Education and Business
Tell Lawmakers to Say NO to Tax Dollars for an 8th Grade "pre-pre-SAT"
Published May 27, 2009 @ 07:05AM PT
From the Department of "Enough, Already!" The College Board, "non-profit" purveyor of the SAT, PSAT, AP, and other money-makers from the bubble-sheets-equal-intelligence economic bubble, is poised to inflict yet another standardized test on our students - this time in middle school.
Where will it all end? College prep bubble-tests for newborns?
This is no idle kvetching session. School districts - that means you, taxpayers - will end up paying for this new test, if the College Board isn't stopped, which means they won't have money to spend on more constructive ways to help our students learn.
Read more below, or just cut to the chase and sign this petition to Obama, EdSec. Duncan, Congress, and state governors to say NO to a middle school SAT clone.
The Big Money on Slate has more:
Before the financial crisis hit, eighth-graders across the country were scheduled to take a new test this fall, their first to get into college. The exam is called ReadiStep, and it's a new standardized test that simultaneously says it's "low-stakes" while also being a "vital step" toward getting ready to get a bachelor's degree. It's all multiple-choice, and it's split into three parts: reading, writing, and math. The test will offer teachers "insight into students' academic progress and early feedback that enables them to help students create a road map for success." Plus, administering the exam "helps create a college-going culture"—don't we have one already?—and the results are "predictive" of PSAT scores. PSAT scores, of course, are predictive of SAT scores, which are predictive of where one gets into college. ReadiStep is poised to become a new rite of passage for American youths.
But the test is not provided by the federal government. Nor is it a brainchild of state and local school boards or mandated by No Child Left Behind. It's provided by the College Board, the same organization that administers the PSAT and the SAT. It was originally supposed to launch this fall, but was postponed due to economic circumstances. . . . For students, ReadiStep is the gateway to a life of bubble-sheets and No. 2 pencils.
For the College Board, it's another way to make tons of money.
ReadiStep will cost 10 bucks a pop, which will likely be paid by school districts. That money goes straight to the College Board, just like all of the revenue generated by its other standardized tests. Read more....
The article sheds much light on the true nature of the selfless-sounding entities known as "non-profits." The president of the "non-profit" College Board pocketed a saintly salary of
$673,757 in 2006, an 88 percent increase from his initial starting salary," and "the College Board has 10 senior vice presidents and 28 vice presidents; senior staff members make an average of $239,374 in compensation. These numbers are presumed to have gone higher since 2006."
Who needs profit when two years at a non-profit can make you a millionaire? Thanks, charitable donors and taxpayer-financed government grants!
Again, please sign the petition here. This is getting ridiculous. Let's spare our 12-year-olds the anxiety of thinking bubbles determine their fate, and instead teach them that they have much more control over their lives than those bubbles do.
Are College Application Essays Obsolete?
Published May 22, 2009 @ 07:04AM PT
From my own experience here in Korea, where the elite families pay thousands of dollars for tutors to "help" their kids write their application essays for top-tier US colleges, my answer would be a resounding "Ya think?"
The director of admissions at Cambridge does. He says...
that his institution does not give any weight to personal essays in applications. “With the profusion of companies and Web sites offering to help draft applicants’ personal statements for a fee, no admissions tutor believes them to be the sole work of the applicant anymore,” Geoff Parks was quoted as saying in both The Times and The Guardian. “We certainly don’t assign any marks to personal statements,” Mr. Parks added in The Times.
He adds teacher references to the obsolete pile, too:
"now that students can ask to see their references, teachers have stopped saying anything interesting or controversial,” The Times reported, and those recommendations are therefore also given little weight.
While we're at it, let's add the SAT itself to the pile. It's no secret that money buys higher SAT scores, and parents who can pay are willing to. Walk down any street in Seoul, and you can't swing a dead cat without hitting an SAT cram school.
photo by oceandesetoiles
Report: NYC Charters Do Cream, Exclude Neediest Students
Published May 20, 2009 @ 09:03PM PT
InsideSchools crunched the data and performed the oversight that the NYC DOE doesn't have to perform, and so, apparently, doesn't bother to. The results are more evidence that charter schools do "cream," are a "separate and unequal" school system, and do need a mandatory oversight body to keep their practices in line with their PR and marketing.
Vanessa Witenko writes,
Charter schools claim they outperform neighborhood schools while enrolling the same student demographic. Opponents argue that charter schools only attract children whose parents are involved and invested in their education, since the parents had to seek out a charter school and fill out an application by the April 1 deadline. Additionally, because charter schools operate independently of the city DOE, opponents say there is no oversight to protect the most vulnerable students – those who don’t speak English or require special education services.
An analysis of student data involving some of the most challenging students to educate, students who are homeless, special education students, and English Language Learners (ELL), shows that charter schools don’t serve or enroll the same students as local public schools. Read more....
Some highlights:
- "In New York City, 51,316 public school students are homeless, and only 111 of them attend a charter school."
- "Although between 14-17 percent of New York City public school [students] are still learning English, according to 2008-09 Title III allocations (federal money schools receive for students learning English), they represent just three percent of the charter school population."
- Charters that do have English Language Learners typically lump them together with Special Needs/Learning Disabled students. As an ESL specialist, I can confirm this is looked upon as very bad practice, and shunned by quality schools. Read more....
Al Sharpton recently said there should be no "sacred cows" in school reform. When pushed, he almost admitted the "sacred cow" in question was teachers unions. Let's add the charter cow to the list.
The issue here is not whether there are good and bad charter schools; of course there are, just as there are good and bad traditional public schools. The issue, instead, is the claims that charters make about their performance relative to traditional schools. Those comparisons only work if the two systems serve the same demographics. Since more and more evidence shows they don't, we need to at least demand the charter marketers be held to a higher and more transparent standard of accountability when making their claims of superiority.
(h/t to Gotham Schools)
photo by garboden
Diane Ravitch's Modest Proposal for Klein, Duncan, Sharpton
Published May 20, 2009 @ 12:44AM PT
Something that stands out about Ed Sec Arne Duncan and his inner circle - Klein, Sharpton, and, lord help us, Newt Gingrich at the *cough* "progressive" Education Equality Project; Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Mayor Bloomberg, and the whole Billionaire Boys' Club gang; Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp, and the "give us a rookie idealist and a five week crash course, and we'll give you a competent, expert teacher" gang at Teach for America - and their whole "reform" discourse is how much talk and proposed action we hear about teachers, and how little about teaching.
An obvious cause is that Duncan and most of his gang have more background in management (or, lord help us, politics) than in education. And the frightening thing is, when we listen to them, there's little evidence they're aware of the difference between an MBA and a Ph.D. in education. It's like the hospital comptroller thinking he should have the right to dictate surgical techniques in the O.R.
Even if Duncan, Klein, Rhee, Kopp, Gates, Broad, et. al. really do have deep knowledge of education research and classroom (and broader) realities, they need to win credibility in the education sector by demonstrating that knowledge.
Diane Ravitch hits on a way for them to do this with the following modest proposal:
I think our society is in dangerous territory on this subject of accountability. The so-called "reformers," the guys (yes, guys) who call themselves the Education Equality Project, would have the world believe that accountability is the key to improving American education. They think it can be done fast, not incrementally. They think the key to improvement is punishing the bad students, the bad teachers, and the bad schools. Their latest formula, as enunciated by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, is to close down 5,000 schools and re-open them. I wonder where he plans to find 5,000 new principals and thousands of new teachers, or does he just intend to reshuffle the deck?
This approach rests squarely on the high-stakes use of testing. One only wishes that the proponents of this mean-spirited approach might themselves be subjected to a high-stakes test about their understanding of children and education! I predict that every one of them would fail and be severely punished. (read all)
Stop Fattening Our Kids: Petition for a Healthy School Lunch Program
Published May 18, 2009 @ 03:04PM PT
What a hoot: I just googled "School Lunch Program petition" to start some research for my own petition here on Change.org, and lo and behold, I discovered that there's already a petition on Change.org for the cause.
Before copying and pasting it, I'll just note that I've already posted about the outrageous domination of the School Lunch Program by the junk food lobbyists. Their influence is unarguably a factor in the childhood obesity epidemic in America, which surely contributes to massive long-term health care costs draining the US economy in an "invisible recession" far less hypothetical than that of the McKinsey Report. It would be great to see Arne Duncan talk about this as much as he talks about standardized test scores.
Here's an eye-popping video about that lobby's presence in Washington. It's not "all about the kids" at all:
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To note the obvious, school lunches featuring more fruits and vegetables would also help schools' local farming communities, instead of sucking local dollars into the junk food conglomerates.
Here's the text of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine blog on Change.org. Please sign the petition:
We need your help to revolutionize school lunches across America! Sign the Healthy School Lunch petition today.
All students have the right to have vegetarian and vegan meals available in their schools. But for 30 million children their only options are artery-clogging, high-cholesterol meats and dairy products. These bad foods are unfair and risk their health over the long run. Now is the time to ask Congress for the healthy school lunches that students deserve.
Ask Congress to amend the Child Nutrition Act to help schools provide students school lunches with more vegetables, fruits, vegetarian foods, and healthful nondairy beverages.
Help get the word out about the petition: Tell your friends about Healthy School Lunches.
Stephen Colbert Should Replace David Brooks at NYTimes
Published May 13, 2009 @ 02:04PM PT
[Update: Aaron Pallas gives a good critical response to the Fryer/Dobbie research here. All that glitters.]
More on NYTimes columnist David Brooks and the generally rampant stenography posing as thinking in the NYTimes op-ed columns these days (see the Thomas Friedman posts for more).
Brooks begins his much-panned mis-reading of the Harlem Children's Zone "miracle" with this:
I was startled when I received an e-mail message from Roland Fryer, a meticulous Harvard economist. It included this sentence: “The attached study has changed my life as a scientist.”
Fryer and his colleague Will Dobbie have just finished a rigorous assessment of the charter schools operated by the Harlem Children’s Zone.
"Meticulous." "It changed my life as a scientist." Isn't this all a bit grandiose? Especially when it didn't change a lot of people's minds? And shouldn't Fryer have written "social scientist," anyway? Or has economics become a hard science due to the success of the free marketeers in economic science over the last few decades?
"A scientist." Kill me.
A 21st Century Rule of Thumb: Whenever a pundit drops a name, google it. I did so, and learned that Fryer is perhaps best known for his questionable idea that the way to raise the achievement gap was - hold on - to pay kids cash for grades.
Better still, google led me to Stephen Colbert's beautifully common-sensical fun with the idea in this classic interview:
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| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Roland Fryer | ||||
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I hope reading Ravitch "changed Fryer's life as a scientist" back to whatever it was before he wrote his report.
For a straight criticism of the "pay-for-grades" idea, see Rethinking Schools: "Children as Guinea Pigs: Washington, D.C., bribes its students to perform."
Arne Duncan's Faith-Based Certitudes
Published May 12, 2009 @ 08:48AM PT
EdSec Arne Duncan's Fiscal 2010 Education Budget's "fourth pillar" of reform calls for "promoting innovation and excellence in America's schools by expanding charter schools, extending learning time, and turning around low-performing schools."
Enough has been said on these pages about the ambiguity of charters as a solution already, so I'll pass on saying more (though a new study of Michigan charter schools adds yet one more study to the "charters are not outperforming traditional schools" pile).
What the charter push has in common with the other two initiatives in the pillar is this: no proven track record.
Regarding longer school days, weeks, and years, I found myself surprised to agree with Frederick Hess in U.S. News and World Report last month:
Simply locking students in mediocre schools for additional hours presumes that the proper response to chaos or tedium is more of the same. And ham-handedly extending the day can disrupt fruitful activities for millions of youths who have rewarding lives after 3 o'clock.
A longer day could make sense for many students and offer a respite for stretched families. Where schools know how to use the hours, where talented teachers have the ideas and energy, and where families think the student would benefit, OK. But before proposing expensive new policies, wedging kids into lousy schools for hundreds of extra hours, and imposing substantial new demands on teachers, let's ensure schools are making good use of the time they have. (source)
As for closing failing schools and reopening them with "new adults, and the same kids"? Duncan's on fire about that one, wanting to "turn around" 5,000 schools over the next five years, saying it "could really lift the needle, lift the bottom and change the lives of tens of millions of underserved children."* But it seems another solution based on faith, not proof. The Chicago Catalyst blog knew Duncan well when he was closing ("turning around") schools in Chicago, and reports "serious questions" about whether turnarounds are "lifting Chicago's needle" at all:
CPS notes that test scores are up at Sherman and Harvard elementary schools, where an ambitious “turnaround” program (replace teachers, keep the students) has paved the way for similar efforts at four additional schools this year.
It’s true, test scores are up at Sherman and Harvard—and at a faster clip compared to district-wide gains. Sherman’s composite scores jumped from 34.9 percent to 40.2 percent; Harvard’s scores climbed from 31.8 percent to 40.1 percent.
But data from the district’s newest “value-added” measure raises serious questions. That measure compares how well individual students at each school perform on tests relative to students with similar backgrounds across the district.
A quick explanation: Schools where students make more progress compared to their peers elsewhere in the city get green lights. Red lights are stamped on schools where children are making less progress than average. A yellow light means it’s unclear whether students’ gains outpace or fall short of their peers.
Sherman got yellow lights in both reading and math. Harvard posted split results: a red in reading and a green in math.
Experts say it could take five years to determine the effectiveness of the turnaround approach, yet CPS plans to dramatically increase the number of turnarounds in 2009.
--And Arne Duncan plans to dramatically increase them across America. Never mind that we need a few more years of the data so cherished by Duncan's education management crowd before we can know if this is a "proven strategy." Faith's enough for now.
So, for the millionth time, Duncan seems a genuine and well-meaning Joe, but he's a "CEO," not an educator. I wish I could have more confidence in him when reading his remarks or watching his speeches, but usually don't, due to the simple fact that I've read research and/or had classroom experience at odds with his authoritative-yet-dubious certitudes.
And it's déja vu all over again with this "fourth pillar." It brings to mind a quote I read recently on Sharon Higgins' blog by a business professor about one benefit of a business education: It "equip[s] students with a vocabulary that enable[s] them to talk with authority about subjects they do not understand."
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*By my count, for a single ten million students to be affected by closures at 5,000 schools means each school would have an average of 2,000 students. Unless schools significanlty larger than 2,000 students are common, it seems that plural tens of millions is either hyperbole or fuzzy math. Maybe I'm wrong. [Update: I definitely am wrong, if we view the consequences (assuming they're good ones) over subsequent years. Mea culpa.]
