Time to be data-driven!
Carol Burris decided it was time to test the extravagant claims of the New York Board of Regents and Commissioner John King by checking the numbers.
The Regents and King made a grand pretense of delaying the date when the Common Core tests will be used for graduation. It is all a charade, she writes.
Consider what would have happened if they had used the Common Core tests as graduation standards this year:
“If these scores were used last year, the New York four-year graduation rate would have dropped from 74 percent to 34 percent. But even that awful rate would not be evenly spread across student groups. A close look demonstrates just how devastating the imposition of the Common Core scores would be for our minority, disadvantaged and ELL students, as well as our students with disabilities.
“The Percentage of 2013 4-Year Grads who earned the Common Core “pass” scores (required for students who enter high school in 2018)
“Low SES (socioeconomic status) students – 20 percent
“Students with Disabilities – 5 percent
“English Language Learners – 7 percent
“Black students – 12 percent
“Hispanic students – 16 percent
“Even if we project 10 years forward, given the expected incremental increases in test scores, far too many students will not earn a high school diploma. A full doubling (and in some cases a tripling) of rates for the above groups of students would not approach an acceptable outcome. We would be taking already too low graduation rates and making them far worse.”
Despite the inflated and misleading claims that Common Core would advance civil rights, the numbers show that the poorest and neediest children not only fall farther behind but the achievement gap grows larger. How will our society prepare for the huge failure rates that the Common Core seems sure to generate?
Burris shows that students in New York persist longer in college than students in top-rated Massachusetts.
Test-based reform is a failure. High school grades matter far more than standardized tests.
She concludes:
“This should come as no surprise. Student grades reflect not only classroom learning, but also work ethic, cooperation and attendance —the stuff that really matters for later life success. How do we increase those behaviors while using sensible accountability systems—that is the right road to travel.
“If our destination is to make all of our students college and career ready, we need to open doors for students, not shut them with sorting and punitive testing. Creating unreasonable graduation standards that will marginalize and exclude our most at-risk students while we implement untested standards linked to high-stakes testing, will not get us where we want to be. It is a road on which too many students will be lost.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Now Carol, you did not fairly apply the reformy formula for success!
Ignore Poverty and its effects
+ Rigor!
+ Untested CCSS
+ tests that discriminate against the poor, people of color, and ELL ensuring their failure
+ Firing experienced teachers through VAM to dehumanize the profession
+ Hiring TFA people with no experience and no expectation of good salary or benefits
+ Even more RIGOR!
+ SOME KIND OF NEOLIBERAL REFORM MAGIC
= College and Career Ready drones
These drones will be properly prepared to work in Taylorized high productivity/low wage settings of the future job market (see WalMart and Amazon and how they treat their employees) where no one questions their betters and none make enough money to think about organizing the workers for better wages and treatment.
http://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons_sick_brutality_and_secret_history_of_ruthlessly_intimidating_workers/
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In my fourth grade classroom, I have two students who are reading at a first/second grade level. One is classified Special Ed and the other has not. I believe they both have Dyslexia. They are very bright children. They both have interventions for reading and are making progress. They work twice as hard as other students. They show perseverance and determination. Their computerized test scores don’t demonstrate what they know. They are capable of comprehending and understanding all that their peers do but, they cannot decode (read) at the same level. The computer tests they take reflect this shortcoming. They are not failures, I have not failed them. They are not their test score as some “big” business would lead us to believe. If their test scores are tied to my evaluation it will prove what? That I did not have high expectations for them, that I did not very my instruction for them, that I failed as a teacher? If the powers that be believe failure looks like…giving up my own time to tutor them, supporting them in all of the content area reading that is required, telling them they are amazing, that I understand that they have to work at least twice as hard as their peers, knowing in my heart that they will be successful in whatever they choose to do because in spite of adversity they continue to strive to do their best. My first passion is to teach children, my second to end this crazy nonsense of high stakes testing and the attack on teachers. The Big Business machine driving the attack should be ashamed at the bullying that is taking place, all in search of the almighty dollar. I will always strive to do the best by my students as I believe most teachers do…Let’s do what we know works…how about public preschool with parent education to give our students a strong foundation, lunch and breakfast for hungry students, libraries, enriching art, science, technology, and athletic programs. The amazing things that could be done with the wasted dollars…truly bringing all students forward. Humans need to know they are loved, that they belong, and that they are valuable contributors to our community,,,, that doesn’t come from a test score! Stop the madness…
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Beautiful Post ..
What you say is what the Real Teachers and the Real Educators KNOW and what the Testing Hierarchy and the Plastic Politicians DO NOT want to HEAR!
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The achievement gap is only measured by test results. The test results are not the achievement gap. If we used a test that provided a low enough bar that all students were labeled proficient, it would not mean that the gap was gone.
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How do you define this “achievement gap”? A test designed and administered so that those who already have much do well and those who have little do poorly is hardly a fair analysis of anything. My poor students of color, many of whom are also ELLs, have achieved many successes and possess skills that would be alien and beyond the reach of upper middle class white children.
The problem is that poor people of color and ELLs don’t get to write and administer the tests so the tests ignore and penalize their successes while highlighting and reifying those of the upper middle class white students, ensuring the maintenance of the status quo. Achieving the class-based, racial “successes” valued on the tests designed and geared to those already in power is no guarantee of achievement for people of color and ELLs.
Your unquestioning acceptance of and faith in the pseudo-science of psychometry as beyond critique or questioning is disturbing in an academic.
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The majority of poor people are white. The percentage of black poor people is larger than the percentage of poor white people. When politicians attack programsfor the poor, they are mostly attacking whites.
Not to nitpick, but high stakes testing has been destroying children, it is not will destroy.
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Chris,
If you mean to say that there is no achievement gap, I will take your word for it and we can stop worrying about it. We should probably revise a good bit of educational policy in that case.
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Oh, TE. I did not say that there is no “gap”. I challenged you to prove that the gap was meaningful and that it should or could be used for anything, let alone something important like earning a diploma or firing a teacher. You have failed to do that. Your achievement gap in understanding simple questions is showing. Better do something about that!
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Well, if the gap is meaningless, yet another argument to move on and start worrying about meaningful things. I don’t have a problem with that. It is Dr. Ravitch that keeps posting about “the gap”.
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TE
And if you provided a bar that was ridiculously (as NYS did last April) it would not mean that the gap was that large. Let me help you TE, IT WOULD MEAN NOTHING.
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Just games with invalid numbers. Conclusions are only as accurate as the data that’s used.
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ridiculously HIGH
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I agree. Changing the cut score does not change a thing about students.
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The whole game since NCLB was first instituted has been a matter of fiddling with cut scores, fiddling with what questions are asked on the exams, and fiddling with the raw-score-to-scaled-score conversions to get the numbers you want. Just do some graphs of New York State’s raw-score-to-scaled-score conversion charts over the past ten years. These are supposed to be in linear relationship, but graph the raw scores over the scaled scores used by NY for its reporting over the past 10 years under NCLB and you will find that the lines jump around like gerbils on methamphetamine or like lines in a Jackson Pollack painting.
The truth is that people manipulate these scores to get whatever results they want to get. That’s why I call Reformish “data-driven decision making” a variety of numerology.
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TE, thank you for asking me politely to explain the differences I see. I am a radical teacher. I would guess that you assume the “gap” indicates that a segment of the population, namely the poor, people of color, and English language learners, are disadvantaged because they score rather poorly in general on these tests.
I believe, in contrast, that the tests simply identify who has privilege and who does not have privilege in our society. I would guess that your solution to this problem is to educate those poorly scoring folks in the ways of the privileged in order to bring them into the fold. I, on the other hand, would offer the solution of ending the current privilege structure altogether to seek new ways of understanding the world.
I know that you will probably dismiss me as a crackpot liberal and that’s ok. As John Lennon said, I’m not the only one. Paulo Freire influenced me mightily in my doctoral studies and I have always seen my teaching, even of 1st graders, as a subversive activity. I seek a different and better world, not more conformity and support for the current world. My Catholic faith also supports me in this endeavor.
I am also a disciple of Maria Montessori and I believe that Dr. Montessori found a way to transform the poor in a way that honors and respects their own life successes without treating them like lesser beings, like KIPP and Teach Like a Champion advocate.
There is no expectation in my classroom that the purpose of education is to continue the existing inequality of the current capitalist system where the 1% take most of the pie and the 99% are pushed ever further into a corner to fight over the remaining crumbs.
I’ve taught 6 year old multiplication and other advanced mathematical concepts because they asked me too and their curiosity was natural and followed a progression of their own choosing, trusting in the inherent dignity and intelligence of all children rather than trying to turn poor children, children of color, and English language learners into imitation white protestant conservatives in order to have a chance at happiness.
Clearly we disagree on many issues but I respect the dialog we engage in on this blog, including your contributions.
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Actually I assume that some of what the test picks up is the disadvantages some poor students face. The test is, in part a measure of the disadvantages, it does not cause those disadvantages.
No doubt my view of the world is overly influenced by my own experiences. I teach large classes with a relatively large number of well off students coming from suburban high schools. The differences in abilities in mathematics is far larger than the variation in household income. The differences in mathematical abilities between my three children is even wider.
I respect alternative approaches to education like Montessori and Waldorf schools. That is why I post here in favor of choice schools for the relatively poor as well as the relatively rich. Perhaps that is another area of agreement.
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Chris, I have some questions and one definition. My question is why do you think that “poor’ students score poorly on the tests? Do the alternatives to public schools, that you stated, improve their abilities? If so what do they do that public schools should do?
You called yourself a radical teacher and you stated that you did not approve of the privilege structure and then you stated that you thought you were a crackpot liberal. You may define liberal as a person who believes in freedom, but just as the conservatives want less government, you are stating the same thing: less governmental interference. There is no significant difference between liberal and conservative or radical. The meaning of radical is quite similar to those of liberal and conservative: an anti-state or anti-government position. What I think you are trying to say is that you are an egalitarian who believes in equality, or in equal liberty, and therefore in equal resources for students.
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Equal resources for students is radical! That upends property taxes funding schools, which, to some, would be equated with socialism. Specifically, redistribution of wealth.
For what it’s worth, equal resources for students doesn’t go nearly far enough. Some degree of reverse discrimination, in the form of advantages for minority or poor students, isn’t out of line. It’s just hard to implement that without going off the deep-end.
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The more state and federal funding in the local schools the more state and federal legislatures will want control. As poster Ang said in a thread recently, if I am paying part of the bill I want a say.
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‘Equal resources’ is considered socialist only from a State planning perspective. In actuality, funding is communitarian. Since the majority of people live in large cities and their average income is quite low compared to suburban and rural areas, their property taxes, as a %, are much lower. Also, may of the people in the cities do not live in houses and so pay no property taxes. The State is supposed to follow a formula for (re) distribution of funds and they also address inequalities up to a point. But, suburban and rural communities supplement their state funding with property taxes which significantly increases their spending per pupil, and voila, better education. However, when State planners have attempted to increase the funding per pupil to be commensurate with suburban schools, the extra funding did not have the same bang for the buck due to cultural differences in parenting between socioeconomic classes. There is a dearth of research on the qualitative differences between working class and middle class parenting which result in higher achievement for middle class students. The working class students do not comprehend the daily lessons, in a middle class context they fail egregiously.
Your concept of radical implies that the State should not be involved in education at all which will contradict the State constitutions in which it is stipulated that every person has a right to education. This is called democratic rights language. The radical approach is nonsense – it is in effect anti-intellectual, which is exactly the mindset of most americans of whom the rest of the world readily acknowledges, “They don’t read.” And I will add they don’t listen good either. The radical claims a natural selection perspective of swim or sink without any contingency plans.
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You are assuming, TE, one narrow set of measures of “achievement.” So, wrong from the start. Kids are not widgets. There is a severe achievement gap between me and the fellow at the repair shop on the corner with regard to auto mechanics. There is a severe achievement gap between him and me with regard to wood working (I am a trained luthier).
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I am not assuming anything. I had thought that most who posted here believed that there was a gap between academic abilities between those raised in wealth and those raised in poverty that was significant and likely to impact their future. Standardized exams are one way to measure that gap, just like they are used, in part, to diagnose the learning disabilities of my foster son.
Chris in Florida informs me that that gap has no importance. If true, it is certainly a relief and we can go on to be concerned with the things that matter.
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I am not opposed, TE, to having a wide variety of highly specific, well-vetted diagnostic tests available for use by teachers and counsellors for the purpose of individualizing education. I am opposed to having a Common Core Curriculum Commissariat impose unilateral measurements on everyone. The list of reasons to oppose these is very, very long, indeed, but obvious enough to real educators like Carol Burris.
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You will be pleased to know that there is a bill pending in my state legislature to forbid any local school district in the state from using any common core aligned resources. That seems a little top down to me, but I am the one who worries most about what my state government will do to education.
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Once again, TE, you put words in my mouth that I did not say. I never said the “gap” has no importance. It has immense importance. It is an artificial measure that was specifically designed to harm public school teachers, public education, and minorities.
The “gap” has been, from its inception, a means of “proving” that government-run schools are bad in some nebulous way, that minorities are inferior (remember The Bell Curve and Dinesh D’Souza — still standard gospel in conservative circles), to deny decent pay and benefits to career teachers (most of whom were/are women), and to further the careers of slimy, dishonest politicians and petty bureaucrats, not to mention as a source of easy money for snake oil reformers.
Diane posts about the “gap” for these very reasons. Dr. Gerald Bracey wrote about this for the past few decades of his like. Susan Ohanian has written reams and reams of pages about this false gap. Many others have joined their voices to the outcry against the false “gap” narrative.
The reformers have skillfully confused poverty and its effects with the “gap” and with a little legerdemain, convinced gullible citizens that the “gap” causes poverty instead of being a simple measure of that poverty, and this hocus pocus is behind all the current reforms.
Hogwash is hogwash and bull excrement is bull excrement. The “gap” is not a “fixable” problem nor a “treatable” malady outside of real and longterm solutions to poverty.
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There are two separate things here: a difference between the academic functioning of the relatively wealthy and the relatively poor and our measurement of those differences. Certainly measures can be better or worse (I had a boatload of crap dumped on me by posters here for pointing out that we measure poverty badly in the US, for example) and I am interested in the distinction you draw between “artificial” measures of the gap and what I presume you must think are natural measures of the gap in academic functioning of student. What natural measures do you have in mind?
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Bob Shepherd & Chris in Florida: forgive my picking on the use of terminology, but when you use words that don’t mean what you say then you’re not saying what you mean.
Even on this blog people seem to easily slip into using “achievement” and “performance” as if they describe “learning” and “real-world competence” and so on. Given current discourse on education they carry a strong psychometric charge, e.g., “achievement gap” becomes just another way of saying “test score gap.”
Given that high-stakes standardized testing of students measures very little, is inherently imprecise, and is more often than not used for purposes for which it is highly unsuited, let’s just say what we mean so we can be sure we are talking about the same thing and are not talking at cross-purposes.
Yes, there is a “test score gap” between different segments of the population [slice and dice as you see fit] but when you describe it that way, then one feels obligated to think more deeply about the design/production/pre-test/administration of said tests. For example, score spread, norm-referenced tests (NRTs) and criterion-referenced tests (CRTs), how carefully designed standardized tests are to the wishes of the buyer/renter to give the results that the client pays for, and so on.
Suddenly we realize we have to abandon a single descriptive/summative statistic and have to learn more about context and goals of education and the like.
Please excuse if I am being overly picky, but I think you were both getting close to saying this yourselves.
Thank you for your comments on this thread.
😎
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Agree 100%….
And your quote above sums it up PERFECTLY!!!
“The truth is that people manipulate these scores to get whatever results they want to get. That’s why I call Reformish “data-driven decision making” a variety of numerology.”
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King’s pseudo “gesture” of common core accountability for student graduation being pushed further down the road reminds me of another “brilliant reform idea” that an entire nation had to endure – let us not forget that NCLB mandated that all students would be proficient by the year 2014. How is that working out! It is working out just as King’s newest “gesture” will.
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This is what the robber barons and the wolves want. To continue to build on the meme and myth that public schools are failures.
Remember, the private sector schools aren’t required to teach or test Common Core, has no oversight, doesn’t have to prove anything and parents are cut out of the process if a private school wants to cut them out.
Any parent complains, their kids will be sent back to the so-called horrible and dangerous killing fields of the pubic schools.
No Child Left behind never applied to private sector schools.
The Race to the Top never applied to private sector schools.
It’s all part of the plot.
Scapegoat,Demonize and Deceive
Will the succeed? They think so because they own most of the traditional media and control what the public hears. But they don’t own the Internet. the Internet, unless it is censored, has become the only media source left for the people to get their messages out.
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One of the underlying issues related to the gap is the SAT where the private-public and rural-urban differences emerge. It should seem obvious that the CCLS is an attempt to improve on the rigor by accentuating on specific cognitive skills to reduce these gaps in comprehension and writing skills. Oddly, I never hear of a private school failing to produce nearly 100% of their students graduating and being accepted to college and all of them going as well!
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And your point is?
You did bring up a good question though. How many kids go to college from private schools compared to public and if this is true, why? It’s always good to know the fundamental reason for anything.
Using Google, I found Capenet.org @ http://www.capenet.org/facts.html
10% of all US students k – 12 attend private schools and 25% of all US schools are private.
The first thing I noticed is the class size. In private schools, class size is usually much smaller. In addition, 80% of private schools are religious. In fact, 42.9% in 2011-12 and in the last decade Conservative Christian increased it’s share by 3.1% while Catholic shrunk 12.5%.
What about tuition. In 2007-08, the average of all private schools K- 12 was $10.045 annually which was about the same as the cost of public school the same year. In 2005 – 06, average per student expenditures in the public school was $10,458 in the US.
How does this translate: Private schools have lower class sizes and teachers are paid less, on average.
And 85% of children from wealthy families earning an annual income over $75,000 attend public schools—only 12% of kids attend private schools with parents from this income bracket.
The 2011 NAEP Math Report CARD reported that only 9% of children attending private schools are advanced in math compared to 6% in public schools (2% is not a huge achievement gap by any measure) and by 8th grade that’s 13% compared to 8%.
For reading, the comparison of advanced at 4th grade was 13% for private and 7% for public. By 8th grade both number shrunk: private was down 5$ to 8% and public was down 4% to 3%.
When I reached the NAEP 2012 U.S. History Report Card, the results were astounding
For advanced, private was 2% and public 1%.
Then there is: Percentage of teachers who perceptive certain issues as serious problem in their schools:
Student disrespect for teachers: Public 17%; Private 4%
Use of alcohol: Public 7%; Private 3%
Drug abuse: Public 6%; Private 2%
Student tardiness: Public 10%; Private 3%
Student absenteeism: Public 14%; Private 3%
Students unprepared to learn: Public 30%; private 5%
lack of parent involvement: Public 24%; Private 3%
Student apathy: Public 21%; Private 4%
Then there’s the percentage of students, age 12-18 who in 2005 reported that street gangs were present at, or on the way to/from school: Public 24.5%; Private 4.2%
Statistic Brain.com offers an easier to read comparison @ http://www.statisticbrain.com/private-school-statistics/
It think it is highly arguable that the environment at home and in the local community has a major impact in outcomes in public and private schools.
What happens to the private schools when all those kids in the public schools flood their classrooms. If you think that private school teachers will make a difference, I think I can sell you an acre on the surface of the sun where you may want to build a vacation home close to a spectacular coronal mass ejection.
Once all the public schools have vanished, then all the kids who belong to street gangs and those kids who abuse drugs/alcohol who come from homes with a lack of parent involvement will drastically change the learning environment of any private school that lets them in leading to a dramatic drop in outcomes.
The result: a radical reverse back to the era where involved parents (who have the money to rent or buy in middle class communities far from poverty) may segregate their children from the rest of the population. If any public schools remain, they will be sorely underfunded with a lack of support and will become in reality holding pens that feed kids in a direct pipeline to prisons. The turnover rate among teachers will increase dramatically.
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Lloyd, thanks for acknowledging my “”point.”” However, your endgame analysis is too conjectural and I doubt that the situation will eventually become the same thing all over again. In the Sociology of Education and Sociology generally, the variables being analysed are entirely distinct from what educators are understanding. But, one set of factors is very clear: the home environment is highly differentiated and corresponds to income or class and to educational achievement. The educational system is tasked with the differentiation of students from their family and this is certainly facilitated by lower class size. In your example, you may as well ask what would happen if lower class students were placed in upper class schools, which was one of the presuppositions behind Brown. We now recognize that there are a series of problems which must be addressed from attitudes towards education, to housing, to crime control, to class size, to jobs and income, etc.
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“We now recognize that there are a series of problems which must be addressed from attitudes towards education, to housing, to crime control, to class size, to jobs and income, etc.”
Yes, attitudes towards education: like educating the public about what’s really going on and that the schools are not failing and never have been failing but have been improving slowly and steadily for decades regardless of the war that has been waged to demonize public school teacher for decades by the growing ranks of robber barons and wolves of Sesame Street.
When I started teaching in 1975, the teachers I worked with worked together collaboratively through departments to address what works best for students. In fact, in the first school where I taught full time in 1978-79, the principal, Ralph Pagan, organized the teachers into critical thinking, problem solving teams and supported what those teams decided was the best approach to any problem. Under his consensus based leadership, in a few short years, an Intermediate school that was considered the most violent and dangerous school in Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley was turned around 180 degrees and became a model school for the region.
And no decisions came from above forced on those teachers because of the results of bubble tests.
But that cooperative educational environment didn’t last long. After a few years, Ralph had a stroke and almost died; he was replaced with traditional top-down micro-management who cared little for what teachers thought and this mentality has become a national shame, a malignant cancer.
If there is any failure going on, it starts at the top and is caused by corporate and elected leaders who are so distant from the community of each school, they have no idea of the damage they are causing by their remote control. Instead, these ignorant fools rush in like a deranged bull elephant in a glass factory.
This, of course, leads to the destruction of the public schools as they are turned over to the private sector that is often unprepared to deal with at risk children and what it takes to educate them.
The endless standardized tests used to judge teachers and schools will not change the realities of where children come from or why some are at risk. However, as the research indicates, the best results come from properly supported public schools that are held accountable for how the money is spent; where teachers are in charge of curriculum development, the school environment and how best to meet the educational needs of the children in the community served by that school.
Trained, highly educated and veteran teachers who are up close and personal is much better than distant, out of touch with reality leadership who makes their decisions based on the results of bubble tests.
Standardized tests that judge will never result in a solution. Privatizing the schools will never result in a solution but will only make the situation worse.
I have a few questions for you:
As a child, what socioeconomic environment did you grow up in?
What was the education of your parents?
How often did your parents read?
What schools did you attend?
If you are a teacher, what schools have you taught in and what socioeconomic strata did those students come from?
Right now, at least to me, you are just someone who goes by the anonymous name of Fredrick Welfare who peppers his comments with words that few of the children in America would understand. How about some transparency so we know who we are talking to. Debating with an anonymous person is no different than arguing with a concrete wall.
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Lloyd, why the Accusatory tone?, you can google me if you want to know about my reputation. I started teaching in 1984 and recently retired. I know what I am talking about. I have had every role in a NYC public city school that anyone can possible have short of administrator. ANYWAY, when I started teaching, the worst school system in the US was NYC due to the dropout rate, and very low graduation rate, the very high violence rate. I taught for 20 years at the school that was considered by the NYT as the most violent in NYC and I was a Dean for 4 years! The school was broken up into magnets and has since improved in very dramatic ways but it is still not the kind of school I expect to see: 150 freshmen in, 150 seniors out all going to college! That kind of goal has been approached in the 30 years of my educational career, but we are not there yet and that is where we need to go. I want to be objective in everything I am aware of, so I do not want to ignore statistical results of the educational system. It is important that students pass Regents Exams and score high on the SAT so that everyone is going to college. Now this is a serious problem because deep down, many people do not want everyone going to college, but I do. What makes me feel good is hanging out where everyone is a graduate of college.
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“150 freshmen in, 150 seniors out all going to college!”
Find one country where this has been achieved—-one! This is a fantasy and it’s the foundation of claiming the public schools are failing, because they haven’t achieved what no one else has done in the history of the world.
When will people that set goals for others—for instance these 150 freshmen in—ask the kids what they want first and find out if they even know?
Someone has to be a car mechanic, dig ditches, pick up the trash, be cooks in restaurants, cut hair—they don’t need to go to college.
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HA! that is the typical case in private schools!
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“Many people do not want everyone going to college, but I do. What makes me feel good is hanging out where everyone is a graduate of college.”
It is a noble goal, but it is not what we need to do according to latest educational research. I like hanging out with college educated people too, but the western world has been over overschooling and undereducating it students for the past 200 years.
http://www.21learn.org/publications/books/overschooled-but-undereducated-how-the-crisis-in-education-is-jeopardizing-our-adolescents/
In other words, the industrialized factory model that we have been using is wrong. Dividing the real world into separate subjects and getting kids to memorize a bunch of things is not how people naturally learn. They learn by stories, doing things, and figuring it out for themselves. They learn best by apprenticeship.
The American privatized reform will be able to meet the needs of 17% of its nation’s students, but it will come at the expense of everyone else. It is a shame too. Educationally, our generation was given more than any other in history. But it is not enough for us. Somehow, we feel entitled to take (or make a profit) from the next generation too. Is this what we want the legacy of the baby boomers to be?
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You are talking about private schools where most of the children (10% of the total who attend schools in the US) come from homes where the parents are highly educated and live in upper middle class communities.
You are talking about kids who mostly have supportive parents who are literate and read instead of spend most of their day outside of the six hours in school playing video games, texting friends, listening to music or watching TV, etc.—primary source studies and surveys indicate the average American child spends 10+ hours a day in this sort of activity outside of the classroom where teachers have no influence.
I’m sure you are talking about kids with parents who make sure their children eat a healthy diet and get enough sleep while the average American child sleeps less than seven hours a day when they need nine hours or more and the average child doesn’t eat a healthy diet.
It is arguable that the 10% who attend private schools don’t fit this average profile.
In case you are setting me up for another one of your so-called “Ha Ha” replies, there will always be a few exceptions but that number will be small compared to the whole.
You are talking about private schools that do not keep or accept children who don’t perform and cooperate with the teachers.The teachers teach.The kids learn. When kids don’t want to read, pay attention, do the classwork, do the homework, they don’t learn.
You are talking about kids in private schools who came mostly from homes rich in literacy that value education.
I’m talking about the other 50+ million kids who come from every socio-economic strata and where most of the 16+ million kids who live in poverty go to school and where teachers often teach their hearts out and a significant number of kids make no effort to learn.
I’m talking about public schools where the million plus kids who belong to more than 38,000 violent urban street gangs attend classes warming a seat but seldom cracking a book.
I’m talking about the public schools who teach the millions of children of illegal immigrants—parents who often speak no English at home and are illiterate in their primary language. It’s estimated by the federal government that the number of unauthorized immigrant children who attend US schools stays constant at 1.5 million—and 75% come from Mexico where only a third of adults ever graduate from high school and there’s a high number of illiterate adult citizens compared to the United States.
Some of these kids come to the US public schools fir the first time as teenagers and they don’t even know how to hold a pencil and are illiterate in the language of the country they came from.
In 2010–11, there were about 13,600 public school districts with over 98,800 public schools, including about 5,300 charter schools. In 2011–12, there were about 30,900 private schools offering kindergarten or higher grades.
In fall 2013, about 50.1 million students will attend public elementary and secondary schools. Of these, 35.3 million will be in prekindergarten through 8th grade and 14.8 million will be in grades 9 through 12. An additional 5.2 million students are expected to attend private schools.
This is worth repeating: private schools represent 10% of the number of students attending public schools.
What I think you are advocating is doing away with mandatory education and replacing it with tax payer funded private schools where laws may be flaunted behind closed doors not open to inspection or accountability where kids are forced to learn or end up being severely punished in ugly ways that would be considered cruel and inhuman. And then when the kids still won’t perform, they are kicked out of those public schools and once the public schools are gone, where will those kids end up.
All the evidence points to the fact that most if not all of the hardest to reach kids do not attend private schools.
I find it difficult to believe you taught for long in public schools that took the most at risk kids and that you are blind to the facts and truth of the situation.
You never answered my other questions about where you went to school as a child; what kind of parents you had; what kind of community did you grow up in. You said you are easy to find but when I searched Google for “Fredrick Welfare”, I didn’t find your profile or any info on the first page of the search that led to who you really are.
You claimed to have taught in classrooms with kids who lived in poverty and were at risk. How long did you teach at that level? What subject did you teach? And did you flee to administration to escape the challenges those children offer. I didn’t. I stayed in the classroom for thirty years working with those children.
And when you became an administrator, as you claimed, that doesn’t mean you know what it takes to teach these at risk kids who are challenges for teachers to work with. During my thirty years teaching at risk kids, we had many out of touch administrators who refused to listen to the teachers or properly support us. The higher the position of the administrator, the more removed they usually were from the reality of the classroom.
It is unrealistic and irrational and absurd to even think that 100% of the children in America would all be college ready by 12th grade if public school teachers were doing their jobs because no other country in the world has achieved this in history. In China, for instance, about 10% of the children who start school at age six graduate from high school and even a smaller ratio go to college. I think it’s safe to say that the parents of the 10% who made it have very supportive even pushy parents—parents who push the kids while supporting the teachers.
It is a fantasy to expect every parent to be supportive and every child to arrive at school ready to learn.
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First of all, I don’t know why you insist on reading my resume. I am not applying for a job. Secondly, if you reread your post, you first wondered if I was an administrator and then you claimed I was. You were clueless and still are, but you can go back and read my original post in which I gave the relevant information. I am here to discuss issues, not state my past history. However, I seem to have inspired you. Which was the positive twist I put on reading your diatribe. I clearly stated the nature of the high school I taught at, so I am well aware of the challenges involved in getting students to study and prepare for post-secondary education. Yes, you were right about the parenting problem. In yesterday’s NYT, there was a lengthy article on single-parent families which surely has an effect on student’s academic growth. I am for educational reformer, I guess you could call me a reformer. I notice that most private schools are highly effective. I also have noticed that for the past 30 years, large comprehensive high schools have been downsized into smaller schools, that a Charter School Movement has emerged supported by the State leaderships which blatantly and crudely states” either get your school in order or face closing and reorganization. In those school in which the faculty is unable to get their school in order, a change is necessary and the powers that be, the leadership, have a plan. Believe me when I say, everyone wants to know about a better way to improve schools and education.
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Knowing the history of a so-called reformer helps us understand why they may hold such wrong headed ideas.
By the way, I haven’t seen your so-called resume. I have no idea who you are, where you came from, where you went to school, etc. Don’t imply that I do.
As far as I know, you grew up insulated from the world I was born and lived in for most of my youth, and your perception of the world is based on that filtered and protected environment you came from and probably returned to each day after work.
Living in one world while working in another means you can leave it each day and you will never know what it’s like to grow up in that world. At risk kids seldom have the opportunity to leave the world that they were born into and the public schools in their community—if properly supported—are often safer than the streets they come from.
There is no need to reform the public schools by turning them over to the private sector, firing the teachers and closing schools, because the public schools are not broken and they are not failures.
Instead, the right course would be to support the schools and allow the teachers to find ways to educate the most at risk kids without turning the schools over to small number of billionaire oligarchs who the evidence says are profiting off the taxpayers while not solving anything.
Yes, private schools tend to be highly effective at getting kids ready for college but look at the kids and parents they work with—-once we factor in these differences there is no sane way to compare private schools to public without transparency and accountability to know all the facts and the so-called reform movement is doing all it can to continue to hold public schools accountable by the most atrocious methods (using standardized test scores of students to fire teachers and close schools), while not applying the same method of accountability for the private schools that are replacing the public ones.
And when a study—for instance, the Stanford Study—manages to pierce the curtain of reform that hides what’s going on from the public, the results reveal that this experiment in so-called public school reform to rob the taxpayers and increase the wealth of a few oligarchs is not working.
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The key factors involved in closing schools is not only or simply student test scores, but more seriously, student’s grades and graduation rates. The graduation rate is the reciprocal of the dropout rate and the student’s grades are reflections of the teacher’s attitudes. I would argue that the reason why school perform so poorly that state evaluation agencies close them and reorganize the setting is because of student resistance – so student attitudes must be addressed – students should arrive at the classroom having prepared for interaction and discussion and being prepared to study. If they are not, then the socialization of the students has gone awry and must be corrected.
Instead of trying to blame someone, try to discuss the organizational dynamics and the empirical processes of social interaction in the school setting. Somethings are happening in certain schools that are effective, that are not happening in schools that are failing. Adults need to address this difference.
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You said, “The student’s grades are reflections of the teacher’s attitudes.”
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. However, I throw down the gauntlet. Prove it. How can anyone know the attitudes of millions of teachers in 13,600 public school districts with almost 100,000 schools spread across 50 states and territories teaching more than 50 million children.
And by your own admission, your experience in public education was limited to New York City, one district, the largest in the nation.
In addition, you seem to think changing the organization of a school setting will make the difference.
How is that going to happen when the stakeholders—concerned parents, teachers and even students—in a community are not given the responsibility to achieve just that?
In addition, it is obvious that most of the private sector schools that are sprouting like weeds replacing public schools aren’t even allowing parents or teachers a chance to take part in the decision making process as profits become king and the CEO’s of private schools earn more than the president of the US.
Instead, the President of the United States, Congress, governors and a few billionaire oligarchs are deciding by force that students must take tests that will be used as a measurement tool of success. Students take bubble tests and then the results are used to judge teachers and schools. That is wrong on so many levels.
Back to your assumption that student grades are a reflection of teacher attitudes.
I’ll use my brother and me as two examples. My brother, who was twelve years older than me, refused to cooperate even when our mother and father fought with him to study. He cut school, ran around with girls who also cut school, ran with a biker gang, got into drugs, drank, spent fifteen years of his adult life in prison and raised several children to follow in his footsteps.
Then there was me. As a young child, I faced serious health challenges and was under a doctor’s care for years because a virus was threatening to destroy the valves in my heart. I was severely dyslexic, was not allowed to take part in PE or sports, and missed many days of school due to illness. I was even held back a year and had to repeat a grade. Teachers gave advice to my mother who taught me to read at home when she could. It was a teacher who also convinced my mother to have my eyes tested. Yep, my vision was so bad the world was a blur but I had no idea the world looked different than that blur. From my desk in the classroom, I couldn’t read what was on the board and I was so shy that I said nothing. But the teacher noticed and talked to my mom.
Our father when he wasn’t drinking and was working steadily was a great guy, as nice as could be, but he also cheated on my mother even with her best friend and my godmother. He was a gambler and an alcoholic. We lost a house due to unemployment and his heavy drinking. I was born in poverty and lived my first few years in a house that was literally only a roof with tar paper as outside walls—there were no windows or doors when we moved in.
My brother earned horrible grades and so did I. I barely graduated from high school and barely beat the virus that threatened to end my life as a child. At 18, I stood 6’4″ tall and weighed 125 pounds. My PGA when I graduated from high school was 0.09. But I could read and learned to love reading books. I devoured science fiction and historical fiction sometimes two books a day. But I didn’t pay attention in class, I didn’t do homework or study.
And you seem to think that the grades my brother and I earned in high school were due to the attitude of more than fifty teachers K – 12.
The story of my brother and I could be repeated millions of times across America for children who live in poverty, run with street gangs, come from dysfunctional homes, and who are immigrants living here illegally with parents, family members or guardians.
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Your long story does contain some evidence of teacher attitudes and perceptions, for example, you stated that a teacher made an intervention to get your vision corrected. That sounds like all the teacher(s) did, they apparently did not address your nutrition. Perhaps they believed that they were not supposed to make an intervention, that the family values were sufficient. So, it was considered acceptable that the children did not study. It is somewhat contradictory that you learned to read and you loved books yet your grade average was .09, I guess that means 9 out of 100!! I think you provided exactly the evidence that substantiates my claim about teacher attitudes. But, I never speak or write in absolutes, so when you try to pick out one statement of mine as my version of the ultimate truth you distort me, much like McCarthy distorting Owen Lattimore. Try a little more reasonableness.
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Your flawed assumption that teachers must be held responsible for the behavior and lifestyles of every student from birth to age 18 is so ridiculous as to be not worthy of debate.
Under your flawed logic, a teacher with 200 students—who change hourly and annually—would be required to oversee and dictate the lives of every family of the students they taught and if teachers are not doing this their attitude stinks.
Are you serious or are you playing devil’s advocate throwing out foolish ideas?
Back in the 1980s, I recall reading about a woman GOP candidate running for the US Senate somewhere in the mid-west who blamed public school teachers for all the adults who grew up illiterate or who went to prison after committing crimes—she never mentioned the responsibility and/or failure of parents. Her argument was just as flawed as yours is that teacher attitudes cause poor grades and failing schools.
The schools are not broken so they don’t need to be dismantled and turned over to a few billionaire oligarchs to fix—and after twenty years, the track record of these private sector revisionists have mostly failed miserably.
If any adjustments need to be made in a public school, those changes should be built on collaborative site based problem solving between involved parents, motivated students, teachers and site administration (district level administration can stay out of it)—and not the way the billionaire oligarchs have been going about it for more than twenty years while boosting profits.
As for arm chair critics such as the still anonymous Fredrick Welfare, who seems to be advocating for Big Brother where every teacher becomes an agent of the government to intrude on the privacy of every family with school age children, he can keep his nose out of the business of the public schools too.
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Lloyd, your ad hominems are showing. I have stated several times that I don’t understand your bullying comments. You want to say something differently that I, fine, but I do not feel that you have rebutted my claims at all. I did not mention billionaires, you did. I have been talking about why schools fail and pointed out that it depends on what teachers do; my first post today mentioned what parents do – go back and reread it. Do you have a poor memory, can you remember what someone has stated before?
So, you state, “If any adjustments need to be made in a public school, those changes should be built on collaborative site based problem solving between involved parents, motivated students, teachers and site administration (district level administration can stay out of it)—and not the way the billionaire oligarchs have been going about it for more than twenty years while boosting profits.” Parents, students, teachers and administrators need to collaborate, absolutely. Hardly any different from what I have been saying.
However, you need to understand something about social systems like education. Without the oversight from upper level administration, that is, from district superintendents to Chancellors to Commissioners, your efforts will be piecemeal and will not stick. To change a school setting requires multiple interventions with multiple stakeholders conducted dynamically and continuously, as in policy. Resistors are of no use and should not be tolerated. The ideal disposition of a teacher is as an intervention agent. One of the key factors leading to failed schools or under performers is the failure of teachers to coordinate or be coordinated in their interventions which requires the leadership of the non-teaching administrators. Student resistance and teacher indifference are symptoms of poor organizational structure and poor supervision. For example, it is no use if one teacher assigns and demands homework, everyone must do it, just like it does not do much good if one person leads a few students to achieve noteworthy goals if no one else is trying to do the same thing or will continue that effort.
The ultimate problem in these schools is justice – people not treating each other fairly and there being no mechanism to address the problem, so ppl fight, leave, or get defensive.
Please notice I did not mention your name, and I tried to give you some information. If you could take a similar tack, I would appreciate, because you come off sounding belligerant.
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Mr. Welfare:
You said, “Some things are happening in certain schools that are effective, that are not happening in schools that are failing.”
What proof do you have that any schools are failing? The schools and teachers are not failing. There is no valid evidence of this. Have you read Diane’s book, “Reign of Error”?
The accusation that some schools are failing is a result of decades of scapegoating the public schools, teachers and teacher unions.
And what happens in one school that works may not be replicated in another depending on the circumstances.
It was my experience that what worked had nothing to do with a school but had more to do with a unique coming together of administrators, teachers and parents at a given time and that dynamic could change at any time when one or more of the game changers left.
For instance, my first full time teaching job was at one of the most dangerous intermediate schools in the San Gabriel Valley and within a short time that school became a model mostly because of one man’s management style. His name was Ralph Pagan, a Korean War Veteran who may still be alive but retired. When he accepted the job as principal he was allowed to transfer teachers out that he considered not the right fit for that school environment and its students who mostly were Latino, poor and lived in a community dominated by violent street gangs.
He built a staff of strong, tough-love no-nonsense tiger teachers and then organized us into teams to manage the different aspects of the school through site based cooperative management. Several years later he had a stroke and was forced to retire. He was replaced by a principal with a different management style (the site based cooperative model vanished to eventually be replaced by micromanagement out of the district office) and in time many of the gains were lost but not all of them because the staff he built was still there and it would take many more years before they drifted away through retirement, etc.
The lesson here is that what works in one school at any given time may not last and that school could be considered a failure in later years by events that teachers have no power over.
Here’s another for instance. In the early 1990s I accepted the position of adviser for the high school newspaper and became a journalism teacher for one period a day while still teaching four periods of ninth grade English. As the adviser I changed the way the school newspaper worked and for several years, the students won local, regional, national and international recognition as a high school newspaper. Then I left the position because of the fact that after several years of working 100 hours weeks sometimes from six in the morning until after ten at night, it was time for me to get some rest and slow down.
The journalism class fell apart, the quality of the high school newspaper went downhill fast, and the equipment I’d spent years putting together through grants and using my own credit card to help the students produce the school paper ended up all over the school or in storage to gather dust.
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A school that is failing is one that does not graduate its students. This is not a lambda dilemma problem. C’mon. What in the world are you trying to defend, that schools are just hunky-dorry. There are serious problems in many schools that only get worse unless the adults in the building take action to solve them. If they do not act, then the problems get intolerable until evaluators conclude that the faculty and administration are incompetent or overwhelmed.
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Lloyd,
How would you characterize the effectiveness of the the teachers that Mr. Pagan transferred out of the school? How important was it that Mr. Pagan choose specific teachers to replace those transferred out. Would any veteran public school teacher have done?
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Lloyd, After reviewing your recent posts, I noticed that along with blaming politicians, you are against testing. Do you realize that these tests have a rather low cut off score and that if you consider why students fail you might want to question that instead of the tests. Students fail tests because they, the students did not study, because the teachers did not teach the standards upon which the test was created (for example, the biology standards are considerably broader than any one set of test items, so as a teacher I must address all of the standards if I want to ensure that my students pass), because parents did not provide their student with the appropriate resources to succeed in the school, and because of several other factors: the peer environment, the security effectiveness, transportation, tone in the school with respect to rigor, etc.
One of the forms of student resistance that I resented was their interrupting and indifference to the daily lesson. So, in this case, I blame the students for their failure because I not only addressed the standards but I also addressed their behavior, attitude, and misconceptions.
The mistake that the educational systems MIGHT be making is to use the student’s test scores as the only measure of teacher competence. VAM is sensible if and only if the percentage of a teacher’s competency based on student test scores is somewhat low. Remember, Chicago conducted a strike against using student test scores to evaluate teachers and they won!! But, teachers should be sensitized to the issue that student test scores reflect their competency – it is not entirely the student’s fault for failing these rather simple tests. Adults should take responsibility for the aggregated data.
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Frederick Welfare: read the research. I have cited it here. VAM is not accurate. It measures who is in the classroom, not teacher. Quality.
Standardized tests are very limited measures of what students know and can do. They are typically normed on a bell curve that reflects family wealth and income.
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Diane Ravitch: There were no citations regarding VAM on this particular thread. However, what is at issue is that VAM is being implemented whereas grading is not a part of the evaluation. Although I would think that fail rates would be considered relevant.
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I just read “Reliability and Validity of Inferences About Teachers Based on Student Test Scores” by Edward H. Haertel after finding the citation on your blog. He does not claim that VAM is useless or irrelevant, he describes the many situations that require careful application of these test scores to teacher evaluations. I would agree with his conclusions. However, I see a place in teacher evaluation for including student test scores. Maybe 10% with exceptions for particular students or classes. Last Year, I taught a class with 34 students, 15 were LD and 7 were ELL, and several others were very uncooperative. So, my statistics for that class were poor, in fact not one single student passed the Regents Exam. that had never happened to me before and I often pulled 60-80% pass rates. So, here was an exception. Also, the principal cut the 6th period lab time. There are other reasons and if VAM were the sole basis of evaluation, it would be unfair. Haertel points out that VAM should be used cautiously, and that should be something to consider in your opinions. Complete denunciation has the effect of releasing certain teachers from any sense of urgency, rigor, or responsibility to teach students the standards and to be able to demonstrate competency on exams. Rejecting assessment and evaluation is not an appropriate attitude towards learning or towards education.
Teachers on your blog are extremists with regard to VAM, the Commissioner, and CCLS, among other items. Their opinions are unreasonable and should be more rational and less emotional, less rejecting.
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What do you think of the Canadian educational system? I migrated to British Columbia in 2012 after teaching in North Carolina for 20 years. I have had two kids enrolled in the Canadian public schools and have tried to pay close attention to the differences. The teachers and classrooms of the separate countries are far more similar than different. The biggest difference is that they teach to the child in BC, just like we used to do in NC, before the accountability tests arrived.
Before No Child Left Behind, US and Canadian schools both ranked around 10th place. Look where the two nations rank now. (Pay particular attention to British Columbia’s 2012 PISA rankings on pp. 19, 34, and 35.) http://www.cmec.ca/Publications/Lists/Publications/Attachments/318/PISA2012_CanadianReport_EN_Web.pdf. Now look at how BC is currently reforming their educational system. http://www.bcedplan.ca/ They are essentially following the suggestions coming from the 21st Century Learning Initiative. NC and BC offer an interesting contrast in that they are headed in opposite directions. Although the quality of teachers in NC and BC are nearly the same, my bet is that BC will continue to do better. Which one do you think will do better in the future?
Finally, we were lucky enough to have John Abbott, creator of the 21st Century Learning Initiative, end his world tour with a presentation to Victoria’s PTA groups. He talked about how we need to start teaching to the “grain of the brain.” (I have read about a dozen of his paper since.) I also got the opportunity to ask him if Canadian schools were at risk of headed in the same accountability testing direction as the United States. He said no, that the Canadian school system is about the safest in the world. What do you think?
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The “student resistance” comes from the natural way that adolescence learn. For 200 years we have been stuffing the human brain with memorized facts, but that is not how the human brain was made to learn. http://www.21learn.org/publications/books/overschooled-but-undereducated-how-the-crisis-in-education-is-jeopardizing-our-adolescents/
The more the US tries to cram memorization skills for accountability tests the less the students will actually learn. Thier international rankings will continue to fall. The nations, like Canada, teaching with the “grain of the human brain” will continue to do the best. http://www.21learn.org/archive/learning-to-go-with-the-grain-of-the-brain/
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Kids do poorly on tests when the answers or the method to reach answers is not stored in memory or is not easy to access. These tests have no way to test what the teacher taught or how the teacher taught it.
For instance, yesterday there was a comment here that said it would be good for kids to read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
However, the odds are that almost every child who attends the public schools in the US have been exposed to or read those documents in class through textbooks, lecture, film, assignments, cooperative group work and essays. I know that these documents have been on state curriculum in California for history for decades for teachers to teach and they are in the textbooks and school libraries have films that focus on these documents.
Why, because when I taught multiple subjects in grade school my first few years in teaching, I taught these history topics and I know history teachers at the Intermediate and high school level who also taught kids about these documents and more about US history—that is often soon forgotten by the kids. Memory works this way. What’s important to a kid will usually stick around longer but if the kid thinks a subject isn’t important, the mind automatically dumps these facts while the child sleeps. While sleeping our mind works sorting through the events of the day and keeping what’s considered important (not by the teacher, President, billionaire or Congress) but by the child depending on many factors that usually have nothing to do with school.
Just because a teacher teaches a subject, doesn’t mean the child will remember all the details and facts word for word years later when some reporter stops them on the street and asks them to name the capitals of the states or the first five presidents and they can’t remember.
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I don’t think any veteran teacher would have met his requirements. It was obvious from his choices that he was picking teachers who were more than capable of dealing with the challenges that particular student population offered. Some of the teachers he transferred to other schools were not incompetent when it came to teaching but did have trouble maintaining discipline among students.
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Do you think those new teachers in the school had an important impact on the students there or was it a change of circumstances to the students lives independent of those teachers that really made a difference?
You say some of the teachers he transferred to other schools were not incompetent when it came to teaching. Just out of curiosity, what percentage of those teacher would you say were not incompetent when it came to teaching?
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I can’t answer your question. When I was hired at the start of the 78-79 school year, the other teachers had already been transferred to other schools in the district. You would have to ask Ralph Pagan. When I retired from teaching in 2005, he was still alive and was a consultant working out of CSU Cal Poly, Pomona’s education department.
Cal Poly lists: PAGAN, RALPH, Lecturer, Department of Education (1992-2006)
http://catalog.csupomona.edu/content.php?catoid=5&navoid=812#P
Here’s a link to a paper he co-authored in 2004:
http://editlib.org/noaccess/14676
The reason I said those teachers were competent was because they all went through the microscope of the first few years of being observed and evaluated more than once by more than one administrator. If they had been incompetent, they would have lost their job before earning the next level of job protection that is commonly called Tenure. The first few years in all or most public school districts are probationary years of teaching with NO job protection.
There’s a difference between a teacher who is a competent teacher and one who is a competent teacher who can also control extremely challenging, at-risk, unruly kids.
Rowland Unified School district is divided by the 60 Freeway in the San Gabriel Valley. On the east side of the freeway was the barrio, the poverty and the street gangs and some middle class areas in the hills. On the west side of the freeway is a middle class community that was blue collar when I started in 75 but is now mostly Asian white collar. The west side demographics changed drastically over the years.
Teachers who were competent but did not fit on the east side of the freeway could easily be transferred to teach on the west side where they didn’t need the skills of a thick skinned, tough as nails teacher. Teaching at risk kids takes more than just being a competent teacher.
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By reform standards Mother Theresa would have been rated as highly ineffective. Far too many residents of Calcutta are still poor, undereducated, and sickly.
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Imagine how effective she would have been if only she spent her life working with the people of Beverly Hills Or East Hampton.
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NY Teacher:
Love your comment!
Obviously, Mother Theresa has failed, probably would rate only a “developing”, according to Danielson, NCLB and RTTT standards.
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Hard reality: After a decade of the No Child Left Behind Act hammering at the foundations of education, achievement in the critical areas hypothetically measured by a Common Core test have declined.
Get the “reformers” out of the way and let teachers teach.
Raise teacher pay, while we’re at it, to boost the quality of the teachers corps.
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amen
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The teachers are in the classroom …..trying to Test-Prep for the upcoming benchmarks , quarter tests, weekly tests, daily tests, and the Grand Tests…..
Your comment makes too much sense for these reformers to understand.
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That “…far too many studens will not earn a high school diploma” maybe means, and should mean, that have not earned a h.s. diploma and should not receive one. This sounds kinda like social promotion.
I think the article just glosses over the implications what those scores indicated. Yes, I know, most everyone who reads this blogs dismisses the scores for a variety of reasons.
I would be far more interested to read about exactly what these numbers mean rather than an editorial arguing, seemingly, against standardized testing per se just because the results are abysmal. Maybe they’re abysmal because a huge portion of the population isn’t receiving basic education and the scores are reflecting this.
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Keep in mind that Diane extrapolated test results from grades 3 to 8. No high school students have been subjected to CCSS graduation tests – yet.
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If you are on the front lines, especially in a lower socioeconomic districts…….. the ills of such reform and high stakes testing are evident. It’s plain and simple. It’s easy for everyone to be an armchair quarterback when you have never been a teacher.
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One thing I notice lately is the constant use of “college and career ready” in our lexicon as if this is new to public education. When “reformers” use this term to me it seems as if the ever-so-important focus on creating life-long learners passionate about life and all its curiosities is put on the back burner in a quest for creating a work-force. Creating happy life long learners passionate about life cannot be separated as if it is not connected with productivity and the workforce in society.
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The deformers continually speak as though they just discovered this or that–reading closely, asking text-dependent questions, higher-order thinking skills, reading informational texts in the content areas. It’s disgusting to listen to these know-nothings pontificate about such matters when they know so little.
I listen to David Coleman speak and I think of a story told by the guitarist Chet Atkins. He was one a cruise once, and someone had left a guitar on a lawn chair on deck. He picked it up and started playing. A small crowd gathered around. After a while, someone said, “You know, you’re pretty good on that guitar. I mean, you’re no Chet Atkins, but you’re pretty good.” Well, the deformers’s passing judgment on how others teach English is like that guy explaining to Atkins how to play the guitar.
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The entire reform movement is predicated on a set of lies that have been injected into the political discourse over the last few decades…Lies about public schools and their students, lies about charter schools an vouchers, and especially lies about the motivations behind the reforms.
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Ironically, the Common Core Standards expect that any claim stated include reasons and causes. It seems that all you are doing is claiming a lie without telling anyone what you think the lie is, and of course there is the matter of whether you have any evidence for your claim!
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Reblogged this on McBlog.
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Corporate takeover of public education and the obsession with testing and accountability are destroying education – indeed! Here is THE ULTIMATE IN BAD REPORTING… read this surprising article from NEA Magazine that tries to promote the notion that in reality teachers are satisfied these days. Hard to believe that this actually could be published and have an ounce of truth to it … and LOOK AT WHO IS PUBLISHING THIS….
http://neatoday.org/2014/02/26/wait-what-educators-highly-satisfied-with-classroom-autonomy-morale/
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Actually, did you read it? The article debunks the idea that teachers are satisfied.
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I think the whole thing is wrong. It seems that the whole accountability system is based on the false premise that if you let them be, educators will be lazy and not only that that you can’t trust the school systems to figure that out either because those folks are lazy and ineffectual too. I bet if they took a closer look almost all students who struggle with tests, struggle due to something beyond the control of the school. Sure there are rotten teachers, but I don’t think their students’ test scores is a very efficient or accurate way to identify them. I am a parent and for sure my kid has had a few teachers that have been pretty bad, in every case the administration has identified them and let them go.
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I am an advocate of peer evaluation. It is the other teachers in the building that know the most about what is going on inside the building and are the most offended by poor teaching.
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Excellent. As it should be.
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Something we agree on! Good on you, TE.
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Agree about peer evaluation.
My district ( in some schools, including the one I was in at the time), was experimenting with this.
Looking good and most were excited about it.
And then along came NCLB.
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There has been no “peer evaluation” in the NYC public schools. Evaluation is solely the prerogative of the principal; supervisors or ass’t principals observe and assess. Knowing what is going on, proving it (ironically the key issue in the CCLS), and being authorized to take action, other than forms of harassment, are contradictory. I suppose wiser older teachers “should” help younger, newer teachers but when has this been a requirement?
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In post secondary education peer evaluation is standard. A committee of the faculty make decisions on tenure and promotion as well as allocating raises ( though the real salary increases generally come if there is an outside offer or threat of an outside offer).
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Carol Burris is one of the great educators. Thank you, Carol, for actually putting students first.
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the expansion of the gap matters TE because there are real world consequences for kids. Test sores determine who is promoted. They determine who gets into the best schools in the city. They determine who gets into honors classes, gifted programs and who gets accelerated in math.
Now, I do not believe. In sorting kids by scores and in tracks, but most do. If the gaps widen, fewer students of poverty, color, ELL status and disability get less access.
TE that is the real world of testing. This is a civil rights issue and it should not be dismissed.
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Again, I am the one taking the “gap” seriously here.
It is Chris in Florida who “…challenged you (that is me) to prove that the gap was meaningful…..”. If the gap is not meaningful, lets all stop worrying about it.
I suspect that the difference between well prepared students and ill prepared students in mathematics will grow, but it will have little to do with standardized tests. It will be the result of inquisitive and gifted students having access to resources outside the classroom. It will not be possible to hold these students back anymore by restricting them to whatever curriculum they have in the school.
Let me quote from a posting by one frustrated secondary school student:
“I am still 15 years old, but I am very interested in pure math. I have been teaching myself though books, from the internet and from others for the past year or so. I haven’t mastered all the topics that are covered in university, just the ones that happen to interest me (elements of differential and integral calculus, complex analysis……
Now, a few months ago, back in school, I asked my math teacher for help on a differential calculus question whose solution I did not understand. I was told by this teacher that I should not be doing calculus and I should wait until I learn it in school. Other math teachers either did not understand what I was asking or shared the same view as my math teacher. For awhile this had distressed me very much, because some of my own math teachers were telling me to stop learning math and to wait three or four years to continue! Should I stop learning math by myself?”
Schools have lost control over learning.
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I’ll simply refer you to the answer I gave above about the misuse of the “gap” data. I have never said it doesn’t matter — I said it doesn’t matter for the reasons you assume and give it in your statements above.
And, once again, anecdotal stories about a few genius children frustrated with one particular teacher or school make nice Fox News talking points but prove nothing from a scientific viewpoint.
I could spend time on the net and find an equal number of happy genius students who share their stories about how their teacher went above and beyond the standard curriculum and helped them navigate advanced learning.
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I think you will find it much more difficult to keep sting students of mathematics happy than students who are unusually adept at, say, English language arts. A high school teacher can easily assign students to read some if the best written works in the English language, a student can potentially write a paper that might be publishable. Neither is possible in any mathematics class in the current curriculum.
I don’t think these students are all that rare, it is the opportunity to demonstrate these talents that are rare. Every year there is at least one high school junior who takes the science engineering calculus sequence at my university (two five credit hour courses). Every three or four years there is a high school student taking a graduate math course or two (one student graduated high school having taken five).
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Is this your son?
I am truly sorry for any child to have such an experience.
In my 20+ years of experience, I have never seen such. I have worked with some amazingly gifted students ( both wealthy, well connected, and not), and there has always been some resource we could find to challenge / engage the student in their area of gift.
I do agree that the current top down testing mandates and required classes hurt our best students as well as our most struggling, but that is not the fault of the school.
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No, it was an anonymous poster on an internet math site called math stack exchange. At fifteen my son was taking calculus at my local university.
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It’s not the fault of the schools, the public school teachers or their unions. The public schools are governed by a complex set of laws out of Washington DC, state capitals, local school boards and the results of law suits from across the nation all the way to the Supreme Court.
How most public schools are run through elected school boards and administration is mostly based on how much revenue they have and the local interpretation of the layers of those complex, and often confusing laws.
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TE, I don’t think your example is fair. The issue here is not calculus, it is algebra at the 9th grade level. I cannot imagine a teacher refusing a student help on a problem in algebra. Your example is an outlyer and rarely occurs. Let’s stick to real issues and not go off on tangents.
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I think it will be occurring with increasing frequency as students are made more aware of resources available on the internet.
Every three or four years a student at my local high school takes graduate courses in mathematics at my university. Multiply that by the number of high schools in the country and we are starting to get some real numbers. Fairfax county has a high school that offers the first two years years of college mathematics to their students. Multiply that by all the counties and you are starting to get some real numbers.
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TE, You said, “Now, a few months ago, back in school, I asked my math teacher for help on a differential calculus question whose solution I did not understand. I was told by this teacher that I should not be doing calculus and I should wait until I learn it in school.”
I am saying that it is disingenuous to claim that students are seeking help for calculus problems; if students are seeking help it is more likely for algebra and teachers are probably not likely to refuse to help the students. This example you site is an outlyer and would rarely occur in actuality.
I don’t think your argument is sound. Of course students can access resources on the Internet, they could even use their books!!!
You seem to claim that equalization will occur when gifted students rise to the occasion which begs the question about all the rest of students. For example, you said, “I suspect that the difference between well prepared students and ill prepared students in mathematics will grow, but it will have little to do with standardized tests. It will be the result of inquisitive and gifted students having access to resources outside the classroom. It will not be possible to hold these students back anymore by restricting them to whatever curriculum they have in the school.”
Do you really believe the issue is access to resources outside the classroom? Perhaps we need to start with the skill of ‘sit and focus’ during class. The standardized tests do not cause achievement, they measure it.
You also seem to think that curriculum is either variable or nonexistent across the state’s classroom. Everyone has the same curriculum, it is called the NYS Standards. I assume you are in NY, but all states have standards which teachers address by fashioning lessons guided by objectives obtained from the standards. Perhaps you are referring to particular classrooms or particular teachers. The issue is aggregated data from across the state, or across the nation aggregated data. Whatever is terribly awry that is causing the “gap” is probably other than access to resources or the curriculum. I suggest addressing motivational problems within schools and households to explain underachievement.
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I am far away from New York. I live in what the coastal folks talk about as a flyover state.
I am not at all claiming equalization, I am arguing exactly the opposite. The gap will grow larger as students are able to look to resources on the internet to supplement their education.The internet is more than access to materials it is access to a community outside your local schools. Take a look at the site where I pulled the quote from (http://math.stackexchange.com) and you will find a group of mathematicians and students of mathematics working together to educate each other. There are no curricular or age boundaries.
Here are some of the responses to the post by the 15 year old I quoted from
“Ignore your teachers. If you like doing it, it is not too early. Is there a college or university near you……”
“If your teachers told you not to do calculus because it’s ‘too early’ then they’re idiots. The math I’ve learned from stumbling around above my level is stuff I remember much better…..”
“Sorry to say this, but your teacher is an idiot.”
“I am also 15 years old, and I’ve been in the same trouble (what a coincidence!). My opinion is that it’s never too early (or late!) to learn things we are interested in. Absolutely no one incentives me at school, but I just ignore them…..”
“That teacher is simply not qualified to teach. He may have the math qualification…..”
” Unfortunately a lot of teachers seem to have that opinion. Also, keep in mind that – for you – almost all learning is self-learning. I think you should hire a tutor….”
“Well, to say the least I am, inspired by the question. I have turned 14 and I am studying calculus, currently exploring integrals. I must say I enjoy it, at times I do not understand, but it gradually clears up, and I love playing….I cannot take advantage of an university, we do not have such a system here in India. Getting the books are also difficult, for example Spivak is just not published here, so you have to get it at astronomical prices, which I cannot afford…However in response, I have learnt to make efficient use of the internet, this site, Khan Academy, university pages, among others, which have helped me a lot. Overall, I feel I quite content with what I am doing with no real problems discouraging me. :)”
“I always wanted to say this, but haven’t gathered the courage to speak this up myself. Seeing @Michael’s comment above, I think I can do this now. The teacher is an idiot, and has no qualification to teach math. The one who taught me math a couple of years ago was physical education teacher. Mathematics is not meant for idiots…”
“I was recently in a similar situation. After finishing precalculus at my high school, when I was 15 I started taking calculus at my local university and studying higher mathematics on my own (out of the book “Modern Algebra: An Introduction” by John Durbin, which in retrospect seems laughably basic but at the time blew my mind). Three years later, I can say without a doubt that it is the best decision I’ve ever made. I ended up learning mathematics through a combination of taking classes at university, talking with students/professors, reading textbooks, and using this site.”
“There is no reason to delay looking at whatever you want to look at. For that matter, I would say that you have no obligation to “systematically” read anything, or do exercises, unless you want to. In the U.S., not only is the high school math curriculum stultifying and anachronistic, but also most of the undergrad curriculum is the same. In particular, I’d recommend not being toooo trusting of “standard textbooks”….”
These people have all found each other and encourage each other to excel in ways that would not be possible without the ability to communicate on the internet.
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TE, You are not understanding the problem. You said, “I suspect that the difference between well prepared students and ill prepared students in mathematics will grow, but it will have little to do with standardized tests. It will be the result of inquisitive and gifted students having access to resources outside the classroom. It will not be possible to hold these students back anymore by restricting them to whatever curriculum they have in the school.”
I then asked you what about all of the other students than these few gifted students. You then responded by claiming that teachers are lousy, the gym teacher was helping you with calculus and other such nonsense.
The issue absolutely is equalization which is the opposite of the “gap.” If you want to insist that school boards and their revenue are driving curriculum and testing and denying the State Education Departments that administers the curriculum, the licensing, the evaluation etc etc, then you will fail to be on point with this issue of the “gap.”
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Wow, what an appalling answer was given that kid!!! That’s really shocking, TE. Kids like that are the dream, what we should all be striving for.
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I know of not one math teacher who would have discouraged this student from learning Calculus in the tenth grade or the first grade for that matter …if the child chose to do so.
Not one
I can not imagine this being a truthful post.
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I don’t think there is any doubt about the truthfulness of the post. If you look at the responses to the students post no one expressed surprise at the teacher’s response. I think most of those that posted (the posters on that site are a mix of current and retired post secondary faculty, graduate and undergraduate students of mathematics, enthusiasts, and talented high school students) . I think that the validity of the post was never questioned because the story was consistent with their experience in K-12 education.
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I absolutely disagree. Teachers do not respond like that. Teachers would normally take up the students query and find out what it was about and if they could not answer it on the spot would get back to them at another time. The problem is that students do not ask questions. I completely disagree with your notion or those particular students’ statements. Perhaps they had one experience with one teacher, but generally teachers address serious questions.
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This student clearly asked the question. None of the others that commented on the post expressed any doubt about the story. Several said they experienced the same treatment. It rang true to the participants on that site because it was a common experience.
My middle son goes to a highly selective university and tends to hang out with the math folks there. He reports that all of them were basically miserable in their high school. It was good to know he was not the only one.
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HA, if your story were true why did n’t you go to the school and ask why? I’ll bet the story will prove different when both sides are heard. I think your story of “miserable” students who can’t find anyone to answer their “”calculus”” questions is hogwash. I doubt that they even know what calculus is – the story is unbelievable and just because no one objected is no evidence of its veracity. AND, my post was a second to another post that found your story questionable.
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Absolutely, it’s a civil rights issue. It’s a bit murkier in h.s., but definitely if there’s a problem earlier on it should be fixed. isn’t that the intent of NCLB? I would naively assume that a standardized test here and there would have some utility, but I’m sure a chorus will reply “no standardized testing.”
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Testing is only beneficial for a teacher using a test to measure the learning that takes place from their teaching and then use that info to adjust accordingly—if more teaching and learning is required.
Using a standardized bubble test once or twice a year to measure teaching through what students learned or remember at any given moment is absurd at best because there are far too many variables that a standardized test does not take into consideration and may be incapable of measuring.
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Testing can also be helpful to a student by giving an independent view of the students academic ability. This is especially important for boys who tend to be graded down due to comportment issues.
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think its illegal to grade a boy or any student for behavior. At least that’s what we were told more than once when I was still teaching.
Has the law changed there too? Are teachers grading kids down due to disruptive behavior? I don’t approve of that at all.
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My middle son would have received a higher grade for the semester had he brought in two Kleenex boxes. In my state teachers have wide leeway.
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In California that would be a big credential busting No-No if a teacher got caught marking a child’s grade down for not bringing in two boxes of Kleenex.
I don’t agree with that at all. A child’s grade for an academic class should be based only on their school work. What class was it for? If it was an art class and the Kleenex was needed for an art project, then that might be okay. But academic, no.
Oh well, the only thing you can do about a law or legislation you think is unjust is see if you can get it changed in the courts or through legislation.
We live in a democracy where that option does exist.
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Not marking Dow, it is marking up. Ends up having the same impact though.
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It wasn’t extra credit of any kind was it?
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Indeed it was extra credit. Allowed in California?
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As extra credit, yes, as long as it’s only added on after the regular grade is computed based on classwork, homework tests and quizzes—the mandatory work every student must do to earn a grade.
For instance, if we say the grade is based on 100% of classwork, homework and maybe a quiz or two, and the student earns credit for 82% of that work for a B-, then we add in the extra credit for whatever—not being tardy to class, participation in discussions, doing an extra credit report or essay, bringing a box of tissue to class, etc.
Lets say that by the end of a semester there might be enough extra credit to boost the semester grade an additional 25% beyond the grade earned from mandatory work.
But the student with the B- only earns 10% from that 25% of extra credit. Once we add in the 10%, the grade jumps to 92% and it becomes an A-.
In the same class, I’ve had kids with a 0% average because they didn’t do anything but warm a seat no matter how many times I called the parents and mailed a certified failure warning notice home (if we didn’t do this, we couldn’t fail them) and another kid with 125% average because they did it all including every scrap of extra credit—most of the extra credit in my class was an extra book report (it was mandatory to do one book report a month from a book that I had to approve but the student selected), a review of the semester school play and essays—all totally voluntary.
I actually had one girl who was running a 128% average two weeks before the semester final and when she earned an A- on a minor assignment, she came unglued in tears that she was going to lose her A. It took me ten minuted to calm her down and prove to her that there was not way she’d lose her A+.
It turned out that her allowance came from her grades. And she earned the most from an A+ for each class. I’m talking about big money here. She could earn a couple of thousand for one report card and she’d already done the research and priced everything she wanted to buy. She had a shopping list.
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TE
Those Kleenex Rectangular Prisms would be torn apart in my classroom. I am already thinking about 250 activities I could use them for…
Once your child got through all of them, you would be demanding a grade for all of the work….. and ……your child would have learned so much math!
Oh Wait…I forgot..that is not in the script. …
Unless you can find Pearson Kleenex Boxes.. I am not allowed to use them..
Get out your I-Pad children and we shall go to the P-3D website for today’s lesson…aw heck..I forgot to recharge them…
OK..let’s pick up one of those Balance of the Smartest Problems..Find the volume of your book bag ..
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Before NCLB was implemented, NYS required students to pass 5 Regents exams to graduate. Before that NYS reform, students had to pass 5 RCT’s (Regents Competency Tests) which are easier than Regents Exams. NCLB did not affect NYS testing requirements because NYS had already reset their requirements. You may recall that at first a score of 55 passed until one-by-one the requirement for each test was pushed up to 65. The Regents Exams have not yet been infused with CCLS problems, and now with the 3 year retreat, that will not happen until the Regents Exams in 2017! During the time period between the acceptance of RCT’s and the reinstitution of Regents Exams for graduation, research indicated that students’ weaknesses were primarily cognitive and involved both rate of comprehension and writing skills. The CCLS includes the requirement of ‘claim language’ accompanied by statements of reasoning, evidence and causality, and counterfactual rebuttals regardless of whether the ‘data’ comes from inquiry or texts. I can tell immediately whether a person commenting on the CCLS has an inkling of these standards simply by whether they use claim language.
Ravitch complains about the “gap” which is caused by a complex of multiple factors, e.g. housing, peer influence, prior educational contexts, school climate, etc. Ravitch also states that student achievement should be measured by their grades but grading is notoriously relativistic. Even if student grades were based on classroom tests, we would be discussing the validity of testing all over again. If a student can explain (another key CCLS and NYS Standards term) the solution to a problem, odds are that the student can also answer a standardized test question correctly. What seems to have occurred is that a certain sector of teachers and researchers have gathered together to complain about the notion of ‘argumentation’ as inappropriate to the curriculum, perhaps they would prefer that we teach the students to learn to complain?
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What seems to have occurred?????????????????
How many years have you taught?
What grade level?
What subject(s)
Read on Fred..Read on…
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To Neanderthal100, I said, “What seems to have occurred is that a certain sector of teachers and researchers have gathered together to complain about the notion of ‘argumentation’ as inappropriate to the curriculum, perhaps they would prefer that we teach the students to learn to complain?” And you complained – HAHAHA
You then present ad hominem related questions as if you don’t get the message. Answer the question rookie.
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“perhaps they would prefer that we teach the students to learn to complain”
Actually, that’s not a bad idea.
If kids learned how to writer a proper, well researched, balanced Op-Ed piece, which is nothing but a skilled, organized complaint (or argument/opinion), then they’d be better prepared to identify charlatans like the robber barons and wolves of Sesame Street.
They would also be taught and learn how to identify logical fallacies:
Hasty Generalizations
Faulty Use of Authority
Doubtful Cause
False Analogy
Ad Hominem
False Dilemma
Slippery Slope
Begging the Question
Straw Man
Two Wrongs Make a Right
Non Sequitur
Ad Populum
Appeal to Tradition
Fault Emotional Appeals
If we were to check off the logical fallacies used by the robber barons and wolves of Sesame Street, how many in the above list would be checked?
What a field day the kids would have to complain about the movement to privatize education.
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If you had taken up the issue related to the Common Core, that is, curricula related to learning how to argue, then I would approve of your post. But, instead, you presented a list of fallacies which are pertinent to learning how to argue, and contextualized them as complaining. It is irresponsible to advocate teaching students to whine and complain. I think you are being sarcastic, it feels good, but it is a useless passion. Besides, the students already know how to complain; what they lack is the ability to comprehend and argue by presenting reason backed claims.
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Can’t argue with this: “Besides, the students already know how to complain.”
But why not take that (for want of a better term) and teach them how to turn complaints into supportable (and arguable) opinions?
And along the way teach them about the logical fallacies so they will avoid them and recognize them when used by someone else.
If more Americans recognized the use of logical fallacies by the critics of public education, the robber barons and wolves of Sesame Street wouldn’t be succeeding in their war against teachers.
Common Core Standards are used by other countries.
Singapore and China are two good examples of countries with rigorous standards. Each has a strong early focus on math and science. Singapore also ensures students have a strong foundation in world languages. In both countries, teachers receive strong subject-matter preparation and continuing professional development opportunities.
For instance, In most, but not all high-performing countries, a central curriculum accompanies the standards. This helps to ensure consistency in teacher training and implementation. For instance, Australia has recently developed national standards and curriculum, along with a range of resources available online to support implementation.
Along with standards and curriculum, the third leg of the stool for creating high expectations for student learning is rigorous assessments. The form assessments take vary widely in high-performing countries: from Finland, which primarily uses school-based assessments with periodic sample testing from the national level, to South Korea, which famously places all emphasis on the end-of-school exam. Increasingly, the leading education systems are creating opportunities for more open-ended and performance-based assessments to provide students more authentic ways of demonstrating mastery of disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge and skills.
http://asiasociety.org/education/learning-world/global-roots-common-core-state-standards
I taught in California for thirty years (1975 0 2005) and for most of that time teachers were guided by a very detailed state curriculum for each grade level. In fact, we had department meetings and as teachers decided what to teach to meet those state goals and how to teach it.
There were no annual tests starting in kindergarten. Instead of learning from the success of other countries, the US has reinvented the wheel and asked people who have little to know experience in the classroom to come up with these endless bubble tests.
If that wasn’t bad enough, then they say 100% of students must be successful or the teacher is incompetent and they need to be fired and the schools closed when too many students don’t score high on those bubble tests.
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“How will our society prepare for the huge failure rates that the Common Core seems sure to generate?”
The number of prisons that need to be built in the future are based upon 3rd grade reading scores. Considering states are cutting early reading programs, I suspect our society will build more prisons. If both schools and prisons are privatized, it is possible for someone to generate a profit either way, more money to made with prisons anyway.
We already throw 1/3 of our black males into jail at some point in their lives and then they lose their right to vote forever. I suppose it works out great for those you want to keep them in their place. Carrying around handguns helps keep them in their place too.
Historians will one day look back and say that this was the time when America descended into fascism, complete with the elimination of the educated class and the rise of the black concentration camps. Heaven help us.
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It’s too late, the private prison industry is already here making the school to prison pipeline a reality:
The ACLU reports, “This report finds, however, that mass incarceration provides a gigantic windfall for one special interest group—the private prison industry—even as current incarceration levels harm the country as a whole.
“Over the past four decades, imprisonment in the United States has increased explosively, spurred by criminal laws that put more people in prison for longer sentences. At the same time, the nation has seen the rise of for-profit prison companies, which benefit from keeping more people locked up.”
What is the private prison industry worth: “For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold. They don’t have to worry about strikes or paying unemployment insurance, vacations or comp time. All of their workers are full-time, and never arrive late or are absent because of family problems; moreover, if they don’t like the pay of 25 cents an hour and refuse to work, they are locked up in isolation cells.
The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners’ work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself,” says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being “an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps.”
The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. “This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors.”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united-states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery/8289
After they are done destroying the public schools so only the most difficult and challenging kids are held there waiting for prison, the job will be done.
This is what America inherited when Reagan launched the privatization movement. Before Reagan, healthcare in the US was all nonprofit.
They are also working at privatizing the military and then special forces in the private sector will have a license to murder and maim without worry of going to prison.
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There is no necessary relation between curricula and prison, please get head out of sand.
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Head not in sand. Where did I say that there was a link between curriculum and prison? I didn’t.
There is a strongly arguable link from poverty to prison and/or illiteracy to prison. And a curriculum based on memory based tests used to fail kids will quickly become a third pipeline to prison reinforcing the first two.
Most kids from poverty already start out behind and they will not catch up because the Congress and President pass a law that says they have to or else we’ll fire your teachers and close your schools to punish you.
“As evidence, they cite recent surveys indicating children of prisoners are more likely to live in poverty, to end up on welfare, and to suffer the sorts of serious emotional problems that tend to make holding down jobs more difficult.”
The Common Core out of Washington DC as it is being crammed down the throats of the public schools is a disaster in the making.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2010/10/toxic_persons.html
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Firstly, the Slate article addresses not only a poverty-to-prison problem but also a prison-to-poverty cycle. The ex-con returns to their ‘home’ reproduces and remains unemployable or as I figure it just doesn’t want to work. The reproduction of children by ex-cons who fail to provide is a problem. Their children do not have the necessary resources to compete with their peers. All poor people are not in prison!!!
Anyway, none of this is relevant to curricula. The Slate article was considering data from 1980-2008 which showed that students who dropped out were more and more likely to become incarcerated. Oh, and the crime rate dropped precipitously. Seems apropo. I actually approve of DA’s who are strict because that might mean that my child or the children around me are not exposed to drugs and guns.
But, you got carried away with the notion that testing and the CCLS are evil and villainous. Testing is relevant and simply measures the results of the learning experiences. CCLS is relevant because it requires teachers to teach and students to learn how to argue by providing reasons and evidence to back up their claims to stop making emotional assertions. There is no connection between the curricula and the crime rate. AND, the government is not cramming it down our throats, they are simply expecting you to read it. Have you even read it yet??? On the off-chance that you study it, you might actually find somethings worthwhile in it to incorporate into your lessons.
All this hoopla about teaching to the test. So what? Why not consider the possible contents of future tests when learning something, it might help you to focus. What are we doing: learning knowledge with no expectation of demonstrating comprehension? What is at issue is the quality and validity of the day-to-day learning experiences.
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Teaching to the test doesn’t work. There are better methods—proven methods. Instead of pontificating as you do, I’ll let others prove my point:
The second thing happened in the 1980s: Finland abolished standardized tests. Instead of test-based accountability in schools, the country—because of the high quality of its teaching force—had a trust-based system to allow teachers a certain freedom to teach with creativity. Students, too, had autonomy to learn in different ways.
http://asiasociety.org/education/learning-world/what-accounts-finlands-high-student-achievement-rate
Countries that give schools autonomy over curricula and student assessments often perform better. This finding is orthogonal to the basic premise of GERM that assumes that externally set teaching standards and aligned standardized testing are preconditions for success. PISA shows how success is often associated with balanced professional autonomy with a collaborative culture in schools. Evidence also shows how high performing education systems engage teachers to set their own teaching and learning targets, to craft productive learning environments, and to design multiple forms student assessments to best support student learning and school improvement.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/08/pisa-education-test-scores-meaning
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It is ridiculous and paranoid to claim that the CCLS will lead to imprisonment. Complete nonsense. If you had even read the CCLS, you would know that the point is to give reasons and evidence that support your claim, not make wild assertions.
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You do realize that you are ignoring the evidence that refutes your claim regarding the wonders of CC. Twelve years of NCLB failure and now you see the solution is to just make the tests harder. Threats, punishment, coercion, and humiliation cannot be the guiding principles or cornerstone of any education reform. Got that rookie.
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Not only ignoring the failure but also ignoring what successful countries are doing and they are not testing their kids to death; firing teachers and closing schools.
In fact, the exact opposite is happening.
In Finland, learning goals focus on “21st century citizen skills, including problem-solving, teamwork and entrepreneurship skills, participation and initiative.” And in the European Union, there is a focus on innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, self-direction, and motivation.
http://asiasociety.org/education/learning-world/global-roots-common-core-state-standards
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What evidence? The reform of education is merely represented by NCLB. Educational reform is neveending, it is a part of the institution of education. If you had read the post I clearly stated that NYS had already implemented the Regents Exam standardized testing years before NCLB was institutionalized. Anyway, there is nothing wrong with the NCLB policy. Why are teachers whining and protesting what is obviously sensible?
But your claim, or your apology of it, that there is evidence that CCLS is a causal factor leading to imprisonment is completely irrational. Also, your gloss on supervision and administration is a direct response to noncompliance and denial of duty. Governmental policy has the force of law, and you are rejecting it. Perhaps if teachers were imprisoned for the harassment of other teachers who do comply with the law, the NCLB, your point would have substance. But its face is irrational. Bone up on some facts!!
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CCLS itself is not setting up a pipeline for prisons, but the politicians in the southern states taking instructions from ALEC are.
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If 12 years of NCLB failure was so “obviously sensible” why don’t you enlighten us with some facts.
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You made the claim of its failure, so you provide the evidence. I don’t think it was a failure. It required all teachers to obtain a Masters Degree, it required teachers to teach only in their subject areas, and it required students to be accounted for when they quit or dropped out. The drop out rate, er, graduation rate improved at least 20% in NYC. My experience in my school was that graduation rates improved over 60% because of the concerted effort by faculty/counselours/administrators to get students to do the work, attend!, to graduate.
So your perceptions, whatever they are, you gave no evidence, contradict mine, I gave some evidence.
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The Common Core itself is not related to the pipeline to prisons. But North Carolina is definitely finding small reasons to give black kids a criminal record.
Read how they handcuffed a mild-mannered black kid for cutting in the lunch line and how he ended up with a nine month probation.
http://www.dignityinschools.org/news/teen-handcuffed-cutting-line-school-cafeteria-complaint
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The thing that kills me is that the potential is so great:
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/5-year-olds-can-learn-calculus/284124/
I don’t have a blog, so I put this up here. Anyhow.
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Correction: I meant GPA not PGA.
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