Gary Rubinstein: Why I Left the “Reform” Movement | Diane Ravitch's blog

Gary Rubinstein: Why I Left the “Reform” Movement | Diane Ravitch's blog

Gary Rubinstein: Why I Left the “Reform” Movement

Gary Rubinstein is well known to readers of this blog, as I have posted almost all of his blogs. He is a career high school math teacher in the New York City public schools. I met Gary about ten years ago, when I had made a complete turnaround in my views about testing and choice. I was working on an article about “miracle schools” that fudged their data and discovered that Gary was an expert on reviewing school-level data and exposing frauds. He helped me write an article (“Waiting for a Miracle School”) that appeared in the New York Times in 2011, and he has continued to be a friend ever since. Gary’s analytical skills have been invaluable in fighting off idiotic “reforms,” like evaluating teachers by their students’ test scores (known as VAM). In his multiple posts on that subject, he showed its many flaws. For example, an elementary teacher might get a high score in reading and a low score in math, posing the dilemma of whether the district could fire her in one subject while CONTINUE READING: Gary Rubinstein: Why I Left the “Reform” Movement | Diane Ravitch's blog

My series of videos about school math finally complete! | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

My series of videos about school math finally complete! | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

My series of videos about school math finally complete!

Though I am most likely known to those who read my blog as a miracle school debunker, a TFA watchdog, or a education research number cruncher, the thing that I do most with my time is do math, think about teaching math, and teach math.

Sometimes an ed reform twitter troll will accuse me of just being a nay sayer who has nothing positive to contribute to the discussion and I guess they sometimes have a point that I do spend a lot of time fighting against false claims made in The74 or Education Post or places like that. It is true that they have kept me quiet busy.

What you may not know about me is that I have made hundreds of hours of YouTube videos on my YouTube channel when I try to share what I know about math to whoever in the world wants to learn it from me. While my videos are not as popular as the stuff you see on Khan Academy, they do get some traffic and I’ve received a lot of very nice comments.

Most of my videos are geared at high school students and cover some really esoteric topics like math proofs from the History Of Math, which is a hobby of mine. But I had an ambitious idea over the summer: Create a series of videos where I start with kindergarten math and work my way up, sequentially, until I get to about eleventh grade. Though of CONTINUE READING: My series of videos about school math finally complete! | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

Education Reinventers | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

Education Reinventers | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

Education Reinventers

For the past ten years public education has been under assault by the self-proclaimed education ‘reformers.’ Strong personalities like Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Michael Bloomberg, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Corey Booker, and others led the movement that gave us Race To The Top, Race To The Top waivers, and the Every Child Succeeds Act.

They got a chance to experiment with their ideas subjecting kids and neighborhoods around the country to school closures, charter schools, and state test madness. After a few years they declared that their experiments were working, they pointed to a few schools that seemingly proved that if you replace unionized teachers who are not scared of being fired with non-unionized teachers who are scared of being fired, you will close the achievement gap measured by standardized test scores. But the successes were mostly false — charter schools were shedding 75% of their students in order to get a so-called 100% college acceptance rate. Other schools were practicing abusive discipline practices that forced out many of the most difficult to teach students. There was even a fiasco called the Tennessee Achievement School District which promised to take over schools in the bottom 5% and move them to the top 25% within five years. Ten years later exactly none of the schools made it out of the bottom 10%.

Reformers needed to change their PR strategy. They replaced Michelle Rhee with CONTINUE READING: Education Reinventers | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

Back By Unpopular Demand! My Kindle E-Book About My Life | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

Back By Unpopular Demand! My Kindle E-Book About My Life | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

Back By Unpopular Demand! My Kindle E-Book About My Life

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I’m a math teacher. Math and teaching are two of my life passions and they are two things that I have some talent for. I would say that I’m a ‘very good’ teacher but merely a ‘good’ mathematician.

I’m also a writer. I’ve written 7 books (4 math books, 2 books on teaching, and co-authored 1 children’s book), about 20 published articles in various magazines and journals, and, of course, hundreds of blog posts. Writing is another passion of mine and, in my opinion, the thing that I do best. I never wanted to go through what it takes to make a living as a writer. I’m not someone who can really force my writing so I don’t think I would like the pressure of needing to write to eat.

So over the past thirty years, I’ve gotten the urge, from time to time, to work on my collection of personal essays about my life. I started writing these when I was about 21 and, over the years, would write an essay when I’d see a call out for the ‘Chicken Soup For The Soul’ series of books or just when I’d get the urge to write. Even though I’ve been a prolific blogger, these essays are much more difficult to write. There are only about 25 of them written in the past thirty years.

Though you might know me as a serious writer who writes about education and charter schools and who makes scatter plots about value-added data, the type of writing that I do is ‘humor.’ Comedy is something that I’ve been drawn to since I was a child. When I was about 11 years old my mother gave me a record of Woody Allen doing his stand-up from the 1960s and I listened to it all the time.

You never know if you are really funny until you try to perform stand-up in a New York City comedy club and, as a hobby over the past 15 years, I have done that from time to time and have always done well. Here’s a montage of some shows over the past 15 years.

About 8 years ago I published a Kindle e-book of essays I had CONTINUE READING: Back By Unpopular Demand! My Kindle E-Book About My Life | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

My Remote Teaching Tips Videos | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

My Remote Teaching Tips Videos | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

My Remote Teaching Tips Videos

Maybe the only advantage to teaching remotely is that you can fart anytime you want.

Compared to live teaching, remote teaching introduces so many new challenges. I think the biggest challenge is that teachers don’t get to leverage a personal connection with their students. Hearing a pep talk from a teacher in a small square on your screen just doesn’t have the same effectiveness. And with all the windows on my screen and the technologies, I’m not able to build relationships the way I did before. Delivering content has its own challenges. In a live classroom, I can feel the energy of a class that is getting it, but on Zoom with students looking tired it is hard to gauge.

Last spring when we switched to full remote in March, the main technology I used was Zoom with chat and breakout rooms. I wasn’t so happy with my effectiveness so this year I made sure to improve things. Now I have a daily flow that I am quite proud of and I am sure my students are learning very well because of it.

I made a series of videos which I put on a playlist to share with other teachers who want to be more effective remote teachers.

Here is the playlist https://youtu.be/8CH8tZ8gS8s

There are currently 6 videos up and if people seem to like them, I will make more. The first video shows the hardware I used in school to maximize effectiveness. The second video is how I did a similar setup from home. The third video is what I sent to parents ahead of CONTINUE READING: My Remote Teaching Tips Videos | Gary Rubinstein's Blog