This is a sad reversal for Connecticut’s poorest children.
As a candidate for governor, Dannell Malloy supported a lawsuit that would guarantee that the children of the state have a constitutional right to a quality education.
Now that he is governor, he is trying to quash the lawsuit he once supported.
Go figure.
Carol Burris, principal of South Side High School in Rockville Center, New York, explains here why parents should take the results of the new Common Core assessments with more than a grain of salt.
They will be used in New York to determine whether students ages 8-14 are “college-ready.” Can you imagine that? A test taken by a child of 8 will tell you whether he or she is college ready!
The Illinois House moved to set a three-year moratorium on virtual charter schools after some suburban districts rejected them.
I wonder if the representatives understand that the quality of cyber charters is low, test scores are low, graduation rates are low. And the quality of education is poor.
But the companies make big profits.
Really, EduShyster has done it again.
The rich, powerful, and famous end up as toast when skewered by her sharp satirical lance.
In this post, she has Wonder Boy Mark Zuckerberg solving the problem of the “skillz gap” by hiring a rightwing operative to run a national campaign. This campaign will use our public schools as the enemy, the schools that fail to provide the entry-level workers (willing to work for less), thus making it necessary for him to import foreign talent (willing to work for less).
What will those hapless billionaires think of next?
Bruce Baker chides state policymakers for claiming that they are relying on MET, the Gates’ teacher evaluation program.
In his previous post, Baker delves into the ways that state officials are misusing value-added measurement and student growth percentiles. I asked Bruce if he would clarify the difference and he responded as follows (go to the link to see the video):
The key difference is explained in the previous post – which I think needs more attention:
With value added modeling, which does attempt to parse statistically the relationship between a student being assigned to teacher X and that students achievement growth, controlling for various characteristics of the student and the student’s peer group, there still exists a substantial possibility of random-error based mis-classification of the teacher or remaining bias in the teacher’s classification (something we didn’t catch in the model affected that teacher’s estimate). And there’s little way of knowing what’s what.
With student growth percentiles, there is no attempt to parse statistically the relationship between a student being assigned a particular teacher and the teacher’s supposed responsibility for that student’s change among her peers in test score percentile rank.
Quick summary is that value added models attempt, I would argue unsuccessfully, to parse the influence of the teacher on student test score growth, whereas growth percentile models make no effort to isolate teacher effect. It’s entirely about relative reshuffling of students, aggregated to the teacher level.
As I say in the video:
One approach tries (VAM) and the other one doesn’t (SGP). One doesn’t work (VAM) and the other is completely wrong for the purpose to begin with(SGP).
You have no doubt heard the story of Parent Revolution. That is the group that wants to “empower” parents to seize control of their schools so they can turn it overto a charter operator.
The founder of Parent Revolution previously worked for Green Dot charters. Then he got funded by Walton, Gates, and Broad to start Parent Revolution.
A typical corporate reform sham since there are no parents involved, unless you count Ben Austin, the executive director.
An investigative reporter just did a story about Parent Revolution and was able to determine that the big funding comes from Walton, which has put more than $6 million into the endeavor. Walton is the most conservative of the big foundations. And clever too.
Walton has an agenda, and it can be summed up in one word: privatization.
By now, we have all read the encomia heaped on KIPP, and we know that KIPP presumably has what Mayor Rahm Emanuel once referred to as the “secret sauce.” That is the extra ingredient that
magically turns ordinary kids into scholars bound for Harvard.
Gary Rubinstein, ex-TFA, went to visit a KIPP school. He didn’t see the magic. He saw young teachers struggling to control their classes.
Read it to see what goes on, and be sure to read the comments.
A new report from CReATE, an organization of education researchers in Chicago, says that the Chicago Public Schools dramatically underestimated the number of children who will be affected by the mass elimination of public schools in that city.
No one will ever accuse CPS of undue compassion, concern, or attention to the city’s neediest children. As their legacy, they will be remembered for their cold and ruthless indifference to the children who are most at risk.
Please read the CReATE report:
“CReATE Researchers on Impact of Proposed School Closing”
CReATE researchers Josh Radinsky and Federico Waitoller (University of Illinois-Chicago) have prepared a report that details the impacts of the proposed school closings in Chicago in terms of student relocation and faculty dismissal. These researchers find that CPS statements on this matter greatly underestimate the scale of the impact. One of the stunning facts this report reveals is that the number of African American elementary students to be impacted by these actions (34,946, elementary only, not counting the 8 high schools) represents over 27% of all African American children between the ages of 5 and 14 living in the City of Chicago.
The report on the Impact of Proposed School Closings is available at http://tinyurl.com/d86lzdx.
## MEDIA CONTACT ##
Dr. Josh Radinsky josh.radinsky@gmail.com
Dr. Federico Waitoller fwaitoll@uic.edu
The New York Times recently reported on the introduction of software that is able to grade student essays and give instant feedback. It is currently being used in a number of universities; many others are likely to follow suit.
The student submits an essay and instantly receives a graded response from a computer. The student can then revise in hopes of improving the grade.
The software inevitably will be adopted for use in schools as well as colleges and universities.
Actually the Educational Testing Service already has an essay grader that can grade 16,000 essays in 20 seconds. Michael Winerip wrote about this in another article in the New York Times, back when he had a regular education column.
In both articles, the chief critics of machine grading of essays is Lew Perelman of MIT, who teaches writing. He says that it is easy to game the system, to prep for it; he also says that the system cannot identify good writing. It does not like short sentences or short paragraphs. Worse, as he says about the ETS system, it cannot tell truth from falsehood:
“He tells students not to waste time worrying about whether their facts are accurate, since pretty much any fact will do as long as it is incorporated into a well-structured sentence. “E-Rater doesn’t care if you say the War of 1812 started in 1945,” he said.”
Brave New World, indeed.
Jonathan Pelto reports that the Connecticut House approved the nomination of a charter school executive to the State Board of Education.
According to his account, Governor Dannell Malloy promised that if she was confirmed, the next two appointments to the state board would be individuals who support public schools, where the vast majority of the state’s students are enrolled.
