Mike Klonsky's Blog: What's happened to Chicago schools since Arne Duncan got Judge Kocoras to lift the deseg consent decree

Mike Klonsky's Blog: What's happened to Chicago schools since Arne Duncan got Judge Kocoras to lift the deseg consent decree

What's happened to Chicago schools since Arne Duncan got Judge Kocoras to lift the deseg consent decree

I'm reading Sarah Karp's WBEZ story about Chicago's experiment with school desegregation and recalling how Arne Duncan helped get a federal judge to quash the city's deseg consent decree.

Karp writes:

Most of the city’s 78 magnet and test-in schools — including classical, gifted and selective enrollment — were created under the decree as a way to lure in a diverse group of students. But even after the court order was lifted, school district officials said they believed integration was important, and they started integrating by the socioeconomic status of children.

Students wait for the bus in front of Bouchet Elementary Math & Science Academy in Chicago's South Shore neighborhood. More than 74% of students whose neighborhood school is majority black schools are bussed to majority-black schools. (Manuel Martinez/WBEZ)

In 2009, U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras lifted the consent decree ending three decades of efforts to integrate Chicago schools. The decree’s bilingual education provisions, according to Kocoras, duplicated protections in state law. The ruling came despite evidence presented by DOJ lawyers in court that the district repeatedly failed to enroll English learners in bilingual education fast enough or provide them with required services.

Since then, writes Karp, CPS has continued busing and spending extra funding on magnet and test-in schools and also added 13 new ones plus more charter schools that have been shown to contribute to segregation. This year, the school district plans to spend $50 million for bussing and extra positions at these schools, which serve 62,000 students.

But, says Karp, the WBEZ analysis finds only about 20% of magnet and test-in schools meet the racial makeup goal set out in the court order, compared to 35% a decade ago. Under that CONTINUE READING: Mike Klonsky's Blog: What's happened to Chicago schools since Arne Duncan got Judge Kocoras to lift the deseg consent decree

NYC Public School Parents: Revelations at today's hearings on high-stakes testing and testimony by Emily Carrazana

NYC Public School Parents: Revelations at today's hearings on high-stakes testing and testimony by Emily Carrazana

Revelations at today's hearings on high-stakes testing and testimony by Emily Carrazana

Today's NYC Council hearings on "Breaking the testing culture" were fascinating.  CM Treyger did a great job in asking piercing questions to DOE, especially about the NY State high school Regents exams and why they don't encourage the creation of more Performance- based assessments like those used by the New York Performance Standards Consortium.

There was also compelling testimony from Anthony Ramos, now a Broadway actor who had a lead role in Hamilton and is now starring in the film "In the Heights".  He spoke about how he failed multiple Regents exams at New Utrecht high school, and struggled in school.  His high school had class sizes of 35 which severely hampered his learning: "There are like 35 kids in a class with 35 different issues in their head and one person to deal with that , who probably doesn't even want to teach that because it's just in the curriculum."  His testimony and that of the Sara Steinweiss, the NYC theater teacher who recognized his talent, put him in a play, found a college scholarship for him and changed his life, is posted here, along with an animated short about his story.  Here is an article about his experiences in the WSJ.

Several Consortium students and teachers also talked about how engaging and challenging the education provided by their schools has been in comparison to the rote learning that the Regents exams require.  When Linda Chen, Chief Academic Officer of DOE was asked why the DOE doesn't celebrate the Consortium school practices, she said it's a complex process to implement performance-based assessments. CM Treyger responded "So is dismantling inequity in our schools, but it's worth doing."

CM Treyger asked about the cost of testing. DOE officials spends $3 million on the administration of Regents/3-8 state exams and prep materials, $1.9 million to Pearson and for "administrative support" for the SHSAT test, and $4.4 million for the gifted exams -- totaling nearly $10 million in all.

The most shocking thing was to hear Linda Chen, Chief Academic Officer of DOE confirm that they intend to implement a uniform system of standardized formative assessments four times a year in place of current school-selected assessments, in order to "streamline" them, because "we can't compare results with so many different tests."

This will undoubtedly lead to more meaningless and wasteful testing and test-prep. They can't completely eliminate the locally-chosen school-based assessments because by the CONTINUE READING: NYC Public School Parents: Revelations at today's hearings on high-stakes testing and testimony by Emily Carrazana

The Absurdity of Standardized Testing: Caught Between Prediction and Assessment | gadflyonthewallblog

The Absurdity of Standardized Testing: Caught Between Prediction and Assessment | gadflyonthewallblog

The Absurdity of Standardized Testing: Caught Between Prediction and Assessment

Standardized testing is truly absurd.

It’s both a prediction and an assessment.

You take a test to determine what you’ve learned and that will in turn predict what you will be able to learn in the future.

We hardly ever do this anywhere else in life.

We don’t measure babies’ leg muscles to predict whether they’re ready to walk. We let them do what they do, possibly with some encouragement and positive models of locomotion, and they do it.

There are cognitive and developmental benchmarks we look for, and if children don’t hit them, we provide help. But no further prediction is necessary – certainly not based on artificial markers put together by corporate interests.

In most situations, predictions are superfluous. We just assume that everyone can learn if they so desire – unless something happens to make us think otherwise. And CONTINUE READING: The Absurdity of Standardized Testing: Caught Between Prediction and Assessment | gadflyonthewallblog

CURMUDGUCATION: Ohio Has A Chance To Fix A Terrible School Takeover Law. It's Going To Blow It.

CURMUDGUCATION: Ohio Has A Chance To Fix A Terrible School Takeover Law. It's Going To Blow It.

Ohio Has A Chance To Fix A Terrible School Takeover Law. It's Going To Blow It.

It looked like Ohio was going to get better, but the legislature is poised to screw it all up.

It has been hard to keep up with the news out of Lorain, Ohio, a school district that is being run through the wringer under Ohio's terrible, awful, no good, really bad school takeover law (HB 70). Lorain's CEO (a district takeover czar created by HB 70), David Hardy, Jr., is yet another guy who believes that his two years as a TFA temp in a classroom qualifies him to be an education policy expert and, under HB 70, run every single aspect of a school district-- well, at worst, he is someone who has vastly over-estimated his capabilities and, at best, is a manager who does not play well with others.

Some shady baloney going on here

I'm not going to go through all the shenanigans of the past many months, but one episode gives you a flavor of the atmosphere in Lorain. The district treasurer tried to resign for a new job. The board did not accept his resignation, but Hardy did, and proceeded to attempt to replace the treasurer with his own pick. The board filed a restraining order against Hardy, who in turn threatened that the district staff would not be paid, a threat that seems to have been based in nothing more than Hardy's tendency to get pissy when people get in his way (kind of like the time he "fired" some union reps).

But meanwhile, even as Hardy has been working overtime to show all the ways that HB 70 is a bad CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Ohio Has A Chance To Fix A Terrible School Takeover Law. It's Going To Blow It.

Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure? – Fred Klonsky

Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure? – Fred Klonsky

WAS DAEDALUS REALLY STRICKEN WITH GRIEF WHEN ICARUS FELL INTO THE SEA? OR JUST DISAPPOINTED BY THE DESIGN FAILURE?

Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure? -Alison Bechdel

As a K-5 art teacher the curriculum was a yearly construction and reconstruction, and always based fundamentally on what was interesting to me and what interested my students.

As a student in Professor Schubert’s education classes I was introduced to Ralph Tyler’s Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction which contained Tyler’s four basic curriculum questions:

1.  What educational purposes should the school seek to attain?

2.  What educational learning experiences can be provided that are likely to attain these purposes?

3.  How can these educational experiences be effectively organized?

4.  How can we determine whether these purposes are being attained?

Tyler gave me a  CONTINUE READING: Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure? – Fred Klonsky

Neo-segregation: Why these communities are divorcing their school districts - The Washington Post

Neo-segregation: Why these communities are divorcing their school districts - The Washington Post

Neo-segregation: Why these communities are divorcing their school districts

After the U.S. Supreme Court declared separate public schools for black and white students were unconstitutional in the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling, some whites in the South resisted by opening private schools or by creating white-only public school districts.

For nearly two decades, a new school secession movement has been growing — and it’s not only in the South. I ran a post last year about this, and here is a new look, with a discussion about the consequences for U.S. students.

This report comes from a newsletter produced and published by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The center produces high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions and issues critiques of research published elsewhere. This was published on the center’s website, and I was given permission to publish it.

Here’s the report from the National Education Policy Center:

In 2014, six suburban towns seceded from Shelby County Schools, the school district that includes the city of Memphis, Tennessee.

One year later, the rapidly growing, semirural suburb of Pike Road seceded from Alabama’s Montgomery Public Schools, building separation from the city that Martin Luther King, Jr. began calling home in 1954.

Meanwhile, in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, three secessions occurred between 2000 and 2010, and a fourth is pending.

The secessions are part of a trend of neo-segregation in which predominantly white and relatively affluent areas divorce themselves from school districts that are majority-minority and have greater poverty. In total, 47 occurred between 2000 and 2017 in 13 counties, seven of which are located in CONTINUE READING: Neo-segregation: Why these communities are divorcing their school districts - The Washington Post

Litigating Algorithms, Beyond Education | VAMboozled!

Litigating Algorithms, Beyond Education | VAMboozled!

Litigating Algorithms, Beyond Education

This past June, I presented at a conference at New York University (NYU) called Litigating Algorithms. Most attendees were lawyers, law students, and the like, all of whom were there to discuss the multiple ways that they have collectively and independently been challenging governmental uses of algorithm-based, decision-making systems (i.e., like VAMs) across disciplines. I was there to present about how VAMs have been used by states and school districts in education, as well as present the key issues with VAMs as litigated via the lawsuits in which I have been engaged (e.g., Houston, New Mexico, New York, Tennessee, and Texas). The conference was sponsored by the AI Now Institute, also at NYU, which has as its mission to examine the social implications of artificial intelligence (AI), and in collaboration with the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law, affiliated with the NYU School of Law.

Anyhow, they just released their report from this conference and I thought it important to share out with all of you, also in that it details the extent to which similar AI systems are being used across disciplines beyond education, and it details how such uses (misuses and abuses) are being litigated in court.

See the press release below, and see the full report here.

—–

Litigating Algorithms 2019 U.S. Report – New Challenges to Government Use of Algorithmic Decision Systems

Today the AI Now Institute and NYU Law’s Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law published new research on the ways litigation is being used as a tool to hold government accountable for using algorithmic tools that produce harmful results.

Algorithmic decision systems (ADS) are often sold as offering a number of benefits, CONTINUE READING: Litigating Algorithms, Beyond Education | VAMboozled!

2019 Medley #20: Poverty and Testing | Live Long and Prosper

2019 Medley #20: Poverty and Testing | Live Long and Prosper

2019 Medley #20: Poverty and Testing

IT’S POVERTY, STUPID

The connection between family income and school achievement has been well documented (see the links at the end of this post ) yet policymakers and the media continue to blame schools, teachers, and the students themselves for low achievement.

David Berliner notes that there are out-of-school factors to student achievement including medical care, food insecurity, family and community characteristics, and environmental pollutants. Included among the latter is lead poisoning, which contributes to low achievement levels and is more damaging to children of poverty.

Policymakers, however, have a vested interest in deflecting the blame for low achievement onto schools, teachers, and students. If poverty and its side effects are ignored, then those who are tasked with helping reduce poverty and, by extension, its side effects, are not to blame.

The articles in this post discuss the effects of poverty on student achievement. Achievement, in nearly all the articles, is measured solely by standardized test scores. Standardized test scores, aside from keeping testing companies in business, “measure what matters least.” Alfie Kohn wrote,

What generally passes for a test of reading comprehension is a series of separate questions about short passages on random topics. These questions “rarely examine how students interrelate parts of the text and do not require justifications that support the interpretations”; indeed, the whole point is the “quick finding of answers rather than reflective interpretation.”

In mathematics, the story is much the same. An analysis of the most widely used standardized math rests found that only 3 percent of the questions CONTINUE READING : 2019 Medley #20: Poverty and Testing | Live Long and Prosper

Profile in Persistence: Every Educator Deserves a Living Wage

Profile in Persistence: Every Educator Deserves a Living Wage

Profile in Persistence: Every Educator Deserves a Living Wage

Debbie Reyes gets very emotional when she recalls the day a student broke her nose. A special education paraeducator for the Pfleugerville Independent School District, in Texas, Reyes works with students on the autism spectrum, many of whom are nonverbal and have severe sensory and behavior challenges.

It was the end of the day and time to clean up, but the boy was sleeping. His mother said he regularly woke up at 3 a.m., wanting to go to school and unable to go back to sleep. The special educators often let him nap, but when Reyes woke him up that afternoon, he responded by striking out, hitting her in the face with his elbow.

“I heard a pop and a crack,” she said. Her nose was fractured in two places, requiring surgery. It took more than a year for her nose to heal.

“I don’t blame him,” Reyes says, tearing up as she tells the story. “He needs a lot of behavior support, and his parents asked us for help. I work with him in the communications unit, a section of the special education room where we help students calm down and communicate what they’re feeling, because a student can’t learn until his behavior is under control.

He just needs help and I want to be a voice for him.” Reyes is committed to being a voice for her special education students. She’s also a voice for her fellow education support professionals (ESPs) who are essential to a well-rounded education for their students but still don’t earn a living wage.

Every Job Matters

Reyes and fellow ESP members of the Pflugerville Educators Association (PfEA) in central Texas have been fighting for a $3 an hour pay raise for all hourly employees CONTINUE READING: Profile in Persistence: Every Educator Deserves a Living Wage

A Very Busy Day Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007

Video & Transcript Of Greta Thunberg’s speech to world leaders at UN Climate Action Summit | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...

A Very Busy Day Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007

Classroom Instruction Resources Of The Week

by Larry Ferlazzo / 3h

Each week, I publish a post or two containing three or four particularly useful resources on classroom instruction, and you can see them all here. You might also be interested in THE BEST RESOURCES ON CLASS INSTRUCTION IN 2019 – PART ONE. Here are this week’s picks: Limiting “Teacher Talk,” Increasing Student Work! is from Achieve The Core. When Middle School Students Think Like Historians appear

A Simple Way I Differentiate TPR (Total Physical Response) Lessons – Do You Have Other Suggestions?

by Larry Ferlazzo / 4h

harishs / Pixabay Most teachers of English Language Learners are familiar with TPR (Total Physical Response) – see The Best Resources For Learning About Total Physical Response (TPR) . TPR can probably be described most simply as a teacher (or a student) modeling an action at the same time as saying that action’s verb, and then students replicate the action. I recently observed our principal mode

YESTERDAY

“Q&A Collections: Professional Collaboration”

by Larry Ferlazzo / 11h

Q&A Collections: Professional Collaboration is the headline of my latest Education Week Teacher column. All Classroom Q&A posts offering advice on Professional Collaboration (from the past eight years!) are described and linked to in this compilation post. Here’s an excerpt from one of them:

The Best Line Ever That Explains A Key “Advantage” Charters May Have Over Regular Public Schools

20by Larry Ferlazzo / 13h

Thanks to our former (and exceptional) principal, Ted Appel, I learned about a New York Times book review that recently appeared about Robert Pondiscio’s new book about the large charter school network in New York City called Success Academy. The review was written by Dale Russakoff , who I’ve previously talked about in this blog . I’ve also posted an interview I did a few years ago with Robert P

You Might – Or Might Not – Find This Three Minute Video Useful Of Me Talking About Student Motivation

by Larry Ferlazzo / 13h

suju / Pixabay Awhile back, a Swedish TV show on education interviewed me via Skype about student motivation. The show just came out, and they included what I think is a relatively decent three minute clip of me talking about student motivation and growth mindset. I’ve linked directly to that short clip here (they don’t allow embedding). You might, or might not, find it useful. I’m adding it to a

“Speek” Lets You Easily Record Online Messages

by Larry Ferlazzo / 14h

GraphicMama-team / Pixabay Speek is a new website that lets you record audio of a message and then share a link or embed it somewhere, like this: Of course, there are a zillion phone apps (like FlipGrid where you can record audio while showing yourself or, even better with students because of privacy concerns, images) or Vocaroo (which is not ideal these days because it requires Flash) that let y

Video & Transcript Of Greta Thunberg’s speech to world leaders at UN Climate Action Summit

by Larry Ferlazzo / 14h

geralt / Pixabay Here’s the transcript and video of Greta Thunberg’s speech today. I’m adding it to THE BEST RESOURCES ON TEENS DEMANDING AN EFFECTIVE RESPONSE TO CLIMATE CHANGE :

Video & Transcript Of Greta Thunberg’s speech to world leaders at UN Climate Action Summit | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...