Randi Weingarten believes in the promise of the Common Core standards, and she has strongly defended them.
But she recognizes that the rushed implantation, notably in New York, jeopardized the standards.
In this post, Randi says that the standards must be separated from the testing.
They must not be used to rank and rate teachers or to apply value-added measurement, where teachers are judged by computer-generated algorithms.
She writes:
“It’s time to call the question. Will the powers-that-be continue to be more concerned with creating a testing and data system that ranks and sorts schools and educators, in the quest for the perfect industrial algorithm to judge teachers, students and schools? Or will they look at the evidence and join educators, students and parents in fighting to reclaim the promise of public education?
“We can’t reclaim the promise of public education without investing in strong neighborhood public schools that are safe, collaborative and welcome environments for students, parents, educators and the broader community. Schools where teachers and school staff are well-prepared and well-supported, with manageable class sizes and time to collaborate. Schools with rigorous standards aligned to an engaging curriculum that focuses on teaching and learning, not testing, and that includes art, music, civics and the sciences — and where all kids’ instructional needs are met. Schools with evaluation systems that are not about sorting and firing but about improving teaching and learning. And schools with wraparound services to address our children’s social, emotional and health needs.”
We know who “the powers that be” are. Will they listen?
This is one of the best posts I have read in a long while. I have been thinking quite a lot about Big Data and trying to understand why so many Big Thinkers are in love with Big Data.
This post by John Kuhn helps me figure out how this happened and what it is wrong.
He refers to Campbell’s Law when he describes the principle that the more a measure counts, the more it distorts the very process it was intended to measure. That means that an audit should have no stakes attached to it. If testing is high-stakes, then people start acting as if the test score is the same as education instead of a measure.
This is where John Kuhn starts, and it gets better and better with each paragraph, written in the fierce and direct style of this great education thinker of our day:
While data (plural) should inform, each datum wants to rule alone. In an America that is uncomfortable with nuance, we have two dominant political parties, two dominant soda brands, and so on. We like to reduce things to manageable-if-extremely-imprecise chunks. As such, a single datum such as a Standardized Test Score–like the ring in The Lord of the Rings–invariably wants to take over. Data-informed quickly gives way to data-driven, and then data-driven gives way to datum-blinded. And that is, in my opinion at least, where we live today.
Another excellent point:
Data, like fire and shotguns, is neither intrinsically good nor bad. In fact, like fire and shotguns, it can be a life-saver when used properly in the right circumstances, and it can be deadly when used improperly in the wrong circumstances. Teachers and parents who get labeled “anti-testing” (because, again, nuance is hard) are often not at all against testing. The vast majority of the so-called “anti-testing” teachers give tests in their classrooms. So it isn’t the test that motivates much of the opposition to reform. And it isn’t the data, either. It’s the fact that many, many stakeholders don’t trust the people hoovering up the data to use–they presume, because of their experience with the school reform movement as it has unfolded–against students, teachers, and schools.
Truth is, I could quote almost every line in this excellent post, because every line has the wisdom of experience, the wisdom of an educator who cares about teachers and students, and who doesn’t want to see them abused by Big Data.
With a respected superintendent nearing the end of his contract, with a mayoral election in the offing, with the school board majority up for grabs in the next election, Nashville is looking like a tasty prize for the privatizers.
And there are so many of them! Start with State Commissioner of Education Kevin Huffman, who spent two years in TFA but otherwise has no experience as a principal or a superintendent. His major passion seems to be turning public dollars over to charter schools and passing laws to reduce the security and status of teachers. Then there is Governor Haslam, a reactionary who seems to despise public education and has the support of a compliant legislature. And don’t forget Karl Dean, the mayor of Nashville, who is eager to see private interests take control of public education in his city.
Nashville has been ripped asunder by the aggressive demands of the charter school crowd. The district has only 23 charters but those charters have “sucked up almost all the air” out of all public discussion of education, as if they and they alone held the key to success.
Although the district has chartered some 23 privately run schools to operate using district money, the role these charter schools play has sucked up almost all the air at Metro’s Central Office on Bransford Avenue over the past year-and-a-half.
The topic of charter schools — which have the autonomy to operate without the strings normally attached to traditional schools, including issues like how teachers are hired and fired or what class schedules look like — has polarized the district.
The division has created camps of pro-charter advocates, who argue that many of their schools are outperforming the district and MNPS should be more welcoming to the innovation. That has galvanized an equally entrenched anti-charter camp, which warns of the private investors and interests behind such schools and the taxpayer dollars the district must siphon from traditional public schools to fund these new ones. There has been little discussion trying to find a meeting ground in the middle.
The conflicts between the two are seemingly endless, starting in earnest with the district’s school board refusing a charter school targeted to open on the more affluent west side of town; the state fining MNPS $3 million for said rejection; battles with Gov. Bill Haslam, state education commissioner Kevin Huffman and House Speaker Beth Harwell over approval and costs of charter schools; a fight over leaked data showing charter schools kick out students weeks before state test time; embarrassing spats on Twitter and Facebook between board members and charter school advocates; the school board threatening to sue the state for its charter school law; a noisy protest by charter school advocates on the district’s front lawn; holding charter schools’ growth responsible for the district’s money problems; blaming under-capacity schools on the charter-school boom; and most recently, redirecting new charter schools to South Nashville or to convert select failing schools.
Four seats on the school board will be up for grabs in an election in seven months. The school board elections will attract some of the nation’s most notorious corporate reformers, including Stand for Children, Democrats for Education Reform, and Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst (Rhee is the ex-wife of State Commissioner Huffman). The charter school advocates will spend heavily to gain control of the school board, in hopes of expanding the charters and transferring public funds to their own operations.
Make no mistake. This is a well-funded raid on the public treasury, intended to take money away from the public system and hand it over to the friends of those providing the money for the election:
“Democrats for Education Reform is excited to support candidates who will increase the capacity of our public school system to better serve Nashville’s children, whether those candidates are running for school board or in the upcoming mayoral race,” says Alex Little, chair of the Nashville steering committee for the pro-charter-school group, which has been quietly combing the city for board candidates.
Charter school and reform groups are no strangers to investing in politics, dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars into local and state races here in recent years.
At the state level, education-reform lightning rod Michelle Rhee’s Students First organization poured more than $200,000 into legislative races and some local ones, without being shy about throwing massive checks to key candidates.
Last cycle, Metro’s school board races attracted an unprecedented $400,000 among five races and funders of all stripes. Gathering sums more suitable for a bid for state representative than the local school board, Ingram Industries’ Margaret Dolan amassed more than $115,000 for the MNPS board seat she lost to underdog Amy Frogge from Bellevue. In the same cycle, former Teach for America executive Elissa Kim raised some $85,000, largely from fellow TFA types, to beat out the school board’s then-chairwoman, Gracie Porter, in East Nashville.
The biggest players last cycle included the pro-charter crowd, with Mayor Karl Dean and the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce bringing influence and some money, and locally organized Great Public Schools and StudentsFirst dishing out dollars. Democrats for Education Reform, working out of Nashville, plans on joining the effort this year. That group is led by Natasha Kamrani, wife of Tennessee Achievement School District head Chris Barbic, whose job duties include taking over or hiring charters to turn around the state’s weakest 5 percent of schools.
“ROCKETSHIP SPUTTERS: Rocketship Education has been one of the hottest charter networks for some time, hailed for a blended learning model that puts its K-5 students to work on computers for part of the day. But it’s recently hit a rough patch. This fall, the network failed to meet enrollment targets for its first school outside California, signing up 307 students in Milwaukee when it had projected 485. Then a federal review found that software the network has used extensively to drill students in math has no discernible effect on math scores.
“- This week, Rocketship withdrew its application to open a school in Santa Clara County, Calif., after intense community opposition. But Rocketship officials say their academic results remain strong and they’re still committed to a huge national expansion. The network now serves 5,000 students; within three years, it expects to enroll 25,000, with campuses in Tennessee, Louisiana, Indiana and D.C. Senior Vice President Kristoffer Haines said his team has “invested a lot of time building strong relationships with community partners” in the target cities – and feels confident families will flock to enroll.”
Last year, Louisiana led the nation in passing absurd laws about education.
This year, that dubious distinction goes to North Carolina. Hardly a day goes by without more evidence of misinformed, specious, nonsensical meddling by the Legislature.
Could someone explain to State Senate leader Phil Berger that testing is not teaching?
No Child Left Behind mandated that all children would be proficient by 2014. Hello, it’s 2014, and it didn’t happen. Maybe there is a lesson here, if anyone is listening. Mandating that all children must be proficient doesn’t make them proficient. Mandating that all third-graders must read doesn’t mean it will be so.
The time spent on testing is time that should be spent reading, writing, listening, and learning.
As the old chestnut goes, you don’t fatten a pig by weighing it.
John Flavin teaches language arts in a rural high school in Oregon.
He wrote this article for Oregonlive.com explaining what really matters in school reform.
Time and resources for teachers to prepare for the flood of federal mandates.
Class sizes of 22 or less. In his school, some classes have more than 40 students.
A restoration of options and electives. He wrote: “All across America students are stripped of drama, band, wood and metal shops, and dozens of other career-starters designed to serve a diverse population.”
A de-emphasis on standardized tests,which harm children with high needs.
He concludes:
“If you’re not a teacher, you ought to be saying to yourself: The enemy of America’s future is anyone who is opposed to guaranteed classroom sizes of 22 or less, increased professional development for teachers, diversified options for students and the elimination of standardized tests as we know them.”
This remarkable article by Cassie Walker Burke with assistance from the Better Government Association details the story of Juan Rangel and the UNO charter school network, the biggest charter chain in Chicago.
It is a gripping tale about the consequences of deregulation and privatization, of creating schools that are not subject to the same laws as public schools, and of the problematic nexus between charter operators and politicians. The charter operators need the money controlled by the politicians, and the politicians need the troops controlled by the charters.
Burke writes, after a lengthy interview with Rangel last fall:
What emerged is a cautionary tale about the intersection of ambition and opportunity. UNO and its CEO thrived mainly because of gaping loopholes in the charter school system. While UNO has received a staggering $280 million in public money over the past five years to spend on education, neither Chicago Public Schools nor the Illinois State Board of Education provided enough oversight. Without that, insiders say, UNO developed a free-wheeling culture that was ripe for abuse. It collected lots of money, and Rangel amassed lots of power. But he didn’t always use them for the benefit of the thousands of kids in his charter schools…
From the beginning, Rangel operated on the notion that charters were exempt from the school district’s nepotism rules (they are allowed to write their own ethics policies) and from the so-called Shakman Decree, a consent decree put into place in 1983 to curb the patronage practices of Chicago pols (it applies to CPS but not to charter operators). As the UNO organization grew, it created plenty of jobs: teachers’ assistants, IT consultants, central office administrators, and community relations officers that Rangel and Mullins filled as they pleased…
[After dismissing its external for-profit management company], UNO…began paying itself a “management fee” of $1 of every $10 it received from local, state, and federal sources. (Some years UCSN kicked up more. In 2012, those fees totaled $5 million.) Under Rangel and Mullins, UNO had control over how that cash was spent…
A third of the nation’s charter schools pay fees to management companies—a head-scratching arrangement when you consider that charters were created as a way to eliminate bureaucracy, not create it. Few rules govern these arrangements, according to Gary Miron, a professor of education at Western Michigan University who has studied charter financing (though not UNO’s specifically). Once the charter manager collects the fee, the funds go under “the veil,” says Miron. “Basically, all of this money ends up getting paid to the management company, but we don’t know how much goes into their pockets or how much they spend on administrators, or administrators’ nephews or uncles.”
Free from oversight or supervision, the UNO organization collected millions from private foundations (like Walton) and from the government; and it was rife with conflicts of interest.
In June 2009, the state legislature awarded UNO a $98 million grant for school construction. Even charter advocates were shocked by such a staggering sum handed out to a single operator. “Very few, if any, charters [nationwide], except UNO, get that kind of state money to build schools,” says Andrew Broy, the president of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, a lobbying and resource group.
Anticharter parents’ groups and unions immediately cried foul. “What on earth was the state thinking?” says Julie Woestehoff, the executive director of Parents United for a Responsible Education, a Chicago advocacy organization. “We have this huge budget crisis. To be giving UNO $98 million—it’s preposterous. It throws into enormous relief the political nature of this organization, the clout they have.”
UNO’s coup was the result of a classic one-two punch. The cousin of Miguel d’Escoto, Rangel’s chief organizer at the time, had bused hundreds of parents in matching T-shirts to Springfield to rally for weeks in front of the Capitol and the TV cameras. Behind the scenes, Rangel had worked Republican lawmakers— many of them charter fans—from Senate Republican leader Christine Radogno on down. To reinforce the message, he had hired a cadre of powerhouse lobbyists, including Victor Reyes and Michael Noonan, a former Madigan aide.
“They were playing the ‘Kumbaya’ chord that this was for the betterment of Latino families,” recalls Senator William Delgado, a Chicago Democrat who chairs the Senate Education Committee and voted for the grant—a decision he says he now regrets. “But it was the wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing. These guys [at UNO] weren’t responsible enough to get that much money.”
With that $98 million, UNO began scrambling to build new schools, Rangel’s two-campus Soccer Academy complex among them. No one inside the organization, it seems, bothered to read the grant agreement’s fine print. It specified that UNO “must immediately notify the [Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, which administered the grant] in writing of any actual or potential conflicts of interest.”
As the Sun-Times would reveal in February 2013, a long line of contractors, plumbers, electricians, security firms, and consultants tied to many of the VIPs on UNO’s organizational chart got a piece of the action. Rangel spelled out in tax documents and in later bond disclosures that the construction firm d’Escoto Inc.—owned by former UNO board member Federico d’Escoto, the brother of Miguel d’Escoto—was the owner’s representative on three projects funded by the grant. Another d’Escoto brother, Rodrigo, was paid $10 million for glass subcontracts for UNO’s two Soccer Academies and a third school in the Northwest Side neighborhood of Galewood.
The vendor lists were peppered with other familiar names: a $101,000 plumbing contract awarded to the sister of Victor Reyes, UNO’s lobbyist, who helped secure the state grant; a $1.7 million electrical contract given to a firm co-owned by one of Ed Burke’s precinct captains; tens of thousands in security contracts to Citywide Security, a firm that had given money to Danny Solis, and to Aguila Security, managed by the brother of Rep. Edward Acevedo, who voted for the $98 million for UNO.
…Behind the scarlet curtain, UNO’s schools could be sloppy. Rangel rarely entered them. From 2008 until 2011, day-to-day operations fell to a strict Catholic nun, Sister Barbara McCarry, a veteran from the CPS office that vetted charters. To make up a budget gap from leaner times, UNO began stuffing more kids in classrooms (up to 30 in kindergarten and first grade, compared with the CPS average of 24) and levying “activity fees” on unsuspecting families. Expectations were high, tempers were strained, and a revolving door of principals (called directors at UNO schools) left a young and largely inexperienced crop of teachers casting about for guidance. Teachers say they felt pressure to please parents and to not draw any negative attention to the schools….
UNO’s teacher turnover rate careened toward 40 percent for the 2011–12 school year, though the network wasn’t the only charter operator in Chicago burning through staff. According to the independent Chicago education journal Catalyst,average teacher turnover at all local charters exceeded 50 percent the previous year….
[with legal troubles growing, Rangel resigned in December but UNO is still operating.]
UNO can’t count on more largess from the State of Illinois, at least until the inevitable political amnesia sets in. (In an email, a Quinn spokesperson wrote “NO” in all caps in response to the question of whether the governor would consider future UNO grants.) But the network’s authorizer, CPS, remarkably still seems to have its head firmly planted in the sand. Last February—after the Sun-Times stories broke—the board of education voted unanimously to extend UNO’s charter for another five years.
“Perhaps more than anything else, I hate it when pundits – who often have little clue what they are talking about to begin with, toss around big numbers with lots of zeros… or “illions” attached in order to make their ideological point.”
The school was created to serve students with disabilities.
Brandenburg points out that the charter was very profitable for its leaders.
The court documents how charter officials–deregulated and lightly supervised by their collaborators in the D.C. charter School Board–allegedly transferred large sums of money to themselves.
While we appreciate the article “Investing in students’ futures” (Eagle, Dec. 3), we would like to make some clarifications.
The $8,700 that the Lee Middle and High School A.P. teachers gave to the school is not from “grant pay,” but rather “merit pay,” earned as a result of high student scores on last spring’s A.P. exams. Unfortunately, the acceptance of “merit pay” was a non-negotiable requirement imposed by MMSI as part of the grant. We accepted these terms only for the additional benefit that a strong and varied A.P. program would provide for our students — “merit pay” was not an incentive to us. By refusing to accept this money and instead returning it to the school, we found a way to make it more palatable.
As a union, we strongly oppose “merit pay” on both philosophical and ethical grounds. First, the notion of “merit pay” suggests that high achieving students are more worthy of a teacher’s time and effort than average achieving students or those who struggle. Refusing to accept the “merit pay” has allowed us to put the money back into our departments to enhance the learning of all our students. We will buy much-needed items, such as supplies, textbooks, and technology, and also fund field trips and SAT preparation classes for students lacking the means to pay for them themselves.
Second, “merit pay” for certain teachers of certain students in certain classes is inequitable to professional educators. In our view, it is a way to undermine union efforts to ensure fair and equal pay for equal work, education, and experience. Before students arrive in an A.P. class in 11th or 12th grade, they have already been in school for at least 10 years. It is faulty logic to assume that the efforts of one A.P. teacher were the only cause of high scores. Earlier teachers, parents, and community members all help contribute to the success of our students.
Merit pay is an insult to our professionalism and a divisive tool designed to incite dissension among us in hopes of weakening our union, which is not only a political organization, but also a professional one, intended to protect the interests of both educators and students.
The LEA was pleased to find a way to bring high-quality, college-level curriculum to our students while holding on to non-negotiables of our own.
JANE MCEVOY
Lee
Jane McEvoy is A.P. Language and Composition, English Department Chair and LEA Vice President.
The letter was also signed by Robert Hungate, A.P. Biology, Science Department Chair, Mary Verdi, A.P. Literature and Composition, Thomas McCormack, A.P. Statistics, and Pamela Briggs, A.P. Calculus.
Diane Ravitch's blog 