Education Links

"As a CPS alumnus of the strikes of '83, '85, and '87, and as a parent of two Chicago Public Schools students, I know how hard strikes are on students and families. But as a CPS teacher with 12 years of experience, I encourage my students to understand the facts before they make up their minds. I can't speak for the union, but I can help shed light on some of the facts underlying this week's labor dispute."

"Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been pushing a school reform agenda backed by the Obama administration that is at the center of the strike that the Chicago Teachers Union is now waging in the third largest school district in the country. This is not about whether or not you think the union should have called a strike as it did on Monday, but rather about the central problem with the reforms that Emanuel has been advocating: There's no real proof that they systemically work, and in some cases, there is strong evidence that they may be harmful."

"Chicago teachers walking picket lines on Monday, in a strike that has closed schools across the city, are taking on not just their combative mayor but a powerful education reform movement that is transforming public schools across the United States."

"Chicago teachers are fighting not just for fair pay and decent health care but for a host of things that will improve education for Chicago kids-smaller classes, needed books and teaching materials, comfortable and well-maintained schools. But they're running into a buzz saw of well-organized, well-funded opposition from the massive anti-teacher, pro-corporate education policy world. Teachers don't have the money or the media platform that Wall Street billions and Mayor Rahm Emanuel will get you, which is why they need our help and support. What we're seeing in Chicago is the fallout from Jonah Edelman's hedge fund backed campaign to elect Illinois state legislators who supported an anti-collective bargaining, testing based education proposal giving Edelman the "clear political capability to potentially jam this proposal down [the teachers unions'] throats," political capability he used as leverage to jam an only slightly less awful proposal down their throats. It's a political deal that explicitly targeted Chicago teachers, while trying to make it impossible that they would strike by requiring a 75 percent vote of all teachers, not just those voting, for a strike to be legal. But more than 90 percent of Chicago teachers voted to strike. It's not just Jonah Edelman, though. Rahm Emanuel worked with a tea party group to promote Chicago charter schools and denigrate traditional public school teachers and their unions."

"When you make me cram 30-50 kids in my classroom with no air conditioning so that temperatures hit 96 degrees, that hurts our kids. When you lock down our schools with metal detectors and arrest brothers for play fighting in the halls, that hurts our kids. When you take 18-25 days out of the school year for high stakes testing that is not even scientifically applicable for many of our students, that hurts our kids. When you spend millions on your pet programs, but there's no money for school level repairs, so the roof leaks on my students at their desks when it rains, that hurts our kids. When you unilaterally institute a longer school day, insult us by calling it a "full school day" and then provide no implementation support, throwing our schools into chaos, that hurts our kids. When you support Mayor Emanuel's TIF program in diverting hundreds of millions of dollars of school funds into to the pockets of wealthy developers like billionaire member of your school board, Penny Pritzker so she can build more hotels, that not only hurts kids, but somebody should be going to jail."

"Why are these 29,000 teachers and school workers going on strike in the nation's third-largest public school district? Because they want what all workers want: fair pay and decent working conditions. They also want what all teachers want - to serve their students to their best of their abilities. Here's a few things you need to know about the strike, and why the CTU is right and Mayor Rahm Emanuel - who has failed to fairly bargain with the union - is wrong:"

"...education is at a crossroads in our country and our neighborhood, our city is right at the intersection of these crossroads. There is an attempt to make schooling privatized, charter-ized, and more inequitable than it already is. There is an attempt to get rid of experienced teachers who have built relationships with families, who truly know how to teach and replace them with less expensive, inexperienced teachers who likely will only be at the school for two years.  There is an attempt to teach through testing, to make your child so bored in school from over-standardized testing that students aren't excited for school anymore. There is an attempt to further cut librarians, counselors, nurses, PE, World Language, Art and now classroom teachers, in order to "save" money. A budget is a political document, not a financial one, it's about priorities. Some priorities obviously need to be re-evaluated.  Teachers in no way shape or form want to strike, we want to be working with and educating your children."

"This week I went to a screening of Won't Back Down starring Viola Davis and Maggie Gyllenhaal.  The movie is about a mom and a teacher who band together and use the Parent Trigger law (which is never mentioned by name) to take over and turnaround a failing elementary school in Pittsburgh.  The film is loosely based on real events (though in my research I couldn't find anything other than the Los Angeles based parent trigger law, which was backed by a big charter school organization), and produced by the same man who produced Waiting for Superman. As someone who has been deeply embroiled in the discussion and reality of parents advocating for better schools, for student and parent rights, and as a PA C0-President who has worked closely with many teachers and administrators, this movie got to me on many levels. So, I have decided to break it down in two parts: As a movie and then as a propaganda film."

"While at the DNC, I was lucky enough to be invited to a small gathering of public education supporters with Governor Dean and Randi Weingarten, who heads the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). I'm a tremendous fan of Governor Dean - in fact, I was a Deaniac before there was a netroots. I still think he's fantastic on so many issues close to the hearts of progressives. And I love the "50-state strategy." In fact, had I not had a second awakening as an engaged citizen and activist, inspired by Governor Dean's work, I probably wouldn't have been at the DNC at all. I'm grateful that he took the time to speak with us. Here's my recollection of what took place at the meeting."

"Experienced principal Carol Burris describes how she evaluates teachers at South Side High School in Rockville Center, New York."

"As the lights dimmed and the opening credits rolled during my preview of 'Won't Back Down,' I got a little nervous.  Based on some of the commercials I had seen, I thought there was a chance that it was going to be a good 'film.'  I do think that a good film could be made about any subject, even one I might not agree with its underlying premise."

"Atkins wrote a very important piece about a meeting he and a few other progressive bloggers had at the Democratic National Convention with Howard Dean, the former DNC chairman, and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. I already wrote about Atkins's insightful observation about the usefulness of narrative in countering the corporate reformy movement; now I want to get to the meat of the meeting."

"The Chicago Teachers strike is an incredibly important development because it is a the first time a union local has threatened to strike against education policies pushed by the Obama Administration through its Race to the Top initiative, policies, in my judgment have had incredibly destructive consequences for Urban school systems and distressed urban communities The policies pushed by Rahm Emmanuel, which are being simultaneously implemented in New York and many other cities, involve evaluating teachers and schools on the basis of student test scores, closing schools whose test scores fail to meet a certain standard and firing half their staffs, replacing public schools with charter schools, some run as non profits and some run for profit, and trying to weaken teacher tenure and introduce merit pay The first three components have been already introduced in Chicago and the mayor wants to intensify them and legnthen the school day. The union is saying enough is enough."

"I am in the process of writing a long piece that recounts the experiences of former KIPP teachers.  The following represents some of the data from just one interview, with minimal contextualizing and no analysis.   Names have been changed to protect the identities of participants."

"Despite increasing popularity, little indicates that charter schools are inherently better than public schools overall. A compilation of research showing that on average charter schools do not outperform their traditional public school counterparts also led charter-school proponents elsewhere to preach greater focus on accountability as these schools spread. There are, of course, pockets of excellence, school chains or specific places where charter school students outperform their peers -- but the same could be said for traditional public schools."

A keystone of this reform movement is the replacement of subjective evaluation with quantifiable measures of each teacher's effectiveness. The quantitative method is known as value-added modeling (VAM), a statistical analysis of student scores that seeks to identify how much an individual teacher contributes to a pupil's progress over the years. The use of VAM in teacher evaluations is growing, but the method remains extremely controversial. Critics often claim that it does not and cannot measure actual teacher quality. This paper addresses that claim. Part I analyzes data from Florida public schools to show that a VAM score in a teacher's third year is a good predictor of that teacher's success in his or her fifth year. Having established that VAM is a useful predictive tool, Part II of the paper addresses the most effective ways that VAM can be used in tenure reform."

"The accountability provisions in Virginia's original application for "ESEA flexibility" (or "waiver") have received a great deal of criticism (see here, here, here and here). Most of this criticism focused on the Commonwealth's expectation levels, as described in "annual measurable objectives" (AMOs) - i.e., the statewide proficiency rates that its students are expected to achieve at the completion of each of the next five years, with separate targets established for subgroups such as those defined by race (black, Hispanic, Asian, white), income (subsidized lunch eligibility), limited English proficiency (LEP), and special education. Last week, in response to the criticism, Virginia agreed to amend its application, and it's not yet clear how specifically they will calculate the new rates (only that lower-performing subgroups will be expected to make faster progress). In the meantime, I think it's useful to review a few of the main criticisms that have been made over the past week or two and what they mean."

"New schools founded in the last three years get more money per student than schools the city began shutting down this year, a Daily News analysis finds. Under a reform - ironically called Fair Student Funding - the city distributes the bulk of school funding based on the enrollment and demographics of each school. The reform introduced in 2007 hasn't been fully funded because of budget cuts in recent years, but all 30 new schools opening this year get their full share of the money to which they're entitled while the struggling schools remain badly underfunded."

"According to a recent article on Reuters, an international news service based in Great Britain, "investors of all stripes are beginning to sense big profit potential in public education. The K-12 market is tantalizingly huge: The U.S. spends more than $500 billion a year to educate kids from ages five through 18. The entire education sector, including college and mid-career training, represents nearly 9 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, more than the energy or technology sectors." Pearson, a British multi-national conglomerate, is one of the largest private businesses maneuvering for U.S. education dollars. The company had net earnings of 956 million pounds or approximately 1.5 billion dollars in 2011."

"From my experience, education reporters are smart, knowledgeable, and attentive to detail. That said, the bulk of the stories about testing data - in big cities and suburbs, in this year and in previous years - could be better. Listen, I know it's unreasonable to expect every reporter and editor to address every little detail when they try to write accessible copy about complicated issues, such as test data interpretation. Moreover, I fully acknowledge that some of the errors to which I object - such as calling proficiency rates "scores" - are well within tolerable limits, and that news stories need not interpret data in the same way as researchers. Nevertheless, no matter what you think about the role of test scores in our public discourse, it is in everyone's interest that the coverage of them be reliable. And there are a few mostly easy suggestions that I think would help a great deal. Below are five such recommendations. They are of course not meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather a quick compilation of points, all of which I've discussed in previous posts, and all of which might also be useful to non-journalists."