Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé

South Carolina remains a disturbing subset of the larger education reform movement effectively dismantling but not improving pubic schools, institutions that have historically and are currently failing vulnerable student populations who need public opportunities more than anyone.

Charleston is now the battle ground over expanding charter schools and embracing the already failed turnaround or takeover models that many early adopters in other states are ending.

The public version of the debate has included the following:

• Beware of ‘turnaround’ school districts (see compilation of research at the end)
• Beware of privatizing public education, Millicent Brown and Jon Hale
• Momentum grows for Charleston education, Anita Zucker and Ted Legasey
• Brentwood and Burns make public schools work for kids
• Don’t trust ‘free market’ reforms for public schools, The Rev. Joseph A. Darby

Beyond the specifics of the issues of this debate about takeover policies and charter school expansion (and the implications of privatizing public…

The Network for Public Education, with members in every state, has issued a call for a national opt out from standardized testing.

The tests have no diagnostic value. They are used to rank and grade students, teachers, and schools, but they provide no information to help teachers or students. They are useless.

They consume an absurd amount of time. Little children spend more time to take tests than law exams.

The tests have an absurdly high passing mark, which guarantees that the majority of students will fail.

The tests do not help children. They hurt children. We don’t know how to measure what matters most.

Join us. Opt out.

You have the right to refuse the state tests.

Here is how you do it in New York.

For information about your own state, go to the website of United Opt Out.

Do you want to know why to opt out?

Here is a short summary. The tests now in use are tied to a cut score (passing mark) that guarantees that about 70% of all students will fail. The tests will be especially harmful to students with disabilities and students who are English language learners. But the harm extends far beyond those students.

The tests do not provide any useful information. They will tell you whether your child is a 1, 2, 3, or 4. What good is that? It will tell you what percentile rank your child is. What good is that? The test will not help your child or her teacher. It will label your school as…

Our reader Dennis Ian gives his analysis of the role of Teach for America. TFA is an April Fool’s joke on American education. It claims that its inexperienced and idealistic recruits can transform lives and provide an excellent education in only two years of teaching. It claims that its five weeks of training in summer camp prepare its recruits to “perform” even better than experienced teachers. It perpetuates the myth that test scores are the most important outcome of schooling. It sneers at mentions of poverty, since those who are concerned about poverty are allegedly making “excuses.” It is a huge corporate entity with annual revenues in excess of $300 million, whose executives are paid six figure salaries, as befits executives of a major corporation. It gives the political and corporate leaders of our society the illusory belief that amateurs are better than veterans if the former went to an…

The Southern Education Foundation has released a new report that explodes the myth that charters and vouchers increase opportunity for students of color and low-income students. Far from it. Privatization via charters and vouchers has intensified racial segregation and is reversing the Brown Decision of 1954. The disreputable concept of “separate but equal” is returning under the guise of “school choice.”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Autumn Blanchard
ablanchard@southerneducation.org
404.991.6766

PRIVATE SCHOOL SEGREGATION: OLD NEWS, NEW PITCH
State-funded “separate but unequal” education billed as opportunity for underrepresented

MARCH 29, 2016 – The Southern Education Foundation (SEF), an advocate for equity in education, releases Race & Ethnicity in a New Era of Public Funding of Private Schools: Private School Enrollment in the South and the Nation. This report explores the phenomenon of publicly funded private school segregation occurring more than 60 years after the Brown v. Board of Education verdict declared segregated…

The tabloid press in New York City, which has consistently supported corporate reform, such as charters and high-stakes testing, regularly claims in its editorials that the parents’ opt out movement is secretly funded and manipulated by teachers’ unions.

This is absolutely untrue. There are teachers involved in the opt out movement, but as individuals and parents, not as representatives of their unions. When Karen Magee, the president of the New York State teachers’ union, endorsed opt out last spring, right before the testing started, it was big news. (My blog got the biggest one-day readership in its history [about 140,000 views in one day] when I reported Magee’s decision).

The New York City United Federation of Teachers never endorsed opt out, never funded it.

Please, editorial writers for the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and yes, even the New York Times, please take note: The opt out…

On Tuesday, the Education and Workforce Committee held a Congressional hearing called “Strengthening Education Research and Privacy Protections to Better Serve Students”.  With one parent advocate, one data guy from the Georgia Department of Education, and two corporate schills (yes, there were two, more on that one later).  The hearing was stacked with U.S. Representatives who are, shall we say, sympathetic to the data-testing regime.  We all know the type!

If you looked at the witness list for who was giving testimony at this hearing on the EdWorkforce website, you can see who they were:

So who are these people?  Rachael Strickland is the co-founder and co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy.  Neil Campbell is the Policy Director for Next Generation Reforms at the Foundation for Excellence in Education (Jeb Bush’s company).  Jane Hannaway is with the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.  Robert Swiggum…

In this post, Valerie Strauss recounts the sordid history of Florida’s State Superintendent, Pam Stewart, who tries to force severely disabled children to take standardized state tests.

One of them, Ethan Radiske, was dying as the Florida Department of Education harassed his family to get him to take the test. Poor Ethan cheated the state by dying without taking the test.

Valerie Strauss writes:

“Now, a mother named Paula Drew is fighting the same kind of battle with the Florida Department of Education. Paula’s daughter, 15-year-old Madison Drew, has cerebral palsy and cannot speak. She suffers from a number of conditions related to her condition and takes several medications daily to prevent seizures, which can affect her cognitive abilities, a doctor’s written diagnosis shows.

“Drew said she sought an exemption from state-mandated testing, but Pam Stewart, the Florida education commissioner, denied the request…

“I asked the Florida Department of Education…

Stephen Dyer of Innovation Ohio reports on the latest comparisons between charters and public schools.

“Here are the toplines:

“72.5 percent of all state charter funding went to charters that DO NOT outperform the local school district.

“Nearly 1 in 3 charter schools receive all their state funding from higher performing local school districts.

“50 percent of the charter dollars that leave the Youngstown Schools go to charters that perform worse on the state report card.

“80 percent of all money sent to eSchools came from higher performing local school districts.

“92 percent of Ohio school districts (563 of 609) received less per pupil state funding because of the way Ohio funds its charter schools.

“Here’s my blog about the report and some more about its methodology: http://bit.ly/1RiretJ

Stephen Dyer

Education Policy Fellow

Innovation Ohio

35 E. Gay St.

Columbus, OH 43215

http://www.innovationohio.org”

The Chicago and Detroit and Philadelphia school districts are out of money due to political fights in their statehouses. Privatization through charters and vouchers continues to grow.  States adhere to the supply-side theory that prescribes radical tax cutting as the only way to attract jobs and grow the economy.  States rank and rate school districts and create policies that explain low achievement in the very poorest districts by castigating the schools and blaming the teachers.  I hope those of us who know better will stay informed, get organized, and continue to lift our voices, because the forces on the other side have constructed and funded an institutional framework to ensure that their policies get enacted by the legislatures across the states.  And as more and more states have school vouchers, for example, that give tax dollars to families to fund private and parochial schools, vouchers become normalized in the public’s…