Report Testing Child Abuse in New York Kindergartens
If you suspect child abuse, you are required by law to report it Child Protective Services. Call toll free in New York 800-342-3720.From NY Daily News:Goodbye Play-Doh, hello No. 2 pencils.Because of a tough new curriculum and teacher evaluations, 4- and 5-year-olds are learning how to fill in bubbles on standardized math tests to show how much they know about numbers, shapes and order.Teachers s
Show us the evidence
Posted on State Impact: Ohio - Eye on Education - http://tinyurl.com/ltoc4xqIn the class described in "How the Common Core is Changing How Kids Learn in English Class," (Dec 16), the teacher urges students to "cite evidence" for their statements, part of the push for increased nonfiction in the schools. Ironically, there is no scientific evidence that anyone can cite that suppo
Do other countries teach better?
Sent to the New York Times, Dec. 19, 2013The Times asks "Why Other Countries Teach Better?" (Dec. 18). But there is no clear evidence that they do. The most powerful factor in developing well-educated citizens, not mentioned by the Times, is poverty: When researchers control for the effects of poverty, our students score near the top on international tests. A survey from the Organization
Weingarten Joins Union Enemy John Engler to Plead with Governors to Keep Common Core
On December 10 Randi Weingarten flew into Newark with her gold-plated bullhorn to protest the entirely predicted outcome to a teacher contract that she helped negotiate just over a year ago. At the time the Newark agreement gave bragging rights to Republican governor Chris Christie for making New Jersey the first state in the Union to base teacher pay on student test scores and on a teacher evalu
The Biggest Lies of "We Won't Back Down"
The movie "We Won't Back Down" was on television this week. It is a product of the corporate-sponsored Parent Revolution. With the help of financing by Walden Media and other business conservatives, the movie tells the fictionalized story of the California "Parent Trigger" law allowing the takeover of a failing school when 51% of parents file a petition. In their telling, howev
Excuses, Excuses...
In response to test scores for New York City:New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's reign as head of the nation's largest school system resulted in greatly improved graduation rates, but test scores that lagged behind the pace of other large American cities. New York City students' scores on national math and reading tests released Wednesday didn't show significant change in 2013 from 2011, ticki
Doomed!
A clip from the Salon article:. . . . Few would dispute that we should hold our educators and the children they are entrusted with to a high bar of excellence, but evaluating performance on test scores has never been a viable strategy. As Common Core test results have started trickling in, the results aren’t pretty. In New York, they show a widening of the achievement gap between black and white s
12-18-13 Schools Matter
Schools Matter: Accountability without Autonomy Is TyrannyAt The Answer Sheet, Valerie Strauss confronts What’s wrong with this headline?:What’s wrong with this headline speaks to what’s wrong with a lot of the debate about school reform today. The problem is the indiscriminate and inaccurate use of the word “accountability.”While politicians and the media continue to pound at one nail—teacher qua