A Check-Plus For These Seven Blog Posts

Obama's New Math-Science Education Bill Alyson Klein
The measure, which is sponsored in the House by Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., is aimed at better coordinating the myriad of programs geared toward improving math and science education.

The Latest Media Wave: Paying Teachers Who Don't Teach EIA
We've seen it happen with performance pay, school lunches and childhood obesity, and the shortage of minority teachers. The most recent media wave concerns paying teachers who don't teach.

Qualitative data on schools SDorn
Rhee sent teams of people into schools she wanted to change...Having students, parents, and educators visit schools to provide a snapshot is dramatically different from just looking at test scores and prescribing a cookie-cutter "fix."

Questions about the CRCT continue AJC
Kathy Cox threw out the CRCT social studies scores for sixth- and seventh-graders, but kept the math scores for eighth-graders. The state schools superintendent says there’s a big difference between the two exams.

Sol Stern and the SUTVA Shenanigans The 'Kette
Experiments in social science are fundamentally different than experiments in medicine, and it turns out gold standard is often more silver or bronze than we would have hoped.

Girl Stabbed in School Fight Detention Slip
Rather than making 'burn books' and spreading mean rumors, girls are now skipping all the middle men and just slashing their enemies with a series of life-threatening cuts.

Daaaaaaamn Teaching In The 408
I heart anyone who will take a hard-line stance to the whine-despair-whine- hand-to-the-forehead-whine of the tests are big and bad and scary (there was a fair amount of editing on the actual gross tonnage of all that).

Comments

[john thompson]

Kevin Carey, as usual, made some good points in discussing Michelle Rhee’s reports on 27 failing schools in Washington D.C., but the way that he “connected the dots” was just weird. Carey concentrated on a single line in the article “the theme resonating most powerfully in the reports is student frustration with the lack of academic rigor.” Oh really? We’re are supposed to believe that that was the most powerful theme of the students’ concerns - as opposed to the adults’ preconceived conclusions. I am not questioning whether students feel disrespected by low expectations. But how many teens express themselves in that voice? The newspaper article showed much more resonance as it described indifference and complete dysfunction. (These types of “inside baseball” are not minor to real world teachers struggling to turn around schools because they are often used by administrators to predetermine the rate at which we introduce challenging material. Because the central office is mad [or should be mad] at incompetents, they try to micro-manage dedicated teachers. Go figure.)

I have no doubt the educational incompetence is real. But the article invested nearly six times as much print on describing the breakdown of discipline. It recounted the same story of truancy, hall walking, defiance, and the refusal of administrators to assess consequences. (The students didn’t volunteer far more complaints about the disorder? Everyone should check their own knowledge about teens and ask whether it was plausible that Rhee’s report was really respecting the students’ opinions.)

Why was the much more important story ignored by Carey and Rhee? The obvious answer is politics. But the real story is that this is just the way the game is played. The central office is not about to tackle this horrible and complex problem. It is much easier to repeat the same old (free) diagnosis of “high expectations” and the blame game.

If we want solutions, we must address the complex systemic problems that burn out teachers and principals and students. If educators were burned out by the system, and can’t be rehabilitated (and they probably can’t) they should be fired. But we have to address the administrative policies (including those favored by armchair quarterbacks and ideologues like Rhee), or we will just burn out another generation of principals and teachers.

Kevin gets really creative in his logic as he explains that the Post article is an argument for NCLB, because schools that have already fail under NCLB are demonstrably failing. Who ever doubted that? How is that relevant to HELPING students? (Wasn’t the same logic expressed by the student quoted in the article saying that teachers just point out their failures but don’t offer anything helpful?)

The real issue is SOLUTIONS. How do we create a learning culture? The distraction - and the disrespect inherent in single measure standardized testing - is relevant is what way?