Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: A Sinking ship

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: A Sinking ship:

A Sinking ship

I watched an old film, "The Shipping News" the other night. I liked it, mainly because it's set on the wild, stormym Newfoundland coast and starsKevin Spacey, one of my favorites. One scene that grabbed me, had newsman Quoyle, played by Spacey, an inexperienced sailor out in an unworthy boat in rough waters, bailing furiously while the sea overtakes and sinks his sorry craft... (I'll stop here, in case you haven't see it).

That image stays with me as I'm following (and telling) the story of the equally unworthy craft, the leaky Rahm Emanuel regime in the midst of another stormy scandal. Only Rahm (a terrible actor) is in the sinking boat with a crew of thieves and scalawags. Among them, his indicted schools chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett, police Supt. Garry McCarthy and State's Atty. Anita Alvarez. As the story unfolds, Rahm is faced with the choice of throwing some of the dead weight overboard or going down with the ship.

But no matter how hard he bails, it's the rotting, fabric of the regime that's sinking him. And each of his hand-picked crew that gets tossed, only reveals the depths of Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: A Sinking ship:

Where teachers earn the most - Business Insider

Where teachers earn the most - Business Insider:

Here's what teachers earn around the world

If you're a teacher in Luxembourg, you're in luck.

Using data from a recent OECD report, the World Economic Forum put together a chartshowing in which 10 countries teachers with 10 years of experience who work in public institutions at the lower secondary level earn the most.

Luxembourg was No. 1 on the list. There, teachers with the aforementioned qualifications can earn a salary of $99,900 — or just shy of six figures.

That salary trumps that of the second-place country, Germany, where teachers earn around $65,843. Meanwhile, the United States came in sixth place at $53,758.

Notably, seven out of the 10 countries on the list are in Europe. The other three are the US, Australia, and Canada.

World Economic Forum

Interestingly, a working paper by Markus Nagler, Marc Piopiunik, and Martin R. West found that the quality of teachers goes up during recessions in the US.

The key factor here is that during recessions a teacher's salary is more attractive relative to the lower (expected) earnings in other professions. Therefore, people who might not otherwise have gone into teaching end up becoming teachers because they expect to earn more in that job than in others.

Given those findings, the authors noted that: "Intrinsic motivation seems to be of second-order importance relative to the effects of increasing teacher pay on selection when hiring more effective teachers."

And that suggests that if teachers were paid more relative to other professions, perhaps the overall quality of teachers would be improved as more capable people would choose to teach.Where teachers earn the most - Business Insider:

Why many high-stakes testing foes see ‘modest’ progress in No Child Left Behind rewrite - The Washington Post

Why many high-stakes testing foes see ‘modest’ progress in No Child Left Behind rewrite - The Washington Post:

Why many high-stakes testing foes see ‘modest’ progress in No Child Left Behind rewrite

Now that U.S. lawmakers have unveiled final draft legislation rewriting the No Child Left Behind education law and are expected to vote on it soon, the question is how much will really change for public schools if it becomes law. The bill, titled the Every Student Succeeds Act, calls for a substantial shift of authority over education policy from the federal Education Department to states and districts, and explicitly limits the role the U.S. education secretary can play in local education decisions. As my colleague Emma Brown wrote here, it “attempts to thread the needle between conservatives who want to shrink the federal government’s footprint in education and civil rights advocates who worry that some states, left to their own devices, will obfuscate or ignore the poor performance of schools serving low-income and minority students.”

Here is an analysis of how the legislation, should it become the new education law of the land, will change testing policy. It was written by Monty Neill, executive director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, known as  FairTest, a nonprofit organization that works to end the misuses of standardized testing and to ensure that evaluation of students, educators and schools is  valid and educationally sound. Neill comes down on the side of those who think the new legislation is an improvement over the old law, but that more work would need to be done to create a more sensible accountability system for public schools.

By Monty Neill

Years overdue, Congress looks like it is about to vote on replacing the test-and-punish mandates of No Child Left Behind with a comprehensive overhaul of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The rewrite will also end the even more punitive requirements of NCLB waivers granted by the U.S. Department of Education.

From an assessment reform perspective, FairTest is convinced that the “Every Student Succeeds Act” (ESSA) now before the House and Senate, though far from perfect, improves on current testing policy. The bill significantly reduces federal accountability mandates and opens the door for states to overhaul their own assessment systems.

Failure to pass this bill in 2015 means NCLB and waivers will continue to wreak havoc for at least another several years.

The primary improvement would be in “accountability.” The unrealistic “Adequate Yearly Progress” annual test score gain requirement would be gone, as would be all the federally mandated punitive sanctions imposed on schools and teachers. States will be free to end much of the damage to educational quality and equity they built into their systems to comply with NCLB and waivers. Waivers to NCLB would end as of Aug. 1, 2016. (Other Why many high-stakes testing foes see ‘modest’ progress in No Child Left Behind rewrite - The Washington Post:

5 Things To Know About the Revised No Child Left Behind

5 Things To Know About the Revised No Child Left Behind:

5 Things To Know About the Revised No Child Left Behind

In the com­ing weeks, the House and Sen­ate will vote on a ma­jor over­haul of the fed­er­al edu­ca­tion law.

The fi­nal text of the Every Stu­dent Suc­ceeds Act, de­signed to re­place No Child Left Be­hind, was re­leased Monday. If a bi­par­tis­an co­ali­tion of law­makers has its way, it will be headed for the pres­id­ent’s desk be­fore the end of the year.

Next Amer­ica summed up a few high­lights of the full bill.

1. First, the ba­sics. If passed, the law would reau­thor­ize the na­tion’s Ele­ment­ary and Sec­ond­ary Edu­ca­tion Act for four years in­stead of the stand­ard five, which gives Con­gress the abil­ity to change it dur­ing the next ad­min­is­tra­tion. The move to this law would take place from 2016 to 2017, mean­ing par­tially un­der the Obama ad­min­is­tra­tion and par­tially un­der the next pres­id­ent. Dozens of pro­grams would be rolled in­to a single block grant and states have more flex­ib­il­ity with how they use funds.

2. Broadly, the bill marks a roll­back of fed­er­al power. Wash­ing­ton wouldn’t have a say in teach­er eval­u­ations, a big win for both Re­pub­lic­ans and teach­ers’ uni­ons, who have balked at the idea. While states would still be re­quired to test stu­dents’ math and read­ing abil­it­ies each year between the third and eighth grades and once in high school, ex­actly what they do with the res­ults would be up to them. And al­though states would still be re­quired to ad­min­is­ter tests to at least 95 per­cent of their stu­dents, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment would not be able to set con­sequences for schools that fall be­low that mark.

3. Des­pite the weak­en­ing of fed­er­al muscle, Demo­crats and civil-rights groups have some things to be ex­cited about. States have to track how sub­groups of stu­dents—in­clud­ing Eng­lish-lan­guage learners and poor stu­dents—are do­ing, without lump­ing them to­geth­er, and identi­fy schools where dif­fer­ent sub­groups struggle.

4. After a bit­ter fight over so-called ac­count­ab­il­ity meas­ures, the fi­nal draft would still re­quire states to file plans for in­ter­ven­ing in schools where the na­tion’s most vul­ner­able stu­dents are strug­gling (see No. 3). States would have to in­ter­vene in the bot­tom 5 per­cent of their schools, high schools with gradu­ation rates be­low 67 per­cent, and schools where sub­groups are strug­gling. They, however, will get to lay out how they plan to close achieve­ment gaps. And al­though states will have to in­clude stand­ard meas­ures like per­form­ance on state tests as well as their choice of at least one new meas­ure, such as “school cli­mate,” states get to pick how much weight to give the dif­fer­ent meas­ures.

5. Com­mon Core isn’t out, but it’s not in either. States would need to pick aca­dem­ic stand­ards, but Wash­ing­ton can’t de­term­ine what those stand­ards look like. In oth­er words, one state might choose Com­mon Core and an­oth­er might go for something dif­fer­ent. What would be more defin­it­ively “out” is ty­ing teach­er re­views to how stu­dents per­form on tests.

If you’re look­ing for more de­tails, Edu­ca­tion Week has a roundup of where the bill comes down on Title I port­ab­il­ity, preschool de­vel­op­ment grants and the po­ten­tial for law­suits, here (be­hind a pay­wall).

What’s next? Votes in the House and the Sen­ate, no amend­ments per­mit­ted. As un­likely as pas­sage has seemed for years, the fi­nal bill passed through con­fer­ence with only one vote against it, from Sen. Rand Paul—a pres­id­en­tial can­did­ate who last year said, “I don’t think you’d no­tice if the whole [Edu­ca­tion De­part­ment] was gone to­mor­row.” While the pro­pos­al surely will re­ceive cri­ti­cism from both the Right and Left, it has already picked up sup­port from both con­ser­vat­ives and lib­er­als.5 Things To Know About the Revised No Child Left Behind:

State treasurer asks charter schools to put finances online mydaytondailynews

State treasurer asks charter schools to put finances online | www.mydaytondailynews.com:

State treasurer asks charter schools to put finances online

COLUMBUS —

State Treasurer Josh Mandel is cajoling thousands of local governments, public universities, the Ohio pension systems and others to post their expenditures on his government transparency website, OhioCheckbook.com, but until recently he had omitted Ohio’s 395 charter schools – an entire wing of public education that costs taxpayers nearly $1 billion in state funding each year – from his call list.

Following an inquiry from the Dayton Daily News about why charters had not been approached, Mandel’s office sent letters to 374 community school operators inviting them to post their daily expenditures on OhioCheckbook.com at no cost to the schools. “I look forward to partnering with you to shine sunlight on spending and help showcase your school as a leader in government transparency,” Mandel’s form letter concludes.

Eighteen bricks-and-mortar charter schools — 4.8 percent of the total — committed to posting their spending data on OhioCheckbook.com, according to Mandel press secretary Chris Berry. He noted the online schools had been inadvertently left off the list but letters later went out to them.

“We don’t plan on sending (the letter) to the (charter school) management companies as the online checkbook is not intended for private sector business expenditures,” Berry said.

In Ohio, each charter school has a sponsor, or authorizer, which monitors compliance with laws and regulations. The sponsor may operate the school or hire a for-profit or non-profit management company to hire personnel, lease property, pay utilities and handle day-to-day operations. That means that even if the online and site charter schools join, Ohioans won’t be able to see details on large swaths of community school spending.

Donors with connections to charter schools have contributed more than $117,000 to Mandel’s state campaign account. The biggest chunk — $86,390 — came from Ann and David Brennan, who founded White Hat Management in 1998. The company is the largest for-profit charter school operator in the state.

In 1997, Ohio lawmakers authorized charter schools, which are taxpayer funded but operate independent of any school board. Nearly 20 years later, 120,000 of Ohio’s 1.7 million public school students attend 395 charter schools at a cost of almost $1 billion. Some 80,000 students attend site-based charter schools while 40,000 attend e-schools.

Ohio charter schools have been the focus on FBI investigations, state audits and media scrutiny over attendance scandals, test rigging and public corruption. On balance, charter schools academic performance is sub-par, with more than 60 percent of schools receiving a D or F, according to the Ohio Department of Education’s State treasurer asks charter schools to put finances online | www.mydaytondailynews.com:

Segregation still increased in Wake County plan | Duke Today

Mixed Results for Income-based K-12 Assignment | Duke Today:

Mixed Results for Income-based K-12 Assignment
Segregation still increased in Wake County plan, but not as much as in other counties

DURHAM, NC - When Wake County Public Schools switched from a school assignment policy based on race to one based on socioeconomic status, schools became slightly more segregated, according to new research from Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy.

However, segregation increased much more rapidly in four other large North Carolina school districts that simply dropped race-based strategies and did not attempt to pursue diversity in other ways. 

“While we found some decline in the degree of racial diversity associated with Wake County schools after adoption of the socioeconomic plan versus the prior race-based plan, there was significantly less diversity in the school districts that were not using either plan,” said William A. Darity Jr., Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy in the Sanford School.

In addition, Wake County math and reading scores rose slightly and the achievement gap between black and white students narrowed after the switch. In the four other N.C. districts, scores fell among black students after race-based school assignment stopped.

The research was published online in the journal Urban Education on Nov. 27. 

“The main message is, we may not want to give up on using diversity-based policies to achieve integration and address opportunity gaps and achievement gaps,” said lead author Monique McMillian. McMillian, an educational psychologist, is an associate professor at Morgan State University in Maryland and an affiliate of Duke University’s Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality. 

North Carolina school districts stopped using race-based assignment plans in the late 1990s after a series of court cases struck down the practice in various settings around the country. 

In 2000, Wake implemented a new assignment policy based on income and achievement, in which no school would consist of more than 40 percent students receiving free or reduced lunch, nor more than 25 percent of students performing below grade level. (In 2010, the Wake County school board voted to stop using an income-based policy. However, income remains a component — albeit a smaller component — of the current assignment policy.) 

McMillian saw the change as an opportunity to investigate how the different policies affect school integration and student achievement. 

She, Darity and their colleagues analyzed data from Wake and four other large N.C. school districts: Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Cumberland County, Guilford County and Winston-Mixed Results for Income-based K-12 Assignment | Duke Today:

Nation’s Report Card Doesn’t Discount Optimism | Articles | Noodle

Nation’s Report Card Doesn’t Discount Optimism | Articles | Noodle:

Nation’s Report Card Reveals Declining Math Scores, But Is There Room for Optimism?

This October, the National Center for Education Statistics released the Nation’s Report Card — and educators, administrators, and parents found the results more troubling than they’d expected.

For the first time since 1990, when the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) exams were initially administered biannually to fourth- and eighth-graders nationwide, the Nation’s Report Card revealed that scores in math and reading had declined. Specifically, on average, eighth-graders scored two points lower in both subjects than they had in 2013. Fourth-graders scored one point lower in math, while staying the same in reading.

No Gains, Some Declines

Such few points may not seem reason enough to be upset, but two factors are informing people’s concerns. First, overall growth in test scores has been consistently incremental since the early 1990s, usually creeping up a point or two, or staying stagnant. Second, the scores aren’t fantastic to start with; only 40 percent of fourth-graders and 33 percent of eighth-graders scored high enough in math to be considered proficient; 36 percent of fourth-graders and 34 percent of eighth-graders scored high enough to be considered proficient in reading.

This marks the first time the scores have actually decreased. Depending on how various factions feel about educational reforms enacted over the past two decades, including No Child Left Behindand Race to the Top (the latter a federal incentive to get states to adopt Common Core, since those standards are decided and overseen at the state level, though the federal government has been eager to embrace it), these are likely to draw blame. In turn, detractors are likely to argue in favor of eradicating or reconceiving of reforms, whereas supporters are likely to advocate for more time so that the initiatives may succeed.

Outgoing Secretary of Education Arne Duncan acknowledged the scores weren’t good, but attributed them to growing pains as states adjust to new Common Core standards.

“Big change never happens overnight,” said Duncan, as reported by the Washington Post. “I’m confident that over the next decade, if we stay committed to this change, we will see historic improvements.”

Sign that Reforms Aren’t Working

Duncan’s critics, though, aren’t buying it.

“Considering that the rationale for the Common Core State Standards initiative was low NAEP proficiency rates, it would appear that the solution of tough standards and tough tests is not the great path forward after all,” Carol Burris, a former New York principal and head of the Network for Public Education, a nonprofit dedicated to improving public schools, wrote in an editorial for the Post. “For those who say it is too early to use NAEP to judge the Common Core, I would remind them that in 2013, Education Secretary Arne Duncan used NAEP increases to do a victory dance about the states that had already implemented the Core at that time — and I never heard any reformer complain.”

Author and education historian Diane Ravitch, who was assistant education secretary under President George H.W. Bush and cofounder of the Network of Public Education, also pointed to No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, programs implemented by the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as culprits for declining student performance.

“The best single word to describe NAEP 2015 is stagnation,” Ravitch wrote on her blog. “Contrary to President George W. Bush’s law, many children have been left behind by the strategy of test-and-punish. Contrary to the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, the mindless reliance on standardized testing has not brought us closer to some mythical ‘Top.’”

As the dust has settled on the scores in the past month, though, it appears that legislators are agreeing with the critics, at least on NCLB and Race to the Top.

On November 19, members of the House and Senate came up with an agreement called the Every Student Succeeds Act, which amends NCLB by giving much of that program’s federal power back to the states. The act’s authors — Reps. John Kline, R-Minn., Bobby Scott, D-Va., and Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Patty Murray, D-Wash. — hope to bring it to the floor in both houses of Congress in December. Whether it will pass through both houses is uncertain, as is the question of whether President Obama will approve it.

There is at least one sign that the president will sign the bill, if passed, into law. Just days before NAEP results were released, Obama announced his support for cutting back on the time that public-school children spend taking standardized tests, so some have taken that as the president’s tacit agreement that federal reforms haven’t been working.

Adjustments Needed, Room for Optimism

Lucille Davy, a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees NAEP, is urging everyone to keep the recent test results in perspective, however.

“It’s just one set of results on a single administration of a test,” she said. “And I think people will be analyzing and looking at some of the reports that have been done regarding the alignment Nation’s Report Card Doesn’t Discount Optimism | Articles | Noodle:

Ohio Teacher Plans To Sue Kasich Education Department For Bullying

Ohio Teacher Plans To Sue Kasich Education Department For Bullying:

Ohio Teacher Plans To Sue Kasich Education Department For Bullying

During a recent class training to recognize bullying, one teacher in Ohio realized that she fell into the bullied category. The bully, according to Dawn Neely-Randall, wasn’t from any individual but the State of Ohio.

The story, including her plans to sue the state, was published by Diane Ravitch, a historian of education and Research Professor of Education at New York University.

ODE Is The Bully

Dawn Neely-Randall, a teacher in Elyria City Schools at Mckinley Elementary School, wrote, “As a teacher in the State of Ohio, I suddenly realized that I am being harassed by the Ohio Department of Education’s own legal definition as well as from legislators who are passing harmful laws to hurt me as well as many harmful laws that hurt my students, which totally, unequivocally knock the wind right out of me.”

The concern of Ms. Neely-Randall is that the state is asking teachers to educate and test students in ways that many teachers do not feel are morally correct or developmentally appropriate. “Our Ohio Department of Education is a mess,” she said, noting that state superintendents don’t stay in place very long while some staffers at the Ohio Department of Education [ODE] aren’t familiar with their own tests, as she learned recently in a call to Columbus when a staffer she talked to didn’t know basics, including what PARCC and AIR stood for.

High among her concerns is the charter scrubbing scandal at ODE. In addition to the ridicule Ohio’s charter school system is engendering nationwide, is the scandal resulting from data scrubbing to favor poor performing charter schools undertaken by David Hansen, husband of Gov. John Kasich’s presidential campaign and former chief of staff.

“Urban public schools are constantly being told they are FAILING and being threatened with state takeover while the Ohio Department of Education falsified charter information not only to the citizens of the state, but also to the United States Department of Education, and continued to label schools and did nothing to press charges against the person(s) falsifying the data, even though teachers in another state are IN JAIL for doing the same thing,” she said.

“Bottom line: I feel harassed by the Ohio Department of Education,” she wrote. “I feel abused. I feel heartsick with what they are asking us to do in education Ohio Teacher Plans To Sue Kasich Education Department For Bullying:

An Interview with Henry Giroux, Professor of Public Education at McMasters University | The Politic

An Interview with Henry Giroux, Professor of Public Education at McMasters University | The Politic:

An Interview with Henry Giroux, Professor of Public Education at McMasters University

Henry Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department. He has written and lectured extensively on the nature of public and higher education in the United States.

The Politic: How do you define education? When you discuss how education is going to create the next generation of active citizens, you place a lot of the onus on schools to create this change. Does your definition of education also include the family and society more generally?

Professor Giroux: My understanding of higher education is that it should be a democratic public sphere, a place that basically educates individuals not only to know something historically and to be able to think in terms sociologically and in terms of relations, but also to learn how to be responsible citizens, to have some understanding between the relationship of themselves, others, and the world, and basically what it means to be a critically engaged agent.

The key issue here for me around education is that if you don’t have a formative institution creating informed citizens, you don’t have a democracy. So I think education is a foundational place where students should be educated not just how to learn how to occupy jobs or be entrepreneurs, but also how to be actively engaged critical citizens.

The Politic: How should schools create more actively engaged and critical citizens?

Professor Giroux: There are a number of things. First off, students have to learn to think outside of disciplines. They have to find themselves under those pedagogical conditions where there imaginations can roam. I think increasingly we find that too many students are utterly specialized, have no sense of the larger connections they can make with the world, and seem to think knowledge is so isolated that you can actually survive in the world by only learning how to be an accountant.

I think that many students are not learning how to translate personal issues into larger public considerations. I think this question of translation is absolutely central to what students should be learning. I mean how do they take isolated issues and rather than privatize or personalize them, learn how to set them in a larger set of social, economic, and political conditions.

I think students need to learn to be theoretically rigorous. I think we need to understand theory less as a form of theoreticism in itself but basically as a resource. I get too many graduate students who just want to cite Foucault and that is what they do. Their papers are filled with citations. I think we are not teaching students enough about what theory is and what these intellectual traditions mean in terms of being able to use them in ways to address social problems that have some relevance to our lives

Among other things, students need to learn to take risks. I think they need to learn how to hold power accountable. I think they need to learn how to question in ways that are not terrifying for them. The assumption that anything that unsettles us lately is basically something they have to be wary of is antithetical to any notion of critical thinking.

I think we maybe need to move away from critical thinking to something called critical consciousness, meaning that I’m not really concerned about students being smart in the way I described – I think that’s important – but I also think they need to be socially responsible. They need to be able to learn that the issues of economic and political justice should not be separated from the issues they are talking about because it seems to me that if we want to reclaim the social sphere we need to suggest to students that they live in a An Interview with Henry Giroux, Professor of Public Education at McMasters University | The Politic: 

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA): Some Eleventh-Hour Observations | deutsch29

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA): Some Eleventh-Hour Observations | deutsch29:

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA): Some Eleventh-Hour Observations

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is the version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorization that has flown through conference committee and continues on its speedy trek to the House for an expected vote on December 02, 2015.

The document is 1,061 pages long. The public was able to see it for the first time on November 30, 2015.

Zoom, zoom.

I read much of it and skimmed the rest for particular issues of interest. This post includes my notes on my rapid reading of the ESSA document. (Rapid in this case is several hours, but it was a quick read given the document length.)

Here we go.

Pages 7 and 8 declare Duncan’s NCLB waivers “null and void and to have no legal effect on or after August 1, 2016.”

Page 47 notes that for states to be eligible for Title I funds, they must have “challenging academic content standards” that have corresponding, “aligned academic achievement standards” that have at least three levels of achievement. Also, states must demonstrate that their standards are “aligned with entrance requirements for The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA): Some Eleventh-Hour Observations | deutsch29:

California leads drive to reverse focus on standardized tests | EdSource

California leads drive to reverse focus on standardized tests | EdSource:
California leads drive to reverse focus on standardized tests

When President Barack Obama declared that “unnecessary testing” is “consuming too much instructional time” and creating “undue stress for educators and students,” it was another sign that the dominant strategy over the past 15 years to use standardized tests to hold children and schools “accountable” in education reform may have reached a tipping point.

California is on course to have a major impact on reshaping the national discourse – and practice – on this issue. The state is in the middle of devising a new accountability system, a massive and complex undertaking in a state as large and diverse as California, that is intended to go far beyond a narrow preoccupation with test scores.

President Obama’s recent anti-testing pronouncements are especially significant because using test scores as the dominant measure of school and student progress has been central to his K-12 education reform agenda.

Arne Duncan, Obama’s departing secretary of education, acknowledged the administration’s contribution to the problem. “It’s important that we’re all honest with ourselves,” he said. “At the federal, state and local level, we have all supported policies that have contributed to the problem in implementation. We can and will work with states, districts and educators to help solve it.”

By contrast, Gov. Jerry Brown has been consistent in challenging the role of testing – and has clashed repeatedly with the Obama administration on this issue, even before he returned to the governorship in 2011.

Brown likes to recount what was apparently a seminal experience while he was a student at St. Ignatius College Prep in San Francisco, when the only question on an exam asked students to give their impressions of a green leaf.

“Still, as I walk by trees, I keep saying, ‘How’s my impression coming? Can I feel anything? Am I dead inside?’ So, this was a very powerful question that has haunted me for 50 years.”

The point, Brown says, is that “you can’t put that on a standardized test. There are important educational encounters that can’t be captured by California leads drive to reverse focus on standardized tests | EdSource:

THE DEAL: Baraka and Cerf become school “reform” allies | Bob Braun's Ledger

THE DEAL: Baraka and Cerf become school “reform” allies | Bob Braun's Ledger:

THE DEAL: Baraka and Cerf become school “reform” allies

The deal last June was a stunner for many reasons–Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and Republican Gov. Chris Christie cut a bargain to bring in former state schools chief Christopher Cerf, a charter school champion, to be the city schools superintendent. It didn’t initially make a lot of sense but, after the joint Cerf/Baraka announcement later today, Tuesday, city residents might get a better idea of what happened behind closed doors last spring that led to today’s surprising result: Baraka and Christie have become partners in school reform.

As this site reported last week,  Baraka and Cerf will jointly promote a so-called “community schools initiative” aimed at making just one neighborhood in the city, its impoverished South Ward,  into a showcase for Baraka’s idea for school reform: local schools that also serve as centers for providing health care and other services to neighborhood residents.

Former Mayor Cory Booker, Cerf, and Anderson–architects of the privatization of many Newark schools.

And here’s another shocker: The Cerf/Baraka plan will seek at least some of its funding for the plan from funds given to the city by Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, who donated $100 million to Newark to jumpstart what was supposed to be a plan–backed by former Mayor Cory Booker–to make Newark the “charter school capital of the nation.” Recent reportsindicate that about $30 million of that money still exists in the accounts of the Foundation for Newark’s Future (FNF). FNF’s president, Kimberly Baxter McLain, will be part of the joint announcement at City Hall the morning of Tuesday, Dec. 1.

Baraka became mayor in the May, 2014, election primarily because of his opposition to state control, personified by then state-appointed superintendent Cami Anderson–a woman who was appointed city schools chief by Cerf in 2011 when Cerf was state education commissioner. Many of the actions taken by Anderson–including the closing of public schools, expansion of charters, failure to follow state law and regulations–were either outlined in a plan Cerf wrote for the state when he THE DEAL: Baraka and Cerf become school “reform” allies | Bob Braun's Ledger:

Report: Tougher admission to California universities bad for the state | 89.3 KPCC

Report: Tougher admission to California universities bad for the state | 89.3 KPCC:

Report: Tougher admission to California universities bad for the state

California's public universities are becoming increasingly out of reach for all but the most elite students, a new report by the L.A.-based Campaign for College Opportunity argues. 

The group’s report, "Access Denied: Rising Selectivity at California’s Public Universities," details how policymakers have not only failed to keep up with population growth but also have shut access to students through funding cuts that have reduced the number of seats available at the state’s two public university systems.

“I think all of us who live here in California should be worried about, what does the future look like 20 years from now when not enough of our citizens got the college education they need to succeed in this work force?” said Michele Siquieros, the group’s president.

The state's population has grown 265 percent since 1950, according to the report, while the University of California and the California State University systems have endured budget cuts. In response, administrators have increased tuition 200 percent at U.C. since 2000, while tuition at CSU has gone up 175 percent in the same time period.

At CSU, budget cuts forced administrators to turn away nearly 140,000 eligible students between 2009-2014, while at U.C. the competition for admission has led to entering classes with average grade point averages higher than 4.0 at six of nine campuses.

Researchers predict that with the technology and problem solving skills many new jobs require – usually obtained through higher education – California will fall short way short of college educated workers by 2030.

“Does it really make sense that we’re not sending equally talented students -- that are for the most part also A and B students -- to have that chance to go to college,” Siqueiros said.

In 1960 the public universities agreed to limit U.C. admission to the top 12.5 percent Report: Tougher admission to California universities bad for the state | 89.3 KPCC:

#STOPESEA | Save Maine Schools

#STOPESEA | Save Maine Schools:

#STOPESEA

For several months, I have been blogging like a madman about my suspicions that we are being ushered into a new era of embedded, competency-based assessment that has been planned behind the scenes for years by the testing, ed-tech, and student loan industries.

And now here we are.  The final bicameral version of the ESEA rewrite has been released for us to view, two days before the House intends to vote on it.

I wonder – are our Congressmen busy doing what many of us are tonight?  Searching this document madly to see what’s in it?  Trying to make sense of which clauses go with what, and what all the double-speak actually means?

Do they know what is meant by “competency-based“?  How about “instructionally embedded”?  Do they know the difference between community schools and Community Schools?

What will your representative think when (if?) he or she reads this section below?  Do they know who stands to gain from all of this, and what it may mean for our kids?

INNOVATIVE ASSESSMENT SYSTEM DEFINED:

The term ‘innovative assessment system’ means a system of assessments that may include competency-based assessments, instructionally embedded assessments, interim assessments, cumulative year-end assessments, or performance-based assessments that combine into an

annual summative determination for a student which may be administered through computer adaptive assessments; and assessments that validate when students are ready to demonstrate mastery or proficiency and allow for differentiated student support based on individual learning needs.

Please call if you haven’t and ask them to delay this vote.  We need time to explain to them what all this means.

                  202-224-3121

Here he is again, the No Squirrel: 

#STOPESEA | Save Maine Schools: