Cape Girardeau official: Those who oppose Common Core Standards haven't read them

I am beginning to see a sameness with all of the statements that have been issued by those who are in favor of Common Core Standards.

-We can't get rid of Common Core because we have spent so much implementing it in our schools

-The people who are criticizing Common Core are ignorant and have not actually read the standards (the implication being, of course, that once you read them, you will love them).

-We are setting our own curriculum. No one else is doing it for us.

-If you are opposed to Common Core, you are one of those paranoid people who think the government is out to get you.

That same attitude is obvious in comments from Cape Girardeau's assistant superintendent in an article in today's Southeast Missourian:

Formative assessments are administered on a frequent basis -- such as daily or weekly -- to ensure students are on track in their learning.

Summative assessments are for the end of a unit, end of a semester or end of a year to make sure students learned what they needed to during those time frames.

(Assistant Superintendent Sherry) Copeland said students are doing much better on the assessments than they have in the past.

"We determine curriculum; we decide what textbooks, if any, we use, [and] what resources we use," Copeland said. Many of those resources are online with the advent of the district's 1:1 initiative at Central High School, where students were given laptops that could be converted into tablets.

That initiative will be moving down to Central Middle School in the fall.

"People who don't understand Common Core and are posting on Facebook and Twitter and really haven't read the standards," Copeland said. "That's concerning to me."

"We are constantly changing and improving as a society and education has to keep up with that. Missouri was right: We want our students to be college and career ready," she said.

It would be hard to fit in any more educational buzzwords in a passage. Districts are spending millions on 1:1 initiatives because Common Core requires that standardized tests be taken online. Even more technology has to be purchased because the tests begin in the lower elementary grades well before keyboarding instruction normally begins. And with the addition of the now-necessary keyboarding classes for elementary students, we are eliminating other instruction that would be far more valuable to them at that age.

The buzz words "college and career ready" are thrown around. Perhaps all of these computers will make it easy to step into the workplace, though I have my doubts, but please stop the nonsense about them making the students college ready. How many colleges and universities do we see that are providing the same kind of technology to all of their students? Not only is it not being done, but for most institutions of higher learning it is not even on the agenda for the distant future.

Cape Girardeau, Joplin, and other schools that have completely immersed themselves in the 1:1 philosophy and are totally changing teaching styles in order to make every lesson about the machines are not preparing the students for college where many of the classes will be done by lecture, a style that is considered disgraceful by the proponents of 21st Century education.

When the Cape Girardeau official talks about constant assessments, she is hitting on another of the problems with Common Core. While it is true that teachers are making assessments all the time and did even in the days before Common Core, this is not what is meant by assessments nowadays.

When it comes to today's educational landscape, everything is about the standardized tests and the testing companies are making a killing off Common Core. The students are being forced to take boring practice standardized tests that not only take away from valuable instructional time and destroy the joy of learning, but they have little educational value. Standardized tests were always meant be just one weapon in the educational arsenal. When everything revolves around them, education suffers. The Joplin R-8 School District, for example, has used McGraw-Hill's Acuity practice tests for years, taking them eight times a year to give the district an idea of where the students are when it comes to preparing for the end-of-the-year tests.

Even worse, I sat in on meetings in which we prepared curriculum based on the Acuity tests. Joplin is not the only school that thought it could game the system by buying practice tests from the company that prepared the annual MAP tests.

Now the entire state is being forced to do this since DESE (the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education) has signed an $18 million contract with McGraw-Hill to not only provide the Common Core annual tests, but also to provide its practice Acuity tests to the entire state.

In other words, we will have all state schools building their curriculum around the tests and the practice tests. Missouri's schools will soon follow Joplin's example and not only have practice tests for the standardized tests, but also practice tests for the practice tests (yes, it happens on a regular basis).

With the Obama Administration's Department of Education basing the awarding of millions of dollars on whether states are implementing Common Core and whether evaluation of teachers is being based on standardized tests, you will not only see a sameness in the curriculum of all schools, despite the protests by Common Core supporters who know so much more than the rest of us, but you will also see more and more teaching to the test because the jobs of teachers and administrators are going to depend on it.

History does not look with kindness on Common Core supporters' argument that it would be horrible to eliminate Common Core because so much money has already been spent to implement it.

Suppose the same thing had been said about the integration of America's schools.

In fact, it was. Those who wanted to maintain the separation of the races in southern schools often cited how much money it was going to cost to change things and how much money had already been spent to build the system they had.

When something is wrong, keeping it because you have already spent so much money doing it, is not an intelligent argument.

Anson Burlingame is an idiot; the Joplin School Board race is not about me

I don't make a habit of calling people idiots, even when their behavior would certainly seem to indicate the label applies.

That being said, Anson Burlingame is an idiot.

One sign of how far the Joplin Globe has fallen over the past few years has been its eagerness to make this man out to be some sort of wise thinker whose columns should appear in the newspaper's pages. The Globe tried a failed experiment a few years back of setting up certain people in the area as bloggers. At first glance, it seemed like the blogs were a success; they were filled with reader comments.

Unfortunately for the Globe, most of the comments were from their own bloggers, bickering with each other.

How much they were paying these people for their wisdom I have no idea, but the experiment came to a screeching halt a couple of years ago.

Since then, the Globe has propped up the two "conservative" bloggers, Burlingame and Geoff Caldwell, by providing them with regular space on the editorial pages as "guest columnists." Both of them were featured on today's opinion page.

Burlingame's column shows just how little the man knows about what is going on in Joplin.

Los Angeles school IPads expensive and already outdated

It is no wonder that Bill Gates and the people who run technology companies are so interested in education- it is a continuing cash cow, especially when you consider the tried-and-true practice of tech companies to make their products obsolete after a short time.

The Los Angeles Times continued its investigation into the L.A. School District's purchases of iPads for high school students:

L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy said it was important to buy a computer-based curriculum that fully incorporates learning standards recently adopted by California and 44 other states. And he wanted each student to take upcoming tests, linked to those standards, on a tablet that is permanently assigned to them.

"Our youth deserve the best we can afford," Deasy said.

The tablet chosen by L.A. Unified — the iPad 4 with 32 gigabytes of storage — has since been discontinued as a retail product, but the price under L.A. Unified's contract with Apple Inc. was locked in.

What is worse is that in Los Angeles, the money used to buy the iPads came from construction bonds.

California teacher's predictions for 2014- Education will move away from IPads

California teacher Larry Ferlazzo, who blogs for Education Week, has a list of predictions for 2014 that, if they come true, could spell a good year for those who are concerned about the efforts to "reform" and privatize public education.

One of his predictions, however, if it comes true, is not good news for the Joplin R-8 School District.

The district, which spent more than $300,000 to give IPads to all eighth graders this year and has plans to give them to sixth and seventh graders at some point, has not had the problems the Los Angeles School District has had with IPads (though it would not matter if it had since the Joplin Globe would never write anything about it), but LA's problems have education officials re-examining the push toward putting IPads or laptops in the hands of every student. Ferlazzo's prediction:

Thanks to the continuing iPad fiasco in Los Angeles schools, more and more districts will not only move much more slowly to integrate tablets/laptops into the classroom (no more large-scale roll-outs; instead, very small pilots followed by gradual expansion), but Dell’s and Google’s low-cost Chromebooks will dramatically increase in popularity and begin to overtake iPad use in public schools.
I question whether that move toward Google Chromebooks or any Dell product will take place. The words "low cost" cannot be found in Joplin R-8 Administration vocabulary.

2013 in Review: Former Joplin Schools tech employee had pornographic photos of high school girls on his laptop

(From September 10, 2013)

After the arrest of Joplin R-8 tech employee Ronny Justin Myers on child sexual exploitation charges earlier this month, Superintendent C. J. Huff told media that Adams' job provided no access to children.

While he may not have had access to the students, Myers did have access to pornographic images of those students, according to a sentencing document filed today in U. S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri.

In the document, Assistant U. S. Attorney Abram McGull says that during a three-hour interview "defendant admitted that he has secretly stored child pornography on his computer. He stated he had approximately 10 child pornography images of Joplin School District co-eds on his laptop. Four of the girl have been positively identified as D. F. (age 15), LS (age 16), GS (age 16) and NC (age 15)."

Placing technology ahead of teachers will not work

Some of the critics of this blog (and hard as it is to believe, there are a few) have said that my criticism of the use of laptops and IPads in our schools shows that I and other teachers are afraid of technology in the classroom.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

As anyone who has ever been a student in my classroom (and as far as I have been able to determine, that does not include any of my critics) I was always able to stay ahead of the curve when it came to using technology in the classroom.

If I had been allowed to continue my teaching, I have no doubt that I would have adjusted to the addition of IPads for every middle school student in the Joplin R-8 School District.

Unfortunately, that is more than I can say for the people who are implementing this ill-advised strategy. If you have watched the pronouncements of soon-to-be former Assistant Superintendent Angie Besendorfer you have heard  her talk numerous times about the students learning on their own with teachers serving as facilitators rather than doing any teaching.

That is a recipe for disaster.

Of course, we love it when students run with what we give them and seek knowledge on their own, but that is never going to be the way most education works even if we have world class facilitators. Pushing this idea that teachers are not important and are interchangeable is doing a disservice to students. How many of us can think back to our school days and remember teachers who provided us with knowledge and inspired us to learn more?

How many people who have succeeded would have done so if educators in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s had simply been facilitators and had not provided us with the knowledge we needed to succeed?

Learning, no matter what people like Angie Besendorfer say, is not something that magically occurs when you hand a student a laptop or an IPad. What is ironic is that today's teachers are being devalued by administrators who, for the most part, have spent little time in the classroom. Those of us who received our education in public schools a few decades ago were used to having administrators who served several years in the classroom before becoming principals and superintendents.

In today's education, many are fast-tracking themselves into administrative positions and are more interested in building resumes than they are in building an educational foundation that will last far beyond their years.

Unfortunately, we live in a society where the path to the top is not achieved by administrators who build a strong foundation and an educational community. Those who succeed and end up making salaries three or four times as much as the classroom teachers they often treat like disposable commodities are the ones who are willing to latch on to any new program, or several at once, just to be able to show they are innovative.

They move on, often leaving their former school systems in debt and having to recover from all of the "innovation."

Their school systems are loaded with technology and buzz-word programs, often at the expense of teachers and students.

Take a look at your local school district. Is that what is happening?

Common Core standards bring big bucks for vendors

The Education Week blog K-12 Marketplace notes the big bucks that educational vendors are raking in because of the implementation of Common Core Standards.

Companies are cashing in on the change, including testing companies, textbook companies, and of course, those that are supplying the technology that is required for Common Core. It should be noted that most of the people who were involved in creating Common Core Standards are connected to technology, textbook, and testing companies.

As districts implement the Common Core State Standards, 68 percent plan to purchase new instructional materials—an increase from 62 percent two years ago, according to a survey by MDR , a provider of marketing information and services for education.

The potential market size of purchasing common-core materials is 7,600 district buyers, according to the survey, which will be included in MDR's EdNET Insight State of the K-12 Market 2013. 

The damaging effect of Joplin's high teacher turnover

I imagine there are Turner Report readers who are tired of hearing that more than 200 teachers left the Joplin R-8 School District over the past two years.

That is especially true when the situation has been explained by Superintendent C. J. Huff and others with these three scenarios:

-The teachers were suffering from the traumatic effects of the tornado

-Their spouses landed jobs in other towns.

-And the most recent one, which was posed by an anonymous commenter on this blog- The teachers left because they are afraid of technology.

Anyone who is close to the situation knows you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of teachers who left because their spouses were hired for out-of-town jobs.

I still have not heard the name of one teacher who left because of the tornado. On the contrary, I know many who resolved to stay because they wanted to help the students get through the recovery process.

As for the technology nonsense, teachers have always adapted to the technology, even when the addition of such technology and the requirements for implementing it do not make any sense.

You are always going to have some turnover in education. It is a stressful job and there are people who realize they are not equipped to handle the stress or who find that their interests lie in other directions.

With that being said, the biggest problem with high teacher turnover is the effect it has on the students.

When that many teachers are leaving, whether it be by choice or coercion, with them goes experience that cannot be replaced. There will always be teachers retiring and beginning teachers being added to schools. It is when veteran teachers who are nowhere near retirement age are leaving that you have a serious problem.

The Joplin R-8 School District has a serious problem.

The district is running through principals at an unheard-of pace and when you have lost more than 100 teachers in each of the past two years, you are talking about a crisis situation.

Where there has not been high turnover in the past few years are two areas- the top two administrators in the district, which has remained the same for six years until Angie Besendorfer's resignation takes effect next month, and the board of education.

If Ashley Micklethwaite had not taken a job out of town, we would have the same board members during that entire time. It is almost unheard of for a board of education to stay together for that long.

One way that has been accomplished is through public relations machinery that has convinced the public there are no problems in the school district. It looks as if that public relations machinery has had a breakdown. For the first time, other than two previous candidacies by David Guilford, who was close enough to the situation to know the problems that exist, there are challenges to the incumbents, including former Irving Elementary Principal Debbie Fort, Jeff Koch, and Guilford.

One major issue will be the spending spree that has put the district on the brink of financial chaos.

The biggest issue, however, is the incredible amount of turnover in the district. When McKinley Elementary has only a couple of teachers remaining from the 2012-2013 school year and the principal is rewarded with a job in upper-level administration, you have a serious problem.

When that principal is replaced, in a school that now has an entirely new faculty, including many young teachers, with a leader who not only is taking her first principal's position, but who is not qualified for that position, you have a serious problem.

When you have a board of education that has rubber-stamped the bloodbath that the Joplin R-8 School District has seen the past couple of years (always by 7-0 votes), you have a crisis.

And the ones who are paying the most for that crisis are the children.

***

WWNO, the public radio station in New Orleans, has a revealing report on the effects of high teacher turnover, which includes this passage:

The changeovers impact students and families in that there is less continuity. There's less of a chance for teachers and administrative staff to get to know students and their families well, and so families may not have someone at the school they know they can talk to if there's a problem. Instead they're dealing with new people all the time.