4LAKids - some of the news that doesn't fit 4-28-14

4LAKids - some of the news that doesn't fit:

CULTURE+CREATIVITY CANDIDATE FORUM: April 30th

  April 28, 2014 This Wednesday, the Arts Community is coming to LACMA for a Supervisor Candidate Forum on Culture & Creativity at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Bing Theatre. Can I count on you to be there? The next County Supervisor for the 3rd District will replace Zev Yaroslavsky, who, among other accomplishments, has been a huge advocate for the arts, including the LA County

by smf / 11min hide  //  save

School Cancels Annual Kindergarten Show In Order To Better Prepare Kids For College+Career

By Beth Greenfield,  Yahoo Shine Staff | Team Mom |  http://yhoo.it/1nA0fiz Photo courtesy of Harley Avenue School. Aprill 28, 2013  ::  A New York public school has decided to nix an annual year-end kindergarten show in favor of more college-prep time for its youngest students, sounding alarm bells for those concerned about the toughening standards of early education. “These are

1 by smf / 58min 

Who’s who in Education: EDUCATION LEADERSHIP CHANGES ON CAPITOL HILL

From ASCD (formerly the Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development) NewsBrief |  http://bit.ly/1iyv1FF APRIL 28, 2014  ::  The U.S. Senate and House education committees are undergoing significant changes in their membership that could greatly influence their priorities and decision-making, ultimately affecting the day-to-day lives of educators. Senate Education Chairman Tom

by smf / 1h 

PARENTS MUST GIVE OK BEFORE LAUSD iPADS SENT HOME WITH STUDENTS

By Howard Blume, LA Times | http://lat.ms/1lpQNvK Students at Roosevelt High in Boyle Heights use iPads provided by the school district. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times / September 17, 2013) April 25, 2014, 4:55 p.m.  ::  The Los Angeles Unified School District will seek the approval of parents before sending iPads home with students, under an updated policy. "That is a wonderful

by smf / 1h 

Lausd And City Of Los Angeles Team Up To Help Needy Families

By Rick Orlov, Los Angeles Daily News | http://bit.ly/QQV0xx 4/25/14, 1:08 PM PDT  ::  A pilot program in which the city would join with the Los Angeles Unified School District to coordinate delivery of services to the parents of students was approved Friday by the Los Angeles City Council. This summer, four schools in the district will implement the program, called Optimizing Access to Service

by smf / 1min 

Report: CALIFORNIA KEY TO RAISING NATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL GRAD RATE + CDE Announces 80.2% Grad Rate

By Lisa Leff, The Associated Press from the San Bernardino County Sun | http://bit.ly/1fJZdZM 4/27/14, 12:01 PM PDT  ::  SAN FRANCISCO >> The high school graduation rate in the United States will not increase as quickly as experts think it can without more improvement in California, which educates one-fifth of the nation’s low-income school children and more Hispanic students than any other

by smf / 27min 

Governor’S Proposed Rainy-Day Fund Reserve Would Rarely Be Filled

By John Fensterwald | EdSource Today http://bit.ly/S26krw April 27th, 2014  ::   To even out the boom-and-bust revenue cycles that can particularly destabilize education funding, Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing a separate reserve for K-12 schools and community colleges in his revised plan for a rainy day fund. But that lock box for education would gather dust most years because of the tight

by smf / 21min hide  //  save

L.A. TIMES ENDORSES GEORGE McKENNA FOR L.A. SCHOOL BOARD

ELECTIONS 2014: In the race to replace the late Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte in District 1, he stands out as the kind of person the district needs right now. by Times Editorial Board | http://lat.ms/1fpGrfn George McKenna (Handout / April 28, 2014) April 28, 2014  ::  The seven candidates for the District 1 seat on the Los Angeles Unified School Board include several teachers, a

by smf / 47min 

 PPIC Survey: CALIFORNIANS SUPPORT HISTORIC CHANGES IN SCHOOL FUNDING, CURRICULUM

By Teresa Watanabe, LA Times | http://lat.ms/PLgzhU Californians support new national learning standards known as Common Core, a new survey found. In Santiago Elementary School in Santa Ana, teachers are already using the new standards to emphasize critical thinking and prepare students for more complex tests. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times / April23, 2014) April 23, 2014, 9:00 p.m.  ::  In

by smf / 5min 

4LAKids - some of the news that doesn't fit 4-27-14

4LAKids - some of the news that doesn't fit: Photo: OBAMA & THE MARSHMALLOW GUNphoto from Getty Images by Sal Loeb I wonder we could get a grant from the National Rifle Association …or the Stay Puft Marshmallow Foundation – to mount one of these puppies in the balcony of the Beaudry Boardroom?by smf / 7min 4LAKids - some of the news that doesn't fit 4-26-144LAKids - some of the news that doesn

by mike simpson / 20h 

Duncan's Trip Down the Waiver Rabbit Hole :: Frederick M. Hess

Duncan's Trip Down the Waiver Rabbit Hole :: Frederick M. Hess:

Duncan's Trip Down the Waiver Rabbit Hole

by Frederick M. Hess  •  Apr 28, 2014 at 11:09 am
Cross-posted from Education Week

On Thursday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan yanked Washington State's NCLB waiver, forcing the state to again operate under provisions of a law that Duncan has declared "broken." I criticized the move, prompting several readers to ask whether I was being unfair and what I would have Duncan do instead. Duncan apologists cheered his decision as simply a case of him enforcing the law, while explaining that he's only acting because Congress won't, promoting good reforms, got the approval of state education leaders, and had to do something about misbehaving states.

I find these claims laughable. Indeed, they reflect a profound lack of respect for, or understanding of, our system of government. First, living in a nation of laws means we don't bypass legislatures even if they fail to act. Duncan could have worked with Congress. Instead, his waiver band-aids have made action more difficult. Second, "good" reforms can be much less so when mandated on recalcitrant states, especially absent legislative support. Third, state leaders are okay with this largely because they know Duncan's bureaucrats can make their lives harder or easier, depending on whether they play ball. Fourth, laws provide measures for dealing with bad actors. Duncan's problem here is a product of him wanting states to do something that he has no standing to make them do. Duncan's waiver strategy has taken us down an ill-advised, lawless rabbit hole. (Note: This is not about conspiracy theories or questioning Duncan's good intentions. I'm happy to stipulate that Duncan means well.)

No law requires Washington State to do what Duncan demanded. There is a relevant law here--the No Child Left Behind Act, which has the virtue of actually being a law. It was enacted by Congress, signed by President Bush--the whole deal. A Secretary of Education invested in enforcing the law could have, you know, enforced it.

Now, NCLB is a troubled law, for reasons that Checker Finn and I wrote about a decade ago. So I'm all for revamping it. And Duncan could have tried. He could have tried in 2009 and 2010, when the Democrats had hefty majorities in the House and Senate. He didn't. Partly because he and his team were having so much fun with make-it-up-as-you-go projects like Race to the Top and School Improvement Grants, cases where a Democratic Congress had given him carte blanche to do pretty much whatever he felt like. Duncan clearly found that more engaging than the dreary business of negotiating with Congress.

Heck, the administration took more than a year to even offer its sketchy "ESEA blueprint" and those big Democratic majorities never moved a bill out of committee. In 2011, 2012, or 2013, Duncan could have worked to pass a bipartisan bill. In fact, last summer, the House passed an ESEA reauthorization (the Student Success Act) that I think is pretty terrific.

Instead, Duncan opted to gut NCLB by waiving key parts of the law for states that promised to do stuff he Duncan's Trip Down the Waiver Rabbit Hole :: Frederick M. Hess:

Sacramento City Unified's Withdrawal from the CORE Waiver is No Big Loss | The Sacramento Coalition to Save Public Education

Sacramento City Unified's Withdrawal from the CORE Waiver is No Big Loss | The Sacramento Coalition to Save Public Education: Sacramento City Unified's Withdrawal from the CORE Waiver is No Big Losspublished by Kate_Lenox on Mon, 04/21/2014 - 2:32pm       Jonathon Raymond left Sacramento last December for personal reasons.  It must gall him that since his departure, Sacramento City Unified School

by mike simpson / 1h 

NYC Public School Parents: Sign our petition to Commissioner King and the Board of Regents on the need to protect student privacy!

NYC Public School Parents: Sign our petition to Commissioner King and the Board of Regents on the need to protect student privacy!:

Sign our petition to Commissioner King and the Board of Regents on the need to protect student privacy!

Read the petition below and sign it here.

---------

To Commissioner King and the Board of Regents:

For more than two years, since the state entered into a data-sharing agreement with inBloom, you have refused to notify the public, hold hearings, or even answer parents’ questions about your plans to disclose the personal information of their children to this corporation.  Your lack of respect for student privacy and parental concerns was also made clear by the fact New York was the last state among nine to sever its relationship to inBloom and the ONLY one in which a law had to be passed to do this.

Now that inBloom is closing its doors and the new state law contains a range of new privacy protections, including a privacy officer who will develop a parent bill of rights, we urge you to demonstrate a new transparency and accountability by taking the following steps:

1-    Minimize the state’s collection and sharing of personal student data and maximize the opportunities for parental notification and consent;

2-    Appoint an independent privacy advocate as your privacy officer, rather than someone from  inside the NYS Education Department or from the corporate world;

3-    Hold public hearings and elicit comments and suggestions from parents and other stakeholders as to the parent bill of rights and the regulations that will enact the new law, while also encouraging the public to submit their comments online and posting them;

4-    Appoint an advisory board of parents, advocates, educators, administrators and privacy experts to guide your work going forward and to provide independent oversight for the state’s P20 “cradle to the grave” student tracking system, that is designed to collect and link personal data on children from many state agencies;

5-  Immediately post any and all contracts in which the State is providing personal student data  to vendors and other third parties– including your agreement with the PARCC consortium that is developing the new tests that will replace the state exams.

These agreements should delineate exactly which data elements are being disclosed to third parties, what restrictions have been placed on their use,  whether the third parties are barred from redisclosing the data without parental consent, what security and encryption protections are being used, and when the data will be destroyed.

If you take the steps outlined above,  it will help demonstrate a new acknowledgement on your part that parents have a legitimate interest in the privacy and security of their children, which must be respected rather than ignored.

Sincerely yours,
Sign here

4-28-13 Curmudgucation

CURMUDGUCATION:

Branding Education

What if we were serious about treating education like a business?I recently finished an advance copy of What Great Brands Do by Denise Lee Yohn. It is a book that has absolutely nothing to do with education. Instead, Yohn looks at how brands from Kodak to Nike fail or succeed, and how building a brand leads to a higher level of real success. Yohn has been around through several decades of corporat

1 by Peter Greene / 58min 

The Gates Wants Us To Take a Stand

Over at Inside Higher Ed, Dan Greenstein and Vicki Phillips are making yet another pitch for the Core on behalf of the Gates Foundation (Greenstein is director of postsecondary success and Pillips is director of education).  I would love to tell you that they have shiny new talking points to offer, but no-- it's the same old fluffernuttery. Here's the breakdown.They begin with a mystery-- why, the

by Peter Greene / 6min 

4-27-13 Curmudgucation Week

CURMUDGUCATION: Brookings Research Reveals Teachers Are the ProblemBrookings will release a new book this week with the charming title Teachers versus the Public: What Americans Think about Schools and How To Fix Them.And yes-- that title tells us where we're going right off the bat-- teachers really are the problem. In fact, teachers aren't just the opposition-- teachers aren't even American. Per

by mike simpson / 4min 

Taking an assembly-line management technique to the classroom: root cause data analysis | Education By The Numbers

Taking an assembly-line management technique to the classroom: root cause data analysis | Education By The Numbers:

Taking an assembly-line management technique to the classroom: root cause data analysis

Back in the late 1950s the Japanese auto maker Toyota developed a novel approach for fixing problems on its production line. Rather than making a bandaid repair on a visible symptom, the idea was to ask a series of five “why” questions to get at the underlying root problem and fix that so that the problem doesn’t keep recurring. Here’s an example I found on another website.

Problem: The computer monitor is not working.

Why? The monitor’s light signal is not on.

Why? The monitor’s power cord is not functioning.

Why? The cord is damaged.

Why? It was placed under a heavy load.

Why? I didn’t place the cords properly when the monitor was plugged in, which caused damage.

The answer to the last why is the root cause of the initial problem of the computer monitor not working.

Critics of this approach pointed out that the answers to each why question were based on gut hunches and guesses. Different employees could ask a different series of why questions leading to completely different root cause determinations. So manufacturers started using statistical approaches to determining the answers to why questions. One of the more famous ones is embedded in a management technique called Six Sigma, developed by Motorola in the 1980s. This rigorous data analysis approach to fixing problems reduced manufacturing defects to nearly zero. 

Over time root cause analyses became so popular that other industries, from retail to health care, began adapting and adopting it in their workplaces.

Now educators are experimenting with applying this kind of data analysis to fixing problems in the classroom. This coming wednesday, April 30th, the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences  is offering a webinar on how to apply root cause analysis to education. Theagenda indicates that Roni Silverstein, Principal of Fallsmead Elementary School in Montgomery County, Maryland is already using it in his school. A second webinar is scheduled for November 5, 2014.

I’d be curious to learn what areas of education would most benefit from this kind of assembly-line data analysis. I suspect that if you started with the big problems, such as, student achievement is too low that five why questions aren’t going to get you to an root cause answer that you can act upon. And I worry that each student is so different that it’s hard to come up with a math teaching fix that will apply equally well to the students who are two-years behind grade level as to the ones who have already mastered the material and are bored. Even a simpler problem, such as too few students are submitting homework, might have a multitude of answers to the question why.

New York City’s chance to reinvent better middle schools

The City of New York is offering an unprecedented opportunity that could benefit as many as 50,000 families in the five boroughs.  The de Blasio administration has made $131 million available to principals of 371 middle schools to offer free, high-quality, daily after-school programs by partnering with youth-serving community organizations, such as settlement houses. This would more than double th

by Christopher Carus... / 5min

Standards Development Work Group Not as Advertised | Missouri Education Watchdog

Standards Development Work Group Not as Advertised | Missouri Education Watchdog:

Standards Development Work Group Not as Advertised

Members of the Missouri Coalition Against Common Core have been going around the state educating the public on Common Core because it is hard to fight against that which you don’t understand. In each presentation, we make a point of talking about the individuals who constituted the two work groups of CCSSI. The glossy public image, artfully presented by the NGA and CCSSO early on was a group of happy teachers, parents and education professionals (you fill in the definition of those folks) who got together and considered “best practices” which everyone assumed had something to do with helping kids learn the things they really needed to know. The actual picture has been very hard to reveal and, it turns out, very different from this education mega team initially presented to the public.

Mercedes Schneider wrote an excellent post summarizing what really happened and who ended up being on these work groups. Thought it is long, I encourage you to read it to fully understand the Standards Development groups. She provides thorough research details.

Though CCSSI may have started out with the best of intentions, they were racing an artificially created clock to get the work done on time and a host of corners were cut.

For instance, the initial July 2009 press release by the National Governors Association (NGA), said that the ELA and Math work groups were made up primarily of folks from the standards-writing nonprofit (Achieve) and two testing companies (ACT and College Board). They had great intentions to expand that group later in the year to include “additional experts to develop the standards for grades K-12 in English language arts and mathematics. Additionally, CCSSO and the NGA Center have selected an independent facilitator and an independent writer as well as resource advisors to support each content area work group throughout the standards development process.”

But the plan to have all of the work done by December of that year, meant that there was little time to add these other experts and truly consider their work. Making things worse was the fact that Standards Development Work Group Not as Advertised | Missouri Education Watchdog:

4-28-14 Fred Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher

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

I’ll be going to the NEA Representative Assembly as a Retired Delegate from Illinois.

Well, I certainly didn’t get elected in a state-wide election for NEA RA retired delegate because of my good looks. I ran as a critic of current union policies and practices. And I ran as a die-hard supporter of teacher unions and the labor movement. I ran as a proponent of greater union democracy. I ran as an advocate and activist for our pensions. I ran a an opponent of corporate school reform.

by Fred Klonsky / 4min 

NEA staff joins cafeteria workers’ picket line at DC NEA headquarters.

- report/photo by Chris Garlock “If I had a little bit more money I could pay the bills and save some for my boys,” said Jessica Reyes. “I want them to go to college and not have to work a job like mine.” Reyes works in the cafeteria at the National Education Association’s headquarters on 16th Street, which is operated by Culinary Seasons. Culinary was the target of a noontime picket yesterday by

by Fred Klonsky / 24min hide  //  save

We’re closing your school, but dress appropriately.

Today I received this from a CPS teacher: “With everything going on in CPS, THIS is the first interoffice memo I’ve been forwarded directly from the CEO in all my years teaching. There are so many reasons why teachers might not dress in her definition of “professional attire,” from crawling on the floor with pre-schoolers to trying to be more approachable and less intimidating during parent confer

by Fred Klonsky / 36min 

Online testing and the babel generator.

Photo: M. Scott Brauer for The Chronicle. Les Perelman (left), with the help of students at MIT and Harvard, created the Babel Generator, a software program that generates meaningless essays to test the mettle of machine graders. Les Perelman is an old high school chum and presently retired as director of graduate writing at MIT. He is a long-time critic of the use and misuse of standardized test

by Fred Klonsky / 17min 

Ten minute drawing. Whites only.

by Fred Klonsky / 5min hide  //  save

Journalism.

I admit that I am flexible about this journalism thing. I’m not a journalist. I’m a retired K-5 art teacher who writes a blog. And I am an activist around a bunch of issues. That doesn’t mean I don’t try to be honest and accurate. But unlike most of who make questionable claims to being journalists – I don’t make such a claim Last year, the first in two decades that I wasn’t elected as a delegate

by Fred Klonsky / 14min 

4-27-14 Fred Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher

Fred Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher who is just looking at the data.: Sunday reads.  The Clipper’s Donald Sterling joins with Supreme Court majority. He’s caught on TMZ audio tape saying, “Don’t let Black students into state universities. No more of that f—– affirmative action.” Gordon Lafer on Miwaukee’s Rocketship Charter scam. Koch brothers and others influence judge

by mike simpson / 23h