In this installment of her investigative analysis of the National Council on Teacher Quality, Mercedes Schneider reviews the career of Deborah McGriff.
This provides a fascinating insight into the tangled web of the corporate reform movement.
Archives for category: Bush, Jeb
Matt Di Carlo of the Shanker Institute here dissects the claims of Jeb Bush about the success of the state letter grade system.
As he shows, the number of A-rated schools went up because the state changed the rules of the game.
You can always get more points on the basketball court if you drop the basket a foot or two.
You can get more home runs if you bring the fences closer.
Are people foolish enough to believe the boast that Florida is now a model for the nation?
I happen to think that letter grades for schools are a ridiculous idea. Schools are complex institutions that do some things well and some things not as well. One can come up with a rating system that is far more sophisticated than a grade of A-F.
No one would dream of sending a child home with a report card with only one letter on it. Why in the world would anyone label a school with a single letter?
This is the rankest sort of political interference in the functioning of education.
No state or district should use letter grades to reward or humiliate schools.
This is politics, not accountability.
And it has nothing to do with improving education.
When the National Association of Independent Schools starts handing out letter grades to its members, let me know.
You may have heard that former Governor Jeb Bush regularly parades the “Florida miracle,” perhaps preparing for a 2016 run at the presidency. The formula, we hear, is testing and accountability, grading schools, charters and vouchers, and of course, online courses and schools.
This Florida teacher wrote a comment and gives a different view from the trenches:
I will go out on a limb here and argue that there IS no “Florida miracle.” I taught in a Miami-Dade high school for 6 years and I watched our school grade go from a C to a D back to a C, stay a C, and then up to a B…I think it was also an F at some point in there. During that time, did I see any change in the “quality” of student? Nope. Did I see any change in the quality of the teachers? Nope. Did I see any change in the quality of the coursework? YES. It went DOWN year after year, as more and more emphasis was placed on testing, and less and less on everything else. As end-of-course exams were introduced, the quality went down still further, as classes were disrupted even more for testing and test prep. And while the class size amendment was the one and ONLY good thing left in FL education, that too has pretty much gone out the window, at least in high school, as “core classes” were redefined to mean “FCAT classes.” My last year teaching (last year) I had up to 38 students in my French classes. The quality of my classes definitely went down, though not because I was lazy or incompetent or any of the other things teachers are called all the time…but simply because to keep a class of 38 from dissolving into chaos, you have to have a pretty teacher-centered class going on all the time. That is not ideal for a language class, but then again, neither is having a class of almost 40 kids all doing their own thing (which, as any teacher knows, means each one playing with a phone or worse).
There is no Florida miracle. Education has only gotten worse over the past few years, no matter how schools, districts and the state itself game the system. And, contrary to what the media will tell you, it is NOT teachers’ fault, unions’ fault, and I won’t even blame it on the kids or their parents this time. It is the fault of education “reform” led by Jeb Bush et al.
Maine Democrats insist on a more careful review of the evidence about the track record of cyber charters before allowing K12 to open one in their state.
Governor Paul LePage is furious! He wants a K12 cyber charter to draw students and funding away from public schools and he sees no point in reviewing the evidence.
Meanwhile, Maine legislators are aware that K12 has gotten dismal results in other states. And they probably remember the exposé of Jeb Bush’s role in pushing for digital schooling in Maine. They may even have in mind the campaign contributions and lobbying that got the issue on the governor’s agenda.
When legislators start asking for evidence instead of blindly swallowing promises and campaign contributions, the days are numbered for the hucksters.
Keep your eye on this reporter, Colin Woodard, he is one sharp fellow. He may singlehandedly save the state of Maine hundreds of millions of dollars.
Lee Fang has published a blockbuster investigation of Jeb Bush’s foundation. Fang is an investigative writer for the Nation Institute.
Last year he published a stunning exposé about the online industry in which Bush and his chief lobbyist were central players. That article followed the money.
In this new article, he digs into the financial entanglements of Bush, based on emails that were obtained by a public interest group.
To understand the great push for online learning, charters, vouchers, and union-busting, read this.
Follow the money. Here is an astounding article about the thousands of emails that were released and what they contained about Bush’s activities through his “Foundation for Educational Excellence.” Read this article from Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet.
Coach Bob Sikes reports here that Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence is under fire by groups who claim that it is promoting the for-profit interests of its corporate sponsors.
The Bush foundation, which presumably has a tax exemption, claims that 90% of its funding comes from philanthropic donors, not corporations.
This investigation in Maine shows the relationship between the Bush foundation, its chief strategist, and the corporations that stood to benefit financially from the activities of the Bush team.
And any investigation into the connection between the Foundation for Education Excellence and its sponsors should definitely look at the Ten Elements of Digital Learning. (Notice the long list of corporate sponsors, all in the business of selling digital products.)
This is the release of emails in response to FOIL of “In the Public Interest.”
Read to see interchange between Bush foundation and corporate interests.
Between the two Bush brothers–George W. and Jeb–the nation’s education system is locked into a regime of endless testing, grading, evaluating, marking, measuring, etc.
It doesn’t seem to get us very far. After all, Texas has been in this business for as long as anyone can remember–was it the mid-80s?–and folks there are still complaining about failing schools.
And Texas is not # 1 anyway, Massachusetts is.
Florida is supposedly the model state, because it started giving grades to all its schools and closing the ones with low marks, and opening charters.
But it turns out that there are lots of failing charters
And again, Florida is not #1. Massachusetts is.
Coach Bob of Florida brings us up to the date on Florida’s nutty accountability system.
Think about it.
What corporation would be proud that it had created a quality-control system that made its employees demoralized and angry?
If this is a business model, it’s bad business. Or monkey business.
Jeb Bush and Michelle Rhee are working Tennessee, with grandiose claims about the great results that charters and vouchers can accomplish.
The good news is that the reporter shows skepticism about thei claims.
Why don’t they tell their audiences about Milwaukee, which has had vouchers and charters for 20+ years? On the NAEP, Milwaukee is one of the nation’s lowest scoring cities, and state scores show no difference between the public schools, the charters and the voucher schools.
Saddest of all is that the performance of black students in Milwaukee is very low.
Remember that line about “the civil rights issue of our time”?
Vouchers and charters are not it.
Tony Bennett, the defeated state superintendent from Indiana, has landed the job as state commissioner in Florida.
Bennett is the hero to the rightwing “reform” sector, a champion of privatization, vouchers, charters, online for-profit schools, and the Common Core. His last action in Indiana was to lower standards for new trackers and principals, so that no preparation was needed to become a teacher and anyone could become a principal with only two years of experience as a teacher, even in higher education.
Jeb Bush is mad for Bennett, who serves as head of Bush’s Chiefs for Change.
Diane Ravitch's blog 