Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Value-added, along with other growth measures, are powerful because they level the playing field and measure the right thing -- student academic progress. Students come to teachers each year with vastly different levels of achievement, and the teacher's goal is to "add value" or growth. If we only measured achievement, why would any educator ever want to teach in a place with a disproportionate number of low-performing students? Value-added information should not be used to name, blame, and shame; it should be a catalyst to uncover, discover, and recover.

he race for City Hall starts in the classrooms Mayor Michael Bloomberg may not be running for reelection next year, but he will undoubtedly be playing a starring role in the race to replace him. The six Democrats expected to run next year are all supportive of the mayor's efforts to take control of the school system, but differ with Bloomberg on most everything else-whether it's school closures, co-locations with charter schools, relations with the teachers union or standardized test scores. So if next year's race is for the right to be the next education mayor, how do the candidates stack up? What are their qualifications, their accomplishments and their thoughts on some of the more controversial policies of the Bloomberg administration? David Bloomfield, a professor of education at CUNY and an expert on education policy in New York, was kind enough to offer his analysis of each candidate's qualifications.

For-profit colleges and universities have a well-deserved reputation for deceptive recruiting, low-quality programs, and sky-high prices. Now you can add union suppression to that reputation. A branch of the for-profit college mega-provider Kaplan University has noticed that some of its teaching staff are considering a union, and the management is not pleased. Recently, administrative staff at a branch of Kaplan International Centers (KIC) in New York City issued a memo to teachers to explain "the risk" of showing an interest in "union organizing." And the contents of the memo are revealing of the smears and innuendo that for-profit education institutions and other employers use to squelch union organizing activities and to make employees uneasy of asserting their rights to collective action.

This post contains my preliminary thoughts in development for a forthcoming article dealing with the intersection between statistical and measurement issues in teacher evaluation and teachers' constitutional rights where those measures are used for making high stakes decisions.

A popular history of vouchers suggests that they are a "new" reform tool and a product of free market ideas. They captured national attention relatively recently when they were implemented in the Milwaukee and Cleveland schools in the early 1990s.  In 2002, the Supreme Court resolved the constitutional questions concerning Cleveland's voucher program. This history typically cites Milton Friedman as the intellectual father of vouchers. Not so fast, says Professor Jim Carl. The origins and purposes of vouchers in American education are closely tied to our social history, he argues. In Freedom of Choice: Vouchers in American Education, Carl skillfully traces the origins of vouchers back to the segregated South in the 1950s. In this context, they were used to combat desegregation post- Brown.  However, through their history, civil rights advocates, free market economists, and policy makers all have embraced vouchers, seeking solutions to urban education. In other words, vouchers have been pliable and appealed to different groups, for different reasons. But, importantly, they began as a product of a social agenda in the South.

Gov. Bobby Jindal has remade the Louisiana public schools system with impressive speed over the past legislative session. Last week, he signed into law a suite of landmark reform bills that will likely change the direction of public education in Louisiana forever. But not all change is good, and critics say both Jindal's agenda and the strategy to move it come right from the playbook of conservative advocacy group ALEC, in an effort to revive Jindal's national political profile. Louisiana is now home to the nation's most expansive school voucher program. Charter school authorization powers have been broadened. And teacher tenure policies have been radically transformed. Louisiana already had something of a reputation as a radical-reform state, thanks to the post-Katrina educational climate in New Orleans. But not all change is good, and education advocates have deep concerns about the efficacy of Jindal's overhaul, and the interests that have push it.

Philadelphia public schools are on the operating table, reeling from a knockout blow of heavy state  budget cuts. It was too much to bear after decades of underfunding and mismanagement at the hands of shortsighted Philadelphians and mean-spirited politicians in Harrisburg. So the District is today announcing that it's going to call it quits. Its organs will be harvested, in search of a relatively vital host. "Philadelphia public schools is not the School District," Chief Recovery Officer Thomas Knudsen told a handful of reporters at yesterday's press conference laying out the five-year plan proposed to the School Reform Commission. "There's a redefinition, and we'll get to that later."  He got to it: talk about "modernization," "right-sizing," "entrepreneurialism" and "competition." Forty schools would close next year, and six additional schools would be closed every year thereafter until 2017. Closing just eight schools this year prompted an uproar. Anyhow, the remaining schools would get chopped up into "achievement networks" where public or private groups compete to manage about 25 schools, and the central office would be chopped down to a skeleton crew of about 200. District HQ has already eliminated about half of the 1,100-plus positions that existed in 2010. 

The backlash against high-stakes standardized testing is growing into a genuine nationwide revolt. Nearly 400 school districts in Texas have passed a resolution opposing high-stakes testing, and the number increases every week. Nearly a third of the principals in New York state (some at risk of losing their jobs) have signed a petition against the state's new and untried, high-stakes, test-based evaluation system. Today, a group of organizations devoted to education, civil rights, and children issued a national resolution against high-stakes testing modeled on the Texas resolution. The National Testing Resolution urges citizens to join the rebellion against the testing that now has a choke-hold on children and their teachers. It calls on governors, legislatures, and state boards of education to re-examine their accountability systems, to reduce their reliance on standardized tests, and to increase their support for students and schools.

The Governor's position is that parents have a "right to know" the job evaluations of their child's teacher. I disagree, and I'll explain why.

A new report by the Schott Foundation documents policies and practices of the New York City Department of Education that create and reinforce unequal opportunities to learn ("A Rotting Apple"). It maintains that what is taking place in the nation's largest school district amounts to no less than education redlining because the census tract in which students live determines the quality of education they receive. It's a provocative argument. But there's another side of the story that needs to be told. In an ideal world, there would be equal opportunities to learn by all students regardless of the location of their residence. The only country that has come close to that educational Eden is Finland. That's because differences in income are modest. The U.S. is the antithesis. The yawning gap between family incomes explains why.

Several weeks ago, Chris Lehmann tweeted from the Ed Innovation Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona, "Educators - if you don't see that there is a billion dollar industry wanting to take over schools using tech as the Trojan Horse, wake up." If I were to have one quibble with the metaphor, it would be this: the free marketeers are not hiding inside the horse, ready to jump out only after they are let in the gates of schools. They are riding right on top of the horse, shouting "Hey, this is a great horse! Let me tell you how we plan to use this horse to advance our free-market ideology in the education sector."

While Governor Malloy's proposal to ban collective bargaining at Commissioner's Network schools is appalling and inappropriate, the notion of turning a public district school over to a charter school company should be rejected because, despite what Mr. Green claims, Connecticut's charter schools DO NOT have a proven track record when it comes to serving the broader community. Charter schools may be a "successful" model for a sub-set of parents, who want their children to attend a certain type of program, and local legislators have every right to support those parents, but district schools must take every child who walks through the door; the facts make it extraordinarily clear that charter schools do not do that.

An example from the Civil Rights era of what happens without public education.

If you're an educator, a parent, a student or anyone who cares about public education, you should know that ALEC, the radical conservative lobbying group, is eyeing your throat. The American Legislative Exchange Council has been drawing drams of lifeblood from the public school system for decades, but now that it has disbanded its controversial Public Safety and Elections Task Force (read "More Guns and Fewer Democratic Voters Committee") it is expected to redouble its efforts to decrease local control of schools by parents and elected school boards, privatize public school jobs, funnel public dollars to private entities, and limit or destroy the collective bargaining rights educators rely on to advocate for students.

Because I spent three years chronicling the tenure of Michelle Rhee in Washington, DC - another city with a spate of thus-far-unexplained 'wrong to right' erasures on standardized tests - I am interested in this story. I'd like to know if anyone cheated in the DC schools. If so, who and why? But a teacher I correspond with occasionally brought me up short recently. My focus on actual, literal cheating - physically changing answers or giving kids answers in advance - is too narrow, this teacher wrote.

For three years of my K-8 schooling, from 7:40 a.m. until 3:05 p.m., I was black and invisible. I was bused across town to integrate a white school in Southeast Portland, Ore. We arrived at school promptly at 7:30 and had 10 full minutes before the white children arrived. We spent that time roaming the halls - happy, free, normal. Once the white children arrived, we became black and invisible. We were separated, so that no more than two of us were in a class at a time. I never saw black people in our textbooks unless they were in shackles or standing with Martin Luther King Jr. Most of us rarely interacted with a black adult outside of the aide who rode the bus with us. I liked school and I loved learning. But I never quite felt right or good. I felt very black and obvious because I knew that my experience was different from that of my peers. But I also felt invisible because this was never acknowledged in any meaningful way. I became visible again at 3:05 when I got back on the bus with the other brown faces to make our journey home.

Pre-Bloomberg, school names reflected the city's rich heritage of protest and social progress. Now, schools named after trade union leaders, civil rights leaders, democratic socialists, feminists and civic reformers have all had their names stripped from them, one by one, by the corporate reformers

Things are bad everywhere but nowhere is it worse than in Louisiana, where Gov. Bobby Jindal and State Superintendent John White threaten to annihilate the state's public schools with budget cuts, vouchers, the expansion of virtual charters, the erosion of teacher rights, and other forms of noxious corporate reform.  The following is by  Don Whittinghill , a consultant to the Louisiana School Boards Association (LSBA), a non-profit service organization representing local school board members in 69 local systems.

Stand for Children, a group in nine other states that has initiated epic battles with teacher unions in Illinois and Oregon, began a five-week television campaign in the Boston market that several sources indicate will be cost more than $500,000. The group has past the first hurdle to getting a ballot question this November before voters, calling for teacher effectiveness over seniority rights in making decisions over promotions and layoffs.

The Daily News reported yesterday that fully 1/3 of the Teacher Data Reports - 4000 reports - are unreliable. And just to add a little context: They all have multiple years of data, which are supposed to be more reliable. Hundreds and hundreds have margins of error of less than 10 percentage points - five on either side - giving the public, parents, and teachers assurances that these reports are quite correct. In fact, the DOE was so confident in its findings that 46 of these reports had no margins of error at all! That's 4000 reports. And that means since teachers are ranked against each other, that all the reports are unreliable. Or, let's just get right to it: "unreliable" is a euphemism for wrong.