Archives for the year of: 2013
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Kay McSpadden: Why “Invisible Man” Belongs in the Schools

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2013 //
2

These days, one is surprised to hear any good news coming out of North Carolina, which has achieved national ignominy for its governor’s and legislature’s relentless attacks on public education and teachers.

Yet there is good news, as teacher Kay McSpadden explains, the Randolph County school board reversed its decision to remove Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” from its schools and libraries. The board banned it in response to a parent who complained, saying, “The narrator writes in the first person, emphasizing his individual experiences and his feelings about the events portrayed in his life. This novel is not so innocent; instead, this book is filthier, too much for teenagers. You must respect all religions and point of views when it comes to the parents and what they feel is age appropriate for their young children to read without their knowledge.”

Educators who reviewed the book opposed banning it, but the board banned it. After this absurd decision made the board an object of national ridicule, it reversed its vote only two days later.

McSpadden explains why the book has become a classic and is appropriate for teenagers.

She writes:

“The first time I read “Invisible Man,” I, too, thought it was a hard read – a complex read – and I knew I needed to read it again to understand what I missed the first time through. A few years later when I wrote my master’s thesis, “Invisible Man” was the perfect book – so layered and complex that I could read it a dozen times and still find something new.

“That’s one reason I assign it every year to my Advanced Placement students. I hope it is a hard read – the kind that forces them to read with engaged intellects as well as with opened emotional sensibilities.

“It seems to be. My students like it – some even calling it the favorite novel we read all year. The nameless narrator’s quest to discover his identity is the same journey my students are on – making it a book that speaks to teenagers. A story that intentionally follows the mythical hero arc, it is both universal and particular, focusing on our shared humanity even as it speaks to the particular experience of being black in America.”

For anyone interested in learning more about the history of book banning and censorship of the language and imagery that appears on standardized tests, please read “The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn.”

A thought: does this episode not remind us how important fiction is? Doesn’t it remind us how literature compels us to reflect on our thoughts and feelings? Doesn’t it suggest that books become classics when we find we can return to them again and again to discover new things about the book and ourselves? These days, with the exaltation of “informational text” in the Common Core, it is good to be reminded that great literature has power that lasts a lifetime.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/09/28/4347647/sometimes-a-hard-read-is-the-most.html#.UkbgsbzWZCY#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/09/28/4347647/sometimes-a-hard-read-is-the-most.html#.UkbgsbzWZCY#storylink=cpy

Categories North Carolina

The DC Miracle Continues to Unravel

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2013 //
14

Valerie Strauss reports that the DC principals’ evaluations are in and half got low ratings. Only 11 percent were “highly effective.” As Strauss puts it, time to blame the principals for the disrict’s achievement gaps and low scores.

Categories Education Reform

Red Queen in LA Asks: “Who Is Diane Ravitch?”

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2013 //
48

Here is a good blog by a Los Angeles parent who asks the question, “who is Diane Ravitch?–and explores the answer.

I know who I am.

I am one of eight children, born in Houston and a graduate of the Houston public schools.

I was lucky enough to be admitted to Wellesley College, where my friends included incredibly talented women. I graduated in 1960.

I married a wonderful man two weeks after college, moved to New York City, and began having children. I had three sons, one of whom died of leukemia at the age of two.

I earned a Ph.D. in the history of American education from Columbia University in 1975. My mentor was the great historian Lawrence A. Cremin.

My first book was a history of the New York public school system, published in 1974. It was also my doctoral dissertation.

I was divorced in 1986. My ex-husband and I are good friends.

From 1991-93, I was Assistant Secretary of Education in the first Bush administration. Then I worked as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution for two years.

I missed New York City and moved back to Brooklyn and became an adjunct at New York University. I published more books.

In 1997, the Clinton administration appointed me to serve on the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees federal testing. Secretary Richard Riley reappointed me in 2001, and I served on that board for seven years, learning a lot about testing.

I was a fellow at three different conservative think tanks in the 1990s and early years of this century. The Manhattan Institute, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution.

In 2010, I published a book explaining that the ideas I had thought were good in theory turned out not to work, that they were actually damaging education, and I became a critic of testing, accountability, choice, and competition. My book explained why and how I lost faith in these ideas. It is “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining American Education.”

I have lived with my best friend for the past 25 years.

I still live in Brooklyn. I have written ten or eleven books and edited many more.

I have four grandsons.

My latest book –Reign of Error–is the #1 book in education and the #1 book on public policy as of this moment on amazon.

I am 75 years old.

I have no staff, no research assistant. Whatever appears under my name was written solely by me.

I love what I am doing.

I love children, and I admire those who dedicate their lives to educating children and improving the lives of children, families, and communities.

I want all children to have a wonderful education, not just the basics and testing.

I will work for a better education for all as long as I have strength and breath.

Categories Ravitch, Diane

Matt Taibbi: Who Is Looting Your Pension Fund?

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2013 //
49

In this stunning article in Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi describes the cool deals that have enriched hedge fund managers while the pensions of public employees are whittled away. His article is based on research conducted by investigative journalist David Sirota for the Institute for America’s Future. Read Sirota’s article in Salon here, with a link to the full report. And here.

A sample:

“A study by noted economist Dean Baker at the Center for Economic Policy and Research….reported that, had public pension funds not been invested in the stock market and exposed to mortgage-backed securities, there would be no shortfall at all. He said state pension managers were of course somewhat to blame, but only “insofar as they exercised poor judgment in buying the [finance] industry’s services.”

“In fact, Baker said, had public funds during the crash years simply earned modest returns equal to 30-year Treasury bonds, then public-pension assets would be $850 billion richer than they were two years after the crash. Baker reported that states were short an additional $80 billion over the same period thanks to the fact that post-crash, cash-strapped states had been paying out that much less of their mandatory ARC payments.

“So even if Pew’s numbers were right, the “unfunded liability” crisis had nothing to do with the systemic unsustainability of public pensions. Thanks to a deadly combination of unscrupulous states illegally borrowing from their pensioners, and unscrupulous banks whose mass sales of fraudulent toxic subprime products crashed the market, these funds were out some $930 billion. Yet the public was being told that the problem was state workers’ benefits were simply too expensive.

“In a way, this was a repeat of a shell game with retirement finance that had been going on at the federal level since the Reagan years. The supposed impending collapse of Social Security, which actually should be running a surplus of trillions of dollars, is now repeated as a simple truth. But Social Security wouldn’t be “collapsing” at all had not three decades of presidents continually burgled the cash in the Social Security trust fund to pay for tax cuts, wars and God knows what else. Same with the alleged insolvencies of state pension programs. The money may not be there, but that’s not because the program is unsustainable: It’s because bankers and politicians stole the money.

“Still, the public mostly bought the line being sold by Arnold, Pew and other anti-pension figures like the Koch brothers. To most, it didn’t matter who was to blame: What mattered is that the money was gone, and there seemed to be only two possible paths forward. One led to bankruptcy, a real-enough threat that had already ravaged places like Vallejo, California; Jefferson County, Alabama; and, this summer, Detroit. In Rhode Island, the tiny town of Central Falls went bust in 2011, and even after a court-ordered plan lifted the town out of bankruptcy in 2012, the “rescue” left pensions slashed as much as 55 percent. “You had guys who were living off $24,000, and now they’re getting $12,000,” says Day. Though Day and his fellow retirees are still fighting reform, he says other union workers might rather settle than file bankruptcy. Holding up an infamous local-newspaper picture of a retired Central Falls policeman in a praying posture, as though begging not to have his whole pension taken away, Day sighs. “Guys take one look at this picture and that’s it. They’re terrified.”

And here is more from the article:

“The bottom line is that the “unfunded liability” crisis is, if not exactly fictional, certainly exaggerated to an outrageous degree. Yes, we live in a new economy and, yes, it may be time to have a discussion about whether certain kinds of public employees should be receiving sizable benefit checks until death. But the idea that these benefit packages are causing the fiscal crises in our states is almost entirely a fabrication crafted by the very people who actually caused the problem. It’s like Voltaire’s maxim about noses having evolved to fit spectacles, so therefore we wear spectacles. In this case, we have an unfunded-pension-liability problem because we’ve been ripping retirees off for decades – but the solution being offered is to rip them off even more.

“Everybody following this story should remember what went on in the immediate aftermath of the crash of 2008, when the federal government was so worried about the sanctity of private contracts that it doled out $182 billion in public money to AIG. That bailout guaranteed that firms like Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank could be paid off on their bets against a subprime market they themselves helped overheat, and that AIG executives could be paid the huge bonuses they naturally deserved for having run one of the world’s largest corporations into the ground. When asked why the state was paying those bonuses, Obama economic adviser Larry Summers said, “We are a country of law. . . . The government cannot just abrogate contracts.”

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/looting-the-pension-funds-20130926page=5#ixzz2gLniZOKv
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook

Categories Democrats for Education Reform, Pensions

Should the Gates Foundation Be Sued for Wrongful Termination?

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2013 //
19

This reader notes that Bill Gates admits that we won’t know if his education “stuff” works for a decade. Yet based on Gates’ support for evaluating teachers by student test scores, teachers are losing their jobs. These are real people, who need to feed their children, not data points in an experiment.

Meanwhile, most researchers agree that the metric is flawed, unreliable, and unstable. Thus comes this reader’s suggestion:

“Here’s a suggestion offered only partly tongue-in-cheek.. The Gates Foundation should be joined as a repondent in every suit filed for wrongful termination as a consequence of any Gates sponsored or designed teacher evaluation system. What could be more quintessentially American than that? Moreover, when suing, it’s always better to go after the party with deep pockets. After all, should cash-strapped urban districts that have had these evaluation systems forced upon them be held solely liable?”

Categories Accountability, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

NYCDOENUTS Reviews “Reign of Error”

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2013 //
2

A NYC teacher who calls his or her blog NYCDOENUTS has written a wonderful review of “Reign of Error.”

Teachers understand that this book may be (to use Arne Duncan’s favorite phrase) a “game changer.”

You see, big money can buy legislators, it can buy ads, it can buy media.

But words and ideas can beat big money in a democracy, if we organize.

NYCDOENUTS concludes:

“In the final chapters of the book Ravitch takes the next step by offering many solutions to our current problems in education. It is in this final third of the book where I believe she exceeds her previous book The Death and Life of the Great American School System. The solutions she offers are nothing radical or earth shattering, and none of them would change the system overnight. However they are real solutions (not the next big thing that will be thrown out in 3 years, after several billion dollars are wasted and millions more have dropped out) that would bring real positive results over time. Things like reduced class size, wraparound services, and strengthening the teaching profession. These are real solutions that any teacher who has spent more than two years in a classroom knows are necessary for progress.

“Ravitch has done all of the hard work for us activists. She has made many clear and well researched arguments, and advocated for the real reforms that real educators want. Reign of Error may just be the catalyst that finally pushes back the tide of education reform. Once the public is truly informed and sees through the lies, double talk, and half truths, of the reformers it will be impossible to stop the push back.”

Categories Reign of Error

Patrick Welsh: Four Decades of Failed Reforms

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2013 //
16

Patrick Welsh is an experienced teacher who writes often in the Washington Post about the real problems of schools. If only the editorial board of the Post–besotted with the failed strategies of corporate reform–would heed the wisdom of Patrick Welsh!

In this article, he describes the many reforms that have been imposed in teachers in his high school since he started teaching forty years ago. The article refers to “four decades of failed school reforms.”

Now we are in the worst of all reforms, where the “reforms” are devised by non-educators or people who taught for a year or two. Where non-educators or those with minimal experience are made state commissioner of education and use their power to demoralize teachers and destroy the teaching profession.

This era will end. But how many excellent teachers will we lose before the reform industry admits its failure and goes away?

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Humor, Teachers and Teaching

Can Schools End Poverty?

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2013 //
44

Matt Bruenig has written in many journals. He also has
a blog, where this post appeared. He analyzes a fairly
straightforward question: Can schools end poverty? The column is a
commentary on the “reformers” who say that we can’t end poverty
until we fix schools, or something to that effect. We have heard
the same statement from Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan, Joel Klein,
Bill Gates, and others. Duncan says that even the President agrees.
Bruenig analyzes these three statements:

  1. Education is a way to end
    poverty.
  2. Education is the best
    way     to end poverty.
  3. Education
    is the only way to end
    poverty.

He starts his short analysis with
this statement: These are all false, but since number
three is the one Rhee and Duncan and the education reformer crowd
pushes, let’s start there. It is flatly not the case that to end
poverty you need to alter education. Americans should know this.
Starting from the 1960s, we
as a society cut outrageously high rates of elderly poverty by
71%. We did that by sending old people checks called
Social Security. We also know from international data that
low-poverty countries get that way through tax and transfer
schemes, not unlike Social Security (I, II).
If you are saying nothing but education will dramatically cut
poverty, when things other than education absolutely will and have,
you are an enemy of the poor. You are contributing to a discursive
world where people ignore the easiest, most proven ways to cut
poverty. If this is true, and I think it is, all the
energy and billions expended on school reforms that are totally
lacking in evidence–like VAM and merit pay and privatization of
public funds–is a handy distraction from meaningful ways to end
poverty.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Poverty, Rhee, Michelle

Bill Gates: We Won’t Know for a Decade Whether Our Ideas Work

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2013 //
109

In the early years of this century, Bill Gates felt certain
that he knew how to fix the nation’s high schools. He pumped $2
billion into breaking them into smaller schools, often Nader the
same roof.

In 2008, he decided he was not pleased with the
results,and he dropped that idea.

Then, he decided that teacher evaluation was broken, and he would use his billions–plus the
billions of Race to the Top–to create a metric that would identify
the best and worst teachers.

He adamantly opposed reducing class size, even though his own children go to a school known for small classes.

His theory was that “bad” teachers identified by his
metric would be fired, while the “best” teachers would get more
money and larger classes. He gave hundreds of millions dollars to
district to develop the measuring stick, but so far there has been
no results.

The federal government, fully on board with the Gates
idea, now has almost every state following agates’ plan. As
Valerie Strauss points out on her blog, Gates now says
that it will take about a decade to determine whether his latest
hunch actually works.

So far, it has failed to produce a reliable
metric or results anywhere. So far, it has failed wherever it was tried, and billions of dollars have been wasted.

In the meanwhile, real teachers are being fired and losing their livelihood based on Gates’ latest big
idea. Strauss writes: “Hmmm. Teachers around the country are
saddled every single year with teacher evaluation systems that his
foundation has funded, based on no record of success and highly
questionable “research.”

And now Gates says he won’t know if the
reforms he is funding will work for another decade. But teachers
can lose their jobs right now because of reforms he is funding.

In the past he sounded pretty sure of what he was doing. In this 2011 oped
in The Washington Post (cited in Valerie’s post), he wrote: “What should policymakers do? One
approach is to get more students in front of top teachers by
identifying the top 25 percent of teachers and asking them to take
on four or five more students.” The problem with Gates is that he
tries out his ideas as if he were playing with toy soldiers.

Doesn’t anyone around him have the chutzpah to tell him that his
untested hunches don’t work and are ruining the lives of decent
people? Will anyone in his foundation be held accountable for his
latest foray into redesigning the nation’s public schools? I have
some really good ideas for him in my latest book. They have solid
research behind them. They work. They help people instead of
ruining the lives of others. They do no harm. I wish he would read
it. He could leave a lasting legacy of success rather than a long string of costly failures that harmed people who were doing good work.

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations

Suburban New York Parents Don’t Believe Common Core Tests

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2013 //
28

New York’s first Common Core tests, administered last spring, produced a dramatic score decline. 70% of the students across the state allegedly “failed.” State education leaders said the tests set a new “benchmark.” They implied that the tests demonstrated the failure of the state’s schools, that more “reform” was needed, and that more years of testing and accountability would cure the widespread “failure.”

However, suburban parents in successful districts see the matter differently. They know they have excellent schools. They don’t believe in the validity of the state tests.

The low scores have ignited a revolt against the state tests among parents and local educators.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

“But the state is looking at a hard sell, particularly in the Lower Hudson Valley and on Long Island, as a growing movement of educators and parents is questioning or outright dismissing the test results for grades three to eight. Their main argument: Most local students already go to good colleges and do quite well, thank you, so the state’s findings can’t be right.

“What do these results mean, that our kids are not at the level we thought?” asked Lisa Rudley, who has three children in the Ossining schools and recently co-founded a statewide group, NYS Allies for Public Education, that plans to fight “excessive” testing and sharing of student data. “I think parents are informed about what the state is saying, but they don’t like it and don’t accept it.”

“Her group has started a campaign urging parents to send their test-score reports back to Education Commissioner John King in Albany. The group is asking parents to write on the envelope: “Invalid test scores inside.”

The state’s strategy backfired. It has fueled the resistance to high-stakes testing.

Categories Common Core, New York, Parents, Pearson
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