Archives for the month of: June, 2013
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Jan Resseger on Absurdity of Ohio VAM

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2013 //
5

This just in from an advocate for children who live in poverty:

This week the Cleveland Plain Dealer has a new series, “Grading the Teachers.” It is basically an endorsement of the new Ohio Value Added Measures (VAM) program by which teachers will be rated. Scores are being made available on-line. Ohio’s VAM formula, according to the news account, does not consider the socioeconomic information about the children.

Here are the articles thus far in the series:

· Grading the Teachers, Part I ‘Value-added’ ties teacher ratings to pupils’ test scores.
· Grading the Teachers, Part 2” Value-added scores show no link between performance and salary.

I just sent the following to the paper for use as either a letter or op-ed. I suspect it won’t be published, which is why I’m sending it around now. Usually I would wait to see if it gets published, but this time I’m not going to, because this is so important.

Fifty years ago Johns Hopkins sociologist James S. Coleman documented the most powerful factors affecting student achievement: the socio-economic background of children’s families and the concentration of poverty in particular communities.

Two years ago Duke economist Helen Ladd wrote: “Study after study has demonstrated that children from disadvantaged households perform less well in school on average than those from more advantaged households. This empirical relationship shows up in studies using observations at the levels of the individual student, the school, the district, the state, the country.”

A year and a half ago Stanford educational sociologist Sean Reardon documented that while in 1970, only 15 percent of families lived in neighborhoods classified as affluent or poor, by 2007, 31 percent of families lived in such neighborhoods. Reardon documents a simultaneous jump in an income-inequality achievement gap between very wealthy and very poor children, a gap that is 30-40 percent wider among children born in 2001 than those born in 1975.

Surely we can agree that poverty should not be an excuse. But blaming school teachers for gaps in scores on standardized tests, as the Plain Dealer does in “Grading the Teachers,” is not only cruel to the teachers singled out when scores are published—for example, Euclid’s Maria Plecnik, a previously highly rated teacher who will leave the profession this year— but foolish as public policy. Who will want to teach in our poorest communities with the system of Value-Added Measures that the Plain Dealer acknowledges, “do not account for the socioeconomic backgrounds of students as they do in some other states.”

Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville critiques the logic of those who would blame school teachers: “Some want to make the absurd argument that the reason low-income youngsters do poorly is that, mysteriously, all the incompetency in our education systems has coincidentally aggregated around low income students. In this view, all we need to do is scrub the system of incompetency and all will be well.”

Blaming teachers certainly gets the rest of us off the hook. If we can just fire teachers, we won’t have to fund schools equitably or adequately. We won’t have to address the impact of economic and racial segregation or the shocking 22 percent child poverty rate in America, the highest in the industrialized world.

Ms. Jan Resseger
Minister for Public Education and Witness
Justice and Witness Ministries
700 Prospect, Cleveland, Ohio 44115
216-736-3711
http://www.ucc.org/justice/public-education
“That all citizens will be given an equal start through a sound education is one of the most basic, promised rights of our democracy. Our chronic refusal as a nation to guarantee that right for all children…. is rooted in a kind of moral blindness, or at least a failure of moral imagination…. It is a failure which threatens our future as a nation of citizens called to a common purpose… tied to one another by a common bond.” —Senator Paul Wellstone, March 31, 2000

Categories Ohio, Teacher Evaluations

How the Bloomberg DOE Kills Schools

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2013 //
15

The Bloomberg administration loves small schools. Conversely, it hates large schools, especially large high schools. The city used to have dozens of large high schools, some of which had a storied history. Now few remain. One that was slated to close last year was Long Island City High School, but it was saved by a court order.

So the Department of Education is killing it by the usual means, by diverting students to other schools. As enrollment falls, so does funding. We previously saw this process at historic Jamaica High School, where the city starved it of students and funding until programs died and nothing was left but bare bones of what was once the pride of the community.

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, Closing schools, New York City

EduShyster: Are You a Koppitalist?

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2013 //
8

As Teach for America expands into a global marketplace, EduShyster compares Koppitalism to Late Capitalism. What do they have in common? How hard is it to bring Excellence to everyone in the world?

Categories Teach for America TFA

Reader: How to Describe Corporate Reform in Plain English

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2013 //
31

A reader commented on an earlier discussion with these thoughts:
***************************************************************************

“”Does anyone else feel like we are basically being ignored?” – 2old2tch

While I applaud the sentiment and aspirations of this letter I am saddened with the weak tea rhetoric and carefully qualified points in academic insider language. This is how academics exchange views at conferences. Arne Duncan is not an academic and he has yet to show any respect for or interest in anything academics have to say.

Offering a long list of research citations is great if your are publishing in a peer-reviewed journal. Otherwise they indicate a false belief in the authority of the research, which the reform movement has largely ignored and dismissed all along. This high flown rhetoric doesn’t stand up well to Duncan’s canned talking points outside of academia.

A non-academic reading this might well ask: So what exactly are they saying? What exactly are they asking for? Where’s the beef?

Can we get a plain-spoken English translation, something like: You are destroying public schools and the teaching profession. Standardized testing is out of control, cruel, and useless in determining success of students and teachers. Your “Race to the Top” creates losers as well as winners. These programs have been tried over and over and always fail — why are you still promoting them?

If the purpose was to convince other academics then it serves that purpose well, a preaching to the choir moment. If the purpose is to impact and change wrong-headed policies then the audience should be much broader and the language much less academic and their tone much more forceful. That’s how the game is played today.

“Does anyone else feel like we are basically being ignored?” – 2old2tch

“Yes.”

Categories Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization, Vouchers

First Grade Teacher: How I Conquered the Testing Monster

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2013 //
22

In response to the question, “Can You Do the Wrong Thing in the Right Way?,” this teacher responded with a fascinating account of how she conquered the testing monster in her first-grade classroom.

She writes:

I’ve been thinking about testing too. A lot. I teach first grade. My students arrive at the tender age of 5 or 6 and exit at 6 or 7. I give my students 6 benchmark tests a year, 3 in literacy and 3 in math. This past year, 4 more tests were added to the roster – this time on computer. That adds up to 10 – yes 10 -multiple choice tests every year for children who still cry for their moms, pee on the carpet, fall asleep spread eagle on the floor, and poke, prod, tease, and growl at each other. Oh –did I say that the children can’t read, at least for the first third of the year –the first 3 or 4 tests?

I am told the tests are to help inform my instruction. But I know the truth. The tests are there in first grade to get the kids ready for the tests in second grade –the tests that really matter – the tests that will count on the schools’ API and AYP reports. (California tests 2nd grade).

As a pragmatist, I’m efficient, organized, hold traditional values, and like rules and order. I know how to do what is expected of me and how to show results. So I reasoned I could use these structural strengths to get the tests over with, show the expected results, meet the smart goals, so that I could move on to the creative part of teaching –the part that cannot be quantified– the part of teaching where I get to interact with the children I am charged with developing academically, I get to know their passions, fears, ideas, the part of teaching that educates children – where there are no borders between painting and reading and playing basketball and building towers and writing , the part of teaching that is magical, that combines knowledge of standards, expertise, and passion on the part of the teacher with excitement, willingness, surprise, and vision from children.

But that is not what happened. Every breathing space I created for myself and my students by my efficiency got filled up with another expectation. More students – 18 one year, 20 the next, 24 for a few years, then 26; a new policy of all-day, full inclusion of special needs children in the general education classroom; a neighborhood impacted by the housing market decline and its resultant mobile population – causing more to move in and out of my classroom during the year; a school in program improvement – in effect designated as failing, and the resultant punishments – more administrative scrutiny, narrowing of curriculum to math and reading, canceling of arts programs during the school day; flight of families to school with better scores; and noisy classrooms in buildings without connecting walls.

So I got tired. I got beaten down. I got discouraged. And if you think I had it bad, think of the kids. Imagine a teacher for them who is always cross, always serious, harps about the test, never takes the time to ask them how they are doing, is too busy to tie a shoe lace or rub a boo-boo. That is me. I cringe as I write this.

Standardized tests don’t just stop my students from thinking, they teach them not to think. Imagine a 5 year old child who doesn’t read, and may not even speak English. They look at an 8 by 11 inch white paper devoid of all but one or two sketches. They listen as I read the question to them. Then I read the 3 or 4 choices. They pick the choice and fill in the bubble. Imagine the time I spend teaching them how to find the question, scroll with their eyes through the 4 choices, all while listening to me drone on and repeat the question and the choices until all 26 of them have bubbled something in. Imagine that this one test has 8 pages of questions – 15 or 20 questions in all. No wonder I’m cross. No wonder their eyes are glazed and they are growling.

But it gets worse. I am complicit in this next part. Standardized tests actually make students stupid. Yes, stupid. Not only are the kids not thinking, they are losing the ability to think. In my zeal to get administrative scrutiny off me and my students, I mistakenly thought that if I give them the test results they want, then I could do what I know was best for my students. To that end I trained my students to do well in these tests. I taught them to look for loopholes; to eliminate and guess; to find key words; to look for clues; in short, to exchange the process of thinking for the process of manipulation. I capitalized on my knowledge of young children, and the fact that they want to please adults and like to get the answer “right”. I justified my actions by saying that I had no choice, that the consequences of low test scores at my school were too dire to contemplate, and I wasn’t willing to put myself in professional or financial jeopardy. Clearly, testing made me stupid too.

I can’t speak for all my fellow teachers at my school, but I suspect many of them would, at the very least, recognize similar behaviors in their test-teaching practices. So, when despite our best collective efforts at raising test scores failed and my school entered 2nd year program improvement, I surrendered my stupidity and started speaking up, and eventually speaking out. I read research, blogs, government publications, and journals. I read widely from educational, historical, economic, pediatric, and psychological literature. I challenged administrative authority at my school to do the same – read, think, debate, discuss, and much to my surprise, did not get rebuffed. Astonishingly, I got ignored.

At about the same time I woke up out of my testing-induced nightmare , I started to notice the monster I had helped create. My students were only happy when they got the answer right. For many years my collegues and I had noticed a trend in young children – a trend toward passivity in learning. We had theories – all the kids had TV’s in the bedrooms, they had far too much screen time – computer, games, cells, TV’s in cars, lack of adult supervision and interaction, lack of conversational models at home, lack of social models at home, the list went on. But what wasn’t on the list was what I was culpable for – I had become about the right answer. They wanted to please me. They knew that if they waited long enough I would help them find the right answer. And I did.

One day, during small group math rotation, I put up privacy boards during the practice part of a lesson on math reasoning. The story problem went like this: There are 10 buttons on my coat. 6 are red and the rest are blue. How many are blue? We have worked on these kind of problems frequently, and the children have seen them in test format. Using connecting cubes as buttons, the children had to make a model of the problem. Three kids cried that day. The stress of thinking for and by themselves got to them. You see, many of the children had become expert at copying – watching what other children did in the group to get an answer and then providing “their” answer a nanosecond later. The children did not trust themselves enough to even attempt an answer. Their discomfort was palpable, and I was appalled.

Crying notwithstanding, I continued to use privacy boards. I also started to coach the kids about my belief in their abilities. I found that as they worked out a math problem using manipulatives to represent objects, I could lean in and coach them, one to one. Then, when they all had their answers, we pushed down the privacy boards to explore what we had all done. Ever so slowly, over many weeks, they started to regain their confidence.

You might wonder why I had not been doing this kind of teaching all along. I had, 11 years ago, pre-NCLB. Testing, along with the breadth of the standards and the resulting mountain of material to cover, much of it developmentally inappropriate, slowly eroded my professional judgement. Pressure to produce results through collaboration and mind-numbing analysis sapped my energy. A constant barrage of media stories about the ineffectiveness of teachers, some of it supported by leaders at my own school, drowned my spirit. Then I heard you, Diane, speak as a guest of my district and union. I started to read your work and have never looked back.

So thank you from the bottom of my heart. You are truly brave. You inspire me to speak up and speak out. You remind me that knowledge is power –I had forgotten. Now I get my ducks in a row, collect my facts, back up my intuition and experience with research, and speak up without fear or rancor. And in the process of speaking up for myself, I speak up for my students. And ever so slowly I start to rebuild my confidence too.

Categories California, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Imposing Standardization on Other People’s Children

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2013 //
20

Robert D. Shepherd, one of our many brilliant readers, offered the following explanation of the impulse to standardize the education of children across the nation:

“It’s no secret that income inequality has skyrocketed in the United States in recent decades, that economic and social mobility have plummeted, that wealth has been increasingly concentrated at the top, and that increasingly, the affluent in this country are isolated in their own circles–living in their own separate neighborhoods; sending their kids to their own separate schools from preschool through college; keeping their money offshore; spending much of their time in homes outside the country; and so on.

“Isolation from ordinary people breeds contempt and prejudice. Lack of intimate, long-term interaction with ordinary people makes it easier for the wealthy to generalize about “those people,” whoever they might be–workers, teachers, the poor, etc., and to buy into across-the-board, one-size-fits-all prescriptions regarding those Others. It becomes easy to think that it makes sense that we have a top-down, mandated, invariant curriculum for the masses based upon the vise of invariant standards on the one side and invariant tests on the other if one thinks of teachers, students, workers, the poor–of any group of people outside the privileged class–as homogenous. “If only we held those people accountable via a standardized test!” begins to sound sensible, even though giving the same test to every third grader is equivalent to giving the same certification exam to plumbers, doctors, airplane mechanics, and NBA players. And when the privileged, with all their accomplishments and clout, make such generalizations, others buy in out of fear and self interest and, of course, respect. How could a man as clearly brilliant and skilled as, say, Bill Gates, be so terribly wrong? Our politicians left and right have almost entirely bought into the absurd generalizations underpinning the accountability movement. And our educational “leaders” have lacked all leadership; they haven’t had the courage to say that the emperor has no clothes.

“There are two main issues here: First, we can have liberty, or we can have standardized objectives (and, inevitably, the standardized curricula that follow from them) mandated by a small, centralized, unaccountable, totalitarian authority. Second, we can recognize students’ uniqueness and diversity and foster their individual propensities and talents, or we can give them a homogenous, one-size-fits-all education.

“It’s astonishing to me that there is even any debate about which we should do. And it’s horrifying that our “leaders”–professional education people–have come down so often on the side of taking away educators’ autonomy, their ability to make their own decisions about what to teach, when, and to whom.”

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform

Choice, Competition, and Deprofessionalization in Chile

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2013 //
14

A reader sent the following observation about parallels between educational developments in Chile under the dictator Pinochet, an admirer of free-market reforms, and in the U.S. today. He writes:

“I have recently been studying the neoliberal privatization of public education in Chile since this is the path we are now on in the USA. Initiated by the dictator Pinochet and encouraged by the same world players who are advocating these changes here, it is frightening and sobering to see how the policies of choice and privatization have destroyed the system there and how, instead of democratizing the system, the system has become a cesspit.

After 30+ years the students and the people are finally taking to the streets in protest and the government is fighting back with an iron fist. If we do continue on this path this is our future.

Sobering, indeed.

Here are jus a few articles that outline the Chilean neoliberal education machine. It is identical to what is being imposed upon us here, with school choice, vouchers, de-professionalization of the teaching profession, high-stakes testing, and profit-seeking in schooling.

http://www.academia.edu/1836169/Neoliberal_Education_and_Student_Movements_in_Chile_Inequalities_and_malaise

http://www.isa-sociology.org/universities-in-crisis/?p=914

http://www.bostonreview.net/world/lili-loofbourow-no-profit?

http://educationincrisis.net/learn-more/country-profiles/latin-america/item/489-chile/489-chile?start=2

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, International, Testing, Vouchers

Teacher: Do What’s Right No Matter What They Tell You

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2013 //
10

A teacher offers this advice to other teachers:

“Okay, the reality of the situation is a once slow suffocation. The people in power want public education to wither and limp along on life support. This will help further marginalize minorities and low-income families, so the power base has little to no competition politically, economically, or socially. Public education in the USA enabled a post-WWII country to prosper and reach heights that were unimaginable just a decade earlier. If one follows the money trail in public education he or she will find that faltering school systems are locked into contracts with educational corporations that force them to adhere to and use antiquated educational programming that lobbying and politicians signed onto.

“The solution: do what’s right regardless of what the board of ed, the superintendent, or your principal says. As a public educator I have to make this decision on a daily basis. This also means I need to keep my own data on student growth, so I can defend my practices and live the life I believe was intended for me.”

Categories Corporate Reformers, Teachers and Teaching

PBS Blog: Common Core Has Fatal Flaw

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2013 //
103

On the PBS blog, economist Robert Lerman of the Urban Institute and American University expresses skepticism about the one-size-fits-all academic nature of the Common Core.

Lerman strongly supports youth apprenticeship programs.

Lerman is skeptical of Common Core for two reasons: One is that it lacks any evidence. In other words, as I have written repeatedly, Common Core has never been field-tested and we have no idea how it works in real classrooms, and how it will affect the students who are currently struggling.

The other is the dubious assumption that college and career skills are the same.

As he writes:

“…Two issues concern me about the debate. One is the lack of solid evidence about the effects of the curriculum on students. Education research, long a backwater of social science, has become more rigorous in recent years, backed in part by the federal government’sInstitute of Educational Sciences and its funding for rigorous experimental methods to test educational interventions. Yet, here is the same federal government encouraging a massive educational initiative without solid evidence documenting gains for student academic or career outcomes.

The second concern is justifying the Common Core on the highly dubious notion that college and career skills are the same. On its face, the idea is absurd. After all, do chefs, policemen, welders, hotel managers, professional baseball players and health technicians all require college skills for their careers? Do college students all require learning occupational skills in a wide array of careers? In making the “same skills” claim, proponents are really saying that college skills are necessary for all careers and not that large numbers of career skills are necessary for college.”

Lerman smartly traces back the origins of this astounding claim.

It is true, he says, that most employers identify certain skills they seek: “Nearly every study of employer needs over the past 20 years comes up with the same answers. Successful workers communicate effectively orally and in writing and have social and behavioral skills that make them responsible and good at teamwork. They are creative and techno-savvy, have a good command of fractions and basic statistics, and can apply relatively simple math to real-world problems like financial or health literacy.

But, he says, the Common Core misinterprets this consensus to mean that all students need the same level of academic preparation. He writes: “Employers never mention polynomial factoring. But what about the higher level math required by the Common Core? Consider algebra II, the study of logarithms, polynomial functions and quadratic equations. Many states want to make algebra II a requirement for graduating high school. Yet, a stunning finding produced by Northeastern University sociologist Michael Handel(cited in a recent Atlantic blog) indicates that only 9 percent of the work force ever use this knowledge, and less than 20 percent of managerial, professional, or technical workers report using any algebra II material.”

Trying to squeeze all students, regardless of their interest or wishes, into a common mold, he concludes, is a bad idea.

Categories Common Core

Ohio Teachers Subjected to Junk Science Ratings

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2013 //
30

Now it is teachers in Ohio that have been rated by a secret value-added formula.

Teachers in affluent schools were twice as likely to score well as those in low-income schools.

Here is the key language:

“The details of how the scores are calculated aren’t public. The Ohio Department of Education will pay a North Carolina-based company, SAS Institute Inc., $2.3 million this year to do value-added calculations for teachers and schools. The company has released some information on its value-added model but declined to release key details about how Ohio teachers’ value-added scores are calculated.

“The Education Department doesn’t have a copy of the full model and data rules either.

“The department’s top research official, Matt Cohen, acknowledged that he can’t explain the details of exactly how Ohio’s value-added model works. He said that’s not a problem.”

Think of it. The person at the Ohio Department of Education in charge of the ratings doesn’t understand how the model works. He says it is not a problem.

Well, it is a problem for excellent teachers who were told they were “least effective.”

These models,based on standardized tests, are inaccurate and unstable.

Do not trust the ratings. They are garbage. No high-performing nation is rating teachers this way. It is mean-spirited, mechanistic, and meaningless.

Categories Ohio, Teacher Evaluations, Testing
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