Archives for the month of: August, 2012
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The Film That Should Be Screened at Dem Convention

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2012 //
8

When the Democrats hold their national convention, this is the film that should be shown:

During the Democratic Convention, I’d like to be invited to a viewing of the documentary, The Inconvenient Truth About Waiting for Superman. I’d like to see a similar panel of Democrats speaking afterward against privatization of our public schools and on behalf of teachers and students.

What a great idea! “The Inconvenient Truth About Waiting for Superman” was produced by teachers and parents in New York City.

It was made by the Grassroots Education Movement, whose symbol is an RR (Real Reformers).

Can anyone out there set up a screening for real Democrats who support public education and oppose privatization?

Categories Education Reform

You Can See “WBD” at Dem Convention Too, but NOT Sponsored by DNC

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2012 //
25

StudentsFirst, Parent Revolution, and Democrats for Education Reform are  hosting a screening of the film “Won’t Back Down” at the Democratic National Convention. It is not on the official program, so I hear.

UPDATE: This screening is not sponsored by the DNC. It is being shown independently by the sponsors mentioned above.

This is the film celebrating the parent trigger, the law started by the billionaire-funded Parent Revolution in California and since adopted by the far-rightwing group ALEC as model legislation to encourage parents to seize control of their public school and hand it over to a charter school operator.

http://www.studentsfirst.org/page/s/dnc-signup

Join Us for a Screening of Won’t Back Down at the DNC

You and your guests are cordially invited to a pre-screening of Won’t Back
Down at the Democratic National Convention sponsored by Democrats for
Education Reform, Parent Revolution and StudentsFirst. The film will be
followed by a panel discussion with Michelle Rhee, Ben Austin, Joe Williams,
Mayor Kevin Johnson and others.

Where: EpiCentre Theaters – 210 E. Trade St., Charlotte, NC 28202
Date: September 3, 2012
Time: 1:00 – 3:00pm

Categories Corporate Reformers, Parent Groups, Parent trigger

Why Data Count More Than Any Other Measure

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2012 //
10

When the purveyors of evaluation systems are hawking their latest program, they confidently assert that the test scores are only one of multiple measures.

Don’t worry, they say, the test scores are only 20%, or 30%, or 40%, or 50%.

We will put them into context with lots of soft measures derived from classroom observations or other non-data sources.

But it is not true, even if they mean it when they say it.

This principal writes:

The allure of data is simply too strong to resist.

I began teaching in a state where a high-stakes state testing system was already in place. Naturally, the pressure was intense on teachers, schools, and districts, but it was the only reality I knew.

Later, my wife and I moved to another state where high-stakes tests were just a seed of an idea, almost beginning to germinate. Of course, there was talk of it being just “one of many indicators.” Both my wife and I thought, “Yeah, right. We know what’s coming.” And ten plus years later, this fleur du mal has fully bloomed.

As a principal, I try to use data sensibly, as just “one of many indicators,” but it’s a losing battle. It’s difficult to complicate people’s thinking, to point out the complexities of educating young people, in an environment hooked on numbers. They’re so tangible, so easy to communicate. We can wave them about as proof of success or failure. As complicated as the algorithm can be, the numbers dumb us down.

I need our numbers to show improvement or else my leadership is questioned (or I’ll possibly get turnarounded). I don’t need to point out the numbers to our teachers; they scour them, searching for vindication. Our community judges us by them. As for the politicians and policymakers, we know how they use them.

I can’t go so far as to say the numbers have no place in education (Why can’t I go so far? Maybe I need to challenge my thinking on this.), but it appears that consuming them in moderation demands a level of intellectual rigor and self-discipline we don’t possess.

Categories Accountability, Teacher Evaluations

I Will Be Interviewed Sunday at 6 PM EST

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2012 //
1

I will be interviewed Sunday night on that great site supporting schools and teachers called “The Chalkface.”

You can listen at  http://www.blogtalkradio.com/chalkface/2012/08/26/at-the-chalk-face-progressive-edreform-talk-1
The call in # is (805) 727-7111
The show starts at 6 pm EST and ends at 6:30.
The hosts are Tim Slekar and Shaun Johnson.
Categories Ravitch, Diane

The Damage Done by Data-Driven Evaluation

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2012 //
37

I often hear from teachers who tell me how the professional conversations within their schools have changed. They no longer discuss instructional improvements in their staff meetings; they no longer review opportunities for professional development related to classroom practice. They talk data. They hear from data experts. They strategize about how to get the numbers up. They drill down into the data. They focus on the kids who are a 2 on the state tests and ignore the 1s and the 3s and 4s. Data drive their conversation, their practice, their life. Data determine whether they will have a job next year. Data determine whether their school will live or die.

This state of affairs is the direct result of NCLB and Race to the Top. Miss your targets and you lose your profession. If you want to survive, be driven by data.

What’s wrong with that? It is the end of education. Education is not about amassing data. Education is about changing the lives of students; enabling them to become wiser, more thoughtful, more intelligent, more judicious, and to grow in health and character.

David Gamberg is the superintendent of schools in Southold, Long Island, in New York state. He describes what happens when educators lose sight of their purpose.. When your goal is to educate children, numbers do not tell the whole story. And when you forget sight of why you educate, you may no longer be educating. Just serving the dictates of distant policymakers.

Categories Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations

This Teacher Says: Support Teachers and Get Out of the Way

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2012 //
5

In response to an earlier post that asked whether schools improve by attacking teachers, this reader offers advice based on her experience in Nevada:

Schools don’t improve if you attack teachers, or threaten them, or harass them, or fire them, or just hound them out of the profession! Schools only improve with appropriate professional development training in ‘best practices,’ with a shared belief system, and a common and well defined goal. Rather than ‘getting rid of’ teachers who don’t fit the mold or the school culture, you achieve cohesiveness by showing positive results. Just like the children we teach, teachers need to want to learn, want to achieve similar results, and trust their professional colleagues enough to ask for help.

That paragraph contains about ten years of experience and observation, and requires a lot of explanation.

I teach in Nevada. Nevada school districts encompass the entire county, – 17 counties, 17 school districts. There are three major population centers, each in a different county, – Las Vegas in Clark County, Reno in Washoe County, and Carson City in Douglas County. The rest of the state is rural. I teach in Nye County. Geographically, Nye County is the third largest county in the United States, after the Borough of Barrow, Alaska, and San Bernardino County, California. From Duckwater’s one-room schoolhouse in the northern county, and Gabbs K-12 schools also in the northern county, to the town of Pahrump with four elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school in a town of 30,000 people is a good six to seven hour drive. About eleven years ago, my position at Gabbs Elementary was cut, and I transferred to Manse Elementary in Pahrump.

My first day on the job was a teacher work day. The school had been struggling for two years to come to terms with NCLB, and was a needs improvement school. They had also changed principals twice, and had about 40 percent of their teachers retire or move out of the district. On that teacher work day, a group came from the state to ‘help’ our struggling school, and the first words the first person said were “We can fire all of you!”. I don’t remember anything else anyone in that group said, and they talked, harangued and cast blame all day long. I remember being angry, and tearful, and distrustful of my colleagues. I also remember thinking that the needs improvement status was based on standardized tests given to 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students, and that an entire grade level had moved on to middle school, and that I was new at that school, and that I could be much better employed getting my first grade classroom ready for the students.

I had been in the military, and that experience taught me never to identify a problem unless I could also propose a solution. That group from the state had no proposed solution to the problem. And, honestly, I feel that the core problem is NCLB! Giving anyone only one way to succeed and 37 ways to fail is just wrong! Any teacher, parent, clergyman, psychologist, coach or sensible person could tell you that!

My school and district have been working on the problems ever since. I have received training, gone to conferences, had professional development, and done a lot of personal research and independent reading. I feel I’m a much better teacher, and getting better all the time!

One of the best things my school does is called Instructional Consultation. That is where one knowledgable teacher with a puzzling and struggling student asks for help, and another knowledgable teacher helps identify the reason the child is struggling, and together they arrive at a better instructional match for the child. We also have Professional Learning Community groups at our school, and that has greatly improved communication among teachers, and between grade levels.

I’ve also become very informed about my teacher’s union membership, and the master contract that covers union and non-union people in the bargaining unit in this right-to-work state. That group from the state could never have fired any of us, and could only have recommended a transfer if they could specifically identify a teacher as being responsible for a failure in one of those 37 sub categories. Their bullying tactics were not only poor motivation for improvement, but they were based on wrong information.

So my solution for NCLB, simply stated, is support the teachers who teach the children who take the tests. Give the teachers the tools and training they need to do their job, and then get out of their way and off their backs while they do it. Threats, intimidation, bullying, personal and professional attacks, – those don’t work!

Categories Teachers and Teaching

At the Bottom of the Chain, Where the Kids Are

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2012 //
4

The discussion of the relationship between the Common Core standards and early childhood education (K and pre-K) continues with this comment, responding to Karen Nemeth’s earlier post:

“The federal government has in no way established requirements for what must be taught in preschool. Standards do not equate to a curriculum. As I often tell my audiences, standards are like ingredients, but each classroom still needs its own recipe for how to use those ingredients. A curriculum is more like a recipe.”

This is a fine example of the detachment and misunderstanding of those who are no longer in the classroom but rather members of organizations facing “audiences” and who have little comprehension of the radical changes that have taken place in the day-to-day realities of teaching today.

Because the federal government has established no requirements states are interpreting those requirements themselves (with great support from profit-making publishers and political agenda-driven authors of the CCSS), based largely upon the in-place curriculum established under NCLB and Reading First. I have recently read several articles lamenting the fact that in many places the CCSS are being treated exactly as a curriculum by states and checklists are proliferating everywhere. The interpretations of the CCSS into state and district curriculums have little to do with best practices and teacher professional knowledge. While NJ may have created a model plan the proof of the metaphorical recipe is in the pudding produced by the local districts and school administrators as head chefs with ultimate control, not the teacher “cooks”.

From required formats for lesson plans that must be turned in and approved weekly by administrators to a constant barrage of memos and emails from district personnel highlighting the latest mandates, required assessments, and ever-changing expectations that will be monitored, checked off on a list during frequent inquisitor visits, and answered to through VAM, scrambling to meet the requirements of grants, local and state laws that change yearly, and federal guidelines that rival drug testing protocols, the effect and power of teachers to control the impact of CCSS is greatly constrained and a work of great risk and peril. Why won’t academics and professional organizations admit this obvious truth?

Limited, personal anecdotal experiences of freedom and power notwithstanding, this apologia and defense of the CCSS amazes me.

“I do believe it is possible to address the preschool skills and knowledge that lead up to what is expected in K and 1st in a hands-on, creative, project-based, child centered way. We just need to make sure we do what needs to be done to prepare preschool teachers AND the administrators who supervise and support them.”

The author apparently has little knowledge or experience of Title I schools in many states where the curriculum is (and has been for the last 11 years of NCLB) delivered from on high and compliance is mandatory and enforced with great vigor and rigor, as the reformers like to say. It is fascinating to see how the author uses her own anecdotal experiences to undermine and dismiss the experiences of real PreK and K teachers who have posted their heartrending experiences and cri de coeur here on this very blog as a a warning and condemnation of CCSS.

She chooses instead to address her colleagues in academia and professional organizations. “We know better and we are more qualified to speak on these issues” is the message I received, intended or not. We all were told for years that NCLB had great potential to fix the problems of poverty and education. We were told that Reading First was not an end to good reading instruction and that “good” teachers would be able to subversively resist the worst of the many foolish requirements. We were told that we should see all the reforms as “opportunities” to speak out professionally and have an impact. None of that was true then and it is not true now.

The professional organizations, the schools of education, and the pillars of academe largely left those of us who choose to stay in classrooms without aid or cause while they continued their academic exercises in self-promotion, profiteering, and self-aggrandizement. Diane has proven to be a great exception and I have great respect and trust in her. I’m afraid that I don’t automatically grant that respect and trust to those who list their credentials (I have credentials too — NBCT, BA in English, MA in English, MA in Teaching and Learning, two time recipient of district Teacher of the Year Award, member of IRA, NCTE, NCTM, etc., etc.) and then defend the indefensible while telling me that my experiences and interpretations are faulty and unwarranted while defending the status quo or claiming that teachers will be able to turn the sow’s ear of CCCS into silk purses.

Also, full disclosure: you did not highlight your involvement with the NAEYC in your bio or defense.

Categories Common Core, Education Reform

“Everything You’ve Heard about Failing Schools Is Wrong”

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2012 //
6

That’s the title of an excellent new article by Kristina Rizga in Mother Jones.

Rizga spent a year embedded at Mission High School in San Francisco and got to know some of the students and teachers well.

According to the federal government, Mission High School is a “failing” school.

Rizga got there expecting to see “noisy classrooms, hallway fights, and disgruntled staff. Instead I found a welcoming place that many students and staff called “family.” After a few weeks of talking to students, I failed to find a single one who didn’t like the school, and most of the parents I met were happy too. Mission’s student and parent satisfaction surveys rank among the highest in San Francisco.”

She found a “failing” school where the majority of the 925 students are Latino or African-American or Asian-American, a school where 72% of the students are poor. She also discovered that 84% of the graduating class went on to college, higher than the district average.

But it is a failing school!

Of course, the feds would love to close the school and do a “turnaround.” But the principal, relatively new to his job, the teachers, and the students don’t want to lose their job.

If you need convincing that NCLB is a disaster for our schools, and that the “turnaround” demands of Race to the Top are equally harmful, you will enjoy this article.

It is the wisest in-depth journalism that I have seen on education issues in recent memory.

Categories California, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top

Is Common Core “Developmentally Appropriate”?

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2012 //
11

A reader comments on the discussion of Common Core’s effect on pre-K and K:

Thanks, Diane, for making room on your blog for this critical topic.

Karen states that the “overacademization of kindergarten and preschool classrooms” is not a new trend. That may be true, though without a doubt the problem has intensified. The Alliance for Childhood report The Crisis in Early Education A Research-Based Case for More Play and Less Pressure (Miller and Almond, November 2011) states that “the pushing down of the elementary school early childhood has reached a new peak with the adoption by almost every state of the so called common core standards.” That report also looks at the high rate of preschool expulsions of late. Preschoolers and kindergarteners are now being expelled at three times the rate of K-12 children. How can that be okay? Peter Gray has documented the decline of play and the increase of childhood problems over recent decades in his article “The Decline of Play and the Rise of Psychopathology in Children and Adolescence” (The American Journal of Play, volume 3, number 4; Spring 2011). The increase in the number of young children attending overly-academic preschools and kindergartens is most assuredly part of the problem. An increase in childhood depression and anxiety are some of the results. When our mission should be, at the very least, to do no harm, clearly the children are being harmed. We cannot toss them in the trash like a cake with too much salt or a recipe gone awry (to further Karen’s analogy above). They are human beings, for goodness sake.

Finding ways to stay developmentally appropriate, when many of the tests and assessments are not, is becoming increasingly difficult. And looking critically at the how, what, when and why of testing and assessments which have increased with RTTT, is important work for the early childhood community. If ever there was a time in the USA for early childhood educators to be looking closely at policy and debating the direction of early childhood education, now is the time. As the leading organization of early childhood educators, NAEYC should be at the forefront of advocating for young children – and speaking out against policies that aren’t grounded in what decades of research has proven: that children develop best — socially, emotionally and cognitively — when they have educational experiences that promote creativity, thinking and problem solving skills, and engage in meaningful activities geared to their developmental levels and needs.

Nancy Carlsson-Paige is not alone in her assessment of the situation. A national coalition of early childhood educators met earlier this year regarding their concerns about the current education policy trends and their negative effects. You can read more about that in an op-ed piece titled “How ed policy is hurting early childhood education” published in Valerie Strauss’ The Answer Sheet at The Washington Post. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/how-ed-policy-is-hurting-early-childhood-education/2012/05/24/gJQAm0jZoU_blog.html)

Geralyn Bywarter McLaughlin
Director, Defending the Early Years
deyproject.org

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Common Core

Finding the Genius in Every Child

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2012 //
6

Robert D. Shepherd previously wrote a post about why standardization fails. Now he asks whether we want to standardize for a certain outcome or whether we want an education that discovers the genius in every child:

Every child born today is the product of 3.8 billions years of evolution. Between his or her ears, is the most complex system known to us, and that system, the brain consists of highly interconnected subsystems of neural mechanisms for carrying out particular tasks. Years ago, some Japanese researchers won the Nobel Prize for mapping the neural system in fruit flies that functions ONLY to detect movement from left to right in the visual field. Marvin Minsky calls this complex of interconnected systems a “society of mind.”Early in the twentieth century, a psychologist named Charles Spearman posited a single intelligence factor, “G.” A couple decades ago, Howard Gardner made a name for himself by positing seven (later eight) “multiple intelligences.” But that’s all hocus pocus. The truth is that there are, quite literally, billions of intelligences in the brain–mechanisms that carry out very particular tasks more or less well, many of them sharing parts of the same machinery to carry out subroutines.Over that 3.8 billion years of evolution, these many intelligences were refined to a high degree. Creatures, like us, who reproduce sexually and mix up our genes, are born with different unique sets of mechanisms, and these are pruned and refined based on our experiences, for the neural machinery is extraordinarily plastic. In other words,

1. People are extraordinarily variable, and
2. All have propensities to become very good at some things and not at others

In EVERY child some of these subsystems are extraordinary and some are merely adequate.

In other words, there are no standardized children. Almost every new parent is surprised, even shocked, to learn that kids come into the world extraordinarily unique. They bring a lot of highly particular potential to the ball game. And every one of those children is capable, highly capable, in some ways and not in others.

What if, instead of schools having as their purpose turning out identically machined parts, they, instead, existed to find out what a given child is going to be good at doing? What if children were carefully, systematically, given opportunities to try out the enormous range of purposeful human activity until we identified each child’s GENIUS? What if we said to ourselves, presented with a particular child, “I know that this little person is the product of 3.8 billion years of evolution, that he or she has gifts conferred by that history of fitness trials, and it is my responsibility to discover what those are?”

I heard an Indian elder, whose name, unfortunately, I forget, speak about this once. He said, “Look at the kids. Really look at them. You can see who the leaders are and who the followers.” This insight can and should be generalized.

Now, before you dismiss this as a preposterous idea, consider this fact: A child can be born with, say, perfect pitch and go through our entire K-12 education system without anyone ever discovering this about that child.

A society, to be a society, needs SOME shared common culture, and it’s valuable, for that reason, to have some common, shared set of knowledge and skills transmitted from one generation to the next. But a pluralistic society also needs the astonishing variety of attributes that people are born with or are capable of developing.

No list, however well vetted, will represent the natural variety of ability and potential that exists in children. Nor will it represent the variety of abilities that the society actually needs in order to function well. It’s bad for kids and it’s bad for society as a whole when someone has the hubris to come up with THE LIST of what everyone needs to know.

Let me be clear about what I am NOT saying: I am NOT saying that school should be a place where kids “do their own thing.” What I am saying is that it should be a place that enables kids and their teachers to discover what kids, given their particular endowments, can do. I believe, strongly, that every child has some genius among those TRULY multiple intelligences.

It would take a lot of re-envisioning to come up with a workable model of schooling that would do that properly and rigorously. And it wouldn’t look anything like what we are now doing.

Finally, to get to the specific question. The revolutionaries who founded the United States recognized that any system that awards people based upon the accidents of their birth rather than based upon their talents, whatever their birth, wastes a lot of human potential. They were committed to the idea that everyone deserved a chance to follow his or her genius, whatever the conditions of his or her birth. That’s why many of them were also committed to the idea universal education and why it is in the interest of all of us to end disparity of educational opportunity. The founders had this crazy idea that no one was disposable, that everyone had gifts to bestow on his or her fellows that would flower in the right circumstances. Any rigidly enforced system of standards treated as a curriculum is not going to enable the achievement of the founders’ vision because while everyone else’s children are toiling through the checklist of standardized skills attainment, the children of the elite will be having extraordinarily varied experiences enabling them to find and follow their bliss (what they care about and have the potential to do well).

If that’s the society that we want, the Morlochs and the Eloi, then uniform national standards treated as curricula, the same in every school, for every student, is the way to go.

That works for folks who think that there are the few gifted who are destined to rule and the great mass of interchangeable worker bees who need to be as identical and predictable as possible. It doesn’t work for people who believe in pluralistic democracy.
Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Common Core, Curriculum, Education Reform, Students, US Education
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