The man who writes your students’ papers tells his story

By Ed Dante, in The Chronicle

Editor’s note: Ed Dante is a pseudonym for a writer who lives on the East Coast. Through a literary agent, he approached The Chronicle wanting to tell the story of how he makes a living writing papers for a custom-essay company and to describe the extent of student cheating he has observed. In the course of editing his article, The Chronicle reviewed correspondence Dante had with clients and some of the papers he had been paid to write. In the article published here, some details of the assignment he describes have been altered to protect the identity of the student.

The request came in by e-mail around 2 in the afternoon. It was from a previous customer, and she had urgent business. I quote her message here verbatim (if I had to put up with it, so should you): “You did me business ethics propsal for me I need propsal got approved pls can you will write me paper?”

I’ve gotten pretty good at interpreting this kind of correspondence. The client had attached a document from her professor with details about the paper. She needed the first section in a week. Seventy-five pages.

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By Ian Lovett, in The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — Colleagues of Rigoberto Ruelas were alarmed when he failed to show up for work one day in September. They described him as a devoted teacher who tutored students before school, stayed with them after and, on weekends, took students from his South Los Angeles elementary school to the beach.

When his body was found in a ravine in the Angeles National Forest, and the coroner ruled it a suicide, Mr. Ruelas’s death became a flash point, drawing the city’s largest newspaper into the middle of the debate over reforming the nation’s second-largest school district.

When The Los Angeles Times released a database of “value-added analysis” of every teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District in August, Mr. Ruelas was rated “less effective than average.” Colleagues said he became noticeably depressed, and family members have guessed that the rating contributed to his death.

On Monday, a couple hundred people marched to the Los Angeles Times building, where they waved signs and chanted, demanding that the newspaper remove Mr. Ruelas’s name from the online database.

“Who got the ‘F’? L.A. Times,” chanted the crowd, which was made up mostly of students, teachers and parents from Miramonte Elementary School, where Mr. Ruelas taught fifth grade.

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By George Wood, in The Forum for Education and Democracy

After the election of 2008, I thought the stars were aligning for some serious changes in the way the federal government treated public schools.

Gone were the architects of No Child Left Behind. A president who had repeatedly said we should not judge schools or children on the basis of one test was elected to office. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act was up for reauthorization, and I was hopeful things would change.

I did not mind waiting while other issues took stage, because I liked most of what was going on. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, health-care reform, getting higher education student loans out of the hands of the banks, a recovery act, and much more. Schools were provided a generous slice of the recovery dollars – not just once, but twice– and that money kept the budget ax from falling on my school.

But reauthorization of ESEA languished, and the initiatives from the U.S. Department of Education including more money for charters, turnaround plans that seemed to focus more on punishing than supporting teachers, support for short-term teacher training, all echoed the plans of prior administrations. Now that the reins of legislative power have again changed hands, what should we expect this time?

I am not sure. I worry that despite election-year rhetoric about the intrusion of the federal government into local school decision-making, the new bosses in Washington may be the same as the old boss (with apologies to The Who). But I have an idea as to a bi-partisan effort that might make everyone happy: eliminate the Department of Education.

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GLOBAL

THE PUBLIC SCHOOL is a school with no curriculum. At the moment, it operates as follows: first, classes are proposed by the public (I want to learn this or I want to teach this); then, people have the opportunity to sign up for the classes (I also want to learn that); finally, when enough people have expressed interest, the school finds a teacher and offers the class to those who signed up.

THE PUBLIC SCHOOL is not accredited, it does not give out degrees, and it has no affiliation with the public school system. It is a framework that supports autodidactic activities, operating under the assumption that everything is in everything.

LOCAL

THE PUBLIC SCHOOL project was initiated in New York by common room and Telic Arts Exchange as The Public School (for Architecture) and operated with support from the Van Alen Institute between September and December 2009.

Beginning in January 2010 THE PUBLIC SCHOOL will continue as The Public School New York and will be based at 177 Livingston Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201.

THE PUBLIC SCHOOL is a self-organizing educational program for which the curriculum is proposed by the general public. The development of course topics and class participation is open to students and instructors from any field of study.

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By Sarah Firisen

If you have children, you have probably noticed a fascinating and common phenomenon: seemingly without instruction or reading manuals, they know more about computers and cellphones, in fact most technology, than you do. They impatiently seize controls out of your hands saying, “Let me show you how to do it.” And then, you the parent, weary and old, with too many mundane details of life clogging up your brain say, “How do you know how to do that?” Then your child, whether they’re 5 or 15, rolls their eyes and says “Duh!” Children get technology, seemingly instinctively, and they love it.

Over the last 10 months or so, I’ve ruminated in this blog on two major themes that seem, at first glance, only casually to have anything do with each other: educating children for 21st century success and children’s use of social media and technology. As it happens, I think that these two topics can and should be thoroughly integrated. We can debate the value of test taking and how else students’ progress might be evaluated, discuss the virtues of rote memorization and heavily invasive teaching methods, where most of the communication is a one-way transfer (or attempt to transfer) knowledge from the teacher to the students, but I would assume there can be little argument when I say that children, everyone really, learn best when the thing they are learning about interests them, or the teaching method is enjoyable. And there is no doubt that most children find technology enjoyable. Whether computers, cellphones or video games, these clearly engage children (and adults). So why don’t we utilize technology to better effect in education?

Most schools spends a lot of time trying to stuff facts into children’s heads and then repeatedly test to see how quickly and efficiently those facts can then be pulled out again. But we have ample evidence everyday that this is not the way children really learn; they’re curious, they explore, they experiment, they learn from each other. So why do we expend so much time, money and energy trying to educate them in these other, counterintuitive ways?

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By Pedro Noguera

There has been a fierce, ongoing debate among educational leaders about how to teach poor children: One side has argued that we must address the wide variety of social issues (like poor health and nutrition, mobility, inadequate preparation for school, etc.) that tend to be associated with poverty. The other side has argued that schools serving poor children must focus on education alone and stop making excuses.

For more than 20 years, I’ve been associated with the first camp – and I remain baffled about why we are still debating such an obvious point. We’ve long known that family income combined with parental education is the strongest predictor of how well a student will do on most standardized tests. There is abundant evidence that in schools in the poorest communities, achievement is considerably lower than in schools with more socioeconomic diversity.

Studies on literacy development in small children show that middle-class children arrive in kindergarten literally knowing hundreds more words than poor children.

And schools alone – not even the very best schools – cannot erase the effects of poverty.

In recent years, policymakers have focused on how to achieve higher test scores without addressing the influence of poverty. The results have mostly been discouraging. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan claims that thousands of schools across America are chronically underperforming; in New York, Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein have shut down more than 100 schools in eight years. Inevitably, the struggling schools serve the poorest children and experience the greatest challenges. It will take more than pressure and tough talk to improve these schools.

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By Olivia Scheck

In 2005, Yasmine Issa was a 24-year-old homemaker, raising twin toddlers in Yonkers, New York. Having just divorced, the newly single mom, with no college degree or professional training, was also in need of a job.

So, like 2.8 million others, Issa enrolled at a for-profit postsecondary school – the kind that you see advertised on TV and highway billboards – called the Sanford-Brown Institute in White Plains.

The program, for people training to become ultrasound technicians, included 12 months of classes, a 6-month internship and the assistance of their career services center, all for around $32,000. Issa used her savings and child support payments to pay for half of the training and took out a federal student loan of $15,000 to pay the rest.

What Issa didn’t realize, until she’d finished the program and spent five months unsuccessfully searching for a job, was that the Sanford-Brown ultrasound program was not accredited by the American Registry for Diagnostic Medical Sonographers (ARDMS).

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By Nina Power

Is it necessary to presuppose the intellectual equality of those you teach? To be an educator at all it seems likely that one would have at least an implicit theory of mind, such that one knows what one is doing (or, at least, what one aspires to be doing) when standing at the front of the classroom. Is education merely the transplanting of gobbets of information onto the blank slate of a student’s mind (we could call this the Lockean approach), or are we drawing out forms of rational and creative capacity possessed (equally?) by students qua rational beings? Jacques Rancière contributes much to this debate, particularly in his work on the unusual educator Joseph Jacotot in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. This paper attempts to analyse the possibility of what could be called the “utopian rationalism” of Jacotot (and of Rancière himself), within the context of the modern university. Rancière’s work will be read alongside that of Pierre Bourdieu and Ivan Illich as other crucial figures in the understanding of the way in which educational achievement relates to certain assumptions about what teaching involves. Ultimately, it may be that the modern university is antithetical to any possibility of establishing true equality among its players – Rancière’s position at times invokes the possibility of a radically de-institutionalized autodidacticism that predicates all learning merely on the basis of the will of those desiring to learn. This stance is the very opposite of the Lockean approach, which emphasizes the passivity of the student-receiver. Can the contemporary university bear the weight of Rancière’s challenge?

Mainstream education arguably operates with two major contradictory imperatives: that one should in principle be able to teach everyone openly and equally and, at the same time, one must constantly rank these same students via tests, marks, and, in the case of higher education, final degree classifications. The rationalist educator is constitutively torn. But how to reconcile the desire to – on some level – treat students equally, with the simultaneous recognition that injustice necessarily lies at the heart of all assessment?

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By BENEDICT CAREY

Every September, millions of parents try a kind of psychological witchcraft, to transform their summer-glazed campers into fall students, their video-bugs into bookworms. Advice is cheap and all too familiar: Clear a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. Do not bribe (except in emergencies).

And check out the classroom. Does Junior’s learning style match the new teacher’s approach? Or the school’s philosophy? Maybe the child isn’t “a good fit” for the school.

Such theories have developed in part because of sketchy education research that doesn’t offer clear guidance. Student traits and teaching styles surely interact; so do personalities and at-home rules. The trouble is, no one can predict how.

Yet there are effective approaches to learning, at least for those who are motivated. In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying.

The findings can help anyone, from a fourth grader doing long division to a retiree taking on a new language. But they directly contradict much of the common wisdom about good study habits, and they have not caught on.

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By Christopher A. Lubienski and Peter C. Weitzel, foreword by Jeffrey R. Henig

When charter schools first arrived on the American educational scene, few observers suspected that within two decades thousands of these schools would be established, serving almost a million and a half children across forty states. The widespread popularity of these schools, and of the charter movement itself, speaks to the unique and chronic desire for substantive change in American education. As an innovation in governance, the ultimate goal of the charter movement is to improve learning opportunities for all students—not only those who attend charter schools but also students in public schools that are affected by competition from charters.

In The Charter School Experiment, a select group of leading scholars sets out to survey the past, present, and future of this dynamic area of education reform. Contributors with varying perspectives on the charter movement carefully evaluate how well charter schools are fulfilling the goals originally set out for them: introducing competition to the school sector, promoting more equitable access to quality schools, and encouraging innovation to improve educational outcomes. They explore the unintended effects of the charter school experiment over the past two decades, and conclude that charter schools are entering a new phase of their development, beginning to serve purposes significantly different from those originally set out for them.

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By Preaprez

The LA Times decision to use a value added assessment method to look at LA teachers and then publish a ranking of teachers by name in their newspaper has created clarity and confusion.

That alone is not surprising.

What is surprising is who is clear and who is confused.

Over on the political right a dispute has erupted between Ricky Hess of the far right-wing American Enterprise Institute and the wing-nut Fordham’s Liam Julian.

Hess likes the use of the questionable value added approach but thought the LA Times crossed some lines in publishing individual teacher names. Julian likes value added but thinks teachers should be marched through the public square with dunce caps on if their students don’t score well.

Then there is the national education czar, Arne Duncan. He likes the test. He likes the publication of teacher names. The goof just loves it all. So Duncan and Fordham are on the same page. This guy isn’t just bad. When a Democratic president has a Secretary of Education who is to the right of the American Enterprise Institute…

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From Jessica B. Mulholland

The iPad is the hottest tablet to be carrying around. And soon, first and second graders at Burley Elementary School in Chicago will be carrying them around the classroom.

Burley, a literature and technology magnet within Chicago Public Schools (CPS), will use the iPads to differentiate instruction according to individual need, and encourage critical thinking through multimedia apps and collaborative tools. This could include using apps such as Question Builder, which helps elementary-aged children learn to answer abstract questions and create responses based on inference, and iWriteWords, which teaches handwriting.

Burley’s first and second graders will use the iPads to take audio notes on class lessons, conduct interviews and produce their own multimedia projects. For example, the school’s grant proposal says while second graders study forest communities, classes can take pictures of artifacts from nature, inspect them on the tablet, record observations and incorporate those images into multimedia presentations about the forest.

More than 20 Chicago schools will test iPads in the classroom this year, thanks to a mini-grant offered by CPS. Two hundred schools applied for the grants, valued at more than $20,000. Each grant includes 32 iPads, 1 MacBook Pro for syncing purposes, $200 in iTunes credit for applications and a storage cart for the hardware. As CPS implements this new technology into its instructional plans, it must navigate how to make sure it’s an effective learning tool rather than an entertaining tech toy.

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From SHARON OTTERMAN and ROBERT GEBELOFF

Two years ago, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, testified before Congress about the city’s impressive progress in closing the gulf in performance between minority and white children. The gains were historic, all but unheard of in recent decades.

“Over the past six years, we’ve done everything possible to narrow the achievement gap — and we have,” Mr. Bloomberg testified. “In some cases, we’ve reduced it by half.”

“We are closing the shameful achievement gap faster than ever,” the mayor said again in 2009, as city reading scores — now acknowledged as the height of a test score bubble — showed nearly 70 percent of children had met state standards.

When results from the 2010 tests, which state officials said presented a more accurate portrayal of students’ abilities, were released last month, they came as a blow to the legacy of the mayor and the chancellor, as passing rates dropped by more than 25 percentage points on most tests. But the most painful part might well have been the evaporation of one of their signature accomplishments: the closing of the racial achievement gap.

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From DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Wednesday cleared the way for a $26 billion package of aid to states and school districts, and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said she would summon members from their summer recess to grant final approval to the bill.

The measure had been hung up by partisan wrangling between Democrats, who said it was necessary to avert layoffs of teachers and cutbacks in services by strapped states, and Republicans, who objected to another round of government spending and characterized it as a political payoff to unions.

The procedural vote in the Senate was 61 to 38, with the Maine Republicans, Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe, joining Democrats in support of ending debate. The Senate is set for a final vote on Thursday before adjourning for its recess.

The vote quickly prompted calls for the House, which adjourned last Friday, to return to Washington. And in a Twitter message Wednesday, Ms. Pelosi said lawmakers would reconvene next week to approve the bill and send it to President Obama.

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From JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — Saying that reforming education is perhaps “the economic issue of our time,” President Obama went before a major civil rights organization on Thursday to defend his main education program against criticisms from some minority and teachers groups.

“It’s an economic issue when the unemployment rate for folks who’ve never gone to college is almost double what it is for those who have,” Mr. Obama said, according to prepared remarks. “It’s an economic issue when eight in 10 new jobs will require workforce training or a higher education by the end of this decade. It’s an economic issue when we know countries that outeducate us today will outcompete us tomorrow.”

Mr. Obama, in his speech before the 100th anniversary convention of the National Urban League, acknowledged “some controversy” about his education initiative, which he attributed partly to “a general resistance to change, a comfort with the status quo.” But he chose the civil rights organization as his audience to address specifically the complaints of minority groups that schools and teachers in impoverished communities and inner cities will be unfairly neglected in the competition to meet higher standards and the drive to impose accountability for students’ standardized test results.

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