Archives for the month of: June, 2013
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NSBA: Dems Support Federal Control of Education

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2013 //
42

On a party-line vote, Democrats on the Senate committee reported out a bill that expands the role of the federal government in education and makes the Secretary of Education the national superintendent of schools. The National School Boards Association describes the legislation here, which NSBA opposes.

Summary of Senate HELP Mark-up of the Strengthening America’s Schools Act, S. 1094

The Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) Committee approved a bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) on Wednesday, June 12, 2013. The Strengthening America’s Schools Act, S. 1094 was passed after two days of sometimes heated deliberation on a 12 Democrat – 10 Republican party line vote. Whether and when the bill will be considered by the full Senate is uncertain, but Chairman Tom Harkin (D-IA) expressed his intention to get it to the floor by the end of the year.

The issues voiced by NSBA in its letter to the Committee were raised frequently during the two days of discussion and voting. In fact, Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) read from and held up NSBA’s letter during his opening statement as evidence of the strong objections to federal overreach and the overwhelming increase in reporting requirements in S. 1094 as introduced.

Without doubt the fulcrum of debate at the mark-up was the proper role of the federal government in education. Unfortunately, the partisan gap continues on what that role should be. Chairman Harkin characterized the bill as “a new partnership of shared responsibility,” and passed an amendment clarifying that states and districts could refuse Title I, Part A funds, and thereby be free of federal requirements. Meanwhile, Ranking Member Lamar Alexander (R-TN) repeatedly asserted that S. 1094 creates “a national school board.”

The partisan gap prevailed in the Committee’s efforts to address all major issues. Of the 23 amendments offered, all but one Republican amendment was rejected, whereas all but 1 of the Democratic amendments were accepted to the base bill. This was despite recognition – acknowledged by Chairman Tom Harkin (D-IA) himself – that the Department of Education has exceeded its authority on ESEA waivers, and Congress has exacerbated the problem by failing to reauthorize ESEA. For example:

Role of the Secretary: The role of the Secretary of Education appears to have increased substantially in S. 1094. Throughout the bill, the Secretary is authorized to determine the overall quality and effectiveness of greatly expanded state plan requirements that will, in turn, impact the local level. The Secretary would appear to be involved in the design of programs, directing the specifics, for example, in addressing parent/community engagement and extensive data collection. In the case of data, the bill calls for multiple cross tabulations of a wide range of academic and non-academic student data that we believe will be overwhelming for many school systems to produce. The same can be said of new local plan requirements. Amendments described by their sponsors as attempts to eliminate new or onerous reporting and federal oversight requirements were rejected by the Committee. In fact, amendments were approved to create additional reporting requirements on military children, interscholastic sports, and career and technical education.

Turnaround models: Local educational agencies, including those receiving NCLB waivers from the Secretary, continue to be concerned with the limited flexibility in designing and implementing turnaround models for low performing schools. Several amendments intended to increase flexibility on how States and LEAs identify and improve low-performing schools were not approved.

Comparability: NSBA supports the concept of comparability and believes it is important to ensure that Title I schools receive comparable educational support. The proposed comparability provision in S. 1094 would change the method for how LEAs determine whether comparable services are being provided from local resources to Title I schools compared to other schools in the district. It would require local educational agencies to show that they spend no less at each Title I school – as determined by the combined state and local per-pupil expenditures for personnel and non-personnel – than they do at the average non-Title I schools in the district. Local school officials have determined that the provision is burdensome and not geared to achieving the desired educational outcomes. Efforts to address comparability were rejected by the Committee, so the unworkable language in the base bill stands.

Public Charter Schools Expansion: Local educational agencies continue to be concerned with the increased congressional support for public charter schools in the legislation and the apparent willingness of Congress to not hold public charter schools to the same accountability requirements as traditional public schools. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) offered, but then withdrew an amendment to hold charter schools to the same accountability requirements as other public schools. Chairman Harkin pledged to work on an amendment for the floor, however.

Other amendments on ESEA flexibility waivers, vouchers, Race to the Top, college access, special education, and teacher and principal effectiveness sparked spirited discussion and even a little table-pounding before S. 1094 was reported out favorably by the Committee on a 12 – 10 party line vote.

NSBA is not able to support S. 1094 in its current form, and will continue to urge Congress to reauthorize an ESEA bill that supports local school district governance. In preparing for the full Senate floor vote, NSBA will prepare amendments and work with the engagement of the state associations to secure support from targeted Senators.

House Action – Committee Mark Up Tomorrow – June 19

The Committee on Education and the Workforce in the U.S. House of Representatives has released its version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) Reauthorization, entitled The Student Success Act, H.R. 5 and it is scheduled for mark up this Wednesday, June 19, 2013. NSBA sent this letter Committee members.

Reminder: The Committee on Education and the Workforce determines the provisions in the law that best help local school boards to improve academic achievement for our students. Please contact your member of Congress if he/she sits on the Committee on Education and the Workforce in the U.S. House of Representatives through the Capitol Hill Switchboard (202-224-3121) as soon as possible.

Your Message to Your Member of Congress

As a local school board member, I urge you to:

1) Support the House Committee bill, The Student Success Act, H.R. 5 because the bill eliminates unnecessary and overwhelming administrative requirements and restores flexibility and governance to local school boards who are in the best position to address the needs of students in our local communities; but

2) Re-instate the maintenance of effort provisions for education to ensure that states provide at least the same level of funding for K-12 education from one year to the next.

Thank you for responding to our call to action. Please provide any feedback to kbranch@nsba.org.

Sincerely, Kathleen Branch & NSBA’s Advocacy Team

——————————————-
Kathleen Branch
Director, National Advocacy Services Programs
National School Boards Association
Alexandria, VA
——————————————-

Categories Duncan, Arne, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top

Massachusetts: Will Common Core Dumb Down Our Students?

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2013 //
10

Tom Birmingham was president of the State Senate in 1993 when the state passed its landmark education reforms. From those reforms came a historic new investment in public education and new standards and assessments. Today, Massachusetts leads the nation on NAEP at both grades four and eight in reading and math.

However, the state abandoned its successful standards and assessments to qualify for Race to the Top funding. In doing so, it adopted Common Core.

Birmingham worries about whether the state gave up its successful program for a one-size-fits-all approach in which the children of Massachusetts will meet the same standards as children in Mississippi and Alabama.

He writes, ” In implementing the Common Core, there will be natural pressure to set the national standards at levels that are realistically achievable by students in all states. This marks a retreat from Massachusetts’ current high standards. This may be the rare instance where what is good for the nation as a whole is bad for Massachusetts.”

Categories Common Core, Massachusetts

“A Danger to National Security: Mainstream Education Reporting”

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2013 //
3

Last night, I attended the 5th annual Skinny awards, hosted by Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters. A large and enthusiastic crowd cheered this year’s winners: teacher bloggers Gary Rubinstein and Arthur Goldstein.

Gary Rubinstein teaches at Stuyvesant High School. He was honored as a great blogger, with special mention of his deconstruction and demolition of NYC’s “teacher data reports.” Gary showed that they were random and worthless.

Here is his latest post: http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2013/06/17/wisdom-from-a-2012-cm-it-doesnt-matter-what-their-scores-are/

Arthur Goldstein teaches at Frances Lewis High School. He blogs at http://nyceducator.com/.
Arthur writes with the most amazingly sardonic wit. He has roasted the Powers-that-be to well-done in a thousand different ways. I used to think I was first to say that VAM was “junk science,” but Leonie said that a careful review demonstrated that Arthur beat me to it. (Apparently Michael Simpson of the Office of General Counsel at the NEA was truly first in the world to label VAM junk science, in an article titled “L.A. Story: How the Los Angeles Times used junk science to malign an entire city of teachers).

I would have an impossible time picking out his best blogs. Here are a few recent ones. Here you will read about the most perfect mayor ever of all time and any place, whose reforms have transformed NYC into utopia. Here is his latest on our state commissioner John King, who is referred to sometimes as Reformy John, as here, but sometimes as King John. And here he shows the genius of both. And those are only the latest. He has been skewering the mighty for years and has been an inspiration to people like me.

Surprisingly, when these two accepted their awards, they switched roles. Arthur, the wit, spoke briefly and modestly. Gary, the serious mathematician and data cruncher, delivered a hilarious spoof. He used reformer language to describe the terrible crisis stalking the land: mediocre education journalism. He explained that bloggers emerged to save readers trapped into failing mainstream media. He said that scientific evidence conclusively demonstrated….something about three times in a row or three times as much.

Watch the video (luckily, Norm Scott was there to tape the event). I hope Gary prints his speech on his blog. If you have trouble hearing him, it is because the audience was laughing so much.

Categories Class Size Matters Org, Humor

Good News from Florida (Sort Of)

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2013 //
10

Florida has an unusually nutty teacher evaluation program. Jeb Bush and Bill Gates determined some years ago that teachers cause low test scores, so the way to fix education is to fire teachers who don’t get high test scores from their students. There was this little problem: most teachers teach non-tested subjects. So Florida addressed the problem by assigning scores to teachers of students they had never taught.

I mean, really, if your goal is to punish and beat up on teachers, this method makes sense.

But the legislature realized it would have to change this little anomaly because teachers started suing the state. It is kind of hard to defend terminating a teacher who was fired when the scores of students she didn’t teach didn’t go up.

Here is a report from a reader in Florida:

On a slightly higher (mixed blessing) note, the Florida Legislature and Governor have seen fit to fix a huge, gaping flaw in the ALEC/Jeb Bush written teacher evaluation law after the state was widely ridiculed and derided over the ridiculous tenets of the law:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/06/16/new-florida-law-teachers-cant-be-evaluated-on-students-they-dont-have/

Valerie Straus reported Sunday in the Washington Post that the state decided to fix the part of the law that required teachers (like me) to be evaluated on the test scores of students they had never taught and may have never met for the last 2 years.

Like New York City’s new teacher evaluation program, in Florida you can receive “highly effective” or “effective” ratings on the entire eval but if the school’s average test scores are low you are rated “ineffective” overall and face firing and loss of your teaching certificate after 2 consecutive “ineffective” ratings.

Each of Florida’s 67 counties had to come up with their own way to implement and score the evaluation plan so there is no real standardization at all nor is their consistency and fairness, with the exception of test scores really being 100% of the evaluation.

The VAM formula chosen by the state of Florida is so confusing and scattered that the first year’s evaluations weren’t even released to the teachers until the following year in most districts. My own district gave us 2 sets of evaluations — their own and the state’s because they weren’t sure which was more accurate or acceptable. We haven’t received this year’s evaluations yet; I don’t know if we’ll receive them around Halloween again or when school resumes in August. Know one seems to know.

The law doesn’t address what to do about the deeply flawed evaluations of the last 2 years, however, so the NEA/FEA lawsuit brought by 7 teachers against the state DOE continues.

The bad news is that the state will simply work that much harder and faster to invent untried, unscientific, and unmanageable testing regimes for all the teachers who don’t teach math, reading, writing, or science in grades 3 -12 (the current FCAT 2.0 test’s purview).

I dread seeing what they come up with in haste and without piloting to test Kindergarteners, 1st and 2nd graders, music/art/PE classes, etc. It is destined to be outrageously expensive, be riddled with problems and inaccuracies, and it will fail.

It is also guaranteed that the new system will be punitive and punishing to the teachers who dared object to the hair-brained eval scheme in the first place. That’s how the legislature and Jeb Bush “No Longer Governor But Running for President, So Still In Control” roll down here in the Sunshine State. Jeb has never forgiven the FEA for twice (once, and then again when he and the legislature did an end-run to ignore the law, which was slapped down by the Florida Supreme Court) defeating him on the state’s class size amendment by having voters approve it twice and having it written into the state constitution. He vowed revenge and boy, is he getting it. In spades.

Categories Florida, Teacher Evaluations

Is the Common Core “Literary Kudzu” or an “Empty Suit”?

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2013 //
46

In this post, Bill Korach calls Common Core an empty suit and Will Fitzhugh describes it as literary kudzu.

Korach writes:

“Remember when standards actually expected students to learn something like: “Why did the German’s decision in WWI to launch unrestricted submarine warfare against neutral shipping, cause America to enter the war against the Germans?” In CCSS language arts you learn about a system or a method, but you don’t obtain knowledge, much less wisdom. Twenty or thirty years ago, students were taught to write, by learning grammar and then writing. But we always wrote about something that required knowledge.”

Fitzhugh writes:

“Educrat Professors and Educrat Psychologists who have, perhaps, missed learning much about history and literature during their own educations, and have not made any obvious attempt to study their value in their education research, of course fall back on what they feel they can do: teach processes, skills, methods, rubrics, parameters, and techniques of literacy instruction. Their efforts, wherever they are successful, will be a disaster, in my view, for teachers and students who care about academic writing and about history and literature in the schools.”

What do you think? Is Common Core “how-to ism,” as Fitzhugh claims or does it promote richer curriculum, as its advocates claim?

Categories Common Core

EduShyster Offers Free Career Advice for Those Who Want an Excellent Job

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2013 //
2

EduShyster offers free career advice to those who worry about being unprepared for the new economy or being fired.

She takes her cues from the New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. The first tip is to make a point of rooming with Tom’s daughter at Harvard.

The second tip is to learn who Kanye West is and start tweeting about him.

Her other tips are equally valuable. You should not miss this one.

Categories Economy, Humor

Mark NAISON on the New BTA: Yes, You Too Can Join

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2013 //
4

Several people wrote to say that membership in the highly distinguished Badass Teachers Association was closed, that they applied and were turned down. This seemed unlikely to me, given the group’s desire to spread, so I contacted its founder Mark NAISON and asked him if there was a glitch. I also asked him if he could create a website for those who are not on Facebook. Here is his response (for some reason, whenever I write Mark’s last name on my iPad, it always turns into caps):

Hi Diane!

We now have six administrators on the site so anyone who applies gets In quickly!

As to how to create a non Facebook option for the group, I will have to discuss that with the five people who have been working with me in this, who are much higher tech then I am!

This whole explosion of interest caught me totally by surprise! I hav e started several Facebook pages and I would have never predicted tha this is the one that would go viral and capture so many people’s imaginations

Now people are talking about just showing up in Washington on Labor Day and surrounding Congress with teachers parents and students

Given what has happened in the last few days, I would not write this off as impossible!!

Best, Mark

Mark D Naison
Professor of African American Studies and History
Fordham University
“If you Want to Save America’s Public Schools: Replace Secretary of Education Arne Duncan With a Lifetime Educator.” http://dumpduncan.org/

Categories Support for public schools, Teachers and Teaching

Ohio Charters Spend More on Administration than Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2013 //
25

One of the claims of charter advocates is that could supply better education for less money.

These claims have not panned out. When charters enroll the same kids, they usually get the same results. Charters range in quality across a wide span, and some achieve “success” by high rates of attrition or excluding difficult kids.

Now we know that charters don’t save money either. Nor do they direct more resources to the classroom.

The latest report from Innovation Ohio shows that charters in that state have higher administrative costs by far than public schools. The weaker the charter, the more it lends on administration.

Categories Charter Schools, Ohio

Michael Feuer: The Flaws of the NCTQ Report

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2013 //
13

Some in the mainstream media have given credence to the report of the National Council on Teacher Quality about teacher preparation. They should have talked to some of the institutions that were graded before venturing an opinion.

In this post, Dean Michael Feuer of the George Washington University School of Education explains how far wrong the report was about his school, its programs, and its students.

Categories National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), Teachers and Teaching

Robert Skeels Attends a pRev Meet and Greet

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2013 //
12

Robert Skeels attended a “meet and greet” sponsored by pRev (the organization formerly known as Parent Revolution). Read what he learned as he socialized with those who are prepared to close down 50 public schools in Los Angeles. Why? Well, firing people makes better schools. Or does it?

Categories Los Angeles, Parent trigger
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