NYC Public School Parents: My frustrating Thursday: DOE's evasions and the Mayor's refusal to reduce class size or admit that he ever said that he would

NYC Public School Parents: My frustrating Thursday: DOE's evasions and the Mayor's refusal to reduce class size or admit that he ever said that he would:

My frustrating Thursday: DOE's evasions and the Mayor's refusal to reduce class size or admit that he ever said that he would

Me asking the Mayor about class size  in Jackson Heights on Thursday night.

For other accounts, see reports of the Mayor's Town hall at ChalkbeatNY and the Daily News.

On Thursday I attended two events -- first in the morning at a briefing on Renewal Schools at City Hall and later that evening, a Town hall meeting in  Queens with Mayor de Blasio.

The City Hall briefing consisted of a long power point from Aimee Horowitz, the Executive Superintendent of the Renewal school program and Chris Caruso, Executive Director of Community Schools.  For more than an hour we listened to all the various programs and services that are planned, with no mention of reducing class size in either presentation.

Finally I got a chance to speak.  I asked Ms. Horowitz: "In which renewal schools are class sizes reduced this fall, to what levels, what resources and strategies are being used, and how was the list of schools selected?"  

My question followed from the DOE claim to the state  last December and again this fall, in their Contract for Excellence presentations, that they would be focusing their "Class Size Reduction planning efforts on the School Renewal Program."   This was a repeat of questions that CEC members and I have been asking DOE officials for months; without any response. We already have heard of several Renewal schools this year where class sizes have risen to 27 students per class in Kindergarten, 31 in 1st grade and 35 or more students in high school. 

Ms. Horowitz replied that there was no separate list of Renewal schools slated for class size reduction, and that all 94 schools were expected to lower class size by use of their increased Fair Student funding and help with "programming." When I asked if that meant we should see smaller classes in all of these schools when the data is released on Monday, she nodded yes, but then said "proper class sizes."  I followed up with an email asking her what  she means by "proper class sizes", but I am not hopeful of a substantive reply. 

Later that evening, I attended the Town hall meeting in Jackson Heights where Mayor de Blasio fielded questions about NYC Public School Parents: My frustrating Thursday: DOE's evasions and the Mayor's refusal to reduce class size or admit that he ever said that he would:

Graduating Early “A Stupid Idea”? | deutsch29

Graduating Early “A Stupid Idea”? | deutsch29:

Graduating Early “A Stupid Idea”?

A Lynchpin

In December 2010, at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) meeting in Washington, DC, former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s test-centric education reforms were featured in the form of ALEC model legislation called the “A-plus Literacy Act,” an omnibus document that includes school and district letter grades, publicly-funded vouchers for private school attendance, corporate tax credits for donating money to voucher programs, alternative teacher certification, social promotion ban, and merit pay for teachers of Advanced Placement (AP) courses.

A corporate reform smorgasbord.

In the background and drafting notes for this piece of ALEC model legislation, the first point discussed involves “school and district report cards and grades” (see page 46 of the previous link).

The drafting notes include an important acknowledgement: Applying A-B-C-D-F letter grades to schools and districts is the “lynchpin for the reforms.”

A lynchpin is something vital to an enterprise. In this case, the enterprise is the reduction of the value of education to test scores and the resulting privatization of public education when those easily-manipulated, high-stakes test score outcomes indicate failure. The use of letter grades (as opposed to numbers or some other rating system, like a star rating system) to foster the effects of such test-centrism is that letter grades draw greater public and media attention.

Indeed they do.

Behind the letter grades are the test-score-dependent formulas used to arrive at those letter grades. So, high test scores become important for both public school and district survival, including school and district funding.

In the end, students and parents become pawns as schools vie for higher letter grades and increased funding associated with securing and retaining students who produce high test scores.

The above leads me to a discussion I had this weekend with one of my nephews. He Graduating Early “A Stupid Idea”? | deutsch29:

4LAKids - Pop Quiz: WHAT’S WRONG WITH L.A. UNIFIED’S LEADERSHIP? Answer: JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING

4LAKids - some of the news that doesn't fit: Pop Quiz: WHAT’S WRONG WITH L.A. UNIFIED’S LEADERSHIP? Answer: JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING:

Pop Quiz: WHAT’S WRONG WITH L.A. UNIFIED’S LEADERSHIP? Answer: JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING

STEVE LOPEZ  |  L.A. TIMES COLUMNIST | HTTP://LAT.MS/1H2YLOD

Teachers and children rally at Stevenson Middle School in East Los Angeles against a proposal, spearheaded by the Broad Foundation, that would move half of L.A. Unified students into charters over the next eight years. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

14 Nov. 2015 | 10:00 AM  ::  The more you hear about attempts to improve the nation's schools, the sorrier you have to feel for the kids.

After years of "No Child Left Behind" and "Race to the Top" initiatives, national test scores dived deeper into failure and mediocrity in the last reading. In a stunning reversal, the Obama administration, a tireless champion of more and more testing, is now whistling a different tune.

There's too much testing going on out there.

Arne Duncan, Obama's education secretary, said his conversations with countless educators have made him realize "how much time testing and test prep are taking from instruction."

Translation: Instead of testing, let's try teaching.

It couldn't happen too soon in test-oppressed California, where recent headlines tell a sobering story about achievement, or lack thereof.

"California test scores in the cellar," said one. "California test scores among worst in U.S.," said another.

Recently released statewide Common Core test results were no better, and L.A. Unified students scored below California averages in disturbing fashion. In math, three-fourths of LAUSD students did not meet state standards. In English, two-thirds were underwater.

So what's wrong in Los Angeles?

The first problem, which never gets enough attention in the school-reform debate, has nothing to do with schools. LAUSD is a district made up primarily of poor children, and to be fair to district administrators and teachers, this presents daily challenges that are unknown to more affluent districts.

The second problem is that in L.A. Unified, it's rarely clear who's in charge, and that's certainly the case now.

The last superintendent, John Deasy, was shooed out of office in part because of his own blunders and the unresolved question of who was captain of the listing ship — Deasy or the school board. And there are signs that board members, terrorized by Deasy for so long, never recovered from their PTSDeasy.

The current superintendent, Ramon Cortines, is a temporary fill-in and lame duck who wants only one thing for Christmas: his retirement papers.

And the search for a replacement is a peculiar and naturally contentious spectacle, part public but mostly private, involving a private consulting firm. Because you can never hire too many outsiders while schoolhouses deteriorate and bean counters warn of a projected $333-million deficit in a district with a shrinking enrollment.

Complicating the search for a new boss is a lack of consensus as to what kind of superintendent the district should go after.

A visionary?

A crusader?

A baby sitter?

You'd almost have to scratch anybody naive enough to want the job, especially if a flak jacket and Humvee are not part of the package. The new superintendent will be rolling straight into the crossfire of a raging war between charter school champions and charter school foes.

That's not a new conflict, but the stakes got higher when The Times' Howard Blume broke the story of a massive $490-million plan — mapped out in secret — by billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad and other self-anointed saviors of the American way. They'd like to funnel no less than half of LAUSD's schools into charters, rescuing them from the rusted machine of district bureaucracy and politics.

The teachers union, which would lose busloads of its members and much of its clout, is militantly aggrieved and philosophically opposed to what it calls the corporatization of public schools. The union contends with reasonable logic that a dramatic multiplication of charters — not all of which are necessarily a better alternative — would drain money from non-charters, leaving many of the district's poorest students in the lurch.

Broad, I should note, isn't the only local billionaire making headlines for claiming to know what's missing from local school options. David Geffen, apparently unimpressed with the public and private school offerings in West L.A., last week pledged $100 million to establish a private middle and high school on the UCLA campus for the children of UCLA staff and others, with financial aid for 40% of the students.

It's a lovely gesture but part of a rich-get-richer narrative, if you ask me. UCLA has a $2.2-billion endowment as it is. Geffen made his fortune in music and film, and after The Times' 4LAKids - some of the news that doesn't fit: Pop Quiz: WHAT’S WRONG WITH L.A. UNIFIED’S LEADERSHIP? Answer: JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING:

CURMUDGUCATION: NCTQ New Report on Teacher Evaluation

CURMUDGUCATION: NCTQ New Report on Teacher Evaluation:

NCTQ New Report on Teacher Evaluation

It's a big report, over a hundred pages, and I've read it so you don't have to. But that doesn't mean you don't have your work cut out for you here on this blog. Let's get going. 

Who are these people? 

The National Council on Teacher Quality's continued presence in the education world is one of the great mysteries of the reformster era (or maybe just one of the great con jobs). This "national council" includes a staff composed almost exclusively of former TFA folks and professional bureaucrats and a board of directors that contains no teachers.

Let me say that again-- this group that has declared itself the arbiter of teacher quality for the country has no career teachers in positions of authority. None.

They have been an excellent tool for reformsters, which may be why their funders's list is a who's who of reformy money (Gates, Broad, Walton, Joyce, and even Anonymous). Like other heavy-hitters (or at least heavy cash-checkers) of the "non-partisan research and policy organization" world, they specialize in putting a glossy figleaf of research study paper over the big ugly naked truth of reformster advocacy.

Their particular brand is about assaulting the teaching profession with a concern trolling spin. From their mission statement:

We recognize that it is not teachers who bear responsibility for their profession's many challenges, but the institutions with the greatest authority and influence over teachers. To that end we work to achieve fundamental changes in the policy and practices of teacher preparation programs, school districts, state governments, and teachers unions. 

In other words, teachers suck, but it's not their fault, poor dears, because they are helpless, CURMUDGUCATION: NCTQ New Report on Teacher Evaluation:

4LAKids - ELI BROAD’S COVER LETTER TO HIS CHARTER PLAN: “a landmark Opportunity” to achieve 50% charter market-share.”

4LAKids - some of the news that doesn't fit: ELI BROAD’S COVER LETTER TO HIS CHARTER PLAN: Explaining “a landmark Opportunity” and how+why “Los Angeles is already well-positioned to achieve 50% charter market-share.”:

ELI BROAD’S COVER LETTER TO HIS CHARTER PLAN:

Explaining “a landmark Opportunity” and how+why “Los Angeles is already well-positioned to achieve 50% charter market-share.”

Hello Connecticut? Ah, our Fiscal House is on Fire - Wait What?

Hello Connecticut?  Ah, our Fiscal House is on Fire - Wait What?:

Hello Connecticut?  Ah, our Fiscal House is on Fire

In “Fiscal flood warning: Nothing but red ink forecast in CT,” the CT Mirror’s Keith Phaneuf reports;

Nonpartisan fiscal analysts issued projections Friday that Connecticut, already coping with a significant budget shortfall in the current year, is facing a far worse problem just over the horizon: nearly a $2.3 billion gap in state finances over the next two fiscal years.

The legislature’s nonpartisan Office of Fiscal Analysis is projecting a $552 million deficit in the next fiscal year, which begins July 1, 2016. And finances are on pace the following year to run $1.72 billion in the red….

It was only 48 hours ago that Governor Dannel Malloy was quoted in the Hartford Courant claiming;

“…a shortfall of “a couple of hundred million dollars” needs to be kept in perspective, the Democratic governor said.

“These numbers aren’t that big, folks,” Malloy told reporters Thursday at a news conference at the state Capitol.  “We’re talking about a $20 billion budget. That’s 20 thousand million dollars. We’re talking about finding a couple of hundred million of dollars in cuts. It’s a relatively small number versus the entire expenditure.”

He added: “I know it all gets reported as a crisis. This is not a crisis.”

Here at Wait, What?, the blog post about the budget read,  Making Sh*t Up – the New Normal in American and Connecticut Politics.

Just last year, as the 1^st term governor sought to convince voters to give him four more years in office, Malloy said there was not deficit and if re-elected he would not proposal or accept tax increase if re-elected;

“We won’t have deficits. We don’t have deficits.” – Malloy – CT Mirror – Feb 4, 2014

“We really don’t have a deficit.” – Malloy – CT Mirror – August 4, 2014

“There won’t be a deficit. And there won’t be tax increases, because I’m taking that Hello Connecticut?  Ah, our Fiscal House is on Fire - Wait What?:

Naming of Margaret Spellings as UNC system president called ‘a disturbing new low’ - The Washington Post

Naming of Margaret Spellings as UNC system president called ‘a disturbing new low’ - The Washington Post:

Naming of Margaret Spellings as UNC system president called ‘a disturbing new low’

In recent years the University of North Carolina system — long considered one of the best in the country — has sustained massive budget cuts by the state legislature as well as efforts to force some academics to change their priorities. Now there is a new challenge: the appointment of Margaret Spellings, education secretary under President George W. Bush, as system president. The move — by a Republican-dominated governing board — is being attacked by students and faculty as a political move that will damage the state.

Spellings was chosen last month to run — starting in March 2016 — the system of 16 universities, with 222,000 students. She will earn enough to put her in the top range of college presidents: a  $775,000 base salary for each of five years in a contract that also gives her deferred compensation of $77,500 annually and potential performance bonuses, and use of a presidential home.

She was selected by the system’s Board of Governors, which had forced out Tom Ross, who was tapped as president in 2010 when Democrats controlled the legislature. Ross — who had a long academic career, unlike Spellings — was believed to have been opposed to the budget cuts and other priority changes being sought at UNC.

The News & Observer reported in August on e-mails showing that conservatives expressed delight when the board voted on Jan. 16 to oust Ross (who earned a base salary of $600,000 in his final contract year):

That day, several supportive emails and messages arrived in the inbox of board Chairman John Fennebresque. “John – this is certainly good news,” wrote U.S. Rep. George Holding, a Republican from Raleigh. “I know you will find a great replacement. Best, g.”

The selection of Spellings was so controversial, even within the governing board, that its chairman, John Fennebresque, resigned a few days later. According to NC Policy Watch, “just three days after she was hired, the chair of the UNC Board of Governors announced he was resigning from the board, following calls from his colleagues to step aside as a result of the acrimonious search process and the jumbled dismissal months earlier of Spellings’ predecessor, Tom Ross.” Fennebresque had, NC Policy Watch reported, said with tears in his eyes after Spellings was appointed that he  hoped she would prove to be a great UNC leader.

Spellings oversaw the initial implementation of No Child Left Behind when she was education secretary under Bush, from 2005 to 2009, and she currently is the head of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas. While education secretary, she convened the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which in 2006 released a report with controversial recommendations, including a call for colleges and universities to focus on training students for the workforce and supporting research with commercial applications. She also served on the board of directors for the Apollo Group, the parent company of the for-profit University of Phoenix, which paid her more than $300,000 for her involvement.

The choice of Spellings has sparked savage criticism by students and faculty, who have said that she is not a suitable president for the vaunted UNC system and that she was chosen as a political move because she is likely to accept Naming of Margaret Spellings as UNC system president called ‘a disturbing new low’ - The Washington Post:

CA educators push back against unregulated charter schools that threaten students’ futures « Education Votes

CA educators push back against unregulated charter schools that threaten students’ futures « Education Votes:

CA educators push back against unregulated charter schools that threaten students’ futures

TAKE ACTION ›

Tell lawmakers it’s time for tougher standards and more oversight and accountability for charter schools. CLICK HERE ›

It’s not unusual for parents to see educators when dropping off their kids at school. But this morning, within the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), parents saw educators outside holding up signs and handing out flyers. They were using their free time before class and their unified voice to alert parents that the future of their child’s education could be in danger.

“We want to make sure the parents understand the dangers of the Broad Walmart plan,” said Cecily Myart-Cruz, a middle school English and language arts teacher. “They want to take 50 percent of our students outside of LAUSD and put them into unregulated charter schools that are not held to the same rigorous standards as traditional public schools.”

That plan is being promoted by billionaire Eli Broad, who heads up the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. He’s going around securing a half-billion dollars from his rich buddies, including the Walton Family, because he wants to build 260 new charters in the district and enroll more than 300,000 LAUSD students. Charter schools are funded using taxpayer dollars but are run by private companies and are often exempt from the rules and regulations governing traditional public schools.

Right now in our public schools, parents have the right to join with educators and have a say in their child’s education,” said Myart-Cruz, who is also vice president of the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), which represents more than 31,000 educators and health and human service professionals. “However, we know that parents and students have absolutely no voice with unregulated, privately-run charters. Also, public schools have to take in all students. Unregulated charters do not.

CA educator Cecily Myart-Cruz

“If we lose 50 percent of our students to unregulated charters, that means we’re going to have 50-percent less of a teaching force. The sizes of those classes remaining in the public schools are going to be sky high. Students won’t get the one-on-one interaction they need and deserve.”

Myart-Cruz says this is why it’s a bad idea to let billionaires run our public schools. She says instead of investing in unregulated charters, people like Broad and the Walton Family should work with educators and public schools to implement proven strategies and policies that inspire children’s natural curiosity and imagination and ignite their desire to learn.

“Teaching middle school students—that is my life blood, my calling” said Myart-Cruz. “Opening upTo Kill a Mockingbird and talking about character analysis, narration—I know how to bring these concepts to life for my students. I know what CA educators push back against unregulated charter schools that threaten students’ futures « Education Votes:

CURMUDGUCATION: PA: Testing Stutter Steps

CURMUDGUCATION: PA: Testing Stutter Steps:

PA: Testing Stutter Steps

Pennsylvania may or may not be close to getting a budget, or a temporary budget patch, or a deal to at least pay schools while the full budget continues to circle the drain. The new changes about every three or four hours.

But word comes out of Harrisburg that the budget talks also include discussion-- again-- of the use of the Keystone exams as a graduation requirement.

The Keystones are our version of the Big Standardized Test, theoretically aligned to the Pennsylvania Core Standards. The Pennsylvania Core Standards are of course one more version of the Common Core that are totes different from the national version because ours have the word "Pennsylvania" in the title and also don't have the word "Common" in the title, so completely different thing, absolutely. The Keystones are also our very own exam system even though I once sat through a state training on the testing in which we used PARCC materials and were assured those would work just fine. So there's that.

The original grandiose plan was for Keystone exams in every single subject area, but some problems have emerged with that plan including A) it turns out to be hard, B) it turns out to be expensive and C) pretty much everybody thinks the tests we have so far are crap.

It is C that has triggered an ongoing discussion about using the Keystones as graduation requirements. That requirement is supposed to happen for the class of 2017, which means that it's happening now because most schools give the exams in 10th or 11th grade in order to have some wiggle room to rescue the fails. People can't help noticing that a huge number of students who have are otherwise likely to complete graduation requirements are likely to be denied a diploma because of this crappy bubble test. And yes-- the Keystone is transparently the same old stupid bubble test because we have avoided on-line testing because we tried it once years ago and it was disastrous, so we are still bubbling in dots with our pencils.

Many of our legislators would like to press pause. And last summer, State Senator Lloyd Smucker managed to get a bill to pause the Keystones as a grad requirement for at least two years. This is no small thing-- Smucker is no friend of public education, but in fact has been a mover and shaker in pushing a Pennsylvania Achievement School District, a tool that Tennessee reformsters have found simply awesome for privatizing public schools. So even Smucker thinks that Keystones-as-grad-requirements is not ready for prime time. Which makes a little sense-- privatizers need to label CURMUDGUCATION: PA: Testing Stutter Steps:

Your School Shapes How You Think About Inequality : NPR Ed : NPR

Your School Shapes How You Think About Inequality : NPR Ed : NPR:

Your School Shapes How You Think About Inequality

Ask yourself this question: Were you aware of inequality growing up?

Your answer may depend in part on where you went to high school. Students at racially diverse schools, particularly black and Hispanic students, are more tuned in to injustice than students going to school mostly with kids that look like them.

That's one of the main threads of a new book by Carla Shedd, an assistant professor of sociology and African-American studies at Columbia University. In Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice Shedd goes straight to the source: the students at four Chicago public high schools. She even let the kids pick their own pseudonyms.

Unequal City

Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice

by Carla Shedd

Paperback, 225 pages

purchase

Two of the schools were largely segregated: one had no white or Asian students. The other two were fairly diverse — by Chicago standards — one with about a third white or Asian students and the other, a magnet school, with more than half.

Shedd followed the schools from 2001 to 2011, a turbulent decade when the city demolished its infamous high-rise public housing units and began closing public schools in large numbers.

I spoke with Shedd about how school segregation can damage a student's sense of self.

Let's jump right in. What did the students have to say?

Black and brown kids going to their neighborhood school, many of them didn't have the concrete experiences to know that maybe their experiences are unequal. Those kids are very different from the kids who leave their neighborhood and go to a school downtown and sit with classmates very different from them. They see what's similar and they see what is different. This is mind blowing for 14, 15 and 16-year-olds who are making sense of who they are. It will form their perceptions of opportunity.

So what does that look like from the student perspective?

Both Alex and TB live on the South Side of Chicago in all black neighborhoods. Alex travels all the way from the South Side to just north of Chicago's downtown for his school. He has a racially mixed group of friends and his experiences confirm both his privilege and his disadvantage.

Alex went on a shopping trip with his friends to the mall downtown. So, he's in a mixed group of friends, they're doing something social, and a store security guard believed that one of their group members was shoplifting. The guard approached them and pulled out the three black kids in the group and told them they had to leave. Alex was really stressed by it.

And the contrast is TB. He has been searched but not arrested multiple times. He still thinks the police are fair. I asked him, "How do you feel when this happens?," And he says, "Doesn't this happen to everyone?" It's almost normal for him. TB's school can't confirm that what he experiences is not the norm for everyone else.

So, students of color in segregated schools might be less aware of inequality, but in diverse schools, they might be overwhelmed by it. Where's the balance?

With kids in segregated schools I talk a little about dosage. If they have a lot of these Your School Shapes How You Think About Inequality : NPR Ed : NPR:

Judge: Phila. schools should heed seniority, hire counselors

Judge: Phila. schools should heed seniority, hire counselors:

Judge: Phila. schools should heed seniority, hire counselors

The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers has won another round in its battle with the School District over seniority and counselor staffing levels.

A Common Pleas Court judge denied the district's request to overturn an arbitrator's finding that the district violated the union contract in 2013 when it ignored seniority in recalling laid-off counselors.

In an order filed Tuesday, Judge Linda A. Carpenter also backed the arbitrator's decision that the PFT contract required each school to have at least one counselor on staff.

Union president Jerry Jordan said Thursday that he was "delighted with Judge Carpenter's decision that clearly there should be one counselor in every school for the children."

He added: "I think that this is a big victory for the children. I hoped that her ruling would be the end of this, and that the counselors would be restored to the schools."

But that will not be the case.

A district spokeswoman confirmed that the district had filed an appeal in Commonwealth Court on Thursday, but she declined further comment.

Citing financial woes, the district laid off all 283 counselors in June 2013. It brought back 126 that fall without regard to seniority, and required many of them to serve students at more than one school.

Principals selected the counselors who were recalled, and the PFT filed a grievance.

During a hearing before Carpenter in September, district lawyers argued that Ralph Colflesh, an independent arbitrator, had misinterpreted the PFT contract and overstepped his authority when he ruled in July that every public school in the city should have a full-time counselor.

The district contended that the PFT contract did not contain language covering the recall or reassignment of laid-off counselors. The district also said counselors were restored to the schools they had left based on where the needs were the greatest. To do otherwise, the district said, would have resulted in "mass reshuffling."

The district has said it would cost $3.4 million to hire enough counselors to have one in every school and millions more to



Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/education/20151113_Judge__Philly_schools_should_heed_seniority__hire_counselors.html#O2XaGucK4BR6xCJG.99

Will President Obama's Education Reformers Own Up to Their Failures? - Living in Dialogue

Will President Obama's Education Reformers Own Up to Their Failures? - Living in Dialogue:

Will President Obama's Education Reformers Own Up to Their Failures? 

By John Thompson.

Perhaps because I’m an incorrigible supporter of President Obama on almost every non-education issue, I grasped at straws hoping that his and Arne Duncan’s staffing of the Education Department with former Gates Foundation true believers in market-driven reform would not create a mess. Even though they flew in the face of a large body of social science and the professional judgments of teachers, I hoped the Race to the Top (RttT), School Improvement Grants (SIG), and other innovations wouldn’t be a waste of money – or worse.

Before turning to other recent criticisms of the Duncan administration’s alphabet soup of technocratic, top-down mandates, I must recall my most naïve response to the RttT, the SIG and, later, NCLB waivers. In 2009, the Obama administration was in the process of saving the nation’s schools and the entire economy from the Great Recession. It was (then) investing less than $10 billion on pilot programs, while pushing the $100 billion of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) bailout. In such a situation, the United States could afford a set of competition-driven experiments.

If the RttT and the SIG worked, that would be great. If they didn’t, we could learn important lessons. Such experiments, however, would require an objective evaluation of their outcomes, as well as a willingness of the administration to honestly confront the results. At the time, I couldn’t have known that Arne Duncan and his team of former Gates Foundation administrators would be so allergic to facing up to facts.

Now, we are getting the next best thing as conservative reformers, as well as educators, are calling them to task. One of the most recent examples of the pushback is conservative reformer Andy Smarick’s challenge to Joanne Weiss’s defense of the RttT. Weiss personified the administration’s overreach. As director of the RttT, she set out to impose corporate school reform on states and localities across the nation.

Weiss ignored the need for checks and balances of authority, and then she seemed to blame states and localities for the failures of her federal micromanaging of school policies. Smarick concludes, “even when federal education officials are pure of heart, their plans reliably underperform, as in the case of SIG, the backlash to NCLB and Common Core, the disappointing results of educator evaluation reform, and the disintegration of the federally funded testing consortia.” (I don’t agree that federal policies always under-perform, but it is a safe bet that grandiose federal social engineering always will.)

Some of the best critiques of Weiss’s spin can be found in the comments prompted by her article in theStanford Social Innovation Review. Almost all of the fifty-plus comments were negative, and many were Will President Obama's Education Reformers Own Up to Their Failures? - Living in Dialogue:

Schools Matter: AERA Concludes the Facts Are Factual about VAM

Schools Matter: AERA Concludes the Facts Are Factual about VAM:

AERA Concludes the Facts Are Factual about VAM

The American Education Research Association (AERA) can be counted on to remain irrelevant to research discussions of great social significance.  Not surprisingly, AERA's shrinking membership numbers havecoincided with the org's steady drift into the arms of education reform schoolers and the corrupt CorpEd foundations that are laser focused on redirecting education at all levels into corporate revenue streams.  

AERA's complacency and complicity have been sickening to watch, with their kowtowing to Bill Gates and his various bad ideas culminating last year when AERA announced a fellowship program for doctoral students interested channeling and then relinquishing their doctoral research to the Gates's MET database.

Now almost 20 years after legitimate researchers starting ringing the alarm bell on the value-added muddle that was thrust upon the education world by the tobacco-chewing ag statistitian, Bill Sanders, and six years after the National Academy of Sciences sent their hair-on-fire letter to Arne Duncan (which was ignored), warning him about including not-ready-for-prime-time VAM in Race to the Top requirements , AERA has finally concluded that the truth must be true:  VAM is not a legitimate tool for ANY high stakes education decisions.  

From AERA's announcement:

. . . . In recent years, many states and districts have attempted to use VAM to determine the contributions of educators, or the programs in which they were trained, to student learning outcomes, as captured by standardized student tests. The AERA statement speaks to the formidable statistical and methodological issues involved in isolating either the effects of educators or teacher preparation programs from a complex set of factors that shape student performance.

“This statement draws on the leading testing, statistical, and methodological expertise in the field of education research and related sciences, and on the highest standards that guide education research and its applications in policy and practice,” said AERA Executive Director Felice J. Levine.

The statement addresses the challenges facing the validity of inferences from VAM, as well as specifies eight Schools Matter: AERA Concludes the Facts Are Factual about VAM:

Philosophers vs. Welders: Can’t We Have Both? - Education Writers Association

Philosophers vs. Welders: Can’t We Have Both? - Education Writers Association:

Philosophers vs. Welders: Can’t We Have Both?

There was plenty of levity on Twitter in the wake of Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio’s declaration that “we need more welders, less philosophers.”(This English major would have preferred he said “fewer” welders, by the way.)

Consider this inspired mashup from ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis:

In fact, there are strong arguments to be made that welders and philosophers both fill vital roles in a well-rounded society, rather than cancel each other out. Ideally all students would have opportunities to pursue work that interests them  – whether it involves Plato or a plasma cutter. 

Rubio’s larger point – that the nation has significant vacancies in the skilled trades – is a fair one. And it’s an important part of the larger debate over whether preparing all students for college is a reasonable, or even desirable, goal. 

As college-and-career readiness advocates will tell you, the larger goal is to give more students choices after high school, rather than letting assumptions adults make about them as they enter high school force them into either a vocational or college prep path that determines their futures. (Tracking and ability grouping remainhighly contentious issues.)

Inside Higher Ed points out that this isn’t the first time Rubio has come down hard on philosophy majors – or the more traditional college paths, for that matter. And among many fact-checkers to challenge Rubio’s claims that welding is a more lucrative field than philosophy were Politifact, Vox, and the Washington Post. To be sure, there is not a clear winner. As Boston Globe columnistMark Pothier notes, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ pay scales for those professions encompass several different types of jobs that vary widely by location. That being said, you’ll certainly find more job openings listed nationally for welders than those demanding philosophy degrees.

But the gold medal goes to the New York Times for actually finding a philosopher-turned-welder who has written a book extolling the virtues of his overlapping fields.)  Matthew B. Crawford found work at a think tank after graduating from the University of Chicago with a degree in Philosophy, the New York Times reports. But he was unhappy, and later became a welder and author. From the New York Times:

One of his books, “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” is devoted to debunking the notion that manual trades are mindless. “The division between knowledge work and manual work is kind of dubious, because there is so much thinking that goes on in skilled trades,” Mr. Crawford said. As for the payoff, Mr. Crawford rejects the idea that philosophers cannot figure out how to earn a living.

“It’s obviously kind of a reductive approach to think of your course of study in college as merely a means to a paycheck,” Mr. Crawford said, suggesting the study of things like happiness can be enriching in ways that are hard to measure. “And nobody goes into philosophy because they think it’s going to make them rich.”

Writing for the Washington Post earlier this fall, Jeff Selingo dug into a Gallup Poll of 30,000 college graduates. Just 38 percent of individuals who graduated within the past 10 years “strongly Philosophers vs. Welders: Can’t We Have Both? - Education Writers Association:

School board chief: How to fix the mess we’ve made in Florida’s public schools - The Washington Post

School board chief: How to fix the mess we’ve made in Florida’s public schools - The Washington Post:

School board chief: How to fix the mess we’ve made in Florida’s public schools

In September Florida’s school superintendents issued a public attack on the state’s accountability system that uses standardized test scores to measure students, teachers and schools, saying that they “have lost confidence” in the system’s accuracy and called for a  suspension and a review of the system. Since then there have been solutions proposed that call for an end to the use of the Florida Standards Assessments (FSA) for accountability purposes and a switch to national tests. For example, Seminole County Superintendent Walt Griffin proposed three national tests — the Iowa Test, the SAT and the PSAT — as substitutes in different grades.

Here’s a different suggested solution, from Steve Luikart, chairman of the school board in Florida’s Pasco County. Luikart spells out the problem — and how it was created — and poses questions to be answered in creating a solution.

[Florida superintendents revolt]

Steve Luikart is chairman of the school board in Pasco County, Florida.School board chief: How to fix the mess we’ve made in Florida’s public schools - The Washington Post:

School board chief: How to fix the mess we’ve made in Florida’s public schools - The Washington Post: