Jersey Jazzman Examines the ‘Myth of the Heroic Charter School’ — New Jersey Style

As you know, certain charter chains keep claiming that nothing needs to be done about poverty in America.

All that needs to be done to get rid of the ‘achievement gap’ is to get rid of unionized, veteran teachers; hire inexperienced, untrained teachers; and require them to follow a script, have ‘high expectations’, maintain tight discipline. Then, the scores will go through the roof.

Jersey Jazzman has actually taken the time to look into this, and has lovely graphs and tables backing up his words showing that it’s really a load of cow manure. The graphs should be read deciphered by all.

Pay particular attention to the graph that shows that on one Big Standardized (BS) test (where a particular charter chain scored quite high), the vast majority of the public-school students they were compared to, didn’t even bother taking the test, because they knew it didn’t matter to their futures in any way at all and was a big PITA.

Here is the link.

Who are the Edu-DEformers?

Mercedes Schneider has done an admirable jobs of sleuthing out the Edu-DEformista leadership of a group called the National Council on Teacher Quality. This link takes you to part XIII (or 13) of MKS’ perusal of the NCTQ board, but she is up to part XVI (16) as of this writing.

Also don’t miss the exposes of  ‘Jersey Jazzman’ .

The NCTQ board is mostly made up of people who have never taught in a classroom a single day in their life but who are ‘bold’ reformers –often hedge-fund gamblers – committed to data and measurement and DEforming public education (which they neither attended or worked in).

There are a few others who are more akin to the five-week wonder, Teach-For-Awhile teacher with a grand total of TWO years of classroom experience (at which she most likely was a dismal failure) and an expired teaching license, who is now in charge of all of teacher training for the entire state of Louisiana.

Lastly, let me point people in the direction of Diane Ravitch’s blog. She is doing a tremendous job, in my humble opinion, despite the fact that she is obviously deluding in thinking that I’m doing a more than adequate job at exposing venality and hypocrisy in US education.

Jersey Jazzman Dissects Joel Klein’s non-existent progress as School Chancellor in NYC

Looks like the start of an excellent series by Jersey Jazzman.

This is how he begins his column:

Joel Klein: As Excellent As He Says He Is? Part I

 

I and many others spent a good deal of time last year documenting the real legacy of Michelle Rhee. This is important work: Rhee occupies an outsized place in the current debate about education “reform,” largely based on claims of her own success, both as a teacher and as Chancellor of Washington, D.C.’s schools.Thanks to the close scrutiny of Gary Brandenburg, Bob Somerby, Matt DiCarlo, Dana Goldstein, Diane Ravitch, USA Today, and others, we now know the true story: Rhee was never a miracle worker. She was, at best, an average new teacher (meaning she had a long way to go) and a mediocre large-city superintendent when judged by student achievement (when judged by other criteria, she was clearly a trainwreck).It’s important to get this on the record, because the anti-teacher and anti-union “reforms” Rhee implemented in D.C. – the very ones she wants to impose on the rest of the country – did nothing to affect large-scale changes in educational outcomes. Rhee’s argument for “reform” is, in fact, undercut by her own history.

I say that it’s time to start applying this same level of examination to other prominent members of the corporate “reform” movement. When they make claims of big successes, those claims ought to be vetted very carefully: after all, why should we listen to what they have to say about holding educators accountable if they aren’t held to account themelves?

Which brings us to Joel Klein.

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Maybe he is confusing me with Gary Rubenstein?