DID YOU MISS DIANE RAVITCH'S BLOG TODAY? | A site to discuss better education for all

Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all

DID YOU MISS DIANE RAVITCH'S BLOG TODAY?

A site to discuss better education for all

Massachusetts: A Parent Thanks a State Official Who Exposed Dark Money

by dianeravitch / 18min

One of the very exciting episodes in my new book SLAYING GOLIATH describes the struggle in Massachusetts surrounding a 2016 referendum to expand the number of charter schools in the state. The referendum was called Question 2. Yes on 2 received funding from billionaires (the Waltons and Bloomberg), DFER (hedge fund managers), and out-of-state groups whose donors were unknown. The last group is ca

Ohio: Should States Subsidize Private and Religious Education by Subtracting Money from Public Schools?

by dianeravitch / 1h

Jan Resseger asks the ultimate cost about vouchers , in response to the Ohio legislature’s recent decision to expand vouchers to two-thirds of all school districts in the state, including high-performing districts. Should public money be subtracted from public schools to underwrite vouchers for private and religious schools? The state’s public schools will be hit hard by the voucher law. And sinc

North Carolina: I Endorse Jen Mangrum for State Superintendent of Schools

100+by dianeravitch / 2h

I am happy to give my personal endorsement to Dr. Jennifer (Jen) Mangrum, who is running for State Superintendent of Public Instruction in North Carolina. Jen has already been endorsed by the Network for Public Education, which concluded that she is far and away the most qualified candidate in the race. Jen is a career educator who understands the importance of restoring the integrity of public e

Sue Legg: The Dark $ide of $chool Choice in Florida

by dianeravitch / 3h

What happens when Florida’s biggest for-profit charter chain takes over three low-performing public schools? Follow the money. Ka-Ching! Sue Legg of the Florida League of Women Voters guides you through a path paved with greenbacks. Here is her summary: The whole sordid affair was orchestrated by the current Senate Ed. Committee Chair. Millions of dollars were poured into the K12 consolidated sch

The Two Most Horrifying Stories about Standardized Testing in the Past Decade

67by dianeravitch / 4h

Valerie Strauss wrote a column in her Answer Sheet blog at the Washington Post about the two most horrifying stories in the past decade of high-stakes standardized testing. Both occurred in Florida, a state where standardized testing is treated as an unerring and essential metric, except for students who use state money to attend religious schools, which are exempt from the state’s testing regime

YESTERDAY

Teresa Hanafin: Trump Reduces More Environmental Regulations, While Treasury Secretary Mnuchin Hides Trump’s Travel Expenses

27by dianeravitch / 1d

I fear we are becoming insensitive to shock in the Trump era. And the very concept of “government ethics” seems to be an oxymoron in this era. Here are two shocking reports by Teresa Hanafin, who writes the Fast Forward commentary of the Boston Globe: Trump holds another campaign rally tonight, this time in Toledo. Earlier in the day, he’s scheduled to announce some proposed National Environmenta

Newark: Superintendent Wants to Close Four Charters and Limit New Ones

85by dianeravitch / 1d

Roger Léon, superintendent of Newark schools, wants to close four charter schools and ban most new ones. Patrick Wall of Chalkbeat reports: The head of the Newark school system is calling for the closure of four local charter schools and a ban on most new charter schools, a clear signal that the district hopes to rein in the city’s fast-growing charter sector. The schools — M.E.T.S., People’s Pre

I Endorse Andy Saultz for State Legislature in Oregon

by dianeravitch / 1d

Andrew (Andy) Saultz is running for the Oregon State Legislature in District 33 (Northwest Portland). I am pleased to endorse his candidacy. The legislature will be fortunate to have Andy Saultz, an experienced and knowledgeable educator, among its members. Education is the most important of every state’s responsibilities. Nothing matters more than making sure that the children and young people o

Jan Resseger: The Empowering and Hopeful Message of “SLAYING GOLIATH”

28by dianeravitch / 1d

In this post, Jan Resseger reviews my new book SLAYING GOLIATH: THE PASSIONATE RESISTANCE TO PRIVATIZATION AND THE FIGHT TO SAVE AMERICA’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS. Jan is an expert on the damage imposed by so-called “reformers.” Several years ago, when I was in Cleveland, she took me on a tour of devastated neighborhoods. Ohio legislators and local leaders responded to growing poverty by creating charters

Daniel Koretz: American Students Are Not Getting Smarter, and Test-Based “Reforms” Are to Blame

24by dianeravitch / 1d

Daniel Koretz is one of the leading authorities on testing in the United States. A professor at Harvard University, he has written two important books about testing–its uses and misuses. The first was Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us. His latest is The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better. He recently wrote an article about how the federal government’s demand f

Texas: State Judge Temporarily Blocks State Takeover of Houston Schools

by dianeravitch / 1d

A state judge in Texas blocked the state takeover of the Houston Independent School District until she issues a final order in June. A state judge Wednesday evening immediately blocked Texas from taking over the Houston Independent 

Big Education Ape: Join Diane Ravitch to Discuss Her Latest Book - 
Network For Public Education - 
https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2020/01/join-diane-ravitch-to-discuss-her.html

Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all

Join Diane Ravitch to Discuss Her Latest Book - Network For Public Education

Join Diane Ravitch to Discuss Her Latest Book - Network For Public Education

Join Diane Ravitch to Discuss Her Latest Book

Join Diane Ravitch to Discuss Her Latest Book - Network For Public Education

Politics as Sport: The Naive Democracy of the U.S. | radical eyes for equity

Politics as Sport: The Naive Democracy of the U.S. | radical eyes for equity

Politics as Sport: The Naive Democracy of the U.S.

Social media provide one easily accessible version of the marketplace of ideas in the U.S. While still gated by some levels of privilege, social media platforms include a fairly wide range of people participating by both posting who they are and what they believe or viewing those posts.

Claimed political affiliations and support for political parties and candidates are often expressed through social media, but even more revealing are posts that people seem to believe are somehow not political but in fact expose the real politics beneath the rhetoric.

One of the most revealing and disturbing is the pattern of conservatives posting about socialism, communism, and (more rarely) Marxism—proving that they have no real idea what the terms mean but have embraced them as broad and clumsy slurs of an imagined (and oppressive) Left.

As I have explained several times, there is no real Left of consequences in the U.S., even in academia (where I have worked for almost two decades).

After posting The Market Fails Education yesterday, I followed up a discussion on Facebook with this: Republicans in the U.S. are market fundamentalists who are averse to publicly funded institutions, and Democrats are market-first, public tolerant.

A genuine political Left with power in the U.S. would be public-first and market tolerant, but this simply doesn’t exist within any real power structure in the country.

Market fundamentalism or market idealism drives a great deal of political discourse, ideology, and then policy in the U.S. In almost all real ways, the CONTINUE READING: Politics as Sport: The Naive Democracy of the U.S. | radical eyes for equity

Dem. Candidates Call for Equitable Public School Investment. Can the New Narrative Be Sustained? | janresseger

Dem. Candidates Call for Equitable Public School Investment. Can the New Narrative Be Sustained? | janresseger

Dem. Candidates Call for Equitable Public School Investment. Can the New Narrative Be Sustained?

Is our society beginning to realize that we must invest in helping instead of punishing the school districts which serve our poorest children?

Clearly the conversation about public education among the Democratic candidates for President has turned away from what has been a quarter century of bipartisan test-and-punish, pro-privatization education policy.  No Child Left Behind, which was signed into law 18 years ago, formalized the strategy.  But in a remarkable commentary on Wednesday in USA Today, Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders declared a very different agenda: “Under NCLB, standardized tests were utilized to hold public schools and teachers ‘accountable’ for student outcomes. As a result, some schools that underperformed were closed and their teachers and unions blamed.  The long-term effects of this approach have been disastrous.  NCLB perpetuated the myth of public schools and teachers as failing, which opened the door for the spread of school voucher programs and charter schools that we have today.  Some of these charter schools are operated by for-profits, many of them are nonunion and are not publicly accountable… The most serious flaw of high-stakes testing, however, is that it ignores the real problems facing our teachers and students: social inequality and underinvestment in our schools.”

And all the leading Democratic candidates have also taken notice. In Pittsburgh on December 14, at a Public Education Forum 2020, the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination for President all endorsed tripling or quadrupling the federal investment in Title I.  They spoke for helping instead of punishing the schools in our nation’s poorest communities.

The Devastation Wrought by Accountability-Based, Test-and-Punish, Pro-Privatization School Reform

Federal and state governments have imposed school closures, state takeovers, and the transformation of low-scoring public schools into charter schools, but I don’t know of any school district serving mostly poor children with enough money to do the things wealthy CONTINUE READING: Dem. Candidates Call for Equitable Public School Investment. Can the New Narrative Be Sustained? | janresseger

2020 Teachers’ New Year’s Resolutions: 4. Focus on developing positive relationships | Live Long and Prosper

2020 Teachers’ New Year’s Resolutions: 4. Focus on developing positive relationships | Live Long and Prosper

2020 Teachers’ New Year’s Resolutions: 4. Focus on developing positive relationships

2020 Teachers’ New Year’s Resolutions
4. Develop Positive Relationships

It’s a new year and as is our custom here in the USA, we make resolutions which, while often broken, can be redefined as goals toward which we should strive.

NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION #4

• Focus on developing positive relationships in the classroom.

Economists Ate My School – Why Defining Teaching as a Transaction is Destroying Our Society

Teachers are the most important in-school factor when it comes to student success in school. Out of school factors, especially those related to poverty, have CONTINUE READING: 2020 Teachers’ New Year’s Resolutions: 4. Focus on developing positive relationships | Live Long and Prosper

"We Are All School Reformers" (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

"We Are All School Reformers" (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

"We Are All School Reformers" (Part 1)

On the first day of a graduate seminar at Stanford University that I taught a few years ago, I asked each of the 20 students to give a two-minute self-introduction detailing their name, what they did prior to graduate school, and why they enrolled in “Good Schools”: Research, Policy, and Practice.” After they introduced themselves, I, too, took the time to say that I had been a former high school teacher and superintendent for over two decades.

In listening to the students I reckoned that about one-third of the students had been teachers (many alums of Teach for America), about a third worked as consultants and policy analysts for education non-profits and had no direct experience in schools (save for their years as students). The remaining students came from backgrounds in business, science, and the arts.

I listened to each student as they told of their classroom experiences as student or teacher or their strong impulse to give the next generation of children and youth a better schooling than they had received. Many expressed a fervent wish to turn failing schools, particularly in urban districts, into successful ones. They wanted to reduce the inequities they saw (or experienced) in schools. This seminar, they felt, would provide answers to the questions they had about how to do such turnarounds.

After hearing their self-introductions and why they had enrolled in this seminar, CONTINUE READING: "We Are All School Reformers" (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Robots Will Never Replace Teachers. They Can Only Displace Us | gadflyonthewallblog

Robots Will Never Replace Teachers. They Can Only Displace Us | gadflyonthewallblog

Robots Will Never Replace Teachers. They Can Only Displace Us

My favorite movie of all time is “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

And my favorite character is the computer HAL 9000.

In the future (now past) of the movie, HAL is paradoxically the most human personality. Tasked with running the day-to-day operations of a spaceship, HAL becomes strained to the breaking point when he’s given a command to lie about the mission’s true objectives. He ends up having a psychotic break and killing most of the people he was supposed to protect.

It’s heartbreaking finally when Dave Bowman slowly turns off the higher functions of HAL’s brain and the supercomputer regresses in intelligence while singing “A Bicycle Built for Two” – one of the first things he was programmed to do.

I’m gonna’ be honest here – I cry like a baby at that point.

But once I clean up my face and blow my nose, I realize this is CONTINUE READING: Robots Will Never Replace Teachers. They Can Only Displace Us | gadflyonthewallblog

All Things Education: My Testimony Regarding the Governor's Proposed Budget for Education in Virginia

All Things Education: My Testimony Regarding the Governor's Proposed Budget for Education in Virginia

My Testimony Regarding the Governor's Proposed Budget for Education in Virginia

I definitely owe the education blogosphere a post about my post-doc job market experience (hint: it was not good). For now, I will share that I am back in the classroom teaching high school U.S. & Virginia Government to seniors (and getting my butt whooped but in a humbling and valuable way, though), and have been since the start of the 2019-2020 School Year. I  need to write a post about that, too. Good things come to those who wait, right? In the meantime, I have been involved with VEU (Virginia Educators United) because, oh, wait, I am a teacher again, and I heeded their leaders' call to attend the General Assembly's House Appropriations and Senate Finance Committees' public hearings to hear feedback on the Governor's budget priorities. The issues with the education funding in the budget are laid out very clearly here in VEU's talking points.

Here's a video of my testimony:

And here's the text from my spoken remarks:

"Good afternoon. My name is Rachel Levy and I am a Virginia public school parent, teacher, writer and activist with a Ph.D. in educational leadership and policy. I live in Ashland, Virginia, I am a member of VEA, Virginia Educators United, the Virginia PTA, and the American Educational Research Association.

The Governor’s budget proposal for education is a step in the right direction, but unfortunately, it’s not sufficient.

I have been a teacher on and off for most of my career. Teaching is the most meaningful, challenging, intellectual, and socially useful work there is. As a teacher and a parent, I have seen the quality of our facilities, the availability of our CONTINUE READING: All Things Education: My Testimony Regarding the Governor's Proposed Budget for Education in Virginia

PISA Peculiarities (3): More Fear, Better Scores - Education in the Age of Globalization

Education in the Age of Globalization » Blog Archive » PISA Peculiarities (3): More Fear, Better Scores

PISA Peculiarities (3): More Fear, Better Scores

PISA has many peculiar and surprising discoveries…

Fear of failure improves academic performance.

That’s a conclusion one can draw from PISA’s analysis of its data. This is true at the system level. “At the system level, the greater the fear of failure expressed by students, the higher the reading scores in that education system” (OECD, 2019, p. 193). This is especially true for high performing East Asian education systems and some English speaking systems. PISA found that:

a large number of English-speaking and East Asian education systems were amongst those whose students were both more likely to report a fear of failure and to be high performers in reading. (OECD, 2019, p. 193).

It is also true within systems: “in a majority of school systems, students who expressed a greater fear of failure scored higher in reading than students expressing less concern about failing, after accounting for the socio-economic profile of students and schools” (OECD, 2019, p. 192).

Moreover, self-efficacy or self-confidence, the opposite of fear of failure, does not seem to lead to better academic performance, according to PISA’s analysis.

The strongest positive associations between general self-efficacy and reading performance were observed largely in countries and economies whose average reading performance was below the OECD CONTINUE READING: Education in the Age of Globalization » Blog Archive » PISA Peculiarities (3): More Fear, Better Scores

Washington Met Students Seek Support Before January Decision on Closing – Education Town Hall Forum

Washington Met Students Seek Support Before January Decision on Closing – Education Town Hall Forum

WASHINGTON MET STUDENTS SEEK SUPPORT BEFORE JANUARY DECISION ON CLOSING

The January 9, 2020 show of Education Town Hall featured four current students at DCPS’s Washington Metropolitan high school in studio, talking about their journey, and that of their fellow Washington Met students, since learning right before Thanksgiving that DCPS proposed closing their school. They are

Lyric Johnson, 16 years old

Na’Asia Hawkins, 18 years old

Travius Butler, 17 years old

Angel Johnson, 19 years old

The students explained that Washington Met alone of DCPS’s four opportunity academies contains a middle school and thus is the only place in the city that ensures that students from middle school years up who have not found academic success at other schools will have a pathway to graduation. They noted that the DCPS chancellor has said the decision to close the school—first announced before Thanksgiving—will be made by the end of January. At the few public meetings about the closure, students have said that they have never gotten satisfactory answers as to the reasons for the closure, noting that students who attend will naturally have issues that students at other schools will not—and that no one seems to be taking that into account.

The students made clear that the school has provided a safe and welcoming haven for them, CONTINUE READING: Washington Met Students Seek Support Before January Decision on Closing – Education Town Hall Forum

INSECT-BASED TEACHER TRAINING | The Merrow Report

INSECT-BASED TEACHER TRAINING | The Merrow Report

INSECT-BASED TEACHER TRAINING

The latest development in the never-ending struggle to improve teaching involves “A bug in the ear” AND “A fly on the wall.”  This insect-based approach has a highly-trained but distant observers watching (on closed circuit video) teachers at work and giving them instructions and suggestions in real time, so the teachers can modify methods and instantly improve their instruction. 

According to Education Week, what’s called ‘Bug in the Ear Coaching”  is being used in about a dozen states. “The premise is simple: A teacher wears an earpiece during a lesson, which is being live-streamed for an instructional coach who is somewhere else. Throughout the lesson, the coach delivers in-the-moment feedback to the teacher, who can add something or switch gears based on what she’s hearing in her ear.”

I reached out to some of the sources I developed in my 41 years of reporting for a closer look. One enthusiastic superintendent, who requested anonymity, said that the system would pay for itself in higher scores on standardized tests. “While the initial investment of $500,000 per school for cameras and directional microphones for every classroom, a dedicated room of monitors, the cost of a half-time tech person, and the salaries of the instructional experts who monitor the teachers, looks CONTINUE READING: INSECT-BASED TEACHER TRAINING | The Merrow Report