Archives for the month of: March, 2013
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This Is What School Reform Does Not Look Like

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2013 //
16

Once again, New York City’s Panel on Educational Policy (formerly known as the Board of Education) rubber-stamped the closing of 22 schools.

After nearly a dozen years of mayoral control, the authorities showed how hollow “reform” is. The closings never end. Success is nowhere in sight.

The representatives from Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens propped a moratorium on school closings and “co-locations” of charters into public school space, but their pleas were ignored. Michael Mendel of the UFT eloquently opposed the closings.

The farce continues. Chancellor Dennis Walcott, who is said to have taught nursery school for a year or so, decades ago, but has never been a principal or school leader, had the last word. As reported here:

“Chancellor Dennis Walcott even boasted of his power and the uselessness of the PEP when he said this regarding closing schools, ‘At the end of the day, the decision is mine.'”

In short, it doesn’t matter what parents or teachers or communities say.

This is not what democracy looks like.

It appears that the NYC DOE doesn’t even pretend to know how to help schools.

Categories Closing schools, New York City

Providence: When Adults Take the Test

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2013 //
16

The Providence Student Union thought it was wrong that a single high-stakes exam should determine whether they graduate.

To prove their point, they invited legislators, educators, and community leaders to take the test. The test was made up of released items. The results will be released later this week.

Hats off to the brave adults who took the risk.

Here is the students’ press release:

March 16, 2013

CONTACT: Aaron Regunberg | Aaron@ProvidenceStudentUnion.org | 847-809-6039 (cell)

STUDENTS INVITE LEADERS, POLICY MAKERS TO “TAKE THE TEST” –

WOULD THEY GRADUATE UNDER NEW NECAP POLICY?

Providence, Rhode Island – March 16, 2013 – Youth in Providence turned the testing tables today with an event designed to lend a deeper perspective to the debate over Rhode Island’s new high-stakes NECAP diploma system. Members of the Providence Student Union (PSU), a high school student advocacy group, administered a shortened version of the test that is currently being used as a make-or-break graduation requirement for the Class of 2014 to over forty elected officials, nonprofit directors, attorneys, and other community leaders.

“We expect this event to prove that people are more than test scores,” said Leexammarie Nieves, a sophomore at Central High School and a member of PSU. “We also want these community leaders to get a sense of what students are going through with this new policy.”

The adults sat at tables in the basement of the Knight Memorial Library in Providence, no. 2 pencils in hand, as students passed out the test, read the official directions, and proctored the exam. “This is a shortened version of the Math NECAP,” explained Tamargejae Paris, a junior at Hope High School at the beginning of the event.

“We are focusing on the math portion because that is the test that is putting the overwhelming majority of students at risk of not graduating. The test we are using was put together from the items RIDE releases, and we did our best to estimate the same ratios of each kind of question as is used on the real NECAP. So, though it is not a statistically valid test, we believe it is a good general representation of the test Rhode Island juniors are required to take.”

The participating adults were there for numerous reasons. Teresa Tanzi, a State Representative from Wakefield, said before beginning her test, “I’m here because I think this is an important exploration. I’ve heard people say that adults taking the test isn’t a fair representation, because we have all been out of school for a long time.

But if this is a test that accomplished adults cannot perform well on, then exactly what is NECAP testing? The truth is, this is a test that was designed as a diagnostic tool to measure large populations – where many are expected to fail – not to make these high-stakes decisions for individual students.
Having said that, however, I am here to do as well as I can and really see what it is we’re asking of students.”

Ken Fish, a former Director of Middle School and High School Reform at RIDE, shook his head when asked how he think he did. “I doubt that I passed the Math test, but those skills have never been relevant in my life or in a successful career managing multimillion dollar budgets. I have other compensating abilities, just as kids do. But students are trapped in an unfair and rigid system that negates their strengths, ignores their accomplishments, and brands them a failure…because of one test! This is outrageous. I think it’s time for the members of the Board of Education to take this test themselves, and then to change the NECAP graduation policy.”

State Senator Adam Satchell agreed. “We’re trying to teach students twenty-first century skills—how to speak, how to use technology. That’s not what this test measures,” he said. “It’s not an accurate measurement of our students.”

Cauldierre McKay, a junior at Classical High School, summed up the spirit of the event when he told the crowd, “We will release your scores in the following week. However you may have scored, we are willing to hypothesize that your score will not be a meaningful representation of all of your academic and real world value and success. This room is filled with accomplished individuals –there are elected officials who are charged with representing thousands of their fellow citizens; nonprofit directors who have created organizations that help countless people every day; brilliant lawyers; even some people that create education policy for Rhode island students. How can you measure all of that success by a single, arbitrary test? You can’t.”

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Categories Education Reform

Rupert Murdoch Wins Contract to Develop Common Core Tests

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2013 //
67

Amplify, the company owned by Rupert Murdoch, won a $12.5 million contract to develop formative assessments for Common Core tests. The award was made by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, one of two groups funded by the Obama administration to create national tests, administered online. Joel Klein runs Murdoch’s Amplify division.

When Murdoch purchased Wireless Generation in the fall of 2010, he said:

“When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching,” said News Corporation Chairman and CEO, Rupert Murdoch. “Wireless Generation is at the forefront of individualized, technology-based learning that is poised to revolutionize public education for a new generation of students.”

Categories Common Core

Mike Deshotels: Another Account of Showdown in Baton Rouge

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2013 //
4

Mike Deshotels writes a terrific blog about education in Louisiana. He attended my debate with Chas Roemer, and here is his account. He also writes about the teacher town hall, where I urged teachers to become politically active.

He urged teachers to join the Network for Public Education. They should also join the “Defenders of Public Education.”

It is not teachers alone who are at risk in Louisiana. It is the very principle of public education as a founding pillar of our democracy.

Categories Louisiana

Infected by GERM, Britain Looks to Bain for Education Ideas

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2013 //
4

We are not alone.

We are not the only great nation doing truly absurd things to our education system to advance the interests of private enterprise, under the guise of “reform.”

Great Britain’s Minister of Education Michael Gove has invited Bain & Company of the U.S. to advise him on how to make cuts to the national education budget and encouraged them to apply for contracts in the newly reconstituted Department for Education.

Bain is the company created by our own Mitt Romney.

Now if Minister Gove brings in Boston Consulting (the company that birthed Bain & Company), Stand for Children, and Andy Smarick of Bellwether Partners, he can get a report recommending full privatization of the British education system and finish the job.

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International, Privatization

Yong Zhao Offers Advice on How to Beat China

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2013 //
5

Yong Zhao knows that American policymakers are obsessed with getting higher test scores.

Not their own test scores, of course, because they don’t take the tests, but the scores of America’s children.

They want higher scores than those of China.

Actually, we don’t know what China’s scores are, because the national scores have never been released.

We have only the scores of students in Shanghai, which are not representative of the nation.

Yong Zhao offers advice here on how to do it.

Categories Education Reform, International

Is This the ALEC Group for Testing Common Core?

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2013 //
11

The PARCC assessment group includes all or almost every member of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change.

What is strange is to see the commissioners of Massachusetts and New York aligned with the state commissioners of the states most closely aligned with the ALEC agenda of high-stakes testing and privatization.

Categories ALEC, Chiefs for Change

Data-Driven Teacher: I Will Not Quit

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2013 //
31

A letter from a NYC teacher:

I am a Nationally Board Certified Teacher (2003, 2013) teaching in NYC. Two years ago, I was intimidated to leave my first NYC school due to test scores on the grade 8 ELA exam. My students passed but didn’t make enough progress. This school was an “A” school in a very depressed neighborhood. Unfortunately, I did not love data enough and I refused to view multiple-choice questions as text.

I chose to assess my students differently: Where are they now? Where are they going? What do they need to know to get there? How can I help them reach their goal? I asked myself these questions daily. I chose community texts, intensive writing workshops, and art to help my students reach their goals. More than anything, I wanted them to experience a type of learning that had nothing to do with worksheets or tests. I wanted to provoke and inspire.

At the end of of my third year, I was slammed with my first formal observation the day after Spring Break. I was informed in an email about 12 hours before the start of the next school day. As my pre-observation was three months earlier, I made sure to send a lengthy and detailed email to my AP prior to the lesson. This was a gamble in itself since my administration was so terrified of email that they usually reprimanded us for using it. They preferred handwritten memos. The AP sat in the back of the room and did not make eye-contact with me. She simply typed.

Immediately following the observation, I was called down for a meeting. The AP who did the formal was not in attendance. The principal told me I did not make tenure. I asked why and how I was evaluated. He said nothing of my formal observation, my three years of teaching, or the countless handwritten memos that stated I was doing a great job (I saved all of them). Instead, he showed me data. Data from the three-day tests he made us give four times a year. These tests were photocopies of old NYS tests. Only the multiple-choice sections were used. Data from the Accelerated Reader (AR) program we struggled to implement. How does a student take an online test without an Internet connection? How do they read without even three titles they could enjoy on their reading level? They don’t. And so my principal also used a lack of data against me. And of course there is VAM. I am “Lucky Number 7.” Once published, that score would hurt his school.

I won’t lie. I cried. I cried because I had spent ten years teaching in functioning public schools in Orange County, FL and Montgomery County, MD. I cried because I was so exhausted fighting for my right to teach and the students’ right to learn. In previous schools, I was treated like a professional. I had working relationships with my administrators. All of us were about changing the lives of our students and we did it together. For ten years, I was inspired, motivated, and supported.

For days after that meeting, my principal would stand outside my room and watch me teach. He would come inside and examine my unit plans, which needed to be aligned to the CCS. He would glare at me if my eighth-graders spoke in the hallways or while walking down five flights of stairs to lunch. During that time, I actually received a memo that said, “Monitor your students at all times. I saw Clara push Timmy during line-up.”

I quickly secured a new position.

On my last day there, we had to wait in line to hand in our classroom keys. I passed my keys to the school secretary and the AP passed me my formal observation paperwork. It was signed, but not one box was checked. I had never known such insidiousness could exist in a place for children.

My current school is a large, “failing” NYC high school. The two APs I work with care about their teachers and students. Through them, I have learned so much about teaching city kids–without lowering my standards or testing them into oblivion. Together, we are building something better for our students. That feeling of support, of community, of compassion is priceless.

Categories New York City, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching

Louisiana Blogger Wants Chas Roemer to Answer His Question

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2013 //
5

Forgive me if I seem to be focusing quite a lot of space on Louisiana, but please understand that the state is now a Petri dish for privatization of public education on a massive scale. To keep costs down, the state is doing its best to drive out experienced teachers and replace them with TFA.

Another reason I post often about Louisiana is that it has so many excellent bloggers. They are smart, fearless, and relentless. They help the rest of us understand the systematic destruction of public education (a process now called “reform”).

When I spoke in Baton Rouge last Thursday, I debated the president of the state board of education, Chas Roemer. Chas described himself as “a redneck from northern Louisiana,” but Locals know that his father was governor, he graduated from Harvard, he is an avid supporter of choice, and his sister heads the state charter school association.

One of the state’s best bloggers, Crazy Crawfish, was there that day. He used to work in the Louisiana Department of Education. He didn’t get to ask his question because time was up. Here is his summary of the event and the question he wished he could ask but didn’t get a chance.:

Categories Charter Schools, Louisiana, Vouchers

Mayor Bloomberg’s Chaos Theory

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2013 //
20

This article in the New York Times describes how one large high school now houses nine small schools. Some succeed, some fail, some statistics are better, some are worse or no different. Some statistics are undoubtedly inflated by credit recovery and other tricks to game the system. One thing is clear: a building that once had one principal now has nine.

It is not clear that the nine schools are doing a better job than the one old school in meeting the needs of the students. This jumble should attract the attention of a scholar looking for a big project.

The new mayor will have some heavy lifting to do just to restore the citizens’ belief that they are getting accurate data from the Department of Education, not spin and embroidery.

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, Corporate Reformers, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, New York City
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