Archives for the month of: November, 2013
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My Health: Good News!

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2013 //
100

As readers know, I suddenly developed blood clots in my legs a week ago and was hospitalized.

This was not the first time this happened; that was in 1998, when I not only had blood clots (deep vein thrombosis (DVT), but pulmonary embolism (PE), which is potentially fatal, as it means the clots detached and flood your lungs).

This time, thank goodness, I recognized the DVT before it turned into a PE and went right to the emergency room of the nearest hospital (not the one that treated me in 1998, which has fallen under the budget axe).

When I got home after two days of treatment, I began a battery of tests at Mount Sinai Hospital, which is one of the best in the nation. The vascular surgeon did a scan and found I had clots in both legs, not just one. When I took an echo-cardiogram, the cardiologist told me that I had a leaky heart valve and might require heart surgery. That really scared me. At that point, I canceled all my travel for the rest of December. I had really overdone it.

Today, I had a meeting with a hematologist (blood expert) and had a CT scan of my entire vascular system. The doctors conferred and decided that I do not need heart surgery. That I should rest up for a few weeks. That I should not pretend I am half my age. But that after mid-January, I could return to normal activities, but not so frenetic as in the past.

So, I will be in Chicago on January 11 to speak to the Modern Language Association at its annual convention on the subject of the Common Core. Originally, I was scheduled to debate David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core, but he said he had to attend a board meeting in California and withdrew.

So, thank you for your many good wishes and prayers and even chicken soup (truly!). Your support meant a lot to me and kept my morale high.

I am not going away. I am in it with you. For the kids. For our society. For a better education for all.

Categories Education Reform

Teachers: Please Submit Your Ideas for the Laura and John Arnold Foundation

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2013 //
30

Earlier today, I wrote a sincere apology to John Arnold for having overstated the amount of money he was paid when he left Enron (before its collapse). He left with $4 million, then created a hedge fund and accumulated a fortune in excess of $3 billion. As EduShyster pointed out, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation has supported charter schools, Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst, and Teach for America.

A reader on the blog has some different ideas for the Arnold Foundation:

Mr. Arnold, how about using your wealth to endow a struggling school with a state of the art library and technology resource center, a parenting center, a health and social services clinic, a day care center, science labs, a theater, music facility and art gallery? Provide funds for class trips! Create a community garden at the school and give classes on healthy nutrition and eating habits! Reinvest in industrial arts and vocational training! Then sit back and watch these kids thrive. Twelve years of corporate education reform have failed. Put your money to better use.

Teachers: You know your students. What would you advise the Arnold Foundation to support that would improve student success in school and in life? Share your good ideas based on your experience.

Categories Education Reform

UPDATE: Colorado Dumps inBloom

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2013 //
23

Colorado has severed its ties with inBloom, the data storage project financed by the Gates and Carnegie Corporation, which intended to aggregate 400 data points on every student, including confidential information, and store it on a “cloud” managed by amazon.com. Parents are fearful that the data cloud may be hacked and that the ultimate purpose of the data warehouse is to use their children’s information for marketing purposes.

A reader sent this message:

“I was fortunate to be with a large group of parents united against inBloom and Common Core yesterday, when the CDE announced to us that they have severed ties with inBloom statewide! Please spread the word that Colorado will “Bloom no more”! Cheri Kiesecker CoreConcerns.weebly.com”

Here is further confirmation.

Categories Privacy and Privacy Rights

An Apology to John Arnold

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2013 //
26

On October 10, I posted a column about John Arnold, a billionaire who supports charter schools, TFA, and similar projects. I noted that he was giving $10 million to keep Headstart centers open during the government shutdown. In that column, I quoted investigative journalist David Sirota, who said that Arnold was trying to buy good will to divert attention from his efforts to cut the pensions of retirees (aka, pension reform).

A lawyer contacted me on behalf of Mr. Arnold and asked me to correct factual inaccuracies in that post. Arnold did not leave Enron with $3 billion. He left before the firm collapsed with $8 million, which a judge later reduced to $4 million. According to his lawyer, he made $3 billion as a hedge fund investor after he left Enron.

So, I apologize for saying that Arnold left Enron with $3 billion and that he “fleeced” Enron investors. He did not.

We disagree about education reform and pension reform.

I always strive for accuracy and am quite willing to correct any errors I have made.

I am delighted to learn that John Arnold reads my blog and hope that he will continue to do so.

Categories Education Reform, Pensions

A Wonderful Review of “Reign of Error”

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2013 //
9

This is one of the best reviews of “Reign of Error” that I have read. Because it was written as an editorial, it didn’t go into close detail, as others have, but it went right to the point:

 

What she claims is that many tried-and-true practices work; many new-fangled innovations now favored by politicians and powerful interest groups do not. Small class sizes demonstrably improve achievement, for instance; merit pay and charter schools motivated by profit do not. In this context, she has high praise for Vermont, calling it the “best education state in the nation” because of its commitment to small neighborhood schools governed by local communities. Other states have been more easily swayed by the promise of charters and by federal money that encourages competition among schools.

But of all the points Ravitch makes, we find most compelling her assertion that corporate money and power threaten the integrity and possibly the very existence of public education. Public schools uphold collective values, break down racial and religious barriers, and are integral to the concept of citizenship. Without them, democracy would be jeopardized. Local communities, not hedge fund managers and entrepreneurs, must remain financially and socially invested in public education. That’s a back-to-basics lesson not to be forgotten.

 

 

 

Categories Education Reform

John Thompson: In Education, You Get What You Pay For

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2013 //
4

Historian-teacher John Thompson, one of our wisest education writers, http://paulgoodenough.com/principal/?p=1331 on the blog of Rob Miller, the hero principal of Jenks Middle School.

He disaggregates the international test scores that politicians and pundits use to excoriate American education. On the whole, our scores are very impressive, he says, except for the states that do not fund education adequately. This idea might once have been considered common sense. But our policymakers unfortunately believe in faith and miracles, which leads them to discount common sense.

Categories Education Reform

Fred Smith: The Errors of State Testing in New York

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2013 //
16

Fred Smith is an experienced testing expert who now advises a group called “Change the Stakes,” in opposing high-stakes testing. He was invited to testify before a committee of the New York State Senate about the woeful recent history of state testing. The scores went up, up, up until 2010, when the state admitted that the previous dramatic gains were illusory, a consequence of artful adjustments of the “cut score” (passing rate). Then the scores began to rise again, until this past year’s Common Core tests, when the state scores fell deep into the basement, and three quarters of the state’s children were marked as failures.

As Smith quite clearly describes, testing has become a political game that hurts children.

Please read through his testimony, linked at the bottom of the page.

He wrote this to me:

This is my statement to the NYS Senate Education Hearing on October 29th –an umbrella for testimony concerning common core, its assessment and how to protect data privacy from data piracy. It includes data and findings that I have developed since 2006 pertinent to the New York State Testing Program that expose the 2013 core-aligned ELA and math tests analytically, as failed unreliable instruments incapable of serving as a baseline or foundation. It raises issues about the efficacy and ethics of stand-alone field testing procedures which SED and Pearson will continue to follow until they are stopped.
 
It appeared on Senator John Flanagan’s web page: hhtp://www.nysenate.gov/event/2013/oct/29/regents-reform-agenda-assessing-our-progress which gave links to the testimony of other invited speakers and provided a video of the hearing. Here’s mine:
 
http://www.nysenate.gov/files/pdfs/Fred%20Smith.NYSSEN.pdf
Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, New York, Pearson, Testing

Principal Explains to CEO of Xerox Why Common Core Is Not What She Thinks

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2013 //
25

Dan Drmacich was principal of Rochester’s School Without Walls. He is now head of that city’s Coalition for Justice in Education. He read an opinion piece in the local paper by Xerox CEO Ursula Burns touting the virtues of the Common Core and decided he needed to respond. He concluded she had no idea what she was talking about.

He argued that her essay demonstrated why corporate executives like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and Burns should stop telling educators what to do.

One by one, he took apart her flawed claims.

And he concluded by saying:

“To adequately implement any major education change, meaningful practitioner involvement must be a major part of the change process (in this case, teachers, curriculum experts and motivation researchers), along with field-testing and fine-tuning the processes, before it is fully implemented. I am sure Burns would not initiate any organizational change as complex as Common Core at Xerox without first using research-based processes.”

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, New York

NYC Parents Sue to Block Data-Sharing Plan

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2013 //
17

A dozen parents in New York City have sued to stop the State Education Department from releasing confidential information about their children to data storage companies, such as the Gates-Murdoch group called inBloom.

One of the parents explained:

Karen Sprowal, a petitioner whose son is in fifth grade in a New York City public school, said in a statement that she’s been “unable to rest easy” since learning about the state’s plans to share information with inBloom.

She’s worried that information about her son, who has special needs, might get into the wrong hands and hinder his ability to get into college or succeed in a job in the future.

“Up to now, his confidential records have been protected by his principal, the school’s nurse and psychologist, but now the state intends to provide this highly private information to vendors, without consulting me or asking for my permission,” she said. “Commissioner King has shown a dismissive attitude towards the concerns of parents and indifference to the dangers facing my son and more than three million other children enrolled in the state’s public schools.”

Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters,an advocacy group who has spearheaded the opposition to the state’s sharing of students data, urged Gov. Andrew Cuomo to call on King to “halt … this unethical and dangerous plan.”

Cuomo’s office did not immediately offer a comment. The governor does not have direct authority over the Education Department, which is controlled by the Board of Regents.

“Commissioner King has ignored the protests of thousands of parents who have urged him to drop this plan and begged him to protect their children’s highly sensitive information,” Haimson said. “They have been joined by a growing chorus of school board members and superintendents throughout the state who say that his data-sharing plan is not only unnecessary, it poses huge and unprecedented risks.”

Categories Privacy and Privacy Rights

Teacher Meg Norris to Her Students: “I Love You and Believe in You”

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2013 //
24

Meg Norris was a seventh-grade teacher in Georgia who left teaching because she no longer believed in what she was mandated to do. She saw her students struggling with the Common Core standards. She believed that they were written in ways that were far beyond the students’ understanding.

This is the letter that Meg Norris wrote to her students and which she posted online for all to read and share:

 

To My Students,

I did not return to the classroom this year and I want to apologize.  I am truly sorry for having left you.  It was the hardest decisions I have ever made. I want you to understand why I left.  It had nothing to do with you.  I still love you and believe in you.  You are still amazing and you can do anything you want to do.  I did not give up on you.  I left to fight for you.

I saw you struggling with Common Core skills.  Even with the new curriculum from the district, no matter how I broke it down for you I could see you didn’t understand.  I saw the frustration on your faces.  And when time ran out and we had to take the county’s test (on the county’s schedule), I saw the tears roll from your eyes.  You failed.  I saw you missing school more days than normal.  I saw you with long sleeves covering up the cutting scars on your arms.  I saw how the sparkle in your eyes dimmed. I saw the small bald spot on your head where you had pulled out your hair.  And it wasn’t just in my class.  You hated going to math.  You came early everyday for homework help, but it didn’t make any difference.  You still could not understand.

I want you to know none of this is your fault.  It is not you.  I know the school, the county and the state call it “rigor.”  That is a horrible word.  Look it up in the dictionary for me.  Rigor is for dead people.  You are not failing because it is too hard.  You are not failing because you are not working hard enough.  You are not failing because of your teachers.  You are failing because Common Core was not written by teachers. Common Core was not written to help you.  Let me explain why this hurts you so much.

Your brain, as it develops, can only learn certain things at certain times.  Common Core is trying to force you to learn things your brain is not ready to learn.  Researchers for decades have found that the things Common Core requires you to do are impossible until you reach high school, at the earliest.  No matter what your teachers do to get you to learn it, you aren’t going to be able to.  There is nothing wrong with you.  Your brain was designed perfectly.  Common Core standards were not.

Common Core was written by businessmen trying to make money off of you.  You and your learning are a grand experiment in corporate profits.  If you fail at school, if your teachers fail to teach you, these corporations can sell more books, workbooks, tests, software and technology to schools and even to your parents to try at home.  None of it will work.  These same businessmen want to convince states to let them and their companies take over your schools.  Your parent’s tax dollars would then go to these companies.  Over $600 billion is spent on education every year in this country.  This money should go to your education, not to private companies. It is very similar to what was done to prisons several years ago.

Common Core is the first time in the history of this country that a privately written and copyrighted plan has become public policy.  There is no research to back it and it has never been tested.  Politicians are pushing it because these corporations are giving them money to push it.

When I left I met with members of your Board of Education and told them what was happening.  They ignored me.  I went to the local newspaper and they ignored me too.  When I spoke to the state Senate education committee they dismissed me as a political nut job.  When I came back to chaperone your fall dance I was told I was “no longer one of you” and I could not come in because of my position on Common Core.  Ghandi once said, “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.”  We will win.  We will win for you and every student after you.  This is not political.  This is for the future leaders of our country.  These corporations don’t want to teach you how to think.

It is time for you to talk to your parents. Help them understand that opting you out of state testing will protect your personal information as well as stop the data that is being used to unfairly judge you and your teachers. Schools where more than 80% of kids have been opted out are cancelling these stressful tests that measure nothing.  There is a new test coming to replace the CRCT, which is why politicians like Governor Deal and Superintendent Barge want to keep Common Core.  Have your parents demand a portfolio of your work be kept and that your hard work be used to decide if you should go on to the next grade, not a random test.  Any test not written by and graded by your teachers should never be allowed in the classroom.

Please do not worry about me.  I am strong and people have called me worse names and banned me from much better places. Standing up for what is right is not always the easy thing.  I knew that when I left my classroom.  I have 32,000 other teachers from all over the country who are standing with me. I have education experts and child psychologists standing with me.  I have politicians standing with me.  I have famous authors standing with me.  And the group is growing.

Just this week I got an email from Judy Blume, author of famous children’s classics like Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Blubber, Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret, Forever, and Tiger Eyes. She shared with me that she was a horrible test-taker.  She is very grateful that she is not in school taking the kinds of tests you are taking.  Can you imagine how horrible it would be if our favorite authors gave up because they could not do well on standardized tests that meant nothing?  I don’t want to find out.

Talk to your parents and let them know what is happening in your classrooms.  Every time you take a test or a survey, tell your parents.  Be brave and keep making me proud.  You can be anything you want to be. I am always here for you.

Mrs. Meg Norris, Ed.S.

7th Grade (former) teacher

Georgia

Meg Norris is a doctoral candidate in education and a certified teacher in Georgia.  After 18 months with Common Core in her classroom her observations compelled her to walk away from her dream job of teaching to fight against the implementation of Common Core and high stakes testing.  She was banned from her former school because of her stance against Common Core.

 

 

Categories Common Core, Education Industry
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