Merryl Tisch is the Chancellor of the New York Board of Regents. She has been a Regent for 20 years. She is a strong supporter of high-stakes testing. In this article, she criticizes those who opt out and who encourage others to opt out. She says they are hurting the kids who need help the most. She thinks the schools would neglect the neediest children if they were not tested every year. Since no high-performing nation tests every child every year, they must be overlooking their neediest children.
She writes:
“It used to be easy to ignore the most vulnerable students. Without assessments, it was easy to ignore the achievement gap for African-American and Latino students. Without an objective measure of their progress, it was easy to deny special education students and English Language Learners the extra resources they need. Obviously we still need to do more for those students, but now is not the time to put blinders back on.
“Without a comparable measure of student achievement, we risk losing track of the progress of all of our students in all of our schools. This risk applies not only to students of color, urban and rural students, and students with special learning needs. Many students from affluent districts do not make the year-to-year progress necessary in today’s world and need early support to get back on track. It’s far better to find that out while they’re still in the classroom than wait until they’re out of school and faced with real world challenges in college or the work place without the skills they need to overcome those challenges.”
One would think after a dozen years of high-stakes testing that there might be evidence that the children she names have benefitted, that poverty has decreased, but she fails to mention any evidence of the benefits of high-stakes testing.
Celia Oyler, a faculty member at Teachers College, Columbia University, read Chancellor Tisch’s letter and drew different conclusions. She wrote the following comment to The Hechinger Report, where Tisch’s article appeared:
Professor Celia Oyler wrote:
“Very few parents would be refusing the New York State Pearson tests if they were decent measures of learning. And if they were decent measures of learning from year to year there would be no Teachers of Conscience movement of teachers who are refusing to administer the high stakes tests. There are so many flaws with what Chancellor Tisch and Commissioner King have done:
“(1) These tests are not measures of what an individual student has learned from year to year: they are not vertically aligned. State Ed has created what they call growth scores, but calling something by a name does not make it real. In fact, these scores do not measure growth from year to year, but measure the score on the test one year and the score on a different test the next year.
“(2) The NYS tests are too blunt to measure learning of the students Chancellor Tisch proclaims to care most about: the children who do not do well on standardized measures (whether due to horrible stresses that often accompany poverty and affect learning, or from a print or language or intellectual disability, or because they are learning English as an additional language). And we also know from numerous adequately designed studies that a teacher accounts for only about 10-15% of test score variance on any child: to hold one teacher 50% responsible for a single test score is scientifically unjustifiable. And doing so damages the chances for such children to receive the education they need. Children who struggle with school tasks do not need more test prep curriculum (which is what they are mostly getting — get out to schools more, Chancellor Tisch!), they need more rich, integrated, experiential, three-dimensional learning that is organized around meaning and not memorization. Punishing children, their schools, and their teachers for poor scores on poor tests is not the way to promote the rich learning environments they desperately need.
“(3) The misuse of so called Value Added Models or Measures takes lousy tests and then puts them through a formula not even designed to measure one teacher’s influence on the score from year to year: VAMs have greatest reliability when used on groups of teachers across multiple years. To make matters worse, most all researchers continually agree that a teacher accounts for about 10-15% of any standardized score variance. So teachers in NYS are punished by giving them a score that was not even designed to measure what Chancellor Tisch has made it measure. Study after study after study demonstrates that VAM has confidence intervals of as much as 60%! This is utterly insane and has enraged educators who understand what is being done to them.
“(4) Chancellor Tisch has just announced that some districts and schools should be exempt from this high stakes bad math folly that she and her cronies have wrought upon the children and teachers of New York State. This is an abomination. We have decades of research demonstrating the link between wealth and standardized test scores. Yes, there are exceptions: we have schools where children from low-income schools have learned to do well on a high stakes test. We need to learn more from these anomalies. But even within the anomalies researchers continually find that doing well on one high stakes test does not transfer to other high stakes tests. This means that students can be taught how to do well on a high stakes test. It does not mean they are learning content, concepts, and skills of value, that transfer. This raises the question: Do we want learning, or do we want achievement test scores?
“It is apparent to many parents who are refusing the tests, and to many teachers who are taking up activism against these brutal educational “reforms,” that Chancellor Tisch and her ilk care way more about a reductive number on a spreadsheet than they care about real learning and about actually improving the possibilities for the most marginalized children in our society. New York State teachers and children deserve support and assistance, particularly in economically distressed communities. Tisch and her millionaire friends can do much better than punish us all with their willful ignorance.”
—
Celia Oyler, PhD
Box 31 Teachers College
525 W. 120th Street, NY, NY, 10027
office phone: 212.678.3696
office location: 312 Zankel Hall
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Maybe someone could conduct a study to see exactly, on average, how many tests a child has to take so they can be lifted out of poverty?
Daniel,
Apparently a student gets smarter every time he or she takes a test.
Unless they don’t.
LOL Daniel Spaniel! It apparently takes a lot because the kids in my school have taken plenty of tests and are still mired in poverty.
Ahh yes the billionheiress by injection who ponied up a million to create her own little reformy army of Regents Fellows to do her reformy dirty work in NYSED and elsewhere is now seized with angst over the plight of the little brown and black people. I love how these Limocrats go blithely along until they hit a snag in their rhetoric and suddenly they all become Mother Teresa or Ghandi caring only about the less fortunate. Pretty Meryl you fool nobody.
Meryl – another expert? “She thinks.” No, sadly she and many others don’t think. Until that changes…nothing will change.
Tisch Still Trying to Cover Her Tusch
Why hasn’t 14 years of NCLB test data produced any results? In fact Meryl, by the very metrics you worship, NY students are doing worse than ever. Failure rates for SE and ELL students at 95%; Black and Hispanic failure rates at near 85%. The resources this glorious test data has procured for the down trodden and disadvantaged doesn’t seem to be working. Please mam, can we have some more?
We need to keep hammering the point that the deformers now own the results! Their goal has been to declare all public education a failure– but it has taken them so long they now own the results they have intentionally sabotaged. Tisch is also responsible for hiring two disasters as Commissioner. David Steiner was forced to quietly resign after accepting expensive world travel from Pearson and subsequently signing a $32M contract for the tests that include passages like the “Tortoise and the Pineapple Race.” The Pearson tests are so bad that NYSED now makes every educator sign a pledge to remain silent on their content under threat of losing their license! The other Commissioner Tuschie brought into NYSED was King John–who simply got laughed out of NY after calling parents a “special interest group” when they challenged his and Tuschie’s agenda. Tisch has been a disaster–but as a member of the uber wealthy class no one will tell her. The Empress keeps believing her new clothes are very stylish!
“The Pearson tests are so bad that NYSED now makes every educator sign a pledge to remain silent on their content under threat of losing their license!”
Refuse to sign. I refuse to give a test that I have not vetted, therefore I couldn’t, in good conscience, sign such a statement. Quit being GAGAers, teachers!!!
I see the Board of Regents appointed four new regents. Three of them are minorities, and all of them have histories of working in public education. I worked with one of the African American women many years ago. She was smart, hard working, and all about high expectations for minorities. Later, she went to Washington to work with Clinton and “choice” initiatives. She later returned as a superintendent in Westchester. I have no idea where her thinking is now; hopefully, she sees through the garbage of today’s reform movement. We’ll have to wait and see if these new members will improve the Regents.
Here’s a link to the new appointees:http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/albany/2015/03/8563704/board-regents-include-more-minority-women
I would like to see someone challenge the ELL, ESL rubric for the enforced cultural assimilation that it is. If one grasps mathematics as a universal language, ditto the periodic table and Linnaean classification; include all the medical and scientific terminology derived from Greek roots, and the difference between English and Spanish is considerably reduced. Geometry is the source of reason itself, the empirical basis for trigonometry and calculus. Algebraic equations, vector dynamics, the fundamental axioms of physics underpinning mechanical and civil engineering, all universal. So, if we are actually pursuing STEM proficiency, language shouldn’t be the problem.
Your belief is both true and untrue. I’m a retired ESL teacher with thirty-eight years of experience. While many well educated ELLs can often succeed in math and sometimes science before the other disciplines, most of the ELLs from Mexico, Central America, and Afro-Caribbean areas have very little to no academic background. This academic gap holds them back as much as the language issues. Many ELLs are refugees from war torn countries where they could not attend school. While it is true that I have seen Russian and Asian students ahead of us in math, these students are a minority of the ELL population. The vast numbers of ELLs are way behind in language and academics. The young man that came here at eight from Africa and got accepted by all eight ivy league schools is not typical.http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/17-year-ny-student-accepted-ivy-league-schools-30141380
Geometry, physics, periodic table, scientific nomenclature,etc. aren’t belief. They simply exist. Lately, I have been looking for bilingual books (English/Spanish) for children. Very few available, mostly primary level. Ditto for adults. Meanwhile, I can pull up a free software off the internet that will make remarkably accurate English/Spanish translations. Am I missing something?
A computer translator, no matter how accurate, will not address the skills gap. Good bilingual instruction can be successful. Sadly those programs are few. Many bilingual students languish in classrooms with low expectations for years. There is a shortage of qualified bilingual teachers as well. I once had a Salvadorian student transfer from Los Angeles. She had been in school in LA since kindergarten. While she had some receptive language, she had almost no expressive language, and her report card had blanks for English grades. I don’t know what they were doing there, but the absence of English is not bilingual education.
After Gödel, logic is king, but mathematics does get more interesting and runs deeper than geometry. I agree STEM is important, but we need a balance. I prefer the STEAM term used nowadays. I will be sad if a Theory of Everything means we study nothing. I love world languages and the arts for the richness they bring to our existence. Otherwise, we become automatons operating solely on algorithms. I have to believe the universe has meaning. Reformers do not. They see me and my students as well-defined models, devoid of any role other than data producers. I have spent most my life in theoretical and applied math, but my thirst for the freedom of the arts is growing each year. Is that strange? Am I losing it? It just seems like there is more….
By the way, my kids delight in taking literary classics and historical speeches and running them through various Google translate languages multiple iterations to increase the error. Any world language teacher can tell – if a first year student suddenly writes in subjunctive, something is up.
Retired, please add that many ELLs have weak native language skills. They are hampered by limited vocabularies. Their reading and writing levels are generally below grade level.
“Am I missing something?”
YES! Quite a bit.
Computer translations still aren’t very good at all. I can spot em a mile away.
Are you bilingual, Michael?
I consider learning math to be almost the equivalent of learning a second language. To work in math in a foreign language is that much harder than in one’s native tongue. So no, those Greek, Latin and other terms do not necessarily help the ELL.
As someone with a working knowledge of Spanish and a high level of fluency in French, some of the computer translations are a joke, especially since English has so many homphones, homographs and homonyms.
Obviously! I forgot about music. I am not bilingual, although I can thrash my way through a bit of French and Spanish, and the occasional Latin or Greek quote. I wouldn’t want to depend on computer translations, either. The point, if I have one, is the extreme cultural bias favoring English.
Opt out is a civil rights issue. Parents should not cede all their civil and natural rights to government on how to raise their own children. It isn’t racial, it is parental.
It is a parental choice. How else will the powers that be get the message that it is unacceptable to subject students to hours of mindless testing that serves no purpose other than to data mine. That wasted time is stealing from students’ education.
It seems like a good issue for both tricorner hat tea party members to pulpits of a Sunday sermon. Parents should not lose all rights to government. Reformers have a selective view of “choice”.
“Let them eat tests”
Or, the Hunger Games’ Effie Trinket lands in a remake of a Michael Jackson Thriller video?
Did you have to post that?
She deserves the same fate as Marie Antoinette…
This is not a good comment.
From my perspective, working in conjunction with the ESL here in Florida, lots of programs are being funded right now under the assumption that because having the tests data their progress can be recorded. They argue that before implementing the tests, they were barely taken in consideration. I don’t believe this at all and seeing how many children in programs of ESL are suffering with so much testing EVERY YEAR I really think that they should measure these programs in other ways, like with their graduation rates (which by the way here in Florida are really low).
We had that same assumption in New York. As an ESL teacher, I don’t have a problem with putting teachers on notice that they are responsible for all students. ELLs are often easy to ignore, and some teachers don’t know what to do with them. I do object to rigged tests with rigged cut scores with punitive outcomes for teachers and students. We always used the CAT test in New York. While it was a pain and disruptive, nobody lost a job or pay as a result of the test. I do have a problem with excessive testing. When I retired in 2008, I calculated that I lost 27 mornings to standardized and mandated state tests. This is too much time in an elementary school since most of the mornings are key academic times as little ones tend to “zone out” in the afternoons.
“I really think that they should measure these programs in other ways”
AAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!
Those programs aren’t being “measured”. They may be being “assessed” or “evaluated” but they are not being “measured” in aany way, shape or form.
We need to quit using the edudeformers’ malapropisms when talking/writing/condemning all of their educational malpractices.
I would be happy to see all standardized testing go. I never found any of it very useful. The real world will not let that happen. The government wants to see some yardstick used to assure all the stakeholders that kids are learning. Don’t make it such a “high stakes-high pressure” situation for students and teachers. I used to look at it as a “necessary evil.” Now they want to nail teachers to the wall over a snapshot of students on one morning; For those of us that don’t teach traditional kids such as ESL, or classified students, it’s torture. Now the Common Core is a bogus bunch of nonsense with rigged scores. Please just stop the insanity! I am so happy to be out of the game.
Duane,
You might find This is not a measurementby particle physicist Jon Butterworth interesting.
It’s about trying to “measure” quarks and gluons, which are themselves not observable:
“They influence the observable results of a collision – the jets of hadrons – but they themselves only appear in the quantum mechanical calculations used to predict these jets.”
“The problem was that the measured quark and gluon distributions depended strongly on abstruse details of the code. A small bug could make a huge difference; approximations which should be equivalently good gave totally contradictory results; and depending on which version of which author’s code you used, the measurement changed again, even though all of them were supposed to be doing the same thing. This was just horrible.”
Horrible indeed. Unfortunately, what the author says about quarks and gluons also applies to many of the things that “reformers” (and others) claim to be “measuring”: learning (with standardized test scores), teaching (with VAM), etc.
In particular, the statement that “depending on which version of which author’s code you used, the measurement changed again, even though all of them were supposed to be doing the same thing” is directly applicable to things like VAM scores which are highly dependent on the details of the model used (as pointed out by ASA in their position paper on VAM)
The problem is that “learning” and “teaching” (like quarks and gluons) are not “observables” (things like velocity, temperature, mass — which can actually be measured)
Teachers influence student outcomes (just as quarks and gluons influence hadron jets), but teaching can not be directly “measured” and to claim that VAM is a “measurement of teaching” is quite literally nonsense.
SDP,
Great analogy!
When one gets to a certain point in explanations of anything, we humans many times have to rely on. . . dogma, prior beliefs that may or may not be verifiable, mythology, superstitions, etc. . . .
Unfortunately no one wants to admit that.
Haven’t read the link, too “disappointed” with the Cards loss to the baby bears to have any sense of logical thought go through the brain right now-ha ha! Will read it tomorrow, and somehow I know it has a bunch of excellent information to utilize.
Gracias, otra vez.
Before Common Core Standards and Common Core testing, millions of students in America’s public schools learned at the highest levels. 60-70% of the freshman in America’s best private, and a higher percentage of freshman in America’s best public universities, went to (and continue to attend) public schools. These students learned how to read, how to write, they learned history, geometry, calculus, American, British and world literature, they learned earth science, biology, chemistry, physics, they demonstrated their understanding of the natural world in national science fairs, they wrote original history, composed original music scores, painted, sculpted, photographed at levels recognized by artists in those fields as exceptional, and on and on and on. Doesn’t this record of actual accomplishment suggest that we have not lacked high standards–since in order for these students to do what they did, their teachers and schools must have used high standards to build engaging curriculum? So what is actually new about these “new” standards? And is what is “new” good, or just new?
Before Common Core testing, public school students’ work was assessed in many different ways, ways that Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, University of Michigan, Berkeley…recognized as legitimate and useful measures of student achievement. So what is “new” about Common Core assessments? Is what is “new” useful? If so, why don’t the private schools in the US use them?
Our problem is not a lack of high standards, or a lack of legitimate assessment. Our problem is that not all of our students have access to instruction that meets standards that are “high” and well-known. And by “access,” I do not mean only highly qualified and talented teachers, but also the nutritional, psychological and familial conditions that favor the development of young children and adolescents. Insofar as we have a “problem,” it is that we do not support instruction at high enough levels throughout our very large nation. This problem is a resource problem, not a standards or assessment problem.
There is no real “news” here, but we need to keep pointing out the truth of our current situation; kids need to grow up in secure and nurturing environments, they need teachers whose knowledge, skills and attitudes about the young are developed to high levels by excellent training and continuous professional development, they need public advocates who understand the deep connection between public education, widespread national prosperity and democracy.
They don’t need privatization or the sentimental clap-trap of billionaires who have too much free time on their hands.
Because we waste the precious time and focus of this generation of young Americans on this nonsense, while the time and focus of the children of these self-appointed trustees of the nation are not wasted, we continue to expand the income, wealth, education gap between the people of the United States and the plutocrats who govern them (or fail to govern them).
Let’s hope that the resistance that may be growing around the nation to education “reform” continues to intensify, to the point of educating everyone to the real game that is currently going on all around us.
Let’s talk about real “reform,” not the ersatz junk being sold by politicians who could use a few high standards themselves.
Steve-This problem is a resource problem, not a standards or assessment problem. You hit the nail on the head! The refusal to deny the existence of poverty is part of their wooden headed “no excuses” mantra. All the ranking and stacking does not change outcomes. We need to put our resources into getting jobs, housing, healthcare for families. We need to support struggling families and single mothers. We need to integrate our schools and demand that no school is under-sourced or left to rot. Our money would be better spent on developing innovative programs for our neediest students. We also need to convince corporate America to bring manufacturing jobs back to America. These jobs pay more than the low level service jobs available now. This is one of the reason Texas is doing better than most other places. They still have manufacturing jobs, although I don’t trust Texas’ lack of regulation.
“This problem is a resource problem, not a standards or assessment problem.”
It sure is a standards and assessment problem. When the foundations (standards and standardized testing) are unsubstantiated, error ridden, and COMPLETELY INVALID, then everything that follows is “VAIN AND ILLUSORY”, in other words COMPLETELY WORTHLESS as educational practices.
yay, Ms. Oyler.
In a sane world it would be embarrassing to admit that you don’t know that poor inner city kids are being poorly served unless you test them repeatedly. In a sane world, we’d be able to understand these things just by comparing school budgets and looking at school facilities and resources across poor and affluent districts.
In a sane world we would all admit that poor inner city kids are poorly served by a federal testing regime designed to produce super-failure rates.
I’ll add poor rural kids, too. Schools in Appalachia are getting the shaft under Kasich. While they tend to vote Republican (!?), the testing burdens are tough for small districts with shrinking resources. It is interesting to watch these red district legislatures try to resolve their small government beliefs with draconian cuts from the statehouse. Many Midwesterners are still struggling. Contrary to Kasich’s stealth presidential campaign speeches, Ohio is near bottom in job creation and still has not recovered from 2008.
Merryly we roll along, roll along, roll along
Merryly we roll along, disaster’s all we see
Ok, now I have that tune stuck in my head.
which is prolly more than Merryl has stuck in hers.
Well, Meryl, instead of relying on test data, you could try asking actual teachers how their actual students are doing by going to their actual classrooms.
Just sayin’
“What was educationally significant and hard to measure has been replaced by what is educationally insignificant and easy to measure. So now we measure how well we taught what is not worth learning.” Arthur Costa, Emeritus Prof. California State
All the reason you need not to have your children abused by the testing industry! OPT OUT!
YEP!
In Bridgeport, CT, three new students enrolled in one of our true public schools yesterday. All three had just arrived from Congo and spoke no English, however the school had just started the annual CT SBAC testing. Although no one could determine if any of these children had ever used a computer before, they were forced to sit and take the test in English.
What is absolutely nuts is that their test scores can be linked to their teachers evaluation. This is not the America we know. America believes in fairness, equity and right from wrong. This is just simply wrong.
Agreed. In NY some of the content tests were translated in native languages. I had to give students the tests in Spanish or Haitian Creole, even though they had never been taught to read in those languages. In Spanish some students spoke a dialect, not standard Spanish, but we had to follow the foolish rules of administration.
I still wonder how they give the tests to students who speak Karen which is not a written language.
Ok, opting out is bad for neediest kids, but abusive punative reforms aren’t necessary for the successful districts. Does this women use a magic 8 ball to write her public statements?
She already suggested that high performing schools be exempt from the Cuomo Testing Agenda. Cuomo’s henchmen put a quick stop to that truly stupid idea.
She’s not only stupid rich, she’s stupid, stupid.
“Ok, opting out is bad for neediest kids. . . ”
Horse manure!
Ms. Tisch has been on the Board of Regents since 1996, where’s her VAM score?
“State Ed has created what they call growth scores, but calling something by a name does not make it real. In fact, these scores do not measure growth from year to year, but measure the score on the test one year and the score on a different test the next year.”
Can you spot the ironical logical fallacy here?
“VAMs have greatest reliability when used on groups of teachers across multiple years.”
Can you spot the logical fallacy in this one?
“Yes, there are exceptions: we have schools where children from low-income schools have learned to do well on a high stakes test. We need to learn more from these anomalies.”
Unless one considers hard core XXX test prep, NO! we don’t need to learn from those anomalies.
The ship “Merryl-Go-Around” runs aground at the PARCC.
Here’s my thought:https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10205609414528538&set=gm.10153217613765859&type=1&theater
Posting and thread: thank you everyone.
Yes, the self-styled “education reformers” now own the current results but keep pleading for more time as if they just started their experiment in the creative disruption of OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN.
Previously on this blog I have provided the first point from Alfie Kohn’s piece in MANY CHILDREN LEFT BEHIND: HOW THE NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT IS DAMAGING OUR CHILDREN AND OUR SCHOOLS (2004, pp. 86-87). I am giving all three points here in order to drive home my point that recent history has been very unkind to Ms. Tisch and her support of NCLB and its various iterations.
Remember that character played by Tom Hanks on SNL called “Mr. Short-term Memory”? He played it for laughs. When it comes to Ms. Tisch, she wants the joke to be on us—and it ain’t funny.
[start excerpt]
1. How many schools will NCLB-required testing reveal to be troubled that were not previously identified as such? For the last year or so, I have challenged defenders of the law to name a single school anywhere in the country whose inadequacy was a secret until yet another wave of standardized test results was released. So far I have had no takers.
2. Of the many schools and districts that are obviously struggling, how many have received the resources they need, at least without a court order? If conservatives are sincere in saying they want more testing in order to determine where help is needed, what has their track record been in providing that help? The answer is painfully obvious, of course: Many of the same people who justify more standardized tests for information-gathering purposes have also claimed that more money doesn’t produce improvement. The Bush administration’s proposed budgets have fallen far short of what states would need just to implement NCLB itself, and those who point this out are dismissed as malcontents. (Thus Bennett and Finn: “Democrats are now saying that Republicans are not spending enough. But that is what they always say—enough is never sufficient for them when it comes to education spending.”)
3. What have the results of high-stakes testing been to this point? To the best of my knowledge, no positive effects have ever been demonstrated, unless you count higher scores on these same tests. More low-income and minority students are dropping out, more teachers (often the best ones) are leaving the profession, and more mind-numbing test preparation is displacing genuine instruction. Why should anyone believe that annual do-or-die testing mandated by the federal government will lead to anything different? Moreover, the engine of this legislation is punishment NCLB is designed to humiliate and hurt the schools that, according to its own standards, most need help. Families at those schools are given a green light to abandon them—and, specifically, to transfer to other schools that don’t want them and probably can’t handle them. This, it quickly becomes clear, is an excellent way to sandbag the “successful” schools, too.
[end excerpt]
The book was published in 2004. This is more than the ten years proposed by Bill Gates to see if his “stuff” works.
Time’s up. Opt out.
Starve the testing beast that feeds a few adults and THEIR OWN CHILDREN at the expense of everyone else.
😎
Your points are well taken KTA. Too bad it is an utter waste of time trying to rationalize with the edu-fakers. This has never, ever been about improving education. It has never been about pedagogy and best practices. They have not one shred of evidence to support their stand; and countless observations that disprove all they have implemented. They broke the system with a top-down, punitive approach – and now they own the failure. This was an invasion from the get go, stay fierce and fearless.
NY Teacher: I know you understand all too well that describing the heavyweights and enforcers and enablers of the self-styled “education reform” as “thought leaders” does a disservice to the English language—
The phrase “thought leaders” has one too many words in it, i.e., the word “thought” is superfluous, a distractor/mislead/decoy as the psychometricians would say.
It’s the vast majority of the population that will be concerned about issues of fairness and equity and honesty and morality. Our conversation is with them, first and foremost.
Forgive the nitpicking, but “invasion” is too grand a word for what the rheephormsters are doing. It’s just down and dirty “smash and grab.”
And when they finish smashing what belongs to us and grabbing as much $tudent $ucce$$ as they can lug away, they will continue to ensure for THEIR OWN CHILDREN the kind of education and life they are denying OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN.
Always living by their Marxist aphorisms:
“While money can’t buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.”
In this case, they buy the happiness and want to continue to outsource the misery to us.
Only trouble is, some of us read more Frederick Douglass than their beloved Groucho:
“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
Although, to be fair, when it comes to refusing the failed refuse of rheephorm policies, they seem to have forgotten one of the finest Marxist dialogues extant:
“Chico: The garbage man is here.
Groucho: Well, tell him we don’t want any.”
I bet they thought I’d forgotten that one…
😎
1) Which best describes the NCLB waiver deal (Duncan’s Folly)
engineered by Bill Gates?
a) An invasion
b) A smash and grab
c) Pickpocketing
d) Extortion
Remember, there is only one correct answer and three plausible distractors.
The neediest children are ignored because people like Superintendents, Cluster Leaders and the Chancellor and the Mayor choose to ignore them. Even with high-stakes testing educators trying to do what is right for our neediest children are silenced by political powerhouses such as those in high places. As former principal of one of the neediest schools in NYCDOE, I begged and pleaded to stop the abuse that was perpetrated upon my school community. Even when I brought a failing school to a B my supervisors were relentless. They wanted the school closed, and that was that. So, significant progress on the high stakes test did not save my children. Just sent them into a tail spin again, removed me as principal, and 1/4 of the highly effective teaching staff left and the children begin again with their 5th principal in 8 years. The only thing that our neediest children need is honesty, transparency, people who really want to see them achieve success and support for great principals and teachers who work day in and out to give these children all the opportunities that are offered to Tisch and all the other powerful regents and their families. This is not rocket science, many people do not want these children to succeed!
Tisch’s comments are a slap in the face to teachers who she implies are idiots that cannot identify the students in their classrooms which need extra help.
Ellen #NotAFool
TO CHANCELLOR TISCH: When my school admits new students, we ascertain their basic reading/writing level via a 15 minute writing sample and verbal interview. We are then able to level and program them, with not a dime of extra money spent.
Because we are an inner-city school in the South Bronx, we can make certain common sense predictions about the majority of students before they even pick up a pencil. If you live in this district, there is a good chance your functioning math and ELA levels are likely to be far behind grade level – this is consistently affirmed after we do the writing samples.
The philosophy undergirding NY’s testing regime is that annual tests are needed to pinpoint exact math and reading levels in order to compile racial and economic statistics, and then pit students against students domestically and internationally.
The mistake, from the beginning has been concentrating on math and English to the exclusion of most else, imposing punitive accountability onto local educators from the state and federal level instead of providing the actual supports to remove actual learning obstacles.
When I was a kid in an inner city NYC public school, we had a full band program for all grades, a full orchestra, a full chorus, a visual art program with paints and canvases, a full ‘shop class’ program, a ceramics program and both Spanish and French, with gym everyday (including locker rooms to change in), ALL IN ONE SCHOOL.
Today, my students get almost none of this, making the problem snowball. Kids hate school, hate tests and hate math and inane reading passages more than ever. After years of being threatened, they mistrust adults, mistrust the government, mistrust the authorities and spot anything that looks like corporate, scripted curriculum a mile away.
Kids needed smaller class sizes, wraparound services and rich whole-child curricula for student and family buy-in. This has been the mantra for years.
All along this long journey to nowhere, we’ve been told the testing shows us where the help should go, but real help for struggling schools has never come, the only thing that has come is vendor contracts, school closures, threats, high stress and wild-eyed propaganda faulting inner city teachers as lazy, incompetent child molesters.
As NCLB made education political, they quickly ascertained that almost all inner city schools were behind in math and ELA (no sh#t Sherlock), but instead of providing actual support, they allocated “funding” that had various strings attached including unproven theories, disproven assumptions, trojan horses and naked political agendas.
Why did we mandate the scientifically impossible, that all kids must develop at the same pace? Why did we increase the stakes of bubble test scores when 1 in 4 answers can be guessed at random? Why did we upend districts that had world class results for decades? Why would we ratchet up standards in the inner city if they weren’t reaching the old standards? The answer is the outsized influence of billionaires in an era of unlimited campaign spending.
The Regents and legislators should have all along be de-politicizing these budgets, fighting the influence of corporate lobbyists, listening intently to the educators on the ground, in the classrooms who have patiently, politely and repetitively been explaining what the problems in the ‘hood are.
Let’s stop pretending and call this what it is – it’s austerity and class war, using students as pawns to threaten and usurp local control, dictate to middle class families, weaken organized labor and mold children into some corporate-approved vision of future workers.
We must tie this crisis to campaign finance because we just saw PACs throw the balance in the NY Senate in the last election with less than $5 million dollars. This is easy for them. But NY is waking up and joining teachers because we see representative democracy being washed away. Parents in particular are recognizing that hedge fund vultures have a greater influence on their kids’ education than professionally certified, experienced educators.