Archives for the month of: March, 2014
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Breaking News: Tennessee State Senate Guts Local Control

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2014 //
23

The Tennessee State Senate passed a bill based on ALEC model legislation to minimize local control.

ALEC is more dedicated to privatization and to the destruction of public sector agencies than to local control.

ALEC’s agenda is not conservative; it is extremist.

Under this bill, those who wish to open a privately managed charter school may apply to a state authorizing board if the local board turns them down.

This guts local control.

The legislation applies only to 5 of the state’s 95 districts, because the charters want to expand in the urban districts, especially Memphis and Nashville.

The bill is payback against the Metro Nashville school board, which on four occasions turned down the controversial Great Hearts Academy, which wanted to open in an affluent section of Nashville with no transportation plans for children from other neighborhoods. The board rejected their proposal because it would not serve the city’s neediest children.

State Commissioner Kevin Huffman–whose only experience as an educator was his two years in TFA–fined the Nashville district $3.4 million for rejecting Great Hearts.

Great Hearts has been criticized in Arizona, where it is based, for its lack of diversity, and for conflicts of interest on its board. 

According to research by the Arizona Republic:

The 15 schools under the non-profit Great Hearts Academies offer a college-preparatory curriculum that stresses classic literature. That means students get an intensive reading regimen.

To supply the books, the schools have been making regular purchases for at least the last three years from a Tempe-based textbook company called Educational Sales Co. Daniel Sauer, the company’s president and CEO and a shareholder, is also an unpaid officer of the Great Hearts Academies non-profit.

Since July 2009, the schools have made $987,995 in purchases from the company.

Great Hearts also gives parents the option of buying books directly from the company. Six of the Great Hearts school websites feature links only to Educational Sales’ website for parents who want to buy a second set of books for use at home.

Great Hearts CEO Dan Scoggin said he doesn’t believe there is a conflict of interest because Great Hearts has no mandates on where its schools buy books. Many Great Hearts schools use several vendors based on pricing, service and availability, he said.

Great Hearts schools are exempt from state purchasing laws. Scoggin said Great Hearts doesn’t have a contract with Educational Sales because schools have choices on where they make textbook purchases.

Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/20121016insiders-benefiting-charter-deals.html#ixzz2wcWACd5J

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Privatization, Tennessee

David Greene: How the Common Core Standards Stifle Creativity

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2014 //
25

Just a few days ago, Bill Gates told the annual assembly of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards that the Common Core standards were “the key to creativity,” and likened their development to the standardized electrical plug. I am not sure I see the analogy, but I guess he meant that with a standardized electrical plug, we could all have electric lights and do better work in the light. Or something. But if he meant that standardization was a formula for creative teaching and learning, I doug that many of the National Board Certified Teachers in his audience were convinced.

David Greene certainly does not agree. He is an experienced teacher trainer and mentor who recently published an article in U.S. News & World Report about how the Common Core standards kill creative teaching, precisely because they attempt to standardize what teachers do.

 

He writes:

To try to live up to the new demands and ensure better test scores, states, districts and schools have purchased resources, materials and scripted curricular modules solely developed for test success. Being lost is the practical wisdom and planned spontaneity necessary to work with 20 to 35 individuals in a classroom. Academic creativity has been drained from degraded and overworked experienced teachers. Uniformity has sucked the life out of teaching and learning.

Good and great teachers leave and are replaced by new and cheap workers more willing to follow fool-proof, factory-like, prescribed lesson plans. In fact, the average teaching tenure has dropped from approximately 15 years of service in 1990 to less than five in 2013.

Imagine your brain surgeon having to “follow the book” while operating on you or lose his job. While you are on the table, he discovers an unforeseen problem that, because of his experience and practical wisdom, calls for a spontaneous change of plan, yet he can’t do what he knows will work. You die on the table. So have students. He retires early, frustrated with conditions. So have the best teachers.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman coined the term “Carlson’s law” to describe Dr. Curtis Carlson’s take on autocracy in the workplace: “Innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart. Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb.”

Top down innovation is what Common Core and other efforts to homogenize education are bringing us. So the only real question left is: Why have President Obama, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, Bill Gates and Achieve Inc. chosen to be orderly but dumb, especially when the opportunity cost is children?

David Greene’s recently published book is called Doing the Right Thing: A Teacher Speaks. Unlike the technocrats, bureaucrats, and Beltway insiders who wrote the Common Core standards, David Greene is a teacher with long experience and deep knowledge of the classroom and of students.

Categories Common Core

Good News! TEA Sues Governor, Commissioner re Junk Science VAM

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2014 //
15

The Tennessee Education Association filed a second lawsuit against the use if value-added assessment (called TVAAS in Tennessee), this time including extremist Governor Haslam and ex-TFA state commissioner Huffman in their suit.

The teachers rightly say that the evaluations are unfair, a point on which most reputable researchers are in their corner.

“TEA’s lawsuit was filed on behalf of Knox County teacher Mark Taylor, an eighth grade science teacher at Farragut Middle School. Taylor was unfairly denied an APEX bonus after his TVAAS estimate was based on the standardized test scores of only 22 of his 142 students.

“Mr. Taylor teaches four upper-level physical science courses and one regular eighth grade science class,” said Richard Colbert, TEA general counsel. “The students in the upper-level course take a locally developed end-of-course test in place of the state’s TCAP assessment. As a result, those high-performing students were not included in Mr. Taylor’s TVAAS estimate.”

“While Mr. Taylor’s observation score was ‘exceeding expectations,’ his low TVAAS estimate based on only 16 percent of his students dropped his final evaluation score below the threshold to receive the APEX bonus,” Colbert said.

“Unfortunately, Mr. Taylor’s situation is not an uncommon one. Many teachers across the state – particularly at the high school level – are being unfairly evaluated on an arbitrary percentage of their students.”

Gosh, Arne Duncan only recently hailed Tennessee as one of the stars of Race to the Top. Not so much.

Categories Resistance, Teacher Evaluations, Tennessee

Jason Stanford: “Divergent” is a Major New Film about Testing Abuse

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2014 //
12

Testing is rapidly becoming radioactive. No one likes it, yet Congress can’t bring itself to drive a stake through the withered, lifeless heart of NCLB, nor call a halt to Race to the Top’s promotion of even more testing.

Jason Stanford says a new film called “Divergent” shows how standardized testing is harming students, determining their future, and inspiring rebellions against it. It will debut on March 21.

He writes:

“Because of its resourceful and tough female protagonist, Divergent will draw comparisons to The Hunger Games franchise. But the popular Jennifer Lawrence movies are all about income inequality and poverty whereas the new film, based on the 2012 bestseller by Veronica Roth, questions whether our children can still determine their own futures.

“The central feature of Divergent is that children are given aptitude tests that sort them by virtues, sometimes separating them from their families. These sorting tests are nothing new in popular young adult fiction. Harry Potter had the Sorting Hat that grouped students based on their innate traits. The Hunger Games held a lottery to single out a boy and a girl for ritualized murder. And in the Percy Jackson novels, only genetics—not skill, talents, or knowledge—could get a child into Camp Half Blood.

“But Divergent, intentionally or not, puts high-stakes testing at the center of the educational dystopia it portrays. As in present-day reality, testing takes time away from classroom instruction and occurs on a single day. The Divergent tests measure aptitude, not comprehension, and serve mainly to sort students according to immutable traits into one of five factions “to determine who we are and where we belong.” In schools, we use standardized tests to figure out whether someone is “college or career ready.”

Who decided that the testing corporations would become the gatekeepers of social and economic privilege?

Categories Testing

Florida: Parents and Teachers Stopped the Voucher Bill

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2014 //
8

Kathleen McGrory of the Miami Herald shows how parents and teachers stopped the voucher bill in Florida.

““We really saw this as an attack on public education,” said Mindy Gould legislative affairs for the PTA.

“The testing issue had become a sticking point.

“John Kirtley, who helped craft the original voucher legislation in 2001 and is chair of the Step Up board, said it would have been “a very difficult task to quickly remake the academic accountability for this program.”

The sticking point was the lack of accountability for voucher schools.

The legislation would have transferred $874 million in public funds to nonpublic schools.

The organization overseeing it (Step Up) was very disappointed, as it collects a commission, which would have grown from $8 million to $24 million.

Categories Florida, Vouchers

You Too Can See “Rise Above the Mark”

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2014 //
2

Rocky Killion, the superintendent of West Lafayette, Indiana, public schools and his film crew created a fabulous documentary about the greatness of teachers, of our kids and our public schools.

They traveled across the nation to interview leading policy experts, and spent lots of time in classrooms interviewing teachers and principals.

They produced “Rise Above the Mark,” which is inspiring. It is about an hour long.

You can contact the team and get a showing by going to the website www.riseabovethemark.com

 

 

Categories Supporting public schools

A Néw Way for Néw York?

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2014 //
15

Several superintendents in Long Island, Néw York, hope to find a path out of the morass created by Néw York State’s authoritarian Board of Regents, which loves high-stakes testing.

Here is a comment by one of those superintendents:

Opening the Door: An Alternate Way for Public Education

Our public education system is truly at a crossroads. The question is, do we just passively sit and watch big business tycoons, lawmakers and our elected educational leaders at the state and national level to continue the perpetuation of unproven lies? The over standardization of curriculum and testing as well as their stripping teachers of their professionalism and dignity is not what’s best for kids. There is another way…

Three Long Island superintendents, Mr. David Gamberg, Dr. Steven Cohen and I co-organized an Education Forum that focused on solutions to the broken New York State Regents Reform Agenda. School district administrators, teachers and parents gathered on Thursday, March 13th at Stony Brook University for a panel discussion about “Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School.” Book co-authors and education advocates Dr. Michael Fullan and Dr. Andy Hargreaves joined the panel along with school superintendent Dr. Steven Cohen of Shoreham-Wading River, renowned Finnish education expert Dr. Pasi Sahlberg, South Side High School principal Dr. Carol Burris, and Plainview-Old Bethpage assistant superintendent Dr. Tim Eagen. Southold superintendent David Gamberg moderated and I represented the Shelter Island School District as a panelist.

“The worst teachers teach alone” and don’t collaborate with others. “How hypocritical to put them in competition?” Dr. Hargreaves said, in reference to proposed teacher incentive programs tied to student test scores. Dr. Hargreaves and Dr. Fullan explained that the “professional capital” approach toward education is about creating a comfortable atmosphere for teachers to encourage curiosity and creativity in students. They also described the U.S.’s current direction with education as “business capital” since the focus of measuring academic success has shifted toward the reliance of test scores and unproven methods to evaluate teachers and principals.

From a practical sense, teachers need time to collaborate. Most respected professions do this. School leaders must break the industrial revolution public school model of how schools operate and find ways to alter the internal structure (schedule) of their school day to promote “social capital”. Our east end Long Island school districts are partnering together to begin a district collaboration process to promote our human and social capital capabilities. Dr. Cohen, Mr. Gamberg and I are committed to walk the walk of this alternate and research-based path for public education.

In an effort to change the state’s current path toward their misguided view, we are forming a new lobbying effort called “Summer 2014 Education Action Institute.” It is currently in the conceptual stages. Its purpose is to rally parents and community members to encourage elected officials to participate in future workshops and events.There will be more to come regarding our Summer Institute.

Public Education is at a crossroads but it is not broken. Many will lead you to believe it is. Private sector business tycoons do not have the answer nor do our elected Regents in New York State. The answer is not through testing, standardizing and evaluating every single little thing within our public schools. It’s about trusting and building the capacity of our teachers. The door is open to a better way of educating our children. The question is… will you enter and join us?

Dr. Michael J Hynes is the Superintendent of Schools for the Shelter Island School District.

Twitter:
@MikeHynes5

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Common Core, New York

Bad News from Michigan as Failed EAA Expands to Harm More Children

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2014 //
13

A reader reports:

“Big win for Arne Duncan and Rick Snyder on Eli Broad’s EAA experiment in Detroit:

“Democratic lawmakers said the bill is an attempt to prop up Snyder’s struggling EAA, which has been dogged by declining enrollment, financial problems and teacher turnover during its two years of running schools formerly operated by Detroit Public Schools.

“This isn’t about helping schoolchildren. This is about a politically and ideologically driven agenda to destroy public education as we know it,” said House Minority Leader Tim Greimel, D-Auburn Hills.”

“The EAA isn’t financially viable unless they keep packing in more kids. Now that they have 50 more Michigan (formerly) public schools, and the capacity to take over really as many as they want, they should be able to keep this failed experiment going for a while.

“Now it’s too big to fail, which of course was the point of expanding it.”

http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140320/POLITICS02/303200131/Michigan-House-narrowly-passes-EAA-expansion-bill

Categories Michigan

NEPC: Rural Communities Do Not Need Charters

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2014 //
28

Did it ever occur to you that what rural communities really need is a privately managed charter school to compete with the community school? Apparently the idea sounds swell to Andy Smarick, who doesn’t think that communities should have any public schools.

Smarick worked as deputy commissioner of education in Chris Christie’s administration in New Jersey and before that worked in the George W. Bush administration and for various Republican legislators and conservative policy centers. He currently works for Andrew Rotherham at Bellwether Education Partners.

He is a proponent of charters everywhere, as the report under review shows.

The review by Craig Howley of Ohio University for the National Education Policy Center is critical of the premise that rural areas need charter schools. Howley says:

“While it is presented in a fashion similar to scholarly research, serious omissions and distortions make New Frontier little more than a political lobbying document targeting rural regions (even the most urbanized states have rural regions). Especially problematic are the inadequate support or explanation for New Frontier’s premises and its presentation of superficial and misleading use of research, particularly rural education research. In the end, it is little more than an advocacy document with premises that predetermine its recommendations: how to establish more charter schools in rural regions. Missing research and slanted representations render the document useless as a source of objective information. New Frontier is propaganda—neither a thoughtful inquiry nor an honest report.”

Categories Charter Schools

Study: Most Teachers Will Never Collect a Pension

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2014 //
32

Stephen Sawchuk reports in Education Week on a study finding that most teachers will not stay on the job long enough to collect a pension.

He writes:

“The report from Bellwether Education Partners, a Washington-based consulting group, contends that states’ current defined-benefit pension policies, which pay out according to a fixed formula, are not well aligned with a profession that has grown rapidly younger and more mobile. And that could put teachers at serious financial risk later on in their lives.

“For the paper, analysts Chad Aldeman and Andrew Rotherham used “withdrawal” tables—state estimates on teacher-turnover rates—to estimate the percentage of teachers who will earn a pension in every state. They drew on each state’s assumptions for female teachers aged 25 who began teaching after Aug. 1, 2013. (Keep in mind that the state formulas are different for male teachers or those of other ages, and these stats would look different for them.)

“Based on those assumptions, only 45 percent teachers in the median state will qualify for payouts, a process that typically takes 5 years. And only 20 percent will reach the normal retirement age of 58.

“That’s a lot of money left on the table. Many teachers won’t even meet the vesting requirements. And for those that don’t, states typically allow teachers to take only the contributions they made into the pension plan if they leave the profession, or move to another state. ”

Of course, many states are trying to ditch defined benefit pensions altogether.

And it must be noted that one of the implicit goals of the current “reform” movement is to encourage teacher turnover, specifically to reduce future pension costs. That’s not good for the teaching profession or for children or for education, but it helps cut costs.

Categories Pensions
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