The collapse of test scores in New York following the first
tests of the Common Core standards is fueling the growth of the
anti-testing movement. A huge protest took
place in Port Jefferson Station on Long Island on Saturday.
Fifteen hundred people turned out to denounce the Common
Core and the tests that labeled most children as “failures.” To get a turnout of this size on a Saturday in August in a small town signals big trouble for Common Core and its cheerleaders in the State Education Department.
Hero educator Dr. Joseph Rella was one of the speakers.
Newsday, the most widely read newspaper on populous and politically
powerful Long Island, published a vivid photograph of the rally
(open the link) and wrote as follows: “Protesters carried signs and
cheered as they waited to hear from Comsewogue Superintendent
Joseph Rella, a vocal curriculum critic.
“All of us have been passengers on a plane being built in midair,” Rella said to the
crowd. “Today, we are canceling our flight reservations.” “He urged
the group to use social media to spread the word and demand that
state legislators re-evaluate the potential effects of Common Core
standards. “Stop it, fix it or scrap it,” Rella chanted with the
crowd.”
A blogger noticed this great sign held by a child: “I should be blowing bubbles, not filling them in.”
Meanwhile, the Suffolk Times and Riverhead News-Review, the
main newspaper for the North Fork of Long Island, ran
a blistering editorial denouncing the Common Core and the
tests, predicting that state officials would end up
dropping them and admitting their error.
The victims of the Common Core, he warned, “will likely be the poorest among us.”
Michael White, editor of the Suffolk Times and Riverhead News-Review,
understands that the engineers of the standards and tests are
detached from reality.
He wrote: “Consider that many children in
poverty-stricken areas will still be living in single-parent or
no-parent households in our new, Common Core world. They still
won’t be eating or sleeping properly. They won’t be getting proper
medical attention for physical or emotional issues that interfere
with school. They won’t be getting help with homework, or even
having their homework checked at home. In fact, extra attention for
such students will be increasingly funneled away from them, as the
focus shifts to teaching to the Common Core assessments.
“For these kids, school’s simply getting harder, with no significant amount of
funding set aside to provide them better access to school supplies,
computers and internet access, or any plans to expand the school
day or school year or bulk up after-school enrichment programs.
With higher test failure rates, there’s also sure to be a huge
spike in students in need of additional support through mandated
programs such as academic intervention services. Where does that
money come from?
“State officials keep arguing that we must adopt
Common Core because America’s education system lags behind those of
other industrialized nations. But they never acknowledge that much
of the disparity is accounted for by the performance of students in
poor and non-English-speaking immigrant communities, which aren’t
as prevalent in more homogeneous nations like Finland and South
Korea.”
White sagely concluded: “Locally, it was revealed by the
state last week that for the 2012-13 year, 74.7 percent of
Riverhead School District students in grades 3 through 8 failed to
meet the state’s math proficiency standard and 73.8 percent failed
to meet the ELA standard. “Those numbers will change very little
moving forward (at least not after some initial curriculum
adjustments). Here’s why. In Riverhead, scores will increase
somewhat for wealthier students but will fall at about the same
rate, with potentially disastrous results, for those who don’t have
the same support systems at home. Those in the middle will break
one way or the other. “When these disparate results between
wealthier districts and the rest of the state become apparent —
especially in New York City — the backtracking on these
numbers-driven policies will begin.
“Yes, it’s my prediction Common Core will be reversed. But it’s also my hope. My fear is that so
much money will be tied up in pricey books, testing materials and
other increasingly entrenched funding sources for this initiative
that the politicians and policymakers won’t ever budge. Meanwhile,
our teachers will remain handcuffed and will continue teaching to
tests, and more and more students who lack either a natural
aptitude for learning or parental support will disengage from the
classroom and the educational process in general.
“Eventually, we’ll be wondering how we slipped even further behind Finland and
South Korea.”
Wow.
When suburban parents have the visionary
leadership of men like Joseph Rella and Michael White, they will
not fall for the lie that three-quarters of their children are
failures. They will catch on: the kids did not fail. The tests were
designed to label them as failures. Suburban parents will see this,
rightly, as an assault on their children, not “reform.” And they
will tell their elected officials to stop these crazy policies that
hurt children.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There is a sort of irony in all this for me. Historically (I am always tentative to look at history on Diane’s blog but I will give it a go), the suburbs represented a way for people with means to escape urban decaying environments. This led to deep segregation over time. As our cities’ children (mostly of color and low ses status) continued to falter, our nation’s students’ tests scores continued to decline. Those who lived in suburbs, particularly affluent suburbs seemed to feel immune to all this. They used their entitlement to look away from the deterioration of their own cities. But no one in a society is immune to the demise of their society’s citizens. We are all impacted by the this. The CCS and their ensuing tests are a culmination of that impact.
I am not suggesting the there is any justification for the CCS implementation. Standards have been a topic in education throughout its history, and used to manipulate educational outcomes, in particular since Regan’s administration and the publication of a Nation at Risk. Once those with power realized the financial potential of accessing public dollars to gain profit in private sectors, it was all over for public education. My point is that now that it is finally and explicitly impacting those with means (means enough to see that impact but perhaps not enough to afford excellent private school education in their affluent areas) they are standing up and saying this is wrong. Well, this has been wrong for over 15 years, very wrong. And now that no one is protected from the debilitating impact of standards and high-stakes testing, the only possible solution is for all of us to come together, those of color, of means, of mature age, our entire society, and say that this is wrong. Because until this happens, the Broads, the Waltons and the Gates (who I liken to pitbulls holding on to someone’s leg), will not let the CCS, high stakes testing, charter school expansion and the worst of the worst, virtual education, go.
YES!!!!!
When is anyone on this blog going to acknowledge that the CCSS are a UNESCO initiative brought to us by Bill Gates, an avowed depopulationist? The first director of UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) was Julian Huxley, the brother of Aldous Huxley, who wrote Brave New World, a dystopian view of the future. Julian Huxley was Vice-President (1937-44) and President (1959-62) of the British Eugenics Society. He was also a founding member of the World Wild Life Fund, and coined the term “transhumanism” (as a means of disguising eugenics).
“There are instances of biological inequality which are so gross that they cannot be reconciled at all with the principle of equal opportunity. Thus low-grade mental defectives cannot be offered equality of educational opportunity, nor are the insane equal with the sane before the law or in respect of most freedoms. At the moment, it is probable that the indirect effect of civilisation is dysgenic instead of eugenic; and in any case it seems likely that the dead weight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability, and disease-proneness, which already exist in the human species, will prove too great a burden for real progress to be achieved. Thus even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for Unesco to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable.”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/world-evolutionary-humanism-eugenics-and-unesco/9477
The people who have brought us the Common Core don’t just want to commit menticide….they will go for genocide after all of the longitudinal data collection systems have done their job of “culling the herd.” Anyone who thinks it can’t happen here is unfamiliar with the history of the eugenics movement which began here in the U.S. before Hitler picked it up. California led the nation, performing nearly all sterilization procedures with little or no due process. In its first twenty-five years of eugenic legislation, California sterilized 9,782 individuals, mostly women.
Eugenics was the racist pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings deemed “unfit,” preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-seven states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in “colonies,” and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.
The Rockefellers and the Carnegies funded eugenics which is why it was able to exist in reality instead of someone’s sick mind. Who is funding the UN and the Common Core today?
This is an incredible post.
Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen so far, the suburban reaction is less “we’re all in this together” and more “it’s not our fault that our towns and schools benefit from racial and socioeconomic segregation, so leave us out of it”.
The Common Core educapitalists, who are banking on suburban low test scores to incite fear and distrust of the public schools, are in for a rude awakening. I can complain about my brother all I want, but you better say nothing but good about him. Suburban families love their schools, they won’t let them be run over, closed, and “turned around.” Schools are personal to these people because they see them as reflections of their own success. The carpetbaggers haven’t taken this into consideration in their business plan to plunder the suburban schools.
Excellent point. And imagine the big high schools and their football teams throughout our country. Don’t mess with them.
Yes Robert. I agree 100%. I was just noting that resistance is coming and in many forms. The tide is turning.
Candace and Linda,
I could not agree with you more.
But the fight is not just about that (not that you necessarily believe it is).
I came from a leafy tree suburban school culture of, in part, football games and homecoming parades with tissue paper and chicken wire floats. Remember those?
A community like the seemingly Stepford-wives-and-husbands district of Pleasantville in Westchester County, NY, has just as much as a vested interest to speak up as a voice for an overcrowded school in Hartford or the Bronx with kids from housing projects.
Solid middle class and upper middle class school districts and municipalities MUST fight back against corporate reform for the sake of protecting low income children who live in poorer suburbs, rural or urban regions.
If their fight does not become our fight, there will be no fight at all, and the Rhee-formers will come creeping back to get all of us.
Why?
Well, for starters, they are the real life World War Z zombies who will stop at nothing to get what they want. They don’t discriminate against any socio-economic status in their fervor and insatiable hunger to gorge themselves with the cognitive entrails of children.
This reform movement is no good for ANY child, ANY family.
As always, I look forward to your comments.
I truly believe that when Pleasantville parents and parents across Westchester finally receive their copy of THEIR child’s score report, there will be plenty of noise.
I agree. The rheeformers have played a brilliant game so far; however their fatal flaw will be underestimating the power of community, a concept they’re trying to erode.
Well, then, as metaphors go, we’ll just have to beat the pulp out of them . . . . (keeping the concept as a metaphor!).
I find this thread particularly frustrating due to the actions of the OSBLC, which was created by members of our regional Tea Party and the leaders of our local school board who had been pushing for privatization. The abhor the state standards as they interfere with their goal to teach Creationism along with other strands of revisionist history.
Edutopia has a video which explains how CCS fit into project based learning, by focusing on a project which teaches the standards. After watching the video I felt like this approach mirrored my experiences in the workforce, and have seen my daughter benefit from similar instructions at her college day camps over the summer.
What about CCS makes them anything more than a challenge which they will need to solve once our students begin taking on a more active role in their communities?
Here’s this suburbanite’s POV– it was my response to Cunningham’s ‘Ravitch Redux’ over at huffpost: I don’t know who you think you’re fooling, you & your friends Duncan & Obama, but it sure isn’t this public-education h.s. graduate. My well-heeled NJ town w/o so much as a big-box grocery in its property tax base has been ponying up 96% of its school budget for yrs in order to replace funds sent to the state to help out places like Newark– funds which HuffPost sweetheart Cory Booker is using to build a privatizer’s wet dream on the ashes of closed public schools, a live-in TFA compound ringed with unregulated McSchools serving up “school choice” for the poor. This is the truth of your little shell-game: taxation without representation
This on the same day that the AP comes out with its heavily skewed survey of parent attitudes toward standardized testing. It was sponsored by the Joyce Foundation, which tells those of us who follow reformy ideas that it’s worth the proverbial “bucket of warm spit” when it comes to conducting a non-biased assessment. Fortunately, Mercedes Schneider has already taken this survey apart and shown the duplicity of both the survey itself and AP’s reporting of selected results. I doubt that this will stem the tide of parent dissatisfaction and disgust that is growing over the reformy agenda, What it does show, I think, is that the corporate reformers have finally gone too far and are trying to shore up that agenda with the thinnest of props.
I live and teach on Long Island. There has been quite a buzz about CCC. Our local news channel just ran a rather ill-informed editorial. Another teacher and I were attending our dog training class Saturday morning lamenting how we were missing the rally. I told my fellow dog owner she must follow Diane’s blog!
Way to go Long Island! Although Newsday quoted 1,500 at the rally, I heard the number was closer to 2,000.
Kudos also to the editor of the News Review for writing with common sense and courage. Riverhead, although more suburban today, is a hardworking community with small town values, and those common sense, old fashioned beliefs come shining through in this editorial. Bravo!!
Arne Duncan @arneduncan 17 Aug
Smart move in TN this week. State board gives thumbs up to new teacher license that includes evidence of classroom success.
From Duncan’s Twitter feed. There’s not going to be any “mid course correction” coming from the DOE, no matter how much the parents of public school children object.
Duncan is still promoting the reform mantra and the best-connected and most dogmatic reformers. I think his approach is such a mistake for a public entity like schools. He’ll have no one to blame but himself if parents rebel. This simply isn’t how public schools are run on the local level. We don’t have a CEO who issues directives. We’re working on passing a levy here (due to cuts in state funding under “reform”) and there were 3 well-attended public meetings over 6 months to develop the proposed plan and ballot language. I suppose the school board could have issued a directive to “stakeholders” but that would have been a mistake.
Maybe school reformers could learn something about democratic governance of a public entity from existing public schools. It’s more difficult than directives and bullying, but it’s worth it. We’ll have majority community buy-in on the levy proposal (hopefully!) by the time it’s on the ballot.
My new favorite slogan, which I keep repeating:
“When you build a plane in mid-air, you crash in the Andes and end up eating each other.”
Excellent!
Perfect! Can I use it too?
May this be yet another hole, crack, and splintering of a dam that whose walls are becoming thinner and whose water is filling up too fast, too furiously.
May reformers lke Michelle Rhee find themselves in an unstoppable, wrathful, and harsh deluge . . .
Yet, our fight against the 2% and the state and federal governements is far from over . . . .
I commend Long Island educators and parents . . . . I am a direct and proud product of Long Island culture.
When the parents of the 60+% of students in Williamsville, NY, (the highest ranked school system in Erie County), get the CC test results, there is going to be a cry of “foul play”, because the majority know their children are not “failing”, so it must be the test.
Can’t wait! Go Williamsville!
Same thing will happen in communities across Westchester for exactly the same reason.
A class action lawsuit to release the 2013 state tests is necessary in order to evaluate their efficacy. Once released, the state will not be able to defend nor justify them. Only then will this madness stop.
Did reformers not anticipate that the constant chanting of “choice” was eventually going to run right into their state and national directives?
These two ideas are incompatible. Public school parents don’t have any “choice” under reform. It’s either accept the most dogmatic extreme “reform” or go pound sand. What if my “choice” is to keep my 5th grader in my local public school but reject the reform agenda that is distorting and destroying my school? That’s not an acceptable “choice” under reform?
Wow. “Choice” turns out to mean what reformers say it means. For parents who are committed to local public schools, there’s no choice at all.
The “reformers” are being exposed now: they can prey on the large urban districts serving economically disadvantaged children where mayors have undermined democracy by usurping the power of elected school boards. Rural and suburban school districts will never allow corporations to supplant their locally elected school boards.
I’m so happy and relieved that administrators are beginning to lead the way and support teachers. For so long I thought, ” it can’t possibly be that just the advocates on this blog and others saw the shell game occurring” It’ll be easier to advocate for a stronger public education with more people like Dr. Rella coming forward.
There really is no choice after witnessing Chicago, NYC, Philly, NC, TN, WI,
Diane, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but the PA school reform agenda is about to implode.
Hundreds of charter schools are suing public school districts to re-direct federal funding from public schools to charter schools. It’s a huge amount of money they’re taking.
They’re doing an end run around the state legislature and using the lawsuits to pressure Corbett directly, probably anticipating Corbett’s loss in the next election. He’s a wildly unpopular governor, but he’s lock-step privatization.
This must be the “cooperation” I’ve heard so much about 🙂
http://www.mcall.com/news/nationworld/pennsylvania/mc-pa-charter-school-funding-20130814,0,4473516.story#ixzz2c7uyn1rg
It’ll pit charter schools directly against public schools in an adversarial court system. Public schools in PA have been gutted under reform. Public schools have nothing left to give. I don’t think public school parents take this transfer of funds without a fight.
“For years, local school district officials have tried to get state lawmakers to pass laws reducing the amount of tax dollars paid to charter schools.
Now charter schools — which since 1997 have evolved from independent, isolated institutions into a united, powerful political force — are fighting back. They have launched a coordinated effort to gain up to $150 million annually in additional funding from local school districts in the Lehigh Valley and across the state.
In hopes of doing it, charter schools are bypassing the House, Senate and state Board of Education and going right to Gov. Tom Corbett’s administration in a bid to change the funding formula in their favor.”
Over the past 15 months, charter schools, with the help of one law firm, have filed 231 identical legal appeals with the state Department of Education challenging the department’s funding formula.
The appeals, one of which was filed against the Bethlehem Area School District, ask Corbett’s education secretary to no longer allow school districts to deduct the federal portion of their instructional costs when calculating the per-pupil tuition payments they are required to send to charter schools.
Pennsylvania’s 500 school districts got $508 million in federal funds in the 2011-12 school year. The state’s 173 charter schools, including eight in the Lehigh Valley, got more than $6 million.
If the charter schools win the appeals, school districts could lose between $100 million and $150 million annually in federal funds, according to Stuart Knade, interim executive director of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association.
Going around the legislature and even the state board of education! Wow.
I think we need to get the word out to Pennsylvania parents before they lose federal funding for their schools. They aren’t going to know about it because they’re taking it to a court rather than the legislature.
When individual scores are given to NY parents, I have a feeling parents are suddenly going to be bombarding this website, opting out and increasing their protests. Many parents, and even teachers, haven’t realized the impact of all the changes. Most have been busy leading their lives, getting through the day, and just doing their job. Parents have trusted the public school system, not realizing the implications of common core testing. But, once the individual scores come out, watch out Albany! You haven’t seen anything yet.
I agree, totally.
I really hope you are right!!! The policies that are in place are a disgrace. They should be ashamed of themselves. I hope this blog helps too. I wish them all good luck!!! Is anyone protesting in the upstate region? I live in Rochester and heard that some parents in Webster refused to allow their kids to even take the test. Those children had IEP’s which is also just ridiculous.
In the Ichabod Crane school district (Columbia county NY) approximately 130+ (grades 3 – 8) students opted-out of math/ELA testing this past April. Average grade is about 150+ students.
Not sure what to do with that envelope when it arrives, burn it, send it back, save it for their college graduation, definitely not sharing it with my kids.
Bright red sharpie: INVALID ….return to sender. FIRE John King.
Wonderful! Thank you for posting and thanks to those who turned out for the protest. The disengagement is real and it can be deeply described, in all its tragic dimensions, by thousand of teachers in Title I schools. Hope they speak out because this is institutionalized child abuse and it needs to be stopped. Let’s roll out the numbers on just how much $$ is now being spent on the pricey books, testing materials, reteach workbooks or software. Yes, let them see the selfish, senseless waste of money that could be spent on enhancing, empowering and emancipating the intellects of these potential-rich children.
Worcester Telegram and Gazette, Worcester MA (there is a U. Mass there and 10 or 12 other colleges..
quote: “Between 2005 and 2011, Massachusetts kids topped their peers in other states on each administration of the reading portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Deep immersion in classic fiction, poetry and drama was the source of the Bay State’s success on every reading test imaginable.
Fatefully, the Obama administration and Washington, D.C.-based education trade organizations, largely funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, are pushing inferior quality K-12 national standards called Common Core, which will cut the classic fiction Massachusetts students will read by 60 percent. Now, America’s 3 million annual high school dropouts won’t be the only ones missing out on timeless literature.
—————————————————————————
go to united opt out http://unitedoptout.com print out the letter that’s been prepared
for your state and then hand them out to other teachers (off school grounds/after
school) and parents you think will be willing to help their children.
If we all do something – even small acts help – we can contribute to overwhelming and
fighting the system.
Third Grade Cut Scores in NYState. Students receive an overall score out of the total number of points possible. For a child to pass the Math test, they had to achieve 80% of the total points. Does this make sense???
ELA Cut Scores and Level Percentage of total points Range
4
358-423 90.54% – 100% 383-423
84.63% – 90.30% 358-382
3
320-357 81.08% – 84.39% 343-357
78.01% – 80.85% 330-342
75.65% – 77.77% 320-329
2
291-319 73.05% – 75.41% 309-319
70.44 – 72.81% 298-308
68.79% – 70.21% 291-297
1
148-296 57.44% – 68.56% 243-290
35.00% – 57.21% 148-242
Math Cut Scores & Level Percentage of total points Range
4
340-394 90.86% – 100% 358-394
86.29% – 90.60% 340-357
3
320-357 83.25% – 86.04% 328-339
81.22% – 83.00% 320-327
80.00% -81.17% 314-319
2
291-319 71.63% – 79.44% 303-313
74.62% – 76.65% 294-302
72.33% – 74.37% 285-293
1
148-296 62.44% – 72.08% 246-284
35.28% – 64.47% 139-254
Every little thing that someone does….opting a child out from a test, supporting an education friendly candidate, learning about so called reform in education and sharing knowledge with others helps. We are all in this together and we both CAN and MUST succeed in our fight against it. But it is going to take EVERYONE of us to do it!
Art defines our humanity, culture, history, and our future. It can be art for art’s sake or blended with ANY other discipline. As money gets short, accountability grows, and art programs get cut. As we move into cutting these programs, we further limit our students from the very enriching, deep, meaningful subjects that fuel better achievement. We strip them of these creative opportunities and we close the door on their development.
Steve Jobs, founder, of Apple and Pixar, dropped out of college. He wasn’t interested in the curriculum. The first class that he re-enrolled in as a part time student; a calligraphy class. This is where he fell in love with fonts, icons, the beauty of a well-designed object. He credits this class with the inspiration for the way a MacPro book looks when you turn it on.
I think of the inequality when I realize that my talented, creative art students are taking another math class as opposed to choosing an elective that would give them the confidence and desire to stay in school. They won’t have the opportunity to even get to a calligraphy class in college because their ability and creativity will have been squandered and wasted. When my students in the urban district drop out, they are forced to work to help support generations of a family. My students will be further from her potential in five, ten, or twenty years because we have ignored their voice. We should be providing these students those options because chances are they won’t access them later and then WE have lost out on something.
We cannot narrow the academic path of our students because of our insistence to measure. I fear the statement, if it can’t be measured, then it must not be important. This is a dangerous message to our future Steve Jobs, Tim Burtons, Kara Walkers, and Yo-Yo Mas.
The Administration and their followers(benefactors) need to stop telling(dictating) the experts(teachers and administrators with legitimate degrees and credentials) what works and start to become students and find out from the Educational Experts who actually have done research, have real classroom experience, and have legitimate degrees and credentials what may work in certain circumstances and what will almost never work. They need to understand that children come from various cultures, backgrounds, life experiences, socioeconomic levels, and many other factors that have an impact on how they learn and how teachers need to adjust their teaching stratigies for each child. But, they instead attack those who do because they are behaving like the spoiled child who does not get his way. They blame others such as: the Schools Of Education are all failing, public teachers belonging to unions are failing, the teachers union is protecting those failing teachers and so on. They need to do some homework, maybe for the first time. So hopefully, they will talk to one of those Educational Experts from one of those countries out-scoring us in math. However, this would cause them to see their mistakes and people like them never admit makings mistakes. I am willing to help them find such an Expert. All they have to do is read the section below.
Why do we say we need to compete globally, but we do not want to learn from those countries supposedly outperforming us? Please read the following and remember, Finland is one of the top scoring countries in math year after year. Let us read and learn.
Finland’s education expert Pasi Sahlberg
Finland’s Pasi Sahlberg is one of the world’s leading experts on school reform and the author of the best-selling “Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland?” In this piece he writes about whether the emphasis that American school reformers put on “teacher effectiveness” is really the best approach to improving student achievement.
He is director general of Finland’s Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation and has served the Finnish government in various positions and worked for the World Bank in Washington D.C. He has also been an adviser for numerous governments internationally about education policies and reforms, and is an adjunct professor of education at the University of Helsinki and University of Oulu. He can be reached at pasi.sahlberg@cimo.fi.
By Pasi Sahlberg
Many governments are under political and economic pressure to turn around their school systems for higher rankings in the international league tables. Education reforms often promise quick fixes within one political term. Canada, South Korea, Singapore and Finland are commonly used models for the nations that hope to improve teaching and learning in their schools. In search of a silver bullet, reformers now turn their eyes on teachers, believing that if only they could attract “the best and the brightest” into the teaching profession, the quality of education would improve.
“Teacher effectiveness” is a commonly used term that refers to how much student performance on standardized tests is determined by the teacher. This concept hence applies only to those teachers who teach subjects on which students are tested. Teacher effectiveness plays a particular role in education policies of nations where alternative pathways exist to the teaching profession.
In the United States, for example, there are more than 1,500 different teacher-preparation programs. The range in quality is wide. In Singapore and Finland only one academically rigorous teacher education program is available for those who desire to become teachers. Likewise, neither Canada nor South Korea has fast-track options into teaching, such as Teach for America or Teach First in Europe. Teacher quality in high-performing countries is a result of careful quality control at entry into teaching rather than measuring teacher effectiveness in service.
In recent years the “no excuses”’ argument has been particularly persistent in the education debate. There are those who argue that poverty is only an excuse not to insist that all schools should reach higher standards. Solution: better teachers. Then there are those who claim that schools and teachers alone cannot overcome the negative impact that poverty causes in many children’s learning in school. Solution: Elevate children out of poverty by other public policies.
For me the latter is right. In the United States today, 23 percent of children live in poor homes. In Finland, the same way to calculate child poverty would show that figure to be almost five times smaller. The United States ranked in the bottom four in the recent United Nations review on child well-being. Among 29 wealthy countries, the United States landed second from the last in child poverty and held a similarly poor position in “child life satisfaction.” Teachers alone, regardless of how effective they are, will not be able to overcome the challenges that poor children bring with them to schools everyday.
Finland is not a fan of standardization in education. However, teacher education in Finland is carefully standardized. All teachers must earn a master’s degree at one of the country’s research universities. Competition to get into these teacher education programs is tough; only “the best and the brightest” are accepted. As a consequence, teaching is regarded as an esteemed profession, on par with medicine, law or engineering. There is another “teacher quality” checkpoint at graduation from School of Education in Finland. Students are not allowed to earn degrees to teach unless they demonstrate that they possess knowledge, skills and morals necessary to be a successful teacher.
But education policies in Finland concentrate more on school effectiveness than on teacher effectiveness. This indicates that what schools are expected to do is an effort of everyone in a school, working together, rather than teachers working individually.
In many under-performing nations, I notice, three fallacies of teacher effectiveness prevail.
The first belief is that “the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.” This statement became known in education policies through the influential McKinsey & Company report titled “How the world’s best performing school systems come out on top”. Although the report takes a broader view on enhancing the status of teachers by better pay and careful recruitment this statement implies that the quality of an education system is defined by its teachers. By doing this, the report assumes that teachers work independently from one another. But teachers in most schools today, in the United States and elsewhere, work as teams when the end result of their work is their joint effort.
The role of an individual teacher in a school is like a player on a football team: all teachers are vital, but the culture of the school is even more important for the quality of the school. Team sports offer numerous examples of teams that have performed beyond expectations because of leadership, commitment and spirit. Take the U.S. ice hockey team in the 1980 Winter Olympics, when a team of college kids beat both Soviets and Finland in the final round and won the gold medal. The quality of Team USA certainly exceeded the quality of its players. So can an education system.
The second fallacy is that “the most important single factor in improving quality of education is teachers.” This is the driving principle of former D.C. schools chancellor Michele Rhee and many other “reformers” today. This false belief is central to the “no excuses” school of thought. If a teacher was the most important single factor in improving quality of education, then the power of a school would indeed be stronger than children’s family background or peer influences in explaining student achievement in school.
Research on what explains students’ measured performance in school remains mixed. A commonly used conclusion is that 10% to 20% of the variance in measured student achievement belongs to the classroom, i.e., teachers and teaching, and a similar amount is attributable to schools, i.e., school climate, facilities and leadership. In other words, up to two-thirds of what explains student achievement is beyond the control of schools, i.e., family background and motivation to learn.
Over thirty years of systematic research on school effectiveness and school improvement reveals a number of characteristics that are typical of more effective schools. Most scholars agree that effective leadership is among the most important characteristics of effective schools, equally important to effective teaching. Effective leadership includes leader qualities, such as being firm and purposeful, having shared vision and goals, promoting teamwork and collegiality and frequent personal monitoring and feedback. Several other characteristics of more effective schools include features that are also linked to the culture of the school and leadership: Maintaining focus on learning, producing a positive school climate, setting high expectations for all, developing staff skills, and involving parents. In other words, school leadership matters as much as teacher quality.
The third fallacy is that “If any children had three or four great teachers in a row, they would soar academically, regardless of their racial or economic background, while those who have a sequence of weak teachers will fall further and further behind”. This theoretical assumption is included in influential policy recommendations, for instance in “Essential Elements of Teacher Policy in ESEA: Effectiveness, Fairness and Evaluation” by the Center for American Progress to the U.S. Congress. Teaching is measured by the growth of student test scores on standardized exams.
This assumption presents a view that education reform alone could overcome the powerful influence of family and social environment mentioned earlier. It insists that schools should get rid of low-performing teachers and then only hire great ones. This fallacy has the most practical difficulties. The first one is about what it means to be a great teacher. Even if this were clear, it would be difficult to know exactly who is a great teacher at the time of recruitment. The second one is, that becoming a great teacher normally takes five to ten years of systematic practice. And determining the reliably of ‘effectiveness’ of any teacher would require at least five years of reliable data. This would be practically impossible.
Everybody agrees that the quality of teaching in contributing to learning outcomes is beyond question. It is therefore understandable that teacher quality is often cited as the most important in-school variable influencing student achievement. But just having better teachers in schools will not automatically improve students’ learning outcomes.
Lessons from high-performing school systems, including Finland, suggest that we must reconsider how we think about teaching as a profession and what is the role of the school in our society.
First, standardization should focus more on teacher education and less on teaching and learning in schools. Singapore, Canada and Finland all set high standards for their teacher-preparation programs in academic universities. There is no Teach for Finland or other alternative pathways into teaching that wouldn’t include thoroughly studying theories of pedagogy and undergo clinical practice. These countries set the priority to have strict quality control before anybody will be allowed to teach – or even study teaching! This is why in these countries teacher effectiveness and teacher evaluation are not such controversial topics as they are in the U.S. today.
Second, the toxic use of accountability for schools should be abandoned. Current practices in many countries that judge the quality of teachers by counting their students’ measured achievement only is in many ways inaccurate and unfair. It is inaccurate because most schools’ goals are broader than good performance in a few academic subjects. It is unfair because most of the variation of student achievement in standardized tests can be explained by out-of-school factors. Most teachers understand that what students learn in school is because the whole school has made an effort, not just some individual teachers. In the education systems that are high in international rankings, teachers feel that they are empowered by their leaders and their fellow teachers. In Finland, half of surveyed teachers responded that they would consider leaving their job if their performance would be determined by their student’s standardized test results.
Third, other school policies must be changed before teaching becomes attractive to more young talents. In many countries where teachers fight for their rights, their main demand is not more money but better working conditions in schools. Again, experiences from those countries that do well in international rankings suggest that teachers should have autonomy in planning their work, freedom to run their lessons the way that leads to best results, and authority to influence the assessment of the outcomes of their work. Schools should also be trusted in these key areas of the teaching profession.
To finish up, let’s do one theoretical experiment. We transport highly trained Finnish teachers to work in, say, Indiana in the United States (and Indiana teachers would go to Finland). After five years–assuming that the Finnish teachers showed up fluent in English and that education policies in Indiana would continue as planned–we would check whether these teachers have been able to improve test scores in state-mandated student assessments.
I argue that if there were any gains in student achievement they would be marginal. Why? Education policies in Indiana and many other states in the United States create a context for teaching that limits (Finnish) teachers to use their skills, wisdom and shared knowledge for the good of their students’ learning. Actually, I have met some experienced Finnish-trained teachers in the United States who confirm this hypothesis. Based on what I have heard from them, it is also probable that many of those transported Finnish teachers would be already doing something else than teach by the end of their fifth year – quite like their American peers.
Conversely, the teachers from Indiana working in Finland–assuming they showed up fluent in Finnish–stand to flourish on account of the freedom to teach without the constraints of standardized curricula and the pressure of standardized testing; strong leadership from principals who know the classroom from years of experience as teachers; a professional culture of collaboration; and support from homes unchallenged by poverty.
We need to educate our public about the reasons behind the decisions being made. I cannot wait for Professor Ravitch’s new book to help in regard to educating people about what is happening in our educational system.
International Comparisons of Students
You’ll Be Shocked by How Many of the World’s Top Students Are American
JORDAN WEISSMANNAPR 30 2013, 2:00 PM ET
(Reuters)
When you look at the average performance of American students on international test scores, our kids come off as a pretty middling bunch. If you rank countries based on their very fine differences, we come in 14th in reading, 23rd in science, and 25th in math. Those finishes led Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to flatly declare that “we’re being out-educated.”
And on average, maybe we are. But averages also sometimes obscure more than they reveal. My colleague Derek Thompson has written before about how, once you compare students from similar income and class backgrounds, our relative performance improves dramatically, suggesting that our educational problems may be as much about our sheer number of poor families as our supposedly poor schools. This week, I stumbled on another data point that belies the stereotype of dimwitted American teens.
When it comes to raw numbers, it turns out we generally have far more top performers than any other developed nation.
That’s according to the graph below from Economic Policy Institute’s recent report on America’s supply of science and tech talent. Among OECD nations in 2006, the United States claimed a third of high-performing students in both reading and science, far more than our next closest competitor, Japan. On math, we have a bit less to be proud of — we just claimed 14 percent of the high-performers, compared to 15.2 percent for Japan and 16.2 percent of South Korea.
Part of this is easy to explain: The United States is big. Very big. And it’s a far bigger country than the other members of the OECD. We claim roughly 27 percent of the group’s 15-to-19-year-olds. Japan, in contrast, has a smidge over 7 percent. So in reading and in science, we punch above our weight by just a little, while in math we punch below.
But the point remains: In two out of three subjects, Americans are over-represented among the best students.
If we have so many of the best minds, why are our average scores so disappointingly average? As Rutgers’s Hal Salzman and Georgetown’s B. Lindsay Lowell, who co-authored the EPI report, noted in a 2008 Nature article, our high scorers are balanced out by a very large number of low scorers. Our education system, just like our economy, is polarized.
What’s the takeaway? Salzman and Lowell argue that our large numbers of top scorers should help put to rest the concern that we’re losing the global talent race executives and politicians love to fret about. I’m not sure they’ll do the trick, though. In 2009, Chinese students in Shanghai sat for the PISA test for the first time, and their scores were spectacular. Although data for its other mainland provinces hasn’t been published, the OECD’s test guru says they’re similarly impressive.It seems pretty likely, in other words, that China has more young math and science geniuses at its disposal than we do (whether that’s something that should be keeping any of us up at night is another issue). But Salzman and Lindsay make another point that’s worth dwelling on: You can’t replicate a country’s style of education without replicating its culture, so instead of looking abroad for ideas about how to teach our kids, as some policy-types are inclined to do, perhaps we should look at what’s succeeding here at home and spread it. Our schools are already producing plenty of bright thinkers of their own.
Thank you for reading this paper and let us pray for our children and grandchildren.
Concerned Grandparent
The education chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Listed below in a random order are the links of the learning chain. Can you put them in order of strongest to weakest?
Why are we trying to improve education by changing some of our stronger links?
state standards
socio-economic status
curriculum
parental support
facilities
teachers
textbooks
student motivation/effort
culture