Anna Allanbrook, principal of PS 146 in Brooklyn, is not afraid. She is one of the remaining veteran principals in a city that has ruthlessly pushed out veterans and replaced them with teachers who have only a few years experience. Allanbrook is 58. She remembers what it was like to be an educator before the state and city leaders became obsessed with test scores.
Her school is highly popular. Last year, 1,538 students applied for 175 openings. Teachers love the school and seldom leave. In contrast to many of the charters, where staff turnover is 40-50% every year, only 4% of PS 146 teachers leave annually.
Allanbrook is here added to our honor roll for her courage in telling the truth about a state testing system that is not only unreliable and erratic, but is reckless with the lives of children and teachers.
“As a senior principal I feel a duty to speak honestly about what’s going on,” she said in an interview. “By my age, my position is relatively safe; I feel like I’ve learned a lot and should express what younger principals and teachers are too scared to say.”
“At 58, she is part of a generation that remembers when standardized testing did not dominate. She says from the time she started teaching in the 1980s, there has always been a place for testing to help assess student performance. But she worries that over the last decade, tests have superseded a teacher’s judgment.
“The P.S. 146 fourth-grade classes where 94.9 percent were proficient in math last year? This year, as fifth graders, only 25.6 percent of those same students passed. How did such gifted fourth graders become such challenged fifth graders? The problem isn’t the fifth-grade teachers, she says. Last year, with the same teachers, 83 per cent of fifth graders passed.
“Neither the 94 percent or the 25 percent reflects reality,” Ms. Allanbrook says. In the 1990s, when students took the tests, she says, results weren’t distorted by test prep. “You got a clearer sense of a child’s strengths and weaknesses,” she says. “What could parents possibly learn about their child’s abilities from such crazy results?”
“Here’s one way to think about it: Suppose your worth was measured by how much money you earned for a company, but the fellow who kept track of everyone’s earnings periodically forgot how to count.
“During the last decade, she has watched as state officials have repeatedly thrown out test results or rejiggered them.”
The state education department cannot be trusted. The test scores do not show what students know and can do. The scores do not show–as Arne Duncan claims–that the adults have been “lying” to the children. The results show that the adults in charge are incompetent.
As an aside: Welcome back to Michael Winerip, the nation’s most knowledgeable education beat reporter, who was inexplicably switched by the New York Times from covering education to writing about The Boomer generation. Every once in a while, he manages to write a column about education that reminds us how much we miss him.
The column is listed under the heading, “Booming.” I think it’s fair to believe that “education” is not a focus of the NY Times.
Kind Regards,
Nick Penkovsky
Please excuse any typos or terseness, this was sent from my Sprint BlackBerry®.
How is it that a public school can select students?
Read the linked article. By lottery. Her school does not have room for thousands of students who wish to attend.
So the students at this school are creamed from the neighborhood schools?
Do you own a charter or something? Are you secretly Michelle Rhee?
If it’s a lottery, kids are chosen by luck and you know it.
The difference with charters (I’m sure this isn’t breaking news to you, though) is that even if they accept kids by lottery, they have a funny way of running off any kids with high-need levels who were chosen by the lottery.
Charters run the kids off by enforcing a bunch of nonsense a regular public school couldn’t get away with. The school referenced in this piece accepts kids by lottery but can’t run them off.
The kids are chosen randomly from the students that apply for the lottery. The decision to apply is not random, and this has been a criticism of NYC charter schools on the blog, pointing out that more motivated families are likely to be the ones applying for the lottery.
Yes, more motivated parents are generally the ones who apply for lottery spots but that’s not the same as your “question” that this school went and picked out only cream-of-the-crop kids from other schools.
That is the way it is often discussed here, at least when it comes to charter schools.
It’s clear at this point that many folks have no problem moving around or ignoring goalposts if it furthers their cause.
Even if they are run by a traditional district and employ district staff, magnet schools, exam schools, and “unzoned” lottery schools cream engaged and motivated students and destabilize traditional zoned schools. This isn’t really disputable.
I believe that rational people can agree on “levels” of proficiency for every grade level. However, it is totally unrealistic to demand that every student progress in lockstep fashion. Why can’t anybody outside of teaching understand this?
Unfortunately there’s an answer for that too – then you end up with just-in-time learning and computerized learning.
Meanwhile, those types of programs hurt the students they’re supposed to help because they require a level of input from students that many don’t have the attention span to give to a program and don’t care enough about the results that even if it times them out or holds things against them, that they’ll do what they want and fail.
Many of our students need a human being to respond to their needs – a computer cannot offer compassion nor can it offer approval (or disapproval) that a child will independently value.
We need teachers. I find it incredible that the most optimistic of reformers seems to say that about 6% of teachers at least should be fired (leaving 94% – which I’d say is a damn good number – unless you’re Michael Bloomberg and you want half of all teachers fired).
We’re juggling our priorities around a perceived VERY low amount of bad actors – and the “benefits” of trying to weed them out is not being demonstrated except when they manipulate the tests or their scores or to enable cheating (such as during a computerized test).
Why has Michael Winerip been relegated to the online boomer column? Was it because he speaks truth about education?
Bravo to another fine educator with morals and humanity. With age comes wisdom, experience, and most important, courage of conviction. Thank you for protecting our children and inspiring teachers to stand tall in knowing what is right for their students.
My sense of the “heroes” that Diane has recently been pointing out is that if the edudeformers had not overstepped the “bounds of propriety” that effect the wealthier upper socio-economic districts through making appear to be “bad” schools then more likely than not they wouldn’t be crying foul now. As long as those districts didn’t bear the burden of the edudeformers illogical, unethical nonsense they would still be “going along to be getting along”. Where were their consciences then? Don’t get me wrong I’m glad to hear these folks finally speaking out as they’re the ones who have a lot more political clout due to their constituency. But. . . .
I agree 100%.
The dismal results are excellent news for those of us in the urban trenches because now the “reformers” have lost all credibility.
I hope Arne decrees more and more of this nonsense and I hope he goes after private schools somehow. It will hasten the end of the reforms.
A related, if general observation:
1. The Regents Reform Agenda is intended to make students “college and career ready.”
2. Most of the NY State Regents send their kids to independent schools.
3. Most independent schools have not decided to adopt the Regents Reform Agenda. These schools believe their way of preparing students for college is superior.
4.The most prestigious independent schools succeed very well in getting their students into the best colleges and universities in the nation.
5. Doesn’t this reality mean that the Regents Reform Agenda is not only not essential to achieve the Regents’ purported goals, but the Regents themselves, by their actions, negate the value of their own agenda. (I.e., the agenda may hurt students rather than help them.)
6. Their real agenda differs from their stated purpose.
I think point numbers 2 – 4 speak volumes.
“. . . a state testing system that is not only unreliable and erratic, but is reckless with the lives of children and teachers.”
Until all realize that the usage of any assessment for purposes other than what it is designed is UNETHICAL and that the basis of the standardized testing regime, the supposed standards themselves and the resulting conclusions drawn are illogical, “vain and illusory” and produce only falsehoods and chimeras and cause great harm to many of the most innocent, the young students, of society. Until the beast is attacked at its heart or the weed pulled out by it roots to destroy these educational malpractices we will continue to cause much harm to way too many students.
Were that all would fight the windmills that appear to be giants.
To understand why educational standards, standardized testing and the “grading” of students please read Noel Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms shit in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
As a parent, I don’t really care about the political implications or motives behind the common score standards. What I care about is whether children receive the highest quality of education that they deserve and whether they prepare themselves for college and future
career.
The fact that at PS196 (in Forest Hills), a top school, a child didn’t learn
multiplication until 3rd grade and that the teacher spent 45 minutes
teaching kids 0 multiplied by any number equals to 0 make me wonder if my
child is receiving highest quality of education. The fact that at the
second parent teacher conference I was given my childr’s work samples
that are exactly the same as what I was given at the first conference and
that the teacher never reviewed children’s work make me wonder if teachers
are really working hard.
That’s why I think raising the standards will force the teachers and
schools to work harder. I respect educators’ opinions, but I think to a
great extent, their own personal interests will be deeply affected by these
standards. Therefore, their opinions may be self-serving. CEOs of
business are the consumers of school products and they want schools to send
them high quality candidates. In a way, they have the same goals as our
parents, i.e. to improve learning. So I respect their opinions.