Money for Nothin'

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY

For the past two decades Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation have been dropping millions of dollars into education schemes the billionaire was sure would transform America's schools. Gates tried small schools, teacher incentives, and the Common Core to try to influence the achievement of public schools – all to no avail. (Further reading: Anthony Cody's, The Educator and the Oligarch: A Teacher Challenges the Gates Foundation)

The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation has invested millions of dollars into training managers to run school systems like businesses. They've put money into large scale teacher merit-pay experiments in school districts. They've supported legislation, including the so-called "Parent Trigger" which would allow a majority of a schools current parents to transfer a community owned public school to a for-profit charter company.

The Walton Family Foundation, run by America's wealthiest family, has invested millions of dollars in the privatization of public education. They have supported the creation and expansion of voucher programs in Indiana and other states.

The attempts to improve America's education by billionaires, none of whom have any training in education, have several things in common.

First, none of the schemes have been successful enough, or been replicable on a large enough scale to improve the country's public education system.

Second, the money used to fund the projects hasn't been sustainable. Some programs have failed when grants ended, because of the inability of the school systems to continue to pay for it.

Third, nearly all attempts to improve schools measure that improvement with standardized test scores which are often inadequate.

Fourth, America's low international test scores are often cited as the reason for the billionaires' interference in education. I have explained in detail why our students' average scores are lower on international tests in The Myth of America's Failing Public Schools.

Finally, none of the attempts by these wealthy families, even if we assume that they are altruistic in their desire to help children succeed, attack the root cause of low achievement in America. Poverty.

POVERTY: THE CRUX OF THE PROBLEM

The late Gerald Bracey wrote,

When people have said “poverty is no excuse,” my response has been, “Yes, you’re right. Poverty is not an excuse. It’s a condition. It’s like gravity. Gravity affects everything you do on the planet. So does poverty.”

David C. Berliner, professor and dean of the Mary Lou Fulton Institute and Graduate School of Education at Arizona State University, presented a brief titled, Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success. The report explains how improvements of schools are not enough to overcome the out-of-school factors faced by children who live in high poverty areas.

...the negative effects of many [out-of-school factors] are concentrated in the schools that serve poor and minority children and families. This increases the burden on these schools in such a way as to make broad reductions in the achievement gap nearly impossible.

MONEY FOR NOTHIN'

Silicon valley billionaires are dumping their tax write-offs into America's schools in the hopes, they say, of increasing test scores...and, if they can get a few bucks themselves in the process, so much the better.

The New York Times has a long article detailing ways that projects from tech entrepreneurs, like Netflix's Reed Hastings and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, are influencing America's schools. Once again they aren't focusing on the real problem.

The influx of money from rich technology-king benefactors has an influence on what teachers are teaching...and how they teach. After all, when a teacher or school gets a grant for a half million dollars in hardware and software they generally don't turn it down. The students, then, become the "de facto beta testers" for the billionaires' ideas.

But does it actually help?

The Silicon Valley Billionaires Remaking America’s Schools

Tech companies and their founders have been rolling out programs in America’s public schools with relatively few checks and balances, The New York Times found in interviews with more than 100 company executives, government officials, school administrators, researchers, teachers, parents and students.

“They have the power to change policy, but no corresponding check on that power,” said Megan Tompkins-Stange, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “It does subvert the democratic process.”

Furthermore, there is only limited research into whether the tech giants’ programs have actually improved students’ educational results.

Once again we have billionaires dumping money into schools, and often into privatization schemes, without regard to actual research and often without public oversight.

Technology can be a powerful educational tool, when used correctly. Where did Mark Zuckerberg get his teaching credentials? Who is determining how these programs are used? Who is monitoring them to see if they work? Will the money disappear if the programs fail?

ANOTHER WAY: A LESSON FOR THE BILLIONAIRES – FROM SOME MILLIONAIRES

A New Jersey family won a lottery of nearly a half billion dollars...guess where it's going?

Family in New Jersey Wins $429 Million Lottery, Uses Money to Fight Poverty

Last year, the Smith family in Trenton, New Jersey, won the $429 million Powerball lottery, and they planned to use all that money to help fight poverty. Pearlie Mae Smith and her seven children meant what they said at a press conference when they promised to give that money back to their community.

...They used the money to pay off bills and student loans before they put it back into their community with the Smith Family Foundation. “We want to fund programs that directly affect systems of poverty so we can help change the systems or change the dynamics that are causing people to be in poverty,” Harold Smith told NJ.com. “Rather than just helping them find food or give away food, we can make it so they now have the ability to obtain employment, get their proper education in order to be able to go out and get their own food.”

The foundation will work with the city in order to provide both long- and short-term grants for Trenton. [emphasis added]

Imagine if Gates, Broad, The Waltons, and the rest tried to improve education by donating their billions to help fight poverty, like the Smiths, in cooperation with municipalities and states. If we reduce poverty we can reduce the negative effects of out-of-school factors that get in the way of student achievement.

In his Southern Christian Leadership Conference Presidential Address, on August 16, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. said,

...we are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished.

🖥⌨️🖨

Random Quotes - September 2015

TEACHER SHORTAGE

Irony, Education Reform and Teacher Shortages

Is the current teacher shortage the result of a purposeful attempt to destroy the teaching profession? After years of teacher bashing fewer people are becoming teachers. States are opening up classrooms to untrained novices like 5-week trained graduates in TFA programs, and "professionals" who are content area specialists with no training in pedagogy (REPA III in Indiana). Fewer long-term professionals means less money spent on personnel. Less money spent on personnel means more profits when the same low standards are applied to privately owned charter schools and private/parochial schools. More profits...

Who would want to enter a profession which is constantly belittled, poorly paid, and set up to fail?

Two quotes from educator Russ Walsh...

From Russ Walsh

So as I understand the reform agenda, repeated attacks on the teaching profession is not the problem. The problem is, instead, the economy. We can expect to attract the best and brightest to a profession that has low pay, low esteem and low stability. That does not sound like any law of supply and demand that I read about.

After making the teaching profession as undesirable as possible we need to lower our standards for teachers in order to fill classroom shortages. Add Indiana to the states mentioned below.

Next, we can solve the teacher shortage by loosening certification requirements, so that anyone who can prove s/he is breathing can teach. This seems to be the direction that states like North Carolina and Kansas are going. As I understand this argument, it goes something like this, teachers and their unions are the problem in education, so let’s solve the problem by putting even less qualified, less knowledgeable people in the classroom. I have to wonder how many reformsters go to a doctor who is unlicensed and received five weeks of medical training in the summer.

TESTING

Duncan Still Oblivious

The buck gets passed...Duncan blames the states, the states blame the federal government, local school districts blame the states and the federal government.

The fact is that our students are tested to death in order to fill the bellies of test manufacturers.

Today, while talking to a teacher about testing, I was told that now, the third graders in our local school district only have to take the ISTEP (the state test given in two parts in February and April), IREAD-3 (given in March), and the NWEA (a computer based achievement test given two or three times a year depending on the school system).

The teacher gave me that information and from the tone of his voice he was relieved because this was actually less than third graders have had in the past. We have so over tested our students –– we're so used to massive amounts of testing –– that when we cut the amount of testing down to only three different tests in one year, taking approximately 15-20 hours of class time (not including test-prep and transition time) it almost seems reasonable.

But it's not reasonable. The tests are still misused and overused.

ISTEP is being misused to grade schools and teachers and has virtually no diagnostic benefit for teachers and students. IREAD-3 is being misused to punish students who struggle with reading by threatening them with retention. Why do we need IREAD-3 when ISTEP and NWEA also test reading achievement? Why do we need ISTEP when NWEA also tests math, reading, and language?

How many millions of dollars are schools in Indiana spending on testing which should be spent on student learning?

...and Duncan thinks that "no one is that focused on [test] scores?"

From Peter Greene

Meanwhile, [Duncan is] clueless. "No one is that focused on scores," he says, and I'm now thinking that he's not so much smoking something as shunting it directly into his brain. Because the kids who can't move on to Fourth Grade in some states because their scores were too low, or the schools that are being shut down or sucked dry by charters because their scores are too low, or the teachers whose professional evaluation is in some part set by BS Test scores-- I think all of those folks are pretty focused on scores. Plus, Duncan's comment sidesteps a big question-- why should anybody be focused on test scores at all?

WHO GETS TO CHOOSE?

Destroying Public Schools To "Save" Them

What happens when public schools are blamed for all the societal failures in the nation, and taxpayer funds are diverted to private charters and parochial schools?

From Jersey Jazzman

You shouldn't be surprised when families "choose" to send their children to schools that have resource advantages, even if they lack transparency and accountability to the communities they supposedly serve.

No Zip Code Tyranny

"Reformers" claim that we must close "failing" schools and replace them with charters...and by "failing" schools they mean schools where test scores are low. Where are test scores the lowest? In schools with high numbers of students who live in poverty. Schools in poor neighborhoods of cities are the ones often targeted to be closed and replaced with charters. Who lives in the poor neighborhoods of cities? Children of color.

From Peter Greene

...the wealthy do not choose choice.

Burdick-Will took a look at 24,000 rising ninth graders in Chicago. In neighborhoods with median income over $75,000, the students attended one of two or three schools. In neighborhoods with median income under $25,000, students were divied up among around thirteen different schools.

..."We think of choice as a thing of privilege,” she said. “But what we see is that there is a privilege of not having to choose." [emphasis added]

PRIVATIZATION

School Closure: A Tragic Turnaround Strategy

Across the nation public schools are the focus of community in neighborhoods and small towns. What happens when those schools are closed, instead of improved, in order to free up funds for privatization?

From Jan Resseger

School closure is one of the four approved, top-down “turnaround” plans prescribed by the federal No Child Left Behind Act for schools unable to raise test scores after several years. The implication of the “turnaround” language, of course, implies that somehow closure will inspire rebirth, but too often school closure has meant not only the death of the school but also the demise of the neighborhood for which the school was the institutional anchor.

USED: Accountability for Public Schools Only

Secretary Duncan's Education Department just tossed another $157 million at charter schools. Take a look at how carefully USED takes care of public tax money (which should be going to public schools) –– check out Diane Ravitch's article, You Can’t Make This Stuff Up! Manipulator of Charter Data Wins Big Federal Grants for Ohio

From Peter Greene

The double standard remains the same. Public schools must account for every penny, including federal bucks that must be spent only as Uncle Sugar demands. Public schools must keep open records always available to the taxpayers. Public schools must even hire employees whose only job is to monitor and report on the money-- all the money. Meanwhile, charter schools just get money thrown at them with no requirement to do anything except, I suppose, have a nice day.

EduShyster: Three “White Shoe” Law Firms Sue to Lift the Charter Cap in Massachusetts

The only thing Diane Ravitch doesn't mention here is that the same thing is happening all over the country.

From Diane Ravitch

The Bay State–or at least its current leaders–seem determined to create a fiscal crisis for underfunded districts and a two-tier system of schools with public funds. One free to choose its students, the other required to enroll all students.

HIGH-TECH EDUCATION

Technology for technology's sake

In the mid-80s desktop computers invaded public schools. As an "early adopter" of computer education, I was fortunate enough to be able to help colleagues develop lesson plans which used computers to enhance learning. It was difficult, however, to convince people that, like a film projector, or a tape recorder, computers were just tools...and should not be the focus of education itself. Software for education, I argued, should be high quality, taking advantage of the medium's strengths rather than just copying paper-based teaching tools. The software "worksheet" was the prime example. Why would a mindless, busywork worksheet delivered electronically be better than the traditional paper and pencil mimeographed sheet?  Obviously, it wouldn't. Both are a waste of resources -- either physical or electronic.

Times have changed but there are still new technological advances being used as simple replacements for obsolete technology. The latest...moving overused and misused standardized tests to computers.

Gerald Bracey is missed...

From the late Gerald Bracey

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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.

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Stop the Testing Insanity!

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A Manifesto for a Revolution in Public Education
Click here to sign the petition.

For over a decade...“reformers” have proclaimed that the solution to the purported crisis in education lies in more high stakes testing, more surveillance, more number crunching, more school closings, more charter schools, and more cutbacks in school resources and academic and extra-curricular opportunities for students, particularly students of color. As our public schools become skeletons of what they once were, they are forced to spend their last dollars on the data systems, test guides, and tests meant to help implement the “reforms” but that do little more than line the coffers of corporations, like Pearson, Inc. and Microsoft, Inc.

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2012 Medley #7

An 8th Grader Searches for a High School, Double Standards, News Media Reports on Education, Poverty, VAM, Reform Ideas, Technology, Finland vs. Indiana, ALEC.

An Eighth-Grade Sports Encyclopedia Finds Himself Without a High School

This article left me stunned. Where is this child's neighborhood school? Competition destroys public education. Notice the way this is worded...the high schools select the students. This is "choice" at work.

That so many people know Omri became important a few weeks ago when the 69,000 eighth graders across the city learned what high schools they had been selected to attend next year. Of the 127 eighth graders at East Side, only five were not picked by any school, and Omri was one of them.

“Omri was up in homeroom crying hysterically, so we brought him downstairs,” Mr. Goldspiel said. “I found him sobbing, sitting on the floor outside the main office waiting for me.”

“I was speechless,” Omri recalled. “Everyone else was saying, ‘I got in, I got in,’ and I just felt dumb and stupid. I had anger in me I never really felt before. I didn’t know how to react.”

...started preparing for the next round in the high school lottery.

Is There Really a Point to Advocating Both Standardization and Choice?

A Double Standard: The public schools have to reform or be replaced by charters...but then, why don't the charters have to meet the same requirements?

...what we have here is a massive effort on the one hand, to require traditional public school districts to adopt a common curriculum and ultimately to adopt common assessments for evaluating student success on that curriculum and then force those districts to evaluate, retain and/or dismiss their teachers based on student assessment data, while on the other hand, expanding publicly financed subsidies for more children to attend schools that would not be required to do these things (in many cases, for example, relieving charter schools from teacher evaluation requirements).

Flunking the Test

The American education system has never been better, several important measures show. But you’d never know that from reading overheated media reports about “failing” schools and enthusiastic pieces on unproven “reform” efforts...

"The idea that we have a crisis in American education, that there is pervasive failure, starts with policy makers," says Pedro Noguera, the eminent education researcher and New York University professor. "This is the line we hear in D.C. and in state capitals. There are certainly areas in which we're lacking, but when you report it that way, it doesn't at all acknowledge the complexity of the situation [and] where we're doing quite well. The discussion is quite simplistic. I'm not sure why exactly. My suspicion is that the media has trouble with complexity."

Stephen Krashen Pulls the Rug Out From Under the Standards Movement

Poverty is, in fact, the issue. While American students' scores on international tests are not as bad as critics say they are, they are even better when we control for the effects of poverty: Middle-class students in well-funded schools, in fact, score at or near the top of world. Our average scores are respectable but unspectacular because, as Farhi notes, we have such a high percentage of children living in poverty, the highest of all industrialized countries. Only four percent of children in high-scoring Finland, for example, live in poverty. Our rate of poverty is over 21%.

Now I Understand Why Bill Gates Didn’t Want The Value-Added Data Made Public

Being a Billionaire doesn't qualify you as an expert in the education of children.

Nor do these educational Deformers think that value-added mysticism is nonsense. They think it’s wonderful and that teachers’ ability to retain their jobs and earn bonuses or warnings should largely depend on it.

The problem, for them, is that they don’t want the public to see for themselves that it’s a complete and utter crock. Nor to see the little man behind the curtain.

Krash Course #5: Reform We Need

Each time I publish or post a critique of the education reform insanity coming from the Corporate Reformers, I receive badgering responses asking what I would do instead. So here is a list of Reform We Need...

• Secretary of Education Arne Duncan needs to resign...
• Federal and state policies must address the lives of children...health coverage...Food security...
• All aspects of the accountability era, including standards-based testing, must be dismantled...
• ...[end] all aspects of perpetuating inequity found in schools—testing, tracking, teacher assignments, "no excuses" practices.
• Teacher and schools must be afforded autonomy...

Testing Our Limits and Failing Our Students

Technology for the sake of technology (as opposed to technology as a tool for learning in and out of the classroom) is stealing time from real education.

Unless we stand together, erroneous computer data and educational officials detached from the realities of teaching will continue to determine our students’ futures.

Lesson from Finland: Everything Indiana is doing is wrong

There's an assumption that policymakers and "reformers" are well meaning and want to improve education. I don't believe that any more. The current debate about public education is not about education at all, but about who will control the pursestrings...the public, or the private sector. The same people who brought us the banking debacle and the economic collapse are working hard to take over public education -- the students, parents and teachers be damned. How much do Arne Duncan, Rahm Emmanuel, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, and Eli Broad really know about how children learn?

You want to know why other countries score higher on average than we do? It's because they care about all their children. There's more to educating a child than standards and tests.

Finland’s system, he said, could not work in the U.S. Factors of societal, economic and cultural differences must be considered and will always shape a country’s education system to make it unique....In short, he argued that several of the fundamental beliefs of reformers here — reformers like [Indiana's Tony] Bennett — were just flat wrong.

Who's Really Behind Education Reform?

Julie Underwood, the Dean of the UW-Madison School of Education, discusses ALEC's school privatization agenda.

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Testing, Texts and Tenure

In this era of tweets, texts, emails and blogs it's easy to forget that there is another means of expression still available to us as citizens -- Letters to the Editor. Here are some letters to various newspapers around the country dealing with some current educational issues.

Stephen Krashen on Tests

Stephen Krashen is a prolific letter writer frequently sending his thoughts to various newspapers throughout the country. The federal and state departments of education insist that teachers and schools use research-based programs and interventions with students. Krashen cites real research, by real researchers to make his points. Unfortunately his work isn't always published (From SusanOhanion.org).

Submitted to Baltimore Sun but not published
02/09/2012

To the editor

We should all worry about overwhelming students, schools with tests (2/7/12).

As the Sun points out, the new testing will be extremely time-consuming. There is no scientific evidence, however, that increasing the amount of testing done will increase student achievement.

As the Sun points out, the new tests need to be given online, and schools don't have the technology needed to administer the tests. Not to worry, the test publishers and computer companies will be happy to sell it to them, as well as sell them costly new equipment as the old equipment rapidly becomes obsolete.

As the Sun points out, the tests will be used to evaluate teachers. Study after study, however, has shown that this kind of evaluation does not produce reliable results. It also encourages pumping up test scores without real learning.

We all understand the need to assess students and evaluate teachers, but the brave new online tests are not the way to do it.

— Stephen Krashen

Books Before Bytes

Technology has always lured educators. Like the general public, administrators and teachers alike are enamored with the latest bells and whistles. Technology is also a way of acquiring grant money for schools. Tech companies, too, enjoy the tax write off that comes with "helping schools into the 21st century." So it's significant that a tech company entrepreneur is the one who suggests that new technology can wait. Libraries and student health come first (From SusanOhanion.org).

Submitted to Los Angeles Times but not published
02/05/2012

To the editor

Kudos to Michael Hiltzik for his column (Hyping tech will not help students, February 5) criticizing federal officials for overselling the benefits of technology to K-12 schools. As co-producer of the most popular educational podcast in the world (ESLPod.com's English as a Second Language Podcast), I'm no enemy of new technology.

But our students need nutrition, health care, quality teachers and librarians, and (especially here in California) something to read in their near-empty school libraries, the worst in the nation. iPads, iPods, and Kindles are great, but first things first: books before bytes.

The writer is Co-producer of English as a Second Language Podcast, former Associate Professor of Education, California State University, Fullerton, and author of "The Literacy Crisis: False Claims, Real Solutions" (1998)

— Jeff McQuillan, Ph.D.

Poverty matters, and the United States, as Stephen Krashen has so often pointed out (HERE, HERE, and HERE, for example), has the highest poverty rate among industrialized nations. Filling a school with iPads and Kindles might work for some things. Students can read books on them (whether that's good or not is debatable and not the subject of this posting), but they can't replace years of neglect, avoidable illness, lack of resources and malnutrition brought on by the high rate of poverty in America.

Letters: Teacher tenure helps promote good education

USA Today published three letters having to do with teacher tenure. The first hints at the de-professionalizing of public school teachers. Taking away teachers' job protections is a major step in turning the profession into a job. Teachers didn't cause the economic meltdown. Teachers unions don't automatically mean lower test scores (Schools in states with union teachers, for example, out perform schools in non-union states), but the privatizers can't stand unions protecting the rights of their members. Corporations buy politicians who then can't wait to bust unions. Fewer college students are going into Education. Teachers are retiring in large numbers. Nearly half of all beginning teachers still leave the profession in less than 5 years. Who is going to staff our schools?

The security that tenure brings adds to the effectiveness of a teacher's practice. Always worrying about pleasing whoever is in charge at the moment and stressing over one's future would certainly detract from the attention that a teacher gives to her or his studies, teaching and students ("States weaken tenure rights for teachers").

Doing away with tenure for public school teachers, combined with low pay and increased surveillance of performance, would add to the exodus of the best teachers from the profession. And those teachers who persevere would need to stick to the status quo or risk being fired for political reasons. This likely is behind much of the call for scrapping tenure.
Political control is increasing all around us, and the schools are a primary and convenient site for this. Without tenure, harassment could turn to termination of employment, and consequently lead to the hiring of robotic yes-people. This would encourage an increase in the mindless reduced-to-the-test, so-called education that's being forced upon teachers already.

Paula Meyer; San Diego

In the next letter, Stephen Krashen once again cites research to back up his claims. Evaluation of teachers using student test scores is not valid.

Need for better evaluation system

The article "States weaken tenure rights for teachers" emphasizes the importance of evaluating teacher effectiveness. A major problem is that these evaluations are often based on students' gains on standardized tests, called "value-added" measures.

A number of studies have shown that value-added measures are very unstable: Teachers' ratings based on previous years are weak predictors of test scores at the end of a year with new students. A teacher who succeeds in boosting scores with one group will not necessarily succeed with others. Different tests can result in different scores for the same teacher.

Value-added evaluations also ignore the huge impact of factors beyond the teachers' control. Finally, there are ways of pumping up test scores without student learning, including teaching test-taking strategies and making sure weak students don't take the test.

Nobody objects to teachers being evaluated on their effectiveness. Using gains on standardized tests is a bad way to do it.

Stephen Krashen, professor emeritus; University of Southern California; Los Angeles

In contrast, the third letter denounces tenure as an expensive luxury.

A factor in rising cost of education

A major factor in the rising cost of higher education is teacher tenure. Tenure basically means that after several years as a full professor, an individual who meets certain standards is guaranteed that job for life.

Those teachers are granted "academic freedom," so they can teach when and how they see fit. It's very difficult to fire them. A lot of them spend much of their time writing books or memoirs, not teaching our young students.

This is similar to the problem with teachers retiring at age 55 with generous pensions and health care benefits for life. It is unsustainable.

Dickie Benzie; Charlotte, N.C.

2011 Medley #9:

Poverty, iPads, Honoring Teachers, Standardized Tests, SAT, Common Core Standards

Public education's biggest problem gets worse

*22 percent of American children live in poverty
*39 percent of black children live in poverty
*35 percent of Hispanic children live in poverty

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What the iPad (and other technology) can’t replace in education

We’re focused so much on the device that we’re ignoring what’s on it...We need to stop pretending that technology can fix problems that aren’t technological in nature. Kids are bored. They don’t know why they’re learning what they’re learning. The solution isn’t asking the question better. The solution is asking a better question.

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In Honor of Teachers

...how do we expect to entice the best and brightest to become teachers when we keep tearing the profession down? We take the people who so desperately want to make a difference that they enter a field where they know that they’ll be overworked and underpaid, and we scapegoat them as the cause of a societywide failure.

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Why More Standardized Tests Won’t Improve Education (with references)

The scholarly consensus that documents the limits of standardized testing is quite clear. For example, a comprehensive, nine-year study of testing and evaluation commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences recently concluded that: “available evidence does not give strong support for the use of test-based incentives to improve education.”

A second National Academy report questions the use of test scores to evaluate teachers, noting that such scores “have not yet been adequately studied for the purposes of evaluating teachers and principals,” and “face substantial practical barriers to being successfully deployed in a personnel system that is fair, reliable, and valid.”

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What the decline in SAT scores really means

At some point, all of the evidence will start to convince policy-makers that the punitive test-driven reforms won’t improve academic achievement, especially among the growing numbers of first-generation students and English language-learners.

We can only hope that it will be soon, before more damage is heaped on the harm already done to public education.

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Jeffrey N. Golub: Common Core Standards Leave Teachers Out of the Equation

Common Core Standards...are not 'well-grounded,'...because the authors of the standards have failed to factor in some crucial elements or aspects of instruction. This failure of foresight and insight will surely cause the standards to 'sink' - to become ineffective, inappropriate, and intolerable. The biggest problem with this 'sinking' that is sure to happen is that the students, teachers, and indeed, whole school systems that will labor under these burdensome 'goals and expectations' will sink right along with them.

Teachers do not have a problem with accountability. They are responsible for making learning happen for their students, after all, so they welcome authentic assessments of the progress that they, and their students, have made. But they do object, and rightly so, to a situation in which they are being held accountable for a curriculum over which they have no control.