Archives for category: Duncan, Arne
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Crazy Crawfish on Arne Duncan

By dianeravitch
October 6, 2013 //
18

Crazy Crawfish blogs from Louisiana. His friends know him
as Jason France. He worked in the assessment division of the
Louisiana Department of Education until he couldn’t stand it
anymore.

He wrote a comment for this blog in which he critiques Arne Duncan’s critique of critics who
live in “an alternate universe.”

Crazy Crawfish writes:

I may not know the secret to fixing every school, but I know what doesn’t
work: Arne Duncan.

Also: Closing the schools

Firing all the teachers

Busing all the kids hours away to new schools

Putting 50+ kids in.a class

Virtual schools

Common core

Stripping funding from them

Handing then over to profit centric people

TFA

Handing everyone an ipad instead of a good teacher

Continued testing

Vouchers

Forcing all disabled kids to take ACT

Charters with fascist mandatory marches

Narrowing curriculum to exclude arts, history, science

USED

Resegregation

Schools that teach creationism

Schools that treat kids like products instead of people

Mass school closings Etc

(Basically anything Arne Duncan does)

By opposing Arne Duncan, if we do nothing else, we are improving schools by delaying
him from destroying them.

Categories Duncan, Arne

Julian Vasquez Heilig: Who Is Living in an “Alternate Universe”?

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2013 //
12

The ever-dazzling Julian Vasquez Heilig here addresses the burning issue of the day: whose opinion matters?

Or stated another way: who lives in an “alternate universe”?

Categories Duncan, Arne

Arne Duncan Blasts Critics of His Reforms as “Armchair Pundits”

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2013 //
85

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan blasted critics of Race to the Top and his “reforms” as “armchair pundits.”

Anthony Cody writes about his remarks here and reproduces part of his remarks (not the part where he boasts of his many “accomplishments” as Secretary of Education). I expect he made no reference to the high levels of demoralization among teachers and principals documented by the annual MetLife survey. But, hey, disruption is part of the plan, right? Pushing out the veterans is not counted a bad thing in Arne’s play book. He likes the nimble kids who stay two years, then leave.

Does Duncan think that teachers and principals are armchair pundits?

Does he think that researchers who have demonstrated the futility of value-added assessments like Linda Darling-Hammond (candidate Obama’s education advisor in 2008) are armchair pundits?

Does he think that researchers like David Berliner, who has studied the effects of poverty on academic achievement for decades, is an armchair pundit?

I guess he means me. I have studied the history and politics of American education for more than forty years. It is true that I believe what Duncan calls “reform” is a disaster that is demoralizing teachers and principals, harming communities, and doing incalculable damage to American education. I explain why I believe this in my new book, “Reign of Error.” I document everything I write.

I would like Secretary Duncan to explain why he thinks that more testing and more standardization and more charter schools is better than placing his bets on the research-based recommendations in my book.

I would like him to explain why the Obama administration’s education policies are so closely aligned–nearly identical–to the failed NCLB policies.

Looking for common ground.

Categories Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, For-Profit, Poverty, Privatization, Race to the Top

Can Schools End Poverty?

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2013 //
44

Matt Bruenig has written in many journals. He also has
a blog, where this post appeared. He analyzes a fairly
straightforward question: Can schools end poverty? The column is a
commentary on the “reformers” who say that we can’t end poverty
until we fix schools, or something to that effect. We have heard
the same statement from Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan, Joel Klein,
Bill Gates, and others. Duncan says that even the President agrees.
Bruenig analyzes these three statements:

  1. Education is a way to end
    poverty.
  2. Education is the best
    way     to end poverty.
  3. Education
    is the only way to end
    poverty.

He starts his short analysis with
this statement: These are all false, but since number
three is the one Rhee and Duncan and the education reformer crowd
pushes, let’s start there. It is flatly not the case that to end
poverty you need to alter education. Americans should know this.
Starting from the 1960s, we
as a society cut outrageously high rates of elderly poverty by
71%. We did that by sending old people checks called
Social Security. We also know from international data that
low-poverty countries get that way through tax and transfer
schemes, not unlike Social Security (I, II).
If you are saying nothing but education will dramatically cut
poverty, when things other than education absolutely will and have,
you are an enemy of the poor. You are contributing to a discursive
world where people ignore the easiest, most proven ways to cut
poverty. If this is true, and I think it is, all the
energy and billions expended on school reforms that are totally
lacking in evidence–like VAM and merit pay and privatization of
public funds–is a handy distraction from meaningful ways to end
poverty.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Poverty, Rhee, Michelle

Do You Need a Laugh Today? Read This.

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2013 //
18

Julian Vasquez Heilig is the most creative blogger I know in terms of his brilliant combination of flashy graphics, research, and informed commentary.

Here he describes the century-long battle between the managerial elites—who believe that schools can be improved by data, management, mandates and standardization, always controlled by them–and the pedagogical crowd–who have fought the managers that the starting point in education is the students, how they learn, what they need, not the management.

It is Taylor vs. Dewey.

The Taylorites run the show for now. They ARE the status quo.

The day of reckoning is coming.

They are losing because everything they have done has failed.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Rhee, Michelle, Students

DC Insiders See Bleak Future for CCSS

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2013 //
15

This poll of DC insiders shows a deep pessimism about the prospects for Common Core and reauthorization of NCLB.

Most interesting observations:

• “Any bandwidth Congress has seems to be devoted to re‐litigating the health care act.”
• “There’s no sense of compromise and no incentive on either side to try to compromise.”
• “Arne Duncan has so mangled federal education at this point that it’s going to take a new administration and secretary to reframe the debate and offer a path forward.”

Categories Duncan, Arne, Race to the Top

Jason Stanford: When California and Texas Agree But Arne Duncan Says No

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2013 //
35

Jason Stanford has written a brilliant analysis of the efforts by state officials in Texas and California to cut back on unnecessary testing, and of Secretary Duncan’s rejection of both requests.

Just in terms of federalism, this situation shows how Washington has now taken control out of the hands of the states, which can no longer decide what is best for their students, even though they put up 90% of the funding.

In California, state officials want to drop the state tests so they can make the transition to Common Core testing, but Duncan said no. The California legislature voted to drop the state tests. This should lead to an interesting showdown between the state and the federal government. Someone might even remember the tenth amendment to the Constitution.

In Texas, state officials developed a plan to test the kids who needed testing and to reduce testing for the kids who don’t.

Stanford writes:

Meanwhile in Texas, the Department of Education rejected a common-sense reform in, of all places, Texas. Legislators and Gov. Rick Perry recognized that it wasn’t necessary to force every child to take every test every year to keep them on track. Under current law, a Texas schoolchild has to pass 17 tests to get to high school. This takes months out of the school year, costs millions of dollars, and produces data of dubious value.

For example, a child who passes a reading test one year is overwhelmingly likely to pass it the next year, according to data from the Texas Education Agency. The legislature asked for a federal waiver to let students who passed their state standardized tests in the 3rd and 5thgrades to skip the tests in the 4th, 6th and 7th grades. Teachers could focus on those kids who needed more help, students who had mastered the work would be freed up to learn new things, and taxpayers would save $13.4 million over two years.

This was a great example of government getting out of its own way, but there was a hitch. Because the Texas law conflicted with No Child Left Behind, Texas needed permission from the U.S. Department of Education to stop giving tests to kids who did not need them in order to produce data that told us nothing.

Unfortunately, Obama’s Education Department said no.

Gosh, when even Texas thinks there is too much testing, that should say something about how far we have wandered from common sense.

Categories Accountability, California, Duncan, Arne, Testing, Texas

Klein’s Amplify Tablets Crack the $17 Billion Market

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2013 //
61

The New York Times magazine has a long article by Carlo Rotella about the first trial of the Amplify tablet in the schools of Guilford County, North Carolina. Amplify is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and run by Joel Klein, the former chancellor of the NewYork City public schools.

Klein is certain that public education in America is a disaster and the only things that can save it are disruptive technology and the Common Core. Those are the same recommendations made by the task force Klein co-chaired for the Council on Foreign Relations last year.

Happily for Murdoch, Klein, and other apostles of saving the schools by selling technology to them, they have a friend in Arne Duncan. He is quoted as follows:

“To keep doing the same thing we’ve been doing for the past hundred years — everybody working on the same thing at the same time, not based on competency. . . .” He sighed and let the thought trail off, then added his standard reminder that we must equip our students to compete with counterparts in India and China. He did acknowledge, though, that the fear of falling behind puts added pressure on school systems to do something, anything, which then makes them more vulnerable to rushed decisions and to peddlers of magic bullets. “There are a lot of hucksters out there,” he said.

“Duncan, whose longtime allies include Joel Klein, Bill Gates and other apostles of disruption, has a record of supporting reforms that increase the role of market forces — choice, competition, the profit motive — in education. He wants private enterprises vying to make money by providing innovative educational products and services, and sees his role as “taking to scale the best practices” that emerge from this contest.”

One of the trainers of teachers uses a phrase that we have now heard about a million times , meaning that we are experimenting on you and don’t know how things will turn out: “Another PLEF, Wenalyn Bell, told her group, “It’s like building a plane while it’s flying.”

Rotella retains a healthy skepticism. He knows that Los Angeles laid off teachers while it spent big bucks to buy iPads.

He ends with these observations from his last interview with Klein.

“Take Finland,” Klein continued, citing everyone’s favorite example of a country that puts its money on excellent teachers, not technology, and routinely finishes at the top in international assessments. “There’s a high barrier for entry into the teaching profession,” the kind that lets in the Robin Britts and keeps out weaker aspirants. Teachers there are also well paid, held in high esteem and trusted to get results without being forced to teach to the test. But America’s educational system is a lot bigger, messier, less centralized and more focused on market-based solutions than Finland’s. Also, our greater income inequality and thinner social safety net make for much wider variation in student performance, and a toxic political climate has encouraged our traditional low regard for teachers to flower into outright contempt.

“Still, if everyone agrees that good teachers make all the difference, wouldn’t it make more sense to devote our resources to strengthening the teaching profession with better recruitment, training, support and pay? It seems misguided to try to improve the process of learning by putting an expensive tool in the hands of teachers we otherwise treat like the poor relations of the high-tech whiz kids who design the tool.

“Are our overwhelmed, besieged, haphazardly recruited, variably trained, underpaid, not-so-elite teachers, in fact, the potential weak link in Amplify’s bid to disrupt American schooling? Klein said that we have 3.5 million elementary- and middle-school teachers. “We have to put the work of the most brilliant people in their hands,” he said. “If we don’t empower them, it won’t work.” Behind the talking points and buzz words, what I heard him saying was Yes.”

Categories Duncan, Arne, Klein, Joel, Technology, Computers

KrazyTA on Arne Duncan’s Rhetoric

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2013 //
29

Our frequent commenter KrazyTA was not pleased when Arne Duncan told California it could not stop state testing while introducing Common Core testing.

This was his observation:

This latest statement by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan needs to be viewed in context.

If you read his speech to the April 2013 American Education Research Association he is: for standardized testing and against it; it is useful and not useful and somewhat useful; education is all about testing and not all about testing and somewhat about testing; tests measure and mismeasure and somewhat measure learning and teaching; and to get to the point before his distinguished audience, schools and test experts need to get their testing act together. The clincher: “Some schools have an almost obsessive culture around testing, and that hurts their most vulnerable learners and narrows the curriculum. It’s heartbreaking to hear a child identify himself as “below basic” or “I’m a one out of four.””

Link: http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/choosing-right-battles-remarks-and-conversation

What is one to make of all this ‘word salad’ that wanders all over the place and seeks to placate and deflect? Teresa Watanabe let the cat out of the bag in the LATIMES of 8-29-13, “State academic performance slips, but L.A. Unified improves.” Her first paragraph: “California public schools lost ground this year in overall academic performance for the first time in a decade, but more than half met state goals for achievement on reading and math standardized tests.”

So just how important are standardized tests in the overall scheme of things?

“The achievement ratings, called the Academic Performance Index, are based on a 1,000-point scale compiled from standardized test scores. They are widely viewed as a comprehensive marker of school quality, affecting property values and triggering penalties, among other effects.”

Link: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-api-scores-20130829,0,447246.story

In other words, the quality of schools and student achievement and teacher effectiveness = scores on high-stakes standardized tests.

Am I exaggerating? Taking him out of context? Obviously not, for even when for good reasons—within the very strictures imposed by high-stakes standardized testing!—state officials take obvious action to forego for a short time one round of the Holy Edumetrics of $tudent $ucce$$ in order to prepare for another, the Secretary of Education suddenly grows a backbone and speaks his mind plain and simple:

“If California moves forward with a plan that fails to assess all its students, as required by federal law,” Duncan said in a statement released Monday night, “the Department will be forced to take action, which could include withholding funds from the state.”

Link: [the second above in Diane’s posting]

One of the great functions of this blog: to make it possible to put such folks on the spot with their own public words and actions!

Duane Swacker: I think this is a rare instance of you and I parting company on measuring qualities by quantities. I think that blind acceptance of the all-importance of the scores of high-stakes standardized testing can give us an excellent measure of the LACK of: creativity, critical thinking, curiosity, civic-mindedness, compassion, empathy, courage, imagination, and humility [not to mention others]. [taken from Gerald Bracey, EDUCATION HELL, 2009, p. 4].

Just look at the current Secretary of Education. He passed the high-stakes standardized test of “LACK of” with flying colors! He scored a perfect 100 out of 100!

🙂

Lastly, on the misuse and overuse of standardized testing in general, from THE MISMEASURE OF EDUCATION (2013) by Jim Horn and Denise Wilburn, p. 147:

“When the right thing can only be measured poorly, it tends to cause the wrong thing to be measured, only because it can be measured well. And it is often much worse to have a good measurement of the wrong thing—especially when, as is so often the case, the wrong thing will in fact be used as an indicator of the right thing—than to have poor measurements of the right things. —John Tukey mathematician Bell Labs and Princeton University”

Categories California, Duncan, Arne, Testing

California Ignores Duncan Ultimatum

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2013 //
34

When California officials decided to skip its regular state tests while making the transition to the new Common Core tests, Secretary Arne Duncan warned them that he wouldn’t permit it.

California’s leaders ignored Duncan’s warnings and threats. The state legislature passed the legislation to suspend the state tests.

What a paradox! No one has pushed harder for states to adopt the Common Core (untested) standards than Duncan, yet here he was threatening to punish a state that was doing what he supposedly wanted.

Lewis Freedberg of Edsource in California commented:

“Veteran education watchers in California could not recall a presidential cabinet officer ever attempting to block state legislation and certainly not in the heavy handed way U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan attempted to do on Monday night.”

Federalism seems to be an unknown concept to Duncan.

..

Categories California, Common Core, Duncan, Arne
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »