Months ago, I hailed Don Sternberg, the principal of Wantagh Elementary School in Long Island, New York, as a hero of public education. He spoke out loud and clear against the misuse of standardized tests to evaluate students, teachers, principals, and schools.
Please read the letter below, in which he educates the parents of his students about the statistical madness that is called “education reform,” but should be recognized instead as education malpractice and child abuse.
We need more like him!
He writes:
February 26, 2013
Dear Parents,
I want to thank you for the many good wishes that I have received since announcing my retirement after 32 years as the Wantagh Elementary School’s principal. While time and circumstance have pointed me in the direction of retirement, I feel that I am, in some way, abandoning my students at a time that they might need my voice the most.
The direction that educational reform is heading is a place where non- educators (politicians, statisticians, and big business) are in control. The misinformed public seems to desire change because they are being led to believe that something is wrong with our educational system. The public is being duped into thinking something needs to be done to avert ‘the crisis in education.’ Ironically, the same people purporting that there is a crisis – the politicians, statisticians, and big business – are, in fact, the ones causing the crisis!
While there are pockets within New York State where reform is necessary – places where high school graduation rates are low and students heading into the workforce and post-secondary school need better skill-sets — this is not universally the case, although pseudo-pundits would have you believe otherwise. The solution presented by these politically-based educational ‘experts’ is not to differentiate and treat academic issues where and when they arise, but rather to treat the metaphorical broken leg and hangnail with the same remedy.
Why aren’t school districts that already meet the education reform goals presented by the federal government exempted from the process? I believe the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which gives states responsibility for education is still in effect. However, the federal government has skirted the Amendment (47 states, including New York State, essentially have relinquished their constitutionally guaranteed control over education by accepting Race-to-the-Top funding) because states and local districts desperately need the federal dollars associated with this federal initiative. The result: assessment upon assessment upon assessment! (For your information: Although Wantagh is subject to every assessment associated with Race-to-the-Top, our district received $0.00 of Race-to-the-Top funding.)
The rigors associated with the national Common Core standards are outstanding and will serve all of our children well. Common Core is starting to approach the rigor of an International Baccalaureate (IB) program which I believe should be the basis of all school academic experiences. However, I am seeing and hearing about more and more students who do not want to come to school or who are manifesting the stress of these new requirements in the form of stomachaches and the like. Add the additional pressure from all the mandated assessments associated with the Race-to-the-Top funding and you have a groundswell of emotion-based malaise. I find this deeply troubling.
The issue that most upsets me, and that I see as counterproductive, is the desire to record, in a quantifiable fashion, the educational development of our children. There is clearly a ‘quota system’ being applied to schools, school children, teachers and principals — and it is negatively impacting our children! When I was growing up I was never measured with some insidious number that categorized my ability and progress, and that served to measure the effectiveness of my teachers and my school. We are constantly told that when the students of the United States are compared to other countries from around the world, we do not measure up to them. I ask, measure up to what? All that is being compared is a measurement against other measurements.
Other countries admire American creativity and problem-solving abilities. We haven’t cured cancer yet, but I’ll bet that when a cure is discovered, it will be by an American. We are the only country to put people on the moon (and then bring them back). We developed and perfected the Internet! Apple! McDonald’s! Microsoft! Starbucks! Google! None of these endeavors or companies were started by excellent test-takers! I fear that our present cadre of educational reformers – the non-educators noted above – are creating children who are great little test-takers, who can select A, B, C or D as an answer with the best of them, and whose performance can be placed onto a nice little spreadsheet. But we must ask ourselves, at what price? Is effectively selecting A, B, C or D how we want our children to excel? We are not creating life-long and creative learners; we are creating wonderful test-takers!
I shiver when I see and hear students asking their teachers, “Is this the way you want it?” or, “Did I do this the right way?” We are systematically testing our kids at multiple times every year to a point where they think that the only measurement of success is a state assessment result! Often students cannot think critically or are afraid to be creative and produce something independently. Will you really be satisfied that your child is doing well in school because a test indicates such? Or will you expect more? Testing at the elementary level is replacing a love for learning that we want to instill in every child. The proper use of assessment is to drive instruction, not to be the definitive evaluation of a child or to serve to fill a state or federal statistical data bank.
Past practice clearly has shown that students will succeed if they are given the time to learn — not weeks of test prepping and hours of testing masquerading as learning. We have been forced to narrow the curriculum to only that which will be tested. Please let me be clear, we are spending your tax dollars for months, teaching to the tests because in today’s statistician-based educational reform movement, that is the only thing that counts. This has resulted in very few of the students in our school feeling enthusiastic about learning or even about coming to school. This is something I have never experienced in my decades as an educator.
I entered the field of education to inspire, motivate, challenge and captivate young minds; not to assess ad nauseam and be a data collector.
Why am I sending this letter to you now? I am writing to you because I want you to watch your children. Are they acting differently than in past years? Are they talking differently about school than they have in the past? Are they anxious, even nervous, about coming to school and the forthcoming tests? If they are, ask yourself, “Why?” And, “Is this what I want for my child, year after year after year?” If you are as upset as I am, put this letter down and write your own to the bureaucrats asking them to ‘Stop the Madness!’
If we (Wantagh) are already reaching the goals of Race-to-the-Top, and if we do not get any monetary or intrinsic value from RTTT that supports our kids, then our students are serving as a ‘control group’ in a bureaucratically-induced statistical experiment! Our children’s education is consequently an anomalous exercise to gain data.
My pappy always said to me; “Sonny, always leave a place better than you found it.” Alas, for me, due to our existing educational system and how bureaucrats are presently designing it, that will not be the case.
Sincerely,
Don Sternberg, Ed.D. Principal
He’s got it more right than many so far, but he stops short of saying that the federal government should totally get out of the business of giving money to the states for education. He does make a nice elitist suggestion, however. Exempt schools meeting high criteria from the testing regimen, and let it continue for the poor peoples’ districts. That’s having your cake of public funding without the arsenic of testing in it. When the feds pay the piper they will insist on calling the tune. Yet he stops short of saying cease federal education aid to the states. Why?
Perhaps he thinks the federal government should spend more money on education rather than less. Excess government spending is what is stagnating the economy and depressing tax revenues. He doesn’t go to the true heart of the matter, government spending in general. He praises the Common Core, but as Diane has pointed out, they facilitate a national testing environment where Pearson can design one test for the whole country. His observations of the abuse being perpetrated are correct, but he doesn’t identify the chief abuser, the man with the money. The fish rots from the head. But what loyal teacher will blame Obama for RTTT, as he should be, along with Bush II and Ted Kennedy for NCLB. Utter waste of taxpayer money. Once the Feds have their sticky fingers on things they’ll never let them go. Sternberg is getting out before he has to make impossible personal choices, defy the government and refuse to give the tests, or be fired in disgrace for insubordination. He ignores parent opt out. Will Diane’s new organization do any of the things Sternberg omits? I’m skeptical Diane is that radical. She’ll take the king’s shilling, but still expect to control the army. We’ll see. We are living in interesting times, not just for education, but for America as a whole as it wrestles with its legacy of excessive government spending on unearned entitlements. Public education shouldn’t be cut, but it will be, because all the stimulus is doing is destroying it with accountability testing. Bizarre.
Technically, no child should be subjected to this experiment, but if ‘something’ is truly wrong with our educational approach, why not fix what is ‘wrong’ without messing up what is already working?
If reformers want there to be a problem, fine, than there is one – in our urban and rural areas, where thanks to NCLB we’ve figured out that poor kids don’t test good.
Now FIX the problem. I said FIX [THE] problem.
I live in suburbia, with a strong public school system. Now I will have to spend my money on sending my kids to a private school in order to shield them from the harm of the NCLB Act and RttT initiative.
And I agree with your assessment in terms of wasteful government, especially in terms of education. And this ties right back into solving [THE] problem – if we could fix wage inequality and the lack of social mobility, which have exceedingly gotten worse, then educational outcomes would vastly improve.
We have 25% of students coming to us in poverty – up from mid-teens in the 90’s. Even then it was too high.
It is ridiculously too high now. But I still agree with your assessment of wasteful spending. We can throw money at this all day long through our educational system, but until our middle class rules, both in wages and votes, then educational outcomes will continue to suffer.
We need our middle class jobs back. Until they come back, more and more of us will be poorer and poorer and educational outcomes will suffer.
I thought rampant deregulation and the mortgage crisis stagnated the economy and depressed tax revenues? Where have I been?
No, it was the teachers’ unions that stagnated the economy. Have you not been paying attention – the teachers’ unions caused the bank debacle of the 80’s and 90’s, the technology bubble, and the most recent bank debacle causing the Great Depression.
Harlan Underhill pretty much beat me to the punch. I was tremendously impressed until I got to the paragraph about the alleged “rigors” of the Common Core. The illogic of that paragraph was disheartening, particularly as the author makes it sound like it’s the CONTENT of the Common Core that is having all those stressful effects on kids. I seriously doubt THAT is the problem, regardless of my disdain for specific things in CCSSI and my contempt for the very idea of a “common core.” The stress isn’t coming from an ostensibly more rigorous curriculum (where is there a math book at any grade level that truly aligns with CCSSI, regardless of the hype on nearly every new text?). Rather, it’s coming from the insanity of the process, the impact on teachers and administrators, and how that all reaches innocent children.
Sternberg’s heart is clearly in the right place (and unlike the deform crowd, he clearly HAS a heart and deeply cares about children), but he goes off the rails when he loses sight of the fact that it’s testing madness, not content, that is making kids sick.
One other point: Sternberg is wrong, on my view, to miss that the really is a crisis in American public education, but it’s not the one the deformers love to squawk about. That is, it’s not our “losing” some imaginary international competition as mismeasured on these dopey tests, but rather our anti-child approach to K-12 education as a whole. Even in ‘good’ districts, this is evident, if we look past the surface. People who are part of the overall system in such ‘good’ districts have a very hard time seeing that problem and naturally are very defensive about attacks on public education as a whole. While they’re right to deny the accusations of the deformers, they need to look hard at what does and does not go on in our classrooms and school buildings in light of what it would mean to have education that really serves children and democracy as a whole. To do so is to challenge so many of the assumptions of what public schools are supposed to do, however, that the cognitive dissonance is terribly painful for those who serve the “successful” part of the system. We need a major change, a revolutionary evolution (a purposely contradictory phrase if ever there was one), if we are ever going to have education that helps us reach the promise of “America.”
Shorter Sternberg: my community and my school have had a glorious decades-long run of reaping the benefits of hypersegregation. Sure, the schools in the communities where my region warehouses its poor people of color aren’t doing well, but why do you have to drag us into their mess?
(His school, per the most recent NYSED report cards, is 94% white, without a single African American child or a single child who qualifies for reduced/free lunch.)
Yes, thank you- I was all on board until his argument became another “us vs. them”, “we’re not the problem” discussion. So excessive testing is OK for struggling schools that REALLY can’t afford it, financially or otherwise? We certainly do need more brave teachers and administrators to speak up against these sorts of abuses, but what we REALLY need are those teachers and administrators in successful, wealthier (read: politically powerful) districts to stand up for all students- not just their own, but those in districts with little to no political clout. Instead of stirring the pot, we would all be far better served if this gentleman had also educated his community about WHY some districts are not as successful as his own. Pipe dream, I know.
Pipe dream maybe, but you are correct. If you expand the idea into the future, as urban schools fail and are converted to charters that are exempt from the testing non-sense then eventually the ratings will become suburban school vs suburban school. The lower 20% of the suburban schools will be converted until Public schools are a thing of the past!
Charter schools in New York aren’t exempt from testing; in fact, I’d say one of the most common criticisms here is that they focus too much on preparing for them.
Overall, I think it’s a very inspiring letter.
I disagree on two key points though:
1.) I don’t believe the pressure of the Common Core rigor pushed down as far as Kindergarten is healthy for young children.
2.) While I believe it’s a valid point that high performing districts were unnecessarily pulled into the high-stakes testing quaqmire, when the problem is really poverty, I think the testing mania is not in anyone’s best interests and needs to be stopped for all involved.
Three cheers for Dr. Sternberg! I have been saying the same thing about how we are educating our children today vs back in the days when all the people who have made all the great companies and inventions possible that we all reap the benefits of daily.
There is not one child, teacher or administrator in this country that should be subjected to CCSS or standardized testing. It is child abuse and should be illegal. When will more people speak up!!
All the comments and not a work about disipline. So sad. Try to conduct a class and have to put up with students who don’t want to learn but will disturb. Now don’t go off on some tangent and say there isn’t a problem. Parents who haven’t put down the basics at an early age have been given us an injustice. But they surly do not want the school to discipline their little baby. Until there is a sea change in what teachers are required to put up with the best test or reform will mean nothing.
Well said.
I would hope that Dr. Sternberg continues on as an avid activist in retirement . . .
Dr. Sternberg, if you’re reading this, please consider joining The Network for Public Education.
Something tells me you’re just as much of an actualizer as you are a rhetorician.
Reblogged this on Elsesser's Education Blog and commented:
I share this retiring Principal’s concerns about the direction education reform has taken.
Although the comment about “those other schools” was…well…just “bad”, I think his letter is excellent. I don’t care about the racial makeup of his school. He’s operating off of his own experience which, really, is the only true means of expressing yourself in a meaningful way. Take out the idea that other schools should be subjected to this idiocy (and then closed because they don’t “measure up”), and you’ve got one of the best assessments of the situation that I’ve seen so far.
This principal has hit the nail on the head!!
Nothing short of the truth of education today!!
Education is in the hands of the BIG BUSINESSES and the Race to the Top Money is a bunch of crock!!
The public does not have a clue as to what is really happening…
“The public does not have a clue as to what is really happening…”
Can’t tell you how much I agree with that. And many of the teachers, too.
The curriculum is chaotic-disorganized and the test are designed to trap the teacher-testers into thinking their job is in jeopardy if they do not get every single student to score big time..
I would like to see every teacher in the States that spend money on nothing but tests….. walk out at the same time….I would not recommend teaching to anyone unless you really want to live a stressful-unappreciated-underpaid-TESTING JOB..which is all you get in 2013…
It’s like having a new “game” we’re going to play. Whether you want to play or not. Whether the old game was a good one or not. Whether the new game is any fun or worth playing at all. It’s just been given to you by someone who knows nothing about the subject matter of the game to begin with, but has set it up according to his/her new “standards” (rules).
You are given the rules. The NEW rules. And you have no choice BUT to play in this new game with the new rules.
If you don’t play by the new rules, you’re disqualified and you’re out.
If you play but don’t win, you’re out.
If you DO win, then you really aren’t winning at all. You’re just continuing to play the new game, according to the whims of the creator(s) of this new system.
Reblogged this on GrassHOPPERteacher's Weblog and commented:
This was shared at school when it first was posted. I kept meaning to repost myself because of how important I think it is that administrators step up and note what current politics are doing to not only teachers, but primarily the children.