Archives for the month of: November, 2013
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David Sirota: How the Oligarchs Bought Education

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2013 //
28

David Sirota explains how a small number of very rich men bought control of American education.

“But, then, as shocking as this let-them-eat-cake attitude may seem when it is evinced so brazenly by a national politician, it is the same oligarchic attitude that now dominates local education politics all over the country. Perhaps most illustrative of the trend is my home state of Colorado. This state has unfortunately become the national petri dish of the Education Oligarchs – people like the Walton family, of Wal-Mart fame; Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft; Michael Bloomberg, the anti-union media mogul; and Philip Anschutz, the billionaire sponsor of right-wing Christian causes. These oligarchs and others aim to put everything – including our kids future – up for sale to the highest bidder in the Colorado education system.”

Categories Education Reform

NY: Forum for Common Core and Testing Brings Out Angry Parents and Educators

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2013 //
56

Commissioner of Education John King is conducting a series of hearings around the state on the subject of the Common Core and the testing.

Each meeting has been a disaster.

This evening, a large number of parents and teachers crowded into a high school auditorium on Long Island to speak out against the state’s heavy-handed imposition of the new tests and standards.

The chancellor of the State Board of Regents Merryl Tisch assured the angry crowd that their message was heard.

But Commissioner King made clear there would be no backing down from the state’s commitment to the standards or the testing, despite the protests.

The speakers at Ward Melville did not pull their punches.

From school principals to teachers to parents, they blasted the state for overreliance on testing, hasty implementation of curriculums and resulting stress on educators and students, drawing cheers and applause from the standing-room-only crowd in the auditorium. The event was live-streamed into the cafeteria.

Beth Dimino, a science teacher in the Comsewogue district, called for King’s resignation and cautioned Flanagan that he stands to lose support from parents if he continues to back the current structure.

“We are abusing children here in the State of New York,” Dimino said.

Bill Connors, a member of the Three Village board of education, said while he supports the philosophy of Common Core, “changes must be made.”

“We must slow down so teachers can be properly trained,” Connors said. “There needs to be a pullback on the emphasis of high-stakes testing.”

King, in a brief availability with reporters before the forum began, said, “Now is not the moment for a delay.”

Categories Common Core, New York

Texas: Is the Age of the Hero Superintendent Coming to an End?

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2013 //
15

This superb article in the Texas Observer by Patrick Michels is one of the most astute and hopeful I have read in months.

It chronicles the idea of the school superintendent as super-hero: the man or woman who can reshape the schools and achieve astonishing goals solely by force of will and personality.

The story is about Mike Miles, the superintendent of Dallas, but it is really about the national scene, about the rise and fall of the myth of the Super-Superintendent, the super star who makes bold promises, sets lofty targets, disrupts the district, then moves on–either to more money or obscurity.

The working premise of the Hero Superintendent is that the system is broken and needs to be turned upside down, with  lots of firings and threats.

Michels writes:

The business world’s interest in remaking public education is nothing new—calling school leaders “superintendents” became popular a century ago, when factory efficiency experts took a first pass at redesigning public schools.

America is enjoying another such moment today. Popular business literature is suffused with the idea that strong leadership has the power to improve even the most massive bureaucracy, and the education world has fallen in line. The George W. Bush Institute, the think tank tied to the presidential library at Southern Methodist University, is home to an “Alliance to Reform Education Leadership.” The Broad Superintendents Academy in Los Angeles is one of the most polarizing institutions of the current school-reform movement, grooming “exceptional leaders and managers to help transform America’s education systems, raise student achievement and create a brighter future,” according to its website.

“I think there’s been something of an infatuation with business management in education,” says Young, the University of Virginia scholar. “Schools are not businesses. We don’t necessarily have the same moral obligations to the community and to kids that you have to stakeholders that are investing their money.”

“The reason it works in business is you do have a bottom line,” Brewer says. “In order to do that in education, they had to find one indicator of success. That’s not necessarily compatible with the complexity of education.”

New superintendents who focused on “quick wins” in the “first 90 days”—that’s all straight out of popular business literature. So is the focus on transformational change, the faith that we’re capable of rapid improvement in society if only we’ll shake off the old ways and dismantle the status quo. No business concept has been more contentious in schools than the tech-inspired enthusiasm for “disruption.”

As it happens, after a year of disruptions, firings, and departures, Miles was in deep trouble with his board. He barely survived, on a 5-3 vote.

The article ends with the prediction that the age of the Hero Superintendent is drawing to a close.

Michels writes:

You can’t improve a school district if you only last a couple of years. School chiefs who ride into town with a hero complex, alienate everybody and get dragged out like martyrs don’t get to build a legacy.

Joe Smith of TexasISD.com believes the hero trend is falling out of favor. “We’ve gotten to the peak of that movement, and I think we’ll see the pendulum come back,” Smith says. “If you’re looking at redefining your schools in your community, I would think that someone who knows the community would have a jump on anybody else.”

 

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Texas

Science Standards Under Fire

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2013 //
16

The Next Generation Science Standards are under attack for a variety of reasons. Even defenders of the Common Core are dissatisfied. Read here to learn why.

Categories Common Core, Curriculum, Education Industry, Education Reform

Jack Schneider: Arne Duncan’s Obsession with Data

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2013 //
6

Jack Schneider here describes the frustrating and ultimate fruitless pursuit to create the perfect data system to measure the quality of schools and teachers.

The waivers from NCLB were supposed to provide greater flexibility but they provided no relief from the standardized testing mania.

Categories Data and Data Mining, Duncan, Arne, NCLB (No Child Left Behind)

Chicago Parents to CPS: We Prefer Teacher Grades to Standardized Tests

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2013 //
9

The Chicago parent organization PURE (Parents United for Responsible Education) called on Chicago school officials to de-emphasize standardized testing and pay greater attention to teachers’ judgment.

PURE issued this press release today:
Parents give district a “D” for its test-focused policy

Chicago, IL: Today, tens of thousands of Chicago Public Schools (CPS)
parents will flock to their children’s schools to pick up student report
cards and meet with teachers. They look forward to these meetings as an
important step in strengthening the home-school connection. Report card
pick-up day is the best opportunity most parents have to learn how to
help their children succeed in school from the people that know the most
about how to do that – their children’s teachers.

Parents take the report cards home and study them. They discuss them
with their children – sometimes those are happy discussions, sometimes
not so happy! Parents sign the back of the report card and slide the
cards into their children’s backpacks, often taking that moment to
resolve to do more to help their children learn and improve in the weeks
ahead.

This process has been meaningful to parents for decades, but it’s been
increasingly pushed aside as school districts like CPS give standardized
test scores more and more power over students, teachers and schools.

Parents from the Chicago group More Than a Score disagree with this
trend, and have presented CPS with an alternative promotion policy

http://chicagotestingresistance.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/promotionproposal10-13.pdf

that relies primarily on report card grades and uses standardized test
scores in the way they were intended to be used, as diagnostic tools and
not high-stakes “gotcha” measures.

More Than a Score parents give CPS a “D” grade for a promotion policy
that continues to focus too much on test scores and ignores the value of
report cards.

“Report cards are the only evaluations that look at the students’ work
over time and across all areas of learning. They are the only
evaluations done by experienced, qualified adults who personally observe
and assess each student’s progress,” said CPS parent Julie Fain.“That’s
the kind of information that makes sense to parents and actually helps
children. When we get our children’s standardized test scores at the end
of the year, we don’t get to see the questions or their answers. We have
no idea whether they missed a certain concept or were just distracted
for part of the test. In any case, our children are so over-tested that
these results have become less and less useful to parents.”

“The CPS promotion policy begins and ends with the state test score,”
said Julie Woestehoff, head of Parents United for Responsible Education
(PURE). “Most of the information from report cards is ignored by CPS
when end-of-the-year promotion decisions are made.”

“I believe standardize testing is a harsh way to keep a child from
thinking outside the box. All our children have different needs, speeds,
and challenges. I have witnessed up close and personal the emotional
stress testing causes – creating a lack of self-esteem while labeling my
children as dumb only because they did not meet your standardized laws.
I support my children by opting them out of testing,” said Rousemary
Vega, a CPS parent.

Parents who have opted their children out of standardized tests are also
confused and concerned because the new promotion policy just swapped one
high-stakes test (the SAT-10), for another (NWEA), making opting out
more difficult.

Since the promotion policy was first implemented in 1996 by Paul Vallas,
it has focused on test scores on the Iowa test, then the IGAP, ISAT, and
SAT 10. The new proposal substitutes the NWEA, which CPS officials say
is just temporary until they replace it with the PARCC Common Core
tests.

“How are we supposed to keep track of this alphabet soup of tests?” asks
Linda Schmidt, a CPS parent who notified her child’s school at the
beginning of this school year that she does not want her student to take
the NWEA. “Will my child be held back next August because I made a
decision last September?”

Policymakers often cite the subjective nature of teacher grades as a
reason for giving them less weight than standardized tests scores.
However, test questions are written by subjective human beings, too, and
test makers consistently state that their tests should not be used to
make high-stakes decisions about children. The manual for the SAT-10,
which CPS used last year to retain students, states that test scores
“should be just one of the many factors considered and probably should
receive less weight than factors such as teacher observation, day-to-day
classroom performance, maturity level, and attitude” – just the kind of
information in report cards.

“What’s wrong with report cards?” asked Wanda Hopkins, the parent of a
CPS high school student. “If CPS does not trust teacher grades, they
need to explain why and what they are doing to fix it. I trust my
child’s teacher more than I trust for-profit test companies.”

Parents with More Than a Score believe that our proposed promotion
policy

http://chicagotestingresistance.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/promotionproposal10-13.pdf

offers an alternative to the CPS test-based promotion policy that
respects input from teachers, avoids the pitfalls of standardized test
misuse and retention, makes sense to parents, and – most importantly –
provides a higher quality evaluation of each student’s progress and
needs.

Notes to the proposed alternative promotion policy here

http://pureparents.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/PromotionPolNotes10-13.pdf

Link to this post on MTAS web site here:

http://morethanascorechicago.org/2013/11/12/chicago-parents-to-cps-use-report-card-grades-not-test-scores-for-promotion/

Categories Accountability, Chicago, Education Reform, Parents, Testing

A First-Grade Math Test in the Common Core

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2013 //
138

Children in some countries don’t start school until age 7. Yet here we are suddenly pressured to believe that children in first-grade, usually age 6, must be able to solve math problems or our nation will fall behind the global competition.

Carol Burris, the principal of South Side High School in Rockville Center on Long Island, New York, obtained a copy of the first grade math test. Some of the questions sound reasonable; others do not. Apparently some of Burris’s high school math teachers were befuddled by some of the questions.

See if this makes sense to you.

The more that the public sees of the Common Core and the testing, the less they like it. Parents are getting fed up by demands that they realize are not developmentally appropriate; they don’t like that their children are allegedly “failing” on tests that ask them to solve problems they were never taught.

At some point, Arne Duncan’s fierce denunciation of the Tea Party as the only antagonist of Common Core (which he insists he had nothing to do with as he continues to defend it at every opportunity) will fall flat as he realizes that the problem is the Common Core itself. He loves to tell the public that our teachers and schools have been “dummying” the curriculum and “lying” to our children. But he should ask himself: why does he have such a low opinion of our students, our teachers, our principals, and our schools?

Categories Education Reform

Los Angeles Times: Putting Bureaucrats First

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2013 //
16

The Los Angeles Times has a strange editorial today, first excoriating the new board majority for pushing Superintendent Deasy too hard and acting as though they were in charge, not he. This is weird, because the board is elected and Deasy is their employee, not their boss.

Then they blamed the board (the “reform” board that they admired, which was aligned with Deasy’s agenda) for not vetting the troubled iPad rollout:

“It helped, in ways, that the meeting was devoted to the troubled plan to provide every student in the district with aniPad. This is one area in which the previous board majority, which was more aligned with Deasy’s agenda, failed to ask certain basic questions before approving the billion-dollar project.”

Now, given that the L.A. Times strongly supported the ousted majority, it is passing strange to blame the board for the lack of planning, the “failure to ask certain basic questions” about Deasy’s billion-dollar iPad project. Wasn’t it Deasy’s responsibility to plan ahead before asking the board to approve this very troubled project? On one hand, the editorial excoriates the current majoritiy (not aligned with Deasy’s agenda) for micromanaging, then turns about and criticizes the board (aligned with Deasy’s agenda) for not doing the necessary and basic planning in the iPad rollout.

Which is it, editorialist? Is Superintendent Deasy accountable for planning and implementing the iPad mess? Or was that the board’s responsibility? Is the board wrong when it asks questions and also wrong when it fails to ask questions?

Or should we just assume that Deasy is always right and his every decision is also right even when it is a billion-dollar fiasco? And if things don’t turn out right, blame the board, not the ones who are paid to implement the board’s decisions.

Categories Accountability, Los Angeles

Wendy Lecker: Common Core Violates Connecticut’s Constitution

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2013 //
20

Wendy Lecker is a civil rights attorney and an education activist. In this column in the Stamford Advocate, she argues that the Common Core standards violate the Constitution of the State of Connecticut.

The state constitution clearly states (as most people once understood) that the purpose of public education is to equip young people for citizenship. Yet the Common Core standards ignored this fundamental goal and stressed economic purposes instead.

Lecker writes:

The drafters of the Common Core ignored Connecticut’s primary goal for public education: capable participation in democratic institutions. Sources involved in the Common Core’s development process confirm that citizenship was never the focus. In fact, the Common Core’s foundational document mentions “economy” more than 100 times, while the word “citizen” appears only once — in a footnote.

Ironically, although the sole focus of the Common Core was the ability to compete in the global marketplace, the most serious threat to our national and global economy is our government’s current dysfunction. The recent government shutdown cost the nation $24 billion and 120,000 jobs. The International Monetary Fund warns that if Congress cannot agree to raise the debt ceiling, the world might plunge into another recession.

Given the failure of our democratic institutions, our most urgent goal should be to ensure that our children learn the lessons of democracy. Yet the architects of the Common Core disregarded this fundamental purpose of public education.

Perhaps if the Common Core standards were developed in a democratic fashion in our state, Connecticut’s goals would have been considered.

When Connecticut wrote its own standards, it was an open process that involved teachers, administrators, and the public. By contrast, the Common Core was developed behind closed doors.

There was no public comment. The organizations even refused to release the drafters’ names until there was public outcry. The entire development process remains shrouded in secrecy. NGA and CCSSO are not subject to any sunshine laws that governmental bodies must obey.

The members of Common Core validation committee were required to sign confidentiality agreements. This committee was ostensibly charged with ensuring that these standards that were about to be used in schools across America were valid. It is shocking that the public would be prevented from knowing what this committee discussed.

The finished product was eventually presented to states on a “take it or leave it” basis. States that said “no” were not eligible to compete for $4.35 Billion in federal dollars.

It can hardly be surprising that a document developed without a democratic process pays no attention to the roles and duties of citizens in a democratic society.

Categories Common Core, Connecticut

David Greene: Why “Reign of Error” is NOT a Page-Turner

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2013 //
9

David Greene, master mentor of teachers in Néw York City, reviews “Reign of Error” here.

THROW THE JACOBINS OUT.

After quite a while I just finished reading Diane Ravitch’s Reign of Error. When most people compliment a book, they tend to call it a page-turner. I can’t say that about Diane’s book. For the first 20 chapters, that was impossible. I had to stop, dog-ear, or bookmark page after page of material I hope to use in sharing her wealth of evidence against the privatization movement in public education.

In fact not only can’t I say I couldn’t put it down, I have to say I had to put it down, or be brought to tears of anger or depression. In truth her book is about a Reign of Terror.

The book can be nicknamed, NSLU (No Stone Left Unturned.) In a straightforward, clear, incredibly well-documented manner she dismisses every argument the “reformers” have to offer in support of their plan. Then, she clearly explains several common sense solutions to the problems we all recognize exist, not those made up to play the propaganda game.

Ravitch clearly understands how the “Ministry of Education”, as she calls the Department of Education has become like Orwell’s 1984 Big Brother Ministry of Truth which used the big lie and repetitious slogans (ominously similar to chapters in Mein Kampf): WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Our spokespeople for today’s “Ministry of Education” repeatedly state. CHILDREN FIRST. STUDENTS FIRST. WE CAN TURN THINGS AROUND. REPLACE FAILED PUBLIC SCHOOLS WITH CHOICE.

Ravitch, time and time again, simply proves the Ministry of Education wrong, wrong, and wrong, and millions of parents, teachers and children right, right, right about the reality of public schools and privatization.

As a nation, we should be ashamed to let her words go unheard. As a people, we must rise up and be heard by those in power to let democracy rule public education not global dollars.

Categories Reign of Error
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