Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé

Billionaire Eli Broad decided long ago that one of his missions in life would be to privatize public schools, even though he and his wife are graduates of Michigan public schools. He has never explained his passion to stamp out the institution that educated him. He has spent years funding organizations committed to diverting public dollars to private hands. I once was invited to meet him in his glamorous penthouse apartment in New York City, and he explained that he didn’t know anything about education, but he knew management. He believes that non-educators should run education, especially if they surround themselves with people who have degrees in business and business experience. When I was on the board of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, he funded a “manifesto” declaring that principals should be managers, not educators. He started a Superintendents Academy to train urban superintendents in his philosophy. A startling number…

“In the Public Interest,” an organization that keeps track of privatization of the public sector, points out that Trump and DeVos have a lot riding on the outcome of the school board election in Los Angeles on May 16.

Their allies have invested millions of dollars in gaining control of the school board so they can turn students and schools over to private hands.

If they can defeat Steve Zimmer and Irma Padilla in run-offs, they will be able to divert public funding to charter entrepreneurs and corporate charter chains. They will squash democratic control of public schools. They will send tax dollars to corporate entities that are neither accountable nor transparent. They will widen the reach of an unregulated industry that has been marred by scandal, theft, fraud, misappropriation of funds, and self-dealing.

Citizens of Los Angeles. Stand up for democracy and public education! Vote for Steve Zimmer and…

William J. Mathis is the former Commissioner of Education in Vermont, currently managing director of the National Education Policy Center

Fake News and Politicized Prevarications: The Florida State Department of Education and the Center for Education Reform Reports on Charter School Performance

“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”
— Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price, 1789.

In a rational world, we accept that knowledge, honestly applied, will set things right. But the nation’s political world is not so rational. In our current controversies, “fake news” and “alternative facts” are used to establish an ideology or to dismiss inconvenient truths. This is not a recent phenomenon. Throughout history fake news has been used to justify wars, unify people, and assault opponents. Its purpose is to invent or establish some scientific appearing veneer to justify activities which otherwise would be on shaky grounds. Unfortunately, education does…

Each year, U.S. News And World Report generates a report of the ‘best’ high schools in the country.  This year, the charter world has been celebrating because out of the top 100 schools, by the U.S. News rating system, 34 of them are charter schools.

There are a lot of ways to measure the quality of a high school.  The way that U.S. News does it is as follows:  75% of the score is the percent of 12th graders who get at least a 3 on at least one AP test.  25% of the score is the percent of 12th graders who took at least one AP test.  They call this weighted average the ‘College Ready Index.’  By including the participation rate, a school can’t inflate their scores by only allowing students to take the AP who are most likely to pass.

The school at which I teach, Stuyvesant High…

What do Marta W. Aldrich’s Teacher merit pay has merit when it comes to student scores, analysis shows and Matthew G. Springer’s Teacher Merit Pay and Student Test Scores: A Meta-Analysis have in common?

Irony, in that they both lack merit.

Let’s be brief but focus on the nonsense.

Well, as Aldrich reports about Springer’s research, a meta-analysis (this is research-speak that is supposed to strike fear into everyone since it is an analysis of much if not all of the existing research on a topic; thus, research about research), we now have discovered that merit pay in fact works! You see, it causes [insert throat clearing] “academic increase … roughly equivalent to adding three weeks of learning to the school year, based on studies conducted in U.S. schools, and four weeks based on studies across the globe.”

Wow! Three to four weeks of learning. That is … nonsense.

So…

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…