Last year, Carol Dweck received the Yidan Prize of nearly $4 million for her work on “growth mindset.”
Were these bold choices? Safe choices? Relevant choices? Choices likely to change the life chances of millions of children around the world?
What do you think?
Torr Leonard, a father of a kindergarten student at the Gault Street Elementary School, was frustrated because so many of his neighbors were sending their children long distances to attend magnet schools or charter schools. He has made it his mission to tell them about their neighborhood public school.
When Torr Leonard moved into his Lake Balboa neighborhood five years ago, he discovered nearly every parent on his street sent their children to schools other than the neighborhood school a block away.
Leonard said he found that just one other nearby family sent their children to Gault Street Elementary, where his son Luc, started kindergarten last month. So, he has made it his mission to advocate for the school and encourage parents to re-think their decision to send their children to magnet or charter schools blocks — or even miles —away from their San Fernando Valley neighborhood.
“Why not try to market this school to the neighborhood to get people to actually send their kid there,” Leonard said in an interview.
Too bad that public schools do not have budgets for marketing, like the charter industry, which sucks public dollars away from public schools.
Arizona is hurtling back a century or more. The state superintendent of education has invited an anti-evolutionist to review the state science standards.
The writer for the Arizona Republic, Laurie Roberts, is quick to spot frauds and quacks in the Ed industry:
“Here is a bit of instruction from a guy Superintendent Diane Douglas tapped to help review Arizona’s standards on how to teach evolution in science class:
“The earth is just 6,000 years old and dinosaurs were present on Noah’s Ark. But only the young ones. The adult ones were too big to fit, don’t you know.
“Plenty of space on the Ark for dinosaurs – no problem,” Joseph Kezele explained to Phoenix New Times’ Joseph Flaherty.
“Flaherty reports that in August, Arizona’s soon-to-be ex-superintendent appointed Kezele to a working group charged with reviewing and editing the state’s proposed new state science standards on evolution.
“Kezele is a biology teacher at Arizona Christian University. He also is president of the Arizona Origin Science Association and, as Flaherty puts it, “a staunch believer in the idea that enough scientific evidence exists to back up the biblical story of creation.”
“Douglas has been working for awhile now to bring a little Sunday school into science class. This spring she took a red pen to the proposed new science standards, striking or qualifying the word “evolution” wherever it occurred.
This, after calling for creationism to be taught along with evolution during a candidate forum last November.
“Should the theory of intelligent design be taught along with the theory of evolution? Absolutely,” Douglas said at the time. “I had a discussion with my staff, because we’re currently working on science standards, to make sure this issue was addressed in the standards we’re working on…”
“Kezele told Flaherty that there is enough scientific evidence to back up the biblical account of creation. He says students should be exposed to that evidence. For example, scientific stuff about the human appendix and the Earth’s magnetic field.
“I’m not saying to put the Bible into the classroom, although the real science will confirm the Bible,” Kezele told Flaherty. “Students can draw their own conclusions when they see what the real science actually shows.”
“Because, hey, Barney floating around on Noah’s Ark.
“Kezele told Flaherty that all land animals – humans and dinosaurs alike — were created on the Sixth Day.
“And there was light and the light was, well, a little dim for science class, if you ask me.”
Law professor Derek Black writes that California’s ban on for-profit charters is stronger than skeptics expected. It bans not only for-profit charters, but does not permit non-profits to hire for-profit management companies, a common ruse in many states.
He writes:
“One of the major critiques of charter schools, although not the only one, is that they allow private entities to profit off the education of children. Some say the possibility of profits is a good idea because it brings new players into the education “market,” incentivizes efficiency, and creates competition that might drive down the cost of quality education. In theory, I suppose that is possible, but in reality, we have seen far more evidence to the contrary. And the possibility of profit taking without sufficient state oversight also opens the door to downright corruptions. Preston Green has done an excellent job of tracking scandal and corruption in the charter school sector. I argue here, however, that what we call “corruption” is often actually legal when charters do it. The self-serving contracts and leases are the type of behavior that would land public school officials in jail, but which are relatively common with some charter school operators.
“That is what makes California’s new statute barring for-profit charter school operators so significant. On their face, most charter schools are non-profit. Many states will not issue a charter to a for profit entity. If Big Box Stores, Inc., for instance, applies to operate a charter in Kentucky, they state will reject it. This, however, does relatively little to block for profit entities. All Big Box Stores, Inc. needs to do is form a non-profit. They can call it Big Box Academies. If Big Box Academies gets a charter, it can then simply enter into a contract with Big Box Store, Inc. to supply all the labor and supplies for the charter school. In fact, non-profit charters regularly turn over their entire budget to for-profit management companies. Those companies can then take as much profit as they can manage. As Tom Kelley has shown, they develop “sweeps” contracts that are so egregious that the charter schools are probably running afoul of non-profit rules.
“California’s new charter law takes a big bite out of this problem. It makes it clear that only non-profits can receive a charter in the state. It also prohibits those non-profit charters from transferring responsibility and management to a for-profit entity…
“With that said, there is still more to be done to ensure that non-profit charters are acting like non-profits. The California law stops charters from acting purely as shell companies for outside entities, but they don’t stop non-profit charters from paying their upper level staff and management unreasonably high salaries while paying their teachers unreasonably low ones. They also don’t stop non-profit charters from entering into unreasonable leases. As Tom Kelley has shown, exorbitant leases appear to be one of the biggest profit-taking mechanisms. No non-profit acting in its and its students’ own best interests would every enter into some of these lease agreements. California’s new statute prohibits for-profit management, but it does not prohibit lease deals that are not on the up-and-up. To be clear, the point of leasing out one’s land is to make money. So leases that send profits to landlords are not inherently problematic. But California should not think its job is done with this statute. It still needs to exercise enough oversight to ferret out problematic contracts and leases and ensure that state money is spent on students.”
Until 2015,Kentucky did not have a charter school law. Then hard-right Republican Matt Bevin was elected governor, and he pushed hard to get a charter law passed by the legislature. But the legislature has not yet allocated funding for charter schools. Opposition has been strong and bipartisan. Now the governor has packed the state school board with charter advocates, fired the state superintendent and hired a state superintendent who wants charter schools.
Their target is Jefferson County, which includes Louisville, the biggest city in the state. Parents have mobilized to block a takeover. (I’m speaking at an anti-charter rally in Louisville on October 18, the night before the NPE conference in Indianapolis; the great Jitu Brown of Journey for Justice will be there, and Sue Legg of Florida’s League of Women Voters).
In this article, Jeff Bryant lays out the financial machinations behind Kentucky’s charter cheerleaders. It is NOT about the kids. Follow the money.
Read about the BB&T Bank of North Carolina, which is deeply involved in financing charters and involved in finding Kentucky’s Bluegrass Institute.
“BB&T has collaborated with the Koch Brothers for years in funding academic centers and professorships at colleges and universities across the country with the stipulation gifts will support teaching about principals of free-market capitalism and use the works by libertarian icon Ayn Rand. The bank has donated millions more for capitalism programs at the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
“But BB&T’s investments in spreading capitalist doctrine and education reform are not strictly ideological or altruistic. The bank finances charter schools. “BB&T Capital Markets has been ranked the No. 1 charter school underwriter in the nation for two consecutive years,” claims the bank’s website, where it also lists numerous charter school properties across the country financed by the bank.
“The connections between charter school expansion and real estate development are underreported and little-understood but worth exploring. Charter school expansions in many states, including North Carolina, Florida, and New Jersey, have been accompanied by new schemes to profit off the land and buildings related to the charter organizations.
“In Louisville, locals see this scheme playing out similarly. Rob Mattheu, a Jefferson County parent and avid blogger about local schools, explains in an email, “There are big bucks to be had” in connecting new charter schools with land deals.”
This is a beautiful statement. Computer-graded essays represent the ultimate dumbing down of education. Professor Les Perelman of MIT has has written many studies about the stupidity of machines. They are indifferent to factual accuracy. They don’t understand tone or irony or wit. They can be fooled by pretentious gibberish.
Keep fighting!
Open Letter to Ohio Department of Education from English teachers. Concerning: Computer-graded exams.
by inthevalleyofthedoanSeptember 8, 2018
OPEN LETTER
TO: Paolo DeMaria
Superintendent of Public Instruction
Ohio Department of Education
superintendent@education.ohio.gov
CC: Office of Curriculum and Assessment:
Brian.Roget@education.ohio.gov
Sarah.Wilson@education.ohio.gov
Shantelle.Hill@education.ohio.gov
Daniel.Badea@education.ohio.gov
Sarah.McClusky@education.ohio.gov
FROM: English teachers of Shaker Heights High School
September 7, 2018
Dear Superintendent DeMaria and the Office of Curriculum and Assessment,
We are English teachers at Shaker Heights High School, and we would like to voice our profound dismay over the direction that the Ohio Department of Education has taken with the End of Course exams.
In the nation’s unthinking rush to test, test, test, we have reached a new low: We are now expected to teach our students how to write for a machine to read.
We have been given a document called, “Machine-Scored Grading: Initial Suggestions for Preparing Students,” produced by the Westerville City Schools “in consultation with the ODE.” According to these guidelines, “When composing text to be read by a computer, the writer cannot assume that the machine will ‘know’ and be able to interpret communicative intent.”
Imagine for a moment how humiliating it is for students to hear that what they write will be read by a machine, not by a human. Can you think of anything as pointless? Would anybody be inspired to do their best work?
The message that we send students is this: Your inner self, the ground from which all writing springs, has no value, no relevance. We do not care about the content of your mind, only that you have the mental machinery to decipher and generate informational text.
Writing for a computer is antithetical to everything that led us to become educators. Our overseers in Columbus, however, have a very different attitude. In support of machine scoring, this is from an official statement from an Associate Director of the Office of Curriculum and Assessment:
“This is the only way to get to adaptive testing and to return results faster, with the goal to be eventual on demand results, which has been an extremely vocal issue by the field to legislators, ODE Leadership, etc.”
First of all, this is an appalling sentence. But once we get past the errors in syntax, grammar and capitalization, and the sloppy, confusing phrasing, we are still left with an absurdity. We teachers are supposed to set students before a computer and then wait breathlessly for the machine to tell us how well or poorly the student writes? That is the ultimate goal? And the person in charge doesn’t even know how to write? How much are Ohio taxpayers spending on this?
There are always the same three justifications for computer grading:
It’s fast.
It’s cheap.
It’s objective.
But we can point to a system that is faster, cheaper, and maybe even more objective. There just happens to be a group of trained professionals handy: people who are dedicated to the wellbeing and growth of Ohio’s schoolchildren, people who love writing and literature, people who are trained to the standards of the Ohio Department of Education, people who continually strive to improve their ability to provide meaningful evaluation of student writing:
Teachers.
We can do the job fast because we’re with the students every day. We can do it cheap, in fact at no extra cost to Ohio taxpayers, because it’s what we’re paid to do anyway.
You might assume that machines have us beat when it comes to objectivity. But computers are only as objective as the humans who program them. And we have good reason to distrust multinational corporations when they invoke proprietary trade secrets to hide the systems that determine the fates of millions of public school children.
But objectivity may be the wrong criterion. As English teachers, we love writing because it is one of the most subjective things taught in school. We love the teaching of writing because we love to see students develop their unique voices, their sense of themselves as the subjects of their own lives.
If we begin our thinking with the assumption that standardized tests are a sacred imperative, then, surely the fastest, cheapest, most objective thing is to grade them is with a machine. However, if we begin our thinking with the belief that students should learn how to write well, then we see that artificial intelligence is not just irrelevant, but counterproductive.
Superintendent DeMaria, what is truly being tested here is the ODE itself. Are you so captive to the testing-industrial complex that you throw millions of taxpayer dollars into an unnecessary technology? Or are you so committed to educating students that you are willing to use your available human capital to do it for free?
Yours sincerely,
English teachers at Shaker Heights High School
Jan Resseger nails the politicians who are responsible for ignoring the ECOT scam. The $1 billion that ECOT took to produce inferior education (or none at all) was purchased with campaign contributions, 92% of it to Republicans.
As it happens, the guilty politicians are running for state office this November. In only a few weeks, they will be judged by the voters.
Jon Husted, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor; Keith Faber, the Republican candidate for state auditor; Mike DeWine, the Republican candidate for governor; and Dave Yost, the Republican candidate for attorney general.
Will the voters in Ohio remember in November who skimmed millions from their public schools to enrich the owner of ECOT?
When Peter Greene learned that Jeff Bezos and his wife planned to allocate $2 Billion to creating their own preschools and helping the homeless, he was appalled.
Greene has a better idea for the billionaire class: They should pay their taxes. More taxes.
“Jeff Bezos (and his wife) starting pre-K schools is stupid. Let me count the ways (in no particular order).
“This damn guy
“It’s a stupid small pledge on his part. Yes, $2 billion is a chunk of money (aka more money than any teacher will ever make in their lifetime), but it’s chump change to Bezos. As this piece points out, it’s about 1% of his wealth. It’s considerably less than some of his fellow billionaire dabblers have donated. This is the exact opposite of a “we’ll spend whatever it takes to do this right” pledge.
“His concept is stupid, as witnessed by the oft-quoted “the child will be the customer.” This is, in its own way, as stupid as the many rich amateur education “experts” who insist that the child is the product. In our current hyper-commercial environment, as exemplified by the cutthroat capitalism of Amazon.com, the customer is a business’s adversary, the mark from whom pennies must be shaken loose by any means necessary, in return for which, the vendor will provide the absolute minimum they can get away with. How is this a good model for schools? A business has no relationship with a customer (though it may serve the business well to dupe the customer into thinking there’s a relationship there). The interactions are purely transactional– you give me some money, I give you whatever goods or services the money was supposed to pay for. The rest of the customer’s life and concerns are immaterial. How is this a good model for schools? Schools should help create educated citizens, help students become their best selves, create the public for a country; none of this is the same as creating customers. And customers, it should be noted, have to earn the right to be served by showing that they can plunk down the money.
“The stupid keeps getting deeper because we already know about Bezos’s treatment of people with whom he has a transactional relationship– he screws them mercilessly. Amazon workers are notoriously poorly treated so that Bezos can make more money. Bezos has made cities dance and scrape and bow for the privilege of having him gift them with another amazon hq. A school should take care of the students it serves. When has Jeff Bezos ever taken care of anybody?
“It’s stupid because of the blinding hypocrisy. I know this has been said, but it deserves endless repetition– Bezos wants to give money to the homeless, even as his corporation helped kill a tax bill in Seattle designed to help the homeless. But this isn’t just hypocrisy– it’s a blatant example of modern fauxlanthropic privatization. It’s about doing an end run around democratic-style government and insisting on commandeering the project yourself, in the same way that avoiding taxes is not just greedy, but is the Bezos way of saying that he will spend his money on his own terms, and if he’s going to spend money on something, then he will by God own it himself.
“It’s stupid because of the sheer oligarchical privatizing balls displayed. If Bezos wants some of his money to go to improving schools, there’s a mechanism in place for that; it’s called “paying your taxes.” If Bezos wants a say in how schools are operated, there’s a mechanism in place for that; it’s called “running for school board.” The country is not served by having vital institutions dependent on the largesse of the wealthy. We are not served by falling back into a system in which cities get their schools or water supplies by convincing some rich patron to take care of them.
“It’s stupid because the poor Montessori people are once again having their “brand” co-opted by somebody who doesn’t even get it. Bezos’s schools will apparently be sort of Montessori-flavored, whatever the hell that is supposed to mean.
“It’s stupid because it is soaked in tech-giant arrogance. Note that Bezos says nothing along the lines of, “I will bring in the top education experts to don this right.” Experts, shmexperts. Bezos will just “use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon. Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession.” In other words, running a school or a giant internet-based mail order business is pretty much the same thing, so I already know everything I need to know. Even if Amazon weren’t built on a mountain of worker abuse aimed at working the customers over, this would still be an arrogant, stupid thing to say.”
Read it all.
Peter Greene’s crap detector is better than anyone else’s. Jeff Bezos should listen to him.
Glenn Kessler, whose column in the Washington Post is called “The Fact-Checker,” writes that Trump set a record today. He surpassed 5,000. That is, he has made 5,000 (actually 5,001) misleading or demonstrably false statements since his inauguration on January 20, 2017. And the day is not over!
“On Sept. 7, President Trump woke up in Billings, Mont., flew to Fargo, N.D., visited Sioux Falls, S.D., and eventually returned to Washington. He spoke to reporters on Air Force One, held a pair of fundraisers and was interviewed by three local reporters.
“In that single day, he publicly made 125 false or misleading statements — in a period of time that totaled only about 120 minutes. It was a new single-day high.
“The day before, the president made 74 false or misleading claims, many at a campaign rally in Montana. An anonymous op-ed article by a senior administration official had just been published in the New York Times, and news circulated about journalist Bob Woodward’s insider account of Trump’s presidency.
“Trump’s tsunami of untruths helped push the count in The Fact Checker’s database past 5,000 on the 601st day of his presidency. That’s an average of 8.3 Trumpian claims a day, but in the past nine days — since our last update — the president has averaged 32 claims a day. When we first started this project for the president’s first 100 days, he averaged 4.9 claims a day. He passed the 2,000 mark on Jan. 10 — eight months ago. “
According to Politico Morning Education, the pro-voucher forces are throwing in the towel before the November referendum on Prop 305.
Prop 305 would overturn a law passed last year to offer unlimited vouchers.
Parents and educators gathered over 100,000 signatures to get it on the ballot. The Koch brothers sent in their legal team to try to knock it off the ballot but failed.
The voucher forces anticipate defeat so they are quitting ahead of the vote. They surely have polled and the numbers look bad for vouchers.
Vouchers have been overwhelmingly defeated in every state referendum.
Politico writes:
SCHOOL CHOICE GROUP TAKES SURPRISE STANCE IN ARIZONA: The prominent school choice group once chaired by DeVos is on the same side as public school advocates on a key ballot question in the state this fall.
— The American Federation for Children has decided it supports a “no” vote on a ballot question that lets voters decide if they want to keep a law passed last year that expands eligibility for a school choice-friendly program in the state.
— The decision places AFC in the unusual position of being aligned with public school supporters who had opposed the law. Previously, AFC was among the school choice-friendly groups that pushed for its passage.
— The AFC’s reasoning is complicated, but ultimately it argues that more children could be eligible for the program moving forward if an older law remains on the books.
Diane Ravitch's blog 