What do teacher evaluations really accomplish? - Newsday

What do teacher evaluations really accomplish? - Newsday:

What do teacher evaluations really accomplish?

 In 2011, a few hundred educators were called to Albany by the State Education Department to be the vanguard for New York's education reform movement -- to learn the Common Core, and to introduce changes in teacher evaluation.

The Common Core was barely newsworthy then, but the seeds of discontent were being planted by the proposed teacher evaluation system referred to as APPR, or Annual Professional Performance Review.

Originally, the minimum score needed for an effective rating was 24 out of 40 points on the testing or objective portion (12 points for State tests and 12 points for "other" tests). To earn an effective overall rating, 75 total points were needed, so a teacher would need 51 additional points on the subjective part of the evaluation. But in April of 2012, the department lowered the minimum objective score for effective from 24 points to just 18 points. This meant that a teacher could now be rated effective with just 18 points out of 40 on the testing portions but would need 57 additional points on the subjective evaluation to earn 75 points and be effective overall.

This made for a spectacular imbalance. Only 45 percent of the objective points (18 out of 40) were needed to be effective in testing, while 95 percent of the points were needed (57 out of 60) to be effective on the subjective portion! Why should that be? Was the department inviting high subjective scores? Was it backing away from its insistence on the primacy of New York State test scores?

As a note of explanation, in its April 2012 APPR advisory, the department created what it called a "concrete example" to define a typical minimal score for an effective teacher. In this illustration, the minimal score used for an effective teacher on the subjective component was precisely 57 points. There could be no mistaking the department's intent.

Now, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is clearly upset at the high percentages of effective teacher ratings on Long Island. He has accused administrators of using a scale recommended by the teachers' union for the subjective component. But, in fact, it was the State Education Department that used this example in its own APPR advisory, and thereby invited administrators to choose that score of 57 for a minimally effective teacher.

This results in only four possible subjective scores to differentiate among the numerous effective and highly effective teachers (57, 58, 59, or 60). Equally odd is that there would be 57 ways (scores from zero to 56) to distinguish among ineffective or developing teachers.

Originally, the minimum score needed for an effective rating was 24 out of 40 points on the testing or objective portion (12 points for State tests and 12 points for "other" tests). To earn an effective overall rating, 75 total points were needed, so a teacher would need 51 additional points on the subjective part of the evaluation. But in April of 2012, the department lowered the minimum objective score for effective from 24 points to just 18 points. This meant that a teacher could now be rated effective with just 18 points out of 40 on the testing portions but would need 57 additional points on the subjective evaluation to earn 75 points and be effective overall.

This made for a spectacular imbalance. Only 45 percent of the objective points (18 out of 40) were needed to be effective in testing, while 95 percent of the points were needed (57 out of 60) to be effective on the subjective portion! Why should that be? Was the department inviting high subjective scores? Was it backing away from its insistence on the primacy of New York State test scores?

As a note of explanation, in its April 2012 APPR advisory, the department created what it called a "concrete example" to define a typical minimal score for an effective teacher. In this illustration, the minimal score used for an effective teacher on the subjective component was precisely 57 points. There could be no mistaking the department's intent.

Now, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is clearly upset at the high percentages of effective teacher ratings on Long Island. He has accused administrators of using a scale recommended by the teachers' union for the subjective component. But, in fact, it was the State Education Department that used this example in its own APPR advisory, and thereby invited administrators to choose that score of 57 for a minimally effective teacher.

This results in only four possible subjective scores to differentiate among the numerous effective and highly effective teachers (57, 58, 59, or 60). Equally odd is that there would be 57 ways (scores from zero to 56) to distinguish among ineffective or developing teachers.

No one really knows what percentage of teachers in the state or Long Island should be classified as effective or highly effective. What we do know is that a "reform movement" designed to improve student instruction through a new curriculum (Common Core) and better teacher evaluations has been badly damaged. The flawed teacher evaluation system has driven a wedge between teachers and their possible support for Common Core.

Cuomo now cites the inflated evaluations of Long Island administrators as a major issue. The real issue, however, is neither Common Core nor administrators mishandling teacher evaluations. The real problem is a misaligned evaluation system influenced by political considerations rather than student needs and real teacher improvement.

Fred Cohen is former assistant superintendent of the Bellmore-Merrick school Districts who also worked with the State Education Department as a professional performance review trainer in Nassau County. He is currently a consultant for Nassau County school districts on test data analysis.

What do teacher evaluations really accomplish? - Newsday:

Fate of No Child Left Behind Law Generates Hope and Fear - NYTimes.com

Fate of No Child Left Behind Law Generates Hope and Fear - NYTimes.com:

Fate of No Child Left Behind Law Generates Hope and Fear

 CLEVELAND — Ginn Academy, the first and only public high school in Ohio just for boys, was conceived to help at-risk students make it through school — experimenting with small classes, a tough discipline code and life coaches around the clock.

Its graduation rate was close to 88 percent last year, compared with 64 percent for theCleveland Metropolitan School District as a whole. And it has enjoyed some other victories. There is the junior whose test scores are weak but who regularly volunteers at a food bank. And the senior proudly set to graduate this spring who used to attend school so irregularly that he had to be collected at home each morning by a staff member.

But under No Child Left Behind, the signature education initiative of the George W. Bush administration, the academy, which opened in 2007, was consistently labeled low performing because it did not make the required “adequate yearly progress” in raising test scores.

As Congress debates a rewrite of the No Child Left Behind law, Mr. Petty may well see that happen.

The law, which was intended to make sure schools were educating children, particularly the neediest, ushered in an era of high-stakes testing to measure student progress. After more than a decade, the proliferation of tests, along with punishments for schools that failed to improve their scores, has angered parents and teachers. It has also set off protests and boycotts of testing.

Congress needs to find a way to “let 1,000 flowers bloom” and back away from a punitive approach to controlling schools, said Robert C. Pianta, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.

A rewrite of the law could collapse in partisan disarray as in past years. But it could also herald a new era of education, keeping some testing but eliminating prescriptive punishments for schools.

At the same time, it could allow some states to lower their academic standards, and others to reduce the amount of federal money flowing to schools that serve the poorest children.

No Child Left Behind was a bipartisan effort that was intended to help schools improve reading and math in the third to eighth grades. The law required that every child in the nation be proficient by 2014 in those subjects, as measured by standardized tests. Cascading punishments — beginning with mandated tutoring and going all the way to school takeover — were imposed on schools that failed to make sufficient progress toward this goal.

As Arne Duncan, the education secretary, put it in a speech this year, the law, formally a reauthorization of President Lyndon B. Johnson’sElementary and Secondary Education Act, “created dozens of ways for schools to fail and very few ways to help them succeed or to reward success.”Fate of No Child Left Behind Law Generates Hope and Fear - NYTimes.com:

Hipsters for charter schools: The big lie “Togetherness” tells about race and education - Salon.com

Hipsters for charter schools: The big lie “Togetherness” tells about race and education - Salon.com:

Hipsters for charter schools: The big lie “Togetherness” tells about race and education

Rich whites run charter industry and funnel them cash. On HBO, it's a post-racial bandwagon gutting public schools

 Michelle Pierson, a 40-ish mother of two, is in a state of confusion over her the direction in life and finds herself wandering down the main drag of her gentrifying, hip Northeast Los Angeles neighborhood. She hears a confident voice coming from Eagle Rock City Hall that entices her in.

Inside, David Garcia, a handsome, charismatic Latino, is speaking stirringly to a group of concerned parents. He says, “There’s like bird shit all over the place — I mean you got kids eating five-day-old sloppy joes. Our public school system is broken. I don’t think we can fix the old schools but I’ll tell you what we can do. We can build a new one. Isn’t a great school no more than a box and an inspired teacher inside of it? We need a great charter school here in Eagle Rock. Let’s create a place for our children to flourish. There’s a big empty hole in our community. And if we don’t do anything about it, our kids are going to be more disenfranchised and lost than we are now.”

Michelle is entranced, and suddenly her life has found a purpose.

Charter school dogma has made it to the Big Time: It just got its own soapbox on the Duplass brothers’ HBO Sunday night series “Togetherness.”

The one thing the aging-hipster parents know of their school district, Los Angeles Unified, is its “broken-ness” — and by extension, the rest of America’s obsession with that term. These “thoughtful” parents don’t waste one breath discussing the possibility of their white middle-class children attending their neighborhood school, saving it instead for lengthy wails of anxiety about private school applications and liberal guilt about isolating their kids from “the community.”

Who cares what a Hollywood show about “disenfranchised and lost” film industry workers and their precious progeny does?

We all should, because “Togetherness” very much reflects the state of national discourse on education and its corrosive effects on public schools, particularly as it has played out in Los Angeles. (I taught in LAUSD public schools for 20 years.) The show also presciently mirrors a current school board race in that district that is pitting a charter school reformer against an old-time public school advocate.

With “Togetherness,” we witness the battle through the intersection of art, politics, race and class.

---

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The show’s creators, Mark and Jay Duplass, are the very talented Hollywood powerhouse titans of smart, artsy films about the white middle class and its obsessions; their work dominates Sundance and they have a four-picture deal with Netflix. The brothers also live in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles School Board District 5, and that’s where they’ve set “Togetherness.” It also happens to be where I live and will send my son to school when he is old enough. Although the show is ostensibly about the marriage and lives of Hollywood sound man Brett and his wife, Michelle, the charter school plotline is enlightening and can be discussed in light of not only LAUSD’s relationship to these characters, but to the nation as a whole.

The charter school speech-maker, David Garcia, an aspiring politician, begins with the mantra that has been drummed around the country for the last 20 years: “Our public education system is broken.”

Is it broken in Palos Verdes? In Beverly Hills? In Malibu? Or any of the richer districts that surround L.A.?  No, but definitely, apparently, in Eagle Rock.

Michelle goes up to David after his speech and says, “My daughter is going to start kindergarten and we’re talking about where is she going to go… what is she going to do… I’m wondering why is there not some community place — somewhere I can put her and feel good with a lot of different people. I don’t want to put her in a private school where she doesn’t get to experience what life is like where we live. I mean why is therenot a great place?”

The Eagle Rock public schools are obviously not an option for Michelle. Our local elementary schools — Eagle Rock, Rockdale, Dahlia Heights — get conflated into the fictional “Townsend Elementary,”  and are clearly not gonna cut it. It goes without saying.

Michelle has previously been shown speaking longingly to her husband, who has all but decided to put their kid in private school: “Don’t you want her to be in a different kind of community with kids of different colors and economic backgrounds?

That obviously — to these characters and to many real life members of their demographic — isn’t the public schools.

But why not? One LAUSD school board member has said pointedly that “maybe it’s time Hipsters for charter schools: The big lie “Togetherness” tells about race and education - Salon.com:

School Medicaid claims rejected again :: SI&A Cabinet Report

School Medicaid claims rejected again :: SI&A Cabinet Report :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet:

School Medicaid claims rejected again

by Tom Chorneau

(Calif.) After several years of negotiations, federal administrators of a school-based Medicaid program appeared this week to issue a final rejection of some $460 million in claims for services provided by California schools dating back to 2009.

Although state officials and advocates representing local educational agencies say they will continue to press the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for higher reimbursements, a letter from the agency’s acting director to the California Department of Health Care Services suggests it has made its best and final offer.

That offer, which covers as many as 972 LEAs statewide, would pay 100 percent of claims submitted for less than $25,000; 75 percent for claims between $25,000 and $50,000; and 40 percent for claims above $50,000.

Hellan Roth Dowden, an advocate representing a coalition working with Local Education Agencies said the state has been given until April 1 to come up with a plan for reconciling the pending claims with the federal reimbursement offer.

“I’m sure there are going to be some meetings in the next week or so with the (state) department and the various stakeholders in the education community to develop some sort of strategy for dealing with this,” she said. “We don’t know what they want to do with this.”

Dowden noted that it is the largest districts – which serve the highest numbers of low-income students – who would be the biggest losers if the federal payment plan remains unaltered.

In some cases, LEAs would not only lose out on a big percentage of their federal claim but would end up owing the state moneyas well. Because federal money generally passes through the state before going to districts, a number of LEAs received their full reimbursement before claims payments began to be deferred.

Medicaid, known in California as Medi-Cal, is the nation’s primary program for providing health care to low-income families, the elderly and the disabled. It is a critical source of health care coverage for children and provides a range of care directed at K-12 students including medical screenings as well as dental, vision and hearing services.

Schools also serve as funnels for getting families and children into the system and typically incur significant expenses performing outreach, making eligibility determinations and other administrative duties.

Federal auditors raised questions about some claims submitted by California districts dating back to 2009, prompting Medicaid administrators to begin withholding reimbursements in 2012.

State officials have argued that not all districts have filed improperly.

Most districts attempted to keep the services going by using general fund money but last year some were unable to keep up and it resulted in layoffs for school nurses, speech pathologists, counselors School Medicaid claims rejected again :: SI&A Cabinet Report :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet:

New funding law creates disparity among low-income schools | EdSource

New funding law creates disparity among low-income schools | EdSource:

New funding law creates disparity among low-income schools

 The state’s new education funding formula provides extra money for all low-income children, students learning English and foster youth, and contributes more dollars if they make up the bulk of students in a district. But if these “high-need” kids happen to be concentrated in a few schools within wealthier districts, they get less funding than they would receive in a poor district, a recent study revealed. The report also cautioned that districts’ accountability plans lacked the information to determine if the students were receiving the help they needed.

In “Implementing California’s School Funding Formula: Will High-Need Students Benefit?” researchers Laura Hill and Iwunze Ugo of the Public Policy Institute of California quantified a dilemma of the new funding system. There are 200,000 high-need students in 677 schools throughout the state who don’t draw maximum dollars under the formula because their districts don’t qualify as high-need. The funding formula “has not eliminated all concerns about funding adequacy and about how districts with unevenly distributed high-need students will allocate funds to students,” the report released last week said.

SOURCE: PUBLIC POLICY INSTITUTE OF CALIFORNIA.

This map shows the distribution of high-need students, defined under the formula as low-income children, students learning English and foster youths, by county. They are most heavily concentrated in Imperial, Monterey and Yolo counties and counties in the Central Valley. Disparities between high-need and wealthy schools within districts are most prevalent in the Bay Area and Orange County.

Under the formula that Gov. Jerry Brown pushed and the Legislature passed two years ago, a school district annually receives a base level of funding for every student plus a 20 percent supplement for each high-need student; that’s an average of about $1,500 extra per student per year, with some variation by grade. Districts with at least 55 percent high-need students receive additional “concentration” dollars for every student above the threshold. For districts with a high-need population of 60 percent (5 percent over the threshold), the concentration funding amounts to only a couple of hundred dollars per student. But for districts with 90 percent high-need students, the per-student concentration grant can be $2,000 or more each year.

The formula is calculated on districtwide student numbers, not on a schoolwide basis, even though in many large urban and suburban districts, particularly in the Bay Area and Southern California, property values create distinct neighborhoods of poverty and wealth. As a result, poor kids living in largely middle-class and wealthy districts get the 20 percent supplemental funding but not the concentration add-on.

The study cited two elementary schools in Capistrano Unified in Orange County; one school had 97 percent high-need students and the other 91 percent, yet in the district overall, only 24 percent of students qualified for extra money. In one elementary school in Carmel Unified, 76 percent of students qualified as high-need, compared with 17 percent in the district overall.

This funding issue was debated in the Legislature when the Local Control Funding Formula was proposed, said Carolyn Chu, a senior analyst with the Legislative Analyst’s Office. Concentration dollars recognize that districts need extra funding to help mitigate the challenges posed by the large proportions of non-English-speaking families and pervasive poverty. Proponents of the formula, including Brown and State Board of Education President Michael Kirst, who co-wrote the concept paper behind the formula, insisted that calculations be done at the district level, where state funding had always flowed, Chu said. One reason was to prevent a perverse incentive to redraw school boundaries to attract more concentration dollars. That would compound the problem of poverty, she said.

GOING DEEPER

• Regulations governing LCAPs and distribution of money under Local Control Funding Formula, November 2014
• “Implementing California’s School Funding Formula: Will High-Need Students Benefit?” study by PPIC, March 2015
• “Toward a Grand Vision: Early Implementation of California’s Local Control Funding Formula,” study by Daniel Humphrey and Julia Koppich, October 2014
• “Implementing Local Accountability in California’s Schools: The First Year of Planning,” study by Paul Warren and Giselle Carrillo, PPIC, March 2014
• “Building a More Equitable and Participatory School System in California: The Local Control Funding Formula’s First Year,” study by Carrie Hahnel, Ed Trust-West, December 2014

Calculating funding by school also would have increased the state’s cost to fund the formula – or required raising the high-need threshold to qualify for concentration dollars, she said. The tradeoff was that some high-need schools would get less money than their counterparts in poorer districts. The LAO agreed with Brown’s design, Chu said.

To ensure that supplemental money reaches high-need students in districts where they aren’t heavily concentrated, the state board added a requirement in the spending regulations. Districts can spread the money across the district – to extend the school day or provide language coaches in every school ­– only if it’s the most effective use of the money and mainly benefits high-need students. Otherwise, the money should be more narrowly targeted to meet these students’ needs. Starting this year, districts also must provide research to justify using money allotted for high-need students for districtwide programs and purposes.

In the Local Control and Accountability Plans, or LCAPs, that districts must complete annually, districts are supposed to spell out how they will increase and improve programs and services for high-need children proportional to the extra money that they attract to the district. However, state regulations don’t require a strict accounting for the spending.

And, the study said, there weren’t enough details in many of the first-year LCAPs, which districts completed last spring, to know for certain how money was spent. Several studies of first-year LCAPs – by researchers Daniel Humphrey and Julia Koppich, by Education Trust-West, and New funding law creates disparity among low-income schools | EdSource:

Common Core's cyber spies - Stephanie Simon - POLITICO

Common Core's cyber spies - Stephanie Simon - POLITICO:

Common Core's cyber spies

 Bent over their computers in Salt Lake City, a dozen cyber sleuths scan the vast reaches of the Internet for contraband.

Only, they’re not hunting traffickers of drugs or sex.

Story Continued Below

It’s standardized testing season across the U.S. — and they’re on the lookout for student tweets about the tests.

The web patrol team works for Caveon, a test security company charged with protecting the integrity of new Common Core exams developed by the publishing giant Pearson. To that end, they’re monitoring social media for any leaks about test questions. News of the surveillance broke this week, sparking a firestorm. The American Federation of Teachers even circulated a petition demanding that Pearson “stop spying on our kids.”

But Pearson is hardly the only company keeping a watchful eye on students.

School districts and colleges across the nation are hiring private companies to monitor students’ online activity, down to individual keystrokes, to scan their emails for objectionable content and to scrutinize their public posts on Twitter, Facebook, Vine, Instagram and other popular sites. The surveillance services will send principals text-message alerts if a student types a suspicious phrase or surfs to a web site that raises red flags.

POLITICO PRO

Full coverage of technology policy

A dozen states have tried to limit cyber snooping by banning either colleges or K-12 schools, or both, from requesting student user names and passwords, which could be used to pry open social media accounts protected by privacy settings. Among those taking action: California, Illinois, Michigan and Utah.

At least five other states, among them New York and Maryland, are considering similar laws this session, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

But such laws protect only accounts marked as private. Many kids post publicly to build up their online followings.

And when they do, companies with names like Social Sentinel, Geo Listening, Varsity Monitor and UDiligence are there to read them.

The rise of online student monitoring comes at a time of rising parent protests against other forms of digital surveillance — namely, the vast quantities of data that technology companies collect on kids as they click through online textbooks, games and homework. Companies providing those online resources can collect millions of unique data points on a child in a single day. Much of that information is not protected by federal privacy law.

ON POLITICO MAGAZINE

Is Newark the Next Brooklyn?

JASON NARK

School administrators don’t tend to be too interested in that data, because it’s far too granular for them to make sense of it until an ed-tech company mines it for patterns.

But some principals, coaches and college presidents are acutely interested in student tweets.

Enter the surveillance services, which promise to scan student posts around the clock and flag anything that hints at bullying, violence or depression. The services will also flag any post that could tarnish the reputation of either the student or the educational institution. They’ll even alert administrators to garden-variety teenage hijinks, like a group of kids making plans to skateboard on school property .

Some of the monitoring software on the market can track and log every keystroke a student makes while using a school computer in any location, including at home. Principals can request text alerts if kids type in words like “guns” or “drugs,” or browse websites about anorexia or suicide. They can even order up reports identifying which students fritter away hours on Facebook and which buckle down to homework right after dinner.

Other programs scan all student emails, text messages and documents sent on a school’s online platform and alert school administrators — or law enforcement — to any that sound inappropriate.

View Photo Gallery

ON POLITICO MAGAZINE

An Education in Downtown Newark

MARK PETERSON

The more comprehensive services attempt to break down anonymity offered by sites like Twitter and YouTube, where students don’t have to display their real names. Analysts cross-reference photos, map friend networks and even try to deduce class schedules from the timing of social media posts in order to unmask students who use pseudonyms online.

Sometimes the monitoring is covert: One company advertises that its surveillance

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/cyber-snoops-track-students-116276.html#ixzz3V2ElbzgM

How to Build a School Library from Scratch | School Library Journal

How to Build a School Library from Scratch | School Library Journal:

How to Build a School Library from Scratch

By Jess deCourcy Hinds on March 9, 2015 Leave a Comment

Jess deCourcy Hinds with one of the student volunteers who helped build her library.
Photo by Bruce Conwell

Fresh out of library school in 2009, I was invited to start a brand-new library for Bard High School Early College Queens (BHSEC Queens) in New York, a public high school and college associates degree program. On my first day, assistant principal Sue Leung Eichler presented me with an enormous key—gold and shiny and spanning my palm. “Good luck,” she said with her characteristic frankness and warmth. “You’ll need it.”

I found myself in a musty room, knee-deep in boxes of discarded papers. The bookcases were mostly empty, and the few titles were for much younger or older readers (including a title for newly diagnosed Alzheimer’s patients). One shelf contained only garden gloves and a package of radish seeds. How do you grow a library? I wondered.

Despite having dedicated administrators, colleagues, and financial support from Bard College, our mother campus, my task seemed daunting—if not impossible. Luckily, I’d brought a CD player, and saxophone notes helped me imagine the possibilities. The music also welcomed the dozens of volunteers who arrived with sleeves rolled up.

NEW LIBRARIES: REASON TO CHEER

In this article:

Connect with grant opportunities, free materials, and volunteers online

Five questions for
prospective volunteers

Also read:

“Designing a Library, via Listserv:
a ‘Must Have’ List”

I’m not the only recent MLIS grad who accepted this kind of golden key recently. While school libraries are imperiled or closing in many regions, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, new ones are also opening. An informal poll among my classmates at the Pratt Institute in New York City showed that 50 percent launched or overhauled a library in their first job. At library conferences, I always meet people who’ve founded multiple libraries. Elementary school libraries, especially, tend to be started by one person and lots of elbow grease.

“Administrators who are adding new school libraries understand the critical role school librarians play in supporting academic achievement,” says Terri Grief, president of the American Association of School Librarians. There are currently 98,460 school libraries in the United States, adds Grief. “The best situations are where librarians, administrators, teachers, and students work together to make the spaces as conducive to learning as possible.”

Many school librarian job postings describe positions overseeing start-up ventures. Others involve modernizing facilities whose retiring librarians left behind outdated facilities requiring massive weeding and a tech and digital makeover. I read about new or transforming libraries on library list-servs at least once a month, and cheer. What could be a more hopeful sign for the field than a fresh new library?

STARTING FROM SCRATCH

Minerva Aponte of the Bronx, NY, began with a $10,000 Department of Education “REACH” grant that her administrators secured before hiring her. A large portion funded her online catalog system. She also received her annual budget of about $6,000. Aponte works for a campus school, CS 102, which serves 1,200 students in four different schools from pre–K to fifth grade, one of which is primarily for special needs pupils. The majority of students are African American or Latino, and one-third are English Language Learners.

“With my library, I started from scraaaaatch,” she said, elongating the vowel to emphasize the immensity of her task. She began with a 50-foot mailroom filled with abandoned mail and packages.

A fan of yard sales and stoop sales, Aponte always kept an eye out for deals on popular paperbacks. A Laura Bush grant in the $5,000–$8,000 range offered a boost, and lucrative Scholastic Book Fairs provided a reliable source of books each year. In her fourth year at the school, Aponte applied for a grant from the office of the then-Bronx borough president Adolfo Carrión.

During her application process, a custodian learned that she was cold-calling Carrión—a “big shot.” He was incredulous. “Don’t you know he’s an important person?” He asked.

“Don’t you know I’m an important person?” Aponte responded. “What I’m doing is important.” She got How to Build a School Library from Scratch | School Library Journal:

46th District Seattle Democrats pass a resolution to support Nathan Hale High School teachers who do not administer the SBAC | Seattle Education

46th District Seattle Democrats pass a resolution to support Nathan Hale High School teachers who do not administer the SBAC | Seattle Education:

46th District Seattle Democrats pass a resolution to support Nathan Hale High School teachers who do not administer the SBAC

This resolution is a highly shortened version of other legislative district resolutions but it does show support for the Nathan Hale teachers who choose not to administer the SBAC.

I have a feeling that the 46th will have wished they passed something stronger after the reaction of parents whose students go through the SBAC testing begin to surface.

At least Representative Gerry Pollett took a stab at it. One must give him credit because he was one of the state legislators who voted for the original Common Core Standards bill that was approved before the Common Core Standards had even been released.

Kudos to the 46th District voters who understood and appreciated the seriousness of what is happening in our schools. All but one member voted for the resolution. The person who voted against the resolution was Lisa Macfarlane of DFER. No surprise there.

And for the record, School Board Director Stephan Blanford, who lives in the 37th District, spoke rather in-eloquently against the resolution with some rather unbelievable mis-information. Not surprising given his financial backers. See the Post Script for more on his mis-representations.

To follow is the resolution:

Resolution in Support of Nathan Hale HS Educators’ Decision Not to 46th District Seattle Democrats pass a resolution to support Nathan Hale High School teachers who do not administer the SBAC | Seattle Education:

NJ, Pearson, and PARCC: Lies or ineptitude? | Bob Braun's Ledger

NJ, Pearson, and PARCC: Lies or ineptitude? | Bob Braun's Ledger:

NJ, Pearson, and PARCC: Lies or ineptitude?

 A legal analyst for the New Jersey education department told a legislative committee the other day that Pearson, the multi-billion British corporation that produces the PARCC tests,  could protect its “intellectual property” rights in the test by searching out what students are posting about the test on social media sites. The only problem with what Patrician Morgan said it this: Pearson doesn’t own the tests or the test questions.

A few days earlier, The New York Times blog “Bits” reported that PARCC–a coalition of a dozen states that hired Pearson to develop the tests–had ordered Pearson to stop using a database of student information to search out the students. There is a problem with that, too–few, if any, people outside the PARCC coalition even knew Pearson, a private company, had access to such a database.

Someone is lying. Or obfuscating. And the pity is that, given how feckless the New Jersey Assembly Education Committee was the other day in drawing out information from the education department, most parents are left not knowing what was going on.

State Education Commissioner David Hespe, in a move of breathtaking cowardice, refused to show up to answer the committee’s questions. He had been asked to come to the meeting days before but somehow could not clear his calendar in time to address the uproar over the revelations in his site that Pearson was spying on the social media postings of New Jersey children. Pearson also didn’t show him. To plead a previous engagement was, pure and simple, a lie.

Instead, he sent a young lawyer, Patricia Morgan, who read from a script and then offered  to answer questions, although it was clear she knew very little about the NJ, Pearson, and PARCC: Lies or ineptitude? | Bob Braun's Ledger:

Winner Of $1 Million Teaching Prize Has Some Depressing Thoughts About The State Of Education

Winner Of $1 Million Teaching Prize Has Some Depressing Thoughts About The State Of Education:
Winner Of $1 Million Teaching Prize Has Some Depressing Thoughts About The State Of Education

Nancie Atwell, who over the weekend won a $1 million award for her accomplishments in education, has been a teacher for more than four decades -- but she said she would not advise her students to go down the same career path.

After Atwell was awarded the first Global Teacher Prize from the Varkey Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to improving education for underprivileged students, she told The Associated Press that she feels "validated every day just by the experiences I have with children in the classroom."

However, in a subsequent interview with CNN, she said that she would not advise kids to become teachers.

"Honestly, right now, I encourage them to look in the private sector," she said during an appearance on "New Day." "Public school teachers are so constrained right now by the Common Core Standards and the tests that are developed to monitor what teachers are doing with them. It's a movement that's turned teachers into technicians, not reflective practitioners."

"If you're a creative, smart young person," she continued, "I don't think this is the time to go into teaching."

Depressing words -- especially coming from someone who has been in the field for 42 years.

The Common Core State Standards are a set of math and English standards that have been adopted in a majority of states in an effort to make sure students around the country are being held to the same learning benchmarks. In theory, Common Core issupposed to give teachers freedom over what is taught in their classrooms on a day-to-day basis. Some teachers, however, echo Atwell's complaints and say the standards actually limit them.

Atwell beat out 1,300 applicants from 127 countries to receive the prize, which the Varkey Foundation describes as the "Nobel Prize of teaching," Education Week reports. Atwell currently works at The Center for Teaching and Learning in Edgecomb, Maine, a school she founded in 1990. She has said that she plans to donateWinner Of $1 Million Teaching Prize Has Some Depressing Thoughts About The State Of Education: