Archives for category: Duncan, Arne
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Leonie Haimson: The Woman Who Stopped Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, and the Ed Profiteers

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2013 //
19

Below is a letter from Leonie Haimson, who was previously added to the honor roll of this blog for fighting for students, parents, and public education.

Leonie almost singlehandedly stopped the effort to mine student data, whose sponsors wanted confidential and identifiable information about every child “for the children’s sake.” Leonie saw through that ruse and raised a national ruckus to fight for student privacy. Privacy of student records is supposedly protected by federal law (FERPA), but Arne Duncan weakened the regulations so that parents could not opt out of the data mining.

It is not over. The Gates Foundation and Carnegie Corporation put up $100 million to start inBloom, and Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless Generation got the contract to develop the software, and amazon.com plans to put it on a “cloud.” They will be back. We count on Haimson and the many parents she has inspired to remain vigilant on behalf of our children. As a grandparent of a child in second grade in a Brooklyn public school, I have a personal interest in keeping his information private.

Here is Leonie’s letter, written 12/20/13:

Dear folks,

I have good news to report! Yesterday, Sheldon Silver, Speaker of the NYS Assembly, along with Education Chair Cathy Nolan and fifty Democratic Assemblymembers sent a letter to Commissioner King, urging him to put a halt to inBloom.

“It is our job to protect New York’s children. In this case, that means protecting their personally identifiable information from falling into the wrong hands,” said Silver. “Until we are confident that this information can remain protected, the plan to share student data with InBloom must be put on hold.”

Why is this important? Because Speaker Silver and the Democrats in the Assembly appoint the Board of Regents, as the Daily News noted. The Regents control education policy in New York, and appoint the commissioner.

We have begun to make real headway in the past year against inBloom, but we need your support so we can continue the fight for student privacy and smaller classes in the public schools.

We count on donations from individuals like you as our main source of funding. If you appreciate our work and want it to continue and grow stronger, please give a tax-deductible contribution right now by clicking here: http://www.nycharities.org/donate/c_donate.asp?CharityCode=1757 or sending a check to the address below.

I am proud to have been called “the nation’s foremost parent expert on inBloom and the current threat to student data privacy.” We were the first advocacy group in the nation to sound the alarm about inBloom’s plan to create a multi-state database to be stored on a vulnerable data cloud run by Amazon.com with an operating system built by Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify. The explicit goal of inBloom was to package this information in an easily digestible form and offer it up to data-mining vendors without parental consent.

In February, inBloom formally launched as a separate corporation, and nine states were listed as “partners.” We worked hard to get the word out through blogging, personal outreach to parent activists and the mainstream media. After protests erupted in states throughout the country, inBloom’s “partners” pulled out. Now, eight out of these states have severed all ties with inBloom or put their data sharing plans on indefinite hold.

Sadly, as of yesterday, New York education officials were still intent on sharing with inBloom a complete statewide set of personal data for all public school students– including names, addresses, phone numbers, test scores and grades, disabilities, health conditions, disciplinary records and more. To stop this, we helped to organize a lawsuit on behalf of NYC parents which will be heard in state court on January 10 in Albany (note the new date), asking for an immediate injunction to block the state’s plan. (The state has delayed the hearing in order to gain more time to respond to our legal briefs.)

In addition, we will continue our work on the critical issue of class size. As a result of our reports, testimonies and public outreach, we have been able to shine a bright light on what many consider to be the most shameful aspect of Mayor Bloomberg’s education legacy: the fact that class sizes in NYC have increased sharply over the last six years and are now the largest in the early grades since 1998. More on this issue is in my Indypendent article just published, called Grading the Education Mayor

Class sizes have increased every year, despite the fact that the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case was supposedly “settled” by a state law in 2007 that required NYC to reduce class sizes in all grades. As a result, 86% of NYC principals say they are unable to provide a quality education because classes are too large. Parents say that smaller classes are their top priority according to the Department of Education’s own surveys. There is no more critical need than smaller classes if the city’s children are to have an equitable chance to learn.

But class size is not just a critical issue in NYC public schools. Because of budget cuts, class sizes have risen sharply throughout the state and the nation as a whole. In more than half of all states, per-pupil funding is lower than in 2008 and school districts have cut 324,000 jobs.

At the same time, more and more money is being spent by billionaires and venture philanthropists on bogus “studies” to try to convince states and districts that class size doesn’t matter and public funds should be spent instead on outsourcing education into private hands – despite much rigorous research showing the opposite to be true.

With vendors trying to grab your child’s data in the name of providing “personalized” instruction – a euphemism that really means instruction delivered via computers and data-mining software in place of real-life teachers giving meaningful feedback in a class small enough to make this possible — our efforts are more crucial than ever before.

Please make a donation so that our work can continue and be even more effective in 2014.

Thanks for your support and Happy New Year,

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
212-674-7320

Categories Arts Education, Class Size Matters Org, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privacy and Privacy Rights

What Happens If NFL Listens to Arne

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2013 //
11

This is a very funny
spoof of federal education policy. Imagine Arne Duncan
and Roger Goodell, the president of the NFL, calling a joint press
conference to announce a new program called Race to the End Zone.
Imagine an agreement that all teams will use the same plays. Now
the NFL will have no failing teams! “We in the NFL love the Common
Core Curriculum that Mr. Duncan is pushing on schools here in D. C.
and in forty-five states,” Goodell continued. “Just as he believes
Common Core Curriculum can save the schools, we believe a Common
Core Playbook will save our struggling teams. Beginning with the
2013 season every coach and every team will use the same playbook.”
The press corps grumbles: “An MSNBC reporter shouted from the fifth
row: “Do you truly believe if all teams run the same plays they’ll
all have the same success?” “Of course,” Mr. Duncan interjected.
“It’s going to work in education, too. I promise. And I went to
Harvard. So you have to listen to me.”

Categories Common Core, Duncan, Arne, Race to the Top

Charleston, S.C., Builds a Bridge to Nowhere–in Its Schools

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2013 //
6

Surprise! The school leadership of Charleston, South Carolina, has come up with some stale ideas and branded them as “reform.”

Nothing like copying what was tried and failed everywhere else!

The district calls it a “new” program of teacher evaluation, pay for performance, and reconfigured salary structure BRIDGE but in fact it is the status quo demanded by the U.S. Department of Education.

Every Broad-trained superintendent has the same ideas but is tasked with calling them “new” (when they are not), “evidence-based” (when they are not), and “reform” (when they are the status quo, paid for and sanctified by the U.S. Department of Education).

Patrick Hayes, a teacher in Charleston, has launched a campaign to expose the destructive plan of the district leaders, whose primary outcome will be to demoralize and drive away good teachers.

This blogger, the Charleston Area Community Voice for Education, recognizes that the new structure is not new, that it relies on “Junk Science,” and that it is “a Bridge to I Don’t Know Where.”

He writes:

BRIDGE brings into full play in Charleston many of the recent reform strategies and policies, including

  • large-scale testing,
  • using test scores to rate principal and teacher performance (VAM), merit pay,
  • Broad Academy trained leadership (starting with the superintendent), for example

It is important to note that these are the reforms of the last decade or so that have produced little improvement in schools as measured by the same testing and by the recently announce PISA results. These “reforms” are the status quo; in fact, they are not reform at all. As Hayes and others have pointed out, there is no credible evidence to support the effectiveness of these efforts, at least in terms of increased learning or even measuring teacher quality.

Further, the school district has built no case for why do BRIDGE in terms of what we want for our children, teachers, and classrooms. BRIDGE appears to be a large, well-funded ($23.7 million) solution to vague, and even non-existent problems. It is a solution the district apparently intends to impact every classroom and hence every student in Charleston public schools.

Here’s the thing. There are students in all schools who are not learning to their potential. There are also schools that have issues, academic and otherwise, that need addressing. There are also schools and students doing amazingly well.

The success of those students and schools cannot be attributed to evaluation (of teachers, schools, or even the students), nor is there any evidence that evaluation will fix the problems that do exist. Hint: we already know where the problems are. To base a massive restructuring of how schools, teachers, principals, and certainly students do business and spend their days is bogus, and the impacts of flawed, misdirected programs in education usually drive us to a cliff.

The bottom line is this: Charleston County School District has embarked on a very large experiment, called BRIDGE, with vaguely defined goals (except, perhaps raising test scores) with the plan of “let’s see if this works, because we have to do something”. Of course, in science, when you’re out there exploring the unknown, you don’t know what you’ll get.

Perhaps I’m missing the point here, so maybe I need to ask my six year old granddaughter and her teacher and principal, all of whom are doing quite well, thank you.

I would like to hear an answer from the school board and superintendent addressed to Grace (who understand quite a bit) to this question:

Why are you doing this BRIDGE thing?

Go ahead. I dare you.

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure, Testing

PISA Showed We Need a Game-Changer, Not More of the Same Failed policies

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2013 //
25

A reader sent this tweet from Arne Duncan:

Arne Duncan ‏@arneduncan 17h
The bad news from #OECDPISA: US is running in place while other countries lap us. Good news: We’re laying the right foundation to improve.

This is very sad. If PISA shows anything, it is that the policies of the Bush-Obama administrations have not reached their one singular goal: higher test scores.

NCLB was signed into law on January 8, 2002. Since that time, every public school in the nation has followed the same federally-mandated prescription. It doesn’t work.

A reporter asked me last night whether the US performance over the past half century shows that no reforms work. I disagreed strongly. There was never any nationwide school reform that affected every school and every district until NCLB. Only since 2002 have we had a single federal policy. Before we had different districts adopting different programs and reforms, as they chose. PISA shows that the past decade of annual testing of basic skills in grades 3-8 failed. No other country in the world tests every child every year. No other country places as much value on test scores as we do. No other country fires principals and teachers and closes schools based on test scores.

Arne’s tweet is like a basketball coach who tells his team to use the same game plan again and again and again. It fails every time. Yet he says we must stick to his game plan anyway.

It makes no sense. We need a game changer. We need reduced class sizes for the students who struggle. We need bilingual teachers for English learners. We need experienced teachers but we are losing them. We need medical care for the students who never get a check-up. We need pre-K to help kids get a good start. We need after school programs and summer programs. We need healthy communities and healthy families and healthy children.

We need a national commitment to the well-being of all our children. Our children are our society’s future. We must treat them as our own.

Categories Duncan, Arne, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top

Jersey Jazzman: “‘Twas the Night Before PISA Day!”

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2013 //
7

Please read Jersey Jazzman’s hilarious spoof on “The Night Before Christmas.”

He anticipates not the joy of Christmas and Santa, but the much-anticipated release of PISA scores, when Arne Duncan gets to tell the nation once again how terrible American education is and how we are losing the global competition and why we are still a nation at risk.

He will conveniently overlook the fact that he is Secretary of Education and has now been in charge for nearly five years. No accountability for him!

He will surround himself with Beltway insiders who agree that our schools are dreadful despite 11 years of No Child Left Behind and nearly five years of Race to the Top.

How many more years must we wait until we declare these programs failures?

This is how JJ’s poem begins:

“‘Twas the night before PISA Day, when all through the foundations
The wonks were all dreaming about Bill Gates’s donations;

The rankings were crafted for each nation with care,
In hopes that more grants would come from billionaires;

The children were tested and stressed at their desks;
While visions of bubble sheets made them feel quite grotesque;

Suburban moms in their ‘kerchiefs, and dads in their caps,
Hoped on test day their children’s brains wouldn’t collapse,

When out at the DOE there arose such a clatter,
I looked up from Klein’s tablet to see what was the matter.”

Categories Duncan, Arne, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), Humor, International, Testing

Politico: Arne Duncan’s Ambitious Agenda Hits Speed Bumps

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2013 //
19

Stephanie Simon describes the political minefields that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has run into as he seeks to remake American education.

She does not mention that Duncan’s program dovetails with No Child Left Behind, which is now widely acknowledged to be a failed approach.

Nor does she mention that Duncan’s tenure in Chicago, where he honed his present ideas about reform, was unsuccessful.

Duncan is generously praised by the hedge fund managers’ group Democrats for Education Reform.

But critics call him out for micromanagement:

Critics, however, say his strategies have been shortsighted, even naive. States are backing away from promises they made to secure grants and waivers; just this month, Arkansas said it couldn’t stick to its timetable for improving student performance or raising the quality of its teaching force. In most cases, the secretary has little leverage to make states uphold their pledges. In a ritual that strikes even some bureaucrats as absurd, he has begun granting waivers to his own waivers.

“In 2009, Arne was the new sheriff in town, with big boxes of ammunition and a shiny new gun,” said Frederick Hess, an education analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “Now, it’s later in the movie and he’s all out of bullets and he’s trying to scare states by shaking a stick at them.”

So many other questions are unasked:

Did his efforts to replace the principle of equity with the strategy of competition for federal aid makes any sense?

Why did a Democratic administration accept the ideology and strategies of its Republican predecessors?

How could Duncan say he wants to raise standards for teaching while giving $50+ million to Teach for America?

What have been the results of Duncan’s unprecedented support for shifting public dollars to privately managed charters?

Why has Duncan been silent as more and more state legislatures enacted anti-teacher legislation?

Why has Duncan been silent as more and more states authorized vouchers?

 

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/arne-duncan-education-secretary-100372.html#ixzz2lr23niys

Categories Duncan, Arne

Brilliant Analysis of US DOE Silly Plans to Re-Engineer Higher Education

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2013 //
32

Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, has written an outstanding analysis of the Obama administration’s shockingly uninformed plans to redesign higher education.

McGuire notes that Arne Duncan has an annoying habit of trying to marginalize critics by calling them “silly.” If there is anything silly, it is his ill-conceived program to make college more affordable by gathering more data. Excuse me?

She points out that Duncan listens to no one with any experience in the field (sound familiar?) and plans to hold hearings where knowledgeable people will have five minutes to speak. It is just plain silly to think that these “hearings” will change anything.

As she notes,

“This arrogant view that most critics are silly has led the U.S. Department of Education to devalue any challenging input on the higher education proposals. On very short notice, the Department announced that it would hold just four one-day hearings at public university campuses around the country where people who wanted to make comments would get five minutes to do so. This is a cynical way to block thoughtful participation in the regulatory process. The proposals are serious and complicated, requiring far more than a cursory five minutes of analysis. This administration has a huge credibility problem these days; saying it wants input but then providing only the most superficial input method adds to the perception that there’s no real interest in sincere dialogue and exploration of any ideas other than those the administration already proposes.”

The administration claims that it wants to control costs and increase access, but its proposals are contradictory. McGuire sees a train wreck ahead, but no one at the US DOE is listening.

If you care about higher education, read this article.

Categories Duncan, Arne, Higher Education

Vasquez Heilig: Arne’s Top 10 Gaffes

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2013 //
22

Julian Vasquez Heilig has helpfully assembled Arne Duncan’s ten most outrageous mis-statements. His sneering comment about “white suburban moms” was the latest, but far from the worst of what happens when Arne doesn’t stick to a script.

Categories Duncan, Arne

A Superintendent Writes a Letter to Secretary Duncan About Those “Moms”

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2013 //
49

Following State Commissioner John King’s “listening tour” and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s insulting remarks about “white suburban moms,” Long Island Superintendent Joseph Rella wrote the following letter to Duncan:

“Who You Callin’ a White Suburban Mother???

The Commissioner’s “Listening Tour,” launched after open, public meetings did not produce the results he desired, was replaced by “Open-Public-Meetings – By-Invitation Only” (not only oxymoronic but just plain moronic). Far from quelling the tide of criticism against the Common Core Initiative – standards, curriculum, testing/APPR, etc. and its horrible effects on children, educators, and families, it has fanned the flames of outrage.

This was accomplished in no small part by the Commissioner’s purposeful deafness to what he was hearing from anyone selected to speak and from the audience (select or walk-ins). So now we have the “Open-Public-Meetings – By-Invitation Only – NON-LISTENING TOUR.” Not working out so well.

In an effort to rescue the rapidly sinking ship that is the NY Common Core Initiative, the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, (as reported in the Washington Post – November 16, 2013) told an audience of state superintendents this afternoon [11/16/13] that the Education Department and other Common Core supporters didn’t fully anticipate the effect the standards would have once implemented.

“It’s fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were, and that’s pretty scary,” Duncan said. “You’ve bet your house and where you live and everything on, ‘My child’s going to be prepared.’ That can be a punch in the gut.”
Overcoming that will require communicating to parents that competition is now global, not local, he said.

Did he really say that? Was I in Toronto listening to Mayor Ford? White suburban moms? Really??? In 2013??? Competition is global, not local – so parent concerns about what’s happening to their children do not matter? Did he and Commissioner King go to the same Charter Charm School???

Although I found Governor Cuomo’s comment about failing schools reprehensible, I think that THAT Charm School would definitely qualify for the death penalty!

I had to write to him. It will go out tomorrow as soon as I get to district office…don’t have letterhead at home.”

Categories Common Core, Duncan, Arne, New York

Alert: White Suburban Moms Declared a Terrorist Threat!

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2013 //
13

Thanks to the warning issued by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, white suburban moms have been declared a terrorist threat, according to satirist Students Last.

“Citing national security concerns, “white suburban moms” have been classified as a terrorist group.

Time to get a belly laugh from the national madness!

http://studentslast.blogspot.com/2013/11/white-suburban-moms-not-very-bright.html”

Categories Common Core, Duncan, Arne, Humor
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