Saturday, March 28, 2015

Bill 11...How Long Before We Become Atlanta North?

SomeConsequencesAreMoreIntended
ThanOthersVille


There is a lot of praise on the Twittmachine for the VSun's Daphne Bramham's analysis of the Clarklandian (anti)public education bill introduced in the BC legislature last week.

And that praise is, in my opinion at least, very well deserved.

Here is Ms. Bramham's lede:

A blunt reading of the B.C. government’s plan for public education is this: Impoverish it, neuter critics (including teachers and elected school trustees) and centralize control.

Once control is centralized, the blueprint seems to be to move to the American model where public school funding and teachers’ pay are linked more closely to students’ test scores...




Which has me wondering....

If this thing does, indeed, become law, how long will it be before we are forced to deal with stuff like this:

The jury deciding the Atlanta (Georgia) Public Schools cheating case will return for a sixth day of deliberations on Monday...

{snip}

...Prosecutors say the 12 defendants — former administrators and teachers — conspired to cheat on the 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Test so the higher scores would help the district meet federal benchmarks and those set by former Superintendent Beverly Hall. In some instances, teachers prompted students as they took the standardized test, according to the charges. Other times, educators allegedly sat down, pencil in hand, and corrected wrong answers.

Consequently, there were inexplicable jumps in test scores for students who could barely read, write or do basic math...



Gosh.

It almost makes you think that someone with close ties to the finest of the finest fine folks from the Fraser Institute really might be working to keep all those promises that must be kept deep inside Clarklandia.


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Tip O' The Toque to Rod Mickleburgh for bringing the situation in Atlanta (which is NOT an isolated incident, of course) to our attention on his highly established and extremely credible, gasp!....Blog.


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7 comments:

Anonymous said...

BC Liberals at war with everybody?

http://www.tricitynews.com/national/vancouver/297850191.html

sd said...

Michelle Rhee is another one lying about how "reforms" improve test scores. She was caught lying about it in D.C. and Baltimore. It's all about profit from tax payers.

Anonymous said...

Thanks Ross for flagging this!

Wow, great article by Daphne and tons of comments. Always good, albeit surprising, to see a hard hitting article in the Vancouver Sun.

Pearson also has its hands in the BC education pie; Pearson has also had a very negative effect on US education.
---otr

RossK said...

Thanks for the heads-up sd and otr.

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Dana said...

Seems to me Clark must really hate her father.

RossK said...

I dunno about that Dana--

However, clearly Ms. Clark and her former life partner fully understand how important it is to keep their true patrons happy at all times.

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Anonymous said...

The arbitrary punishment of New York teacher evaluations

Cathy O'Neil, mathbabe


Remember that the reason the Value-Added Model for teachers (VAM) is being pushed so hard by people is that they don’t like it when evaluations systems think too many people are effective.

In fact, they’d rather see arbitrary and random evaluation than see most people get through unscathed.


http://mathbabe.org/2015/04/02/the-arbitrary-punishment-of-new-york-teacher-evaluations/