Hump Day on Diane Ravitch's blog
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
Hump Day on Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all
Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all:
Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all:
How is your school doing? Online dashboard gives parents new tool - SFGate
How is your school doing? Online dashboard gives parents new tool - SFGate:
How is your school doing? Online dashboard gives parents new tool
How is your school doing? Online dashboard gives parents new tool
California parents who want to know more about the progress of their children’s schools will be given access Wednesday to a system that uses color-coded charts and graphics to offer a comprehensive assessment of classrooms that goes well beyond standardized test scores.
The new online portal, called the California School Dashboard, measures school and district performance using a variety of criteria, including graduation and suspension rates, progress of English learners and success at preparing students for college, as well as math and English test scores.
In the future, the dashboard will also include parent participation and feedback from students and parents on school safety and available support, among other things.
The approach is a big departure from the old accountability system, the Academic Performance Index, which ranked schools using one number on a 1,000-point scale based on test scores. Known as the API, it was suspended three years ago as the state phased in Common Core testing.
Charter schools’ ‘thorny’ problem: Few students go on to earn college degrees
Charter schools’ ‘thorny’ problem: Few students go on to earn college degrees:
Charter schools’ ‘thorny’ problem: Few students go on to earn college degrees
Charter schools’ ‘thorny’ problem: Few students go on to earn college degrees
Like many charter school networks, the Los Angeles-based Alliance College-Ready Public Schools boast eye-popping statistics: 95% of their low-income students graduate from high school and go on to college. Virtually all qualify to attend California state universities.
Its name notwithstanding, the network’s own statistics suggest that few Alliance alumni are actually ready for the realities — academic, social and financial — of college. The vast majority drop out. In all, more than three-fourths of Alliance alumni don’t earn a four-year college degree in the six years after they finish high school.
Publicly funded, but in most cases privately operated, charter schools like Alliance are poised to become a much bigger part of the USA’s K-12 public education system. Yet even as their popularity rises, charters face a harsh reality: Most of the schools boast promising, often jaw-dropping high school graduation rates, but much like Alliance, their college success rates, on average, leave three of four students without a degree.
Statistics for charter schools as a whole are hard to come by, but the best estimate puts charters’ college persistence rates at around 23%. To be fair, the rate overall for low-income students – the kind of students typically served by charters – is even worse: just 9%. For low-income, high-minority urban public schools, most comparable to charters, the rate is 15%.
Charter schools must 'pivot' from original mission
So while many charter schools offer students a more viable path to high school graduation, the low college success rate in many cases is forcing the schools themselves to rethink their offerings.
“It’s time for us to pivot,” admitted Dan Katzir, Alliance’s CEO. Asked to rate the importance of raising the network’s college graduation rate, he said: “This is our work for the next 10 years.”
In many ways, charter schools were designed a quarter-century ago to help close the Charter schools’ ‘thorny’ problem: Few students go on to earn college degrees:
Feds: CPS consultant made millions through 'corrupt process from beginning to end' - Chicago Tribune
Feds: CPS consultant made millions through 'corrupt process from beginning to end' - Chicago Tribune:
Feds: CPS consultant made millions through 'corrupt process from beginning to end'
Feds: CPS consultant made millions through 'corrupt process from beginning to end'
The executive at the center of a federal bribery scandal at Chicago Public Schools helped steer Barbara Byrd-Bennett into the district's top job and manipulated district procedures to secure a no-bid contract for his companies, federal prosecutors said in a filing this week.
In their response to a sentencing memo filed earlier this month by attorneys for Gary Solomon, prosecutors rejected pleas for leniency and said Solomon made millions of dollars in a case that "involved a corrupt process from beginning to end."
Solomon "may have comforted himself with the thought that he was not a governor or alderman or public official, but he profited far more handsomely than most convicted of public corruption offenses," prosecutors said. "The government agrees with Solomon that this is not a typical honest services bribery case. It is significantly worse."
Solomon, the co-owner of the SUPES Academy and Synesi Associates education consulting companies, pleaded guilty last year to a single count of wire fraud and admitted his role in a scheme to bribe Byrd-Bennett with a percentage of the value of contracts she helped secure for his firms. Prosecutors are asking a judge to sentence Solomon next week to nine years in prison.Feds: CPS consultant made millions through 'corrupt process from beginning to end' - Chicago Tribune:
Battleground in the Fight over Voucher Expansion Opens in Texas - Education Law Prof Blog
Education Law Prof Blog:
Battleground in the Fight over Voucher Expansion Opens in Texas
Battleground in the Fight over Voucher Expansion Opens in Texas
While Betsy DeVos has almost no current power as Secretary of Education to push vouchers, her public stance in favor of them may be emboldening state legislatures to take action on their own. Texas has moved quickly and the battle lines are being drawn. Even Senator Cruz is getting involved.
"I usually stay out of fights in Austin. We've got plenty of fights in Washington," Cruz said Saturday night at the Dallas County Republican Party Reagan Day Dinner. "This is the best opportunity we've had in the history of the state of Texas to pass meaningful school choice legislation in the Texas Legislature."
As Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick listened, Cruz told Texas legislators in the room to take a "bold and courageous stand."
"School choice is the civil rights issue of the 21st century," Cruz said. "Do the right thing for the kids, and the history of Texas will vindicate your courage and principles."
Teachers and religious leaders are coming out just as strong in opposition. The Dallas Morning News reports:
Teachers and pastors on Monday rallied against the Senate's school vouchers proposal, even as its author announced the bill will be heard Thursday.
"It is a sin before God," Charles Foster Johnson led hundreds in chanting, "to make commodities out of our children and to make markets out of our classrooms."
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and GOP Senate leaders would harm public schools and impermissibly lend government support to religion if their self-styled "school choice" bill becomes law, Johnson warned at a Capitol rally organized by the state affiliate of the American Federal of Teachers union.
"Generally, the House of Representatives is holding firm," he said to teachers and school district employees Education Law Prof Blog:
In violation of state lobbying laws, corporate education reform group behind Malloy’s disastrous special education funding proposal - Wait What?
In violation of state lobbying laws, corporate education reform group behind Malloy’s disastrous special education funding proposal - Wait What?:
In violation of state lobbying laws, corporate education reform group behind Malloy’s disastrous special education funding proposal
In violation of state lobbying laws, corporate education reform group behind Malloy’s disastrous special education funding proposal
Among the many bad budget recommendations included in Governor Dannel Malloy state spending plan is a proposal that would leave Connecticut’s cities and towns without the resources they need to properly fund mandated programs for students who require special education services.
Now, according to documents acquired through a Freedom of Information request, Malloy’s absurd proposal which undermines Connecticut’s special education program was actually developed by a corporate education reform group, despite the fact that the group reported that it did not engage in any administrative lobbying activities.
The entity in question is an off-shoot of the Connecticut Council on Education Reform (CCER), a corporate funded lobbying group that has been trying to divert scarce public resources to Connecticut’s charter schools, while lobbying on behalf of Malloy’s massive Common Core SBAC standardized testing debacle and his other corporate education reforms.
Last year, staff from CCER formed The Connecticut School Finance Project.
Following Governor Malloy’s recent proposal to create a Connecticut Special Education Cost Cooperative, a new bureaucratic structure designed to inappropriately control special education funding and services, The Connecticut School Finance Project prepared an “independent analysis examining these proposed changes and how they align with six key principles and practices all special education finance systems should follow.”
However, neither the Governor nor the lobby group revealed that the proposal was actually developed by the Connecticut School Finance Project after months of close communication with the Malloy administration and their “independent analysis” was of a plan they actually wrote.
Worse, in an outright lie and in apparent violation of state law, the Connecticut School Finance Project reported to the State Ethics In violation of state lobbying laws, corporate education reform group behind Malloy’s disastrous special education funding proposal - Wait What?:
HR 610 Vouchers Unlikely; DC Voucher Renewal Advances Without Protecting Vulnerable Students | janresseger
HR 610 Vouchers Unlikely; DC Voucher Renewal Advances Without Protecting Vulnerable Students | janresseger:
HR 610 Vouchers Unlikely; DC Voucher Renewal Advances Without Protecting Vulnerable Students
HR 610 Vouchers Unlikely; DC Voucher Renewal Advances Without Protecting Vulnerable Students
There is a lot of fear about House Resolution 610, Iowa Rep. Steve King’s proposal for national school vouchers that has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. But don’t be too fearful; this particular bill is unlikely to go anywhere.
Andrew Ujifusa, one of Education Week‘s primary reporters on federal education legislation, explains what this bill is: “The Choices in Education Act of 2017… would repeal the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the main K-12 law, of which the Every Student Succeeds Act is the latest version. It would create vouchers funded by Washington for parents to use at private schools if they chose to do so, or to use for home schooling their child. Under King’s legislation, the federal government would fund those vouchers through creating block grants for states… In addition, King’s bill would overturn nutritional standards published in 2012 for the national school lunch and school breakfast programs.”
The purpose of Ujifusa’s recent column is to calm widespread worries about the bill, concerns tied to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ declared commitment to launching a federal voucher program of some kind. Ujifusa reminds readers that DeVos cannot institute a voucher program without Congressional approval; he adds that rural members of Congress, “have expressed concern about a federal voucher program, in part because they don’t feel private school choice will help many of the children back home.” Ujifusa explains that the bill’s sponsor, Rep. King, does not sit on the House committee that oversees education, and the bill is legislatively complicated because another committee on agriculture would have to oversee the provisions of the bill to change the school lunch program. Ujifusa adds: “In fact, in 2015, the Senate rejected (Sen. Lamar) Alexander’s proposed amendment to ESSA that would have instituted a voucher program. And the Senate now has more Democratic lawmakers than it did then. It’s unlikely any Democrat will vote to create nationwide, federal vouchers.”
Congress will likely need a different vehicle from HR. 610 if it acts on Trump’s and DeVos’s promise of a federal voucher program. But Congress is moving forward with another voucher bill, one that has historically been opposed by Democrats, but a bill that has passed before and HR 610 Vouchers Unlikely; DC Voucher Renewal Advances Without Protecting Vulnerable Students | janresseger:
Why even the world’s highest-scoring schools need to change - The Washington Post
Why even the world’s highest-scoring schools need to change - The Washington Post:
Why even the world’s highest-scoring schools need to change
Why even the world’s highest-scoring schools need to change
Marion Brady is a veteran educator who has long argued that public schools in the United States need a paradigm shift. The core curriculum, he says, does not meet the needs of today’s students, and schools fail to do the most important thing they should be doing. He explains in the following post.
Brady has written history and world culture textbooks (Prentice-Hall), professional books, numerous nationally distributed columns (many are available here), and courses of study. His 2011 book, “What’s Worth Learning,” asks and answers this question: What knowledge is absolutely essential for every learner? His course of study for secondary-level students, called “Connections: Investigating Reality,” is free for downloading here. Brady’s website is www.marionbrady.com.
By Marion Brady
Betsy DeVos, the new U.S. secretary of education, has a theory. She agrees with former Florida governor Jeb Bush and other education “reformers” now shaping American education that what’s wrong with America’s schools has an easy fix: competition in the form of market forces — vouchers, merit pay, charter schools, etc.
DeVos is wrong. Dozens of variables — most of them beyond educator control — affect kids’ ability to learn. Believing that market forces can erase the effects of those variables is magical thinking.
Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, David Bohm, Alfred North Whitehead, Ernest Boyer, Harlan Cleveland, Arthur Koestler, Thomas Merton, Peter Senge, and many other internationally known and respected thinkers have a different theory about poor learner and school performance. If they’re right, even the world’s highest-scoring schools aren’t serving learners well.
Here’s why:
- For efficient, productive thought, information must be mentally organized. The “core” curriculum now in near-universal use worldwide is a poor organizer of information. The thinkers mentioned above all believed that the core curriculum in use in schools since 1893 is fragmented, incoherent, artificial and disconnected from the reality it’s supposed to explain to learners and help them explore.
- Businesses, industries, the military, and other information-dependent entities don’t use academic disciplines or school subjects to organize information. To cope with reality’s inherent complexity, to more accurately model reality’s systemically integrated nature, and Why even the world’s highest-scoring schools need to change - The Washington Post:
Teachers and Researchers: Searching for the Truth of Classroom Change | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
Teachers and Researchers: Searching for the Truth of Classroom Change | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:
Teachers and Researchers: Searching for the Truth of Classroom Change
Teachers and Researchers: Searching for the Truth of Classroom Change
I am preparing to write a section in my forthcoming book on technology integration about the different perspectives that teachers and researchers have on changes in classroom lessons. To do that, I have looked back at the handful of posts I have written since 2009 on this point so I can figure out what to say in this forthcoming book.
Here is one from November 2009 along with a reader’s thoughtful comment (and criticism) of the position I take in the post.
Over the years, I have interviewed many teachers across the country who have described their district’s buying computers, deploying them in classrooms while providing professional development. These teachers have told me that using computers, interactive white boards, and other high-tech devices with accompanying software have altered their teaching significantly. They listed changes they have made such as their Powerpoint presentations and students doing Internet searches in class. They told me about using email with students.Teachers using interactive white boards said they can check immediately if students understand a math or science problem through their voting on the correct answer.
I then watched many of these teachers teach. Most teachers used the high-tech devices as they described in their interviews. Yet I was puzzled by their claim that using these devices had substantially altered how they taught. Policymaker decisions to buy and deploy high-tech devices was supposed to shift dominant ways of traditional teaching to student-centered, or progressive approaches. All of this in years when No Child Left Behind, extensive testing, and coercive accountability reigned. What I encountered in classrooms, however, departed from teachers’ certainty that they have changed how they teach.
I am not the first researcher to have met teachers who claimed substantial changes in their teaching in response to district or state policies. Consider “A Revolution in One Classroom; The Case of Mrs. Oublier.”
In the mid-1980s, California policymakers adopted a new elementary math curriculum intended to have students acquire a deep understanding of math Teachers and Researchers: Searching for the Truth of Classroom Change | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:
Betsy DeVos Uses a Willing Public School Superintendent as a Privatization Prop | deutsch29
Betsy DeVos Uses a Willing Public School Superintendent as a Privatization Prop | deutsch29:
Betsy DeVos Uses a Willing Public School Superintendent as a Privatization Prop
On March 13, 2017, US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos tried to sell her interest in public schools. However, even as she spoke to the Council of Great City Schools (CGCS), a coalition comprised of 69 urban public school districts, DeVos could not help trying to sell school choice.
Betsy DeVos Uses a Willing Public School Superintendent as a Privatization Prop
On March 13, 2017, US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos tried to sell her interest in public schools. However, even as she spoke to the Council of Great City Schools (CGCS), a coalition comprised of 69 urban public school districts, DeVos could not help trying to sell school choice.
Most of her 12-minute speech focused on her established, school choice bent couched in that seemingly-benign, parent-empowerment, for-the-children language that leaves her audience with the unsettling feeling that even though DeVos tried at moments to sound supportive of public schools, her support is suspiciously qualified:
And one of those quality options should be a great public school. I’ve said this before, and it bears repeating: I support great public schools, and I support great public school teachers—because I support students—all students.
DeVos supports *great public schools,* and we know it’s true because she says so today.
But DeVos also has a public school superintendent as a fan, and she was willing to throw that name out there to her audience of urban public school superintendents:
For years, I mentored at-risk girls who were attending an urban public school in Grand Rapids. I’ve witnessed the impact one person can have on a child’s life, and I’ve seen the changes in a community when it chooses—often through local initiatives that include public and private partnerships—to come together and invest in the rising generation.This is what motivated me to develop a friendship and relationship with Teresa Weatherall Neal, the superintendent of Grand Rapids Public Schools.I have supported and continue to support her work to transform Grand Rapids Public Schools to better serve the students of Grand Rapids.
DeVos referenced her mentoring at a “public school” during her January 17, 2017, confirmation hearing. Neither then nor in her CGCS speech has she divulged the name of that school. She has also not disclosed just how much time, exactly, she spent “mentoring,” or what, exactly she means by the term.
Before her CGCS audience, she brushes past such details and proceeds to name-Betsy DeVos Uses a Willing Public School Superintendent as a Privatization Prop | deutsch29:
Are school vouchers good for education? That debate is playing out in Indiana - YouTube
Are school vouchers good for education? That debate is playing out in Indiana - YouTube:
Are school vouchers good for education? That debate is playing out in Indiana
Are school vouchers good for education? That debate is playing out in Indiana
Hoosier School Heist TV is Doug Martin's channel featuring videos of his book tour across Indiana speaking on the corporate takeover of public education. Order Hoosier School Heist at http://hoosierschoolheist.com/.
Follow Hoosier School Heist on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HoosierSchoolHeist
Tweet with Doug Martin at: https://twitter.com/DougMartinED
What about school funding? Will we lose our Blue Ribbon Status?: A report from the front lines of the NY Opt Out Movement - Badass Teachers Association
Badass Teachers Association:
What about school funding? Will we lose our Blue Ribbon Status?: A report from the front lines of the NY Opt Out Movement
NYS has a robust opt out movement. Last year over 260,000 students refused the NYS tests in Grades 3-8. Each year some NY Boards of Education, Superintendents, and Principals try to use scare tactics to get parents to opt back into testing. Two scare tactics are that the school will lose funding (NO school in NYS has ever lost funding due to opt out) or the school will not be eligible for the Blue Ribbon Award (aka a NY Reward School). Here is a bit of information for NY parents and educators. Don't believe the scare tactics and don't sell your child out for a blue ribbon that steals their education and childhood!
NYC Opt Out member Tracy Peel -
It’s a favorite line of people who want your kid to take the test, but so far, no NYS school has ever lost any of its funding due to the number of kids who opted out of testing. The next time someone tells you this, ask them which school lost any of its funding. For each of the past two years, more than 200,000 kids in NY State have opted out of the state tests and their schools did not lose funding because of opt-out.
So, where does the rumor come from?
The NYS Department of Education names “Reward Schools” each year based on test scores. For most schools, the only “reward” is being named to the “Reward School” list. Gee, thanks!
For the past several years, the NYSDOE has announced a grant application for Reward Schools that are also Title I schools (schools with lots of poor kids.) These schools must have at least 95 percent testing to apply for the small grant. So, if a Reward School has less than 95 percent test participation, it can’t apply for the grant.
But wouldn’t it be great to get more money?
The application for “Reward School” Title I grants takes a lot of staff time, with no guarantee the school will get money, many strings attached, and little to no benefit to the applying school. The NYS DOE has never publicized its grant winners, just the grant application, and it is possible no eligible school has ever applied for this money!
NYC DOE, desperate to keep down opt-out, has pitched that not getting to apply for these small potatoes, strings-attached grants is a “penalty.” They have been forwarding around an article from last year. The article is deceptive (not because of the reporter) but because of the DOE's misleading statements to the reporter.
In past years the use of the grant money was restricted so the money had to be used for the school that got the grant to share its techniques for achieving high test scores with other Title I schools. The old grant application is not available (links are broken or send you to the current grant program), but the grant was only to a district with a Reward School, and was only “up to” $75,000 per successful applicant school, some of which could have gone to the school, to, Badass Teachers Association:
What about school funding? Will we lose our Blue Ribbon Status?: A report from the front lines of the NY Opt Out Movement
NYS has a robust opt out movement. Last year over 260,000 students refused the NYS tests in Grades 3-8. Each year some NY Boards of Education, Superintendents, and Principals try to use scare tactics to get parents to opt back into testing. Two scare tactics are that the school will lose funding (NO school in NYS has ever lost funding due to opt out) or the school will not be eligible for the Blue Ribbon Award (aka a NY Reward School). Here is a bit of information for NY parents and educators. Don't believe the scare tactics and don't sell your child out for a blue ribbon that steals their education and childhood!
NYC Opt Out member Tracy Peel -
But what about school funding?
It’s a favorite line of people who want your kid to take the test, but so far, no NYS school has ever lost any of its funding due to the number of kids who opted out of testing. The next time someone tells you this, ask them which school lost any of its funding. For each of the past two years, more than 200,000 kids in NY State have opted out of the state tests and their schools did not lose funding because of opt-out.
So, where does the rumor come from?
The NYS Department of Education names “Reward Schools” each year based on test scores. For most schools, the only “reward” is being named to the “Reward School” list. Gee, thanks!
For the past several years, the NYSDOE has announced a grant application for Reward Schools that are also Title I schools (schools with lots of poor kids.) These schools must have at least 95 percent testing to apply for the small grant. So, if a Reward School has less than 95 percent test participation, it can’t apply for the grant.
But wouldn’t it be great to get more money?
The application for “Reward School” Title I grants takes a lot of staff time, with no guarantee the school will get money, many strings attached, and little to no benefit to the applying school. The NYS DOE has never publicized its grant winners, just the grant application, and it is possible no eligible school has ever applied for this money!
NYC DOE, desperate to keep down opt-out, has pitched that not getting to apply for these small potatoes, strings-attached grants is a “penalty.” They have been forwarding around an article from last year. The article is deceptive (not because of the reporter) but because of the DOE's misleading statements to the reporter.
In past years the use of the grant money was restricted so the money had to be used for the school that got the grant to share its techniques for achieving high test scores with other Title I schools. The old grant application is not available (links are broken or send you to the current grant program), but the grant was only to a district with a Reward School, and was only “up to” $75,000 per successful applicant school, some of which could have gone to the school, to, Badass Teachers Association:
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