she had committed herself to carrying out the mission, regardless of what it took and regardless of personal consequences.

She noted that a lifeboat mentality among the teachers helps create a camaraderie among “team and family,” which enabled levels of self sacrifice that remain somewhat mysterious to those who are on the outside.  Understanding this phenomenon only took hold when her own life was put in jeopardy by refusing to accept her own physical limits to sustain the demands imposed by the “no excuses’ code:

I think that there is an expectation where you don’t want to let anyone down at KIPP.  They [KIPP leaders] are constantly telling you how important you are and how important this work is, and how you’re saving all these children.  And then you do find yourself thinking, oh my God, what am I doing?  You’re watching teachers drop left and right.  I mean I’m stronger than most because I was experienced, but I’m sitting there watching new teachers literally have—I’ve seen about four teachers have complete nervous breakdowns.

And then you find yourself asking, why am I doing this?  And it’s basically because I think something kicks in where you don’t want to disappoint…

….And then before you know it, you’re in there a year, you’re in there two years.  And after two years you’re considered like a veteran teacher at KIPP.  Then, finally, I just had to stop.  I mean you become physically ill.  Your body breaks down—you can’t take it anymore.  I fell asleep one day driving home from work, and I hit a car in front of me.  That’s when I woke up, and I was like, okay, this is enough.

Predictably, this kind of distress contributes to many teachers like this one eventually leaving the “no excuses” schools.  When I asked her what it was like after she left KIPP, she had this to say:

Heaven, if there is one.  It was like for the first time I got to sleep.  My body started to repair itself.  I noticed that my mind was clearing up.  I was being able to communicate effectively. I can’t explain what your body does.  It shuts down—your body shuts down.  You just become like a robot.  It took me a good six months . . . to recover from that experience.  And after six months I found myself like enjoying life again because it was absolutely miserable for two years. 

The KIPP Foundation and its political and financial supporters would have us believe that there are, indeed, no excuses, and that its schools prove as much.  Are they right, and if they are right, what are the economic and human costs and benefits of such a program, and for whom?  The answers to these questions are teased out in the following pages, but for now one thing is certain: by ignoring or denying the effects of economic disadvantage and segregation on student achievement scores, supporters the KIPP mission must pressure ever harder the stressed-out KIPP personnel to corral and channel the behaviors and attitudes of KIPP children whose lives, from the beginning, have been shaped by the effects of poverty.

The failure to acknowledge and alter those economic and social disadvantages places an intense focus and weight upon what happens inside the KIPP classroom to change children so that they become, in effect, impervious to the effects of poverty.  The resulting cultural, character, and behavioral compacting process, then, creates debilitating and unsustainable pressures for teachers and students, alike.

The sacrifices required of “no excuses” teachers and students assure that large numbers will not survive in the KIPP Model schools.  In this brave new world of corporate schooling aimed to build gritty super kids taught by “rock star” teachers,  such losses have become entirely unexceptional, and they are quickly forgotten by the “no excuses” survivors who must continue to face the unrelenting demands of a system that assures one’s best is almost never good enough.  In a system where teaching experience is regularly not required or even desired, new and inexperienced teachers’ lack the professional knowledge or experience leads to acceptance of narrow, robotic learning goals that are often enforced by brutal methods. 

Coming soon: Much more testing than ever.

Sent to USA Today, Feb. 8

Former testing enthusiast John King now joins the chorus of born-again critics of over-testing, a clear reaction to the success of the United Opt-Out movement.  ("Acting Ed. Secretary: Educators 'unfairly blamed' for schools' challenges," Feb 8):  In King's home state of New York, 20% of students who were to be tested opted out last year. 
   Secretary King does not mention that the "well-intentioned" so-called reformers plan to replace end-of-year standardized tests with what could be daily testing. The core of education will consist of module after module of programmed instruction that students will work through online and be tested on, which will drastically diminish the role of teachers and increase profits of technology companies.  The new education law announced grants for the development of these teach and test machines (sections 1201 and 1204).
   The pro-common core National Governor's Association admitted that there is little evidence supporting this major shift, but nevertheless enthusiastically supports it.  So much for the "olive branch" to teachers.

Stephen Krashen

Sources:
United Opt-Out: http://unitedoptout.com/
20% opt out in NY State: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/13/nyregion/new-york-state-students-standardized-tests.html?_r=0
National Governor's Association: "Although an emerging research base suggests that CBE is a promising model, it includes only a few rigorous evaluations and analyses of current and ongoing CBE pilots and similar programs" (p. 6).  From:  "Expanding Student Success: A Primer on Competency-Based Education from Kindergarten Through Higher Education.  www.nga.org. 

Additional sources:
McDermott, M. 2015a. Reading between The Lines: Obama’s “Testing Action Plan”  http://educationalchemy.com/2015/10/25/reading-between-the-lines-obamas-testing-action-plan/
McDermott, M. 2015b. Common core and corporate colonization: the big picture. http://educationalchemy.com/2015/10/30/common-core-and-corporate-colonization-the-big-picture/
Robertson, P. 2015a. U.S. Dept. of Ed. and Educational Warfare. http://www.pegwithpen.com/2015/10/us-dept-of-ed-and-educational-warfare.html
Robertson, P. 2015b. Opt out revolution: the next wave. http://www.pegwithpen.com/2015/10/opt-out-revolution-next-wave.html
Talmage, E. 2015a. Dear Mark. http://emilytalmage.com/2015/11/14/dear-mark/
Talmage, E. 2015b. What is proficiency-based learning? http://emilytalmage.com/2015/04/26/save-maine-schools/

Big Data Needs Your Personalized Data Points

As you take a few moments to listen to this super snail oil salesman, think about the implications of this technology in the hands of Zuckerberg and the Wall Street crime bosses who want to control the worldwide education industry. 

The battle to preserve student autonomy and anonymity from the efficiency zealots running Big Data will be the next great battle for teachers, parents, civil libertarians, and all freedom-loving people. 

The war against high stakes testing is now even more critical than before.  The expansion of opt out options will be required for parents who will need to have other alternatives to this kind of "schooling."  

While middle class parents will find options and, thus, be in positions to refuse this kind of dystopian plan for their schools, urban parents face socioeconomic obstacles that could allow for the imposition of fine-grained paternalistic treatments that will make the present-day "no excuses" chain gangs seem primitive by comparison.
 


The video above is from 2012, and since then Knewton has moved aggressively to partner with more textbook companies like Harcourt, technology giants like Microsoft (surprise!), gaming companies, online giants like Arizona State U, and various boutique tech companies.  

The key to Knewton's kingdom is what they call adaptive learning, which is refined by more and more data points that can only result from student (or other human) interactions with the technology. The more time students spend plugged in, the more their "personalized" learning plans become. 

Our technology allows us to personalize online education for our users. When it is integrated with online learning materials, our technology causes the presentation and focus of the course materials to adapt based on the user’s needs and how they learn best, and also provides analytic reporting to help track the user’s progress. This technology is key to most of our Service offerings.

It is fair to say that teachers and other humans get in the way of the accumulation of data points, as that time does not feed directly into the ongoing collection of data points that are used by Knewton's adaptive algorithms to fine tune its analysis and predictions. 

Since 2012, Knewton has expanded its consumer services so that anyone with a Knewton account is subject to having data used by their Consumer Services:"

We create a personalized learning profile for each user based on their interactions with online learning materials that use our adaptive learning technology (a “Learning Profile”). In cases where a Knewton Account or Child Account (as described below) has been created, we may be able to apply and link this Learning Profile across multiple online learning courses and subject domains that a user interacts with (including the Consumer Service and third party online learning applications) and which use our adaptive learning technology.