Mister Journalism: "Reading, Sharing, Discussing, Learning"
"Dedicated to the premise that no matter what 'experts' say, trends in Education really are fleeting; and that the ONLY goal of all school employees should be to work with parents to help their students become better people in June than they were in September."
LOLGOP has posted a new item, ‘GOP, it’s time to give 9 or 10 candidates a
participation award and send them home’, at Eclectablog
You may view the latest post at
http://www.eclectablog.com/2015/10/gop-its-time-to-give-9-or-10-candidates-a-participation-award-and-send-them-home.html
What is the purpose of this website? This blog records the investigatory work of Garson O’Toole who diligently seeks the truth about quotations. Who really said what? This question often cannot be answered with complete finality, but approximate solutions can be iteratively improved over time.
Who uses this website? Articles on the Quote Investigator website have been cited by journalists and writers at The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Economist, The Washington Post, Slate, The Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, Real Clear Politics, The Jacksonville Times-Union, A Way With Words (Public Radio Program), ABC Television News, ABC (Australia), and more.
People are sharing what they have discovered on the website via multiple social media channels including: Twitter, Reddit, Google+, YCombinator News, Quora, StumbleUpon, FaceBook, Pinterest, Tumblr, Slashdot, and Metafilter.
John F. Kennedy? Ralph Waldo Emerson? Anonymous?
Find out here:
CURMUDGUCATION By Peter Greene
A grumpy old teacher trying to keep up the good classroom fight
in the new age of reformy stuff.
|
| The Only Good Standardized Test
Posted: 30 Oct 2015 04:20 AM PDT As testing has risen once again to the surface of the ed policy soup, I have found myself in versions of the same conversation, because people who like the idea of standardized testing really like the idea of standardized testing, and because I said the number of necessary standardized tests is zero.
Jennifer Borgioli Binis challenged me to be a little more precise in my language. I took exception to Robert Pondiscio’s assertion that data from tests are the life blood of education and he took exception with my exception. Someone in the comments called me a “union shill.” And a reporter asked me what the alternative to standardized testing would be. It’s a fair question. Is there such a thing as a useful standardized test? Find the answer here->
|
Flint police are reviewing an incident where a city police officer handcuffed a child at a Flint school.
Flint Police Chief James Tolbert says he has apologized to the mother of the child who was handcuffed.
Rick Pluta from Michigan Public Radio reports that two state lawmakers have forged a bipartisan effort to take Michigan off Daylight Saving Time. If they get their way, Sunday would be the final time Michiganders have to re-set their clocks to accommodate the time change.
State Representatives Jeff Irwin, D-Ann Arbor, and Peter Lucido, R-Shelby Township, say the twice-a-year time change is inconvenient, confusing, and can even be dangerous to people’s health and safety.
More on this here – http://michiganradio.org/post/lawmakers-want-ditch-daylight-saving-time
Michigan Public Radio reports that there were feelings of optimism earlier this week in Lansing that the state Senate might just pass a road funding plan the House passed the week before. But, once again, that optimism has fallen flat, as the House adjourned without a vote after about eight hours of discussion.
The full report is here – http://michiganradio.org/post/house-adjourns-without-vote-roads-plan-once-again-stuck-mud
Response to President Obama’s open letter to parents and teachers on testing
“Like you, we want to know how our children are doing in school. But we really don’t learn much from standardized test reports released months into the next school year on tests that seem to change every year. We learn much more from our students’ report cards, teacher conferences, and reviewing schoolwork over time – information that Department of Education policies have pushed to the sidelines.”
– See more at: http://parentsacrossamerica.org/paa-responds-president-obamas-letter-testing/#sthash.B2fEeZWj.AZKs92um.dpuf
New Report: Federal Funds For Charter Schools Go Into A ‘Black Hole ’ http://owl.li/TMpEo
America’s experiment with charter schools has thus far generated academic results that are mixed, at best. Another promise, that these schools would be more educationally “innovative,” is also generally unfulfilled so far.
Adding to those uncertainties posed by charter schools is another: Very little is known about how these schools have spent over $3.7 billion the federal government has used to fuel expansion of the charter industry since 1995. (https://www.facebook.com/EmpathyEducates/?fref=nf)
LOLGOP has posted a new item, ‘Republicans want to talk about fantasy economics,
not fantasy football’, at Eclectablog
You may view the latest post at
http://www.eclectablog.com/2015/10/republicans-want-to-talk-about-fantasy-economics-not-fantasy-football.html
BOULDER, CO (October 30, 2015) — For 15 years, journalists, advocates and policymakers have cited scores on international tests, such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), to conclude that American student achievement “lags woefully behind” other nations, threatening our future and suggesting an urgent need for education reform.A brief published today by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado Boulder explores such policy analyses and claims around PISA as well as a second prominent international test, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS).
In International Test Score Comparisons and Educational Policy: A Review of the Critiques, Stanford education professor Martin Carnoy focuses on four main critiques of analyses that use average PISA scores as a comparative measure of student achievement.
The ranking is misleading, Carnoy asserts, because:
Professor Carnoy also assesses the underlying social meaning and education policy value of international comparisons. First, he describes problems with claims that average national math scores are accurate predictors of future economic growth. Second, he explains that using scoring data in this manner has limited use for establishing education policy, due to the lack of causal inference analysis. This is the well-known “correlation is not causation” problem.
Third, there is a conflict of interest arising from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (which administers the PISA) and its member governments acting as a testing agency while simultaneously serving as data analyst and interpreter of results for policy purposes.
Fourth, Carnoy questions the usefulness of nation-level test score comparisons with regard to countries such as the United States with such diverse and complex education systems. The differences between states in the U.S. are so large that employing state-level test results over time to examine the impact of education policies would be more useful and interesting.
Despite such compelling critiques of international testing, Carnoy concludes that these tests will not go away, nor will they stop being wrongly applied to shape educational policy. However, he says, “there are changes that could be made to reduce misuse.” He concludes with five policy recommendations, including reporting test results by family academic resource subgroups of students with different levels of resources.
In a companion report released today by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), Carnoy and co-authors Emma García and Tatiana Khavenson provide detailed analyses explaining how and why comparisons using data at the level of U.S. states are more useful than comparing the U.S. with other countries for understanding and improving student performance.
Find International Test Score Comparisons and Educational Policy: A Review of the Critiques by Martin Carnoy on the web at:
http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/international-test-scores
.
Stuff That Needs To Be Said
My thoughts on public education and other things
A site to discuss better education for all
Revive, Rally and Recover Public Schools
Elected school boards are the bedrock of American democracy.
Bringing awareness to mental illness and sexual assault
Communications for the Godfrey-Lee Public Schools community
an indie author writing to stay sane
Just another Delaware WordPress.com weblog
Attacks on our public education system hurt America
Independent Thought for an Independent World
"That all citizens will be given an equal start through a sound education is one of the most basic, promised rights of our democracy. Our chronic refusal as a nation to guarantee that right for all children.... is rooted in a kind of moral blindness, or at least a failure of moral imagination.... It is a failure which threatens our future as a nation of citizens called to a common purpose... tied to one another by a common bond." —Senator Paul Wellstone --- March 31, 2000
Speaking My MInd
Mister Journalism: "Reading, Sharing, Discussing, Learning" 