Schools Matter:
Teachers Sabotaged by Unaccountable Text Book Companies
Schools Matter All Week
The Cy Young argument for increased testing
NEA president Dennis Von Roekel has made this argument: "Under the No Child Left Behind law, states have released test results that supposedly tell us how many students are proficient in math and reading. The problem is, each state sets its own benchmark for proficiency, and different students are held to different standards. Imagine if the batting average of one baseball player was based o
Do educators support the common core?
Last month (September) the National Education Association announced " that a "Majority of Educators "strongly" support the Common Core State Standards" (headline of an article that appeared in NEA Today). I have been unable to find the details of the questions and the results on the internet, but the NEA's own report of the results are not consistent with their headline
Teachers Sabotaged by Unaccountable Text Book Companies
Each day, the stories get more and more Kafkaesque.Perhaps while the teachers are waiting for their corporatized, standardized, soulless curriculum and text books to arrive, they can have the students and staff read Diane Ravitch's Reign of Error. From NYT: Tardy Deliveries Keep New Books Out of Teachers Hands“They want to evaluate us on how well the kids do on the test,” Mr. Mulgrew said, “but th
The Great Phonics Debate Again! This time in Australia
Phonics debate in The Australianhttp://tinyurl.com/prp2ucvContents: Our letter, then two responses, then our responseThe (limited) impact of heavy phonics instructionPublished in The Australian, Oct 1, 2013 as "Foster Love of Reading"In "Bad teaching kills reading skills," (Sept. 30) Jennifer Buckingham claims that failing to include "explicit, systematic and structured&qu
YESTERDAY
Will Value-Added Testing Do as Little for the Nation as It Has for Tennessee?
If you go the Washington Post education page, hang a right down the hallway to the back bedroom and look under the bed in the box labeled "Stuff Jeff Bezos Won't Like," you will find this article, which is based largely on findings from TMoE. Update 10:56 AM: The title above, "Will Value-Added Testing Do as Little for the Nation as It Has for Tennessee?" has been changed. Why
OCT 03
From the End of the Beginning to the Beginning of the End for High Stakes Testing
Mark Mulville/Buffalo NewsRemember: it happened in Buffalo--the night that 2,500 parents, teachers, and administrators showed up. Now let's keep the hammer down.From the Buffalo News by Dale Anderson: Reform of high-stakes testing for schoolchildren, a groundswell movement of lawn signs and small-scale protests, became an earthquake Wednesday evening.The Summit for Smarter Schools, organized b
Bill Gates Gets an F From Shareholders
LOOKS LIKE YOUR MEASUREMENTS AND DATA ONLY CAN GET YOU SO FAR
Gates Gets an F From Shareholders
LOOKS LIKE YOUR MEASUREMENTS AND DATA ONLY CAN GET YOU SO FARShareholders ask Bill Gates to Step DownLooks like Bill Gates has been asked to step down as the leader of Microsoft.
OCT 02
Billboards That Matter
From Don Perl:Dear Colleagues:I have randomly gone through the names of those who have been strong activists in the past for our billboard campaign to inform parents of their rights to exempt their children from the fraud of high stakes standardized testing. As most of you know, we have advertised on Colorado highways since 2005 to raise awareness of the boondoggle of CSAP (now TCAP) and eac
Options PCS Featured in Today's Charter School Crime Log
A clip from WaPo:In the court complaint, D.C. officials allege that the managers’ salaries were far out of line with what public officials make, especially given the size of the school.Montgomery’s “salary and bonuses from Options PCS during a one-year period — at least $425,000 combined — totaled more than the salary of the President of the United States and more than twice the salary of the
Arne Duncan, Extortionist
extortion |ikˈstôrSHən|nounthe practice of obtaining something, esp. money, through force or threats.In California, where corporate legislators have decided to suspend NCLB testing for one year while they implement a new generation of racist tests using the new testing delivery system, the Common Core, Arne Duncan is on the scene, threatening to withhold Title I money if California moves forward:
OCT 01
Head Start Hammered by Shutdown
From WaPo: The government shutdown has caused as many as 19,000 children to lose access to Head Start today, the National Head Start Association reported Tuesday.More than 20 programs across 11 states did not get the annual grant they had been scheduled to receive Tuesday and cannot provide early education and related social services to children and families.
ASD in TN Makes State Test the Only Grade that Counts
We have known for a long time that school grades are better indicators of later student success than standardized test scores, and we have known, too, that many parents have complained and continue to complain when their children get passing marks and are held back for failing the state test. Well, both of those possibilities have just been eliminated in Memphis schools under the control of Supt.
Take Action Now Against Mike Pence's Public Education Power Grab
By Doug Martin UPDATE: Fellow Schools Matter blogger Douglas Storm spoke with Vic Smith, Phil Harris, and Gary Crow (IU School of Ed) last night on his radio show. You can now listen to the podcast at WFHB. Just what exactly is the recently announced ‘Center for Education and Career Innovation’ created by Indiana Governor Mike Pence? It is a power grab from the governor and state board of educa
The Assault on Public Education in SC Continues: More Innovation!
How much education innovation can a high-poverty state take?Apparently, according to former-general-without-a-second-of-experience-as-a-teacher Superintendent Mick Zais, just a little more.As reported by Patrick Hayes at EdFirstSC (and not reported at the Charleston Post and Courier because the P&C is all about endorsing the worst possible policies for SC public schools, such as merit pay and
SEP 30
Shelby County's Mayor, Mark Luttrell, Leading Public Effort to Privatize Head Start in Memphis
In 2010 State Democratic Chairman, Chip Forrester, said this about Shelby County mayor, Mark Luttrell:"He's a right-wing ideologue whose two planks are to build a bigger jail [now #10 in the U.S.] and to out-source county jobs. He's attempting to cozy up to Democrats, and he's not clear about his Republican pedigree. There's a sense that Mark Luttrell is a moderate, somebody who stays in
Mike Pence’s Faith-Based Quest to Corporatize Preschool
By Doug MartinEven though Indiana does not fund preschool and even failed to pass a law for a preschool pilot program recently, Mike Pence has a newly-formed early childhood learning advisory committee which doesn’t seem to be meant to help the situation. In fact, the advisory committee reflects a free-market biblical capitalism and should shock true Christians and parents alike. Instead of fundi
SEP 29
Protests Spread Against Huffman Among Tennessee School Administrators
In the most recent outbreak of protests against Kevin Huffman's mis-leaderership of Tennessee schools,The Marshall County Board of Education has formally endorsed a letter recently submitted to Gov. Bill Haslam and the General Assembly that expresses discontent with the current leadership in the Department of Education.The eight-member school board approved the single page resolution Tuesday at a
Michael Goldenberg's Review of The Mismeasure of Education
By Michael P. Goldenberg "Markov Chaney"This review posted at Amazon.THE MISMEASURE OF EDUCATION pays homage in its title to Stephen Jay Gould's classic MISMEASURE OF MAN, a book that exposed much of the sordid history of intelligence testing in the United States and how it became almost from its inception tainted by racist assumptions and an obsession with rank-ordering human being
Petrilli's Embarrassing Post about Poor Mothers Being "Bad"
This post is embarrassing—both for the content and the fact that Petrilli appears unaware how embarrassing it is.Single-mothers are not "bad"; they are overwhelmed.Education is not to create economically self-sufficient people (that serves the privileged who feed off the economy). Education's goals are much BIGGER than that—self-awareness and complete autonomy, within which economic self
SEP 28
How Bill Gates Views the World
Money is power.Power is money.Bill Gates has too much of both.Valerie Strauss gets it—that Bill Gates is not what education needs: “Education reform should not be driven by private philanthropists with their own agendas, however well-intentioned.”Ultimately, the problem is Gates’s view of the world. And there is no better way to express that view than the chess scene in Mel Brooks’s History of the