Over 400 parents and children protested Pearson

Brandishing pineapples, parents and students target Pearson

Pearson's Failed Attempt to Facebook Parents

Parents and Teachers Tell Pearson What They Think About Their Attempt to Demystify Testing

50 ways to get to DAR: Hop on the [family] bus, Gus!

We are hearing a funny thing from parents over at Blair High School.

Blair High School administrators are requiring students to pay $20 to ride a bus to graduation at DAR.  


But, the Blair PTSA is offering chartered bus rides to DAR for Blair family members for $10 a person.  


Students, go ride on the family bus and save your family $10.  

MCPS Bans Cell Towers at Elementary Schools

On November 21, 2011, a Hearing Examiner for the Montgomery County Board of Appeals issued an Opinion in Case No. S-2818.  On page 40 of that Opinion, at Footnote number 19, we learn that MCPS is no longer placing cell phone/telecommunications towers on elementary school playgrounds.  

This change in MCPS standard operating procedure comes too late for Daly Elementary School (shown below), but benefits the the other 130 elementary school sites that were ripe for the picking by cell tower companies. 

Daly Elementary School playground /cell tower compound

Since the Board of Education has never taken a public vote to place a cell tower on any public school site, decisions to let a private company build a cell tower transmission facility on public school land have been made behind closed doors with little or no public notice or input.  


From this Opinion, we now know that cell phone companies are no longer free to make behind closed door deals with MCPS to build cell tower facilities on elementary school playgrounds.
  
Score 1 for the little kids that get to keep their playground space!

********************************

Cell tower compounds have already been installed on playgrounds/fields at the following Montgomery County Public Schools: 

Northwood HS - Silver Spring

Blake HS - Silver Spring

Einstein HS - Silver Spring 

Kennedy HS - Silver Spring

Wheaton HS - Silver Spring 

Springbrook HS - Silver Spring

Blair HS - Silver Spring

Watkins Mill HS - Gaithersburg

Daly Elementary School - Germantown*

Magruder HS - Rockville

Tilden Middle School - Rockville

Sherwood HS - Sandy Spring

Woodwards Road ES site - Gaithersburg

*The Daly ES PTA and community said no to this cell tower and Superintendent Jerry Weast signed the lease and placed the tower on the playground anyway.

In Lists of Best High Schools, Numbers Don't Tell All

From Michael Winerip at the NYT.  For the full story go here.  Thanks Mr. Winerip!

This is the time of year when the lists of best high schools in the United States are published. For anxious consumers, the number of lists can be daunting, whether national in scope (U.S. News & World Report; The Washington Post; Newsweek and The Daily Beast) or local (Boston magazine; New Jersey Monthly; The Chicago Sun-Times).

No one in his right mind would take these lists lightly. Property values rise near best high schools. Parents will fight to the death for best high schools. Best teachers and best principals want to work in best high schools.

And:

What schools score highest on Newsweek’s index? Of the top 50, 37 have selective admissions or are magnet schools, meaning they screen students using a combination of entrance exam scores, grade-point average, state test results and assessments of their writing samples.

In short, to be the best, high schools should accept only the highest performing eighth graders, who — if the school doesn’t botch it — will become the highest performing 12th graders.

Put another way: Best in, best out, best school.

And:

At all costs, avoid Scarsdale, N.Y. It didn’t even make the top 1,000. Though its average SAT score of 1935 would rank it 21st among the 100 best, the school does not offer A.P. courses, and Newsweek counts A.P. data as 40 percent of the rating.

Why no A.P.? Scarsdale officials find that A.P. courses encourage students to go a mile wide and an inch deep, so the high school has created its own advanced courses. Instead of spending all their time working out of A.P. textbooks, students visit the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston and the Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site in Hyde Park, N.Y., to do field research.

Two-thirds of Scarsdale seniors are accepted to colleges that the Barron’s Guide to the Most Competitive Colleges ranks as the “most competitive” in the country. Of course, Newsweek doesn’t own Barron’s, so it wouldn’t make any sense to use that as a criterion.

High-stakes testing protests spreading

Here’s more of what’s going on, from Monty Neill, executive director of the non-profit National Center for Fair & Open Testing, known as FairTest:
*Testing errors, such as the notorious “Pineapple story” in New York and the “I have a secret” writing prompt in New Jersey have further roiled the waters. “Pineapple” was just one of more than 20 mistakes on the New York exams. The impact was intensified because New York’s tests are now kept secret. Until recently the state made its questions and answers public after administering them. Under its new contact with test-maker Pearson, however, they are secret, as they are in most states. Teachers face severe sanctions for revealing scores, but students and their parents have been revealing the flaws.
*In New York, parents are organizing to boycott the June administration of a “try out” test. Students will answer experimental questions soPearson can select items for future tests, perhaps to be used in multiple states for more profits, as was “Pineapple.” The company already had included experimental questions on the May state tests.
Some parents opted their children out of the regular New York tests. In some cases, principals allowed the students to do schoolwork when exams were being administered, but in other schools principals threatened parents with truancy and child-endangerment laws. (Given that the tests have been known to increase fights in school, create emotional distress, and even induce vomiting, the real “child endangerment” is the testing.) Now, more and more parents, urban and suburban, are rising up to say, “Enough,” “No Mas.”...

The Answer Sheet article in full at this link.

Is Blair HS Mandatory Bus Fee for Graduation Legal? $13,100 to bus grads to DAR

Last we knew, public school bus fees were illegal in Maryland.  But, Blair High School has put a mandatory $20 bus fee on their graduating seniors. 

Does it really cost Blair High School $13,100 to bus the senior class (655 students) to DAR Constitution Hall for graduation?  What kind of buses are they using? Why the mandatory bus ride?  Or, is this just another way of saying "senior fee" and slush fund for local school? And, how is this bus fee an exception to Maryland law?  


Graduation Package 2012

Will Common Core stifle brightest pupils?

Huffington Post:  Common Core Math In North Carolina Would Keep Elementary Students From Taking Middle School Courses

...In an effort to phase in a set of national education reforms knows as the Common Core -- an educational initiative that seeks to improve American education through unified and rigorous teaching across state lines -- North Carolina has voted to install a more difficult curriculum for the 2012-2013 academic year.
Officials say that middle school math courses currently taken by gifted elementary school students will be too difficult for them after the curriculum changes, theMcClatchy-Tribune reports. As a result, middle school courses will no longer be available to advanced elementary school students.
These changes fuel an already heated national debate on education reform. They raise the question of whether compliance to national educational standards such as the Common Core can stifle individual schools, preventing them from being able to push -- and conversely, alienating -- their brightest pupils...

"...inconsistencies between schools as to how students are punished..."

Gazette:  Montgomery educators discuss state’s proposed discipline policies at forum

...The state board’s proposed changes, released in February, require school systems to address the suspension disparities among races.
In public high schools in spring 2011, 9.8 percent of black students received out-of-school suspensions, compared to 5 percent of Hispanic or Latino students and 2.1 percent of white students, according to the county school system’s safety at a glance report.
The changes require school systems to come up with a plan within one year to close those gaps, and, within three years, the disparities must be gone.
When Robert Murphy, a specialist of state education department school completion and alterative programs, told the crowd that Thursday, some snickered...

For the Class of ’12, employers still have the upper hand

Slow recovery, tight job market leave many graduates scrambling

...For college graduates between ages 20 and 24, the national unemployment rate was 7.2 percent in the first quarter, down from 8.8 percent last year, according to federal labor figures. Some 19 percent of young grads were underemployed last year, working fewer hours than they would prefer.
The unemployment rate among all young people up to age 25 was 12.8 percent in Maryland in 2011, down from 15.5 percent in 2010. The state rate last year was lower than the national average of 17.3 percent...

This was 2001, has MCPS changed since then?

An unusual lawsuit in Montgomery County Maryland  received much focus...  In this case, Paul Hassler, a teacher with a  high record of student failure and professional abuses, sued a parent and math tutor who alerted school officials. The full trial transcripts are posted here (Day One).(Day Two).    Included in the transcript is testimony by school administrators, John Nori and Steven Seleznow that they shredded all student testimony about the abuses.  

Also included in the transcript is the teacher's abrupt exit as ABC-TV's 20/20 began recording the trial...

...In a school district often touted as the nation's finest, records showed that 75% of Paul Hassler's Algebra II students received D's or E's on the county-wide final exam...

..."There is one person missing in this courtroom," the trial began. "One person who should be here to listen to this testimony. And that is Jerry Weast, the new Superintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools."
As the facts came to light, the picture emerged of a school system bogged down by bureaucracy and protections for its staff, but without similar protections for children.

"If they can't do anything to remove an abusive and incompetent teacher, fine. Admit that. Just tell us," a parent said. "But to tell us 'we care' and 'we can' and 'we want to hear from you' and then leave a parent hanging out there alone to fight the nightmare of a million dollar lawsuit, for following the exact steps they ask us to follow...this is wrong."

Read the complete summary of this case at this link.  

Parents to Protest at Pearson Headquarters

 JOIN OUR JUNE 7TH DEMONSTRATION !!!

Public school parents from across the [New York]city are gathering outside the headquarters of test publisher Pearson to protest excessive and misguided testing in the public schools.The New York State Education Department* has turned over control of the education system to a private for-profit company with no accountability and no oversight.
It’s time for parents, educators and concerned citizens to say, enough is enough! We want a rich curriculum for our kids – not “teaching to the test.” We believe in our children and our schools, and refuse to continue to stand by silently as they are overwhelmed by more and more standardized testing...

*and Montgomery County's Board of Education has done the same thing! 

Supt. Josh Starr on STEM Education

Scroll through to 1:12:30 to hear Dr. Starr on STEM Education, IQ tests, "EQ" and more!

Documents show that system ignored flawed information in cheating investigation

The Baltimore Sun:  Experts critical of methods of investigation

According to documents obtained by The Baltimore Sun this week, independent hearing officers — attorneys hired by the system to render facts and findings in personnel hearings — found the school system's investigation, triggered by plunging student test scores, to be fundamentally flawed.
"While there is a healthy dose of speculation, suggestion and suspicion that cheating occurred in 2009, there is a lack of credible evidence that cheating actually occurred," one hearing officer wrote. "Not one witness was able to testify with certainty that they knew what happened in Abbottston. To the contrary, witness after witness stated that they did not know what happened at Abbottston."
The hearing officers also said city schools CEO Andrés Alonso knew there were problems with a state analysis of eraser markings in test books but moved ahead anyway to dismiss the principals last year.
The findings also raise questions about how the system determines whether a school cheated and who is responsible...
...The most troubling aspect of the school system investigation, according to the hearing officers, was that the system built its case on a faulty erasure analysis. In his announcement that Abbottston had cheated last year, Alonso said the analysis showed patterns of erasures from wrong to right answers "beyond the realm of probability."
In their findings, the hearing officers called the erasure analysis "incompetent" and "crude," and outside experts have called it an embarrassment to the scientific profession. The erasure analysis, conducted by a longtime state Education Department official, was done manually in a living room. Any documentation that could have authenticated it was destroyed....
...Robert Wilson, the lead investigator of a cheating scandal in Atlanta, considered the largest in the history of U.S. public education, said the Abbottston scores should never have been invalidated based on the analysis because it was so flawed. He reviewed hearing documents in the Baltimore case.
Wilson led the 2011 investigation that uncovered rampant cheating in Atlanta public schools — where his team issued a 171-page report identifying 150 educators, 82 of whom confessed to cheating.
Atlanta's erasure analysis consisted of reviewing more than 100,000 test booklets to establish a benchmark, electronically scanning the test booklets and a manual analysis to verify the results.
"If you showed me 167 booklets, and I did exactly what she did, I might be able to say, 'This is a hell of a lot of erasures,' but I'd have to have a lot more than that," Wilson said.
"I am surprised that someone who claims to a psychometrician would have been willing to draw conclusions from such unreliable work," he added. "That the Baltimore City Public Schools would have relied upon it is even more surprising."...

MCPS Hiring New Administrator!

There's always room for another administrator!  Who knew that "partnerships" were more important than classroom teachers? 

...MCPS seeks candidates with a commitment to academic excellence to apply for the Chief Engagement and Partnership Officer... ...The Chief Engagement and Partnership Officer, working with senior school system leaders, establishes a comprehensive vision for family, community, and business engagement. Oversees the development, design, and implementation of short- and long-term family, community, and business engagement strategies that are aligned with the MCPS strategic plan and Board of Education policies. Plans and manages strategic partnerships between MCPS and businesses, government agencies, higher education institutions, and community organizations to provide families and students with the supports needed to be college and career ready. Develops partnerships with the business community to increase alignment between the K–12 experience and careers. Designs and directs plans for expanding partnership programs to garner additional corporate input and resources and targets new partners based on district and school needs. Supports schools in their efforts to identify, develop, and maintain community and business partnerships. Directs the planning and implementation of parent engagement and community programs and services that promote family support of children’s learning and development and build the capacity of schools to support students and families. Directs the development of a systemic outreach strategy for engagement with traditionally underrepresented and emergent communities. Develops strategies to support and enable parent leadership and empowerment. Develops and implements strategies for improving interagency collaboration among federal, state, county, public, private, and volunteer agencies.

Assoc. Superintendent for Shared Accountability Opening

The MCPS office in charge of not-sharing real public school data is getting a new boss...

MCPS seeks candidates with a commitment to academic excellence to apply for the Associate Superintendent for Shared Accountability. The candidate must hold a Master's degree from an accredited college or university in one of the following: educational psychology, research and assessment, school administration or related field.  A doctoral degree is desirable.  Maryland state certification requirements for Administrator I or II is desirable.The position will report to the Deputy Superintendent of Teaching, Learning, and Programs. The associate superintendent manages the applied research, program evaluation, policy, records, reporting and testing functions of the school system, including the assessment program, the collection and analysis of systemwide data, the definition and implementation of accountability models, the preparation and coordination of statewide/systemwide testing materials and surveys, and the continuous collection and dissemination of education research.  The associate superintendent provides oversight of state and federal reporting requirements as well as the development and revision of school board policies and administrative regulations. Works closely with the deputy superintendents and other executive staff members.http://www.washingtonpost.com/jobs/JS_JobSearchDetail?jobid=32210562&jobSummaryIndex=0&agentID=&QUICK_SEARCH=

Citizens Appeal to State, Seek to Protect Park

Seeking to preserve an important county asset, citizens of Kensington’s Rock Creek Hills community have filed an appeal with the Maryland State Board of Education, asking the State board to overturn the Montgomery County school board’s recent decision to take the site of Rock Creek Hills Park to build a middle school...continues at link below

 http://savekensingtonpark.blogspot.com/2012/06/citizens-appeal-to-state-seek-to.html

Travel for 5 to Cincinnati

There's always room in the MCPS Operating Budget for travel! 


On May 23rd and 24th at least 5 people from MCPS (shown in tweet at left from Superintendent Starr) traveled to Cincinnati, Ohio for the 2012 Labor Management Conference.  The U.S. Department of Education was paying for travel and lodging for 3 representatives from a school district.  
Of course, MCPS sent 5.

Do we think they carpooled and slept at a budget motel?  No. 
In keeping with MCPS past practice local taxpayers would be footing the bill for airfare, limo to and from airports, meals, and luxury accommodations for the 2 extra travelers not covered by the Dept. of Education for at least 2 days and 2 nights.  


What's a few thousand dollars when classrooms are overcrowded and teachers are buying their own supplies? 

A 10-Year Trend in Spending by the Education Industry

Since 1989, spending by the education industry to fund election campaigns and lobbying activities has continuously increased. Also of note is the large disproportional level of spendings on campaigning versus lobbying efforts. The chart below tracks spending reported through 2011. 

See graphs at this link.

National League Leaves Artificial Turf in the Dust

For the first time in four decades the National League will play all its baseball games on real grass instead of artificial turf. Montreal was the last N.L. stadium with fake turf, but the Expos have moved to Washington, D.C., where they will play on natural turf at RFK Stadium.

NPR audio at this link.