A while back, I read a vitriolic article in a rightwing publication that expressed contempt for the public schools and congratulated Betsy DeVos for trying to cut federal funding for schools.
The article asserted that public schools are “garbage” and the government should slash their funding. A major piece of evidence for the claim that money doesn’t matter was the failure of the Obama administration’s School Improvement Grants program, which spent more than $3 billion and accomplished nothing. The evaluation of SIG was commissioned by the U.S Department of Education and quietly released just before the inauguration of Trump. The report was barely noticed. Yet now it is used by DeVos acolytes to oppose better funding of our schools.
The wave of Red4Ed teachers’ strikes in 2019 exposed the woeful conditions in many schools, including poorly paid teachers, lack of nurses and social workers and librarians, overcrowded classrooms, and crumbling facilities. The public learned from the teachers’ strikes that public investment in the schools in many states has not kept pace with the needs of students and the appropriate professional compensation of teachers. Many states are spending less now on education than they did in 2008 before the Great Recession. They reacted to the economic crisis by cutting taxes on corporations, which cut funding for schools.
Sadly, the Obama-Duncan Race to the Top program promoted the same strategies and goals as No Child Left Behind. Set goals for test scores and punish teachers and schools that don’t meet them. Encourage the growth of charter schools, which drain students and resources from schools with low test scores.
One can only dream, but what if Race to the Top had been called Race to Equity for All Our Children? What if the program had rewarded schools and districts that successfully integrated their schools? What if it had encouraged class-size reduction, especially in the neediest schools? Race to the Top and the related SIG program were fundamentally a replication and extension of NCLB.
When Arne Duncan defended his “reform” (disruption) ideas in the Washington Post, he cited a positive 2012 evaluation and belittled his own Department’s 2017 evaluation, which had more time to review the SIG program and concluded that it made no difference. The 2017 report provided support for those who say that money doesn’t matter, that teacher compensation doesn’t matter, that class size doesn’t matter, that schools don’t need a nurse, a library, a music and arts program, or adequate and equitable funding.
The Education Department’s 2017 evaluation shows that the Bush-Obama strategy didn’t made a difference because its ideas about how to improve education were wrong. Low-performing schools did not see test-score gains because both NCLB and RTTT were based on flawed ideas about competition, motivation, threats and rewards, and choice.
Here is a summary of the SIG program in the USED’s report that the Right used to defend DeVos’s proposed budget cuts.
The SIG program aimed to support the implementation of school intervention models in low-performing schools. Although SIG was first authorized in 2001, this evaluation focused on SIG awards granted in 2010, when roughly $3.5 billion in SIG awards were made to 50 states and the District of Columbia, $3 billion of which came from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. States identified the low-performing schools eligible for SIG based on criteria specified by ED and then held competitions for local education agencies seeking funding to help turn around eligible schools.
SIG-funded models had no significant impact on test scores, high school graduation, or college enrollment…
The findings in this report suggest that the SIG program did not have an impact on the use of practices promoted by the program or on student outcomes (including math or reading test scores, high school graduation, or college enrollment), at least for schools near the SIG eligibility cutoff. In higher grades (6th through 12th), the turnaround model was associated with larger student achievement gains in math than the transformation model. However, factors other than the SIG model implemented, such as unobserved differences between schools implementing different models, may explain these differences in achievement gains.
These findings have broader relevance beyond the SIG program. In particular, the school improvement practices promoted by SIG were also promoted in the Race to the Top program. In addition, some of the SIG-promoted practices focused on teacher evaluation and compensation policies that were also a focus of Teacher Incentive Fund grants. All three of these programs involved large investments to support the use of practices with the goal of improving student outcomes. The findings presented in this report do not lend much support for the SIG program having achieved this goal, as the program did not appear to have had an impact on the practices used by schools or on student outcomes, at least for schools near the SIG eligibility cutoff.
What NCLB, Race to the Top, and SIG demonstrated was that their theory of action was wrong. They did not address the needs of students, teachers, or schools. They imposed the lessons of the non-existent Texas “miracle” and relied on carrots and sticks to get results. They failed, but they did not prove that money doesn’t matter.
Money matters very much. Equitable and adequate funding matters. Class size matters, especially for children with the highest needs. A refusal to look at evidence and history blinds us to seeing what must change in federal and state policy. It will be an uphill battle but we must persuade our representatives in state legislatures and Congress to open their eyes, acknowledge the failure of the test-and-punish regime, and think anew about the best ways to help students, teachers, families, and communities.
The findings of the report were devastating, not only to the SIG program, but to the punitive strategies imposed by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, which together cost many more billions.
Other examples of this use of the wrong action plan and of the wrong evaluation tool: Billy “Professor Marvel” Gates’s determinations that “class size doesn’t matter” and that “teacher education past the bachelor’s degree” doesn’t matter because these were not correlated, in studies by the Gates Foundation for FUBARing Everything, even after intervention with lots of Common Core-y test prep, with higher scores on invalid, unreliable Common Core-y tests.
Stupid interventions. Ridiculous evaluations. Garbage in, garbage out.
Only an idiot with absolutely no clue about K-12 education would claim, ofc, that class size and teacher education don’t matter. They both so obviously do. (Just how many essays do you think that one English teacher can read, Mr. Gates? Oh, I see. No need to worry. Those can be scored by computers. Aie yie yie. One can’t make up stuff this idiotic) One would have to look, say, to the Fordham Institute to find folks so beholden to Gates and the Waltons and the like for their paychecks that they are willing to make such preposterous claims with straight faces.
Sadly, like so much of what Gates has peddled, these two ideas have, because of the influence that his money buys, done a lot of damage, with districts and states, in response to Gates’s “findings” (oh Lord, pleeze), failing to address class size issues or scaling back or eliminating programs that paid teachers with higher-level degrees more or that assisted poor teachers in paying for their advanced education.
Gates has, for a long, long time, been the bull in the China shop in U.S. education, and here’s the funny thing: he is so lacking in self-reflection, so arrogant, so certain that having made money shows that he is smarter than ordinary mortal are, that he has no clue, none whatsoever, just how deep (very deep) and broad (very broad) the damage that he has done has been. He’s been a one-man wrecking crew. The damage that this one man has done to U.S. education is incalculably enormous.
I imagine them all lined up–the folks who have been harmed by Gates’s quarter-baked educational ideas.
Here’s Sarah. 16 years old. She has never had an English class in which there was an authentic interaction with a text. She’s spent her whole school life doing test preppy garbage based on the Gates/Coleman Common [sic] Core [sic] (” Which of the following sentences best illustrates the use of metaphor to establish tone in paragraph 6?” Click on Answer A, B, C, or D. Then go to the next page.”)
Here’s Tom. 24 years old. He won’t be getting his Master’s degree because as a beginning teacher, he can’t afford it, and his district has cut the program that partially paid for teacher tuition because of a Gates Foundation report that advanced degrees don’t matter.
Here’s Yvonne. 49 years old. She has quit her job as a textbook editor and writer because she refuses to be a Vichy collaborator with the dumbing down of ELA textbookks to make them Common [sic] Core [sic[ test preppy. She is particularly horrified that texts are no longer organized coherently but have become random collections of Common Core-y test prep.
Here’s Hector. 52 years old. An inspiring teacher. He’s being let go from his job because he refuses to give the district-mandated Common [sic] Core [sic] standardized multiple-choice end-of-semester finals because these are abusive, unreliable, and invalid; lead teachers to teach to the test; and leave out almost everything important to learning English language and literature, including almost all concrete discursive and procedural knowledge because the Common [sic] Core [sic] is an almost content-free skills list.
Here’s Caroita. 46 years old. Her kids’ neighborhood school was taken over by the Major. Now it’s being closed down. After years of getting much less in resources than the nearby suburban school does. Why? Test scores. Gates-inspired Ed “Reforms.”
Here’s Juanita, 35 years old. She’s not going to get her bonus this year because the average VAM score for teachers in her school fell by a few points. So, no violin lessons for her kid.
And so on and so on. MILLIONS of people whose lives have been dramatically, tragically affected by Gates’s ill-conceived, ignorant magic elixirs.
“Only an idiot with absolutely no clue about K-12 education would claim, ofc, that class size and teacher education don’t matter. They both so obviously do.”
Perhaps you are correct, but those with malevolent intent also make ridiculous statements. Since Gates and his like-minded group are arguably intelligent, this leaves me no choice but to assume they are of evil intent where education is concerned.
Of course they could be completely foolish where education is concerned. Ian Anderson wrote a good line: “Your wise men don’t know how it feels to be Thick as a Brick.” Perhaps knowing how to control markets to make the money flow through your pocket so you can scrape off a bit — this is certainly Gate’s genius — is not a mark of real understanding. Maybe that type of genius is actually nothing more than animus to the human condition packaged in a way that will hide its true nature.
Not sure I agree here, Roy.
His success was not about genius. In the beginning it was sheerest luck. Then it was absolute ruthlessness and a low cunning, abetted by having achieved, accidentally, a near monopoly, which he leveraged to create other near monopolies. And our regulatory agencies let him get away with this. Gates is so obviously wrong about education that this has to be idiocy, but it”s idiocy of a particular kind: hubris (overestimation of his own knowledge and understanding) combined with an inability to grok other people except as data points–that is, a breathtakingly low EQ and inability to process emotion..
I should have written,
“Ofc, only an idiot with absolutely no clue about K-12 education would SINCERELY assert that class size and teacher education don’t matter. They both so obviously do.”
I’ve listened to Gates and his hatchings like Duncan make idiotic statements about education for decades now, and some of them do seem, pretty obviously, to be insincere–to be statements made for other reasons. But some seem to be, though breathtakingly clearly false (e.g., the stuff about class size and teachers’ degrees), also seem to be sincerely held beliefs. Holding idiotic beliefs is, by definition, idiotic.
And also that Gates had a large amount of wealth that he was born into.
Was Gates evil or stupid? He was untethered. Gates said his goal was to make a profit by bringing his technocratic business model to education. He called it a win-win, killing two birds with one stone. When he made money, so would students. He did not see the conflict of interest. He did not see the faults of the trickle down theory behind his actions. He did not see. His vision was obstructed by the stock ticker. He was blinded by the gathering of his wealth, and so he bulled over the glass in the china shop. Like Zuckerberg, he moved fast and broke things, without looking where he was going. Like Bezos wants to literally do, he figuratively reached the edge of space, the height of hubris, and looking out through a tiny window thought he could see everything, when really he could see nothing; the humanity in his field of vision was too far away. He got lost in his own fantasy capsule far removed from earth. He never came back.
I know, Bob. The whole thing lacks credulity. We’re supposed to believe some brainiac wok up one day & said, “hey, we’ve been going at this education thing all wrong. Teachers? Discussions? Let’s just wire the toddlers up to a machine for an hour a day [or feed them Professor Wogglebug’s Information Pills, or insert any counterintuitive self-evidently wacko plan]– & the great minds of the education world head-bobbled in agreement. IMHO it’s always and ever and still is about $$$. Well-intentioned, schmell-intentioned.
Exactly, Bethree!
Somebody should give DeVos a month long “subsistence grant” and dump her off in Baltimore where she has to live on the grant for a month without outside assistance. At the end of the month she would truly know that money makes a big difference. Of course, money matters. Her family has cheated thousands of people out of lots of money with their scamway pyramid scheme in order to make more money. If money didn’t matter, there would be no Wall St. and no billionaires competing in an absurd space race.
Biden is the first President in forty years willing to invest in public education. If the Biden administration uses the money wisely to invest in lower class size and support services for poor students, they will see improvement in student outcomes. Instead of looking at reading a math scores as goals, a better way to measure achievement is student attendance and graduation rates as well as the number of students going on to post high school education after graduation. If the Biden administration allows most of the money to go to expanding on-line learning, they will have squandered a real opportunity to make a significant difference in the lives of at risk students.
Great idea. There was a movie years ago with Joe Pesci as a slum lord and he was sentenced to live in one of his buildings.
Wouldn’t it be great if that could be imposed on these billionaire reformers. They should be required to live teach for a few years in a low performing school in an impoverished area.
What cannot be quantified? I hope I am not pushing back at science when I suggest that the underlying logical fallacy of the effort to reform schools over the last 20 years is that all things can be quantified. Some things cannot.
Two cars come off the assembly line that are identical. A slight flaw in one makes it a lemon. The other lasts a long time. Two fine guitars are made in the same shop by the same people. One develops into a beautifully balanced instrument, the other retains a flat tone that belies its excellent development. We have ways to look at quality control in manufactures, but cars and guitars demonstrate how complex systems can go awry. How much more complex is the process of human development?
I believe attempt to quantify human development are fundamentally detrimental to the process of education. This is the underlying problem in the last 20 years of education reform.
Market based principles do not belong in education.
No doubt, Roy. The ed reformers have been trying to do brain surgery with a sledge hammer.
Trying to do brain surgery when the brain is absent — in the brain surgeon, that is.
If They only had a Brain
When surgeon is lacking
A brain, he goes hacking.
The patient is doomed
To join the entombed
The patient is doomed
to join the entombed.
Oh my sweet Lord, SomeDAM, that is good! One of those lines I so wish I had written. Just freaking perfect.
Only our poet could possibly rhyme doomed with entombed (why is it one o?) with such effect. Well played!
How incredibly slowly our system changes! We’ve had more than a generation, now, of this Gates/Duncan-style Ed Reform, and we’ve seen ZERO improvement by the self-styled Reformers’ own measure, test scores.
When is enough enough?
Reporters still keep going to this guy, Duncan, who failed so spectacularly and caused so much damage, for his view on current issues in education in the same way that they kept interviewing war criminal Henry Kissinger, for decades, about issues in foreign policy.
Let’s see–what catastrophically wrong person might we seek out for input on this? Ah, of course.
We also forget that Arne Duncan knew NOTHING about education. Why he was brought to Chicago schools with no prior experience, I can only attribute to the fact that he was friends with someone important. Then, he was lucky enough to be friends with and “hoop” with the man who became the future president of the United States. When Arne Duncan was in Chicago, he was seen as a joke. He ran a school district in which he didn’t even have the qualifications to be a principal, assistant principal, or teacher. How does THAT happen?
How does that happen, indeed!
Chicago employee: as Coleman knew nothing about the teaching of English. He didn’t even know, for example, that almost all schools in the U.S. did American Lit in Gr. 11 and Brit. Lit in Gr. 12. He didn’t know that they all used one of about five literature anthology programs that contained the same acknowledged literary classics (works from “the canon”). And he didn’t bother to find out. He just MADE STUFF UP, and people followed blindly because he had all that Gates money and folks like Jeb Bush and Arne Dunkin behind him.
“He just MADE STUFF UP, and people followed blindly because he had all that Gates money and folks like Jeb Bush and Arne Dunkin behind him”
Ugh!!!
Swagger, confidence… b.s……money… is what matters. It’s all about how you spin and your game and getting the uniformed to follow.
I am sure we all have seen it at the local level. I know I have. Fast talking, b.s. artists… just worrying about keeping their high salaried jobs and not having the experience and depth of knowledge to be a real leader.
B/c you know those teachers… they are mostly simple minded women…. and we have data based, business solutions to hold them to account.
“Reporters still keep going to this guy” Must be that darned left wing media I hear so much about these days.
None of these reforms ever work because education is not a one size fits all. Urban poverty has different need than rural poverty has different needs than suburban schools and so on. This is not addressed because we do not have teachers writing policy. Instead, we have politicians trying to satisfy voters to ensure re-election.
None of the so-called reforms is evidence based. They are the product of politicians and well connected wealthy folks with the audacity to believe they can retool education. As Peter Greene points out, they are “well connected amateurs.” If anything, real educators have been left out the the plans They have been marginalized and blamed because, after all, they are just teachers.http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-single-biggest-scourge-of-education.html
Amen, Ms. Hersey!
Also accountability is only placed on the teacher. No one holds students or parents accountable, at least not in my district. If we continue misplacing accountability or not spreading it evenly, I don’t care what is done, nothing will change.
How about stop placing kids with a 2nd-6th grade math level in a 9th grade math course!! Most of our classes are full of these types of examples. However we are expected to teach a rigorous math curriculum asking level 3 and up depth of knowledge questions to kids who have no prerequisite knowledge or understanding. Teacher are micromanaged and harassed when this doesn’t occur in their classrooms. Oh the opportunity myth. 😂 Regardless of student level, if you expose children to grade level work they will learn it. Riiiiight. The biggest jump in my own students’ test scores was when I taught SLIFE kids. I had no curriculum (well I sort of did but I didn’t follow it) or set standards I needed to follow. I met them at their needs and began there. Their test scores didn’t elevate to grade level but their growth goals skyrocketed
No one holds the Ed Deformers accountable. They wasted and appropriated billions and stole a decent education from an entire generation of students in the name of accountability, but they are not held accountable.
For example, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Committee to recover the billions paid to companies and consultants for scam state testing.
What we really need is a multi billion dollar class action suit against the Gates Foundation brought by teachers, students , parents and others who have been deceived and defrauded.
The consultants. Don’t even get me started on that ridiculousness. We had this group in our school that would come observe us and give us red, (bad) yellow (meh/ok), or green (good!) depending on what they “saw.” Well we were on our third consultant from this company, he said to me, “Oh Nichole, you went from all reds that the last consultant gave you on this standard to two green and one yellow!” I said, “All reds? From (her name)? How? She hasn’t been in my room to observe me since months ago!!!! How on earth did she come up with all reds when she never entered my room????” His answer, “Well, uh, you’d have to take that up with her and she’s gone now,” I retorted, “What other scores did she fabricate?” They hated me. I eventually got him kicked out of my room as well for accusing me of not teaching. He came to my room for 3 minutes and left. I teach math. Before he arrived, I had returned the kids’ tests, gave makeups, gone over the objective in two languages, gone over vocabulary in two languages, and he entered when they had to get their books from the bookshelves. They returned to their seats, and I waited a few seconds for them to settle and he was GONE. He went and reported to my teacher leader and assistant principal that I only began teaching because HE entered the room and I really don’t teach. Seriously? I have highly effective on my evals. One of those highly effective evals, my admin tried to lower my scores even though I had all the evidence that warranted the higher score. Grieved that and won. He hated me too. Anyway, these consultants are a waste of time and money.
Even the name Common Core State Standards Initiative is a fraud.
It did not originate from the states.
It was a national – not a state — standard that came from David Coleman and Bill Gates and was effectively forced on states with the Obama Race to the Top program.
This is why I always write it Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic]. They are NONE of these things. Not common. Not core. Not created by the state. Hardly informed enough to set any sort of standard. (If Coleman wrote standards for the Navy like his standards for ELA, these world warn against the danger of sailing off the flat Earth. The ELA “standards” are that uninformed.) Except that they are common in the sense of “vulgar, received, unexamined, base.” What’s truly shocking about the CC$$ is that they weren’t laughed off the national stage when they were first foisted upon us. Consider the claim that the ELA “standards” are somehow “core” to the study of English. These consist almost entirely of blitheringly vague, prescientific, unexamined, puerile descriptions of “skills.” Ofc, mastery of ELA involves a lot of world knowledge (What famous novel did Mary Shellley write? How do Orwell’s telescreens differ from televisions, and why is this significant? and so on) and a lot of specific procedural knowledge (How do you make your speaking voice more melodic? What is MLA documentation style?), almost NONE of which appear on the almost completely content free Gates/Colman list.
Yep. Race to the Top was just as horrific if not more horrific than no child left behind.
Anyone like Bill Gates who was meeting with sex trafficking, pedophile scum like Jeffrey Epstein should never have been allowed to have anything to do with the education of our children. it
Biull’s picture should be in unabridged, illustrated English language dictionaries next to the term Dunning–Kruger effect.
Hahaha
Seriously, the biggest issue is we have people like THEM writing curriculum and policy. All non-educators know better than educators how to educate. Didn’t you know?
The king or queen touches your shoulder with a sword, and you are made a knight. Gates sends you money, and you are an Education InstaPundit.
We have the one profession that everyone else knows better than we do. Imagine if we told a trauma surgeon how to operate? Or an electrician how to do his or her job? However! Every lay person, politician, billionaire, etc knows how to teach better than the trained teacher. Lol. Gotta love it.
Exactly so, Ms. Hersey!
I am old enough to remember when it wasn’t this way–when administrators consider the English teachers to be the experts on the teaching of English, the history teachers to experts on the teaching of history, and so on. A better time, for certain.
No one does his or her best work under conditions of low autonomy and esteem.
I remember that too. Only it was short lived when I began. Unreal. Oh and call me Nichole. Please. 💙😁
A pleasure to meet you, Nichole. So, you have seen these consultant beastlings up close and personal. I have much experience of them myself. Another great American flim-flam.
Likewise!!!
I’m sorry you’ve also had the experience. It’s horrendous really. Beats the teaching right out of you year after year after year.
The state has taken over our district.
Get this: we have this commissioner that vilifies teachers publicly trying to pit the public and our community against us. She hired this superintendent from out of the district who hired a superintendent of secondary schools from his former district.
Well this secondary schools superintendent used to make kids take off their shoes and he would “pop” their toes as a disciplinary action. Commissioner and Superintendent both knew this when he was hired (although the commish refused to admit it) It was her job to know it anyway, so if she didn’t, she failed. Anyway, this toe popper got himself arrested because he was at a gym in one of my state’s cities and he approached a minor boy. He asked the kid about his sneaker and began touching the inside of the shoe. THEN he pulled the kid’s sock off and starting rubbing the kid’s foot and wouldn’t let go when said kid tried pulling away. The superintendent that hired him, was working on an emergency cert because his expired TEN YEARS ago. The commissioner is acting as if she knew nothing about the toe popping when it was publicized when they joined the district. YOU CAN’t MAKE THIS GARBAGE UP.
When Epstein was arrested again after having been let allowed to slide by the guy awarded by Trump with the position Secretary of Labor, news stories said that his Manhattan townhouse was completely wired with cameras and video recorders and contained an entire room for storing and monitoring all that stuff. A little fishy? Well, yes.
But here’s the TRULY DISTURBING thing. Since then, there has been not a single word about pictures and videotape recovered there. None.
So, what happened to all that evidence?
Gosh. I don’t know. Perhaps it was sucked into a portal in the space-time continuum.
And where are the journalists asking this question?
And the profs at MIT, Harvard and other universities who were meeting with Epstein should not be allowed to educate our kids either.
These people believe they are untouchable.
You have to admit that the Race to the Top plan that Gates came up with* to “sell” (or maybe extort would be a better word) Common Core to the states was very clever. And the VAM requirement for RTTT funds ensured that teachers would be concerned about just keeping their jobs.
*Arne Duncan was certainly not bright enough to have come up with any of the scheme and I’d have to say that virtually the entire plan was Bill’s. You know, because he likes to control every aspect of things that involve his money.
Those emails between Gates and Duncan would be very interesting. Some journalist should file a FOIA request. I bet there would be a Pulitzer in the story.
Yes, as I said, the man has a kind of low cunning. One can multiply examples of this from throughout his career. He had a business plan. He would dramatically reduce the costs involved in public education (facilities, salaries) by computerizing everything. He would create and own the nation’s gradebook (the massive, Orwellian database InBloom), and anyone who wanted to play in the curricular materials space would have to pay him to play for this reason. And he would peddle depersonalzied education software. But he wasn’t going to stop there. InBloom was envisioned to become THE evaluation system throughout people’s lives–in school and on the job. With him twiddling the knobs, manning the tollgate (Yes, you can play. No, you can’t) and collecting his tithe. Sound familiar?
I found it transparently horrific and knew it was abysmal.
All it did was add more accountability on teachers and lessen it for students and families while forcing these standards on, in my case, kids who performed far below grade level.
I would bet that the video tape and other photographic evidence still exists , since Epstein s partner in crime (Maxwell) undoubtedly made copies. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that she is using said copies to, first ensure that (unlike Epstein) she doesn’t have any suicidal tendencies in jail and second, ensure that she doesn’t spend the rest of her long life in jail.
But either way, the evidence will ever see the light of day.
Have you seen the Epstein Christmas tree ornament? A picture of JE and the phrase, “This ornament did not hang itself.”
In other words, I’d bet Maxwell has created a Dead man’s (or in her case, Woman’s ) switch with the evidence.
Undoubtedly an effective “defense” strategy.
The difference between the case of telling teachers how to do their job and telling surgeons and electricians is in the nature of the consequences.
If someone told a surgeon how to operate and the person died, that someone could be held directly liable.
By the same token, if someone told an electrician what to do and the house burned down, that someone could be held liable.
But the consequences from telling teachers how to teach, though potentially just as disastrous, are less immediate and less obvious and subject to plausible deniability.
Therefore, those who tell teachers what to do can get away with it Scott free even when they fail catastrophically.
Ms Hersey: I totally sympathize with your evaluation experience. I have had all manner of evaluations, but never by a person who has ever taught my course. The idea that a person can come into a class and spend a short time, coming away with the idea of how well you teach is like telling a dairy farmer whether he does a good job based on one milking: it ignores all the stuff that happens besides milking.
Sorry. Once a farmer, always a farmer.
Hi! Please call me Nichole
Yes. It’s a tiny snapshot. Our evaluations aren’t even scored on what we actually do to teach or how we react to certain situations that arise. Most of our score is based on what kids do and how they react to us or a standardized test. I mean is a doctor failing because you had a heart attack? That’s the logic of the evals that came with the race to the top money. Absolute garbage.
Ornamental Suicide
They hang themselves on Christmas trees
The suicidal balls
Like pedophilic Jefferees
Who can’t escape the walls
The self-despised accoutrements
Do box themselves , to boot!
The suicidal ornaments
Are really quite a hoot
The milking tells it all
The milking tells it all
Like shot, in basketball
Or squop in tiddlywinks
The basic thing’s the jinx
MIT, which is supposed to one our nations top Universities, is a pathetic joke:
For his dealings with and acceptance of funding from convicted pedophile Epstein, MIT physics professor Seth Lloyd basically got a slap on the wrist:
“For a period of five years, a set of disciplinary actions will limit Professor Lloyd’s compensation, his ability to engage in solicitation of donors and foundations, and his involvement in first-year undergraduate advising, and will impose several other restrictions on normal privileges accorded to a faculty member,” Schmidt wrote. “In addition, Professor Lloyd will be expected to undergo training on professional conduct before resuming certain activities on campus, including teaching.”
https://www.masslive.com/boston/2020/12/massachusetts-institute-of-technology-disciplining-professor-with-ties-to-disgraced-financier-jeffrey-epstein.html
Oh, my, they “will limit Professor Lloyd’s compensation, his ability to engage in solicitation of donors and foundations, and his involvement in first-year undergraduate advising, ”
Does that mean he can no longer solicit funds from convicted pedophiles? And that he can’t advise undergrads to solicit funds from convicted pedophiles? Or that he just has to first get the OK from the University president before he does so?
And he will have to undergo “training on professional conduct before resuming …teaching”
To inform him that it’s not “professional” to accept funding from convicted pedophiles because that is not already obvious?
I tell ya, they really threw the book at that guy.
It’s also “interesting” that in the findings and recommendations from their ” investigation” MIT officials criticized Lloyd for not revealing Epstein’s conviction when higher-ups within the MIT administration were fully aware of Epstein’s conviction.
How about stop placing kids with a 2nd-6th grade math level in a 9th grade math course!!
yes. yes. yes. I saw this all the time in my school. Insane. Well, they have to be held to the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sci] Standards [sic] for their grade level.
Idiots. Idiots running our systems.
I have a great idea! let us make all 9th graders take Algebra I so they will all be ready for Algebra II ! This way we can penalize a student who cannot add fractions to pass the entry test into a nurse assistant program.
Has been happening in Tennessee for a decade.
“toe popping” without consent”??
Is there such a thing as “toe popping WITH consent”?
Is that legal jargon?
Totally nailed it, Ms. Hersey!
regarding “toe popper”
Wait…. WHAT??
I just looked it up. Yikes a daisy!
The superintendent this commissioner hired also covered up some type of sexual misconduct by a substitute teacher. How on this planet do these bozos bounce from system to system? It is the commissioner’s JOB to fully research the trash she hires before hiring them. Seriously. Wtheck????
The superintendent and toe popper are gone but all it is is ripping a band aid off an opened wound. That commissioner needs to leave as well. She’s incompetent and a complete drama queen.
She refers to Providence, where both the superintendent and his deputy were fired after the deputy did some “toe popping” without consent.also, the state commissioner was ousted from the contract meetings. She has very little administrative experience. TFA for two years, never a principal or district superintendent.
If someone only has a couple years of actual classroom teaching experience (especially if they don’t have an ed background like TFAs) and then goes directly into admin . . . there most likely will be a gap in how you understand schools and education.
Someone who skips over years of actual classroom teaching experience to be put in a high level position that leads a school improvement movement based on blaming teachers……must be a good in interviews, overly confident and a good b.s. artist.
Beachteach, you are describing many current state superintendents, who were elevated to the top with minimal classroom experience. Or none at all.
Why not… we have non educators dictating curriculum and policy and uncertified teachers being hired to execute the agenda. It only fits the game to hire superiors without worthy qualifications.
It used to be that eye popping was the term to describe something very outlandish.
But “toe popping” might have one up on eye popping.
Perhaps the reason many can’t hear above the “din”
of concocted notoriety is the ongoing symphony of
dog whistles. Emotional trip levers “planted” in the
minds of children. The ideas or opinions, in the
strict sense of the word, prejudices.
Instead of developing faculties of discernment, to judge
and think, energies are spent to stuff heads full of the ready-made thoughts of other people.
“Tommy Schultz
@Tommy_USA
· Jul 7
HUGE #SchoolChoice victories in state legislatures this year.
Check out our website and map with the details”
The echo chamber Duncan belongs to are all celebrating their huge political victories in promoting and funding private school vouchers and charter schools.
Not a word about anything they’ve accomplished for public schools. That’s because they don’t have anything to point to.
Ed reform doesn’t offer anything for public school students and families. They simply have nothing positive to contribute to our schools. We should find and hire people who do. Public schools really could break free from this echo chamber. Staying with these folks isn’t serving students in public schools. It would take courage and a positive agenda of our own, but the only thing forcing us to continue to follow the directives of a group of people who don’t add value to public schools is us.
Follow whatever mandate they put in. whether that’s testing or policing social studies, we all have to follow laws, but cut them loose as far as the day to day practical issues that actually effect students. If the objective of public schools is to serve public school students following a group of people who don’t believe in the basic premise of public schools is madness. There’s no real reason to continue.
They don’t share your mission. Find people who do.
Public school supporters and advocates should be as passionate about supporting public schools as the ed reform echo chamber are about supporting private school vouchers and charters.
You’re permitted to work on behalf of public schools.Don’t let the ed reform echo chamber shame you out of being passionate promoters of public schools and public school students. They have no compunction about spending a good part of every working day promoting charters and vouchers. You’re allowed to do the same with public schools. As we have learned over the last twenty years, if we don’t advocate for public schools and public school students it won’t get done.
Public schools have no duty to work towards ed reform’s goal of privatized system. That doesn’t serve their students. Let ed reform handle grand ideological privatizing plans. We can handle our own public schools. That’s where our students are.
We know what a charter/voucher centered education policy looks like- that’s ed reform.
What would a public school centered education policy look like? We don’t have to ask their permission or apologize to them for not supporting their vision of the “education marketplace” or whatever they’re calling it this week. We can just come up with our own and find people to hire or elect who share it.
If public schools survive and thrive it isn’t going to be due to the efforts of people who don’t support our schools and students and have made that abundantly clear over the last 20 years.
t’s going to be due to the efforts of people who value public schools and public school students. We’re all we have 🙂
Biden is better than Obama on public schools, mostly because he funds them and doesn’t bash them to promote some other model but he ultimately is still captured by the ed reform echo chamber.
President Biden
@POTUS
United States government official
The fact is 12 years of education is no longer enough to compete in the 21st Century.
That’s why my Build Back Better Agenda will guarantee four additional years of public education for every person in America – two years of pre-school and two years of free community college.
Schools are more than job training and students are more than economic units.
This is a REALLY barren and grim view of the role of public education and I think it’s reflected in their work. This is what happens when you let business people and economists run education. They reduce it.
We could have a bigger vision than this, if we wanted to, and we could do that in public schools. We don’t have to accept such an impoverished, technocratic view of either our schools or our kids. If we can break away from this we really could write our own script. That’s possible. But we gotta cut em loose first. As long as we’re stuck in this box they’ve put us in we’ll never grow.
While I agree wholeheartedly that increasing inequality and poverty plays an enormous (and entirely obvious) role in reduced academic achievement, I feel it’s more powerful to recognize that Common Core, standardized testing etc. hurts ALL students, especially the poor. These often unachievable and severely developmentally inappropriate targets are causing a variety of emotional health issues in young people; Kindergarten is traumatizing lots of children with full-day, need to show up already reading expectations. And even for kids that are high performers, our system burns them out before they reach college and also is designed to impair their own thinking despite the often placed “critical thinking” buzzword. It’s all trained monkey tricks to enable test scores.
High test scores are a “win-win” to the opposition because it undermines teachers while also appealing to the rat-race mentality of parents that crave the belief that their child is ahead of others. Therefore, appealing to the concept of equity only inspires resistance by these parents because they want to believe their child has been elevated from the “riff-raff.”
Agree wholeheartedly.
Both are important… addressing the underlying causes of poverty which greatly impacts how students are prepared for learning and how they engage in school. AND the burn out from all the data and testing for all students.
Students in high performing areas have had more data and academic pushed down to their K-2 curriculum as well…. and it is impacting them too.
We need to invest in play-based, nature-based pre-K – 3 systems and ALL will benefit.
If you are not familiar with Defending the Early Years (DEY) … they advocate for developmentally appropriate practices in early education (prek-3rd grade). This is from a recent DEY conference:
The ed reformers don’t draft and implement ed policy to hurt the home schooled kids of the religious. The harm inflicted by the plutocrats, Gates, Koch, Walton heirs, etc. is reserved for the communities’ public schools. The current head of the Alliance Defending Freedom (a “Christian” legal firm) had 8 home-schooled kids in 1993. He’s now got 10 kids. ADF’s Michael P. Farris described public schools as a “Godless monstrosity” (NYT). TPM posted yesterday about the campaign to overturn the 2020 S.C. election results. Farris is mentioned along with other “big wig conservative lawyers”.
Until public education defenders are willing to acknowledge and fight the attack from the conservative religious legal firms and, state religious conferences that lobby for school choice (with public schools as the unwanted stepchildren) and, Catholic bishops and evangelical leaders and, the lay groups of conservative religion, oligarchs are going to steal with abandon Main Streets’ assets and their tax money.
We spend around 720 billion on public education across the country annually, which isn’t enough when you account for the inability to reduce class sizes or play teachers professional wages. The 3 billion offered for Race to the Top therefore was an absolute joke. Even if the money had been distributed to address equity, the results would have been negligible due to the enormity of inequitable funding that exists because of an overdependence on property taxes to fund schools. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, our national GDP grows 71.6% faster than public school spending. In other words we do not invest in our schools. This is what Vevos et al want because the only economic model they understand is the pyramid scheme that supports the 1%. Regretfully, I am not seeing much push back from the Biden DOE.
Race to the Top was funded with $4.35 billion. Only 18 states won money to implement Duncan’s agenda.