I am late in reporting this story, but did not want to miss the opportunity to correct my oversight.
One of the truly bad ideas that has been adopted in various states is that third graders must pass a reading test or flunk. They can’t advance to fourth grade. This is part of the punitive test-based accountability of our times, which hurts children and trusts standardized tests more than teachers.
“The governor on Tuesday vetoed a bill allowing a student who fails the test to still be promoted if a team of parents and educators approve. Lawmakers applauded and cheered when the veto override passed 79-17 in the House and 45-2 in the Senate.
“Some parents had approached lawmakers to complain about the high-stakes testing, which was to be implemented for the first time this year.
“The legislative action means the bill immediately becomes law, directly affecting nearly 8,000 Oklahoma students who scored “unsatisfactory” on the test.”
Children who are flunked get badly discouraged. It is better to give children extra help, tutors, and reduced class sizes than inflict the pain and humiliation of leaving them behind their peers. Given the appropriate support, they will catch up.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Darn those soccer moms!
This is excellent news. I know Florida and Louisiana also have laws to retain students who fail the test. I am sure others do as well. It flies in the face of decades of research that shows that retention does not work and dramatically increases the odds of dropping out.
It’s an ALEC bill. Ohio adopted it whole. The Ohio bill has a provision where if the kids fail the test, their parents are to be directed to private tutoring companies, and the district will pay the invoice.
It’s just another way to get the failed NCLB private tutoring companies agenda enacted. Absolute disaster with NCLB, so of course it’s back in another form.
In Ohio they used a brand-new legislator to carry the bill forward, because no one wanted their fingerprints on it. They basically sacrificed her to lobbyists. It was really one of the most cynical things I’ve ever seen in the statehouse, and it is difficult to shock me.
http://www.politicususa.com/2013/03/18/alec-education-bill-hides-privatization-disguise-reading-skills.html
The third-graders in Ohio performed better than “predicted”. They also reported fall reading scores to show how much better they did. I am afraid this “success” will make it harder to get rid of the legislation. Those who support the Third Grade Reading Guarantee will likely proclaim how it made a huge difference in our third graders’ lives because they “made the teachers accountable”.
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2014/06/17/Ohio-third-grade-reading-scores-improve.html
Ohio has this law. It has been propagated through ALEC and “evidence” that failure to pass muster on third grade reading tests dooms a kid to life-long failure. Not an ounce of discussion of the horrible consequences of holding kids back, or the limitations on reading tests, or the crushing boredom from having kids do “close readings” of content without the benefit of contextual knowledge or experience. Once again the economists have run numbers and these “tell” policy makers the only solution is to put kids through the reading grind and tests again.
But only for this year and next…MY granddaughter’s classmates, going into second grade, will be subjected to the ‘flunk the test, flunk third grade’ horrors. Our work is not finished. We have built a coalition of parents, educators, retired educators, who can mobilize quickly.
More on that day…
http://fourthgenerationteacher.blogspot.com/2014/05/patheticyou-know-whats-really-pathetic.html
Nah. They’ll be onto something else. They are the definition of fad-followers. Delayed two years means “dead”.
I think pre-k is a growth area, myself. We’ll see a huge tranche of lobbyists enter that sector once they get the public funding. Look for high stakes testing of 3 year olds.
Already here in Florida, Chiara, and has been since 2012.
Coming to a state legislature near you via JEB! Bush, the future Republican presidential nominee hopeful, and his buddies at ALEC.
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-09-03/features/os-pre-k-test-disagreement-2-20120903_1_preschools-new-test-child-care-management
“But the test’s introduction, required by the Florida Legislature, has prompted criticism from the private preschools and child-care centers that run most of Florida’s pre-K program and the local agencies that help administer it. The Early Learning Advisory Council even wrote Gov. Rick Scott this summer, asking him to halt the new test.
Some dislike that the test does not assess the full range of the state’s pre-K standards, which also include emotional, physical and social development.
The council’s letter, for example, complained that it ignored other areas “critical for school success.” And it argued that the test focuses on a “very narrow skill set” that would lead to “poor instruction that is inappropriate for young children.””
Chiara, the law is written so it only applies to this year’s third graders who just took the test, and rising third graders who will take it next year. The bill is written so that after these two years, the state reverts back to the original intent: flunk kids. ANOTHER law will have to be written to protect kids.
Universal language rich preschool would go a long, long way toward mitigating any language, and later on, reading deficits. Oral language deficits are one of the biggest impairments to learning to read in english. A few years of spoken language, story and song enrichment in a preschool environment for ALL American children is what we need prior to kindergarten entrance, not punishment in third grade because of a lack of early language experience.
Denise, yours is the “outside the box” solution we need. There is a real problem with elementary school kids getting passed along without having learned the basics -ask any middle school or high school teacher. But this “Reading Guarantee” approach sounds Kafkaesque: it punishes kids and teachers for failing, but fails to offer sound approaches to preventing or remedying the problem. The conventional approach –teaching reading strategies –is not nearly sufficient to make a good reader. As you point out, prolonged and repeated exposure to rich language is the sine qua non. This is what kids of professional parents get at home. Unless schools offer a similar years’-long immersion in language rich environments, these kids will never attain true reading proficiency. In other words, we need a revolution in the way we think about curriculum, not testing and punishing.
Except even with lots of exposure to literature there are vocabulary words they will never understand as per article in NYT… Words like trust fund, stock options, coxswain, lacrosse, Chilean Seabass, Au pair, etc. The problem is and will
continue to be poverty and the ever widening gap between the haves and have nots. The have nots are fighting to survive… Reading to their children is a luxury of time and energy that is short in supply. Plopping kids in skill and drill preschool programs, and that is what is coming, won’t change that.when we can start having real discussions about education with real educators, let me know. I’m a little tired of male dominated legislators dictating the punishment culture they so enjoy instituting on teachers and children.
Marble,
I agree that poverty causes learning deficits and that rich curriculum cannot overcome all of them. Parents who work at Walmart and have to moonlight elsewhere to pay rent absolutely cannot read to kids, etc. We need policies that create more economic equality so that parents can properly parent. At the same time, schools need to nourish kids minds’ with better brain food than what they tend to offer now. If schools insist on just “teaching the Common Core standards” that will likely lead to skills drills (e.g. find the main idea; find support for statement x) rather than a concerted effort to teach kids about the world, which is what young minds really need to grow. The reformers aren’t our only problem; dud ideas circulating within our profession are hurting our kids as well.
The extent of such things as parents reading to their children is part of “shared environment” which seems to have little effect. At one time it was thought that playing Mozart to babies or breast feeding wuold raise IQ. However there does not seem to be any casual effect. Rather parents who play Mozart for their babies or breast feed are likely to have higher IQ’s than parents who don’t and their children inherit their higher IQ’s.
Similarily the tendency of people who were physically abused as children to themselves tend to be abusive as adults seems to be largely a genetic effect.
Also the suppossed casual effect of maternal cigarette smoking on the IQ of their children is probably mostly just a non-casual association.
Raising IQ is not a legitimate function of public education mainly because IQ is a concept bereft of logical and rational meaning.
Why are we applauding the legislature. Didn’t they pass the no-pass law in the first place? I’m confused. But it was the right thing to do.
This Frankenstein Law was the brainchild of Jeb Bush. We’ve had it here in Florida for many years. This past year all of my “F” school’s student test scores on the FCAT went up in reading, writing, and math for grades 4 and 5. The math scores went up in 3rd grade also but the reading scores stayed flat across the district and across the state. It will probably result in us remaining an “F” school despite one of the biggest improvements in writing and math scores in the state, which garnered us a congratulatory letter from the governor.
After a decade of the 3rd graders failing the FCAT test in huge numbers, over and over again and again, you’d think the state would consider the simple fact that the test must not be an appropriate measure, is poorly designed, the cut scores are not reasonable, nor is passing achievable for your average 3rd grader. Instead the fault always lies with the teachers and the test is sacrosanct and unassailable per Jeb Bush.
This past school year we had three 12-year olds in 3rd grade in my school due to failing the FCAT two years in a row and failing to pass the summer reading institute test (SAT10) and the portfolio alternative exam as well. That means that these children will be 21 in 12th grade if they stay in school and make it that far and don’t get retained again. It’s a one-way route to dropping out and giving up. Guess who the vast majority of failed 3rd graders are? Poor children of all races and ELL learners.
Next year we’ve had to add 2 more classes to our 3rd grade in order to provide a place for all the children who are being retained automatically due to the FCAT failures. The children may attend a summer reading camp and if they pass the test at the end they can then be promoted. Otherwise its 3rd grade again and again.
This asinine and cruel policy has failed to produce any kind of change. It happens every year. Yet Bush and his foundation lie and lie and claim that it is the impetus for statewide “improvement” and change, despite the fact that NAEP scores have remained stagnant instead of improving during the years this idiocy has been forced upon the children of Florida.
Go Oklahoma! You are OK in my book!
That’s okay. If they drop out we’ll put them in a for-profit credit recovery mill and call them graduated, and the US Secretary of Education will travel the country promoting an increase in graduation rates.
12-year-old 3rd graders. As a parent, I would be FURIOUS to have a 12-year-old, approaching puberty, into a class with nine-year-olds. It’s inappropriate for all students.
Isn’t that the truth? Think of the total shame of a 12 year old third grader. We can all think of who those kids would be. How awful. Instead of planning programs which would help those students learn a trade and develop into a good contributing member of society, we will create dropouts who are homeless in alleys, thus contributing to even more crime. The people making these stupid decisions truly want to destroy our world. They are evil.
This is a great piece on how they set the cut scores in Ohio. It’s all very, very scientific, as you will see if you watch the video and they work backwards to find 10k kids to fail.
They wanted to retain 10k third graders. About 60% of them will come from low income urban areas.
This is an amazingly reckless experiment they’re conducting. On 9 year olds. We won’t find out the results until they are 18, that is, if they haven’t dropped out.
http://janresseger.wordpress.com/tag/jeb-bush/
Oh Music Teach
June 29, 2014 at 9:31 am
The third-graders in Ohio performed better than “predicted”. They also reported fall reading scores to show how much better they did. I am afraid this “success” will make it harder to get rid of the legislation. Those who support the Third Grade Reading Guarantee will likely proclaim how it made a huge difference in our third graders’ lives because they “made the teachers accountable”.
I don’t know. I know they can spin and market anything, so that part is true.
I went to a local meeting on testing and although the focus was supposed to be the CC testing, the parents (basically) took it over and every single complaint was third grade reading guarantee.
They’re not listening. Parents are complaining about high stakes tests so they’re putting more of them in? This goes beyond “out of touch”. This is deliberately ignoring the people they’re supposed to be serving.
This was a lobbyist-written bill. The Ohio bill was pulled so completely off the ALEC template they left the ALEC caption on. It had the ALEC caption. They had to pull it back and re-title it. They’re not even reading this stuff, let alone debating it.
I saw the witness list for one of these lobbyist-written edu-bills the other day. Of 16 witnesses before the legislature, 14 came from Michelle Rhee’s lobby shop.
It’s complete and total capture by lobbyists. They’re no more “lawmakers” than I am.
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/06/26/5007271/cms-reading-camp-is-ticket-to.html#.U7Aw8YX5F5A
I am an Ohio teacher. Thanks to John Kasich and his ALEC buddies, Ohio education is in a mess. It would be a dream come true for John Kasich to be voted out of office come November. He is a monster, and I am even a registered Republican. I vote on party platform. I switched from Democrat when Obama got president (can’t stand the man.) What makes me so sick is that Kasich’s twin daughters do not have to suffer with the policies that our children have to suffer with.
I2 year olds in the 3rd grade? How awful! That Jeb Bush is a fool. He thinks he has a chance at the presidency. In no way can our country survive the 3rd Bush as president. What a nightmare!!!!!!! I can’t even think about it.
I really enjoy all of your posts. You are all very informative. My heart aches for those 12 year old third graders. I am positive that they have talents that could be developed and nurtured. I hope these evil lawmakers like very, very hot places. That is where they are all headed. Anyone who does this to a precious child deserves a very hot, hot place to reside in for eternity. Don’t worry. They will get theirs.
“I vote on party platform”
And that is your major problem whether that party be the Dims or the Rethugs. Do some research on each candidate, especially non-duopoly candidates and then vote each race. Voting party line is an ignorant and lazy man’s strategy.
Duane, I totally agree with you. My husband and I find that we do not like the Democrats or the Republicans anymore. Our families were both life-long Democrats, but I’ve told my parents that our Democratic party is not the party of JFK. I do not recognize it anymore. We are registered Republicans now (when Obama mistreated Hillary), but I don’t agree with the policies of the Republicans either. Bush did a terrible job in his 8 years. I also cannot stand our Ohio Republican governor, John Kasich. His greed has done so much damage to Ohio education.
Yes, we will both always do research to vote for the right person. Both parties have done a lot of damage to our country. Thank you for your comments. We will all continue to fight the fight.
I still shock the Georgia types in Orlando. But there is something to be said for the “say what you mean,mean what you say” approach in Oklahoma. I left at 17 as they also liked to ponder why a female wanted to do STEM stuff? Certainly, they can be wrong. But they hate out and out lying. And flunking third graders back to third grade is a lie. It is a lie that hurts the most important member sof our world- the children.
“. . . the Georgia types. . .”
What is a “Georgia type”? Please elaborate! Thanks!
This is a complete farce. In Florida, if students fail the test, alternative assessments and portfolios are used(or should be used) to promote the students. Most do, anyway. There are some admins who still perceive opting out as some kind of challenge to their authority, and give it all they’ve got to resist parents opting out. But by and large, schools are cooperating with most of our parents – the ones we know of.
If they use portfolios to promote the kids, and it’s a more authentic way to assess any child’s skills and achievements, why don’t we rely more on portfolios?
Could it be that there is no money to be made? No data to be collected? No way to assign a punitive school grade?
OPT OUT of testing. Do your child and his/her teacher a favor and ask for a portfolio at the beginning of the school year. It’s a good thing.
At least here in NYC, our new chancellor understands this. We now how multiple criteria to determine promotion. Under Bloomberg, a failed ELA or Math test meant an automatic holdover. Interestingly, he held kids over by using what was called a cut-score. The cut score was derived from just multiple choice parts of each test. If a student got a certain percentage of items correct, they were either promoted or left behind. When Bloomberg cut the summer school budgets, he made the cut score lower so that fewer kids failed. Basically, budget needs were the real determining factor for promotion. Thank goodness this is no longer the case. Promotion was determined holistically this year. It was based mostly on a portfolio of student work and some additional criterion-based assessments. Interestingly, one student we held over even met this year’s cut score. We made this decision because the student presented no evidence of achievement because he was absent 104 out of 180 days due to parental neglect and truancy. The decision was made in collaboration with the Administration of Children’s Services. The student comes from a problematic family that has refused to consent to have the student evaluated. The student, besides having truancy issues, is probably learning disabled. We really did not want to hold over the child. We did it to motivate the family to work with us in getting this student the services he needs to deal with not only his educational needs, but also the social-emotional factors that are affecting his learning.
” We really did not want to hold over the child. We did it to motivate the family to work with us in getting this student the services he needs to deal with not only his educational needs, but also the social-emotional factors that are affecting his learning.”
So you are using the child as a pawn in a power struggle between the parents and the school???
That’s wrong, dead wrong.
To clarify, this is not a power struggle but a school trying to save a child who has been grossly neglected by incompetent caregivers. One parent died of a drug overdose and the other parent is in jail for life for the murder of a police officer. The one caregiver is a great-grandparent who is near 90 years old and mostly bedridden. There is a grandparent who lives in a separate household and inconsistently comes into and leaves this child’s life. I, my principal, and his teacher have supplied all his school supplies this last year. His teacher had to give him a winter coat this year because he had none. He wears basically the same clothes each day. He stays home to take care of his caregiver when she is sick or because he is so frustrated because he is over two years below grade level and cannot do the work at all. When he took the common core ELA assessment, he sat on his knees by his desk and prayed that he would pass before the start of the exam.
Under Bloomberg’s system, because he passed the cut score, he would have been promoted to sixth grade with no skills. At least now, in consultation with the Administration of Children Services, we held the kid back based on the new promotional regulations that stated if a child had insufficient work and was truant for a significant period during the school year, there were significant grounds to retain him. Obviously, if he would be promoted, he would probably get lost in an overcrowded middle school. The guidance personnel would literally be starting from scratch while we have an established a working relationship with the child and the social service agency which is trying to intervene with this dysfunctional family.
Do you still feel what we are doing is unethical and immoral? We hope what we are doing will help. The holdover builds a case for educational neglect. Will the removal of the child help or hurt in the long run, I do not know? All I do know is that I have spent most of my career trying to help high needs students in a real way. The so called reformers would have given up on such a child a long time ago. They only measure the worth of a child using test scores. My measurement is trying in some way to give this child a chance at a better life.
Thanks for the clarification, liberalteacher! What your dealing with is a totally different scenario from what I had imagined from your first description. Now knowing the, as Paul Harvey would say, “rest of the story” it’s a no-brainer. So what you are doing is good and proper. Thanks for the work you are doing for the child.
Unfortunately, we’ve all seen to many students being used in power struggles between schools and parents. And ultimately it is the parent’s responsibility to do what they believe is right for their child. Obviously the parents in this situation have given up their rights. It is a fine line that schools must walk when handling these situations.
I’m writing as an Oklahoman mother tonight. I have four son. The two youngest are twins, and the only ones still in school. My youngest twin has a reading disability that was finally diagnosed in the third grade. His third grade reading test was modified, and he scored an ” advanced “. My husband and I decided to have his IEP changed to where the only modification would be smaller testing settings. We thought his next scores would drop some since he wouldn’t be taken a modified test, but they bottomed out with an unsatisfactory.
His scores would yo-yo back and forth from then on with no rhythm nor reason.
We never knew why until this year when the controversy over the third grade reading test happened. Then I learned 1) that none of the tests our students take are correlated; and 2) the “reading” tests are not really measuring reading comprehension. They are language arts tests.
Unfortunately, for my son his yo-yoing scores didn’t fall right. He scored almost an advanced his seventh grade year, but he scored limited knowledge last year. In Oklahoma to get your driver’s permit you must pass the eighth grade reading test. He will have to retake the test next year.
These tests tell us nothing of importance; whether we are teachers or parents. They are just hoops we must jump through to satisfy the education gurus.
And one last thing: I don’t care what anyone says about how little time is actually used on testing . I know for a fact, as a teacher, l lost all of the instructional time in April and most of May to mandatory testing or to “field” testing. “Field” testing our State Superintendent said was mandatory.