Location: Back in Ohiya, for now ... Gender: Zodiac: Chinese Yr:
Posted:
Apr 27, 2013 - 5:19am
aflanigan wrote:
So John Stossel now fancies himself an educational expert? Great! When is his expose on incompetent high energy physicists coming out?
If he really did know the first thing about judging the quality of education, he would know that standardized test scores are probably the least reliable and valid measure of how well schools do their job. But let's take this sort of measure (standardized test scores) as a valid metric for the sake of argument. Stossel cites some cherry-picked data from a single example to make a broader argument, which is a rather poor logical approach, as you know (it's like looking at the results from last night's interleague game between the Yankees and the Mets to argue the superiority of the American League). Moreover, Stossel has, like many politicians, fallen under the spell of the Miracle School Myth.
From a policy standpoint, the appropriate question to ask is, are charter schools as a whole substantially more effective than public schools? The answer is pretty clear from the CREDO study.
Just passing thru, haven't got time to do more right now.
Been a fan and follower of Stossel since his days at ABC and especially on 20/20.
He's not a hack, IMO. He presents views rarely represented in any legitimate Media. He is also deeply involved in education and could qualify as an expert in some areas.
Location: Downstairs at Downton Gender: Zodiac: Chinese Yr:
Posted:
Apr 26, 2013 - 11:38am
miamizsun wrote:
better scores, better attendance, saved the govt money
yet while parents sobbed and children pleaded with the board, they closed this school anyway?
screw the fantastic results, we know the children are performing better, we know that the kids and their parents are happy/pleased
wait, there's made up political rule/reg that could be violated
this type of nuttiness (the war on efficiency, common sense and better outcomes) is usually reserved for political cronies
so you think Chavis should get defunded? or the school should get defunded?
versus removing him and keeping the obviously successful program in place?
and if you were on the school board would you vote to defund him (or the school) and if you chose to do so what would be your reason/logic to justify it?
just curious
john is the reporter and we can pick on him in a bit
I don't think the term "reporter" applies to Stossel any more, if it ever did. He's basically a hack who works from a script that promotes his notion of free market idealism.
If he were truly a reporter, he wouldn't tell one side of the story, present conclusory statements as fact, and neglect to look at what might really be going on in this fellow's charter schools.
We don't know that students are doing better than they would have if they had attended a different, public school. All we have allegations of improved performance based on a flawed measure: standardized test scores. Stossel doesn't give us anything except a bare allegation that he expects us to accept on face value. Why doesn't he have any curiosity about those high scores? Does he look at: 1. whether the charter school does a lot of test prep to artificially boost scores? 2. Whether they exclude certain students from enrolling (or being tested) to boost the school's scores? Does he examine the possibility of cheating? All of these and more have been used in the past to make test scores go up. He could have easily learned that the answers to these questions had he had enough curiosity to to basic shoe leather research. It's even easier with the internet (hey, John!! Check out the series of tubes!!!!)
Snippets From Wikipedia:
AIPCS was chartered by the Oakland Unified School District in 1996 with the mission of improving the abysmal performance of Native American students in the Oakland schools. As a charter school, AIPCS is free to students and has significant autonomy. The school, located in a converted church in Oakland's Laurel District, originally had a predominantly Native American student population and focused on Native American culture; students had classes in bead-making and drumming and had smoking breaks.
(highlighting mine)
Chavis, who believes principals need to be held more accountable for their schools' performance,<5> replaced most of the school's staff, eliminated bilingual education and Native American cultural content from the curriculum, and gave away all the school's technology equipment.<6>Chavis focused instruction on the California Content Standards and instituted a number of unorthodox disciplinary policies
(see question 1 above; "focused instruction" is a euphemism for test prep designed to artificially boost scores)
In the years that followed, the school's enrollment grew<4> and test scores made dramatic improvements, becoming one of the highest in the state. During the same time period, the percentage of students identifying as American Indian at the school decreased to less than 5%, following the general trend in Oakland's public schools. (such a dramatic shift in the school's demographics towards students who are typically much better test takers would be expected to produce much better test scores, regardless of curriculum or educational philosophy, as wikipedia entry later points out:)
The recent demographics represent a shift from earlier years, when the school had a larger American Indian population and smaller Asian population.<24><25><26> At AIPCS II, located in Oakland's Chinatown neighborhood, 67% of the students are Asian and are recruited almost exclusively from the nearby Lincoln Elementary School, which also has high test scores and is predominantly Asian.<27><28>
California Charter schools are required to either accept all applicants, or, if they have more applicants than capacity, to hold a lottery to determine entrants. AIPCS has never held a lottery and was denied a petition to open a new school in the fall of 2008, in part because AIPCS was "unable to describe" their selection process. AIPCS staff stated they had never needed to hold a lottery because they had never had more applicants than seats,<13> however, in the same petition, AIPCS stated its primary motivation for opening an additional school was to serve the many families wishing to enroll that the existing schools could not accommodate.<27>
Furthermore, in 2006, an African-American parent filed a complaint stating that AIPCS told her there was no room for her son and refused to place him on the school's waiting list, even while it was accepting applications from white students. Chavis' allegedly told a Caucasian parent that her son would be placed at the top of the school's waiting list because there were too many "darkies" and Asians enrolled in the school. If true, AIPCS violated federal and state laws, which prohibit public schools, including charters, from discriminating by race.<15>
(see question 2. above)
AIPCS has been accused of "cherry-picking" - recruiting students who will do well and getting rid of students who won't.<21><22> AIPCS denied the allegations, but half the 6th grade students performing poorly in 2007 had left the school before graduation, and only 39 of the 51 students who started in 2006 completed their middle school years with AIPCS. It should be noted, however, that the students who entered below grade level and stayed through the 8th grade all improved.<13> The failure to take into account the attrition of poorly performing students who have dropped out of a school is often the most decisive indicator that a school's evaluation has been inadequate.<20>
(It's easy to claim fantastic success in preparing high school grads for college when many of your students never even make it to senior year)
IQ expert<11>Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, praised AIPCS and said he would send his children there. However, he expressed skepticism towards AIPCS' high test scores, stating that he had never seen an example of a school that produced dramatic score improvements that stood up to scholarly scrutiny. He proposed six questions that should be asked regarding AIPCS' test scores, such as whether the scores had been influenced by the "practice effect," and predicted that test score improvements at AIPCS under Chavis would prove much less impressive once the questions had been answered.<20>
What Stossel is presenting is basically an op-ed in favor of Charter schools, not reporting. If he decides to do some actual reporting, take up Murray's suggestion and answer the six questions found here, I'd be very interested to read it.
So John Stossel now fancies himself an educational expert? Great! When is his expose on incompetent high energy physicists coming out?
If he really did know the first thing about judging the quality of education, he would know that standardized test scores are probably the least reliable and valid measure of how well schools do their job. But let's take this sort of measure (standardized test scores) as a valid metric for the sake of argument. Stossel cites some cherry-picked data from a single example to make a broader argument, which is a rather poor logical approach, as you know (it's like looking at the results from last night's interleague game between the Yankees and the Mets to argue the superiority of the American League). Moreover, Stossel has, like many politicians, fallen under the spell of the Miracle School Myth.
From a policy standpoint, the appropriate question to ask is, are charter schools as a whole substantially more effective than public schools? The answer is pretty clear from the CREDO study.
better scores, better attendance, saved the govt money
yet while parents sobbed and children pleaded with the board, they closed this school anyway?
screw the fantastic results, we know the children are performing better, we know that the kids and their parents are happy/pleased
wait, there's made up political rule/reg that could be violated
this type of nuttiness (the war on efficiency, common sense and better outcomes) is usually reserved for political cronies
so you think Chavis should get defunded? or the school should get defunded?
versus removing him and keeping the obviously successful program in place?
and if you were on the school board would you vote to defund him (or the school) and if you chose to do so what would be your reason/logic to justify it?
just curious
john is the reporter and we can pick on him in a bit
So John Stossel now fancies himself an educational expert? Great! When is his expose on incompetent high energy physicists coming out?
If he really did know the first thing about judging the quality of education, he would know that standardized test scores are probably the least reliable and valid measure of how well schools do their job. But let's take this sort of measure (standardized test scores) as a valid metric for the sake of argument. Stossel cites some cherry-picked data from a single example to make a broader argument, which is a rather poor logical approach, as you know (it's like looking at the results from last night's interleague game between the Yankees and the Mets to argue the superiority of the American League). Moreover, Stossel has, like many politicians, fallen under the spell of the Miracle School Myth.
From a policy standpoint, the appropriate question to ask is, are charter schools as a whole substantially more effective than public schools? The answer is pretty clear from the CREDO study.
I wrote recently how teachers unions, parent-teacher associations and school bureaucrats form an education "Blob" that makes it hard to improve schools. They also take revenge on those who work around the Blob.
Here's one more sad example:
Ben Chavis, founder and principal of the American Indian Public Charter Schools, got permission to compete with the Blob in Oakland, Calif. Chavis vowed, "We'll outperform the other schools in five years." He did. Kids at the three schools he runs now have some of the highest test scores in California.
His schools excel even though the government spends less on them.
But Chavis paid his wife to do accounting work, rented property to his schools and didn't follow all of the Blob's rules. So last month, the Oakland School Board said it might close the schools.
They'll be hard-pressed to beat Chavis' academic results, though. U.S. News & World Report says his schools are No. 1 in Oakland. The Washington Post this month said American Indian is No. 1 on the list of most challenging high schools in America. Over the past three years, 100 percent of Chavis' high school seniors were accepted to four-year colleges.
By contrast, in New York City, where I live, a third of high school students don't even graduate in four years.
Chavis says that if the board thinks he stole money, they should arrest him instead of shutting down his schools.
hippiechick
Did you ever grow anything in the garden of your mind?
Location: topsy turvy land Gender: Zodiac: Chinese Yr:
WTF is going on in Texas?? The government is run by extremist on both sides, is there anybody in government that is reasonable and rational in that state????
hippiechick
Did you ever grow anything in the garden of your mind?
Location: topsy turvy land Gender: Zodiac: Chinese Yr:
Posted:
Feb 27, 2013 - 9:09am
sirdroseph wrote:
Didn't seem objective at all to me which IMO is how school should be. Individual teachers should have the freedom to interject their opinions on issues, but this is pretty institutionalized by the sound of it. When some of the teachers have major misgivings of what they are told to teach, that should indicate PC gone amok maybe?
Since when do teachers teach without judgment or opinion. I had to have a talk with my son's second grade teacher who reprimanded him for making a green lion (he is color blind also.) I asked her what she thought might have happened if someone told Picasso that.
Are there many Muslim children in that school? In their opinion, maybe they do see these men as freedom fighters. They were certainly committed to their mission.
It doesn't seem as if they were "teaching that opinion" - it seems, from the article, as if the teacher was trying to teach "perspective" - that the terms "freedom fighters' and "terrorists" are defined by one's point of view. Still, that seems like a pretty heavy-handed way to do it.
Didn't seem objective at all to me which IMO is how school should be. Individual teachers should have the freedom to interject their opinions on issues, but this is pretty institutionalized by the sound of it. When some of the teachers have major misgivings of what they are told to teach, that should indicate PC gone amok maybe?
hippiechick
Did you ever grow anything in the garden of your mind?
Location: topsy turvy land Gender: Zodiac: Chinese Yr:
Posted:
Feb 27, 2013 - 8:46am
sirdroseph wrote:
And our schools should not be the one's teaching that opinion one way or the other. I mean they are teaching creationism one day and glorifying killing innocents the next. WTF?? We are going to have some confused kids and they already live in Texas which is confusing enough on the face of it.
So what would you call them?
There is no reason why we shouldn't be called terrorists, for what we do in other countries.
We are a long way from taking jugment out of our history. Most of what we learn in schools is lies anyway, especially when it comes to history.
Proclivities
There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.
Location: Paris of the Piedmont Gender: Zodiac: Chinese Yr:
Posted:
Feb 27, 2013 - 8:46am
sirdroseph wrote:
And our schools should not be the one's teaching that opinion one way or the other. I mean they are teaching creationism one day and glorifying killing innocents the next. WTF?? We are going to have some confused kids and they already live in Texas which is confusing enough on the face of it.
It doesn't seem as if they were "teaching that opinion" - it seems, from the article, as if the teacher was trying to teach "perspective" - that the terms "freedom fighters' and "terrorists" are defined by one's point of view. Still, that seems like a pretty heavy-handed way to do it.
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
And our schools should not be the one's teaching that opinion one way or the other. I mean they are teaching creationism one day and glorifying killing innocents the next. WTF?? We are going to have some confused kids and they already live in Texas which is confusing enough on the face of it.
hippiechick
Did you ever grow anything in the garden of your mind?
Location: topsy turvy land Gender: Zodiac: Chinese Yr:
