Lying with Statistics

Posted on January 16, 2014 by debmeier

To avoid being fooled by statistics requires using the knowledge we already possess. A lost art? I struggle with this constantly.

To print data claiming that: Shanghai and Singapore have a better educated workforce than the USA when they certainly must realize that (1)  neither is a country; and (2) to ignore the fact that China’s low-income workforce are treated as part-time immigrants  in Shanghai, whose children are not allowed to attend their schools and/or in most cases (including Singapore)  live beyond these city’s boundaries, means either purposely misusing data or not using one’s own knowledge. Not to mention the naiveté of accepting any data’s reliability when dealing with a totalitarian regime. These are simple facts that any journalist reporting on these statistics should know. As we gentrify the remaining sections of Manhattan where low-income people of color still reside, we might enter Manhattan in the world’s test score rankings. In fact, we have several states that would rank pretty high up if we decided to call them separate nations, much less excluded the scores of “immigrants.”  It’s bad enough when they—the US media-—take US test score data at face value, much less accepting without question the data from nations we know often lie to us and their own people.

Karen Lewis Has @GovChristie’s Number

 Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, knows what it’s like to have a bullying politician try to unilaterally force school system changes on students, their families, and their teachers. Because she is so damn smart, she saw through mayor Rahm Emanuel’s transparent union-busting call for a longer school day, and demanded instead that Chicago’s children get a better school day. Thanks to her leadership, CTU had the support of the city when they went on strike, and Emanuel is now one of the most loathed politicians in America.

I am proud to claim Karen as a friend (trust me, you will never find a better dinner companion anywhere). So I imposed on her and asked her to comment on Chris Christie’s latest distraction: his useless proposal to lengthen the school day and school year in New Jersey.

What say you to the teachers, students, and parents of New Jersey, Ms. Lewis?

Αυτοοργάνωση σε εκπαίδευση και θέατρο

  Sunday December 08, 2013 17:20 by Dmitri – 1 of Anarkismo Editorial Group Στο μαχνοβίτικο κίνημα

Μαχνοβίτικο κίνημα: Αυτοοργάνωση στην εκπαίδευση και στο θέατρο – Από το βιβλίο Ιστορία του Μαχνοβίτικου Κινήματος 1918-1921, Πέτρος Αρσίνωφ,σελ.134-136

«…Οι εργάτες του Γκιουλάϊ-Πολέ αφιέρωσαν επίσης μεγάλη προσοχή στο ζήτημα της εκπαίδευσης. Οι επανειλημμένες ένοπλες εισβολές είχαν αποδιοργανώσει σοβαρα την εκπαιδευτική δραστηριότητα σ’ολόκληρη την περιοχή. Οι δάσκαλοι, έχοντας πολύ καιρό να πληρωθούν, είχαν σκορπιστεί για να κερδίσουν τα προς το ζην όπως μπορούσαν καλύτερα. Τα σχολικά κτίρια είχαν εγκαταλειφθεί. Μετά τη συμφωνία μεταξύ Μαχνοβιτών και Σοβιετικών αρχών, οι μάζες αντιμετώπισαν αμέσως το πρόβλημα της εκπαίδευσης. Οι Μαχνοβίτες πίστευαν ότι αυτό το ζήτημα έπρεπε να λυθεί στη βάση της εργατικής αυτοδιεύθυνσης. Η εκπαιδευτική δραστηριότητα , έλεγαν, όπως και κάθε άλλη δραστηριότητα που αφορά τις βασικές ανάγκες των εργατών, είναι καθήκον του

Teacher Quartering: Four Reasons Why Teachers Avoid, or Leave, High Poverty Urban Public Schools

Teaching within a high poverty urban public school is challenging, to say the least. Time and again, I hear education policy experts claim that high poverty urban schools don’t have enough effective or high quality teachers “at the helm.” Part of this is due to the misuse of VAM-based models, but another aspect of this phenomenon is the propensity for working conditions to drive effective or high quality teachers out of high poverty urban public schools. In fact, at times, it feels as if teaching within a challenging or “struggling” school is akin to some form of medieval quartering. At each end of a teacher’s limb is a rope that’s attached to a “horse”, or stress-producing trigger, which, collectively, rips the teacher apart at the limbs. In my humble opinion, here are four stress-producing triggers that may cause high poverty urban public school teachers to avoid teaching in the most challenging schools, or leave the profession altogether.

Why Are Parents Revolting Against the Common Core? Start With the English Curriculum

Posted: 01/16/2014 10:02 am

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 My wife and I recently attended a coffee klatch to discuss the Common Core with our state senator. A teacher stood up and said, with a tremble in her voice and a tear in her eye:

«If parents knew what the Common Core is doing to the classroom, there would be a revolt.»

What is happening to the classroom as a result of the Common Core? If you would like an answer to this question, spend some time with the English Language Arts (ELA) materials on the New York State Education Department (NYSED) website.

Music Offers a Boost to Education in Low-SES Environments

by Kayt SukelDecember 2, 2013

Socioeconomic status (SES), the standardized measure of a person’s social and economic standing as it relates to others, has long been correlated with cognitive and educational outcomes. A child raised in a lower SES household is more likely to show more diminished abilities in language, memory, and cognitive development than his or her higher-SES peers. For decades, educators have looked for different interventions that might offset this disadvantage-including music programs. Now, researchers at Northwestern University have demonstrated that just two years of musical training in high school may offer some assistance.

Universities are still best place to train teachers, report says

A new report backs up academics’ fears about the coalition policy of shifting more teacher training into schools

• Harriet Swain/The Guardian, Tuesday 14 January 2014

Joy Carter, vice-chancellor of Winchester University, says: ‘If the quality of teaching plummets any further, we are in trouble as a country’. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

For months, university leaders have been moaning about the increasing transfer of control of teacher-training programmes in England from universities to schools.

While most have insisted their concerns are for the future of English education, their objections have also carried a strong whiff of self-interest: the changes introduced by the government involve increasing the number of training places available in schools through the School Direct programme and cutting those funded through universities, leaving them at the mercy of schools’ desires rather than their own strategic planning.

To save a generation from despair, it’s not enough to hassle them into low-paying jobs

The most important political battles are fought on the territory of the imagination. Young and unemployed people need to know: you are more than your inability to find a job.

By Laurie Penny Published 10 January 2014 10:25

Cleaning staff sweep the Zappion hall in Athens in January 2014. Photo: Getty.

It is difficult to quantify despair. You’ll know what I mean if you’ve ever filled in one of those strange little forms that require you, with helpful tick-boxes, to rank your mood from sunny to suicidal. Nonetheless, the latest survey from the Prince’s Trust tells the public what youth campaigners, activists and anyone who frequently meets people in their teens and twenties already know: life for young men and women in Britain today is tough unless you’ve got a trust fund. Nine per cent of respondents said that they “have nothing to live for” and a third of young unemployed people had considered suicide.

It Is Expensive to Be Poor

Minimum-wage jobs are physically demanding, have unpredictable schedules, and pay so meagerly that workers can’t save up enough to move on.

Barbara Ehrenreich Jan 13 2014, 10:09 AM ET

 Fifty years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson made a move that was unprecedented at the time and remains unmatched by succeeding administrations. He announced a War on Poverty, saying that its “chief weapons” would be “better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities.”

So starting in 1964 and for almost a decade, the federal government poured at least some of its resources in the direction they should have been going all along: toward those who were most in need. Longstanding programs like Head Start, Legal Services, and the Job Corps were created. Medicaid was established. Poverty among seniors was significantly reduced by improvements in Social Security.

Talent and intelligence: nature or nurture?

Wednesday, 08 January 2014

Written by Andy Fenwick

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Recent statements from Boris Johnson regarding “Cornflakes“ rising to the top of the packet with regard to natural intelligence are as stupid as claiming that you have a “Divine Right” to rule over the lower orders. This is from a man who failed three simple IQ questions on radio, but who wants to segregate children at birth on the basis of natural ability.

We’ve all heard people say, ‘Oh, he’s just naturally good at sport,’ or ‘Oh, she’s always been musical’; and without doubt the best of these young prodigies was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who at the age of five was competent on keyboard and violin, as well as composing music.

Is teacher education a disaster?

By Valerie Strauss/

13-1-14

(freepik.com/)

One of the biggest debates in public education today is over how to best educate student teachers for the rigors of the classroom. This is the third and final part of a series on the subject by scholar Mike Rose, who is on the faculty of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and author of  books that include Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education and Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America. A revised and expanded version of his latest book, “Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us“, is due out in February.

You can find the first of the three parts of the series, titled “Why educating the educators is complex,” by clicking here, and the second part, “What’s right — and very wrong — with the teacher education debate,” here. Here’s the third: