Teacher: Let’s All Pull Together | Diane Ravitch's blog

Teacher: Let’s All Pull Together | Diane Ravitch's blog

Teacher: Let’s All Pull Together

Melanie Sirof is a teacher in the Bellmore-Merrick School District on Long Island innNew York.

“Let’s start rowing in the same direction”.

“Posting this now, before I walk into the first day of meetings that signal the start of school. I’m sure by three o’clock I will feel overwhelmed & frustrated, so I write this now, while I am still clear-eyed:

Know this, parents, we teachers are going to make the most of this lemon of a situation. We want your students to have a great year & not just “a great year, all things considered.” We are aware of our place in the story of your child’s life, understand that they only get one “senior English teacher” (or Math, or Chem, or Gov), one sixth grade experience. So we are going to do our best to live up to that mythology. We want your children to discover things about the world & themselves they had not known before our time together & our time starts now.

Can you help? Can you stop talking about what a disaster this is going to be? (Perhaps it will be, but let’s not lose the game before we get on the court.) Can you help your kids to respectfully reach out to us when they are struggling? Can you set them up for success with a CONTINUE READING: Teacher: Let’s All Pull Together | Diane Ravitch's blog

How Covid-19 Froze School Reform (Part 2) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

How Covid-19 Froze School Reform (Part 2) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

How Covid-19 Froze School Reform (Part 2)

What was school reform like before Covid-19 ( BC)?

Since the mid-1980s, U.S. public schools had been enthralled with and institutionalized a series of reforms that are now called the “standards, testing, and accountability movement.” It is nearly three decades long.

Recall that the Progressive movement began in the 1890s and, depending upon the historian one reads, lasted until the 1920s or through World War II. The other reform movement that flowed across the schools had a shorter life-span. The civil rights movement spilling over public schools is usually dated by the 1954 Brown decision and peters out by the mid-1970s. Soon to be overtaken by the “standards, testing, and accountability” reforms that readers know so well.

Civic and corporate leaders allied with enthusiastic donors turned public schools in the 1980s to building human capital essential to fostering economic growth and stronger competition for global markets. Their overall strategy was (and still is) to apply a business model of competitiveness, innovation, and efficiency to public schools that fixed attention on the bottom line of test scores and return-on-investment in high school graduates entering and completing college.[i]

These leaders and foundation officials over the past three decades have created beefy portfolios of reform ventures including changes in funding and structural innovations such as vouchers, charter schools, common curriculum standards, testing and accountability including using student scores to determine district CONTINUE READING: How Covid-19 Froze School Reform (Part 2) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Standardized Testing: Indispensable to Those Who Are Not Subjected to It. | deutsch29

Standardized Testing: Indispensable to Those Who Are Not Subjected to It. | deutsch29

Standardized Testing: Indispensable to Those Who Are Not Subjected to It.

This is what standardized testing has been in public schools across America ever since No Child Left Behind (NCLB):

It’s like some president-backed, bipartisan Congress decided that we need to measure student physical health based on student weight. Of course, student physical health is by far too complex a concept to be captured by student weight, but let’s just put that reality aside in favor of the appearance of being able to pack a huge, complex package into a matchbox by getting those kids on the scale and putting the onus on teachers and schools to make students weight what the state (answering to the federal government in exchange for funding) decides those students should weigh.

Now, it is ridiculous on its face to hold teachers and schools responsible for student weight– which is why no bathroom scale company will guarantee that their scales are meant to be used to determine anything beyond the weight of the person standing on the scale. However, that president-backed, bipartisan Congress has decided that schools and teachers must ensure that their students achieve some predetermined optimal weight.

So. Weight-prep programs are instituted for students at risk of not achieving their state-determined optimal weights, the point of which is to drill students in scale-optimizing strategies (i.e., where to stand on the scale in order to make the weight appear higher or lower; how to push down on the scale to “weigh more”). In order to make time in the school day for these at-risk weighers to be drilled and redrilled, they must miss lunch, group sports, and playtime, but what is important to the school and to the teacher is achieving the optimal weight CONTINUE READING: Standardized Testing: Indispensable to Those Who Are Not Subjected to It. | deutsch29

Choosing Democracy: SCUSD Imposes a Plan for Distance Learning - Lets see what teachers do !

Choosing Democracy: SCUSD Imposes a Plan for Distance Learning - Lets see what teachers do !

SCUSD Imposes a Plan for Distance Learning - Lets see what teachers do !

 The Sacramento City Unified School District adopted a distance learning plan Saturday after starting the school year two days before without one. The teachers union says its teachers will not follow the plan.

The two groups have been working for weeks to determine how much time teachers will spend in direct instruction via video conference calls and how much time students will be asked to learn asynchronously, or independently

The district decided to move forward without an agreement with the union. The plan is the same originally set forth less than a week ago on Aug. 30

The district is calling for more time spent in synchronous instruction and less time doing independent work. Although both plans meet state education requirements, SCTA’s relies more on independent study in favor of face-to-face screen time. 

The Sacramento Bee has an editorial on the impass. 

Administrators do not teach., Teachers do.  Lets see what happens next.

Choosing Democracy: SCUSD Imposes a Plan for Distance Learning - Lets see what teachers do !

CURMUDGUCATION: Will The Pandemic Give DeVos Her $5 Billion Voucher Scheme

CURMUDGUCATION: Will The Pandemic Give DeVos Her $5 Billion Voucher Scheme

Will The Pandemic Give DeVos Her $5 Billion Voucher Scheme

Betsy DeVos has been pitching "Education Freedom" as long as she's been in office. It's a tax credit scholarship scheme, which is to say, a voucher program that would blow a $5 billion hole in the federal budget, but would be a real treat for rich folks who A) like private schools better than public ones and B) would rather not pay taxes to the feds.

This frickin' guy

The Education Freedom pitch has landed with a thud every time. But more recently what has been new about it is that, somehow, DeVos got Senator Ted "Least Loved Man In The Senate" Cruz to pitch it. And right this moment, Cruz is doing what he does best-- being an absolute pain in everyone's ass--and he's doing it over DeVos's pet project.

Yesterday, CNN reported that the Senate's new stimulus bill (which has been a the focus of a spectacular display of GOP dysfunction for months) may be hung up over Cruz's insistence that the DeVos Voucher Bill be included in the stimulus package.

CNN's sources say that

Cruz has argued the coronavirus pandemic has showcased the weakness of public school systems and that Republicans should get behind an idea that the party is advocating this election year, CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Will The Pandemic Give DeVos Her $5 Billion Voucher Scheme

Will Teachers Determine the Next President? | Ed In The Apple

Will Teachers Determine the Next President? | Ed In The Apple

Will Teachers Determine the Next President?

Ballots for the November 3rd presidential election are in the mail in North Carolina, we are in the countdown phase heading towards selecting a president.

Teachers live and work in every hamlet, town and city, in every one of the over 13,000 school districts. 

There are 3.2 million public school teachers in the nation, if you add in guidance counselors, school nurses, teacher aides, and paraprofessionals etc, over four million educators in public schools; about 70% of whom belong to one of the two teachers unions. (See all the data here).

A majority of students are non-white.

Here’s a racial breakdown of the student population in American public schools, as of 2017:

• White students: 47.6%
• Hispanic students: 26.7%
• Black students: 15.2%
• Asian students: 5.2%
• Two or more race students: 3.9%
• American Indian/Alaska Native students: 1.0%
• Pacific Islander students: 0.4%

When it comes to race, America’s teachers look very different from its student CONTINUE READING: Will Teachers Determine the Next President? | Ed In The Apple

A VERY BUSY DAY Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... The latest news and resources in education since 2007

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

A VERY BUSY DAY

Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...

The latest news and resources in education since 2007

 

 

Big Education Ape: THIS WEEK IN EDUCATION Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... The latest news and resources in education since 2007 - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2020/09/this-week-in-education-larry-ferlazzos.html

Here Is How I’m Assessing ELLs At The Beginning Of The School Year – What Are You Doing?

by Larry Ferlazzo / 2h

mohamed_hassan / Pixabay Because of the pandemic, most schools in in California did not complete the annual language assessment for ELLs (called ELPAC). I’ve generally not found those assessments very helpful. This year, ELPAC scores are especially useless since they are more than fifteen months old. Given that, and bearing in mind the criticisms education researcher Dylan Wiliam has about commer

“Q&A Collections: Classroom Organization”

by Larry Ferlazzo / 12h

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

Sunday’s Must-Read & Must-Watch Articles & Videos About School Reopening

by Larry Ferlazzo / 12h

mohamed_hassan / Pixabay Here are new additions to THE BEST POSTS PREDICTING WHAT SCHOOLS WILL LOOK LIKE IN THE FALL : Sacramento City Unified locks in distance learning plan. Union says teachers won’t follow it is from The Sacramento Bee. When Learning Is Really Remote: Students Climb Trees and Travel Miles for a Cell Signal is from The New York Times. What I’ve Learned From Teaching Online http

Video: “Lateral Reading”

by Larry Ferlazzo / 12h

geralt / Pixabay I’m adding this video The Best Tools & Lessons For Teaching Information Literacy – Help Me Find More .

New BBC Video: “What’s the difference between weather and climate?”

by Larry Ferlazzo / 12h

madartzgraphics / Pixabay I’m adding this new BBC video to The Best Sites To Learn About Climate Change :

Most Popular Posts Of The Week

by Larry Ferlazzo / 12h

I’m making a change in the content of the regular feature. In addition to sharing the top five posts that have received the most “hits” in the preceding seven days (though they may have originally been published on an earlier date), I will also include the top five posts that have actually appeared in the past week. Often, these are different posts. You might also be interested in IT’S THE THIRTE

Four Useful Infographics

by Larry Ferlazzo / 21h

200degrees / Pixabay Here are four useful infographics for teaching and learning: A 3D Look at the Largest Population Density Centers is from Visual Capitalist. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning About Our 

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