So writes the Brookings Institutions’ Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, who asserts that nowhere in the “stimulus” legislation authorizing RTTT does it say that the U.S. Secretary of Education can award money based on states doing things he prescribes. No, the authorizing legislation, according to Whitehurst, says that the money must go to states that have already made significant reform progress.It's an interesting post.
chem & bio labs, art, vo-tech
cleaning and building maintenance
buses, cafeteria
energy, heating, cooling, water
"purchasing fewer products or having fewer products that require compilance"
identify, assess, control, and reduce environmental impact of its activities, products, or services
who has what impact on the enviroment, prevent address that impact, stay out of trouble, save money, and feel good over a long period of time
Plan--->Do---->Check--->Act "exactly what teachers do"
district-wide issues: 4 management programs for asbestos, hazardous materials, hazardous waste, and emergency response
EMS has to be in place by July 1 (including manual and management programs)
use of the Healthy Schools Checklist
Monfredo asks how this will be shared with the schools? A full rollout
Allen: first focusing on districtwide activities, then on individual schools
Foley: "what is in essence a punitive action...taking it two, three, four steps forward...something forced upon us at first and making" it an opportunity
Think Tank Research Quality demonstrates the importance of those independent expert reviews. Taken together, the reviews reveal that think tank publications have clear patterns of misleading, flawed, and even deceptive research practices. Yet this think tank research often serves as the foundation for federal and state programs. As the nation moves forward with Race to the Top, as well as the current effort to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind law also known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, this book provides a cautionary tale...
Unfortunately, according to the project's co-director Kevin Welner, professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, "Across the nation, think tanks are churning out a steady stream of often low-quality reports that use weak research methods, offer biased analyses, and make recommendations that do not fit the data." "Moreover," explains co-director Alex Molnar, professor at Arizona State University, "in the political process, the influence of a report often has little relation to its quality. As a result, new school policies and reform proposals frequently are based on research of questionable value."
(I don't have the numbers for Worcester, but I do know that, despite the eligiblity for student transfers, most parents prefer to stay in their neighborhood school.)In 2009, 26,381 CPS students were eligible to transfer to other schools because they were "stuck" in schools deemed as failing under NCLB.
483 students applied.
Only 276 or about one percent of those eligible actually transferred.
Only 1 of the receiving schools was a charter school...
The truth is, parents overwhelmingly want good neighborhood schools, not "choice." That's what national polls say. That's what this CPS report make obvious.
Our legislators need to get off the privatization train, get a clue, and get with the parents and the general public who want all public schools to succeed - and that means we need our state legislators to get off their rear ends and give us fair, adequate state school funding.
Notes coming next!
I was dumbfounded. How could we so ignore the lessons of 50 years of failed school reform and the learning and strategies of those hundreds of innovative boutique projects, funded over these years by billions of dollars from philanthropic foundations, that excited and changed thousands of teachers nationwide?
How could we simply set aside the conclusions and recommendations of those many behavioral and social scientists in the fields of economics, history, psychology, sociology, child development, psychometrics, philosophy, education, and more, who have from their inquiries provided so much of the knowledge necessary for those whose work it is to guide the becoming of a wise people? And what about the knowledge of those experienced practitioners, thoughtful parents, and others? Is there any major field of endeavor other than schooling that has so little agency for its own mission, conduct, and well-being?
"When we look at it realistically with limited resources we have to make sure we put our energies and our efforts into places that we know we can be successful in and that fit what the direction of Vermont education is moving in," Vilaseca said. "Vermont has a highly successful educational system, when you look at our NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) results when you look at how our students do across the board, graduation rates, we are one of the leaders in the country. We have still room to improve but this program doesn't move us in the direction where we feel we should be going in."
Charter schools were first envisioned in 1988 by two men who didn’t know one another. Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, had the idea, as did Professor Ray Budde of the University of Massachusetts.
Both of them thought that public school teachers could get permission from local authorities to open a small experimental school and then focus on the neediest students. The school would recruit students who had dropped out and who were likely to drop out. It would seek new ways to motivate the most challenging students and bring whatever lessons they learned back to public schools, to make them better able to educate these youngsters.
The original vision of charter schools was that they would help strengthen public schools, not compete with them.
By 1993, Shanker turned against his own idea. He concluded that charter schools had turned into a form of privatization that was not materially different from vouchers. From then until his death in 1996, he lumped vouchers and charters together as a threat to public education and a distraction from real school reform.
Going back to the Bakkes and Imagine Schools, the part that jumped out at me was Mr. Bakke's message regarding whose schools they are:
Mr. Bakke cautioned his executives against giving boards of schools the “misconception” that they “are responsible for making big decisions about budget matters, school policies, hiring of the principal and dozens of other matters.”Instead, he wrote, “It is our school, our money and our risk, not theirs.”
We got a hint of that 10 years ago at a meeting in Albany, N.Y., when the state’s chief test-maker was asked why New York tested students’ ability to factor a polynomial but not to speak standard English, even though good verbal skills matter far more on the job to far more people. The answer? “Because we can test factoring but not speaking.”...
Every study of employer needs made over the past 20 years—from the U.S. secretary of labor’s 1992 Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, to the more recent “Are They Really Ready to Work?” report from the Conference Board and the nonprofit Corporate Voices for Working Families—has come up with the same answers. Successful workers communicate effectively, orally and in writing, and have social and behavioral skills that make them responsible and good at teamwork. They are creative and techno-savvy, have a good command of fractions and basic statistics, and can apply relatively simple math to real-world problems such as those concerning financial or health literacy. Employers never mention polynomial factoring or solving shepherd problems.
Those changes that Race to the Top requires, much supported by Joel Klein, who runs NYC public schools?Tennessee and Delaware, the first two states to win education funding through President Obama's $3 billion Race To the Top competition, were chosen through “arbitrary criteria” rather than through a scientific process, according to a new report by a non-partisan research institute.
The report called, “Let’s Do the Numbers,” by William Peterson and Richard of the nonprofit, independent Washington D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute, says that the 500-point system created to decide the “best” proposals for education reform is based on false precision.
...it seems important for Klein to remember that under his tenure and his business approach to public schools, the percentage of African American and Hispanic children accepted into gifted and talented programs -- based entirely on a standardized test score-- dropped from 46 percent to 22 percent, according to education historian Diane Ravitch’s “The Death and Life of the Great American School System."Let's hope Patrick--and not only Patrick--is backing off from this disaster.And, she said, under Klein, the number of black students admitted to selective high schools plummeted. Of 900 freshmen, in 2004 there were 83 black students; by 2009, only 7 black students qualified; Hispanic students dropped from 96 to 17.
Meanwhile, in 2009, when Klein announced the expansion of charter schools, he didn’t mention that of 51,316 public school students in the city who were homeless, only 11 were enrolled in charter schools.
Aldine boots nearly three times as many students as neighboring Houston ISD — which expelled 181 students in 2008-09 — even though its enrollment, about 67,000, is only a third the size. The forced-out students get processed into either the Harris County Juvenile Justice Alternative Education Program or one of two “very strict” special schools run by the Harris County Department of Education, an unusual agency that provides services to area districts but runs no schools for the general public, according to agency spokeswoman Carol Vaughn. An additional 1,399 students were shipped off to a district alternative program — not technically expelled but removed from traditional classes....
“They’re being treated like they’ve committed a crime when maybe they’ve just been disruptive in class,” Fowler said in an interview. “And that increases the likelihood that they will penetrate the criminal justice system further.”
And that system, often as not, is being populated with minority students committing low-level offenses. When Texas Appleseed pointed to that disparity in an earlier report, it ignited a backlash claiming the statistics did not prove discrimination — but rather that minority students simply commit more offenses warranting expulsion, Fowler said. So this time, researchers took a finer cut of the data to explore the issue further. What it found, Fowler said, tended to throw cold water on the backlash. When looking only at mandatory expulsions — those for serious “zero tolerance” offenses outlined clearly in state law, such as weapons incidents, drug-dealing and sexual assaults, African-Americans are expelled in proportions equal to their overall proportions of enrollment. But when researchers probe data on discretionary expulsions — for less serious offenses involving judgment calls by districts — the proportion of African-American student expulsions rises sharply.
Indeed, the more subjective the criteria, the more African-Americans get expelled. Black students accounted for 14 percent of the state’s mandatory suspensions, exactly matching the percentage of all black students. That figure rises to 22 percent when only discretionary expulsions, involving subjective decisions, are examined. And in the most subjective category of discretionary expulsions, for “serious and persistent misbehavior,” black students account for 31 percent — more than double their presence in the student body at large.
The data on Hispanic students shows a different, in some ways opposite, trend. They are overrepresented moderately in the discretionary expulsions — 52 percent compared with 47 percent of total enrollment — but represent an even higher proportion of less subjective mandatory expulsions: 66 percent, according to the report.
In the letter, Gandhi, who is responsible for certifying collective bargaining agreements as fiscally sound, tells Rhee that although there is a projected $34 million in "underspending" in the school operations section of the agency's budget, it is offset by an estimated $30 million in overspending in the system's central office.
In unusually blunt language, Gandhi takes Rhee to task for what he describes as a failure to adequately consult his office before mentioning the surplus at a meeting with D.C. Council members.
"I was incredulous to learn that in your April 13, 2010, presentation to the Council on the contract you asserted that a surplus is available to fund the proposed salary increases based on preliminary information," he wrote.
But back to parents - all they're supposed to do is pick a school and help their kids reach those "college-ready standards" (ie the new Common Core standards, at this point). This falls way short of any kind of genuine parental involvement, but markets are about financial transactions, not relationships.
On schools of ed:
Schools of education take a hammering from these very same reformers, but never for the right reasons. Instead of suggesting improvements to ed schools that would include intensive training (akin to med school residencies) and a solid grasp of how power, privilege, and culture plays out at the school and classroom level, these corporate reformers push for sycophantic neophytes in brief alt prep programs hopped up on positive psychology nonsense and drill-and-kill pedagogical approaches. The added bonus of stripping away all the "unnecessary" frill classes - like schools and society, intercultural communication, how to work with parents, etc - makes it that much easier for the pro-business reformers to control the debate about public education. You won't hear these reformers talking about getting more minority teachers into the classroom - they're too busy pushing pay-for-test-score programs like SB6 down in Florida
When the head of education suggested that perhaps parents might supervise instead, the parents said no.The Australian Education Union federal executive said today that teachers would not supervise the national tests scheduled for next month unless the federal government addressed teacher concerns about use of the data on the website.
The union's federal president, Angelo Gavrielatos, said teachers would not administer the tests until the federal government stopped the results being used to "publicly brand students and schools as failures in league tables".
"That is damaging for students and school communities," he said.
"No other test, student assessment or report will be affected by this decision.
"The primary concern of teachers is the fact that nothing has been done to stop test data being taken from the My School website to create damaging league tables in which schools are ranked on test results alone.
"We also have serious concerns that the NAPLAN results are being used on the My School website in a way that is misleading for parents."
Gray placed District Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi, city administrator Neil Albert, acting DCPS chief financial officer George Dines and Gandhi deputy Gordon McDonald under oath to ask whether there was currently money in the budget to underwrite the contract. Dines said no. Gandhi and McDonald said they didn't know. And Albert said he hadn't looked.