Archive for the ‘Education Books’ Category

Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (©2014) by Diane Ravitch takes on the private-sector school leaders and the political officials behind our current reform movement. Diane exposes the many myths that have driven reform, and supplies solutions that we should seriously consider. If you want to know what’s wrong with education reform this book is a must. Be sure to click at the bottom of any page to get copies for concerned educators and parents you know.

Diane Ravitch

• Diane is a research professor at New York University. She served as Assistant Secretary of Education for Research for George H. W. Bush, and was appointed to the National Assessment Governing Board by Bill Clinton. She is the author of ten previous books. In 2011, she received the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize from the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She has an excellent blog at DianeRavitch.Net and is active on Twitter @DianeRavitch.

Our School Are at Risk

• Politicians on both sides along with our media seem to agree that public education is broken. This has feed the ideas that we need to close schools and fire a large number of teachers and administrators. It wasn’t until Diane saw the corrosive effects of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation that she recanted her support for high-stakes testing, test-based accountability, competition, and school choice via charter schools and vouchers. NCLB’s unrealistic goals have turned reform into a privatization movement, which was probably the intent of many of the bill’s supporters.
• Diane claims that what works is what well off parents do and expect schools to do. This includes rich programs in the arts, physical education, libraries, well maintained schools, small classes, and after school programs where students can explore their interests. There should be a joyful pursuit of play, time to sing and dance, and draw. Diagnostics should focus on what students know, and what they need to learn next. These same parents supply learning opportunities before and after their kids start school unlike poor parents who generally have less education themselves.

The Context for Corporate Reform

• Diane points out that much of the rational for NCLB was based on a Texas Miracle that never existed. The law’s impossible goals guaranteed failing schools that could be closed so the students could be shifted to charter or private schools, and first among the failing schools were those that served poor and minority children. Charters were supposed to innovate and share success with public schools. Due to the competitive nature of the reform movement, however, sharing between schools doesn’t happen much. It wasn’t long after NCLB passed that teaching to the test, narrowing the curriculum, and outright cheating became common proactices.
• Rather than fix NCLB when it was up for reauthorization in 2007, Congress did nothing, which left an opening for the Obama administration to introduce Race to the Top (RTTT) in a unilateral manner. The only real difference between the two was that RTTT introduced the use of test scores to evaluate teachers. It also put more emphasis on competition as a means of allocating federal funding.

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Rethinking Value-Added Models in Education: Critical Perspective on Tests and Assessment-Based Accountability by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley describes and analyzes the imposition of value added test-based evaluation of teachers, the theory behind it, the real-life consequences, and its fundamental flaws. It contains great detail and should be in the hands of any person or organization fighting this alarming practice. Click at the bottom of any page to get a copy for your school’s professional development library.

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, PhD

• Audrey is a former middle and high-school mathematics teacher. She received her PhD in 2002 from Arizona State University in the Division of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies. She is an Associate Professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University, and one of the top education scholars in the nation who has been honored for contributing to public debates about the nation’s educational system. Audrey’s research interests include educational policy, research methods, and more specifically, high-stakes tests and value-added measurements and systems. In addition, she researches aspects of teacher quality, teacher evaluation, and teacher education. She is the creator and host of an online biographical show titled Inside the Academy during which she interviews top educational researchers. She is also the creator and host of the blog: VAMboozled!.

1. Socially Engineering the Road To Utopia

• Audrey starts with examples of how governments use policies to socially engineer the societies they govern. It starts with something in the way of a worst case example involving the Cambodian government who had a policy to kill all the intellectuals after the Vietnam War ended. The social engineering currently aimed at schools is traced back to the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983. It began a series of policies that lead to the Measure and Punish or M & P theory of change. Using standardized tests to enforce accountability turns out to be an overly simplistic causal model. A better model would be more difficult to understand and defend as it would have to consider students’ levels of intelligence, social capital, and levels of risk. To this point, empirical evidence shows that the M & P theory is flawed and misguided, and many of it’s early proponents have become its biggest opposition.
• There many reports of how teachers and administrators have gamed the system and resorted to outright cheating. By some standards, the M & P theory of change and its policy derivatives might be viewed as the greatest failed social engineering project of our time. At the end of each chapter, Audrey includes a box with the top ten assertions made in the chapter. You might consider reading these boxes first and last.

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You’ve Gotta Connect: Building Relationships that Lead to Engaged Students, Productive Classrooms, and Higher Achievement by James Alan Sturtevant makes the case that the most important thing teachers can do is connect with and accept their students. It may not always be easy, but once you do connect, students will behave better and learn more. This book is packed with great advice and belongs in every teachers professional development library. Click at the bottom on any page to purchase copies for teachers you know.

James Alan Sturtevant

• James has worked as a high school social studies teacher since 1985. He see it as a wonderful activity but his job by no means defines him. Since the early 1990s he has taught at Big Walnut High School located in Sunbury, Ohio. He earned a BA in history and Political Science from Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio, and an MA in history from the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. He has been married to Penny Sturtevant since 1991.  Penny is the principal at Big Walnut Middle School. They have three children that they love dearly.

1. Commitment: Don’t Start Class Without It.

• When a visiting professor asked him how he created such a wonderful atmosphere in his classroom, James gave it much thought and came up with the following. Connections have improved as his career has progressed. Connection is not automatic as he had to work at it. You don’t have to have his personality type to connect. You need to be willing to try new approaches and gauge their effectiveness. As a result of this pondering, this book was born.
• To begin, you have to make a commitment to connect, even with students who have annoying attitudes. You also need to be prepared to work hard on connecting with some students. Humans need connection and when they connect, they are more likely to be happy and productive. Connected students will be more engaged in learning and more creative as well. They will retain more, have fewer behavior issues, feel better about themselves, get along with other students, achieve at higher levels, and not drop out. Keep in mind that you can care for a student and still have high expectations.
• James suggests that you make a poster for yourself that contains what effective communication is and is not. (See page 22) In short, you need to be: available, caring, respectful, trustworthy, warn, welcoming, compassionate, loving, interested in students, a great listener, and accepting. What you shouldn’t do is: act like a peer, try too hard to be liked, gossip, have vague boundaries and expectations, be sarcastic, pamper students, be phony, demand respect rather than earn it, and pretend to care. Like the other chapters in this book, this one ends with a number of activities that you can do by yourself or with others to help internalize the key concepts.

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