Archives for category: Common Core
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Gates Funds Programs to Grade Student Essays

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2014 //
28

Thanks to Leonie Haimson for this item.

http://www.grantspace.org/Tools/Knowledge-Base/Individual-Grantseekers/For-Profit-Enterprises/business-funding

By and large, foundations do not make grants to for-profit enterprises. If you are seeking funds to start a for-profit business, please consult the resources below for more information. You might also consult the business section of your local public library, or economic development agencies in your city, county, or state.

Social enterprises

If your for-profit business has a strong social mission, it might be considered a social enterprise. Social enterprise, also known as social entrepreneurship, broadly encompasses ventures of nonprofits, civic-minded individuals, and for-profit businesses that can yield both financial and social returns.

A small but growing number of foundations may provide program-related investments (PRIs) to social enterprises as well as nonprofits. PRIs are low-interest loans that a foundation can give to organizations or projects that match the funder’s giving interests.

Liquid Interactive

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/Quick-Links/Grants-Database/Grants/2014/05/OPP1109052

Date: May 2014

Purpose: to fund development of a web-based tool to help improve students’ writing skills
Amount: $200,000
Term: 12
Topic: College-Ready
Regions Served: GLOBAL|NORTH AMERICA
Program: United States
Grantee Location: Brisbane
Grantee Website: http://www.liquidinteractive.com.au/

Liquid Interactive creates engagement between businesses and customers using digital technologies. Combining strategy, creative and technology, we connect brands and products with audiences in a multiplatform communications environment to deliver business outcomes.

Marketing and education go hand in hand at Liquid Interactive and this unique value proposition assists us in developing strategies and solutions for behavioural change, consumer engagement, product education and information retention and recall.

,….

Writelike is a platform designed to teach users how to write more effectively—in any style, for any purpose. It is based on a large library of text snippets taken from all manner of sources—novels, children’s stories, newspapers, magazines, instruction manuals. Learners are presented with snippets and asked to rewrite them in different styles, and in so doing they learn differences of form and craft.

Writelike is one of Liquid Interactive’s internal, experimental projects that we are hoping to develop in the near future into something usable in Australian schools.

LightSIDE Labs LLC

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/Quick-Links/Grants-Database/Grants/2014/03/OPP1109032
Date: March 2014
Purpose: to develop a system that automatically assesses and gives feedback on student writing, and supports the revision process for students
Amount: $200,000
Term: 13
Topic: College-Ready
Regions Served: GLOBAL|NORTH AMERICA
Program: United States
Grantee Location: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Grantee Website: http://www.lightsidelabs.com

Automated Support for Student Writing
Educational technology is failing to provide tools for writing in the classroom in a way that benefits actual teachers. The current practices of automated essay scoring are focused heavily on summative, standardized testing. When they do give formative feedback, it emphasizes mechanics and grammar over content and literary awareness of elements like genre, audience awareness, and argumentation. That’s not enough – especially with the upcoming shift to Common Core and the increased workload it represents. LightSide is developing tools that really work in schools, based on conversations with teachers and direct classroom experience. Our mission is to improve writing skills. We’re doing that with our flagship writing platform, the Revision Assistant, and with our automated scoring product, LightBox, which provides truly customizable and open access to the education industry.

April 2012: LightSide’s automated essay scoring engine was proven reliable in a study commisioned by Smarter Balanced and PARCC in a bake-off competition hosted on Kaggle.com. Read more about the competition.

http://gettingsmart.com/2013/10/lightside-essay-scoring-engine-goes-school/

Automated scoring of student essays is fast, accurate, and affordable. That was the conclusion drawn from two prize competitions sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. ASAP began in February of 2012 with a demonstration of capabilities of the eight largest testing vendors. The “bake off” was hosted on the Kaggle platform and, as Mark Shermis and Ben Hamner reported, demonstrated that current scoring engines could match expert graders across eight sets of essays. A case study, “Automated Student Assessment Prize Phase One and Phase Two: A Case Study to Promote Focused Innovation in Student Writing Assessment,” was published in January.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the ASAP competitions was the stunning performance of LightSide, an open scoring engine developed at Carnegie Mellon University. Grad student Elijah Mayfield and the open source code held their own against testing companies and data scientists from around the world.

Categories Common Core, Technology, Computers

Why Computers Should Not Grade Student Essays

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2014 //
25

In the brave new world of Common Core, all tests will be delivered online and graded by computers. This is supposed to be faster and cheaper than paying teachers or even low-skill hourly workers or read student essays.

But counting on machines to grade student work is a truly bad idea. We know that computers can’t recognize wit, humor, or irony. We know that many potentially great writers with unconventional writing styles would be declared failures (EE Cummings immediately to mind).

But it is worse than that. Computers can’t tell the difference between reasonable prose and bloated nonsense. Les Perelman, former director of undergraduate writing at MIT, created a machine, withe help of a team of students, called BABEL.

He was interviewed by Steve Kolowich of The Chronicle of Higher Education, who wrote:

“Les Perelman, a former director of undergraduate writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sits in his wife’s office and reads aloud from his latest essay.

“Privateness has not been and undoubtedly never will be lauded, precarious, and decent,” he reads. “Humankind will always subjugate privateness.”

Not exactly E.B. White. Then again, Mr. Perelman wrote the essay in less than one second, using the Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language Generator, or Babel, a new piece of weaponry in his continuing war on automated essay-grading software.

“The Babel generator, which Mr. Perelman built with a team of students from MIT and Harvard University, can generate essays from scratch using as many as three keywords.

“For this essay, Mr. Perelman has entered only one keyword: “privacy.” With the click of a button, the program produced a string of bloated sentences that, though grammatically correct and structurally sound, have no coherent meaning. Not to humans, anyway. But Mr. Perelman is not trying to impress humans. He is trying to fool machines.

“Software vs. Software

“Critics of automated essay scoring are a small but lively band, and Mr. Perelman is perhaps the most theatrical. He has claimed to be able to guess, from across a room, the scores awarded to SAT essays, judging solely on the basis of length. (It’s a skill he happily demonstrated to a New York Times reporter in 2005.) In presentations, he likes to show how the Gettysburg Address would have scored poorly on the SAT writing test. (That test is graded by human readers, but Mr. Perelman says the rubric is so rigid, and time so short, that they may as well be robots.)

“In 2012 he published an essay that employed an obscenity (used as a technical term) 46 times, including in the title.

“Mr. Perelman’s fundamental problem with essay-grading automatons, he explains, is that they “are not measuring any of the real constructs that have to do with writing.” They cannot read meaning, and they cannot check facts. More to the point, they cannot tell gibberish from lucid writing.”

The rest of the article reviews projects in which professors claim to have perfected machines that are as reliable at judging student essays as human graders.

I’m with Perelman. If I write something, I have a reader or an audience in mind. I am writing for you, not for a machine. I want you to understand what I am thinking. The best writing, I believe, is created by people writing to and for other people, not by writers aiming to meet the technical specifications to satisfy a computer program.

Categories Common Core, Technology, Computers, Testing

Peter Greene: Reform and the Cult of Order

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2014 //
65

Peter Greene has noticed that reformers are in love with order. They love it wWhen students wear identical uniforms and walk in straight lines without a word.

He writes:

“The Cult of Order believes in blind, unthinking devotion to Order. Everything must be in its proper place. Everything must go according to plan. Everything must be under control.

“It is not new to find cult members in education. We all work with a least a couple. Desks must be just so. The surface of the teacher desk must be pristine and orderly enough that bacteria will avoid it and others will either stay back in awe (or experience a near-uncontrollable urge to violate it). Students lose a letter grade for putting their name in the wrong corner of a paper. In high schools, they believe that even seniors would benefit from going class to class in neat and orderly lines.

“But reformster members take the Cult of Order to new levels.

“They were bothered by the chaos of the crazy-quilt state standards, each different from the rest. They are alarmed at the possibility that individual teachers might be teaching differently from other teachers. Order, predictability, uniformity– these are qualities to be pursued, not because they are a path to better outcomes of some sort, but because they are in and of themselves desirable outcomes. Standardization and a national curriculum that gets every student in every classroom on the same page at the same time– this vision is good. Don’t ask “Good for what?” To the Cult of Order that’s a nonsense question, like asking about the utility of a kiss. For them, controlled, orderly standardization is as beautiful as a sunrise.

“The Cult of Order is all about fear– fear that some sort of dark, menacing chaos lurks just beyond the borders. There’s a horrible monster waiting just on the other side of that white picket fence, and the only way to keep it at bay is to make the fence just as neat and orderly as possible.

“And yet, we know this is not how the world of human beings works. Human relationships are messy, wobbly, unpredictable, hard to plan. At first flutter of your heart, you cannot know how that story will end. Friendship may grow or wither, and no amount of orderly control can change it. And on the large scale, throughout human history, the dream of perfect order always travels hand in hand with aspirations of totalitarian despots.”

The Cult of Order never succeeds. In this country, for sure, it won’t. We are too diverse, too varied, too rambunctious, too independent, ultimately too non-conformist for it ever to succeed, not here, not now, not ever.

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers

Ken Previti: Same Poo-Poo in Different Bags?

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2014 //
12

Ken Previti explains Governor Rick Scott’s Dilemma: he wants to denounce Obama and disassociate from the Common Core, but he wants to keep everything about the Common Core because his mento Jeb Bush loves it.

So what does he do? He rebrands Common Core and calls it something else. But everything remains “aligned” with Common Core.

To avoid offending my sensibilities, Ken referred to “poo-poo” rather than use that familiar four-letter word, which is derived from Old English and Middle English.

Categories Common Core, Florida

Mercedes Schneider Debates Common Core with Two Advocates

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2014 //
12

Mercedes Schneider, high school teacher, debates Common Core with a state representative and a representative of the pro-voucher group Black Alliance for Educational Options. Mercedes explains who BAEO is, then engages in 6 minutes of debate in which the two men were pro-Common Core and Mercedes was critical. Does 2 vs. 1 sound unbalanced? At least there was some disagreement. A few days ago, there was a well-publicized forum on Common Core that included Merryl Tisch, chair of the Board of Regents; John King, state commissioner; Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers; Carmen Farina, Chancellor of the New York City public schools; and one or two others. Every member of the panel supported Common Core. Some debate.

Categories Black Alliance for Educational Options, Common Core, Louisiana

Schneider: The New Sales Technique for Common Core

By dianeravitch
August 31, 2014 //
52

Mercedes Schneider has discovered a new public relations campaign to sell the Common Core, especially in California, where the state has not jumped head first into testing, as New York did.

Since public support, especially teacher support, for Common Core appears to be evaporating, it makes sense to hire a sophisticated group of communications experts to redesign the sales campaign.

No more crisis talk (quick, someone tell Arne and Bill)!

No more bad-mouthing our kids. After all, if they are so far behind, how can they meet new standards?

Downplay the blame game, downplay the importance of competition, downplay the high-stakes testing. Those tropes don’t work. They discourage support.

The good words are innovation, excellent teaching, systemic, etc.

As a teacher, Schneider is not convinced: “Just because someone hands me a tablecloth, calls it a cape, and tells me to tie it to my back does not mean that if I jump from my roof, I will fly.”

She could have used that great line about putting lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig.

As for Common Core, no amount of high-priced PR can save it. The more that teachers learn about it, the less they like it. How else to account for teacher support falling from 76% to 46% in a single year?

Common Core is not simply a toxic brand, as some of its defenders believe. It got one of the greatest send-offs in history, adopted by 45 states even though no one was sure exactly what it was. It came wrapped in such grandiose claims that it was bound to flop. There was no evidence that Common Core standards would improve education, raise test scores, narrow the achievement gaps, make children globally competitive or college and career-ready.

If there is a lesson to be learned from this fiasco, it is that process matters, evidence matters. Money can buy elections, but money alone is not enough to buy control of American education. A change as massive as national standards requires the willing and enthusiastic by educators, parents, and communities. Arne Duncan and Bill Gates thought they could bypass those groups, if they funded enough of their leadership organizations. They thought they could design the standards they thought best and impose them on the nation. It is not working. As New York high school principal Carol Burris said recently about Common Core, stick a fork in it, it’s done.

Categories Common Core

Crazy Crawfish and Mike Deshotels: Test Score Manipulation in Louisiana Hides Declines

By dianeravitch
August 30, 2014 //
4

Veteran educator Michael Deshotels filed a public records request last June to find out how the state tests were scored. The state claimed that the tests were harder but the scores held steady. Deshotels got the records and concluded that the state had manipulated the scoring of the tests.

He writes:

“It turns out that the number of correct answers required for a passing score (or a level of basic) was significantly reduced for three out of four categories of the LEAP high stakes testing. Once one knows how the passing scores are routinely manipulated it’s no surprise that the percentage of students scoring basic or above remained steady. The test grading scale for LEAP was adjusted or “equated” (to use the lingo of testing experts), apparently to make certain that the perceived performance of students on the new Common Core aligned tests remained steady.”

Crazy Crawfish (aka Jason France, who was a data analyst for the Louisiana Department of Education) wrote a post about the same scores called “Standardized Lying.”

He writes:

“Student performance in Louisiana is dropping rapidly. The decline started just about the time John White became superintendent of Education and has accelerated rapidly with the introduction of Common Core in Louisiana schools. Based on a sample analysis of the very meager data LDOE finally released under threat of lawsuit it is clear that not only is student performance not increasing or staying steady, it Is in fact declining, and being masked by a lowering of the number of correct answers required to pass LEAP and iLEAP tests….

“I don’t have magical powers, but I can confidently predict this is something you will find and see happening across the nation, especially in education Reformer infested territories. There is nothing standardized about the testing of Common Core, the only standardization comes in in the form of lying about it.

“Proponents of Common Core, and the High Stakes testing required by it, have claimed the comparability of test scores across states will make for meaningful comparisons. To have this meaningful comparison, all states must teach the same curriculum and all must administer identical tests from one of the two federally funded consortiums (Smarter Balanced and PARCC). However neither consortium controls the cut scores; those are entirely in the control of the states. These scores can go up or down as local politics require.

“Let me spell this out for you. If you want to show progress in your state you can artificially inflate the scores to show improvement. If you need to make a case for more charter schools and school closures simply lower the scores and take them over and then raise the score back to show that reform worked. That is exactly what Louisiana has done and no doubt other reform markets as well. The actual data shows the Reforms, including Common Core, have had the exact opposite effect, and a very dramatic one.
Even though the proposed tests are identical, even though the curriculum is identical, the actual scores and their meanings are left up to individual states to determine. That fact nullifies the argument for identical standardized tests and even the need for a standardized curriculum. Our scores, our levels of achievement, will not be and are not comparable to scores in other states. These tests are actually the opposite of comparable. NAEP and DEIBELS are national tests that are comparable, and neither of them requires a standardized curriculum nor extensive, expensive, technology intensive, obsessive testing, like Common Core does.”

Categories Common Core, Louisiana, Testing

Duncan Punishes Oklahoma for Repealing Common Core Standards

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2014 //
28

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan decided to punish Oklahoma for revoking the Common Core standards, according to Caitlin Emma in Politico. Oklahoma will lose its federal waiver from the structures of No ChildLeft Behind, which mandates that all students in grades 3-8 must be proficient in math and reading by this year. Since this is in fact an impossible goal, all public schools in Oklahoma will be “failing” schools and subject to a variety of sanctions, including state takeover, being turned into a charter school, or closed.

Indiana, which also revoked the Common Core standards, received a one-year extension of its waiver because it has not yet replaced the Common Core standards.

““It is outrageous that President [Barack] Obama and Washington bureaucrats are trying to dictate how Oklahoma schools spend education dollars,” Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin said in a statement. “Because of overwhelming opposition from Oklahoma parents and voters to Common Core, Washington is now acting to punish us. This is one more example of an out-of-control presidency that places a politicized Washington agenda over the well-being of Oklahoma students.”

“This marks the first time the Education Department has stripped a state of its waiver on the grounds of academic standards, said Anne Hyslop, a senior policy analyst for Bellwether Education Partners.

“This is obviously dicey water for the Secretary [Arne] Duncan, given growing opposition to Common Core,” she said.
States had to adopt so-called college- and career-ready standards to escape some of NCLB’s requirements, including offering school choice and tutoring or reconfiguring schools that are considered failing under the law. But most states with waivers adopted the Common Core.

“Fallin did an about-face on her support of the standards this year and signed a bill in early June repealing the Common Core after previously supporting the standards. The state reverted to its old academic standards, the Oklahoma Priority Academic Student Skills standards.”

Even Michael Petrilli of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a fervent supporter of Common Core, denounced Duncan’s decision:

“Fordham Institute President Michael Petrilli called the Education Department’s move a “terrible decision.”
“While Bobby Jindal doesn’t have a case against Arne Duncan, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin sure as heck does,” he said. “I hope she sues. Nothing in ESEA gives the secretary of education the authority to push states around when it comes to their standards.”

Whatever your opinion of the Common Core, Duncan’s actions make clear that the U.S. Department of Education is coercing states to adopt them through the waivers, and that Duncan is asserting federal control of state standards, curriculum, and instruction, all of which are interwoven in the Common Core standards and tests. The fact that this role is forbidden by federal law should concern someone somewhere.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/oklahoma-common-core-no-child-left-behind-waiver-110421.html#ixzz3BmReC5XW

Categories Common Core, Duncan, Arne, Federal Waiver, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Oklahoma

“The People Who Write These Tests Don’t Know You…”

By dianeravitch
August 28, 2014 //
9

I received news from England that a letter written by Rachel Tomlinson, the head of Barrowford, a primary school in Lancashire, went viral.

The letter was a clone of one written by American teacher Kimberly Hurd Horst on her blog.

No claims of plagiarism here. Maybe every principal and teacher should send the same letter home when students get their Common Core test scores, saying they failed. Remind parents that children are more than a test score. Tell them that the passing mark was set unreasonably high. Tell them that the tests failed, not the children.

In October last year Hurd Horst wrote on her blog: “There are many more ways to be smart than what many schools are currently allowing. The current testing culture personally drives me crazy. It does not tell students that they matter. Tests do not always assess all of what it is that make each student special and unique. The people who create these tests and score them do not know each student the way I do, the way I hope to, and certainly not the way the families do. They do not know that some of my students speak two languages. They do not know that they can play a musical instrument or that they can dance or paint a picture. Doesn’t that matter more?”

The school seemed to acknowledge debt to Hurd, retweeting a comment from someone linking to her blog.

Categories Common Core, International, Testing

Arizona State Superintendent Huppenthal Loses to Challenger

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2014 //
4

Arizona State Superintendent John Huppenthal was defeated by Diane Douglas, a very conservative former school board member who ran on a single issue: rolling back Common Core. Huppenthal embarrassed himself a few months ago when he admitted using a pseudonym to write disparaging comments about other people and groups on blogs.

Douglas is a big supporter of school choice.

“In the November election, Douglas will face David Garcia, an Arizona State University professor who defeated high school English teacher Sharon Thomas in the Democratic primary.”

Categories Arizona, Common Core
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