Two Congressmen–a Democrat and a Republican–proposed legislation to cut back on federally mandated testing.
This is great news!
The legislation was immediately endorsed by the NEA.
“Today the National Education Association endorsed HR-4172, introduced last week by Reps. Chris Gibson (R-NY) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ). The bill would amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to change the number of federally mandated standardized tests state would be required to administer under the current law, eliminating annual testing and replacing it with grade-span testing (or testing once over a certain span of grades.)
“According to Rep. Gibson: “In the decade since No Child Left Behind was signed into law the focus in education has shifted from teaching to testing. But data shows the current testing regime established in No Child Left Behind has not led to higher standards. Teachers are spending more time preparing students to take tests and less time educating, while students are spending more time taking tests and less time learning.”
“The NEA’s leadership agrees. The organization today issued a lengthy endorsement of the legislation, praising the bill’s sponsors and slamming high-stakes standardized testing as harmful to students and detrimental to education.”
Write or call or email your Congressman and Senators and urge them to support HR-4172.
End the failed mandates of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Changing the number of these standardized tests is not enough.
We need to eliminate them.
The proponents of standards and testing, seeing the groundswell of opposition nationwide, are taking a preemptive measure. Leave the standards and testing in place. Pass off a bill that limits the number of tests as a response to the nationwide fury.
This legislation simply keeps SON OF NCLB alive. The deformers still get their standards-and-testing machine, and it still rolls over the nation’s kids.
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It’s time to put a stake in NCLB and NCLB II, not to seek ways to keep the blood-sucking deforms alive.
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This will be a longer fight than any of us would like it to be. I am in the fight for the long haul. Are you?This is a small step in the ‘correct’ (can’t bring myself to say ‘right’) direction. Every small step gives me renewed energy to fight for the next step. Yeah!!!
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it’s a start, though. And that’s good.
Love,
Pollyanna
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I’m not sure it is good. If the bill passes, it pretty much closes the discussion. “We listened to your concerns and limited the amount of testing. What more do you want? You’re being unreasonable.”
I agree with Robert – kill it now. Stake through the heart, silver bullet, cloves of garlic, whatever it takes, just kill them.
Love,
Pessimist
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I do see your point.
🙂
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I think, Dienne and Joanna, that if this bill makes it to the floor and passes in both houses, then the anti-deform movement is pretty much over.
The deformers will have their national standards and national tests, as well as their accountability systems based on those, the vendors will continue to sell practice tests and curricula with test-prep-style activities that “cover” the bullet list of standards, the plutocrats will laugh on their way to bank the profits from computer-adaptive curricula designed for test prep and correlated to those national standards, and real curricular and pedagogical innovation will be dead.
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I don’t think it will make a difference, because a lot of the states have piled on the testing, and those states with CC have those tests.
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I don’t agree with you Dienne. We won’t change the mind set of enough Americans, in the short term, to reverse the effects of decades of well funded propaganda directed at an illiterate and ill informed electorate . The business Round table/ Chamber of Commerce, (ALEC?) began organizing against the interests of labor a long time ago. Labor has not kept up. Most businessmen are autocrats in their little heart of hearts. I don’t see that changing. They will not accede power willingly.
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Bob, you are absolutely tight! This is a side door to renew the NCLB legislation. Having “fewer” high stakes tests just ratchets up the stakes, and still holds children and teachers “accountable” to the corporate overlords.
“The bill would amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to change the number of federally mandated standardized tests state would be required to administer under the current law, eliminating annual testing and replacing it with grade-span testing (or testing once over a certain span of grades.)”
NO, NO, NO. End it, don’t mend it. As you can see Randi is right on board for this, as is the website linked above, which is an advocacy site for the “education technology” industry.
Diane, please don’t let your friendship for Randi blind you to this question. She’s still playing for the other side.
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And, this bill will just create a huge market in interim testing to be provided by vendors so that districts can “check” to see if kids are “on track.”
So, more of the same.
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Bob, you’re right but this isn’t a bill, it’s an amendment to one of the worst bills in modern history. It’s purpose is starkly to win permanent legislated imposition of the control of the accountability industry.
How in God’s name aren’t the AFT and the NEA calling for the REPEAL of NCLB?!
The way we can use it is to welcome the sentiment, but then table it pending full congressional hearings. We can use it as publicity for the necessity of the hearings.
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Meanwhile, the kids in private schools take none of the mandated state tests and yet most of them go off to college or into the workforce and apparently do just fine in life.
We shouldn’t have spend an average of $20K per child per year on private school tuition to protect our children from our own government and its mandated tests.
Government should serve all citizens and not a few corporations.
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Well said, Cupcake!
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i ❤ cupcake's comment!
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Great news BUT as others have noted, perhaps just a shift to more use of interim tests. Also, I am unclear about the intersection of the proposed NCLB changes (if passed) and the requirement for teacher evaluations based on student scores on annual state tests. All of that is hard-wired into RttT grants and into the requirements of many states who applied for and did not receive those grants. And then there are the forthcoming PARCC and SMARTER tests for the C0mmon Core. So there may be less than meets the eye unless and until all of the rest of this is sorted out.
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Add to your Twitter Feed: Copy, paste and ReTweet often
Costly annual standardized tests harming children
WRITE
CALL
EMAIL
Your Congress Reps & urge them to support HR-4172
http://bit.ly/PtUzIU
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Lloyd, how can somebody who was so adamantly dismissive of the proposal for congressional hearings be suddenly so enthusiastic about this crappy amendment?
Remember how you wrote, just last week, that
“it’s obvious that the odds of Congressional hearings dealing with this corruption are slim to nothing.
The political machine that supports the destruction of public education to the benefit of he billionaire robber barons and wolves of Sesame Street may only be dealt with the same way Teddy Roosevelt dealt with similar problems when he was president—–through the courts using existing laws.”
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The odds of the amendment getting through Congress are probably slim but that doesn’t mean you don’t support the members of Congress who support your cause.
The enemy of your enemy is your friend and the actions of these members of Congress supports public education and teachers. It may not go as far as some would like but often a position such as this one is a step in the right direction.
In addition, supporting the amendment being put forward by these two members of Congress through Twitter gets the word out that someone sees what’s going, thinks its wrong and is attempting to fix it.
You do not ignore something like this just because the odds are against success. That is foolish.
Actually, its as foolish as someone who votes for a GOP candidate in the 2014 Congressional elections because Obama is unpopular in the polls. Democrats who are members of Congress are not all neo-liberals or liberals. Many are moderates closer to GOP moderates which is why we often find members from both parties joining in alliances to introduce amendments and bills that ma be unpopular from extremists from both parties. The same goes for the GOP that’s made up of tea party conservatives, no-conservatives, fundamentalist Christians, moderates, etc.
All Republicans are not far right conservatives and all Democrats are not far left liberals.
Congressional candidates must be judged on their voting record and not their party affiliation.
Anyone who takes the effort to think before an election may go to Vote Smart and check voting records on specific issues for members of Congress.
http://votesmart.org/
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I emailed a message to my local congressman. He’s a Rep & seems to lean pretty far right. I appealed to his budget sense.
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Nothing ventured
Nothing gained
:o)
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If we are to have assessments, then let them not be a single set of invariant summative assessments but a range of alternative assessments, including portfolios DESIGNED BY STUDENTS AND THEIR TEACHERS rather than by some distant, totalitarian assessment consortium.
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No, we are to have NO mandated tests. Mandating any data-driven policies at all will surrender public education to corporate control for another generation.
Legislating tests is not an appropriate use for legislative powers.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx “Legislating tests is not an appropriate use for legislative powers.”
I so agree with this. It’s bureaucratic micromanagement, & uncalled-for interference in local affairs by state & fed.
Look to the Finns, the Asians, any other country whose ed achievement our leaders SAY they want to compete with. None of them mandate annual standardized tests!… OK, the UK may be stupidly following in our footsteps– let’s model a sensible second look/ backtrack from expensive foolishness which LOOKS like accountability but ACTUALLY is a recipe for privatizing ed!
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If state and federal governments pick up more of the cost of education, state and federal supervision will inevitably follow. As poster Ang stated not long ago, if I am paying for it, I want a say in how it is run. This is, I think, a pretty common sentiment.
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No “ifs, ands or buts.” We do not need federally mandated standardized testing. We do not need some elaborate alternative assessment tinker toy assembly by anyone. Teachers do just fine at evaluating their students without someone dictating how it should be done. Years ago my children presented portfolios of their work to us. Rather than bringing the work home when completed and hanging it on the refrigerator, we waited until conferences to get a stack of work that our children got to describe to us with different categories: Hardest, most interesting, most fun… While interesting I missed the excitement of home presentations and displays, and I certainly did not need them from the kids as they got older. Any reflection by the kids was done at the time they received the assignments back. I really see little value in yearly review and setting goals. It is not a management review. The next thing we know our kids will be writing vision statements. Give me a break. Can we allow kids to grow up and learn without dissecting everything they do? Plain old ordinary grades appear to be a fairly accurate predictor of college performance. Let teachers do their thing. If they are into rubrics and projects, more power to them. As soon as project based learning becomes THE way to do things and portfolios are mandated they will become almost as oppressive as bubble tests. The only difference is having a local authority telling you how you must teach. You can be sure that the approved project plan (using the approved project planning tool) to be turned in before implemented will not be far behind. Does everything have to be a production? Sorry, Bob. This is my own tirade not meant to bash your interest in project based learning. However poorly I have presented my case, I just don’t one micromanagement system overtaken by another.
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Completely agree 2O2T. How did this country survive to this point without all the “micromanagement” systems in public education? Sheer luck, I guess.
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Big love to 2old2T and Duane!
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I agree. No centrally mandated tests. Ecologies are healthier than are monocultures.
I want to be absolutely clear about this.
We should have no centrally mandated tests. None.
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None that are not completely voluntary. Students who wish to use a particular mechanism to demonstrate their abilities or achievements should not be denied that.
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I had this discussion with a friend the other day. When I was in school we had to take Comps, comprehensive exams, that covered our entire major. I found the exams a valuable experience that forced me to put all I had learned in context. My friend, however, knew a student who absolutely freaked and ended up failing the exams despite being Phi Delta Kappa. She had to retake the exam that summer. It was a very intense two day test. I remember long hours of preparation and very little sleep, but, for me, the experience was valuable. For her, the exam was a nightmare even though I know her grades far outmatched mine. Since there were no free grades at this college, I know she deserved every one.
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Hurray!!!!!!
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If you read a little more closely, you’ll notice that it’s only an amendment. There is probably a lot more in ESEA that should be changed.
http://gibson.house.gov/legislation/gibson-esea-amendment.htm
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I do know that in NC our state superint. is vocal about not needing the high stakes test at the end of the year when we are already tracking data with benchmarks all throughout the year. . .tracking progress. I don’t see that just completely going away—many teachers like the data they get throughout the year, but not the pressure of the end of grade with its high stakes for kids and their jobs.
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“many teachers like the data they get throughout the year,”
Really?
From bubble in, corporate made tests?
Everyone I know looks at the “data” with a “big a$$ eye roll”, and rueful laugh.
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No, it’s not from bubble in. It’s from these I-pad assessments with the M-Class.
Seriously. A lot of teachers like knowing exactly where the children are and find the data helpful.
Yes, it’s corporate made, but so were text books. And I was never bothered by text books.
It’s about balance.
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False equivalency.
Textbooks do not equal tests.
I know of no one bothered by books.
I know of a lot of teachers who think our standardized assessments are junk.
I have no experience with M class, whatever that is. Perhaps it is wonderful.
But no number taken from one assessment, (especially one I didn’t make, cannot see and do not have the opportunity to go over with the kid after) has ever given me a picture of a student.
It is just a number.
Not a kid.
Oh well.
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PS, Joanna,
I am not trying to disagree with you…just very saddened to hear teachers are buying in to the “data driven instruction” thing.
I feel sorry for their students.
Less time with the micro (one number) more time with the macro (whole kid), IMHO.
Anyway, have a great evening
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Go ahead and disagree, Ang. you’re 100% correct in your description of teachers eye-rolling.
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Ang— no problem. I don’t mind disagreeing when it helps me learn more.
Sometimes I also have these feelings of shock that anyone could like Common Core or not be totally bothered by all testing. BUT in the daily grind where these things are part of daily routines and there is not time to take a stand on them esoterically, I do find that teachers can tell you exactly what they are OK with and not. I grabbed the textbook analogy only because I recall that it was maybe the old corporate stamp on public Ed that is being replaced with CCSS and things like M-Class (it is made by Amplify Inc).
I forget if you are a teacher, but I have learned that there is a middle between the opinions I read on this blog and the reality of the application of things resulting from RttT. As I have framed it before, NC got knocked up (RttT) and married (CCSS). So we have this proverbial baby and marriage and while regulars on the blog are preaching about the horrors of this illegitimate child, it is real. It cries, poops, eats and has contracts associated with it and we have not found a new home for it. It will grow into something, but it is here. It is real.
So I try to listen to what teachers say (something we should all be doing), and I generally hear stuff like this:
“Worst is TRC progress monitoring (Dibels progress monitoring is fine). Second is passages crammed into one semester and not used formatively. Will be useful but not current way used. Third was cut score used to determine passage rate of reading eog. I do not mind mclass as a benchmark. I think it is useful. ”
From a third grade teacher.
So maybe we shouldn’t have had this RttT baby, but we did.
You see the difference here? We are too far into this to not talk about it in real terms and not just theoretical ones. It is our daily grind.
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“Doctor! I am analyzing the data on your patient! The heartrate is 200bpm, temperature 101.6F, respiration is 20. BP is 150 over 95. Clearly something is wrong!”
“Well… you didn’t actually look at the patient. You just measured my perfectly healthy cat”
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No one botherd by books?
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TAGO, TE!
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Joanna,
Yes, I am a high school biology teacher. Over 20 years.
Every level of the subject.
Every type of kid you can think of, at one time or another.
Every type of parent you can think of, too.
And I really do feel sorry for any teacher so confused, traumatized, manipulated, lied to, or whatever that they think some number (generated by one of these crappy tests, benchmarks, etc.) really tells them anything new about a student.
Actually, as I said, I really feel for the students.
So it is not about a messy middle or balance.
This is crap and we are wasting a ton of money, effort and time on this snake oil.
But most importantly, we are wasting our children.
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Ang–
it’s not like that. And believe me, I used to feel frustrated and sick at the very thought of any type of acquiescing to the data movement, but elementary classroom and ESL teachers are telling me that they are glad to be able to track definite aspects to learning to read in the children as they progress. So you see, this is where data can be helpful. . .I’m not suggesting that it then be taken and used for marketing, etc. (and if you have to have one with the other, then I would be for dumping it too). But I am listening to elementary teachers who are saying that there is value in having this data to help them pinpoint where a child needs more help and growth.
I’m just reporting what I’ve heard.
And, I don’t think it will be thrown aside completely. How could it be? That would be like going back to a quill and a papyrus and an abacus when newer things replaced them.
I think elementary and high school are probably very different. But many teachers say they like the data. So if it can be for teachers to help students, that’s not a bad thing.
And nobody paid me to say that. (Damn, I wish someone would, though. . .nice work if you can get it, I guess).
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“But many teachers say they like the data. So if it can be for teachers to help students, that’s not a bad thing.”
I hear you saying that some teachers are telling you they like “data”.
OK
I really do believe they are confused, misguided, concerned about the wrong things, inexperienced, brainwashed, cowed by administration, “get on board” types, “make the best of it” types. Perhaps they have been lied to and convinced of the effectiveness or necessity of these random number generators.
All of the above, some of the above, any of the above.
I really don’t know.
Elementary teachers taught reading (to all kinds of children) for generations without the invasive, expensive, time wasters and joy killers known now as assessments. Experienced, trained teachers knew what the students needed and how to provide it.
I have seen no evidence that there is any benefit to the student in frequent bubble assessments or computer adaptive money making schemes.
BTW, I teach ESL biology , too. Love working with those kids.
Hate giving them the benchmarks.
Frustrates them in order to provide me with “data” that I already know.
They do not read english well;-)
Anyway, that is where I am coming from.
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Are you a teacher Ang?
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Betsy,
Yep.
See my post above, 7:54 pm
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Well said, Mathvale!!!
Exactly!!!
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Ang, what joy to read your comments! YUP, somehow we muddled along without having standardized tests and Lord Coleman dictating to us AND PRODUCED THE GREATEST EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM IN THE WORLD.
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Joanna, the wording, “I don’t see that just completely going away”, is exactly the off-the shelf stock phrase of the sock-puppets who have been deployed across the internet by “opinion molding” services.
Just to be clear: Yes, it’s going all-the-way away. There was never any reason for it except for the hostile take over, and no, actual teachers don’t like it. The only ones who say they do are the few who are directly recruited to say that. You lost the narrative; the public is wise to you; it’s going to be over.
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I am not part of the Corporate movement, Chemteacher. But I am in a NC school every day.
Wish I had your crystal ball.
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“You lost the narrative. The public is wise to you.”
????
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“BUT in the daily grind where these things are part of daily routines and there is not time to take a stand on them esoterically. . . ”
Maybe not esoterically, but MORALLY, ETHICALLY and PROFESSIONALLY it’s always time to take a stand. Those that don’t, well, what do I call them, Joanna?
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It’s a disease, Swacker. It’s not peer pressure. If you work in a facility that is infected, you have to help the people there.
This is not a peer pressure thing. The peer pressure thing happened at some higher level and it caused a disease and our schools are infected. There’s no choosing whether to go along or not. . .if you are in an infected area, you are in an infected area.
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Interesting analogy. TAGO!
But one can inoculate oneself against most diseases, especially idiologies of the mind.
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True dat.
Anyone who makes this as black and white as chmtchr is going to help nothing.
I can’t believe he thinks I’m a troll.
My husband is dying laughing at that because all I ever talk about is saving public schools.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx With the right statutory ed structure, your NC teachers’ org, if they like the ipad MClass stuff, could vote it in as a recommendation for the localities– who, if they wanted it, could get funding for it.
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Congressmen? They don’t have any real power. That is just the middle level that deals with local politics. Local politics don’t really matter. Local politics are just a distraction for the masses, and if they do anything that the elites don’t like, new laws will appear, etc. Local politicians play games and make people think that they have a say in the grand scheme of things. The local, little politicians may do these stunts to get votes, but that’s about all folks! Back to the drawing board. It would be much better to write to your local billionaire. Go buy a copy of Forbes and go down the list. That is about the only chance. Does anyone have a billionaire in the family tree? I doubt it…Oh well.
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That’s not the only chance. Make better choices about where to spend money…
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XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Now just a cotton-pickin’ moment. There is more than a faint possibility that this amendment was introduced by legislators who’ve noticed a voter backlash afoot despite the billionaires’ propaganda– could it be, (the legislators think) their voters are getting wise despite print & TV ads? Perhaps they’re trying to cover their bases, make sure they get re-elected. If voters were to amass loud support of this amendment, it could form part of a turnaround.
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Better than nothing, I guess, but you know this isn’t going to go anywhere.
What really needs to be done is drag Obama and Duncan into impeachment hearings over their completely illegal education mandates.
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How about for Obomber for ordering the assassination of American citizens with no judicial proceedings whatsoever.
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Or at least demand congressional hearings on holding tax money hostage for contests.
That’s just as much a problem as testing.
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Let’s see what actually happens next. I don’t trust the deformers.
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I recently read “The Power Elite” by Mills, and it really opened my eyes. That book from the 1950s really explains everything. Of course, things are much “further along” since 1956… Mills was obviously a genius to see this so far back. Once I read that book (I mean really read it), I realized that there was nothing I could do, and I went back to watching Netflix. In other words, don’t get a heart attack about things you cannot change. You can always teach in a private school or move abroad as well. We are still allowed to leave the country at will. That is an important freedom we still have. When you travel, you see that there are many wonderful countries in the world. There are many countries that respect education and their teachers. We are an outlier.
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“Once I read that book (I mean really read it), I realized that there was nothing I could do, and I went back to watching Netflix.”
I’m not trying to make you feel bad, because we’ve all been there, but that is the exact opposite of what CW Mills hoped would happen upon reading his book.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx On the other hand, you could look at the current situation (polarization, gridlock in congress, big-$ interests infiltrating every level of govt already halfway to privatizing public goods) as an inevitable convulsion, a giant backlash, provoked by hard economic times, against the progressive advances made when the economy was booming. A cycle which is coming near to running its course, as voters’, teachers’, parents’, taxpayers’ voices are beginning to be heard, which will inevitably cause the pendulum to swing back toward the middle. Why not be part of the outcry?
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If in the ideal world all this high stakes testing ended abruptly, the corporate “ed reformers” would be finding “plan b” as to how to profit off of public education .. just n another way. So what would that “other way” be??? Just wonderng.
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Plan B is for profit charter schools/ online charter schools/ private schools or maybe that was plan A- they win either way.
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Plan A was privatization, the means to get there are standards and the accompanying tests.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxYour question is a good reminder of the other political path all of us must pursue simultaneously, which is campaign reform, especially legislation to override the Citizens’ United decision.
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I am continuing with my planned meetings with my representatives, and using the NPE’s toolkit to work for congressional hearings to stop the mandated tests.
http://www.networkforpubliceducation.org/2014/03/grassroots-toolkit-time-for-congressional-hearings-into-the-abuse-of-standardized-testing/
This is a question that needs to be fully investigated and understood by the American people. If the NPE endorses this amendment, though, that constitutes an endorsement of the extension of NCLB, and I will have to revoke my membership.
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Take your ball and go home, huh?
Your way or the highway? Sounds familiar.
Chmtchr: sometimes revoking a membership makes a statement or provides a distance to allow for thought to prevail over emotion. But I don’t see who you’ve got (we’ve got) other than NPE.
We have to accept where we are in order to redirect it. We can’t just stamp our feet and declare black and white truths. Strong persuasions and visions will impact things, but corporate contracts and the data movement (which this might be referred to in hindsight) will forever be part of education DNA.
And nobody paid me to say that.
You are a little bit paranoid, I think. It’s ok to talk to people whose visions differ slightly. Heck, having a drink with a reformer might be a good exercise for you.
Don’t run off and hide.
Talk. Think. Pray. Engage.
Watch Fox News sometimes so you don’t emulate it in just another language.
There will always be right leaning policies with which to contend.
Keep your head.
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Pray, don’t need no stinkin praying about the edudeformers’ idiologies and idiocies, other than to say “goddamn them all”.
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Joanna, I have to wonder who you think you are to characterize any position opposed to yours like this, but you’ve (again) interposed your insults when I’m attempting to communicate with other actual supporters of public education.
No, like many others I was an activist on these issues before NPE existed, and I have no intention of going home if it fails. The statement you’ve just posted displays exactly who you speak for here, and I think you are throwing around the word “we” much too loosely.
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OK.
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Relax, Joanna.
Chemtchr once accused me of being a troll, and all I ever do is oppose privatization, defend tenure and pensions for the right reasons, and defend education as a public trust only.
Chemtchr is a purist, and I am very attracted to purism.
But I find pragmatism and calculation in my activism to simply produce more results and faster.
Still, I will always consider Chemtcher to be my ally even if he/she does not requite my sentiment.
And you, Ms. Joanna, are also the Best defender of public education, no doubts ever . . . . . .
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Again, I’m talking to other committed activists here. This is important.
Diane, this is the kind of “unity” that will deflect us from effective action.
I don’t know how the board takes positions on legislation, but I hope you give serious consideration before you support any possible endorsement of NCLB renewal. It is a deal killer, and a movement killer. I joined to win this fight, not to surrender to the concern trolls. I guess Randi is on the board (God, I hope Dennis isn’t. Did you see he jumped to endorse this, also?). Does her vote outweigh mine?
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So what are they going to do to everyone when NO ONE makes NCLB mandates? Turn us all into charters? Since all of this federal posturing extends beyond their mandate, perhaps at some point enough people will realize that they have skin in the game, and they will object. How many people do your really think want to pay their taxes to fund private education? People will ignore as much as they can, but there will come a time when enough is enough.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx “perhaps at some point enough people will realize that they have skin in the game” — you put your finger right on it. This is the way the message needs to be focused: help people understand, BOTH SHORT- & LONG-TERM, how ed-deform policies are affecting them personally.
This means taking the bull by the horns! Do we have a message for inner-city families whose zoned school stinks & they’re being offered charter alternatives? Can we formulate an appropriate message for insulated folks who fear public-school ‘indoctrination’ & want to funnel their taxes into evangelical charters?
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This is fantastic. I have been waiting to hear something like this for a long time! even though I would much rather see NCLB removed all together at least this is start. its nice to see that legislators are taking the numbers that testing produces and putting them to use with the original act, instead of using it to get rid of teachers, and threaten schools.
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Watch out. . .you will get attacked for thinking that.
I just did.
See above.
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i appreciate the concern, but there is a great quote out there that states “So you have enemies? good, that means you have stood up for something in your life.”
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I remember when my district decided that everyone should give Aimsweb reading tests all the way through high school if the student was receiving reading instruction. Now remember it was never tested on high school students. It just all of a sudden was being marketed to high schools when it was sold (to Pearson?). So in addition to using an intensive reading program that provided more information than Aimsweb could ever dream of providing without disrupting class, I was supposed to pull aside, in the middle of class, the kids on my caseload and give them their timed readings once a week, once every other week,…depending on their reading rate. These little breakaway sessions were unrelated to what I was teaching to the rest of the class. My students generally tried to read as fast as they could. I was not supposed to check for comprehension, of which there was little, just the reading rate. some of my ELL students could read very rapidly but had no idea what they had read. I was then supposed to enter this stuff into a computer record which I never managed to master using some elaborate formula for calculating something. I soon dropped the whole process as a worthless waste of time. I frequently forgot to do the testing as it did not fit with what I was teaching. No one ever questioned me on the scores. It is this kind of mindless collection of data that really pisses me off.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I am with you, Joanna. Government works incrementally, not with giant steps. Even though we’re overwhelmed with top-down changes imposed in just a few short years, there were “many slips ‘tween cup & lips” between 1980 (Reagan) & 2001 (NCLB)& 2009 (draft CCSS)– and, simultaneously, between 1980(Reagan), 1994(NAFTA), 1999(repeal Glass-Steagall) & 2008(financial collapse) — which made possible the educational leviathans seen in states which clinched all-Republican statehouses in 2010 (Wisc, Ohio, Indiana, NC, Fla, etc).
We can only come back to the center with incremental steps. Amending NCLB to roll back the number of standardized tests is a good place to begin.
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2old2T,
Re:”It is this kind of mindless collection of data that really pisses me off.”
Hear you, feel you, living it.
Also the mindless worship of “data” really pisses me off!
XO,
Ang
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Joanna makes a good point data can be useful. But only if we fully understand how that data is collected and modeled. Question and require evidence and validation. Do not accept what is handed to you by central office or “experts”. Statistical models are only as good as their assumptions. My skepticism with VAM starts with being too complex, requires too many questionable assumptions, and not peer reviewed when applied to teaching. The proponents seem lost in the wilderness of statistics. They have lost all sense of perspective and reality when applying the science. VAM may very well be an incredible misapplication so damaging, it will take us years to fix.
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They have lost all sense of perspective and reality when applying the science.
Precisely.
From the Reformish Lexicon:
data-driven decision making. Reformish numerology.
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Isn’t some of that because it’s new? So everyone wants to exploit it to the max. Like when email first came out and it was encouraged that you email the person in the next room instead of walking over to talk to them. Just a new bell or whistle to resound because you can? But eventually it evens out. Like those Christmases in the mid 80s when we all got a VCR and watched eight movies the first day?
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It would be something we could roll our eyes over and go about our business if data worship was not doing so much damage. I love your email analogy; I remember thinking exactly that. With time we did learn the best uses, one being don’t write anything down that could come back and bite you. I once had an administrator come an apologize to me over an email I had yet to read. In it he had promised remedies he legally didn’t have to provide (for situations that didn’t exist). I had not read it and naively said not to worry I would deep six it. I didn’t and soon got feedback from other sources that told me to read it. The guy was a snake and continued to prove it. His only reason for coming to speak to me was damage control. He had put things in writing that he really should have only delivered face to face. That way he could deny them. Someone with tenure could have used his deviousness against him. Data is being used for destructive control. Too many people, students and teachers, are being hurt by its seductive ability to feign truth. As such, we cannot afford to roll our eyes while they work out the kinks. It is and will come back to bite us.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx It needn’t take ‘years’ to fix. We can start immediately with a “moratorium” of 3 – 5 yrs — long enough to let it die in committees while allowing legislators to save face, then it will die its natural death.
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“Statistical models are only as good as their assumptions.”
Yup and all of the statistical models that utilize educational standards and standardized testing as their starting points, i.e., assumptions, are rotten to the core as the epistemological and ontological bases on which they are based are so fraught with error which renders any conclusions drawn to be completely INVALID. Start with crap end up with crap. See Wilson referenced above to understand why.
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The Huffington Post ran, today, an article making predictions about the future of the Internet. One of the predictions was that “The Internet will be a better teacher than your teacher is.”
That’s the view that many of the deformers have. The technocrats believe that learning in the early grades can be and should be all laid out in a neat computerized maze with the same interim and final goals for every kid. The “personalization” that these people have in mind is simply measurement to find out where on the maze to place the kid. That there should be a single maze, with invariant, predetermined goals for every kid is, for them, a given. This is given by the model that they have fallen in love with.
That maze is the standard computer-adaptive learning model.
I am reminded of a story that Charles Heiser told in a genetics class that I took years ago about a team of agriscientists who went to the high Andes in Bolivia and said, “These ignorant peasants. They’re doing it all wrong! They are planting these crops every which way, all interspersed with one another, a little of this and a little of that. They showed the peasants how to do things in a scientific way, following modern, industrial principles. They showed them how to rip everything out and plant neat little monoculture rows.
And then, in the harsh altiplano, all the scientists’ crops died.
Ecologies are healthier than are monocultures. Independent teachers making independent decisions about their differing students and their teaching and following their screwball, unique passions and interests and values and techniques make for a healthier educational system than one gets from these a priori plans–the completely preformulated tests and computerized instructional systems.
There is no single way to be a good teacher or a good learner. There are many, many paths.
Here’s what I think of evaluation checklists: @&%@&#$*&@&*!!!!!!! I am a teacher. I practice the same profession that Yeshua of Nazareth, Gautama Buddha, Rumi, Nasreddin, Socrates, Hypatia, Nan-in, and Richard Feynman practiced. And guess what? They were all GREAT teachers but in very, very different ways. And somehow they managed without standardized tests. Imagine someone applying the Danielson rubric to one of Socrates’s conversations with a bunch of his pupils. The best teacher I had in elementary school stood at the front of the class and LECTURED most of the time!!! My god, I wouldn’t recommend that to anyone!!! But he was amazing, and we all would have followed him anywhere, and did, to wondrous places of the imagination.
Here’s the most important thing that happened to me in my senior year of high school. An English teacher gave my class an assignment to write a sonnet. I wrote one. A couple days later, he yanked me out of class and took me to his office and sat me down and said, “I love the tension, in this, between the strict form and the salty, slangy language you used. Have you read Robert Browning?”
“No.”
He grabbed a big volume off his shelf and threw it open and started picking out passages and reading them to me. “You see?” he said. “The guy wrote in the way that people speak, or seemed to. It’s all actually very, very controlled. You could learn from him. You’re already part way down the path he took.”
And I did. I read the hell out of Browning and a dozen other poets. And I became a teacher and a writer for a living.
That teacher seized a teachable moment. He dealt with me and my particular propensity. He recognized my tentative exploration. He showed me how to go further on THAT path, which was not the same one to be followed by the girl sitting in front of me who wanted to be a nurse and work with kids.
Find that on the computer-adaptive maze. Find that in the P.A.R.C.C. exam. Find that in the rubric or the LDC template.
Good luck.
Standardization is a great evil. We should squash it like a bug.
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Standardization is the Rheeformish faith, and it’s a dark, dangerous one, a left-hand path that leads to Orwellian nightmare. Resist it.
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One way to resist it is to for you to found your own school with like minded rebels.
If you want the same variety of educational experience as the private school system, you will need to allow parents and students the choice of which school to attend. Without the choice, you end up with a school designed to be minimally acceptable to everyone instead of a school system that provides a variety of approaches to education that matches the variety of students.
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“peashooter”
Showing your age, Robert. Weren’t those “outlawed” in the late 60s as too many “eyes were being shot out”.
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TE, I went to high school in Bloomington, Indiana. In those days, Bloomington was a little town–about 60,000 residents, half of them students at the local university. Yet we had a traditional high school, an alternative school, a university lab school, and an outstanding vo-tech school, all in the local public school district. And the teachers had a great deal of autonomy, so students didn’t get stuck with the same teachers doing the same schtick year after year. I attended the lab school, where many of the teachers had PhDs, and there took innovative courses in subjects like Russian history and wave motion and paleontology with professors who knew their subjects and were passionate about them.
So, there was a lot of variety within that system, and parents could fairly easily move within it. I don’t foresee any public school system deciding to turn all its elementary schools into Montessori schools or Core Knowledge schools, but I do imagine that it might be possible to create such a program as an alternative within a public system and to give locals the choice of enrolling kids in it, and I would encourage systems to empower teachers to come together to design and implement such alternative programs or tracks.
I am extremely sympathetic to the idea of making attempts to provide as much variety in the offerings as possible because I understand that kids are not the same, that they have differing needs and propensities, and that the most important thing that a school can do is to light some sort of fire in every kid.
In the past 40 years, we have seen, in this country, a dramatic movement toward increasingly distant, centralized control of our K-12 schools. In the 1980s, urban districts started seizing a lot of power from local schools. They started issuing learning progressions or curriculum outlines, for example, and doing district-wide textbook adoptions, and there was a lot of debate about this–about whether it was a good idea to allow educrats at the central office to usurp the building-level authority of principals and teachers. Then, that authority shifted to the state level. A lot of states started doing state-wide textbook adoptions and issuing state-level curriculum frameworks, standards, testing mandates, and so on. Now, we’re seeing the reductio ad absurdum of this increased distancing and centralization of control–nationalization of standards and assessments. And a lot of people seem to believe that such centralization and standardization is going to lead to better outcomes for students, which seems completely crazy to me. Unfortunately, a lot of educrats trained in education schools have participated in this increased distancing and centralization and have collaborated with the plutocrats in the current totalitarian “reforms.” Such people spend thinking about education and decide that they have THE ANSWER and should be allowed to foist their answers on everyone else.
I think that we need to return autonomy to the local level and remove the mandates so that local schools and districts can innovate.
Suppose, TE, that you got your wish and we had no more public schools, only these private alternatives, and that every kid’s parents got a voucher to spend at those private schools. What would prevent the rampant abuses that we are seeing in the charter and voucher sectors today–schools cherry picking students; administrators of small schools paying themselves half a million dollar a year salaries; profiteers increasing class sizes, spending more money on marketing than on curricula, and driving out experienced teachers and replacing them with ignorant, inexperienced kids and with dumbed down worksheets on a screen in order to drive down costs? Maximizing profits and maximizing educational outcomes don’t always coincide. There is too much incentive to drive up the former by driving down the latter.
Such abuses as I have described are RAMPANT already, and low-SES parents and guardians are the ones MOST LIKELY to fall into the profiteers’ traps. We’re seeing a lot of these schools–the virtual charters come to mind–in which the money all goes to profits, administrators’ salaries, and marketing. But that happens not just in the virtual charters. There is a brick-and-mortar charter system here in Florida in which the owner purchases old grocery store buildings, guts them, puts PCs around the walls, and has kids doing worksheets on a screen all day, every day, in classes with very high student-to-teacher ratios, and this charter system advertises for teachers all the time because it has a constant churn. It’s a profitable business, but that’s all that one can say for it.
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Robert,
If you look at my posts, I advocate for choice schools. I am one of the few here that argue in favor of magnet schools even though they skim and destroy neighborhoods.
I thin that you should add one more bullet point to your list:
“give locals the choice of enrolling kids in it”
Without the choice, there will be no building autonomy, no lab school (wouldn’t you say the lab school skimmed?), no vo-tech school.
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Choice is a popular meme, a seductive fairy tale that promises that the grass is greener if we offer kids a wide variety of choices similar to the shopping experience when we have to decide between Costco,Target, Wal-Mart or another store to buy toothpaste or a t-shirt—-often shopping at the story that offers the lowest price.
But when it comes to education, we aren’t buying t-shirts. We’re working with individuals who are part of a community—not an ID number on a bubble test, and public schools are run by elected school boards who are part of the same community and they answer to voters and parents who might live on the same street. And most school board members raised children in the same community, children who went to the same public schools.
Then there are the dedicated teachers who are often there for decades teaching in the same schools. For instance, near the end of my thirty years, I started to get kids with parents that I taught years before—parents who gave me trouble as teenagers but their kids didn’t because those former students who were now parents knew I was there for the kids and worked hard to teach better literacy skills—skills that might offer an escape from poverty; from the gangs.
School choice has been around for more than twenty years in enough communities across the country to see if it was a viable theory, and it failed. FAILED!!! Study after study—-that wasn’t funded by a Koch, Murdock or Gates think tanks—-has revealed the results and the results say it doesn’t work.
But it is in the interest of a few billionaire oligarchs to keep the dead “Choice” meme alive because there’s too much money involved and the wealthy are always greedy for more wealth and power. They are addicted to it the same as the billionaire oligarchs that Teddy Roosevelt taught when he was Governor of New York and Preside of the United States. I’m so glad that I’m reading “The Bully Pulpit” right now because it shines a harsh light on what’s going on now. Nothing really changes and we can “learn” from history if we are open to what it will “teach” us.
For anyone who still believes Choice is the magic pill, Lincoln sums it up best: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
It’s time to wake up and stop drinking the Kool Aid sold by the likes of Bill Gates.
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I may be wrong, but I think that magnet schools are seen as relatively successful. I know that qualified admission magnet schools generally have very competitive entrance requirements, suggesting to me at least that they are seen by the community as a very valuable choice.
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We weren’t talking about Magnet schools. We were talking about private sector Charter Schools. You changed the subject.
There’s also a difference between magnet and charter schools. You may want to read this piece to find out:
“Magnet schools are part of the public school system. Unlike the public schools where students are zoned based on the neighborhood in which you live, magnet schools exist outside of zoned school boundaries and students have to apply to be admitted. Magnet schools differ from other public schools in that they usually receive additional funding to enable them to spend more money on their students, supplies, teachers, programs, etc. There are Magnet schools at the elementary school, middle school, and high school levels –
http://www.piedmontparent.com/articlemain.php?Magnet-Schools-vs.-Charter-Schools-What-rsquo-s-the-Difference-1156
In addition, there is a very big diffidence between public magnet and charter schools and the private sector charter schools—that difference is called transparency.
The public schools (regular, magnet and charter) are transparent and answerable to democratically elected school board members who live in the same community as the public schools they govern and these board members often send/sent their own children to the same schools they now govern at the will of the people who voted them in.
But the private sector schools are usually opaque and answer to no one in the community but to someone in a distant board room with one goal: profits for even more distant and very wealthy and out of touch investors who own a lot of stock, who belong to the 0.01 top percent and hold the power to get rid of the CEO at any time by a simple majority of a few board members who are usually all very wealthy too. And their interests are not even close to the parents who lie in the community served by the public schools and ruled over by other parents who live in the same community and were elected to serve.
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I talk about students having choices of schools and how that can free up schools to differentiate themselves from each other. If students are enrolled in schools based on street addresses, school boards will have to make sure that the arbitrary assignment of student to school does not matter. This enforces uniformity across traditional zoned schools.
There is certainly a difference between the two, but much of the criticism offered here to charter schools, for example about skimming, apply equally or perhaps with even more force, against magnet schools.
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It’s not the students who have a choice. It’s the parents and sometimes the choices they may be looking for are so exclusive, that it is economically unfeasible for any school to give them what they want unless it is an exclusive private school that charges $20 to $40 thousand annually.
The tax dollars are supposed to serve all students and not cost ten times more for a few who may want choices that are too costly to provide within the public budget. Do you really think a voucher that matches the per student costs of a public school will provide that level of a private education?
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I have never advocated for vouchers, but I don’t think cost differential is much of a problem, at least in my part of the country. Private school tuition is about the same as the amount spent per student in public schools.
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I’m not sure what you want/ed out of the public schools. It seems that they did right by your son who went on to college and is graduating, as you said, this year with a lucrative degree in math.
Eventually this issue—funding any private sector schools, profit or nonprofit, no matter what they are called—will reach the Supreme Court in one or more cases and the nine justices will have to rule if it is Unconstitutional to take tax money that funded public education for more than a century and turn it over to religious and/or private sector schools that are opaque with no accountability or oversight that insures the tax payers money is being spent in the best interests of children instead of paying half million dollars salaries to private Charter school CEOs and profits to private sector corporations with no way to tell if the money was spent properly and wisely.
As it is, this week, “the Kansas Supreme Court ruled unanimously (all seven justices) on Friday that the state must increase funding for public K-12 schools. The Court’s ruling gutting Brownback’s education plan was a victory for parents, school districts, and students who sued Brownback who has spent the past four years significantly cutting per student funding while cutting taxes for the rich and corporations. One of the lawyers representing the school districts, John Robb, welcomed the Court ruling and said, “The constitution protects education. It does not protect tax cuts.”
http://www.politicususa.com/2014/03/09/republicans-slash-public-education-fund-tax-cuts-millionaires-corporations.html
Cases like this tend to work their way to the US Supreme Court when the loser appeal.
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I meant to say Teddy Roosevelt “fought” not “taught” …
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How do you see traditional zoned neighborhood schools leading students away from the great evil of standardization? Do you see all of the families in a school catchment area agreeing to something other than the status quo?
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You pose a very important question, TE, one we all should be giving a great deal of thought to. I know that I have.
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An important question that only a heterodox participant on this blog would raise. What do you think is the answer?
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I don’t have a complete answer to that, TE, but here’s some of what I have been thinking:
The way I see it, we are poised between the Scylla of that leveling catchment and the Charybdis of for-profit schools that cherry pick students and provide too many opportunities for grift. The Chilean model, in which a set amount of money follows the student wherever he or she wishes to go, sounds great in theory, but in practice it led to perpetual, savage inequity and to a lot of exploitation of the poor by profiteers. And look at the for-profit, proprietary colleges. They are a disgrace. They promise jobs and deliver debt. And I am loath to throw over a public school model that has long been and still is the glory of the world. If you correct for SES level, our students lead the world on the very international standardized tests that the ed deformers so love.
I think that the answer lies in staying with the current public school model but with changes like these:
a. returning autonomy to local schools and school districts
b. dramatically reducing administration at the state and local levels
c. eliminating standardized tests and state and national standards and replacing these with a few well-thought through voluntary, very general guidelines that provide the degrees of freedom within
d. dramatically increasing the pay and the barriers to entry to the teaching profession
e. dramatically empowering teachers to make their own decisions regarding curricula and pedagogical strategies and giving them the time in their schedules to submit their practice to reflection and critique via something like Japanese Lesson Study
f. providing innovation grants to schools, districts, scholars, and researchers directed at creating alternative tracks for students with differing propensities and interests and setting up a national clearinghouse for information on such tracks (including materials on facilities, PD, curricula, pedagogical approaches, frameworks, etc)
g. encouraging businesses and education schools to work with public school systems to create alternative public schools within public schools, ones that follow innovative models
h. dramatically expanding wrap-around services for poor children and creating carefully designed compensatory spoken language environments in play centers for toddlers to redress the breathtaking 30-million-word language gap between low-SES and high-SES four year olds
i. introducing governance and evaluation by teachers to the public schools
If we did all that, I think that we could count on two mechanisms to help bring about the sorts of change that I would like to see: a. local social sanction—parents interested in having the propensities of their kids recognized and built upon and b. the innovation that occurs when local schools have the autonomy to try new approaches, without being hamstrung by state and federal mandates.
But I am just thinking aloud here. My expertise is in ELA curricula. I only save the world as a hobby, and I am suspicious of those who have easy answers, like voucher systems, for universal salvation. I suspect them of being cult leaders.
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I think you have missed a crucial ingredient. If you want building level autonomy it must be accompanied by student autonomy in building choice.
To illustrate my point, think about the meeting at school A where the teachers announce that they are using their autonomy to change the school to a Waldorf style school , School B announces it will now be a French immersion school, and school C informs the parents that mathematics will now be taught entirely through the urban agriculture program that they are starting. Do you think the parents who are assigned to those schools based on street address would support those. Notices by those autonomous schools?
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Again, I think comparing some silly adaptive learning engine to the book is like comparing me with a peashooter to Caesar’s legions. The comparison is all out of proportion. There is so much hype and so little light in this area of ed tech. I say that as a great PROPONENT of ed tech, as someone who thinks that it can be revolutionary and liberating.
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I do thing, TE, that there are some entirely new kinds of learning emerging as a result of the internet. I meet a lot of young people who rarely read whole books but are incredibly knowledgeable. To a bookish guy like me, this is difficult to believe, but there’s just too much evidence of it. And instead of isolating people, the net is creating a lot of extended communities and a lot of foment and creative juxtaposition. It’s all fascinating to watch. People are becoming smarter, and in new ways. I’ve seen a lot of terrible ed tech–all hype and glitz but, underneath that, dumbed down and reductive. But there’s a lot of promise in the availability of the universal library, in people being able to follow unique paths, in their being able to come together in community, in their being able to seek help and to help others and to share their creations. It’s an exciting time, and it’s really fun to create in this new medium, to think about how it can be used in ways that aren’t dumbed down and reductive and autocratic and dehumanzing and disrespectful of users.
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BTW, that was just an expression. Don’t go squashing bugs indiscriminately. When you squash a bug, this may mean little to you, but to the bug, it means everything.
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Let me hasten to add that I am a big fan of the computer-adaptive model (called, in the old days, programmed learning)–in the right place, with the right material, for the right student. It should be one of the tools in the kit. But, if the only tool you have is a hammer, then you start treating everything as if it were a nail, and a lot of things get damaged.
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Some learning tools have become so ubiquitous that they are not even thought of as tools in the tool kit. Reading comes to mind as the best example.
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Well said, TE. But some of us haven’t forgotten that the book is a tool. And the book is one of those very, very rare inventions that changes everything. Computer-adaptive learning isn’t remotely comparable in its power to change things for the better, at least not in its anything like its present forms. There’s a great danger in trying to think everything through beforehand, in all that centralized planning. The right-wingers behind these education deforms ought to be able to understand that. If they don’t, then they should go back and reread their own beloved book The Road to Serfdom.
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Not yet, but so far all we have really done so far is move the book to an electronic format. The true gains will come when we realize that it is no longer a book, but is something that is capable of so much more. No doubt we will lose some things that are currently valued (memory, for example, was much more important before the invention of writing), but the gains will far out way the losses.
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“…but the gains will far out way the losses.”
Are you really sure of that, TE? I hope so, but I have stopped assuming anything.
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You must certainly agree that the invention of writing, which had such a catastrophic impact on the oral tradition, has been on balance a good thing. Come to think of it, how ironic is it that modern technology has reinvigorated the importance of the spoken word.
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The invention of reading and writing had little effect on most people’s lives for hundreds of years. The invention of the printing press began the change although its influence was only gradually felt by the masses who again remained illiterate and dependent on oral tradition for hundreds of years. We are now entering a time where the definition of literacy could be challenged again when we have adults who do not need to read to do their jobs or stay informed. I do not find that an exciting idea.
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I doubt the great bards found the idea of written tales very attractive.
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I’m sure they didn’t. Perhaps that is why we have poetry slams, debates, and speeches however poor they are as substitutes. This is a bit facetious but if we had several of those devastating solar flares we hear about that could knock out all electronic communication, I would rather that we still be able to communicate through reading and writing. Perhaps we wouldn’t have to go quite so far back in the evolution of society especially if someone kept all the books we no longer felt we needed. Way, way off topic, but fun to indulge in flights of fancy.
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I LOVE this, Bob.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx What a beautiful post, Robert. Thank you for this.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Bob, your beautiful post inspires me to set down a few of my own teachable moments from a bygone school system.
As a rural kid in the ’50’s, I was fortunate to attend the last “one-room schoolhouse” in the region (1st-3rd, built 1923) & a similar one 4th-6th (2 grades/ classroom). Pedagogical methods were 100 yrs old & quite similar to H Kohl’s “The Open Classroom”.
At age 6, the teacher sat me down w/a few readers & math books, gave me a piece of candy, & said, ‘go home & ask your mom if you can move to 2nd grade’ [I moved over 1 desk row the next day]. From this I gathered the school structure was flexible; it reflected what you could do. From that school– since reading circles were led by advanced students– I learned that teaching was an advanced form of learning. If you could teach what you had learned, you really understood it.
In 4th grade I learned about ‘churn’: we had 3 teachers that year due to pregnancies. My mother claimed this was the reason I didn’t grasp fractions, which caused future math issues.
In 5th-6th, I learned how a teacher can change your whole life. The 30’x20′ room was ringed with books, which we were encouraged to sign out & read. This teacher read aloud daily: her brilliant renderings of Kipling Jungle Stories and Toby Tyler– her primers & diagrammed sentences– clinched my lifelong love of lit. She kept me in at lunchtime to go over those tough math assignments.
& just by dumb luck, Sputnik resulted in an option for daily French lessons during lunch– while I was still in optimum language-learning years, resulting in a multilingual lit career.
My primary education is the one I would have wished for my kids. Nary a standardized test (oh, OK, there were Iowas in there somewhere, every few yrs). Homework done during the day (in a 2-grade classroom, one grade gets taught while the other does hw from the lesson just learned); at home you planned & executed long-term projects.
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what a delight to read this, S&FF!
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Bob,
Reading about your high school experience in English class brought back powerful memories of my own experiences with writing since I was in 7th grade. . . .
You wrote that SO succinctly and extracted all the beauteous truth about teaching, learning, and motivation.
GREAT POST!
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When Diane was in Indianapolis, she recalled that teachers used to grade the Iowa Basic Skills tests for their own students. No high stakes were attached. The tests just told students, parents, teachers, and administrators how students compared to their peers nationwide. Teachers used the results to inform future instruction and remediate students.
Now Indiana’s state test provides pass-fail status, but teachers don’t get to see the individual questions which students failed. Test results arrive in the summer after the students have left school for the next grade. So using the test to address any student’s needs or to inform future instruction is impossible. These tests cost tens of millions which would be better spent on instruction and remediation. They are a colossal waste of time and money.
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Perhaps the President will actually obey the letter and spirit of such new legislation, but don’t hold your breath until he begins faithfully executing the laws already passed by Congress. The ACA is the most egregious example of his ‘disobedience’ of his oath of office. I don’t believe anything will be done while he is still in office. I’m not sure Hillary will be any better on devolving education back to the states, given her long standing views on national health care.
I prefer the old Reagan proposal to eliminate the federal department of education.
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Do I need to ask how you would feel about going back to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare?
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Excellent question. I don’t know enough about the old HEW to say for sure, but in general, anything that shrinks government and limits its regulatory authority is probably a good.
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Reblogged this on Schools of Thought Hudson Valley, NY and commented:
Congressman Chris Gibson has introduced H.R. 4172, the “Student Testing Improvement & Accountability Act.” This bipartisan bill makes common-sense reforms to the No Child Left Behind Act, empowering state and local school systems to focus on teaching instead of testing:
Washington, Mar 12 –
Congressman Chris Gibson (NY-19) announced the introduction of H.R. 4172, the “Student Testing Improvement & Accountability Act,” which makes common-sense reforms to the No Child Left Behind Act by reducing the frequency of federally-mandated assessments in U.S. schools.
Congressman Gibson introduced the bipartisan legislation March 6 with Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema (AZ-9).
“My constituents have overwhelmingly expressed their concerns with the recent shift in education policy from a focus on teaching to a focus on testing,” said Congressman Gibson. “Parents and educators across Upstate New York know that maintaining this approach will continue to hamstring our teachers and students.”
“Working in Arizona schools for nearly a decade taught me the importance of empowering teachers to teach to the content they want their students to master—not simply to teach the material needed to know the next upcoming standardized test,” said Congresswoman Sinema.
H.R. 4172 replaces current annual testing requirements for math and language arts with the exact same grade-span testing requirements in current law for science classes. This returns federal testing requirements to the once-per-grade-span standards established before 2001, when math and reading assessments were typically conducted once in grades 3-5, once in grades 6-9, and once in grades 10-12.
Under H.R. 4172, the states would retain the ability to exceed federal testing requirements if they seek to do so.
“I have lived a life of accountability, and I understand the need for a means to accurately gauge school performance, but I reject the notion that the only way to achieve this is through burdensome over-testing,” said Congressman Gibson.
The National Education Association (NEA), which represents 3 million educators across the country, announced its support for the bill.
“The over-emphasis on standardized testing has caused considerable collateral damage in too many schools, including narrowing the curriculum, teaching to the test, reducing love of learning, pushing students out of school and driving teachers out of the profession,” said NEA President Dennis Van Roekel. “This bill by Rep. Gibson and Rep. Sinema would help put a stop to these negative consequences and help ensure that all students succeed.”
http://gibson.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=372669
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Reblogged this on Saint Simon Common Core Information and commented:
A step in the right direction to limit federally mandated testing.
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I absolutely LOVE reading comments from all walks of life posted! Thank you to all for sharing your opinions and enlightening those that know something is DEFINITELY wrong…just not exactly sure what to do about it!
Also, please know…
Private schools DO take standardized tests as well!
(Catholic school in Indiana following the Archdiocese “recommendation”)
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Reblogged this on 21st Century Theater.
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