Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Paranoid Michelle Rhee blames her "enemies" for cheating report - Education - Salon.com

Paranoid Michelle Rhee blames her "enemies" for cheating report

Reuters/Hyungwon Kang

Former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, champion of "education reform," is a right-wing folk hero because while working for the public she combined corporatist policy with open contempt for the public. An ostensible Democrat, she now advises Republican governors on how best to battle the nefarious teachers' unions, which, in her reckoning, are almost solely responsible for poor student performance. Her solutions to the "education crisis" mostly involve the privatization of public schools. Her qualifications, besides having all the currently fashionable opinions, are her successes as head of Washington's schools. Test scores increased during her tenure! In some places, they increased

Judge again blocks implementation of collective bargaining law - JSOnline

Judge again blocks implementation of collective bargaining law

Madison - A Dane County judge Tuesday blocked the state from implementing Gov. Scott Walker's collective bargaining measure.

"Further implementation of the act is enjoined," said Dane County Judge Maryann Sumi.

Sumi noted her original restraining order issued earlier this month was clear in saying that the state should not proceed with implementing the law. The Walker administration did so after the bill was published Friday by a state agency not included in Sumi's earlier temporary restraining order.

"Apparently that language was either misunderstood or ignored, but what I said was the further implementation of Act 10 was enjoined. That is what I now want to make crystal clear," she said.

But minutes later, outside the court room, Assistant Attorney General Steven Means said the legislation "absolutely" is still in effect.

Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca (D-Kenosha) balked at that

Survey: Americans want more news about teacher effectiveness | GothamSchools

Survey: Americans want more news about teacher effectiveness

by Maura Walz

Americans want more news coverage of how teachers and students are performing, according to a surveyreleased today by the Brookings Institution.

More than 70 percent of respondents said that they wanted more news coverage of teacher effectiveness and of student academic performance. Nearly the same percentage want to know more about school safety, curriculum, finances and school reform.

In previous studies, the report’s authors have found that education policy and curriculum issues are frequently under-covered in national news. Of the national news stories on education examined in a 2009

KOCH BREAK News | www.kochwatch.org

News | www.kochwatch.org

Ed Schultz & Mike Papantonio: The Alternative Reality of the Koch Brothers WATCH ON YOUTUBE:

The Nation: Republican Party Launches McCarthyite Attack on a Professor—Unfortunately, They Can't Spell His Name *March 28, 2011-* The Republican Party of Wisconsin has launched an all-out attack on William Cronon, arguably one of the most prominent and respected academics not just on the University of Wisconsin campus but nationally. Why the attack? Because ...

MPS Outperforming Voucher Schools on Statewide Exams « Larry Miller's Blog

MPS Outperforming Voucher Schools on Statewide Exams

by millerlf

The results are in on the 21 year voucher “experiment .” Overall MPS students score higher on standardized state tests than voucher students.

2010-11 Wisconsin Student Assessment System results-All Grades Percent Proficient or Advanced

State	Math 77.2	Reading 83.0
State Economically Disadvantaged	63.2	71.7
MPS	47.8	59
MPS Economically Disadvantaged	43.9	55.3
MPCP (vouchers)	34.4	55.2

After $1.1 billion spent on vouchers and relentless attacks on MPS and public education, the truth comes out. Now watch the dance of the privatizers – it’s already begun. Just look at the headline of today’s Journal sentinel. It states, “Choice schools not outperforming MPS.” Compare that to the news release headline from DPI State Superintendent Tony Evers: “Overall MPS results higher than choice schools on statewide exams.” This is the

Latest from the University of Minnesota Student Occupation « Student Activism

Latest from the University of Minnesota Student Occupation

by Angus Johnston

Students at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities launched an “open and soft” occupation of the university’s Social Sciences Tower yesterday. Though the building was officially scheduled to close at 11 pm, they were able to stay through the night, and they seem to be consolidating and expanding their presence today.

The group has a blog and a Twitter account, both set up before the occupation. They released a list of demandsthis morning, and a schedule of activities for the day early this afternoon. They’re planning what one of them calls

NYC Public School Parents: Statement on DiNapoli's discharge rate audit

Statement on DiNapoli's discharge rate audit

by Leonie Haimson

We would like to thank the Comptroller Di Napoli and the Office of the State Comptroller for their hard work on today’s discharge rate audit, which was done in response to a request on April 30, 2009 from Betsy Gotbaum, then-NYC Public Advocate, following a report that we wrote with Jennifer Jennings on the continued high number of students reported as discharged from NYC public schools. (Our 2009 report is posted here)

Even after the OSC office allowed the DOE to provide “additional information and documentation” for randomly selected students who did not have sufficient evidence in their files, 15% of the general education students in the graduating class of 2008 who were reported as discharged, and 20% of those from the special education cohort did not have the required proof to show that they were not actually dropouts. Thus, all these students were improperly removed from the cohort, inflating DOE’s reported graduation rates.

The audit’s findings of an error rate of between 15-20% in reported discharge rates are cause for grave concern

The Koch Line News | www.kochwatch.org

News | www.kochwatch.org

Talking Points Memo: Report: Wis. Supreme Court Race Running Close In Internal Polls *March 28, 2011- *The Wisconsin Supreme Court race on April 5, pitting incumbent Justice David Prosser against challenger Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg, could be going down to the wire in a state that has become highly polarized due ...

Thom Hartmann: Do we take Prosperity Drive or Depression Drive? WATCH ON YOUTUBE:

Talking Points Memo: Labor Ups Pressure On Lawmakers To Nix Union-Busting House Bill *March 28, 2011-* Labor activists are preparing to step up their advocacy efforts on Capitol Hill ahead of a key vote on a union-busting measure later this week, according to sources familiar with their campaign. The stepped up effort comes as ...

Wisconsin Journal Times: Wanggaard wants homes off limits to protesters; U.S. Supreme Court has upheld law prohibiting it *March 26, 2011-* Grab your protest sign. Grab your megaphone. Next, make sure where you are going is legal. The city, for one, has an ordinance against picketing in front of an individual's house. State Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine, wants to take it ...

For those who thought if you ignored the witch hunters they would go away. They haven’t « Fred Klonsky's blog

For those who thought if you ignored the witch hunters they would go away. They haven’t

by Fred Klonsky

Talking Point Memo reports that another Michigan based right-wing group has used Michigan’s version of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in an ongoing campaign of political intimidation of teachers and professors.

This time it involves The Mackinac Center For Public Policy. They are funded by the Koch brothers, the Walton Foundation (Wal-Mart) and the Prince family of Blackwater fame.

The targets? According to TPM, they include Labor Studies Center at the University of Michigan and the Douglas A. Fraser Center for Workplace Issues at Wayne State University. A third FOIA was directed to Michigan State University, which has a School of Human Resources & Labor Relations.

The requests specifically seek emails from all labo

KOCH Break News | www.kochwatch.org

News | www.kochwatch.org

Bold Progressives: Recall Momentum! (Green Bay) WATCH ON YOUTUBE:

Wisconsin State Journal: Gov. Walker’s spending plan: reform or Republican? *March 27, 2011-* The throng of angry protesters rushed into the state Assembly, filling every corner of the chamber and stopping lawmakers from moving forward with a piece of controversial legislation. The crowd was angry. Police were tense. The ...

NPR: Shaping Stae Law With Little Scrutiny (AUDIO) *(What does this have to do with the Koch brothers? You can find SourceWatch's report on ALEC on our Links page.)*

NYT: Op-Ed: William Cronon and the American Thought Police *-By Paul Krugman* *March 27, 2011-* Recently William Cronon, a historian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, decided to weigh in on his state’s political turmoil. He started a blog, “Scholar as Citizen,” devoting his first post to the role ...

UnemployedWorkers.Com: Michigan Lawmakers Vote to Begin Dismantling State's Unemployment Insurance System NELP and UnemployedWorkers.org Urge Governor to Veto Misguided, Short-Sighted Bill and Demand Legislature Fix Extended Benefits Legislation Without Gutting Basic Benefits *March 24, 2011-* Yesterday, in the dead of night, Michigan lawmakers dealt a ...

Questions for myself. « Fred Klonsky's blog

Questions for myself.

by Fred Klonsky

What did you think of Obama’s speech last night?

I didn’t watch it.

Does it bother you that some progressives support the war on Libya?

Of course it bothers me. Like Obama, they won’t say the word, “war.” You don’t have to be a cynic to suggest that Obama’s actions have less to do with protecting civilians and more to do with oil and the need to reassert US leadership among the big powers that Bush destroyed.

Anything else?

You just have to be unhappy when big powers get militarily involved in little country’s civil wars. And do it

University of Minnesota Occupation Releases Demands « Student Activism

University of Minnesota Occupation Releases Demands

by Angus Johnston

The students occupying a building at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities have made it through their first night, and they’ve released a list of demands:

Because we are residents of Minnesota, and because this is a public, land-grant university,

We demand the right to peacefully occupy space at our university,

We demand that the general public has reasonable access to university resources;

We demand that the university respect the rights of all workers to organize and to earn at least a living

More Student-Bashing from The Chronicle « Student Activism

More Student-Bashing from The Chronicle

by Angus Johnston

This is so weird.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a new opinion piece out today in which an adjunct professor named Elayne Clift describes a class that went completely off the rails. Apparently the first session was a disaster (although Clift refuses to say what happened), and she was never able to get things back on track. In twenty years of teaching, she says, she had “never … seen such extraordinarily bad behavior in [her] students.” Even some of their classmates agreed: “I’ve never seen such disrespect for a teacher,” she quotes one of them as saying.

I get this. Sometimes you wind up wrong-footed early in the term, and things just … deteriorate. Whether it’s because a relationship with a vocal student has turned adversarial, because you’ve failed to articulate your expectations clearly, or just because you can’t quite manage to dispel an odd mood, it’s surprisingly easy to discover, a month or two in, that a class has gone weird on you.

But that dynamic isn’t what this prof wants to talk about. Executing a sharp rhetorical pivot in her fifth paragraph,

Mas de 5.000 de personas están de acuerdo: ¡Fuera con Easley! | DeFENSE

Mas de 5.000 de personas están de acuerdo: ¡Fuera con Easley!

by admin

el 28 de marzo del 2011

Contacto: John McBride 720-270-0327 o Larry Borom 303-355-4635
Organizaciones: Northeast Community Congress for Education, Black Education Advisory Council, and Democrats for Excellent Neighborhood School Education (DeFENSE)

Correo Electronico:info@defensedenver.com

Sitio del Red: http://defensedenver.com

Evento: Entrega de peticiones para la retirada del representante del DPS Distrito 4

Fecha/Hora: Martes, 29 de marzo, 2011 3:30 pm

Lugar: Denver Election Commission , 200 W. 14th Ave., Suite 100 (esquina suroeste, 14th y
Bannock), Denver, 80204

Más de 5,000 votantes del Noreste de Denver Apoyan la Retirada del

I Give Up - Pay Anything... - The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - 03/28/11 - Video Clip | Comedy Central

Monday March 28, 2011

Daily Show: I Give Up - Pay Anything...

As greedy public workers bankrupt states, America makes it harder for honest corporate citizens to create jobs.

My New Column on the D.C. Testing Irregularities - Dana Goldstein

My New Column on the D.C. Testing Irregularities

by Dana Goldstein

This morning the Washington, D.C. Board of Education announced it would launch an investigation into widespread standardized testing irregularities in the city's public schools during the reign of Michelle Rhee. One-hundred-and-three of the district's 168 public schools submitted multiple choice answer sheets with abnormally high erasure rates, with many of those schools displaying a consistent pattern of incorrect answers being replaced by correct ones.

Statisticians told USA Today, which broke the story, that the number of erasures at some D.C. schools were so high that "the odds of winning the Powerball grand prize were better than the erasures occurring by chance."

Check out my column at The Daily Beast about the education policy lessons we can learn from this discouraging--but ultimately, not all that suprising--news:

In the social sciences, there is an oft-repeated maxim called Campbell’s Law, named after Donald Campbell, a psychologist who studied human creativity. Campbell’s Law states that incentives corrupt. In other words, the more punishments and rewards—such as merit pay—are associated with the results of any given test, the more likely it is that the test’s results will be rendered meaningless, either through outright cheating or through teaching to the test in a way that narrows the curriculum and renders real learning obsolete.

Read the whole thing.

What is a Charter School? And what does it have to do with you? | Uppity Wisconsin

What is a Charter School? And what does it have to do with you?

by Sen. Kathleen Vinehout

“I’ve heard of charter schools,” the woman told me. “But I really don’t know understand them.” People are not familiar with schools often run by a private group but using taxpayer dollars.

Imagine a school created with a business-like contact or “charter”. This charter sets it own rules for the school and exempts it from the usual rules about classes, staff, budgeting and administration.

Many charter schools are created and run by local school districts but some are independent charters. Cost to local school districts for these independent schools this year was almost $60 million statewide. In our Senate District, school districts will pay an estimated $1.3 million in the next two years for these independent charter schools.

Last week, as a member of the Senate Committee on Education, I participated in a ten hour hearing on a bill that

Prosser on the spot?

by xoff

WisPolitics.com reports that the appeals court rejected a motion from Atty Gen JB Van Hollen to withdraw his appeal over Dane County Judge Maryann Sumi's temporary restraining order barring the publication of the collective bargaining bill.

The appeals court says Van Hollen should ask the State Supreme Court to rule on his motion, since the appeals couort has asked the Supremes to hear the case directly.

Will that put Justice David Prosser on the spot the week before the election? Could be very interesting. Will

Teamster Nation: Great WI recall ad (video)

Great WI recall ad (video)

Efforts to recall in Wisconsin Republican senators got a boost today with a terrific new ad. It features the people of Wisconsin: teachers, corrections officers, administrative workers and college students. They have this to say:

This is for my children, my wife, our friends and neighbors. This is for our community.

Republicans declared war on the middle class. Now, with this

Relationships Matter More Than Numbers « Failing Schools

Relationships Matter More Than Numbers

MARCH 29, 2011

by mariasallee

I was attending a recent school district meeting designed for the public when I first heard the phrase “human capital”. Then I heard it again. And again. It appears this is a new buzzword administrators and other school personnel are using to describe teachers and other educational employees. However, at a time when we are engaging in such heated national debate about the “value” of teachers and the purpose of unions, I feel a little alarm sounding in my head. For me, that phrase “human capital” evokes images of the scene in Pink Floyd’s The Wall where the thought-controlling teacher is mashing the children through a meat grinder until they come out a worm-like mass. It also brings to my mind thoughts of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factoryfire and high school history lessons about our nation’s industrial revolution era, its legacy of fat-cat industrialists monopolizing markets, getting rich on the backs of underpaid, ill-treated

Teaching Boys Feminism « Feminist Teacher

Teaching Boys Feminism

by feministteacher

The following is cross-posted at Gender Across Borders and Equality 101 for their jointly hosted Feminism & Education series.

Each year, boys sign up for my high school course on feminism (photo, Ileana Jiménez)

When I was in college, I always thought that teaching girls about feminism was my life’s calling. It turns out that teaching boys about feminism has made that calling even more profound.

In the past three years, I have taught a high school course on feminism titled Fierce and Fabulous: Feminist Writers, Artists, and Activists. Each year, girls and boys sign up for the class and each year, these young men

University of Minnesota Occupation Press Release « occupy california

University of Minnesota Occupation Press Release

by *

from UMNsolidarity:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Contact: Hallie (612)217-2462, umnsolidarity@gmail.com

Students and Community Supporters Occupy Social Sciences Tower at University of Minnesota Twin Cities Campus – West Bank

Occupying in Solidarity with Wisconsin Students and Workers and Against University Budget Cuts

Minneapolis – On Monday, March 28th, a group of students and community members have occupied the first floor of the Social Sciences tower on the West Bank of the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota. Following a rally in front of Coffman Memorial Union, participants marched across the East Bank of campus and crossed the Mississippi River onto the West Bank. Students and supporters entered into the first floor of the Social Sciences tower and held an assembly to discuss possible courses of action. Using a democratic process of consensus, protesters decided to hold the space in an open and soft occupation.

Since the occupation is non-violent and open, as of press time the University has not removed the occupiers.

Thoughts on the Failure of Merit Pay - Bridging Differences - Education Week

Thoughts on the Failure of Merit Pay

by Diane Ravitch

Dear Deborah,

Teacher merit pay is one of the hot "new" ideas of the moment. It has the wholehearted support of the Obama administration, which made it one of the criteria for states hoping to win a piece of Race to the Top funding. The Obama administration has also proposed spending nearly $1 billion for merit-pay programs in fiscal 2011. The president never tires of saying that we should pay more to "our best teachers," and we know that he approves of using standardized test scores to identify the "best teachers." Now, with the ascendancy of very conservative Republican governors and legislatures, merit pay is on the front burner in many states.

Let me say, as an aside, that it is breathtaking to see how closely aligned are the agendas of conservative governors and the Obama administration when it comes to education.

It is curious that teachers vigorously oppose merit pay, even though they are the ones who are supposed to reap the rewards. What do they know? They know that merit pay undermines collaboration and teamwork. They know

Shanker Blog » Teacher Quality Is Not A Policy

Teacher Quality Is Not A Policy

by Matthew Di Carlo

I often hear the following argument: Improving teacher quality is more cost-effective than other options, such as reducing class size (see here, for example). I am all for evaluating policy alternatives based on their costs relative to their benefits, even though we tend to define the benefits side of the equation very narrowly – in terms of test score gains.

But “improving teacher quality” cannot yet be included in a concrete costs/benefits comparison with class size or anything else. It is not an actual policy. At best, it is a category of policy options, all of which are focused on recruitment, preparation, retention, improvement, and dismissal of teachers. When people invoke it, they are presumably referring to the fact that teachers vary widely in their test-based effectiveness. Yes, teachers matter, but altering the quality distribution is whole different ballgame from measuring it overall. It’s actually a whole different sport.

I think it is reasonable to speculate that we might get more bang for our buck if we could somehow get

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: The money behind school reform

The money behind school reform

by Mike Klonsky

Proposed TEPCO plant on Texas Gulf coast.

Disaster capitalists Gates, Buffett...

Whenever there's an environmental disaster in the world, I always look to see how deeply Bill Gates, his partners, and his foundation are involved. The Gates Foundation's investments in Nigeria have helped turn much of that country into an unlivable, oil-polluted wasteland.

Gates got off scott free after the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf, even though his foundation owns millions of shares of BP and his hedge-fund school reform partnersWarren Buffett and Whitney Tilson own NALCO the company that makes COREXIT, the dispersant that is

Schools Matter: Humane Schooling vs. KIPP-Genics

Humane Schooling vs. KIPP-Genics

by Jim Horn

At the segregated KIPP containment camps, children who have signed away, along with their parents, all their rights as humans are subjected to a relentless and rigid psychological sterilization process that leaves KIPPsters unable to separate their capacity to affect the world from the KIPP brainwashing message that centers on instilling a false sense individual responsibility for all the good and bad that comes the way of these children and future altered adults.

In short, the captive KIPPsters internalize the message that if they work hard enough and are nice enough, the world is their oyster; if the world does not open up to them, then it is the fault of their own shortcomings to, yes, work hard enough and be nice enough. Any other consideration becomes entirely peripheral, and physical containment that begins at KIPP is transformed to life-long psychic containment as children function within a waking coma of compliance.

This circular closed logic for assuring constant self-monitoring, self-regulation, and self-flagellation of KIPPsters

City Beat: Mayor KJ and Rhee: lovey-dovey emails and dates with his mom

Mayor KJ and Rhee: lovey-dovey emails and dates with his mom

Dates with his mom. Cute text messages. Sundays at home watching "Mad Men."

That sums up the relationship of Mayor Kevin Johnson and Michelle Rhee, according to an interview the couple recently did with Marie Claire magazine.

Johnson told the magazine's Andrea Todd that he and his fiancée "text and email 'lovey-doveys' throughout the day" and that Rhee handles the couple's wardrobe. He said the couple is very compatible and that he has to "restrain myself from firing off an email or making a phone call" when Rhee is criticized in the press.

Their first date was at a rooftop Mexican restaurant in Denver during the 2008 Democratic Convention, despite Rhee's apparent concern that the pair disagreed a lot. Rhee, who runs a national education reform organization based here and is the former chancellor of the Washington, D.C. public school system, said

AFT president visits East Bay, defends union rights The Education Report

The Education Report

AFT president visits East Bay, defends union rights

By Katy Murphy
Monday, March 28th, 2011 at 10:30 pm in OEA, budget, politics, teachers, union contract
No Comments

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten came to the Bay Area today. I heard her on KQED this morning and again tonight, at a Commonwealth Club event in Lafayette.

Weingarten appeared in the “Waiting for Superman” documentary about the state of public education in the country; UC Berkeley Professor Bruce Fuller, who moderated this evening’s talk, joked that the audience might remember her as the “evildoer who resists all reforms presented in public policy circles.”

Weingarten’s central message was — no surprise, given what’s been happening in Wisconsin — in defense of collective bargaining. While it’s perceived to be an adversarial process, she said, it doesn’t have to be. Read the rest of this entry

Latest News and Comment from Education

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Paranoid Michelle Rhee blames her "enemies" for cheating report

Judge again blocks implementation of collective bargaining law

Más de 5,000 votantes del Noreste de Denver Apoyan la Retirada del

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Daily Show: I Give Up - Pay Anything...

As greedy public workers bankrupt states, America makes it harder for honest corporate citizens to create jobs.

Great WI recall ad (video)

Relationships Matter More Than Numbers