Michelle Rhee continues to try to salvage her shaky reputation, while more and more stories emerge to challenge her myth, and the style of school reform she champions. Here is a great video, from teachers and people familiar with Hart Middle School in DCPS. I’ll write more about this soon.
I have urged my legislators to vote NO on HB 1443. It has become an unwieldy Frankensausage of a bill, larded with controversial and discredited corporate ed reform practices, many of which usurp local authority and labor union rights and do harm to teaching and learning. It would not make good law.
HB 1443 contains language that reinforces the controversial and flawed practice of tying teacher evaluations to standardized student test scores. It potentially enables school closures, weakens teachers unions, enables less qualified
By Beth Hawkins | Published Thu, Apr 14 2011 9:04 am
How many posts about the former schools chief of a city that’s 1,100 miles from here can one blog suffer? I don’t know, but we’re going to find out.
It seems I was a few days premature inwriting about the controversies that continue to dog erstwhile D.C. chancellor and bee-eater Michelle Rhee. Her reforms are the subject of two separate, critical national studies, themselves the subject of a new 3,200-word dissection in a high-profile education policy journal.
The first study, undertaken by Alan Ginsburg, a former director of Policy and Program Studies in the U. S. Department of Education, found that contrary to claims by Rhee supporters, D.C. students performed worse
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On exam day in Sabina Trombetta's Colorado Springs first-grade art class, the 6-year-olds were shown a slide of Picasso's "Weeping Woman," a 1937 cubist portrait of the artist's lover, Dora Maar, with tears streaming down her face. It is painted in vibrant -- almost neon -- greens, bluish purples, and yellows. Explaining the painting, Picasso once said, "Women are suffering machines." The test asked the first-graders to look at "Weeping Woman" and "write three colors Picasso used to show feeling or emotion." (Acceptable answers: blue, green, purple, and yellow.) Another question asked, "In each box below, draw three different shapes that Picasso used to show feeling or emotion." (Acceptable drawings: triangles, ovals, and rectangles.) A separate section of the exam asked | ||||||
Put up, or shut down. That was the message from the San Diego Unified school board to two struggling charter schools, writes Emily Alpert.
The board voted to send letters to the schools seeking changes after lists of accusations, ranging from "failing to hold open meetings" to "failing to report child abuse," were leveled. The touchy subject has Promise Charter School's parents and teachers taking sides. "Clearly there's a lot of dysfunction going on in this school," school board member Scott Barnett said.
But the school board itself is no high-functioning dream machine, either. Last month it Read the rest of this article
Months after San Diego Unified took a controversial step to concentrate more of its federal money for disadvantaged students on the very poorest schools, one school board member wants a do-over.
John Lee Evans abstained in December when the school board made one of its most controversial calls: It chose to gradually pull money away from schools with lower percentages of poor children and give it to schools where 75 percent of students or more are poor enough to get free or reduced price lunches. Though the highest poverty schools already get more money per pupil, this move would concentrate the money even more heavily on the most disadvantaged schools.
The change would take place slowly, phased in over five years. Parents and principals on the losing end have protested it will strip services for poor children who go to somewhat better-off schools. Backers say it will focus more of the money where it is most sorely needed, arguing that San Diego Unified has diluted the dollars by spreading them out to schools with lower poverty levels.
Evans said he didn't vote on the idea in December because he felt the school board didn't have any solid information about how well the money was being used to make their decision. The vote was 3-0, with Evans abstaining and Kevin Beiser absent from the meeting. Read the rest of this article
I'm looking into how much harder it is to get into a public college with California's budget crunched. One of the most striking factoids I've found is that in the fall, local community colleges turned away roughly 10,000 students. Community colleges are Read the rest of this article
Comment to my blog this morning.
Advance Illinois, which represents the Illinois corporate players in school reform, loves the agreement that the three unions agreed to yesterday.
Robin Steans of the group Advance Illinois was at the negotiating table, along with representatives from the state’s three largest teachers unions and the Illinois State Board of Education.
“It is hard to overstate what a huge step in the right direction this is on a whole host of fronts,” said Steans.
Take seniority, she said.
“For layoffs, which have been happening around the state, it’s been last hired,
He [the bullshitter] does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies
Dear Diane,
It was fun to catch even the last 10 minutes of your speech last week at AERA in New Orleans. It was too bad that half or more of the audience couldn't get in to hear you. (I finally found a secret rear door to sneak in.) And thanks for exposing to one and all that I have lived 10 years longer than I had planned. 8o is surprising, but I like it. I encourage others to aim for it.
Two experiences come to mind as I read your blog and heard you speak. It's said briefly in the title to Mike Rose's book: Why School?
In September 1969, I asked 20 5-year-olds this question while teaching at P.S. 144 in Central Harlem: "Why do you suppose your parents sent you to school instead of keeping you at home with them?" (Or something like that.) They had lots of first-round responses. "To learn to raise your hand." "To learn to line up." "To learn to talk only when the teacher tells you to." "To take turns," and so on. Finally, one child said: "To learn to read." I
Not much time for another full length post today. There are numbers to be crunched. But, I did feel it necessary to clear up a few issues regarding NJ Education Reform proposals, including those laid out yesterday focused on a) reforming teacher evaluation to focus on student assessment data, b) tying evaluation to compensation, tenure and dismissal policies, c) ending last in first out, and d) requiring mutual consent in placement/hiring of teachers to specific school locations.
And of course, these policy proposals are framed with the usual urgency.
Here are four overarching claims based on reformy logic being applied in the New Jersey policy debate:
We must act now!
The argument that we must act now, before it’s too late, because things are so awful. First, it’s rather hard to argue with a straight face, and certainly not with any data, that NJ’s public education system is so awful. NJ performs at or near the top among states on national assessments, and NJ low-income students (qualifying for
The Oregon-based anti-teacher union outfit that raised $3 million dollars to go after teacher union collective bargaining rights, tenure and seniority, got their payoff yesterday. The three teacher union players agreed to support a bill that restricts the right to strike and demolishes seniority rights.
Says SFC:
Historic education improvements that would have been considered impossible just one year ago are on the horizon in Illinois. Today, state Senator Kimberly Lightford (D-4 District) introduced Senate Bill 7 (SB 7), a comprehensive education improvement package, after nearly three months of negotiations
The Center for American Progress today release a report on class size reduction authored by Matthew Chingos, who has conducted a handful of recent interesting studies on the topic.
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/04/pdf/class_size.pdf
This report reads more or less like a manifesto against class size reduction as a strategy for improving school quality and student outcomes. I’ll admit that I’m also probably not the biggest advocate for class size reduction as a single, core strategy for education reform, and that I do favor some balanced emphasis on teacher quality issues. I’m also not the naysayer that I once was regarding class size reduction and its relative costs. There still exists too little decisive information regarding the cost-benefit tradeoffs between the two – teacher quantity
A few years back, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a piece about a campus gang rape case in which he said that the best approach to preventing such incidents was the approach that colleges took in the days before the sexual revolution.
Educators in decades past, Brooks wrote,
understood that when you concentrate young men, they have a tropism toward barbarism. That’s why these educators cared less about academics than about instilling a formula for character building. The formula, then called chivalry, consisted first of manners, habits and self-imposed restraints to prevent the downward slide.
There’s a lot to object to in this — starting with the suggestion that all men have the impulse to rape, and that the best of us are merely taught to restrain it. But there’s one bit that I’d like to address specifically, as a
Not many people know this, but I am the product of a mixed marriage. I was blissfully unaware of it growing up, which I think speaks well of my Mom and Dad, who apparently wanted to protect their six children from the raw emotion and even hatred that was out there then — but seems to me to be out of control today.
My parents met when he was in his mid 20s and already out in the world, and she was barely out of her teens. Her parents were strongly opposed to any sort of relationship and did their best to nip it in the bud. They took her away to Europe for the summer, hoping that the spark would die. It didn’t work. Pop met the boat when they returned to New York. Her parents reluctantly accepted what they could not
I hope you're sitting down. One of the hottest new education blogs is (1) hosted on the Forbes website and (2) written by a self-professed "leftwing civil societarian." The new American Times blog is the work of E. D. Kain, a frequent contributor to the prominent progressive blog Balloon Juice and editor-in-chief of the blog The League of Ordinary Gentlemen.
It's a measure of Kain's significance that the blog's debut quickly netted a feature on Alexander Russo's This Week in Education. There, Kain shares his education background (former substitute teacher, "education hobbyist") and his goals
