As thousands of activists plan to rally in Albany against the stat’s heavy reliance on standardized testing on June 8, many parents and educators are speaking out against Pearson’s field tests. The testing corporation is trying out questions in the state’s classrooms that might be used on future tests, but opponents say “enough is enough.” The students recently completed two weeks of grueling state tests.
One reward of opening the link is that you get to see a picture of Peter DeWitt, one of the state’s best principals and an outspoken opponent of high-stakes testing. DeWitt was recently the target of an effort by the State Education Department to intimidate him. He is one of my heroes. For he steadfast defense of children, he certainly belongs on the honor roll. He is a champion of children, a champion of public education, and a champion of ethics in education,
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I am an adult ed teacher in Los Angeles and Pearson is invading our neck of the woods too. The GED is being privatized by Pearson – the current version of the GED, administered by a not-for-profit company, is expiring at the end of this year. The new version (computer only, not paper and pencil) will be run by the for profit company, Pearson. Many states (like California and New York) are considering opting out of the Pearson GED test and developing their own high school equivalency test. Check out this article here: http://socialistworker.org/2012/12/11/a-privatized-ged-fails-students
And here’s another article about the switch to a privatized GED:
http://www.ibtimes.com/states-drop-ged-40-states-look-alternative-test-price-set-double-go-digital-2014-1192095#
And why is it important to K-12? Because the two most important factors to a child’s success are the economic status and the educational attainment level of their parents.
Educational attainment & income (“More education continues to pay off in big way”) graph: http://www.census.gov/schools/census_for_teens/educational_attainment.html
Without a high school education by region & race graph: http://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/035/
The education of adults matters.
Peter! Peter! Leadership!!
Poestenkill Elementary School is 98% white, has only 10% of its students eligible for free lunch, and has one single child who is an ELL.
What can we do to get some of these ‘honor roll’ principals into schools that desperately need great leaders? Alternatively, what can be done to make schools like Poestenkill educate their fair share of at-risk kids?
Tim, Poestenkill is not a selective school. It serves its community. What’s your point?
The point is that residential segregation leads to educational segregation, and it ‘creams’ as ruthlessly and brutally as any private or charter school does. There is a tendency for your ‘honor roll’ selections to have come from districts that profit from residential segregation.
I’d strongly recommend that you read a series of blog posts about segregation written by Ta-Nehisi Coates during the course of the last month: it’s not an innocent coincidence that Poestenkill, located only minutes from communities with high minority populations like Troy and Albany, is virtually 100% white, and it’s hardly surprising that the public schools in the communities where we’ve warehoused most of our poor people of color are struggling.
I’d like to see more honor roll principals and superintendents coming from schools and districts that aren’t so privileged, or ones who have good ideas about how to unlink educational and residential segregation. It is illegal, for example, for a child living in Troy, just a short drive away, to enroll at Poestenkill Elementary, but does principal DeWitt think this is ethical?
Tim,
I’ve been saying since NCLB started that the “real”* push back against it wouldn’t start until it affected the posh tony suburban districts.
*by real I mean “listened to”. If you’re not “listened to” like us peon teachers and rural/urban poverty districts, then you don’t count.
Hi Tim,
I do agree with your point about a city school being so close and yet boundaries keeping us apart. There are families who have not been truthful about where they live due to these inequities. I taught in two poor city schools for most of my career and did not have any suburban experience before going to Poestenkill. One was in Poughkeepsie and the other in Watervliet. To be perfectly honest with you, seven years ago when I became a principal I was overlooked for a city school job. Poestenkill gave me a chance.
One of the things that I miss is diversity. However, you speak to racial diversity and there is economic diversity in our community. However, some of our parents do not apply for free and reduced lunch although they can so we do not always show up on the poverty line. Much of what you discuss is due to equitable funding which I have also been vocal about on my Ed Week blog.
One of the ways we try to teach our students about the struggles of others is through service learning, which our school does a great deal of. Our whole district focuses on helping others.
After 4 years of layoffs, millions of dollars (close to 14) in budget cuts and other hard times due to a lack of industry in our community, I do not feel as privileged as you suggest.
Thank you for your time.
ps. Please notice how I use my full name.
Peter,
Yes, I don’t use my full name when posting. My comments criticize, sometimes sharply but never unfairly (I hope), a wide range of powerful interests — NYSED, the DOE, the UFT, charter school operators, and so forth. Maybe I’m paranoid, but I’d like to minimize the risk of someone holding my words against my children.
I’m sure that you and the other honor roll principals/superintendents do incredible work, and I’m well aware that even the most well-to-do districts deal with powerful issues like bullying, substance abuse, mental illness, and so forth.
But I think it is somewhat inconsistent for Diane to extol the virtues of schools and districts that are relatively well off (and yes, even if you’ve got parents under-applying and your true FRPL rate is 25%, rather than the reported 14%, you’re still sitting pretty) while at the same time using poverty as a generic defense for any school or teacher that isn’t doing well. It’s similarly inconsistent to oppose most forms of school choice on the grounds that they worsen segregation while not recognizing the relationship between segregation and traditional district schools.
One thing we can agree on: the way we fund our schools is nutty, although at almost $25,000/yr/kid, I don’t think money, per se, is the problem here in New York City.
Thanks for your response, and I look forward to reading your blog, which I somehow hadn’t heard of up until now. Not that reading another blog is going to help me any; when it comes to education, my predicament is explained by Matt Johnson’s (The The) lyric, “The more I see, the less I know.”
Hi Tim,
I sometimes feel as though I am constantly reading and reading and not always getting somewhere, so I understand your predicament. Just to be clear I do not use poverty as a generic defense. I have written about it in my blog but I have never said that we have a poverty issue in the school that I lead. However, there are other issues that schools face besides poverty (i.e. abuse, medical issues, etc.), and those are social-emotional struggles that students go through.
Whether you believe it or not, because my school’s poverty rate was what you highlighted, students who come from lower middle class as well as upper class families have social-emotional issues as well. Some of them are more severe than I would want to delve into on this blog. You’re right, most school leaders do work very hard to combat this issue.
As for your district philosophy, I completely agree with you. Jonathan Kozol has been talking about opportunities by zip code for decades. After teaching in two city schools, and trying to find a leadership position in one as well, I have experienced teaching in classrooms where students did not have supplies, parents were illiterate and I spent a great deal of time working through the struggles of homelessness long before McKinney Vento. Please feel free to share your ideas about how to change that.