NYCDOE Gag Order - Political Repression at the DOE - District Supt. Claims Teachers Who Discuss Opt Out Violate Law: Must See Michael Elliot Video

Is MORE UFT Presidential candidate Jia Lee violating state, city and DOE laws by talking opt out? Come and get her.

Michael Elliot made this brilliant 3 minute extract of the District 15 Town Hall Testing event we attended on December 9 with panelists Carol Burris, Kathy Cashin, Jennifer Jennings, Dist. 15 Supt Anita Skopp and a principal and Assistant principal - see my pre-report here.

Skop claimed it was against the law for teachers to share political views with parents or students, equating opt out with political views  - with former NY State principal of the year Carol Burris who has been talking opt out for years, sitting a few seats away.

• [See Carol's latest WAPO blog on The Cuomo Common Core report: hint, more hype than relief.
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/12/14/how-far-will-n-y-gov-cuomo-really-go-in-overhauling-common-core/]

One of our ace opt-out parents Janine Sopp pointed this out from the audience - how come Carol does it? Another parent called out  to say how can Skop equate a discussion with parents on the quality and impact of tests and pointing out they did have the option to opt out with endorsing political candidates, pointing out that was as much an educational issue as talking about homework. See Skop's lame response in Michael's video. (I have video of the entire event and will get off my ass and post unedited versions of each panel member -- Carol Burris is just dynamite and Cashin was pretty good too -- and made sure to give Change the Stakes' Fred Smith some recognition.)

Cashin did point out that Skop was part of a chain of command linked to Farina and de Blasio - so though the buck stops there, let's not let Skop off the hook with the "I was only following orders excuse" excuse which so many people under Joel Klein claim now.

And what will the UFT tell you about these outrageous claims to muzzle teachers?

Arthur Goldstein has a few words for them at NYC Educator:

You Can Fool Some of the People Some of the Time, but You Can't Fool Opt-Out NY

Even as UFT leadership breaks out the champagne over NY State's largely meaningless Common Core recommendations, Governor Cuomo ought to keep worrying. Because the fact is UFT leadership has played virtually no part in opt-out. They've delayed and prevented meaningful resolutions, and backed up reformy claims that aid would be withheld if not enough kids took tests that Cuomo himself called meaningless, except for rating teachers.

Arthur closes with the reason MORE chose the leading teacher voice for opt-out, Jia Lee, for its presidential candidate to run against Mulgrew.

We need to take a stand with the opt-out movement, a true grassroots movement fueled by truth, passion and a desire to do what's right for our children. If Michael Mulgrew and his loyalty-oath signing sycophants are unwilling or unable to do the right thing, they should move over and endorse opt-out activist Jia Lee for UFT President. 

If you are a teacher without a union to protect you, get on your knees and thank an opt out parent for defending you.

https://vimeo.com/148527338




Also see Alan Singer:

Opt-Out Campaign Must Continue

www.huffingtonpost.com

The parent and teacher campaign to have children opt-out of high-stakes Common Core aligned testing is remarkably successful.

Carol Burris on Mary-Ellen Elia in The Answer Sheet

MaryEllen Elia

Elia’s appointment received praise from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.... MaryEllen Elia put into place a teacher accountability system that included evaluation by student test scores and pay based on that evaluation.... The day after she was appointed, Elia stated that “we have pushed Common Core into a box” and that New York has to “repaint” the narrative.... Complaints from the parents of special-needs students include those over reactioni to the deaths of four students with disabilities while under the supervision of Hillsborough employees...  Carol Burris

And let's not forget that Elia will do what she can to trash the opt out movement. (More on that later in my report on the Skinny Awards dinner last night).

The tough tests facing New York’s new state education commissioner

Last month,  New York tapped a new state education commissioner, MaryEllen Elia. She is the 2015 Florida Superintendent of the Year who led the public schools in Hillsborough County for a decade before she was fired by the school board this past January with more than two years left on her contract.

Her firing surprised many people because Elia, a former teacher, had a good deal of support in Florida, not only from the Republican political and business establishment but also from the Florida Education Association, a teachers union, whose president, Andy Ford, said in a statement after she was hired in New York that she worked “to bring people together” and toward a “positive, proactive agenda.” He said: “New York will be lucky to have MaryEllen.”

Yet the Hillsborough board majority, which officially fired her without cause, had been on record as criticizing her, among other things, how she dealt with the panel, constituent complaints about too much high-stakes standardized testing, and a lack of services for special-needs students.
There has also been criticism about some of the reform policies she instituted in Hillsborough, which are analyzed in this post by Carol Burris, an award-winning principal in New York. Burris suggests how Elia can close divisions in the state’s education world that have resulted from the controversial implementation of the Common Core and Core-aligned tests under former commissioner John King. He quit last December after N.Y. Gov. Andrew Cuomo expressed unhappiness with him over botched Core implementation. Now King is managing the U.S. Education Department’s operations as a senior adviser to Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Burris, of South Side High School in the Rockville Centre School District,  was named New York’s 2013 High School Principal of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York and the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and was tapped as the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State. She has also written several books, numerous articles and posts on this blog about New York’s troubled implementation of school reform.

----Valerie Strauss, Answer Sheet, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/06/10/the-tough-tests-facing-new-york-new-state-education-commissioner/


By Carol Burris

On May 26, the New York Board of Regents unexpectedly assembled in Albany to vote on a single item–the appointment of MaryEllen Elia as the new education commissioner of New York State. With the transparency of a papal selection, the vote was taken and then her name was announced, prompting New Yorkers to ask, “who?”
MaryEllen Elia was not an unknown for long. Internet sleuths shared newspaper articles, videos and tweets about the policies and practices of the woman who will be New York’s new education chief. She helped. She quickly made it clear where she stands on the Common Core and the opt-out movement, in which hundreds of thousands of parents have refused to allow their children to take high-stakes Common Core exams. “Opt-outs are no good for teachers and no good for parents,” she said when visiting an Albany school the day following her appointment. During an interview a week later on Capitol Pressroom, she was all about the “A” word—”accountability,” mentioning it no fewer than 6 times.

Elia was dismissed by her school board by a 4-3 vote in January. There were long-time tensions between her and two members of the board, and her leadership became an issue in the November 4, 2014, board election, in which an Elia opponent won a seat.  Two candidates of 14 expressed approval and five expressed disapproval of her performance. Other candidates refused to weigh in during the contentious election. Reports indicated the community was evenly split, and her decision to display the campaign sign of a candidate running against one of her board opponents was characterized as “juvenile” by The Tampa Tribune. You can learn more about her dismissal and how it influenced the school board elections here, here, here and here.

It is clear that Elia, like most superintendents, has fans and enemies. That is to be expected, and it is not necessarily an indicator of whether or not she would be a good choice for the state of New York. What she believes in, and with whom she has alliances, however, are matters of interest as indications of the direction in which she might lead. Below is summary of Elia’s involvement on five important topics. Each discussion is followed by what I believe she will need to consider, or reconsider, if she wants to calm the present tensions in New York and chart a more productive path for our schools.

MaryEllen Elia put into place a teacher accountability system that included evaluation by student test scores and pay based on that evaluation.

In 2008, Elia’s district received a $10 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The initiatives in the grant included: the establishment of an evaluation system based 40 percent on student test scores; the inclusion of test scores in decisions to grant tenure and determine teacher career paths; merit pay, which is referred to in the grant as “pay for performance”; bonuses for principals and teachers who raise low-performing students’ scores; the use of data for hiring; and the use of “data dashboards” to make instructional decisions.

By 2012, the Hillsborough district had spent $24.8 million on the grant’s initiatives, including using Race to the Top, additional grants and district funds. District funds were 19 percent of all expenditures, with $3.2 million spent developing a value-added model (VAM) to measure teacher performance by test scores (a method many assessment experts say is not a valid for this purpose). The $24.8 million was considered by RAND Education and American Institutes for Research the AIR, which studied the spending for the Gates Foundation, a “lower bound” estimate of the true cost.

Winning the grant was heralded as a reform in which a teachers union had cooperatively worked with a superintendent to enact evaluation reform. In his book, Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools, Stephen Brill describes Hillsborough union president, Jean Clements, as a union president who was “willing to embrace the Jeb Bush reforms rather than take a hard line against them.” Brill reported that Clements collaborated on the grant after being prodded to do so by the American Federation of Teachers. (Brill wrote that AFT President Randi Weingarten said that she was involved in the negotiations of the Gates teacher evaluation grants, and the AFT issued a statement welcoming the “unprecedented support” of the Gates Foundation for “efforts to improve teaching and learning.” ) Elia wanted 50 percent of the evaluation to be based on test scores; Clements insisted that it not be more than 40 percent.

The Gates grant has not been popular with many teachers in Hillsborough. In 2012, 30 Hillsborough teachers went to Jacksonville, Florida, to participate in a televised discussion on merit pay and the evaluation of teachers by test scores. You can listen to what they had to say here. The teachers complained about the negative effects that merit pay and evaluation by test scores had on their teaching. In December of 2014, a month prior to Elia’s dismissal, the school board asked for a review of the evaluation program based on complaints. During that review, the once enthusiastic Clements voiced concerns. She told the school board that the system she helped put into place is considered by teachers to be “demeaning and unfair” and that teacher voice and input has decreased.

Elia’s positions on teacher evaluation will be carefully watched in New York. She is becoming commissioner at a time of parent and educator push-back against the legislature’s revision of the teacher evaluation system—a revision that gave student test scores far greater weight than before.

MaryEllen Elia could win goodwill by arguing that her Florida experience tells her that test scores should play a minimal role. She should share the concerns of her teachers and ask for a year’s delay for implementation, with an opportunity to recommend adjustments.

MaryEllen Elia is a true believer in the Common Core.
Elia argues that we have had standards since the 1600s and that standards should be revised and improved. She also credits the Common Core with promoting active student learning. You would be hard pressed to find anyone who does not believe that standards should be reviewed and changed, and that learning should be active. But neither belief is dependent upon the Common Core. New York parent and teacher Core concerns center on developmentally inappropriate standards in the early grades, overly complicated elementary math, and an overemphasis on close reading and informational texts.

The day after she was appointed, Elia stated that “we have pushed Common Core into a box” and that New York has to “repaint” the narrative. That might be true if the majority of New Yorkers did not understand why they are opposed to the Common Core, but that is not the case. Elia will encounter very sophisticated and organized parents who, for the most part, are not opposed to the Common Core for political or ideological reasons, but for its effects on students.

Rather than try to tell parents that they should like something that they clearly do not like, Elia should lead a thorough review of the standards with an eye toward addressing concerns. The simple rebranding of the Common Core, which occurred in Florida, will not work in New York. Elia should investigate why the opt-out movement has become such a force in New York by taking a long, hard look at the content of the tests, their length and the cut-score setting process.

Elia supporters include teacher unions, leaders of the corporate reform movement and politicians

Elia’s appointment received praise from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, Hillsborough Union President Clements, and Andy Ford, the president of the Florida Education Association. They praised her collaboration with the FEA during the implementation of difficult reforms in the Sunshine State. That statement was released the day of her appointment, and can be read here.

Other fans include high-stakes test accountability reformer, Kati Haycock, and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who praised Elia for including business leaders, unions and philanthropy in decision making.

Elia also has allies in the political arena. According to Florida sources, one of MaryEllen Elia’s close friend and supporter is Kathleen Shanahan, who worked as chief of staff for Dick Cheney when he was vice president-elect, and in the same position for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who appointed her to the Florida Board of Education. Shanahan led a petition drive to keep Elia as superintendent and made a passionate plea to the Board of Education on her behalf, which you can listen to here.  During Shanahan’s good-bye dinner as superintendent, she signaled her support for the candidacy of Tampa mayor, Bob Buckhorn, for Florida governor, and made clear that she would like to be his Florida commissioner of education.

New York education commissioners have traditionally kept an arm’s length from politics. Elia should consider continuing that tradition. The divisions in New York are so deep, to be successful she must listen to parents and teachers who are critics of the current reforms and find solutions to their concerns. If she is seen as an acolyte of Jeb Bush-style education reforms, tensions are will worsen. Many New York parents and educators are looking for relief from testing, not someone who tries to collaboratively make the best of test-based accountability systems.

 Serious concerns have been raised by parents of students of disabilities.
Complaints from the parents of special-needs students include those over reactioni to the deaths of four students with disabilities while under the supervision of Hillsborough employees. Parents of 7-year-old Isabella Herrera filed a federal lawsuit that brought attention not only to what occurred, but also to Elia’s reaction. Parents have also publicly complained of the roadblocks they face when attempting to get their children needed services from the school district.

Many New York State parents are active advocates of students with disabilities, as well as outspoken opponents of the Common Core and testing. It is important that the new commissioner show sensitivity to their concerns as well as a willingness to address those concerns around Common Core testing.

Complaints about discriminatory practices have highlighted unaddressed inequities in her former district.
Hillsborough is presently under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. The investigation is a result of complaints made by retired educator, Marilyn Williams, who claimed that there are pervasive patterns of racial discrimination in both discipline and teacher assignment in Hillsborough.  One of the schools where suspensions and expulsions of black students are highest is McLane Middle School. An in-depth report on the school puts the blame squarely on the school district policies that created it.

According to the report, MaryEllen Elia, who was then head of the district magnet program, put in place a choice system in an attempt to create a diverse student body in the district’s middle schools. One of the consequences of choice is that if students do not apply or are not accepted into magnet schools, they are warehoused into what quickly become undesirable schools. In the case of McLane, inner-city students ride buses in the Florida heat for a 12-mile trip to a school with inexperienced teachers, bad test scores and rampant violence. The problem, according to The Tampa Bay Times, has festered and worsened for over a decade.

Ironically, the New York governor and the Board of Regents are presently considering magnet schools for STEM, arts and technical programs to reduce costs and give parents choice. Let’s hope that the new commissioner informs them that choice programs always come with a cost and they often result in failing schools for the kids left behind.

MaryEllen Elia has a fresh start in a new place. For the sake of New York students, let’s hope that in a blue state, a new MaryEllen Elia will emerge and that her collaborative skills are used to create a new direction.

Leonie Haimson/Class Size Matters: Skinny Awards Dinner, June 9

I've been to every one of these events and for those fighting ed deform there is no better place to be on a June evening with a gaggle of like-minded folks. I've been to every one and am going again this year. The Skinny Award (a slam at the Broad award) is a major fundraiser for the amazing work Leonie does. She is honoring principals Carol Burris and Liz Phillips. And the great Patrick Sullivan. Past winners include MOREistas James Eterno and Julie Cavanagh. Arthur Goldstein and Gary Rubinstein were honored last year.

Dear friends,

Our annual Skinny Award Dinner is only three weeks away.  This year Class Size Matters will be honoring three terrific leaders in the fight to preserve and strengthen our public schools:  Liz Phillips, principal of PS 321 in Brooklyn, and Carol Burris, principal of South Side HS on Long Island, both of whom have spoken out publicly against the high-stakes and low quality of the NY State exams.  

We are also honoring our Board chair, Patrick Sullivan, former Manhattan representative to the Panel on Education Policy, who stood up for parents and challenged the DOE to justify their irrational policies during the Bloomberg years.

The dinner will be held on Monday, June 9 at 6:30 PM, at Bocca Di Bacco, 191 7th Ave (21st St).

Please join us for a rare opportunity to enjoy a four course dinner with wine and celebrate three heroes who have given us the real "skinny" on NYC schools.
We have a lot to celebrate this year, including our successful challenge of inBloom’s plans to collect and disclose the personal student information of millions of students to for-profit vendors, without parental notification or consent.  We led the battle for student privacy  here in NY, where last month legislation was passed to  prevent the State from participating in this project.  inBloom was funded with $100 million of Gates Foundation money, and had an operating system built by Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless/Amplify, run by Joel Klein.   

Even earlier, we had also reached out to other parents in the eight other inBloom states to inform them of this plan, and because of protests, every single state pulled out.  A few weeks ago, inBloom announced it was closing its doors. 

Please reserve your ticket now, or if you cannot attend, please make a tax-deductible donation to Class Size Matters, so we can continue our efforts to reduce class size, alleviate school overcrowding and protect student privacy. 

Thanks so much, Leonie   
PS Diane Ravitch who just had knee replacement surgery will hopefully be there as well!

 

Leonie Haimson

Executive Director

Class Size Matters

124 Waverly Pl.

New York, NY 10011

212-674-7320

leonie@classsizematters.org

www.classsizematters.org

http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com

Follow me on twitter @leoniehaimson

Carol Burris: Common Core tests widen achievement gap in New York

The time to “reform the reform” is long overdue.....In the coming months, the fruits of the poisonous tree will be much examined, sorted and discussed.  But the fruit is rotten and parents are warning their children not to bite. The opposition to testing grows and soon the tree will finally fall.
Carol Burris at The Answer Sheet

Another wallop at ed deform from Carol with Valerie's assistance.

Common Core tests widen achievement gap in New York

By Valerie Strauss, Published: August 26 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/08/26/common-core-tests-widen-achievement-gap-in-new-york/

Here’s the latest post from award-winning Principal Carol Burris of South Side High School in New York, who for more than a year on this blog has chronicled test-driven reform in her state (here, and here and here and here, for example). Burris was named New York’s 2013 High School Principal of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York and the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and in 2010,  tapped as the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State. She is the co-author of the New York Principals letter of concern regarding the evaluation of teachers by student test scores. It has been signed by more than 1,535 New York principals and more than 6,500 teachers, parents, professors, administrators and citizens. You can read the letter by clicking here. 
 
By Carol Burris
The New York Common Core test results are the fruit of a poisonous tree — what should be useful evidence of student learning is, instead, data without value.  Commissioner John King refers to the Common Core test results as  “baseline data.”  Producing baseline data was never the intent.  Chancellor Merryl Tisch said that if we educators were not prepared for the Common Core, we were “living under a rock.”  Since the results were published, however, her tone has changed.  At a recent public forum, Tisch remarked,  “We need to do a great job communicating why these new test scores that we’ve just seen are not an indicator that there’s been no learning or teaching going on.” If one muddles through the double negative, the takeaway is that the results of the tests for third-to-eighth graders are meaningless.

They may be meaningless, but they are not inconsequential.  The results expanded the black/white achievement gap.  In 2012, there was a 12-point black/white achievement gap between average third grade English Language Arts scores, and a 14-point gap in eighth grade ELA scores.  This year, the respective gaps grew to 19 and 25 points.  In 2012, there was an 8-point gap between black/white third-grade math scores and a 13-point gap between eighth-grade math scores.  The respective gaps are now 14 and 18 points.  The gap expansion extended to other groups as well. The achievement gap between White and Latino students in eighth-grade ELA grew from 3 points to 22 points.  Students who already believe they are not as academically successful as their more affluent peers, will further internalize defeat.

The percentage of black students who scored “below basic” in third-grade English Language Arts rose from 15.5 percent to 50 percent. In seventh-grade math, black students labeled “below basic” jumped from 16.5 percent to a staggering 70 percent. Nearly one-third of all New York children scored “below basic” across the grade level tests. Students often score “below basic” because they guess or give up. Principals and teachers cannot get accurate feedback on student learning.  Although Ms. Tisch may say that “this does not mean there’s no learning going on,” what will parents think? Students will now need to be placed in remediation, or Academic Intervention Services.  Schools that serve a predominately minority, poor student body will be fiscally overwhelmed as they try to meet the needs of so many children.  Those who truly need the additional support will find that support is watered-down.

You don't hear deformers talking very much about the old AG anymore. Note how they shift the ground as each deform fails. Now it's teacher effectiveness (which used to be teacher quality but when the holes in that were pointed out they moved the ball.)

When all those anti-union states get rid of every teacher they can and the old AG stays stuck or drops where do they go next? We ought to have a contest. Carol, the Rational Educator, continues:

Experienced educators understand why the reform agenda is not working. Reformers “wish” their unrealistic goals and expectations to be attainable, and then “whip” educators and schools using test scores, in order to make their wishes come true.  But the “wish and whip” strategy of school reform simply does not work. Michael Fullan, a scholar of school reform, has continually warned that test scores and punishment cannot be successful strategies to transform schools.

The time to “reform the reform” is long overdue. The first step in that process will be a difficult one for reformers to accept. They must re-examine their belief that college readiness is achieved by attaining a score on a test, and its corollary — that it is possible to create college readiness score thresholds for eight year olds.  It is, at its essence, an absurd assumption that is wasting a fortune in tax dollars while leading us down a fool’s path.

As I explained in my last blog post, the cut scores for Common Core tests are based, in great part, on finding correlations with other tests’ so-called “college readiness” scores. Here are three reasons why this strategy is folly.

READ all the reasons here

Carol Burris is State HS Principal of Year, Change the Stakes Meets Today

Carol Burris at GEM/Change the Stakes Forum

Video below of Carol Burris with an intro by a very pregnant Julie Cavanagh at a GEM April 2012 forum on teacher evaluation. (And Julie still had 3 months to go - Jack was a big boy even before he was Jack).

Of course to Unity slugs it is way more important for Julie to speak at a stage-managed Delegate Assembly than to organize a forum bringing together Carol, Leonie Haimson, Gary Rubinstein and Arthur Goldstein (who couldn't be there due to a death in the family).

New York’s High School Principal of the Year, Burris is now a candidate for the award of National High School Principal of the Year, an award sponsored by the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) and The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. A principals institute and awards ceremony sponsored by NASSP and MetLife will be held in Washington, DC this fall. ---The Patch

How exciting if Carol wins the national award. What a strike against the ed deform industrial complex. Carol has pointed to the major ills of the common core and the state testing system. She has criticized the unions for going along, which led to an attack on her by Leo Casey. Here are some links: Setting The Record Straight On Teacher Evaluations: Scoring - Edwize 

defender of the faith leo casey defends indefensible - ICEUFT Blog

iceuftblog.blogspot.com/.../defender-of-faith-leo-casey-defends.html

Feb 24, 2012 – Besides Long Island Principal Carol Burris, who co-wrote the principal's letter ... The UFT leadership answers this by trotting out Leo Casey, ...

Leo Casey “Sets the Record Straight” on the New Teacher ...

theassailedteacher.com/.../leo-casey-sets-the-record-straight-on-the-ne...

Feb 22, 2012 – Over at Edwise today Leo Casey, Vice President of the United ... principal Carol Burris of the new teacher evaluations here in New York State.

1. 
   

   
   

   ATTENTION NYC TEACHERS: YOU HAVE BEEN HAD BY YOUR .

   theassailedteacher.com/.../attention-nyc-teachers-you-have-been-had-...

   Jan 30, 2013 – Remember when Carol Burris criticized the UFT for agreeing to a system ... Here is Leo Casey addressing Burris' point about our schools being ...

Hey, getting Casey agitated is enough reason to give Carol this award. I can't tell you how many supervisors who I respect are shaking their heads at the union's going along with the state evaluation system -- even they think the union is leading its member to slaughter. But I guess it might take another landslide win by Mulgrew followed by the slaughter to get the message across --- that only a strong opposition will force the UFT to act in defense of its members. Sorry for turning a great event for Carol into a political diatribe. So back to Carol.

Carol Burris is part of Change The Stakes, the group fighting his stakes testing and working with parents opting out. CTS it a unique group with teachers, parents and administrators -- the best you can find. We are meeting today at 5:30 rm 3389 at CUNY if you are interested. (Small room so email me if coming.)

I have shot some video of Carol. Here, MORE's Julie Cavanagh introduces Carol Burris at a GEM/Change the Stakes Teacher Evaluation forum in April 2012. In this segment Julie also reads a statement from Arthur Goldstein who couldn't attend due to a death in the family. (I will put up the other segments from this event in a separate post.)

http://vimeo.com/40748945


GEM Teacher Evaluation Forum Carol Burris Statement from Grassroots Education Movement on Vimeo.

Here is my interview with Carol in her office at her school. I told her when I interviewed her last May, "I would come out of retirement to work for you."




HST Film Carol Burris from Grassroots Education Movement on Vimeo.

Burris' 2012 book, Opening the Common Core: How to Bring ALL Students to College and Career Readiness.

http://www.amazon.com/Opening-Common-Core-Students-Readiness/dp/1452226237

NOTES: MORE MEETS TOMORROW AND HOSTS SEATTLE TEACHER TEST BOYCOTT LEADER JESSE HAGOPIAN ON SUNDAY. CHECK MORE BLOG FOR DETAILS.