Please Read: Diane Ravitch

This is another post in a series that I wish to call Please Read. My purpose here is to randomly and inconsistently provide a handful of links on a certain topic that should be read.

I am thankful for the work of Diane Ravitch. She provides a good chunk of the little bit of sanity mainstream media actually picks up on in regards to education policy.

Here are a couple of Ravitch's latest articles:

A test for politicians on education (with cheat sheet)

The Teacher Accountability Debate

Universities to be tested to distraction

No Student Left Untested

I'm trying Blogger's Dynamic Templates... Again

Last October I tried Blogger's Dynamic Templates for a day or two before deciding that they simply were not ready for prime time.

I love the crisp, clean look of the Dynamic Templates, but their lack of labels/tags and access to blog archives were simply too much to overcome.

Here's how you find labels, blog archives
and subscribe gadgets.

Well, Blogger recently added some functionality to their Dynamic Templates and so I've returned to give them another shot. On the far right, you can mouse over the edge of your browser and the labels, archives and subscribe functions appear.

I know I use the search function, labels/tags and blog archives a lot on my blog, but I don't necessarily know what my readers' needs are for these kinds of gadgets.  So I'm reaching out for some feedback from you.

1. Do you like the Dynamic look of my blog or should I return to my traditional look? 

2. What functions do you use on my blog? Search, blog archives, labels... etc. 

3. Or maybe none of this matters because you view my blog via an RSS feed or mobile device...

Affluent kids in worst schools

"Are schools social levelers or do they reinforce the class pyramid by tracking and sorting children from a young age?”

-Astra Taylor

Taylor's quote got me thinking:

What if the affluent & the progressive enrolled their children in the worst schools in an effort to improve them?

I recently purchased Astra Taylor's book (Kindle Single) Unschooling. I'll let you know how it goes.

Reduced to Numbers

"Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts." 

-Albert Einstein

Last year, teachers in Los Angeles suffered under the LA Times printing of teacher evaluations based on standardized test scores.

This year, New York teachers are the target of a naming and shaming operation that took place when the New York media published evaluations that ranked teachers by their students' standardized test scores.

There's a lot wrong with all this and Diane Ravitch aptly explains how reducing the quality of a teacher to a score and then making this unreliable and invalid data public is nothing more than a ploy to undermine public confidence in public education.

The problem here isn't just that these teacher evaluations and rankings were made public -- although making them public certainly does make things worse -- the real problem here is that the complex work of teaching is being reduced to a number at all.

Teacher evaluations via test scores are prone to such error that they are not valid or reliable regardless of whether they are public or private.

After reading one New York teacher's response to being labelled "below average" despite what other anecdotal and qualitative evidence suggests, I took note of one of his points:

As with many things in life, teaching cannot be simplified into an algorithm.

What if the logical conclusion of this line of reasoning is that the most important things that happen in school cannot and should not be reduced to a number?

What if Rog Lucido is right in saying:

We delude ourselves into thinking we have measured learning because we uncritically accept the premise that 'learning is measurable'.

How many teachers are demoralized or angered about having their complex work reduced to a number but then go to school the next day and do exactly that to their students?

With every crisis there comes an opportunity. Could it be that there is an opportunity for us all to see that neither teaching or learning should be reduced to numbers?

If there's a silver lining to all this I hope it is this:

It wasn't until the system tried to grade teachers that teachers could finally see why they should not be grading students.

For more on abolishing grading from school check out this page.

To join a movement for abolishing grading, check out The Grading Moratorium.

You might also want to check out Alfie Kohn's article The Case Against Grades.

Judging Teachers via Test Scores

I've written before that the US is the anti-model for how to reform education.

Well, they are up to it again. This time New York has released a new way of evaluating teachers.

Diane Ravitch explains:

Last week, the New York State Education Department and the teachers’ unions reached an agreement to allow the state to use student test scores to evaluate teachers. The pact was brought to a conclusion after Governor Andrew Cuomo warned the parties that if they didn’t come to an agreement quickly, he would impose his own solution (though he did not explain what that would be). He further told school districts that they would lose future state aid if they didn’t promptly implement the agreement after it was released to the public. The reason for this urgency was to secure $700 million promised to the state by the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, contingent on the state’s creating a plan to evaluate teachers in relation to their students’ test scores.

The new evaluation system pretends to be balanced, but it is not. Teachers will be ranked on a scale of 1-100. Teachers will be rated as “ineffective, developing, effective, or highly effective.” Forty percent of their grade will be based on the rise or fall of student test scores; the other sixty percent will be based on other measures, such as classroom observations by principals, independent evaluators, and peers, plus feedback from students and parents.

But one sentence in the agreement shows what matters most: “Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall.” What this means is that a teacher who does not raise test scores will be found ineffective overall, no matter how well he or she does with the remaining sixty percent. In other words, the 40 percent allocated to student performance actually counts for 100 percent. Two years of ineffective ratings and the teacher is fired.

As an Albertan, I have seen signs that our education system is perhaps moving in a very different direction than the US.

However when I see someone like Jim Dueck featured in the Edmonton Journal, and Rutherford talk radio show, I get worried.

I get worried because Jim Dueck is involved in reviewing applications for competition for federal funding under Race to the Top. And it is because of Race to the Top that many states are marrying standardized test scores to teacher evaluations.

Next time someone like Jim Dueck gets air time on the radio or face time with the minister of education, I wish they would bring all this to the public's attention.

Canadians should not be too quick to dismiss the idea that the lunacy of high stakes standardized testing, vilification of teachers, merit pay and other corporate reforms can come to Canada.

The 49th parallel does not offer some kind of inherent insulator to this madness.

We must all be aware that all it takes for destructive education reforms to become reality is for good teachers, parents & students to say and do nothing.