Reply to Mayor Plans to Underfund Charter Schools

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Color me cynical, but when the education reform you’re bragging about is higher 4th grade NAEP scores, and the mechanism you used to achieve this is simply not allowing the lowest-scoring students to enter 4th grade in the first place, I conclude that you’re not so much educating students as hiding data. [/quote]

You are the poster child for why reform in DC won't work. We can't improve things because unless the proposed solution solves ALL PROBLEMS we can't even try. If you read the article you would have seen the cliff for promotion got teachers and parents invested in remediation. Further research concluded that kids who repeated were no worse off down the line. Also noteworthy that, yes, the kids held back were disproportionately black and brown and Mississippi said, "Yes, and? We are trying to help kids learn to read. If that's more black and brown kids then the problem isn't our standards are too high, it is that those populations need more support to succeed". Would never fly in DC.

Serious question: What do people like you get from opposing all reforms? Why are you so invested in our failing system and the tons of kids who suffer as a result? Are you a WTU member? I'm seriously asking because I do not understand why people like you behave like you do.[/quote]

I’m not a WTU member. I’m a parent. And I don’t oppose all reforms. For example I support the switch from Calkins to phonics, which was part of the Mississippi success story.

And I didn’t even say I was opposed to this particular reform—[b]I just said I was cynical about whether there was actual improvement or just data manipulation[/b]. I’ve seen a lot of trends in education reform over the past 25 years, and most produce some kind of showy stats at the beginning without a lot of long-term gains. One reform I lived through was moving the kindergarten age cutoff in DC back from December to September, and gosh, it turns out older kids score higher even if nothing else changes. I’m particularly cynical about this kind of system that holds kids back so they're older when they take a test, especially if they’re still allowed to drop out of high school at the same age. If they’re still dropping out at 16, you didn't increase their lifetime learning, you just changed the year they take that particular test. [/quote]

Couple things:
1. Bolded is akin to Trump screaming "fake news" at anything he doesn't like. You have an opinion and no data or studies are going to convince you 
2. If you think delaying K is the same thing as having a promotion cliff then you are just ignorant. Not remotely the same thing. Alarms me you would equate the two
3. The comment about "Still dropping out at 16" is, as I said, why people like you stand in the way of progress. Unless we solve for ALL problems (i.e. no one drops out) it isn't worthwhile to try and improve the system and outcomes for anyone
4. Your latching onto Caulkins vs phonics is a sign that you are more interested in academic discussion than transformational change. You want to nibble on some inane pedagogical discussion while others want to help kids. Read the article! The cliff forced Mississippi to try all kinds of remediation to overcome the failures. Some worked, some didn't

My thesis remains. People like you are the biggest impediment to systemic improvement. You want to sit in the back and throw stones form the cheap seats. You want to tell us why proposed solutions won't solve all problems and argue that in the absence of a silver bullet no change can be made. You. Are. The. Problem.
[/quote]

No.

You are the problem.[/quote]

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