Tom Torlakson Announces 2014-15 CAHSEE Results - Year 2015 (CA Dept of Education)

Tom Torlakson Announces 2014-15 CAHSEE Results - Year 2015 (CA Dept of Education):

State Schools Chief Tom Torlakson Announces Release of 2014-15 California High School Exit Exam Results

SACRAMENTO—State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson today announced that the California High School Exit Examination (CAHSEE) data for the class of 2015 are now available.

As a result of two bills signed into law by the governor, the CAHSEE exam is no longer required for students to get their high school diploma.

Senate Bill 725 , signed into law on August 26, 2015, suspended the CAHSEE as a diploma requirement for students completing grade twelve in 2015 who met all other graduation requirements.

Senate Bill 172 , signed into law on October 7, 2015, retroactively eliminates the CAHSEE as a requirement for graduation going back to the class of 2006, requiring local educational agencies to grant diplomas to students who had completed all graduation requirements, except passing the CAHSEE. The law will become effective on January 1, 2016. The law also suspends the CAHSEE as a graduation requirement for the classes of 2016, 2017, and 2018 and requires the State Superintendent of Public Instruction to convene an advisory panel to make recommendations to replace the CAHSEE.

The pass rate for the class of 2015 was 95.8 percent—exceeding the record pass rate from last year by 0.3 percent. The preliminary 2014–15 results are for the July, October, November, and December 2014 and the February, March, and May 2015 test administrations.

Results for the 2014-15 CAHSEE, including a summary report and accompanying data tables, are posted on the CDE CAHSEE 2014-15 Summary Results page. Individual student CAHSEE results are confidential and are not included in the Internet posting.

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Tom Torlakson — State Superintendent of Public Instruction
Communications Division, Room 5206, 916-319-0818, Fax 916-319-0100

Last Reviewed: Friday, November 13, 2015

Tom Torlakson Announces 2014-15 CAHSEE Results - Year 2015 (CA Dept of Education):

Charter Schools : A Map of Failure and a Money Vortex | Seattle Education

Charter Schools : A Map of Failure and a Money Vortex | Seattle Education:

Charter Schools : A Map of Failure and a Money Vortex

The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released a special report on its year-long investigation into charter school spending in the United States. See “Charter School Black Hole”.

PR Watch provides a review:

Charter School Black Hole: CMD Special Investigation Reveals Huge Info Gap on Charter Spending

CMD, a national investigative group that conducts in-depth investigations into the influence of corporations, trade groups, and PR firms on media and democracy, found that the public does not have ready access to key information about how their federal and state taxes are being spent to fuel the charter school industry since charters began almost 25 years ago.

Indeed, no one even knew how much the federal government had spent on its program designed to boost the charter sector. So CMD reviewed more than two decades of federal authorizations and appropriations to calculate the sum, which is now more than $3.7 billion—as noted in this new report. CMD also found that the federal government was not providing the public with a list of all the charter schools that received federal tax monies and how much.

CMD also found that many states have not provided the public with ready information Charter Schools : A Map of Failure and a Money Vortex | Seattle Education:

The Gates Syndrome: Charter schools—What we know– The Network For Public Education

November – 2015 – The Network For Public Education:

Archives / 2015 / November

Charter schools—What we know

November 13, 2015 Charter Schools, Gates Foundation

More than a quarter of a century (and a million articles) later, charter schools show about the same performance level as traditional public schools. Certainly, there are a number of advocacy groups generating testimonials about charter school miracles, when the very best research is examined, the pattern is clear – there’s not much difference when the two sectors are compared. »

Gates intrusion into Florida

November 13, 2015 Gates Foundation

And that’s when I saw the influence of the Gates Foundation. They have the one thing non-profit, educational, civic, and parent groups are in desperate need of – funding. »

Gates and the effort to weaken student data privacy

November 13, 2015 Gates Foundation, Privacy Issues

by Leonie Haimson NYC parent activist and Executive Director of Class Size Matters   Bill Gates has had an enduring fixation on the need to expand the collection and disclosure of personal student data. In 2005, the Gates Foundation organized a “data summit” among its grantees, at which launched the Data Quality Campaign, “to Improve the collection, availability and use of high-quality educat... »

Denver’s Gates funded teacher evaluation system

November 13, 2015 Gates Foundation, Teacher Evaluation

by Aaron Lowenkron Denver teacher Regarding Denver’s teacher evaluation system, this was my former colleague, science teacher Amy Hanson: Yet, somehow, her LEAP observation scores (our effective teaching rubric) were always “effective,” never “distinguished”. She has since left the classroom and moved to the University of Colorado, Boulder. My colleagues in the math d... »

Bill Gates on class size

November 13, 2015 Class Size, Gates Foundation

While small classes and individualized attention will be reserved for his own children and those of the business and political elite; he has continued to maintain that everyone else’s children should be subjected to increasing class sizes and get their education instead through large scale experiments in online education and data-mining.»

When Gates came to Chicago

November 13, 2015 Gates Foundation

by Mike Klonsky Chicago Educator and Community Activist   Gates supported small schools like a rope supports a hanging man. When Gates came, uninvited, to Chicago in 2001, an initial $50 million investment soon led to the transformation of a vibrant, teacher-led small-schools movement, into a top-down corporate-style reform initiative imposed on schools and on the school district. Schools and... »

The Gates teacher evaluation system in action—a costly and ineffective adventure in Hillsborough, Florida

November 13, 2015 Gates Foundation

  by Carol Burris Executive Director, Network for Public Education and former New York principal (Part of this report first appeared in Valerie Strauss’ The Answersheet as a guest blog by Burris) In 2008, Florida’s Hillsborough School District received a $10,000,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The initiatives in the grant included: the establishment of an evaluation syst... »

November – 2015 – The Network For Public Education:

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The Gates teacher evaluation system in action—a costly and ineffective adventure in Hillsborough, Florida – The Network For Public Education

The Gates teacher evaluation system in action—a costly and ineffective adventure in Hillsborough, Florida – The Network For Public Education:

The Gates teacher evaluation system in action—a costly and ineffective adventure in Hillsborough, Florida

Executive Director, Network for Public Education and former New York principal

(Part of this report first appeared in Valerie Strauss’ The Answersheet as a guest blog by Burris)

In 2008, Florida’s Hillsborough School District received a $10,000,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The initiatives in the grant included: the establishment of an evaluation system based 40% on student test scores; the inclusion of test scores in decisions to grant tenure and determine teacher career paths; merit pay, which is referred to in the grant as “pay for performance”; bonuses for principals and teachers who raise low performing students’ scores; the use of data for hiring; and the use of “data dashboards” to make instructional decisions.

By 2012, the Hillsborough district had spent a whopping $28.4 million on the grant’s initiatives, using Race to the Top, additional grants, and district funds. District funds were 19% of all expenditures. $3,224,000 was spent developing a value added model (VAM) to measure teacher performance by test scores. The $24.8 million was considered a “lower bound” estimate by AIR, which studied the spending.

Winning the grant was heralded as a reform in which a teachers union had cooperatively worked with a Superintendent, Mary Ellen Elia, to enact evaluation reform. In his book, Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools, Stephen Brill describes Hillsborough union president, The Gates teacher evaluation system in action—a costly and ineffective adventure in Hillsborough, Florida – The Network For Public Education:

When Gates came to Chicago

by Mike Klonsky

Chicago Educator and Community Activist

Gates supported small schools like a rope supports a hanging man.

When Gates came, uninvited, to Chicago in 2001, an initial $50 million investment soon led to the transformation of a vibrant, teacher-led small-schools movement, into a top-down corporate-style reform initiative imposed on schools and on the school district. Schools and teachers were mandated to create “small schools” as a way to tap into funding, regardless of local conditions or whether they were needed, wanted – or not – by the school community. The devastating impact was felt, not only on the schools, but on the city’s flourishing education foundations who couldn’t compete with the might of the Gates Foundation and ended up pooling their resources into a fund ruled by Gates and administered by the Community Trust.

When asked by educators and small-schools activists if they could be on the board that would administer the grants, the response from a Trust leader was: “That would be like allowing the workers to run the factory.”

When Gates came to Chicago

Tentative deal struck on a replacement for No Child Left Behind - The Washington Post

Tentative deal struck on a replacement for No Child Left Behind - The Washington Post:

Tentative deal struck on a replacement for No Child Left Behind

Congressional negotiators have struck a tentative deal to replace No Child Left Behind, the main K-12 federal education law, by shifting authority for K-12 schools to states and freeing them from many federal demands and restrictions in place for 13 years.

The deal largely follows the contours of a measure passed by the Senate with strong bipartisan support in July, according to several sources briefed on the agreement who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about closed-door negotiations.

And it plucked a few ideas from a bill passed by House Republicans in July, including the elimination of several programs that were deemed ineffective by the federal government or had never been funded.

[Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray went old-school to make a deal]

The agreement maintains the federal requirement that states test students annually in math and reading in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school, and publicly report the scores according to race, income, ethnicity, disability and whether students are English-language learners.

And it requires states to intervene in schools where students are testing in the lowest five percent, where achievement gaps are greatest, and in high schools where fewer than 67 percent of students graduate on time.

But states would determine what action to take, and they would also have the freedom to define progress and set timetables for their schools to reach the goals the state has set.

And for schools that are not the worst performers, states would decide how to judge their performance, how much weight to give to their standardized test scores, and whether to use test scores to evaluate teachers.

The law affects the nation’s 100,000 public schools.

The negotiators, staff members of key House and Senate committee chairmen and ranking members, think the deal straddles the differences between Republicans, who want to dramatically reduce the federal role in education, and Democrats and the Obama administration, who insist that the federal government make sure at a basic level that states are educating all children, including those who have been historically under-served.

The deal would significantly reduce the authority of the U.S. Department of Education, prohibiting the secretary from influencing state academic standards and assessments, requiring teacher evaluations or using grant programs to influence state education policy.

“Under this, the secretary is allowed to get coffee,” quipped one lobbyist familiar with the agreement.

The deal includes a provision championed by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), ranking member of the Senate committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, to create competitive grants to help states coordinate various early-childhood programs. The program would be run by the Department of Health and Human Services; Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate education panel and a former U.S. Secretary of Education, has been opposed to expanding the portfolio of the education agency.

The agreement leaves intact the current formula for the way the federal government distributes about $14 billion annually to help educate low-income students. The program, known as Title 1, follows a complex set of formulas that favors states with large populations and wealthy states that spend a lot on education. Rural states, and states with smaller populations, tend to receive less on a per-pupil basis, and lawmakers from those states sought to change the formula to receive a greater share.

Instead, negotiators agreed to amend another formula used for another program, Title 2, which is designed to help states train teachers, in a way that would favor rural states, sources said.

Congressional sources say they expect the deal to be presented to both chambers for a vote after Thanksgiving.

Passage would be significant; lawmakers have been unsuccessfully trying to rewrite the law for eight years.

When it was signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, No Child Left Behind ushered in an era of test-based accountability for schools. For the first time, the federal government required states to test students in math and reading and to make steady academic progress until every student in the country was “proficient” by 2014, or face increasingly severe penalties.

Those goals were later seen as unrealistic, and the law had unintended consequences: Many schools squeezed out art, science and other subjects to focus on math and reading; cheating scandals erupted; and some states Tentative deal struck on a replacement for No Child Left Behind - The Washington Post:

Duncan: Changes to federal role in K-12 'actually pretty small' | Washington Examiner

Duncan: Changes to federal role in K-12 'actually pretty small' | Washington Examiner:

Duncan: Changes to federal role in K-12 'actually pretty small'

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will step down at the end of the year, and he's begun to reflect on his seven-year tenure. Duncan visited a Boston high school Thursday that has improved out of "underperforming" status according to state standards, the New York Times reports.

Despite the active role the Department of Education has had under Duncan, he claimed little credit for any progress that's been made.

"Our role in this change was actually pretty small," Duncan said.

Duncan's Department of Education took an unusually active role in state and local education matters. The administration initiated a number of untried programs, including the Race to the Top grant program and controversial conditional waivers from penalties in No Child Left Behind.

"The good news here is that, over the past handful of years, America's educators have put in place the building blocks not for incremental or one-time change, but rather for improvements that will last a generation — as you've done here in Massachusetts," Duncan said, according to the Boston Globe.

Duncan said he wasn't arguing schools in the country were perfect, acknowledging there is more work to be done. "This is not some 'Mission Accomplished' moment, not even close," Duncan said. "We have not gotten as far as I, or as anyone, had hoped. But there's been vitally important progress. … We haven't gotten everything right."

Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.

Help SCUSD update its Strategic Plan -- take our survey - come to a Community Meeting

Help SCUSD update its Strategic Plan -- take our survey - Sacramento City Unified School District:

Help SCUSD update its Strategic Plan — take our survey

November 12, 2015

SCUSD is updating its Strategic Plan for implementation starting with the 2016-17 school year. There are four big goals outlined that the district is committed to achieve. They are:

• Ensuring that all students are college and career ready.
• Fostering school environments that are safe, healthy and engaging for all students.
• Empowering families and the community to be equal and active partners in student’s educational successes.
• Ensuring that SCUSD is service-focused and operates efficiently and effectively.

The first draft of the Strategic Plan is just an outline, without specifics, to allow for feedback from all stakeholders. We would like to know how our community would prioritize the actions listed below each of the goals. Please complete theStrategic Plan survey to share your opinion.

If you would like to learn more and provide your feedback on the plan, please come to a Community Meeting at one of these sites:

• November 17, Serna Center, 6:30 p.m.
• December 1, California Middle School, 6 p.m.
• December 2, Caroline Wenzel Elementary School, 6 p.m.
• December 8, Albert Einstein Middle School, 6 p.m.

Help SCUSD update its Strategic Plan -- take our survey - Sacramento City Unified School District:

Shake Off Those Charter Chains! | The Progressive

Shake Off Those Charter Chains! | The Progressive:

Shake Off Those Charter Chains!

• Mark Fiore

Ever wondered about the magic bullet of charter schools?  Turns out they may not be the promised educational salvation so many claim.  Sure, there are good, community-based charter schools that are built from the ground up, but the rise of huge “Charter Chains” dwarfs them by comparison.

I did this cartoon in collaboration with the good people at The Progressive.  This video is a good starting point for learning about a very real threat to public education in the United States.  The more you dig into some of these Charter Chains, the more awful they become.

And the hits keep coming.  Success Academy charter schools in New York kept a “got to go” list to kick out kids who might drag down its scores. Hillary Clinton weighed in, making news by saying that most charter schools don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, and if they do, they don’t keep them. As Progressive Education Fellow Peter Greene points out, charter schools drain resources from already-strapped public schools.

Enjoy the cartoon, and be sure to dive into some of the accompanying links!

- See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/11/188410/shake-those-charter-chains#sthash.cHUdWnoK.dpuf

CURMUDGUCATION: More Charter Pushback for HRC

CURMUDGUCATION: More Charter Pushback for HRC:

More Charter Pushback for HRC

Man-- so much fuss from a couple of Hillary Clinton sentences.

After Robert Pondiscio stood up for charters, yesterday's USA Today included another pushback from charter cheerleader Richard Whitmire (Emerson Collective).

Whitmire has several charer-friendly notions that he would like to put forth.

First, he allows that charters have not turned out to be the great laboratories of innovation first envisioned-- but he blames that on public schools. Whitmire would have us believe that charters are chock full of innovative secrets to educational success, although he does not name a single lesson that public schools can learn from charters. In fact, I have never seen a charter advocate lay out lessons for public schools from charters, and I would propose that it's because there are no lessons to learn.

Spend more time on instruction. Have smaller classes. Be selective about which students are allowed to sit in your classroom, and when they can be admitted. Spend lots of money on resources and support, but don't take on any students who need a disproportionate amount of resources.

These are the "lessons" that modern charters have to teach, and they are not news to anybody. But CURMUDGUCATION: More Charter Pushback for HRC: