From the Florida Times Union
by Idolfan
Teachers are speaking out. When they do they are often reprimanded and in some cases retaliated against. When I entered the system it was wonderful and I worked in a failing school. The teachers supported one another and the principal supported us by having strong expectations and discipline set for the kids as well as the teachers. The atmosphere has completely changed and I think many teachers are frustrated and if they could find another job they would. Many do. My first few years I absolutely loved teaching and everything about it...now not so much and it isn't the kids. The good majority of Kids will rise to the expectations you set for them whether you are a parent or educator. However when you are told to set high expectations and have ''RIGOR" in your classroom and hold the students accountable for doing the right things....BUT then when they don't someone comes along and says ''it's ok we're going to pass you anyways'' WHAT IS THE POINT?
Teachers are held accountable at every level. We have huge binders in which we have to show dates of everytime a student acts up and all the interventions we tried before we wrote them up, all the data we collect for the myriad of tests students (all 140) take throughout the year (and there are plenty mandated for us to take that don't even include tests on classroom learning). I have to have lesson plans that lay out every detail I'm doing in my classroom. Not to mention my word wall, my standards based bulletin board, and my standards, essential questions, objectivs, warm up, work period, closing, homework posted everyday on the board. (which NONE of the kids ever read). In addition I'm called into meetings AT LEAST three times a week so they can again tell me what is expected of me. Administrators were in rooms day 1 of school already evaluating teachers.
Now I can deal with all this even if it ticks me off from time to time. What i can't deal with is the policies that don't hold students accountable. We're already seeing the first week of school behavior that warrants referrals...yet you can't write one yet. Not til you try a seat change time out, phone or email home, warnings, team detention after school (and yeah that's on your time). Kids know they can misbehave without any REAL consequences and often the bad kids you guys have labeled thugs are actually good kids who have been sucked into doing bad because they see others doing it. Plus, Kids know they don't have to do any work to pass. They have seen their older brothers and sisters be passed without doing any work other than their computer ''grade recovery'' that is basically a game that reads you the questions and you keep answering til you get right. I justifiably failed many students last year who did nothing (many told me it was ok they'd pass anyways). ALL of them failed the FCAT too. But this year they are ALL sitting in schools (all intervene schools by the way) in the next grade. Is it any wonder these schools continue to fail? And is any wonder our drop out and failure to graduate with an actual diploma is so high when we keep passing kids up who are not on grade level in reading and math. Either get rid of the test or make it actually mean something. (besides just teacher salaries). "Look you need to do this work, pass this test, and do well in school so you can get the REAL diploma and a decent job'' often falls on deaf ears that are too young to even conceptualize tomorrow.
This is not about being a liberal or conservative. This is about teaching our next generation. We have teachers who are members of both parties at my school and I can tell you ALL voice the same concerns about discipline and passing kids on. Paddling worked when I was in school because no one was exempt from it. The fear of it kept most of us in check. Our teachers could also hit us and that kept us in check. BUT even when I began teaching we still had paddling in the county. It was not widely used. Parents had the choice of opting their students out of paddling and they did. But with no paddling there are still discipline options. Like believing the teacher when he or she says this student cursed me out, rather than pulling in five other students to get the ''real story about what happened''.
In the last two weeks I have worked 16 EXTRA hours outside of my normal work day. This was not to even do grading (that's this weekend). It was to get my room set up with all the proper ''artifacts" and their labeling and to get my notebook set up and start gathering and looking at data. AND I'm not even one of those teachers that go above and beyond who worked last Saturday and stayed til dark. We are all doing this for less pay than before too. I had 50 dollars taken out of my paycheck thanks to Rick Scott and if you don't think that is much...think of a tank of gas that gets me to work. Teachers are not working for the money, they are not working for the acclaim, they are not working for the fantastic benefits. They are working for the children and their future. We need support and not constant blame and we need a voice that is listened to by the powers that be. But currently that is not happening And don't blame the teacher's unions for this mess. They are actually pretty much ineffective and weak in this county. Good teachers have been fired and weak teachers (who kiss butt better) have been kept all on DTU's watch.
All we hear is "This is DCPS policy. There is nothing we can do about it. Please adhere to it so you can be successful."
http://jacksonville.com/opinion/letters-readers/2011-08-21/story/lead-letter-teachers-not-supported-duval-schools#ixzz1WfMrc8GK
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
The anti-science presidential candidates
From the New York Times
by Paul Krugman
Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.” This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.
To see what Mr. Huntsman means, consider recent statements by the two men who actually are serious contenders for the G.O.P. nomination: Rick Perry and Mitt Romney.
Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas, recently made headlines by dismissing evolution as “just a theory,” one that has “got some gaps in it” — an observation that will come as news to the vast majority of biologists. But what really got people's attention was what he said about climate change: “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.”
That’s a remarkable statement — or maybe the right adjective is “vile.”
The second part of Mr. Perry’s statement is, as it happens, just false: the scientific consensus about man-made global warming — which includes 97 percent to 98 percent of researchers in the field, according to the National Academy of Sciences — is getting stronger, not weaker, as the evidence for climate change just keeps mounting.
In fact, if you follow climate science at all you know that the main development over the past few years has been growing concern that projections of future climate are underestimating the likely amount of warming. Warnings that we may face civilization-threatening temperature change by the end of the century, once considered outlandish, are now coming out of mainstream research groups.
But never mind that, Mr. Perry suggests; those scientists are just in it for the money, “manipulating data” to create a fake threat. In his book “Fed Up,” he dismissed climate science as a “contrived phony mess that is falling apart.”
I could point out that Mr. Perry is buying into a truly crazy conspiracy theory, which asserts that thousands of scientists all around the world are on the take, with not one willing to break the code of silence. I could also point out that multiple investigations into charges of intellectual malpractice on the part of climate scientists have ended up exonerating the accused researchers of all accusations. But never mind: Mr. Perry and those who think like him know what they want to believe, and their response to anyone who contradicts them is to start a witch hunt.
So how has Mr. Romney, the other leading contender for the G.O.P. nomination, responded to Mr. Perry’s challenge? In trademark fashion: By running away. In the past, Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, has strongly endorsed the notion that man-made climate change is a real concern. But, last week, he softened that to a statement that he thinks the world is getting hotter, but “I don’t know that” and “I don’t know if it’s mostly caused by humans.” Moral courage!
Of course, we know what’s motivating Mr. Romney’s sudden lack of conviction. According to Public Policy Polling, only 21 percent of Republican voters in Iowa believe in global warming (and only 35 percent believe in evolution). Within the G.O.P., willful ignorance has become a litmus test for candidates, one that Mr. Romney is determined to pass at all costs.
So it’s now highly likely that the presidential candidate of one of our two major political parties will either be a man who believes what he wants to believe, even in the teeth of scientific evidence, or a man who pretends to believe whatever he thinks the party’s base wants him to believe.
And the deepening anti-intellectualism of the political right, both within and beyond the G.O.P., extends far beyond the issue of climate change.
Lately, for example, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has gone beyond its long-term preference for the economic ideas of “charlatans and cranks” — as one of former President George W. Bush’s chief economic advisers famously put it — to a general denigration of hard thinking about matters economic. Pay no attention to “fancy theories” that conflict with “common sense,” the Journal tells us. Because why should anyone imagine that you need more than gut feelings to analyze things like financial crises and recessions?
Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/opinion/republicans-against-science.html?_r=3&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
by Paul Krugman
Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.” This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.
To see what Mr. Huntsman means, consider recent statements by the two men who actually are serious contenders for the G.O.P. nomination: Rick Perry and Mitt Romney.
Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas, recently made headlines by dismissing evolution as “just a theory,” one that has “got some gaps in it” — an observation that will come as news to the vast majority of biologists. But what really got people's attention was what he said about climate change: “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.”
That’s a remarkable statement — or maybe the right adjective is “vile.”
The second part of Mr. Perry’s statement is, as it happens, just false: the scientific consensus about man-made global warming — which includes 97 percent to 98 percent of researchers in the field, according to the National Academy of Sciences — is getting stronger, not weaker, as the evidence for climate change just keeps mounting.
In fact, if you follow climate science at all you know that the main development over the past few years has been growing concern that projections of future climate are underestimating the likely amount of warming. Warnings that we may face civilization-threatening temperature change by the end of the century, once considered outlandish, are now coming out of mainstream research groups.
But never mind that, Mr. Perry suggests; those scientists are just in it for the money, “manipulating data” to create a fake threat. In his book “Fed Up,” he dismissed climate science as a “contrived phony mess that is falling apart.”
I could point out that Mr. Perry is buying into a truly crazy conspiracy theory, which asserts that thousands of scientists all around the world are on the take, with not one willing to break the code of silence. I could also point out that multiple investigations into charges of intellectual malpractice on the part of climate scientists have ended up exonerating the accused researchers of all accusations. But never mind: Mr. Perry and those who think like him know what they want to believe, and their response to anyone who contradicts them is to start a witch hunt.
So how has Mr. Romney, the other leading contender for the G.O.P. nomination, responded to Mr. Perry’s challenge? In trademark fashion: By running away. In the past, Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, has strongly endorsed the notion that man-made climate change is a real concern. But, last week, he softened that to a statement that he thinks the world is getting hotter, but “I don’t know that” and “I don’t know if it’s mostly caused by humans.” Moral courage!
Of course, we know what’s motivating Mr. Romney’s sudden lack of conviction. According to Public Policy Polling, only 21 percent of Republican voters in Iowa believe in global warming (and only 35 percent believe in evolution). Within the G.O.P., willful ignorance has become a litmus test for candidates, one that Mr. Romney is determined to pass at all costs.
So it’s now highly likely that the presidential candidate of one of our two major political parties will either be a man who believes what he wants to believe, even in the teeth of scientific evidence, or a man who pretends to believe whatever he thinks the party’s base wants him to believe.
And the deepening anti-intellectualism of the political right, both within and beyond the G.O.P., extends far beyond the issue of climate change.
Lately, for example, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has gone beyond its long-term preference for the economic ideas of “charlatans and cranks” — as one of former President George W. Bush’s chief economic advisers famously put it — to a general denigration of hard thinking about matters economic. Pay no attention to “fancy theories” that conflict with “common sense,” the Journal tells us. Because why should anyone imagine that you need more than gut feelings to analyze things like financial crises and recessions?
Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/opinion/republicans-against-science.html?_r=3&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
CEOs get richer as the middle class takes a beating
From Think Progress.com
by Pat Garofal
Last year, as Americans across the country grappled with the widespread effects of the Great Recession, tax dodging by corporations and the wealthy cost the average U.S. taxpayer $434, even as corporate profits soared 81 percent. In fact, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, “corporate tax dodging has gone so out of control that 25 major U.S. corporations last year paid their chief executives more than they paid Uncle Sam in federal income taxes”:
– Of last year’s 100 highest-paid corporate chief executives in the United States, 25 took home more in CEO pay than their company paid in 2010 federal income taxes.
– These 25 CEOs averaged $16.7 million, well above last year’s $10.8 million average for S&P 500 CEOs. Most of the companies they ran actually came out ahead at tax time, collecting tax refunds from the IRS that averaged $304 million.
– CEOs in 22 of these 25 firms enjoyed pay increases in 2010. In 13 of these companies, CEO paychecks ratcheted up while the corporate income tax bill either declined or the size of the corporate tax refund expanded.
Included amongst the 25 are well-known corporate behemoths like General Electric, Boeing, Verizon, and Ebay. Prudential CEO John Strangfeld, in one example, made $16.2 million last year while his company reaped a $722 million tax refund. Bank of New York Mellon CEO Robert Kelly received $19.4 million, after his bank got a $670 million tax refund.
Eighteen of the 25 companies that the IPS studied operated subsidiaries in offshore tax havens. In fact, “the firms, all combined, had 556 tax haven subsidiaries last year,” including 128 for just one company (the reinsurance corporation Aon).
Currently, corporate taxes have plunged to historic lows, with many of America’s largest companies literally paying no federal income taxes. Meanwhile, according to researchers at Northeastern University, corporate profits accounted for 88 percent of real national income growth since 2009, while wages and salaries made up less than 1 percent. In 2010, executive pay grew by 27 percent while wages grew by only 2 percent.
The IPS also found that “of the 25 companies that paid their CEO more than Uncle Sam, 20 also spent more on lobbying lawmakers than they paid in corporate taxes. Eighteen gave more to the political campaigns of their favorite candidates than they paid to the IRS in taxes.”
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/08/31/308487/25-corporations-paid-more-to-ceo-taxes/
by Pat Garofal
Last year, as Americans across the country grappled with the widespread effects of the Great Recession, tax dodging by corporations and the wealthy cost the average U.S. taxpayer $434, even as corporate profits soared 81 percent. In fact, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, “corporate tax dodging has gone so out of control that 25 major U.S. corporations last year paid their chief executives more than they paid Uncle Sam in federal income taxes”:
– Of last year’s 100 highest-paid corporate chief executives in the United States, 25 took home more in CEO pay than their company paid in 2010 federal income taxes.
– These 25 CEOs averaged $16.7 million, well above last year’s $10.8 million average for S&P 500 CEOs. Most of the companies they ran actually came out ahead at tax time, collecting tax refunds from the IRS that averaged $304 million.
– CEOs in 22 of these 25 firms enjoyed pay increases in 2010. In 13 of these companies, CEO paychecks ratcheted up while the corporate income tax bill either declined or the size of the corporate tax refund expanded.
Included amongst the 25 are well-known corporate behemoths like General Electric, Boeing, Verizon, and Ebay. Prudential CEO John Strangfeld, in one example, made $16.2 million last year while his company reaped a $722 million tax refund. Bank of New York Mellon CEO Robert Kelly received $19.4 million, after his bank got a $670 million tax refund.
Eighteen of the 25 companies that the IPS studied operated subsidiaries in offshore tax havens. In fact, “the firms, all combined, had 556 tax haven subsidiaries last year,” including 128 for just one company (the reinsurance corporation Aon).
Currently, corporate taxes have plunged to historic lows, with many of America’s largest companies literally paying no federal income taxes. Meanwhile, according to researchers at Northeastern University, corporate profits accounted for 88 percent of real national income growth since 2009, while wages and salaries made up less than 1 percent. In 2010, executive pay grew by 27 percent while wages grew by only 2 percent.
The IPS also found that “of the 25 companies that paid their CEO more than Uncle Sam, 20 also spent more on lobbying lawmakers than they paid in corporate taxes. Eighteen gave more to the political campaigns of their favorite candidates than they paid to the IRS in taxes.”
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/08/31/308487/25-corporations-paid-more-to-ceo-taxes/
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Fallout from the Florida Legislature gutting the class size amendment
From the Miami Herald
by Laura Isenisee
At Miami Beach High, it takes 20 minutes for Nadia Zananiri to take attendance in a college-prep World History class.
There are 54 freshmen and 40 desks.
“Everything takes longer. These kids have questions, and there’s not always time to answer them,” she said.
A week into the school year, many teachers and students in Miami-Dade are grappling with bigger classes, because of changes in state rules.
Last year, enrollment in nearly every high school course was capped at 25 students, as the final phase of Florida’s Class Size Amendment (added by voters to the state Constitution in 2002) kicked in. But in the last legislative session, state lawmakers reduced the number of courses under the mandate by two-thirds. The move saved cash-strapped districts money and gave them more flexibility.
The caps still apply to core courses like reading, math and science that are required for graduation. But they no longer apply to college-prep offerings, foreign languages and honors courses like precalculus.
District officials say they are working to level out classes. Rosters may be shifted, or new ones added. Students may also opt to take some Advanced Placement courses online. Last year, the district turned to virtual courses to help meet class-size rules.
“We’re six days in. We’re are still in the process enrolling students,” said Daniel Tosado, assistant superintendent for district operations at Miami-Dade County Public Schools.
New students are still arriving — some won’t show up till after Labor Day — and other students may transfer between programs and adjust their schedules.
The school district and administrators will have firm enrollment numbers by October, when the state takes a head count in all schools.
Tosada said the target enrollment would be about 30-32 students.
“We’re going to have outliers, and we’ll address them ... We’ll have a better idea day by day,” he said.
Zananiri solved the space crunch by putting computers on the floor so students can sit at the computer table. More students mean Zananiri will have a bigger teaching load — at least an extra 35 essays a week in the rigorous, writing-intensive course — for the same amount of pay.
She said what worries her more: giving all her students the attention they need.
“It’s their first AP course. It’s very difficult. I can’t always answer all their questions with 54 students and one of me,” she said.
The AP program and other advanced courses, such as International Baccalaureate, are designed to give students the same rigor as a college class. College-prep classes also contribute to schools’ state grades.
“This is just the state being cheap. This is state skirting the law on the class-size amendment,” said Karen Aronowitz, president of the United Teachers of Dade. “It’s cutting corners, but it’s cutting quality, too.”
So far, Chris Dougnac, a senior at Dr. Michael Krop Senior, is taking bigger classes in stride. In two of his AP classes, English literature and psychology, there are just over 40 students. It reminds him of elementary school days at Ruth K. Broad Bay Harbor Elementary. Back then, he schlepped with his mom to PTA meetings and heard the campaign to limit class sizes.
“It’s intimidating, but at the same time it reminds me you have to make yourself heard,” he said.
Chris plans to apply the lesson he learned in his first AP class in 10th grade. “I realized if I want to get one-on-one teacher help, I would have to prove myself by asking for that one-on-one.”
He said his AP economics/government class, in which there were not enough desks the first day, has gotten smaller.
Parents at Coral Reef Senior High complained that one AP government class had ballooned to more than 30 students. Sections of AP physics and English literature had also grown to about three dozen students each, they said.
At North Miami Middle School, several teachers tried to organize a rally last week about crowded classes, including some core classes like science. Dwight Williams, a science teacher, said students at the struggling school can’t afford to wait for classes to be evened out or more teachers hired.
“These students deserve 180 days of education,” he said.
Several teachers said the bigger classes mean they will have to tweak their teaching style to be less personal and centered more on lectures.
“Even though we only started school a week ago, you’re feeling that some of them will be slipping through the cracks because you don’t have the ability to be as personable as you could have if there were only 25 students,” said Orlando Sarduy, 30. He teaches honors and college-prep math courses at Coral Reef. Nearly all of his classes have grown to 30-plus students.
At Hialeah High, Maite Jerez, 34, said two of her four college-prep courses have grown to more than 30 seniors. “It doesn’t seem like much, but five or six more bodies in a large setting can have an effect, negative or positive.” Jerez said.
On the positive side: “You get more brains, more voices and more perspectives in the room,” she said.
But it also means more focus on managing the classroom. Jerez said she will likely have students do more prep work.
Miami Herald staff writer Kathleen McGrory contributed to this report.
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/08/29/v-fullstory/2381056/changes-in-state-rules-lead-to.html#ixzz1WVh17x47
by Laura Isenisee
At Miami Beach High, it takes 20 minutes for Nadia Zananiri to take attendance in a college-prep World History class.
There are 54 freshmen and 40 desks.
“Everything takes longer. These kids have questions, and there’s not always time to answer them,” she said.
A week into the school year, many teachers and students in Miami-Dade are grappling with bigger classes, because of changes in state rules.
Last year, enrollment in nearly every high school course was capped at 25 students, as the final phase of Florida’s Class Size Amendment (added by voters to the state Constitution in 2002) kicked in. But in the last legislative session, state lawmakers reduced the number of courses under the mandate by two-thirds. The move saved cash-strapped districts money and gave them more flexibility.
The caps still apply to core courses like reading, math and science that are required for graduation. But they no longer apply to college-prep offerings, foreign languages and honors courses like precalculus.
District officials say they are working to level out classes. Rosters may be shifted, or new ones added. Students may also opt to take some Advanced Placement courses online. Last year, the district turned to virtual courses to help meet class-size rules.
“We’re six days in. We’re are still in the process enrolling students,” said Daniel Tosado, assistant superintendent for district operations at Miami-Dade County Public Schools.
New students are still arriving — some won’t show up till after Labor Day — and other students may transfer between programs and adjust their schedules.
The school district and administrators will have firm enrollment numbers by October, when the state takes a head count in all schools.
Tosada said the target enrollment would be about 30-32 students.
“We’re going to have outliers, and we’ll address them ... We’ll have a better idea day by day,” he said.
Zananiri solved the space crunch by putting computers on the floor so students can sit at the computer table. More students mean Zananiri will have a bigger teaching load — at least an extra 35 essays a week in the rigorous, writing-intensive course — for the same amount of pay.
She said what worries her more: giving all her students the attention they need.
“It’s their first AP course. It’s very difficult. I can’t always answer all their questions with 54 students and one of me,” she said.
The AP program and other advanced courses, such as International Baccalaureate, are designed to give students the same rigor as a college class. College-prep classes also contribute to schools’ state grades.
“This is just the state being cheap. This is state skirting the law on the class-size amendment,” said Karen Aronowitz, president of the United Teachers of Dade. “It’s cutting corners, but it’s cutting quality, too.”
So far, Chris Dougnac, a senior at Dr. Michael Krop Senior, is taking bigger classes in stride. In two of his AP classes, English literature and psychology, there are just over 40 students. It reminds him of elementary school days at Ruth K. Broad Bay Harbor Elementary. Back then, he schlepped with his mom to PTA meetings and heard the campaign to limit class sizes.
“It’s intimidating, but at the same time it reminds me you have to make yourself heard,” he said.
Chris plans to apply the lesson he learned in his first AP class in 10th grade. “I realized if I want to get one-on-one teacher help, I would have to prove myself by asking for that one-on-one.”
He said his AP economics/government class, in which there were not enough desks the first day, has gotten smaller.
Parents at Coral Reef Senior High complained that one AP government class had ballooned to more than 30 students. Sections of AP physics and English literature had also grown to about three dozen students each, they said.
At North Miami Middle School, several teachers tried to organize a rally last week about crowded classes, including some core classes like science. Dwight Williams, a science teacher, said students at the struggling school can’t afford to wait for classes to be evened out or more teachers hired.
“These students deserve 180 days of education,” he said.
Several teachers said the bigger classes mean they will have to tweak their teaching style to be less personal and centered more on lectures.
“Even though we only started school a week ago, you’re feeling that some of them will be slipping through the cracks because you don’t have the ability to be as personable as you could have if there were only 25 students,” said Orlando Sarduy, 30. He teaches honors and college-prep math courses at Coral Reef. Nearly all of his classes have grown to 30-plus students.
At Hialeah High, Maite Jerez, 34, said two of her four college-prep courses have grown to more than 30 seniors. “It doesn’t seem like much, but five or six more bodies in a large setting can have an effect, negative or positive.” Jerez said.
On the positive side: “You get more brains, more voices and more perspectives in the room,” she said.
But it also means more focus on managing the classroom. Jerez said she will likely have students do more prep work.
Miami Herald staff writer Kathleen McGrory contributed to this report.
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/08/29/v-fullstory/2381056/changes-in-state-rules-lead-to.html#ixzz1WVh17x47
Teachers, the Rodney Dangerfields of America
From the Washinton Posts Answer Sheet
By Nancy Flanagan
Let's say you are a teacher, and not just any teacher. You are one of those special teachers we hear about in news and policy discussions — the supposedly rare educator who has passionate disciplinary expertise, a toolbag full of teaching strategies and genuine caring for their students. You became an educator because you want to make a difference, change the world, raise the bar. You love teaching, finding it endlessly variable and challenging. You plan to spend a long time in the classroom.
So you begin pursuing a graduate degree in education. You notice that getting a masters degree in education is scorned in policy world as having little impact on student learning. A few of your classes are tedious. But some of them are genuinely interesting and valuable, pushing you to think more deeply about the work you do and increasing your content knowledge. Even though pundits declare your advanced degree does not correlate with increased student achievement, you press on. You're enjoying the intellectual stimulation and — let's face it --accruing credits is another way to increase your salary and you need the money.
You're fascinated by new instructional strategies and curriculum ideas. You're eager to learn.
But your district — which just replaced all its computers in the past two years — has no money for professional development. So you burn two of your business days, pay your own registration fee and mileage, and travel with three colleagues to a conference across the state, where — being a teacher type — you attend every single session and collect tons of free stuff to take back to your classroom in a canvas bag (which you will later give to a student as a reward for reading 25 books). The four of you share the $200 hotel room, and split a pizza. The high life.
You're eager to share new techniques with colleagues when you return. (Those digital books would be killer for your schoolwide Mark Twain unit!) But then the State Board, in its wisdom, removes Huckleberry Finn from the 9th grade curriculum framework because talking about race is too risky for teenagers, even though you've been doing just that for 10 years and getting amazing feedback from students about these tough conversations.
After 15 years, when you have children and a mortgage — but still love teaching — you decide to sit for National Board Certification. You already have an advanced degree and a wall covered with certificates, but National Board Certification is a greater test of your knowledge and skills than anything you've tackled.
You spend about 300 hours videotaping and analyzing your lessons, finding some genuine gaps in your understanding and mastery of good instruction, curriculum and assessment. You share these perceived needs with other candidates for certification — breaking out of the egg-crate isolation endemic in teaching, and looking critically at your practice. In preparation for the National Board subject matter exams, you do a thorough content review across your disciplinary field.
And your good work and honed expertise pay off — you're among the fraction of National Board candidates who achieve certification in the first round. This means the fee for certification (about 5% of your annual salary) will be paid back and — because you're lucky enough to live in a state where National Board Certification is rewarded by a salary incentive — you'll get a $2,500 annual bonus for 10 years. You may actually be able to replace your 10-year old car.
You're not the kind of person to rest on your laurels, however. You're already looking around for the next challenge in your personal pursuit of excellence when you read these stories:
*Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declares that your graduate degree is essentially worthless. "Districts currently pay about $8 billion each year to teachers because they have masters’ degrees, even though there is little evidence teachers with masters degrees improve student achievement more than other teachers — with the possible exception of teachers who earn masters in math and science."
*The state superintendent in Oklahoma, Janet Barresi, gives herself and her aides a raise, but cancels National Board bonuses for teachers there.
*Duncan, at last week's Twitter Town Hall, worries about losing "great young talent," through what former D.C. schools chancellor and national school reformer Michelle Rhee calls “the insanity” of last-in, first-out policies let the least experienced teachers go. You wonder why nobody's defending great, experienced talent in the educator pool.
*Teach for America becomes more high profile than ever. At the University of Wisconsin, Emma Spath, the UW-Madison campus campaign coordinator for the organization, wrote in a letter to the editor in the Badger Herald: “I'm especially excited that 350 students applied from our institution alone. A new federal budget proposal would dim future admissions prospects for college seniors. Teach For America requested $50 million from Congress to meet demand among college students and communities. Without federal funding, Teach For America would be unable to hire more than 1,350 teachers who would reach 86,000 students in the 2011-12 school year. We need programs like Teach For America to increase educational opportunity in our public schools."
You do the math. Teach for America needs $50 million to hire 1,350 teachers? That's $37,000 per teacher — new college graduates who get five weeks of summer training before teaching in some of the country’s neediest schools — while 91,000 National Board Certified Teachers are losing their very modest bonuses all across the country. You wonder precisely whose educational opportunities are being threatened.
How does it feel to have your profession and classroom become society's laboratory, subject to overhaul at every election cycle?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/the-plight-of-great-teachers/2011/08/29/gIQA7vZVoJ_blog.html?wprss=answer-sheet
By Nancy Flanagan
Let's say you are a teacher, and not just any teacher. You are one of those special teachers we hear about in news and policy discussions — the supposedly rare educator who has passionate disciplinary expertise, a toolbag full of teaching strategies and genuine caring for their students. You became an educator because you want to make a difference, change the world, raise the bar. You love teaching, finding it endlessly variable and challenging. You plan to spend a long time in the classroom.
So you begin pursuing a graduate degree in education. You notice that getting a masters degree in education is scorned in policy world as having little impact on student learning. A few of your classes are tedious. But some of them are genuinely interesting and valuable, pushing you to think more deeply about the work you do and increasing your content knowledge. Even though pundits declare your advanced degree does not correlate with increased student achievement, you press on. You're enjoying the intellectual stimulation and — let's face it --accruing credits is another way to increase your salary and you need the money.
You're fascinated by new instructional strategies and curriculum ideas. You're eager to learn.
But your district — which just replaced all its computers in the past two years — has no money for professional development. So you burn two of your business days, pay your own registration fee and mileage, and travel with three colleagues to a conference across the state, where — being a teacher type — you attend every single session and collect tons of free stuff to take back to your classroom in a canvas bag (which you will later give to a student as a reward for reading 25 books). The four of you share the $200 hotel room, and split a pizza. The high life.
You're eager to share new techniques with colleagues when you return. (Those digital books would be killer for your schoolwide Mark Twain unit!) But then the State Board, in its wisdom, removes Huckleberry Finn from the 9th grade curriculum framework because talking about race is too risky for teenagers, even though you've been doing just that for 10 years and getting amazing feedback from students about these tough conversations.
After 15 years, when you have children and a mortgage — but still love teaching — you decide to sit for National Board Certification. You already have an advanced degree and a wall covered with certificates, but National Board Certification is a greater test of your knowledge and skills than anything you've tackled.
You spend about 300 hours videotaping and analyzing your lessons, finding some genuine gaps in your understanding and mastery of good instruction, curriculum and assessment. You share these perceived needs with other candidates for certification — breaking out of the egg-crate isolation endemic in teaching, and looking critically at your practice. In preparation for the National Board subject matter exams, you do a thorough content review across your disciplinary field.
And your good work and honed expertise pay off — you're among the fraction of National Board candidates who achieve certification in the first round. This means the fee for certification (about 5% of your annual salary) will be paid back and — because you're lucky enough to live in a state where National Board Certification is rewarded by a salary incentive — you'll get a $2,500 annual bonus for 10 years. You may actually be able to replace your 10-year old car.
You're not the kind of person to rest on your laurels, however. You're already looking around for the next challenge in your personal pursuit of excellence when you read these stories:
*Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declares that your graduate degree is essentially worthless. "Districts currently pay about $8 billion each year to teachers because they have masters’ degrees, even though there is little evidence teachers with masters degrees improve student achievement more than other teachers — with the possible exception of teachers who earn masters in math and science."
*The state superintendent in Oklahoma, Janet Barresi, gives herself and her aides a raise, but cancels National Board bonuses for teachers there.
*Duncan, at last week's Twitter Town Hall, worries about losing "great young talent," through what former D.C. schools chancellor and national school reformer Michelle Rhee calls “the insanity” of last-in, first-out policies let the least experienced teachers go. You wonder why nobody's defending great, experienced talent in the educator pool.
*Teach for America becomes more high profile than ever. At the University of Wisconsin, Emma Spath, the UW-Madison campus campaign coordinator for the organization, wrote in a letter to the editor in the Badger Herald: “I'm especially excited that 350 students applied from our institution alone. A new federal budget proposal would dim future admissions prospects for college seniors. Teach For America requested $50 million from Congress to meet demand among college students and communities. Without federal funding, Teach For America would be unable to hire more than 1,350 teachers who would reach 86,000 students in the 2011-12 school year. We need programs like Teach For America to increase educational opportunity in our public schools."
You do the math. Teach for America needs $50 million to hire 1,350 teachers? That's $37,000 per teacher — new college graduates who get five weeks of summer training before teaching in some of the country’s neediest schools — while 91,000 National Board Certified Teachers are losing their very modest bonuses all across the country. You wonder precisely whose educational opportunities are being threatened.
How does it feel to have your profession and classroom become society's laboratory, subject to overhaul at every election cycle?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/the-plight-of-great-teachers/2011/08/29/gIQA7vZVoJ_blog.html?wprss=answer-sheet
Monday, August 29, 2011
Diane Ravitch the anti-Michelle Rhee
From the WashingtonCityPaper.com
by Dana Goldstein
In the month of April, Diane Ravitch, the 72-year-old preeminent historian of American education, sent 1,747 tweets, an average of about 58 messages per day, many between the hours of 11 p.m. and 1 a.m.
On May 20 alone, Ravitch tweeted 99 times to her 13,000 followers. Linking to the news of a D.C. Public Schools investigation into test tampering under former chancellor Michelle Rhee, she asked: “How can teachers be evaluated by student test scores, when the scores are so often manipulated and inaccurate?” Throughout the day, she mused on the shortcomings of standardized tests, whose ubiquity in American schools she has compared—with characteristic hyperbole—to “the Chinese cultural revolution.”
“Life’s problems do not translate into four possible answer[s],” she tweeted. Minutes later, she added: “Just think: 12 years of picking the right answer, never taking a risk with a different approach to problems. Ugh.” And then: “Those who can’t teach, pass laws about how to evaluate teachers.”
Ravitch went on to note that President Obama, whose education policies she opposes, is given more time to prove himself—four years—than the average teacher, who usually gets two or three years to win tenure. By afternoon, she was on to scorning Wall Street types, writing that “teachers can do more [good] than many who collect millions for betting on stocks or hog bellies or gold.”
Ravitch was producing scholarly monographs well before anyone ever imagined microblogging. But like her books, Ravitch’s 140-character missives are serious stuff. In the past year, they’ve become a major front in her war against what advocates call “school reform” and opponents like Ravitch sometimes label “school privatization.” In the process, the Brooklynite has become a relevant figure in Washington’s local debate: Somewhat improbably, this former education official from the first Bush administration has emerged as the most media-savvy progressive critic of the reform campaign embraced by everyone from Education Secretary Arne Duncan to billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates—a campaign that, in the public mind, is perhaps most associated with Rhee.
Last March, Ravitch capped a long career with the publication of her 13th book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. Though she says it was rejected by 15 publishers, Death and Life (its title an homage to Jane Jacobs, the great defender of urban spaces) became a bestseller. It also proclaimed a sea change in Ravitch’s worldview.
Once a vocal proponent of No Child Left Behind, charter schools, vouchers, and merit pay for teachers, Ravitch decided sometime around 2006 that there was actually no evidence that any of those policies improved American education. She now believes that the “corporatist agenda” of school choice, teacher layoffs, and standardized testing has undermined public respect for one of the nation’s most vital institutions, the neighborhood school, and for one of society’s most crucial professions: teaching.
The best way to improve American education, the post-epiphany Ravitch argues, is to fight child poverty with health care, jobs, child care, and affordable housing.
The apostasy turned Ravitch into a sort of rock star—much like Rhee, but with a different audience. The crowds at the 100-plus speeches Ravitch has given since publishing Death and Life are heavy on unionized teachers. Last year, she won the “Friend of Education” award from their largest union, the National Education Association; delegates at the group’s annual convention greeted her with cheering, whooping glee. Death and Life has been translated into Korean and Japanese, and in the coming months, Ravitch will speak in Germany and Finland.
In November, Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter dubbed Ravitch the “Whittaker Chambers of school reform,” declaring her Gates’ “biggest adversary” for speaking out against the Microsoft founder’s efforts to bring corporate efficiency standards to public schools. In December, the American Academy of Political and Social Science awarded Ravitch the 2011 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize, for public intellectuals who have used social-science research to improve public policy. And in April, she addressed an overflow crowd at the annual summit of the American Education Researchers’ Association. She’s likely the first headliner at the staid confab to have also appeared on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.
“She got two standing ovations,” says Brad Olsen, a professor of education at the University of California at Santa Cruz, who attended the conference. “There were folks clamoring with their cellphones trying to get pictures of her. She seemed universally adored by the audience, many of whom were very young, quite frankly. They are graduate students, and they don’t know about the Diane Ravitch from before.”
If her late emergence as a liberal hero strikes progressives as ironic, it infuriates the Rhee fans who dominate both the Obama administration and the GOP. Critics call Ravitch a self-promoter, an opportunist, and a scholar who picks evidence to support her conclusions, rather than vice versa—in other words, a lot of the same things Rhee’s critics say about her.
“The problem with ‘I was wrong about everything’ as the prelude to an argument is that it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the repudiator’s judgment,” Kevin Carey of the think tank Education Sector complained in The New Republic. “[Ravitch] simply trades one pre-defined agenda for another: the collected talking points of the reactionary education establishment. It is a philosophy of resentment and futility, grounded in the conviction that public schools—and the adults within them—can’t really be expected to do better than they currently are.”
That’s a relatively respectful version of it. But the school-reform debate now has enough star power that there’s plenty of lower-brow criticism, too. If the idea of an education-policy historian popping up on Jon Stewart’s show is weird, the idea of a parody Twitter feed to caricature said education-policy historian may be even weirder.
But a review of Ravitch’s career, which actually began on the left, suggests a more complex narrative. A lifelong political liberal who has always wrestled with a sort of innate personal conservatism, Ravitch—like Jane Jacobs, the urbanist whose book she referenced—has been constant in her deep attraction to institutions that have survived the test of time, and her aversion to intellectual fads. “It’s the fierce urgency of no,” Ravitch says of her worldview. “I like institutions, in part because I like to rebel against them, but also because I think society needs them and needs to continually reshape them, not blow them up.”
Diane Silvers was born into a middle-class family in Houston in 1938, the third of eight children. Her parents owned a small chain of liquor stores. A bookworm, she also found time for adolescent thrills: At San Jacinto High School, she was a tomboy and an ardent drag racer. She’d been in three car accidents by age 16.
The Houston of Ravitch’s adolescence was embroiled in McCarthyism. Hailing from an FDR-loving, Democratic family, Ravitch was horrified by a campaign against her ninth-grade history teacher launched by the Minute Women of the U.S.A. The teacher, Nelda Davis, subscribed to a liberal internationalist worldview; she was eventually forced out. Another formative political experience came during Ravitch’s senior year, when she discovered a cache of books on the Soviet Union stashed under the school library’s circulation desk. They had been censored. She devoured them.
At the suggestion of her family rabbi’s wife, Ravitch went off to Wellesley College, in Massachusetts. Her goal was to become a reporter, so she interned one summer at The Washington Post. The experience put her off newspapering: She says most of the women in the newsroom were “gal Fridays,” making copies and fetching coffee, which seemed boring. But in D.C. she met her future husband, Richard Ravitch, who was working for a Democratic congressman from California. The couple married two weeks after Diane’s 1960 graduation, settling in Manhattan.
Ravitch set out to find a job to match her writerly ambitions. Because she didn’t want “women’s work,” it was a slog. “The only jobs available for someone with my inexperience were secretarial, typing,” she says. “It was a big turnoff.” Then, in January 1961, she came across a New York Times editorial about the death of Sol Levitas, the Russian exile who had run the small democratic socialist magazine The New Leader. The Times called The New Leader “one of the most stimulating and valuable magazines of our day,” filled with “every variety of democratic opinion.”
Ravitch looked up The New Leader’s phone number and called the office. A flustered secretary invited her for an interview. By the close of business, she had landed a $10 per week editorial assistant job. For three years Ravitch worked there on and off, gaining an introduction to the New York anti-Communist left. She remained a part of that world for decades. Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, became a friend; in the late 1980s, he sent Ravitch to Eastern Europe to speak to newly organized teachers’ unions.
But Ravitch was never purely a creature of the left. As the counterculture took root in the mid-1960s, she was busy with two all-consuming projects—motherhood (her sons were born in 1962, 1964, and 1967) and research on what would become her celebrated 1974 history of the New York City public schools, The Great School Wars. She was attracted to the topic because she was fascinated by the era’s battles between community-control advocates, teachers, administrators, and the United Federation of Teachers. It was black vs. Jew, organized labor vs. New Left. And, in Ravitch’s view, the era also involved too many misguided philanthropists “playing God in the ghetto” by supporting new-fangled identity-politics curricula at the expense of traditional liberal arts.
Ravitch’s criticisms of that phenomenon yoked her to the conservative establishment, where right-leaning outfits like the Hoover Institution, the Olin Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute supported her work. She went on to spend 18 months in the first Bush administration and to produce another decade’s worth of policy writing in favor of introducing “competition” to education.
Ravitch’s move away from the left also came as she was dealing with an overwhelming personal loss. In 1966, her two-year old son died of leukemia. She was still mourning “as the flower children were running around in Central Park barefoot and setting firebombs in the flower beds,” Ravitch says. “I was not a fan of the counterculture, in part because it was such a tragic time in my own life, and, educationally, I disliked the contempt for knowledge, professionalism, and institutions.”
She still does. And while Ravitch located those trends on the left back then, she sees them today in the bipartisan consensus around market-based education reforms. In her book, Ravitch claims she was swayed by peer pressure from the Washington free-market types she worked alongside at the Department of Education and then the Brookings Institution. “Having been immersed in a world of true believers, I was influenced by their ideas,” she writes in Death and Life. “I became persuaded.”
Now that she’s been unpersuaded, Ravitch spends the greatest chunk of her energy arguing against what she sees as a war on teachers, defending their unions, tenure protections, and pensions. In fact, it’s a point she made during her time on the other side, too. In 1983 she wrote a New Republic essay called “Scapegoating the Teachers” in which she noted that “it is comforting to blame teachers for the low state of education, because it relieves so many others of their own responsibility for years of educational neglect.”
Almost 30 years later, Ravitch says she’s particularly offended by the suggestion—implicit in the media’s celebration of Teach for America, the organization that launched Rhee’s career—that perhaps teaching should not be a lifelong profession at all, but a bleeding-heart diversion for elite 20-somethings.
“To me, it’s like saying that we’re going to build up the Peace Corps so at some point we can replace the senior diplomats,” she says. “That’s ridiculous.” Ravitch—who says she’d probably apply for TFA if she were leaving college today—nonetheless thinks that instead of letting the much-publicized program suck up all the “psychic energy,” there should be college loan forgiveness for people who become teachers. “Then you would have so many people applying to join this field that you could select the top 10 or 15 percent,” she says.
In her new pose, Ravitch’s policy ideas sometimes seem politically irrelevant in a budget-cutting, public sector-baiting season. No GOP-run Congress would approve a national college loan forgiveness program for public school teachers. But, especially in the year of the Wisconsin labor showdown, the argument about honoring professional teachers has struck a cord.
“When I was in Florida the other day a guy came up to me, and he was literally crying,” she says. “He said, ‘I was about to quit teaching and I read your book and I decided to stay.’ So I feel almost a sense of mission.”
Ravitch may have a knack for self-promotion, but her emergence as the leading voice of education-reform dissent also owes a lot to serendipity—with an assist from D.C. voters.
Though Ravitch spent years sparring with New York schools chief Joel Klein, Rhee’s story last year became a truly national one. For much of her tenure, the high-profile chancellor benefited from the fact that nearly all of her critics could be caricatured as local yokels with no ability to focus on the big picture. That caricature reached its apotheosis after last year’s mayoral election, which much of the media characterized as a revolt by down-market ignoramuses who couldn’t understand the importance of school reform. Officially crowned a martyr, Rhee embraced a second career as a national education activist.
With a significant media profile of her own, Ravitch became a go-to critic for anyone looking for a contrary opinion. The former DCPS chancellor made things pretty easy, giving Ravitch an opening to blast her for advising far-right governors like Rick Scott of Florida and Chris Christie of New Jersey. “Rhee maintains being bipartisan while being closely affiliated with the Tea Party governors,” Ravitch says. “The bipartisan agenda has become what used to be the GOP platform. I wonder if the Democratic Party will ever regain its sense about the importance of public education and equity.”
Ravitch was in Argentina in March when USA Today broke the news that half of all D.C. schools had likely corrected students’ mistakes on standardized tests. Nevertheless, she dashed off a column for The Daily Beast (where I am also a contributing writer). Rhee’s policy of tying pay to test scores, Ravitch wrote, had resulted in “cheating, teaching to bad tests, institutionalized fraud, dumbing down of tests, and a narrowed curriculum…This formula, which will be a tragedy for our nation and for an entire generation of children, is now immensely popular in the states and the Congress. Most governors embrace it. The big foundations endorse it. The think tanks of D.C., right-wing and left-wing, support it. Rhee helped to make it fashionable. If she doesn’t pause to consider the damage she is doing, shame on her.”
Hari Sevugan, a Rhee spokesman who used to work for the Democratic National Committee, says, “Ms. Ravitch may be satisfied that our students are placing at the bottom or middle of the pack in international assessments, but we aren’t. In order to increase our competitiveness with rising powers in China and India, we can no longer accept the status quo—as Ms. Ravitch is doing.”
Sevugan also points out that StudentsFirst, Rhee’s advocacy organization, has worked in Michigan, Nevada, and Maine to pass school reform laws that attracted bipartisan support. “I’m a proud Democrat, but I know that reform cannot be achieved by one party alone,” Sevugan says.
In May, Ravitch picked a high-profile fight with another reform-minded former D.C. education official, Deborah Gist, now Rhode Island’s education commissioner. In an Education Week blog post, Ravitch claimed that at a meeting that also included Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee and state teachers’ union leaders, Gist “dominated the conversation, interrupted me whenever I spoke, and filibustered to use up the limited time... In many years of meeting with public officials, I have never encountered such rudeness and incivility. I am waiting for an apology.”
In response, Chafee said Gist had “comported herself in an appropriate and respectful way at all times.” A documentary filmmaker who’d been at the meeting then offered to release footage if all parties agreed; Ravitch said she wanted to see it first. On May 24, she took to her blog to apologize: “I wrote harsh words about state Commissioner Deborah Gist. On reflection, I concluded that I had written in anger and that I was unkind. For that, I am deeply sorry. Like every other human being, I have my frailties; I am far from perfect. I despair of the spirit of meanness that now permeates so much of our public discourse.”
The apology for meanness did not address the charge that she had misrepresented Gist’s behavior. The footage has not been released.
In a separate contretemps, an anonymous Twitter feed called “OldDianeRavitch,” opened in April, featuring a steady stream of hyperlinked free-market school reform arguments Ravitch once made, but now disclaims, such as: “NYC schools chancellor should have the power to close schools that consistently fail or engage in corrupt practices” (from a 1995 Times op-ed) and, “Without testing, there is no consistent way to measure success or failure” (spoken at a 2001 panel discussion at City College).
The account was clearly a parody. But Ravitch pushed Twitter to shut it down as a violation of its anti-impersonation policy. The feed soon relaunched with the handle “NOTDianeRavitch.” In an email, its author sneered that “the old Diane Ravitch cherry-picked the evidence that supported her policy views at the time, and the new Diane Ravitch does the same, just for a different set of views.” Of course, the parodist insisted on sniping from behind the veil of anonymity: In an email interview, the writer would only say that he or she holds a Ph.D in one of the social sciences and was doing the Twitter mockery anonymously because, “I thought that I might be pigeonholed” politically for tweaking someone now considered a liberal icon.
Several of Ravitch’s former allies declined to be interviewed for this story. Off the record, some questioned whether there’s something strange or even disturbing about the way she seems to go out looking for a fight, then responds in a hurt way when she herself is attacked. That view is most bluntly articulated by Jay Greene, a conservative University of Arkansas professor who blogs on school reform. “She is behaving like a classic bully,” Greene wrote about Ravitch’s behavior toward Gist. “She hurls insults and allegations against others on a continual basis, but as soon as she is challenged she tries to shut-down the opposition, punish her critics, and deplores the meanness of public discourse.” It’s the same case many of Rhee’s critics made.
Asked for her take on these recent tempests, Ravitch emailed, “Why are conservatives so afraid of me? Why invest so much energy attacking a 73-year-old (as of July 1) historian who has been writing about education for 45 years? What’s their problem?”
But the after-effects of Ravitch’s switching sides are not always venomous. The same day she issued her apology to Gist, Ravitch traveled to a D.C. meeting about one of the most controversial strategies in reformers’ playbook: shuttering low-performing schools. In D.C., Rhee closed 20 of them. Focus groups organized by the meeting’s sponsor found that District parents would have rather seen their children’s schools flooded with resources than closed down.
It’s the argument Ravitch has been making for a year. “They’re not shoe stores that you can close and move to a different mall,” she said during a panel debate afterwards. “We don’t close the firehouse if there are more fires in the neighborhood. We don’t close the police station if there is more crime in the neighborhood.” Instead, singing from the liberal hymnal, she argued for policies to address the poverty-related “root causes” of academic failure.
Facing off against her in the debate was Chester Finn of the Fordham Institute, which advocates for school choice and where Ravitch once sat on the board. Finn argued that school closings are a rational response to tightened budgets and shrinking enrollment. Ravitch listened with her hands clasped under her chin, staring out into the distance.
It was a poignant moment. The pair were once close: They co-founded an education-reform research clearinghouse in 1981; they profess to adore each other’s families. In an anguished review of Death and Life, Finn cited their 30-year friendship before declaring that Ravitch’s “prescription for the future is guided by wishful thinking, nostalgia and unwarranted faith in an antiquated institutional arrangement.” He took particular issue with Ravitch’s defense of teachers’ unions, which he, like many reformers, sees as a primary obstacle.
Disagreeing so stridently has made the relationship “difficult,” Ravitch said quietly during the coffee break before she and Finn spoke. Are they still friends? “Not the way we used to be.”
Diane and Richard Ravitch divorced in 1986. Today, she lives in a gracious brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, one of the borough’s poshest neighborhoods. Her longtime companion is Mary Butz, a former New York City public school principal who ran a progressive principal-training program that was shut down by former schools chancellor Klein in 2005.
Sporting an electric-blue turtleneck, leggings, and neat silver bowl-cut as she knocks around a living room lined with bookshelves and decorated in eagles, roosters, and red, white, and blue Americana, Ravitch says she enjoys the education-policy pugilism, Twitter fights and all. “If I’m on Twitter it means I’m not writing. But you know, I think fast, and when I see somebody say, ‘this is right, this is wrong,’ then I want to get into an exchange!” But she says her speaking schedule is so exhausting that she plans to make more of her future appearances via video-conferencing.
A grandmother of three, Ravitch is also excited about her youngest grandson enrolling, this September, at P.S. 321 in Park Slope, one of New York’s most coveted neighborhood schools. Some 65 percent of the kids are white; 80 percent meet or exceed state standards in math, English, science, and social studies. The PTA fundraises, via PayPal and employer matching, to support supplemental programs. At P.S. 167 in Crown Heights, less than three miles away, 99 percent of students are black and Hispanic; fewer than half perform at grade-level in math and reading. There is a PTA, but it doesn’t have a PayPal-enabled website.
And that, to Ravitch, is the problem. P.S. 167 needs more funding and support to improve curriculum and instruction—not blame for being in a tough neighborhood, where it must work with disadvantaged kids whose parents are less able to get involved at school. “All children should get the kind of education I want for my own grandchildren,” Ravitch said. “I still think it’s valuable to know grammar and spelling, even in a computer age. I still think that history should be taught chronologically. Children should know two languages, and one of them should be English.”
So while it’s true that Ravitch has changed her mind, she’s also pretty constant on some basic questions. And, like the disillusioned liberal she was during the 1960s, she’s still profoundly pessimistic about the contemporary scene. Just like 40 years ago, Ravitch fears, the small-c conservatives are losing the argument.
“It’s a very bad time,” she says, dramatically. “These are dark days.”
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/41083/diane-ravitch-the-anti-rhee/full/
by Dana Goldstein
In the month of April, Diane Ravitch, the 72-year-old preeminent historian of American education, sent 1,747 tweets, an average of about 58 messages per day, many between the hours of 11 p.m. and 1 a.m.
On May 20 alone, Ravitch tweeted 99 times to her 13,000 followers. Linking to the news of a D.C. Public Schools investigation into test tampering under former chancellor Michelle Rhee, she asked: “How can teachers be evaluated by student test scores, when the scores are so often manipulated and inaccurate?” Throughout the day, she mused on the shortcomings of standardized tests, whose ubiquity in American schools she has compared—with characteristic hyperbole—to “the Chinese cultural revolution.”
“Life’s problems do not translate into four possible answer[s],” she tweeted. Minutes later, she added: “Just think: 12 years of picking the right answer, never taking a risk with a different approach to problems. Ugh.” And then: “Those who can’t teach, pass laws about how to evaluate teachers.”
Ravitch went on to note that President Obama, whose education policies she opposes, is given more time to prove himself—four years—than the average teacher, who usually gets two or three years to win tenure. By afternoon, she was on to scorning Wall Street types, writing that “teachers can do more [good] than many who collect millions for betting on stocks or hog bellies or gold.”
Ravitch was producing scholarly monographs well before anyone ever imagined microblogging. But like her books, Ravitch’s 140-character missives are serious stuff. In the past year, they’ve become a major front in her war against what advocates call “school reform” and opponents like Ravitch sometimes label “school privatization.” In the process, the Brooklynite has become a relevant figure in Washington’s local debate: Somewhat improbably, this former education official from the first Bush administration has emerged as the most media-savvy progressive critic of the reform campaign embraced by everyone from Education Secretary Arne Duncan to billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates—a campaign that, in the public mind, is perhaps most associated with Rhee.
Last March, Ravitch capped a long career with the publication of her 13th book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. Though she says it was rejected by 15 publishers, Death and Life (its title an homage to Jane Jacobs, the great defender of urban spaces) became a bestseller. It also proclaimed a sea change in Ravitch’s worldview.
Once a vocal proponent of No Child Left Behind, charter schools, vouchers, and merit pay for teachers, Ravitch decided sometime around 2006 that there was actually no evidence that any of those policies improved American education. She now believes that the “corporatist agenda” of school choice, teacher layoffs, and standardized testing has undermined public respect for one of the nation’s most vital institutions, the neighborhood school, and for one of society’s most crucial professions: teaching.
The best way to improve American education, the post-epiphany Ravitch argues, is to fight child poverty with health care, jobs, child care, and affordable housing.
The apostasy turned Ravitch into a sort of rock star—much like Rhee, but with a different audience. The crowds at the 100-plus speeches Ravitch has given since publishing Death and Life are heavy on unionized teachers. Last year, she won the “Friend of Education” award from their largest union, the National Education Association; delegates at the group’s annual convention greeted her with cheering, whooping glee. Death and Life has been translated into Korean and Japanese, and in the coming months, Ravitch will speak in Germany and Finland.
In November, Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter dubbed Ravitch the “Whittaker Chambers of school reform,” declaring her Gates’ “biggest adversary” for speaking out against the Microsoft founder’s efforts to bring corporate efficiency standards to public schools. In December, the American Academy of Political and Social Science awarded Ravitch the 2011 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize, for public intellectuals who have used social-science research to improve public policy. And in April, she addressed an overflow crowd at the annual summit of the American Education Researchers’ Association. She’s likely the first headliner at the staid confab to have also appeared on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.
“She got two standing ovations,” says Brad Olsen, a professor of education at the University of California at Santa Cruz, who attended the conference. “There were folks clamoring with their cellphones trying to get pictures of her. She seemed universally adored by the audience, many of whom were very young, quite frankly. They are graduate students, and they don’t know about the Diane Ravitch from before.”
If her late emergence as a liberal hero strikes progressives as ironic, it infuriates the Rhee fans who dominate both the Obama administration and the GOP. Critics call Ravitch a self-promoter, an opportunist, and a scholar who picks evidence to support her conclusions, rather than vice versa—in other words, a lot of the same things Rhee’s critics say about her.
“The problem with ‘I was wrong about everything’ as the prelude to an argument is that it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the repudiator’s judgment,” Kevin Carey of the think tank Education Sector complained in The New Republic. “[Ravitch] simply trades one pre-defined agenda for another: the collected talking points of the reactionary education establishment. It is a philosophy of resentment and futility, grounded in the conviction that public schools—and the adults within them—can’t really be expected to do better than they currently are.”
That’s a relatively respectful version of it. But the school-reform debate now has enough star power that there’s plenty of lower-brow criticism, too. If the idea of an education-policy historian popping up on Jon Stewart’s show is weird, the idea of a parody Twitter feed to caricature said education-policy historian may be even weirder.
But a review of Ravitch’s career, which actually began on the left, suggests a more complex narrative. A lifelong political liberal who has always wrestled with a sort of innate personal conservatism, Ravitch—like Jane Jacobs, the urbanist whose book she referenced—has been constant in her deep attraction to institutions that have survived the test of time, and her aversion to intellectual fads. “It’s the fierce urgency of no,” Ravitch says of her worldview. “I like institutions, in part because I like to rebel against them, but also because I think society needs them and needs to continually reshape them, not blow them up.”
Diane Silvers was born into a middle-class family in Houston in 1938, the third of eight children. Her parents owned a small chain of liquor stores. A bookworm, she also found time for adolescent thrills: At San Jacinto High School, she was a tomboy and an ardent drag racer. She’d been in three car accidents by age 16.
The Houston of Ravitch’s adolescence was embroiled in McCarthyism. Hailing from an FDR-loving, Democratic family, Ravitch was horrified by a campaign against her ninth-grade history teacher launched by the Minute Women of the U.S.A. The teacher, Nelda Davis, subscribed to a liberal internationalist worldview; she was eventually forced out. Another formative political experience came during Ravitch’s senior year, when she discovered a cache of books on the Soviet Union stashed under the school library’s circulation desk. They had been censored. She devoured them.
At the suggestion of her family rabbi’s wife, Ravitch went off to Wellesley College, in Massachusetts. Her goal was to become a reporter, so she interned one summer at The Washington Post. The experience put her off newspapering: She says most of the women in the newsroom were “gal Fridays,” making copies and fetching coffee, which seemed boring. But in D.C. she met her future husband, Richard Ravitch, who was working for a Democratic congressman from California. The couple married two weeks after Diane’s 1960 graduation, settling in Manhattan.
Ravitch set out to find a job to match her writerly ambitions. Because she didn’t want “women’s work,” it was a slog. “The only jobs available for someone with my inexperience were secretarial, typing,” she says. “It was a big turnoff.” Then, in January 1961, she came across a New York Times editorial about the death of Sol Levitas, the Russian exile who had run the small democratic socialist magazine The New Leader. The Times called The New Leader “one of the most stimulating and valuable magazines of our day,” filled with “every variety of democratic opinion.”
Ravitch looked up The New Leader’s phone number and called the office. A flustered secretary invited her for an interview. By the close of business, she had landed a $10 per week editorial assistant job. For three years Ravitch worked there on and off, gaining an introduction to the New York anti-Communist left. She remained a part of that world for decades. Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, became a friend; in the late 1980s, he sent Ravitch to Eastern Europe to speak to newly organized teachers’ unions.
But Ravitch was never purely a creature of the left. As the counterculture took root in the mid-1960s, she was busy with two all-consuming projects—motherhood (her sons were born in 1962, 1964, and 1967) and research on what would become her celebrated 1974 history of the New York City public schools, The Great School Wars. She was attracted to the topic because she was fascinated by the era’s battles between community-control advocates, teachers, administrators, and the United Federation of Teachers. It was black vs. Jew, organized labor vs. New Left. And, in Ravitch’s view, the era also involved too many misguided philanthropists “playing God in the ghetto” by supporting new-fangled identity-politics curricula at the expense of traditional liberal arts.
Ravitch’s criticisms of that phenomenon yoked her to the conservative establishment, where right-leaning outfits like the Hoover Institution, the Olin Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute supported her work. She went on to spend 18 months in the first Bush administration and to produce another decade’s worth of policy writing in favor of introducing “competition” to education.
Ravitch’s move away from the left also came as she was dealing with an overwhelming personal loss. In 1966, her two-year old son died of leukemia. She was still mourning “as the flower children were running around in Central Park barefoot and setting firebombs in the flower beds,” Ravitch says. “I was not a fan of the counterculture, in part because it was such a tragic time in my own life, and, educationally, I disliked the contempt for knowledge, professionalism, and institutions.”
She still does. And while Ravitch located those trends on the left back then, she sees them today in the bipartisan consensus around market-based education reforms. In her book, Ravitch claims she was swayed by peer pressure from the Washington free-market types she worked alongside at the Department of Education and then the Brookings Institution. “Having been immersed in a world of true believers, I was influenced by their ideas,” she writes in Death and Life. “I became persuaded.”
Now that she’s been unpersuaded, Ravitch spends the greatest chunk of her energy arguing against what she sees as a war on teachers, defending their unions, tenure protections, and pensions. In fact, it’s a point she made during her time on the other side, too. In 1983 she wrote a New Republic essay called “Scapegoating the Teachers” in which she noted that “it is comforting to blame teachers for the low state of education, because it relieves so many others of their own responsibility for years of educational neglect.”
Almost 30 years later, Ravitch says she’s particularly offended by the suggestion—implicit in the media’s celebration of Teach for America, the organization that launched Rhee’s career—that perhaps teaching should not be a lifelong profession at all, but a bleeding-heart diversion for elite 20-somethings.
“To me, it’s like saying that we’re going to build up the Peace Corps so at some point we can replace the senior diplomats,” she says. “That’s ridiculous.” Ravitch—who says she’d probably apply for TFA if she were leaving college today—nonetheless thinks that instead of letting the much-publicized program suck up all the “psychic energy,” there should be college loan forgiveness for people who become teachers. “Then you would have so many people applying to join this field that you could select the top 10 or 15 percent,” she says.
In her new pose, Ravitch’s policy ideas sometimes seem politically irrelevant in a budget-cutting, public sector-baiting season. No GOP-run Congress would approve a national college loan forgiveness program for public school teachers. But, especially in the year of the Wisconsin labor showdown, the argument about honoring professional teachers has struck a cord.
“When I was in Florida the other day a guy came up to me, and he was literally crying,” she says. “He said, ‘I was about to quit teaching and I read your book and I decided to stay.’ So I feel almost a sense of mission.”
Ravitch may have a knack for self-promotion, but her emergence as the leading voice of education-reform dissent also owes a lot to serendipity—with an assist from D.C. voters.
Though Ravitch spent years sparring with New York schools chief Joel Klein, Rhee’s story last year became a truly national one. For much of her tenure, the high-profile chancellor benefited from the fact that nearly all of her critics could be caricatured as local yokels with no ability to focus on the big picture. That caricature reached its apotheosis after last year’s mayoral election, which much of the media characterized as a revolt by down-market ignoramuses who couldn’t understand the importance of school reform. Officially crowned a martyr, Rhee embraced a second career as a national education activist.
With a significant media profile of her own, Ravitch became a go-to critic for anyone looking for a contrary opinion. The former DCPS chancellor made things pretty easy, giving Ravitch an opening to blast her for advising far-right governors like Rick Scott of Florida and Chris Christie of New Jersey. “Rhee maintains being bipartisan while being closely affiliated with the Tea Party governors,” Ravitch says. “The bipartisan agenda has become what used to be the GOP platform. I wonder if the Democratic Party will ever regain its sense about the importance of public education and equity.”
Ravitch was in Argentina in March when USA Today broke the news that half of all D.C. schools had likely corrected students’ mistakes on standardized tests. Nevertheless, she dashed off a column for The Daily Beast (where I am also a contributing writer). Rhee’s policy of tying pay to test scores, Ravitch wrote, had resulted in “cheating, teaching to bad tests, institutionalized fraud, dumbing down of tests, and a narrowed curriculum…This formula, which will be a tragedy for our nation and for an entire generation of children, is now immensely popular in the states and the Congress. Most governors embrace it. The big foundations endorse it. The think tanks of D.C., right-wing and left-wing, support it. Rhee helped to make it fashionable. If she doesn’t pause to consider the damage she is doing, shame on her.”
Hari Sevugan, a Rhee spokesman who used to work for the Democratic National Committee, says, “Ms. Ravitch may be satisfied that our students are placing at the bottom or middle of the pack in international assessments, but we aren’t. In order to increase our competitiveness with rising powers in China and India, we can no longer accept the status quo—as Ms. Ravitch is doing.”
Sevugan also points out that StudentsFirst, Rhee’s advocacy organization, has worked in Michigan, Nevada, and Maine to pass school reform laws that attracted bipartisan support. “I’m a proud Democrat, but I know that reform cannot be achieved by one party alone,” Sevugan says.
In May, Ravitch picked a high-profile fight with another reform-minded former D.C. education official, Deborah Gist, now Rhode Island’s education commissioner. In an Education Week blog post, Ravitch claimed that at a meeting that also included Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee and state teachers’ union leaders, Gist “dominated the conversation, interrupted me whenever I spoke, and filibustered to use up the limited time... In many years of meeting with public officials, I have never encountered such rudeness and incivility. I am waiting for an apology.”
In response, Chafee said Gist had “comported herself in an appropriate and respectful way at all times.” A documentary filmmaker who’d been at the meeting then offered to release footage if all parties agreed; Ravitch said she wanted to see it first. On May 24, she took to her blog to apologize: “I wrote harsh words about state Commissioner Deborah Gist. On reflection, I concluded that I had written in anger and that I was unkind. For that, I am deeply sorry. Like every other human being, I have my frailties; I am far from perfect. I despair of the spirit of meanness that now permeates so much of our public discourse.”
The apology for meanness did not address the charge that she had misrepresented Gist’s behavior. The footage has not been released.
In a separate contretemps, an anonymous Twitter feed called “OldDianeRavitch,” opened in April, featuring a steady stream of hyperlinked free-market school reform arguments Ravitch once made, but now disclaims, such as: “NYC schools chancellor should have the power to close schools that consistently fail or engage in corrupt practices” (from a 1995 Times op-ed) and, “Without testing, there is no consistent way to measure success or failure” (spoken at a 2001 panel discussion at City College).
The account was clearly a parody. But Ravitch pushed Twitter to shut it down as a violation of its anti-impersonation policy. The feed soon relaunched with the handle “NOTDianeRavitch.” In an email, its author sneered that “the old Diane Ravitch cherry-picked the evidence that supported her policy views at the time, and the new Diane Ravitch does the same, just for a different set of views.” Of course, the parodist insisted on sniping from behind the veil of anonymity: In an email interview, the writer would only say that he or she holds a Ph.D in one of the social sciences and was doing the Twitter mockery anonymously because, “I thought that I might be pigeonholed” politically for tweaking someone now considered a liberal icon.
Several of Ravitch’s former allies declined to be interviewed for this story. Off the record, some questioned whether there’s something strange or even disturbing about the way she seems to go out looking for a fight, then responds in a hurt way when she herself is attacked. That view is most bluntly articulated by Jay Greene, a conservative University of Arkansas professor who blogs on school reform. “She is behaving like a classic bully,” Greene wrote about Ravitch’s behavior toward Gist. “She hurls insults and allegations against others on a continual basis, but as soon as she is challenged she tries to shut-down the opposition, punish her critics, and deplores the meanness of public discourse.” It’s the same case many of Rhee’s critics made.
Asked for her take on these recent tempests, Ravitch emailed, “Why are conservatives so afraid of me? Why invest so much energy attacking a 73-year-old (as of July 1) historian who has been writing about education for 45 years? What’s their problem?”
But the after-effects of Ravitch’s switching sides are not always venomous. The same day she issued her apology to Gist, Ravitch traveled to a D.C. meeting about one of the most controversial strategies in reformers’ playbook: shuttering low-performing schools. In D.C., Rhee closed 20 of them. Focus groups organized by the meeting’s sponsor found that District parents would have rather seen their children’s schools flooded with resources than closed down.
It’s the argument Ravitch has been making for a year. “They’re not shoe stores that you can close and move to a different mall,” she said during a panel debate afterwards. “We don’t close the firehouse if there are more fires in the neighborhood. We don’t close the police station if there is more crime in the neighborhood.” Instead, singing from the liberal hymnal, she argued for policies to address the poverty-related “root causes” of academic failure.
Facing off against her in the debate was Chester Finn of the Fordham Institute, which advocates for school choice and where Ravitch once sat on the board. Finn argued that school closings are a rational response to tightened budgets and shrinking enrollment. Ravitch listened with her hands clasped under her chin, staring out into the distance.
It was a poignant moment. The pair were once close: They co-founded an education-reform research clearinghouse in 1981; they profess to adore each other’s families. In an anguished review of Death and Life, Finn cited their 30-year friendship before declaring that Ravitch’s “prescription for the future is guided by wishful thinking, nostalgia and unwarranted faith in an antiquated institutional arrangement.” He took particular issue with Ravitch’s defense of teachers’ unions, which he, like many reformers, sees as a primary obstacle.
Disagreeing so stridently has made the relationship “difficult,” Ravitch said quietly during the coffee break before she and Finn spoke. Are they still friends? “Not the way we used to be.”
Diane and Richard Ravitch divorced in 1986. Today, she lives in a gracious brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, one of the borough’s poshest neighborhoods. Her longtime companion is Mary Butz, a former New York City public school principal who ran a progressive principal-training program that was shut down by former schools chancellor Klein in 2005.
Sporting an electric-blue turtleneck, leggings, and neat silver bowl-cut as she knocks around a living room lined with bookshelves and decorated in eagles, roosters, and red, white, and blue Americana, Ravitch says she enjoys the education-policy pugilism, Twitter fights and all. “If I’m on Twitter it means I’m not writing. But you know, I think fast, and when I see somebody say, ‘this is right, this is wrong,’ then I want to get into an exchange!” But she says her speaking schedule is so exhausting that she plans to make more of her future appearances via video-conferencing.
A grandmother of three, Ravitch is also excited about her youngest grandson enrolling, this September, at P.S. 321 in Park Slope, one of New York’s most coveted neighborhood schools. Some 65 percent of the kids are white; 80 percent meet or exceed state standards in math, English, science, and social studies. The PTA fundraises, via PayPal and employer matching, to support supplemental programs. At P.S. 167 in Crown Heights, less than three miles away, 99 percent of students are black and Hispanic; fewer than half perform at grade-level in math and reading. There is a PTA, but it doesn’t have a PayPal-enabled website.
And that, to Ravitch, is the problem. P.S. 167 needs more funding and support to improve curriculum and instruction—not blame for being in a tough neighborhood, where it must work with disadvantaged kids whose parents are less able to get involved at school. “All children should get the kind of education I want for my own grandchildren,” Ravitch said. “I still think it’s valuable to know grammar and spelling, even in a computer age. I still think that history should be taught chronologically. Children should know two languages, and one of them should be English.”
So while it’s true that Ravitch has changed her mind, she’s also pretty constant on some basic questions. And, like the disillusioned liberal she was during the 1960s, she’s still profoundly pessimistic about the contemporary scene. Just like 40 years ago, Ravitch fears, the small-c conservatives are losing the argument.
“It’s a very bad time,” she says, dramatically. “These are dark days.”
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/41083/diane-ravitch-the-anti-rhee/full/
Why won't Jeb Bush leave Florida's schools alone
From the Baccuda Post
As we recently reported, email accounts from Gov Scott’s transition office were closed in January and the private company handling those accounts deleted the emails. But a member of Scott’s transition team recently recovered a batch of e-mails that included some sent by former Governor Jeb Bush to Scott. Jeb prefaced these emails to Scott as “Take them for what they are … a desire that you succeed,” while including a long list of lessons learned with suggestions of items Scott should focus on in his agenda. While these e-mails could be interpreted as the sincere desire of one who has been in those same shoes, other aspects should make Floridians sit up, pay attention and scratch under the surface of our politicians’ moves to see what is really going on. If Jeb had simply wished Scott well, told him to take his time making decisions, and find time to enjoy life, it would have been gracious. But Jeb was anything but. Jeb was throwing his considerable weight around, forcibly hinting that Scott pass his policy concerns. Policy concerns that represent Jeb’s future political life. Since it’s sometimes difficult to connect the dots with so much information out there, we will attempt to bring some sense to those gratuitous, arrogant, and, frankly, hypocritical suggestions.
Part 1 – The “Education Savings Accounts” Suggestion
Jeb recommended to Scott that he push ahead with “education savings accounts” or a form of universal private school vouchers. These vouchers would allow kindergarten through high school students to receive an amount they could use to offset private school tuition. While opponents say these vouchers would hurt public education, Jeb and his supporters say that these vouchers give parents choice, improve education and save Florida money by shifting students to private schools.
But which private schools would benefit the most from these vouchers? CHARTER SCHOOLS. The same charter school movement that Jeb himself has been deeply involved in since he helped fund the Liberty City charter school in Miami in 1995. And why is it so important to Jeb? Jeb made “education reform” the hallmark of his two terms as Governor, in spite of his having absolutely no credentials that would qualify him as any kind of an expert in education, and has continued on this mission in the years since. Since Jeb couldn’t transition to the White House directly from the governorship like his brother did, this has become his signature issue to remain relevant in the national landscape for his future presidential run. And fundamentally changing the public school system nationwide, with education improvement coming because of charter school education, would cast Jeb as a “reformer” and would provide the blueprint to cast him as a Reaganesque visionary. Yet Jeb, like Reagan, needs help from others. And over the years, different enablers have stepped up to the plate.
http://www.barracudapost.com/jebs-continued-push-to-make-florida-his-education-trough/
As we recently reported, email accounts from Gov Scott’s transition office were closed in January and the private company handling those accounts deleted the emails. But a member of Scott’s transition team recently recovered a batch of e-mails that included some sent by former Governor Jeb Bush to Scott. Jeb prefaced these emails to Scott as “Take them for what they are … a desire that you succeed,” while including a long list of lessons learned with suggestions of items Scott should focus on in his agenda. While these e-mails could be interpreted as the sincere desire of one who has been in those same shoes, other aspects should make Floridians sit up, pay attention and scratch under the surface of our politicians’ moves to see what is really going on. If Jeb had simply wished Scott well, told him to take his time making decisions, and find time to enjoy life, it would have been gracious. But Jeb was anything but. Jeb was throwing his considerable weight around, forcibly hinting that Scott pass his policy concerns. Policy concerns that represent Jeb’s future political life. Since it’s sometimes difficult to connect the dots with so much information out there, we will attempt to bring some sense to those gratuitous, arrogant, and, frankly, hypocritical suggestions.
Part 1 – The “Education Savings Accounts” Suggestion
Jeb recommended to Scott that he push ahead with “education savings accounts” or a form of universal private school vouchers. These vouchers would allow kindergarten through high school students to receive an amount they could use to offset private school tuition. While opponents say these vouchers would hurt public education, Jeb and his supporters say that these vouchers give parents choice, improve education and save Florida money by shifting students to private schools.
But which private schools would benefit the most from these vouchers? CHARTER SCHOOLS. The same charter school movement that Jeb himself has been deeply involved in since he helped fund the Liberty City charter school in Miami in 1995. And why is it so important to Jeb? Jeb made “education reform” the hallmark of his two terms as Governor, in spite of his having absolutely no credentials that would qualify him as any kind of an expert in education, and has continued on this mission in the years since. Since Jeb couldn’t transition to the White House directly from the governorship like his brother did, this has become his signature issue to remain relevant in the national landscape for his future presidential run. And fundamentally changing the public school system nationwide, with education improvement coming because of charter school education, would cast Jeb as a “reformer” and would provide the blueprint to cast him as a Reaganesque visionary. Yet Jeb, like Reagan, needs help from others. And over the years, different enablers have stepped up to the plate.
http://www.barracudapost.com/jebs-continued-push-to-make-florida-his-education-trough/
Schools depend on handouts to survive
From the New York Times
By MICHAEL A. REBELL and JESSICA R. WOLFF
EARLIER this month, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced that he and five other wealthy individuals had raised $1.5 million to reinstate the January Regents exams, which New York State had canceled because of budget cuts.
Private Donors, Including Mayor, Save January Regents (August 3, 2011) Although praiseworthy as a matter of personal philanthropy, the donation by the mayor and the others, whose names were not disclosed, is highly distressing as a matter of public policy. It is disgraceful that essential components of our public education system now depend on the charitable impulses of wealthy citizens.
At least 23 states have made huge cuts to public education spending this year, and school districts are scrambling to find ways to cope. School foundations, parent-teacher organizations and local education funds supported by business groups and residents contribute at least $4 billion per year to help public schools throughout the country.
In New York City, families and philanthropies are asked to pay for classroom supplies and music and art lessons. In Lakeland, Fla., a church provided $5,000 worth of supplies for an elementary school’s resource room, and paid for math and English tutors. The board of the Los Angeles Unified School District voted in December to accept corporate sponsorships and to allow the placement of corporate logos on cafeteria walls and in ball fields.
Many schools that have already reduced hours, increased class sizes and eliminated electives are also now charging fees for workbooks, use of lab equipment and other basic instructional materials; extracurricular activities long considered essential are now available only to students who can afford them.
In Medina, Ohio, The Wall Street Journal reported, it now costs $660 for a child to play on a high school sports team, $200 to join the concert choir and $50 to act in the school play. High school students in Overland Park, Kan., pay a $120 “activity programming fee” and a $100 “learning resources fee.” In Naperville, Ill., they are charged textbook and workbook fees, even for basic requirements like English and French, according to The Chicago Tribune.
In some cases, students from impoverished backgrounds are exempted from these payments if the class is required, but must pay for Advanced Placement courses or sports and other extracurricular activities. If they can’t pay, they miss out.
Public education was built on the philosophy articulated by Horace Mann, the Massachusetts reformer who pioneered the Common School: a system “one and the same for both rich and poor” with “all citizens on the same footing of equality before the law of land.” Today, that vision of equality is in jeopardy.
As anti-union sentiment continues to spread, politicians may wrongly assume that education cutbacks mainly affect the salaries and benefits of teachers. In reality, it is the students who pay the dearest price. Some California districts have reduced the number of days in the school year; in Miami, 4,500 students will be deprived of after-school programs this year; Texas has cut pre-kindergarten programs for 100,000 children. The poor are, unsurprisingly, disproportionately affected: Pennsylvania’s education cuts amounted to $581 per student in the poorest 150 school districts, but only $214 per student in the wealthiest 150 districts.
Not every state will have a Bloomberg to step in, not every school has a P.T.A. with the resources to help out, and not every child has a family that can afford fees. Depending on private contributions is inequitable and unconstitutional; public financing should fully support public education.
Most state constitutions, in fact, guarantee all students a sound, basic public education. These constitutional rights cannot be put on hold, even in tough times. It is unconstitutional to call on parents to pay for textbooks and lab fees for required courses. And art, music, sports, basic educational support services and many extracurricular activities that promote learning, creativity and character are not luxuries; they, too, are essential features of a sound, basic education.
California acknowledged as much last December when it settled a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union challenging illegal school fees. Officials ordered school districts to halt the practice and to refund the fee money they had collected. While schools in California now must eliminate textbook and activity fees, affluent children whose parents can afford to reinstate teaching positions will continue to have more educational opportunities than their poorer counterparts.
A number of judges have begun to respond to the devastation in state education financing: in May, the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered Gov. Chris Christie and the Legislature to reinstate $500 million in funds for poor urban districts, and last month, a North Carolina judge blocked cuts that would have decimated financing for a statewide preschool program.
The courts are doing their job, but litigation is time-consuming and expensive. Politicians have a constitutional obligation to protect public education. They need to ensure that adequate public funds are available, and the people need to hold them accountable for doing so.
Michael A. Rebell is the executive director and Jessica R. Wolff is the policy director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/opinion/when-schools-depend-on-handouts.html?_r=1
By MICHAEL A. REBELL and JESSICA R. WOLFF
EARLIER this month, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced that he and five other wealthy individuals had raised $1.5 million to reinstate the January Regents exams, which New York State had canceled because of budget cuts.
Private Donors, Including Mayor, Save January Regents (August 3, 2011) Although praiseworthy as a matter of personal philanthropy, the donation by the mayor and the others, whose names were not disclosed, is highly distressing as a matter of public policy. It is disgraceful that essential components of our public education system now depend on the charitable impulses of wealthy citizens.
At least 23 states have made huge cuts to public education spending this year, and school districts are scrambling to find ways to cope. School foundations, parent-teacher organizations and local education funds supported by business groups and residents contribute at least $4 billion per year to help public schools throughout the country.
In New York City, families and philanthropies are asked to pay for classroom supplies and music and art lessons. In Lakeland, Fla., a church provided $5,000 worth of supplies for an elementary school’s resource room, and paid for math and English tutors. The board of the Los Angeles Unified School District voted in December to accept corporate sponsorships and to allow the placement of corporate logos on cafeteria walls and in ball fields.
Many schools that have already reduced hours, increased class sizes and eliminated electives are also now charging fees for workbooks, use of lab equipment and other basic instructional materials; extracurricular activities long considered essential are now available only to students who can afford them.
In Medina, Ohio, The Wall Street Journal reported, it now costs $660 for a child to play on a high school sports team, $200 to join the concert choir and $50 to act in the school play. High school students in Overland Park, Kan., pay a $120 “activity programming fee” and a $100 “learning resources fee.” In Naperville, Ill., they are charged textbook and workbook fees, even for basic requirements like English and French, according to The Chicago Tribune.
In some cases, students from impoverished backgrounds are exempted from these payments if the class is required, but must pay for Advanced Placement courses or sports and other extracurricular activities. If they can’t pay, they miss out.
Public education was built on the philosophy articulated by Horace Mann, the Massachusetts reformer who pioneered the Common School: a system “one and the same for both rich and poor” with “all citizens on the same footing of equality before the law of land.” Today, that vision of equality is in jeopardy.
As anti-union sentiment continues to spread, politicians may wrongly assume that education cutbacks mainly affect the salaries and benefits of teachers. In reality, it is the students who pay the dearest price. Some California districts have reduced the number of days in the school year; in Miami, 4,500 students will be deprived of after-school programs this year; Texas has cut pre-kindergarten programs for 100,000 children. The poor are, unsurprisingly, disproportionately affected: Pennsylvania’s education cuts amounted to $581 per student in the poorest 150 school districts, but only $214 per student in the wealthiest 150 districts.
Not every state will have a Bloomberg to step in, not every school has a P.T.A. with the resources to help out, and not every child has a family that can afford fees. Depending on private contributions is inequitable and unconstitutional; public financing should fully support public education.
Most state constitutions, in fact, guarantee all students a sound, basic public education. These constitutional rights cannot be put on hold, even in tough times. It is unconstitutional to call on parents to pay for textbooks and lab fees for required courses. And art, music, sports, basic educational support services and many extracurricular activities that promote learning, creativity and character are not luxuries; they, too, are essential features of a sound, basic education.
California acknowledged as much last December when it settled a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union challenging illegal school fees. Officials ordered school districts to halt the practice and to refund the fee money they had collected. While schools in California now must eliminate textbook and activity fees, affluent children whose parents can afford to reinstate teaching positions will continue to have more educational opportunities than their poorer counterparts.
A number of judges have begun to respond to the devastation in state education financing: in May, the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered Gov. Chris Christie and the Legislature to reinstate $500 million in funds for poor urban districts, and last month, a North Carolina judge blocked cuts that would have decimated financing for a statewide preschool program.
The courts are doing their job, but litigation is time-consuming and expensive. Politicians have a constitutional obligation to protect public education. They need to ensure that adequate public funds are available, and the people need to hold them accountable for doing so.
Michael A. Rebell is the executive director and Jessica R. Wolff is the policy director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/opinion/when-schools-depend-on-handouts.html?_r=1
Is cheating on standardized tests here to stay
From the NPR
by Larry Abramson
Cheating scandals have rocked a number of school districts across the country this year. The publicity is pushing states to look for better ways to detect and prevent tampering with the test results, and some say constant vigilance is required to guard against cheating.
What happened in Atlanta is hard to imagine: Dozens of administrators and teachers apparently conspired to change answers on standardized tests. When those tests showed big gains, school leaders took the credit. But they were caught, in part, because Georgia investigators have been looking for signs of tampering for years.
Kathleen Mathers, who runs Georgia's Office of Student Achievement, says her state is in its third year of using erasure analysis of all elementary and middle school tests. Mathers says that concerns about testing led the state to ask test designer McGraw Hill to look extra closely at those No. 2 pencil marks.
She says the company's scanners can differentiate "between an answer choice that is definitely made and intended to be the answer choice, and answer choices that were previously made and then erased."
Mathers says that analysis cost the state about $27,000 — a small fraction of its testing budget. The data established that in many schools there were just too many switches from wrong to right.
Hard To Detect
That information alone is just the start, says testing forensics expert John Fremer. "The best thing to do is looking for unusual agreement among test takers."
Fremer runs Caveon Test Security, which has helped Atlanta and Washington, D.C., investigate suspicious incidents. He says if every student is getting the same answer right or the same answer wrong, then something might be going on.
No Child Left Behind required testing to be rolled out at each of the grades between grades three and eight. But with this it meant that we had to distribute the resources for testing across more grades.
- Cary Miron, professor at Western Michigan University
Investigators also look for unusual spikes in test scores, he says. Sometimes there's a good explanation for that improvement. Fremer says cheating is hard to detect because despite recent scandals, it is still very rare.
"Only 1 or 2 percent, maybe, of educators don't follow the rules," he says.
Pennsylvania is currently looking into patterns of unusual erasures or jumps in achievement.
But not every state follows up on that initial erasure analysis as vigorously as Georgia did. That probe involved involved dozens of investigators across state government.
Some say educators tampering with kids' futures may actually become more common.
The Consequences Of Not Passing
Professor Gary Miron of Western Michigan University says this problem is part of the troubled legacy of No Child Left Behind. The law said test scores would determine the fate of entire schools.
Schools that fail can be shut down, and bad test scores can also jeopardize funding. And now a growing number of states are planning to evaluate teachers based in part on test scores.
Miron says before No Child Left Behind, schools tested less often and more carefully.
"No Child Left Behind required testing to be rolled out at each of the grades between grades three and eight," he says. "But with this it meant that we had to distribute the resources for testing across more grades."
Miron says that leaves less money to check for tampering.
But others in the field say scrutiny of test results costs only a fraction of testing budgets and should be considered part of the cost of doing business.
Fremer of Caveon Test Security has built a business on this assumption.
"You're not going to be able to run a state testing program without doing comprehensive analyses of the results," he says. "I mean that ship has already sailed."
Most states have joined in an effort to establish a common national curriculum and, eventually, a common set of tests.
They hope to administer most tests by computer, which could make it tougher to tamper with results or force investigators to develop a new set of tools to find and stop cheating on standardized tests
http://www.npr.org/2011/08/28/139941424/states-search-for-answers-to-cheating-scandals?ft=1&f=1013
by Larry Abramson
Cheating scandals have rocked a number of school districts across the country this year. The publicity is pushing states to look for better ways to detect and prevent tampering with the test results, and some say constant vigilance is required to guard against cheating.
What happened in Atlanta is hard to imagine: Dozens of administrators and teachers apparently conspired to change answers on standardized tests. When those tests showed big gains, school leaders took the credit. But they were caught, in part, because Georgia investigators have been looking for signs of tampering for years.
Kathleen Mathers, who runs Georgia's Office of Student Achievement, says her state is in its third year of using erasure analysis of all elementary and middle school tests. Mathers says that concerns about testing led the state to ask test designer McGraw Hill to look extra closely at those No. 2 pencil marks.
She says the company's scanners can differentiate "between an answer choice that is definitely made and intended to be the answer choice, and answer choices that were previously made and then erased."
Mathers says that analysis cost the state about $27,000 — a small fraction of its testing budget. The data established that in many schools there were just too many switches from wrong to right.
Hard To Detect
That information alone is just the start, says testing forensics expert John Fremer. "The best thing to do is looking for unusual agreement among test takers."
Fremer runs Caveon Test Security, which has helped Atlanta and Washington, D.C., investigate suspicious incidents. He says if every student is getting the same answer right or the same answer wrong, then something might be going on.
No Child Left Behind required testing to be rolled out at each of the grades between grades three and eight. But with this it meant that we had to distribute the resources for testing across more grades.
- Cary Miron, professor at Western Michigan University
Investigators also look for unusual spikes in test scores, he says. Sometimes there's a good explanation for that improvement. Fremer says cheating is hard to detect because despite recent scandals, it is still very rare.
"Only 1 or 2 percent, maybe, of educators don't follow the rules," he says.
Pennsylvania is currently looking into patterns of unusual erasures or jumps in achievement.
But not every state follows up on that initial erasure analysis as vigorously as Georgia did. That probe involved involved dozens of investigators across state government.
Some say educators tampering with kids' futures may actually become more common.
The Consequences Of Not Passing
Professor Gary Miron of Western Michigan University says this problem is part of the troubled legacy of No Child Left Behind. The law said test scores would determine the fate of entire schools.
Schools that fail can be shut down, and bad test scores can also jeopardize funding. And now a growing number of states are planning to evaluate teachers based in part on test scores.
Miron says before No Child Left Behind, schools tested less often and more carefully.
"No Child Left Behind required testing to be rolled out at each of the grades between grades three and eight," he says. "But with this it meant that we had to distribute the resources for testing across more grades."
Miron says that leaves less money to check for tampering.
But others in the field say scrutiny of test results costs only a fraction of testing budgets and should be considered part of the cost of doing business.
Fremer of Caveon Test Security has built a business on this assumption.
"You're not going to be able to run a state testing program without doing comprehensive analyses of the results," he says. "I mean that ship has already sailed."
Most states have joined in an effort to establish a common national curriculum and, eventually, a common set of tests.
They hope to administer most tests by computer, which could make it tougher to tamper with results or force investigators to develop a new set of tools to find and stop cheating on standardized tests
http://www.npr.org/2011/08/28/139941424/states-search-for-answers-to-cheating-scandals?ft=1&f=1013
How much and what type of math do we actualy need?
From the New York Times
Sol Garfunkel and David Mumford
There is widespread alarm in the United States about the state of our math education. The anxiety can be traced to the poor performance of American students on various international tests, and it is now embodied in George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind law, which requires public school students to pass standardized math tests by the year 2014 and punishes their schools or their teachers if they do not.
All this worry, however, is based on the assumption that there is a single established body of mathematical skills that everyone needs to know to be prepared for 21st century careers. This assumption is wrong. The truth is that different sets of math skills are useful for different careers, and our math education should be changed to reflect this fact.
Today, American high schools offer a sequence of algebra, geometry, more algebra, precalculus and calculus (or a "reform" version in which these topics are interwoven). This has been codified by the Common Core State Standards, recently adopted by more than 40 states. This highly abstract curriculum is simply not the best way to prepare a vast majority of high school students for life.
For instance, how often do most adults encounter a situation in which they need to solve a quadratic equation? Do they need to know what constitutes a "group of transformations" or a "complex number"? Of course professional mathematicians, physicists and engineers need to know all this, but most citizens would be better served by studying how mortgages are priced, how computers are programmed and how the statistical results of a medical trial are to be understood.
A math curriculum that focused on real-life problems would still expose students to the abstract tools of mathematics, especially the manipulation of unknown quantities. But there is a world of difference between teaching "pure" math, with no context, and teaching relevant problems that will lead students to appreciate how a mathematical formula models and clarifies real-world situations. The former is how algebra courses currently proceed — introducing the mysterious variable x, which many students struggle to understand. By contrast, a contextual approach, in the style of all working scientists, would introduce formulas using abbreviations for simple quantities — for instance, Einstein's famous equation E = mc², where E stands for energy, m for mass and c for the speed of light.
Imagine replacing the sequence of algebra, geometry and calculus with a sequence of finance, data and basic engineering. In the finance course, students would learn the exponential function, use formulas in spreadsheets and study the budgets of people, companies and governments. In the data course, students would gather their own data sets and learn how, in fields as diverse as sports and medicine, larger samples give better estimates of averages. In the basic engineering course, students would learn the workings of engines, sound waves, TV signals and computers. Science and math were originally discovered together, and they are best learned together now.
Traditionalists will object that the standard curriculum teaches valuable abstract reasoning, even if the specific skills acquired are not immediately useful in later life. A generation ago, traditionalists were also arguing that studying Latin, though it had no practical application, helped students develop unique linguistic skills. We believe that studying applied math, like learning living languages, provides both usable knowledge and abstract skills.
In math, what we need is "quantitative literacy," the ability to make quantitative connections whenever life requires (as when we are confronted with conflicting medical test results but need to decide whether to undergo a further procedure) and "mathematical modeling," the ability to move practically between everyday problems and mathematical formulations (as when we decide whether it is better to buy or lease a new car).
Parents, state education boards and colleges have a real choice. The traditional high school math sequence is not the only road to mathematical competence. It is true that our students' proficiency, measured by traditional standards, has fallen behind that of other countries' students, but we believe that the best way for the United States to compete globally is to strive for universal quantitative literacy: teaching topics that make sense to all students and can be used by them throughout their lives.
It is through real-life applications that mathematics emerged in the past, has flourished for centuries and connects to our culture now.
Sol Garfunkel is the executive director of the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications. David Mumford is an emeritus professor of mathematics at Brown.
http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/how-to-fix-our-math-education/1188212
Sol Garfunkel and David Mumford
There is widespread alarm in the United States about the state of our math education. The anxiety can be traced to the poor performance of American students on various international tests, and it is now embodied in George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind law, which requires public school students to pass standardized math tests by the year 2014 and punishes their schools or their teachers if they do not.
All this worry, however, is based on the assumption that there is a single established body of mathematical skills that everyone needs to know to be prepared for 21st century careers. This assumption is wrong. The truth is that different sets of math skills are useful for different careers, and our math education should be changed to reflect this fact.
Today, American high schools offer a sequence of algebra, geometry, more algebra, precalculus and calculus (or a "reform" version in which these topics are interwoven). This has been codified by the Common Core State Standards, recently adopted by more than 40 states. This highly abstract curriculum is simply not the best way to prepare a vast majority of high school students for life.
For instance, how often do most adults encounter a situation in which they need to solve a quadratic equation? Do they need to know what constitutes a "group of transformations" or a "complex number"? Of course professional mathematicians, physicists and engineers need to know all this, but most citizens would be better served by studying how mortgages are priced, how computers are programmed and how the statistical results of a medical trial are to be understood.
A math curriculum that focused on real-life problems would still expose students to the abstract tools of mathematics, especially the manipulation of unknown quantities. But there is a world of difference between teaching "pure" math, with no context, and teaching relevant problems that will lead students to appreciate how a mathematical formula models and clarifies real-world situations. The former is how algebra courses currently proceed — introducing the mysterious variable x, which many students struggle to understand. By contrast, a contextual approach, in the style of all working scientists, would introduce formulas using abbreviations for simple quantities — for instance, Einstein's famous equation E = mc², where E stands for energy, m for mass and c for the speed of light.
Imagine replacing the sequence of algebra, geometry and calculus with a sequence of finance, data and basic engineering. In the finance course, students would learn the exponential function, use formulas in spreadsheets and study the budgets of people, companies and governments. In the data course, students would gather their own data sets and learn how, in fields as diverse as sports and medicine, larger samples give better estimates of averages. In the basic engineering course, students would learn the workings of engines, sound waves, TV signals and computers. Science and math were originally discovered together, and they are best learned together now.
Traditionalists will object that the standard curriculum teaches valuable abstract reasoning, even if the specific skills acquired are not immediately useful in later life. A generation ago, traditionalists were also arguing that studying Latin, though it had no practical application, helped students develop unique linguistic skills. We believe that studying applied math, like learning living languages, provides both usable knowledge and abstract skills.
In math, what we need is "quantitative literacy," the ability to make quantitative connections whenever life requires (as when we are confronted with conflicting medical test results but need to decide whether to undergo a further procedure) and "mathematical modeling," the ability to move practically between everyday problems and mathematical formulations (as when we decide whether it is better to buy or lease a new car).
Parents, state education boards and colleges have a real choice. The traditional high school math sequence is not the only road to mathematical competence. It is true that our students' proficiency, measured by traditional standards, has fallen behind that of other countries' students, but we believe that the best way for the United States to compete globally is to strive for universal quantitative literacy: teaching topics that make sense to all students and can be used by them throughout their lives.
It is through real-life applications that mathematics emerged in the past, has flourished for centuries and connects to our culture now.
Sol Garfunkel is the executive director of the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications. David Mumford is an emeritus professor of mathematics at Brown.
http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/how-to-fix-our-math-education/1188212
Sunday, August 28, 2011
America is number 1, in children living in poverty
Not quite but give us time. -cpg
From the Washington Posts Answer Sheet
By Larry Cuban
If there is one drumroll that most Americans recognize it is the familiar chord reformers have played for three decades: U.S. students score perform poorly compared to other countries in math, science, and other academic subjects. The familiar thrum drives the foot-tapping rhythm that reformers have used again and again to show that Shanghai, Seoul, Bangalore and Singapore graduates will out-innovate and out-compete U.S. students. So the drumbeat over international rankings drumbeat gets played repeatedly.
Largely ignored by many current reformers, however, is the 2010 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report: The Children Left Behind . Playing off the name of the law that President George W. Bush signed in 2002, the title refers to inequality among children in rich societies. The data in the UNICEF report challenge the assumptions President Bush and bipartisan policy elites believed were unassailable when passing the legislation. That is, public schools can reduce racial and economic inequality by extending opportunity to succeed in schools for those on the lower rungs of the social ladder. Immigrant and poor parents believe this in their bones and have acted on it for decades. So have a legion of school reformers.
Yet the report places the U.S. at or near the bottom of the list of 24 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a list composed of the world’s wealthiest nations. The report measures inequality in children’s health, educational achievement, housing and well-being.
The report examines three aspects of inequality: material well-being (household income, access to educational resources, and the amount of space in homes), educational achievement, and health. For each country, researchers asked:”‘how far behind are children being allowed to fall?”
“The question … requires a measure not of overall inequality but of inequality at the bottom end of the distribution. In other words, the metric used is not the distance between the top and the bottom but between the median and the bottom. The median level of child well-being – whether in material goods, educational outcomes, or level of health – represents what is considered normal in a given society and falling behind that median by more than a certain degree carries a risk of social exclusion.”
Thus, the report deals with the gap between the middle and the bottom. Such inequality, when it appears among rich nations, is — to some degree -- avoidable, the report says. After all there are nations that rank at the top — meaning they have reduced bottom-end inequality — while other wealthy nations at the very bottom have done little to reduce inequality. Policies, then, do matter.
Surely, the metrics used and the all-important standard of measuring the distance between the middle and the bottom in a rich nation (see p. 32 of report) leave room for debate as all international rankings do.
AFTERMATH OF REPORT
After the report made headlines across the globe and was mentioned in the U.S. press briefly in December 2010, it dropped from sight. Nary a mention by reform-minded venture capitalists, edu-preneurs, business roundtables, national leaders or other card-carrying members of the policy elite. Sure, I know that the national attention span is in the nano-second range but here are data that show the United States in the basement when it comes to reducing inequality among children in rich countries.
So often in the past, reformers select, polish, and spread evidence that blames public schools, especially, when international tests in science, math, and other subjects put the United States just above Bulgaria.
But when evidence comes to light that some wealthy nations have put policies in place to reduce “bottom end inequality” where children’s health, housing, and other indicators of poverty are concerned and the United States has not, that news hardly raised an eyebrow among determined American school reformers. Why?
With a history of putting onto schools the burden of solving serious national problems — a dysfunctional tic unique to the United States — it comes as no surprise that when TIMMS or PISA scores are released an earthquake of attention rushes through the media and blogosphere with aftershocks occurring for months. Reformers drag U.S. test scores into policy debates over charter schools, parental choice, pay-for-performance plans to show that these solutions are best.
However, when a report such as The Children Left Behind points to national social, economic, and political structures (e.g., federal tax policies, governmental action on poverty, health insurance for the uninsured) that would need to be altered to reduce inequalities, silence spreads among policy elites committed to their school reforms.
Trusting the “invisible hand” to guide market-driven solutions in U.S. schools and classrooms is what current school reformers do when they follow the equation: better teachers + better schools= growing economy and reduced inequality. The Children Left Behind metaphorically raises the middle finger of another hand less trusting of market-driven solutions.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/international-rankings-reformers-like-to-ignore/2011/08/27/gIQA6Gc6iJ_blog.html?wprss=answer-sheet
From the Washington Posts Answer Sheet
By Larry Cuban
If there is one drumroll that most Americans recognize it is the familiar chord reformers have played for three decades: U.S. students score perform poorly compared to other countries in math, science, and other academic subjects. The familiar thrum drives the foot-tapping rhythm that reformers have used again and again to show that Shanghai, Seoul, Bangalore and Singapore graduates will out-innovate and out-compete U.S. students. So the drumbeat over international rankings drumbeat gets played repeatedly.
Largely ignored by many current reformers, however, is the 2010 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report: The Children Left Behind . Playing off the name of the law that President George W. Bush signed in 2002, the title refers to inequality among children in rich societies. The data in the UNICEF report challenge the assumptions President Bush and bipartisan policy elites believed were unassailable when passing the legislation. That is, public schools can reduce racial and economic inequality by extending opportunity to succeed in schools for those on the lower rungs of the social ladder. Immigrant and poor parents believe this in their bones and have acted on it for decades. So have a legion of school reformers.
Yet the report places the U.S. at or near the bottom of the list of 24 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a list composed of the world’s wealthiest nations. The report measures inequality in children’s health, educational achievement, housing and well-being.
The report examines three aspects of inequality: material well-being (household income, access to educational resources, and the amount of space in homes), educational achievement, and health. For each country, researchers asked:”‘how far behind are children being allowed to fall?”
“The question … requires a measure not of overall inequality but of inequality at the bottom end of the distribution. In other words, the metric used is not the distance between the top and the bottom but between the median and the bottom. The median level of child well-being – whether in material goods, educational outcomes, or level of health – represents what is considered normal in a given society and falling behind that median by more than a certain degree carries a risk of social exclusion.”
Thus, the report deals with the gap between the middle and the bottom. Such inequality, when it appears among rich nations, is — to some degree -- avoidable, the report says. After all there are nations that rank at the top — meaning they have reduced bottom-end inequality — while other wealthy nations at the very bottom have done little to reduce inequality. Policies, then, do matter.
Surely, the metrics used and the all-important standard of measuring the distance between the middle and the bottom in a rich nation (see p. 32 of report) leave room for debate as all international rankings do.
AFTERMATH OF REPORT
After the report made headlines across the globe and was mentioned in the U.S. press briefly in December 2010, it dropped from sight. Nary a mention by reform-minded venture capitalists, edu-preneurs, business roundtables, national leaders or other card-carrying members of the policy elite. Sure, I know that the national attention span is in the nano-second range but here are data that show the United States in the basement when it comes to reducing inequality among children in rich countries.
So often in the past, reformers select, polish, and spread evidence that blames public schools, especially, when international tests in science, math, and other subjects put the United States just above Bulgaria.
But when evidence comes to light that some wealthy nations have put policies in place to reduce “bottom end inequality” where children’s health, housing, and other indicators of poverty are concerned and the United States has not, that news hardly raised an eyebrow among determined American school reformers. Why?
With a history of putting onto schools the burden of solving serious national problems — a dysfunctional tic unique to the United States — it comes as no surprise that when TIMMS or PISA scores are released an earthquake of attention rushes through the media and blogosphere with aftershocks occurring for months. Reformers drag U.S. test scores into policy debates over charter schools, parental choice, pay-for-performance plans to show that these solutions are best.
However, when a report such as The Children Left Behind points to national social, economic, and political structures (e.g., federal tax policies, governmental action on poverty, health insurance for the uninsured) that would need to be altered to reduce inequalities, silence spreads among policy elites committed to their school reforms.
Trusting the “invisible hand” to guide market-driven solutions in U.S. schools and classrooms is what current school reformers do when they follow the equation: better teachers + better schools= growing economy and reduced inequality. The Children Left Behind metaphorically raises the middle finger of another hand less trusting of market-driven solutions.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/international-rankings-reformers-like-to-ignore/2011/08/27/gIQA6Gc6iJ_blog.html?wprss=answer-sheet
Saturday, August 27, 2011
What questions did the Times Union ask Superintendent Pratt-Dannals
The superintendent met with the Times Union’s editorial board and reportedly they talked about a lot of issues.
The Times Union in recent years has been pro status quo and many times has written that Pratt Dannals is the right superintendent to lead us to a brighter education future. Since this is the case I wonder if they asked him tough questions or just lobbed softball after softball in his direction.
If they asked him any questions of substance I hope they asked him this one: How do so many kids arrive to high school without the academic skills (many also arrive without discipline and a work ethic too) they need to be successful.
He answers that one question and we fix that problem then our schools are bound to improve.
The Times Union in recent years has been pro status quo and many times has written that Pratt Dannals is the right superintendent to lead us to a brighter education future. Since this is the case I wonder if they asked him tough questions or just lobbed softball after softball in his direction.
If they asked him any questions of substance I hope they asked him this one: How do so many kids arrive to high school without the academic skills (many also arrive without discipline and a work ethic too) they need to be successful.
He answers that one question and we fix that problem then our schools are bound to improve.
If only unions were the problem in education
From Reuters
By Deborah Meier
Reuters invited leading educators to reply to Steven Brill’s op-ed on the school reform deniers.
As I read Brill’s opening paragraphs I was cheering. Aha, he’s going to apologize for his New Yorker attack on the teacher unions! He’s going to acknowledge the difficulty of finding honest data for his students to use when it comes to education.
I’ve become such a habitual skeptic about virtually all school data for over 30 years. But democracy depends on us trusting some common sources of data. Yet, Brill’s attack on teachers and unions, and his defense of the new “reformers,” rests largely on anecdotes.
Yes, like doctors, lawyers or bankers, teachers need to pool their resources to protect their collective interests as others do as well. The AFT and NEA are their vehicle for doing this. But their collective self-interests often overlap with what’s good for students.
Now, a response to just a few of Brill’s points:
1. Rubber Rooms. I happen to know some terrific teachers and principals who were sent to the Rubber Room. They left 30-40 years of extraordinary work in despair and dishonor. It wasn’t the union that created the Rubber Room—but former schools chancellor Joel Klein. The fact that many never get charged with any crime, much less given the opportunity for a hearing, is not the union’s fault either. Brill might acknowledge that the contract was created by two groups, and that both the original decision to remove the teacher and the subsequent investigation and final appeal are part of management’s responsibility. I don’t blame my lawyer if the prosecutor delays an investigation or hearing.
But should they be “sleeping, playing board games, chatting” for their $85,000 a year? Would Brill have been happier if they were reading Crime and Punishment? One friend of mine tried to get excused from the Rubber Room to volunteer in New Orleans after Katrina. She was not allowed.
2. Charter schools. What about the many charters that have been closed for financial irregularities? What happened to those kids? What about the Stanford University study that showed that only 17% were better than equivalent public schools, and 37% were worse?
3. Verbose contracts. Those long contracts are the result of two sides putting into print all their requirements. Like many of the reform friends I’ve spent 45 years working alongside, I think there are alternatives to these contracts. But only if we’re prepared to build trust. Adam Urbanski, president of the Rochester Teachers Union, negotiated a different kind of contract. Tom Payzant and the Boston Teachers Union have innovative contracts for Pilot Schools in Boston. Steve Phillips managed dozens of public schools for some of the most difficult urban kids in NYC in the ’80s. With support from the Annenberg Foundation, we developed a plan for a system reform offered to New York City in the early 90s—called Networks for School Renewal. It proposed ignoring everything but salary/benefits in the contract for willing schools that served 50,000 kids, in an effort to learn from scratch what is and is not needed. The union was our most devoted supporter but the plan was vetoed by management.
4. What’s “reform”? What Brill calls reform is precisely the kind of schooling I’ve spent a lifetime trying to change; one that resists research and ideology that has long claimed that most low-income kids need constant carrots and sticks, tasks that are broken down into teachable and testable bits, and a testing system that rests on just bubbling in “right” answers. Not the kind of schooling I was raised on, nor that Education Secretary Arne Duncan or President Obama think is good for their own children. The most obvious discovery I made when I began subbing in the early 1960s on Chicago’s southside was that there wasn’t anything “progressive” (ala Sidwell Friends or the Lab School) about the schools the least advantaged attended.
5. Charters. Most charters are far from breaking new territory. Compared to their neighbors they have fewer special education and non-English speakers. They often have more reduced vs. free-lunch kids, and their “turnover” rates of teachers and kids are high. But then NYC’s Klein-era reforms have introduced such cream-skimming into almost all his new small public schools! Fifth grade test-scores are now the SAT of junior and senior high school in NYC. Without a score of “3” or perhaps even “4” your options are few.
6. Seniority/LIFO/tenure. ”Last In First Out” is commonplace in many workplaces—with or without unions. It relates to loyalty and fair play. Firing people unfairly has not “plainly” become unnecessary in today’s modern age. Discrimination is still alive and probably in some form will always be. Where has Brill been living?
7 Poverty. The U.S. has the highest percentage of child poverty of all the industrialized countries and ranks at the bottom in all services for children, including schooling. Say that to yourself over and over.
We who have labored in education before Brill have long been adamant that our schools are not doing the job our society needs. It’s too bad he has little interest in the work the “deniers” have already put in as the original reformers.
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2011/08/22/if-only-the-unions-were-the-problem/
By Deborah Meier
Reuters invited leading educators to reply to Steven Brill’s op-ed on the school reform deniers.
As I read Brill’s opening paragraphs I was cheering. Aha, he’s going to apologize for his New Yorker attack on the teacher unions! He’s going to acknowledge the difficulty of finding honest data for his students to use when it comes to education.
I’ve become such a habitual skeptic about virtually all school data for over 30 years. But democracy depends on us trusting some common sources of data. Yet, Brill’s attack on teachers and unions, and his defense of the new “reformers,” rests largely on anecdotes.
Yes, like doctors, lawyers or bankers, teachers need to pool their resources to protect their collective interests as others do as well. The AFT and NEA are their vehicle for doing this. But their collective self-interests often overlap with what’s good for students.
Now, a response to just a few of Brill’s points:
1. Rubber Rooms. I happen to know some terrific teachers and principals who were sent to the Rubber Room. They left 30-40 years of extraordinary work in despair and dishonor. It wasn’t the union that created the Rubber Room—but former schools chancellor Joel Klein. The fact that many never get charged with any crime, much less given the opportunity for a hearing, is not the union’s fault either. Brill might acknowledge that the contract was created by two groups, and that both the original decision to remove the teacher and the subsequent investigation and final appeal are part of management’s responsibility. I don’t blame my lawyer if the prosecutor delays an investigation or hearing.
But should they be “sleeping, playing board games, chatting” for their $85,000 a year? Would Brill have been happier if they were reading Crime and Punishment? One friend of mine tried to get excused from the Rubber Room to volunteer in New Orleans after Katrina. She was not allowed.
2. Charter schools. What about the many charters that have been closed for financial irregularities? What happened to those kids? What about the Stanford University study that showed that only 17% were better than equivalent public schools, and 37% were worse?
3. Verbose contracts. Those long contracts are the result of two sides putting into print all their requirements. Like many of the reform friends I’ve spent 45 years working alongside, I think there are alternatives to these contracts. But only if we’re prepared to build trust. Adam Urbanski, president of the Rochester Teachers Union, negotiated a different kind of contract. Tom Payzant and the Boston Teachers Union have innovative contracts for Pilot Schools in Boston. Steve Phillips managed dozens of public schools for some of the most difficult urban kids in NYC in the ’80s. With support from the Annenberg Foundation, we developed a plan for a system reform offered to New York City in the early 90s—called Networks for School Renewal. It proposed ignoring everything but salary/benefits in the contract for willing schools that served 50,000 kids, in an effort to learn from scratch what is and is not needed. The union was our most devoted supporter but the plan was vetoed by management.
4. What’s “reform”? What Brill calls reform is precisely the kind of schooling I’ve spent a lifetime trying to change; one that resists research and ideology that has long claimed that most low-income kids need constant carrots and sticks, tasks that are broken down into teachable and testable bits, and a testing system that rests on just bubbling in “right” answers. Not the kind of schooling I was raised on, nor that Education Secretary Arne Duncan or President Obama think is good for their own children. The most obvious discovery I made when I began subbing in the early 1960s on Chicago’s southside was that there wasn’t anything “progressive” (ala Sidwell Friends or the Lab School) about the schools the least advantaged attended.
5. Charters. Most charters are far from breaking new territory. Compared to their neighbors they have fewer special education and non-English speakers. They often have more reduced vs. free-lunch kids, and their “turnover” rates of teachers and kids are high. But then NYC’s Klein-era reforms have introduced such cream-skimming into almost all his new small public schools! Fifth grade test-scores are now the SAT of junior and senior high school in NYC. Without a score of “3” or perhaps even “4” your options are few.
6. Seniority/LIFO/tenure. ”Last In First Out” is commonplace in many workplaces—with or without unions. It relates to loyalty and fair play. Firing people unfairly has not “plainly” become unnecessary in today’s modern age. Discrimination is still alive and probably in some form will always be. Where has Brill been living?
7 Poverty. The U.S. has the highest percentage of child poverty of all the industrialized countries and ranks at the bottom in all services for children, including schooling. Say that to yourself over and over.
We who have labored in education before Brill have long been adamant that our schools are not doing the job our society needs. It’s too bad he has little interest in the work the “deniers” have already put in as the original reformers.
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2011/08/22/if-only-the-unions-were-the-problem/
Friday, August 26, 2011
Is it time to give up on reading?
Many schools in the nation have given up on the teaching of cursive; the reason they give is because modern technology has made it passé. Well maybe because of the modern student reading has become passé too. I know that’s not going to be a popular thought but read along for a moment.
Our education leaders need to come to grips with the fact we don’t have the children they wish we had, but instead we have the children that we do and then should start planning accordingly. Today’s kids aren’t like the ones from just a generation ago. They have been raised on fast food, video games and MTV and not the MTV where they played music videos but the MTV that glorifies bad choices (The Real World, Jersey Shore, Teen Mom, etc).
Many kids today don’t read books to get information or heck even for fun anymore. They hit a few keystrokes and their computers take them to Google and Wikipedia. When they do read it is usually an article or a passage about whatever subject they are being forced to learn about and I use the word “force” on purpose.
These Ritalin popping kids who can barely sit through a ninety-minute movie don’t look at education as a way out or even as a way to do what they want. They look at school like it is hoops they have to jump through before they and three of their friends can get their own apartment working minimum wage jobs. They don’t look to the future unless the future is three o’clock and the dismissal bell rings, freeing them.
Society can’t keep looking to what worked in the past to find our solutions to the problems facing education today. Just a generation ago we had four channels and one was PBS and instead of having aliens, zombies and stolen cars spoon fed us, we had to go into our neighborhoods and use our imaginations to create them. Then when the street light came on we had to find them in books because we couldn’t find them in video games or in the hundreds of channels kids today have to choose from.
When I grew up thirty years ago I did so on a steady diet of comic books that led to a whole world of literature, Heinleim, Howard, and Adams among others but have you read comic books recently? They are written for guys that grew up reading them 30 years ago.
Who knows if I would have spent so much time at my desk reading if I had had the SYFI channel, the History Channel and the NFL network to watch on TV or Resident Evil, Grand Theft Auto and Metal Gear Solid to play?
We have to look at today’s kid and find today’s solution and we have to come to grips that reading may not be a big part of it; who a generation ago could have predicted society would give up on cursive writing.
I believe step one is to recognize that not every kid is going to go to college and we should be okay with that. Somewhere along the way we lost sight of the fact that the country needs tradesmen and a skilled workforce and that those are honorable and in many instances high paying jobs. A kid marginally interested in school thinks of the light at the end of the as a freight train rushing at them, especially if they have to gut out four more years of college to get a decent job.
What do you think would happen to our kids’ interest in school if we could promise them a job making 15-18 dollars an hour upon graduation, not “maybe” four years down the road, when they will most likely have tens of thousands of dollars in student debt as well? I think they would eat it up like they do their video games and MTV now.
There are all sorts of trade and skills programs we could be teaching kids in unison with their reading, writing and arithmetic. We could graduate nursing assistants, certified child care workers, plumber and carpenter apprentices, mechanics, chefs, kids with certificates in the computer or technology fields and cosmetologists among many others. You know all those positions that aren’t being outsourced to third world countries and emerging markets.
We make school irrelevant to kids. We make it such drudgery. We put the kids in one-size fits all curriculums and then we wonder why so many of them do so poorly. Do you know what the difference in curriculum between a student with a 130 IQ at Stanton who wants to be a doctor and a kid with an 80 IQ at anyone of our neighborhood schools who wants to drive a truck is? If you answered there is none then you win the prize. Unfortunately the neighborhood school kids prize is to spend four years in high school learning things they aren’t interested in and most likely will never use.
After kids are in the workforce for a while they can then decide if college is for them. I didn’t finish my degrees until I was thirty preferring to bounce around in special needs camps. It was only when I was passed over for a few jobs, I believe because of my lack of education that I became serious about school. However do you see what had to happen? Education had to become relevant for me; it had to make a difference in what I wanted to do.
I am not saying blow up the basics. I am saying for many what the basics have become is immaterial. Kids today have to take Algebra II and Chemistry whether those things will be applicable to what they want to do or not. There are so many jobs that don’t require a working knowledge of those subjects to be successful. Do you know what class I wish I had taken in high school that would have helped me out as an adult and here is a hint it wasn’t any math class. It was typing. What do most of you use more often, your keyboard or your advanced math skills?
We can also use the basics as carrots for the classes they like. You want to be a draftsman, okay we will need to see at least a C average in Algebra I (a genuine algebra I class, not the move on through classes that have replaced the legitimate classes of yesteryear). Want to take cosmetology classes, sure but I need to see those grades in English come up.
In a way kids are more sophisticated than they were a generation ago. I went to school and made an effort because I was told it would lead to a brighter future, but with jobs being shipped over seas, a nine plus percent unemployed rate, double that is we count the under employed; kids today buy that same line of thinking with a wink and a nod. They know somewhere inside that it isn’t true. They have a sinking feeling that unlike their parents with their grand parents, they aren’t going to have it better than mom and dad.
We don’t have to give up on reading but it’s time we took an approach to reading, an approach to education that serves the kids. Like how changing times have forced schools to take a different approach to writing in cursive, it’s probably time we lumped reading in along with it. Once again, we don’t have the kids we wish we did, we have the kids we do and it’s time we planned accordingly. It is time we came up with solutions that will make more of our kids successful even if that means they don’t go to college right away or ever at all. It’s time we had programs that gave all are kids a chance, even if they “don’t read so good”.
Our education leaders need to come to grips with the fact we don’t have the children they wish we had, but instead we have the children that we do and then should start planning accordingly. Today’s kids aren’t like the ones from just a generation ago. They have been raised on fast food, video games and MTV and not the MTV where they played music videos but the MTV that glorifies bad choices (The Real World, Jersey Shore, Teen Mom, etc).
Many kids today don’t read books to get information or heck even for fun anymore. They hit a few keystrokes and their computers take them to Google and Wikipedia. When they do read it is usually an article or a passage about whatever subject they are being forced to learn about and I use the word “force” on purpose.
These Ritalin popping kids who can barely sit through a ninety-minute movie don’t look at education as a way out or even as a way to do what they want. They look at school like it is hoops they have to jump through before they and three of their friends can get their own apartment working minimum wage jobs. They don’t look to the future unless the future is three o’clock and the dismissal bell rings, freeing them.
Society can’t keep looking to what worked in the past to find our solutions to the problems facing education today. Just a generation ago we had four channels and one was PBS and instead of having aliens, zombies and stolen cars spoon fed us, we had to go into our neighborhoods and use our imaginations to create them. Then when the street light came on we had to find them in books because we couldn’t find them in video games or in the hundreds of channels kids today have to choose from.
When I grew up thirty years ago I did so on a steady diet of comic books that led to a whole world of literature, Heinleim, Howard, and Adams among others but have you read comic books recently? They are written for guys that grew up reading them 30 years ago.
Who knows if I would have spent so much time at my desk reading if I had had the SYFI channel, the History Channel and the NFL network to watch on TV or Resident Evil, Grand Theft Auto and Metal Gear Solid to play?
We have to look at today’s kid and find today’s solution and we have to come to grips that reading may not be a big part of it; who a generation ago could have predicted society would give up on cursive writing.
I believe step one is to recognize that not every kid is going to go to college and we should be okay with that. Somewhere along the way we lost sight of the fact that the country needs tradesmen and a skilled workforce and that those are honorable and in many instances high paying jobs. A kid marginally interested in school thinks of the light at the end of the as a freight train rushing at them, especially if they have to gut out four more years of college to get a decent job.
What do you think would happen to our kids’ interest in school if we could promise them a job making 15-18 dollars an hour upon graduation, not “maybe” four years down the road, when they will most likely have tens of thousands of dollars in student debt as well? I think they would eat it up like they do their video games and MTV now.
There are all sorts of trade and skills programs we could be teaching kids in unison with their reading, writing and arithmetic. We could graduate nursing assistants, certified child care workers, plumber and carpenter apprentices, mechanics, chefs, kids with certificates in the computer or technology fields and cosmetologists among many others. You know all those positions that aren’t being outsourced to third world countries and emerging markets.
We make school irrelevant to kids. We make it such drudgery. We put the kids in one-size fits all curriculums and then we wonder why so many of them do so poorly. Do you know what the difference in curriculum between a student with a 130 IQ at Stanton who wants to be a doctor and a kid with an 80 IQ at anyone of our neighborhood schools who wants to drive a truck is? If you answered there is none then you win the prize. Unfortunately the neighborhood school kids prize is to spend four years in high school learning things they aren’t interested in and most likely will never use.
After kids are in the workforce for a while they can then decide if college is for them. I didn’t finish my degrees until I was thirty preferring to bounce around in special needs camps. It was only when I was passed over for a few jobs, I believe because of my lack of education that I became serious about school. However do you see what had to happen? Education had to become relevant for me; it had to make a difference in what I wanted to do.
I am not saying blow up the basics. I am saying for many what the basics have become is immaterial. Kids today have to take Algebra II and Chemistry whether those things will be applicable to what they want to do or not. There are so many jobs that don’t require a working knowledge of those subjects to be successful. Do you know what class I wish I had taken in high school that would have helped me out as an adult and here is a hint it wasn’t any math class. It was typing. What do most of you use more often, your keyboard or your advanced math skills?
We can also use the basics as carrots for the classes they like. You want to be a draftsman, okay we will need to see at least a C average in Algebra I (a genuine algebra I class, not the move on through classes that have replaced the legitimate classes of yesteryear). Want to take cosmetology classes, sure but I need to see those grades in English come up.
In a way kids are more sophisticated than they were a generation ago. I went to school and made an effort because I was told it would lead to a brighter future, but with jobs being shipped over seas, a nine plus percent unemployed rate, double that is we count the under employed; kids today buy that same line of thinking with a wink and a nod. They know somewhere inside that it isn’t true. They have a sinking feeling that unlike their parents with their grand parents, they aren’t going to have it better than mom and dad.
We don’t have to give up on reading but it’s time we took an approach to reading, an approach to education that serves the kids. Like how changing times have forced schools to take a different approach to writing in cursive, it’s probably time we lumped reading in along with it. Once again, we don’t have the kids we wish we did, we have the kids we do and it’s time we planned accordingly. It is time we came up with solutions that will make more of our kids successful even if that means they don’t go to college right away or ever at all. It’s time we had programs that gave all are kids a chance, even if they “don’t read so good”.
NCLB gets a dose of steroids, or How just how bad is Arne Duncan
From the Washington Post's Answer Sheet
By William J. Mathis
The Council of Chief State School Officers’ (CCSSO) plan for replacing the No Child Left Behind accountability system, hinted to be the recipe for states to win a waiver from the Education Department from the worst provisions of the law, not only retains the most ineffective pieces of NCLB but magnifies them. Contrary to all we have learned, it suggests to additional mandates and testing.
Americans are now well aware of at least four main drawbacks of NCLB, none of which are remedied in the CCSSO plan: (a) the huge inequities in funding and opportunities to learn (b) the neglect of out-of-school and environmental factors, (c) an inordinate and unbalanced emphasis on testing which leads to narrowed and dumb-downed curriculum, and (d) the ineffectiveness of turnaround strategies.
As longtime educator Larry Cuban has noted, despite 20 years of state-based and federal top-down accountability mandates, there is not a single example of a successful urban district reform generated by this type of scheme.
The CCSSO touches on a couple of useful and sound ideas, but the bulk of their plan signals that the authors have learned little from the past decade’s voluminous research. The chiefs’ roadmap provides “references” yet almost all of these can be characterized as speculative documents. Thus, major educational policy would again be determined by ideology rather than research and experience.
The CCSSO organizes its plan around nine principles and processes (its roadmap is organized differently):
1) College and Career Ready Standards
State curricular alignment to uniform national standards (the Common Core) with annual performance benchmarks would be required. Instead of all students reaching proficiency by 2014, all must be proficient on the new standards by graduation. Adequate Yearly Progress, known as AYP, is replaced with an “on-track” interim measure or “school effectiveness targets.” This simply continues the same flawed NCLB practice albeit flowered with new euphemisms. If the standards are truly “rigorous,” then — absent a substantial increase in resources and opportunities — all students in all groups will not come close to “success,” while Duncan’s “slow-moving train wreck” careens on toward its destiny.
2) Annual Determinations for Each School and District
This represents no real difference from the current model except a growth aspect is required. As naturally attractive as growth scores are to most everyone, the measurement limitations make this almost impossible. For example, the objectives at grade seven are not the same as the objectives at grade 8. Subtracting one from the other subtracts apples from oranges. To compound the problem, when it comes to testing higher order skills like reasoning and problem solving, the entire “standardized” system gets very unstandardized. Growth models can be very useful but they don’t have enough power to justify attaching high stakes consequences. As one prominent psychometrician wagged, “There are three ways to do growth scores and all of them are wrong.”
3) Focus on Student Outcomes
CCSSO suggests that more tests in more grades and subject areas are needed. Other measures would also be necessary (college entry, remediation rates, etc.). As reading and math tests narrow the curriculum, the chief’s solution is to expand testing to other curriculum areas.
This is probably the biggest conceptual fallacy in the chiefs’ plan. The previous system did not work, so doing more of it is not exactly a logical conclusion. We should, instead, look to areas of greater promise. Schools are not single-handedly responsible for or capable of over-coming all adverse conditions. Setting aside ideological proclamations, we have to face the fact that the differences in social capital is a deeply documented, incontrovertible and sober truth. Any plan with promise for success must simultaneously address social and school issues. The chiefs’ ignore this vast framework.
4) Continued Disaggregation of Sub-Groups
This principle calls for the continued break-out of scores by race, language status and poverty and that these sub-group scores continue to be part of the accountability process. Since all students must reach the new standards, the effect is no different from NCLB. In time, all schools fail.
Perhaps the greatest danger of this thinking is that it continues “the myth of the shining of the light.” That is, if we just shine the light on low scores, things will improve. We have been shining the light on poor sub-group performance for 10 years while we neglected to provide effective and sufficient resources and assistance to solve the problems. Illumination of problems, without providing solutions, may provide sustenance to the failure proclamation industry but it does nothing to solve learning problems.
5) Timely Reporting of Actionable and Accessible Data
This goal is laudable and necessary but has the ring of tokenism. The Institute of Education Sciences reports that the collection and use of data has little evidence of being an effective reform strategy. While additional “input data” and “returns on investment” information may represent new data collections and reporting burdens for schools and/or states, it is not at all clear as to how this will improve children’s learning.
6) Deeper Diagnostic Reviews
State summative tests, because they are designed to have the most power around the cut score, cannot provide useful diagnostics for teachers. They are general survey tests. “Deeper diagnostic reviews” would require the collection of more detailed assessment data. Increased reliance on standardized tests comes at the price of decreased attention to higher order skills, experiential learning and activities designed for advancing the common good. It’s also poor pedagogy. Such a narrow and singular definition of the purposes of education is basically incompatible with the needs of the twenty-first century.
7) Building School and District Capacity
While there would likely be broad consensus favoring increasing the capacity of schools, the roadmap interprets this point as increasing the precision of identifying schools. Specific recommendations are absent other than such phrases as “. . . hold providers of supports and interventions accountable. “ The report says states should be motivational and not just punitive, yet the focus of the section (pp32-33 of the roadmap) is top-down and directive. Students cannot be expected to learn more unless they are given greater opportunities to learn, and these opportunities depend on increasing school and district capacity. The chief’s plan falls well short on this criterion.
8) Targeting Low Performing Schools
Instead of NCLB’s progression through stages of increasing sanctions, the lowest scoring five percent (or more) of schools in each state will be subject to “significant interventions.” Sadly, a review of the literature about the current “turn-around” or intervention strategies shows a remarkable lack of success. Those hoping to find better intervention models will be disappointed. Instead of actions that help children by addressing the community and school needs in our most economically and socially marginalized communities, the emphasis is on changing governance and staffing.
9) Innovation and Continuous Improvement
Continuous improvement is laudable in most every enterprise. “Innovation” in our schools, however, has come to simply mean change, which can be either good or bad. It therefore requires a bit of caution. Moreover, when reform “churn” hits a school, the effects can be extremely disruptive to reforms that are just beginning to take root.
Sadly, the CCSSO plan does not demonstrate a command of the research literature, just as President Obama’s Blueprint for Reform never found a sound evidentiary footing. The chiefs would be well-served to review the recent National Academies report that finds no evidence that such high stakes, test-based models are successful. Accordingly, if this CCSSO plan is widely adopted, the evidence says it will, most likely, also be unsuccessful.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/no-child-left-behind-on-steroids/2011/08/25/gIQA92bzdJ_blog.html
By William J. Mathis
The Council of Chief State School Officers’ (CCSSO) plan for replacing the No Child Left Behind accountability system, hinted to be the recipe for states to win a waiver from the Education Department from the worst provisions of the law, not only retains the most ineffective pieces of NCLB but magnifies them. Contrary to all we have learned, it suggests to additional mandates and testing.
Americans are now well aware of at least four main drawbacks of NCLB, none of which are remedied in the CCSSO plan: (a) the huge inequities in funding and opportunities to learn (b) the neglect of out-of-school and environmental factors, (c) an inordinate and unbalanced emphasis on testing which leads to narrowed and dumb-downed curriculum, and (d) the ineffectiveness of turnaround strategies.
As longtime educator Larry Cuban has noted, despite 20 years of state-based and federal top-down accountability mandates, there is not a single example of a successful urban district reform generated by this type of scheme.
The CCSSO touches on a couple of useful and sound ideas, but the bulk of their plan signals that the authors have learned little from the past decade’s voluminous research. The chiefs’ roadmap provides “references” yet almost all of these can be characterized as speculative documents. Thus, major educational policy would again be determined by ideology rather than research and experience.
The CCSSO organizes its plan around nine principles and processes (its roadmap is organized differently):
1) College and Career Ready Standards
State curricular alignment to uniform national standards (the Common Core) with annual performance benchmarks would be required. Instead of all students reaching proficiency by 2014, all must be proficient on the new standards by graduation. Adequate Yearly Progress, known as AYP, is replaced with an “on-track” interim measure or “school effectiveness targets.” This simply continues the same flawed NCLB practice albeit flowered with new euphemisms. If the standards are truly “rigorous,” then — absent a substantial increase in resources and opportunities — all students in all groups will not come close to “success,” while Duncan’s “slow-moving train wreck” careens on toward its destiny.
2) Annual Determinations for Each School and District
This represents no real difference from the current model except a growth aspect is required. As naturally attractive as growth scores are to most everyone, the measurement limitations make this almost impossible. For example, the objectives at grade seven are not the same as the objectives at grade 8. Subtracting one from the other subtracts apples from oranges. To compound the problem, when it comes to testing higher order skills like reasoning and problem solving, the entire “standardized” system gets very unstandardized. Growth models can be very useful but they don’t have enough power to justify attaching high stakes consequences. As one prominent psychometrician wagged, “There are three ways to do growth scores and all of them are wrong.”
3) Focus on Student Outcomes
CCSSO suggests that more tests in more grades and subject areas are needed. Other measures would also be necessary (college entry, remediation rates, etc.). As reading and math tests narrow the curriculum, the chief’s solution is to expand testing to other curriculum areas.
This is probably the biggest conceptual fallacy in the chiefs’ plan. The previous system did not work, so doing more of it is not exactly a logical conclusion. We should, instead, look to areas of greater promise. Schools are not single-handedly responsible for or capable of over-coming all adverse conditions. Setting aside ideological proclamations, we have to face the fact that the differences in social capital is a deeply documented, incontrovertible and sober truth. Any plan with promise for success must simultaneously address social and school issues. The chiefs’ ignore this vast framework.
4) Continued Disaggregation of Sub-Groups
This principle calls for the continued break-out of scores by race, language status and poverty and that these sub-group scores continue to be part of the accountability process. Since all students must reach the new standards, the effect is no different from NCLB. In time, all schools fail.
Perhaps the greatest danger of this thinking is that it continues “the myth of the shining of the light.” That is, if we just shine the light on low scores, things will improve. We have been shining the light on poor sub-group performance for 10 years while we neglected to provide effective and sufficient resources and assistance to solve the problems. Illumination of problems, without providing solutions, may provide sustenance to the failure proclamation industry but it does nothing to solve learning problems.
5) Timely Reporting of Actionable and Accessible Data
This goal is laudable and necessary but has the ring of tokenism. The Institute of Education Sciences reports that the collection and use of data has little evidence of being an effective reform strategy. While additional “input data” and “returns on investment” information may represent new data collections and reporting burdens for schools and/or states, it is not at all clear as to how this will improve children’s learning.
6) Deeper Diagnostic Reviews
State summative tests, because they are designed to have the most power around the cut score, cannot provide useful diagnostics for teachers. They are general survey tests. “Deeper diagnostic reviews” would require the collection of more detailed assessment data. Increased reliance on standardized tests comes at the price of decreased attention to higher order skills, experiential learning and activities designed for advancing the common good. It’s also poor pedagogy. Such a narrow and singular definition of the purposes of education is basically incompatible with the needs of the twenty-first century.
7) Building School and District Capacity
While there would likely be broad consensus favoring increasing the capacity of schools, the roadmap interprets this point as increasing the precision of identifying schools. Specific recommendations are absent other than such phrases as “. . . hold providers of supports and interventions accountable. “ The report says states should be motivational and not just punitive, yet the focus of the section (pp32-33 of the roadmap) is top-down and directive. Students cannot be expected to learn more unless they are given greater opportunities to learn, and these opportunities depend on increasing school and district capacity. The chief’s plan falls well short on this criterion.
8) Targeting Low Performing Schools
Instead of NCLB’s progression through stages of increasing sanctions, the lowest scoring five percent (or more) of schools in each state will be subject to “significant interventions.” Sadly, a review of the literature about the current “turn-around” or intervention strategies shows a remarkable lack of success. Those hoping to find better intervention models will be disappointed. Instead of actions that help children by addressing the community and school needs in our most economically and socially marginalized communities, the emphasis is on changing governance and staffing.
9) Innovation and Continuous Improvement
Continuous improvement is laudable in most every enterprise. “Innovation” in our schools, however, has come to simply mean change, which can be either good or bad. It therefore requires a bit of caution. Moreover, when reform “churn” hits a school, the effects can be extremely disruptive to reforms that are just beginning to take root.
Sadly, the CCSSO plan does not demonstrate a command of the research literature, just as President Obama’s Blueprint for Reform never found a sound evidentiary footing. The chiefs would be well-served to review the recent National Academies report that finds no evidence that such high stakes, test-based models are successful. Accordingly, if this CCSSO plan is widely adopted, the evidence says it will, most likely, also be unsuccessful.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/no-child-left-behind-on-steroids/2011/08/25/gIQA92bzdJ_blog.html
Schools can't be run like a bussiness
Run it like a business seems to be the cry people outside of education both yell and try to sell. I wonder what business schools should it be run like? Should they be run like a bank or a mortgage company, probably not they have had their fair share of problems recently. What about like a car company or an international oil conglomerate, probably not either right as they have had their problems too. I recently read a statistic that said 20,000-business fail a month, which of those should we run education like? The truth is we can’t run a public school system like a business and even though it sounds good to some, saying it is impractical does a disservice to things that are truly impractical.
No shoes, no shirt, no service right? Well what about no school supplies no service? If I kicked out every kid who didn’t bring a pen or pencil to my class, some days I would have had an extra planning period. If I gave away one pencil or pen I gave away a thousand. And don’t get me talking about paper and books.
Businesses can fire employees that are don’t do their work or who sleep while at work. Schools can’t, if they did they would be getting rid of some of their best workers.
Businesses can fire employees and then get a restraining order against workers who threaten or throw things at the boss. Teachers are required to welcome them back after a brief time out.
Do businesses call disruptive and disrespectful employees parents and ask them to do something to get them under control? I didn’t think so.
As far as I know the winners of popularity contests don’t run most businesses either.
Now are their business strategies the school system can employ? Definitely. How about we don’t put teachers in nearly impossible situations and blame them when they don’t succeed. How about we foster creativity and autonomy and support our teachers when they are faced with other disrespectful and disruptive students.
We could follow our own rules as laid out in the code of conduct instead of ignoring it. We could also maximize our workforce by putting everyone in the classroom. Duval County literally has thousands of certificated employees who don’t work directly with students. Then how about over-time, wouldn’t it be nice for teachers to get paid for the hours they actually worked, though if we did that now schools would truly go broke.
Good businesses also have their best employees be managers instead of promoting friends or people that can pass a test and just because you can pass an Ed leadership class or two does not magically transform you into a leader. Good businesses also have a coherent and realistic plan; unfortunately all we have is a mission statement and it's not very realistic.
The closest business I can think of to teaching is being a bike builder, except teachers are suppose to build the bike while riding it with some of the pieces missing too, oh and more often than not it's raining too.
Schools shouldn’t be run like a business they should be run like what a loving parent would do if they had a very sick child. If the parent loved the child there isn’t anything they wouldn’t do, no stone would be left unturned, no bush would go unbeaten and no expense would be spared. They would do whatever in their power they could to help their child get better. They wouldn’t say, lets tackle this illness like a business. If they did they might cut their losses and move on.
No shoes, no shirt, no service right? Well what about no school supplies no service? If I kicked out every kid who didn’t bring a pen or pencil to my class, some days I would have had an extra planning period. If I gave away one pencil or pen I gave away a thousand. And don’t get me talking about paper and books.
Businesses can fire employees that are don’t do their work or who sleep while at work. Schools can’t, if they did they would be getting rid of some of their best workers.
Businesses can fire employees and then get a restraining order against workers who threaten or throw things at the boss. Teachers are required to welcome them back after a brief time out.
Do businesses call disruptive and disrespectful employees parents and ask them to do something to get them under control? I didn’t think so.
As far as I know the winners of popularity contests don’t run most businesses either.
Now are their business strategies the school system can employ? Definitely. How about we don’t put teachers in nearly impossible situations and blame them when they don’t succeed. How about we foster creativity and autonomy and support our teachers when they are faced with other disrespectful and disruptive students.
We could follow our own rules as laid out in the code of conduct instead of ignoring it. We could also maximize our workforce by putting everyone in the classroom. Duval County literally has thousands of certificated employees who don’t work directly with students. Then how about over-time, wouldn’t it be nice for teachers to get paid for the hours they actually worked, though if we did that now schools would truly go broke.
Good businesses also have their best employees be managers instead of promoting friends or people that can pass a test and just because you can pass an Ed leadership class or two does not magically transform you into a leader. Good businesses also have a coherent and realistic plan; unfortunately all we have is a mission statement and it's not very realistic.
The closest business I can think of to teaching is being a bike builder, except teachers are suppose to build the bike while riding it with some of the pieces missing too, oh and more often than not it's raining too.
Schools shouldn’t be run like a business they should be run like what a loving parent would do if they had a very sick child. If the parent loved the child there isn’t anything they wouldn’t do, no stone would be left unturned, no bush would go unbeaten and no expense would be spared. They would do whatever in their power they could to help their child get better. They wouldn’t say, lets tackle this illness like a business. If they did they might cut their losses and move on.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)