Everything You've Heard About Failing Schools Is Wrong | Mother Jones

Everything You've Heard About Failing Schools Is Wrong | Mother Jones:
This is a long narrative but a nice read.  Enjoy.

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Wendy Lecker: Tests fail at measuring student growth - StamfordAdvocate

Wendy Lecker: Tests fail at measuring student growth - StamfordAdvocate: "The DOE also decided what point on each scale represented appropriate achievement levels for each grade; i.e., what the "cut scores" were. Score above this point and you are "proficient." Score below it and you "fail." As the late education expert Gerald Bracey explained, cut scores are set by deciding in advance what percentage of students you want to fail; a procedure that is "both arbitrary and political."

So, what does the vertical-scale score tell a parent about how her child has progressed in math or reading? Not much. It is a rough approximation of what someone has called math or reading achievement.

The DOE claims that these vertical scales are tools to improve instruction and improve schools. However, as testing guru W. James Popham told me, scale scores have "essentially no diagnostic value whatever to teachers, parents or students.""

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Hugh Bailey: So much for keeping politics out of it - Connecticut Post

Hugh Bailey: So much for keeping politics out of it - Connecticut Post:

A mayoral-appointed board raises the specter of cronyism. To combat this perception, Bridgeport's Charter Revision Commission created what was to be called a Candidate Qualifications Board, a panel of educational stakeholders that would need to approve any choices. This was to be the bulwark against pure politicization, and was a major selling point in the commission's efforts.

As of May 24, the proposed new charter read: "There shall be a Candidate Qualifications Board composed of five (5) members whose sole function shall be to evaluate and certify the Mayor's prospective appointees to the Board of Education."

Except now it won't. The name of the new panel has been changed to Advisory Council, and it's not just semantics. A note on the final version of the new charter approved by the City Council, dated July 23, reads: "It was determined that the role of the Board was purely advisory to the Mayor and thus would be an advisory council to the Mayor. However, the findings of the Council with regard to candidates formally nominated for the Board of Education would be subject to review by the City Council."

So instead of a Qualifications Board specifically designed to approve or turn down prospective school board candidates -- to keep the politics out of it, which everyone swears is the ultimate goal -- it will be up to the mayor and City Council alone.

This is a bad idea, for a simple reason. Even if you trust this mayor, and think he nothing but the best intentions for the schools, he won't be mayor forever.

Read more: http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/Hugh-Bailey-So-much-for-keeping-politics-out-of-3779619.php#ixzz23bZLFV2d
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Parents give “Won’t Back Down” movie trailer a thumbs down « Parents Across America

Parents give “Won’t Back Down” movie trailer a thumbs down « Parents Across America: "The trailer for “Won’t Back Down,” an upcoming film starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, Holly Hunter and Viola Davis, shows parent power triumphing over bad teachers and claims that the film is “inspired by actual events.” But members of Parents Across America (PAA) say the film will tell a false story and is funded by right-wing forces to spread an anti-public-education message."

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Sorting out the effects of inequality and poverty, teachers and schooling, on America’s youth

Recently, Diane Ravitch posted a chapter written by David Berliner on the effects of wealth inequality and how they impact education.  It's a fairly long piece with a lot of information.  What follows are some notes and annotations touching on the main of the article.

Notes on Berliner article

Our schools are not failing, it's our policies which are failing.  General, one-size-fits-all policies are being created to address the specific needs of specific communities.  These policies are being created to address the wrong problem.

• --teacher not the greatest impact on student
• --general case: poor stay poor, teachers cannot change that 
• --only 9% of poor achieve college degrees (pre-recession)
• --NCLB & extra testing as stick to motivate the lazy is failed policy

Negative side effects of high stakes testing

• --1/3 all schools failed to make ayp 08-09
• --2012 estimates 80% not make ayp
• --2014 goal of 100% students at grade level is unattainable
• --PISA (Program for International Student Assessment): nations with high-stakes testing have generally gone down in scores from 2000 to 2003 and then further in 2006.
• --Finland (no high stakes testing) shows growth & improvement
• --we compare results with Finns but not policies (all social policies, not just educational)

Impact of Out of School effects

• --school effects account for 20% of variance in scores, teachers are a part of that 20%
• --out of school effects account for 60% of variance
• --according to PISA, socioeconomic factors explained 17% of variance in USA
• --Less than 10% in Norway, Japan, Finland, Canada
• --policies can be created to help students from impoverished communities do well 

Examination of US education achievement

• --less than 10% free lunch = great scores (highest in the world in math & science)
• --10-24.9%=quite high still
• --only 4 other nations in the world beat this group
• --25-49.9% (three groups make up over 1/2 of all US students) still do well
• --Over 50% free lunch do poorly

• --almost 20% of students attend school where over 75% of students are free lunch
• --these schools are funded differently-- poor schools get less money
• --scores on PISA are lower than every OECD country except Mexico
• --price of housing leads to segregated communities
• --40% of black & hispanic students attend schools that are 90 to 100% minority (whites=under 1%)
• --pervasive myth: schools with 90% minority & 90% poor can achieve 90% passing if there are competent educators.

Effects of income inequality

• --poverty in the midst of wealth may make the negative effects of poverty more powerful
• --USA has greatest income inequality in the world
• --THE LEVEL OF INEQUALITY WITHIN A NATION STRONGLY PREDICTS POOR PERFORMANCE (If CT has the greatest inequality then it makes sense it would have the greatest gap)
• Effects of inequality:
• --Child well-being
• --Mental health
• --Illegal drug use
• --Infant & Maternal mortality
• --School Dropouts
• --social mobility
• --school achievement 
• --teen pregnancy
• --Abuse
• --rates of imprisonment (in CT for every 11 white males, 254 black & 125 hispanic)

Policies which would have positive impact

• --Living wage
• --higher taxes
• --early childhood education programs (7% to 10% return on investment through savings in prisions, health care, remedial education)
• --small class size
• --summer educational opportunities (academic & cultural)
• --retention policies for failure
• --reduce teacher 'churn' (turnover?) in poor communities
• --wrap-around policies
• --adult education programs

Conclusion

• WWII to 1979=wealth convergence, spread more evenly
• "Certainly poverty should never be an excuse for schools to do little, but poverty is a powerful explanation for why they cannot do much!"
• School and economic policies are not independent of each other

Introduction to David Berliner (Video)

From the NEPC website:

"David C. Berliner is Regents' Professor Emeritus in the College of Education at Arizona State University. His research interests include school vouchers, high-stakes testing, classroom teaching and learning, teacher education, and educational policy. In December 2005, he received the New England Association of Schools and Colleges' Charles W. Eliot Award for his outstanding and permanent contribution to education at all levels."

In this video, Berliner summarizes his work and his educational philosophy.


You can read more of his work here.  Recently, Diane Ravitch posted a chapter written by Berliner on the effects of wealth inequality.  Notes from that piece can be found here.

Education reform’s central myths - Salon.com

Education reform’s central myths - Salon.com: "To begin with, the U.S. public school system is hardly the abysmal failure portrayed in the conventional wisdom. The international comparative data is skewed, by vocational tracking in Europe (all American high school students are sometimes compared to select Gymnasium and Lycee students in Germany and France) or geography (the entire U.S. is compared to the Shanghai metro area, rather than to all of China — the French educational system would look pretty bad, if it were compared in its entirety to Westchester County, New York).

Furthermore, non-Hispanic white Americans who are mostly the products of suburban public K-12 schools, are at the very top of global comparisons....

Before we abandon our existing, mostly-successful system of public education for an untested theory cooked up by the libertarian ideologues at the University of Chicago Economics Department and the Cato Institute (who, as it happens, have been wrong about almost everything else in the last quarter century), shouldn’t we see if there is any evidence to support their claims?"

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Private firms eyeing profits from U.S. public schools | Reuters

Rememeber when Paul Vallas said that anyone thinking there was money to make in this business was crazy?  It looks like there are a lot of crazy people out there:

Private firms eyeing profits from U.S. public schools | Reuters: "The K-12 market is tantalizingly huge: The U.S. spends more than $500 billion a year to educate kids from ages five through 18. The entire education sector, including college and mid-career training, represents nearly 9 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, more than the energy or technology sectors.

Traditionally, public education has been a tough market for private firms to break into -- fraught with politics, tangled in bureaucracy and fragmented into tens of thousands of individual schools and school districts from coast to coast.

Now investors are signaling optimism that a golden moment has arrived. They're pouring private equity and venture capital into scores of companies that aim to profit by taking over broad swaths of public education.

The conference last week at the University Club, billed as a how-to on "private equity investing in for-profit education companies," drew a full house of about 100."

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