Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Seniority list
All members MUST check the seniority list ASAP to see if there are any mistakes. If you notice a mistake make sure you tell your administrator so it can be fixed. This is very important when it comes to lay offs. If you don't tell anyone your start date is incorrect and you end up getting a pink slip it will be very hard for SMETA to fight for you. So check that list!!!!
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Viewpoints: For California schools, we need less testing and more assessing
By Linda Darling-Hammond
Special to The Bee
Published: Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2012
There is a saying that American students are the most tested and the least examined of any in the world. Nowhere is that more true than in California, where students take 35 tests before they hit the SAT and AP exams.
Gov. Jerry Brown's call for less testing and more focus on meaningful learning is a welcome breath of sanity in an American education landscape that has appeared more and more like Alice's Wonderland. Fortunately, the state's decision to join the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium – a group of more than 20 states creating new tests – will support, rather than conflict with, these goals, as a Feb. 5 story in The Bee suggested.
No country tests its children as often as the United States: The highest achieving often have few or no tests until the end of high school. Furthermore, the tests that are used in top-ranked nations like Finland, South Korea and Singapore are open-ended essay and oral examinations. Most top systems also expect students to design and conduct extended research projects and scientific investigations.
By contrast, in California, nearly all of our current tests are limited to bubbling in answers on multiple-choice items, rather than writing well-defended responses, researching and presenting information, solving complex problems and using new technologies or other skills increasingly critical in our 21st-century society.
With punitive sanctions from the federal government attached to test scores, parents and teachers have complained for years that these important higher-order skills are often edged out of the curriculum in favor of test prep that encourages a drill-and-kill, multiple-choice curriculum. All this testing has not helped California's achievement: The state ranks in the bottom five on every national measure of achievement, far below states that test students much less and use different kinds of measures.
The Smarter Balanced tests will replace California's existing English language arts and math tests in grades three through eight, and grade 11 with new computer-assisted assessments that include more written responses from students, plus tasks that require them to engage in research, solve more complex problems and use technology. These tests will be designed to measure student growth more accurately and to return results more quickly to teachers, students and parents.
Local districts may choose to support teaching with some of the formative instructional lessons and interim assessments the consortium will offer. These will be less costly and more aligned to the Common Core standards than current products that many districts are trying to buy or create, but they will be completely optional. And, unlike current bubble tests, these lessons and assessments will foster complex-thinking and problem-solving skills, and give teachers timely feedback on how well students understand what is being taught.
California can replace up to 18 of its tests with a smaller number of these new assessments. Brown's proposal should lead us to reconsider the other 17 as well. In particular, we should rethink the science tests that – unlike those in other countries and some leading states – include no real experimentation or investigation, as well as the history and social science tests that include no real analysis of historical events or extended reading and writing about important social issues.
Many schools and districts in California have already developed exciting, intellectually rigorous projects and assessments for students in these and other subjects. Envision Schools, New Tech and High Tech High Schools, Linked Learning schools, and many others require their students to engage in the kind of science and technology assessments that are used in Singapore, Hong Kong, Finland and other high-flying nations. Their outcomes show that they are preparing their students to be truly college- and career-ready. Shouldn't we do this for all our students?
The governor's call to tap local initiative and creativity should encourage us to look to our own pioneers for ways to focus schools on the kind of learning that will matter for our children's – and California's – future.
Linda Darling-Hammond is a professor of education at Stanford University and co-director of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. Her latest book is "The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future."
Governor Brown Tax Initiative
There are a few initiatives coming up in the near future. Governor Brown's initiative proposes a temporary income tax increase for the next 5 years on high earners. 1% on those making $500,000-$600,000, 1.5% on $600,000-$1,000,000 earners, and 2% on those making more than $1,000,000. This measure is expected to generate $7 billion a year. This money would be placed in an education protection account for pre-K -12 education and community colleges. Keep an eye open for ways to get involved in the next election.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Food Drive
Hey members, don't forget to fill those bags with non perishable foods for SMETA and the district's Second Harvest Food Drive. We hope to fill at least 10 bins of food this Friday. Bring your bags of food to the Professional Development day at Bowditch school. We would also love to see you show some SMETA support by wearing your SMETA blue. See you there.
Monday, February 13, 2012
Professional Development day
I was assigned a workshop I didn't even rank as one I would be remotely interested in. In fact it has nothing to do with what I teach. Did this happen to anyone else?
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Education: Achievement gap starts before school starts
If you read news magazines or watch TV, you might think that American education is in a crisis of historic proportions. The media claim that that our future is in peril because our students have low test scores caused by incompetent, lazy teachers.
Don't believe it. It's not true.
Yes, our students' scores on international tests are only average, but our students have never been at the top on those tests; when the first such test was given in 1964, we ranked 12th out of 12. And, yet, the United States continued to prosper.
So maybe standardized tests are not good predictors of future economic success or decline. Perhaps our country has succeeded not because of test scores but because we encouraged something more important than test scores — the freedom to create, innovate, and imagine. Unfortunately, recent educational reforms throw aside that philosophy in favor of an even greater emphasis on test scores.
In 2001 Congress passed No Child Left Behind, which imposed a massive program of school reform based on standardized testing. The theory behind the plan was that teachers and schools would try harder — and see rapid test score gains — if their test results were made public.
Instead of sending the vast sums of money that schools needed to make a dent in this goal, Congress simply sent testing mandates that required every child in every school to reach proficiency by 2014 — or the schools would be subject to sanctions. If a school failed to make progress over five years, it might be closed, privatized, handed over to the state authorities, or turned into a charter school.
The Obama administration launched its own school reform plan in 2009 called Race to the Top. The program dangled nearly $5 billion in front of cash-hungry states, which could become eligible only if they agreed to open more privately managed charter schools, to evaluate their teachers by student test scores, to offer bonuses to teachers if their students got higher test scores, and to fire the staff and close schools that didn't make progress.
None of these policies has any consistent body of evidence behind it. The fundamental belief that carrots and sticks will improve education is a leap of faith, an ideology to which its adherents cling despite evidence to the contrary.
Two major reports released in spring 2011 showed what a risky and foolish path the United States has embarked upon.
The National Research Council gathered some of the nation's leading education experts who concluded that incentives based on tests hadn't worked. In other words, the immense investment in testing over recent decades was based on intuition, not on evidence—and faulty intuition, at that.
The second report, by the National Center on Education and the Economy, maintained that the approach we are now following—testing every child every year and grading teachers by their students' scores—is not found in any of the world's top-performing nations.
Piece by piece, our entire public education system is being redesigned in the service of increasing scores on standardized tests at the expense of the creativity, innovation and imagination that helped this country succeed.
We are now at a fork in the road. If we continue on our present path of privatization and unproven reforms, we will witness the explosive growth of a for-profit education industry and of education entrepreneurs receiving high salaries to manage nonprofit enterprises.
The free market loves competition, but competition produces winners and losers, not equality of educational opportunity. We will turn teachers into “at will” employees who can be fired at the whim of a principal based on little more than test scores. Their pay and benefits will also depend on the scores. Who will want to teach? Most new teachers already leave the job within five years.
What the federal efforts of the past decade ignore is that the most consistent predictor of test scores is family income. Children who are homeless or living in squalid quarters are more likely to miss school and less likely to have home support for their schoolwork. Children who grow up in economically secure homes are more likely to arrive in school ready to learn than those who lack the basic necessities of life.
If we are serious about closing the achievement gap, we should make sure that every pregnant woman has good prenatal care and nutrition and that every child has high-quality early education.
The achievement gap begins before the first day of school. If we mean to provide equality of educational opportunity, we must level the playing field before the start of formal schooling. Otherwise, we'll just be playing an eternal game of catch-up — and that's a game we cannot win.
Diane Ravitch, a former U.S. assistant secretary of education, is a historian of education and a professor at New York University.
Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/community/northwest/news/article/Education-Achievement-gap-starts-before-school-2213710.php#ixzz1lrGe2ojF
Don't believe it. It's not true.
Yes, our students' scores on international tests are only average, but our students have never been at the top on those tests; when the first such test was given in 1964, we ranked 12th out of 12. And, yet, the United States continued to prosper.
So maybe standardized tests are not good predictors of future economic success or decline. Perhaps our country has succeeded not because of test scores but because we encouraged something more important than test scores — the freedom to create, innovate, and imagine. Unfortunately, recent educational reforms throw aside that philosophy in favor of an even greater emphasis on test scores.
In 2001 Congress passed No Child Left Behind, which imposed a massive program of school reform based on standardized testing. The theory behind the plan was that teachers and schools would try harder — and see rapid test score gains — if their test results were made public.
Instead of sending the vast sums of money that schools needed to make a dent in this goal, Congress simply sent testing mandates that required every child in every school to reach proficiency by 2014 — or the schools would be subject to sanctions. If a school failed to make progress over five years, it might be closed, privatized, handed over to the state authorities, or turned into a charter school.
The Obama administration launched its own school reform plan in 2009 called Race to the Top. The program dangled nearly $5 billion in front of cash-hungry states, which could become eligible only if they agreed to open more privately managed charter schools, to evaluate their teachers by student test scores, to offer bonuses to teachers if their students got higher test scores, and to fire the staff and close schools that didn't make progress.
None of these policies has any consistent body of evidence behind it. The fundamental belief that carrots and sticks will improve education is a leap of faith, an ideology to which its adherents cling despite evidence to the contrary.
Two major reports released in spring 2011 showed what a risky and foolish path the United States has embarked upon.
The National Research Council gathered some of the nation's leading education experts who concluded that incentives based on tests hadn't worked. In other words, the immense investment in testing over recent decades was based on intuition, not on evidence—and faulty intuition, at that.
The second report, by the National Center on Education and the Economy, maintained that the approach we are now following—testing every child every year and grading teachers by their students' scores—is not found in any of the world's top-performing nations.
Piece by piece, our entire public education system is being redesigned in the service of increasing scores on standardized tests at the expense of the creativity, innovation and imagination that helped this country succeed.
We are now at a fork in the road. If we continue on our present path of privatization and unproven reforms, we will witness the explosive growth of a for-profit education industry and of education entrepreneurs receiving high salaries to manage nonprofit enterprises.
The free market loves competition, but competition produces winners and losers, not equality of educational opportunity. We will turn teachers into “at will” employees who can be fired at the whim of a principal based on little more than test scores. Their pay and benefits will also depend on the scores. Who will want to teach? Most new teachers already leave the job within five years.
What the federal efforts of the past decade ignore is that the most consistent predictor of test scores is family income. Children who are homeless or living in squalid quarters are more likely to miss school and less likely to have home support for their schoolwork. Children who grow up in economically secure homes are more likely to arrive in school ready to learn than those who lack the basic necessities of life.
If we are serious about closing the achievement gap, we should make sure that every pregnant woman has good prenatal care and nutrition and that every child has high-quality early education.
The achievement gap begins before the first day of school. If we mean to provide equality of educational opportunity, we must level the playing field before the start of formal schooling. Otherwise, we'll just be playing an eternal game of catch-up — and that's a game we cannot win.
Diane Ravitch, a former U.S. assistant secretary of education, is a historian of education and a professor at New York University.
Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/community/northwest/news/article/Education-Achievement-gap-starts-before-school-2213710.php#ixzz1lrGe2ojF
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