What is NCTQ? (and why you should know)

This from Diane Ravitch at The Answer Sheet: 

Several months ago, U.S. News & World Report announced that it planned to rank the nation’s schools of education and that it would do so with the assistance of the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ).

Since then, many institutions announced that they would not collaborate. Some felt that they had already been evaluated by other accrediting institutions like NCATE or TEAC; others objected to NCTQ’s methodology. As the debate rated, NCTQ told the dissenters that they would be rated whether they agreed or not, and if they didn’t cooperate, they would get a zero. The latest information that I have seen is that the ratings will appear this fall.

To its credit, NCTQ posted on its website the letters of the college presidents and deans who refused to be rated by NCTQ. They make for interesting reading, as it is always surprising (at least to me) to see the leaders of big institutions take a stand on issues. Two of the conservative Chiefs for Change are on NCTQ’s technical advisory panel.
U.S. News defended the project, saying that it had been endorsed by leading educators. The specific endorsement to which it referred came from Chiefs for Change, the conservative state superintendents associated with former Florida governor Jeb Bush. This article, by the way, has good links to NCTQ’s website, describing the project and its methods.

Just this week, NCTQ released a new report about how teachers’ colleges prepare students for assessment responsibilities. The theme of this report is that “data-driven instruction” is the key to success in education. The best districts are those that are “obsessive about using data to drive instruction.” The Broad Prize is taken as the acme of academic excellence in urban education because it focuses on data, data, data. The report acknowledges that the data it prizes in this report is “data derived from student assessments — ranging from classwork practice to state tests — to improve instruction.”

Data-driven decision making is now a national priority, it says, thanks to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who required states “to improve their data systems and create high-quality assessments” if they wanted a crack at his $5 billion Race to the Top.
Unfortunately despite a massive investment in data collection by states and the federal government, the report says, teachers don’t value data enough. Reference is made to the report sponsored by Gates and Scholastic, which found that most teachers do not value the state tests. I wrote about that report here. How in the world can our nation drive instruction with data if the teachers hold data in low regard?

The balance of the report reviews teacher training institutions by reviewing their course syllabi. The goal is to judge whether the institutions are preparing future teachers to be obsessed with data.

Now, to be candid, I am fed up with our nation’s obsession with data-driven instruction, so I don’t share the premises of the report. The authors of this report have more respect for standardized tests than I do. I fear that they are pushing data-worship and data-mania of a sort that will cause teaching to the test, narrowing of the curriculum, and other negative behaviors (like cheating). I don’t think any of this will lead to the improvement of education. It might promote higher test scores, but it will undermine genuine education. By genuine education, I refer to a love of learning, a readiness to immerse oneself in study of a subject, an engagement with ideas, a willingness to ask questions and to take risks. I don’t know how to assess the qualities I respect, but I feel certain that there is no standardized, data-driven instruction that will produce what I respect.
And then there is the question that is the title of this blog: What is NCTQ?

NCTQ was created by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in 2000. I was on the board of TBF at the time. Conservatives, and I was one, did not like teacher training institutions. We thought they were too touchy-feely, too concerned about self-esteem and social justice and not concerned enough with basic skills and academics. In 1997, we had commissioned a Public Agenda study called “Different Drummers”; this study chided professors of education because they didn’t care much about discipline and safety and were more concerned with how children learn rather than what they learned. TBF established NCTQ as a new entity to promote alternative certification and to break the power of the hated ed schools.

For a time, it was not clear how this fledgling organization would make waves or if it would survive. But in late 2001, Secretary of Education Rod Paige gave NCTQ a grant of $5 million to start a national teacher certification program called the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (see p. 16 of the link). ABCTE has since become an online teacher preparation program, where someone can become a teacher for $1,995.

Today, NCTQ is the partner of U.S. News & World Report and will rank the nation’s schools of education. It received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to review teacher quality in Los Angeles. It is now often cited as the nation’s leading authority on teacher quality issues. Its report has a star-studded technical advisory committee of corporate reform leaders like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee.

And I was there at the creation.

An hour after this blog was first published, a reader told me that NCTQ was cited as one of the organizations that received funding from the Bush administration to get positive media attention for NCLB. I checked his sources, which took me to a 2005 report of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education (a link in this article leads to the Inspector General report), and he was right. This practice was suspended because the U.S. Department of Education is not allowed to expend funds for propaganda, and the grantees are required to make full disclosure of their funding. At the time, the media focused on payments to commentator Armstrong Williams.

According to the investigation, NCTQ and another organization received a grant of $677,318 to promote NCLB. The product of this grant was three op-eds written by Kate Walsh, the head of NCTQ; the funding of these articles by the Department of Education was not disclosed.

Partisanship Drives Down Supreme Court Approval

This from the Huffington Post:

The American public's faith in government continues to decline.

President Barack Obama's job approval rating currently stands at 47 percent, Gallup reported. However, nearly as many respondents said they disapproved of the president's actions.

The reputation of Congress is practically in the gutter, treading water at 17 percent in April. That was a slight improvement from February, when approval of the lawmakers in D.C. reached a record low of 10 percent.

Now the people have weighed in on the justices of the high court, and the report isn't stellar. According to a new poll conducted by The New York Times and CBS News, just 44 percent of Americans approve of the job the Supreme Court is doing.
 
Three-quarters said the nine justices sometimes decided cases based on their personal or political views, rather than along constitutional lines. Only 1 in 8 Americans said the justices decided cases based solely on legal analysis, The New York Times reported.

Sixty percent of Americans also agreed with the statement that "appointing Supreme Court justices for life is a bad thing because it gives them too much power." Only one-third said that life tenure for justices was "a good thing because it helps keep them independent from political pressures."

Back in 1994, the court's approval rating hit an all-time high of 80 percent, The Associated Press reported. Such a drastic change in less than two decades could be attributed to the changing makeup of the court, particularly after the ideologically divided 5-to-4 decisions in Bush v. Gore, which determined the 2000 presidential election, and Citizens United, the 2010 decision that gave unlimited campaign spending rights to corporations and unions.

Whether the upcoming decision on the Obama administration's health care overhaul has an impact on the public's view of the court remains to be seen.

Are Teachers Too Easily Caught in Crossfire Over Student Achievement?

This from PBS:

In the recent debates on fixing American schools, a lot of emphasis has been placed on teachers, how to train them, how to pay them, even when and how to fire them. Is putting teachers at the center of reform at least a step in the right direction?

DIANE RAVITCH, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education: Well, certainly, teachers are crucial to schools.

They're crucial to everything that happens in schools. But there's been way too negative a discussion. There has been so much demonizing of teachers, as though they're a great problem. And the overwhelmingly majority of teachers in this country are very hardworking, very dedicated and, for the most part, underpaid.

RAY SUAREZ: Is there a place where an evaluation system that figures out what teachers do well, identifies areas where they need improvement, and then goes on to pay top performers accordingly?

DIANE RAVITCH: Well, there's two parts to your question.

Watch Are Teachers Too Accountable Over Student Achievement? on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

First of all, should teachers be evaluated? Yes. Should they be evaluated by the test scores of their students, as Race to the Top, the Obama program, requires? Absolutely not. That is an unproven and actually a very harmful way to evaluate teachers.

Should teachers be paid more if the test scores go up? No, they should not be, because that puts too much emphasis on very poor tests. It causes teachers to teach to the test, which everybody agrees is a terrible thing to do. It also leads to narrowing of the curriculum, so that schools will drop the arts. They will drop history. They will drop civics, foreign languages. And they will focus only on what's tested.

So, it actually is very educationally harmful to pay teachers to get higher test scores in reading and math or in any subject, because it's just not a good method. And, by the way, I might add that this whole idea of merit pay has been tried again and again since the 1920s. It has never, ever produced results.

RAY SUAREZ: But how do you achieve some form of accountability? If you can't look at a classroom of 23, 28, 30 kids and say, these kids know how to read when they couldn't, know how to compute when they couldn't, we can actually see whether this teacher is doing an effective job?

DIANE RAVITCH: Well, that's absolutely crucial. That's the job, first of all, of the principal of the school, the department chair.

And also in systems that are doing this, it's a job of peer review. The way you measure teacher performance is to observe teachers performing. And then you also look at the work that their students do. You look at where they were when they came in, whether they're learning or not.

And you don't make that judgment just based on test scores, because these standardized tests are way too narrow and really not a very useful instrument for that.

RAY SUAREZ: You made the point they're being asked to take the lion's share of the blame. But there, in fact, ineffective teachers, and are they -- can they be fired in places where collective bargaining agreements have historically made it difficult to do it?

DIANE RAVITCH: Well, are there ineffective teachers? I'm sure there must be. I've heard stories of ineffective teachers. And I certainly don't think there should be even one ineffective teacher in any school.

And it's the job of the administration, the job of the principal primarily, to make sure that no ineffective teacher ever gets tenure. Once they get tenure, all that means is -- it doesn't mean they have a lifetime job. It doesn't mean they get paid for breathing. It means that they have a right to due process. If, after getting tenure, the principal says, I want to fire you, they have to have evidence. They have to have a hearing before an impartial administrator.

That really is not such a burdensome thing. But it's very clear that this is not the key problem in American education, because the lowest performance is not in union districts. The highest performance in America is Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey. These are three states that are all union states.

They have very strong collective bargaining agreements and the highest-performing states. The weakest performance is in the states that have no collective bargaining and where there's a lot of poverty. I think it's really important in your discussions about education that you recognize that the most -- the biggest single correlate and, very likely, I would say the cause of low performance is not teachers or union contracts. It's poverty and racial isolation.

In every district where there is very low academic achievement, there is poverty and racial isolation. And yet we are now trapped in this national conversation where there's almost an agreement we will not talk about poverty. We will not talk about racial isolation. We will just talk about teachers. We are talking about the wrong problem.

RAY SUAREZ: You got a lot of attention when you wrote an article reassessing some of the educational policies you had supported before, like No Child Left Behind's emphasis on testing, using competition, using charters. What changed your mind?

DIANE RAVITCH: Well, it wasn't just an article. It was a book.

I wrote a book called "The Death and Life of the Great American School System," explaining why I turned against testing, accountability, competition, choice, the accumulation of evidence saying that these are not only just ineffective policies; they're actually harmful to education. They undermine education.
The accumulation of evidence was such that I found I could no longer support No Child Left Behind or any of these programs that say that teachers should compete with one another, because they don't. Teachers want to work together. They know that they're on the same team. They want to collaborate. The essence of every good school is collaboration and teamwork, not competition.

RAY SUAREZ: Another big change in the years you have been talking about has seen foundations become big players in proposing and advocating new educational policies, including privatization, parental control, increased use of charter schools.

Have the foundations been a worthwhile addition to the debate over the future of education?
DIANE RAVITCH: Well, I have a chapter in my book about -- I call them the billionaire boys club. The billionaires boys club is led by the three biggest foundations in America, the Gates Foundation, the Walton Foundation, the Broad Foundation.

These are the three billionaire foundations that give a lot of money to American education. And it has been given to push the privatization movement forward, as well as to put a very heavy emphasis on testing and test scores as part of teacher evaluation. I think that -- you know, I'm a historian. So, I look back and I say, there has never been a time in our national life where foundations, which are accountable to no one, make decisions about what our education policy should be.

Sometimes, they make the wrong bet. And the Gates Foundation is a very good example of this. They put $2 billion into breaking up large high schools into small high schools. And after doing that for almost a decade, they said, whoops, that didn't work. We're not going to do that anymore. Now we're going to put the focus on teacher evaluation.

And so the immense amount of money, the hundreds of millions of dollars that the Gates Foundation and now these other big foundations are pouring in, they are directing the national conversation. And I think that's not -- it strikes me that that's in some ways not democratic.

Our conversations about what to do about our schools should be held at the local level and at the state level. The federal government is there to level the playing field. They're not there to steer the boat.

RAY SUAREZ: Diane Ravitch, great to talk with you. Thanks for joining us.

DIANE RAVITCH: Thank you so much, Ray.

Melinda Gates on the Importance of Evaluations in Shaping Effective Teachers

This from PBS:

Since 1994, the philanthropic [Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation] has spent $6 billion on U.S. That has placed the foundation at the center of many debates in education, including smaller schools, testing and teacher evaluation.

Melinda Gates, thanks so much for joining us.

MELINDA GATES, co-founder, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Thanks for having me.

HARI SREENIVASAN: So we just had the 10th national conversation American Graduate teacher town hall. Teachers have been speaking around the country in different forms. What are you hearing?

MELINDA GATES: I'm hearing that they are working under very difficult circumstances, that with the state budgets going down, they're seeing a lot of kids who are at risk in the school system. Their jobs are getting harder.

We know they're working on average about 10 hours and 40 minutes a day. And yet I'm also hearing from them, we want our kids to succeed, and so there have to be structural changes that allow us to do our jobs.

HARI SREENIVASAN: So, what's the foundation's central premise when you're trying to make or enable these structural changes to happen?

MELINDA GATES: Well, we know from good research that the fundamental thing that makes a difference in the classroom is an effective teacher. An effective teacher in front of a student, that student will make three times the gains in a school year that another student will make.

Watch Melinda Gates on the Importance of Evaluations in Teaching on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

And so what the foundation feels our job is to do is to make sure we create a system where we can have an effective teacher in every single classroom across the United States.

HARI SREENIVASAN: We've heard this idea that it takes a village to raise a child. What about the principals, what about the parents, what about all the other factors that contribute to whether a kid or a child does well or not?

MELINDA GATES: There are a huge number of factors of whether a child succeeds in that school building. But at the end of the day, it comes down to the teacher. And that doesn't mean just the teacher teaching the subject matter. As you heard from a lot of the teachers in the town hall, they build these strong relationship with the kids.

And it's that relationship they have. But we're hearing that what teachers don't have today are really three things. One is, they're saying we don't know what we have to teach by the end of the year. So the foundation has been involved in trying to create a core curriculum that 48 states have signed up to say, what are the core subjects and things kids need to learn at every grade level?

Number two, they need great curriculum support, so they can go and grab different modules, and they are flexible modules that help them teach to that core curriculum, though. And then the third thing they need is great professional development. We do not have an evaluation system today in the American school system that says, how do we know we have an effective teacher, and what professional development needs to be in place to support those teachers so they can become the most effective teacher when they're teaching?

HARI SREENIVASAN: One of the measurements in certain school districts around the country has been to tie teacher performance or teacher evaluations to student test performance.

And a lot of teachers push back and say, hey, there's a lot of other reasons that a student does well or doesn't do well. Why should it reflect solely on me?

MELINDA GATES: One of the things that the foundation is really trying to get the message out about is that it's not just the test. The test is just one measure of saying, is the child learning what they need to learn at grade level? That needs to be one component of an evaluation.

But there are other components. The most effective evaluation systems have pure observations, where peers come in who are trained to know what effective teaching is. They come in and evaluate the teacher. And then they coach and they give instruction on teaching.

Another key component is the principal observation, not just coming in with four little check boxes once a year and then never having the coaching conversation, but the principal coming in knowing what great teaching looks like , really being able to evaluate the teacher and then sitting down and having an honest conversation with the teacher: These are the areas where you're doing well. These are the areas you need to do better.

Another piece of the evaluation system can be also student feedback. It turns out students do know whether they have a good teacher in front of a classroom or not. And their feedback is also indicative of whether they're going to learn the material by the end of the year.

HARI SREENIVASAN: A lot of the teachers that are very frustrated say at this point, I'm teaching to the test.

Are we in an over-tested society?

MELINDA GATES: You have to kind of go state by state, because there are different tests in different states.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Sure.

MELINDA GATES: But I think one thing that has happened is there's maybe so much testing today without saying, are we testing against the core important things?

And so one of the things that we have learned, for instance, that is really important is that kids need to learn, for instance, how to read a nonfiction passage and really take that apart and be able to know what the critical pieces are. Most state tests don't even test against that.

So, one of the things we've done with this Common Core curriculum is to say, what is it kids really need to know? And then these 48 states signed up to this core curriculum. And now we can lots of service providers come in and create curriculum around things that actually matter, not some thing that is on the margin that you don't need to test against that doesn't really matter.

HARI SREENIVASAN: A few years ago, the foundation was very focused on smaller schools. And now you're very focused on -- it seems to be teacher evaluation. Why the switch?

MELINDA GATES: Well, it's not really a switch. It's -- honestly, it's an evolution.

So, where we started in small schools, which were these small learning environments, yes, those do make a difference. But what we learned from that was the fundamental thing that made the difference was the teacher, that relationship with the teacher at the end of the day and that teacher's teaching.

So, saying, okay, an effective teacher makes a difference, we then said how do you know when you have one? Where's the research that shows what an effective teacher is? We feel like we know intuitively if we had a great teacher. There was no great research around that. So, we actually went out and did the research, 3,000 teachers in six different school districts, to prove out, what does effective teaching look like?

And now the piece we're involved in saying, okay, how do you get a whole system that has an evaluation system that helps develop teachers into these super-effective teachers?

HARI SREENIVASAN: How do you view your responsibility? Just by the fact that the amount of money that you're contributing to this conversation, do you feel like you have a disproportionate voice?

MELINDA GATES: Sometimes, people look at something like a foundation or our foundation and say, my gosh, they have huge resources.

And the truth is, when you look at the scale of the problems we're going against, the state of California spends slightly under $30 billion a year educating their kids. So our entire foundation is $30 billion. So we could spend -- spend our money all in one year just in the state of California.

But we don't do that. What a foundation has to be is to be a catalytic wedge. It can take innovations and show where they work. It can measure them. It can show what doesn't work and take the problems apart. And it's ultimately for governments to scale up.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Finally, what is working and what can scale up?

MELINDA GATES: Well, I think two things are working.

If you look back a decade ago, when we started into this work, there wasn't even a conversation across the nation about the fact that our schools were broken, fundamentally broken. And I think that dialogue has changed. I think the American public has woken up to the fact now that schools are broken. We're not serving our kids well. They're not being educated for the -- for technology society.

We're being outcompeted by other nations. So I think that has gone well. But the other thing that I think is going really well is people are starting to say, we really do need an effective teacher. And we have districts across the country, Memphis, Denver, Pittsburgh, Tampa, L.A., where they are saying, okay, we're really going to go for teacher evaluation. We're really going to figure out how to make effective teaching happen. And we're going to invest in that. And we're going to keep doing it until we get it right. And we're going to develop our teachers.

And I think we are just on the verge of that happening. I think there will be some pain points along the way. I don't think this work is easy. But I think we're starting to see that bow wave change. And it's going to take a few more years to really see, okay, that's the path, and then lots of districts are on -- are doing it. But I think we're on the cusp of that.

HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, Melinda Gates, thanks so much for your time.

MELINDA GATES: Thanks, Hari.

Bunk

Bunkum Awards 2011 

This from the National Education Policy Center: 

Not all think tank reports are created equal…

Among the 20 think tank reviews NEPC published in 2011, several got a “thumbs up” from NEPC’s expert reviewers. In the carefully considered judgment of those reviewers, the authors did a good job of applying sound social science research principles. Such reports made a contribution to our overall knowledge about the topics they examined. Those reviews are fulfilling for us.

Other reviews described reports produced by think tanks that are worthless and mundane, wasting the reader’s time, obscuring what is already known, and contributing little if anything of value to the overall education policy discussion.

And then there were those special cases that shone through as prime exemplars of incompetent science. It is these marvels of multi-colored packaging garnished with impressive-looking footnotes, charts and appendices – these advocacy pieces cloaked in research panoply – that we illuminate with a particular type of recognition of merit: our annual Bunkum Awards.

2011 Bunkum Honorees:

The 'Cancer is Under-Rated' Award - 2011 Grand Prize Winner

To Progressive Policy Institute for Going Exponential: Growing the Charter School Sector’s Best

Read Review →

The Progressive Policy Institute deserves our top award for combining a weak analysis, agenda-driven recommendations, and the most bizarre analogy we have seen in a long time. This report spoke to us in ways matched by no other publication.

The report’s authors seemed to think it was a good idea – in a report advocating the exponential growth of their favorite charter schools – to compare those charters to delightful things such as viruses and cancer:

We also conducted research about when and how exponential growth occurs in the natural world, specifically examining mold, algae, cancer, crystals and viruses. We used these findings in addition to cross-sector lessons to fuel our thinking about fresh directions for the charter sector. The similarities between the natural world and organizational worlds are rather striking and useful for understanding the critical elements of exponential growth.

As our reviewer pointed out, the report never quite explains how the growth of cancer and viruses applies to the growth of charter schools. But even if the authors had somehow managed to do so, we can’t help but feel that the comparison is a bit tone deaf. Setting aside the example of crystals, which we think are rather interesting and attractive (NEPC is housed in Boulder, after all), what we take away from this comparison is that exponential growth in the natural world is not always desirable. It can, in fact, be quite deadly.

Beyond the analogy, the report suffers from an almost complete lack of acceptable scientific evidence or original research supporting the policy suggestions. It presents nine “lessons” or suggestions that are essentially common and vague aphorisms from the business world. Yet it fails to make the case that the suggestions or references are relevant to school improvement.

The 'Mirror Image (What You Read Is Reversed)' Award - 2011 First Runner-Up

To Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for Learning About Teaching

Read Review →

Money can’t buy you everything. Yes, the $45 million allocated by the Gates Foundation to its “Measures of Effective Teaching” (MET) project is going to fund much more than this first-year evaluation report. And the MET project as a whole seems quite worthwhile. But one would hope that the evaluation of such a major project would be a serious effort. Unfortunately, that is not the case here. Using data from six school districts, the report examined correlations between student survey responses and value-added scores computed both from state tests and from higher-order tests of conceptual understanding. The study found that the measures are related, but only modestly, and the report interprets this as support for the use of value-added as the basis for teacher evaluations. The Gates Foundation touted the report as “some of the strongest evidence to date of the validity of ‘value-added’ analysis,” showing that “teachers’ effectiveness can be reliably estimated by gauging their students’ progress on standardized tests.” This would indeed be impressive were it not for the results suggesting exactly the opposite.

As our review points out, the data indicate that a teachers’ value-added for the state test is not strongly related to her effectiveness in a broader sense. Most notably, value-added for state assessments is correlated 0.5 or less with that for the alternative assessments included in the study, meaning that many teachers with low value-added using one test are in fact quite effective when judged by the other. As there is every reason to think that the problems with value-added measures apparent in the MET data would be worse in a high-stakes environment, these initial MET results raise serious questions about the value of student achievement data as a significant component of teacher evaluations – even if that’s not what the authors of the Gates report would have readers believe.

The 'If Bernie Madoff Worked in School Finance' Award

To ConnCAN for Spend Smart: Fix Our Broken School Funding

Read Review →

This report from a Connecticut-based education advocacy group aims to Fix Our Broken School Funding System with a reverse Robin Hood take-from-the-poor approach nicely wrapped in a pious package of verbiage designed to hide its true effects. In truth, few areas of school policy are as ripe for legitimate critique as the way states allocate funds to schools. A disconcerting level of arbitrariness and inadequacy often marks these funding formulas. Yet this report doesn’t make use of well-established research conventions (adequacy or equity studies), or for that matter any sensible approach for determining if a formula is in fact broken. Instead, it promotes a “money follows the child” funding system that our reviewer points out would have the effect of making the system even more inequitable by shifting funding away from students learning English and those in poverty.

The report’s empty claims are perfectly combined with its evidentiary barrenness. Consider, for instance, the genealogy of the report’s claim that the current formula provides low-income children with only an additional 11.5% of funding. That claim is based on a previous ConnCAN report, which refers readers to information in a footnote, which then refers readers to that report’s appendix. But pity the intrepid reader who makes it that far; the appendix provides no justification or further reference to the phantom 11.5% figure. Our reviewer pointed to similar evidentiary black holes regarding the report’s claims about charter school funding and performance. And yet another instance of fantasy numbers comes from the report’s recommended removal of funding for English language learners based on the contention that these children have already been counted as low-income children. There is no compelling evidence to this effect in the literature – nor is there any in the report.

The 'If Political Propaganda Counted as Research' Award

To Center for American Progress for Charting New Territory: Tapping Charter Schools to Turn Around the Nation’s Dropout Factories

Read Review →

Competent social scientists base their findings and draw their conclusions from the evidence they have gathered using rigorous and appropriate research methods. This report reverses the process. Drawing on mysterious backwards-engineering techniques, the authors of this report were able to build a foundation for their findings and conclusions that (when looked at with just the right mood lighting) bears a glancing resemblance to real evidence. For this achievement, we felt they deserved our recognition.

The report’s citations to “research” literature about school turnarounds, for instance, consisted of four references: a blog, a consultant’s template, a non-peer reviewed case study, and an article from the Hoover Institution journal Education Next. The report also focused on the ostensibly inspiring improvements of one school that, after concentrated, intensive and skillful charter management, catapulted English Language Arts proficiency rates to 14.9% and math proficiency rates all the way to 7%.

Sadly, the inspired imagination of the authors was lost on our expert reviewer, who wrote, “The report is designed and presented in a manner more consistent with political propaganda than as a research document.”

The 'Discovering the Obvious While Obscuring the Important' Award

To Third Way for Incomplete: How Middle Class Schools Aren't Making the Grade

Read Review →

This Third Way report is not shy about its intent: to “ignite the conversation about middle-class schools.” In particular, the report attempts to convince its readers that middle-class schools are doing a lot worse than we think. So what do we think? Years of research tell us that family wealth is an excellent predictor of test scores. One would therefore expect middle-class students to do substantially better than poor students but substantially worse than wealthy students. As our reviewer shows, that’s exactly how well these schools do. Middle-class schools score (…brace yourselves for this shocking finding…) in the middle.

What, then, is basis of the conversation Third Way is attempting to ignite? We’re not sure. That’s because in a normal conversation, one can understand what the other person is saying. Yet this report mixes and matches data sources and units of analysis to such an extent that it’s almost impossible for readers to figure out which analyses go with which data. Even more troubling, since the report defines “middle class” as having between 25% and 75% of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch, its analyses of district-level data include the urban schools districts in Detroit, Philadelphia, Houston and Memphis. The Third Way appears to have found a new way to address urban poverty: define it out of existence.

The 'Get a Life(time) Achievement' Award 

To Matthew Ladner, Senior Advisor of Policy and Research for Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education

NEPC has never bestowed an individual with a Bunkum Award. But we’ve never before had someone campaign for one, and we’ve never before found someone with an individual record of Bunkum-worthy accomplishments that cries out for recognition. This year, however, we are honoring Matthew Ladner, an advisor to former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s advocacy organization, the “Foundation for Excellence in Education.”

Dr. Ladner’s body of Bunk-work is focused on his shameless hawking of what he and the Governor call the “Florida Formula” for educational success.  As our reviews have explained, they’d be less deceptive if they were selling prime Florida swampland. One cannot, however, deny Dr. Ladner’s salesmanship: gullible lawmakers throughout the nation have been pulling out their wallets and buying into his evidence-less pitch for flunking of low-scoring third graders and other policies likely to harm many more students than they help.  See here and here for more analysis of Dr. Ladner's body of bunk and its unfortunate reach.

Our judges were particularly impressed recently, when Ladner attributed Florida’s “hitting the wall” drop in NAEP scores to a collapse in the housing bubble and other “impossible to say” factors. Bunkums have been awarded for far less impressive an accomplishment than this sort of “heads I win, tails you lose” use of evidence. So Matt Ladner – this Bunkum’s for you.

Romney Ed Policy

This from Politics K-12:

•Jay Matthews says Gov. Romney and President Obama have more in common on education than you think.

•Andy Rotherham of the still-fabulous Eduwonk blog says Romney is using school choice to draw a bright line between himself and President Obama. He's also betting that Romney's higher education proposals could land him in hot political water, since the Obama administration could make the case. Bonus: Eduwonk also points to two other critiques of Romney's proposals, from James Ryan, a law professor, and radio host Matt Miller.

•Mike Petrilli, of Fordham and Flypaper Fame, examines the pluses and pitfalls of Romney's approach, which he says (jestingly? seriously?) is federal overreach on school choice. And Petrilli's boss, Checker Finn, thinks Romney's Title I proposals are worth considering.

•Ed Sector's Quick and the Ed blog corrects Checker's grammar—and offers some policy ideas, of course.

•John Wilson, the former executive director of the National Education Association, whom Edweek has recently "Unleashed" has this great take on Romney's policies from a teacher's perspective.

•Rick Hess of Rick Hess Straight-Up fame, says the plan is a good start, while his AEI colleague, Andrew Kelly, is on same page, and has some thoughts about the higher education pieces of the proposal.

Plus, the team of news reporters at Edweek did some kick-butt reporting on Romney. Check it out at Storify.

Schools prepare for financially bleak year ... again

This from the News-Enterprise:

OUR VIEW:  Educational and economic issue needs new solutions

Hardin County and Elizabethtown Independent school districts recently adopted draft budgets, showing drops in Support Education Excellence in Kentucky money, the main source of revenue for Kentucky’s school districts. These SEEK funds will drop this year from $3,903 to $3,833 per student.

With the state carrying most of a school’s funding, budgeting can be a tricky business, particularly in a less than robust economy.

During the school year that just ended, for example, Hardin County Schools received $1.3 million less than expected in state funding. Now, that district plans to lose another $1.4 million with SEEK cuts. EIS also is working to get through cut on top of SEEK cut.

The recently approved plans are the second step in a three-step school budgeting process. Tentative budgets are approved early in the calendar year and a working budget, the most definite of school budgets, will be approved in September.

Salaries, as is the case for most employers, are the greatest expense. And salaries, as is the case for most of the middle class, aren’t increasing like they once did.

In both districts, teachers will receive what’s called a step increase — meaning they move up on the pay scale because they’ve gained experience — but no other raises are budgeted at this time.

That means something inside and outside the classroom. Certainly, we should flitch at anything endangering education standards. But as one of the largest industries in the county, school districts and their budgets simply are a local economic issue, too.

Consider Hardin County Schools alone. That’s 2,655 people — 2,106 of them are full-time employees — who probably won’t be improving their buying power until at least the second half of 2013. That might mean delaying a home or car purchase or just keeping the firm grip on household budgets. It’s not good news for business throughout our community.

Schools are a key to long-range economic development and improving Kentuckians quality of life. Period. It’s not time to debate its worthiness.

Instead, it’s time to start creating new solutions to protect schools, even go so far as to make them recession proof.

When will enough be enough? When the workforce of the future is pitiful and the workers apologize for learning to read during an economic downturn?

We need big ideas at the legislative level. We need big ideas for educating our children less expensively — that’s different from simply doing more with less, by the way. We need big ideas for creating new or redirected tax revenues.

No more broad solutions puffed up with jargon and tied down with excuses. There’s too much at risk to do any less.

Two EKU alums make good as authors and as consummate professionals

I am way behind in pimping my buddy "Ranger" Rick Robinson's rise to fame and a glorious life among the literati. My third semi-cousin twice removed and fellow Ludlow grad, Robinson really became "a friend" after high school (since he's my baby sister's age). We bonded during our Jaycee days in the early 80s when we first learned how to "count votes." Rick went on to count a lot more votes as Jim Bunning's chief counsel and court jester. Quick witted - even reminiscent of Robin Williams when he's on a roll - Robinson brings humor to every enterprise.

His last book, Sniper Bid, earned 5 national awards: Finalist USA Book News Best Books of 2009; Finalist Best Indie Novel Next Generation Indie Books Awards; Runner-up at the 2009 Nashville Book Festival; Honorable Mentions at the 2008 New England Book Festival and the 2009 Hollywood Book Festival. Throughout 2009 both books appeared on Amazon's Top 100 Best Seller List on the same day.

In Writ of Mandamus, Congressman Richard Thompson's reelection campaign is sent into a tailspin when his opponent files a lawsuit asking the Court to order that Thompson live up to his campaign promises and vote against a pending federal spending bill. Thompson's efforts to dodge the issue thrust him into the middle of a nefarious business deal where arms dealers are using the Keeneland horse sales to illegally run F-14 Tomcat parts to the government of Iran. In a fast-paced story that travels from the storied horse farms of Kentucky to the green fields of Ireland, Thompson is forced to realize that more is at stake than simply a campaign. In the end, an unlikely hero steps forward to make his future path clear. 

This from Don McNay at Ky Forward:

In 1980, I was the “student moderator” for an out of control Young Democrats debate at Eastern Kentucky University.

Student Regent Rick Robinson represented Jimmy Carter and Rob Dollar, the editor of the student newspaper, represented Ted Kennedy. Young Democrats president Jim Biaso was for Jerry Brown.

The “debate” grew more and more raucous each passing round. As moderator, I lost control of the room and it started to resemble a professional wrestling match.

In the final round, Dollar knocked over the podium and gave an impassioned, from the heart, speech about how the country had lost its focus under Carter and needed new leadership.

Robinson responded by singing “God Bless America”

Robinson went on to have a tremendous political career, first as an aide to Congressman Jim Bunning and then as a candidate himself for Bunning’s seat in Congress. Dollar went onto be an award winning journalist in Hopkinsville and Clarksville, Tn.

Now both are successful authors. In a way, both of them can trace their careers back to that debate at Eastern Kentucky University.

Rick’s career as a political insider is a central part of his books and Rob’s passionate advocacy, as a journalist and activist, play into his new book.

Robinson has put out four outstanding works of political fiction. All four are regulars in the Amazon top 100 bestsellers on the political fiction list.

The latest, Writ of Mandamus, was the Grand Prize Winner at the London Book Festival. It is a stunning masterpiece. It has all the plot twists and turns of a Grisham or Tom Clancy novel.

GRAND PRIZE WINNER London Book Festival Best Fiction

Robinson, who was named 2010 Independent Author of the Year, has a main character based on Robinson himself and Rick’s campaign for Congress.

Kentucky references and especially Eastern Kentucky University references are peppered through all of Robinson’s books but especially Writ of Mandamus.

Robinson dedicated the book to Dr. Thomas Myers, the longtime Vice President of Student Affairs at Eastern Kentucky University. When Dr. Myers died, Rick told me that he based his life on the standards that his father, Dr. Myers and Senator Jim Bunning set for him.

A pretty good group of mentors.

Both Rob and Rick reference me in their respective books but Rick has the most creative twist. He has me as a saloon keeper in Ireland.

Based on my family tradition as the ‘son of a son of a gambler” it was an inspired choice.

Rob Dollar co-wrote, When Newspapers Mattered: The News Brothers & Their Shades of Glory with award-winning editor Tim Ghianni.

When Newspapers Mattered is funny, profane, zany, profound and an auto-biographical history of how their work at small newspapers made a difference in an era before a “bottom line” mentality set in the media business...

Both Rick and Rob have remained close and loyal friends since college and I have been proud of their success.

I’m proud that both men have stayed true to the same values they exhibited in college and never “sold out” or stopped following their dreams. Being an author is hard work (I can tell you about that myself) and I am proud of my friends for making their books a reality.

My alma mater also should be proud. The education they received at Eastern Kentucky University shaped the rest of their lives.

We had big dreams in 1980.

Rick and Rob made their dreams happen.

Is Teaching a Science or an Art?

I teach that it is both.

Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has another answer.

  This from the Answer Sheet:

Daniel Willingham delves into the true nature of teaching and, in the video below, answers the question: “Is teaching a science or an art?”

Even if the answer seems obvious to you, the video will teach you something nonethless. Willingham is a psychology professor at the University of Virginia and author of “Why Don’t Students Like School?” (The answer, by the way, isn’t as simple as you think. Willingham explains here.)

His next book, “When Can You Trust The Experts? How to tell good science from bad in education,” will be published in July.

Willingham has made a number of what he calls “garage-band quality” videos. This one was posted on his new Science and Education blog.

KDE to Launch Kindergarten Screener

This from the Kentucky Department of Education (Press release):

Starting in the 2013-14 school year, kindergarten classrooms in Kentucky’s public schools will use a readiness screener to ensure that all children receive the support they need to be successful in school.

The Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) has contracted with Curriculum Associates, LLC and will be using the BRIGANCE® Kindergarten Screen as the common kindergarten readiness screener. The screener will be used in all Kentucky kindergarten classrooms to provide information and support children’s learning. Schools and districts also may use this data to collaborate with families and communities to ensure all children are receiving developmentally appropriate educational instruction leading to success.

The kindergarten screener will not be used to determine eligibility for kindergarten. State law provides that all children who are age 5 by October 1 of the school year are eligible to attend kindergarten. (NOTE: Senate Bill 24, passed in the 2012 Regular Session of the Kentucky General Assembly, revises the October 1 date to August 1, beginning in the 2017-18 school year.)

Educators will use the screener to observe students as they complete specific tasks. Data collected from the kindergarten readiness screener will inform teachers of each child’s readiness to learn.

There is no cost to school districts for materials to implement the screener; those are paid for by state funds. The initial contract period is May 23 to June 30, 2012, with options to renew through June 30, 2016. The cost to the state for the first year of implementation will be $8.95 per student, then $3.95 per student in future years for materials replacement.

Approximately 53,000 students are enrolled in kindergarten in Kentucky’s public schools each year.

School districts may use the kindergarten entry screener data in the following ways:

• to inform educators, parents and communities about early learning in order to close the school readiness gap
• to inform policy decisions at the local level to support early learning experiences prior to school entry
• to establish local goals for program improvement in order to achieve early learning outcomes
• to include data as evidence in the kindergarten through grade 3 Program Review

The BRIGANCE® Kindergarten Screen is aligned to both Kentucky’s School Readiness Definition and Kentucky’s Early Childhood Standards. Five areas are covered by this kindergarten entry screener: adaptive, cognitive, communication, motor and social-emotional.

In its final report, the 2010 Governor’s Early Childhood Taskforce recommended that KDE and the Early Childhood Advisory Council (ECAC) jointly establish the use of a common readiness screener for kindergarten. The proposed state regulation 704 KAR 5:070 will guide the implementation of the kindergarten readiness screener, and data collected through the screener will comply with the regulation’s mandates.

Data collected through the use of a kindergarten readiness screener will ensure that all children receive educational instruction to meet individual needs. The kindergarten readiness screener will not be used in isolation, but will be an important step in an ongoing assessment process. The proposed regulation indicates that children be screened no more than 15 calendar days prior to school starting and no later than the 30th instructional day of the school year.

It is anticipated that the kindergarten readiness screener will be mandatory and fully implemented in all kindergarten classrooms in the 2013-14 school year.

KDE invites school districts to volunteer to use the BRIGANCE® Kindergarten Screen during the 2012-13 school year, either in all schools or in selected schools. Volunteer districts will agree to comply with the expectations set forth in the proposed regulation. Any district interested in volunteering to participate in the use of the screener process for the 2012-13 school year must complete a survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/L2Z82ZT by Wednesday, June 6.

School board meets in secret to evaluate JCPS superintendent

Hargens' first year is being evaluated

This from The Courier-Journal:

The Jefferson County Board of Education met privately for three hours Tuesday afternoon as they began evaluating Superintendent Donna Hargens’ first year on the job.

Following the three-hour executive session, school board chairman Steve Imhoff said no action was taken during the meeting and he expects there to be public discussion of Hargens’ evaluation at the school board’s June 11 meeting.

“We started the process of evaluating Dr. Hargens, and I think we had a really good discussion,” he said. “This process will continue over the next few weeks.”


The school board was allowed to hold Tuesday’s discussion in executive session under a 2010 law that allows portions of the process to be conducted in secret.

Three years ago, after former Superintendent Sheldon Berman's evaluation was discussed in private, The Courier-Journal filed a complaint with Attorney General Jack Conway, contending that the board had violated the state's open-meetings law.

After Conway issued an opinion agreeing with the newspaper, the school board took the matter to circuit court. In December 2009, Jefferson Circuit Judge Irv Maze concurred with the attorney general and ordered the board to pay $20,258 in attorney fees to the newspaper.

During the 2010 legislative session, however, a law was approved to allow preliminary superintendent evaluations to be handled in executive session, with the final evaluations to be discussed and voted on in public.

Imhoff is the only school board member who has not been in favor of holding the evaluations in private. He said Tuesday he still believes that a superintendent’s evaluation should be done in the public “since the school district is funded by taxpayer money.” ...

How Charters Compete

This from Diane Ravitch:

A while back, I read a story in the New York Times that really bothered me.

It explained that neighborhood public schools are now compelled to “market” themselves because of competition with charters. In Harlem, charters are omnipresent, and the city administration has closed many public schools to make way for charters. New York City Department of Education officials make clear their preference for charters, leaving no one to fight for or defend the public schools against their competitors. If charters want public school space, they get it, usually over the opposition of the parents and community.

But what was so striking about the story–and you have to read to the end to find this–was the contrast between the resources of the public school and the invading charter. The public school had $500 or less to market itself, with flyers, brochures, volunteers. The charter–in this case, Harlem Success Academy–spent $325,000.

Wow. How can a public school compete when the charter can expend $325,000 to persuade people to participate in the lottery?

This story made me realize that the lottery isn’t really about admission to the school. The lottery is a marketing device. By whipping up interest, curiosity, and enthusiasm, all that money produces large numbers of applicants for the lottery. The lottery is an extravaganza with balloons, the turning of the wheel, the announcement of the winners, the disappointment of the losers. The daughter of a hedge fund manager in Connecticut, who is deeply involved in the charter school “movement,” produced a documentary called “The Lottery,” to promote charters.

Marketing is part of the business plan. Public relations is part of the business plan. Promoting the idea that charters are a cure for the ills of poverty is part of the business plan. Presenting charters as “the civil right idea” of our time is part of the business plan (a cry echoed by both Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney)...

Pensions and the New York City Budget

This from the New York Times:

Few investors are more bullish these days than public pension funds. 

While Americans are typically earning less than 1 percent interest on their savings accounts and watching their 401(k) balances yo-yo along with the stock market, most public pension funds are still betting they will earn annual returns of 7 to 8 percent over the long haul, a practice that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg recently called “indefensible.”  

Now public pension funds across the country are facing a painful reckoning. Their projections look increasingly out of touch in today’s low-interest environment, and pressure is mounting to be more realistic. But lowering their investment assumptions, even slightly, means turning for more cash to local taxpayers — who pay part of the cost of public pensions through property and other taxes.

In New York, the city’s chief actuary, Robert North, has proposed lowering the assumed rate of return for the city’s five pension funds to 7 percent from 8 percent, which would be one of the sharpest reductions by a public pension fund in the United States. But that change would mean finding an additional $1.9 billion for the pension system every year, a huge amount for a city already depositing more than a tenth of its budget — $7.3 billion a year — into the funds. 

But to many observers, even 7 percent is too high in today’s market conditions. 

“The actuary is supposedly going to lower the assumed reinvestment rate from an absolutely hysterical, laughable 8 percent to a totally indefensible 7 or 7.5 percent,” Mr. Bloomberg said during a trip to Albany in late February. “If I can give you one piece of financial advice: If somebody offers you a guaranteed 7 percent on your money for the rest of your life, you take it and just make sure the guy’s name is not Madoff.”...

CBO Report Says Deficit Reduction Will Cause New Recession

This from the Huffington Post:

A new government report said spending cuts scheduled to go into effect in 2013, coupled with the simultaneous expiration of Bush-era tax cuts, will shrink the U.S. economy and raise unemployment -- contradicting the Republican claim that reducing the federal budget deficit will spur economic growth.

The Congressional Budget Office report, released on Tuesday, estimated that the policies slated to kick in on Jan. 1 would slash the deficit and shrink the national economy by 1.3 percent during the first half of next year, likely throwing the country over a "fiscal cliff" into another recession. 

 

If left in place, the current policies would reduce the federal deficit by $607 billion, or 4 percent of gross domestic product, the report said. That reduction, from immediate tax increases or spending cuts, would "represent an added drag on the weak economic expansion," the CBO noted in its report.

"The resulting weakening of the economy will lower taxable incomes and raise unemployment, generating a reduction in tax revenues and an increase in spending on such items as unemployment insurance," the report said. 

 

The CBO report offers a stark contrast to a standard Republican argument. While Republicans frequently target President Barack Obama for the approximately $5 trillion increase in federal debt since he took office in 2009, this report suggested that rapid deficit reduction would cause short-term harm to the economic recovery. 

 

Many expect Congress to act on the fiscal restraints imposed as a result of last year's failed "super committee" negotiations, prior to the Jan. 1 deadline...

Obama spending binge never happened

This from Rex Nutting at the Wall Street Journal's Market Watch:

Of all the falsehoods told about President Barack Obama, 

the biggest whopper is the one about his reckless spending spree

As would-be president Mitt Romney tells it: “I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno.” 

Almost everyone believes that Obama has presided over a massive increase in federal spending, an “inferno” of spending that threatens our jobs, our businesses and our children’s future. Even Democrats seem to think it’s true.

But it didn’t happen. Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s. 

Even hapless Herbert Hoover managed to increase spending more than Obama has. 

Here are the facts, according to the official government statistics:

• In the 2009 fiscal year — the last of George W. Bush’s presidency — federal spending rose by 17.9% from $2.98 trillion to $3.52 trillion. Check the official numbers at the Office of Management and Budget. 

• In fiscal 2010 — the first budget under Obama — spending fell 1.8% to $3.46 trillion. 

• In fiscal 2011, spending rose 4.3% to $3.60 trillion. 

• In fiscal 2012, spending is set to rise 0.7% to $3.63 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the budget that was agreed to last August. 

• Finally in fiscal 2013 — the final budget of Obama’s term — spending is scheduled to fall 1.3% to $3.58 trillion. Read the CBO’s latest budget outlook.

Over Obama’s four budget years, federal spending is on track to rise from $3.52 trillion to $3.58 trillion, an annualized increase of just 0.4%.

There has been no huge increase in spending under the current president, despite what you hear.

Why do people think Obama has spent like a drunken sailor? It’s in part because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the federal budget.

What people forget (or never knew) is that the first year of every presidential term starts with a budget approved by the previous administration and Congress. The president only begins to shape the budget in his second year. It takes time to develop a budget and steer it through Congress — especially in these days of congressional gridlock. 

The 2009 fiscal year, which Republicans count as part of Obama’s legacy, began four months before Obama moved into the White House. The major spending decisions in the 2009 fiscal year were made by George W. Bush and the previous Congress. 

Like a relief pitcher who comes into the game with the bases loaded, Obama came in with a budget in place that called for spending to increase by hundreds of billions of dollars in response to the worst economic and financial calamity in generations. 

By no means did Obama try to reverse that spending. Indeed, his budget proposals called for even more spending in subsequent years. But the Congress (mostly Republicans, but many Democrats too) stopped him. If Obama had been a king who could impose his will, perhaps what the Republicans are saying about an Obama spending binge would be accurate. 

Yet the actual record doesn’t show a reckless increase in spending. Far from it. 

Before Obama had even lifted a finger, the CBO was already projecting that the federal deficit would rise to $1.2 trillion in fiscal 2009. The government actually spent less money in 2009 than it was projected to, but the deficit expanded to $1.4 trillion because revenue from taxes fell much further than expected, due to the weak economy and the emergency tax cuts that were part of the stimulus bill. 

The projected deficit for the 2010-13 period has grown from an expected $1.7 trillion in January 2009 to $4.4 trillion today. Lower-than-forecast revenue accounts for 73% of the $2.7 trillion increase in the expected deficit. That’s assuming that the Bush and Obama tax cuts are repealed completely. 

When Obama took the oath of office, the $789 billion bank bailout had already been approved. Federal spending on unemployment benefits, food stamps and Medicare was already surging to meet the dire unemployment crisis that was well under way. See the CBO’s January 2009 budget outlook. 

 

Obama is not responsible for that increase, though he is responsible (along with the Congress) for about $140 billion in extra spending in the 2009 fiscal year from the stimulus bill, from the expansion of the children’s’ health-care program and from other appropriations bills passed in the spring of 2009. 

If we attribute that $140 billion in stimulus to Obama and not to Bush, we find that spending under Obama grew by about $200 billion over four years, amounting to a 1.4% annualized increase. 

After adjusting for inflation, spending under Obama is falling at a 1.4% annual pace — the first decline in real spending since the early 1970s, when Richard Nixon was retreating from the quagmire in Vietnam. 

In per-capita terms, real spending will drop by nearly 5% from $11,450 per person in 2009 to $10,900 in 2013 (measured in 2009 dollars). 

By the way, real government spending rose 12.3% a year in Hoover’s four years. Now there was a guy who knew how to attack a depression by spending government money!

A Faith-based Initiative in the FCPS Transportation Department

For at least the second time, magical elements have been called into service to rid a Fayette County School bus of evil spirits.

A circle of salt, smashed strawberries, and feathers from some unfortunate (or is it heroic?) bird were essential elements in a cleansing ceremony performed by one FCPS driver on Thursday. The ceremony, which is said to be religious, was apparently well-intended; to keep the children safe through the elimination of unspecified evil spirits. One assumes the driver's involved were not thinking of the children themselves.

Still it is unclear how well Fayette County parents will accept this particular faith-based initiative.

According to The Only Wiccan Spell Book You'll Ever Need, at page 74 (ahem), it is the
Wiccans' modern awareness of the pathological problems associated with the use of actual blood that has led Wiccans to substitute strawberries or passion fruit in today's spell recipes. 

School officials told H-L they are handling the matter administratively. I wonder what that means.


This from WLEX:

School officials are looking into some strange happenings at a Fayette County bus garage Thursday after one witness found the leftovers of what she calls a voodoo ceremony. Some call it a joke, others say it's nothing to laugh about.

The ceremony happened at the bus garage on Old Frankfort Pike, and it had many people who saw it doing a double take. Photos sent to LEX 18 show what was left afterward, including feathers tied to the bus door, and another picture of a red-colored mess on the ground near the bus that's said to be a pile of mashed up strawberries, apparently one of the elements used in the ceremony.

A spokesperson for Fayette County says a bus driver who is a member of the Wiccan faith was asked by another bus driver to cleanse his bus of "evil spirits." The so-called cleansing ceremony took place after all the routes were over and no students were involved.

School officials say when they found out, they cleaned up the material and are handling the incident administratively.

Is there really a policy to turn to for such an occurrence? KSN&C has been told the driver has been "talked to" about this before. Assuming that talk included a request that the individual refrain from eliminating evil in this particular manner, what's next? One supposes this to be a matter of deliberate.....faith....so maybe a really stern talking to is in order.


I suppose an insubordination charge might hold up, assuming the district can legally request the driver to stop getting salt on the ground; and do so without alarming the maintenance department's road crews. But district officials have until next winter to worry about that.

Alternatively, the driver might be employed by the district to make salt circles around the Director's office. Weave a circle 'round him thrice....

A friend, FCPS employee, and KSN&C reader asked, "Can things get any worse at FCPS Transportation?"

Perhaps we will soon be able to quit worrying. Apparently, higher powers are being called upon...by someone...to do something.