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Sunday, December 1, 2019

CATCH UP WITH CURMUDGUCATION + ICYMI: Deer Season Edition (12/1)

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Deer Season Edition (12/1)


ICYMI: Deer Season Edition (12/1)
Yes, it may be Thanksgiving weekend where you are, but in my neck of the woods, schools are closed tomorrow for the first day of deer season. Don't knock it if you haven't eaten some excellent deer baloney. In the meantime, here's some reading from the week


Sign of the times. This one was in New Jersey. One more reminder of the vulnerability of school data systems.

Over at The Hill they've noticed that DeVos is not exactly racing to help students drowning in debt incurred at frauduversities. Fun detail I hadn't previously seen in coverage of this-- when DeVos signed off on claims already approved, she added "with extreme displeasure" below her signature. What a sweetheart.

This is just awesome. Researchers took a look to see what happened if you used VAM to check on which teachers had the best effect on student height. Turns out VAM is just as valid for that purpose as it is for measuring teacher effect on test scores. A great addition to everyone's VAM is a sham file.

In a shocking development, yet another set of PD stuff turns out to be largely useless (I know-- I'm shocked, to). Peter DeWitt at EdWeek asks what the problem might be.

Stephen Dyer at 10th Period takes a look at how Ohio charter vampires are upping their blood intake to even more dangerous levels.

Thomas Ultican has a thoroughly researched look at all the reasons i-Ready is a snare and a delusion. A great read (and not just because he included me).

Peter Gray at Psychology Today reminding us, again, that pushing academics on the littles is not doing anybody any good.

Audrey Watters is freakin' awesome. Here's the text of a recent speech she delivered about the stories that ed tech pushers use to sell their junk. A must read.

Wrench in the Gears traveled to Seattle to speak about some of the threats hiding behind the tech revolution in education.

David Dawkins at Forbes identifies one of the many longterm problems that come with the rise of our philanthropist kings.

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has been digging again, and she's found another project messing with education being funded by Michael Bloomberg's daughter.



CATCH UP WITH CURMUDGUCATION




TX: Bigotry In The Classroom

by Peter Greene / 54min
This is a troubling story, for several reasons. Georgia Clark was an English teacher in the Fort Worth Independent School District, a district with over 80% Hispanic student population. Clark sent a message to Donald Trump, asking him to do something about all the illegal [sic] immigrant students. Her request included charming lines like "anything you can do to remove the illegals from Fort Worth

YESTERDAY

Ed Tech Giant Powerschool Keeps Eating the World

200+by Peter Greene / 23h
If you want to be a tech giant, you can try to grow organically within your company, or you can just look for companies that are already doing what you want to do, and buy them. Some are better than the strategy than others-- Facebook absorbed Instagram well enough, but Google seems to kill everything it touches . Back in the day, PowerSchool was a simple little program for taking care of classroo

NOV 29

CO: READ Didn't Work. Quick, Call A Consultant!

100+by Peter Greene / 1d
In 2012, Colorado joined the list of states whose legislators don't understand the difference between correlation and causation. Colorado passed the READ Act , "born out of convincing research by a variety of sources...that shows students who cannot read by the end of third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school." That's an interesting, possibly valuable correlation. But to ar

NOV 28

Be Grateful

100+by Peter Greene / 2d
It's ironic, with a very American sort of irony, that we have a national holiday about thankfulness and gratitude, because we are kind of lousy at that whole thankfulness and gratitude thing. We're more attracted to the self-made story, the I-pulled-myself-up-by-my-own-bootstraps story, the story that in this country, anyone can get ahead with grit, virtue and hard work (and if you haven't gotten

NOV 27

AI: Bad Data, Bad Results

57by Peter Greene / 3d
Once upon a time, when you took computer programming courses, you had two things drilled into you: 1) Computers are dumb. Fast and indefatigable, but dumb. 2) Garbage in, garbage out. The rise of artificial intelligence is supposed to make us forget both of those things. It shouldn't. It especially shouldn't in fields like education which are packed with cyber-non-experts and far too many people w
Finn And Hess Accidentally Argue For Teacher Tenure

69by Peter Greene / 4d
Chester Finn (honcho emeritus, Fordham Institute) and Rick Hess (AEI education guy) are concerned about the threat of rampant wokeness , particularly in the reformster universe. And they are not afraid to exercise some strenuous prose in service of the point: School reformers have long seen themselves as plucky champions of change. Today, however, as funders and advocacy groups chant from a common

NOV 26

TN: Doubling Down On Bad Reading Policy

80by Peter Greene / 5d
Among the worst policy ideas of the past decades, we have to count third grade reading retention laws. These laws can sometimes give schools a brief bump in test scores, but the consequences for actual human students are not good . And some folks in Tennessee have decided that more of a bad idea would be super. Why tell a eight or nine year old child that they failed third grade, even though they

NOV 24



ICYMI: Good Lord Is Thanksgiving Really Next Week Edition (11/24)

by Peter Greene / 7d
I find that in retirement holidays sort of sneak up on me. I suppose it's because I'm not exposed to the daily reminders from students and the school calendar. Mostly I like it, but sometimes I'm surprised. In the meantime, here are some 
CURMUDGUCATION - http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/
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