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Every Student Succeeds

AlaskaBushPilot

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Joined
Nov 6, 2010
Messages
4,341
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was widely reported for confirming the death of Common Core. Or at least that it has been taken off life support: federal funding.

We've been in the new era of Every Student Succeeds (ESSA) since Obama signed it in December 2015. A bit of background:

In 1965 the Federal Government passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It was mostly about granting money to low-income educational districts. No Congress can bind a future Congress, so this original act is re-authorized continuously, but with faddish revisions that will always revolutionize education and bring the Easter Bunny to life.

It's grown to nine "Titles" now and roughly $20 billion in funding. It didn't get the feds out of the education business.

This is the main cause of the problem - the existence of this original Act and the constant revisions. The feds dangle hundreds of millions of dollars before state and local educational bureaucracies, so long as they comply with the newest provisions. This latest fad had states doing these little public meetings nobody really knew about to re-write their standards from the ground up, if they so chose. Did you attend your meetings?

Obama got an enormous increase in this education budget temporarily through the Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act. That's how the states signed on to Common Core: unprecedented bribery.

States that adopted the corpse of Common Core still have to remove themselves from it - but there is no federal funding contingent on it now.

States still have to submit education plans to the feds in order to get the money. There's on the order of seven major federal laws tangling up strings. ESSA is over a thousand pages.

The traditional low-income funding (Title I) is still by far the largest component at about $15 billion. There is no big change in direction with the original 1965 Act provision.

As for the rest, each state I've checked has an ESSA page explaining what they're doing under the new Act. Our state commissioner has this to say in her first sentence:

ESSA is not Alaska's vision for public education...

But we're complying, in order to get the money.

https://education.alaska.gov/akessa/

If you check your own state, you will see reference to a plan your state is supposed to complete along with everyone who is supposed to be consulted. A bunch of make-work bureaucracy, but with potential for determined constituencies to exert influence on these plans. My prediction is a lot of word salad from most states.

Surely, every student will succeed, since that is the title of the Act. :)
 
Just so everyone knows, that consistently happened in (local) school systems long before the gov't stepped in with it's research claims and one system overall policies. Basic problem is different students (in several ways) learn differently but school systems will not, and claim they cannot, functionally assign students who learn best in a specific way to specific teachers who teach best in that way. Changes to the systems usually start with one of the systems taking over in one part of the country and moving through the country as "the new thing that really works" and over an approximately 7 year period it is THE WAY to teach as the trend moves over the country it is adopted all over the country. Except!!!- it begins to be noted that only about a third of the students are doing really great with the program.

Now, in the original area the WAY started a new system is newly promoted as the way to improve the students not doing so well and it turns out to really help the students that were not doing well and over and over this cycles. With three moderately different methods. The real result is in each change you have the top group of A students who do well under any of the systems but the lower A students start dropping more into the B ranges. The higher B students tend to move into the lower A range and lower B students will either move up or down as the new version comes in, etc. down the line. As a rule the changes in the lower D and F students tend to stay that way though IF the method works better for certain D and F students they may rise in grades. This is based on readings long ago of research in education magazines/journals including those for principals and Guidance persons Oh, why I did not mention C students. There tend to be factors that make them less affected by these changes in styles - they are there, they know to do what they need to pass and they do it, No biggie. The system by the by goes (starts) in seven year cycles for each of the three major versions such that each is popular/required for This means that each area uses it for app. seven years but it is in effect somewhere for about 9-10 years. Then the next version has it's ten years of being king somewhere and then the last basic version has it's ten. This took me three plus a little years to figure out due to watching what happened in Pasco and Orange Counties and observing other parts of the country.

I should note that the presence of the slime Marzano did affect this for several areas because it simplified a lot of silliness being used to make it available and look educational. Meant treating students like 1st graders (if you don't understand this raise
one finger, if you feel like you sort of understand this raise two fingers. if you really understand this raise three fingers!!!) (I always really felt like saying " If you are sick of this idiot Marzano crap raise your middle finger!!" but I forbore doing so. Though at many teacher meeting (without principals involved ) I always got a loud laugh as I was leaving and said, as I was about to go through the door, " Oh, as you are leaving try not to step in the marzano!!!!" A laugh riot ensued dependably!!!
 
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U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was widely reported for confirming the death of Common Core. Or at least that it has been taken off life support: federal funding.

We've been in the new era of Every Student Succeeds (ESSA) since Obama signed it in December 2015. A bit of background:

In 1965 the Federal Government passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It was mostly about granting money to low-income educational districts. No Congress can bind a future Congress, so this original act is re-authorized continuously, but with faddish revisions that will always revolutionize education and bring the Easter Bunny to life.

It's grown to nine "Titles" now and roughly $20 billion in funding. It didn't get the feds out of the education business.

This is the main cause of the problem - the existence of this original Act and the constant revisions. The feds dangle hundreds of millions of dollars before state and local educational bureaucracies, so long as they comply with the newest provisions. This latest fad had states doing these little public meetings nobody really knew about to re-write their standards from the ground up, if they so chose. Did you attend your meetings?

Obama got an enormous increase in this education budget temporarily through the Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act. That's how the states signed on to Common Core: unprecedented bribery.

States that adopted the corpse of Common Core still have to remove themselves from it - but there is no federal funding contingent on it now.

States still have to submit education plans to the feds in order to get the money. There's on the order of seven major federal laws tangling up strings. ESSA is over a thousand pages.

The traditional low-income funding (Title I) is still by far the largest component at about $15 billion. There is no big change in direction with the original 1965 Act provision.

As for the rest, each state I've checked has an ESSA page explaining what they're doing under the new Act. Our state commissioner has this to say in her first sentence:



But we're complying, in order to get the money.

https://education.alaska.gov/akessa/

If you check your own state, you will see reference to a plan your state is supposed to complete along with everyone who is supposed to be consulted. A bunch of make-work bureaucracy, but with potential for determined constituencies to exert influence on these plans. My prediction is a lot of word salad from most states.

Surely, every student will succeed, since that is the title of the Act. :)

Also familiar are ASWS (All student's will succeed), ESAL (Every Student a Learner) OSAL (Our Students Are Learners) LIWWD (Learning Is What We Do) WPL (We Produce Learners) GLAOBG (Great Learners are our Biggest Goal) and by familiar I mean I have seen these - many local schools seem to have been required to come up with such and I am sure this is not all of them!!!
 
As always, people will take the most extreme examples and try to use those to refute the system.

"Oh, but what about Johnny who is lazy and does no work and beats up all the other kids for their lunch money? Does he succeed as well?"

As though there is no programs in place for students like Johnny.
 
Therefore, bullies can never be rehabilitated. Because they'll all just end up in jail anyway, nothing can or should be done to help them.

If they get rehabilitated and change their ways, we stop calling them bullies.
 
So, contrary to what you previously said, bullies don't go to jail, unless they fail to reform. Which was my point.

Bullies end up in jail. If they are no longer bullies then the rule doesn't apply to them. This is confusing?

But on the schooling front, those with emotional issues which interfere with the socialization we rely on for education are often segregated and get special handling. I can't say how well this works.
 
Bullies end up in jail. If they are no longer bullies then the rule doesn't apply to them. This is confusing?

But on the schooling front, those with emotional issues which interfere with the socialization we rely on for education are often segregated and get special handling. I can't say how well this works.
Which also was my point, but never mind.
 
So when was the Golden Age of Schooling?

Sort of long ago and exemplified by this: President James Garfield expressed his concept of an ideal university as “Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other” (Kunitz & Hatcraft, 1964, p. 384). As unrealistic as this one-to-one faculty/student ratio might be, the image supports the idea that a student learns best when approached as an individual.

Essentially, a teacher and a small group of students interacting as appropriate. No way that is possible in the real world unless the public is willing to pay for it or do it!!!!!
 
As always, people will take the most extreme examples and try to use those to refute the system.

"Oh, but what about Johnny who is lazy and does no work and beats up all the other kids for their lunch money? Does he succeed as well?"

.

Well he does get their lunch money.
 
Basic problem is different students (in several ways) learn differently but school systems will not, and claim they cannot, functionally assign students who learn best in a specific way to specific teachers who teach best in that way.

Yes, of course. Interesting that as part of the push-back against the Common Core this individualized learning concept has gained resurgence. It is a flat rejection of the notion Bill Gates proffered, that children are like electrical outlets that should all be made with the same dimensions so that they are all interchangeable.

This is easiest to see in the girls vs. boys. Most of the boys cringe at girl-centric reading and just don't want to read it. With play too - my boys will throw things at me if I say we're going to play with dolls instead of ten rounds of boxing.

What's strange to me is how much acceptance this stupid idea got - that we're all robots needing the same software. In the real world we aren't perfect substitutes. People have very different aptitudes even at elementary levels and the way to stifle individual development is to make everyone be the same.

The only way for parents to protect their kids from the winds blowing this way and that from these endless educational reforms is to be involved themselves. Not by running for the school board and building a new charter school - I've seen parents killing themselves with these extremely time-intensive efforts when all they really need to do is be involved with their own kids.
 
The other part of the problem is politicians who push on their local schools to do better but do not want to pay the teachers, make the schools all safe at the same level, provide constantly improved materials that are high value educational rather than having bad or misdone information or emphasize too much religious affected material to keep fundy parents happy but lessen the kids ability to really do well after school and in higher education thanks to the religious propaganda!!!!
 
Bullies end up in jail. If they are no longer bullies then the rule doesn't apply to them. This is confusing?

Cars driving on highways end up in high speed collisions when the road runs out. If they slow down or take an exit they are obviously no longer driving on high ways.

Seems like a pretty meaningless point to make. Do most bullies continue to be bullies until they end up in jail? Or do most give up bullying? If the latter your statement seems pretty misleading. Do some continue to be bullies for their whole lives but still avoid jail? That seems to be ruled out by your statement, but I don't see any reason to believe it's not a possible outcome.
 
The other part of the problem is politicians who push on their local schools to do better but do not want to pay the teachers,

It isn't just pay. Anyone paying attention does have to concede, yes - that the teachers in the highest performing academic regions of the world are higher paid (relative to their non-teaching counterparts). What that does is allow you to cull out the stupid people from teaching professions.

But the cultural factors are quite important. In these areas, you're going to be a highly respected member of the community. Held in high esteem. Near worship in the classroom from the students.

Order in these cultures, social order, is high.

In some of them maybe a little too high, rolling tanks over protesters and what not. But without order in the society, in the school,in the individual classrooms - how can anyone study.

That's why we cut fingers off at our school. To establish order.
 
Also familiar are ASWS (All student's will succeed), ESAL (Every Student a Learner) OSAL (Our Students Are Learners) LIWWD (Learning Is What We Do) WPL (We Produce Learners) GLAOBG (Great Learners are our Biggest Goal) and by familiar I mean I have seen these - many local schools seem to have been required to come up with such and I am sure this is not all of them!!!

Well, acronyms are essential. How can anyone be against these fine word salads?

To get this most recent Federal money, districts had to solicit input from enumerated "stakeholders". You need a name for what you are doing, something less embarrassing than Whores for Money.

We just call ours "school". Reading, writing, and math. I can't say "arithmetic" anymore because our first-grader is doing algebra and introductory calculus.

Our state has legislation expressly prohibiting passing a test to get a high school diploma. Good thing too. Can you imagine if 1/3 or more of the student body were prohibited from a High School diploma just because they can't read, write, or do arithmetic? This would prevent them from succeeding.

The Golden Age of Education is right now, lion king. For someone, anyway. Like Shanghai. Singapore. Hong Kong. The Asians really banked on hard work in education securing their futures in a world economy. And they'll execute you for drugs too so they really mean business.

Shanghai has ESSA (Every Student Suffers in Agony). Nobody gets ribbons.
 
In my neck of the woods, the schools implemented a more positive approach:

SUPER OK! (Show Up, Pass Everything Regardless Of Knowledge!)

Explains why the unemployment rate here is a bit high.
 
Essentially, a teacher and a small group of students interacting as appropriate. No way that is possible in the real world unless the public is willing to pay for it or do it!!!!!
Working with small groups can be a blast but lead classroom teachers rarely have the luxury.

As for bullies, I figure any school with 400 students is going to have at least a couple of psychopaths. If they are using force or threatening to use force to get something, they're already violent criminals.
 
In my neck of the woods, the schools implemented a more positive approach:

SUPER OK! (Show Up, Pass Everything Regardless Of Knowledge!)

Explains why the unemployment rate here is a bit high.

lol. Ironic because most of the educational "report cards" I look at have meticulous records on attendance front-and-center, as if that were the measure of output.

All you have to do is attend, and they pass you along. Social promotion.

Their scores on tests are hidden behind a wall of obfuscatory gobbledygook. The test scores tell you everything you need to know. But instead of reporting them they make up definitions like "proficient", and tell you what proportion of the students are "proficient". Since different states and districts have different definitions of "proficient", this removes the ability to compare attainment across locations.

That's why they do it. It would be trivial cost-wise to include scores along with the meaningless twaddle.

"Proficient", for the states I've looked at is also not a fixed concept. It is instead a percentile score on the tests. If you are 43rd percentile on national tests, you are "proficient". So as our math scores slide internationally, the state of "proficiency" has remained the same.
 
It gets worse.

http://foxbaltimore.com/news/projec...sage-instructs-city-teachers-to-change-grades

"A Calverton educator, who reached out to Fox45, claims to have received that text. “[It instructed me to] go into my grade book, make sure no students are failing, and essentially change the grade if they are failing so they will pass with a 60 percent,” said the teacher, whose identity we are concealing upon request."
 
It gets worse.

http://foxbaltimore.com/news/projec...sage-instructs-city-teachers-to-change-grades

"A Calverton educator, who reached out to Fox45, claims to have received that text. “[It instructed me to] go into my grade book, make sure no students are failing, and essentially change the grade if they are failing so they will pass with a 60 percent,” said the teacher, whose identity we are concealing upon request."

From your link:

But this teacher says grade changing at Calverton goes much further than just taking a failing grade and making it a 60. Some students who pass, according to this educator, don’t even have grades because they’ve never showed up to class.

“There were student on my roster all year that I had never met, had never seen. On paper they passed my class and passed onto the next year.”
 
It's not about the students. It's about placating the parents who will raise all levels of hell if their special little baby isn't recognised as the genius who can do no wrong that he or she clearly is.

Don't blame the millennial kids who received the participation awards. Blame the parents of the millennial kids who demanded them.
 
We used to call that "reform school." I think it's just called jail now.
Actually, the bullies in my school were probably the least likely to end up in prison (in the UK). The worst dudes in my school were the rich kids and the bullying was more psychological than physical. Kids who were poor were often the ones on the end of the bullying and would bunk off school to avoid it, possibly getting into trouble.

Some of the kids who were bullies are now working in banks or started their own businesses. They have the inner confidence, arrogance and sometimes nastiness to get what they want and have figured out how to work the system.


Your comment is IMO ill considered and narrow minded and only true some of the time.
 
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In my experience a major issue with student led learning is finding enough teachers who are willing or understand how it's meant to work. Micro managing each student in a high school of 2000+ pupils which has a natural teacher turnover and therefor has many temporary (agency) teachers doesn't help.

Teachers are only human and some are good and some are bad. I think to ensure individual students are not failed, individual pupil centered teaching would need good teachers who are prepared to put in the effort. because lets be honest it is going to take much more effort.
 
In my experience a major issue with student led learning is finding enough teachers who are willing or understand how it's meant to work. Micro managing each student in a high school of 2000+ pupils which has a natural teacher turnover and therefor has many temporary (agency) teachers doesn't help.

Teachers are only human and some are good and some are bad. I think to ensure individual students are not failed, individual pupil centered teaching would need good teachers who are prepared to put in the effort. because lets be honest it is going to take much more effort.

And, frankly, more money - as it would require more work, improved record keeping, quality inservices (that were actually useful, not just inservices to be having inservices), constantly (at least every two to three years) updating for any textbooks that have reason to be updated OR (and better) computers for each student that had installed/net accessed programs having the text material which could then be updated as needed. I am not holding my breath on that happening.
 
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