Schools Matter:
Schools Matter All Week
Poor Children Need More High Stakes Standardized Testing
How much longer will this nation and its political and corporate leaders continue to hide behind standardized testing and accountability for teachers while more children and families slip into poverty because of greedy sociopaths? Answer: as long as parents and teachers allow it.Do you think the Acosta children will cause their teachers to lose their jobs because they didn't reach 100 percent prof
YESTERDAY
While Protesting School Closures and Conversions in Philadelphia, Weingarten Begs Congress for Expanded Support for Charter Schools
"It is critical that you adopt proposed amendments providing important safeguards to ensure that all students have equitable access to charter schools, and that charters are held to similar standards of accountability and transparency as traditional public schools." See the letter here.
Reading for points vs. reading for pleasure
Sent to the Christian Science Monitor, May 9, 2014The book popularity data from "What are kids reading? Books like 'Hunger Games,' but classics, too," (May 8) comes from reading done in preparation for tests, not reading for pleasure. The data comes from reading done as part of the Accelerated Reader (AR) program. AR sells tests that students take after reading a book. Students are award
MAY 08
12th grade NAEP scores: Does the common core deserve the credit?
Sent to the Hartford Courant, May 7, 2014It is a premature to give the "new academic standards" of the common core credit for Connecticut's good performance on the 12th grade NAEP reading test ("State Students Excel On 'Nation's Report Card'," May 7). First, the improvement was not uniform: Grade 8 scores increased less than grade 12 scores, and grade 4 scores stayed the same a
Where Do TN Schools Stand After Two Decades of the Sanders VAM Fertilizer Treatment?
After two decades of value-added nonsense posing as a school improvement plan, 70 percent of Tennessee teachers are being evaluated based on test scores that belong to someone else, and the state's 12th graders are ranked one step from the basement in terms of proficiency in math and reading. With Bill Sanders now out to pasture, will his flawless algorithm for diverting attention away from educa
SPLC says don't read tacit support for Common Core into their condemnation of reactionary hate groups
"In short, the real literacy crisis occurs whenever we deploy a pedagogy that asks our students only to consume texts and not to produce them as well." — Richard E. Miller Profiteering members of the testing industrial complex, and right-of-center Democrats were quick to embrace the release of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) report that correctly takes issue with right wing extrem
MAY 07
Chicago Teachers Join National Opposition to Common Core
BY CTU COMMUNICATIONS | 05/07/2014CHICAGO – Today, members of the House of Delegates (HOD) of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) passed the following resolution that enjoins the city’s educators to growing national opposition to the Common Core State Standards, saying the assessments disrupt student learning and consume tremendous amounts of time and resources for test preparation and administrati
Charter Schools: New Report on Massive Fraud, Abuse, and Mismanagement
Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud, & Abuse
KIPP's Gritsters Get Hammered for Amoral Character Goals
Capitalism is neither moral nor immoral; it is amoral. There is no room at the bottom line for pious judgments of right or wrong that might affect the balance sheet. Capitalism is about the accumulation of capital to make more capital and nothing else. There was a time in our not-so-distant past when capitalists chose to make money in ways that supported some of the humane individual and group
MAY 06
Houston Teachers File Federal Lawsuit Over Use of VAM
Seven teachers, union suing HISD over evaluationsWhen Bill Sanders, the agricultural statistician and adjunct professor who developed TVAAS and EVAAS and became a multimillionaire as a result, is asked about how he derives his estimates of teacher effects on test scores, he flashes his algorithm, which is supposed to satisfy those who wonder how the Wiz does his thing:Statisticians may be impre
Can a Weingarten Stamp of Approval Mean Anything Good for NYC Teachers?
The saddest part of Randi Weingarten’s rainy day trip to Lake Placid to get some press press photos of her protesting at the DFER ed deform meeting is that the Misleaders of the AFT and NEA have endorsed most of the agenda of the hedge funders inside the meeting, whether it is bonus pay for test scores, teacher eval based on test scores, segregated corporate charter reform schools, and the Common
MAY 05
KIPP Denies Access to Memphis KIPP Schools: Former Teacher Tells All
When I presented a paper on KIPP at AERA in New Orleans a few years back, an audience member asked me if I had ever visited a KIPP school. I answered, no, that I had not, any more than I had visited the concentration camps that came to light after WW II. Nonetheless, I went on, we have a pretty good picture of what happened at those camps, and most everything we know came after the grisliest of
those brave new tests
Ed Week cheerfully reports field-tests for Smarter Balanced and PARCC tests are going jus' fine:"Early Reports Suggest Few Field-Testing Snags" [http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/05/06/30fieldtest_ep.h33.html?cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS1]I posted this comment: This "field-testing" seems to be mostly about technical aspects of implementation. I get the impression that analysis of the t
MAY 04
Randi to the Barricades Once More
Randi Weingarten was donning her rain gear today as she protested a meeting of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) and the profiteering loser swine who get rich through corporate welfare privatizing strategies. Randi's dramatic photos and angry shouts would be much more compelling if AFT did not support and enable the primary corporate strategies that all the DFER guys were discussing today indo
The Myth of the Non-Profit Charter School
The AFT, NEA, and all their non-profit corporate hangers-on attempt to minimize their support for the total compliance segregated charter chain gangs by trying to distinguish between the "bad" for-profit charters and the "good" and the more numerous non-profit variety. There are 2 principle reasons this distinction is as phony as the idea that Dennis and Randi support the inte
Teacher Vows to End the Madness
Posted at WaPo:By Ralph RattoToday was the first day I was ever ashamed to be a teacher.Today I finished administering the sixth day of New York State Common Core assessments. I was a facilitator in a process that made my 10-year-old students struggle, to the point of frustration, to complete yet another 90-minute test. I sat by as I watched my students attempt to answer questions today that were
MAY 03
"Pressing needs" in American education
S. Krashen Diane Ravitch recently observed that there has been a big hurry to implement the Common Core. In 2009, she urged the authors of the Common Core to field test it before implementation, advice they did not follow. Again in 2010, at the White House, she urged field testing, but officials "quickly dismissed the idea. They were in a hurry. They wanted Common Core to be rolled out as qu
"Orgy of Tabulation"
We had a previous testing frenzy of similar magnitude during the "progressive" Eugenics Era of the 1920s and the 1930s. Harold Rugg referred to it as an "orgy of tabulation." At that time it took the Nazis to remind of where we were headed and a Great Depression to make the test mania unaffordable. What will it take this time? No good idea, strategy, or intervention in educat