Crazy Crawfish is one of those amazing Louisiana bloggers who refuses to be bought, intimidated, or silenced.
He used to work in the data division of the Louisiana Department of Education. He reached a point where his conscience told him he had to work somewhere else.
Now he has a blog where he repeatedly shines his spotlight on the spin coming from his old department.
He keeps fighting for kids, fighting for public education, fighting for honest data.
Why does he keep fighting?
This is a very interesting read about how Finns think about education.
They think about education, not just schooling. They think about how different institutions interact to shape young people. As Lawrence Cremin (my mentor and the author’s) taught, education is a network of institutions.
Finns care about equality, not as an abstraction but a reality. They make sure that everyone has health care and education. Teachers are highly respected. And they don’t understand our obsession with choice.
This is a good read.
This article shows how the Broad Foundation has shifted gears. It used to train school boards to its way of thinking (it trained the Atlanta school board, for example, to believe that metrics and data matter more than anything les).
Now it send school boards on tours to selected sites.
The Syracuse superintendent, a product of the unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy, leads her school board to meetings around the nation to learn about the Broad style. In this case, they are in New Orleans, the Mecca of privatization. You can be sure that no one will tell them that at least two-thirds of the New Orleans charters are academically unacceptable, even in the reports of their supporters at the Cowen Institute at Tulane.
Bruce Baker has a great post about Matt Di Carlo’s April 1 post on the Maryland NAEP scores. Baker knows that Di Carlo was using his post to mock the misuse of NAEP data, but Baker shows how people like Chris Cerf frequently use misleading graphs to make a point.
When Di Carlo put up his April Fool’s Day post about a “miracle in Maryland,” he forgot to label it as a satire. He updated it.
I posted it in the original version, and noted that neither Matt nor I believe in miracles. When Matt updated his post, I updated my post.
But the interesting point is that the graphs in Matt’s post about the gains posted by Maryland were not made-up. They were real. Maryland has made impressive gains in reading and math.
Matt’s point was that NAEP data cannot be used to explain causation. He extrapolated possible causes as a way of satirizing the way certain big-name reformers like Jeb Bush use NAEP data and claim credit for their policy preferences. Doing this is wrong. NAEP shows trend lines, but it doesn’t say why the scores went up or down. In most states and cities, there are many things happening at the same time: demographic changes, state law changes, federal mandate changes, and unexplained changes. The trend lines can’t tell you which of those changes, if any, caused the scores to change.
Kudos to Nancy Flanagan, for reporting on the mess at the Jalen Rose Academy charter school.
Why do sports celebrities think they are qualified to run a school?
At the Jalen Rose school, 100% of the teachers quit at the end of the first year.
Nancy asks an obvious question:
“Here’s my question: What would parents think if all the teachers in a traditional public school quit? If their children had no sinks in the science rooms, but flew to Las Vegas to meet a basketball team? Or if students couldn’t access necessary instructional materials because their laptops didn’t work?
“When the Academy (which gets the same per-pupil state funding as all public schools in Detroit) ran out of money in May, they held a private party to make up the shortfall. And in spite of what looks like a poorly managed train wreck of an inaugural year, the article [to which she links in her post] is full of upbeat adults praising Rose’s vision for education.”
Is there some special Kool-Aid that inoculates people from seeing what is happening when a charter school is involved?
Jersey Jazzman has done some amazing research to uncover the source of the money that is flooding local school board races.
He has found a pattern. The same people are dropping thousands of dollars into key school board races around the country, into districts where they do not live. In Perth Amboy, NJ, school board candidates typically spend about $5,000-8,000, but in the last election one candidate had about ten times that much, almost all from big names in California.
Then he found the same people picking races in other states.
Who is coordinating this campaign?
This just in:
“http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/4/prweb10586920.htm
Federal Judge Orders Michelle Rhee Suit to Go Forward, will Broaden to Concealment and Fraud Claims
A US federal judge has denied a Motion to Dismiss by former DC Public School Chancellor Michelle Rhee in a wrongful termination lawsuit over the mass firings of DC Public School teachers back in 2009. Case to be amended to add concealment and fraud claims against Rhee and her CFO Noah Wepman.
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Washington, D.C. (PRWEB) April 01, 2013
For nearly three years, efforts by hundreds of DC Public School teachers who were victims of the much publicized mass firings by former Chancellor Michelle Rhee- herself hailed as a reformer and darling of major media- have failed to gain any traction in the courts.
However, in what may be a turning of that tide, US District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras has denied Rhee’s motion to dismiss claims by a music teacher that his firing was concocted by using a misapplied or non-existent job title to enable his poor evaluation and subsequent firing.
The suit involves Willie J. Brewer Jr., a 53-year-old teacher who worked for DCPS for 28 years before being terminated in October of 2009 due to “budgetary constraints” under a RIF (Reduction in Force). Under this circumstance, the pecking order of teachers to be terminated as determined by Rhee, were first those with poor performance evaluations. However, Brewer claims he was an instrumental music teacher and that his RIF competitive standing was erroneously governed by the standards for a vocal music teacher, a position that required a skill set different from his own. As a result, Brewer claims he scored a poor evaluation and was terminated.
Brewer has set out to prove that his circumstance was not the result of mere error but an illegal systematic effort by Rhee to replace teachers en masse- perhaps supported by Rhee’s own public statements regarding her ideology to aggressively fire, en masse, teachers she deems as failing.
(Read Judge Contreras’ Memorandum and Order for US District Court for the District of Columbia Civil Action No. 11-1206http://www.leagle.com/xmlResult.aspx?
page=1&xmldoc=In%20FDCO%2020120921E21.xml&docbase=CSLWAR3-2007-CURR&SizeDisp=7)
Along that line, it has been learned that Brewer will now amend his original complaint to broaden the scope of Rhee’s alleged actions into possible civil fraud and concealment claims. This has developed as a result of videotaped testimony by the former DCPS CFO Noah Wepman before the DC City Council on November 30, 2009. In that testimony, Wepman appears to admit that he willfully concealed, with the knowledge of Rhee, the true accounting figures which indicated that the DCPS had no budgetary shortfall at all- the pretext for the RIF to be instituted and the mass firings to take place.
The alleged scheme indicates that after the mass firings occurred, Rhee and Wepman then reported the true accounting figures and the money re-appeared in the DCPS budget enabling them to hire an entire flock of new teachers.
If Brewer prevails, with the case now in its discovery phase, Rhee’s- and now presumably Wepman’s- ideological experiment, which has been widely heralded by an entire nation, may quickly unravel.
Read here to see the illustrated version of the Wolf attack on me and NEPC.
What do we need to protect us from future Wolf attacks? Garlic? A mirror?
Maybe just common sense and concern for the commonweal.
But what do I know. I am but a humble blogger with a doctorate in history, not a statistician.
A great post here by Carolyn Heinrich of the University of Texas.
She explains that Texas spends more than any other state in the nation on testing, but is seeing no returns on its heavy investment.
The cost is not just in dollars, but in the amount of time that students spend preparing for tests and taking tests, not to mention the distortion of the purpose and content of education.
This is a great analysis of how a well-meaning state can make disastrous decisions that hurt the quality of education.
