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On May 5, 2015, twelve civil rights groups led by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights issued a statement “opposing anti-testing efforts.” In short, these groups are confronting the growing strength of the Opt Out/Resist the Test movement.

These groups are the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the American Association of University Women (AAUW), Association of University Centers on Disabilities (AUCD), Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, Inc. (COPAA), Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), NAACP, National Council of La Raza (NCLR), National Disability Rights Network (NDRN), National Urban League (NUL), Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC), and TASH.

I wrote about their statement in this May 5, 2015, post, entitled, Opting Out Interfering with the “Civil Right” of Testing?

When I first read the May 5, 2015, statement by these 12 civil rights organizations that are defending annual testing even in the face of nationwide standardized-testing overuse…

As I write this post, I have in front of me my permanent education record from kindergarten through eighth grade. It is by way of an unusual set of circumstances that I have this file. The short of it is that the records clerk at the first high school I taught at gave it to me in 1992.

It includes my standardized test scores for grades K, 1, and 4-8.

Yes. I took standardized tests beginning in kindergarten. My first was the Metropolitan Readiness Test, Form B (1973). It assessed my readiness for first grade, in six areas: word meaning, listening, matching, alphabet, numbers, and copying.

My teacher used it to help determine whether I should advance to first grade.

The test was not misused to grade my teacher or school.

None of the other six tests were used to grade my teachers or my school. They were used for…

It’s Charter Scam Week again, and we can conclude that charter advocacy has revealed itself in the following ways:

• Charter advocacy cannot be about improving student achievement since charter school consistently have a range of outcomes similar to public and even private schools once student populations are considered.
• Charter advocacy cannot be concerned about resegregation of schools by race and class since charter schools are significantly segregated.
• Charter advocacy is a thinly veiled attempt to introduce school choice as “parental choice” despite the U.S. public mostly being against school choice.
• Charter advocacy is tolerating at best and perpetuating at worst schools for “other people’s children”—a system that subjects minority and high-poverty children to limited learning experiences, extensive test-prep, and authoritarian/abusive disciplinary policies.
• Charter advocacy chooses to ignore that charters underserve some the most challenging students, ELL and special needs students.
• Charter advocacy also ignores that nothing about “charterness” distinguishes charter from public schools.

I don’t live in Los Angeles, but then neither do the hedge fund managers and equity investors and billionaires who regularly pump money into campaigns in districts where they don’t live. I am giving Bennett Kayser’s campaign $100 because he expects charter schools to be financially and academically accountable. All schools that receive public money should be held to the same standards. His opponent Ref Rodriguez operates a charter school which tried to keep a recent audit secret until after the election. It has been leaked, however. See the KPCC public radio summary here. Rodriguez is the charter’s co-founder and treasurer; the audit finds the school was “insolvent” for nine years and was poorly managed in terms of its finances.

Here is a comment on the blog:

“Here’s where you can donate on-line to Bennett’s campaign:

“http://www.bennett2015.com/donate-online.html

“Here’s his website in general:

http://www.bennett2015.com/

“One more thing, Ref portrays himself…

If you’re paying attention to education matters in the state of Michigan, you know that Michigan’s Governor Snyder has come out with his plan for what is to become of Detroit Public Schools.  In a nutshell, it consists of creating two school systems, one that will exist only to contain and deal with existing debt, and the other to run as a debt free portfolio system  of common enrollment that will contain what is left of traditional public schools in Detroit, and charter schools.

There are some interesting quirks in this plan.  Most interesting to me is that this plan implicitly recognizes that the previous state takeover of DPS was a failure.  Governor Snyder’s response to this failure is this plan, which essentially is a state takeover of a failed state takeover.  ( Remember Einstein’s definition of insanity?)

As Detroit Data and Democracy points out, the consequences of the state takeover, originally…

Fordham Institute former president Chester Finn is concerned about the “cheapening” of the meaning of “college educated.”

Here is some of Finn’s April 25, 2015, lament:

A vast amount of contemporary education policy attention and education reform energy has been lavished on the task of defining and gauging “college readiness” and then taking steps to align K–12 outcomes more closely with it. …

The entire Common Core edifice—and the assessments, cut scores, and accountability arrangements built atop it—presupposes that “college-ready” has the same definition that it has long enjoyed…

The idea of graduating more “college-ready” kids from high school is intended to lighten the remediation burden…

But what if “college-ready” no longer means that you actually have to be prepared to succeed in credit-bearing college courses? Or if “credit-bearing courses” are diluted such that more people appear “prepared” to succeed in them, even though such success means less than it…

The National Education Policy Center regularly reviews research findings, in effect, acting as an independent peer review board.

In this case, its reviewer challenges the latest CREDO report on urban charters:

Is It Time to Stop the CREDO-Worship?

New review explains CREDO charter school research flaws, raises concerns about misunderstandings of effect sizes

Contact:

William J. Mathis, (802) 383-0058, wmathis@sover.net

Andrew Maul, (805) 893-7770, amaul@education.ucsb.edu

URL for this press release: http://tinyurl.com/mbse6m7

BOULDER, CO (April 27, 2015) — A recent report contends charter schools generally helped students increase reading and math scores and that urban charters had an even stronger positive effect. But a new review released today questions the strong reliance that has been placed on this and similar reports.

Andrew Maul reviewed Urban Charter School Study Report on 41 Regions 2015 for the Think Twice think tank review project. The review is published by the National Education Policy Center…

A teacher wrote this little essay and dedicated it to Governor Andrew Cuomo:

“There is a man in Albany, who I surmise, by his clamorous paroxysms, has an extreme aversion to educators. He sees teachers as curs, or likens them to mangy dogs. Methinks he suffers from a rare form of psychopathology in which he absconds with our dignity by enacting laws counterintuitive to the orthodoxy of educational leadership. We have given him sufferance for far too long. He’s currently taking a circuitous path to DC, but he will no doubt soon find himself in litigious waters. The time has come to bowdlerize his posits, send him many furlongs away, and maroon him there, maybe Cuba?

She added:

I’m not supposed to say this, but all these insanely hard words appeared on the 4,6, and 8th grade tests last week.

Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” will be greatly missed when he steps down in August. He is the only national television figure who really gets what is happening in education, perhaps because his mother worked in the public schools of New Jersey.

In this segment, he contrasts the treatment of the Atlanta educators convicted of “racketeering” for changing answers on students’ tests with the treatment of Wall Street fraudsters. He is the best.