Front Line Teachers

Wanted:

Progressive presidential candidate.

MUST SUPPORT PUBLIC EDUCATION.

No. Not just the words. Not as a soundbite. Must actually support policies that help public schools – not tear them apart and sell them away piece-by-piece while you smile and brag about how much you support education.

This means you must:

1) Repudiate and Vow to Repeal Common Core State Standards

-Must know how they were created by unqualified partisans with little input from real educators.

-Cash strapped states were coerced into accepting them – in many cases even before they were done being written – as a condition for increased funding.

-They have never been proven to help kids learn and are in fact a massive social experiment at taxpayers’ expense and students’ peril.

-They are a huge payday for the testing and test prep industry who provide the new standardized assessments and new textbooks necessary for their implementation.

-They…

Yesterday, I wrote a piece on Fountas and Pinnell. It was clear that the newly identified below grade level readers were not a result of a sudden reading crisis, but a shifting of F & P cut scores.

Rupert Murdoch (who once claimed ed was a $500 billion industry) and happens to own DIBELS, also decided to raise the bar for children. Under the guise of Common Core, the cut scores for DIBELS have been changed. For instance, pre Common Core a 1st grader was expected to read 40-64 words per minute. Under the Common Core, they are now expected to read 69+ words per minute.

There is no money to be made in labeling children as successful, but labeling them failures has continued to fuel the perceived crisis in education and increases profits.

I was in finance before I became a teacher. If someone tried to push this…

A reader posted this link to a billboard fund in New Jersey. Help get the word out to New Jersey parents. Send a gift of any size to help.

Funny, I was thinking about the millions that the rightwing “Center for Union Facts” has available to buy huge billboards in Times Square and full-page ads in the New York Times to attack unions and teachers. And here is a campaign to raise $8,000 and change. If everyone who reads this blog sends in $10, the organizers of the campaign will meet their goal.

Meanwhile, if you want to get involved, think of direct action, people power, demonstrations and sit-ins that cost nothing but show the strength of our numbers and the power of our ideas.

Gerri K. Songer of the Illinois Township High School, District 214, conducted a Lexile analysis of the PARCC assessment and what she found was very alarming. The reading levels embedded in the assessment are absurdly high. Many young people will fail the PARCC test because it is developmentally inappropriate for high school students.

What exactly is the point of writing a test at a level that large numbers of students are guaranteed to fail? What will be the consequences for their teachers, who will be rated ineffective based on a test that is not written for high school students? As Songer writes: “Efforts can be made by educators to raise the level of reading comprehension, yet there is not much teachers can do to change the natural development of the human brain.” If she is right in her analysis, then PARCC is not only developmentally inappropriate but is designed…