Public Education News Roundup
In the "wait, what?!" category comes this story from the Washington Post's Answer Sheet - School puts nearly 100 kindergartners in one class in a teaching experiment. The first sentence in the article says "no, it's not a headline from The Onion."
This is being tried at the lowest-performing school in Detroit. There are three teachers in the class.
Incidentally, the lead teacher is 30 years old, another teacher is in her second year and the third is in her first year.
It's from a story in the Detroit Free Press. It sounds like it works (somewhat) but I honestly do not believe it is what is best for children.
The AP is reporting that Washington state is the only state denied renewal of its NCLB waiver that seems unlikely to get their waiver back (the other three states seem to be doing what Arne Duncan wants).
Randy Dorn, the WA state superintendent said this:
Dorn said he didn't think the proposed change to state law - going from optional use of statewide tests to mandatory use in teacher evaluations without a specific goal on how big a factor the tests would be - wouldn't have changed the way teachers are evaluated.
Seriously? Of course, it would make a difference to teachers. That principals already talk with teachers about scores does not make the next logical step to make scores the primary driver of their evaluations.
Speaking of NCLB, here's another dumb idea - Race to the Top. Education Week created a very fun (and funny) road map of RttT.
Remember how everyone thought giving every student a laptop was the way to go? Hoboken School District has a closet for you. From WYNC:
Inside Hoboken’s combined junior-senior high school is a storage closet. Behind the locked door, some mothballed laptop computers are strewn among brown cardboard boxes. Others are stacked one atop another. Dozens more are stored on mobile computer carts, many of them on their last legs.
That’s all that remains from a failed experiment to assign every student a laptop at Hoboken Junior Senior High School.
"We bought laptops that had reinforced hard-shell cases so that we could try to offset some of the damage these kids were going to do,” said Crocamo. “I was pretty impressed with some of the damage they did anyway. Some of the laptops would come back to us completely destroyed.”
Some rather sobering numbers from Washington State's latest GED results (via Pearson testing). There is some fascinating linkage with Common Core and Gates and ALEC. This is from Restore GED Fairness:
The new 2014 Pearson GED test is much harder than the previous 2002 version of the GED test. In fact, in Washington State 80+% fewer students have earned their GED from January to April 2014 as did in 2012 during the same time period. This drop is due to the difficulty of the test.
This is being tried at the lowest-performing school in Detroit. There are three teachers in the class.
Incidentally, the lead teacher is 30 years old, another teacher is in her second year and the third is in her first year.
It's from a story in the Detroit Free Press. It sounds like it works (somewhat) but I honestly do not believe it is what is best for children.
The AP is reporting that Washington state is the only state denied renewal of its NCLB waiver that seems unlikely to get their waiver back (the other three states seem to be doing what Arne Duncan wants).
Randy Dorn, the WA state superintendent said this:
Dorn said he didn't think the proposed change to state law - going from optional use of statewide tests to mandatory use in teacher evaluations without a specific goal on how big a factor the tests would be - wouldn't have changed the way teachers are evaluated.
Seriously? Of course, it would make a difference to teachers. That principals already talk with teachers about scores does not make the next logical step to make scores the primary driver of their evaluations.
Speaking of NCLB, here's another dumb idea - Race to the Top. Education Week created a very fun (and funny) road map of RttT.
Remember how everyone thought giving every student a laptop was the way to go? Hoboken School District has a closet for you. From WYNC:
Inside Hoboken’s combined junior-senior high school is a storage closet. Behind the locked door, some mothballed laptop computers are strewn among brown cardboard boxes. Others are stacked one atop another. Dozens more are stored on mobile computer carts, many of them on their last legs.
That’s all that remains from a failed experiment to assign every student a laptop at Hoboken Junior Senior High School.
"We bought laptops that had reinforced hard-shell cases so that we could try to offset some of the damage these kids were going to do,” said Crocamo. “I was pretty impressed with some of the damage they did anyway. Some of the laptops would come back to us completely destroyed.”
Some rather sobering numbers from Washington State's latest GED results (via Pearson testing). There is some fascinating linkage with Common Core and Gates and ALEC. This is from Restore GED Fairness:
The new 2014 Pearson GED test is much harder than the previous 2002 version of the GED test. In fact, in Washington State 80+% fewer students have earned their GED from January to April 2014 as did in 2012 during the same time period. This drop is due to the difficulty of the test.
Comments
Replication will also run into that killer of most educational experiments - the Decline Effect. Yep, increase the quality and quantity of experimental controls and the quantity of experiments/classrooms run and watch the results ("effect size") decline. They may learn a couple of interesting aspects about how to occasionally take advantage of combined groups, but I'm not worried about the standard class size suddenly becoming 100... union or no union.
Sea Teacher
That said, many Montessori schools operate just fine with much larger class size because the materials and the other kids shoulder a portion of the teaching load.
Did the designers of the experiment ever meet a 5 year old? Could the "Ed Wizard" brainiac who thought this up stand to be in such a classroom?
How will sensory-integration disorder children do in such a wild high-stim environment?
Why must everything in education be new? Little kids are little kids. They need to feel safe, be well rested and well fed, they need to get excercise everyday and play time and downtown and then well thought out lessons executed by an adult who cares about them and knows them well and connects with them. With 100 kids and 3 teachers, there will be too much diffusion of responsibility and the quiet, shy, or well behaved kids will get lost in the shuffle.
Would Bill Gates put his kids in such an environment? Don't think so.
Common sense, let just common sense prevail. Whoever is still left in Detroit, this is giving that young family one more reason to flee.
Ludocracy
Honestly, I've always found the "sit with one teacher in a single classroom all day" incredibly limiting. My elementary was entirely open concept with 5-6 homerooms per grade level. We approached subjects in blocks, language arts and math. We used "tote trays" that went with us from room to room as we traveled with our similarly abled peers to our blocks. I benefited from increased exposure to more teaching styles, increased chances to interact and collaborate with different peers, and, because we were taught at our appropriate level/speed, I was always learning instead of waiting around for 5 different levels of "differentiation" to get to the same page.
The current system in many of the schools in SPS of expecting one teacher to teach 6 different subjects and reach 5+ levels of instructional need in each subject is setting our classrooms up for failure, at worst, and mediocrity at best.
It was a typically sized school in my city but ginormous by Seattle standards. We still had a strong community and I knew the name of every single kid in my grade level. The fear surrounding these 500-650 kid schools is just plain silly.
(sorry for the overuse of quotation marks)
http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2024203210_preschoollawsuitxml.html
PS- Will someone tell me how to do a hyper-link?
The unions also have filed an ethics complaint against the city with the state auditor, the state Public Disclosure Commission and the Seattle Ethics and Election Commission.
The complaint alleges the city improperly made policy decisions opposing I-107 behind closed doors and provided The Seattle Times editorial board with a fiscal analysis of I-107 that the city refused to provide to the coalition.
The lawsuit accused the City Council of discussing and carrying out legislative duties related to I-107 in those closed-door sessions in violation of open-meetings laws.
You can find directions here.
And the above is right-many Montessori schools operate using large classrooms and several teachers/aides to work with small groups within the larger setting.
I don't think this is new or scary at all.
One Done
--- swk
-NewMom
However, contained or open concept, I still stand against the insanity of expecting our teachers to teach every subject well at 5 different levels. We should be looking for creative solutions that take advantage of teacher strengths while allowing students to progress at at their own developmentally appropriate pace.