Tyrrell's Re-education

Re-statement of Faith

"Something exciting is happening at the intersection of Christianity and culture. Christians are becoming dissatisfied with the postures they adopted toward culture in the twentieth century: condemning it, critiquing it, copying it, or just consuming it. More and more, we want to be people who cultivate: people who tend and keep what is good. And we want to be people who create: adding new cultural goods that move the horizons of the possible in places as wide as the world and as small as a home." 

See Andy Crouch http://www.culture-making.com/about/site

NYU Professor Ravitch does an analysis of NAEP test and most recent NYS elementary standardized test scores and finds that the levels of learning don't match. Fueled the fire's for the opt out movement?

Link below

http://dianeravitch.net/2013/08/09/will-the-new-york-testing-fiasco-fuel-the-anti-testing-movement/

Philanthropy Giant Re-thinks (Education?)

This is a piece from NY times from Peter Buffet (Warren's son) that re-accesses large scale charitable handouts. Hopefully Bill Gates is listening

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/opinion/the-charitable-industrial-complex.html?src=me&ref=general&_r=0

Cost of Common Core Testing has Casualities

The cost of one assessment from PARCC is $29.50. Multiply by number of students times 2 tests a year (Math and English). Costs for Buffalo City Schools, NY- over 2 million dollars per year.


Some-states-see-costs-spike-with-common-core-tests-94586.html#.Ue38w45Nip8.twitter

Campbell's law

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Campbell's law is an adage developed by Donald T. Campbell:^[1]

"The more any quantitative social indicator (or even some qualitative indicator) is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

The social science principle of Campbell's law is sometimes used to point out the negative consequences of high-stakes testing in U.S. classrooms.^{[citation needed]}

What Campbell also states in this principle is that "achievement tests may well be valuable indicators of general school achievement under conditions of normal teaching aimed at general competence. But when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways. (Similar biases of course surround the use of objective tests in courses or as entrance examinations.)"^[1]

Campbell's law was published in 1976 by Donald T. Campbell, a social psychologist, an experimental social science researcher and the author of many works on research methodology. Closely related ideas are known under different names, e.g. Goodhart's law, and the Lucas critique. Another concept related to Campbell's law emerged in 2006 when UK researchers Rebecca Boden and Debbie Epstein published an analysis of evidence-based policy, a practice espoused by Prime Minister Tony Blair. In the paper, Boden and Epstein described how a government that tries to base its policy on evidence can actually end up producing corrupted data because it, "seeks to capture and control the knowledge producing processes to the point where this type of ‘research’ might best be described as ‘policy-based evidence’."^[2] (Boden and Epstein 2006: 226)

Simpson's Law

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/06/10/34swanson.h29.html

"A familiar concept within statistical circles, but rarely part of mainstream discussions, Simpson’s Paradox observes that there are circumstances in which disaggregated trends (such as graduation rates among minority groups) may not track closely with aggregate trends (for example, the nation’s overall graduation rate). There even can be times when aggregate and disaggregated trends run counter to one another. In such cases, some initially unnoticed factor usually accounts for the non-intuitive findings.

Shifting demographic patterns are the likely explanation in the case of graduation rates. Over time, the public school population has come to consist of proportionally fewer traditionally higher-performing white students and more members of historically underserved groups, most notably Latinos.

All else being equal, population growth among groups with low average graduation rates will tend to suppress improvements in the overall graduation rate. Pertinent to the case of high school completion: The size of the Latino student population, whose graduation rate currently lags 21 percentage points behind that of non-Hispanic whites, has grown by 50 percent in the past decade alone."

Simpson's Law and Buffalo NY Graduation Rates

Population of ESL students in some Buffalo Schools is as high as 70%.

NYS commissioner and education irony

Letter to Editor July 17

NYS Ed Commissioner Needs Perspective

I read with some disbelief the Buffalo News front page article of July 12, 2013 that reported the NYS Commissioner’s recent suggestion that students from two Buffalo Public Schools attend the BOCES program. As with many of my colleagues, I mostly choose to ignore bombastic political types that put down Buffalo schools and I simply continue working as hard as I can to get students a good education. However, the striking irony of the suggestion that students should attend BOCES program could not escape a response. Buffalo Public Schools were known for the excellent vocational programs for better part of the 20^th century. Programs in the skill trades, architectural engineering and even aeronautics were premier programs from which large numbers of Buffalo people can trace their training and graduation. In the last two decades the State Education Department has promoted the idea that every student should take courses that prepare them for college. As the volume got turned up on this idea, vocational tracts became less viable to the point where the Buffalo Vocational Program is a skeleton of it’s former self. The irony is self-evident. Now in 2013, the commissioner wants to advocate for these vocational programs in a way that smacks of politics and would be an impractical logistical nightmare. This seems to be the usual NYSED rhetoric that keeps creating the self-fulfilling negative stereotype of Buffalo, distances itself from the problem, doesn’t think creatively about how to work with stakeholders for the good of Buffalo students, is ill-informed (see John Hopkins response in the same Buffalo news article), has lost self-reflective abilities and most of all perspective.