Author Archives: ted

The Vergara Ruling

There is so much I could say about this… and I’ll try to write more about it soon. In the meanwhile, here are links to various news articles, analyses, responses and perspectives on the ruling and its larger meanings/implications… to which I will continue to add…

Old Family Photos 1: Henry, Roger, Norman Altenberg

In response to a request from cousin Nancy Kolodny, here are some old Altenberg family photos that cousin Lee Altenberg sent me a while ago, which he scanned from old prints.

Grandpa Leo Altenberg, 1940 or '41?

Grandpa Leo Altenberg, 1940 or ’41?

Grandpa Leo, 1918 or 1919?

Grandpa Leo, 1918 or 1919?

Uncle Norman at Twin Lakes Camp (Maine), 1929

Uncle Norman at Twin Lakes Camp (Maine), 1929

Uncle Norman, 1941

Uncle Norman, 1941

Uncle Norman, 1946?

Uncle Norman, 1946?

Uncles Norma & Roger

Uncles Norma & Roger

Dad (Henry) on right, Uncle Roger on left, ages 12 and 14, 1937.

Dad (Henry) on right, Uncle Roger on left, ages 12 and 14, 1937.

Uncle Roger, age 17, 1939

Uncle Roger, age 17, 1939

Uncle Norman and his wife Delia, 1952

Uncle Norman and his wife Delia, 1952

Uncle Norman and Delia, and their son my cousin Leo

Uncle Norman and Delia, and their son my cousin Leo

New Report Rebukes Central Feature of ‘Race to the Top’

By Diane Ravitch, posted 12 April 2014, and reposted at CommonDreams.org (www.commondreams.org/view/2014/04/14-7):

The central feature of the Obama administration’s $5 billion “Race to the Top” program was sharply refuted last week by the American Statistical Association (115 KB PDF), one of the nation’s leading scholarly organizations. Spurred on by the administration’s combination of federal cash and mandates, most states are now using student test scores to rank and evaluate teachers. This method of evaluating teachers by test scores is called value-added measurement, or VAM. Teachers’ compensation, their tenure, bonuses and other rewards and sanctions are tied directly to the rise or fall of their student test scores, which the Obama administration considers a good measure of teacher quality.

Secretary Arne Duncan believes so strongly in VAM that he has threatened to punish Washington state for refusing to adopt this method of evaluating teachers and principals. In New York, a state court fined New York City $150 million for failing to agree on a VAM plan.

The ASA issued a short but stinging statement that strongly warned against the misuse of VAM. The organization neither condemns nor promotes the use of VAM, but its warnings about the limitations of this methodology clearly demonstrate that the Obama administration has committed the nation’s public schools to a policy fraught with error. ASA warns that VAMs are “complex statistical models” that require “high-level statistical expertise” and awareness of their “assumptions and possible limitations,” especially when they are used for high-stakes purposes as is now common. Few, if any, state education departments have the statistical expertise to use VAM models appropriately. In some states, like Florida, teachers have been rated based on the scores of students they never taught.

The ASA points out that VAMs are based on standardized tests and “do not directly measure potential teacher contributions toward other student outcomes.” They typically measure correlation, not causation. That means that the rise or fall of student test scores attributed to the teacher might actually be caused by other factors outside the classroom, not under the teacher’s control. The VAM rating of teachers is so unstable that it may change if the same students are given a different test.

The ASA’s most damning indictment of the policy promoted so vigorously by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is:

Most VAM studies find that teachers account for about one percent to 14 percent of the variability in test scores, and that the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions. Ranking teachers by their VAM scores can have unintended consequences that reduce quality.

The ASA points out:

This is not saying that teachers have little effect on students, but that variation among teachers accounts for a small part of the variation in scores. The majority of the variation in test scores is attributable to factors outside of the teacher’s control such as student and family background, poverty, curriculum, and unmeasured influences.

As many education researchers have explained — including a joint statement by the American Educational Research Association and the National Academy of Education (112 KB PDF) — the VAM ratings of those who teach children with disabilities and English language learners will be low, because these children have greater learning challenges than their peers, as will the ratings of those who teach gifted students, because the latter group has already reached a ceiling. Those two groups, like the ASA agreed that test scores are affected by many factors besides the teacher, not only the family, but the school’s leadership, its resources, class size, curriculum, as well as the student’s motivation, attendance and health. Yet the Obama administration and most of our states are holding teachers alone accountable for student test scores.

Yosemite

Some lovely time lapse photography of Yosemite National Park, by Project Yosemite:

Yosemite HD II from Project Yosemite on Vimeo.

They introduce themselves (at www.projectyose.com) thusly:

“Project Yosemite is a time-lapse video project set in Yosemite National Park and shot by Colin Delehanty and Sheldon Neill. We started it in January 2012 after meeting through the video sharing website, Vimeo. The idea for the project came to us during our first overnight trip to Half Dome.”

The Growth of Walmart

This gif is just so illuminating (“horrifying” is what the original post called it), I wanted to share it. This is a post written by Brandon Weber and posted on UPWORTHY, as part of a special Upworthy series about work and the economy, made possible by the AFL-CIO (of which I am a member, through CFT-AFT).

When big box stores (I’ll leave it to you to decide just WHICH big-box stores) come to town, they almost always shut down all the mom-and-pop stores in the area they open in. And it’s a pretty simple formula:

  1. Move in.
  2. Open doors with lower prices than anyone else.
  3. Get employees on welfare and Medicaid because you don’t want to pay well or provide medical insurance.
  4. Force smaller shops out of business.
  5. Raise prices, because now you’re the only game in town.
  6. Rinse, repeat 15 miles down the road.

I’ve heard some say, “capitalism works this way, and great for the owners of [INSERT_BIG_BOX_STORE_HERE] that they’re able to do so well because at least they create jobs.”

To them I say, “At what price?”

walmart-growth

Note: This map only goes to 2006; it’s much worse now, believe it or not.

About:
This image was found on PolicyMic. It was created by Daniel Ferry, Excel Hero, who explains how it’s done. For some of the facts about Walmart’s pay and etc., there’s this from last year. And for even more facts about its pay, here’s an image and data source from a previous post as well.

The Gates Foundation: Doing Great Good, Doing Great Evil…

A friend recently shared a link to an article by Bill Gates about lessons he’s learned from his work in India trying to eradicate polio. Here’s my response:

Interesting article, and yes, some lessons that might be drawn from their great work on world health… And I am glad Bill & Melinda are putting hundreds of millions into world health, great to see that wealth doing good.

Cover of Diane Ravitch's book, The Death and Life of the Great American School SystemHowever, if I may now climb on my soap box for a moment, it’s very sad to know that the Gates Foundation is one of a small handful of very wealthy foundations who are also actively engaged in a concerted attack on public education, on the so-called “reform” movement which is not really about helping improve public schools or help kids, it’s about privatizing education, wringing profits out of the public education “sector” by diverting public funds into private charters, and destroying public pension funds and unions in the process. Bill & Melinda’s cohorts in this are none other than the Waltons (Walton Foundation = Wal-Mart $$$) and the Broad Foundation.

See as a couple starting points:

Cover of Diane Ravitch's book, Reign of Error I’d love to talk about these issues with anyone interested, and if you are interested, I highly recommend Diane Ravitch’s last 2 books, and/or her blogs. In 2010 she came out with The Death and Life of the Great American School System, which is a thorough history of how we got to where we are now with this privatization attack on public education. Just last month she came out with Reign of Error, which more directly challenges and disproves so many of the current claims of these “reformers” —she cites lots of data where they just pontificate w/o evidence to back their claims— and then she offers solutions for what will actually help improve schools and help kids.

OK, I’ll climb down from the soap box now. Thanks for letting me vent. (This is an issue dear to my heart and of great concern to me and many others.)