How Blueberries changed a corporate reformer

Via out friends at American Society Today, comes a short video of how a teacher in the audience changed a corporate education reformers mind. The video starts out slow, but the pay-off at the end is well worth it.

I was dead meat, but I wasn't going to lie to the lady. I said "ma'am I would send them back"

Not a young women, she sprang to her feet, she points her finger at me. She says "that's right, you would send them back. We can never send back the blueberries our suppliers send to us".

"We take 'em big, small, rich, poor, hungry, abused, brilliant, homeless, with bad vision, poor hearing, bad teeth, creative, cautious, frightened, with ADHD, English as a second language - and that's why it's not a business - it's school!"

Yeah - Blueberries Pal! Blueberries!

How Socrates would fare on new teacher evaluation plan

This is a pretty entertaining piece

The upstart Gates-funded organization Educators 4 Excellence has just put forth a proposal for teacher evaluations in New York City. They would accord 25 percent of the evaluation to student value-added growth data; 15 percent to data from local assessments; 30 percent to administrator observations; 15 percent to independent outside observations; 10 percent to student surveys; and 5 percent to support from the community.

The observations, they say, should follow a rubric. What sort of rubric should this be? The proposal states:

Observations should focus on three main criteria:

1. Observable teacher behaviors that have been demonstrated to impact student learning. For example, open-ended questions are more effective at improving student learning than closed questions.

2. Student behaviors in response to specific teacher behaviors and overall student engagement.

3. Teacher language that is specific and appropriate to the grade level and content according to taxonomy, such as Bloom’s. For example, kindergarten teachers should use different language than high school biology teachers.

Let’s see how Socrates might fare under these conditions. As I recall, he asked a fair number of closed questions. He did this to show his interlocutors a contradiction between what they assumed was true and what they subsequently reasoned to be true.

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BASA and OASBA urge legislators to reinstate merit pay

BASA and OASBA sent a letter to the General Assembly urging budget bill conference committee members to reinstate teacher merit pay and RIF provisions. They clearly see it as a way to reduce salaries for teachers.

BASA/OASBA HB153 Final Memo

You should continue to send emails and make phone calls to your legislators and urge them to keep these SB5 like provisions out of the budget.

Michele Rhee, stranger to the truth

Here's Michele Rhee. In her own words and voice

"In fact the children that are in school today will be the first generation of Americans who will be less educated than their parents were"

Ahem.

That's the longitudinal student performance trend in NAEP reading average scores for 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students.

That's the longitudinal student performance trend in NAEP mathematics average scores for 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students.

Those are not difficult graphs to read, and neither show any declines for current students vs their parents performance, in fact - it's the opposite. Why Rhee wants to lie about the data in order to fire teachers is a mystery only she can answer - but that is her agenda, and it is not supported by the facts.

Super Who?

Michele Rhee is famous, or in a growing number of eyes, infamous, for implementing a corporate education reform agenda in Washington DC's schools. A significant part of her plan, as it is with corporate education reformers, was to fire teachers. Lots and lots of teachers.

NEWSWEEK did a cover story a few months ago asking why we can't fire bad teachers. Today Washington, D.C., Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee proved that you can, announcing plans to fire 300 of the district’s 4,000 teachers based on poor performance or licensing issues.

Another 729 teachers will be notified that they have been identified as "minimally effective," according to a new evaluation system Rhee put into effect, meaning that they will not get their scheduled step raise and will have only one year to take advantage of professional-development resources to pull up their performance score or face firing next year. If most of those teachers fail to significantly bump up their performance, the D.C. system could see as many as a quarter of its teachers fired within two years, a prospect Rhee described as "daunting."

We'll sidestep the observation that many have that it's "difficult to fire teachers", when this story demonstrates it was pretty easy to fire 6% of the DC schools teachers in one fell swoops and put another 20% on the chopping block. Instead, let's see what all this firing brought the district. In an Op-Ed this weekend, in the Washington Post, Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, and former Rhee booster, mentioned the newly release NAEP scores for the district

The bad news, however, is that graduation rates are still low, and achievement gaps between the rich and poor sections of town remain vast. Despite the NAEP achievement gains, scores are still among the lowest in the nation’s major city school systems. An analysis by my organization also indicates that the D.C. public schools score well below what one would expect statistically, compared with other cities with similar poverty, language, race, disability and family characteristics. Students show unusual difficulty reading and interpreting texts, evaluating and critiquing information, identifying appropriate measurement instruments, and solving problems involving geometric shapes. There is much more work to be done.

Yes. Rhee fired a lot of teachers, ending their careers - for literally nothing.

Relying on Magic: The Foundations of Would-be Education Reformers

With high unction, priests of educational reform often proclaim their notions are grounded on a strong scientific base. Embarrassingly, the President and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, have made similar assertions of scientific footings, notwithstanding the failure to actually support those claims.

Science, of course, has certain advantages, in that its proofs are subject to verification, are based on careful observations, must generally be replicable, and must follow commonly accepted designs and rules of evidence. But science has the pesky drawback of not necessarily confirming the answers we want to hear. There are all those awkward things to explain like reformer Joel Klein claiming success as an “established fact” while Arne Duncan says 83 percent of the schools are failing.

Magic, however, has been discovered to be a far more flexible and useful tool for supporting policy reforms. Contrary scientific findings can be brushed away with the same untroubled ease as an end-of-worlder explaining why the apocalypse didn’t happen last week.

As magical notions gain political traction, a supporting “science” is retro-invented. Contemporary retro-science includes reports that provide squishy, oblique and leading evidence on how untrained teachers will do as well or better than trained ones, class sizes can be increased without harm to children, and test-based accountability will save all despite the last twenty years of less-than-stellar success. Magicism is most easily recognized by its strong declaratory incantations, frequently delivered by people with limited or no experience in the field. Being short on science, it relies on the brandishing of symbols, rituals, and rites.

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