Archives for the month of: December, 2013
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Momma Bears: How to Get Stinking Rich Off Education

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2013 //
9

Some very smart public school parents in Tennessee who calls themselves Momma Bears have figured out the game plan of the education industry.

Here is their plain and simple 10-step plan about how to cash in on the public school marketplace and get stinking rich.

These are the first three steps (read the post to learn about the other seven steps that will make you a millionaire):

Times are tough, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make a buck in education right now. No qualifications or experience? No problem! In fact, it is actually works better if you have zero classroom experience (so you won’t have any compassion for the hardworking teachers and innocent students you’ll be profiting from).

You could pay $1,395 to attend a workshop (like this one) to learn how to get rich in the education industry, but Momma Bears already did the homework and figured it all out. And Momma Bears is all about sharing knowledge with other concerned folks. So, save your money and read about the easy 10-step program to getting rich with other people’s money through America’s public school system…

10 steps to hitting the jackpot in education:

Picture

Step #1: Start a consulting business or organization. It doesn’t really matter if it is profit or non-profit. Non-profit organizations will seem more trustworthy and innocent to the public (but don’t worry, that doesn’t mean you won’t get a nice paycheck.)Step #2: Create a catchy name for your organization. Acronyms work especially well. Don’t forget a logo. You cannot go wrong with an apple logo, they are very much in style right now.

Step #3: Make a website with pretty pie charts and lots of catchy buzz-words like these:

  • achievement gap
  • data driven benchmarks
  • human capital
  • Common Core aligned
  • education strategies
  • global citizen
  • rigorous, relevant, and robust

Keep reading, and you too will hit the jackpot.

Categories Education Industry, Tennessee

Pasi Sahlberg Speaks Tuesday in Rhode Island

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2013 //
4

The great Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg will speak at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston on Tuesday evening. He is a delightful, charismatic speaker who has a deep understanding of education around the world.

Don’t miss it!

Categories Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International

Do iPads Improve Learning and Raise Test Scores?

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2013 //
59

This article was published earlier this year but remains timely.

Mostly the blog reports on an article by veteran journalist Peg Tyre on the potential value of technology in the classroom.

Tyre knows that the technology boom is accelerating but she offers a few cautions.

Take iPads.

“iPads in the classroom, too, are hardly turning out to be a panacea. Teachers in some schools use iPads to great effect. Most, not. And they are not likely to lead to cost savings. In a widely quoted blog post, Lee Wilson, tech watcher and President & CEO of PCI Education, calculated that once you consider the training, network costs, and software costs, iPads cost school districts 552 percent more than those old-school textbooks.”

Where technology has proved especially popular is in charter schools enrolling low-income students.

Tyre writes:

“The experiments are far-reaching. Currently, there are roughly 275,000 K-12 students from 31 states who are taking classes online. School administrators all over the nation are handing out iPads and asking teachers and students to come up with new ways to learn with them. Some schools are experimenting with flipped classrooms, in which kids read or watch videos of a lecture for homework and work through problems or questions with an instructor during class time.

“Other schools, including a rapidly expanding chain of charter schools that serve low-income children, are employing what they call a “blended learning” model. It works like this: The classroom is broken down into small groups. Some kids work with a qualified, credentialed teacher, while others are shepherded to a computer room, where, under the watchful eye of a paid-by-the-hour supervisor, zoom ahead or redo a lesson using interactive, adaptive software.

“At another chain of charter high schools, kids sit in what resembles a call center, receive videotaped lectures and interactive lessons on a monitor, and get pulled into smaller, teacher-led groups to get a particular lesson refreshed or reinforced.”

The goal, of course, is higher test scores.

In the best suburba, urban, and private schools, technology is used by expert teachers for enrichment of instruction, not to cut costs.

Categories Technology, Computers

Reminder: I Will Be at P.S. 15 in Brooklyn on December 11

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2013 //
2

I will join with teachers, parents, and anyone else who wants to attend on December 11 at 5 pm at P.S. 15 in Brooklyn for a conversation about my recent book Reign of Error. 

No lecture, just discussion. All are welcome.

P.S. 15 is located in Red Hook on Sullivan Street in Brooklyn.

You are invited!

Categories Reign of Error

Are You a Parent Who Fights for Your Child?

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2013 //
21

Anna Shah-bomba is a parent in New York who attended a Common Core forum and was startled to be dismissed as a member of a “special interest” group by the state commissioner of education. To help other parents advocate for their children, she wrote this post:.

She asks, “Are you “that parent”?

She begins like this:

“Advocating in a small school district presents a challenge on many fronts. Sometimes, its hard to rally other parents so that your cause has enough strength and/or support that will actually make a change.

You may feel like your voice is drowned out by the chatter of nothingness.

You may feel powerless or that your efforts are fruitless.

You may question why bother doing this at all.

You may feel alone but, I assure you, that you are not.

Some parents are quick to complain but slow to take action.

Others are simply too scared to step up lest they be singeled out and ostracized by their peers.

Many parents support you secretly but are afraid to show it in school because they fear backlash from unscrupulous officials or that their friends wont approve.

Many parents worry that they wil be labelled or known as “that parent” which is apparently a derogatory term.

Lets face it, no one wants to be “that parent” after all.

You know who “that parent” is….”

Read it all.

Categories Parents

Laura Clawson: What About Charters for Rich White Kids?

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2013 //
30

Laura Clawson writes about charters that target a specific demographic: Affluent white kids.

Two of the most celebrated charter chains are Great Hearts Academy and Basis, both located in Arizona but now opening in cities outside that state. Their key demographic is not poor black and brown students.

She quotes from a story that appeared in The Texas Tribune and the New York Times:

At the 16 campuses that Great Hearts operates in the Phoenix area (where nearly 60 percent of public school students are Hispanic or black), 69 percent of the nearly 7,000 students are white. Only two of Great Hearts’ Arizona campuses participate in a federal program that offers free and reduced-price meals for low-income students. Of the almost 5,000 Basis students in Phoenix, Tucson and Scottsdale, roughly 12 percent are Hispanic and 2 percent are black. None of the eight campuses offer free and reduced-price meals, which is also the case at the San Antonio school.

Clawson writes:

Making your “public” school cost $1,000 a year, require private transportation, and not offer free or reduced-price school lunches is slightly more subtle than naming it “No Poor Kids Academy.” But only slightly.

Schools like these benefit the whole push for more more more charters: By recruiting upper-middle-class students and giving them an especially well-funded education, these schools are likely to boost the overall academic outcomes of charter schools in general, so that when charters and traditional public schools are compared, the deck is just a little more stacked against public schools. But the basic model is the same, forcing public schools that accept and try to educate all kids to compete with schools that get to pick and choose.

To learn more about BASIS, read Julian Vasquez Heilig’s post. It is quite an operation.

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Categories Charter Schools, Privatization

Teacher: What I Learned When I Taught at Steve Perry’s “No Excuses” School in Hartford

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2013 //
23

Ebony Murphy-Root was intrigued by what she heard on television about Steve Perry’s Capitol Prep school in Hartford, and she applied to teach there. This is her report on her year teaching in Perry’s school.

She started work during the six-week summer session. And she noticed something strange:

“But within that six week period, six teachers disappeared. I didn’t yet know this but such sudden disappearances were a regular occurrence at Capital Prep. After the December break, one of the best teachers in the school simply failed to return. I never found out if she’d been fired or had just become disenchanted with the place. By that point the shine was already off for me. Dr. Perry was gone constantly, traveling the country on paid gigs even as he was accepting his sizable salary. Once we went almost a month without paper in the copy machine with no explanation.”

She was puzzled by Perry’s hatred of unions:

“Perry directed his insults toward members of the Hartford Board of Education, the Hartford Federation of Teachers, even other principals. I could never figure out Perry’s obsession with unions, and as the daughter of a Teamster it didn’t sit well with me. What sort of jobs did he envision for his students after college? I wondered. After all, Perry himself belonged to a union. If our poorest students had parents with union jobs, steady wages and paid time off, they might be able to support their kids better, both financially and emotionally. I wondered how Perry, if he’d ever been a classroom teacher himself, might teach about the history of the labor movement.”

She was not happy, and the school was not happy with her. By February, she was offered a choice of resigning or being fired.

This is an interesting insider’s view of a school that boasts of miraculous results.

Categories Connecticut, Teachers and Teaching, Unions

Public School Parent on Steve Perry and His “Miracle” School

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2013 //
15

Jonathan Pelto has recently posted several times about Steve Perry, who runs a magnet school in Hartford and boasts that he has the secret to success for all students, no matter what their background.

Perry is a “no excuses” kind of guy, who sets strict rules and enforces them with a strong hand.

In this post, Pelto reprints a letter from a public school parent about Perry and his methods.

The parent says that Perry would never be able to apply the same methods to white and/or middle class students.

Perry’s rule at Capital Prep is evidence of a deep racism, for the simple reason that his bullying and obnoxious ways would NEVER be tolerated in a middle class suburban school predominantly populated by “white” children. Perry would not dare to practice his authoritarianism on such children. He is an egotist, but even he cannot be so stupid as to antagonize middle class people with lawyers who know their rights. He knows that in Simsbury or West Hartford or in Farmington, parents would be after him so quickly, if he bullied their children, that his feet would not touch the ground. The School boards in any of these towns would fire him quicker than he could fire off one of his trademark tweets. But Perry does all his bad stuff to Hartford children for the very simple reason that he knows he can get away with it.

The Hartford Board of Education recently voted 5-4 not to give another school to Perry.

Categories Connecticut

How to Evaluate a Teacher, Really

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2013 //
85

This is a terrific article that appeared on Huffington Post by Nicholas Ferroni.

He speaks truths that every teacher will understand.

This is what he did this week:

This week of school, like every other week, was pretty normal: I gave out about fifty dollars to various students who didn’t have lunch money; I resolved two teenage relationship issues; I comforted three girls who, for some reason, think they are so ugly that no boys will ever like them; I got three students, who have whispered three words each all year, to speak in front of the class; I paid for four students to join the gym and also offered to train them in order for them to deal with their aggression constructively; I went out of my way to make sure that five of my students, who I know are having problems at home, know that they are intelligent, strong and have so much to offer this world. So, in the education world where you deal with hundreds of uniquely individual teenagers trying to accept who they are, it’s just a normal week. I am not trying to brag because my commitment to my students is not the exception but the norm, especially at the high school where I teach where so many of my colleagues, day in and day out, give their hearts, souls and money to their students without a thought. I also do not want your sympathy because I, like most teachers, went into education for this very reason: to educate, empower and nurture youth.

Yet politicians constantly take pot shots at teachers and try to find a metric to weigh their value, usually with test scores. Teaching is so much more complicated and demanding than test prep, Ferroni explains.

He adds:

Without going into too much off topic, has anyone advocating for teacher evaluation and merit pay ever even consider what impact it will have on the performance of students in the classroom? They are incredibly naïve if they think that the fact that all accountability now lies on a teacher’s performance, and not the student, will not lead students performance to decline. Why would students work harder to excel in the classroom, when they are completely free of any responsibility for their grade? This is ultimately suggesting that each student has no role in their own success or failure in the classroom. Any one of us who has attended school knows that without a doubt that, not only are we responsible for our own academic performance, but that we are far more responsible than our teachers, our parents and even our friends were for our grades.

This brings me back to my opening paragraph; the most important role a teacher plays in the lives of his or her students is not as an examiner, but as a nurturer. Attempting to evaluate a teacher based on standardized tests is like evaluating a doctor solely on whether a patient lives, dies, or is cured. Just as every doctor gives his or her all attempting to save and cure patients, every teacher gives his or her entire self to students (who we treat more like our own children than our students). I can’t imagine a world where teachers are so fearful of losing their jobs because their students, who may be going through so many various and horrible circumstances, that they disregard the emotional role of an educator and focus solely on the academics. I will never tell a student, “Stop crying! I don’t care if you are depressed, or you haven’t eaten breakfast, or your parents beat you. I need you to do your work and study so you do well on your exam, so we meet our district goals and my pay is not garnished!”

Categories Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching

The Mandela That the Mainstream Media Won’t Tell You About

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2013 //
58

Thanks to TeacherKen for directing me to this terrific article that contains a dozen Mandela quotes that are not likely to be repeated in the mainstream media.

When you read Mandela’s obituary in the corporate media, he is sanitized and turned into a benign African version of Martin Luther King, Jr. (who was also sanitized by the MSM, which liked his lofty sentiments about justice but not his strong statements supporting unions and opposing the Vietnam War and poverty).

Here are a few of Nelson Mandela’s pithy sayings:

“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”

“Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity, it is an act of justice. Like Slavery and Apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. Sometimes it falls on a generation to be great. YOU can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom.”

“Gandhi rejects the Adam Smith notion of human nature as motivated by self-interest and brute needs and returns us to our spiritual dimension with its impulses for nonviolence, justice and equality. He exposes the fallacy of the claim that everyone can be rich and successful provided they work hard. He points to the millions who work themselves to the bone and still remain hungry.”

Categories Education Reform
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