Survey: Linda Darling-Hammond, Ben Carson Most Likely Ed. Secretary Picks - Politics K-12 - Education Week

Survey: Linda Darling-Hammond, Ben Carson Most Likely Ed. Secretary Picks - Politics K-12 - Education Week:

Survey: Linda Darling-Hammond, Ben Carson Most Likely Ed. Secretary Picks

Education researcher Linda Darling-Hammond and former Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson are the most likely picks to be U.S. Secretary of Education for White House candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, respectively, according to an "Education Insiders" survey by Whiteboard Advisors released Monday. And who's second on the list for Clinton? American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, say these insiders.

The survey of roughly 50 to 75 current and former White House and U.S. Department of Education leaders, current and former congressional staff members, state education officials, and think tank leaders also found that a slight majority of them believe that over the next two years, more states will stop participating in two consortia (PARCC and Smarter Balanced) that were originally funded by Washington and create tests aligned to the Common Core State Standards. 

And these "insiders" are generally pessimistic about the extent to which both the media and presidential politics will focus on education, although there's some belief that higher education could be an exception.

"I'm not sure if K-12 will get much attention because the recent reauthorization of ESEA [Elementary and Secondary Education Act) probably means that the next president won't have an opportunity to influence K-12 education (at least not legislatively) unless he or she gets a second term," according to one respondent, none of whom were quoted by name.

Let's go back to the favorites for the next secretary of education. The survey asked respondents for the most likely picks for Clinton and Trump. Here's what they came back with: 

Darling-Hammond is the president of the Learning Policy Institute (launched last year) and a professor emeritus at the Stanford University graduate school of education. She's got a long track record in K-12 policy work—her activities range from significantly influencing California's shift to a new accountability system, to serving as an adviser to the Smarter Balanced testing consortium that creates exams aligned to the Common Core State Standards. She helped to start two charter schools through Stanford, but in 2010 the elementary school's charter was not renewed, and it shut down—the high school is still operating. And she's pushed for less testing in American schools. 

Weingarten has been an outspoken advocate for Clinton. The AFT acted quickly to endorse the Survey: Linda Darling-Hammond, Ben Carson Most Likely Ed. Secretary Picks - Politics K-12 - Education Week:

State board to choose school improvement metrics | EdSource

State board to choose school improvement metrics | EdSource:
State board to choose school improvement metrics

 The State Board of Education on Wednesday is planning to choose a handful of statewide metrics to measure student performance as part of its creation of a new school accountability system.

The board will approve the new system in September and begin using it in the fall of 2017. It will replace the Academic Performance Index, the single-number score, based solely on standardized test scores, that the board suspended two years ago. The board is also designing the new system to satisfy federal accountability requirements of the Every Student Succeeds Act.

State board staff are recommending that the board initially choose five metrics to identify which schools and districts need assistance and which demand more intensive intervention. They are:

• Student test scores on Common Core tests in math and English language arts;
• Progress of English learners toward English language proficiency;
• High school graduation rates;
• An added weight for two markers of a student’s progress through school: test scores in Grade 3 reading and Grade 8 math;
• Student suspension rates at various grade levels.

Not included on the initial list are three measures that student and parent advocacy groups have pressed the board either to adopt now or commit to using in the future: rates of chronic student absenteeism, which is an indicator of school climate and a predictor of a student’s underperformance; as-yet-to-be developed tests on the new state science standards, and indicators or an index of college and career readiness. Board members have expressed interest in eventually incorporating these measures, and at its meeting this week, the state board is expected to adopt an annual timetable for researching and approving new metrics.

In a letter sent Friday to the state board, a collection of nonprofit organizations expressed disappointment that college and career indicators weren’t chosen.State board to choose school improvement metrics | EdSource:

Did Mark Zuckerberg Just Get Taken In Again on Education Reform? | janresseger

Did Mark Zuckerberg Just Get Taken In Again on Education Reform? | janresseger:
Did Mark Zuckerberg Just Get Taken In Again on Education Reform?

 You may remember that Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg’s initial foray into education was in Newark, NJ, where he allowed then-mayor Cory Booker and governor Chris Christie to convince him to donate $100 million to fund their scheme to charterize Newark’s public schools.  Now Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, have launched the huge Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and they have hired Jim Shelton to run it.  Shelton headed up the Office of Innovation and Improvement at Arne Duncan’s U.S. Department of Education, where he rose through the ranks to become Assistant Deputy Secretary, Deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer.

Shelton was really good with the rhetoric. In 2012 he told Michele McNeil of Education Week: “(T)hough the federal government provides only a small fraction of education funding, we are one of the largest single sources. We send incredible signals to the marketplace about what should happen with innovation.  That’s not been something either policymakers or regulators have thought a lot about… (I)nnovation happens in the context of an ecosystem.  R&D leads to entrepreneurship and investment, which leads to adoption and use… (W)hen we create things like the Investing in Innovation competitive grant program (i3), we are defining an evidence threshold that was not a part of most federal education programs before… As i3 continues and as we get more comfortable putting tiered evidence levels in other areas of the department, we will work on that.”

Shelton has now taken a job heading up the new Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, described by Benjamin Herold for Education Week: “The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was formed last fall, when the couple announced their intent to give 99 percent of their Facebook stock, valued at an estimated $45 billion, to a variety of causes, headlined by technology-enabled personalized learning in K-12 education.  Created as a limited liability corporation, the organization is free to make philanthropic donations, invest in for-profit companies, and engage in political lobbying and policy advocacy.” Mark Zuckerberg built his fortune from Facebook.

In many ways, Shelton’s resume and training are a perfect match for his new job running the Chan Zuckerberg philanthropic limited liability corporation. Shelton came to the U.S. Did Mark Zuckerberg Just Get Taken In Again on Education Reform? | janresseger:

Business-inspired School Reform: Has the Wave Crested? | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Business-inspired School Reform: Has the Wave Crested? | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:
Business-inspired School Reform: Has the Wave Crested?
I saw this cartoon and burst out laughing.

 The cartoonist takes airline frequent flier practices that sort out passengers for best-to-worst seating and applied it to school busing.  The New Yorkercartoonist’s pen  gives satisfaction to critics of business-influenced school reform, by poking at the unrelenting “privatization” of public schooling over the past three decades.

Although no critic of such reforms that I have read or heard has suggested this practice, those who criticize  the charter school movement, expanded parental choice, the standards/testing/accountability movement, and evaluating teachers using student test scores have pointed to  hedge fund managers, philanthropists who made their money in business, corporate CEOs, Business Roundtable executives and Chambers of Commerce knee-deep in these initiatives. Critics see such support for these reforms as strong evidence of “privatization.”

Both critics and champions of these reforms, however, seldom mention the decades-long commercial penetration of schooling in everything from ads displayed on high school gymnasia and football fields, or curriculum materials supplied by corporations, or deals with soda companies in vending machines–and on and on. And don’t forget ads on school buses.

Researchers have documented the spread of this sort of business influence for decades. This nexus between commerce and public schooling has a long history and is not a recent phenomenon. As early as the 1890s, business leaders have lobbied for vocational education and succeeded in adding such courses of study to public schools. Since then, reformers have turned to using successful business practices in schools time and again (e.g., Malcolm Baldrige Quality Awards to schools).

“Educationalizing” national problems from racial segregation to national defense to economic growth has been a definite pattern in the history of school reform. But is the current instance business-minded reform tying schooling to economic prowess fading in U.S. public schools?

There are some signs that it is. With the slow-motion retreat from the punitive No Child Left Behind law in the U.S. Congress reauthorizing the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015), increasing evidence that National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test scores have leveled off and even fallen, a growing “opt-out” movement of parents objecting to standardized tests, and increasing public awareness of non-school factors strongly influencing students’ academic performance, talk about “privatization”  is slowly waning as policymakers, practitioners, researchers, and parents see that simple-minded applications of business “best practices” fail to deal with core issues in schooling U.S. children (see N-gram mentions of “privatization” peaking in 2003). And so has the failed adoption of business-inspired practices such as determining teacher effectiveness on the basis of student test scores.

Yet there are signs that counter such evidence of waning interest in business-inspired reforms. Charter school annual growth continues at a six percent rate; 43 states now allow charter schools (see here). In some urban districts, more than half of public school students attend charter schools (e.g., New Orleans, Detroit) and others are approaching that (e.g., Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Ohio). Widespread adoption of charter schools have left what appears to be a permanent footprint in U.S. schools.

Moreover, while growing popular resentment to testing is clearly in evidence, and the number of annual tests will probably decrease, ending annual standardized testing is not about to happen simply because quantitative school outcome measures are essential accountability tools in any $600-plus billion industry, public or private . And standardized test scores are an inexpensive way Business-inspired School Reform: Has the Wave Crested? | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

Schools Matter: Riding the 'Turnaround' Merry-Go-Round in the Continuing Assault on Philadelphia Public Schools: Part IV

Schools Matter: Riding the 'Turnaround' Merry-Go-Round in the Continuing Assault on Philadelphia Public Schools: Part IV:

Riding the 'Turnaround' Merry-Go-Round in the Continuing Assault on Philadelphia Public Schools: Part IV

The Philadelphia School Reform Commission – April 28, 2016

 Crossing the Rubicon

  

The Rubicon has been crossed in the privatization assault on Philadelphia public schools. On Thursday, April 28^th, the Philadelphia School Reform Commission voted to turn three more public schools over to charter companies.

The Battle for Wister has been decided in favor of Mastery Charters over the objections of many parents at the school. (See The Battle for Wister in Part I of this series.)  What makes this turnover different than all preceding turnovers is that Wister, even by Broad graduate Superintendent Hite’s own admission, had been making progress as a public school. The School Reform Commission (SRC) reversed his decision one week after Hite had withdrawn Wister from the turnaround list. No more can the SRC claim that the turnover of a public school to a charter company is based on the pretense that their “data” shows a school is a “failing school”. It is now clear for all to see that the drive for privatization is based on the market interests of corporate education reform, not education.

Also to be turned over to charter companies that have a dubious history, are Jay Cooke Elementary to Great Oaks Charter and Samuel B. Huey Elementary to Global Leadership Academy.

These turnovers went forward despite the SRC’s Charter School Office presenting strong evidence that many charters up for their five-year renewals are performing no better, or worse, than the public schools they replaced. In addition, Philadelphia Newsworks' reporter Kevin McCorry observed, based on Newsworks analysis, “the most consistent thing about school ‘progress’ as captured by the SPR [the District’s School Progress Report] is inconsistency.” He wrote,

There are many reasons to be wary about relying too heavily on the School District of Philadelphia’s main tool for measuring school quality [SPR] – especially when it comes to making high-stakes decisions about closures, staffing shake-ups and charter conversions.

Despite this evidence, along with protests from parents, students, teachers and community members, the SRC is forging ahead with turnovers to charters and disrupting the lives of thousands of students and staff. Like all corporate education reform, it presents its decisions as being based on “failed schools” due to “bad teachers and administrators”. That these turnarounds are happening only in low-income neighborhoods gives the lie to this claim. The educational opportunities of children from low-income families will not change by moving school professionals from one school to another, year after year. What must change are the economic circumstances of these families.

The Latest Spin of the Turnaround Merry-Go-Round in Philadelphia Schools

Click here to read the rest of the article. 

Schools Matter: Riding the 'Turnaround' Merry-Go-Round in the Continuing Assault on Philadelphia Public Schools: Part IV:

Data show segregation by income (not race) is what's getting worse in schools - The Hechinger Report

Data show segregation by income (not race) is what's getting worse in schools - The Hechinger Report:
Data show segregation by income (not race) is what’s getting worse in schools
The intersection of poverty and race is producing larger and more alarming achievement gaps

 There’s a new narrative that U.S. schools are “resegregating” along racial lines. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights used the word “resegregation” on the headline of a recent press release and scheduled a briefing on the subject for May 20. And the word “resegregation” gets bandied about frequently at education conferences and in the press.

But academic researchers, speaking at a May conference for education journalists in Boston, said they don’t see evidence of a worsening racial separation across the country, as if whites and minorities who once learned in the same classrooms were now heading to different schoolhouses. What they do see is an increasing number of minority students in public schools, and an increasing number of schools that are dominated by minority students, but both trends are keeping pace with the increase in the minority population overall.

It’s the U.S. population that’s changing, not a redistribution of races in our schools, as the word resegregation implies. White students now make up less than half the public school population, and there are fewer of them to spread around.

It’s worth remembering that even at the peak of integration, in the late 1980s, schools were still quite segregated. White students tended to go to schools that were majority white, minorities to schools that were largely minority. For a school that was already, say, 70 percent minority, an influx of immigrants could easily tip the population into the 90 percent camp. This could happen without policy makers pulling the plug on integration, or families picking up and moving into separate, more racially homogenous school districts.

“We have segregation, and increases in concentrations of low-income minorities,” said Sean Reardon, a sociologist at Stanford University. “But it doesn’t mean that school systems have begun to allocate students more unevenly.”

Yes, the percentage of minorities is rising at many schools. But to prove increased racial segregation, you would need to show that the number of minority students in many schools is increasing faster than the increase in the minority population. You can find examples of that in some regions and communities, but the data don’t show that for the nation as a whole. Similarly, you would need evidence of white students flocking away from minorities. Instead, the data show that the typical white student is going to school with more minorities. So-called “white” schools are becoming more integrated. Back in 1996, for example, the average white student attended a school that was 81 percent white. That figure is now below 75 percent, according to the most recent data.

From the perspective of an individual black or Hispanic student, who sees his or her school getting “browner,” it may feel like a distinction without a difference. It certainly feels segregated when there are many more schools today in which minority students number more than 90 percent of the student body.  Today, the typical minority student is less exposed to white students at school.

To be sure, certain school districts have “resegregated.” But desegregation court orders have expired in fewer than 500 districts. While that sounds like a large number, it’s small compared to the more than 12,000 school districts across the country. Ann Owens, a sociologist at the University of Southern California, explained that she hasn’t yet seen evidence that these instances of resegregation have been large enough to drive the numbers nationally.

What Reardon and Owens are finding is another kind of segregation in the schools — along income lines. Rich families are increasingly pulling away from poor ones, and sending their kids to different schools. At the same time, more families are living in poverty. According to a February 2016 paper published by Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis, income segregation between different school districts increased 15 percent between 1990 and 2010. Within large districts, the segregation of students who are eligible and ineligible for free lunch increased by about 30 percent during the same 20 years.

And here’s the rub: this increase in poverty is more pronounced in minority schools. That is, the poverty rate in predominantly minority schools is rising faster than the poverty rate in predominantly white schools, according to Reardon’s calculations.

This new income segregation is now exacerbating Data show segregation by income (not race) is what's getting worse in schools - The Hechinger Report:

Hedging Education

Hedging Education:
Hedging Education
How hedge funders spurred the pro-charter political network.

 This article is a preview of the Spring 2016 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here. 

Not too long ago, school board races were quaint affairs. Even in big school districts, candidates usually only had to raise a few thousand dollars to compete.

But as the movement to marketize public education gained momentum, advocates broadened their focus from the federal level to state and local governments. There, where campaign costs were substantially lower than in federal elections, the well-funded movement could more effectively leverage its political money.

One of the starkest casualties of that strategic shift has been the American school board election. A network of education advocacy groups, heavily backed by hedge fund investors, has turned its political attention to the local level, with aspirations to stock school boards—from Indianapolis and Minneapolis to Denver and Los Angeles—with allies.

In recent years, this powerful upstart operation has had tremendous, albeit somewhat stealthy, success playing politics at the local level, by cultivating reform leaders in areas with disappointing schools and a baseline desire for change. They have looked to building a state philanthropic infrastructure that can sustain local efforts beyond one election.

The same big-money donors and organizational names pop up in news reports and campaign-finance filings, revealing the behind-the-scenes coordination across organizational, geographic, and industry lines. The origins arguably trace back to Democrats for Education Reform, a relatively obscure group founded by New York hedge funders in the mid-2000s.

The Hedge Fund Connection

The hedge fund industry and the charter movement are almost inextricably entangled. Executives see charter-school expansion as vital to the future of public education, relying on a model of competition. They see testing as essential to accountability. And they often look at teacher unions with unvarnished distaste. Several hedge fund managers have launched their own charter-school chains. You’d be hard-pressed to find a hedge fund guy who doesn’t sit on a charter-school board.

Consider Whitney Tilson. Straight out of Harvard, Tilson deferred a consulting job in Boston to become one of Teach For America’s first employees in 1989. Ten years later, he started his own hedge fund in New York. Soon after that, Teach For America founder Wendy Kopp took him on a visit to a charter school in the South Bronx. It was an electrifying experience for him. “It was so clearly different and so impactful,” Tilson says. “Such a place of joy, but also rigor.”

The school was one of two original Knowledge Is Power Program schools—better known as KIPP—which has since grown into a prominent charter network with nearly 200 schools in 20 states plus the District of Columbia, serving almost 70,000 students, predominately low-income and of color.

But back then, charter schools were still a rather unfamiliar novelty to most people. Tilson, however, was convinced that they were the future of education. He started dragging all his friends, most of whom were hedge fund investors, from Wall Street up to the South Bronx to see the KIPP school. “KIPP was used as a converter for hedge fund guys,” Tilson says. “It went viral.”

Many critics of the corporate education-reform movement are quick to accuse proponents of seeking to cash in on the privatization of one of the United States’ last public goods. And while there certainly are those in ed-reform circles who stand to benefit from a windfall of new education technology, testing, and curriculum services, hedge funders by and large do not fit that stereotype. Theirs is more of an ideological and philanthropic crusade, rather Hedging 
Education:

Donald Trump on education: Wrong, wrong and wrong - The Washington Post

Donald Trump on education: Wrong, wrong and wrong - The Washington Post:
Donald Trump on education: Wrong, wrong and wrong

 Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, doesn’t talk all that much about education issues, but when he  does, it is usually about the Common Core, rankings and spending. And usually he is wrong, wrong and wrong.

In one Trump ad this year, he hit all three in just a few sentences:

“I’m a tremendous believer in education. But education has to be at a local level. We cannot have the bureaucrats in Washington telling you how to manage your child’s education. So Common Core is a total disaster. We can’t let it continue. We are rated 28th in the world, the United States. Think of it, 28th in the world. And, frankly, we spend far more per pupil than any other country in the world. By far. It’s not even a close second.”

And on May 2, he said:

Now, if you look at education. Thirty countries. We’re last. We’re like 30th. We’re last. So we’re last in education. If you look at cost per pupil, we’re first. So we — and by the way, there is no second because we  spent so much more per pupil that they don’t even talk about No. 2. It’s ridiculous.

Talk about ridiculous.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has been repeating some false statements over and over again. Here are the last four of his claims that the Post's Fact Checker gave Four Pinocchios. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

For one thing, the United States is not “last in education.” He is presumably talking about education outcomes and appears to be referring to international rankings of students, of which there are several based on different tests given in different countries.

There is, for example, the Program for International Student Assessment, better known in the education world as PISA, which is given every three years to 15-year-olds around the world in Donald Trump on education: Wrong, wrong and wrong - The Washington Post:

Detroit lawmakers say DPS bills appear to be part of a conspiracy - WXYZ.com

Detroit lawmakers say DPS bills appear to be part of a conspiracy - WXYZ.com:

Detroit lawmakers say DPS bills appear to be part of a conspiracy

LANSING, Mich. (WXYZ) - The House of Representatives is expected to vote on controversial bills that would address the Detroit Public Schools financial crisis.

One thing is clear. No Detroit lawmaker is likely to vote in support of the bills.

This is one of two proposals in Lansing right now in response to the district’s financial crisis. The other was put together by the Senate.

So what do the bills (House Bills 5382, 5383, 5384, and 5387)  being debated right now do and why are Detroit lawmakers so against them? There are several issues.

Detroit lawmakers say it is about power. The House plan would delay the election of a school board in Detroit until next year.

“That is unacceptable. Our children have suffered long enough under emergency managers,” said Rep. Sherry Gay-Dagnogo (D-Detroit).

It is also about busting unions. 

Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee, which voted for the bill - sending it to the full House - made it clear they are unhappy with the protests by Detroit teachers that closed schools.

The protests happened after teachers said they learned they were facing payless paydays because the district was underfunded by the state, and protested to ensure they are given what they are owed. 

Many Republican lawmakers say the teachers should have stayed in the classroom teaching kids, not participated in such political actions.

The proposals would create a new school district and throw out current labor contracts. They would potentially decrease the pay of teachers in Detroit, by allowing the district to use uncertified teachers.

Republicans say this would address the teacher shortage.

“Teachers are professionals. You don’t put uncertified teachers in just Detroit Schools,” said Sen. Coleman Young II (D-Detroit) “You wouldn’t do that with anyone else. You wouldn’t say to address the pilot shortage, we are going to take away the certification to become Detroit lawmakers say DPS bills appear to be part of a conspiracy - WXYZ.com:

OKCPS suspensions more complex than just race - NonDoc

OKCPS suspensions more complex than just race - NonDoc:

OKCPS suspensions more complex than just race

(Morguefile.com)

Conservative school reformer Mike Petrilli has criticized the U.S. Office of Civil Rights (OCR) and its recent agreement to settle a complaint against the Oklahoma City Public School District for racially disparate suspension rates.

Petrilli cites the OCR’s finding that, “African American students are 62 percent more likely to be given in-school suspensions in Oklahoma City than are white students.” He adds that African Americans in Oklahoma City are three times likelier to be poor than whites. Petrilli concludes:

Oklahoma City will suspend fewer students, possibly putting student learning and safety at risk, because nobody was willing to challenge the federal government’s questionable assumptions. Oklahoma politicians were up in arms over the feds’ heavy-handedness on the Common Core; why are they so willing to be pushed around on student discipline?

Petrilli is half right in criticizing the OKCPS suspensions and the OCR, but he seems unaware of how complex these issues are. Below is just one example of how I learned how complicated the process of creating safe and orderly schools is.

NCLB undermines code of conduct

When John Marshall H.S. was given relatively more power to enforce its code of conduct, we improved more than any secondary school in the district. Our principals had always OKCPS suspensions more complex than just race - NonDoc:

School districts are a big reason for the rise in income segregation in the U.S., study says - LA Times

School districts are a big reason for the rise in income segregation in the U.S., study says - LA Times:

School districts are a big reason for the rise in income segregation in the U.S., study says

Who are your classmates? (Anne Cusack/Los Angeles Times)

It's no secret that in searching for a home, parents scrutinize nearby schools. The wealthy can afford to live in neighborhoods with small school districts, where most other students are wealthy, too.

Now, a new study out of USC lends credence to the notion that this decision-making process is partially responsible for the rise in America's income segregation between 1990 and 2010.

In the country's 100 largest metropolitan areas, "income segregation is nearly twice as high among households with children as among those without," according to the study from USC sociologist Ann Owens, published in the American Sociological Review in late April.

The study's second major finding is that among the families that  have children in those large areas, there is more income segregation in areas that encompass more school districts. 

Of course, it's difficult to attribute all income segregation to schools.

Almost three-fourths of children attended the school to which the district assigned them in 2007, according to a government report Owens cites, suggesting that parents want to live near their child's school.

Take Los Angeles: Parents could live in the boundaries of the huge Los Angeles Unified School District, but many wealthy families choose to live in cities like Beverly Hills, which are higher-income and have their own school districts with more concentrated resources. 

Los Angeles is slightly less segmented than the average large county in Owens' study. 

In Los Angeles County in 2010, the average high-income family with children lived in a place where 34% of their neighbors were in the top fifth of earners with $116,466 or more, and 12% were in the bottom fifth of the population, making $22,246 or less, Owens found.

High-income Angelenos living without children are less segregated: on average, they lived in places where 31% of neighbors earned $116,466 or more and 14% earned $22,246 or less. 

Average L.A. families with children in the lowest fifth of earners lived in neighborhoods where 28% had similar incomes, and 10% of neighbors were in the highest fifth of earners. Poor people without children were more likely to be exposed to wealthy neighbors: For the average household without children at the poorest income level, 26% of households had similar incomes and 16% of neighbors were in the top fifth.  

Follow the Times' education initiative to inform parents, educators and students across California >> 

And it's more than just geography that divides them. Poor parents are spending about the same on children as they have for decades, but wealthy parents are spending more than ever before. That spending can come in the form of tutoring, extracurriculars or a house in a wealthy neighborhood and an in-demand school district, said Sean Reardon, Stanford's professor of poverty and inequality in education.

Families with children are "seeking out more advantageous environments for their kids at a rate that’s higher than it was in earlier decades," said Jennifer Jennings, a New York University sociology professor who studies education policy and income.

So why does this matter? This study can influence housing policies moving forward, said Reardon.

When wealthy people are concentrated in one area, the resources they give to their schools and to their School districts are a big reason for the rise in income segregation in the U.S., study says - LA Times:

CURMUDGUCATION: Instructional Googling

CURMUDGUCATION: Instructional Googling:
Instructional Googling

Robert Pondiscio is in US News sounding the alarm about teachers who develop their own materials either on their own or by googling their way to instructional strategies, on his way to noting that the "dirty little secret" of education is that the quality of instructional techniques is an afterthought, and probably not so great. But I think he's managed to mis-represent the problem and add to it all at once.

Here's the cold open.

If you caught your pediatrician Googling "upset stomach remedies" before deciding how to treat your child and homebrewing medications over an office sink, you might start looking for a new pediatrician. So how would you feel if you learned that Google and Pinterest are where your child's teacher goes to look for instructional materials?

If my pediatrician was stumped by a tricky diagnosis, I would expect her to consult other experts in the field and go look through the literature about the ailment. And because my pediatrician is a trained professional, I'd be unlikely to view treatment that she developed and used based on her professional knowledge and judgment as a "home brew." 

So right up front, let's dispose of the notion that Google and Pinterest are automatically bad news. For many teachers they have become the modern equivalent of walking across the hall and saying, "I can't quite get Chris to understand how to work with mixed fractions. Have you got anything that you've had success with?" Google and Pinterest (and few dozen other sites) make it possible to walk across thousands of other halls and ask millions of other fellow professionals what professional advice and materials they might have to offer. This is not a bad thing.

Like any tool, it can be misused. Teachers need that most important of 21st century research skills-- the ability to tell Good Stuff from Crap. And of course the interwebs can enable lazy teachers, but this is not a new phenomenon-- it's simply the 21st century equivalent of your old teacher who just CURMUDGUCATION: Instructional Googling:

ICYMI: Some edu-reading for the day

Many a varied readings for today.

How Not To Explain Success

Remember all that noise a year ago about the "triple package" of traits that lead to success. Yeah, that was probably baloney.

Why the New SAT Isn't As Transparent As the College Board Wants You To Believe


What?! David Coleman's College Board is busy blowing marketing smoke?! I am shocked. Shocked!!

Black and Brown Boys Don't Need To Learn Grit; They Need Schools To Stop Being Racist

Yes, it's been said before. It should be said repeatedly until the message sinks in.

DPS sickout a sympton of Lansing's ill behavior

The Detroit Free Press has a few things to say about the Detroit teacher sick-out and just who is responsible

School Vouchers Are Not a Cure for Segregation

At Jersey Jazzman, Mark Weber has been writing a three-part (so far) explanation of just how much voucher systems do not help segregation. Essential reading, with charts and graphs and facts and stuff.

Rely on Local Actors Instead of Faulty Information To Make Judgements About School Quality

Reform fans Jay Greene and Mike Petrilli have been dialoguing about the finer points of testing and evaluation etc, with Greene attacking some reformster orthodoxy. Here he answer the question of what to do if the test data says the school sucks but the people there think it's great. Shouldn't be a radical notion, but that's where we are...

You Won't Believe This (Unless You Know Chicago)

The Chicago Public School system has decided to try to take down principal Trot LaRaviere. Here's his own account of the sequence of events. If this doesn't make you angry, I'm not sure anything will.

We Did Everything the State Asked-- Didn't Matter

A teacher in Georgia gives voice to the frustration of trying to make a reformster regime happy. 
CURMUDGUCATION http://bit.ly/1hqZ7wL

Reader Faves

• Teacher Pay Decay
  WRAL in North Carolina has created a documentary looking at the state of pay in the state of North Carolina. It's not great. Once you co...
• Lamar Alexander Takes John King To Woodshed
  Well, that didn't take long. John King was in front of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and while King m...
• PTA Sells Out (Again)
  The National PTA has become a one-stop shop for reformsters who want to push back against parents who insist on shrugging off the warm, refo...
• John King Is Concerned
  If you're on the USED mailing list, this weekend you received a "Friend" e-mail from John King, the latest in a series best en...
• MI: Let's Test Kids Into Oblivion
  [Update: check the comments or this link for a bit more nuance and background from someone who lives there] Congratulations, Michigan-- ...
• A Pair of Presidential Proclamations
  Because somebody has a dark sense of humor, this week is both National Teacher Appreciation Week and National Charter Schools Week. And Pres...
• The Free Market Does Not Work for Education
  The initial spark for this piece was going to be this story out of Philly , where parents are shocked, upset and frustrated to learn that t...
• Where Reading Improvement Comes From
  Recently on multiple platforms, Robert Pondiscio talked about reading on his way to standing up for Secretary of Education John King. We dis...
• MA: How To Gut Schools, Boston Edition
  QUEST is an organization that has dogged Boston Mayor Marty Walsh and his reformy friends for quite a while, and they have recently shaken ...
• The Other Testing Problem
  It's testing season, and that means we are hearing the annual recitation of stories of despair and misery among the students, as small c...