RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

Mexican Americans and the 2012 elections

Republican myopia regarding Latino voters is turning out to be a huge blessing bestowed on Democrats, as some recent statistics indicate:

Most repeated word in the GOP debate last night: "border" (followed by "illegal" and "fence")Percentage increase in the Phoenix Latino turnount from 2010 to 2011: 480%
Percentage of likely Republican primary voters in Arizona who "said they'd be more inclined to vote for a presidential candidate who backs SB 1070, according to the NBC News/Marist Poll": 67+%
Percentage of Latino respondents saying the GOP 'did not care about their support or was hostile to their commmunity' in a recent Latino Decisions poll conducted for Univision: 72%
Number of GOP presidential candidates who have "voiced support for a broad amnesty that would allow younger illegal immigrants to become permanent legal residents": Zero
Number of Times Rick Santorum said "Jobs" in the debate last night:Zero

From. J. Green. On the Democratic Strategist. blog

For profit schools

On line, for profit schools are exploiting G.I.s, and G.I. benefits.
http://video.pbs.org/video/1901016916/

Duncan and RESPECT for teachers

At the Department of Education, Warm Snow Falls Up

By Anthony Cody on February 23, 2012 10:32 AM

As the Simpson family prepared to travel south of the equator to Brazil, Homer revealed some misconceptions. In opposite land, according to Bart's father, "warm snow falls up." Reading the latest press releases and speeches from the Department of Education, sometimes I feel as if this is where we have arrived.

For the past two years, the Department of Education policies have been roundly criticized by teachers. The latest response from Arne Duncan is a big public relations push bearing the title RESPECT -- Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching.

However, as in Homer's opposite-land, everything seems to be upside down.

In his speech launching the project last week, Secretary Duncan laid out what he feels are the problems afflicting the teaching profession.

The Department has solutions to each of these problems - but they often have pursued policies that actually make things worse. Here are the problems, and the solutions the Department of Ed has offered -- many of which are mandatory if states wish to qualify for Race to the Top or escape the ravages of NCLB:

Problem #1: "Many of our schools of education are mediocre at best. A staggering 62 percent of young teachers say they felt unprepared to enter the classroom."

Solution: Evaluate schools of education based on the test scores of the teachers they graduate. Use VAM scores to rate schools of education, and remove funding from those that do not produce teachers with sufficiently high VAM ratings. Since VAM ratings have been shown to be lower among teachers of English Language learners and special education students, programs that place teachers in these classrooms are likely to do poorly. All schools of education will feel significant pressure to prepare their teachers to focus on test scores.

Problem #2: "Many teachers are poorly trained and isolated in their classrooms."

Solution: Continue to support programs such as Teach For America, which places novice teachers in the most challenging classrooms with only five weeks of training.

Problem #3: "Teachers are given little time to succeed--and they are under increasing pressure to get results to meet accountability targets."

Bizarre. What agency of the federal government made competitive grants and the continuation of federal funding contingent on whether states created evaluation programs like the one released last week in New York, that will result in teachers being fired after two years of poor VAM ratings?

Ravitch: Teachers Should be Evaluated

Excerpt:

 

Of course, teachers should be evaluated. They should be evaluated by experienced principals and peers. No incompetent teacher should be allowed to remain in the classroom. Those who can’t teach and can’t improve should be fired. But the current frenzy of blaming teachers for low scores smacks of a witch-hunt, the search for a scapegoat, someone to blame for a faltering economy, for the growing levels of poverty, for widening income inequality.

 

 The New York Review of Books

No Student Left Untested

Diane Ravitch

February 21, 2012

 

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/feb/21/no-student-left-untested/

Respect for Teachers

Billed as a new initiative to rebuild the teaching profession and elevate teacher voice, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s new RESPECT Project (which stands for Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence, and Collaborative Teaching) seeks to involve teachers and principals in a national conversation about teaching. The work builds on the more than 100 roundtable discussions that the Department of Education’s Teaching Ambassador Fellows have had with fellow teachers across the country and will continue to have throughout the year.
 
During a teacher town hall to launch the RESPECT Project, Duncan outlined his goals for revamping the teaching profession, which include

▪                Improving teacher preparation programs;

▪                Dramatically increasing teacher salaries and tying pay to job performance, skills, and demonstrated leadership ability;

▪                Establishing career ladders that allow for advancement and leadership opportunities without requiring teachers to completely leave the classroom;

▪                Improving professional development and providing teachers more time for meaningful collaboration;

▪                Providing teachers with greater classroom autonomy balanced with more accountability; and

Greece and California budgets

Pain without Gain.  Paul Krugman. 2/20/12. NYT.

“And this downturn is hitting nations that have never recovered from the last recession. For all America’s troubles, its gross domestic product has finally surpassed its pre-crisis peak; Europe’s has not. And some nations are suffering Great Depression-level pain: Greece and Ireland have had double-digit declines in output, Spain has 23 percent unemployment, Britain’s slump has now gone on longer than its slump in the 1930s.

Worse yet, European leaders — and quite a few influential players here — are still wedded to the economic doctrine responsible for this disaster.

For things didn’t have to be this bad. Greece would have been in deep trouble no matter what policy decisions were taken, and the same is true, to a lesser extent, of other nations around Europe’s periphery. But matters were made far worse than necessary by the way Europe’s leaders, and more broadly its policy elite, substituted moralizing for analysis, fantasies for the lessons of history.

Specifically, in early 2010 austerity economics — the insistence that governments should slash spending even in the face of high unemployment — became all the rage in European capitals. The doctrine asserted that the direct negative effects of spending cuts on employment would be offset by changes in “confidence,” that savage spending cuts would lead to a surge in consumer and business spending, while nations failing to make such cuts would see capital flight and soaring interest rates. If this sounds to you like something Herbert Hoover might have said, you’re right: It does and he did.

Fix poverty , not add more tests

Mercedes Olivera
Tests, tests and more tests won’t fix the problems with our nation’s schools.
More funding would certainly help in an era of widespread state budget deficits.
But the real problem, says Stephen Krashen, is poverty.
Stephen Krashen.

That’s the message the linguistics and education scholar gave to bilingual educators at the annual conference of the National Association for Bilingual Education. About 3,000 educators attended the event in Dallas this week.
Krashen has a point.
It’s become almost axiomatic these days to talk about America’s educational system as “broken.” U.S. students do poorly on tests when compared with those in other countries, especially in math and science.
But recent studies also reveal that U.S. students from middle-class families and
well-funded schools outscore students in nearly all other countries.
“Our average scores are less than spectacular because the U.S. has the highest percentage of children in poverty of all industrialized countries,” said Krashen, professor emeritus at the University of Southern California.
“People think that our schools were once very good and that they have declined, and the best way to make them better, as good as they were in the good old days, is ‘rigorous’ standards and tests to enforce the standards. But the assumptions aren’t true.”