Education Activists Converge on Presidential Debate – Cloaking Inequity

Education Activists Converge on Presidential Debate – Cloaking Inequity:

Education Activists Converge on Presidential Debate

Today, in response to a nationwide attack on public education, supporters of high-quality, democratically controlled, neighborhood public schools are holding events at the first presidential debate in New York, demanding that the candidates respond to concerns about school privatization and unfair funding, and releasing a national public education platform.

The organizers of the debate protests belong to Journey for Justice Alliance (J4J), a national network of more than 40,000 active members of grassroots community organizations led primarily by people of color in twenty-four U.S. cities. The presidential debate events are co-sponsored by the Network for Public Education Action, a national organization led by Diane Ravitch.

Journey for Justice will host a press conference at Long Island’s Hempstead High School, sponsor a Public Education Nation meeting at SUNY Old Westbury and then hold a rally and march to Hofstra University where the first presidential debate is being held.

Journey for Justice Alliance members who march for equity on Monday are calling for a national equity assessment for public schools in the United States. Funding inequity is readily apparent in public schools in the United States—wealthy neighborhoods usually have better funded public schools—the Alliance also demands a national assessment that considers “curriculum, teacher supports, wraparound supports, student climate and community engagement.”

The Journey for Justice Alliance events at the first presidential debate on Monday in New York underscore community-based opposition to the destruction of community public schools and the rise of publicly funded, privately operated charter schools, school takeovers, and over-testing. The events surrounding the first presidential debate are the latest salvo in a black civil war between those who believe in privately operated, market based school choice and those who are are demanding high-quality, properly resourced, democratically controlled, neighborhood public schools.

Make no mistake: there is a civil war going on in the black community. On the one side are charter operators, billionaire foundations, and their acolytes who support the private control of public schools, as envisioned by economist Milton Freidman in the 1950s. On the other side are parents and other stakeholders who are demanding true equity and democracy in our public schools.

National civil rights organizations are divided over this issue. The National Urban League, United Negro College Fund, NCLR and other civil rights groups have typically aligned themselves with market-based school choice proponents. On the other side, the NAACP has passed three national resolutions critical of charter schools over the past six years (the most recent resolution critical of charter schools is awaiting a vote by the NAACP National Board). Black Lives Matters coalition, our nation’s newest national civil rights umbrella group, also released a platform of policy demands critical of charter schools this past summer.

Recently, both sides in the education civil war have focused on communicating to policymakers and the public that they are representing the interests of black families whose communities have been deliberately left behind. Last week charter school owners and their supporters released a letter saying they represent the interests of tens of thousands of black students and bemoaning the NAACP’s most recent resolution criticizing charter schools.

Market-based school choice proponents’ primary agenda has been to promote privately operated “school choice” as the fix for the education of poor children. In contrast, the Journey for Justice Alliance believes that the conversation should be refocused the inequities in our nation. In their platform, they cite lack of equity in public schools as the “major failure of the American education system.”

The Alliance’s platform calls for a moratorium on school privatization. That is also the NAACP’s position in a 2016 national convention resolution that calls for a moratorium on new privately operated charter schools.

Over the past two decades, the U.S. Department of Education has spent billions of taxpayer dollars on privately operated charter schools. The alternative vision presented by the Alliance is a federal funding request for 10,000 sustainable community schools. The Alliance’s platform also calls for an end to zero tolerance discipline policies, (also called for by the NAACP’s 2016 charter school convention resolution). The Alliance and the NAACP cite school discipline research by the UCLA Civil Rights Project that found charter schools are even worse than traditional public schools for black and brown students. The Alliance is also calling for ending mayoral school takeovers and appointed school boards and the overuse of standardized tests to justify school takeovers.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump may not have much to say on the subject, but equal access to education is a crucial to our democracy, to the American ideal of equal opportunity, and to civil rights.

Julian Vasquez Heilig is a professor at California State University Sacramento and West Coast Regional Progressive Education Fellow. He blogs about education and social justice at Cloaking Inequity.

This article appeared here first at The Progressive Magazine.

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Education Activists Converge on Presidential Debate – Cloaking Inequity:

Why "Grading" Schools is Wrong - SF Public School MomSF Public School Mom

Why "Grading" Schools is Wrong - SF Public School MomSF Public School Mom:

Why “Grading” Schools is Wrong

One of my favorite edu-parent-bloggers, Bill Ferriter, of The Tempered Radical, recently wrote about the North Carolina’s decision to assign letter grades to individual schools based on nothing more than test scores, a practice which I believe should be illegal.

It’s high time we started tearing down the belief that “grading” schools somehow informs parents or improves education. Not only does it unnecessarily worry parents, it’s unfairly blames teachers, increases segregation in our communities and undermines our public education system as a whole.

Grading schools is wrong

Here’s a bit of what Bill has to say about his state’s rating system, and it’s impact on his daughter’s school:

My daughter’s school is nothing short of a remarkable place.  EVERY time that I stop by, I feel a sense of happiness from everyone that I meet. Students smile and skip and laugh and joke with each other and with their teachers.  Teachers are relaxed and joyful, invested in each other and in their students.  Provocative questions are being asked and answered, positive messages are being shared in conversations and in school-wide displays, and programs that concentrate on developing the whole child….

…But they were rated a C — which means something akin to “decidedly average” — by the State of North Carolina last week.  And that has me worried…[My daughter] has role models to look up to who challenge her to be better than who she is — and I am convinced that those role models see her as something much more than just a test score…

…I am worried about is the consequences that a C rating will have on the choices that her teachers make.

[Read more here.]

Test scores might tell us about individual students, but they don’t tell us much about overall instruction

We all know that test scores tell us more about parent education level, income and, yes, RACE, than they do about teaching quality. Unfortunately, many parents use Why "Grading" Schools is Wrong - SF Public School MomSF Public School Mom:

CURMUDGUCATION: Center for Ed Reform All In on Privatizing

CURMUDGUCATION: Center for Ed Reform All In on Privatizing:

Center for Ed Reform All In on Privatizing

The Center for Education Reform, Jeanne Allen's charter-and-choice advocacy group, is having a senior moment. Under the breathless headline, "Nation's Most Senior Education Reform Group Relaunches," CER has issued a press release about "its complete refocus on the changing landscape of American education, taking on the most difficult issues that no other national organization is currently pursuing."

Wow! What plucky drive these folks have! This appears to be a follow-up to the manifesto they issued this summer. I waded through the whole thing here, but let me summarize even more succinctly--

Reformsters have gotten too wimpy and off-message, allowing themselves to be too often engaged by the dupes of the evil teachers' unions, and so now we must have bold and decisive leadership that unashamedly embraces the value of turning education over to corporate control. We must learn a lesson from the fate of the Common Core, struck down in its prime because its defenders did not boldly resist the evil forces arrayed against it (and not at all because it sucked and couldn't deliver any of what it promised).

But now, the CER has found new focus, new dedication, and, apparently, a new English-to-corporate gobbledeegook translator:

Coming on the heels of an intensive 8-month review of the organization, the larger education CURMUDGUCATION: Center for Ed Reform All In on Privatizing:



NAEP Board Still Includes Few Educators

See, John King. This is one more reason we have a hard time taking you seriously. Because for all your big talk about teachers being leaders and raising the profession and teach to lead and all the rest, when it comes time to put people in charge of Important Stuff, actual teachers do not get the call.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is sometimes called the nation's report card. It is the grandmama of Big Standardized Tests, the measure by which other BS Tests are sometimes measured. The NAEP is managed by the National Assessment Governing Board, and King just announced the appointment of six members to four-year terms on that board.

“We are honored to welcome these exceptional education leaders to the Board,” King said. “The Board plays a vital role in helping to shape education in our country, and their perspectives and insights will be major assets in strengthening the status of The Nation’s Report Card as the gold standard for measuring academic achievement.”

Exceptional education leaders! Well, that sounds awesome. Who are these exceptional education 


NAEP Board Still Includes Few Educators

Schools Matter: Retired Teacher's Thoughts on Union Misleadership

Schools Matter: Retired Teacher's Thoughts on Union Misleadership:

Retired Teacher's Thoughts on Union Misleadership

Denis Ian served for 34 years as a high school teacher. 

by Denis Ian

Teacher unions are being destroyed from within and without. And it’s been happening for a long while.

The same “reform" forces that wormed their way into the the curriculum discussions and redesigns also used their wealth to purchase political influence. And their worming was not confined only to state elected officials, but extended to national union leaders and major inner city unions as well. Think Weingarten and Garcia.

If these union leaders could be captured by funding temptations and empty promises of continued influence, well, then the take over of public education would get a whole lot easier. And that is precisely what has happened from without.

The AFT and the NEA leadership are hand-maidens to the reformists. Of course, they peacock their independence for their membership, all the while acquiescing on issues that will alter the lives of the teachers they represent … high stakes testing, teacher evaluations, and curriculum design. Think Weingarten and Garcia.
The leadership of large, inner city unions seem especially easy to seduce. Michael Mulgrew, the NYC UFT union boss, has embraced the Common Core … and all of the attending slop that rode in with that lousy reform. And he did it for JudasSchools Matter: Retired Teacher's Thoughts on Union Misleadership: 

Two Years After a Night of Horror, Mexican Students Seek Answers - The New York Times

Two Years After a Night of Horror, Mexican Students Seek Answers - The New York Times:

Two Years After a Night of Horror, Mexican Students Seek Answers

Edgar Andrés Vargas, 21, survived a night of violence in September 2014 in which 43 Mexican college students were kidnapped. He was shot in the face and has had six surgeries. Credit Meghan Dhaliwal for The New York Times

MEXICO CITY — Two years after 43 Mexican college students disappeared during a night of violence committed, in part, by security forces, the mystery of their fate remains unsolved.

An international panel of legal and human rights experts who spent a year studying the case questioned the Mexican government’s ability and willingness to get to the bottom of it.

Since the experts’ departure in April, the government has broadened its investigation to include a wider range of possible suspects. In addition, theattorney general’s top investigator resigned amid an internal affairs inquiry into his handling of the case.

Still, there is a prevailing feeling here and abroad that the Mexican government alone cannot be left to figure out who was behind the violence in Iguala in Guerrero State on the night of Sept. 26, 2014, and what happened to the students, most of them freshmen. Many observers are now pinning their hopes for justice on the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which will deploy a team to shadow the investigation.

The parents of the disappeared and the dead, most of them working class, have maintained their relentless lobby for answers. Accompanying them throughout have been the dozens of students who lived through the night but will forever reckon with its scars. Here are three of them.

Edgar Andrés Vargas

Last Thursday, Mr. Andrés underwent a sixth surgery to repair his face. During the attacks in Iguala, he was struck by a bullet that pulverized his upper teeth and shattered his upper jaw. He does not know how many more operations he will have to endure.

At the time of the attacks, Mr. Andrés was a third-year student at the Escuela Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos, a teachers college in Ayotzinapa. He was among a group of students who responded to distress calls from freshmen who had come under fire by the municipal police in Iguala, a nearby city. The younger students had gone to Iguala to commandeer buses to go to a demonstration in Mexico City, a longstanding practice at the college.

Photo

Doctors removed skin from Mr. Andrés’s arm to transfer to his lips.CreditMeghan Dhaliwal for The New York Times

Mr. Andrés and his peers arrived after the 43 students had disappeared. While they examined the scene, gunmen fired, hitting Mr. Andrés. Despite his wounds, he was ignored by military personnel and even by the medical Two Years After a Night of Horror, Mexican Students Seek Answers - The New York Times:

Wisc. Congressional Rep. Mark Pocan on School Vouchers | Educate All Students: Larry Miller's Blog

Wisc. Congressional Rep. Mark Pocan on School Vouchers | Educate All Students: Larry Miller's Blog:

Wisc. Congressional Rep. Mark Pocan on School Vouchers

(Photo: Tim Brinton)

When I first came to Congress, I called on the Government Accountability Office to study taxpayer-funded school voucher programs across the country. Wisconsin is home to the nation’s first and largest taxpayer-funded voucher experiment with more than 31,000 students enrolled in the program across the state. The GAO report, which was released last week, confirms many of my deepest concerns.

Taxpayer-funded voucher schools, the report found, lack high educational standards for students and teachers, discriminate against certain students and fail to demonstrate true academic achievement. Republicans in Wisconsin and across the country are breaking our public education system by depleting funds from public schools and rerouting them to the comparatively few students in private schools.

In Wisconsin, about 79% of the new students who received a taxpayer-subsidized voucher in 2013 were already attending private schools. This means taxpayer dollars are not being used to advance public education, but instead are being used to subsidize the education of a small number of students already enrolled in private schools. Students and teachers in public schools are suffering from diminishing funds, and it demonstrates a tactic to further privatize education. According to a report from the Wisconsin State Journal earlier this year, funding for voucher school students across the state was up 14% while funding for our public school students is down by 4%. This marked the first year in which school districts experienced a drop in state aid in order to pay for students living in district boundaries but attending private schools.

Taxpayer-funded voucher and charter schools exhaust needed resources in public education and they also fail to serve all students. Advocates for people with disabilities, including the ACLU and Disability Rights Wisconsin, have raised concerns that Wisconsin’s school choice program, either tacitly or explicitly, allows voucher schools to discriminate against students with disabilities in their admission policies. Many of these programs cannot even meet the basic needs of students with disabilities who are enrolled in their program, leaving students and their families struggling to find appropriate educational services which would have been otherwise guaranteed in a public school.

A number of revelations from the report further call into question the legitimacy of these schools. The GAO’s report found some taxpayer-funded voucher schools do not have a set of minimum criteria for the teachers tasked with educating our kids. It also was disturbing that GAO confirmed that taxpayer-funded voucher schools can mandate religious requirements for students as a part of admissions criteria.

The Milwaukee Sentinel Journal reported earlier this summer that Right Step Inc., a taxpayer-funded voucher school in Milwaukee, was being sued by a group of parents for allegedly abusive practices. Reports indicate that only 7% of students tested at this school met English language arts proficiency and 0% were proficient in math.

In its report, GAO recommends that the federal Department of Education issue guidance on how taxpayer-funded voucher programs affect federal education dollars and public school systems. I agree the Department of Education should provide additional guidance but I also believe taxpayers must demand accountability from taxpayer-funded private voucher schools that do not have the same level of accountability as public schools.

It is unconscionable for taxpayers to continue funding these profit-making schemes disguised as schools. It is time for the Department of Education to protect students and further clarify the steps to ensure oversight. After all, this should be about quality education for our kids.

Mark Pocan is a Democratic congressman from Madison.Wisc. Congressional Rep. Mark Pocan on School Vouchers | Educate All Students: Larry Miller's Blog:

New Mexico Lawsuit Update | VAMboozled!

New Mexico Lawsuit Update | VAMboozled!:

New Mexico Lawsuit Update

As you all likely recall, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), joined by the Albuquerque Teachers Federation (ATF), last fall, filed a “Lawsuit in New Mexico Challenging [the] State’s Teacher Evaluation System.” Plaintiffs charged that the state’s teacher evaluation system, imposed on the state in 2012 by the state’s current Public Education Department (PED) Secretary Hanna Skandera (with value-added counting for 50% of teachers’ evaluation scores), was unfair, error-ridden, spurious, harming teachers, and depriving students of high-quality educators, among other claims (see the actual lawsuit here). Again, I’m serving as the expert witness on the side of the plaintiffs in this suit.

As you all likely also recall, in December of 2015, State District Judge David K. Thomson granted a preliminary injunction preventing consequences from being attached to the state’s teacher evaluation data. More specifically, Judge Thomson ruled that the state could proceed with “developing” and “improving” its teacher evaluation system, but the state was not to make any consequential decisions about New Mexico’s teachers using the data the state collected until the state (and/or others external to the state) could evidence to the court during another trial (initially set for April 2016, then postponed to October 2016, and likely to be postponed again) that the system is reliable, valid, fair, uniform, and the like (see prior post on this ruling here).

Well, many of you have (since these prior posts) written requesting updates regarding this lawsuit, and here is one as released jointly by the AFT and ATF. This accurately captures the current and ongoing situation:

September 23, 2016

Many of you will remember the classic Christmas program, Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer, and how the terrible and menacing abominable snowman became harmless once his teeth were removed. This is how you should view the PED evaluation you recently received – a harmless abominable snowman.  

The math is still wrong, the methodology deeply flawed, but the preliminary injunction achieved by our union, removed the teeth from PED’s evaluations, and so there is no New Mexico Lawsuit Update | VAMboozled!:

Are you ready to vote? Are your family and friends? It's time! - Lily's Blackboard

Are you ready to vote? Are your family and friends? It's time! - Lily's Blackboard:

Are you ready to vote? Are your family and friends? It's time! 

September 27 is National Voter Registration Day, and across the nation, nonprofit groups and volunteers are hitting the streets to register voters. In 2002, the National Association of Secretaries of State first established September as National Voter Registration Month to encourage voter participation and let everybody know what’s required to register in his or her state. (Interesting trivia: Every state except North Dakota has a registration requirement for voting.)

The state secretaries’ association offers several resources on its website along with a short video to answer questions about voter registration.

According to the most recent Census numbers, approximately 62 million eligible Americans are not registered to vote. The number of voters who simply don’t show up, and  falling participation rates among registered voters, let us know we’ve got plenty of work to do before Election Day (Tuesday, Nov. 8).

In most states, you can check your voter registration status online; in more than 30 states and Washington, you canregister online.  Plenty of information is out there, so there’s really no good reason for not voting. (OK, this might be one. But if you’re planning this kind of adventure for Election Day, you can always vote early or absentee.)

No doubt, you’ve heard about the states where legislatures are making it harder for citizens to vote.They’ve instituted ID requirements, shortened early voting periods, eliminated early voting on Sundays and eliminated same-day registration. Those laws have been challenged in court, and some have been found to be unconstitutional. However, 14 states have voter restrictions on the books for the first time in a presidential election, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

On August 6, 2015, the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, here’s what President Obama said about new restrictions on voting:

“Fifty years ago, registering to vote across much of the South meant guessing the number of jellybeans in a jar or bubbles in a bar of soap. And while the Voting Rights Act broke down many of the formal and more ridiculous barriers to voting … there are still too many barriers to the vote, and too many people trying to erect new barriers to the vote.”

Because we’re educators, we believe that all students should have the opportunity for a great education, one that will prepare them to lead our democracy. But too often, public policy decisions are made that devalue students and destabilize public education. That gives us extra reason to be active participants in our democracy.

“We as citizens must take action and must make our voices heard with our vote,” says Lucia Baez, an NEA activist Are you ready to vote? Are your family and friends? It's time! - Lily's Blackboard:

New Website Vote LAUSD

Vote LAUSD | Vote LAUSD:
Vote LAUSD

Vote LAUSD | Vote LAUSD:

VoteLAUSD’s Goals:

1. Engage the Community in Healthy Discussion & Debate
   Bring everyone together for the good of our kids, while making it useful and fun
2. Learn from Each Other
   Stay open to learning new ideas and new perspectives
3. Get More People to Vote
   Educate and motivate people to vote for the good of our kids.

VoteLAUSD brings elected officials, parents, students, educators, administrators and concerned citizens together for the good of all our kids.

We encourage, facilitate and moderate healthy discussions and debates on the most important issues affecting our kids’ schools. We then make it easy for users to find the top rated opinions for and against important issues and candidates, so the community can form its own opinions from a balanced and diverse set of facts and opinions.

We also provide a forum to evaluate the best candidates for the LAUSD School Board. We share candidates’ positions on the most important issues, as well as the communities’ opinions of candidates, to help people determine who should represent our kids.

Why?

Many of the issues facing LAUSD are complex. Healthy discussion, debate and collaboration are useful for good decision making.

Also, many voters don’t understand all the issues and they don’t understand how important the LAUSD School Board is. Many people think the Mayor or the Superintendent are more influential, when the reality is that the Superintendent serves at the pleasure of the School Board and the Mayor has no direct control over the School Board. Many school board elections have very low voter turnouts (oftentimes less than 10% of eligible voters). By working together and sharing our opinions via VoteLAUSD, social media and word-of-mouth we can all play a key role in educating and motivating the community so we dramatically increase voter turnout.

How We do It:

VoteLAUSD is free and open to everyone. We encourage people to invite others into the community so we get more diverse points of view. We then let the community rate everything on the site, so the best opinions, comments and points-of-view rise to the top. The goal is to make it easy to see what the community feels is most important and useful to the discussion.

We also allow comments-on-comments, so anything anyone adds to the community is subject to transparent discussion and debate.

Another key feature of our community is showing two columns of opposing views side-by-side, so you can quickly get a balanced viewpoint and formulate your own opinions.

We also let the community flag inappropriate content (personal attacks, spam, off topic, etc.) so we can remove it from the site. This way we can all stay focused on what matters most, while not being distracted by “noise” or irrelevant conversations. We ask everyone to agree to keep the discussions respectful - disagreeing is fine but we ask people to keep it respectful.

These features work together to give users an efficient and balanced viewpoint on the most important issues and elections.

Frequently Asked Questions:

• Q: How do you rank the comments?
  A: We let the community rank the comments, and then we use best practices used by the top user generated web/mobile communities. If you want to geek out and read all about it… specifically we use the lower bound of Wilson score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter and you can read all about it here.
• Q: How do you determine what content should be removed from the site?
  A: We let the community flag comments (by clicking the Flag icon on comments). Moderators review flagged content and determine what should be removed. Moderators may also directly remove content.
• Q: What if you feel your comment was removed unfairly?
  A: If your comment is flagged and removed from the site, you will receive an email message telling you so, as well as an explanation of why it was removed. If you disagree, you can escalate it to a senior moderator for review. If it is found to be flagged in error, it will be added back to the normal view.
• Q: How do we know you aren’t just removing content you disagree with?
  A: You can see all the content we remove from the site and judge for yourself (when you select the “show flagged content” option in the menu, removed content will return to the discussions). We want to be completely transparent and our goal is to only remove content that is a personal attack, spam or off topic.
• Q: Why do you allow anonymous posting?
  A: We do encourage people to post as themselves, but we also realize that sometimes it may be difficult for certain people to speak openly (for fear of losing their job or political backlash). For these reasons, we feel it is important to allow anonymous postings. Also, since the platform allows the community to comment on comments, vote on comments and flag and remove inappropriate content, the community will figure out what is truthful and useful.
• Q: What happens if a user abuses the system (flags things that aren’t inappropriate, continuously posts things that are personal attacks, spam, or off topic, abuses the appeals process, etc.)?
  A: We reserve the right to remove anyone from the community. This would be a last resort for us, and we would first try to educate people on the intended purpose of this community. We want to engage people in healthy debate and discussion.
• Q: Who is funding this site?
  A: VoteLAUSD is totally independent and funded 100% by a Los Angeles technology entrepreneur interested in increasing discussion and collaboration between LAUSD's administrators, teachers, parents and concerned citizens.

Carl J. Petersen for LAUSD School Board, District 2 because:

All Kids Are Our Kids!

• The LAUSD School Board needs a parent's perspective. None of the current Board members has a child enrolled in the district.
• One size education does not fit all. The District must provide opportunities to all students, not just those who are college bound. We will fight to block the closure of special education centers and return funding to vocational education.
• Eli Broad's plan to privatize education must be stopped. Unlike Mónica García's campaign, this campaign will not be funded by the charter industry. I will answer to the parents and students of the district, not corporate donors.

 CHANGE IS COMING!

March 7, 2017

Carl J. Petersen for LAUSD School Board 2017 (ID# 1384794) -http://www.changethelausd.com/

Vote LAUSD | Vote LAUSD:

Is it pure stupidity or political expediency that led the legislature to cut its oversight of the Malloy administration? - Wait What?

Is it pure stupidity or political expediency that led the legislature to cut its oversight of the Malloy administration? - Wait What?:

Is it pure stupidity or political expediency that led the legislature to cut its oversight of the Malloy administration?

CT Newsjunkie columnist Sara Darer Littman digs deeper into the incredible decision by Connecticut’s legislative leaders to dump the professional staff of its Program Review and Investigations Committee rather than trim the legislature’s partisan, political staff.

As explained in last week’s Wait, What? post entitled, Surprise!  CT Legislature decides to function in the dark,

As the former House Chair of the Connecticut General Assembly’s Program Review and Investigation Committee, I’ve waited with baited breath as Connecticut’s legislative leaders’ contemplated ways to trim their generous legislative branch budget.

One option facing the Democratic-controlled Legislative Management Committee was to reduce the number of partisan, political staff that serve as the part-time legislator’s year-around aides.

Alternatively, legislative leaders announced that would have to consider taking the unprecedented and illogical step of eliminating the professional staff who work for the critically important Program Review and Investigation Committee, the primary entity that allows the legislature to investigate and oversee Executive Branch programs.

What, oh what, would legislative leaders do when faced with such a “difficult” decision?

Should they take a small step that might reduce their power of incumbency or 

Is it pure stupidity or political expediency that led the legislature to cut its oversight of the Malloy administration? - Wait What?:

 

Michigan Mom: Mandatory (a)Musings: M-Stepping those Results Right into the Trashcan

Mandatory (a)Musings: M-Stepping those Results Right into the Trashcan:

M-Stepping those Results Right into the Trashcan



I received my daughter's 4th grade M-Step results in the mail yesterday. 

I had not seen the results report before; two years ago, I opted her out. But last year, in a co-parenting compromise with my ex-husband, I allowed my daughter to take the test.

You will be happy to know that my daughter is 100% adequate. Or, to be specific, she is making "adequate progress." I was surprised at the naming of this progress indicator, since her scores are in the "Advanced" range in Math and English Language Arts, and at the very top edge of the "Proficient" range in Science. But, for a 4th grader approximately 1/3 of the way through her K-12 education, her progress is deemed as adequate. One must suppose then, that her teachers have also been adequate and her school is pretty adequate.

I question the use of this terminology; does "adequate" seem "proficient" or "advanced" to you? I realize that this word, according to google, means "satisfactory or acceptable."  But I challenge you to use this word in conversation and see how it is perceived. In fact, next time you are eating a dinner that your significant other prepared, I dare you to announce that it is "adequate." And next time you and your significant other are in the midst of...ahem...a romantic physical encounter, I Mandatory (a)Musings: M-Stepping those Results Right into the Trashcan: