By John Thompson. This is the second of two posts on Joel Klein’s spin and misstatement of facts. The first is here. I mostly want to check the supposedly objective facts of Klein’s Lessons of Hope, but I have to start this one by challenging one of his interpretations of facts. Klein rejected the …
By Anthony Cody. When the history of modern education reform is written one of the most shameful chapters will be the continued embrace of various forms of “Value Added Models” for purposes of measuring the effectiveness of teachers in raising test scores. This month, the Department of Education is asking for …
By Anthony Cody. New York principal Carol Burris’ latest post is infuriating. In it, she describes the inaccurate data that the New York state Department of Education has published which fails to show the true number of students attending college. The Department of Ed published the faulty data by district …
By Anthony Cody. The following terms have taken on special meaning as the religion of test-worship has taken over our schools. Those not raised in the church of Father Coleman might benefit from a translation into plain English. This lexicon reflects a complete worldview. The enthusiastic embrace of these meanings …
By John Thompson. Valerie Strauss does a great service for students and schools by showcasing the “small but growing number of teachers who are refusing to administer standardized tests that they think are harmful to their students and publicly explaining why they are doing so, sometimes at the risk of being …
By Anthony Cody. It is a strange commentary on the news media that the best portrait of what is happening in America comes to us from a former chef by the name of Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain’s show last week took him back to Massachusetts, where he first started working as a dishwasher and cook. He found much has …
By M. Shannon Hernandez. Teachers, parents, and administrators are raising their voices louder, and in solidarity, as unrealistic demands for students are being handed down from education policy makers and corporate reformers. It is becoming apparent that we’ve had enough of the testing, enough of the scripted, …
By Sarah Lahm. Wham, VAM, here comes a public airing of teacher evaluation data for all Minneapolis Public Schools teachers, just in time for the 2014 election. Sources tell me that Minneapolis’ largest newspaper, the StarTribune, will publish teacher evaluation information, based on SOEI (Standards of Effective …
By John Thompson. Anthony Cody’s The Educator and the Oligarch recalls his 2012 debate with representatives of the Gates Foundation. He summarized the work of education scholar Linda Darling-Hammond, mathematician John Ewing, and the American Statistical Association when explaining why value-added models …
By Anthony Cody. When I visited the Gates Foundation a few years ago, one phrase stuck with me. “You can only manage what you can measure,” I was told. This is the underlying framework of our 21st century accountability paradigm. On the 2008 presidential primary campaign trail, candidates Obama and …
