The city of Detroit is a city with high levels of poverty.
The Detroit public school system has an emergency manager who has imposed a new contract.
This contract will allow class sizes in the upper grades (6-12) to rise to as many as 61.
In grades 4-5, class size might go as high as 46 before officials step in.
In K-3, class size might balloon to 41.
Remember, folks, this is called “education reform.”
I can think of better words to describe what is happening in Detroit.
It’s not about the children. And it’s not about education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
How awful for the children in Detroit and elsewhere who are caught up in this destruction of our school system.
And the children know what is being done to them! They know that they “don’t matter” because if they did then this would not be occurring. If I was their teacher what could I say, what would I say that could counteract their perception? Sadly, nothing.
This is terrible. In the Detroit Free Press today, EM of Detroit Public Schools had this to say about the contract he recently imposed (note he mentions nothing of class size).
http://www.freep.com/article/20120715/OPINION05/207150614/Guest-commentary-New-DPS-contract-good-for-students-teachers?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|FRONTPAGE|s
And this disgrace goes further than the schools. Both local papers are lauding our governor this weekend for “cleaning up the neighborhoods” in Detroit for the benefits of Detroit’s schoolchildren and families.
In conjunction with Roy Roberts (DPS’ Emergency Manager), foundations, and the unitary community group, certain neighborhoods around “certain” schools will finally be “blight-free” (after at least two decades of blight). Want to guess which neighborhoods around which self-governed, charter, or EAA schools will be targeted? Oh, the best part is that the Governor is “waiting” to see which other 3 of the 6 areas will be cleaned up. My personal take is that they are waiting to see if the community protests these EAA schools (through non-attendance) in which case; the neighborhoods would no longer be “deserving” of this state action.
Where is the national press? Outrageous!
The national press i. e. “free press” is a joke. It is owned by the same people who are destroying representative government and our schools. The so called free press, both right and left are both controlled by the same “money” interest. Education is the second largest industry in the USA. Go figure!
Good for you! More people need to speak truth to power.
As I’ve stated many times over the last ten or so years to my fellow teachers: It was never about education, it was/is about cutting cost. In my opinion a successful businessperson is not the best choice to be a good politician. Business thinks about efficiency, greatest production at lowest cost. While cost is important, a good politician would also think about increasing employment, quality of life, helping the poor, how to make real educational improvements, etc. Specifically to education, less “efficiency” would be better…smaller classes. I remember a time when we were unable in my school to program students into their proper classes for weeks at a time because the computer support staff of the DOE in NYC was fired en-mass. If you had a problem with the system there was no one to call. Someone had to send an email and hope for a response that could take weeks or longer. The support staff was rehired several months later but for the many students who were in the wrong classes around the city the damage was done.
Good Morning– I have been reading the entries on this blog since 6:00 am. It is gratifying to read all of the comments from people who obviously care a out children. In the late 80’s I took a graduate course in comparing the British schools with the American schools and traveled to England for the field study. The Minister of Education had spent a month conferring with the New York State Department of Education. What he brought back to England after that visit was the concept ofba Core Curriculum and testing– making test scores public . This would enable parents to choose which school they wanted their children to attend. As part of the field study, we were taken to the publishing company that was creating the curriculum and the tests. We were not allowed to take brief cases in to the meeting– we were met and the ground floor and escorted in the elevator to the meeting room. All very top secret. We were not allowed to take any materials in or out of the meeting. I found this very strange, until I think about all of the events that are now happening in regards to what is appallingly being called education reform. Back then, Pearson Publishing was operating in secret. Just as they are now. The onset of their business plan for making billions must have been in the embryonic stages way back then. It is beyond my imagination as to why the US would emulate literacy in England when they rank 25th in the world. It isn’t about literacy, and it isn’t about children. It is about making billions of dollars on the backs of children. How can we idly stand by and tolerate the narrowing of curriculum, teaching to the test, and the ultimate dumbing down of America? I just don’t get it. How did we become so apathetic where our nation’s children are concerned?? The children deserve more. Has anyone thought about developing an individualized education plan for each child? We know that all children learn at different rates. Why not accelerate those that are capable and do away with step by step grades. Why are we trying to standardize children and create widgets??
Cowgirl
This is unbelievable! The adimnistration should be ashamed of themselves. THAT is not education its chaos!
Diane, when I read about this yesterday, it immediately brought me back to what I witnessed in South African schools for black and colored students, and in the Ghanaian schools I visited….and these are so called “developing countries”. It was especially telling in South Africa because the disparities are so prominent. Black and colored schools would have more than 60 students to a classroom. There are many variables (mainly the residuals of the Apartheid Regime) that contributed to this unfortunate circumstance.
In conversation with one woman, she told me one of the reasons she sent her daughter (who was mixed race) to the white/Afrikaan’s school was because the class sizes were no more than 25. I asked her daughter how many other students were like her in her school, and she told me maybe 10, but she was the only one in her class. This girl was fortunate because her parents could afford to send her to the high-tuition public school, but very few have that luxury. I was amazed, because the low-tuition public school I was working with for black and colored students had 60 + students, the teachers were burnt-out, tired and tried really hard to reach all of their students. One teacher confided in me and told me she was quitting because she could not handle it; low pay, overcrowded classrooms, and a second job as a nanny for a wealthy family.
I was amazed and had a great deal of respect for those teachers. If you’d told me then that we would be experiencing similar problems in the US, with classroom caps at 61, I would have looked at you with “the side-eye”! I fear for the future of our children if we continue down this road.
It is just a single example to a nation wide trend to cut major services that are in the public interest and which belong to the public. The cruel, heartless and mean spirited policies that will force more children into over crowded classrooms is supposed to create even greater failing in the system. Failure that will achieve two major goals – both will benefit the criminal class on top – to hold teachers responsible for not being the super men/women we have been looking for and justify purges of professional educators, but also to create an even more ignorant and obedient generation of adults in years to come.
Detroit, just like other municipalities and as the Obama’s administration claim it is a budget issue or deficit that left them no other choice but to sabotage public education. (don’t worry the Obama girls will not have to sit in a class of 60 student, nor 30, nor 20).
Yet it never seemed to be hard for the oligarchs in charge to find money to build what the economist Joseph Stiglitz called “America’s socialism for the rich”.
As Matt Taibbi of the ‘Soling Stone’ magazine observed regarding wall street bailouts: “we of course just witnessed the biggest government handout in history… Four and a half trillion dollars in bailout money already disbursed, trillions more still at risk in guarantees and loans, sixteen trillion dollars in emergency lending from the Federal Reserve, two trillion in quantitative easing”
All went to banks that – unlike our school children and educators – are involved constantly in harmful criminal activity on a massive scale. Whether they defrauded local municipalities out of billions of dollars, laundered drug cartels’ billions of dollars (http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303292204577514773605576442.html?mg=reno64-wsj) , defrauded and took advantage of people of color on a massive scale (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18822484), and forged documents to evict hundreds of thousandths of Americans out of their homes.
Lets not forget today’s Iraq’s reconstruction audit that found tens of billions of dollars being wasted on fraudulent overpriced private contractors bills: http://news.yahoo.com/auditors-billions-likely-wasted-iraq-174443860.html
(sounds like our “reformers” vision of education)
The disgrace is not reserved to the “broke” municipality of Detroit but for the entire nation, and thanks to the oligarchs who are in charge. But mean spirit, cruelty, hate and distrust are integrated part of the American spirit, where the poor, sick, needy, elderly are being neglected, mocked and blamed for their own peril. US seems to be only country that a viable presidential candidate like Romany can boasts that “if they want more stuff from government tell them to go vote for the other guy — more free stuff.” Where candidates in order to get elected have to underline how they will NOT help the poor and the sick.
Or In the words of Woody Guthrie’s “Mean talking blues”:
“I hate ev’rybody don’t think like me,
And I’d rather see you dead than I’d ever see you free.
Rather see you starved to death
Than see you at work —
And I’m readin’ all the books I can
To learn how to hurt —
Daily Misery — spread diseases,
Keep you without no vote,
Keep you without no union.”
Frank Little, Thank you for your brilliant insight into all that is happening. In Arizona the prisons are privatized and according to a few news reports several prisoners have died from neglect, and yet, the same corporation was hired to privatize them again. Frankly, I don’t know how the general public could become more ignorant or obedient. The next most possible thing that could happen is that the corporations will offshore the students to work in factories around the world. One can only ask “What’s
next?” I personally think the people who are doing this to children and citizens are evil!
Excellent comments. As someone who worked in two large Detroit high schools, I need to state openly that few classrooms I saw could possibly hold 61 students, even without desks, safely. The exceptions are former studios for machine shop classes and the like.
Regardless of the simple fire/safety considerations, it can’t possibly be educationally healthy for anyone to teach or learn in classes that large. Classes that size constrain teachers to use strictly lecture methods (and I’m sure that the deformers, who tend to favor the most archaic and conservative pedagogical practices, are not unaware of this implication) and make student-student interaction difficult, if not impossible. A little thought would reveal many of the limitations of cramming 61 students into a K-12 classroom. Plutocrats of both major parties eschew environments so antithetical to learning for their own children and instead send them to schools with very low student to teacher ratios. But of course, for other people’s children, the wealthy deformers have no problem with this policy. None whatsoever.
“the wealthy deformers have no problem with this policy. None whatsoever”. No they don’t. They can’t because they obviously deserve what they have and the “others” have chosen their own course of not becoming wealthy. Let them eat cake!!
Conjecture maybe, but does it occur to ed watchers that the Detroit schools contracting for classrooms caps of 61, may be a pilot exercise as the next step to Distance Learning which has been touted by Dr. Terry Moe and others as the future for education. When that is in place the plan will relegate teacher’s roles to that of monitors and overseers keeping students on task with the individualized curricula which will be “taught” by teachers from anywhere in the world. Distance Learning won’t require the same configuration of brick and mortar schools with limited class sizes. I warned ( “Revised and Abridged “Deliberate Dumbing Down of America” by Charlotte Iserbyt, pg. 7) that “teachers had better leave their concentration on the minutia of each maneuver of the process being carried out”…”to concentrate on the big picture” of Distance Learning. Your jobs are about to be offshored just as manufacturing, engineering and other professions have been. Your unions won’t be able to counteract it any more than industry unions were able to do for the unemployed of empty factories and lost professional positions.”
One can only wonder whether the significance of a trial run for doubling the number of bodies in established classrooms occurring in Detroit where the offshoring of industrial jobs has been felt more severely than probably anywhere in the nation. Offshoring of jobs was successfully carried out over time there. As criticism of charter schools surfaces, charters may have served their purpose of removing what is left of local jurisdiction. Could Detroit be the place designated to
begin the process of a segway to Distance Learning and the offshoring of teacher’s jobs?
That’s exactly what it’s about.
Yes, Detroit is experimenting with many ideas in corp-edreform. The Michigan Legislature lifted the caps on charters and cyber schools. The Mackinac Center, Michigan’s “chapter” of ALEC and Americans for Prosperity, pushes the GOP agenda to privatize the public school system in our state. They’ve started with the economically struggling minority communities. This is just a small step in the strategy to dismantle public education. When the parents return in September and see the size of the classes, they will take their students out of the few remaining public schools and enroll them in one of the shiny new charters down the street. Unless, of course, they are special needs students. Then they will remain in the overcrowded room and learn virtually. Finally, the politicians will applaud how the charter students outperformed the public school students on standardized tests. It is classic shock doctrine. Many will make a lot of money off these business ventures (charters, testing materials, cyber schools) and off-shoring teachers would increase profits.
Mary Thompson is on target. How many “experiments” in Direct Instruction have been done on the poor and disabled in our schools? Of course, this is a perfect opportunity for Distance Learning…no money…so the plan is accepted by the public easily…once again to their children’s detriment.
Ten years ago when I was supervising student teachers in the Detroit Public Schools, I saw first grade classrooms with 35 students, insufficient desks and supplies, and infrastructure problems like chronically flooded bathrooms that were simply appalling. It’s hard to believe that things are about to get much much worse. My heart breaks for those children who are so kind and eager to learn.
How about expanding on that comment Chem Teacher!
This is in response to Kelleigh. Your comment made me think that I wish the students would begin to speak out about this. I am wondering how students from years ago feel about the large classroom size. They experienced it first hand. What was their experience?? I feel that we need to interview students. Find out how they feel about large class size, testing, and the Core Curriculum. What do students want to study?? My students tell me that the tests do not test what they were taught. Could this be a vicious attempt from bureaucrats to create a mammoth achievement gap ?? As the saying goes —- out of the mouths of babes……
If, as seems likely, Detroit lacks the $ to support minimal standards in its public schools, Michigan should step in with supplemental funding. The state created the city and delegated to the city the state’s obligation to educate the children. If the state’s creature (the city) cannot meet its delegated obligation, the state should be held accountable. Viewed in constitutional terms, Michigan is obligated under the 14th Amendment’d Equal Protection clause to treat each citizen more or less the same. By delegating the education responsibility to Detroit and then standing by while Detroit underfunds education (either by political choice or fiscal necessity) and other Michigan communities adequately fund education, Michigan is denying the children in Detroit equal protection.
At the federal level, a “no child left behind” concept — if applied literally rather than figuratively/politically — suggests that the federal govt should step in to provide additional funding where a city/state cannot afford to adequately fund the public schools. But don’t hold your breath waiting for the Republicans (or the Obama/Duncan Dept of Ed) who love NCLB to put their $ where their mouths are and actually spend some federal $ helping the Detroit children who are being left behind.
Labor Lawyer, If what you say is correct, then why don’t you help these poor people? Words without action have little value.
The Detroit teachers union, the Detroit NAACP, and/or an adhoc group of Detroit parents (perhaps a city-wide PTA organization) would be the logical plaintiffs for such a lawsuit against the state of Michigan alleging the 14th Amendment equal protection violation. The federal obligation is political, not legal. It would be a real stretch to convince a court that the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause requires the federal govt to insure that a state provides at least minimally-adequate funding for each student (the 14th amendment requires a state to treat its citizens equally and requires the federal govt to treat US citizens equally but does not require the federal govt to force the states to treat their citizens equally) + the amount of federal $ spent on K-12 education is such a small percentage of the total K-12 spending that differences in federal funding between Detroit and other cities would not rise to the level of a federal equal protection violation.
LL,
I do not mean this facetiously, but seriously, Where is the lawsuit then? I really believe that it is going to take hundreds of lawsuits across the nation to drive a dagger into the heart of the education deformers’ “reforms” as Brown vs Board did to segregation (and even that was more of a slow painful struggle, certainly not with “all due haste”). Unfortunately, those most affected by these defunding schemes and privatization don’t have enough money to follow through with a lawsuit.
How do we get this done?
Duane
Unfortunately, the battle against most of the corporate education reform has to be fought politically rather than legally.
Detroit (and some other inner-city school systems) are extreme examples where the school funding is collapsing relative to funding elsewhere in the state — usually due primarily to collapsing inner-city property values/property taxes.
In other words, the equal protection violation arises due to unequal funding. If the per pupil funding is roughly equal between two school systems in a state (or, more precisely, if the two school systems each provide enough per pupil funding to meet a minimally-adequate standard), it’s extremely difficult to argue that the manner in which the $ is spent creates an equal protection violation. If School System A decides to spend its $ on charters or vouchers and School System B decides to spend its $ on neighborhood public schools, the courts will see this a policy decisions properly committed to the elected officials rather than an equal protection violation.
Thanks for the response. I believe I understand what you are saying about the political vs legal responsibilities. I guess the question becomes, and it is a political one it appears “What is the minimal level of adequate funding?” Oh man, public education is quite the beast on many levels.
On a different note, is it required of a school to give “x” number of minutes for lunch? And can teachers be assigned to lunch room supervision during said lunch without a compensatory break?
Thanks!
This is really tragic, I was in Detroit recently and learned they now have three casinos downtown, I assumed to generate revenue. Where is the money going, I guess my cynical self can figure it out.
Reblogged this on Abelardo Garcia Jr's Blog and commented:
I guess the emergency manager in Detriot has no idea of maximum occupancy laws? Please let us keep watch lest this happen in our neighborhoods!!!
I believe the courts will come to the aid of both students and teachers in this time of educational fraud and idiocy. Today the ACLU filed suit against a school in Michigan for not teaching children to read.
Teachers DO know how to teach almost every child to read, but of course it takes more than an inexperienced teacher out of Yale and a ten-dollar group test. Once this lawsuit is won, and I believe it will be, we’ll begin to see some real changes for the children: small classes, experienced teachers with proven track records of success, tutoring by specialists, readiness classes for preschoolers and so forth.
The current “reform” effort is designed to divest in schools for the poor, but it’s only a matter of time before this disgraceful situation is recognized and reversed. This is still the USA.
Do you have a link for more information? Please supply if so.
I’m having trouble posting the link. Just google “ACLU sues Michigan school Highland Park, Huffington Post.”
This sounds like an effort to run the kids into the charters and the teachers out of education. How would you even fit 61 kids in a classroom? In these modern buildings there is not enough room for that many desks. This kind of thing is tolerated in underdeveloped countries because the kids are desperate for an education of any kind but this is both un-american and dangerous. What if someone has a seizure? It would be impossible to stop a fight. How would you even know if that kid in the back was supposed to be in your class. I noticed in the picture the kids were also wearing uniforms. If you have 61 in uniforms you are not even going to be aware that there are any individuals.
I’ve had personal experiences with large class sizes as a student, as well as small class sizes, which some folks have asked about (sorry for the length):
When I was in school in the 50s and 60s, in my large urban district, my public school classes typically had 45 – 65 students. In older classrooms, where the desks were bolted to the floor, there were about eight rows of ten desks. This meant the back desks were not filled when I attended, as we usually had about 65 kids in those classes. Teachers often talked about how, when they and our parents were in school, classes were even larger and that those back seats were all filled then. My parents and grandparents went to school here, too, and confirmed this to me. I’ve looked but have been unable to locate research about such large class sizes during different generations here and, in fact, what I found contradicted my family’s and my experiences.
Not all of my classes had desks bolted to the floor, but even where desks were not bolted down, the class sizes were still usually large and teachers typically kept the desks in rows anyways.
I learned early on how easy it was to fade into the woodwork in those large classes. I noticed that the kids who usually got the most teacher attention were the ones that teacher’s thought were the brightest and those who they thought had behavior problems. This meant that most kids did not get much individual attention, and many teachers focused more on lecturing and controlling student behaviors than on engaging children in meaningful learning experiences.
I had wonderful progressive education experiences in my private preschool and in my public Kindergarten, so my primary education experiences were in stark contrast to that. I had some experiences with authoritarian primary teachers that were truly devastating and impacted me for a very, very long time.
Some of the worst experiences I had were with my young 1st Grade teacher. I won’t go into all of the details, but suffice it to say that this woman was all about animal taming, and she said some very negative things to children which, to this day, are inexplicable to me. Maybe it’s that in those days, they thought humiliating children would make them progress. I don’t know.
For example, she often told some kids, “You’re not so smart”, and she said this to me while I was taking my first standardized test. That didn’t help my confidence and I scored just average. She frequently called on kids to read aloud from our Dick and Jane readers, but while some children were reading, she would then say that she had never called on them and that they didn’t know how to listen. She did that to me frequently and, though I had looked forward to learning how to read in 1st Grade, that made me question my hearing and it scared me off from ever wanting to read. I wasn’t the only child she treated badly. I have a lot of memories from 1st Grade and I recall a number of awful things she said and did to kids. Today, I think she never should have been teaching young children.
I quickly developed an aversion to reading in school, as well as school textbooks, and I got mediocre grades and test scores throughout my mostly lock-step learning experiences in elementary and middle school. I recall having only ONE grade school teacher who took advantage of the opportunity to move students’ desks and engage us in project work and cooperative learning, which was in the second half of 4th Grade, after my family moved and I attended a different public school. (I didn’t experience that again until high school.) However, unlike many kids from low income families, I was very fortunate to have had positive out of school factors that helped me to grow and continue to improve my reading skills, such as peers who inflluenced me to read books, like Nancy Drew, as well as family resources, which included many adult magazines, newspapers and an extensive library of books.
I was creative and resourceful and, due to inspiring middle school English teachers, I began to broaden my interests in things that I wanted to read about, so I began to read school related reading material then and I excelled in middle school English courses.
Earning straight As in English resulted in my being placed in all Honors classes in my very diverse High School (which had about equal thirds black, white and Hispanic students), I begged my parents to get me out of those Honors courses though, because I was used to fading into the background in all but my English classes and I didn’t feel like an Honors student. After much discussion, my Mom decided to go to bat for me and she got me out of all but Honors English.
Taking both regular and Honors courses in a city public high school enabled me to see how students were treated very differently. While my regular courses had 45 – 65 students, and one general science class was filled to the max with about 80 kids, my honors courses had more like 20 – 25 kids. This made no sense to me, because there were other sections of those courses that they could have easily combined. Most of the kids in my Honors courses were white, so I thought it was probably about racism. I didn’t do very well in Honors English when I was a junior, because the focus was on Middle English, which was an entirely different language to me, so I tried to fade into the background there, too, but I discovered it wasn’t easy to do so in that size class and I felt like the lone dummy in there. I was able to fade more readily in my regular classes and, across the board, my grades were pretty poor.
The summer before my last year of high school, my family moved to the suburbs and I had an entirely different academic experience there –though I was furious about having to move then. I was placed in regular classes at my public suburban high school and they averaged 15 – 20 students per class. The approach there was progressive; we engaged in a lot of interesting project work, and they had courses that had not been offered at my city high school, such as World Literature, Sociology and Russian History, which I took. For the first time since Kindergarten, I really loved learning in ALL of my classes and I genuinely looked forward to going to school.
I blossomed so much there that, when my grades from the city arrived very late, my counselor called me in to inquire about the discrepancies between my previous low grades and the straight As that I earned there. After scoring high on my ACTs, he even gave me an IQ test, because he was concerned that my class ranking was going to prevent me from getting into a decent college. My folks didn’t want me to go away to school then though, so he referred me to a private college with a diverse student body, small class sizes and a progressive approach, which was a great fit for me. My newly rekindled interest in learning, in virtually all disciplines, propelled me to become an autonomous lifelong learner.
I didn’t aspire to be a teacher back then, even though I had several jobs working with kids and really loved them, because it took a very long time for me to overcome my learning experiences with authoritarian teachers, and I found it hard to think of myself as being a member of that club. However, when I did eventually decide to go into education, having had such vastly different school experiences provided me with the contrasts to discern the exemplary paradigms and their efficacy in my own education.
So I know personally how important small classes, authoritative teachers and progressive education based on constructivism are to fostering school success. I just don’t get why policy-makers are permitted to get away with securing that model for their own children, while dictating the opposite for virtually everyone else’s kids.
As a baby-boomer growing up in New York City, my classes were also relatively large. If I remember correctly, the cap was 35 or 36 students in a class, and I believe that cap was insisted upon by the teachers’ union (someone please correct me if I am wrong).
BUT as substandard as that was — in those days, everyone in the class was typically-developing.
The children with special needs were not included. (In some states and places, they were weren’t even allowed to go to school, but that is another story).
I can’t imagine a special needs child succeeding in a class of 35, 40, or more. There is no way he can possibly receive the attention he needs. A super-large class is not the least restrictive environment!
Yes, I’m a boomer, too, and Special Ed then certainly wasn’t what it is today, or what it became in 1974 when PL 94-142 was passed, but I don’t think our classrooms were as homogeneous as one might think. I knew kids at my public school who had been diagnosed as “hyperkinetic” and “emotionally disturbed”. They were rare, but they were there.
In those days, speech disorders were the most commonly diagnosed and treated problems in schools. Kids with severe physical disabilities and cognitive disorders were not in neighborhood public schools. However, there were probably a lot of kids with learning and behavioral problems who were there but who had not been diagnosed, since we didn’t have all the categories we have now, including Specific Learning Disabilities. There weren’t a lot of options for gifted kids either then, so they were in regular grade school classes and, at most, they were skipped a grade.
In my city, what compounded matters even more was that they had mid-year enrollments and mid-year graduations. This meant that classes often contained two groups of kids, one a half year ahead of the other –though the kids who started in the fall were a larger group than those who began in January. Those teachers had very little time to give much attention to individual students.
I was inspired by the words of the Labor Lawyer. It helped me remember that in my research, I stumbled upon an Affadavit written against New York State some years back for their failure to show on paper the Reliabilty and Validity of these high stakes tests. The Affadavit was filed by a psychometrician. If such Affadavits were filed in all states, perhaps our voices would be heard. I believe that Pearson Publishing holds the testing contracts in 30 plus states. If they are getting paid $32 million for the contract with NY, what are they getting from the other states?? What is the total amount of money they are getting for their testing contracts alone? It would seem to me, the least they should have to do is demonstrate the Reliability & Validity of their tests to those who hold degrees in statistics!!! How does one go about filing and Affadavit?? Would it not be wonderful to do so in every state on behalf of innocent children ???
Cowgirl
Cowgirl,
“It would seem to me, the least they should have to do is demonstrate the Reliability & Validity of their tests to those who hold degrees in statistics”.
Well the fact is is that they can’t demonstrate reliability nor validity. See Noel Wilson’s “A Little Less than Valid: An Essay Review” for all the details. It can be found at: http://www.edrev.info/essays/v10n5index.html . For a more comprehensive destruction of educational standards, standardized testing and grading see Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577 .
Duane
http://detroitk12.org/admin/emergency_manager/robert_bobb/
Detroit’s emergency manager’s website to keep up with what is going on. I’m born and raised in and around Detroit, went to Mercy College of Detroit-now part of University of Detroit. What is happening is just so sad and I no longer think of moving back to teach. Of course NOW I am teaching in Louisiana which is sad in similar ways just hotter and more humid!
When I graduated in education over 30 years ago, Detroit schools were known to pay well because it was awful conditions. This Sounds extremely worse. And who is losing? We can say the children but honestly, we all are. These are our future, future workers, future voters…future rioters? Let’s make some conscious decisions to make this world a better place.
I attended Detroit Public Schools from Kindergarden to 12th grade and taught five years in DPS before transferring to Ohio. The problem with the DPS is so deep rooted that it would take volumes of reports to begin to scratch the surface. Part of the problem is poor funding but so is corruption, ineptitude, low parental involvement, high poverty rates, discrimination, and a myriad of other issues.
While teaching in DPS, I saw my principal arrested for embezzlement, two separate shootings, and I had my identity stolen by DPS officials after I resigned. When I left DPS in 2007, there were approximately 35 schools that were shuttered (I taught at one of the shuttered schools). At the time, security and other top school officials were warned that some of the realignments would bring problems with regards to gangs. Not only were the warnings ignored, those of us with concerns were told we were idiots and the gangs just had to stay under control. There was an immediate increase in school shootings that lead to two homicides on school property or property adjacent to schools when students were traveling to or from. While the criminals should shoulder criminal responsibility, the schools failed to provide a safe environment.
I taught at a high school that had 42 doors, 1100 students, four DPS safety and security officers (unarmed, no police powers), and no DPS safety rangers (armed with police powers). The Detroit Police Department had one two man unit who were assigned to half a dozen schools over a five square mile area. There was an attempt to increase the number of rangers but the number was at around 25 (I might be off) but that is not enough to cover the middle and high schools.
All of these issues and this is only regarding the safety, I have not begun to think about the missing textbooks, the back room deals where board members issued contracts to themselves and has little to no documentation of services they provided. I can go on and on but the truth is that DPS is broke. It hurts me to my soul to state that because I love my city and my students. DPS needs to be a test study in reform, whatever comes from it, it can not be any worse. Detroit Public School system is dead, it just has not fallen down yet.
These actions appear to be an all out effort to destroy the Detroit Public School System. I feel for the teachers who will have to attempt to teach such large numbers of students within their classrooms. This will surely create a lose-lose situation for the students as well as the teachers. It is a penny wise dollar foolish approach that will end up costing the City of Detroit more money in the long run.
Why is the Detroit Federation of Teachers president not speaking out about this travesty, this injustice to deserving students and teachers who are on the frontlines trying to “make due” with what is being shoved down their throats? It took the AFT president to come to the city ( due to a convention) to rally for the mistreated teachers that staff these classrooms. WHERE IS KEITH JOHNSON? lurking in the background only surfacing because the national teacher convention is there in Detroit for the weekend? He is a poor representative who seemingly looks into a thesaurus before he acknowledges reporters. I see why teachers are not getting fair treatment, they have incompetent representation leading them.