Crazy Crawfish Warns About Louisiana Data Fraud. So this is exactly what happens when you design a competition. You cheat!
Crazy Crawfish Warns About Louisiana Data Fraud
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Many New York Districts Are Boycotting Pearson Field Tests
Who are BUILD funding partners
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
The Alliance for Early Success
The George Gund Foundation
Helios Education Foundation
Irving Harris Foundation
The Heinz Endowments
The Kresge Foundation
W. K. Kellogg Foundation
Robert R. McCormick Foundation
The McKnight Foundation
Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust
Pritzker Children’s Initiative
Rauch Foundation
The Schott Foundation for Public Education
The Schumann Fund for New Jersey
William Penn Foundation
NC awarded RTT money as the lead state 2013
Maryland got 5 million. (The proposed Consortium of seven States (Connecticut, Indiana, Maryland [fiscal agent],
Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, and Ohio) and three partner organizations (WestEd, the Johns Hopkins University Center for Technology in Education, and the University of Connecticut’s. Measurement, Evaluation, and Assessment Program) has a compelling vision for enhancing a multistate, state-of-the-art assessment system composed of a kindergarten entry assessment (KEA) and aligned formative assessments
Texas got 4 million. The Texas Education Agency (TEA), in collaboration with The University of Texas Health Science Center’s Children’s Learning Institute (CLI) – and backed by the Texas Association of School Boards, the Texas Association of School Administrators, and a network of renowned experts from the University of Miami, New York University, the University of Denver, the University of Virginia, the University of Texas at Austin, Michigan State University, and Kansas University – proposes to implement an ambitious and achievable Texas Kindergarten Entry Assessment System (TX-KEA) that enhances the quality and variety of assessment instruments and systems used by Texas’ 1,227 school districts serving 5,075,840 total students, including up to 400,000 incoming kindergarten students across 4,342 elementary campuses, annually.
NC won 6 million dollars ($6,131,422 to be exact)
The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NC DPI) along with 8 other Consortium states (AZ, DE, DC, IA, ME, ND, OR, RI), one collaborating state (SC), and three research partners, SRI International, the BUILD initiative, and Child Trends, will enhance NC’s K-3 formative assessment which includes a Kindergarten Entry Assessment (KEA). The Consortium believes that a KEA as part of a K-3 formative assessment will provide more meaningful and useful information for teachers than a stand-alone KEA. The Consortium proposes to enhance the K-3 assessment including the KEA because a single snapshot of how a child is functioning at kindergarten entry will have limited value and create an implementation challenge since teachers prefer information that can guide instruction for the entire school year. Furthermore, a good KEA must include content that extends beyond kindergarten to capture the skills of higher functioning children so enhancing an assessment that covers kindergarten entry through Grade 3 produces a significantly more useful assessment at marginal additional costs.
The NC K-3 assessment being developed under their RTT-ELC grant will be enhanced by: (a) aligning the content of the NC assessment to standards across the Consortium and enhancing the validity of the assessment through evidence-centered design (ECD) and universal design for learning (UDL); (b) incorporating smart technologies for recording and reporting to reduce assessment burden on teachers; and (c) expanding the utility of the assessment to a broader range of users by soliciting and incorporating input from stakeholders in the other Consortium states into the design of the assessment. The project will be led by NC DPI with a management team that includes the three research partners (SRI, BUILD and Child Trends) who will work together provide overall leadership and coordination to the project. Project work has been organized around seven major activity areas: (1) overall project management; (2) across- and within-state stakeholder engagement including support for implementation planning; (3) application of ECD/UDL to the assessment content; (4) enhancement of professional development materials; (5) pilot and field testing; (6) psychometric analyses and performance levels; and (7) technology. Each activity team will be led by either NC DPI or one of the research partners and many of the teams will include staff from more than one organization to facilitate cross-project coordination. The Consortium states will play a significant role in the development of the enhanced assessment. All Consortium states will undertake Tier 1 activities including participating in regular consortium calls and meetings; sharing state-developed early childhood and K-3 assessment-related materials including standards; providing input into the review of assessment-related materials; and conducting broad stakeholder outreach activities. Some Consortium states will engage in additional Tier 2 activities including participating in the ECD/UDL co-design teams; pilot testing the assessment content; pilot testing the assessment supports such as technology enhancements and reporting formats; field testing the assessment; convening state experts to review assessment-related materials; and conducting more in depth stakeholder engagement activities.
The primary outcome of this project will be an enhanced formative K-3 assessment that includes a KEA that provides powerful information for improving student outcomes. The EAC will be a developmentally appropriate, observation-based formative assessment based on learning progressions that teachers use to guide instruction across the five domains of development and learning. Smart technologies built into the EAC will assist teachers with documentation and scoring, minimizing teacher burden, increasing reliability, and maximizing the EAC’s utility so that teachers can use it on a regular basis to inform instruction. Additionally, the EAC will provide meaningful and useful information to the students and families. Students will receive developmentally appropriate information to show where they are in their learning and where they need to go next. Families will contribute evidence for the assessment and will receive information to assist in supporting their child’s development and learning. Finally, the KEA will produce a child profile of scores across the five domains. The KEA child profile data will be useful in the aggregate for principals, district and regional administrators, state policymakers, and advocates to inform programmatic decisions around curriculum, professional development, policy development, and resource allocation. In addition, the KEA will be the first assessment point within a K-3 formative assessment system that will inform instruction and learning, improving student achievement.
Closing the Gap
Data from NAEP data explorer showing reading trends for 9 year olds, 1990 and 2012 data points with standard errors figured in. Black and white. This looks like closing the gap to me?! Scroll to the right to see the graph
Is this admitting privitization? wi/ “unprecedented levels of investment by the Obama admin and private foundations
Have you heard about the doctoral program at Harvard that offers free tuition? In the first two years of the program, students will participate in a new customized curriculum of classes, modules, and practice-based experiences. In the concluding year, students will enter a year-long residency in a partner education organization pursuing transformational change where they will receive hands-on training and lead a capstone project to complete the doctoral degree
Is this just TFA take to the doctoral level?
Take a look at the partners involved.
Ed.L.D. partners include:
Achieve, Inc.
Achievement First
Aspire Public Schools
Atlanta Public Schools
Charlotte-Mecklenburg (N.C.) Public Schools
Chicago Public Schools
Denver Public Schools
The Education Trust
Jobs for the Future
KIPP
Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education
National Center on Education and the Economy
New Leaders for New Schools
New Schools Venture Fund
The New Teacher Project
New Visions for Public Schools
New York City Department of Education
Oregon Department of Education
Philadelphia Public Schools
Portland (Ore.) Public Schools
Public Education Network
Teach For America
“In creating this groundbreaking program, we are proud to bring together the strengths of our three great faculties with an array of exceptionally pioneering organizations,” said Professor Robert Schwartz, academic dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “The Obama Administration and large private foundations are about to make unprecedented levels of investment in education reform. It is critical that states and districts, and the national organizations they count on for support, have access to a pipeline of leadership talent equipped with the knowledge and skills to ensure that these investments produce dramatic improvements in the performance of our schools.”
It’s Deep
Get your scuba gear on, we are going for a deep dive with the Common Core and assessments to occur with 45 million students this year. See the graphic at http://visual.ly/what-everyone-needs-know-about-common-core-state-standards.
There are two companies that did a public opinion survey. Tarrance Group and David Binder Research. If you look at DBR, the clients and current work are only in California for Education work: Association of California School Administrators
California Faculty Association
California Federation of Teachers
California Higher Education Recruitment Consortium
California School Employees Association
California State University
California Teachers Association (CTA)
Northern Arizona Alumni Association
San Francisco City College
University of California
United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA)
Their website claims: “We serve diverse clients throughout North America including political campaigns and ballot measures, corporations, sports and entertainment businesses, ad agencies, public interest groups, and labor organizations.”How can they promote public opinion, when the sample is not randomized nor cross-state? These are just preliminary thoughts. The Tarrance Group is described as “one of the most widely respected and successful Republican strategic research and polling firms in the nation”. The Collaborative for Student Success, a pro-Common Core group, will issue results this afternoon from a public opinion survey on the standards. A sneak peek: 60 percent of respondents nationally said they would be “more likely” to support a candidate for public office that supports using the Common Core. And a majority of voters in Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Ohio and Michigan said the same. The survey was conducted last month by the Tarrance Group and David Binder Research. Read the findings here later this afternoon: http://bit.ly/1m3czV1. If you click on the link now, you get an error. We will check it out this afternoon. The Collaborative for Student Success by the way is part of the charter school movement The New Venture Fund 2014. Gates gave them: at least 22 million in 2011, 12 million in 2012, about 10 million in 2013 and about 1,200,000 in 2014. These figures estimate grants given to the New Venture Fund and the New Venture Schools Fund and New Schools fund dba New Schools Venture Fund.
Marketing
So it’s either a marketing faux pas or propaganda. Check out the main page for Friendship Schools in DC http://www.friendshipschools.org/. You have to wait until the scrolling marquis gets through several staged photos of the students. You will see a young child reading a book. The photographer is behind her, and she is reading Early Childhood Philosophy. She looks like she is about 8. I wonder what the Lexile score is on that TEXT is. ?! And why are we calling everything texts? What ever happened to stories for 5 year olds and literature?
My life changed
My life changed course twice this year. The first time was when I decided to go back to school…to get a doctorate and fight for all the things that have bothered me since I became a public school school psychologist. It’s not about the letters behind my name. I just want to know more. I need to know. Especially if I am going to be the voice for those that are too tired, too young, or too hurt to speak out.
The second instance was when I sat on waiver committees for high school students. When you look into the eyes of a student who has worked hard all semester, maintained a 95% average! participated in discussion and turned all his work in, then you will know the heartache of sitting on the other side of the table. I was a committee of 4 and he and his dad had waited for 3 hours. It took us 5 minutes. He had spent the weekend worrying about flunking an exam and feeling crushed and worried that he couldn’t pass. A good kid held hostage to the gloom of failure. I could sense it. And that is not only my training, but my nature. I love all kids. I work with all kids. I see the twitch and fumble as they try to read passages that are too hard. I see them face failure every day; craving success. And I see some rise beyond the shadow and others who fall beneath it. I fight for them all. I am not blaming teachers or educators. I blame the CCSS rollout and incessant test prep high stakes rigor mentality. Some times we should be able to stop, teach, learn and love.
The money behind the decisions
Just thinking how unusual it is that states can contract with corporations to manage data and create assessments when there is also so much talk about how there is no money in education. It seems as though we our talking out of both sides of our mouth?
juliannnc 