Jeannie Kaplan, who recently retired from the Denver school board, knows how to read the reports and data from the district. Here is one of her best posts. She is a stalwart critic of the data-driven corporate reform culture and has often noted how little progress students have made after a full decade of corporate reform and constant testing. The latest bad news concerned test scores in science and social studies. But the district superintendent Tom Boasberg did not issue a press release acknowledging the low scores and proposing more time for instruction in science and social studies.
Kaplan writes:
So, what happens when test results are so awful that even a crack public information office, focused on test scores and accountability, can’t figure out how to put a positive spin on standardized test numbers? Denver Public Schools and Superintendent Tom Boasberg faced this situation in late October when, after several delays, the Colorado Department of Education released its first Colorado Measures of Academic Success (CMAS) Social Studies (grades 4 and 7) and Science (grade 5 and 8) results. This is a somewhat ironic name since the academic success was nowhere to be found. The superintendent writes regularly about the wonders of “reform” in DPS and has historically been able to spin even the worst “gains.” This time, however, he was flummoxed.
CMAS results were released at noon on Monday, October 27, 2014. Boasberg’s email went out later that afternoon. His 11 paragraph epistle waxed on about these new standards, how helpful they will be, how they set higher standards for our students, and how they will help ensure “our students graduate high school ready for college and career in the 21st century.” In paragraph six he briefly shifts gears and half-heartedly bemoans “the overall number of state assessments and the time spent on them” and asks very quietly for the state to find a way to make assessments precise, targeted and SHORT “to lessen the amount of lost instructional time” This from the quintessential Broad trained superintendent. There is hardly a standardized test he hasn’t supported.
What did this data-driven “reformer” not cite in his email? You guessed it. The data! Of the six links in the email, none of them links to actual data and test results. Instead there are PowerPoints and generalities about CMAS and the like. Again, no test results or links to test results. The actual test results for the state and more importantly for Denver Public Schools are nowhere to be found. But do not fear. I am here to shed light on that missing piece and help ensure the truth be told.
The scores were in fact abysmal. Read her post to see just how awful they were. Some charter schools with “science” in their names did poorly, as did most public schools.
Kaplan writes:
The superintendent is right about one thing: he always proclaims the kind of school – turnaround, innovation, charter, traditional – really doesn’t matter when it comes to academic outcomes. Whatever school is academically successful, he is all for it. In this situation he is right: no school has been successful in teaching Social Studies and Science. In this regard the kind of school is irrelevant. What he fails to understand is if you are not allowed to teach the subject, children in any kind of school will not learn the subject. And if you can’t speak, read and write English with fluency, you most likely won’t do well on a test in English.
This is all very puzzling to me. I truly cannot figure out how telling people they are failing is a good strategy. I truly cannot understand the long term purpose of testing all the time. Most of all I truly am saddened by how the education decision makers either never understood the purpose of public education or have lost sight of it. If you have solutions for stopping this madness, please share them.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Science and social studies instruction is a casualty of the maniacal focus on reading and math scores. In, “Give us back our time!” I argued that elementary school children need more time to learn as scientists, social scientists and artists…..I called upon literacy educators to advocate to give us back our time. I urged parents to demand that school leaders and policy makers give us back our time. – See more at: http://www.arthurcamins.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Give-Us-Back-Our-Time_Camins.pdf
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Yes. YES. The focus on math and reading is out of control. You don’t get improvement by piling on what is not working. Students need good reasons to learn math and reading, and their good reasons will drive improvements. Some of those good reasons are just wanting to come to school and doing more drill and kill. Their horizons for learning need to be expanded with content from the arts sciences, and humanities, not strictly academic–but doing inquiry.
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I have a colleague that teaches 4th grade in the lowest-scoring district in the state of Utah. He has been told that he can ONLY teach math, reading, and writing. Nothing else.
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Protecting instructional time for science and social studies at especially the elementary level is an important battle to fight. The concepts and applications are important and often engaging for students.
I would take most state standardized assessments of science and social studies with a grain of salt, however. Sometimes they are as much a measure of how well the student reads informational text as a meaningful measure of a child’s knowledge and conceptual development in science and social studies.
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“I would take ALL state standardized assessments of NOT ONLY science and social studies BUT ALL SUBJECTS with a grain of salt, AND THEN IMMEDIATELY THROW THEM IN THE TRASH.”
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Señor Swacker: since standardized tests measure very little, are inherently imprecise, and are increasingly robbing more and more time from genuine learning and teaching—
They need to go the way of the TRex. Extinction.
I would say what you said, but I have been inundated again with emails from some obscure organization called Trash For America [TFA]. They have made the point—theirs, not mine—that trash already suffers unfairly from unwholesome images and negative connotations. Lumping trash in with standardized tests would be adding insult to injury, lowering even further the already precarious status of TFAers everywhere.
Again, their point, not mine, it’s like calling VAM “junk science.” VAM is certainly not science, and no junk worthy of its name would ever want to have anything to do with the sham that is VAM.
If it’s any consolation, Socrates has offered to part with a few drachmas and let the ouzo flow freely down at Pink Slip Bar & Grille. He’s still stuck on truth and beauty and thinks that when all is said and done, the above is just a bunch of hooey, and at times like this I think he may be more than half right…
Be there or be square.
😎
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I don’t have a solution but I do have a suggestion for advocates, which of course they may take or leave, but I do believe it to be true 🙂
Focus on what ed reform is doing to existing public schools. I don’t care of it’s rural, urban, suburban, wealthy or middle class or working class or poor, most kids go to public schools. The parents with kids in public schools won’t pay any attention if you talk exclusively about charters and vouchers, because that doesn’t apply to them.
The three issues public school parents have focused in on are (lack of) funding, over-testing and the Common Core. I think that’s because those are the ed reform policies they see in their public schools.
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E.D. Hirsch founded the Core Knowledge Sequence to provide curricula guidance for schools. His theory is that if you enrich young children with a good foundation of History, Science, Literature, and the Arts, you build a content base for deeper comprehension in reading and in all areas, even Mathematics. Additionally, since the sequence flows and is continuous between grades and between subjects, students can switch schools without disruption. The CK Sequence was a basis for CCSS.
Look what it has become! This is not what E.D. Hirsch envisioned.
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Studied “the Arts” component in Hirsch’s curriculum. Much to be desired. Premise was teach about ancient Egyptian art in the earliest grades and you don’t have to do that again. Eurocentric content in the main, and studies in art constrained by the desire to keep that conventional narrative in place. Some of the writers for Hirsch migrated to the CCSS and some migrated to Lynn Munson’s ELA “curriculum maps,” prject, strictly CCSS with an effort to add a dab of the arts.
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In New York State, the Department of Education spent years and tens of millions of dollars developing common core aligned curricula in ELA and math, grades K-12, called curriculum “modules.” The lead consultant on the project, Kate Gerson, was/is one of the privately funded “Regents Research Fellows,” part of the current, shadow State Ed Department in Albany. Gerson was a HS English teacher for a couple years, and a HS principal for a couple years (in a small school of about 150 pupils called a “transfer school,” or the last stop in NYC for over-aged and under-credited students to pursue a HS diploma). That is the sum and substance of Gerson’s experience in public education in NY State–so let’s put her in charge of curriculum! State wide! K-12! Hurray!!!
The English modules rolled out under Gerson’s direction are heavy with informational text–only it’s text that does not align with New York State’s social studies OR science scope and sequences. When educators raised questions along the lines of, “Why are the tenth grade ELA modules about the Civil War, when we don’t teach the Civil War in tenth grade,” Gerson’s informed response was, “You mean you don’t teach the Civil War in tenth grade?” [No, in NY we teach global history and geography from the Age of Absolutism to the present in 10th grade–you know, the French revolution, nationalism, industrial revolution, capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, World I, communism, fascism, totalitarianism, World War II, stuff like that].
Chris Cerrone, a leader in NY’s education reform resistance movement, has written several commentaries on the modules, and their lack of alignment with NY’s curricula. See for example this contribution on social studies and ELA module (mis-) alignment in graades K-3:
http://atthechalkface.com/2014/08/26/engageny-modules-out-of-alignment/
I just saw Citizenfour last night–the recently released Edward Snowden documentary. As a film it leaves some things to be desired. As a call for reflection and discussion about democracy, freedom, the rights and responsibilities of citizens, the appropriate limits of and for government, Citizenfour is very important. As I reflected this morning on the film, what struck me in particular was Snowden’s exceptionally articulate rationale for his decision to go underground and release classified documents pertaining to NSA’s fantastically intrusive and over-arching surveillance not only of American citizens but also the citizens and governments of other nations. Twenty nine years old at the time, he spoke eloquently to principled action in a democratic society, in defense of the rights of citizens, as articulated and protected by the Constitution of the United States.
Where would we be without civics education? Where would we be without an understanding of history? Without a passing acquaintance with the Constitution? Lost, long gone and lost, I fear. And I fear that is the direction in which we may be headed, without social studies and science.
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This is one of my greatest fears. I see a focus on Americas failures rather than on our laws and the reasoning behind them. There is a definite anti US government and constitution flavor in the common core. I fear we are setting ourselves up for a totalitarian government.
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There is nothing in the Common Core about the Constitution at all. Social studies, along with science and other non-reading and math subjects, is simply relegated to an appendix in the back of the ELA standards.
Perhaps you meant that the Common Core bypassed democracy and public comment when it was signed off in each state. If that’s what you mean, I TOTALLY agree.
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It does show up in the “Reading:Informational Text” standards for grades 11-12.
http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RI/11-12/8/
http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RI/11-12/9/
It’s funny how the ELA standards are almost entirely drafted in terms of skills, with fleeting (if any) references to specific content, which is treated like details that can be worked out later. I say that’s “funny” because all the stuff I read about standards in the late 80s and 1990s framed standards as something like a bullet list of content — the canon of what every American “needs to know.”
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There is nothing in the Common Core about the Constitution at all
No surprise there.
The last thing the folks who developed CC want is to have students across the country doing a close reading of the US Constitution!
And of course, they also don’t want students reading a coherent, informed, literate, rational document which they can then compare with the ignorant, incoherent tripe that is Common Core.
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Let’s ask teachers and trust their answers. Stop this political stance in education and privatization of schools. The people who deal with students and parents everyday are the ones who can give honest input as to how to make our education system strong. Education cannot be turned into a cash cow, if we continue allowing this we are going to lose the premise of an education for all no matter the ability to pay.
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