Archives for the year of: 2013
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My Western Tour Begins Today

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2013 //
28

At the moment, I am looking out at the Brooklyn skyline, but tonight I will be speaking in Denver.

Tomorrow night I speak at the University of Washington in Seattle.

The next night I speak in Sacramento.

Then Berkeley.

Sunday is a day of rest in San Francisco.

September 30 I speak at Stanford University in Palo Alto.

October 1, I speak at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

October 2, I speak at Cal State Northridge.

West Coast, here I come!

Check the webpage of the Network for Public Education or my own webpage for times and places.

Categories Education Reform

Enrollments in Teacher Preparation Program Plummets

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2013 //
30

According to a new report by Edsource in California, enrollment in teacher preparation programs in that state continues to plummet.

Teacher layoffs and budget cuts combine to make teaching a bad bet as a career.

The attacks on teachers by prominent reformers no doubt add to the diminishing prestige of teaching as a profession.

The reformers’ insistence that a “great” teacher needs only five weeks of intensive training is no doubt another contributing factor.

So, while “reformers” insist that the teacher is the most important factor in closing the achievement gap and producing students prepared for college and careers, their ideas are destroying the teaching profession.

This is not the lesson to be learned from other nations that the reformers claim to admire, like Finland, where entry into the profession is highly selective and the course of preparation lasts five years.

What is happening is criminal.

Categories Accountability, Teachers and Teaching

Students in Los Angeles, Indiana Outwit iPads

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2013 //
43

Students in Los Angeles and Indiana wasted no time in cracking the security codes on their iPads and going to sites that were supposedly off-limits, like games, Facebook, and other social media.

Who says our students are not smart?

Categories Education Reform, Technology, Computers

Teacher Rebellion in Montclair

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2013 //
9

At a meeting of the Montclair, New Jersey, school board, the union president was speaking and was cut off. The teachers in the audience were outraged. So were sympathetic members of the public. Watch the video.

Categories Education Reform

Correction: US DOE Closes Down “Doing What Works” Not “What Works Clearinghouse”

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2013 //
7

A reader writes and offers this clarification. It still remains the case that nothing mandated by the test-obsessed DOE is based on research or evidence:

It’s not the What Works Clearinghouse that has been taken down. It’s still up and running: http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/

WWC does the evaluations–that’s what has been controversial because of the very, very narrow focus of their evaluation efforts.

It’s the research-to-practice website called” Doing What Works” that is no longer being supported. That was the web site that had more teacher-friendly materials and strategies. Frankly, I liked that web site and used to use it all the time for their literacy information to share with pre-service teachers. I’m quite sad that the piece that was actually useful to teachers is no longer being supported. DWW had been contracted out to AIR and WestEd — not sure if they just lost the contract, or if this is a result of the sequestration, or what. And I’m also not sure why they thought the materials need to be more “user friendly.” Some of the existing free materials are still available in the WestEd bookstore.

This was the email I had received:

From: “U.S. Department of Education”
Subject: Update on the Doing What Works Website
Date: September 20, 2013 8:29:36 PM EDT
Dear subscriber:
The U.S. Department of Education has suspended operation of the Doing What Works website. We sincerely regret this unfortunate event. You can still acquire many DWW media and materials through other channels. Please email dww@wested.org for specific instructions on how you can gain access to DWW media and materials.
Sincerely,
The DWW Team

Diane, perhaps you should post a clarification of this?

Categories U.S. Department of Education

What Albert Einstein Said About Standardizing

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2013 //
51

Thanks to Robert Shepherd for sharing this great quote:

“I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.”

—— Albert Einstein, Saturday Evening Post interview, 10/26/1929″

Categories Education Reform

A Young Teacher-in-Training, Making Sense

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2013 //
24

The author of this email requested anonymity, for obvious reasons.

 

I started reading your blog recently and it has been a lifesaver. I was a participant in the (as I learned) corporate-reform-driven Teaching Fellows program in XXXXX, and I was cut at the end of the their pre-service training.

This was, as it turned out, a good thing, since I wasn’t ready to teach (nor was anyone in the program, if the current experiences of my friends who continued in the program count for anything); I was unwilling to continue using the required behaviorist, authoritarian classroom management methods and scripted lesson plans; and I discovered that the principal that hired me had a policy of hiring only TFA and TNTP participants for the ‘core’ academic subjects.

In the process of making sense of my strange experience, I decided to read Wendy Kopp’s original thesis on her idea for a ‘Teacher Corps.’ In some ways, the original idea is very different from what it is today — she envisioned that corps members would only teach in districts experiencing shortages of fully-certified teachers (and only in high schools — there is no mention whatsoever of charter schools).

In other ways, not so different: “Like the Peace Corps did in its early days, the Teacher Corps will create a level of spirit and mystique which would rival the hype that currently lures so many who have undefined career plans into investment banking!”

But what struck me most was the advice given to Wendy Kopp by the president of the NEA, to whom she wrote about her idea of a teacher corps: “We feel strongly that the core of this Nation’s commitment to education must flow from fully prepared, career focused, and professionally oriented persons. Even a suggestion that acceptable levels of expertise could develop in short termers simply doesn’t mesh with what those of us in the business know it takes to do the job–much less with what our young people need and deserve….We certainly wish you the very best with your idea and hope you choose to devote your energies to a career in teaching. There are few more satisfying or challenging professions you could elect.”

Thanks again for your blog, and I hope I will be able to write to you in the not-so-distant future that I am teaching math, fully certified through a real teacher preparation program.

Categories Education Reform

US DOE Suspends Research Website on “What Works”

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2013 //
28

This is truly astonishing news.

Valerie Strauss reports today that the U.S. Department of Education sent out an email announcing the suspension of the “What Works Clearinghouse,” a site where the Department publishes reports about research and shows “what works.”

Valerie Strauss notes: “I won’t mention the irony in the fact that department spends millions on school reform that has no proven record of success but ran out of cash for its Doing What Works website.”

Ironic, indeed, because almost everything the Department supports as part of its “Race to the Top” has no research to support it. The Department’s insistence that teachers should be evaluated, to a significant degree, by the test scores of their students is not supported by research. The Department’s support for performance pay, based on test scores, is contradicted by decades of research. The Department’s insistence that schools of education be graded by the test scores of the students taught by their graduates has no support in research. The Department’s lavishing of millions of dollars on charter schools has mixed support, at best, in research; judging by the results from Ohio, the Department should stop the proliferation of charter schools. The Department’s quiet acquiescence to the proliferation of vouchers has no support in evaluations or research. The Department’s silence in response to budget cuts to essential services has no basis in research. The Department’s promotion of standardized testing in the early grades and even pre-kindergarten has no basis in research. The Department has placed no priority on reducing class size, even though the “What Works Clearinghouse” has found that smaller classes benefit high-needs students.

Is it any wonder that the Department decided it could no longer afford to keep open a website that shows no support for its own misguided policies?

Categories Education Reform, Race to the Top, U.S. Department of Education

DC Insiders See Bleak Future for CCSS

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2013 //
15

This poll of DC insiders shows a deep pessimism about the prospects for Common Core and reauthorization of NCLB.

Most interesting observations:

• “Any bandwidth Congress has seems to be devoted to re‐litigating the health care act.”
• “There’s no sense of compromise and no incentive on either side to try to compromise.”
• “Arne Duncan has so mangled federal education at this point that it’s going to take a new administration and secretary to reframe the debate and offer a path forward.”

Categories Duncan, Arne, Race to the Top

Florida Will Drop Common Core Tests

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2013 //
33

The architects of the Common Core standards wanted to rush them into implementation, and Arne Duncan used the federal government’s billions to coerce states to “voluntarily” adopt the standards, if necessary, sight unseen.

Now they are paying the price of their haste.

There is very little buy-in. The Tea Party on one side, and critics of standardization and scripted curricula on the other, are attacking the CCSS.

Several states have announced they will not use the Common Core tests. More will follow.

The latest is Florida, where Governor Rick Scott responded to the furor on the right, by declaring that the state was pulling out of the federally-funded testing.

Meanwhile, experienced educator Joanne Yatvin has an article in Education Week explaining that teachers will have to fix and rework the standards to avoid their design flaws and to make them appropriate for the children in their classes. No one else will, so the teachers must do what they have always done: revise the standards and use what works and drop what doesn’t.

Categories Common Core
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