How is it that education policymakers can profess to respect teachers while at the same time ignoring national teacher opinion polls and instead supporting policies like merit pay based on test scores, competitive grants, and the expansion of online learning and charter schools?
Over the past couple of weeks, we've posted about different examples of successful community organizing from across the country and they're worth highlighting again all in one blog post as proof of the power of grassroots organizing.
"Evaluating Teacher Evaluations," published in Phi Delta Kappan is a great tool for understanding value-added rating models and how they fail to account for the vast number of factors that influence a student's test scores from one year to the next. Since value-added models can't control for factors like class size, home and community challenges, summer learning loss (which disproportionately affects low-income students), then there is no way they can provide an accurate picture of how effective a teacher is in raising student test scores.
New York City recently joined the Los Angles Unified School District in making value-added teacher ratings open to the public despite significant evidence that value-added scores are riddled with errors and inconsistencies.The scores were subsequently published in major newspapers in each city, mislabling teachers publicly and proving that there needs to be more that goes into determining the "value" of a teacher than "value-added" scores.
Montgomery County School District has gotten a lot of attention for its successful efforts to improve graduation rates and narrow the achievement gap. But Montgomery is also a model for collaboration between teacher unions and administrators, and it provides a strong argument against corporate-style reform efforts that antagonize and seek to dismantle unions.
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Florida policymakers should have realized by now that something isn't right with their proposed "parent trigger" legislation. After all, the very parents the bill would be empowering are organizing against it.
As Valerie Strauss points out on her Washington Post blog The Answer Sheet, Florida parents aren't fooled by the illusion of choice that "parent triggers" represent. Allowing parents to hand over their local schools to private or charter management companies isn't how you help low-performing schools improve.
What with being attacked left and right by politicians across the country, who can blame teachers for being more than a little unsatisfied with their jobs. According to the annual MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, the drop in teacher job satisfaction over the past two years is a whomping 15 points - from 59 percent in 2009 to just 44 percent in 2011.
Targeting one of the most dire inequalities facing our nation - access to quality education - the Occupy Movement is holding a national day of action focused on education. From Albany to Sacramento, students, parents and educators across the country are staging walkouts and marches to departments of education on behalf of equitable funding to provide all students with an equal opportunity to learn.
Earlier this week Tanya McDowell, the Bridgeport, Connecticut, mother accused of fraudulently enrolling her son in a Norwalk school, was sentenced to prison and must pay $6,200 to the city of Norwalk for stealing a better education for her son.
The case parallels a similar one in Ohio.
