Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Who speaks for public education? Policy-makers, who set change in motion with mandates and incentives designed to get them re-elected? School leaders, who find themselves administering policy "solutions" that actually get in the way of what leaders believe is best for the school community they're leading? Teachers, whose autonomy, professional judgment and organizations are denigrated daily? Parents, who are deeply invested in educational outcomes, but seldom asked for their perspectives on core issues of teaching, learning and decision-making? Or --do we get our impressions about public schools from the media?

As state after state rewrites their education laws in line with the mandates from Race to the Top and the NCLB waiver process, the teaching profession is being redefined. Teachers will now pay the price - be declared successes or failures, depending on the rise or fall of their students' test scores. Under NCLB it was schools that were declared failures. In states being granted waivers to NCLB, it is teachers who will be subjected to this ignominy. Of course we will still be required to label the bottom 5% of our schools as failures, but if the Department of Education has its way, soon every single teacher in the profession will be at risk for the label. This revelation came to me as I read the Score Card on Education prepared by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), authored by Dr. Matthew Ladner and Dan Lips. This is a remarkable document. It provides their report on where each of the states stands on the education "reform" that has become the hallmark of corporate philanthropies, the Obama administration and governors across the nation.

Charter schools are being hailed as 'the answer' and then they unapologetically push my students out. I have worked with kids who were counseled out of all of the major charter school providers in Chicago, even the highly publicized ones lauded by Arne Duncan, Mayor Emanuel, and President Obama. The charters are not serving my kids. My students are also getting more and more untrained novice teachers, like the corporate reform favorite Teach for America provides, and fewer experienced educators. Many of these young college grads know nothing about these students' cultural backgrounds or extensive social-emotional needs. To add to all of that, my students are being labeled as "failures" by the standardized tests mandated by corporate reform's signature piece of legislation, No Child Left Behind. All I hear coming from the powers that be is to "fire more teachers," "create more charters schools," or "give more tests." None of the remedies being peddled by the elites help my students AT ALL. They are the kids being left behind. So what DO my students need? They need caring, committed, EXPERIENCED teachers.

Clearly, Cuomo has an agenda here. What that is, who knows, but it is not the betterment of public education in New York. His continual bashing of those who are the front-line troops of education is having an enormously corrosive effect. It is richly ironic when he called himself the lobbyist for students during his budget message, because he is anything but. Or for their parents, either. A one-size-fits-all teacher evaluation plan, a la Cuomo, will be one more unfunded state mandate for taxpayers, and the destruction of a key foundation brick for successful education: local control.

As I travel the country, I am frequently asked to identify an urban district where public education is working. My first impulse is to say that public schools everywhere have been hemmed in and harmed by the mandates of No Child Left Behind; one has to look far and wide for an urban district that has managed to sustain a vision of good education, untainted by the federal law's pressure to produce higher test scores every year.

The 2013-2014 school year may seem like a long way off, but state school officials are already fretting over a perfect storm of education reforms that could make today's extensive state testing regimen seem like a snap. That's the year when students could take as many as five state-mandated tests, on top of their teachers' occasional pop quizzes and the tests given several times each year by the local school systems. While the Maryland School Assessment will be phased out, those tests will still overlap with a new battery of four new assessments to be field tested here and in 23 states.

Nine year olds should not have to take tests that will determine the fate of their schools or their teacher's jobs.  NCLB mandates that they do, so I decided to take a look at the New York State 3rd grade math test from 2010.

Where I take offense is how Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has chosen to mandate a system that cannot take into account the myriad factors that actually affect teacher effectiveness. This matter demands serious inquiry, not sound bites or headlines. This matter deserves serious consideration of the available research to ensure that, long term, its ultimate success can be measured by the number of productive children our schools graduate.

I am firmly of the belief that you lay out grading expectations for students with as much notice as possible, and so here is my grading scale for reporters and newspapers in handling the value-added scores that the city Department of Education is releasing today, after courts have mandated their release

In our nation's public schools, March Madness has taken on a whole new meaning. It is test prep time in America. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is fond of saying that we should not teach the test. At the same time, there are huge consequences for schools, teachers and principals that do not raise test scores. The NCLB waivers allow states to eliminate Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for the majority of schools, but huge pressure will still be applied to the bottom tier of schools, those with high poverty and large numbers of English learners. And new policies mandated by the NCLB waivers require the inclusion of test scores in teacher and principal evaluations. As the month of March begins, across the country schools are in the midst of the most pressure-packed time of the year. We have just a few short weeks before the tests will be given that determine the fate of our students, our schools, our principals and ourselves. It is test-prep time.

In the Republican Party, presidential debates candidates like Mitt Romney and Herman Cain tout their business executive experience and claim expertise at job creation. Former Governors Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman promote their management experience as the CEO of state governments. Whatever you may think of their proposals for stimulating the economy and ending unemployment, there is no question that these candidates believe, and they believe their audience believes, that knowledge and experience are important leadership qualities. However, when it comes to educational leadership, it seems that knowledge and experience do not count for very much, certainly not to the Obama-Duncan team, the Cuomo-King-Tisch team that establishes educational policy in New York State, or the Bloomberg-Walcott team that runs the schools in New York City.

The fact that so many states have mandated 4-5 category schemes right out of the gate, seemingly based on little more than speculation among advocacy groups, is yet another instance of the rushed, ill-considered drive to overhaul teacher evaluations. It's amazing how certain some people seem about what these new systems are supposed to look like, given the fact that there is barely a shred of evidence as to their optimal form. In these situations, it's often wise to encourage experimentation, see how different configurations turn out and learn from this variation.

"During the 2010, 2011, and 2012 legislative sessions, a combination of federal policy incentives and newly elected governors and legislative majorities in many states following the 2010 elections sparked a wave of legislation addressing teacher effectiveness. More than 20 states passed legislation designed to address educator effectiveness by mandating annual evaluations based in part on student learning and linking evaluation results to key personnel decisions, including tenure, reductions in force, dismissal of underperforming teachers, and retention. In many cases states passed multiple laws, with later laws building on previous legislation, and also promulgated regulations to implement legislation. A few states acted through regulation only. In an effort to help policymakers, educators, and the public better understand how this flurry of legislative activity shifted the landscape on teacher effectiveness issues-both nationally and at the state level-Bellwether Education Partners analyzed recent teacher effectiveness legislation, regulation, and supporting policy documents from 21 states that took major legislative or regulatory action on teacher effectiveness in the past three years. This analysis builds on a previous analysis of teacher effectiveness legislation in five states that Bellwether published in 2011. Our expanded analysis includes nearly all states that took major legislative action on teacher effectiveness over the past three years."

"A dominant narrative of the past decade and a half of education reform has been to highlight alleged persistent failures of our education system.  While this tale began long ago with the Reagan Administration report A Nation at Risk, it has been put into overdrive in the era of test based accountability that began with the No Child Left Behind Act.  That series of amendments to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act mandated annual standardized testing of all students in grades 3-8 and once in high school, set a target for 100% proficiency for all students in English and mathematics, and imposed consequences for schools and districts that either failed to reach proficiency targets or failed to test all students.  Under the Obama administration, the federal Department of Education has freed states from the most stringent requirements to meet those targets, but in return, states had to commit themselves to specific reforms such as the adoption of common standards, the use of standardized test data in the evaluation of teachers, and the expansion of charter schools.  All of these reforms are predicated on the constantly repeated belief that our citizens at all levels are falling behind international competitors, that our future workforce lacks the skills they will need in the 21st century, and that we have paid insufficient attention to the uneven distribution of equal opportunity in our nation. But what if we've gotten the entire thing wrong the whole time?"

"The Condition of Education (COE) is a congressionally mandated annual report that summarizes important developments and trends in education using the latest available statistics. The report presents statistical indicators containing text, figures, and tables describing important developments in the status and trends of education from early childhood learning through graduate-level education. The contents of The Condition of Education are organized within the 5 sections shown on the left of this page. In addition to the indicators in these sections, there are Topics in Focus that examine specific issues. The Condition of Education 2011 contains 50 indicators, but additional indicators from earlier volumes are also available on this web site. "

"Over the past year or two, roughly 15-20 states have passed or are considering legislation calling for the overhaul of teacher evaluation. The central feature of most of these laws is a mandate to incorporate measures of student test score growth, in most cases specifying a minimum percentage of a teacher's total score that must consist of these estimates."

Michele Bachmann's victory in the Iowa straw poll Saturday represents many obvious things: the mainstreaming of the Tea Party, the overnight ordinariness of female presidential candidates, the increasing irrelevance of also-ran moderates like Jon Huntsman. But her growing popularity among the Republican base also signals something that's been less widely acknowledged: a sea change in the party's education agenda. It's safe to say that the political era of George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind is now officially over, even as the law's testing mandates continue to reverberate in classrooms across the country.

Millions of Texas students head back to school this week confronted by a dramatically altered, state-mandated social studies curriculum.

Students receive abundant information about their educational performance, but how this information affects future educational-investment decisions is not well understood. Increasingly common sources of information are state-mandated standardized tests. On these tests, students receive a score and a label that summarizes their performance. Using a regression-discontinuity design, we find persistent effects of earning a more positive label on the college-going decisions of urban, low-income students. Consistent with a Bayesian-updating model, these effects are concentrated among students with weaker priors, specifically those who report before taking the test that they do not plan to attend a four-year college.

The state's new teacher merit pay law kicks in this school year and the idea behind it sounds simple: the better students perform, the more teachers can earn. But in areas such as art, music and physical education, it's raising more questions than answers. The law mandates up to half of a teacher's raise be based on how well students do on standardized tests, but there is no state criteria to evaluate specialty teachers. Districts will have to come up with that this year.