Category Archives: Uncategorized

John Merrow decided to calculate which school leader was making the most money based on the number of students enrolled.

Carmen Farina pulls down about $.20 per child, $.40 if you include her pension.

“New York’s most prominent charter school operator is, of course, Eva Moskowitz, the founder and CEO of Success Academies. She has received a significant pay raise and now makes $567,000 a year, as Ben Chapman reported in the New York Daily News. Success Academies enrolls 11,000 students, the same number as in Chicago’s Noble Network.

“Let’s do the math. 567,000 divided by 11,000 equals 51.35, meaning that Ms. Moskowitz is earning $51.35 per student, nearly two-and-one-half times what Mr. Milkie is paid per student.

“If Carmen Fariña were running Success Academies instead of the nation’s largest school district, at her current pay rate of 40 cents per student she’d be earning $4400 a year!

“Put another…

William Doyle recently returned from a Fulbright year in Finland, and he spent his year studying education. His own child attended a Finnish school.

He wrote about some of the lessons he learned in this article that appeared in the Hechinger Report.

Here is the big takeaway:

If you want results, try doing the opposite of what American “education reformers” think we should do in classrooms.
Instead of control, competition, stress, standardized testing, screen-based schools and loosened teacher qualifications, try warmth, collaboration, and highly professionalized, teacher-led encouragement and assessment.

When American reformers refer to “personalized learning,” they mean that every child should have his/her own laptop. Finnish teachers use the concept of “personalized learning,” but they mean person-to-person learning:

While the school has the latest technology, there isn’t a tablet or smartphone in sight, just a smart board and a teacher’s desktop.

Screens can only deliver simulations of personalized learning…

NBC News has caught on to one of the biggest hoaxes of the corporate reform movement: the failure of virtual charter schools. About 200,000 students are currently enrolled in virtual charters. The attrition rates are high, but the industry spends taxpayer dollars constantly recruiting to increase their numbers. It is good to see the mainstream media catching on to what critics of virtual charters have known for a few years.

Some sharp eyed person in their news department learned about the CREDO study last fall that showed that students enrolled in these stay-at-home schools lose ground academically. In the case of math, they lose a full year of instruction for every year they are enrolled. In reading, they also lose ground, as much as 72 days.

The CREDO study says:

The first set of analyses examines the academic growth of online charter students compared to the matched VCRs made…

Gold!

There’s gold in them thar schools!

Don’t believe me?

When you drive by an inner city school, it doesn’t exactly look like the Taj Mahal. Does it? Even relatively upscale suburban schools wouldn’t be mistaken for a house on MTV Cribs. And some of those fly-by night charter schools look more like prisons than Shangri-La.

But I’ve got it on good authority that there’s $1.3 trillion available for someone who knows how to take it.

That someone is Harold Levy, an expert on how to get rich through school privatization.

The former chancellor of the New York City School System has begun a second career managing an investment company.

“For-profit education is one of the largest U.S. investment markets, currently topping $1.3 trillion in value,” according to the Website for one of his master classes for rich investors.

Wooo-weee! That’s a lot…

Robin Alexander, head of the Cambridge Primary Review and prominent British educator, learned that the conservative Education Minister wants to bring a US charter leader to run the British school inspectorate, called Ofsted. He was not happy. He knows what corporate reform is, and he doesn’t want their leaders in Britain.

Alexander writes:

“A check on the touted names makes it clear that the search is less about talent than ideology. The reputation of every US candidate in which the Secretary of State is said to be interested rests on their messianic zeal for the universalisation of charter schools (the US model for England’s academies), against public schools (the equivalent of our LA-maintained schools), and against the teaching unions. This, then, is the mission that the government wants the new Chief Inspector to serve.

“Too bad that the majority of England’s primary schools are not, or not yet, academies. Too…

There is a disturbing trend among Republican Presidential candidates, who are making claims—if elected—that goes against what the Founding Fathers wrote in the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights.

For instance, on ABC, Ted Cruz said that the U.S. Supreme Court replacement for Justice Antonin Scalia should not be nominated by President Obama. Cruz said, “This should be a decision for the people. … Let the election decide. If the Democrats want to replace [Scalia], they need to win the election.”

Antonin Scalia was appointed to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan, who I think was the Prince of Darkness himself. How did this happen? Simple, the Senate majority at the time was held by the Republicans and Strom Thurmond from South Carolina was Senate Pres. Pro-tem. If you want to read more about Scalia as a terrible person, click this link on another Blog written by another blogger:

I posted this study a month or so ago. But I continue to get inquiries from school board members in states that are considering the adoption of vouchers. I heard today that this study may have killed vouchers in Tennessee, at least for now (true believers never give up). Make sure that every member of your state school board and every member of your state legislature gets a copy of this study. The study was completed by researchers at MIT.

The study is titled “School Vouchers and Student Achievement: First-Year Evidence from the Louisiana Scholarship Program.” Granted, this is only the first year, but the findings are strong and devastating to the belief that vouchers (most of which go to religious schools) will “save poor kids from failing public schools.” The study compared the test scores of lottery winners and lottery losers, which is supposedly the gold standard for voucher…

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which oversees the Program in International Student Assessment (PISA), has released a lengthy study comparing the nations that take the PISA test.

The conclusions of the report confirm what almost everyone knows: the students with the lowest test scores are those who live in poverty, those who have an immigrant background, and those who live in a single-parent home (which is usually a female parent, who usually lacks the income to support the family). These findings are not surprising.

How does the US compare? Apparently there have been no changes in reading scores since 2003—despite No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top and their heavy emphasis on reading and math. There were some gains in science, which is surprising since science was not a priority subject for either of the  big federal programs.

So how does the U.S. stack up…

Peter Greene brings his sharp scalpel to the latest “research” by the National Council for Teacher Quality. This is the group created in 2000 by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation with the purpose of bringing down teacher education. As I wrote in an earlier post, NCTQ was sustained at the outset by a $5 million grant from Secretary of Education Rod Paige, when it had not yet figured out a way to destroy traditional teacher education programs.

Now NCTQ has issued a new “report,” claiming that it knows exactly what makes for successful teaching.

Greene writes:

The National Council on Teacher Quality is one of the great mysteries of the education biz. They have no particular credentials and are truly the laziest “researchers” on the planet, but I think I may have cracked the code. Let me show you their latest piece of “research,” and then we can talk about…

Brian T. Woods, a district superintendent in Texas, wrote an article exposing the myth of charter schools’ waiting lists.

Charters claim they must expand because 100,000 students are on waiting lists. Woods says that recent hearings before the state senate education committee demonstrated the falsity of that claim, based on data presented by the Texas Education Agency.

Some charters have waiting lusts, but most don’t. Charters actually have at least 108,000 vacant seats in the state. There are 250,000 charter students in the state, which is 5% of public school enrollment. About 30% of charter seats are empty. Why open more charters?

Woods also pointed out:

“The other revelation was a new study on the funding of charter schools versus that of independent school districts. A well-respected educational consulting group released a report examining the various funding structures. Among its findings, according to a Texas Association of School Boards report…