Books:
Ghosts in the Schoolyard, a brilliant study of school closings by Eve Ewing. It tells the story of how students, teachers and whole communities were devastated by the closing of 50 plus schools in Chicago by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2013. Diane Ravitch writes about this amazing book here. Many of Ewing’s findings were also reported in a more purely academic way by a report from the University of Chicago Consortium, which confirmed how students from closing schools experienced long-term negative educational effects. As to Ewing’s book, I can only read a little at a time because it makes me relive in my mind the traumatic hearings on the 100 plus NYC school closings carried out during the Bloomberg years and now the de Blasio administration. It also makes me regret that with all the scholars and authors in the NYC area, no one has written a similar book about the damage down by the NYC school closings.
Bad Blood by John Carreyrou was probably the most enthralling work of non-fiction I read this year, about Theranos, the start-up blood testing company, whose worth was estimated at one time at a billion dollars – an evaluation built solely on exaggeration, fraud and outright lies. Though not about education per se, the book reveals how much of the corporate culture in Silicon Valley is based on hype and overly credulous reporting by the media. This unearned hype is similarly reflected in the popularity of online or “personalized learning” ed tech products in schools throughout the country, despite the lack of any independent research showing they work to improve student outcomes, the risk to student privacy involved, and the growing evidence that they undermine the essential human relationships necessary for real learning.
The recent RAND report on the massive Gates-funded teacher evaluation project in three school districts and four charter management organizations (CMOs) showed that despite spending millions in taxpayer funds to evaluate and compensate teachers based in part on their students’ test scores, these initiatives showed no positive results. In one district in particular - Hillsborough County school – these policies led to near bankruptcy of the district, lower achievement and less access to effective teachers for low-income and minority students.
The Common Core standards have been shown to be a disaster as well, as indicated by stagnant The standards have led to a “lost decade” in which student achievement has not increased for the first time since the NAEPs have been administered. Even the Fordham Institute, the chief Gates-funded cheerleaders for the Common Core, released the results of a national teacher survey,showing that, as many of us warned would happen, the Common Core has indeed driven out classic works of literature, including novels and plays, from the English curriculum, in favor of a rigid quota of “informational texts” . In addition, teachers report that students’ writing skills have worsened, and the Core’s emphasis on “close reading”, with teachers told to refer solely to the assigned text rather provide any factual or historical context, has caused curriculum with real content to be sacrificed to hours of content-free test prep. Their conclusion:
Student Privacy as a dominant concern: From being ignored by most policymakers, student privacy has emerged as one of the most important issues in education since the defeat of inBloom in 2014. With the continued spread of unsafe and unproven data-mining ed tech products, the CONTINUE READING: NYC Public School Parents: Highlights of 2018 in books, education policy and political activism
This means that the 67% of students who scored below proficient on the NAEP’s 8th-grade reading test were not honor students, not that they were “below grade level.” Students who are “proficient” are high achieving students. Students who are “basic” are average, and students who are “below basic” are the ones who are at risk of failure. 67% of students below “proficient” does not mean that 67% failed the test!
In fact, 76% of eighth graders scored at “Basic” or above on the NAEP nationally. That’s still not perfect…and some might argue that it’s not even acceptable, but it’s much better than the mistaken assumption that “67% of eighth graders score below grade level.”
Understand that the increased importance of standardized tests — CONTINUE READING: 2018 Top Ten: Medley #25 – Live Long and Prosper
