Archives for the month of: May, 2013
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Zombie Federal Policies

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2013 //
116

Bill Gates is wrong. American education is not “broken.”

Federal education policy is broken.

Testing children until they cry is a bad idea. It is educational malpractice.

Basing teachers’ evaluation, their salary, and their tenure on student test scores is a bad idea. It doesn’t work. It is professional malpractice. The Gates Foundation has invested hundreds of millions of dollars trying to make it work. It doesn’t work. Arne Duncan has made it a cardinal principle of federal education policy. It doesn’t work.

Giving bonuses to teachers based on test scores is a failed idea. It has never worked. The U.S. Department of Education under Duncan put $1 billion into such programs. They fail.

Closing schools doesn’t make them better. It shatters communities and sends children to search for a school that will accept them. That’s federal policy. It’s wrong. It is wrong in Chicago and it is wrong everywhere else.

There is no such thing as a “failing school.” Schools are buildings. Buildings don’t fail. If the students in a school have low test scores, it is the responsibility of the superintendent to find out why and to supply the needed staff and resources to improve the school.

When schools struggle, it is the responsibility of the people at the top to help them, not to close them.

Federal education policy, from No Child Left Behind to Race to the Top, is broken. It has failed. It must be changed.

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

Hake’s Reading List on the Root Causes of Poor Academic Performance

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2013 //
10

Richard R. Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics at Indiana University, compiled the following reading list to help others understand the root causes of low academic performance:

Professor Hake writes:

“Penny” commented: ”We know that poorer (lower socioeconomic) students tend to do poorer in school. How about looking at the true root cause.”

For the “true root cause” see the REFERENCE list below containing poverty-related references from my *complete* post “The Contentious Common Core Controversy” at http://bit.ly/Y7ocMv

Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University

REFERENCES
Berliner, D.C. 2009. “Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success.” Education and Public Interest Center (Univ. of Colorado) and Education Policy Research Unit, (Arizona State University); online as a 729 kB pdf at http://bit.ly/fqiCUA. In his abstract Berliner states: “This brief details six Out of School Factors (OSFs) common among the poor that significantly affect the health and learning opportunities of children, and accordingly limit what schools can accomplish *on their own*: (1) low birth-weight and non-genetic prenatal influences on children; (2) inadequate medical, dental, and vision care, often a result of inadequate or no medical insurance; (3) food insecurity; (4) environmental pollutants; (5) family relations and family stress; and (6) neighborhood characteristics. These OSFs are related to a host of poverty-induced physical, sociological, and psychological problems that children often bring to school, ranging from neurological damage and attention disorders to excessive absenteeism, linguistic underdevelopment, and oppositional behavior.”

Brady, M. 2012. “Eight problems with Common Core Standards,” in Valerie Strauss’ “Answer Sheet,” Washington Post, 21 August; online at http://wapo.st/15Z4kTg. Note especially Brady’s crucial problem #4: “So much orchestrated attention is being showered on the Common Core Standards, the main reason for poor student performance is being ignored-a level of childhood poverty the consequences of which no amount of schooling can effectively counter” – see e.g., Berliner (2009), Duncan & Murnane (2011), Kristof (2013), Marder (2012), Neuman & Celano (2012), and my 14 blog entries on the overriding influence of poverty on children’s educational achievement at .

Duncan, G.J. & R. Murnane, eds. 2011. “Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances.” Russell Sage Foundation, publisher’s information at http://bit.ly/nCkmKv. Amazon.com information at http://amzn.to/r3MrCh.

Kristof, N.D. 2013. “For Obama’s New Term, Start Here.” New York Times OP-ED, 23 Jan, online at http://nyti.ms/WnEhU2. Kristof wrote: “Something is profoundly wrong when we can point to 2-year-olds in this country and make a plausible bet about their long-term outcomes – not based on their brains and capabilities, but on their ZIP codes. President Obama spoke movingly in his second Inaugural Address of making equality a practice as well as a principle. So, Mr. President, how about using your second term to tackle this most fundamental inequality?”

Marder, M. 2012. “Failure of U.S. Public Secondary Schools in Mathematics,” Journal of Scholarship and Practice 9(1): 8-25; the entire issue is online as a 2.7 MB pdf at http://bit.ly/KPitWM, scroll down to page 8. Marder wrote: “The collection of nationwide data do point to a primary cause of school failure, but it is poverty, not teacher quality. As the concentration of low-income children increases in a school, the challenges to teachers and administrators increase so that ultimately the educational quality of the school suffers. Challenges include students moving from one school to another within the school year, frequency of illness, lack of stable supportive homes with quiet places to study, concentration of students who are angry or disobedient, probability of students disappearing from school altogether, and difficulty of attracting and retaining strong teachers. Most people who see the connection between poverty and educational outcomes are confident that low-income students in a sufficiently supportive environment will learn as much in a school year as students in well-off communities.”

Neuman, S.B. & D.C. Celano. 2012. “Giving Our Children a Fighting ChancePoverty, Literacy, and the Development of Information Capital,” Teachers College Press, publishers information at http://bit.ly/ZVCsil. Amazon.com information at http://amzn.to/VVml0G, note the searchable “Look Inside” feature. The publisher states: “This is a compelling, eye-opening portrait of two communities in Philadelphia with drastically different economic resources. Over the course of their 10-year investigation, the authors of this important new work came to understand that this disparity between affluence and poverty has created a *knowledge gap* – far more important than mere achievement scores – with serious implications for students’ economic prosperity and social mobility. At the heart of this knowledge gap is the limited ability of students from poor communities to develop *information capital.* This moving book takes you into the communities in question to meet the students and their families, and by doing so provides powerful insights into the role that literacy can play in giving low-income students a fighting chance.”

Categories Common Core, Education Reform, Poverty

Who Needs Kant?

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2013 //
25

Diana Senechal has written a parody of higher education today.

This is a college philosophy class in which the reading of Kant has been replaced with clickers for answering multiple-choice questions.

I have to give satire alerts because education policy has become so wacky that almost anything may seem real.

When the ideas from our leaders get so bizarre, parody becomes difficult.

Categories Humor

Deconstructing The Legend of BASIS Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2013 //
29

David Safier is a great blogger in Arizona who has his hands full trying to keep up with the myth-making of the charter industry in his state.

In this column, he dissects the legend of the BASIS charters. Their backers spin the story that high standards produces miraculous results that every school could match if it copied the BASIS mdl, but the reality is something else.

As Safier writes, “An obscenely well funded coalition of organizations exists to sing the praises of schools like BASIS as part of their continuing efforts to push their privatization agenda.
BASIS schools begin with a reasonably high achieving group of 6th grade students (recently they added a 5th grade). Of those 11 and 12 year olds, only one out of three will make it to their senior year. The other two-thirds withdraw, mainly because the expectations and pressure are so great, they know they won’t be able to succeed. The biggest student dropoff is from the 8th to the 9th grade. Any middle schooler who’s struggling to keep up knows the pressure and expectations will be far greater in high school as the coursework becomes increasingly more demanding and they’re required to take a number of AP courses. However, even among the ninth graders who make the cut, between 30% and 50% don’t last to their senior year.”

The promoters won’t talk about the selection process or the attrition rate.

This is a recurring theme, unfortunately, in every “miracle” school story. Education is hard daily work. Children are not transformed overnight.

Honesty and transparency should be starting points, not rare commodities.

Categories Charter Schools

High-Stakes Testing of Students in Special Education

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2013 //
46

Louise Marr sent this from her book:

**********£*******
“Every spring, the Philadelphia public school students take the standardized tests, or PSSAs. (Starting in 2013, the district has switched to a different test called the Keystone Exams.) These tests are a huge part of how schools are evaluated and rated. It is from these scores that Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) is determined. There is a big push to prepare the eleventh graders for the tests from the beginning of the year to test day, usually after the first of the year. This particular year at Vaux, the students took the test over a course of several days. They were divided into several different classrooms for three to four hours in the morning, with two teacher proctors per room. All eleventh graders take the test, even the SPED students. Schools across the country take statewide tests very seriously, because of the implications that they present. In the five high schools where I have taught, there has been a common atmosphere at test time: the school is quiet and rules must be strictly enforced. In the classroom that I proctored at Vaux, it was sometimes a challenge to maintain the serious atmosphere.

There were five students in the room I proctored. Four were SPED students. One was MMR, and read at first grade level. He was given the same test. After a few minutes, he put his head down, because he did not understand the reading. Teachers are not allowed to help, only to say, “Do the best you can.” He didn’t even bother to ask.

Takierrah and Courtney were working on their tests, until Courtney looked up and caught Takierrah looking at her.

“Stop looking at me!”

“You’re ugly, I will f*** you up.” “I can’t stand your black ass.” “You’re black too!”

“No, I’m light-skinned.”

“You’re still ugly.”

“I’m cuter than you.”

“Get outta my face.”

“I’m not in your face, because if I was, I would f*** you up.”

They did manage to settle down without a physical confrontation,
but this scene made a huge impression on me. These tests would be used to evaluate the progress of our school. They were obviously way above the comprehension level of the Special Education students, yet the students were not given any accommodations at all. When I asked an administrator about this, she just shrugged, “That’s just the way it is.”

From the book, “Passed On: Public School Children in Failing American Schools”
by Louise Marr. Chapter 3: No Longer a Special Education

Categories Closing schools, Special Education, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Yes, Too Good to Be True

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2013 //
12

Earlier I posted a story about an elementary school in Massachusetts where the principal fired the security guards and expanded the arts program….and, voila! The school miraculously improved.

The title was, “Could This Be True?”

Sadly, it was not true.

According to our friends in Massachusetts, the principal fired most of the teachers and the enrollment of the school changed, raising its socioeconomic profile.

No miracle.

Here is a comment from EduShyster:

“Barack Obama visited this school just last year–although the principal’s decision to bulk up the arts budget was not the lesson that BO was there to promote. Before Principal Bott got rid of the security guards he got rid of 80% of the teachers. And unlike other schools in Massachusetts where slash-and-burn turnaround efforts have produced very little, test scores at the school have risen, making Orchard Gardens what Arne Duncan might call a SIG-sess story.”

ChemTeacher added this comment:

“Let’s ask Deborah Meier. She has some understanding of the pilot schools in Boston. According to the video, the school originally opened as an empty promise, and the art and music equipment was left in storage.

That was for the old Orchard Garden Children. After those children were replaced with higher socioeconomic children, somebody finally thought of hiring art teachers.

“The new Orchard Gardens replaced a failed, dysfunctional public housing development with a mixed income community of over 200 units of affordable family housing in an inner city neighborhood. ”
http://www.dhkinc.com/Housing/public_housing/9606A.asp

The moral might be that we need integrated, mixed income communities, or maybe we can just hire art teachers right away. I’m worried about where the old Orchard Park children are, and do they have art and music there?”

ChemTeacher added:

“This is not necessarily a heart-warming story. Please read the link I posted above. The scores rose because they moved out the old, low-scoring population. Firing teachers didn’t raise the scores. The only way corporate reformers know to dramatically raise average scores is to cheat, or to raise average socioeconomic status. Art and music will save children’s lives and souls, and eventually pay off for their community and nation, but it won’t necessarily work standardized-test-score miracles.

“My guess is that the school was prepared and equipped specifically for the new affordable housing development, and that’s why the arts and music curriculum wasn’t launched until after the old community was gutted.

“Affordable housing” doesn’t mean low-income.”

Another Massachusetts reader sent this story, of a school that got $4 million in federal grants, extended the day from 7:30 to 5:30 pm, and hired a new staff of data-driven teachers. If Arne Duncan wants to give $4 million to every low-performing school, maybe he will see big change. If they all fire 80% of their teachers, where will we find new teachers? And how destructive is that to the teaching profession? Or is that what he wants?

Categories Arts Education, Duncan, Arne

Why We Need School Libraries

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2013 //
17

This was written by a parent in Los Angeles, who blogs as the Red Queen in LA:

Disarticulating Public Schools

It was a bad day 30 years ago when some business management-type decided to restructure academic departments to be fiscally self-sustaining, economically independent. In this scenario university libraries, a service-providing unit with no inherent money-generating capacity, would be held to the same standard as, say, microbiology with all its grant-overhead revenue generating potential.

Faddish ideas are hard to stop, even bad ones and so this conundrum has trickled down to our primary and secondary level of schooling too. But the model there remains inherently inappropriate; it can never be made to work. Nevertheless in insisting on the impossible, that such departments “pull their own weight”, the standing of libraries has devolved to that of ‘frivolous luxury’, akin to nail-art salons or a car wash.

This is a really bad paradigm. Libraries may be service-oriented, but the service they provide is fundamental support for the essentially solitary activity of learning. While teachers may broker the ingredients necessary for learning, at the end of the day each and every pupil must do their very own hard work of incorporating new material into their understanding. This requires nurturing the intellectual space of the pupil, to provide the support and safety necessary for that process of learning, the rearranging of one’s existing canon of knowledge into a novel set of explanatory connections.

And this is the true function of a library: it provides an atmosphere where ideas can be suspended long enough to permit rearrangement. Libraries are the petrie dish of intellect and the information stored there provides the agar of learning. But students themselves muster the work necessary to grow understanding.

Until it is clear that a library is the portal of learning, students will be without the means to accomplish their essential, lonely task. Libraries are the common intellectual meeting ground of individualized learners.

Now infuse that scenario with the isolation of the immigrant’s experience. That library becomes the embodiment of the hard task they face bootstrapping knowledge and understanding. That library provides the means for their unbelievably difficult task, just literally and physically in the form of electronic equipment and other tools, but also spiritually in the form of language and information, there for those able to invest their hard work in the effort. That library is the very key to dispelling the immigrant’s disenfranchisement. That library is a dream, sustaining the dream of Dreamers.

When we defund a school’s library, we dismantle the very capacity of the school to conduct its mission. Exterminating librarians defeats the purpose of school itself. When the librarian leaves and the library is starved, we lose our very access to the sustenance of learning and knowledge.

Categories Budget Cuts, Support for public schools

Teacher: No One Escapes High-Stakes Testing, Not Even My Child

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2013 //
15

This teacher was accustomed to teaching poor minority kids how to pass the tests. She was really good at it.

But she was shocked to discover that her own children’s school–in an affluent neighborhood in Brooklyn–had succumbed to the same pressures.

Testing, as she realized, had found her and her children. There was no escape. She concluded:

“As I reflect on why I was (am?) so shocked that testing had found me, I recognize that I honestly believed that my children were immune to high-stakes testing given our race and class privilege, and as much as I consider myself an educator for social justice, I was completely okay with that. That makes me feel dirty and ashamed. But we are not immune and our privilege can’t save us. It is here, it is everywhere, and if your kids are in the public schools, it seems you can’t hide from it. We can only fight back.”

Categories New York City, Testing

Teaching or Testing?

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2013 //
45

Michael Weston shares the news from his school, where testing takes precedence over teaching.

He writes:

May 3, 2013. It actually happened at Freedom High School today. The Unthinkable. Beyond the Pale. This afternoon, 7th period, we had an AP Testing pep rally. Yes, a testing pep rally. I had heard rumors of such things, but had a hard time believing them. Today I saw.

Hillsborough County Florida is one of those districts that has stuffed AP classes full with any student who a) wants to take one, b) can be cajoled to take one, c) is involuntarily signed up for one, or d) is placed under extreme pressure to take one.

This is all in the name of increased rigor of course. Apparently “increased rigor” is “New English” for Superintendent bonus. Yes, the number of AP tests taken is in her contract as a bonus provision.

Students lose instructional time taking these tests.
Students lose instructional time when their teachers have to proctor these tests.
Students lose instructional time when classes are under half full because OTHER kids are taking tests.

The list goes on.

For the last 4 weeks we have been FCATing. Two weeks ago started Florida End of Course Exams (they continue for some weeks) and Monday begins AP testing season.

Now – students lose learning time to a TESTING PEP RALLY??? REALLY?

Florida teachers should file a class action law suit or union grievances that this level of attention to testing creates a hostile environment for teaching.

Parents should likewise take action, as this level of attention to testing creates a hostile environment to learning.

Categories Florida, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Online Testing Broke Down in Several States

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2013 //
26

State testing was disrupted by major computer breakdowns in Indiana, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Minnesota.

All 46 states and D.C. are supposed to administer Common Core assessments online by 2014-15.

Maybe the corporations will solve the technological problems by then. Maybe states will come up with the money to pay for enough computers by then. Maybe students will figure out how to hack into the assessments by then.

All sorts of surprising and unpredictable things happen when big business and big government decide to take the work of humans out of human hands.

Categories Common Core, Technology, Computers, Testing
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