Cluster event

Race to the Top was driven by a bureaucratic application process. The demands were so onerous that the Gates Foundation offered $250,000 grants to 16 favored states to help hire consultants to pen their grant applications. Racing to meet program deadlines, states slapped together proposals stuffed with empty promises. States promised to adopt “scalable and sustained strategies for turning around clusters of low-performing schools” and “clear, content-rich, sequenced, spiraled, detailed curricular frameworks.” Applications ran to hundreds of jargon-laden pages, including appendices replete with missing pages, duplicate pages, and everything from Maya Angelou’s poetry to letters of support from anyone who might sign a paper pledge. As one reviewer described it to me, “We knew the states were lying. The trick was figuring out who was lying the least.”

Lofty Promises But Little Change for America’s Schools by Frederick Hess

Best Wishes in Your Search for Truth

Truth in American Education

Americans rightly have voiced these concerns that we address:

■Operating outside of the system of checks and balances that Americans rely on is dangerous to our freedoms. They are an affront to parents’ rights, the 10th Amendment and our tradition of local control over education.
■The mixing of public, corporate and foundation money without proper accountability is troublesome, as taxpayers contribute a significant portion of education funding.
■A one-size-fits-all set of national standards, curriculum and testing controlled by a few will affect us all.
■Impacts to public school, private school and home school education will be felt, as mandates increase and curriculum choices will diminish.
■Students are not widgets and require individualized learning. More top-down control is not in the best interests of educating individual students.

Truth in American Education provides information to parents, taxpayers, school board members, educators and legislators who are concerned about these issues. At the heart of it, the disposition of these issues will determine whether the federal government and elite, special interest groups have the right to form the hearts and minds of children and whether we will reject, or affirm, the concepts laid down by our founding principles.

wake me when it's over

cross-posted to the Irvington Parents Forum:

I attended a meeting on the Race to the Top teacher evaluation protocols up in Bedford, and the new regs are a horror.

I’m completely off the boat with RTTT. If even half of what I heard the other night is true, schools are going to become a compliance nightmare beyond imagining as every teacher in the state receives annual ratings of “highly effective” and all probationary teachers are granted the right to years of appeals when they don’t get tenure. This is the ultimate bad law.

I talked to a number of school board members coming out of the meeting as well as one assistant superintendent. They were reeling.

Preview of coming attractions: under the new law, a school with 40 teachers could have ALL FORTY TEACHERS appeal their RTTT-mandated evaluations AT THE SAME TIME, and the principal would be required to respond to all 40 appeals on deadline and with multiple documents and timelines and rationales and data sets and god knows what else in order.

Schools will have to hire armies of administrators to process all the appeals. More likely, everyone will be rated Highly Effective forever.

Tsunami.

New York, New York

How did this happen?

New York’s placement among the finalists had been anything but certain, even though Mr. Duncan has frequently praised New York City’s school improvement efforts under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. But the competition barred states with laws that prohibit the use of student achievement data to evaluate teachers, and New York has a law that seemed to fit that criteria. But the state argued that the law banned the use of such data only in making teacher tenure decisions. The law sunsets at the end of June.

Merryl H. Tisch, chancellor of the state Board of Regents, said Thursday that she believed the Legislature needed to pass a law raising the state’s cap on charter schools before New York could be awarded money.

New York Is Among Finalists for U.S. School Grants by Sam Dillon - March 4, 2010

Here was Joe Williams, in August:

In my home state (New York) we’ve got big problems with a law on the books that prevents student performance from being used in making teacher tenure decisions. The law is so bad, that when reporters wrote about it last year, not even the teachers union would claim credit for having pushed it through the legislature. So yeah, New York should have to adios this law before it can apply for Race To The Top funding, especially since nobody seems to want to defend it anyway. If New York doesn’t lift a finger and it gets funding in the Race, Obama and Duncan will essentially be lifting a finger (you know which one) to all of the other states that are doing everything they can to show they are ready for change and reform.

New York loses Race to the Top Funds?

I haven't followed the ins and outs, so this is all I've got.

NCTQ report recommends CO adopt Singapore Math

The National Center on Teacher Quality released a report entitled: Race to the top: Colorado may be used to high altitudes but can it compete in Race to the Top?

Commissioned by the Piton Foundation, the Donnell-Kay Foundation, the Colorado Children's Campaign and the Public Education & Business Coalition, the report suggests 7 strategies the state might take while applying for the RTT funds.

• Strategy 1: Performance management (Teacher Evaluation, Tenure & Dismissal) - Given the tremendous impact teachers have on learning, no strategy a state will take on is likely to have a greater impact on student achievement than one that seeks to maximize teacher and principal performance.

• Strategy 2: Equitable Distribution of Teachers and Principals - Schools serving children living in poverty are more apt to employ teachers with lower qualifications than schools serving more affluent children.

• Strategy 3: Induction - CO should develop a statewide system of induction support for new teachers, particularly in its high needs and remote rural schools.

• Strategy 4: Compensation Reform - CO needs to move away from lockstep salary schedules towards a system that differentiates salary on a number of factors, including teacher effectiveness, the relative difficulty of a school setting and the demand for teachers with particular skills or knowledge.

• Strategy 5: Teaching in STEM fields: CO should develop a coherent state strategy to address the difficulty school districts face in attracting and retaining sufficient numbers of qualified STEM teachers.

• Strategy6: Statewide Adoption of an Effective Curriculum: Students achieve when 4 elements are in place: Standards, Curriculum, Teachers & Assessment.

• Strategy 7: Educator Preparation (Including Alternate Certification) - In spite of countless studies looking at the value of teacher education, we have only been able to learn (apparently) that no single method of teacher preparation yields more effective teachers than another.

I'll be honest, I haven't read through the entire report as yet, however I managed to get through Strategy 6, in which the authors recommend statewide adoption of Singapore Math at the elementary level. The report notes that:

...curriculum has been troublingly absent in conversations about education reform as well as ignored in the indifferent approach some educators take to curricula adoptions.

... the current emphasis on human capital and effective teachers has been at the expense of an equally urgent emphasis on the importance of good curricula.

And when discussing common standards, the report flat-out states:

We would go so far as to say that if the standards were in conflict with the Singapore curriculum, a state ought to consider opting out of the new standards.

Well, you don't hear that everyday!
Read and enjoy.
(Cross-posted at Singapore Math Source)