Two nations were influenced by our thinkers and example:
Finland and Chile. Finland learned its lessons from John Dewey. Its
schools are child-centered. It prizes the arts and physical
education. It has no standardized testing. Its schools are noted
for both excellence and equity. It is a top performer on
international tests. Chile learned its lessons from Milton
Friedman. It has vouchers and testing. Its schools are highly
segregated by social class. The quality of education is highly
dependent on family income. Students in Chile are rioting to demand
free public education. No one considers Chile a model. Which
direction are we going? Why? Whose ideas are dominant
today?
A site to discuss education and democracy
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Don’t forget Italy. The Reggio Emilia education is also based on Dewey. Viva Dewey!
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The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.
John Dewey
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Fall MAPS Testing to Resume Next Week!
Dear Parents:
I previously let you know about the MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) test students take to begin the school year. The fall MAP is an important tool because it helps establish benchmarks to measure student growth throughout the school year. The MAP is also used as one of several components to determine which students qualify for extended services or if a child needs instructional interventions. Unfortunately, as you may have heard from your child, there were complications related to the MAP test during the second week of school, more so in some schools than in others. At this point, I had communicated to you that we were temporarily suspending the MAPS testing.
The continual errors with the MAP test were beyond our control due to the collapse of network servers at the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), which administers the assessment for schools nationwide. Teachers and students in several states encountered the same interruptions we saw last week, so the problems were not unique to Barrington 220. To make matters worse, NWEA’s browser software malfunctioned, which is designed to prevent students from wandering onto the Internet during the test in search of answers. The combination of problems convinced the school district to temporarily halt MAP testing in every school.
The district’s technical support and network specialists worked together to quickly isolate the problems and to determine solutions, only to realize the fix must come primarily from NWEA. Thankfully, the issues were corrected and Wednesday there was a successful field test with students at one school without the errors reoccurring. The next step is to scale the MAP up again when all schools can participate without technical holdups.
Because this assessment is so important in helping us determine a learning plan for your child, we will restart all students from the beginning of the MAP assessment on Monday, Sept. 9. Understandably, with so many significant decisions and placements contingent on accurate MAP scores, we do not want parents to feel their child was disadvantaged or wrongly evaluated due to glitches with the MAP test. Nor can we risk the possibility students in any school may have performed poorly on the MAP due to technical difficulties, while those in another school encountered few hindrances.
The fair and valid solution is to begin the test again for all students now that we have assurance the bugs have been eliminated. This is not a perfect or convenient approach – especially considering the value of instructional time – but we feel this is the most reasonable response in the best interest of students given the circumstances.
As always, thanks for your understanding and support. Below is the new testing schedule. Any changed to this schedule, will be communicated by the classroom teacher.
Tuesday, Sept. 10th: PM: Contreras (Math), Wisinski (Math) & Dowdy (Reading)
Thursday, Sept. 12th:
AM: Heath (Math) & Mikusch (Math)
PM: deBruin (Reading), Christianson’s 4th grade Reading, Giunchedi (Reading) & Marienau (Math)
Friday, Sept. 13th:
AM: Giovannelli (Math), Marienau (Reading), Dowdy (Math), Luedtke (Math) & Christianson’s 5th grade Math
PM: deBruin (Math) & Giunchedi (Math)
Monday, Sept. 16th: AM: Unger (Reading) & Miller (Reading)
Tuesday, Sept. 17th: AM: Unger (Math) & Mays (Reading)
Wednesday, Sept. 18th: AM: Miller (Reading) & Mays (Math)
Monday, Sept. 23rd:
AM: Heath (Reading) & Mikusch (Reading)
PM: Giovannelli (Reading) & Wisinski (Reading)
Monday, Sept. 24th:
AM: Christianson 4th Grade Math, Luedtke (Reading) & Christianson’s 5th grade Reading
PM: Conteras (Reading)
If you have any questions regarding MAP testing and/or the testing schedule, please feel free to contact your child’s classroom teacher or me.
Sincerely,
Jill Schweiger
Principal
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The reason we are going in this direction is due to the fact that the present “reform” is about money and not improved education. If we keep that in mind, everything else makes sense.
As we have seen with Chile, once this course of privatization takes hold, it hurts many citizens and is extremely difficult to reverse.
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I think that there are many people in the reform movement who genuinely believe that they are on the side of the angels and that turning our schools into a test-kids-until-they-scream machine is going to improve schools that have dramatically failed.
These people are deeply mistaken–the new ELA standards are an amateurish mess; ten years of the testing regime has brought no improvement; the tests are deeply flawed, and basing decisions on them is pseudoscience; the evaluation schemes are incoherent and egregiously unfair and are ripping our schools apart; our students and schools have not failed, and, in fact we perform well, comparatively, on the international tests if one corrects for the socioeconomic levels of the kids taking the exams; there is no reason to think that these top-down, totalitarian mandates will improve matters and every reason to think that they will drain budgets and have enormous opportunity costs and will kill innovation and autonomy and morale and so make things much worse–
but I genuinely believe that the problem is more commonly cluelessness than it is rapaciousness.
That said, money does play a big role in all this. Those whose pockets are being and will be handsomely filled by these deforms of our educational system aren’t inclined to listen to reason, and they typically occupy lofty and distant perches from which critiques of are simply background noise.
There are few people who get up in the morning and say to themselves, “I want to do a lot of evil in the world today.” More commonly, they fool themselves. They fool themselves into thinking that what happens to benefit them (selling a lot of tablets and operating systems to schools, creating regulatory hurdles to real curricular innovation to protect their markets) is good for the country. And these deformers are an incestuous lot. They den. They attend only to one another. They meet and meet and meet and group-think and group-think and group-think, and they characterize any dissenting voices as those of some sort of lunatic fringe.
The damage that is being done by these “reforms” is incalculable. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. These are some of the most dangerous good intentions that I’ve had the displeasure to know about.
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I’m a big fan of tablets, BTW, and believe strongly in the power of the Internet to transform education for the better. But that promise will be killed by these reforms, which are guaranteed to create a mediocre, bureaucratic system of prole training, as opposed, of course, the other, parallel system of education for the children of the wealthy.
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cxs:
“ten years of the testing regime HAVE brought no improvement”
they typically occupy lofty and distant perches from which critiques of THEIR SCHEMES are simply background noise.
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Robert, that the so-called reformers “beliefs” are closely entwined with their professional and financial interests should be an immediate cause for skepticism about their intentions.
When I compare what the so-called reformers say with their actions, I see deception and self-deception at best, and straight-out bad faith much of the time.
The worst liars are those who believe their own prevarications, so I’m personally unwilling to cut them any slack for the destructive lies they comfort themselves with and impose on others.
They should be publicly shamed, driven out of the Temple of Learning, and thereafter shunned.
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One doesn’t have to look far to find a whole lot of very highly placed politicians whose cousins and brothers and pals are benefiting enormously–we’re talking millions here–from specific parts of the current reform agenda.
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Yes, technically the Italian education system is based on humanistic studies that encourage critical thinking and problem solving, inspired by Dewey and Montessori, yet, in the last few years we have also undergone a reform that has implemented by law Common Core State Standards which here are called INVALSI, producing, for instance, discrimination between North and South since it doesn’t take into account social and economic context and background. And here too teachers are held responsible for the high failing rate of students, in fact legislators have come up with an evaluating system for teachers and a Merit pay system forTeachers as well, so, as you can see we are happily following the U.S. model. Lucia
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I forwarded an email I received from my children’s principal . They were tested 4 or 5 times last year. I like an objective assessment of my child’s abilities, but I feel the tests are too tedious.
Jennifer compall
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I also think Canada has been a strong and effective proponent for many of the ideas and concepts in the US educational system; Canada has not gone off “the deep end” n testing…. they have a much more substantial perspective on educational leadership for public schools and educational goals. Cf. Ken Leithwood who writes at the Ontario OISE (he is professor emeritus)….. also, in light of the extreme politicization of U.S. educational goals cf. Who Will Educate Our Candidates? The Politicalization of
Educational Leadership Preparation Programs
by Marilyn Korostoff and Linda Orozco
[marilynk@csulb.edu & Lorozco@fullerton.edu]
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As a retired professional educator (I wrote the conceptual framework for the University 5 years ago with a colleague) we included the leadership ideas of Leithwood and others. I am concerned that these values are being tossed aside and the steamroller of shock and awe is running over all of us….
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Watch Canada change as they have financially with their new right wing president. Not much different from Obama in reality. This is all about percentages and how much can you interfund transfer into your own or your friends accounts at the expense of the nation and the taxpayers and the next generation for the profit and power of an elite few who believe they have the “Divine Right” to all.
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There is a misplaced belief that processes that seem to work in the business world will work anywhere else.
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There are a lot of sound business principles that are being violated by these reforms. But that is a long, long conversation.
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Also worthy of note is China who is making a big, slow but deliberate turn away from the aspects of their education system that most resemble the worst excesses of reform here in America. http://zhaolearning.com/2013/08/22/china-enters-%E2%80%9Ctesting-free%E2%80%9D-zone-the-new-ten-commandments-of-education-reform/ which leads to http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/17/business/chinas-ambitious-goal-for-boom-in-college-graduates.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
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“China is making a $250 billion-a-year investment in what economists call human capital. Just as the United States helped build a white-collar middle class in the late 1940s and early 1950s by using the G.I. Bill to help educate millions of World War II veterans, the Chinese government is using large subsidies to educate tens of millions of young people as they move from farms to cities.
The aim is to change the current system, in which a tiny, highly educated elite oversees vast armies of semi-trained factory workers and rural laborers. China wants to move up the development curve by fostering a much more broadly educated public, one that more closely resembles the multifaceted labor forces of the United States and Europe. “
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“China has engaged in numerous systemic reforms over the last few decades, with the goal to minimize the impact of testing on teaching and learning. “However, due to internal and external factors, the tendency to evaluate education quality based simply on student test scores and school admissions rate has not been fundamentally changed,” says the document. “These problems [of evaluation] severely hamper student development as a whole person, stunt their healthy growth, and limit opportunities to cultivate social responsibilities, creative spirit, and practical abilities in students.”
To solve these problems, the Ministry of Education realizes that more serious reforms are needed to change how schools are evaluated.
Dubbed “green evaluation,” the new evaluation framework attempt to end the use of test scores and success rates of sending students to higher-level schools as the only measure of education quality. Instead, it drastically broadens the scope of indicators.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/06/25/chinas-new-education-reform-reducing-importance-of-test-scores/
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It seems we are witnessing our recipe for success being off shored at the same time that we have decided that educationally, throwing out the baby with the bath water and the tub itself all across America is somehow a good idea. Oh I forgot, someone is getting rich, profits before progress forever in the USA!
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Chile is a proxy of the United States. It’s “elite” and senior military are schooled here,
in the corporate/capitalist/imperialist model that oppress the working poor and indigenous populations for the benefit of transnational companies.
The United States has a long and and sordid past in Chile as in the rest of South America; in particular the CIA coup that deposed democratically elected Salvador Allende.
I’m sure that American efforts to spotlight any “business model” educational system like Chile’s, as a “paragon” of progress, would bring much unwanted press from Chile’s more independent neighbors who have managed to throw off the yoke of U.S. imperialist interference.
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We have a girl from China renting a place in the house as she has been here in the universities for 5 years now. Her boyfriend won the chemistry contest in China and he just went back to be in the government. They are not fooling around. We are. We invest in war, They invest in war and the people and technology as we give it to them. A former girlfriend ran the FAA connection for Boeing and was involved in the original China-McDonnel Doublas deal. I also know a lot about the aerospace business and have worked in it at the top of making planes in the past. Technology comes from the aerospace business. Think about all the cool stuff we have now that is a result of the aerospace business. All your computer stuff for one thing. The internet was originally for labs to communicate rapidly and cut down the traveling. Computers were originally code breakers. The Chinese and other cultures math is so precise because they used a binary system. A manual computer.
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