Archives for the month of: December, 2013
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Cody: Is the Common Core the Rosetta Stone of Corporate Reform?

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2013 //
19

Anthony Cody, in a brilliant column, asks whether Common Core will be the Rosetta Stone of Corporate reform.

The Rosetta Stone, he explains, made it possible to decipher ancient languages:

” In the year 1799, a French soldier discovered an ancient stone in Egypt that had been inscribed with a royal proclamation in the year 196 BC, in three languages; Ancient Greek, Demotic, and Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The same text in all three languages allowed scholars to crack the code of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, and since then, the term “Rosetta Stone” has come to signify a means by which hidden codes are uncovered. The Common Core has become a Rosetta Stone for understanding how corporate education reform is reshaping public education.”

The Common Core weaves together and makes plain what once seemed to be disparate themes:

1. It unveils the powerful role of the Gates Foundation, which poured nearly $200 million into creating and promoting the Common Core standards.

2. It shows the heavy hand of the federal government, manipulating states into adopting the Common Core, despite the fact that it is prohibited by law from influencing curriculum and instruction in the nation’s schools.

3. It has revealed the extent to which nonprofits, including the teachers’s unions, accepted funding from Gates to advance the Common Core.

4. “The Common Core is propelled by a vision of education as serving the needs of commerce and corporations. Many of the arguments for Common Core portray our children as products on an assembly line. As a high level Gates Foundation official wrote recently, “I am pleased to see the excitement in the business community for the common core. Businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools, so it’s a natural alliance.”

5. Common Core reinforces NCLB’s insistence that schools be held accountable for constantly rising scores.

6. Common Core was designed to cause tests ores to plummet.

Read on.

What comes clear is that Common Core has little to do with education reform and everything to do with the corporate agenda of high-stakes testing and the undermining of public education.

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers

Mother Jones: Where Does the Gates Foundation Invest Its Billions?

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2013 //
17

Alex Park and Jaeah Lee wrote an article in “Mother Jones” detailing what they call the Gates Foundation’s “hypocritical investments.”

While professing concern for children’s health, they are heavily invested in companies like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s.

It also has a major investment in Walmart, as well as smaller sums in privately managed prisons.

While professing concern about climate change, Gates invests in many oil and gas companies, like Exxonmobil.

Do as I say, not as I do.

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

South Carolina Teacher: Merit Pay Is a Bad Joke

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2013 //
24

Patrick Hayes is a third-grade teacher in Charleston, South Carolina, who is bravely battling those who are destroying public education and the teaching profession in the guise of “reform.”

South Carolina has one of the highest numbers of children living in poverty, which is a reliable predictor of poor academic performance. But reformers don’t talk about poverty. They talk about “bad” teachers, “lazy” teachers, teachers who need to be incentivized with a bonus to do their job.

In this newspaper article, Hayes thoroughly debunks these slanders against the teachers he works with daily.

He writes:

”

“Nobody envies Charleston County School District leaders.

“How would you recruit, retain, and motivate teachers with salaries below those of comparable districts?

“Would you start with an approach that teachers have told you they don’t like?

“Would you gamble on one with an extensive record of failure?

“The district’s plan to replace its current pay structure with merit pay is just such an approach.

“Merit pay appeals to many people. They just aren’t CCSD teachers. In a survey, only 1 percent responded favorably.

“Somehow, a system that teachers distrust is supposed to attract, retain and motivate them.

“CCSD’s plan goes further than just dangling bonuses. By 2015, it would withhold promised salary increases and make teachers hit targets to win them back.

“It would also use unreliable data to threaten their jobs.

“Working in schools for 18 years, I’ve never noticed a motivation problem.

“Most teachers come early and stay late, trundling out to their cars with armloads of work.

“Some get better results than others. All of them care deeply about how things turn out.

“That’s probably why merit pay has failed to raise student achievement each of the many times it’s been tried.”

Teachers won’t profit from merit pay, but Mathematica Policy Research will.

Even though MPR knows how flawed “value-added” rankings are, how they fluctuate from year to year, it is being paid $2.9 million to design a test-based accountability system for the teachers of Charleston.

By the way, as Hayes points out, only three states have a higher child poverty rate than South Carolina.

Forget about that. It is time to give a fat contract to find and fire those bad teachers.

Categories Merit pay, Poverty

Rhee: America Is Failing Its Kids: We Need Common Core

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2013 //
42

Michelle Rhee argues that the PISA scores prove that America is failing its kids. She believes that the way to get higher test scores for all is higher standards, more tests, more rigor. She also promotes charters, vouchers, merit pay, and evaluation of teachers based on student test scores.

Rhee has a close personal association with the Common Core standards. David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core standards, was the treasurer of the original StudentsFirst board; other members included Jason Zimba, who wrote the Common Core math standards. The only other member of Rhee’s board worked for Coleman’s organization, Student Achievement Partners.

Rhee’s StudentsFirstNY group packed meetings in New York City to endorse Common Core testing and support the Regents’ agenda of rapid implementation of Common Core.

Only Common Core, Rhee argues, can lift our students’ performance on international tests.

Apparently she never read Tom Loveless’s article in which he demonstrated that the biggest test score differences are within states, not between states. Loveless concluded that Common Core would have little or no impact on student achievement.

Categories Common Core, International, Rhee, Michelle, Testing

Shepherd: What Is Wrong with Common Core ELA

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2013 //
173

Robert Shepherd has written curriculum, textbooks,
assessments, and lots else in recent decades.

Here he explains what
is wrong with the Common Core’s version of English Language Arts:

The CCSS in ELA appear to have been written by complete NOVICES
based upon

a. poorly conceived, unexamined notions about how the
outcomes of ELA education should be characterized and measured AND

b. vague memories of extremely mediocre English classes that the
authors happened to attend when they were in school years ago.

It would be amusing that so much money and time had been spent on
“standards” (I can barely bring myself to use this term to refer to
them) this mediocre if not for the fact that they are going to have
dire consequences on many different levels, including dire
consequences for curricula, for curricular innovation, for
pedagogical practice.

So, what are the problems with the new
national standards in ELA? (My God, I could write several books on
this topic, but I’ll settle for providing the outline.)

To begin with, with, as almost any teacher will tell you, the very idea of
creating a single set of mandatory standards for every child is
crazy. How could it be, I ask myself, that any sane person, any
thoughtful or experienced educator, anyone who gave the matter the
least critical examination, could possibly conclude that it makes
sense to have a single set of ELA standards for every child in the
nation?

At the risk of stating what ought to be the blindingly
obvious: a. Children differ; b. We need diversity in outcomes, not
identity in outcomes, from Pre-K-12 education; c. a single set of
standards dramatically reduces the design space within which
curricular and pedagogical innovation can occur; d. a single set of
standards for all effectively tells every curriculum coordinator,
every curriculum designer, every teacher, “What you know or think
you know about your students and about outcomes for them doesn’t
matter–we have made these decisions for you. Shut up and do as you
are told.”

These considerations, alone, should have been enough to
have stopped the CCSS in ELA. But I haven’t even begun to address
the problems with these PARTICULAR top-down, across-the-board,
one-size-fits-all, totalitarian “standards.”

A few of the many
problems with these “standards” in particular. The CCSS in ELA

a. are wildly developmentally inappropriate.

b. embody a lot of completely prescientific notions about how children acquire
language skills.

c. are full of glaring lacunae that teachers and
curriculum designers will not be able to address because they will
be told, “It’s not in the standards.”

d.reflect extremely unimaginative, pedestrian, mostly unexamined notions about what
education in that domain should consist of. The characterizations of what education in literature, in writing, and in language skills should consist of are particularly unimaginative and uninformed.

e. seem often to have been assigned to particular grade levels
completely at random.

f. preclude many logical, potentially highly
effective alternate curricular progressions both within particular
grades and across grades

But here’s the biggest problem of all with
these particular standards, and it’s a problem with most of the
state standards that they supplant: It’s an ENORMOUS mistake to
couch desired outcomes in ELA terms of abstract skills to be
attained rather than in terms of a. world knowledge (knowledge of
what) and b. SPECIFIC procedural knowledge (knowledge of how). In
other words, the CCSS in ELA are WRONG FROM THE START, misconceived
at their most fundamental design level, that of their categorical
conceptualization. The Common Core is a monoculture. It’s just NOT
what is needed by a diverse, pluralistic society, one that prizes,
and benefits enormously from, individual autonomy and
difference.

Categories Common Core

Retired Special Ed Teacher Chastises Commissioner King and Regent Tisch

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2013 //
31

At the Manhattan forum convened by State Commissioner John King and the chair of the Regents Merryl Tisch, a mother gave this moving speech, which she sent with permission to post.

She wrote;

“Commissioner King, Chancellor Tisch, thank you for the opportunity to share with you tonight. My name is Lorri Gumanow, and my husband and I are the proud parents of a very talented 13-year old public school student who is an actor and puppeteer, and wants to work with the Jim Henson Company someday. I am a newly retired special educator. But tonight I am here to ask you to walk in my shoes as a parent.

Our son was born 3 months premature and has several neurological disabilities and an IEP. His disabilities are not the result of poverty, poor prenatal care or poor educational opportunities. He has always thrived in the public school environment. He has had wonderful teachers, wonderful inclusive public schools, and wonderful supports.

All of a sudden he is failing. He failed the math test last year with a score of 1. What happened? The roll out of the Common Core asks 8th graders to now magically perform as 10th graders, without any attention to the skills and knowledge they might have been required to learn and practice in those 2 missing years.

Your solution is that my son just needs to try harder. Increase the rigor! No excuses! And what do you really mean every time you say, “This work?” He does 4 hours of homework every night and still fails his classroom test! If you don’t pass, you are a failure, and your teacher is a failure too. Fire that bad teacher! Close that failing school! Failure is not an option. Raise the bar. Unfortunately, when you throw some kids into the “deep end of the pool,” with a brick tied to their ankle – label the brick whatever difference you prefer – it is foolish to believe they are all going to be able to come back up for air. A lot of them are going down! I am tired of the jargon and the rhetoric. You are willing to write my son off as collateral damage. I care about my child! I care about all children! And so do his teachers! Education is not a competition – it is a human right and our responsibility!

My son now says he is stupid, he can’t take it anymore, my teacher will get fired if I fail, why can’t I be normal, he says he wants to kill himself, he has meltdowns regularly over homework – AND he has pulled the kitchen knife out of the drawer. He has always received outstanding medical care and mental health care! Now I have to give him, in addition to his daily medications, a sedative when he loses control – over homework and schoolwork????? I sedate my kid with strong drugs so he doesn’t hurt himself over an ELA quiz??? Something is very wrong with this picture. School should not be a life or death experience. School is not worth dying for!

And as a parent, would you want this medical history about your child on inBloom, for the world to see? (By the way, our son has given me permission to share this with you!) Are we overprotective parents, protecting him from rejection and failure? Absolutely not – he is an actor. He knows that when he experiences rejection after an audition, he picks himself up, works hard and tries again. But it’s demeaning to try again when you know you don’t have the skills. Experiencing failure is an important lesson in life. But being punished for something out of your control is abuse, and it is discriminatory.

My son is a proud member of the Drama Desk award-winning TADA! Resident youth theater ensemble, and just earned a leading role in their upcoming off-Broadway musical production. Talent exists in many forms, academic talent being just one form. The arts are what save my son’s life! He will reach his dream through hard work, perseverance, and dedication to his craft. Those are qualities that employers value! Your testing and sorting of children, and treating them as human capital will not bring our children down, because we won’t let you. We love and support our children, and embrace all of their special talents! We are active, concerned, informed and intelligent parents and we won’t let you hurt our children. Pull out of inBloom. Fire Pearson now! Drop the Common Core! All children, not just the children of Ivy-league educated and wealthy parents, are entitled to a good education in our democracy. Not just the kids in private schools and charter schools. ALL children!! I hope you were listening. Oh, and by the way. I graduated from an Ivy-league college too and I believe in our public schools! Thank you!”

Categories Common Core, New York, Testing

Schneider: Who or What Is the “Center for Union Facts?”

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2013 //
76

On December 10, the “Center for Union Facts” published a very expensive full-page ad attacking Randi Weingarten, the AFT, and teachers’ unions, blaming them for the PISA scores.

In this post, Mercedes Schneider explores the “Center for Union Facts.” As she says, don’t believe the name. It is a corporate-funded, rightwing foundation-funded operation whose goal is to destroy unions.

Categories Merit pay, Unions

Rightwing Group Attacks Unions in “New York Times”

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2013 //
28

A few days ago, a little-known group called the Center for Union Facts published a full-page ad in the New York Times blaming Randi Weingarten, the AFT, and teachers’ unions en bloc for the mediocre performance of the United States on PISA. The “center” says that the unions oppose merit pay, and that’s why the scores of 15-year-olds are not at the top of the world.

This ad is patently absurd.

Leave aside for the moment the fact that our scores on PISA are not declining; leave aside the fact that scores on international tests do not predict the future of the economy (we were last on the first international test in the mid1960s); leave aside that the AFT did approve some form of merit pay in contracts in Baltimore and New Haven; leave aside the fact that merit pay has been tried again and again for nearly a century and has never made a difference. Albert Shanker once said to a proponent of merit pay: “Let me get this right: Students will work harder if you offer their teachers a bonus? That makes no sense.” Leave aside the voluminous research showing that financial incentives and test-based accountability don’t make a difference, whether the bonuses are offered to students or teachers.

What matters here is that this alleged “center” has no knowledge or expertise about education, and is a “center” of union busting propaganda.

I know this for a fact. Several years ago, as I was transitioning from my role in conservative think tanks to my current role as a critic of high-stakes testing and privatization, I was invited to participate in a conference of the Philanthropy Roundtable at the elegant Rainbow Room high atop Rockefeller Center in New York City. The Philanthropy Roundtable was created by conservative and rightwing foundations as a counter to what they perceived as leftwing bias at the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation (where are they now?)

I was asked to be a judge on a panel to select the best reform idea for the next decade. I was going to be the Simon Cowell, the tough critic who scowled at bad or half-baked proposals. The room was full of foundation leaders–maybe 150 of the big donors.

One of the proposals was offered by Richard Berman of the Center for Union Facts. He said that his exciting new idea was to attack and demonize the teachers’ unions. He showed pictures of the billboards he had erected across major highways in New Jersey, blaming the unions for high costs and bad test scores. Needless to say, he was very proud of the work he had done.

The audience seemed to love his presentation.

When it came my turn to question him, I asked him these questions: can you explain why the states that are unionized have the highest scores on the federal tests? Did you know that New Jersey is one of the nation’s highest performing states? Can you name a high-performing state that is not unionized?

Berman seemed stunned, momentarily speechless. Then he said, “I am not an education researcher. I am in public relations.”

Case closed.

But as you can see, his “big idea” has gotten the funding to go national.

Categories Merit pay, Unions

John Thompson: How Mayor de Blasio Can Fix Some of Bloomberg’s Failures

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2013 //
6

Historian-teacher John Thompson analyzes a recent review of the Bloomberg administration’s education initiatives and explains how the private education funders wasted $2 billion.

The great mistake of the Bloomberg administration was its unalloyed faith in accountability, the threats of punishment and sanctions.

As the budget expanded, the number of reading specialists for the early grades plummeted–“from 1,158 in 2002 to 637 in 2013.”

By contrast, “de Blasio respects experts who estimate that ’75 percent of the city’s four year olds — that is, about 73,000 children — would attend full-day pre-kindergarten if it were available and readily accessible.’ Wouldn’t it be nice if Bloomberg had invested billions of dollars filling that real-world need and not his personal need to sort and punish?”

Thompson is very hopeful that de Blasio sees a better path for school improvement–through support, early childhood education, and coordinated social services–not A-F grades for schools.

He writes:

“Now, New York City has a mayor who respects social science and understands the need to strengthen the social and institutional infrastructure of poor communities. Now, NYC “can counter the social isolation common in these poor neighborhoods and temper the impact of poverty and low social capital on educational failure and lifelong poverty.” Soon, researchers may not need to be so circumspect in choosing their words about the need for:

A targeted, neighborhood-centered approach to poverty would weave together school improvement with coordinated human services, youth development, high-quality early education and child care, homelessness prevention, family supports and crisis interventions.”

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, Childhood, Pre-K, K, New York City

Our Hero, Bruce Baker

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2013 //
8

In the world of education research, few scholars have been as forthright and reliable as Bruce Baker of Rutgers. Whenever a study is published that makes miraculous claims, we can count on Bruce to put it under the microscope and see what was left out. Bruce has taught in high schools and understands that teaching is a difficult career and that progress is at best incremental. He is fearless, insightful, careful in his methodology, and–often–outrageously funny.

Happily, others have noticed. In this article, Gregory Ferenstein compares Bruce to Nate Silver, who developed a reputation for using statistics to puncture illusions.

Bruce Baker is a hero to all those who labor in the trenches and all those who oppose the current climate of “reform” frenzy, in which half-baked ideas are declared miracles and hard-working teachers are demonized.

I am happy to place him on the honor roll of this blog; I wish I could bestow something grander, like the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for bringing light and reason to an era of incoherence and shoddy thinking.

Categories Honor Roll
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