Archives for the month of: February, 2014
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Who Is Behind the Vergara Attack on Due Process in California?

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2014 //
33

Who is paying for and supporting the lawsuit claiming that due process for teachers harms the civil rights of students?

Until now, all we knew was that the case was bankrolled by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur named David Welch.

That much is true, but Welch also has an advisory board that includes Russlyn Ali, who served as an assistant secretary to Arne Duncan, now working for the supposedly liberal Education Trust; and even more disturbing, Ted Mitchell of NewSchools Venture Fund, who was nominated by President Obama to be the #2 official in the U.S. Department of Education. Also on the board is Ben Austin of Parent Revolution.

The anti-due process group, anti-union group is running a well-honed PR campaign. The California Teachers Association has decided not to compete in the PR war.

” Remarkably, this one-sided communications war has been initiated by a single person – Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Welch, the founder of the nonprofit organization Students Matter, which brought the suit – and provides a case study of what impact a single individual can have if he has the resources, or access to them, to take action based on his beliefs.

“California Teachers Association President Dean Vogel says his organization, representing more than 300,000 teachers, has no intention of trying to counteract what he described as a campaign funded by the bottomless pockets of the “billionaires boys club….”

“The organization is a relative newcomer to the California education policy landscape. The organization has no staff on its payroll, or even its own office. Instead it is run out of its communications firm’s office in Los Angeles. Its sole purpose, as described on its website, is “sponsoring impact litigation to promote access to quality public education. Welch’s net worth is unknown, although public reports assert that he receives more than $2 million in annual compensation from the Infinera Corporation, which he founded.

“For weeks leading to the opening of the trial on Jan. 27, media outlets have received a stream of emails and announcements about the pending proceedings.

“An email sent out on the weekend before the trial opened provided possible tweets – complete with scripts, hashtags and Twitter handles – with a half dozen to draw from. Here’s one: Let’s get back to basics, starting with a great teacher in every classroom! I support @Students_Matter #VergaraTrial

“Students Matter called a news conference a few days before the trial opened, and on opening day yet another news conference was held during the lunch break with all nine students who are listed in the suit as plaintiffs in the case, along with Los Angeles Unified Superintendent John Deasy who has testified on their behalf.

“On the morning the trial opened, Students Matter emails sent at 5 a.m. by the communications firms landed in media outlets’ inboxes. Before 8 a.m. that day a news release appeared on Yahoo News with the headline “California Students Get Their Day in Court: Groundbreaking Education Equality Trial Begins Today.”

Win or lose, the goal of the campaign seems to be to smear the union and teachers.

Is it surprising that a soon-to-be-confirmed high-level official in the Obama administration is part of the anti-teacher team?

Categories Los Angeles, Teacher Tenure, U.S. Department of Education

NC Governor McCrory Pledges Pay Raise for New Teachers Only

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2014 //
26

I participated in the major North Carolina Emerging Issues forum, where Governor Pat McCrory promised a pay increase to teachers in their first five years of teaching, but nothing for experienced teachers. Some veteran teachers will earn the same as teachers in thir fifth year. This went over like a dead balloon. Some observers speculated that it was a bonus for Teach for Merica, which won a $5-6 million contract fom the far-right McGrory administration at the same time that the nationally recognized North Carolina Teaching Fellows program was eliminated.

As salaries go up for new teachers, they stagnate for experienced teachers, who have not had a raise since 2008.

Before I spoke, I was preceded by a Teacher Town Hall, a panel of teachers who quit, mostly because they were disgusted by low pay, which seemed like disrespect. One teacher, who moved to Maryland, said she was earning $20,000 more.

NC has a major brain drain. Senior teachers are leaving because of low pay and lack of autonomy.

Apparently, that is what the Governor and legislature want. New teachers, low wages, high turnover. And that is called “reform.”

Categories North Carolina, Teach for America

NCLB: The Undead Vampire Law

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2014 //
41

Remember back in 2001 when Congress passed No Child Left Behind and mandated that all children in grades 3-8 would be proficient in reading and math? Remember when President George W. Bush signed it into lain January 2002, surrounded by Senator Ted Kennedy, Congressman George Miller, Congressman John Boehner, and others who hailed a historic moment in Anerican history?

We now know that NCLB was a monumental failure. Testing doesn’t make kids smarter, doesn’t make education better.

Here is a great article by Lisa Guisbond of Fairtest, who explains why NCLB failed and how Race to the Top has preserved its failed ideas and made them even worse.

She writes:

“Unfortunately, those driving the federal school policy bus clearly haven’t learned any real lessons from NCLB’s failures. To the contrary, they’re staying the course of test-driven education reform. And they’re still trying to sell Miller’s false suggestion that the problem isn’t too much testing, it’s simply that communities can’t handle the truth being delivered by the test scores.”

But parents, educators, and students have learned the lessons of NCLB, and they are fighting back.

The question now is whether and how long big money and political power can keep their failed ideas afloat, imposed on other people’s children.

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind)

Ladd and Fiske: Destroying Public Education in North Carolina

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2014 //
32

Helen F. Ladd of Duke University and Edward B. Fiske, former education editor of the Néw York Times, lambasted the Governor and Legislature of North Carolina for their calculated program to destroy public education in the state.

Only two years ago, Ladd and Fiske drafted a “vision statement” for the state board of education, describing how public education could better serve the children and the state.

But in the last year, Governor McCrory and the General Assembly have attacked the foundations of public education, underfunded the schools, and attacked the teaching profession.

They write:

“If one were to devise a strategy for destroying public education in North Carolina, it might look like this: Repeat over and over again that schools are failing and that the system needs to be replaced. Then make this a self-fulfilling prophecy by starving schools of funds, undermining teachers and badmouthing their profession, balkanizing the system to make coherent planning impossible, putting public funds in the hands of unaccountable private interests and abandoning any pretense that the goal is to prepare every child in our state to succeed in life.””

“We do not know what motives have driven McCrory and other Republican leaders to enact their education agenda. We do know that their actions look a lot like a systematic effort to destroy a public education system that took more than a century to build and that, once destroyed, could take decades to restore.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, North Carolina, Supporting public schools, Teacher Tenure, Teachers and Teaching, Vouchers

The Two Faces of John Deasy

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2014 //
19

When the Los Angeles School Unified School District was sued by lawyers claiming that due process for teachers harms the civil rights of minority students, one of those who testified FOR the plaintiffs and AGAINST the district was Superintendent John Deasy. The high-powered lawyers are paid by a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur.

The goal of the lawsuit is to remove the single most important protection that teachers have: freedom from arbitrary and capricious firing, and the right to a fair hearing before an independent arbitrator. This is not a right lightly awarded (or should not be); it is awarded by administrators after two years of teaching in the Los Angeles district. It is the responsibility of leaders to make sound judgments about teachers based on observation and to deny tenure to any who are “grossly ineffective,” or “ineffective” in any sense. In other jurisdictions, the probationary period is three or four years. Some states allow teachers to be fired at will. That seems to be Deasy’s goal.

The story begins:

“Last week’s testimony in the Vergara v. California trial raised many an eyebrow when Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Superintendent John E. Deasy testified on behalf of plaintiffs in a lawsuit whose defendants had originally included LAUSD.
Despite its supporters’ protests to the contrary, Vergara is widely seen as a frontal attack against statutory guarantees of due process and seniority rights for state teachers. The suit is the brainchild of Students Matter, a Bay Area nonprofit created by wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Welch and partly financed by L.A. billionaire Eli Broad.

“Under friendly direct examination by plaintiff attorney Marcellus McRae, the superintendent offered testimony that supported the suit’s contentions that the way in which teachers are fired, laid off and granted tenure has an adverse impact on the overall quality of the teacher workforce and illegally discriminates against low-income and minority students.
At one point Deasy’s apparent eagerness to anticipate McRae drew an instruction from Judge Rolf M. Treu for the superintendent to wait for the question before supplying the answer.

“Deasy readily agreed that due process laws complicated dismissals of “grossly ineffective teachers” and damaged the morale of the profession. “Morale is absolutely affected,” Deasy insisted, before attacking the state’s teacher seniority policies.
He also denied any connection between student performance and poverty. “I believe the statistics correlate,” he said, “but I don’t believe in causality.”

“Deasy’s performance as a friendly witness should not have come as a complete surprise, however. The day after the suit was originally filed against the state and the L.A. school district in 2012, then-defendant Deasy took the unusual step of issuing a press release endorsing the lawsuit’s aims. (Deasy, through a spokesperson, declined to comment for this article.)
For the city’s public school teachers and longtime education policy observers, the spectacle of the L.A. school chief siding with a lawsuit against the very system he is paid to uphold has become a familiar feature of Deasy’s fractious, two-and-half year tenure.”

Categories Los Angeles, Teacher Tenure

Teacher: Why “Stupid Bubble Tests” Are Meaningless

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2014 //
19

In this post, which arrived a few days ago as a comment, Ron Lapekas, a retired teacher, explains why standardized tests have no value or validity for many students:

“I am a retired teacher. I always thought the SBT’s (Stupid Bubble Tests) had little value for my East Los Angeles 99% Latino students for several reasons.

“First, vocabulary necessary both to understand the questions and the answer choices made any test results meaningless, even in math. If you don’t understand the question how can you evaluate the correctness of the answer?

“Second, we didn’t get the results until the end of summer. I never gave SBT’s to my students because, as I told them, I grade work, not answers. If a student doesn’t know which answers were incorrect, if there is no way to review how the answers were selected, and if there is no way to give feedback to the students, SBT’s are not education tools at all.

“Third, SBT’s are so standardized that they are useless for our most challenged and disadvantaged students. Unlike business models used by the Broad-Gates advocates, you can’t order students to learn and you can’t demand that they all learn at the same rate in the same way. That is like pushing rope.

“Fourth, evaluating teachers by student test results is like comparing the driving skills of drivers driving different models of cars built in different years. My students arrived with different levels of knowledge so I taught from the lowest level. This bored some of the better prepared students — but they were “better” because of test scores, not because they understood how they got their scores. By the end of the year, 70% of my students were at grade level and the other 30% had significantly improved their understanding. (As one teacher told, me he would rather have my “F” students than some teachers’ “A” students.) But I could do this because I had tenure.

“Fifth, the administrators have lost touch with the classroom. If they have been out of the classroom for more than five years, they have no clue how to teach the “new” standards. Therefore, they abdicate their duty to evaluate the teacher’s teaching schools and use the arbitrary test scores and “measurable” or observable factors such as disciplinary records, pretty bulletin boards, and classroom organization instead. For example, I was once down-checked because I re-taught a topic my students didn’t understand and, therefore, did not follow my scripted lesson.

“Lastly, SBT scores are used more as “evidence” to dismiss teachers than they are to identify areas in which to focus attention to improve teaching skills. As noted above, few administrators have a clue about how to teach subjects according to the “new” standards so they use checklists with ambiguous and arbitrary descriptions.

As most readers of this blog will agree, until all students enter a classroom with uniform background knowledge and skills, proper nutrition, and enough time to learn, evaluating teachers by the scores of their students will create false data for the Broad-Gates “data driven” models.”

Categories Standardized Testing, Students

Wisconsin: State Senator Reveals Covert Plan to Privatize Public Education

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2014 //
45

Senator Kathleen Vinehout revealed a plan hatched behind closed doors to close 5% of thestate’s schools every year and turn them over to private corporations.

She wrote:

“The latest version of the bill was crafted behind closed doors; unlike three years ago when a wide-ranging group developed a system to test and report the progress of all students attending school with public money. Private school advocates publically agreed to the same public school accountability standards but privately lobbied for something different.

“The bill reversed current law requiring all students be tested using the same type of exam. This bill allowed private schools to choose their own type of assessment and even choose the students who took the test – allowing them to game the system.

“Concealed in the bill was a way to gradually close more and more public schools or turn them over to independent private charter operators.

“For the next several years, 5% of public schools must be named as failing – even if those schools weren’t failing by current standards. With few exceptions, schools that failed for three years would be required to close or be operated by an independent private charter management company with a minimum five-year contract. Local school boards would have little authority over this company for five years. For Milwaukee, this change would apply to schools that failed for just one year.”

She said the bill is “a dream for out-of-state charter management companies.”

Categories Charter Schools, Closing schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization, Wisconsin

NY Republicans, with Cuomo’s Silence, Block Tax for Pre-K

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2014 //
13

The leading education reform of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s campaign was universal pre-kindergarten, funded by a small tax increase on city residents with income over $500,000.

Governor Cuomo opposes any new taxes.

So do State Senate Republicans, who announced that the tax idea was dead.

Shame on them.

If residents of NYC want to tax themselves, why should they block it?

The real cost of the tax increase is a few dollars a day for the richest.

Categories Bill de Blasio, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Cuomo, Andrew, New York

Stan Karp: The Trouble with the Common Core

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2014 //
23

In this trenchant analysis of the Common Core, Stan Karp explains that the fundamental problem is not about their content but their context.

While people argue the merits of the Common Core, public education itself is under assault:

Karp writes:

Today everything about the Common Core, even the brand name—the Common Core State Standards—is contested because these standards were created as an instrument of contested policy. They have become part of a larger political project to remake public education in ways that go well beyond slogans about making sure every student graduates “college and career ready,” however that may be defined this year. We’re talking about implementing new national standards and tests for every school and district in the country in the wake of dramatic changes in the national and state context for education reform. These changes include:

A 10-year experiment in the use of federally mandated standards and tests called No Child Left Behind (NCLB) that has been almost universally acknowledged as a failure.

The adoption of test-based teacher evaluation frameworks in dozens of states, largely as a result of federal mandates.

Multiple rounds of budget cuts and layoffs that have left 34 of the 50 states providing less funding for education than they did five years ago, and the elimination of more than 300,000 teaching positions.

A wave of privatization that has increased the number of publicly funded but privately run charter schools by 50 percent, while nearly 4,000 public schools have been closed in the same period.

An appalling increase in the inequality and child poverty surrounding our schools, categories in which the United States leads the world and that tell us far more about the source of our educational problems than the uneven quality of state curriculum standards.
A dramatic increase in the cost and debt burden of college access.

A massively well-financed campaign of billionaires and politically powerful advocacy organizations that seeks to replace our current system of public education—which, for all its many flaws, is probably the most democratic institution we have and one that has done far more to address inequality, offer hope, and provide opportunity than the country’s financial, economic, political, and media institutions—with a market-based, non-unionized, privately managed system.

Categories Common Core

Help Students Organize to Speak For Themselves

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2014 //
1

Please help this great group of students crowd-source a national convening of student leaders to fight false reforms.

I first learned about its spokesperson Hannah Nguyen when she challenged Michelle Rhee. I subsequently met Hannah and gave her a hug when I visited Occidental College in Los Angeles last fall.

Hannah and her allies must raise $2,000 by February 15. I sent a donation. Send whatever you can: $5, $10, $25, $50, $100.

The EmpowerED 2014 conference now has a website where you can find all the information you need:

http://empowerED2014.com/

This is a statement from the organizers:

Students all over the country, from Portland to Philadelphia, are tired of feeling powerless and unheard when it comes to decisions that affect their education. That’s why they’ve begun to form student unions and fight back against threats to their educational rights. From massive walkouts and sit-ins to creative street theater and flash mobs, these students are demanding that their voices be heard.

EmpowerED 2014 will be the first event ever to engage a student community in a conversation about their education. It is a conference designed for students by students. The conversation will be initiated by a handpicked team of student leaders from Chicago, Newark, Portland, Providence, and Baltimore, who will share incredible stories of how they have elevated student voice and fought for educational justice in their communities. The students in attendance will then have the chance to work with the student organizers in workshops to build organizing skills, share their ideas for education, and collaborate on developing a student power movement in their Los Angeles.

Here is the link to the crowdfunding campaign once again:

http://gofundme.com/6mnms8/

We are still $2000 short of our goal, so we need all the support we can get at this point! Once again, the majority of the funds will go directly to the student organizers’ travel to LA, and the rest will be for conference materials such as food, printing, workshop supplies, etc…

If you teach in the Los Angeles area, please tell students about the conference! It will be a wonderful event where students will have a voice and be given a space to collaborate on building a local student power movement. The conference is entirely student-run and led by students for students in the LA community.

Thank you so much for your time and support.

Peace and power,

Hannah Nguyen

Categories Resistance, Students
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