I was astounded a few days ago to learn that Promise Neighborhoods is not revealing the results of the $60 million grant it made to the Castle Park neighborhood in Chula Vista two years ago. I attended Castle Park Elementary as a student and worked there as a teacher, so I'm quite familiar with the culture of the school. I had a feeling that the Promise grant wasn't going to help much because the people in charge were basically the same people who had driven Castle Park Elementary into the ground ten years ago.
Here's my recent post on the problem.
Below is an article with some thoughts about why we have inadequate leaders most of the time in most areas of endeavor.
The problem? Hypocognition. We just don't know enough, and we don't know what we're missing. It's the "unknown unknowns" that Donald Rumsfeld talked about.
Why are these clowns winning? Neuroscience explains incompetence of all sides
Paul Rosenberg
Salon
Nov 29, 2014
...[W]hen a very smart idea or very smart person comes along, the
organizations are not necessarily very skilled at recognizing that
person’s genius,” Dunning said. “We have lots of data showing that very
top performers, their top performances are very much missed. The genius
of their ideas are just missed by the group.”
...University of California, Berkeley, cognitive linguist George Lakoff,
whose work illuminating the cognitive and communicative differences
between liberals and conservatives—”Moral Politics,” “Don’t Think of An Elephant,” “Whose Freedom,”
etc.—has found a wide audience centered in the progressive activist
base, but has yet to seriously impact the political professionals whose
collective failure I alluded to in this story’s first paragraph.
When I interviewed him recently for Salon, Lakoff even highlighted the concept of hypocognition—that “we don’t have
all the ideas we need.” One example he cited was the concept of
reflexivity, “the fact that thought is part of the world. That when
you’re thinking, it’s not separate from reality, it’s part of reality.
And if your understanding of the world is reflected in what you do, then
that thought comes into the world through your actions,” which helps to
explain, in part, the power of conservative mythos, even when it’s mistaken as a matter of fact, a matter of logos.
Lakoff also pointed out that “Hypocognition itself is
an idea that we need.” There are things going on in our social and
political world that we don’t have names for—and because we don’t have
names for them, we can’t think and talk about them coherently. So, we
have conservatives on the one hand acting on their mythos, mistakenly believing it’s true as a matter of logos—which
is one kind of incompetence—and yet, nonetheless reshaping reality
through the power of reflexivity. (Think of how invading Iraq in
response to 9/11 helped bring ISIS into existence, for example.) On the
other hand, we have liberals seeing things only in terms of logos,
who can’t understand how wildly mistaken conservatives can nonetheless
reshape the world to reflect their paranoid fantasies, because they’re
missing the crucial concept of reflexivity (and even the very concept of
missing concepts, the concept of hypocognition)—which is another, very
different, but very real form of incompetence.
So, when Dunning
told me, “The genius of their ideas are just missed by the group,”
Lakoff’s discussion of hypocognition naturally came to mind. What could
be a worse idea to miss than the very idea of missing ideas? If you
don’t think they’re out there, you’ll never go looking for them—never
believe anyone who claims to have found one of them, either.
Showing posts with label education reform. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education reform. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 03, 2014
Sunday, June 08, 2014
How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution
Maura Larkins' comment:
I don't understand why anyone would think that Gates is motivated by self-interest when he tries to improve education. Why don't people accuse him of self-interest when he spends huge amounts on limiting disease in Africa?
Why are teachers upset about being asked to teach kids basic concepts?
Obviously, not all classrooms will be able to cover all the concepts. Why are teachers so anxious about that fact? It's a goal, for heaven's sake. Anyone who thinks that every kids will learn all the concepts hasn't been paying attention. The important thing is that kids learn as many basic concepts as they can.
Teachers should be responsible for kids making significant strides. But teachers don't need to get hysterical over the fact that they won't be able to teach all the standards to all the kids.
If your students are learning hardly any concepts, then, yes, it's time to worry.
In my experience, the teachers that get upset about standards are the ones who don't know how to teach. They just say out loud to their students whatever is in their textbook.
The teachers unions do not want the most effective teachers to be favored in any way because that would interfere with union politics. Smarter teachers are more likely to question how things are done and don't stay "on message" as reliably as struggling teachers.
The fact is that smarter teachers adapt better to new ideas. Common core is easy for them because they are accustomed to teaching concepts rather than vocalizing the textbook page by page.
The teachers union appeals to the least common denominator among teachers: the mediocre teacher. That's where the bulk of their big bucks comes from.
Link--click HERE to see full interview: Bill Gates on the Common Core
The pair of education advocates had a big idea, a new approach to transform every public-school classroom in America. By early 2008, many of the nation’s top politicians and education leaders had lined up in support.
But that wasn’t enough. The duo needed money — tens of millions of dollars, at least — and they needed a champion who could overcome the politics that had thwarted every previous attempt to institute national standards.
So they turned to the richest man in the world.
On a summer day in 2008, Gene Wilhoit, director of a national group of state school chiefs, and David Coleman, an emerging evangelist for the standards movement, spent hours in Bill Gates’s sleek headquarters near Seattle, trying to persuade him and his wife, Melinda, to turn their idea into reality.
Coleman and Wilhoit told the Gateses that academic standards varied so wildly between states that high school diplomas had lost all meaning, that as many as 40 percent of college freshmen needed remedial classes and that U.S. students were falling behind their foreign competitors.
The pair also argued that a fragmented education system stifled innovation because textbook publishers and software developers were catering to a large number of small markets instead of exploring breakthrough products. That seemed to resonate with the man who led the creation of the world’s dominant computer operating system.
“Can you do this?” Wilhoit recalled being asked. “Is there any proof that states are serious about this, because they haven’t been in the past?”
See all SDER posts re Common Core.
Wilhoit responded that he and Coleman could make no guarantees but that “we were going to give it the best shot we could.”
After the meeting, weeks passed with no word. Then Wilhoit got a call: Gates was in.
What followed was one of the swiftest and most remarkable shifts in education policy in U.S. history.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t just bankroll the development of what became known as the Common Core State Standards. With more than $200 million, the foundation also built political support across the country, persuading state governments to make systemic and costly changes.
Bill Gates was de facto organizer, providing the money and structure for states to work together on common standards in a way that avoided the usual collision between states’ rights and national interests that had undercut every previous effort, dating from the Eisenhower administration.
The Gates Foundation spread money across the political spectrum, to entities including the big teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, and business organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — groups that have clashed in the past but became vocal backers of the standards.
Money flowed to policy groups on the right and left, funding research by scholars of varying political persuasions who promoted the idea of common standards. Liberals at the Center for American Progress and conservatives affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council who routinely disagree on nearly every issue accepted Gates money and found common ground on the Common Core.
One 2009 study, conducted by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute with a $959,116 Gates grant, described the proposed standards as being “very, very strong” and “clearly superior” to many existing state standards.
Gates money went to state and local groups, as well, to help influence policymakers and civic leaders. And the idea found a major booster in President Obama, whose new administration was populated by former Gates Foundation staffers and associates. The administration designed a special contest using economic stimulus funds to reward states that accepted the standards.
The result was astounding: Within just two years of the 2008 Seattle meeting, 45 states and the District of Columbia had fully adopted the Common Core State Standards.
The math standards require students to learn multiple ways to solve problems and explain how they got their answers, while the English standards emphasize nonfiction and expect students to use evidence to back up oral and written arguments. The standards are not a curriculum but skills that students should acquire at each grade. How they are taught and materials used are decisions left to states and school districts.
The standards have become so pervasive that they also quickly spread through private Catholic schools. About 100 of 176 Catholic dioceses have adopted the standards because it is increasingly difficult to buy classroom materials and send teachers to professional development programs that are not influenced by the Common Core, Catholic educators said.
And yet, because of the way education policy is generally decided, the Common Core was instituted in many states without a single vote taken by an elected lawmaker. Kentucky even adopted the standards before the final draft had been made public.
States were responding to a “common belief system supported by widespread investments,” according to one former Gates employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing the foundation.
The movement grew so quickly and with so little public notice that opposition was initially almost nonexistent. That started to change last summer, when local tea party groups began protesting what they viewed as the latest intrusion by an overreaching federal government — even though the impetus had come from the states. In some circles, Common Core became known derisively as “Obamacore.”
Since then, anti-Common Core sentiment has intensified, to the extent that it has become a litmus test in the Republican Party ahead of the GOP’s 2016 presidential nomination process. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, whose nonprofit Foundation for Excellence in Education has received about $5.2 million from the Gates Foundation since 2010, is one of the Common Core’s most vocal supporters. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, who, like Bush, is a potential Republican presidential candidate, led a repeal of the standards in his state. In the past week, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin (R), a former advocate of the standards, signed a law pulling her state out, days after South Carolina’s Republican governor, Nikki Haley, did the same.
Some liberals are angry, too, with a few teacher groups questioning Gates’s influence and motives. Critics say Microsoft stands to benefit from the Common Core’s embrace of technology and data — a charge Gates vehemently rejects.
[Maura Larkins' comment: the teachers union, of which I am a member, does not want the most effective teachers to be favored in any way because that would interfere with union politics. Smarter teachers are more likely to question how things are done and don't stay "on message" as reliably as struggling teachers. The fact is that smarter teachers adapt better to new ideas. Common core is easy for them because they are accustomed to teaching concepts rather than vocalizing the textbook page by page.
The teachers union appeals to the least common denominator among teachers: the mediocre teacher.]
A group calling itself the “Badass Teachers Association,” citing opposition to what it considers market-based education reform, plans a June 26 protest outside the Gates Foundation’s headquarters in Seattle.
In an interview, Gates said his role is to fund the research and development of new tools, such as the Common Core, and offer them to decision-makers who are trying to improve education for millions of Americans. It’s up to the government to decide which tools to use, but someone has to invest in their creation, he said.
“The country as a whole has a huge problem that low-income kids get less good education than suburban kids get,” Gates said. “And that is a huge challenge. . . . Education can get better. Some people may not believe that. Education can change. We can do better.”
“There’s a lot of work that’s gone into making these [standards] good,” Gates continued. “I wish there was a lot of competition, in terms of [other] people who put tens of millions of dollars into how reading and writing could be improved, how math could be improved.”
Referring to opinion polls, he noted that most teachers like the Common Core standards and that those who are most familiar with them are the most positive.
...Common Core’s first win
The first victory for Common Core advocates came on a snowy evening in Kentucky in February 2010, when the state’s top education officials voted unanimously to accept the standards.
“There was no dissent,” said Terry Holliday, Kentucky’s education commissioner. “We had punch and cookies to celebrate.”
It was not by chance that Kentucky went first.
The state enjoyed a direct connection to the Common Core backers — Wilhoit, who had made the personal appeal to Bill and Melinda Gates during that pivotal 2008 meeting, is a former Kentucky education commissioner.
Kentucky was also in the market for new standards. Alarmed that as many as 80 percent of community college students were taking remedial classes, lawmakers had recently passed a bill that required Kentucky to write new, better K-12 standards and tests.
“All of our consultants and our college professors had reviewed the Common Core standards, and they really liked them,” Holliday said. “And there was no cost. We didn’t have any money to do this work, and here we were, able to tap into this national work and get the benefits of the best minds in the country.”
“Without the Gates money,” Holliday added, “we wouldn’t have been able to do this.”
Over time, at least $15 million in Gates money was directed both to the state — to train teachers in Common Core practices and purchase classroom materials — and to on-the-ground advocacy and business groups to help build public support.
Armed with $476,553 from Gates, the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce’s foundation produced a seven-minute video about the value and impact of the Common Core, a tool kit to guide employers in how to talk about its benefits with their employees, a list of key facts that could be stuffed into paycheck envelopes, and other promotional materials written by consultants.
The tool kit provided a sample e-mail that could be sent to workers describing “some exciting new developments underway in our schools” that “hold great promise for creating a more highly skilled workforce and for giving our students, community and state a better foundation on which to build a strong economic future.”
The chamber also recruited a prominent Louisville stockbroker to head a coalition of 75 company executives across the state who lent their names to ads placed in business publications that supported the Common Core.
“The notion that the business community was behind this, those seeds were planted across the state, and that reaped a nice harvest in terms of public opinion,” said David Adkisson, president and chief executive of the Kentucky chamber.
The foundation run by the National Education Association received $501,580 in 2013 to help put the Common Core in place in Kentucky.
Gates-backed groups built such strong support for the Common Core that critics, few and far between, were overwhelmed.
“They have so much money to throw around, they can impact the Kentucky Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Education, they can impact both the AFT and the NEA,” said Brent McKim, president of the teachers union in Jefferson County, Ky., whose early complaint that the standards were too numerous to be taught well earned him a rebuke by Holliday.
[Maura Larkins' comment: It takes about two minutes for a highly effective teacher to teach a single, simple concept. The rest of the time is spent on re-teaching, using different tactics for different kids, reinforcement, and exploration and wider applications of the concept for the more advanced students.]
The foundation’s backing was crucial in other states, as well. Starting in 2009, it had begun ramping up its grant-giving to local nonprofit organizations and other Common Core advocates.
The foundation, for instance, gave more than $5 million to the University of North Carolina-affiliated Hunt Institute, led by the state’s former four-term Democratic governor, Jim Hunt, to advocate for the Common Core in statehouses around the country.
The grant was the institute’s largest source of income in 2009, more than 10 times the size of its next largest donation.
Bill Gates
Link--click HERE to see full interview: Bill Gates on the Common Core
Bill Gates sat down with The Post’s Lyndsey Layton in March to defend the Gates Foundation’s pervasive presence in education and its support of the Common Core. Here is the full, sometimes tense, interview.
With the Gates money, the Hunt Institute coordinated more than a dozen organizations — many of them also Gates grantees — including the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, National Council of La Raza, the Council of Chief State School Officers, National Governors Association, Achieve and the two national teachers unions.
The Hunt Institute held weekly conference calls between the players that were directed by Stefanie Sanford, who was in charge of policy and advocacy at the Gates Foundation. They talked about which states needed shoring up, the best person to respond to questions or criticisms and who needed to travel to which state capital to testify, according to those familiar with the conversations.
The Hunt Institute spent $437,000 to hire GMMB, a strategic communications firm owned by Jim Margolis, a top Democratic strategist and veteran of both of Obama’s presidential campaigns. GMMB conducted polling around standards, developed fact sheets, identified language that would be effective in winning support and prepared talking points, among other efforts...
Later in the process, Gates and other foundations would pay for mock legislative hearings for classroom teachers, training educators on how to respond to questions from lawmakers.
The speed of adoption by the states was staggering by normal standards. A process that typically can take five years was collapsed into a matter of months.
“You had dozens of states adopting before the standards even existed, with little or no discussion, coverage or controversy,” said Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, which has received $4 million from the Gates Foundation since 2007 to study education policy, including the Common Core. “People weren’t paying attention. We were in the middle of an economic meltdown and the health-care fight, and states saw a chance to have a crack at a couple of million bucks if they made some promises.”
The decision by the Gates Foundation to simultaneously pay for the standards and their promotion is a departure from the way philanthropies typically operate, said Sarah Reckhow, an expert in philanthropy and education policy at Michigan State University.
“Usually, there’s a pilot test — something is tried on a small scale, outside researchers see if it works, and then it’s promoted on a broader scale,” Reckhow said. “That didn’t happen with the Common Core. Instead, they aligned the research with the advocacy. . . . At the end of the day, it’s going to be the states and local districts that pay for this.”
Working hand in hand
While the Gates Foundation created the burst of momentum behind the Common Core, the Obama administration picked up the cause and helped push states to act quickly.
There was so much cross-pollination between the foundation and the administration, it is difficult to determine the degree to which one may have influenced the other.
Several top players in Obama’s Education Department who shaped the administration’s policies came either straight from the Gates Foundation in 2009 or from organizations that received heavy funding from the foundation...
They created Race to the Top, a $4.3 billion contest for education grants. Under the contest rules, states that adopted high standards stood the best chance of winning. It was a clever way around federal laws that prohibit Washington from interfering in what takes place in classrooms. It was also a tantalizing incentive for cash-strapped states.
...[M]ost states eyeing Race to the Top money opted for the easiest route and signed onto the Common Core...
On the defensive
Now six years into his quest, Gates finds himself in an uncomfortable place — countering critics on the left and right who question whether the Common Core will have any impact or negative effects, whether it represents government intrusion, and whether the new policy will benefit technology firms such as Microsoft.
Gates is disdainful of the rhetoric from opponents. He sees himself as a technocrat trying to foster solutions to a profound social problem — gaping inequalities in U.S. public education — by investing in promising new ideas.
Education lacks research and development, compared with other areas such as medicine and computer science. As a result, there is a paucity of information about methods of instruction that work.
“The guys who search for oil, they spend a lot of money researching new tools,” Gates said. “Medicine — they spend a lot of money finding new tools. Software is a very R and D-oriented industry. The funding, in general, of what works in education . . . is tiny. It’s the lowest in this field than any field of human endeavor. Yet you could argue it should be the highest.”
Gates is devoting some of his fortune to correct that. Since 1999, the Gates Foundation has spent approximately $3.4 billion on an array of measures to try to improve K-12 public education, with mixed results.
It spent about $650 million on a program to replace large urban high schools with smaller schools, on the theory that students at risk of dropping out would be more likely to stay in schools where they forged closer bonds with teachers and other students. That led to a modest increase in graduation rates, an outcome that underwhelmed Gates and prompted the foundation to pull the plug.
Gates has said that one of the benefits of common standards would be to open the classroom to digital learning, making it easier for software developers — including Microsoft — to develop new products for the country’s 15,000 school districts.
In February, Microsoft announced that it was joining Pearson, the world’s largest educational publisher, to load Pearson’s Common Core classroom materials on Microsoft’s tablet, the Surface. That product allows Microsoft to compete for school district spending with Apple, whose iPad is the dominant tablet in classrooms.
Gates dismissed any suggestion that he is motivated by self-interest.
[Maura Larkins' comment: I don't understand why anyone would think that Gates is motivated by self-interest. He has enough money to give his own kids exactly the education he wants them to have. He's got billions. He isn't interested in making money off charter schools. Why don't people accuse him of self-interest when he spends huge amounts on limiting disease in Africa?}
“I believe in the Common Core because of its substance and what it will do to improve education,” he said. “And that’s the only reason I believe in the Common Core.”
Bill and Melinda Gates, Obama and Arne Duncan are parents of school-age children, although none of those children attend schools that use the Common Core standards. The Gates and Obama children attend private schools, while Duncan’s children go to public school in Virginia, one of four states that never adopted the Common Core.
Still, Gates said he wants his children to know a “superset” of the Common Core standards — everything in the standards and beyond...
I don't understand why anyone would think that Gates is motivated by self-interest when he tries to improve education. Why don't people accuse him of self-interest when he spends huge amounts on limiting disease in Africa?
Why are teachers upset about being asked to teach kids basic concepts?
Obviously, not all classrooms will be able to cover all the concepts. Why are teachers so anxious about that fact? It's a goal, for heaven's sake. Anyone who thinks that every kids will learn all the concepts hasn't been paying attention. The important thing is that kids learn as many basic concepts as they can.
Teachers should be responsible for kids making significant strides. But teachers don't need to get hysterical over the fact that they won't be able to teach all the standards to all the kids.
If your students are learning hardly any concepts, then, yes, it's time to worry.
In my experience, the teachers that get upset about standards are the ones who don't know how to teach. They just say out loud to their students whatever is in their textbook.
The teachers unions do not want the most effective teachers to be favored in any way because that would interfere with union politics. Smarter teachers are more likely to question how things are done and don't stay "on message" as reliably as struggling teachers.
The fact is that smarter teachers adapt better to new ideas. Common core is easy for them because they are accustomed to teaching concepts rather than vocalizing the textbook page by page.
The teachers union appeals to the least common denominator among teachers: the mediocre teacher. That's where the bulk of their big bucks comes from.
“The guys who search for oil, they spend a lot of money researching new tools,” Gates said. “Medicine — they spend a lot of money finding new tools. Software is a very R and D-oriented industry. The funding, in general, of what works in education . . . is tiny. It’s the lowest in this field than any field of human endeavor.
Link--click HERE to see full interview: Bill Gates on the Common Core
How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution
Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates is taking heat from education
groups, which say the Gates Foundation’s philanthropic support comes
with strings attached. Here, he responds to his critics in an interview
with The Washington Post’s Lyndsey Layton.
The pair of education advocates had a big idea, a new approach to transform every public-school classroom in America. By early 2008, many of the nation’s top politicians and education leaders had lined up in support.
But that wasn’t enough. The duo needed money — tens of millions of dollars, at least — and they needed a champion who could overcome the politics that had thwarted every previous attempt to institute national standards.
So they turned to the richest man in the world.
On a summer day in 2008, Gene Wilhoit, director of a national group of state school chiefs, and David Coleman, an emerging evangelist for the standards movement, spent hours in Bill Gates’s sleek headquarters near Seattle, trying to persuade him and his wife, Melinda, to turn their idea into reality.
Coleman and Wilhoit told the Gateses that academic standards varied so wildly between states that high school diplomas had lost all meaning, that as many as 40 percent of college freshmen needed remedial classes and that U.S. students were falling behind their foreign competitors.
The pair also argued that a fragmented education system stifled innovation because textbook publishers and software developers were catering to a large number of small markets instead of exploring breakthrough products. That seemed to resonate with the man who led the creation of the world’s dominant computer operating system.
“Can you do this?” Wilhoit recalled being asked. “Is there any proof that states are serious about this, because they haven’t been in the past?”
See all SDER posts re Common Core.
Wilhoit responded that he and Coleman could make no guarantees but that “we were going to give it the best shot we could.”
After the meeting, weeks passed with no word. Then Wilhoit got a call: Gates was in.
What followed was one of the swiftest and most remarkable shifts in education policy in U.S. history.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t just bankroll the development of what became known as the Common Core State Standards. With more than $200 million, the foundation also built political support across the country, persuading state governments to make systemic and costly changes.
Bill Gates was de facto organizer, providing the money and structure for states to work together on common standards in a way that avoided the usual collision between states’ rights and national interests that had undercut every previous effort, dating from the Eisenhower administration.
The Gates Foundation spread money across the political spectrum, to entities including the big teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, and business organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — groups that have clashed in the past but became vocal backers of the standards.
Money flowed to policy groups on the right and left, funding research by scholars of varying political persuasions who promoted the idea of common standards. Liberals at the Center for American Progress and conservatives affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council who routinely disagree on nearly every issue accepted Gates money and found common ground on the Common Core.
One 2009 study, conducted by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute with a $959,116 Gates grant, described the proposed standards as being “very, very strong” and “clearly superior” to many existing state standards.
Gates money went to state and local groups, as well, to help influence policymakers and civic leaders. And the idea found a major booster in President Obama, whose new administration was populated by former Gates Foundation staffers and associates. The administration designed a special contest using economic stimulus funds to reward states that accepted the standards.
The result was astounding: Within just two years of the 2008 Seattle meeting, 45 states and the District of Columbia had fully adopted the Common Core State Standards.
The math standards require students to learn multiple ways to solve problems and explain how they got their answers, while the English standards emphasize nonfiction and expect students to use evidence to back up oral and written arguments. The standards are not a curriculum but skills that students should acquire at each grade. How they are taught and materials used are decisions left to states and school districts.
The standards have become so pervasive that they also quickly spread through private Catholic schools. About 100 of 176 Catholic dioceses have adopted the standards because it is increasingly difficult to buy classroom materials and send teachers to professional development programs that are not influenced by the Common Core, Catholic educators said.
And yet, because of the way education policy is generally decided, the Common Core was instituted in many states without a single vote taken by an elected lawmaker. Kentucky even adopted the standards before the final draft had been made public.
States were responding to a “common belief system supported by widespread investments,” according to one former Gates employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing the foundation.
The movement grew so quickly and with so little public notice that opposition was initially almost nonexistent. That started to change last summer, when local tea party groups began protesting what they viewed as the latest intrusion by an overreaching federal government — even though the impetus had come from the states. In some circles, Common Core became known derisively as “Obamacore.”
Since then, anti-Common Core sentiment has intensified, to the extent that it has become a litmus test in the Republican Party ahead of the GOP’s 2016 presidential nomination process. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, whose nonprofit Foundation for Excellence in Education has received about $5.2 million from the Gates Foundation since 2010, is one of the Common Core’s most vocal supporters. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, who, like Bush, is a potential Republican presidential candidate, led a repeal of the standards in his state. In the past week, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin (R), a former advocate of the standards, signed a law pulling her state out, days after South Carolina’s Republican governor, Nikki Haley, did the same.
Some liberals are angry, too, with a few teacher groups questioning Gates’s influence and motives. Critics say Microsoft stands to benefit from the Common Core’s embrace of technology and data — a charge Gates vehemently rejects.
[Maura Larkins' comment: the teachers union, of which I am a member, does not want the most effective teachers to be favored in any way because that would interfere with union politics. Smarter teachers are more likely to question how things are done and don't stay "on message" as reliably as struggling teachers. The fact is that smarter teachers adapt better to new ideas. Common core is easy for them because they are accustomed to teaching concepts rather than vocalizing the textbook page by page.
The teachers union appeals to the least common denominator among teachers: the mediocre teacher.]
A group calling itself the “Badass Teachers Association,” citing opposition to what it considers market-based education reform, plans a June 26 protest outside the Gates Foundation’s headquarters in Seattle.
In an interview, Gates said his role is to fund the research and development of new tools, such as the Common Core, and offer them to decision-makers who are trying to improve education for millions of Americans. It’s up to the government to decide which tools to use, but someone has to invest in their creation, he said.
“The country as a whole has a huge problem that low-income kids get less good education than suburban kids get,” Gates said. “And that is a huge challenge. . . . Education can get better. Some people may not believe that. Education can change. We can do better.”
“There’s a lot of work that’s gone into making these [standards] good,” Gates continued. “I wish there was a lot of competition, in terms of [other] people who put tens of millions of dollars into how reading and writing could be improved, how math could be improved.”
Referring to opinion polls, he noted that most teachers like the Common Core standards and that those who are most familiar with them are the most positive.
...Common Core’s first win
The first victory for Common Core advocates came on a snowy evening in Kentucky in February 2010, when the state’s top education officials voted unanimously to accept the standards.
“There was no dissent,” said Terry Holliday, Kentucky’s education commissioner. “We had punch and cookies to celebrate.”
It was not by chance that Kentucky went first.
The state enjoyed a direct connection to the Common Core backers — Wilhoit, who had made the personal appeal to Bill and Melinda Gates during that pivotal 2008 meeting, is a former Kentucky education commissioner.
Kentucky was also in the market for new standards. Alarmed that as many as 80 percent of community college students were taking remedial classes, lawmakers had recently passed a bill that required Kentucky to write new, better K-12 standards and tests.
“All of our consultants and our college professors had reviewed the Common Core standards, and they really liked them,” Holliday said. “And there was no cost. We didn’t have any money to do this work, and here we were, able to tap into this national work and get the benefits of the best minds in the country.”
“Without the Gates money,” Holliday added, “we wouldn’t have been able to do this.”
Over time, at least $15 million in Gates money was directed both to the state — to train teachers in Common Core practices and purchase classroom materials — and to on-the-ground advocacy and business groups to help build public support.
Armed with $476,553 from Gates, the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce’s foundation produced a seven-minute video about the value and impact of the Common Core, a tool kit to guide employers in how to talk about its benefits with their employees, a list of key facts that could be stuffed into paycheck envelopes, and other promotional materials written by consultants.
The tool kit provided a sample e-mail that could be sent to workers describing “some exciting new developments underway in our schools” that “hold great promise for creating a more highly skilled workforce and for giving our students, community and state a better foundation on which to build a strong economic future.”
The chamber also recruited a prominent Louisville stockbroker to head a coalition of 75 company executives across the state who lent their names to ads placed in business publications that supported the Common Core.
“The notion that the business community was behind this, those seeds were planted across the state, and that reaped a nice harvest in terms of public opinion,” said David Adkisson, president and chief executive of the Kentucky chamber.
The foundation run by the National Education Association received $501,580 in 2013 to help put the Common Core in place in Kentucky.
Gates-backed groups built such strong support for the Common Core that critics, few and far between, were overwhelmed.
“They have so much money to throw around, they can impact the Kentucky Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Education, they can impact both the AFT and the NEA,” said Brent McKim, president of the teachers union in Jefferson County, Ky., whose early complaint that the standards were too numerous to be taught well earned him a rebuke by Holliday.
[Maura Larkins' comment: It takes about two minutes for a highly effective teacher to teach a single, simple concept. The rest of the time is spent on re-teaching, using different tactics for different kids, reinforcement, and exploration and wider applications of the concept for the more advanced students.]
The foundation’s backing was crucial in other states, as well. Starting in 2009, it had begun ramping up its grant-giving to local nonprofit organizations and other Common Core advocates.
The foundation, for instance, gave more than $5 million to the University of North Carolina-affiliated Hunt Institute, led by the state’s former four-term Democratic governor, Jim Hunt, to advocate for the Common Core in statehouses around the country.
The grant was the institute’s largest source of income in 2009, more than 10 times the size of its next largest donation.
Bill Gates
Link--click HERE to see full interview: Bill Gates on the Common Core
Bill Gates sat down with The Post’s Lyndsey Layton in March to defend the Gates Foundation’s pervasive presence in education and its support of the Common Core. Here is the full, sometimes tense, interview.
With the Gates money, the Hunt Institute coordinated more than a dozen organizations — many of them also Gates grantees — including the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, National Council of La Raza, the Council of Chief State School Officers, National Governors Association, Achieve and the two national teachers unions.
The Hunt Institute held weekly conference calls between the players that were directed by Stefanie Sanford, who was in charge of policy and advocacy at the Gates Foundation. They talked about which states needed shoring up, the best person to respond to questions or criticisms and who needed to travel to which state capital to testify, according to those familiar with the conversations.
The Hunt Institute spent $437,000 to hire GMMB, a strategic communications firm owned by Jim Margolis, a top Democratic strategist and veteran of both of Obama’s presidential campaigns. GMMB conducted polling around standards, developed fact sheets, identified language that would be effective in winning support and prepared talking points, among other efforts...
Later in the process, Gates and other foundations would pay for mock legislative hearings for classroom teachers, training educators on how to respond to questions from lawmakers.
The speed of adoption by the states was staggering by normal standards. A process that typically can take five years was collapsed into a matter of months.
“You had dozens of states adopting before the standards even existed, with little or no discussion, coverage or controversy,” said Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, which has received $4 million from the Gates Foundation since 2007 to study education policy, including the Common Core. “People weren’t paying attention. We were in the middle of an economic meltdown and the health-care fight, and states saw a chance to have a crack at a couple of million bucks if they made some promises.”
The decision by the Gates Foundation to simultaneously pay for the standards and their promotion is a departure from the way philanthropies typically operate, said Sarah Reckhow, an expert in philanthropy and education policy at Michigan State University.
“Usually, there’s a pilot test — something is tried on a small scale, outside researchers see if it works, and then it’s promoted on a broader scale,” Reckhow said. “That didn’t happen with the Common Core. Instead, they aligned the research with the advocacy. . . . At the end of the day, it’s going to be the states and local districts that pay for this.”
Working hand in hand
While the Gates Foundation created the burst of momentum behind the Common Core, the Obama administration picked up the cause and helped push states to act quickly.
There was so much cross-pollination between the foundation and the administration, it is difficult to determine the degree to which one may have influenced the other.
Several top players in Obama’s Education Department who shaped the administration’s policies came either straight from the Gates Foundation in 2009 or from organizations that received heavy funding from the foundation...
They created Race to the Top, a $4.3 billion contest for education grants. Under the contest rules, states that adopted high standards stood the best chance of winning. It was a clever way around federal laws that prohibit Washington from interfering in what takes place in classrooms. It was also a tantalizing incentive for cash-strapped states.
...[M]ost states eyeing Race to the Top money opted for the easiest route and signed onto the Common Core...
On the defensive
Now six years into his quest, Gates finds himself in an uncomfortable place — countering critics on the left and right who question whether the Common Core will have any impact or negative effects, whether it represents government intrusion, and whether the new policy will benefit technology firms such as Microsoft.
Gates is disdainful of the rhetoric from opponents. He sees himself as a technocrat trying to foster solutions to a profound social problem — gaping inequalities in U.S. public education — by investing in promising new ideas.
Education lacks research and development, compared with other areas such as medicine and computer science. As a result, there is a paucity of information about methods of instruction that work.
“The guys who search for oil, they spend a lot of money researching new tools,” Gates said. “Medicine — they spend a lot of money finding new tools. Software is a very R and D-oriented industry. The funding, in general, of what works in education . . . is tiny. It’s the lowest in this field than any field of human endeavor. Yet you could argue it should be the highest.”
Gates is devoting some of his fortune to correct that. Since 1999, the Gates Foundation has spent approximately $3.4 billion on an array of measures to try to improve K-12 public education, with mixed results.
It spent about $650 million on a program to replace large urban high schools with smaller schools, on the theory that students at risk of dropping out would be more likely to stay in schools where they forged closer bonds with teachers and other students. That led to a modest increase in graduation rates, an outcome that underwhelmed Gates and prompted the foundation to pull the plug.
Gates has said that one of the benefits of common standards would be to open the classroom to digital learning, making it easier for software developers — including Microsoft — to develop new products for the country’s 15,000 school districts.
In February, Microsoft announced that it was joining Pearson, the world’s largest educational publisher, to load Pearson’s Common Core classroom materials on Microsoft’s tablet, the Surface. That product allows Microsoft to compete for school district spending with Apple, whose iPad is the dominant tablet in classrooms.
Gates dismissed any suggestion that he is motivated by self-interest.
[Maura Larkins' comment: I don't understand why anyone would think that Gates is motivated by self-interest. He has enough money to give his own kids exactly the education he wants them to have. He's got billions. He isn't interested in making money off charter schools. Why don't people accuse him of self-interest when he spends huge amounts on limiting disease in Africa?}
“I believe in the Common Core because of its substance and what it will do to improve education,” he said. “And that’s the only reason I believe in the Common Core.”
Bill and Melinda Gates, Obama and Arne Duncan are parents of school-age children, although none of those children attend schools that use the Common Core standards. The Gates and Obama children attend private schools, while Duncan’s children go to public school in Virginia, one of four states that never adopted the Common Core.
Still, Gates said he wants his children to know a “superset” of the Common Core standards — everything in the standards and beyond...
Sunday, February 23, 2014
American schools have failed: 1 In 4 Americans Thinks The Sun Goes Around The Earth, Survey Says
How do school officials expect students to understand science when they barely understand that the earth is not flat?
Is the average American teacher subpar? Yes.
Obviously, the concept of the earth orbiting the sun is one that SHOULD BE taught with a living, moving demonstration with objects such as a basketball for Jupiter, a marble for the earth, etc.. The sun would ideally be eight feet in diameter, but balls that size are hard to come by. I myself used something smaller for the three-dimensional demonstration, and then I put up a bulletin board with part of a yellow butcher paper sun (with butcher paper flames). Also, the rotation of the earth on its axis should be taught by letting kids see (or, better yet, carry!) a globe that is turned slowly as it moves around the "sun" (which should be the biggest, roundest, most orange object the teacher can come up with).
What excuse is there for the legions of teachers who don't bother to make sure that their students understand these concepts? I am frequently appalled by the mental laziness of teachers.
As a teacher I was amazed at the percentage of my fellow teachers who would stand up in front of the class and recite a fact, and then think that their job was done regarding that fact.
Parents: most of your kids are receiving inadequate instruction in basic concepts. I urge you to support Common Core, and to hold teachers accountable for learning how to teach it. DON'T FALL FOR ALL THE WHINING THAT TEACHERS ARE DOING. They are college graduates. They should be able to figure out how to teach basic concepts.
See all posts re Common Core.
See all posts re lazy teachers.
1 In 4 Americans Thinks The Sun Goes Around The Earth, Survey Says
by Scott Neumann
NPR
February 14, 2014
A quarter of Americans surveyed could not correctly answer that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, according to a report out Friday from the National Science Foundation.
The survey of 2,200 people in the United States was conducted by the NSF in 2012 and released on Friday at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago.
To the question "Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth," 26 percent of those surveyed answered incorrectly.
In the same survey, just 39 percent answered correctly (true) that "The universe began with a huge explosion" and only 48 percent said "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals."
Just over half understood that antibiotics are not effective against viruses.
As alarming as some of those deficits in science knowledge might appear, Americans fared better on several of the questions than similar, but older surveys of their Chinese and European counterparts.
Only 66 percent of people in a 2005 European Union poll answered the basic astronomy answer correctly. However, both China and the EU fared significantly better (66 percent and 70 percent, respectively) on the question about human evolution.
In a survey compiled by the National Opinion Research Center from various sources, Americans seemed to generally support science research and expressed the greatest interest in new medical discoveries and local school issues related to science. They were least interested in space exploration, agricultural developments and international and foreign policy issues related to science
Sunday, October 06, 2013
Teachers in high-scoring countries work hard to make learning interesting for kids
Teachers like to blame others, but the fact is that it's the teacher's job to make learning interesting to kids.
What High-Scoring Countries Do Right in Math, Reading, and Science
By Catherine Gewertz
Education Week
September 30, 2013
A new study analyzes the results of international math, reading, and science tests and provides a profile of the practices that schools, parents, and teachers in the highest-scoring countries have in common.
The TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center released the study today. It was made possible by the fact that the TIMSS, which assesses math and science achievement, and the PIRLS, which gauges reading skill, were given at the same time in 2011. That enabled the test administrators at Boston College to synthesize information from the two in order to make observations about what they called "the culture of educational excellence."
They used data from 34 participating countries to offer some analysis at the 4th grade level. They focused on about half of those countries, where took 90 percent of 4th graders scored at a basic level of proficiency in all three subjects, and in particular, on five nations that educated 35 percent of their 4th graders to a high level of achievement in all three: Singapore, Chinese Taipei, Finland, Hong Kong and Russia.
Ina V.S. Mullis and Michael O. Martin, the executive directors of the TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center, said in a statement that while each country had its own unique strengths and approaches to education, "the analyses presented in this report suggest that, across countries, there are a number of school and home factors that can positively affect student achievement in reading, mathematics, and science at the fourth grade."
One key finding concerned the pivotal role of good reading skills. Not only do strong skills drive high achievement in literacy, but they facilitate high achievement in math and science, too, where students often must read complex material to solve problems.
Far more details are in the full report, which is on the study center's website, but here are some highlights.
School conditions that correlate with higher student achievement in reading, math, and science:
• All parties—principals, teachers, parents and students—are "equally invested" in working together to achieve success;
• Teachers understand curricular goals;
• Teachers are successful implementing curriculum;
• Teachers expect student achievement;
• Parents support student achievement;
• Students want to do well in school; and
• The school provides a safe and orderly environment by maintaining discipline and reducing frequency of bullying.
What teachers do that correlates with higher student achievement in reading, math, and science:
• Making sure students know what they're expected to do;
• Making sure students like what they're reading;
• Trying to be easily understood;
• Presenting content in interesting ways; and
• Giving students interesting things to do and read.
What parents do that correlates with higher student achievement:
• Creating a home environment supportive of educational attainment, with a lot of books available; and
• Reading books, telling stories, singing songs, playing with alphabet toys, reading signs and labels aloud, and playing word games.
What High-Scoring Countries Do Right in Math, Reading, and Science
By Catherine Gewertz
Education Week
September 30, 2013
A new study analyzes the results of international math, reading, and science tests and provides a profile of the practices that schools, parents, and teachers in the highest-scoring countries have in common.
The TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center released the study today. It was made possible by the fact that the TIMSS, which assesses math and science achievement, and the PIRLS, which gauges reading skill, were given at the same time in 2011. That enabled the test administrators at Boston College to synthesize information from the two in order to make observations about what they called "the culture of educational excellence."
They used data from 34 participating countries to offer some analysis at the 4th grade level. They focused on about half of those countries, where took 90 percent of 4th graders scored at a basic level of proficiency in all three subjects, and in particular, on five nations that educated 35 percent of their 4th graders to a high level of achievement in all three: Singapore, Chinese Taipei, Finland, Hong Kong and Russia.
Ina V.S. Mullis and Michael O. Martin, the executive directors of the TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center, said in a statement that while each country had its own unique strengths and approaches to education, "the analyses presented in this report suggest that, across countries, there are a number of school and home factors that can positively affect student achievement in reading, mathematics, and science at the fourth grade."
One key finding concerned the pivotal role of good reading skills. Not only do strong skills drive high achievement in literacy, but they facilitate high achievement in math and science, too, where students often must read complex material to solve problems.
Far more details are in the full report, which is on the study center's website, but here are some highlights.
School conditions that correlate with higher student achievement in reading, math, and science:
• All parties—principals, teachers, parents and students—are "equally invested" in working together to achieve success;
• Teachers understand curricular goals;
• Teachers are successful implementing curriculum;
• Teachers expect student achievement;
• Parents support student achievement;
• Students want to do well in school; and
• The school provides a safe and orderly environment by maintaining discipline and reducing frequency of bullying.
What teachers do that correlates with higher student achievement in reading, math, and science:
• Making sure students know what they're expected to do;
• Making sure students like what they're reading;
• Trying to be easily understood;
• Presenting content in interesting ways; and
• Giving students interesting things to do and read.
What parents do that correlates with higher student achievement:
• Creating a home environment supportive of educational attainment, with a lot of books available; and
• Reading books, telling stories, singing songs, playing with alphabet toys, reading signs and labels aloud, and playing word games.
Sunday, September 08, 2013
Mexican Senate battles teacher union corruption, votes for education reform
Mexican teachers attack political party offices
Salon.com Apr 24, 2013
A protestor runs past office furniture set to fire by teachers in an attack of a Secretary of Education office, in protest against Mexican President Pena Nieto's education reform project... (AP Photo/Alejandrino Gonzalez)(Credit: AP)
See all posts re education reform in Mexico, teacher strikes and demonstrations.
Mexican Senate passes major education reform
Associated Press
MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN
September 4, 2013
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico's Senate overwhelmingly passed a sweeping reform of the notoriously dysfunctional public school system early Wednesday, handing President Enrique Pena Nieto an important victory in his push to remake some of his country's worst-run institutions.
The Senate voted 102-22 in favor of a standardized system of test-based hiring and promotion that would give the government the tools to break teachers unions' near-total control of school staffing.
That control includes the corrupt sale and inheritance of teaching jobs, and it has been widely blamed for much of the poor performance of Mexican schools, which have higher relative costs and worse results than any other in the 34-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
"The inheritance and sale of jobs has ended," Education Secretary Emilio Chuayffet said on Twitter. "Merit is the ideal means of access to, and progress in, a teaching career."
The late-night vote clears a path for Pena Nieto to move forward with a series of even more controversial reforms, including a measure that would violate one of modern Mexico's longest-standing taboos by allowing private investment in the state-run oil company.
But there is potential trouble ahead.
Education advocates say a series of concessions to the smaller of the two main teachers unions undermined the reform's ability to create true change in the national education system.
And despite those concessions, the smaller teachers union continued days of debilitating demonstrations in Mexico City, sending tens of thousands of supporters to shut down the capital's main boulevard and protest outside key government building Wednesday. Thousands attended smaller protests in cities around the country. The union also pledged to throw its support behind a weekend protest against the oil reform by leftist leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
"When Congress is rendered void, the only thing that remains is the streets," leftist Sen. Mario Delgado said as a series of his Democratic Revolution Party's objections to specific measures of the reform were rejected in relatively narrow votes.
The education reform initially pitted Pena Nieto against the country's main teachers union — Latin America's largest union and once one of the most important allies of his Institutional Revolutionary Party. The union, known by the Spanish acronym SNTE, fell into line after its head, Elba Esther Gordillo, was arrested on corruption charges in February. She remains jailed pending trial.
A smaller, dissident union known as the National Education Workers' Coordinating Committee, or CNTE, continued protesting and eventually rallied thousands of teachers from poor southern states, paralyzing large sections of the capital for more than a week.
In the end, the CNTE won a series of concessions that help protect its members. Reform advocates called the law an important first step but said much more remained to be done in order to change the system.
"It's not everything we would have hoped for but it's an historic change," said David Calderon, director of the education reform advocacy group Mexicans First. "Of course it's just a change in the rules that still has to be turned into reality."
Much of Mexico's educational dysfunction is attributed to the relationship formed more than a half-century ago between the Institutional Revolutionary Party and the teachers unions, which gained increasing control of the education system in exchange for throwing their strength behind the government in the voting box and on the streets.
Over the years the unions developed a virtual lock on teacher hiring and promotion. Almost every new teacher must go through a union to gain a school assignment, a practice that has spawned notorious levels of corruption, including the sale and inheritance of teaching positions.
Particularly in states with schools controlled by the CNTE, critics say, union influence has transformed schools from educational institutions into mechanisms for extracting funds from the state. The CNTE has become notorious for threatening elected officials with debilitating strikes and marches in order to maintain and increase benefits that make teaching one of the primary sources of legal income in much of rural Mexico.
Mexico today spends a greater share of its budget on education than any other member of the OECD except New Zealand. Out of that budget, the country spends more than 90 percent on staff compensation, again higher than any other member of the OECD. That spending doesn't translate into better results or smaller class sizes, however. Only 47 percent of Mexican children graduate from the equivalent of high school and Mexico also has the OECD's highest student-to-teacher ratio — 25 pupils to every teacher, on average.
Among the benefits ended by the educational reform are payments of more than $100 million a year by some estimates to thousands of teachers who work full-time as union organizers and rarely, if ever, set foot inside a classroom. Education reform groups have found some union representatives earning hundreds of thousands of dollars per semester.
The rest of the reform focuses on reasserting government control by awarding teaching jobs to the highest scorers on a standardized test instead of funneling them through a teachers union, a measure weakened by a series of back-room compromises with the CNTE.
The law maintains union control over the current crop of teaching students by delaying purely test-based hiring for two years. Serving teachers will have three chances to pass an annual performance test. If they fail all three, they will be moved to an administrative job or given the chance to retire instead of being fired. In another compromise, failing teachers can appeal transfers to local labor law magistrates, a measure that reduces federal control in favor of local officials more easily influenced by the unions.
The law was also weakened by a measure that classifies individual teachers' test results as private, personal information, angering reform advocates who said that broached a key promise to empower parents by giving them more information about their children's schooling.
"Obstacles that kept us from having qualified teachers have been removed, but that's not enough to move the positive part forward," said Calderon, the head of Mexicans First. "That requires new study plans, it requires the involvement of universities in teacher training, it requires parents participating more and demanding more."
With the education reform headed to Pena Nieto's desk, still pending are the oil reform; detailed reform of the country's weak tax laws; and strengthening of its telecommunications regulations, which have allowed two families to control most of the multi-billion dollar market while charging prices, particularly for phone service, that are well above global norms.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Here's a plan to resolve the violent teacher standoff at the Zocalo in Mexico City
I agree with the indigenous teachers from the poverty-stricken south of Mexico that they should not be systematically replaced with richer, whiter native-Spanish-speakers who received better educations, nor should they be replaced for political reasons.
My plan for effectively utilizing all teachers, originally designed for the US, would be perfect for Mexico. See bottom of this post.
Reforma Avenue, Mexico City, Aug. 22, 2013 Photo by Marco Ugarte/AP
In Mexico, teachers fight tooth and nail against reforms familiar to those north of the border
Members of the National Workers of Education Coordinator (CNTE, for its initials in Spanish) protest violently against the educational reforms in the street across from Congress...
By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post
August 28, 2013
MEXICO CITY — The Mexican government is trying to overhaul the nation’s public schools in a way that might ring familiar in the United States: changing how teachers are hired, fired and evaluated.
But if American teachers unions were resistant to the idea, some in Mexico are openly hostile.
Hundreds of ski-mask-wearing, rock-throwing, stick-wielding teachers have smashed windows and set fire to the offices of the major political party in the southern state of Guerrero, and thousands are flooding Mexico City, blocking national TV networks, subway lines and, on Wednesday, swarming the roads around Los Pinos, the official residence of the president.
In what has become a fairly common event here, at least 8,000 teachers have set up camp under a sea of nylon tents in Mexico City’s central Zocalo square, where Gumaro Cruz Lopez, an elementary school director from the southern state of Oaxaca, explained his fear that the changes will turn kids into globalized robots at the expense of indigenous culture, free thought and possibly homemade tacos.
“They want to create one prototype of individual for the sole service of the global socioeconomic system,” said Lopez, 51. “They say private companies like Coke, Pepsi and Bimbo” — one of the world’s largest baking companies —“can help to better our schools, but soon they’ll start bringing all their sodas and snacks and all the little pastries of Bimbo!”
The angry invoking of transnational soda and snack-food companies has to do with the fact that Coca-Cola has built model schools in Mexico, as corporate giants such as Microsoft have gotten involved in U.S. education reform. Union leaders have turned that into a symbol for their fear that some distant authority will soon be telling them how and what to teach.
Political analysts say the fierce resistance also has to do with the fact that the changes directly challenge long-standing union power over jobs.
The overhaul that Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is pursuing keeps with ideas championed in recent years by former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee and others who argue that raising teacher standards is the key to fixing failing schools.
In February, Peña Nieto signed into law the framework for his plan, which would shift the power to hire, fire and evaluate teachers to the federal government and away from Mexico’s main teachers union, which has been accused of rampant corruption and presiding over a system of awarding jobs in ways that have little to do with merit.
A new system of periodic teacher evaluations is intended to identify incompetent teachers, reward good ones and set professional standards, with the hope that Mexican students will become more globally competitive.
“In principle, the reforms have a positive spirit,” said Miguel Szekely, director of the Institute for Education Innovation. “They are going in the right direction, but implementing them will take time.”
Additional legislation is required to spell out how the system will work. And that is what the massive teacher protests here have stalled, along with traffic.
The emphasis on union corruption — almost universally acknowledged as a huge problem — has to some extent obscured other concerns of the teachers who traveled to Mexico City from some of the poorest states in the southern part of the country. The union that holds sway there is not the one directly targeted by the new education law, but a smaller one that controls jobs and state education budgets and is among the most radical in Mexico.
Rosalia Alonzo, a director of an elementary school in Oaxaca, said any new measures should recognize the disparities between the poorest schools of the south and wealthier ones elsewhere.
“A lot of schools don’t have power or technology, or even books,” she said. “The people who come up with these reforms, their kids go to Harvard. They don’t know what it’s like for us.”
Pilar Palma, a teacher at the protest, said she suspects that evaluations will be used unfairly. “I agree I should be evaluated,” she said. “But give me the tools and the ways to get better.”
Lopez, the elementary school director, noted that many students and teachers in his area speak native languages in addition to Spanish. He worries that such particularities will be obliterated by standards handed down from Mexico City.
“Those languages are close to our own customs, to our own environment,” Lopez said. “They want to make our children useful as labor for the future of the private sector — to teach them only to work and obey and not to reflect, not to liberate their minds.”
It was early afternoon Tuesday, and thousands of teachers were heading from the plaza to protest a national TV network they said has been unfairly describing them as a nuisance. The station broadcast interviews with Mexico City residents fed up with the road blockages, people who described the teachers as “dirty” and “those Indians,” a reference to their native background. “We are going to block Televisa!” Lopez said, undeterred. “We will be here until the authorities answer us.” (END)
Romualdo Gutierrez, Oaxaca
Maura Larkin's Plan--A great teacher for every child without firing anyone
This research indicates that the average teacher salary in Mexico is $20,000. I imagine the number is significantly lower in southern Mexico, but this figure will serve to demonstrate my point. My plan (see Idea Tournament article below) would offer a pathway to much higher earnings for many teachers--and students!--while allowing weaker teachers to keep their jobs and have an opportunity to become master teachers.
Here's what the chart in the article below would look like for four classrooms and one extra salary (in thousands) in Mexico:
Currently: $20 + $20 + $20 + $20 + $20 = $100
New plan: $32 + $17 + $17 + $17 + $17 = $100 (minus exorbitant cost of education vendors)
All Kids Can Have Great Teachers (Without Firing Any Teachers)
By: Maura Larkins
Voice of San Diego
September 7, 2012
No one really knows what’s going on in individual public school classrooms. Observations by principals tend to be fleeting and few. We don’t need to fire anybody, but we do need to use highly-skilled teachers and ordinary teachers where they can do the optimal good.
The truth is that the critical moments in learning don’t happen continuously five hours a day. They add up to at most a couple of hours each day, and probably much less. The rest of the time an ordinary teacher can handle lesson reinforcement, computer activities, art projects, silent reading, etc.
The best teachers should be able to rise far above average teachers on the salary scale — and they should have far more responsibility. In my plan, each classroom would have a full-time regular teacher. Several classrooms would share a master teacher, who would be responsible for student progress, teaching lessons part-time and guiding the regular teacher. Gifted regular teachers would be eligible to become master teachers. Instead of bringing in vendors selling the latest gimmick for tens of thousands of dollars, master teachers would do all necessary training.
Here’s the comparison for four classrooms and one extra salary (in thousands):
Currently: $60 + $60 + $60 + $60 + $60 = $300
New plan: $100 + $50 + $50 + $50 + $50 = $300 (minus exorbitant cost of education vendors)
If we add more money, we could have more master teachers. Meaningful evaluations of teachers would have to be instituted. Current evaluation systems are worse than useless. My plan would call for frequent observations by both master and regular teachers, who would observe classrooms in other districts to keep school politics at bay. The observations would have a beneficial side effect: they would allow teachers to pick up new ideas.
See more of my plan in the yellow column on the right of this page.
Profesores se manifestaron este viernes afuera de la SecretarÃa de Gobernación en protesta por las leyes secundarias de la reforma educativa (Cuartoscuro).
El diálogo entre legisladores y docentes de la CNTE, en un punto crÃtico
Las negociaciones estuvieron cerca de romperse debido a que el PRI señaló que la evaluación docente podrÃa votarse la próxima semana
Por Mauricio Torres
CNN Mexico
30 de agosto de 2013
El encuentro de este viernes entre legisladores y docentes terminó sin avances
Los lÃderes de la CNTE se molestaron por declaraciones del coordinador de los diputados priistas
Beltrones dijo que es posible que se vote la Ley del Servicio Profesional Docente el martes
Los legisladores y los docentes se reunirán de nuevo este sábado
"A nosotros nos parece altamente preocupante que por un lado tengamos esta mesa acá, que se hablé de diálogo, y por la otra, en otro carril, estén declarando en la Junta de Coordinación PolÃtica de la Cámara de Diputados que a más tardar el próximo martes se presentará la Ley del Servicio Profesional Docente. Este nos parece que es un doble juego."
--Francisco Bravo, lÃder de la Sección 9 de la CNTE
CIUDAD DE MÉXICO (CNNMéxico) — El diálogo entre legisladores y la Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (CNTE) estuvo cerca de romperse, debido a la molestia de los docentes por los señalamientos del Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) en el sentido de que la ley que contempla la evaluación magisterial podrÃa votarse en los próximos dÃas.
El encuentro de este viernes —el cuarto de la semana— entró en receso cuando tenÃa una hora de haber comenzado, luego de que los lÃderes de la CNTE expresaran su molestia por las declaraciones del coordinador de los diputados priistas, Manlio Fabio Beltrones, que por la mañana dijo que es posible votar la iniciativa de Ley del Servicio Profesional Docente el martes, aun cuando la CNTE pide suspender el proceso.
Los dirigentes dejaron la reunión privada para analizar si se mantendrÃan en las negociaciones o no, informó la diputada Nelly Vargas, del partido de izquierda Movimiento Ciudadano, que en las mesas ha exigido atender las propuestas de la CNTE.
"Los compañeros de la CNTE están declarando un receso en la mesa bicameral que tenemos montada. (...) La percepción que tenemos es que a los compañeros los están engañando", dijo Vargas a medios.
Alrededor de 30 minutos después, los lÃderes de la CNTE volvieron al encuentro argumentando que seguÃan con "disposición" a dialogar y plantear sus demandas. Más tarde, al término de la reunión, informaron que sus exigencias inmediatas son que los legisladores garanticen que la iniciativa de ley no se votará próximamente y que sus planteamientos en la materia serán escuchados.
La respuesta a esos puntos tendrá que producirse en el encuentro programado para las 16:00 horas (local) de este sábado, según los dirigentes Rubén Nuñez, de la Sección 22 (Oaxaca); Juan José Ortega, de la 18 (Michoacán), y Francisco Bravo, de la 9 (Distrito Federal).
"El gran desencuentro, el problema que hoy se planteó fue el carácter de la mesa. A nosotros nos parece altamente preocupante que por un lado tengamos esta mesa acá, que se hablé de diálogo, y por la otra, en otro carril, estén declarando en la Junta de Coordinación PolÃtica de la Cámara de Diputados que a más tardar el próximo martes se presentará la Ley del Servicio Profesional Docente. Este nos parece que es un doble juego", dijo Bravo a medios.
En otro encuentro con la prensa, los diputados priistas que acudieron a la reunión señalaron que ellos no pueden tomar esa decisión y que plantearán la solicitud a los lÃderes parlamentarios de la Cámara baja.
"No hay en este momento un dÃa señalado. Lo que sà queda claro es que tenemos una gran comunicación, acuerdos entre las principales fuerzas polÃticas (...) de que es necesario que concluya el proceso legislativo de la reforma educativa", dijo el priista Arnoldo Ochoa.
La del Servicio Profesional Docente es la única de tres leyes reglamentarias que falta por aprobar en el Congreso para que la reforma pueda funcionar.
El documento causa polémica entre los docentes porque establece que aquellos que no aprueben evaluaciones obligatorias serán cesados, lo que la CNTE considera lesivo de los derechos laborales del magisterio.
Los diputados priistas dijeron este viernes que la CNTE apenas presentó propuestas concretas de redacción, aunque sólo de forma verbal. Según esa versión, los profesores pidieron cambios al artÃculo 75 de la legislación para especificar en qué casos un maestro será sujeto de sanciones.
El dirigente magisterial Rubén Núñez tachó de "mentira" esa declaración y aseguró que entregaron a los legisladores un escrito con sus planteamientos.
"Si el gobierno ignora nuestra posición, no hace caso, será su responsabilidad", dijo Bravo.
Los lÃderes de la CNTE han advertido que realizarán más movilizaciones en la capital mexicana durante los próximos dÃas, como lo han hecho desde hace más de una semana: bloqueando sedes legislativas, televisoras, edificios gubernamentales y algunas de las principales avenidas de la ciudad. Hasta ahora, no han detallado qué acciones tomarán.
Este viernes, los docentes mantuvieron un plantón de ocho horas frente a la SecretarÃa de Gobernación (Segob), en demanda de que su titular y funcionarios de las secretarÃas de Educación Pública (SEP) y de Hacienda y Crédito Público (SHCP) se sumen a las negociaciones con legisladores.
My plan for effectively utilizing all teachers, originally designed for the US, would be perfect for Mexico. See bottom of this post.
Reforma Avenue, Mexico City, Aug. 22, 2013 Photo by Marco Ugarte/AP
In Mexico, teachers fight tooth and nail against reforms familiar to those north of the border
Members of the National Workers of Education Coordinator (CNTE, for its initials in Spanish) protest violently against the educational reforms in the street across from Congress...
By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post
August 28, 2013
MEXICO CITY — The Mexican government is trying to overhaul the nation’s public schools in a way that might ring familiar in the United States: changing how teachers are hired, fired and evaluated.
But if American teachers unions were resistant to the idea, some in Mexico are openly hostile.
Hundreds of ski-mask-wearing, rock-throwing, stick-wielding teachers have smashed windows and set fire to the offices of the major political party in the southern state of Guerrero, and thousands are flooding Mexico City, blocking national TV networks, subway lines and, on Wednesday, swarming the roads around Los Pinos, the official residence of the president.
In what has become a fairly common event here, at least 8,000 teachers have set up camp under a sea of nylon tents in Mexico City’s central Zocalo square, where Gumaro Cruz Lopez, an elementary school director from the southern state of Oaxaca, explained his fear that the changes will turn kids into globalized robots at the expense of indigenous culture, free thought and possibly homemade tacos.
“They want to create one prototype of individual for the sole service of the global socioeconomic system,” said Lopez, 51. “They say private companies like Coke, Pepsi and Bimbo” — one of the world’s largest baking companies —“can help to better our schools, but soon they’ll start bringing all their sodas and snacks and all the little pastries of Bimbo!”
The angry invoking of transnational soda and snack-food companies has to do with the fact that Coca-Cola has built model schools in Mexico, as corporate giants such as Microsoft have gotten involved in U.S. education reform. Union leaders have turned that into a symbol for their fear that some distant authority will soon be telling them how and what to teach.
Political analysts say the fierce resistance also has to do with the fact that the changes directly challenge long-standing union power over jobs.
The overhaul that Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is pursuing keeps with ideas championed in recent years by former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee and others who argue that raising teacher standards is the key to fixing failing schools.
In February, Peña Nieto signed into law the framework for his plan, which would shift the power to hire, fire and evaluate teachers to the federal government and away from Mexico’s main teachers union, which has been accused of rampant corruption and presiding over a system of awarding jobs in ways that have little to do with merit.
A new system of periodic teacher evaluations is intended to identify incompetent teachers, reward good ones and set professional standards, with the hope that Mexican students will become more globally competitive.
“In principle, the reforms have a positive spirit,” said Miguel Szekely, director of the Institute for Education Innovation. “They are going in the right direction, but implementing them will take time.”
Additional legislation is required to spell out how the system will work. And that is what the massive teacher protests here have stalled, along with traffic.
The emphasis on union corruption — almost universally acknowledged as a huge problem — has to some extent obscured other concerns of the teachers who traveled to Mexico City from some of the poorest states in the southern part of the country. The union that holds sway there is not the one directly targeted by the new education law, but a smaller one that controls jobs and state education budgets and is among the most radical in Mexico.
Rosalia Alonzo, a director of an elementary school in Oaxaca, said any new measures should recognize the disparities between the poorest schools of the south and wealthier ones elsewhere.
“A lot of schools don’t have power or technology, or even books,” she said. “The people who come up with these reforms, their kids go to Harvard. They don’t know what it’s like for us.”
Pilar Palma, a teacher at the protest, said she suspects that evaluations will be used unfairly. “I agree I should be evaluated,” she said. “But give me the tools and the ways to get better.”
Lopez, the elementary school director, noted that many students and teachers in his area speak native languages in addition to Spanish. He worries that such particularities will be obliterated by standards handed down from Mexico City.
“Those languages are close to our own customs, to our own environment,” Lopez said. “They want to make our children useful as labor for the future of the private sector — to teach them only to work and obey and not to reflect, not to liberate their minds.”
It was early afternoon Tuesday, and thousands of teachers were heading from the plaza to protest a national TV network they said has been unfairly describing them as a nuisance. The station broadcast interviews with Mexico City residents fed up with the road blockages, people who described the teachers as “dirty” and “those Indians,” a reference to their native background. “We are going to block Televisa!” Lopez said, undeterred. “We will be here until the authorities answer us.” (END)
Romualdo Gutierrez, Oaxaca
Maura Larkin's Plan--A great teacher for every child without firing anyone
This research indicates that the average teacher salary in Mexico is $20,000. I imagine the number is significantly lower in southern Mexico, but this figure will serve to demonstrate my point. My plan (see Idea Tournament article below) would offer a pathway to much higher earnings for many teachers--and students!--while allowing weaker teachers to keep their jobs and have an opportunity to become master teachers.
Here's what the chart in the article below would look like for four classrooms and one extra salary (in thousands) in Mexico:
Currently: $20 + $20 + $20 + $20 + $20 = $100
New plan: $32 + $17 + $17 + $17 + $17 = $100 (minus exorbitant cost of education vendors)
All Kids Can Have Great Teachers (Without Firing Any Teachers)
By: Maura Larkins
Voice of San Diego
September 7, 2012
No one really knows what’s going on in individual public school classrooms. Observations by principals tend to be fleeting and few. We don’t need to fire anybody, but we do need to use highly-skilled teachers and ordinary teachers where they can do the optimal good.
The truth is that the critical moments in learning don’t happen continuously five hours a day. They add up to at most a couple of hours each day, and probably much less. The rest of the time an ordinary teacher can handle lesson reinforcement, computer activities, art projects, silent reading, etc.
The best teachers should be able to rise far above average teachers on the salary scale — and they should have far more responsibility. In my plan, each classroom would have a full-time regular teacher. Several classrooms would share a master teacher, who would be responsible for student progress, teaching lessons part-time and guiding the regular teacher. Gifted regular teachers would be eligible to become master teachers. Instead of bringing in vendors selling the latest gimmick for tens of thousands of dollars, master teachers would do all necessary training.
Here’s the comparison for four classrooms and one extra salary (in thousands):
Currently: $60 + $60 + $60 + $60 + $60 = $300
New plan: $100 + $50 + $50 + $50 + $50 = $300 (minus exorbitant cost of education vendors)
If we add more money, we could have more master teachers. Meaningful evaluations of teachers would have to be instituted. Current evaluation systems are worse than useless. My plan would call for frequent observations by both master and regular teachers, who would observe classrooms in other districts to keep school politics at bay. The observations would have a beneficial side effect: they would allow teachers to pick up new ideas.
See more of my plan in the yellow column on the right of this page.
Profesores se manifestaron este viernes afuera de la SecretarÃa de Gobernación en protesta por las leyes secundarias de la reforma educativa (Cuartoscuro).El diálogo entre legisladores y docentes de la CNTE, en un punto crÃtico
Las negociaciones estuvieron cerca de romperse debido a que el PRI señaló que la evaluación docente podrÃa votarse la próxima semana
Por Mauricio Torres
CNN Mexico
30 de agosto de 2013
El encuentro de este viernes entre legisladores y docentes terminó sin avances
Los lÃderes de la CNTE se molestaron por declaraciones del coordinador de los diputados priistas
Beltrones dijo que es posible que se vote la Ley del Servicio Profesional Docente el martes
Los legisladores y los docentes se reunirán de nuevo este sábado
"A nosotros nos parece altamente preocupante que por un lado tengamos esta mesa acá, que se hablé de diálogo, y por la otra, en otro carril, estén declarando en la Junta de Coordinación PolÃtica de la Cámara de Diputados que a más tardar el próximo martes se presentará la Ley del Servicio Profesional Docente. Este nos parece que es un doble juego."
--Francisco Bravo, lÃder de la Sección 9 de la CNTE
CIUDAD DE MÉXICO (CNNMéxico) — El diálogo entre legisladores y la Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (CNTE) estuvo cerca de romperse, debido a la molestia de los docentes por los señalamientos del Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) en el sentido de que la ley que contempla la evaluación magisterial podrÃa votarse en los próximos dÃas.
El encuentro de este viernes —el cuarto de la semana— entró en receso cuando tenÃa una hora de haber comenzado, luego de que los lÃderes de la CNTE expresaran su molestia por las declaraciones del coordinador de los diputados priistas, Manlio Fabio Beltrones, que por la mañana dijo que es posible votar la iniciativa de Ley del Servicio Profesional Docente el martes, aun cuando la CNTE pide suspender el proceso.
Los dirigentes dejaron la reunión privada para analizar si se mantendrÃan en las negociaciones o no, informó la diputada Nelly Vargas, del partido de izquierda Movimiento Ciudadano, que en las mesas ha exigido atender las propuestas de la CNTE.
"Los compañeros de la CNTE están declarando un receso en la mesa bicameral que tenemos montada. (...) La percepción que tenemos es que a los compañeros los están engañando", dijo Vargas a medios.
Alrededor de 30 minutos después, los lÃderes de la CNTE volvieron al encuentro argumentando que seguÃan con "disposición" a dialogar y plantear sus demandas. Más tarde, al término de la reunión, informaron que sus exigencias inmediatas son que los legisladores garanticen que la iniciativa de ley no se votará próximamente y que sus planteamientos en la materia serán escuchados.
La respuesta a esos puntos tendrá que producirse en el encuentro programado para las 16:00 horas (local) de este sábado, según los dirigentes Rubén Nuñez, de la Sección 22 (Oaxaca); Juan José Ortega, de la 18 (Michoacán), y Francisco Bravo, de la 9 (Distrito Federal).
"El gran desencuentro, el problema que hoy se planteó fue el carácter de la mesa. A nosotros nos parece altamente preocupante que por un lado tengamos esta mesa acá, que se hablé de diálogo, y por la otra, en otro carril, estén declarando en la Junta de Coordinación PolÃtica de la Cámara de Diputados que a más tardar el próximo martes se presentará la Ley del Servicio Profesional Docente. Este nos parece que es un doble juego", dijo Bravo a medios.
En otro encuentro con la prensa, los diputados priistas que acudieron a la reunión señalaron que ellos no pueden tomar esa decisión y que plantearán la solicitud a los lÃderes parlamentarios de la Cámara baja.
"No hay en este momento un dÃa señalado. Lo que sà queda claro es que tenemos una gran comunicación, acuerdos entre las principales fuerzas polÃticas (...) de que es necesario que concluya el proceso legislativo de la reforma educativa", dijo el priista Arnoldo Ochoa.
La del Servicio Profesional Docente es la única de tres leyes reglamentarias que falta por aprobar en el Congreso para que la reforma pueda funcionar.
El documento causa polémica entre los docentes porque establece que aquellos que no aprueben evaluaciones obligatorias serán cesados, lo que la CNTE considera lesivo de los derechos laborales del magisterio.
Los diputados priistas dijeron este viernes que la CNTE apenas presentó propuestas concretas de redacción, aunque sólo de forma verbal. Según esa versión, los profesores pidieron cambios al artÃculo 75 de la legislación para especificar en qué casos un maestro será sujeto de sanciones.
El dirigente magisterial Rubén Núñez tachó de "mentira" esa declaración y aseguró que entregaron a los legisladores un escrito con sus planteamientos.
"Si el gobierno ignora nuestra posición, no hace caso, será su responsabilidad", dijo Bravo.
Los lÃderes de la CNTE han advertido que realizarán más movilizaciones en la capital mexicana durante los próximos dÃas, como lo han hecho desde hace más de una semana: bloqueando sedes legislativas, televisoras, edificios gubernamentales y algunas de las principales avenidas de la ciudad. Hasta ahora, no han detallado qué acciones tomarán.
Este viernes, los docentes mantuvieron un plantón de ocho horas frente a la SecretarÃa de Gobernación (Segob), en demanda de que su titular y funcionarios de las secretarÃas de Educación Pública (SEP) y de Hacienda y Crédito Público (SHCP) se sumen a las negociaciones con legisladores.
Saturday, July 27, 2013
With ‘Parent Trigger’ Laws on the Ropes, Three Overhauled Schools Reopen in Southern California
With ‘Parent Trigger’ Laws on the Ropes, Three Overhauled Schools Reopen in Los Angeles
Controversial legislation that allows parents to vote in new management at public schools is faltering everywhere but Southern California, where the law is getting its first real test
By Natasha Lindstrom
The Hechinger Report
July 26, 2013
LOS ANGELES—When classes resume in Southern California in the coming weeks, three public schools will be the first in the nation to reopen under new management spurred by a controversial education law dubbed the “parent trigger.”
Parent Esmeralda Chacon is excited that 24th Street Elementary, just west of downtown Los Angeles, is bringing back a pre-kindergarten program and partnering with a local charter school operator.
Parent Llury Garcia at Weigand Elementary in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles—where the principal has been ousted and 21 teachers subsequently asked for transfers—hopes her 8-year-old daughter will become a better reader.
And Cynthia Ramirez expects to have more say in setting discipline policy and curriculum at her fourth-grade son’s school, Desert Trails Preparatory Academy in the desert town of Adelanto, now that it has been taken over by a small nonprofit charter operator.
These parents helped lead the so-called “parent unions” that ran campaigns to overhaul their children’s respective schools with guidance and financial backing from Parent Revolution, a Los Angeles nonprofit formed to promote California’s Parent Empowerment Act. Known as the parent trigger law, the legislation allows a majority of parents at an underperforming school to force major changes ranging from replacing the principal and half the staff to ceding control to a charter operator.
When the law was passed in 2010, Former California State Sen. Gloria Romero, its author, compared it to the civil rights movement five decades before, and envisioned bipartisan support for parent trigger laws spreading to state legislatures across the nation. The 2012 Hollywood movie “Won’t Back Down” aimed to build legislative momentum, but the box office flop only seemed to draw more critics. Three and a half years later, Romero’s grand vision seems remote as opposition grows to any bill that even resembles a parent trigger. No group has succeeded in invoking a parent trigger law—or even made a full-fledged attempt—outside of southern California.
Only seven states have a parent trigger law on the books, with some versions weaker than others. In 20 states, bills to create or expand such laws stalled or died in legislatures this past spring; only one became law. Teachers unions, school administrators and even some parent advocacy groups have been fighting what they see as a corporate takeover of public schools under the guise of parent power, pointing to Parent Revolution’s financial backers, which include the Bill & Melinda Gates, Broad, Walton Family and Wasserman foundations. (Some of these foundations are among past and present supporters of The Hechinger Report, which produced this story.) Critics fear that parent triggers will transform the school system into an assembly line of identically run schools that focus on test scores at the expense of teacher autonomy in the classroom.
“The terms ‘parent trigger’ and Parent Revolution have just become so toxic,” said Gwen Samuel, founder of the Connecticut Parents Union, which helped pass a milder form of parent trigger in her state. “Anyone who mentions it, my gosh, people just come at them. And it’s not fair to the parent who just wants a good school.”
The laws have become part of a broader debate over the proliferation of charter schools, private school vouchers and everything else now dubbed “education reform,” a vague term used by self-identified reformers to describe nearly any attempt to challenge the traditional public school system.
“I don’t know if we’re so much caught up in the parent trigger battle going off or more caught up in an even larger battle between the education establishment and education reformers, and this is just another battleground in that war,” said Oklahoma State Sen. David Holt, R-Oklahoma City, whose parent trigger billcleared the State Senate in March but never made it to a vote in the House. “It had been branded so significantly, it was no longer about the bill,” said Florida State Sen. Kelli Stargel, R-Lakeland, who failed to advance her parent trigger legislation in late April. Even after an amendment gave local school boards greater veto power, the bill died on a tie vote in the State Senate for the second straight year.
It hasn’t helped that the first few attempts at invoking a parent trigger led to fierce hostility and feuding within schools, with parents turning on one another and accusations of harassment, intimidation and fraud flying on both sides...
Undeterred by the bills that stalled or died in 2013, Parent Revolution spokesman Derrick Everett said that “laws as novel as the parent trigger process have often taken multiple legislative sessions to both get the law ‘right’ and get it passed.” With its nearly $5.5 million budget and some 45 staffers, Parent Revolution has helped create 13 parent union chapters in the greater Los Angeles area, according to Everett. But only three have invoked the trigger. A fourth parent union, at Haddon Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles, voted to pause its trigger push and instead compromise with the district for less drastic reforms.
Supporters and opponents alike will be watching closely how these schools perform in the coming years.
(MORE: Can Computers Replace Teachers?)
Samuel, in Connecticut, urges parents to avoid political drama and choose for themselves the types of changes they want for their schools. “Parents have got to say, ‘We’re not going to get caught in the fray,’” Samuel said. “You have to make it work instead of letting politics run the show.”
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Read more: http://nation.time.com/2013/07/26/with-parent-trigger-laws-on-the-ropes-three-overhauled-schools-reopen-in-los-angeles/#ixzz2aI7fLNdq
Controversial legislation that allows parents to vote in new management at public schools is faltering everywhere but Southern California, where the law is getting its first real test
By Natasha Lindstrom
The Hechinger Report
July 26, 2013
LOS ANGELES—When classes resume in Southern California in the coming weeks, three public schools will be the first in the nation to reopen under new management spurred by a controversial education law dubbed the “parent trigger.”
Parent Esmeralda Chacon is excited that 24th Street Elementary, just west of downtown Los Angeles, is bringing back a pre-kindergarten program and partnering with a local charter school operator.
Parent Llury Garcia at Weigand Elementary in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles—where the principal has been ousted and 21 teachers subsequently asked for transfers—hopes her 8-year-old daughter will become a better reader.
And Cynthia Ramirez expects to have more say in setting discipline policy and curriculum at her fourth-grade son’s school, Desert Trails Preparatory Academy in the desert town of Adelanto, now that it has been taken over by a small nonprofit charter operator.
These parents helped lead the so-called “parent unions” that ran campaigns to overhaul their children’s respective schools with guidance and financial backing from Parent Revolution, a Los Angeles nonprofit formed to promote California’s Parent Empowerment Act. Known as the parent trigger law, the legislation allows a majority of parents at an underperforming school to force major changes ranging from replacing the principal and half the staff to ceding control to a charter operator.
When the law was passed in 2010, Former California State Sen. Gloria Romero, its author, compared it to the civil rights movement five decades before, and envisioned bipartisan support for parent trigger laws spreading to state legislatures across the nation. The 2012 Hollywood movie “Won’t Back Down” aimed to build legislative momentum, but the box office flop only seemed to draw more critics. Three and a half years later, Romero’s grand vision seems remote as opposition grows to any bill that even resembles a parent trigger. No group has succeeded in invoking a parent trigger law—or even made a full-fledged attempt—outside of southern California.
Only seven states have a parent trigger law on the books, with some versions weaker than others. In 20 states, bills to create or expand such laws stalled or died in legislatures this past spring; only one became law. Teachers unions, school administrators and even some parent advocacy groups have been fighting what they see as a corporate takeover of public schools under the guise of parent power, pointing to Parent Revolution’s financial backers, which include the Bill & Melinda Gates, Broad, Walton Family and Wasserman foundations. (Some of these foundations are among past and present supporters of The Hechinger Report, which produced this story.) Critics fear that parent triggers will transform the school system into an assembly line of identically run schools that focus on test scores at the expense of teacher autonomy in the classroom.
“The terms ‘parent trigger’ and Parent Revolution have just become so toxic,” said Gwen Samuel, founder of the Connecticut Parents Union, which helped pass a milder form of parent trigger in her state. “Anyone who mentions it, my gosh, people just come at them. And it’s not fair to the parent who just wants a good school.”
The laws have become part of a broader debate over the proliferation of charter schools, private school vouchers and everything else now dubbed “education reform,” a vague term used by self-identified reformers to describe nearly any attempt to challenge the traditional public school system.
“I don’t know if we’re so much caught up in the parent trigger battle going off or more caught up in an even larger battle between the education establishment and education reformers, and this is just another battleground in that war,” said Oklahoma State Sen. David Holt, R-Oklahoma City, whose parent trigger billcleared the State Senate in March but never made it to a vote in the House. “It had been branded so significantly, it was no longer about the bill,” said Florida State Sen. Kelli Stargel, R-Lakeland, who failed to advance her parent trigger legislation in late April. Even after an amendment gave local school boards greater veto power, the bill died on a tie vote in the State Senate for the second straight year.
It hasn’t helped that the first few attempts at invoking a parent trigger led to fierce hostility and feuding within schools, with parents turning on one another and accusations of harassment, intimidation and fraud flying on both sides...
Undeterred by the bills that stalled or died in 2013, Parent Revolution spokesman Derrick Everett said that “laws as novel as the parent trigger process have often taken multiple legislative sessions to both get the law ‘right’ and get it passed.” With its nearly $5.5 million budget and some 45 staffers, Parent Revolution has helped create 13 parent union chapters in the greater Los Angeles area, according to Everett. But only three have invoked the trigger. A fourth parent union, at Haddon Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles, voted to pause its trigger push and instead compromise with the district for less drastic reforms.
Supporters and opponents alike will be watching closely how these schools perform in the coming years.
(MORE: Can Computers Replace Teachers?)
Samuel, in Connecticut, urges parents to avoid political drama and choose for themselves the types of changes they want for their schools. “Parents have got to say, ‘We’re not going to get caught in the fray,’” Samuel said. “You have to make it work instead of letting politics run the show.”
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Read more: http://nation.time.com/2013/07/26/with-parent-trigger-laws-on-the-ropes-three-overhauled-schools-reopen-in-los-angeles/#ixzz2aI7fLNdq
Monday, May 27, 2013
Middle class and poor kids are scoring lower on tests than in the past compared to rich kids
Our society discards the potential contributions of gifted poor kids in order to keep the children of rich and middle class families in top positions. The rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago. This statistic has nothing to do with race.
Obviously, this situation does not benefit our country since it puts less competent people in charge of progress. Nor does it benefit the planet, since our society is so powerful.
No Rich Child Left Behind
By SEAN F. REARDON
New York Times
April 27, 2013
...What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially.
One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did this using information from a dozen large national studies conducted between 1960 and 2010, I found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago.
To make this trend concrete, consider two children, one from a family with income of $165,000 and one from a family with income of $15,000. These incomes are at the 90th and 10th percentiles of the income distribution nationally, meaning that 10 percent of children today grow up in families with incomes below $15,000 and 10 percent grow up in families with incomes above $165,000.
In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.
The same pattern is evident in other, more tangible, measures of educational success, like college completion. In a study similar to mine, Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski, economists at the University of Michigan, found that the proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a bachelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points.
In a more recent study, my graduate students and I found that 15 percent of high-income students from the high school class of 2004 enrolled in a highly selective college or university, while fewer than 5 percent of middle-income and 2 percent of low-income students did.
These widening disparities are not confined to academic outcomes: new research by the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam and his colleagues shows that the rich-poor gaps in student participation in sports, extracurricular activities, volunteer work and church attendance have grown sharply as well.
In San Francisco this week, more than 14,000 educators and education scholars have gathered for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. The theme this year is familiar: Can schools provide children a way out of poverty?
We are still talking about this despite decades of clucking about the crisis in American education and wave after wave of school reform.Whatever we’ve been doing in our schools, it hasn’t reduced educational inequality between children from upper- and lower-income families.
Part of knowing what we should do about this is understanding how and why these educational disparities are growing. For the past few years, alongside other scholars, I have been digging into historical data to understand just that. The results of this research don’t always match received wisdom or playground folklore.
The most potent development over the past three decades is that the test scores of children from high-income families have increased very rapidly. Before 1980, affluent students had little advantage over middle-class students in academic performance; most of the socioeconomic disparity in academics was between the middle class and the poor. But the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor. Just as the incomes of the affluent have grown much more rapidly than those of the middle class over the last few decades, so, too, have most of the gains in educational success accrued to the children of the rich.
Before we can figure out what’s happening here, let’s dispel a few myths.
The income gap in academic achievement is not growing because the test scores of poor students are dropping or because our schools are in decline. In fact, average test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called Nation’s Report Card, have been rising — substantially in math and very slowly in reading — since the 1970s. The average 9-year-old today has math skills equal to those her parents had at age 11, a two-year improvement in a single generation. The gains are not as large in reading and they are not as large for older students, but there is no evidence that average test scores have declined over the last three decades for any age or economic group.
The widening income disparity in academic achievement is not a result of widening racial gaps in achievement, either. The achievement gaps between blacks and whites, and Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites have been narrowing slowly over the last two decades, trends that actually keep the yawning gap between higher- and lower-income students from getting even wider. If we look at the test scores of white students only, we find the same growing gap between high- and low-income children as we see in the population as a whole.
It may seem counterintuitive, but schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students. We know this because children from rich and poor families score very differently on school readiness tests when they enter kindergarten, and this gap grows by less than 10 percent between kindergarten and high school.
There is some evidence that achievement gaps between high- and low-income students actually narrow during the nine-month school year, but they widen again in the summer months.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t important differences in quality between schools serving low- and high-income students — there certainly are — but they appear to do less to reinforce the trends than conventional wisdom would have us believe.
If not the usual suspects, what’s going on? It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.
My research suggests that one part of the explanation for this is rising income inequality. As you may have heard, the incomes of the rich have grown faster over the last 30 years than the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool and — in places like New York City, where 4-year-old children take tests to determine entry into gifted and talented programs — access to preschool test preparation tutors or the time to serve as tutors themselves.
But rising income inequality explains, at best, half of the increase in the rich-poor academic achievement gap. It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using it differently. This is where things get really interesting.
High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich.
With a college degree insufficient to ensure a high-income job, or even a job as a barista, parents are now investing more time and money in their children’s cognitive development from the earliest ages. It may seem self-evident that parents with more resources are able to invest more — more of both money and of what Mr. Putnam calls “‘Goodnight Moon’ time” — in their children’s development. But even though middle-class and poor families are also increasing the time and money they invest in their children, they are not doing so as quickly or as deeply as the rich.
The economists Richard J. Murnane and Greg J. Duncan report that from 1972 to 2006 high-income families increased the amount they spent on enrichment activities for their children by 150 percent, while the spending of low-income families grew by 57 percent over the same time period. Likewise, the amount of time parents spend with their children has grown twice as fast since 1975 among college-educated parents as it has among less-educated parents. The economists Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey of the University of California, San Diego, call this escalation of early childhood investment “the rug rat race,” a phrase that nicely captures the growing perception that early childhood experiences are central to winning a lifelong educational and economic competition.
It’s not clear what we should do about all this. Partly that’s because much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich.
We’re also slow to understand what’s happening, I think, because the nature of the problem — a growing educational gap between the rich and the middle class — is unfamiliar. After all, for much of the last 50 years our national conversation about educational inequality has focused almost exclusively on strategies for reducing inequalities between the educational successes of the poor and the middle class, and it has relied on programs aimed at the poor, like Head Start and Title I.
We’ve barely given a thought to what the rich were doing. With the exception of our continuing discussion about whether the rising costs of higher education are pricing the middle class out of college, we don’t have much practice talking about what economists call “upper-tail inequality” in education, much less success at reducing it.
Meanwhile, not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile.
We need to start talking about this. Strangely, the rapid growth in the rich-poor educational gap provides a ray of hope: if the relationship between family income and educational success can change this rapidly, then it is not an immutable, inevitable pattern. What changed once can change again. Policy choices matter more than we have recently been taught to think.
So how can we move toward a society in which educational success is not so strongly linked to family background? Maybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children’s educational opportunities from the day they are born. Investments in early-childhood education pay very high societal dividends. That means investing in developing high-quality child care and preschool that is available to poor and middle-class children. It also means recruiting and training a cadre of skilled preschool teachers and child care providers. These are not new ideas, but we have to stop talking about how expensive and difficult they are to implement and just get on with it.
But we need to do much more than expand and improve preschool and child care. There is a lot of discussion these days about investing in teachers and “improving teacher quality,” but improving the quality of our parenting and of our children’s earliest environments may be even more important. Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children.
This means finding ways of helping parents become better teachers themselves. This might include strategies to support working families so that they can read to their children more often.. It also means expanding programs like the Nurse-Family Partnership that have proved to be effective at helping single parents educate their children; but we also need to pay for research to develop new resources for single parents.
It might also mean greater business and government support for maternity and paternity leave and day care so that the middle class and the poor can get some of the educational benefits that the early academic intervention of the rich provides their children. Fundamentally, it means rethinking our still-persistent notion that educational problems should be solved by schools alone.
The more we do to ensure that all children have similar cognitively stimulating early childhood experiences, the less we will have to worry about failing schools. This in turn will enable us to let our schools focus on teaching the skills — how to solve complex problems, how to think critically and how to collaborate — essential to a growing economy and a lively democracy.
Obviously, this situation does not benefit our country since it puts less competent people in charge of progress. Nor does it benefit the planet, since our society is so powerful.
No Rich Child Left Behind
By SEAN F. REARDON
New York Times
April 27, 2013
...What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially.
One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did this using information from a dozen large national studies conducted between 1960 and 2010, I found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago.
To make this trend concrete, consider two children, one from a family with income of $165,000 and one from a family with income of $15,000. These incomes are at the 90th and 10th percentiles of the income distribution nationally, meaning that 10 percent of children today grow up in families with incomes below $15,000 and 10 percent grow up in families with incomes above $165,000.
In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.
The same pattern is evident in other, more tangible, measures of educational success, like college completion. In a study similar to mine, Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski, economists at the University of Michigan, found that the proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a bachelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points.
In a more recent study, my graduate students and I found that 15 percent of high-income students from the high school class of 2004 enrolled in a highly selective college or university, while fewer than 5 percent of middle-income and 2 percent of low-income students did.
These widening disparities are not confined to academic outcomes: new research by the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam and his colleagues shows that the rich-poor gaps in student participation in sports, extracurricular activities, volunteer work and church attendance have grown sharply as well.
In San Francisco this week, more than 14,000 educators and education scholars have gathered for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. The theme this year is familiar: Can schools provide children a way out of poverty?
We are still talking about this despite decades of clucking about the crisis in American education and wave after wave of school reform.Whatever we’ve been doing in our schools, it hasn’t reduced educational inequality between children from upper- and lower-income families.
Part of knowing what we should do about this is understanding how and why these educational disparities are growing. For the past few years, alongside other scholars, I have been digging into historical data to understand just that. The results of this research don’t always match received wisdom or playground folklore.
The most potent development over the past three decades is that the test scores of children from high-income families have increased very rapidly. Before 1980, affluent students had little advantage over middle-class students in academic performance; most of the socioeconomic disparity in academics was between the middle class and the poor. But the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor. Just as the incomes of the affluent have grown much more rapidly than those of the middle class over the last few decades, so, too, have most of the gains in educational success accrued to the children of the rich.
Before we can figure out what’s happening here, let’s dispel a few myths.
The income gap in academic achievement is not growing because the test scores of poor students are dropping or because our schools are in decline. In fact, average test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called Nation’s Report Card, have been rising — substantially in math and very slowly in reading — since the 1970s. The average 9-year-old today has math skills equal to those her parents had at age 11, a two-year improvement in a single generation. The gains are not as large in reading and they are not as large for older students, but there is no evidence that average test scores have declined over the last three decades for any age or economic group.
The widening income disparity in academic achievement is not a result of widening racial gaps in achievement, either. The achievement gaps between blacks and whites, and Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites have been narrowing slowly over the last two decades, trends that actually keep the yawning gap between higher- and lower-income students from getting even wider. If we look at the test scores of white students only, we find the same growing gap between high- and low-income children as we see in the population as a whole.
It may seem counterintuitive, but schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students. We know this because children from rich and poor families score very differently on school readiness tests when they enter kindergarten, and this gap grows by less than 10 percent between kindergarten and high school.
There is some evidence that achievement gaps between high- and low-income students actually narrow during the nine-month school year, but they widen again in the summer months.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t important differences in quality between schools serving low- and high-income students — there certainly are — but they appear to do less to reinforce the trends than conventional wisdom would have us believe.
If not the usual suspects, what’s going on? It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.
My research suggests that one part of the explanation for this is rising income inequality. As you may have heard, the incomes of the rich have grown faster over the last 30 years than the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool and — in places like New York City, where 4-year-old children take tests to determine entry into gifted and talented programs — access to preschool test preparation tutors or the time to serve as tutors themselves.
But rising income inequality explains, at best, half of the increase in the rich-poor academic achievement gap. It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using it differently. This is where things get really interesting.
High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich.
With a college degree insufficient to ensure a high-income job, or even a job as a barista, parents are now investing more time and money in their children’s cognitive development from the earliest ages. It may seem self-evident that parents with more resources are able to invest more — more of both money and of what Mr. Putnam calls “‘Goodnight Moon’ time” — in their children’s development. But even though middle-class and poor families are also increasing the time and money they invest in their children, they are not doing so as quickly or as deeply as the rich.
The economists Richard J. Murnane and Greg J. Duncan report that from 1972 to 2006 high-income families increased the amount they spent on enrichment activities for their children by 150 percent, while the spending of low-income families grew by 57 percent over the same time period. Likewise, the amount of time parents spend with their children has grown twice as fast since 1975 among college-educated parents as it has among less-educated parents. The economists Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey of the University of California, San Diego, call this escalation of early childhood investment “the rug rat race,” a phrase that nicely captures the growing perception that early childhood experiences are central to winning a lifelong educational and economic competition.
It’s not clear what we should do about all this. Partly that’s because much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich.
We’re also slow to understand what’s happening, I think, because the nature of the problem — a growing educational gap between the rich and the middle class — is unfamiliar. After all, for much of the last 50 years our national conversation about educational inequality has focused almost exclusively on strategies for reducing inequalities between the educational successes of the poor and the middle class, and it has relied on programs aimed at the poor, like Head Start and Title I.
We’ve barely given a thought to what the rich were doing. With the exception of our continuing discussion about whether the rising costs of higher education are pricing the middle class out of college, we don’t have much practice talking about what economists call “upper-tail inequality” in education, much less success at reducing it.
Meanwhile, not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile.
We need to start talking about this. Strangely, the rapid growth in the rich-poor educational gap provides a ray of hope: if the relationship between family income and educational success can change this rapidly, then it is not an immutable, inevitable pattern. What changed once can change again. Policy choices matter more than we have recently been taught to think.
So how can we move toward a society in which educational success is not so strongly linked to family background? Maybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children’s educational opportunities from the day they are born. Investments in early-childhood education pay very high societal dividends. That means investing in developing high-quality child care and preschool that is available to poor and middle-class children. It also means recruiting and training a cadre of skilled preschool teachers and child care providers. These are not new ideas, but we have to stop talking about how expensive and difficult they are to implement and just get on with it.
But we need to do much more than expand and improve preschool and child care. There is a lot of discussion these days about investing in teachers and “improving teacher quality,” but improving the quality of our parenting and of our children’s earliest environments may be even more important. Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children.
This means finding ways of helping parents become better teachers themselves. This might include strategies to support working families so that they can read to their children more often.. It also means expanding programs like the Nurse-Family Partnership that have proved to be effective at helping single parents educate their children; but we also need to pay for research to develop new resources for single parents.
It might also mean greater business and government support for maternity and paternity leave and day care so that the middle class and the poor can get some of the educational benefits that the early academic intervention of the rich provides their children. Fundamentally, it means rethinking our still-persistent notion that educational problems should be solved by schools alone.
The more we do to ensure that all children have similar cognitively stimulating early childhood experiences, the less we will have to worry about failing schools. This in turn will enable us to let our schools focus on teaching the skills — how to solve complex problems, how to think critically and how to collaborate — essential to a growing economy and a lively democracy.
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Lynne Varner says Seattle teacher protests against testing are focused on the wrong problem
You would think that smarter kids would do better in school, right?
Wrong--and least not for poor black kids.
The fact is that any child of average intelligence can succeed in school--as long as he/she has a rich environment of verbal interactions, a wide variety of experiences, a safe home, preparation for kindergarten and full support for emotional, physical and educational success. Of course, all these things also contribute to a higher IQ.
If your parent or parents are away working at two jobs, or, in a worst-case scenario, abusing drugs and hanging out with gangs, you aren't likely to develop anything approaching your full potential.
A brilliant child with a bad home situation and intellectually impoverished environment will not do anywhere near as well in school as a child with a plodding, low-average intellect who is raised to be a success.
This is true of all races, but the statistics show that a much higher percentage of white and Asian kids are groomed for success. The situation among poor blacks is so bad that the benefits of high intelligence are completely wiped out, statistically speaking. A lot of good brains are being wasted.
The high cost of wasted educational opportunity — now that’s worth a teacher protest
Boycotting a Seattle Schools standardized test is small potatoes. But don’t worry. There’s plenty in education to get riled up over.
By Lynne K. Varner
Seattle Times
February 7, 2013
I remain unconvinced the Garfield High School teachers’ boycott of the Measures of Academic Progress test is anything more than adult hubris.
For one, nearly all Seattle Public Schools have begun administering the required test, despite differing views about its value. For another, the test is unlikely to survive as a ninth-grade requirement. The case to keep it is stronger for middle and elementary grades, but even there pilots of new tests by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium may yield better options.
The push for more sophisticated tests has good intent. But the boycott and its attendant protest rallies — designed to pressure Superintendent José Banda into making a decision a mere three months before he plans to anyway — is overkill.
I’ll give boycotters something to protest.
Let’s start with dismal news that African-American, Latino and Native American elementary students still lag white students in core subjects, such as math and reading. We know this from results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress test given to fourth- and eighth-graders across the nation.
Sure, Washington state as a whole posts test scores above the national average on the NAEP, but that’s far from the case for brown children and those from low-income families. Here’s a chant: “Education, not academic stagnation!”
I’m a parent and I’ve also written about education long enough to become as frustrated as the Garfield teachers and parents. I’m frustrated that despite the $13 billion spent every two years on the K-12 system, students still graduate from high school who don’t read well or understand basic math.
Who’s going to take to the streets about that?
Seattle is a city that prides itself on progressive values but I see a regressive bent in some corners, particularly the obsession over education reforms.
I remember the outrage in 2011 when a Seattle high-school principal was fired from a school that had only 5 percent of African-American students, 16 percent of Latino students and 3 percent of bilingual students passing the district’s standardized math test.
The principal was reinstated and the furor died down. But I’ve wondered what happened to the students with the abysmal scores. Our attention waned because the school’s overall test scores are quite good.
How are those students surviving without basic math skills? Is their future what we would want for our own children?
Schools, teachers and parents are working harder than ever. I see it when I’m out reporting but I also see the efforts reflected in data. Between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of college degrees going to blacks, Hispanics and Asian/Pacific Islanders went up. That’s progress.
But I worry about high-school students and young adults because they are most likely to get caught on the wrong side of the growing mismatch between skills required for available jobs and the skills they actually have.
If the skills gap is not addressed, attention toward picket lines will soon be directed toward growing unemployment lines.
Critics of the MAP and other standardized tests point out their cost. They aren’t cheap. But neither is a poor education.
My next point puts this into context: Eliminating the achievement gap would have boosted by $240 million the earnings of currently working African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans, according to the Washington state Policy and Budget Center.
Protesting standardized tests is not so much wrong as it is misdirected.
The high cost of wasted educational opportunity is the bigger problem and far worthier of a rally or two.
Wrong--and least not for poor black kids.
The fact is that any child of average intelligence can succeed in school--as long as he/she has a rich environment of verbal interactions, a wide variety of experiences, a safe home, preparation for kindergarten and full support for emotional, physical and educational success. Of course, all these things also contribute to a higher IQ.
If your parent or parents are away working at two jobs, or, in a worst-case scenario, abusing drugs and hanging out with gangs, you aren't likely to develop anything approaching your full potential.
A brilliant child with a bad home situation and intellectually impoverished environment will not do anywhere near as well in school as a child with a plodding, low-average intellect who is raised to be a success.
This is true of all races, but the statistics show that a much higher percentage of white and Asian kids are groomed for success. The situation among poor blacks is so bad that the benefits of high intelligence are completely wiped out, statistically speaking. A lot of good brains are being wasted.
The high cost of wasted educational opportunity — now that’s worth a teacher protestBoycotting a Seattle Schools standardized test is small potatoes. But don’t worry. There’s plenty in education to get riled up over.
By Lynne K. Varner
Seattle Times
February 7, 2013
I remain unconvinced the Garfield High School teachers’ boycott of the Measures of Academic Progress test is anything more than adult hubris.
For one, nearly all Seattle Public Schools have begun administering the required test, despite differing views about its value. For another, the test is unlikely to survive as a ninth-grade requirement. The case to keep it is stronger for middle and elementary grades, but even there pilots of new tests by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium may yield better options.
The push for more sophisticated tests has good intent. But the boycott and its attendant protest rallies — designed to pressure Superintendent José Banda into making a decision a mere three months before he plans to anyway — is overkill.
I’ll give boycotters something to protest.
Let’s start with dismal news that African-American, Latino and Native American elementary students still lag white students in core subjects, such as math and reading. We know this from results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress test given to fourth- and eighth-graders across the nation.
Sure, Washington state as a whole posts test scores above the national average on the NAEP, but that’s far from the case for brown children and those from low-income families. Here’s a chant: “Education, not academic stagnation!”
I’m a parent and I’ve also written about education long enough to become as frustrated as the Garfield teachers and parents. I’m frustrated that despite the $13 billion spent every two years on the K-12 system, students still graduate from high school who don’t read well or understand basic math.
Who’s going to take to the streets about that?
Seattle is a city that prides itself on progressive values but I see a regressive bent in some corners, particularly the obsession over education reforms.
I remember the outrage in 2011 when a Seattle high-school principal was fired from a school that had only 5 percent of African-American students, 16 percent of Latino students and 3 percent of bilingual students passing the district’s standardized math test.
The principal was reinstated and the furor died down. But I’ve wondered what happened to the students with the abysmal scores. Our attention waned because the school’s overall test scores are quite good.
How are those students surviving without basic math skills? Is their future what we would want for our own children?
Schools, teachers and parents are working harder than ever. I see it when I’m out reporting but I also see the efforts reflected in data. Between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of college degrees going to blacks, Hispanics and Asian/Pacific Islanders went up. That’s progress.
But I worry about high-school students and young adults because they are most likely to get caught on the wrong side of the growing mismatch between skills required for available jobs and the skills they actually have.
If the skills gap is not addressed, attention toward picket lines will soon be directed toward growing unemployment lines.
Critics of the MAP and other standardized tests point out their cost. They aren’t cheap. But neither is a poor education.
My next point puts this into context: Eliminating the achievement gap would have boosted by $240 million the earnings of currently working African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans, according to the Washington state Policy and Budget Center.
Protesting standardized tests is not so much wrong as it is misdirected.
The high cost of wasted educational opportunity is the bigger problem and far worthier of a rally or two.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Teachers union head Elba Gordillo, who made big bucks fighting teacher accountability in Mexico, has been arrested
Teachers union leader Elba Esther Gordillo fought against assessments for teachers in Mexico. I guess she figured that's what teachers pay dues for. American teacher union leaders seem to feel the same way.
Mexican union boss arrest sounds warning to reform foes
The arrest of Mexico's best-known trade union leader on fraud charges has thrown down the gauntlet to powerful interests standing between President Enrique Pena Nieto and his plans to shake up Latin America's second-biggest economy.
By Dave Graham
MEXICO CITY
Feb 28, 2013
(Reuters)
The arrest of Mexico's best-known trade union leader on fraud charges has thrown down the gauntlet to powerful interests standing between President Enrique Pena Nieto and his plans to shake up Latin America's second-biggest economy.
For a generation, even presidents shied away from taking on teachers' union boss Elba Esther Gordillo, making her Mexico's most prominent female politician and a formidable enemy to those who accused her of fostering corruption rather than education.
Pena Nieto, who has been in office for less than three months, crossed that line on Tuesday when police arrested Gordillo and three other people with her at Toluca airport near Mexico City.
Mexican television showed Gordillo, 68, wearing a prison uniform and standing behind bars as a state prosecutor formally charged her with embezzling around $200 million from union coffers and using the money to pay for U.S. property, luxury goods, designer clothes, works of art and plastic surgery.
She is not allowed to apply for bail under the charges.
Gordillo, who deferred comment to her lawyers, faces a maximum jail sentence of 30 years, though prisoners can apply to be moved to house arrest at age 70.
"It is clearly a criminal case," Attorney General Jesus Murillo said in a television interview. "The case is very solid."
A former grandee of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, Gordillo has denied accusations of corruption.
She was snared a day after Pena Nieto signed a law aimed at improving education standards that she had opposed because it would weaken her union's clout.
Mexico union leader Elba Esther Gordillo arrested
BBC
26 February 2013
Union head Elba Esther Gordillo, known as Mexico's most powerful woman, has been arrested on corruption charges.
Ms Gordillo, who runs the 1.5 million-member Mexican teachers' union, is alleged to have diverted about $200m from union funds to personal accounts.
No-one from her legal team has responded to the allegations, but in the past she has denied any wrongdoing in handling the funds.
The arrest came after major reforms to the education system on Monday.
President Enrique Pena Nieto signed the sweeping reforms, which seek to change a system dominated by Ms Gordillo in which teaching positions could be sold or inherited.
"We are looking at a case in which the funds of education workers have been illegally misused, for the benefit of several people, among them Elba Esther Gordillo," Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said.
His office alleges Ms Gordillo, 68, spent the funds on plastic surgery and a luxury home.
Real influence
The BBC's Will Grant in Mexico City says that Ms Gordillo is one of the highest profile figures in Mexican political life, known simply as "la maestra" or "the teacher".
For more than 20 years she has led the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE).
With an estimated 1.5 million members, Ms Gordillo has held real influence over governments and individual presidents by persuading her union members to vote as a single bloc, our correspondent says.
The teachers were also responsible for manning polling stations on election day.
Her union is also very wealthy, and can count on an annual budget of tens of millions of dollars.
It is on claims that she mishandled those funds, allegedly diverting money intended for the union's coffers to her personal accounts, that she has now been arrested.
The reforms appeared set to weaken the powerful teachers' union, which has largely controlled access to the profession.
The union has argued that reforms could lead to massive lay-offs.
Critics also say the changes could signal the start of the privatisation of education in Mexico.
Mexico's education system currently ranks bottom in a list of members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The reforms will require teachers to undergo regular assessments, something that has previously never taken place inside Mexico's primary and secondary schools.
Many teachers in Mexico are said to have a very low standard of education themselves, with some only having graduated from high school.
Another change is intended to tackle the problem of absent or even deceased teachers receiving wages.
Ms Gordillo has been an outspoken critic of the current education minister and his approach to the reforms.
Mexican union boss arrest sounds warning to reform foes
The arrest of Mexico's best-known trade union leader on fraud charges has thrown down the gauntlet to powerful interests standing between President Enrique Pena Nieto and his plans to shake up Latin America's second-biggest economy.
By Dave Graham
MEXICO CITY
Feb 28, 2013
(Reuters)
The arrest of Mexico's best-known trade union leader on fraud charges has thrown down the gauntlet to powerful interests standing between President Enrique Pena Nieto and his plans to shake up Latin America's second-biggest economy.
For a generation, even presidents shied away from taking on teachers' union boss Elba Esther Gordillo, making her Mexico's most prominent female politician and a formidable enemy to those who accused her of fostering corruption rather than education.
Pena Nieto, who has been in office for less than three months, crossed that line on Tuesday when police arrested Gordillo and three other people with her at Toluca airport near Mexico City.
Mexican television showed Gordillo, 68, wearing a prison uniform and standing behind bars as a state prosecutor formally charged her with embezzling around $200 million from union coffers and using the money to pay for U.S. property, luxury goods, designer clothes, works of art and plastic surgery.
She is not allowed to apply for bail under the charges.
Gordillo, who deferred comment to her lawyers, faces a maximum jail sentence of 30 years, though prisoners can apply to be moved to house arrest at age 70.
"It is clearly a criminal case," Attorney General Jesus Murillo said in a television interview. "The case is very solid."
A former grandee of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, Gordillo has denied accusations of corruption.
She was snared a day after Pena Nieto signed a law aimed at improving education standards that she had opposed because it would weaken her union's clout.
Mexico union leader Elba Esther Gordillo arrested
BBC
26 February 2013
Union head Elba Esther Gordillo, known as Mexico's most powerful woman, has been arrested on corruption charges.
Ms Gordillo, who runs the 1.5 million-member Mexican teachers' union, is alleged to have diverted about $200m from union funds to personal accounts.
No-one from her legal team has responded to the allegations, but in the past she has denied any wrongdoing in handling the funds.
The arrest came after major reforms to the education system on Monday.
President Enrique Pena Nieto signed the sweeping reforms, which seek to change a system dominated by Ms Gordillo in which teaching positions could be sold or inherited.
"We are looking at a case in which the funds of education workers have been illegally misused, for the benefit of several people, among them Elba Esther Gordillo," Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said.
His office alleges Ms Gordillo, 68, spent the funds on plastic surgery and a luxury home.
Real influence
The BBC's Will Grant in Mexico City says that Ms Gordillo is one of the highest profile figures in Mexican political life, known simply as "la maestra" or "the teacher".
For more than 20 years she has led the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE).
With an estimated 1.5 million members, Ms Gordillo has held real influence over governments and individual presidents by persuading her union members to vote as a single bloc, our correspondent says.
The teachers were also responsible for manning polling stations on election day.
Her union is also very wealthy, and can count on an annual budget of tens of millions of dollars.
It is on claims that she mishandled those funds, allegedly diverting money intended for the union's coffers to her personal accounts, that she has now been arrested.
The reforms appeared set to weaken the powerful teachers' union, which has largely controlled access to the profession.
The union has argued that reforms could lead to massive lay-offs.
Critics also say the changes could signal the start of the privatisation of education in Mexico.
Mexico's education system currently ranks bottom in a list of members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The reforms will require teachers to undergo regular assessments, something that has previously never taken place inside Mexico's primary and secondary schools.
Many teachers in Mexico are said to have a very low standard of education themselves, with some only having graduated from high school.
Another change is intended to tackle the problem of absent or even deceased teachers receiving wages.
Ms Gordillo has been an outspoken critic of the current education minister and his approach to the reforms.
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Chicago teachers are suspending seven-day strike
Chicago teachers suspend strike, classes to resume
September 18, 2012
(CBS/AP)
Chicago teachers are suspending a seven-day strike in the nation's third-largest city, a move that will send thousands of students back to classrooms.
The union's House of Delegates voted Tuesday to suspend the strike after learning details of a tentative contract agreement.
A proposed settlement was presented to delegates during the weekend. Sticking points included teacher evaluations and job security, provisions at the core of a debate about the future of public education across the nation.
The union delayed its vote to give teachers more time to assess the contract they'll vote on in the coming weeks.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel had pushed for a quick resolution as parents found alternatives for about 350,000 students. He even went to court to try to force teachers back to class...
September 18, 2012
(CBS/AP)
Chicago teachers are suspending a seven-day strike in the nation's third-largest city, a move that will send thousands of students back to classrooms.
The union's House of Delegates voted Tuesday to suspend the strike after learning details of a tentative contract agreement.
A proposed settlement was presented to delegates during the weekend. Sticking points included teacher evaluations and job security, provisions at the core of a debate about the future of public education across the nation.
The union delayed its vote to give teachers more time to assess the contract they'll vote on in the coming weeks.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel had pushed for a quick resolution as parents found alternatives for about 350,000 students. He even went to court to try to force teachers back to class...
Sunday, September 16, 2012
Chicago teachers extend strike, mayor seeks court order
See update HERE.
Did Camille Zombro move to Chicago? It seems unreasonable for teachers to reject 16% pay rise, just because they don't want to be accountable for student test scores. And the deal that "delegates" rejected even included an appeals process! At least in San Diego Unified, the rank and file was allowed to vote--and they promptly rejected the hard line of Camille Zombro and Emma Leheny (the chief counsel for California Teachers Association). In Chicago, the union leaders won’t let the rank-and-file vote until leaders have had a chance to exert pressure on them. This certainly isn't about teachers wanting to help kids learn.
Chicago teachers extend strike, mayor seeks court order
By Mary Wisniewski
Sep 16, 2012
(Reuters)
The confrontation between Chicago teachers and Mayor Rahm Emanuel escalated on Sunday when their union extended a strike and the mayor said he would go to court to block the walkout, risking more friction within President Barack Obama's political coalition as the November 6 election nears.
There will be no classes in Chicago public schools on Monday and Tuesday, affecting 350,000 kindergarten, elementary and high school students.
The showdown left in doubt a deal on wages, benefits and education reforms for 29,000 unionized teachers that negotiators thought they had struck on Friday to end the biggest labor dispute in the United States in a year.
It also could widen a rift within the Democratic Party between education reformers such as Obama's former top White House aide Emanuel, and organized labor, which the Democrats need to get out the vote in the election.
Chicago union President Karen Lewis said some 800 union delegates met on Sunday and decided to consult with rank-and-file members before voting whether to end the walkout...
EARLIER STORIES:
It sounds like an excellent compromise has been reached regarding teacher evaluations in Chicago. Teachers will be paid more, and will be more accountable.
See previous post on CTU strike.
In Chicago, Outline for a Deal on Teacher’s Contract
By MONICA DAVEY and STEVEN YACCINO
New York Times
September 14, 2012
Five days into the teachers’ strike that has halted classes for 350,000 public school students across this city, leaders on both sides of a contract fight said Friday afternoon that they had an outline in place for an agreement that could clear the way for schools to reopen Monday.
Robert Bloch, the attorney for the teachers’ union, said that both sides were still working out the details but that union officials were “hopeful” that they could present a complete agreement to the union’s house of delegates on Sunday.
“This has been one of the most difficult labor contracts negotiated in decades,” he said when asked why negotiations had taken so long.
Emerging from the negotiating room shortly after Mr. Bloch, David J. Vitale, president of the Chicago Board of Education, said, “The heavy lifting is over and the framework is in place.” Later, he added that parents “should be prepared to have their kids in school by Monday.”
The two sides broke up for the day but plan to reconvene Saturday morning in Mr. Bloch’s office to work out the remaining details...
Among the proposed changes, according to schools officials: teachers’ raises would average 16 percent over four years at a cost of $320 million, as had already been offered, but would be distributed differently; health insurance rates would not rise for teachers with families, as had been planned, if the union agreed to take part in a wellness program; and an appeals process would be created for teacher evaluations, which have been a significant area of disagreement...
Rahm Emanuel: Rahmbo at the School Barricades
Chicago mayor and Obama confidant Rahm Emanuel explains his cool approach to the city's teachers strike.
By DAVID FEITH
Wall Street Journal
September 14, 2012
...Members of the Chicago Teachers Union will reportedly receive 16% raises, over three years, in exchange for accepting a new teacher-evaluation system that relies partly, but not heavily, on student test scores...
Did Camille Zombro move to Chicago? It seems unreasonable for teachers to reject 16% pay rise, just because they don't want to be accountable for student test scores. And the deal that "delegates" rejected even included an appeals process! At least in San Diego Unified, the rank and file was allowed to vote--and they promptly rejected the hard line of Camille Zombro and Emma Leheny (the chief counsel for California Teachers Association). In Chicago, the union leaders won’t let the rank-and-file vote until leaders have had a chance to exert pressure on them. This certainly isn't about teachers wanting to help kids learn.
Chicago teachers extend strike, mayor seeks court order
By Mary Wisniewski
Sep 16, 2012
(Reuters)
The confrontation between Chicago teachers and Mayor Rahm Emanuel escalated on Sunday when their union extended a strike and the mayor said he would go to court to block the walkout, risking more friction within President Barack Obama's political coalition as the November 6 election nears.
There will be no classes in Chicago public schools on Monday and Tuesday, affecting 350,000 kindergarten, elementary and high school students.
The showdown left in doubt a deal on wages, benefits and education reforms for 29,000 unionized teachers that negotiators thought they had struck on Friday to end the biggest labor dispute in the United States in a year.
It also could widen a rift within the Democratic Party between education reformers such as Obama's former top White House aide Emanuel, and organized labor, which the Democrats need to get out the vote in the election.
Chicago union President Karen Lewis said some 800 union delegates met on Sunday and decided to consult with rank-and-file members before voting whether to end the walkout...
EARLIER STORIES:
It sounds like an excellent compromise has been reached regarding teacher evaluations in Chicago. Teachers will be paid more, and will be more accountable.
See previous post on CTU strike.
In Chicago, Outline for a Deal on Teacher’s Contract
By MONICA DAVEY and STEVEN YACCINO
New York Times
September 14, 2012
Five days into the teachers’ strike that has halted classes for 350,000 public school students across this city, leaders on both sides of a contract fight said Friday afternoon that they had an outline in place for an agreement that could clear the way for schools to reopen Monday.
Robert Bloch, the attorney for the teachers’ union, said that both sides were still working out the details but that union officials were “hopeful” that they could present a complete agreement to the union’s house of delegates on Sunday.
“This has been one of the most difficult labor contracts negotiated in decades,” he said when asked why negotiations had taken so long.
Emerging from the negotiating room shortly after Mr. Bloch, David J. Vitale, president of the Chicago Board of Education, said, “The heavy lifting is over and the framework is in place.” Later, he added that parents “should be prepared to have their kids in school by Monday.”
The two sides broke up for the day but plan to reconvene Saturday morning in Mr. Bloch’s office to work out the remaining details...
Among the proposed changes, according to schools officials: teachers’ raises would average 16 percent over four years at a cost of $320 million, as had already been offered, but would be distributed differently; health insurance rates would not rise for teachers with families, as had been planned, if the union agreed to take part in a wellness program; and an appeals process would be created for teacher evaluations, which have been a significant area of disagreement...
Rahm Emanuel: Rahmbo at the School Barricades
Chicago mayor and Obama confidant Rahm Emanuel explains his cool approach to the city's teachers strike.
By DAVID FEITH
Wall Street Journal
September 14, 2012
...Members of the Chicago Teachers Union will reportedly receive 16% raises, over three years, in exchange for accepting a new teacher-evaluation system that relies partly, but not heavily, on student test scores...
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