Archives for the month of: June, 2012
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Take a Stand for Better Education

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2012 //
4

More than 10,000 individuals and more than 350 organizations have signed the National Resolution to Oppose High-Stakes Testing.

More than half the school districts in Texas have signed the original anti-high-stakes testing resolution, which inspired the national resolution.

Many districts in Florida have endorsed it, including Broward County.

Let’s reclaim as schools as places for learning, not just places to test, measure, assess, rate, rank, and evaluate one another.

Please sign the resolution and send it on to others.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, Testing

Mayor Bloomberg Is Angry

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2012 //
9

Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City and Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York state had a disagreement.

The mayor wanted the power to publish the names and evaluations of all teachers in the city, as happened earlier this year when the New York City Department of Education released the single-number ratings of 18,000 teachers, based solely on test scores. The mayor says the public has a right to know the job ratings of every teacher. The teachers’ union (among others) objected because the ratings are highly flawed and inaccurate; and it humiliates teachers to have their ratings made public. Others objected to the public release because the job evaluations of police, firefighters and corrections officers are shielded by state law; why single out teachers and open their ratings to the public? Even Bill Gates wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times opposing public release last winter, a day before the ratings went public, on the ground that they are useful only as part of a discussion between teachers and their supervisors about how to improve. Public release turns them into a tool for humiliating people, not a means of helping them become better at their work.

The governor argued that the parents have a right to know the ratings of their child’s teachers, but that the ratings should not be made public.

The state legislature overwhelmingly passed a law reflecting the governor’s view. The ratings will not be published but parents have a right to know the ratings of their child’s teacher.

Mayor Bloomberg became very angry that the Legislature sided with the governor and rejected his view. So he said on a weekly talk show that the city would contact every one of the city’s parents or guardians of 1.1 million children and make their ratings known. Many people saw this response as the reaction of a petulant billionaire who can’t stand to lose. Be that as it may, the New York City Department of Education now has the burden of enacting a policy or program to do as the mayor directs because New York City has mayoral control and the department must carry out the mayor’s wishes, no matter how odd they may seem and no matter if they violate the spirit of the law that was just passed.

GothamSchools published an account of how the Department of Education intends to carry out the mayor’s wishes. It appears that every principal will be required to contact every parent to inform them of their right to know, but it is not clear how or if this information will be released. Maybe it won’t be, as that would clearly be illegal.

Based on this article, it appears that the mayor thinks that parents are consumers who should be able to go teacher-shopping. If they don’t like Mr. Smith’s rating, they should be able to transfer their child into Ms. Jones’s class because she has a higher rating. The problem here is obvious and I wonder if this occurred to the mayor. Unlike a business, where consumers may decide to shift their patronage, a teacher can accommodate a limited number of children. If a school has 500 students, and Ms. Jones has the highest rating in the building, her classroom can still enroll only a certain number of students, between 25 and 34, depending on the grade. What happens if the parents of 200 students or all 500 students want to be in her class? It doesn’t work, and it makes no sense.

Furthermore, given what we already know are the huge margins of error built into the ratings, Ms. Jones may not be the best teacher at all. The consumers may be misinformed.

Mayor Bloomberg has a faith in the value of the standardized test scores that shows how little he knows about measurement. The scores measure student performance, not teacher quality. When used to assess teacher quality, the rankings produced are inaccurate, unreliable and unstable. A teacher who appears to be effective one year may not be effective the next year. And the more that schools use test scores to rate teachers, the more they incentivize behaviors that actually undermine good education.

As it happens, I just read a blog by a teacher in Los Angeles who announced that he had changed his mind about using test scores to evaluate teachers. He concluded that they are misleading, that they needlessly demoralize almost all teachers, and that they aren’t good for students or for education.

I agree with him.

Diane

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Cuomo, Andrew, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations

Which States Are Most Unfair to Poor Kids?

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2012 //
4

Which states lead the nation is fiscal unfairness to poor children and their public schools?

Bruce Baker, the invaluable social scientist from Rutgers, the one who has actually taught in schools, has figured it out by analyzing Census data.

Bruce has a terrific blog, where he asks important questions and has the data to support his answers. I wish that every corporate reformer would read him. You should too.

These are the states that are most unfair to poor children and their public schools:

Categories Education Reform

Thank a Teacher Today

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2012 //
5

I have written several blogs about how teachers today are under appreciated. I think teachers have one of the hardest and most thankless jobs in our society. Teachers do work of great social value and yet they are paid far less than people in the private sector who sell useless objects or who have desk jobs at think tanks thinking about how to reform the schools.

This comment by a teacher is a good reminder of why everyone who wants to live in a decent society should immediately find a teacher and say “thank you for what you do. Thank you for what you do every day. I can’t do what you do and I am in awe of your work for our children.”

Politicians never discuss all that teachers do that goes above and beyond the confines of our jobs. I have and I know of others who have bought clothes, combed hair, paid for field trips, bought school supplies, bought Christmas gifts, come in early and stayed late just so a child could have a chance at a successful life. It’s so easy for presidents and other politicians to judge as they stand on their pedestals far removed from the real world of education. I challenge them to come to my school in an urban, low socio-economic area, where students often don’t get love and support until they arrive at school. Teachers are in a battle every day and it seems that each new year our enemies seem to grow and get stronger. All I ever wanted to do was teach and tell me how many politicians can say the same, or do what we do every day? Not many would or could take students who are often hopeless and give them hope and dare them to dream. Until those who judge teach a mile in our shoes, they should cease and desist blaming people who are mere mortals working to achieve against herculean sized obstacles! A teacher made you who you are today and it’s funny how that message never seems to be in a political speech! Thank a teacher each and every day that you are able to pass a sign and read it!
Categories Education Reform

“Do This Or We Will Punish You”

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2012 //
17

A reader writes in response to the blog about the fraud that teachers are compelled to be complicit in, by passing students who have not done the work, by meeting quotes or face punishment:

Our entire school structure is a compliance-based model, where time is constant and learning is the variable. It is based on handing out penalties to students when they are out of compliance and don’t perform at the same level as their chronological peers. More than anything in the history of American education, NCLB has served to further advance a concept of “do this or we will punish you,” by not only labeling students as failures for not adhering to the compliance model and keeping up with their classmates, but doing the same to teachers and schools. Public education has become a barbaric system of mental whips and chains. Why wouldn’t people be compelled to cheat to get higher scores and inflate to “produce” higher grades when the entire system is based on “do this or we will punish you.”

Instead of focusing on reform efforts that eliminate the outdated structures in K-12 education, including the mountains of useless federal and state regulations that perpetuate a dead system, we’re too focused on taking people to the dungeon and torturing them into improvement or else. “What, you failed 5th grade? On the rack with you! The pain will continue until you start learning!”

We are truly a sick people.

Do you agree?

Categories Education Reform

CTU Strike Humor: What About Those Greedy Teachers?

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2012 //
2

Last Stand for Children First is a very funny Twitter site. The person who created it does a great job of impersonating trust-fund babies who know everything about how to fix public schools without ever setting foot into one.

Follow the outrageous, sophomoric, enjoyable humor of Last Stand for Children First on Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/LS4C1

Categories Chicago, Humor, Unions

A Letter to Change.Org

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2012 //
24

Dear Change.Org,

You told the world that you stopped collecting the signatures of unknowing people for StudentsFirst.

You didn’t tell the truth.

You informed me that I was a member of StudentsFirst because I signed a petition on your website a year ago.

I never knowingly  signed on as a member of StudentsFirst.

I was duped.

Apparently StudentFirst has cynically used your website to dupe a million other people as they duped me.

When will you stop facilitating this deception?

The letter below says you are still running three different StudentsFirst petitions.

StudentsFirst claims 1.3 million members. According to the letter sent to my blog, 1.275,700 of those members were gathered at Change.Org, using the same deception that fooled me.

Michelle Rhee uses these numbers to raise millions of dollars from rightwing donors and to intimidate politicians to accept her agenda. She then spends these millions to bash teachers and promote privatization.

If my math is right, StudentsFirst has 24,300 members nationwide, not 1.3 million members.

No one can tell me how to resign as a member.

Enough is enough.

I will report you to the Federal Trade Commission and to consumer fraud agencies if you don’t sever your ties with these deceptive tactics.

Please contact me as soon as possible to let me know how to get my name off the rolls of StudentsFirst. It was put there by Change.Org.

Diane Ravitch

Dear Diane, your concern SHOULD be with Change.org’s policy as much as with Rhee’s deceptive tactics. The business model of Change.org enables the abuse, and so long as that’s true the progressive image of Change is nothing but a pitch to draw in more honest grassroots campaigns that can become automated recruitment vehicles for their (paying) opposition. Despite a statement to the press implying a response to concerns, Change. org continues to run 3 StudentsFirst petitions. Those active campaigns and all 34 StudentsFirst petitions on record on Change.org, whose 1,275,700 signatures (on last count) were obtained by misleading viral-marketing features provided by Change.org only to paying clients, ought to be disabled immediately and their contact lists withheld from StudentsFirst. And we ought to be asking, furthermore, how many other causes are being subverted in this way on Change.org. If we think of the sheer configuration of honest campaigns from around the country and the world that become the infrastructure for Change.org profits, routing for-pay campaigns like Rhee’s to identified supporters of “related” causes, the scheme passing as the Change.org policy begins to emerge in its disturbing fullness. As things stand now, Change.org is a bait advertiser’s (and a bait lobbyist’s) dream.
Categories Rhee, Michelle, StudentsFirst

How to Rip Off Children with Disabilities and Taxpayers Too

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2012 //
4

The New York Times reveals today some of the findings of an ongoing audit of New York State’s privatized program to provide special education services for prekindergarten children Thomas P, DiNapoli, the Comptroller of the state of New York, has found evidence of massive fraud. New York’s preschool special education program is a $2 billion system that relies mostly on private contractors, many of them for-profit operators. New York spends more to provide these services than any other state in the nation.

Here are key excerpts:

“The owners of a Bronx company that employs teachers for disabled toddlers used thousands of dollars in government funds to fix up a weekend getaway in the Poconos, state auditors found. A Brooklyn company in the same program, which provides treatment for prekindergarten special education students, billed taxpayers for his wife’s $150,000 salary as his assistant director when she was a full-time professor at the City University of New York, the auditors said.”

“And the owners of an upstate company improperly diverted more than $800,000 to pay, among other things, rent and interest to themselves and the full-time salary of an executive who lived in South Carolina and seldom worked.”

A valuable story to read and ponder as our nation’s policymakers are pushing more and more districts and states to privatize the management and control of their public schools.

Diane

Categories New York, Privatization, Special Education

Chicago Democrats and Wall Street at War with CTU

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2012 //
24

More evidence, this time in the Chicago Tribune, that Wall Street hedge fund managers and Obama Democrats are pouring money into the fight against the public school teachers of Chicago.

I know that Republicans get a hearty laugh when they see Democratic mayors like Rahm Emanuel and Cory Booker and Antonio Villaraigosa at war with the teachers’ unions in their cities. I am on several conservative mailing lists and I can practically hear they snickering and cheering every time a Democcratic mayor praises school choice, privatization, and charters while warring with the teachers.

I wonder if any of the people at the White House pause to wonder how these district-level battles will affect the election in 2012? Remember, the Presidential election?

Will teachers who have been pounded into submission by Rahm Emanuel and Obama operative and Wall Street titans vote for Obama? Maybe they will hold their noses and vote, but will they knock on doors, will they call their friends and relatives, will they volunteer on election day to help the same people that are now bullying them?

Just asking.

Diane

Categories Chicago, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm

The Most Idiotic Reform of the Day

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2012 //
16

Thanks to the reader who sent me this article about the advent of standardized testing in the public schools of New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Many of the worst tendencies of corporate reform are exemplified right here in this article.

First, the assumption that standardized tests will tell us what we need to know about individual children (are they meeting the norm that someone at Pearson or McGraw Hill selected?).

Second, the assumption that teachers’ professional judgment is inadequate and must be replaced by an off-the-shelf test.

Third, the assumption that what is measured matters most.

Fourth, the assumption that children at the age of 5 should be assessed with standardized tests rather than by experienced teachers.

Fifth, the assumption that the data derived from these these tests can be entered into a database that will shape the judgment about this child for the rest of his school days.

Please add your suggestion for points I have not thought of at this moment.

Diane

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Testing
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