This is an important message from a local school board member–Damon Buffum– to the New York Board of Regents. To commend him for his straight talk and thoughtfulness, I add him to our honor roll as a champion of American education.
–
From: Damon Buffum (dbuffum)
Sent: Monday, October 13, 2014 11:27 AM
To: Norwood; Regent Bendit; Regent Bennett; Regent Bottar; Regent Brown; Regent Cashin; Regent Cea; Regent Cottrell; Regent Dawson; Regent Finn; Regent Phillips; Regent Rosa; Regent Tallon; Regent Tiles; Regent Tisch; Regent Young
Cc: Damon Buffum (dbuffum) (dbuffum@cisco.com)
Subject: Times Union article Re: Common Core Divides State’s Regents Board
Hello New York State Board of Regents –
My name is Damon Buffum and I’m a Board of Education member in the Fairport Central School District (Monroe County). I’m also a District Resident, father, grandfather and high tech Engineering Manager with Cisco Systems. The comments in this email are my own and don’t represent the opinions or policy of the Fairport BoE or Cisco Systems.
I wanted to comment on the recent article in the Albany Times Union regarding education policy and the views of the state Regents. First, thanks for your efforts. I know from my experience on the Fairport BoE, the time commitment to education in New York is immense and I can only imagine the time and dedication required to fulfill your roll on the state Regents Board. The main purpose of the note however, is to strongly support the views that Regent Rosa expresses in her comments in this article. She states, “They are using false information to create a crisis, to take the state test and turn it on its head to make sure the suburbs experience what the urban centers experience: failure”. I couldn’t agree more. In representing the Fairport education system I can firmly state that we have no crisis in the Fairport education system.
It’s disturbing to me to listen to Governor Cuomo, Commissioner King and the Board of Regents decry, universally, that New York schools are failing our children, that we spend more money than any other state and that our state government is providing more funding to public education that ever before. All of these statements have context, but are ultimately not true. I believe that you understand this. I do consider it a fact that we have certain districts that are in crisis, but I’ve also done personal analysis and know that there is a DIRECT link of education performance (whatever academic metric you chose) and student poverty. This is not a vague connection, but a direct connection. To divert attention away from this link to poverty and broadly paint this as a nationwide or statewide education failure is both misleading and incorrect. Using our sparse and valuable resources to attack this problem through inappropriate curriculum for early grades, over testing and data collection, high stakes testing, curriculum changes and the need for increased (overwhelming) investment in technology, new text books, teacher development is irresponsible and wasteful. I won’t go into the associated, unquantified, costs to these reform policies, but I have a firm belief that these are moving New York education in the wrong direction and will ultimately cost our state dearly in terms of an educated workforce and a healthy economy. We sadly do have a crisis in many urban and rural communities. We have a poverty crisis, a social structure crisis, a health crisis and economic opportunity crisis. These are the FUNDAMENTAL issues that have to be recognized and dealt with. A child spends roughly 17% of their time in schools. The best teachers, curriculum and tests won’t fix a problem if 83% of a child’s time is being impacted by other areas that are in crisis. This is where Governor Cuomo should be focused. Schools and teachers can do amazing things, but the children have to be safe, fed, healthy and ready to learn.
In my home district, the Common Core and associated testing (3-8 state testing, field testing, SLO testing) have caused an immense distortion of our child-centric focus and ensuring the education of the whole child. I understand that the CCSS are only standards and not curriculum or a test, but it’s naïve to think that the immense quantity of time and impact of these tests to do not have a direct link to the curriculum, funding, focus and morale of our education system. I’ve personally toured every building in our District and spoken with administrators, staff and students. We have a 95% graduation rate, our kids have a healthy education experience that includes the arts, history, the sciences, athletics, robotics, community service, diversity and inclusion. We are proud of our kids and our schools. Again, for me personally, I consider the New York state reform agenda to be a direct attack on the education community we have.
I know that I haven’t told you anything that you haven’t heard or known already. However, I am asking you to get real here. Let’s recognize the REAL problems that we have in New York and start attacking those. We need to stop proclaiming ALL education systems as failures and support the best of what we have while addressing the gaps. We need to support these activities with funding – and giving support and then taking it away through the GEA is absurd. The current Common Core implementation in New York is creating chaos. We have our Superintendents divided in terms of impact, the states teachers union initiating a lawsuit around a testing gag order, multiple Districts adopting declarations against high stakes testing, tens of thousands of students and parents opting out of state tests, schools being closed and we have total political dysfunction. Our kids are paying the price for this as they only experience their education a single time. We entrust you with our state education policy. Please put our schools and kids first (above a political or corporate agenda) and put education back in the hands of educators.
Regards –
Damon Buffum
http://m.timesunion.com/local/article/Common-Core-divides-state-s-Regents-board-5067470.php
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’m a retired teacher and a former BoE member in NY state. Everything stated in this hero’s letter rings true. Ed Reform = tell lies, create chaos, cash in!!!
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Thank you for sharing this. BOE member Buffum depicts clearly the current situation and exposes the “crisis in education” for what it is – an excuse to undermine public schools and a distraction from the very real issue of child poverty.
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Couldn’t have said it better myself!!
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The real problem in New York is that racism has led to intense hypersegregation, with poor people of color concentrated in a relatively small number of cities. Rochester, just ten miles from Fairport, is one of them.
For all his many flaws, the governor is entirely accurate when he says that New York spends more per student than any other state, and New York residents have (by far) the highest combined tax burden in the US. Furthermore, the funding inequities that exist downstate aren’t in play upstate: Rochester schools get considerably more per-student funding than the non-integrated communities that surround it.
Fairport’s student population is only 7% black and Latino, 11% free-lunch eligible, and 1% ELL. The district isn’t serving its fair share of its community’s (many Fairport residents work in Rochester, including Rochester’s schools) at-risk children. Pleading for more money and time doesn’t address this fundamental imbalance.
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Tim,
I went to one of the John King/ Merryl Tisch “listening tour” thingies last year. They both (and also data czar Ken Wagner) used strong equity arguments to justify all of their standardization projects including Common Core and InBloom. (they actually said they had to datamine everyone because that was the only way they could afford to datamine at risk students – like it was a free app.)
And there was the Student’s First participant who yelled out “at last Bed Stuy will get the same education as Park Slope!” when showing her “support” for common core.
Communities that were previously quite comfortable are now seeing that the state can’t deliver standardization at the Park Slope level. Everyone will get the same lousy education – equity problem solved!
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Tim…
You are correct in that New York does spend a large sum of money per student and we actually spend more per student in the city of Rochester than the suburbs. Fairport’s cost per student is actually on the lower range of Monroe County schools. The cost per student isn’t a direct correlation to student success (or even a test score). Again, consider the enormous cost of poverty. A student base living in poverty raises costs for a District food program, social services, counseling and psychologist, providing extra teachers for suspended students (still must be taught), security and much more. Again, a District with less poverty doesn’t have the same magnitude of costs. So who do we hold responsible for this? Do we slam school districts who have to provide these services to our kids or do we hold our political representatives responsible for not providing fundamental social structures for our society so our kids are able to learn?
New York has one of the highest (if not THE highest) percentages of kids living in poverty. This is expensive. Can schools solve the poverty crisis? I am not pleading for more money, but insisting that we receive the money that was committed to our kids. After all, this is PUBLIC education. This is our money paid through our taxes and there’s no bigger priority than our kids and our schools. The fact that the Governor has refused to fully fund education, continually put cost burdens on local tax payers (and then put a tax cap on BoE’s) and has prioritized giving tax breaks for the wealthy is disgusting. There was a $2B budget surplus this year in New York, yet the Governor and Legislature maintained the GEA and took back billions from school districts, some of which have eroded all of their savings and are forced to cut teachers and program. Will a Common Core or high stakes test solve this problem?
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As a current BoE member in East Aurora New York I couldn’t agree more. Mr. Buffum needs to send this to the New York Times. I speak for myself as a former educator, not as a representative of our BoE; East Aurora has a 98 percent graduation rate, a Stem program, multiple accolades to both our administrators and schools. We are highly successful although we suffer under severe lack of funding from both GAP elimination and lack of foundation aid for the past 5 years. We are at rock bottom with staff but have been able, currently, to keep our Art and Music programs.
Each community has it’s challenges and the states effort to paint us all with the same brush, “failing”, is patently untrue and unfair. A great deal of the money being spent per child in NYS goes to Pearson or MacGraw Hill for testing.
CCLS is fraught with problems and was poorly implemented, but started at kindergarten level and allowed to progress over a generation could be adapted. It would need much scaffolding for the challenged learner. Bloom’s taxonomy moves from literal to abstract thinking on a spectrum. My feeling is CCLS starts in the middle of that spectrum. This presents a real problem with both understanding and age appropriate content.
This is why we need well written articles like Mr. Buffum’s to reach the ny times. There are many very successful district’s who are being starved for funding, forced into testing, in spite of our continued success. It is definitely effecting morale because the dialog about “all” public schools is nefarious and not so veiled attempt to take away local control, end teachers protections and pensions, and replace public schools with vouchers, tax credits and charters.
Finally, with this attack on schools and the teaching profession, how do we continue to at track the brightest and best to public education?
I will be going to the NYSSBA conference in NYC next weekend and will be listening to hear their focus in this battle.
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It is so encouraging to hear and read Board members’ growing disillusionment with CC, testing, and the politics behind it. I am fortunate to live in the East Aurora School District and support my local schools. I’ve always admired Judy Malys’s educational stance. I teach in another district that is rural and socio-economically deprived. Our Board members are not members of NYSSBA and while I think they mean well, I believe they are not as informed as they should be. Needless to say, they’re not quite on board with the rest of us.
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“CCLS is fraught with problems and was poorly implemented, but started at kindergarten level and allowed to progress over a generation could be adapted.”
I’m assuming that the CCLS is NY’s version of CCSS. If so then it and it’s accompanying standardized testing, and no they can’t be separated as they are two sides of the same edudeformer coin, still suffers from all the epistemological and ontological errors that Noel Wilson has identified that render those educational malpractices COMPLETELY INVALID and any usage of the results UNETHICAL. To understand why read and comprehend his never refuted nor rebutted “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
By Duane E. Swacker
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Excellent article. The only issue he left out is the data mining aspect. The reformers had to say that suburban schools were failing as well as urban districts so that everyone was forced to adopt uniform standards. The uniformity allows the data to be tagged and organized to create the Big Data required by the ‘school to work’ planned economy that Marc Tucker detailed in his “Dear Hillary” letter of 1993. The privatizers are determined to end public schools and local control. The UN wants to negate our national sovereignty. The Common Core is just a necessary step towards these political goals, having nothing whatsoever to do with what is best for our children.
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Please add to the list the fully implemented 5 Regents requirement for graduation for all students, including those with learning disabilities, IEPs and 504 plans. Many of these students have tried to pass the Regents exams 3, 4 or 5 times (or more) at this point. They do need a diploma to graduate. They need a diploma to get any job but they do not need to be able to handle an Algebra or Global History exam to get a good job as a truck driver, plumber, beautician, or a whole host of other occupations. Students have already given up, knowing that they will not be able to earn a diploma in 2015. Drop out rates will increase steadily for SPED students.
Now, add on ELL/ESL students.
Now pile on Common Core and the changes implemented to the regents exams so far. The Algebra regents in now a vocabulary test. The ELA regents has increased from 2,000 words to 6,000 words and is more about analyzing government documents then it is about a rich experience in literature.
This is not NCLB. This is throwing people away.
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I am also an upstate teacher. I have been appalled by the overt take over of the education dept. in NY by the board of Regents. M. Tisch has created her own personal work force. Ms. Tisch created a ‘Regents Research Foundation” She contributed $1,000,000. to the research foundation, then Mr. Bill Gates contributed $3.3million, and many other conservative people with very deep pockets added more money, totaling $19 million . Ms. Tisch hired 27 people to “shadow state ed. employees”. She directs their work or “research” and she pays them. This has been ignored by the Governor, but not by the newspapers. The Times Union a local Albany newspaper had an investigative article about this. James Odato was the author and he wrote that it took him more than one year to find out how much the “regents research fellows” were being paid, though he used the freedom of information act to obtain the information
For me this is underhanded ,unethical, and and it represents the way the common core learning standards were introduced and developed.
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Cross posted athttp://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/An-Important-Message-to-th-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Crisis_Education_Experience_Poverty-141020-538.html#comment516679
with this comment (which has embedded links at Oped)
I hope anyone who reads the articles Ipost here which follows the destruction of public schools, passes the information on. The ignorance about the conspiracy to end public education is incredible.
I am reminded of the essay by Paul Krugman about Inventing Failure.
Knowing what manipulation and outright fraud is passing as ‘reform’ now that the schools are failing because they have been underfunded and been emptied of the professional staff of veteran educators. Krugman talks about inventing failures, so the ‘fix’ can change everything, and this was the plan! Ignoring the facts of income inequality is jut another way to create a ‘failure’ in need of ‘fixing’ by Bamboozling the people and selling as “choice’ magic elixirs such as charter schools.
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