Los Angeles Superintendent John Deasy testified in the trial of the lawsuit claiming that teacher tenure violates the civil rights of students.
The plaintiffs in the Vergara lawsuit want to eliminate due process so it is easier to fire teachers if their students have low test scores.
Most researchers acknowledge that family income and education play a larger role in student test scores than teachers. When the California Teachers Association lawyer Jim Finberg asked Deasy about the role of poverty, this was Deasy’s response:
“When Finberg asked Deasy if he agreed that other factors, such as family wealth and poverty, influence the success or failure of a student, Deasy said, “I believe the statistics correlate, but I don’t believe in causality (of poverty).”
Odd that the gap between haves and have-nots appears on every standardized test. Deasy doesn’t see that poverty might be a causal factor. Like hunger, poor health, homelessness, frequent moves, frequent absemces, economic insecurity, etc., just happen, but don’t cause lower test scores.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Deasy ought to voluntarily give up his home and his car. Would sleeping outside, skipping basic hygiene, and spending hours a day walking and riding busses impact his job performance? If so, would that be a causative impact, or just a correlation?
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LOL. Exactly.
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sorry, he is correct. Poverty does not cause low test scores. It is highly correlated, but correlation is not causation–as you should know from reading any entry level statistics, research methods or sociology textbook. Even the other variables you suggest are not causes of low scores. They are highly correlated. If poverty caused low test scores, people such as myself would never have scored so highly on SAT or ACT or GRE or any of the other exams (state tests) over the years. Sure, take a kid who scores high on all of your list and I would guess that that kid will not pass. But that failure is not guaranteed.
How do you suggest we evaluate teachers? Just curious. Our education programs turn out so-called high quality teachers but they claim they have no way of evaluating the performance of these teachers. A few even guaranteed their grads would perform in the classroom, but what was the metric?
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While you may “technically” be correct, the fact is there is some causation, just not for everyone. For example, smokers have a high level of lung cancer, but doesn’t mean everyone will get it. Same thing with poverty. People who are poor score lower than those who don’t but that’s not a guarantee. There is a lot of wiggle room. What everyone is complaining about when they talk about poverty is the “culture” that comes from poverty. Divorce rate, drugs, gangs, stress, abuse, etc. As someone who grew up with family that was poor and rich, there is a HUGE difference in help/support.
As for how do you evaluate teachers? You could use student scores, they just have to be done right. I think research shows there is a 20-30% swing in reliability JUST using them with nothing else. Using students scores with other measures would be a better indicator. Kind of like when you want to hire someone. I always look at the interview, prior work accomplishments, portfolio, recommendations, etc. I don’t give 1 area more weight then another. I take it as a “total” to make a informed decision.
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“For example, smokers have a high level of lung cancer, but doesn’t mean everyone will get it. ”
Clearly you do not understand the research on smoking and cancer.
There is much more to it than correlation.
And, of course everyone will not ” get it”.
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The correlation vs. causation debate isn’t settled by citing outliers. There can be outliers who defy trends for either correlation or causation.
In my opinion teachers should be evaluated by professionals (peers and school administrators) who periodically observe them in their classrooms and review their lesson plans and the portfolios of their students.
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“The correlation vs. causation debate isn’t settled by citing outliers.”
Precisely. The only way to solve it is to come up with a model of student achievement as measured by test scores that explains more of the variation without using poverty as a predictor. This is going to be challenge because…
“a simple bivariate regression of state test scores and state poverty rates indicates that a full 40% of the variation in reading scores and 46% of the variation in math scores is associated with variation across child poverty rates. The addition of one other explanatory variable related to family background, the percentage of children who are members of minority groups, increases the explanatory power of the relationship to about 50% in reading and 51% in math.”*
For something as complex as educational outcomes, the fact that a state’s poverty rate can explain 40% of the variance in test scores alone is quite remarkable. Clearly, Deasy is just parroting stuff he has heard and he doesn’t realize how ignorant he sounds.
*http://research.sanford.duke.edu/papers/SAN11-01.pdf
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Your sample size of one (yourself) is hardly widespread evidence of a national trend that has been reflected in nearly every study.
And, trust me, teachers aren’t afraid of evaluations. We are simply skeptical of the use of standardized tests to evaluate us. We also don’t trust administrators who have the right to fire without cause. Their motivations are not always pure. Need to get rid of high priced veteran (even a good one)? Don’t need a reason. Need to get rid of a teacher who asks uncomfortable questions about district policy? Don’t need a reason. Need a job for your niece? Fire a teacher, don’t need a reason.
There are plenty of ways to evaluate teachers. Unannounced observations, student surveys. District created assessments. Student portfolios demonstrating individual student work.
And all of those are localized to meet the needs of the community rather than some broad brush test generated by a profit-making company that has no interest in measuring teachers but rather in satisfying investors.
To your original point, if it isn’t causation, then how come every reform has failed miserably on a large scale? Charters generally perform poorly. State run districts like RSD in New Orleans and EAA in Detroit have been disasters. How to explain these items. What’s the common feature? Poverty.
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To evaluate a teacher fairly, other professionals must be familiar with her work. These people must be able to assess her classroom climate, quality of instruction, rapport with students and progress of students as well as other factors.
It’s not that difficult to evaluate a teacher, but it can’t be done with a two-dollar group test.
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Well said.
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Causation doesn’t necessarily mean a one-to-one correlation. For instance, it’s been thoroughly established (despite the kicking and screaming of the tobacco industry) that smoking causes cancer. That doesn’t mean that everyone who smokes will get cancer because there are other factors such as natural resistance. As another example, what causes ulcers – bacteria or stress? The answer is that both do in different ways. The bacteria are necessary, but two different people can have the same levels of bacteria but one will get ulcers and the other won’t because of (among other things), the level of stress each one is under and how each one manages that stress.
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Well done, Dienne.
( biologist seal of approval!)
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Hold on. Trained statistician speaking. Correlation does not prove causality. True. However it is a great tool in hunting for cause.
99% of crack addicts started on milk. Bad causality indicator.
99% of scurvy sufferers have a low vitamin C intake. Good causality indicator. Yet, of two people with the same low C intake, one may be symptomatic, the other not – does not change the PROVEN causality.
You are misusing a well known misuse of data.
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trained statistician here as well. I agree and said, they are highly correlated and a combination of the variables cited would probably lead to very high failure rates. But they do not cause it. My point is that he was correct, low test scores are not caused by poverty in statistical terms. Many in education have moved away from the statistics jargon to develop and apply their own, such as practically significant. Not research based but evidence based. These are not interchangeable and have very different meanings and assumptions underlying them.
Again, I am not defending his position and policies. I think Deasy is not a champion of public schools and students, I think the research has clearly shown that charters/choice/vouchers do not lead to improved student test scores and I doubt they enhance learning.
I know, the APA has spent a good deal of time debating what statistical significance means as related to practical significance and which is more important, but papers do have to be given and published. As for those trying to defend teacher evaluation systems, I agree-vam and student test score based evaluations are very troublesome and highly inaccurate. But what are your alternatives. I have sat and listened to higher ed deans claim the tests are not valid measures of teacher performance, but when pressed they offer no alternatives. And the problem of using locally developed and locally administered evaluations is that we lead to the situation where students are being praised for their high performance when in fact they are not performing well at all.
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The countries with the highest poverty rates have the worst rankings on international tests. The states with the highest poverty rates have the worst national rankings. (and so on). Children of poverty are less likely to have educated parents and are less likely to have the comforts of a safe home environment where academics is emphasized, not to mention access to books, tutors, etc. Why do you think so many countries like China, Italy, Spain, Israel, Switzerland, etc etc pick and choose which areas of their country will be part of their representative sample? They deliberately leave their poorest areas out of their international testing samples (the US does not). If these countries tested their poorest and their second language learners, their international scores would be much lower. They know this, that’s why they pick and choose who takes the tests in their country. Poverty is a reality for many. While some will rise above it, most will not. It’s not that children living in poverty are not capable, they have just had more obstacles, psychologically, physiologically and environmentally, since before they were even born. It doesn’t matter how great a teacher is….he or she cannot fix all the life issues that accompany children to the classroom. We need to stop blaming and punishing our teachers. And no new so-called magical set of common standards is ever going to change the scores in our highest poverty schools.
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Of course poverty does not cause low test scores. Poverty causes conditions that cause low test scores. Correlation is not causation, but it’s certainly a clue. Those who ignore such strong correlations can quite accurately be said to be clue-less.
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A,
By your logic, smoking does not cause lung cancer because my Uncle Gustuav smoked every day for 60 years and never had lung cancer!
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Ang,
Great minds…
My apology, I did not see your comment above!
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No worries, Galton!
Nice succinct statement about uncle Gustuav!
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So this is the reformer end-run around one of the few states that still has tenure. I live in Michigan where tenure exists but is meaningless. Layoffs can be done regardless of seniority and job protections were lowered by the legislature significantly in 2011.
I’m actually a little shocked that California still has meaningful tenure (in that I mean that teachers receive due process).
I’m witnessing the effects of the new laws firsthand in my district. We’re facing budget cuts and layoffs and teachers are pulling out “special lesson plans” for their administrator visits that don’t reflect their normal teaching styles. Lots of going along to get along as well. None of this is helping the profession.
In a job that needs some protections, we’re basically at-will employees now.
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” I live in Michigan where tenure exists but is meaningless.”
No, “tenure” does not exist. You may have a meager smattering of “due process rights” in which the administration still holds the whip, the cudgel and the mace, but you don’t have “tenure”.
Please do not use the edudeformers’ language. No K-12 teacher in the US has “tenure”.
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Deasy doesn’t want to see poverty as part of the cause of poor school performance. Then he would have to do something about it which would divert his attention from his true singular goal-to destroy one of the largest teacher’s unions in the country.
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Let’s just hope that he was not offering an expert opinion, and that the other side has real experts to contradict his inane comment.
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Deasy doesn’t want to see the part that poverty plays in low performance in education because it would divert him from his main goal: to break one of the biggest teacher’s unions in the nation.
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Poverty causes suffering, which is produced by the current arrangment of our society. Deasy is complicit in that suffering because his thinking and actions do nothing to alleviate that suffering.
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Akla above reasons that poverty has no correlation to poor learning ability and the resultant poor test scores, causality.
For over 40 years as an educational researcher and public policy educator, and through endless empirical and other observations and valuations, I must disagree.
Diane shows statistics on poverty vis a vis learning in her book, Reign of Error, as does Mercedes Deutsch on her blog site, Deutsh 29. And hundreds of education longitudinal studies for universities and think tanks such as Rand, Stanford Research Institute, and many others, all show the bottom line to impaired learning is poverty as a main issue.
My personal observations doing longitudinal studies nationwide show clearly that without parental involvement, meaning early positive child care with parents as first teachers who also provide their children with adequate rest, nutrition, health care, these children lag behind in school. Pre School availablility is prime, as is a home environment where parents are actively engaged in their children’s upbringing. Living in poverty, either on skid row or in sub-standard housing, without adequate food and other necessities, often without English language skills, and often with either single family parents working 2 or 3 jobs, or a parent on drugs or in prison, which is the large group of those in children who live in poverty, cannot get any child off to an optimum school career.
Deasy, whom I have met a number of times, to whom I have spoken one on one, has manipulated the local LA community of color to his own end. I have written about it often on this site as have many others. He is where the buck stops and his assessment, as a Broad Academy-trained, business model, CEO who has virtually no academic background for his current position as LAUSD Superintendent, is not known for his leasdership ability as witness the iPad fiasco and teacher jail and Miramonte decisions, nor his truth telling. Many educators complain about his wild mendacity and his terrible temper tantrums, and given his 91% NO conficence vote from teachers, he does not belong in his job nor giving testimony in what could become a landmark case.
Vergara was not brought by these children plaintiffs…it was nurtured, with them as actors, by the billionaire group which wants to kill teacher’s unions. Ted Olson does not take cases pro bono…and his bill will be huge, far beyond the means of these plaintiffs. So again I say, follow the money.
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You seem to have misread my post. I did not say the two were not correlated. I never said correlation is not meaningful to shaping policy. I said deasy was correct in stating that low test scores are not caused by poverty. Pay attention. Public Policy degree holder here also. Shall we dual with our published papers? As for the rest of your post, duh–that is what the actual research has shown and it has been demonstrated through proper research design, analytical methods and non-biased conclusions. And statistically significant to boot. We know that the wealthy have far more advantages and access to resources and this is what we measure on our tests. Over and out
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“Shall we dual with our published papers? ”
Yes, please.
Since you offered…
List your published papers.
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Correlation does not prove causation but it does not disprove the link either.
From a *statitical* sense, Deasy is just as wrong to say poverty does *not* cause poor performance as anyone else is to say that poverty does cause poor performance. We don’t have “gold-stadard” statistical evidence to support either position.
However, it would be completely insane when searching for a way to improve education not to investigate a factor that has the biggest correlation with achievement. Or to take on board evidence from countries that have targetted child poverty as a way to improve educational achievement e.g. Finland.
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If poverty has no causal relationship to test scores (the only measure that LAUSD seems to care about) then why is Deasy spending $200 million per year and taking 20 minutes of instructional time out of every day to feed poor children breakfast in the classroom?
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Addendum…forgot to sign my real name to the above diatribe.
Ellen Lubic, Educator
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Of course, correlation is not causation. However, one cannot have causation without correlation. To suggest otherwise is nonsense.
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Poverty itself might not be the cause. But he’s evading the issue. If there’s a high correlation between poverty and poor performance, there is SOME causal factor that systematically affects poor people differently from non-poor. So, what is it? Either way, the teacher is not the factor since both poor and non-poor students have teachers. Often the same teachers. So if he believes poverty isn’t the cause, it’s irresponsible not to try to find out what IS the cause. Instead he’s denying causality so he can pursue the agenda he wants to pursue. That of blaming teachers.
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Exactly…you can see how he/she responded to my post with insults and challenges as to our ostensibly mutual public policy creds. I worry about folks who post with NO name attached. I think that, particularly regarding Vergara, many shills for the plaintiffs will show up here to debate and/or impose poor and/or distorted theories to deflect from the true meaning of this case.
This may end up being a SCOTUS case that can change public education dramatically. With all the big money being poured into this it is obvious that there will be much dirty pool. If it goes to SCOTUS, with the current makeup of the court, we can get a ruling similar to Citizens United…meaning a far reach from the true issues of a Hillary movie…to one that outlaws unions or whatever else Scalia and his buddies can do as the most activist court in history.
So who are you, akla??? Please identify yourself if you want to be taken seriously.
I am Ellen Lubic.
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wow, if you would address what I posted instead of going off on a tangent and claiming I posted something else. I point out that you claimed I was saying something I did not and you come back with this “challenge” stuff. This site, like many others, consist of bullies.
My point, if you wish to be taken seriously, use proper terminology. All of you are willing to jump on the bandwagon that poverty causes low test scores, that those in poverty who do not score low are outliers, etc. Or I am a shill for the charter/choice/voucher corporate flacks. Pay attention to what is written and posted. Focus. As an educator and public policist, I want to know what it is that leads to those outliers, why do children from poverty score well? Why do children of affluence score low? How can we change our instructional methods to meet the needs of the student to help the achieve?
In pointing out simple statistics terminology and meaning, and in asking for comments on how you think we should evaluate teachers, I get labeled a shill and bullied. Shame on you.
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Corey & Woof Thomsen/Ellen Lubic: word games used to deceive, mislead and deny are right out of the charterite/privatizer playbook.
An abstract argument can be made for quibbling about terms and refining their usage. However, the general public will understand the words of Superintendent John Deasy in their most general meaning: the oft-repeated rheephorm mantra of “poverty is not destiny” and that only lazy haters [especially teachers!] use poverty as an excuse for “failing our kids.”
Think of how the leading charterites/privatizers and their edubully underlings generally explain high-stakes standardized testing to the general public. They almost always leave the impression that the familiar diagnostic tests that the adult population had in school—produced by their teachers and used to assess whether or not teacher are teaching and students are learning—are just like, say, “The Pineapple and the Hare” bubble-ins. Until the public finds out otherwise…
Link: http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2012/04/20/daniel-pinkwater-on-pineapple-exam-nonsense-on-top-of-nonsense/
Link: http://www.pinkwater.com/the-story-behind-the-pineapple-and-the-hare/
It is not just the amount of time and energy and money devoted to high-stakes standardized tests—by their very nature they measure very little, are inherently imprecise, and are used and abused for purposes for which they are not suited. Yet the faith [literally] of the self-styled “education reformers” in standardized test scores is a startling confirmation of their ignorance of their own Holy EduMetrics.
So you can have Secretary of Education Arne Duncan both promoting and denouncing high-stakes standardized tests and their abuses—
Link: http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/choosing-right-battles-remarks-and-conversation
The fact that they can torture logic, massage numbers and invent facts—then regurgitate that toxic word salad with a straight face—was foretold long ago by one of those old dead Greek guys:
“A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.” [Demosthenes]
So keep on clarifying and correcting and explaining. It’s good to fumigate once in a while…
😎
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And who would sneeze at Demosthenes, dear Krazy TA?
As you know, I may retreat, but after 40 years in the trenches of education, I do try to “fumigate.”
MS continues throughout to push his/her views of pro charters, never condemning any. although there are vast differences among them. No mention of the Gulen Movement with 143 charters making so much profit off American taxpayers that it is fomenting revolution in Turkey using our money. Their students are not from the inner cities, and are not impovrished, but rather from middle class communities that are mainly Turkish.
I do understand the tempation to drift off into philosophical discussion, but this issue today of Deasy and Vergara is prime to educators in LA and all over California. I would have preferred if MS used the public policy skills that he/she claims to have to assess the topic presented instead of going off on a tangent about the great good that Success Academies are doing in NY.
And counter to his/her adminition to me that I should be ashamed of myself for not reading the comments carefully and for speculating that he/she may be a shill from the Broad group, I agree with Diane 100% that the MS hard sell is worthless to most of us.
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After the Korean War the population of South Korea was poorer than that of Haiti yet it was possible to greatly increase the educational level of the population without the need for a great amount of spending. Despite the enormous amount of poverty which still exists in China particularly in the countryside it seems not very difficult to educate Han Chinese.
The correlation between SES and school performance probably reflects the underlying causal effect of differences in cognitive level. People with a genotype conducive to success in modern high-tech societies are likely to have higher IQ. Their children inherit their genes for higher IQ and so do better in school.
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More Eugenics babbling.
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Natural selection and survival of the fittest. Read Dawkins premier book from 1972, The Selfish Gene, for more on this avenue of discussion.
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“Their children inherit their genes for higher IQ and so do better in school.”
Please list your sources for this information on genetic inheritance .
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http://www.technologyreview.com/news/411880/a-comeback-for-lamarckian-evolution/
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Hume famously said that correlation was causation. Hardly anybody accepts that statement. For one thing a correlation coefficent is a symmetric function while causation is a non-symmetric relation. So clearly Hume was wrong but he did have the key insight that correlation is the only way that causal relations manifest themselves empirically. However a high correlation between A and B could indicate that A causally effects B or that B causally effects A or that both A and B are causally effected by something else. Furthermore these possibilities are not mutually exclusive.
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No, Hume famously said that when we speak of causation, we have no right to do so because all we have actually witnessed is correlation. Different statement.
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Good point, however, about the symmetric nature of correlation. Excellent point.
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Dienne – No doubt someone with an IQ of 80 is just as likely to be successful in our society as someone with an IQ of 120.
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What does IQ measure, Jim?
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Undoubtably , someone at some point told Jim he had a high IQ.
He perhaps took that bit of information too seriously and has banked everything on that numbers importance.
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And what does “successful” mean?
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Now you’re getting there, Joanna, bravo!!
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The “correlation does not imply causation” tenet does not come into play here. SES predicts test scores. Be pretty hard to get experimental evidence here!
Is Desay building a new, twisted version of No Excuses?
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Pretty clever: “but I don’t believe in causality (of poverty)” The ‘I’ Blissful ignorance. Must be nice.
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Deasy is Gates’ flunky. No surprise when he parrots Gates’ ideology
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And he is Broad’s toadie…and he is clear with his lessons from both of these mentors.
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Do you know what’s interesting?
Today, I had a student who almost stepped on another student sitting down as a matter of play. I saw him with my own eyes. I put up my hand and waved it toward me to direct him to come over to where I was standing (about 8 yards). The student – a 9-year old third grader – opened his arms, shrugged his shoulders and barked at me “What?!! What did I do?!” … And didn’t budge from his spot.
Authorities place so much weight on scoring assessments based on demographic information and levels of income, free lunch, poverty, race….the list goes on. Then they say “What causal relationship?! What do you mean it has an effect?!!” And they don’t budge from their own malfeasance – they’re ‘spot.’ They see us watching. Then they gaslight us into thinking we’re wrong. We are not. They are.
Remember Newton’s Laws….
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“Then they gaslight us into thinking we’re wrong. We are not. They are.”
Love the gaslight reference.
And, yes, I agree we ( teachers, students, parents, ) are being gaslighted.
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Um, I think Hume really said that correlation was not causation but only appears to be.
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More on correlation
http://enthusiasms.org/post/238289205
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Dienne –
Question – What does IQ measure?
Answer – Intelligence.
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Good guess, and that’s what you might think based on “Intelligence” Quotient. But what it really measures is advantage.
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Yep
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Suggest Jim read the many articles not only how privilege affects intelligence testing and other testing, but how it affects SAT scores. There is massive data showing that Caucasian students from homes where parents read to them from practically birth, give them music lessons which also correlates with math, and other advantages that come with middle to upper class income, and who speak English, will do far better on the SATs…thus get into Ivy League schools and good universities at a far greater percentage than students who live in poverty. There are occasional acceptions…but they are rare.
David Coleman is presently revising the SATs to correlate with CC. Put all this together with charter schools choosing only the top students in inner cities, leaving behind the ELL and Special Ed, plus behavioral problem, students, and it is clear that we will have an American underclass locked into poverty in perpetuity.
Ellen Lubic
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IQ is what is measured by IQ tests.
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Yes.
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Robert D. Shepherd: exactly.
But I know you don’t expect the trolls and shills to understand your plain and direct English.
Then again perhaps that is part of what defines them.
Keep on posting. I’ll keep on reading.
😎
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Nothing is measured by IQ tests!
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There are a lot of things that Deasy “does not believe” but that does not mean that the person with high, average or below average intelligence feels the same or should feel the same! The best example of “Deasy-fog brain” … an I-Pad with Pearson loaded curriculum in the hands of every LA student with money coming from money set aside for building improvements. So I fully expect that his “view” on poverty and its effect on learning is more about bringing him praise and personal profit from the corporate world.
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Harold – You are incorrect. Perhaps you should read Hume. He is pretty emphatic on this point. As a result of his extreme position it was rather easy for others to ridicule his views. However Hume should still receive credit for focusing attention away from a metaphysical conception of causality to a more empirical appraoch.
In some areas of science the notion of causality evaporates. For example in celestial mechanics you simply have a differential equation and the notion of causality in no way is needed for an analysis of the phenomena.
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If you are only chasing scores on standardized tests as measures of student “performance,” you are probably not doing a great job of understanding learning as process that extends over time and is far more complicated than is provided by these “snapshots” of right wrong responses to about 50-55 items on a typical statewide computer-scored test, with about 10% of these items present for the convenience of test-makers who need to field-test items and refresh the pool of items. Up to 10% of the items are likely to be scored incorrectly or have no clear answers.
The qualitative judgments of student learning that guide the work teachers make have been discredited in a sustained campaign by economists, statisticians, and fans of numbers who have done a great job of persuading policy makers that no teacher is a trustworthy judge of what and how their students are learning.
The reification of test scores as if these are perfected measures on which to base policies is aided by an unregulated testing industry that generates an estimated $6.1 million a year.
Scores on standardized tests are not objective. They are the product of many judgments, statistical assumptions with unexplained “noise” in data from which grand inferential leaps are made about the teacher (and only the teacher) “adds value” to learning.
Standardized tests are designed for efficient use more than insight into teaching and learning. For the latter, you will have to dump the fast food of the test and spend time with teachers, students, parents, and community members, not algorithms and spreadsheets.
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Yes, it is another version of “no excuses”, a slogan I believe is borrowed from the military? As though education were simply a version of marine boot camp — or ought to be.
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I think teacher is not the factor for both poor and non-poor students. Often the same teachers. So if he believes poverty isn’t the cause, then sorry to say according to Maine it’s also a cause. I think you not to try to find out what IS the cause. Instead he’s denying causality so he can pursue the agenda he wants to pursue.
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I think teacher is not the factor for both poor and non-poor students. Often the same teachers. So if he believes poverty isn’t the cause, then sorry to say according to Maine it’s also a cause. I think you not to try to find out what IS the cause. Instead he’s denying causality so he can pursue the agenda he wants to pursue.
http://www.thehoustonimmigrationlawyer.com/
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Most of the children in poverty have childhood stress that literally slows the brain. Why is the issue so strong on all kids learning at the same rate. The issue isn ‘t when they learn, it is that they learn. Why can’t we be a country that just waits for their children that don’t learn so fast. Stay with them and they will succeed. Why do we have to bully kids into all being the same, in lock step, like the stepford kids
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Stress has, indeed, been shown to have dramatic consequences for student achievement, on several measures. And, of course, poverty causes stress, lots and lots of it.
Deasy would probably explain that what he means is that we should not take a defeatist position–the position if a student is poor, he or she cannot possibly succeed. Agreed, entirely. Of course.
But it’s insane, of course, to point to a few outliers–to a few who managed to succeed despite horrific conditions in childhood–and hold these up as evidence disproving the OBVIOUSLY TRUE GENERALIZATION that poverty matters, that it matters A LOT. Anyone who suggests that it doesn’t thereby betrays utter ignorance of the realities facing teachers and schools. He or she shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near an educational administration or policy-making desk.
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“Deasy would probably explain that what he means is that we should not take a defeatist position–the position if a student is poor, he or she cannot possibly succeed.”
But why state the obvious ad nauseum? I can’t think of any credible academic or pundit who says that poor students can’t succeed. It is a total strawman argument. Every time I hear it it makes me want to scream!
Everyone ought to be quite plan about what Deasy’s mealy-mouthed response means. He is using the absence of a clear mechanism to explain the variance in test scores to deny that poverty is the most important single predictor. As if it’s spurious. This is a bald-faced lie. Poverty is highly predictive of student outcomes cross-sectionally, longitudinally and cross-culturally. While it is true that there is much work to be done as to why this is so there is little left to do regarding that it is so.
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Yes, Emmy. Clearly, that is the case.
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Deasy also said that not firing bad teachers wasn’t the result of bad management, because LAUSD doesn’t have bad management. HA!
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Said in my best WC Fields red nosed voice: “Thass a goooood onnnee!”
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How do I say this clearly enough? “Cause and Effect” is a third grade skill. The cause is poverty. The effect is lower scores. Because kids are poor, their scores are lower. I teach this skill to eight year old kids. Come see me if you need remediation.
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These days “Cause and Effect” is even taught and tested in 1st grade! So if the powers that be expect 1st graders to get it…
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What does John Deasy know about teaching and learning? He has a doctorate that is questionable, at best. The person who gave it to him is in federal prison for education fraud. “Coincidentally,” Deasy hired the same person as a highly paid consultant before the doctorate was awarded. Somehow, Deasy was able to comply with U. Louisville’s residency and earned hours requirements by mental telepathy because he was in California for most of the time. Lastly, if you read Deasy’s doctoral thesis you can understand why he is clueless about the causal relationship between poverty and performance. Thus, the doctorate has all the earmarks of a quid pro quo — and the LAUSD board just rehired him.
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“The person who gave it to him is in federal prison for education fraud.”
Do tell.
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After his phony act on how he was resigning, which even the LA Times published, and the many emerging stories on the iPad mistakes, and the 91% No confidence vote, etc., we in LA must also ask ourselves how our elected BoE who are supposed to represent the real public, not the phony bussed in group who he arranged for the show on Oct. 29, could get it so wrong and rehire him.
What does he have on each member that they would support this sham?
His arrogance since then is over the top. Only Marguerite LaMotte, who died shortly after this vote, had the guts to vote repeatedlyagainst him.
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Well spoken. Dr. Deasy only cares about test scores and not about communities, not about principals and teachers that really care about their students and are trying desparately to make the community care about the learning environment of their children. That’s what it is all about! Community awareness. What does it take to make our children successful in school? If you ask just a a single parent, they will dismiss it and say it’s up to the school. What we have learned is that it takes a community to raise a child. The parents, the community have to care about education starting at preschool and going through elementary, middle school and high school. They need to be actively involved in the school. Most teachers are there, they care and educate the children. I am a traveling music teacher. I see it in 5 schools. I see principals that are over worked but they are still there to watch over the education process, keep tabs on the teachers, the children’s progress . There is only so much they can do. Parents need to be actively involved with not only their own children but the community of the school that their children are attending.
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Robert D. Shepherd – Conditions in South Korea at the time of the Korean War were pretty horrific. People were literally selling their children on the streets to get something to eat. Nevertheless it proved possible to educate the South Korean population in a fairly short period of time without massive expenditures. The South Korean population has an average IQ of 108. I suspect that had something to do with South Korea’s rapid rise from extreme poverty.
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Jim, it is clearly the case that there is something real called general cognitive ability that is measured by IQ tests and various aptitude tests. After that, things get really murky. No single gene that is highly correlated with g has yet been discovered despite considerable work toward that end. And epigenetic factors make the previously accepted heritability estimates for g quite suspect. I suspect that intelligence is extraordinarily complex and that genetic determinism will go the way of phlogiston and the ether.
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Tests measure what tests measure. Nothing more. We make a leap of faith that test responses represent something defined as cognitive ability. It may be we have created the notion of intelligence to conform to what we expect to measure. It would not be the first time science has lost its way nor succumbed to a Tyranny of Ignorance. I don’t have the hubris nor pedigree that so many others do to parade psychometrics as such an absolute science that we refuse to question its methods and outcomes. Like any science, it can fail when applied and MUST be tempered with human thought. That is the least we can do when staring at bar graphs and distributions when we should instead be given the freedom to teach our students.
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MathVale. I agree entirely. These various aptitude tests correlate very strongly with one another. But what an IQ test measures is IQ, not that elusive, variable thing called intelligence. Howard Gardner wrote of a handful of “multiple intelligences.” But there are billions of them, discernible at various design levels, and not touched by any of these tests, and in this, as in so much else, there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our [natural] philosophy (uh, science).
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“It may be we have created the notion of intelligence to conform to what we expect to measure.”
This. Succinct and accurate, thanks.
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The educational attainment of parents also correlates with their children’s academic achievement. In any case, although horrible, the poverty of Korea in wartime was a temporary phenomenon when set against their thousand-year-plus Confucian culture that prized learning.
A latter-writer to the NY Times observed rightly that if we really want to help children to learn we ought to start investing heavily in adult education. It’s a win-win proposition.
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Well said, Harold.
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When you say the poverty in Korea was temporary wartime, are you referring to the Korean War or the 35 years of occupation by Imperial Japan or both?
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Can you read?
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It is unclear to me if you count the 35 year occupation of Korea by Imperial Japan from 1910-1945 as wartime. Was that included?
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Teaching economist, you need to address your question to Jim’s ridiculous assertion.
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I did not see that poster Jim characterized the poverty and deprivation in Korea as temporary, so I am not sure why it is relevant to him.
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I taught in S. Korea; it’s all about the college entrance test. Very warped one dimensional society…
Oh, and teachers are paid more and have strong union rights, no high standardized tests, no charters.
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Jim, do you sleep with The Bell Curve under your pillow or something? ;P
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Well said Emmy!! LOL
In Indiana, our ed reformer mitch and tony passed out copies of the racist C murray’s work on a new education system to mitch’s appointed education roundtable members. They all thought it was wonderful.
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JIM:
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/411880/a-comeback-for-lamarckian-evolution/
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Tests “measure” nothing. They are not a “measuring” device and therefore cannot measure anything. Just because something is numerated doesn’t mean it was “measured”
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Akla et al. Here is my proposal for the development of a useful, valid teacher evaluation system. DON’T. The cost in treasure and emotion going into systems that are guaranteed to be highly flawed, is huge. Teachers are not the problem. Complicated, expensive evaluation schemes are bad solutions in search of a problem.
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Bad solutions in search of a problem. Well said, Michael. That just about sums up the whole education deform movement. If you go to the Achieve website, for example, you will see that the Home page is plastered with the usual deformer song and dance about how the U.S. is so terribly far behind other nations in reading and math and science as measured by international test scores. But, of course, correct those scores for the socioeconomic status of the kids taking the tests, and you find that our students lead the world.
These guys love their data [massaged to give the results they were looking for to begin with].
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Jim, I suggest reading current thoughts on genetics and heredity and intelligence.Some good information is here.I wish the answers were as simple as it is all genes or ii is all poverty but the reality is much messier. They all tend to impact each other. Here was some nice discussions.
Though we cannot always figure out causes when we look at meta-studies like Hattie or Hartel we have seen that teachers make up 10-30% of the effect size of student achievement ( depends on study – this often confounded with other school factors) and these same studies fine student characteristics ( which confound intelligence and poverty together as well as other family issues) as predicting 50% of student achievement. This is too general to use on any individual student or even small sample, but these studies do show that the teacher- though a valuable influence on children’s learning is one of hundreds of variables that we do not control for. So Deasey can deny poverty if he wants but how does he justify that it is all the teacher? That is what is a mystery to me.
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Jim:
You might, for example, read this:
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/411880/a-comeback-for-lamarckian-evolution/
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Poverty itself does not cause low achievement, just as affluence does not guarantee high achievement. However, the EFFECTS of poverty can result in low scores, and often does, just as many privileges can have a positive effect on learning.
It’s important for educators to use the correct terms. Saying that poverty causes low achievement sounds fatalistic and makes it sound as though educators think low achievement is inevitable for the poor. Those of us who worked in impoverished schools know that this is not true.
That said, fifty years of research has shown a very high correlation between income and academic achievement. Put simply, generally the higher the income, the higher the achievement and the lower the income, the lower the achievement. As someone said, this suggests many “causes” at work, but that’s not the same as cause and effect. If that were true, poverty would always cause low achievement.
Some educators say that “poverty is destiny.” In my opinion, that statement makes it sound as though teachers think it’s hopeless to expect poor kids to do well. Of course, that is far from the truth. After all, teachers are the people who work so hard to help each child reach his potential.
Poverty AFFECTS the academic achievement of children, but it does not determine it.
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I suspect it comes down to the fact affluent children are ALLOWED to fail with less consequence than poor children. The testing culture amplifies this. A wealthy family may be able to provide both a social and academic safety net if their child makes a mistake. It is no secret that well-off parents can smooth the path of a struggling child even all through life.
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I agree and caution anyone not to use that big umbrella when talking about achievement. Poverty causes childhood stress among other things which does slow the brain. But it does not stop some families from providing a strong environment conducive to learning. nd those children move ahead without a problem.
Generalizations always lead to trouble when the political double talk starts. Be specific in discussing educational problems and realize first, every child is different and second, even if students blossom slower, if we don’t push them so far behind that they leave school, they will progress, at their best rate.
To bad our system of education doesn’t account for that
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Couldn’t care less about student “achievement”. Care most about the teaching and learning processes.
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common sense and nicely said Linda.
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Thank you for stating what I said in terms perhaps the posters here will understand. Probably not. Once we move beyond seeing the poverty, we can begin seeing the student and start teaching how that student needs us to teach. It does not require any fancy new name or for us to develop new jargon, but it does require resources, time and real professional development. And building up the community, educating the parents, creating a safe crime free community etc. But alas, instead of those discussions on how people are doing this or how we can get policy people to address this, bullies jump on me for not parroting their simplistic statements concerning causation. 😦
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http://www.nih.gov/news/health/oct2010/nichd-25.htm
Study on Improving Parent Literacy
Improving mothers’ literacy skills may be best way to boost children’s achievement
Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health concluded that programs to boost the academic achievement of children from low income neighborhoods might be more successful if they also provided adult literacy education to parents.
The researchers based this conclusion on their finding that a mother’s reading skill is the greatest determinant of her children’s future academic success, outweighing other factors, such as neighborhood and family income.
The analysis, performed by Narayan Sastry, Ph.D., of the University of Michigan, and Anne R. Pebley, Ph.D., of the University of California, Los Angeles, examined data on more than 3,000 families.
The study, appearing in Demography, was supported by NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
“The findings indicate that programs to improve maternal literacy skills may provide an effective means to overcome the disparity in academic achievement between children in poor and affluent neighborhoods,” said Rebecca Clark, Ph.D., chief of the Demographic and Behavioral Sciences Branch at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the NIH institute that funded the study.
After mother’s reading level, neighborhood income level was the largest determinant of children’s academic achievement.
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Thanks Harold for raising this issue. In the 1990s, we found in Santa Barbara County schools, that the Latino population, which was mainly comprised of both service and field workers (and the first in the state to have over 50% Latino attendance in public schools, and now have over 80%), had many parents who could not read and write in Spanish. As agrarian workers in Mexico they were working in the fields by 7 years old so their education was truncated at first grade) Thus, they could not read notices even though they were written in Spanish. We understood that English cannot be learned without a grounding in the native language, so I and a few other educators started the Spanish Language Literacy Program. Our volunteer tutors were well trained by an LA group of Latino educators.
We found however that we had not factored in the native culture. Mothers and grandmothers to whom we directed our initiation were delighted with the idea of learning to read so as to pass this skill on to their progeny. However, many mothers worked as pickers and/or hotel service workers, and were gone all day. It was the culture that these women did not come out in the evenings when we scheduled classes. We tried classes on weekends, but found that they did not attend them for they had to be at home to do family tasks.
Many of our teacher group also taught ESL night classes at the city college and found that younger motivated people were regular attendees. Now those classes are gone pretty much all over California as a result of budget cuts for Adult Ed.
I have since worked on grant projects training grandparents who are fluent in their first language to help with reading programs as classroom aides. Since these grandparents are a generation older than our first attempt, it is a far more successful program. They work one on one with ELL students and the results are dramatic. These are volunteer aides not paid by the districts.
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“Like hunger, poor health, homelessness, frequent moves, frequent absences, economic insecurity, etc., just happen, but don’t cause lower test scores.”
What a pity it is when a great scholar like Diane Ravitch has to state, for powerful officials, something this OBVIOUS, but thank you, Diane, for doing so, for hammering this home, again and again. The deformers of our K-12 educational system want to pretend that the savage inequalities of our schools and of the home environments of our students make no difference. Why? Because they are of the oligarchical class, and many of this class want to believe a fairy tale–that they occupy their positions not because of the luck of the draw but because of their innate superiority.
Social darwinism, genetic determinism, meritocracy defined by the oligarchical elite, ed deform, the totalitarian centralization of command and control in education–these are all part of a single sick package. All we hear from the ed deformers is the same tired, transparently self-serving sloganeering, again and again. These people read and listen and think only within their own echo chamber.
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Learning is mastery of the bullet list.
Teaching is punishment and reward.
Education is sorting.
Arbeit macht frei.
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Education is sorting. You go left. You go right.
We need a centralized Common Core Curriculum Commissariat to do that for us; to mill, identically, the children of the proles; and to teach them the grit, tenacity, and perseverance they will need in order to contain their alienation and remain obedient.
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Or, as Bill Gates put it in a recent talk, “If you don’t like the new tests, wait until you have a boss.”
Well, guess what, folks? You all have a boss now. Bill Gates has decided that he runs U.S. education now. And the Duncans, the Achieves, etc., these are just his wind-up toys. Don’t bother to protest. No one gives a $&$#&**&!! what you think. These matters have been decided for you.
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With beliefs like that Deasy shouldn’t be a superintendent of a public school district.
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Jimmie…wonderful to see you here. I hope you will be running for the District 1 BoE seat. Marguerite would be so pleased.
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Long-time urban public school system evaluator here: Deasy could simply ask his Testing Department to disaggregate the test scores by, for example, Free or Reduced-Price Lunch Code. Guess what he’ll find? What we unfailingly find: big differences. To be even more refined, sort by mother’s education. (Last I checked, the single most powerful SES indicator, accounting for around 82% of the variance there.)
So what is the relationship between poverty and student achievement? Generally about two-thirds the variance, about 62% – 68%. So not 1% and not 99%. But – and a big but – that kinks up in a big way when classroom poverty (define it by the Lunch Code) goes above 67%. At that point and above, learning really slows down.
The point of this is it is all measurable. If we want an honest dialogue (which we surely are not getting) then we need to start there.
As to a poster’s point above about increasing parent literacy – yes, that does help improve student achievement, and keeps the achievement going.
All of this should be about the dialogue I rarely see here, the pretending that student achievement and school performance are one in the same. Because we pretend this, our states and federal accountability systems have painted themselves into a corner: punishing high performing schools who really are lifting poor kids (not just urban but also rural), while rewarding mediocre upper-middle class schools coasting on their parents’ incomes. Whatever one thinks of value-added measures, guess what is driving that.
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Excellent comment. Thumbs up!
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superb post, Max!
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I’m not sure how this fits into the discussion, but after reading all of the comments on poverty and education I remembered a book I stumbled on in 2010, “In The Realm Of Hungry Ghosts”, by Gabor Mate. He found a correlation between mothers who had experienced high stress levels in the third trimester and the effects on their children. They were more prone to display learning disorders, anxiety, and eventually addictions. That school year I had 30 students and 7 of them had 504’s and 8 others required special attention through counseling, revised learning assignments. I did the math and realized most of the students were born not long after 9/11. My school is about 20 miles from D.C. and the Pentagon-a significant portion of the student’s parents are government employees.
That book helped me get through a very challenging year and I would love to know if these students have progressed. I e-mailed the author and asked him if there were any other studies I could look at-he said some research had been done in Israel that looked at how stress effected the expectant mothers.
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In addition…many of the children are born with alcohol fetal syndrome, and addicted to drugs at birth. These problems do not resolve with time nor with therapy. These children have permanent brain deficiencies.
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You will be interested in this, Karen:
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/411880/a-comeback-for-lamarckian-evolution/page/2/
and this:
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/129/1/e224.full
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And this:
http://developingchild.harvard.edu/topics/science_of_early_childhood/
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The test results at Success Academy in NYC prove that poverty is not to blame for poor test results. This is why the anti reformer extremists on our far left like the author of this blog are so scared of the charter movement, it blows their incorrect preconcieved notions out of the water. Stop blaming poverty and race and those evil wall streeters and start looking at what gets results folks.
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“prove that poverty is not to blame for poor test results. ”
Details, please.
How does success “get results”?
Admissions tests.?
Requirements for parents?
Application process?
Other skimming practices?
Dismissal of students for low scores?
Draconian discipline practices?
Drill and kill lessons?
High student turnover?
Do tell exactly how they do it.
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outside of a blind lottery for zoned kids none of those questions pertains to Success Academies. In fact, their attrition rate is lower then zoned schools. I dont see how they can skim when they retain more students then the schools they colocate with.
The reason they perform better is because they have a more demanding curriculum. If you read the Stanford study on Charters in NYC you will see that they learn an extra month in reading and 5 in math annually vs zoned schools. To be more clear, they simply work more. THey go to school more. They are not burdened by the mismanagement of the DoE and labor contracts which restrict teachers from working more and protect incompetent teachers from being fired. Bottom line, they do it right.
If you looked at SAs results thru anything other then rose colored glasses, you would be amazed at what they are doing and how spectacular their results are. The anti choice extremists like Mrs Ravitch come up with nonsensical excuses that hold no water, do your research and you will see the fraud in those excuses.
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Sure, MS. Teaching to the bullet list. Teaching to the test. Extrinsic motivation, punishment and reward. All test prep all the time. That’s what gets results.
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Challenging kids gets results, being lazy teachers does too, only those results are failing, which is why charters are in such high demand.
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MS…when the charter operator has the ability to choose the students they wish to have attend their school, they always choose the best of those who vie for admittance. They leave behind the hard to teach, the Special Ed, and the ELL, English Language Learners. It is not hard to fill a roster of motivated students with motivated parents. These are the students who tend to succeed…although if you have the real interest in how charters fare in real world education, and not only want to take hits at Diane Ravitch and others in our field of education, you might read the results of the recent Credo study out of Stanford University.
It shows real data…and only 17% of charters actually do better than public schools.
Are you one of the shills sent to be disruptive on this site? Who are you and why don’t you use a real name? What is your academic background and work experience, and why should we care about what you have to say? Your comment above is without academic merit.
Try reading all the earlier posts and maybe you might learn from them.
Ellen Lubic, bona fide educator.
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woof your facts are wrong, in NYC Charters vastly outperform zoned schools. On average a schollar at a charter will learn an extra month of english and extra 5 months of math in one year at a charter vs a zoned school. This means that when a charter schollar graduates he is a year ahead of his zoned school friends in reading and 5 years ahead in math. Now tell me who is more prepared for the rigors of US college, the kid who is 1 and 5 years ahead or the other?
As for picking, it is illegal for charters to pick who they want, by NY State law their charters mandate a blind lobby with the only weighted factor being proximity to the school. This takes away any of the choosing you incorrectly claim takes place. IT seems you are not well versed in how NYC Charters work.
As for ELL, charters like SA use to put aside 20% of their seats for ELL, but due to federal laws, they had to stop the preference or lose millions in funding. It is not their fault that the Obama administration has made ELL preferences non fundable.
IM a parent who supported my zoned school until I put my child in it, then I pulled my child out and put him in SA, Ive seen both sides of the fence and supported both sides. After seeing the reality, its clear the charter system of Success Academy blows away its zoned school alternatives.
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On the Common Core tests last spring, the charter sector as a whole collapsed.
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Ellen Lubic: entirely your call, but I suggest you don’t feed the trolls and the shills. It only encourages them in their headlong pursuit of $tudent $ucce$$.
I know you realize this, but it’s just eduproduct spin and hype. For example, there was a posting on this blog not too long ago:
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2013/10/08/parent-groups-moskowitz-march-proves-that-charters-are-not-public-schools/
So when the SAs are closed during the school week and parents [along with students and staff] are ordered into public political action—er, wouldn’t that meet Ang’s mention of “Parent requirements”?
Yawn. Can’t the charteriters/privatizers come up with anything better than proof by assertion?
Guess not…
Thank you for your comments.
😎
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“The test results at Success Academy in NYC prove that poverty is not to blame for poor test results.”
One of the first rules of scientific research is to know how to generalize findings. Test results at Success Academy cannot prove that poverty is not to blame for poor test results.
Got any data for us to chomp on?
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sure, here are last years statewide testing results for the Success Academies who took the tests compared to the zoned schools they are co-located with:
http://nypost.com/2013/08/11/schooling-the-critics/
Success Academies in the Bronx with no white kids scored in the top 5% of schools state wide!!! These are the same kids who are going to the zoned schools within the same walls. Why is it the kid in the zoned school in the same building is scoring a 0-13% on these tests when the SA kids are scoring in the top 5% of the state??
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I get letters from Success Academy teachers. They burn out fast because of stress of constant test prep.
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Great that the test scores are so high. But these data alone are not enough to reject the null hypothesis that poverty and poor test results are unrelated…as in, like, everywhere. Here are a few things that would make others get more excited about SA’s test scores.
1. Make sure the co-located school and the SA school are truly matched pairs in terms of sample. Others on this blog have suggested ways that the student populations might be different.
2. You need to isolate the intervention so that the co-located school can serve as your control group. Skeptics say that student population and test prep account for the scores. Proponents say it is about expecting more and believing the kids can do it. Or maybe it is about more total instructional time.
If you want people to be more excited, you’ve got to tell them what is in the secret sauce because high test scores themselves need a context. It may be possible to raise the test scores of ELL students 50% in one year by strapping them into a computer adaptive module for 5 hours a day. But, would we want to do that?
Supposedly, the whole point of charters was to be able to scale up innovations. High test scores themselves tell us very little about the specific intervention(s) that are causing them. And, since we are talking about developing human beings here, we really need to get a sense of potential side effects of these interventions and if a less “costly” (financially or otherwise) change would achieve our goal just as well.
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Very well said!
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Emmy, quality response. Ill answer as I see it. Again I am no expert, just someone who has lived thru both sides of this debate having supported both sides.
1. SA charters are predominately in poor minority areas. They draw kids from the same zones and schools they co-locate with. Many of the students literally moved from one level to another of the same building. There are few to no kids bussing in from the burbs to get into a SA. In fact, their lottery preference is based on proximity to the school and they only choose kids from within the district they are located. So its the same kids, with the same socioeconomic background.
2. The secret in SAs sauce is they actually educate. Instead of one teacher in front of 30 kids for half a day they consistently break down into smaller groups for more direct teaching. They also are not bound by the onerous and beurocratic mess of union contracts that hold back school administrations from using the system they believe fits best. One great example is that in each SA classroom there is a fulltime teacher and a jr Teacher per 25 kids, so the ratio is really 12.5:1. They can do this because they do not have the massive pension and legacy costs that come along with union contracts. They can also fire underperforming teachers, something the union contracts make very difficult to do. Here is a link to SA explaining their general philosophy though, it is very insightful:
http://www.successacademies.org/experience-success/
I disagree with you on one point, high scores on tests beyond a shadow of a doubt that the innovations these schools are using work. Now you can take the Ravitch approach and just throw out the test results altogether and say testing is a sham because your methods produce inferior results, or you can realize that these tests adequately reflect how much a student has learned in a subject matter. But most importantly these tests, at the very least, can be used to compare the two co-located schools with the identical student population base. The results you see here show who’s winning and who is losing. In the end, this is why the anti choice folks on this forum are so upset, they are having their lunch eaten for them!
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MS,
Test prep is the educational equivalent of steroids used in professional sports. While they jack up the test scores of Eva’s in the short run, the massive test-prep, like steroids, are ultimately detrimental to a child’s long-term educational outcome.
Have you read anything from the teachers who have defected from Eva’s test-prep factories?
Have you not heard Eva’s infamous quote where the salivating Paul Fucaloro, Eva’s Director in Instruction, brags about turning her test-prep factory sweatshop workers… errr… I mean “Eva’s students” into “test-taking machines”—with this idiot not showing the slightest self-awareness or basic understanding about how harmful such a pedagogy is?
http://nymag.com/nymag/features/65614/index3.html
PAUL FUCALORO: “By the time test day came, they were like little test-taking machines.”
Or this from Harlem Success Academy defectors commenting on the above New York Magazine story:
http://nymag.com/nymag/letters/65751/
—————————-
“Others took issue with the network and its emphasis on test preparation. ‘Yes, all schools spend some time on test prep, but [Harlem Success Academy] goes too far … Are students here really learning or are they just becoming ‘test-taking machines’ ? ”
“A self-identified former teacher at Moskowitz’s Success Charter Network disputed her assertion that students spent only ten minutes a day on test prep (‘Totally untrue. Try two hours’), and focused on the Network’s policy toward disabled students.
———————————————-
Or how about this same defector blowing the whistle on Eva’s dumping of kids with special ed:
Again, at:
http://nymag.com/nymag/letters/65751/
——————————–
“ ‘(Success Academy administrators) counsel children with learning disabilities and behavioral difficulties out [of the school] because they do not want their test scores affected. It is beyond shocking, and morally disgusting.’ ”
“Others criticized Paul Fucaloro, Harlem Success’s director of instruction, who was quoted by (the original article writer) Coplon as saying, ‘I’m not a big believer in special ed.’ ”
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MS, no matter how many times you write the same things, no one is fooled.
Game over.
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In addition to what everyone else has pointed out, $ucce$$ Academy requires a heavy parental commitment of volunteer time (including forced protest marches, ahem). What slice of the poor population has a parent available for that kind of a commitment who’s not too drunk, stoned, high or depressed to do it? The answer is the thinnest and most advantaged slice. That little requirement alone guarantees that $ucce$$ Academy is not educating the same kids as public schools.
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“What slice of the poor population has a parent available for that kind of a commitment who’s not too drunk, stoned, high or depressed to do it?”
This comment seems out of character for you? The equation may be simpler. Don’t come to work = don’t get paid. Low-wage jobs are renown for their non-standard hours, unpredictable schedules, and lack of PTO.
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Sorry, Emmy, you’re right, I didn’t say that very well. Among the poor, most parents are working their behinds off with two or more jobs each just to put food on the table – those parents are certainly not available for volunteering. Of those who are not working so much, many are not available to volunteer because of the reasons why they’re not working – mental illness, substance abuse, physical disability, incarceration, etc. It’s not like there’s a large number of poor people who can simply afford to have a stay-at-home parent while the other parent works. Also, the types of jobs the poor tend to be able to get tend to be jobs that are not flexible with time off for school-related activities. Many professionals can take a day off to chaperone a field trip or leave early every Friday to coach their kids’ team or whatever. Most working-class people can’t. So in any case, the fact that Eva is able to get parents who can volunteer that much means that they come from a very small and relatively advantaged slice of the overall poor population – not at all the same population that public schools are serving, even in the same neighborhood.
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Thanks for hearing me, Dienne. I was confident this was the full context of what you were saying.
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Dienne: I too thought that your comment was out of character.
But we all make mistakes. I know I do. We all do.
But consider the startling difference between you and all those edupreneurs and edubullies and educrats and edufrauds [thank you, Linda!].
They rarely even hold themselves to a minimal level of being accountable.
“I go in, fix the system, I move on to something else.” [Paul Vallas]
Link: http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/Paul-Vallas–213999671.html
No need to even go over the unaccountable claim by Michelle “No Regrets” Rhee that she took her students from the 13th to the 90th percentile…
You were held accountable—and then felt responsible for correcting your mistake.
How refreshing! Even courageous compared to the leaders of the “new civil rights movement” of our time.
But then, what sort of times do we live in when
“One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.” [Mary Sarton]
Thank you for keeping it real.
Not rheeal.
Krazy props.
😎
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Dienne, THe protest was not forced. Most of the parents at our SA chapter did not attend. You have your facts wrong. As SA parents I can also say Ive neither been asked nor taken part in a single activity for the school nor has my wife. I suggest you get to know SA a little better before making unfounded claims that lack any truth, it takes away your credibility when you post lies on the forum.
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MS, stay happy in your “no excuses” charter school that excludes the ELLs, the kids with disabilities, the toughest kids. But please give it a rest. Saying the same things over and over is not persuasive. Encourage Eva to take over an entire district and show her stuff. No excuses.
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Diane, you do not have your facts strait once again. SA does have ELL students, they can not by law exclude them, that would be a criminal offense. They use to put aside 20% of their lottery seats for ELL but had to stop due to federal law. You can educate yourself on what happeneed here:
http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20130913/upper-west-side/no-more-reserved-ell-seats-at-success-academy-leaves-advocates-fuming
You know what the saddest part is, Eva tried to do all of this from within the reigns of the City Counsil but in proper NY fashion she was not able to get anything done thru the union controled burocracy of a waste of government we must live thru. So she took matters into her own hands and started her own charter network, now she is putting all of your failed ideological extremist views on education to bed with groundbreaking results for inner city kids at lower costs to the taxpayer. I fully understand why you fear her so much. She is the revolution, you are the old guard establishment holding on to your slipping power.
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Go read Gary Rubensteins analysis of the success academies using publically availalbe data
http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2013/08/13/how-to-define-success/
As a snippet
“Of those 73 first graders in 2007, only 35 took the seventh grade test. Of the 83 kindergarteners, only 47 took the sixth grade test last spring. Overall, they have ‘lost’ 47% of the original two cohorts. If this is one of the costs of having such high test scores, I’m not sure if it is worth it.”
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Thanks Megan, I commented on that post on Mr Rubinsteins forum some time ago, Im the last comments at the bottom, I’ve still gotten no response as his data is truly incomplete. Perhaps you can answer what Gary did not. Tell me, is the attrition rates at SA higher then the attrition rates at the schools close by? It is unfair to look at an attrition rate and simply assume it is bad or worse then the alternatives . So, I did some digging myself and found this:
http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/2014attritioncharterpublic.html
THe IBO studied attrition rates citywide and found that on average charter schools have LOWER attrition rates than zoned schools. So, if charters are creaming out, what are zoned schools doing?
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What gets results at charters, MS, is selecting the student body and eliminating ELLs, kids with disabilities and kids with behavior issues. Check out who starts at any given charter, and who graduates. The data is there, and that’s what counts, right?
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Charters in NYC have LOWER attrition rates then zoned schools. If charters cream and force out the kids who underperform, why do zoned schools kick out more students then charter schools overall?! Something doesnt add up here.
The reality is charters dont cream, they hold on to more students because they get better results and kids as well as their parents are demanding better educations.
As for ELL, you have to thank your President for that, his laws have forced charters to cut out their ELL preferences. Most Charters are begging to take on more ELL but cant for they would lose a key source of funding.
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MS: give it up. You won’t find any buyers here for your sales talk. The readers have heard that swan song too many times.
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dianerav: thank you for your patience.
😎
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Step right up for one thin dime–a mere pittance–and avail yourselves of the magic elixir, the philosopher’s stone, the fabulous educational cure-all. Forget about those expensive fixes–highly educated teachers, healthy home environments, small classes, after-school enrichment programs, well-equipped schools, libraries, arts programs, special education, carefully thought-out learning progressions, robust curricula, great curricular materials, and all that rot. Why pay for all these when for a mere pittance you can have DEFORMY MAGIC? Just teach to the bullet list of standards and teach to the test. And DEFORMY MAGIC not only does students. It does teachers and schools as well!!!See, ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS TO USE OUR SECRET FORMULA TESTS!!!
And boy, do I have a deal for you on those!
120 students per class? No problem! High crime and poverty rates? No problem! Students with crack-addicted mothers? No problem! Schools falling down? No problem? Hungry children? NO PROBLEM! DEFORMY MAGIC takes care of it all as quickly as you can say VAM, BAM, THANK YOU MA’AM!!!
DEFORMY MAGIC is a registered trademark of the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth, formerly known as Achieve, Inc. Offer void in sane nation states.
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Re that last paragraph, correlation looks like causality but isn’t, right? Saying it sure looks like causality is the same as saying there’s a correlation, which is what the testimony admitted. What I’m curious about is the causality Tough describes (How Children Succeed) between trauma/stress and success. The correlation between poverty and chronic stress then becomes the point.
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Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 20:01:18 +0000 To: cathyhesse@msn.com
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Harold – Advanced civilisations developed in East Asia long before Confucius lived. Since the time of the Shang Dynasty, East Asia has consistently had at any given time some of the most advanced cultures in the world. It is silly to believe that Confucius created Chinese civilisation which was already well-developed more than a thousand years before his time. The influence of Confucian thought on Japan wasn’t very great but nevertheless Japan has been among the most prosperous and advanced countries in the world for the last 1500 years. The living standard of Wester Europe did not surge past Japan until the end of the eighteenth century and the European advantage lasted little more than a century. Meanwhile Sub-Saharan Africa, in terms of internal developments, has lagged behind Eurasian cultures since the beginning of the Mousterian period 50,000 years ago. Measured IQ’s of different human populations vary from about 55 for Mbuti pygmies to 115 for Ashkenazi Jews. The average IQ levels of different populations accord well with their historical records of cultural and technological achievements.
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I suggest you go to the library and read some anthropological ethnographies. Human progress can be measured in many ways. The one I like best is love. How does a people care for its weakest members?
For all our wealth and smarts, we’ve got a long way to go. Some “primitive” societies have done much better than us in efficiently distributing goods and services to all of its members.
Have you ever considered that human beings are meant to share their innovations? Or that that “progress” is distributed rather than linear for a reason? People with high IQs can do a lot, but not everything that needs to be done in this world. Just ask someone who has Downs Syndrome or one of their relatives.
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just ask someone who has Downs Syndrome or one of their relatives.
yes, yes, yes
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The one I like best is love. How does a people care for its weakest members?
yes yes yes
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Perhaps we should give every ghetto child a copy of the Analects. I doubt that would do them any harm but as for making much of an improvement its a long way from Confucius to NWA.
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Jim,
It would be so wonderful if you would just go away….
Thanks
K
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Lol
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The Analects is just about a simple-minded a text as was ever conceived by the human mind. But it appeals to people who like rigid, unexamined hierarchies, whose ideals run to modeling human societies on those of ant colonies. Everyone in his place and following orders. Yup. That’s what we need. Keep ’em in their place. Teach them some obedience. Execute them if they deviate or don’t learn the lesson. LOL
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All of this reformer doublespeak, doubt, etc, remind me of the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail–“If she weighs as much as a duck, she’s made of wood, and therefore is a witch.” Same sound logic in both cases.
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Kay – I’m just attempting to awaken you from your “dogmatic slumber”. It’s for your own good.
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Emmy – I actually have read some descriptions of primitive peoples. In the traditional hunting cultures of the Canadian tundra when a women’s husband died she and her children were doomed. They might be able to survive in the summer when the caribou were abundant by getting some food from others but when winter approached and the caribou migrated to the south their fate was sealed. In the grim tundra winter there was simply no surplus to support any kind of welfare system.
A friend of mine who was born in China near the Mongolian border told me once that when he came to the US nothing amazed him as much as the bountiful American welfare system. He said that there was nothing like that in China. When a person there develops a serious illness for which he cannot afford a treatment his only recourse is to see what little money his kin may be able to offer him. If after getting what assistance he can from his relatives he still can’t afford the medicines or treatment too bad.
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Excellent, Jim. I’ve always thought there were similarities between LAUSD and the tundra. Great support for Kay’s point.
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Peter Smyth: touché!
There never seems to be a shortage of people who—after digging themselves into a hole too deep to get out of—keep insisting that if they just dug harder, exhorted themselves more, had better shovels, they could find a way to free themselves.
Strangely [?], a lot of them are graduates of something called the Broad Academy.
Rheeally!
😎
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Absolutely. Broadly speaking.
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Jim et al
….it is discomforting when anyone says, “it’s for your own good” (how paternalistic and supercilious)….
I have reread all these comments, and added my voice often, and it seems to me that when one is not a ‘boots of the ground’ educator here, folks misdirect the conversation to other countries which are in no way comparable to the US and particularly to the hugely diverse population of California schools where over 109 languages are spoken by students and in LA where there are tens of thousands of homeless students plus a huge population of pickers children who roam from school to school all over the state. SO it seems to me when
the dilletantes among us cannot reflect real first hand knowledge gleaned from experience, they resort to bringing up the philosophers which is a non issue.
Wish we could stay on track since we educators in Californa are suffering with Deasy and are facing much angst due his the Vergara testimony. While you in the other 49 states are fighting the weather and SS Academy in NY…we are watching a blow by blow of court action which could result in the final coffin nail driven into the union movement.
Ellen Lubic
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Emmy – Your ideas about welfare among primitive people are extremally naive. Many primitive people are nomadic moving constantly in search of food. When frail older people cannot keep up with the group they are left behind to die. Its not that these people are unusually cruel but their harsh way of life gives them no choice. Often older people themselves tell the group to go on without them.
In contrast in modern America it is not uncommon for society to spend millions of dollars to extend the life of a person with terminal cancer for a few months.
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Thanks, Jim. So nomads have higher test score. But wouldn’t letting the old people die lower the test scores?
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Emmy – I’m not saying that people in modern societies are kinder or better than people in primitive societies but primitive societies simply do not generally produce the surplus required to support those adults who have become frail or disabled.
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Robert D. Shepherd – “they are of the oligarchical class, and many of this class want to believe a fairy tale – that they occupy their positions not because of the luck of the draw but because of their innate superiority.”
After the allied victory in WW II a bunch of Nazi bigwigs were put on trial in Nuremburg. The IQ’s of these individuals were measured by American psychologists. All were significantly above average. As I recall from what I read long ago I believe Kalltenbrunner had the lowest IQ but he was stil 110 or 114 or something like that. Two of these individuals, Goering and Seyss-Inquart had IQ’s near or over 140. The average IQ of these individuals was about 125 which is about one and a half standard deviations above the average of the German population.
Robert you’re not dealing with reality. Members of the elite of any culture are definitely not average with respect to many of their significant characteristics such as IQ.
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Jim, I’ll try to say this as kindly as I can. We’re all busy here. I am not interested in entertaining whatever it is you’ve got going on. If you want me to teach you something, you’ll have to sign up for a class. If you want to teach me something, I’m afraid I am full up on the applicable social science coursework. Perhaps you could develop a syllabus and an on-line course and some of us might stop by. No one can learning anything from random bits of truthiness spewed on a blog. If you feel you you need to wake people up from a “dogmatic slumber” you’ve got some serious work to do and this isn’t the place.
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Jim, I never made that claim. You are attacking a straw man.
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Bill Gates wrote an operating system for the IBM PC on his own. That doesn’t mean he’s Leibniz but he is clearly quite a bit above average in intelligence.
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Bill Gates adapted an operating system that he purchased, Jim.
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Deasy’s assertion here is incredulous at best. It is true that in statistics, correlation does not equal causation. We know this from simple examples such as by showing a correlation between 2 completely un-related factors with other known causes – such as a decrease in the number of buggy whip makers causing increased global warming. We can draw a 1-1 correlation between the 2 – that one has gone down while the other has gone up, but we know obviously that the causes of those 2 phenomenon is entirely un-related.
Now, to extend that to schools, we see there is indeed a correlation between poverty and education. We are not sure which causes which – just that as poverty increases, the achievement of students decreases and we also don’t know if they’re at all related because it is extremely tricky to try to control for ALL factors in a human being’s life over time and to isolate one.
We can speak all day about the outlying factors that can effect each side of the equation – poverty and education.
However, if you apply the fix of decreasing poverty or looking at areas with less poverty, and examining their educational practices compared to urban schools, and you will see a strong correlation there too.
In addition, if we chart this correlation over a long enough set of time (and that is a researcher’s project and I don’t have the data this moment to back it up), we can likely compare student achievement over time for as far back as we can to national employment – that a higher % of unemployment would correlate strongly to educational outcomes. We’d predict that it would produce that strong correlation, but even if it didn’t, you’d still have problems with controlling for other factors.
As complex as people are, to say we can break down behavior to data points and then control behavior based on the charting of those points of data (Johnny acted up with X teachers but was behaving himself in Y subjects) – did the teachers cause the misbehavior or was it the student’s interest in the subject? We’d likely say both to an extent depending on the student’s special needs and likes/dislikes.
What they are talking about with charting such behavior is to try to find a way to control people – to believe that if you introduce X ideas at Y time you can adjust to control the student and create positive outcomes – is madness. Aside from the idea of mind control (putting on my tin-foil conspiracy cap), it suggests a reductionary approach to the complexity of humanity such that it doesn’t take much to see how you could then introduce and measure things that have nothing to do with a solid education, but could produce consumers for particular products.
Deasy’s idea here is to apply a well known statistical fallacy and to say that it excuses the notion of causality. However, it isn’t disproven to any extent either as we assume the null hypothesis and he apparently doesn’t care to even concern himself with the idea that it’s possible for poverty to impact education. That’s where data driven decision making becomes belief and not data driven.
When we actually list the components of poverty though and then turn around and ask the question “Does this effect a child’s ability to learn” – simply on a human level when we think about “could I do that?” we know that it does.
Compassion is a human trait students need to learn. Dispassionate data with nothing humanizing about it de-humanizes children and creates the exact automatons that reforms claim that their ideas will NOT create.
We may not be able to prove statistically that poverty 100% causes lower achievement with some outliers because of the difficulty in controlling for all factors (how do you mathematically represent the value of ADHD? Of having X number of years of schooling in one language in addition to another?)
Compassion should tell us that even though we can’t prove it to be causal with data even though there’s a strong correlation that we can’t 100% prove is connected, we do know that this would effect any human being’s ability to focus and perform, and with kids, that they will not sit still and be spoken to and fill out sheets or click or type all day and expect them to perform to their potential.
The irony is that these data driven folks are ignoring the unquantifiable data and saying that what we can measure, we can increase. By doing that, we need to question what are we sacrificing to drive those factors upwards.
Unfortunately, the underlying assumption that higher test scores = more learning is likely also false. We don’t have anything that suggests a nation’s success is causally based on these factors which in measuring, we say measures Z behaviors (this goes to the idea of does the test question actually measure what we say it measures).
However, we should also entertain the idea that since we don’t know if that assumption is correct, perhaps we shouldn’t gamble a generation on it trying to test whether it works or not to turn around and find that the only thing we increased was the amount of money corporations received at the expense of our collective society believing that education is a collective right.
We know enough about student learning that even though we can’t statistically prove it works because of this statistical fallacy, we can observe that some things work even though we don’t have enough isolated data points to know WHY they work with what approaches scientific certainty.
Funny that we should choose the path that reduces human beings and enriches a few and not the path of the Great Society that can bring up the many – but remember – I can’t prove the causality…
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When we use the large umbrella of poverty of course we don’t know which causes which, nore can we be specific about what part of poverty relates to Try thisand learning. However, we do know that childhood stress slows the braiin, and malnutrition and others influence. That should be the focus. Even some rich families kids have childhood stress but it is predominate in poor families.
And families with poverty induced stress are more prevelant. And the cycle of disfunctional families caused by this stress continues. Thus in this way, the cause and effect become cyclical. and it goes on forever, Until we solve the social problems of the world, we must, as educators, take action. First, take kids from where they are rather than fail them into oblivion. That takes systemic change. http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-personal-map-to-success.html
This begins with real assessment. Assessing kids as well as teaching them using their personal background information as a jumping off point. Like this http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/accountability-with-honor-and-yes-we.html
To accomplish this, we must be vigilant because CC will be near crumbling when the results come in http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/is-stumbling-and-bumbling-good-thing.html
So in stead of blah blah, now is the time for action. Prepare a viable alternative in your school today. How can I help?
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Kids are starting to rack up student debt even in elementary school. Just sad:
Lunches seized from kids in debt at Salt Lake City elementary
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A better link, hopefully:
Lunches seized from kids in debt at Salt Lake City elementary
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/57468293-78/lunches-olsen-district-parents.html
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Emmy – Your fantastic ideas about welfare systems among primitive people are ludicrous.
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Actually Robert I will grant you that saying that Bill Gates wrote an operating system completely on his own was an error on my part. But according to Wikipedia while an undergraduate at Harvard he discovered an algorithm for solving a previously unsolved problem in combinatotics and his algorithm was not improved on for thirty years. I quoted your words implying that members of the elite are basically just lucky. This is nonsense.
An individual I know at one time in the past was involved in a business transaction with Bernie Madoff. He told me that Madoff was one of the sharpest guys he had ever encountered. No doubt Madoff was a sociopath but he was a highly intelligent sociopath.
The idea that members of the elite are just ordinary people who had a bit of luck is utter nonsense.
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Jim,
I think Bill Gates is a smart man and probably knows a lot of things about a lot of things. But I do know that intelligence as measured by IQ tests is not equivalent to wisdom or compassion or give anyone the right to rule others. My problem with having wealthy people make decisions for society is that they tend to make decisions for other people that do not apply to them, and the decisions tend to be self-serving.
I believe the Common Core serves Bill Gates interests better than mine or my children. Even if he is a lot smarter than me, my 30+ years working in education gives me some understanding and experience his money and intelligence cannot provide him. My intelligence is considered high and I am fortunate to test well. I am even a member of one of the groups you think is genetically superior. That and $3 gets me coffee at Starbucks. But what makes me successful is persistence and an ability to see and nurture other people’s abilities. Sadly, those qualities are not measured on an IQ test.
Jim even if you believe some people are genetically superior than others in intelligence, do you believe that means their lives are worth more? If so, you really have not evolved very much at all. You better hope some compassionate people love you when you are old or if you even get a disability. Social Darwinism is not to kind to the elderly or people with disabilities.
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Janna, you make excellent points.
I love to hear the genetically superior (read Jim) say things like
“according to Wikipedia …”
It sort of blows away all the great knowledge they impart to us.
According to Wikipedia.
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Glad Peter brought up Wikipedia. I do not let my university students
use Wikipedia as primary source material for it is written by the public
as is too often incorrect.
Jim, I taught a course last year on the History of Economics, and suggest you read Heilbroner on Learning from the Worldly Philosophers. Please focus your expanded education on primitive tribes and how they functioned economically. They generally did have welfare systems. And until the time of Christ, societies lived a
subsistence existence.
Ellen
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Robert – Regarding the respect for authority and hierarchy on the part of Confucius and characteristic of East Asians in general. I agree that as a Westerner it sometimes seems a little excessive to me. I doubt if I would do best personally in a highly Confucian society. However looking at history objectively it is apparent that East Asian cultures have been highly successful in comparison with many other cultures. I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the comparative advantages of hierarchial and authoritarian East Asian cultures.
Western style democracies have benn generally rare in history and certainly the democracies of ancient Greece and early Rome proved highly unstable. Some people think democracies are the wave of the future but their rareness in the past may due to inherent instability and I would not be surprised if in the long run they again become rare.
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You are right, of course, Jim, that I should not be so quick to dismiss other ways of being. This is just emphatically not a way of being that I want to adopt for myself or that I would like to see adopted, generally, by people in my country.
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Janna – There seems to be a popular idea that traits like persistence and empathy are not genetic in the way that intelligence is but all behaivioral traits are partly genetic. In fact there is no such thing as a biological trait in which genetics is not important. Basically all organic phenomena revolves around the biochemistry of nucleotides. So an individual who succeeds on the basis of sheer persistence may owe his or her success just as much to genetics as someone who succeeds on the basis of very high IQ.
I’m not sure what group who are referring to. I’m guessing it’s Ashkenazi Jewish. The intellectual superiority of Ashkenazi Jews is patently obvious and presumably everybody is aware of it. Probably about 30-40% of the top mathematicians of the twientieth century were Ashkenazi Jewish. Also an extraordinary number of chess grandmasters have been Ashkenazi Jews. An interesting aspect of this phenomena is that there have been quite a few top mathematicians who although not raised culturally in Jewish families have Ashkenazi ancestors. Of course this is a matter of averages and does not apply to every individual. There are stupid Ashkenazi Jews. I’ve met some. However one would have to be remarkably unobservent not to notice the high average intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews.
Its obviously genetic. Eating gefilte fish and wearing a funny skullcap is not going to raise my IQ 15 points.
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Again you are purposely missing my point. There is research on which traits have genetic components and which do not but I will not get into that. Plus some traits develop with age (like empathy). But even if I grant you that all traits are genetic I still say that Bill Gates even if he really smart, does not have all the traits I want in someone who is going to make decisions about me and my children. Again, even the most genetically perfect person does not have the right to make unilateral decisions for the rest of us. The are not better than me or even you.
And you did not address the fact that all of these decisions seem to be quite self serving but have no consequences for the people making them. I know you love to argue ( I guess that is one of your traits) but I have always assumed you were still intelligent enough to see that if a person benefits from a decision and does not live with the consequences that their work should be looked upon with suspicion, not awe for how smart it is. Jim, I work daily with people being harmed by these new reforms. Bill Gates is not being harmed. I guess you are not either. But unlike you, I care about people who are being told they are not proficient when it is really is not true.
To get back to the original post, for Deasy to say that there is no relationship between poverty (whether genetically induced or environmentally induced) and educational outcomes is disingenuous at best and most likely deceit to further his own agenda. And I know you know that 🙂
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Here are some other good articles on Vergara:
First, by David Cohen:
or this one — “Eight Problems with the Vergara Lawsuit” :
or another, longer article by Thompson:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-thompson/why-a-nice-philanthropist_b_4598322.html?utm_source=Alert-blogger&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Email%2BNotifications
or this from Gary Ravani
http://edsource.org/today/2014/declaring-war-on-teachers-rights-wont-improve-childrens-access-to-a-sound-education/56538#.Uu8aXvY7h2L
And this from Bruce Baker which, while it doesn’t address Vergara by name, attacks the arguments behind Vergara:
http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2013/10/09/notes-on-the-seniority-smokescreen/
Here’s another good one from Lorraine Richards, one of our fellow union sisters in Montebello Teachers’ Association:
http://www.sgvtribune.com/opinion/20140124/lawsuit-wrongly-targets-teachers-guest-commentary
“Yet none of the statutes identified in Vergara are depriving students of anything, nor are they violating anyone’s constitutional rights. Years of chronic underfunding, devastating cuts and skyrocketing class sizes may very well be, but fortunately current increases to school funding are starting to turn things around.
“But this lawsuit isn’t concerned with school funding, resources, class sizes, training or anything else actually proven to improve the quality of our schools. Instead it’s cynically attempting to use the state constitution as a weapon to strip away rights, rather than to protect them.
“Stripping away rights and attacking teachers and labor is really what this is all about. The forces behind Vergara are some of the same corporate education ‘reformers’ who have spent the last decade blaming teachers, attacking unions and undermining public schools instead of addressing actual problems facing California students. Supporters of ‘Students Matter,’ the organization behind Vergara, are a Who’s Who of privatized charter and anti-union advocates, represented by a high wattage public relations firm tied to Wal-Mart.”
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Peter Smyth – Is the account in Wikipedia that Bill Gates while an undergraduate at Harvard solved a previously unsolved problem in combinatotics incorrect?
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Janna – You are projecting all kinds of positions into my views that I don’t have and have never stated. The fact that I have never stated for example that the elite is above reproach is why I ignored some of what you said that had nothing to do with anything I ever said. I gave in one of my comments a quotation of a sentence of Robert Shepherd similar to many other comments on this blog that implies that members of the elite are basically Jethro doofuses who happened to strike oil in their backyard. This is simply factually false and I gave Bill Gates as an example of a member of the elite who simply isn’t an ordinary guy who got lucky. The people who say run the Fortune 500 companies no doubt have their faults but it is delusional to believe that they are average Joes who had a bit of luck.
By the way, from a tactical point of view I think Diane Ravitch’s constant personal attacks on Bill Gates may be counterproductive for her cause. At least on television dear oll Bill doesn’t come across as very demonic.
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Jim, you have a habit of attributing absurd positions to others and then attacking those. I never said that members of the elite are stupid. I said that many of them like to think that their position is due to their innate superiority. Different statement. This happens time and time again, Jim.
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Related to the due process (“tenure”) issue:
Does the existence of tenure/due process improve teacher retention in a way that improves student outcomes?
I imagine that this question has been asked and addressed elsewhere, but this is a huge and busy blog to follow for someone who doesn’t have enough time!
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There’s one argument that the defendents’ lawyers can use.
The Vergara lawyers’ first and star witness—-LAUSD Superintedent John Deasy—made the incredible claim that there is no causal relationship between a child’s impoverished circumstances and that same child’s academic achievement. Presented with a Mount Everest of studies, statistics, and in depth analysis of the specific factors and mechanisms that support the claim that yes, Virginia, poverty does negatively impact a child’s academic outcomes.
“When Finberg asked Deasy if he agreed that other factors, such as family wealth and poverty, influence the success or failure of a student, Deasy said, ‘I believe the statistics correlate, but I don’t believe in causality (of poverty). ‘ ”
In essence, Deasy is laying 100% of the blame for any child from poverty not achieving on a par with their wealthier peers ON THE TEACHERS.
If only those lazy, LIFO unionized teachers at traditional public schools in poor communities would just stop holding back, step it up and bring their A-Game, those kids from homeless situations, foster care, etc. would be achieving on a level with the kids from Beverly Hills and Brentwood. Hence, we need to obliterate any and all job protections or due process rights currently held by those teachers in California.
Okay, John… that’s interesting… Again, ‘overty has no “causal relationship”, you say… ?
Well, John, what comprises “poverty”…? Would you agree that the two main factors are… wait for it, now… “Food and Shelter”… is that right?
Well, John, you recently spearheaded a billion dollar plan—a plan that was just put into effect out here in Los Angeles—known as “Breakfast in the Classroom”—which is exactly as its name indicates… the first 20-30 minutes of every day, the kids eat a breakfast paid for by this billion dollar plan.
On multiple occasions, John, you and other LAUSD district officials have touted the plan along the lines of … “It’s absolutely necessary for a all children, rich and poor, to be well and properly fed if that same child is to achieve academically.. blah-blah-blah… and ‘Breakfast in the Classroom’ is doing just that.. blah-blah-blah… ”
Whoa, whoa… hold it here. If the conditions of poverty—including one of its two primary conditions… “Food” of “Food and Shelter”—has no causal effect on a child’s ability to learn… why do you go around blathering about how the billion dollars spent on “Breakfast in the Classroom” that puts food in the mouths of impoverished students will…. IMPROVE ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT OF THOSE SAME CHILDREN????!!!!!
According to your “no causal factor” thinking, wouldn’t that billion dollars blown on Breakfast in the Classroom be just a big waste of money?
He’s off the stand, so maybe the lawyers fighting the “corporate reform” privatizers can put such questions to some of the other witnesses.
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