Two Peas in a Pod: Tony Bennett and John White

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1. Alabama teacher says:

   August 5, 2013 at 11:30 pm

   The article needs to be seen by as many people as possible, especially news investigators. When the truth is exposed to everyone, maybe White will be forced to resign as did Bennett, as he well should. Every reformer caught not telling the truth should be forced out. By the way, everyone needs to go to the previous posting from tonight and sigh the petition have Michelle Rhee investigated.

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   • twinkie1cat says:

     August 6, 2013 at 12:29 am

     Trouble is, the local media is not picking it up and running with it! There has been no big expose’ with the exception of one that outed a charter way up in North Louisiana that had no teachers or classrooms. A little bitty paper, the Monroe News Star outed them. But as far as anything heavy in the big papers, nothing notable in Town Talk (Alexandria and noticeably conservative) or the Advocate (Baton Rouge with coverage in New Orleans) Times/Picayune (New Orleans) has reduced itself to 3 days per week and an online presence. The only place you hear much at all is in Louisiana Voice, which is strictly online.

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     • Alabama teacher says:

       August 6, 2013 at 3:16 pm

       My city’s newspaper was one of several newspapers that went to a 3 days a week print version along with Times/Picayune. It’s pathetic, now. That is part of how I started doing more research online.

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   • M.Schneider says:

     August 6, 2013 at 2:13 pm

     One of my colleagues tweeted the post to the all Louisiana Legislature Education Committee members.

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     • Robert D. Shepherd says:

       August 7, 2013 at 1:23 am

       awesome

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2. twinkie1cat says:

   August 6, 2013 at 12:24 am

   The scores the teachers got showed the major flaw in Compass system. Many of the teachers who got the bad scores were Teachers of the Gifted. Their students were already achieving as highly as the tests were able to measure so they could not show “improvement”. They were already above grade level. Of course when the flaw came to light John White had to do something. Yes, it was very political.

   But if the test is wrong, which it is, who is going to put White’s feet to the fire. Except for two members, Jindal either appointed the members of BESE or supported and funded their political campaigns. They have been paid to go along with whatever Jindal and White want. And if White did resign, there is no reason to believe the next State Superintendent would not be just as bad.

   Louisiana is a mess in so many ways. Budget cuts, aid to disabled people vetoed, Medicaid, schools, even the sheriff in East Baton Rouge Parish who used a law that was declared unconstitutional 10 years ago being used to entrap gay men in a park by undercover agents offering free sex. And neither the state legislators nor the EBR Parish Council will stand up to the Louisiana Family Forum, a hate group that tried to bar gay children from the charter schools and prevented an anti-bullying law to protect them from being passed. And the schools that have been taken over by the state, the Recovery District Schools, the ones White came from have the lowest test scores in Louisiana, below even the most chronic underachievers.

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   • Herb B says:

     August 6, 2013 at 7:12 am

     I asked White specifically about the apparent bias. In his reply, he claimed that there was no bias. The department of education gave teachers multiple assurances in advance that they had the system properly tweaked and that this specific situation would not be a problem. Without indication of bias, it makes John White’s action even more unjustified, as he does not even claim that it fixes a problem.

     The Dept of Education explained that they put a cap on high performing student’s predicted scores, leaving sufficient room for growth. This shows that they examined the system specifically for this problem and decided that the system was fair to these teachers.

     You might think that White was surprised by the results leading to to action. But that is not the case.

     The 2013 Compass Report contained language indicating that this exact situation had been studied and that these results were to be expected.

     The system worked as designed and expected, but after the results were in, White singled out these teachers for special treatment. What galls me is that he doesn’t offer the justification of bias. White’s decision is completely arbitrary. His delay of announcing this special exemption until the release of the scores, in my opinion, was an end run around proper BESE oversight. He bowed to apparent political pressure and needed to avoid public review of why he wanted this special treatment.

     I would like to see John White specify the law or BESE rule that gave him the personal authority to effectively invalidate these results.

     For the record, I am happy for these teachers being exempted from the punitive aspects of our flawed VAM system. I would like to see ALL of the results thrown out, not just these, and White’s end run around BESE should be investigated.

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3. jean sanders says:

   August 6, 2013 at 5:09 am

   Education Next has an article by M. Podgursky (U. Missouri) on teacher and administrator pensions. this is what I put on the comments to the article.

   quote from Podgursky: “This is unfortunate given the fact that the costs of current pension plans are a huge source of fiscal stress in many states, and that a more modern, mobile, and cheaper retirement benefit plan could better help public schools compete for academically talented young (and mobile) college graduates. School reformers need to understand that on the issue of pension reform, labor and management are likely to be on the same side of the bargaining table.”
   —————————-
   This article is well written. I have a few comments based on what has happened in Chicago, in Detroit and North Carolina. I have placed those comments elsewhere so I won’t repeat them here. I question if you need to use the word “cheaper” because that is the word that the headlines for UPI will grab? When they grab a headline they don’t explain as well as M. Podgursky explains and they send out “Teacher are Pricey”. Right now the intervention specialists in New York haven’t been paid since April because “people cost too much” and we need to find “cheaper systems” and technology will replace all the books and teachers and these are out and out lies and the corporations are selling snake oil to the public.

   I don’t want anyone to distort what M. Podgursky is writing by changing headlines or grabbing words like “cheap” out of context. Thank you for the submission of this article. There is a lot of hubris around where the business managers in colleges tell the professors “you just don’t know anything about math and economics” and that is not true. I majored in math one year in college and my brother-in-law was a finance general who explained a lot to me at the breakfast table with my neices and nephews and I take offense when the UPI headlines distort what Education Next puts out.

   It would also be useful if this article had the source reference listed that I was able to dig out from U. Missouri. Ralph Nader is the only one I have seen who writes about the professors in academia and how they are treated by the business office. These are different silos in the bureaucracy and the communication between silos is horrendous. Policy people don’t want to learn anything from Michael Katz, Henry Levin, Michael Scriven, or J. Guthrie , or the new text “how not to make mistakes”….. of “flaps” or egregious policies that affect students and teachers.

   quote: This is unfortunate given the fact that the costs of current pension plans are a huge source of fiscal stress in many states, and that a more modern, mobile, and “cheaper ”

   This is where our value differences would probably be extreme. There are so many “voodoo economic” plans, “market” bubbles (Savings and Loan thanks to N. Bush), technology bubbles, housing bubbles that the average taxpayer is not able to trust any of the proposals. I call the IN /FL debacle “psychometric fudge.” The other value differences we have are important because the terms used are “mobile” (whereas I think schools need more stable; ask a principal if 50% of the staff turns over in a year if “mobility ” is good. Churning staff by firing 10% each year is not a workable remedy) ; or homeless that means “more mobile”. Or, in Boston, the turnover rate in technology was 18 months for an employee — I haven’t checked recently but I don’t think that is reasonable for a school;. Schools don’t need intentional chaos they need more stability. (I am more traditionally conservative and I am a frugal householder so to attack me the E.N. people call me “status quo”. I had a girl scout leader when I was 14 who watched McCARTHY hearings every day and she drilled Ayn Rand into our heads. As a result, I became fiercely independent. ) This is what happens when you beat up on people so much.
   j
   During the reign of King Romney, the local schools were placed under more stress (muicipal overburden) because he cut state funding and more had to be absorbed locally. The poorer districts (with their local tax base) have to tax them selves more substantially than the more affluent suburbs. My former supervisor was President of the Massachusetts Association of School Business Officials and he wrote his doctoral dissertation on that at BU. The formulas for funding are different in each state (J. Guthrie taught me that) and they are not equitable for the 350 school districts that operate and MA has no county system. I am not the least ashamed of the improvements that have been made in MA schools in the last 40 years and I don’t want Arne Duncan and Jeb Bush to take us backwards . IN/FL fiasco of Commissioners does not help the overall picture and because the proponents of corporate technology are so loud and they have so much money they push the parents and teachers to the side. Like Freedom Works telling us they are “grass roots” when it is a lie.

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