Search results for: "engageny"

Teacher: Beware EngageNY Curriculum: It’s No Good!

July 22, 2015 //

A reader reports on first-hand experience with Néw York’s EngageNY curriculum for Common Core:

“As a 2nd grade teacher with nearly 20 years teaching experience, I cannot express how disturbing it is to be forced to use the EngageNY materials every day. It goes against everything we know works effectively to engage and educate our students. As professionals originally hired for our creativity, enthusiasm, and dedication – these materials do everything possible to kill those qualities in each of us.

“We were told from day one that we were to use the program “with fidelity.” It was obvious that no one had actually reviewed the materials (probably due to the fact that many of the modules hadn’t even been completed yet when districts adopted them) or had asked teachers to take a look at what we were being given ahead of time. We also were not given any training – the boxes were just delivered just a few days before the school year began. As the year progressed and it became increasingly evident that there were multiple errors and/or no way to implement all of the many components scheduled in a day with the time allotted, we were then told to “use common sense.” We were not exactly sure what that meant as we were still expected to follow the program and would be evaluated on our use of it as well.

“Last year we entered our second year with EngageNY. Having been through it once, we are still identifying more and more errors and, most importantly, developmentally inappropriate material that we are expected to present to our students. Mid-year we were told that we would finally have a day to meet with a representative to do some training. All we had ever requested was that someone come in to our school and demonstrate exactly HOW all of the materials were to be used in a given lesson. Please just SHOW US! – we asked over and over. That would never happen. However, during our “training” (which was essentially just a sales presentation showing us each component), again we asked how it would be possible to fit all of these things that were dictated in a lesson into our limited time each day. The representative did finally admit that there really couldn’t be any at to fit 2 1/2 hours worth of lessons in an hour or 1 1/2 hour period.

“We, teachers and students, are being set up to fail. It is so sad to think that I hear teachers talk about “the good old days” when we used to be able to create fun and engaging activities that students enjoyed and we loved teaching! I am sorry that this has been a bit long-winded (and I could go on and on with more about this), but I haven’t had an opportunity to share this with any teachers outside of my own district. It is both comforting (and discouraging) to know that there are others experiencing the same things around the country. I hope that we can come together and fight for what we know is right for our students!”

Categories Common Core, Curriculum, New York

EngageNY=Lock-Step Teaching=Dumbing Down Our Kids

By dianeravitch

July 19, 2015 //

This post is a description of EngageNY, the scripted curriculum written for use in New York state and now migrating to other states. Ken Wagner, former deputy commissioner of the New York State Education Department, now Rhode Island state superintendent, promises to import them to Rhode Island. New York’s new state commissioner says she used the New York curriculum with great success in Florida. Read this post and decide for yourself. Be sure to read the comments.

Here is a sample:

The same people who gave us standardized testing have now given us standardized teaching, which goes directly to the information a student can get, how the student gets it, and what the student is supposed to get out of each and every class minute. It is 19th-century educational lockstep, pushed by the White House and institutionalized by the New York governor’s office.

If standardized testing dumbed down school and teacher evaluation, standardized teaching takes it a step further: It dumbs down the kids.

The project is called “Engage New York.” It does anything but.

If, say, you are a teacher of 11th-grade English in Buffalo, you get, every 10 weeks, a thick three-ring binder with instructions on what you are to do in every class. The copy I have of one of these runs 587 pages. The volume is excruciatingly boring to read. (I cheated: I skimmed most of the pages.) I cannot imagine what it is like to be a creative and imaginative teacher hamstrung by it. Worse: I cannot imagine what it must be like to be a student in classes that now have to be taught by teachers forced to deliver this drivel or be fired.

The book is divided into teaching “modules,” which list what questions the teachers should ask, what answers they should get, and how they should respond to them. They list what words students should learn each day.

There are regular pages headed “Unit-at-a-Glance Calendar,” telling the teacher the specific lines and paragraphs to be covered in each class. There are pages listing “Activity” items for each class; each named activity includes the percentage of class time to be devoted to it. One, for example has “Activity 1: Introduction of Lesson Agenda. 5%”; Activity 2: Homework Accountability. 10%”; “Activity 3: Masterful Reading. 5%”; “Activity 4: Hamlet Act 1.2, Lines 900-110 Reading and Discussion, 60%.”

Day after day of this, class after class, minute by minute.

The questions the teachers are ordered to ask are often so banal they read like a Monty Python parody. Here is an example. The teacher is told to ask the question, “What information do you gather from the full title of the play: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark?” (All teacher questions are in bold type.)

Permissible student answers are:

—The play is about a person named Hamlet.

—This is a tragic or sad play.

—Hamlet is a prince.

—This play likely takes place in Denmark.

This is drivel. The book is full of things like that. It is also full of misinformation.

Categories Common Core, Curriculum, New York

Laura Chapman: Can Teachers Be Measured by the Same Methods Used for Cows?

By dianeravitch

October 18, 2020 //

Our wonderful reader Laura Chapman reports here on the origins of the laws that purport to measure teacher quality by the test scores of their students. The founding father of this methodology was the late William Sanders, an agricultural statistician who believed that the same productivity used to measure cows could be used to measure teachers. His ideas were adopted and promoted by Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top, which required states to adopt “value-added methodology” if they wanted to compete for a share of billions of federal dollars. The Gates Foundation also embraced test-based accountability. These methods proved to be ineffective at measuring teacher quality; they are inaccurate and demoralizing.

According to a 2019 report coauthored by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, 15 states are still inflicting teacher evaluations by VAM (value added measures) and 28 are using the equally invalid process of writing up Student Learning Objectives (SLOs). SLOs require you to predict the end-of-year (or end of unit) achievements of students, among other ridicule-worthy feats. https://kappanonline.org/mapping-teacher-evaluation-plans-essa-close-amrein-beardsley-collins/

Vamboozled, the website of Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, is a great resource for anyone still being a victim of this method of estimating the “value you have added” to the test scores of your students.

But there is also a deeper and little known origin story for VAMs. That story was exposed to view in April, 2020, by Gene V. Glass, a Senior Researcher at the National Education Policy Center and a Regents’ Professor Emeritus from Arizona State University. Glass released a treasure trove of correspondence about VAM (value added measures), first used in education by the late William Sanders, an agricultural statistician. http://ed2worlds.blogspot.com/2020/04/an-archaeological-dig-for-vam.html

In his blog post “Archeological Dig for VAM,” Glass reveals how William Sanders borrowed statistical methods for calculating VAM, then began using those calculations to judge teacher productivity/quality, based on the test scores of their students, specifically in the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS).

It turns out that Sanders’ TVAAS process (VAM) was “built on the formulation of the late C.R. Henderson, a Cornell statistician, a fellow in the American Statistical Association, known for his pioneering work in breeding animals, specifically herds of dairy cows. Henderson’s statistical methods of producing a “genetic evaluation of livestock have been widely accepted, utilized, and enhanced by animal breeders and statisticians.”

Until Henderson’s 1953 publication of “Estimation of variance and covariance components” in Biometrics,” no one had tackled the difficult problem of “estimating variance components from unbalanced data of cross-classified models, e.g., of milk production records of daughters of A.I. (Artificially Inseminated) sires in different herds – where sires are crossed with herds, and, for a large group of herds, each sire has daughters in many herds and each herd has daughters of many sires.” https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/31657/BU-1085-MA.pdf;sequence=1

If you have a background in statistics (mine is minimal and vintage), you may enjoy reading the extended “defense” of VAM/TVAAS by the late William Sanders who cites his debt to Henderson’s work. Sanders’ defense of using VAM with teachers and the test scores of their students is revealed in his answers to numerous questions from William Robert Saffold, Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies, who is well-informed about the results in TVASS in Tennessee and wanted more information to interpret the results of TVAAS for educators. The extended discussion reveals the many unwarranted assumptions Sanders made in constructing TVAAS.

I think the hoopla over the specifics of VAM (and SLO’s) is too often disconnected from the fact-based origin story on “how to cull herds of dairy cows to maximize their productivity.” VAMs and SLOs are designed to cull teachers based on their productivity in raising the test scores of their students.

Almost all of the accountability structures in education based on standardized test scores are designed to cull–select and discard–teachers who are not producing gains in test scores. In VAMs, test scores of students are not much different from measures of milk production, whether of individual teachers or the whole herd (school).

Some supporters of VAM’s are acting as if education geneticists. They seem to think that some teachers are destined to be more productive than others. They insist, for example, that Teach For America graduates with high GPA’s from selective colleges are good breeders of above average test scores in their students. Moreover, these potentially good breeders only need is a brief course in summer before they are ready to produce students who are high scorers on tests. That brief summer dose of instruction is analogous to providing artificial insemination in breeding females… or for males, perhaps a dose of Viagra.

VAMs and SLOs are flawed measured pushed by the Obama/Duncan administration’s Race to the Top. These measures are still present in many state ESSA plans. That may explain why Race to the Top testing resources are still available, even if developed under contract for Race to The Top by members of a “Reform Support Network.”

The Reform Support Network was nothing more than a huge marketing campaign for these flawed measures. Here, for example, is how they marketed SLOs as a substitute for subjects and grade levels for which there were no statewide standardized test scores for calculating VAM. One is the infamous collective measure where, as Diane notes, teachers “are assigned ratings for students they never taught in subjects they never taught.” https://www.engageny.org/sites/default/files/resource/attachments/rsn-slo-toolkit.pdf

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Stupid, Teacher Evaluations, VAM (value-added modeling)

Fred Smith: The Pathetic Lies of the New York State Education Department, in Service of the Testing Regime

By dianeravitch

March 27, 2017 //

Fred Smith is a testing expert who worked for the New York City Board of Education for many years. In retirement, he volunteers for parent groups fighting to stop excessive and pointless standardized testing. The testing starts tomorrow across the state, and the State Education Department is pulling out all the stops to hinder, deter, and block the opt-out movement.

The New York State Education Department (SED) has been campaigning to dissuade more parents from abandoning the annual testing program.

Last year the parents and guardians of 220,000 children opted out of the English Language Arts (ELA) and math exams. They are given to 1.2 million children annually in grades 3 through 8. Their administration becomes the center of attention for six school days. They are due to begin on Tuesday.

The effort to keep parents onboard this year depends on repeating the same misleading information the state provided in 2016. It must be challenged. There are also important test-related matters SED fails to advise parents about.

Seeking to turn back the opt-out movement, misinformation about testing has been reduced to a few scripted points to help SED and education administrators convey the idea that the testing program has improved: The number of questions on the exams has been reduced; more teachers have been involved in developing them; and the tests are untimed.

On the surface these seem attractive. But, fewer items make less reliable tests. The teachers who were involved reviewed but didn’t write the questions, which were developed by test publisher Pearson. And the removal of time limits means the tests are no longer being conducted under standard conditions, thereby nullifying attempts to measure growth.

Effectively, the results of the 2017 exams cannot be used to make meaningful comparisons over time. This should end their already shaky use to assess student progress, or be factored into value-added formulas to judge teacher effectiveness, or enter into the evaluation of school performance. Ipso facto, the inability to make year-to-year comparisons of achievement is a sufficient reason for opting out.

Another selling point the state makes is that, while the tests will continue to be given, no teachers or principals will be affected by the results. This may lull people concerned about the misuse of the tests into accepting their administration because negative consequences have diminished.

My experience tells me something different. Whenever there is an investment in testing, a use for the scores will be found to justify the cost and to shield decision makers, who lean on the results, from taking direct responsibility for their actions.

There is a darker side to the propaganda. In announcing the improvements, an SED spokesperson said, “It’s up to parents to decide if their children should take the tests and we want them to have all the facts so they can make an informed decision.”

Then why does State Education Commissioner Elia withhold information on a parent’s right to opt out of the exams? And why has the state continued since 2012 to keep parents in the dark about the field testing of questions that allow publishers to develop future exams for free by trying out test questions on children?

Both omissions are most notable in a one-page document posted on SED’s Engageny , titled The 2017 Grades 3-8 New York State Assessments: What Parents Need to Know. Evidently, they must know the tests are untimed, shortened, reflective of teacher involvement and the fact that some districts will give them on computers. The ultimate goal is a transition to universal computer-based testing. No reason they should know about opting out or about the field tests.

This is pure arrogance. Presenting information in a need-to-know manner implies that parents are like soldiers told only those things that are essential to the discharge of their duties—in this case, an obligation to take the tests. This is how we “enage” parents?!

Here are some more facts about 2017’s field testing that parents don’t need to know:

There are two approaches publishers follow to develop questions and determine which should be kept for subsequent exams. The preferred way is to embed try-out material (reading passages and associated questions) in the test booklets that students are striving to complete. In theory, students can’t tell which questions are experimental and do not count in scoring their tests from the operational ones that count. Thus, they should be motivated to do well on the trial items.

This year, 22% of the ELA multiple-choice items that appear in Test Book 1 (March 28) are being field tested. In grade 3, 25% of the items are being tried out. That is, one reading passage and six out of the 24 items are developmental. They don’t count, but they require time and energy to complete and their inclusion on the tests can have an impact on the results.

In math, embedded items will make up 14% of the tests, interspersed among the operational items. They are contained in Test Books 1 and 2 (May 2 and 3). Statewide, 1.2 million children have been volunteered to participate. Parents haven’t been asked for their consent.

The less preferred way to try out items, known as stand-alone field testing, has also been taken by SED, because embedding has not yielded enough items to build new tests. So, separate field tests are used to generate sufficient material for the next round.

Here too, parents are not told about these tests. The state has targeted 3,073 schools for ELA or math stand-alone field testing on one grade level any day between May 22 and June 9. 973 of them are being tapped to participate in the computer-based testing part of this experiment.

What makes stand-alone field testing weak is that students are not motivated to do well on tests that are given late in the year consisting entirely of questions they know don’t count. Therefore, the information obtained about how the try-out items functioned is tenuous when publishers must choose which ones will become operational.

Stand-alone field testing has been discredited and criticized as contributing to poorly constructed Common Core exams. There are no negative consequences for rejecting this shoddy approach.

Clearly, not leveling with parents shows contempt. It is part of SED’s conspiracy of silence designed to keep mass testing in place. Parents and their children, the lifeblood of the public schools, should strongly consider opting out of the 2017 exams.

Categories Lies, Opt Out, Parents, Propaganda, Standardized Testing, Students

NY Times Opinion Piece Lauds Common Core and Core Knowledge

By dianeravitch

August 28, 2015 //

140

In an opinion article today, a D.C. based writer commends the Common Core, E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum, and New York’s “EngageNY” modules.

Natalie Wexler maintains that the standardized tests did not cause curriculum-narrowing. She says that schools have long given preference to skills over knowledge. She believes that Common Core will reverse that unwise preference.

I have always preferred a balanced approach that includes both skills and knowledge. I was a member of the board of the Core Knowledge Foundation for many years. I don’t think that the Common Core standards will unleash a fervor for knowledge because it is really just more of the skill-based approach that Wexler decries. Presumably she wants states and districts to adopt the Hirsch Core Knowledge curriculum, as the “EngageNY” modules do. I think she would be wise to read those modules. Teachers and parents have complained about the overload of information in them.

Here is a selection from the first-grade module. Consider that some first-graders are just learning to read. Few, if any, have a context into which these facts can be assimilated:

Locate the area known as Mesopotamia on
a world map or globe and identify it as part
of Asia;

Explain the
importance of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and the use of
canals to support farming and the development
of the city of Babylon;

Describe the city of
Babylon and the Hanging Gardens;

Identify cuneiform as the system of writing used in
Mesopotamia;

Explain why a written
language is important to the development of a
civilization;

Explain the significance of the
Code of Hammurabi;

Explain why rules and laws
are important to the development of a
civilization;

Explain the ways in which a
leader is important to the development of a
civilization;

Explain the significance
of gods/goddesses, ziggurats, temples, and
priests in Mesopotamia;

Describe key
components of a civilization;

Identify Mesopotamia as
the “Cradle of Civilization”;

Describe how a civilization evolves
and changes over time;

Locate Egypt on a world
map or globe and identify it as a part of
Africa;

Explain the importance of the
Nile River and how its floods were important
for farming;

Identify hieroglyphics as the
system of writing used in ancient Egypt;

Explain the significance of gods/goddesses in ancient
Egypt; Identify pyramids and explain their
significance in ancient Egypt;

Describe how
the pyramids were built; Explain that much of
Egypt is in the Sahara Desert;

Identify the Sphinx and explain its
significance in ancient Egypt;

Identify Hatshepsut as a pharaoh of ancient Egypt and
explain her significance as pharaoh;

Identify Tutankhamun as a pharaoh of ancient Egypt
and explain his significance;

Explain that much of what we know about ancient
Egypt is because of the work of
archaeologists

Wexler predicts that the high failure rates on the Common Core tests will lead to a demand by parents for Core Knowledge. Since we know that those failure rates were engineered artificially by setting a ridiculous passing mark aligned with NAEP proficient, it seems safer to predict that continued failure will encourage the growth of the opt out movement.

What do you think?

Categories Education Reform

Not Everyone in Rhode Island is Thrilled with New State Superintendent

By dianeravitch

July 22, 2015 //

Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo is a former venture capital entrepreneur. As state treasurer, she redirected the state’s pension funds. Her husband Andy Moffitt is a co-founder of the Global Education Practice at McKinsey. He is active with the anti-union, anti-teacher Stand for Children. He was a member of Teach for America. Moffitt co-wrote (with Paul Kihn and Michael Barber) “Deliverology 101: A Field Guide for Educational Leaders.”

The blog site “RIFuture” wrote of McKinsey:

“In terms of corporate education reform, one prominent McKinsey-watcher and follow-the-money researcher puts the firm in a class by itself:

“They have been the leaders in crafting the dominant narrative of an education crisis for decades, and now deeply entrenched in education reform policies, they are reaping the financial and political benefits of marketing solutions to the problems they manufactured in the first place.”

Governor Raimondo recently selected Deputy Commissioner of Education Ken Wagner as the new State Superintendent in Rhode Island. In Néw York, he was known as a strong supporter of high-stakes testing, VAM, and corporate reforms.

Sheila Resseger, a teacher in Rhode Island for many years, was unhappy with Raimondo’s choice. She wrote, in response to a post about Néw York’s Common Core curriculum called EngageNY:

“Here was my comment to the post that Diane referenced. I am going to make it my mission to inform Rhode Islanders about the total disdain that Ken Wagner has for authentic teaching and learning. According to the RI Dept of Ed and Gov. Raimondo, he “developed” EngageNY. By his own admission he is opposed to Opt Out and for data collection. These are the trifecta of evil in my book: Common Core/Pear$on testing/data mining.

“I find this so profoundly disturbing that I can hardly see straight to type this comment. I live in RI. As you may know, our Governor, Gina Raimondo, recently nominated NY State Deputy Commissioner of Ed Dr. Ken Wagner to be our new Commissioner of Education (replacing Broad-trained Deborah Gist). This past Monday night the RI Board of Education and Council on Elementary and Secondary Education met to decide whether or not to confirm Dr. Wagner. I was the only one to speak against his confirmation. Dr. Wagner was credited with developing EngageNY, and seemed to be delighted that it has been downloaded for free 20 million times. He also declared that the Common Core does not script lessons, but actually frees up teachers to teach creatively. Another egregious comment of his was that we don’t have to be concerned with Piaget’s developmental stages–that theory is passé. Now we know that children can do so much more than we had expected of them before. Yes, every first grader is delighted to learn about the Code of Hammurabi.

“Here is my post in RIFuture.org, published before the meeting. http://www.rifuture.org/will-ken-wagners-past-in-new-york-shape-his-future-in-rhode-island.html”

Categories Data and Data Mining, New York, Rhode Island, Standardized Testing, Teacher Evaluations, VAM (value-added modeling)

Can Your 3rd Grader Read 300 Words a Minute?

By dianeravitch

April 5, 2015 //

Kevin Glynn, who blogs as Lace to the Top, teaches elementary school. In this post, he describes the extraordinary demands of the third grade Common Core in Néw York.

“Can your 8 year old read 300 words per minute? Mine can’t. In fact, I don’t know anyone who can. Yet, that is exactly what Common Core state tests require.

“In looking through samples of Common Core state tests on engageNY for third graders, I find myself once again puzzled by what they are asking our children to do.

“The typical Common Core passage is 600 words in length. During the first day, (of a 3 day test) students are required to read a minimum of 5 passages and answer 30 questions. Students have 70 minutes to complete day one of the test.

“If a student spends only 1 minute reading and analyzing each of the 30 questions, they will have to read passages that are 2-3 years above grade level at a pace of 75 words per minute. Some would argue that is not too difficult a task and at first glance, I might agree.”

He then demonstrates the absurd expectations that guarantee most children will fail.

Categories Common Core, Testing

David Greene: The Importance of Respect–for Students and Teachers Alike

By dianeravitch

February 13, 2015 //

David Greene, a veteran educator, reflects on the meaning of respect and wonders why our society no longer respects teachers–and if it ever did. He certainly respected his teachers. They changed his life. Yet he recounts a dinner where one young upstart dropped a condescending comment about teachers having “common and ordinary intellects.”

Students need respect too. He writes:

For kids, respect is as important as motivation, often more so. I am not talking about their respect for teachers. They respect those who respect them. They want structure and authority. The teachers they are most successful with are those who enforce the code of the school yet, at the same time, show respect for them.

They know that the best teachers understand what Elijah Anderson calls their “code of the street” in his 1999 book of the same name. Whether that street is urban, suburban, or rural, respect from their peers, who they have to live with outside of class and school, becomes critical. “Even small children test one another, pushing and shoving…ready to hit other children over matters not to their liking.” Why? To maintain respect.

The state of New York shows its disrespect for teachers by imposing phony evaluation systems (APPR) and discarding teacher-made state curricula for off-the-shelf curricula from vendors. What does the state do?

We get APPR. The Annual Professional Performance Review is a return to the use of Frederick Taylor’s scientific management of the early 20th century. Then, corporate robber barons used scientific management to attempt to make their industrial factory workers more productive. Today, new robber barons pay the NYS Department of Education to turn college-educated teachers into low-level industrial employees that productively churn students out as if they were manufacturing Model T’s.

Here are 3 examples of the negative effects of APPRs based on predominantly flawed data from flawed tests with manufactured cut scores.

“A teacher of the year, i inherited a gifted class whose collective score was 3.2 out of 4.0. For me to be graded as a competent teacher my following year’s class, had to average 3.7. However, my new gifted students only averaged 3.5…so even though the scores improved i ‘needed improvement’.”
“This year i taught students who have IQs from 56-105. One third of my students were non-readers. What are my chances of being “effective”? More importantly, who is going to want to teach these students under those conditions?”
“Ninth grade algebra teachers have higher reported student scores on their regents exams than do global studies teachers and thus have better APPR But does that mean they are better teachers? On the august 2011 integrated algebra “regents,” test results were weighted so that a student only needed to get 34% of the questions correct to pass with a 65%. On the unweighted august 2011, global history regents a student needed to get 72% of the multiple-choice questions correct plus at least 50% on the short answer and essay questions to get the same 65% passing grade.” How is that equitable?
We get EngageNY, NYS’s version of the common core. The state decided that the long time, top rated, and nationally renowned teacher developed k-12 syllabi were not good enough and so created EngageNY.

Who prepared this huge website filled with everything from policy to modules (curricula) and resources? The site says it is “in house”. Here is what I found:

NYS says:

“Engageny.org is developed and maintained by the New York State Education Department to support the implementation of key aspects of the New York State Board of Regents reform agenda. This is the official web site for current materials and resources related to the regents reform agenda.”

The three real writers: commoncore.org, http://www.elschools.org and coreknowledge.org

NYS says: “the Regents research fellows planning will undertake implementation of the Common Core Standards and other essential elements of the Regents reform agenda. The Regents fellows program is being developed to provide research and analysis to inform policy and develop program recommendations for consideration by the board of regents.”

The reality: these 13 research fellows (none NYS teachers) are paid as much as $189,000 each, in private money; at least $4.5 million has been raised, including $1 million donated by dr. Tisch.” Other donors include bill gates, a leader of the charge to evaluate teachers, principals and schools using students’ test scores; the national association of charter school authorizers and the Robbins Foundation, which finance charter expansion; and the Tortora Sillcox Family Foundation whose mission statement includes advancing “Mayor Bloomberg’s school reform agenda.” Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Gates are expert at using philanthropy in a way that pressures government to follow their private public policy agendas.”

I respectively submit that they believe we teachers of “common and ordinary intellect” are no longer capable of curricula planning.

Categories Curriculum, New York, Students, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers

Robert Pondiscio: This Is What a Great Common Core Lesson Does NOT Look Like

By dianeravitch

September 30, 2014 //

Robert Pondiscio, who now works for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, shows here how a Common Core lesson can be deadly dull. New York put one of its “experts” on NPR to demonstrate how exciting a Common Core lesson was . But it wasn’t.

“I referred my listeners to a recent NPR effort to get “super-specific about what makes a good Common Core–aligned lesson.” The reporter enlisted the aid of Kate Gerson, who works with EngageNY, a New York State Education Department’s web site. She’s one of the leaders of New York State’s transition to Common Core; NPR asked her to walk through a supposedly exemplary ninth-grade lesson—a close reading of a short story by Karen Russell entitled, “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised By Wolves.”

Pondiscio didn’t think much of the lesson. It was the same old skills-based lesson. Same old, same old.

Categories Common Core

As Testing Frenzy Grows, So Does Opt-Out Movement

By dianeravitch

August 23, 2014 //

Here is the latest summary of testing news from FAIRTEST:

Across the U.S., students are returning to classrooms where even more time will be devoted to standardized exam preparation and administration. Over the summer, some districts developed hundreds of new tests to comply with mandates from federal and state politicians who are still not listening to their constituents

(http://www.naplesnews.com/news/education/collier-must-create-more-than-700-exams-by-fall).

Not surprisingly, the escalating testing frenzy is additional motivation for the nation’s growing assessment reform movement.

Colorado Opt-Out Movement Grows
http://co.chalkbeat.org/2014/08/15/more-colorado-students-opt-out-of-tests-but-no-sign-of-groundswell/#.U_IigRaumNx

Large Florida County School Board Votes to Research Opting Out of Standardized Testing

http://www.news-press.com/story/news/education/2014/08/12/lee-county-school-board-to-meet/13947251/

Florida District Test Opt-Out Options Legally Unclear

http://www.news-press.com/story/news/education/2014/08/13/lee-school-board-opt-legality-unclear/14036977/

More Lessons From Atlanta, Georgia Cheating Scandal

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/walt_gardners_reality_check/2014/08/atlanta_cheating_scandal_lessons.html

Indiana Superintendent Criticizes Politically Motivated School Grading System

http://www.courierpress.com/news/education/making-the-grade/ritz-expresses-displeasure-with-af-school-grades-in-meeting-with-retired-teachers_70429957

Michigan School’s Grade Plunges Due to Administrative Error