This week marks the beginning of testing week in Tennessee. All week long students will be taking the annual TCAP assessments. These tests will establish their worth, their teacher’s worth, their school’s worth, their state’s worth, their countrie’s worth, and… well you get the picture. These tests are so important that people feel the need to create pep rallies, special festivals and even video’s to relieve some of the pressure. Initially I saw the one above on the Tennessee Department of Education web site but before writing this post I perused YouTube and probably found 100 more.
That’s over a hundred video’s dedicated to celebrating a test. Yes, I said test, not a school, not books, not learning in general. They celebrate a test. Think of all the resources that went into producing those pieces that could have been applied to actual learning, not to mention the creativity wasted. Some of them are…
It’s easy to manipulate facts. The fake Ed reforms do it all the time to make the public schools look bad, and even some public schools cherry pick facts to look good. Technically what both sides share with the public are not lies, but they don’t paint a holistic and/or honest picture either.
For instance, I checked several on-line accountability school report cards for the high school (I will not provide the links or name of that school here) where I taught for the last 16 years of the thirty I was a classroom teacher (1975 – 2005).
For instance, that high school reported that the 2012 graduation rate was more than 89% for the 449 (from a class of 502) seniors who graduated on time that year. That’s way above the national average of 78.2% for 2010 (the highest national average on-time graduation rate in U.S. history), and the reported average for California that was even better that year at 78.5% (reported by the L. A. Times).
Why do so many Americans earn their high school diploma between the age of 18 and 25?
The high school’s accountability report card that’s posted on-line shows for 2011-12 that there were:
545 students in 9th grade
631in 10th
581 in 11th (This is the year most students turn 16 and by law they may drop out of school—did you notice the 8% drop from 10th grade and an additional 14% drop by the end of 12th grade)
502 in 12th grade.
But nowhere is there any information about how large the 2012 graduating class was four years earlier in 9th grade. To discover that, I had to find the on-line accountability report card for 2008-09, and I did. When you know a school’s name, Google is great—most of the time.
During the 2008-09 school year, there were 659 students in 9th grade, but four years later only 502 were still there. Where did the other 157 go? Did they move, drop dead, drop out, transfer to other schools? Why isn’t there an explanation? 659 students started as 9th graders in the class of 2012 but only 449 graduated—that’s an almost 32% drop.
It probably would have been more realistic to say: The on-time graduation rate for 2012 was 68.2% when taking into account the number of students who started in 9th grade four years earlier. Then there should be an explanation of what happened to the other 210 kids, but that might not look good for the school district. Instead, administrators at the district level probably went through the figures—with legal advice to make sure they weren’t breaking any laws—and cherry picked facts that end up looking better than the holistic story.
And of course the fake Ed reformers never mention how many adults in the U.S. have earned a high school degree or its equivalent by age 25. For 2013, that number was 88.15%.
The reality is that everyone doesn’t learn at the same speed; doesn’t mature at the same pace, and better late is better than never.
Instead, the fake Ed reformers that include President Obama and the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, have mandated through Race to the Top legislation that every child must be college ready by age 17/18 and if they aren’t those schools and their teachers will be crucified in the media and labeled as failures in a world where no country has ever achieved that goal in recorded history.
But how can anyone place blame for those 157 kids who vanished, because you can’t teach a kid who isn’t there and you can’t stop them from leaving if they want to go?
There’s also another fact that the fake Ed reformers don’t report holistically. You will hear them shouting that the US has a high school dropout epidemic but nowhere will they say that in 1970, the high school dropout rate was 14.6%, but by 2011 it had fallen to 7% according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Recent on-time graduation rates by race (did you know that the on-time high school graduation rate in the U.S. in 1900 was 6.4% and by 1950, it was 59%):
Asian: 93.5% (by age 25 to 29 that number reaches 96%)
White: 83% (95%)
Black: 66.1% (89%)
Hispanic: 71.4% (75%)
Does that look like an epidemic?
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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
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It will take only a few minutes to read this post and less than an hour to watch the five videos. The question is: If you’re an American, are you willing to give up that much time to learn about the threats against your democracy and the loss of the freedoms you take for granted? In fact, you don’t have to give up an entire hour in one sitting. You could read the Blog post and watch the first video, and then return to watch the second, etc., spread over several days.
“A new report shows that top CEOs were paid 331 times more than the average US worker in 2013. At the same time, the poorest fifth of Americans paid an average tax rate of 11 percent while the richest one percent contributed half that rate at state and local levels. In this essay, Bill reflects on the forces…
In May 2009
, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and former State Education Superintendent Paul Pastorek signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). This CCSS MOU would become “Appendix B” for the US Department of Education’s (USDOE’s) Race to the Top (RTTT) program.
In June 2009, the National Governors Association (NGA), in conjunction with US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, announced that 46 states were already signed on for what would become CCSS.
The formal document, the CCSS MOU, outlines in detail the different groups of individuals and what their roles would be in “developing” CCSS.
The document signed by Jindal and Pastorek in May 2009– the CCSS MOU that would become RTTT Appendix B– is the same document I wrote about in this post.
The CCSS MOU makes it clear that the chief decision makers for CCSS were the individuals on the…
Watch the trailer for the longer documentary that sets the record straight. Then if you want to learn more, please watch the full length version (scroll down to find it).
SECOND:
Then there’s “Fact-checking Waiting for Superman” that appeared at the Huffington Post.
Fact-checking Waiting for ‘Superman’: Documentary or Urban Myth?
“We simply cannot trust the corporate oligarchy currently making policies for our schools to create a fair evaluation system, including those who backed Waiting for ‘Superman‘, given their proclivity to misuse and distort data, as shown by the inaccurate figures cited in the film.”
“Rather than a documentary, perhaps the movie (Waiting for Superman) should be re-categorized, with an appropriate disclaimer, as an urban myth.”
Full length version of “The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman”
FOURTH: Recently I had a debate with an individual, an acquaintance, who believed the schools were broken and the only way to fix them was to take away all teacher legal, due process rights so any teacher could be fired without due process. That way, the schools would be able to remove so-called incompetent teachers without the burden of proof.
That’s why I suggest you also read: The Myth of Teacher Tenure published by The Washington Post
“School districts consistently win the vast majority of the court decisions concerning the involuntary cessation of a teacher’s employment based on incompetency. In a comprehensive canvassing of court decisions based on teacher evaluation for competency, I found that the defendant districts prevailed in more than a 3-to-1 ratio, and that there was no significant difference between the outcomes for nontenured as compared to tenured teachers.”
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
It is a peculiar, dark and unhinged world in which we dwell and it seems to grow more so all the time. Consider the extraordinary case of Vergara v. California, now winding down and awaiting a judgment. Here we have nine students, bankrolled by Silicon Valley technology entrepreneur David Welch, co-founder of Infinera, and founder of the advocate group StudentsMatter, suing the state of California. The suit claims that teacher tenure laws have denied them their civil rights.
Yes, for those who have not been following the case, you read that correctly.
The claim is that tenure laws — which merely insure that a teacher who has already passed through a probationary period of at least three years has the right to a hearing or due process before he or she is fired — are denying the nine students, a multicultural lot who…
Chili went over the public education cliff the United States is headed for and now, decades later, is climbing the cliff with goals to reverse the damage.
The following post was written by Mario Waissbluth, President of Educación 2020 Foundation, a Chilean citizen’s movement founded in 2008. Its latest reform proposals (in Spanish) are called “La Reforma Educativa que Chile Necesita”, and were published in April 2013. A book on this subject (in Spanish) is also available. These proposals were mostly adopted by and included in the educational program of the recently elected government of Michelle Bachelet, and are starting to be implemented now.
Valentina Quiroga (32) was one of the student founders of this organization and is now Undersecretary of Education.
Although Educación 2020 remains as a fully independent movement, the positions stated thereon are in many ways similar to those of the current government.
Chile: Dismantling the most pro-market education system in the world
In story after story, the New York Times consistently misses the essence of the controversy surrounding Common Core.
Today’s New York Times gives its lead article on page 1, column right, top of the fold, to the battle raging within the Republican party, about the Common Core. On one side is Jeb Bush, standing up for the Common Core standards (presumably a moderate, let’s not talk about his fight for vouchers and for the destruction of public education in Florida), while on the other are figures like Ted Cruz and other extremists of the party. Common Core, we are told, is now the “wedge issue” in the Republican party, with sensible people like Jeb Bush fending off the extremists.
A few weeks ago, the newspaper wrote an editorial enthusiastically endorsing the Common Core standards, while giving no evidence for its enthusiasm other than the promises offered by the advocates of…
On Friday, Néw York Times’ columnist David Brooks wrote a column excoriating critics of the Common Core standards as “clowns.”
He didn’t seem aware that his personal opinion piece, devoid of documentation other than anecdotes, is precisely the kind of writing that David Voleman abhors. In his most famous statement about the Common Core, Coleman said that when you grow up, no one gives a &$@& about what you think or feel. Brooks told us what he thinks and feels, but gets all the facts wrong.
Here is Mercedes Schneider at her best. I will provide a link so you can see the video she embeds. YOU MUST ALSO GO TO HER POST TO SEE ALL THE LINKS EMBEDDED, DOCUMENTING WHAT SHE WRITES, AS THEY DID NOT TRANSFER TO MY BLOG.
Schneider writes:
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David Brooks, Common Core Circus Performer
Why newspapers hire individuals to regularly offer the public unsubstantiated…
Abby White is a junior at Shaker Heights High School in Ohio and an editor at her high school newspaper. She researched the Common Core, read the standards, interviewed faculty, and developed her own views about their strengths and weaknesses.
She has done more research than many newspaper reporters, who like to quote what people say for and against the Common Core, without deigning to read them. She works harder to understand and explain the subject than many people twice her age.
Without spoiling her effort to analyze the standards, I present here her biggest concern: how do we know they will measure up to all the promises?
She writes:
“That’s like devising a new surgical method to fix a man’s heart condition, not testing that method, and going ahead with the surgery anyway. I can’t speak for anyone…
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 