Students Last: New Titles Help Students Cope With High Stakes Testing

Students Last: New Titles Help Students Cope With High Stakes Testing:

New Titles Help Students Cope With High Stakes Testing

As students around the country prepare to take and fail a battery of state exams based on the Common Core standards, Amazon.com has complied a list of books to help them and their parents cope.

Mending Jose's Broken Heart, "Even though we find out that Jose has failed the exam and will not be promoted and that his favorite teacher has been fired and his school is slated to close, the story is not maudlin, but uplifting and told with honesty, wisdom and much love."

I Used to Like School: A Parent’s Guide to Discussing the Common Core Standards With Your Child, "A Classic. Simply worded concepts with wonderfully colored pictures - that explain the changing nature of the school day from one of joy to one of pedantic exhaustion. It is one of those great books that feels written for adults as well as kids."

Helping Children Say Goodbye to Recess and Art: Coping Strategies for Testing Times, "Few books are able to explain the need to eliminate the 'extras' to children, let alone explain what happened to their fired teachers. This book does both and does it well!

Why Is Johnny Sad All The Time? Answers To Questions Posed During Standardized Testing Season, "This book will help children and their families move forward towards acceptance, understanding and hope as they prepare for the Common Core exams."

The Broken Pencil, "As Freddie experiences feelings of anger and frustration during test prep, he learns that misery is an expected and accepted part of life at school."

What's Summer School? "A gentle narrative following the conversations that pass between a mother and a young daughter in the days immediately after learning that the little girl has failed the state exams."

Students Last: New Titles Help Students Cope With High Stakes Testing:

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Interested in how we came to write this? Go to NYC Department of Education website: TIPS FOR TALKING WITH YOUR ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILD ABOUT THE COMMON CORE STANDARDS & CHANGING STATE TESTS

Parents Can Opt Out - United Opt Out National

Click Here to go to United Opt Out National: 

Click Here to go to the Website- United Opt Out Team

Click Here to go to the Website FairTest

Jersey Jazzman: New York's Absurd Debate About Teacher Evaluations & Test Scores

Jersey Jazzman: New York's Absurd Debate About Teacher Evaluations & Test Scores:

New York's Absurd Debate About Teacher Evaluations & Test Scores

 From this side of the Hudson, the controversy in New York this week over test scores and teacher evaluations makes New Jersey's education policy debates look relatively sane.


And that's no small trick.

Of course, there was already plenty to hate about New York's teacher evaluation system, APPR (Annual Professional Performance Review) before Angry Andy Cuomo got his way and imposed changes that make a bad system even worse.

APPR, like New Jersey's AchieveNJ, is predicted on the idea that the educator -- and only the educator -- is responsible for the "growth" of his or her students. It ignores the impacts of funding inequities or district-level curriculum decisions or inadequate facilities or non-random assignment of students or any of the many factors that impact student learning that are completely out of the control of teachers and/or principals.

In New Jersey, the test-based components of AchieveNJ also ignore student characteristics, even though SGPs -- Student Growth Percentiles, the test-based measures of student achievement used in teacher evaluations -- are clearly biased against teachers who work in high-poverty, low-resourced schools.

New York's growth model at least attempts to account for differences in student characteristics. According to the state's Technical Report, the bias against teachers and schools serving high-needs students has been significantly reduced compared to earlier versions of the model.

But that doesn't make New York's growth measures any less statistically noisy or invalid. According to the Technical Report, one-third of New York's teachers changed ratings from Jersey Jazzman: New York's Absurd Debate About Teacher Evaluations & Test Scores:

What Autism Means in My Family - Reflections on Teaching

Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » What Autism Means in My Family:

What Autism Means in My Family

It’s Autism Awareness Week. Just so you’re aware, I have autism in my family.

Apparently there is some controversy in autism, centering around who speaks for the autism community. Since I’m the adult in the house with a blog, I’ve been the one speaking about autism in our family. My being more neuro-typical certainly advantages me in this, but I also say more about it than my super-social-savvy spouse.  As with most of my autism posts which cite my son, I’ll be running it past him for approval. My son is at the point of his development where he can speak for himself, and I’m hoping he will do more of that. I think this is a good thing. It is the rising number of verbal and communicative folks with ASD (autism spectrum disorder) that have really brought up this issue, which is healthy. Anyway, this growing need to speak for themselves has lead to backlash againstAutism Speaks, the largest autism advocacy/charity group. The arguments are probably best articulated by the folks with this complaint, but center around a couple of things, who speaks for the autistic community, and what should the goal of a group formed to address this issue be? Specifically, does autism need a “cure”?  Some folks still want a fix, and are not happy that Autism Speaks is now talking about accepting autism as a gift.

I think I’m in a unique position, because in addition to having a fairly well-adjusted son with ASD, I grew up with a brother with classic, non-verbal autism. I don’t talk as much about him because he really can’t give consent as my son can, but I’m going to talk about why some families might want a cure, and others resent that idea. My brother was born in the mid-1970s when the “refrigerator-mom” theory of autism was dying a well-deserved death, but nothing new had really taken its place. No one knew what to do. There was little in the way of treatment or therapy at the time.  He was clearly “different” from a very young age (I remember thinking something was “off” when he was 6 months old, and I was only 9 at the time), but he was a beautiful, physically healthy baby. I saw my brother last Spring. He speaks in monosyllables. The best thing for me is that he seems happy because most of my memories of him, are not about a happy child, and the few times when he was happy, everyone else was very frustrated because it involved behavior like emptying every single bottle of shampoo down the bathtub, etc. Every adult in the family wanted a “cure” for my brother. As I got older, I wished he could have one because he was so frustrated, and angry.

While I understand concerns about trying to “mold” those with ASD into being neuro-typical, and concerns about language and behavior towards ASD individuals by families and Autism Speaks that is dehumanizing, I also know how frustrating it is to live with a severe, non-verbal person with autism. I also know that having mild-to-moderate ASD and raising a kiddo with that, is a whole different ball of wax than what my parents went through. Although many things have changed since the dark ages of Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » What Autism Means in My Family:

How to Grow Good Teachers:

How to Grow Good Teachers

APRIL 4, 2015 BY NANCY BAILEY LEAVE A COMMENT

Here is how those who have power could help teachers in public schools if they really wanted to. They are in no special order. I included these in the post about Nancie Atwell the other day, but I think they are worthy of standing alone. I didn’t want them overshadowed by the Nancie Atwell discussion.

Teachers and parents, feel free to add to the list. I will give you credit for your suggestions.

• Federal, state and local school district policy makers need to start proudly investing in public schools instead of withholding funds in order to eventually convert public schools to charters.
• Reduce the number of required high-stakes tests.
• End Value-Added Measurement which is not accurate and does not improve teaching.
• Support high school programs like Future Teachers of America to help young people think of teaching as a career.
• Help public schools be community hubs to bring people together, giving teachers visibility and support.
• Strengthen the PTA. Bring parents and teachers together.
• Lower class sizes, especially in kindergarten through third grade.
• All teachers should be fully-credentialed in their subject by a College of Education in an accredited university.
• Any non-credentialed teacher should only be hired in an emergency and it should be temporary.
• Create a new public relations program to welcome future career teachers to the university.
• Insist on well-prepared, credentialed teachers for all classes, including the arts.
• Create schools that have a balanced curriculum including the arts.
• Permit teachers to have a vested interest and a voice in their school.
• Increase support staff at the school, including guidance counselors, librarians, nurses, and school psychologists.
• Address special education with a continuum of services, including parental involvement.
• Look for better ways to devise unique school schedules that support a teacher’s ability to teach where learning is not disrupted.
• Give teachers adequate time to plan each day.
• Bring teachers together to collaborate for the benefit of their students.
• Provide fair due process for all teachers.
• Give teachers tenure and better job security afterHow to Grow Good Teachers:

Parents and Teachers Meet in a New York Minute (or 5 if They’re Lucky) - NYTimes.com

Parents and Teachers Meet in a New York Minute (or 5 if They’re Lucky) - NYTimes.com:

Parents and Teachers Meet in a New York Minute (or 5 if They’re Lucky)

NEA - Try This: The New Parent-Teacher Conference http://bit.ly/1IeqvcL

 On parent-teacher conference day at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan last week, scores of tense parents bunched together in the lobby, penned in behind yellow caution tape. At exactly 1 p.m., the tape dropped and the grown-ups stampeded up the stairs, jostling to get to the front of the pack.

“It’s like the running of the bulls in Pamplona,” said Randi Amick, the mother of a junior, before disappearing down a hallway.

In middle and high school, most New York City public school teachers have at least 150 students, and so the few hours each year set aside for formal conferences become an exercise in orderly chaos.

Parents must bolt from one floor to another lest they miss their strategically chosen time slots, based on a mental algorithm of distance between rooms and the demand for each teacher. Students, enjoying a touch of power, stand sentry at doorways, telling parents when their five minutes (or usually less) are up. Teachers must be prepared to summarize any of their students at any moment, and occasionally, they describe the wrong one.

Photo

Parents wait their turn to speak with a teacher during parent-teacher conferences at Stuyvesant. CreditSam Hodgson for The New York Times

“Use your time wisely,” said an email sent to parents at Middle School 51 in Brooklyn, which encouraged them to prioritize, to space out appointments and to keep time by their cellphones to avoid being late. “Due to time constraints, all conferences are strictly limited to three minutes each.”

Carmen Fariña, the city’s schools chancellor, has made encouraging parent involvement a centerpiece of her administration, and in many schools, an extra 40 minutes each week has been built into the teacher contract for “parent engagement.” Some schools offer English-language classes or cooking lessons to get parents in the door. Nonetheless, the rapid-fire parent-teacher conference, the most traditional form of parent outreach, remains a fixture.

Experienced parents say a good deal of strategy is involved in getting as many slots as possible, and to space them in such a way that you can be at the appointed classroom when your name is called. If you are not, you will be skipped, and some list monitors are less flexible than others about rescheduling.

Those monitors are generally children.

At Stuyvesant, a sophomore girl curled up in a desk outside an Advanced Placement world history classroom, keeping time on her phone. When time was up, she would poke her head in the doorway and wave. Other time’s-up signals at her school included knocking on the door frame, holding up a beeping kitchen timer and, outside one social studies classroom, clanging a cowbell.

“It’s a little like the Oscars with the music ushering you offstage,” said Wendi Devlin, the parent of a Stuyvesant freshman and a former teacher herself.

Parents are generally well behaved, students said, though a monitor reported that one had dropped a four-letter bomb upon learning a slot hadParents and Teachers Meet in a New York Minute (or 5 if They’re Lucky) - NYTimes.com: 

Teachers union president calls for North High principal's ouster - Worcester Telegram & Gazette - telegram.com:

Teachers union president calls for North High principal's ouster

Lisa Dyer, principal of North High School, speaks during a meeting March 19 at Worcester City Hall on safety issues t the school. At right is Meghan Milonopoulos, lead teacher for safety and accountability at the school. (T&G Staff File Photo/STEVE LANAVA)

Media

Text of email from Lisa Dyer (PDF, 100 K )

Related

North High principal apologizes for email blasting teacher

 WORCESTER — The president of the Worcester teachers union Tuesday called for the principal of North High School to resign or be fired for writing an "unprofessional" email to faculty Sunday, blasting an opinion column written by a teacher. 


"What she did was unacceptable, and is unacceptable in any field," Leonard Zalauskas, president of the Educational Association of Worcester, said Tuesday. "(I am) calling for the immediate resignation or termination of Principal Lisa Dyer based on her unprofessional behavior." 

Mr. Zalauskas' call is in reaction to an email Ms. Dyer sent to faculty and staff at the school Sunday concerninga column written for Worcester Magazine by contributor and North High teacher Janice Harvey. 

"Let's just say if we didn't have race relation problems before, we certainly have them now," Ms. Dyer wrote in her email, accusing Ms. Harvey of unfairly criticizing a group of community activists and of aligning herself with a controversial blogger she labeled racist. 

"In one sentence, she disrespects Dr. Boone, Superintendent of Worcester Public Schools, and aligns withTurtleboy Sports, a troll, known for his ability to incite causing maximum disruption and argument, particularly around issues of race for this troll," Ms. Dyer wrote. 

The March 26 piece by Ms. Harvey questioned the motives of the Coming Together Collective — a group of leaders of organizations involving people of color that came out in support of the district's beleaguered superintendent on March 17. 

Ms. Harvey said some leaders of color would stand to "profit" were racial turmoil to develop surrounding the situation at North High and Ms. Boone, who is the city's first African-American superintendent. Ms. Harvey said she did not believe racism had anything to do with the school's problems, writing that staff and students alike are "colorblind" and that conditions at the school have improved since police were added. 

The comments did not sit well with Ms. Dyer. 

"She re-hashes the negative events we suffered and have begun to overcome, and in my opinion, underestimates all the hard work staff has done in the building to turn things around, crediting the police instead," Ms. Dyer wrote. 

Ms. Dyer said that Ms. Harvey unfairly criticized the collective, which includes leaders of color in the city including, she said, pastors, reverends, North High teachers, parents and city councilors. 

Ms. Dyer said the collective legitimately came together to address perceived racism on the TurtleBoy Sports Teachers union president calls for North High principal's ouster - Worcester Telegram & Gazette - telegram.com:

Keep Washington Out of Your Kid's School - Bloomberg View

Keep Washington Out of Your Kid's School - Bloomberg View:

Keep Washington Out of Your Kid's School

 What do Republicans want federal education policy to look like? In the mid-1990s, they wanted to abolish the Department of Education. A few years later, President George W. Bush wanted to use federal dollars to make states reform their schools. Right now, Republicans are divided about what they want. The open question is whether they can make an effective response to the dramatic centralization of education policy that has taken place in recent years.

Most Republicans these days have at least a vague impulse to take power over the schools away from Washington. Some of the party's presidential candidates have supported the Common Core educational standards, for example, but all of them say that the federal government should leave decisions over the standards to the states.

What a lot of Republicans don't appreciate is how much power Washington has already amassed. That misunderstanding helps explain why House Republicans have had trouble passing an education bill. Their leaders, a few weeks ago, tried to hold a vote on the Student Success Act, which would, among other things, end the federal mandate that states ensure 100 percent of their students are proficient at math and English. But the bill had to be pulled after a revolt by conservatives who said it still allowed too large a federal role. They want states to get federal aid with no strings attached.

While Congress bickers, the executive branch is setting policy. Congress hasn't reauthorized the main federal programs for primary and secondary schools since Bush's No Child Left Behind Act became law in 2002. That law was written on the assumption that Congress would revisit education policy well before now. Since the law has instead continued on auto-pilot, most schools are now technically failing its standard of 100 percent proficiency and thus are subject to penalties.

The Department of Education has filled the vacuum. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has given states waivers from these penalties in return for their adoption of policies he favors -- including the Common Core standards that many conservative activists abhor.

The Student Success Act would no longer designate most schools as failing. It would also prevent the federal government from rewarding states for adopting Common Core or any other standards. That makes sense: The disappointing results of No Child Left Behind suggest that federal meddling does more to generate controversy than to improve schooling.

But nobody is talking about eliminating the federal role entirely. Even when Republicans wanted to abolish the Education Department they weren't proposing to end all the programs it houses. Nor is anyone proposing that today. And there's no argument in principle for the federal government to spend billions of dollars with no strings attached. There are only practical questions about how many strings, and what kind of strings, will do any good.

Proponents of the Student Success Act say it strikes a reasonable compromise on these questions. States will still have to test students regularly in the interests of transparency and accountability (to voters and parents, that is, not to the Department of Education). But the federal government will no longer try to drive school reform. Because even teachers' unions dislike some of the federal regulations the bill would abolish, it may also have a realistic shot at becoming law. Removing all conditions from federal funding, on the other hand, won't fly.

The great disappointment of the bill is that it only lets poor students use federal funds for public and charter schools, excluding private and parochial ones. The federal government acquired a large role in education in the first place in the name of helping those children. If their parents decide that their needs are best served by a private school, the funding should enable that choice. Prominent Republicans, including the party's last presidential nominee, have endorsed that idea. It should at least be up for a vote.

But even if the Student Success Act doesn't get the federal role quite right, it's still much better than the status quo -- in which the Keep Washington Out of Your Kid's School - Bloomberg View:

Rep. Kraus announces passage of Charter School Reform Bill from Ohio House - The Beacon

Rep. Kraus announces passage of Charter School Reform Bill from Ohio House - The Beacon | Port Clinton News, Marblehead News, Oak Harbor News, Lake Erie Islands News:

Rep. Kraus announces passage of Charter School Reform Bill from Ohio House

 State Representative Steve Kraus (R-Sandusky) voted in support of House Bill 2, legislation that adds revisions and increased oversight to the state’s charter school system.

“I believe House Bill 2 is a step in the right direction, and will be instrumental in strengthening our education system,” Kraus said. “It is our duty as representatives of the people to ensure our children are getting the education they deserve.”

Focusing primarily on issues of transparency, responsibility and accountability, House Bill 2 represents the most comprehensive piece of stand-alone legislation on the subject of charter schools in 12 years, particularly in the areas of charter school governance.

Among the major provisions of the legislation is greatly reducing the potential for conflicts of interests among school sponsors. For instance, the bill prohibits school sponsors from selling goods or services to the schools they authorize, as well as prohibiting employees of schools districts or educational service centers (ESC) from serving on the governing authority of a charter school sponsored by that particular district or ESC.

One of the ways in which House Bill 2 enhances transparency is by requiring charter school sponsors to annually report expenditures that have been made for the purposes of providing oversight or technical assistance to the charters they authorize. Similarly, all governing board members of a charter to disclose transactions made with any immediate relatives or associates who have done business with the school over the past three years.

Other provisions of House Bill 2 include:

• Prohibiting district school board members from serving on charter school boards• Requiring school treasurers to be directly employed by, or under contract to, the charter school governing authority• Requiring that a charter school sponsor, as opposed to a contracted agent, meet with the Auditor of State regarding enrollment, financial records and audits• Requiring the Ohio Department of Education to publish an annual performance report for all charter schools in the state, to be published on ODE’s website• Requiring that contracts between sponsors and charter schools contain performance measures that include state report card measures• Requiring governing authority members, administrative and supervisory staff to receive annual training on open meetings and public record laws

Having passed the House with bipartisan support, the bill now heads to the Senate for further consideration.Rep. Kraus announces passage of Charter School Reform Bill from Ohio House - The Beacon | Port Clinton News, Marblehead News, Oak Harbor News, Lake Erie Islands News:

Right and Left against the state: education without classes

Right and Left against the state: education without classes:

Right and Left against the state: education without classes

 Education reform, whether promoted by the Left or Right, often fails to deeply address the class-based issues driving the alleged "failure" of the educational system.

Right

"...we used to have all these individual performers who would sing before we had pre-recorded music and it’s very sad now that you just listen to this performance that’s a hundred times better." --Bill Gates [1]

A while ago, on NPR's "Fresh Air" I heard about 20 minutes of Terry Gross's interview with New America Foundation corporate education reformer Kevin Carrey. He was promoting Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) which he believes will level the educational playing field, eliminating the existing hierarchy of educational opportunity by creating online access for all. [2] Carrey earnestly griped about the ways upper tier and Ivy League colleges favor white people, and rich people, admitting students based on factors such as which elite high school they attended, or what legacy family they come from. Carrey could not claim that MOOCs will get rid of these elite institution's expensive tuitions, or alter their function as networks plugging wealthy students in to top financial, political, managerial, and tech/science jobs, with a smattering of lower middle class and poor included to make it look "fair."

It is not realistic to expect a format featuring canned lectures (which Carrey says are superior to brick and mortar university lectures because you can pause them and go get a coffee) and class sizes up to tens of thousands of students, to do away with the inequality in the social and economic system at the heart of educational inequity. That's the problem. Carrey's "solution" looks at a _function_ of capitalism-- the reproduction and maintenance of social class, in this case both supported by and expressed in the unequal access to education and opportunity, and treats it like a malfunction. He pretends to advocate an end to this two-tier system, but is really outlining a different two-tiered division within this same social system. One educational tier will be cheaper and more efficient, and this will somehow level the currently existing opportunity hierarchy within society. It's absurd on it's face, by design.

The "cheaper" part happens when you have a world-class professor, super-star author or uber-researcher tape his or her lecture series once. At this point, says Carrey, you've covered the base cost of producing the content (there are other expenses to getting a class online) and it doesn't cost any more to add one, or one million more students to the class. 

Ignore the fact that this implies dismantling the teaching profession and automating positions via pre-recorded superstars, thereby destroying tens of thousands of present and _future_ jobs in education. It's no coincidence that this dovetails with ongoing austerity-driven attacks on public sector unions, of which the teaching profession is a stronghold.

Such efficiency comes with high social costs.With fewer teachers, you narrow the perspectives within education, eliminating differences in life experience, local knowledge, and professors' connections to regional student populations. The now redundant professors would have otherwise interacted with each other developing relevant curriculum, and they would also have, or at least they used to have, a democratic say in how their universities are run. In that older model, when it was functioning, the driving concerns focused much more on the quality of educational experiences, and the quality and direction of research, than the business model of education's narrowed focus to the University's financial portfolio and investor returns. It's not that this model was impervious to distortion by state and market forces. It wasn't. It's more that the new direction toward online super-stars is the wrong one. Providing a "cheaper" privatized version of whatever the college experience used to be--which could have included community experience, a place of criticality, and even resistance to governmental or private tyranny implicit in critical thought, is a way of dismantling a public service. The new structures are designed to facilitate the flow of capital first, and learning as a byproduct of the streamlined product.

Carrey was clear that the University model is 800 years old (old is bad) and based on "scarcity," a critique which sounds almost Marxian. So now it won't have to be. Everyone can have the computer version for "free." Included in the cost of "free" is a massive victory for the private educational companies that are positioning themselves to take control out of public hands and into their own.  [3]

Scarcity of educational opportunity currently exists largely because funding for public education is under attack, not because the private sector has been barred from creating the kind of efficiencies that austerity is currently implementing on the global workforce. Market forces are making huge strides in restructuring Universities in a business model of education that is top heavy with overpaid manager-administrators, and bottom heavy with precarious temp-adjunct staff with no supports.

Carrey wants us to believe he is against standardization, noting that college admissions are based on standardized tests which are a "blunt instrument," and besides "who knows who wrote that college admission essay?" And yet, it does not seem likely that it would be easier to tell who wrote an essay or took a test when dealing with students online, whether a small class or thousands of people in a MOOC. Reducing the learning experience to MOOC platforms is certainly a shift toward standardization.

Left

“Far from contesting this historical process, which is subordinating one of the last relatively autonomous sectors of social life to the demands of the commodity system, the above-mentioned progressives protest against delays and inefficiencies in its implementation. They are the partisans of the future cybernetized university, which is already showing its ugly head here and there. The commodity system and its modern servants — these are the enemy." [4]

The saddest thing about all of this is that we expect this ironic concern for the dispossessed from the Right, from corporations, and the ruling class. It is less expected from other quarters, especially ostensibly radical ones. The Global Center for Advanced Studies (GCAS) has its own critique of the University from the Left.

The Center wants to go "beyond hierarchy, and beyond the antiquated 'great man'" [5] model of professorship. Yet, in the fight against this plague of elitism, "GCAS is the first higher education institution to bring together the most publicly-engaged, theory-informed faculty members in the world." In other words, the great men and women of such theory. One imagines this could eliminate the need to attend classes with mediocre professors who might not even have a book out.

The bar that GCAS sets is rightfully high, but it's tough to separate believing in the reality of one's desires from delusions of grandeur. In a Huffpost interview, Founder Creston Davis gushes that the Center is a "venue in which the leading theorists, artists, architects, etc. and students can explore and create new futures and worlds." Co-Director Jason Adams defines the problem of both private and public colleges:

"The problem with current institutions, at least in the U.S., is twofold: first, you have elite, private institutions like those Creston and I taught at after graduating (and that he studied at prior to graduating); second, you have popular, public institutions like those that I attended before graduating. In the age of advanced neoliberalism, these are, really, becoming two sides of the same coin, and it's Right and Left against the state: education without classes:

Basta Ya! A video about opting out in Spanish. Please share. | Seattle Education

Basta Ya! A video about opting out in Spanish. Please share. | Seattle Education:

Basta Ya! A video about opting out in Spanish. Please share.

Padres en Nueva York se unen a un movimiento nacional que rechaza los exámenes estandarizados bajo el nuevo estándar académico conocido como Common Core.

Dora TaylorBasta Ya! A video about opting out in Spanish. Please share. | Seattle Education:

Powerful Video: Future of New York State Education | deutsch29

Powerful Video: Future of New York State Education | deutsch29:

Powerful Video: Future of New York State Education

On March 31, 2015, the New York State Assembly proved that budgeting well takes a back seat to “budgeting badly but on time.”

Even before the official vote was taken, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie knew that the budget would pass the Democrat-controlled Assembly because “the people of this state want an on-time budget.”

So, according to Heastie,  it’s “the people” who “want” politicians to tell New York schools how to evaluate teachers– just so long as the screwy budget that also relieves New York’s wealthiest from sales tax on yachts is Approved. On. Time.

Due to that Democrat-induced, “on time” approval, New York now has a similar teacher evaluation stupidity that passed in Louisiana in 2012 (with student test scores counting for 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation unless the teacher is rated “ineffective,” in which case the test scores override all else). Moreover, New York has an extra layer of idiocy, even outdoing Louisiana: the “independent evaluator” nonsense that promises to introduce unprecedented disruption in the running of already-pressured schools as their administrators could be required to travel to other schools to evaluate teachers in unfamiliar contexts.

Did I mention that all of this “admin swap” means nothing in the face of the “ineffective test scores” trump card?

And “ineffective,” well, that is To Be Determined by the New York State Education Department (NYSED).

Ahh, yes. The bottom line is that all New York career teachers are now at the mercy of whatever test score “growth” NYSED concocts in its effort to please a governor who is decidedly and openly hostile to the “public school monopoly” he vowed to “bust” upon reelection.

There you have it, People of New York: A casualty of the “budgeting on time” that Heastie says you demand.

Therefore, don’t blame the “heavy-hearted” Democrats captured in short order in the brief, powerful video below. And certainly don’t blame those clueless legislators who voted for a budget without fully comprehending its ramifications.

The politicians are innocent… right?

Future of NYS Education, by Stronger Together (ST) Caucus

________________________________________________

Schneider is a southern Louisiana native, career teacher, trained researcher, and author of the ed reform whistle blower, A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who In the Implosion of American Public Education.

She also has her second book available on pre-order, Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools?, due for publication May/June 2015.Powerful Video: Future of New York State Education | deutsch29:

Charter schools still a D.C. hot-button issue - The Washington Post

Charter schools still a D.C. hot-button issue - The Washington Post:

Charter schools still a D.C. hot-button issue

For years, District residents have forecast — for better or worse — a future where charter schools consumed neighborhood schools. And with charter school enrollment growing every year for nearly two decades, that day has seemed not too far away.

But this year, the percentage of students attending charters in the District has leveled off, with 44 percent of school-age city residents enrolled. At the same time, the city’s traditional public schools marked their third consecutive year of growth.

Leaders of the D.C. Public Charter School Board said in a Washington Post op-ed recently that the city’s balance — “with a thriving public charter sector and strong traditional schools — is about right.”

The message from Executive Director Scott Pearson and board Chairman John “Skip” McKoy was met with relief by advocates of neighborhood schools and disbelief from some who want to see more aggressive charter school growth in one of the most closely watched school reform efforts in the nation.

“They said the mix is right now, but the mix cannot be right, because there are still thousands of kids who are in schools that are not working,” said Andy Smarick, a charter advocate and partner at Bellwether Education Partners in the District.

He argued in an education blog that the board’s position signaled the close of an “exhilarating chapter of reform” and suggested that the District should approve a second charter school authorizer that would be willing to take the city to the next level of growth.

Pearson and McKoy later clarified the statement they made in the op-ed in The Post, saying they are not calling for a pause in charter school growth. The charter board is considering six applications for additional charter schools this spring. But Pearson and McKoy reiterated support for a neighborhood school system that has been making substantive improvements and also cautioned that growing much larger could lead charter schools to sacrifice some of their autonomy.

Their comments come as Deputy Mayor for Education Jennifer C. Niles is poised to launch a task force to study how charter and traditional schools can increase their collaboration.

There has been a groundswell in recent years for the city to make more efficient use of taxpayer funds and streamline duplicative school programs in an environment in which additional schools are cropping up every year.

Last year, many criticized the location of a campus of Harmony Public Schools, a Houston-based network, which opened a science and technology-focused elementary school across the street from Langley Elementary in Northeast. Langley is a traditional public school with the same academic focus as the Harmony school.

This year, advocates of neighborhood schools are protesting plans by Washington Global, a charter middle school approved in May, to open less than a half-mile from Jefferson Middle School, near Charter schools still a D.C. hot-button issue - The Washington Post: