2012-02-16T06:34:21Z http://blog.eduflack.com/comments/atom.aspx Quick Blogcast tag:blog.eduflack.com,2012-02-10:15904754 John Thompson 2012-02-10T19:26:24Z 2012-02-10T19:26:24Z There seems to be something wrong with your captha code, so I'm posting this here.<br /><br />"If done correctly, efforts such as tenure reform can ..."<br /><br />Using value added models that cannot adequately account for circumstances beyond teachers control are, by defintion, the opposite of doing it correctly.<br /><br />Fundamentally, tenure is due process, and fundamentally, due process is signing the paperwork with an affirmation the the information it includes is not false. By definition, no such signiture can be attached to claims that a teacher's failure to meet the growth target was due to his ineffectiveness, and not the school's or the system's policies. <br /><br />The most dysfunctional of those policies are direct results of the disrepect dumped on educators. Would you support "reforms" that would destroy the careers of doctors BEFORE they were tested?<br /><br />"We need to trust all ..." No, we need for educators to have the same rights as others enjoy in a constitutional democracy. Constitutional democracies are based on checks and balances, because "power corrupts ..." <br /><br />We can't build respect for educators by implementing collective punishment. We can't build respect for educators by incentivizing rote instruction and test prep.<br /><br />If you were an inner city teacher, you would have seen why NCLB-type accountability has encouraged more educational malpractice and driving down teacher quality. You'd see how "teacher quality" reforms are NCLB on steroids and will drive self-respecting educators from the inner city. <br /><br />Since you haven't taught in the 'hood, what is your best estimate of how often and why it is commone for twenty, forty, sixty or more absences to be dropped and for "credit recovery" to be used to pass on students? When, as in many (most?) urban districts, those practices are ubiquitious, how are the teachers in schools where students attend class half as much as those in effective schools supposed to meet their growth targets? <br /><br />In schools where students always bury one or more of their classmates, and bury significant numbers of relatives (especially the grandparent who raised them) we should show respect for teachers by firing them for not meeting growth targets? So, when our school had five funerals in one year, we should have destroyed the careers of the teachers? Are you saying that we can upgrade the profession by telling new hires that they will not have too great of a chance of being fired due to mathmatical chance, until the next gang war hits?<br /><br />I have studied every major value-added report. Can you cite one piece of evidence in them that will address my complaints? If not, or if you don't have enough concrete knowledge of the conditions in the inner city to answer, why move ahead on those theories? Can you articulate a scenario where value-added for evaluations, in the hands of managment alone, does not encourage an exodus of teaching talent from the schools were it is far, far harder to meet growth targets? tag:blog.eduflack.com,2012-02-10:15904747 John Thompson 2012-02-10T19:23:14Z 2012-02-10T19:23:14Z "If done correctly, efforts such as tenure reform can ..."<br /><br />Using value added models that cannot adequately account for circumstances beyond teachers control are, by defintion, the opposite of doing it correctly.<br /><br />Fundamentally, tenure is due process, and fundamentally, due process is signing the paperwork with an affirmation the the information it includes is not false. By definition, no such signiture can be attached to claims that a teacher's failure to meet the growth target was due to his ineffectiveness, and not the school's or the system's policies. <br /><br />The most dysfunctional of those policies are direct results of the disrepect dumped on educators. Would you support "reforms" that would destroy the careers of doctors BEFORE they were tested?<br /><br />"We need to trust all ..." No, we need for educators to have the same rights as others enjoy in a constitutional democracy. Constitutional democracies are based on checks and balances, because "power corrupts ..." <br /><br />We can't build respect for educators by implementing collective punishment. We can't build respect for educators by incentivizing rote instruction and test prep.<br /><br />If you were an inner city teacher, you would have seen why NCLB-type accountability has encouraged more educational malpractice and driving down teacher quality. You'd see how "teacher quality" reforms are NCLB on steroids and will drive self-respecting educators from the inner city. <br /><br />Since you haven't taught in the 'hood, what is your best estimate of how often and why it is commone for twenty, forty, sixty or more absences to be dropped and for "credit recovery" to be used to pass on students? When, as in many (most?) urban districts, those practices are ubiquitious, how are the teachers in schools where students attend class half as much as those in effective schools supposed to meet their growth targets? <br /><br />In schools where students always bury one or more of their classmates, and bury significant numbers of relatives (especially the grandparent who raised them) we should show respect for teachers by firing them for not meeting growth targets? So, when our school had five funerals in one year, we should have destroyed the careers of the teachers? Are you saying that we can upgrade the profession by telling new hires that they will not have too great of a chance of being fired due to mathmatical chance, until the next gang war hits?<br /><br />I have studied every major value-added report. Can you cite one piece of evidence in them that will address my complaints? If not, or if you don't have enough concrete knowledge of the conditions in the inner city to answer, why move ahead on those theories? Can you articulate a scenario where value-added for evaluations, in the hands of managment alone, does not encourage an exodus of teaching talent from the schools were it is far, far harder to meet growth targets? tag:blog.eduflack.com,2012-02-09:15891380 Jeffrey Pflaum http://JeffreyPflaum.webs.com 2012-02-09T05:41:15Z 2012-02-09T05:41:15Z Hi Patrick,<br />There was always the fear that once politics and politicians entered, what do you call it, The Race to the Top, everyone would lose, and that is what has happened, and that, Patrick, is the scary part (see NCLB Act and NYCDOE). <br /><br />One of the reasons tenure is hard to take away is that the principal hired the teacher in the first place, and he/she looks "bad" when that teacher does not work out, and of course, the paper work, red tape, the whole investigation into a teacher's performance in the classroom gets messy. You're talking about a complex evaluation process when the teacher in question falls into a grey area as opposed to someone who is incompetent. Again, Patrick, as an outsider, as journalists and policy-makers are, you cannot have a overall understanding of the situation.<br /><br />Tenure should not be a one-shot deal and then you're free for life to do as you please. All teachers need to be re-evaluated throughout their so-called tenure. At the same time, I ask you, what about tenure for education journalists, policy-makers, and journalists in general? What standards are they held accountable for? What about inaccurate reporting and stories? A little retraction buried deep in the newspaper. <br /><br />You believe in due process? Are you going to arrest all teachers? Sounds pretty heavy to me. That gets a little scary, Pat. Are you starting to see teachers as "persons-of-interest"?<br /><br />Why are you so negative on teachers? They're good, then they struggle, but let's have the district move in and help them with some professional development. What happened in their undergraduate/graduate/in-service/professional development courses along the way? How could this teacher not see the light?<br /><br />Merit pay, pay for kids who score high on standardized tests, or, why don't you pay them a buck-a-book for each one that they read. This has not been proven to help these situations: intrinsic motivation is more effective than extrinsic motivation. Where do you get your passion from, Patrick?<br /><br />Systematic evaluation is good if there's such a thing as systematic teaching, which is not always the case. You're trying g to place a system on a field that tends to be more artistic. Why not go to the video tape? Let's make it a sporting event.<br /><br />How do you measure teacher effectiveness? What would be some of your "objective" performance standards? How do you measure student performance? What would be your criteria besides tests? How would parents rate-the-teachers? But what about teacher reviews of parents? Where's their report card? Shouldn't we rate the effectiveness of standardized tests? How objective are they? Who says so?<br /><br />You're asking a lot, I think, if you expect kids to be taught only by very good teachers, at least at this stage, because there is the fact that education still does not know how to educate teachers. Should all teachers only teach very good students? Are all parents only very good parents?<br /><br />What say tag:blog.eduflack.com,2012-02-03:15831396 Robert Bortins http://www.classicalconversations.com 2012-02-03T13:41:54Z 2012-02-03T13:41:54Z So what about kids who would graduate early? Do they have to stay in school till 18? What about a computer nerd who could create thousands of jobs, but has to stay in school? What do we do if these 17 and 18 year old are truant? Currently we send them to jail. This problem would only increase. Moving the education age to 18 will not help the quality of education our students receive, it will likely hurt it. tag:blog.eduflack.com,2012-02-01:15751390 Gary Ravani 2012-02-01T22:02:05Z 2012-02-01T22:02:05Z Some "communication:" 100% in disagreement. The expose of Apple shows what's really going on. It's not that there aren't enough qualified people to fill jobs. It's that qualified people in the US won't work for peanuts, live in a dorm, and put up with 70 hour work weeks. <br /><br />If you look at those zip codes where kids don't perform in school you'll find communities with high poverty, low levels of social services, no health care, high crime, and shabby housing. Those are all in the control of policy makers, not schools. The issues of poverty translates to 2/3rds of school achievement. The US has the second highest level of child poverty of all industrialized nations. This is shameful. tag:blog.eduflack.com,2012-01-29:15635697 Caitlyn Prosser 2012-01-29T05:09:31Z 2012-01-29T05:09:31Z I am currently studying the Common CORE Standards. They are indeed standards. The task is for school corporations and teachers to design a curriculum based on them. The standards intentionally do not have a more specific curriculum map to avoid negative responses implying the Federal Government is trying to control public education. <br /><br />Also, just to put more information out there, the "Common CORE" were not initiated by and are not specifically promoted by the Federal Government. "Race to the Top" funds involved financial incentives for states to adopt standards geared toward college and career readiness. If they wanted to make their own, great. If they wanted to adopt the recently designed "Common CORE," great. The intention of the Common CORE has always stressed VOLUNTARY state adoption. It just happened that states either were not prepared to develop their own revised standards soon enough or, as some states already had revisions in the works, they felt the Common CORE Standards were close enough to or better than theirs and recognized the benefits of having more uniform goals and expectations across the nation.<br /><br />Sources include current Education journal and magazine articles as well as websites such as commoncore.org and commoncore360.com. tag:blog.eduflack.com,2012-01-26:15618585 Judy Ramirez http://wordsahead.com 2012-01-26T12:07:12Z 2012-01-26T12:07:12Z Thank you for summary, Eduflack.<br /><br />What's missing?! I've always said that the BREAKTHROUGH IDEA is to "remerchandise" all lessons (prerequisite from preK-college) to focus on relevant vocabulary, ahead of time, including pronunciation of parsed speech sounds and explicit spelling of those sound-units.<br /><br />When possible, if teachers would join a silent revolution of this kind, their students would thus become more intellectually r-ea-d-y to learn! tag:blog.eduflack.com,2012-01-25:15613508 amy 2012-01-25T21:24:59Z 2012-01-25T21:24:59Z The President's been good at speaking directly to students about what their responsibilities are. tag:blog.eduflack.com,2012-01-24:15607466 Eduflack 2012-01-24T12:43:03Z 2012-01-24T12:43:03Z In terms of telling us how our nation and states are doing, absolutely. &nbsp;But none of those tests provide us a snapshot of how a particular school or our particular child is doing. &nbsp;As a parent, I want to know how my school and my kid are performing. tag:blog.eduflack.com,2012-01-21:15590010 Jane Jackson http://modeling.asu.edu 2012-01-22T03:13:26Z 2012-01-22T03:13:26Z Patrick,<br />Isn't it sufficient to have NAEP, PISA, and TIMSS?