Archives for the month of: November, 2015
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Why a Retired Elementary School Principal Warned Her Daughter to Choose Another Field

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2015 //
26

Why would a former elementary school principal in Texas warn her daughter–who wants to be a teacher–to choose another field?

 

Could it be the incessant hammering of the media on teachers and blaming them for all the ills of society? That is part of it.

 

But more important, it appears, is that schools in many states are losing funding even as the politicians demand better results.

 

Open the link and see whether your state has cut or added funds to public schools.

 

Kristi Rangle says that teachers, especially those in the poorest neighborhoods, are set up to fail. Current policies actually discourage teachers from working in schools serving low-income students:

 

 

The lack of funding sets teachers, and students, up for failure, according to Rangle. She argued that teachers these days are required to pick up more responsibilities that traditionally fell upon other faculty members, like school counselors and social workers.
Though Rangle’s piece focuses on her experience teaching in the Texas school system, her argument could apply to many school systems in the US.

 

More than half of states are providing less per-pupil K-12 funding for kindergarten through 12th grade than they did in 2008 during the financial crisis, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities found last year.

 

Funding is not the only problem, however. Rangle also fears that in today’s system where teachers are evaluated based on student performance, good teachers who work with low-income populations have been set up for failure.

 

She’s troubled by this trend, but says experienced teachers can’t in good faith recommend that new teachers try to work in low-income school districts.

 

“New teachers, like my daughter, are urged by veteran educators not to begin their careers in the types of schools where we found our passion for students and learning – the sort of places that need eager, energetic teachers the most,” Rangle wrote.

 

 

 

 

Categories Funding, Teacher Evaluations

Iowa Goes Backward

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2015 //
8

Across the nation, states are dropping out of the Common Core testing. Most have decided that the tests are too long, too expensive, and provide no more information than the tests they had before.

 

But Iowa, among the high-scoring states in the nation, has decided to adopt the Smarter Balanced Assessment at the same time that others are backing out. The new tests will begin in the 2016-17 year.

 

The irony is that Iowa has long been one of the nation’s high-performing states even though it had no state standards or assessments.

 

But the state board of education has decided to follow everyone else, even as others are dropping out.

Categories Common Core, Iowa, Testing

Cuomo Has a Vision of Children Taught by Machines

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2015 //
40

Governor Cuomo couldn’t sleep, so he turned on a movie. It was scary. It was about machines talking back to people, machines smarter than people. Then he figured out that machines should teach children. Every child should have his or her own machine. That way, machines that are way smarter than people can teach children.

 

Makes sense? No.

 

Can someone please help Governor Cuomo get a good night’s sleep? What’s troubling him?

Categories Cuomo, Andrew, New York, Technology, Computers

Hillary Aide Insists that Hillary DOES Support Charters, if They Are Equitable and Accountable

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2015 //
72

Ann O’Leary, who advises Hillary Clinton on education policy, wrote an article in which she corrected the impression that Hillary does not support charter schools. O’Leary explains that Hillary does support charter schools, so long as they meet their obligation to include students with disabilities and English language learners and stop suspending kids they don’t want.

 

O’Leary takes the tack that charters are public schools, and Hillary has always supported public school choice.

 

She writes:

 

Hillary believes that every public school should be serving our students and supporting our teachers. And when charter schools are producing results, she believes we should double down on their success by scaling the model and ensure that their innovations are widely disseminated throughout our traditional public schools. That was the original bargain of charter schools.
At the same time, we must also have the courage to shut down charters that are failing our kids. And don’t just take this from me, or Hillary, for that matter. Take it from Geoffrey Canada:
“You know, people tell me, ‘Yeah, those charter schools, a lot of them don’t work.’ A lot of them don’t. They should be closed. I mean, I really believe they should be closed.”

 

Geoffrey Canada (who stepped down last year as leader of the Harlem Children’s Zone and now spends a large part of his time lecturing about the glories of charter schools) was the star of the anti-teacher, anti-union, anti-public school propaganda film “Waiting for ‘Superman.'” He had two billionaires on the board of his Harlem Children’s Zone and $200 million in the bank. According to the New York Times, there are 15 students in a class with two licensed teachers, and individual tutors. His charter schools never lacked for money or whatever they wanted. Even so, their test scores were nothing to brag about. When his entering class failed to get high scores (according to Paul Tough’s book about Canada called “Whatever It Takes,“) Canada simply kicked the entire class out in May, when it was too late for them to get into a high school of choice. When I confronted Canada with Tough’s account on national television (“Education Nation”), he denied it and claimed he closed the whole school. But it wasn’t true. He kicked out the entering ninth grade class, everyone of them.  A public school can’t do that.

 

In Ohio, Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and other states, charter school founders (all non-educators) have collected tens of millions of dollars in profit by running charter schools. No public school superintendent or principal can do that. In Chicago, 50 public schools were closed in a single day, to be replaced by privately managed charter schools where the citizenry has no voice. Eli Broad has proposed putting half the students in Los Angeles in privately managed charter schools; how many members of UTLA will be replaced by temps willing to work 60-hour weeks? Tennis star Andre Agassi (a high-school dropout) and his partner, investor Bobby Turner, are building charter schools for profit, and they are currently raising another $1 billion to profit from the taxpayers’ largesse. Does Hillary want to see more profiteers fatten from the taxpayers’ dollars?

 

I take issue with the claim that charter schools are public schools. When they have been brought to federal courts for violating the rights of employees under state law, their defense is that they are not public schools. When they have been hauled before the NLRB for fighting efforts to form a union, their defense is that they are not public schools. When charter operators in California were tried for embezzlement, the California Charter Schools Association defended them on grounds that they are not public schools and therefore not subject to the same laws. When Eva Moskowitz did not want to be audited, she went to court and insisted that the state had no right to audit her school (what public school can do that?); when she feels like holding a  political rally in Albany or at City Hall, she closes her schools for half a day (what public schools can do that?).

 

Another point about Hillary and charters. 93% of charters are non-union. How can she simultaneously court the millions of teachers who belong to the NEA and AFT while praising a sector that is proudly, defiantly non-union? Almost all charters are non-union, and their owners fight to keep them non-union. That’s why the far-right Walton Family Foundation has invested $1 billion in expanding the charter sector: to eliminate teachers’ unions. That’s why charters are applauded by ALEC and the likes of Scott Walker, John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Rick Snyder, Rick Scott, and other rightwing governors. Is this the crowd that Hillary should be hanging with?

 

I do hope that Hillary thinks some more about her views of charter schools. We are hurtling towards mass privatization of public education in our urban districts. Some of these charters are for-profit or run by incompetent non-educators. For-profit charters should not get a penny of public money, not a penny. Charter chains that exclude students with severe disabilities and students who don’t speak English and students with low scores should not receive public funding. Charter chains run by foreign nationals should not get public funding. At present, charters are neither equitable nor accountable.  And there is nothing in the law that would make them so.

 

Why should we eliminate public schools and replace them with privately managed, unaccountable charter schools? No high-performing nation in the world has charter schools.

 

Please, Hillary, think about it some more. Or better yet, meet with me so I can walk you through the issue.

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

Petition Addressed to LAUSD Board: Do Not Hire Inexperienced TFA for Students with Disabilities

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2015 //
30

A group of parents, teachers, and scholars wrote a petition to the board of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is hiring Teach for America to supply inexperienced teachers for students with disabilities. It is astonishing that the board would want to place young college graduates into classrooms with students who need well-trained teachers, not youngsters with five weeks of training.
PETITION
http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/lausd-rescind-the-tfa?source=c.em.cp&r_by=856483

 

 

Cancel the contract that pays TFA to recruit untrained interns to teach our vulnerable special education students. Identify reputable programs to recruit graduates and student teachers who are committed to the teaching profession, to our schools and our students.

 

The long version–

 

This is to urge the LAUSD school board to immediately rescind its contract with TFA for special education services. Our most vulnerable students deserve the most qualified professionals possible.

 

Los Angeles Unified School District ratified a contract with Teach For America to provide trainees to fill 25 teaching positions in special education at its November 10, 2015 board meeting. There was no debate on the matter; it was hidden in the consent calendar with attachments of attachments buried deep.

 

While Board member Dr. George McKenna raised important questions about TFA’s retention rate and its commitment to our students, the answers he was provided were misleading because they rely on unchecked data from TFA itself, according to a report in American Prospect (1/5/15). The truth is 87% of TFA recruits plan to leave teaching after their internships end, according to a recent article in Bloomberg News (3/9/15). LAUSD was only the most recent stop by TFA on a statewide campaign over the last few months making the same claims about the need for special ed TFAers. Most school districts from Chula Vista to Santa Ana resisted the sales job after public outcry. But those districts held actual discussions about the controversial contracts with TFA.

 

LAUSD senior staff needs to go back to the drawing board to create partnerships with reputable teaching programs to recruit teachers who will be qualified on Day 1 and are likely to remain committed to the teaching profession.

 

TFA is one of the tools that Eli Broad is using to attack our schools and undermine the very fabric of the public school system in Los Angeles (his foundation is a top funder of TFA). Our elected leaders just endorsed that by approving this contract. It should be rescinded immediately.

 

We are a coalition of public education advocates that includes:

 

Tina Andres, Santa Ana Unified teacher and special education parent

 
Jameson Brewer, PhD, former TFA

 
Anthony Cody, co-founder/board member Network for Public Education

 
Paul Markowitz, teacher and principal, retired

 
Josh Leibner, National Board Certified Teacher

 
Ellen Lubic, Joining Forces for Education

 
Carl Petersen, Change the LAUSD

 
Betty Jo Ravitz, former teacher and Director of Music

 
Sari Rynew, retired teacher

 
Robert Skeels, Juris Doctor Candidate and public education advocate

 
Julian Vasquez Heilig, PhD, Cloaking Inequity

 
Karen Wolfe, PSconnect

 
Thank you for your attention to this urgent matter.

Categories Los Angeles, Special Education, Teach for America

Mercedes Schneider Transcribes Walmart’s Anti-Union Video

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2015 //
17

Mercedes Schneider obtained a copy of a Walmart video for new employees, warning them not to join a union. The video was online, then taken down. She transcribed it, in the event it never resurfaces.

Shop at Walmart, and make America’s richest family richer.

Categories Education Reform

Denis Smith: What if Ohio Charter Schools Were Subject to Recall? The Risks of Deregulation

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2015 //
7

Denis Smith used to work for the Ohio Department of Education, where he oversaw the charter schools. Now that he has retired, he can speak freely.

 

In this post, he reflects on the recall of faulty cars and airbags. And he wonders, what if faulty charters could be recalled?

 

The post is priceless for the number of links to industry malfeasance.

 

He includes a long list of charter industry failures, suggesting that embezzlement and cooking the books is not a one-off phenomenon, but a systemic failure.

 

 

Here are some examples of problems in that other, non-automotive, non-manufacturing industry:

 

A record 17 industry locations in one city – Columbus – closed in just one year.
One of the industry’s treasurers embezzled nearly $500,000 from several locations, earning a two-year prison sentence.
An executive in the industry, operating under a phony consulting contract, also embezzled about a half-million dollars, while employee salaries had to be cut in an economy move.
In Cleveland, five industry executives were charged with stealing nearly $2 million in a scheme that saw the creation of five shell companies to receive public funds. Even the board chairman, who owned the building in which the industry operated, was part of the fraud that was detailed in a 32-count indictment.
Three industry treasurers were singled out several years ago for their responsibility with more than $1 million in “questionable spending,” according to audit findings.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Ohio, Privatization

Carol Burris: New York’s Teacher Evaluation Crashes and Burns, Again

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2015 //
15

I wish someone would take the time to figure out how many hundreds of millions or billions New York state has spent to implement the Race to the Top, which brought the state $700 million. Three years ago, a suburban superintendent estimated that the $400,000 won by six districts had cost them $11 million.

 

Carol Burris, recently retired principal and now executive director of the Network for Public Education, writes here a succinct summary of the mess that teacher evaluation is in since the state won a grant from the Race to the Top.

 

When the New York State Education Department began its mission of preparing educators, it proudly showed a film of a plane being built in mid-air. This ridiculous metaphor turned out to be apt. The reality is that  you cannot build a plane in mid-air, and the odds are certain that the plane will crash. Who in his or her right mind would board a plane that was not yet built and had just enough power to be airborne? Now the video is nowhere to be found (it used to be on the SED website, but no longer.)

 

Governor Cuomo keeps putting his redesign of the plane into the mix, making the flight even more impossible. He pushed a plan that was adopted, then was disappointed when too many teachers were highly rated. He then denounced his own plan and insisted that student test scores count for 50% of teachers’ evaluations. At this point, the overwhelming majority of districts have applied for and received waivers, giving them more time to figure out what to do.

 

It is a mess. The plane has crashed and burned.

 

Meanwhile, teachers and principals go about their daily responsibilities, trying to educate the state’s children, while the politicians continue to meddle in matters they don’t understand.

 

Categories Failure, New York, Teacher Evaluations

Emily Talmage Writes a Warning to Mark Zuckerberg

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2015 //
38

Emily Talmage teaches fourth grade in Maine. She wasn’t supposed to be a career teacher. She went to Exeter, then Amherst, and became a teacher through the New York City Teaching Fellows Program. Unexpectedly, she discovered that she loved teaching.

As it happened, she was a sophomore at Exeter when Mark Zuckerberg was a senior. She may have shared a Latin class with him. She takes advantage of this slight proximity to write an open letter to him, warning him that he is hanging out with the wrong crowd. That is, Bill Gates and the other corporate reformers.

Here is an excerpt:

“Corporate reformers,” as we call them on the ground, are very good at preying on our best intentions. I, myself, was once taken in by a school that promised it was “closing the achievement gap,” but whose practices were so appalling and abusive that I left within a year. Of course, I have never been to a Summit Public School, so I cannot speak about their system. I must confess, however, that when I see who else is promoting this school, the hair on the back of my neck stands up.

“Let me assure you that “personalized learning,” as it is being pushed by the Gates Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Digital Learning Now Council, as well as countless educational technology companies, start-ups, and venture capitalists who have invested millions into personalized learning experiments (they call them “innovations”), is a far, far cry from the type of education we got at Exeter.

“At Exeter, we sat around shiny hardwood tables debating meaning buried within novels that were carefully selected by our teachers; we disagreed about interpretations of historical events, and were sometimes drowned out by the passion of Harkness Warriors (I was never one of those, were you?). Our teachers had ways of guiding us toward particular insights, but they never held us hostage to specific outcomes, or “competencies” as they are called now, before allowing us to move on. (If you aren’t sure what I mean by “competencies” and the role they play in personalized learning models, please read more here.) If an outside observer had come into one of our classrooms, as happens now in many public schools, to ask us “What is your learning target today, and how will you know if you have met it?” I’m quite sure not many of us would have been able to say. Our teachers probably would have been appalled at such a question.

“These are the constraints under which “personalized” learning models operate. Standards, competencies, learning targets and progressions, all of which must be tracked and monitored and controlled in order to work, are the ingredients of “personalized learning.” Students may be in control of their “learning trajectory,” in such a model, but not of their own minds, as we were at Exeter.

“In my humble opinion, this is a bastardization of true education.

“Of course, you can see why venture capitalists, educational technology companies and their related foundations (yes, I do mean Gates) would see a prime opportunity for profit through this type of model. Computers can, indeed, do this type of work.”

Will Mark Zuckerberg see Emily’s letter?

Post it on his Facebook page. He needs our help.

Categories Education Reform

Bret Wooten: Dark Secrets of the Classroom

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2015 //
30

Bret Wooten, a businessman in a small town in Texas, was puzzled about why his wife, a second grade teacher, spent so much money on her students. At tax time, he reminded her that the purpose of working was to make money, not to rack up expenses that were not tax-deductible.

 

She invited him to visit her classroom. And he did.

 

“When I came by that next afternoon, I found myself surrounded by the children doing projects and I jumped right in. I dropped by the school as often as I could, so the children were used to me at this point. But one young man always kept his distance. After the kids had gone, I asked Michelle why. She then revealed her dark secrets, the histories of the children in her classroom.

 

“These kids endured everything from true poverty to sexual abuse. Her list of questionable deductions started to make sense: granola bars, orange juice, cereal, milk, jackets, band aids and endless school supplies.

 

“The young man that would not approach me? She told me about him last. He had endured the worst. All the men in his life injured this child in ways that still bring tears to my eyes and a rage in my soul.

 

“Then she said: “He needs shoes.”

 

“The only thing I could mutter was: “What size?”

 

“These days we think we will find the answer to so many questions within the pages of a book or the folds of a standardized test, but this is the reality of many children in America. I wish stories like this were on the news or touted by politicians.

 

“Unfortunately, acts of kindness are far too common in education and thereby deemed unnewsworthy. If these stories were aired, maybe we could actually solve some problems instead of just pointing them out.”

 

 

Categories Poverty, Students, Teachers
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