Devos Michigan schools experiment gets poor grades

haymarket · Dec 16, 2016

CycloneWanderer said:
If "A>B" is the limit of your ability to comprehend how statistics represent (or misrepresent) reality, you aren't qualified to interpret them much less teach others what they mean.

once again - you go to a damn school and you sit there in a teachers meeting when the standardized results come in when the principal starts to go on about delicining test scores and you get up in your high and might arrogance and tell the principal just how far he has his head up his own butt because higher and lower doesn't mean crap.

What part of ALL THEY CARE ABOUT IS NUMBERS do you not seem to get?

CycloneWanderer · Dec 16, 2016

haymarket said:
once again - you go to a damn school and you sit there in a teachers meeting when the standardized results come in when the principal starts to go on about delicining test scores and you get up in your high and might arrogance and tell the principal just how far he has his head up his own butt because higher and lower doesn't mean crap.

What part of ALL THEY CARE ABOUT IS NUMBERS do you not seem to get?

I don't give a flying **** if they only care about the numbers. Politicians and k-12 administrators are often dumb as hell when it comes to research statistics. You think that's news to me? I live in Alabama, a state where currently anyone can technically graduate high school so long as they take the ACT regardless of how well they do on it. (Ironically, this was done in a reaction against standardized testing.) It's not about numbers for numbers' sake. It's about what the numbers mean; it's about what they represent. Consider the following.

Here's a fictional set of numbers representing the number of people golfing in two specific states today. (While the numbers are fake, I'm willing to bet the trend is accurate.)

Florida: 1,000,000
Michigan: 4

Does that mean more people golfed in Florida today? Yes. Does it mean people in Florida like to golf more than people in Michigan? Probably not. Does it mean Michigan golf courses are failing? Does it mean Michigan golf courses are not doing their jobs as well as Florida golf courses? Of course not. But, if you just look at the raw numbers it doesn't look good for Michigan. I could demonstrate the opposite if I presented growth percentages of the increase of golfers per day in each state during the next 5 months. It's not about the numbers. It's about understanding what is really going on. How would you react if someone claimed that no one in Michigan likes to golf because they saw such a statistic? If you were kind, you might explain why they are wrong. However, if they kept just pointing at the numbers and exclaiming that no one in Michigan golfs because "that's what the numbers say," what would you do?

haymarket · Dec 16, 2016

CycloneWanderer said:
I don't give a flying **** if they only care about the numbers.

Sadly for you the government who funds all these schools does care a great deal about these numbers.

CycloneWanderer · Dec 17, 2016

haymarket said:
Sadly for you the government who funds all these schools does care a great deal about these numbers.

Evidently you only care about the first sentences of things...

Is that how you graded your students' papers?

nota bene · Dec 17, 2016

haymarket said:
And what objective measurements are you using to determine that our school suck as you claim?

Well, that's part of the problem--the obsession with measurement and assessment.

haymarket · Dec 17, 2016

CycloneWanderer said:
Evidently you only care about the first sentences of things...

anything else you want to say?

haymarket · Dec 17, 2016

nota bene said:
Well, that's part of the problem--the obsession with measurement and assessment.

No doubt about it. But it is the ruler of the roost these days and has been for quite a while now.

CycloneWanderer · Dec 17, 2016

haymarket said:
anything else you want to say?

At this point I've exhausted myself trying to provide you with intelligent, reasonable responses just to have you ignore them.

CycloneWanderer · Dec 17, 2016

haymarket said:
anything else you want to say?

Anything that I have left to say to you would break forum rules.

haymarket · Dec 17, 2016

CycloneWanderer said:
At this point I've exhausted myself trying to provide you with intelligent, reasonable responses just to have you ignore them.

I think I have responded to your posts.

AlbqOwl · Dec 17, 2016

haymarket said:
DeVos' Michigan schools experiment gets poor grades - POLITICO

If one of the top colleges in the nation needed a new football coach, you would guess that they would go out and find somebody who has been very successful in coaching football. And success is generally determined by their record. Not so in politics where it appears ideology trumps a solid record.

Donald Trump has selected Betsy Devos of Michigan as the new Department of Education chief. The only problem is Devos has a losing record in education in her home state of Michigan and her promises have failed to materialize despite a very cooperative state government which has given her side just about everything they desired in education and law to facilitate it.

In short, she talks the conservative talk but fails to walk the educational improvements walk.

When this was first announced, I was well aware of Devos from my three years in Lansing working as chief of staff or a Michigan legislator. Devon is very well known as the point person for many charter school issues. But in her years she has gone from promising better schools with better results for kids to merely offering choice for parents as the Holy Grail of her movement.

This is not just about a bad pick in putting the fox inside of the hen house and resulting in dead chickens. It is about putting a person in charge of something with a very poor record of accomplishment and who is simply not fit for that task based on her previous record.

I did not expect Trump to nominate the President of the AFT to run the Department of Education. But to nominate someone who has no record of accomplishment and failed to deliver on her educational promises - that is inexcusable... and conservatives should agree if they care about record and ability to deliver what you promise.

Whether at state level or the national level, the Secretary of Education cannot "FIX" education. Only local school boards, parents, students, and the educators themselves can do that. What a competent leader can do is provide support for and encouragement for improvement in the schools and generally that means getting government out of it as much as possible.

I ran down the links Google--not exactly a bastion of conservative support--allowed me to see on the initial page of the search. Yep, all the typical "we hate anything conservative or non-progressive' sources such as the NY Times, WAPO, CNN, Politico, etc. all trashed Devos' track record pretty well.

But going to the National Review that has a pretty good track record for objectivity, I see a much different story being told.
DeVos and Detroit's Charter Schools | National Review

Maybe Devos hasn't failed so much in Detroit as the corrupt system in Detroit made sure that she didn't succeed? Detroit did vote overwhelmingly Democrat in the general election while the rest of Michigan mostly didn't with those other counties that did vote blue being much more equally split between red and blue than what happened in Detroit.

haymarket · Dec 17, 2016

AlbqOwl said:
Whether at state level or the national level, the Secretary of Education cannot "FIX" education. Only local school boards, parents, students, and the educators themselves can do that. What a competent leader can do is provide support for and encouragement for improvement in the schools and generally that means getting government out of it as much as possible.

I ran down the links Google--not exactly a bastion of conservative support--allowed me to see on the initial page of the search. Yep, all the typical "we hate anything conservative or non-progressive' sources such as the NY Times, WAPO, CNN, Politico, etc. all trashed Devos' track record pretty well.

But going to the National Review that has a pretty good track record for objectivity, I see a much different story being told.
DeVos and Detroit's Charter Schools | National Review

Maybe Devos hasn't failed so much in Detroit as the corrupt system in Detroit made sure that she didn't succeed? Detroit did vote overwhelmingly Democrat in the general election while the rest of Michigan mostly didn't with those other counties that did vote blue being much more equally split between red and blue than what happened in Detroit.

WOW!!!! I used to have more respect for National Review when they had writers who could write and they usually got their facts straight.

The entire meme repeated in that article about two months has been thoroughly debunked and it was charter school people elsewhere and its right here in this very thread.

An NR seemed to have not gotten the numbers outside of cherry picking a few with incomplete comparisons. This is the picture

An analysis of test-score data done for Bridge Magazine by Public Sector Consultants shows charters falling along roughly the same achievement lines as traditional public schools, for both better-off and less-advantaged students.

While many charters produced outstanding results on statewide tests of academic achievement, taken on average, their test results were at or below statewide averages. In fourth-grade reading, math and writing tests, the statewide averages for traditional-school students ranked as meeting or exceeding standards were 84.8 percent, 91.8 percent and 48.2 percent, respectively. Charter-school students scored 76.8 percent, 87.6 percent and 37.7 percent on the same tests.

In eight-grade reading, math and science, traditional-school students meeting or exceeding standards were 82.3 percent, 78.8 percent and 78.9 percent respectively, while charter students were at 77.6, 67.8 and 68.7 percent.

On every tested level and in every tested subject public school students did better than the charter school students.

I wonder if NR missed that story?

chromium · Dec 18, 2016

CycloneWanderer said:
Which is appropriate. Statistics like that are meaningless without an understanding of the environmental factors and variables influencing and composing them. Unfortunately, the very things that provide readers a basis for accurate interpretation is often what gets ignored by journalists who are not familiar with the intricacies of the subject they are covering.

That and they know most readers wouldn't comprehend any of it if they did. This is why the uneducated should not get to have any influence on education!

Jack Hays · Jan 2, 2017

School Choice for Children Who Have None
Fred Hiatt, Washington Post

Devos Michigan schools experiment gets poor grades

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