Book Banning, through Consumer Safety Act.

This is from notes from the latest CURE meeting http://www.curewashington.org/

The Consumer Product Safety Commission had issued a requirement which, among other things, curtailed the sale of children’s toys and books that do not meet the safety standards for phthalates. (Phthalates are chemicals mainly used as plasticizers (substances added to plastics to increase their flexibility), although they are used in other products as well.) Children’s products also had to meet stricter lead content standards. Children are defined as being 12 years of age or younger. (Collector’s items, clearly not meant for children, were exempt.)

The regulation: http://www.hslda.org/docs/news/20091130.asp

This would seriously affect sellers of old toys and children’s books. Apparently, children’s books printed before the early 1980s contained some lead. This safety requirement would effectively ban all children’s books printed before the early 1980s.

As we all know, children’s books written before the 1970s or so, often don’t meet today’s standards of political correctness. Sometimes the older books had religious or patriotic references. In the newer books, if there are any references to religion or patriotism, they are often negative.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission has granted a grace period. According a February 3, 2009 memo of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA),
“the Consumer Product Safety Commission has voted to delay enforcing a portion of new safety requirements regarding certain products for children 12 and under. Specifically, the agency decided to wait a year before requiring manufacturers and importers to test and certify any children's products that would have been mandated for testing on February 10. Overall safety standards remain in place and still apply even to small retailers and vendors of second-hand items.

The delay: http://www.hslda.org/docs/news/200902030.asp?PrinterFriendly=True

“Manufacturers of children's products will still need to be sure that they are conforming to the safety standards on leads and phthalates in products. However, they will be given an extra year of limited relief from the requirement for testing and certification (lasting till February 10, 2010)……..

“…..HSLDA will continue to go ahead with meetings with the CPSC Commissioners to discuss our concerns with the regulations. We will additionally push for legislation to permanently protect small family businesses, such as Senator Jim DeMint's proposed legislation. “

Hey, I made Washington DC TV!

This blog on the Robert Wone case has been covered by DC TV. One of my posts flahes by on the news video posted here:

http://www.myfoxdc.com/dpp/news/031209_who_murdered_robert_wone


There's also a new faceboook group for this case:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=47506881621&ref=ts

Will Bellevue's New Superintendent Be As Bad As Riley Was?

I left this comment on Bellevue's new superintendent who hopefully wasn't select as a female hispanic to balance out the white guy they had last:

Bothell, WA 11 comments March 27, 2009 at 12:07 PMRating:(0) (0) Report abuseI didn't like that Riley Guy, a total outcomebased education hack. Wanted to require passing college level AP testsjust to get a high school diploma, tolerated abomination no-arithemtic"Investigations" math, thought everybody ought to graduate withcalculus. We need people whose job isn't to promote whatever new crazybig-eduation ideas are coming down the pike, and demand "excellencefor all" which is just a map to wrecking education for everybody. Willthis person have the guts to kill the new "classroom based assessment"that's worse than the WASL??

Welcome to Bellevue's new school superintendent, Amalia CudeiroThe challenge for Amalia Cudeiro, the Bellevue School District's new superintendent, is to keep a high-flying district aloft.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/editorialsopinion/2008930843_edita27bellevue.htmlAmalia Cudeiro ONE senses the Bellevue School District has beenwaiting for a leader like Amalia Cudeiro.

In choosing Cudeiro, the School Board underscored the most importantingredients in a successful superintendent: formidable leadershipskills and a personal success story that closely aligns with theaspirations of families in a high-performing suburban district.

Cudeiro has the goods.
She teaches leadership at Harvard University's Urban SuperintendentsProgram and is a partner at a consulting firm that emphasized schoolleadership. Deeper knowledge of how schools work comes from Cudeiro'sdays as a former deputy superintendent of the Boston Public Schoolsand principal in two Southern California schools.

Cudeiro's life story is a powerful one that resembles the stories ofmany of Bellevue's students. She emigrated to the United States fromCuba as a child. Her father was an accountant but because he didn'tspeak English was relegated to work as a hotel dishwasher.
Her experience resonates in a district where more than 80 languagesare spoken. English is a second language for about 10 percent ofstudents.

Bellevue is the gold standard among districts, with its nationalreputation for excellent high schools and experienced teachers.Eighteen percent of Bellevue's teachers have gone through the rigoroustraining to become nationally board certified (THIS IS JUNK), compared with just 5.3percent of teachers statewide. Two success stories, Bellevue andCudeiro, equal a good match.

But all is not rosy in Bellevue. The district faces challenges. Awealthy tax base is offset by steep reductions in state funding.Nearly a third of students qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch. (AND RILEY WANTED THEM ALL TO EAT CALCULUS??) Cudeiro's challenge will be continuing to maintain Bellevue'seducational quality, meeting the needs of all students and doing sowith fewer resources.

Cudeiro must repair fissures in the relationship between the districtand its teachers, differences exposed during a bitter two-weekteachers strike last fall. Her leadership skills and ability toconnect on a personal level will come in handy.

Cudeiro is an excellent pick.

Test Scoring Scam Again in Texas TAKS

Thanks to Donna Garner for posting this on EducationLoop yahoogroup. She
reveals that Texas scorers were not allowed to give out any "A" level
scores, no matter how good the papers were.

This was the same problem with North Carolina writing project that I
scored. They would move definitions up and down day by day depending
on whether they had too many or too few scores. High score was a 4,
but you had to have permission to give out a 4. Published figures on
their website after the fact showed that fewer than 1% were given a 4.
Top 1% is good enough to get into Harvard or Yale, but not good enough
for an "A" on this test. If you said "integrity is a good thing" and
produced a New York Times article that re-worded a press release, but
said nothing new, that was a 1. If you said that "Martin Luther King
had integrity", that was a 2. If you gave a real person like GW Bush, a
person from the novel "Night", and a story about your mother, that was
a 3. If you wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, that MIGHT be
good enough for a 4, and in this TAKS example, would not be good
enough if no high scores were permitted.

Contrast that to my son's 10th grade writing WASL - 20% got a PERFECT
score, which would mean perfect convention and perfect content. This
also correlates to California CLAS where there were ZERO "4" math
scores statewide, and the woman in charge told Washington state
legislators that this was deliberate to "give room for improvement".
The entire process is designed to produce low scores at the start and
inflated them to produce high pass rates at the end. Washington

Republicans in my state are still blaming killing the WASL on liberals
who don't have standards. We have to keep on message that "standards"
is jus another word for "outcomes" and that "outcomes based education"
was and still is a disaster. It's also how businesses are being run
when you have to rank people and pay them by "performance-based
evaluation" and produce "continuous improvement" or else.


\YR\09\DOC\WEB\2009\03\taksscore.txt
TAKS SCORING BY PEER PRESSURE -- BY DONNA GARNER -- 3.23.09
Posted by: "Donna Garner"
Mon Mar 23, 2009 5:50 pm (PDT)
"TAKS Scoring by Peer Pressure"
by Donna Garner

March 24, 2009

From time to time, I receive anonymous e-mails from people who read my
reports that are posted on the Internet. Last week I received one such
e-mail. This person said he had seen my 4.15.08 article entitled "An
Exposé of the TAKS Tests." (Please see my three attached reports on
Texas' state-mandated TAKS tests.). He said my concerns echoed his own
personal concerns about TAKS scoring because he had worked as an
experienced scorer for Pearson, the company that has the contract with
the Texas Education Agency (TEA) to develop and score students' TAKS
tests. My anonymous source (i.e., "John Doe") confirms my long-held
concerns that having subjectively scored sections on high-stakes tests
is an open invitation for manipulation of scores.

John had been an educator for many years and had decided to work as a
scorer for Pearson on the English / Language Arts (ELA) TAKS scoring
project. He became very uncomfortable about the harsh and inconsistent
manner in which the scoring was done and finally quit the job as did
many others. John said the scorers were forced to give low scores to
students who demonstrated exemplary writing skills but higher scores
to those students who were less deserving.

He said, "There was what I call an 'unspoken no 3 rule' on the
expository portion of a reading comprehension question [open-ended
response questions]. By unspoken, I mean that we weren't explicitly
told in so many words not to give a 3, but that we should obtain the
express approval of our supervisor before so doing. Whenever a scorer
would request permission to give a 3 on a particular paper, the
supervisors would not give their consent. In due course, many scorers
began to stop giving 3s altogether. I failed to see the logic in
this." [On the ELA-TAKS, Grade 11, Spring 2008 administration, 0% of
students in Texas made 3's on the open-response questions.]

John went on to say that an adaptation of a Readers Digest article
instructed the students to explain why they thought a particular
person was a hero or was not a hero. John said that the prompt along
with scoring materials contained major problems which should have been
resolved prior to reaching the scorers' desks. "The anchor papers
(i.e., papers used as examples) and rubric all contained several
errors and inconsistencies. In some cases, the annotations under the
student-written portion were not illustrative or supportive of the
examples given. Some of the examples provided did not even reflect the
goals stated in our manual."

John told me that during the training session for the job, various
people questioned the Texas representatives about the problems with
the anchor papers. The scorers were told to ignore the problems and
score them anyway. One of these Texas Education Agency representatives
was Victoria Young. "We were told not to rely upon our anchor papers
but to use the rubric more. The problem was that the language used in
the rubric was very general and over-broad. This created too many
loopholes and led scorers to drift, either giving too many high scores
or too many low scores. This undermined the integrity of the scoring
altogether. Anchor papers were far more precise than the rubric and
were essential to accurate scoring, especially on the open-ended
questions."

John explained that many of the scorers expressed their concerns to
Pearson management about the inequities, but the managers simply
shifted the blame back to Texas and said they were powerless to do
anything about it. If the scorers did not "go along to get along" at
Pearson, they were considered to be renegades and were treated with
group disapproval. The scorers were heavily criticized if their scores
were too high or too low; and when they tried to explain their
rationale for giving the scores they did, they were treated like
"naughty children who refused to obey."

In addition, a spreadsheet was circulated around the scoring room
periodically so that John and the other scorers could compare their
scores with the rest of the scorers (e.g., to see if they were giving
too many 1's or 2's). If so, they were told they had to change; but
they did not know how to begin because no specific work samples were
provided for reference. In fact, John said the Pearson scoring system
was not based on accuracy but on general agreement and consensus of
opinions. Roughly, only 20% of the papers scored were backread by
supervisors and/or directors. "It's basically a majority-rules system,
where conformity with your fellow scorers is of the essence, and
quality control plays little if any part at all."

One of the most disturbing statements made by John is that last year,
Pearson began a policy whereby bonuses were given to scorers based on
several criteria such as high validity scores, productivity levels
(number of papers scored per hour), and other subjective factors
determined by the supervisor and scoring director. John explained that
validity is one of the criteria used to monitor and gauge a scorer's
consistency in performance and/or application of the rules, but the
problem was there was no way to measure accuracy. He said it was
feasible that a scorer could be consistently wrong but still wind up
with a bonus. If a scorer made a mistake at the beginning of the
project and tried to correct it later on, he would receive a lower
validity score that affected his bonus. One supervisor actually told
one of the scorers that if he wanted a bonus, he should keep on
repeating what he had done at the beginning even if it was wrong!

I continue to say that subjectively assessed sections (including
portfolio assessments, open-response questions, and essays) on
high-stakes tests are ludicrous. People's opinions, peer pressure, and
manipulation take over; and the final scores then become meaningless
as measures of student academic performance. At least 80% of any
high-stakes test should be based upon objectively tested,
right-or-wrong answers. This is only common sense.

Donna Garner wgarner1 at hot.rr.com

Writer/Consultant for MyStudyHall.com
http://www.mystudyhall.com

English Success Standards (K-12)
http://mystudyhall.com/myskillbuilder/articles/ENGLISH%20SUCCESS%20STANDARDS%20(K-12).mht

Please let me know if you do not wish to receive my e-mails, and I will take you off my address list. Thank you

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Taking school kids to the art gallery .. the rest of the story

"Naked guy on beach with Death"

Kids at the Art Gallery

I dunno if I'm taking things too seriously after the classroom based
assessment with the Picasso "woman in a hat in a shirt that shows too
much" and the surrealistic "lipstick on a garage". I visited Seattle's
free Frye gallery, and they had all sorts of 2nd and 3rd grade kids
being show the paintings. One lady asked her kids "what do you see"?
One kid said "well the dark lighting makes it look like a jail".
"There's a chain on his leg" "There's a soldier with a gun behind
him". The painting was about a revolutionary condemned to death.


"Sin"

On
the wall behind the kids were two big pictures of fairly undraped
women, and in the room behind that, big pictures of half naked men,
fully naked men, and a room full of naked men wrestling. There was a
movie booth of a stop action rat / wolf with a girl sprouting from his
behind plus what looks like his "ding a ling" from his front.


"Girl stuck to anatomically correct wolf" by Nathalie Djurberg

This sort of has
the same feel of assessments that assume 4th graders should be exposed
to topics in writing (write a short story with sentences your first
day in first grade), mathematics (design a bicycle trailer 3-view
isometric projection drawing in 4th grade with some assistance from a
professional carpenter), research (cite an unpublished thesis) or
music (sing from sheet music from sight, no piano) science (design a
lab experiment including beaker and bunsen burner in 5th grade
isolating two different variables) that most college educated adults
never have to do, and the coffee table book I saw a parent give to his
3rd grade of Picasso at a gifted child information meeting that had
distorted naughty parts on every other picture.

Step up to WASL math requirement (Or snap out of the madness!)

March 18, 2009 at 8:39 AM

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WASL was sold on the premise that too many 10th graders were graduating with 4th grade level skills. Well, when 90% of kids "pass" the WASL, that's EQUIVALENT TO PERFORMING AT THE LEVEL OF THE AVERAGE 4TH GRADER. The bell curve is not a problem, it is a fact of life. Definding "success" as performing with the top 10%, and then requiring that every child be successful is a formula for disaster. We can only give children an opportunity, and grade them at WHATEVER level they perform at. The next step is a government that "assesses" you at your job, and requires 10% improvement every year, and requires you to meet an arbitrary "standard" every year or be fired. This is no way to run a free society. We read 1984 and brave new world in the 1970s and joked "they're never really going to do that". But with WASL and standards, that's exactly what we're doing to our kids, and us grown-ups are next.

searthurhu

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2008876533_opinb18eide.html

 

Guest columnist

Step up to WASL math requirement, don't hide from it

Both houses of the Washington Legislature took the easy way out by voting to eliminate the need for 10th-grade students to pass the math portion of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, argues guest columnist Christopher Eide. He suggests state educators look to the example of Massachusetts for a formula for success in math education.

By Christopher Eide

Special to The Times

AFTER a decade of failure, both houses of the Washington Legislature resoundingly approved bills to eliminate the need for students to pass the 10th-grade mathematics section of the WASL.

In 1999, 33 percent of Washington's 10th-graders passed the Washington Assessment of Student Learning math section; that rate steadily improved until 2004-05 when the scores flattened out around 49 percent.

After no real evidence of progress in the past four years, what do you do? Do you look for another solution, or just hide it away, move on and pretend that it didn't happen? Washington lawmakers are poised to choose the latter rather than look for help.

As it turns out, a highly similar state chose the former. Massachusetts has accepted innovation and has seen its 10th-grade math scores more than double over the past decade.

In the most recent Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) test, Massachusetts was allowed to participate as its own country and it scores ranked in the top 5 in the world. But as it turns out, that state is not much different from ours.......

 

Bothell, WA

10 comments

 

 

March 18, 2009 at 8:34 AM

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Mr Eide, the WASL is doodoo. 20% of 10th graders got a perfect writing score, but almost nobody gets a perfect score in any other grade. What is the point of a test that asks kids to perform task most adult COLLEGE grads cannot do on demand?

Education is not an arms race where government can set an set-in-stone goal that every child will be ready for 4 year university OR ELSE. Most of the 4th grade test cannot be solved with elementary arithmetic, some cannot even be solved with EALRs up to 10th grade, or what I learned at MIT. Forcing "continuous improvement" is the basis for failed outcome/performance/standards-based education reform. My kids don't need more requirements, more days in the year, more science, or more of ANYTHING. The biggest problem they've had growing up in the 90s-00s was the !@#$%% EDUCATION REFORM CRAP. 1st grade mile run times. Write 10 sentences around 10 words sorted in alphabetic order THE FIRST DAY FIRST DAY HOMEWORK. Investigations math that deliberately does not teach carry or borrow. Whole/Hole language that does not teach how to read. Connected/Crap Mathematics Project that forbids printing pi r squared and how to add decimal numbers from the student book. Core/Crap Plus that doesn't teach how to solve simple algebra but asks "Is Jim mentally retarded if his IQ is 70?"

We have too many "smar"t people who can't tell the sheep from the Shinola instead of truly demonstrating "critical thinking". This is MADNESS.

Now that we've slaid WASL because it was stupid, it's time to realize the ESHB 1209 Education Reform bill that was built around WASL IS STUPID.

brier guy

Brier, WA

82 comments

March 18, 2009 at 8:05 AM

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The article hints that Massachusetts incorporates the scores of its parochial private, and charter schools into its test score data. This is not the case in our State. Massachusetts has always had a much higher number of parochial schools than does Washington, And it has allowed the incorporation of charter schools. So Mr. Eide will need to provide us with more precise statistics to see how the gains in the Massachusetts public school sector compare to the scores in our public schools.

Mr. Eide teaches in a well funded district that hires applicants who have graduate degrees from Harvard. He is probably unaware of the sea of mediocrity elsewhere in the more poorly funded districts. So maybe he could do a traveling show and explain to us why teaching math as a tool to solve WASL problems is a better methodology than teaching math as a science unto itself. And would someone please explain why every student must spend years on quadratic equations and little time on statistics.

CMP Word's Worst Math Book Continued - P R SQUARD

My 7th grader just showed me his Crap / Connected Mathematics Project CMP 1 book which simply expects them to know that the area of a circle is p r squared to get the volume (you multiply by height). But the 6th grade book treats the method as the answer to a derivation exploration that isn't in the book. It only appears in the teacher book as "one possible answer", and in the letter to the parents. In fact, EVERY standard and formula method if you look it up in the index looks like "based on what you have learned, can you devise an algorithm or method to compute adding fractions / adding decimals / area of a circle / etc. The term "common denominator" does not appear anywhere in fractions, not even the index. It shows up in ADDING DECIMAL NUMBERS (??). There is a formula for area of a trapezoid on the cover of that book - that is the ONLY formula they actually give you in the entire student book. My understanding is that CMP 1 did not even expect students to learn standard methods at all. All of this information is on a 4 page "math review" card you can buy at Kinkos.

** NONE OF THE METHODS LISTED ON THE MATH REVIEW CARD ARE ANYWHERE IN CMP 2 STUDENT TEXTBOOK. **