Group items tagged

"The next mayor of New York City faces some tough challenges particularly when it comes to setting public education priorities. Should he or she abandon Mayor Michael Bloomberg's fixation on testing and data-driven accountability, or expand school choice and close failing classrooms to give more options to families, especially English-language learners and those in low-income communities?"

"Let's consider what we know now about the major education reform agendas currently impacting out schools"

"The New York Regents are the masters of the non-response response.  The day after they published their recommendations entitled Adjustment Options to Common Core Implementation, this was the Newsday headline: Pullback on Common Core: Regents Delay Tougher NY Test Requirements for High School Students Until 2022. That headline on Tuesday came from the Regents' third recommendation: "Give students more time to meet the Common Core standards." That sounds impressive until you discover that nothing was pulled back at all."

"As charter school proponents go to Albany this week to plead their case, let's examine the realities behind their claims of stretched resources, unique student demand and stellar academic results."

"Lindsay Wagner is an excellent journalist at NC Policy Watch. She covers the legislature. Here is her summary of the slash-and-burn policies that the legislature applied to public education"

"Alan Brown, a professor in North Carolina, wrote this open letter to State Senator Berger, who has sponsored a series of destructive bills that were passed into law. It was published here. It is clear, informed, and coherent. The tone is friendly and non-confrontational. Brown invites Senator Berger to look at the evidence. This letter could serve as a model. Everyone should write to their elected representatives, bringing to light the facts of your own state."

"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. "

"This Sunday's NY Times featured an outrageously one-sided article on Success charters.  It is not the first.  One remembers the Steve Brill article from 2010 on Harlem Success Academy which was so similar in tone that I had to keep checking to see that this was not the exact same piece. The Brill article was replete with many factual errors - claiming that the high-performing students at Success charters were exactly like those as the public schools with which it shared space, even though that was a clear falsehood that any reporter or editor could have checked if they had bothered to look at the data.  This time, the reporter Daniel Bergner admitted that the type of students enrolled may be different, writing in an offhand manner"

"...But the New York Times neglected to mention one important fact that is key to placing the work of our foundation in the right context-that our spending, though significant, is barely more than a half of one percent of what the country spends on education every year. The Times noted that we spent roughly $375 million on U.S. education in 2009. That's a significant amount of money to be sure. But each year, the country as a whole spends some $600 billion on education..."

"The nation's largest charter management organization is the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). KIPP schools are emblematic of the No Excuses approach to public education, a highly standardized and widely replicated charter model that features a long school day, an extended school year, selective teacher hiring, strict behavior norms, and a focus on traditional reading and math skills. No Excuses charter schools are sometimes said to focus on relatively motivated high achievers at the expense of students who are most diffiult to teach, including limited English proficiency (LEP) and special education (SPED) students, as well as students with low baseline achievement levels. We use applicant lotteries to evaluate the impact of KIPP Academy Lynn, a KIPP school in Lynn, Massachusetts that typifies the KIPP approach. Our analysis focuses on special needs students that may be underserved. The results show average achievement gains of 0.36 standard deviations in math and 0.12 standard deviations in reading for each year spent at KIPP Lynn, with the largest gains coming from the LEP, SPED, and low-achievement groups. The average reading gains are driven almost completely by SPED and LEP students, whose reading scores rise by roughly 0.35 standard deviations for each year spent at KIPP Lynn."

"New York City high schools have been crazy for the 22 years of my employment as a school social worker. But recently, the convergence of No Child Left Behind, the continuing economic meltdown and "managerial fetishism" have plunged them to new depths of absurdity, despair and destruction of human potential. (Being open-mined and un-doctrinaire, I picked up the term "managerial fetishism" from an op ed by John Podhoretz in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, which is happily provided free at school to enrich everyone's intellectual development.)"

"Many of those who are driving education policy today are fixed on a certain set of numbers and measurements that we're told are the way to gauge a quality school. But as a parent, that's not really what matters to me about my daughter's education."

"...Today, the bands of nouveau corporate royalists (with coats of arms bearing such names as Coors, DeVos, Koch, Scaife, and Walton) are determined to take back those middle-class gains of yesteryear."

This is the RAND final evaluation report on the NYC bonus program.

Harvard professor Tony Wagner explains how the nation achieved extraordinary successes by de-emphasizing testing

At March's General Meeting, TSJ took a look at Mayor-Elect Rahm Emanuel's plan for the future of public education in Chicago. We had a robust and interesting discussion both in small groups and as a whole. There were so many insightful views and ideas on this plan; here we will share some of those points that resonated most with the group