Carol Burris here describes how Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York legislature pulled a fast trick on the parents of the state.
Archives for the month of: April, 2014
Peter Greene just keeps writing hit after hit. This
one explains what VAM means and why it works well in
manufacturing but not in dealing with human beings.
He explains how
Pennsylvania measures teacher quality: PVAAS uses a
thousand points of data to project the test results for students.
This is a highly complex model that three well-paid consultants
could not clearly explain to seven college-educated adults, but
there were lots of bars and graphs, so you know it’s really good. I
searched for a comparison and first tried “sophisticated guess;”
the consultant quickly corrected me—“sophisticated prediction.” I
tried again—was it like a weather report, developed by comparing
thousands of instances of similar conditions to predict the
probability of what will happen next? Yes, I was told. That was
exactly right. This makes me feel much better about PVAAS, because
weather reports are the height of perfect prediction.
Here’s how it’s supposed to work.
The magic formula will
factor in everything from your socio-economics through the trends
over the past X years in your classroom, throw in your pre-testy
thing if you like, and will spit out a prediction of how
Johnny would have done on the test in some neutral universe where
nothing special happened to Johnny. Your job as a teacher is to get
your really Johnny to do better on The Test than Alternate Universe
Johnny would. The only thing that goes wrong is that it
doesn’t work. Students are not inanimate objects like pieces of
steel. So he concludes: This is one more example of a
feature of reformy stuff that is so top-to-bottom stupid that it’s
hard to understand.
But whether you skim the surface, look at the
philosophical basis, or dive into the math, VAM does not hold up.
You may be among the people who feel like you don’t quite get it,
but let me reassure you– when I titled this “VAM for Dummies,” I
wasn’t talking about you. VAM is always and only for dummies; it’s
just that right now, the dummies are in charge.
See? All that’s required for VAM to work is believing
that the state can accurately predict exactly how well your
students would have done this year if you were an average teacher.
How could anything possibly go wrong??
April Fool’s Day!
April’s Fool’s Day!
Valerie Strauss posts here a hilarious explanation of the college admissions process, as devised by those witty folks at the Onion.
The Onion would have a hard time satirizing the education “reform” movement of our time, where every day is April Fools’ Day.
What happens when parents say “No, not with my child”? They protect their child against state-sanctioned harm.
PRESS RELEASE
EMBARGOED UNTIL 9:15 AM APRIL 1, 2014
BROOKLYN, NY
Contact 1: Elizabeth Elsass, 917-605-3640, rinelsass1@gmail.com
Contact 2: Dani Liebling, 347-218-3107, daniliebling@yahoo.com
GROUNDSWELL OF BROOKLYN PARENTS FROM BROWNSVILLE TO CARROLL GARDENS REFUSE STATE TESTS
A grassroots opt-out campaign organized by Brooklyn parents has yielded a record number of test refusals for this year’s 3rd – 8th grade state-mandated math and English exams. The campaign is part of a national movement in which parents are rejecting high-stakes standardized tests as harmful to their children, teachers, and schools and as detrimental to creativity and deep learning. In a first for the borough, at least three public schools will have more students sitting out the exams than taking them.
Families of children in the testing grades at PS 446/Riverdale Avenue Community School (District 23, Brownsville), the Academy of Arts & Letters (District 13, Fort Greene), and PS 146/Brooklyn New School (District 15, Carroll Gardens) deluged their principals with “opt out” letters. Each school had a refusal rate of over 70 percent; at Arts & Letters the 3rd grade refusals topped out at 83%.
Administrators expect to continue to receive refusals, but as of March 31, the day before the start of the annual testing season, 225 of the 306 students in grades 3-5 at Brooklyn New School had submitted letters. (Last year, 4 families at the school opted out.) Parents of 48 of 60 children refused the tests at PS 446. At Arts & Letters, where the refusal effort focused on the 3rd grade, 44 of 53 3rd graders will not be taking the tests.
“The high stakes attached to these tests must go,” says PS 146 parent Elizabeth Elsass. “We refuse to take part in a test-score-driven education system that is hurting all children.” William Fletcher, whose son attends 3rd grade at PS 446, adds, “In third grade, children need music, art, and gym. But these get crowded out by the tests.”
The groundswell of parent protest is fueled by deep concerns over the length, cost, and content of the tests; their inappropriate use as the primary, and sometimes sole, evaluator of children, teachers, and schools; and their damaging effect on the direction in which public education is headed. Many parents stress that they are not against testing in general. Betsy Guttmacher, who is opting out her eighth-grade daughter at Arts & Letters, explains, “Parents want authentic, meaningful assessments of our children’s learning, and of their teachers’ effectiveness—not punitive, poorly designed, high-stakes testing.”
Parents who refuse the tests are outraged by:
• The length and content of the exams: Children as young as 8 are expected to sit for 6 days of 70-minute test sessions. 5th graders will spend 90 minutes a day taking the tests, longer than college graduates spend on the GRE, MCAT, or LSAT. School staff who saw last year’s exams report that questions were “tricky” and that some questions had no clear right answer. They did not see a chance for children to demonstrate deep thinking, even though the Common Core-aligned tests claim to measure exactly that. Only 5% of English Language Learners passed the state tests last year.
• Promotion decisions determined by one test score. (Recent state legislation may render this exact point moot, but parents remain uneasy since they do not know the extent to which this single score will figure in promotion and admissions decisions.)
• Teacher evaluations based on children’s test scores.
• The high stakes of the tests which force teachers to teach to the test and abandon rich, creative curriculum.
• The high costs of testing. For-profit testing companies receive millions while schools struggle to work with reduced budgets each year. This results in larger class sizes and reduced staff.
• The requirement that schools pay for the scoring of the tests out of their own budgets and/or send teachers out of the classroom for several grading days. (Doubly outrageous at schools where so few children are actually taking the test!)
• The collection and sharing, without parental consent, of children’s personal data (for the cloud-based inBloom database).
Parents who are refusing the tests reflect the diversity of Brooklyn’s opt-out movement, cutting across class and color lines. Many of them have been educating and organizing their fellow parents for months—attending meetings, producing literature, and researching opt-out related questions. For example, when 4th grade parents at Brooklyn New School wondered whether opting out would affect their children’s middle school applications, parent organizers surveyed 19 middle schools. Their findings: there is no ironclad connection between test scores and middle school admissions in the consulted schools. (These were mostly District 15 and citywide middle schools.) The results of this parent survey are available to the press.
The conviction of the parent activists is infectious. Mother of 3, Johanna Perez, relates, “Learning about the tests has been eye-opening. I shared what’s going on at our school with my sister, whose kids go to school in the Bronx; now we’re both opting our children out.” Says parent Marvin Piqué, “We need a system that works for all children. The obsession with testing is hurting the children it is designed to help the most. Stop this and fix it.”
PRESS ALERT
Contact 1: Elizabeth Elsass, 917-605-3640, rinelsass1@gmail.com Contact 2: Dani Liebling, 347-218-3107,daniliebling@yahoo.com
GROUNDSWELL OF BROOKLYN PARENTS FROM BROWNSVILLE TO CARROLL GARDENS REFUSE STATE TESTS
WHAT:
To mark the first day of State-mandated standardized tests, Brooklyn parents from schools with unprecedented rates of test refusal will hold a playground press conference to announce how and why they have embarked on a civil disobedience campaign.
WHEN:
Tuesday,, April 1st at 9:15 AM
WHERE:
DiMattina Playground (between Rapelye and Woodhull Streets & Henry and Hicks Streets), adjacent to the Brooklyn New School in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
WHO:
Parents from a diverse group of Brooklyn public schools including host schools PS 446/Riverdale Ave Community School (Brownsville), Arts & Letters (Fort Greene), and PS 146/Brooklyn New School (Carroll Gardens); elected officials or their representatives. (Confirmed: Brad Lander,
City Council Member; Daniel Wiley, Community Coordinator for Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez; Representative from Community Education Council 15. List in formation.)
WHY:
Brooklyn parents organized a grassroots opt-out campaign that yielded a record number of test refusals for this year’s 3rd – 8thgrade state math and English exams. In a first for the borough, more students at the host schools will sit out the tests than will take them.* The campaign is part of a national movement in which parents are rejecting high-stakes tests as harmful to their children, teachers, and schools and as detrimental to creativity and deep learning.
Diana Senechal, author and high school teachers, has found what is needed in American education today: a renewed emphasis on the Inhumanities.
Senechal has identified a district in Wisconsin where this new initiative is taking place.
“Rhino Falls, Wisconsin—Citing a global trend toward ruthless school and workplace practices, Superintendent Mark Sequor called on for a steep increase in the inhumanities throughout the K–12 grades. “It’s time we not only caught up with Singapore and China, but showed them who’s who,” he told an assembly of 10,000. “Our kids think they have lots of meaningless tests? They should see the tests the kids in Korea take. Our kids think they have too much homework? Compared to other kids, they’re on permanent vacation.”
“To catch up with the rest of the world, says Sequor, the schools need an inhumanities emphasis even more than a STEM emphasis. “STEM might still give you a few stargazers,” he explained; “whereas a course in inhumanities will keep every child on task.”
“The inhumanities, Sequor continued, are at the heart of the Race to the Top competition, which awards funding to districts that race into flawed reforms without really thinking them through. “The whole point here is to get ahead, not to think,” he said, “and so, by embracing the inhumanities, we’re really going the extra mile—faster than anyone else, I’ll add.”
“Telos Elementary, a model school in Rhino City, allows visitors to witness its inhumanities curriculum in action. The day is filled with rapid and strictly timed activities, where students from kindergarten on up must turn and talk, repeat, rotate, move to the next station, repeat, summarize, and get in line. “We can’t let them get dreamy,” said Holly Vide, the school’s inhumanities coach. “We need to have everyone engaged. Also, in the workplace, they’ll be switched from task to task or even fired, so we need to prepare them for that reality.”
In later grades, the inhumanities are honed to a fine art.
“Once students enter high school, they are expected to do everything, he said. “Every high school student, in order to have a fighting chance in life, must have top grades, top test scores, leadership credentials, an array of extracurriculars, athletic prizes, community service hours, and at least ten things that go above and beyond what everyone else is doing. Can you be a person of integrity and character and do all of this?” he asked with a rhetorical flourish. “Of course not. That’s part of the point. Integrity and character are relics of medievalism. I think it was the medieval writer Flannery O’Connor who said something about how integrity lies in what one cannot do. We live in a ‘can-do’ era. A ‘can’t-do’ attitude is simply out of bounds.”
Dear Friends,
Today this blog reached the unbelievable number of eleven million page views!
I had no idea this would happen when I wrote the first post on April 26, 2012.
Thank you for reading. More than that, thank you for participating.
Many of you contribute regularly to what must be the liveliest discussion about education on the Internet. I read your comments and pick out some that are the most interesting, the most thoughtful, the most informative, and the most provocative and post them. It may be the same day or weeks later. The important thing is that I have tried to make this blog a place where the voices of parents, students, teachers, principals, and superintendents are heard, unedited.
The rules of the blog are limited and simple. Be civil. Avoid certain four-letter words which I will not print. Do not insult your host. There are plenty of other forums for all of the above. Just not here.
As you know, the blog has a point of view, because I have a point of view. I care passionately about improving the education of all children. I care passionately about showing respect for the dedicated men and women who work hard every day to educate children and help them grow to be healthy, happy human beings with good character and a love of learning. I care passionately about restoring real education and rescuing it from those who have dumbed it down into preparation for the next standardized test. I care passionately about restoring to all children their right to engage in the arts, to play, to dream, to create, to have a childhood and a youth unburdened by fear of tests. I care passionately about protecting the public schools from those who seek to monetize them and use them as a source of profit and power.
I am in my end game. I will fight to the last to defend children, teachers, principals, and public education from the billionaires and politicians who have made a hobby of what is deceptively called “reform.” What is now called “reform,” as the readers of this blog know, is a calculated plan to turn public schools over to amateurs and entrepreneurs, while de imaging the teaching profession to cut costs.
The people who promote the privatization and standardization of public education are the StatusQuo. They include the U.S. Department of Education, the nation’s wealthiest hedge fund managers, and the nation’s largest foundations. They include ALEC, Democrats for Education Reform, Stand on Children, ConnCAN, and a bevy of other organizations eager to transfer public dollars to private organizations. Their stale and failed ideas are the Status Quo. Their ideas have been ascendant for a dozen years. They have failed and failed again, but their money and political power keep them insulated from news of the damage they do to Other People’s Children.
We will defeat them. We will outlast them. Who are we? We are the Resistance. We are parents and grandparents, teachers, and principals, school board members, and scholars. We will not go away. They can buy politicians, but they can’t buy us. They can buy “think tanks,” but they can’t buy us. Public schools are not for sale. Nor are our children. Nor are we.
April 1 is a day for joy, not just a day for tricks and foolishness.
If you want to feel some joy, watch this video of a nun who rocks Italy’s TV talent show.
EduShyster here reviews some of the very worst movies now available through Reed Hastings’ Netflix.
She begins by reminding us that Hastings is certain that elected school boards will soon be consigned to the dustbin of history as corporate style charters take their place, relentlessly determined to push test scores through the roof. Hooray for the corporate takeover of public education and the demise of democracy!
EduShyster envisions the films that will titillate the viewing public about the valiant reformers. Surely they will do better than that non- blockbuster “Won’t Back Down,” which opened in 2,500 theaters, had big-name stars, a huge publicity campaign, but quietly disappeared in less than a month.
This was my favorite:
“When a Stranger Calls”
“A high-profile, no nonsense superintendent makes headlines and enemies with her plan to at last bring excellence and high expectations to Newark NJ—whether Newark, NJ likes it or not. But things take a turn for the non-communicative when said superintendent announces that she will no longer attend School Advisory Board meetings because they are *dysfunctional* and *set a bad example for children.* Also, she stops returning the calls of board representatives making this technically a silent film.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 