8-6-13 SCHOOLS MATTER @ THE CHALK FACE

SCHOOLS MATTER @ THE CHALK FACE:

Do you think the accountability hacks get sexual gratification from pummeling teachers?

Seriously. There has to be some kind of fetish with this stuff, some kind of sexual fantasy. This from The Answer Sheet. Do you have any idea how humiliating this poor woman does any good whatsoever? This kind of public display of humiliation of an educated person does absolutely no good, I’m serious. I think that’s […]

by Chalk Face, PhD / 12min 

Twas the Night Before Scores

Twas the night before scores And all across the state Teachers waited to hear their fate The scores will be lower Was predicted long ago Now we all wait to see just how low NYSUT says the scores are a baseline For informing instruction When in reality The scores mean destruction For teachers and students […]

by antiqueteacher60 / 2min 

Duncan: Heading off disaster?

Two back to back items from New York City based media appeared in my twitter feed today from a press call with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Duncan was talking about the new Common Core state assessment scores in New York which will be released to the general public tomorrow. School administrators already have the […]

1 by Chris Cerrone / 12min 

Mental Health and American Children Who Are in Chronic Poverty

Cynthia Lamy’s American Children in Chronic Poverty is a must-read for all service providers, as well as educators.  A first post reviewed synthesis of an amazing body of social science research in a way that informs comprehensive planning for all sorts of anti-poverty efforts.  This post will focus on her findings that are most important […]

by John Thompson / 3min 

8-5-13 Schools Matter @ The Chalk Face

SCHOOLS MATTER @ THE CHALK FACE: Educating American Children Who Are in Chronic PovertySince America failed to win the War on Poverty, we have become used to a series of reports that promising programs have only achieved modest results.  Whether we are discussing Head Start, housing vouchers, reduced class size, or increased spending for education or social services, it has become easy to over-sim

by mike simpson / 10h 

Washington Post Sale Lets Company Focus on Education Challenges - Bloomberg

Washington Post Sale Lets Company Focus on Education Challenges - Bloomberg:

Washington Post Sale Lets Company Focus on Education Challenges

By Edmund Lee & Sara Forden - Aug 5, 2013 8:13 PM PT

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Washington Post Co. (WPO)’s sale of its flagship newspaper to billionaire Jeff Bezos rids the company of its weakest division, letting it focus on a once high-flying education business now beset by government scrutiny.

The Washington-based company draws about 55 percent of its $4 billion in annual revenue from education, including its Kaplan chain of for-profit colleges, whose sales tumbled 9 percent to $2.2 billion last year.

Like its competitors in the education industry, the business faces increased oversight into marketing, student-loan defaults and job-placement claims. Still, the challenges weren’t as daunting as those of the newspaper division, where revenue has shrunk for seven straight years. There wasn’t anything more the company could do to save the storied Washington Post from the print-media industry’s decline, Chairman Don Graham said.

“We’ve tried,” Graham said in an interview after announcing the sale of the newspaper yesterday. “We have innovated very successfully in terms of building audience, in terms of our reputation and in terms of our products, but not in terms of offsetting the decline in revenues.”

The sale to Bezos will add $250 million to the company’s coffers, and it spurred a share gain of as much as 5.5 percent to $600 in extended trading yesterday. Even so, management won’t have an easy task as they turn their attention back to education. Concern about escalating 

LISTEN TO DIANE RAVITCH 8-6-13 Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all

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

Big Money Ready to Attack Tennesee Public Schools

Rightwing groups have targeted Tennessee as ripe for privatization on next year’s election. Last election, Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst pumped more than $200,000 into Tennessee races, mostly to Republicans but also to a pro-voucher Democratic legislator. The pro-privatization groups Democrats for Education Reform and Stand on Children are also likely to add funding to candidates who oppose public

7 by dianerav / 59min 

Jeff Bezos: Another Billionaire for Privatization of Public Education

Last fall, Bill Gates collected $10 million from his friends to push through approval of a referendum to permit privately managed charter schools in Washington State, which voters had turned down three times previously. Among the friends of Bill Gates who helped make charters possible was the Bezos family, the parents of Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos is the founder of amazon.com. He is a billionaire many

1 by dianerav / 4min 

Moral Monday: The North Carolina Protest Movement Spreads

The message from North Carolina: We can defeat the power if we organize and stand together. The Moral Monday idea started in North Carolina but it is spreading:   It’s heartening to see that word of North Carolina’s Moral Monday events are inspiring others, just as we have been inspired by the actions occurring in other states across this nation.    http://www.carolinamercury.com/2013/08/thousands

by dianerav / 1min 

Who Got Pink Slips in Chicago?

In Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s budget cuts, the ax fell most heavily on teachers of the arts, physical education, bilingual education, foreign languages, special education, and librarians. The next time the Chicago mayor goes on a national television talk show to boast of his dedication to children and education reform, remember his priorities and if you have the chance, ask if he would want this kind o

2 by dianerav / 17min 

The Dissidents of TFA

A few weeks ago, critics of Teach for America met in Chicago to look critically at what TFA is doing, to air their complaints, and to shape a different path for the future. See, TFA recruits very smart, idealistic young people, and they can figure out what is happening and recognize when they are used as pawns. This post is one of the fruits of that meeting. It is a description of TFA’s leading d

1 by dianerav / 17min 

Protests in Chicago Against ALEC

A coalition of civil rights groups, clergy, unions, and supporters of public education began protests against ALEC at the Palmer House, where ALEC plans to hold its 40th annual conference on Wednesday. The coalition is called the Chicago Moral Monday Coalition. ALEC sponsors model laws that are anti-immigrant, anti-union, anti-public education, and supportive of corporate interests. Go to this w

by dianerav / 2min 

A State Without Ethics

Which state has the lowest ethics in the nation? Without question, it is Louisiana. This is the state where the “ethics board” ruled that members of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education could vote on contracts for campaign contributors, because they did not work for them as employees. This is the same “ethics board” that saw no conflict when Kira Orange Jones, the director of Teach for

by dianerav / 2min 

Dallas: Teachers Flee, Superintendent Mike Miles Under Investigation, His Family Moves Back to Colorado

Since the arrival of Superintendent Mike Miles a year ago, the Dallas Independent School District has been in constant turmoil. Of course, Miles wanted it that way, as he is a Broad-trained superintendent and he apparently believes that disruption is good. He started off with ambitious goals, some of which seemed wildly unrealistic, including a goal that by 2015, 75% of the staff and 70% of the co

5 by dianerav / 35min 

An Open Letter to Tom Torlakson

A teacher in California sent this letter to State Superintendent Tom Torlakson. California recently announced that it was prepared to spend $1 billion implementing Common Core, although the state’s public schools have not recovered from the billions of dollars cut during the Schwarzenegger era. Here is the letter: August 1, 2013 Dear Superintendent Torlakson, Thank you for your commitment to incr

5 by dianerav / 15min 

Warning: NY Aligns Scores to NAEP

New York City’s chief academic officer–a testing zealot–here announces that scores will plummet on the new Common Core tests administered last spring for the first time. They will plummet because the state decided to align its standards to NAEP, which are far more demanding than those of any state. Over the years, many researchers have maintained that the NAEP achievement levels are “fundamentall

by dianerav / 2min 

  What Will This Charter School Teach This Public School?

New York State has this really big idea. It will spend $4.5 million so that top charter schools can teach ordinary public schools how to succeed. What secrets will the charter schools share with the less fortunate, less successful neighborhood public schools? Consider the example in the article linked here by Ben Chapman in The Daily News. The Bronx Charter School for Excellence will help nearby

by dianerav / 3min mark as read  //  save

Robert Putnam on the Crumbling American Dream

This is one of the most powerful articles I have read in a long time. Robert Putnam describes life in his home town of Port Clinton, Ohio, population 6,059, as he was growing up in the 50s. Port Clinton was “ a passable embodiment of the American dream, a place that offered decent opportunity for the children of bankers and factory workers alike.” But today, “wealthy kids park BMW convertibles in

2 by dianerav / 1h

Diane in the Evening 8-5-13 Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all

Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all: What is the Goal of Common Core Testing?For months, school officials in many states have warned parents to expect proficiency rates on Common Core-aligned tests to plummet. They have warned that the proportion of students rated proficient was likely to drop by as much as 30%. When this happens, it will make public education in Amer

by mike simpson / 2h 

Schooling in the Ownership Society: For Pearson CEO, measurable learning outcomes is a growth industry

Schooling in the Ownership Society: For Pearson CEO, measurable learning outcomes is a growth industry:

For Pearson CEO, measurable learning outcomes is a growth industry

Pearson CEO Fallon

“Education is now emerging as one of the major growth industries for the next decade and beyond; it is serving a huge rise in the global middle class, and we now need to be thinking of how to serve global products focused on efficacy,” says Pearson CEO John Fallon.

Our strategy is to transform Pearson into a single operating company that is sharply 

 

Can MOOCS replace face-to-face teaching/learning?

Peter Scott, a professor of higher education studies, writes about MOOCS in yesterday's Guardian. The acronym stands for mass open online course, now rapidly replacing face-to-face teaching/learning in post-secondary education in Britain and the U.S.. The idea is to make higher education more accessible to the masses by uploading more and more courses to the Cloud. But the reality is that the test

2 by Mike Klonsky / 3h 

Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » Why other State Governors wanted Common Core (and why Texas probably doesn’t)

Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » Why other State Governors wanted Common Core (and why Texas probably doesn’t):

Why other State Governors wanted Common Core (and why Texas probably doesn’t)

In WARNING: THE COMMON CORE STANDARDS MAY BE HARMFUL TO CHILDREN | Education News, a principal from Texas takes a look at the Common Core standards and concludes that they are developmentally inappropriate for K-5. She has some really great examples in primary, but I wanted to share this one for fifth grade:

In most of the Reading/Information standards, the same expectations for describing complex relationships among multiple items appear: (RI.5.5) Compare and contrast the overall structure (e.g., chronology, comparison, cause/effect, problem/solution) of events, ideas, concepts, or information in two or more texts.
For 5th graders, this standard would be even more difficult to meet than the previous one because it asks them to carry out two different operations on two or more texts that almost certainly differ in content, style, and organization.

And here is the “old” California standard (pre-Common Core):

Structural Features of Informational Materials
2.1 Identify structural patterns found in informational text (e.g., compare and contrast, cause
and effect, sequential or chronological order, proposition and support) to strengthen
comprehension.

This is not the fifth grade standard, but a fourth grade one. This is a 

Missouri Education Watchdog: Data Quality Campaign Ties Education Data into Workforce Data

Missouri Education Watchdog: Data Quality Campaign Ties Education Data into Workforce Data:

Data Quality Campaign Ties Education Data into Workforce Data

From Data Quality Campaign and DQC Gets a New Baby Sister: Workforce Data Quality Campaign:

Category:

• P–20/Workforce Pipeline

The Data Quality Campaign has joined with the Association for Career and Technical Education, CLASP, National Association of State Directors of Career and Technical Education Consortium, National Association of State Workforce Agencies, National Skills Coalition, and New America Foundation to advocate for inclusive, aligned, and relevant education and workforce data. This group of national partners believes that in order to achieve economic growth and shared prosperity, we need data-driven education and training policies that prepare all Americans for a skilled workforce that helps US industries compete in a changing 21st century economy. To that end, we created the Workforce Data Quality Campaign (WDQC) in order to ensure that workforce data systems

• include all students and pathways;
• count industry-recognized credentials as well as degrees;
• assess employment outcomes for all participants;
• expand use of labor market information;
• ensure appropriate data access and use.

And now we have a leader to help us accomplish these goals. Rachel Zinn will join the national partners of the WDQC as the organization’s first director this month. Ms. Zinn is an experienced 

Five absurdities about high-stakes standardized tests:

Five absurdities about high-stakes standardized tests

By Valerie Strauss, Published: August 6 at 4:00 amE-mail the writer

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Barely a day goes by when the education world isn’t treated to some new story involving high-stakes standardized tests, the chief metric of “accountability systems” in the modern era of school reform.

It might be about how student test scores went up or down or all around; about how standardized tests were incorrectly scored by giant companies that make millions from testing contracts; that some questions on the test don’t make any sense; that the high stakes being attached to the results — which are being used to evaluate students, teachers, principals, schools, districts and states — have gone from being unfair to preposterous.

Against this backdrop, here are five absurdities about all of the current standardized testing frenzy. Feel free to add your own and I can publish a more complete list.

1. Teachers are being evaluated on the test scores of students they never had and subjects they don’t teach.

This sounds like a fantasy, but alas, it is not. A number of states have passed laws requiring that teachers be evaluated in part (often in large part) by standardized test scores — but, most subjects don’t yet have standardized tests on which to attach high stakes. So complicated (and invalid) formulas are used to devise how teachers who don’t teach math and English are judged by the test scores of teachers who do.

In Florida, for example, legislators just passed a law making it illegal to evaluate