Sunday Cartoon Fun

Fire The Teachers (Bloggers)

Band of Bloggers?

One of our brethren has been released from his teaching position due in part to the reflective teacher writing that he posts anonymously on his teacher blog. Instead of being reprimanded, or even censured, he’s been fired.

Great. A teacher gets fired for speaking up on a blog. I don't know what he said, but I guess it was enough. I can guarantee it was not because he was doing anything pedagogically unsound; surely it was because he presented another view on NCLB, testing, and the rest. This is how things are going to go far a while--at least until parents and teachers take back the schools from the politicians!

Let's Talk Turkey

unedited version!!

I understand the outrage about Sarah Palin's "death-to-turkeys" interview. People in America who don't kill their own food (most of us, except Ted Nugent) are taken aback when they see the slaughter. Well, gross as it is, deal with it. If you want to eat turkey, then you might have to see one get dispatched.

My dad used to say that if you want to drive, you're going to have to put up with the occasional oil spill. I think he was right. We lefty, vegan, holier than thou types should probably just shut up about the Palin Turkey Interview as it relates to interviews and interview etiquette.

And that nonsense that Sarah Palin did not know about the slaughter? Bullshit. She is so full of shit her voice is straining to hold back more shit. If she had stood by her moose-killing, caribou-eating, wolf-hunting persona--her true persona--I would (as you see above) have no problem with the interview. But when she starts lying about it to make her seem like she is taken aback, when indeed she would probably be happy to slit the turkey's throat herself, then I get confrontational.

She is a lying liar, and she tells lies.

ObamaTube II

Friday Big 3 Cartoon fun

Secretary Of State Clinton: Done

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton has decided to give up her Senate seat and accept the position of secretary of state, making her the public face around the world for the administration of the man who beat her for the Democratic presidential nomination, two confidants said Friday.

Stuffed

A Teacher's Dilemma

I want to take my kids on a field trip to the zoo. I want to because I found out that one of my second graders has never been to the zoo! That's right, never. He lives no more than 10 miles from the nearest zoo, and no more than 20 miles from a really big-city zoo. I can get it done, no problem. I have some money (? mom2015) for the bus, and probably enough for admission; I hate asking parents for money.

In order for a zoo trip to be any fun for the kids, I need parent volunteers to come with me so I can break the kids into small groups, facilitating easy access and transit to and from display to display. I am sure I will get enough parents, and I will make it clear that any extra parents will need to pay their way. Also not a problem, usually.

Now the dilemma: I am pretty sure one of the parents who will want to come is a tweaker, a methhead, a drug addict. The grandmother (bless her) is raising the kids because mom is in and out of rehab. She happens to be out this month. I cannot give her a group of kids at the zoo. I cannot make that obvious to her, or her kid, or the other kids. It's a dilemma.

Have a nice day!

Michelle Rhee: Self-Important Bitch

This Examiner story shows a couple things: First, that Michelle Rhee seems to realize that parents are a huge (79 pages worth) problem with the education of children, and second, that Ms. Rhee would like all parents to realize that it is the teachers/schools that are the problem. Rhee has 2 faces, the one that knows the truth, the other that wants a job. I hate her. She deserves my hate. She is worse than Hitler (almost!)

DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee proposes teaching parents ‘basic skills’

Mention the name Michelle Rhee in education circles and you will get a very mixed set of emotions. Her less than tactful methods of approaching school reform have brought about a variety of reactions from various members of the educational community.

Many welcome her methods and praise her no-nonsense approach towards ‘reforming’ the DC Public School system. She has affectionately been called "a maverick" and "the Ax" by those who see her methods as bringing about necessary change to the DC School system.

Critics, however, fear that her lack of experience and refusal to collaborate with educational stakeholders – parents, educators, community members - will create even bigger problems for the failing school system.

Most of her zealousness has been aimed at teachers and their unions and people tend to like a good old fashioned teacher-bash; but what happens when she starts to apply "the Ax" towards parents?

Bill Turque at The Washington Post reports that Rhee has presented a 79 page "action plan" which discusses proposals to address important issues in the DC school system. Among the issues discussed are security and discipline policies, more specialized schools and interestingly enough, the creation of a "Parent Academy". Turque reports:

The academy would be created as a part of other community outreach programs and proposes to :teach parents "the full set of basic skills necessary to be a successful participant" in their child's education.

The academy seems to have been proposed in response to the fact that Rhee does not feel that parents quite understand what is best for their children. Turque writes:

The report also addresses at length the issue of parent involvement and is at one point bluntly critical of families for accepting, even supporting, mediocre schools.

"Too many of our students' parents are uninformed consumers of public education who blindly support the District's public schools without full knowledge of the significant deficiencies of the schools," the document says.

Rhee has come under fire lately by some parent groups who feel that the chancellor has been ignoring their input and refusing to include their opinions.

Educators make the claim that Rhee fires individuals who oppose her methods, but what can be done with parents who do not agree?

I guess you can always send them to a "parent academy".

To Test, Or To Teach, The Story Of Every Teacher (These Days)

From miss brave, a typical teacher who wishes she could teach. This post could be about every teacher I know:

Does testing equal teaching?

It's been a while! This is mostly because I spent all week grading my students' TC assessments. One month ago, they took these new Teachers College spelling assessments. We were told we would eventually get together as a grade and go over the procedure for grading them (it's not as simple as "correct" or "incorrect"; they actually get points for various word features like initial consonants and short vowel sounds).

The giant pile of assessments sat on my desk for a month, until Thursday, when we had our meeting where we learned how to grade them and were informed that our administration would like us to finish grading them by Monday so they can be plugged into the computer. Excuse me? We sat on this for a month and then we're given three days (two of which, I might add, are weekend days) to get it done? Most of the teachers I work with had fewer than 12 to grade; I have 51 students. Two lists of 25 words each equals 102 spelling tests on which I had to analyze every word and then add up the number of "feature points" per word. Plus, the grading grid is naturally microscopic, as to fit all the information in, so I was hunched over my desk all day yesterday trying to fit the numbers in my tiniest handwriting. Not to mention the fact that my students cannot spell, so I had a lot of deciphering to do to make sure they were still getting credit for all the "word features" they did include.

Allegedly, all this data is going into a computer that will spit out oodles of fascinating information about exactly what my students need to work on (I can tell you right now: most of them have their consonants down cold, but those long vowel patterns like the o-e in hope and the i-e in shine? Ouch), but what's killing me is that November is a week away and we'll be starting running records and this assessment again. Are we really going to see enough of a seismic shift in a month's time that it's worth taking away our instructional time to administer this blasted thing again, not to mention our personal sanity to grade it? I mean, we haven't even looked at the data yet, let alone made any attempt to use the data in order to drive our instruction, so it's highly unlikely that we'll see any growth...so why are we wasting our time?

Part of the assessment is sitting with one kid at a time while he or she reads eight lists of high-frequency sight words. It's easy to do -- they (hopefully) just shoot down the list, all "the a and he she it they will" without stopping to take a breath -- but it takes forever, and meanwhile no one's getting a guided reading group or a strategy lesson or an individual conference that day because I'm checking off sight words. I'm thinking it'll take at least two weeks to finish all my running records and these assessments, especially in the midst of all the other stuff that goes on that precludes reading, so that's two weeks where I'm not actually, you know, teaching reading, and then our administration wonders why our kids aren't improving, like they're supposed to learn these reading strategies by osmosis or something...unless they think that testing actually equals teaching?

Wednesday Cartoon Fun, At The Clintons' Expense

Hertzberg On Palin's Choice (Pro!)

Perfect, unless you are a right-wingnut-crusader type:

A Choice and an Echo

Via Andrew, here is Kathryn Jean (K-Lo) Lopez, head honcha of National Review Online, explaining why Governor Palin is her leader:

What is it about Sarah?

For many folks on the Right, she represented an influx of social conservatism in the campaign. All she had to do was arrive at the scene with her son Trig to demonstrate her pro-life bona fides. Some estimated 90 percent of Americans faced with the knowledge that they might give birth to a child with Down Syndrome wouldn’t have made the choice she and her husband, Todd, did to let the child live.

I detect some assumptions here. (1) Palin’s carrying Trig to term was a choice. (2) The choice was hers and her husband’s to make, not God’s or the government’s. (3) She deserves praise for having chosen the choice she chose.

But if Palin (and Lopez) were truly “pro-life”—if they truly believed that abortion, especially elective abortion in the first trimester, is murder or at least unjustifiable homicide—then having Trig was not a choice. It was a simple matter of obedience to God’s law, which is infinitely more sacrosanct than man’s law. Palin no more deserves praise for it than I deserve praise for not having lately gunned down any friends, colleagues, or strangers.

What this demonstrates is that even in the minds of anti-abortion zealots, abortion is now implicitly viewed in the same light as divorce: an unfortunate choice, a reprehensible choice, a choice that may even contravene the will of God, but still a choice. And, again implicitly, the choice that Sarah Palin had every right to make. In both directions.

This is why, even if Roe v. Wade is eventually overturned, it will always be legal to get an abortion somewhere in the United States of America.

Rhee And Opinions: Who Cares?

From The Duke Chronicle:

Rhee pushes contentious education reform policy
By: Ryan Brown
Posted: 11/18/08

When it comes to school reform, Michelle Rhee doesn't care what you think.

The chancellor of the Washington, D.C. public school system has had about enough of adult opinions and adult priorities.

"It's our kids who have no due process," she said. "We still allow the color of a child's skin and their zip-code to dictate the quality of their education, and that's the biggest social injustice imaginable."

Rhee, 38, has set off a firestorm of controversy among education reformers with her bold plans to overhaul the school system in D.C., widely regarded as one of the worst districts in the nation. But Monday night, she played to a different crowd.

Filling every level of the building, members of the Duke community packed the Fleishman Commons at the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy to hear Rhee speak about her experiences in the field of urban public education, and to ask their own questions of the young leader who has made a name for herself in the education world as a scrappy, no-nonsense reformer.

"Her parents hoped for her to become a doctor or a lawyer or at worst an investment banker," President Richard Brodhead said in introducing Rhee. "But in spite of that, she became a teacher."

Rhee's meteoric rise to the chancellorship took her down a path familiar to many Duke graduates. After graduating from Cornell University in 1992, she joined Teach For America, a program that sends recent college graduates to some of the nation's worst schools to teach for two years.

The program currently counts 3,800 first-year teachers among its ranks, and 10 percent of Duke's Class of 2008 applied for a spot last year, said Caroline Davis, a senior recruitment director for the program. This year, there are 43 former Duke students teaching in the program, which has for several years been one of the largest employers of recent Duke graduates.

As for Rhee, she jumped from TFA to graduate school at Harvard University to a job organizing a TFA off-shoot called the New Teacher Project.

Then one day last spring, she got a call from D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty. He had a request: He wanted her to take the reins of his city's struggling schools.

"I said, are you kidding me?" Rhee recalled to the Sanford audience. "There was no worse job I could think of than being an urban superintendent."

But Fenty wasn't prepared to give up that easily. He and Rhee eventually struck a deal. He would dissolve the school board and give her nearly full autonomy to run the district, and she would come to work in the D.C. schools.

Rhee didn't waste any time. Only weeks into her tenure, she began to slash the jobs of a group of teachers and administrators who she said were "egregiously incompetent." Almost immediately after, parents and teachers began to complain, but Rhee was unphased.

She charged forward, unleashing a controversial idea: a pay-for-performance plan that would reward teachers whose students made marked improvements in state and national standardized tests.

"We have lots of teachers in our system who are heroic, who go beyond what they have to do every single day, but the current system doesn't reward them," she said.

Her comments generated a stir in the Sanford audience as well. When moderators opened the floor to questions, audience members asked questions about the economics, sustainability and practical implications of Rhee's plan.

But Jacob Vigdor, an associate professor of public policy studies and economics whose research focuses on education reform, said however her initiatives play out, her creativity as a reformer should be lauded.

"There's only so much you can figure out sitting around talking about hypothetical situations," he said. "The more people try things, the more we'll learn."

Sophomore Nikhil Taneja said he walked away from the speech inspired by Rhee's tenacity.

"She's not afraid to say what has to be said," he said. "She's putting kids first and that gives me confidence."

NCLB Debate

Over at newtalk, they are having a little NCLB debate. Here is a response from Richard Rothstein:

NCLB is a failure, and should be scrapped, for these reasons:
a) By requiring accountability only for math and reading, it distorts the goals of education. In any institution, if principals hold agents accountable only for some of the institution’s goals, agents will distort their behavior to accomplish only those things for which they are held accountable. This is rational behavior. It is the reason the Soviet command economy was so inefficient (textile mills required to make adequate yearly progress in the production of yards of cloth produced only useless narrow widths; trucking firms required to cover more miles drove around in circles, etc.); it is also the reason that NCLB-type accountability programs in job training, welfare reform, and health care have been abandoned. Local agencies held accountable for placing workers in jobs concentrated on placing workers most likely to be placed without agency assistance, not those most in need of assistance; hospitals required to improve the survival rates of cardiac surgery patients refused to operate on the sickest patients, etc. The biggest tragedy of all this is that goal distortion has been most severe for disadvantaged children, because these are those for whom there is the biggest payoff for substituting math and reading drill for instruction in other subjects and behavioral traits.
b) Leave aside any racial or socioeconomic differences in achievement. There is sufficient variation among youth, irrespective of social background, that a single standard of proficiency cannot possibly be “challenging” (to use the NCLB term) to below-average, average, or above-average children. The problem is not whether proficiency is defined too high, or too low, or differently among states. Any standard of proficiency is irrational if applied to all students.
c) NCLB permits no adjustment for socioeconomic differences, although these are the most important determinants of student achievement, on average. (Yes, I know, some poor students excel, just as some smokers don’t get lung cancer, but on average, socioeconomic disadvantage has a big impact. As you know, I’ve written a book on this topic, but forget me as an authority - Janet Currie has estimated that 25% of the black-white school readiness gap can be explained by differences in a few measurable health characteristics of children and their mothers; our own Rick Hanushek and colleagues have estimated [for Texas] that about 14% of the racial achievement gap can be explained by differences in student mobility rates. Etc.)
d) An accountability system based on test scores alone has stimulated nationwide score inflation, as teachers and administrators have naturally learned how to game the system, both by legal means and by unlawful cheating. The nationwide improvement of state test scores, relative to NAEP scores, is evidence alone that NCLB and its required state accountability systems have resulted more in gaming than in improved instruction. We are back to the “Lake Wobegon effect” of the minimum competency movement of the late 1970s.

The above does not mean that, in principle, the federal government could not design and administer a satisfactory accountability system. But federal micromanagement of education (NCLB) has now proven to be so incompetent, for reasons stated above, that it would be foolish to rush headlong into another federal system, as poorly thought through as NCLB was. Why not let the states struggle with these very difficult challenges? Some may design better accountability systems, some may stick with NCLB-type systems. But after the NCLB fiasco, we’ve got little to lose by letting states experiment with alternative accountability systems.

Go on over and read the crazies defend NCLB, and the more reasonable explain why it should go away.

Well Done