Big Education Ape: Apr 15, 2019

Monday, April 15, 2019

The Center for American Progress—Not Progressive on Education - Progressive.org

The Center for American Progress—Not Progressive on Education - Progressive.org

The Center for American Progress—Not Progressive on Education

Over the past decade, the left-leaning Center for American Progress has become one of the most relentless voices for the corporate “education reform” movement. Although originally created as a left-leaning think tank to counterbalance groups like the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute, in recent years the center has become indistinguishable from the ed reform voices on the right.

CAP’s preferred policies—on charter schools, high stakes testing, test-based teacher evaluation, TFA, and national college-and-career ready standards—are the same positions taken by right-leaning think tanks including the Thomas Fordham Institute. Even compared to groups like the Heritage Foundation or AEI, CAP is different only in its willingness to say the words “Common Core.” CAP has even partnered with AEI and the Chamber of Commerce on ed reform.

CAP was founded in 2003 by John Podesta, former Bill Clinton Chief of Staff, counselor to Barack Obama, and current Hillary Clinton campaign chairman. Podesta’s CAP is wide-reaching and deeply funded with plenty of Soros money, among other sources. CAP has united a diverse group of organizations including the two major teachers unions, TFA, and the union-hating Democrats for Education Reform under the banner TeachStrong.

CAP has advocated for teacher merit pay. While they have pointed out that teachers don’t make enough, they advocate raising the pay for only someteachers, by linking teacher salaries to student results on the Big Standardized (“BS”) Tests.
CAP has pushed for charter schools, arguing that students must be rescued from underfunded, resource-poor public schools and their terrible CONTINUE READING: The Center for American Progress—Not Progressive on Education - Progressive.org

CURMUDGUCATION: FL: Charter Thievery And The Worst Legislature In The USA

CURMUDGUCATION: FL: Charter Thievery And The Worst Legislature In The USA

FL: Charter Thievery And The Worst Legislature In The USA

Imagine. You live on the 300 block of your city, and your neighborhood is starting to look kind of run down, mostly because the city has redirected a ton of your tax dollars to the neighborhood on the 400 block. You try to fight city hall, but that's futile, so instead, you get the neighborhood together, and you collect money from amongst yourselves to upgrade sidewalks, clean the streets, refurbish the curbs, and just generally fix the place up. And then the city sends a message-- "That money you just collected? You have to give some of it to the neighborhood in the 400 block."

Congratulations. You live in Florida.

Florida's elected Tallahassee-dwellers have pretty much dropped all pretense; under Governor Desantis, the goal is to completely demolish public education, with no more cover story than to insist that the resulting privatized system is still a "public school system." I have seen better gaslighting from a fourteen year old saying, "I did not throw that pencil at Chris" even though he watched me watch him do it.

The Tampa Bay Times offers some background:

Let’s check the record. For years, Republicans who control the Legislature have attacked teacher unions as the enemy and complained about under-performing public schools while starving them of financial resources. They would not let local school districts keep additional tax revenue created by rising property values. They gave them little or no money for construction and renovation. And last year, they increased base spending per student by a grand total of 47 cents.

We'll put Swampland Charter right here.

Florida has been systematically starving its public school system, so some districts took the most logical step available to them-- they levied taxes on themselves to raise teacher salaries, replace programs that were cut, and basically use their own local money to reverse the problems caused by state- CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: FL: Charter Thievery And The Worst Legislature In The USA

EssayBot will do your homework. But it won’t get you an A. - Vox

EssayBot will do your homework. But it won’t get you an A. - Vox

This bot will do your homework for $9.95 a month. Does it actually work?
According to one 10th-grade history teacher, it’s unlikely to get you an A.

“EssayBot is the highly acclaimed online platform giving essay writing assistance to students and subject authors. As the program has been produced with the most sophisticated tools and technologies, it is extremely automated and individualized. This US-based corporation works with the only purpose to give honest and convincing aid to authors for creating superior volumes that will get rewards and praises.”

That’s what EssayBot says when I asked it to describe itself. The service aims to be the holy grail for the world’s burnout 11th-graders. Type in your prompt — any prompt, from your history assignment to the question “what is EssayBot?” — and the machines get to work.

Your opening paragraph is pulled whole cloth from a database of scholastic material. Then the diction is gently rephrased, with synonyms swapped in for non-essential words, until it can fly under the radar of the average plagiarism detector. From there, you can import a laundry list of additional paragraphs related to the subject of your essay, or you can use a drop-down menu called a “sentence creator,” perched patiently next to your blinking cursor. Write a word and EssayBot does its best to think up a sensible follow-up clause, based on the contours and language of what you’ve already got written down. All this for only $9.95 a month, or $49.95 a year. If you’ve ever spent a sleepless school night staring at an empty Word doc, you know what it’s like to be desperate enough to pay up.

I discovered EssayBot via YouTube ad, and when I put the site’s name into Google, I found hundreds of cautiously hopeful students taking to forums and review sites over the past year, asking if EssayBot is too good to be true. Procrastinating teens are an underserved market.

Aaron Yin, the proprietor of EssayBot, has been trying to sell AI text generation for years with limited success. His first attempt came in 2017 with a service that automatically constructed résumés, and the tech infrastructure of EssayBot was initially intended to help small businesses generate branding copy. But that angle never took off. Instead, Yin needed to find a hungrier demographic, and the millions of young men and women on a humanities deadline CONTINUE READING: EssayBot will do your homework. But it won’t get you an A. - Vox

Quilting Resistance: Fabric, Humanity, Serendipity & Cybernetics – Wrench in the Gears

Quilting Resistance: Fabric, Humanity, Serendipity & Cybernetics – Wrench in the Gears

Quilting Resistance: Fabric, Humanity, Serendipity & Cybernetics

It’s been a bit quiet on the blog. I continue to research, to map, to watch talks and prop myself up reading books about resistance. A friend told me I needed to take a break and get some perspective-to MAKE something.

Eventually, I did. I spent a few weeks making a quilt for a colleague who is expecting her first child. I viewed it as a meditation on hope for young people coming up, those who might work together to build a future that acknowledges past harms, rectifies injustice, and creates space to be otherwise.

As I stood over the cutting mat,

sat at the kitchen table with my foot on the sewing machine pedal,

crouched on the quilt inserting basting pins, and

hand-stitched the binding,

I fought a growing sense of alarm that keeps rising in my chest.

So many stories coming through my social media feed attest to the fact that Big Data, Big Brother, and global finance are on the move.

Pearson joining with Tom Vander Ark’s Learn Capital on a $50 million venture fund advancing innovative education enterprises prioritizing augmented reality. Here
DataKind and Commit!, Strive’s partner in Dallas, making plans to run the data of the school district’s 500,000 children through machine learning to see what patterns they can discern. Here
A story about income sharing agreements funding tuition for higher education. Here
Former McKinsey Mayor Pete’s South Bend, Indiana being set up as a pilot cradle to grey “City of Lifelong Learning” via the Drucker Institute-yeah, Peter Drucker the father of management science and mentor to Saddleback Church’s Rick Warren and Bob Buford (deceased), the Institute’s Board Chair Emeritus, Texas television tycoon, and mega-church consultant. Here

We are striding towards a cybernetic reckoning, one that aims to meld people with machines in service of viciously lean efficiencies that profit the global elite. Power players in finance, tech, faith communities, and the government want nothing more than to engineer a future for the masses that allows them to maintain control and preempt insurgency. To them the poor are numbers, 1s and 0s set up to be harvested and poured into CONTINUE READING: Quilting Resistance: Fabric, Humanity, Serendipity & Cybernetics – Wrench in the Gears

Cursive Seemed to Go the Way of Quills and Parchment. Now It’s Coming Back. - The New York Times

Cursive Seemed to Go the Way of Quills and Parchment. Now It’s Coming Back. - The New York Times

Cursive Seemed to Go the Way of Quills and Parchment. Now It’s Coming Back.

While cursive has been relegated to nearly extinct tasks like writing thank-you cards and signing checks, rumors of its death may be exaggerated.

The Common Core standards seemed to spell the end of the writing style in 2010 when they dropped requirements that the skill be taught in public elementary schools, but about two dozen states have reintroduced the practice since then.

Last year, elementary schools in Illinois were required to offer at least one class on cursive.

Last month, a law went into effect in Ohio providing funding for materials to help students learn cursive by fifth grade.

And beginning this fall, second graders in Texas will learn cursive, and will be required to know how to write it legibly by third grade.

Even as keyboards and screens have supplanted pencil and paper in schools, lawmakers and defenders of cursive have lobbied to re-establish this old-school writing pedagogy across the country, igniting a debate about American values and identity and exposing intergenerational fault lines.

When Anne Trubek, the author of “The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting,” started studying the resurgence of cursive about a decade ago, reasons for teaching it focused on developing a civilized, well-mannered population.

“People were upset about the idea that you might not seem educated if you didn’t know cursive,” she said.

But in recent years, the reasoning for cursive became associated with “convention, tradition, conservatism,” she said, and tied to discussions about school uniforms and the Pledge of Allegiance.

Indeed, several Republican lawmakers have spearheaded campaigns CONTINUE READING: Cursive Seemed to Go the Way of Quills and Parchment. Now It’s Coming Back. - The New York Times

Asleep at the Wheel: - Network For Public Education

Asleep at the Wheel: - Network For Public Education

Asleep at the Wheel:

Download [6.63 MB]

Read the Executive Summary

This report details the Network for Public Education’s two month examination of the U.S. Department of Education’s Charter Schools Program (CSP). Our investigation found a troubling pattern of insufficient applicant review, contradictions between information provided by applicants and available public data, the gifting of funds to schools with inadequate financial and governance plans, a push-out of large grants to the states with little supervision by the department, and the waste of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

By comparing claims made by charter grant applicants to information on state databases and school websites, we found numerous examples of federal tax dollars being misspent due to an inattentive process that routinely accepts applicants’ claims without scrutiny.

We found that it is likely that as many as one third of all charter schools receiving CSP grants never opened, or opened and shut down. In fact, the failure rates for grant-awarded charter schools in California has reached nearly four in ten.

American taxpayers have a right to demand that their tax dollars not be wasted. Tax dollars that flow to charter schools that never opened or quickly close should not be considered the cost of doing business. And a program with a stated commitment to spread “high-quality” schools should not be a major funding source for schools that leave families in the lurch and promote discriminatory enrollment practices that increase segregation and unequal opportunity for students with disabilities, behavioral challenges or English CONTINUE READING: Asleep at the Wheel: - Network For Public Education

CURMUDGUCATION: Arne Duncan Makes Me Want To Punch Myself In The Brain

CURMUDGUCATION: Arne Duncan Makes Me Want To Punch Myself In The Brain

Arne Duncan Makes Me Want To Punch Myself In The Brain

Arne Duncan still has a gift. I'm not talking about his ability to continually get bookings as an education, though that certainly counts as a gift in the sense that he has done nothing to earn it. No, I'm talking about his preternatural ability to raise my blood pressure.

He still hasn't gone away.

This morning, as the Board of Directors naps, I am scanning through a batch of edu-reporting that comes across my screen. I am looking at a summary of various stories from the balonyfest that is ASUGSV, when I get to a summary of a discussion of the "real" lessons of the college admissions scandal, and there I find this:

Arne Duncan, managing partner at Emerson Collective and former U.S. secretary of education, pointed out that students from wealthy families who score low on college readiness exams still have a better chance of graduating college than high-scoring students from lower-income families.

Well, duh. You might imagine that the very next sentence would be something like, "That's one more piece of proof that my policy of basing all district, school, and teacher accountability on scores from standardized tests based on allegedly college and career ready standards was a bunch of bunk, completely misguided, and a huge mistake that I now deeply regret." Ha, just kidding. Nobody familiar with Duncan would imagine that because another of Duncan's gift was a complete disconnect between the words that came out of his mouth and the policies that came out of his office. Duncan could-- and did-- wax rhapsodic about the importance of caring teachers building relationships with students in making a difference, and then go right back to demanding that those teachers be judged on their standardized test scores. He could talk about the importance of CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Arne Duncan Makes Me Want To Punch Myself In The Brain

Anthony Cody Dissects Alexander Russo’s Defense of Betsy DeVos | Diane Ravitch's blog

Anthony Cody Dissects Alexander Russo’s Defense of Betsy DeVos | Diane Ravitch's blog

Anthony Cody Dissects Alexander Russo’s Defense of Betsy DeVos

Anthony Cody was taken aback when he saw that pundit Alexander Russo was critical of the media for ganging up against Betsy DeVos when she explained at a budget hearing why she was defunding the Special Olympics. Russo seemed to think that the media critique of DeVos may have been the work of “advocates and trolls,” special interests blowing up a story that was a Nothingburger. Russo treated the hearing as a ho-hum event, nothing new.

But Cody, who sat behind DeVos throughout the hearing, saw plenty that was new.

First, Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro grilled DeVos about the new report by the Network for Public Education which documented that the federal Charter Schools Program had wasted nearly $1 billion on charter schools that either never opened or closed soon after opening. The basic issue was that the Department of Education was handing out millions of dollars without fact-checking the applications. Yet DeVos was seeking a $60 million increase for this slipshod, wasteful program while asking to cut or eliminate many other programs. Russo didn’t find that newsworthy.

There was another important story that Russo found to be not newsworthy. Anthony Cody became part of that story because of the expression on his face as he sat directly behind DeVos.

He writes:

“In fact, I wound up being a part of a whole OTHER viral story that Russo doesn’t even mention – the moment when Lucille Roybal-Allard asks DeVos to explain her absurd belief that larger class sizes may benefit students. And although I am indeed an advocate (if not a troll) I had very little to do with this clip going viral — 8.4 million views at last count.”

Cody complains that Russo has tried to set himself up as the “ethical minder” of education journalism. But anyone with an ethical barometer should be appalled every day CONTINUE READING: Anthony Cody Dissects Alexander Russo’s Defense of Betsy DeVos | Diane Ravitch's blog

Louisiana’s Apex Collegiate Charter School to Close; Website Still Encourages Enrollment | deutsch29

Louisiana’s Apex Collegiate Charter School to Close; Website Still Encourages Enrollment | deutsch29

Louisiana’s Apex Collegiate Charter School to Close; Website Still Encourages Enrollment

On April 10, 2019, Apex Collegiate Academy charter school CEO Eric Lewis told parents that the school would close at the end of the 2018-19 school year. Located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Apex Collegiate is one of number of charter schools contributing to instability in the K12 school landscape in Baton Rouge. From the April 10, 2019, Baton Rouge Advocate:

In yet another shakeup for the Baton Rouge charter school world, Apex Collegiate Academy broke the news to its parents Wednesday that it will close its doors on May 31 when its school year ends.

“Academically, the pace at which our students are moving is not fast enough,” Eric Lewis, Apex’s founder and school executive director, told The Advocate.

The charter school’s board of directors voted late last week to close the school, which has an F academic letter grade, after three years in operation. Lewis said he sent a letter Friday to the Louisiana Department of Education informing it of the move. …

The news was a surprise for parents and students alike. …

Apex’s announcement comes as the state said it wants to revoke the charter for Laurel Oaks Charter School, which also opened in 2016, a move that Laurel Oak leaders say they will fight.

Meanwhile, the charters for two more Baton Rouge charter schools, Baton CONTINUE READING: Louisiana’s Apex Collegiate Charter School to Close; Website Still Encourages Enrollment | deutsch29

NEWARK SCHOOL VOTE: Tricks, lies, and videotape |

NEWARK SCHOOL VOTE: Tricks, lies, and videotape |

NEWARK SCHOOL VOTE: Tricks, lies, and videotape

Where decisions are made for, but not by, the people of Newark

All you really need to know about the Newark school board election Tuesday can be found on some videotape clips.

The first was recorded at a cocktail reception at the North End Bar April 3, held to raise money for school board member–and candidate for reelection– Tave Padilla.

Padilla is running on a slate organized by, and beholden to, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. Baraka, of course, promised to support an independent elected school board once the district was freed from state control. Baraka also regularly complains about the growth of privately-operated charter schools that divert funds from the public schools.

But, now, Baraka–because of the money he can generate and the organization he can put into the streets–controls the “independent” school board–and he has backed pro-charter candidates in four straight elections.

An independent school board? How can a school board be independent if it’s controlled by a mayor and his machine? How can it be free of politics? How can it be cleansed of the same sort of nepotism and cronyism that led to the state takeover of Newark schools 24 years ago?

Nearly all you need to know about Tuesday’s school board election can be found in a brief videotape recorded at at meeting at the North Ward Bar. Here is the link to the tape so take a listen:

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10217409561807171&id=1118403638

First, you hear the voice of state Sen. Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex) already claiming CONTINUE READING: NEWARK SCHOOL VOTE: Tricks, lies, and videotape |

Where We Belong | The Jose Vilson

Where We Belong | The Jose Vilson

Where We Belong

When I first attended the annual National Council of Teachers of Mathematics conference, it took place in Salt Lake City, Utah. I’d never been to SLC, but the burgers were good, the company was cool, and Malcolm Gladwell was the opening keynote speaker. I was only a few years into teaching, but the carnival of math education aficionados drew me in. The names that influenced so many of our professional development sessions and textbooks came to life in their workshops and presentations.

I also knew it was a space to attend because one of these presentations showed the value of dividing fractions directly instead of using the reciprocal, a concept I use to this day.

Fast-forward to 2019, and I’ve been asked to speak as the first ever current classroom teacher to keynote in this space. I took this responsibility very seriously, so much so that I had a hard time telling anyone until the announcements came in their mailboxes. Even then, I didn’t know exactly what I’d say until a few minutes before I got on stage. I needed to use my platform, once again, to both elevate our profession and challenge us to dream for better. I understood that I have been in a unique position for a good while now. I had already been the first current classroom teacher to be a featured speaker at any number of prestigious conferences and universities. I did my best to embody how we allow educators to move the profession forward in ways that hadn’t been done before. I assured anyone who would listen that shortly after I spoke, I’d be grading papers and preparing for lessons CONTINUE READING: Where We Belong | The Jose Vilson

Badass Teachers Association Blog: DEBACLE: Opt Out 2019

Badass Teachers Association Blog: DEBACLE: Opt Out 2019

DEBACLE: Opt Out 2019

The drama now unfolding in New York in response to this year’s testing troubles could foreshadow a national tipping point. In the ongoing national parent revolt against high-stakes standardized testing, New York has had the largest test refusal movement by far, with approximately one in five students refusing each year since 2015. The first round of this year’s grades 3-8 tests began last week amid fresh outrage over punitive new regulations and an official misinformation campaign designed to intimidate and confuse parents.

Feeling their concerns ignored, New York parents began publicly sharing district letters showing threats, bribes, and false information. The chaos and contention was compounded by a large online system crash almost immediately after testing began last Tuesday; reports emerged that the state’s computer-based testing platform would not let some students log on or submit tests they had worked on for hours. By day’s end, headlines from Long Island to Buffalo and everywhere between declared the online testing a “debacle”.

According to the NY State Education Department (SED), some 6,600 students were affected; all online testing was postponed one day as experts scrambled to troubleshoot the problem. Because a similar crash plagued New York schools last year (along with student data breaches), the NYS Council of School Superintendents, the largest state teachers’ union NYSUT, and the NYS PTA immediately called for the firing of the testing vendor Questar. The Minnesota-based testing corporation has also presided over disastrous system crashes in Mississippi and Missouri, and in Tennessee where the legislature responded with a multi-year moratorium on online exams.

Leading up to test time, SED Commissioner MaryEllen Elia touted shorter tests, CONTINUE READING: Badass Teachers Association Blog: DEBACLE: Opt Out 2019

Diane Ravitch’s New Book is a Fun and Breezy Romp Through the Maze of School Policy | gadflyonthewallblog

Diane Ravitch’s New Book is a Fun and Breezy Romp Through the Maze of School Policy | gadflyonthewallblog

Diane Ravitch’s New Book is a Fun and Breezy Romp Through the Maze of School Policy

Imagine you could talk with Diane Ravitch for 10 to 15 minutes everyday.

That’s kind of what reading her new book, “The Wisdom and the Witt of Diane Ravitch”, is like.

You’ve probably heard of Ravitch before.

She’s the kindly grandmother you see on the news who used to think standardized tests and school privatization were the way to go but actually had the courage to pull an about face.

She’s that rare thing in public policy – a person with the honesty to admit when she was wrong — and even lead the resistance to everything she used to believe in!

Now she champions teacher autonomy, fair and equitable school funding and authentic public schools with duly-elected school boards.

Her new book is full of shorter pieces by the education historian from all over the mass media – The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Huffington Post and even her own blog.

You’ll find an article explaining why she changed her mind about school reform nestled next to a reflection on what it’s like to grow up Jewish in Texas. Here’s a succinct take down of President Obama’s Race to the Top next to an article extolling CONTINUE READING: Diane Ravitch’s New Book is a Fun and Breezy Romp Through the Maze of School Policy | gadflyonthewallblog