PARCC In The Open, Aldeman Calls BS On Finance, Telegenic Brown, Click Gets Her Muscle At Last, Chicago, Wolfe Of Wonk Street, Lousy OH Charter, Lousy Choice Rules, Elite Schools And Low-Income Students, Homeschooling, And More. Plus, Llamas and Physics!

New York Times headline on…..May 17th, 2016: Mississippi District Ordered to Desegregate Its Schools.

So a PARCC test got released and everyone is upset. Predictable. But here’s the buried lede: A professor at Columbia Teachers College apparently doesn’t get that you don’t have “Constitutional First Amendment rights” to publish IP you don’t own. Others don’t get this either. Presumably if people started publishing her books online for anyone to read without paying that might bring some clarity? You can criticize the tests all you want – that’s an important First Amendment protected activity – but you’re not allowed to take another’s property, that’s not a free speech right! And if you’re going to do it at least just say, I realize what I’m doing but think it’s too important not to.  Or at least please don’t teach civics.

In any event, PARCC understandably wants to protect their IP and state dollars. There are sample questions around so while I personally think more transparency is better to demystify the tests PARCC is at least making an effort to communicate about the tests in a way you don’t generally see. They’re also a Bellwether client, btw, but on operational issues not on test design or IP.

Elsewhere in bad behavior can we stop referring to Campbell Brown in sexist terms? She is telegenic, sure, and you know what else? She’s also quite competent so you can disagree with her on substance without invoking her looks.

Chad Aldeman on why we can’t have nice things:

The distinction that Weingarten and Garcia are making, but that they’re unable to say publicly, is that they support equitable funding across districts but not within them. These are separate issues, but they both contribute to school funding disparities.

As progressives, it makes sense that union leaders would support equity in general, but there’s no good reason for why that moral impulse should stop at school district borders. Instead, this seeming contradiction can be explained by the fact that fixing within-district disparities would inevitably touch on issues of teacher compensation and teacher placement that are under the purview of locally negotiated teacher labor contracts. Districts could address within-district inequities in lots of ways — they could offer higher salaries to teachers in poorer schools, they could have lower class sizes in poorer schools, or they could expand other services within poorer schools — but local teachers’ union contracts often prohibit all of these policy options.

Sawchuk and Superville are all over Chicago.  History and status quo here. Local color and perspective here. Chicago has been really significant to the education world and its politics over the last few years so keep an eye on all this.

The winner of the Fordham wonk contest, Christy Wolfe, on all the great things states “can” do under ESSA provisions.

What took you so long! The Times discovers one of Ohio’s bad actors in the charter sector. Notice the lack of defenders of the school other than its operator – that’s a key part of the story in Ohio and relates to the reform bill that is mentioned only in passing.

This seems sort of screwed up.   Elsewhere a Nevada judge upholds the state’s new education savings account policy.  And lots of conflict at Central Park East.

Melissa Click is finally getting some muscle over here! From the AAUP.

ACT and UNCF on college and career readiness for African-American students (pdf).  How the transgender bathroom debate is playing out in one VT school.  Nick Anderson looks at low-income students at elite schools.  Boston Globe on the same dynamics from last year.  Republican Hill leaders rattling the cage on ESSA rulemaking (pdf).  Broad charter prize finalists announced.  Pension reform back on the table in PA.  Wisconsin’s Supreme Court rules in state ed chief governance dispute there. Homeschooling is all over the place from really good to really irresponsible.

Llama Llama likes Whitney Houston. Virginia woman dissatisfied with the 2016 candidates. And if you get a bunch of people to send you money, like a million dollars, that you then bury in your backyard while you’re “treating” them for curses with the promise to return it later when they’re cured. Well, that’s OK. If you spend the money instead and don’t return it? That’s fraud. And if you’re a psychic you should know this is what’s going to happen to you.

9 Replies to “PARCC In The Open, Aldeman Calls BS On Finance, Telegenic Brown, Click Gets Her Muscle At Last, Chicago, Wolfe Of Wonk Street, Lousy OH Charter, Lousy Choice Rules, Elite Schools And Low-Income Students, Homeschooling, And More. Plus, Llamas and Physics!”

  1. In writing about Campbell Brown, idiot and liar are good enough and certainly not sexist.

    I suppose appropriating Mary McCarthy to describe Campbell might be seen as sexist by the professionally offended class like Peter Cunnngham, Mr Civility himself.

  2. Andrew, one issue Chas didn’t address is the backlash effect when affluent schools, or districts, perceive that poorer schools or districts are receiving extra resources. I have worked in several districts in both California and Louisiana: Beverly Hills Unified, LAUSD, New Orleans Parish Schools and Sacramento City Unified.
    For example, when I worked at Beverly High it was clear to me that the teachers there thought highly of themselves and, conversely, looked down upon teachers in poor districts, not adequately taking into account the effect of poverty on students. In fact, many of the teachers in Beverly Hills began their careers in LAUSD and move to Beverly Hills because of the much better working conditions and would never be lured back to poor school for any amount of money. If incentives were given for these teachers to move to poorer districts the parents in Beverly Hills would, I have no doubt, protest loudly. I am sure they would resist subsidizing poor students. Look what has been going on in Texas for years in their attempt to merely equalize total funding.
    Similar events have happened and are happening in New Orleans. When was an Orleans Parish Teaching Fellow I was assigned to Mcdonogh 28, an all poor, all black, school with very low performance stats. Lusher, an Uptown school, had a high percentage of whites, a high SES and was high performing. Just like in Beverly Hills, the teachers at that school gave themselves undue credit for their student’s success. The community, just like in Beverly Hills, would not take kindly to an effort to lure their beloved teachers away and would certainly protest if they thought they were forced to subsidize poorer schools. At the same time, I learned through conversations with Lusher teachers, that most of them would not, even want to teach in poor all black schools for any amount of money. This was all reinforced in my mind with a conversation I had with a very wealthy and influential member of the New Orleans establishment. He told me not to mention his name, but he came from an Old New Orleans family and was worth hundreds of millions. Anyway, he assured me that his circle of friends had no desire of having poor black kids compete for places at Tulane and for jobs with their own children and would resist any meaningful attempts to adequately fund poor black schools.
    Finally, as you may be aware, since Katrina, the same Lusher community set up an Uptown K-12 charter system that requires an entrance exam! Think about that: A charter school that requires and entrance exam, clearly an attempt to segregate with a thinly veiled disguise for racism. What they really did was establish a private school using public funds. Conclusion, any attempt to truly equalize funding will face a stiff backlash from the wealthy and whites.

  3. Intellectual property??
    The stories were not written for PARCC, but were pulled from published authors. Have the authors objected?

    ELA 4th Grade Prompt #1

    Refer to the passage from “Emergency on the Mountain” and the poem “Mountains.” Then answer question 7.

    Think about how the structural elements in the passage from “Emergency on the Mountain” differ from the structural elements in the poem “Mountains.”
    Write an essay that explains the differences in the structural elements between the passage and the poem. Be sure to include specific examples from both texts to support your response.

    http://tinyurl.com/hlcyryk

    Boy, you have been striking out this week Andrew.

  4. Andrew, Tom Loveless criticized Campbell Brown and yet you and Peter don’t mention him.
    Is that because Tom is a man and Carol and Diane are women?
    Who’s the sexist now?

  5. Tom was pointing out that Campbell may have used the wrong metric in arguing that too many kids are below “grade level.” Tom did not say, as others have, that Campbell’s ideas are no good and that people only pay attention to her because she is pretty.

  6. Missed,
    Art.
    Where did Tom said her ideas are good or that Diane said people only listen to her because of her looks?

    As I have noted, she is dishonest and a liar. See her Twitter exchange with Tom.
    And she and Andrew make the argument that teacher unions prevent the police from arresting those accused of abusing children and prosecutors from bringing up charges.

  7. Phillip… You have to do your own homework about who said what where. As to the present flap, while metrics matter, Campbell’s argument that too many children are underachieving does not fall simply because she spoke imprecisely about “grade level”.

    Countering false notions of grade-level would require full-employment for measurement types, but there are better uses of our time.

    Finally, one of the many things that I admire about this blog is that it’s pointed, but high-toned. Regular readers recognize the sources of the departures.

  8. Art, If Campbell can’t get simple facts correct and needs to dissemble when corrected, why trust her with larger matters.
    Matthew 25: 14-30
    (Hopefully, that’s high toned enough for you. You can’t get any higher than The Lord)

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