Archives for the year of: 2014
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NY BATS “Joyful” at King’s Departure

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2014 //
29

The Néw York State Badass Teachers Association expressed their delight that John King is leaving as State Commissioner.

In a press release, they said:

“The New York Badass Teachers Association (BATs), an activist organization of 2250 educators, voices its joy that Commissioner John King has resigned. During his tenure as New York State Commissioner of Education, King ignored the voices of experienced educators, parents, and children, even dismissing parents as “special interests.” He was the puppet for moneyed interests in New York State who seek to privatize, and profit from, our public education system. Many New York Superintendents and Principals indicated that they had no confidence in his ability to lead the education system in New York State. “

Categories New York, U.S. Department of Education

Repeat: King Will Not Be Second Highest Ranking Official at DOE

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2014 //
18

The Néw York Times reports that John King will be “senior advisor” to Arne Duncan and the second highest ranking official in the Department. Wrong. His position does not require Senate confirmation. He is outranked by the Undersecretary and possibly by various Assistant Secretaries who were confirmed by the Senate.

Categories U.S. Department of Education

John King Will Not Be Deputy Secretary

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2014 //
21

New York Commissioner John King willl resign and join the staff of the U.S. Department of Education. Early reports said he would be Deputy Secretary of Education, but Stephanie Sumin of politico.com tweeted that he would be a “senior advisor” to Duncan. Thus, he would not require Senate confirmation.

Like Duncan, King is a strong advocate for Common Core, high-stakes testing, and value-added-modeling (judging teachers by student test scores).

Stephanie Simon (@StephanieSimon_)
12/10/14, 6:11 PM
.@JohnKingNYSED to get Jim Shelton’s portfolio at @usedgov but not the title of deputy secretary; he will be “senior advisor” to Duncan

The rumor in Néw York is that Cuomo pushed out King.

Categories New York, U.S. Department of Education

NY Commissioner John King Leaving for DC

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2014 //
49

New York State Commissioner of Education John King is stepping down to take a position with the U.S. Department of Education.

King encountered strong opposition from parents and educators for his strong advocacy of Common Core, high-stakes testing, and test-based evaluations of teachers and principals.

King’s own children attend a private Montessori school which does not believe in standardized testing.

Although news reports say he will take the #2 job at the U.S. Department of Education, that position is already filled by Ted Mitchell, Undersecretary of Education, who was recently confirmed.

Categories New York, Teacher Evaluations, U.S. Department of Education

Louisiana Teachers, Fired After Katrina, Lose Again

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2014 //
14

After Hurricane Katrina, 7,500 public school teachers and other staff were fired by the new Recovery School District. Three-quarters of them were African American. Eventually almost every public school was converted to a privately managed charter, many staffed by Teach for America corps members.

The fired teachers sued for back pay. The Louisiana Supreme Court rejected their appeal, in a 5-2 split decision.

In October, the Supreme Court had overturned decisions favorable to the teachers in lower courts. The teachers said were dismissed en masse, without evaluation or due process.

At that time, the case was described in these terms:

“The case had ramifications beyond the public purse, and beyond the emotional and financial hit experienced by the employees, whose termination letters were in some cases delivered to houses that had been washed away in the storm. It became a symbol for people who felt disenfranchised when the state, saying the Orleans Parish School Board had failed its children, took over four fifths of the city’s public schools in the fall of 2005. Many teachers objected that they were all painted with the same brush as incompetent. And analysts such as former Loyola University professor Andre Perry said the layoffs knee-capped the city’s African American middle class.”

The earlier article explained the Supreme Court’s reasoning:

“That was not why the state Supreme Court dismissed the case, however. The majority invoked the principle of res judicata, which holds that a case cannot be argued if it covers the same people and arguments as a previous case.

“Indeed, most of the individual plaintiffs were members of the United Teachers of New Orleans. That labor union in 2007 settled several similar lawsuits against the School Board for $7 million, about $1,000 per union member. The Supreme Court decided those settlements sufficiently addressed the plaintiffs and questions in the current case.

“But the majority also accepted the defendants’ arguments across the line. Even if the case had not been dismissed, “neither the OPSB nor the State defendants violated plaintiffs’ due process rights,” Justice Jeffrey Victory wrote.

“The 4th Circuit Court of Appeal had found that the School Board should have created a recall list and systematically used it to hire back employees. The Supreme Court, on the other hand, while deciding that an employee hotline set up after the storm did not constitute an official recall list, determined that “imperfect” post-Katrina responses were good enough to satisfy the state Constitution given the circumstances.

“Furthermore, the fact that almost all the jobs disappeared permanently made a difference, Victory wrote: “The Teacher Tenure Laws did not envision, nor provide for, the circumstance where a massive hurricane wipes out an entire school district, resulting in the elimination of the vast majority of teaching positions in that district. It would defy logic to find the OPSB liable for a due process violation where jobs were simply not available.”

“Nor would the state have been liable for not systematically hiring the Orleans Parish employees, Victory wrote, because the Legislature gave the Recovery School District the auth0rity to hire whomever it wanted.”

Categories Louisiana, New Orleans, Teachers

Stephen Dyer: Public Schools in Ohio Outperform Charters

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2014 //
19

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank that authorizes charters in Ohio, sponsored an evaluation of charters in that state by CREDO of Stanford. CREDO is led by Margaret (Macke) Raymond and has completed many charter evaluations. Critics gripe that CREDO is funded by the charter-loving Walton Family Foundation and that Raymond is the wife of conservative economist Eric Hanushek, but it has nonetheless gained a reputation for balance and nonpartisan judgment.

Stephen Dyer here reviews the findings of the latest CREDO study of Ohio charters. There are good charters and bad charters, but on the whole, the findings are negative for students in charters. Over 40% of charters are doing very poorly. The students in these schools fall farther behind every year.

“Overall, kids in charters lose 36 days of math and 14 days of reading to their traditional public school counterparts. Of the 68 statistically significant differences CREDO found between charters and public schools, 56 showed a negative charter school impact, and 12 showed a positive one.”

Dyer points out that the state spends more than $900 million a year for these disappointing results. This money is taken away from community public schools.

Categories Charter Schools, Ohio

Katie Osgood: Forget Winter, Here Comes PARCC!

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2014 //
77

Katie Osgood, who teaches in Chicago, describes what the Common Core and PARCC have done to her classroom. Whatever the children read is decontextualized, lifeless, bare of interest, skill-based.

 

They are engaged in “close reading,” following David Coleman’s ideology.

 

She writes:

 

My school is drowning under the ridiculous Common Core Standards. Everything I know to do to inspire my students is forbidden. Instead, we are forced to deliver truly horrible curriculum in developmentally inappropriate ways with pacing charts that move so fast all our heads are spinning. My students with special needs are shutting down, acting out, or just giving up entirely. Sometimes I hear them whisper, “I hate school”. And they are right to think that. All the teachers are upset. And every time we ask “Why? Why are you making us do this?” the answer is always the same. PARCC is coming….

 

For the past two weeks, my co-teacher and I were teaching off the standard that asks our fifth graders to compare and contrast two pieces of literature from the same genre. In my inclusion classroom, that looks like reading two myths without any teaching around what myths are, about Ancient Greece, about how the myths point to our own humanity. No, we are told to have the kids create a Venn diagram of the two texts and then practice writing a constructed response. The kids have no idea who Zeus or Hera are. They know nothing about the way myths were used to explain religion and nature to an ancient people. There is no chance to connect these ancient stories to the kids’ own lives. I hear the kids mutter, “Why are theses such funny names?” But because we are on a strict pacing guide, and because the teaching of Greek Mythology is not in the standard, we simply moved on. This week we’re on to comparing poems. In order to practice more constructed responses. To get ready for PARCC.

 

I cannot believe how we are warping the experience of reading for these children. Sometimes we are told to do a “close read”of stirring passages about the Underground Railroad for the sole purpose of pulling out the main idea and supporting details. We don’t actually talk about the Underground Railroad-letting the horror of slavery sink in. No, it’s simply about getting the skill, so the kids can demonstrate the same skill on the dreaded test. What a ridiculous disservice. I still remember my fourth grade teacher reading us a novel on Harriet Tubman and how that story was one of my first understandings of true injustice. We were inspired to create art projects, to write poetry, to pull out further texts on slavery from our library. We had class discussions. We wrote letters. We felt the text come alive. Our kids are not getting anything remotely like that experience. Because of PARCC.

 

And to make things worse, I teach at an all African-American school in a high-poverty neighborhood on Chicago’s southside. Killing the love of reading before it starts for my students is nothing short of criminal. But because of the high-stakes nature of PARCC, knowing that schools just blocks away have been closed for their poor test scores, our school is in a sickening frenzy to raise our test scores by any means necessary. Everything revolves around this test. And my students who so desperately need safe, supportive, relevant, and engaging learning environments, instead are given high-pressured, standardized, test-prep CCRAP.

 

Will anyone defend these absurd practices? Or must we go along because Arne says so. Because the College Board says so. Because the business community believes that Common Core will prepare our children to be “globally competitive.” Based on what evidence?

 

 

Categories Common Core

Stephanie Simon: Tech Industry Promoting Tech Industry

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2014 //
14

Stephane Simon has written an in-depth article about the tech industry’s campaign to promote the tech industry.

Politico writes:

“CODING CONFLICTS OF INTEREST?: A PR campaign that featured an appearance from President Barack Obama on Monday to promote computer science education is raising questions about the motives of the tech-company funders and the growing influence of corporations in public schools. The $30 million campaign touting the need to train more employees for the industry is financed by companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon – even as tech giants lobby Congress for more H-1B visas to bring in foreign programmers. Courses through the campaign’s marketer, the nonprofit Code.org, have not been formally tested but are making their way into tens of thousands of classrooms nationwide. And the coalition is pushing more than a dozen states to count computer science classes toward high school math or science graduation requirements.”

Simon writes:

““Nowhere else in education do we start by saying ‘We have a need for this in the K-5 curriculum because there are good industry jobs at Google,’” said Joanna Goode, an associate professor at the University of Oregon who works on computer science education. “I’m not doing this work to train Google employees.”
Such skepticism hasn’t slowed the industry’s momentum. Founded just last year, Code.org created three introductory programming courses for students in elementary and middle school in a matter of months. The curriculum has not been formally tested — but already, about 60,000 classrooms nationwide already have committed to using it….

“Silicon Valley CEOs have complained for years about a huge shortage of qualified programmers. In its “National Talent Strategy” released in 2012, Microsoft said it had 3,400 unfilled jobs in the U.S. for researchers, developers and engineers. And Zuckerberg has said that Facebook aims “literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find,” because they’re in short supply.

“The Bureau of Labor Statistics lists numerous categories of computer services as among the fastest-growing careers in the country; those jobs are also generally well-paid.

“Skeptics, however, aren’t convinced that there’s a real shortage — and suggest that tech companies are simply eager to bump up the supply in order to keep their labor costs down.
They note that salaries in the IT industry have not increased, in real terms, since the late 1990s — unlike salaries in other fields, such as petroleum engineering, where the labor market was undeniably tight. Furthermore, only about two-thirds of students who earn college degrees in computer and information sciences take jobs in that field within a year of graduation, according to an analysis by Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/hour-of-code-schools-obama-113408.html#ixzz3LQUUSsq1

Note:

Jeb Bush is one of the biggest boosters of online learning, virtual charters, and graduation requirements for online courses. His Foundation for Educational Excellence is funded in large part by the tech industry.

Categories Education Reform, Technology, Computers

Georgia’s Crazy Approach to Education

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2014 //
15

Myra Blackmon, a regular contributor to OnlineAthens (Georgia), here writes about the state’s devotion to failed education policies. If it isn’t working, do more of it:

Blackmon writes:

The clichéd definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly but expecting different results. That may be true in some instances, but when it comes to education in Georgia, we have our own special crazy.

While education “reform” is an issue as old as the republic, Georgia’s approaches to it are crazier than any patchwork quilt. We bounce around from one quick fix to the next. We routinely ignore research about what works, and use ideas that have never been tested.

Our legislature tries to micromanage our schools, the governor controls the policy-making state school board and we elect the state school superintendent, who is not required to know anything about education policy or the business of running schools.

We passed a new school funding formula in 1985, adjusted it several times, but never actually appropriated enough money to actually implement it. After 15 or so years of that, our elected representatives decided that there was too much “fat” in the education budget and proceeded to whack away at it.

While piling on new requirements each year, the legislature has slashed some $7.5 billion from a budget that was never fully funded in the first place. We’ve had additional, often severe cuts at the local level triggered by falling property taxes. At the same time, our public school enrollment has grown by more than 246,000 students.

As our student population has grown, we have lost or cut teaching positions. In its 2013 report “Cutting Class to Make Ends Meet,” the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute found Georgia had lost at least 9,000 teachers in four years. And in 2014, we have 2,500 fewer teachers than we had for the 2011-12 school year. The budget cuts have resulted in more than 100 districts with school years shorter than the mandated 180 days. The cumulative reduction in instructional time from budget cuts alone is significant and can produce only a negative impact on student achievement. There are also fewer courses available, thus narrowing opportunities for student growth.

What has been our response to this crisis? First, there was the great outcry about “failing schools,” based on the scores from poorly constructed, invalid tests. From there, we moved on to teacher-bashing, with a loud determination to rid our schools of the mythical hosts of bad teachers. Multitudes of experienced teachers have left the profession and today more than half of new teachers leave the field within their first five years. Surely the bad ones are about gone….

That’s right, we cut money for a decade, complaining all the while about low test scores and then decide to make it all even harder.

The “reformers” are telling us that the solution to our children’s lack of educational achievement is to make it more difficult. Test them more! Then make it harder next year again! Friends, we are buying this snake oil by the gallon. It’s just plain nuts.

Students in grades 3-5 will spend about 30 hours just taking state-mandated tests this year. And that doesn’t include all the practice tests and test preparation time that further reduces their actual learning time. That adds up to several weeks of learning time that could be put to much better use….
.

And while our schools are limping along on life support, we insist on substituting testing for learning, swapping test prep time for projects and enrichment, and setting expectations so high the failure rate is bound to go up. That is what crazy looks like in Georgia. We could stop it if we wanted to.

Myra Blackmon, a local Banner-Herald columnist, works as a freelance writer, consultant and instructional designer.

http://onlineathens.com/opinion/2014-12-06/blackmon-georgias-patchwork-approach-education-isnt-working

Categories Budget Cuts, Georgia, Standardized Testing

California: The Big Money Behind Tuck Campaign

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2014 //
18

The race for state superintendent in California cost over $26 million, far more than the governor’s race. Tom Torlakson, the incumbent, was supported by the California Teachers Association. Marshall Tuck, the charter school executive, received large sums from billionaires. The key issue between them was teacher due process rights. Torlakson appealed the Vergara decision; Tuck prouded not to do do.

The Network for Phblic Education, which endorsed Torlakson, analyzed the spending behind Tuck’s campaign.

“Heavy hitters in the “education reform” movement, namely Broad, Walton and Fisher, really stepped up to the plate for Tuck by donating millions to multiple Independent Expenditure Committees, (AKA Super PACs) as well as smaller direct contributions to Tuck’s campaign. The biggest Super PAC contributing to Tuck was the deceptively named “Parents and Teachers for Tuck for State Superintendent, 2014.” The Super PAC’s funding came from no less than a baker’s dozen of privatization focused billionaires, and assorted elites from the financial and technology sectors, with a net contribution of almost 10 million dollars.

“Parents and Teachers for Tuck also received contributions from a host of other Super PACs with names like Parents and Teachers for Putting Students First, Education Matters, EDVOICE, and Great Public Schools for Los Angeles. A closer look at these Super PACs tells us that they too are funded by essentially the same cast of characters behind Parents and Teachers for Tuck, with additional millions from the Broad, Fisher and Walton families lining the coffers of each of the Super PACs.

“But you’d be hard pressed to find a public school parent or teacher who contributed to any of the Super PACs for Tuck.”

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, Broad Foundation, California, Corporate Reformers, Teacher Tenure
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