When I was in Portland, Oregon, last year, I met a very impressive and thoughtful state legislator, Lew Frederick.
Please watch this video, which begins with Representative Frederick’s passionate plea for a new vision of the outcomes that matter most for students–not test scores on a single day–but the kind of person they are, the kind of lives they might live, the kind of contribution they will eventually make to society.
This is the text of the bill under consideration.
Representative Frederick is followed by teachers, who explain the time lost to test prep and how their students feel humiliated by the testing. Listen to the teachers who talk about how their students feel depressed, crushed, belittled, stigmatized. Listen to the teachers with classes of 40, struggling to teach each of them.
Listen to the last teacher. Listen to what she says about Calvin, who wants to know what he got wrong on the test, and she can’t tell him because she doesn’t know.
Listen to their voices. This will be a worthwhile 20 minutes for everyone who watches and listens.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Next step, a fiscal evaluation of the common core.
The tax and spend curriculum changers are killing the taxpayers. No unfunded mandates.
Right now we are in Connecticut Mastery Test mode at my school. Teachers of the upper elementary grades are cramming the last bits of “knowledge” into their students’ heads in the hope that something will stick for the test. What a waste of time and energy.
Tests, in their multiple forms, can potentially serve to encourage learning and to edify students. They can also challenge and even inspire. However, tests can just as easily demoralize and demotivate, oversimplify and trivialize, threaten and equivocate, misinform and mislead.
As an Action Canada Task Force, we conducted research on standardized testing in Canada, with a case study focus on Ontario – a jurisdiction recognized as a “world leader” by the OECD. Our recommendation is that a review of standardized testing in this jurisdiction is not only timely, but urgently needed, since it is unclear whether the intended benefits of standardized testing regimes are worth the investment in terms of money and time, as well as the risk of misuse. Education and accountability are about a whole lot more than test results from a handful of topics, and their planning horizon should be a lot longer than given snapshots. Our report, titled “Real Accountability or an Illusion of Success: A Call to Review Standardized Testing in Ontario,” is available at http://testingillusion.ca.
In order to generate dialogue on standardized testing as an accountability measure in education systems, we’ve created a 4-minute “cartoon”: http://youtu.be/ramucjnTGGs. This video doesn’t offer facile answers to difficult questions; instead, it can be interpreted in myriad ways, and the hundreds of details it playfully features are hoped to serve as springboards for discussions.
Rep. Lew Frederick is a great champion for public education! He has been attentive to the Oregon Save Our Schools activists.
This past Thursday, Senator Mark Hass introduced SB 567 on behalf of Oregon Save Our Schools. He is the Chair of the Senate’s Education and Workforce Development Committee.
To access the bill and written testimony, which includes support from Oregon ACLU, go to these links.
Click to access sb0567.intro.pdf
https://olis.leg.state.or.us/liz/2013R1/Committees/SEDWD/2013-02-28-13-00/SB567/Details
With the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) dismantled by rule changes in Dec. 2011 and with the onslaught of BIG DATA collected and mined in state longitudinal data systems, we believe a Chief Privacy Officer for Education is essential.
We also agree with Kathleen Styles, the US Dept. of Education’s first CPO, that beyond compliance with laws, state agencies should use fair information practices.
http://www.educause.edu/blogs/kathleen-styles/ed-cpo-privacy-emerging-technologies-and-new-uses-data
Among other things, Fair Information Practices include knowing what kind of data is collected, why it is collected and who has access to it. http://bobgellman.com/rg-docs/rg-FIPShistory.pdf
We also need to be able to correct records… As I testified, my son’s SLDS records (obtained through a FERPA request) have him coded 4 times from 4th through 8th grade as a “W8”: Left to Earn a GED. I assure you he did not do that. Yet the Oregon Department of Education and the Beaverton School District don’t have a good explanation for that code and don’t seem to care to fix it! (Imagine how many other kids are wrongly coded and what that might mean for those “turnaround” schools!)
In my testimony, I advocated for an amendment to expand the work of a CPO. See Ohio and CA websites:
http://www.privacy.ca.gov
http://www.privacy.ohio.gov
I did this because mission creep is already happening here. HIPAA is the federal law that protects patient privacy. Last summer, Oregon’s Early Learning Council asked for a federal waiver for HIPAA/FERPA as needed for data sharing. No doubt that more health records will be maintained as “education records” on our new Student Information System, Edupoint Synergy, in the Beaverton School District since we were awarded $500,000 for school-based health care.
http://www.oregonlive.com/beaverton/index.ssf/2012/12/beaverton_school_district_gets_1.html
As a physician, I am very aware that this sector has had huge data breaches–so much so that the 2009 stimulus stipulated that the Office of Civil Rights monitor breaches greater than 500. http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/administrative/breachnotificationrule/breachtool.html
The largest breach last year was Utah Department of Health. Nearly 800,000 records breached due to a weak password… A big problem since the BSD Chief Information Officer says Edupoint’s Synergy does not demand password stringency for ParentVue.
The Oregon Department of Education was unaware that FERPA trumps HIPAA in p-12 education.
Click to access hipaaferpajointguide.pdf
http://www.nsba.org/SchoolLaw/Federal-Regulations/Archive/HIPAA-FERPA-FAQs.html
I also included information on a “Memorandum of Understanding” funded by the Gates Foundation to create a regional data exchange in Sept. 2011. Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, Idaho agencies have been using the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education and the National Student Clearinghouse as intermediaries to disclose and redisclose data since TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE NEW FERPA RULES WERE FINALIZED!!!
Lastly, I admonished the Senators to be wary of the data reporting contract awarded by SBAC to Wireless Generation, a subsidiary of News Corps. Education Division, Amplify.
Lisa Shultz, a Mentor Graphics engineer and former Beaverton School District School Board member, also gave testimony that day. That she never knew these databases existed when she was a board member says something. Her testimony is very powerful!!!
Good for you, Oregon! STOP GIVING THESE TESTS!!! Parents, OPT OUT NOW!
High school students–OPT OUT NOW!!