Thursday, July 21, 2011

Two of Pa.'s largest charters part of test score probe | Philadelphia Public School Notebook

Two of Pa.'s largest charters part of test score probe

by Benjamin Herold on Jul 18 2011 Posted in Latest news

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Two of the largest charters in Pennsylvania, Chester Community Charter School (CCCS) and the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School (PA Cyber), are among the 89 schools across the state that are to be investigated for statistical irregularities on 2009 standardized tests.

In all, 10 Pennsylvania charters were found to have 2009 test scores warranting further inquiry, according to a recently revealed state reportmeant to identify "potential test results that may have been earned unfairly."

The rest of the 89 schools are spread over 38 school districts. State Secretary of Education Ronald Tomalis has directed those districts to conduct investigations in all their traditional public schools that were heavily flagged in the study. The charters with unusual results will investigate themselves, according to

ACTION United community "veto" budget rally

by thenotebook

Professionals for Progress leader Emmanuel Bussie (center) joined State Rep. Babette Josephs (left), ACTION United leader D. William Browning, and others for a rally at City Hall today urging Mayor Nutter to challenge Gov. Corbett's education budget cuts. Bussie proposed that attendees head to City Council and demand "not just change, but transformation."

Sponsored by ACTION United, the rally drew a small crowd of teachers, parents, and activists who are working

All Around the Interwebs - Dana Goldstein

All Around the Interwebs

by Dana Goldstein

Check out my new piece at Slate, which puts the Atlanta standardized test cheating scandal in some historical perspecitve. Sadly, this is not an isolated case:

In the late 1980s, states began to experiment with offering schools financial awards for improving test scores. As the local media filled with optimistic stories about rising scores, a West Virginia doctor named John Cannell wondered why so many of his teenage patients complained of feeling lost at school. In 1988, Cannell published a classic research paper (PDF) reporting that most school districts in all 50 states boasted average test scores higher than their state's average—a statistical impossibility if the districts had been honest about performance. In his indispensible 2008 book Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, Harvard psychometrician Daniel Koretz writes, "This phenomenon quickly became known as the 'Lake Wobegon effect,' after Garrison Keillor's mythical town where 'all the women are strong, all the

Shanker Blog » A "Decent Work" Solution To America's Jobs Crisis

A “Decent Work” Solution To America’s Jobs Crisis

Posted by Randall Garton on July 21, 2011

Decent work? Some days, it sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? It also brings to mind an old saying, favored by the AFL-CIO’s late president, Lane Kirkland, that if work were so great, the rich would have kept it for themselves.

But the truth is that work is one of life’s realities. For most people, it is the sole source of income. Work also can bring great personal satisfaction. Whether self-employed or working for a large multinational corporation, we all aspire to jobs that are interesting, safe, and pay a good wage with benefits – a job that can support a family, with something left over. Even these days, when people are happy to have ANY job, we still want THAT kind of a job: Decent work at decent pay.

But “decent work” is much more than a daydream – it is a concrete social and economic policy issue that is at the heart of a decade-long campaign by a major United Nations agency, the International Labor Organization, (ILO). Since 1999, the ILO, with support from member governments as well as employer and labor representatives, has pushed the “Decent Work Agenda“. This document declares that “work is central to

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel chooses private school for kids - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel chooses private school for kids

by Valerie Strauss

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who strongly supports school reform that centers on standardized test-based accountability for students, schools and teachers, has decided to send his children to a private school that doesn’t obsess on standardized tests.

Emanuel, who served in the White House as President Obama’s chief of staff for a few years, and his wife have chosen, according to a local radio station CBS News 2 in Chicago, to send their three children to the prestigiousUniversity of Chicago Laboratory Schools in Hyde Park.

Read full article >>

Misrepresenting the “Preponderance of the Evidence” Standard on Campus Sexual Assault Hearings « Student Activism

Misrepresenting the “Preponderance of the Evidence” Standard on Campus Sexual Assault Hearings

by Angus Johnston

The Department of Education recently issued new guidelines on campus policies on sexual assault, including a directive that judicial bodies investigating sexual assault allegations employ the “preponderance of the evidence” standard in their deliberations.

“Preponderance of the evidence” is the standard commonly used in resolving civil cases — lawsuits — in the United States. It basically means that the question at hand will be resolved by a determination of which party’s version of events is more likely to be true. (“Beyond a reasonable doubt” is the standard of guilt used in criminal cases in the US, and there are other standards used in other circumstances, too.)

I don’t yet have an opinion on the DOE’s directive, and I think it’s an important question, so I’ve been reading up

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Quotable: Karen Lewis

Quotable: Karen Lewis

by Mike Klonsky

On the mayor's decision to send his kids to Chicago Lab, a well-funded private school
“We understand why he would choose a school with small class sizes, a broad, rich curriculum that offers world languages, the arts and physical education, a focus on critical thinking not test-taking, a teacher and an assistant in every elementary classroom and paid, high-quality professional development for

Why I’m Marching Forward (It’s The Only Direction) | Edwize

Why I’m Marching Forward (It’s The Only Direction)

by José Vilson

[Editor's note: José Luis Vilson is a math teacher, coach, and data analyst for a middle school in Manhattan. He blogs at The Jose Vilson where this post first appeared.]

You’ve got to be wondering what a teacher like me is doing marching against the “reform” trends. For those of you unfamiliar with my background, I graduated with a degree in Computer Science from Syracuse University. A year later, after 6-8 months of unemployment and a stint as a data entry person at an educational database firm, I went into the NYC Teaching Fellows program, an offshoot of Michelle Rhee’s New Teacher Project. On the surface, I’m a perfect candidate to follow the corporatist thinking about education, and should be easily molded into the dominant thinking from elites who ostensibly believe they’re going into education for the common good. All it takes is the right amount of fear, the right amount of frustration, the right amount of ignorance, and the right amount of failure to tip people into the hands of those who wish to rotate our profession backwards.

Fortunately for me, I lucked out. And if you’re reading this, I’m thinking the same goes for you.

You see, I teach at a school that, somewhere along the line, decided to value veteran leadership and

4LAKids - some of the news that doesn't fit: CALIFORNIA COLLEGE SYSTEM IN DECLINE, STUDY FINDS +Study: "Consequences of Neglect"

CALIFORNIA COLLEGE SYSTEM IN DECLINE, STUDY FINDS +Study: "Consequences of Neglect"

The state no longer is a leader in such areas as affordability, preparation of high school graduates and college-going rates, according to researchers at Cal State Sacramento.

BY CARLA RIVERA, LOS ANGELES TIMES | HTTP://LAT.MS/R12XQC

Cal State Long Beach

Thousands of Cal State Long Beach students, teachers and parents rally during a national day of protests against education funding cuts. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times / March 4, 2010)

July 21, 2011 - California's higher education system is in decline, with fewer students able to afford college, falling college participation rates and dwindling state support, according to a study released Wednesday.

The report suggests that the state, once celebrated nationally for its three-tiered system of public colleges, has lost status as a leader in such areas as affordability, preparation of high school graduates, college-going rates and investment

Principal Apportionment, Fiscal Year 2011-12 - Principal Apportionment (CA Dept of Education)

Principal Apportionment, Fiscal Year 2011-12

Distribution of funds for local educational agencies (LEAs) in support of the public school system. Includes elementary school, high school and unified school districts; charter schools; and county offices of education.

Advance Apportionment

Certified July 20, 2011

Apportionment Letter - 20-Jul-2011

Calculations to determine the Advance Apportionment

Funding Exhibits - Advance Apportionment

Funding Excel Files - Advance Apportionment
Detail report of the Advance Apportionment Summary and Payment Schedule Summary.

Special Apportionments for Charter Schools

Pupil Estimates for New or Significantly Expanding Charters (PENSEC)

Resources

2011-12 Principal Apportionment Deadlines (School Districts and COEs)

2011-12 Principal Apportionment Deadlines (Charter Schools)

2011-12 Principal Apportionment At-A-Glance Calendar (DOC; 204KB; 1p.)
Accessible Alternative Version of the 2011-12 Principal Apportionment At-A-Glance Calendar
A one page fiscal year calendar showing key deadlines for school district, COE, and charter school data.

Questions: Office of Principal Apportionment and Special Education | 916-324-4541
Office of Charter Apportionments and District Reorganization | 916-324-4541

NYC Educator: Penny Wise, Pound Criminal

Penny Wise, Pound Criminal

by NYC Educator

Mayor Bloomberg has to prioritize, of course, as he applies his financial genius to the ruinous 3.2 billion dollar surplus this year. He's brilliantly managed to avoid firing 4,000 teachers, but has managed to lose a good 8,000 over the last three years. This is an important achievement as it saves a bundle for no-bid deal to give personal info about 1.1 million school kids to Rupert Murdoch, who's now purchased Joel Klein. Klein, as you may recall, presided over the DOE as it took a billion dollars to reduce class sizes and magically made them go up.

In yet another innovative coup, Mayor Bloomberg is replacing the filthy no. 6 oil that his people say costs

How Does the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School Explain its Test Results?« City School Stories

Reflections: Then and Now « City School Stories

How Does the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School Explain its Test Results?

Submitted by Frank Murphy on July 21, 2011

There are currently four cyber charter schools operating in Pennsylvania. The functions of these schools, for the most part, are invisible to public scrutiny.

One of the 89 schools whose PSSA test scores are under investigation by the Pennsylvania Department of Education is the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School. According to a study conducted by Data Recognition Corporation (DRC) on behalf of the state, the test results of multiple grades of this school were flagged for potential irregularities.

I had written a post earlier this year concerning the large sum of funding this school receives from state-mandated charter school payments. This money is drawn from the operational budgets of the local public school districts where its cyber school students live. I noted how this one virtual school receives more funding per school year than the entire budgets of many

This Week In Education: History: Oakland Teacher Recalls Stanford Prisoner Experiment

History: Oakland Teacher Recalls Stanford Prisoner Experiment

by Alexander Russo

The current issue of Stanford magazine has an article looking back at the (in)famous Stanford prisoner study, in which students were assigned to play the role of guards and prisoners for two weeks and took to their roles so completely that the experiment had to be shut down prematurely. One of the "prisoners" was a community college student named Richard Yacco who is now an Oakland school teacher and describes a connection between that time and the present: "One thing that I thought was interesting about the

#bloggermarch Video Postcards in Solidarity « Cooperative Catalyst

#bloggermarch Video Postcards in Solidarity

by mrsenorhill

Last night the fine folks at edtechtalk invited some coopsters to have a livestreamed google+ hangout on the network. It was a wonderful experience, allowing many of us to interact in a real-life way for the first time.

One of the things that came from the conversation and the backchannel was the idea of sending video postcards to participants of the Save Our Schools March in Washington D.C., July 28 – July 31.

I wanted these videos to reflect our own passions for catalyzing educational change and to inspire the many folks involved in the march and the concurrent events.

Here’s mine:

Please create your own mini video (mine took less than 5 minutes of production) and post to your favorite video sharing site. I used my webcam on my mac, but any camera will do.

Then, so all the videos can be aggregated, send them to coopcatalyst@gmail.com, link to them in the comments section of this blog post, or link to it via twitter with the hashtag #bloggermarch and @coopcatalyst.

It would be great to have a trove of this videos to send of to @sosmarch to demonstrate our solidarity in the fight, even if we can’t be there in person.

Thanks for your participation!

Attempt by Republicans to Gut Title 1 Funding « Larry Miller's Blog

Attempt by Republicans to Gut Title 1 Funding

by millerlf

Hurting Poor Students

Published: July 19, 2011 NYTimes

Extremists in Congress have long wanted to gut the spending restrictions in Title I, a federal law dating back to the 1960s that underwrites extra help for disadvantaged schoolchildren. A bill, approved by a House committee last week, would do just that, damaging one of most important civil rights programs in the country.

The State and Local Funding Flexibility Act would let school districts spend money earmarked for impoverished children on almost any educational purpose they chose. This would inevitably lead to money going from politically powerless poor schools to those without the same needs.

Title I was created during the Johnson administration in response to the failure of the states to offer access to equal education for all students as required by Brown v. Board of Education. The education law is based on a strict formula that drives federal aid to high-poverty districts, where large numbers of disadvantaged children often pose educational challenges. It is supposed to provide an added layer of federal money to high-poverty schools

More on ALEC: How Wisconsin Republicans Create Right Wing Legislation

by millerlf

July 13, 2011

In the midst of trying to balance the state’s multibillion-dollar budget, who had time to debate the state tax on moist tobacco products?

The American Legislative Exchange Council’s allies in the Wisconsin Legislature did.

Late in the budget debate, six Republican lawmakers – including four currently facing recall elections – sponsored a proposal to lower the overall price of moist snuff like Copenhagen and Skoal. Specifically, the provision would have altered the tax on smokeless tobacco products from one based on the price of the tobacco to one based on weight.

That stance on this obscure subject matches a model resolution approved by ALEC, a conservative outfit that

Time to get off our knees and do more than just march « Cooperative Catalyst

Time to get off our knees and do more than just march

by scottnine

Jonathan Kozol was spot on. It is time for educators, parents, and young people to reclaim the “public” in public education and get off our knees. I’ve been enjoying reading his and teachers diaries about why they’ll march toSave Our Schools on July 30th in DC. I’ll be there too.

But I’m not going to DC for the march. I’m going for the messy work of organizing what comes after the march that will take place at the SOS Congress on July 31st at American University from 11am to 3pm EST.

We are right to make demands, to craft policy proposals, and to seek media attention. We need coherent narratives about the school to prison pipeline, the learning and teaching environments that grow curiosity, a

Save Our Schools March

Scrutiny on Murdoch’s School Reform Agenda Grows - Yahoo! News

Scrutiny on Murdoch’s School Reform Agenda Grows

By Dana Goldstein | The Nation – 21 mins ago

The Nation -- If you watched Rupert Murdoch’s weak-sauce testimony in front of the British Parliament Tuesday, you might have felt just a teensy bit sorry for former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, who sat directly behind Murdoch the entire afternoon, pouting.

Sure, Klein is probably earning more money than God in his new role as executive vice president atNews Corp. But the Justice Department attorney-turned data-and-accountability school reformer signed up with Murdoch to get out of the harsh political limelight and help News Corp make a mint selling educational technology products to school districts. Instead, Klein now finds himself heading up the company’s internal response to the explosive phone hacking scandal, which has tainted nearly

HechingerEd Blog | Student teaching criticized in new study; schools of education fire back

Student teaching criticized in new study; schools of education fire back

by Sarah Garland

Knowing the subject matter is all well and good, but one skill that many new teachers lack as they embark on their first year of teaching is how to control a classroom, or so say many critics of teacher education. This critical skill along with the other practical aspects of teaching — how to teach a new concept to a room of students with varying levels of ability, and then make sure they all understood, for example — aren’t typically figured out until teachers try out the book-learning they do in their courses in an actual classroom. For most teachers, this first attempt is during their student teaching.

A new study by the National Council on Teacher Quality out this week finds fault with the way many schools of education run their student teaching programs, however. Among other issues, the NCTQ criticizes a common set up in many teacher training programs where schools, not the colleges, get to pick which mentor teachers will get student teachers assigned to them. (The NCTQ would prefer that schools of education pick the teacher

Feminist Teacher on the Radio « Feminist Teacher

Feminist Teacher on the Radio

by feministteacher

Within the past few months, I’ve had the terrific honor of being a guest on two feminist radio shows: Digital Sisterhood Network’s Feminism Online Project and Feminist Magazine. Last night, Feminist Magazine co-hosts Celina Alvarez and Christene Kings interviewed me during their show on KPFK 90.7 Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles. Calling in from México, I was thrilled to talk to Celina and Christene about my work with young people in high school.

One of the points I made was that the reason why students are attracted to feminism is because they can use its tools in their everyday lives: “What I do in the classroom not only focuses on gender and sexuality but also race and class . . . Students get excited because it’s about them . . . they face sexism, they face racism, they face classism, they face homophobia, transphobia, all of it, and feminism is the perfect launching point for those kinds of conversations. They want their education to be personal but they also want it to be useable, and I think

The charter school myth | Being Latino Online Magazine

The charter school myth

by Adriana Villavicencio

by Adriana Villavicencio

Most Republicans and Democrats can only agree on three things: vacations in August, getting reelected, and charter schools. Charter schools – technically public schools that aren’t required to comply with all of the regulations imposed on regular public schools – have become a bipartisan hallmark of current education reform and have been portrayed as the salvation of failing schools systems in large urban districts.

The media is so rife with charter success stories, miracles, and models of achievement that it is easy to forget that only 17% of charter schools outperform public schools, while 37% of charter schools perform worse than public schools. The truth is some charter schools are great, some are terrible, and most are somewhere in between (guess what…the same can be said of regular public schools).

There are, however, some successful charters that stand out when compared to their district schools, but when

The Scaled Down Contract: Boon or Bane to the Teaching Profession? - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher

The Scaled Down Contract: Boon or Bane to the Teaching Profession?

by Anthony Cody

Today I am sharing a guest post by Moira Saucedo, who is the mother of a special needs student in the Arlington County Public Schools, in Arlington, Virginia.

by Moira Saucedo.

My interest was sparked by a June, 2011 notice on Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's website of a $500,000 grant to the Future Is Now Schools, (FIN) a charter schools management organization founded by Steve Barr. FIN has been recently re-branded (some say divorced) from the LA-based Green Dot Public Schools, founded by Barr, and from Green Dot America, an effort by Barr to open charter schools nationally. The purpose of the grant is "to provide national support for the use of a scaled-down collective bargaining contract and to amplify the voice of reform-minded teachers in select cities by sharing organizing expertise."

The "scaled-down collective bargaining contract" phrase gave me pause. Our nation has just gone through a harrowing year of stripped-away collective bargaining agreements (CBAs), and rollbacks of pensions and

So we know you #LovePublicEd...

So we know you #LovePublicEd…

by TeacherSabrina

…to the tune of $4,570 as of 10:21 EDT this morning. We’re impressed– and extremely grateful.

We’ve now raised our one-day goal to $10,000, all of which go towards event costs like a giant screen, sound equipment, staging, and the like. If you haven’t yet done so, please make a donation using the button on the right, to help us reach this new goal!

Also, there’s still time to register for the opportunity to join us in conversation with historian and education advocate Dr. Diane Ravitch, tonight at 8PM EDT. As one of the earliest supporters of this March, and the highlight of our very first fundraising event, it seems especially fitting that she’ll join us tonight. Be there to hear her speak, ask questions, and get excited for the big event next Saturday!

–The Organizing Committee