Archives for the month of: May, 2016
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New York: 98% of School Budgets Pass, Opt Out Supporters Elected to Local Boards

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2016 //
3

New York appears to be in resistance mode. Governor Andrew Cuomo passed a tax cap when he first took office, requiring a 60% supermajority to raise the school budget more than 2% in any year.

 

Despite the millions spent by billionaires to prove to New Yorkers that their local public schools are failing, the voters gave them a vote of confidence. 98% of districts passed their school budget, some overriding the tax cap.

 

In addition, many new school board members were elected, including supporters of the opt-out movement and teachers.

 

The current estimate, reported in this story, is that the opt out numbers were as large this year as last year, that is, about 20% of all the state’s students in grades 3-8.

 

Opt out continues to be a powerful tide, and there is no indication that it is diminishing. As long as the high stakes testing continues, so will the opt out movement.

 

 

Categories Education Reform, Funding, New York, Opt Out, Supporting public schools

Jonathan Pelto: Pearson’s War Against Bloggers

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2016 //
46

Jonathan Pelto recounts here the story of PARCC’s efforts to stifle hundreds of bloggers.

 

Can a multinational corporation stifle free speech?

 

Can teachers and parents speak about and criticize the tests that children are required to take?

 

Can Pearson/PARCC hide behind copyright law to prevent any open discussion of the quality and developmental appropriateness of the tests they create?

 

When a conscientious teacher writes that the test her students took in fourth grade were written in language appropriate for sixth and seventh grade, isn’t this information that parents and the public need to know?

 

Is the copyright law being used to hide the shoddy quality of Pearson’s work?

 

Does the “fair use doctrine,” which permits limited quoting from copyrighted material, pertain to standardized tests?

 

Is it possible to give a test to millions of children and expect that none of the questions will be discussed at home, on social media, or in teachers’ lounges?

 

 

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Freedom of Speech, Pearson, Testing

What is the Secret of Success?

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2016 //
31

To answer the question, I don’t know. But there are any number of people who make a career of finding answers to this question. And we Americans have always been avid consumers of the latest big idea. At present, the secret ingredient is grit, but if we interpret that in old-fashioned terms like persistence, conscientiousness, hard work, it doesn’t seem like a new idea at all.

 

Here is another view about what makes for success in life–and what does not. The authors, Christopher Chabris and Joshua Hart, teach psychology at Union College in New York. They critique a book by Yale law professors Amy Chua and her husband Jed Rubenfeld, which claims to pinpoint the secrets of success.

 

If you recall, Chua wrote a bestseller a few years ago about how to turn your children into high achievers (“Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”). She espoused a harsh disciplinary regime (“no excuses,” no fun, no wasted time). In their book, Chua and Rubenfeld identify a package of three characteristics that they say explain success: belonging to a certain ethnic group (e.g., Cubans, Jews, Indians); having a strong sense of personal insecurity; and strong impulse control.

 

Chabris and Hart say that their own research contradicts the conclusions of Chua and Rubenfeld.

 

They write:

 

“We found no special “synergy” among the triple package traits. According to Professors Chua and Rubenfeld, the three traits have to work together to create success — a sense of group superiority creates drive only in people who also view themselves as not good enough, for example, and drive is useless without impulse control. But in our data, people scoring in the top half on all three traits were no more successful than everyone else….

 

“Our studies affirmed that a person’s intelligence and socioeconomic background were the most powerful factors in explaining his or her success, and that the triple package was not — even when we carefully measured every element of it and considered all of the factors simultaneously.”

 

The trouble with all this reasoning, surveying, and speculating about success is that we operate from different definitions of success.

 

What is success? It all depends on what you value most.

 

Is it making the most money? Many who achieve billions have very unhappy personal lives.

 

Is it becoming famous? See the bit above about unsatisfying personal lives.

 

Is it achieving professional distinction?

 

Is it giving your life to a cause greater than yourself?

 

Is it being known as the most beloved teacher in your community?

 

Is it being a wonderful father, mother, friend?

 

Success depends on what matters most to you.

Categories Education Reform, Grit

John Merrow and the “Golden Age of Education Reporting”

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2016 //
19

John Merrow is the senior statesman of education journalism. He recently wrote an open letter to the Education Writers Association and declared that this was “the golden age of education reporting.”

 

Years ago, very few reporters on the education beat wanted to be there. It was a stepping stone to a better assignment. Fred Hechinger was an exception. He was education editor of the New York Times, and he stayed. (Personal note: He was the commencement speaker at my college graduation in 1960, and I subsequently became friends with him and his wife Grace.)

 

Merrow suggests some under-reported stories: one is the relationship between the Gates Foundation and the U. S. Department of Education.

 

I would suggest an addition: the ethics of the financial contributions of the Gates Foundation to the media.

 

Paul Thomas has been writing critically about the flaws of education journalism. It would be interesting to get his take on Merrow’s comments.

Categories Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Media

Robert Kagan: This is How Fascism Comes to America

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2016 //
110

Robert Kagan is a distinguished scholar of foreign policy. He wrote this important article for The Washington Post about the danger that Donald Trump poses to our nation. He excoriates the GOP leaders who are meekly falling into line behind him in the name of party unity. I am 77 years old. This is the most crucial presidential election of my lifetime.  If Trump should win, if he should appoint one or two Supreme Court justices, every major progressive decision would be rolled back, including Roe v. Wade.

 

Kagan writes:

 

 

“The Republican Party’s attempt to treat Donald Trump as a normal political candidate would be laughable were it not so perilous to the republic. If only he would mouth the party’s “conservative” principles, all would be well.

 

 

“But of course the entire Trump phenomenon has nothing to do with policy or ideology. It has nothing to do with the Republican Party, either, except in its historic role as incubator of this singular threat to our democracy. Trump has transcended the party that produced him. His growing army of supporters no longer cares about the party. Because it did not immediately and fully embrace Trump, because a dwindling number of its political and intellectual leaders still resist him, the party is regarded with suspicion and even hostility by his followers. Their allegiance is to him and him alone.

 

“And the source of allegiance? We’re supposed to believe that Trump’s support stems from economic stagnation or dislocation. Maybe some of it does. But what Trump offers his followers are not economic remedies — his proposals change daily. What he offers is an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence. His incoherent and contradictory utterances have one thing in common: They provoke and play on feelings of resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger. His public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a wide range of “others” — Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees — whom he depicts either as threats or as objects of derision. His program, such as it is, consists chiefly of promises to get tough with foreigners and people of nonwhite complexion. He will deport them, bar them, get them to knuckle under, make them pay up or make them shut up.

 

“That this tough-guy, get-mad-and-get-even approach has gained him an increasingly large and enthusiastic following has probably surprised Trump as much as anyone else. Trump himself is simply and quite literally an egomaniac. But the phenomenon he has created and now leads has become something larger than him, and something far more dangerous.

 
“Republican politicians marvel at how he has “tapped into” a hitherto unknown swath of the voting public. But what he has tapped into is what the founders most feared when they established the democratic republic: the popular passions unleashed, the “mobocracy.” Conservatives have been warning for decades about government suffocating liberty. But here is the other threat to liberty that Alexis de Tocqueville and the ancient philosophers warned about: that the people in a democracy, excited, angry and unconstrained, might run roughshod over even the institutions created to preserve their freedoms. As Alexander Hamilton watched the French Revolution unfold, he feared in America what he saw play out in France — that the unleashing of popular passions would lead not to greater democracy but to the arrival of a tyrant, riding to power on the shoulders of the people.

 

“This phenomenon has arisen in other democratic and quasi-democratic countries over the past century, and it has generally been called “fascism.” Fascist movements, too, had no coherent ideology, no clear set of prescriptions for what ailed society. “National socialism” was a bundle of contradictions, united chiefly by what, and who, it opposed; fascism in Italy was anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-Marxist, anti-capitalist and anti-clerical. Successful fascism was not about policies but about the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Führer), in whom could be entrusted the fate of the nation. Whatever the problem, he could fix it. Whatever the threat, internal or external, he could vanquish it, and it was unnecessary for him to explain how. Today, there is Putinism, which also has nothing to do with belief or policy but is about the tough man who single-handedly defends his people against all threats, foreign and domestic.

 

“To understand how such movements take over a democracy, one only has to watch the Republican Party today. These movements play on all the fears, vanities, ambitions and insecurities that make up the human psyche. In democracies, at least for politicians, the only thing that matters is what the voters say they want — vox populi vox Dei. A mass political movement is thus a powerful and, to those who would oppose it, frightening weapon. When controlled and directed by a single leader, it can be aimed at whomever the leader chooses. If someone criticizes or opposes the leader, it doesn’t matter how popular or admired that person has been. He might be a famous war hero, but if the leader derides and ridicules his heroism, the followers laugh and jeer. He might be the highest-ranking elected guardian of the party’s most cherished principles. But if he hesitates to support the leader, he faces political death.”

 

Read it all. And think about what lies ahead if this bully is elected.

 

 

Categories Democracy

Laura Chapman: Who Created and Owns EdTPA?

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2016 //
18

The Pearson teacher certification exam called EdTPA is e trembly controversial. Many teacher educators believe that it seeks to standardize teacher preparation and reduces the autonomy of those who know future teachers best: those who taught them.

 

Laura Chapman, retired arts educator and crack researcher, here explains the origins of EdTPA.

 

 

“Pearson is the target of criticism of the edPTA, but the real culprit is that should be given attention is the lead developer, and it is NOT Pearson.

 

“The lead developer for edPTA was The Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning and Equity (SCALE).

 

“Stanford University owns the intellectual property rights and trademark for edTPA. SCALE is responsible for all edTPA development including candidate handbooks, scoring rubrics, and the scoring training design, curriculum and materials (including benchmarks). SCALE also develops and vets edPTA support materials in the Resource Library and through the National Academy.” http://edtpa.aacte.org/faq

 

“Stanford University has an agreement with Evaluation Systems, a unit of Pearson, licensing Pearson to administer and distribute edTPA.

 

“So, if you have complaints about edTPA, the target should not just be Pearson, but SCALE at Stanford University, where the edPTA was first envisioned as comparable to tests given in the professions of law and medicine indicating “readiness” to practice as a professional.

 

“SCALE as a big fan of so-called performance assessments. The SCALE website lists these “partners.”

 

1. American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. AACTE “coordinates overall project management and communication and provides implementation support to participating institutions of higher education (IHEs) through a website, resource library, and an online community.

 

2. Center for Collaborative Education (CCE) provides technical assistance and professional development to schools, districts, and state boards of education. CEE and SCALE are working with the Innovation Lab Network (ILN) of twelve states “taking action to identify, test, and implement student-centered approaches to learning that will transform our public education system.” The CCSSO (see below) facilitates this work, organized around “shared principles, known as the six critical attributes” for innovation: including: Fostering world-class knowledge, skills; Student agency; Performance-based learning: Anytime/anywhere opportunities: Providing comprehensive systems of learner support. In other words, anytime/anywhere online learning.

 

3. Council of the Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and SCALE have partnered on the National Quality Assessment Project and the Teacher Performance Assessment Consortium. The CCSSO played a major role in launching the Common Core State Standards. It receives generous funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

 

4. Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) and SCALE work on College and Career Readiness research and tools for high school/college alignment especially state-of-the-art, criterion-based, standards-referenced methods of course and document analysis.

 

5. Envision Schools/Envision Learning Partners, a charter management company in the San Francisco Bay Area, operates four Arts and Technology High Schools. SCALE helped to design, develop, and promote their College Success (Digital) Portfolio System with performance outcomes, scoring rubrics, and tasks in ELA, mathematics, science inquiry and science literacy, history-social science, foreign language, and the arts.

 

6. Evaluation Systems, a Group of Pearson, is the operational partner for edTPA. Evaluation Systems provides the infrastructure and technical platform to collect, score, and deliver edTPA results to teacher candidates and preparation programs.At last report, 18,000 teachers took the test. Each paid a minimum of $300. It is unknown what Stanford and/or SCALE may receive for this use of their intellectual property.

 

7. Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC). SCALE has created “a rigorous jurying process for LDC curriculum modules” for the Common Core; a standard, accurate process for reviewing modules and “providing teachers with actionable feedback for revision; training in this process in support of “calibration around the quality of teacher work.”

 

8. Measured Progress is a not-for-profit testing company with statewide assessment contracts in over half of the states. For the past decade and a half, Measured Progress has operated alternate assessment programs for students with moderate to severe learning disabilities, in more states than any other company. It operates a Common Core Assessment Program and conducts R& D work with SCALE on scoring performance assessments.

 

9. Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT) This is a consortium of 32 pre-service teacher preparation programs that contribute annually to ongoing improvements in an “alternative” for the state-mandated performance assessment needed to qualify for a preliminary teaching credential.

 

10. ShowEvidence works with SCALE on refining the practice of submitting and rating artifacts to support student and teacher assessment and evaluation.

 

11. Silicon Valley Math Initiative works with SCALE on student performance assessment projects in mathematics in Ohio and New York City. They have also worked with SCALE to design and develop performance outcomes, scoring rubrics, scoring protocols, and performance assessment tasks.

 

12. Teachscape has a contract with SCALE to develop and field test a tier II teacher licensing system in Ohio. Teachscape served as the management lead for the Gates-funded Measuring Effective Teachers project of which SCALE is a partner. (The MET Project, nothing to brag about, is critically examined here http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-MET-final-2013)

 

13. Westat collaborates with SCALE on The Common Assignment Study, a three-year effort to promote a common methodology for teaching the college and career readiness standards in Colorado and Kentucky, with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Participating teachers develop and teach two units, incorporating common performance tasks for students.

 

14. WestEd and SCALE are providing professional development in multiple states to build educator assessment literacy, especially performance tasks to support instruction for college and career readiness and success. This includes project includes work to “train the trainers” for professional development.

 

“I have edited these descriptions of partnerships for length.

 

“It is clear that SCALE is functioning as an R&D lab and promoter of the Common Core, College and Career agenda along with modular curricula and assessments for so-called personalized learning.

 

“SCALE is very much a promoter of the Gates version of “reform,” and the focus on Pearson’s highly questionable edPTA should not leave SCALE and Stanford off the hook.”

Categories Education Industry, Farina, Carmen, Teacher Education

Chicago: Rahm Proposes 40% Budget Cut; Critic Troy LaRaviere Wins Election

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2016 //
15

Interesting times in Chicago. Frightening too. Can the nation’s third largest school district survive?

 

Mike Klonsky reports that Mayor Rahm, who does not like public schools, has proposed a 40% budget cut.

 

It is tough to teach amidst so much instability, austerity, and hostility.

 

Meanwhile, Blaine Elementary School’s dissident and suspended principal, Troy LaRaviere, was elected as president of the Chicago Principal and Adobistrators Association. Troy was suspended and may soon be fired, despite winning many awards. He has been an outspoken critic of Mayor Rahm.

 

Categories Budget Cuts, Chicago, Education Reform, Principals

Peter Cunningham Comes to the Defense of Campbell Brown

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2016 //
81

Peter Cunningham, former deputy to Arne Duncan, accused Carol Burris and me of “attacking” Campbell Brown. He says we “attack” anyone who disagrees with us. Peter now runs a website called Education Post, where he received $12 million from various billionaires (including Walton and Bloomberg) to defend the corporate reform movement of high stakes testing, VAM, and privatization of public schools.

 

Anyone who reads my post about Campbell will see that there was no attack. I was doing my best to educate her about what grade level means and why NAEP proficient is not and should not be used as a “passing mark.”

 

Carol tweeted with Campbell. So did Tom Loveless of Brookings, who told her that she was wrong and urged her to correct her error. For some reason, Peter did not include Tom in the list of people who were “attacking” Campbell.

 

Obviously, neither she nor Peter bothered to read the links to scholarly studies and government websites included in my post.  They should. They might learn something and stop bashing American public schools and their teachers. I served seven years on the NAEP governing board. I could help them if they are willing to learn.

 

As for calling Campbell “telegenic,” that’s no insult, that’s a compliment. If you call me telegenic, I would say thank you.

 

 

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Testing

New York Times: Online Charter Schools Are Failures

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2016 //
16

Motoko Rich writes in the New York Times about the terrible results obtained by online charter schools. She focuses on the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, whose founder has become very wealthy thanks to taxpayer money and the friendship of reformers such as Governor JohnKasich and the GOP legislators in Ohio. Founder William Lager has been very generous to his friends who hold elected office.

 

A terrific business. A lousy education.

 

Five years ago, the New York Times ran a superb expose of online charters, pointing out that they are very profitable but basically scams that rip off taxpayers.

 

In 2011, the Washington Post published an excellent expose of Michael Milken’s K12 Inc, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

 

 

For-profit virtual charter corporations are a cynical business that exploits children and does not have educate them. It demands full state tuition to provide home schooling plus a “teacher” on a monitor.

 

I wrote about the online charter fraud in my 2013 book “Reign of Error.”

 

Numerous studies have concluded that these schools have startlingly high attrition rates, large “class” sizes, low wages, high teacher turnover, and their students very little.

 

The latest study, by CREDO, found that students lost 180 days of instruction in math for every year of 180 days in a virtual charter.

 

Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy wrote about today’s article in the Times and pointed out that ECOT has received nearly $1 billion in public funding since 2002.

 

Frankly, these fake schools should be investigated by authorities, monitored, and limited to students who are unable to attend school. They should exist only as public institutions, not profit-making corporations.

Categories Education Reform, Failure, Fraud, Virtual Charter Schools

British School Principal Warns that Reading “Harry Potter” Causes Brain Damage to Young Children

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2016 //
35

The headmaster of the Acorn School in the town of Nailsworth warned that reading fantasy books like the Harry Potter series and “Lord of the Rings” may cause brain damage.

 

Dissenters to his view pointed out that the classics he prefers are also violent.

 

In a lengthy blog post that went viral over the weekend, Graeme Whiting, the headmaster of the Acorn School in the English town of Nailsworth, claimed that popular fantasy books “can damage the sensitive subconscious brains of young children, many of whom may be added to the current statistics of mentally ill young children….”

 

 

The principal lamented the fact that children can buy these books without a “Special licence.”

 

 

“Buying sensational books is like feeding your child with spoons of added sugar,” Whiting wrote, “heaps of it, and when the child becomes addicted it will seek more and more, which if related to books, fills the bank vaults of those who write un-sensitive books for young children!”

 

 

Whiting praised the “old-fashioned values of traditional literature,” offering as examples William Shakespeare, John Keats, Charles Dickens and “Shelley.” (He didn’t specify whether he meant Percy Bysshe Shelley, author of “The Necessity of Atheism,” or Mary Shelley, author of the pioneering horror novel “Frankenstein.”)

 

The principal ended his post with the lines, “Beware the devil in the text! Choose beauty for your young children!”

 

Admirers of authors such as J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling reacted to Whiting’s blog post with disbelief.

 

In the Guardian, fantasy author Samantha Shannon criticized Whiting for hypocrisy, noting that Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus”
has a character who is brutally raped and mutilated by attackers, and later murdered by her father.

 

“The logic of dictators and book-burners throughout history, crystallised in all its nonsensical glory: that imagination can only flourish when it’s kept inside a cage,” Shannon wrote.

 

And at Bustle, writer Kristian Wilson contends that Whiting is “clearly Voldemort in disguise,” and suggested that the principal probably hasn’t read the authors he claims to love.

 

“If he had,” Wilson wrote, “he’d know that Wordsworth’s Lucy poems are full of dead women, Keats’ ‘Lamia’ is all about sex, the Shelleys wrote tales of torture and horror, Dickens’ body of work is full of prostitutes and orphans, and Shakespeare covered every graphic and occult theme you can think of.

 

 

 

Is this why the Common Core puts more value on “informational text” than fiction?

Categories Humor
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