CURMUDGUCATION:
AP Now Stands for Assessment Prep
AP Now Stands for Assessment Prep
In Which I Have To Take Back Some of the Nice Things I Said About AP Courses When I last wrote about the AP courses (this morning), I praised the looseness of the course design. I should have known better. Alert readers pointed me at the news from AP-land; apparently the looseness is now seen as a design flaw to be fixed.Some courses, like the Literature and Composition, still sum up the basics in
Ap A-Ok?
The US DOE, among its many promotional and marketing activities, has been pushing hard for AP classes. This week they aimed loud praise noises at the state of Colorado for increasing AP participation in the state. The laudatory article declares success because more students take and pass the AP courses.But before parents and students get too excited about the spreading and blooming of AP courses,
What! Already?
The end of May is always hard. Tests, prom, yearbook distribution, my birthday, and suddenly it's finals and summer vacation. Already? Seriously?I know there are teachers who count down to the first day of summer vacation like it's Christmas morning. I am not one of those teachers. For me it's more like the countdown of a ticking bomb.There has never been enough time in the year. When I started te
YESTERDAY
Pearls, Triggers, Exonians & Checker
The trigger warnings issue has now reached a massive level of pearl clutching all around.What's the Issue?We know that trigger warnings are a thing because the New York Times wrote about them last Sunday. The basic idea seems to be that certain works of literature, classroom subjects, even statues, should come with warning labels attached because they might trigger a traumatic memory or reaction o
Tyranny of the Test
When Michelle Obama spoke up in support of the arts this week, I was not moved. In fact, I was bummed. Because her "defense" of the arts was simply one more sign that we live under the Tyranny of the Test.The bottom line here is very clear: Arts education isn't something we add on after we've achieved other priorities, like raising test scores and getting kids into college. It's actually
Why Students Drop Out
This pooped up on twitter a few days agoTo ensure every student graduates HS, 1st we need to understand why some don’t. New Grad Nation report helps explain http://t.co/5xS6f1m2ep— Arne Duncan (@arneduncan) May 22, 2014And, because I'm always interested in what Arne has to say, I followed the link. And I think Arne maybe didn't actually read it.The link goes to a report from Gradnation, a project
MAY 22
Did President Obama Ruin CCSS?
It's Obama's fault.The state-led initiative was chugging right along, moving forward without any interference from the feds, when somehow, they decided to leap in. Or as Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday recently put it, things were fine "until the President and secretary of education took credit for the Common Core."This is part of the current conservative CCSS support narr
Happy Birthday, CCSS
It seems like just yesterday that the Common Core shambled out of its cave, wearing a tissue-paper cape emblazoned with "State Led" and flexing its big rigorous baby muscles.But it has been four years, give or take a bit (because gauging its birthday is hard, depending on which backroom deal, which protean form, which lunch meeting between Achieve and its buddies, or which Memorandum of
Flunking Geography
If you want to find the grubby handprints of Rich People on education, look at the issue of geography.It has become fashionable for Reformsters to decry the influence of geography, to say that students should not be stuck with a school based on zip code, that community schools are quaint and all, but their time has passed. From Denver to Newark, Reformsters are taking deliberate aim at community s
MAY 21
Relationships & Other Missing Links
Even I can be amazed at how far off track we've gotten.I just came home from our high school choir concert. It was particularly bittersweet because our young choir director has had quite a year. She delivered a child with some complications, including the complication that led to surgery a few weeks ago (for her-- the baby is doing well now). Somewhere in the midst of all that, administration call
Common Core Cement
It's easy to get lost in the big picture or the strained minutia of Common Core, so let's for a moment just focus on one simple, clear, fatal flaw in the CCSS. If your civilian friends can't understand anything else about the fuss, help them understand this.The Common Core State Standards are set in stone.Not just stone, but stone mounted in cement crazy-glued to bedrock all sealed in amber.Let's
EWA Holds Common Core Pep Rally
The Education Writer's Association has carried lots of water for the pro-test, pro-corporate, pro-Core, anti-public ed crowd, so there's no real surprise when it was time for a discussion about the state of CCSS, their convention panel of "experts" includes six CCSS shills and one actual voice for public education.Monday's panel included Dennis van Roekel (NEA president and CCSS fan), Te
MAY 20
Go Home, Gramps!
In the ongoing battle to get older, more experienced, and (most importantly) more expensive teachers out of schools, the only surprise is that the latest push didn't come sooner.Education Next, the magazine by and for the discerning corporate conservative educrats at the Fordham Institute, Harvard Kennedy School, and the Hoover Institution, brings us an article about incentive programs for early r
Further Proof Researchers Don't Understand Humans
Most of us suffer from employment bias, the belief that we are doing work that is self-evidently important. On that list of Things They Don't Teach You In Teacher School is the realization that while we can see how obviously important our work is, not everyone shares that belief.Our employment bias simply sets us up for discouragement. But the employment bias of the folks who work with surveys and
MAY 19
Rigorizing Eight Year Olds
One of the most odious policies to emerge from the Reformster swamp is the mandatory retention of all third graders who don't pass the Big Test in reading. And now Mary Laura Bragg, the director of Florida's program, has popped up to help us all understand just how anti-child this policy is.She has popped up in North Carolina (motto: Strapping schools to a rocket and shooting hem back into the 19t
MAY 18
FEE & FL Spew Out More Silly Test Advice
Are your students worried about big stupid standardized tests? Well, Jeb Bush's shiny ed initiative has some help for you.You may recall that Jeb Bush has been scaling up the Learn More Go Further campaign. The educational reformy initiative has been scaled up for a national audience-- it's almost as if Jeb is trying to prepare for some sort of national campaign of some sort. Learn More Go Further
Serious People
Why is it that I'm so hard on some people I disagree with here and so gentle with others? Because I have a hard time taking people seriously when they aren't serious people.Certain positions in the current debates indicate clearly how serious a person is. I don't support the idea of national education standards; I think it's a bad idea, doomed to failure, that will not yield any of the benefits it
MAY 17
PA Charters Don't Want To Die By Sword
In Philadelphia, Irony has collided with Karma, casing an explosion of hilariously tragic tears.First, some history. Philadelphia schools have suffered from financial and political issues (PA's school funding system is messed up, but we'll save that for another day), as well as questions about how well it was actually teaching children. In the late 1990s this resulted in some lawsuits against the