10-4-13 Fred Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher who is just looking at the data.

Fred Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher who is just looking at the data.:

Responding to protests, CMS/HMS push back cleansing deadline to December 6th.

As a result of protest from across the state, including to and from this blog, the Illinois Central Management System – which manages the Teachers Retirement Insurance Program (TRIP) – has pushed back the deadline for submitting dependent eligibility information. This is a partial but significant win. Under the original rules, TRIP members claiming dependent coverage were being asked to submit a b

4 by Fred Klonsky / 1h 

Are they a think-tank or a dunk-tank. Illinois Policy Institute considers failure a success when it comes to pension cleansing.

From WICS Channel 20: Director of Health Policy at the Illinois Policy Institute, Naomi Lopez-Bauman, said the audit is a reasonable way to ensure taxpayer money isn’t being misspent. As to the problems of getting ahold of tax return transcripts, she said she looked on the I.R.S. website “and it turns out that even though there is a government shutdown, they’re still able to order transcripts, and

by Fred Klonsky / 28min 

Ten minute drawing. Illinois Gothic: Pension cleansing.

2 by Fred Klonsky / 9min 

The in box. They are looking for a pro-teacher candidate in the Illinois 37th House district.

  Pension bomber Renee Kosel is quitting the Illinois House. From IEA Region 28. Rep. Renee Kosel has decided to retire and is not running for re-election in the 37th District.  The district includes all or parts of Frankfort, Homer Glen, Homer Township, Joliet, Mokena, New Lenox, Orland Park and Tinley Park. This is good news for IEA members. She voted in favor of SB1 and has consistently voted

by Fred Klonsky / 49min 

Illinois’ retirees have to look out for each other.

In trying to unravel the situation with Central Management Services and HMS, the company they hired to cleanse the TRIP rolls of alleged dead beats, I have come to believe this: We have to look out for each other. I have talked to many attorneys about legal options. They have varied opinions. That’s why I love lawyers. Neither the lawyers no I believe that deadbeats ought to be allowed to claim de

by Fred Klonsky / 2min 

CMS is paying nearly $700,000 for HMS to “cleanse the state’s insurance rolls.”

While I have a FOIA request to get hold of the contracts between Central Management Services and HMS, The Pentagraph is reporting that CMS is paying nearly $700,000 for cleansing the insurance roles. HMS promises clients that they can reduce those on their roles by four to eight percent. In an attempt to cleanse the state’s insurance roles, the Illinois Department of Central Management Services si

1 by Fred Klonsky / 21min 

Guzzardi leads in the race against incumbent Democratic Machine pension-bomber.

It is early and the candidates haven’t even officially filed yet. But when the daughter of Machine Boss and Cook County Assessor Joe Berrios voted with Speaker Mike Madigan for the public employee pension-busting Senate Bill 1 it angered many public employees who live in the House district on Chicago’s northside. The Ward Room: The 2012 race for Illinois 39th District was one of the tightest con

2 by Fred Klonsky / 11min 

10-3-13 Fred Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher who is just looking at the data.

Fred Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher who is just looking at the data.: What is the purpose of the state auditing every Illinois retired teacher on TRIP?  FOIA I filed for all CMS and HMS contracts. What is the purpose of the data dredging audit that Central Management Services (CMS) has hired HMS to do? I posted about this yesterday. My post came after the letter HMS sen

by mike simpson / 10h 

10-4-13 Ed Notes Online

Ed Notes Online:

Shael in the Eye of the Storm in Debate with Parents on Testing

In many ways this was the most remarkable part of Monday night's CEC 15 High Stakes Testing event -- a real debate between a chief Tweedie (Gotham lists him as one of 5 potential Chancellor candidates) and parents and teachers. (You can see MORE's Lisa North and Michelle Hamilton making comments. You won't see anyone from Unity or New Action.) But I will give Shael credit for being the only Tweedi

1 by ed notes online / 3h 

Co-Location Madness: PS 196, MS 582 Petition to Stop 3rd School Co-location

Why would the DOE put a 2nd middle school in the same building where one already exists in addition to an elementary school?Another act of madness by the exiting madmen and women at Tweed.PS 196 is in District 14 on Bushwick Ave. just a few blocks north of the school I taught at for 27 years. I know Rob and many teachers at the school since I was the district tech liason there from 1998-2002 when

2 by ed notes online / 3h mark as read  //  save

Rockaway Theatre Company Weekend Update: Last days to see Boeing, Boeing

NOTE: RTC has sent out a notice that due to the slimebags in Congress Gateway National Park, where the theater is located, is shut down. So amongst all the other stuff the incredible work these people put into the show is in jeopardy this weekend. Luckily they performed the last 2 weekends and I taped the performance last Sat night. It is up on the web in a private space for the RTC (can't make it

1 by ed notes online / 3h 

10-3-13 Ed Notes Online

Ed Notes Online: Shame on "Journalists" Supporting E4E Closed Meeting Where All Had to Sign "The Pledge"Panelists included journalists Ben Max (Decide NYC), Lindsey Christ (NY1), Sarah Garland (Hechinger Report) and Sarah Darville (GothamSchools). What does this say about these journalists? Teachers who do not agree with the E4E position are banned. We know that E4E supports ev

by mike simpson / 10h 

FOUR DAYS until PUBLIC ENEMY is ON-SALE! | Bill Ayers

FOUR DAYS until PUBLIC ENEMY is ON-SALE! | Bill Ayers:

FOUR DAYS until PUBLIC ENEMY is ON-SALE!

Apart from being a committed activist, engaging thinker, brilliant parent, Bill Ayers is a great storyteller.~~Aleksander Hemon, author ofNowhere Man; The Lazarus Project.
On October 8—not the day before and not the day after—order 1, 2, 3, or more copies of Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissidentfrom your local independent book store or your favorite on-line source.
Several Tea Party brothers have written to tell me they will take the book to the Annual Rush Limbaugh Book Burning Party—extra copies are in order! Others have vowed to disrupt my readings; please come!
Mostly, order a book (or two) on OCTOBER 8! 

10-4-13 Perdido Street School

Perdido Street School:

@#$% Education Reformers Say

Chaz has some great quotes from the likes of the Mayor of Money, Joel Klein, Dennis Walcott, Cathie Black, Bill Gates, et al.I added one additional education reform figure/enabler and his quote in the comments:"Sure, NYSED Commissioner John King makes a great independent arbitrator for the APPR teacher evaluation negotiations..." -- Michael Mulgrew.Go on over to Chaz's and add your own f

by reality-based edu... / 3min 

Bill De Blasio Has Private Meeting With Rupert Murdoch And Mort Zuckerman

Danger! Danger!Democratic mayoral nominee Bill de Blasio attended a private meeting with a number of leading New York City business figures yesterday.Among them were Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of both News Corp. and its sister corporation, 21st Century Fox (who has taken a particular interest in trying to reshape public education); Robert Thomson, the chief executive of News Corp.; and Mortimer

by reality-based edu... / 29min 

Danielson'd

Those of you who have already had an observation under the new Danielson rubric, I am interested in your experiences.Was this a formal or informal observation?Did you use a suggested lesson plan format?What was the pre-observation conference like?What was the lesson observation like?Did you allow it to be filmed?What feedback did you get from the principal or assistant principal?How were you rated

by reality-based edu... / 24min 

De Blasio Calls Himself A "Fiscal Conservative"

Turns out that Bill de Blasio the "Marxist" is also Bill de Blasio the "fiscal conservative" - at least that's what he told a group of business leaders today:De Blasio's ascension has created a sense of nervousness within some corners of the city's business community, which prospered during Mayor Michael Bloomberg's 12-year reign and is fearful of more liberal policies emanatin

by reality-based edu... / 26min 

Jealous Andy Cuomo

Anyone else wondering if @NYGovCuomo is getting jealous of @deBlasioNYC's poll numbers?— David W. Chen (@davidwchen) October 4, 2013We'll know soone enough.I suspect that Cuomo's tax cut commission headed by the man who knocked off his father as governor is the first sling aimed at de Blasio.Hard to see how Cuomo runs as a tax cutting governor next year but allows de Blasio to raise taxes on wealt

by reality-based edu... / 39min 

Charter Schools Cheaper Than Public Schools Because They Pay Little In Salary And Pension Costs

The charter school-touting NY Post runs a story on a report showing charter schools cost less per pupil than traditional public schools because they have lower salary and pension costs.This is supposed to spur Bill de Blasio to begin to support charters, I suppose, but if you dig down deep into the story, you see the connection between de Blasio's Tale of Two Cities campaign theme and charter scho

by reality-based edu... / 54min 

Real Estate Brokers Are Sad Mayor Bloomberg Is Leaving Office

Just as the Wall Street criminals are sad Mayor Bloomberg is leaving office, the real estate criminals are sad too: Mayor Bloomberg would be crazy to try to run for a fourth term — but real estate brokers say it’s crazy to want anyone else in City Hall. “I’m depressed at the thought that someone else will be mayor,” says Shaun Osher, president of real estate brokerage CORE. “I wish we could change

by reality-based edu... / 46min 

The Charter School Question In The NY Times/Siena Poll

The NY Times is hawking a Siena poll today that shows Bill de Blaiso with a 50 percentage point lead over Joe Lhota, but says the poll shows notes of caution for de Blasio because some of his signature policy positions are in opposition to what a majority of New Yorkers feel about things.One of those policy positions is on charter schools.The Times asks "Do you support or oppose the creation

by reality-based edu... / 1h 

BREAKING NEWS: Two More Names On De Blasio's Short List For Chancellor Revealed

Gotham Schools and the Post ran speculation pieces about who Bill de Blasio might pick to be the next NYCDOE schools chancellor.Both pieces gave proponents of various candidates the opportunity to shill for them and try and promote their "perfect candidate" for the position.The Gotham Schools piece touted former Baltimore schools chief Andres Alonso, president of New Visions for Public S

by reality-based edu... / 3h 

10-3-13 Perdido Street School

Perdido Street School: More Andrew Cuomo Corruption News - Moreland Commission EditionCuomo said the Moreland Commission could look at anybody's campaign fundraising - including his own.But he's hiding something here: Gov. Cuomo’s anti-corruption commission killed a subpoena to the Cuomo-controlled state Democratic party, the Daily News has learned. The subpoena was to seek information on the part

by mike simpson / 10h

UPDATE: The failures of for-profit K-12 schools

The failures of for-profit K-12 schools:

The failures of for-profit K-12 schools

By Valerie Strauss, Published: October 4 at 5:00 amE-mail the writer

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Money and more money.
(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Here’s a smart look at the spotty record of for-profit schools, by Larry Cuban, a high school social studies teacher for 14 years, a district superintendent (seven years in Arlington, VA), and professor emeritus of education at Stanford University, where he has taught for more than 20 years. His latest book is “Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice: Change without Reform in American Education.” This post appeared on his School Reform and Classroom Practice blog.

By Larry Cuban

For all of the three-decade hype about how business practices applied to K-12 schools will make them more efficient and high performing, a short hop and skip through the past half-century of for-profit companies failing in the education market might illustrate how applying market-driven practices to improve schools and make money  at the same time is hard to do for even the shrewdest of entrepreneurs.

In 1969, Behavioral Research Laboratory, contracted with the largely black Gary (IN) district to raise test scores in reading and math in the Banneker elementary school.

Good student Laela Gray held back over 1 point on test

The story of an 8-year-old girl in Orlando offers a perfect illustration of what “high stakes” standardized testing means. Bay News 9 reported that Laela Gray was held back in third grade this fall — despite a fine report card … Continue reading →    

1 by Valerie Strauss / 28min 

The civics test native Americans flunked — but immigrants passed

By Valerie Strauss, Published: October 4 at 8:30 amE-mail the writer

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The failure of Congress to accomplish the basic task of funding the federal government — thus forcing it to close down this week — provides us with a new opportunity to look at the miserable state of civics literacy in the country.

A study undertaken by the Center for the Study of the American Dream at Xavier University  in Cincinnati, Ohio, is instructive. Last year the center took the basic civic literacy test (see some questions below) that immigrants must pass in order to become American citizens and gave it to native Americans.

In 2010, 97.5 percent of immigrants taking the test passed,  according to this report by the center on their study. One in three native Americans failed, based on a standard of getting six out of 10 questions correctly. If the pass rate had been 7 out of 10, a full half 

Case study: The false promise of value-added teacher assessment

Value-added assessment is all the rage in school reform these days. It involves the use of complicated formulas that plug in student standardized test scores to try to determine how much “value” a teacher has added to that result. Assessment experts … Continue reading →    

3 by Valerie Strauss / 3h 

Is The Common Core 2013 the "new math" of 1963?

The Straight Dope: What exactly was the "new math"?:

What exactly was the "new math"?

Dear Straight Dope:

I'm old enough to have heard of the "new math" but as far as I can tell that was what I was taught in school. I have asked people older than myself what exactly the "old math" was. They were definitely sure I must have been exposed to the newfangled stuff, but seemed puzzled when I asked them what the differences were. Personally, I really couldn't find any math that I was taught in high school or college that didn't have solid foundations before this century.

— Matt de Vries

In the fifteenth century, when German parents wanted their kids to learn addition and subtraction, they sent them to local universities. To get them to learn multiplication and division, however, they needed to send their kids to Italy for graduate school. The new math that arrived in Europe soon after, which transformed CCLXIV x MDCCCIV into a problem that we can teach to sixth graders, was truly revolutionary. The new math of the sixties was, well, like many other movements of the sixties, disruptive, despised, and moderately beneficial, and is now still around, but incognito.

After Sputnik was launched, Americans felt the schools were in crisis. The National Science Foundation (NSF), created in 1950 to promote basic scientific research, was expanded in 1957 and began to examine and promote change in secondary school education in math, biology, chemistry, and social sciences. The changes in the curricula and texts had a filter-down effect on the primary schools as well. The main thrust of these changes was a switch from teacher "telling" and student recitation to "inquiry" and "discovery," with the hope that students would be more likely to retain information they found out themselves than what was just told to them in lecture form and memorized. In the hard sciences, and to a lesser extent the social sciences, this was described as "hands-on learning." It's a teaching technique still held in high regard by educators and parents today.

In the more abstract mathematics, however, the 'hands-on' connotation was disturbing to teachers and parents who had learned the addition facts and multiplication tables by rote. One focus of the new math was set theory, where students were encouraged to think of numbers in a new, hopefully more concrete way. Students would take a set of four items, and add it to another set of five. Yes, the result was still nine, but the emphasis was on the concept of addition, rather than the answer per se. Using this technique, students were hoped to discover that the sets would yield the same number regardless of their order (the commutative property), and that taking one original set from the combined set would yield the other original set, thereby discovering subtraction, the inverse of addition. Other aspects of the new math including using number bases other than base-10 and introducing more abstract number theory concepts such as prime numbers earlier in the students' careers. As you say, none of these concepts were newly discovered in the 20th century; the shift was purely in teaching technique, not in basic concepts.

Teachers were quite resistant to this, noting that instruction of the class as a whole was less uniform, and that the possibility of some students falling too far behind was greatly increased. Parents were more vocal in their opposition, claiming that they couldn't help their third-graders with their homework anymore, and pointed to a noticeable decline in the more concrete skills such as computation. New math was derided in the public forum, such as in Tom Lehrer's song New Math: "It's so simple / So very simple, / That only a child can do it!" By 1976, only 9% of school districts were using the NSF-proscribed curriculum in their math programs. Morris Kline, in Why Johnny Can't Add: The Failure of the New Math, wrote that "with near perfect regularity, [teachers] applaud the return to tradition content [and] instructional methods, and higher standards of student performance."

The textbooks were only dominated by the new math system for about 10 years. However, elements such as set theory and base-n computation are still retained to this day, albeit with less emphasis and as a much smaller portion of the overall curriculum. Don't even get me started on the so-called "New New Math", which is a debate that remains to be answered in the classrooms, school board and PTA meetings, and maybe the courts, and promises to become a hot-button topic in the next couple of years. Stay tuned.