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Saturday, March 23, 2013

Diane in the Evening 3-23-13 Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all

Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all:









Chicago Tribune Abandons Public Education

The Chicago Tribune says that the public is ready for “reform.”
What they mean by reform is that it is time to blame teachers if kids don’t learn, and punish the teachers, like, fire them.
What they mean by reform is that the editorial board wants the public schools to be put into private hands.
They are positive about merit pay even though it has never succeeded anywhere, including Chicago. The Chicago merit pay plan was funded with $27 million from the US Department of Education’s Teacher Incentive Fund. The 


A Frank Letter from the Principal of Venice High School

The Venice High School in Los Angeles has been offered a choice by the district administration: accept a pilot school or a charter school to share your space. The community was not asked for its input nor offered the choice to say no to a pilot school and a charter school.
The first pilot school was going to be created by non-educator Steve Barr, but the LA board decided to backtrack so they approved the plan to co-locate in the VHS building but to locate Barr’s school elsewhere.
The principal of Venice High School was told that a decision about the future of the school will be made during 

A Teacher’s View of a Closing School in Chicago

From a teacher:
“I worked at one of the CPS schools that is going to be closed and, contrary to the administrative determination, it is not an “underutilized” school.
“The school is truly an anchor in the community. Many teachers have worked there so long that their students 

Those Wacky Teacher Evaluation Schemes

Matt Di Carlo is a careful social scientist. He combs through the data on teacher evaluation and tries to understand whether they make sense statistically. In his latest blog, he reports that the the results so far seem to show that most teachers are getting very good ratings. This is a huge disappointment to the corporate reformers, because they were counting on the new evaluations to discover vast numbers of “bad teachers” and those teachers would be fired.
He cites an article in Education Week which found that “in Michigan, Florida and Georgia, a high proportion of teachers (more than 90 percent) received one of the two top ratings (out of four or five). This has led to some grumbling among advocates and others, citing similarities between these results and those of the old systems, 


LISTEN TO DIANE RAVITCH 3-23-13 Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all

coopmike48 at Big Education Ape - 31 minutes ago
Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all: [image: Click on picture to Listen to Diane Ravitch] Governor Malloy Abandons Equitable Funding Plan in Connecticut by dianerav In this important article, civil rights attorney explains how Governor Malloy switched sides on the funding formula for Connecticut public schools. What hypocrisy! As mayor of Stamford, he was a plaintiff in the lawsuit. As governor, he now opposes the views he once espoused. Lecker writes: “As Stamford’s mayor, Dannel Malloy was an original plaintiff in the pending school funding case, Th... more »