‘Insufficient Resources’ Is Destiny
When I hear the mantras ‘Poverty Is Not Destiny,’ and ‘Poverty Is Not An Excuse,’ I can understand why they are so compelling. The problem, though, is the ambiguity of the key words: ‘Poverty,’...
View ArticleTNTP releases odd report about progress in D.C.
For people following ed reform in this country, Washington D.C. is the most significant place to track. Though New Orleans is the place where the most experimentation is going on, the people doing the...
View ArticleMy visit to KIPP
On Veteran’s Day I toured the KIPP High School here in New York City. Public schools were closed but some charters were open (one of those ‘needs of the kids ahead of the needs of the adults’ things,...
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Ready or not …
On my recent visit to KIPP NYC College Prep High School, I received one of their newsletters. In it I found this graph demonstrating how their students rank in ‘college readiness’ compared to other...
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Why does the ‘worst’ NYC high school have better SATs than the ‘best’ NYC...
My father, the occasionally high profile defense attorney Ronald Rubinstein, graduated from Samuel J. Tilden High School in Brooklyn in 1956. Fifty years later, the NYC DOE began the process of...
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The 50 million dollar lie
Last year I spent a lot of time making scatter plots of the released New York City teacher data reports to demonstrate how unreliable value-added measurements are. Over a series of six posts which you...
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$50 million. 3 years. No clue.
In my last post, I showed how in the final report from the Gates Foundation MET project they produced a very misleading graph. Though the implication of this graph — namely, that value-added measures...
View ArticleThe Status Quo Miracle District
Over the past two years I’ve spent a lot of time debunking ‘miracle’ schools and ‘miracle’ districts. The way it works is that some politician or journalist tells a story about how this school or...
View ArticleEt tu, Rube?
On a post I wrote last week called ‘The Status Quo Miracle District,” I got a bunch of angry comments from people who seemed to feel betrayed by my ‘debunking’ of the media inflated claims of a...
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Unions and charters are strange bedfellows
When you ask the leader of an allegedly high performing charter school what makes them so successful, they generally say that they have more flexibility with hiring and firing since they are free from...
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Canada’s Legend-ary TED Talk Lie
Geoffrey Canada recently did a TED talk entitled ‘Our failing schools. Enough is enough.’ Canada is the president and CEO of The Harlem Children’s Zone and star of ‘Waiting For Superman.’ The premise...
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At KIPP, at least for 07102, zip code is destiny
One of the most annoying phrases uttered in ed reform is some version of ‘poverty is not destiny.’ Occasionally they mix it up a little with something like ‘zip code is not destiny.’ The implication...
View ArticleHome Field Advantage
In New York State, the high school standardized tests are called ‘The Regents’ exams. Unlike the state tests for grades 3 through 8, which are graded externally, the Regents have always been scored by...
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Randi Weingarten and I discuss miracle unionized charter school on Twitter
Yesterday I noticed what I considered an unusual pair of re-Tweets by Randi Weingarten, president of the UFT. Weingarten is one of the few people on ‘my side’ of the ed reform debate who I have never...
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Fat (Lie) Tuesday
Yesterday, there was some exciting news out of New Orleans. I learned about it from a tweet by TFA co-CEO Elisa Villanueva-Beard. Now I’ve written before about The New Orleans ‘Miracle.’ They...
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Driven by data … right off a cliff
Yesterday the big announcement in New York was the results of the latest ‘common core aligned’ state tests. As expected, the scores plummeted. The New York Times reported that from last year to this...
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How To Define ‘Success’?
The new and improved New York State tests have arrived and the higher standards have taken much of the air out of many charter chain’s balloons. Schools, in particular, from KIPP and Democracy Prep...
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The Underachievement School District
If you’re a parent, a student, or a teacher, the last thing you want to hear is that the state you live in has been commended by Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, as a ‘reform’ leader. This has...
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How I teach 2.6 months more of math in a year than the rest of you slackers
A report was recently released which according to some TFA defenders “settles the issue” about the effectiveness of Teach For America teachers. By comparing the standardized test scores of TFA...
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Polis Joke
Jared Polis is a Democratic Colorado Congressman. He recently had this interchange with Randi Weingarten on Twitter about Diane Ravitch. Though this caused a backlash, he seems to be standing by his...
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