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NYC Education Bureaucracy Gone Wild: The Suspension of a Hero Teacher

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2014 //
60

Mayor Bill de Blasio was elected as a progressive candidate. Much of his support came from critics of the Bloomberg-Klein regime and its hostility to teachers and even to public schools. The Bloomberg regime never stopped berating the system that it totally controlled for nearly a dozen years.

De Blasio selected veteran educator Carmen Farina as his chancellor, who promised to bring back “the joy of learning.” Unfortunately, the de Blasio administration has been slow to clean house. The Klein regime still controls large sectors of the education bureaucracy, including the infamous “gotcha” squad that is always on the alert for teacher misbehavior. True, the “gotcha” squad completely missed a high school teacher arrested for having sexual relations with several students at selective Brooklyn Technical High School, who is currently suspended with pay.

But the “gotcha” squad bagged a teacher who helped run a Kickstarter campaign for a student with cerebral palsy. This teacher was suspended without pay for 30 days for “theft of services,” having helped the campaign during school hours.

As Jim Dwyer, columnist for the New York Times reports:

“This is a story of an almost unfathomably mindless school bureaucracy at work: the crushing of an occupational therapist who had helped a young boy build a record of blazing success.

“The therapist, Deb Fisher, is now serving a suspension of 30 days without pay for official misconduct.

“Her crime?

“She raised money on Kickstarter for a program that she and the student, Aaron Philip, 13, created called This Ability Not Disability. An investigator with the Education Department’s Office of Special Investigations, Wei Liu, found that Ms. Fisher sent emails about the project during her workday at Public School 333, the Manhattan School for Children, and was thus guilty of “theft of services.”

“The school system has proved itself unable to dislodge failed or dangerous employees for years at a time.

“Ms. Fisher’s case seems to represent just the opposite: A person working to excel is being hammered by an investigative agency that began its hunt in search of cheating on tests and record-keeping irregularities. It found nothing of the sort. Instead, the investigation produced a misleading report, filled with holes, on the fund-raising effort.

“By omitting essential context, the report wrongly suggested that Ms. Fisher was a rogue employee, acting alone and in her own self-interest.

“In fact, the entire school, including the principal, was involved in the Kickstarter project, with regular email blasts counting down the fund-raising push. And the money was to be used not by Ms. Fisher, but by Aaron, who is writing a graphic book and making a short film about Tanda, a regular kid who is born with a pair of legs in a world where everybody else has a pair of wheels.

“Aaron has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair to navigate the world. Ms. Fisher has worked with him since kindergarten.”

Chancellor Farina, it is time to fire the “gotcha” squad. It is time to replace Joel Klein’s legal team. It is time to clean house and install officials who share Mayor de Blasio’s vision and values.

Categories Bill de Blasio, Farina, Carmen, New York City

Los Angeles: Miraculous Increase in Graduation Rate!

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2014 //
41

If you believe in miracles, clap your hands!

 

With Superintendent John Deasy under pressure because of the accumulation of his bad decisions, the district just announced that high school graduation rates increased by a stunning 12% in only one year! Clap your hands!

 

While citizens are demanding Deasy’s resignation, and the city’s elites defend him because he gets results, even if teachers and parents don’t like him, Deasy announced that the graduation rate had soared to an amazing 77% (clap your hands).

 

Howard Blume writes a cautionary note:

 

But the good news comes with a substantial caveat. The rate is calculated based on students enrolled in comprehensive high schools, and it leaves out students who transfer to alternative programs — which frequently include those most at risk of dropping out.

For example, Bernstein Senior High in Hollywood had a graduation rate of 62%; Alonzo, the “option” school on the corner of that property, had a graduation rate of 5.2%. Santee Education Complex, south of downtown, had a rate of 68%; Kahlo High School, the alternative campus on its perimeter, had a rate of 10%.

Once the alternative campuses are factored in, L.A. Unified’s rate drops to 67% — much less impressive but still surpassing what the district has accomplished in recent history. The previous year’s rate of 65% also did not include students in such programs.

In the past, graduation rates have been subject to extreme manipulation, although that is less likely under current methods of record-keeping.

“We continue to move closer to our goal,” Deasy said. “The results keep getting better and better.”

The statewide graduation rate is 80% for 2012-13, the most recent year available.

 

The one thing we have noticed in recent years is that the more data matter, the more data are manipulated to produce the necessary results. That is known as Campbell’s Law.

 

“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” 

 

 

 

 

Categories Campbell's Law, Los Angeles

Ginia Bellafante: Why Do Students Have Such a Hard Time Completing Community College?

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2014 //
56

Ginia Bellafante has an excellent article in the New York Times about the dilemma of poor and immigrant students who strive to achieve success in community college.

 

She selects a student, Vladimir de Jesus, to illustrate the obstacles in his path. He wants to be an art teacher. He has a young daughter and has to work to pay his tuition and the cost of living.

 

She writes:

 

As a community college student, Mr. de Jesus is both prototype and outlier. The majority of community college students come from low-income families, and many arrive at school, as he did, with competing obligations (29 percent of community college students in the United States are parents), as well as the need for extensive remediation. The widely held impression that community colleges are essentially vocational is inaccurate. Data released by the American Association of Community Colleges in September indicated that most of the associate degrees awarded in 2012 were given in the liberal arts and sciences, outnumbering those for nursing, say, or marketing.

 

In recent years, mounting concerns about inequality have fixated on the need for greater economic diversity at elite colleges, but the interest has tended to obscure the fact that the vast majority of high school students — including the wealthiest — will never go to Stanford or the University of Chicago or Yale. Even if each of U.S. News and World Report’s 25 top-ranked universities committed to turning over all of its spots to poor students, the effort would serve fewer than 218,000 of them. Community colleges have 7.7 million students enrolled, 45 percent of all undergraduates in the country.

 

Philanthropists and hedge fund managers don’t care about community colleges, despite their oft-proclaimed dedication to poor kids. The community colleges serve mostly children from low-income families, but they don’t attract much funding from the wealthy who give millions to charters schools and their alma maters.

 

Bellafante writes:

 

Among individual donors, community colleges ignite little charitable impulse. An endowment fund begun at LaGuardia in 2003 has raised $11 million, of which $8 million has been spent. To put those sums in perspective, Prep for Prep, the organization started in the 1970s to help channel bright, disadvantaged New York City children into top private schools and ultimately the Ivy League, raised $3 million on a single night in June when it held its annual gala.

 

This shows, perhaps, that the Wall Street hedge funders and the philanthropists shower their millions on the strivers and the winners, not on the strugglers and stragglers like Vladimir de Jesus.

 

One especially large obstacle, for Vladimir and other students: the algebra course. He can’t pass the algebra course. He has taken it again and again. He can’t pass it.

 

Mr. de Jesus began the winter semester auspiciously; he received an A for an early personal essay. In addition to his English and art classes, he was taking a remedial course, Math 96, which is algebra-based and focuses on linear and quadratic equations.

Passing this class, which teaches math that most affluent children study in eighth or ninth grade, is required for graduation and the ascent to four-year programs. But at community colleges across the country, the basic math requirement has been a notorious hindrance to advancement. More than 60 percent of all students entering community colleges must take what are called developmental math courses, according to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, but more than 70 percent of those students never complete the classes, leaving them unable to obtain their degrees.

Mr. de Jesus was taking Math 96 for the third time last spring, having failed it twice. On one attempt he had fallen short by just a few points on the final exam; on another, he did not bother to show up for the exam at all because he was already failing. But in math, too, he had started the spring semester well, with grades in the 80s and 90s on the initial exams, his professor, Yelba Gutierrez, an adjunct at the time, told me.

When Mr. de Jesus came to school, he was present and engaged. In his English class, he typically offered observations that were sharper than those of the other students. But as the semester wore on, he had trouble getting to his classes on time — or at all….

 

“This whole thing with math just hits your spirit in the wrong way,” Mr. de Jesus remarked recently. “It demolishes your spirit. You become lazy.”

When I conveyed his sentiment to Dr. Mellow, LaGuardia’s president, she agreed and praised his wording. Dr. Mellow stands on one side of an intense debate among educators about the necessity of algebra for students who do not plan to pursue concentrated study in math- or science-related fields.

“I once got a note from a student who said, ‘This developmental algebra is a stainless-steel wall and there’s no way up it, around it or under it,’ ” she told me in her office one afternoon recently.
What makes algebra so hard for community college students? One factor is that many have been taught so poorly before they arrive. They have developed a debilitating reliance on calculators, Abderrazak I. Belkharraz, the chairman of the LaGuardia math department, told me, “for things as simple as what is the cosine of pi over two.” And the pedagogy tends to focus on computation rather than the underlying concepts, leaving the practice of math to seem far removed from the students’ experiences.

 

Imagine that! De Jesus could not figure out something “as simple as what is the cosine of pi over two.”

 

Let the truth be told: I took two years of algebra in high school, and I have no idea of what the cosine of pi over two is. Maybe I did in 1956, the year I graduated from high school, but I don’t now. And over the course of the many years since then, I have never once needed to know the cosine of pi over two. Why should a young man who desperately wants to teach art be required to pass an algebra test to get a community college degree? Perhaps he will never pass that test. Perhaps he will never get an associate’s degree. Perhaps he will never be allowed to teach art because he doesn’t know algebra. Without that degree, what will he do?

 

 

 

Categories Higher Education

One Week from Today! Public Education Nation in Brooklyn and Livestream!

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2014 //
1

Just ONE Week Away! The first-ever PUBLIC Education Nation

 
This time we own the table, and we will bring together educators, parents and students to tell the truth about what is happening in our schools, and what real reform ought to be all about.
TOMORROW, Sunday, October 5, will be our major money bomb online fundraiser for the event. This is NOT sponsored by the Billionaires – it is sponsored by US – each and every person who cares about the future of public education
One easy way to help is to sign up for our Thunderclap. Just a few clicks will allow a SINGLE tweet or Facebook post to be made, showing your support and spreading the word about the fundraiser. Please sign up — and share. Thank you!!
Please donate here, and spread the word.
If you are in the New York area, and would like to attend the October 11 event in person, please show up by 11:30 am at 610 Henry St at Brooklyn New School/Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies, and register here in advance. You can also sign up for the online event on Facebook here.
Follow us on Twitter at @PublicEdNation & @NetworkPublicEd

Panel #2:
Support Our Schools — Don’t Close Them!

The second panel next Saturday will be moderated by a classroom teacher from Chicago, Xian Barrett. Xian has been active in the Chicago teachers Union, and numerous other organizations that work to elevate the voices of teachers. He will be joined by the following education experts:
Yohuru Williams, PhD, is the Assistant Professor of history at Fairfield College in Connecticut. Here is why he is passionate about supporting schools:

“Schools are the nucleus of communities. Every school closed is a community compromised. I fight school closures because I believe in the importance of schools as centers of learning and places for community dialogue and participation. The arbitrary closure of schools, driven by corporate education reform, is another example of how so called education reformers undermine democratic practices and place profits over people. The disbanding of popularly elected school boards, reallocation of critical resources to unproven charter schools, and narratives of teacher and student failure that accompany school closures betray the real agenda of the corporate raiders-their desire to line their pockets, in spite of the detrimental influence school closures have on communities. This is why we fight.”
Tanaisa Brown is a high school student active in the Newark Students Union. She explains her activism:
I fight against school closure because I see the detriment it has, not just on ONE school, but the whole community. Newark, NJ has been under state control for 20 years, and slowly but surely, they have been underfunding our district. From this point, they deemed many of our schools as “failing” in order that they could “prove” that they needed to enter and “reform”. These are reforms that close schools, and sell PUBLIC PROPERTY to privately owned companies not in correlation with education.
As a community, Newark has taken great action from students, parents and teachers, and even to Board Members who file legal complaints about the reforms. As an organization,The Newark Students Union has taken many actions. About 2 years ago, we had our first meeting with about 100 students at a local college. From there, we held our first protest where the superintendant and Cory Booker were in attendance for a radio show. Since then, we have had 2 city-wide walkouts of many high schools, and a boycott of Newark’s Public Schools. Our major events include a shutdown of Newark Board of Education’s business board meeting where we remained in the central offices for 17 hours. We also recently shutdown 3 public high schools in a soft blockade and marched the first day to have skill shares at a park, while on the second day we performed a hard blockade next to the Board of Education on the busiest street in Newark for about 8 hours. Aside from actions, we inform students about current issues, meet with other organizations to create unity, and were deeply involved in the recent Mayoral Election.
In having our events, we always have demands that will count as “wins” if they are met. The most important one is a stop to the One Newark plan, which displaces our students, staff, and furthers harm of education. The entire community is against this plan and it would be really huge if we could defeat the plan introduced by the nonchalant Superientendent Cami Anderson. A “win” that encompasses the one previously mentioned one is FULL LOCAL CONTROL. This “win” is something that all urban districts can agree with because with local control over OUR DISTRICTS, we can have more of a direct say-so in our educational policies. Chris Christie will not be able to send puppets to NJ’s districts to destroy them! But besides stopping the ed reformers, we wish to implement community schools with wrap-around services that can not only uplift the students but our families as well! Community schools have always proven to be effective and produce better results for the whole city!
I think one of the most important things is good media coverage and social network coverage and support. These are both excellent ways to educate the masses on the issues happening in your area and it allows for allies to give support and to share your stories with their allies and home communities. I think in order to work nationally in this movement, we need unity and support because as the saying goes, divided we fall. If other organizations are hosting events that may be close by or you are able to sacrifice to get to (works well for summer actions), then we should be able to network, connect and invite eachother. Keeping in touch no matter the distance is a great way to stay united. But an idea for national unity that we can work towards is to keep one central demand amongst the ones that are more personal to your community. For example, we can all have a central goal/demand of “Community schools” or “Stop privatization and standardized testing”, nationally rallying around that one idea while still presenting a plethora of your own specific issues. This will show unity to the oppressors, showing that this force is bigger than they thought, and it will also stand out to the different media sources as the begin to notice a national trend.
Think of our school districts as a flower. Chris Christie and Cami Anderson believe that in order to help the flower, you have to uproot it. I disagree, I believe that to help this flower grow beautifully, we need to water the same flower, expose it to sunlight, and show it love.

 

Hiram Rivera is the Executive Director of the Philadelphia Student Union. He is a native of New Haven, CT, a father, an activist, and an organizer. He started his career in youth organizing as a coordinator at Youth Right’s Media in New Haven, training Black and Latino students in video production and campaign organizing around Education & Juvenile Justice issues.
On Saturday, Oct. 11, you can tune in online here at SchoolhouseLive.org to the live broadcast starting at 12 noon Eastern time, 9 am Pacific time.

The event will conclude with a conversation between Diane Ravitch and Jitu Brown.

The Network for Public Education is hosting this event. It is NOT sponsored by the Gates, Walton or Bloomberg foundations. It is sponsored by YOU, each and every one of the people who care about our children’s future.

Can you make a small donation to help us cover the expense of this event? We are determined to create the space not ordinarily given to voices like these. But we need your participation. Please donate by visiting the NPE website and clicking on the PayPal link.

A live-stream of the event will be available on Saturday, Oct. 11, starting at Noon Eastern time, 9 am Pacific time at http://www.schoolhouselive.org.

Categories Network for Public Education

New Video Game: No Pineapple Left Behind

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2014 //
7

Here is a terrific article about a new video game: “No Pineapple Left Behind.”

Friends, our federal education policy has reached some absurdity and stupidity and child abuse that the best way to explain it is through satire.

Soon, as we continue on the path charted by George W. Bush, Margaret Spellings, Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates, and their devotees, we will be an international laughing stock. No other nation tests every child every year. No other nation subjects little children to 8-hour tests, no other nation rates teachers by the test scores of their students. We are breaking new ground. But it is not innovation. It is a misplacing of bad business techniques into education.

This house of cards will not stand.

Categories Education Industry, Funding, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Teachers, Testing

Louisiana: High School Graduation Rates Are Flawed by Missing Data

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2014 //
2

Danielle Dreilinger of the Times-Picayune reports that Louisiana’s graduation rate is deeply flawed by missing data in several districts.

When students transfer out, are they leaving for private school, home school, another school, or another state?

“Education officials audited 2012-13 transfer records of 34 of the state’s 69 systems and found one third of these exits could not be properly documented.”

“Much is at stake with the record-keeping, for students must be considered dropouts if their transfers are not properly documented. That depresses the school’s graduation rate. But if the transfer papers are in order, the student is not counted in their high school’s graduation rate.

“The graduation rate counts for 25 percent of the school performance score. That score determines whether conventional schools may be taken over by the state and whether charter schools may stay open.

“The worst results in the audit were found in Jefferson and East Baton Rouge parishes, and in the New Orleans schools run directly by the Recovery School District. Only 27 percent of East Baton Rouge transfer records — and none of the Recovery-New Orleans records — had proper documentation. In Jefferson, the verification rate was 31 percent.”

Veteran educator Mike Deshotels believes that school officials might be cooking the books. The state, of course, vigorously denies that claim.

We should have learned from Bernie Madoff and Ken Lay of Enron that data are highly malleable.

Categories Data and Data Mining, Graduation rates, Louisiana

Australian Education: Stop Copying Our Bad Ideas!

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2014 //
3

This is a newsletter from Australia, written by Phil Cullen in a blog called The Treehorn Express.

Treehorn Express

http://treehornexpress.wordpress.com

Facts About Australian Schooling

Schooling in Australia is a state responsibility. Each state, however, relies on the distribution of money collected from its citizens by the commonwealth government, which then places conditions on the way the money must be spent by the states. It is a strange relationship. Because this arrangement locates exceptional power in the centre, the federal minister for education assumes full responsibility for all levels of schooling; and this allows the incumbent political party to determine aspects of schooling, some of which might be at odds with a state’s notions. :”There has been concern at the political level over the intrusion of the Commonwealth government and Commonwealth agencies into the field of education, traditionally and constitutionally a State responsibility. Some of these enterprises appeared to have a philosophical basis different from that underlying State activities in education” [M.J.Ahern Q, Hansard 04-04-78] . Such differences depend a great deal on the federal minister’s view of schooling. Few state ministers ever disagree and things runs smoothest when both governments share the same political ideology. The federal minister possesses enormous personal power and is allowed to indulge his or her will – from the sublime to the ridiculous – without reference. No state has reclaimed its right to supervise the curriculum requirements of schooling since the drastic changes to schooling in Australia in 2008, for instance; so the federal minster can do as he or she likes e.g introduce a high stakes testing regime or call for a curriculum review or whatever is part of a personal fancy. The state ministers have yet to test the limits of their own power over schooling in their own state.

SCHOOLS Children can attend a public state school for twelve years, free of charge. If they have rich or frugal parents, they can attend a private school at high cost. There is little difference, if any, in quality.
School years operate according to the calendar year, and promotion is year by year from Year 1 to Year 12.
Most children sit still in classrooms for twelve years or more. In some schools, the children must all face the same way for most of each school day. This benefits the sermonising teaching tactics required to practise for the annual testing program.

AGE Children can start school at age five, even though they need not do so. Many prefer to wait for sound reasons. In some states they may attend when as young as four and a half. Laws of compulsory education differ in each state, so the age of admission differs and causes disruption to people who change states, but there is little interest in stabilizing national ages of schooling,

TESTING & CURRICULUM The present-day written curriculum is over-burdensome. It’s huge. Any additions would be insane. Despite its extent, only certain aspects of literacy and numeracy need be taught. These are tested each year – Years 3,5,,7,9 – using a cold heatless format – in May. Results are available some months later, but there are moves to provide the tests quicker, more often, electronically. This testucating ideology is aimed at bringing each child up to the exact same standard on the exact same day….nothing more, nothing less. The tests have little relevance to the intellectual development of children, but they are handy for descriptive purposes by those who know only a little bit about classroom practices and nothing about the effects of testing on child development.

Since most schools are not trusted to describe a pupil’s suitability for his or her career opportunities or have its own evaluation and reporting program, intense testing is also undertaken towards the end of Year 12. A certificate is issued to school graduates, purporting to describe the level of competency in school subjects undertaken; and employers interpret them as best they can. If employers wish to know about the more essential qualities required, they have to make their own arrangements.

SYLLABUS LEVELS A curriculum usually refers to the learning entitlements of children when they attend school. A syllabus details requirements for pupils to reach curriculum goals. Australia has three levels of syllabus requirements according to the prevailing schooling ideology. The tri-level system introduced to Australia in 2008 distinguishes the requirements: 1. Testable aspects of literacy and numeracy are high level. Schools need only teach these, to be regarded as a ‘good’ school. Nothing else needs to be taught. 2. Mid-level interest can be taken in science, history, geography, social studies according to the level of pressure by people in authority. 3. Music and Art and similar airy-fairy subjects don’t count very much. They take time from test preparation. They command some attention on special occasions; and the results are usually spectacular.

‘STUDENTS’ Children at school are described as ‘students’, because the term has no relationship to schooling per se. It’s a safe description. It infers that children at school don’t have to be taught. They study. More serious authorities [e.g. Britain] describe all school attenders as ‘pupils’, using the O.E.D. meaning that suggests learning at a school involves the use of teachers. Although pupilling involves a teaching/learning contract between two people, Australia prefers the United States descriptor of ‘student’ because it follows the U.S. in all things as blindly as possible; especially schooling arrangements. The word doesn’t mean anything special.

PRIVATE or PUBLIC There are differing opinions as to quality of offerings. Australia has joined the U.S. in the press for the privatisation of schooling despite the high quality education by public schools. A private school can be a very profitable business and Australia’s ruling governments in recent times have been controlled by the neoliberalist philosophy of privatisation. People tend to believe that private and systemic schools are better, despite the results from various scrutinies. Many see NAPLAN tests as an admission ticket to the ‘best’ private or select school. Indeed some such schools, whose notions of pupilling is limited, ‘brand’ their intakes for streaming purposes using test scores. The brands last forever. But………

Nice people go to private schools. Some public schools contain a lot of foreigners, some of whom are Muslims.

HOME SCHOOLING is permitted, albeit grudgingly. A worthy alternative to institutionalised forms of instruction, it is becoming very popular with parents who are able to do so and who enjoy sharing their children’s educational development within a family setting. Such parents disapprove of test-driven forms of schooling, threatening their children’s welfare. Some use reliable diagnostic tests as required when required. While little state assistance is offered to these home-based forms of pupilling in a pure form, local coteries of home schoolers in various localities share teaching experiences, learning enterprises and shared evaluation techniques.

GROWTH INDUSTRIES – EDUCATIONAL & PHARMACEUTICAL

1.The printing and sale of Practice Tests and associated texts is now in the multi-million dollar range. Schools prescribe them even though their popularity is a reflection on the profession; and parents use them extensively at home or on holidays. 2. The rise in the number of ‘back-yard mechanics’ aka tutoring shops that concentrate on NAPLAN tests, has been quite staggering. A quick google will indicate the extent. Costs range from $20 to $50 per hour. 3. The use of pharmaceutical supplements to enhance performance is not disallowed nor discouraged by education authorities. While the rugby league and Australian football authorities have taken this matter seriously, no warnings or cautions have ever been provided to the public by educational jurisdictions. Neither has the extent of the use nor the side effects of such usage been researched extensively. Medical assistance for those children who are in distress, vomit and become emotionally ill or cannot sleep during the preparation period is, of course on the increase as part and parcel of the testing industry. Sadly, it would appear that child health and social welfare is at a low level of interest to the various state authorities while testing resides within..

MAJOR CONTEMPORARY ISSUES The dramatic changes to schooling in 2008, when these testing devices were introduced to control the curriculum, have caused wide rifts in professional conversations. The gulf between what is now called the ‘testucation’ community and the ‘education’ one is wide. As with most macabre political issues, the gap will slowly close. and this repulsive use of Standardised Blanket Testing to mould children according to a one-size-fits-all pattern. using tactics that run counter to all the sacred beliefs of caring for kids, should disappear. Its disappearance needs encouragement.

The belittlement of teachers has never been been so high. The blame for the muck-up in the 2014 NAPLAN writing test was said to be theirs. Their over-zealous practising disposed the testucating hierarchy to try to ‘catch’ them by requiring a most peculiar response to a weird question…..and their attempts rebounded.
Small wonder there is a heavy resignation rate. Those who continue to teach in the face of extreme unethical behaviour are surely amongst the greatest of all times; producing such quality all-round products in the face of the requirements of test tyrants and muddled, muffled political deviants.

That’s Australian schooling…… girt by political unscrupulousness in a sea of arrested intellectual development. It’s been so for six years now. Time to stop the rot. The damage has been too costly for our future.

OUR FUTURE Our present schooling system is clearly a product of our obsession with all things American. Australia seems to be compelled to copy quasi-educational. unsubstantiated Yank gimmickry that usually ends up in disaster. High-stakes testing, charter schools, performance pay, core curriculum, common core syllabuses and serious judgements made on unreliable testing procedures are features of this American/Australian system. Australian classroom-experienced teachers have the capacity to design a system, uninfluenced and unsupervised by the testing fraternity, that will establish a high-level learning culture based on love of learning, instead of on a fear of it. Encouragement to learn can easily replace the fear-of-failure syndrome now dominating our classrooms. Our future depends of the freedom to learn. It needs to be released from bondage before any progress can be made.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Phil Cullen [….in support of a fair-dinkum, no-nonsense,kid-oriented Australia] 41 Cominan Avenue, Banora Point Australia 2486 07 554 6443 cphilcullen@bigpond.com

http://qldprimaryprincipals.wordpress.com/ http://kelleyandcullen.net/ http://primaryschooling.com

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Categories Charter Schools, International, Merit pay, Privatization, Testing

Mercedes Schneider Connects the Dots about the Real Purpose of “Reform”

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2014 //
37

Mercedes Schneider has put together the pieces and figured out what lies behind “reform.”

It is not about better education. It is about converting our schools into an assembly-line to produce workers for the economy. It is not about helping schools meet the needs and develop the interests of students. It is about fitting children into the slots where the economy needs them. Their purposes, interests, and personal goals don’t matter.

To make her case, she looks at three representative documents. One comes from Indiana Governor Mike Pence, who created a “Department of Workforce Development” to compete with and supplant the state’s Department of Education. Of course, we know that Pence will do anything to cut down State Commissioner of Education Glenda Ritz. But it is revealing that he sees the noble profession of education solely as “workforce development.”

Then she looks at a 1992 document by Marc Tucker, who envisioned “labor market boards” to align curriculum and jobs. Of course, that was more than two decades ago. Does he still see education solely in economic terms? I for one would not want to be held strictly accountable for things I wrote in 1992.

Schneider then considers an article written by a South Korean teacher who described the cruel and inhumane pressures endured by South Korean students in pursuit of high test scores. Yet, harsh as it is, Arne Duncan looks longingly at this system because of its results.

Schneider has anephany:

“After reading and meditating on these three articles today, I had an epiphany of sorts regarding privatizing utility of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

“Now, I know a lot about CCSS. This summer I wrote a book on its history, development, and promotion. However, what occurred to me this afternoon is the reason for the business push for CCSS particularly and the spectrum of privatizing reforms in general.

“It has nothing to do with “competing in the global economy.” That’s just a distractor.

“The goal of business in aggressively promoting CCSS while bashing the teaching profession into false, test-score-riddled “accountability” is to reshape the purpose of education into streamlined, assembly-line-to-market service.

“Yes, CCSS is about corporate profits, but it is about more than companies like Pearson making potential billions off of selling CCSS products and services.

“The true business goal behind CCSS and other market-driven “reforms” is to make American education completely economic — which means completely dehumanized in its purpose.

“It is about corporate America funneling the nation’s youth into predetermined, objectified service of the corporate, gluttonous market needs. And a crucial component of that goal is to break the spirit of teachers and make us nothing more than the trainers of What the Market Requires.”

She concludes:

“There is certainly money to be made in promoting “reforms” that, ahem, “benefit the economy.” But we must recognize this “cradle to grave” shaping of the American education system for what it is: A purposed effort to separate America into two groups, the privileged and the serfs. Indeed, the privileged are trying to finesse the message of serfdom as one that “concerned citizens” seemingly cannot say no to: a falsified image of national economic health that, if ingested by the American consciousness, will prove to be nothing more than caustic gluttony that dehumanizes most members of our society and corrodes our democratic foundation.”

Categories Corporate Reformers, Economy

Myra Blackmon: Don’t Whitewash Our History

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2014 //
36

Myra Blackmon,a frequent contributor to Online Athens in Georgia, writes in opposition to those who want to teach a sanitized version of U.S. history.

She writes that it is important to understand that we have made mistakes, committed terrible wrongs, and that dissent and protest hold an honored place in our history. To pretend that we were always in the right is bad history.

Here is a sample of a great article:

“I worry when I read stories about groups demanding a more positive treatment of slavery — the greatest evil our great nation ever perpetuated — and an emphasis on the idea that God has somehow chosen America to be “better” than other nations.

“Civil disobedience, protest and questioning government are fundamental to our success as a nation. Without them, we would still have child labor, no protection for workers, legal segregation and discrimination. Women would not have the vote, and wives and children would still be considered the personal property of their husbands and fathers.

“The idea that we would discourage any disruption of the social order, all under the guise of “respect for authority,” frightens me.

“We were born of protest and a disruption of a social order the founders believed unjust and morally wrong.

“I love my country. I am proud to be an American. I believe to my core that we are an exceptional nation. Not because we never made mistakes, never had bad leaders and always rescued others from tyranny. I believe we are exceptional because we lived and learned from all our history.

“America is exceptional because we rebuilt our economy after the end of legal slavery, because we survived the Vietnam war, because we are working to repair the damage we perpetrated on the people who lived here before the Europeans arrived.

“America is exceptional, not because we are a Christian nation, but because we are a nation where the practice of any religion is protected. We didn’t get there easily.

“America is exceptional because we have maintained the orderly transfer of power through tumultuous times. We have learned from wrongdoing like Watergate and used those lessons to strengthen our democracy.”

Categories Curriculum

This Is What Close Reading Looks Like in First Grade

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2014 //
85

Chris in Florida describes here his attempt to introduce “close reading” as required by the Common Core. No one who wrote the Common Core ever taught elementary school. Yet they have imposed the Néw Criticism on young children who don’t yet know how to read.

Chris writes:

“Yep. I’m forced to test my 1st graders on tests where they are expected to do a close reading of a passage and answer complex, text-evidenced questions all because of David Coleman and CCSS.

“It is ridiculous. In that wonderful 1st grade way of creating one’s own reality many of my children WHO CAN’T READ YET simply select random answers, smile, and move on to something far more developmentally appropriate and fun.

“This idiocy is obvious even to 6-year olds. One said to me yesterday: “Teacher, why do they think I can answer those questions when I can’t read yet and they won’t let the computer read it to me?”

“Why, indeed? David Coleman, ‘rigor’, ‘grit’, and BS are the only logical explanation for this farce.

“As I find time I am going to create a Hall of Shame website of all of these reformers to document in one handy place the parade of idiots who have wreaked destruction on my precious little ones. They should be tarred and feathered.”

Categories Common Core
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