Special Nite Cap: Catch Up on Today's Post 12/28/15

CORPORATE ED REFORM

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Why I Won't Be Debating Charter Schools for the Next Couple of Months

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Why I Won't Be Debating Charter Schools for the Next Couple of Months: Why I Won't Be Debating Charter Schools for the Next Couple of MonthsLately at the blog, my observation is that much of the discussion around charter schools is about whether they are useful, not useful, take resources from other public schools, etc.I'm not going to be talking about those issues

by mike simpson / 1min 

Best and Brightest Teacher Bonus, by the numbers | Tampa Bay Times

Best and Brightest, by the numbers | Tampa Bay Times: Best and Brightest, by the numbersFlorida's Best and Brightest teacher bonus came under challenge by the Florida Education Association last week. Among the concerns: The program unfairly benefits new teachers, who need not meet the requirement of a "highly effective" performance evaluation.Data released by the Florida Department of Ed

by mike simpson / 4h 

Preschool Common Core Dialogic Reading: Can’t Mother Goose Fly Alone?

Preschool Common Core Dialogic Reading: Can’t Mother Goose Fly Alone?: Preschool Common Core Dialogic Reading: Can’t Mother Goose Fly Alone?Yes. Mother Goose can fly alone! She doesn’t need any help from dialogic reading, which is like close reading for preschool. This formulaic reading exercise was created by Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst an experimental psychologist who is director of the Brown Ce

by mike simpson / 4h 

Peg with Pen: Gaslighting & Turnaround Schools

Peg with Pen: Gaslighting & Turnaround Schools: Gaslighting & Turnaround SchoolsI am currently working in a turnaround school.   A turnaround school is a public school that has been deemed "failing" by policy makers. The policy makers inflict draconian, fascist measures on such schools in an effort to turn them around - aka - increase test scores.  If they don't increase test sco

by mike simpson / 6h 

Why Standardized Tests Should Not Be Used to Evaluate Teachers (and Teacher Education Programs) | VAMboozled!

Why Standardized Tests Should Not Be Used to Evaluate Teachers (and Teacher Education Programs) | VAMboozled!: Why Standardized Tests Should Not Be Used to Evaluate Teachers (and Teacher Education Programs)David C. Berliner, Regents’ Professor Emeritus here at Arizona State University (ASU), who also just happens to be my former albeit forever mentor, recently took up research on the use of test s

1 by mike simpson / 7h 

The Problem With Definitions » Missouri Education Watchdog

The Problem With Definitions » Missouri Education Watchdog: The Problem With DefinitionsThe now infamous Bill Clinton quote “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” comes to mind when you look at how changing definitions of formerly well understood words can create chaos. The definition of a high school diploma used to have a fairly common understanding. The definition of a good schoo

1 by mike simpson / 7h 

CURMUDGUCATION: Outsourcing Subs: A Big Fat Philly Fail

CURMUDGUCATION: Outsourcing Subs: A Big Fat Philly Fail: Outsourcing Subs: A Big Fat Philly FailLast summer, reaction abounded over Philly schools' plan to outsource its substitute teaching to the temp company Source4Teachers.In July, some quick googling told me this about the company:S4T has run into trouble in some of the markets it has moved into. With typical complaints about the service inclu

1 by mike simpson / 7h 

Community schools model the way to go in Philly

Community schools model the way to go in Philly: Community schools model the way to go in PhillyBy Randi Weingarten and Jerry T. JordanWhen we walked into Kimrenee Patterson's classroom at South Philadelphia High School, the students were excited, engaged, and immersed in study to prepare for a career in early childhood education.A small group of students were learning about infant reflexes by sim

by mike simpson / 8h 

Five 2015 victories that put cracks in the ‘testocracy’ | I AM AN EDUCATOR

Five 2015 victories that put cracks in the ‘testocracy’ | I AM AN EDUCATOR: Five 2015 victories that put cracks in the ‘testocracy’Never in U.S. history have more students, parents, and teachers engaged in acts of resistance to standardized tests. During the 2015 testing season, over 620,000 public school students around the U.S. refused to take standardized exams, according to a report by the Nat

by mike simpson / 8h 

Reformers Continue to Spin Failed Accountability Schemes - Living in Dialogue

Reformers Continue to Spin Failed Accountability Schemes - Living in Dialogue: Reformers Continue to Spin Failed Accountability SchemesBy John Thompson.The Education Post’s Peter Cunningham sent out a mass email saying,Meanwhile, Chalkbeat Tennessee explores the ‘healthy tension between accountability and instructional freedom’ triggered by Duncan’s signature reform program, Race to the Top, and a

by mike simpson / 8h 

When “Montessori-style” teaching is viewed as derogatory | @ THE CHALKFACE

When “Montessori-style” teaching is viewed as derogatory | @ THE CHALKFACE: When “Montessori-style” teaching is viewed as derogatoryWhen working with children from high-poverty backgrounds, the argument for their style of education largely goes as follows, and I paraphrase:By the early grades, they’re already behind, so we need to play catch-up. There’s really no time for childhood shenanigans. We

by mike simpson / 8h 

Schools Matter: Rigged Trade Deals, Corporate Core Standards, and Human Commodities

Schools Matter: Rigged Trade Deals, Corporate Core Standards, and Human Commodities: Rigged Trade Deals, Corporate Core Standards, and Human CommoditiesEvery so often the corporate foundations and the billionaires need to reach way down in their nasty bag of tired tricks to come up with another smelly old chestnut aimed to infuriate teachers and raise the worry levels of the general public.  Their

by mike simpson / 8h 

School Finance Reality vs. the Money Doesn’t Matter Echo Chamber | School Finance 101

School Finance Reality vs. the Money Doesn’t Matter Echo Chamber | School Finance 101: School Finance Reality vs. the Money Doesn’t Matter Echo ChamberAn eclectic mix of politicians, philanthropists, conservative (and not-so-conservative) think tanks and a select few scholars have, for decades, created an echo chamber for the claim that more money will not help improve America’s schools. The claim

by mike simpson / 8h 

NYC Spends $1 Million To Fire OWS Teacher And Failed | PopularResistance.Org

NYC Spends $1 Million To Fire OWS Teacher And Failed | PopularResistance.Org: Teacher won his job back — and $260,000 in back pay The city has lost a four-year, $1 million battle to fire a teacher arrested in the Occupy Wall Street protests.David Suker, a US Army veteran who taught at-risk youths in The Bronx for 14 years, was removed from the classroom in December 2011. He was charged with riling

by mike simpson / 9h 

NYC Educator: Common Core: Children as Work Product

NYC Educator: Common Core: Children as Work Product: Common Core: Children as Work ProductIt's always interesting to get other points of view. Fortune has a piece about how business got schooled, and it's interesting on multiple levels. Of course, those of us who've seen Common Core as a top-down corporate takeover of public education are interested in seeing business fail here. That's the main po

by mike simpson / 9h 

School Testing 2016: Same Tests, Different Stakes : NPR Ed : NPR

School Testing 2016: Same Tests, Different Stakes : NPR Ed : NPR: School Testing 2016: Same Tests, Different StakesIt has been a high-stakes year for high-stakes standardized tests.The debate over renewing the big federal education law turned, in part, on whether annual testing would remain a federal mandate. Republicans initially said no, Democrats said yes. Ultimately the overhaul passed with te

by mike simpson / 9h 

NEA president on what teachers do all day - Business Insider

NEA president on what teachers do all day - Business Insider:A teacher explains what teachers really do all dayIn a speech at a Campaign for America's Future event, National Education Association president and teacher Lily Eskelsen Garcia gave a rousing explanation for what the teaching profession entails.After starting the speech by saying teachers needed to educate politicians on what the typica

by mike simpson / 9h 

The Top 10 Politics K-12 Blog Posts of 2015: Yes, ESSA Dominates - Politics K-12 - Education Week

The Top 10 Politics K-12 Blog Posts of 2015: Yes, ESSA Dominates - Politics K-12 - Education Week: The Top 10 Politics K-12 Blog Posts of 2015: Yes, ESSA DominatesIt's that magical time of year when we revisit the ten most-read blog posts on Politics K-12 in 2015. This year, nearly all of them came in one big avalanche, at the end of the year.That's because it's been less than a month since Presid

by mike simpson / 9h 

Top 10 education data stories of 2015 - The Hechinger Report

Top 10 education data stories of 2015 - The Hechinger Report: Top 10 education data stories of 2015Most popular Education By The Numbers stories of this yearr my year-end post, I’m highlighting the 10 most popular Education By The Numbers stories of 2015. They’re listed in the order of the number of times readers viewed them on our website, The Hechinger Report.Thank you to everyone who has read a

by mike simpson / 9h 

YESTERDAY

Schneider’s ESSA Digest, Part II (Pages 47 – 90) | deutsch29

Schneider’s ESSA Digest, Part II (Pages 47 – 90) | deutsch29: Schneider’s ESSA Digest, Part II (Pages 47 – 90)I am in the process of carefully reading the 1,061-page Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the December 10, 2015, reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), and writing a series of posts that will form a digest of those 1,061 pages.As previously noted, it

by mike simpson / 18h 

DIARY OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHER!: Just Because Our Students Are Living in Poverty...

DIARY OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHER!: Just Because Our Students Are Living in Poverty...: Just Because Our Students Are Living in Poverty...BAN KI-MOONMany times we allow stereotypes to rule our perceptions of others, whether it's race, gender, or socioeconomic status. We allow these perceptions to cloud our judgment, and we make decisions based on these misconceptions. We believe if it is true of on

by mike simpson / 19h 

The Atlantic: The New Preschool Is Crushing Kids | Seattle Education

The Atlantic: The New Preschool Is Crushing Kids | Seattle Education: The Atlantic: The New Preschool Is Crushing KidsKindergarten children will be taking the MAP test this year in Seattle, cruel as that might sound, and preschoolers will be evaluated for “kindergarten readiness” through “evaluations” per the mayor’s “Preschool for All” program.With the focus on standards, learning and being evalu

by mike simpson / 22h 

Special Nite Cap: Catch Up on Today's Post 12/27/15

CORPORATE ED REFORMBill Gates keeps pushing Common Core, with big money (and a bid to get Charles Koch to like it) - The Washington PostBill Gates keeps pushing Common Core, with big money (and a bid to get Charles Koch to like it) - The Washington Post: Bill Gates keeps pushing Common Core, with big money (and a bid to get Charles Koch to like it)You can say this about Bill Gates: When he likes s

by mike simpson / 1d 

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Why I Won't Be Debating Charter Schools for the Next Couple of Months

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Why I Won't Be Debating Charter Schools for the Next Couple of Months:

Why I Won't Be Debating Charter Schools for the Next Couple of Months

Lately at the blog, my observation is that much of the discussion around charter schools is about whether they are useful, not useful, take resources from other public schools, etc.

I'm not going to be talking about those issues any longer. Why? Two reasons.

1) From some comments, I get the feeling there are some charter supporters (employees?) who are here to stir the pot and/or waste my time. Mind you, I do recognize several names of long-time readers who disagree with me on charter schools and that's fine.

However, my stand on charters is clear and unchanged. I have done my research, I have visited some charters and I feel my opinion has been created on a solid foundation. If you disagree, again fine, but you won't be changing my mind.

(To note, I separate charter school supporters/funders from charter school families. I don't believe the thinking or knowledge base or agenda is the same in both groups.)

2) Like the Supreme Court, I am not here to argue the merits of charter schools. 
The Court found the charter school law unconstitutional which is the same thing that many of us working during the No on 1240 campaign said. But we Seattle Schools Community Forum: Why I Won't Be Debating Charter Schools for the Next Couple of Months:

Best and Brightest Teacher Bonus, by the numbers | Tampa Bay Times

Best and Brightest, by the numbers | Tampa Bay Times:

Best and Brightest, by the numbers

Florida's Best and Brightest teacher bonus came under challenge by the Florida Education Association last week. Among the concerns: The program unfairly benefits new teachers, who need not meet the requirement of a "highly effective" performance evaluation.

Data released by the Florida Department of Education don't bolster the criticism. Of 5,084 eligible applicants for who details are available, 820, or 16 percent, are listed as first-year teachers. The remaining 84 percent (not counting another 250 who fall under public records exemptions) had to meet the evaluation mandate.

The median age for the applicants was 37, according to the Palm Beach Post, meaning half were older and half were younger.

The FEA also contended that the program discriminated against teachers of color, in that studies have shown the qualifying SAT and ACT exams to be culturally and racially biased. Districts were not asked to submit race or ethnicity information about the applicants to the state. 

Some other interesting tidbits did crop up within the data. Among those:

- Orange County had the highest number of eligible applicants, with 672. Only five other districts had more than 200 eligible applicants. They are, in order, Hillsborough, Seminole, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Pasco.

- Nine schools had 20 or more eligible teachers on their staffs, with Orange Winter Park High the top at 44. The others, in order, are Seminole Oviedo High and Lake Mary High (26 each); Seminole Winter Best and Brightest, by the numbers | Tampa Bay Times:

Preschool Common Core Dialogic Reading: Can’t Mother Goose Fly Alone?

Preschool Common Core Dialogic Reading: Can’t Mother Goose Fly Alone?:

Preschool Common Core Dialogic Reading: Can’t Mother Goose Fly Alone?

Yes. Mother Goose can fly alone! She doesn’t need any help from dialogic reading, which is like close reading for preschool. This formulaic reading exercise was created by Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst an experimental psychologist who is director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. Here is more about Dr. Whitehurst.

By having adults overanalyze the story plot and picture by interrupting and asking specific questions, the child is given too much direction without being allowed to figure things out on their own. Their right to interpret the meaning of the story, or the pictures, by themselves is stolen.

Let’s consider nursery rhyme, which is important to preschoolers. Reading Dr. Seuss, Mother Goose or any of the many rhyming books, can pique a child’s interest to read. The enjoyment of hearing sounds and making sense of the meaning of the verse is exciting to a child.

Dialogic reading as described here breaks up the flow of reading the verse. Parents Preschool Common Core Dialogic Reading: Can’t Mother Goose Fly Alone?:

Peg with Pen: Gaslighting & Turnaround Schools

Peg with Pen: Gaslighting & Turnaround Schools:

Gaslighting & Turnaround Schools

I am currently working in a turnaround school.   A turnaround school is a public school that has been deemed "failing" by policy makers. The policy makers inflict draconian, fascist measures on such schools in an effort to turn them around - aka - increase test scores.  If they don't increase test scores they bring the hammer down harder by firing teachers, handing the school over to a charter, or closing the school, and so on. 

Turnaround schools are not failing. Rather, the truth is that the policies are the failures. The racist, classist, sexist policies are based on lies and false realities meant to create compliant worker bees who do as they are told to increase test scores, while ultimately allowing the corporate reformers to push forward other measures which increase profit, increase the privatization of our public schools, and finally, increase the power of the privileged. That's it in a nutshell. 

However, the factual process of turnaround in no way reveals to the public how this brutal takeover goes down.  How to articulate the process has been at the forefront of my mind for the last five months as I found myself thrown head first into this madness.  And indeed, it  is a madness like no other - a combination of insane asylum and prison. As I tried to articulate it to a dear friend of mine, she said, "Peggy, you are being gaslighted."  I had never heard the term gaslighting. I immediately began to read about it. I owe much gratitude to Peg with Pen: Gaslighting & Turnaround Schools:

Why Standardized Tests Should Not Be Used to Evaluate Teachers (and Teacher Education Programs) | VAMboozled!

Why Standardized Tests Should Not Be Used to Evaluate Teachers (and Teacher Education Programs) | VAMboozled!:

Why Standardized Tests Should Not Be Used to Evaluate Teachers (and Teacher Education Programs)

David C. Berliner, Regents’ Professor Emeritus here at Arizona State University (ASU), who also just happens to be my former albeit forever mentor, recently took up research on the use of test scores to evaluate teachers, for example, using value-added models (VAMs). While David is world-renowned for his research in educational psychology, and more specific to this case, his expertise on effective teaching behaviors and how to capture and observe them, he has also now ventured into the VAM-related debates.

Accordingly, he recently presented his newest and soon-to-be-forthcoming published research on using standardized tests to evaluate teachers, something he aptly termed in the title of his presentation “A Policy Fiasco.” He delivered his speech to an audience in Melbourne, Australia, and you can click here for the full video-taped presentation; however, given the whole presentation takes about one hour to watch, although I must say watching the full hour is well worth it, I highlight below what are his highlights and key points. These should certainly be of interest to you all as followers of this blog, and hopefully others.

Of main interest are his 14 reasons, “big and small’ for [his] judgment that assessing teacher competence using standardized achievement tests is nearly worthless.”

Here are his fourteen reasons:

1. “When using standardized achievement tests as the basis for inferences about the quality of teachers, and the institutions from which they came, it is easy to confuse the effects of sociological variables on standardized test scores” and the effects teachers have on those same scores. Sociological variables (e.g., chronic absenteeism) continue to distort others’ even best attempts to disentangle them from the very instructional variables of interest. This, what we also term as biasing variables, are important not to inappropriately dismiss, as purportedly statistically “controlled for.”
2. In law, we do not hold people accountable for the actions of others, for example, when a child kills another child and the parents are not charged as guilty. Hence, “[t]he logic of holding [teachers and] schools of education responsible for student achievement does not fit into our system of law or into the moral code subscribed to by most western nations.” Related, should medical school or doctors, for that matter, be held accountable for the health of their patients? One of the best parts of his talk, in fact, is about the medical field and the corollaries Berliner draws between doctors and medical schools, and teachers and colleges of education, respectively (around the 19-25 minute mark of his video presentation).
3. Professionals are often held harmless for their lower success rates with clients who have observable difficulties in meeting the demands and the expectations of the professionals who attend to them. In medicine again, for example, when working Why Standardized Tests Should Not Be Used to Evaluate Teachers (and Teacher Education Programs) | VAMboozled!:

The Problem With Definitions » Missouri Education Watchdog

The Problem With Definitions » Missouri Education Watchdog:

The Problem With Definitions

The now infamous Bill Clinton quote “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” comes to mind when you look at how changing definitions of formerly well understood words can create chaos. The definition of a high school diploma used to have a fairly common understanding. The definition of a good school used to be well understood, as were special needs and gifted. I doubt you would find agreement about these definitions today. Most recently the New York Times questioned what a high school diploma means (although they are jumping on a band wagon that has been circling for many years.) Then there’s the term career ready which even the titans of industry can’t seem to agree upon.

Fortune magazine related a story about a meeting between Bill Gates and Charles Koch in which they tried to discuss the merits of Common Core. Gates is obviously pro Core while Koch is siding with those who oppose a one size fits all mandatory uniform education. Gates is clear that his definition of what a high school or college diploma means is that graduates are prepared to work for him. They will come out of schools preloaded with a skill set that is desired by the business community which has been seeking better schooled workers for years. He buys into the definition of Common Core as a guarantee that those having a high school diploma will, by definition, be universally career ready because they have all been taught to the same standard. He doesn’t seems to understand that the push for uniformity deforms the education process, creating the poorer trained graduate that some American schools are pushing out.

Fortune writes, “The Common Core standards were drafted by determining the skills that businesses (and colleges) need and then working backward to decide what students should learn.” It is clear that career and college ready are now synonymous. College is merely a more advanced career training facility than high school. The classical liberal arts education that used to qualify one for a Bachelor of Arts degree (future students are going to have no idea why their degree is named that) has been all but erased from the modern college campus. Mizzou’s 207 majors, e.g. Accountancy, Real Estate, Leisure Service Management, Forest Entrepreneurship and Business, Radiology, sound more like business titles than classical arts college majors.

But preparing a K-12 student for more advanced career training in college DOES call into question what the definition, or value, of a high school diploma is. The definition of what a good school currently means a school whose students score high on standardized tests aligned to common standards and who graduate the most students (give out the most diplomas.) This definition causes schools and states to tinker withThe Problem With Definitions » Missouri Education Watchdog:

CURMUDGUCATION: Outsourcing Subs: A Big Fat Philly Fail

CURMUDGUCATION: Outsourcing Subs: A Big Fat Philly Fail:

Outsourcing Subs: A Big Fat Philly Fail

Last summer, reaction abounded over Philly schools' plan to outsource its substitute teaching to the temp company Source4Teachers.

In July, some quick googling told me this about the company:

S4T has run into trouble in some of the markets it has moved into. With typical complaints about the service including unqualified subs and ballooning costs (but stagnant sub wages). In at least one case, S4T's contract was terminated after allegations of hitting a student.

Reviews at glassdoor.com were not encouraging:

CEO is socially awkward and the President of the organization has a God complex and depending on the day of the week or which way the wind is blowing your guess is as good as anyone's as to how you might be treated on a given day. Benefits are non-existent, leadership is void. The COO is a former administrator that couldn't manage his way out of a paper bag.

S4T's plans for Philly were, shall we say, counter-intuitive. They were hired not just (or maybe even CURMUDGUCATION: Outsourcing Subs: A Big Fat Philly Fail:


One Wrong Move

Back in November, Hannah Rosin started a ball rolling with her Atlantic cover story about the high rate of student suicides in Silicon Valley. Two high schools in Palo Alto have a 10-year suicide rate between four and five times the national average.

If students from wealthy families in one of the most affluent communities in the country are feeling driven to these sort of extremes-- what the heck can that mean.

And it's not just the issue of suicide. Rosin writes:

The rich middle- and high-school kids [Arizona State professor Suniya] Luthar and her collaborators have studied show higher rates of alcohol and drug abuse on average than poor kids, and much higher rates than the national norm.* They report clinically significant depression or anxiety or delinquent behaviors at a rate two to three times the national average. Starting in seventh grade, the rich cohort includes just as many kids who display troubling levels of delinquency as the poor cohort, although the rule-breaking takes different forms. The poor kids, for example, fight and carry weapons more frequently, which Luthar explains as possibly self-protective. The rich kids, One Wrong Move