In this post marking the one-year anniversary of her blog, EduShyster interviews herself.
She answers such pressing questions as:
Do you really consume wine by the box?
Will the education reform movement survive the coming Zombie apocalypse? (I promise you will love this one, especially the illustration.)
If you were an education reform group, which one would you be? (Love the photo.)
David Safier writes here about a charter school in Arizona that offers students $100 to sign up. Arizona was once known as the Wild West of charter schools, but now other states are catching up as charter operators join the Gold Rush.
The Gates Foundation gave $10 million to the Discovery Institute.
This is a conservative public policy institute that promotes “intelligent design” and is skeptical of evolutionary theory.
It was founded by Bruce Chapman, an official in the Reagan administration.
The purpose of the grant is for research, advocacy, and transportation.
Presumably this mean the Gates Foundation wanted the Discovery Institute to do research about and advocacy for intelligent design. Why they needed so much money for transportation is not all that clear.
If these are concerns of the Gates Foundation, why didn’t they give the money to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Research Council, or some other august scientific group?
I don’t understand the Gates Foundation.
In this blog post, Crazy Crawfish reveals his true identity.
He was working inside the Louisiana Department of Education when Bobby Jindal took control.
The story he tells is alarming and shocking.
It all started with Katrina. That event created a massive shock and provided an opening for Jindal: “Jindal immediately started privatizing and tormenting state employees with gleeful abandon, while simultaneously hiring unqualified cronies to run all aspects of state government . . . into the ground.”
What he describes is a calculated effort to distort the facts about the state of education in Louisiana and to shower favoritism and funding on certain vendors.
From what he saw, “reform” meant censorship, cronyism, and corruption. He became an “anti-reformer.”
He quit.
You should read his story.
It is important.
Students in New York recently completed a battery of tests aligned with the Common Core and developed by Pearson.
The tests remain secret though some bootleg copies have circulated. They should be released for public review.
Although educators were not allowed to disclose the test questions, Lucy Calkins of Teachers College created a website where educators could register comments about the tests. She received over 1,000 comments.
Some of them:
Many teachers complained about the emphasis on meta cognitive skills, as opposed to understanding the meaning of the text.
Another big complaint was timing. Many good students couldn’t finish their answers and ended up frustrated and defeated.
This is quite a treasure trove, written by teachers, about the tests that will be consequential for their students and their careers.
This Bridgeport parent activist has an old-fashioned idea. She believes that those who are paid to run public schools should support them. The current superintendent of schools in that Connecticut city is Paul Vallas. She reviews his record in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans, where he closed many public schools and opened large numbers of privately managed charters.
The same might be said of many other superintendents today, who see their job as advancing private control of public assets.
Arthur Goldstein, aka Néw York Educator, describes the vain and convoluted effort to create a teacher evaluation system in Néw York. A pinch of this, a heavy dose of testing, and the computer will tell us which teachers are great and which are the stinkers.
Vicki Cobb, an award-winning author of more than 90 children’s books about science, recently received a request from a test publisher to write for the new Common Core assessments. However, when she saw the guidelines, she wondered if she could do it. Will her voice disappear? Will she be compelled to write the same pap that deadens textbooks? Stay tuned.
Rhonda Brownstein, the executive director of Pennsylvania’s Education Law Center, says that it is time to stop trusting the claims of cyber charter promoters. For years, they have promised that students would get “innovative” education and that wondrous things would happen when virtual charters became reality, but Pennsylvania now knows that none of that turned out to be true.
Pennsylvania has allowed unchecked growth of cyber charters. They have drained funding away from public schools while providing a low-quality of education.
She writes:
“Attorneys at ELC have heard from the families of many students attending cyber charter schools. Here’s what those families have reported: Students spending countless hours behind computer screens without any required human interaction; students with disabilities who are not receiving any appropriate academic instruction; and students who have been pushed into computer-based programs as a result of behavioral incidents.”
And she adds:
“Cyber charter supporters tout policy recommendations that focus on a theoretical version of the future without addressing the ill effects of Pennsylvania’s 13-year embrace of cyber charter schools. Some of those supporters go so far as to say that Pennsylvania is in jeopardy of falling behind other states in an imagined race to expand the number of cyber charter schools. But the truth is that, despite mounting evidence of the academic failure of these schools, Pennsylvania has blindly led the full-time cyber schooling movement for years. In fact, during the 2011-2012 school year Pennsylvania accounted for 16 percent of all students enrolled in full-time cyber schools in the entire country.”
“Pennsylvania has been experimenting with students in cyber charter schools under the guise of “innovation” for more than a decade. We no longer need to hypothesize about the results. Cyber charters do not work for the majority of the students they enroll.”
This reader explains the conflict between Common Core expectations and her professional judgment. How did she resolve it? She did what she believed was in the best interests of children. It’s not easy.
She writes:
“As a literacy consultant and Title 1 coordinator at my K-6 rural NH school, I sympathize. At my school, we use Fountas and Pinnell’s Benchmark Assessment System as our universal screening tool for literacy. When F&P came out with their revised reading level expectations (obviously inspired by the CCSS, although they refuse to admit this), my colleagues and I came to consensus about the fact that we will not adhere to them, as we feel that at several grade levels (most notably kindergarten), they are developmentally inappropriate and unrealistic.
“Because we are the only elementary school in our district that came to this conclusion, I am receiving complaints from the one middle school into which all elementary students in the district funnel: “But now our grade level expectations for reading are not aligned! How are we supposed to determine which students are truly at core, strategic, intensive, etc.?”
“My stance is, do the work to figure it out. Get to know the whole child. Let’s stop pretending that each child develops at the same rate, and that it’s as easy as looking at a piece of data to determine which students truly need intervention. Policies and guidelines like this we put into place so that educators don’t have to think. It is something I work against every single day.”
