The legislature in Louisiana is turning a cold shoulder to Governor Bobby Jindal’s plans to demoralize teachers and dismantle public education. The bills that sailed through last year, when Jindal was riding high, are in trouble now.
Only Stand for Children, once thought of as a civil rights group, insists on firing teachers faster and somehow finding great teachers to replace them .
Another one of those zany testing stories.
In California, the staff gets the kids all excited about doing well on the state tests. They ave pep rallies, pizza parties, motivational assemblies, prizes, and anything else that might encourage the students to do their best.
But here is the odd part. The tests have no stakes for the students. Their purpose is to evaluate teachers, principals, and schools. The kids have no skin in the game.
Al Shanker used to say about merit pay (I heard him say it): “Let me get this right. The kids will work harder so the teachers can get a bonus? How does that work?”
In California, the kids have it in their power to fire their teachers and close their school, should they choose to do so. Is this a crazy country or what?
Peter DeWitt writes a regular blog for Education Week. He is the principal of an elementary school in upstate New York. In this column, he says that Michelle Rhee’s organization does not put all students first. DeWitt describes the Tennessee legislator who was named “Reformer of the Year” by StudentsFirst. This legislator is known for his anti-gay proposals, as well as his efforts to increase the number of charter schools and evaluate teachers by test scores. DeWitt had a Twitter exchange with an official for StudentsFirst, who claims that the organization didn’t notice what else their honoree supported, and had they known, well, they would have done something different.
From a teacher who gave up:
After 13+ years as a successful special education teacher in Los Angeles and then Virginia, I resigned last year. I just felt like I could no longer teach one more year in the current atmosphere that the teaching profession has become. I decided to take at least a year off, but it may be permanent. I know I have helped so many students and families over the years, and the students remained the only pleasant part of being a teacher at all. The excessive paperwork and lack of funding and support from society, the administration, and the government got worse and worse with every year, and the major down-slide began with No Child Left Behind and the increasing emphasis on test scores. The pressure for my students to pass standardized tests became unbearable even though many did pass and advance in terms of progress, but who cares about progress if it isn’t a passing score, and who cares about whether my students have disabilities, and most importantly, who cares if one test taken on one day cannot possibly assess the many successes and advances my students make yearly? Maybe I will go back to the classroom one day, but for now, I sorely need a break from the circus education has become.
AFT President Randi Weingarten called for a moratorium in the rush to impose the Common Core. Several states are considering proposals to withdraw from the Common Core. The Republican National Committee lambasted it as federal intrusion. Progressives like Stephen Krashen and Susan Ohanian object to standardization. Defenders try to paint critics as far-right extremists.
Is the Common Core too much, too soon? Did the Obama administration nd the Gates Foundation move too fast, without adequate buy-in from educators?
What happens next? Stay tuned.
From a reader:
Libbie, my daughter with Rett Syndrome, could not talk or use her hands functionally to communicate, yet she was forced to go through the state testing every year. Her IEP “accommodations” forced her teacher to work with her 1 on 1, and ask each question so Libbie could eye-gaze at her chosen answer, as an “alternative assessment”. In 5th grade, she figured how to “opt-out” on her own. She would simply close her eyes and refuse to participate. Her teacher frantically called me to somehow remedy the situation, but I only smiled with pride at my silent daughter’s wise choice. She took a nap, rather than take a test.
Libbie passed away 3 years ago, due to complication from Rett. In my grief, I have become so angry at how much time she spent in school being tested, precious moments of her already difficult life completing meaningless tasks. I hate standardization of all children, especially our beautiful ones with special needs.
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has been friendly to school choice experiments, but now has turned cool.
Why?
In this editorial, the newspaper says the evidence DOES NOT SUPPORT SCHOOL CHOICE.
Governor Scott Walker wants to lift the income limits on the voucher program and expand it beyond Milwaukee, but the newspaper disagrees. It reviews the research and concludes:
“But here’s the bottom line: The evidence isn’t persuasive that the choice schools have had much impact on achievement. Kids in the voucher schools do about the same, overall, as their peers in the public schools.
“And that underwhelming finding surely is not enough to justify a broad expansion that seems based more on ideology than on anything else.”
The North Carolina legislature is about to approve a massive giveaway of public property to private charter operators.
The charter corporation will be able to get public property for $1, then open a “school” staffed by uncertified teachers. No criminal background check required.
Call the cops!
Arthur Goldstein is a teacher-blogger who terrifies corporate reformers like State Commissioner John King. That is because Goldstein is a career teacher who knows what he is talking about; also, he writes lucidly and has a dry sense of humor. King, on the other hand, taught for two years in a “no excuses” charter school with a high suspension rate (at the same time that he miraculously earned both a law degree from Yale and a doctorate in education from Teachers College). King has one big advantage over Goldstein: He was a classmate of Merryl Tisch in one of TC’s QuickTime doctorate programs, and Dr. Tisch is now Chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, which hired the inexperienced King to be State Commissioner.
In this post on his marvelous blog, Golstein describes the sheer absurdity of the New York State evaluation plan.
Listen to this:
“I’m hearing stories all over about the DOE’s agents doing practice observations with administrators. Armed with their adapted Danielson rubrics, with the three domains they have determined are inevitable, they do 15-minute observations. During these 15 minutes, they determine whether teachers are highly effective, effective, developing, or ineffective. The fact that the evaluation system does not yet exist deters them not at all. The fix is in, they figure, and Reformy John (King) will grant them whatever they ask.”
It just goes downhill from there.
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