Archives for the year of: 2014
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Jersey Jazzman Corrects Pundit Jonathan Alter

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2014 //
12

A few years ago, I “debated” Jonathan Alter on a Denver radio show but soon realized that I had entered a zone where facts were irrelevant because Alter’s mind was made up. He loves charter schools. He thinks testing and accountability are the answer to the deep problems of education. He is contemptuous of public schools and the teachers who work in them. He thinks that unions exist to protect failed teachers.

Jersey Jazzman, who is completing a Ph.D. In education research, tries here to set Alter right. It is a hopeless task, in sorry to say. Alter has a deep ideological devotion to charter schools, and he won’t listen to data about attrition or how many kids with special needs are excluded from them.

But I’m glad that JJ has the will to try.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers

A Few Election Results

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2014 //
9

Andrew Cuomo won with 62% of the vote; Zephyr Teachout received 34%. Teachout had a great showing considering that she was a complete unknown with little name recognition, vastly outspent by Cuomo. Her $200,000 vs his $35 million. And his legal team kept her tied up in court challenging her residency; she won but lost two weeks of campaigning. Cuomo did his best to make Teachout invisible, never debating her, never mentioning her name, turning his back to her when she tried to shake her hand, treating her as a non-person. Yet she nonetheless managed to win the votes of 34% of Democrats who voted. She swept many upstate counties, perhaps on the hydrofracking issue (she is against it). She was a class act. He was a cold, calculating bully who refused to mention her name or shake her hand.

 

After the election, Cuomo bragged that “he had bravely taken on several narrow but well-organized special interests — state employees, teachers and hydrofracking opponents — who, he said, were upset with him because he did not give into their wishes.” So we are likely to see more education budget cuts, more cheerleading for non-union charter schools, and gubernatorial support for hydrofracking, since these are some  of the groups that Cuomo was proud to have defeated. The unions and the Working Family Party should have endorsed Teachout. Well, there is always next time. She was a great candidate and she has a future, if she chooses to stay in the arena.

 

Aaron Regunberg, former organizer of the Providence Student Union, won a seat in the State Senate in Rhode Island. That’s great news. Never again will the State Senate pass a policy on education without hearing the voices of those it affects most: students.

 

Gina Raimondo was elected governor of Rhode Island. She wasn’t my choice because of her role in cutting pensions but she is preferable to Mayor Taveras, who touts charters and was DFER’s choice..

Categories Education Reform

Peter Greene: John Oliver Explains Student Debt and Scamming the Public

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2014 //
25

This is a must-see. Peter Greene here presents and discusses comedian John Oliver on student debt.

Most students will leave college with heavy debts; some will spend years trying to pay it off. The arrangement was created by the federal government and state governments, which have steadily decreased their responsibility for subsidizing the cost of higher education, transferring the burden to students. There once was a time when community colleges were tuition-free. No longer. For-profit institutions and online “universities” have moved in to fill their place. These institutions have terrible completion rates. Despite repeated calls to regulate the for-profits, Congress and the U.S. Department of Education have failed to do so. The for-profit industry hires top lobbyists from both parties to protect their interests. Who protects the students?

When one of the worst for-profit institutions (Corinthian) teetered near bankruptcy, the US DOE extended a bail-out instead of closing it down.

Categories Education Industry, For-Profit, Higher Education, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes, Students

OECD: Competition Among Schools Not Associated with Higher Scores

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2014 //
14

A report from the OECD, which sponsors the international assessment PISA, finds that competition among schools for students (“choice”) is not associated with higher math scores but is associated with higher levels of social segregation.

“PISA results…show that, on average across countries, school competition is not related to better mathematics performance among students. In systems where almost all 15-year-olds attend schools that compete for enrollment, average performance is similar to that in systems where school competition is the exception.

“What this means is that school choice may actually spoil some of the intended benefits of competition, such as greater innovation in education and a better match between students’ needs and interests and what schools offer, by reinforcing social inequities at the same time.”

In the U.S., school choice began as an integral part of the opposition to court-ordered desegregation. The word “choice” was a code word for segregation. Southern politicians were all for choice because it would allow white students to “escape” to white schools, leaving black students in all-black schools. Today, charter schools are more segregated than district schools, even in districts that have high levels of segregation, according to the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. today, the media celebrates all-black schools if they get high test scores. Charters have become a way of enabling renewed segregation.

Categories Charter Schools, International, Vouchers

Good News: Anti-Due Process Group in Missouri Drops Its Campaign This Year

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2014 //
15

Good news for teachers in Missouri.

The group seeking a constitutional amendment to eliminate teachers’ right to due process (aka “tenure”) has decided to abandon its campaign for now. Called Teach Great, the organization hoped to make test scores the key factor in all decisions about teachers.

“The proposed amendment will still appear on the ballot. It seeks to end tenure and require that decisions around the hiring, promoting, firing and laying off of teachers be determined by at least 51 percent on student performance measures.

“Teach Great took on the task of gathering petition signatures and promoting the ideas that are championed by St. Louis financier Rex Sinquefield.” Sinquefield is a billionaire libertarian.

In an earlier post, I wrote that Sinquefield had put up $750,000 to launch the campaign to eliminate teacher tenure.

I wrote at that time:

“Conservative billionaire Rex Sinquefield does not believe that teaching should be a career. He doesn’t think that teachers should have any job security. He thinks that teachers should have short-term contracts and that their jobs should depend on the test scores of their students. He has contributed $750,000 to launch a campaign for a constitutional amendment in Missouri to achieve his aims.

“The campaign, in a style now associated with those who hope to dismantle the teaching profession, has the duplicitous name “teachgreat.org” to signify the opposite of its intent. The assumption is that the removal of any job security and any kind of due process for teachers will somehow mysteriously produce “great” teachers. This absurd idea is then called “reform.” This is the kind of thinking that typically comes from hedge fund managers, not human service professionals.

“Sinquefield manages billions of dollars and is also the state’s biggest political contributor.

“The “Teachgreat.org” initiative would limit teacher contracts to no more than three years. It also requires “teachers to be dismissed, retained, demoted, promoted, and paid primarily using quantifiable student performance data as part of the evaluation system,” according to the summary on the group’s website.”

See? Never give up hope. Bad ideas come and go, and they go away faster when teachers and parents work together.

Categories Missouri, Teacher Tenure

Here is a Link to Tavis Smiley Show

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2014 //
37

In case you missed, here is my interview with Tavis Smiley from September 8. It is about 12 minutes. Tavis asked about the Vergara decision and teacher tenure, about the attacks on teachers and public education, about the goals of the current “reform” movement, Common Core, and my judgment of Race to the Top.

All in 12 minutes!

By the way, if you wonder why I was holding my head in last minutes of show, I should explain that I didn’t have a toothache. My earpiece with the audio feed was falling out, and I was holding it in my ear.

Categories Common Core, Race to the Top, Ravitch, Diane, Teach for America, Teacher Tenure, Teachers and Teaching

And Now a Word from “Sad Teacher”

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2014 //
60

A reader with the name “Sad Teacher” wrote the following comment:

“My problem is that I cannot follow the Marzano rubric and continue to get excellent test scores. I’ve been told for many years what to teach, but now we are being ordered how to teach it. It is almost against the law now for a teacher to go to the dry erase board and explain the strategies to solve a proportion. That is called direct instruction, and it is a bad word in my district, thanks to the Marzano model of the teacher evaluation system.

“I was actually told by my evaluator that I needed to teach the highest kids in my classroom how to properly solve a proportion – and then they would teach the rest of the class in small groups, of course. It is my job to just walk around the classroom and look up at the ceiling (facilitate their learning they call it) and, of course, TEST LIKE CRAZY! I can’t teach this way! It has all gotten so ridiculous that I can’t stand the stress anymore. I love my students dearly, but all they have is a kind teacher with dark circles under her eyes with a sad smile on her face looking at the calendar on her desk to see the next assessment deadline. They deserve so much more.”

Categories Teachers and Teaching, Testing

If CCSS is not a Curriculum, Why Do All the Textbooks Look Alike?

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2014 //
48

A letter from a public school parent:

“Hi Diane —

I am an avid follower of you, Carol Burris, and other brilliant experts who have helped me understand the state of education today.

A lot has been written about CCSS, and we know that advocates love to say “It’s standards, not curricula” and “States are free to teach the standards their own way; it’s not prescriptive.”

What I don’t see addressed is the reality that, across the nation, CCSS curricula from every publisher is frighteningly similar. From viral post from the engineer dad who wrote the letter in his son’s homework to “tell Jack what he did wrong,” to the coffee cup conundrum Carol Burris outlined in WaPo, I find it eerie that these are nearly identical to the questions my kids are having to tackle in workbooks at their NYC public elementary school. I have also compared notes with my mom friends in Colorado, California, Idaho and Texas, and we are finding that questions are nearly exactly the same — in both ELA and math. And incidentally, we are all also struggling with badly written, error-filled material that clearly has not been proofed, fact-checked or reviewed/edited. Insult to injury!

I realize my observation is strictly anecdotal, but it nags at me. How can there be such marked similarity on a national scale? Were they all written by one shadowy non-profit funded by Gates and then licensed out to publishers? How can it be that they all are filled with so many errors? My children (going into 2nd and 4th grade at a public school in Brooklyn) use workbooks published by Curriculum Associates. That company doesn’t seem to have any connection to Pearson or any other big education publisher. So why is their curricula content the same as all the others? Clearly what’s happening on the ground doesn’t jibe with what CCSS advocates keep saying.”

 

Lorna

Categories Common Core

What Is the Real Cost of Federally-funded Common Core Tests?

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2014 //
13

This report from the Pew Charitable Trusts says that many states are reconsidering the costs of Common Core testing, and a small number have withdrawn from participation in the two federally-funded tests, PARCC or Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.

“But as controversy over the Common Core has challenged some states’ commitment to the standards, a number of states have decided to withdraw from PARCC or Smarter Balanced or to use alternative tests, raising questions about the cost of the tests and the long-term viability of the multistate testing groups, which received $360 million in federal grants to develop the tests. The federal grants will end this fall, and it is unclear whether the testing groups will continue past that point.

“What gets tested is what gets taught,” said Joan Herman, co-director emeritus of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing at UCLA. “To the extent that the assessments well represent the spirit and meaning of the standards, the spirit and meaning of the standards will get taught. Where the assessments fall short, curriculum, instruction and teaching will likely fall short as well.”

Federal law prohibits any officer or agency of the federal government from attempting to influence or control curriculum or instruction in the nation’s public schools. It is axiomatic that “what gets tested is what gets taught,” so it is surprising that the U.S. Department of Education funded these two testing consortia; private foundations should have done it.

In the article, several “experts” are quoted about the minimal costs of switching to the new tests, but at least one of them points out that the low-ball estimates rarely include the costs of new technology and additional bandwidth.

At a time when many states are cutting education budgets and increasing class sizes, some states will find it challenging to increase their spending on assessment.

Unmentioned in the article is the issue of computer-scored testing. Students in theory will answer questions by explaining why they answered as they did. Computers will evaluate their “deeper thinking” as well as their essays. Les Perelman of MIT has demonstrated that robo-graders are unable to tell the difference between sense and nonsense so long as the sentences are structurally sound. Yet millions of students will be judged by computers that are unable to discern irony, wit, creativity, humor, or even fact.

Whose idea was it to put all testing online? Dumb idea. In my view, which doesn’t count as much as Arne Duncan’s or Bill Gates’, most tests should be written by teachers (they know what they taught) and graded by teachers (so they can discover immediately what students learned and did not learn).

Categories Common Core, Testing

Dawn Neely-Randall: Silent No More

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2014 //
7

Dawn Neely-Randall is a teacher in Ohio. She is in her 25th year in the classroom. For a long while, she watched in silence as the testing mania absorbed more and more instructional time. And then she decided she had to speak out. She had to defend her students. She had to defend her professional ethics. She could not remain silent. And speak she did. Here is an article that she wrote that appeared on Valerie Strauss’s blog.

If every state had 1,000 teachers as brave, bold, and outspoken as Dawn Neely-Randall, we could stop the insanity that is destroying children’s lives and debasing education. For her courage in speaking out, for her refusal to remain docile and silent, I add Dawn Neely-Randall to the honor roll.

Here are a few choice excerpts from her impassioned article.

“Last spring, you wouldn’t find the fifth-graders in my Language Arts class reading as many rich, engaging pieces of literature as they had in the past or huddled over the same number of authentic projects as before. Why? Because I had to stop teaching to give them a Common Core Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) online sample test that would prepare them for the upcoming PARCC pilot pre-test which would then prepare them for the PARCC pilot post test – all while taking the official Ohio Achievement Tests. This amounted to three tests, each 2 ½ hours, in a single week, the scores of which would determine the academic track students would be placed on in middle school the following year.”

“In addition to all of that, I had to stop their test prep lessons (also a load of fun) to take each class three floors down to our computer lab so they could take the Standardized Testing and Reporting (“STAR”) tests so graphs and charts could be made of their Student Growth Percentile (SGP) which would then provide quantitative evidence to suggest how these 10-year-olds would do on the “real” tests and also surmise the teacher’s (my) affect on their learning.

“Tests, tests, and more freakin’ tests.

“And this is how I truly feel in my teacher’s heart: the state is destroying the cherished seven hours I have been given to teach my students reading and writing each week, and these children will never be able to get those foundational moments back. Add to that the hours of testing they have already endured in years past, as well as all the hours of testing they still have facing them in the years to come. I consider this an unconscionable a theft of precious childhood time……”

“And most disconcerting of all, in my entire 24-year career, not one graded standardized test has EVER been returned to the students, their parents, or to me, the teacher. Also, for the past three years here in Ohio, released test questions have no longer been posted online. In addition, teachers have had to sign a “gag order” before administering tests putting their careers on the line ensuring they will not divulge any content or questions they might happen to oversee as they walk around monitoring the test.”

Categories Honor Roll, Ohio, Students, Teachers and Teaching, Testing
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