Archives for the month of: August, 2013
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Moral Monday: The North Carolina Protest Movement Spreads

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2013 //
5

The message from North Carolina: We can defeat the power if we organize and stand together. The Moral Monday idea started in North Carolina but it is spreading:

 

It’s heartening to see that word of North Carolina’s Moral Monday events are inspiring others, just as we have been inspired by the actions occurring in other states across this nation. 
 
http://www.carolinamercury.com/2013/08/thousands-attend-mountain-moral-monday-protests-spread-to-chicago-and-oakland/
 
 
As you’ve said,
WE ARE MANY. THERE IS POWER IN OUR NUMBERS. TOGETHER, WE WILL SAVE OUR SCHOOLS.
 
We’re on a roll.
 
Patty
 
Patty Williams
Communications Director
 
Great Schools in Wake:   greatschoolsinwake.org / Facebook / Twitter
Public Schools First NC: publicschoolsfirstnc.org / Facebook / Twitter
Categories California, Chicago, North Carolina

Jeff Bezos: Another Billionaire for Privatization of Public Education

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2013 //
28

Last fall, Bill Gates collected $10 million from his friends to push through approval of a referendum to permit privately managed charter schools in Washington State, which voters had turned down three times previously. Among the friends of Bill Gates who helped make charters possible was the Bezos family, the parents of Jeff Bezos.

Jeff Bezos is the founder of amazon.com. He is a billionaire many times over, one of the richest men on the planet.

Yesterday he bought the Washington Post.

An article in the Washington Post today describes his interest in education.

It says:

“Like Washington Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham, Bezos has shown support for efforts to change education policy, including the creation and expansion of public charter schools.

The Bezos Family Foundation — whose board includes Bezos, his parents and other family members — gave more than $11 million in 2011 to an array of national organizations such as Teach for America, Stand for Children and the KIPP Foundation, according to tax filings. The foundation also gave grants to scores of individual schools around the country as well as several charter school chains, including Uncommon Schools, which operates schools in New York and Massachusetts.

Bezos’s parents, Mike and Jackie, were active in a fierce battle last year to allow the creation of public charter schools in Washington state. Washington had been one of a handful of states that did not permit charters, which are publicly funded schools that are privately run and largely without unions. Teachers unions opposed the ballot measure, which narrowly passed with financial backing from Mike and Jackie Bezos as well as Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Netflix founder Reed Hastings.”

In short, Bezos is no friend of public education.

 

Categories Charter Schools, Teach for America TFA, Unions

Two Peas in a Pod: Tony Bennett and John White

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2013 //
8

John White of Louisiana and Tony Bennett of Indiana and (briefly) of Florida have much in common, writes Mercedes Schneider. Both are (or were) part of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change. Both use data to create narratives. Bennett is gone. White is not.

Categories Chiefs for Change, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana

Intended or Unintended Consequence of “Reform”?

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2013 //
80

A reader sees how “reforms” make public schools undesirable. Is this their purpose?

He writes:

“When you go to a kindergarten meeting (in the wealthy suburbs), and the teachers are telling all the parents, “common core this and common core that/test and test”, I can’t really blame parents for opting out of the entire public school system. That is the danger I see. The wealthier suburban parents will get fed up with all this testing crap, and just take their kids to private schools who still teach students in a more traditional way and don’t try to label their kids as failing. In this way, the common core may succeed. Let’s be honest here. If you had school age kids would you want them going to public school the way it is becoming? Part of me wants a voucher, so I can send my kids to a private school (and I am a public school teacher). I don’t want my kids taking all of these bubble tests, and I will not let my kids become teachers in this crazy country.”

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Testing

What is the Goal of Common Core Testing?

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2013 //
81

For months, school officials in many states have warned parents to expect proficiency rates on Common Core-aligned tests to plummet.

They have warned that the proportion of students rated proficient was likely to drop by as much as 30%.

When this happens, it will make public education in America look just as bad as the corporate reformers have been claiming.

When New York administered the first Common Core tests last spring, a copy of one fifth grade test was leaked to a Daily News reporter. She sent it to me and I studied it and concluded that the test questions were similar in difficulty to what was typically seen on an eighth grade NAEP test. I went to the NAEP website, looked at the released items and questions, and ranked the fifth grade test as “difficult” for an eighth grader.

Here is a report that I just received from the testing coordinator of a high-performing school in one of the best districts in New York:

“Just to let you know that because I am my school’s test coordinator I just looked at the scores for the ELA.  We are a “high achieving” school.  Last year only 5 students in grades 3, 4 and 5 got a level 1.  Now it is 32. Approximately 40% of our students scored levels 3 and 4 this year down from about 80% last year.  What does this mean?  Nothing because a test that measures skills that could not possibly be taught and is developmentally too hard is INVALID.”

So why the rush to make the tests so hard that more students will fail?

Rick Hess wrote last fall that many of the “reformers” believe that the terrible results (eagerly anticipated by them) will cause suburban parents to demand “reforms” and an escape from their neighborhood schools.

I can’t help but recall that David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core standards, was the treasurer of the board of Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst in its first year. If the Common Core tests produce a collapse of proficiency rates, then it makes Rhee and her attacks on public schools look good. Will everyone run for the exits and demand charters and vouchers?

Sick thought, but inescapable.

 

Categories Coleman, David, Common Core, NAEP, Rhee, Michelle, StudentsFirst, Testing

Utah Legislator: End Compulsory Education

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2013 //
68

State Senator Aaron Osmond of Utah has called for an end to compulsory education.

Osmond says that parents are expecting too much of the schools. He believes that education should be a choice, not a mandate.

This is evidence that education “reform” is hurtling backwards in time, taking us to an era when there was no compulsory education, when kids could be kicked out of school for low test scores or bad attitudes, when students were expected to obey and sit in silence.

Yes, we will soon have fully restored 19th century educational methods, all in the guise of “reform.”

Categories Education Reform

EduShyster: Training Minority Youngsters for the McJobs of the Future

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2013 //
4

EduShyster is excited to see that Morgan Spurlock has discovered charter schools, which are training minority students to be busy every minute every day. Spurlock has a CNN program called “The Inside Man” where he sees how things really work.

When Spurlock decided to find out why our schools are “failing,” This is what he did:

“The Inside Man was off on a mission. First stop: Finland, where Spurlock joined a long and growing list of American visitors who descend on that country intent on learning nothing. Then it was time to find a school that takes every single one of the elements of the Finnish success story and either ignores them completely or does the precise opposite of what the Finns do. Welcome to Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School, where there is no magical 100% solution but rather one hundred, individual 1% solutions. Let’s take a look, shall we?”

What are the secrets of this charter?

“Williamsburg Prep’s “immersion approach” relies on key special sauce ingredients like tracking the speaker plus some nifty new flavors, including lots of hand clapping and snapping. Most importantly though, neither these students, nor their hands, are ever idle. And that’s key because it is a well known historical fact that idle hands do the Devil’s work. Also, in the jobs of the future, there will not be much downtime, if you know what I mean. In other words, Williamsburg Prep looks a lot like a school in Finland, if Finland was actually called SLANTland and instead of educating students, the Finnish teachers were training seals.”

To learn more about this miraculous school, read on.

Categories Charter Schools, Economy, Education Industry

Gary Rubinstein Deconstructs the Latest “Miracle” in Louisiana

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2013 //
11

Gary Rubinstein was intrigued to read a tweet by John White of Louisiana boasting about the dramatic improvements in education.

Gary decided to look more closely at the data. Not surprisingly, he found that White was playing games with numbers, which seems to be a habit in Brooklyn schools.

Gary discovered this significant fact; “In the Times-Picayune article they indicated “the percentage of students passing the exam dropped from 44 percent to 33 percent: 3,501 of the 10,529 test-takers.” So in 2012, 41% (the article had this number wrong) of students who took at least one AP test passed at least one, while in 2013 this number dropped to 33%. So they are celebrating, basically, that 4,000 new students TOOK the AP. Of those 4,000 students, only 19% passed an AP.”

So White was celebrating the number of students who took the AP, not the proportion who passed.

But wait: the lowest proportion of students who took and passed the exam was in the Recovery School District. Not quite 6% in that much-celebrated state-run district managed to pass. At SCI Academy, and the top charter school in the RSD had only 11% of its students earn a 3 or better on the AP.

So much for the New Orleans “miracle.”

If you want to read the Louisiana take on this shape-shifting scandal, read Crazy Crawfish here.

Categories Louisiana, New Orleans

EduShyster: Training Minority Students for the McJobs of the Future: LINK added!

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2013 //
10

EduShyster is excited to see that Morgan Spurlock has discovered charter schools, which are training minority students to be busy every minute every day. Spurlock has a CNN program called “The Inside Man” where he sees how things really work.

When Spurlock decided to find out why our schools are “failing,” This is what he did:

“The Inside Man was off on a mission. First stop: Finland, where Spurlock joined a long and growing list of American visitors who descend on that country intent on learning nothing. Then it was time to find a school that takes every single one of the elements of the Finnish success story and either ignores them completely or does the precise opposite of what the Finns do. Welcome to Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School, where there is no magical 100% solution but rather one hundred, individual 1% solutions. Let’s take a look, shall we?”

What are the secrets of this charter?

“Williamsburg Prep’s “immersion approach” relies on key special sauce ingredients like tracking the speaker plus some nifty new flavors, including lots of hand clapping and snapping. Most importantly though, neither these students, nor their hands, are ever idle. And that’s key because it is a well known historical fact that idle hands do the Devil’s work. Also, in the jobs of the future, there will not be much downtime, if you know what I mean. In other words, Williamsburg Prep looks a lot like a school in Finland, if Finland was actually called SLANTland and instead of educating students, the Finnish teachers were training seals.”

To learn more about this miraculous school, read on.

Categories Charter Schools

Breaking News: Philly May Sue Banks for Fraud Losses

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2013 //
11

Investigative journalist Daniel Denvir reports that the Philadelphia school district may sue banks and Wall Street firms that sold defective financial instruments to the school district, causing massive losses.

Denvir writes:

“Philadelphia and other cities have filed similar lawsuits, contending that such “interest-rate swaps” — billed as a protection against rising borrowing costs — were tilted in banks’ favor through the fraudulent rigging of the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor.

“The School District took out swaps with Wachovia (purchased by Wells Fargo in 2008), Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. But a lawsuit could name more banks as defendants. Philadelphia’s lawsuit names banks that were direct counterparties and also those that are accused of rigging Libor, including Citi, JPMorgan, RBC, Bank of America, Barclays, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, RBS and UBS.”

Categories Budget Cuts, Philadelphia
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