Who knew that math would be such a big deal, or that counting would have such deep political issues? Just let me know when he's gone, or at least moved on to his next big grift. In the meantime, lots to read about this week. Remember, the stuff you like you should share.
Audrey Watters has some thoughts about how we keep putting failed ed tech enterprises in the memory hole and letting the architects of these failures carry on with freshly scrubbed reputations. Also, Proctorio sucks.
Bruce Baker guests to talk about how conservative thinky tank the Hoover Institution helped spread the idea that investing in public education was pointless and fruitless.
A batch of articles working through different aspects of the topic, with a good side of data. You're probably not going to buy all of this, but there are some good places to start talking here.
A pair of Stanford students have launched a small business is getting refurbished laptops to students in need. It's a small story, but an encouraging one.
Diane Ravitch is at The Hill explaining why this Trumpian idea is a bad one. Yes,. I know this version of it is likely dead now, but let's just drive a stake through it to be sure, okay.
I've referenced this piece elsewhere, but you may want to read the whole account of what top aid Stef Feldman had to say about the full range of ed policy topics. Currently it's the most direct statement we have about what Biden has in mind.
Many's the time I've objected to what Morgan Polikoff had to say, but his summation of the l;ousy place we're stuck in right now is as good as any I've read. At Hechinger Report.
This interview with sociologist Jessica Calarco in Culture Study is pretty powerful stuff. And her suggestion about thinking sociologically is needed at the moment when so many teachers are beating themselves up for not being able to handle the pandemess perfectly.
At EdWeek, Doris Santoro, who wrote a book about this stuff, explains how the current pandemess is keeping teachers from "reaping the moral rewards" they are used to getting from the work. And more. Another useful "Oh, this is what I'm feeling" article.
Word keeps popping up on line from here and there that some schools are going ahead with teacher evaluations this year, even this fall. Which is nuts. Teachers are reeling, scrambling, doing their damnedest to stay upright on constantly shifting ground, trying to maintain some semblance of education in the midst of chaos and uncertainty that is marked by a widespread lack of leadership and direct
The charter advocacy Twitterverse is unhappy about this part of the Biden plan, as described here by Biden staffer Stef Feldman talking to the Education Writers Association : And we’ll require every charter school, including online schools, to be authorized and held accountable by democratically-elected bodies like school boards and also held to the same standards of transparency and accountabili
I just read a piece that doesn't necessarily say anything new, but puts it all in a useful frame. Let me show you the first paragraph: There’s no such thing as a “good school” in the abstract. Every school serves a particular community, in a particular time and place, with its own needs and desires. A good school in rural Montana might not be a good school in Midtown Manhattan, just as a good sch
Among the folks pushing the narrative that schools are shut down because of the Evil Teachers Unions, we find this sparkly website-- Speak Out For Teachers . Here's their pitch: Are you one of the millions of teachers eager to return to safe, in-person learning — only to find a teachers’ union is fighting to keep schools closed and students at home? Share your story below. It might even air on na
Well, that didn't take long. Back in October, top Biden aid Stef Feldman spoke to Education Writers Association members about ed policy. It was... not encouraging. She didn't make a "firm commitment" about state testing waivers, an odd stance for someone who promised to put an end to high stakes testing. She stood by the "former public school educator" promise, but as many of us have noted, depen
It sucks that Donors Choose exists. For those unfamiliar, it's basically a Go Fund Me for classrooms instead of medical problems. Like all such charities, it occasionally pops up in the news because some celebrity and/or business decides to sponsor a bunch of projects ( like that time with Katy Perry and Staples ) and we get a bunch of warm fuzzy stories and I just hate that stuff, because we sho
Has it only been a week since we got together here? Seems like that was in a whole different world, and I have a feeling that we have a few more to go through before we're done. But as soon as the last echoes of Beloved Leader's 1,732 lawsuits dies down, maybe we can get back to doing some important stuff and not dying and--well, won't it just be nice not to have to have him barging into our cons
It has been a few hours since the race was finally called, and now, once we get past a few hundred petulant lawsuits, the Trump Train will be leaving DC (undoubtedly kicking over every table it can find on the way out). That means that Betsy DeVos will be leaving the department of education, and that is
How can a school system evaluate their teachers this year?
No one has been trained to work under our current conditions of either remote learning or learning while maintaining a social distance while wearing face coverings.
Everyone is doing what they can to make things work.
Some of the teachers who have worked hard to be there for their students have gotten sick.
We’ve discovered that COVID can strike anyone…even children. Even in school.
Parents who work outside the home can infect their children, and those children can infect their teachers.
When students or teachers get COVID, school systems, cities, and municipalities are quick to say “it didn’t happen at school.” This keeps the schools open and the kids at school so parents can work even if it’s not true. (And I understand the need for parents to work. I understand the difficulty for some parents of not being able to work from home…and at the same time having to be home with their children).
Sometimes if it gets too bad, schools will “go virtual.”
What happens to the parents, then? Do they quit their jobs? Do they lose their jobs? Do they enlist the aid of grandparents who might be more susceptible to CONTINUE READING: Who’s to Blame? | Live Long and Prosper
We can argue about how effective testing plans are. Should we do it weekly? Every other week? Monthly? Which percentage do we need to test at a time? Should we vary depending on the rate of positivity? These are all valid concerns. I'm not an expert or a medical professional, and I'd defer to the opinions of those who are.
Everything I hear, though, tells me that however we answer the above, things are far from kosher in the Big Apple. Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Carranza are constantly paying valuable lip service to just how much they care about the safety of students and staff. Carranza writes us flowery letters saying how much he cares about us even as he tries to pick a billion dollars from our collective pocket. Meanwhile, I can only suppose we aren't supposed to pay attention to actual conditions on this astral plane.
It's my understanding, from multiple sources now, that those who do the testing have numbers they need to hit. I'm not sure exactly how they arrive at these numbers, but once they reach whatever their quotas happen to be, they are gone. That's fine. If we have a hundred people and they need to do 20% a week, they therefore need to test 20 people a week.
In fact, in our school, they initially favored coming in on Fridays. There are very few people in our building on Fridays. That's a day we reach out to students with special needs or issues, and the pool of students and staff in our building is by no means representative. It took them weeks to remedy that, though it should've been one simple conversation. While that may be representative of their lack of competence, that's not even the main CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: NYC School COVID Testing Is a Scam
Watch As Kevin Welner and I discuss His New Book “Potential Grizzlies”
I enjoyed reading Kevin Welner’s new book “Potential Grizzles.” There are many hilarious short pieces about education fads, absurd federal laws, Duncan, DeVos and more.
You will enjoy reading about the innovative Ammocentric Charter School in Arizona. Or the discovery that when the bottom 5% of teachers are fired, another bottom 5% pops up the next year. Or the insight that teachers can be fairly evaluated by their height. Or what happened when a promising student got a growth on her mindset.
Kevin and I discussed the book on a Zoom sponsored by the Network for Public education. We had a lot of laughs thinking about the absurd disconnect between research and policy.
Kevin has pledged any royalties he earns to NPE. I hope you will watch, listen, then buy the book.
Why did the Schools and Communities First initiative lose when other
progressive measures passed in California?
The 2020 presidential election outcome was a nail-biter, but in California there was another drawn-out, high-stakes contest.
On November 10, with more than 90% of the vote tabulated, the contest was
called against Proposition 15, which was losing by 3.6 percentage points after a months-long campaign
and a week-long ballot count.
The Schools and Communities First initiative, Prop. 15, was launched by a
coalition of community organizations, the Service Employees International
Union’s California State Council and the California Teachers Association
to create more resources for schools and local amenities by changing the
commercial and industrial properties tax structure. (Disclosure: The two
unions are financial supporters of this website.)
“The anti-15 people did as the pro-13 people did—they hit the right
buttons. Tax increases, housing supply—all of that resonates with the
California electorate.”
— Sherry Bebitch Jeffe
Prop. 15 would have reset the assessment of California corporate property
tax rates that were established by 1978’s landmark Proposition 13,
assessing them at present market value. Today most annual corporate
property bills are based on rates that have gone un-reassessed for
decades. With Prop. 15, Disney Studios’ million-plus-square-foot lot in
Burbank would no longer be assessed at $5 and change per foot while some
local businesses pay around $200 for the same space.
The California Legislative Analyst estimated that the Prop. 15 reform measure could have raised between $6.5
billion and $11.5 billion a year for local governments and schools. Why
then, with a $56-million-plus campaign war chest, did it lose—especially
when other progressive measures passed?
“The anti-15 people did as the pro-13 people did—they hit the right
buttons,” says Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a senior fellow at the University of
Southern California’s Sol Price School of CONTINUE READING: Proposition 15 Goes Down Swinging |
[Many years ago, at my husband’s class reunion]: Inebriated classmate starts rhapsodizing about the extreme superiority of the education they all got at their well-regarded co-ed Catholic high school in the suburbs of Detroit, back in the day. His monologue derails (did I mentioned he was sloshed?) and he turns to yammering at ME (a public school teacher) about how terrible schools are today (he has no children) and that the public schools—well, they’re the worst of all. Everybody knows that.
I bite my tongue.
I’m used to people assuming that private and religious schools are, somehow, automatically better than public schools. On the face of it, if ‘you get what you pay for’ is a truism, private schools ought to be better than public schools. Depending on your definition of ‘better,’ of course.
Part of the cachet of privately funded education is exclusion. You’re paying for the privilege (a carefully chosen word) of sending your child to a school that other people can’t afford, and having them taught using a set of values (religious and otherwise) that your family has chosen, not been assigned to by location.
There's Only One Reason Districts Should Be Doing Teacher Evaluations This Year
Word keeps popping up on line from here and there that some schools are going ahead with teacher evaluations this year, even this fall.
Which is nuts. Teachers are reeling, scrambling, doing their damnedest to stay upright on constantly shifting ground, trying to maintain some semblance of education in the midst of chaos and uncertainty that is marked by a widespread lack of leadership and direction on all levels. Even in schools that are open for face-to-face, teachers work wondering at what instant things will change. And of course, underneath all the rest, anxiety about the possibility of debilitating illness and death.
But sure-- now is an awesome time to make sure that teachers are checking off all the items on the Madeline Hunter checklist and are keeping their classroom spic and span. The Big Standardized Test, previously almost completely useless for truly measuring teacher performance, will be double-plus-useless this year. The whole standard array of teacher evaluation techniques will be pointless this year, like judging a round of Dancing with the Stars on the deck of a ship knocked to and fro on CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: There's Only One Reason Districts Should Be Doing Teacher Evaluations This Year
The pendulum was swinging toward reopening schools — then came the COVID-19 surge
Since the summer, the simmering state and local debate over reopening K-12 public schools has reflected the nation’s deep partisan divide on the coronavirus, with Republicans favoring openings and Democrats more likely to support a cautious approach.
But new scientific evidence showing that in-person learning has resulted in relatively few outbreaks of COVID-19 — combined with growing concerns about learning and social development setbacks for kids — may be closing that chasm.
For now, the national COVID-19 surge that is overwhelming hospitals in some states has stalled any further movement toward opening classrooms. Scores of schools are closing in hard-hit states, and major cities are shelving plans to reopen schools for the first time.
Still, large school systems in liberal cities and counties are coming under increasing pressure from mayors, governors, educators and public health experts to provide in-person learning as soon as the current COVID-19 spike abates.
Sam Wineburg and Nadav Ziv: We Must Teach Students to Recognize Misinformation
Sam Wineburg and Nadav Ziv, professor and student at Stanford University, maintain that it is crucial to teach students how to recognize misinformation, a point that the recent election made clear. The Republican Party repeatedly called Democratic candidates “radical socialists” and smeared any proposal to improve the lives of people as “socialism.”
They wrote in the Los Angeles Times:
The 2020 election has once again demonstrated how easy it is to spread misinformation online. And universities across the U.S. are failing in teaching students how to identify it. Many colleges offer students guides to evaluate the trustworthiness of websites. But too many of them base their advice on a report from 1998. That’s nine years before the first iPhone, and 18 years before Russian interference sparked an urgent discussion on how we interpret information online.
Privatizing public schools involves changing school words to reflect a business-like environment. There’s nothing wrong with these words in general, but when applied to schools, they change the nature of schooling and the way we look at teachers and students.
Business-like terms used with schools increased during the 1980s and 1990s. They are so frequent now they’re taken for granted.
Phi Delta Kappan’s October issue is called School for Sale.They discuss the role of business in schools. Did you put the For Sale sign in the front yard of your democratic public school? Probably not, and neither did I.
Privatizing public schools has not worked well, but business words and their meanings have reshaped how we look at public education.
Accountability applied to schools means that teachers and school officials are responsible for the child’s learning. Standards in the form of test objectives become the CONTINUE READING: Business Terms Used to Privatize Public Schools
