Testing for Wisdom? | Truth in American Education

Testing for Wisdom? | Truth in American Education:

Testing for Wisdom?

I noticed an article in Scientific American entitled “Is the U.S. Education System Producing a Society of Smart Fools?”

They interviewed Cornell University psychologist Robert Sternberg who annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science they said sounded the alarm about standardized testing.

He addressed problems with IQ tests and college entrance exams that are selecting and rewarding people who have a particular kind of intelligence, but not the intelligence needed to solve significant challenges.

Tests like the SAT, ACT, the GRE—what I call the alphabet tests—are reasonably good measures of academic kinds of knowledge, plus general intelligence and related skills. They are highly correlated with IQ tests and they predict a lot of things in life: academic performance to some extent, salary, level of job you will reach to a minor extent—but they are very limited. What I suggested in my talk today is that they may actually be hurting us. Our overemphasis on narrow academic skills—the kinds that get you high grades in school—can be a bad thing for several reasons. You end up with people who are good at taking tests and fiddling with phones and computers, and those are good skills but they are not tantamount to the skills we need to make the world a better place.

He argues we must factor other variables with intelligence to cultivate the problem-solvers our society needs.

What I argue is that intelligence that’s not modulated and moderated by creativity, common sense and wisdom is not such a positive thing to have. What it leads to is 

Testing for Wisdom? | Truth in American Education:

Torlakson Announces CA Schools Mobile App Release - Year 2017 (CA Dept of Education)

Torlakson Announces CA Schools Mobile App Release - Year 2017 (CA Dept of Education):

State Schools Chief Tom Torlakson Announces

Release of CA Schools Mobile App

SACRAMENTO—State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson today announced the release of the California Department of Education’s (CDE) first mobile application that offers detailed information about California’s 10,000 public schools.

The CA Schools mobile app, developed in-house by the CDE and available for iOS and Android systems, lets users locate nearby schools based on their current location and provides a wealth of details, including contacts and directions, demographics, test scores, and a school’s California School Dashboard profile page.

“Never before have we put so much school information literally in the hands of our students, parents, and community members and made the information so accessible and user-friendly,” Torlakson said. “Home buyers can check out schools in their prospective neighborhoods. Parents heading to a child’s away game can map directions to the host school. There are all kinds of potential uses.”

The CA Schools Mobile App draws upon the same data as the CDE’s California School Directory and links to additional content on the CDE’s Web site such as a school’s California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) test results. In addition to location-based searches, users can find schools by city, county, school district, and ZIP code. Users can search specifically for charter schools and even private schools.

The CA Schools mobile app is available for free download through Apple’s App Store  Web page or the Google Play  Web page. More information is available on CDE’s CA Schools Mobile Application support Web page.

# # # #

Tom Torlakson — State Superintendent of Public Instruction
Communications Division, Room 5602, 916-319-0818, Fax 916-319-0100

Torlakson Announces CA Schools Mobile App Release - Year 2017 (CA Dept of Education):

Commencement speaker warns graduates: ‘You are entering a low social esteem, often thankless, profession’ - The Washington Post

Commencement speaker warns graduates: ‘You are entering a low social esteem, often thankless, profession’ - The Washington Post:

Commencement speaker warns graduates: ‘You are entering a low social esteem, often thankless, profession’ 

UNLESS YOU BECOME A BADASS TEACHER

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Commencement speeches are, by and large, moments when a speaker tries to “uplift” graduating students with hopeful expectation for the future. By his own admission, speaker Elias Vlanton did something a bit different Friday, when he delivered the address to graduates of the Master of Arts in Teaching program at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

[The greatest commencement speech ever]

Vlanton, who taught social studies in Prince George’s County Public Schools for 16 years, talked not just about the joys of teaching, but he also presented the unvarnished truth about the hardships educators must confront. Here’s a sample:

Future teachers: You are entering a low social esteem, often thankless, profession — condescended to by many and ignored by the rest. You’ll get tired of hearing, at your neighborhood barbecues or cocktail parties, that you are “only” a teacher, and you’ll be lectured by complete strangers, with no training in education, on how they could teach better than you. Your students’ parents might be completely disengaged from their children’s lives and of no help in your mission or, possibly worse, over-engaged, telling you how their little Juan is unique and must be treated with special care — implying all your other students are interchangeable. While lecturing you on the importance of treating students with sensitivity and respect, the school’s administration might treat you with neither.

Vlanton, in fact, gave himself an “F” in the uplifting department. Read his speech and see what you think.

Vlanton received an honorary doctorate of letters from St. Mary’s College in 2009 for his work at Bladensburg High School in helping low-income students attend college by mentoring them. Many of the students attended St. Mary’s as the first in their families to go to college, and those students graduated at higher rates than the St. Mary’s average, he said.

He is also a freelance journalist, and in addition to articles on education, he wrote a study titled, “Who Killed George Polk? A Press Covers Up a Death in the Family.” Polk was a CBS radio journalist who was murdered in 1948 while he was covering the Greek civil war, though it is still not known who killed him.

[Why caps and gowns at graduation? Let’s go back 900 years.]

Here’s Vlanton’s commencement speech:

A commencement speech aims to uplift graduates as they enter the workforce; sorry, kids, I’ll earn an “F” on that score.

Future teachers: You are entering a low social esteem, often thankless, profession — condescended to by many and ignored by the rest. You’ll Commencement speaker warns graduates: ‘You are entering a low social esteem, often thankless, profession’ - The Washington Post:

Remade Pile of Words: Will ‘conscious’ charters fail? – Cloaking Inequity

Remade Pile of Words: Will ‘conscious’ charters fail? – Cloaking Inequity:

Remade Pile of Words: Will ‘conscious’ charters fail?

About this time 16 years ago I was sitting on the lawn listen to Professor Ray McDermott talk about the work of bees in a hive and the application of their activity to education. It was a PERFECT spring graduate school course. Well, in that course, McDermott also used an interesting pedagogical tool. What Ray would do is encourage us to take complex texts and replace the nouns and other words with alternative topics to see how the work would read and provide a new meaning. I call this a textual interchange approach. For example, here is what I did with a Marx text as a graduate student in 2002:

Precisely because political economy (education policy) fails to grasp the interconnections within the movement (education), it was possible to oppose, for example, the doctrine of competition (school choice movement) to the doctrine of monopoly (school resource allocation) the doctrine of craft freedom (charter schools) to the doctrine of the guild (industrialists and elites) and the doctrine of the division of landed property (school funding formulas based on property values) to the doctrine of the great estate (school district boundaries), for competition (market-based school choice) craft freedom (charter schools), and division of landed property (school funding formulas based on property values) were developed and conceived only as accidental, deliberate, violent consequences of monopoly (school resource allocation), of the guilds (industrialists and elites) of feudal property (segregation of education resources), and not as their necessary, inevitable, and natural consequences.

At the time, I was contemplating how McDermott’s course readings on Marx and his ideas on political economy could be transposed/translated to school choice and education policy.

Fast forward to the modern day.

I read an article in The Guardian entitled Whole Foods represents the failures of ‘conscious capitalism‘ The piece got me thinking about the constant public conversation about charters as conscious. Betsy DeVos is a big supporter of charter schools and in Michigan more than 80% of charter schools are for-profit. Is this the direction that the conscious charter school sector is headed? What does this evolution toward for-profit portend for the future?

To ponder these questions, I have undertaken the McDermott textual interchange approach with The Guardian piece to portend how an article might read in 2020.

It’s hard to think of a better poster child for “conscious capitalism” than [charter schools]. These days, the [for-profit charters] are floundering and a potential buyout is on the horizon. What does that say about the conscious capitalism it championed? 

[Enrollments] have declined for six straight quarters, [millions of students] walked away during the same period. Last month activist hedge fund funds swooped in buying up 8.3% of [for-profit charters] and demanded an overhaul. The [for-profit charter chains] responded by reshuffling boards, bringing in a handful of big box retail stars and promoting [individuals] who hail from private equity.

The [for-profit charter chains] are valued at almost $12bn, but six straight quarters of declining [enrollments] have led to speculation of a takeover bid. What went wrong?

A failing [school] isn’t exactly news. In the dog-eat-dog world of global capitalism lots of [schools] have their moment in the sun only to crash and burn a few years later.

But [charter schools] were supposed to be different.

[Charter school proponents] have long argued that [charters] are wired differently — that they runs on a “conscious capitalism” model that outsmarts the competitive pressures of our [neighborhood public schools] through creativity and innovation.

[There is a] growing consensus that [for-profit education] is doing irreparable harm to [communities] and the people who live in them. Our for-profit system is increasingly viewed as a zero-sum game in which [neighborhood] destruction and rising inequality are firmly linked to the rapacious behavior of corporations.

Free-market [choice], according to [charter school proponents], is actually a “beautiful”, “heroic” system that, properly harnessed, can operate “in harmony with the fundamentals of human nature” and communities.

We don’t need to rein in [charter schools] through onerous labor [agreements] and regulations, because the virtuous feedback loop of honoring stakeholders plus innovation will leave “unconscious” [schools] in the dust.

The conscious capitalism model is appealing. It’s simple, easy. We can avert looming [community] catastrophe by becoming conscious consumers who frequent conscious [charter schools]. After all, [attend school at charter] is a heck of a lot more fun than lobbying for regulations on [charter schools]. More [charters], less [neighborhood schools]. Problem solved.

[Charter school proponents] were right about one thing: people do love to [enroll their children] at [charter schools] – or at least, they used to. These days that demon called competition has caught up with the [community-based charters]. [Large, for-profit] behemoth [charter school chains] now offer [franchise schools in all fifty states].

The point of this dour appraisal is not to crow over [charters] misfortune. It’s to take a hard look at models that claim to solve the ills of capitalism without challenging the in-built drives of our for-profit system.

[Charter proponents] have loudly declared unions akin to herpes and state regulation little more than “crony capitalism” – that all we need to solve community crises are better, smarter, “conscious” capitalists. The crisis of [charter schools] belies this notion. There’s no way to “fix” corporations’ compulsion to produce ever more, ever more cheaply. It’s written into the DNA of global capitalism.

Attractive as the conscious capitalism model may be, we simply can’t rely on companies to deliver dignified workplaces, equitable models of [education].

All [students] are not equal in our global economy, and even the best intentioned [schools] run up against the implacable foes of profit and competition. Ultimately, the thorny problem of sustaining both decent livelihoods and a livable [communities] won’t be solved by [market-based approaches to schools]. It’ll be solved through political struggle and demands that put people before profit.

Does this textual interchange approach demonstrate what we will be reading in 2020? or even 2018.

Stay woke.

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Remade Pile of Words: Will ‘conscious’ charters fail? – Cloaking Inequity:

Why should the federal government support high-quality early education? - The Washington Post

Why should the federal government support high-quality early education? - The Washington Post:

Why should the federal government support high-quality early education?

Every year the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, releases a report on state-funded prekindergarten programs in the United States. It is the only national report with detailed information on preschool enrollment, funding, teacher qualifications and other policies related to quality, such as the presence of a qualified teacher and assistant, small class size and low teacher-to-student ratio.

The newest edition, the 2016 yearbook, was recently released, with profiles on preschool programs in 43 states plus Guam and the District of Columbia and some information on early-education efforts in states and the U.S. territories that do not provide state-funded preschool. There was both good news and bad from the 2015-2016 school year, as the report noted:

Nationwide, state-funded preschool program enrollment reached an all-time high, serving nearly 1.5 million children, 32 percent of 4-year-olds and 5 percent of 3-year-olds. State funding for preschool rose 8 percent to about $7.4 billion, a $564 million increase. State funding per child increased to $4,976, exceeding pre-recession levels for the first time. Six state funded preschool programs met all 10 current quality standards benchmarks. Nine states had programs that met fewer than half; and seven states do not fund preschool at all.

Below is a post on the data and on the federal government’s role in prekindergarten, written by W. Steven Barnett, a Board of Governors professor and director of the National Institute for Early Education Research. His research includes studies of the economics of early care and education, including costs and benefits; the long-term effects of preschool programs on children’s learning and development; and the distribution of educational opportunities. Barnett earned his PhD in economics at the University of Michigan and has written or co-written more than 180 publications.

By W. Steven Barnett

In his first budget proposal, President Trump calls for the Department of Education to “refocus its mission on supporting States and school districts in their efforts to provide high-quality education to all our students.”  Our new national survey of state preschool Why should the federal government support high-quality early education? - The Washington Post:

EWA2017: “Nation’s Education Reporters Confident They’re Making a Difference” – Missouri Education Watchdog

EWA2017: “Nation’s Education Reporters Confident They’re Making a Difference” – Missouri Education Watchdog:

EWA2017: “Nation’s Education Reporters Confident They’re Making a Difference”

Is the Job of an Education Reporter to Learn How to Write PR Instead of the Facts? Philanthropists, NGOs and EdReformers Hope So.

The Education Writers Association (EWA) is the invitation only event for writers covering education.  The title of this article was taken from EWA’s website and the announcement of the EWA2017 recent seminar.  Do you remember EWA2016?:

Richard Phelps writes in The Education Writers Association casts its narrowing gaze on Boston, May 1-3:

An organization claiming to represent and support all US education journalists sets up shop in Boston next week for its annual “National Seminar”. The Education Writers Association’s (EWA’s) national seminars introduce thousands of journalists to sources of information and expertise. Many sessions feature journalists talking with other journalists. Some sessions host teachers, students, or administrators in “reports from the front lines” type panel discussions. But, the remaining and most ballyhooed sessions feature non-journalist experts on education policy fronting panels with, typically, a journalist or two hosting. Allegedly, these sessions interpret “all the research”, and deliver truth, from the smartest, most enlightened on earth.

Given its central role, and the profession it represents, one would expect diligence from EWA in representing all sides and evidence. Indeed, EWA claims a central purpose “to help journalists get the story right.”

The ‘seminar’ for 2017 seems much like 2016.  Here is the agenda and sponsors:

Here are a few of the sessions:

Parents were represented at this conference and writers were asked to glimpse into the hearts and minds of EWA2017: “Nation’s Education Reporters Confident They’re Making a Difference” – Missouri Education Watchdog:

Several states moving to expand age kids must be in school - ABC News

Several states moving to expand age kids must be in school - ABC News:

Several states moving to expand age kids must be in school

A dozen states are trying to keep children in school longer, from making kindergarten mandatory to raising the legal drop-out age. But it's not an easy sell.

Nevada is among the states this year that have or are considering proposals to stretch the compulsory attendance age. A bill that would require children in Nevada to start school at age 5 was met with such resistance that it was amended to age 6. Current state law sets the age at 7. The proposal is likely to go nowhere, as the Nevada legislature is set to adjourn Monday.

"If you're really concerned about kids dropping out, I don't think making kindergarten mandatory is really the heart of the issue," said Maggie England, who opposes the Nevada bill and wants to homeschool her three children.

Supporters admit that it wouldn't have much of an impact on enrollment numbers — and therefore school budgets. State officials estimate that about 95 percent of 6-year-olds are already learning in a formal capacity. What's to be gained, then, said Nevada Assemblywoman Olivia Diaz, is the message that the state sometimes mocked as the "Mississippi of the West" is taking seriously its mission to turn things around in its glaringly deficient schools.

"I believe every child deserves a fair and equal shot at the American dream and that starts with school," said Diaz, the bill sponsor who is also a Las Vegas-area teacher. "I just think it's going to be a philosophical argument and we're just going to have to agree to disagree. As a teacher, and as an assemblywoman who represents a very at-risk population, this is fundamental."

The conversation among advocates is often tinged with this kind of anxiety about economic disparity. Their debate is centered as a moral imperative, extolling research on the importance of access to education, particularly for poor and disadvantaged children. Lately, education access has also seen a heightened, urgent interest on the national stage, ranging from college tuition to daycare and pre-kindergarten. The compulsory school age issue gained peak momentum when then-President Barack Obama in his 2012 State of the Union address urged states to raise the dropout age to 18.

In the past decade, both Republican and Democrat lawmakers have pushed for changes that would stretch the compulsory school attendance age, in some states requiring children to be in the classroom for as many as 13 years, from age 5 to 18. This year alone, at least six bills were proposed in Mississippi to expand the years that children must be in school. All of them have failed.

Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, New Jersey, South Carolina, Montana, Mississippi and North Carolina also have considered the issue this year.

Nearly all states require free education to be offered by age 5, though in half the country, Several states moving to expand age kids must be in school - ABC News:

Moan-day Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all

Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all:

Moan-day Diane Ravitch's blog

A site to discuss better education for all

Keep Watch Over Our National Lands

2by dianeravitch / 27min

The American edition of The Guardian, a British newspaper, has https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/05/public-lands-project-description?utm_source=eml&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=&CMP_TU=&CMP_BUNIT=&att5=tarted a series to cover any efforts to sell off our national lands or lease them to oil and gas interests or for mining. “At a moment of deep political division, few issues draw as much

The Broadway Version of Covfefe

5by dianeravitch / 34min

Randy Rainbow is a delightful humorist. In this post, he performs a Broadway medley about “Covfefe,” the word Trump introduced on Twitter a few days ago. “Despite constant negative press Covfefe,” the full tweet. Some think he fell 

Trump Will Privatize Public Infrastructure

4by dianeravitch / 50min

The organization “In the Public Interest” reports that global equity investors are gearing up for Trump’s infrastructure plan. Question: if the banks own bridges and tunnels, can they put fees on them and raise fees whenever they want? They 

New Jersey: Over-Testing is Hurting the Children It is Supposed to Help

4by dianeravitch / 1h

From a teacher in New Jersey: Testing Frenzy Steals Learning Time from Students The public school testing frenzy is at an all-time high, and it is robbing our students of time to learn. Take it from me, an elementary school teacher from New Jersey with more than 30 years of experience. In an effort to be ready for the state-mandated PARCC tests, we are hurting the very students we most wish to he

Ann Waldman: Vermont’s Voucher Program Pays Tuition at Elite Boarding Schools

6by dianeravitch / 2h

Voucher advocates like to point to Vermont as the nation’s oldest program. When it was started in 1869, it was intended to pay the tuition of students whose town did not have a public school. It has very little in common with the curren voucher movement, which takes its inspiration from the libertarian economist Milton Friedman, who wrote a seminal essay in 1955 proposing that all students should

Peter Greene: There is Nothing Democratic about School Choice

24by dianeravitch / 3h

Peter Greene has a genius for taking complicated ideas and boiling them down to their essence in language that everyone can understand. This post is a classic example of that genius. Others have written entire books trying to explain what he says concisely here. In the recent writings about school choice, pro and con, Peter Greene was especially affronted by a statement from Kevin Chavous, who wo

YESTERDAY

The Staff at Sunburst Elementary School: We Love Our School!

100+by dianeravitch / 23h

If you wonder why people become teachers and remain in the classroom, watch this vide o created by the teachers at Sunburst Elememtary School in Glendale, Arizona. They are having fun! They have a culture of happiness. Not every public school is happy. But those with a strong culture are like families. Watch this family of teachers cavorting for the joy of it. By the way, I googled the school and

Rutgers Professor Prevails Over New Jersey Charter Lobbyists Who Tried to Silence Her

300+by dianeravitch / 1d

This is a sordid story with a happy ending. It tells how the deep-pocketed charter industry tried to silence and discredit a scholar who disagreed with them. The story appears in the Nonprofit Quarterly. Professor Julia Sass Rubin is an associate professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. She has researched charter schools in New Jersey, and o

DeVos Shows What Vouchers are About

60by dianeravitch / 1d

When she was questioned by Congress, Betsy DeVos let the cat out of the bag about vouchers. The U.S. Department of Education will hand out money for vouchers and will not enforce civil rights laws. “She lifted the curtain on school vouchers and made clear exactly what this system of using taxpayer funds to pay for private and religious schools is. “It’s a way for some parents, particularly bigots

Harold Meyerson: Why Do Billionaires Care So Much About Charter Schools?

21by dianeravitch / 1d

Harold Meyerson, editor of The American Prospect, raised a question that I have heard dozens of times: Why do billionaires care so much about charter schools ? Why have so many of the 1% decided that charter schools will provide a better education than public schools? Are we to believe that the Walton Family, Eli Broad, Michael Dell, Doris Fischer, Reed Hastings, and many lesser-known billionaire

The Most Important Expose You Will Read Today: The Fringe Right Universe of “Charities”

48by dianeravitch / 1d

The Washington Post published a deeply researched expose today about the “secret universe” of “charities” that fueled the election of Donald Trump. Please understand before reading this that the Internal Revenue Service classifies 

Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all: