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Mary Horsley says:

January 5, 2016 at 7:16 am

We returned to school this week, only to be dictated to that we are to begin midyear Pals testing on the 6th and Map testing on the 11th and 13th. The students just returned from a two week break! Anybody who retains their sanity in this crazy world would realize that children need an opportunity to re-acclimate to the school routine, before we beat them into submission with tests.

Well, I have decided at 61, my blood pressure rising a bit, my right eye messed up some, I still have to teach 10 more years. The only way I will be able to do this is to play the high card: Civil Disobedience. In January we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. His quote of ” One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws, ” reminds me that our schools are unjust. If they can’t provide me with computers, audible tests, and headphones, allowing each child with disabilities to hear it read to them, then I refuse to even try. I refuse to march upstairs and drag some old laptops to my room, only to find there is no audible function. If they want me to do it, then give me what I need.

Gandhi fought for civil disobedience, too. His quote is “Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless and corrupt!” Thoreau said, ” Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.” Our own 3rd president, Thomas Jefferson stated, “If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so.”

This teacher will survive. I have to. I am all I have. I am a widow with no savings. But I will remain strong. I would love to give a speech to the Save our Public Schools event next summer. Even if they don’t allow us to strike, we as teachers, highly qualified ones, must band together and be strong.

Thank you, Diane, for leading and inspiring. They want me to teach history, I will teach the right history
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Chiara says:

January 5, 2016 at 8:07 am

Uh, oh. Looks like Louisiana voucher system actually harms students:

“We evaluate the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP), a prominent school voucher plan. The LSP provides public funds for disadvantaged students at low-performing Louisiana public schools to attend private schools of their choice. LSP vouchers are allocated by random lottery at schools with more eligible applicants than available seats. We estimate causal effects of voucher receipt by comparing outcomes for lottery winners and losers in the first year after the program expanded statewide. This comparison reveals that LSP participation substantially reduces academic achievement. Attendance at an LSP-eligible private school lowers math scores by 0.4 standard deviations and increases the likelihood of a failing score by 50 percent. Voucher effects for reading, science and social studies are also negative and large. The negative impacts of vouchers are consistent across income groups, geographic areas, and private school characteristics, and are larger for younger children. These effects are not explained by the quality of fallback public schools for LSP applicants: students lotteried out of the program attend public schools with scores below the Louisiana average. Survey data show that LSP-eligible private schools experience rapid enrollment declines prior to entering the program, indicating that the LSP may attract private schools struggling to maintain enrollment. These results suggest caution in the design of voucher systems aimed at expanding school choice for disadvantaged students.”

Ed reform is all about data, right? Oddly, I can’t find this study being promoted by any of the 500 ed reform lobbying groups or any of the 10,000 paid ed reform lobbyists. They must not like the conclusion.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w21839

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- Tim says:
  
  January 5, 2016 at 8:14 am
  
  You must not have looked very hard.
  
  Over-regulation backfires on Voucher Supporters
  
  So that’s one study showing negative effects vs. what, a dozen or more showing positive? Do you accept the findings of the positive?
  
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  - dianeravitch says:
    
    January 5, 2016 at 9:34 am
    
    Tim,
    
    Most of the vouchers in Louisiana go to church schools, few of which have certified teachers, many of which teach creationism. Do you think that Bible-based science and history is a good preparation for the 21st century?
    
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  - Tim says:
    
    January 5, 2016 at 10:15 am
    
    I’m personally lukewarm on vouchers. My comment was merely to point out that some of the most prominent supporters of vouchers actually had openly addressed the LA study, and that the gold-standard random assignment research is overwhelmingly positive for vouchers.
    
    That said, there are plenty of religious schools that do a fine job of teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. And some that don’t.
    
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  - dianeravitch says:
    
    January 5, 2016 at 11:33 am
    
    Tim,
    
    The religious schools in Louisiana that do a fine job of teaching reading, writing, and math take very few voucher students; maybe one or two or three in a year. The religious schools in Louisiana that rely on vouchers for funding are not those schools. They are fundamentalist schools that teach creationism.
    
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- MathVale says:
  
  January 5, 2016 at 8:48 am
  
  If private schools accept public money, the schools must accept public governance. Wonder what happened to the tea party “no taxation without representation” thing in conservative circles?
  
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- MathVale says:
  
  January 5, 2016 at 9:13 am
  
  Tim, Hardly a marquee blog for Reformer’s velcro-based social experiments. True, a recent Fordham study claimed gains by closing challenged schools, but the absorbing schools lost. The long term effects are unknown. It may be just rearranging chairs on the Titanic and diluting the problems, rather than actually addressing funding, poverty, and income inequality. Will parents at the absorbing schools leave as the performance declines and discipline problems increase due to vouchers? And Fordham definitely is biased against certain schools in which they do not have a financial interest.
  
  Since these vouchers go to religious schools, I see no reason why the accepting schools can now impose their theist, dogmatic beliefs with public tax dollars. Case in point. If a Catholic school is kept alive by public funded vouchers, they should not be able fire teaches who are gay or support gay children. If they want to discriminate, stay private.
  
  Vouchers may in fact backfire in other ways as the public demands representation with influence over these so-called, private schools.
  
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- Dienne says:
  
  January 5, 2016 at 10:22 am
  
  Tim, this J.P. Greene guy is full of, at best, hot air. He claims, “I could produce a pile of random assignment voucher studies with significant positive results”, but he doesn’t do so. Nowhere in his ranting does he produce any such alleged studies. Can you actually find any such studies? How could anyone even do a “random assignment” study of vouchers? How can you randomly assign kids to either public or voucher schools? Don’t parents have some sort of say in the matter? How ridiculous. So, please, find me some studies – I won’t even hold you to the “random assignment” nonsense – showing positive effects of vouchers, including a demonstration that vouchers do not harm the public schools. Stripping out all the high performing students from public schools does not qualify as a positive effect of vouchers.
  
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  - Tim says:
    
    January 5, 2016 at 12:55 pm
    
    You can read about the research here: http://www.edchoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2013-4-A-Win-Win-Solution-WEB.pdf. A lot of people have attacked these studies for being aligned with Walton, Broad, etc., but I have not seen a substantial, formal critique of their methodology or results. Not only do the studies show a positive impact on the children who receive a voucher, they also show either a positive change or no change in public school outcomes.
    
    As for how random assignment studies are conducted in this particular instance, I gather it is simple—you offer a voucher to parents who are interested in sending their child to a private school rather than the traditional public school they are assigned to on the basis of residence (people like you!). If there are more parents interested in taking a voucher than there are vouchers to give, you track the outcomes of those who got vouchers and those who didn’t, controlling for income, race, parental characteristics, and so on.
    
    I am opposed to vouchers because of the religious issue but mainly due to accountability and oversight. Seems like those are same reasons most private schools don’t want to get involved, so I think we’re all safe.
    
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  - dianeravitch says:
    
    January 5, 2016 at 2:45 pm
    
    Vouchers and charters “work” if your goal is to eliminate a universal public education system that accepts all children regardless of race, religion, disability status, language, or sexual orientation. If you believe that a democratic society needs a public education system required to educate all children, then vouchers and charters are anathema.
    
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Chiara says:

January 5, 2016 at 8:22 am

Here’s another inconvenient study:

“At $200 per computer, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) has sold or facilitated donations of about 2.5 million laptops to classrooms in 42 different countries.

A new study suggests those laptops do not, however, have any effect on achievement in math or language.

The study, which was conducted by development funding source in Latin America called Inter-American Development Bank, looked at 319 public schools in Peru. It found that although OLPC students were more likely to use computers than their non-OLPC counterparts, the two groups scored about the same on math and language assessments 15 months after laptops were deployed.

Furthermore, the laptop program did not affect attendance, time allocated to school activities or quality of instruction in class. Even though the laptops came loaded with 200 books, reading habits of recipients matched those of their control-group peers — 74% of whom have five or fewer books in their homes.”

Oddly, the “data driven” Obama Administration continues to push low and middle income public schools to spend scarce funds on devices.

They managed to dupe these schools into spending 200 dollars out of of +/- 1000 dollars in ed funding per student on devices It was a bad investment. Why is the federal government pushing a bad investment? Are they TRYING to harm existing public schools?

http://mashable.com/2012/04/09/one-laptop-per-child-study/#ckqFb24peaqc

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- MathVale says:
  
  January 5, 2016 at 9:26 am
  
  I have often found technology is foisted upon teachers without actually asking them if it is beneficial to their classroom. A laptop cart of broken, virus-infected last year’s models often just gets moved to the corner of the library as a coat rack Teaching is a very human endeavor, and a phone app to remind kids about assignments or a cartoonish presentation of Newton’s Laws of Motion just doesn’t replace supported, valued teachers with time to plan, innovate, and collaborate. And don’t get me started on the famous videos with the guy droning on while scribbling on an electronic scratch pad. Fifteen minutes of those gems and kids are begging for real, human attention.
  
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Tim says:

January 5, 2016 at 10:20 am

“Public schools have to take all kids” — except when they don’t:

“Lofton allegedly asked the case manager look up student information in a CPS database, using someone else’s credentials, and used that information to identify 15 students on the list who qualified as special education learners “whom she did not want to be offered enrollment.”

“Lofton told the coordinator to lower those admission scores to make it appear as if the students were not eligible. According to the report, the coordinator followed Lofton’s request and changed the scores.”

Well, this must have been a reformer or TFA or principals academy type, right? Well . . .

“Lofton graduated from Kelvyn Park High School and volunteered with the Chicago Public Library as a literacy tutor in the ’80s.

“She went on to teach English at Lincoln Park High School and Benito Juarez Community Academy in Pilsen before moving to CPS headquarters to work on curriculum development.”

http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20160104/edgewater/ex-senn-principal-lowered-scores-keep-special-needs-kids-out-report

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Adrian Mendez says:

January 5, 2016 at 4:33 pm

I don’t think the KY governor cares much what the results are from deep cuts or privatisation of public education. We already know the kind of sympathy the working class gets from the very far right reactionary policies of the Republican Party, especially the Tea Party. For Christ’s sake, he was willing to cut Medicaid, which would have resulted in many unnecessary deaths within a year. I don’t think he would have the same backlash if he does the same with schools since the results are not as noticeable and quite frankly, the corporate press (e.g. NYT, LA Times, Wall Street Journal) would love to see privatisation so we won’t see outrage there.

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