CATCH UP WITH CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Nearly Spooky Edition (10/26)

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Nearly Spooky Edition (10/26)

 ICYMI:  Nearly Spooky Edition (10/26)

Here's the reading for the week. Remember to pass it on.

School Choice Has Not Cured Philadelphia's Ailing System  

The Inquirer takes a look at choice in Philly and the various problems it hasn't fixed.

The History of Privatization

Talking Points Memo takes a look a privatization across a series of articles, including public education.

Teach For America Will Not Save Us 

Larry Lee blogs about one of the "solutions" that will not help with Alabama's teacher shortage.

How To Reduce the Toxicity of Teen Girl Social Media Use 

Some good ideas for blunting the impact of social media on teens. Pretty sure this would work for boys, too.

Could Betsy DeVos Cost Trump the Election

Jennifer  Berkshire has made a few trips to Michigan, and this time she brought back an interesting angle on 2020 elections for the New Republic. To know DeVos is....well, not to love her, exactly, and that could well be cutting into the GOP base.

College Board Under Fire for Selling Student Data

No this isn't an old article from one of the other six zillion times the College Board has caught grief for monetizing young humans. This time it's Non Profit Quarterly noting their well-earned troubles.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn Pushes for USED To Move To Tennessee 

Okay, it's not going to happen, but it's an intriguing little proposal.

DeVos Held In Contempt By Court

Yes, you've already heard about this. But don't you want to read about it one more time?

City Fund Looking To Buy Elections 

Chalkbeat reports that one of the newer reformster groups is throwing large piles of money at local school board elections. Because democracy is just so damned inconvenient.

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Nearly Spooky Edition (10/26)

CATCH UP WITH CURMUDGUCATION

AND DON'T FORGET PETER GREENE ON FORBES CLICK HERE 

Taking Back Teacher Evaluations

100+by Peter Greene / 20h

There's a slowly-rising tide of writing out there focusing on principals and evaluations, quietly returning focus to the idea of making evaluations meaningful. It's a welcome change, because the status quo for the past over-a-decade has been the junk that disruptors stuck us with, in which teacher "evaluation" meant "slap some Big Standardized Test scores together and call that the teacher evaluat

OCT 25

Betsy DeVos Enlists Help Of Kellyanne Conway And American Enterprise Institute To Sell $5 Billion School Choice Program

200+by Peter Greene / 2d

At the beginning of this month, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway sat down with Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute to make one more pitch for DeVos’s Education Freedom Scholarships. The program seems unlikely to succeed on the federal level. What Is She Selling? The EFS are what’s known as a tax credit scholarship. Several states have them, a

OCT 24

NC: When Charters Become Orphans

33by Peter Greene / 3d

The TeamCFA website promises that the foundation exists "to promote the academic growth and success of each student in each TeamCFA school as well as the growth of the entire network. Each school in the TeamCFA network receives long term, meaningful partnership and oversight from the TeamCFA Foundation, with specific regard to academics, business, and governance through the Affiliate Agreement." B

OCT 23

NYC: Testing Is Still Not Teaching

30by Peter Greene / 3d

People say dumb things when they're trying to defend bad policy decisions. Alex Zimmerman at Chalkbeat reports that New York City schools are going to hit third and sixth graders at 76 schools labeled "low performing" by the state with three more tests per year. This is part of a plan to start testing the crap out of students doing formative assessments four times a year. Chancellor Richard Carran

CT: Another Way To Privatize Education

60by Peter Greene / 4d

To read press accounts, one must conclude that Ray and Barbara Dalio are not exactly like other billionaire dabblers in education. He is a successful hedge fund manager and the richest guy in Connecticut. She immigrated from Spain fifty-ish years ago and worked at the Whitney before settling into the mom-and-kids track. He has announced that capitalism is not working, and that income gap is a huge

OCT 22

Vouchers And Federally-Supported Discrimination

38by Peter Greene / 5d

School voucher programs are becoming one of the major fronts in a federal battle to safeguard discrimination by religious organizations. Some flaps created by private religious schools seem minor, like the pastor at a Catholic school who banned Harry Potter books because he believes the books contain “actual curses and spells.” But earlier this year, the Catholic Archdiocese of Indianapolis touch

OCT 20

ICYMI: Why I Write Day Edition (10/20)

by Peter Greene / 7d

I have an easier time understanding why some people write than I do understanding why so many people don't. Doesn't everybody need to? But then-- there are many things I don't fully understand, like why some people hate candy corn. While I'm pondering, here are some pieces of writing from the week for you to read and share. Murdoch-Funded Anti-Gerrymandering Group Raises Questions Not about educat

Shame

100+by Peter Greene / 7d

The most shocking and disturbing thing that I saw on line this week had nothing to do with politics. It was a post by a teacher explaining her school's disciplinary system. As with many systems, students have a color-coded behavior level monitored and adjusted throughout the day. Unlike any school I'd ever heard of before, students at this school receive a colored card for their behavior level tha

OCT 18

What Ever Happened To Rebecca Friedrichs?

66by Peter Greene / 8d

You remember Rebecca Friedrichs. She was the face of the union-busting lawsuit of 2014 . Supreme Court Justice Alito signaled that he was ready and willing to hear a case that would revisit the issue of union free-riders, and the 

CURMUDGUCATION

Betsy DeVos owes taxpayers at least $100,000. And we owe her our contempt. | Eclectablog

Betsy DeVos owes taxpayers at least $100,000. And we owe her our contempt. | Eclectablog

Betsy DeVos owes taxpayers at least $100,000. And we owe her our contempt.
Even a Judge and a Republican cannot help be disgusted by DeVos’ passion for loading up Americans with unpayable debt

Last Thursday should be remembered as the day the news caught up with the remorseless wretchedness of Betsy DeVos.

We can now say with certainty that Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education is illegally ripping off Americans who’ve already been illegally ripped of by a for-profit college of the sort her policies encourage.

Politico:

A federal judge on Thursday held Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in contempt of court and imposed a $100,000 fine for violating an order to stop collecting on the student loans owed by students of a defunct for-profit college.

The exceedingly rare judicial rebuke of a Cabinet secretary came after the Trump administration was forced to admit to the court earlier this year that it erroneously collected on the loans of some 16,000 borrowers who attended Corinthian Colleges despite being ordered to stop doing so.

Of course, the crime is multiplied by who will pay the fine: Taxpayers.

A cool $100,000 is nothing for a born-billionaire like DeVos, whose family’s capital gains income went up $5 million in 2018, after the Trump tax cuts went into effect.

Notably, this “exceedingly rare judicial rebuke” pales to an an even more historic slam of DeVos’ CONTINUE READING: Betsy DeVos owes taxpayers at least $100,000. And we owe her our contempt. | Eclectablog

CURMUDGUCATION: Taking Back Teacher Evaluations

CURMUDGUCATION: Taking Back Teacher Evaluations

Taking Back Teacher Evaluations

There's a slowly-rising tide of writing out there focusing on principals and evaluations, quietly returning focus to the idea of making evaluations meaningful.

It's a welcome change, because the status quo for the past over-a-decade has been the junk that disruptors stuck us with, in which teacher "evaluation" meant "slap some Big Standardized Test scores together and call that the teacher evaluation." As many folks pointed out repeatedly, this is a super-crappy way to evaluate teachers. And worse, reformsters were insistent that these crappy evaluations should be used to make employment decisions. Fake junk papers like TNTP's oft-referenced "Widget Effect" were used to justify the idea that schools should be firing teachers whose students got low test scores, and only paying good salaries to teachers whose students get high scores,  and if we could get rid of "tenure" and FILO and just fire our way to excellence then education would be saved.

This was a stupid idea. It was always stupid, it's still stupid, and I look forward to the day when it's like polyester bell-bottoms and pet rocks and people look back at it and ask, "How did anyone ever think this was anything except stupid."

Sadly, that day has not yet arrived. Still, some writers are starting to suggest that teacher evaluations could be reclaimed as useful tools for principals to use to help teachers do better work.

Take, for instance, this piece from the ever-stodgy Education Week, supported in part by the ever-reformy John Arnold Foundation and written by Denise Superville, an assistant editor at EdWeek. "8 Ways to Make Teacher Evaluations Meaningful and Low-Stress" is almost like a relic from another CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Taking Back Teacher Evaluations

Goodbye DARE — more schools are embracing realistic drug education | Salon.com

Goodbye DARE — more schools are embracing realistic drug education | Salon.com

Goodbye DARE — more schools are embracing realistic drug education
Arming students with facts empowers them to educate people around them, whether they choose to use drugs or not.

Like millions of people in the United States, I participated in Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE), the iconic drug education program rooted in the abstinence-only, “just say no” message of the Reagan administration. DARE was run by police officers who made frequent visits to our fifth-grade classroom. It was the mid-90s, and the cops informed us that using drugs would surely ruin our minds, turning us into glassy-eyed zombies, turning us hopelessly addicted and leading us straight to jail. Marijuana was a dangerous “gateway” to this awful life. We pledged never to use drugs.

The contradictions were unavoidable by the time I entered high school. By then, medical marijuana was making headlines, and researchers had determined that illegal weed was less harmful than legal cigarettes and alcohol. Parents smoked pot, just like famous musicians. Adderall and other stimulants that can produce a long-lasting buzz were systematically overprescribed to teenagers and were readily available at school. Older students I looked up to used drugs, and their lives didn’t go down the drain. They were star athletes and honor students winning college scholarships. My friends joked about DARE as we popped pills and smoked cigarettes at the bowling alley, where a former DARE police officer got hammered at the bar.

Of course, illicit drug use can have consequences. Some of my friends were arrested or kicked out of school for days at a time, increasing the likelihood that they would be further criminalized and incarcerated. A few developed serious addictions, a problem I would see more and more as I grew older. I lost half a dozen friends to opioid overdoses before I was trained to administer the lifesaving overdose-reversal drug naloxone in my late 20s (to learn more about overdose prevention, click here). By that time, communities across the nation were facing a burgeoning overdose crisis that would claim hundreds of thousands of lives and begin to change the public conversation about drugs to one that focuses on addressing health needs — and not a moment too soon.

Learning about how to administer naloxone was one of the most important lessons of my adult life. That’s why I was excited to chat with Drew Miller, a health teacher at Bard Early College High School in New York City. Miller’s students learn about how to identify and respond to an overdose during a CONTINUE READING: Goodbye DARE — more schools are embracing realistic drug education | Salon.com

What If States Competed Like Schools? | Diane Ravitch's blog

What If States Competed Like Schools? | Diane Ravitch's blog

What If States Competed Like Schools?

I read the following commentary by Bill Phillis of Ohio Coalition for Adequacy and Equity, and it gave me an idea:

The HB 70-triggered chaos continues in Lorain City School District

While state officials fiddle with the potential of repeal of HB 70, Lorain City School District continues to burn.

The HB 70 CEO claimed and then retracted that school employees would not be paid; the Board of Education filed a lawsuit; Representative Joe Miller asked for public records regarding contracts and expenditures; HB 70 CEO makes a request for mediation to the Ohio Supreme Court’s Government Conflict Resolution Services; etc. The chaos is ever present.

State takeover of school districts do not resolve the problem of low grades on the state report card. Poverty is the problem. The delivery of public education programming and services is a function of local communities via elected boards of education. State takeover of school districts would be akin to a federally-appointed commission replacing the functions of state government. That would not sit well with elected state CONTINUE READING: What If States Competed Like Schools? | Diane Ravitch's blog

SomeDAM Poet: First They Came for the Billionaires…. | Diane Ravitch's blog

SomeDAM Poet: First They Came for the Billionaires…. | Diane Ravitch's blog

SomeDAM Poet: First They Came for the Billionaires….

One of our readers asserted that it was unfair to raise taxes on billionaires and alluded to the famous saying by Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller. Only he put it this way:

First they came for the billionaires. Then they came for the millionaires. Then they came for those with $100,000 a year. Then they came for you. And private property was no longer permitted. That’s what socialists want. No private property for anyone. That used to be called slavery, to the state this time.

Thus, we must object to taxing the billionaires, because taxation inevitably leads to socialism! Never mind that taxation pays for the military, the police, highways, bridges, tunnels, parks, schools, medical and scientific research, and other public functions.

So…

This is what Pastor Niemöller actually wrote:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

The reader, a contrarian, is neither a socialist, nor a trade unionist, nor a Jew. He typically defends Trump and all his actions.

Our blog poet, SomeDAM Poet, responded with this poem:

First they came for Gates

First they came for Gates
And I did not speak out
About the taxing rates
Cuz Gates was just a lout

Then they came for those CONTINUE READING: SomeDAM Poet: First They Came for the Billionaires…. | Diane Ravitch's blog

Peter Greene: Chicago Teacher Strike: Three Things To Remember

Chicago Teacher Strike: Three Things To Remember

Chicago Teacher Strike: Three Things To Remember

I’ve been through two strikes in my teaching career–one as a newly hired teacher and one as a local union president. Believe me when I tell you this: no teacher wants to strike. It is always a tool of last resort, because it is always difficult, stressful, and disruptive. When teachers strike, it is always because they have run out of options.

Teachers do not strike because union leaders somehow force them to. This is particularly true in Chicago, where the teachers’ union is one of the most democratically run of the big city unions.

But as Chicago teachers and support staff hit the picket lines today, and news outlets rush to cover and, in some cases, spin it, here are three things to keep in mind.

This is not your grandfather’s teacher strike.

In the previous century, teacher strikes were simple. Teachers went to the bargaining table for more pay, school boards dug in their heels and refused to negotiate, and so, strike.

But the Chicago strike is about more than that. The union’s message on its website is simple; Chicago Teachers Union is “fighting for quality pay and benefits (including health care), full staffing in our schools, smaller class sizes and justice for students and families.” Teachers are asking for a hard cap on class sizes, prep time during their work day, support staff for all schools (like the social workers, librarians and school nurses that the majority of schools lack), affordable housing programs, and special assistance for homeless students. They would also like the mayor to write these agreements down in an enforceable contract (as if one cannot trust the word of a Chicago politician).

In short, CTU is not just trying to improve conditions for its own CONTINUE READING: Chicago Teacher Strike: Three Things To Remember

NYC Educator: Too Much Testing? City Has Simple Solution--More Testing

NYC Educator: Too Much Testing? City Has Simple Solution--More Testing

Too Much Testing? City Has Simple Solution--More Testing

CPE1 is a progressive stronghold. They have a vibrant school community that stands up to nonsense. When an abusive principal started pressing charges against UFT activists and banning activist parents from their children's school, they screamed, and continued doing so. The principal was reassigned. For all I know, she's twiddling her thumbs at Tweed, in the company of other highly-compensated thumb-twiddlers.

CPE1 is among a small circle of city schools in which opt-out is a popular option.  They have over a 70% opt-out rate on state tests. The parents at CPE1 do not appear to believe that pointless testing, let alone teaching to pointless tests, is the way to help their children. Having spent a good part of last year teaching students, half of whom had already passed, how to deal with the abysmal English Regents exam, I understand completely.

The state, of course, overreacted. It rated CPE1 a "struggling school," despite appeals otherwise from the Chancellor. Yet the city, evidently in response to this rating, has decided to give more tests to CPE1 and Brooklyn Collaborative studies, which also had a high opt-out rate. I'm not sure that's a logical response. If my daughter refused to eat broccoli, my first response wouldn't be imposing the all-broccoli diet. Of course, I'm just a lowly parent and teacher, not among the few, the proud, who do Whatever It Is They Do at Tweed.

This comes in the wake of an effort to enact more testing citywide. I understand the chancellor's concerns, and I understand his interest in knowing how our students are progressing. What I really do not understand is exactly how a standardized test CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: Too Much Testing? City Has Simple Solution--More Testing