What kind of a school has a “reorientation room?”
What kind of a school has a “Dean of School Culture?”
What kind of a school has large numbers of uncertified teachers?
Would you send your own child there?
What kind of school is this? Read the link.
Archives for category: Connecticut
This parent in Connecticut is furious that teachers didn’t tell her that the testing had gotten excessive. They didn’t tell her what the overuse and misuse of testing was doing to her children. She understands that they were just doing their job, but she wants them to stand up and shout that what’s happening is wrong. This is a terrific letter. Once the parents and the students begin to understand what is happening, there will be a grand alliance to take back our schools and rebuild education for the benefit of students and our society:
With all due respect to teachers–I’ve been hearing whispered rumblings from educators for at least 8 years (since my oldest entered public schools) that teachers knew/know these tests are a load of crap. Teachers SHOULD have been speaking up louder a long time ago. Look what silence/fear/going-along/intimidation has resulted in for a generation of our children. Instead of hearing whispered, whimpy rumblings, parents should have been hearing forceful denunciations of these useless tests a long time ago. Parents are not in the classroom every day. Parents have no idea how bad these tests are unless teachers make them aware. At least where I live (Connecticut), that wasn’t the case. In fact, the few times I’ve tried to bring up the subject in the past I got averted eyes and a changing of the subject. I get it–this is your livelihood and you have administration to worry about. But these are our KIDS we’re talking about here. Water under the bridge now, I suppose. But now is the time to make up for lost time. Now is the time to speak up forcefully and DEMAND a change to better practices. And if your unions aren’t supporting you in this THEY SHOULD BE. Union management works for YOU. If they aren’t leading the fight in this, hold them accountable!
Michelle Rhee is is a one-person PAC. She is raising hundreds of millions of dollars from rightwing billionaires and foundations and corporations to subsidize her program.
What is her program? Destroy teachers’ unions; eliminate tenure and seniority; privatize public education. Having failed to transform the public schools of the District of Columbia, she now wants to privatize public education everywhere.
When I was in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I learned from a Democratic state senator that Rhee had poured $105,000 into a race between a liberal Democrat and a conservative Democrat. The difference between them? The conservative Democrat supports vouchers. My informant said, “Candidates here will jump through hoops for a contribution of $1,000. Getting $105,000 is unimaginable.” Rhee bought the election. The voucher-loving Democrat won. He added: Most of Rhee’s money goes to conservative Republicans.
She is trying to buy a seat in Connecticut now. A reader writes:
Rhee’s fraud of an organization has nothing to do with students, teaching or learning. It is a political lobbyist group that secretly slithers around the nation passing our billionaire donated cash to influence and bribe politicians. Her dirty donations push the privatization, anti-union, anti-public school, collective bargaining busting, teacher trashing dogma down their throats. Here she is a pariah and getting her money is the kiss of death here in CT:
CNN contributor Steve Perry is an ardent critic of unions and everyone else who is not supportive of the corporate reform movement.
Bruce Adams of Buffalo took the time to review Dr. Perry’s recent book.
No matter what the calendar says, it’s springtime for charters in Connecticut.
The State Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor was a member of the board of Achievement First, a charter chain in Connecticut. He believes in charters, like his colleague John King, the state commissioner in New York, whose only experience was in the charter sector (Uncommon Schools).
Jonathan Pelto has been writing about the massing of hedge fund money in support of the charter agenda in Connecticut.
Be sure to read Pelto’s link to the excellent article by Stamford parent advocate Wendy Lecker.
One consistent finding in the research is that charters have not been successful in taking over low-performing schools and doing a “turn-around.” KIPP tried it at Cole Elementary School in Denver and gave up. Charters prefer to start from scratch so they can mold students from the beginning.
Let’s keep watch and see what happens in Connecticut.
I posted this morning about the “standards” for pre-schoolers in Connecticut.
The teacher I quoted added this comment:
Click to access Pk_to_Kindergarten_Mathematics_Continuum.pdf
Sorry Dr. Ravitch, I put in two links to the language arts standards and didn’t include the link to the math standards. The above link takes you to the math standards. I love the one about preschoolers being able to describe real graphs. Also the one which expects preschoolers to “discuss strategies to estimate and compare length, area, temperature and weight.” Have any of these people read Piaget?
Jonathan Pelto reports on Jeb Bush’s recent visit to Connecticut. While there, he saluted the “reforms” pushed through the legislature by Governor Dannell Malloy, especially his efforts to curb teachers’ tenure and seniority. And he boasted about Florida’s achievement (he didn’t mention the class size reduction initiative, which voters approved and he tried to roll back). And choice, choice, choice!
Funny that no one mentioned that Connecticut is one of the top two or three states in the nation on NAEP, even though it has strong teachers’ unions, seniority and tenure. It is far ahead of Florida. Since when does a state whose students are ABOVE the national average (8th grade math, NAEP) take lessons from one that is well below the national average?
Jonathan Pelto reports that Paul Vallas, the interim superintendent of Bridgeport, CT, has ordered that students there take three rounds of tests in addition to the Connecticut state tests.
This is indicative of a common fallacy among education reformers. They tend to think that the cure for low test scores is to take more tests. They think that the answer to low scores is to raise standards even higher.
By taking more tests, students will learn how important the tests are, they will get used to taking tests, they will be more ready for the next test. The problem with this reasoning is that testing is not teaching. Students are learning test-taking skills, which have no real value outside of K-12 schooling. This is not a skill in high demand anywhere else. More time for testing means less time for teaching. Less time for teaching means less time for learning.
Raising standards higher when kids can’t reach the ones you have is pointless. It’s like saying that if 50% of the children can’t jump over a 3-foot bar, the answer is to raise it to 4-feet. Next stop: grade inflation and credit recovery.
Bottom line: dumbing down education.
What these students need: more and better instruction.
A progressive website published a “leaked document” that allegedly shows bad blood between Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst and Connecticut’s Parent Union.
Both are supposed to be working together to promote the parent trigger in Connecticut but it seems they got into a slugfest over money.
Read it for yourself.
Residents of Bridgeport, CT, will soon vote in an election for members of their school board.
For reasons to complicated to get into here, the previous unelected school board was declared illegal by the state’s highest court, which ordered a new election.
If you read Jonathan Pelto’s blog, you will get the full story of how an illegal board was put in charge of the district, hired Paul Vallas to be a superintendent for $229k a year at the same time that he runs a consulting business on the side.
Now as the election approaches, one of the members of the illegal board is running for the elected. Although he is a Democrat, he declares that he favors vouchers, which is a historic Republican plank. He favors vouchers even though the money to fund them will decrease the funding of the public schools he want to oversee.
This election will test the residents of Bridgeport. That is, unless the electoral process is not corrupted by an infusion of big money from the Wall Street hedge fund managers who seem to grow on trees in places like Darien, New Canaan, and Greenwich.
Diane Ravitch's blog 