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Zesty Politics with a Dollop of Louisiana Goodness
Browsing All posts tagged under »accountability«
Shadow Schools, the many victims of their success, and why US ED is useless
If you are a journalist. . . beware trying to cover this story. This may be a story only a blogger can handle because of all the high profile political players involved. Just asking questions about this subject is liable to get you fired as one reporter unfortunately found out. Some of my earlier readers of […]
The Grand Accountability Scam – Kill the RSD
April 29, 2013
John White and Bobby Jindal have mixed two smart sounding messages in a way designed to punish people for being poor. It sounds good when you say, “poverty is not an excuse for poor performance.” It sounds good when “we refuse to allow poverty to be an excuse for poor performance.” Who could disagree with […]
Why I fight, and why you should too
April 1, 2013
I recently received a comment on my blog that struck a chord. . . and triggered a memory of who I used to be and who I am. It addresses a number of questions people ask me about my own feelings on a wide range of issues, and I found it both focusing and inspirational […]
Louisiana Believes – SPED students should be reclassified before test time to optimize test scores
February 6, 2013
Dr. Gary Jones, former Superintendent of Rapides Parish schools and current Assistant Superintendent with the Louisiana Department of Education explains in the letter that follows that districts should carefully consider whether they reclassify their students as disabled but currently classified as able to take the state mandated ACT tests and graduate as suddenly too severely disabled to […]
A Guest column response, by Herb Bassett, to Superintendent John White’s reply to Deborah Tonguis’s question about the inflated 2012 Louisiana High School Performance Scores.(with notes from yours truly)
January 11, 2013
An open response by Herb Bassett (one of the researchers who has recently produced a paper the inflation of Louisiana’s SPS scores as well as LDOE’s published intent to radically inflate next year’s scores) to Superintendent John White’s reply to Deborah Tonguis’s question about the inflated 2012 Louisiana High School Performance Scores. On November 29, 2012, Deborah […]
John White “I’m just a leaf in the wind.”
January 8, 2013
In an e-mail response to Deborah Tonguis, 2009 Teacher of the Year, regarding the obvious inflation of SPS scores John White claims he doesn’t understand simple mathematical formulae or obvious statistical anomalies, and couldn’t possibly be expected to, since all the decisions that went into it were made long before he got there. To your point, and to […]
White’s Lies and Faux Student Improvement – Part II (The prediction edition)
January 6, 2013
My apologies for publishing so many articles so quickly folks, but I’ve been getting a lot of material lately to go through and some of what it reveals is truly astounding and needs to be shared. To recap: I recently published an article on how the most recent release of SPS scores was inflated simply due […]
White’s Lies and Louisiana’s Faux School Improvement – Part I
January 5, 2013
When I first saw a press release some months ago from the Louisiana Department of Education heralding scads of school improvement and data that showed almost all of the state’s high schools had significant gains, suffice it to say I was a tad skeptical. I know all too well of some of the tricks LDE has employed in the past with […]
Louisiana and John White decide to explicitly codify Shadow Schools
November 10, 2012
I think it’s safe to say I underestimated just how sleazy John White and his TFA toddlers were capable of being. When confronted from multiple sources with evidence of Shadow Schools (unreported schools or formerly reported schools no longer reported for the purposes of altering accountability scores) rather than crack down on districts like St […]
The correlation between random temperatures and Value Added Scores
November 2, 2012
I think most people would agree that it makes sense to evaluate people on the job they are doing. I think it is safe to say most people appreciate valuable feedback and constructive criticism. (Well probably not my wife, or myself so much, but stick with me here.) Ideally, if you are going to be […]
May 6, 2013
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