5-2-14 @ The Chalk Face

@ THE CHALK FACE:

Incompetent Pearson “Wins” PARCC Contract. Big Surprise.

In his six-minute videoed speech on the necessity of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), billionaire Bill Gates patiently explains that it is not enough for individual states to implement their own standards because “scale is good for free market competition.” Here is the reality of “free market competition” in this time of unprecedented education profiteering: A […]

by deutsch29 / 5min 

Randi W. Blows An Easy One (For A Change)

RANDI WEINGARTEN, LOOKING . . . CONFUSED.    I love unions, but I have a hard time fathoming the leadership of contemporary American teachers’ unions. With so many glaring idiocies afloat from the world of education deform (aka GERM - as Pasi Sahlberg calls it), you’d think it would be impossible not to find incisive things […]

by Michael Paul Gold... / 0min hide

Welcome to SC: A Heaping Stumbling-Bumbling Mess of Ineptitude

Welcome to SC: A Heaping Stumbling-Bumbling Mess of Ineptitude. via Welcome to SC: A Heaping Stumbling-Bumbling Mess of Ineptitude.Filed under: PAUL THOMAS: Becoming Radical

1 by plthomasedd / 1h 

5-1-14 @ The Chalk Face

@ THE CHALK FACE: Discussing Research Methodology with the Gates FoundationRick Hess, in “A Small Request for My Friends at Gates,” was kind enough to urge the Gates Foundation to consider three of my research proposals. Rick Cantrell, the Senior Program Officer for Research and Data, responded to Rick’s post. Dr. Cantrell and I talked for nearly 1-1/2 hours. I would again like to thank […]2 by Jo

by mike simpson / 8h 

5-2-14 With A Brooklyn Accent Go BATs

With A Brooklyn Accent:

On the Hunt for "Bad Teachers"

The percentage of "Bad Teachers" in our public schools is probably no higher than Bad Principals, Bad Superintendents, Bad Commissioners, Bad Politicians, and Bad Philanthropists. Yet people in every walk of life seem obsessed with getting rid of them. This isn't a well thought out policy position. it is more like a form of communal Magic, a ritual to rid to rid ourselves of Demons, real

5 by Mark Naison / 3h 

 

4-30-14 With A Brooklyn Accent Go BATs All Week

With A Brooklyn Accent: As NY's Math Tests Begin- Let Us Honor the Test ResistorsToday, another awful round of testing begins in NY State, this time for Math. Our third graders face three days of testing that are more time consuming than the tests applicants take for Medical School, Business School, Law School or admission to college. How our education policy makers and elected officials signed of

by mike simpson / 8h 

5-2-14 the becoming radical | A Place for a Pedagogy of Kindness (the public and scholarly writing by P. L. Thomas, Furman University)

the becoming radical | A Place for a Pedagogy of Kindness (the public and scholarly writing by P. L. Thomas, Furman University):

Token Outrage and “Oafish” Racists

The recent racism controversy over Donald Sterling prompted me to examine more on two Americas and ask, Where Is Outrage for Systemic Racism? To that question, I found a powerful and important response by Ta-Nehisi Coates: This Town Needs a Better Class of Racist. At the center of Coates’s piece is how token outrage allows the U.S. to simply ignore systemic racism: But style is the hero. Cliven Bu

3 by plthomasedd / 26min hide  //  save

Welcome to SC: A Heaping Stumbling-Bumbling Mess of Ineptitude

This is my 53rd year of living in South Carolina, the totality of my life. This is my 31st year as an educator in SC—18 years as a high school English teacher and 13 years now in higher education. My teaching career, coincidentally, began the exact year SC officially stepped into the accountability/standards/testing arms race that grew out of the early 1980s. Over the past 30 years, SC has created

9 by plthomasedd / 1h  

5-1-14 the becoming radical | A Place for a Pedagogy of Kindness (the public and scholarly writing by P. L. Thomas, Furman University)

the becoming radical | A Place for a Pedagogy of Kindness (the public and scholarly writing by P. L. Thomas, Furman University): Revisiting James Baldwin’s “Black English”The first five or six years of teaching high school English have blurred in my memory, but certain days, certain events, and certain students remain vivid. One day in those years a young woman in my tenth-grade course blurted out

by mike simpson / 8h 

5-2-13 Curmudgucation Week

CURMUDGUCATION:

Is This CCSS Criticism Fair?

The supporters of Common Core have eaten so much cheese with their whine that we may have to call a whaaaambulance.Their complaints have been percolating for a while, but the heat of the Louis C.K. flame-up has brought their big bowl of treacly tears to a roiling boil. The criticisms are not fair. Those stupid examples of bad assignments have nothing to do with the Core, and the terrible tests are

by Peter Greene / 1h 

Petrilli's Shovel At Work Again

I have a confession to make-- I kind of like Mike Petrilli. I've never met him. I've never met any of the big names in the ed biz, because I'm a high school English teacher in small town USA  (isn't the internet cool), so I depend on long-distance close-reading of all these folks, and while many of the Reformsters seem lost or confused or walking in that kind of dull cloud that people fall into wh

1 by Peter Greene / 3min 

Another Plutocrat for USDOE

Alyson Klein at EdWeek reports that Robert Gordon has been chosen to serve as assistant secretary for planning, evaluation and policy development at the US DOE.Gordon's previous work credits include the Office of Management and Budget, where he seems to have been a man behind the scenes for the various Fiscal Cliff negotiations. More recently he's been a guest scholar at the Brookings Institute, a

1 by Peter Greene / 1h 

5-1-13 Curmudgucation Week

CURMUDGUCATION: Throwing AwayIt seems like some kind of joke to call a movement "un-American," but I think the Reformy Status Quo has earned that adjective.Here's the thing about us as a country, as a culture. We fight. We struggle. We have sometimes extremely violent, deadly battles among the many smaller tribes that make up this country. But as a nation we are built to accommodate all

by mike simpson / 8h 

5-2-14 Perdido Street School

Perdido Street School:

UFT Contract Open Thread

Pretty negative reaction to the contract news at my school.The feeling I get is, quite a few people are angry enough to vote no.What were you hearing out there?

by reality-based edu... / 8min 

Here's How You Know The UFT Contract Deal Is A Bad One - The NY Post Likes It

One of the measures of any UFT contract deal is what the neo-liberals at the Daily News and Times and the neo-cons at the Post think about it.If these editorial boards, who never saw a merit pay proposal they didn't like, a teacher they didn't want to fire or a traditional public school they didn't want to turn into a non-unionized charter school, like the new UFT contract deal, then you know ther

by reality-based edu... / 53min hide  //  save

Will UFT Members Approve This Teachers Contract With So Much Delayed Compensation?

James Eterno at ICEUFT has all the details of the tentative UFT contract and you should go over to ICEUFT blog and get the scoop.Yesterday I focused on two parts of the tentative agreement I find very troubling - the termination proceedings ATR's will face if they don't find permanent placement after two "trials" in schools and allowing the city to run 10% of NYCDOE schools outside of th

5 by reality-based edu... / 2h 

5-1-14 Perdido Street School

Perdido Street School: UFT Contract Agreement Has HitchesJuan Gonzalez details the fissures between the "uniformed" unions and the "civilian" unions over the tentative UFT contract deal:The tentative UFT deal includes two years of 4% retroactive pay increases for teachers, who have been without a contract since November 2009 — longer than nearly all other city unions. Increases

by mike simpson / 8h 

What Selfies Can Teach us About Education

What Selfies Can Teach us About Education:

What Selfies Can Teach us About Education

But first, let me make a personal reflection.

A selfie is an image that serves as a form of external self-expression. This trend may seem jovial to many of an older generation; however, to educators it should verify that students are bursting at the seams to communicate. If many students are excited to express themselves through pictures, then why limit their opportunities for expression when in school?

While a selfie communicates information about our exterior, there are ways for students to express their internal individualities through other mediums.

Personal reflections speak about our interior and express our truest emotions. When we reflect, we think, write or speak about past experiences and determine what our feelings are about those events. We decide what worked and what did not, develop emotions, brainstorm alternatives, and overall relate to the events that occurred.
These reflections become valuable learning experiences in schools, and become even more powerful when they are shared with others.

This year, I made a large push toward incorporating student reflection as a form of learning. The method that I used is known as Backchanneling. This tactic allows a student conversation to transpire alongside or outside of the traditional classroom instruction. The hope is to build student interest in classroom content by providing them with an informal means to communicate.

In my class, a calendar was created with each student’s name. The day the student’s name appeared, they were asked to moderate a group discussion at home on a secure virtual discussion forum. The student moderator would create conversational questions related to that day’s content. Students were asked to join the conversation, reflect on what they learned, and take class discussions to whatever depths they wanted. This created an avenue for students to speak without a teacher regulating the information. Students were provided with trust, support and confidence. The results What Selfies Can Teach us About Education:

Seven challenges to getting the Common Core right | EdSource Today

Seven challenges to getting the Common Core right | EdSource Today:

Seven challenges to getting the Common Core right

May 1st, 2014 | 1 Comment | 
By Morgan Polikoff / commentary

Morgan Polikoff

The rollout of the Common Core standards offers California – and most of the nation – an opportunity to address some of the issues that have plagued education reform in the past. Foremost among these issues is the generally poor quality of state assessments of student achievement and a resulting negative effect on instruction.

State tests in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era tended to be: a) highly procedural, ignoring the conceptual skills in the standards, b) heavily or exclusively multiple-choice, and c) predictable in their coverage of a narrow slice of content in the standards. These features undoubtedly contributed to the narrowing effects of the NCLB law, leading teachers to spend substantial time in test preparation and focus heavily on English and math at the expense of other subjects.

California’s new assessments will come from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, one of two federally funded consortia designed to measure student mastery of the Common Core. While there are promising signs about these new assessments, they also present several challenges. In a recent report for the Center for American Progress, I laid out seven of the most important challenges that must be addressed if the new assessments are to live up to their promise and support effective standards implementation.

The first challenge is making the case for and standing firm on higher definitions of proficiency. One of the goals of Common Core is to set more accurate definitions of proficiency so that, for instance, “proficient” students can enroll in college without remediation. Setting a higher target means that more students will be labeled as below proficient. As we have seen in New York, lower rates of student proficiency than parents and educators were used to seeing under the former state standards can sometimes produce political blowback. Making the case for the new, more rigorous targets, perhaps with public-service announcements, op-eds and targeted mailings to parents and educators, may help reduce backlash.

The second challenge is meeting the technological needs of new assessments. The consortium has guidelines in terms of the technology needed to take new computer-adaptive Seven challenges to getting the Common Core right | EdSource Today:

NYC Scraps 3rd Grade Guarantee As Ohio Adopts It–Based on ALEC Model Law | janresseger

NYC Scraps 3rd Grade Guarantee As Ohio Adopts It–Based on ALEC Model Law | janresseger:

NYC Scraps 3rd Grade Guarantee As Ohio Adopts It–Based on ALEC Model Law

Posted on May 2, 2014 by janresseger

Ohio’s acting state superintendent of public instruction, Michael Sawyers claims that Ohio’s new 3rd Grade Guarantee will help Ohio’s children.  After all, Governor John Kasich has consistently alleged that children behind in reading by third grade are more likely to drop out of school than stronger readers.

Sawyers extolls the 3rd Grade Guarantee as a dropout prevention program that will primarily support students who have fallen behind in Ohio’s poorest urban school districts.  TheCleveland Plain Dealer reports that the percentage of children projected to be held back in third grade at the beginning of the 2014-2015 school year across Ohio’s urban districts is:  Youngstown, 59.8 percent; Cleveland, 57.8 percent; East Cleveland, 57.2 percent; Warren, 55 percent; Warrensville Heights, 54.1 percent; Euclid, 52.1 percent; Lorain, 51.3 percent; Columbus, 49.3 percent; and Dayton, 47.7 percent.

Contrary to Kasich’s and Sawyers’ belief that the 3rd Grade Guarantee will lower the dropout rate, this blog has covered a mass of expert research demonstrating that repeating a grade is not only unlikely to improve reading but also very likely to result in students dropping out later as they become over-age in grade during adolescence.

Expert research, however,  hasn’t stopped the American Legislative Exchange Council from developing and distributing across the legislatures of the 50 states model legislation to require that children pass the standardized reading test before they can be promoted to fourth grade.  The Ohio law taking effect in 2014 is a replica of ALEC’s model legislation.  According toChapter 7, Section 2 (C) of the ALEC model law, “Beginning with the 20XX-20XY school year, if the student’s reading deficiency, as identified in paragraph (a), is not remedied by the end of grade 3, as demonstrated by scoring at Level 2 or higher on the state annual accountability NYC Scraps 3rd Grade Guarantee As Ohio Adopts It–Based on ALEC Model Law | janresseger:

NYC Public School Parents: NYS Assessment blues and statement from NYSAPE on latest exam fiasco & call for John King & Tisch to resign

NYC Public School Parents: NYS Assessment blues and statement from NYSAPE on latest exam fiasco & call for John King & Tisch to resign:

NYS Assessment blues and statement from NYSAPE on latest exam fiasco & call for John King & Tisch to resign

Thanks to Howie Ratem for the below video and song; and NY State Allies for Public Education for their statement below on the latest fiasco from NY State Education Department: an unknown number of  3rd graders received Pearson math exams yesterday, with pages and questions missing -- calling into question the validity or the results.  NYSAPE is demanding that the Commissioner and Chancellor Tisch resign.



For more on parent distress at the Common Core testing regime, see Rebecca Mead in the New Yorker, and comedian Louis CK's recent tweets.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 2, 2014

More Information Contact:
Eric Mihelbergel (716) 553-1123; nys.allies@gmail.com
Lisa Rudley (917) 414-9190; nys.allies@gmail.com
New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE) www.nysape.org

NYS 3rd Grade Test Invalid, Chancellor Merryl Tisch and

 Education Commissioner John King Must Resign

The leaders of the New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE), a coalition of more than 45 parent and educator groups from throughout the state, are calling for the NYS 3rd Grade math test to be deemed invalid, since many questions were missing today from one of the four forms. This week, once again, parents are reminded of the grossly inappropriate practice of subjecting 8 and 9 year olds to 6 to 12 hours of testing over the course of six days. In light of the high stakes attached to these tests for children, schools and teachers, an error of this magnitude calls NYSED’s leadership and relationship with Pearson into serious question. This is yet another major misstep by our Commissioner of Education and the Board of Regents who oversee NYSED.

Commissioner King and the Board of Regents have been criticized extensively for not listening to parents or educators on the need to revamp the Common Core standards, lessen the focus on testing, and to cease and desist from thrusting one-size-fits-all statewide curriculum on local schools. And despite repeated issues with its testing vendor, NYSED has failed to take meaningful action, ignoring criticism from all corners of the state.

After repeatedly witnessing NYSED and the Board of Regents leadership fail to act within their authority, New York State Allies for Public Education now calls for the termination of Commissioner John King and the resignation of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch. The concerns of parents and educators throughout New York State have been casually dismissed at the detriment of their children for far too long.

“This comedy of errors has gone on too long. From the overly long, obscure and confusing ELA exams, with commercial product placements, and now with missing questions from the math exam, it is clear that the educrats at NYSED who have flunked, not our children,” said Chris Cerrone, Springville parent, Western New York Educator and founding NYSAPE member.

“While NYSED is eager to impose high-stakes on our schools and our teachers, where’s the accountability for them?” asked Jeanette Deutermann, North Bellmore public school parent and founder of Long Island Opt Out, “We need to stop the excessive testing and test prep, with defective modules and exams, and get back to educating our children once again.”

“Even as Louis CK has brought attention to the inherently flawed nature of the Common Core test prep materials this week, parents throughout the state are opting out their children in even larger numbers. In our school district, more than 48% refused to take the math tests. But it is unfair to all children and teachers to be assessed and compared with others through an invalid exam with missing questions. Enough is enough! John King and Merryl Tisch, resign!” said Stacey Serdy, Worcester Central School District parent and founder of Worcester Community for Education.

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Teachers For Social Justice: UIC Social Justice Initiative Events

Teachers For Social Justice: UIC Social Justice Initiative Events:

UIC Social Justice Initiative Events

MAY 1, 2014 LEAVE A COMMENT

Follow us on Twitter Friend us on Facebook University of Illinois-Chicago Upcoming SJI              Events @UIC

Greetings, Join us at our Teaching and Learning Freedom event on May 7th at the WBEZ Little Village Bureau. Next week's Eyes on the Prize community dialogue facilitators are Jackson Potter and Asif Wilson. Lastly, make sure to participate in our May 21stTwitter Town Hall and also attend the UIC Feminist Film Series taking place this week! In solidarity! - UIC Social Justice Initiative   UIC Feminist Film Series Hosted by: GWS Feminism and Social Change 390 Students & Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johnson   A documentary film series that will engage students on issues of sexual violence, community responses, restorative justice, envisioning a feminist future, and more. Nights of critical conversations, dialogue, and sharing of resources. [Information about the films can be found here.]   April 22nd & April 23rd @UIC Latino Cultural Center (B2) April 24th and April 25th @PUJA Gallery (729 S. Maxwell St.) (Both spaces are accessible) RSVP HERE All Film Screenings 5:30pm-8:00pm   Save the Date! SJI Freedom Summer Twitter Town Hall  Wed, May 21, 3pm  Beyond Allyship: Raising the Bar on Freedom Struggles Featured tweeters: Barbara Ransby, Mariame Kaba, April Callen (April Scissors), Mia McKenzie, Moya Bailey, Andrea Smith, Molly Adams (Vocalo), Maya Schenwar (TruthOut), Coya Paz, Gary Younge, Kevin Coval   Freedom Dreams…Freedom Now!  May 28th - 30th, 2014 The Social Justice Initiative invites you to attend a conference commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Freedom Summer ’64.  REGISTER NOW Space is limited. Emails questions to: sjiuic@gmail.com   Dr. Barbara Ransby: UIC Summer 2014 Course on Justice Movements