Students in Los Angeles and Indiana wasted no time in cracking the security codes on their iPads and going to sites that were supposedly off-limits, like games, Facebook, and other social media.
Who says our students are not smart?
Archives for the month of: September, 2013
At a meeting of the Montclair, New Jersey, school board, the union president was speaking and was cut off. The teachers in the audience were outraged. So were sympathetic members of the public. Watch the video.
A reader writes and offers this clarification. It still remains the case that nothing mandated by the test-obsessed DOE is based on research or evidence:
It’s not the What Works Clearinghouse that has been taken down. It’s still up and running: http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/
WWC does the evaluations–that’s what has been controversial because of the very, very narrow focus of their evaluation efforts.
It’s the research-to-practice website called” Doing What Works” that is no longer being supported. That was the web site that had more teacher-friendly materials and strategies. Frankly, I liked that web site and used to use it all the time for their literacy information to share with pre-service teachers. I’m quite sad that the piece that was actually useful to teachers is no longer being supported. DWW had been contracted out to AIR and WestEd — not sure if they just lost the contract, or if this is a result of the sequestration, or what. And I’m also not sure why they thought the materials need to be more “user friendly.” Some of the existing free materials are still available in the WestEd bookstore.
This was the email I had received:
From: “U.S. Department of Education”
Subject: Update on the Doing What Works Website
Date: September 20, 2013 8:29:36 PM EDT
Dear subscriber:
The U.S. Department of Education has suspended operation of the Doing What Works website. We sincerely regret this unfortunate event. You can still acquire many DWW media and materials through other channels. Please email dww@wested.org for specific instructions on how you can gain access to DWW media and materials.
Sincerely,
The DWW Team
Diane, perhaps you should post a clarification of this?
Thanks to Robert Shepherd for sharing this great quote:
“I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.”
—— Albert Einstein, Saturday Evening Post interview, 10/26/1929″
The author of this email requested anonymity, for obvious reasons.
I started reading your blog recently and it has been a lifesaver. I was a participant in the (as I learned) corporate-reform-driven Teaching Fellows program in XXXXX, and I was cut at the end of the their pre-service training.
This was, as it turned out, a good thing, since I wasn’t ready to teach (nor was anyone in the program, if the current experiences of my friends who continued in the program count for anything); I was unwilling to continue using the required behaviorist, authoritarian classroom management methods and scripted lesson plans; and I discovered that the principal that hired me had a policy of hiring only TFA and TNTP participants for the ‘core’ academic subjects.
In the process of making sense of my strange experience, I decided to read Wendy Kopp’s original thesis on her idea for a ‘Teacher Corps.’ In some ways, the original idea is very different from what it is today — she envisioned that corps members would only teach in districts experiencing shortages of fully-certified teachers (and only in high schools — there is no mention whatsoever of charter schools).
In other ways, not so different: “Like the Peace Corps did in its early days, the Teacher Corps will create a level of spirit and mystique which would rival the hype that currently lures so many who have undefined career plans into investment banking!”
But what struck me most was the advice given to Wendy Kopp by the president of the NEA, to whom she wrote about her idea of a teacher corps: “We feel strongly that the core of this Nation’s commitment to education must flow from fully prepared, career focused, and professionally oriented persons. Even a suggestion that acceptable levels of expertise could develop in short termers simply doesn’t mesh with what those of us in the business know it takes to do the job–much less with what our young people need and deserve….We certainly wish you the very best with your idea and hope you choose to devote your energies to a career in teaching. There are few more satisfying or challenging professions you could elect.”
Thanks again for your blog, and I hope I will be able to write to you in the not-so-distant future that I am teaching math, fully certified through a real teacher preparation program.
This is truly astonishing news.
Valerie Strauss reports today that the U.S. Department of Education sent out an email announcing the suspension of the “What Works Clearinghouse,” a site where the Department publishes reports about research and shows “what works.”
Valerie Strauss notes: “I won’t mention the irony in the fact that department spends millions on school reform that has no proven record of success but ran out of cash for its Doing What Works website.”
Ironic, indeed, because almost everything the Department supports as part of its “Race to the Top” has no research to support it. The Department’s insistence that teachers should be evaluated, to a significant degree, by the test scores of their students is not supported by research. The Department’s support for performance pay, based on test scores, is contradicted by decades of research. The Department’s insistence that schools of education be graded by the test scores of the students taught by their graduates has no support in research. The Department’s lavishing of millions of dollars on charter schools has mixed support, at best, in research; judging by the results from Ohio, the Department should stop the proliferation of charter schools. The Department’s quiet acquiescence to the proliferation of vouchers has no support in evaluations or research. The Department’s silence in response to budget cuts to essential services has no basis in research. The Department’s promotion of standardized testing in the early grades and even pre-kindergarten has no basis in research. The Department has placed no priority on reducing class size, even though the “What Works Clearinghouse” has found that smaller classes benefit high-needs students.
Is it any wonder that the Department decided it could no longer afford to keep open a website that shows no support for its own misguided policies?
This poll of DC insiders shows a deep pessimism about the prospects for Common Core and reauthorization of NCLB.
Most interesting observations:
• “Any bandwidth Congress has seems to be devoted to re‐litigating the health care act.”
• “There’s no sense of compromise and no incentive on either side to try to compromise.”
• “Arne Duncan has so mangled federal education at this point that it’s going to take a new administration and secretary to reframe the debate and offer a path forward.”
The architects of the Common Core standards wanted to rush them into implementation, and Arne Duncan used the federal government’s billions to coerce states to “voluntarily” adopt the standards, if necessary, sight unseen.
Now they are paying the price of their haste.
There is very little buy-in. The Tea Party on one side, and critics of standardization and scripted curricula on the other, are attacking the CCSS.
Several states have announced they will not use the Common Core tests. More will follow.
The latest is Florida, where Governor Rick Scott responded to the furor on the right, by declaring that the state was pulling out of the federally-funded testing.
Meanwhile, experienced educator Joanne Yatvin has an article in Education Week explaining that teachers will have to fix and rework the standards to avoid their design flaws and to make them appropriate for the children in their classes. No one else will, so the teachers must do what they have always done: revise the standards and use what works and drop what doesn’t.
I am not happy with the way that Common Core was developed. Very few people were involved in this effort to develop national standards. Once a document was in hand, the Obama administration made adoption of the standards a condition of eligibility for participation in its $4.35 billion Race to the Top. Since then, adoption of the CCSS has become a condition to receive waivers from Arne Duncan from the nutty demand by NCLB for 100% proficiency by 2014–or else.
The Gates Foundation underwrote their development, their promotion, and almost every aspect of the CCSS. As Mercedes Schneider has documented again and again on her blog, it is hard to find a national organization that has not received millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation to support the standards.
There is now a price being paid in state after state for this top-down, non-democratic creation of “national standards.” The Obama administration aggressively defends them yet insists it had nothing to do with creating them (or imposing them, which strictly speaking is not true).
Since so few people in this vast nation knew much about them, there is a vigorous campaign in opposition to them, based on rumor and half-truth and semi-half truth.
I came out in opposition to them not because I oppose national standards in principle, but because I thought they should be field tested. I still think so. I worked on the development of state standards, and learned that the feedback from teachers was always helpful in making them better. Bringing in the field and listening to their ideas and reactions is a way to improve the standards and also build support for them. Not pretend support, not pretend listening, but real support and listening.
Now we learn from Education Week that major corporations are going all out to promote the standards. Since they have no idea whether the standards will work or not, whether they will narrow or widen the gaps among different groups of students, whether they will do all they promise, what is going on here? Would any one of these major corporations launch a new product nationally without trying it out in a city or state and finding out about how it works in reality?
Until standards have been tried in the classroom, they are only words on paper.
And because the promoters of the standards couldn’t wait to try them out and see how they work, they are now facing a major backlash as state after state withdraws from the testing consortia (funded by the U.S. Department of Education for $350 million).
Because of the U.S. Department of Education’s ham-handed rush to impose these standards while pretending not to; because there was no respect for the democratic process, the Common Core standards may fail. Twenty years from now, they may be a trivia question.
Murkland Elementary School in Lowell, Massachusetts, has seen a remarkable improvement in its test scores. The local newspaper reported the story. Nothing was said about firing the principal, firing the teachers, firing the entire staff. Nothing was said about turning the school over to the state or giving it to private entrepreneurs.
Something else happened. Teamwork, collaboration. What a fresh idea!
A hardworking staff and focus on collaboration lifted the Murkland Elementary School to the highest achievement category measuring Massachusetts schools, from one where it was labeled as underperforming, school officials said Wednesday.
The state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education announced that the Murkland was one of 14 schools statewide to have improved beyond Level 4 status, a designation given to schools that are are “low performing” on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System during a four-year period, without showing signs of substantial improvement.
The Murkland School jumped up to Level 1 based on its students’ 2013 assessment scores.
“The Murkland School has been working on improvement over the last three years or longer,” Superintendent of Schools Jean Franco said. “They built their community to really come together and collaborate, and really make the right instructional moves, looking at what’s been best for children and families.”
The principal of the school revealed the secret of the improvement:
“There are many things that go into the turnaround process,” Murkland Principal Jason DiCarlo said. “But I think ultimately it was really the hard work and the dedication of the staff, who really committed to the process of school improvement and working to implement some of the ideas and strategies that were really going to benefit our students.”
DiCarlo said part of the school’s plan included giving teachers opportunities for high-quality professional development and time to collaborate and work together.
“There were other intricate little things that we’ve done around what’s effective instruction, and effective practices and effective curriculum development,” he said. “But all of that happens when you have the time and you have the culture that’s really committed to working with each other and doing the very challenging and difficult work that’s required.”
Both DiCarlo and Franco said the school’s progress was a team effort among the teachers, district staff, school administrators, the teachers’ union, parents and community members.
Hmmm. Seems very innovative!
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