Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé

The Ohio blogger Plunderbund here lays out the astonishing record of William Lager and the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow.(ECOT). This online charter school is the largest charter in the state. It receives almost $100 million a year from the state.

“On the latest report cards released by the Ohio Department of Education, ECOT continues to rank below all of the 8 large urban schools that are often-criticized by legislators and in the media for their “sub-par” performance.

“That hasn’t stopped ECOT’s founder, William Lager, from continuing to get paid. And getting paid he is.”

“Lager is also the owner of two privately-held companies that provide both the management services (Altair Learning Management) and curriculum (IQ Innovations) to the online school.” Those two companies will collect another $22 million for their services.

Plunderbund shows that Lager is a major campaign contributor. He has donated $2 million to political campaigns since he…

Zephyr Teachout is running against Andrew Cuomo for Governor of New York.

Cuomo twice tried to knock her off the ballot and lost in court both times.

Cuomo refuses to debate her, fearing to let the public hear her.

Why is he afraid of Zephyr?

Read this excellent article by Jaime Franchi in the Long Island Press and you will find out why he is afraid of her candidacy.

“Teachout is hoping to capitalize on the left’s disappointment in Cuomo’s right-leaning positions and leadership, which had promised an end to corruption in Albany but has instead highlighted just how entrenched that corruption is. She’s been hammering Cuomo on these and many other topics while swinging through communities across the state on a recent “Whistleblower Tour,” attempting to chip away at the giant lead his monumental advertising budget, incumbency, and name recognition provides.”

She has a well-established record as a fighter…

Troy A. LaRaviere is principal at Blaine Elementary School. In this article in the Chicago Sun-Times, he explains how the city’s public schools got higher test scores than the city’s well-funded, politically favored charter schools. To my knowledge, the Chicago Tribune–a cheerleader for charters– has not reported this story, nor has Mayor Rahm Emanuel acknowledged it. Please let me know if I am wrong.

LaRiviere writes:

“In terms of assessing the effectiveness of charter schools, I believe the most accurate comparison is to public magnet schools since both charters and magnets have lottery admissions processes that increase the likelihood of enrolling students with involved parents. In essence, charters are privately run magnet schools and therefore should be measured against publicly run magnet schools. I believe that turnaround schools should be compared to neighborhood schools since they both must accept students within their attendance boundaries. Using the Sun-Times results, the…

Marc Tucker writes that we test students more than any of the high-performing nations in the world.

Here is a graph that demonstrates the differences.

Tucker proposed a new accountability system for the U.S. that puts us more in line with common practice.

Here are his key points:

“The ideas outlined by Marc Tucker in Fixing Our National Accountability System signify a departure from conventional thinking on the issue of accountability. Rather than focus on punishing teachers for the results of a system that others designed, the core components of this report rest on three fundamental principles:

1) Testing: Instead of testing all of our students every year with low-quality tests, students would take high-quality accountability tests, covering a full core curriculum, only three times in their school career. In some off years, tests in math and ELA would be administered only to samples of students by computer…

Tom Moran, chief editorial writer for the Star-Ledger of New Jersey, responds here to the open letter written by three New Jersey bloggers, posted on their sites, and at blue jersey.com.

Here is Jersey Jazzman’s reply to Moran.

Moran was offended by the tone of the bloggers’ letter to him. The bloggers are offended by Cami Anderson’s One Newark” plan, which seeks to charterize large numbers of Newark’s public schools without consulting the Newark community.

Education policymakers in the U.S. seem to think that more tests will produce higher achievement, but there is no evidence for this assumption. As this article from the Center on International Education Benchmarking shows, the U.S. tests more frequently than any of the world’s high-performing nations.

Jackie Kraemer writes:

“Unlike the top-performing countries on the 2012 PISA, the United States stands out for the amount of external testing it requires for all students. As the chart below shows, the United States is the only country among this set to require annual testing in primary and middle schools in reading and mathematics. A more typical pattern among the top-performers is a required gateway exam, or an exam that allows a student to move on to the next phase of education, at the end of primary school, the end of lower secondary school and the end of upper secondary school. This…

I have written a couple of posts of late regarding the results of Education Next’s 2014 public opinion survey, especially as concerns EdNext’s and its editor-in-chief Paul Peterson’s attempts to sell the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) to a public that is only half aware of CCSS– and with the half who are aware increasingly rejecting those “common standards in English and math.”

(The New York Times will be sponsoring a CCSS debate on September 9, 2014. It has entitled its debate, “Embrace the Common Core,” and yet its own polling result shows overwhelming rejection of CCSS. As of this writing, the survey has approximately 41,500 responses– 89 percent of which are cast against CCSS. Apparently America is not too keen on the NYT-encouraged CCSS “”embrace.”)

Given the length of the EdNext survey, I have chosen to examine it– and Peterson’s cultivation of the education-privatization message– in a number…