Sorry about typos in last few posts.
Typing in airport on cellphone.
Auto correct took control.
Then I was in air and just landed in NYC
Sad funeral in Houston.
Archives for the month of: November, 2012
Jeb Bush recognized at his summit meeting that the policies he champions were soundly rebuffed by voters in Indiana (and did he mention Idaho?).
But he assures his rightwing allies that testing, evaluating teachers by student scores, vouchers and charters are the right course, even if educators, parents, and other citizens don’t agree. He apparently compared himself to Lyndon Baines Johnson, fighting to push civil rights legislation when it was unpopular.
Someone should inform him that he is fighting to preserve a failed status quo, not a struggling dissident movement. Someone should tell him that NCLB is federal law and that its ugly step-child Race to the Top bribed the states to double down on the punitive strategies of NCLB.
His lament of “stay the course” is very good news indeed. It is a public admission that the privatizers know they have no popular base.
Their strategies have failed for more than a decade.
When do they admit to themselves that it’s over?
At some point, they will stop pouring money into a losing and unpopular cause.
That’s the day when we can begin to build a genuine movement to improve our schools.
John Podesta, who heads the Center for American Progress and headed the 2008 Obama transition team, was a keynote speaker at Jeb Bush’s DC gala.
He called on his fellow “reformers” to work in harmony with unions, even though nearly 90% of charter schools are non-union schools.
“Reform” (I.e. privatization) “is not a foregone conclusion.”
It is important to win the acquiescence of unions, especially now that the public is pushing back and trying to ward off the attack of the billionaires and hedge fund managers.
It seems the public is not yet completely sold on the idea of handing the public schools over to entrepreneurs.
Funny, that.
A Federal judge in Louisiana put a halt to the state voucher program and the new teacher hiring laws in one parish, saying they was likely to undercut the desegregation program.
The State Department of Education will appeal. TFA Commissioner John White believes that choice and privatization matter more than desegregation.
From a reader who is passionate about child’s play:
Let’s talk to Arne about Play Science? We have schools in Asia setting up Play Science Institutes. They know that they need to innovate. The teacher is the one who can identify and scaffold upon the innate talents of the child. No computer program can see, feel, connect and mentor that deeply. Data is not knowledge. Metaphoric thinking is developed through three dimensional play, something one cannot develop from a two dimensional screen. It has everything to do with hand-brain co-evolution and the neuroscience of tinkering, object play, or other three dimensional forms of play. Real world problem solving necessitates nuanced metaphorical thinking, not rigid, scripted programming.
This published today in Richmond Times Dispatch
And I think everyone here will like this one, as scripted schooling kills innovation.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2012/0124/Toddlers-to-tweens-relearning-how-to-play
This is not a joke.
Tom Friedman of the New York Times thinks Arne Duncan should be the Secretary of State because he can do to the world what he has done to education.
Wonder what a Race to the Top would look like internationally?
Gary Rubinstein ponders the familiar phrases “poverty is not destiny” and “poverty is not an excuse.”
He understands that many poor students succeed in school, but most don’t.
The typical claim of the “reform” movement is that every student, regardless of poverty, would perform at high levels of proficiency if their teacher has high expectations or if they attended a “no-excuses” charter school.
Gary suggests it might be more fruitful to ask whether insufficient resources are destiny.
He writes:
A suburban school where the students don’t have to contend with so many out of school factors might not need very many resources for the majority of the students to be ‘college bound’ (assuming, for now, that this is a good goal to have). A school with a lot of poor students, though, might require extensive resources in order to get the majority of their students college bound. They might need an army of nurses, social workers, mental health experts, and more. Either school if not provided with sufficient resources is going to ‘fail’ to get the students to be college bound. But the suburban school, not needing as many resources, is likely to have a sufficient amount, while the urban school, since it needs more, is unlikely to get the resources it needs.
Reformers like to point to schools like KIPP or Eva Moskowitz’s charters to say that they don’t spend more than regular public schools.
But, says Gary, that’s not true. They do spend more, and they don’t have to accept every student who walks in the door, and they do have higher attrition rates than public schools.
Maybe we have to change our spending priorities if we want to be sure that “poverty is not destiny.”
John Kuhn is superintendent of a small school district in Texas. But his voice is mighty and powerful. Those who have heard him wish he were Commissioner of Education for the state of Texas or in another position where everyone would learn from his wisdom.
Kuhn was the first person to be named to the honor roll for his eloquence and courage in support of public education.
November 02, 2012 07:21 PM CDT November 02, 2012 09:04 PM
Point Person: Our Q&A with John Kuhn on school’s over-reliance on testing
The Dallas Morning News
Published: 02 November 2012 07:21 PM
John Kuhn, superintendent of the Perrin-Whitt school district in Jack County, northwest of Fort Worth, is active speaking out and writing critically about public-education reformers. He’s gained some fame for his oft-quoted “Alamo letter” from 2011, in which he vowed never to surrender the fight for his students. Now that more than 850 Texas school boards have signed on to a resolution against over-reliance on high-stakes testing, we asked Kuhn what that movement is all about. (This is a longer version of the Q&A that appears in print.)
You’ve said some very pointed things about education reformers, including Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and their impact on schools. What worries you the most?
What worries me most as both a dad and an educator is the outsized influence of test-makers, statisticians, and economists on modern educational decision-making. Unfortunately, our wizards of data are not wizards of humanity, and they have foolishly elevated impersonal forces as the drivers of education.
The education of children is above all a human endeavor. We aren’t programming answers into computers; we are inspiring and encouraging and challenging and coaxing and pushing and pulling and hoping and praying and hugging and wiping tears and watching ballgames and telling them how nice they look in their prom dresses. The value of the factory model touted by today’s educational Taylorists is quickly disproved by its absence of the holistic and humane methods employed in the best private schools. Middle class kids need and deserve more art in their lives than the arrays of bubbles they pencil in. Elite reformers want what’s best for their kids, but they often only want what’s most efficient for yours and mine.
Ultimately, I want for my kids what caring parents, like our president, want for theirs: a thorough, non-standardized education of the whole child. Today we are so busy raising test scores that we are forgetting to raise children. The little red schoolhouse is fast becoming a little red widget factory, and that’s wrong for kids and detrimental for our future well-being as a people.
To what extent are your concerns shared by other local educators?
We are nearing critical mass. I only speak for myself, but there are hundreds of Texas schools suing the state in a lawsuit that has been called “the granddaddy of school finance lawsuits.” They aren’t suing for more money but rather for sensible policies and an honest accounting by the state of the costs of its mandates. Reduced education funding sometimes happens during hard times, but reduced regulation? Our recent $5.4 billion school funding reduction came with a brand new $500 million dollar contract with the London test-shop Pearson.
There are also hundreds of school boards in Texas that have signed a resolution that says standardized tests are strangling education and draining it of its vibrancy and excitement for learners. The resolution—started in Texas—has spread to several other states. Then there are Texas parents forming groups like Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment, Texas Parents Opt Out of State Tests, and Kids Can’t Wait. School board members have organized initiatives like last session’s “Make Education a Priority” movement. Over 20 school districts are participating in the Texas High Performance Schools consortium; they will pilot a new way of holding teachers and students accountable for learning that embraces modern technology instead of tools inspired by 19{+t}{+h} century scientific management theory. They will hopefully develop a new, less punitive and misleading accountability methodology that reduces the onslaught of bubble tests that our kids face today.
Are my concerns widely shared by local educators? I would guess yes, but I can’t prove it. Many educators prefer to keep quiet and keep their jobs (which aren’t as secure as they used to be) so you won’t hear too many speak out publicly about the burdensome and sometimes near-impossible demands they face. In fact, an educator who speaks up is usually condemned fairly quickly as an apologist for the status quo. Meanwhile, the real status quo is the expensive and ineffective testing-and-labeling we’ve been doing for 30 years in Texas.
Put it in human terms. What’s not happening in the classroom today because of focus on standardized testing?
High schoolers must pass five EOC tests per year; they’re often placed in remedial classes if they don’t pass. Sophomores may be losing one or two periods for a remedial class. That’s one or two electives gone. As time passes, some will stack up tests they failed two years ago, last year, and tests they face this year. A struggler who might flourish because of a trade won’t get his hands dirty. This is one size fits all; all kids are going to college whether they want to or not.
Texas Workforce Commissioner Tom Pauken notes that Texas has a shortage of welders and plumbers, but our system is built so that students most likely to benefit from technical training won’t get it. We’re channeling would-be highly-paid technicians not into available industry-recognized certification programs but rather into schedules that feature a paucity of hands-on experiences, so they can focus on their tests.
In elementary school, strugglers lose art, recess, music, or PE. We tell at-risk students to stay in school; then we take away classes they most enjoy. When we reduced education to a competition, we condemned exploration and discovery and settled for rote proficiency.
How does this affect how a teacher teaches?
Teachers face a perverse incentive to drill and kill in the classroom and focus intensely on the narrow curriculum that is tested. Principals face the temptation to enforce scripted approaches that overemphasize test prep. Marketers are pitching materials keyed to STAAR with great zeal; districts face an onslaught of big promises: “Raise STAAR Scores Now!” Some teachers and schools resist a test-centered approach in favor of a child-centered approach; but with livelihoods on the line if scores don’t rise, it’s as if teachers are being asked to teach under hanging anvils.
Teachers and administrators agree with the need for accountability and want to be held accountable for our results. What we ask for are honest measures that take into account all factors that contribute to our success or failure. Educational outcomes do not solely hinge on teacher quality. There are home and community and funding factors in play, but accountability gurus are happy to leave those variables out of their formulas. No one but the teachers are up for criticism in their world of selective accountability.
The U.S. Department of Education has chosen to set a 100 percent standardized testing pass rate as the goal, with constant classroom duress as the main motivator for teachers and students and absolutely no pressure on legislators to provide equitable resources from school district to school district. We shouldn’t be surprised to see unintended consequences as schools struggle to attain the impossible: getting 100 percent of their kids to pass the almighty bubble test by 2014. What’s good for test scores isn’t always what’s good for kids, but our punitive accountability fetish has established test scores as the measurably more important of the two.
But aren’t there poor teachers who fail to prepare their students, and don’t test scores help establish that?
Yes, poor teachers exist. No, a poor test score doesn’t establish poor teaching. It’s not that simple. A terrible teacher in an $8,000-per-pupil school may obtain higher scores than a wonderful teacher in a $4,000-per-pupil school. Those extra funds impact outcomes by providing smaller classes, fewer leaks in the roof, more and newer instructional materials, and various supports that aren’t available at the other school.
Our current system dissuades the best teachers from teaching in our toughest schools because they will be facilely scapegoated for things outside their control. Pinning everything on the classroom teacher lets policymakers and budget writers off the hook pretty easily. Accountability only falls on teachers, and politicians laugh all the way to re-election.
What does your “child-centered approach” look like, and how does the state make sure that all students learn the fundamentals?
Tom Pauken’s approach is child-centered, with multiple paths to graduation: a math/science path, humanities/fine arts path, and a technical/vocational path. Students get ownership of their education and focus on their strengths instead of adhering to one-size-fits-all mandates from outsiders. Elementaries need a well-rounded curriculum including core classes, arts, physical education, and recess for unstructured play.
Test advocates pretend a $500 million plan to test every student every year is the only way to monitor learning and that everyone who opposes this bamboozle opposes accountability. But many of us who wish to reform reform support smart testing using sampling techniques at certain grades to save limited instructional time and education dollars.
There are many additional ways to monitor outcomes if Texans will think outside the testing contract straightjacket. Online portfolios, NAEP scores, ACT-PLAN and PSAT scores, grades and passing rates, graduation rates, college-acceptance rates, dropout rates, and student surveys are just a few that come to mind. We can also require all graduates to show they are college-ready by means of college acceptance and/or ACT/SAT scores, or show they’re career-ready by obtaining an industry-recognized vocational certification prior to graduation. This isn’t hard; it just isn’t what lobbyists want to hear.
I admit that I am not sold on STAAR. I do not agree with the allegation that I therefore oppose accountability. In fact, I want accountability even for the accountability merchants.
More than 850 Texas school boards have passed resolutions objecting to the over-reliance on standardized testing. What impact do you expect that to have in next year’s lawmaking session?
I don’t know. I suspect that voting parents calling their representatives will have more impact than school board resolutions. It was telling months ago how quickly and publicly some Texas moms rebuked a prominent testing advocate when he accused superintendents of “scaring mom” over the testing issue. Rep. Jimmie Don Aycock said in a hearing last session that officials were getting lots of phone calls from parents about overtesting. At the same time, I understand that lobbyists representing the testing firms won’t go down without a fight.
I would like to note that these resolutions were adopted by elected local trustees. In Texas schools, school board members are often parents and involved community members; they are regular folks. This is representative democracy in action—local citizens are using the resolution to let their voices be heard alongside the lobbyists in Austin. If our leaders truly want to represent their constituents, the resolution will indeed influence their actions.
Why fight? Don’t you have a lot of common ground with advocates of standardized testing — high school graduates who are prepared to go into the workforce, onto more training or onto college?
I don’t think I have much common ground with folks who set impossible targets (100 percent of students must pass their standardized tests in 2014, under No Child Left Behind) and ignore the effects of funding injustices (Academically Unacceptable districts get funded an average of $1,000 less per student than Exemplary districts). These policies don’t help kids; they help to torpedo public schools.
Texas leaders have worshipped test-and-punish technocrats for over 20 years, and yet a testing advocate recently wrote “Wake Up – Schools Are Failing.” He says the solution is to “stay the course,” i.e., more of the same. But why are schools failing after two decades with accountability hawks in charge? When will their prescriptions work? It’s telling that Texas private schools are allowed to utilize the state’s testing system but politely say, “No thanks.”
Meanwhile, the universal failure of Texas public schools is preordained for 2014 — guaranteed by those who came up with the federal accountability targets — and news of their failure will be music to the ears of some. But to many of us, the school is still the heart of the community.
Our sons and daughters still grow up in the glow of Friday night lights, just as they have for generations. We still put their pictures in the paper when they do well at the spelling bee or win an essay contest; we still burn a bonfire and crown our small-town royalty. My son and I recently looked at my dad’s yearbook photo from 1951. Dad was a Pirate, and now, 60 years later, my sons and my daughter are all Pirates, too.
Some people may want a charter school or a virtual online school for their kids, and that’s fine — but many of us simply want Texas to stop undermining our humble community schools by carpet-bombing them with tests, paperwork, and inane targets … and maybe pat our hard-working teachers on the back once in awhile, too. To me, these things are worth fighting for.
These are the same public schools that educated the greatest generation and taught the Americans who won the space race. News of their demise is greatly exaggerated.
This Q&A was conducted via email and condensed by Dallas Morning News editorial writer Rodger Jones. His email address is rmjones@dallasnews.com. John Kuhn can be reached at johnkuhntx@gmail.com.
Oh my heavens!
I can’t believe it.
Creationism survives.
Science teachers, get involved.
Indiana teachers and parents and citizens: aren’t you glad Glenda Ritz will be state commissioner of education next year?
From a newspaper in Indiana:
A lengthy column today in the Lafayette Journal-Courier, by David Bangert, is headed “The evolution of Gov. Pence starts here; another creation science bill looms: An old fight over science will get a new look in 2013.”
A sample:
Indiana will have another discussion in the 2013 General Assembly session about how evolution is taught in the state’s science classrooms.
Same issue, new approach
“We’re going to try something a little different this time,” state Sen. Dennis Kruse, R-Auburn, said this week.
Kruse was behind last session’s Senate Bill 89. In its original form, the bill offered to give local school boards the option to “require the teaching of various theories concerning the origin of life, including creation science.”
Though not all prone to focus on the merits of sticking with the scientific method in science classrooms, senators were moved to water down the bill largely because of the presumed price tag. Creation science — even offered as a school board choice rather than a state mandate — adds up to a losing church-and-state proposition in the high courts. Rulings have been clear, not to mention expensive: Teaching creation science and intelligent design in public schools amounts to pushing religion, not science. And that crosses the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
A compromised SB89 that made it through the state Senate allowed schools to add courses that looked at the origin of life, provided they included theories from multiple religions. Considering that school districts already could do that with their non-science elective courses, the Indiana House took a pass.
This year, Kruse said, he’ll carry a bill designed by the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based public policy think tank. According to its website, the Discovery Institute “seeks to counter the materialistic interpretation of science by demonstrating that life and the universe are the products of intelligent design and by challenging the materialistic conception of a self-existent, self-organizing universe and the Darwinian view that life developed through a blind and purposeless process.”
More from the story:
Louisiana has had a similar law since 2008. Tennessee followed suit in 2012. Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam declined to sign it, saying it would bring confusion instead of clarity, according to the Tennesseean newspaper in Nashville. Civil libertarians, the Tennessee Science Teachers Association and members of the National Academy of Sciences warned about what came to be called the “monkey bill,” named for the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial that went after a Tennessee teacher who dared to teach evolution against state laws at the time.
Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, told Nature magazine that the law was simply a “permission slip for teachers to bring creationism, climate-change denial and other non-science into science classrooms.”
The law took effect in April without the governor’s signature.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel in Chicago plans to close as many as 100 public schools because they are under enrolled. But he also plans to open dozens of new charter schools. It is the dynamic of privatization: as public school close, privately managed charters open, accelerating the destruction of neighborhoods and public education. The charters, of course, will almost all be non-union.
“Kurt Hilgendorf, a CTU researcher and legislative activities staffer, spoke November 20, 2012, at the Chicago City Council Education Committee Hearings on School Closings. Kurt Hilgendorf taught history, economics and psychology at John Hope HS in Englewood and Von Steuben HS in Albany Park. Below is an edited version of his comments.
“Executive Summary
“School closings are wrenching and demand careful decision-making. The district needs additional time to chose the schools it will close. But it must also ask for a delay in implementation of the closings. That crucial step cannot be rushed.
“For that reason, we recommend that CPS take no school actions until at least December 1, 2013. The law does not require school closures, and the public is solidly opposed to them. It would be far better for CPS to take a year to develop a stable utilization plan before destroying school communities.
“We are concerned that CPS has created a new commission to solicit input from the community on the closings. The existing Chicago Educational Facilities Task Force (CEFTF) was created by state statute in 2010. CEFTF represents the community and is made up of a representative range of stakeholders: legislators, CPS officials, CTU members, local school council members, community organizations, and community members
“The new CPS commission, however, is a confusing duplication of effort with a focus that is much too narrow. It will avoid discussion of charter school openings on CPS utilization rates. Ordinary common sense dictates that the CPS commission must develop a plan that includes the new charters it will open. Also it is not possible for the community to provide the new CPS commission with useful input unless the commission will identify which schools CPS will close.
********************************************************************
“There are four reasons for a hold on school actions until December 1, 2013.
“First, CPS — with more than 600 facilities — has no master plan on how to use them. It will not have a plan in place at the end of March 2013, when CPS plans to close up to 100 schools. Without proper planning, if the district closes 60 neighborhood schools but adds 60 charters in the next few years, it will end up with the same problem it has today — continued underutilization.
“Second, CPS’ projected cost savings is minimal. Even at the inflated number of $500,000 to $800,000 per building — savings could at most reach $80 million. That is only 1.5% of the district’s operating budget; a small gain for the large amount of distress closing 100 schools will cause.
“Third, CPS created the utilization problem by aggressively expanding charter schools. Over the past 10 years, CPS added 50,000 charter seats, while Chicago lost 8% of its population. Opening charters causes underfunded neighborhood schools to lose students, and the vast majority of underutilized neighborhood schools are near charters. Even some charters are underutilized, according to CPS’s formula.
“The fourth and final reason we oppose the district’s proposal is that a legislative amendment is unnecessary. School actions are not required by law. Rather than change the rules in the middle of the game, the district should take the time to do the process effectively.
******************************************************************
“It is useful to remember the following examples of problems with earlier CPS closings.
“CPS has not tracked the 7,700 students who were
part of last year’s school actions. The district has little information about these students, even though state law required tracking and support. Of those 7,700 students, almost 1,000 were homeless.
“School actions have been concentrated on the South and West sides of the city, and African American students make up 88% of those children affected by school actions. Remember, school actions destroy stability in school communities, and the district has targeted only certain communities.
“Students displaced by school closings, especially those tied to performance, have ended up at schools that perform no better than the schools they left. The district’s actions have failed the “educationally sound” test that the facilities law established.
“Truancy is a more pressing issue than school closings. During the period that CPS undertook school actions, it went without truant officers. As a recent Tribune series outlined, chronically truant students are a significant problem for the city, both in terms of worse student outcomes and the loss of millions in state funding. CPS has not proposed a reinstatement of truant officers.
“CPS is asking teachers to create new curricula aligned to new tests that students must master at the same time it proposes major facility reorganization. Any of these initiatives would individually require several years to analyze the process and assess. When these initiatives are combined, the district is creating a logistical nightmare.
“Despite the complexity of these actions, there is little evidence to suggest that the current leadership has the capacity to simultaneously complete a master plan, work with schools to combine instructional staffs and merge organizational cultures, develop a safety and security approach, organize new transportation schedules and routes, and solicit input from community members.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 