2016 Medley #3

No Evidence, Failure in Michigan, 
Diversity and Gifted Students, 
VAM, ADHD and DIBELS, Waltons

THERE'S NO EVIDENCE

We’re onto the phony education reformers: Charter school charlatans and faux reformers take it on the chin: After years of attacks on teachers and public education, Americans are catching up to the real story in our schools

If I were an optimist I would say that this article is a good sign...showing that the general public is finally catching on to the damage done by "reform" to America's public education. Perhaps it's because I live in the super-"reformist" state of Indiana – near the super-"reformist" states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, and the super-"reformist" city of Chicago – but I see continued, if not stronger inroads made by privatizers against a fully funded public education system. The attack is slowly killing public education...

...comments made by establishment presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will reverberate through the election in 2016. Specifically, at a town hall held in South Carolina, broadcast by C-SPAN, Clinton responded to a question about charter schools by saying, “Most charter schools, I don’t want to say every one, but most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids. Or if they do, they don’t keep them.” A week or so later, Clinton transgressed the status quo again by remarking, in a conversation with members of the American Federation of Teachers, “I have for a very long time also been against the idea that you tie teacher evaluation and even teacher pay to test outcomes. There’s no evidence. There’s no evidence.”

FAILURE IN MICHIGAN: DETROIT

Here are two versions of the same story...and both give the same information about a city which has abandoned its children. This is not just a problem for Detroit...it's a problem with our nation and is happening in other places as well. When will the nation as a whole understand that our future depends on the way we treat our children. Carl Sagan said,

What kind of a future do we build for the country if we raise all these kids as disadvantaged, as unable to cope with the society, as resentful for the injustice served up to them. This is stupid.

We are one of only three wealthy nations in the world who spend more money to educate the children of the wealthy than we do to educate the children of the poor.

How bad are conditions in Detroit public schools? This appalling.

The odorous smell of mold and mildew hits you like a brick wall when you step through the front doors at Spain Elementary-Middle School in Detroit.

I have been at Spain for 19 years, first as a first-grade teacher, then, after earning a master’s degree in counseling, as a school counselor. When I first started, it was a school any city would be proud to have in its district. Today, it’s the poster child for neglect and indifference to a quality teaching and learning environment for our 500 students. The gym is closed because half of the floor is buckled and the other half suffered so much rainwater damage from the dripping ceiling that it became covered with toxic black mold. Instead of professionally addressing the problem, a black tarp simply was placed over the entire area like a Band-Aid. That area of the school has been condemned.

The once beautiful pool sits empty because no one has come to \fix it. The playground is off-limits because a geyser of searing hot steam explodes out of the ground. What do our kids do for exercise with no gym, playground or pool? They walk or run in the halls. Seriously. Our pre-K through eighth graders move like mall walkers.

Exposed wires hang from missing ceiling tiles. Watermarks from leaks abound. Kids either sit in freezing classrooms with their coats on or strip off layers because of stifling heat.

How can you teach or learn in conditions like these?

Detroit Public Schools: Beyond a State of Emergency

Since 1999, the state has been “taking over” Detroit Public Schools. Since 2009, Detroit’s schools have been subject to a stream of emergency managers who move in for just under 18 months, do not answer to voters, and can basically do what they want without consequence.

FAILURE IN MICHIGAN: FLINT

This Is What Happens To Humans When They Are Exposed To Too Much Lead

Flint, Michigan has become ground zero for the battle against America's poor. Democracy was canceled, a state sponsored dictator was imposed upon the people, and, through neglect and shortsightedness the families of Flint were poisoned. The dictator, after doing his damage, has now moved to Detroit, to manage the public schools.

This isn't specifically about Flint...just about what happens when an entire city has been poisoned.

Infants and children exposed to lead may suffer in various ways, including delayed puberty, speech impairment, high blood pressure, hearing loss, decreased muscle and bone growth, kidney damage, and a weakened immune system. Breastfed infants are also at risk if there is lead in their mother’s bloodstreams.

Equally important, lead also affects children’s brains and nervous systems. Those exposed to lead at a young age may suffer from a coma, convulsions, or even death. Children who survive serious lead poisoning may be left with mental retardation and changes in behavior, like a shortened attention span or increased antisocial behavior.

Lead Exposure in Children

DIVERSITY IN TEACHER MAKEUP HELPS KIDS

Bright black students taught by black teachers are more likely to get into gifted-and-talented classrooms

Diversity in our teaching force is essential.

A better, quicker solution to reducing the racial gap in gifted classrooms, according to Grissom, is to test every child in the school system for giftedness, so that you’re not relying on subjective humans to decide whom to test. Education geeks call it “universal screening.”

Indeed, after Broward Country, Florida, adopted universal screening in 2005, the number of Hispanic students in gifted programs increased by 130 percent and the number of black students by 80 percent. Low-income students increased by 180 percent. But it proved expensive to test everyone, and the district stopped testing all children in 2011. The number of disadvantaged students in gifted classrooms fell back to pre-2005 levels...

People often say the solution to our education problems isn’t more money. But in this case, it might be.

VAM

Fact Sheet: Value-Added Measurement (VAM)

Thanks to Parents Across America for this well thought out and comprehensive information sheet about the evaluation of teachers using student test scores. VAM is built on junk-science and tries to put a number on something that can't be measured by numbers – the impact that a caring adult has on a child. It also doesn't even attempt to include other valuable aspects of teaching such as the ability to motivate and inspire students.

Now is the time to write to your state legislators and urge them to end this practice. If you're an Indiana resident you can find your legislators at iga.in.gov/legislative/2014/legislators/

The proliferation of high-stakes standardized tests has had many negative side effects. Overtesting has led to increased stress, a narrowed curriculum and widespread teaching to the test. It has caused students to lose interest in school and learning, driven excellent teachers from the profession and discouraged young people from pursuing teaching careers. It has fueled the school-to-prison pipeline, sparked cheating scandals, and diverted time, energy and resources from other educational goals. These negative effects have been especially evident in schools that serve low-income children of color. Even if VAM ratings could be calculated accurately, the limited information they provide is simply not worth the effort or the consequences.

MEMO FROM THE REAL WORLD

School Testing Makes My Daughter Feel Stupid

Here's a story from the mom of an ADHD and Learning Disabled child...and the damaging effect of testing. Specifically, the piece is about DIBELS, and how difficult it is for her child to focus and succeed. The child says "I'm stupid," a common response from students with learning challenges when they are faced with impossible tasks and tests.

At the end of the article the mom says, "DIBELS has affected my home life and my daughter’s self-confidence. I know that there are many benefits to conducting this test in schools." That's wrong. DIBELS is not a good test. Its benefit is that it's short and it provides numbers. Whether those numbers mean anything is questionable and it's still in wide usage.

DIBELS sounds like a disease, doesn’t it? It stands for Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills. It is one of North Carolina’s ways of testing our kids to make sure they meet the requirements for No Child Left Behind (NCLB). DIBELS is a computerized test, administered by a teacher to acquire a child’s knowledge in oral reading fluency, retell fluency, and word use fluency. Teachers hold a handheld device that records a student’s response to the content being assessed. Why would this test cause my daughter to feel like she is not smart, can’t read, doesn’t know how to write, and to hate school? It is a timed test that some adults would find stressful. DIBELS allots one minute to each section of the test. One minute? Give me a break. I can’t even pack a lunch in one minute, much less think about being tested on my knowledge.

WAL-MART ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

The Walton Billion Dollar Plan

My Medley wouldn't be complete without something from Curmudgucation's Peter Greene.

The last paragraph below shows Greene's insight into the "reform" movement. Treating school like a business, like Wal-Mart, for example, provides billions for those at the top, but "cheap mediocrity" for the rest of us.

If they were truly concerned about the well being of students, and improving schools, the Waltons would notice this cognitive dissonance. The fact that they don't implies either the conscious misuse of their economic power for more economic gain, or a lack of ability to comprehend what they are actually doing.

The thought was that more choices would generate more competition. Competition would catalyze systematic improvement.

Let's think about this for a second. Let's really think about whose theory this was. This was the Walton theory, the theory of people whose entire fortune is built on being hugely competitive, leading to several results, over and over-- the systemic destruction of most retailers in a community who aren't Wal-Mart. Nor have they achieved this by pursuing excellence-- raise your hand if you associate the Wal-Mart brand with excellence. No, the Wal-Mart brand is built on "broad mediocirty that's cheap and good enough for unwealthy people" and the very goal of their competitiveness has been to win the retail competition by eradicating other choices. Wal-Mart's business plan is not, "We will go into a community, compete by providing excellent products to the community, and when we're done, there will be a broad range of excellent choices among many retailers."

I continue to be gobsmacked that the Waltons, of all people, would imagine that school choice would spark competition that would lead to excellence, because these are people who seem to have a pretty good idea of how the free market works-- and the free market does not work in ways that go well with public education.

###

2015 Medley #15

Testing, Poverty, "Reform,"
Charters, Play, Gifted

TESTING

...from Diane Ravitch. Let your senator know that it's time to end the abusive, misuse and overuse of high stakes tests. Click the link in the text below to write to your senator.

As you probably know, No Child Left Behind saddled the schools with a heavy dose of annual testing from grades 3-8, and Race to the Top required states to use those test scores to evaluate teachers. Testing is out of control. The curriculum is narrowed, especially in schools that enroll low-income students, where the scores are lowest. Educators have cheated to save their jobs, and some lost their jobs, their reputations, and their freedom for cheating.

No high-performing nation in the world has annual testing or evaluates teachers by test scores.

The current revision of NCLB retains annual testing unfortunately. However, Senator Tester (ironic name) has written an amendment to change annual testing to grade span testing: once in elementary school, once in middle school, once in high school.

Learn here how to support his sensible proposal. Write your Senator now. There is no time to waste.

Those who say that annual tests are needed to protect children of color, children with special needs, and English language learners have not looked at the racist history of standardized tests. These are the children most likely to be on the bottom half of the normal curve that governs standardized tests. They are the very children most likely to be labeled and stigmatized by the tests. What children need most are reduced class sizes, a rich curriculum, experienced teachers, fully resourced schools, and the opportunity to learn. This is what they need, not more testing. A test is a measure, not the goal or purpose of education. And it is a flawed measure.

Opinion: Who’s Grading The Kids’ Standardized Tests?

The fact that required tests are high stakes makes everything worse. We're using inadequate and inappropriate assessments to determine the futures of children, teachers, and schools.

In Indiana, these test results form the basis for a letter grade for their school and their district. Schools’ reputations hang in the balance, along with funding.

Incredibly, the people grading these exams, which require more than simple multiple choice answers, are not testing experts, and may not even have a background in education.

Rather, they are $12 an hour temporary workers hired by testing corporations like CTB McGraw Hill, which operates Indiana’s test, and Pearson, which oversees Illinois’ Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC).

POVERTY

Poverty, family stress are thwarting student success, top teachers say

Research shows it...educators have been saying it for years...now, the best of the best are saying it: The problem with our schools is poverty, not "bad teachers," "failing schools," or unions.

Will anyone listen?

The greatest barriers to school success for K-12 students have little to do with anything that goes on in the classroom, according to the nation’s top teachers: It is family stress, followed by poverty, and learning and psychological problems.

Those were the factors named in a survey of the 2015 state Teachers of the Year, top educators selected annually in every U.S. state and jurisdictions such as the District of Columbia and Guam.

Why Do Poor Students Lag Behind Rich Students in Reading Development?

Various popular theories abound in attempting to answer this question. For the longest period of time, the parents were thought to be the problem. More recently, it is teachers of low-income children who have been identified as the problem. That is, teachers in high-poverty schools are either not as talented as teachers in suburban schools or teachers in high-poverty schools simply do not work as hard as teachers in suburban schools. This line of hypothesizing has led to schemes whereby all teachers will be paid (or retained in employment) only when their students make good progress with reading development.

The problem with these popular theories is that they have both been proven wrong by the evidence we already have available.

REFORM

Education “reform’s” big lie: The real reason the right has declared war on our public schools

The practice of excluding practicing K-12 educators from public education policy isn't new. From the first day on the job at the U.S. Department of Education, the nation's schools have been led by lawyers, politicians, and business tycoons. Jimmy Carter set the tone by appointing as the first Secretary of Education, Shirley Hufstedler, an attorney, judge, and college professor. Since then, only two Secretaries of Education, Terrell Bell and Rod Paige, have had experience at K-12 teaching, but none were practicing teachers when they were tapped for the position of Secretary.

It isn't like teachers haven't been talking about this for years. Finally, though, as evidenced by the mobilization of teachers in Chicago, Washington state, and elsewhere, educators' voices are loud enough so that the politicians can hear the sound of votes coming from the public schools...where 90% of America's children spend their educational years.

It's time voices of teachers are heard.

The current age of education reform can be traced to the landmark 1983 report A Nation at Risk, subtitled “The Imperative for Educational Reform.” Future dictionaries may mark this report as the turning point when the definition of reform changed from cause to a curse. In 1981 Ronald Reagan’s first Secretary of Education Terrel H. Bell appointed an 18-person commission to look into the state of US schools. He charged the commission with addressing “the widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” The commission included 12 administrators, 1 businessperson, 1 chemist, 1 physicist, 1 politician, 1 conservative activist, and 1 teacher. No students or recent graduates. No everyday parents. No representatives of parents’ organizations. No social workers, school psychologists, or guidance counselors. No representatives of teacher’s unions (God forbid). Just one practicing teacher and not a single academic expert on education.

It should come as no surprise that a commission dominated by administrators found that the problems of U.S. schools were mainly caused by lazy students and unaccountable teachers. Administrative incompetence was not on the agenda. Nor were poverty, inequality, and racial discrimination. A Nation at Risk began from the assumption that our public schools were failing. Of course our public schools were failing. Our public schools are always failing. No investigative panel has ever found that our public schools are succeeding. But if public schools have been failing for so long—if they were already failing in 1983 and have been failing ever since—then very few of us alive today could possibly have had a decent education. So who are we to offer solutions for fixing these failing schools? We are ourselves the products of the very failing schools we propose to fix.

Have We Wasted Over a Decade?

The crisis in education is not low test scores, "failing schools," "bad teachers," or any other "reformer" bogeyman. The crisis in education is privatization. American schools do good work and need to be improved not privatized.

...when poverty characteristics are taken into account, the accomplishment of US students and schools is even more impressive. Students in schools with between 10-25% of students eligible for free or reduced lunch scored 584, which is higher than the national average for top performing Singapore, a city state where roughly 1 in 10 households earns an income below the average monthly expenditure on basic needs and whose actual poverty rate may be higher. At the same time, United States students whose schools have 75% or more students qualifying for free or reduced lunch, scored 520, roughly the same as African American students, and “tied” with France, 18 places behind the U.S. average.

The PIRLS data tells us something that we’ve known for some time. United States testing data, much like United States educational funding, is tightly coupled with the poverty characteristics of the community tested. Dr. Stephen Krashen, Professor Emeritus at University of Southern California, concluded that the unspectacular scores on U.S. students on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) are largely attributable to our 21% child poverty rate and the impact that has on communities and individual children. PIRLS results tell a similar story, and the persistent connection between race and poverty in America similarly explains the score gap between African American students and other ethnic groups.

PRIVATIZATION: CHARTERS

Feds Spent $3.3 Billion Fueling Charter Schools but No One Knows What It's Really Bought

Lack of oversight for charter schools is a feature...not a bug. That's how they want it.

Charter scandals are getting more and more press, yet the U.S. Department of Education wants to keep pouring money into the charter industry with no additional safeguards.

Despite the huge sums spent so far, the federal government maintains no comprehensive list of the charter schools that have received and spent these funds or even a full list of the private or quasi-public entities that have been approved by states to "authorize" charters that receive federal funds. And despite drawing repeated criticism from the Office of the Inspector General for suspected waste and inadequate financial controls within the federal Charter Schools Program - designed to create, expand, and replicate charter schools - the U.S. Department of Education (ED) is poised to increase its funding by 48% in FY 2016.

REAL EDUCATION: PLAY

Let the Kids Learn Through Play

Real educators understand that learning is more than just testing, paperwork, and data collection. Real learning happens through life.

...a growing group of scientists, education researchers and educators say there is little evidence that this approach improves long-term achievement; in fact, it may have the opposite effect, potentially slowing emotional and cognitive development, causing unnecessary stress and perhaps even souring kids’ desire to learn.

One expert I talked to recently, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a professor emerita of education at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., describes this trend as a “profound misunderstanding of how children learn.” She regularly tours schools, and sees younger students floundering to comprehend instruction: “I’ve seen it many, many times in many, many classrooms — kids being told to sit at a table and just copy letters. They don’t know what they’re doing. It’s heartbreaking.”

The stakes in this debate are considerable. As the skeptics of teacher-led early learning see it, that kind of education will fail to produce people who can discover and innovate, and will merely produce people who are likely to be passive consumers of information, followers rather than inventors. Which kind of citizen do we want for the 21st century?

REAL EDUCATION: GIFTED

The Common Core “Deep Learning” Message that All Students are Gifted is Wrong

Giftedness is an exceptionality, and by definition, that means that it's the "exception" not the rule. Every child has positive attributes that can be nurtured. Every child has abilities which can be developed, but not every child is gifted.

...not every child is gifted.

The myth that all students are gifted is wrong, and the idea that all children can blend together with just the right dose of deep learning will destroy any hope for special programming for gifted students in the future.

To blend students together implying that everyone can be gifted with deep learning is both naive and dangerous. It is not unheard of that students who are gifted, without identification, drop out of school and never have their qualities recognized.

Many gifted children currently languish in classrooms. They complete tasks that do nothing to help them achieve all they are capable of doing. Students who come from poverty are especially at risk, because their parents might not have the means or the insight to get their child tested. Gifted children might act out and appear to be anything but gifted!

~~~

Support Teachers of Conscience

The narrow pursuit of test results has sidelined education issues of enduring importance such as poverty, equity in school funding, school segregation, health and physical education, science, the arts, access to early childhood education, class size, and curriculum development. We have witnessed the erosion of teachers’ professional autonomy, a narrowing of curriculum, and classrooms saturated with “test score-raising” instructional practices that betray our understandings of child development and our commitment to educating for artistry and critical thinking. And so now we are faced with “a crisis of pedagogy”–teaching in a system that no longer resembles the democratic ideals or tolerates the critical thinking and critical decision-making that we hope to impart on the students we teach.

~~~

Stop the Testing Insanity!

~~~

Vermont State Board of Education: Statement and Resolution on Assessment and Accountability, Adopted August 19, 2014

~~~

~~~

~~~

2015 Medley #8

Privatization, the Common Good,
Double Standards

PRIVATIZATION: CHARTERS

Charter Schools: Fragmenting our Communities

Even those few good charter schools that exist are draining resources from public school systems, pitting neighbor against neighbor, and introducing unhealthy competition into public education. It's a Friedmanesque belief that competition will cure all the ills of society, but competition in public education is damaging, not helpful. In her speech to the Rally for Ritz, Cathy Fuentes-Rohwer, who also wrote the article below, said,

"These are not businesses, these are schools. Our children should not be in a competition for a quality education because no six year-old should be on the losing end for equal educational opportunity."

There must not be "winners" and "losers" in public education, but, by definition, that's what competition creates. It assumes that public schools and public school teachers only need to "try harder" to improve, and that's ridiculous as well as insulting. Public school teachers and public schools are not holding back; If anything, they are being held back. They're not hiding the best lessons because they are too lazy to use them. The vast majority of public schools and public educators are working their hardest to reach the students they have. To claim that public schools are failing because they aren't teaching students how to pass what are often inappropriate and inadequate assessments is disingenuous at best, and a flat-out lie at worst.

Grading schools and teachers using student test scores, which is what "reformsters" and privatizers do to justify competition, is an inappropriate use of testing, and political manipulation of public ignorance about testing. Higher test scores do not mean better schools. In most cases, higher test scores simply mean higher funding and higher neighborhood income. The true problem with public education in America is the same problem that permeates our entire social structure: poverty. The U.S. has the highest child poverty rate in the advanced world, yet we're too selfish, ignorant, or unmotivated to do anything about it.

Instead of creating competition between schools, we need to encourage collaboration (see Teacher Collaboration Gives Schools Better Results and Why collaboration is vital to creating effective schools). We need to fully fund local, public schools so that every child, even those whose parents don't know how to "game the choice system," are provided a free, appropriate, high quality public education just like our state constitution requires.

Our schools (as with our society) are what we make them. Accountability in a democracy is found in the voting booth. How many parents helped and voted on the school board races last fall? (A school board that has no bearing on the Project School as it is a separate entity). How many parents concerned about testing voted for legislators who reject the drive for data over the education of the whole child? How many voted for Hoosiers for Quality Education-funded candidates who are now supporting the expansion of vouchers, the redirecting of public school funding to charters, and the rewriting of the school funding formula to take funds from poor districts and give them to the wealthy ones?

The competition for resources in our own communities will continue as long as we are unwilling to embrace the idea that all children deserve adequately funded schools and equal educational opportunity. [emphasis added]

Are Charter Schools Todays Version of Sub Prime Mortgages?

From the YouTube description...

Mark Naison debunks Charter School mythology in this episode of Education News. Comparing the Charter School explosion to the subprime mortgage collapse, Naison reveals the startling failures and false promises of the Charter mystique.

The Charter School Accountability Agenda

Charter schools aren't going to go away just because I want them to, but given that charters are here to stay we ought to at least hold them to the same standards as true public schools. At the top of that list of standards are things like, full academic and fiscal accountability and the requirement that they provide appropriate services for and accept all children who choose to attend.

Require companies and organizations that manage charter schools to open board meetings to parents and the public, similar to public school board meetings.

Charter schools are cheating your kids: New report reveals massive fraud, mismanagement, abuse

This article is from 10 months ago...but that doesn't mean it's outdated. There are still many charters with very little public oversight even though they are using public funds.

While there are plenty of other troubling issues surrounding charter schools — from high rates of racial segregation, to their lackluster overall performance records, to questionable admission and expulsion practices — this report sets all those admittedly important issues aside to focus squarely on activity that appears it could be criminal, and arguably totally out of control. It does not even mention questions raised by sky-high salaries paid to some charter CEOs, such as 16 New York City charter school CEOs who earned more than the head of the city’s public school system in 2011-12. Crime, not greed, is the focus here.

WHAT ABOUT THE COMMON GOOD

Is Indiana Really Good for Business? What about the Common Good?

There's a new corollary (which I just came up with) to the old saying, "What's good for business is good for America." It's, "What supports the common good, is good for business." If we used public funds to make our cities and towns welcoming and comfortable places to live, our economy would grow. One way to do that would be to provide equitable, safe, and fully supported public schools for everyone.

How in the world have we become a place where veiled cruelty and lack of compassion are rewarded and where genuine disagreement is dismissed as dysfunction which needs to be punished? When did kindness and concern become replaced by mean spiritedness, condescension, and moronic talking points?

LOOKING FOR BLAME IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES

Lilly Endowment: Link Between Education Dysfunction and Poor Wellness

In America, instead of using our great wealth to help ourselves and grow our nation, we blame the victims and fight against one another. Our greatest enemies aren't religious extremists or socialists. The greatest enemies our nation faces are our selfishness, our immaturity, and our inability to come together to build the nation for the common good.

Just to clarify where we are so far:

High infant mortality rates – we blame the individual.
Low student achievement test scores – we blame the system.

CORPORATE DOUBLE STANDARD

Hoosiers for Quality Education pushes corporate ed 'reform' agenda with Bennett's help

There's a double standard at work here. A corporate funder for privatization of public education uses students to publicize their products.

H4QE recently held a corporate sponsored school choice “rally” at the Indiana Statehouse. Just as the group has done previously, hundreds of charter and private school students were bussed in to attend. Approximately 200 were in attendance and the vast majority were students.

There is no doubt that ISTA, Indiana PTA, NAACP and other coalition partners would be severely criticized had there been a concerted effort to bus in public school students to attend the public education rally a week prior. Just another example of the double-standard setting that occurs.

Wright teacher opens up about student letters

Here, those same corporate funders of privatization -- and the recipients of the campaign donations -- criticize a teacher whose students wrote letters to legislators. The criticism came without knowledge of the situation. They assumed that the class was manipulated into writing what they did and that children couldn't possibly have an opinion about their education. The teacher responds...

Dye stated, “My students didn’t slander anybody, they merely expressed their opinions based on what they know, what they feel, and what they found in their research.”
Dye continued, “While I may have been naive to think that my students’ letters and own words would be read in the spirit they were sent, I still believe this was a meaningful lesson for my students as they took ownership and were more fully engaged in their learning.”

~~~

Support Teachers of Conscience

The narrow pursuit of test results has sidelined education issues of enduring importance such as poverty, equity in school funding, school segregation, health and physical education, science, the arts, access to early childhood education, class size, and curriculum development. We have witnessed the erosion of teachers’ professional autonomy, a narrowing of curriculum, and classrooms saturated with “test score-raising” instructional practices that betray our understandings of child development and our commitment to educating for artistry and critical thinking. And so now we are faced with “a crisis of pedagogy”–teaching in a system that no longer resembles the democratic ideals or tolerates the critical thinking and critical decision-making that we hope to impart on the students we teach.

~~~

Stop the Testing Insanity!

~~~

Vermont State Board of Education: Statement and Resolution on Assessment and Accountability, Adopted August 19, 2014

~~~

~~~

~~~

2014 Medley #17

Corporate Religions, Teachers,
Gifted Education, Vouchers, Reading Wars,
Reformers Vs. Anti-Reformers

HOBBY LOBBY

Post-Hobby Lobby, Religious Orgs Want Exemption From LGBT Hiring Order

The Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision has opened the dam...

The day after the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby ruling, a group of religious leaders sent a letter to President Barack Obama asking that he exempt them from a forthcoming executive order that would prohibit federal contractors from discriminating against LGBT people.

What's next? A religious owned corporation refusing to hire Muslims or Jews based on their "theology?"

Citizens United proclaimed that corporations are people. Hobby Lobby proclaimed that corporations have religions. Is the next step giving corporations seats in state legislatures and the U.S. Congress? Oh...wait...never mind.

TEACHERS

The Cost Of Leaving Educators Off The Education Agenda

Imagine a medical convention without medical professionals. Imagine Spring Training without ball players...a fire safety symposium without fire-fighters...

Why is it so easy to discuss education in the U.S. without including educators? Is it any wonder that American teachers feel like their profession is not valued?

The latest such example came from the Center for American Progress who staged a panel recently on “A Roadmap for a Successful Transition to the Common Core in States and Districts.” Typical of these sorts of affairs, the panel consisted of two Beltway think tank execs and two former pols now firmly ensconced in the private sector. There wasn’t an actual practicing educator in sight.

The report bears out the superficial substance of the PR event, a view from 30,000 feet up with seemingly no input from practicing teachers and principals on the ground.

Keep in mind this is an effort to promote implementation – where the rubber really meets the road – with, supposedly, examples of teachers and administrators doing it more successfully. And it’s a “roadmap.” Yet there’s little if any evidence of input from the people actually driving on the road.

U.S. teachers have harder job than counterparts in industrialized world — survey

American teachers work in a national atmosphere of disrespect.

...the survey shows that American teachers today work harder under much more challenging conditions than teachers elsewhere in the industrialized world. They also receive less useful feedback, less helpful professional development, and have less time to collaborate to improve their work. Not surprisingly, two-thirds feel their profession is not valued by society — an indicator that OECD finds is ultimately related to student achievement.

Teachers’ Union President Fired Following Opposition to High-Stakes Testing

...Holyoke teachers elected Gus Morales as their union president in May on a platform that opposed education privatization. But on June 17, Morales, a middle school teacher, received a letter from his principal, Amy Fitzgerald, informing him that his employment had not been renewed.

“As I started speaking out, I was targeted with negative observations. One can infer that the negative observation was meant to quiet me. As long as I kept my mouth shut, everything was good, and then when I started speaking about what was happening to my students, I was let go,” says Morales, one of only a handful of Puerto Rican teachers in a school district that is nearly 80 percent Hispanic. [emphasis added]

THE READING WARS

The Reading Wars Continue: Scientific Literacy vs. Balanced Literacy

Real teachers don't teach programs; they teach children. When you actually teach children, observe their learning, sit beside them and shape their development, you can see clearly that learning to read and write is a combination of developing skill and fostering the will to read and write.

Skill and will are complementary aspects of literacy learning. Children begin with the will to learn, develop the skills as they receive instruction, and improve as they practice in real reading and writing situations under the guidance of the teacher. No program can achieve this for children. Only good teachers can.

VOUCHERS

New data shows just how much school districts lost due to Private School Vouchers

Voucher supporters still claim that vouchers don't hurt public schools...

New data obtained from the Indiana Department of Education reveals exactly how much funding local public school districts have lost to private school vouchers in their districts.

Three of the largest school systems in the state...coincidentally three school systems with high levels of poverty, lost the most.

1 Indianapolis Public Schools -$5,635,851.14
2 Fort Wayne Community Schools -$4,536,366.51
3 South Bend Community Schools -$3,035,150.49

My local school system, which continues to close schools due to budget cuts, lost more than half a million dollars.

East Allen County Schools -$553,958.57


REFORMERS VS. ANTI-REFORMERS

This morning's tweets from John Kuhn, ‏@johnkuhntx

John Kuhn defined "reformers" and "anti-reformers" on his twitter feed this morning.

JAY MATHEWS - "GIFTED EDUCATION CLASSES ARE A WASTE OF TIME"

Jay Mathews is an education writer for the Washington Post. Diane Ravitch says of him that,

...he changes his mind when the evidence changes. He gets enthusiastic about big ideas, but is willing to step back if he thinks he was wrong.

Last month he wrote an article on gifted education.

Four gifted writers share doubts about gifted education

Mathews' thesis is that "gifted education" is a waste of time.

I am among those people who think gifted education classes are usually a waste of time and money. It’s better to give super-bright kids a library card or a computer with a Web connection and get out of their way.

He has nothing with which to back this up so he qualifies his thesis with words like "usually" just in case someone has actual facts to dispute him.

Unfortunately, there is no research proving me wrong or right. So I have gone the unscientific route. I asked four original thinkers how much their schooling contributed to their success.

Here Mathews claims that, since he hasn't looked for any research, there must not be any...and again qualifies his thesis, this time admitting that it's "unscientific."

Now that he has protected himself from any reasonable rebuttal because he was 1) speaking of the "usual" gifted/talented education classes and 2) speaking "unscientifically," he can continue.

He interviews four fellow journalists who were "original" though only one of the four was ever in any "gifted" program. The other three were products of elite and expensive private schools.

[Two attended Mitt Romney's alma mater, the Cranbrook Schools in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. The other went to the Williston Northampton School in Easthampton, Massachusetts. Both have student teacher ratios of about 6:1]

While I have no doubt that the four people Mathews interviewed were very bright, I don't think that they represent and "average cross-section" of America's gifted children.

In order to give Mathews the opportunity to admit he's wrong based on evidence, here are some resources which I would recommend to him.

Meta-Analyses and Review of Research on Pull-Out Programs in Gifted Education

The authors investigated nine pull-out programs dealing with gifted students and determined that pull-out models...

...in gifted education have significant positive effects for the variables of achievement, critical thinking, and creativity.

Myths about Gifted Students

Mathews' article is essentially a rehash of the old myth that gifted students don't need any extra help...that they'll do fine on their own. We know, however, that this is not the case. In fact, for many students, gifted and otherwise, good schools are essential.

Would you send a star athlete to train for the Olympics without a coach? Gifted students need guidance from well-trained teachers who challenge and support them in order to fully develop their abilities. Many gifted students may be so far ahead of their same-age peers that they know more than half of the grade-level curriculum before the school year begins. Their resulting boredom and frustration can lead to low achievement, despondency, or unhealthy work habits. The role of the teacher is crucial for spotting and nurturing talents in school.

Meeting the Needs of Gifted Students: Differentiating Mathematics and Science Instruction

Just like other areas of education, one size does not fit all. Perhaps some gifted and talented students would benefit from a childhood of self-directed learning, however, that's not true for most.

When students are not presented with learning experiences that are appropriate for their abilities, they lose motivation and sometimes even their interest in learning and school. Brain research suggests that the brain will not maintain its level of development if students are not challenged.

~~~

Sign An Education Declaration to Rebuild America

All who envision a more just, progressive and fair society cannot ignore the battle for our nation’s educational future. Principals fighting for better schools, teachers fighting for better classrooms, students fighting for greater opportunities, parents fighting for a future worthy of their child’s promise: their fight is our fight. We must all join in.

~~~

Stop the Testing Insanity!

Sign the National Resolution on High Stakes Testing!

~~~

2011 Medley #14

Charters, Evaluations, Teacher Certification, Poverty's Influence on Education, Gifted Students, Economy

Should Schools Be Run for Profit?

Led by Patricia Levesque, an experienced lobbyist...the campaign has scored notable successes in the past year, promoting for-profit virtual charter schools...Levesque recommended that "reformers should 'spread' the unions thin 'by playing offense' with decoy legislation...allowing taxpayer dollars to go to religious schools by overturning the so-called Blaine Amendment, 'even if it doesn't pass ... to keep them busy on that front.' She also advised paycheck protection, a union-busting scheme, as well as a state-provided insurance program to encourage teachers to leave the union and a transparency law to force teachers unions to show additional information to the public. Needling the labor unions with all these bills, Levesque said, allows certain charter bills to fly 'under the radar.'"

Principals Protest Role of Testing in Evaluations

...President Obama and his signature education program, Race to the Top, along with John B. King Jr., the New York State commissioner of education, deserve credit for spurring what is believed to be the first principals’ revolt in history...658 principals around the state [NY] had signed a letter — 488 of them from Long Island, where the insurrection began — protesting the use of students’ test scores to evaluate teachers’ and principals’ performance.

Degrading Teacher Certification

...there's a big difference between knowing a subject well and knowing how to teach it well. For example, before Evan Hunter became famous as author of "The Blackboard Jungle," he taught English in a vocational high school in New York City. When asked in an interview years later why he quit after a short stint, he replied: "I was trying, but they weren't buying." Clearly, Hunter knew how to write, but that was not enough.

‘Broader, bolder’ strategy to ending poverty’s influence on education

To ignore [the reality of poverty] and make bold assertions that all children can achieve while doing nothing to address the outside-of-school challenges they face is neither fair nor a sound basis for developing public policy

Is giftedness always a gift?

the challenge for families and individual children can be immense. “Some bright kids will do well regardless: they are resilient. But for many more the lack of stimulation in school will actually lead to underachievement. A percentage will fall in with the mainstream and never perform to their ability. Another percentage will become so frustrated that they will withdraw altogether. They think the system is just not designed for them. Then you hear the comment, ‘Well, maybe she wasn’t that bright to begin with.’ It’s a terrible waste of potential.”

Neuroscience & The Classroom: Making Connections.

Insights drawn from neuroscience not only provide educators with a scientific basis for understanding some of the best practices in teaching, but also offer a new lens through which to look at the problems teachers grapple with every day. By gaining insights into how the brain works—and how students actually learn—teachers will be able to create their own solutions to the classroom challenges they face and improve their practice.

For Business, Golden Days; For Workers, the *Dross

For companies, these are boom times. For workers, the opposite is true...effective tax rates, both corporate and personal, are well below where they were during most of the post-World War II era.

*Dross n.
1: the scum that forms on the surface of molten metal
2: waste or foreign matter : impurity
3: something that is base, trivial, or inferior


From Merriam Webster Online Dictionary.

News and Commentary

The Rich and Powerful
Diane Ravitch talks about some issues in public education...and the fact that those opposed to public education include the richest people in the country (billionaires Eli Broad and Bill Gates, for example) and the most powerful people in the country (President Obama and Secretary of Ed Arne Duncan). Together the rich and powerful have decided that "school reform" = privatization.

Diane Ravitch: Schools for $Sale: Inquire at U.S. DOE

Central Falls Teachers Rehired
The Central Falls Teachers have overwhelmingly approved the tentative agreement between the teachers and the school board. President Obama says this is a good thing. He also said that firing them all was a good thing. Read the NYT report.
 
Going Back to School: Fired Staff is Rehired

Lead Poisoning in DPS
Does it surprise anyone that many low achieving children in the Detroit Public Schools have been affected by lead poisoning from living in poverty along with lead based paint.

Lead and Learning: Detroit Public Schools

Gifted Children are Stepchildren in School Reform
Walt Gardner makes the case for improving the education of our gifted children. With all the talk about diminishing the achievement gap between low income and middle class students, gifted children have been ignored. Their academic and social needs must be addressed as well.
 
Walt Gardner: Gifted Children are Stepchildren in School Reform

Charter School Scandals
The Rich-and-Powerful, in their quest for more money made on the backs of our children, have used charter schools as the main tool to combat "failing public schools" (read: public schools serving children in poverty). But do the charter schools work any better? The research to date indicates that they don't. Most investigations show that charters are no better or worse than public schools, though there is some research showing that, in general, charter schools are "failing" more than public schools. Here's a blog (which I have also added to my blog list at right) which deals with scandals in charter schools. We're wasting incredible amounts of money and jeopardizing the future of our children on the unproven "improvement" of charter schools...money which should be spent improving the public schools.

Charter School Scandals

Banned Book Week

September 26 through October 3 is Banned Book Week.



Catcher in the Rye . . . Harry Potter . . . Captain Underpants . . .
Every year, there are hundreds of attempts to remove books from schools and libraries. Celebrate YOUR freedom to read and right to choose your book during Banned Books Week.

Edison, Einstein, and Everyone else

Thomas Edison was intelligent and creative. Albert Einstein was brilliant and insightful. Both men left their fingerprint on western civilization through their contributions to science and society. Neither however, was predicted to have a great future when they were young. Einstein, for example, was a patent clerk repeatedly passed over for promotion because he was so "ordinary."

Both of these men were, in their younger days, low achievers. Both had trouble in school...and were considered less than capable by the adults who were charged with their education.

Why was it that they were missed? How did they get from being "below average," to their positions as leaders in the sciences?

I'm not an expert in either man's biography, and I'm not about to go on a big research mission just for a blog entry, but I can take a guess as to why no one realized how highly intelligent these two men were. The adults evaluating them did not understand the difference between ability and achievement.

The online version of the American Heritage Dictionary has the following definitions:

ABILITY: 1. The quality of being able to do something, especially the physical, mental, financial, or legal power to accomplish something.

ACHIEVEMENT: 1. The act of accomplishing or finishing. 2. Something accomplished successfully, especially by means of exertion, skill, practice, or perseverance.

Simply put, if you have ability you are capable of doing something...if you achieve, you do it.

They are not the same thing. In school, teachers talk of ability grouping when they mean achievement grouping. Putting kids in groups based upon their individual skill levels is grouping by achievement because, as Edison and Einstein proved, you can't determine one's ability by how well you do in school.

So what does this mean for practical use in the classroom? There are several things that educators need to be aware of

1. If a student is a low achiever it does not mean that he/she is of low ability.
2. Children of extreme high ability are entitled to be part of the programs for high ability students whether they are achieving or not.
3. High achievers, while most certainly of high ability, are not necessarily the highest ability students in a given classroom. Not all high achievers are gifted. Not all gifted students are high achievers.

Edison and Einstein were highly intelligent, yet were branded as failures at school. They were, however, able to persevere and eventually their lives were marked by great achievement. The damage done to students by our current test-crazed culture is that low achievers who have high ability are labeled failures and not all of them will be able to overcome the emotional and social impact of that label.

If we don't recognize students of ability no matter what their achievement, then the Einsteins and Edisons in our classrooms today may be silent in the future.

No Child Left Behind is leaving thousands of children behind!
Dismantle NCLB!
Sign the petition by clicking on the link on the side.
More than 21,000 signatures so far...