Archives for the year of: 2014
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Peter Greene: Did Connecticut Discover a Way to Measure Grit?

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2014 //
23

In the ever-ending boundaries of educational science, there is a new frontier: measuring grit.

Peter Greene discovers a striking phenomenon: apparently Connecticut has unlocked the secret of Grittology.

“I am sure that all of us, all around the country, want to know how this is done. I am sure that phones are ringing off the hook in CT DOE offices as other educational thought leaders call to ask for the secret of grittological measurements.

“Was it a physical test? Did they make teachers do the worm for a thousand yards? Did they make teachers peel onions and sing “memories” while watching pictures of sad puppies, all without crying? Did they have to compete in three-armed wheelchair races? Were they required to complete a season of the Amazing Race as participants? Did they have to stand stock still while being pelted with medium-sized canteloupes?

“Or perhaps it was a study of their personal history. We know that grittologists have determined that people who have tended not to quit things in the past probably won’t quit things in the future (who knew?) So maybe the state looked for people who didn’t quit things, like lifelong members of the Columbia Record Club or folks who actually finished an unfinishable sundae or who stayed in a bad marriage. Maybe the state only accepted cancer survivors or acid reflux sufferers or folks with chronic halitosis.

“Or maybe Connecticut has a special computerized grit test. Take a PARCC exam on a computer with a bad internet connection or using a keyboard on which some eighth grader has previously moved around all the keys. Create a word document on a computer running Windows 3.0– no swearing at the blue screen of death. Play HALO with a six-year-old on your team. Is there a grit praxis?”

Keep your eyes on Connecticut. They measure grit there. But be sure to read the comments where you will learn most teachers who applied to the program were accepted. Guess that all teachers in Connecticut have grit.

Categories Connecticut

Teacher to David Coleman: Yes, What Children Think and Feel Does Matter

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2014 //
41

Veteran teacher Eileen Riley Hall has some advice for David Coleman, architect of the Common Core standards.

Coleman famously said, in taped remarks at the New York State Education Department, that

 

“As you grow up in this world, you realize people really don’t give a (expletive) about what you feel or what you think.”

 

That remark, she says, typifies “all that is wrong with the soulless Common Core standards and its rigid, test-obsessed approach to education.”

 

They focus “myopically on intellectual skills theoretical children should have when they graduate from high school and then builds backward. However, a good teacher, like a good parent, begins by considering the needs of the real children in her classroom and builds forward. Children are not just walking brains, but bodies, hearts and souls as well. Contrary to Mr. Coleman’s crass assertion, our children’s thoughts and feelings should be the heart of our schools.”

 

She offers him a few lessons, based on her many years in the classroom:

 

“You don’t make kids smarter just by making school harder. If you’ve seen the convoluted Common Core elementary math lessons, you know this. Dictating one method of teaching doesn’t make sense, especially when that method complicates simple lessons, frustrating the majority of students. Schools should offer students a variety of ways to approach subjects, increasing opportunities for success.

However, the suffocating standardized tests demand one rigid methodology that does not allow teachers to tailor lessons to their students. Too often, students feel like failures when they are simply not developmentally ready for material or need a different strategy. Success is motivating; repeated failure is not. Build on children’s strengths; don’t hammer them with their weaknesses.”

 

A happy school is a productive school. “Children are in school for seven hours a day, five days a week, for 13 years. School, especially in the elementary years, should cultivate a child’s love of learning. Yet, the Common Core scorns all the creative endeavors (music, literature, art) that inspire students to imagine and dream. Instead of poetry, we now have technical reading. Imagination may not be quantifiable, but it keeps kids invested and ultimately yields far more impressive results than relentless test prep.”

 

What if all the millions now spent on new Common Core-aligned materials and consultants, new software and hardware for the testing, were spent instead to meet the needs of children? “Free lunch and breakfast programs; social workers and counselors; after-school, mentoring and tutoring programs; and smaller classes.”

 

If there had been any experienced classroom teachers on the committee that wrote the Common Core, these lessons might have been learned before they were written in stone and imposed on 46 states by the lure of Race to the Top gold. If the writing committee included as many teachers as testing experts, the Common Core would look very different and would not be facing massive pushback across the nation.

Categories Common Core

Wendy Lecker: Why So Many Segregated Charter Schools in Connecticut?

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2014 //
33

Civil rights attorney Wendy Lecker calls out the charter sector of Connecticut for its unabashed practice of racial segregation.

A new report from Connecticut Voices for Children finds that charter schools are hyper segregated and that they exclude children with disabilities and English language learners.

Don’t expect the State Commissioner of Connecticut to care: he was co-founder of one of the state’s most segregated charter chains.

Charter founders think they are advancing civil rights by creating segregated schools but that turns history on its head, Lecker writes:

“As the Voices report notes, the practices engaged in by charter schools and condoned by the state reveal a troubling approach to choice. For them, choice is about advancing the individual interests of families, rather than any broad community wide educational goals; such as desegregation. The authors found that when individual interests are the goal of choice, then choice policies undermine the goal of equitable educational opportunity for all students.

“The idea of equity for all was the driving force behind the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. declared that “I am never what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.”Lyndon Johnson’s motto was “doing the greatest good for the greatest number.”

“The principles of communal good underpinned Connecticut’s commitment to school integration. Connecticut’s Supreme Court deemed that having children of different backgrounds learn together is vital “to gain the understanding and mutual respect necessary for the cohesion of our society.” The late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall maintained: “Unless our children learn together, there is little hope that our people will learn to live together.”

The charters have a peculiar idea of civil rights, one that does not reflect the views of Dr. King or Justice Marshall:

“Choice as practiced by charter schools perverts the notion of integration. In its annual report, under the goal of reducing racial isolation and increasing racial and ethnic diversity, Achievement First Bridgeport wrote that the school’s “African-American, Hispanic and low-income students will outperform African-American, Hispanic and low-income students in their host district and state-wide, reducing racial, ethnic and economic isolation among these historically underserved subgroups.”

“Achievement First defines integration as children of color getting better standardized test scores. Justice Marshall must be spinning in his grave.”

In the eyes of charter leaders, higher test scores–achieved by pushing out o excluding low-performing students–trumps integration.

Categories Charter Schools, Connecticut, Corporate Reformers, Privatization, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Standardized Testing

Does Data Matter to the Status Quo Defenders?

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2014 //
83

Reader Chiara Duggan says that study after study shows that charters and vouchers demonstrate that data don’t change their minds. She is right. The charters that get high test scores systematically exclude the most challenging students. Some public schools get higher test scores because they serve affluent districts. The differences between charters, vouchers, and public schools tend to be small if they enroll the same students. But the Status a quo pays large numbers of people to argue that the Status Quo–the destruction of an essential institution of a democratic society–is “working” and has positive effects. When the test scores don’t support their argument, they shift the goal post and claim that the private schools–the charters and vouchers–have higher graduation rates. They take care not to mention attrition rates, which are very high. In the case of Milwaukee, the “independent” evaluators from the Walton-funded University of Arkansas quiet.y acknowledged that 56% of those who started in voucher schools left before graduation.

Chiara writes:

Oh, data doesn’t matter to ed reformers. It’s a belief system. Private is better than public. You can’t move someone off a belief with numbers.

How many times have you see a voucher study like this over the years? Once a year for two decades? Yet Democrats and Republicans and paid lobbyists and pundits still promote publicly-funded private schools over public schools. Vouchers have expanded every single year in this country under ed reformers. There isn’t a scintilla of evidence that they’re any better than the public schools they undermine and then replace, but it simply doesn’t matter.

“Students attending private schools receiving taxpayer-funded vouchers in a new statewide program did not score as high overall as public school students on state tests in reading and math, according to data released Tuesday by the Department of Public Instruction.”

It doesn’t matter what public schools do; improve, don’t improve, whatever. They are the designated punching bags for the punditry set. It’s knee-jerk at this point. Heck, a lot of people are PAID to bash them. It’s a smart career move.

I think this may inadvertently benefit public school students. As it becomes more and more clear that privately-run schools don’t outscore public schools in any meaningful way, the goalposts will move, and standardized test scores will no longer be the measure. I think it’s already happening. Ed reformers may actually do something that benefits public schools, and deemphasize the lunatic, obsessive fealty to test scores. They’ll do it it only to defend their own schools, but public schools may benefit collaterally.

Read more: http://host.madison.com/news/local/education/blog/dpi-wisconsin-voucher-schools-show-lower-test-scores-compared-to/article_df494180-cd29-538a-80be-a923cded39aa.html#ixzz2yNzhk7yP

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Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Data and Data Mining, Research, Vouchers

“Common Core: Building the Machine”

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2014 //
50

This is an interesting documentary on the Common Core, featuring some of its strongest supporters at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (as well as guest cameos by Jeb Bush and Bill Gates) and some of its strongest critics, notably Sandra Stotsky and James Milgram, both of whom served on the “validation committee,” but refused to sign off on the standards. It was produced by the Home School Legal Defense Association (represented by Mike Farris). So far as I know, home schoolers are not bound to abide by the Common Core standards, although they may need them if they take the SAT or the ACT.

 

The documentary makes two very provocative points about Common Core.

 

One is a civic critique of the undemocratic way in which the Common Core standards were written: by a small committee that included no classroom teachers, no specialists in early childhood education or in the teaching of children with disabilities or of children who are English language learners, and no working teachers of the subjects at issue. Customarily it takes two, there, or four years to wire state standards, because of the need to hear from different constituencies, especially those that are knowledgeable and directly affected. The Common Core standards were written in a year and adopted by 45 or 46 states in a year, because of the lure of $4.35 billion in federal dollars. The process was speedy and efficient, but it was not democratic. The absence of a democratic process has fed distrust, which in turn has created an angry backlash. The documentary has a few poignant moments about how democracy works. The writers of the Common Core would have benefited immensely by a reminder of what democracy means and how it should work.

 

The second interesting point that the film raises is whether a single set of national standards can meet the needs of both college-ready and career-ready. Some people complain that the standards are too hard, others complain that they are too easy. This is a contradiction at the heart of the CCSS.

 

There has been a conscious effort to say that “the train has left the station,” but that’s not a good enough reason to jump aboard (how do you jump aboard a train that has already left the station anyhow?).

 

First, you want to be sure that the train is going where you want to go. Second, be careful about who is driving the train.

 

I, for one, am not convinced that the train has left the station. I see more indications every day that the promoters of Common Core are getting desperate because of the negative public reaction. There is a palpable sense that the public can’t figure out how we got national standards in the absence of any democratic discussion about their pluses and minuses. And so we have Gates and newspaper editorials and television advertising and other promotional activities to sell us on something that not many people understand.

 

Nope, the train is still in the station, and a lot of parents and teachers need to be convinced and a lot of revisions need to be made before this train goes anywhere. This will be hard because it seems that the engineer, the conductor, and the crew have moved on to other jobs.

 

 

 

 

Categories Common Core

Breaking News: NC Judge Blocks Anti-Tenure Law

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2014 //
87

A judge in Guilford County, North Carolina, ruled that the district and Durham Counties do not have to comply with a state law intended to take away tenure.

It’s not yet clear whether e the ruling applies statewide or only to the districts that opposed the law.

But for now, teachers view it as vindication of their claim that the law violates the state constitution.

Districts were supposed to offer $500 a year for the top 25% of their teachers if they abandoned due process rights.

“RALEIGH, N.C. — A Guilford County judge on Wednesday halted a requirement that North Carolina school districts offer a quarter of their teachers multi-year contracts as an enticement for them to give up their so-called “career status” protections.

“Special Superior Court Judge Richard Doughton issued an injunction that allows Guilford County Schools to evade the requirement, which lawmakers passed last year as part of the state budget.

“Durham Public Schools last month joined a lawsuit filed by the Guilford County school district, and more than a quarter of the 115 school districts statewide have expressed opposition to contract requirement.

“Under career status, commonly referred to as tenure, veteran teachers are given extra due process rights, including the right to a hearing if they are disciplined or fired.

“Lawmakers asked school districts to identify the top 25 percent of their teachers and offer them new four-year contracts with $500 annual salary increases. In exchange, those teachers would lose their tenure rights. The provision aims to move North Carolina to a performance-based system for paying teachers instead of one based on longevity.

“A spokeswoman for Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger, who initially crafted the tenure elimination proposal, said legislative leaders plan to seek an appeal of Doughton’s injunction.

“It is hard to fathom why a single judge and a small group of government bureaucrats would try to deny top-performing teachers from receiving a well-deserved pay raise,” Amy Auth said in an email. “We will appeal this legal roadblock and continue to fight for pay increases for our best teachers.”

Because if low pay and the legislsture’s attacks on teachers, North Carolina has experienced unprecedented resignations among veteran teachers. The legislature, for example, abolished the respected five-year NC Teaching Fellows program while allotting $5 million to TFA.

Categories North Carolina, Teacher Tenure

Greet the Hedge Funders and Cuomo with a Picket in the Pines!

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2014 //
24

When the union-busting Wall Street crowd gathers with Governor Cuomo at their pretentious “Camp Philos,” there won’t be any public. School parents or teachers there. The few willing and able to fork over $1,000 were told they were not welcome. So Cuomo and his buddies want to “reform” public schools without the voices of those who matter most: Students, patents, and teachers.

The New York State United Teachers plans to picket their exclusive gabfest. Message: our public schools are not for sale.

« View Resources

Picket in the Pines! Put the PUBLIC back in public education!

Sunday, May 4, from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Lake Placid, NY.
Register online: http://www.cvent.com/d/h4qslh
RSVP via Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/events/234136926786807

WHY:

Education Reform Now, a union-bashing “reform” group run by Wall Street hedge fund managers, is hosting a retreat at Lake Placid May 4-6. The hedge-funders’ deep-pocket Political Action Committee – Democrats for Education Reform – also will hobnob at the $1,000-a-head “Camp Philos.”

These groups promote non-union charter schools, overreliance on standardized tests and Common Core, student-data collection, vouchers, merit pay, test-based teacher evaluations, privatization, and removing teacher unions from almost any role in shaping curriculum or determining working conditions.

ACT:

Picket in the pines to put the “public” back in public education! For too long, so-called “reformers” have drowned out the voices of parents and teachers. These hedge-fund propagandists have contributed to New York State’s Common Core mess, the (failed) In-Bloom push for student data, and the spread of corporate charters that undermine public schools serving all kids.

WHEN:

Sunday, May 4, from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.

WHERE:

Meet at the Comfort Inn
2125 Saranac Ave
Lake Placid, N.Y. 12946

REGISTER ONLINE:

Register online at http://www.cvent.com/d/h4qslh.

The deadline to register is Wednesday, April 30.

Based on participation and need, buses from NYSUT Regional Offices will be made available.

SPREAD THE WORD:

Promote via Twitter. Use the hashtag #picketinthepines.

RSVP via the official Facebook event – and share with your friends!

TENTATIVE PROGRAM:

1-2 p.m.
Lunch

2-3:30 p.m.
Presentation by Sabrina Stevens of Integrity in Education

3-4 p.m.
Picket Sign-In and Sign Making

4-5 p.m.
Picketing at the Whiteface Lodge where Education Reform Now and DFER are meeting

See you there!

Picket in the Pines:

Categories Corporate Reformers, Cuomo, Andrew, Parents, Teachers, Unions

Hedge Fund Group Pours Money into Newark Mayor’s Race for Charter Supporter

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2014 //
4

According to the first filing of spending in the Newark race for Mayor, the hedge fund managers’ group Education Reform Now has given $850,000 to Shavar Jeffries, a charter school supporter.

Jeffries’ spending is about triple the spending of his chief opponent Ras Baraka, and the gap is expected to grow given the deep pockets of Jeffries’ supporters on Wall Street.

The Network for Public Education has endorsed Ras Baraka for mayor, in light of his opposition to closing public schools. He is a high school principal and a member of the City Council of Newark.

 

 

 

 

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, New Jersey, Privatization

Alex Pareene in Salon: Time to Fire Everyone on the New York Times’ Opinion Page

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2014 //
15

Alex Pareene does a demolition job on almost the entire staff of the New York Times’ opinion page.

That page is the most valuable space in American journalism today, yet several of the regulars seem to have grown stale and lazy, recycling opinions based on little more than gossip they heard at the latest high-powered cocktail party or something that Bill Gates–who knows everything–may have said in the last few weeks or months.

Pareene singles out David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, and Thomas Friedman for his special scorn.

I must say I appreciate Paul Krugman, a Nobel-prize winning economist who pays close attention to the growing inequality in our nation.

And Charles Blow often has original contributions.

But Pareene’s beef is that the columnists he singles out have grown stale and boring.

Opinion columnists are expected to have an opinion on everything, even topics about which they are woefully uninformed.

Since they write so often, they don’t have time to do research and they are too self-confident to check with other knowledgeable sources, so they just echo conventional wisdom.

Not a one of the columnists singled out by Pareene has even the slightest understanding of American education or the issues that are now creating upheaval and chaos in our nation’s schools.

Maybe they just don’t care.

It is not as if education is an unimportant issue. It’s just that to the Times’ opinion writers, it doesn’t matter, even though it will have a huge impact on our future.

No one can know everything about everything. The Times should eliminate tenure for their opinion writers and recycle them, perhaps with Write for America temps.

At least, they would have some fresh ideas and opinions. And in a few months, or a year, they would be gone.

 

Categories Accountability

Pennsylvania: 1 of Every 6 Charters Succeeds; Cyber Charters Are Low Performing

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2014 //
39

A report released by Representative James R. Roebuck, chair of the House Education Committee, found that one of every six charters in the state is “high-performing.

None of the state’s cyber charters is high-performing.

Pennsylvania has 162 brick-and-mortar charters, with 86 in Philadelphia. It has 14 cyber charters.

Representative Roebuck recommended that public schools might learn from the practices of the state’s 28 high-performing charters.

Public schools outperform charter schools. Cyber charters perform worst of all schools. Charter schools, with a few exceptions, do not improve their performance over time. The report says:

 

“In terms of school performance, in 2013 the state changed how it measures academic performance of schools from Adequate Yearly progress to a School Performance Score on the new School Performance Profiles. Although the measures have changed on average, charter schools, particularly cyber charter schools, still perform academically worse than other traditional public schools. For 2012-2013, based on a scale of 100, the average SPP score for traditional public schools was 77.1, for charter schools 66.4 and for cyber charter schools 46.8. None of the 14 cyber charter schools had SPP scores over 70, considered the minimal level of academic success and 8 cyber charter schools had SPP scores below 50.

These results mirror results in both the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 school year where traditional public schools performed better than charter schools and significantly better than cyber charter schools in terms of achieving Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), the federal school performance standard established under the federal No Child Left Behind law. AYP is determined by student academic performance on state reading and math assessments (PSSAs).

For 2010-11, while 94% of school districts met AYP, 75% of public schools met AYP. In contrast, only 61% of charter schools met AYP and only two of the 12 cyber charter schools met AYP.

The percentage of students performing at grade level in Math and Reading in order for a school to achieve AYP increased from 67% of students in Math in 2010-2011 to 78% in 2011-2012 and increased from 72% in Reading in 2010-2011 to 81% in 2011-2012. This resulted in reducing the percentage of all public schools achieving AYP in 2011-12 with larger declines for charter and cyber charter schools.

For 2011-12, while 61% of school districts met AYP, 50% of public schools met AYP. In stark contrast, only 29% of charter schools met AYP and none of the 12 cyber charter schools met AYP.

Performance of Charter Schools Based on How Long They Have Existed

In looking at the performance of just brick-and-mortar charter schools, their results do not significantly improve the longer that a charter school has been open. Fifty percent of brick-and-mortar charter schools have now been open for ten years or more. Unfortunately, for 2012-2013, a majority, 51%, of the charter school open 10 years or more have SPP scores below 70. While this is better than those charter schools opened within the last 3 years, where 85% have SPP scores below 70, these results are not encouraging and it raises concerns about renewing many charters with poor performance over so many years.

Charter schools in the Philadelphia school district do slightly better that charter schools located outside Philadelphia the longer that they have been opened, with 52% of charters open 10 years or more in Philadelphia having SPP scores above 70. In contrast, none of the 10 Philadelphia charters open 3 years or less has an SPP score above 70.

For cyber charter schools, no cyber school, no matter how long they have been open has an SPP score above 70.

 

The report recommends that the state’s 28 high-performing charters might serve as a model. It says:

“Twenty-eight of the 163 charter schools had SPP scores of 80 or above. When examining the characteristics of these high performing charter schools there are certain common characteristics amongst the 28 charter schools. What is most common is that they offer innovative education programs with most of them focused on a specific approach to education instruction or a specific academic area of instructional focus. Three offer the Montessori approach to instruction, many offer longer school days and more days of schools and many offer more individualized education programs. These charter schools also tend to be smaller with less than 1,000 students in part because more of them are elementary schools. Only seven out of the 28 had enrollments more than 1,000 students and only two of the 28 schools serve only a high school population, though there are five charter schools that serve K-12 grades.

“These charter schools also serve significantly fewer special education students than traditional students. Only two of these 28 high performing charter schools have a special education student population greater than the 15% average of traditional public schools. Further, as noted in the 2013 Special Education Funding Commission report, charter school enroll significantly less special education students with severe disabilities than traditional public schools.”

Half of the 28 high-performing charter schools enroll 10% or fewer students with disabilities.

Two interesting findings emerge from this report. One, it echoes the 2009 CREDO report that found that only one of every six charters was high-performing. Two, it echoed previous studies that found that cyber charters get abysmal academic results. It also found that a significant number of students in cyber charters were previously home schooling, meaning that money is siphoned out of the districts’ budgets to pay the sponsors of the cyber charter for their low-quality services to homeschooled students.

Representative Roebuck recommends that the state’s schools can learn from the examples of the 28 high-performing charters. One lesson: accept small numbers of students with disabilities (nothing is said about the nature of disabilities, as many charters do not accept those children with the most challenging disabilities). Given the large proportion of low-performing charter schools, it would have seemed apt to recommend that the charter sector might learn from high-performing public schools. One lesson from high-performing public schools: it is better to have 100% of your teachers certified, not 75%.

Categories Charter Schools, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
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