Here is the full schedule and details for the organized protest against corporate education reform and high-stakes testing on April 4-7 in Washington, D.C.
I will speak on Thursday afternoon.
There is a stellar lineup of speakers and events.
Please come to Washington if you can.
One of the model laws promoted by ALEC creates vouchers for students with disabilities.
ALEC is the far-right group that brings together big corporations and very conservative state legislators to figure out strategies to advance privatization and protect corporate interests. ALEC does not like public education, does not like regulation, does not like unions, and does not like teacher professionalism. It likes vouchers, charters, online learning, all as unregulated as possible, and teachers who can enter the classroom with little or no certification or training.
ALEC pushes vouchers for students with disabilities as a way of establishing the legitimacy of vouchers, using the most vulnerable children as the poster children for their favorite anti-regulation, anti-government ideas. Once vouchers get a start in one sector, they reason, it is easy to make a case for vouchers for all. As states are slowly discovering, the more charters and vouchers schools there are, the more difficult it is to supervise what happens in them or where the money goes.
Florida has a voucher program for students with disabilities. It is a sham. Florida journalist called it “a cottage industry of fraud and chaos.” Gus Garcia-Roberts won the Sigma Delta Chi award for public service journalism–one of the highest honors of the profession– for this series about the abuse and neglect of students with disabilities who receive vouchers in Florida.
Months ago, I hailed Don Sternberg, the principal of Wantagh Elementary School in Long Island, New York, as a hero of public education. He spoke out loud and clear against the misuse of standardized tests to evaluate students, teachers, principals, and schools.
Please read the letter below, in which he educates the parents of his students about the statistical madness that is called “education reform,” but should be recognized instead as education malpractice and child abuse.
We need more like him!
He writes:
February 26, 2013
Dear Parents,
I want to thank you for the many good wishes that I have received since announcing my retirement after 32 years as the Wantagh Elementary School’s principal. While time and circumstance have pointed me in the direction of retirement, I feel that I am, in some way, abandoning my students at a time that they might need my voice the most.
The direction that educational reform is heading is a place where non- educators (politicians, statisticians, and big business) are in control. The misinformed public seems to desire change because they are being led to believe that something is wrong with our educational system. The public is being duped into thinking something needs to be done to avert ‘the crisis in education.’ Ironically, the same people purporting that there is a crisis – the politicians, statisticians, and big business – are, in fact, the ones causing the crisis!
While there are pockets within New York State where reform is necessary – places where high school graduation rates are low and students heading into the workforce and post-secondary school need better skill-sets — this is not universally the case, although pseudo-pundits would have you believe otherwise. The solution presented by these politically-based educational ‘experts’ is not to differentiate and treat academic issues where and when they arise, but rather to treat the metaphorical broken leg and hangnail with the same remedy.
Why aren’t school districts that already meet the education reform goals presented by the federal government exempted from the process? I believe the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which gives states responsibility for education is still in effect. However, the federal government has skirted the Amendment (47 states, including New York State, essentially have relinquished their constitutionally guaranteed control over education by accepting Race-to-the-Top funding) because states and local districts desperately need the federal dollars associated with this federal initiative. The result: assessment upon assessment upon assessment! (For your information: Although Wantagh is subject to every assessment associated with Race-to-the-Top, our district received $0.00 of Race-to-the-Top funding.)
The rigors associated with the national Common Core standards are outstanding and will serve all of our children well. Common Core is starting to approach the rigor of an International Baccalaureate (IB) program which I believe should be the basis of all school academic experiences. However, I am seeing and hearing about more and more students who do not want to come to school or who are manifesting the stress of these new requirements in the form of stomachaches and the like. Add the additional pressure from all the mandated assessments associated with the Race-to-the-Top funding and you have a groundswell of emotion-based malaise. I find this deeply troubling.
The issue that most upsets me, and that I see as counterproductive, is the desire to record, in a quantifiable fashion, the educational development of our children. There is clearly a ‘quota system’ being applied to schools, school children, teachers and principals — and it is negatively impacting our children! When I was growing up I was never measured with some insidious number that categorized my ability and progress, and that served to measure the effectiveness of my teachers and my school. We are constantly told that when the students of the United States are compared to other countries from around the world, we do not measure up to them. I ask, measure up to what? All that is being compared is a measurement against other measurements.
Other countries admire American creativity and problem-solving abilities. We haven’t cured cancer yet, but I’ll bet that when a cure is discovered, it will be by an American. We are the only country to put people on the moon (and then bring them back). We developed and perfected the Internet! Apple! McDonald’s! Microsoft! Starbucks! Google! None of these endeavors or companies were started by excellent test-takers! I fear that our present cadre of educational reformers – the non-educators noted above – are creating children who are great little test-takers, who can select A, B, C or D as an answer with the best of them, and whose performance can be placed onto a nice little spreadsheet. But we must ask ourselves, at what price? Is effectively selecting A, B, C or D how we want our children to excel? We are not creating life-long and creative learners; we are creating wonderful test-takers!
I shiver when I see and hear students asking their teachers, “Is this the way you want it?” or, “Did I do this the right way?” We are systematically testing our kids at multiple times every year to a point where they think that the only measurement of success is a state assessment result! Often students cannot think critically or are afraid to be creative and produce something independently. Will you really be satisfied that your child is doing well in school because a test indicates such? Or will you expect more? Testing at the elementary level is replacing a love for learning that we want to instill in every child. The proper use of assessment is to drive instruction, not to be the definitive evaluation of a child or to serve to fill a state or federal statistical data bank.
Past practice clearly has shown that students will succeed if they are given the time to learn — not weeks of test prepping and hours of testing masquerading as learning. We have been forced to narrow the curriculum to only that which will be tested. Please let me be clear, we are spending your tax dollars for months, teaching to the tests because in today’s statistician-based educational reform movement, that is the only thing that counts. This has resulted in very few of the students in our school feeling enthusiastic about learning or even about coming to school. This is something I have never experienced in my decades as an educator.
I entered the field of education to inspire, motivate, challenge and captivate young minds; not to assess ad nauseam and be a data collector.
Why am I sending this letter to you now? I am writing to you because I want you to watch your children. Are they acting differently than in past years? Are they talking differently about school than they have in the past? Are they anxious, even nervous, about coming to school and the forthcoming tests? If they are, ask yourself, “Why?” And, “Is this what I want for my child, year after year after year?” If you are as upset as I am, put this letter down and write your own to the bureaucrats asking them to ‘Stop the Madness!’
If we (Wantagh) are already reaching the goals of Race-to-the-Top, and if we do not get any monetary or intrinsic value from RTTT that supports our kids, then our students are serving as a ‘control group’ in a bureaucratically-induced statistical experiment! Our children’s education is consequently an anomalous exercise to gain data.
My pappy always said to me; “Sonny, always leave a place better than you found it.” Alas, for me, due to our existing educational system and how bureaucrats are presently designing it, that will not be the case.
Sincerely,
Don Sternberg, Ed.D. Principal
Mercedes Schneider here examines how the New Orleans Recovery School District has been falsely portrayed as a “miracle.”
It is an important national story, which the privatization movement has endlessly retold in hopes of persuading the American public that the problem with public schools is that they are democratically controlled. They want us to believe, as Arne Duncan once said, that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to education in New Orleans. It wiped out the public school system, destroyed the teachers’ union, and cleared the way for massive privatization.
One of the worst sins of Teach for America is that it has convinced politicians and corporate leaders that teachers need little or no professional preparation. Unlike doctors, lawyers, social workers, architects, engineers, or any other profession, teachers are allegedly well prepared to teach simply by holding a college degree and getting five weeks of training. In any other profession, this would be considered absurd. But TFA has sold our elites on this devaluation of the profession.
This reader has another view of what is really needed:
Dear Diane,
I am currently retired after teaching in Glenview, Illinois for 34 years. In the early 90’s our district was invited to create a clinical model school by the Illinois Department of Education. The idea was to develop a more comprehensive and effective method for inducting students into the profession.
Candidates applying for the program needed to have a BA, with preferably several years of post graduate employment. The program was modeled on the medical profession’s training. First year interns were placed with master teachers in three different classrooms at three different levels. During this first year, they functioned much as a traditional student teacher under the direct supervision of their mentor teachers. University classes were taken at night and on weekends.
The second and third years these interns became residents and were assigned their own classrooms, but still connected to a mentor teacher at their same grade level. This mentor counseled them through their first opening of the school year, their ongoing planning, their first teacher conferences, report cards, and closing of the school year.
At the end of two years, they received their master’s degree in education and also had two years of teaching experience. I’m sure many would say that this is too time consuming and expensive a process, but until we decide that teaching is a serious profession that demands long-term commitment, we will not produce the skilled teachers that are needed to address the needs of our children.
We currently have a system that invites anyone with a college degree and a pulse to be a teacher. So how do we think that’s going? It invites exactly the kind of contempt that we are receiving at the hands of hedge fund managers and other “reformy” know-it-alls.
Full disclosure. The above clinical model school was finally phased out of the district when the administrators and teachers who were so invested in it retired, and as new school board members were elected. That’s the other major challenge. Even when an effective system is developed, it is terrifically difficult to replicate and to sustain because the societal commitment is not there.
Sorry to go on so long, but I thought you might be interested to know that such a program was actually up and running nearly twenty years ago.
Georgia Gebhardt
Wilmette, IL
New Hampshire has become a new battleground over church-state issues. Conservatives want to divert public funding to support of religious schools.
Defenders of public education are taking action. A group called Advancing New Hampshire Public Education is a valuable resource of information and research about this stealth attack on public education. Some of those behind this project want nothing less than to dismantle public education.
A teacher writes about the pluses and minuses of the Common Core:
There are a lot of good reasons to adopt the Common Core Standards. They really do provide an excellent framework for what would would love to see our students doing: thinking, writing, finding evidence in text, justifying arguments, and persevering in problem solving.
That being said, it is clear that there are some crazy problems that will require a lot more thoughtful implementation. There is no technology to prepare for the tests. There are no curricular materials to support teachers.
There are serious problems with expectations for students in middle and high school (less so at the elementary level). There is incredible confusion over the extent to which informational text is to be integrated (do science teachers incorporate more text or do English teacher incorporate more content? Again, not as big of an issue at the elementary level.)
The biggest problem is that we are doing this in an environment of hostility between states and teachers, totally ignoring the effects of poverty on background knowledge and performance, and it is all WAY TOO FAST!
I truly view the Common Core as an overall positive development in a sea of horrific rhee-forms. It is correct to say that it is an experiment. We are still not sure if students will be able to rise to the challenge. If they do not, we fear that teachers will take the blame yet again.
Standards by themselves are great but introducing them in a toxic environment with no money to back them up is not going to work.
MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry tore into New York City Mayor Bloomberg for his latest tactic: blaming teen pregnancy for causing poverty.
Harris-Perry knows that poverty is caused by the economic structure of society, by a society that allows one man–like Michael Bloomberg or Bill Gates or Eli Broad–to accumulate many billions of dollars while millions are trapped in miserable living conditions with low wages or no jobs.
Harris-Perry knows that the 1% blame the poor for their poverty.
They also blame teachers and public schools for causing poverty.
Thanks, Melissa, for nailing it.
Marc Epstein is an experienced history teacher in New York City whose school–Jamaica High School–was closed as part of the Bloomberg reform plans. Marc holds a Ph.D. In Japanese history, but he is now part of the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) pool, a large number of teachers whoever schools were closed. The teachers now roam the system, assigned for a week at one school, then another, their skills, knowledge, and experience completely discarded.
In this article, Marc asks the unavoidable question, what happens when the reformers have won? What changes after they have abolished unions, tenure, and the public control of public education? There are many ways to write this scenario. This is Marc’s.
Gary Rubinstein noticed a burst of TFA tweets making dramatic claims. They said that a new study found that students of TFA teachers gained one year more than teachers with same experience, and that middle students gained a half year more from TFA teachers than from other new teachers.
Gary read the study and found that these dramatic claims were over hyped.
In eight comparisons, five showed no statistically significant difference.
In the middle school study, the students in TFA classrooms got two extra questions right on a 40 question test. The amazing one-year of alleged gains were based on three more questions right.
Gary concludes:
“I think that TFA needs to back off on the miracle stories. The fact is that new TFA teachers are not much better, if they even are any better, than new non-TFA teachers. Neither are that good, really. Teaching has a big learning curve, but by the time you figure it out, you generally have to wait until next year to have a fresh start with a new group. As far as alumni teachers, yes, I think they are generally pretty good. I’d let an alum teach my kids. But as good as they might be, to ignore the fact that most of the comparisons were pretty neutral and then buy into the idea that when one group of students learns a year more than another group, they will only get, on average, three more questions correct on a multiple choice math test, well that’s the kind of thing that is going to keep me investigating these kinds of claims and spreading the word.”
