178 teachers and 38 principals in one Atlanta's best performing school districts have just been caught participating in "a massive test cheating scandal," revealed by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. According toColor Lines, "The GBI investigation confirmed cheating in 44 of 56 public schools they looked into. Eighty teachers confessed to participating in the district's cheating." The district garnered a lot of attention in recent years for significant hikes in standardized test scores. The GBI's report suggests that the cheating could have been spurred by "politicians and school officials [who] set and enforced unreasonable targets for yearly testing progress that were to be met at any cost. This in turn helped institute a culture of fear and intimidation throughout the district." Back in October of 2010, after the investigation had just gotten under way, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan insisted that Atlanta city schools Superintendent Beverley Hall and Governor Sonny Perdue "were dedicated to what was best for the children" and emphasized the "double-digit gains" made by Atlanta students on the national exams. "Whatever the outcome of the state investigation, these accomplishments should not go unrecognized," he told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Now, Color Lines writes, those accomplishments are being questioned.
Educator Diane Ravitch, author of "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education," comments on the recently uncovered, decade-long cheating scandal in the Atlanta school system.
Atl. cheating scandal renews school reform debate
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RSSTired of being scapegoats for all the ills of the public schools, 200 teachers from 15 states, Puerto Rico, Canada, and Mexico were in Chicago July 6 for the National Conference to Fight Back for Public Education.
The attendees—and there were more of them than organizers had expected—came for a variety of reasons. All were upset about the attacks on teachers and students. Some were already leading fights against the attacks as reform officers in their locals. Many wanted to find out how fights were being carried out in other cities. Others were dissatisfied with their locals or their national unions.
Rob Panning-Miller, a Minneapolis high school teacher, said he wanted to hear from the horse’s mouth how various “reforms” such as charter schools and new forms of teacher evaluation are playing out on the ground for classroom teachers. What he hears from his union’s national leaders about changes in particular cities, he said, is often quite different from what teachers in that city have to say.
Many at the meeting saw a lack of leadership in their national organizations, the NEA and AFT, which have reacted to the demonization of teachers by endorsing too many elements of President Obama’s “Race to the Top” agenda for schools. That agenda relies on standardized testing, substitutes merit pay for seniority, strips teacher tenure,
It is hypocritical for pundits who favor for their own children, expensive schooling with diverse curriculum, small class size and little standardized testing (freeing teachers to be professionals), to argue for less money, class size increases and increased standardized testing (and teacher evaluation based on those tests) when it comes to other peoples’ children.Yes, I too personally favor expensive private schooling for the reasons I’ve indicated above. And yes, my private school significantly outspends both the elite suburban public school district where I live and New Jersey’s reasonably well funded urban districts (compared to other states, see: www.schoolfundingfairness.org). The way I see it, I would not just be a hypocrite, but a complete a-hole if I used my pulpit (what little pulpit I have) as a school finance expert to argue that we should be spending less on others, advocating different policies for others than I desire for myself. But it’s precisely because I spend my day buried
If you took at face value the press release that D.C. Public Schools issued about the just-released results of the 2011 D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System exams, you might think that great progress has been in the city’s classrooms.
What the press release really shows is that the city’s new mayor, Vincent C. Gray (D), and the city’s new schools chancellor, Kaya Henderson, are just at good at spinning and obfuscating as the previous mayor, Adrian M. Fenty (D), and the erstwhile chancellor, Michelle Rhee, when it comes to talking about student progress.
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Click here to register: Join us for a conversation with Civil Rights Leader Dr. John Jackson: Making Educational Opportunities Real for All
Tuesday, July 12, 8 PM EDT
Join civil rights leader Dr. John Jackson for a discussion about current opportunity gaps in education and the campaign focused on providing an opportunity to learn for all children. Dr. Jackson, President and CEO of The Schott Foundation for Public Education, will provide an overview of the landscape and significance of public education to America’s future. The webinar will also highlight that macro and micro messaging and organizing tools and tactics necessary to promote several proposed policy solutions in core areas to provide all students a fair and substantive opportunity to learn. This free event is open to all, and will take place starting at 8 pm Eastern time, on Tuesday, July 12.
by Susan Barrett 
I recently stepped down as a volunteer co-leader of a Stand for Children (SFC) team in Portland Oregon, the headquarters of this organization. Being a SFC member has meant fighting for the needs of children and better public schools for all students in this state (see this pdf.) However, things have started changing here in Oregon, and I worry that SFC is headed down the path that disaffected parents, like me, identify as the corporate reform movement.
I was prompted to write this piece for a couple of reasons: One, I have seen characterizations of SFC as one of the “astroturf” organizations that have recently sprouted up like weeds, generated by the fortunes of billionaires and hedge fund managers to push their particular preference for implementing business strategies in education, attacking teachers and their unions, and promoting privatization. SFC is not astroturf, and that can make them perhaps more deceptive if we are not paying attention.
This leads to my second reason for writing this: I want to make sure that people pay close attention to who is on the SFC board, where their money is coming from, and think critically about whether or not the agendas they are promoting will bring the results parents and community members hope for in public education.
As I read blogs and articles from across the nation, it seems that many people have already determined that SFC has a top-down, corporate reform type agenda. Here in SFC’s home state, it is not that simple to classify the organization. SFC holds a special place for many activist parents and community members in Oregon. You have to understand that they didn’t storm into the state with millions of dollars to influence election outcomes like they did in Illinois. Here, they had far more humble beginnings.
The organization was inspired by a Stand for Children Day Rally in 1996 in Washington, D.C. Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, enlisted the help of her son, Jonah Edelman, to help organize this event. With over 300,000 people attending, Jonah wanted to keep the spirit alive and continue to work on issues attendees were passionate about. He and a co-founder set up a home base in Oregon, and worked on smaller issues with positive impact such as after-school program funding and emergency dental care for uninsured kids. Many parents like me who joined SFC a while back still remember how it was an organization fighting for the Portland Children’s Levy, which provided funds for early childhood education, foster care, child abuse prevention programs, and a variety of other programs centered on children.
Because this is part of the organization’s history, it makes it that much harder to believe how much it has changed. Parents and community members most likely do not know that SFC now has private equity investors and venture philanthropists on the board, making decisions for the organization as it grows new chapters. And, grow they will, as they have announced the need to hire a National Expansion Manager, having raised over a million dollars in funding from the Walton Foundation, and over three million dollars from the Gates Foundation.
My fear is that unwitting parents and community members will join SFC because they want to rectify the problems they see every day in their children’s public schools, such as
Although the district-compact grants from the Gates Foundation don’t hurt, the 100K grants alone are probably not driving the charter-district détente. My view is that the wall dividing charter and district schools on the basis of their label alone is very much like the false divide between the people of Western and Eastern Europe toward the end of the Cold War. It has simply become all too obviously ridiculous and at odds with mutual interest. Smart district leaders know that high-performing charter schools can help them serve kids now stuck in chronically failing schools and attract entrepreneurial leaders. Smart charters know they need access to facilities
Murdoch putting Klein in charge of ethics investigation is like hiring Mike Tyson as a marriage
Sharona Coutts and Jennifer LaFleur of ProPublica lay out, flawlessly, data previously unreleased by the federal government that shows “Florida leads the nation in the percentage of high-school students enrolled in high-level classes—Advanced Placement and advanced math. That holds true across rich and poor districts.”
LaFleur, Coutts, Al Shaw, and Jeff Larson also put together a database that lets you search your own school district to compare.
I don’t spend much if any time talking about my personal decisions and preferences on this blog. It’s mostly about data and policy. There’s been much talk lately about whether a Governor’s or President’s choice to send their children to elite private schools, or where Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg or prominent “ed reformers” attended school are at all relevant to the current policy conversation around “reforming” public schools. When those choices have been questioned publicly, they’ve often been met with the backlash that those are personal choices of no relevance to the current policy debate – just dirty personal attacks about personal, rational choices.
I have no problem with these personal choices. But, these personal choices may, in fact be relevant to the current policy debate. I do keep in mind my own personal choices and preferences as I evaluate what I believe to be good policy for the children of others. And, I try to keep in mind what I know from my background in research and policy when I make my personal choices. Like these prominent politicos and pundits, I too choose private independent schools – relatively expensive ones – for my children, and I have my reasons for doing so. As I’ve noted on my blog on a number of occasions, I taught at an exceptional private independent
I’m not a Christian, but like many concerned with social justice issues, I find the Bible, especially the New Testament books related to the life of Jesus, an invaluable resource for handy quotes, and aphorisms.
Render unto Caesar is one of my favorite quotes when dealing with demanding bureaucracies/bureaucrats, Kafkaesque requirements, or any of the other stupidity of modern day life. To me it suggests the most subtle
So Michele Bachmann has signed a pledge to support families that’s got some very creepy stuff in it. In particular, there’s this:
“Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.”
Others have noted just how brain-curdlingly offensive this is, and I agree 100% with what they’ve written. But I want to pause for a second and look at the numbers behind the claim.
The pledge cites an invalid source, as it turns out, but the standard estimate for the number of slave families broken up by the sale of children away from one or both parents is about one in three. With life expectancy so much lower in the 19th century than it is today, I’d guess that about half of all slave families in the antebellum
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| Stand for Children's Jonah Adelman (right). |
He says their ability to raise $3 million dollars from the Chicago corporate community allowed them to “jam it down their throats.” When they met in the lame duck session following their electoral
By Jim Devor
There are multiple reasons why the Red Hook Charter School would be detrimental to Community School District 15. The following are excerpts from the comments I submitted to the New York State Regents in opposition to the Red Hook Charter School application.
Contrary to the representation made by the applicant, there is little evidence of much community support for this charter school. For example, the proponent of the application in question was duly notified, in advance, of the public hearing. On that evening, over thirty parents appeared in support of the application of the Brooklyn Urban Garden School. Yet, no one, aside from Lisa Chamberlin, spoke in favor of the Red Hook Charter School proposal nor (as far as I could tell from the front of the room) did anyone else appear to be in support of it.
The application’s explicit reference to the increasingly affluent and “whitening” populations in Census Tracts 55, 57 and 59 in Red Hook is far from casual. Rather, it describes the population the proposed Charter School is
The Atlanta school board has suspended a search for its next superintendent as the city tries to figure out what to do amidst one of the largest cheating scandals in U.S. history.
School board officials decided Thursday to give interim chief Erroll Davis Jr. a one-year term to clean up a school system that suffered from widespread cheating on state standardized tests, according to a report released Tuesday by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal. More than 75 percent of the 56 schools investigated cheated on a 2009 state standardized test. More than 80 teachers confessed to changing students' answers and other misconduct.
Davis outlined his initial plan for cleaning up the school district at a special school board meeting Thursday, which was open to parents. Key action points include a plan to investigate all schools whose test scores increased by a larger-than-usual percentage. These "trigger points" haven't been set, but would set off an "automatic" investigation, Davis said. The
