From the CURMUDGUCATION blog: “Campbell Brown Goes To Boston”

Campbell Brown Goes To Boston
Posted by Peter Greene: 06 Sep 2016 
Campbell Brown has decided to add her two cents to the sprawling debate about raising the charter cap in Massachusetts (and really, why not, because lord knows everyone else has added their two cents, or two million dollars).

Brown’s argument is the same basic one repeated by other charter school proponents:

1) We should do it for the poor children.
2) Unions suck
3) Boston charters have had amazingly awesome results

Or as Brown puts it, “Wow. For Madeloni, her union, and their supporters, Boston charters are an extraordinary menace. Not because they are failing poor children of color, but because they are serving them so well. ”

Each of these points is problematic. Let’s go one at a time…. Here: CURMUDGUCATION: Brown Goes To Boston

America Is Even Less Socially Mobile Than Economists Thought – From The Atlantic magazine online

Sociologists and economists are probably psyched that the work they’ve been doing on inequality and social mobility for decades has finally gotten attention from the average American. But one downside of having your message saturate the media is that people might start to take your findings for granted, which can obscure something that’s true of any data-based endeavor: Researchers are always learning new things, always trying to better map the extent of a phenomenon.

In this spirit, a Pew report out today tells us things about American social mobility that are new—and at the same time all too familiar. Scads of reports have documented how parents’ income dictates how financially successful someone will go on to be. But this report suggests the effects are at the high end of previous estimates. “One might think we’d have nailed it by now, but there was some uncertainty,” says David Grusky, the director of Stanford’s Center on Poverty and Inequality and an author of the report.
Grusky and Pablo Mitnik, his co-author and colleague at the Center on Poverty and Inequality, use a new data set provided to them by the IRS to show that in the U.S., roughly half of parental income advantages are…

Read the full article here: America Is Even Less Socially Mobile Than Economists Thought – The Atlantic

FBI Raids Former SAT Exec Manual Alfaro’s Home; Alfaro Posts on LinkedIn Next Day | From the ‘deutsch29’ blog

On August 26, 2016, Reuters reported that the FBI raided the home of former College Board exec Manuel Alfaro, in connection with a leak of over 400 SAT test items to Reuters earlier the same month.

According to Reuters, the FBI “seized computers and other material” from Alfaro’s residence.

Alfaro has been publicly posting his concerns about the redesigned SAT in detail for months on LinkedIn, and he continues to post on LinkedIn the day following the raid, August 27, 2016.

Below is Alfaro’s August 27th post, in full, which he begins with a bold declaration:  https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2016/08/27/fbi-raids-former-sat-exec-manual-alfaros-home-alfaro-posts-on-linkedin-next-day/

FBI Raids Home of SAT Whistle Blower

Diane Ravitch's blog

Mercedes Schneider writes here about the strange events surrounding Manuel Alfaro, an ex-College Board employee who has been complaining loudly about the defects of the redesigned SAT.

His home was raided by the FBI, very likely searching to find out if he was the one who released 400 test items to the media.

The day after the raid, he wrote a long commentary about the flaws of the new SAT.

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Court Seal Put On Whistleblower’s Account of Coleman’s SAT Wrongdoing | From ‘kavips’ blog

Court Seal Put On Whistleblower’s Account of Coleman’s SAT Wrongdoing by kavips

It takes a little sleuthing to figure out what happened.

In a nutshell the game was up when Manuel Alfaro, who was the executive director of assessment design and development at the College Board went online at Linkdin and posted some cryptic messages.  Over time this was his story.

Coleman brought him in a month after his takeover of  SAT by Common Core. Coleman to meet test deadlines simply transferred Common Core’s material over to the SAT data base and had hired Alfaro to create a fake research and development operation to get around copyright laws… Basically his job was to make it look like it was not stolen.

The test was published and distributed before being proof read.  Proof readers were eventually hired but after the test had been sent out… The May 2016 test was this test, it is the one Juniors took in Delaware to determine… whatever…  Small problems in this test were wrong answers marked as right ones, or no correct answer available among the 5 options. Bigger problems involved the “fake” questions now regularly inserted in such tests which do not count towards the score and are only there to test their quality for use in future tests.  These inserted questions were so difficult and time consuming, they prevented students from finishing the test.  Hence the scores of May 2016 will be lower than years past.

However Alfaro though he lived through it, does not have the tests. Therefore he was appealing to several states including Delaware, to use the transparency clauses in their contracts to bypass the College Board’s proprietary restrictions and have them find the questions, answers, and details to back up what he lived through…

His computer has been confiscated by the FBI.  Now, because of this court case, a gag order has been levied upon him and all involved and all relevant documents have been put under court seal.

Simultaneous to this, Reuters is reporting …

Read the full blog post here: 

https://kavips.wordpress.com/2016/09/06/court-seal-put-on-whistleblowers-account-of-colemans-sat-wrongdoing/