Wednesday, January 1, 2020

Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007

It's Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... A VERY BUSY DAY

The latest news and resources in education since 2007

Quote of the Day: I’m Going To Keep “The Stonecutter’s Creedo” In Mind This Year

by Larry Ferlazzo / 29min

This year, as in all years past, there will be times when I’m feeling frustrated, disappointed, or impatient when I’m in the classroom. I’m going to try and keep “The Stonecutter’s Creedo” more in mind when that happens. I’m adding this to The Best Resources For Learning About “Grit”

Ed Tech Digest

by Larry Ferlazzo / 12h

Six years ago, in another somewhat futile attempt to reduce the backlog of resources I want to share, I began this occasional “” post where I share three or four links I think are particularly useful and related to…ed tech, including some Web 2.0 apps. You might also be interested in THE BEST ED TECH RESOURCES OF 2019 – PART TWO , as well as checking out all my edtech resources . Here are this we

A Look Back: “Let’s Do Less ‘Fire, Ready, Aim'”

by Larry Ferlazzo / 12h

I thought that new – and veteran – readers might find it interesting if I began sharing my best posts from over the years. You can see the entire collection here . Today, I’m sharing an article I wrote for The Huffington Post years ago where I take issue with advice from Seth Grodin where he basically says that if you have an idea you want to try, and it meets some resistance, you should just do

New BBC Video: “Transhumanism: Will humans evolve to something smarter?”

by Larry Ferlazzo / 12h

Alexas_Fotos / Pixabay I’m adding this new video from the BBC to The Best Sites For Learning About Human Evolution :

“In what ways can writing support reading instruction?”

by Larry Ferlazzo / 12h

The new question-of-the-week at my Education Week Teacher column is: In what ways can writing support reading instruction? Please leave responses in the comments section….

Video: “Confirmation Bias”

by Larry Ferlazzo / 21h

johnhain / Pixabay I’m adding this new video from Sprouts to THE BEST VIDEOS EXPLAINING CONFIRMATION BIAS:

The Best Tools That Show “Parallel Text” – Same Sentences Translated Into Different Languages Side-By-Side

36by Larry Ferlazzo / 23h

skeeze / Pixabay When teaching English to older students, they sometimes – and understandably – get tired of reading books designed for much younger children. One way I deal with this challenge is by find more age-appropriate

Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007

NANCY BAILEY: A Review of Daisy Has Autism: In 2020, a Commitment to Students With Disabilities!

A Review of Daisy Has Autism: In 2020, a Commitment to Students With Disabilities!

A Review of Daisy Has Autism: In 2020, a Commitment to Students With Disabilities!

Daisy Has Autism by Aaron J. Wright should be mandatory reading for every school board member, school administrator, and teacher. It’s a book that will help parents of children with disabilities know they’re not alone. It’s an interesting story for anyone.

The book details the struggles of Arthur and Annie Russell, whose daughter has autism. The challenges they face getting her services in their local public school are overwhelming.

As I read this book, I repeatedly asked why? How could this happen? Our public schools are supposed to serve all children.

In 1975, P.L. 94-142 guaranteed a free appropriate public education to each child with a disability. This law had a dramatic, positive impact on millions of children with disabilities in every state and each local community across the country.

So, what happened?

The Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which CONTINUE READING: A Review of Daisy Has Autism: In 2020, a Commitment to Students With Disabilities!

NYC Educator: Happy 2020!

NYC Educator: Happy 2020!

Happy 2020!

I want to wish every reader of this blog a happy, healthy and prosperous 2020. It's a new decade. Let's start clean and look forward.

Danielson is not the end-all be-all, especially if you're gifted with a Boy Wonder supervisor who wouldn't know a competent teacher if one were beating him over the head. Look at your interactions with kids and see who you're helping. Your help, in fact, is not limited to making kids pass tests.

I always recall my friend, a Chinese teacher, telling me about a conversation she heard in her classroom.

"I don't know what I'm going to do. I can't pass the English Regents exam."

"Why don't you take Goldstein's class?"

"Why? Is it good?"

"No. It's terrible. You will hate it. But you'll pass the test."

That was a kind of sideways compliment. Back then, the English Regents exam entailed writing. I made the students write until their hands were about to fall off at the wrist. What did they learn? Well, hopefully they learned how to pass that English Regents exam. Of course, they didn't learn how to pass the current Regents exam. More importantly, they CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: Happy 2020!

Breaking: Our class size lawsuit will be heard Jan. 13 & last chance in 2019 to support our efforts | Class Size Matters

Breaking: Our class size lawsuit will be heard Jan. 13 & last chance in 2019 to support our efforts | Class Size Matters

Breaking: Our class size lawsuit will be heard Jan. 13 & last chance in 2019 to support our efforts

Dear Friend:

I wanted to let you know that we just heard yesterday that the appeal of our class size lawsuit vs the DOE Chancellor and State Education Commissioner, Agostini vs. Elia, will be heard on Monday, January 13 at 1 PM in the Appellate Court in Albany.

We filed the lawsuit originally in April 2018, along with nine NYC parents and AQE, when then-Commissioner Elia refused to make DOE comply with the Contracts for Excellence law in response to our complaint. Wendy Lecker of the Education Law Center will be in court representing us, as she has from the beginning, defending the rights of NYC children to be provided with their constitutional right to a sound, basic education which, according to the state’s highest court, depends upon far smaller classes than the DOE currently provides.

All of you are invited to witness the court proceedings; we’ll be taking the train on Monday morning. If you’d like to come, please reply to this message. I have written more about the lawsuit and the current class size situation on my blog here.

This is also the last day in 2019 that you can donate to the goals of achieving smaller classes and protecting student privacy. If you believe that all children deserve class sizes where they can be truly known and supported by their teachers, rather than taught via commercial software and machines, making it more likely that their personal data will be misused and/or breached, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Class Size Matters.

If you want your donation to be used specifically to protect student privacy, please indicate that on the online form.

Happy New Year to you and your families,

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
phone: 212-529-3539/917-435-9329
www.classsizematters.org
info@classsizematters.org

Breaking: Our class size lawsuit will be heard Jan. 13 & last chance in 2019 to support our efforts | Class Size Matters

CURMUDGUCATION: OH: Ohio Excels and the Hostile Takeover of Education

CURMUDGUCATION: OH: Ohio Excels and the Hostile Takeover of Education

OH: Ohio Excels and the Hostile Takeover of Education

Ohio is one of many states in which business leaders have appointed themselves education overseers. The most recent version of this phenomenon is Ohio Excels, a lobbying group that believes that ~~Ohio's education system owes them better meat widgets for job fodder.~~ "improving the quality of education will give students a better chance to succeed and will help Ohio businesses grow and innovate, fueling a robust state economy."

Their board includes a few heads of city-level "partnerships" or "committees," a method by which some CEO types form up a group and declare themselves civic leaders. There are some foundations like the Farmer Foundation and the Peters Foundation, an ed reformster "philanthropic" group. The Ohio Business Roundtable is here, represented by GOP Congressman-turned-business advocate Pat Tibiri. They also get funding from the usuals-- Gates, Walton. They belong to the PIE network with a long list of very reformy groups. You will be unsurprised to learn that their ideas for improving education include advocating for school choice.

If you pay any attention at all to Ohio education policy politics, you know the name Lisa Gray. Gray is the president of Ohio Excels since October of last year (the group actually "launched" in March) This newest job comes after a career in consulting and working with a list of clients that includes the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Achieve, Inc., Philanthropy Ohio, Battelle for Kids, Ohio Business Roundtable, and Teach for America.

Gray appears to be well-connected; her name often pops up in discussions of what's going on in the CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: OH: Ohio Excels and the Hostile Takeover of Education

Jersey Jazzman: Blogging Resumes

Jersey Jazzman: Blogging Resumes

Blogging Resumes

It's been a while...

I won't get into the details, but suffice to say I had to take some time off from blogging. Too much stuff on my plate, and I was running the risk of doing it all badly. Something had to give.

During the time off, I thought about shutting the blog down. I've got a place to do my Jersey-specific work, another place to do descriptive analysis and other similar research, another place to preach the gospel of equitable and adequate school funding, and a bunch of other things in the works for 2020 -- including a few partners some of you will probably be shocked to see me working with (heh, heh)...

So why keep blogging? It's way more time-intensive than you probably think, it doesn't get me any accolades, it certainly doesn't make me new friends (usually it's quite the opposite). Many times blogging has distracted me from doing paid work, or work that would up my cred in academic circles, or work around the house that keeps my marriage happy.

So why keep blogging?

The simplest answer is that I think there are analyses to be conducted or data to be CONTINUE READING: Jersey Jazzman: Blogging Resumes

Arguably the two most appalling stories about the standardized testing obsession of the 2010s - The Washington Post

Arguably the two most appalling stories about the standardized testing obsession of the 2010s - The Washington Post

Arguably the two most appalling stories about the standardized testing obsession of the 2010s

Of all of the absurd and appalling stories that emerged from the standardized test-based school reform movement in the 2010s, there were two that, arguably, best revealed to me how bankrupt and even cruel some of the things policymakers foisted on children could be.

There were, to be sure, plenty of stories in the past decade to choose from — even without going back to the start of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era in 2002, when President George W. Bush (R) signed his signature education law that ushered in an era of school reform based on the scores of standardized tests.

No teacher had been asked to help write NCLB, and the results showed: Schools were labeled as failing and penalized unfairly; many schools sharply limited or dropped teaching key subjects such as history, science and the arts because only math and reading were tested; and test preparation became the focus of the school day in many classrooms. Recess for young kids? No time.

Arne Duncan, education secretary for President Barack Obama from 2009-2015, knew that NCLB had been a failure, but he pursued policies that made standardized testing even more important than before. He wanted states to use the scores to evaluate teachers and principals. And he once proposed evaluating colleges of education in part on how well the students of their graduates performed on — you guessed it — standardized tests.

There were stories about teachers being evaluated on the test scores of students they didn’t have and CONTINUE READING: Arguably the two most appalling stories about the standardized testing obsession of the 2010s - The Washington Post

Audrey Watters: The Most Important Post of the Decade: The 100 Worst EdTech Disasters of the Decade | Diane Ravitch's blog

Audrey Watters: The Most Important Post of the Decade: The 100 Worst EdTech Disasters of the Decade | Diane Ravitch's blog

Audrey Watters: The Most Important Post of the Decade: The 100 Worst EdTech Disasters of the Decade

I just opened my email and discovered this brilliant post by Audrey Watters, whose critical voice on EdTech is indispensable.

Watters lists the 100 biggest EdTech debacles of the past decade, and seeing them all in one place is astonishing.

What strikes me is the combination of unadulterated arrogance (i.e., chutzpah), coupled with repeated failures.

What is also impressive are the number of entries that were hailed by the media or by assorted journalists, then slipped quietly down the drain, without impairing the reputation of the huckster who took the money and ran.

Again and again, we encounter EdTech start-ups and innovations that are greeted with wild acclaim and hype, but whose collapse is ignored as the parade moves on to the next overpromised miracle technology.

Whatever happened to the promise that half of all courses in school would be taught online by this year (false) or that most colleges and universities would die because of the rise of the MOOC (false)? Why do virtual CONTINUE READING: Audrey Watters: The Most Important Post of the Decade: The 100 Worst EdTech Disasters of the Decade | Diane Ravitch's blog

Recommended: Literacy Crises: False Claims and Real Solutions, Jeff McQuillan | radical eyes for equity

Recommended: Literacy Crises: False Claims and Real Solutions, Jeff McQuillan | radical eyes for equity

Recommended: Literacy Crises: False Claims and Real Solutions, Jeff McQuillan

Recently, I have been (frantically but carefully) drafting a new book for IAP about the current “science of reading” version of the Reading War: How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policy Makers, and People Who Care.

Those familiar with this blog and my scholarly work should be aware that I often ground my examinations of education in a historical context, drawing heavily on the subject of my dissertation, Lou LaBrant. The book I am writing begins in earnest, in fact, with “Chapter 1: A Historical Perspective of the Reading War: 1940s and 1990s Editions.”

As I have posted here, the “science of reading” over-reaction to reading and dyslexia across mainstream media as well as in state-level reading legislation has a number of disturbing parallels with the claims of a reading crisis in the 1980s and 1990s. Few people, I explained, are aware of the 1997 report authored by Linda Darling-Hammond on NAEP, reading achievement in the U.S., and the positive correlations with whole language (WL) practices and test scores.

I imagine even fewer education journalists and political leaders have read a powerful and important work about that literacy crisis in the 1990s, Literacy Crises: False Claims and Real Solutions by Jeff McQuillan.

In his Chapter 1, “What Isn’t Wrong with Reading: Seven Myths about CONTINUE READING: Recommended: Literacy Crises: False Claims and Real Solutions, Jeff McQuillan | radical eyes for equity

“We Are the Resistance and We Are Winning.” | tultican

“We Are the Resistance and We Are Winning.” | tultican

“We Are the Resistance and We Are Winning.”

By Thomas Ultican 1/1/2020

Historian and former United States Assistant Secretary of Education, Diane Ravitch’s, new book, Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools is due for release January 21. This masterpiece weaves together recent history with illuminating data concerning “corporate driven education reforms.”

The reported community response to self-anointed reformers is spiritually uplifting. Ravitch presents strong evidence that resistance to their reforms is carrying the day. She declares, “Judged by their own chosen metrics – standardized test scores – the fake ‘reforms’ failed.”

Diane tells a deeply personal story of her own journey through the education wars while bringing to life the experiences of teachers, students and parents harmed by “fake reforms.” In this captivating read, Ravitch describes the fight to save the commons.

Disruption and Changing Course

There is a parallel between Diane Ravitch and Elizabeth Warren. Both Warren and Ravitch were scholars whose research led them to a profound change of thought. Warren was fundamentally a moderate Republican when she began researching bankruptcy law. Ravitch was an advocate of top down standards based education reform. Through their personal research both these women CONTINUE READING: “We Are the Resistance and We Are Winning.” | tultican

Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Bill Raden: Failing the Test: Oakland’s Charter School Tipping Point - Beyond Chron

Failing the Test: Oakland’s Charter School Tipping Point - Beyond Chron

FAILING THE TEST: OAKLAND’S CHARTER SCHOOL TIPPING POINT

Last September’s sensational leak of the Great Public Schools Now Initiative, a half-b illion-dollar plan to double the number of charter schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), sparked a firestorm of controversy. Citing the plan’s potentially crippling fiscal impact on a financially troubled district that already leads the nation in its number of charters (around 230), critics denounced the plan as “an outline for a hostile takeover” and “a declaration of war on public schools.”

The combination of public furor and the LAUSD school board’s unanimous repudiation of the initiative — which was quickly dubbed the “Broad Plan” after its sponsor, Los Angeles philanthropist Eli Broad — subsequently forced the nonprofit tasked with implementing it to beat a retreat in its rhetoric, if not its intent to transform half of Los Angeles’ public schools into charters.

Rosie Torres, Oakland School Board Member: “What’s going to happen if we continue to have charter schools opening and we destabilize the financing of public schools?”

Yet Capital & Main has learned that a similar private initiative has been on the table for the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) for at least a decade. Virtually unknown to Oakland’s parents, and without the benefit of public exposure or open debate by its school board, the Oakland charter expansion scheme has been quietly driving policy under the political radar for a number of years. (The OUSD school board did not respond to Capital & Main’s request to comment for this article.)

Charter schools, which were born of the education reform movement of the 1980s, compete for public tax dollars but are today often run like private businesses and aren’t bound by much of the state’s education code. But what makes such CONTINUE READING: Failing the Test: Oakland’s Charter School Tipping Point - Beyond Chron

Latest News and Comment from Education

Wednesday, January 1, 2020

Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007

NANCY BAILEY: A Review of Daisy Has Autism: In 2020, a Commitment to Students With Disabilities!

NYC Educator: Happy 2020!

Breaking: Our class size lawsuit will be heard Jan. 13 & last chance in 2019 to support our efforts | Class Size Matters

CURMUDGUCATION: OH: Ohio Excels and the Hostile Takeover of Education

Jersey Jazzman: Blogging Resumes

Arguably the two most appalling stories about the standardized testing obsession of the 2010s - The Washington Post

Audrey Watters: The Most Important Post of the Decade: The 100 Worst EdTech Disasters of the Decade | Diane Ravitch's blog

Recommended: Literacy Crises: False Claims and Real Solutions, Jeff McQuillan | radical eyes for equity

“We Are the Resistance and We Are Winning.” | tultican

Disruption and Changing Course

Tuesday, December 31, 2019

TOP POSTS THIS YEAR AND TOP POSTS OF THE DECADE #REDFORED #tbats

Bill Raden: Failing the Test: Oakland’s Charter School Tipping Point - Beyond Chron

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