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Tuesday, November 5, 2019

Giving schools an honest grade - The Washington Post

Giving schools an honest grade - The Washington Post

Were public schools better way back when? Giving today’s schools an honest grade

By James Harvey and Jack McKay

Roland Chevalier, a former superintendent in St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, liked to describe what he called the “piñata theory” of school reform: Keep beating the schools until good things fall out of them.
It’s discouraging. A steady stream of censure, carping, derogation, and disparagement has been aimed at public schools ever since A Nation at Risk intoned in 1983 that school failure meant, “Our nation is at risk.”
 

The denunciations rest on a three-legged stool of poorly documented claims. Our schools used to be much better. Our students used to learn more. And school failure has undermined American competitiveness as, in the words of A Nation at Risk, “one great American industry after another [has fallen] to world competition.” The Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s teaching in American elementary and secondary schools have a lot to answer for.
Most of that indictment is nonsense. No one denies there are problems in our schools. We’ll get to them. But to lay the effects of globalization at the schoolhouse door is a stretch.
Despite that, demoralized school leaders have often deferred to the judgments of powerful people, no matter how thin and poorly documented the critics’ arguments.
Let’s look at the record.

Schools used to be much better
Really? How can anyone with a straight face claim that the legally segregated schools in the Old South were an improvement over today’s schools? Or that it was acceptable for public schools to refuse to enroll children with disabilities? Are we prepared to abandon nearly 3.5 million young women playing high school sports and return to the day when only about 300,000 did so? Each of these inequities CONTINUE READING: Giving schools an honest grade - The Washington Post

Big Education Ape: John Thompson: Insights on the Origins of “A Nation at Risk”: A Conversation with James Harvey and John Merrow | Diane Ravitch's blog - https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2018/11/john-thompson-insights-on-origins-of.html

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Will Texas be the first for African American studies? | Cloaking Inequity

Will Texas be the first for African American studies? | Cloaking Inequity

WILL TEXAS BE THE FIRST FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES?

Public comments for statewide adoption of African American Studies will be Wednesday, November 13th.  I encourage anyone with interest in the course to speak before our Board on the importance of adoption and maintaining factual integrity.  The curriculum framework can be found here https://www.ginatxsboe1.com/aas.html

Public comments will be considered during the First Reading in January 2020 and Second Reading in April 2020, so please be sure to leave a one-pager and contact information.

You will need to know the specific item number, date, and committee.  The window for registration is Friday, 11/8 at 8am to Monday 11/11 at 5pm.  Each individual will need to register themselves, and there are no limits to how many individuals can register to speak.

I’m truly thankful for your advocacy.

Educationally yours, 

Aicha Davis
Find out more at The Purple Apple by GEORGINA CECILIA PÉREZ
— Read on www.ginatxsboe1.com/purpleapple/african-american-studies-is-on-the-november-agenda

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The new CTU contract, sick days and pensions. – Fred Klonsky

The new CTU contract, sick days and pensions. – Fred Klonsky

THE NEW CTU CONTRACT, SICK DAYS AND PENSIONS
I don’t buy the story that Mayor Lightfoot is Rahm 2.0, plus I supported the teachers and the CTU’s strike demands.
Under their new contract, Chicago Teachers Union members would be able to accrue more than six times as many unused sick days as before.
The tentative agreement reached Thursday between the city, Chicago Public Schools and the CTU allows union members to bank 244 sick days, up from 40.
That’s more than enough days to cover an entire school year — an increase that could allow a longtime employee to retire a year early and still receive their full pension.
The 40-day cap was the result of 2012 contract negotiations following scrutiny of a policy that allowed employees to cash CONTINUE READING: The new CTU contract, sick days and pensions. – Fred Klonsky
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Louisiana Educator: Common Core and Ed Reform; Overwhelming Evidence of Failure

Louisiana Educator: Common Core and Ed Reform; Overwhelming Evidence of Failure

Common Core and Ed Reform; Overwhelming Evidence of Failure

 Louisiana adopted Common Core standards sight unseen.
Louisiana adopted the Common Core State Standards in 2010, before they were even written, partly because the Louisiana power brokers (LABI) and some out-of state billionaires said "the children could not wait". Strong medicine was needed to cure the ills of public education. Our reform oriented leaders thought we could cash in on generous grants offered by the O'Bama administration to implement this scheme without the need for clinical trials.  The only problem was that since there was not enough federal money appropriated to fund all the states that took the plunge on Common Core, only a few states were selected for the grants. Louisiana passed laws, and regulations forcing all our public schools to adopt and implement the standards even though we did not get the grant money. On top of what was done to our students, our teachers were stripped of rights shielding them harm by political influence that had been working well for many years to insure that teachers were treated as professionals.

We would never allow completely untested medicine or drugs to be used on our children; not so with education experiments.
This idea of administering strong untested medicine to cure the ills of education was sort of like how parents used to give their children caster oil and other untested remedies before they had access to modern medicines tested using clinical trials.  Also, today, for education strategies, we have well established methods of field testing and validation before we try new ideas on innocent children. But unfortunately the self appointed education reformers like Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, the Waltons and others who would never use untested practices on there own businesses, decided that CONTNUE READING: Louisiana Educator: Common Core and Ed Reform; Overwhelming Evidence of Failure


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Teaching at D.Tech High School: Chemistry (Part 3) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Teaching at D.Tech High School: Chemistry (Part 3) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Teaching at D.Tech High School: Chemistry (Part 3)
I enter the classroom after Greg Fenner has begun the lesson. Thirty-one students sit at eight scattered tables in a large room adorned with the essential Periodic Table of Elements. A cart filled with tablets sits at one side of the room. Each table seats four students comprising a team for activities and homework that the teacher assigns during a lesson.
Sporting a trim beard and mustache, Fenner wears jeans, blue T-shirt and tan desert boots. He also has a cloth shoulder strap holding a small pouch.  Perched on his head is a pair of goggles. A graduate of a Bay area university’s teacher education program, this is Fenner’s fourth year at d.tech. He lives in San Francisco and often bikes to the city train station, rides to a stop a few miles away from d.tech high school and completes the commute on his bike.
Today is lab day.  Students will be studying chemical reactions using hydrochloric acid and baking soda. They follow instructions in their textbook, Chemistry in the Earth System, a text linked to Next Generation of Science Standards adopted by California.

Lab workbook exercise
A table near where I am sitting holds eight lab trays filled with a thermometer, flask, measuring cylinder, filter paper, beaker, and one pair of goggles. Fenner explains what the strength of the acid is and the importance of being careful when using it in the experiment. He explains students will mix it with sodium hydrogen carbonate (baking soda). He gives safety instructions to the class before one student from each team comes up to get a tray to bring back to the CONTINUE READING: Teaching at D.Tech High School: Chemistry (Part 3) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

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UPDATE: Resisting the Silver Bullet in Literacy Instruction (and Dyslexia): “there is no certifiably best method for teaching children who experience reading difficulty” | radical eyes for equity

Resisting the Silver Bullet in Literacy Instruction (and Dyslexia): “there is no certifiably best method for teaching children who experience reading difficulty” | radical eyes for equity

Resisting the Silver Bullet in Literacy Instruction (and Dyslexia): “there is no certifiably best method for teaching children who experience reading difficulty”
The Mind, Explained episode 1, Memory, introduces readers to some disorienting facts about human memory, transported in the soothing and authoritative voice-over by Emma Stone.
The episode shares a 9-11 memory from a young woman, recalling sitting as a child in her classroom and watching the smoke from the Twin Tower collapse billowing past the window as she worried about her mother working in the city.
Her memory is vivid and compelling, but it also factually wrong—both the detail of the billowing smoke (the window didn’t face that direction and the proximity of the school would not have allowed that event to occur) and her mother was not in the city that day.
Memory, the episode reveals, is often deeply flawed, as much a construction by the person as any sort of accurate recall.
Watching this, I thought about one of the most misinterpreted poems commonly taught in schools, Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.”
This poem, and how people almost universally misread it, is parallel to the problems with memory in that people tend to impose onto text what we predict or want that text to say; and the verbatim elements of a text, the raw decoding of words, also depends heavily on schema, what the reader knows and the correlations that reader makes with words and phrases.
Frost’s poem, by the way, is about the significance of choosing, in that when we choose we determine our path. But the poem literally states multiple times that the paths are the same; therefore, the poem is not some CONTINUE READING: Resisting the Silver Bullet in Literacy Instruction (and Dyslexia): “there is no certifiably best method for teaching children who experience reading difficulty” | radical eyes for equity

On Normal, ADHD, and Dyslexia: Neither Pathologizing, Nor Rendering Invisible | radical eyes for equity - https://wp.me/p2GmBR-9a2 via @plthomasEdD

Image result for Normal, ADHD, and Dyslexia
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UPDATE: A new ranking system for L.A. schools? look like a no-go Board to consider 1-to-5 scale - Los Angeles Times

A new ranking system for L.A. schools? Board to consider 1-to-5 scale - Los Angeles Times

Yelp-like ratings for L.A. public schools look like a no-go. But what’s next?

Jackie Goldberg

By HOWARD BLUME
Students receive grades on their report cards, but should schools also be graded on their performance?
In this era of at-a-glance five-star ratings and numeric rankings, the Los Angeles school board is wrestling with how to fairly assess campuses and present data in an easy-to-understand way.
On Tuesday, a school board majority is expected to reject its first-ever plan to rate schools The next steps are not entirely laid out. But an emerging strategy would use already reported state data and make it more accessible and easier to understand. The state does not rank schools.
Veteran educator Jackie Goldberg, who joined the board via a special election in May, fueled the anti-grading momentum after the plan to rate schools on a scale of 1 to 5 became more widely known in August. The plan was never supported by the unions representing teachers or administrators.
Goldberg contends that simple “summative” ratings are not fair to schools that serve students from low-income families because academic achievement is largely linked to their socioeconomic level.
“There’s nothing wrong with giving people data,” Goldberg said. “But I don’t want to do it a way that displays the ‘good schools’ and displays the ‘bad schools’ and then allows people to say: ‘Let’s punish the bad schools.’ I don’t believe in public humiliation.”
That’s not how board member Nick Melvoin sees it.
“We need a vocabulary to talk about schools that are high- and low-performing,” said Melvoin, who would like to see a summary rating of schools.
Melvoin said that an easy-to-understand, single rating for schools based on a system designed by the district, would be more fair and valid than outside rating websites.
Under the proposed L.A. Unified grading system, elementary and middle schools, for example, would have had 45% of their ratings based on test improvement and 35% on the actual scores. The final 20% would have been based on how well each school is keeping suspension rates low and preventing chronic absenteeism.
Even though such ranking systems have gained political favor, they remain controversial, with experts divided.
Although California no longer applies a single score to a school, most states have moved in the other direction — with 45 using or planning to use some form of CONTINUE READING: Yelp-like ratings for L.A. public schools look like a no-go. But what's next? - Los Angeles Times - https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-11-05/grading-schools-in-los-angeles by @howardblume on @latimes


A new ranking system for L.A. schools? Board to consider 1-to-5 scale


By HOWARD BLUME

Los Angeles Unified is considering its first-ever plan to provide a rating scale for public schools and privately run charters, a move aimed at giving parents and educators simple and accessible analysis of campus performance, documents reviewed by The Times show.
If it moves forward, the effort to rate schools on a scale of 1 to 5 would allow for a direct comparison of academic programs in a way that would benefit some schools and present others in an unflattering light. The proposal is already raising red flags among critics who say such simplified ratings would be unfair to some schools.
“Schools are not restaurants and should NOT be rated!” said Juan Flecha, president of the school administrators union, in an email. “I think this is demoralizing and a slap to all of the dedicated employees of schools receiving one, two, and three stars.”
The system, which could roll out as soon as October, appears to have lukewarm support from Supt. Austin Beutner and mixed support from Board of Education members.
“We have to, as a district, get comfortable talking about results,” said board member Nick Melvoin, who supports the proposed system.
The goal is to allow all schools to be compared “side by side with consistent data,” according to documents. Most of a school’s score would be based on students’ performance on state standardized tests. More credit would be given for a school’s test improvement rate rather than the scores.
At elementary and middle schools, 45% of a rating would be based on test improvement and 35% on the score. The final 20% would be based on how well the school is keeping suspension rates low and preventing chronic absenteeism.
At the high school level, 40% of the rating would be based on a school’s test improvement and 25% on scores. Again, 20% would be based on suspension numbers and absenteeism. Another 15% would take in factors including the graduation rate, the percentage of students who qualify for admission to a four-year state college and student performance on the standardized exams related to Advanced Placement courses.
The formula takes into account how well smaller groups, such as Latinos or African American students, are faring. If such a group is doing especially poorly, it would count against the school’s overall number.
The new School Performance Framework is an outgrowth of a resolution passed by the school board on April 10, 2018, several weeks before Beutner was hired. It was brought forward by Melvoin and Kelly Gonez.
Melvoin said he expects the system to be in effect by October, when parents will be using a relatively new online application for magnet schools and other programs.
“We need a vocabulary to talk about schools that are high- and low-performing,” as well as which schools are having more success with similar students, Melvoin said. “There is this myth that we already know this information. If we know this and are not doing something about it, then that’s a problem. I actually don’t think we know this.”
On that part, Beutner is in agreement.
“We need as much information as possible for those in the school community — for school leaders — to understand where the opportunities are, to understand what CONTINUE READING: A new ranking system for L.A. schools? Board to consider 1-to-5 scale - Los Angeles Times

Big Education Ape: See how closely Ohio school report card grades trend with district income - cleveland.com - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2019/09/see-how-closely-ohio-school-report-card.html



Big Education Ape: State School Rankings and School Report Cards Drive Racial and Economic Segregation | janresseger - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2019/06/state-school-rankings-and-school-report.html
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Audio: A Lesson From Indiana About L.A.'s Proposed School Rating System | 89.3 KPCC

Audio: A Lesson From Indiana About L.A.'s Proposed School Rating System | 89.3 KPCC

A Lesson From Indiana About L.A.'s Proposed School Rating System
L.A. Unified School District officials have been developing a system to give each of its schools a grade — a single, overall rating of its academic performance.
But the idea has been controversial, and on Tuesday, the LAUSD board could vote to end the project.
Big Education Ape: State School Rankings and School Report Cards Drive Racial and Economic Segregation | janresseger - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2019/06/state-school-rankings-and-school-report.html
The district considered the idea because California is one of the rare states that does not issue ratings, labels, or even letter grades to schools.
Every year, 45 states issue school ratings — including Indiana, where a 2013 scandal about the state's A-F letter grade ratings holds lessons about how school rating systems work.
Audio: A Lesson From Indiana About L.A.'s Proposed School Rating System | 89.3 KPCC
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Monday, November 4, 2019

When Facts Get In The Way, Change Them - Carl J. Petersen - Medium

When Facts Get In The Way, Change Them - Carl J. Petersen - Medium

When Facts Get In The Way, Change Them


When Six Flags purchased two identical Intamin Impulse Coasters in 2001, they placed one of them in Marine World (now Discovery Kingdom) in Vallejo, California. The ride’s height surpassed the city’s limitation of 150 feet so they solved the problem by changing the marketing. The press release announcing the coaster being built at Six Flags Great America stated that “the vehicle rockets up a 185-foot spiral tower”. It then went on to state that “after traversing the first peak, the guests swoop backward through the station and up a second, 185-foot tower.” However, the Marine World release touted the identical roller coasters as having “two 150-foot vertical sky towers.” Both rides were described as having a “630 feet of U-shaped” track.
Eventually, Vallejo city officials noticed that there were 35 additional feet of steel on each of the coaster’s two towers. Before opening in 2002, the coaster was modified so that it conformed to the city’s building codes.
Trump’s fans are more gullible than the city of Vallejo. They think that their president has saved the economy even if it has been almost five years since the GDP grew by 5.5% in a quarter. Also, by this point in the Obama presidency, stocks had risen by 50.6%. Trump’s supporters think that he is doing better with a growth of 37.7%. Even with the tax cuts that plunged our country deeper into debt, 1.493 million fewer jobs were created during Trump’s first 31 months in office than in Obama’s last 31 months.
The willful ignorance of the Trump base is a direct result of his mastery of branding. Before the public even had a chance to see the Mueller Report, he had his Attorney General mischaracterize the findings by stating that there was “no collusion, no obstruction.” It was a message repeated ad nauseam by the President and his fellow purveyors of fake news. When the report was finally released it did not matter that Mueller had actually shown that Trump and his campaign had committed both.
The same strategy is being used as Trump edges towards becoming the third president in American history to be impeached. His supporters cling to a narrative that ignores the contents of a transcript between the American and Ukrainian presidents to claim “no quid pro quo.” Trump himself has become so invested in the lie about his “perfect call” that he reportedly would like to read the evidence against him aloud in a nationally televised fireside chat.
Unfortunately, the virus that creates false realities has not been isolated to the White House. In Los Angeles, School Board Member Nick Melvoin was caught red-handed conspiring with the charter school industry to hand over CONTINUE READING: When Facts Get In The Way, Change Them - Carl J. Petersen - Medium
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