4-4-14 The Whole Child Blog — Insights on Writing: A Core Skill — Whole Child Education

Insights on Writing: A Core Skill — Whole Child Education:

THE WHOLE CHILD BLOG

Insights on Writing: A Core Skill

April 4, 2014 by Klea Scharberg

Writing powerfully is a skill that teachers know every student needs to develop if he or she is to have the best chances in life. Yet, paradoxically, it's one of the skills that students most often resist practicing. The April 2014 issue of Educational Leadershipexamines the many ways to help students grow as writers. Articles in this issue look at some of the central skills involved in the complex act of writing—and how educators can get past students' too-common resistance to writing.

In her "Perspectives" column, Editor-in-Chief Marge Scherer notes the struggle teachers have between setting high expectations for students while also convincing them that writing can be a useful, a joy, and even an art. She asks,

"So how are teachers of all subjects going to meet the challenges of teaching students to be effective writers who don't hate to write? How are they going to prepare students to engage in all kinds of writing that they will need in the future—academic discourse, report writing, journalism, personal narrative, and even tweets? Today, social media of all kinds provide us outlets to share our personal ideas like never before. In the blogosphere, however, the highly structured five-paragraph essays rarely are those most clicked on. Come to think of it, which of your favorite books do you remember for their great sentence combinations? A new kind of literate writing is called for."

Articles in the issue include

• "Making the Most of Mentor Texts" by Kelly Gallagher
  To learn to do something unfamiliar, stand next to someone who knows how.
• "Teaching Argument Writing to ELLs" by Larry Ferlazzo and Katie Hull-Sypnieski
  Strategies for every level of language learner—from beginner to advanced.
• " Research Says / Teach Critical Thinking to Teach Writing" by Bryan Goodwin
  Examining the link between thinking and writing.
• "One to Grow On / Commending Writing" by Carol Ann Tomlinson
  How do we motivate kids to do what is inherently difficult?
• "Jump-Starting Stalled Writers with Storytelling" by Alexandra Keller and Sandie Grinnell
  Kids see writing with new eyes when they receive letters from seniors.

View the insights of these and other contributors to the issue in the infographic (PDF) below, and start a conversation with your professional learning community using the free study guide.

National Release of Speak Up 2013 National Findings

2014 Congressional Briefing
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
12:00-1:30PM
Dirksen Senate Office Building Room 562

Please join us for the release of the Speak Up 2013 National Findings. This is the first of two Congressional Briefings on the data results from the 403,000 online Speak Up surveys submitted from education stakeholders nationwide in fall 2013.

The April 8th briefing will include a presentation of the national findings and a moderated panel discussion with students and educators. This year’s national report on the findings will be distributed to all attendees.

Click here to RSVP to attend the briefing; click here to request a copy of the report.

If you need additional information about Speak Up or the Congressional Briefing, please feel free to contact Jenny Hostert atjhostert@tomorrow.org or 949 609-4660 ext 17.

4-2-14 The Whole Child Blog — High-Morale Schools: Readying Students to Take on the World — Whole Child Education

High-Morale Schools: Readying Students to Take on the World — Whole Child Education: THE WHOLE CHILD BLOGHigh-Morale Schools: Readying Students to Take on the WorldApril 2, 2014 by Lora M. HodgesPost written by Lora M. Hodges for Northeast Foundation for Children/Responsive Classroom, a whole child partner organization.Morale can be hard to define, but you know it when you see it. When you walk in

by mike simpson / 6h 

Politicians Pushing Common Core Heed the Warning: Education Votes!

Common Core Turns Business Leaders Against Oklahoma GOP : NPR:

Common Core Turns Business Leaders Against Oklahoma GOP

by CLAUDIO SANCHEZ

April 04, 2014 5:49 PM ET

 Mike Neal gets annoyed when he talks about politicians in his state. Just three years ago, when the Common Core State Standards were implemented, no one had a problem with it, says Neal, president of the Tulsa, Okla., Regional Chamber of Commerce.

"It's been a really frustrating situation to the business community in Oklahoma in that we've all been on the same page from the governor, the House, the Senate, school board members," Neal says. "They've all been behind this."

Now, things are different.

"You've got a lot of people just running scared," Neal says.

That's because they're running for re-election, he explains. This spring, Republicans and Democrats have been bombarded by opponents of the standards and told, "if you support Common Core, we're going to beat you and we'll beat you over this one single issue."

The threat is real. What's not real, Neal says, are the arguments being used to threaten legislators. Namely, that it's a federal scheme to tell teachers what to teach, that private groups will mine and profit from test results and that the Common Core will take local control of schools away from Oklahomans. Neal says that's not true.

"Despite what some fringe groups may say, we don't think it takes [local control] away at all," he says.

Education

Q&A: A Crash Course On Common Core

As Common Core Tests Approach, So Does A Sea Change In Schools

Critics Say Schools' Common Core Standards Rollout Is Rushed

Jenni White is founder of R.O.P.E., which stands for Restore Oklahoma Public Education, a fervent opponent of the standards.

"This is about people who are concerned about the direction of education in Oklahoma and across the nation today," White says.

White is also a lifetime Republican, mother of five and a former science teacher. She says R.O.P.E. has not threatened elected officials, but it has shown them why the adoption of the new standards was a mistake.

"You're talking about a set of standards that was created completely outside of the state in which taxpayers had no voice," White says. "So parents have risen up and said, 'Wait a minute. We need to feel like we have some control over the education of our children.' And that has frustrated the Chamber of Commerce, who, really, isn't for parents. They're for businesses."

That argument persuaded Oklahoma State Representative Jason Nelson to co-author a repeal of the Common Core.

"What the bill does, is to say that the state cannot cede its discretion or control over our standards or assessments," Nelson says.

But Mike Neal of the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce says that a repeal would be a costly step backwards.

"We, in this state right now, waste outrageous amounts of money on remediation for students that come out of high school with good grades. But they're not ready for higher education," Neal says. "They're not ready to be hired by businesses ... they're not going to be able to compete."

Neal worries that later this month Oklahoma is likely to become the second state, along with Indiana, to dump the core standards. What happens after that?

"I think that's an excellent question and it's something that we would like to know the answer to as well," White says.

She says that assuming lawmakers vote to drop the standards, schools will return to the old state standards, which even she concedes weren't great. But, still.

"We would really prefer to go back to those while we're preparing a really great set of standards," White says.

That, business leaders say, will take schools back to square one, with no guarantees that Oklahoma will end up with standards as good as the Common Core.

David Sirota. Chicago’s pension theft and Rahm’s slush. | Reclaim Reform

David Sirota. Chicago’s pension theft and Rahm’s slush. | Reclaim Reform:

David Sirota. Chicago’s pension theft and Rahm’s slush.

Posted on April 4, 2014by Ken Previti

Ken Previti:

“Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers” by Ellen E. Schultz was published in 20111 – 2012. This superbly written and well researched book mentioned that laws present at the time of publication prevented the same thing from happening to public pension funds but that legislation was being attempted to legalize the public plunder. It is well worth reading. David Sirota explains the massive theft clearly via Fred Klonsky’s blog which is reposted here.

Originally posted on Fred Klonsky:

Chicago slush.

- David Sirota

Chicago is the iconic example of all of these trends. A new report being released this morning shows that the supposedly budget-strapped Windy City – which for years has not made its full pension payments – actually has mountains of cash sitting in a slush fund controlled by Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Indeed, as the report documents, the slush fund now receives more money each year than it would cost to adequately finance Chicago’s pension funds. Yet, Emanuel is refusing to use the cash from that slush fund to shore up the 

Barfing on high-stakes exams? Literally. - K-12 Zone

Barfing on high-stakes exams? Literally. - K-12 Zone:

Barfing on high-stakes exams? Literally.

Posted on April 4, 2014 | By Ericka Mellon

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We’ve all heard stories that students get nervous, even sick, before high-stakes exams. It turns out the Texas Education Agency tracks this, in a way.

The agency reports that 102 exams, out of 13.2 million last year, were returned to the testing company Pearson designated as containing “biohazardous materials.”

“This designation includes blood, vomit, and ‘other,’ ” spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe wrote to Houston Chronicle columnist Lisa Falkenberg.

In 2012, the agency counted 72 “biohazardous” exams.

While the agency tracks a lot of data, we’re sorry to report there’s no breakdown of just the barfed-on tests. The dirtied exams may mostly be a result of bloody noses, paper cuts and stomach bugs, not nerves.
Feel free to leave your icky testing stories in the comments, which we’ll read after lunch.

HISD board to reconsider closing Dodson Elementary

After parents and community leaders continued to protest over the looming closure of Dodson Elementary, HISD trustees plan to reconsider the school’s fate. Board president Juliet Stipeche and trustees Wanda Adams and Rhonda-Skillern Jones used their authority to bring the item back to the board for consideration Thursday, four weeks after voting 5-4 to close […]

by Ericka Mellon / 1min

UC Berkeley’s Jesse Rothstein at Vergara v. California |:

UC Berkeley’s Jesse Rothstein at Vergara v. California

 To read a decent and fair summary of the Vergara v. California trial, please see this piece posted by The Pew Charitable Trust. Also covered on VAMboozled! was a summary, but also the summarized testimonies of Linda Darling-Hammond and David Berliner.

It seems Jesse Rothstein, an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California Berkeley, also testified for the defense. His research has been critical in terms of the evidence about bias in VAM estimates, and whether the sophisticated controls are indeed sophisticated enough to control for the nonrandom assignment of students to classrooms.

As per Rothstein’s testimony (again summarized by Pew) he cautioned “against placing too much weight on the “value-added models” now being used by many states to try to determine the impact of a teacher on student learning. The models try to tease out how much an individual teacher has contributed to a student’s academic progress.

Rothstein’s research has found that such models can yield very different findings for the same teacher from one year to the next, in part because 25 students or so are not a large enough sample size to create a reliable estimate of a teacher’s teaching ability. Value-added models also assume that students are assigned to teachers randomly, which very often is not the case.

“I think we want to think hard about how to use them,” Rothstein said of value-added  UC Berkeley’s Jesse Rothstein at Vergara v. California |:

A Practical Guide To Common Core | Oklahoma Observer

A Practical Guide To Common Core | Oklahoma Observer:

A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO COMMON CORE

0 COMMENT

 04 APR 2014   POSTED BY AHAMILTON

BY JOHN THOMPSON

Common Core standards are a sideshow. The real issue is the “unfunded nightmare” of high-stakes Common Core or “Common Core-type” testing.

Improved standards of learning can contribute somewhat to school improvement. During the 1980s, Massachusetts schools, ranked 8th or 9th nationally, used high-quality, well-funded standards-based reforms to become No. 1.

Under Sandy Garrett, Oklahoma consistently earned B+s or better on its standards. Garrett’s implementation of standards-based reforms was just as exemplary as that of Massachusetts’, but we still earn Ds and Fs on student performance.

Oklahoma offers excellent education in low-poverty schools but provides deplorable schools for poor children of color. Great standards are nice, but an overwhelming body of research explains why curriculum-driven, test-driven reforms cannot address the real problem – poverty.

And it’s unlikely that America will fund the $16 billion price tag for properly implementing Common Core.

I once welcomed Common Core. Its advocates acknowledged that bubble-in accountability had failed. The standards seemed to be a corrective to the primitive basic skills, worksheet-driven malpractice encouraged by No Child Left Behind. Under NCLB, test prep and remediation drove the joy of learning   A Practical Guide To Common Core | Oklahoma Observer:

Rupert Murdoch, Common Core and the dangerous rise of for-profit public education - Salon.com

Keep Fox News out of the classroom! Rupert Murdoch, Common Core and the dangerous rise of for-profit public education - Salon.com:

 Rupert Murdoch, Common Core and the dangerous rise of for-profit public education

Rupert Murdoch and other moguls smell mega-riches in Common Core Standards. They can't be allowed to wreck schools

ERIN OSBORNE

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TOPICS: EDUCATION, COMMON CORE, BILL GATES, BILL AND MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION, ARNE DUNCAN,MICHELLE RHEE, RUPERT MURDOCH, EDITOR'S PICKS, BUSINESS NEWS, NEWS, POLITICS NEWS

Rupert Murdoch (Credit: Monika Flueckiger)

The Pearson Foundation has agreed to pay $7.7 million to settle allegations that the nonprofit broke New York state law while attempting to profit from Common Core-aligned products. An investigation by New York state Attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman revealed the charitable side of Pearson spent years wooing the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in hopes the two would partner in creating Common Core courses. The Pearson Foundation and Gates Foundation joined together in 2011, creating 24 online courses that were then sold to the for-profit side of Pearson for $15.1 million.

As for the $7.7 million settlement, the Pearson Foundation has announced it will donate the money to 100kin10, a company that focuses on developing science, technology, engineering and mathematics education. Interestingly, the Gates Foundation has also pledged $7 million to 100kin10 over the next six years along with several other partners Pearson works with. Clearly, the new standards mean big business and big profits.

America’s most recent education reform, the Common Core State Standards, has divided teachers and parents across the United States. Whether or not the standards mark a step in the right direction for the education system, one thing is for sure. For the first time in American history, businesses are able to freely tap into the K-12 market on a large scale, and they aren’t waiting.

The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers began writing the standards in 2009 with the financial help of private donors, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Pearson Publishing Co. A few months later the United States Department of Education announced a $4.35 billion contest called Race to the Top in which every state could compete for federal grant money. The applications for funding were judged on a point system of fulfilled criteria, one of which was adopting the new Common Core State Standards. Many states agreed to adopt the new standards before they had even been finished, proving that the decision was largely a financial one. The grant money in RttT was a powerful vehicle in spreading the standards quickly across the United States.

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How have the authors proposed we track the success of this reform? Testing, and lots of it. Along with the Common Core come two new major testing consortiums called SmarterBalanced and Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. Forget your No. 2 pencil; these aren’t the bubble tests you remember from school but adaptive computer testing that is required two to three times a year for every student in every grade. From theSmarterBalanced website, “The full suite of summative, interim, and formative assessments is estimated to cost $27.30 per student … These costs are estimates because a sizable portion of the cost is for test administration and scoring services that will not be provided by Smarter Balanced; states will either provide these services directly or procure them from vendors in the private sector.”

Big business in education isn’t new. Pearson and McGraw-Hill have dominated the textbook market while the College Board, makers of the SAT and Advanced Placement courses, are the veritable gatekeepers to higher education. The entire U.S. education system has been valued at nearly $1.5 trillion, second only to the healthcare industry. As media mogul Rupert Murdoch saidafter acquiring education company Amplify (previously known as Wireless Generations), “When it comes to K-12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting Keep Fox News out of the classroom! Rupert Murdoch, Common Core and the dangerous rise of for-profit public education - Salon.com:

Want to See What Data Nevada Collects On Your Kids? Just Pay $10K | Truth in American Education

Want to See What Data Nevada Collects On Your Kids? Just Pay $10K | Truth in American Education:

Want to See What Data Nevada Collects On Your Kids? Just Pay $10K

Filed in Privacy/SLDS by Shane Vander Hart on April 4, 2014 • 0 Comments

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John Eppolito is a Stop Common Core activist in Nevada.  He asked a couple of months ago to see what data was collected on his four children by the Nevada State Department of Education.  The cost for him to receive that information is staggering.  Below is the email thread between him and Judy Osgood, the Public Information Officer with the Nevada Department of Education(published with his permission):

From: Judy Osgood
Sent: Friday, February 07, 2014 4:36 PM
To: ‘John Eppolito’
Subject: SBAC – SDLS

Mr. Eppolito,

The Department’s Director of Information Technology, Glenn Myer, has reviewed your request to receive reports of data for each of your four children that is contained in the SLDS.  He has estimated that the cost will be approximately $10,194, which represents at least three solid weeks (120 hours) of dedicated staff time (billed at $84.95/hour) to build, test and validate a new application that will be able to display individual student data in a readable format.  Payment of this fee must be made in full before work can begin.

Please understand that the primary purpose of  the Department of Education’s SLDS is to support required state and federal reporting, funding of local education agencies, education accountability, and public reporting.  The system currently is not capable of responding to the type of individual student data request you have presented.  Thus, the extraordinary