Stake-proof vampires

Nice that Merrow published this right after the Frontline doc on Rhee and the publication of the D.O.E. whitewash, but you have to wonder why it wasn’t part of the documentary. Should be enough to put RheeFirst in the graveyard of vampiric education reform, but it won’t be.

Shameless

These VAM-vampires have absolutely no shame: Gun control-advocate Mayor Bloomberg compares teachers union to NRA – NY Daily News: ‘Teachers want to work with the best, and most of them are not in sympathy with the union,’ Bloomberg said during his weekly radio show. ‘The NRA’s another place where the membership, if you do the polling, doesn’t agree with the leadership.‘

Kudos

A friend and reliable editor gets a shout-out from the CS Monitor.

“Loss can separate a student from peers just at a time when children desperately feel the need to fit in,” said Susan Kitchell, a nurse at Galileo Academy of Science & Technology in San Francisco, in a press release about the survey. But “[e]ducators can play an important role … by helping friends and classmates understand what is happening.” Ms. Kitchell helped coordinate bereavement training in San Francisco as part of an AFT-New York Life project to expand such training.

BTW, California ranks 45th. of 50 states in its student-to-school nurse ratio.

Maybe Susan can arrange on-going grief counseling for those of us mourning the loss of public education?

TFA – Teach for Admission to that MBA / law degree program you’ve dreamed of

No need to challenge the NYT’s irresponsible acceptance of Teach for America’s numbers. Earlier this month, Gary Rubinstein  and Anthony Cody debunked TFA’s loose use of data. This Twitter exchange tells it all:

Edushyster: Seems like something TFA would want 2 publicize widely given how it differs from indiv district experiences.

(TFA) Heather Harding replies: Estimates aren’t really appropriate for publicizing now are they? Nice try @Edushyster

Does TFA really have two-thirds of its of its 28,000 alumni remaining “in education roles, including as principals and superintendents (about half of those educators are in classroom settings),” appropriately measured or not? Well, I suppose it’s possible. If Yale Law School and McKinsey no longer guarantee the career path that every Ivy grad is entitled to, and if public ed has become Rupert Murdoch’s lucrative $500 billion dollar sector desperately awaiting “reform,” it makes sense that these bright young thinks join the herd following the next big cash bull in the market.

The NYT suggests that the secret to TFA-ers’ success is a stronger basis in “data analysis.”  Data, data, data: the essence of good teaching. We can probably expect one of the bright young things to come up with an educational version of  the (in)famous Gaussian copula function with similar results. Oh wait, maybe the formula is already in use?

What wonders of reform our students, and teachers, can expect.

Excellent choice.

So Arnie and company have decided to turn down Torlakson’s reasonable request for a waiver to the unrealistic requirements of NCLB. The 70% of our state’s schools currently labelled as being “out of compliance” with NCLB demands will rise. And then the powers-that-aren’t will use that increase to prove further systemic failure and to require even more compliance to unreasonable requirements.

The sticking point with the Feds is of course Value Added Measures (VAM) for teacher evaluations. Torkakson et al. resisted what Bruce D. Bakers calls VAM’s “forced choice between ‘bad’ measure and ‘wrong’ ones.” But what about this CORE group (site is temporarily down for maintenance), with SFUSD part of the pack? What will their inevitable request to Arnie for a “district waiver” entail? My guess is that CTA and CFT will be happy to collaborate with the 10 districts to serve up something like the LA agreement. (The two unions act more and more like a waiter at a really cheap, really bad all-you-can-eat buffet, leaning over as we dip a spoon into the grey-green Swedish meatballs and murmuring soothingly, “Excellent choice, if I do say so myself.”) Is the LA deal on test score inclusion any better than the NY State evaluation system?  I’m no Bruce D. Baker (and boy do we need a California version of Bruce D.), but I’d bet a career’s  supply of grey-green Swedish meatballs that Academic Growth over Time (AGT) is as stupid as all the other VAM scams.