There have been rumors for months that TFA has seen a sharp decline in applicants. This may be confirmation.
Teach for America is closing down its NYC office because of a decline in recruitment.
It seems the pushback from alumni has made a difference, despite TFA’s massive PR and funding. Alumni have written many articles warning that they were ill-prepared for their assignments.
The following letter was sent to Secretary Arne Duncan by Dean Lisa Vollendorf of the College of Humanities and the Arts at San Jose State University, in response to Duncan’s plan to rate colleges of education by the test scores of students taught by their graduates. Comments on this proposal will be accepted until January 2, 2015. Please send your to: https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2014/12/03/2014-28218/teacher-preparation-issues
Dear Secretary Duncan:
As a committed educator who has devoted her life to public higher
education, I am dismayed by the onerous requirements put forth by this
proposal. At San Jose State University, which is part of the 23-campus
California State University system, we will find it fiscally impossible to
comply with so many requirements. In particular, it will cost us much more
than we can afford to track our graduates. Moreover, we are deeply troubled
by the connection between accreditation for teacher credentialing programs
and the test scores of those teachers’ students. The CSU is the largest
four-year public higher education system in the nation, and we are
committed to affordability and access. That commitment translates into
recruiting and training students who are in turn committed to working
throughout the community, including in low-income and under-served areas of
our K-12 system. By tying the test scores of those children to our
accreditation standing, the federal government is sending the message that
the only students we should be serving are those who are lucky enough to
live in privileged areas with a strong tradition of good schools. I am
proud to educate diverse students from all walks of life, and proud when
they go out into the diverse communities from which they hail to give back
and make society better. These new regulations will disincentive programs
and teachers from serving those communities. Please reconsider this overall
plan and think again about the adverse effects on those who most need
improved schools and those who prepare teachers to work in those
under-served communities. Public institutions will be so hard hit by these
regulations that we are concerned that we will no longer be able to afford
credentialing programs.
Lisa Vollendorf, PhD
Dean, College of Humanities and the Arts
San José State University
Jeff Bryant explains why test scores plummet when Common Cores tests are given. It is not because our students got dumber, and not because the standards are rigorous, but because the passing marks on the tests were set artificially high. Our kids are not stupid. The tests are.
Troy LaRaviere, head of the Chicago Principals’ Association, writes that school officials adjusted the scores of Chicago charter schools to make it appear that they made bigger gains than originally reported.
The original data showed that students in public schools were. Performing better than their peers in charter school.
(Read Peter Greene here on this shenanigan.)
This is a small part of Laraviere’s findings:
“Our findings were published in a Chicago Sun-Times Op-Ed. In addition, the Sun-Times published its own independent analysis, which affirmed our findings. Our analysis was based on a file containing the school level results of the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) assessment. This file was released by the CPS Office of Accountability in early August. That original file is no longer available on the Office of Accountability website. At some point between the publication of our findings and the release of school ratings, CPS removed the original file containing school growth data and replaced it with a different version. There are no indications or acknowledgements on the site that the data in the file has been changed.
“Fortunately, we saved the original version.
“An analysis of both versions indicates massive changes were made to the student growth data for charter schools at some point during the last few months as CPS delayed the release of school quality ratings.
“Findings
“We found these changes led to certain schools appearing to have greater academic growth by lowering the average pretest scores while leaving the posttest scores as they were. For other schools, the changes raised the pretest scores and once again left the posttest scores as they were, giving the impression of less student growth.
“The changes were made to the data for nearly every charter school while affecting less than 20 public schools. Charter school scores were changed by more than 50 percentile points in some cases while most of the public school changes were 2 points or less.”
The Chicago Sun-Times reported the story. LaRaviere said to the Sun-Times:
““In a system based on ‘choice,’ parents and other stakeholders must be provided with accurate indicators of school quality. [CPS’ ratings system] cannot serve this purpose if there are clouds of suspicion about tampering with the data used to determine these ratings,” LaRaviere said in an email.”
In a historic first, the Dr. King charter school in the New Orleans Recovery School District asked to return to the Orleans Parish Board.
“Friends of King Schools made history Tuesday by becoming the first Recovery School District charter school board to seek to return a campus to the oversight of the Orleans Parish School Board.
“The charter school board opted to leave a system built on choice, the all-charter RSD, by exercising its right to choose its authorizer. The vote to return Dr. King Charter School to the School Board was unanimous, said Orleans Parish School Board member Ira Thomas, who was in attendance. Thomas represents the district that includes King.
“The transfer must still be approved by the state school board and parish school board.”
The following email was sent to me by a Washington, D.C. insider who has been part of the Beltway scene for many years:
“Turnover at ED may be at a record high.
“One former ED staffer told me this week, “Morale at the Department is very, very low. Arne has made so many enemies among teachers and administrators and Chiefs and Congress that it has become painful [for a Dept. staff person] to be on the line supporting his policies to our (ED) constituencies in the field. The Administration has only two years, and everyone knows that if they wait until the last year, finding another job will be more difficult because of the rush, so they consider themselves ahead of the game if they bail now.” I asked about new appointments, and she said, “There should be no shortage because having a Department job with a good title for less than two years is a pretty good gig: you add the title to your resume while knowing that you won’t have to put up with the bureaucratic B.S. for very long.” And, she added: “Since Obama isn’t going to get his nominees confirmed, appointees can, instead, take a Department ‘advisory’ job, make the same pay, and avoid having to go through hearings by a hostile Senate.”
My confidant added:
“At the same time Ted Mitchell was nominated (November 2013), Obama/Duncan nominated Ericka Miller, chief administrator at Ed Trust, to be Asst Sec for Higher Ed.
“Mitchell got confirmed last spring but Miller did not.
“I heard that the higher ed community told Senators that they weren’t happy with Miller. Her higher ed experience is limited to a few semesters teaching English at tiny Mills College in Oakland. (When you were at OERI, Ericka was Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey’s LA for ed.)
“News about Miller’s nomination a year ago:
http://www.careercollegecentral.com/news/obama-nominate-education-trust-official-key-higher-education-post
“So she has been cooling her heels at Ed Trust, I gather, waiting for the Senate to act. Oddly, friends on the Hill say that Arne et al have done virtually nothing to work the Senate HELP committee to confirm her (unlike their extensive work on behalf of Ted). Now they’ve given up. No way, if the Senate Dems wouldn’t confirm her, that the GOP Senate will.
“Rumor has it that Miller, like King, will now go to ED in January as an unconfirmed Sr. Advisor to Arne (in her case on higher ed.). I haven’t seen any formal announcement … just internal Dept correspondence. Will she then be doing the work of a confirmed Asst Sec?! Who knows? This Administration is good at finding ways to bypass Congress…often understandably.
“In the last 2 yrs of the Obama Administration one will see policy (all Depts, not just at ED) overseen by “Advisors.” In Miller’s case for Higher Ed; in King’s case Shelton’s portfolio I guess.
“What is the Ed Trust-like Higher Ed approach? Ratings of Ed schools based on the achievement scores of students of teacher graduates of the school? That seems to be Arne’s philosophy; whether Miller subscribes to it I don’t know. But Ed Trust was an NCLB advocate … and one can see some similarities in the “reform” belief/approach, i.e., teach/assess/rank instructors.
“Arne’s not going away…Obama loves him. Now most of his top staff will all be technical “Advisors.” As one DC-based wag put it this week, “Don’t expect much action from ED in the next 2 years.”
According to news reports, the new federal budget strips all funding from Race to the Top. Good riddance to one of the worst, most destructive federal programs in history. Historians will one day tell us who cooked up this assault on teachers and public schools. If states wanted to be eligible for part of Arne Duncan’s $4.35 billion in Race to the Top funding, they were required to adopt the “college and career ready standards,” aka Common Core, even though no one had ever field tested them. States had to agree to evaluate teachers to a significant degree by student scores, even though there was no evidence for doing so. States had to open more charters, transferring control from public to private management. States had to create massive data systems to track students.
RTTT was an all-out assault on the teaching profession, public education, and student privacy.
For years, charter advocates have insisted that charters enroll exactly the same kids as public schools and get better results.
Daniel S. Katz writes that Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute broke the golden rule of education “reform”: he told the truth about charters, he talked about the rules of the club.
Film-maker Brian Malone of Malone Media has completed a documentary about the corporate assault on public education. the film is called Education, Inc.
Please take a look at the trailer and let Brian know what you think. His email is brian@malonetv.com
Find it here:
https://www.facebook.com/edincmovie
Trailer
REINVENTING THE STANDARDIZED TEST: Pearson has been adjusting its internal focus from print to digital; now the global education giant is out with a study of how that shift can improve testing around the world. “Preparing for a Renaissance in Assessment” argues that our current standardized tests – many of them, of course, developed by Pearson – aren’t making the grade. They’re not sensitive enough to accurately assess student performance at either the low or the high ends of the scale. They don’t give teachers timely, useful feedback. And they’re too focused on assessing low-level skills, rather than the competencies valued in today’s workplace, such as critical analysis, personal communication and hands-on problem solving. What’s the solution? Pearson touts the power of adaptive technology to customize exams. It’s also high on using computer algorithms to robo-grade student essays. (The report states as a fact that the PARCC consortium will use automated essay scoring, though member states have not yet made that determination.) The company also wants to see assessments that collect far more information than current tests, covering “multiple dimensions” of student ability.
– In short, Pearson envisions a future in which students produce ever more data . The report notes that “without such a systematic, data-driven approach to instruction, teaching remains an imprecise and somewhat idiosyncratic process that is too dependent on the personal intuition and competence of individual teachers.” Speaking of teaching, authors Peter Hill and Sir Michael Barber also argue that the field must evolve into a more tightly controlled profession with higher barriers to entry and a common framework for evaluating quality. That will require repudiating a tradition of “teaching as a largely under-qualified and trained, heavily unionized, bureaucratically controlled ‘semi-profession’ lacking a framework and a common language,” Hill and Barber write. Read the report: http://bit.ly/1w0jYvK
Diane Ravitch's blog 