Monday, October 18, 2010

Will Teachers Vote in November?

Martha Infante asks on the InterACT blog, Will Teachers Vote in November? Her question is a good one, as teachers who helped put President Obama in office two years ago are now being asked to return a Congress to Washington to help him. But as Infante relates, what was promised in the campaign hasn't been what Obama has delivered in terms of leadership in education. She somewhat answers her own question:

I think many will not, if the candidates all offer the same fallacious reform strategies that are currently sweeping the nation.  We are looking closely at candidates who are actually listening to teachers’ concerns, those who value the collective expertise of those in the teaching profession.  For these, our votes will be gladly cast.

Paul L. Martin is a bit more biting in his excellent The Teacher's View blog posting, What Would Roosevelt Do? He writes:

Let’s try another tactic. Let’s make it a priority to help the jobless, soon-to-be homeless Americans, those who have been aced out of their livelihood, hoodwinked into mortgages beyond their means, and victimized by the con artists on Wall Street.

Remember who elected you, Mr. President. We are dying out here, and we won’t get fooled again.

Maybe that last line should be read with an accompaniment by The Who. But I really like that Paul's previous post was a great piece about how college (and other) students might keep up with reading assignments and different purposes and techniques of reading. His site isn't all politics all the time.

Yeah, We'll Get Fooled Again!

Blame it on Paul (L. Martin). Today's posting got updated to the power chords of The Who's Won't Get Fooled Again, Squeeze Box, Baba O'Riley, You Better You Bet, and so on from their Greatest Hits album. While the music is great (depending on your taste in music, I guess), America is in real danger of getting fooled again on education "reform."

I sounded a warning way back in a 2001 column, Thermos Bottle Barometer, about the misdirection in education "reform" as NCLB was considered. I wrote then:

It's not likely at this time that our nation will suddenly become committed to addressing the social ills that affect education and other sectors of our society. Such problems defy solution, and by necessity, our country is focused on the war on terrorism. But sadly, ignoring the real root causes of educational problems pretty well insures that the current round of interest in improving education will fail.

And in a 2000 piece, Making Schools Better:

A sizable number of America's homes with school aged children are in a deplorable economic state. We have children being raised by parents who had to practically raise themselves. They have had no example to emulate of a home that provides a safe, healthy, wholesome environment for young learners. Those that do realize what is necessary for their children's upbringing often labor simply to provide a basic roof over their head with little more. The political climate in America today suggests that little will be done at a federal, state, or local level to improve these conditions.

Not much has changed in the last ten years. America got sold a bill of goods with No Child Left Behind. It did raise awareness about the achievement gap, but did little else but perpetrate the myth about legions of "bad teachers" and "failing schools" and usher in an era of narrowed curriculum due to test prep instead of focusing on the true needs of our students.

Our President's education agenda now is driving us deeper into the high stakes testing craziness with performance pay based on those tests thrown in. The Administration plows ahead with its plan that features privatization of public schools by for profit corporations with no regard to the rising chorus of protest from parents and teachers.

With the election of a new President in 2008 who promised to end the craziness of high stakes testing, there was hope that true education reform might begin. But the path he and Secretary of Arne Duncan have led us down is another dead end. It now looks like our country will "get fooled again" on improving education if the current trend continues.

New HuffPost Education Blogger

The Huffington Post's new education page is drawing a number of talented education bloggers. Julie Cavanagh's Do Teacher Unions Have the Cooties is an excellent read. She winds up her initial posting:

Let's turn our sights not on those "wealthy middle class teachers, with their cushy jobs, who retire on pensions that are a fraction of their salary," instead, we should focus on our policy makers and the corporate interests that drive their decision making. Let's stop playing schoolyard games with teachers and their unions and get real. Teachers and their unions do not have 'the cooties', we simply have and want to keep what all workers in this country should have: fair wages, health care, protections from arbitrary firing, safe working conditions, and a reasonable pension so we can live and retire at a fair wage and age.
Our children deserve real reform right now! Write to your policy makers and demand:

• Smaller class sizes
• Public Schools that are Community Centers and Serve ALL Children
• More Teaching -- Less Testing
• Parent and Teacher Empowerment and Leadership
• Equitable funding for ALL schools
• Anti-Racist Education Policies
• Culturally Relevant Curriculum
• Expanded Pre Kindergarten and Early Intervention Programs

Odds 'n' Ends

Robert King continues his excellent series about kindergarteners at Indianapolis School 61 with Playing it smart. Previous articles include:

• Challenges clear for School 61 kindergartners
• A difficult start for one child at IPS School 61
• Kindergartners' 1st test shows who's set to read
• IPS kids repeat kindergarten at a high rate, but does it help?

Walt Gardner today began a three-part series on innovative schools with Charter School Growth Carries a Price. Walt spent 28 years in the trenches and usually has a pretty good view on what now passes for education "reform." I rarely miss reading his Reality Check blog on Education Week.

The Orionid meteor shower will peak this week, but viewing will be tough due to a nearly full moon. Space.com recommends that the best viewing times will be in the early morning after moonset and before sunrise.

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Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Getting ADHD/Dyslexic Kids to Read

Rick Riordan relates in Four Ways to Get Kids with ADHD to Read that he wrote The Heroes of Olympus, Book One: The Lost Hero as "a father's desperate attempt to keep his son interested in reading." Riordan's son, now an avid reader and writer, is ADHD and dyslexic, so Riordan made his character, Percy Jackson, both ADHD and dyslexic, and "made those two conditions indicators of Olympian blood." Riordan shares some of what he's learned as a father and teacher "about getting ADHD/dyslexic kids to read."

School Supper

D.C. schools dinner program aims to fight childhood hunger by Bill Turque tells of a new initiative in D.C. that hopes to impact childhood hunger, help reduce rates of obesity among students, and draw more students into after-school programs where extra academic help is available. He writes that "D.C. public schools have started serving an early dinner to an estimated 10,000 students, many of whom are now receiving three meals a day from the system as it expand efforts to curb childhood hunger and poor nutrition." Turque notes the program comes at a time of "heightened concern" about the impact of poverty on D.C. students.

Odds 'n' Ends

Diane Ravitch's A Manifesto by the Powerful and Valerie Strauss's How billionaire donors harm public education are both excellent reads.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

On the Blogs

Ready to take a test?

Jenny Orr posted eight of her first grade students' writing papers from early in the school year on her Elementary, My Dear, or Far From It blog this week. She asks in First Grade Writing, "How much of this can you read?"

"Mrs. Lipstick's" And then there was puke.. on Organized Chaos tells of paint, puke, and blood all in one day. She asks, "How is it only Tuesday?"

Michael Doyle's The NEA and Me on his Science Teacher blog made me laugh.

I took some liberties in reproducing the post, as the image adds to the humor of Mike's question. I hope he doesn't mind.

Washington Post blogger and columnist Jay Mathews got a good interview with the NEA's Dennis Van Roekel. Dennis Van Roekel on Teaching Today is the video interview, and Video reveals mystery man who runs largest teachers union is Jay's blog posting about the interview and the man.

John Spencer's A Note from My Mentor Brad reminds us about the bigger picture of teaching, life, and the afterlife.

And while I realize that there is "real" education news going on every day, such as Valerie Strauss's excellent blog posting, The Chamber of Commerce's flawed 'Superman' school reform guide, I just wasn't up to the education "reform" wars again this morning. And really, Jenny's kids' writing, Mrs. Lipstick's topsy-turvy Tuesday, and Mike Doyle's bit of humor are possibly more to the point of teaching and teachers. We're real people doing a job very few outside the classroom understand.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Great Cover Art

I bit on a piece of junk mail few weeks ago and ordered a year of Mother Jones magazine for my wife, Annie. The first issue came in yesterday's mail, and I wasn't disappointed with the cover art. It depicts a giant, scantily clad Sarah Palin physically attacking a middle class neighborhood. Coincidentally, I had just run across Kevin Drum's blog posting, Schools and Poverty, from the Mother Jones site. He wrote:

I'm going to get the ed people mad at me again — and I guess I'll add the poverty people too this time — but I continue to think that the biggest problem here is simply that no one has any really compelling answers.

Yep! We'd much rather bash teachers and their unions in this country, rather than honestly address an intractable problem, poverty, that frustrates attempts at real school reform.

Threats to School Reform

Mike Rose, a faculty member at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, has an excellent guest blog this week on Valerie Strauss's The Answer Sheet, Threats to school reform ... are within school reform. He discusses six areas of concern about the current state of education reform:

• Tone down the rhetoric
• The problem with “cleaning house”
• Be careful of the "Big Idea"
• Focus on instruction
• Privileging youth over experience
• Don’t downplay poverty

Rose isn't a screamer, but carefully makes his points. It's a good read.

Odds 'n' Ends

Deborah Meier has some hard words for Waiting for "Superman" filmmaker Davis Guggenheim in Why 'Convenient' Lies Won't Set Us Free:

Wealth brings privileges. To pretend otherwise and insist that the "gaps" between the wealthy and the poor aren't important is not just a benign mistake; it's a dangerous one. When we allow the target to shift to "lazy" teachers and power-hungry unions, we should feel guilty, Mr. Guggenheim.

It seems a little strange, but the first word I saw of New York releasing teacher data, much like the LA Times did, came in a story in the Los Angeles Times, New York to release teachers' ratings. I had to hunt a bit to find confirmation of the story, as the LA Times piece was written by the same disreputable reporters who drove the teacher data release in LA. Initial confirmation came from a Norm Scott blog posting on Education Notes Online. I later found the story on Gotham Schools' City could release individual teacher ratings this week and UFT to Sue to Prevent N.Y.C. Teacher-Rating Release on Education Week.

Friday, October 22, 2010

It's All Odds 'n' Ends

Not having found a major education story yet this morning that moved me to write a full blurb about it, I think I have to declare today an All Odds 'n' Ends Friday. That doesn't mean I didn't find anything of interest over the last twenty-four hours, but no really stupendous events in education occurred. Hopefully later in the day, Barack and Arne will hold a press conference to announce that they've been wrong all along about education "reform," and reverse their course of basing school change on performance pay based on unreliable high stakes testing, pushing charter schools as THE answer to the problems of education, and begin moving on addressing the many social ills that are the major factor that affect our students. I also hope to win the lottery this weekend.

The Washington Post story from yesterday, New York City delays plan to release ratings of teachers based on test scores, has been updated (and renamed) to reflect the delay in releasing scores due to a lawsuit filed by New York's United Federation of Teachers.

eSchool News has an interesting story, Districts install x-ray machines to boost school safety, that makes me wonder if we won't see some strange effects in 20-30 years on students repeatedly x-rayed as they enter school.

Schools Combine Netbooks, Open Source by Patricia Mohr tells how some schools have used netbooks and open source operating systems and applications to provide 1:1 computing for their students at a fairly reasonable price.

Mark Walsh's Court: No Teacher Speech Rights on Curriculum is a harsh reminder that academic freedom only goes so far.

And Dan Bashur's iLife 11: Another Nail in the PowerPC Coffin on Low End Mac reminds me that I'm editing this page on some really antiquated equipment. I'll probably write more on this one next week when my G5 PowerMac turns six years old.

Have a great weekend!

Saturday, October 23, 2010

An Important Statement on Education by the EPI

Ten scholars from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) issued A Statement on Education on Thursday urging "policymakers to not pursue heavy reliance on test scores for evaluating, rewarding and removing teachers." Lawrence Mishel, president of the EPI, asks that likeminded folks sign on in support of the statement.

Heavy reliance on test scores for teacher evaluation is misguided.

Too many policymakers have recently adopted the misguided belief that improvements in students' scores on standardized tests in mathematics and reading can be heavily relied upon to evaluate, reward, and remove the teachers of these tested students.

However, even the most sophisticated use of test scores, value added modeling (VAM), is a flawed and inaccurate way to judge whether teachers are effective or ineffective.

The heavy use of VAM in a teacher evaluation system will misidentify large numbers of both effective and ineffective teachers. Leading authorities (such as the Board on Testing and Assessment of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Education, and researchers from RAND and the Educational Testing Service and a recent Economic Policy Institute paper by a group of prominent scholars, Problems With the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers) concur that VAM is too inaccurate to be used as the primary way to evaluate teachers. Most uses of test scores in teacher evaluation, in practice, actually fall far short of the flawed VAM measures because of a lack of appropriate data and the adoption of weaker statistical methods.

Adopting an invalid teacher evaluation system and tying it to rewards and sanctions is likely to lead to inaccurate personnel decisions and to demoralize teachers, causing talented teachers to avoid high-needs students and schools, or to leave the profession entirely, and discouraging potentially effective teachers from entering it. Educational outcomes will suffer as a consequence.

Besides concerns about the accuracy of statistical methodologies, other practical and policy considerations weigh against heavy reliance on student test scores to evaluate teachers. Research shows that an excessive focus on basic math and reading scores can lead to narrowing and over-simplifying the curriculum to only the subjects and formats that are tested, reducing the attention to science, history, the arts, civics, and foreign language, as well as to writing, research, and more complex problem solving tasks.

Although standardized test scores of students are one piece of information for school leaders to use to make judgments about teacher effectiveness, such scores should be only a part of an overall comprehensive evaluation.

Legislatures should not mandate and districts should not pursue a test-based approach to teacher evaluation that is unproven and likely to harm not only teachers but the children they instruct.

Eva L. Baker
Paul E. Barton
Linda Darling-Hammond
Edward Haertel
Helen F. Ladd
Robert L. Linn
Diane Ravitch
Richard Rothstein
Richard J. Shavelson
Lorrie A. Shepard