Sue M. Legg is a scholar at the University of Florida, a leader in Florida’s League of Women Voters, and a new board member of the Network for Public Education. She has written an incisive and devastating critique of Jeb Bush’s education program in Florida, which began twenty years ago. Bush called it his A+ Plan, but by her careful analysis, it rates an F. Advocates of school choice tout Florida’s fourth-grade scores on NAEP, which are artificially inflated by holding back third graders who dontpass the state test. By eighth grade, Florida’s students rank no better than the national average. Note to “Reformers”: a state that ranks “average” is NOT a national model.
Twenty Years Later, Jeb Bush’s A+ Plan Fails Florida’s Students.
Sue Legg explodes the myth of the Florida miracle in her well documented report: Twenty Years Later: Jeb Bush’s A+ Plan Fails Florida’s Students. She has compiled the research over twenty years showing the negative impact of privatization in Florida. The highly touted achievement gains of retained third graders are lost by eighth grade. Top ranked fourth grade NAEP scores fall to the national average by eighth grade. One half of twelfth graders read below grade level. The graduation rate is above only 14 states.
The A+ Plan was a great slogan, but its defects resulted in a twenty-year cycle of trial and error to fix the problems. School grades are unreliable. A school receiving a ‘B’ grade one year has about a thirty percent chance of retaining the grade the following year. Invalid grades occur so frequently that State Impact reports that Florida made sixteen changes to the school grade formula since 2010. It was thrown out but the new version is no more stable. What it means to be a failing school, moreover, is consistently redefined to make more opportunity for charter school takeovers.
Florida touts improving academic achievement in the private sector that is not supported by research. The CREDO Study reams Florida’s for-profit charter industry. According to a Brookings Institution study, low quality private schools are on the rise, and the LeRoy Collins Institute’s 2017 study, Tough Choices, explains that there are twice as many severely segregated Florida schools (90% non-white students) than there were in 1994-5. The legislature ignores the problem in part because key legislators have personal interest in charter and private schools. “Florida suits him” said Roger Stone, recently indicted in the Mueller investigation. The New York Times article: Stone Cold Loser: quoted Stone’s admiration for Florida when he said “…it was a sunny place for shady people”. A Miami Herald series “Cashing in on Kids” reported a list of questionable land deals and conflicts of interest by for-profit charter school management. The federal government began an investigation in 2014. Last year a charter management firm faced criminal charges, and Florida charters have the nation’s highest closure rate.
WalletHub reports that Florida is 47th of 50 states in working conditions for teachers. As a result, the Florida Education Association projects 10,000 vacancies next fall. Teacher shortages are not only related to money, they are due to a deliberate attack on the profession in order to break teacher unions and impose a political ideology. As Steve Denning in a Forbes magazine article explains: “The system” grinds forward, at ever increasing cost and declining efficiency, dispiriting students, teachers and schools alike”. The thinking, he says, is embedded in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top policies. The A+ Plan is an extension of these policies that includes increased testing and rewards and punishments related to results.
Florida’s teachers are not allowed to strike. Parents may have to. The legislature recently approved small raises for teachers but expanded the unconstitutional voucher program. The governor is not concerned; he appointed three new judges to the Florida Supreme Court. In the May 3rd 2019 Senate session, Senator Tom Lee chastised his fellow Republicans. He has supported charter schools for years, but said ‘the industry has not been honest with us...first they wanted PECO facility funds, then local millage; now they want a portion of local discretionary referendum funds’. He called the current supporters ‘ideologues who have drunk the kool-aid‘.
The full report is published on the NPE-Action website.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think ed reformers in Florida made it very clear what they think of public school students and families.
Did you see that celebration they held? Exclusive to private school students. Public school students got absolutely nothing.
Watching them “work” one would think there isn’t a single public school student or family in that state. They absolutely take them for granted as voters and constituents.
I guess the assumption is public school parents care as little about public schools as ed reformers do. That seems like a bad assumption.
When they break after their legislative session and go back to their districts ask them if they got anything done on behalf of the PUBLIC schools in the state. This question will stump them- it never occurs to them.
Being a neoswackerian, I am unwilling to admit that even NAEP scores are indicative of anything, but one thing that always seems to inflate the numbers is the status of being a place where in-migration predicts a privileged group that will score better. Thus Florida should naturally be doing better than they are. Bush is worse than we thought.
Bush is the “chief for grifters.”
A brilliant application of Neoswackerian principles, Roy!
Swackerian principles are reliable and true. We should stop calling it the Wilson rant and start calling it the Law of Wilson.
Well, there are some things that can be measured, quite easily, within rational degrees of certainty. I can pretty easily determine whether a kid knows his or her times table from 1 x 1 to 9 x 9. Determining whether he or she can “cite textual evidence . . . . to make inferences” by asking one or two questions is another matter altogether. Given the enormous variety of types of inferences there are and the enormous variety of texts and the hundreds of distinguishable abilities that go into a particular inference from a particular text and the lack of specification of the relevant universe of texts that might be chosen and other factors, measuring that, validly, is not just difficult–it is, in fact, impossible. Yes, it’s easy to write questions that require students to do that, but ones that would justify the conclusion that one has measured this “standard” IN GENERAL? Of course not. The very notion is ludicrous.
I know one thing that can’t be measured but I can’t say it here. Hint, it has to do with Trump and his recorded comment and alleged locker-room talk about what he likes to do with women.
That unmentionable thing has to be really small because every time Trump lies, his nose doesn’t get longer, that unmentionable part of his body shrinks.
Florida is doing everything it can to destroy public education and move public money into private pockets. State representatives are also doing everything they can to ensure that decisions are made on the state level instead of by local school boards. The conservatives leading the state do not want to hear from the public. They simply want to hijack the public money. These so-called representatives have done everything they can to hobble the operation of public schools by slashing funding, overburdening them with regulation and testing and micro-managing teachers. It is no accident that teachers are leaving the profession in droves as a result. Everyone should listen to Tom Lee’s honest speech and his disbelief in what the state is doing. At the same time that state leaders inflict what amounts to a universal voucher on public schools, they are also floating a “study” extolling the success of Florida’s many privatization schemes. The people of the state need to vote out the corrupt, conservative grifters that are running the state. http://www.fldoe.org/newsroom/latest-news/new-report-finds-florida-charter-school-students-consistently-outperform-their-peers-in-traditional-public-schools.stml
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
The Bush dynasty has been a tragedy for the United States. Please, after Jeb is gone, let’s hope the rest of the Bush clan vanishes from politics. I’ve never wanted anyone to get run-away, terminal stage-four pancreatic cancer before but Jeb just earned that honor.
You know what I’m going to say by now, right? Jeb’s plan only failed if you think better education was the goal.
If we had access to Jeb Bush’s actual plan to destroy public education, we’d know that he never intended to improve teaching or how children learn.
Jeb’s goal from the start was money, power and gaining control of education so he could brainwash children starting in pre-school and turn them into drones that blindly grow up to support the dystopian autocratic government ruled by a few oligarchs that think like him.
That is the education system he wants to build while profiting from it.
Jeb Bush is an example of how power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
You’re right. That’s why Jeb could hardly contain his excitement in the state legislature when the universal voucher bill was passed by his pawns. $$$
Come on down to Florida, folks, and inroll yore childrens in Bob’s Real Good Florida School. You can use your Florida State skolarship and rest insured that none of our teachers has been to educashun school and had they’re heads filled with Socialism and blasfemy. An if thats not enough to intice you, may be this here will: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/05/05/why-you-should-move-to-florida/
If I was a crook, I’d open a publicly funded private sector charter school where the students would be responsible for their own totally independent study program. No teachers, not even TFA. The classrooms would have cubicles that hold each student and there would be one hundred cubes in each classroom. Each cube would have its own toilet so no child would ever have to take a bathroom break.
There would be a couple of proctors, probably felons who had served time in prison for violent crimes. The brutal proctors would be paid minimum wage with no benefits to make sure the students never leave their cubicles during the school day and are occupied at all times.
The students would be free to study anything they want. For instance, if a boy wanted to watch porn all day every day to study the porn industry, that would be okay. Every student’s personal indie self-study program would be classified like its top secret and no one but the student would ever know what they were doing on the internet.
A student like Trump could study how to become a super troll and internet bully.
Since all students design their own learning programs, there would be an algorithm that would come up with test questions based on the sites they spend the most time on.
This way billionaires and CEOs like Bill Gates and Zuckerberg would approve of the school and give it multi-million dollar grants because of all the money that would flow to Silicon Valley.
Tests would be designed so no student would ever fail. Every time they take a test and get a question wrong, they are notified and the correct answer is revealed. Then they get to take the test over repeatedly until they answer every question correctly. Since everything is classified and kept secret, there would be few that knew what each student was learning.
Well, you will have to open a private school, Lloyd, because most of the charter school students in Florida have to take the state exams. (A few charters are exempt from this, but very few.) But fortunately, you are in luck, for we have these new “scholarship” programs, and for those, you can start a school where anything goes. There are a few rules. You have to report attendance, and you have to offer lunch, and you have to have water and fire inspections. But that’s about it. Otherwise, it’s the Wild West. If you would like a FREE copy of Bob’s Guide to Making Millions in Florida Charter School Real Estate, just write your name on a stack of 100 bills and send those to me as evidence of your commitment.
How big is the stack of $100 bills?
Before I can apply for a “FREE” copy of Bob’s Guide to Making Millions in Florida Charter Schools, I have to know how many $100 bills are in the stack so I can apply for a grant from Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, and the wife of that Apple guy who died from cancer.
I’ll apply for a hundred times whatever your answer is. That way I can buy my own private hundred-foot unsinkable yacht. While my charter school students and teaching themselves whatever they want to learn, I can be out sailing on some billionaires dime.
Sounds like a solid plan, Lloyd. With regard to the size of the stack, go big or don’t go at all! I’ll try to hold you a place in the race to the top here in the swamplands!
I just had a lightbulb explode brightly inside my head. Let’s import a few hundred thousand Australian saltwater crocodiles to Florida and drop them all around Mar-a-Lago.
Lloyd, we can also send you the new Florida guide to privatization called “The Art of the Steal.”
Lloyd, don’t listen to that “Retired Teacher.” The name is a dead giveaway. Someone who used to teach in one of those gubbermint schools, no doubt. Stick with your Old Buddy Bob, who put the “tally” in Tallahassee!
Trump and his followers have become so outrageously outrageous that the only response to their shenanigans is out-of-control hysterical laughter until tears are streaming from your eyes.
Florida. The state where the South is in the North, and the North is in the South. Georgia may think it’s all high and mighty, but we invented the name “cracker” (which comes from the whips that drovers used to round up the wild cattle in the swamps, left here by the Spanish).
Florida is SINKING in more than one way.
Yes, after it subsides beneath the rising oceans, we plan to offer underwater tours of Mar-a-lago.
Is there any way we can speed up the sinking of Mar-a-Lago while Trump is playing golf there, like a 150-foot high tidal wave that sweeps over that area of Florida?
I would not wish such a thing. But the danger posed to Florida, with its low elevation, by climate change is quite real, whatever our President’s “intuition” tells him to the contrary. It’s all so freaking sad. The mechanism at work can be demonstrated with 4th-grade science experiments.
Have you seen John Oliver’s recent piece on AOC’s Green New Deal? If you watch, stay until the end for the best part or just fast forward to the Science Guy’s final demonstration of what Global Warming is going to do to the planet.
I am in love w/ R Stone’s quote on Florida: “a sunny place for shady people.”
Schools are complex, fluid systems of many interlocking and changing parts. School grades are as volatile as VAM ratings; they change from year to year, from day to day, from moment to moment. Look, grading a school is like grading the weather. That it’s raining today doesn’t mean it’s going to rain on the same day next year. School grading is junk science, the same as climate change denial because of a cold winter day is junk science.
Exactly. The CENTRAL IRONY of Ed Deform is that it is a call for “data-driven accountability” and “rigor” based upon junk data and junk science. What the high-stakes tests provide is not data but numerology. The standards-based high-stakes testing is like Tarot card or palm reading or astrology or phrenology or any other pseudoscience.
And there is an exact historical parallel. We’ve been through this before, but we didn’t learn our lesson from it. At one time, in the US, a bunch of billionaires (and foundations established by billionaires) were supporting the Cold Spring Harbor Eugenics Records Office, on Long Island, where “scientists” were accumulating “data” to prove that white people of Northern European descent were superior intellectually and morally to everyone else on the planet. Their work led to federal legislation establishing racial quotas that Hitler described as “a model for the world” and to mandatory sterilization laws in 20+ states. In Virginia, sheriffs deputies would drive into the hills, on weekends, and pick up hillbillies at random and take them to hospitals for forced sterilization. The Eugenics Record Office, with support from those billionaires, the Carnegie Foundation, and the federal government actually issued a report calling for euthanizing the bottom 10 percent of the US population to elevate the US “genetic stock.” This happened in the United States, and we’ve forgotten it.
Junk science with horrific social consequences. This stuff was all the rage among policy makers in the US in the early 20th century, and lots of intellectuals bought into it. It took World War II and the Nazis for them to understand where this crap led.
Same phenomenon, different arena. Bad data. Fallacious reasoning from that data. Stupid decisions based on that reasoning. Horrific social consequences.
Numerology? Are you completely discrediting the results of these tests? I find in 24 years of teaching that I am very RARELY surprised by any of my students’ test scores( in ELA, math, civics or science). They align very closely with what I am seeing in the classroom. Junk science and Hitler? Really? I can predict my students’ math scores to within 10 scale score points.
The problem is, other countries do not have our absurd fetish of “equality” of outcomes. If we do not up the ante on educational outcomes, they most assuredly will. Whatever countries lose this battle will be completely in thrall to the country that wins. . and whoever wins that battle will control the world, my friends (including the ability to shut down all satellite and computer systems).
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-u-s-lagging-in-the-quest-for-quantum-computing/?redirect=1
Neoswackerian suggestions?
I am talking about the ELA tests. The mathematics tests are more defensible.
And the Neoswackerian thing is a kind of inside joke on this blog.
Similar comments were made about the IQ tests that were used, when they were first introduced, in their early versions, to classify immigrants. On the basis of those, the Eugenicists claimed that Jews and Hungarians were among the most feeble minded of peoples. Today, they are among the highest sorcerers on these exams. But this, of course, contradicts the notion that IQ is supposed to be highly heritable and not majorly influenced by environment. Please read my specific comments about validity in ELA standardized testing elsewhere in this thread.
You can predict these within 10 points? Seriously? Are you talking about raw scores? scaled scores? What state are you in? I’ve looked at lots of states’ determinations of scaled scores. There is commonly more than a 10-point variation in where states set their cut-offs from year to year, depending on what results they decide they want to show. LOL. A scam.
And the whole notion that the US is lacking in STEM graduates is highly questionable. See this study: https://cis.org/Miano/H1B-Cap-Reached-New-Study-Shows-US-Not-Falling-Behind-STEM-Education
https://www.pnas.org/content/116/14/6732
And many STEM graduates in the US are having difficulty finding jobs or are underemployed, often as temps. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/stem-crisis-or-stem-surplus-yes-and-yes.htm
I would like to address the particular issue raised by your link to the article about quantum computing. Major advances in such a field are commonly made by truly exceptional individuals. We know that mathematics is one of those fields in which extraordinary ability is often evident early on. It probably makes sense to test children at an early age and to put those very few identified as possible young Gausses and Ramanujans and Turings and von Neumanns and Feynmans into well-endowed special programs specifically for the extremely mathematically gifted. Such people are rare and extremely important.
Yes, I can predict my students’ SCALE scores (on a scale of 393 or 575 in math depending on the subject). I am unfortunately very rarely surprised (positively or negatively) by their results and I have been teaching math since the start of the common core. I have also taught ELA, and the largest determining factor in success on the exams is the amount of independent reading that the student does (duh – more reading, more contact with higher level vocabulary and more domain knowledge). This is not rocket science.
If you would like to know about the horrific social consequences of liberal theory applied to actual lives, I would suggest you read Theodore Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom (he was a psychiatrist in a prison/hospital serving the London underclass). He also speaks from experience, and it truly is appalling. Ideologies of all brands fail to recognize the true nature of humanity, in all its strengths and weaknesses (it takes a Shakespeare to do us justice).
Also, the US may be producing many STEM majors, but they are not progressing on to the highest levels. Please check out the attached tables showing 81% of electrical/petroleum engineering grad students are international as well as 79% computer science grad students.
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign-students-and-graduate-stem-enrollment
more contact with higher level vocabulary and more domain knowledge
yes, yes, yes. I completely agree with you about this
please note that the actual bullet-listed “standards” tested by the high-stakes standardized tests in ELA are almost entirely vague, abstract statements of “skills.” They are almost entirely CONTENT FREE. They treat almost no descriptive knowledge (knowledge of what) or specific procedural knowledge (knowledge of how). And yes, we could make major advances by ensuring that young kids are exposed to ambient linguistic environments in which sophisticated vocabulary and syntax are used and in which there is a lot of verbal interaction, one on one, between kids and adults. Unfortunately, the Powerpointing of US education by the Gates/Colman bullet lists makes real innovation in order to implement insights such as these almost impossible.
So, do the one or two multiple-choice questions on the state exam that deal with ELA standard x (choose one at random) validly test for mastery of this standard? Of course not. Two questions aren’t sufficient to measure, validly, a standard as broad as most of these are, and the standards are for the most part too vague to be operationalized enough, by any rational procedure, to be tested. And where are the independent measures of mastery of the standard to which this measurement, on the test, was correlated to demonstrate its validity? Answer: there are none. And even if the items on the test WERE valid measurements of mastery of the standard (they aren’t), does this make the test as a whole a valid test of mastery of, say, what a student of 8th-grade English should know of 8th-grade English? Well, no, clearly. Mastery of ELA at a particular grade level would involve a lot of descriptive knowledge (knowledge of what) that is entirely absent from the exams and a lot of procedural knowledge (knowledge of how) that isn’t tested either. The whole thing, in ELA, is a scam. It’s numerology. It’s pseudoscience. Anyone who doesn’t recognize this simply hasn’t thought about it much. It’s shocking, really, that English teachers and ELA officials at the state level haven’t laughed this nonsense off the national stage. That they haven’t is a shocking indictment of their independence, seriousness, and knowledge of their subject. That said, my fellow English teachers have often told me that they disapprove of the tests. Many keep silent, except among themselves, out of fear of losing their jobs. And, in fact, using the term “standards” to refer to the Gates/Coleman ELA skills bullet list is ridiculous. Coleman rushed out his stupid bullet list, based on the lowest-common-denominator groupthink of existing state “standards” in order to meet Master Gates’s desire for a single national set of items to key educational software to. Any bs list would do to suit that purpose, and that’s what we got. Here, an analysis of one of these “standards” in ELA: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/on-developing-curricula-in-the-age-of-the-thought-police/ Here, another: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/03/15/what-happens-when-amateurs-write-standards/ The same could be done with almost any “standard” on the Gates/Coleman ELA bullet list.
Scaled scores are generally released AFTER the tests are given, so predicting what a scaled score will be, in the absence of a scale having been established, would be a mighty feat of divination! And, with regard to these “predictions,” you might want to do a little reading about the Pygmalion, or Rosenthal, Effect.
Correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t Abby mentioned she started teaching around the time NCLB was signed into law by G. W. Bush?
That probably means she doesn’t know the difference between teacher-made tests and high stakes standardized tests and that teacher-made tests designed to let the teacher know if his/her students are learning what she/he is teaching them are MUCH better than any high stakes tests.
I think Abby was brainwashed by the Bill Gates-David Coleman propaganda campaign that was designed to sell high-stakes tests as the golden bullet of k-12 education, a bullet that turned out to be a blank that misfired repeatedly.
It is interesting that she went immediately from a defense of standardized testing (i.e., Ed Deform numerology) to a general attack on some perceived liberal notion of the equal value of persons. I suspect that this is not the non sequitur that it seems to be but, rather, relates to a general approval of stack ranking. Of course, right-wingers always intentionally confuse equality under the law as a goal with some perceived notion that people on the left lack discernment and insist upon identity. Well, no, there is a difference between equality and identity. People differ, enormously, in propensities and in the circumstances of the lives into which they are born. It’s really bizarre that these right-wingers, who have always claimed to be supportive of individual freedom nonetheless want top-down, authoritarian Thought Police to dictate to the rest of us. The truth is that this stuff is about stack ranking and command and control of the proles.
And, of course, the high-stakes tests, unlike diagnostic tests and formative assessments, have no pedagogical value. The results come months later and typically are not disaggregated by standard and couldn’t legitimately be so disaggregated because the items on one of these ELA tests related to any particular standard are not a valid measurement of mastery of that standard.
I think that it is highly amusing that you think I am a right winger! I have voted Dem all my life. I am simply a believer in reality – in what I see in front of my lying eyes. As a result, I look at ideologies of all kinds as did Shakespeare – with wide latitude.
Anyone with any minimal mathematical ability can translate scale scores into raw scores. What is the purpose of “scale scores” except to use legerdemain against the public (not let them know the truly abysmal raw scores that are deemed “passing”?)
Correct me if I am mistaken, but your ideology seems to be:
high standards = inequality = eugenics/holocaust
Holocausts have happened throughout history. Were high standards the reason for the Hutus slaughtering the Tutsis? How about the Armenian genocide? Did Genghis Khan obliterate entire villages because they weren’t up to Mongol standards? Did Julius Caesar eliminate over a million Gauls because they didn’t have that Roman uirtus?
By the way, that old right winger Thomas Jefferson had an interesting take on education:
“This bill proposes to lay off every county into small districts of five or six miles square, called hundreds, and in each of them to establish a school for teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. The tutor to be supported by the hundred, and every person in it entitled to send their children three years gratis, and as much longer as they please, paying for it. These schools to be under a visitor [i.e., superintendent], who is annually to choose the boy of best genius in the school, of those whose parents are too poor to give them further education, and to send him forward to one of the grammar schools [high schools, in effect] of which twenty are proposed to be erected in different parts of [Virginia], for teaching Greek, Latin, geography, and the higher branches of numerical arithmetic. Of the boys thus sent in any one year, trial is to be made at the grammar schools one or two years, and the best genius of the whole selected, and continued six years, and the residue dismissed. By this means twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed, at the public expence, so far as the grammar schools go.”
Notes on the State of Virginia, 1781
Talk about stack ranking!
high standards? It amuses me to no end that the Gates/Coleman bullet list is referred to using this phrase. And yes, we know that Jefferson had a low opinion of much of the human race. He didn’t even, on his death, set free his own children by his slaves–something I thought about often when, years ago, I took visitors on tours of Monticello.
All Democrats are not equal and the same just like all Republicans are not.
Maybe you are a corporate neo-liberal or libertarian Democrat.
Please read my comments about these “higher standards.” They are no more than a list of vague, abstract “skills” compiled from the lowest-common-denominator Educratic groupthink of the previously existing state standards, with a couple of Coleman’s prejudices thrown into the mix. They are not “higher.” They remind me of what a group of small-town insurance executives might come up with if they were asked to make such a list based on what they vaguely remembered from English class back in the day. They are prescientific and hackneyed. They are like what one would have gotten by handing Coleman the 1858 edition of Gray’s Anatomy and asking him to make up new “standards” for medicine based on that. They are an embarrassment and should ahve been laughed off the national stage. It’s astonishing to me that anyone takes the Gates/Coleman bullet list in ELA at all seriously.
Teaching back then was based on the Prussian education system of rote teaching, discipline and Bible study that was founded in the18th century, and that model was what Jefferson was familiar with.
Watch the video and learn what has changed since the 18th century. The education system we have today is not an exact match for what existed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Rote learning, Bible study, and harsh discipline are mostly gone except for too many Corporate Charter schools that are bringing those 18th-century Prussian practices back.
It works the other way around. Raw scores are converted into scaled scores. And again, predicting scaled scores beforehand is quite the feat given that states do not release the scaled score cut-offs until AFTER the exams are given and play all kinds of games with these, varying the cutoffs to result in whatever scores they decide they want this carnival season. What they don’t do is simply translate them into so-called standard scores. No, they play games with them.
Well, all I can say is that I am doing my best to make sure that the next generation will be able to compete internationally in a dramatically changing world situation. We definitely live in (as the Chinese would say) interesting times.
Thank you for your commitment to this. It’s one we share. Here, a piece on one of the Gates/Coleman ELA “standards”: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/on-developing-curricula-in-the-age-of-the-thought-police/
Here, another: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/03/15/what-happens-when-amateurs-write-standards/
Looks like Tennessee isn’t very far from the bottom either. Of course kids are going to use the Nazi salute to bully others. What is wrong with the teachers in this school who gave a talking to this girl and then sent her to the principal’s office for protesting?
……………….
Tennessee School Stops Teaching Kids To Do Nazi Salute After Student Pushes Back
05/14/2019
An 11-year-old was removed from class for speaking out repeatedly against her classmates giving the Sieg Heil salute.
…Gamble’s emails state that his daughter was upset at the instruction to give a Nazi salute and that when she noted this, she was given the opportunity to air her grievances in front of the class. She was then instructed by teachers to “not address it again.”
However, Gamble said, the salute was repeatedly used and his daughter continued to voice her concerns. After learning that her classmates were going to perform a mass salute at her specifically, she told another teacher, who then intervened and told students to not give the Nazi salute anymore because it is “wrong.”
Still, the “Living History” project continued and, while the salutes had dropped off after that one teacher’s intervention, they picked up again during the project’s rehearsal. At that time, 10 to 20 students responded to the Sieg Heil from the student portraying Hitler with Sieg Heils of their own.
Gamble’s daughter shouted at her classmates to “stop it” and “put your hands down,” and was then removed from the class for being “disrespectful with her tone and body language to teachers.” She was then given a talking-to by various teachers and sent to the principal’s office, who echoed that she had been “disrespectful.”…
Article: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tennessee-nazi-salute-elementary-school_n_5cdb0889e4b061f59bf88edf
DR. EVIL’S SOLILOQUY:
I’ve got it!
Let’s institute a really draconian School Grading Plan for public schools in Florida, and let’s let private schools do whatever the heck they want using funds taken from the public schools and put into “scholarships” and “education tax credits.” That way, we can completely eliminate public education over time, as parents pull their children out of public schools, which would be awesome because this is the sector in which workers still maintain some rights via tenure and unions, which we’ve almost completely eliminated elsewhere. Kill the public schools, and we kill the last vestiges of worker control over their own lives. We end up with complete command and control! Then we reinstitute the droit du seigneur.
It is a beautiful plan. So thorough. So twisted. So evil!
Bob,
You missed the part about replacing the teachers with technology and calling it “personalized learning.”
Do not forget that Jeb’s education organization has been funded for years by tech companies.
I know that at one point his brother Neil had an ed tech firm called Ignite that sold carts with computers and educational software on them called COWs, for Computers on Wheels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignite!
Oops. Here’s that link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignite!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignite!
For some reason, WordPress will not recognize that exclamation point at the end of the link. It’s necessary for the link to work properly.
This report is outstanding. Kudos to Dr. Legg! It is well researched and well documented. It is cogently reasoned. It is extremely important because it has major implications for other states and for preK-12 education policy generally. And (a rarity for reports of this kind) it is extraordinarily well written. Highly, highly recommended!!! At the end of her report, Dr. Legg acknowledges her “tenth grade English composition teacher, Mrs. Weatherby,” who insisted that her students “Write, support what you write. Then think about what you have said and rewrite.” Dr. Legg learned her lessons extraordinarily well and has the decency to remember who taught her those lessons. And, significantly, she points out that “A computer should never replace that voice” in a student’s head of the tenth-grade English teacher.
Cherry picking of “data” has enabled Ed Deformers to hold up Florida as a model for the rest of the country. This report explodes all that. What this report shows is that decades of Ed Deform have not achieved its stated goals of improving test scores generally or of narrowing achievement gaps but have had severe consequences in terms of re-segregating schools. Bottom line: Ed Deform in Florida, as elsewhere, has failed miserably by its own preferred measures–test scores.
Congrats to Dr. Legg on this splendid work! I wish that every legislator and parent in Florida would read it, and I hope that every visitor to this blog will. Here, again, is the link: https://npeaction.org/twenty-years-later-the-jeb-bush-a-plan-fails-floridas-students/
I have one tiny quibble with the report, but this is one that I have with almost everything written about US education in the past couple decades: the report repeats without qualification or critical analysis the language used by Ed Deformers to describe their “standards” (language that has been used to describe every new set of standards ever issued): that they are more “rigorous.” Scare quotes are definitely called for there. The Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] were not more rigorous, and saying this over and over and over doesn’t make it so. And those “standards” certainly weren’t “higher.” The CC$$ in math were basically a rehash of the previously existing and arguably better NCTM standards. The CC$$ in ELA were a compilation based on a cursory analysis of the lowest-common-denominator groupthink of previously existing state ELA standards. Neither national bullet list is defensible, and neither was ever subjected to critical vetting by people who actually know something about the teaching of math and English. Both have led to narrowing and dramatic distortion of curricula and pedagogy.
I just sent this news article with my curt comment to Senator Niemeyer [R-IN] and Representative Chyung [D-IN]
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Thousands of Indiana teachers, startled by new license-renewal rule, rush to beat July 1 deadline
Changes to professional development requirements, which were quietly passed by state lawmakers and take effect July 1, will be a further burden, teachers say.
There’s a new, teachers-only summer camp coming to Indiana, and it could mean spending a day at a brewery in Bloomington, Westfield or elsewhere — all in the name of professional development.
The teachers will need it, maybe in more ways than one.
The camps are a reaction to new professional license-renewal requirements for all teachers that quietly advanced through the Indiana General Assembly this year.
Any teacher who starts the process after July 1 will have to log 15 hours of professional development related specifically to their community’s workforce needs — like available jobs and skills needed by local employers — before they can renew their teaching license.
The impending change, made by the Indiana General Assembly last month, has thousands of teachers scrambling to beat that deadline.
The new requirements were amended into a voluminous bill dealing with career and technical education, but the licensure changes apply to all teachers…
It requires teachers who are renewing their license through a “professional growth plan” — the most common renewal path — to complete the 15 workforce-related hours. They will be part of 90 hours of professional development that teachers need for renewal, which is every five years for most teachers…
But this change, on top of other state mandates and a disappointing legislative session where teacher pay raises got a lot of talk but little action, has many teachers angry about the new requirements.
“I’ll tell you why teachers are upset,” said Rep. Tonya Pfaff, D-Terre Haute, who is also a high school math teacher. “It’s because it’s just another thing that we have to do.”…
Check out this story on IndyStar.com: https://www.indystar.com/story/news/education/2019/05/15/indiana-teachers-license-renewal-new-rules-catch-teachers-off-guard/1193573001/
The requirements keep being piled on. Something new, each quater o the year. Pretty soon, no one will be willing to do this work. Low pay. No time left, after meeting all the absurd requirements, actually to do the job.