Category Archives: Uncategorized

Below is a guest post by my valued colleague, James Kirylo, who taught at Southeastern Louisiana University before accepting a position at the University of South Carolina. He has also taught at the University of South Alabama, Universidad Evángelica del Paraguay, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

  James Kirylo

As I read Kirylo’s post, I noted its timeliness.

The flowers are blooming and the lawnmowers are humming all over my neighborhood.

Must be testing season.

That Time of Year: Spring and Testing

by

 James D. Kirylo

It is that time of the year again.  The unfolding of nature with its brilliance in color, its sweet aroma, and the emergence of new life gives pause and illuminates all that is good.  It is also that time of year when public schools across South Carolina—indeed the nation—energetically announce standardized test “kick-off” time with pep rallies, balloon send-offs, and a host of other activities…

Chalkbeat Tennessee recently reported that the new director of charter schools in Memphis is the former principal of the Charles A. Tindley Accelerated charter school in Indiana.  I went to the school’s website and found that the school’s motto, which they have painted in large letters on the walls of one of their hallways is, “College Or Die.”

Students are reminded of this motto each time they go to the ‘Student Life’ section of the website, as it is the first item on it.

They have actually produced a video explaining this.  In the description for the video they say:

Located in one of Indianapolis’s roughest neighborhoods, the Charles A. Tindley Accelerated School is promising students not only that they’ll graduate from high school, but that they’ll be accepted into prestigious colleges and universities. The amazing thing is, they’re succeeding with a combination of tough love and academic inspiration.

https://vimeo.com/28427359

Published on Easter Sunday 2017 in the Post and Courier, Paul Bowers offered what I suspect will be a slow and painful series of unfortunate evidence that will discredit claims of educational miracles at Meeting Street Elementary @Brentwood; in this case, the public/private partnership elementary school has a unique and extreme suspension problem:

As a public/private venture, as a school choice and reform mechanism, Meeting Street Elementary @Brentwood is trapped in the need to advocate, sell its process. And since South Carolina has not held this experiment to the traditional school report card transparency, we are left only with the claims of school leaders.

However, we have well over a decade of “miracle” school bluster, all of which has been dismantled—suggesting that, I am sorry to say during this holiday season, there are no miracles.

While the school report card based mostly on high-stakes testing data is a significant…

Joshua Starr, a former school superintendent who is now chief executive officer of Phi Delta Kappa, reports that the American public opposes vouchers. They like the idea of “charters,” but most don’t know what charters are, that they may be run by for-profit or run by national corporations. They like the generic idea but they are not asked what they know about it. Perhaps they have nmagnet schools in mind.

Starr writes:

“Since 1969, PDK International has conducted an annual poll of the public’s attitudes toward the public schools. The methodology is rigorous, the questions are vetted by a politically diverse group of advisers, the data are robust and the results suggest that DeVos hasn’t been listening very carefully.

“Consider school choice, which DeVos has placed at the top of her policy agenda. Our poll reveals that, in general, Americans like the idea of choice in public education. On the…

PSAT/SAT day is Wednesday April 5 this week in NY schools and many other public schools in states around the country. These exams are now required in at least 9 states, but are given in many more states and districts, including NYC.

The College Board is unethically if not illegally amassing a huge amount of personal student information through the administration of these exams and selling it for a profit (though they call it “licensing” the names) at 42 cents per student. They are providing the information to a range of undisclosed institutions and companies, including reportedly the Department of Defense to help them recruit for the military.

If your child or your students are taking one of these tests, tell them to enter only the minimal info: name, address, gender and date of birth.

Read this post by privacy advocate Cheri Kiesecker:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/03/30/how-the-sat-and-psat-collect-personal-data-on-students-and-what-the-college-board-does-with-it/?utm_term=.22c26edc837c

Leonie Haimson responded to the CB…

In 1900, 40-percent of Americans lived in poverty, 7-percent graduated from high school, and 3-percent from college. Women were chattel. That means they belonged to a man: father, husband, brother, etc. Children as young as seven could be sold into a form of slavery called servitude and in some states that included legal prostitution.  Even in states where prostitution was illegal, few ever did anything to save those children sold into that life by their poor parents.

How educated is the United States today? In 2014, 90.83-percent of Americans had a high school diploma or GED, and 44.08 percent had an associate and/or bachelor’s degree.

Since Trump doesn’t read, he doesn’t know this or doesn’t care, and that there is no time in American history that we were greater than we were in the 1960s.

If we look at the chart in this Atlantic piece, we discover America was…

I’m copying and pasting here:

End of public schools and school breakfast and lunch.
The school voucher system proposed by Education secretary Betsy DeVos does not mean you can choose any school you want your kid to go to. It means the public education program will be dismantled.

If your child has an IEP (individual education plan for students with special needs), kiss it goodbye.

If you have a job in special-education, if you’re a special education teacher, physical therapist, occupational therapist, speech pathologist, a para, a teacher’s aid, or an ESL (English as a second language) teacher, you’ll go first.

House Bill 610 makes some large changes. Inform yourselves. This bill will effectively start the school voucher system to be used by children ages 5-17 and starts the defunding process of public schools. The bill will eliminate the Elementary and Education Act of 1965, which is the nation’s educational…

Teachers organizations from across the state of California have formed an alliance to fight for genuine School reform.

CALIFORNIA: 8 Teacher Union Locals Unite Against the Trump/DeVos Agenda, Fight for Public Schools through Collective Bargaining, Community Power

United around common struggles and a shared vision, The California Alliance for Community Schools is a groundbreaking coalition of educator unions from 8 of the largest cities in California, representing more than 50,000 educators. The alliance officially launches tomorrow, Thursday March 23 and includes: Anaheim Secondary Teachers Association, Oakland Education Association, San Bernardino Teachers Association, San Jose Teachers Association, San Diego Education Association, United Educators of San Francisco, United Teachers Los Angeles and United Teachers Richmond.

All 8 unions are uniting around statewide demands, through local bargaining as well as legislation, for more resources in schools, charter school accountability, lower class sizes and other critical improvements. Most of the locals are in contract…

You will note that all of Betsy DeVos’s stories are about struggling students who were rescued from failing public schools by choosing to go to a charter school, a religious school, a home school, or a virtual charter school. Apparently she has never in her life seen a successful public school.

Her latest story is about a young man from India who attended the usual horrible public school. But his life was turned around because he had the good fortune to attend a virtual charter school in Washington State. DeVos was speaking to the National Association of State Boards of Education.

Mercedes Schneider decided it was time for fact-checking.

The young man to whom DeVos referred attended a virtual charter with a four-year graduation rate of 19.1%. After five years, the graduation rate was up to 23.6%.

Surely, someone on her staff knew this. Yet she chose to conceal that…

Research shows us that student’s prospects of earning more than their parents have fallen from 90% to 50% over the past half century; instead of increasing numbers moving up the economic ladder from generation to the next the opposite is occurring.

Anti-poverty programs are maintenance programs, relatively few move up the ladder. The feds maintain a Mobility Index, percentage of kids who move from the bottom 40% by income to the top 40%.

There is one shining light.

The public colleges have been extraordinarily successful in moving graduates up the economic ladder as measured by the Mobility Index

Raj Chetty and others at Stanford, using “big data” techniques scanned extremely large numbers of students over more than a decade and found,

To take just one encouraging statistic: At City College, in Manhattan, 76 percent of students who enrolled in the late 1990s and came from families in the bottom fifth of…