Catch up with CURMUDGUCATION: Nobel-Winning Evaluation Advice + PA: Bad Charter Bill Still Not Dead

CURMUDGUCATION:

Catch up with CURMUDGUCATION: Nobel-Winning Evaluation Advice  + PA: Bad Charter Bill Still Not Dead

Nobel-Winning Evaluation Advice

13by Peter Greene / 2h

Sometimes it takes a Nobel Prize-winning economist to confirm what many of us in education have been saying for years-- reformsters are doing teacher and school evaluation all wrong. The writer pointing this out if Derek Neal (University of Chicago), over at Education Next of all places , The prize-winner he's talking about is Bengt Holmstrom , a Finnish economist at MIT. Holmstrom has done pretty

YESTERDAY

Breaking News: PA Professsors Announce Strike's End

10by Peter Greene / 1d

Per the union website . No comments from me yet, just news. Oct. 21, 2016 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE For more information, contact: Kathryn Morton, kmorton@apscuf.org or 717-236-7486 The strike is over. Faculty negotiators have reached a tentative agreement with Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education. The three-year deal, ending in June 30, 2018, concludes a strike that began 5 a.m. Wednesday

PA: Bad Charter Bill Still Not Dead

9by Peter Greene / 1d

Like that bad enchilada that you just can't keep down, Pennsylvania's HB 530 just keeps coming back. In fact, it appears it will be back this Monday. I wrote about this damn thing last summer , and it has ben kicking around since early 2015. The bill was floated by Mike Reese , who was actually trained to be a history teacher before landing in admissions offices on the college level. Nevertheless,

PA: Professor strike update

10by Peter Greene / 1d

As is typical in the early stages of these things, the main news being reported from the third day of the Pennsylvania strike by college and university faculty is that this is the third day of the strike by college and university faculty. I have heard numerous reports of students joining faculty on the picket line and attempts by schools to keep students going to classes-- even if nobody is teachi

OCT 20

My Visit To Preschool

51by Peter Greene / 1d

I'm in Seattle for almost a week, visiting my daughter, her husband, their newborn son, and their almost two-year-old son. This provides all manner of entertainment (you'll notice blogging has run a little slow), but today it provided an opportunity for me to be a visiting grampa (actually, my grandparental name is "Gump") at my grandson's pre-school class. Like many education observers, I have an

John King's Civics Lesson

14by Peter Greene / 2d

The e-mail from the charter-shilling group Center for Education Reform announced breathlessly that John King "joined the chorus of education leaders, elected officials and respected members of the African-American community in criticizing by the NAACP‘s decision to demand moratoriums on charter schools." He didn't. He spoke in front of the National Press Club at a luncheon this week, said many thi

OCT 19

PA: About the Professor Strike

15by Peter Greene / 3d

As just about everyone has heard today, the professors at fourteen of Pennsylvania's state colleges and universities are on strike (due to a quirk in our system, Pitt, Penn State and Temple are in a different state university system). This is the first such strike in ever. It is hard to know exactly what's going on in the first days of a strike. I was president of my own local union over a decade

PA: Court Decides in Favor of Privacy

19by Peter Greene / 3d

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court this week issued a long-overdue ruling with far-reaching consequences for school privacy issues. The case dates back to 2009, when some folks asserted that Right-To-Know laws meant they could demand home addresses and phone numbers for teachers. The state teachers union fought the issue, but the lower court ruled that teachers should have the right to argue why speci

OCT 18

Dear Hillary. Re: Education

100+by Peter Greene / 4d

We already know that there is no public education candidate running in this Presidential election. But we find ourselves in the unenviable position of having to choose between someone would subject public education to bad, disruptive, destructive, dismantling policies and someone who would just drop a nuke on public education. Not that anyone really wants to talk about public education, mind you.

OCT 16

The NAACP: Ignorant Dupes?

99by Peter Greene / 6d

They probably had their press releases ready. Despite the full-court lobbying, the charter fans had to have an idea which way the wind was blowing. And so when the NAACP announced the official, full-throated adoption of the call for a charter moratorium, charter fans were ready to explain why it should be ignored. As always, nobody leapt in with less nuance or modulation than Jeanne Allen at the C

ICYMI: Goodies for the week (10/16)

12by Peter Greene / 6d

Here's some reading for the day. remember to share the stuff you like; only you can prevent good writing from vanishing into the white noise of the interwebs. Before We Create Opportunity School Districts.. A Georgia teacher talks about what Opportunity District threats look like on the ground, and what would be a 

CURMUDGUCATION:

Jersey Jazzman: More About Attrition Rates in Boston Charter Schools

Jersey Jazzman: More About Attrition Rates in Boston Charter Schools:

More About Attrition Rates in Boston Charter Schools

The debate over Massachusetts's Question 2 -- a referendum on lifting the cap on the number of charter schools in the commonwealth -- rages on. When I last weighed in, I pointed out that the "successes" of Boston's charter sector could not fairly be compared to the "failures" of the public schools because the two sectors were educating fundamentally different students.

One indicator of this is the cohort attrition rate: the shrinkage in the size of a cohort that occurs because students leave a school, but are not replaced with new students entering.

Here's a school that "backfills"; in other words, as students leave because their families move, or they drop out, or they transfer, or whatever, they are replaced by new students entering the system.

This school doesn't backfill. What happens to the size of their cohorts (another way of Jersey Jazzman: More About Attrition Rates in Boston Charter Schools:

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Teaching Compassion from One Teacher's Story

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Teaching Compassion from One Teacher's Story:

Teaching Compassion from One Teacher's Story

You may recall the story earlier this year about a Tacoma kindergarten teacher who was removed from her classroom because she was drunk.  I think most of us were aghast at hearing that.

But one person, reporter Matt Driscolll at the The News&Observer, wanted to know more.  He wrote this piece that appeared this week, 

This kindergarten teacher was fired for being drunk. Three months later, she was dead. 

It's a beautiful story, written with compassion.  It's about how every single person has a story especially beyond their death.

Klara’s story, on the other hand, is one with trauma and addiction at its center. Like roughly 17 million people in the United States, she battled alcoholism. Unlike most, however, Klara’s struggle was very public.

It’s a struggle that ended in early June, when she took her own Seattle Schools Community Forum: Teaching Compassion from One Teacher's Story:

Who Will Carry This Torch? | Poetic Justice

Who Will Carry This Torch? | Poetic Justice:

Who Will Carry This Torch?

I wrote this poem eleven years ago. I return to it today and just want to weep. What are we doing to our children? Who will save them? Who will carry the torch of knowledge for the next generation and for the generation behind us?

No one to close the windows
when the rain storm pellets their beds.
No one to lock the doors at night
and keep intruders from walking in.
No one to warm up dinner and
feed their craving little bodies.
No one to scare away the dragons
who star in their dreams

Read the rest: Who Will Carry This Torch? | Poetic Justice:

Laws Of Exclusion – STOP SCHOOL REFORM: THOUGHTS FROM the LIFE OF A"BAD" TEACHER

Laws Of Exclusion – STOP SCHOOL REFORM: THOUGHTS FROM the LIFE OF A"BAD" TEACHER:

Laws of Exclusion 

In years before the mandates of NCLB pushed assertively into our school to commandeer
curriculum expectations at Central High; in years before the innovation-ordered, outsidercontrolled
programs began to outlaw the non-standardized inclusion of “ethnic” studies (totally
missing the fact that a forced study into an overwhelming surfeit of White males was,
unmistakably, ethnic) – I had enjoyed teaching an old-school non-scripted, fully inclusive
American Literature class.*†

Hoping to capture a broad student interest while waking less motivated imaginations, I
had asked my students to take a time-ordered look into the various cultural settlements particular
to the United States. Following events sequentially, we had studied the work produced by a
variety of disparate authors writing from dissimilar backgrounds; intentionally, we had read and
analyzed the work of the many culturally diverse writers who had most directly helped to fashion
our country’s best recognized and most iconic social movements.

Due to the fact that Central High served as a home largely to children who knew firsthand
how it felt to live with the less-than-comfortable stigma of being not only low-income, but
culturally different, it wasn’t long before I discovered that my students’ interest focused most
keenly upon, and repeatedly brought our conversations back to, the particulars which had
surrounded our country’s most exclusionary legislations. Recurrently my students asked to learn
about, read about and better understand the legalized actions behind our nation’s most openly
mandated separations:

• The governmentally supported caste divisions inside a Latino southwest. 
• The relocation of, and bounded reservations built around, Native populations. 
• The laws meant to regulate slavery, indentured servants and inter-racial marriage. 
• The immigration rulings written to keep Asian cultures from attaining citizenship. 
• The decades of Jim Crow legislation designed to enforce racial separations. 
• The legal promotion of women and children as voicelessly owned property. 
• The ruthless internment of unwanted citizens during years of war. 
• The emergence, and subsequent suppression, of an intentionally inclusive Civil Rights’
  legislation. 

What most accurately honed my students’ attention; what my students most wanted to
read about? Was not, specifically, the long years of a legally ordered exclusion. More exactly,
they wanted to hear about, read about, talk and write about, real people. Those most visibly
intrepid trailblazers who had seen the rules of exclusion, looked directly into the face of
intolerance, understood the legal lay of the land – and yet, still?
Resisted.
Those most notably recognized frontrunners who, through their long-term dedication toLaws Of Exclusion – STOP SCHOOL REFORM: THOUGHTS FROM the LIFE OF A"BAD" TEACHER:

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Trump plans to do away with public school systems

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Trump plans to do away with public school systems:

Trump plans to do away with public school systems

Trump surrogate, Paladino calls educators, "pot-smokers from Vietnam era". Ouch!

If there was any doubt, Trump surrogate Carl Paladino made it perfectly clear that if his boss is elected his goal will be nothing less than the elimination of public education and complete liquidation of the nation's teacher unions.

Paladino, Trump's N.Y State co-chairman told a group of urban school superintendentsyesterday, that Trump would seek to do away with “corrupted, incompetent” public school systems in America’s cities, replacing them with charter schools and vouchers for private schools.

Such an approach would “encourage competition in the marketplace and eventually dismantle the corrupted, incompetent urban school districts that we have in America today,” said Paladino, Trump’s New York State co-chairman, drawing audible boos from an audience composed largely of people who run the school districts Paladino criticized.

Paladino was unfazed: “A monopoly will not continue to work, it will not solve the problem,” he said, decrying what he described as school districts’ dysfunction and their “incestuous relationships with teachers unions.”  

I had to laugh when Paladino went on to attack higher education, referring to academics on college campuses as former “pot-smoking hippies back during the Vietnam era.” Was heMike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Trump plans to do away with public school systems: 

 

Pushing the Privatized “Maker Movement” Into Public Schools

Pushing the Privatized “Maker Movement” Into Public Schools:

Pushing the Privatized “Maker Movement” Into Public Schools

The 3D printing market is projected to be worth $8 billion by 2020.

—Paul Hill, “Ten statistics that reveal the size and scope of the Maker Movement.” November 3, 2015

Why be skeptical of the Maker Movement and its affect on public schools?

The speed to which the Maker Movement is being pushed into schools with little research about its effectiveness is worrisome. Over 1,400 schools representing one million students in all 50 states are involved.

School districts must take an oath.

Here is the list of schools that have signed the promise to implement the Maker Movement.

We are told it will make children into tinkerers, craftsmen, and inventors—bringing out a future Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Ford or other person of fame and Pushing the Privatized “Maker Movement” Into Public Schools: