Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Indiana Voucher Law Challenged

On Friday, a dozen plaintiffs filed a lawsuit in Marion County Superior Court (Indianapolis) seeking a preliminary injunction to block Indiana’s new school voucher law. Defendants named in the suit include Governor Mitch Daniels and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett. The state's largest teachers' union, the Indiana State Teachers Association (ISTA), was not one of the plaintiffs, but supports the action. Shelbyville Central Schools teacher and ISTA vice president Teresa Meredith, one of the plantiffs, commented:

There is no question that this law violates the provisions of the Indiana constitution that protect taxpayer dollars from being funneled to private, religious and for-profit organizations. This voucher program will provide public funds to private schools that can give individual preference to students based on test scores, disabilities, wealth and personal faith. Such preferences should not be publicly funded.

This law is also bad educational policy. How can lawmakers justify draining additional millions in resources from local public schools — on top of the $300 million in cuts made last year? The implementation of this law will most certainly result in larger class sizes, more teacher layoffs and fewer instructional programs for Hoosier public school students.

Governor Daniels released a statement saying, "There the union goes again, putting their financial self-interest ahead of the interests of children and Indiana's low-income families. The bill was drafted from its inception with the state and federal constitutional law in mind."

The National Education Association, with which the ISTA is affiliated, is providing both legal and financial support for the lawsuit.

See: Lawsuit seeks to block Indiana's new school voucher law by Sue Loughlin

In a Sunday Terre Haute Tribune-Star editorial, Vouching for the public school system: Lawsuit challenging state’s new voucher program is far from frivolous, Trib-Star editor Max Jones writes:

The state constitution and the spirit of its language should not be ignored or circumvented...The Indiana Constitution of 1851 and its Bill of Rights spell out a separation of church and state more pointedly than the U.S. Constitution. It says, "No money shall be drawn from the state treasury for the benefit of any religious or theological institution." It also mandates a system of "common schools" that are part of "a general and uniform system" that is "without charge and equally open to all."

Pushing this voucher program through that narrow keyhole will require creative legal minds working to save the new law. It clashes, clearly, with the state constitution. Indiana's collection of private schools includes many religious schools, as well as for-profit schools. Those private schools can, and do, charge fees and do not have to accept all students, as public schools do.

It's About Time

National Education Association representatives have pushed through a resolution demanding that NEA President Dennis Van Roekel "communicate aggressively, forcefully, and immediately to President Barack Obama" that the association "is appalled" with many of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s practices and initiatives. Valerie Strauss notes in NEA goes after Education Secretary Arne Duncan that the NEA's representative assembly cagily goes after Duncan for an education "reform" policy that the President, whom the NEA endorses, also supports. Making Duncan a scapegoat for he and the President's misguided market oriented education "reform" policies may give the President an out to change direction and hopefully install a competent Secretary of Education.

Stephen Sawchuk's NEA Adopts Resolution Criticizing Arne Duncan on Education Week adds a bit more color to the story.

Odds 'n' Ends

In another "brilliant" move, the Indiana Department of Education has decided that cursive writing is no longer important and has dropped it from its required curriculum for public schools in the state. I'm sure the folks at IDOE responsible for this decision carefully printed their names in crayon at the bottom of the new directive.

In other news:

• The Washington Post: At NEA convention, mixed feelings among teachers for Obama ahead of 2012 vote by Michael Alison Chandler
• Education Week: NEA's Delegates Approve Obama Endorsement, Dues Increase by Stephen Sawchuk
• The Answer Sheet: An open letter to Ed Secretary Arne Duncan by Carol Corbett Burris
• The Salt Lake Tribune: Huntsman’s record on education draws mixed reviews by Lisa Schencker
• eSchool News: Project lets K-12 students archive websites by Laura Devaney

I'd written last Friday that I wouldn't be posting again until Wednesday, but it turned out there was news and I had the time. So...I'm back at it with a late Tuesday posting.

Above and below are some images I got with my Canon XSi and Canon EF-S 17-85mm lens. Of course, my camera outfit was outdated the day I bought it, but it still takes great digital photos. Also shown are the current comparable offerings from Canon, the Canon EOS Rebel T3i 18 MP and the Canon EF-S 15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 Zoom Lens.

When I worked for a few years as a wedding photographer, I loved having a large format camera. A big negative, or in the case above, a big digital image, can save a photo, allowing one to pull a small part of an image and still use it for good sized enlargements. The XSi and its successors do just that, as just the small boxed area in the original (inset) was cropped to produce the image above.

BTW: Links on my images above lead to download links for larger versions of each image on our free Desktop Photos page. Links from the camera and lens images, of course, are ads.

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Wednesday, July 6, 2011

I'm shocked, shocked to find that cheating has been going on there!

Call me cynical, but I find the recent revelations about cheating on high stakes testing in the Atlanta Schools a bit reminiscent of the scene from the classic movie, Casablanca. Under pressure from the Nazis, Captain Renault ordered Rick's Cafe to be closed.

Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?
Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
[a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Captain Renault: Oh, thank you very much.
Captain Renault: Everybody out at once!

If you missed the news, the New York Times' Kim Severson relates in Systematic Cheating Is Found in Atlanta’s School System:

A state investigation released Tuesday showed rampant, systematic cheating on test scores in this city’s [Atlanta's] long-troubled public schools, ending two years of increasing skepticism over remarkable improvements touted by school leaders.

Of course, there's nothing funny about the cheating scandal in Atlanta, or in D.C., or any other city or rural school system. But the Casablanca reference seems apt, as I think most veterans of the classroom view claims of remarkable improvement in test scores with a touch of skepticism. Most teachers know how terribly hard it is to eke out just a few points improvement in a year's time. Most administrators should know that, too.

Walt Gardner has repeatedly warned about the effects of Campbell's Law in his Reality Check blog on Education Week. He wrote in a July, 2010, posting:

When heavy emphasis is focused on standardized test scores, the stage is invariably set for Campbell's Law to make itself felt. The more any quantitative indicator is used for decision making, the more it will be subject to corruption and the more it will corrupt the very process it is intended to monitor. This has been the experience this year in Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, Virginia and elsewhere, where investigations have pointed to cheating by educators on standardized tests required under the No Child Left Behind Act.

He wisely noted in a posting in May this year:

Have we forgotten the lessons that Campbell's Law has taught?

It's something to think about because pressure is inexorably building to destroy what critics like to call government schools, and competition is an ideal weapon in their arsenal.

Cheating in any form by teachers and administrators gives our profession an unneeded black eye. We've already been vilified as not having our students' best interests at heart, being incompetent, lazy, and not the sharpest crayons in the box.

But the cheating has been there for a long time. When you use testing to measure student growth and teacher effectiveness with carrots and big sticks included, folks will push the envelope a bit too far. Indiana used to give grants for math improvement, so our elementary school's math scores miraculously went up each year, despite comments by my middle school math teacher buddies who privately told me over a brew, "It ain't so." I knew at the time that I was doing my absolute best, but I knew then, deep down, that something was amiss. Years later, through the grapevine, I learned that some folks had indeed been juicing the test scores by changing wrong answers to correct ones on student answer sheets.

A year or two after I retired, a different cast of characters, three very good people, conspired to create a "practice test" that mirrored the actual tests so closely that test scores shot through the roof. Someone leaked a stolen copy of the practice test to the state, and all three good folks had to resign or be fired. They were all good educators who made a tragic mistake.

I'd like to think I'm not an apologist for the cheaters. I know when the principal involved in the practice test scandal asked me the year I retired to get him a "cold copy" of the ISTEP (then Indiana's version of high stakes testing), I didn't. But I also remember what it's like to be under pressure, whether it's making the mark in tests or even just having enough to eat.

After retiring from teaching, I worked as a staff member at a college for several years. At lunch one day, a young co-worker was trash talking about a poor individual who had been caught stealing food. Without thinking, I quietly and with some embarrassment, remarked, "If you're hungry enough, you'll steal." Another co-worker at the table knowingly met my eye and simply said, "Yes." But if you've never been poor or really hungry, you won't get it.

I think an awful lot of educators are finding themselves poor and hungry in the test score department these days. As NCLB's unmeetable standards for 100% proficiency draw nearer, many more teachers and administrators are going to be subjected to incredible pressure to raise test scores, possibly at any cost.

Odds 'n' Ends

If you're just returning to this site expecting our usual content of links and sites, I guess I did that one yesterday. Other than the Casablanca swipe at public officials and administrators who ignore obvious cheating in their domains, this isn't a happy posting. I feel for the kids in Atlanta who may have been harmed by the cheating. My heart also goes out to the teachers co-opted and compromised by the situation there. But I also feel for the kids across America who are having their opportunity at a complete education stolen by the education "reformers" who think teaching and learning are simply a science of numbers and programmed lessons, or at worst, see education "reform" as a way to feed at the public trough.

Okay, let me leave you with something slightly more upbeat, if clearly sarcastic. Take a look at Valerie Strauss's "Ravitch Rage" - Cause, Symptoms, and Treatment.

Friday, July 8, 2011

Short Post Today

It's a short posting today. Part of that is due to not a lot going on in education news right now, part of it is that I'm spending a lot of time in the garden these days, and part is that my arm problems have me "mousing" left handed! Building some heavy duty shelves in our garage and too much time on the computer have left me with a dandy case of "tennis elbow," so the mouse is now on the left. I first ran into this problem with, of all things, "Atari elbow!" Years later while working for the summer as a carpenter's assistant, I got calcium deposits on the elbow from too much hammering at odd angles.

Stuff like mousing left handed (for a righty) can bring teachers back to earth in our requests of what our students should do. A little humility (and pain, in this case), remind us how things are when you're learning. I've made a lot of bad mouse clicks over the last week.

More on the Atlanta Cheating Scandal

Valerie Strauss dug into the results released this week of a 10-month state investigation of possible cheating on the Georgia standardized Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests (or CRCT) in the Atlanta School System. She shares some of what she found in Shocking details of Atlanta cheating scandal. Most of the initial reports about the testing irregularities used terms such as "widespread," "systemic," and/or "rampant." Valerie's posting illustrates why folks used such extreme terms.

Odds 'n' Ends

Scott Elliott has a good report on what happens when a clueless Superintendent of Public Instruction rushes a new rating system in Good schools fearful of bad grades in rating system.

Last October, I ran a blurb here about HP and Walmart offering a special, garden themed laptop, the HP Garden Dreams. It's no longer available, but an email came in this week promoting the HP Dandelion Breeze Laptop. I'm not sure, but I think the gardener in me likes the flowers from last year a bit more than this year's dandelions!

That's your short, left handed posting for today. So that you don't feel totally cheated for coming here, let me share a bit of color from our kitchen window. We regularly rotate blooming gloxinia plants from our basement plantlight area into the kitchen. Currently, a purple Double Brocade and a red to pink Cranberry Tiger are strutting their stuff for us.

I tell about how to grow gloxinias from seed on our Senior Gardening web site. They can make a wonderful class project...if you have time after test prep!

Have a great weekend!

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