Archives for the month of: August, 2013
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Anti-Testing Movement Grows in NY Suburbs and Towns

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2013 //
44

The collapse of test scores in New York following the first
tests of the Common Core standards is fueling the growth of the
anti-testing movement. A huge protest took
place in Port Jefferson Station on Long Island on Saturday.

Fifteen hundred people turned out to denounce the Common
Core and the tests that labeled most children as “failures.” To get a turnout of this size on a Saturday in August in a small town signals big trouble for Common Core and its cheerleaders in the State Education Department.

Hero educator Dr. Joseph Rella was one of the speakers.

Newsday, the most widely read newspaper on populous and politically
powerful Long Island, published a vivid photograph of the rally
(open the link) and wrote as follows: “Protesters carried signs and
cheered as they waited to hear from Comsewogue Superintendent
Joseph Rella, a vocal curriculum critic.

“All of us have been passengers on a plane being built in midair,” Rella said to the
crowd. “Today, we are canceling our flight reservations.” “He urged
the group to use social media to spread the word and demand that
state legislators re-evaluate the potential effects of Common Core
standards. “Stop it, fix it or scrap it,” Rella chanted with the
crowd.”

A blogger noticed this great sign held by a child: “I should be blowing bubbles, not filling them in.”

Meanwhile, the Suffolk Times and Riverhead News-Review, the
main newspaper for the North Fork of Long Island, ran
a blistering editorial denouncing the Common Core and the
tests, predicting that state officials would end up
dropping them and admitting their error.

The victims of the Common Core, he warned, “will likely be the poorest among us.”

Michael White, editor of the Suffolk Times and Riverhead News-Review,
understands that the engineers of the standards and tests are
detached from reality.

He wrote: “Consider that many children in
poverty-stricken areas will still be living in single-parent or
no-parent households in our new, Common Core world. They still
won’t be eating or sleeping properly. They won’t be getting proper
medical attention for physical or emotional issues that interfere
with school. They won’t be getting help with homework, or even
having their homework checked at home. In fact, extra attention for
such students will be increasingly funneled away from them, as the
focus shifts to teaching to the Common Core assessments.

“For these kids, school’s simply getting harder, with no significant amount of
funding set aside to provide them better access to school supplies,
computers and internet access, or any plans to expand the school
day or school year or bulk up after-school enrichment programs.
With higher test failure rates, there’s also sure to be a huge
spike in students in need of additional support through mandated
programs such as academic intervention services. Where does that
money come from?

“State officials keep arguing that we must adopt
Common Core because America’s education system lags behind those of
other industrialized nations. But they never acknowledge that much
of the disparity is accounted for by the performance of students in
poor and non-English-speaking immigrant communities, which aren’t
as prevalent in more homogeneous nations like Finland and South
Korea.”

White sagely concluded: “Locally, it was revealed by the
state last week that for the 2012-13 year, 74.7 percent of
Riverhead School District students in grades 3 through 8 failed to
meet the state’s math proficiency standard and 73.8 percent failed
to meet the ELA standard. “Those numbers will change very little
moving forward (at least not after some initial curriculum
adjustments). Here’s why. In Riverhead, scores will increase
somewhat for wealthier students but will fall at about the same
rate, with potentially disastrous results, for those who don’t have
the same support systems at home. Those in the middle will break
one way or the other. “When these disparate results between
wealthier districts and the rest of the state become apparent —
especially in New York City — the backtracking on these
numbers-driven policies will begin.

“Yes, it’s my prediction Common Core will be reversed. But it’s also my hope. My fear is that so
much money will be tied up in pricey books, testing materials and
other increasingly entrenched funding sources for this initiative
that the politicians and policymakers won’t ever budge. Meanwhile,
our teachers will remain handcuffed and will continue teaching to
tests, and more and more students who lack either a natural
aptitude for learning or parental support will disengage from the
classroom and the educational process in general.

“Eventually, we’ll be wondering how we slipped even further behind Finland and
South Korea.”

Wow.

When suburban parents have the visionary
leadership of men like Joseph Rella and Michael White, they will
not fall for the lie that three-quarters of their children are
failures. They will catch on: the kids did not fail. The tests were
designed to label them as failures. Suburban parents will see this,
rightly, as an assault on their children, not “reform.” And they
will tell their elected officials to stop these crazy policies that
hurt children.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, New York, Testing

What Your Child Should Do This Summer

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2013 //
8

It is almost too late for these great ideas because school starts soon, along with test prep and the certainty that the test will slap a label on your child and a number.

G.F. Brandenburg has a list of activities that will help your child develop as a resourceful human being.

If it is too late for this year, there are always weekends and holidays and next summer.

Protect your child’s childhood!

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K

Do Parents Support High-Stakes Testing?

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2013 //
72

A reader posted this AP story about parent support for standardized testing and the Common Core. If you read the story carefully, it shows that parents have no idea how test results are being misused and are unfamiliar with the Common Core. The headline says parents support “high-stakes testing,” but nothing in the story supports that assertion.

One parent quote in the story below thinks the test results are used diagnostically, which would be appropriate: ““The tests are good be­cause they show us where students are at, if they need help with anything,” said Vicky Nevarez, whose son Jesse just grad­uated from high school in Murrieta, Calif. “His teachers were great and if there were problems, the tests let me know.”

Parents think that the test results will be used to help their child do better. They don’t realize that the results are not available for months, when their child no longer has the same teacher. Nor do they know that neither the teacher nor the student is allowed to see the test questions after the test, so they never learn what they got wrong and where they need to improve.

A thoughtful poll would reveal, I suspect, that parents know that the teacher is not the sole determinant of their child’s test scores. Even President Obama once opined that one of his daughters got a low test score in science because she wasn’t trying hard enough. He didn’t blame her teacher; he said Malia was “slacking off.” He said, ““But even in our own household, with all the privileges and opportunities we have, there are times when the kids slack off. There are times when they would rather be watching TV or playing a computer game than hitting the books.’’ In the school his daughters attend, teachers write their own tests, which is the way it should be.

How would parents react if they knew that the tests are not used to help their child, but to give her a rating and to rate the teacher and the school How would they respond if they knew that their child’s score would be used to fire her teacher or close her school?

Here is the story. If anyone can find the questions, please send a link or the questions.

Posted by a reader:

New poll: Parents back high-stakes testing

“By Philip Elliott and Jennifer Agiesta

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Often criticized as too prescrip­tive and all-consuming, standardized tests have support among parents, who view them as a useful way to measure both stu­dents’ and schools’ perfor­mances, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. Most parents also say their own children are given about the right number of standardized tests, according to the AP­NORC poll. They’d like to see stu­dent performance on statewide exams used in evaluating teachers, and almost three-quarters said they favored changes that would make it easier for schools to fire poorly performing teachers. “The tests are good be­cause they show us where students are at, if they need help with anything,” said Vicky Nevarez, whose son Jesse just grad­uated from high school in Murrieta, Calif. “His teachers were great and if there were problems, the tests let me know.”

The polling results are good news for states look­ing to implement in­creased accountability standards and for those who want to hold teachers responsible for students’ slipping standing against other countries’ scores. Teachers’ unions have ob­jected to linking educa­tors’ evaluations to stu­dent performance.

As students prepare to return to classrooms, the AP-NORC Center sur­veyed parents of students at all grade levels and found:

» Sixty-one percent of parents think their chil­dren take an appropriate number of standardized tests and 26 percent think their children take too many tests.

» Teachers’ fates shouldn’t rest solely on test results, according to a majority of parents. Fifty­six percent said class­room observations should be part of teachers’ evalu­ations, and 74 percent of all parents said they want­ed districts to help strug­gling teachers.

» Despite many Re­publicans’ unrelenting criticism of the Common Core State Standards, in various stages of imple­mentation in 45 states and the District of Columbia, 52 percent parents have heard little or nothing about the academic benchmarks and a third are unsure if they live in a state using them. Still, when given a brief de­scription of what the stan­dards do, about half of parents say educational quality will improve once the standards are imple­mented, 11 percent think it will get worse, and 27 per­cent say they’ll have no ef­fect.

» Seventy-five per­cent of parents say stan­dardized tests are a solid measure of their chil­dren’s abilities, and 69 percent say such exams are a good measure of the schools’ quality. “We know when the tests are coming up. They spend a lot of time getting ready for them,” said Rod­ney Land of Lansing, Mich. His daughter, Selena, will be in eighth grade at a charter school this fall. The weights-and-mea­sures inspector supports the testing because “it shows what they know, and what they should know.”

“We need some way to keep track of whether the teachers are spending enough time educating,” Land said.

“Education union lead­ers have stood opposed to linking teacher evalua­tions with these tests, ar­guing it is unfair to punish teachers for students’ shortcomings. They also say teachers have not had sufficient time to rewrite their lessons to reflect new academic bench­marks, such as those found in the Common Core.

“When states have adopted the Common Core State Standards, which aim to provide con­sistent requirements across all states for math and English, test results often falter and the stan­dards can make schools and teachers appear to be faring worse than they did the previous year.”

Categories Parents, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

ALEC Owns the Ohio Legislature

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2013 //
17

ALEC, the extremist group that is funded by major corporations to protect corporate interests, has an amazing number of members in the Ohio legislature. That explains why the Ohio’s legislature keeps passing laws to privatize public schools.

Education is a top priority for ALEC.

ALEC strongly supports charter schools and vouchers.

ALEC loves virtual learning, because it diverts public dollars to pay corporations to enroll home-schooled students. The virtual charters get terrible academic results, but they are profitable and they undermine public education. To ALEC, that constitutes success.

ALEC hates unions, hates tenure, hates teacher certification, wants teachers to be at-will employees whose salary is tied to student test scores.

 

Here is a post from Bill Phillis of the Ohio Education and Adequacy Coalition:

 

466 American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) bills introduced in 2013: Legislator “scholarships” may be a factor

 

8/13/13

A report by the Center for Media and Democracy identifies 466 ALEC bills introduced in state legislatures across the nation in 2013. 139 of these ALEC bills affect public education. 31 of these education bills became law this year.

Only seven states didn’t have an ALEC education bill introduced this year. To view the report:http://www.sourcewatch.org/images/8/88/ALEC_report_2013.pdf

ALEC is a champion of charter schools and voucher legislation and thus is geared toward starving the public common school. K-12 Inc., the nation’s largest provider of online charter schools paid its CEO Ron Packard $5 million in total compensation in 2011. Additionally, Packard owns millions of dollars in company shares, not a bad compensation package for a school superintendent. He is on the ALEC Education Task Force.

The Ohio Virtual Academy charter school is operated by K-12, Inc. Ohioans should recognize that tax dollars (deducted from school districts) are being used to support a superintendent’s salary of $5 million plus millions in company shares while many school districts are cutting essential programs and services due to lack of funds.

Money spent on advertising is another issue. This expenditure by for-profit charter schools is not only a slap at public school districts but it shortchanges educational opportunities for charter school kids.

Ohio taxpayers are subsidizing outrageous salaries and benefits of for-profit charter operators, and slick, expensive marketing. On average, charter schools spend twice as much per pupil on administration as traditional school districts.

An August 11, 2013 Columbus Dispatch article states, “About a third of Ohio House Republicans-including Speaker William G. Batchhelder-attended the American Legislative Exchange Council gathering last week at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago.” ALEC provides “scholarships” for legislators to attend ALEC sponsored events. The Dispatch article cites a study by Common Cause and the Center for Media and Democracy that indicates Ohio legislators have walked away with $75,000 in ALEC “scholarships” to attend such events as receptions at professional baseball games, cigar parties and skeet shoots.

During annual ALEC meetings, corporate lobbyists and allied legislators get together to vet legislative proposals. One can bet the farm that the corporate lobbyists are not trying to convince legislators to focus their efforts on improving the public common school system.

Ohio Legislators with ALEC Ties (as of 2011) can be found at http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Ohio_ALEC_Politicians

Below is listing of some of Ohio’s state officials who are members of ALEC:

House of Representatives

Senate

Former Representatives

Former Senators

  • Sen. Robert. C. Cupp (R) currently sits on OH Supreme Court. [40]
  • Sen. Grace L. Drake(R)[41]
  • Sen. Michael A. Fox. (R) was director Butler County Children’s services, currently serving prison term for corruption.[42]
  • Sen. Tom Niehaus (R-14), ALEC Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force Member[43]
  • Sen. Lynn Wachtmann [35]

One of the missions of ALEC is to replace the public common school system with private market-driven education thrift stores. Some Ohio legislators will press forward the concept of a voucher for every student. Read the next email from the E & A Coalition.

William Phillis
Ohio E & A 
Join Our Mailing List!
Categories Education Reform

Teacher: I Am Not Alone

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2013 //
68

A teacher in Connecticut will lose her job because she teaches the neediest kids. If she can get a job in an affluent district, she will get a high rating.

She writes:

“I have been reading your flurry of blog posts and the excellent comments from teachers and other concerned citizens all at once this morning, and while I must say, they are very cathartic, my stomach is all in knots because they so hit home with my present situation, and clearly of so many other teachers. What you say about charter schools being “free to choose its enrollment and kick out disruptive students while we must accept everyone” is one of the kernels of truth at the center of this whole mess.

“I teach 7/8 social studies in one of the “lowest performing” schools (read highest poverty and crime neighborhoods), in a large CT urban district (name withheld to protect the guilty…). According to the new teacher evaluation system tied to test scores, I have been labelled as ineffective, and am being terminated by the district after 10 years.

“My school is not a magnet, and so we must accept students who are “kicked out” of charters and magnets from around the city at all times during the school year, and I actually had 6 students transfer in after March! These are often children with severe emotional disturbances, but they are almost always children who are very low-skilled, and by middle school, very turned off by the “Brave New World” of being tested more than they are being taught. Just the change in the classroom dynamic when new students like these are brought in is enough to throw all learning out of kilter as my current students feel the need to establish themselves in the pecking order of their new classmates. This makes any of my cooperative grouping plans go right out the window until I can try to form relationships with the new students, which sometimes is next to impossible, and this is only one of a myriad of problems like 10 year-old computers, no librarian, huge school wide disciplinary problems, lack of parental involvement, etc., etc.

“However, all these challenges for me and other teachers in schools like mine might be overcome if it were not for the pressure of district and school administrators constantly harping on deficient test scores, not enough “higher order thinking” questions, (very hard to do when many of my students can barely read) and not perfect classroom management. I have always believed that good teachers teach the “whole student” and that before any of those higher order thinking goals can be achieved, I need to meet the students at their level, and try to build on their strengths to give them the confidence they need to succeed, let alone survive the many traumas they face from their home situations. It is cruel to give them tests that just confirm their feelings of inadequacy, and yet, sadly, that is the future for my students with the CCSS Smarter Balance testing on the way.

“Of course I am not trying to claim that I have all the answers, but I don’t think that the powers that be do either. Every weekend of the past two years I have spent countless hours online looking at excellent websites like teachingchannel.org or edutopia.org among many others, and all have been very helpful for me in improving my practice and finding methods to increase student-directed learning. I have attended workshops and served on school reform committees in my district, but still, according to my district, I am not effective because my children are deficient according to these “standards.” I came to teaching 10 years ago after having had another career because I really thought I could make a difference for children in a school like mine, and judging from the number of kids who come back to say hello after they graduate and have written me thank you letters, I think I probably have. I am 57 and have been sending applications to other districts, but this may be the end of my teaching career because of my age and my poor rating.

“Thank you, Diane, for making me feel that at least I am not alone in this tragedy that is occurring in public education, although it is a small comfort considering that the welfare of our most at-risk children is at stake.”

“

Categories Connecticut, Poverty, Students, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

I Recommend This Book

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2013 //
12

This is a book you will enjoy. Michael Edwards, Small Change:
Why Business Won’t Save the World.

Edwards demonstrates what the title says: that business methods
don’t work in the social sector. He says that the only meaningful
change comes about when civil society organizes from the grassroots
up to demand change. Edwards led the Ford Foundation’s program on
governance and civil society. His book analyzes efforts by
philanthro-capitalists to impose business principles and market
thinking on institutions of civil society, where they are
inappropriate. The philanthro-capitalists, he writes, develop
metrics for everything; it’s a means of control. They love
competition, and they love measurement. They don’t understand that
the values and qualities of civil society are different and are not
measurable. Civil society relies on participation; it changes the
world by activism and social commitment. Civil society teaches
tolerance, love, solidarity, sharing and cooperation. Its goal is
not the achievement of certain metrics, but social transformation.

Edwards points to the great social movements of our lifetime—the
civil rights movement, the women’s movement—as examples of civil
society at work, transforming society in ways that are fundamental.
These were bottom-up movements, not movements that were controlled
from the top by a master planner armed with data. We cannot look to
the captains of industry to lead social movements. They never have,
they never will. Their bottom line is profit, not the public
interest.

Categories Education Reform

Shepherd: Instead of Mandatory Standards for All

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2013 //
23

Robert D. Shepherd answers a fundamental question about the Common Core:

“Question: What should we have instead of a single set of mandatory standards for all?

“Answer: Competing, voluntary standards that can serve as guidelines to be followed, or not, by independent, site-managed schools in which teachers make their own decisions about what should be taught, when, and to whom.”

Categories Common Core

The Attacks Begin

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2013 //
62

Because of my new book, which won’t be available until September 18, I fully expect the corporate reform attack machine to come after me. They have invested a lot of energy in charters, vouchers, merit pay, stripping teachers of tenure, collective bargaining rights, pensions, etc. despite the lack of any evidence that these strategies improve education. It makes them angry to be reminded that their plans have failed again and again.

So I was not surprised when I heard that Secretary Arne Duncan’s former Assistant Secretary for Communications lashed out at me in an article on the Huffington Post. I decided to ignore it.

But others did not. Paul Thomas wrote a response here.

Susan Ohanian called it “a whiny rant.”

Read the comments following his article.

Categories Duncan, Arne, Ravitch, Diane

Paul Thomas: The Power of Social Media to Give Voice

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2013 //
20

Paul Thomas is a professor at Furman University in South Carolina. Before that, he was a public school teacher for 18 years. He is one of the most passionate and eloquent writers of our time on the subject of poverty and education.

In this blog, he mentions my transformation from conservative to whatever I am now, but more importantly he talks about how social media offers all of us a way to make our voices heard. Instead of getting our news exclusively from the talking heads on TV or the newspapers, whose ownership is increasingly concentrated among a very few powerful individuals and corporations, we can now use social media to defy the powerful. We can do under our own names, as Paul Thomas and I do–or under pseudonyms like EduShyster and Jersey Jazzman.

Whatever we call ourselves, we can use Twitter, blogs, Facebook, and other electronic formats to raise our voices, find allies, and make a difference. That represents a major change in the politics of our day. And it helps all of us organize to right injustice and even beat those with vast wealth.

Categories Education Reform

David Sirota: What Drives the Privatization Movement? LINK ADDED

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2013 //
61

David Sirota, Denver journalist and talk show host, has
been trying to figure out the push for privatization. He thinks he
has it: profits. He recounts the tawdry Tony Bennett scandal, in
which he rigged school grades to protect a political donor, then
moved on to Florida, where his wife was hired by a for-profit
charter corporation that Bennett favored in Indiana. And he recites
a few more chapters and verses in the privatization story. He
concludes: You could consider that the most prolific
fundraiser in the education “reform” movement is not someone with a
stellar record of education policy success, but instead Michelle
Rhee, the former Washington, D.C., schools chief whose tenure was
defined by a massive cheating scandal. But
maybe the best way to see that profit is the motive of the
education “reform” movement is to note that no matter how many kids
they harm or how many scandals they create, Bennett, Bush, Rhee and
other privatizers continue getting jobs, continue being touted as
education “experts” and continue raising huge money for their
cause. Thanks to that dynamic, education
politics is spotlighting a fact that should be taught in every
civics class. It is a fact that contradicts the pervasive rhetoric
about meritocracy, but it is, alas, a fact: If you are backed by
enough money, you will almost always retain your status in America
— no matter how wrong you are and how many lives you
ruin.    

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Privatization
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