Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé

The Network for Public Education Action Fund released this statement, just minutes ago:

For Immediate Release: June 22, 2016

Media Contact:
Carol Burris 718-577-3276 carol@npeaction.org

The Network for Public Education Action Calls Upon the Democratic Party to Include a Pro-Public Education Agenda in its Platform Statement.

In response to the Democratic Party’s request for platform input, forty-six national and local grassroots groups join the Network for Public Education Action in its petition that five pro-public education principles be included in the party platform. The allied groups are united in their opposition to the privatization of public schools, which has been enabled by both political parties.

A corresponding statement will also be sent to the Republican Party.

New York, New York– Today, the Network for Public Education Action (NPE Action), a national nonprofit 501(c) (4) education advocacy organization with 22,000 supporters, released Strengthening K-12 Education: A Submission to the Democratic Party…

Ever wonder what it is like to teach at a Success Academy charter school in New York City? I have been contacted by several teachers who quit and told me their stories, but they were never willing to allow their name to be published. They were afraid that their future job prospects would be damaged. Here is a statement by a former SA teacher, Sasha Guiridongo, posted on her own blog and then shared with Mercedes Schneider.

What is unusual, of course, is that Sasha is not afraid to tell her story and give her name.

She didn’t last long at Success Academy. She explains why in her post. SA is known for teacher churn and burn out. That explains why Eva Moskowitz’s supporters in the Legislature were pushing hard to get a special exemption for charter teachers in the law, relieving them of the necessity of being certified…

Six eighth grade students at Eva Moskowitz’s charter chain Success Academy passed the examination for New York City’s elite high schools. This is the first time that any student from Success Academy has passed the rigorous exam in the three years that she had students in this grade.

Moskowitz offered this information in a meeting with the New York Daily News editorial board.

Six students out of 54 Success Academy eighth-graders who took the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test were offered seats in 2016 at one of the elite high schools that rely on the test, like Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech or Bronx Science, Moskowitz said in a wide-ranging interview with the Daily News Editorial Board.

That’s up from zero kids who gained seats in 2014 and 2015.

The performance is below the city average acceptance rate of nearly 19%. However, all of the Success Academy kids who took the test…

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley reports here on new research by Steven Klees of the University of Maryland, which concludes that the contribution of individual teachers to student learning cannot be isolated or quantified as “value-added modeling” claims to do.

Accumulating evidence continues to demonstrate that the teacher evaluation systems imposed by Arne Duncan in the Race to the Top is invalid, inaccurate and unreliable. How many teachers and principals have been fired because of these flawed metrics?

http://vamboozled.com/vams-are-never-accurate-reliable-and-valid/

Open the article for her many links.

She writes:

The Educational Researcher (ER) journal is the highly esteemed, flagship journal of the American Educational Research Association. It may sound familiar in that what I view to be many of the best research articles published about value-added models (VAMs) were published in ER (see my full reading list on this topic here), but as more specific to this post, the recent “AERA Statement on Use…

Edward F. Berger is a retired educator who lives in Arizona and builds community support against privatization of public schools.

In this post, he explains the failure of charter schools (which he calls “partial schools”).

This is how the school choice movement went wrong:

Politicians, ideologues, so-called libertarians, and crooks attracted by profit motives, took over the charter school experiment. They decided, with no educational data to back their decisions, that charter schools, regardless of whether they worked for children or not, whether they served America’s need for an educated populous or not, would become stand-alone schools that could be run with little accountability, certification, or even democratically elected boards. Now, tax money is often used to create private Real Estate empires. Our tax dollars that we pay for children and their education are siphoned off to individuals, corporations, and companies that contract with charters to provide “services.” Is…

Arthur Camins, Director, Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, recognizes that the nation’s public schools and their educators have been targets of a false narrative of failure. He argues that it is necessary not only to refute the propaganda campaign but to propose better ideas to strengthen public schools and our democracy.

He writes:

“There are real persistent problems in education. Today, failure narratives are the strategy-of-choice for groups who want to privatize education, undermine unions, disempower workers, and open profitable markets for educational technology, testing materials and publically funded, but privately managed charter schools that are unencumbered by government regulation. However, what is said is a smoke screen for what it intended.

“Let’s open up schools as profit centers,” “We don’t trust communities to make democratic decisions about their schools,” and “Let’s get taxpayers to fund some charter schools…

Steven Singer writes about the slickest con job of our time. He calls it the “Charter School Swindle.” It is a triumph of marketing and propaganda. Would you believe that charlatans sold the idea of segregation to Black and Latino parents and got away with it? Would you believe they sold these families on the claim that entry into a charter school was a ticket to success, with no evidence?

Singer writes:

Segregation now!

Higher suspension rates for black students!

Lower quality schools for Latinos!

These may sound like the campaign cries of George Wallace or Ross Barnett. But this isn’t the 1960s and it isn’t Alabama or Mississippi.

These are the cries of modern day charter school advocates – or they could be.

School choice boosters rarely if ever couch their support in these terms, but when touting charter schools over traditional public schools, this is exactly what they’re…

Linda McNeill is a well-known scholar of high-stakes testing at Rice University in Houston.

She writes here about the ominous role of testing companies in data mining students as they are studying or taking tests online. They gather confidential data about every child. That data may later be used for commercial purposes.

Even as they regularly invade the privacy of unknowing children, they fiercely resist any attempts to make public their tests, on which the fate of students, educators, and schools hinge.

Any discussion of the test content will lead to claims of copyright infringement and threats of legal action. And as we have seen in recent weeks, the test publishers contact Twitter, Facebook, and other social media and lodge complaints that lead to the deletion of tweets, posts, and comments. The testing companies assert the right to censor other people’s products, while shielding their own from public scrutiny.

McNeill…

The California Charter School Association is a super-rich, highly political power broker in politics. It wants to control every possible seat in the state legislature so it can pursue its goal of mass privatization of public schools across the Golden State.

Consider this dirty trick: It has created an organization called the “Parent Teacher Alliance,” which endorses candidates. Thus, the candidates can say that they were endorsed by the “PTA,” even though this Parent Teacher Alliance has no affiliation with the Parent Teacher Associations of the state.

The Los Angeles School Report, whose editorial content is directed by Campbell Brown, has a story about a crucial legislative race playing out in a district where the assemblyman vacated his seat. Voters will decide tomorrow. The go-to speaker quoted in the story is Marshall Tuck, who ran and lost as the pro-charter candidate against Tom Torlakson, the state superintendent. Tuck speaks from…

The Chicago Sun-Times reported on a startling conflict of interest.

The rightwing, anti-union Walton Family Foundation has been funding the Illinois State Charter School Commission, a state agency, as well as many charter schools in Illinois. When the Chicago Public Schools recommended closing two charter schools because of their poor performance, the Commission blocked the closing. The two failing charters were also funded by the Walton Family Foundation.

Have you ever heard of a public agency that relied for funding on a private foundation with a political agenda of privatization?

Reporters Dan Mihalopoulos and Lauren FitzPatrick write:

A private foundation started by the late Walmart mogul Sam Walton and his wife has contributed heavily to the Illinois State Charter School Commission and to two charter operators whose schools the state agency has blocked the Chicago Board of Education from closing over poor student performance, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times…