JOHN THOMPSON: School Reform Lesson: Ravitch Was Right - The Oklahoma Observer

School Reform Lesson: Ravitch Was Right - The Oklahoma Observer

School Reform Lesson: Ravitch Was Right

Next January, Diane Ravitch’s long-anticipated book on education reform, Slaying Goliath, will be published but it is being preceded by an anthology, The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch. I contribute to Ravitch’s blog, and we have only had two types of disagreements. One is addressed in the new book.

The first disagreement was illustrated last fall when we were sitting with some of America’s top education experts. I said that Ravitch is the most important education writer of the last century. Only she dissented.

The second was included in The Wisdom and Wit, where she wrote:

John Thompson contemplates the urgent issue of whether I hurt reformers’ feelings. …To be precise, the question posed by his review is, “Should Diane Ravitch Be More Careful to Not Hurt Reformers’ Feelings?”

Ravitch acknowledged that “reformers say I am ‘mean’ or ‘harsh’ when I say that some ‘reformers’ have a profit motive or that their grand plans actually hurt poor minority children instead of helping them.” She had been told, “Bill Gates was very hurt by my comments about his effort to remake American education. He frankly could not understand how anyone could question his good intentions.” But Ravitch had never questioned his intentions, even though she “certainly question[s] his judgment and his certainty that he can ‘fix’ education by creating metrics to judge teachers.”

Ravitch confessed to being less worried about the Billionaires Boys Club’s feelings than their “constant repetition of the blatant lie that American public CONTINUE READING: School Reform Lesson: Ravitch Was Right - The Oklahoma Observer

North Carolina: State Superintendent Ignores Professionals and Chooses Tech Tool to Assess Youngest Children | Diane Ravitch's blog

North Carolina: State Superintendent Ignores Professionals and Chooses Tech Tool to Assess Youngest Children | Diane Ravitch's blog

North Carolina: State Superintendent Ignores Professionals and Chooses Tech Tool to Assess Youngest Children

Justin Parmenter, NBCT in North Carolina, writes here about the educational malpractice inflicted on the state’s youngest readers by order of State Superintendent Mark Johnson. A TFA alum, Johnson overruled the recommendations of expert professionals in the state and decided to assess and diagnose children’s reading skill with technology instead of a teacher.

As the 2019-20 school year wound down and teachers began their well-earned summer breaks, Superintendent Mark Johnson dropped an unexpected bombshell: North Carolina schools would be scrapping the mClass reading assessment system and replacing it with the computer-based Istation program.

North Carolina schools have used mClass as the diagnostic reading assessment tool in grades K-3 since the Read to Achieve legislative initiative was implemented in 2013.

Johnson’s announcement of the change referred with no apparent irony to “an unprecedented level of external stakeholder engagement and input” which had gone into making the decision.  He neglected to mention that he had completely ignored the recommendations of those stakeholders.

When the Request for Purchase (RFP) for a Read to Achieve diagnostic reading assessment first went out in CONTINUE READING: North Carolina: State Superintendent Ignores Professionals and Chooses Tech Tool to Assess Youngest Children | Diane Ravitch's blog

The 5 Options Exhausted Teachers Have + You Might Be a Petty Tyrant If... - Teacher Habits

The 5 Options Exhausted Teachers Have - Teacher Habits

The 5 Options Exhausted Teachers Have

For most teachers, another school year is in the books. If you’ve been off for a couple of weeks, you have probably already started to forget the suffocating exhaustion you felt over the past ten months. If you’ve just begun your break, then you’re probably still catching up on sleep, relaxation, and your favorite Netflix shows. But one thing is for sure: if nothing changes, you’ll be just as tired next year as you were this past year.

If this is you, then you really only have five options.

1. You can persist.

My suspicion is that most teachers choose this option. They put their heads down and keep going. They accept that they’re going to spend much of the school year stressed out, beaten down, and just plain physically whipped. Some may have made peace with it, while others grudgingly accept it as part of the job; after all, they know plenty of teachers in the same boat. These teachers will return in the fall, and the fall after that, and the one after that, and they’ll keep on keeping on, plugging away and doing their best, all the while wishing things could be different but not taking any steps to make them different.

2. You can neglect.

Those who don’t persist may neglect their responsibilities. These are the teachers who hang on to their jobs but have allowed the spark they CONTINUE READING: The 5 Options Exhausted Teachers Have - Teacher Habits

You Might Be a Petty Tyrant If

A couple of years ago I was written up for wearing a red shirt to school. It was one of those national “Wear Red for Ed” days and the union had sent an email telling everyone to wear shirts that had been designed during a previous round of negotiations. They bore the words “Support Charlotte Teachers As We Support Your Students.” Administration caught wind of it and issued a memo telling teachers that such an act would be considered political and could result in discipline (because I guess suggesting that the public support teachers and students is political now – nice time we live in). Some teachers switched to other red shirts. I altered mine a bit:

The Superintendent directed the principals to go around and record the names of all the teachers who wore red shirts. I guess it’s in my CONTINUE READING: You Might Be a Petty Tyrant If

The Last Day of School | gadflyonthewallblog

The Last Day of School | gadflyonthewallblog

The Last Day of School

On the last day of school this year, my 8th grade students gave me one of the greatest salutes a teacher can get.

They reenacted the closing scene of “The Dead Poets Society.”

You know. The one where Robin Williams’ Mr. Keating has been fired from a boarding school for teaching his students to embrace life, and as he collects his things and leaves, the students get up on their desks as a testament to his impact and as a protest to the current administration’s reductive standardization.

That’s what my students did for me. And I almost didn’t even notice it at first.

The whole thing went down like this.

The bell rang and an announcement was made telling us that the day was done.

I was immediately rushed by a crowd of children turning in final projects, shaking my hand, saying goodbye.

In fact, I was so occupied with the students right in front of me that I didn’t notice CONTINUE READING: The Last Day of School | gadflyonthewallblog

Another OOPS! Philanthropist Sees The Light… Finally | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Another OOPS! Philanthropist Sees The Light… Finally | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Another OOPS! Philanthropist Sees The Light… Finally

Here is a “mea culpa” from Nick Hanauer, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist who made his fortune in technology companies. Hanauer gave much money to transform schools so that they could become engines of equity erasing economic and social inequalities (and poverty as well) that bedevil American society.

Long ago, I was captivated by a seductively intuitive idea, one many of my wealthy friends still subscribe to: that both poverty and rising inequality are largely consequences of America’s failing education system. Fix that, I believed, and we could cure much of what ails America.

This belief system, which I have come to think of as “educationism,” is grounded in a familiar story about cause and effect: Once upon a time, America created a public-education system that was the envy of the modern world. No nation produced more or better-educated high-school and college graduates, and thus the great American middle class was built. But then, sometime around the 1970s, America lost its way. We allowed our schools to crumble, and our test scores and graduation rates to fall. School systems that once churned out well-paid factory workers failed to keep pace with the rising educational demands of the new knowledge economy. As America’s public-school systems foundered, so did the earning power of the American middle class. And as inequality increased, so did political polarization, cynicism, and anger, threatening to undermine American democracy itself.

Taken with this story line, I embraced education as both a philanthropic cause and a civic mission. I co-founded the League of Education Voters, a nonprofit CONTINUE READING: Another OOPS! Philanthropist Sees The Light… Finally | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

New Orleans Charter School Fradulently Tried to Graduate 49% of Its Class of 2019. | deutsch29

New Orleans Charter School Fradulently Tried to Graduate 49% of Its Class of 2019. | deutsch29

New Orleans Charter School Fradulently Tried to Graduate 49% of Its Class of 2019.

Just shy of half of the Class of 2019 at John F. Kennedy High School at Lake Areadid not meet graduation requirements and are therefore not eligible to receive the diplomas that they may have expected to receive when they participated in a graduation ceremony on May 17, 2019. (I write “may have expected” because at the time of the ceremony, both students and the general public knew the school was under investigation for grade fixing.)

That’s 87 out of 177 graduates, or 49 percent (which, by the way, indicates a four-year graduation rate that is at best 51 percent.)

Scandals like this do not begin and end in a single year. And this scandal was not uncovered by state or district oversight. Like too many charter school scandals nationwide, revelation of what you will see described by the board president of the charter organization (New Beginnings Schools Foundation) as “malfeasance and negligence that had for years gone undetected” depended for its detection upon a whisleblower.

The June 21, 2019, Advocate details the fiasco, including backstory. Some excerpts:

Nearly half of the senior class at John F. Kennedy High School was not eligible to graduate this year, even though dozens of those students walked across the stage at a commencement ceremony held in May, officials with the New Beginnings Schools Foundation said Friday.

The charter network’s review of student transcripts, ignited by grade-fixing allegations, revealed that 87 members of the 177-student senior class at Kennedy were ineligible to graduate for a number of reasons  CONTINUE READING: New Orleans Charter School Fradulently Tried to Graduate 49% of Its Class of 2019. | deutsch29

Michigan: Governor Whitmer Lacks Authority to Take Control of Benton Harbor, Says Tom Pedroni | Diane Ravitch's blog

Michigan: Governor Whitmer Lacks Authority to Take Control of Benton Harbor, Says Tom Pedroni | Diane Ravitch's blog

Michigan: Governor Whitmer Lacks Authority to Take Control of Benton Harbor, Says Tom Pedroni

Thomas Pedroni, a professor at Wayne State University, argues that Governor Whitmer is in over her head in her efforts to direct the future of Benton Harbor schools.

She doesn’t even have legal authority to take charge of the district, he writes.

He writes:

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is in over her head in Benton Harbor Area Schools. Suddenly, though, our fledgling governor is waking up to the reality that she is alienating the very demographic — black and progressive voters — who just seven months ago propelled her to the state’s highest office.

Earlier this month community educational advocates from predominately black districts across the state gathered in Benton Harbor to express support for the district’s families, encouraging the BHAS elected board to remain steadfast in its refusal to endorse the governor’s “proposal.” They highlighted the harm inflicted by previous state strong-arming in Inkster, Buena Vista, Highland Park, Muskegon Heights, Saginaw, Detroit and Albion. Many reserved special animus for a governor who had campaigned on a promise to buoy education and protect local communities from the type of state meddling engaged in by her gubernatorial predecessors.

Lost in all this, and apparently lost even on the governor CONTINUE READING: Michigan: Governor Whitmer Lacks Authority to Take Control of Benton Harbor, Says Tom Pedroni | Diane Ravitch's blog