No wonder the corporate reformers are nervous.
The American people are wising up. The slanders against our public schools are
being exposed.
One by one, the Reformy House of Cards is coming
down.
Imagine this scenario: the editorial board of the Meridian
Star toured Meridian High School. The students are 89% African American, and 80% free/reduced price lunch (the federal measure of poverty). What were their expectations? Did they expect to see gangs roaming the halls, graffiti on the walls, lazy teachers with their feet up on their desks? If so, they saw something quite different. They had an epiphany.
They saw with their own eyes what was happening in the
school. They learned what Big Data could not tell them. They
realized that the A-F grading system was wrong. In fact, it is a
hoax meant to label and demean schools. They discovered a good
school in their community.
Here is the editorial in today’s
newspaper:
“Meridian High School a pleasant surprise”
“We have run our share of local stories in The Meridian Star pages of youth
violence, teenagers involved in area crimes and allegations of
school to prison pipelines. And we make no apologies for that.
People want to know what is going on in their communities and our
job is to keep you informed of the good and the bad — and we try to
give you both.
“The Meridian Star devotes a lot of space to school
accomplishments; from students who have achieved academic
excellence to teachers who have gone above and beyond to ensure
their students are provided the best education possible.
“But even we, collectively as a news gathering organization, are surprised
sometimes — ocassionally pleasantly so. One of those pleasant
surprises came recently during a tour of Meridian High School
attended by members of The Meridian Star Editorial Board.
“School Principal Victor Hubbard walked us throughout the school, taking
time out of his busy day to point out steps taken to address prior
problems, recent accomplishments and future goals. What we found
was an energetic and optimistic administration and staff; students
eager to learn and an impressive campus that is immaculate and well
equipped.
“Walk down the halls and you’ll find signs that encourage
students to excel, while others clearly outline school
expectations. For example, one sign directs students to walk on the
right side of the hallway in single file; and they do. In fact, as
Hubbard points out, students will often politely inform visitors if
they are walking up the wrong side of the stairwell.
“At every class we stopped, the students we met were engaged, polite and
respectful. We were also impressed with the school itself, which
boasts nine fully equipped classrooms/labs with 24 computers each.
In fact there are more than 250 computers at the school, all with
Internet access. There is a video interactive classroom used for
distance learning and video production and a Career Center
dedicated to helping students find and obtain college scholarship
funding.
“The school’s vision statement is, “Meridian High School is
committed to developing a community of life-long learners through
rigor, relevance and relationships.” The motto is “Moving from Good
to Great.”
“Listed on the MHS website are the school’s beliefs, some
of which are:
* Every student can learn to become a contributing
member of society.
• Students must be challenged to learn problem
solving techniques, develop healthy self-concepts, and learn to
work with individuals of different cultural, ethnic and
socioeconomic levels.
* Administrators, parents, teachers, students
and the community must share the responsibility of education and
the advancement of the school’s mission.
• Students must be provided a safe and orderly environment in which to learn.
All are lofty goals. And the school has shown improvement, moving up a
letter grade this year from a D to a C, which is reason to
celebrate. Based on our tour of the school, the school’s grade
should be higher. School performance is not always accurately
measured solely by test-based accountability ratings like “A,” ”
B,” or “F.”
“We challenge our state legislators to tour Meridian
High School and other schools where passionate teachers are working
with willing students. Perhaps then they might take another look at
the standardized test-based accountability laws that govern our
schools and take other factors into consideration as well.”
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all the naysayers spent a day in a public school and informed themselves, as the editorial board of the Meridian Star did. Better yet, let them spend a day as a teacher and see the skill and judgment it requires. We have everyday heroes on our midst.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Let them spend a day as a teacher? Only after taking all the courses required to become a teacher, only after the trial period, only after being evaluated by the supervisors, only after writing detailed lesson plans for the week (broken down minute by minute), only after marking hundreds of papers well into the wee hours of the morning and I could go on. They can come in as a student.
The problem is, the Meridian Star is impressed with the wrong things. To wit: ““Walk down the halls and you’ll find signs that encourage students to excel, while others clearly outline school expectations. For example, one sign directs students to walk on the right side of the hallway in single file; and they do.””
This is an accomplishment? I guess the message is that they realized that public schools can be as controlling of poor black kids as a charter school, so maybe we don’t need charter schools.
I’m pretty sure if you go to Sidwell Friends, you will not see students walking in single file on the right side of the hallway. I’m also pretty sure you won’t see signs encouraging students to excel.
That’s a ridiculous comment. There is absolutely nothing wrong with setting expectations for behavior and outlining procedures. When there is a standard, respect and responsibility fall into place. (That works for both children AND adults.) My school has implemented more school-wide procedures, starting with the basics, and things have improved — in students dealing effectively with other students/staff and in academic matters. I believe that without order, there is no safety, without safety, there is no learning. Not every child has been so blessed to have been raised in a household with proper expectations for public behavior.
On the contrary, expectations for behavior and academic performance are best established on the classroom level, emerging and accepted organically within the classroom community.
Posting these things in the hallways is just for show, so that know-nothing editorial board writers and other dog-and-pony-show visitors can be duly/dully impressed, and hopefully leave the school, it’s students, teachers and administrators alone to do their work.
The implication behind the signs is that excellence is not assumed. We (the school) have to tell you (the students) directly to “work hard, be nice”. You (the students” won’t do this without constant reminder. Pretty insulting, really.
And single-file lines are just good preparation for the military.
great– good short link: http://bit.ly/15euwcZ
It reminds me a bit of Michael Brick’s fantastic book on the reality behind the test scores at a real-life thriving but challenged high school in East Austin: Saving the School, http://bit.ly/NDC9zn.
Getting the naysayers past the front door and into the school where they can see the whole gamut of activities and dynamics– that is the challenge. Good for that editorial board for running that powerful editorial.
Several years ago, one of the Teacher Ambassadors at the US Dept of Education, Genevieve DuBose. got much of the senior staff of the Department to go spend 1/2 – full day shadowing teachers in DC. They came back saying that they had had no idea. That was in part because very few of the top people in the US Department of Education have ever been classroom educators at a K-12 level.
I remember Howard Dean once telling a group of us that he had tried being a teacher but found that he did not have the necessary bladder control. Now, that is not a major part of being a teacher, but it is a necessary one. Teach for 3 hours without a break because you cannot leave a class unattended, and the idea of bladder control can become an issue.
At the secondary level, you might have 6 classes with 30 or more student each. That is up to 180 adolescents, each of whom is entitled to be addressed by his or her own name. If I am to be effective as a teacher, I must know the strengths and weaknesses of each, who needs some things repeated, for whom slumping down in her seat is the only way to concentrate on what is being said because she is easily visually distracted.
Yes, newspaper editorial staffs, many of whom went either to elite private schools or public schools in wealthy suburbs, should spend time in the schools in their communities, to see the reality of those schools.
So should the state legislators who pass the state laws under which schools operate.
And maybe, just maybe, states and the federal government and school boards should NOT be turning over the operation and direction of public schools to people who are not educators, and thus who do not understand what education, what teaching, are really about.
Don’t count on it.
Notice the “distance learning” labs, the “Three Rs” slogan, and the school’s recent promotion up a letter grade? The corporate reformers are fully in control of this narrative, and I suspect their online credit recovery vendor is being validated. I’d want to heck how many students have disappeared from the classrooms, and have been dumped onto the vendor’s rosters.
I’d look more closely into the reasons for the editorial board’s sudden delight.
the good news is that the editorial board left their offices and visited the school. They used their own eyes and ears. They got a glimmer of how phony the A-F ratings are.
Another article where the tide is turning. Grassroots-Education passed it on. Here is the direct link.
http://www.buffalonews.com/city-region/education/forum-on-testing-reform-draws-2500-vocal-teachers-parents-and-administrators-20131002
There are some good schools but most do not do the job. In California of all high schools only 40 cannot be taken over as a result of their API scores being so low. What bothers me about the non news and educrats is their total lack of knowledge or concern. Data, there is no data being used for most, only a select few even care. Concerning LAUSD how is it that there are 3 ADA numbers for the same district for the same year and they can vary up to 100,000 ADA? They lie is what they do. Did their scores really go up? No, as they went up as a result of the low performers, 117,000, not coming to school. That will make it look like you raised your scores when they really did not go up. I do not know of even one paper of any status which writes real education stories. Here in L.A. we have been told in private by highly rated reporters that if they tell those stories first, they will never hit the presses. Second, they will lose their job and be blackballed nationwide. We have seen this several times and when confronted about this the reporters turn red and the stories still stink. They are pablum. Why do you think they keep changing reporters on education. So there is no institutional memory and pick those who do not do the research and have total fear of their jobs. Typical.
This is an unusual story as the editorial staff seemed to want to have a real look. This is abnormal not normal. How the story would change if they did real work and discovered as we can give them the fraud and theft being perpetrated by the billionaires and their minions. Then they are finished. The Ravich Blog is helping to accomplish that through the dialog of all who write and comment and all the readers who read and then analyze from there. Many ideas which would never be heard are heard on this blog and that is for the better as clones never accomplish anything.
A wonderful, uplifting story. Letter grades for schools produce hostility, humiliation, branding, and division– just as intended.
So glad to see that the Meridian reporters investigated firsthand rather than buying into the supposed truth of school letter grade nonsense.
From Diane:
“They realized that the A-F grading system was wrong.” And at 11:04: “They got a glimmer of how phony the A-F ratings are.”
And from Mercedes:
“Letter grades for schools produce hostility, humiliation, branding, and division. . .”
My question to both of you (and all others):
Since we know the errors involved in determining letter grades for schools render them ILLOGICAL, INVALID are UNETHICAL, can we expect that you (and any others) will come out as strongly against the educational malpractices that are “letter grades for students”???
And so to not let the importance of my question get run over by the Quixotic Quest Bandwagon I direct all to Wilson’s wise words of wisdom concerning educational standards, standardized testing and the “GRADING” of students in his never refuted nor rebutted “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
Would Matt Damon send his child to Meridian High? Is it good enough for his kids?
Old School Troll, every parent has a right to send their children wherever they want. If they choose a private or religious school, they pay for it. But wherever they send their children, they have a civic obligation to support public education. Even if they have no children at all, they still have a civic obligation to support public education.
Capiche?
A civic obligation? Surely you jest. It’s a matter of the tax laws. Period! I’m still waiting for someone to prove to me that “mass education” works at all. Mass training, maybe, but mass education, never!
Since the turn of the twentieth century the “Frankfurt School” has produced an academic “society” of intellectual ideologues. They are the incessant “tinkerers and fixers” who have reformed “classical education” at the expense of generations of children to arrive at this the capstone of their efforts. Common Core is the final stroke to achieve full Federal control of education in this country. John Dewey would be so very proud!
Humm…Test Scores/Grading System/Common Core…Pipeline…Charter Schools…..Can you help me put them in order Diane