Chiara Duggan, a teacher in Ohio and regular contributor to our blog’s discussion, writes the following, which is a great example of educating the public:
I did two full days of community discussion on our local schools this week. It’s amazing how many new ed reform mandates they have, just this year.
School grading system, A-F (replaces the old grading system) teacher grading system, Third Grade Reading Guarantee and of course the CC.
That’s with millions of cuts in state funding. Next year they lose state (personal) property tax funding, because it’s been zeroed.
No one could do all these things (well) with less funding at the same time. No one. They’re drowning. My sense was they’ve been in this reform system for so long (more than a decade now) that they don’t even recognize how ludicrous the demands sound to an “outsider”.
They need more forums to explain this to the public. The members of the “business community” who were in attendance got it immediately.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’m glad the business community got it. I find they are sometimes the last ones to get it.
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We’ve got the Caveman Caucus in the Ohio House. I’ve never seen such an overt attack on schools and teachers. See the recent budget or comments from the education committee about firing “ineffective” teachers after 2 years or turning over the schools to corporations. Ohio now practices blacklisting and public shaming. If it wasn’t for fracking or casinos, we’d be 50th in job creation. Kasich may think he is a god, but he didn’t put the gas under the Hocking Hills. There’s plenty more of that at the statehouse.
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I think you can go around them. Under them. I think you’re more credible one on one than you know.
Politicians aren’t the most trusted people in the world right now, and neither are pundits or lobbyists. I think people are more likely to trust a local person who actually does the work.
Maybe that’s pie in the sky, and we’re all religiously reading David Brooks on the state of our local schools, or listening to speeches from lawmakers in Ohio (who seem to spend half their time either coming up with measurement systems or sanctions based on measurements systems) , but I don’t believe that.
I mean, they’d LIKE it if that were true… 🙂
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As a 40 year education veteran, the last 23 as a teacher educator, I posted a YouTube to do just this: educate the public on the issues. It can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMn5mj_S7Rg. A text version can be found at http://www.schoolleadership20.com/profiles/blogs/the-great-american-educational-shell-game. I hope somebody somewhere finds it helpful.
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As a 40 year education veteran, the last 23 of which have been as a teacher educator, I posted a YouTube for this very purpose: to educate the public on these matters. It’s called “The Great American Educational Shell Game” and it can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMn5mj_S7Rg. A text version can be found at http://www.schoolleadership20.com/profiles/blogs/the-great-american-educational-shell-game. I hope this helps somebody somewhere.
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Image worth checking out. Some relevant humor.
http://i2.wp.com/www.wideopenground.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Homeschool-donatation.jpg?resize=590%2C590
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Thanks, Diane, but I’m not a teacher. I just want to make that clear. I’m not a teacher so I didn’t understand the extent of this.
We’re having these community meetings because we’re building a new school, and I was invited, along with a really broad cross-section of other people.
I think the teachers that are in the group did a great job of explaining what they do, and how they do it. I wish everyone in this town had heard it, because there is a LOT of misconception and bad information out there.
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I would never guess that you are not an experienced educator. i look forward to reading you replies. They are thoughtful, informed and nuanced. Thank you.
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And maybe I’m completely off-base, but professions and information gets “siloed” (I think this is true in every line of work) and I think if people had an opportunity to hear what goes on in schools, there would be less pontificating and more understanding.
We really don’t know, in the public. We all went to school so we all feel we can weigh in, whether we have any real understanding or not.
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Their goal is to pass unfunded mandates that are impossible to implement and then to grade those schools and teachers as failures for not achieving the impossible mandates.
The next step is to fire the “failing” teachers and close the “failing” schools that didn’t achieve the impossible unfunded mandates, and then use that justification to turn teaching kids over to corporations that never have to follow the same unfunded, impossible mandates—schools that also may be as opaque as absolute black.
The goal by the fake Ed reformers has nothing to do with teaching children anything.
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Thanks Chiara. This is important work, and ALEC needs to be exposed as the source of Governor Kasich’s policies, along with the legislature’s eagerness to approve the Department of Education’s uncritical use of the “management models” and PR from the Reform Support Network created by USDE to promote the RttT agenda nationally.
The A-F grading system, for example, was introduced in Ohio schools last year (2013). It is the latest highly reductive strategy for ranking schools and a version of the 2011 model legislation provided by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council.
Teachers and schools are assigned letter grades, thereby obscuring a host of issues with the underlying VAMs and cut scores that feed into the ranking. ALEC offered this legislation, in part, because it is a simplistic system and appeals to the press. The league tables produced under this system are no more complex than the traditional A-to-F grading system, or so it seems.
However, in Ohio, the system is anything but simple. Up to nine “performance indicators” are graded in the A-F system, then these grades are recast as a single rating. For example, a school cannot receive an “A” if any subgroup of students is awarded a “C.” Some grades are based on “attaining a year’s worth of growth” in test scores. This is a fictional concept from economists who think that gains in scores on standardized tests—pre-test to post-test and year-to-year—are “objective” and should count more than other factors in ranking schools.
In addition to the continued use of VAM scores to rank teachers and schools (with SAS’s proprietary formula and contracts worth millions), about 70% of Ohio’s teachers are rated on their production on gains in scores on state or district approved pre-and post-tests tests. These are described in the dreadful “student learning objectives”
(SLO) exercises that teachers have to produce for one or more their courses or classes. The teachers are graded on their write-ups of SLOs and have to meet about 25 criteria or go back to a revision. You would think teachers are working to specifications for assembling a 747 airplane. I have elsewhere called this “accountability gone wild.” And in Ohio, 50% of a teacher’s evaluation is determined by this non-sense–whether it the VAM or the SLO. For most teachers, an undisclosed formula in a spreadsheet calculates the minimum acceptable gain scores for SLOs and churns out a color-coded rating for the teacher–Green-to-yellow-to-red.
The league-table ratings of Ohio’s schools are gaining the same press as major sports, but without the full-time staff looking into the minutia of school reform or the day-to-day work of teachers and administrators. It comes as no surprise that the A-F grades assigned to schools mirror the SES profiles for communities (Amos & Brown, 2013).
Our Governor, John Kasich, is a pawn of ALEC. He has also decided to offer a “third grade reading guarantee” as suggested by ALEC’s model legislation. Next up is likely to be ALEC’s Student Achievement Backpack Bill. This makes the Duncan/Gates agenda for data mongering “friendly” to parents. The “Backpack” provides access by a student’s parent or guardian or an authorized local education agency (LEA) official to “the learning profile of a student from kindergarten through grade 12 in an electronic format known as a Student Achievement Backpack.” The information in this profile is housed in the “cloud.” It can be accessed by qualified users from a “Student Record Store” posted on the state education agency website. It also includes data about all of the teachers-of-record for a given student, with only a few limits on the data that can be entered. See http://www.alec.org/model-legislation/student-achievement-backpack-act/http://www.alec.org/model-legislation/student-achievement-backpack-act/
You can find out about ALEC’s legislation in your state at http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed
Other Sources here: American Legislative Exchange Council. (2011, January). A-Plus literacy act, Model legislation: Chapter 1. School and district report cards and grades. Retrieved from http://www.alec.org/model-legislation/the-a-plus-literacy-act/
Amos, D.S., & Brown, J. (2013, August 22). State unveils new report cards. Cincinnati Enquirer. Retrieved from http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20130822/NEWS0102/308220025/State-unveils-revamped-report-cards
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Six members of the Ohio House Education committee are members of ALEC. Two of them (Stebelton & Roegner) are “ALEC Education Task Force Members.” Disgusting.
I am in my 25th year of teaching in Ohio. Only 2 things keep me from quitting my lifelong passion: 1. I still love the kids. 2. I’m too darn stubborn to give the ‘reformers’ what they want.
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Kasich has a copy of the Jeb Bush Playbook. Much of that foolishness originates from Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence, which lobbies and cheerleads for all of the wrongheaded policies being introduced in legislatures (VAM, accountability, third grade reading walls, vouchers, etc.). Visit their site only if you have a strong stomach.
Jeb Bush is a snake oil salesman of the first order. Unfortunately, he’s very, very good at his job.
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Right on. In AZ, I describe this as the AZ Legislature’s 3S Formula to Make the Education of Your Child, YOUR Problem. Here’s a link to my infographic: http://wp.me/p3aqgr-hG.
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