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For years know, advocates of the “no excuses” brand of charter school have denied the obvious.  While loudly proclaiming the test scores and graduation rates of the students who remain at their schools, they have denied that their application processes combined with the harsh discipline environments that emphasize extreme conformity to extreme behavioral expectations are forms of “cream skimming” designed to drive out students less likely to burnish their reputations as “miracle factories.”  As time has gone by and evidence piled up, this has become much harder for them to deny with even a hint of honesty.  For example, Dr. Diane Ravitch of New York University, presented the reports of an insider at the New York City department of education on the extreme attrition at most of the so-called “miracle schools”, and demographics of these schools differ greatly from their fully public neighborhood schools.  Part of this comes from charter…

Getting the role of the teacher right is really, really important.  

And getting it wrong leads to all kinds of problems.

One way our education reform movement (and, to be honest, just about everyone else) gets it wrong is imagining teachers’ function to be simply “delivering content.”

This leads to problems in the classroom.  Students are treated as passive recipients of content that is then superficially assessed via tests.  The students themselves, their lives, the contexts they live in, their aspirations, are not important.  What becomes important is the technical question of how to best “deliver content,” and then how to measure our effectiveness in doing so.  What matters is content delivery and assessment.  This is what I and others label “learnification.”

It is simply bad pedagogy.

Am I overstating this?  Read your newspapers, check your local district’s ranking, and get back to me.

In this bad pedagogy, in our current world…

The day after Thanksgiving, someone sent me an absolutely outrageous opinion piece from the Wall Street Journal.  On-line articles in that newspaper are behind a paywall, which means that I cannot provide you a link.  However, I will quote enough here from the faux-scientific piece published by New York Success Academy Charter Schools executive director, Eva Moskowitz, to give you a taste of what she said.  Moskowitz has a Ph.D, or I might suspect she has no idea about collecting and presenting evidence for an argument.  But she clearly knows better, which means she was intentionally and blatantly trying to deceive what she must imagine is a naive or stupid public.

Moskowitz’s article, titled “The Charter-School Windfall for Public Schools,” is followed by a subtitle to explain: “Competition is making even non-charter schools do better in New York. Yet the city is undermining school choice.”  In the article itself…

Rumors of a New Orleans-style Recovery School District (RSD), aimed at Milwaukee Public Schools, are swirling around the Wisconsin political arena once again. The Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce has been lobbying for this for some time. In 2013 the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute proposed the same idea in a report titled “Pathway to success for Milwaukee schools.” (See at http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/-pathway-to-success_170815996739.pdf).

Right now there are RSD’s in New Orleans, Tennessee, Michigan and Virginia. In New Orleans it is called the Recovery School District. In Tennessee it is called the Achievement School District. In Michigan it is called the Education Achievement Authority. In Virginia it is called the Opportunity Educational Institution.

From the practice of these 4 states, the following outcomes have become evident:
• “Low performing” schools are removed from their school districts.
• Administration and teachers are removed from those schools. (In New Orleans 7500 teachers were fired. A…

I have long known that students are individuals, each with their own style of learning. They come to classrooms with varying degrees of competencies. They come with a wide variety of interests, motivations, hopes and dreams. They come from a wide variety of socioeconomic and family environments, even within the same towns, districts or neighborhoods. So why are public schools presently being told to teach students as if they are all the same? Why are they being taught in a substandard and homogenized way?

All of you can decide on the answers to that question, and there are many that I will don’t rant about here. I have done plenty of that. It is not the time to rant. It is, as it usually is, the time to discuss and propose options and better solutions and better solutions.

It is a lie to say schools do not have high expectations…

by Troy LaRaviere

Background

The members of the Administrator’s Alliance for Proven Policy and Legislation in Education (AAPPLE), have once again—unfortunately—found it necessary to attempt to hold Chicago Public Schools officials accountable. Ironically this time it is the CPS Office of Accountability that needs to answer to students, teachers, parents and school leaders across Chicago.

This office is responsible for developing and executing the system used for rating schools using CPS’s five-level “SQRP” system. However, an AAPPLE comparative analysis indicates the Office of Accountability altered the school level growth data used to assign those ratings.

Investigation

In August, AAPPLE analyzed NWEA MAP student growth results and discovered students in public schools were learning far more than their peers in charter schools. Our findings were published in a Chicago Sun-Times Op-Ed. In addition, the Sun-Times published its own independent analysis, which affirmed our findings. Our analysis was based on a…

After speaking and guiding a workshop recently, I was struck by some distinct impressions I witnessed among several hundred educators.

First, although teachers and educational leaders coming to a conference are a skewed subset of teachers, I was impressed with their passion for teaching but more so for their students.

However, I must add that these teachers repeatedly expressed a lack of agency as professionals; a common refrain was “I [we] can’t,” and the reasons were administration and mandates such as Common Core (or other standards) and high-stakes testing. That sense of fatalism was most often framed against these teachers clearly knowing what they would do (and better) if they felt empowered, professionally empowered, to teach from their expertise as that intersects with their students’ needs.

This experience came just two weeks after my trip to the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) annual convention, this year in Washington DC—where…

Valerie Strauss has a column describing a puzzle: younger Americans, ages 18-34, are more educated than their parents’ generation, but making less money.

Your guess is as good as mine, but here is my guess. Inequality is growing; the middle class is less secure. The “reformers” want everyone to go to college, but they do nothing to address the shrinkage of jobs, especially jobs that pay what college graduates are led to expect. All their “reform” blather is a convenient way of diverting attention from growing wage inequality and growing wealth inequality.

Strauss writes:

Young adults in the United States today — those Americans from 18 to 34 years old — are on average earning less than their counterparts 35 years ago, but more have a college degree, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

This piece on the bureau’s blog says that earnings among young adults range from state…

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An extremist is a person who holds extreme or fanatical political or religious views that are very far from what most people consider correct or reasonable and that are highly disagreeable to the majority of the population.

Dementia is a general term for loss of memory and other mental abilities severe enough to interfere with daily life, and it is caused by physical changes in the brain.

For instance, what Oliver Sacks wrote in Speak Memory, February 21, 2013, in The New York Review of Books about our ability to edit and revise our own memories to fit whatever we want to think. Oliver Sacks says, “From the Inquisition and the Salem witch trials to the Soviet trials of the 1930s and Abu Ghraib, varieties of ‘extreme interrogation,’ or outright physical and mental torture, have been used to extract political or religious “confessions.” While such…