My favorite daily commentator, Teresa Hanafin of “Fast Forward” at the Boston Globe, (sorry, I have no link–if you have one, please send it) wrote this morning:
|
Please note that the hashtag #MoscowMitch is trending on Twitter. Do your best to help it trend some more.
Democratic Governor Roy Cooper vetoed legislation to allow the state’s two low-performing virtual charters to expand enrollment.
Republican legislators complained that Cooper was interfering with the family’s right to choose a failing school.
State lawmakers passed a bill in July lifting the enrollment cap on the state’s two virtual charter schools so that they could grow by 20% a year. Cooper announced Monday that he had rejected Senate Bill 392, citing the schools’ poor academic performance.
“Current law already allows the State Board of Education to lift the enrollment cap on virtual charter schools,” Cooper, a Democrat, said in a statement. “Both schools have been low performing, raising concern about the effectiveness of this pilot. Decisions on adding more students should remain with the Board so it can measure progress and make decisions that will provide the best education for students.”
Stephen Singer explains the ways that technology impedes learning. He is not opposed to technology. He is opposed to its overuse and misuse.
Way #1:
I’m a language arts teacher. I want my students to read.
I could simply assign readings and hope students do them, but that’s not practical in today’s fast-paced world. When kids are bombarded by untold promises of instant gratification, a ream of paper bordered by cardboard doesn’t hold much of a claim on their attentions.
So like many teachers, I bring reading into the classroom, itself. I usually set aside class time every other day for students to read self-selected books for about 15 minutes. Students have access to the school library and a classroom library filled with books usually popular with kids their age or popular with my previous students. They can pick something from outside these boundaries, but if they haven’t already done so, I have them covered.
In the days before every student had an iPad, this worked fairly well. Students often had books with them they wanted to read or would quickly select one from my collection and give it a try.
Sometimes when there was down time in class, when they had finished assignments or tests early, they would even pick up their self-selected books and read a little.
What a different world it was!
Now that every student has an omnipresent technological device, this has become increasingly impossible. I still set aside 15 minutes, but students often waste the time looking for an eBook on-line and end up reading just the first chapter or two since they’re free. Others read nothing but the digital equivalent of magazine articles or look up disparate facts. And still others try to hide that they’re not reading at all but playing video games or watching YouTube videos.
Even under the best of circumstances, the act of reading on a device is different than reading a printed page.
The act of reading traditional books is slower, closer and more linear. It’s the way teachers really want kids to read and which will most increase comprehension.
Reading on a screen is a product of social media. We scroll or scan through, seeking specific information and clicking on hyperlinks.
The old style of reading was transformative, absorbing and a much deeper and richer experience. The newer style is more superficial, mechanical and extrinsic. (And, Yes, I’m aware of which style of reading you’re engaged in now!)
To be fair, some students actually prefer reading eBooks on devices and may even experience the richness of the original style. But they are few and far between. Usually students use the devices to escape from the deeper kind of reading because they’ve never really done it before and don’t understand what it really is. And when they have this choice, they may never find out.
Gary Rubinstein has a keen eye for teacher-bashing disguised as research.
In this post, he takes apart a new paper from Michelle Rhee’s old outfit TNTP, which blames teachers for “low expectations.”
He begins:
Before Michelle Rhee was a board member for Miracle-Gro she was the founder and CEO of StudentsFirst. Before that, she was Chancellor of Washington D.C. schools from 2007 to 2010. Before that, she was the CEO of The New Teacher Project.
And even though Rhee is not a public figure anymore in education, she continues to influence education policy through The New Teacher Project which has since changed its name to TNTP. TNTP puts out slick papers that it calls research but is really propaganda disguised as research. Their first one was called ‘The Widget Effect’ which laid out the case for replacing salary schedules with a system based on merit pay based on statistically inappropriate analysis of standardized test scores.
And over the years they have put out other papers with clever titles like ‘The Irreplaceables’, ‘Rebalancing Teacher Tenure’, and ‘Teacher Evaluation 2.0.’ These papers are often quoted by ed reform propaganda sites like The74 and Education Post.
One of their most recent papers is called ‘The Opportunity Myth.’ Its central thesis is something that reformers love to use in their teacher bashing arguments, which is that too many teachers shortchange their students by having low expectations for them. The work they assign is not challenging enough and since students always rise to the challenge of whatever you assign to them, these teachers are negligent in their duties.
In this post, Mercedes Schneider does her trademark “deep dig” into the career of one Jon Schnur. It turns out that he is the quintessential corporate reform careerist.
If you have ever wondered why some people make tons of money in education without ever teaching, study Schnur’s opportunistic and profitable career.
He did it all while working for Clinton, Gore, and Obama, demonstrating the profitable career one can forge with Big Ideas, all the while helping blur and dissolve partisan lines, helping the Democrats lose their identity as champions of public education.
His first big idea was a program that enabled rank amateurs to become principals, although he had never been one himself. His work aligned with that of his Princeton classmate, Wendy Kopp. Both made money by tearing apart the education profession and opening it to amateurs.
Frances Gallo, who was Superintendent of Central Falls, the state’s lowest performing district, was made interim superintendent of the state-controlled Providence District.
She will be replaced in 90 days.
When Gallo led Central Falls in 2010, she threatened to fire every employee of the high school, even the lunchroom employees, to punish them for the district’s low scores. After a time of national notoriety, she left the public sector to work for a charter chain.
Central Falls today remains the lowest scoring and the most impoverished district in the state.
In her new post, Gallo promises sweeping changes:
While Gallo’s tenure as superintendent will be short, she will hold the role during the first day of school, after a full summer of discussion and debate about what to do in the wake of the Johns Hopkins report that painted a dire picture of the schools back in June.
“I’m going to turn the place upside down,” Gallo told reporters.
I hate the Democratic debates. They turn potential allies into enemies. They make it harder for candidates to share the same ticket. They set up minor policy differences as deep rifts. They generate animosity among people who must eventually unite to defeat an insane and criminal president who runs a rogue regime. They help Trump, whose party is united by fear and hatred, while sowing divisions among Democrats, whose differences are small.
|
|
 |
| Your Tax-Deductible Donation Supports Independent Journalism! |
African education leaders spoke out against privatization of their schools, which means Western corporations and taking control of their future. Privatization, they know, is the new colonialism. You can assume that a few well-chosen local leaders have been hired to argue on behalf of privatization.
|
Peter Greene points out in this post that legislatures have a nasty habit of overlooking the central question about charter schools: their funding.
They pretend that they can run two publicly funded school systems without any additional cost.
They pretend that the funding for charters is not subtracted from the funding for public schools.
Public schools are getting hammered by the loss of public tax dollars that have been diverted from public school finances into charter and choice school accounts. Charters, having forgotten the era when they bragged that they could do more with less, complain that they are underfunded compared to public schools.
The problem here, as with several other choice-related issues, is in a false premise of modern school choice movement. That false premise is the assertion that we can fund multiple school districts for the same money we used to use to fund one single public system.
This is transparent baloney. When was the last time any school district said, “We are really strapped for funds. We had better open some new schools right away!” Never. Because everyone understands that operating multiple facilities with multiple staffs and multiple administrations and multiple overhead expenses– all that costs more than putting your operation under one roof.
But the choice pitch has always been some version of, “Your community can have twelve different schools with twelve different flavors of education in twelve different buildings with twelve different staffs– and it won’t cost you a nickel more than what you’re paying now!” This is carnival barker talk, the same kind of huckster pitch as “Why buy that used Kia? I’ll sell you a brand new Mercedes for the same price!”
Adding charters and choice increases educational costs in a community. Sometimes we’ve hid that by bringing in money from outside sources, like PTA bake sales to buy a public school office equipment, or pricey benefit dinners for charters, or increasing state and federal subsidies to help charters stay afloat.
But mostly school choice is the daylight savings time of education– if we just shuffle this money around in new and different ways, somehow there will be more of it.
This trick never works. And we talk all too rarely about why it never will.
Andrea Gabor, The Bloomberg Professor of business journalism at Baruch College of the City University of New York, is one of the nation’s worthy and thoughtful education writers. Her book about W. Edwards Deming has the best refutation of merit pay that I have read (chapter 9, The Man Who Invented Quality). Her latest book book, Education After The Culture Wars, gathers stories of districts where collaboration, not competition, creates a healthy environment for education.
In this post, she argues that America’s infatuation with standardized testing is waning, and it’s time to find a better way to assess how students are progressing.
America’s decades-long infatuation with standardized testing is finally waning, and for good reasons. Despite years of training students to do better on tests, the performance of 17-year-olds on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the nation’s report card, has flatlined. At the same time, the focus on testing produced unintended consequences, including inattention to important educational priorities and growing teacher shortages.
That’s in part because test performance became a goal in many districts instead of a means to an end and, thus, a prime example of Campbell’s Law, which points to the corrupting influence of using a single measurement as a target, thus ensuring that “it ceases to be a good measure.
Gabor says there is a better way. She describes the work of the New York Performance Standards Consortium as a model.
The country’s best under-the-radar experiments are a useful guide. Chief among these is the New York State Performance Standards Consortium, a decades-old effort led by progressive educators and involving 38 high schools, which won exemptions from all standardized tests except English. Instead, students complete ambitious projects known as performance-based assessments — think mini theses with lots of research, writing and real-world projects in everything from social studies to physics, which students present to expert panels, including teachers (often from different schools) and community members.
Since launching in the 1990s, the consortium has racked up far higher graduation rates and college matriculation ratesfor its schools than New York’s traditional public schools.
The consortium prevailed even as New York became Exhibit A for the nation’s testing follies. New York adopted “Common Core-aligned” tests before the standards were completed, and introduced new tests almost every year — making it difficult to track student progress.
Is she right? Is there a big change coming?
