Former Teacher Becomes Homeschooler

The following appeared on Sally Borrink Learning.com.

I was recently involved in a discussion with educators online related to the Pearson testing spying debacle. I brought up that I thought testing had done more to accelerate the movement toward homeschooling than anything else I had witnessed in the past twenty years. Multiple teachers jumped in and said they were either already homeschooling or planned on homeschooling because there was no way they were going to subject their own children to what is currently going on in public (and, in many cases, private) schools.
One of the very experienced and savvy public school employees made this observation which I share here with her permission:

In biology, there’s a descriptor – “indicator species”.  An indicator species may be unusually sensitive to environmental changes, and biologists monitor the indicator species for signs that something is amiss in the environment.
I wonder when somebody is going to notice that teachers are an indicator species. When we leave public schools with our children, people should consider that there’s something amiss.

To read the rest of the piece visit Sally Borrnick.Learning.com. 


"I’ve lost track of how many teachers-turned-homeschoolers I’ve met. Many."  Sally Borrink

Public Education aka Government Education

Compulsory education opened the door to welfare state.  Public Education when it first started in our country was to help educate those individuals whose families could not afford to educate them.  Now all children can be "educated" at the expense of someone else even if said families are either capable of educating their own child, or can afford to educate their own children at their own expense.    The desire by some to dismantle the current public "education" system as it is, is not a desire to have an uneducated populace.  On the contrary, public "education" is failing to actually educate millions of children every year.  Those people who want to dismantle the current system still want children to be educated, just not "educated" in a broken, corrupt, wasteful system.  Much like the welfare system is today. 

Cathy

Students Lives Matter

Sadly there a couple dozen people in the Croydon community that would rather protect a broken, failing, and wasteful system than allow parents to do what is best for their children.  Or have a child in a system that works best for said child.  The sad part of this is that many of those who oppose choice are educators trying to protect a failing system.   The amount of children using the choice system in Croydon is less than one percent and far less than that when you include Newport's school attendance.  It amounts to statistical noise in Newport's budget.  How those that oppose choice can look themselves in the mirror is beyond my realm of understanding.  The following piece appears in full here and on the Thomas B. Fordham Institute website.

Cathy

Why school choice is the highest form of fairness

Matthew Levey

April 08, 2015

Choice and fairness are sometimes cast as values in opposition. This arises from the view that it is unfair to allow some parents to choose their child’s school when others won’t (or can’t). Ultimately, however, choice is the highest form of fairness because it rewards positive behavior and aligns the interests of parents, children, and schools.

This week, I’ll examine the issue from a societal perspective. Next week, I will look at choice from the vantage of the individual family.

Some families can afford private school tuition—often more than $40,000 in New York, and close to that figure in several other major cities. Others move to a suburban district with high property taxes that signify (supposedly) good schools. Some apply to gifted and talented programs. In Brooklyn, we even have a few un-zoned district schools that admit students via lottery. When parents exercise these choices, they are not denounced for acting ‘unfairly.’  The admissions processes of these schools are seldom criticized.

But critics say charter schools that admit kids via lotteries, such as the one my school conducted last week, aren’t fair: We don’t attract enough needy kids, our needy kids aren't needy enough, we don't serve enough special education children, and so on.

As the school’s founder, I spent two years asking parents from across Brooklyn to consider the International Charter School for their kids; I am pleased that many did.

In the week before registration closed, two parents attended our meetings. One mom, who emigrated from Mexico, is unemployed and going through a divorce. Unwilling to send her child to her local elementary school, where just one-quarter of students read at grade level, she applied to seven private schools. Her child was not accepted at any of them. “I’m not poor enough,” she guessed. Luckily, her daughter drew a low number in our lottery and will have the chance to enroll.

Another mom works at a community college and lives in public housing. Her son attends kindergarten at a zoned elementary school in our district. The school’s reputation is improving, yet only 16 percent of the kids currently read at grade level. Her son has a lot of energy; the school says he has ADHD. “But I don't want to medicate him,” she told me. “And I wish his teacher didn't yell at him.” We’ll be able to accept this child, too.

Despite the challenges they and their families face, these parents and 461 others managed to choose ICS. In fact, parents only had to complete a short application that was available on our website twenty-four hours a day; meetings were optional. Parents like these moms invested at least a little time in finding out more and making a choice.

Of course, many others did not. Some might not have agreed with our philosophy and approach. And others, surely, did not get the message—despite fifty meetings in public libraries, bars, hair salons, and community centers. Despite flyers, newspaper ads, Facebook posts, email newsletters, and word of mouth. Despite a city-published school directory and post cards that we mailed to their homes, they did not hear about our free, public school.

Is it unfair that the children of these parents won't have the chance to benefit from our approach? Sure.

To address this challenge, one mom I know proposed that the New York City Department of Education should randomly assign kids to public schools—district and charter—so one would have to compete for slots. “I want to protect the kids whose parents don’t know they need to act,” she said. That’s a fine and selfless impulse—one that would put paid to the oft-repeated lie that charters cream kids, while addressing the segregation in district schools that is a legacy of real-estate redlining and political gerrymandering.

But is her approach fair? Or fairer?

There’s a human instinct to want to protect people, especially children, from making bad choices. But for choice ultimately to have any value, it must encompass the possibility of making a bad choice—and therefore encouraging us to make good ones.

If large urban districts like New York City had a track record of making excellent educational choices on behalf of their less-advantaged citizens, one might plausibly contend that the government knows best. But as even the most casual reader of education news knows, this is not the case.
Society has a clear interest in producing capable, competent citizens who can perfect our far-too-imperfect democracy. To that end, we collect taxes and mandate that children be educated. Yet evidence increasingly shows that families can’t do worse than bureaucrats in selecting the form and locus of that education.

To students and parents like ours, the inextricable connection of choice and fairness could not be clearer. If parents can move, participate in selective programs, and choose private schools (so long as they first pay their property taxes), then I do not see how we can deny them the right to also choose a charter school. Or not.
Matthew Levey is the executive director of the International Charter School, a Brooklyn elementary school opening this fall. His three children attend New York City public schools.

School Board Meeting, Today!

Croydon Village School Board Meeting, tonight, at the little white school house, at 6:45 p.m.

Cathy

“One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honour or observation.” Walter Scott

Another Parent Opts Out of Smarter Balance Testing

The follow was sent to Fosters.com, by a PhD level researcher.   Smarter Balance Testing should be an opt-in testing.  Have you asked your school board members for an opt-in rather than opt out process? 

Cathy

"Great cycles of history began with vigorous cultures awakening to the needs of children, but collapsing with frayed family ties. Have we failed to learn lessons which Ancient China, Greece and Rome learned too late - about day care and death houses for old folks? Do we without protest accept accelerating preschool and nursing home cultures which warn ominously that the earlier you institutionalize your child, the earlier he will institutionalize you!" - Raymond S. Moore, Ph.D.

School Test Unethical and Invalid

Posted Apr. 7, 2015 at 3:11 PM

To the editor: I am writing to commend Shawna and David Coppola of Madbury for their decision to opt their children out of the Smarter Balanced assessment at the Oyster River School District, and to invite other families to follow suit. It is my intention to do the same with my own children.

I am a PhD level educational researcher who studies learning. My opposition to Smarter Balanced is driven by two main reservations: (1) U.S. families have, since 2001, been unwitting participants in a educational research project at an unprecedented scale, with activist reformers and legislators pushing market-based reforms underwritten by a punitive system of testing. Smarter Balanced represents the latest wave of data collection in this widespread experiment. As a researcher, I am subject to Institutional Review Board scrutiny anytime I use psychometric assessments of learning, and it is required practice to secure consent from research participants and to let them opt out at any time with no penalty. Smarter Balanced is such an assessment and should be held to the same ethical standard as all research on human subjects, in which seeking consent is mandatory.

(2) Smarter Balanced is claimed to be a valid assessment of learning. This is false in one crucial respect: Standardized tests have been shown repeatedly to lack ecological validity. In educational research, validity refers to a test’s ability to measure what it claims to measure, and not something else. Above all else, standardized tests measure children’s ability to take standardized tests. There is little correspondence between this ability and the ability to proficiently learn and perform complex tasks in normal environments. I do not necessarily fault the designers of Smarter Balanced for this problem, as it is a common mistake in educational research due to inadequate training. Nonetheless, because Smarter Balanced – and all similar metrics – cannot approximate real-life situations in which people are called upon to learn, it lacks validity in precisely the domain it purports to measure.

I regard Smarter Balanced as part of a nationwide system of compulsory participation in unethically managed, invalid research. The Coppolas are wise to exercise their rights to opt out.

Jayson Seaman

Durham

Schools release private student data - Tewksbury Town Crier: News

Schools release private student data - Tewksbury Town Crier: News

By Brendan Foley and Jayne Miller
Brendan@YourTownCrier.com
Jayne@YourTownCrier.com

Special Education Department publishes list grading parents on ‘cooperativeness’

TEWKSBURY-
Tewksbury Public Schools face angry parental backlash following the
release of private student information online last week. A document
included in a 222-page School Committee packet remained online for the
better part of a week, before being taken down Monday.

Awareness of the data, which details private
information for the out of district placements of 83 students and rates
their parents according to their “cooperativeness” with the district,
raised outrage on social media over the weekend.

In December the district blamed a projected $2
million shortfall for FY2016 on ‘skyrocketing’ out of district costs,
and said that it could not implement a proposed free full-day
kindergarten program as a result. That action generated distrust and
backlash by the special education community, and this most recent
release of data has parents ready to file complaints at the state and
federal levels.

The seven-page memo from Rick Pelletier, Director
of Student Services, to the Superintendent was included in the School
Committee packet as part of its budget justification package last week.
The memo includes a spreadsheet that listed all the students with out of
district placements – and also included a ranking on ‘parental
cooperativeness.’ The amount of data included could indicate a violation
of state and federal law.

The list, which replaces student names with
numbers, remains in alphabetical order. Information included the
student’s current grade, the out-of-district school, the last school
attended, the year the student began attending the new school,
information on whether or not the decision was made by the IEP team, a
legal settlement (typically kept strictly confidential), or if the
student moved in from another town, and miscellaneous detail such as the
involvement of the Department of Children and Families, passage of MCAS
assessments, and more.

The office of Student Services also published its
rating of parents according to their ‘cooperativeness with the
district.’ Parents rated a ‘1’ are cooperative, ‘2’ somewhat
cooperative, and those rated ‘3’ are ‘not cooperative.’

The Town Crier could easily identify seven
families included in the list, and was contacted by others that could
identify more families based on the material in the sheet. The Town
Crier will not publish the names of the families, nor the document, out
of consideration for the privacy of the families and in accordance with
state and federal law.

To read the rest of the story go to Tewksbury Town Crier.



I hope parents soon realize that many school employees just think of you as a money source, and pawns in their little jobs program that they want to maintain for themselves.   They are not as concerned about education as they are about keeping their cushy jobs, benefits package, and retirement packages.  They just want people to shut up and do as they say.

Opt your Child out of Smarter Balanced Assessments

The following piece appeared in full on the kavips website.  Just say no for your child's sake.

Cathy

Why YOU Should Opt Out Your Child From The Smarter Balanced Assessment

February 8, 2015 in ALEC, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporatization of Education, Dave Sokola, DSEA, education, Frederika Jenner, good teachers, Governor Markell, It's About The Kids, Jack Markell, Mark Murphy, public schools, Race To The Top, Rodel, Smarter Balanced Assessments, Standardized Testing, teachers, Teaching Latin, Wilmington, Wilmington School Distirct | Tags: Common Core, Delaware, Opt Out, Smarter Balanced Assessment

1)  Number 1:  It’s a really bad test… See here for yourself… Take your child’s test….
2) 70% of children will fail this test because they won’t be able to understand what the test is asking… or get past the horrendously complicated computer skills necessary to add and subtract.
3) This test will be permanently etched on your child’s school record and will carry from employer to employer for the rest of your child’s life. It will be part of their official transcript, and sold to vendors interested in your child’s data.
4)  Forcing children to undergo testing for very high stakes, is damaging in itself,  They are not adults.  But to do it for the sole reason to make them “think” they are under-performing, is simply cruel.. No religion of today, can endorse any child taking these tests.  These tests are immoral.
5)  There are no accommodations worthy of mention for children with disabilities.  They may be geniuses, but not being able to manipulate a keyboard, they will turn in zeros.  This is due to design.  The testing regime does not want handicap children to succeed because it deflates the value of the test.
6) The English portion of this test uses the north-midwestern dialect to determine all right from wrong.  When taking these tests, the South does bad (both white and black),  inner cities do bad, the West does bad, immigrant cultures do bad, simply because they do not use the same accent as do north Midwesterners (mealy mouths) and therefore tend to use pauses (commas), and word choices that appear more natural and ascetic to us with the dialects we’ve grown up under. ( The test has four fully correct responses; You are to guess which of the four is the “best” answer, a fully subjective exercise).
7) The test is divisive.  Those who pass can go onward to the rewards of a good life.  Those who fail, must undergo retraining and more retraining, and are marked down as permanent laggers with no hope for a well paying job.
8) The test has nothing to do with children.  It’s sole excuse is to provide a reason to privatize public schools.  By making public schools look horrible, they open a market for private investment which can offer something better. One needs to look at two schools in Delaware for proof..   Two of the famed priority schools were rated exceptional by an independent agency out of the University of Delaware, which under old law, was charged with the responsibility of determining if failing schools were improving… Two that were, were included in the priority schools.  And get this… The Secretary of Education is refusing to accept that independent agency’s verdict?  Why?  BECAUSE THEY PROVED HIM WRONG FOR THE ENTIRE WORLD TO SEE!!!   If he accepts their verdict, it would prove to all he accepted his vision and path are the wrong path for education to go down..  (They are; but don’t expect him to ever admit it…  he’d then be fired)…
9)  Child psychologists across this nation almost to the tune of 100% have said this test is child abuse…  They have likened it to making toddlers who can’t jump a 3 foot high jump bar, be forced to jump a 5 foot bar… Then use intimidation, fear, brutality, high-stakes punishment,  and other forms of psychological trauma and force them to fail.  Then fire their coach because they didn’t meet (a brand new, ridiculous) standard.  The Smarter Balanced Test is set two grades higher than what your child has learned… If he is in 3rd grade, his test will reflect the level of a 5th grade test… If in 5th grade, he is being tested on a 7th grade level…
10) This test is actually in spirit, breaking the law… The US Department of Education is forbidden by statute to interfere with curriculum of any school.  So they farmed it out to private corporations.  These curriculums are copyrighted and only those private companies sanctioned, may use the material.  The Feds then withheld money to schools and districts, unless districts acquiesced to acquiring the curriculum.  Very few districts, (we have one in Christina) had the balls to refuse the money and the strings attached.   So whereas the Fed’s did not “imposed” their curriculum on schools, the arrangement is such, that the curriculum the Feds wanted used, due to situations created by the Feds, are being used under the name of Common Core.
11) This test is damaging to children’s learning… As previously mentioned herein, scientists have said that Common Core attempts to teach at levels too advanced for a developing young child’s brain.  The brain builds a core and that core stores basic facts… Such as one plus one equals two… If those principles are not put in at that particular time, the brain is forever deficient of being able to perform that task…  Basically the child goes through life never knowing that one plus one equals two;  but will always have to use another method everytime he needs to calculate to determine every new time that one plus one will equal two…  Scientists warn that Common Core will make the next generation completely mathematically illiterate because everything in life depends upon the relationship between numbers.  There is a biological reason we memorize things as unrelated facts.  Without that memorization at the proper time, that core never exists.
12)  This test is unconstitutional.. The Constitutionality of this nation is solidly based upon the fact that “We, the People” in order to form a more perfect union,  elect representatives to make policy that affects our lives.  If they do wrong, we replace them with someone who will undo that damage.   No elected representative ever had any imput on this test.  No elected representative ever saw the test, and said, yes that is a good thing….  What did happen, was that private companies created the test without allowing teachers, parents, or trained educators to input opinions. Those few educators hand picked to give the test credibility, all said that they and other educational experts were ignored in the making of the test.,  Every single one has spoken out against this test. Every single one said their opinions were ignored, dissed, and the test makers did what they wanted to do anyways… The creator of the test, had never even raised children…
13) This test was never debated in public.  There are some things very wrong here.  But required legislation was maneuvered through legislature with no debate… Using all tricks at a speaker’s disposal, this was pushed into law before anyone other then a handful of people even knew what it was about… One legislator who voted for it, said he never even read the bill.  It was too complex.  He just took them at their word…   As with being rushed into a marriage with a groom you do not know, sometimes the best option is to just say no….
Opt out of this test.
14)  if this test were a good test, one that did really good things… despite all the other secondary arguments, we would not be having this argument about implementing it…  Maybe some people out there would still object, but not absolutely every one who has taken this test and experienced it firsthand. You really need to see what the fuss is all about… You need to take the test…  Once you do, you will join us and opt out your child from taking the Smarter Balanced Assessment… I’m almost guaranteed that… Because no one really HATES their own child so much as to purposefully subject them to this,… what has realistically been called, …  a form of torture.