There will be more to come from Mercedes Schneider, who reports her first thoughts here.
Archives for the month of: March, 2014
At the conclusion of its first annual conference, the Network for Public Education announced a call for Congressional hearings on testing:
NPE Calls for Congressional Hearings – Full Text
March 2, 2014 NPE News
We are writing to request that the Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee hold hearings to investigate the over-emphasis, misapplication, costs, and poor implementation of high-stakes standardized testing in the nation’s K-12 public schools.
Starting with No Child Left Behind legislation in 2001, which mandated standardized testing of every student in grades three through eight, many states have since rolled out testing in additional grades. This emphasis on testing has increased under policies of the Obama administration, such as Race to the Top and the NCLB waivers, that tie test scores to teacher and principal evaluations and school “turnarounds” and closures. There is a danger that tests now seem to have become the purpose of education, rather than a measure of education.
The tests were initiated to measure whether schools were delivering an education of high quality to every child. It makes sense to determine whether all students are achieving at a minimum level of proficiency in English and math, and standardized tests can help discern whether they are.
Our concern is that high-stakes testing in public schools has led to multiple unintended consequences that warrant federal scrutiny, including the following questions, among others.
Do the tests promote skills our children and our economy need? The most popular form of tests today are multiple-choice because they are easy and cheap to grade. But many educators and parents worry that teaching children how to take these tests doesn’t teach them how to think. The new standardized exams from the multi-state testing consortia do not appear to be significantly better, and will likely be scored by computers, which cannot gauge higher order thinking.. The challenges of the future and our nation’s economic success require the ability to solve and identify new problems, think creatively, and work collaboratively with others.
What is the purpose of these tests? Assessments should be used as diagnostic tools, to help teachers figure out where students are in their learning. But in most states, teachers are forbidden to see the actual test questions or provide feedback to students. Teachers do not see how their students answered specific test items and learn nothing about how their students are doing, other than a single score, which may arrive long after the student has left their classrooms. Thus, the tests have no diagnostic value for teachers or students, who do not have the opportunity to review and learn the material they got wrong.
How good are the tests? Problems with the actual content of tests have been extensively documented. There are numerous instances of flawed questions and design, including no right answer, more than one right answer, wording that is unclear or misleading, reading passages or problems that are developmentally inappropriate or contain product placements, test questions on material never taught, and items that border on bizarre, such as a famous example that asked students to read a passage about a race between a pineapple and a hare. Tests are not scientific instruments like barometers; they are commercial products that are subject to multiple errors.
Are tests being given to children who are too young? In many states, high-stakes standardized tests are required for even the youngest school children. In Chicago, for instance, Kindergarten students face four standardized tests two or three times a year and can spend up to a third of their time taking tests. Children of this age typically do not know how to read or even hold a pencil or use a keyboard. Subjecting 5-year-olds to a timed test is not only hopeless from a practical standpoint, but subject children to undue stress.
Are tests culturally biased? Every standardized test in the world is an accurate reflection of socioeconomic advantage and disadvantage. Thus, students from racial and ethnic-minorities, students with disabilities, and students of lower socioeconomic status tend to have lower scores than their more advantaged peers. Further, test results are often used as rationales for closing schools that serve low-income communities of color.
Are tests harmful to students with disabilities? Over the past few years, there have been numerous instances in which children with significant health situations, even undergoing life-saving procedures, were pressured to complete required tests – even from their hospital beds. Children with severe brain disorders have been compelled to take a state test. Recently in Florida, an eleven-your-old boy who was dying in hospice was expected to take a test. Such behavior defies common sense and common decency.
How has the frequency and quantity of testing increased? Testing is taking significant time away from instructional learning time. In Chicago, elementary school students take the REACH, the TRC, the MAP, the EXPLORE, the ISAT, and DIBELS every year. In North Carolina, third-grade students are tested in reading 36 times throughout the year – in addition to other standardized tests. Middle schools students in Pennsylvania may take over 20 standardized tests in a single school year. High school students in Florida can have their instruction disrupted 65 times out of 180 school days by testing. In New York, the time taken by state exams has increased by 128%. When so much time is devoted to testing instead of teaching, students have less time to learn.
Does testing harm teaching? Now that test scores are linked to principal and teacher evaluations in many states, teachers engage in more test prep because they are pressured and afraid, not because they think the assessments are educationally sound. Principals are nervous about their school’s scores. Many educators have admitted they are fearful of taking students on field trips, engaging them in independent projects, or spending time on untested subjects like science or history, art or music because it might take time away from test prep. As a result, the curriculum has narrowed and students have lost their opportunity for a well-rounded education.
How much money does it cost? It is difficult to calculate the entire costs of standardized testing – including the many classroom hours spent on test prep. But it is well known that nearly every state is spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to develop more high-stakes tests for students, and requiring local districts to spend hundreds of millions more to get their students ready to take them. In addition to the cost of the tests and the interim tests, there are added costs of new curriculum, textbooks, hardware, software, and bandwidth that new tests require. There are also opportunity costs when money allocated for testing supersedes other education expenditures, such as libraries, art and music programs, social workers and guidance counselors, and extra-curricular activities.
Are there conflicts of interest in testing policies? In many states, a company that has a multi-million dollar contract to create tests for the state is also the same company that profits from producing curriculum and test prep materials. In some states, a single testing company has been able to win a contract worth many millions of dollars by lobbying and engaging in backdoor influencing of public officials. In other states, school districts buy textbooks from the same company that makes the tests so their students have an advantage on the tests.
Was it legal for the U.S. Department of Education to fund two testing consortia for the Common Core State Standards? According to federal law and regulations, the U.S. Department of education is not allowed to supervise, direct, or control curriculum or instruction. Yet the funding of testing consortia directly intervenes in the curriculum or instruction of almost every public school in the nation, as the tests will determine what is taught and how it is taught.
We believe that every child in the United States deserves a sound education. Every child deserves a full curriculum in a school with adequate resources. We are deeply concerned that the current overemphasis on standardized testing is harming children, public schools, and our nation’s economic and civic future. It’s our conclusion that the over-emphasis, misapplication, costs, and poor implementation of high-stakes standardized tests may now warrant federal intervention. We urge you to pursue the questions we have raised.
Joe Bower, a school leader in Canada, joined us in Austin for the first national conference of the Network for Public Education.
Here are his reactions:
I spent the weekend in Austin, Texas at the first Network for Public Education (NPE) and it was fantastic. You can find my day 1 post here and my day 2 post here.
Here are 3 things I learned from The Network for Public Education Conference:
1. Relationships. I was so happy to get a chance to meet some very cool people that, until this weekend, I had only known as avatars on Twitter. Don’t get me wrong, I love social media — while social media can help connect people by removing the obstacles of time and place, it is no substitute for real life, face to face relationships. I was so happy to meet and spend time with Kirsten Hill, Adam Holman, Jose Vilson, Stephanie Cerda, Xian Barrett, Audrey Watters, Sabrina Stevens, Katie Osgood and Phil Cantor. We don’t have the money of Corporate School Reformers, but we are a real grassroots movement that is fuelled by authentic relationships.
I got to briefly meet Deb Meier, Anthony Cody, Diane Ravitch, and Chris Lehmann.
2. Assault on Public Education. As the token Canadian at the conference, I was struck by the raw emotion that dominated the conference — teachers are saddened and angered by the assault on public education lead by profiteers, politicians and privatizers.
The politics and problems killing American Education is complex, but here’s my Wikipedia version: For a long time, public schools in the United States had been a public good. Schools were about pupils. However, Corporate School Reform has become the status quo — public education is being bastardized into a private interest where schools are about profits.
Essentially Corporate School Reform is led by three foundations: Gates, Walton and Broad — who have allied with the Federal Government, effectively making the United States Department of Education an enemy of public education.
Common Core, high-stakes standardized tests and Teach for America are a money grab for Wall Street at the expense of Main Street. Democratically elected school boards are replaced with Charter CEOs who have absolutely no accountability to the public. Public schools who have a responsibility to take all children who show up are closed and turned into private charters with select admissions. The Charter school movement in the US is re-segregating America and rolling back whatever gains were made from Brown vs Board of Education. Experienced and educated teachers are fired in exchange for well-intentioned but grossly ill-prepared youngsters whose effectiveness have been grossly overstated. And without unions, teacher pay and pensions are slashed and burned and re-pocketed by Big Business. Public Education is being strangled to death by Corporate School Reformers who provide an opportunity-rich education for their own children while imposing other people’s children with schools that are marinated in acquiescence and testing.
The Corporate School Reform is a part of the Global Education Reform Movement which is built on a contradiction:
Use PISA scores to show that public education in the United States is failing but then implement market-based reforms that are almost entirely contradictory to the reforms and policies found in high achieving countries.
3. There is hope. The only thing necessary for destructive mandates and cancerous education policies to succeed is for good teachers, parents and students to say and do nothing. When distant authorities invoke their ignorance with the force of law, remember that your silence is read as assent — and at some point your silence is betrayal to those who do speak up and take action.
The Network for Public Education refuses to remain silent. NPE is the loud speaker for people who support public education. Rather than remain as individual pockets of resistance to Corporate School Reform and GERM, NPE is a way to organize and mobilize a movement that will save public education.
NPE concluded its first National Conference with a call for Congressional hearings to investigate the over-emphasis, misapplication, costs, and poor implementation of high-stakes standardized testing in the nation’s K-12 public schools. The consequence of all this is that testing has become the purpose of education, rather than a way of measuring education.
NPE is encouraging everyone, including Congress to ask some tough questions:
Do the tests promote skills our children and our economy need?
What is the purpose of these tests?
How good are the tests?
Are tests being given to children who are too young?
Are tests culturally biased?
Are tests harmful to students with disabilities?
How has the frequency and quantity of testing increased?
Does testing harm teaching?
How much money does it cost?
Are there conflicts of interest in testing policies?
Was it legal for the U.S. Department of Education to fund two testing consortia for the Common Core State Standards?
If Congress has the time, effort and resources to investigate baseball players using steroids, they can surely find the time, effort and resources to investigate the misuse and abuse of testing.
Guy Brandenburg writes here about the first conference of the Network for Public Education, just concluded in Austin, Texas.
Nearly 400 educators, parents, and activists met to brainstorm about how to roll back the corporate attack on public education.
It was huge, exciting, energizing, and the beginning of a new day.
Bob Peterson here writes about the fate of Milwaukee which is a model city for almost every bad idea of the corporate reform movement.
Milwaukee has had vouchers and charters since 1990. The voucher schools and charter schools do not outperform the public schools. The public schools have disproportionate numbers of students with special needs, who Re not wanted by the voucher and charter schools.
Some of the charter and voucher schools are abysmal and should never have been funded or kept open.
On the NAEP, Milwaukee is one of the nation’s lowest performing districts.
The current school board now wants to turn its lowest-performing schools into charters, even though their record is no better than public schools.
The public schools are slowly and surely dying. The children are not benefitting.
One of our nation’s basic democratic institutions is being abandoned by those responsible for its health.
This is called “reform.”
In this post, Jack Schneider explains why he and his wife chose to send their daughter to the public school across the street.
Schneider, a historian of education (like me), knows that many of his friends and acquaintances don’t agree or approve.
They are not bigots, but they nonetheless are uncomfortable when confronted with the opportunity to react with people of a different race or class from themselves.
Yet, says Schneider, that is exactly why he and his wife wanted their child to attend a public school.
They want her to learn to live in the world and not to be afraid of those who are different from her.
Instead of fleeing to the whitest, most affluent school they can find, he says, parents should be fighting for diverse public schools.
He writes:
The purpose of education, we might recall, is to lay the ground so that young people may find their way through the world in whatever manner they wish, and find their place in it whatever that place may be. The aim is not merely to promote the accretion of knowledge — something segregated schools can do as well as integrated schools — but also to expand the mind and nurture the soul. Education should broaden. It should transform.
Which schools are best prepared to execute this task? Certainly those with qualified teachers, rich and varied curricula, adequate resources, and positive cultures. But also those with diverse student bodies capable of expressing a full range of experiences — student bodies that will expand the way that young people perceive the world and relate to each other. Just as no parent should compromise on the former of those characteristics, none should ignore the importance of the latter.
Truly diverse schools are an educational imperative. Not just because they are a bulwark against racial and economic injustice. But also because they teach young people how to see and be seen in new ways. They are places that serve all students. And insofar as that is the case, all parents should be fighting for them.
Julia Sass Rubin here analyzes “school report cards” in New Jersey.
This analysis was published last year but is as valid now as it was last May.
Rubin writes:
“Comparing schools to those with similar demographics is a good idea that highlights that students’ personal characteristics play a bigger role in determining their academic outcomes than anything that happens to them in-school. And what could be bad about giving parents and educators more information?
“Unfortunately, rather than providing useful data, the new reports undercut New Jersey’s excellent public schools. The reports also create incentives for districts to manage to the new standards through policies that produce higher rankings but may not meet students’ needs.
“There are four types of problems with the new school reports: artificially created competition, poorly designed comparison groups, arbitrary category definitions, and inaccurate data.”
She then describes the errors inherent in each of these measures. They are as misleading as the A-F report cards, which are often based on the same metrics.
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting sick of the unending efforts to find a scale that can quantify children, teachers, schools. I much prefer a complex qualitative report that helps me understands needs and strengths and that leads to improvement, not punishments.
Surly all those statisticians can find something useful to do in industry or agriculture or public health. Big Data has its limits. The more we learn about how it distorts values and degrades education as it should be, the less it is needed to measure children and the quality of learning.
A reader sends the following sad story of a phony “turnaround”:
“In Boston, the Gavin Middle School was “transformed” into the in-district charter school Unlocking Potential (UP Academy) beginning SY 2011-2012. It was part of a package deal in which several schools were closed and morphed into something else. The school department’s first presentation on the takeover included these statements:
•. All students guaranteed a seat at UP; they may also choose from available seats at other schools
• All Gavin students in special education and SEI (Sheltered English Immersion) programs will receive high-quality, appropriate services at UP Academy
• [UP will] Offer individualized consultation for families of students with disabilities
The Gavin had for many years been home to a program for multi-handicapped students, some of our most medically fragile and compromised kids. They were not going to ace state MCAS tests or any other standardized exams.
When the deal had been made and UP’s CEO came to visit, it turned out that any enrolled student who wanted to remain at their school would have to fill out an application, which is not a normal procedure in BPS. Next, it turned out that UP had made recruitment phone calls to select students across the city who were already enrolled in Gifted and Talented classes. The only entity that had access to that contact information would have been the School Department. And finally, UP balked at accepting the multi-handicapped kids.
Our inimitable EduShyster tells the tale:
Now a former employee of UP Academy has contacted EduShyster to express concern about the number of students that the school lost during the past year. The writer estimates that 25% of the students who began the year at UP Academy, which took over the former Gavin Middle School, were gone by the end of the year.
“If almost a quarter of your students are leaving within the year, I think that’s a pretty serious problem. It certainly doesn’t bode well for long-term student retention. FYI: The administration claims that the vast majority of students who left at the beginning of the school year left because of “transportation issues.” If the school really did lose that many students–and the “worst” ones at that–then any plan to open a second school in Boston should include a section on how the administration plans to stop that from happening the second time around.”
And there’s more (you can’t make this stuff up, folks!):
http://edushyster.com/?p=1159
http://edushyster.com/?p=1727
And the MH program? Well, the kids got to physically stay at the Gavin building, but they are not considered UP students – their scores are attached to another, traditional, BPS school.
How has UP been judged? They’ve just been given another elementary school, the Holland, to “turnaround”.”
Theresa Minitullo, a passionate advocate for Hoboken public schools, is dismayed that the city has separate and unequal school systems, all publicly funded.
The overwhelming majority of poor kids go to the public schools.
The white kids and non-poor kids go to the charter schools.
There is a reason: the charters help gentrify Hoboken, assuring young professional tat their kids can get a free public education without saving to go to school with ” those kids.”
But what happened to the Brown decision? Remember? 1954?
EduShyster and co-author Chad Sommer reveal the contents of newly released documents that show the close relationship between Teach for America and charters (90% of which are non-union).
Sommer is an alum of TFA, class of 2011
TFA are inexperienced and inexpensive. They are an essential part of the charter business model.
They write:
Emails sent by the Broad Foundation, a leading advocate of market-based education reform and charter expansion, and acquired through a freedom of information request, reveal that many charter management organizations consider TFA presence in a region a necessary prerequisite for opening new schools. According to the documents, charter management organizations including Rocketship, KIPP, Noble, LEARN and Uncommon Schools all indicated that a supply of TFA teachers was a general pre-condition for expanding into a new region. The emails, which detail the Broad Foundation’s failed efforts to lure high-performing charter operators to Detroit, were released as part of a trove of thousands of documents requested as part of an investigation into Michigan’s embattled Education Achievement Authority.
Greetings from the charter state
In New Jersey, where controversial charter expansion plans have been unveiled in Newark and Camden, TFA is likely to play a key role in providing *local talent* to staff new schools. Cami Anderson’s One Newark education reform plan is predicated on 40% of Newark public schools becoming privately managed charter schools by the 2016-2017 school year. Meanwhile in Camden, yet another TFA-alum-turned-state-appointed-superintendent, Paymon Rouhanifard, has begun introducing local residents to the charter operators that will soon be *turning around* their public schools, but without naming the schools to be turned around. [Note: effective in the fall of 2014, TFA corps members in Newark, Camden and Trenton will all be managed under a single entity: TFA New Jersey].
The handover of public schools to private management would not be possible without the availability of the reserve army of eager and unquestioning TFA, who are willing to work long hours and won’t stay around long enough to ask for a pension.
Diane Ravitch's blog 