Archives for the month of: May, 2014
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New York Parent-Educator Groups Call for Resignations of Commissioner John King and Regents Chair Merryl Tisch

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2014 //
23

This just in:

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 2, 2014
More Information Contact:
Eric Mihelbergel (716) 553-1123; nys.allies@gmail.com
Lisa Rudley (917) 414-9190; nys.allies@gmail.com
New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE) http://www.nysape.org

NYS 3rd Grade Test Invalid, Chancellor Merryl Tisch & Education Commissioner John King Must Resign

The leaders of the New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE), a coalition of more than 45 parent and educator groups from throughout the state, are calling for the NYS 3rd Grade math test to be deemed invalid, since many questions were missing today from one of the four forms. This week, once again, parents are reminded of the grossly inappropriate practice of subjecting 8 and 9 year olds to 6 to 12 hours of testing over the course of six days. In light of the high stakes attached to these tests for children, schools and teachers, an error of this magnitude calls NYSED’s leadership and relationship with Pearson into serious question. This is yet another major misstep by our Commissioner of Education and the Board of Regents who oversee NYSED.

Commissioner King and the Board of Regents have been criticized extensively for not listening to parents or educators on the need to revamp the Common Core standards, lessen the focus on testing, and to cease and desist from thrusting one-size-fits-all statewide curriculum on local schools. And despite repeated issues with its testing vendor, NYSED has failed to take meaningful action, ignoring criticism from all corners of the state.

After repeatedly witnessing NYSED and the Board of Regents leadership fail to act within their authority, New York State Allies for Public Education now calls for the termination of Commissioner John King and the resignation of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch. The concerns of parents and educators throughout New York State have been casually dismissed at the detriment of their children for far too long.

“This comedy of errors has gone on too long. From the overly long, obscure and confusing ELA exams, with commercial product placements, and now with missing questions from the math exam, it is clear that the educrats at NYSED who have flunked, not our children,” said Chris Cerrone, Springville parent, Western New York Educator and founding NYSAPE member.
“While NYSED is eager to impose high-stakes on our schools and our teachers, where’s the accountability for them?” asked Jeanette Deutermann, North Bellmore public school parent and founder of Long Island Opt Out, “We need to stop the excessive testing and test prep, with defective modules and exams, and get back to educating our children once again.”

“Even as Louis CK has brought attention to the inherently flawed nature of the Common Core test prep materials this week, parents throughout the state are opting out their children in even larger numbers. In our school district, more than 48% refused to take the math tests. But it is unfair to all children and teachers to be assessed and compared with others through an invalid exam with missing questions. Enough is enough! John King and Merryl Tisch, resign!” said Stacey Serdy, Worcester Central School District parent and founder of Worcester Community for Education.
##

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, New York, Parents, Resistance, Testing

Bruce Baker: Meet Arne Duncan’s Latest Nutty Idea

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2014 //
11

Bruce Baker can’t believe that Arne Duncan admires the Relay “Graduate” School of Education, where charter teachers grant masters’ degrees to their colleagues. This demeans the very concept of professionalism and graduate study. But it reveals Duncan’s essential contempt for education.

What if Duncan were in charge of medical education (heaven forbid).

Here is the Duncan model of medical education:

Baker writes:

“Let’s……consider the model of the future – one which blends Arne Duncan’s otherwise entirely inconsistent models of training. I give you:

“The Relay Medical College and North Star Community Hospital

“Here’s how it all works. Deep in the heart of some depressed urban core where families and their children suffer disproportionate obesity, asthma and other chronic health conditions, where few healthy neighborhood groceries exist, but plenty of fast food joints are available, sits the newly minted North Star Community Hospital.

“It all starts here. NSCH is a new kind of hospital that does not require any of its staff to actually hold medical degrees, any form of board certification or nursing credential, or even special technician degrees to operate medical equipment or handle medications. Rather, NSCH recruits bright young undergrads from top liberal arts colleges, with liberal arts majors, and puts them through an intense 5 week training program where they learn to berate and belittle minority families and children and shame them into eating more greens and fiber. Where they learn to demean them into working out – walking the treadmill, etc. It’s rather like an episode of the Biggest Loser. And the Hospital is modeled on the premise that if it can simply engage enough of the community members in its bootcamp style wellness program, delivered by these fresh young faces, they can substantively alter the quality of life in the urban core.

“There is indeed some truth to the argument. Getting more community members to eat healthier and exercise will improve their health stats, including morbidity and mortality measures commonly used in Hospital rating systems. In fact, over time, this Hospital, which provides no actual medical diagnosis and treatment does produce annual reports that show astoundingly good outcome measures for community members who complete their program.

“These great outcome measures generate headlines from the local news writers who fail to explore more deeply what they mean (Yes Star Ledger editorial board, that’s you!). NCSH becomes such a darling of the media and politicians that they are granted authority to start their own medical school to replicate their “successes.” And they are granted the authority to run a medical school where medical training need not even be provided by individuals with medical training!

“Rather, they will grant medical degrees to their own incoming staff based on their own experiences with healthcare awesomeness. That’s right, individuals who themselves had little or no basic science or actual supervised clinical training in actual medicine, but have 3 to 5 years of experience in medical awesomeness in this start-up (pseudo) Hospital will grant medical degrees – to their own incoming peers!”

Categories Duncan, Arne, Teachers and Teaching

Robert Shepherd: The Comment that “Newsweek” Won’t Post

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2014 //
41

Robert Shepherd, experienced writer of curriculum, assessments, and textbooks, left the following comment on the “Newsweek” site in response to an attack on Louis C.K.’s critique of the Common Core standards. Instead of covering the commentary over Common Core, as one would expect of a newsmagazine, “Newsweek” has decided its role it to defend the standards and attack their critics. Shepherd has posted the comment repeatedly and says that “Newsweek” will not publish it. So, read it here.

**********************************************

 

I left the following comment on the Newsweek page. A moment or two later, they had deleted it. I reposted it again. Waiting to see if they will delete it again (Diane’s note: they did delete the comment again).

I laugh a bitter laugh every time I hear someone refer to the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] as “higher.” These were hacked together by amateurs, overnight, without any professional vetting. They were paid for by plutocrats who wanted one national bullet list to tag their educational software and assessments to. The ELA “standards” are backward, hackneyed, unimaginative, often prescientific, and dramatically distorting of both curricula and pedagogy. And one could drive whole curricula through their lacunae. Learning involves acquisition of both world knowledge (knowledge of what) and procedural knowledge (knowledge of how). The Common Core in ELA contains ALMOST NONE of the former and expresses the latter so vaguely that, not being concrete or operationalized, they cannot be validly tested, and so the new tests being put together based on the Core are completely invalid. The lead author of these “standards” had absolutely ZERO relevant experience. The authors hacked these together based on a quick review of the lowest-common-denominator groupthink of the state standards that preceded them. Educational publishers are now taking these amateurish, puerile “standards” as a de facto curriculum, producing texts filled with activities that model the egregiously narrowed activities on the new Common Core College and Career Reading Assessment Program (C.C.C.C.R.A.P.) tests. Basically, these “standards” have turned K-12 education in the U.S. into low-level test prep. The “standards” are invariant. Kids are not. These “standards” belong to an extrinsic punishment and reward theory of education that is entirely discredited, for extrinsic punishment and reward is inherently demotivating for cognitive tasks. The “standards” are the product of a takeover of U.S. education by know-nothing plutocrats and business people and politicians who have decided to micromanage U.S. education based on dangerous, backward ideas, and these “standards” will have, are having, precisely the opposite of their intended effect. However, they are making and will make a lot of money for a few software vendors and testing companies. This piece by Nazaryan is clueless. Teachers oppose these “standards” not because they fear being held accountable but because the “standards” themselves are very, very badly conceived and are doing enormous damage, every day, in classrooms around the United States.

Categories Common Core

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley’s New Book on VAM Is Available

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2014 //
4

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley has just published a new book that explains value-added measurement (VAM). It is now available for pre-order.

Having been a classroom teacher and now a university scholar, Beardsley takes a highly critical view of simplistic approaches to teacher evaluation.

Here are her chapter headings.

“Paperback: 256 pages; Chapters: 8 and titled as follows:

Socially Engineering the Road to Utopia
Value-Added Models (VAMs) and the Human Factor
A VAMoramic View of the Nation
Assumptions Used as Rationales and Justifications
Test-Based, Statistical, and Methodological Assumptions
Reliability and Validity
Bias and the Random Assignment of Students into Classrooms
Alternatives, Solutions, and Conclusions”

Categories Teacher Evaluations

Why Powerful and Greedy Elites Scapegoat the Schools

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2014 //
94

Our economy is changing in ways that are alarming. Income inequality and wealth inequality are at their highest point in many decades; some say we are back to the age of the robber barons. Most of the gains in the economy since the great recession of 2008 have benefitted the 1%, or even the 1% of the 1%. The middle class is shrinking, and we no longer have the richest middle class in the world. The U.S. has the highest child poverty rate of any of the advanced nations of the world (and, no, I don’t count Romania as an advanced nation, having visited that nation, which suffered decades of economic plunder and stagnation under the Communist Ceausescu regime).

Forbes reports that there were 442 billionaires in the U.S. in 2013. Nice for them. Taxes have dropped dramatically for the top 1% since the 1970s. But don’t call them plutocrats. Call them our “job creators,” even though they should be called our “job out-sourcers.”

Now what caused these changing conditions? My guess would be that unbridled capitalism generates inequality. Deregulation benefits the few, not the many. People with vast wealth give large sums to political candidates, who when elected, protect the economic interests of their benefactors. Anyone who wants to run for President must raise $1 billion or so. Where do you raise that kind of money? You go to the super-rich, who have the money to fund candidates of both parties, as well as an agenda to keep their money and make more.

A recent paper by Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin I. Page of Northwestern University concludes that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.” Recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court removing limits on campaign contributions by corporations and individuals reinforce elite control of our political system. The danger signals for democracy are loud and clear.

We often hear talk of the “hollowing out” of the middle class. We know that many regions in our country are economically depressed because they lost the local industries that provided good jobs for high school graduates. Some of those jobs were lost to new technologies, and some were outsourced to low-wage countries. Free trade sounds good, but did the politicians realize how many millions of jobs and thousands of corporations would move to Mexico, China, Bangladesh, and other countries that do not pay what Americans consider a living wage?

Instead of looking in the mirror, our politicians blame the schools. They say that we lost those jobs because our schools were preparing students poorly, not because the “job creators” wanted to export jobs to countries that pay their workers a few dollars a day.

The politicians say we must send everyone to college so we can be “globally competitive,” but how will we compete with nations that pay workers and professionals only a fraction of what Americans expect to be paid and need to be paid to have a middle-class life? How can we expect more students to finish college when states are shifting college costs onto individuals and burdening them with huge debt? How can we motivate students to stay in college when so many new jobs in the next decade–retail clerks, fast-food workers, home health aides, janitors, construction workers, truck drivers, etc.–do not require a college degree? (The only job in the top ten fastest growing occupations that requires a college degree is registered nurse.)

So here we are, with politicians who could not pass an eighth grade math test blaming our teachers, our schools, and our students for economic conditions that they did not create and cannot control.

In a just and sensible world, our elected officials would change the tax rates, taxing both wealth and income to reduce inequality. There is no good reason for anyone to be a billionaire. When one man or woman is worth billions of dollars, it is obscene. A person can live very handsomely if their net worth is “only” $100 million. How many homes, how many yachts, how many jets, does one person need? In terms of income taxes, consider this: under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the marginal tax rate for the very rich was 91%; it is now 35%. The tax on long-term capital gains has dropped from 25% to 15%. No wonder that billionaire investor Warren Buffett famously said that there has indeed been class warfare, and “my class has won.” Buffett noticed that secretaries in his office were paying a higher tax rate than he was. He even took to the op-Ed page of the New York Times to complain that the tax code unfairly spared the richest Americans.

Will the “job creators” lose all ambition if they can’t pile up billions and billions? I doubt it very much. Surely there will be even more people yearning to get very rich, even if their wealth has a limit of $100 million or even $200 million.

We need to spend more to reduce poverty. We need to spend more to make sure that all children get a good start in life. We need to reduce class sizes for our neediest children. We need to assure free medical care for those who have none. We have many needs, but we won’t begin to address them until we change our tax codes to reduce inequality.

Categories Economy

Jose Luis Vilson’s Néw Book is Published!

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2014 //
37

Jose Luis Vilson’s new book “This Is Not a Test” has just been published.

It is an excellent read in which Vilson reflects on the intersection of race, class, and education.

Read it. He has an engrossing style.

Categories Education Reform

More on Houston Lawsuit Challenging VAM Methods to Evaluate Teachers

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2014 //
12

As readers of this blog know, using value-added-assessment is a very poor way to gauge teacher quality. The research and evidence do not support this methodology. Teacher quality cannot be judged by computers. Test scores reflect only a small part of what teachers do. And as the American Statistical Association recently said, teachers account for about 1-16% of the variation in test scores, yet their rating will be heavily influenced by test scores.

Here is a press release about the lawsuit filed in federal court in Houston, challenging VAM:

 

For Immediate Release
May 1, 2014

 

 

 

Contact:
Gayle Fallon, HFT
713/623-8891
Janet Bass, AFT
301/502-5222
jbass@aft.org

Seven Houston Teachers, Houston Federation of Teachers File Lawsuit
Challenging Constitutionality of Value-Added Measure for Evaluations
HOUSTON—Highly recognized, good teachers are receiving poor evaluations because of a grossly flawed value-added algorithm that should be changed, seven Houston teachers and the Houston Federation of Teachers said today in an unprecedented lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.
　
The lawsuit details numerous problems with the Houston Independent School District’s Education Value-Added Assessment System, or EVAAS. Its statistical methodology uses a student’s performance on prior standardized tests to predict academic growth in the current year, though what is considered a sufficient level of growth is not defined. A teacher’s EVAAS score is supposed to measure the effect, or added value, of a teacher on a student’s academic growth over the school year. The school district uses this deeply flawed methodology for decisions about teacher evaluation, bonuses and termination, yet it is a “black box” system in which the methodology is considered proprietary and confidential.
　
“Due to a faulty, incomprehensible and secret formula, good teachers like the ones filing this suit are being labeled failures and our entire education system is being reduced to a numbers game,” said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. “Testing isn’t aligned with the purposes of public education. It doesn’t measure big-picture learning, critical thinking, resilience, creativity or curiosity, yet those are the qualities that great teaching brings out in a student. The fixation on testing has literally drained the joy out of learning. We’ve always been leery of value-added models, and we have enough evidence to make clear that not only has VAM not worked, it’s been really destructive and it in no way helps improve teaching and learning.”
　
Daniel Santos, an award-winning sixth grade social studies teacher at Jackson Middle School, said the evaluation system is failing him, his students and his profession.

“It’s dispiriting and insulting to be told I’m ineffective, a judgment that doesn’t mesh with my classroom performance or the time and effort I devote to my students. Texas is using a broken evaluation system that isn’t properly identifying who really needs help to improve,” Santos said, adding, “My students are being tested on material that is not aligned with our curriculum.”

While there have been other suits challenging VAM, the Houston suit is unique because it was brought by highly recognized teachers who contend their poor EVAAS ratings do not correlate with their actual performance nor take into account socioeconomic or demographic variables in predicting student performance. The complaint also charges that the district directed and/or pressured school administrators to “manufacture deficiencies or otherwise find fault with the instructional practices” by teachers who received low EVAAS ratings. Those teachers would be placed on a growth plan to correct the supposed faulty instructional practice.
　
Myla Van Duyn, who teaches ninth grade biology at Davis High School, received an unwarranted low EVAAS score and contends her classroom observation scores were artificially lowered to be aligned with the EVAAS scores.
　
“This is demoralizing,” said Van Duyn, who is leaving the school district at the end of the school year, a decision motivated in part by the flawed evaluation system.

“EVAAS is driving out great Houston teachers because they’d rather work in a place that respects　teachers. Everybody can do better, but the EVASS method does not accurately account for all of the variables that go into a child’s ability to answer questions on a multiple choice test,” Van Duyn said.
　
Andy Dewey, another plaintiff, is a history teacher at Carnegie Vanguard High School who developed the curriculum for two history courses and has been consistently rated well by his administrators. “Houston’s evaluation system is sold as a system to support and strengthen teaching, but it’s actually a bait and switch sham that’s weakening instruction and not helping teaching or learning at all,” Dewey said. “Teachers are told their scores are low but are not given information about what they did or did not do to cause their students to perform less than predicted.”
　
Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, said: “The district is using a woefully inaccurate, educationally destructive evaluation system. If a car had as many design defects as the EVAAS system, it would be recalled as a lemon. EVAAS should be replaced with a fair and meaningful system that will actually help improve teaching and learning.”
　
AFT’s Weingarten said the real culprit is school districts’ fixation on testing, noting none of the top-performing countries subjects their students to as much testing as the United States.
　
“The testing obsession has turned kids into test scores and teachers into algorithms. Rote memorization and testing don’t prepare our students for the 21st century. We need to help kids problem solve, think critically, learn to be persistent and work in teams,” Weingarten said. “This country has spent billions on accountability, not on the improvement of teaching and learning at the classroom level, and value-added models are the leading edge of this misguided effort,” she said.
　
Weingarten said districts should develop, with teachers, a comprehensive evaluation system based on multiple measures that accurately identifies teachers needing improvement and that provides targeted help. To reclaim the promise of public education, she said there should be safe and welcoming neighborhood schools, access to early childhood education, wraparounds services at schools to address health, social and emotional issues, and project-based instruction.

Weingarten first questioned the fairness and accuracy of value-added metrics in 2007. It also has　been criticized　as inaccurate and an unstable measure of teacher performance by, most recently, the American Statistical Association, as well as RAND Corp. researchers, the National Academy of Sciences and the Economic Policy Institute. The ASA said the majority of the variation in test scores is attributable to factors outside the teachers’ control.
　
The federal lawsuit states teachers’ due process constitutional rights are being violated because the EVAAS system is not an accurate or reliable indicator of teachers’ performance and because “a cloak of secrecy” prevents teachers from verifying or challenging their EVAAS score. The suit also contends teachers’ equal protection constitutional rights are being violated because the school district directs and/or pressures school administrators to align teachers’ instructional practice scores with their EVAAS scores—two separate evaluation components—so those with below-average EVAAS scores receive arbitrary, harsher instructional practice scores. The suit also contends that the standards for acceptable growth are arbitrary, vague and constantly being recalibrated.
　
In addition to the Houston Federation of Teachers, Daniel Santos, Myla Van Duyn, and Andy Dewey, the other plaintiffs are Ivan Castillo (a fourth-grade bilingual teacher who has taught at　 Briscoe Elementary School since 1994, was the school’s bilingual teacher of the year in 2013-14 and is a finalist for bilingual elementary teacher for the Houston Independent School District) ; Paloma Garner (a ninth-grade biology teacher at David High School, has received several national awards recognizing her mentoring skills and has a consistent record of strong performance); Araceli Ramos (a ninth-grade English teacher at Austin High School who was selected in 2014 by a school official to tutor teachers on the Texas English Language Proficiency Assessment System) and Joyce Helfman (an eighth-grade English teacher at Johnston Middle School who has had a consistent record of strong performance and is well respected by her colleagues).

 

 

Categories Accountability, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, Texas

Rebecca Mead: Why Louis C.K.’s Complaints about Common Core Matter

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2014 //
33

Thank goodness at least one prominent journalist in the mainstream media sends her child to public school!

 

At Rebecca Mead’s public school, two-thirds of the children opted out of the state tests aligned to Common Core.

 

So Mead understands the frustration of the comedian Louis C.K., whose tweets about the Common Core tests went viral.

 

Louis C.K. had more than 3 million Twitter followers so when he spoke out, his voice was unheard, unlike the voices of countless other parents.

 

The advocates of the Common Core insist that the problems that parents object to are not part of the Common Core but caused by faulty implementation.

(That is the same refrain we always hear about great ideas that fail: faulty implementation.)

 

Mead notes:

 

Plenty of parents and educators agree with him. After last month’s state tests for English language arts, teachers citywide protested, calling the problems tricky and developmentally inappropriate—as well as questioning the need for three long, consecutive days of testing, no matter the quality of the test materials. Elizabeth Phillips, the principal of P.S. 321, a highly regarded public school in Park Slope, called on members of the State Board of Regents to take the exams themselves: “Afterward, I would like to hear whether they still believed that these tests gave schools and parents valuable information about a child’s reading or writing ability,” she wrote.

 

This happens to be my most fervent wish: that all legislators and policymakers would take the tests they mandate and publish their scores.

 

Mead writes:

 

It seems likely that if more parents with the wealth and public profile of Louis C.K. showed their support for public education not by funding charter-school initiatives, as many of the city’s plutocrats have chosen to do, but by actually enrolling their children in public schools, there would long ago have been a louder outcry against the mind-numbing math sheets and assignments that sap the joy from learning. The majority of children in the school system sit in classrooms with far fewer resources than those enjoyed by C.K.’s children, or by mine. The concentration on testing is only another way in which students are short-changed. Educators have been arguing since last spring that the tests are flawed, and that the achievement gap in New York is widening rather than lessening: in 2013, there was a nineteen-per-cent gap between the scores of white and black third graders in the E.L.A. exams, and a fourteen-per-cent gap in math. “Students who already believe they are not as academically successful as their more affluent peers, will further internalize defeat,” Carol Burris, a principal from Rockville Centre, wrote in the Washington Post last summer, calling on policymakers to “re-examine their belief that college readiness is achieved by attaining a score on a test, and its corollary—that is possible to create college readiness score thresholds for eight year olds.” This week, teachers at International High School at Prospect Heights, which serves a population of recently arrived immigrants from non-English-speaking countries, announced that they would not administer an assessment required by the city. A pre-test in the fall “was a traumatic and demoralizing experience for students,” a statement issued by the teachers said. “Many students, after asking for help that teachers were not allowed to give, simply put their heads down for the duration. Some students even cried.” When a comedian points out the way in which the current priorities don’t add up, it earns even the attention of those who haven’t thought much about school since they graduated. But the brutal math of the New York City school system is no laughing matter.

 

 

Categories Common Core

State-Appointed Superintendent of Camden: I Represent the People of Camden

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2014 //
14

Professor Stephen Danley of Rutgers has been attending the school board meetings in Camden. Camden has been under state control for many years. Its new, young, inexperienced Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard wants to turn Camden’s public schools into charter schools. There is no evidence that the people of Camden want him to give their children and schools to charter corporations, but no one can stop him because he was appointed by Governor Chris Christie.

Paymon is under the delusion that he represents the people of Camden, but in reality he represents the Governor and does his bidding.

Why is it that these fake reformers never pay attention to niceties like democracy or evidence? They are blinded by their arrogance.

Do they believe their own press releases?

Categories Corporate Reformers, New Jersey

Why the Tech Industry Loves Common Core

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2014 //
16

A teacher sent the following comment in reference to the requirement that all Common Core testing must be done online. Schools will lay off teachers and cut programs and services to pay for technology for testing:

“My campus has 1200 students and 32 computers in the lab. You do the math. We have to buy HUNDREDS of new computers, so that our primary-aged kids can take a test in the spring. Our district has frozen our salaries, cut staff, and cut our benefits…because our funding was also cut by our state…but we still have to come up with the $10 million that these computers will cost our district.”

Categories Common Core, Education Industry, For-Profit, Technology, Computers, Testing
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