The Real Reading Debate and How We Fail to Teach Reading – radical eyes for equity

The Real Reading Debate and How We Fail to Teach Reading – radical eyes for equity

The Real Reading Debate and How We Fail to Teach Reading

Sometimes cliches hit the nail on the head: It’s deja vu all over again.


Sometimes hackneyed metaphors paint the best picture: When you find yourself in a hole, keep digging.


And that brings us to the “science of reading” version of the Reading War.


Here, I want to address the often misunderstood real reading debate as well as outline how there has been a historical failure in teaching reading that continues today.


First, let’s clarify some facts about reading.


For over a century, measurable reading achievement (test scores) has been mostly correlated with socio-economic factors (the students home, community, and school) and not significantly correlated with how students are being taught to read.


In that same time period, there has never been a moment when the U.S. hasn’t declared “reading crisis.” And as a result of this myopic view of reading achievement, the U.S. has a recurring Reading War; some notable moments include the 1940s, the 1950s-1960s, and the 1990s (see especially McQuillan).


Throughout the history of reading instruction, phonics instruction has always been a key component of how students are taught to read in school. The Urban CONTINUE READING: The Real Reading Debate and How We Fail to Teach Reading – radical eyes for equity

Report Shows Racial Divide in Academic Success

Report Shows Racial Divide in Academic Success

Report Shows Racial Divide in Academic Success in Progressive Cities

The American education system is rife with problems. Schools go underfunded, teachers barely can make a living wage and students have to worry about either getting shot at or body-slammed by school resource officers. While many of those problems tend to be attributed to schools in lower-income areas, a study shows that’s not quite the case.

NBC News reports that in some of the nation’s most progressive cities, academic success is divided across racial lines. Cities such as San Francisco, Minneapolis and Oakland have some of the worst gaps in success between white students and their black and Latino counterparts. In San Francisco, 70 percent of white students are proficient in math while only 12 percent of black students can claim the same. In Washington D.C, 83 percent of white students are reading at a proficient level as opposed to black students who are ranking at 23 percent.

In comparison, some of the most conservative cities in the country have closed if not eradicated the gap completely. While this is not a good look, it’s a problem that can be fixed. Some solutions proposed were politicians allocating more funds into their school systems, more interaction between teachers and the parents of students and programs that will track the year to year progress of minority students.

It’s no secret that American education tends to favor whiteness. This report isn’t so much a shocking exposé as it is a confirmation of what we already knew. I would like to see meaningful change come as a result of this study though I find it highly unlikely. 

Report Shows Racial Divide in Academic Success

Standardized tests voided at three dozen New Orleans schools due to irregularities | The Lens

Standardized tests voided at three dozen New Orleans schools due to irregularities | The Lens

Standardized tests voided at three dozen New Orleans schools due to irregularities

Thirty-four New Orleans public schools had at least one state standardized exam voided last school year due to test policy violations or suspected cheating, according to the Louisiana Department of Education’s annual testing irregularities report. 

Across the state, 1,497 exams at 299 schools were voided for a variety of reasons, ranging from administrative errors, such as an administrator giving students extra time, to suspected cheating. In total, 134 exams, at 34 public schools, were voided in Orleans Parish, out of about 80 public schools in the city.  Last year, 26 New Orleans public schools had 225 voided tests. Of those, 144 were from John F. Kennedy High School.

The majority of this year’s voids, both statewide and in the NOLA Public Schools district, were a result of testing policy violations rather than suspected cheating. 

In New Orleans, 17 tests were voided due to plagiarism and seven due to abnormally high numbers of wrong-to-right answer changes. 

Nearby Jefferson Parish public schools had 218 exams voided overall, St. Tammany public schools saw 30 exams voided, and the St. Bernard Parish school district had 5 exams voided.

Test security has been a focus in New Orleans since increased test scores from Landry- CONTINUE READING: Standardized tests voided at three dozen New Orleans schools due to irregularities | The Lens

Agency saved by DeVos appears to have accredited a college with no students, faculty or classrooms | Salon.com

Agency saved by DeVos appears to have accredited a college with no students, faculty or classrooms | Salon.com

Agency saved by DeVos appears to have accredited a college with no students, faculty or classrooms
A joint investigation by USA Today and The Argus Leader calls the ACICS' ability to vet schools into question

The Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges & Schools (ACICS) accredited a college which appears to have no faculty or students after Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos reversed an Obama era decision to shutter the federal agency after it accredited colleges that defrauded students, according to a new investigation. 

The ACICS, which accredited now-shuttered for-profit schools, including ITT Tech, Corinthian Colleges, and Brightwood College, was shut down by former President Obama's administration in 2016. The department argued at the time that the agency, which oversaw 725 schools and more than $3 billion in federal financial aid, "exhibited a profound lack of compliance" with the "most basic" responsibilities of an accreditor.

A judge allowed DeVos, who has often sided with for-profit institutions, to reinstate the ACICS in 2018, The Washington Post reported. A former Obama administration official told the outlet that Devos "ignored her career staff's 57 findings of ACICS's noncompliance." The education secretary similarly came under fire for ignoring career staff when she gutted a debt relief program for students defrauded by the for-profit colleges accredited by ACICS.

After losing dozens of colleges and their membership fees after it was shut down, the agency had a need for new members. It accredited institutions with dubious operations, including a South Dakota "university" which does appears to have "no students, no faculty and no classrooms," according to the joint investigation by USA Today and The Argus Leader.

With its membership down from 290 institutions to just 63, the ACICS accredited Reagan National CONTINUE READING: Agency saved by DeVos appears to have accredited a college with no students, faculty or classrooms | Salon.com

Amplifying Profits Selling Harmful Pedagogy | tultican

Amplifying Profits Selling Harmful Pedagogy | tultican

Amplifying Profits Selling Harmful Pedagogy

By Thomas Ultican 2/19/2020

Amplify education Inc. has a two decade history of trying to profit by selling education technology. The bottom line is even if their pedagogy was good – which it is not – it would be unhealthy for children. The big dream of replacing teachers with digital screens and making gobs of money has a fatal flaw. The last thing 21st century children need is more screen time. It is dangerously unhealthy and delivers low quality teaching.

A History of Profiteers and Disrupters

Greg Gunn a former associate of the Carlyle Group who had earned a Masters of Electrical Engineering from MIT joined with Larry Berger to found Wireless Generation. Berger was a graduate of Yale University with a BA and had been a White House fellow working on Educational Technology at NASA during the Clinton administration. In 2010, News Corporation paid $360 million dollars to acquire Wireless Generation and renamed it Amplify Education, Inc. Including performance incentives, Larry Berger pocketed $40 million and agreed to stay on as head of curriculum.

Amplify a Commercial Venture Profiteering off Public Education

The mogul, Rupert Murdoch, proposed buying a million I-Pads for delivering classroom instruction. However, the Apple operating system did not allow the flexibility needed to load the Wireless Generation software. Amplify chose a CONTINUE READING: Amplifying Profits Selling Harmful Pedagogy | tultican

Food Fight: How 2 Trump Proposals Could Bite Into School Lunch | 89.3 KPCC

Food Fight: How 2 Trump Proposals Could Bite Into School Lunch | 89.3 KPCC

Food Fight: How 2 Trump Proposals Could Bite Into School Lunch

Two pending rule changes meant to reduce what the Trump administration calls abuse of federal benefit programs could also mean hundreds of thousands of children lose access to free school meals.

The first proposed change: The Trump administration wants to tighten states' standards for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps. States have long been able to simplify enrollment in SNAP, allowing families who live near poverty to apply for the benefit with less paperwork and somewhat more flexible rules to qualify. But the administration believes some households are getting benefits they don't deserve.

"Too often, states have misused this flexibility without restraint," said U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue in July, when the change was proposed. "That is why we are changing the rules, preventing abuse of a critical safety net system, so those who need food assistance the most are the only ones who receive it."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's proposal would force states to tighten SNAP enrollment standards. As a result of the proposed change, USDA estimates more CONTINUE READING: Food Fight: How 2 Trump Proposals Could Bite Into School Lunch | 89.3 KPCC

Public Schools Are a “Pillar of our Democracy.” Trump and DeVos Declare Them “Antiquated and Oppressive.” | janresseger

Public Schools Are a “Pillar of our Democracy.” Trump and DeVos Declare Them “Antiquated and Oppressive.” | janresseger

Public Schools Are a “Pillar of our Democracy.” Trump and DeVos Declare Them “Antiquated and Oppressive.”

If you are going to read one article about public education this week, I recommend Derek Black’s commentary in last Friday’s USA Today, Trump’s ‘Education Freedom’ Plan Is an Attack on Public Schools. That’s Un-American.  Derek Black is a professor of law at the University of South Carolina.

Black begins by challenging what he calls the coded language being used by President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to pitch DeVos’s one program idea—the one she has pitched unsuccessfully to Congress now for three years running and the program she is pitching again this year.  This is, of course, her idea for a kind of federal private school vouchers at public expense, a $5 billion plan for tuition-tax-credits.

Black explains: “‘Education freedom’—the Trump administration’s new buzzwords—is not about good education for the public. It’s about ending all that public education stands for. The administration won’t claim that precise goal because it’s politically toxic, including with a huge chunk of its own base. Instead, President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have carefully aimed at core aspects of public education without ever formally declaring war. But peel away the coded language and convoluted tax schemes, and the only thing left is an agenda incompatible with public education.”

In his State of the Union message, Trump described “American children trapped in government schools.”

Black responds: “‘Government schools’ refers to public schools in general…  (T)he point is to equate public schools with all the negative connotations government conjures—waste, CONTINUE READING: Public Schools Are a “Pillar of our Democracy.” Trump and DeVos Declare Them “Antiquated and Oppressive.” | janresseger

School Reforms That Are Persistent and Admired But Marginal (Part 4) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

School Reforms That Are Persistent and Admired But Marginal (Part 4) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

School Reforms That Are Persistent and Admired But Marginal (Part 4)

Every school reform is a solution to a problem. How a problem is identified (e.g., unilaterally, multilaterally) and who does the framing of it (e.g., policymakers, practitioners, parents), of course, matters. The cartoonish superintendent (or elected official) sees the problem in test scores declining the longer students are in school. His solution: allow 3 year-old toddlers to start school.

Poking fun at the screwy logic of this solution to an identifiable and well-known problem is easy to do. What’s harder is to figure out amid the never-ending flood of school reforms past and present, why some are adopted by districts but stayed mired in a protected corner of the system. And other adopted reforms spread to all schools in a district.

District officials are on the look out constantly for reforms that solve problems they face in school governance, organization, curriculum, and instruction. But these niche-based adopted programs (e.g., charters, Montessori schools, problem-based learning, competency-based learning, International Baccalaureate) persist over time, are admired in what they do–which is why districts embrace them–yet remain marginal to what other schools in the district do daily. It is puzzling.

Before offering my explanation for why this situation is common nationally, past and present, I want to take a crack at the common myth (neither my first nor last CONTINUE READING: School Reforms That Are Persistent and Admired But Marginal (Part 4) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Rounding Up the Top News – Los Angeles Education Examiner

Rounding Up the Top News – Los Angeles Education Examiner

Rounding Up the Top News

Every week we’ll be rounding up the top education news. Here’s the top news from the last eight days.

Who is funding the LAUSD elections?

LAUSD Board elections are becoming more and more expensive. We’ve already discussed how much of that money is from dark money PAC’s, but over the last week larger, legacy media have taken a look at the mega-bucks that are taking over the LAUSD Board elections.

LAist notes that the record for spending in an LAUSD primary election is at least $5.7 million. That record is being challenged with a couple of weeks left, and the figure of over $4 million spent so far is rising rapidly.

About half of those dollars are from retired Manhattan Beach businessman Bill Bloomfield who is sending out hit pieces against incumbent Jackie Goldberg (LAUSD5) and in the open election in LAUSD7. Bloomfield tells the Los Angeles Times that the Board needs a “fresh directive” to justify mailers that, in Goldberg’s words are “vicious lies.”

It seems that the mailers with vicious personal attacks that strain credulity CONTINUE READING: Rounding Up the Top News – Los Angeles Education Examiner

NYC Public School Parents: Class Size and School Overcrowding Citywide Trends

NYC Public School Parents: Class Size and School Overcrowding Citywide Trends

Class Size and School Overcrowding Citywide Trends

Here is a presentation explaining why class size is important, with data showing citywide class size trends since 2006.