KIPP Investigated for Assault on Five Year Old

From St. Louis:

ST. LOUIS - Tammy Howard is still trying to make sense of what happened to her five-year-old son.

On Tuesday, Howard went to her son's kindergarten classroom at KIPP Victory Academy in St. Louis, when she noticed cuts and bruises to her son's face and neck.

When Howard questioned her son about what happened, he told her a school administrator grabbed his arm and took him to the coat closet.

"He said he grabbed him by the face with both hands," Howard said.

Howard immediately called St. Louis Police. The department's juvenile division has launched an investigation. Howard also took her son to the ER, where a doctor treated him for contusions.

"To be aggressive, to leave bruises, that's just too far for me," she said.

The staff member is now on leave. Kelly Garrett, the executive director of Kipp Victory Academy Charter School, sent Newschannel 5 the following statement:

"On Tuesday, November 10, we were notified by the police of allegations of physical misconduct between an administrator and a student at KIPP Victory Academy. We have communicated with police and Child Protective Services, and placed the administrator on administrative leave pending an investigation. At KIPP, we place a high priority on student safety, and act swiftly to address any and all allegations of inappropriate behavior."

Howard said she is now considering pulling her son out of KIPP.

"I want to see justice. I want justice done. He should not be around children," Howard said.

Hillary's Few Good Lies

AERA Concludes the Facts Are Factual about VAM

The American Education Research Association (AERA) can be counted on to remain irrelevant to research discussions of great social significance.  Not surprisingly, AERA's shrinking membership numbers have coincided with the org's steady drift into the arms of education reform schoolers and the corrupt CorpEd foundations that are laser focused on redirecting education at all levels into corporate revenue streams.  

AERA's complacency and complicity have been sickening to watch, with their kowtowing to Bill Gates and his various bad ideas culminating last year when AERA announced a fellowship program for doctoral students interested channeling and then relinquishing their doctoral research to the Gates's MET database.

Now almost 20 years after legitimate researchers starting ringing the alarm bell on the value-added muddle that was thrust upon the education world by the tobacco-chewing ag statistitian, Bill Sanders, and six years after the National Academy of Sciences sent their hair-on-fire letter to Arne Duncan (which was ignored), warning him about including not-ready-for-prime-time VAM in Race to the Top requirements , AERA has finally concluded that the truth must be true:  VAM is not a legitimate tool for ANY high stakes education decisions.  

From AERA's announcement:

. . . . In recent years, many states and districts have attempted to use VAM to determine the contributions of educators, or the programs in which they were trained, to student learning outcomes, as captured by standardized student tests. The AERA statement speaks to the formidable statistical and methodological issues involved in isolating either the effects of educators or teacher preparation programs from a complex set of factors that shape student performance.

“This statement draws on the leading testing, statistical, and methodological expertise in the field of education research and related sciences, and on the highest standards that guide education research and its applications in policy and practice,” said AERA Executive Director Felice J. Levine.

The statement addresses the challenges facing the validity of inferences from VAM, as well as specifies eight technical requirements that must be met for the use of VAM to be accurate, reliable, and valid. It cautions that these requirements cannot be met in most evaluative contexts.

The statement notes that, while VAM may be superior to some other models of measuring teacher impacts on student learning outcomes, “it does not mean that they are ready for use in educator or program evaluation. There are potentially serious negative consequences in the context of evaluation that can result from the use of VAM based on incomplete or flawed data, as well as from the misinterpretation or misuse of the VAM results.”

The statement also notes that there are promising alternatives to VAM currently in use in the United States that merit attention, including the use of teacher observation data and peer assistance and review models that provide formative and summative assessments of teaching and honor teachers’ due process rights.

The statement concludes: “The value of high-quality, research-based evidence cannot be over-emphasized. Ultimately, only rigorously supported inferences about the quality and effectiveness of teachers, educational leaders, and preparation programs can contribute to improved student learning.” Thus, the statement also calls for substantial investment in research on VAM and on alternative methods and models of educator and educator preparation program evaluation. 

For a full research review and history of VAM's origin and growth in Tennessee, see The Mismeasure of Education (Horn & Wilburn, 2013).
 

Invest in school libraries

Sent to the Philadelphia Inquirer,  November 13

"Push to narrow the digital divide" (November 12) argues that we need to invest more in school libraries: There is strong research evidence supporting this argument.
The importance of the school library has been confirmed in study after study: Better school libraries staffed with credentialed librarians mean higher reading scores. In our recent study, based on data from 40 countries, we found that access to a good school library was positively related to reading scores, and nearly offset the negative effect of poverty. In other words, school libraries and school librarians can help close the achievement gap.
We complain about the low levels of literacy in young people, but we cripple and even destroy the most obvious source of reading material, which is often the only source for those living in poverty.

Stephen Krashen
Professor Emeritus
University of Southern California

Study after study: Kachel, D. 2013. School Library Research Summarized. Mansfield University.
http://libraryschool.libguidescms.com/content.php?pid=675677&sid=5634388#21194185.
Our recent study: Krashen, S., Lee, S.Y. and McQuillan, J. 2012. Is the library important? Multivariate studies at the national and international level. Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 8(1): 26-36

Original article: http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20151112_Push_to_narrow_the_digital_divide_.html

"We are an army!"

Have a listen to Michelle R. Michelle at the Common Core session in Syracuse, NY on 11/10/15. 

You won't regret the 4 minutes spent!

Competency Based Learning Demonstrated!

Take two and a half minutes to find out about how this new teaching craze works!

The ODOR at ODOE

Thanks to the work of concerned parents, teachers, and students, Oregon has a strong Opt Out law that explicitly allows parents to opt out their children from the racist, classist, and otherwise worthless state standardized tests.

Now we find the State's DOE has crafted an opt-out form that has this on page 2 just above the signature line:

Story from the Oregonian.

Sardonicky: Plutocrats in Plunderland

Sardonicky: Plutocrats in Plunderland: Just as Hillary C linton was professing her sudden and unexpected opposition to charter schools and Common Core, the think tank founded by h...

Racism Under Inspection by Students at U. S. Campuses

The progress over the past 20 years in establishing the rights of gay citizens has been gratifying to all who seek universal legal justice and social justice.   At the same time, the expansion of institutional racism and "color blind" policies, the embrace of intensely-segregated schools, and the creation of the world's largest and blackest prison and criminal injustice industry have left many of us wondering when the civil rights movement might spread to include black and brown citizens oppressed by corporatists masked as liberators.

So the current challenge to racist practices and do-nothing administrators and board members on college and university campuses is a welcome development.  The fire in the hearts of justice-seeking students has spread from Missouri to Yale to Ithaca and beyond, as this story in the NYTimes indicates.

Below in the video clip is a prime example of the kind of blithe racism by a white elite (note the pink pants and no socks cool of 1970) that can be encountered on any campus on any day of the week across the country.   From the Times:

At Ithaca, one of the issues is the on-campus panel on Oct. 8, in which Tatiana Sy, a 2009 graduate, said she had a “savage hunger” to do everything in college. Another panelist, J. Christopher Burch, the chief executive of Burch Creative Capital who is also an alumnus, responded, “I love what the savage here said,” according to YouTube clips of the event. The moderator, Bob Kur, a former NBC News correspondent, joined in, pointing to Mr. Burch, saying, “You are driven,” and pointing to Ms. Sy and saying, “You’re the savage.” The men are both white, and Ms. Sy describes herself as Afro-Cuban.

When Ms. Sy objected, Mr. Burch said, “It’s a compliment.” Mr. Burch later apologized.

Ms. Sy, the special events director for the Downtown Ithaca Alliance, said in an interview on Wednesday that she had been uncomfortable because Mr. Burch had continued to refer to her as “the savage” even after she reminded him what her name was. “You could sense that there was an energy in the room that everyone was uncomfortable with,” she said.

The White House summit backs the wrong horse

Stephen Krashen
Comment on: White House Announces $375 Million for High School Redesign (Education Week)

At the time of the White House summit on high schools, it was announced that high school dropout rates had decreased, and that 81% of American students now graduate from high school in four years, an all-time high. Yet summit leaders still think that there are too many who fail to graduate in four years and "a fundamental reworking of secondary school is necessary."

The last time I looked, the US ranked about 20th in the world in dropout rate, with 19 countries having a lower percentage of dropouts. Some of the countries that did better are very small (Switzerland, Iceland), but more important, all have lower rates of poverty.

Study after study has shown that poverty is the major factor in predicting school achievement.  My review of the research (In Krashen, S. 1999. Condemned Without a Trial: Bogus Arguments Against Bilingual Education. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Publishing Co.) concluded that the major reason students drop out is economic pressure: They had to work to help their families.

Rather than discuss protecting students from the negative impact of poverty or even trying to reduce poverty, conference attendees focused on new technology, pushing untested but drastic and expensive solutions such as competency-based education. 

Posted at: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/high_school_and_beyond/2015/11/white_house_announces_375_million_for_high_school_redesign.html