We Are All Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf I just finished reading A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School , by Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider . Berkshire and Schneider are co-hosts of the podcast Have You Heard , which is the best $2 I spend every month—and, as journalist and historian, both bring interesting perspectives to the ongoing di
Does Your School Suffer From Advanced Testivitis In some quarters we seem to have cycled back around to the old argument that the Big Standardized Test provides an assortment of necessary data with no actual downside, so
Ex-teacher’s union boss makes play to be Biden’s Education chief Lily Eskelsen García is courting key Hispanic groups and even GOP senators. The former president of the nation's largest teachers union is working to lock up support from Republican senators and Hispanic leaders in her bid to be picked as Education secretary, according to officials familiar with the talks. Lily Eskelsen García is e
"Bye-bye, Betsy DeVos. You won't be missed," says Sanders to billionaire education secretary Sanders calls DeVos "the worst education secretary in the history of America" as she attacks tuition-free college Sen. Bernie Sanders late Tuesday called Betsy DeVos "the worst education secretary in the history of America" and made abundantly clear that he's not mourning her imminent departure after the
False Beliefs It's not just possible, but likely, that for most of us, most of the time, we possess the necessary intelligence, but are hindered by a false belief. For instance, most physicists have given up on the reality of the existence of space and time, yet we've lived our entire lives convinced that spacetime exists. Indeed, we can't even conceive of it, any more than we can envision a col
Bob Shepherd: The Standardized Testing Hoax Bob Shepherd, a frequent commenter here, has been a curriculum writer, as assessment developer, a publisher, and a classroom tea her. As frequent readers of this log know, he is also a polymath, with a broad, nearly encyclopedic range of knowledge. In this essential post , he explains why standardized testing is invalid and useless for accountability p
Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007 Big Education Ape: THIS WEEK IN EDUCATION Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... The latest news and resources in education since 2007 - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2020/11/this-week-in-education-larry-ferlazzos_28.html Friday’s Must-Read Articles & Must-Watch Videos On School Closures by Lar
Will the State Senate Punish Ohio’s 1.6 Million Public School Students by Letting School Funding Reform Die? The Ohio House Finance Committee voted unanimously (32-0) on Wednesday to refer Substitute House Bill 305, the proposal for a new Fair School Funding Formula, to the full Ohio House for approval. And late yesterday afternoon, t he Ohio House of Representatives passed the bill by huge marg
5 Things We've Learned About Virtual School In 2020 Deborah Rosenthal starts her virtual kindergarten class on Zoom every morning with a song — today, it's the Spanish version of, "If You're Happy and You Know It." Her students clap along. There's a greeting from the class mascot (a dragon), yoga, meditation and then some practice with letter sounds: "Oso, oso, O, O, O". Rosenthal teaches Spanis
New Jersey's School COVID-19 Operating Plans: Still Racially Biased, Still Inadequately Funded For Many Students Earlier this year , I posted about the racial inequities in New Jersey's school reopening plans, which were all affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Following that blog post, I used some updated data, refined my analysis a bit, and wrote about it over at the NJPP website . In both of th
Beware of Fake Colleges. Learn to Recognize Them. My seniors are in the process of considering postsecondary education, and given the proliferation of fraudulent sites purporting to offer postsecondary degrees (and the reality that online education is increasingly attractive during a pandemic), it is important for graduates and their parents to know identifiers of potentially fraudulent or other
Register for the California STEAM Symposium - Year 2020 (CA Dept of Education) #CASTEAM20 Keynote Speakers and Early Registration Prizes Announced! New Off-Site Monitoring Best Practices Fact Sheets - Nutrition (CA Dept of Education) - https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/nu/newoffsitemonfactsheet.asp REDWOOD CITY—Give yourself the gifts of community, inspiration, and revitalization by joining us at this ye
What Parents Need Now Are Threats, Says Mayor Given that students can't fail, don't have to hand in work, and are given an extra year to catch up on classes, it's odd to see Mayor de Blasio out there making demands of parents. The mayor is eager to get some of his woefully overcrowded schools open five days a week for the 35% of city students who've opted into live education. So he's saying if y
Big Education Ape THE TOP BANANA TODAY'S EDUCATION HEADLINES Continuous improvement: Rethink how we measure student progress - https://hechingerreport.org/?p=75771 via @hechingerreport Betsy DeVos
It’s not a long book—217 pages plus another 40 pages of notes and references—and it’s eminently readable. It would be an excellent choice for anyone who cares about public education—parents and grandparents, policy-makers, teachers and school leaders—to use as concise handbook explaining what the hell happened to public schools over the last couple of decades. There’s a bit of history, a good look at failed-over-time policies, and a clear analysis of the intersecting factors that got us to this point.
Who wants to see public education die, and why? Berkshire and Schneider tell you, but like all interesting and disturbing stories, you have to trace backward first, to the origins and mission of public schooling and the conflicting values America assigned to education, as a start-up nation. This sounds tedious, but it’s not. In short, succinct chapters, the authors spend the first quarter of the book laying the groundwork for the rapid changes—the dismantling of a once-noble idea—we’ve seen in the 21st century.
Big Education Ape: 100th Episode: A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door – Have You Heard - https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2020/10/100th-episode-wolf-at-schoolhouse-door.html
In some quarters we seem to have cycled back around to the old argument that the Big Standardized Test provides an assortment of necessary data with no actual downside, so let's trot those puppies out here for this already-maimed year. I've spent a bunch of time talking about why the tests provide no actual benefit (here, here and here, for example), but let me take a moment to look at the other half of the problem.
Depending on your state and local leadership, your school may be suffering from the advanced stages of Testivitis, an untreated and damaging condition that is damaging to schools and the students in them. Here are the symptoms to watch for:
Upside Down School
Underlying most of the symptoms listed here is one major shift-- a school in the grip of testivitis is upside down. It is not run to serve the needs of students; it is run to get the students to serve the school's need for certain scores. And it will beat on those students like test-taking pinatas in an attempt to get the "right" scores to fall out. This apparently includes considering actions like requiring students to break pandemic distancing in order to come to school and take the test.
Test Prep
It has long been a contention of BS Test manufacturers that their products cannot be "prepped" for, but what they mean is that you can't pre-load a list of facts to get students ready. Nowadays, test CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Does Your School Suffer From Advanced Testivitis
Ex-teacher’s union boss makes play to be Biden’s Education chief
Lily Eskelsen García is courting key Hispanic groups and even GOP senators.
The former president of the nation's largest teachers union is working to lock up support from Republican senators and Hispanic leaders in her bid to be picked as Education secretary, according to officials familiar with the talks.
Lily Eskelsen García is expected to score the backing of more than 40 Hispanic groups finalizing a letter endorsing her for the position this week. She has also strategized in recent weeks with Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the retiring chair of the Senate committee that oversees education and himself a former Education secretary.
We’ve talked with her and gave her advice on how to get bipartisan support,” said David Cleary, Alexander’s chief of staff and veteran of education policy on Capitol Hill. “There’s a good argument to be made for Lily.”
The National Hispanic Leadership Agenda, a collection of more than 40 Hispanic groups who have coalesced around Eskelsen García, are set to deliver their letter to the Biden team on Thursday or Friday.
Eskelsen García, who until this summer was president of the 3 million-member National Education Association, has also had conversations with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to build support for her nomination, according to a person familiar with those discussions. She would be the first Latina Education secretary if selected and currently serves as secretary of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute.
The former union president is one of many potential Cabinet nominees jockeying for positions as President-elect Joe Biden builds out the leadership ranks of his administration. While most of those hopefuls, like Eskelsen García CONTINUE READING: Ex-teacher’s union boss makes play to be Biden’s Education chief - POLITICO
"Bye-bye, Betsy DeVos. You won't be missed," says Sanders to billionaire education secretary
Sanders calls DeVos "the worst education secretary in the history of America" as she attacks tuition-free college
Sen. Bernie Sanders late Tuesday called Betsy DeVos "the worst education secretary in the history of America" and made abundantly clear that he's not mourning her imminent departure after the billionaire school privatization zealot lashed out at popular proposals to cancel student loan debt and make public colleges and universities tuition-free.
"What do you call a billionaire who registered a $40 million, 164-foot yacht in the Cayman Islands to avoid $2.4 million in U.S. taxes, while undermining public schools? The worst education secretary in the history of America," tweeted the Vermont senator, a leading proponent of student debt cancellation and tuition-free higher education. "Bye-bye, Betsy DeVos. You won't be missed."
In a speech at an Education Department financial aid conference on Tuesday, the outgoing education secretary dismissed as "government gift-giving" proposals to forgive crippling student loan debt and eliminate tuition for public colleges and universities.
"We've heard shrill calls to cancel, to forgive, to make it all free. Any innocuous label out there can't obfuscate what it really is: Wrong," said DeVos, who last year proposed handing the federal government's $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio over to a "stand-alone government corporation." Critics slammed the proposal as an attempt to prevent the next president from canceling any of the debt.
It's not just possible, but likely, that for most of us, most of the time, we possess the necessary intelligence, but are hindered by a false belief. For instance, most physicists have given up on the reality of the existence of space and time, yet we've lived our entire lives convinced that spacetime exists. Indeed, we can't even conceive of it, any more than we can envision a color we've never seen before or a fragrance we've never smelt.
It seems odd that we can't "see" something as fundamental as that, yet as cognitive psychologist and author Steven Pinkler writes, "Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness." Prior to Charles Darwin, natural selection itself was hidden from us by our false beliefs rather rather than our lack of intelligence.
The field of education is rife with false beliefs. We see it in our reliance on testing and grades, our knee-jerk belief in the incompetence of children and their need for our constant supervision and intervention. We see it in our expectation that children, simply by virtue of similar birth dates, can and will learn the same things at the same time via the same methods. And we see it in our reliance upon adult-created curriculum instead of their natural curiosity, which is how CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: False Beliefs
