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Graduation Day Edition

ICYMI: Graduation Day Edition (6/4)

Here is my neck of the woods, we're just a few hours away from high school graduation. It's definitely that time of year. Here's your assorted pieces of reading from the week. Remember to pass on the ones that speak to you. 

These Activists Want Greater Home School Monitoring

In the background, as other education debates rage, is the old set of issues surrounding homeschooling. Here's a look at activists who help the women who were homeschooled to know nothing and be quiet, because, you know, women.

Blaming and Shaming Teachers for Low-Level Tech Practices

From the vaults, Bill Ferriter with a great piece about moving beyond tech and testing and back to actual real educating.

Facts About Newark Charter Schools

Once again, Mark Weber (Jersey Jazzman) breaks down the data to get past the PR baloney and look at the truth of charter schooling.

Is the US Education System Producing a Society of Smart Fools?

In the Scientific American, a psychologist looks at what's wrong with "reformed" education in the US.

Studies That Honor Preschool Rigor Are Not To Be Trusted

About that NYT coverage of that study showing academic rigor is really swell for four year olds...

Building Better Pre-Schools

Russ Walsh on the same subject-- how should we really be prepping the littles?

A Citizen's Encounter with a Charter School

Gene Glass reports on one more specific example of how charter really work to enrich their owners and trample on parents and students.

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NPE and Charter Schools

12by Peter Greene / 2h

The Network for Public Education has issued a clear, concise and pointed statement about charter schools in the US, and it's worth your eyeball time.* The statement is useful if you have been trying to explain to friends or civilians why, exactly modern charter schools are such a contentious concern. It nails some of the fundamental problems of the charter industry: We believe that taxpayers bear

Treating Teachers The Same Way

6by Peter Greene / 2h

Marc Tucker and Chester Finn have been having a bit of a conversation about a new report about teacher empowerment. We may get to that another day, but among Finn's complaints was this old standard, explaining why the reports recommendations can't work: the teacher unions have demanded and not deviated far from an industrial model in which everyone is treated alike. This is an oft-repeated complai

ICYMI: Graduation Day Edition (6/4)

2by Peter Greene / 3h

Here is my neck of the woods, we're just a few hours away from high school graduation. It's definitely that time of year. Here's your assorted pieces of reading from the week. Remember to pass on the ones that speak to you. These Activists Want Greater Home School Monitoring In the background, as other education debates rage, is the old set of issues surrounding homeschooling. Here's a look at act

YESTERDAY

Paperwork

42by Peter Greene / 1d

Rick Hess had a good piece this week that called back to one of my favorite films-- Hess noticed that much of the ESSA planning rolling in looks suspiciously like TPS report work. But you rarely see the paper-shufflers get as much ink or as many pats on the back as you do in schooling. One of the more striking examples of this is the recent fascination with state plans for the Every Student Succe

JUN 02

US Department of Climate Education

24by Peter Greene / 1d

Trump has taken the odd step of withdrawing from a voluntary agreement; the Paris Accord is non-binding and nations can set their own goals, and Trump's statement had almost nothing to say about the actual climate change concern of the accord, so other than declaring the international equivalent of, "You can't tell me what to do! You're not my real mom!" I'm not sure exactly what Trump was hoping

JUN 01

DeVos, Democracy and Vouchers

66by Peter Greene / 2d

First came the LA Times op-ed co-authored by Randi Weingarten (AFT) and Jonah Edelman (Stand for Children). This in itself is another troubling move by Weingarten (add it to the list) because astroturfist Edelman is no angel when it comes to support of public schools. The op-ed tweaked a lot of antennae because buried in the condemnation of vouchers was a ringing endorsement of charters. Almost in

MAY 31

Angry (tl;dr)

26by Peter Greene / 3d

It's important to remember that America has seen angry, agitated times before. The Civil War, when politicians became so angry they left the country and raised armies to kill each other-- that was a fairly angry time. We've had Presidential campaigns that were hugely vicious and libelous, Hell, as we've all been musically reminded, once upon a time the Vice President of the United States killed a

MAY 30

5 Reasons I Oppose Vouchers

300+by Peter Greene / 4d

Honestly, I had thought that vouchers were pretty much dead and gone and living only in the hearts and minds of determined free market cult members. But since it looks like DeVouchers are on the fast track to Policytown, I want to just list, without a lot of fanfare or my usual gumflappery, the reasons I believe that vouchers are Really Bad Policy. So here's a quick list of five reasons to oppose

The End of May

17by Peter Greene / 4d

My Memorial Day weekend generally contains two major features. One feature is the actual honoring of Memorial Day. Here's how I finished up my morning yesterday. This is the park in my small town. On the left is a the Civil War Monument, one of the first couple put up in Pennsylvania. The large building in the back is our County Courthouse. And on the right, our band stand, where I have played sum

MAY 28

Politics vs. Ed Reform

21by Peter Greene / 6d

Derrell Bradford is the head of NYCAN (and some other CANs too), one of the reformy arms of 50CAN , a reliably reformy group . He turns up in many of the usual reformy places, including Campbell Brown's the74 site, where he recently wrapped up a three-part series about the state of the reform movement, adapted from his speech at the Yale School of Management’s Education Leadership Conference in Ap

ICYMI: Memorial Day Weekend Edition (5/28)

3by Peter Greene / 7d

The best read of the week was actually an eight-part series at Slate about cyber schooling, and that's so important that I gave it its own post. So if you haven't caught that yet, you can find the posts laid out here. And for reasons to cast a 

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6 Ways to Prepare for Next Year Before Students Leave - Teacher Habits

6 Ways to Prepare for Next Year Before Students Leave - Teacher Habits:

6 Ways to Prepare for Next Year Before Students Leave

Because summer vacation should actually feel like a vacation, add these six items to your end-of-the-year to-do list and check them off before students leave. Getting them done will make your summer more enjoyable, and they’ll make the transition to a new year in the fall less stressful.

Get Rid of Stuff

Things accumulate. My stuff tends to pile up in three places: my teacher cabinet, my closet, and my filing cabinets. The hustle and bustle of our busy days means things don’t always get put where they belong. After a materials-intensive project, we might shove things into the closet just to get them out of sight. Worthless worksheets get dropped back into a file folder instead of in the trash where they belong. Dried out highlighters take up residence in our cabinets.

There are three reasons to get rid of stuff while students are still around. First, it cuts down on waste. Students will take just about anything home. A teacher’s detritus in the hands of a student can become a creative craft project. Let them have the empty stapler boxes and orphaned marker caps. Second, students are a source of free labor. Give them the tub of markers and have them test and throw out the duds. You’ll save time and they’ll enjoy doing it. Third, they’re done listening to you anyway. This will give them something productive to do.

Organize Your Files

I have Google Classroom and most of the documents I create throughout the year end up in a big mess. I make sure to find time during the last two weeks to open unnamed files and see if they’re worth keeping (and naming). I put every worthy file into a relevantly-

6 Ways to Prepare for Next Year Before Students Leave - Teacher Habits:

Betsy deVos Stands Tall for Segregated Schools

Betsy deVos Stands Tall for Segregated Schools:

Betsy deVos Stands Tall for Segregated Schools

On May 24th, Secretary of Education Betsy deVos was questioned by a House committee. She was asked whether schools that discriminate should be given taxpayer dollars to help them succeed with discriminating.

She said yes. She said that she believes that parents who don’t want their children going to school with undesirable, less human children, should be allowed to make that decision, and to have taxpayers pay for it.

One Congressmember asked about Lighthouse “christian” Academy in Bloomington, Indiana. The school receives almost a million dollars a year of tax money. Its website says that it teaches that the book of Genesis and Creationism are absolute truths. So science, like evolution or biology, or physics, are both irrelevant and simply wrong.

They also tell parents that they don’t have any programs for students with learning disabilities.

The Lighthouse “christian” Academy is a big, national business. We have several of them around Southern California. All of them teaching both that the Bible is inerrant, and that Jesus was fundamentally wrong on various points. (Logical consistency is not the hobgoblin of “christian” minds.) All of them look forward to Betsy deVos increasing their funding and profits. (Some of them actually claim to be “non-profit businesses”.)

What Betsy deVos said in answer to the Congressmember’s repeated questions (repeated, because deVos really tried to avoid answering) was that parents should have the right to choose schools that they like, and the government shouldn’t interfere with that.

But that wasn’t the question. The question was whether the government should provide tax dollars Betsy deVos Stands Tall for Segregated Schools:

Change and Stability in A Four Decade Career in Teaching (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Change and Stability in A Four Decade Career in Teaching (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

Change and Stability in A Four Decade Career in Teaching (Part 1)

I began teaching history in 1956 in an urban high school and ended my career of full-time teaching at Stanford University in 2001 when I retired (I did teach a graduate seminar every other year as an emeritus professor until 2013). Overall, I taught 14 years as a high school history teacher in two cities at all-black and low-income schools and 25 years as a professor of education working with highly motivated, high-achieving graduate students in a private university. I have taught for 39 years seeing reform after reform sweep by my eyes.[i]

Examining my career as a teacher offers possible insights into how, over time, a teacher working at different levels of schooling continuously changes lessons while maintaining the fundamentals of classroom practice. Sounds like a contradiction at first—change amid stability–but looking closely at one’s life as a teacher may resolve what appears to be a paradox

I make no claim that my reflection on how I managed both change and continuity in over decades of teaching in six public high schools and one university is typical. My experience may well be an outlier. Race, gender, class, the generation within which I was born, and passing through the seasons of a life cycle all have effects on one’s experience that may well differ from others. It is, after all, as my academic colleagues would point out an N=1.

Were there many biographies (or autobiographies) of teachers with sections on how they taught over their careers and the impact of the organization, reform cycles moving through their schools, and life events from marriage, raising children, illness, and death on their teaching, I would be able to position my story within these sources. But such personal descriptions and analyses of teaching over time in different institutions and what occurred in classrooms are sparse. [ii]

For those who prize research-produced knowledge married to experienced-produced knowledge as I do, the limning of one’s career may prove helpful in Change and Stability in A Four Decade Career in Teaching (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

The Sunday Times. | Fred Klonsky

The Sunday Times. | Fred Klonsky:

The Sunday Times.

TFW you're listening to Sean Spicer pic.twitter.com/pSKuxDA6kv

— VICE News (@vicenews) June 3, 2017

The school funding mess in Illinois is a result of bi-partisan mendacity, which is another way of saying elected officials lie whenever they talk about education funding.

While they talk about freezing property taxes, they say nothing about adequately funding the state’s public schools. Relying on property taxes to finance education means the poorest communities in Illinois have less money to spend on their schools and suffer under the highest property tax rates.

It’s a system rigged to benefit wealthy homeowners and wealthy communities, while punishing the working class and small businessman. And it allows elected leaders to escape their constitutional obligation while spending your tax money on other things.

People whine that Illinois has no budget, but this state has shirked its responsibility for decades and few cared because only disadvantaged children suffered. The property tax system is corrupt. Phil Kadner

.

Two years waiting for a harp.

He pays out of his pocket the cost to rent the two harps his students use.

“The kids love it,” Turner said. “It just pulls them in, it pulls them in. And I really hate to have to tell a student we don’t have an instrument that they can learn on if they’re The Sunday Times. | Fred Klonsky:

Selfie Sunday Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all

Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all:

Selfie Sunday Diane Ravitch's blog 

A site to discuss better education for all

The Staff at Sunburst Elementary School: We Love Our School!

2by dianeravitch / 10min

If you wonder why people become teachers and remain in the classroom, watch this vide o created by the teachers at Sunburst Elememtary School in Glendale, Arizona. They are having fun! They have a culture of happiness. Not every public 

Rutgers Professor Prevails Over New Jersey Charter Lobbyists Who Tried to Silence Her

30by dianeravitch / 46min

This is a sordid story with a happy ending. It tells how the deep-pocketed charter industry tried to silence and discredit a scholar who disagreed with them. The story appears in the Nonprofit Quarterly. Professor Julia Sass Rubin is an 

DeVos Shows What Vouchers are About

7by dianeravitch / 56min

When she was questioned by Congress, Betsy DeVos let the cat out of the bag about vouchers. The U.S. Department of Education will hand out money for vouchers and will not enforce civil rights laws. “She lifted the curtain on school 

Harold Meyerson: Why Do Billionaires Care So Much About Charter Schools?

5by dianeravitch / 36min

Harold Meyerson, editor of The American Prospect, raised a question that I have heard dozens of times: Why do billionaires care so much about charter schools ? Why have so many of the 1% decided that charter schools will provide a better education than public schools? Are we to believe that the Walton Family, Eli Broad, Michael Dell, Doris Fischer, Reed Hastings, and many lesser-known billionaire

The Most Important Expose You Will Read Today: The Fringe Right Universe of “Charities”

14by dianeravitch / 1h

The Washington Post published a deeply researched expose today about the “secret universe” of “charities” that fueled the election of Donald Trump. Please understand before reading this that the Internal Revenue Service classifies organizations for tax purposes as 501(c)3 or 501(c)4. When Anthony Cody and I formed the Network for Public Education in 2013, we learned that we had to get IRS approva

YESTERDAY

Marc Tucker Debates Checker Finn on Teacher Quality

19by dianeravitch / 21h

I know the headline is off-putting to teachers. The teachers who read here do not like being condescended to by “experts” who can’t do what they do everyday: teach 25-40 students. Nonetheless, I am interested in hearing your reaction to this discussion. Mark Tucker specializes in studying what top-performing nations do. He and Linda Darling-Hammond have prepared a report called “Empowered Educato

North Carolina: Why Are Low-Income Students Overlooked for Gifted Classes?

8by dianeravitch / 22h

Three reporters at the Charlotte, North Carolina, “New Observer” obtained seven years of student data and began to analyze it. Joseph Neff, Ann Doss Helms, and David Raynor will be using this database to ask more questions, but they began with a straightforward inquiry about why so many low-income students were not encouraged to enroll in challenging courses. They write: “About this time every ye

Mercedes Schneider: The True History of School Choice

15by dianeravitch / 23h

In this post, Mercedes Schneider tries to explain the ludicrous claim that vouchers are more “democratic” that public schools controlled by elected school boards. The choice advocates contend that letting parents choose their child’s school is the height of democracy. They do not admit that the schools choose their students, and some will slam their doors to students who don’t fit. Now with Betsy

Ohio: State Auditor Says Closed Columbus Charter School Owes State $340,000

58by dianeravitch / 1d

The Ohio State Auditor said that a charter school that closed due to mismanagement in 2015 owes the state $340,000. http://www.dispatch.com/news/20170525/ohio-auditor-closed-columbus-charter-school-owes-state-340000 “A North Side charter school that shut its doors in 2015, stranding about 300 students, has not repaid the $340,770 it owes the state, according to an audit released Thursday by state

Stuart Egan: A Letter of Outrage to the N.C. State Superintendent: Whom Do You Serve?

17by dianeravitch / 1d

High school teacher Stuart Egan wrote an open letter to the North Caro,Ina Superintendent of Public Instruction. Mark Johnson. Egan thanked Johnson for his kind words on Teacher Appreciation Week, but wonders why Johnson has 

 Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all:

NYC Educator: Educational Leadership--The Right Person for the Job

NYC Educator: Educational Leadership--The Right Person for the Job:

Educational Leadership--The Right Person for the Job

Every day I read the education stories and some days they are simply amazing. Here's the story of an assistant principal who's a serial liar, scamming teachers for cash with various sob stories, getting caught, and then moving up to a better gig on Long Island.

Long Island, evidently, is a really cool place for aspiring supervisors. I remember the former principal of my daughter's junior high school not only for his overuse of the word, "illustrious," which I found disturbing, but also for getting caught somewhere having non-consensual sex with a 16-year old. Turns out he'd also lied about his criminal record. Go figure.

There's something called Sayre's Law, that posits academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small. I wonder how many of us have seen this at work. I can't think of anyone I know who hasn't come across an abusive supervisor. Of course none of us are perfect, and none of us treat everyone fairly all the time. Some people now believe that the use of rubrics mandates fairness and precludes human shortcoming altogether. Of course those people are idiots.

I'm sensitive to stereotype, particularly since I see it so frequently directed against teachers. I want to be careful not to do the same to supervisors. Much as I hate to admit it, I've had positive relationships with my supervisors for most of my career. I'm also gonna go out on a limb here and admit that not all of us teachers are perfect. Sometimes we make mistakes. Let's take it a step further and admit outright that, despite all our complaints about supervisors, almost all of them come from our own ranks.

As such, we are not blameless. There are those of us on a mission to do whatever the hell we are told. When the DOE says the workshop model, or whatever, is the solution to all the ills of humanity, we do the workshop model every goshdarn day. If they say sit in a rocking chair for fourteen minutes, we make sure not to do it for fifteen, as that would likely as not precipitate the end of the world. I think, to be a good teacher or supervisor, there needs to be some level of vision or imagination independent of the top-down messaging that comes down from city, state, or fed. I can't imagine there are a whole lot of students running around saying, "Boy, that workshop model changed my life.Thank goodness Ms. Grundy used it fourteen minutes every single day without exception."

There are also those of us who long to escape the classroom. That's a hard one for me to fathom, because the most rewarding moments of NYC Educator: Educational Leadership--The Right Person for the Job:

Examining The CCSA Juggernaut: Who Bought Nick Melvoin? – redqueeninla

Examining The CCSA Juggernaut: Who Bought Nick Melvoin? – redqueeninla:

Examining The CCSA Juggernaut: Who Bought Nick Melvoin?

The following graph shows relative voter turnout at the polls (“At-poll”) and via mail (“VBM” == Vote By Mail).

Please refer back and forth to it while reading slowly through the text. It’s not always intuitive what it shows and what it means, but there’s a lot to derive.

The voter results are displayed by voting “neighborhood”. LAUSD’s fourth district is very extended with three distinctly different regions, Hollywood (green type), the westside south of the Santa Monica Mountains (red type), and West Valley north of them (blue type). These are not conventionally bound neighborhoods and many stakeholders understand these designations differently. For this purpose a polling place’s address was assigned the LA Time’s 2008 mapping project’s neighborhood name. Occasionally when a polling place fell just outside of a neighborhood already populated by polling places, it was included with the others across boundaries in the interest of summarizing data.

Categorizing neighborhoods consistently and accurately for all parameters (e.g., votes, LAUSD4 and neighborhood boundaries, ethnicity, median house price) is difficult, but miscategorization “dilutes” the “signal”, resulting in more conservative findings of “less” rather than “more” relationship. This project could easily have assigned neighborhood designations more rigorously but for a big picture, quick understanding and because the resulting bias is likely to be weaker than stronger, it seems acceptable.

The data for each neighborhood are plotted as a function of the relationship between vote ratio for VBM and vote ratio for At-poll ballots.

The VBM (Vote By Mail) ratio of ballots is a single number that relates as a fraction (converted to a decimal for plotting) the number of votes received for Melvoin divided by those received for Zimmer in advance of election day, by mail. If they were equal, that ratio would be 1. If the ratio is >1, then Melvoin received more votes than Zimmer; Melvoin’s VBM support in this neighborhood is stronger than Zimmer’s VBM support. If the ratio is <1 then Zimmer received more votes than Melvoin; Zimmer’s VBM support in this neighborhood is stronger than Melvoin’s. Note these ratios aren’t exactly reciprocal – you can’t have a ratio <0 but you can have a ratio >1 that’s a huge number. This is OK. The numbers never got out-of sight like that.

Likewise the At-poll ballots are displayed as a single number that is a ratio of Melvoin’s/Zimmer’s votes cast at the polling booth on election day. Numbers Examining The CCSA Juggernaut: Who Bought Nick Melvoin? – redqueeninla: