In hundreds of races across the nation this weekend is GOTV – Get Out the Vote.
Back in July you’ve scrambled for signatures to get on the ballot, raised money, spent every waking hour running from meeting to meeting, shaking hands, hugging babies, mailers, printing palm cards, and now the final 72 hours.
How many supporters can you get out on the streets? How many doors can you knock?
Winning elections is pulling your voters, dragging your voters to the polls.
The TV attack ads diminished the “other guy,” the puff ads pumped up your guy. Sometime around midnight Tuesday you’ll find out whether you did your job.
Too many potential voters decide not to vote, politics is “dirty,” the Congress can’t get anything done, the Democrats act like Republicans and the Republicans are Tea Party nuts. All of which, to some extent is true.
I am an opinionated blogger, and I blog here in my personal capacity. Unlike some other bloggers doing excellent work in the world of education policy and beyond, I do not claim to be a citizen journalist objectively reporting the news. I’m just a mom with a keyboard and opinions. I occasionally manage to put my thoughts into words as I explore education policy from my perspective as a public school parent. And although I am an attorney, I do not pretend to be blogging in my professional capacity, and I certainly do not intend any of my musings here as legal advice.
That being said.
That being said.
That being said, New Jersey’s Acting Commissioner of its Department of Education, David C. Hespe, appears to have declared war on parents and children who oppose his standardized testing policies.
Specifically, today the Acting Commissioner issued guidance to chief school administrators…
John Thompson reviews Anthony Cody’s néw book THE EDUCATOR AND THE OLIGARCH. The book recapitulates Cody’s five-part debate with the Gates Foundation. Thompson says Cody demolished their spokesmen.
Thompson writes that Cody won the debate, hands down:
“They probably didn’t expect a mere teacher to assemble and concisely present such an overwhelming case against their policies. But, who knows?, perhaps they were completely unaware of the vast body of social science that Cody drew upon, and they blamed the messenger for the education research he brought to the table. The Educator and the Oligarch explains how the failed Gates reforms could create an education dystopia.”
Best of all is Thompson’s summary of Cody’s proposal for how Gates ought to be evaluated.
Example:
“Since Bill Gates, more than any other person, is responsible for the absurd evaluations that are now being imposed on teachers, Cody wonders if Gates’ practice as a…
The message is clear. The business community in New York State fears the loss of millions in federal dollars from the DOE to the state if New York doesn’t implement the Machiavellian and draconian so-called Common Core State Standards by standing up for its Constitutional rights to be in charge of public education in New York state.
In Germany when the Nazis made all the decisions from the top down for everyone, most of the people shouted Heil Hitler. This time it is Heil Duncan.
Yet another group has established itself as promoters of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), and, of course, the group has a catchy, test-driven name: High Achievement New York (HANY).
HANY offered a press release on October 28, 2014. And marvel 0f all marvels, HANY has found that it is best for CCSS to stick around in New York State.
But who is this HANY, you ask?
HANY describes itself as “a broad-based coalition of teachers, parents, school administrators, civil rights advocates, community leaders, and some of NY’s biggest businesses….”
Let’s just stop right there.
In 2014, if “some of New York’s biggest businesses” are involved in advocating for their version of K12 education, then you must have stepped right into a steaming hot pile of corporate reform.
Indeed.
But let me not get ahead of myself.
Here is High Achievement New York’s mission statement, in full:
California blogger “RedQueeninLA” reviews the contest between Marshall Tuck and Tom Torlakson for state superintendent and concludes that Tuck is unfit for the office.
Tuck is the candidate of the power elite, the billionaires who cynically employ fake rhetoric about “it’s all for the kids,” when their real goal is to demonize teachers and invest in technology. They have zero commitment to public education as a civic responsibility.
Tuck comes from the world of investment banking. His education experience at Green Dot Charter Schools and at former Los Angeles Mayor Villaraigosa’s takeover schools was a failure. On that ground alone–his dismal experience–he should be disqualified.
But his greatest liability is his contempt for public education. With him at the helm, public school students would have no advocate in Sacramento. But the oligarchs would.
On behalf of the power elite, Marshall Tuck is running a:
“professionally organized, PR-driven, fact- and experience-free…
This is a great story about the stupidity of the New York state teacher evaluation model (a value-added model), which is inaccurate and causes untold grief to teachers who are wrongly labeled. It arrived as a comment on the blog. This teacher is fighting back!
Sheri G. Lederman, Ed.D., a top performing fourth-grade teacher in Great Neck, today filed a lawsuit against the New York State Education Department, to invalidate a rating of “ineffective.” Judge Richard Platkin of the New York State Supreme Court, Albany County, directed the Education Department to show cause on January 16, 2015, why the rating of Dr. Lederman, whose student’s generally outperform state assessments by over 200%, should not be declared arbitrary and capricious and why the Education Department should not be enjoined from using its so-called growth model for evaluating teachers unless the model is modified to rationally evaluate teacher performance.
Valerie Strauss recapitulates the TIME magazine cover story. She notes that the AFT petition in opposition to the TIME cover has collected 50,000 signatures ( it is now up to 70,000). Strauss compares this current cover to the one featuring Michelle Rhee as the one who was likely to “transform education.” She didn’t. The achievement gap in D.C. remains the one of the largest (possibly THE largest) in urban America. And she also proved that it is not impossible to fire tenured teachers; she fired hundreds of teachers and principals.
Why pick on teachers? Is it because it is a female-dominated profession? Is it part of the tech millionaires’ dream of replacing live teachers with laptops and tablets?
TIME agreed to print some responses.
One was written by Randi Weingarten of the AFT, and I think she got it exactly right. We need to focus on recruiting, retaining, and supporting…
If you are a teacher and your students’ scores don’t go up, you will be fired. That’s federal policy. That makes standardized testing the measure of a teachers’ worth, not a reflection of the demographics in the classroom.
Count on Arne Duncan to speak out against testing while he mandates more and more of it. If you are a teacher and your students’ scores don’t go up, you will be fired. That’s federal policy. That makes standardized testing the measure of a teachers’ worth, not a reflection of the demographics in the classroom. If the teacher teaches students with special needs, the scores may not go up as much as they do for teachers in affluent suburbs. Teachers of English language learners are at a disadvantage. All of this has been proven again and again by researchers. But the news has never reached Arne Duncan.
In this post, Peter Greene says that when Arne Duncan joins the chorus of voices who are criticizing standardized testing, he is just blowing smoke. As usual. Watch what he does, not what he says. Just remember: he was for it before he…
On Diane Ravitch’s Blog, a regular called Teaching Economist (TE) left a comment, and asked: “Do you think that the well-known private schools like Dalton, the Lab Schools, Phillips Exeter, etc. are run ‘like a business’?”
Answer: Yes, TE, Dalton, the Lab Schools, and Phillips Exeter are run like businesses just like Stanford and Harvard and they cost about the same.
Dalton’s—in New York State—annual tuition for day students is currently $41,350, and Business Insider reported that Dalton as one of the 28 most expensive private high schools in America.
Where’s the Common Core test prep? When does Dalton give their students bubble tests to evaluate the teachers? This is what a student gets for more than $41,000 annually.
For theLab Schools in Washington DC, 2014-2015 tuition was: Elementary – $39,600; Intermediate – $39,600; Junior High – $40,350, and High School – $41,995.
For the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, the tuition and mandatory fees are: Boarding – $47,790, and Day – $36,800.
Now that we have the private school tuition, let’s compare that with what the taxpayer pays for the k – 12 public schools in those states.
Current spending per pupil in New York State in 2011 was $19,076; in New Hampshire it was $13,224, and in the District of Columbia (D.C.) it was $18,475.
Wow, if we are going to switch over to for-profit Charters that are run like Dalton, the Lab Schools, and Phillips Exeter, then the taxes that support the public schools will have to go up dramatically like a rocket on the way to Mars.
For instance, in New York State, taxes that support k – 12 education will have to go up about 117% or $22,274 per student so the for-profit Charter schools will make the shareholders happy as they count their increased wealth.
What about New Hampshire? What will the tax payer have to pay to support the new wave of for-profit Charter schools in that state? For just the day students, there will eventually be an increase in state taxes of 128% or $16,904 per student.
Then we have Washington DC’s Lab Schools high school tuition of $41,995. To support the profit for that business, k -12 education taxes in D.C. will have to go up more than 127% or an additional $23,520 per student.
Remember, in the corporate world profits are god and once the public school competition is gone, do you really think those corporations aren’t going to want more money from the tax payers?
Let’s crunch some numbers to discover how much this might eventually cost the U.S. taxpayers.
In 2010-11, k – 12 public school expenditures for the United States averaged $11,153 per student. The average for schools like Dalton, the Lab Schools, and Phillips Exeter is about $40 thousand per student—an increase of 359% over the cost of running the public schools. This adds up to a total of about $2.3 Trillion in annual taxes to support the for-profit Charter school industry instead of the bargain price of $632 billion currently being spent annually to support the public schools.
One last question: Where will the at-risk kids go—those children who live in poverty and are the most difficult to teach—when they are kicked out, because that’s what is already happening in many of the for-profit Charter schools?
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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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Myra Blackmon, journalist in Georgia, writes here about the testing resistance that is growing by the day,
“Despite Georgia’s ridiculous “assessment” of college and career readiness, it’s impossible to predict how the life of a first- or second-grader will turn out.
“All the tests we administer can’t predict a child’s future. The tests don’t measure real learning. They measure test-taking ability.
Research has shown that test scores are most accurate in measuring the socioeconomic level of the student.
“That’s correct. We use tests that don’t measure teacher competence or student learning to make or break careers, categorize children and place them in certain groups or pathways. We assume poor test scores mean a poor teacher, when often the opposite is true.
“We are obsessed with our ridiculous tests. The state legislature insists that test scores make up at least 50 percent of a teacher’s performance evaluation. The lobbyists for Pearson…
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 