Before the election, impassioned supporters of both candidates were threatening to move to Canada.
On the traffic report in Tulsa, this helpful newsman offered very specific directions.
Watch it. Even the crew was laughing.
Archives for the month of: November, 2012
This is a very good analysis of the election results that should gladden the hearts of teachers.
John Wilson points out that in one state after another, those who disparaged and demeaned teachers lost.
They blame their loss on the unions, but the unions have limited numbers.
And most of the rightwing candidates (maybe all) had far greater resources from Wall Street than the teacher-back candidates.
Typically the pro-teacher candidates were outspent 10-1, even 20-1.
The public is getting tired of self-seekers who claim to put “kids first,” “children first,” “students first,” while simultaneously attacking the dedicated teachers who take care of them every day in school.
Wise parents know that good education is a collaboration among students, teachers, parents, administrators and the larger community.
Those who talk about “first” and about a “race” are promoting division, not collaboration.
No one comes “first.” All work together. Teamwork wins, not a struggle for survival among competing interests.
Robert Pondiscio writes movingly about a school that was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy.
PS 333 was a Core Knowledge school, exemplary in many respects.
It was unprotected from the ferocity of the storm surge.
It had 578 students before the storm. It has 30 or so now, and they have been relocated to a school more than an hour and a half away.
The principal is distraught, while the city administration pretends that what matters most is to get back to the routines of preparing for the next test:
With the loss of instructional time, the lack of continuity, and the disruption wrought by Sandy, [principal Angela] Logan fears it will be a lost school year for many of her children, most of whom can ill afford it. “How do you hold them accountable to sit there and learn when [the children are thinking] ‘I don’t have a house. When I go back home it’s freezing cold?’ Those kids are going to suffer,” she says. Even after the all-clear is given and the school safe to occupy, there’s no way to know how many students will return. Some, perhaps most of the low-income families served by Logan’s school, will simply melt into the neighborhoods to which they’ve moved. The scale of the dislocation is immense: P.S. 333 is one of 11 schools in the Rockaways put out of commission by Sandy, and the smallest of them. “No one’s talking about that right now. What’s the reality for the kids that were on that Peninsula?” She doesn’t know.
Logan is openly frustrated with city officials trying to give the impression that things are getting back to normal in New York City’s schools. “You want to make it look good, but you’re not thinking about these kids,” she says. That said, New York City is relocating more schools than Oklahoma City or Portland, Oregon has in total.
EduShyster has done the research and digging on Students for Educational Reform that has thus far eluded mainstream journalists.
(This should not be surprising since few journalists have paid much attention to Democrats for Education Reform, the Wall Street hedge fund managers group, which is able to direct millions of dollars to state and local political elections from a small number of very rich donors. Typically DFER is described in news stories as just another Democratic advocacy group interested in education reform rather than as a small group of billionaires who want to promote privatization of public education.)
EduShyster gives us insight into their $uccess, their board, their ties to the financial elites, and the current focus of their activities (demanding tougher teacher evaluations, a curious preoccupation for university students).
She invites readers to offer a slogan for them. One suggestion she offers: “Pawns of billionaires.”
Maybe you can think of others.
The Shanker blog published a badly needed critique of our policymakers’ insatiable appetite for data by sociologist Esther Quintero.
Quintero makes the sage observation that you need to know why you are collecting data before you acclaim its value. You need to have a theory that you are testing. Without knowing which idea you seek to validate, the data prove nothing other than your ability to accumulate lots of it.
She writes:
“At a basic level, it [collecting data] seems to signal a general orientation toward making decisions based on the best information that we have, which is a very good thing. But there are two problems here. First, we tend to have an extremely narrow view of the information that counts – that is, data that can be quantified easily. Second, we seem to operate under the illusion that data, in and of themselves, can tell stories and reveal truth.”
But the data we can get may not answer the most important questions. First, we must define the questions.
She concludes:
“My colleague recently wrote that NCLB “has helped to institutionalize the improper interpretation of testing data.” True. But I would go even further: NCLB has helped to institutionalize not just how we handle data, but also, and more importantly, what counts as data. The law requires schools to rely on scientifically-based research but, as it turns out, case studies, ethnographies, interviews, and other forms of qualitative research seem to fall outside this definition – and, thus, are deemed unacceptable as a basis for making decisions.
“Since when are qualitative data unacceptable in social and behavioral science research and as a guide in policy-relevant decision-making?
“Our blind faith in numbers has ultimately caused impoverishment in how (and what) information is used to help address real world problems. We now apparently believe that numbers are not just necessary, but sufficient, for making research-based decisions.
“The irony, of course, is that this notion is actually contrary to the scientific process. Being data-driven is only useful if you have a strong theory by which to navigate; anything else can leave you heading blindly toward a cliff.”
I am reporting this because I forgot to include the link. As readers of this blog know (and hopefully forgive), I sometimes forget but always try to rectify.
Gary Rubinstein closely examined the report written by The New Teacher Report about teacher retention in DC and found it to be deeply flawed.
Aside from the obvious conflict of interest inherent in an evaluation of DC schools by an organization previously run by Chancellors Rhee and Kaya Henderson, the report itself says nothing useful about the reforms it claims to appraise.
First, the report shows that teachers in low-poverty schools get higher ratings than those in high-poverty schools. Either the school system has been assigning its worst teachers to high-poverty schools, or the evaluation system favors those who teach in low-poverty schools.
Rubinstein concludes that Rhee’s IMPACT system favors those who teach in low-poverty schools. He wonders, “Why would anyone want to stay in a high poverty school in D.C. and miss out on the bonus pay and promotions that are available to 42% of the teachers in the low poverty schools?” What teacher would be so foolish as to choose to teach in a high-needs school where the odds of failing and being fired are high?
The great irony of the TNTP report, he points out, “is that TNTP and TFA train many of the teachers who work at these high poverty schools so this statistic that there are so few high performing teachers at these schools (just 11%) is in stark contrast with their PR about how good the new teachers are. It seems that the TNTP and TFA teachers are getting low IMPACT ratings.”
Rubinstein says that this paper “would not survive any sort of peer review process. The main conclusion they try to make is obvious and meaningless. Much more important is the repeated suggestion that the system by which the evaluations are made is skewed to benefit the teachers who teach at the schools with the fewest needs.”
This rural teacher says his head is about to explode.
The state says he has to give test after test after test to his first graders.
Then he has to convert those scores into a letter grade.
This doesn’t make any sense to him.
The children are just beginning to make sense of letters and words.
How can he reduce what they have learned to an A or a B or a C or….?
What shall he tell their parents?
Does this make any sense?
Is it developmentally appropriate?
Do they do this at the University of Chicago Lab School or Sidwell Friends?
Michelle Rhee founded The New Teacher Project.* Subsequently, Rhee was chancellor of the DC school system for four tumultuous years. One of the people who worked for Rhee at The New Teacher Project was Kaya Henderson, who is now chancellor of the DC schools.
So if you want to get a truly rigorous, definitely independent study of Rhee’s reforms, what group should be hired to do the review? Obvious: The New Teacher Project!
Here is the not surmising conclusion of the study: Rhee’s reforms are working! Great teachers are retained, bad teachers are fired.
Surely, in a year or two, we will see dramatic improvement in the DC test scores now that there is a great teacher in every classroom. The black-white test scores gaps and the Hispanic-white test scores gaps–now the largest of any city tested by the federal government–will close. With a great teacher in every classroom, all children in the DC schools will be proficient. Maybe as early as 2014.
*After this post first appeared, a reader informed me that Rhee did not “found” The New Teacher Project, although she often claims that she did. My informant says it was founded by insiders at Teach for America, who then asked Rhee to run it. If you check her Wikipedia entry, you will see that she is credited as the founder. I will leave this to Wendy and Michelle to sort out.
Lawrence A. Feinberg is a member of the Haverford Township school board in Pennsylvania.
He is a hero of public education and a model for parents, educators and activists across the nation.
He is a businessman who cares passionately about public education.
Feinberg runs an outstanding website that keeps parents and educators (and people like me who don’t live in Pennsylvania) informed about the events in the state.
Here is a great example of the information that mobilizes parents and activists. In this post, Feinberg and fellow volunteers follow the money and the legislation that affect the future of public education. This one shows how $4 billion dollars in taxpayer funding is paid out to charters in the state with no real oversight. It demonstrates who gets the money and who is making big political contributions to politicians who fail to provide oversight.
Feinberg is a leader of the Keystone State Education Coalition. This is how it describes its work on its website: “Established in 2006, the Keystone State Education Coalition is a growing grass roots, non-partisan public education advocacy group of several hundred locally elected, volunteer school board members and administrators from school districts throughout Pennsylvania. Our mission is to evaluate, discuss and inform our boards, district constituents and legislators on legislative issues of common interest and to facilitate active engagement in public education advocacy.”
Feinberg became active in school board issues as a parent of children in Haverford Township. He has been elected to his local school board since 1999, endorsed by both Republican and Democratic parties.
Pennsylvania is lucky to have Lawrence Feinberg. If every state had advocates as dedicated as Feinberg, we could turn this nation’s education policies around to serve the interests of children, not entrepreneurs, politicians, and privatizers.
A teacher in Memphis writes about how parents in her school reacted to the announcement that it would be taken over by the Achievement School District and turned into a charter school. Her school is poor but it has made steady growth and is not one of the lowest performing schools in the city. The media in Memphis, she says, is not reporting the genuine rage of the local black community:
First, see this article in my local paper about the state takeover of 10 more schools and the meetings about that takeover:
http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2012/nov/07/10-more-memphis-schools-to-be-taken-over-by/
I am a teacher at one of those schools in Frayser, a neighborhood the Achievement School District (ASD) seems to have targeted since they took over three schools there last year. The article notes that 6 of the 10 schools taken over will be run by charter operators.
I attended the meeting last night at Pursuit of God in Frayser, an impoverished and predominantly black neighborhood. The crowd was angry that their children’s teachers were going to be fired and that their children would have to adapt to a whole new school. They spoke about the great current teachers in their schools. They wanted to know what was going to make these schools better, and there was no one from the ASD who could explain that.
There was also concern expressed by a 30-year veteran teacher and resident of Frayser that this was an attempt to segregate the poor black neighborhood of Frayser from the rest of the county in the upcoming merger of Memphis City and Shelby County School Systems.
The community at the meeting was very antagonistic to state takeover. I overheard an employee of the church comment, “We got a tough crowd tonight,” and the ASD people were clearly uncomfortable.
I expected an article in the local paper to mention the atmosphere at the meeting.
The media ran this segment: http://www.wmctv.com/story/20049306/tn-asd-getting-set-to-take-over-more-memphis-schools
And the paper did not report on the events of the meeting. The shot of the crowd was purposefully taken while most of them were in the other room getting refreshments. There was no other coverage of the meeting in the media.
Diane Ravitch's blog 