The New York Board of Regents is determined to pour unprecedented sums into more standards, more tests, and more tests and more standards.
Two Regents have opposed this determined focus on standards and testing: Regent Betty Rosa of the Bronx and Regent Kathleen Cashin of Brooklyn. Interestingly, these are two of the few experienced educators on the state board.
In this article, Regent Rosa blasts the board’s agenda.
“In fact, she thinks the Common Core program is based on incomplete, manipulated data.
“They are using false information to create a crisis, to take the state test and turn it on its head to make sure the suburbs experience what the urban centers experience: failure,” said Rosa, a former teacher, principal and superintendent from the Bronx.
When even members of the Regents recognize that state policy has generated a “manufactured crisis,” wouldn’t you think that other members of the board might stop and think?
Time for the Regents to step back and ask whether higher standards and harder tests are the best way to improve academic performance.
If students can’t jump over a four-foot bar, will they do better if the bar is raised to six feet?
Why not use those billions to provide the support that students and teachers need–like smaller classes, universal pre-K, and after-school programs– instead of pouring it into more measurement?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“They are using false information to create a crisis..” That is the M.O. of the whole privatization movement, use a crisis, whether real or manufactured, as an excuse to privatize education, Social Security, Medicare and the rest of the social safety net. The crisis of hurricane Katrina was used as an excuse to fire more than 4,000 teachers, destroy the teachers unions and to privatize the New Orleans school system. The economic disaster of 2008 was used as an excuse to slash the funding of many social programs and education. The “crisis” of deficits is used as an excuse to slash, burn and cut school funding, pensions and health benefits. The financial crisis in Detroit was used as a rationale to steal the pensions of municipal workers. It’s called the shock doctrine or disaster capitalism.
“False information” – I dunno, doesn’t that translate to, well, lie? Why can’t they just call a spade a spade.
de·ceit
/diˈsēt/
noun
noun: deceit; plural noun: deceits1. the action or practice of deceiving someone by concealing or misrepresenting the truth.
“Just because something isn’t a lie does not mean that it isn’t deceptive. A liar knows that he is a liar, but one who speaks mere portions of truth in order to deceive is a craftsman of destruction.”
“You must remember, my dear lady, the most important rule of any successful illusion: First, the people must want to believe in it.”
“Deceit for personal gain is one of history’s most recurring crimes.
“Anything someone gets conned into will never be that great.”
NYS Teacher,
(From the latest thesaurus by Webster:)
deceit:
King, Tisch, malevolence, sneakiness, disingneuousness, cheating, Bloomberg, chicanery, Klein, slyness, treachery, Rhee, crookedness, majority of Board of Regents, duplicity, Duncan, crookedness, scheme, sham, fraud, Obama
Craftsmen of destruction!
“the most important rule of any successful illusion: First, the people must want to believe in it.”
The craftsmen of destruction may have misunderestimated [sic] the people.
Antonyms ????
There’s an easy way to rebut the privatization charge.
Can ed reformers point to an existing public school or series of public schools that have benefitted from ed reform?
The onus should be on them. They sold this to voters as “improving public schools”. Where are the public schools (individual, district, or state) they have improved?
The measure should not be “how many charters can Tisch open in rural districts? She’s says she’s going after rural districts next. The measure should be “how did her reforms improve existing NYC public schools?”
That’s what she said she intended to do. For goodness sakes. They’ve had more than a decade and billions of dollars. One would think they could point to successful PUBLIC schools, if that was the intent.
Here’s what will happen with Common Core, bc the system hasn’t changed. http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/is-stumbling-and-bumbling-good-thing.html and Here’s the solution to artificial test scores. Challenge them http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/accountability-with-honor-and-yes-we.html
Take charge of your schools, challenge, compare contrast.
It’s at least understandable when a suburban-based Regent says, “We have a lot of great schools. When you factor out the poorest kids, we do great,” as the “progressive” Westchester-based Harry Phillips has. It’s bizarre and not a little bit sad when the Regent representing the Bronx says, in essence: drop dead, urban schools, you’re upsetting the swells.
Where did Rosa say anything like what you are accusing her of saying?
She wants to stop/slow standards reform because “The conversation is (that) kids are not ready; it’s really the black and brown children in urban centers.”
She is asking to protect the current state of affairs, with the overwhelming majority of the state’s students of color, English language learners, those living in extreme poverty, and a disproportionate number of special education students warehoused in a small number of urban districts.
The high-performing districts Rosa is passionately defending are brutally segregated, and the segregation didn’t happen by accident. Where is Regent Rosa’s passionate call to do something to help the children she allegedly represents?
Stopping the “standards” (sic) “reform” (sic) would be a great first step toward helping those children. Testing them and showing how poorly they perform is certainly not helping those kids, is it?
Dienne,
Is it better to not know how poorly they perform?
TE
Glad to see you finally found your way out of your cave. TEN YEARS of NCLB FAILURE with more reasonable standards/assessments than the CCSS train wreck. Foe the last TEN years in NYS students cloud tell exactly how poorly they performed. Are you a “1” ? are you
a “2” ? STOP! Yes I’m a ONE – the lowest of the LOW. I’m not only a ONE, a certified NCLB failure, but I’m in AIS classes to rub it in. No fun electives for this failure; just more time to do poorly. The only difference TE is that now NYS can tell 70% of its 8 to 14 year olds that they performed poorly, that they are 1s or 2s, abject failures. And if your an IEP student, 95% failures; Black students, 85% failures.
It wasn’t that long a go when the mantra was “develop a life long love for learning”
I thought the self-esteem movement did more harm than good, but this movement is beyond harmful – it will scar many children for life.
Life long learners? Ha. Now we’re producing life long haters.
I am not sure you would say I have left the cave. My post was meant to point out that a student has the skills a student has, no matter what label you attach to those skills. A high school diploma does not make a student literate. A high school diploma does not make a student able to add fractions or reason abstractly. Change cut scores to say all are excellent or all fail. It does not change the ability of students one bit.
Hers where your wrong TE. The tests of which we speak “attempt” to measure a very, very, very, very, very, very, narrow range of abilities.
No system should be constraining and labeling children as failures when so, so, so many abilities go unrecognized or un measured.
No one should be defining the intellect of an 8 year old.
The interpretations of standardized scores may try to draw distinctions between very close numbers, but they are not useful. Large differences, however do seem to be significant, at least in the classes I teach.
TE, you seem to imagine that these tests are valid and reliable measures of student “how they perform?” What do you mean by that? Clearly, they are measures of how they perform on these tests. Now, I can imagine all sorts of tests that would provide accurate information. It would be child’s play, for example, to design a test that would tell us whether little Yolanda knows her multiplication table through 12 x 12 or whether little Kwame knows the meanings of “viviparous” and “oviparous.” But to imagine that these tests, as poorly designed as they are, tell us anything meaningful about anything as vague as “general math ability” and “general reading ability” seems pretty fanciful to me. Against what independent measures have these claims been validated? Now, the theory behind these tests seems to be that there is a checklist of standards and one can test each to see if a student has mastered it. If that were true, then one could make a list, based on the test, of the standards that the kid has mastered and those he or she has not mastered. Let’s consider ONE ELA standard:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12. Analyze the impact of the author’s choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story or drama (e.g., where a story is set, how the action is ordered, how the characters are introduced and developed).
Now, let’s ask 600 English professors each to write a multiple-choice question to measure that standard [sic]. Let’s suppose that our professors will be forced to read Tom Clancy novels by the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth if they don’t carry out this insane demand. Of course, we would end up with six hundred WILDLY DIFFERENT questions. Against what independent measure of this standard [sic] would we validate our choice from among those 600 questions of the ONE QUESTION we are going to put on our test to measure the standard [sic]? How will we know that the item we have chosen is measuring what we say we are measuring? Consult an oracle, perhaps?
I can only speak about the tests I know my students take. I have little concern that my students who get an ACT score of 36 will do well in the classes I teach. My students who have an ACT score of 16 often have difficulty in my classes. For you east coast folks, an ACT of 36 is roughly the equivalent of an SAT score of 1600 (verbal and math), and an ACT of 16 is roughly the equivalent of 790 (verbal and math).
Yikes. First sentence should be
“TE, you seem to imagine that these tests are valid and reliable measures of “how they [students] perform.”
I really need to start proofing these posts before hitting the Reply link!
Let me try that all over again. Sorry about the typos.
TE, you seem to imagine that these tests are valid and reliable measures of “how they [students] perform.” What do you mean by that? Clearly, the test results are measures of how they perform on the tests. But that’s a tautology. We want a bit more, I think, of tests.
Now, I can imagine all sorts of tests that would provide accurate information. It would be child’s play, for example, to design a test that would tell us whether little Yolanda knows her multiplication table through 12 x 12 or whether little Kwame knows the meanings of “viviparous” and “oviparous.” But to imagine that these tests, as poorly designed as they are, tell us anything meaningful about anything as vague as “general math ability” and “general reading ability” seems pretty fanciful to me. Against what independent measures have these claims been validated? Now, the theory behind these tests seems to be that there is a checklist of standards and one can test each to see if a student has mastered it. If that were true, then one could make a list, based on the test results, of the standards that the kid has mastered and those he or she has not mastered. But no such lists are provided by the testers because they know that the notion that they are testing specific standards validly is ludicrous.
Let’s consider ONE ELA standard:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12. Analyze the impact of the author’s choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story or drama (e.g., where a story is set, how the action is ordered, how the characters are introduced and developed).
Now, let’s ask 600 English professors each to write a multiple-choice question to measure that standard [sic]. Let’s suppose that our professors will be forced by the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth to read Tom Clancy novels if they don’t carry out this insane demand.
Of course, we would end up with six hundred WILDLY DIFFERENT questions. Against what independent measure of this standard [sic] would we validate our choice from among those 600 questions of the ONE QUESTION we are going to put on our test to measure the standard [sic]? How will we know that the item we have chosen is measuring what we say we are measuring? Consult an oracle, perhaps?
But perhaps there is some sort of incantation that one can perform by means of which all this invalidity of particular items can add up to validity for the test as a whole. Perhaps a whole lot of completely invalid items can add up to a test that is valid overall. Perhaps I shall encounter the shade of Jeanne D’Arc wandering down my hallway this evening. Yes, that seems more likely.
The reasoning from the deformers is simple. One might even say simple-minded. This education business is easy. Simply make a list of what the kids need to have learned. Then test to see if they have learned each item on the list.
It’s the Powerpolnt Bullet List theory of teaching and learning. And look how it is being implemented. See my note, above, about the validity of measurement of particular CCSS ELA “standards.”
Love this image:
“If students can’t jump over a four-foot bar, will they do better if the bar is raised to six feet?”
Probably no different than if you raised the basket on a basketball court in an attempt to get more of us old teacher-types to learn to master the slam dunk!
Way to go Rosa! You tell them, girl!
Whoop, Whoop!
Having worked in higher education for many years in NYS, I can tell you that the game of adding extra semesters to “poor students” schedules is just that – a game. Remedial classes were, and are, cash cows for many institutions. Colleges don’t decry that it takes 5+ years to graduate these days, they thrive on it. And the 2-year schools play by the same rules.
Remedial classes are not the goal at my institution. The goal is to move students through in four years, but there is significant resistance to simply giving degrees away.
Why not just give the funds to the high schools to provide robust remediation and support? Better there than in college, no?
Certainly the math faculty at my institution would be in favor of that. Measured in terms of math enrolment, my university is the largest high school in the state.
Betty Rosa is a hero. Thank you, Ms. Rosa, for your integrity.
Harry Philips is starting to wake up and smell the mistakes he and the Board have made.
Mr. Philips, if you are reading this, do you care to comment where you now stand? You certainly had a lot to say recently when you met with Hudson Valley United, no?
Why didn’t she speak up earlier?
Did you hear? Chancellor Tisch has decided to create a subcommittee of five Regents to evaluate their own behavior vis-a-vis common core. Why bother to have checks and balances in government anymore???? Might as well let the emperor decide if he (she) is wearing any clothes. http://www.newsday.com/long-island/education/regents-chancellor-to-appoint-committee-for-common-core-review-1.6623185
Funny and horrific.
Maybe Chancellor Tisch should create a subcommittee of 5 New York state voters/taxpayers/parents who send their children to public schools in order to evaluate HER behavior.
Let’s predict some scores for her Royal Rote-and-Repeat-Rottenness (0 being “Not Yet”, 1 as “Approaching”, 2 as “Emergent”, 3 as “Transitional”, 4 as “Intermediate”, 5 as “Advanced”, and 6 as “Mastery”):
Arrogance: 3
Ignorance: 4
Disconnect: 5
Hubris: 6
Disingenuousness: 5
Inexperience: 6
Opportunism: 3
Self Absorbed: 6
Well Connected with Wall Street: 6
Closely Knit to Bloomberg: 6
Empathy for Ordinary People: 1
Stupidity: 5
Manipulative: 5
Happy Holidays to Ms. Tisch. Congratulations to her on her generally high scores . . . .
Let’s see… Cuomo is a parent, King is a parent, and Tisch is a parent — so that’s three parents; King and Tisch were teachers — so that’s two teachers (they’ve written and amended their own regulations so that now they can be counted as separate people under more than one category… and past teaching experience counts, no matter the type or duration); and maybe they’ll throw in one a friend who is a psychiatrist. There’s your committee of five.