Archives for the month of: November, 2013
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Commissioner King Makes Clear That He Doesn’t Care About Public Opinion

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2013 //
37

The New York Times summed up the universally hostile response that Commissioner King has received from parents and educators in New York at an ongoing series of forums about Common Core and its botched implementation.

King should use these meetings to apologize for setting absurd cut scores (passing marks), aligned with “proficient” on NAEP, which is not a pass-fail mark, but represents solid achievement of a high order. He should have apologized for testing students on material they had not been taught. He should have apologized to teachers for threatening to evaluate them on the new scores when they had not been prepared to teach the Common Core.

Instead he made clear that he has no intention to change course.

Out comes the usual charge that the critics are led and manipulated by the teachers’ union, even though the union supports the Common Core. This is a variation on Arne Duncan’s claim that “white suburban moms” are disappointed that their child is not so brilliant after all.

The subtext is that suburban parents are dumb and are easily led by “outside agitators,” they don’t know what’s good for their children, they are being used, they don’t want high standards, etc.

Really, people in high public office should show respect for the public, not disdain. They should remember they are public servants, not bosses with unlimited power.

Categories Common Core, New York

Guest Blog: Rachel Levy Questions Why Richmond, VA, Hired TFA

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2013 //
21

Editor’s note:  While Diane is on a somewhat reduced blogging schedule, she has invited members of the Education Bloggers Network, a consortium of people who blog about education issues on the national, state or local level to contribute to her blog.  If you are a blogger who supports public education and would like to join the Education Bloggers Network, contact Jonathan Pelto Jonpelto@gmail.com.

This guest blog is written by Rachel Levy

With a vote of 5-2 (with two members absent) the Richmond School Board has decided to contract with Teach for Americato hire up to 30 teachers. I’ve already written in great detail about how the Teach for America model is problematic hereand then here and about why TFA is not right for the K-12 public school students of Virginia here, so I won’t repeat what I said there.

In the meantime, here is the reporting out of RPS leadership:

“It’s another tool in our recruitment tool box,” said Kristen Larson, 4th District, who voted in favor of the program during a School Board work session Monday. “We know we have a hard time hiring, and we need to look at all paths.”

In Richmond, they will fill as-yet-determined hard-to-staff positions. 

The school system typically has to fill 200 to 300 teacher positions a year, but in recent years it has had a hard time finding enough qualified candidates. This school year began with about three dozen positions open. Some have been filled by long-term substitutes while others remain unfilled.

“We have a lot of work to do in how we attract and retain teachers,” said School Board Chairman Jeffrey Bourne, 3rd District. “Teach for America is injecting some creativity and some new thinking into the hiring process. 

“I don’t think this is an ‘either/or’ situation. It’s an all of the above. There’s room here for different approaches.”

This is very disappointing, especially after the RPS School Board has seemed to be on the right track in so many other ways. They are trying to strengthen and diversify opportunities for Richmond children while staying under the umbrella of the public, democratic system and while involving leaders with expertise in education. Unfortunately, in this case a majority of the School Board has decided come out from under the umbrella and fork over $150,000 ($5,000 per corps member = $150,000) to TFA to hire inexperienced and untrained people to be teachers.

However, this is not surprising since TFA’s chief lobbyist in Richmond has been diligently working the RPS School Boardas well as Governor McDonnell’s administration for quite a while. Furthermore, at least one School Board member in particular has been eager to hire TFA. And I don’t live in Richmond proper and can’t say how many residents have protested the idea of having TFA corps members teaching in Richmond. Perhaps parents have stood up and asked for them.

I do question, however, the nature of their recruitment problem and the extent to which TFA can aid that or ameliorate their retention problems. RPS should really find out how and why they have a recruitment and retention problem first and then propose solutions. If your car is not working for some reason, bringing in a rental car for a few weeks is not going to fix it. If the School Board  wants help with retention, TFA is not the organization to turn to. TFA leadership states unabashedly that they are fine with their corps members only staying two or three years, that getting them exposure to challenging classrooms is step one on a ladder to working in the education reform industry. And according to TFA watchdog and former corps member Gary Rubinstein, about 10% of TFAers don’t even make it through their very first year of teaching.

There also have been questions raised about the process by which this decision has been made. According to RPS parent and Alliance for Progressive Values member Kirsten Gray, there was no public hearing on the matter, almost no effort to publicize the matter, no review of research on TFA’s effectiveness or lack thereof, and no evidence that there is a shortage and no positions open on the website. However also according to Gray, TFA was voted in with an amendment that caps the TFAers to 10% of the hard to staff schools and the amendment also requires the Richmond School Board to come up with a policy on how to use and place corps members. The way I see it, that’s at least one way to pilot TFA and to minimize potential damage at least. But two School Board members, Kristen Larson and Glen Sturtevant, voted against the amendment and perhaps they’ll work to remove it.

Finally, I also have my own personal experience to share which makes me question if there’s a true shortage and how TFA will help with RPS’s human resources issues. In Spring 2011, I was at a social function and I happened to be seated at the same table with a very high ranking RPS administrator. When I mentioned that I was a Social Studies and ESOL teacher and that I would be applying to area school systems including RPS, they told me the market was fairly tight and that my best bet, if anything, was to apply for an ESOL positions. I did, in fact, apply to RPS later that spring. However, I never heard anything back, not even to receive an e-mail confirming my application had been received, until September 19th when I got an e-mail letting me know they might need an ESOL teacher. Well, by then, I had already taken another job (and I had been contacted by two other area school systems with no shortages)–it was nearly a month after school had started. 

Now, I’m no super star of a teacher but I do have a B.A. from a highly-ranked liberal arts college, I have a master’s degree in education, and a current Virginia license. I am dual-certified including in a hard-to-staff area, I have strong references, and several years of teaching experience, including five in ESOL in Virginia. I wonder how many other people with qualifications such as mine have applied to RPS in recent years. The problem there is not lack of “creativity” or lack of qualified applicants; it’s lack of competence, disorder, and a lack of, um, hiring. TFA’s presence won’t change that. 

Those concerned about the impending contract between TFA and RPS should ask for information and for more transparency about the contracting process. They should also ask that citizens get the same access to public officials that TFA has had. They should also ask for a hearing where evidence both of the shortage and rationale behind hiring TFA would be presented. Finally, they should sign this petition which states opposition RPS’s contracting with TFA (and make sure you read the comments there, too). 

This blog has been cross-posted from: http://allthingsedu.blogspot.com/2013/11/tfa-comes-to-rva.html

Categories Teach for America TFA, Virginia

A Parent’s Letter to Arne Duncan

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2013 //
24

TeacherKen, aka Kenneth Bernstein, posted this statement by a parent on his blog at the Daily Kos.

Arne Duncan unleashed a firestorm when he asserted that parent opposition to Common Core testing stemmed from the disappointment felt by “white suburban mothers” when they found out that their child was really not brilliant and that their public school was not so good after all.

The mother who wrote this post was told again and again that her child was not brilliant. She fought for him. He prevailed. She doesn’t want him or other children to be judged by Arne Duncan’s “rigorous” standards.

It is hard to unpack exactly what Duncan had in mind when he spoke disparagingly of America’s children, their teachers, and their schools.. He seems to think that American children have too high an opinion of themselves and he thinks most of them need to be brought down a few pegs. And he has a very low opinion of most public schools.

I wonder what kind of a coach Duncan would be. Would he tell the players day after day that they are terrible and consider that he was providing leadership?

Categories Common Core, Duncan, Arne

Anthony Cody: What Happens After Common Core Is Ousted?

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2013 //
35

Anthony Cody follows up his brilliant analysis of the flaws of Common Core with this thoughtful projection of what to do next.

Cody believes that the standards are fatally flawed by the absence of any democratic process or review or trial.

There is also the indisputable fact that the standards were adopted by 45 states without their review but because the federal government made the adoption of “college and career ready standards” a condition for eligibility to win Race to the Top millions. This, despite the fact that the federal government is prohibited by law from exercising any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, instruction, or textbooks used in schools. Promoting CCSS, as Arne Duncan does, is probably illegal.

Cody concludes:

“…there is a deeper principle at stake here. Standards developed in secret without the active participation of K12 educators, parents, students and experts from the start are not acceptable or legitimate. There may be elements of the Common Core that are worthwhile, as jpatten suggests. The trouble is, we have not had any real process to debate these standards, or try them out with real children. And as indicated before, there is no process available to alter the standards in any meaningful way. According to their sponsors, they must be adopted as is, or dumped. I say dump them. Start over. Go back and fix the process – and the new standards we end up with will be better as a result.

“And for those who just want to skip over the issue of democratic process, and take the standards as a starting point, I challenge you to stop and think about the precedent being set, and the prerogatives we are handing to both the Department of Education and the Gates Foundation. This is our chance to set a completely different precedent, which would undermine rather than reinforce the prerogatives of the powerful. Isn’t that worth doing?”

My view:

Stop the Common Core testing. The students and teachers have not been prepared for the tests.

Stop the Common Core tests. The cut scores are aligned with NAEP proficient, which is a high level of achievement and not a reasonable pass-fail mark. it is guaranteed to fail–unfairly–70% of students.

This is what I hope will happen after the testing is called to a halt.

States and districts should review the standards and see how they work in real classrooms with real students.

The K-2 standards should be dropped or revised.

The arbitrary division between literature and informational text should be eliminated. It has no basis in evidence, experience, or research. If teachers want to teach all-literature or all-informational text, that is their prerogative.

Tests should be prepared and scored by teachers, as they are in other countries. The teachers not only get instant feedback, but see what their students understood and did not understand, and also learn what they did not teach well enough for most students to understand. The current Common Core tests do not provide instant feedback or item analysis, and nothing can be learned from them other than to rank students.

Bear in mind that no one can enforce the standards as written. Will the National Governors Association or the Council of Chief State School Officers sue a dozen states to stop them from improving the standards? Not likely.

Let us not forget that the central conversation here is not about test scores. It is about children, teachers, and education. What is in the best interest of our society? The Common Core causes scores to collapse. Its boosters say that is a good thing. But in the meanwhile, they are causing havoc in the lives of children, teachers, and schools. That is not a good thing, unless you believe that disruption is a thing of beauty and that something good is sure to emerge from chaos, disappointment, outrage, crushed egos, and upheaval.

Count me skeptical.

Categories Common Core

Everything You Wanted to Know about inBloom But Didn’t Know How to Ask

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2013 //
39

This is from Leonie Haimson, who has been the national leader in the fight to derail the collection of confidential student data via inBloom, the Gates and Carnegie-funded program.

Read this:

http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2013/11/nyseds-new-scary-data-dic
tionary-with.html

They are not collecting blood type, voter status, and religious affiliation
(of course.)

They are collecting:

Students’ name, addresses, unique ID;
Their parents’ telephone number, email, and nature of their relationship
(i.e. whether mother, father, stepfather, foster mother, guardian etc.)
The date the student was born and if not born here, when entered the US;
Their family’s economic situation, including whether they participate in
public assistance programs and whether they get free lunch;
Their race, their ethnicity, their home languages, and whether they are
limited English proficient;
Their disabilities, and what services they receive (including special
education services, counseling, etc.)
What their 504 status is, which can include a wealth of medical and health
conditions;
When any of these conditions was first identified and when it was removed;
Every day the student was absent, and whether this was due to an
out-of-school, or an in school suspension, an unexcused or excused absence,
and the reason why;
Every course they took in every year, how many credits they accumulated,
and what grades they received;
Any and all assessments they were given, including achievement tests,
“attitudinal tests” and “cognitive and perceptual skills tests”;
The results of any and all those tests, including their scores and
performance levels;
Any subtests or assessments that relate to specific learning objectives
(or SLOs), and the assessment “response” (ie “a student’s response to a
stimulus on a test”, whatever that means)
The learning standards tested, the content standards and the grade levels
for which the learning objective is targeted.

Categories Privacy and Privacy Rights

Schneider Deconstructs Arne Duncan

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2013 //
19

The Internet is buzzing about Arne Duncan’s condescending and insulting comment about white suburban moms who oppose the Common Core because they discovered their child was not so brilliant after all and their local public school was not very good.

But meanwhile Mercedes Schneider found Arne’s message to the first Moms Congress, where he defined parental engagement in ways that would make ALEC and Jeb Bush happy. Most people think of parental engagement as getting involved to help your school, but Arne defined as as school choice, exercising your right to leave your school and go elsewhere.

Now we understand why rumors flew in 2012 that if Romney were elected, he might ask Arne to stay on. Race to the Top is completely congruent with No Child Left Behind. The main difference between them is that Democrats stood up to Bush’s NCLB.

Categories ALEC, Bush, Jeb, Duncan, Arne

NY: “We Are Listening but Going Full Steam Ahead Anyway”

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2013 //
32

New York is not known as a Tea Party state, but it does have large numbers of suburban moms and dads who care about their children and who are well-educated.

Here is an account of State Commissioner John King’s public forum in Mineola, Long Island, where hundreds of angry parents and educators turned out to reject the state’s Common Core testing.

How many more public beatings will John King subject himself to before he begins to admit he might be wrong? Is that possible? He listens but he does not hear.

Categories Common Core, New York

Mercedes Schneider Refutes Silly StudentsFirst Blast at Me

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2013 //
10

Some guy who works for StudentsFirst–the organization that promotes vouchers and charters and wants to strip teacher of all due process–wrote a criticism of me on Huffington Post because he doesn’t like the way I interpret NAEP data. This is silly because I served on the NAEP board for seven years and know its strengths and limitations. NAEP was designed to serve an audit function, never to be used for high stakes. Like every other standardized test, NAEP reflects socioeconomic status. The kids with the most advantages score at the top, and those with the fewest advantages cluster at the bottom. NAEP is generally known as “the gold standard” because no one knows who will take it, no student takes the whole test, and no one knows how to prepare for it. NAEP scores may reflect demographic changes or other factors.

Here Mercedes Schneider takes him to task for his misinterpretation of what I wrote.

The release of the 2013 NAEP results set off cheering among advocates of corporate reform because DC and Tennessee showed big gains. But, I pointed out, states following exactltly the same formula showed small gains, no gains, or losses.

He missed the point.

Categories NAEP

Bill Mathis On the Vermont Success Story

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2013 //
22

Remember the song, “Kids! What’s the Matter with Kids Today?” from “Bye, Bye, Birdie?”

Watch this. It’s wonderful, and it reminds of how every generation thinks that the younger generation is rotten and declining.

Bill Mathis is a former superintendent in Vermont and now serves as a member of the state board of education. He has steadily opposed the Bad News Club, which constantly bashes the schools and the younger generation, which every generation decries. In this post, he patiently explains that Vermont has exceptionally successful schools. After citing the examples of improvement, Mathis writes:

“As for the greatly lamented “unprepared” college students, only the top scoring 45% enrolled in higher education in 1960. Today, 73% of Vermont children attend higher education — although fewer graduate. As we dip deeper into the pool, we are comparing different cohorts.

Then, there’s the “school failure” industry. Charter school advocates, test manufacturers and politicians profit by manufacturing bad news. They are ably assisted by the media. For example, with the release of the latest national assessment scores, instead of touting the record high scores, ABC led with the theme of “not good enough.” The media did not report that the standard is set so high that no nation in the world could have even half their students meet it.”

Mathis cites the challenges that face Vermont schools. He concludes that “The increasing income gap represents the greatest of problems for our society and our schools. Pretending that adopting higher standards and more tests, by themselves, will close the achievement gap is an irrational distraction.”

This is a hugely important point. Raising standards and adding on more tests do not create jobs, do not feed hungry children, do not narrow the income gap, which is a scandal across our society.

 

 

 

Categories Poverty, Testing, Vermont

Chronic Stress Is Not Good for Children

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2013 //
32

A mother writes:

Environments of chronic stress are not exclusive to Title I schools in Texas. My daughter attends 3rd grade an Exemplary school in a university area of highly educated and involved parents. We are beginning to observe the over emphasis on rewarding performance, fear of making mistakes, perfectionism, and a lack of nurturing social and emotional development. Work is mostly independent and repetitive rote memorization of math facts and vocabulary. In fact, there is very little social interaction among students and little attachment to teacher, who is very businesslike and impatient. My daughter has developed chronic anxiety and sleep problems, chronic stomach aches and constipation. Her teacher uses statements like, “Whoever does best on this practice test I will take it to show the principal?” If she doesn’t make perfect scores she worries. The principal’s STAAR goal this year is 100% on math, as if 98% last year wasn’t good enough. Would you like to be the student who causes this school to miss the mark?
We will not have healthy school environments in elementary school until we get rid of the statewide testing and measure children by healthy developmental standards.

Categories Education Reform
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