July 1, 2014

Scalia's words on government as "minister of God" with power to avenge.

Whenever the Supreme Court takes center stage, these words return to my mind. They literally scare me.

Justice Scalia: Government is the minister of God with powers to "avenge" to "execute wrath"

This is a video about Dominionism, it is about the part of the religious movement in the US that is not going to go away. We have to keep on being aware and dealing with it.

Joan Bokaer of Cornell University's Theocracy Watch gives a rundown on the growing danger of Dominionism, also known as Christian Reconstructionism, the ideology behind the scenes of Christian extremism in the United States and abroad. An important video for anyone who wants to understand the motives of the American Taliban and what's happening to American politics.

http://www.theocracywatch.org

From the video near the beginning, she quotes the words of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia 2002:
"Government...derives its moral authority from God. It is the minister of God with powers to "avenge" to "execute wrath" including even wrath by the sword."

First Things May 2002

July 1, 2014

A look at testing in the "pre-No Teacher Left Unblamed era". A retired administrator speaks out.

Your Kid Is Being Bullied - But Not in the Way You Think

Dr. James Arnold is retired. Was Assistant Principal at Shaw HS, Principal at Shaw in 2001 and Superintendent of Pelham City
Schools in 2010. He is a published author, has written 7 children’s books and contributes
regularly to the Atlanta Journal and Washington Post on educational matters.

He's also a blogger and recently started his Twitter feed

I remember these days he talks about when standardized testing was used as a tool by both parents and teachers to help guide the students' progress.

Right now your child in public education, from kindergarten through their senior year, is being bullied. Bullied by accountabullies that will tell you the only way public schools and public school teachers can be held accountable is through more and more standardized testing and data driven instruction and data points and data walls and data analyzation and more and more data until they finally prove that testing your kid is necessary and required but testing their kid in a private school is not really important. What?

Almost all of the tests I took during my educational career were teacher -made tests. You remember; those tests that individual teachers constructed designed particularly for the students in their classes that covered a well defined content area or subject. That was back when teachers were trusted and allowed to teach without legislative and Federal over the shoulder intrusiveness. The scores we made on those tests, believe it or not, ended up being a significant part of our grade at the end of each grading period.....

...... Students in the pre-No Teacher Left Unblamed era generally took one or two standardized tests during their educational careers. The Iowa Test of Basic Skills was widely used, but the scores did not define the student or the teacher, and parents may have privately done the happy dance when their kids were in a top percentile but did not hang their heads in shame when their progeny were scored on the wrong end of the bell curve because - this is hard to believe - the information was private and not open for public discussion. No attempts were made to shame students or teachers into higher levels of performance. Unbelievably, the information was sent home to parents, but, more importantly, used by teachers to denote where improvements in instructional focus might occur. There is little chance of that happening today with our post-mortem assessment mentality where the tests are given at the end of the school year and results returned far too late for teachers to affect any sort of learning focus from those results. There were no “gotcha” moments when scores were announced because, well, scores weren’t announced.

Well those days are gone, but it's good to see administrators as well as teachers realizing there really is bullying going on now as far as testing goes.

And it's not going to get any better. In fact Arne Duncan has come up with some theories of his own about all the problems testing will solve.

Dr. Arnold had a guest column in the Atlanta Journal Constitution about that new policy.

Guest post at Atlanta Journal Constitution. The 'bizarro" state of American education today.

July 1, 2014

Dr. Arnold's letter to Arne Duncan. Good to see administrators speaking out also.

http://www.drjamesarnold.com/#!blogger-feed/c48f/post/4526412707198826305

Doctors, Dentists, insurance companies, police officers, lawyers and every other profession you can name are not only allowed but required to take into consideration pre-existing conditions, prior service, previous records and personal history of their clients when computing recommendations, outcomes, professional services, treatments and payments. If you truly consider teaching a profession, can you offer them less? To hold teachers or members of any other profession accountable for things they cannot control is reprehensible.

One of the first things every teacher does at the beginning of a new school year is learn about his/her students. It is incumbent upon administrators to follow that example. Learn about teachers, learn about your profession, learn about those things that motivate teachers to help students succeed at higher and higher academic levels. Learn also the difference in motivations for professional teachers and for corporate reformers. Teachers, as you noted in the past, are indeed members of a profession of “nation builders and societal leaders dedicated to our highest ideals.” Please do not confuse teaching, as you seem to have done, with social engineering and misguided corporate reform for financial gain. We cannot fix every student and we cannot save them all, but we will save every child that we can. You must be the leader out of the wilderness of blame and the wrong headedness of equating student progress to a score on a standardized test. Talk to real teachers. Learn from real teachers. Be a teacher. Lead.

July 1, 2014

Guest post at Atlanta Journal Constitution. The 'bizarro" state of American education today.

Maureen Downey of the AJC hosts an education writer's post about Arne Duncan's policies.

Jim Arnold is a former superintendent of Pelham City Schools. He's written several guest pieces for the Get Schooled blog and has his own blog.

Here is Dr. Jim Arnold's blog.

The 'bizarro" state of American education today. More Joker than Superman?

Education seems to have entered its own Bizarro World with Arne Duncan’s policies and beliefs. President Obama’s appointee to head the U.S. Department of Education, second only to Bill Gates as the most powerful force in US educational policy, believes strongly in the Bizarro theory of educational improvement; whatever research says, do the opposite.

....In the category of “you can’t make this stuff up,” Duncan recently noted the performance of special education students in several states was not meeting his lofty expectations. His solution, again meeting Bizarro requirements, was to raise expectations and subject SPED students to more standardized testing by using National Assessment of Educational Progress as an indicator of their progress.

Even though NAEP was not designed to measure this, Bizarro reasoning says it’s OK because “it’s the best we have.” Parents of students with a learning disability will be happy to know their concerns, fears and worries can be erased with the amazing combination of higher expectations and more testing. Who knew?

...If standardized testing were an effective measure of teacher performance and student academic achievement, why haven’t private schools and post -secondary institutions jumped on the bandwagon so their students would not, so to speak, be left behind. That there is no such groundswell seems to indicate the benefits of standardized testing presented by accountabullies in the name of accountabalism only accrue to public school students.

Isn’t it a shame that the children of those making the rules almost always attend schools exempt from those policies?

Posted at Twitter

June 29, 2014

Duck Dynasty's Jase promotes book in FL church. Rolls onto stage on ATV with pastor.

Just a wee bit sensational in my mind. But he played to a full house at the megachurch in Lakeland, a crowd of 3,600.

Duck Dynasty Star Promotes His New Book in Lakeland


Picture courtesy Lakeland Ledger

Jase Robertson, star of the reality TV series "Duck Dynasty," entertained a capacity audience of about 3,600 Sunday morning at Lakeland's Family Worship Center.

Robertson, part of a Louisiana family whose business revolves around manufacturing duck calls, arrived on the stage at the front of the spacious sanctuary riding an all-terrain vehicle, along with the church's pastor, Reggie Scarborough. Robertson wore camouflage pants, a black T-shirt and black cap. His trademark thick beard was on full display.

Robertson, 44, strode the stage wearing a headset microphone and spoke for about 35 minutes. Anecdotes from the shooting of "Duck Dynasty" generated plenty of laughter, but Robertson repeatedly emphasized the role of Christian faith in his life.

...Family Worship Center is an independent Pentecostal church. Though some in the audience wore suits and dresses, many were attired in jeans or camouflage pants and all manner of "Duck Dynasty" T-shirts.

June 29, 2014

A billionaire reformer when Arne was chosen: The stars are now aligned.

http://www.susanohanian.org/outrage_fetch.php?id=704

The Broad Institute is one of those like Gates and Walton foundations who are taking over public education. Eli Broad trains superintendents who are then chosen to move in and take over school systems in a hostile manner.

One thing about Eli Broad: He can't resist gloating. Note this snippet from The Broad Foundation Annual Report 2009/2010: Entrepreneurship for The Public Good in Education, Science, and the Arts [sic]:


The election of President Barack Obama and his appointment of Arne Duncan, former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, as the U.S. secretary
of education, marked the pinnacle of hope for our work in education reform. In many ways, we feel the stars have finally aligned.

With an agenda that echoes our decade of investments--charter schools, performance pay for teachers, accountability, expanded learning time and national standards--the Obama administration is poised to cultivate and bring to fruition the seeds we and other reformers have planted.

More about Arne from a popular science blogger...yes indeedy I quote bloggers a lot. I find them more honest than the network media.

http://doyle-scienceteach.blogspot.com/2011/06/logic-of-arne.html

The logic of Arne

“Diane Ravitch is in denial and she is insulting all of the hardworking teachers, principals and students all across the country who are proving her wrong every day."
Arne Duncan



This is a fascinating logic statement, and my brain's smoking trying to parse it.

I'm a hard-working teacher, working for a hard-working supervisor, under a hard-working principal. And yes, our test scores have incrementally risen over the past few years, and yes, we're recognized as a nationally distinguished Title 1 school.

Incremental gains in "standardized" tests, tests that have us slapping our foreheads as we push mediocre writing habits on our borderline kids so that we make the grade, hardly counts as education.

Getting through another year of AYP successfully is like passing a ridiculously large and hard stool. You do it because you have to, there's a modicum of relief when it's done, and you pray you haven't done too much damage when passing it.

I'm hanging on to the edge of civility here, but if Arne keeps up his nonsense, I'm going to ask him to perform another bodily function not often mentioned in polite company.

Arne Duncan and Eli Broad are good friends and love to have their pictures taken together.

June 28, 2014

Obama needs to call Arne Duncan out for his new tactics for special education students.

The Secretary of Education of a Democratic administration has just announced that he is pushing for a harder curriculum and expanded testing for students with special needs.

This is a dangerous thing to say, and it will do much harm. I expect there to be someone in authority telling Arne Duncan the truth about this policy. So far, nothing but outrage from educators. No leaders in politics in power telling him he is wrong.

If the president does not approve of this new idea of Arne's that problems of special education will be solved by harder curriculum and more testing, then he should say so. If he is silent then it must be assumed he is either unaware of it or he agrees.

It is a dangerous and harmful policy.

Arne Duncan Proposes New Accountability for Special Education by Diane Ravitch.

Duncan actually said the following: “We know that when students with disabilities are held to high expectations and have access to a robust curriculum, they excel.”

Really? Guess he doesn’t know that not all special needs will disappear with the right curriculum, standards, and testing. Guess he subscribes to the same thinking as school administrators who believe kids will outgrow their learning disabilities and differences, thereby requiring fewer support services as they mature. That’s one way to justify cutbacks in the services they need and the special educators and therapists who administer them.

Yes, we should have high expectations for children with special needs. But access to a “robust curriculum” is not the answer. Nor is testing them. Nor is threatening their teachers and schools in the same manner as Duncan’s approach to general education.

There is more about it in the Washington Post.

Obama expands use of standardized tests for special-needs and American Indian students

The president and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, have for years been using student standardized test scores to hold students, teachers and principals “accountable” even though assessment experts say they aren’t reliable enough to be used for that purpose. Assessment experts say that tests should be used only for the purpose for which they were designed and nothing else, yet the administration keeps finding additional ways to use standardized test results in ways that are questionable.

Earlier this week, Duncan announced that the administration was tightening its oversight of states in regard to how they educate special-needs students, applying more stringent criteria. From now on, the department will not only consider whether proper procedures are being conducted but on outcomes, including how well these students score on standardized tests and the achievement gap, based on test scores, between students with and without disabilities.

How well special education students perform on a test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, will be one of the factors considered. This marks the first time that NAEP scores have been attached to any education policy that has potential consequences; the Education Department could withhold federal funds to states that don’t comply with the new special education regulations, though officials there said that is not something they want to do. But NAEP, a test given every two years to a nationally representative sampling of students, wasn’t designed for this purpose. When asked by reporters about whether using NAEP for this purpose was turning it into a high-stakes test, Duncan said, “I wouldn’t call it high stakes.” He said his department was using NAEP because, however “imperfect,” it was the “only accurate measurement we have.”

One of the latest twitter pics says it more clearly than I ever could.

June 27, 2014

Arne Duncan and Special Education – A Dangerous Mixture

Arne Duncan and Special Education – A Dangerous Mixture

I said I was on vacation and not posting again after Monday, but on the eve of my departure, this came crawling across my Facebook feed via my fellow ChicagoNow blogger, Chicago Public Fools:

Arne Duncan Proposes New Accountability for Special Education by Diane Ravitch.

Duncan actually said the following: “We know that when students with disabilities are held to high expectations and have access to a robust curriculum, they excel.”

Really? Guess he doesn’t know that not all special needs will disappear with the right curriculum, standards, and testing. Guess he subscribes to the same thinking as school administrators who believe kids will outgrow their learning disabilities and differences, thereby requiring fewer support services as they mature. That’s one way to justify cutbacks in the services they need and the special educators and therapists who administer them.

Yes, we should have high expectations for children with special needs. But access to a “robust curriculum” is not the answer. Nor is testing them. Nor is threatening their teachers and schools in the same manner as Duncan’s approach to general education.

Another education blogger has this to say:

Quite Possibly the Stupidest Thing To Come Out of the US DOE

Arne Duncan announced that, shockingly, students with disabilities do poorly in school. They perform below level in both English and math. No, there aren't any qualifiers attached to that. Arne is bothered that students with very low IQs, students with low function, students who have processing problems, students who have any number of impairments-- these students are performing below grade level.

Editing to bold this sentence.

And he notes with some sarcasm just how stupid this all is.

That's it. We should just demand that disabled students should do harder work and take more tests.

When Florida was harassing Andrea Rediske to have her dying, mentally disabled child to take tests, they were actually doing him a favor, and not participating in state-sponsered abuse.

...We don't need IEPs-- we need expectations and demands. We don't need student support and special education programs-- we need more testing. We don't need consideration for the individual child's needs-- we just need to demand that the child get up to speed, learn things, and most of all TAKE THE DAMN TESTS. Because then, and only then, will we be able to make all student disabilities simply disappear.

This is just so stunningly, awesomely dumb, it's hard to take in.

And from the Dallas Morning News:

Reaction from trenches to Arne Duncan’s push on special ed testing

He urges his readers to follow Diane Ravitch's blog for the latest debates about education reform.

You’ll learn something. You’ll learn the depth of feelings out there in the trenches whenever the high sheriffs pronounce a new push in the name of “accountability.”

Most recently it was Arne Duncan’s announcement of tighter oversight on special ed.

Behold the physics of public policy, and strong reaction to this federal action. From a writer linked off of the Ravitch blog, this:

Kevin Huffman, education boss of Tennessee (a lawyer with a Teach for America stint as his education background), also chimed in on the conference call, to explain why disabled students do poorly, and how to fix it.

He said most lag behind because they’re not expected to succeed if they’re given more demanding schoolwork and because they’re seldom tested.

It's like the politicians in charge of education now have no awareness that there are children who really truly have severe disabilities that limit their ability to learn. That is the worst and most cruel kind of stupid from people who refuse to even listen to educators.

June 26, 2014

I do have a comment. Are you advocating for 2-tier education?

Your words here sound that way.

It shows a high degree of structure. And in many low SES households, a lot of research shows, the kids lack structure and need structure. And knowledge is to a large extent structure building. When you learn information, it has to come with structure that you replicate or you have to build the structure yourself ex nihilo. The latter is a lot harder than the former. High achievers learn to do this. Low achievers need to have structure provided. High achievers tended to comment, and figure everybody's like them.

It's also judged bad because it didn't show critical thinking, another "X" and the current Moloch of all educational practices. But without facts and background there is no critical thinking, CT skills are discipline-specific, fact-grounded, and high-level. This was year 1 for kids in the prep school. Fifth grade is where kids in poorer communities often start seriously falling behind, when all those expensive early-childhood intervention programs' effects become "statistically significant" but only *statistically* significant.

In my many years of teaching I taught in both high income and near poverty level schools. I don't quote research on this because it is not only low SES households that can be unstructured and dysfunctional. Not by a long shot.

When that kind of mindset is put forth, it essentially says poor kids get rigid strong discipline as in the KIPP type discipline and that shown in the video. And the upper income kids get more of the kind that is seen in Sidwell and that which kids of many other politicians attend.

So I really do question that premise.

June 26, 2014

A 5th grade Social Studies lesson at Nashville Prep.

About Nashville Prep