Yielding to demands by students and educators, the Rhode Island State Senate voted a three-year moratorium on high-stakes testing.
The bill must still pass the House and win the Governor’s okay.
The bigger problem is that the moratorium kicks the can down the road. If it is wrong to use a standardized test for high school graduation, it will still be wrong in three years.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
If testing stops, many of the current problem in education will go away and school will once again become a nurturing environment.
exactly
Are they using common core curriculum? If so they still have a big problem.
Yes they are
This is off topic, so I apologize, but I know Diane is always interested in Texas so I wondered if you saw this report:
“Following a series of reports released by Texas State Board of Education Vice Chairman Thomas Ratliff on charter school financial accountability, a state lawmaker said he’s looking into legislation for the 2015 session that will address the issue.
According to an analysis released by Ratliff last week:
Some charter school superintendents are making 12 times as much as those at public school districts.
Nearly 60 percent of charter schools spend beyond financial benchmarks set by the Texas Education Agency.
Charters have lower student accountability ratings when compared to public school districts.
State Rep. Mike Villarreal, D-San Antonio, who sits on the House Public Education Committee, said the numbers between charters and public schools are so different that’s he’s concerned.
“The fact that charter schools aren’t helping students meet the minimum standards at the same rate as district schools is troubling,” Villarreal said. “It underscores the need for policymakers and parents, especially, to be very vigilant on where they send their children.”
If you click through and look at the actual report the pay differential between public and charter superintendents is huge. Now, some of that is because of economies of scale; each public school (district) superintendent has many more students than each charter school superintendent, but that also raises questions about why one would do that, replicate what is a high-paying job in each charter school. It doesn’t make much sense.
http://tpr.org/post/villarreal-pledges-take-action-following-charter-school-financial-accountability-reports#.U3UiIq3bFHU.twitter
Kicking it down the road three years is better than nothing… but the other two hurdles could be high… HOPEFULLY three years from now NCLB and RTTT will be a bad dream…
So, a little experiment:
For three years, half the states do away, entirely, with the Common Core, with high-stakes summative testing, and with all federal, state, and strict-level micromeddling with curricula and pedagogical techniques. In other words, they return to site-based management under autonomous teachers and building-level administrators. They save billions and can afford to provide a lot more wraparound services for poor kids.
The other half continues on the deform path. They spend billions on all the deformer nonsense–tests and trainings in the proper use of Lord Coleman’s list.
There’s no question whatsoever which students would be doing better at the end of that three years. The former would be, at the end of this period, far, far, far ahead of the latter.
I have no doubt whatsoever about this.
The Common Core and the testing regime are a dead weight on our schools. They are a recipe for mediocrity and demotivation.
How would schools do without Arne Dunkin’ Duncan, Lord Coleman, and the rest of the Test-tots-ster-tones telling them how to do their jobs?
In a word, they would thrive.
It depend a lot on funding. Chicago starves the schools it wants to fail with budget cuts and a failure to attend to infrastructure needs. Then they can justify closing or turning around the school under private management.
That’s why all the funding needs to be returned to the local schools to be spent according to their own discretion. All of it. The federal and state governments should serve two purposes and two only: to redistribute education funds evenly and as a judiciary for hearing cases of discrimination and fair labor practices. They should make NO DECISIONS beyond the general constitutional ones. All those should be up to building-level teachers and administrators running site-managed schools.
Ecologies are far, far healthier than are monocultures. We need a movement in this country to end the micromeddling in the jobs of building-level teachers and administrators.
The city controls the funding which is not distributed equitably.
That’s why I said that it is the responsibility of government to ensure that funds are redistributed–to ensure that that distribution is equitable.
I got a little tangled in your local control vs. state and federal control. The state has no say in how the city spends it local tax dollars. Local control is hard to define in a city. It is much easier to police within smaller districts although because schools are funded through property taxes in Illinois, districts have very different dollar amounts to spend.
I presented a proposal for how I think things should work, not a description of how things do work today. The point of my post was to present an alternative.
I get behind in reading posts and then respond before I have read them all. Again, I apologize if I sound at all snarky.
Bob, I am all for local control. In most cases, I think wise decisions are likely to be made by those most directly affected by those decisions. I totally agree with you. We are on the same page. However, we need to recognize that local means different things depending on the size of a district. As the district becomes larger they become less responsive perhaps because the global concerns of the district affect the attention paid to neighborhood struggles. We can say the government should do something all we want. The truth is that too many urban districts, especially, are not. From a purely economic point of view it opens a community up to charter schools. I wonder if Chicago, among others, isn’t attempting to silence troublesome neighborhood activists in poor neighborhoods by eliminating their voice in their community schools. It is not cost effective for the city to try to run truly quality schools in those neighborhoods especially when so little is being devoted to revitalizing those communities for those residents. Revitalizing generally means gentrifying which drives the existing community out.
I know I sounded like I was nitpicking. I just wasn’t conveying my concerns very well. In principal, I totally agree with you. In practice,… I do not have the answers, just the questions.
I argued for site-based management. Not district level. Not state level. Not federal. Site-based.
You are not going to achieve site based funding or management even in small districts unless they are single school districts. “Give me my money and leave me alone,” is not going to fly within a district. Certainly we need to eliminate oppressive micromanagement at any level, but as I understand your governance structure it sounds more like that given to charters than to most public schools. They seem to be the only ones who are allowed to do what they damn well please ( which is a crude and unfair characterization of what you are saying). Help me here.
That’s exactly what I want to see. I want to see building-level teachers and principals empowered to “do what they damned well please,” within legal limits established for equity and observance of fair labor policies. That’s because I believe that ecologies are far, far healthier than are monocultures and that when you give people autonomy and responsibility, subject to local social sanction, they rise to the occasion in innovative, creative, imaginative, appropriate ways that far, far exceed the imaginings of committees of bureaucrats.
It sounds like you are in favor of a complete restructuring of the educational system. Where before the reform rage, schools were community based, you want to take it to the neighborhood base. Am I understanding your argument?
I think that schools should be run by their teachers and administrators and subject. I do not believe that they should be micromanaged by bureaucrats at the district, state, or federal levels. In many parts of the United States, in the past, this was the way it was. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was actually a lot of debate about whether districts had the right to exert power of their schools–telling them what texts they could and could not adopt, for example.
When people are given autonomy and responsibility, subject to local social sanction, they rise to the occasion. This is human nature. People do their very best work when they work under such conditions. Now, let me say that teachers should be subject to evaluation and, when necessary, to censure or disciplinary action by their peers. I also think that administrators should be elected by teachers and subject to recall by them.
Ecologies are healthier than are monocultures. We need to end the micromeddling in classrooms and completely undo the centralization and regimentation that has increased steadily over the past half century.
I am curious to know what your local school district is like. The administration in mine has gotten a little heavy handed in recent years, but in general it has served the wishes of the community. Up until the last five years, teachers had quite a bit more autonomy in the classroom, and while parents generally expressed satisfaction with individual teachers and even schools, they started to complain about what their kids didn’t do if they heard of an interesting program that another school had. They became hyper-focused on data which was really silly since all the schools scored within 1-2% points of each other on state tests. Then came the push for standardization of curriculum. The schools have managed to maintain an individual character but not to the same extent that they did before. Data collection has become oppressive as far as I am concerned, but the micromanagement came from the aggressiveness of a certain group of parents. Danielson has invaded the evaluation practices and staff dissatisfaction has risen. The scarey part is that on balance they know they are better off than surrounding districts. Would I turn the operation of the schools over to the teachers? No! Public schools are a community and school partnership, and while that partnership has been warped by the reform agenda, teachers are not equipped to be the sole arbiters of how the schools should be run. As much as I dislike the current style of management, I still see a major role for central administration with a more collegial approach where appropriate. The district is more than the sum of the individual schools.
Central to the Grail Legend is the mythological/folkloric motif of the waste land–the land under a curse, the blighted land. There, the soil is barren. There, the people are malnourished and discontent and suspicious and angry and hateful and sad and beaten down. There, a tyrant rules. There, no birds sing.
Well, U.S. education under NCLB and Son of NCLB–RttT and Common Core and the C.C.C.C.R.A.P. (the Common Core College and Career Ready Assessment Program) is that blighted land.
Sheer joy at the lifting of the curse would motivate innovation and acceleration of learning to a degree that the world has never before seen.
Oh for that day, when we can all sing, “Ding dong the wicked witches’ brew of toxic deform has been flushed, and none will be forced to drink of it again.”
Here’s my concern about these moratoriums: they put off the day of reckoning for the toxic deforms. They allow the morons and the Vichy collaborators who are pushing deform to continue to operate their con.
Enough. It makes no sense to say we are going to postpone by three years poking a stick into our eyes.
Here’s a good rundown on the context of this vote, published before it was official.
http://blogs.wpri.com/2014/05/13/why-last-nights-board-of-ed-vote-could-be-meaningless/
Public outrage is driving the politics, and parliamentary opposition can be blown away by that.
I am coming to the opinion that this train really won’t be stopped. There are too many financial backers with skin in the game, and too many former TFA legislators and/or superintendents, principals, lobbyists…..how do we wipe them out? How do we stop the advantages and loopholes that get passed? How do we stop this madness?
This is my fear, too. The deformers have so much money riding on this. They have spent billions. They expect to make billions more. They money they have spent has bought a lot of Vichy collaborators at every level of government and school management. We may have to wait for the whole ugly edifice to come crumbling down on the tops of the heads of millions of kids and teachers before these people get a clue.
And putting off the testing for a time simply allows the deformers space in which to get the fix further in.
I certainly don’t have a crystal ball here. It could be that when the new national C.C.C.C.R.A.P. tests are given, there will be a policy supernova–something like the responses that John King got to his first round of C.C.C.C.R.A.P. testing in New York, but writ large–nationally.
But there’s a lot that the deformers can do to keep that from happening. They can field test and throw out questions until the tests yield acceptable score levels. They can set the cut scores low. It’s child’s play to manipulate the numbers for these standardized summative tests to prevent the true horror of them from getting through to the public. And, of course, they will keep the questions secret so that scholars and researchers and classroom practitioners can’t explain to the public how absurd–how completely invalid and twisted–these tests are.
But who knows? These deformers are not a bright bunch, generally. They might just be stupid enough to replay New York on a national scale.
And if that happens, deform is dead. I suspect that the brighter ones among the deformers–the ones who are in it for the dough–understand this. That’s what bothers me. They will attempt to fix things to prevent the implosion.
I don’t think we can stop the train. Of course that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. It’s worth the fight. Bob is right that there is too much money to be made for the deformists to let up.
The problem is how to build a coalition to fight them given the state of our politics. The corporate wing of the republican party only cares about making money for big business they actually like what’s going on. The far left is so in love with Obama that they’ll roll over and let him do whatever he wants.The Senior lobby doesn’t care, they are long past school age. The upper middle class white crowd can afford private school so they don’t care. The poor white crowd likes the fact that charters are re-segregating schools so their kids don’t need to go to schools with black and hispanic kids. The black community just isn’t going to oppose Obama on anything because doing so would only be helping the racists.
It should have been the unions that stood up to this. But we know what happened there. This is all extremely depressing.
But we have to continue fighting. Eventually, we shall win, because the deforms are really harmful policy, and this will become more and more evident. We’re in the same position that Vietnam protesters were in back in the 1960s. Today, NO ONE thinks that that war made sense. But the thing had to go its ugly course before that became the consensus view. The time will come, of course, when everyone will look back on NCLB and Son of NCLB as an absolute horror, when Duncan will be held up as the model of the clueless bureaucrat windup toy with the destructive policy. That’s inevitable. He will achieve a sort of lasting fame, there. But how much damage will have to be done first.
They are walking a fine line regarding cut scores. America’s public schools are supposed to be “failure factories” and these tests are needed to prove that they are; at least in the first year or two. They will probably steer clear of the 70% failure rate we saw here in NY.
Too many good schools had scores that did not jive with the reality of past success. They also can’t end up with the usual failure rates concentrated only in poor urban districts; that would be status quo NCLB level results.
So what’s a reformer to do? A 50% failure rate might be a fair compromise. Only (wasted) time and money will tell.
That’s the big debate they are having, no doubt about it. Because, of course, the reality is that people pull these cut scores out of their nether regions. What kills me is that they are going to keep the tests secret. They don’t dare do otherwise, and they know that. And so they won’t give in there–not until the villagers all grab their pitchforks and shovels and storm the castle.
Arne Duncan is creating quite a legacy for himself. He will go down in history as the Robert McNamara of Education–the one whose misconceptions and hubris left devastation in their wake.
I wonder whether Arne, after all the damage he has done, will live long enough to give a talk like this:
But even if he does, even if he lives long enough to give that talk, doing so will not absolve him for the extreme damage that he did to an entire generation of little kids.
I hope this indicates the beginning of a tipping point.