On Tuesday night, the New York City Board of Education (aka, the Panel on Education Policy) will vote on paying $699,000 for a program called Teach To One. It was developed by Joel Rose, a protege of Joel Klein when he was chancellor of the NYC public schools.
Gary Rubinstein saw this program in action and thought it was dreadful.
To check whether his judgment was right, he reviewed the scores of the schools using this math program. They were abysmal. In one of the schools, 0.0% of the students passed the state math test.
Why would the Department of Education propose to pour more money into this failing program?
By the way, look at the funders: the Gates Foundation, the Bezos Foundation, etc. guess it doesn’t take much other than who-you-know to get their money.
The leaders of KIPP are on their advisory board, but KIPP doesn’t use the program.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The more I read, the more I think that this alleged reform of public education is part of a deliberate plan to destroy civilization as we know it and kill off the human species.
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Look at the bright side of it, Lloyd. We’ll be already be dead by the time that happens!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep9Vzb6R_58
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And even if we die while it is happening, we have already lived longer than most. Sad for the younger ones though.
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Bezos and Gates live in the state with the most regressive tax system in the nation. The poor pay a rate up to 7 times the rate the rich pay. The state of Washington’s tax policy is colonialism, just like Z-berg and Gates’ investment in for-profit schools-in-a-box.
Politicians and bureaucrats are the weapons of the U.S. oligarchy who have the democracies across the world, in chains.
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Gates is an insecure, greedy, spoiled neoliberal. He knows nothing and didn’t create anything.
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Reading all this vitriol for the two richest four letter men in the world is soothing to my soul. Thank you.
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Oddly, after reading dozens of stories about the perfidy of ATR teachers, I’ve yet to see a story in the press about this. Go figure.
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This is one small example of the impact of capitalistic education. We are pursuing policies that make no sense for students like vouchers and unregulated charters. It has to do with an earlier post about crony capitalism, not with the needs of students. Educational programs are adopted on the basis of pay to play schemes, not merit. We can look for more of this under ESSA unless people start fighting for well funded, well resourced public education.
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If we’re serious about teachers as professionals, they will have the opportunity to select the curriculum for their school – and have a chance to show it had help their students.
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My school district had a policy that any new adoption had to have research based evidence that produced positive results, or the curriculum director would not agree to it. Then, we had to do a small pilot before any large scale adoption was considered. It was a thoughtful process, not like the top down market based madness of today.
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Retired teacher, those sound like wise policies for many adoptions.
I remember being a member of a grade 12 “current issues” textbook adoption team. Since this was a “current issues” course, younger teachers (like me) and some vets convinced the district to let us save some of the $ each year for current publications and periodicals. But some vets warned us this might back-fire.
Sadly they were right. The district encountered some financial problems in the 5th year of the adoption- and took away the remaining $.
Again, an argument for putting the decision-making power re $ at the school level.
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When a new textbook is adopted and purchased, that means the money is available. That money should have been put into a separate account with the understanding that it was untouchable except for the purpose intended. No raiding in later years to make up for lost funds. Instead, they should have looked for ways to make cuts in other areas and involve all interested stakeholders from the bottom up to determine where those cuts were to be made.
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Agreed.
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For instance, one year the teachers in my district negotiated a lower pay raise than the one offered to keep classroom sizes down and save electives like drama, chorus, and band.
When teachers are involved where to cut and the books are open so they can see for themselves where the money is going, it is amazing how many teachers are willing to sacrifice to save what the majority agree are programs they don’t want to lose.
Let’s not forget how much public school teachers already spend out of their own pockets to buy supplies for their classrooms and students. That is only one example of the sacrifice that dedicated teachers make every year.
“The Education Market Association says that virtually all teachers wind up paying out of pocket for supplies, and it’s not chump change, either. On average, most spent nearly $500 last year, and one in 10 spent $1,000 or more. All told, a total of $1.6 billion in school supply costs is shifted from parents — or, increasingly, from cash-strapped districts — onto teachers themselves.”
http://time.com/money/4392319/teachers-buying-school-supplies/
Imagine how much that total would help if it went into supporting candidates that support traditional public schools?
In a decade that adds up to about $16-billion dollars, that those alleged greedy, fat, sloppy, lazy, incompetent teachers, (if we believe the corporate reformers of public education) who don’t care about the children they teach, spend out of their own pockets to teach those children.
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Well stated, Lloyd. Your experience has been the same as mine. Teachers spending their own money to help their students, and teachers putting their own interests aside to enrich programs for students.
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Just for a different perspective:
When I toured MS 88, the “School of One” math program was one of the most appealing things about it. It seemed – at least on the surface – to be a very good way to address the learning needs of students whose math abilities ranged from below average to very advanced. And I especially liked that it was not “here are kids on the computers the entire class”, but instead seemed to be a way to have teachers work with small groups of students to teach a lesson, with those students then working on problems on the computer while the teacher could work with other groups teaching more advanced concepts.
The computer wasn’t replacing the teacher but allowing students to work on what they had learned while the teacher taught other students in a smaller setting. But unlike sending kids to their desk to answer math problems on paper, with no help if they were stuck or no sense of whether they were doing it right, the computer program did provide that help and feedback.
It’s certainly possible what was advertised was not the reality, but as a parent I saw the sense in that approach. And I felt as if the teachers talked about it in a very positive way.
One quibble I have with Gary’s analysis is that using 8th grade math scores is a TERRIBLE way to judge a school because the top 8th grade math students take the Algebra 1 Regents and aren’t required to take the state Math exam. So a middle school is being judged only by its lowest performing students in 8th grade, with all their Algebra 1 students left out. But at MS 88 the 7th grade passing rate on the state math exam was 44%. About 100 fewer students took the 8th grade exam than the 7th grade and those may be the students taking the Algebra Regents.
By the way, MS 88 has 79% economically disadvantaged, 29% students with disabilities and 12% ELL. It is a large middle school with just under 400 students per grade. It is one of the unsung middle schools that try to teach students with a range of abilities and they seem very dedicated. So I think it would be very useful for Gary to speak with the educators and principal there to learn how it works and what can be improved. It is possible that some schools weren’t really embracing all it could do or it is possible that it works for some students but not others.
Regardless of the value of the program, it is appalling that the DOE should have to pay for anything that one of their employees helped create WHEN he was a DOE employee. Something is very wrong about that and it should be looked into. It could even be a bad deal that Bloomberg’s DOE made.
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^^^And for some perspective on using 8th grade scores: One selective District 15 middle school has an 80% passing rate in math overall (6th, 7th, and 8th grade), but only 23% in 8th grade. That’s because a large number of 8th graders take Algebra 1 so the remaining students who take the 8th grade state Math exam are the least advanced students in the school. I think you will find this to be the case at every good NYC middle school — the 8th grade passing rates are very misleading.
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When I was working on the development of AFSE, before the DOE froze me out, it was made VERY clear to me that any work I did on CS education was the property of the DOE and that in no way could I profit from it. In fact, the conflict of interests person made it near impossible for me to give away my services to help more kid.
Of course this all made sense because I was a public school teacher and not one of Klein/Bloomberg’s chosen ones.
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