School vouchers and student achievement: Reviewing the research – from the Journalist’s Resource

“Vouchers have been neither the rousing success imagined by proponents nor the abject failure predicted by opponents,” say the authors of the NBER paper, which was led by Dennis Epple of Carnegie Mellon University. The programs show “no consistent, robust pattern.”

Amid such a heated debate, journalists should be mindful of who is presenting voucher research. Studies can be massaged to bolster the claims of one side or the other. Education policy researchers Christopher Lubienski and T. Jameson Brewer of the University of Illinois single out Ed Choice — the advocacy group founded by Milton Friedman — and warn that it over-emphasizes research that is not as strong as it suggests. Some of the findings that Ed Choice presents as bolstering the case for vouchers leave out caveats explicitly flagged by the authors themselves. “Advocacy based on this research is misguided and should be based on potentially stronger claims,” Lubienski and Brewer write in a 2016 study for thePeabody Journal of Education. “[T]he empirical results are relatively modest at best, and sometimes negative, not to mention incoherent and contested.”

http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/education/school-vouchers-choice-student-achievement

Update on Third-Grade Retention Bill – Fix the mitten

 

 

HERE’S AN UPDATE ON THE THIRD-GRADE RETENTION BILL, HB 4822

Tuesday evening, the House and Senate conferees reached a compromise by a vote of 5-1 (you can read the conference report here).  Lawmakers could vote on the conference committee’s recommendations as early as Wednesday.
 
Most notably, the conference report eliminates language that would have permitted the granting of a good-cause exemption to a third-grade pupil who is not proficient in reading upon the recommendation of his or her principal and reading teacher (other types of good-cause exemptions remain in the bill).

By Nick Krieger (@nckrieger):

Michigan House Bill 4822, the third-grade retention bill, has finally emerged from conference committee.  The bill shares many similarities with the controversial Florida third-grade retention law, as well as ALEC model legislation.

Last October, the Michigan House of Representatives passed HB 4822 by a vote of 57-48.  The bill was then sent to the Michigan Senate, which made amendments and passed a different version of the bill by a vote of 31-6 in March.  The bill was transferred back to the Michigan House, which failed to concur in the Senate substitute.  Accordingly, it was sent to conference committee where it has remained since April.

Tuesday evening, the House and Senate conferees reached a compromise by a vote of 5-1 (you can read the conference report here).  Lawmakers could vote on the conference committee’s recommendations as early as Wednesday.

Most notably, the conference report eliminates language that would have permitted the granting of a good-cause exemption to a third-grade pupil who is not proficient in reading upon the recommendation of his or her principal and reading teacher (other types of good-cause exemptions remain in the bill).  A few other minor changes were made as well.

Overall, the bill remains similar in substance to the original legislation.  It would still require:

—> go here for the rest of the post… Update on Third-Grade Retention Bill – Fix the mitten

Top Six US Problems worse than Terrorism | Informed Comment

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment)

“So here are some problems that are demonstrably worse than terrorism:

“1. Guns. Between 2001 and 2013, over 400,000 Americans died of gunshot wounds. In the same period, 3,380 died of terrorism. One problem seems orders of magnitude more important than the other, despite the numbers being skewed by the inclusion of the highly unusual mass-casualty event of 9/11. Averaged out, about 282 Americans have died in terrorism per year (it falls to more like 9 if you start in 2002). per year. We are told we have to spend trillions, mobilize police and the military, and give our all to end terrorism.

“2. Cigarettes . These nasty nail coffins result in more than 480,000 deaths annually in the USA. But Big Tobacco CEOs are not being threatened with deportation.

“3. Suicide: 42,773. Expanded mental health care and ore government-funded suicide crisis centers might help, but no one on Capitol Hill is in a frenzy about this one. Veterans are particularly at risk here. Again, Congress doesn’t care.

“4. Automobile collisions (they aren’t “accidents) killed 38,000 people last year, a big rise. Lots of things could be done to decrease this number radically. For instance you could make automobile keys that drunk people don’t have enough coordination to use. But no one cares enough to do them.

“5. War on terror. Nearly 7,000 Americans have died prosecuting the war on terror. My guess is that well over half a million human beings have died in it. There is no evidence that the war in Iraq, e.g. had any effect in reducing terrorism, and there is every reason to think that the invasion vastly expanded the scope of ME war and terrorism.

“6. Heat waves kill as many as 1400 Americans each year. Climate change will cause that statistic to rise 20 times over, to 27,000 a year, in the coming decades. That is, over a 50-year period, some 1,350,000 people will die that otherwise would not have. Yet no one is speaking of deporting the CEOs of big hydrocarbon companies.”

Read the full essay here: Top Six US Problems worse than Terrorism | Informed Comment

From Peter Greene’s CURMUDGUCATION blog: Grade Inflation?

Petrilli’s basic argument is that grades are high and BS Test scores are low, therefor the grades must be inflated. There are several problems with his assumptions here.

Grade Inflation?
Posted: 21 Sep 2016 06:08 AM PDT
Mike Petrilli (Fordham) is concerned about grade inflation.

His concern, as expressed in a recent piece at Education Next, is hung on the hook of a recent-ish survey by Learning Heroes , a new group sponsored by the same old folks (Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Helmsley) that has partnered with some other outfits funded by the same people, like Great Schools (funded by Gates, Bloomberg, Helmsley, Walton) to help sell the notion that Big Standardized Testing is Really Important and we should care about it.

The Learning Heroes survey found that 90 percent of parents believe their child is performing at grade level or better. As you might expect, I don’t put a lot of stock in what Learning Heroes have to say, but I can believe that their finding on this point is not far off the mark. Setting aside the construct of “grade level” (as Petrilli also does), I’m not sure that this finding doesn’t say more about parental love than parental academic acumen. Sometimes we lose sight of how a poll actually works, but I ask you to imagine for a minute– a stranger calls you on the phone and asks you to say how smart and accomplished your child is. What do you say? “Yeah, my kids kind of slow and behind,” probably isn’t it.

But for Petrilli, this feeds into a narrative that reformsters have been pushing for over a decade– the public schools are lying to parents about what is being accomplished.

Providing a more honest assessment of student performance was one of the goals of the Common Core initiative and the new tests created by states that are meant to align to the new, higher standards.

That’s Petrilli’s polite way of putting it. Arne Duncan, you will recall, said that white suburban moms were going to be upset to find out their kids weren’t as smart as they thought. At one point reformsters were trying to sell us the Honesty Gap , a method of crunching numbers to determine just how much your state education system was lying to you. This has been the recurring narrative– your teachers, your schools, even your state, has been lying to you about how well your kids are doing, and only federally crafted standards backed up by Big Standardized Tests can tell you the truth.

Pertrilli is no dope; he understands the challenge here for testing industry salespersons

Conscientious parents are constantly getting feedback about the academic performance of their children, almost all of it from teachers. We see worksheets and papers marked up on a daily or weekly basis; we receive report cards every quarter; and of course there’s the annual (or, if we’re lucky, semiannual) parent-teacher conference. If the message from most of these data points is “your kid is doing fine!” then it’s going to be tough for a single “score report” from a distant state test administered months earlier to convince us otherwise. After all, who knows my kid better: his or her teacher, or a faceless test provider?

He dismisses the old test reports as impenetrably complex, and touts instead the new, improved PARCC reports, which a transparent in the sense that one can clearly see that they provide next to zero useful information. But Petrilli argues that these reports soft-pedal the real results, and that we should look sixth graders in the eye and give them the cold hard truth. Nobody, he says, wants to incite a riot and “tell parents to grab a pitchfork and march down to their school demanding an explanation for lofty-yet-false grades their kids have gotten for years on end,” but on the other hand, he says, “maybe they should.”

This is the new pitch. Grade inflation. Petrilli has been asking folks to chime in with a possible solution to the grade inflation problem. My response, when asked, is that first I have to be convinced it exists.

Petrilli’s basic argument is that grades are high and BS Test scores are low, therefor the grades must be inflated. There are several problems with his assumptions here… -> Source: CURMUDGUCATION: Grade Inflation?

How the 1% Rigged the Debates Against 3rd Party Candidates

How the 1% Rigged the Debates Against 3rd Party Candidates
by John Laurits
With the apparently unreasonable hope of being represented, sane conservatives & millions of progressives who were disenfranchised by the “democratic” party are now choosing to support third party presidential candidates, despite the fact that the “winner-takes-all” electoral college has stacked the deck against them. Faced with the two most disliked candidates in history & with nearly half of the US identifying as independents, […]

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John Laurits | September 20, 2016 at 10:35 pm | Tags: Commission on Presidential Debates, Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, polls, Third Party | Categories: According to Math, Bernie Sanders, news | URL: http://wp.me/p5FXIJ-DU