A reader suggested I post this from my website:
Archives for the month of: September, 2012
Mark Naison writes that teachers are the nation’s unsung heroes.
He says:
….in spite of the forces arrayed against you, do not give up or
give in, because you are all that stands between our children and
dehumanization . There is no metric that can measure love, there is no
metric that can measure compassion, there is no metric that can measure
imagination, there is no metric that can measure humor.
You are our hope, You are our future.
Stay true, stay strong. Someday the nation will recognize that your
vision, and your best practices, are the only sure path to improving
our schools.
Yesterday I posted a video of students protesting against StudentsFirst.
The students carried signs and spoke on camera.
They objected to that organization’s support for high-stakes testing and for charters invading their communities. In addition, they complained that StudentsFirst had honored a Georgia state senator as “education reformer of the year,” when he was known as virulently anti-immigrant.
StudentsFirst said the students were pawns for the union.
The video has been taken down.
I will try to locate it.
In response to a post defining a failing school, Paul Thomas tweeted a definition of current school reform, as exemplified by the ruinous policies of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. It is called “ouroboros.” See here for further explanation.
He is especially disturbed by the idea that so many reformers are promoting a kind of schooling for poor children that they would find intolerable for their own. The people who fund corporate reform don’t want no-excuses schools for their children.
He asks an important question:
Why are the corporate reformers creating schools for poor and/or minority children that engage in practices that affluent parents would never accept for their own kids?
He argues:
It is fundamentally anti-American to espouse one type of education for poor urban children and another type for affluent suburban children. If we really, truly cared about these most-neglected and most-deserving kids, we’d be working to make their lives as much like those of their suburban peers as possible – both in and out of the classroom.
After a decade of No Child Left Behind and three years of Race to the Top, officials are getting much better at identifying “failing schools.”
Now we know.
A failing school is one with low test scores and low graduation rates.
A failing school enrolls large numbers of students who are eligible for free or reduced price lunch (i.e., poverty).
A failing school enrolls large numbers of African American and Hispanic students.
A failing school enrolls large numbers of students who are English language learners and new immigrants.
A failing school has disproportionate numbers of students with disabilities.
Based on current federal policy, these are the ways to “turnaround” these failing schools.
Fire the principal; fire half or all of the teachers; turn the school into a charter school under private management; close the school.
What, specifically, is done to address the educational needs of the students? See previous sentence.
New York state published a list of schools based on measures like test scores and graduation rates. At the top are “reward” schools. At the bottom are “priority” schools.
This is the amazing discovery. The schools that enroll mostly white and Asian students in affluent neighborhoods are doing a great job; they get a reward. The schools that enroll mostly black and Hispanic students in poor neighborhoods are doing a bad job; they are in line to get sanctions, interventions.
Bruce Baker did a statistical analysis, posted here. He called the state’s methods “junk science.”
New York City parent activist Leonie Haimson asked a question:
“Does anyone know if [state Commissioner of Education John] King looked at 5 year graduation rates as well as 4 year rates when putting together the focus/priority HS lists as he promised to do at the State Assembly hearings with the NCLB waivers?
Many NYC high schools like Columbus etc. justifiably complained that they were being punished for taking in a lot of new immigrant kids who didn’t even speak English when entering the school. Six years would be even better for schools with a lot of ELL kids.
Of course nothing makes any sense here about “rewarding” schools that primarily are made up of wealthy white and Asian kids and/or require entrance exams so they can further replicate, like Anderson and Stuy. Is that the federal/state answer to eliminating the achievement gap?”
Norm Scott, retired teacher, prolific blogger and lead producer of the film “The Inconvenient Truth Behind ‘Waiting for Superman’,” summed up this policy as “Insanity Reigns.” This policy, he writes, “will force the most struggling schools to focus resources on tests instead of doing what is necessary.”
Carol Burris reviewed the list and discovered only two charter schools in the state at the top and two at the bottom. She writes:
I have been perusing the Reward Schools List produced by New York State and was quite surprised to find how few charter schools are on it. There are two to be exact– Bronx Charter School of Excellence and Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School. To make the list, you must first be in good standing, that is you must first make AYP. Certainly Ms. Moskowitz’s charters do that. See the link she posts here: http://www.successacademies.org/page.cfm?p=11
The schools cannot have growing gaps between groups and the performance index for those groups relative to comparative groups must be in the top 20%. Given that low SES students are compared with low SES students, I would imagine Success Academies do well, as indicated on their website.
However, there is a final criteria to be a Reward school. For the past two years, your students must show yearly growth that exceeds the median growth for students in the state. Growth scores are adjusted for poverty, ELL status and SWD status. You can find the requirements to be a high performing, reward school here: http://roundtheinkwell.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/rewardschoolsidentificationtechnicaldocumentation-2.pdf
There are 53 New York City public schools on the Reward school list. Some are test ins, but others are neighborhood schools. Given all the hype about Success Charters and KIPP schools, wouldn’t you expect to see those schools on the list? Could it be that they keep kids at minimum proficiency but do not get them to grow? I think these are questions worth asking.
By the way, there were two charters on the priority schools list (the troubled schools list) as well.
Teacher Julie Cavanaugh teaches children who live in low-income housing projects. She wrote (on Norm Scott’s blog): “…cash rewards and options for opting out of some state regulations for schools that are doing great, which is correlated with population. More external pressure and “accountability” for schools that are not, which has to do w/ population, but no policies to actually help these kids… as long as we are going by test scores the results of programs like these will be the same: schools with highest concentrations of ELL/Special needs/and children living in poverty will be “low achieving” and schools with low poverty rates (or no poverty) and small numbers of ELLs and special needs students will be “high achieving.”
Here is the list of schools in New York state. Do your own analysis.
Jere Hochman is superintendent of the Bedford School District in New York state. I am adding his name to the highly elite honor roll of superintendents. Hochman understands that a school functions best as a community. He has created an evaluation system for teachers that will take the pressure away from “teaching to the test.” New York State requires that all districts judge teachers in this way: 20% based on state tests; 20% on measures devised by the district; 60% on observations. Some districts are allocating 40% of the state tests because they don’t have the money to buy new tests. Jere Hochman decided that the second 20% would be based on the ELA test and that the whole school would dedicate its efforts to promoting literacy.
Here is his explanation:
- It’s the right thing to do for all students: literacy everywhere
- We are not writing (1,000s of hours and dollars) “SLOs” for teachers/class that do not have a state test.
- It saves hundreds of hours of class time lost to testing, local test grading, and teacher pull out of classroom
- Teachers who do not have a state test will not have to use/give TWO “local” tests to measure growth and achievement (one SLO and one local assessment)
- It rallies the entire school around writing, reading, thinking, and speaking across the disciplines – and everyone teaches vocabulary.
- It means every teacher gets the same “points” on the school-wide goal which clusters the total score, taking the stress off of it.
- It lowers the parent scrutiny because a teacher’s “score” isn’t just about that one teacher.
- It gets us all focused on the foundation of everything no matter if it’s an Ivy-league bound kid or a non-English speaker: literacy!
- It reinforces the systemic approach to closing the achievement gap, raising all students instead of accusations of focusing more on “lower achieving kids”
- The union likes it (and teases me) because of all of the above and because they know I hate anything that is one-size-fits-all and they are getting pleasure out of this “union-like” approach of “one-size-fits all”
I am starting an honor roll for hero superintendents.
As of now, there are four.
If you know of others, nominate them with your reasons.
They deserve our thanks and praise.
Paul Perzanoski of Brunswick, Maine, stood up to a bullying governor.
John Kuhn of Perrin-Whitt Independent School District is a national model of bravery in opposition to political meddling.
Vickie Markavitch of Oakland, Michigan, spoke out against the state’s mislabeling of districts.
Here is another: Joshua Starr of Montgomery County (Md) public schools.
He did not want his district to participate in Race to the Top funding, and his board agreed.
His district refused to sign the state’s RTTT application.
He opposes the RTTT emphasis on rating teachers by test scores.
He recognizes that NCLB and Race to the Top are a reversion to an “industrial model” of education.
Faced with the bewildering roll-out of federal and state mandates, Starr proposed a three-year moratorium on all standardized tests, “while we figure all this out.”
According to the Washington Post article about him from last April:
“Starr critiqued the growth models and rubrics being developed as contradicting research on what motivates teachers. He said Montgomery’s current system, which mentors struggling teachers for a year before decisions about termination are made, is a “hill to die on.”
And he said that singling out teachers as the culprit for education failures and shaming them is the most “pernicious part of the national reform movement.”
Accountability for student success should rightly extend to “you, me, and the entire community,” he said.
But in the midst of all the flux and change, he struck a hopeful chord. He said the transition could give Montgomery a chance to carve a distinct path.
“As No Child Left Behind is dying its slow death, it’s an incredible opportunity to fill that void with what we believe we should do for kids,” he said.”
Joshua Starr is an educational leader of the highest caliber.
He doesn’t comply and follow harmful orders.
He insists on thinking what is best for students and teachers and the community.
My children went to a school where the kindergarten had a doll corner, a sandbox, a place to build a city with blocks and toys, and lots of other play stations.
Their teachers believed that play is children’s work.
I might add that they became skilled readers and writers and have productive lives.
There is no reason to banish childhood.
Exploration and curiosity come naturally to children. They want to know. They want to figure things out.
They will do it unless some misguided adult demands that they stop playing and fooling around.
Let children play and imagine.
It builds their brains and their sense of wonder at the same time.
A retired kindergarten teacher writes:
| As a retired Kindergarten teacher, I feel so sad for these Kindergartens of today and the future. No toys…..no learning how to share and play with others. No dress-up corner….no learning how to role-model acceptable grown-up behavior. No recess…..no gross motor movement and no learning acceptable social behavior and teamwork. Will there be music and dance to stimulate the brain and body movement? Will there be art for creative expression and to develop thinking patterns and processes? Will there be puzzles for spatial recognition and improving math cognizance? Will there be free choice to wander and wonder into the ‘magic’ of science centers, math centers, word centers, listening centers, etc. I could go on and on but I am getting depressed. I LOVED my days in Kindergarten and knowing that I was giving my children the gift of loving school and learning. Today’s teachers will have their hands tied to ‘testing’ and ‘results’ and ‘academics’ (whatever that is!). I mentor student educators now and I ask them to please speak up for what is right in their classroom…..be an activist and stand tall for your children and their learning environment! I hope we can turn this around soon!! |
Diane Ravitch's blog 