Merrow vs Moskowitz: What Happens to Those Who Speak Out? - Living in Dialogue

Merrow vs Moskowitz: What Happens to Those Who Speak Out? - Living in Dialogue:

Merrow vs Moskowitz: What Happens to Those Who Speak Out? 

By John Thompson.

While I disagree with PBS’s ombudsman, Michael Getler, I believe we should take his statement on John Merrow’s News Hour finale as a learning experience opportunity for education activists. Then we can make it a teachable moment for the non-education press.

Merrow closed his illustrious career with a hugely important report on suspensions at Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy. Getler doesn’t seem to understand how big of a story it is.

PBS News Hour acknowledges that as the story unfolded there was a miscommunication with Merrow, the News Hour, and Moskowitz about student privacy laws. Getler doesn’t seem to understand the complexity of those laws — and how inappropriate Moskowitz was in flouting them. If Merrow had done something wrong, I sense Getler would have said so explicitly. Instead, he focuses on a new issue – the use of confidential sources.

The ombudsman recognizes that “Merrow is a highly-experienced, well-respected specialist in this field of reporting, so what he reports and says may be absolutely true and very important in disclosing questionable activities of a high-profile school system and the impact on young children.” He further admits, “I have no special insight into education procedures, can’t evaluate the battle that still rages over the accuracy of the statistical analysis used in this segment, and can’t really tell who is right and wrong on the substance of school policy and procedure.”

Getler’s complaint was that Merrow had to use too many sources who would not go on the record. I wonder if he has the same complaint with the New York Times Magazine’s coverage of Moskowitz. Daniel Bergner watched Moskowitz for months and says her, “impatience with dissent emerged as one part of a furious and almost crazed passion.” He cites two unnamed sources to support the seemingly noncontroversial statement that Moskowitz is “downright imperious.” When reporting on another charge that is intertwined with the battle over her Success Academy, the Times’s wording is very similar to Merrow’s on suspensions, “In talking to dozens of current and former Success Academy employees and parents, the critique with the most staying power involved the schools’ overly heated preparation for the state exams.” (emphasis mine) The names of those dozens of sources were not revealed.

Getler understands that the use of confidential sources is often necessary but, “This is not a big national security issue or something like that when sources frequently decline to be identified. This is charter schools and policies that we are talking about, a big universe and surely not everyone out there with a supportable case to make is afraid of Eva Moskowitz. Or are they?”

(I should also add that given the pervasive nature of Success Academy’s test prep, the universe of Bergner’s potential sources is big. Given the charter schools’ ability to “cream” the easiest-to-teach students, the Merrow vs Moskowitz: What Happens to Those Who Speak Out? - Living in Dialogue:

How the New SAT Test Is Taking Cues from Common Core - The Atlantic

How the New SAT Test Is Taking Cues from Common Core - The Atlantic:

How the Common Core Is Transforming the SAT

The college-admissions test is being restructured as an extension of the controversial public-school reading and writing standards.

High-school students who enjoy obscure vocabulary and puzzle-like math problems might want to sign up for the SAT now, before the 89-year-old college-admissions test is revamped this March to better reflect what students are learning in high-school classrooms in the age of the Common Core.

While other standardized tests have also been criticized for rewarding the students who’ve mastered the idiosyncrasies of the test over those who have the best command of the underlying substance, the SAT—with its arcane analogy questions and somewhat counterintuitive scoring practices—often received special scorn.

Even David Coleman—the president of The College Board, a nonprofit that designs and administers the SAT—readily admits that for far too long students who could afford special classes and tutoring on the test’s tricks (programs that could cost tens of thousands of dollars in some parts of the country) had an unfair advantage. Coleman, who is often called the architect of the Common Core, arrived at the nonprofit in 2012 and has since been on a campaign to make an SAT test that would incentivize students to take rigorous high-school classes and not just the best How the New SAT Test Is Taking Cues from Common Core - The Atlantic:

For American-Israeli Teacher, Death Came on the No. 78 Bus - The New York Times

For American-Israeli Teacher, Death Came on the No. 78 Bus - The New York Times:

For American-Israeli Teacher, Death Came on the No. 78 Bus

BEIT SHEMESH, Israel — Richard Lakin’s funeral on Wednesday was touching in the tiny, usual ways. His grown son tearfully recalled a man who began every morning with a banana and a chuckle. His teenage granddaughter thanked him for teaching her to ride a bike and, barely able to get the words out, “for watching ‘Charlotte’s Web’ endless times with me.”

There were also hints at the unusual circumstances of his death. The United States ambassador to Israel sitting in the chapel’s last row, the former member of Israel’s Parliament helping fill the grave with dirt. And the son, Micah Avni, asking in his eulogy, “How is it that such a beautiful person is struck down in such a brutal and horrific manner?”

Mr. Lakin, 76, was shot in the head and stabbed in the face and chest byPalestinian assailants on a public bus in Jerusalem at the height of this month’s violent uprising. An American who moved to Israel three decades ago, he died after two weeks in the hospital, where he had much surgery and a parade of visitors, including Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations and students from Hand in Hand, Jerusalem’s joint Arab-Jewish school.

Photo

Richard LakinCreditCourtesy of the Lakin Family, via Associated Press

He was one of nine Israeli Jews killed byPalestinians since Oct. 1. One of the two bus attackers was among more than 25 Palestinian suspects shot dead by Israelis during the same period; some 35 other Palestinians have been killed in clashes with security forces.

Each, undoubtedly, is a story in itself. Mr. Lakin’s is one of a teacher slain by young men who could have been his students, of a social media devotee whose family is now suing Facebook over posts they say incite violence, of a man who stood up for coexistence being felled by its failure.

“He was just a deeply optimistic and hopeful person, and refused to be deterred by the grim political reality here,” said Rabbi Levi Weiman-Kelman of Kol Haneshama, the Jerusalem synagogue where Mr. Lakin was a longtime member. “He wasn’t oblivious to the reality, but it didn’t affect his basic existential nature. He could not imagine a solution wasn’t possible and that people couldn’t learn to live together.”

A civil rights activist and Connecticut elementary school principal, Mr. Lakin moved to Jerusalem with his family in 1984. He taught English to Israeli and Palestinian children, performed in musicals and, according to Rabbi Weiman-Kelman, never missed a peace rally.

After a routine doctor’s appointment on Oct. 13, Mr. Lakin called his ex-wife (and still best friend), Karen, to say he was taking the No. 78 bus rather than walking home because he thought it would be safer amid the spate of stabbings on Jerusalem streets. When news broke that a No. 78 had been attacked, she and her son started frantically dialing Mr. Lakin’s number.

“Eventually, one of the nurses in the operating room answered his phone,” recalled Mr. Avni, 46, who works in finance and had walked out of a meeting in his Tel Aviv office to drive to Jerusalem. “She said, ‘Come to Hadassah Ein Karem as soon as possible.’ ”

Hadassah and Jerusalem’s other hospitals are rare oases of the Arab-Jewish coexistence Mr. Lakin promoted. A Palestinian nurse in the emergency room recognized him as he was wheeled in: Her two sons had taken his classes. The surgical team that struggled to stitch together his injured organs included Dr. Abed Khalaileh, an Arab from East Jerusalem, like the attackers on the bus.

“When I talked to the family, I had tears in my eyes — this is a man and he didn’t do anything. What did he do to deserve such a punishment?” Dr. Khalaileh said later. “I am not political here, my goal is not to judge, and I try and disconnect. But still, you live with a sensation that isn’t good, that after all, the person who carried out this attack is from your people.”

One of the attackers, Bilal Abu Ghanem, had surgery in the same hospital, at the same time.

Photo

Shachar Boteach, center, at 16 the oldest of Mr. Lakin’s eight grandchildren, during his funeral in the town of Beit Shemesh, Israel. CreditBaz Ratner/Reuters

“I had the auspicious pleasure of holding my father’s hand and looking that man straight in the eye as he woke up in the intensive-care unit,” Mr. Avni recalled. “And it sounds like he’s doing O.K. — as opposed to my father.”

Mr. Avni, who Hebraicized his last name, said he soon learned that the slain attacker, Bahas Alian, had announced his plans on Facebook. While sitting vigil in the hospital, the family was incensed to find on social networks a re-enactment of the bus attack “to encourage others to take the same action,” Mr. Avni said, and “specific instructions on how to slice someone’s chest open and cut their intestines like what was done to my father.”

Mr. Lakin’s own Facebook page had as its cover a photo of a boy in a Jewish skullcap and one in a Palestinian kaffiyeh under a “Coexist” logo made from religious symbols. The morning of the attack, he posted an article about a long-ago discovery regarding diabetes, but the days before, his page was filled with links regarding the uprising. Mr. Lakin had also made 38,000 Twitter posts since joining in 2009, and had 4,634 followers.

“My father had been a great beneficiary of social media. He used Facebook and Twitter to express his thoughts on education and on peace,” Mr. Avni said. “He also became the victim of a tremendous amount of incitement and hate on those vehicles.”

Now, Mr. Lakin is the lead plaintiff in a suit filed this week in New York by a conservative Israeli antiterrorism group that seeks an injunction to force Facebook to block posts that call for violence against Jews.

None of this was mentioned at Wednesday’s funeral, where Karen Lakin read from Robert Frost and described her ex-husband as the grandson of a Yiddish-speaking socialist farmer.

One group among the hundreds of mourners recalled his roles in the Jerusalem English Speaking Theater’s productions of “The Music Man,” “Pajama Game,” “South Pacific” and “Annie.”

“He was a wonderful, warm, compassionate President Roosevelt,” said Brian Negin, who played Harold Ickes in that “Annie” back in 1998.

“Just like Richard,” added Mr. Negin’s wife, Susan Lazinger.

Shachar Boteach, at 16 the oldest of Mr. Lakin’s eight grandchildren, told the crowd it felt “like the air has been taken out of my lungs.”

“I know you would want me to always try to be a better person and do the right thing. You would want me to spread love and happiness everywhere I go,” she said, speaking directly to his body wrapped in a Jewish prayer shawl. “I think you wouldn’t want me to have not even one ounce of hate in my body, even though what has been done to you.”For American-Israeli Teacher, Death Came on the No. 78 Bus - The New York Times:

Richard Lakin's Thanks2Teachers.com - A Wellspring of Teacher Appreciation and Teacher Inspiration > Home > Home http://bit.ly/1Lly9iQ

Teaching as an Act of Love: Thoughts and Recollections of a Former Teacher ... - Richard Lakin - Google Books http://bit.ly/1LlyimB

Richard Lakin's Thanks2Teachers.com - A Wellspring of Teacher Appreciation and Teacher Inspiration > Home > Home http://bit.ly/1Lly9iQ Teaching as an Act of Love: Thoughts and Recollections of a Former Teacher ... - Richard Lakin - Google Bookshttp://bit.ly/1LlyimB

With A Brooklyn Accent: The Drug War: A Brilliant Strategy to Divide People Along Racial Lines When All Boats are Sinking

With A Brooklyn Accent: The Drug War: A Brilliant Strategy to Divide People Along Racial Lines When All Boats are Sinking:

The Drug War: A Brilliant Strategy to Divide People Along Racial Lines When All Boats are Sinking

During the last thirty years, working class incomes in the US have fallen sharply The vast majority of income gains in the US during those years have accrued to people in the top 20 percent of earners and in the last ten years to people in the top 1 percent. The once proud US industrial economy has become a shadow of itself. A starting auto worker now makes half of what his ( or her) counterpart did in 1947 and 51 percent of all jobs now pay $30,000 or less. More than 2/3 of new jobs being created are at or slightly above minimum wage and many Americans have to package together several jobs to pay rent or support a family. There are few low or moderate income communities in the country where people are not living doubled or tripled up, or renting out rooms because the expense of living space has outpaced incomes

This decline in living standards has been remarkably broad based, affecting rural areas and small towns as well as cities, and affecting whites and Asians as well as Blacks and Latinos.

But rather than creating unity among America's diverse racial and cultural groups, this decline in living standards seems to have increased tensions.

One reason for this is the emergence of the drug war as form of police state surveillance and control for some and a jobs program and economic development strategy for others, largely though not exclusively along racial lines.

A well financed war on drugs, largely focusing on drug sales in urban Black and Latino communities, has led to a significant expansion of the nation's police organizations, and a huge expansion of its prison population which grew from 330,000 in 1980 to over 2 million by 2000. To hold this new inmate population, state and federal government financed a wave of prison construction, much of which was concentrated in depressed, largely white, rural areas. To put it bluntly, prison construction became a job creation strategy for rural whites whose economic prospects had been shattered by factory closings and the destruction of family farming by agribusiness.

What political elites had created, through this policy initiative, was a 

With A Brooklyn Accent: The Drug War: A Brilliant Strategy to Divide People Along Racial Lines When All Boats are Sinking:

NAEP Scores Stagnate; Test-and-Punish Flops; But Duncan’s New Plan Fails to Change Course | janresseger

NAEP Scores Stagnate; Test-and-Punish Flops; But Duncan’s New Plan Fails to Change Course | janresseger:

NAEP Scores Stagnate; Test-and-Punish Flops; But Duncan’s New Plan Fails to Change Course

The biennial NAEP scores were released yesterday.  Diane Ravitch knows a lot about the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the NAEP.  Appointed by President Bill Clinton, she served on the National Assessment Governing Board for seven years. She describes what this test is: “NAEP is an audit test. It is given every other year to samples of students in every state and in about 20 urban districts. No one can prepare for it, and no one gets a grade. NAEP measures the rise or fall of average scores for states in fourth grade and eighth grade in reading and math and reports them by race, gender, disability status, English language ability, economic status, and a variety of other measures. The 2015 NAEP scores showed no gains nationally in either grade and in either subject… The best single word to describe NAEP 2015 is stagnation.”

Ravitch describes what she believes is the meaning of this year’s scores, and I agree with her: “For nearly 15 years, Presidents Bush and Obama and the Congress have bet billions of dollars—both federal and state—on a strategy of testing, accountability, and choice.  They believed that if every student was tested in reading and mathematics every year from grades 3 to 8, test scores would go up and up. In those schools where test scores did not go up, the principals and teachers would be fired and replaced. Where scores didn’t go up for five years in a row, the schools would be closed. Thousands of educators were fired, and thousands of public schools were closed, based on the theory that sticks and carrots, rewards and punishments, would improve education.”  But it hasn’t worked.

Carol Burris, the retired NY high school principal and now executive director of the Network for Public Education, interprets the 2015 NAEP scores: “NAEP is a truth teller. There is no NAEP test prep industry, or high-stakes consequence that promotes teaching to the test. NAEP is what it was intended to be—a national report card by which we can gauge our national progress in educating our youth.  During the 1970s and ’80s, at the height of school desegregation efforts, the gap in scores between our nation’s white and black students NAEP Scores Stagnate; Test-and-Punish Flops; But Duncan’s New Plan Fails to Change Course | janresseger:

Increasing Access to Education Hasn’t Fixed America’s Inequality - The Atlantic

Increasing Access to Education Hasn’t Fixed America’s Inequality - The Atlantic:

Education Reform and the Failure to Fix Inequality in America

An abridged history of the misleading connection between classroom opportunity and economic mobility

As the U.S. continues to reckon with a widening income gap between the wealthiest Americans and marginalized communities, politicians and advocates have often cited education access as one of the greater contributors—and potential solutions—to the problem.

Improving educational opportunities to shrink income disparities depends on increasing the resources available to school districts. But funding alone is not enough to equalize access to a quality education. Schools need new and innovative approaches to turn resources into student results that beget success in the world beyond the classroom. A look back at historical challenges to education access demonstrates how far the U.S. has come, and highlights the obstacles facing students today compared with those of prior generations.

Access to education in the U.S. has improved for demographic groups across four important categories: race, class, ethnicity, and gender. But progress on these fronts has been slow and contentious. Historically, local, state, and federal leaders have instead used education as a tool to control minority populations.

Consider the forced assimilation of Native American children during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These children were sent to boarding schools to acculturate them into a dominant white American society. They were forbidden from speaking in native tongues and were renamed for heroic historical figures like Philip Sheridan and Ulysses S. Grant. Meanwhile, Chinese and Latino children were denied equal access to education in many parts of the country as school systems, spurred on by communities’ xenophobic fears, pushed for laws or found loopholes that allowed them to segregate public schools.

These experiences extended to larger immigrant groups as well, such as theWWI-era pressure on German-American parochial schools in Texas, California, the Midwest, and major cities throughout the Northeast to forgo their ties to German culture. This discrimination grew to include forbidding non-English instruction to students of German descent, as politicians and the American public questioned whether schools founded by ethnic religious orders could be loyal to the U.S. in a time of war.

Minority ethnic groups pushed back against the restrictions as they were imposed, calling on the U.S. government to address inequalities in education access. Progress took time, accumulating in piecemeal gains for minorities.

Building on other education-related legislation throughout the 20th century, Congress took a significant step forward in 1974 with the passage of the Equal Educational Opportunities Act, which required schools to accommodate bilingual students, among other measures. In most states today, instead of shutting out non-English speaking students, K-12 schools and universities now offer Increasing Access to Education Hasn’t Fixed America’s Inequality - The Atlantic:

Opinion: An Inconvenient Truth About President Obama’s Testing Plan - NJ Spotlight

Opinion: An Inconvenient Truth About President Obama’s Testing Plan - NJ Spotlight:

OPINION: AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH ABOUT PRESIDENT OBAMA’S TESTING PLAN

Capping standardized testing at 2 percent of instruction time should overjoy the opt-out movement. So why are they outraged?

On Saturday President Obama proposed a “Testing Action Plan” (TAP) that urges states to cap student standardized testing at no more than 2 percent of instructional time per year.

Media outlets greeted his proposal as news, forgetting, perhaps, that the White House actually proposed the same plan this past summer, as did the Council of Chief State School Officers, the group that developed the Common Core State Standards.

But redundancy isn’t the point. Instead, the president has successfully undermined a set of dynamics that have produced the opt-out movement, which draws its constituency from teacher unions, suburban parents, and local-control adherents. The proof is in anti-testers’ uniformly negative reaction to sensible constraints on the impact of assessments on instructional time.

Counterintuitive? Perhaps. Why, after all, would many of those who feign concern about overtesting greet a proposal for testing reduction with fearful jibes? Because much of the opt-out movement has nothing to do with student welfare and everything to do with teacher job security. If we strip the pretense from the presumption that state-led efforts toward higher standards and accountability have led to an epidemic of student stress, then the opt-out movement, even among its primary constituency of wealthy suburban parents, loses its vigor.

First, the facts: let’s look at what TAP does and doesn’t do in New Jersey:

• It does not overturn current federal mandates for annual standardized testing on course standards. The 2 percent cap -- and, remember, this is a recommendation, not a mandate -- has no impact on New Jersey’s use of PARCC assessments. Do the math: for the typical 180-day school year, 2 percent of the time is 3.6 days, or about 21 hours. As newly configured, PARCC is nine to 10 hours, or less than half the recommended time for test-taking.
• It has no impact on the New Jersey Department of Education or the state Legislature, although either could propose such a policy or law. Last year, for example, New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a law that placed a 2 percent cap on instructional time devoted to test preparation; New Jersey could follow suit.

Here’s what the Testing Action Plan does do:

• It places the burden for finding the proper balance between instruction and assessment on local school boards and districts because overtesting is a local problem, not a federal one. Just as Princeton Public Schools recently limited homework, school boards have always had the prerogative to cap time spent on locally developed tests or direct superintendents to examine test redundancies, especially at the secondary level.
• It puts extra burdens on school administrators and teachers to integrate testing into instruction, as well as integrate testing hours into instructional days. During this nascent year of PARCC testing, some districts reported that although the test itself lasted only 45 minutes, teachers and students still sacrificed a full day. That’s a management problem, not a testing problem.

As Charlie Barone points out, “on average, federal policies account for seven hours of testing per year -- roughly 0.6 percent of an average school year.” And as indicated by the recent Education Post poll, a plurality of parents believe that “fair and periodic standardized testing allows parents to know that their child is learning what they need to succeed.” (Disclosure: I’m part of the Education Post network.) But these facts belie the sentiments that draw testing opponents. Hence, the jibes and resentful reactions that greeted the President’s proposal.

Just listen: Peter Green of the National Education Policy Center: “Obama’s Testing Action Plan Sucks.”

Badass Teachers Association board member Dr. Denisha Jones: “Although this is a step in the right direction I feel we need to see what the policy is before we count this as a win. Given his actions in New York, I have no reason to trust John King [Obama’s new secretary of education], and I'm concerned that this is a ploy to get teachers on the side of Democrats aka Hillary Clinton.”

Diane Ravitch’s Network for Public Education: “NPE is disappointed by the limited response to what it views as a national education crisis … Limiting testing to 2 percent is a symbolic gesture that will have little impact so long as these tests are used for high-stakes purposes.”

And, more locally, the NJEA: "We are pleased that President Obama has acknowledged that overtesting our students is counterproductive to a healthy school-learning environment. His call to limit time spent on testing to no more than two percent of total instructional time is a good first step. However, that does not go far enough to address the negative impact that these high-stakes tests have on classroom instruction.”

This fear of accurate information among testing opponents is palpable. If parents realize that standardized assessments don’t, in fact, consume untoward amounts of instructional time, then they’re less likely to refuse tests for their children. If Tea Partiers and state rightists realize that the bulk of student testing is locally controlled, then their resentment of federal oversight is diminished. If the primary motivation of groups like Opt Out United, the NEA, and the AFT is unveiled as resentment towards changes in tenure law and teacher evaluations, then the momentum of the anti-testing movement is drained off.

There’s a proper balance between instruction and assessment, and school districts have struggled this past year to achieve equilibrium. As results on newly calibrated assessment results aligned with higher standards trickle in, parents are confronted with news that our children aren’t as academically proficient as we thought. Teacher evaluations are evolving in order to elevate the profession and, as with testing, we strive to strike the right balance. Change is hard. But no one is well-served when we cloak fear of accountability in a mantle of convolution about testing. Let’s keep the focus on children, not labor leaders.

Laura Waters writes about education politics and policy for NJ Spotlight and other publications. She also blogs at NJ Left Behind and has been a school board member in Lawrence Township (Mercer County) for 10 years.Opinion: An Inconvenient Truth About President Obama’s Testing Plan - NJ Spotlight:

Prepared Testimony for the People’s Budget Town Hall | Seattle Education

Prepared Testimony for the People’s Budget Town Hall | Seattle Education:

Prepared Testimony for the People’s Budget Town Hall

The City of Seattle’s newly created Department of Education and Early Learning will spend $235 million over the next seven years on various education initiatives. This money gives the city a lot of leverage to pursue its vision of what it wants public education to look like in Seattle.

The purpose of the people’s budget is to create a participatory budgeting process where citizens decide what programs and initiatives should be funded with their tax dollars.

Many parents feel they aren’t being heard when it comes to education policy. Creating a people’s budget at the city and district levels would give parents, teachers, and principals an opportunity to have more of a say on where our education dollars are spent.  Below is prepared testimony from the People’s Budget Town Hall which took place October 27th, 2015.

-Carolyn Leith

Most of us who have dedicated our work lives to public education do not think it’s ok that the Gates billionaire and millionaire cabal should be able to toss tax-deductible big money around to ruin and disrupt public education.

Every bit of progress we’ve made in pushing for progressive public education; for anti-racism, multicultural and alternative education models are being pushed back harder and harder. The most frequently heard lament from the school administrators is lack of funding. There is a lack of funding, of course. It is part of the plan. There is also a lay-down on the tracks mentality among these administrators who welcome this private money train.

We know now none of this corporate ed reform works. We’ve had too many years learning how much it does not work and how it hurts. We see it in the schools and in the whole fabric of society.

The school-to-prison pipeline is a deep, systemic problem. The part that public 

Prepared Testimony for the People’s Budget Town Hall | Seattle Education:

NEA President: NAEP Results Signal What Needs to Change to Better Serve Students - NEA Today

NEA President: NAEP Results Signal What Needs to Change to Better Serve Students - NEA Today:

NEA President: NAEP Results Signal What Needs to Change to Better Serve Students

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—known as The Nation’s Report Card—was released on Wednesday and the results caused a stir in the education community. Overall, students’ math and reading scores dropped or remained stagnant. The results, said National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen García, should compel policymakers at every level of government to make the necessary changes to better serve students now and in the future.

The NAEP results revealed that between 2013 and 2015, math scores for fourth and eighth grade students declined. This year’s average fourth grade score in math was 240, a two-point drop compared to two years ago. The eight grade math score fell from 285 to 282.

In reading, the eighth grade scores dropped by three points, from 288 to 265, while the fourth grade reading score remained virtually unchanged.

Student performance was also measured by achievement in three categories: basic, proficient, and advanced. Students reaching proficiency demonstrate mastery over a subject area. In math, there was a two-point decline in the percentage of fourth and eighth graders scoring at or above proficient. In reading, the percentage of fourth grade students scoring at or above proficient didn’t change significantly, and the percentage of eighth graders scoring at or above proficient declined by two points.

“The recent release of the NAEP scores once again demonstrates what educators have said all along. The effectiveness of a system cannot be judged by a single test score. Scores should be viewed in context, over time and, just because a single test scores goes down (or up) it does not represent the complexity of the system or mean good things are not happening,” García said.

García cited several examples of the good news in education.  “High school graduation rates have increased, the drop-out rate for Hispanic students has decreased and the number of minority students going to college has been rising. We are more focused than ever on closing the opportunity gaps. The opportunity to learn is the foundation of everything. The NAEP scores are just another piece of the puzzle that provides information we need to ensure all students succeed.”

A main piece to this “puzzle” includes the effect of poverty, with more than half of the nation’s public school children living in poverty. García underscored that the NEA President: NAEP Results Signal What Needs to Change to Better Serve Students - NEA Today:

Democracy 'Experiments': Alternatives to Traditional Schools - Bridging Differences - Education Week

Democracy 'Experiments': Alternatives to Traditional Schools - Bridging Differences - Education Week:

Democracy 'Experiments': Alternatives to Traditional Schools 

Deborah Meier continues her conversation with Harry Boyte. To read their full exchange, please visit here.

Dear Harry and friends,

Democracy does, indeed, become an empty word in the absence of any real experience with it—lived experience. One place we might provide such experience is in schools dependent on precisely such a "democratic public." It's a place that families, students, and staff have the opportunity to test out their own and the institution's power to learn about how democracy might work in the "real world." We not only waste that opportunity but we do precisely the opposite. We do some fake exercises in trivializing democracy—meaningless voting for our favorite color, mascot, et al. for kids, and not much more for adults, except behind closed doors.  And then too often the adults exercise their power only over younger and less powerful "children," not with peers, and not with the authorities who make the decisions they must live by. Kids watch and learn—over 12 to 14 years of impressionable youth. Most also note that their families—especially if they are poor or nonwhite—have little power. Growing up is not liberating but more of the same.

Yes, the word "commonwealth"—both words imbedded in it—is a nice way of viewing what's public: what belongs to us all. I have perhaps less scorn for political parties and ideologies than you do. Perhaps that's the "difference" I hope I can bridge—or really better understand—between us.

When people ask me, what would you recommend as an alternative to our current public education system—can your "kind of" work be spread to scale? I feel obliged to come up with suggestions both short- and long-term.

For instance, in the early 1990s we invented a possible answer that, alas, we were never able to test out. Some 100 plus K-12 schools in NYC proposed a large-scale experiment, serving about 50,000 students and representative of the city as a whole. Our aim: to demonstrate the value of greater school/community-based autonomy including show-casing alternative systems of accountability. Annenberg offered us 50 million dollars to try it out. The mayor, NYC chancellor, NYC board of education, the state superintendent of schools, and the American Federation of Teachers local chapter signed on. Two local universities agreed to study our work over five years both statistically and ethnographically. If we hadn't been stopped by a new chancellor and a new state superintendent we'd have learned a lot.

Boston's Pilot schools, a smaller similar effort begun 20 years ago in a much smaller city, was studied with less rigor, but seemed generally successful. But those in power seemed remarkably uninterested in this public solution, and preferred to put their money into charter chains or vouchers.

Similarly, 39 NYC high schools have pioneered for more than 20 years a state-approved alternative system of assessment—the Consortium of schools has been studied and found successful. Again with relatively little attention. Amazing.

So I'm "desperate" to find ways to make these alternatives better understood and explored because they were deliberate attempts to explore what democratic reforms might look like: to persuade, not to mandate. Some of the young admirers of these efforts feel stymied and turn to opening "mom and pop" small charters with more autonomy but where accountability consists primarily in test scores.  

How can we break through the silence by making these public alternatives more visible before they die off as their autonomies are chipped away?

Deb

Democracy 'Experiments': Alternatives to Traditional Schools - Bridging Differences - Education Week:

At a Success Academy Charter School, Singling Out Pupils Who Have ‘Got to Go’ - The New York Times

At a Success Academy Charter School, Singling Out Pupils Who Have ‘Got to Go’ - The New York Times:

At a Success Academy Charter School, Singling Out Pupils Who Have ‘Got to Go’

From the time Folake Ogundiran’s daughter started kindergarten at aSuccess Academy charter school in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, the girl struggled to adjust to its strict rules.

She racked up demerits for not following directions or not keeping her hands folded in her lap. Sometimes, after being chastised, she threw tantrums. She was repeatedly suspended for screaming, throwing pencils, running away from school staff members or refusing to go to another classroom for a timeout.

One day last December, the school’s principal, Candido Brown, called Ms. Ogundiran and said her daughter, then 6, was having a bad day. Mr. Brown warned that if she continued to do things that were defiant and unsafe — including, he said, pushing or kicking, moving chairs or tables, or refusing to go to another classroom — he would have to call 911, Ms. Ogundiran recalled. Already feeling that her daughter was treated unfairly, she went to the school and withdrew her on the spot.

Success Academy, the high-performing charter school network in New York City, has long been dogged by accusations that its remarkable accomplishments are due, in part, to a practice of weeding out weak or difficult students. The network has always denied it. But documents obtained by The New York Times and interviews with 10 current and former Success employees at five schools suggest that some administrators in the network have singled out children they would like to see leave.

At Success Academy Fort Greene, the same day that Ms. Ogundiran heard from the principal, her daughter’s name was one of 16 placed on a list drawn up at his direction and shared by school leaders.

The heading on the list was “Got to Go.”

Nine of the students on the list later withdrew from the school. Some of their parents said in interviews that while their children attended Success, their lives were upended by repeated suspensions and frequent demands that they pick up their children early or meet with school or network staff members. Four of the parents said that school or network employees told them explicitly that the school, whose oldest students are now in the third grade, was not right for their children and that they should go elsewhere.

The current and former employees said they had observed similar practices at other Success schools. According to those employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs or their relationships with people still at the network, school leaders and network staff members explicitly talked about suspending students or calling parents into frequent meetings as ways to force parents to fall in line or prompt them to withdraw their children.

Last year, for instance, the principal of Success Academy Harlem 2 Upper, Lavinia Mackall, told teachers not to automatically send annual re-enrollment forms home to certain students, because the school did not want those students to come back, two former members of the school’s staff said. Ms. Mackall said that her comments had been misinterpreted and that she was trying to encourage parents to take the school’s requirements seriously, but that she also did not believe the school was right for all students.

In another example, a current employee said, a network lawyer in a conversation with colleagues described a particularly unruly student’s withdrawal as “a big win” for the school.

In a written response to questions, Success Academy’s spokeswoman, Ann Powell, said that the “Got to Go” list was a mistake and that the network quickly got wind of it and reprimanded Mr. Brown, the principal.

Ms. Powell said that Success schools did not push children out, and that At a Success Academy Charter School, Singling Out Pupils Who Have ‘Got to Go’ - The New York Times:

Connecticut BEWARE of Governor Malloy’s most fiscally irresponsible proposal yet. - Wait What?

Connecticut BEWARE of Governor Malloy’s most fiscally irresponsible proposal yet. - Wait What?:

Connecticut BEWARE of Governor Malloy’s most fiscally irresponsible proposal yet.

“Gov. Dannel P. Malloy outlined Wednesday a sweeping plan to overhaul state government’s pension system.”  – CT Mirror 10-29-2015

Governor Dannel Malloy’s state budget, that took effect last July 1, is already a quarter of a billion dollars in deficit and the problem is actually far worse.

Next year’s state budget is even more out of balance and after the next election, when legislators reconvene in January 2017, Connecticut will be facing a two-year General Fund Budget Deficit of $1.6 Billion … YES, A DEFICIT OF $1.6 BILLION … [A deficit of at least $927 million in FY 2018 and $831 million in FY 2019.]

In order to address that problem, Governor Dannel Malloy is proposing to dramatically change the way Connecticut funds its state employee pension system.

The maneuver is intended to reduce the amount of money the State of Connecticut puts into its pension fund in the short-term – thereby reducing the hole in Malloy’s state budget.

However, by failing to make the required pension payments in the years to come, Malloy’s plan would shift as much as $10 billion dollars onto the backs of our children.

If Malloy’s plan is adopted, the additional spending would start in 2033.  While it seems years away, the fact is that a child born today will turn 17 in 2033.  Connecticut, like the United States, already taken on too much debt.  Making the required pension payments as we go forward will not be easy, but shifting the burden to our children and their future is even worse.

Malloy’s proposal is complex and thus will get limited media coverage, or worse, no Connecticut BEWARE of Governor Malloy’s most fiscally irresponsible proposal yet. - Wait What?: