Archives for the month of: June, 2012
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Here Are Some Fun Websites

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2012 //
5

Readers sent these to me.

I liked them.

I think you will like them too.

Daniel Pink says really useful things about motivation here. I enjoyed his book Drive and recommend it.

This one explains research showing how people can be identified by the way they fill in their Scantron bubbles. Isn’t it good to know that the bubble tests have an auxiliary value?

This one explains how some of our most important problems get solved while we aren’t thinking about them.

The point is that some really creative thinking happens when we are daydreaming or gardening or dozing or driving or doing nothing at all. So, “time on task” may not be the most important thing that happens in the classroom or in life. I liked this because I find some of my best ideas “happen” when I am doing something completely different, when I am “off task.” Sometimes I have good ideas in the middle of the night and I have to get up and write them down. In the morning I can see if they still look as good as they did at 2 am.

And if you want to know why daydreaming is really important, read Diana Senechal here.

While you are at it, read Diana Senechal’s thoughtful book The Republic of Noise. She has valuable things to say about our insatiable need to be busy, buzzing, and engaged, with no time to reflect or daydream.

Diane

Categories Education Reform

Five Harmful “Reform” Ideas

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2012 //
11

When you read Bruce Baker’s work, you hear a fresh and thoughtful voice in the education debates.

I wish that President Obama was listening to him instead of the number-crunchers now in control of the U.S. Department of Education.

Bruce Baker is a social scientist at Rutgers University who specializes in statistical analysis of school data. Unlike many others who do the same, he was a teacher in public and private schools before he became an academic. So he has a depth of knowledge and understanding and empathy that many others in his field lack.

In his latest blog, he reviews some of the truly terrible reform ideas of the day.

One is the 65% solution, the idea that legislatures should mandate what must be spent on instruction. It sounds so appealing, this notion that money will be spent in classrooms and not on bureaucrats. As Baker explains, the idea was cooked up by Republicans who needed a good idea, but it doesn’t work. What is really interesting is how carefully messaged the program was. It made budget cutters look like reformers.

Another is weighted student funding, which sounds good on the surface as all these ideas do until they are implemented.

And a third is the parent trigger, now in the news, which allows and encourages a bare majority of parents to seize control of their school. Baker calls this “mob rule.”

If you want to know the other two, read Bruce Baker.

Diane

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Parent trigger, Teacher Evaluations

The Perils of Privatization

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2012 //
17

Nobel-Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has an important article in the New York Times. Krugman reflects on a major investigative series in the newspaper about privatized prisons in New Jersey, run by for-profit corporations..

The prisons described in the articles are akin to “hell on earth — an understaffed, poorly run system, with a demoralized work force...”

Krugman says we should read the story in the “broader context of a nationwide drive on the part of America’s right to privatize government functions, very much including the operation of prisons.”

Aside from making money, you might think that the motivation for privatization is the conservatives’ “belief in the magic of the marketplace, in the superiority of free-market competition over government planning. And that’s certainly the way right-wing politicians like to frame the issue.”

But Krugman points out that “…the one thing the companies that make up the prison-industrial complex — companies like Community Education or the private-prison giant Corrections Corporation of America — are definitely not doing is competing in a free market. They are, instead, living off government contracts. There isn’t any market here, and there is, therefore, no reason to expect any magical gains in efficiency.”

Why so much privatization? Krugman points to the skillful way in which private corporations have lobbied, made campaign contributions, and established cozy relationships with elected officials.
Krugman warns of  “a corrupt nexus of privatization and patronage that is undermining government across much of our nation.”
Public schools have experienced occasional scandals–a corrupt official or a wayward teacher– but as more and more government funding is out-sourced to deregulated private vendors, especially the for-profit vendors of educational services, hold on to your hats.
Diane
Categories Education Reform

Galvanic Humor

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2012 //
6

Okay, so I have posted a few blogs about the galvanic skin response monitors that measure one’s physiological level of engagement, and now I am getting into the swing of things. I understand that this “engagement pedometer” will be strapped to my wrist and called a bracelet. I understand it will know me better than I know myself, and it will communicate that information to nameless others. They will find things out about me. Like what makes me happy, what makes me sad, what makes me angry. But most important, they will find out what I want to buy!

So here is a website that says the future is not so far away. It says that in the not distant future, I will learn to communicate with products and they will communicate with me. Products will learn to be social, and I (or you, probably not I)  will talk to the products. I would not need to know my own mind, because my bracelet will make sure that the products know my mind. What a relief! At first, I wondered if this website was a parody, but given the techie ads all over it, I assumed that it is for real.

My friend Diana Senechal figured all of this out, and I am guessing she never saw the Salesforce-Biometric website just mentioned. Read her side-splitting account of the day she spent with her galvanic bracelet and her fruitless efforts to get free of it.

There are times when the best response to crazy stuff is to laugh.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, Humor

Tax Cuts for Business, Austerity for Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2012 //
12

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett has preached a formula that warms the hearts of the far-right base of his party: Tax cuts for the big corporations, budget cuts for public schools and social services. Some districts in Pennsylvania are planning to eliminate kindergarten, and some are teetering into bankruptcy.

The only positive outcome is that Corbett’s poll numbers have dropped to 36% approval, and there is a chance that his party will lose its control of the Legislature.

Are voters in Pennsylvania beginning to understand the harm done to their children and communities by the policies of politicians like Corbett?

Our society cannot continue to fatten the fat calves while starving the herd.

We can’t continue to promulgate policies that benefit the wealthiest while impoverishing our essential public services or giving them away to profiteers.

Diane

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Reform, Pennsylvania

Do Tougher Tests Make Students Smarter?

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2012 //
8

Education suffers because of poor coverage by the media. For years, the media have been interested only in sensationalism and bad news.

Many newspapers do not have regular education writers, so when they do publish a story about schools, they don’t have a deep understanding of education issues.

I just read a story in the Buffalo News that said that a local high school succeeds because it gives tougher tests than other high schools.

Buffalo is a low-performing district with many poor students.

The high school in the story, called City Honors, is a college-prep magnet high school with selective admissions. It enrolls students from grades 5-12. This year, more than 1,100 students competed for 150 openings in the school.

All students are required to take AP and IB courses. Many succeed. City Honors does very well in the rankings of Newsweek and U.S. News, which are based on how many students take those courses.

If you read this story carefully, you understand that the school succeeds because it attracts and selects the very highest-achieving students in the city of Buffalo. You would recognize that very capable students do very well when they take the AP and IB courses.

If you read the story quickly, especially the headline, you would conclude that the school succeeds because the students take hard tests. You would conclude that if all schools required students to take tougher tests, they would get the same great results as City Honors. You would be wrong.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, Testing

Deathwatch for Public Schools in Michigan, part 2

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2012 //
14

When I wrote about the end of public education in two districts in Michigan, I pointed out that the state’s emergency manager law is a mechanism to end democracy when there is a fiscal crisis. That strikes me as draconian.

Surely we don’t want to see governmental entities running up deficits that they can’t pay, but there is another side to the story. Some districts don’t have the property tax base to provide an adequate education. When that is the case, it is the state’s responsibility to assure that there is enough money to educate the children and to make sure that the money is spent responsibly. A fiscal monitor or a financial control board could perform that function. When New York City teetered on the edge of bankruptcy in 1975, the governor did not shut down democracy in New York City; he appointed a financial control board that helped the city to return to fiscal health.

What is happening in Michigan is extremist and anti-democratic. The governor has the power to appoint an emergency manager and to end the functioning of democratically elected and appointed bodies. Is it mere happenstance that in both instances cited, Muskegon Heights and Highland Park, the emergency manager made the same decision to close down public education and to outsource the children to privately managed charter corporations? In Muskegon Heights, the only offers came from for-profit corporations that have poor track records.

In a Michigan article about my blog, several conservatives (I assume they are conservatives as who else would be happy to privatize school districts) expressed their approval at the idea of ending democracy and local control in these two districts. This is simply bizarre. Don’t conservatives prefer local control to the heavy hand of government? Don’t they usually defend the rights of people to determine their own destiny?

According to the article in Michigan, I and others “have not condemned the behavior that led to the deficits or proposed solutions.”

Yes I do have a solution.

My solution is this: The state of Michigan should preserve public education for future generations in every school district, as the founding fathers intended when they passed the Northwest Ordinance. If they suspect fiscal irresponsibility, they should appoint a fiscal expert to make sure that the district is returned to fiscal health. But if the district lacks the resources to educate its children, then the state should supply what is needed to take care of the children.

And yes, I do condemn the behavior that led to the deficits. I condemn Governor Rick Snyder and the Michigan Legislature for heedlessly cutting the funding for public schools and plunging dozens of school districts in Michigan into fiscal distress. I condemn Governor Snyder and the Michigan Legislature for giving tax breaks to corporations instead of funding public schools. I condemn Governor Snyder and the Michigan legislature for fiscal irresponsibility. I condemn them for not caring about other people’s children. I condemn them for preferring privatization over public responsibility.

Diane

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, For-Profit, Michigan, Privatization

What Romney Reform Looks Like

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2012 //
8

We don’t have to wonder what Mitt Romney’s education plan would look like if he is elected. It would look like the Jindal legislation passed this spring in Louisiana.

The Louisiana “reforms” represent the purest distillation of the rightwing agenda for education.

First, they create a marketplace of competition, with publicly funded vouchers and many new charter schools under private management.

Second, more than half the children in the state (400,000+) are eligible for vouchers, even though only about 5,000 seats have been offered, some in tiny church schools that don’t actually have the seats or facilities or teachers.

Third, the charter authorities will collect a commission for every student that enrolls in a charter, a windfall for them. And of course, there is a “parent trigger” to encourage the creation of more charters as parents become discouraged by neglected, underfunded public schools.

Fourth, the money for the vouchers and charters will come right out of the minimum funding allocated for the public schools, guaranteeing that the remaining public schools will have less money, more crowded classes, and suffer major budget cuts.

Fifth, the law authorizes public money for online instruction, for online for-profit schools, and for instruction offered by private businesses, universities, tutors, and anyone else who wants to claim a share of the state’s money for public education.

Sixth, teacher evaluation will be tied to student test scores and teachers can be easily fired, assuring that no one will ever dare teach anything controversial or disagree with their principal. Teachers in charter schools, the biggest growth sector, will not need certification.

Rather than go on, I here link to a blog I wrote at Bridging Differences (hosted by Education Week). My blog links to an article written by a Louisiana teacher who happens to have been a professional journalist. You should read what she wrote.

The Jindal plan is sweeping and it seeks to dismantle public education. It is a plan to privatize public education. It is not conservative. Conservatives don’t destroy essential democratic institutions. Conservatives build on tradition, they don’t heedlessly cast them aside. Conservatives are conservative because they take incremental steps, to fix what’s broken, not to sweep away an entire institution. Jindal’s plan is not conservative. It is reactionary.

And it is a template for what Romney promises to do.

Diane

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, On-Line Education, Parent trigger, Privatization, Romney, Mitt, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure

Wall Street Money Backs Rahm

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2012 //
5

It’s no surprise to discover that the organization representing Wall Street hedge fund managers is putting big money into Rahm Emanuel’s war against the Chicago Teachers Union. The group, which calls itself Democrats for Education Reform, is a major contributor to political advocacy for charter schools. It raises money for influential candidates in local, state and national political races. Money talks.

DFER, as it is known, does not like public schools. It loves privatization. Privatization works for Wall Street. So does deregulation.

DFER and Stand for Children are working together against the interests of public school teachers in Chicago, 90% of whom voted to authorize a strike (actually 98% of all those who cast a vote).

You can bet that DFER and Stand will flood the airwaves with slick commercials to promote Mayor Emanuel’s vision of education for OPC (other people’s children): crowded classrooms; schools with no teachers of the arts; schools with no libraries; endless testing and test-prepping; big contracts for consultants and experts; longer school days with no compensation for teachers; and lots more privatization.

Here’s a thought for DFER, Stand and Mayor Emanuel: Why not support the same quality of education for the children of Chicago public schools that you want for your own?

Diane

Categories Arts Education, Chicago, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm, Stand for Children

We Never Run Out of Truly Bad Ideas

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2012 //
16

Some days ago, I posted a blog about the decision by the Oklahoma Department of Education to post on its website the names and personal information of students who got a waiver and didn’t take the state tests. This was widely understood as a purposeful effort to humiliate the students.

Now from a reader comes something that is either equally mean or meaner. I report, you decide:

Today I read that two schools near me have been prohibited by the California legislature from issuing ID cards and notebooks color-coded TO REFLECT THE TEST SCORES OF THE STUDENTS. Yes!! The students with the top scores had black ID cards and notebooks. Then came gold for “proficient” and then white for low-performing. These last were made to stand in a separate cafeteria line!!!!!!  It’s so difficult to believe that this sort of nonsense is happening in the United States of America.

This sounded too absurd and mean-spirited to be true, and I had to check before posting. It’s true. Read it here.

Diane

Categories Education Reform
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