Archives for the month of: March, 2014
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Texas: Parents Opt Their Child Out of Testing and Test Prep

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2014 //
23

Kyle and Jennifer Massey in Waco, Texas, wrote a respectful letter to their child’s principal explaining why they would not permit him to take the state STAAR tests or to engage in test prep for STAAR testing. As his parents, they care more about their child than the Legislature or Governor Perry or Pearson. They clearly, in this instance, know more than the legislators who are influenced by lobbyists to keep piling on more testing without regard to the best interests of children or our society. They want for their child what “the best and wisest parent ” wants for his own children: a full, rich, creative, liberating education, one that prepares him for life in a democracy, not endless drill and practice for tests that are prepared thousands of miles away, whose sole purpose is to rate their child, his teachers, his principal, and his school.

The Masseys write:

“This letter is to respectfully inform you that our fourth grade child XXXXXX will need to be excused
from all mandated standardized testing (e.g. STAAR test) during the remainder of the school year. This is also
to include classroom activities that are intended as STAAR test preparation, such as practice tests and test-
taking training exercises. As we are morally and ethically opposed to these school activities, we are making this
decision with recognition of our parental rights and obligations under the due process clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment of the United States Constitution and the Texas Education Code (Title 2, Subtitle E, “Students and
Parents, Section 26, “Parental Rights and Responsibilities”).

“We maintain that it is our parental right to choose to opt our children out of school activities that are harmful to
children as stated in the Texas Education Code CHAPTER 26. PARENTAL RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES
Sec. A26.010.EXEMPTION FROM INSTRUCTION. A parent is entitled to remove the parent’s child
temporarily from a class or other school activity that conflicts with the parent’s religious or moral beliefs if the
parent presents or delivers to the teacher of the parent’s child a written statement authorizing the removal of
the child from the class or other school activity. Please consider this letter to be our written statement of
authorization.

“We want our children to become critical and creative thinkers, not subservient test-takers.
We do not want XXX or his teachers shackled to a faulty testing product such as the STAAR test, or any standardized test for that matter. High-stakes standardized testing is not the education experience we want for our children, and thus we are choosing to opt XXXX out of all STAAR testing activities.

“Public education in this country has been the victim of thirty years’ worth of neoliberal hegemonic attacks in the form of political and
economic policies. These corporate attacks have negatively altered the structures, pedagogical practices, and
intended democratic goals of public education. As we reflect on the intended goals of public schools in a liberal
democracy – to prepare citizens for active civic participation, and indeed for global citizenship, for example –
we believe it is morally wrong to put children through the ordeal of standardized testing which has no benefit to
their personal education or development as citizens.

“The following summarizes some of our reasons for our belief that the practice of high stakes standardized
testing is morally wrong:

“AFFECTS SOCIO-EMOTIONAL WELL-BEING: This system of constant testing seems designed to
produce anxiety and depression. Evidence has accumulated over the last few decades of the
detrimental effect of frequent testing on students’ enjoyment of school, their
willingness to learn, other than for the purpose of passing tests or examinations, and their understanding of the process of
learning. A well-documented direct impact of testing regimes is that they induce test anxiety in young
learners and that perceived low scores negatively affect students’ self-esteem and perceptions of
themselves as learners. Any negative impact on motivation for learning is clearly highly undesirable,
particularly at a time in a young person’s life when the importance of learning to learn and lifelong
learning is widely embraced.

“KILLS CURIOSITY AND LOVE OF LEARNING: High-stakes standardized testing actually limits and
reduces the amount of QUALITY learning experiences. Rather than focusing on a child’s natural curiosity, testing emphasizes (and drills in) isolated facts limiting teacher’s ability to create
environments that stimulate a child’s imagination.

“REDUCES A CHILD’S CAPACITY FOR ATTAINING NEW KNOWLEDGE: If children cannot actively
make connections between different topics of study, they don’t remember what they learn from day to
day. Most standardized tests are still based on the recall of isolated facts and narrow skills.

“REPLACES HIGHER ORDER THINKING WITH SKILL, DRILL AND KILL: Most tests include many
topics that are not important, while many important areas are not included on standardized tests
because they cannot be measured by such tests. Teaching to the test does not produce real and
sustained gains on independent learning measures.

“NARROWS THE CURRICULUM: The loss of a rich curriculum has been documented in research and
in teacher testimony. The use of high-stakes tests is universally found to be associated with teachers
focusing on the content of the tests, administering repeated practice tests, training students in the
answers to specific questions or types of question, and adopting transmission styles of teaching. In
such circumstances teachers make little use of assessment formatively to help the learning process.
High-stakes tests are inevitably designed to be as ‘objective’ as possible, since there is a premium on
reliable marking in the interests of fairness. This has the effect of reducing what is assessed to what
can be readily and reliably marked. Generally this excludes many worthwhile outcomes of education
such as problem-solving and critical thinking.

“REDUCES SOCIALIZATION AS A CENTRAL CORE OF LEARING: The reduction of opportunities to
learn to socialize through and collaborative classroom activities reduces children’s opportunities to
develop healthy social skills. Being seated alone at a desk taking a test all day, or for a significant
portion of the day, isolates children from learning how to develop community-based problem solving
skills they will need as adults.

“WASTES VALUABLE EDUCATIONAL TIME SPENT TAKING TESTS: Texas Public Schools will
spend one of every five days or nearly 20% of the school year conducting tests. According to the
Texas Education Agency, Texas public schools will spend 34 out of the 185 day long year conducting
tests mandated by the state government. This does not include the regular testing in schools such as
six-weeks tests, quizzes, and final exams.

“VIOLATES ALL CHILDRENS’ RIGHTS TO A FREE AND APPROPRIATE EDUCATION: High-stakes
testing leads to under-serving or mis-serving all students, especially the most needy and vulnerable,
thereby violating the principle of ‘do no harm’. For example, students living in poverty, who already lack
critical access to books and free reading, are condemned to test prep instead of having opportunities
to read. Monies desperately needed for vital school resources such as clean drinking water, supplies
and roofs that don’t leak are being spent on testing materials. Texas spends $44 billion per year on
public education, of that $1 billion is spent just on testing days!

“LIMITS THE EDUCATION DECISION-MAKING POWER OF COMMUNITIES: Largely though
standardized testing, neoliberal reforms have transferred the control of schools away from the local
school boards, where control has resided since the founding of public schools, to the state and federal
levels, which create policies about which communities have little input but are mandated to implement.
States and the federal government have managed to gain control in part by adopting a discourse of
civil rights and equity, and by not imposing specific curricula on schools but, instead, leaving it to the
local school districts to implement curricular policies to achieve the test score goals, what can be
described as steering from a distance. In this way, the state and federal governments are able to take
credit for whatever perceived improvements result from their policies, and, conversely, whenever their
policies produce negative results, they can blame someone else, usually teachers. Teachers have
suffered the brunt of the blame since the publication of a Nation at Risk (1983) thirty years ago.
Consequently, the negative portrayal of public school teachers in the USA has demoralized many
educators.”

There is more. Go to the link and read the letter.

Categories Parents, Testing, Texas

Breaking News! Taxpayers Will Pay $1 Billion for Vouchers to Private, Religious Schools This Year

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2014 //
39

Stephanie Simon at Politico.com here documents the spread of the voucher movement, which shifts $1 billion away from the nation’s public schools to private and religious schools.

Hundreds of these schools teach creationism as written in the Bible and teach other subjects, including history and even mathematics, from a religious and dogmatic perspective.

She writes:

Taxpayers in 14 states will bankroll nearly $1 billion this year in tuition for private schools, including hundreds of religious schools that teach Earth is less than 10,000 years old, Adam and Eve strolled the garden with dinosaurs, and much of modern biology, geology and cosmology is a web of lies.

Now a major push to expand these voucher programs is under way from Alaska to New York, a development that seems certain to sharply increase the investment.

Public debate about science education tends to center on bills like one in Missouri, which would allow public school parents to pull their kids from science class whenever the topic of evolution comes up. But the more striking shift in public policy has flown largely under the radar, as a well-funded political campaign has pushed to open the spigot for tax dollars to flow to private schools. Among them are Bible-based schools that train students to reject and rebut the cornerstones of modern science.

This is what might be called 12th century STEM education.

Simon adds:

Decades of litigation have established that public schools cannot teach creationism or intelligent design. But private schools receiving public subsidies can — and do. A POLITICO review of hundreds of pages of course outlines, textbooks and school websites found that many of these faith-based schools go beyond teaching the biblical story of the six days of creation as literal fact. Their course materials nurture disdain of the secular world, distrust of momentous discoveries and hostility toward mainstream scientists. They often distort basic facts about the scientific method — teaching, for instance, that theories such as evolution are by definition highly speculative because they haven’t been elevated to the status of “scientific law.”

And this approach isn’t confined to high school biology class; it is typically threaded through all grades and all subjects.

One set of books popular in Christian schools calls evolution “a wicked and vain philosophy.” Another derides “modern math theorists” who fail to view mathematics as absolute laws ordained by God.

Please read the entire article. What it demonstrates is the wisdom of separation of church and state. Sending public dollars to religious schools does not improve education. It sets back education by a millenium, at least.

The kids attending these schools will enter college–if they enter college–unprepared for modern studies. They will not be the scientists, engineers, technicians, and mathematicians prepared for the 21st century. Nor will they have the critical thinking needed to parse the political propaganda of our times.

This is an ideological crusade that has no relationship to improving education.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/education-creationism-104934.html#ixzz2wtCzciDF

Categories Education Reform

With VAM: All Teachers of the Gifted Are “Bad” Teachers

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2014 //
41

In this age of value-added measurement, when teachers are judged by the rise or fall of their students’ test scores, it is very dangerous to teach gifted classes. Their scores are already at the top, and they have nowhere to go, so the teacher will get a low rating. It is also dangerous to teach English language learners, students with disabilities, and troubled youth. Their scores will not go up as much as the kids in affluent districts who have no issues.

Here is what happened to one teacher of gifted students:

“As a teacher of gifted students in Florida, I can attest to the fact that you are more likely to get slammed by VAM. I was rated the worst teacher at my school, the 14th worst teacher in my district, and the 146th worst teacher in the state of Florida (out of 120,000). Previously, I had a great reputation at my school among staff, parents, and students. Now that these scores have been published on the internet, I fear that future students, parents and administrators might be influenced by my extremely negative VAM ranking. Even if they aren’t, I have to worry about being slammed by VAM two years in a row, being rated “needs improvement”, losing my job and having my teaching license revoked by the state. Funny, just two years ago I was selected to be a mentor teacher by my district in the subject that I teach. Now I’m at risk of losing my career based on VAM results of a subject I don’t teach. Thanks a lot Arne. http://kafkateach.wordpress.com/2014/03/01/gosh-damn-thats-a-bad-vam/”

Categories Florida, Teacher Evaluations

Jeff Bryant: The New Extremist Attack on Democracy

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2014 //
23

Jeff Bryant here
describes the rise of an anti-democratic worldview that
threatens not only public education but democracy itself.

 

Under the fraudulent guise of “education reform,” extremists seek to
destroy public education and turn it over to private entrepreneurs.
They trust the marketplace, not the public. They are true believers
in the doctrines of free-market economist Milton Friedman, not
those of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Horace Mann.

 

He quotes an Ohio legislator who says that public schools–which are a
cornerstone of our democracy–are “socialist.” If so, then we have
been a “socialist” nation for over 150 years. At least 90% of our
population was educated in those “socialist” schools and created
the greatest, most powerful nation in the world.

 

Then he quotes the founder of Netflix, Reed Hastings, who longs to see an end to
locally elected school boards, to be replaced by privately managed
charters. Democracy, Hastings seems to think, is too inefficient,
too messy. Are there enough billionaires like Hastings to run the
nation’s schools? Why do these people have such contempt for
democracy? Why do they like to replace democratic control with
mayoral control, governor control, anything but elected school
boards? Several districts in New Jersey have been under state
control for 20 years, with no results. Mayoral control has done
nothing for Cleveland or Chicago other than to increase
undemocratic decision making.

 

Bryant concludes: “The idea of democratic governance of schools as a principal means for ensuring
the quality of schools has never worked perfectly for sure. “It’s
true that too few people bother to vote in school board elections.
The electoral system is often prone to manipulation from powerful
individuals and self-interested groups. Elected boards are often
overly contentious to the point of dysfunction. And the country’s
history is replete with examples of local boards that perpetuated
widespread mistreatment of minorities to the point where outside
intervention was necessary. “But where else has democratic
governance achieved perfection? There are democratic solutions to
these problems: Do more to increase voter education and turnout,
limit the influence of money and factional interests, and ensure
checks and balances from outside authorities that are also
democratically elected. “If we want to give ordinary people more of
a voice in determining the education destinies of their children
and their communities, the solution is more democracy, not
less.”

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, New Orleans, New York City, Privatization, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

SAT, ACT Sued for Selling Student Data

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2014 //
9

A lawsuit
was filed against the SAT and ACT for selling
confidential data of students to colleges. Some states mandate that
all students must take one of these tests, whether they are college
bound or not. Students assume that their names and scores will be
shared with colleges to which they apply, but it turns out that far
more is disclosed about students, and it is sold, not just shared.
It appears that ACT and SAT are in the data-mining business for
their own gain. A lawsuit filed this week contends
that the College Board, which runs the SAT,
and ACT,
Inc., sell identifying information
about the hundreds of thousands of teenagers who take the exams
each year without the students’
consent. The test
companies are “masking the sale” of personal details about the
students “under the
guise of ‘sharing'” the teens’
information with other
agencies, the suit says. It says
the companies don’t disclose to students that their
personal information will be sold for profit.
The companies collect data from test-takers, then sell
the teenagers’ names and personal details to colleges. The
universities use the information to market themselves to potential
students. Across the country, more
than 1.6 million students in this
year’s high school graduating class — including 101,368 in
Pennsylvania and 83,489 in New Jersey — took the
SAT. Nearly 1.8 million graduating high
school students — including 26,171 in Pennsylvania
and 24,202 in New Jersey — took the
ACT. The lawsuit says the companies
collect details about those students — such as their
names, home addresses, birth dates,
phone numbers and social security
numbers — and sell it at a price of 33
cents per student, per buyer, but “at no time disclosed” to
test-takers that their information would be sold “to third parties
for monetary gain.” On its
website, the College Board tells students it provides
information to educational organizations “looking for students like
you” but says the students’ scores, Social Security numbers and
phone numbers aren’t given to other parties.
Last month, the College Board increased
its fees for student information to
37 cents per name; the ACT now charges 38 centsper
name.

Categories Privacy and Privacy Rights, Testing

The Fatal Flaw of the Common Core Standards

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2014 //
67

Across the nation, parents and educators are raising objections to the Common Core standards, and many states are reconsidering whether to abandon them as well as the federally-funded tests that accompany them. Arne Duncan, Jeb Bush, Bill Gates, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Business Roundtable vocally support them, yet the unease continues and pushback remains intense.

Why so much controversy?

The complaints are coming from all sides: from Tea Party activists who worry about a federal takeover of education and from educators, parents, and progressives who believe that the Common Core will standardize instruction and eliminate creativity in their classrooms.

But there is a more compelling reason to object to the Common Core standards.

They were written in a manner that violates the nationally and international recognized process for writing standards. The process by which they were created was so fundamentally flawed that these “standards” should have no legitimacy.

Setting national academic standards is not something done in stealth by a small group of people, funded by one source, and imposed by the lure of a federal grant in a time of austerity.

There is a recognized protocol for writing standards, and the Common Core standards failed to comply with that protocol.

In the United States, the principles of standard-setting have been clearly spelled out by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

On its website ANSI describes how standards should be developed in every field. The American National Standards Institute

“has served in its capacity as administrator and coordinator of the
United States private sector voluntary standardization system for
more than 90 years. Founded in 1918 by five engineering societies
and three government agencies, the Institute remains a private,
nonprofit membership organization supported by a diverse
constituency of private and public sector organizations.

“Throughout its history, ANSI has maintained as its
primary goal the enhancement of global competitiveness of U.S.
business and the American quality of life by promoting and
facilitating voluntary consensus standards and conformity
assessment systems and promoting their integrity. The Institute
represents the interests of its nearly 1,000 company, organization,
government agency, institutional and international members through
its office in New York City, and its headquarters in
Washington, D.C.”

ANSI’s fundamental principles of standard-setting are transparency, balance, consensus, and due process, including a right to appeal by interested parties. According to ANSI, there are currently more than 10,000 American national standards, covering a broad range of activities.

The Common Core standards were not written in conformity with the ANSI standard-setting process that is broadly recognized across every field of endeavor.

If the Common Core standards applied to ANSI for recognition, they would be rejected because the process of writing the standards was so deeply flawed and did not adhere to the “ANSI Essential Requirements.”

ANSI states that “Due process is the key to ensuring that ANSs are developed in an environment that is equitable, accessible and responsive to the requirements of various stakeholders. The open and fair ANS process ensures that all interested and affected parties have an opportunity to participate in a standard’s development. It also serves and protects the public interest since standards developers accredited by ANSI must meet the Institute’s requirements for openness, balance, consensus and other due process safeguards.”

The Common Core standards cannot be considered standards when judged by the ANSI requirements. According to ANSI, the process of setting standards must be transparent, must involve all interested parties, must not be dominated by a single interest, and must include a process for appeal and revision.

The Common Core standards were not developed in a transparent manner. The standard-setting and writing of the standards included a significant number of people from the testing industry, but did not include a significant number of experienced teachers, subject-matter experts, and other educators from the outset, nor did it engage other informed and concerned interests, such as early childhood educators and educators of children with disabilities. There was no consensus process. The standards were written in 2009 and adopted in 2010 by 45 states and the District of Columbia as a condition of eligibility to compete for $4.3 billion in Race to the Top funding. The process was dominated from start to finish by the Gates Foundation, which funded the standard-setting process. There was no process for appeal or revision, and there is still no process for appeal or revision.

The reason to oppose the Common Core is not because of their content, some of which is good, some of which is problematic, some of which needs revision (but there is no process for appeal or revision).

The reason to oppose the Common Core standards is because they violate the well-established and internationally recognized process for setting standards in a way that is transparent, that recognizes the expertise of those who must implement them, that builds on the consensus of concerned parties, and that permits appeal and revision.

The reason that there is so much controversy and pushback now is that the Gates Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education were in a hurry and decided to ignore the nationally and internationally recognized rules for setting standards, and in doing so, sowed
suspicion and distrust. Process matters.

According to ANSI, here are the core principles for setting standards:

The U.S. standardization system is based on the following set of globally accepted principles for standards development:*Transparency Essential information regarding
standardization activities is accessible to all interested
parties.* Openness
Participation is open to all affected interests.* Impartiality

No one interest
dominates the process or is favored over another.

* Effectiveness and Relevance


Standards are relevant and effectively respond to regulatory and
market needs, as well as scientific and technological
developments.

* Consensus
Decisions are reached through consensus among those
affected.

* PerformanceBased
Standards are performance based (specifying essential
characteristics rather than detailed designs) where
possible.

* Coherence


The process encourages coherence to avoid overlapping and
conflicting standards.

* Due Process
Standards development accords with due process so that
all views are considered and appeals are possible.
* TechnicalAssistance

Assistance is offered to developing countries in the formulation and application
of standards. In addition, U.S. interests strongly agree that the process should be:

* Flexible, allowing the use of different methodologies to meet the needs of different technology and product sectors;

*Timely, so that purely administrative
matters do not result in a failure to meet market expectations;
and

* Balanced among
all affected interests.

page7image15608

Lacking most of these qualities, especially due process, consensus among interested groups, and the right of appeal, the Common Core cannot be considered authoritative, nor should they be considered standards. The process of creating national academic standards should be revised to accord with the essential and necessary procedural requirements of standard-setting as described by the American National Standards Institute. National standards cannot be created ex nihilo without a transparent, open, participatory consensus process that allows for appeal and revision.

United States Standards Strategy
http://www.us-standards-strategy.org

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Are You Attending American Education Research Association Meeting in Philadelphia?

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2014 //
13

If the answer is yes, please come to one or both of the two
sessions where I am speaking on April 3. I will give the
John Dewey Society lecture at the
Convention Center, 100 Level, Room 114, from 4-7 pm. (Lots of time
for discussion). My topic: “Does Evidence
Matter?” Fair warning: The room holds only 600
people. Before the Dewey lecture, I will join Philadelphia parent
activist Helen Gym and Carl Grant of the University of Wisconsin
(chair) in a special Presidential session from 2:15 to 3:45,
on the same level in Room 121B The
title of the session is: Rising to the
Challenges of Quality and Equality:
The Promise of a Public
Pedagogy If you join me at the early session,
you will have to race with me to the lecture, and the room may be
full.

Categories Accountability, Data and Data Mining, Education Industry, Education Reform, Research, Teachers and Teaching

Just 27% in Rasmussen Poll Think SAT Should Be Major Factor in College Admission

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2014 //
15

Bad news for the All-New, Revamped SAT: Only 27% in the most recent Rasmussen poll think that the SAT should be a major factor in college admission.

Actually, it may be even less than 27%.

According to Rasmussen,

“…most Americans don’t think the SATs are an accurate reflection of a student’s abilities, nor do they believe they should be a major factor in college admissions.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 21% of American Adults think that, generally speaking, the results of standardized tests like the SATs are an accurate reflection of a student’s knowledge and intelligence. Sixty-two percent (62%) disagree, while18% are not sure.

Somehow the American people have figured out what scholars and even the College Board, sponsor of the SAT, acknowledge: High school grades are a better predictor of success in college than the one-shot admissions tests.

And since so many affluent parents are able to pay for tutoring, the SAT strongly reflects family income.

 

 

Categories Testing

Peter Greene: Why Standardized Testing Sucks

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2014 //
40

Peter Greene here explains what most teachers know about standardized testing. It is a monumental waste of time and money. It doesn’t reflect what students were taught or learned.

He writes:

“Standardized testing is completely inauthentic assessment, and students know that. The young ones may blame themselves, but students of all ages see that there is no connection between the testing and their education, their lives, anything or anyone at all in their real existence. Standardized test are like driving down a highway on vacation where every five miles you have to stop, get out of the car, and make three basketball shot attempts from the free throw line– annoying, intrusive, and completely unrelated to the journey you’re on. If someone stands at the free throw line and threatens you with a beating if you miss, it still won’t make you conclude that the requirement is not stupid and pointless.

“And so the foundation of all this data generation, all this evaluation, all this summative formative bibbitive bobbitive boobosity, is a student performing an action under duress that she sees as stupid and pointless and disconnected from anything real in life. What are the odds that this task under these conditions truly measures anything at all? And on that tissue-thin foundation, we build a whole structure of planning students’s futures, sculpting instruction, evaluating teachers. There is nothing anywhere that comes close in sheer hubritic stupidity.”

The only point he overlooks is that standardized testing mirrors socioeconomic status and distributes benefits and sanctions along the SES curve.

Categories Standardized Testing, Teachers and Teaching

Common Core for Commoners, Not My School!

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2014 //
102

This is an unintentionally hilarious
story about Common Core in Tennessee. Dr. Candace McQueen
has been dean of Lipscomb College’s school of education and also
the state’s’s chief cheerleader for Common Core. However, she was
named headmistress of private Lipscomb Academy, and guess what? She
will not have the school adopt the Common Core! Go figure.

Categories Common Core, Tennessee
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