Superintendent Ken Mitchell took a close look at what his district is getting to comply with Race to the Top mandates and what it will cost his district to comply.
Archives for the month of: February, 2013
Matt Di Carlo of the Shanker Institute here dissects the claims of Jeb Bush about the success of the state letter grade system.
As he shows, the number of A-rated schools went up because the state changed the rules of the game.
You can always get more points on the basketball court if you drop the basket a foot or two.
You can get more home runs if you bring the fences closer.
Are people foolish enough to believe the boast that Florida is now a model for the nation?
I happen to think that letter grades for schools are a ridiculous idea. Schools are complex institutions that do some things well and some things not as well. One can come up with a rating system that is far more sophisticated than a grade of A-F.
No one would dream of sending a child home with a report card with only one letter on it. Why in the world would anyone label a school with a single letter?
This is the rankest sort of political interference in the functioning of education.
No state or district should use letter grades to reward or humiliate schools.
This is politics, not accountability.
And it has nothing to do with improving education.
When the National Association of Independent Schools starts handing out letter grades to its members, let me know.
Jersey Jazzman deconstructs Michelle Rhee’s appearance on Jon Stewart’s show and wonders why interviewers allow her to avoid any real analysis of her policy recommendations. Instead of asking what is the evidence for her views, she is allowed to get away with glittering generalities about how much she loves teachers.
Jon Stewart is one of our very best interviewers, yet she spun her blather past him.
Jersey Jazzman writes:
“Our nation’s dialogue about education has been commandeered by a bunch of ill-informed, intellectually lazy, bought-and-paid-for edu-celebrities. Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Wendy Kopp, Ben Chavis, Steve Perry, Jeb Bush, Arne Duncan, and a few others are pushing an agenda that has little evidence to support it; worse, they are rarely questioned by well-informed journalists as to the specifics of their plans.”
Rhee has never been challenged directly. I wish some radio or TV host would invite us to debate the issues.
Mercedes Schneider continues her review of the board of the National Council of Teacher Quality.
Earlier entries reviewed the bios of Wendy Kopp, Michelle Rhee, and other prominent figures whose lives intersect again and again on the boards of the groups seeking control of American education, with the full-throated support of Secretary Arne Duncan.
Here is Joel Klein, the quintessential corporate reformer. This is part 9 of Schneidr’s deconstruction of the corporate reform leadership team at NCTQ.
Jersey Jazzman read Carol Burris’s account of her “training” sessions where she was being “calibrated” by people who know how to calibrate principals.
He saw behind the smokescreen.
The goal is to create a system so “objective” that principals have no room for judgment and teachers may be fired by those allegedly objective criteria.
We must have standards! We must stack and rank our employees! Where have we heard that before?
The answer is in the link.
I don’t know Michael Weston, but I love his comment below.
He is a teacher in Hillsborough County, Florida, which received many millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation to pilot a new teacher evaluation program.
Bill and Melinda visited the district and expressed great pleasure at the compliments directed their way. They don’t seem to realize that 1) educators are very polite (as a rule), and 2) people are starstruck in the presence of billionaires.
But Michael Weston knows the score.
He decided enough is enough, and look what he is doing:
I am the Union Rep at my high school (in Hillsborough County). Just two hours ago I was explaining to some members that there was absolutely nothing (except running for School Board) I could do about:
1. High school science teachers being evaluated by a former sixth grade teacher.
2. That no consideration is given to how long you have been teaching a particular class, nor how many different class preps you have.
3. That a sleeping child will count against you, but God forbid you touch the child’s desk or anything else that may call attention to a particular kid.
4. All of the teachers being fired this year for poor evaluations are over 40.
5. Since it is a totally subjective rating, they can kill you based on your style vs their style.
etc, etc. etc.
And why is there nothing I can do as their Union rep? The Hillsborough Teacher’s Union is a full participant and support of this nonsense.
So, I filed to run for School Board. Someone has to stop this.
Watch this, get a good laugh, and go to sleep!
We see similar nonsense in the mainstream media every day, but this one is funny.
Carol Burris, principal of South Side High School in Rockville Center, New York, describes how New York is preparing principals and teachers for the new world order decreed by Arne Duncan and his Race to the Top.
She went to a training to learn how to evaluate teachers, something she had been doing successfully in her school for many years.
She learned which words were impermissible.
She was taught to think “out of the box” by conforming to the rules and regulations inside the box.
She was “calibrated.”
She thought she was trapped in a cheesy rendition of “Star Wars.”
She began hoping that Darth Vader would arrive and put everyone out of their misery.
And then she learned–read to the end of her piece–who started this insane process.
I posted Gerald Coles’ predictions about President Obama’s second term. Many commenters responded. This is Coles’ response to those who raised questions:
With respect to the suggestion that the “federal govt. should get out of the classroom entirely,” I think that’s a complicated issue, given, for example, the federal government’s role in ending LEGAL segregation of schools. While issues of curriculum and what should and should not be discussed in the classroom do caution against a national curriculum, there are complications to be considered. For example, do we want “local” control where students can only learn that the world was created 6,000 years ago and global warming is a socialist hoax? I just raise these complications and will leave fuller discussion of them for another day.
Where I think the federal government clearly should be involved is in financial support of schools, teachers & students. Compare, for example, military vs. education spending. I think the Dept. of Ed. budget is about $70 billion, about 2% of the federal budget. In contrast, the military budget is more than a dozen times larger at about $977.5 billion. (For the calculation of true military costs, see David Cay Johnson’s analysis in the current Columbia Journalism Review:
http://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/the_true_cost_of_national_secu.php?page=all
Does the U.S. need nearly anywhere from 700-1,000 (depending on the calculation) military bases ringing the world? Does it need to outspend more than the combined military spending of at least the top dozen or more nations?
Schools deteriorate, teachers are fired, class size increases, neighborhood schools close, teachers spend their own money on classroom materials, while money flows like a rushing river to military corporations and unnecessary wars. With the right national priorities, here there surely is a place for the federal government to contribute to schools and children’s education.
I am reposting this because the first version had a typo in the title. I wrote NOW instead of NOT, changing the meaning.
So here is the correct version!
A reader wrote to ask a question. Are there any states that have resisted the tidal wave of bad ideas? It is impossible to avoid high-stakes testing because it was imposed first by No Child Left Behind and then reinforced by Race to the Top.
Are there ANY states now that are not voucherizing and privatizing, doing high stakes standardized testing, institutiting abusive evaluations, refusing to use Teach for America and generally giving the schools over to the amateurs? I am thinking about on a state level. I am sure there are some schools and even systems that are hanging tough. Where are teachers respected in America? If there are any could you make a post that tells us where. Of course it might create a mass immigration to those states, but that might also shock the idiots out of their collective comas. A few years ago the other southeastern states were losing teachers to Georgia because Zell Miller raised the pay by 15%. The rest groused loudly, but had to raise their pay to compete. So apparently this kind of thing works.
Diane Ravitch's blog 