Yesterday I posted a letter that Superintendent Paul Perzanoski wrote to his staff in Brunswick, Maine. He defended educators against the bullying of the governor and–since the governor had such disdain for the state’s students, teachers and public schools– suggested that the governor should take a standardized test and publish his scores. Since I have often made the same suggestion, I admired him for saying so. Here’s the local press reaction.
Archives for the month of: August, 2012
This is a phenomenal article that explains why the writer decided to leave China, which he loved.
This was one important reason:
Apart from what I hope is a justifiable human desire to be part of a community and no longer be treated as an outsider, to run my own business in a regulated environment and not live in fear of it being taken away from me, and not to concern myself unduly that the air my family breathes and the food we eat is doing us physical harm, there is one overriding reason I must leave China. I want to give my children a decent education.
The domestic Chinese lower education system does not educate. It is a test centre. The curriculum is designed to teach children how to pass them. In rural China, where we have lived for seven years, it is also an elevation system. Success in exams offers a passport to a better life in the big city. Schools do not produce well-rounded, sociable, self-reliant young people with inquiring minds. They produce winners and losers. Winners go on to college or university to take “business studies.” Losers go back to the farm or the local factory their parents were hoping they could escape.
There is little if any sport or extracurricular activity. Sporty children are extracted and sent to special schools to learn how to win Olympic gold medals. Musically gifted children are rammed into the conservatories and have all enthusiasm and joy in their talent drilled out of them. (My wife was one of the latter.)
And then there is the propaganda. Our daughter’s very first day at school was spent watching a movie called, roughly, “How the Chinese people, under the firm and correct leadership of the Party and with the help of the heroic People’s Liberation Army, successfully defeated the Beichuan Earthquake.” Moral guidance is provided by mythical heroes from communist China’s recent past, such as Lei Feng, the selfless soldier who achieved more in his short lifetime than humanly possible, and managed to write it all down in a diary that was miraculously “discovered” on his death.
The pressure makes children sick. I speak from personal experience. To score under 95 per cent is considered failure. Bad performance is punished. Homework, which consists mostly of practice test papers, takes up at least one day of every weekend. Many children go to school to do it in the classroom. I have seen them trooping in at 6am on Sundays. In the holidays they attend special schools for extra tuition, and must do their own school’s homework for at least a couple of hours every day to complete it before term starts again. Many of my local friends abhor the system as much as I do, but they have no choice. I do. I am lucky.
This reader explains why she became a teacher. She didn’t do it because she loves the children but because she loves to teach. What do you think?
Jersey Jazzman parses the latest article by Joel Klein, who frankly admits that the real goal of reform is to open up the education system to entrepreneurs and investors. As more start-ups produce new products and innovations, schools are sure to benefit, he predicts.
Klein also thinks that the R&D cycle for schools is much too slow. Randomized trials in education take years, but Apps for cellphones can be improved in a matter of months without all that slow processing of information.
This appalls Jersey Jazzman. He writes:
It’s really amazing that Klein is comparing the education of a child with a smartphone app. If you buy an app, it costs you maybe 99 cents; if it doesn’t work, you trash it. When you’re a school district, however, you spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of public dollars on curricula that affect every student in your district. If you buy a piece of junk that doesn’t work, you’ve abused the trust of both the taxpayers and the children.
Don’t you think maybe it’s worth taking some time to get these things right?
Jennifer Borgioli, whom I met via Twitter and know as DataDiva, has sent me a post about performance assessments in New York. She is responding to an earlier post about the New York Performance Standards Consortium, which has thus far not gotten permission form the state to add 19 schools to its group. The Consortium many years ago won an exemption from all state standardized testing (except for the Regents ELA exam) and relies instead of performance assessments judged by teachers and others. The article cited in the earlier post indicated that the state was reluctant to allow other schools to escape the state testing regime, which Jennifer does not contest. She believes that the state is open to performance assessment within its testing regime.
In your blog, your last paragraph seemed to suggest that NYS wants to discourage the use of performance-based tasks when in fact, I don’t think that’s the case. I cannot speak to the reasons why there is hesitation to approve more schools for performance-based alternatives to Regents but I do know there is room for performance-based tasks for all schools in New York. In effect, there are two types of performance tasks. The large-scale, long-term tasks as you described (portfolio assessments, etc.) that are used for exit criteria and reflect a deep understanding of the content and skills in a given domain or topic and then there are small-scale, shorter on-demand performance tasks that require students to follow a series of steps or tasks in order to generate a product or engage in a performance.
The NYS APPR guidance documents reference performance-tasks at least twice:
F5. We want to use locally‐developed performance tasks for a variety of grades and subjects that would be assessed using a rubric. Is that allowable?
Subject to local negotiation, locally‐developed performance tasks scored by a rubric could be used as a district, regional, or BOCES developed assessment wherever locally developed assessments are allowed as either a comparable growth measure or a locally selected measure provided that such assessments are rigorous and comparable as described above.
G4. Does vested interest rule apply to pre‐tests given to establish a baseline for a SLO?
To the extent practicable, districts or BOCES should ensure that any assessments or measures, including those used for performance‐based or performance task assessments that are used to establish a baseline for student growth are not disseminated to students before administration and that teachers and principals do not have a vested interest in the outcome of the assessments they score
In a number of regions across the state, teachers are working together to design performance-tasks that get to the most critical learning of their content area or course as determined by the New York State Learning Standards in a way that is authentic as possible. These are not large scale tasks full of student choice and authentic assessment but neither are they traditional, multiple choice tests. Their use reflects a commitment by the participating schools to minimize the impact of APPR regulations on students. These assessments are designed by classroom teachers and will be scored by them using rubrics they create. Though we do not have evidence of reliability yet, that will come after the administration of the pre-assessments and inter-rater reliability analysis this fall, there is every reason to believe that these assessments will generate results as consistent as those generated by a machine-scored, publisher-created multiple choice test.
It’s a small move but it’s a start.
This retired teacher hasn’t seen the controversial movie about the parent trigger.
But he read Frank Bruni’s article and found it insulting to teachers.
He criticizes Bruni for accepting the “reformers” claims that unions and tenures are the bane of U.S. education.
And he points out that students in affluent suburbs get high test scores and have high graduation rates even though they have teachers who belong to unions and have tenure and seniority. He suggests that it is not unions and tenure that cause low performance in urban districts.
Read some of his other posts as well. He has a razor sharp wit and knows the score.
He makes so much sense that he makes you wonder why so many people don’t get it.
This morning I posted about Neil Armstrong and the letter he wrote to one of his teachers when she retired, thanking her for what she had done for him. She was his math teacher in elementary school.
A reader asked if she could turn what I had written into a poster, and I said “of course.”
Hours later, I received this link. Look at it: It is beautiful!
I am touched and grateful.
A reader said he was shocked, shocked by a post that linked to an article that spoke disparagingly of Governor Bobby Jindal and State Commissioner of Education John White. He thought it was “uncivil” to refer to them in disrespectful language.
This teacher from Louisiana disagrees. Since there aren’t many places in Louisiana where his or her views may be expressed in print, I am happy to print them here.
But they are thieves, vandals, liars and profiteers here in Louisiana!
They are also people I disagree with. I disagree with them because I disagree with rating teachers on student test scores. I disagree with them on ACT 54 and value added.
I disagree with them when our Governor and education secretary intentionally ignore the facts and twist the data to spread lies about Louisiana teachers, students and schools.
I disagree with ignoring the real issues of poverty, school quality, teacher qualifications and standardized testing. I
disagree with elected public officials lying, cheating and profiting from the destruction of the lives of the children of our state.
I come here for the discussions, I come to hear people express the truth and if what is happening here is not civil discourse, (I think it is quite civil for the most part and the occasional attacks are quickly rebutted or patiently ignored) then I guess we will have to agree to disagree on what civil discourse is and should discuss if the time for statesmanship has passed in this battle and it is time to change strategy?
I sometimes feel as if teachers are prisoners of this war and need the allies to arrive; I just do not know who the allies are. I thought they would be parents, education program professors, student teachers still in school, the Wongs, NIH scientists, associations like ACSD, NSTA, NTMA, Kaplans and others who write all the books, journals, seminars we attend and buy and programs we use.
If they run an organization for professional teachers and there are no more professional teachers who do they think their membership will be? The graduate schools of education, doctoral programs and certification providers. Why are they silent? All the experts we go to listen to at conferences and national meetings, the employees in the state departments of education(surely they believe what they do is important?) school board members, PTAs, PTOs and governmental organizations like NASA, NOAA, US Geological Survey, and hundreds of other agencies whose resources and outreach we use.
What about the United States Military branches who are constantly short of qualified, educated, diploma holding troops? Does the Department of Defense intend to recruit graduates of virtual schools, students from charters taught by people who are not certified and maybe have college degrees?
Do they want to depend on the for profit companies who are even now submitting their applications for Louisiana’s Course Choice program intended to remove even more students from Louisiana public high schools. Will these programs free of accountability and totally opaque to the parents and community produce men and women with the skills and commitment for national defense?
Do they not see that the destruction of public schools will eventually make them obsolete? Do they not all have a stake in collaboratively helping teachers make our schools the best and able to meet the needs of the children we serve?
This just in from a teacher in Boston, in response to this post about teachers at “no excuses” schools:
Check out the number of special education students and limited English speakers in Boston Public Schools compared to these charter schools where genius teachers from fancy universities are such a great success. BPS has 18.3% special education and 30% limited English speakers. The Edward Brooke has 7.4% special education students and .2% limited English speakers. The Edward Brooke, which is scary with their extreme military style discipline, has the lowest percentage of pesky resistant learners at the charters mentioned in this article. I can tell you after five years of teaching at a Boston charter that these schools are nothing more than test prep factories. I wonder how well these no-excuse reformers would do with special education students, kids who can’t speak English while planning creative, hands-on experiences in a democratically run class room.
Earlier today I published a biting critique of John White and Bobby Jindal, who are doing their best to privatize public education in Louisiana. I happen to think the pair have turned the state of Louisiana into an international laughing stock and put the future of a generation of children at risk.
The writer, who lives in Louisiana, called them vandals, said that John White is a hack, and referred to White’s staff as “the TFA Goon Squad.”
Two people wrote to say how shocked they were that I would permit such language to be used. They said I called for civility and had violated my own pledge.
I am reminded that when I used to tweet, I would find myself at the receiving end of really nasty, vituperative insults. I never responded in kind. But if I dared to show that I was offended, I could count on several reformer-types to jump in and tell me I was out of line. I have heard the same complaints in the past. These guys want a double standard; they want to be able to hurl insults and then step back and say, “you promised to be civil.”
Well, my friends, this is my blog, my living room, and I make the rules. Here they are, if you didn’t get them the first time around.
I watch my own language and tone. But there is very little that other people write that I censor.
I am not going to silence someone who cries out in righteous rage when their profession and their livelihood and their integrity are attacked by so-called reformers. I am not going to defer to those who have no respect for the men and women who teach our children every day.
I am not going to censor a writer who writes in the style of H.L. Mencken and uses colorful language.
Public officials who betray their sacred trust are fair game, and I won’t tell anyone to treat them gingerly. If they don’t like the heat, they can stay out of the kitchen, as Harry S Truman once said.
This is a site to discuss better education for all. If you want to join the discussion, welcome. But don’t expect me to silence or censor voices you don’t want to hear. If you don’t like what you are reading, don’t read it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 