Throwing Angels Under a Bus
Everyone working in a schools knows the hardest job is teaching special education - especially to the most challenging children. Like all elementary music teachers, I work with special education teachers every day, and I have to tell you that they constantly amaze me with their sympathy, intelligence, insight, and patience. As far as I am concerned, anyone who devotes their career to teaching these deserving but demanding children is an angel on earth. And people who casually dismiss their work ought to be ashamed of themselves.
Ghost Of Chris Cerf's Past
Which is why this next story bugs the hell out of me:
Advocates for Children of New Jersey has been working on child poverty issues for a good long while, but only recently started focusing on K-12 education. They recently released a report - Newark Kids Count 2011 - which bemoans the poor level of reading achievement for 3rd graders in the city. The Star-Ledger's Jessica Calefati
Ghost Of Chris Cerf's Past
Michael Winerip of the New York Times had a brutal piece on Sunday documenting a decade of testing disasters in New York. After years of assurances that the state's standardized tests were valid, the system came crashing down:
JULY 2010 Finally someone — Dr. Tisch, the chancellor of the Board of Regents — has the sense to stand up at a news conference and say that the state test scores are so ridiculously inflated that only a fool would take them seriously, thereby unmasking the mayor, the chancellor and the former state commissioner. State scores are to be scaled down immediately, so that the 68.8 percent English proficiency rate at the start of the news conference becomes a 42.4 proficiency rate by the end of the news conference. Shael Polakow-Suransky, chief accountability officer for the city, offers the new party line: “We know there has been significant progress, and we know we