This parent in Connecticut is furious that teachers didn’t tell her that the testing had gotten excessive. They didn’t tell her what the overuse and misuse of testing was doing to her children. She understands that they were just doing their job, but she wants them to stand up and shout that what’s happening is wrong. This is a terrific letter. Once the parents and the students begin to understand what is happening, there will be a grand alliance to take back our schools and rebuild education for the benefit of students and our society:
With all due respect to teachers–I’ve been hearing whispered rumblings from educators for at least 8 years (since my oldest entered public schools) that teachers knew/know these tests are a load of crap. Teachers SHOULD have been speaking up louder a long time ago. Look what silence/fear/going-along/intimidation has resulted in for a generation of our children. Instead of hearing whispered, whimpy rumblings, parents should have been hearing forceful denunciations of these useless tests a long time ago. Parents are not in the classroom every day. Parents have no idea how bad these tests are unless teachers make them aware. At least where I live (Connecticut), that wasn’t the case. In fact, the few times I’ve tried to bring up the subject in the past I got averted eyes and a changing of the subject. I get it–this is your livelihood and you have administration to worry about. But these are our KIDS we’re talking about here. Water under the bridge now, I suppose. But now is the time to make up for lost time. Now is the time to speak up forcefully and DEMAND a change to better practices. And if your unions aren’t supporting you in this THEY SHOULD BE. Union management works for YOU. If they aren’t leading the fight in this, hold them accountable!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Easier said than done…without tenure.
Agree completely!
We public school teachers do not have “tenure”. Please use the correct term-due process. Some of us are granted due process rights after a specified number of years of teaching. Even if one has earned the due process rights it really doesn’t protect one who speaks out against the madness that is educational standards, standardized testing, grades and grading, and “data driven” assessment of student learning.
I know due process is only a very thin defense against an administration who wishes you to be gone. I’ve been forced out of a district for speaking out.
Right because your career aspirations are far more important than the children’s well being!! Such a disgrace to see this comment and the agreement. You are a public or private employee who took a position to guide and protect children. If that means speaking up and losing your job, so be it. It is comical that you fear losing your job while those courageous teachers at Sandy Hook cared for their charges to the highest standard possible. You need to serve first and expect second.
I understand her anxiety,but really what are we suppose to do? With more and more pressure on the teacher, we are reluctant to step out of line. And it seems once again the teacher is to blame for this woman not being informed!
Rather than asking teachers to speak up more than they already have (and be fired and replaced by teachers who won’t), I’d advise this parent to start campaigning with fellow parents. When your administration won’t defend you and the parents of your students won’t defend you, there isn’t really anywhere else to go as a teacher, especially if you’re in a state without union representation, which many of our teachers are.
Wise and appropriate advice, Mike.
I spoke to the teachers at my sons’s school. They are EXHAUSTED. They hate the testing, they are fearful for their jobs but they are even more fearful that their beloved principal will be replaced if they don’t follow these crazy mandates. They are on a watch list now due to NCLB mandates ( special ed failure rate had dipped). This is the BEST school in the whole district- national ranking for newspaper, mock trial, debate, the highest SAT scores in the district, the highest number of AP passing exams score in the district and is ranked in the country. These fantastic teachers, who are dedicated to special needs students and needs of special students, are being crucified by the weekly lesson plans, the state oversight by under-aware and under trained ‘professionals’. These teachers HATE the tests being implemented by this VAM measure that is their prize for winning RTT. They are ridiculous tests that have no merit but the teachers who give their all to the kids in the class and before and after are flat out EXHAUSTED by these VAM measures.
Burning out teachers, who are seasoned and fantastic professionals, for no educational reason at all. That is why parents don’t know.
In
Gad, 95%, give or take, of students should be in a voctech regimen, only.
It was a load of crap, ’tis crap now & it WILL be CRAP in the future.
¿Qué quiere decir este pensamiento?
The Australian experience when I was a principal there about twelve years ago was that parents did act on testing because they knew that teachers couldn’t easily do so thanks to employment contracts and the like. The parents simply withdrew their children from school on the day of testing or wrote notes to the principal (me) that their children were not to sit the test. When these notes started rolling in I called my Regional Manager and asked what I should do. His response was that the parents were the boss, so make arrangements for supervision of the children not taking the tests. Of course this totally threw the statistical validity of the test out of the window and they faded away. Now they are back in Australia and I watch with interest from afar to see how it plays out this time.
The education unions HAVE been fighting this. It is why the cornerstone of ALEC legislation is to destroy unions. We as educators have been shouting… but it seems most of the public is not listening. The billionaires and the corporations have much more money and they put out a lot of blatantly false information only to have it repeated and believed, hook, line, and sinker.
Fred,
I have to disagree that the unions have been fighting this. The Missouri NEA jumped on the whole testing regime bandwagon from the start, they didn’t challenge it at all, you know go along to get along. Other unions have caved to the VAM nonsense, for example, insisting to have it be “only” 25% and not 50% of a teachers evaluation. Even the CTU agreed to VAM.
The Miami teacher’s union leadership actively worked to deceive teachers into voting in favor of Race to the Top. State law mandated 40% be based on standardized test scores and our union upped it to 50%.
that is disgraceful!
From my experience, this advice is far harder than it sounds. Teachers are very much intimidated by administrators, school boards, and the popular press, all of whom will attack complaining teachers as ungrateful civil servants if they raise their voices against the corporations and their well paid academic consultants who are destroying our schools in the name of easy corporate profit.
Of course this is absurd, especially when you consider how much training and education teachers have to accomplish in order to get certified in most states. In what other field would the public be so brazen about shouting down, and often abusing, a profession with these standards? Yet this is America, where the public hates education as obsessively as it worries about not having enough of it, and the national culture looks to business and corporate managers as all-knowing regardless of how stupid and incompetent they are. But these forces are historically strong, well funded, and loud. Getting the public to pay attention to the subtleties and nuances of teaching children and testing requires the public to be patient and open-minded, which is hard in the face of the unrelenting agitprop of corporate marketing. We, those in the public who care, need to help the teachers with our support.
Still, it is past time that the teachers and their unions took up the challenge and started acting up to get the public to pay attention. At this point they have nothing to lose. If ALEC wins, the next lectures they give will end with the words: “Do you want fries with that?”
I think the best ways fight back are to support campaigns that expose the base fraud that the reformers are foisting on America. Explain the money trail; show the data about charter failures; describe the double standards and bait-and-switch to show that what the reformers say and what they do are not the same; explain the nuances of testing and the details of the NEAP and PISA that really prove just how good American public education are. In other words, start teaching the public.
Your first paragraph says it all and very well, indeed!
I’m a parent and not a teacher, yet I have no sympathy for this parent. Knowing what your child’s education is like and knowing its effect on your child is part of your job as a parent. Couldn’t she see what kind of effect all this testing was having on her child? Isn’t it obvious that time spent testing (and prepping for tests) is not time spent on valuable learning? I’m not opposed to a one-time annual standardized assessment for purposes of assessing the strengths and needs of each individual child, but isn’t it obvious that using those test scores to evaluate, pay and retain teachers is only going to create teacher anxiety and cause teachers to teach to the test (or cheat)?
I’m sorry, but this is one of those, “somebody has to DO something!!!” sorts of letters. She should have mailed it to herself and then figured out what she could be doing about it. As every other commenter has pointed out, it’s not so easy for teachers to step up and speak out (although a great many have been doing so anyway). Parenting, on the other hand, is a job where you can’t be fired.
BTW, I’d like to know what this parent’s reaction has always been to her child’s test results? Is she one of those who brags that her kid is in the 90th percentile or that he’s performing two or three grade levels ahead? Because at least some of the pressure for testing is coming from parents who want their precious little Einsteins ranked against other kids for bragging rights, and who do believe that if their child happens to score poorly (heaven forbid!) it reflects bad teaching, not anything about their child and certainly not anything about their parenting.
So true. As a parent and a teacher I have seen testing driven by some parents need for “accountability”. But as a teacher I see the political agenda.
I have a parent conference next week with an irate set of parents who have informed me that their son is a straight A student and always has been. He has a C in my science class due to poor test grades. He plays football and has no time for homework. They sent an email warning me that if my grade prevents him from playing OR keeps him from doing well on the spring tests because he has informed them that I cannot teach, yell all the time and lost all his work; none of which is true; they will sue me. So I will sit and be yelled at yet again for the better part of an hour with administrators and counselors sitting there saying nothing to stop it. Then when the parents leave I will be told, “They have always picked one teacher to go after every year! Don’t worry about it. They are just really bullies. Last year they made so and so cry!”
So I am going to try something different. When they start yelling like they do on the phone, I will say, “I will not be spoken to like that, I would never speak to you or your child like that and I will not allow anyone to speak to me this way! Then I will leave. I will be in more trouble but since I am always in trouble anyway I guess it really doesn’t matter!
One school district for which I worked had a teachers union that had written into their contract that teachers did not have to sit and listen to parents when they became abusive. The district was terrified of lawsuits and did not support their teachers, so the teachers added some protection to their contract. It worked for tenured teachers, but there are always ways to get rid of nontenured teachers.
Teacher run the big risk of losing their jobs. Teachers are put in the impossible position of being asked to speak up and reprimanded when they do. Please, teachers have been begging legislators to listen to them for years with nothing but a cold shoulder being turned to them. Parents as stakeholders have way more influence. It makes no sense, but that’s the way it is. Contact your legislator and make them listen.
Just as information, perhaps you could inform parents about the flaws of high-stakes testing and that teir child is not a test score but a unique and precious human being.
Diane: Being of Irish heritage, I’ve always been bluntly outspoken. Once computers were a standard feature in suburban homes, like those of my students, I routinely created email groups for each class and sent to parents regular reports of what was going on in class. One would infer, therefore, that I was ideally positioned to send home these kinds of messages. And, as a teacher protected by a “continuing contract law” and active in my local, state, & national associations, I need not fear reprisal.
Yet, this would call for systematically challenging both district policy and current educational reform policy in a format that left an identifiable trail back to me. Does the phrase, “He just wants to maintain the status quo!” sound familiar?
At issue here is understanding the problem and being able to communicate it to the public in a way they can understand. This stuff comes easy to us; we deal with it all our professional lives. But, to the average citizen, this is a foreign language. As a prolific writer, it never occurred to me to raise an alarm through my emails. What did occur to me was “insubordination”!
If you are a parent, it is time for you to join your local chapter of the Opt Out Movement. If there isn’t one in your area, you need to get busy and establish one. Do not wait for teachers to speak out and do not wait for government leaders to change the laws/system.
Well said!
Also Parents Across America. I wish that both groups were more active and on the scene where I am. I am basically an optimist, so I think that both groups will be more vocal and visible.
Is there a developing consensus that No Child Left Behind has been a disaster for American education?
El Paso School District Rebuilds After Fraudulent Testing Practices By Administrators
from Huffington Post
“EL PASO, Texas — During his sophomore year, Jose Avalos was urged by a principal to drop out of high school. The next year, his brother was told to do the same after entering the 10th grade. A third Avalos brother shared the same fate in 2009.
Administrators at Bowie High School cited excessive tardiness in their efforts to remove the siblings. But now the brothers suspect they were targeted for an entirely different reason: The district was trying to push out hundreds of low-performing sophomores to prevent them from taking accountability tests. The scheme was designed to help El Paso schools raise academic standards, qualify for more federal money and ensure the superintendent got hefty bonuses.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/02/school-district-rebuilds-_0_n_1933327.html
Contrary to the stereotype of the all-powerful union, teachers are more afraid of their principals and administrators than either of those are of the union because of the highly hierarchical structure of our schools that gives the greatest power to those farthest from the classroom.
It would make more sense for K-12 to be organized like college, with as many instructional decisions as possible made by individual instructors or peer groups of instructors. K-12 needs this even more than higher ed does because so many K-12 pols and politicians who take an interest in education are bought by the corporate “reformers.”
In my experience, the parents have the more powerful voice. They have clout. Administrators are afraid of parents; they listen to them and act upon what they say. They are not afraid of teachers. Teachers are easy to ignore or control.
easy to say teachers should have told parents what was going on.
do these parents not take the time to see what is going on in their child’s school?
do they read newspapers and follow blogs about public education?didn’t they notice that they child had a LOT of test prep and not much else?
telling parents might cost a teacher his/her job or a lot of unpleasantness from the administrators.
parents need to know what is going on in the school their child attends.
that includes private schools.
Great letter !
I’m sorry, but where was this parent when the tests were being talked about and introduced? Why wasn’t she looking into them herself? I was a parent of a child, who was not yet school-age, when my state (one of the very first) introduced their education reform package, which included a long menu of standardized testing. I paid attention, read the news, researched where the ideas were coming from, all before the ease of the internet we have now.
I saw the harm in what they were proposing and linked up with a state-wide group that was very vocally objecting to this testing. In this group were both teachers and parents. We showed up at hearings all over my state, one of which I brought my three-year-old and a letter I’d written to my local paper protesting the tests that hadn’t been printed. Despite a deep fear of public speaking, I read that letter to a crowded auditorium full of legislators, students, parents, teachers, and newspaper publishers. After the applause, and as I was leaving, the local news publisher stopped me, pointed at my child, and had the nerve to ask how I could deny my young child a chance at a decent future by protesting the very tool that would ensure his future. I replied ” How could I not!”
A number of years later, when nothing had changed and the tests were in play, I returned to college to finish my education and became a licensed teacher. I figured that if I couldn’t prevent this travesty of exclusion from being foisted upon our children from the outside and as a parent, I could at the very least go inside and help guide them through it, trying to keep them from being weeded out by it. Now, that’s what I do, for ten years now, and I’m as vocal now as I was when I was a parent. So, instead of the parent in the post above blaming the teachers for not being vocal enough, I ask why wasn’t she! No excuse for not knowing what is going on.
This is a good example of the frog in the pot of water. The water in this pot has been getting increasingly warmer over the past 20 (?) years. Please remember that we teachers in Connecticut were never consulted about any of this beforehand. I remember when we were informed at a staff meeting about the Connecticut Mastery Test. We were told that it was to be used to help students, so we didn’t object. Before long, these test scores were posted on the front pages of newspapers all over the state. It was heretical to even suggest these tests were flawed: the party line was that they gave us good information on kids. Objections to the CMT were met with, “But we have to do it, so suck it up.” I frankly was blindsided by Race to the Top. I never thought Obama would throw teachers under the bus the way he has. Again, objections to the Common Core and the Smarter Balance test are met with the same response as the one to the CMT. Do not underestimate how little power teachers have. You may notice that many teachers have a pen name on this site. (Lehrer is not my surname.) We are all too fearful of repercussions for speaking out.
You are right. It is only October, and we are already being told to start test prep for the CMTs.
I get the point of the letter – but really, we get blamed for this, too??? REALLY?????? There are school districts where teachers are getting penalized at work for what they say OUTSIDE of the school day – but this is our fault? Wow.
Good point, Cassandra. I even had a friend cautioning me about my political posts on Facebook because, after all, I am a teacher. Most of my posts are either Romney-bashing or sharing this blog.
Actually I have told you about the testing. If you were a neighbor or a friend, I have spoken directly. If you are a parent, I have spoken more carefully and urged you to find out more. I have even called you during state testing time to help calm your child. Neighbor, I have listened to you complain about the vast fluctuations in your grandson’s MAP scores, and heard you wonder if the tests were more about his moods than abilities. You shrugged your shoulders when I mentioned your right to opt him out. Another neighbor described her son’s frustration with the computer lab being closed for nearly a month because of the MAP testing, and she also did not think it provided useful information. I have explained to parents at IEP meetings that their child’s RIT scores were not indicative of their abilities, but the lack of time spent on the MAP. Yes, it is possible to complete the entire MAP in under 6 minutes. I had not heard that a box of state tests went missing from the neighborhood school until another neighborhood told me about, but I did mention that if I had children in public schools that I would opt them out.
I’ve written at least 20 vignettes about various kids with IEPs that I have had to submit to state testing, and sent them to a retired special education teacher in Illinois. She has been collecting them to send to the department of education…… I also make it very clear that I no longer spend any time on test prep. My WASL Wednesdays have gone out with the name change in our state tests.
No, I will not risk losing my job over state tests or even the MAP, but I will do what I can to give them as little power as possible.
All I’m seeing here is a lot of excuse-making. We’ll get fired! Parents are the ones who should speak up! We’re blamed for everything! and so on.
Bullshit. This stuff is hurting kids, period. If that’s what your job is, you need to speak up and oppose what’s going on. “I was only following orders” is no defense.
Are you kidding me? You are pulling the same trick that the deformers pull. How dare you doubt the commitment of teachers to their students! They can’t do much for their students if they are fired or harassed into quitting. The deformer agenda has already cost me my job; I will likely not find another. As my screen name indicates, I do not fit the teacher profile from the get go. Still, I protect my identity in the hopes of teaching, and I work behind the scenes to change things. I was a slow learner when I was employed; I had no idea the lengths people will go to to suppress opinions with which they don’t agree. Silly me, I thought examining issues from all sides was a key purpose of education.
In other words, you’ll speak up to protect kids only if there’s no risk whatsoever to you and your paycheck. But your “behind the scenes” efforts to change things aren’t working. Kids’ educations are being destroyed, and their childhoods made significantly more unpleasant to boot. Tell yourself what you like about your behind-the-scenes subversiveness, the fact remains: you are the soldiers who are executing this battle plan. Teachers should be speaking up publicly against what’s happening every chance they get. Some are; most aren’t.
You are obviously not a teacher, Chris. Years ago we had more input into curricula and policy. I used to create units that were engaging and challenging. Today we are handed manuals and told to teach. If you don’t like it, you are told, you can leave because the administration can hire two teachers for the same price as a veteran teacher. I care passionately about education, but I care more passionately about making sure my own children have a roof over their head, eat well, and can afford to go to college. That does not make me a coward, just a realist.
Chris. I do not know of many teachers who use the excuse “I was following orders,” or “We’ll get fired.” All we teachers do is speak up. NO ONE is listening. The power to change these tests comes from the parents. The more parents who take a stand against them, the closer we will get to changing this status quo.
At Open House this year, I gave every parent a copy of the NYS Common Core standards and encouraged them to read the entire thing, not just the part that applies to this year. In my weekly newsletter, I’ve written about WHEN we would be testing. I have spoken to several parents wondering when their child may get some ‘extra help’ and explained that it’s all based on the STAR TEST RESULTS. I post every anti-testing and opt out thing that I can on Facebook (where many of the ‘parents’ in our district get their news).
I am not making excuses – but I am one person in my school and I can only do so much. As for my union – NYSUT – they willingly sat and agreed to the mess that is the APPR. I said over a year ago in a “Leadership Team” meeting that I felt we had an OBLIGATION to educate the parents of our students about the impact of APPR, excessive testing, and when the testing would take place. I was ignored by the Principal and by other teachers. I have left that “team” and am a team of ONE now. I talk about all of this with parents and colleagues and family and just about anyone who will listen.
In the end, though – I do have a greater obligation to my OWN children to provide a home, food, an opportunity to attend college if they choose, and my time and attention.
Thank you for your courage.
Teachers do have an obligation to speak up about harmful practices such as over testing, narrowed curriculum, and privatization. We also have profoundly important obligations to our own families. There are sometimes ways to get the word out without jeopardizing your employment, sometimes not. Those that have more “protection” have more responsibility to lead the way. Coalitions are also more powerful than individual voices.
Here we go again; it’s always the fault of a teacher. Of course, if this parent had concerns about testing, and she obviously did, she could have taken five minutes to read a newspaper or three to jump on the web for a little research, but that would have been too difficult. Apparently teachers should also be required to spoon feed parents politically charged current events at parent-teacher conferences. I could go on, but I’ll stop here: pathetic.
I agree Gary. Furthermore, we teachers have spoken up and no one is listening. It’s a political game where big money is involved. I have met with both Dr. King and Maria Neira while working on the VIVA Task Force for the 60% part of the teacher eval. in New York State. I’m not sure the union has much power to change the testing, and I’m not sure what the answer is. These tests have to go, but which politician will step up to the plate and realize that what teachers are saying is valid? I’m concerned that the change will come too late for many children. I am also afraid we will loose many good teachers because of this….and hindsite will be what’s left.
I believe there is one area that has not been mentioned here that can help both teachers and parents. That is the local media in the area. I’m talking about print and by the airwaves. I live in a capital city. The newspaper coverage of true investigative reporting is appalling. A press release from the DOE or the central office is too often what they use to base their stories. We have three local t.v. stations. None, do a see doing a blue ribbon job of interviewing the stakeholders. I don’t listen to much local talk radio. I can’t offer an opinion on their coverage.
I do think that parents want transparency. So do educators. Both deserve it. Around here, neither is getting that. But, if neither the parents nor the educators are paying attention to what is available to what is happening, shame on them. If the unions are not doing their job to get the word out, shame on them, as well!