What's Gone Wrong – and Right – at San Diego High - Voice of San Diego

What's Gone Wrong – and Right – at San Diego High - Voice of San Diego:

What’s Gone Wrong – and Right – at San Diego High

The best case for what’s gone right at San Diego High is the School of International Studies. That school continues to act as a magnet for high-performing students in central San Diego neighborhoods. But the thing that’s gone right at San Diego High is directly related to what’s gone wrong

Big changes might be coming to San Diego High, San Diego’s oldest school. In front of voters this November could be a proposal to extend the high school’s lease or boot it from the location it’s had since 1882.

The school’s location might have been a constant for the past 134 years. But educationally, the school has been radically restructured, and restructured again, just in the past 15 years.

About 10 years ago, incentivized by funding from the Gates Foundation, district officials divided the campus into six small schools. It was part of a larger movement driven by the belief that breaking large high schools into smaller, autonomous ones – the so-called school-within-a-school model – would create more effective, personalized learning environments.

San Diego High accepted the challenge, along with Kearny and Crawford highs. Those experiments had very mixed results in San Diego. Of the three, Kearny has made the most convincing case the model can work. One of Kearny’s small schools, the School of International Business, has been particularly effective for English-learners who often struggle at other schools. Crawford dropped the idea altogether in 2012 and returned to a traditional school.

All three schools faced serious challenges, namely, how to support the small-school model financially when Gates’ funding ran out.

For San Diego High, the main problem has been how to deal with the common but rarely discussed problem of inter-school segregation.

“The challenge at San Diego High has really been an equity challenge,” said Richard Barrera, a San Diego Unified school board trustee. “How do we have high expectations for everyone at the school?”

San Diego High’s School of International Studies offers an International Baccalaureate program, a rigorous curriculum that attracts high-performing students. In 2014, the School of International Studies was named the 22nd best high school in California and one of the top 200 in the nation.

But that success hasn’t been shared by other programs on campus. Due to lagging enrollment and underperformance, three of the six original programs have been shuttered.

One parent, whose son thrived within the small school model, wants to know what happened at San Diego High.

Question: What has gone wrong, and what has gone right at San Diego High in the past 15 years? (I paraphrased this question.)  – Laurie Black, reader

The best case for what’s gone right at San Diego High is the School of International Studies. That school continues to act as a magnet for high-performing students in central San Diego neighborhoods. For years, more students wanted into the school than it had seats.

If students earn an IB diploma – which not everyone does, because it’s very challenging – they can enter universities with college credits already in the bag.

But the thing that’s gone right at San Diego High is directly related to what’s gone wrong.

That is, while the high-performing students opt into the School of International Studies, other schools on the campus have higher concentrations of students from low-income families, students of color and English-learners. And for several years there wasn’t much collaboration between the schools, even though they shared the same campus.

“The other schools on the campus are not high-performing schools, it’s true, but they have nothing to do with our school. They may as well be miles away from School of International Studies at San Diego High. You should no more lump our school in with those than with any other school in San Diego County – they have nothing to do with one another,” one mother wrote last year.

Barrera said this is the result of a kind of self-selected segregation, one that had been reinforced by the structure of the school.

Students choose which school they’ll enter as incoming freshmen. Students from upper-income families – or those coming out of elementary and middle schools with IB programs – might see the School of International Studies as a welcome challenge. Students from low-income families, on the other hand, might assume they’re not smart enough for IB, and select one of the less rigorous schools.

The most extreme example of racial isolation might be the School of Communications, which was envisioned as a program that would improve language skills for students who were still learning English. Over time, though, the school grew increasingly segregated. In other words, a school that started as a school for English-learners became a school of English-learners – and a severely underperforming one at that.

“It was a school that was designed to fail,” Barrera said in 2011, not long before it was closed. Since then, two others have also been shut down.

Tensions also rose from the simple fact multiple schools had to compete for resources. In 2011, then-Superintendent Bill Kowba sent word down that four of the schools would have to share a principal. The School of International Studies, however, got its own.

“If they deserve one principal, so do we,” one student at the School of Science and Technology said at the time.

Today, a major piece of the work taking place on campus is undoing the results of the past inequities and creating a single identity for San Diego High.

Last year, Superintendent Cindy Marten tasked Carmen Garcia, a former principal of Roosevelt Middle School, with leading the work at the three remaining schools on campus. Instead of three principals operating autonomously, Garcia is now the head principal who oversees the work of three vice principals on campus.

In the past year, Garcia has expanded access to the School of International Studies so more students could get in. That’s made the School of International Studies a little more ethnically and socioeconomically diverse. She’s also focused on what she calls a kind of “cross pollination” that allows students to take courses in other schools.

She’s expanded access to AVID, an in-school preparatory program for college-bound students. In What's Gone Wrong – and Right – at San Diego High - Voice of San Diego:

Schools Matter: Understanding KIPP Model Charter Schools, Part 1

Schools Matter: Understanding KIPP Model Charter Schools, Part 1:

Understanding KIPP Model Charter Schools, Part 1

In March I posted some disturbing new research findings on the caustic disciplining of students within corporate charter schools. With that new information, I also posted the Preface of my book, Work Hard, Be Hard..., which provides an insider's perspective and accompanying analysis of the KIPP Model charter school phenomenon that has been responsible for the most profitable educational eugenics program in American history.

In the coming weeks I will be posting chapters from the book.  Today I offer the Introduction and Chapter 1. 

If you are considering a job in a charter school, or if you know someone who is considering working in a charter school, or if you are thinking about enrolling a child in a charter school, please read and share before making that decision.

Introduction: “Negro Problems” and Philanthropic Solutions

The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.  –William Faulkner (1951)

Shortly after the end the Civil War, a decommissioned Yankee general who was also the son of a former missionary superintendent for the Hawaiian plantation schools, opened the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia.  When named as Hampton's first superintendent in 1868, Samuel Chapman Armstrong’s mission was to rigorously indoctrinate young freedmen to become workers and teachers who would fan out across the South to teach basic literacy to black children and to instill a lifelong devotion to the “dignity of labor” (Anderson, 1988, p. 34).

Armstrong, along with a couple of male assistant administrators and a faculty comprised of white Schools Matter: Understanding KIPP Model Charter Schools, Part 1:

Mike Pence supports bill that threatens school lunch quality | Rethinking Education

Mike Pence supports bill that threatens school lunch quality | Rethinking Education:

Mike Pence supports bill that threatens school lunch quality

Donald Trump’s Vice Presidential candidate Mike Pence favors passage of a bill that would make it harder for poor children in the USA to receive school lunches and would allow all children in school to make nutritionally questionable decisions.

The bill, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Todd Rokita (R-IN), and known as the “Improving Child Nutrition and Education Act of 2016” (H.R. 5003) is intended to save the government money. It would do so on the backs of poor children and would undermine recent gains in the nutritional value of school lunches.

The bill would allow children to substitute chips and sugary gummy fruit snacks for fresh fruit. The American Academy of Pediatrics opposes the bill, as passage would reverse gains in fighting childhood obesity. In 2010 the government passed a bill that required schools to restrict the sale of junk food. This new bill would make it possible for schools to once again provide junk food.

The bill would also require that schools have 60% of children receiving government assistance of some kind – instead of the current 40% – in order for the school to qualify for free lunch for all students. Schools that did not qualify would require needy students to apply for free school lunches. This penalizes poor children, many of whom prefer eating nothing to exposing themselves to ridicule in front of their peers.

This bill, H.R. 5003, is harmful to children, yet it is supported by Mike Pence. Please think carefully before you vote for a ticket that would even consider sacrificing the health of children.Mike Pence supports bill that threatens school lunch quality | Rethinking Education:

Progress on SWD outcomes – half full or half empty? :: SI&A Cabinet Report

Progress on SWD outcomes – half full or half empty? :: SI&A Cabinet Report :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet:

Progress on SWD outcomes – half full or half empty?

(District of Columbia) The performance of students with disabilities is improving in more parts of the country than in previous years although about half of all states are still left failing to meet federal requirements for special education.

Annual determination letters on state implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act were issued last week. This is the third time letters have been released since 2014 when student performance was considered with equal weight as compliance.

Historically, when states were only required to demonstrate compliance with IDEA, far more were deemed to have met their obligations, even if students were not improving.

“Focusing on compliance does not guarantee good outcomes for our students with disabilities,” John Riley, senior policy analyst for the National Education Association, said in an interview. “Instead of over emphasizing compliance timelines, let’s focus on how well these students are actually doing.”

Although IDEA was signed into law in 1990, it wasn’t until 2004 that the law was amended to require states begin developing performance plans and produce annual performance reports.

The 2014 determination letters marked the first time after that amendment that the U.S. Department of Education began to equally weigh student performance with compliance factors, which include sending parent notifications out on time or holding annual Individual Education Program meetings with all required members present.

Upon first glance, the latest determination letters appear to shed a positive light on outcomes for students age 3 through 21. Now, 26 states are meeting requirements under Part B of IDEA compared to 18 that met those requirements in 2014.

Part C, which covers infants through age 2, did not include performance until last year, during which time only 22 states met the requirements. This year, 30 states fulfilled their obligations.

Still, despite the fact that states have only recently had to prove that students with disabilities are making strides, IDEA has been the law of the land for almost 30 years – longer if you include its earliest form, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, enacted in 1975.

According to Diana Autin, executive co-director of the Statewide Parent Advocacy Network, which provides technical assistance to federally-funded parent training and information centers for students with disabilities, there are a handful of factors that could still be holding schools back from meeting these requirements.

“Compliance with the requirements in IDEA requires that all school and district staff understand the requirements, know how to implement them and have the resources they need to do so,” Autin said in an interview. “There are many barriers, including staff and administrator turnover, failure at all levels to allocate sufficient resources to both the procedural and substantive provisions of the law, failure of our educator and administrator preparation systems to adequately prepare them to know how to implement the procedural and substantive provisions of the law, and lack of will to do so.

“And there is another contributing factor–there are no meaningful consequences for failure to implement IDEA,” she said.

If a state does not meet the requirements and is placed into the “needs assistance” category for two Progress on SWD outcomes – half full or half empty? :: SI&A Cabinet Report :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet:

Facebook blames its lack of diversity on America's lackluster public education system - SFGate

Facebook blames its lack of diversity on America's lackluster public education system - SFGate:

Facebook blames its lack of diversity on America's lackluster public education system

Facebook blames its lack of diversity on the scarcity of quality computer science instruction in American public schools. 

An annual diversity report released Thursday revealed the social media giant is still staffed with a lot of white men. The numbers indicate only 2 percent of its U.S. workforce is black and 4 percent hispanic, and when looking at technical staff, 1 percent is black and 3 percent hispanic. These figures have remained the same since 2014. Women make up 33 percent of the U.S. workforce; and 17 percent of technical staff.

In a blog post on the data, Maxine Williams, Facebook's global head of diversity, said the company's diversity problem was due to a lack of available talent and the public education system's failure to provide computer science classes. 

"It has become clear that at the most fundamental level, appropriate representation in technology or any other industry will depend upon more people having the opportunity to gain necessary skills through the public education system," Williams wrote. "Currently, only 1 in 4 US high schools teach computer science."

Williams goes on to share the low number of diverse students taking the Advanced Placement Computer Science exam, stating that in 2015 seven states had fewer than 10 girls take the test, and no girls took it in three. 

She adds, "No Black people took the exam in nine states including Mississippi where about 50% of high school graduates are Black, and 18 states had fewer than 10 Hispanics take the exam with another five states having no Hispanic AP Computer Science (CS) test takers. This has to change."

What's Facebook going to do about this?

The company, which has a history with investing in public education, promised $15 million to Code.org toward computer science education over the next five years. 

"Facebook's five-year commitment will help Code.org to drive the development of curricula, public school teacher-training and student skills-building, particularly among traditionally underrepresented populations in engineering and computer science," Williams wrote. "It will give thousands of students across the country the access to computer science they deserve."

Many observers are criticizing the company's response, saying the pipeline argument is a weak excuse.

"There are a ton of opportunities to increase demographic representation in tech companies with the people that already exist in the workforce," Joelle Emerson, chief executive of Paradigm, a diversity consultancy that works with many Silicon Valley firms, told the Wall Street Journal.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, Leslie Miley, director of engineering at Slack and an advocate of diversity in Silicon Valley, called Facebook's statement a "f------ insult."

Facebook may still lack diversity, but this year's numbers did show some promise. While current representation in U.S. senior leadership is 3 percent black, 3 percent hispanic and 27 percent women, 9 percent of new senior leadership hires in the U.S. are black, 5 percent hispanic and 29 percent women, Williams wrote. What's more, Asians represent 38 percent of Facebook's U.S. workforce and this number has increased by 2 percent each year.Facebook blames its lack of diversity on America's lackluster public education system - SFGate:

Standing up for Ethnic Studies – Cloaking Inequity

Standing up for Ethnic Studies – Cloaking Inequity:

Standing up for Ethnic Studies

I was asked by a student on Friday at my Mi Familia Vota lecture at Rice University how Texas is different from California. Or why is California different from any other state for that matter?

Well, California is debating a History-Social Science Framework’s (HSSFW) Ethnic Studies elective course. In Texas, the standards have essentially erased and marginalized communities of color in many ways. We discussed this problem in our Harvard Education Review article a few years ago (This was one of my first posts. So you can see how far this blog has come since then).

On July 14, the California State Board of Education heard testimony on the proposed elective course. Hundreds of people showed up to testify— probably 300 or so. A member of the CSBE comment that the amount of testimony set some kind of record. You view here (9 hours) public comment and the meeting. There was quite a bit of controversy about the representation of Hinduism.

Here is the video from my testimony— I hyperlinked sources. I follow with the text.

My name is Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig

I am currently a California State University Sacramento Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies and Director of the Doctorate in Educational Leadership

I blog on education and social justice at Cloaking Inequity.

I also serve as the elected Education Chair of the California NAACP. I am authorized to say that the California NAACP unequivocally supports ethnic studies in our state.

The California NAACP has actively worked with Assemblyperson Shirley N. Weber and others to support ethnic studies in our legislature.

Why? California’s students, educators, and other stakeholders have provided many examples and reasons in their testimony today to support ethnic studies.

We have demonstrated in our research in the Harvard Educational Review that communities of color have been historically excluded and misrepresented in our curriculum… purposefully and insidiously.

This has been a travesty.

Peer reviewed Stanford research recently found that ethnic studies students not only made gains in attendance and grades, they also increased the number of course credits they earned to graduate.

I also personally speak in favor of the four imperative recommendations submitted by the ETHNIC STUDIES NOW COALITION.

Thank you for your service to our state.Standing up for Ethnic Studies – Cloaking Inequity:

Please Facebook Like, Tweet, etc below and/or reblog to share this discussion with others.

Want to know about Cloaking Inequity’s freshly pressed conversations about educational policy? Click the “Follow blog by email” button on the home page.

Twitter: @ProfessorJVH

Follow my YouTube channel here.

Click here for Vitae.Standing up for Ethnic Studies – Cloaking Inequity:

PCAPS Community Schools Task Force Celebrates the Announcement of The First Cohort of Philadelphia Community Schools | WeArePCAPS

PCAPS Community Schools Task Force Celebrates the Announcement of The First Cohort of Philadelphia Community Schools | WeArePCAPS:

PCAPS Community Schools Task Force Celebrates the Announcement of The First Cohort of Philadelphia Community Schools

photo credit: Craig Robbins.  Then candidate Jim Kenney at an ACTION United, PCAPS rally at Comegys Elementary in April last year announcing his committment to 25 community schools in his first term.

As the outgrowth of a coalition that has advocated for community schools for over four years, we are gratified to see that idea now becoming a reality in our city with the Mayor announcing the first cohort of nine community schools. We congratulate the Mayor’s office for it’s work over the last six months that has brought us to this point.

There has been an ambitious program of community engagement in which the community school strategy, its implementation, and criteria for selecting schools, have been widely shared and discussed. The fruit of that process is reflected in the plan announced today.

We are excited that the selection process emphasized schools that have developed a collaborative leadership and culture, thus maximizing the likelihood that these schools will implement this strategy successfully.

We also think the first cohort of schools gets high marks for balancing the need for geographic diversity, with a focus on communities of high need.

City Council deserves recognition as well, both for providing the funding in the form of the sugary drink tax, and for supporting a selection process in which political calculation was subordinate to getting the right mix of schools.

We plan to continue to work with school communities to advocate, from the ground up, PCAPS Community Schools Task Force Celebrates the Announcement of The First Cohort of Philadelphia Community Schools | WeArePCAPS:

Rapid Charter Expansion Is Primary Cause of Detroit Schools’ Fiscal Catastrophe | janresseger

Rapid Charter Expansion Is Primary Cause of Detroit Schools’ Fiscal Catastrophe | janresseger:

Rapid Charter Expansion Is Primary Cause of Detroit Schools’ Fiscal Catastrophe

Here is how David Arnsen of Michigan State University and his colleagues frame one of the issues they investigate in a new study on the impact of rapid growth of charters on the fiscal conditions in school districts in the state of Michigan.  The study will be published this autumn in the Journal of Education Finance:  “Thus far, the state has appointed emergency managers in three school districts (Detroit, Muskegon Heights, Highland Park), has dissolved two school districts (Inkster and Saginaw Buena Vista) and established consent decrees in one (Pontiac)… All except Inkster experienced large declines in enrollment between 2002 and 2012.  Compared to districts statewide, all six of these districts experienced much higher loss of resident students to charter schools and higher shares of special education students.”

The researchers conclude: “(T)he deficit districts in which the state intervened were significantly different from deficit districts in which it did not intervene on each of the demographic characteristics examined.  They had significantly higher shares of African American students (86% versus 40%), and significantly higher shares of low-income students (85% versus 67%).  Districts in which the state intervened also had significantly higher charter penetration (29% versus 11%) of resident students.”

The authors caution that their findings about Michigan may not perfectly apply in other states due to Michigan’s method of funding schools.  Michigan reformed its school funding in 1994 to shift funding responsibility primarily to the state; most states instead  balance state and local responsibility for raising revenue.  And Michigan’s system allows students transferring to a charter or to another school district through inter-district public school choice to carry all of their financing with them. However, due to fixed costs and laws that protect services for particular students, school districts are unable quickly to achieve economies of scale to compensate for declining enrollment.

Even when emergency managers have imposed austerity by raising class sizes and eliminating elective courses, Michigan’s most vulnerable school districts have, due to school choice, faced financial ruin.  The near bankruptcy of the Detroit Public Schools, for example, has occurred during years’ of state imposed austerity by a succession of emergency fiscal managers: “(T)he grounds for this emergency intervention under state law are strictly Rapid Charter Expansion Is Primary Cause of Detroit Schools’ Fiscal Catastrophe | janresseger:

Author's Advice to White Teachers in Urban Schools: Drop the 'Savior Complex' and Learn from Students

Author's Advice to White Teachers in Urban Schools: Drop the 'Savior Complex' and Learn from Students:

Author’s Advice to White Teachers in Urban Schools: Drop the ‘Savior Complex’ and Learn from Students

  Dr. Christopher Emdin is a passionate and unapologetic advocate for the advancement of urban education nationwide. In his book, For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood…and the Rest of Y’all Too, Emdin, an associate professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, conveys his methods of “reality pedagogy” and challenges the biased perception of inner city youth being “unreachable.” White educators are not in the classroom to “save” students, he writes, but should focus instead on integrating the cultures and views of the students into the learning experience. As the teacher’s perception of the students changes, Emdin believes, so will the students’ attitudes towards the value of education. Emdin recently spoke with NEAToday.

What are trends in education over the last few years or so that prompted you to write the book?

Chris Emdin: I think the biggest trend in contemporary education that I found problematic, is that it’s layered. There is a high number of educators teaching in schools highly populated with students of color that don’t reflect the community. If you go in schools right now, almost all black schools have a 90% white staff. And of course you hear or see that and go “well, that’s interesting,” but most of these staff don’t live in the community, they don’t understand the community, they don’t know the socio-economic background of the community, and have a perception about those students based upon were they come from.

There are teachers who are not being trained appropriately. Not to speak negatively about education schools, but there are people coming out of school with a Masters or Bachelor’s in education, taking one class in multiculturalism, or one class on ethnicity, race and politics. Then these teachers go into spaces where race, politics, ethnicity and class are the biggest factors they have to face. There’s also the idea of the hyper-scripted curriculum that the teachers don’t have the space to ask the students about who they are.

What has been the reaction of white educators to the title of the book?

CE: I’ve gotten everything from “Oh wow, thanks for telling the truth!” to “This man is racist.” I’ve gotten to the point in time, my life and my mission where I’m not going to allow political correctness to inhibit me from saying what needs to be said. If you’re not ready to talk about that fact that you are white in a black and brown school, then you shouldn’t be ready to teach in that school.

I’m not demonizing white folks or speaking to just white folks, I’m speaking to the rest of y’all too! There are black folks who also enforce those same white supremacist ideologies. The tools are for everyone, the tools are for the fact that we have 80% of white people in urban schools, but it’s also for you black and brown educators who are conditioned to accept the pedagogies that white folks are Author's Advice to White Teachers in Urban Schools: Drop the 'Savior Complex' and Learn from Students:

Readers, Writers, Teachers, and Students: “the pointlessness of so much of it” | the becoming radical

Readers, Writers, Teachers, and Students: “the pointlessness of so much of it” | the becoming radical:

Readers, Writers, Teachers, and Students: “the pointlessness of so much of it” 

I wonder who I would have been, without those shelves, without those people and those places, without books.

I would have been lonely, I think, and empty, needing something for which I did not have words.

“Four Bookshops,” The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction, Neil Gaiman

After 18 years as a public high school English teacher and then 14 years and counting as a university professor (many years of which teaching first-year writing along with teacher education), I was sitting a couple weeks ago in our second workshop designed to help university professors teach writing, and I had an epiphany about teaching writing that I believe has helped me understand better why the teaching of writing remains so contentious.

Both the formal teaching of reading and writing—notably at the secondary and undergraduate levels—is conducted by one of two essential groundings: teaching literacy as a reader and/or writer versus teaching literacy as a hyper-student/teacher [1].

While my teaching and advocacy for teaching rests solidly in the former, I am not here suggesting one is better than the other, but that these two perspectives are at the core why discussing and confronting so-called “best practices” often comes off as a heated debate instead of a productive conversation.

I have noted often that many English majors, including those certifying to teach secondary English and those who attain doctorates to teach at the university level, are prepared to teach a very narrow version of literary criticism—mostly addressing fiction and poetry, and mostly through analysis of literary technique and writer’s craft. (See this interesting argument for close reading of multicultural texts that, I believe, recommending close reading by rejecting close reading.)

During the accountability era when what we teach and what students learn have been reduced to how students are tested, reading and writing have been reduced to artificial (as in how we address them in school and how we test them) forms: reading snippets of text to answer multiple choice questions (no real-world readers do this), writing from a prompt in order to be assessed by a rubric and/or against an anchor paper (at best a bastardization of real-world writing, but honestly, again, no real-world writers do this).

I will not explore this fully here, but we cannot ignore as well how the commodification of education has eroded the authenticity of reading and writing. Textbooks and teaching materials feed the accountability dynamic narrowly but also speak to viewing reading and writing as students and teachers, not as readers and writers.

A Case for Readers and Writers in Formal Schooling

I am currently reading Neil Gaiman’s The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction, and this adventure in a writer’s-writer offering essay after essay about his love affair with books, writers, libraries, and genre is both a pure joy for me as reader and writer as well as yet another journey into trying to understand better the Readers, Writers, Teachers, and Students: “the pointlessness of so much of it” | the becoming radical:

Connecticut Charter School Industry spends another half a million dollars on lobbying elected officials - Wait What?

Connecticut Charter School Industry spends another half a million dollars on lobbying elected officials - Wait What?:

Connecticut Charter School Industry spends another half a million dollars on lobbying elected officials

According to the latest lobbying reports filed with the Connecticut Ethics Commission, the charter school industry and their corporate education reform allies spent another $555,000 during this year’s legislative session in their ongoing effort to support Governor Malloy and persuade Connecticut legislators to divert even more public money to the privately owned and operated charter schools in the state.

While Governor Malloy and the Democratic controlled General Assembly instituted the deepest cuts in state history to Connecticut’s public schools, Malloy and the Democrat’s new budget actually increased the amount of scarce public funds going to the charter schools.

At the same time, the charter school front groups were working with Malloy to fight off efforts to fix Connecticut’s flawed teacher evaluation program.

Malloy and the charter schools are intent on keeping the scores that student receive on the unfair, inappropriate and discriminatory Common Core SBAC standardized tests as a prominent factor in determining teacher quality, despite the fact that every major academic study has revealed that individual teachers have an extremely small impact on how individual students do on standardized tests.

Rather than develop a teacher evaluation system based on how well that educator is actually doing, Malloy and the education reformers want to stick with a faulty system that will unfairly judge teachers on factors beyond their control.

Meanwhile, as Wait, What reported earlier this year, the charter school industry and their corporate funded front groups have spent in excess of $9 million on lobbying since Governor Malloy took office in 2011.  See: Charter School Industry “invests” more than $9 million in Connecticut lobbying

The latest ethics reports indicate that, once again, the New York based Families for Connecticut Charter School Industry spends another half a million dollars on lobbying elected officials - Wait What?:

CURMUDGUCATION: Meat Widgets and the End of College

CURMUDGUCATION: Meat Widgets and the End of College:

Meat Widgets and the End of College

Learning Machine's website has the phrase "Build Intelligence" right there on their page, which gives you an idea of were they're coming from. But it's this post from Natalie Smolenski, "Cultural Anthropologist & Dedicated Account Manager at Learning Machine," that really captures just how deeply and fundamentally wrong this particular band of education reform is.

In "A DSM for Achievement," Smolenski lays out how educated human beings can be produced just like toasters or wood screws. And do note-- the whole article is not just Smolenski whipping something up on her own, but spinning off of a speech by Arthur Levine, President of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, delivered as the keynote at the 2016 Parchment Conference on Innovating Academic Credentials. This is not just some insane notion from the fringes, but an insane notion that a lot of Really Important People are attached to.

Smolenski is holding up the DSM-- the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-- as an example of how it can be done, so first she has to deal with how lousy the DSM is at its job.

The DSM and Its Issues

So that she can establish it as a model, Smolenski raises and dismisses the following DSM issues.

1) It's highly subjective, subject to ongoing change and therefor imprecise and unstable.

The DSM has included at various times the "disorders" involved that lead to runaway slaves, uppity women, and homosexuality. In other words, it has been at least as reflective of subjective societal bias as it has been of any scientific truth. More specifically, it has been reflective of the biases of CURMUDGUCATION: Meat Widgets and the End of College:

Here's An Idea: Change The Federal Definition Of Student Achievement : NPR Ed : NPR

Here's An Idea: Change The Federal Definition Of Student Achievement : NPR Ed : NPR:

Here's An Idea: Change The Federal Definition Of Student Achievement 

Morgan Polikoff has a modest proposal.

The associate professor at the USC's Rossier School of Education has been looking over the new federal education law. He thinks the Department of Education should abandon what has been the central principle of school accountability for the last decade and a half.

He's submitted a public letter during the feds' open comment period for rulemaking, and asked other researchers and education figures to sign on. So far, dozens have joined him.

What Polikoff wants the government to ditch is a reliance on the "proficiency rate."

Under No Child Left Behind, schools have been held accountable for the percentage of students who are proficient — meaning they meet a given cutoff score on a standardized test.

The tests have changed over the years and from state to state. So have the cutoff scores, which usually fall somewhere in the middle of the bell curve. But the magic word — proficiency — has not.

Under the old law, proficiency rates were supposed to rise over time until they reached 100 percent, which never came close to happening.

Right now, the Department of Education is making rules to flesh out the Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaced NCLB. The new law abandons the 100-percent rule, but still refers to "proficiency" more than 60 times.

Judging schools on the percent of students deemed proficient, Polikoff argues, has a lot of problems.

"The most obvious is that systems that rely on percent-proficient only care about students right on the margin," he tells NPR Ed.

In other words, there's no incentive to worry about students who are years behind and unlikely to catch up. Nor are there reasons to fuss over the students who score well ahead of average.

Instead, schools are encouraged to focus heavily on those students who are just below the proficiency line.

Some researchers have termed this problem "educational triage," and shown that it actually affects how teachers in classrooms are allocating their time.

A second major problem arises from comparing achievement gaps among groups, such as high- and low-income students, using percent-proficient.

For complicated statistical reasons, analyses that look only at the percent-proficient, Here's An Idea: Change The Federal Definition Of Student Achievement : NPR Ed : NPR:

Why Brooklyn's Middle Schools Are So Segregated - The Atlantic

Why Brooklyn's Middle Schools Are So Segregated - The Atlantic:

New York City's Great Middle-School Divide

How a series of choices has deepened the segregation of Brooklyn’s schools

M.S. 51 in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood is one of its district's "Big Three" middle schools: coveted and highly competitive, they are also whiter, more affluent, and higher performing than other schools in the district.

In leafy, liberal Park Slope and the Brooklyn neighborhoods nearby, many parents divide the local middle schools into two tiers: the “Big Three” and the rest.

First among the Big Three is M.S. 51 on Park Slope’s bustling Fifth Avenue. One of a dozen middle schools that families can choose from if they live within a four-mile-long stretch of west Brooklyn known as District 15, M.S. 51 is where Mayor Bill de Blasio sent his children and where students find a well-traveled path to the city’s most elite public high schools.

 Next on the Big Three list are M.S. 447, a Boerum Hill school that specializes in math and science, and New Voices School of Academic and Creative Arts, a performing-arts school in Sunset Park.

In theory, any student who lives in District 15’s borders—which include not only the well-heeled Park Slope and Carroll Gardens neighborhoods, but also working-class Red Hook and Sunset Park—can attend the Big Three. In practice, the schools are dominated by a subset of families: At the Big Three, over 50 percent of students are white, and less than 30 percent come from low-income families. At the other nine middle schools, just 10 percent of students are white, and more than 80 percent are poor.

That divide highlights a harsh truth about the sources of school segregation in New York City.

Many people, including Mayor de Blasio, point to segregated neighborhoods as the cause of separate schools. In fact, many of the city’s school zones and districts encompass a mix of families. And by opening up every school to any family in a district, “school choice” systems like the one in District 15 offer a golden opportunity to override divided neighborhoods and make schools integrated.

Instead, district parents, schools, and officials have made choices that reinforce segregation.

* * *

In the whiter, wealthier northern half of District 15, competition is fierce for a seat at a Big Three school.

“You have to battle for your so-called ‘choice,’” said Antonia Martinelli, a Gowanus parent and blogger who put M.S. 51 and 447 at the top of her son’s application. Otherwise, “there’s a fear that your child won’t get into a good enough high school.”

Some parents pay a private consultant $400 for a two-hour consultation about the district’s admission process. Others rely on their social circles. Because parents believe that attending one of the school tours will increase their odds of admission, many wait at their computers for the exact moment when online registration begins. The spots are usually snatched up within hours.

“It’s almost a full-time job,” said Rhonda Keyser, whose child attends M.S. 51.

But ultimately, the competition is within a narrow group of parents.

"Kids who come from more affluent families end up going to the more desirable schools."

Eight of the district’s 25 elementary schools send half or more of their students to one of the Big Three, according to city data. Those elementary schools are on average 64 percent white and just 17 percent low-income. Districtwide, 31 percent of students are white and 65 percent are considered poor.

Monica Kipiniak’s son attends the School for International Studies, one of several district and charter schools where families who did not make it into the Big Three are starting to venture. She said the fight for Big Three seats favors wealthier parents with the time and ability to navigate the process and to ensure their Why Brooklyn's Middle Schools Are So Segregated - The Atlantic: