Schooled for Failure: California's k-12 Crisis

Bill Raden

“You can see a big difference between students who have gone to preschool and who have not,” Jones told Capital & Main in her tidily organized classroom. Aggravating the situation, she adds, is that Angeles Mesa is surrounded by charter schools that tend to siphon higher achieving students and attract more motivated parents, who are drawn as much by safety concerns as academic excellence. That has created an additional inequality within an inequality, as Angeles Mesa is left with a disproportionate population of underachievers lacking in basic social and learning skills.

“It is definitely difficult to have a child come into kindergarten who’s never been read to,” Jones explained. “And it’s not that they haven’t been read to because their parents don’t want to — it’s just when you’re a single mom and you’re working four jobs, it doesn’t always work out that way.”

If there is a lesson in evidence-based research for California policy makers, say Orfield and Gandara, it is that there are limitations to what even the most inspired teachers alone can achieve in a society plagued with inequities.

U.S. kids in more poverty than Europe/West

UNICEF: U.S. kids worse off than many of their Western counterparts By Caitlin Dewey and Max Fisher April 18, 2013 Washington Post The report, which compares kids in 29 Western countries, measures well-being across five metrics: material well-being, health and safety, behaviors and risks, housing and environment, as well as education. It ranks the United States in the bottom third on all five measures of well-being and particularly low on education and poverty. The American children are on average worse off than children in Western Europe and barely better off than their counterparts in the Baltic states and the former Yugoslavia, according to a recent report from United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on the welfare of children in developed countries.

Testing and education stupidity

This is an issue which media pundits- and politicians-  ignore or do not understand.
From Diane Ravitch.

The assault on public education and the teaching profession is now in full swing, as states scramble to qualify for the billions of federal funds in President Obama's Race to the Top program. The latest outrage just occurred in Florida, where state legislators passed an extraordinarily stupid piece of legislation. This law abolishes teacher tenure and ties teacher pay to student test scores. In addition, the state will no longer consider either education or experience as factors in teachers' compensation. What teachers earn will depend on their students' test scores.
The economists who floated this bad idea, perhaps as a theoretical exercise, should step up to the plate and take responsibility for what they have wrought. This path devalues education, devalues whatever cannot be measured, and undermines teachers' morale. It may be that high school students, with a few weeks' training, can produce even higher test scores in basic skills than teachers with National Board Certification. If so, we should turn the schools over to anyone with a pulse and forget about professionalism. We may be the first nation in the world with a federal program intended to dumb down our schools and destroy the teaching profession.
You know how easily the test scores may be corrupted when high stakes are attached to them. For those who don't know, may I recommend that they read chapter eight of my new book, which demonstrates how high-stakes accountability has promoted cheating by teachers, principals, districts, and states. The polite term for cheating is "gaming the system." For those who want to learn more, read Richard Rothstein's Grading Education and Daniel Koretz's Measuring Up. And if you want to see the latest research on how pointless it is to evaluate teachers by test scores, even by "value-added assessment," read chapter nine of my new book.

On Leadership, democracy, and schooling

Deborah Meier on Leadership, democracy, and schooling

http://deborahmeier.com/index.htm