Archives for the month of: June, 2013
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A Word from the Cripples

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2013 //
16

The state of Pennsylvania, the School Reform Commission, Governor Corbett, and the Legislature have decided to strip bare the publuc schools of Philadelphia. They are doing to these students what they would never do to their own. They are vandals.

This morning, i received this poem written by a student, Siduri Beckmann. Why is Siduri less deserving of a full education than the children of the city and state’s leaders?

“This poem has brought tears to many eyes in Philadelphia in the last twenty-four hours!

“Siduri Beckman is a ninth-grader at Julia R. Masterman School. She is the city of Philadelphia’s first Youth Poet Laureate. She “felt like it was part of my job and my duty as a Masterman student to write a poem protesting the school budget cuts.”

A Word from the Cripples

I’ve got something

to say.

It won’t take long

Just as long as it took you

to snatch everything away

One fourth of the body is

the leg

You have crippled us

Cursing us to hobble

all of our lives.

I cannot run

cross-country

on just

one leg.

Rip song

off of our tongues

to find songs are not Velcro but flesh

Snap the bows of the violins

in case the students could ever get the idea

that music

is alive

Because then you would have blood on your hands.

God forbid.

You see us as a problem

the classic class problem

INNER CITY streaked like mud across our faces

they’re all on the street anyway.

But leeches don’t suck out the disease

just the lifeblood.

I am angry

But I will not stoop

and hurt you

As you have hurt me

Thrusting fear

into our hearts

Why make us feel

so small

helpless

Forgotten by the people

whose duty it is to remember

Turn your back on your city

that chose not to choose

you

Because they feared

and now do all fears dawn true.

Bust the beehive

We will come out

In droves of wasps

We sting and live

to sting again

We will show ourselves to be

as formidable a foe

as all of those frackers

who you refuse to tax.

But you have also forgot

all of those ink marks slashed

with no faces or hopes or dreams or blood or flesh

Dismiss us

We cannot vote.

But in this country

we can speak.

Categories Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Philadelphia, Stand for Children, Students

Happy Birthday, EduShyster! One Year in Pursuit of Excellence

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2013 //
3

In this post marking the one-year anniversary of her blog, EduShyster interviews herself.

She answers such pressing questions as:

Do you really consume wine by the box?

Will the education reform movement survive the coming Zombie apocalypse? (I promise you will love this one, especially the illustration.)

If you were an education reform group, which one would you be? (Love the photo.)

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Humor, Teach for America TFA

Hey, Kids! $100 If You Enroll in This Charter School

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2013 //
6

David Safier writes here about a charter school in Arizona that offers students $100 to sign up. Arizona was once known as the Wild West of charter schools, but now other states are catching up as charter operators join the Gold Rush.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry

The Gates Foundation’s Strangest Grant

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2013 //
37

The Gates Foundation gave $10 million to the Discovery Institute.

This is a conservative public policy institute that promotes “intelligent design” and is skeptical of evolutionary theory.

It was founded by Bruce Chapman, an official in the Reagan administration.

The purpose of the grant is for research, advocacy, and transportation.

Presumably this mean the Gates Foundation wanted the Discovery Institute to do research about and advocacy for intelligent design. Why they needed so much money for transportation is not all that clear.

If these are concerns of the Gates Foundation, why didn’t they give the money to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Research Council, or some other august scientific group?

I don’t understand the Gates Foundation.

Categories Curriculum, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Crazy Crawfish Tells All: How He Became an Anti-Reformer

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2013 //
4

In this blog post, Crazy Crawfish reveals his true identity.

He was working inside the Louisiana Department of Education when Bobby Jindal took control.

The story he tells is alarming and shocking.

It all started with Katrina. That event created a massive shock and provided an opening for Jindal: “Jindal immediately started privatizing and tormenting state employees with gleeful abandon, while simultaneously hiring unqualified cronies to run all aspects of state government . . . into the ground.”

What he describes is a calculated effort to distort the facts about the state of education in Louisiana and to shower favoritism and funding on certain vendors.

From what he saw, “reform” meant censorship, cronyism, and corruption. He became an “anti-reformer.”

He quit.

You should read his story.

It is important.

Categories Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana

Lucy Calkins Gathers Feedback on Pearson Exams

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2013 //
31

Students in New York recently completed a battery of tests aligned with the Common Core and developed by Pearson.

The tests remain secret though some bootleg copies have circulated. They should be released for public review.

Although educators were not allowed to disclose the test questions, Lucy Calkins of Teachers College created a website where educators could register comments about the tests. She received over 1,000 comments.

Some of them:

Many teachers complained about the emphasis on meta cognitive skills, as opposed to understanding the meaning of the text.

Another big complaint was timing. Many good students couldn’t finish their answers and ended up frustrated and defeated.

This is quite a treasure trove, written by teachers, about the tests that will be consequential for their students and their careers.

Categories Common Core, Pearson, Testing

Bridgeport Parent: Public School Leaders Should Support Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2013 //
8

This Bridgeport parent activist has an old-fashioned idea. She believes that those who are paid to run public schools should support them. The current superintendent of schools in that Connecticut city is Paul Vallas. She reviews his record in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans, where he closed many public schools and opened large numbers of privately managed charters.

The same might be said of many other superintendents today, who see their job as advancing private control of public assets.

Categories Charter Schools, Connecticut

New York’s Evaluation Nightmare

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2013 //
25

Arthur Goldstein, aka Néw York Educator, describes the vain and convoluted effort to create a teacher evaluation system in Néw York. A pinch of this, a heavy dose of testing, and the computer will tell us which teachers are great and which are the stinkers.

Categories New York, Teacher Evaluations

Writing for the Common Core Tests

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2013 //
34

Vicki Cobb, an award-winning author of more than 90 children’s books about science, recently received a request from a test publisher to write for the new Common Core assessments. However, when she saw the guidelines, she wondered if she could do it. Will her voice disappear? Will she be compelled to write the same pap that deadens textbooks? Stay tuned.

Categories Common Core, Testing

Pennsylvania: Now We Know the Truth About Cyber Charters

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2013 //
25

Rhonda Brownstein, the executive director of Pennsylvania’s Education Law Center, says that it is time to stop trusting the claims of cyber charter promoters. For years, they have promised that students would get “innovative” education and that wondrous things would happen when virtual charters became reality, but Pennsylvania now knows that none of that turned out to be true.

Pennsylvania has allowed unchecked growth of cyber charters. They have drained funding away from public schools while providing a low-quality of education.

She writes:

“Attorneys at ELC have heard from the families of many students attending cyber charter schools. Here’s what those families have reported: Students spending countless hours behind computer screens without any required human interaction; students with disabilities who are not receiving any appropriate academic instruction; and students who have been pushed into computer-based programs as a result of behavioral incidents.”

And she adds:

“Cyber charter supporters tout policy recommendations that focus on a theoretical version of the future without addressing the ill effects of Pennsylvania’s 13-year embrace of cyber charter schools. Some of those supporters go so far as to say that Pennsylvania is in jeopardy of falling behind other states in an imagined race to expand the number of cyber charter schools. But the truth is that, despite mounting evidence of the academic failure of these schools, Pennsylvania has blindly led the full-time cyber schooling movement for years. In fact, during the 2011-2012 school year Pennsylvania accounted for 16 percent of all students enrolled in full-time cyber schools in the entire country.”

“Pennsylvania has been experimenting with students in cyber charter schools under the guise of “innovation” for more than a decade. We no longer need to hypothesize about the results. Cyber charters do not work for the majority of the students they enroll.”

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, On-Line Education, Pennsylvania
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