Explain why the new RTTT-mandated systems in almost every state find that 95-99% of teachers are rated effective or highly effective, but the corporate education for-profit RheeFormers still push hard to use VAM methods to find and fire ineffective teachers—spending billions of pubic dollars in the process and profiting off those dollars.
Hawaii applied for and won a Race to the Top grant. So, of course, Hawaii was required to create a new teacher evaluation system that incorporated student test scores. Many teachers objected. Mireille Ellsworth was one of them. She especially opposed the use of “Student Learning Objectives.” She said the measures were invalid and unreliable. Because she refused to complete the “SLOs,” she got a subpar rating. She challenged the rating, and she won.
When the Hawaii Department of Education released the details of its new teacher evaluation system three years ago, veteran teacher Mireille Ellsworth made a radical decision: She would simply refuse to do part of it.
Like many teachers in the state, Ellsworth felt that linking teacher pay — even partially — to student test scores was unfair. But there were other portions of the complex and multi-tiered system that she objected to as well, including the…
For those of you who have frequently criticized the LA Times as a tool of the charter industry, please note that I was invited to write the article.
The article is a strong plea for a leader who will restore public confidence in public education. Given that Los Angeles has a very rich, very powerful lobby for privately managed charters, it was written to counter their pressure to convert more public schools to private management. They heavily invest in school board candidates who follow their agenda. In the last election, the charter lobby managed to place a charter school operator on the district school board. Only an awakened public can defend the public sector from raids by the corporate sector on what rightly belongs to the…
Donald Trump serves a vital role for the corporate attacks against public services, especially public education, elderly and disabled people, children with special needs, earned and paid-for pensions, and other sane purposes served by a civilized society.
Donald Trump serves as a distraction to make Jeb seem like less than the corporate extremist he certainly is.
Trump plays the angry, comic, side-show goon as Jeb plays the straight man in town after town. Jeb, meanwhile, steadily re-invents his own factual history regarding education and other issues. (We used to call this lying.)
Jeb condemns lobbyists in spite of his incredible pro-lobbiest history with Florida’s legalized, legislative corruption.
Jeb claims that he helps senior citizen voters even after he has cut away at their earned and paid-for benefits and pensions.
Jeb claims to be an anti-intellectual who doesn’t like or use big words even though he graduated Phi Betta Kapa and…
I received this open letter unsolicited from a Teach For America alum. She was assigned to teach special education in California in 2013. After her letter, I have also included a clip at the end from the Network for Public Education’s new series Truth For America.
Dear SPED TFA Corps Members 2015,
Congratulations! You’ve survived TFA Summer Institute. Those broken down moments, sleepless nights, dealing with exhaustion, anxiety moments are finally over. No more lesson planning for another month or so. I know you may be anxious to start, especially to receive the class list.
Yet, I suspect there is a part of you that also feels like something just doesn’t feel right. Perhaps, its because you never really taught a class more than 10 students on your own without any supervision. Or maybe, it could be knowing that the summer session students did not have an IEP. Or maybe, you…
Value Added Measurement (VAM) uses the results of student tests linked to the flawed Common Core Standards that are being forced on the nation’s public schoolsto punish teachers for students who–-for a variety of reasons that seldom if ever have anything to do with the actual teaching—are not learning.
In fact, VAM totally ignores the student learning factor and places ALL the blame on teachers when reputable studies have repeatedly proven that time spent in the classroom and teaching represents less than 30% of the factors that lead to a child’s learning. The other factors that make up two-thirds of what causes a child to learn takes place outside of school in the home/family environment, and poverty DOES play a vital role when it comes to a child learning what is taught by a teacher in the classroom.
Even the results of the International PISA tests prove that poverty is a major factor, and to make my point, I’m using several different reputable sources.
“There is an achievement gap between more and less disadvantaged students in every country; surprisingly, that gap is smaller in the United States than in similar post-industrial countries, and not much larger than in the very highest scoring countries.
“Achievement of U.S. disadvantaged students has been rising rapidly over time, while achievement of disadvantaged students in countries to which the United States is frequently unfavorably compared – Canada, Finland and Korea, for example – has been falling rapidly.
“U.S. PISA scores are depressed partly because of a sampling flaw resulting in a disproportionate number of students from high-poverty schools among the test-takers. About 40 percent of the PISA sample in the United States was drawn from schools where half or more of the students are eligible for the free lunch program, though only 32 percent of students nationwide attend such schools.”
THIRD:Mel Riddle, the Associate Director for High School Services at NASSP (National Association of Secondary School Principals), compared the results of the PISA and focused on children who lived in poverty to discover that children living in poverty in the United States are improving and doing better than their socioeconomic peers in the other OECD countries.
Mel reported: “PISA results have provided ample fodder for public school bashers and doomsayers who further their own philosophies and agendas by painting all public schools as failing. For whatever reason, the pundits, many of whom have had little or no actual exposure to public schools, refuse to paint an accurate picture of the state of education.
“A closer look at the data tells a different story. Most notable is the relationship between PISA scores in terms of individual American schools and poverty. While the overall PISA rankings ignore such differences in the tested schools, when groupings based on the rate of free and reduced lunch are created, a direct relationship is established.”
FOURTH: The Center for Public Education looked closely at the time American children spent in school compared to other countries and asked and answered several questions.
For instance: Are students in India and China required to go to school longer than U.S. students?
According to data from the OECD and the World Data on Education, students in China and India are not required to spend more time in school than most U.S. students.
Do other countries require more instructional hours for students than the U.S.?
According to the OECD, the hours of compulsory instruction per year in these countries range from 608 hours in Finland (a top performer) to 926 hours in France (an average performer) at the elementary level, compared to the over 900 hours required in California, New York, Texas, and Massachusetts.
Are U.S. students receiving less instruction?
The data clearly shows that most U.S. schools require at least as much or more instructional time as other countries, even high-performing countries like Finland, Japan, and Korea.
In conclusion, I ask again: What would happen to the Corporate RheeForm War against Public Education in the U.S. if every American knew the few facts in this post?
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
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KIPP corporate charter chain hires torture expert for its “no excuses” private sector for profit schools that are opaque and do not have to follow the democratic lawss that govern public schools.
KIPP’s innovative approach is grounded in the research of Dr. Martin Seligman and the late Dr. Chris Peterson (the “fathers“ of Positive Psychology). Building off a partnership with KIPP NYC, Dr. Angela Duckworth and the Riverdale Country School, KIPP’s character work focuses on seven highly predictive character strengths that are correlated to leading engaged, happy and successful lives: zest, grit, optimism, self-control, gratitude, social intelligence, and curiosity.
We’ve integrated our own experience as educators with this research, and developed a road map to help teachers, students, and parents foster behaviors that strengthen character.
That’s right. All those low-income minority children need is “CHARACTER”!
I have posted several articles on KIPP charter schools including a compendium…
I miss the era when my blog was hosted on the teachforus.org website. Back then the site was promoted by TFA as a place where current corps members and alumni could blog and communicate through comments. Until the site went down, it was a happening place with at least twenty different bloggers contributing to the conversation. It was also my way of finding out what TFA was up to, particularly with regard to the summer institute training sites.
Back before TFA had let their greed for money and power distort their original purpose, my main issue with them was the way they cheat the corps members out of an authentic training experience. I’ve said throughout the years that I think that most people are capable of becoming competent teachers and that it is even possible to get enough training in a summer that the first year does not have to…
Gary Rubinstein was one of the earliest recruits to Teach for America. He was a corps members in Houston, class of 1991. Since then, he has become a high school math teacher in New York City and a persistent critic of TFA.
His major criticism of the organization is that it recruits smart, idealistic young people and gives them inadequate training for the challenges they will face. He is also not pleased with TFA’s alignment with the Corporate Reform machine that is devoted to destroying and privatizing public education.
In this post, he gives advice to new members of TFA in Houston. He watches videos in which they present their thoughts. He hears too much of the TFA can’t about how they have arrived to save poor children from lazy veteran teachers and a broken system. He knows they are being set up for failure. They don’t know it yet…
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 