Group items tagged

A few days ago, June 10th, Wendy Kopp, founder of TFA delivered the commencement address at Dartmouth (read it or see it here).  Aside from the appropriate motivational stories that make a commencement speech inspirational and relevant, Wendy also dedicated a fairly significant portion of her speech to the TFA critics.

The media react with alarm every time the NAEP scores appear because only about one-third or so of students is rated "proficient." This is supposed to be something akin to a national tragedy because presumably almost every child should be "proficient." Remember, under No Child Left Behind, ALL students are supposed to be proficient in reading and math by the year 2014. Since I served on NAGB for seven years, I can explain what the board's "achievement levels" mean. There are four levels. At the top is "advanced." Then comes "proficient." Then "basic." And last, "below basic."

"If you were thinking of ponying up $20 to buy Jonathan Kozol's latest book, Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America, don't bother. EduShyster has it on EXCELLENT authority that the book suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks. While I haven't actually read Fire in the Ashes, I know someone who has-Teach for America foundress Wendy Kopp-and she thought it was a real dud. You see Kozol has spent the past 642 years writing about the scourge of poverty among America's children, racial segregation in the public schools and inequities in education funding-all of which we now know DO NOT MATTER AT ALL. In fact just by mentioning these non-mattering factors Kozol is practically a one man excuse factory."

"When I read Paul Thomas's reflections on "choice," it reminded me of an exchange I had in conversation with John Merrow recently in Manhattan at the JCC."

"Dear parents: As you may have probably heard, the new state test scores were released to the press and they are disastrous. Only 31% of students in New York State passed the new Common Core exams in reading and math. More than one third -- or 36% -- of 3rd graders throughout the state got a level I in English; which means they essentially flunked.  In NYC, only 26 percent of students passed the exams in English, and 30 percent passed in math - meaning they had a level 3 or 4.  Only 5% of students in Rochester passed.  Though children's individual scores won't be available to parents until late August, I urge you not to panic when you see them.  My advice is not to believe a word of any of this.  The new Common Core exams and test scores are politically motivated, and are based neither on reason or evidence.  They were pre-ordained to fit the ideological goals of Commissioner King and the other educrats who are intent on imposing damaging policies on our schools.  Here are five reasons not to trust the new scores"

"A couple of weeks ago, Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute made the case that absolute proficiency rates should not be used as measures of school effectiveness, as they are heavily dependent on where students "start out" upon entry to the school. A few days later, Fordham president Checker Finn offered a defense of proficiency rates, noting that how much students know is substantively important, and associated with meaningful outcomes later in life. They're both correct. This is not a debate about whether proficiency rates are at all useful (by the way, I don't read Petrilli as saying that). It's about how they should be used and how they should not."

"In the beginning, she laid out what she intended to do.  As should be clear, I believe she more than achieved her goals.  It is the opinion of this reviewer, me, a retired teacher who returned to the classroom to make a difference, in part at the urging of Ravitch, that this book is by far her finest work, and is something with which everyone truly concerned about education should read."

"I've been teaching for almost thirty years, and I don't know precisely when my colleagues and I became public enemy number one. But after reading Reign of Error by Diane Ravitch I'm getting a pretty good handle on why. "

"I have read with interest the dialogue between Marc Tucker, Diane Ravitch, Anthony Cody, and Yong Zhao on the establishment of an American test-based public education accountability system. Forty years of research on the impact of political structures on social systems,[1], [2] in particular public education,[3] leads me to categorize Marc Tucker's rhetoric as nothing more than political cant to protect the lucrative profits of poverty "non-profit" industry that is bent to the will of the powerful rich donor groups that are dominating education policy in the US and UK."

"A couple of weeks ago, the website Vox.com published an article entitled, "11 facts about U.S. teachers and schools that put the education reform debate in context." The article, in the wake of the Vergara decision, is supposed to provide readers with the "basic facts" about the current education reform environment, with a particular emphasis on teachers. Most of the 11 facts are based on descriptive statistics. Vox advertises itself as a source of accessible, essential, summary information - what you "need to know" - for people interested in a topic but not necessarily well-versed in it. Right off the bat, let me say that this is an extraordinarily difficult task, and in constructing lists such as this one, there's no way to please everyone (I've read a couple of Vox's education articles and they were okay). That said, someone sent me this particular list, and it's pretty good overall, especially since it does not reflect overt advocacy for given policy positions, as so many of these types of lists do. But I was compelled to comment on it. I want to say that I did this to make some lofty point about the strengths and weaknesses of data and statistics packaged for consumption by the general public. It would, however, be more accurate to say that I started doing it and just couldn't stop. In any case, here's a little supplemental discussion of each of the 11 items"

"I am mostly writing this just to have a record of where I stand on so-called 21st century skills. Now, I am not an ed tech or tech expert at all, and though it's a topic I try to read a lot about, I haven't written a lot about it."

"Dear Governor Christie, Yesterday I took the opportunity to come hear you speak on your campaign trail. I have never really heard you speak before except for sound bytes that I get on my computer. I don't have cable, I don't read newspapers. I don't have enough time. I am a public school teacher that works an average of 60 hours a week in my building. Yes, you can check with my principal. I run the after-school program along with my my classroom position. I do even more work when I am at home. For verification of this, just ask my children. I asked you one simple question yesterday. I wanted to know why you portray NJ Public Schools as failure factories. Apparently that question struck a nerve. When you swung around at me and raised your voice, asking me what I wanted, my first response "I want more money for my students." Notice, I did not ask for more money for me. I did not ask for my health benefits, my pension, a raise, my tenure, or even my contract that I have not had for nearly three years. "

"By year's end I will have entered 8,892 data points into my district's data collection systems - Gradebook and Reading 3D. This data is from homework, assessments, and report cards. Which of these 8,892 data points are the important ones? I mean, which of these data points will count towards my evaluation? And what problem are you trying to address by including student assessments into teacher evaluations? "

"Yesterday, The U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce approved The Setting New Priorities in Education Spending Act (H.R. 1891), which was originally introduced by Congressman Duncan Hunter (CA-52), permanently eliminates 43 K-12 education programs including Reading Is Fundamental (RIF). Chairman Hunter describes all of these programs as "wasteful" and "ineffective"."

"While much is known about the effects of class size and teacher quality on achievement, there is little evidence on whether policymakers can improve education by utilizing non-instructional resources. We exploit plausibly exogenous within-school variation in counselors and find that one additional counselor increases boys' reading and math achievement by over one percentile point, and reduces misbehavior of both boys and girls. Estimates imply the marginal counselor has the same impact on overall achievement as increasing the quality of every teacher in the school by nearly one-third of a standard deviation, and is twice as effective as reducing class size by hiring an additional teacher."

"Given the magnitude of the recent recession, and the high-stakes testing the U.S. has implemented under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), it is important to understand the effects of large-scale job losses on student achievement. We examine the effects of state-level job losses on fourth- and eighth-grade test scores, using federal Mass Layoff Statistics and 1996-2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress data. Results indicate that job losses decrease scores. Effects are larger for eighth than fourth graders and for math than reading assessments, and are robust to specification checks. Job losses to 1% of a state's working-age population lead to a .076 standard deviation decrease in the state's eighth-grade math scores. This result is an order of magnitude larger than those found in previous studies that have compared students whose parents lose employment to otherwise similar students, suggesting that downturns affect all students, not just students who experience parental job loss. Our findings have important implications for accountability schemes: we calculate that a state experiencing one-year job losses to 2% of its workers (a magnitude observed in seven states) likely sees a 16% increase in the share of its schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress under NCLB. "

"I'm going to D.C. tomorrow to talk with Rick Hess about Terry Moe's new anti-union book, Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America's Public Schools. I read it thinking: "Does this guy really believe what he's saying, or is he only trying to make points with some larger audience he hopes to reach?""

"In the intensifying debate over the future of education, two camps seem to be emerging. On one side, there are people like New York University professor/former Deputy U.S. Education Secretary Diane Ravitch who argue that larger social ills such as poverty, joblessness, economic despair and lack of health coverage negatively affect educational achievement, and that until those problems are addressed, schools will never be able to produce the results we want. On the other side, there are so-called "reformers" who want to radically change (read: charterize and/or privatize) public education under the premise that the primary problems are bad/lazy teachers and "unaccountable" school administrators."

It is satisfying to read a book that examines education without claiming to be an education book. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered feels fresh and inspiring, despite having been around since the early 1970s. In it, British economist E.F. Schumacher attempts to address fundamental questions, as opposed to dwelling on the politics around nonessential issues, even the politics around the politics.

It's always news when Bill Gates opines about education. After all, giving some $5 billion for education grants and scholarships since 2000 warrants attention. Nevertheless, I have to admit that I was a bit surprised to read what Gates said in an interview published in The Wall Street Journal on Jul. 23 ("Was the $5 Billion Worth It?").