Testing and the Emperor's New Clothes

This history of testing in New York State is both funny and terrifying. . . and it could just as well be Michigan.

10 Years of Assessing Students With Scientific Exactitude by Michael Winerip (New York Times article)

PS The comments are good too.

Public Workers Are...

...the people in your neighborhood!

I made plans a couple of months ago to come to Madison, Wisconsin for a bar mitzvah, never expecting to be caught up in some amazing, peaceful protests at the Capitol. These photos don't really do the event justice, but it was amazing. There were TONS of teachers there. I don't know if the teachers' union (WEAC) or AFSCME (the main public workers' union in the state) is bigger, but both were well-represented. The night before the bar mitzvah, at the out-of-towners' Shabbat dinner, there were 12 adults. Over half of them were public workers: a city attorney, a reading teacher, a county employee, two state employees, two federal employees. All have advanced degrees.

It made me wonder: do you know who the public workers in your neighborhood are?

It's not about the money. The Wisconsin bill is an anti-union bill that would strip workers of collective bargaining rights, and he tried to push this through in less than a week--I guess he thought, "Why use democratic process if you don't have to?" The great irony to me is that speakers were holding up Michigan's Republican governor as a model of a governor who wasn't taking on the unions.Yet what does Gov. Snyder's budget proposal actually mean? Nothing good for public workers, civil servants, that's for sure.

This is a view of the Firefighters for Labor marching through the inside of the Capitol. It's significant because Gov. Walker proposed to exempt firefighters and police officers from the collective bargaining provisions of the law. Apparently, WEAC opposed Scott Walker in the election. The police and firefighters unions didn't. But the police and firefighters are supportive of the activists at the Capitol--and the activists were very appreciative of their presence. (You can't hear the cheering in the photo.)  Right now there's only ONE Republican Senator in the Wisconsin Senate who is willing to say, out loud, that he believes in collective bargaining. Do they know who their public workers are?

My friend said to me, "My kids' schools have been closed for three days. But the kids have been down at the Capitol and it's been a great civics lesson."

Which brings us back to Michigan.
Mark Maynard has a lovely post on the impact of Rick Snyder's budget on Ypsilanti and cities like it.

Here's what Glen S. has to say in that post:

Rick Snyder really IS a political genius, I suddenly realized yesterday.

Unlike Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker — who has ignited a national firestorm over his strident and quite overt efforts to bust unions, slash pensions and other benefits, and generally dismantle what’s left of any opportunity for Wisconsin’s public sector workers to enjoy a modest, middle-class lifestyle — Snyder has a smarter, but much more insidious plan.
By dramatically slashing revenue-sharing, per-pupil student aid, and other forms of basic support for Michigan’s struggling cities, school districts, etc., to such a degree that unprecedented restructuring clearly will be necessary, Snyder is, in effect, “outsourcing” the dirty work of breaking unions, reneging on promised pension benefits, etc., to locally-elected city councils, school boards, county commissions, etc.
This way, over the next two years — while hundreds of individual Michigan cities, townships, counties and school districts are all busy fighting their own individual battles with their own individual workers and unions — Snyder will appear to be keeping his hands clean from all of the local budget “unpleasantness,” — while he continues to promote himself as as a genial, and business-minded “one tough nerd,” whose only agenda is promoting “shared sacrifice.”

The Object Lesson for me is that the real enemy of the public worker is not any particular governor. The real enemy is Apathy. How many public, unionized workers, voted for anti-union candidates? How many failed to vote? How many workers--private or public--don't realize that their weekends off, their 40-hour workweek, their environmental safeguards--are due to unions?

This is the civics lesson that we need.

Links to Make You Think

An analysis of special education issues in New Jersey. I know, it's not Michigan, but what I found especially interesting is just how variable the percentage of students diagnosed with special eduction needs is, state to state. Why?

From National Public Radio's On Point, a discussion of the ramifications of laying off so many teachers nationwide.

Tonight, while watching the Tigers game on the television, I saw an ad for Cornerstone Schools. I was curious, so I checked it out. Cornerstone Schools is a private school with a Christ-centered mission (their words, not mine) in Detroit. That's all well and good, but they have spun off two charter schools. Read this article, and you--like me--will likely worry about the division between church and state in charter schools. I don't really get it, and I don't really believe there's much separation going on here.

I generally like Kym Worthy, but jail time for missing parent-teacher conferences? Come on! Don't we have enough people in jail as it is? Let's start with offering more opportunities for parent-teacher conferences, okay?

And, as usual, Sharon Parks of the Michigan League for Human Services has a stellar blog post--in part about foster care--focused on the state budget. Is state government unraveling?

Education and Civil Rights

If education is the civil rights issues of this generation, and states and districts will now have to compete for a significantly larger portion of their education funding, does that mean students are to compete for their civil rights?

That is a quote from the American Association of School Administrators' report on the state of school funding around the U.S. 
Read the press release and download the study here.
Thanks to SalineSchools for tweeting this.
I don't actually know that education IS the civil rights issue of this generation. I think there are lots of other issues--prisons, race, class, ethnicity, poverty--that could qualify. But it is a thought-provoking idea.