CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Snowy Relapse Edition (3/31)

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Snowy Relapse Edition (3/31)

ICYMI: Snowy Relapse Edition (3/31)

The weather outside is, in fact, frightful. So here's a list of things to read inside today.

Teen Boys Ranked Their Female Classmates Based On Looks, And The Girls Weren't Having It

It's a great story, in part because it's about working the issue out, not just getting somebody in trouble.

Small District Reaps Big Profits With Chart Fees

There are a lot of things wrong with California's charter system; here's an explainer for one of them. Are you a small district with money problems? Become a popular charter authorizer and you can make a bundle.

The Digital Expansion of the Mind Gone Wrong

Daniel Willingham looks at three areas where technology was going to make education so much better-- and why none of them lived up to the hype.

Experts Call for an End To Online Preschool

Please.

NJ Tax Money Disappearing Into Charters

A look at charter fraud and waste in the Garden State.

Six School Voucher Myths

A quick debunking of some common voucher talking points.

Trump, DeVos. Special Olympics

The NYT breaks down the wheels within wheels of this massive cluster


Betsy DeVos Told Us Her Real Plan


All Special Olympics and class sizes, Nancy Bailey picks out the most concerning DeVosian quote that tells us what she wants to do.

The Single Most Telling Sentence

If Bailey tells us what DeVos wants to do, Valerie Strauss picks out the sentence that explains why she wants to do it. This is probably my top DeVos hot take of the week.

School Freedom Plans Aren't About Schools Or Education

Leon Galis with a pretty good explanation of why some reformsters and public ed defenders don't seem to be on the same planet.

A Parkland Teacher Speaks Out   

One of the most shameful failures of any school system-- public, private or charter. A teacher talks about the follow-up failure after the murders. I'm sorry I have to send you to the 74 to read this, but schools have to do better.

Don't Cry Over the Death of Arizona's Charter Reform Bill. It Was a Joke.

Well, that's disappointing.

Charter Schools Are Closing, But DeVos Wants More  

USA Today ran this piece, and it doesn't even include a quote from Mike Petrilli.

How One Couple Made Charter Millions

If you want a specific example of how California's lax charter oversight allows fraud, waste and profiteering, here's a perfect example from the LA Times.CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Snowy Relapse Edition (3/31)

DeVos, Class Size, and the Reformistan Bubble

by Peter Greene / 22min

I almost feel sorry for Betsy DeVos. Her two big news breaks this week are not entirely her fault. First, there's the Special Olympics fiasco. It appears that the budget office made the hugely unpopular cut, and DeVos stood by it like a good soldier, right until Donald Trump threw her under the bus and canceled the cuts (that were never going to get past Congress). But now DeVos is the one who get

ICYMI: Snowy Relapse Edition (3/31)

by Peter Greene / 1h

The weather outside is, in fact, frightful. So here's a list of things to read inside today. Teen Boys Ranked Their Female Classmates Based On Looks, And The Girls Weren't Having It It's a great story, in part because it's about working the issue out, not just getting somebody in trouble. Small District Reaps Big Profits With Chart Fees There are a lot of things wrong with California's charter sys

YESTERDAY

Is CTE Good News Or Bad News

28by Peter Greene / 1d

In the last two decades of education reform, a great deal of emphasis has been put on sending high school graduates to college. President Obama in his 2009 State of the Union address proclaimed that by 2020 America would " once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world" (though he hedged that a bit by later saying simply that everyone would need some kind of post high sc

Squeezing the Clock

100+by Peter Greene / 1d

Put this on my list of Things I've Noticed Since Retiring From The Classroom. In a teaching day, every single second counts. Teachers squeeze the clock till it screams. Five minutes left in the period? Just enough time to review the main concept from yesterday. Three minutes between classes? More than enough time to pee and swing by the office to pick up my mail. Twenty-five minute lunch period? I

MAR 29

What Did We Learn From DeVos Hearings This Week?

300+by Peter Greene / 2d

So during Betsy DeVos's terrible horrible no-good very bad week of hearings, what did we learn? Opposition Parties Matter This is the third budget in which DeVos tried to zero out Special Olympics. The third. So why so much fuss this time around? Perhaps because somebody made her go before Congress and explain herself (or not) in some exchanges that made for insta-viral hits. Just imagine what it

MAR 28

What To Look For In A Teacher School

38by Peter Greene / 3d

Robert Pondiscio just reviewed a new NCTQ book for high school students about how to become a teacher. I haven't seen the book, so I'm in no position to comment on it, but it does remind me that we don't spend nearly enough time talking about teacher prep, not from a policy point of view, but the point of view of high school students who want to end up teaching some day. I am not the person to co

MAR 26

The Red Flags In Kamala Harris's Pay Raise Proposal

50by Peter Greene / 4d

I was so determined not to get into the 2020 election this early, dammit. But the Kamala Harris teacher pay raise proposal hit my screen this morning, and there I was on twitter. I've addressed the larger concerns with the proposal here , but there are other concerns that are less interesting to the Forbes audience. When I read the Harris op-ed in the Washington Post, I thought, "Hmmm. Well...." W

Education Scholarship Tax Credits and Undercover Boss: Feeling Good While Fixing Nothing

48by Peter Greene / 4d

You remember Undercover Boss. The mostly-reality show shows a high-level executive putting on a disguise and going out into the trenches of the company. There, they'll meet real employees--often employees with touching hard luck stories. At the end of the episode, the boss meets the employees and metes out a sort of justice--"You get a car, you get a college fund for your kid, you get retraining,

MAR 25

I Will Not Like The Democratic Nominee

70by Peter Greene / 6d

And you probably won't, either. The Trump Presidency is going to be the gift that keeps on giving, and we'd all better start adjusting now. 2016 was a disorienting mess, a confluence of so many surreal elements that we could all be a little fuzzy-headed. But 2020 will be time for cold, hard reality, and Democrats and public education voters had better start adjusting now so we don't get sidetracke

OK: Bogus School Efficiency Report

63by Peter Greene / 6d

EPIC charter schools are boasting about the results of a new efficiency study of Oklahoma schools, and there are so many layers of deep-fried baloney here it takes a minute or two to dig through them. But when charter boosters start talking about "accountability" and "transparency," this is the kind of bullshit that makes their claims less than believable. The very top layer is the least important

MAR 24

ICYMI: My Brother's Birthday Edition (3/24)

by Peter Greene / 7d

It's my brother's birthday today. I'll have to tell you my brother's story someday-- it's an object lesson in how predicting a child's future when they are still in school is, in fact, a fool's game. In the meantime, here is your weekly batch o'reading. If More Teachers Were Men Another way of looking at the issues surrounding teacher policy as the result of teachers being mostly women and teacher

MAR 23

Goodhart's Law And The BS Test

49by Peter Greene / 8d

When discussing the problems of test-based accountability, we've long used Campbell's Law as the go-to framer of the related problems. For the absolute top of the field, get a copy of The Testing Charade by Danielk Koretz . Campbell's law is not very pithy, but it illuminates beautifully: The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to

Stop Talking About Student Achievement

200+by Peter Greene / 8d

If I told you that my student had achieved great things in school this year, what would you imagine I meant? Maybe she started reading longer books with heavier vocabulary and deeper themes. Maybe she not only read them, but spent time thinking about the ideas they contained. Maybe she improved her technical facility and musicality when playing her flute. Maybe she conducted an impressively compl

MAR 22

Foolish Canadian Grit

35by Peter Greene / 9d

Proving that dumb knows no national boundaries, Ontario's Education Minister Lisa Thompson this week defended the plan to increase class size by making this observation : This woman. "When students are currently preparing to go off to post-secondary education, we're hearing from professors and employers alike that they're lacking coping skills and they're lacking resiliency," Thompson told CBC Rad

MAR 21

TN: Taxation Without Representation

21by Peter Greene / 10d

Tennessee's Governor Bill Lee has set a brick on the gas pedal of the school privatization bus, and that bus is driving right through the powers of democratically elected school boards. Lee's very first budget proposal was unveiled at the beginning of the month, supported by Lee's deep, insightful observation "Choice is good." The budget has big money for vouchers; Lee is going with the education

What Education Reformers Get Wrong

81by Peter Greene / 10d

Hard to believe that it took until now for a big voice in the reformster world to write a post entitled " What education reformers believe, " but last week Mike Petrilli (Fordham Institute) did the job. It's not entirely thorough (we'll get to 

LA Times Value-Added Reporters: Where Are They Now | VAMboozled!

LA Times Value-Added Reporters: Where Are They Now | VAMboozled!

LA Times Value-Added Reporters: Where Are They Now 

In two of my older posts (here and here), I wrote about the Los Angeles Times and its controversial move to solicit Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) students’ test scores via an open-records request, calculate LAUSD teachers’ value-added scores themselves, and then publish thousands of LAUSD teachers’ value-added scores along with their “effectiveness” classifications on their Los Angeles Teacher Ratings website. They did this, repeatedly, since 2010, and they did this all despite the major research-based issues surrounding teachers’ value-added estimates (that hopefully followers of this blog know at least somewhat well).

This is also of frustration for me since the authors of the initial articles (Jason Strong and Jason Felch) contacted me back in 2011 regarding whether what they were doing was appropriate, valid, and fair. Despite about one hour’s worth of strong warnings against doing so, Felch and Song CONTINUE READING: LA Times Value-Added Reporters: Where Are They Now | VAMboozled!

Have Charters Already Gamed Gavin Newsom's Schools Task Force? | Capital & Main

Have Charters Already Gamed Gavin Newsom's Schools Task Force? | Capital & Main

Have Charters Already Gamed Gavin Newsom’s Schools Task Force?
Rather than senior researchers, public finance experts and classroom learning specialists, seven of the governor’s 11 appointees appeared to have been recruited from the charter-industrial complex.

“Learning Curves” is a weekly roundup of news items, profiles and dish about the intersection of education and inequality. Send tips, feedback and announcements of upcoming events to  braden@capitalandmain.com, @BillRaden.

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No sooner did author-academic Diane Ravitch expose this month the charter leaningsof Governor Gavin Newsom’s task force studying the fiscal impacts of charters than California schools superintendent and panel chair Tony Thurmond found a Twitter blowtorch pointed his way. With seven of the task force’s 11 appointees appearing to be recruited from the charter-industrial complex, had the findings already been gamed? Judge the task force and him by results, Thurmond reasoned, promising that the panel would deliver recommendations for a charter code overhaul. His message was even more explicit a week later when he pointed out the gaping inequity of laissez-faire ed reform: “You cannot open enough charter schools or new schools to serve every single student in our state,” he told CalMatters. “If you take the competition approach, it means some students — a lot of students — will be left behind.”

Governor Newsom did come through on Senate Bill 126, signing into law long overdue charter transparency and public disclosure requirements that had been repeatedly vetoed by Jerry Brown. Just don’t expect Newsom’s signature on any more of the raft of reformswending their way through committee rooms — at least not before the summer recess. Newsom has already indicated that he’s taking a timeout on charter reform until Thurmond’s task force releases its recommendations in July. Something that is expected: plenty of pushback by the California Charter Schools Association. In the face of collapsing national CONTINUE READING: Have Charters Already Gamed Gavin Newsom's Schools Task Force? | Capital & Main

Mitchell Robinson: The Stunning Hypocrisy of Betsy DeVos: Class Size Edition | Eclectablog

The Stunning Hypocrisy of Betsy DeVos: Class Size Edition | Eclectablog

The Stunning Hypocrisy of Betsy DeVos: Class Size Edition

In light of Betsy DeVos’ comments on the benefits of large class sizes and hiring fewer teachers – “In fact, students may be better served by being in larger classes, if by hiring fewer teachers, a district or state can better compensate those who have demonstrated high ability and outstanding results…” – I wanted to share the following statistics from the school Betsy attended as a young woman, Holland Christian School…

Average class size:

High school, 19.5
Middle school, 23.2
Elementary school, 17.3

Teacher to Student Ratio, 1 : 12.5

From Holland to Detroit

By way of comparison, the teachers’ contract in the Detroit Public Schools Community District (the school system that Ms. DeVos suggested should simply be dissolved) stipulates the following class sizes:

• In grades K-3, the class size is supposed to range from 17-25 students.

• In grades 4-5, the maximum is 30.

• And in grades 6-12, the max is 35 students.

HOWEVER:

Across the district, 14 out of the district’s 115 schools have oversize classes — many of them with multiple classes that are too large. According to fall class data provided by the CONTINUE READING: The Stunning Hypocrisy of Betsy DeVos: Class Size Edition | Eclectablog

UC Berkeley Chancellor says Kopp Monologue is Free Speech | Cloaking Inequity

UC Berkeley Chancellor says Kopp Monologue is Free Speech | Cloaking Inequity

UC BERKELEY CHANCELLOR SAYS KOPP MONOLOGUE IS FREE SPEECH

Wendy Kopp, who infamously created Teach For America to temporarily place teachers in classrooms in her Princeton undergraduate thesis, has been invited to give the 2019 graduation address at UC Berkeley. I recieved the following note protesting the invitation from Jane Nylund to Carol T. Christ, UC Berkeley Chancellor.

As a public school advocate, and a product of California public schools (father and grandmother both attended UC Berkeley), I was outraged and saddened to find that UC Berkeley had extended an invitation to Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach For America, to be featured as the commencement speaker at UC Berkeley this year.

Oakland and other urban school districts have, for years, suffered under the constant threat of privatization. Teach for America is just one of many cogs in the privatization machine; there are many others, but TFA’s influence is not just felt at the school site level, but has also infiltrated higher levels of administration (such as the Oakland mayor’s office), as well as TFA acting as lobbyists for legislation favoring privately managed charter schools and ed reform groups.

TFA has a potent mixture of idealism and practicality; the concept of having the opportunity to “teach” in a high needs district such as Oakland is tantalizing for many young people eager to give something back to the community. According to TFArecruiting manager Jessica Rossoni, whose credentials included a stint at the Daily Californian, “UC Berkeley is one of the largest contributors to the organization in its number of students who join TFA, according to Rossoni. She said UC Berkeley students apply in high rates because of UC Berkeley’s values of equity and students’ desires to tie those values to a career.” Notice that she doesn’t mention the type of career. Could be anything but teaching, and usually is. But, here’s what TFA is really about:

1) Installing low-paid, unqualified, uncertified, non-union teaching labor into the most challenging schools. Leafy suburban schools would never accept a core group of teachers that enter their schools in significant numbers with only 5 weeks of experience. Charter schools actively employ non-union TFA teaching labor; charters’ teacher retention record is abysmal, typically 2 years. Not surprising, since this corresponds with the 2-year TFA teaching commitment.

2) Creating  a “teacher pipeline” to fill teaching positions is secondary to TFA’s true mission mentioned above. Despite TFA’sassertions, there isn’t a teacher shortage; that narrative is trotted out by TFA and is accepted as gospel by the ed reform echo chamber; teachers as a whole are woefully underpaid and unsupported, particularly in high needs districts (was everyone at UCBerkeley asleep during the Oakland strike?). TFA solves none of this; its existence exacerbates the problem by undermining the professionalism, credentials, and experience of authentic teachers committed to the job as a profession, and not just a career stepping stone or resume padding on the part of corps members.

3) TFA charges school districts a fee for hiring TFA members. This fee causes a significant burden for cash-strapped districts already grappling with expenses associated with supporting high needs students. There is no guarantee that these teachers will remain with the district, and in fact, collectively, TFA has a poor track record of teacher retention within the host district in which they serve. This disruptive model of teacher churn caused in part by hiring TFA is damaging to our students, who deserve highly-trained, certified teachers with a long-term commitment to the profession.

4) TFA is a privatization group that is actively supported by the Walton Family Foundation.  Why UC Berkeley would ever align itself with the worst of corporate school privatization supporters completely escapes rational thought. UC Berkeley is one of the most important assets and symbols of public education in California. Support for groups like TFA flies in the face of the core values that UC Berkeley represents. Its mission to serve public students and to serve in the public interest will forever be tainted by this ill-advised invitation to a group that undermines all we value as democratically represented public institutions.

Read here for the unflinching reality of what TFA truly represents, and ask yourself if this narrative aligns with the values of UCBerkeley. I was disheartened to note that UC Berkeley has been a part of what has become the education misery in Oakland and elsewhere by supplying a large pool of students as corps members. Again, while the Berkeley students may find this kind of service admirable, this model is actively undermining the teaching profession. Not surprising that it is our mostly black and brown students that are suffering the consequences because of it. There is nothing admirable or equitable about that.

While I understand that this decision was based in part by student input, it is sometimes advisable for other adults in the room to step up and explain the symbolism behind this TFA invitation. This generation of college students hasn’t been around long enough to understand what has happened regarding school privatization in this country, but someone (besides TFAer Ms. Rossoni) needs to explain it to them. The students’ wish to give back to their community has been hijacked by the very people like the Waltons that want publicly supported institutions like UC Berkeley to go away. The irony is not lost on those of us who have witnessed this calamity for far too long. Please do the right thing and rescind your decision to Ms. Kopp, offer her your sincerest apologies, and find someone like Diane Ravitch or Jitu Brown, both true champions of authentic public education in this country. Thank you for your consideration. .

Regards,

Jane Nylund

Here is the response from Carol T. Christ, UC Berkeley Chancellor.

Dear Ms. Nylund,

Thank you for taking the time to alert us to your concerns about Wendy Kopp being selected as the 2019 commencement speaker.  The University of California, Berkeley has a commencement speaker selection process in place which includes the involvement of the student group, the Californians, the Associated Students of the University of California, and the Chancellor’s office.  Please see the attached flow chart for more detail on the selection process.

We are highly committed to this process and we do not disinvite speakers when groups or individuals come forward who do not support the speaker’s beliefs or body of work.  While we understand the concerns put forth by those who have written, we must adhere to both our process as well as to the tenets of free speech.

Sincerely,

Carolyn

While I believe it is important that we protect constitutional free speech, I also believe that educational leaders must promote dialogues rather than monologues when discussing controversial topis— this approach allows the power of ideas to prevail. As an educational leader, I have participated in Cambridge-style debates, attend workgroups at the American Enterpise Institute (until they couldn’t handle my free speech) and even participated in a mock trial at the Libertarians Freedom Fest. So for me, it’s malpractice for educational leaders to allow monologues instead of dialogues when there are controversial topics at hand. So, here’s what I opined and suggested.

Carolyn, At least now you can’t say you weren’t made aware of the peer reviewed research and criticism about Teach For America for sending unqualified teachers to temporarily teach primarily Brown and Black children in California. You’ve been apprised. You should also reference that the California legislature is debating banning TFA in California schools via AB 221 because the [vast majority] of TFA only stopover in California schools on their way to Berkeley etc. The California NAACP and California LULAC, our state’s largest and oldest civil rights organizations, are supporting the bill. So are the teacher associations of California. Now you also know this also… Furthermore, free speech on campus should not be a one-sided, unbalanced public debate as Berkeley has purposely set up in this instance. Show some scholarly leadership. Create a balanced debate on your campus— that’s free speech.

See: https://progressive.org/public-school-shakedown/how-college-campuses-can-uphold-free-speech-and-shut-down-ra-171215/

In my view, we often shortchange our academic communities and stifle the exchance of ideas that free speech was meant to promote. Promoters of controversial ideas as “free speech” should be ready and willing to defend and promote a platform for dialogue instead of monologue.

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UC Berkeley Chancellor says Kopp Monologue is Free Speech | Cloaking Inequity