Hartford Courant: Pelto Is No Spoiler
It is funny to see the big-money corporate types behind Governor Dan Malloy criticizing Jonathan Pelto as a “spoiler.” These are the same people who love school choice. The just don’t like voter choice. The Hartford Courant says quite rightly that Pelto is playing by the rules. This is democracy, Governor Malloy and friends. Jon Pelto is standing up for teachers and parents and everyone else wh
Will Obama Ban TFA?
Joy Resmovits reports that the Onama administration plans to enforce a provision of NCLB that requires states to put experienced and highly qualified teachers in schools serving high numbers of poor and minority students. Will this create a crisis for Teach for America, whose corps members have no experience? Since this administration believes that teachers can be judged by student test scores,
Carol Burris: How “Reformers” Inflate College Remediation Rates
In the television series called “The Wire,” there is an episode dedicated to “juking the stats.” Since it is a program about the police, criminals, and the drug trade, “juking the stats” means that the officials were able to manipulate crime data to show that crime was up–requiring more police–or down–showing their success in slowing a crime wave. Now we know that the corporate education reform mo
Jason France: The Data Crises in Louisiana
Jason France (aka blogger Crazy Crawfish) writes here about the warping and destruction of data held by the Louisiana Department of Education. He writes: “There is a data crisis at LDOE. Almost all of the data collection systems are failing. The data, statistics and reports being generated are garbage. Data is being ferried back and forth between the department and school districts using Excel w
Linda Darling-Hammond: How to Close the Achievement Gap
Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University offers common-sense ideas about closing the achievement gap. She says that testing is less important than teaching. No surprise there. She reviews an OECD study about teachers. What it shows is that teachers in the U.S. work longer hours under more difficult conditions than teachers in many other nations. “Now we have international evidence about somet
The Same Old Miracle School in Chicago, with a High Attrition Rate
A few years ago,I wrote an article in The New YorkTimes about “miracle schools” that weren’t. I called out Mayor Bloomberg, as well as Arne Duncan and President Obama for making grandiose claims about schools that allegedly graduated 100% of their students or saw dramatic test score gains. On closer inspection, none of the miracles was true. In the schools where the scores jumped by 50 points, the
Indiana: Governor Pence Is Trying to Thwart the Will of the Voters
Two years ago, Glenda Ritz pulled off an astonishing upset in Indiana when she trounced rightwing favorite Tony Bennett to win the position as State Superintendent of Instruction. Bennett far outspent her but lost anyway. She got more votes than new Governor Mike Pence. Since then, Pence has worked tirelessly to undermine Ritz’s authority and transfer her responsibilities to other agencies, includ
Kaiser Fung: Bill Gates Needs to Hire a Statistical Advisor
Thanks to Paul Thomas for the link to this impressive post by Kaiser Fung, a professional statistician. Fung saw an article By Gates claiming that spending on education was rising but student achievement was flat. Fung demolished this claim and said that Gates was promoting innumeracy. The scales of his graph were wrong, the analysis was wrong, the arguments rested on fallacies. Gates, he said,
Susan Ochshorn: Why the Academic Pressure in Kindergarten?
In the early 1980s, our political leaders went into a panic because the economy stalled. Other nations had higher test scores. Thus the schools must be to blame for the industrial growth of Japan and Germany, so said a report called “A Nation at Risk” by President Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education in 1983. By 1988, Susan Ochshorn writes, the academic demands of third grade h
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Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all: Peter Greene: Who Would Replace Duncan?Peter Greene responds to the NEA resolution. Calling for Arne Duncan to resign. he first deals with the debate on Twitter, about who would replace Arne Duncan. The assumption behind the discussion is that President Obama has no idea what Duncan has been doing and that when he finds out, Duncan