Michigan Superintendent: How to Kill a Profession

Diane Ravitch's blog

Steve Matthews, superintendent of the Novi school district, here explains how the education profession has been attacked and demonized, with premeditation.

He begins:

So you want to kill a profession.

It’s easy.

First you demonize the profession. To do this you will need a well-organized, broad-based public relations campaign that casts everyone associated with the profession as incompetent and doing harm. As an example, a well-orchestrated public relations campaign could get the front cover of a historically influential magazine to invoke an image that those associated with the profession are “rotten apples.”

Then you remove revenue control from the budget responsibilities of those at the local level. Then you tell the organization to run like a business which they clearly cannot do because they no longer have control of the revenue. As an example, you could create a system that places the control for revenue in the hands of the…

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Peter Greene: See This Film. It is Free. It is a Stunning Portrait of the “Reform” Hoax

Diane Ravitch's blog

Peter Greene watched “Defies Measurement,” and he urges you to see it too. It was made by a teacher, Shannon Puckett. You can see it free here.

Greene writes:

Let me cut to the chase– I cannot recommend enough that you watch Defies Measurement, a new film by Shannon Puckett.

The film is a clear-eyed, well-sourced look at the business of test-driven corporate-managed profiteer-promoted education reform, and it has several strengths that make it excellent viewing both for those of us who have been staring at these issues for a while and for teachers and civilians who are just now starting to understand that something is going wrong.

The film is anchored by the story of Chipman Middle School in Alemeda, a school that up until ten years ago was an educational pioneer, using the solid research about brains and learning (and where Shannon Puckett once taught). They…

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Stephanie Simon: Who Is Spying on Your Children?

Diane Ravitch's blog

Ever wonder who does the fun job of reading your children’s tweets, Facebook pages, and Instagrams? Stephanie Simon has done the investigative work, on behalf of politico.com, but really on behalf of parents and children across America.

In the new age of Common Core and online testing, student privacy is dead.

Simon visits companies that do the “monitoring.” She calls them “Common Core’s cyber-spies.”

She writes:

“Pearson is hardly the only company keeping a watchful eye on students.

“School districts and colleges across the nation are hiring private companies to monitor students’ online activity, down to individual keystrokes, to scan their emails for objectionable content and to scrutinize their public posts on Twitter, Facebook, Vine, Instagram and other popular sites. The surveillance services will send principals text-message alerts if a student types a suspicious phrase or surfs to a web site that raises red flags.

“A dozen states have…

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Information Control/Filter Bubbles

I recently attended our state technology conference.  One of the sessions talked about Google and filter bubbles.  This was very interesting to me.  As a school library media specialist who teaches and promotes information literacy, now I’m learning that some web companies are “filtering” the information for a searcher based on some criteria.  Here is a video from TEDTalks that explains “filter bubbles” and the harm it may cause.

http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles

2015 13-inch MacBook Pro With Retina Display Review

Has Pearson Gone Too Far? Write Michael Barber!

Diane Ravitch's blog

We learned in the past few days that Pearson is monitoring the Twitter accounts and Facebook accounts and other social media used by America’s children. Some call it spying. Pearson expects America’s teachers and principals to help them police the children to make sure that they don’t write about or even discuss the PARCC test. (The corporation administering the Smarter Balanced Assessments is trying to exercise the same control to protect its tests.)

Mercedes Schneider here describes Pearson’s intrusive policy for non-native speakers of English who take the “Pearson Test of English Academic.”

Part of the agreement signed by the test-taker states:

I confirm that I have carefully reviewed the PTE Academic Test Taker Handbook, including, but not limited to, those provisions relating to testing, score cancellations, privacy policies, and the collection, processing, use and transmission to the United States of the PTE Academic test taker’s personally identifiable data (including…

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The Net Neutrality Drama Train Heads To Congress

GRIT! Do You Have It? How Can You Get It?

Diane Ravitch's blog

A high school principal sent the Grit Scale that is used in KIPP charter schools and possibly in other schools as well to measure whether students have “grit” and how much of it they have. The idea of “grit” was popularized by Paul Tough in his best-selling book “How Children Succeed.” The commonsense idea that is summarized as a four-letter word is that character, perseverance, and determination enable children even in the most difficult of circumstances to overcome obstacles and succeed. Who would disagree? But the question I have after reading this scale is whether it actually measures the qualities it says it measures, and whether those qualities can be taught in school. Is saying that one has perseverance the same as persevering? I don’t know. What do you think? I am reminded of the self-esteem craze of about 20 years ago, when California actually created a task force to…

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Ohio: Another Brave Superintendent Speaks Out

Diane Ravitch's blog

Ohio seems to have an amazing number of district superintendents with integrity, unafraid to speak up. Superintendent Steve Kramer of the Madeira City schools wrote an open letter to the state superintendent Richard Ross, describing the unnecessary burden of testing.

For standing up for students, I name Steve Kramer to the honor roll.

He writes:

Dr. Richard Ross, Superintendent Ohio Department of Education
25 South Front Street
Columbus, OH 43215-4183

Dear Dr. Ross:

This week the Madeira City School District joined districts across the state and nation in implementing the new PARCC and AIR state-mandated testing. After witnessing the monumental amount of time and resources our faculty, staff and administrators have spent in preparing for, and now executing these tests, I am profoundly concerned that they are neither relevant nor important to the high quality instruction Madeira City Schools has been proud to provide for over 80 years.

State and…

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Citizen Coalition Beat Privatization in Arkansas

Diane Ravitch's blog

This is what happens when citizens stand together to oppose corporate takeovers of public institutions. Allies of the Walton family proposed a state takeover of the Little Rock School District, because 6 of 48 schools were low-performing. Advocates for the takeover wanted to turn the district into an all-charter district, like Néw Orleans. But community resistance was strong and the proposed legislation was withdrawn:

Education Advocates Applaud the Halt of School Privatization Bill

Little Rock, AR — The Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS), a national community/labor table that fights for the public school system, has responded to the success of an Arkansas coalition in stopping a proposed bill there that would have privatized whole school districts across the state.

Statement issued by Karran Harper Royal, an advocate and New Orleans parent:

“Public education activists beat the Waltons in their own backyard. The Waltons were touting so-called ‘success’ in New…

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