Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé

The Illinois PARCC results were released yesterday and with no surprises. Failure! It’s happening in all the PARCC states. I know a little about why but I wanted the perspective of a teacher so I reached out to one for whom I have great respect. She’s an insightful Chicago teacher of disadvantaged 8th-grade students who cares. Late last night she responded by email. The story she tells is sad and admittedly angers me as it should anyone who reads this. How could our so-called leaders be so incompetent? Or is it part of a plan to demoralize the students and teachers and in the process destroy traditional public schooling? Or are they just plain stupid? Here is her email. I have removed a partial sentence that contains personal information.

First of all, the students are not accustomed to taking a test on the computer.  There are different tools and if…

Seth Sandronsky, a journalist in California, loves Mercedes Schneider’s new book, “Common Core Dilemma: “Who Owns Our Schools?”

In this review, he summarizes the main themes of the book.

He writes:

“Uncle Sam helped to spur the Common Core State Standards, the newest “big thing” in education reform that profits businesses. Mercedes K. Schneider names the actors and unveils their deeds and words in Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools? (Teachers College Press, 2015).

“A laser-like focus on a politically-connected class of edupreneurs propels her empirical case against education privatization’s bid to establish national test-driven assessments and standards for K-12 public schools. There is a vital history here, away from public view for years.

“Schneider clarifies such deliberate obscurity. In an Introduction, 11 chapters, Conclusion, Glossary, Notes and an Index, she investigates the relevant CCSS methods and motives.

“Schneider begins with a look at the Elementary and Secondary…

On November 17, 2015, the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) will vote on either the PARCC assessments or the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) as the statewide assessment system for Massachusetts.

In 2015, districts were able to decide on either PARCC or MCAS, with over half using PARCC.

Massachusetts commissioner Mitchell Chester chairs the governing board of the struggling PARCC consortium, and in November 2015, he is to make a formal recommendation to BESE on which assessment system to choose.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker has made two new appointments to BESE. One is Michael Moriarty, a Holyoke education and community development expert.

The other is Harvard University economist Roland Fryer, who was (hmmm…) promoted from assistant professor to full professor after a single year on the Harvard University faculty (and skipping right over associate professor, to boot).

Fryer is also the faculty director of Harvard University-based 

I have often written that high school students have the power to stop the bad policies that are ruining their education. When they realize they are being cheated, when they organize to fight for equitable funding and against the misuse of testing, it’s game over for the corporate reformers.

Two high school students in Texas have written a brief to demand adequate funding for their schools, in a case now in the courts.

Valerie Strauss writes:

“Two Texas teenagers representing a group of students in the Houston Independent School District have taken an unusual action: They wrote and submitted to the Texas Supreme Court a 35-page brief siding with more than 600 school districts suing the state for underfunding public education in violation of the Texas constitution.

“The court justices recently held a hearing about the suit, which the state is seeking to have dropped. The school districts — about…

Bad students often hate school.

Not exactly shocking, I know.

But perhaps more surprising is the pattern of low, sloppy or inconsistent academic achievement by so many of those adults who consider themselves education reformers, particularly corporate school reformers.

Our ideas of school are certainly formed during our years in it. Those working so diligently to destroy the public school system and reshape it to resemble the business model are so often people who didn’t fit in. They earned low grades or only excelled in subjects they really liked. Perhaps school failed them or perhaps they failed school. There’s no way to know for sure since school records are almost always kept private. But details do trickle through and display a clear pattern – a pattern that certainly gives the appearance of an ulterior motive.

Are these former bad students more interested in fixing the perceived problems they see…

This is a terrific article about the Common Core test results. It explains in layman’s language how the test scores are calculated and converted to scale scores.

When you read the “results” in the newspaper or get the results for your child or your class, you need to understand that the “scores” are not really scores:

The only things that have been released are percentages of students who supposedly meet “proficiency” levels. Those are not test scores—certainly not what parents would understand as scores. They are entirely subjective measurements.

Here’s why. When a child takes a standardized test, his or her results are turned into a “raw score,” that is, the actual number of questions answered correctly, or when an answer is worth more than one point, the actual number of points the child received. That is the only real objective “score,” and yet, Common Core raw scores have not…

Paul Horton, history teacher at the University of Chicago Lab School, got exasperated about the steady stream of articles endorsing the Common Core in the Chronicle of Higher Education. So he wrote a letter warning the professoriate not to buy the corporate-funded CC propaganda. The letter should have been published as an opinion piece.

An excerpt:

“1. They are the product of a push by private foundations acting in the interest of multinational corporations to colonize public education in the United States and in other areas projected be developed as core production and assembly areas in the emerging global economy. A recent Washington Post article using a well-placed source within the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation essentially confirmed what many critics have suspected: that Bill Gates effectively controls the Department of Education in the United States through his former employees who serve in leadership positions within the Department of Education.

Glenn Ford of Black Agenda Report explains clearly why black parents should opt out.

He understands that high-stakes testing is designed to fail most children and that black children will be failed by tests made artificially “rigorous.”

He knows that the ultimate goal– once a dream for rightwing Republicans–is privatization, which is already firmly implanted in many urban districts.

White parents won’t tolerate this scheme, and he says, black parents shouldn’t either.

It is a scam, he says.

“The movement by parents to opt their children out of high stakes testing is growing by leaps and bounds, but remains largely white and suburban, despite the fact that Black folks are the primary targets of the destructive testing regime. Almost two decades ago, the corporate world began pouring millions of dollars into a massive campaign to split the two pillars of the Democratic Party: teachers unions and Black voters. It began…

The following post was written by Amy Frogge, an elected member of the Board of Education in Nashville. Frogge is a lawyer and a strong supporter of public dchools. She was elected in a campaign where corporate reformers outspent her 5-1. She has been openly critical of “no excuses” charter schools, especially Nashville Prep, founded by Ravi Gupta. inthis post she responds to a post written by Gupta, accusing her of wanting to censor a book used in his school in seventh grade. Gupta has plans to open more charters in Mississippi.

Amy Frogge writes:

WARNING: THE CONTENT OF THIS POST IS NOT APPROPRIATE FOR CHILDREN.

Today I was attacked (again) by Ravi Gupta, the head and founder of RePublic Schools, which operates several schools in the district, including Nashville Prep. This time, Mr. Gupta was upset about a private email I’d written to MNPS administrators (the email was forwarded…

Andrea Gabor, the Michael R. Bloomberg Professor of Business Journalism at Baruch College in New York City, has recently written about the disappointing results of the chartering and privatization of almost every school in New Orleans.

Jonathan Alter was unhappy with her article in the New York Times because he is a fervent believer in the privatization of public education by charters.

The irony, as Gabor notes, is that she and Jonathan were classmates at the Francis W. Parker School, a noted private progressive school in Chicago many years ago. The “no-excuses” charters that Alter so admires are nothing like the Francis W. Parker School.

If you have read Lawrence A. Cremin’s The Transformation of the School, a magisterial history of progressive education, you know that Francis Parker preceded John Dewey as the “father of progressive education.” Here is the thumbnail sketch of the man who started the progressive…