Archives for the year of: 2013
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Michigan Debates Common Core

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2013 //
20

Michigan is debating the Common Core, which it already agreed to adopt.

The curious thing in the debate and in the article is the repeated claim by “experts” that the Common Core will fix all the disparities and problems in American education. It will close the gap between low-perming and high-performing students and lift the performance of American students to the top on international tests.

What is the evidence for their views? How do they know? The standards have been imposed without any test of their value, their feasibility, or their consequences for real-live students. No one actually knows how they will work. What we do know is that full implementation will cost billions of dollars. States are buying new technology and new materials for Common Core even as they are laying off teachers, guidance counselors and librarians.

Will anyone remember these promises of Utopia a decade from now? Who will be accountable if they are wrong?

Can higher, more rigorous standards substitute for the massive disinvestment in education that is occurring in state after state?

Categories Common Core, Michigan

How Ordinary People Get Good Results

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2013 //
11

David Kirp recently led a discussion of his new book “Improbable Scholars” at the Center for American Progress in Washington.

One of his findings is that schools can be improved by collaboration and sound ideas. No charters. No school closings. No TFA.

Here Esther Quintero of the Shanker Institute explores the social science that supports collaboration rather than the disruption favored by the reform crowd.

Categories Support for public schools, Teachers and Teaching

Will TFA Be Able to Meet California’s High Standards?

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2013 //
10

The California Commission on Teacher Credentialing has raised the standards for those who teach English language learners. No one get will uncertified interns be allowed to teach these students who need well-prepared teachers.

This is a problem for Teach for America because California has a huge number of ELLs.

Will TFA fight the higher standards or will they make sure their corps members are better prepared?

http://mobile.edweek.org/c.jsp?DISPATCHED=true&cid=25983841&item=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.edweek.org%2Fteachers%2Fliving-in-dialogue%2F2013%2F04%2Ftfa_faces_a_california_showdow.html

Categories California, Teach for America TFA, Teachers and Teaching

Teacher: Report from Inside a Cyber Charter

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2013 //
40

A reader sent this comment:

“I work at a cyber charter. It is ironic that the administrators at these charters make us work twelve hours a day doing inane busy work, and yet the quality of education is much worse than in public schools.

I just got home from doing state testing. At one point during the day one of the third graders raised his hand to get my attention, he had just finished the multiple choice section and was stuck on the first open-ended question. He asked me what he was supposed to do. I just told him to answer the question, we are not allowed to do much more.

After he stared at the page for fifteen minutes one of the other teachers went over to give him some encouragement and get him working. He still just stared at the page. After about an hour of this we realized that he couldn’t read or write. The other teacher told him to skip the open-ended questions and move on to the next section. In the next thirty minutes, before we noticed, he completed the next three sections.

That should have taken him 3 to 4 hours. He was just acting like he was reading the questions then filling in random bubbles. This is the only face time we will get with them all year. Not enough time to do much of anything. I wonder what will happen to this kid.

I would love a job teaching in the city. I have tried for the past three years to get a job in an inner city public school, but they are too busy firing teachers and closing buildings. They are not hiring anyone because they are losing too much money to the charters.”

Categories Charter Schools, On-Line Education

Merrow: Who Created Michelle Rhee?

By dianeravitch
April 18, 2013 //
103

John Merrow asks the question: How did this woman with little experience and meager accomplishment and a penchant for braggadocio become a major media figure?

She did, by burnishing her resume.

The media did, by basking in her harshness.

Merrow did, by broadcasting 12 segments on national TV about her.

And unions did, by their intransigence.

What do you think?

Categories Rhee, Michelle

Karen Lewis Teaches Torah in Evanston

By dianeravitch
April 18, 2013 //
10

Karen Lewis taught a powerful lesson from the Torah at a synagogue in Evanston.

This is the rabbi’s account of her moving reading of Numbers, in which she connects the Biblical story to recent events in Chicago.

“Her portion, Shelach Lecha (Numbers 13:1-15:41) relates, among other things, the story of the twelve scouts send by by Moses to report on the Promised Land. Ten of them return with words of discouragement – they reported that they saw giants in the land. “We felt like grasshoppers to ourselves,” they said, “”and so we must have looked to them!”

“In her presentation, she pointed out that forces of domination in society can often have this effect on us. In the case of Chicago schools, it is easy to feel cowed by the powerful political-corporate interests that are decimating public education in our city – and in fact, in cities around the nation. The key, Lewis said, is not to be daunted or to give in to a slave mentality that “idealizes Egypt.” The answer, as ever, is to organize and fight back.”

Once again, the powerful oppress the weak. It falls to us to defend the powerless. We must not be intimidated by the oppressor.

Categories Chicago, Closing schools, Emanuel, Rahm

Billionaires and Wall Street Target Denver School Board Race

By dianeravitch
April 18, 2013 //
14

This November, the Denver school board will be up for grabs.

As you will see in this article, the privatization movement has decided to make a play to take control of the board. You know what they want.

If the Denver race plays out like the one in Los Angeles, billionaires and Wall Street hedge fund managers, along with Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst, will pour millions into the race. Expect big gifts from Rupert Murdoch and Philip Anschutz, maybe the Koch brothers. They will turn the schools and the children over to the free market.

If you care about public education, now is the time to stop the corporate takeover.

Categories Colorado, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Industry, For-Profit

Jersey Jazzman On Merryl Tisch

By dianeravitch
April 18, 2013 //
4

Jersey Jazzman read Merryl Tisch’s comments about how she understood test anxiety. He wondered how she might identify with such feelings because she never attended a school with high-stakes. Nor did her children.

Categories New York, Testing

Rhee Discounts Merrow’s “Smoking Memo”

By dianeravitch
April 18, 2013 //
51

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Michelle Rhee responded to questions about John Merrow’s “smoking memo,” the one that showed that she and other top officials were aware of allegations of widespread cheating but failed to investigate.

Howard Blume of the Times reports that Rhee met with the editorial board of the paper.

When Merrow had asked her about the memo, she said so many memos crossed her desk that she couldn’t remember this one. Now she says the memo was not important.

“In an interview with The Times editorial board, Rhee said that although she “didn’t see the memo” at the time, consultant Sandy Sanford “was just writing a memo based on something that we already broadly knew.””

So now she says she didn’t see the memo, and even if she had, it contained nothing new. Everyone already knew there was widespread cheating, so there was no reason to investigate.

Categories Los Angeles, Rhee, Michelle

Parent on the Common Core: Here It Is, Ready or Not

By dianeravitch
April 18, 2013 //
21

This article in The Economist recounts the anxiety and confusion surrounding the adoption of the Common Core. Officials say it is a great thing, but parents are not so sure.

He writes:

“Why has New York decided to subject students to these exams well before the standards have been fully implemented in the classrooms? (Most states are holding off until 2015.) My daughter is a strong math student, and loves taking tests, but when she was given a practice test over the winter holiday that contained high-level work with fractions, division with three-digit numbers and even a dab of algebra, her eyes grew wide. Nothing like this had ever appeared in a lesson in her third-grade classroom. Her teacher has been scrambling to teach these concepts over the past few weeks to get the 8-year-olds ready, but it’s bound to be too little, too late. The teachers are not at fault: much of the content on the practice exams was a surprise to them as well. With school ratings and teacher evaluations hinging on the results, everyone has an investment in this perverse and premature exercise.”

Categories Common Core, New York, Testing
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