Archives for the month of: September, 2014
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Florida Kindergarten Teacher: I Will Not Give the Test

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2014 //
32

Opt Out Orlando posted the following letter by Susan Bowles, a kindergarten teacher. For her courage and dedication to her students, Susan Bowles joins the honor roll.

Her husband wrote this introduction:

“I tried to share this post by my wife, Susan, last night. I just found out her privacy settings don’t let others see it. I am very proud of her stance and completely support her, even if it means she loses her job. That would mean someone whose passion has always been about teaching little kids would be out of the profession. She began teaching in 1977.”

Susan Bowles wrote:

Dear Facebook Friends,

I have just sent emails to my principal and CRT, the superintendent, my colleagues at school, the school board members, ACEA (local teachers’ union) and the Gainesville Sun. I have a letter ready to go to the parents of the children in my class, pending principal approval which is standard protocol.

WHY I AM REFUSING TO GIVE THE FAIR TEST TO MY KINDERGARTNERS!

We have given the FAIR assessment in the past but this year it was revamped. It does provide useful information, but nothing significantly superior to what a typical Kindergarten teacher would observe in her students. This year, it is more time consuming and more difficult. Kindergartners are required to take it on the computer using a mouse. FYI: Kindergartners aren’t born with mouse skills. Many of them are proficient on tablets or smartphones, but the mouse can be tricky. (While testing a child last week, she double-clicked which skipped a screen. This child double-clicked three times and triple clicked once. There is no way to go back. There is no way for the school administrator to go back and make a correction.) While we were told it takes about 35 minutes to administer, we are finding that in actuality, it is taking between 35-60 minutes per child.

This assessment is given one-on-one. It is recommended that both teacher and child wear headphones during this test. Someone has forgotten there are other five year olds in our care. There is no provision from the state for money for additional staff to help with the other children in the classroom while this testing is going on. A certified teacher has to give the test. If you estimate that it takes approximately 45 minutes per child to give this test and we have 18 students, the time it takes to give this test is 13 ½ instructional hours. If you look at the schedule, a rough estimate would be that it requires about one full week of instructional time to test all of the children.

Our Kindergarten teachers have been brainstorming ways to test and still instruct. The best option we have come up with is for teachers to pair up, with one teacher instructing two classes while the other teacher tests one-on-one. So now we are looking at approximately TWO WEEKS of true INSTRUCTIONAL TIME LOST. We will not be putting them in front of a movie or having extended playtime, but the reality is that with 35 students, instruction is not the same. FAIR TESTING IS DONE THREE TIMES A YEAR!

I KNOW I MAY BE IN BREACH OF MY CONTRACT BY NOT ADMINISTERING THIS TEST. I CANNOT IN GOOD CONSCIENCE SUBMIT TO ADMINISTERING THIS TEST THREE TIMES A YEAR, LOSING SIX WEEKS OF INSTRUCTION. THERE IS A GOOD POSSIBILITY I WILL BE FIRED.

I am heartsick over the possibility of losing my job. I love my job. There is nothing I would rather do than teach. I have cried and cried over this, but in the end, it’s not about me. I feel God wants me to stand up for what is best for children. So, come what may, this is my stance. I WILL NOT ADMINISTER THE FAIR TEST TO MY STUDENTS.

If you are wondering what you can do, first and foremost, pray that the testing situation for children in Florida will change. Secondly, if you are a teacher or administrator, tell your story. This is not an education problem. This is a state government problem.

Whom should you contact? Governor Scott sits at the top in the chain of command. I say, voice your concerns to him. He actually might listen since he’s up for reelection. Just Read Florida is the group that masterminded the new version of FAIR. Let them know what you think about it. This issue isn’t about one teacher. This is a springboard for educators and parents to tell their stories. Please, let your voice be heard.

Thanks to Becky Jones Young, my childhood friend and fellow lifelong teacher, for taking a stand of her own in Ohio. She was an amazing middle school English teacher, who quit teaching (her love, joy and passion) because she could no longer participate in cheating children out of fun, creativity and enriching learning – in the name of education.

Susan Bowles
Kindergarten Teacher
Lawton Chiles Elementary School
Gainesville, Florida

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Florida, Honor Roll, Resistance, Teachers, Testing

Special Education: Duncan Sets Unreachable Goals

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2014 //
34

Beverley Holden Johns, a nationally recognized expert in the field of disabilities, strongly disagrees with Arne Duncan. Duncan wants children with disabilities to be able to perform on the highest level of NAEP tests. She points out that NAEP was not designed for this purpose. Duncan unilaterally changed the requirements of the IDEA act, without Congressional authorization. Having changed NCLB without Congressional authorization, he must think that ignoring the law is routine. In Néw York, we learned how students with disabilities do when they took the Common Core test: 95% failed.

Beverley Holden Johns writes:

————————–
NCLB required all students to be proficient on State tests by 2014.

Failure of the public schools to reach that goal has been widely
viewed as the failure of public education, requiring movement
to Charter Schools and even increasing the talk of Vouchers in the name of Choice.

Now Arne Duncan seeks to require ALL students with disabilities to
demonstrate proficiency or advanced mastery of challenging
subject matter on the NAEP tests?

As this is impossible (students without disabilities do not
come close to doing it and are making very little progress
toward meeting that goal), what will be the impact on special ed?

Special education will be deemed to be an utter failure, and
some will urge Response to Intervention, RTI, often called MTSS,
and Full Inclusion for all (although there is no evidence that will
cause students to meet the NAEP goal).

What is wrong with using NAEP?

(1) National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, was not designed for any such purpose, or validated for any such purpose.

(2) NAEP is given at only a few schools in each State to get
a sample of how the State is doing in the 4th and 8th grades
in math and reading every 2 years.

NAEP makes no pretense of testing all children or all schools.

So NAEP offers no accountability whatsoever at the vast majority
of schools in each State.

(3) There have been consistent problems on whether students
with disabilities even take the NAEP, and on whether the NAEP
tests will offer accommodations for students with disabilities
(on which each State has made tremendously varying decisions).

So the percentage of students with disabilities in each State
taking the NAEP varies tremendously from State to State
(making State to State comparisons totally invalid).

(4) NAEP is not aligned with the Common Core so it does
not reflect what may be taught in the classroom.

What does Arne Duncan state that the goal of special ed Results Driven Accountability is?

“While the goal is to ensure that ALL Children with
Disabilities demonstrate proficient or advanced mastery
of challenging subject matter, we recognize that States
may need to take intermediate steps to reach this benchmark.”
(emphasis added)

Please see footnote 7 at

Click to access 2014_part_b_htdmd.pdf

Can anyone provide a complete description of this accountability
system that parents and educators can understand?

On August 4, 2014, all 8 Republicans on the U.S. Senate
education committee in a 3 page letter asked Arne Duncan
detailed questions about this special ed Results Driven Accountability:

“It is troubling that the department made unilateral changes
to the [Individuals with Disabilities Education Act] compliance
framework without seeking legislative approval, disregarded
congressional intent, and appears to have violated the clear letter of the law.”

“The changes spelled out in your ‘Results-Driven Accountability’
framework clearly amount to federal influence on the standards
and assessments states and school districts use to direct the
education program of students with disabilities and would give
the federal government authority to use students proficiency as
measured by the NAEP to evaluate and either reward or
sanction school districts.”

No Child Left Behind, the joint product of George W. Bush and
Ted Kennedy, has positives and negatives, but overall it has
been a disaster for the public schools because it had unrealistic
and utopian goals.

We cannot allow special ed Results Driven Accountability
to be a similar disaster.

Bev Johns

Categories Duncan, Arne, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Special Education

Jersey Jazzman Corrects Pundit Jonathan Alter

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2014 //
12

A few years ago, I “debated” Jonathan Alter on a Denver radio show but soon realized that I had entered a zone where facts were irrelevant because Alter’s mind was made up. He loves charter schools. He thinks testing and accountability are the answer to the deep problems of education. He is contemptuous of public schools and the teachers who work in them. He thinks that unions exist to protect failed teachers.

Jersey Jazzman, who is completing a Ph.D. In education research, tries here to set Alter right. It is a hopeless task, in sorry to say. Alter has a deep ideological devotion to charter schools, and he won’t listen to data about attrition or how many kids with special needs are excluded from them.

But I’m glad that JJ has the will to try.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers

A Few Election Results

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2014 //
9

Andrew Cuomo won with 62% of the vote; Zephyr Teachout received 34%. Teachout had a great showing considering that she was a complete unknown with little name recognition, vastly outspent by Cuomo. Her $200,000 vs his $35 million. And his legal team kept her tied up in court challenging her residency; she won but lost two weeks of campaigning. Cuomo did his best to make Teachout invisible, never debating her, never mentioning her name, turning his back to her when she tried to shake her hand, treating her as a non-person. Yet she nonetheless managed to win the votes of 34% of Democrats who voted. She swept many upstate counties, perhaps on the hydrofracking issue (she is against it). She was a class act. He was a cold, calculating bully who refused to mention her name or shake her hand.

 

After the election, Cuomo bragged that “he had bravely taken on several narrow but well-organized special interests — state employees, teachers and hydrofracking opponents — who, he said, were upset with him because he did not give into their wishes.” So we are likely to see more education budget cuts, more cheerleading for non-union charter schools, and gubernatorial support for hydrofracking, since these are some  of the groups that Cuomo was proud to have defeated. The unions and the Working Family Party should have endorsed Teachout. Well, there is always next time. She was a great candidate and she has a future, if she chooses to stay in the arena.

 

Aaron Regunberg, former organizer of the Providence Student Union, won a seat in the State Senate in Rhode Island. That’s great news. Never again will the State Senate pass a policy on education without hearing the voices of those it affects most: students.

 

Gina Raimondo was elected governor of Rhode Island. She wasn’t my choice because of her role in cutting pensions but she is preferable to Mayor Taveras, who touts charters and was DFER’s choice..

Categories Education Reform

Peter Greene: John Oliver Explains Student Debt and Scamming the Public

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2014 //
25

This is a must-see. Peter Greene here presents and discusses comedian John Oliver on student debt.

Most students will leave college with heavy debts; some will spend years trying to pay it off. The arrangement was created by the federal government and state governments, which have steadily decreased their responsibility for subsidizing the cost of higher education, transferring the burden to students. There once was a time when community colleges were tuition-free. No longer. For-profit institutions and online “universities” have moved in to fill their place. These institutions have terrible completion rates. Despite repeated calls to regulate the for-profits, Congress and the U.S. Department of Education have failed to do so. The for-profit industry hires top lobbyists from both parties to protect their interests. Who protects the students?

When one of the worst for-profit institutions (Corinthian) teetered near bankruptcy, the US DOE extended a bail-out instead of closing it down.

Categories Education Industry, For-Profit, Higher Education, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes, Students

OECD: Competition Among Schools Not Associated with Higher Scores

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2014 //
14

A report from the OECD, which sponsors the international assessment PISA, finds that competition among schools for students (“choice”) is not associated with higher math scores but is associated with higher levels of social segregation.

“PISA results…show that, on average across countries, school competition is not related to better mathematics performance among students. In systems where almost all 15-year-olds attend schools that compete for enrollment, average performance is similar to that in systems where school competition is the exception.

“What this means is that school choice may actually spoil some of the intended benefits of competition, such as greater innovation in education and a better match between students’ needs and interests and what schools offer, by reinforcing social inequities at the same time.”

In the U.S., school choice began as an integral part of the opposition to court-ordered desegregation. The word “choice” was a code word for segregation. Southern politicians were all for choice because it would allow white students to “escape” to white schools, leaving black students in all-black schools. Today, charter schools are more segregated than district schools, even in districts that have high levels of segregation, according to the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. today, the media celebrates all-black schools if they get high test scores. Charters have become a way of enabling renewed segregation.

Categories Charter Schools, International, Vouchers

Good News: Anti-Due Process Group in Missouri Drops Its Campaign This Year

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2014 //
15

Good news for teachers in Missouri.

The group seeking a constitutional amendment to eliminate teachers’ right to due process (aka “tenure”) has decided to abandon its campaign for now. Called Teach Great, the organization hoped to make test scores the key factor in all decisions about teachers.

“The proposed amendment will still appear on the ballot. It seeks to end tenure and require that decisions around the hiring, promoting, firing and laying off of teachers be determined by at least 51 percent on student performance measures.

“Teach Great took on the task of gathering petition signatures and promoting the ideas that are championed by St. Louis financier Rex Sinquefield.” Sinquefield is a billionaire libertarian.

In an earlier post, I wrote that Sinquefield had put up $750,000 to launch the campaign to eliminate teacher tenure.

I wrote at that time:

“Conservative billionaire Rex Sinquefield does not believe that teaching should be a career. He doesn’t think that teachers should have any job security. He thinks that teachers should have short-term contracts and that their jobs should depend on the test scores of their students. He has contributed $750,000 to launch a campaign for a constitutional amendment in Missouri to achieve his aims.

“The campaign, in a style now associated with those who hope to dismantle the teaching profession, has the duplicitous name “teachgreat.org” to signify the opposite of its intent. The assumption is that the removal of any job security and any kind of due process for teachers will somehow mysteriously produce “great” teachers. This absurd idea is then called “reform.” This is the kind of thinking that typically comes from hedge fund managers, not human service professionals.

“Sinquefield manages billions of dollars and is also the state’s biggest political contributor.

“The “Teachgreat.org” initiative would limit teacher contracts to no more than three years. It also requires “teachers to be dismissed, retained, demoted, promoted, and paid primarily using quantifiable student performance data as part of the evaluation system,” according to the summary on the group’s website.”

See? Never give up hope. Bad ideas come and go, and they go away faster when teachers and parents work together.

Categories Missouri, Teacher Tenure

Here is a Link to Tavis Smiley Show

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2014 //
37

In case you missed, here is my interview with Tavis Smiley from September 8. It is about 12 minutes. Tavis asked about the Vergara decision and teacher tenure, about the attacks on teachers and public education, about the goals of the current “reform” movement, Common Core, and my judgment of Race to the Top.

All in 12 minutes!

By the way, if you wonder why I was holding my head in last minutes of show, I should explain that I didn’t have a toothache. My earpiece with the audio feed was falling out, and I was holding it in my ear.

Categories Common Core, Race to the Top, Ravitch, Diane, Teach for America, Teacher Tenure, Teachers and Teaching

And Now a Word from “Sad Teacher”

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2014 //
60

A reader with the name “Sad Teacher” wrote the following comment:

“My problem is that I cannot follow the Marzano rubric and continue to get excellent test scores. I’ve been told for many years what to teach, but now we are being ordered how to teach it. It is almost against the law now for a teacher to go to the dry erase board and explain the strategies to solve a proportion. That is called direct instruction, and it is a bad word in my district, thanks to the Marzano model of the teacher evaluation system.

“I was actually told by my evaluator that I needed to teach the highest kids in my classroom how to properly solve a proportion – and then they would teach the rest of the class in small groups, of course. It is my job to just walk around the classroom and look up at the ceiling (facilitate their learning they call it) and, of course, TEST LIKE CRAZY! I can’t teach this way! It has all gotten so ridiculous that I can’t stand the stress anymore. I love my students dearly, but all they have is a kind teacher with dark circles under her eyes with a sad smile on her face looking at the calendar on her desk to see the next assessment deadline. They deserve so much more.”

Categories Teachers and Teaching, Testing

If CCSS is not a Curriculum, Why Do All the Textbooks Look Alike?

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2014 //
48

A letter from a public school parent:

“Hi Diane —

I am an avid follower of you, Carol Burris, and other brilliant experts who have helped me understand the state of education today.

A lot has been written about CCSS, and we know that advocates love to say “It’s standards, not curricula” and “States are free to teach the standards their own way; it’s not prescriptive.”

What I don’t see addressed is the reality that, across the nation, CCSS curricula from every publisher is frighteningly similar. From viral post from the engineer dad who wrote the letter in his son’s homework to “tell Jack what he did wrong,” to the coffee cup conundrum Carol Burris outlined in WaPo, I find it eerie that these are nearly identical to the questions my kids are having to tackle in workbooks at their NYC public elementary school. I have also compared notes with my mom friends in Colorado, California, Idaho and Texas, and we are finding that questions are nearly exactly the same — in both ELA and math. And incidentally, we are all also struggling with badly written, error-filled material that clearly has not been proofed, fact-checked or reviewed/edited. Insult to injury!

I realize my observation is strictly anecdotal, but it nags at me. How can there be such marked similarity on a national scale? Were they all written by one shadowy non-profit funded by Gates and then licensed out to publishers? How can it be that they all are filled with so many errors? My children (going into 2nd and 4th grade at a public school in Brooklyn) use workbooks published by Curriculum Associates. That company doesn’t seem to have any connection to Pearson or any other big education publisher. So why is their curricula content the same as all the others? Clearly what’s happening on the ground doesn’t jibe with what CCSS advocates keep saying.”

 

Lorna

Categories Common Core
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