Philadelphia journalist Will Bunch connects lots of dots: school closings in Philadelphia, the senseless killing of a black teen in Brooklyn, obscene income inequality, a new high in the stock market.
When people are disrespected and unheard, they explode.
Iowa officials are very proud of a school that increased test scores of low-income kids. One reason, officials say, was that the school eliminated morning recess.
This teacher says the tradeoff is a bad deal. Was it to make time for more instruction or more test prep?
Chris Liebig engaged in a Twitter debate with State Commissioner Jason Glass.
Chris writes:
“You can be the judge of whether the discussion is going anywhere. But it seems clear that Glass must have a different definition of test prep than I have. Mine would be: single-mindedly pursuing higher test scores at the expense of other values that are cumulatively more important. One such value is providing a humane school experience. Another is preserving a child’s enjoyment of learning. Another is not teaching authoritarian values. Another is giving enough attention to subjects that aren’t tested or don’t lend themselves to testing.”
Another question: Would Jason Glass want this for his own children?
Kris Neilsen wrote the most amazing post I have ever posted.
It was called “N.C. Teacher: I Quit.”
It went viral.
On one day, it was opened over 66,000 times.
It went around the world and was reprinted on many other blogs.
Here is one of his latest posts.
Whatever the strengths of the Common Core standards for the upper grades, they have received very negative reviews from educators experienced with very young children.
This teacher explains why the Common Core standards are startlingly indifferent to basic principles of child development.
NYC officials prepared a guide
for parents to help their children survive the stress and trauma of the upcoming tests.
Please read it.
It sounds chilling.
It says the state is about to subject your child to an ordeal. Here is how you should deal with it.
What do you think?
How many times have you heard Arne Duncan or some corporate easer complain that they have to outsource jos because Americans lack the skills that their industry needs?
A new book by Wharton School of Professor Peter Capelli debunks th claim in his new book “Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs?”
Andrea Gabor reviews the book here. It sounds like a good read and sharp rebuke to those who continue to bash our public schools.
New Jersey’s Commissioner of Education Chris Cerf has the good fortune to be leader of a state with some of the best schools and school districts in the nation. New Jersey also has some districts with high concentrations of poverty and racial segregation, where test scores are very low.
But New Jersey–inspired by the example of Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top–will attempt to raise test scores by imposing a teacher evaluation program. Will this address the root cause of poor academic achievement? Of course not.
In theory, it will identify the “best” teachers and the “bad” teachers so that the latter may be fired.
In reality, such statistical models have not worked anywhere because there are so many confounding, unmeasurable, and unknown variables.
But Commissioner Cerf is quite certain this plan will work, despite all the pitfalls and lack of evidence.
Jersey Jazzman explains here in detail why Cerf’s certainty is faith-based.
What is predictable is that teachers will be demoralized as they see their profession turned into a testing game, teaching to the test will become the norm, and teachers will figure out how to game the system. In time, teachers will avoid the high-risk students to preserve their jobs.
This teacher-evaluation-by test-scores is junk science.
What we really need is a way to evaluate our policymakers and hold them accountable for the damage they inflict on students, teachers, schools, and communities.
When Ohio first opened charter schools, advocates claimed they could “save poor kids from failing schools,” while costing less. They would be so effective that at-risk students would learn more, even close the achievement gap. And they would be so efficient that the state would pay less for education.
Of course, it hasn’t worked out this way. A new analysis by a public policy think tank in Ohio reveals that charters cost more than public schools, and with rare exceptions, get worse results.
Meanwhile, the charters siphon money away from more effective public schools.
“Innovation Ohio has analyzed data from the Ohio Department of Education that demonstrates that the way charter schools are funded in this state has a profoundly negative impact on the resources that remain for the 1.6 million kids in Ohio’s traditional public schools.
“In the vast majority of cases — even in many urban school districts — the state is transferring money to charter schools that perform substantially worse than the public schools from which the students supposedly “escaped.”
Key Findings:
“Because of the $774 million deducted from traditional public schools in FY 2012 to fund charters, children in traditional public schools received, on average, $235 (or 6.5%) less state aid than the state itself said they needed.
“More than 90% of the money sent to rated charter schools in the 2011-2012 school year went to charters that on average score significantly lower on the Performance Index Score than the public schools students had left.
“Over 40% of state funding for charters in 2011-2012 ($326 million) was transferred from traditional public districts that performed better on both the State Report Card and Performance Index.
Marc Tucker has written two posts on his blog saying that I am wrong not to support the Common Core standards.
Stephen Krashen, the eminent literacy scholar, disagrees with Tucker. He posted this response on Tucker’s blog and shared it with me.
Krashen writes:
We need to distinguish discussion (1) of the content of the standards and (2) whether we should have standards.
The content of the standards
Contrary to Tucker’s assertion, it is easy to field-test the standards. If standards are simply “what we want students to know and be able to do,” we could see if any students meet the standards. This is called “known-group” validity: Can those who experts regard as well-educated students pass the tests? Let teachers (or anybody else) select students at various levels considered to have the skills and knowledge considered to be satisfactory for students at that level. See if they can pass the tests.
The real issue
But the content of the standards is not the real issue. The real issue is whether we should have standards and tests based on standards. In his post of March 14, Tucker insisted that “We will not improve the performance of poor and minority students by suppressing standards.” I think we will.
The common core standards and the tests that are their spawn will cost billions. The big money is being spent on getting all students connected to the internet so they can take the tests. And there are a lot of tests and there will be a lot more, far more than we need (Krashen, 2012). And once the tests are set up, there will be constant upgrading, new equipment (remember Ethernet?), and of course revision of the tests when it turns out that the CC$$ are not improving achievement. This is one of the greatest boondoggles of all time (Krashen and Ohanian, 2011).
There is a great deal of evidence that the real problem in education in the US is our high level of poverty: When we control for poverty, our international test scores are near the top in the world (Carnoy and Rothstein, 2013). Poverty means food deprivation, poor health care, and lack of access to books (Berliner, 2009; Krashen, 1997), and improving diet, health care and providing access to books (libraries) improves school performance (for recent research on the impact of school libraries, see Krashen, Lee and McQuillan, 2012). The billions we are investing in testing should be used to help solve the problem, not just measure it. A most investment in food programs, school nurses, and school libraries will have a huge impact, not just on test scores but on children’s well-being as well.
Tucker’s position is that tough standards, tough-minded accountability, will finally get
educators moving, and force them to teach effectively. This is an insult to the teaching profession, and is not supported by the evidence: As noted above, when we control for poverty, our students do very well. Middle class students in well-funded schools score at or near the top of the world. This strongly suggests that the problem is not teacher quality (or schools of education, or unions). Of course we are always interested in improving teaching, but there is no crisis. The problem is poverty.
Some sources:
There are a lot of tests: Krashen, S. 2012. How much testing? https://dianeravitch.net/2012/07/25/stephen-‐ krashen-‐how-‐much-‐testing/ and: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/
Boondoggle: Krashen, S. and Ohanian, S. 2011. High Tech Testing on the Way: a 21st Century Boondoggle? http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in- dialogue/2011/04/high_tech_testing_on_the_way_a.html
Control for poverty: Carnoy, M and Rothstein, R. 2013, What Do International Tests Really Show Us about U.S. Student Performance. Washington DC: Economic Policy Institute. 2012. http://www.epi.org/).
Food deprivation, poor health care, lack of access to books, Berliner, D. 2009. Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/poverty-and-potential; Krashen, S. 1997. Bridging inequity with books. Educational Leadership 55(4): 18-22.
Impact of school libraries: Krashen, S., Lee, SY, and McQuillan, J. 2012. Is The Library Important? Multivariate Studies at the National and International Level Journal of Language and Literacy Education: 8(1). http://jolle.coe.uga.edu/
The mass closing of public schools in Chicago should be the lead story on every news channel tonight. It is not. The fact is that a dozen years of No Child Left Behind and three-plus years of Race to the Top has persuaded the American public that closing schools is “reform.”
It is not.
It is a dereliction of responsibility. It is an abdication of any oath of office that a public official in this country takes. It is a betrayal of any commitment to equality of educational opportunity. It is a capitulation to corporate interests. I wish I could be in Chicago on March 27 to stand with the teachers, parents, and students who have been abandoned by Rahm Emanuel and all those who carry out his shameful orders to close neighborhood public schools.
Here is the statement of Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union:
CHICAGO –The Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said the following at a news conference regarding proposed school closings:
“We are standing here today in the beautiful Mahaila Jackson elementary school in our city’s Auburn-Gresham neighborhood. This school was named for one of the greatest gospel singers in our nation’s history, a woman who sang at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral, a woman who was instrumental in our Civil Rights struggle. Unfortunately, we are gathered here today not to talk about this pioneer or even about how this school does an outstanding job of providing a great learning community for some of our special needs students. We are standing here because this school, along with scores of others, has been targeted for closure by Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago Public School district….
“Closing 50 of our neighborhood schools is outrageous and no society that claims to care anything about its children can sit back and allow this to happen to them. There is no way people of conscious will stand by and allow these people to shut down nearly a third of our school district without putting up a fight. Most of these campuses are in the Black community. Since 2001 88% of students impacted by CPS School Actions are African-American. And this is by design.
“Closing 50 schools is not grand or glorious. This is nothing to celebrate or marvel.
“These actions unnecessarily expose our students to gang violence, turf wars and peer-to-peer conflict. Some of our students have been seriously injured as a result of school closings. One died. Putting thousands of small children in harm’s way is not laudatory.
“There is no safety plan. There is no transportation plan. The city has already raised CTA fares and now they expect parents to put their five-year-old on a crowded city bus in order for them to get to school, when they used to be able to walk to a school in their neighborhood. The way this is being done is an insult and it is disrespectful.
“The CTU is the bargaining unit for 30,000 of the district’s employees SEIU and Unite HERE represent thousands more. Yet CPS did not feel obligated to brief any of us in advance of today’s announcements. Instead, they called a few aldermen last night and then summoned principals this morning at 6:00 a.m. to spring the news on them. They had no consideration for their employees or our students—at all. They have no regard for our parents. They do not care about the children of their employees, many of whom also attend our public schools.
“I also find it extremely cowardly for the Mayor’s administration to announce these actions while he is vacationing out of town. They are also making this announcement days before people are headed into spring break. CPS has spun our entire district into utter chaos, a management model perfected on Clark Street where they are headquartered.
“This city cannot destroy that many schools at one time; and, we contend that no school should be closed in the city of Chicago. These actions will not only put our students’ safety and academics careers at risk but also further destabilize our neighborhoods.
“This is why we intend to rally, united and strong, on Wednesday, March 27 to send a signal that we are sick and tired of being bullied and betrayed. Some of us are going to put our bodies on the line—because a threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And when we declare the victory, some of us will sit back and sing the lines of one of Mahaila Jackson’s songs—How I Got Over.
“Rahm Emanuel has become the ‘murder mayor.’ He is murdering public services. Murdering our ability to maintain public sector jobs and now he has set his sights on our public schools. But we have news for him: We don’t intend to die. This is not Detroit. We are the city of big shoulders and so we intend to put up a fight. We don’t know if we can win, but if you don’t fight, you will never win at all.
“The people of this city can no longer sit back and allow this mayor, his school board and his corporate cronies to run rough-shod over democracy. They’ve turned their backs on affordable housing; turned their backs on job creation; and, now they’re turning their backs on our students, their families and our schools. We are tired of playing their school reform games. But who are the winners and losers? Who made the rules? And what do they keep telling the losers to keep them playing their games?
“We do not have a utilization crisis. What we have is a credibility crisis. CPS continues to peddle half-truths, lies and misinformation in order to justify its campaign to wipe out our schools and carry out this corporate-driven school reform nonsense. CPS continues to peddle an ‘underutilization myth’ and ‘billion dollar deficit lie’ as justification for their actions. When research and the facts prove them wrong they simply reconfigure their talking points in order to further perpetrate their sham and to keep us playing their school reform games.
“For the past several weeks there has been a resounding cry against school actions from parents, students, educators and community stakeholders. The Mayor and the CEO have ignored these petitions for justice at these hearings and apparently have not listened to single word that was said. Parents have been direct, loud and clear. Students have been loud and clear. Principals have been loud and clear. Teachers, paraprofessionals and school clinicians have been loud and clear: DO NOT CLOSE OUR SCHOOLS! GIVE US THE RESOURCES WE NEED, RIGHT NOW, TO SUPPORT OUR STUDENTS AND GIVE THEM THE EDUCATION THEY DESERVE.
“Enough with the lies and public deception: School closings will not save money and taxpayers will not see costs benefits in two years. Why? Because vibrant school communities will be quickly transformed into abandon buildings, neighborhood eyesores and public safety hazards.
“This is the mayor’s 25% solution. Yet, who will be held accountable when one of our students is harmed as a result of these policy decisions? And, who will be the ones to ensure justice is served?”
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The Chicago Teachers Union represents 30,000 teachers and educational support personnel working in the Chicago Public Schools, and by extension, the more than 400,000 students and families they serve. The CTU is an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers and the Illinois Federation of Teachers and is the third largest teachers local in the United States and the largest local union in Illinois. For more information please visit CTU’s website at http://www.ctunet.com.
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