Monday, May 23, 2011

Modern School: LA Mayor: Screw Teachers, We Don’t Really Need ‘Em

LA Mayor: Screw Teachers, We Don’t Really Need ‘Em

by Michael Dunn

Teaching was already a tremendously difficult job, even before the current onslaught of anti-teacher propaganda and legislation. The test-taking orgy that has permeated the profession for the past decade has added phenomenal pressure on teachers to make students succeed, despite the overwhelming evidence that test scores are influenced far more by students’ socioeconomic background than their teachers and schools. On top of that, the job is so poorly remunerated that many refuse to go into teaching in the first place. The job is so difficult that half of all teachers quit within their first five years and look for less stressful or higher paying work.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa proposed exacerbating this problem in a speech on Thursday, calling for a four-year probationary period before teachers can earn tenure and linking their evaluations and tenure requests to students’ test scores. Currently, it takes two

California Leads Nation in Inequality

by Michael Dunn

A new report out by the American Human Development Project indicates that while some Californians enjoy some of the highest living standards in the world, large sectors of the state are living in poverty, dying prematurely and being left behind in school. The report was based on data from the United Nations Human Development Index, which looks at indicators of health, wealth and education (see here).

Reuters, which wrote about the report today, says that the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles has only recently attained levels of prosperity comparable to the national average in 1965, making it still one of the poorest communities in the country. According to Reuters, a companion study found that Fresno is the nation’s worst-off congressional district, contrary to

This Week In Education: Best 5 Blogs: Debating Valerie Strauss (& Education)

Best 5 Blogs: Debating Valerie Strauss (& Education)

by Alexander Russo

Valerie Strauss is the Lou Dobbs of Education Jay P. Greene: Just as CNN needed a reinvented Dobbs to capture some of the audience attracted to O’Reilly at Fox, maybe WaPo needed a reinvented Strauss to capture some of the readers attracted to Ravitch and Eduwonkette... Teach Plus changes Web site to reflect reality Valerie Strauss: Today the nonprofit organization Teach Plus changed its “Why We Exist” statement on its Web site in regard to the importance of teachers in student success... A Times DerbyEducation Next: How did we get to the point where we now can’t teach kids unless we first fix their parents and make them middle class? Cheaters Cheaters...Everywhere? Luke Kohlmoos: It is statements like these that

Cartoons: Leveling The Playing Field -- Through Budget Cuts

by Alexander Russo

Via Slate

Sabrina Stevens Shupe: Why I'm Marching

by Sabrina Stevens Shupe

"The development of common standards and shared assessments radically alters the market for innovation in curriculum development, professional development, and formative assessments. Previously, these markets operated on a state-by-state basis, and often on a district-by-district basis. But the adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale."
-- Joanne Weiss, chief of staff to Education Secretary Duncan and former CEO of the New Schools Venture Fund

When I talk to teachers, students and parents, and when I think about education policy and politics, two simple questions almost always come to the fore.
• If America needs to reform its public schools, why aren't public school teachers, students and families leading the education reform movement?
• If teachers, students and public school families are most familiar with the problems with our current school system, why aren't our voices being heard when we question education policy, or suggest better alternatives?

For years, public school stakeholders have struggled with the burden of reform policies they had little hand in

Alfie Kohn: What Parents Aren't Asked in School Surveys -- and Why

by Alfie Kohn

The results of an opinion poll will vary -- and not by a little -- as a function of how the questions are phrased. "Do you favor special preferences for minorities in the form of affirmative action?" will attract many fewer favorable responses than "Do you favor efforts to help minorities get ahead in order to make up for past discrimination?" And then, of course, there are "push polls," which only pretend to sample people's views while attempting to influence them: "Would you be more or less likely to vote for Congressman McDoodle if you knew he was a practicing Satanist?"

I find myself thinking about how much more -- and less -- there is to polling than meets the eye whenever I come across one of those surveys that school administrators like to distribute to parents. I have to assume these are not intended as the equivalent of push polls, that there's a sincere desire to be responsive to the community and

Make Wall Street Pay. « Fred Klonsky's blog

Make Wall Street Pay.

by Fred Klonsky

Photo credit: Jed Brandt

My friend Amanda writes:

I’m writing to ask for your help today. A group of NPA affiliates and allies (the org I work for) are starting to do some kick ass work around the budget cuts and revenue crisis in Illinois. They are calling themselves “Make Wall Street Pay Illinois” and are headed to Springfield tomorrow to push

California School Funding: What’s Different Now That The May Revise Has Been Released?

by cynthia

What’s different for the grassroots movement to fund schools with a 2/3 legislative vote by extending revenues, now that the May revise has been released? In short, nothing. Keep calling State Senators and Assemblymembers, and visiting your legislators in their district offices. School funding is still at risk, because while the unanticipated tax windfall helps in school year ’11-’12, it doesn’t address the long-term funding cliff schools still face after June 30, 2011.

Let me back up. The “May revise” happens every year, when the governor reviews the state’s financial picture after spring tax collection, and reissues his statement on the budget before the books must be closed out at the end of the state’s fiscal year on the last day of June.

Popout

The Legislative Analyst’s Office has this to say:

The administration identifies a $9.6 billion remaining budget problem based on generally reasonable 2010-11 and 2011-12 revenue and expenditure assumptions. The Governor’s plan to

The Effects of Having Undocumented Immigrants as Parents: A Study - Hispanically Speaking News

The Effects of Having Undocumented Immigrants as Parents: A Study

A report from a Harvard developmental and community psychologist has revealed how being undocumented parents effects the lives of their children.

In a recent Congressional briefing on “Children in Immigrant Families,” Prof. Hirokazu Yoshikawa of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, stated, “Citizen children of undocumented parents show lower levels of early language and cognitive skills as early as at 2 years of age.”

“These parents were afraid to enroll their kids in learning opportunities like high-quality center care and particularly the child care subsidies that would help purchase that form of care. And that’s because child care subsidies, for one thing, in our country require confirmation of earnings and employment. And despite the fact that these families were making such low level of earnings, that they more than qualified for subsidies for their citizen children, they were afraid to enroll their kids,” said Prof. Yoshikawa to NPR’s Michel Martin.

“In many cases, with the undocumented moms and dads, our field workers were the first to tell them about

Washington Post: “DCPS leaves consultant Caveon's toolbox shut in test cheating allegation inquiry”

by admin

From Bill Turque’s article in the Washington Post.

“Let’s say there are signs of a serious problem in your house. Water is dripping from ominous stains that are spreading across the ceiling. Maybe there’s mold in the basement. Or cracks in the walls that weren’t there before. You hire the best contractor you can find.

And you ask him to paint the fence in the front yard.

That’s how skeptics characterize DCPS’ approach to investigating possible cheating on the 2010 DC CAS. It retained Caveon Test Security –as it did after the 2009 CAS–to look at classrooms with high rates of wrong-to-right erasures. But like the homeowner with signs of big trouble behind the walls, Acting Chancellor Kaya

Schools Matter: The Lose-Lose of Value-Added (EVAAS) in Houston

The Lose-Lose of Value-Added (EVAAS) in Houston

by Jim Horn

Terry Grier brought with him to Houston a fixation for test scores that he learned in Guilford, NC, where he came under the spell of former adjunct professor and agricultural statistician, Bill Sanders, who created there a vast subsidiary for SAS, Inc. in school testing--the value-added variety. The Sanders brand, EVAAS, has become so big, in fact, that Sanders has moved from the SAS campus back to Ground Zero in TN, where he got his start and where there are now a half-billion reasons, thanks to RttT, to get EVAAS sewn into the fabric of Test Scores Gone Wild--the Tennessee Version.

He did the same for his TVAAS brand in the 1980s, when he managed to get his proprietary statistical wizardry added to the Tennessee Code Annotated as THE algorithm to be used for testing kids. No doubt he is fantasizing about getting it into federal law at this point.

Now it is teachers who are to be evaluated based on the Sanders scheme, and Sanders couldn't care less about

NYC Public School Parents: No Child Left Behind From the Rapture

No Child Left Behind From the Rapture

by Gary Babad

May 23, 2011 (GBN News): The world did not end last Saturday, but the US Department of Education was prepared just in case it did. GBN News has learned that a whopping $100 billion of the Department’s Race to the Top money was secretly put aside to restructure the nation’s schools in the event of the apocalypse.

The plan was said to have been modeled after the way the New Orleans schools were turned around after Hurricane Katrina. Education Secretary Arne Duncan was poised to take full advantage of the fact that most public school buildings would be destroyed by earthquakes, and that with the world ending, the issue of teachertenure would be rendered all but moot.

Unlike New Orleans after Katrina, however, the best students would probably be admitted to heaven instead of to charter schools. Mr. Duncan would thus have to

it's okay to be takei! | angry asian man

it's okay to be takei!

Last week, the Tennessee State Senate approved S.B. 49, better known as the "Don't Say Gay" bill, which prohibits teachers from discussing homosexualityin classrooms. Not even a mention. Which is friggin' ridiculous. But it's cool, because actor/activist George Takei has a plan, and it rhymes. Don't say gay -- say Takei! George explains:

That's right. George Takei is literally lending his name to the cause. Don't worry, Tennessee. You can use "Takei" as a handy substitute for the word gay. He's even opened up an official online store with shirts and mugs and buttons so you can show your Takei Pride. It's okay to be Takei!

More here: The One: George Takei Reacts To Tennessee's 'Don't Say Gay' Bill. And you can follow Mr. Takei on Twitter here.

angrylink | share

Teach Plus changes Web site to reflect reality - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post

Teach Plus changes Web site to reflect reality

by Valerie Strauss

Today the nonprofit organization Teach Plus, which was highlighted in a New York Times story over the weekend about the influence of Bill Gates in education reform, changed its “Why We Exist” statement on its Web site in regard to the importance of teachers in student success.

Previously, the statement said:

“Research makes clear that teachers are the most important variable in student success, yet the profession is not organized to reward excellence, promote teacher development, or retain top performers in the classroom.”

Read full article >>

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Remembering the Creepinator's idiotic "girly men" remarks

Remembering the Creepinator's idiotic "girly men" remarks

by Mike Klonsky

Looking back and remembering Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2004 speech to the GOP Convention. He ridiculed those who lacked optimism about the state of the economy, calling them "economic girly men" which brought the conventioneers to their feet with giddy applaud. He had previously used this line to attack Democrats for being soft on unions.

As it turned out of course, it was Arnold and the Republicans who were leading the country into the economic

Bloomberg Unmasked « EdVox

Bloomberg Unmasked

by edvoxny

By Norm Fruchter

Responding to the filing of a lawsuit challenging his Department of Education’s school closing and charter co-location policies, Mayor Bloomberg let loose a mini-tirade on WOR-AM last week. “Unfortunately there are some parents who just come from —“ the Mayor said, and then cut off the rest of his sentence. One wonders about the intended conclusion — did the Mayor mean to say ignorance? Poverty? Ghetto neighborhoods? Other countries with little or no public schooling? “They never have had a formal education,” the Mayor continued, “and they don’t understand the value of education. Many of our kids come from families – “ again the Mayor cut himself off, and again one wonders about his suppressed conclusion. Instead, the Mayor finished with an odd observation — “the old Norman Rockwell family is gone.”
Norman Rockwell was an artist and illustrator of hundreds of covers for the Saturday Evening Post. Much of his work presented idealized portraiture of sentimental American themes – baseball, scouting life, children’s bedtime, though a few of his Post covers commented on the integration struggle and the murders of civil rights workers in Mississippi. Was the Mayor mourning the demise of the Dick-and-Jane white family that Rockwell

We’re Not Getting Paid « Cooperative Catalyst

We’re Not Getting Paid

by Kirsten Olson

Over here at the COOP, we’re not getting paid to “influence” the reform discourse in education.

Are we ever missing the gravy train.

Returning from a weekend practicing mindfulness for educators (so wrong side of the tracks), I blithely take some deep breaths, settle onto my ergonomic knee chair, and catch up on my emails from the last two days. Only to discover, to the detriment of our personal bank accounts, that none of us here at the COOP, have been receiving half a million dollars a year from the Gates Foundation, to personally influence public opinion to promote favored educational reform initiatives.

In an straightforward, just-the-facts-ma’am expose in the Sunday New York Times, Sam Dillon takes the reader through the rise of “The Big Three” educational foundation’s increasing focus on not just funding projects strategically designed to affect the shape of educational reform, but to influence the formation of opinion about those projects themselves. “We’ve learned that school-level investments aren’t enough to drive systemic changes,” the Times article quotes the president of the Gates Foundation’s United States program saying. “The

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka at the National Press Club - FULL SPEECH

AFLCIONow on May 20, 2011

President Trumka gives a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., outlining the tough questions America faces, the anti-worker actions in Wisconsin, Ohio and other states and the need to fix America's moral deficit

Category:

Nonprofits & Activism

Hechinger Report | A for-profit approach to Head Start

A for-profit approach to Head Start

by Sarah Garland

At St. Elizabeth's Head Start in North Philadelphia, Aaron Lieberman, founder and chief executive officer of Acelero Learning Inc., spends some time with the children in Ashley Post's classroom. (Photo by CLEM MURRAY / Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer)

On a recent spring morning at the St. Elizabeth’s Head Start center in North Philadelphia, Ashley Post, a first-year teacher freshly graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, clicked on her “listening ears” and patted down her “thinking cap” as a room full of 15 preschoolers imitated her every move.

Many of the children were here last year, but most of the adults in the room – including Post, the center director, the curriculum manager, and a Teach For America mentor taking notes on Post’s lesson – are brand new, along

Opponents of New Orleans school reform gaining ground, supporters | NOLA.com

Opponents of New Orleans school reform gaining ground, supporters

Published: Monday, May 23, 2011, 7:00 AM

By Andrew Vanacore, The Times-Picayune

Lee Barrios, a retired middle school teacher from Mandeville, is a scathing critic of what's happened to New Orleans public schools since Hurricane Katrina.

Chris Granger, The Times-PicayuneState Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek, left, and outgoing Recovery School District Superintendent Paul Vallas, right, step aside to let John White, center, the new RSD superintendent, walk through a doorway at a news conference in April. Opponents of school reform in New Orleans have criticized White's selection, one calling him "whollly unqualified."

Barrios calls the Recovery School District, the state body that took over most of the city's schools in the storm's wake, a failure and would like to see it abolished. She looks on charter schools, which are publicly funded but run by independent nonprofits, as money-making schemes. And she excoriates Teach for America, the national group that recruits promising college graduates to serve in schools with needy children, for putting, in her view, under-qualified instructors in classrooms.

When the state board that oversees the RSD met to approve the new superintendent last month, Barrios condemned the state's pick, John White, as "wholly unqualified."

To be sure, all this puts Barrios far to one end of the spectrum of opinion on school reform. But she's part of a broad push-back that has materialized this spring against changes in the way

How to reform education: The answer song - Tucson Progressive

How to reform education: The answer song

by Pamela Powers on May. 23, 2011, under Arizona, Arizona Legislature, Capitalism,education, equality, progressive, Tucson, TUSD, unions

This week thousands of Arizona high school seniors will don caps and gowns and receive their high school diplomas, while others who successfully completed 12 years of schooling but failed the state’s infamous AIMS test will be left feeling dejected and betrayed by our failing public education system. How can students pass all 12 grades and not pass the high-stakes test? What happens to these students now? These are but a few symptoms of Arizona’s broken educational system.

Perhaps also reflecting on graduation day and the state’s failing school system, the Arizona Republic recently published an editorial on education reform: 5 vital ways to reform K-12 education.

The five suggestions read like a right-wing wish list: 1) competition; 2) high expectations; 3) quality teachers; 4) intelligent use of technology; and 5) private sector involvement. Not