The CEA Blog

The Columbus Dispatch has recently run a story on the ongoing testing saga students and teachers in the Columbus City Schools have been forced to endure since returning from Winter Break. The amount of testing at all grade levels in CCS has been the subject of a grievance sent to arbitration by your Association as well as an earlier Speakout on The CEA Blog.

“When you need to be spending time teaching children to read, you are testing them,” said Columbus Education Association President Rhonda Johnson. “That’s taking away valuable classroom time.”

You can read the entire story here.

The blogosphere is awash with wonks, pundits and regular folks putting in their two cents about statements made in the State Of The Union (SOTU) about NCLB by President Bush.

Read just a few of them after the jump.

(more…)

It’s hard to believe we’re halfway through another school year. What’s astounding, however, is how much time testing has eaten from our classroom schedules since winter break.

Since Jan. 7, teachers have given nearly 30 standardized tests, including the Dominie, given in grades 2–5; quarterly assessments given in grades 2–12, and the full-length OAT practice test, given in grades 3–8.

At minimum, that’s 60 hours spent giving the tests, not to mention the hours spent teaching the test format through sample questions and practice exercises and filling out paperwork. Teachers are frustrated by the enormous amount of testing; and our students are burnt out, also. Click on the jump below to read more. (more…)

A recent study  (PDF) of Detroit’s charter school locations and competition techniques by for-profit charter school operators provides chilling insight into the potential marginalization of African-American students who live in high-poverty areas. Released in October and written by Christopher Lubienski of the University of Illinois and Charisse Gulosino of Brown University, the paper outlines the tactics of educational management organizations (EMOs) that operate for-profit charter schools using a geo-spatial and temporal analysis of EMO charter openings. 

(more…)

K12, a for-profit Virginia-based operator of virtual charter schools in 10 different states held an initial public offering of its stock last week; the company did not do quite as well as they had hoped.

Only 63% of its hoped for $172.5 million was raised, but the Washington Post reported K12’s share price raised 36%. The company has operated the Ohio Virtual Academy since the 2002-2003 school year and currently enrolls 3,408 students in Ohio and over 27,000 in its combined operation.

Both the Ohio Virtual Academy and Columbus City Schools earned a Continuous Improvement rating for the 2006-2007 school year, but that is where the similarities end.

(more…)

When backers legislated into existence the option to create charter schools, they argued that these choices for parents would allow them to escape their failing schools and school districts. Today, no urban district has been given an “F” rating; only three earned a “D” rating. This begs the question:

Now that big urban districts and individual schools are improving across the board, what alternatives are charters actually providing?

Read more about it from the Akron-Beacon Journal.

(Hat-tip to Jill Miller Zimon at Writes Like She Talks.)

In early September of this year, The CEA Voice reported that the Columbus Education Association Foundation had become certified by the Ohio Department of Education to provide Supplemental Education Services (SES) to Columbus City Schools students under the No Child Left Behind Legislation (NCLB). The CEA Foundation will be completely responsible for managing the hiring, curriculum and federal money that comes with the program. This is the only SES program in the state of Ohio to be run through a local teacher’s union.

(more…)

The Ohio Department of Education recently released the first annual report on students’ progress using value-added data for Ohio’s 610 school districts. The students of Columbus City Schools earned the district the highest rating possible from the state, achieving over a year’s worth of academic progress in a single school year. CCS joins other local suburban school districts, such as Bexley, Dublin, Hilliard, New Albany-Plain and Upper Arlington that are ranked in the top category. This rating puts CCS in the top half of all school districts across the state, surpassing Grandview Heights and Worthington City Schools, the only district in Franklin County given the “A” rating by the state of Ohio. 

This data shows the enormous gains that Columbus Public School teachers make with their students. “Our students are growing more academically than anywhere in Central Ohio,” responded Columbus Education Association President Rhonda Johnson. “With the implementation of value-added, the high performance of our students and teachers have truly been documented in a way that has not yet accurately been shown on state report cards.” 

Click on the jump below to continue reading.

(more…)

That’s how New York Times Columnist Bob Herbert refers to it in his recent column. In fact, Herbert goes suggests that the “test zealots” be “reined in”.

The most memorable quote from the article comes from Dr. Daniel Koretz, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

“There are a lot of us in the field,” (Koretz) said, “who think that if we ever really looked under the covers, what we’d find is that the shortcuts are particularly prevalent in lower-achieving schools, just because the pressure is greater, the community supports are less and the kids have more difficulties.”

The article goes on to reference the (Ohio-based charter school sponsoring think tank) Thomas B. Fordham Foundation’s report that posits that NCLB-mandated state tests are being made easier so that students can show gains in their testing. Herbert warned against a “false impression of success” that has been created as a result of state-administered NCLB tests.

Afraid of not being able to get the last word in, Fordham Foundation Vice-President Michael Petrilli fired back at Herbert on their website, saying:

“(Herbert) erred in concluding that the solution is getting rid of testing. High stakes testing may not be a ‘panacea’, but abandoning it won’t help to solve our schools’ problems, either.”

Do you agree with Washington Post Columnist Bob Herbert that  high stakes testing is “a shell game”?

Make sure you register and login to comment!