The Senate hearings on NCLB are being live-streamed right now. Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, chair of the HELP (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee) quoted New York principal Carol Burris, as follows, from the article she published on Valerie Strauss’ Answer Sheet:
This is what Senator Alexander quoted:
As we engage in the debate on the issue of how to fix NCLB, I ask that your committee remember that the American public school system was built on the belief that local communities cherish their children and have the right and responsibility, within sensible limits, to determine how they are schooled.
While the federal government has a very special role in ensuring that our students do not experience discrimination based on who they are or what their disability may be, Congress is not a National School Board.
Although our locally elected school boards may not be perfect, they represent one of the purest forms of democracy we have. Bad ideas in the small do damage in the small and are easily corrected. Bad ideas at the federal level result in massive failure and are far harder to fix.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
She NAILED it!!!!
Praying Senator Alexander does this correctly.
it’s a new dawn, it’s a new day…
It is time for our Senators and Representatives listen to the “People”. Listen to what individuals like Ms. Burris have to say. The Boards of Education system of democratically elected individuals from the local community is not perfect — nothing is — but it is a system serving the Students, Parents, Teachers, School Administrators — the whole community — in a why no other elected body can. Decisions need to be made at the local level that meet the needs of the community. One shoe does not fit all people. One decision made in DC does not necessarily fit the needs of all communities. One federally mandated test does not fit all students. This country is made up of individuals who have the right to make decision based on their needs, wants, and desires. The current direction of public education in this country is taking away those rights.
We can only hope that individuals from the grass roots have a chance to speak to the Senators on this committee.
There needs to be a campaign of letters and e-mails to all the Senators from across America expressing our concerns on how NCLB, Race to the Top, Standardized Testing and other parts of the reform movement have and will impact public education.
This is opportunity of Students, Parents, Teachers and School Administrators to stand up and be heard. It is time for Boards of Education to write and pass resolutions to be sent to the Senators expressing the frustration felt by the educational communities across America.
Time is now. Not tomorrow.
Wow! I hope he didn’t cancel out this point in other remarks.
This is progress!
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Although our locally elected school boards may not be perfect, they represent one of the purest forms of democracy we have. Bad ideas in the small do damage in the small and are easily corrected. Bad ideas at the federal level result in massive failure and are far harder to fix.
Truer words have seldom been spoken.
“Bad ideas in the small do damage in the small and are easily corrected. Bad ideas at the federal level result in massive failure and are far harder to fix.”
There are about 15,000 democratically run school districts, and when an elected school broad comes up with bad ideas, the next school board election allows local voters to call for change to fix the bad ideas and get rid of the idiots.
Fifteen thousand possible fixes every election compared to only one federal fix that is heavily influenced by the money oligarchs are spending to buy state legislatures, state governors, both Houses of Congress and the White House.
I think it’s safe to say it is more difficult and challenging for even Bill Gates to buy 15,000 democratically elected local community school boards then it is to buy state and federal governments.
It is now very clear that to totally control and profit from the schools starting with pre-school to college graduation, Bill Gates and the other oligarchs must remove the democratic process from America’s education system.
Carol Burris is a very good writer and she did a great job at the CC debate, particularly as she was debating people who are paid to make policy presentations- they do that as a full-time job. She does it in her spare time in addition to running what sounds like a very good public school.
If the Obama Administration were smart they would have hired her instead of turning her into an opponent. I read her Twitter feed and she’s a life-long Democrat. How they think they are going to “reform” public schools while completely alienating the most passionate people who should be their allies and WORK in public schools is beyond me. That was just dumb. She’s who they WANT running public schools, I would think.
Brilliant! Now to get our governor here in NY to listen the way Senator Alexander has absorbed her wise words…
I suggest that comments mean very little. Obama and Duncan speak of “over testing” and Chris Christie speaks of integrity: so what.
Let’s hope Senator Alexander has that rate political skill of listening well and understanding deeply. “Truth, honestly sought is easily found”.
I read a couple of months ago here that ed reformers have trouble with “systems thinking”. More and more I think it’s true.
This is a former Obama Admin employee who still doesn’t get it:
“Over-testing” of school children has become the battle cry of resistance among many parents, teachers and advocates. But people use the term “over-testing” to mean different things.
For some parents it’s just about the number of tests. For others it’s that their schools focus mostly on reading and math, instead of science, history, the arts, PE and all the other subjects that are part of a well-rounded education.
Some parents complain that schools spend too much time on test prep. Still others fear the relationship between over-testing and “teaching to the test.”
All of those things are related. They work together. Some of them are just different phrases to describe the same complaint. They aren’t really separate complaints. Why can’t they put it together and see how testing infects the whole system? It’s bizarre how they continue to try to take “ed reform” out of the context of “schools”.
http://educationpost.org/fewer-better-fairer-tests-addressing-overtesting-ground/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=Acct&utm_content=TwAcctovertestingPc1#.VMAbyS7xeWg
You know, I ‘tested’ (usually only once every other week) when I actively taught. Nevertheless, I was always uneasy about the resulting accuracy of my ‘evaluation’ and the pain it caused my honest students who fell below the “A”, given the fallibility (clear to me) of the ‘test’. As a result, I taught different ‘courses’ in physics, and tested in different ways. To me an ‘honest’ student (one that engaged and actually tried to understand the lesson) who did poorly in one course was simply misplaced, and needed to transfer to another section (one more suited to their learning style and native interests).
Some of my most insightful students were in my most math-averse courses. It led me to understand that in science (inductive logic) math (deductive logic) was a subservient tool. This was, in fact, the attitude of the ancient Greek philosophers (though not the Romans, that the Greeks drove crazy with their ‘sophistries’).
Of course, I could only serve my students’ needs by being allowed to develop course curricula as a trusted professional. I did so mostly in private schools that catered to the rich, but also in two public school systems (Yellow Springs, Ohio and Wilmington Ohio in the late 80’s).
Sadly, those days seem to be no longer possible. Now, money claims not only political power but, apparently, expertise in everything. But, I still wonder why we test, at all. Is is for motivation? Is it to evaluate ourselves (reasonable, on a personal level)? Is it (as I once believed) to prepare our students for the rigors of future courses in different schools?
Maybe all three of my proposed reasons for testing have some merit, however testing to pit student against student, or State against State, Country against Country have no merit, whatsoever. The reason? Any test is a blunt and fallible instrument. The results are always suspect. Real teachers know this.
Appreciate your thoughtful remarks, John. I’m still trying to unravel the motivations behind the Testing Regime, and I suspect they are different among the different branches of the Reform Movement.
This is great news because it shows that something is getting through finally. Hopefully it’s a signal of the direction they intend to go.
And speaking of elected school boards, the Hillsborough County School Board (8th largest school district in the nation) just elected to terminate the contract of it’s reformster superintendent. Popular with politicians, business peeps, and educationists, she, apparently, wasn’t popular with the board. Whatever the outcome, it will hopefully be enlightening to reformsters to see one of the own hoisted on a petard of their own making (her contract was terminated “without cause”), though, no doubt, they will be blind to it. More here: http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/the-hillsborough-county-school-board-could-act-today-on-elia/2214290
To Chiara:
Since people live with a make-up dichotomous mind, we do not need to repeat their blinded mind, but rather to emphasize our educated mind with action and evidences.
You state that “This is a former Obama Admin employee who still doesn’t get it”.
WHY?
I would offer some suggestions to them, such as
1) Please try your idea on your own circle first, then try your idea on all of supporters in order to lastly convince public to adhere and follow your idea.
2) Please talk the talk, and MUST walk the walk in order to earn public trust and conformity.
3) Please treat a country like human body. If government represent a brain with idea to guide all body parts to function well, the utmost important lesson for a brain or government is to respect the labor which represents hands and feet. If we self destroy our own labor, and then need a help from robot or prosthetic limbs, our brain will not easily command these foreign aids in order to sustain our freedom of movement.
Please note that the big impact on our survival between the educated, civilized background labor and the NON-educated (= robot, or prosthetic limb), foreign background is the COMMUNICATION, and HUMANITY.
In conclusion, whoever wants to try any new, unapproved idea from politicians or business tycoons, welcome to take action on my above suggestions. Back2basic
I’m VERY skeptical and fearful about where Lamar Alexander is heading… I believe he will be using the RTTT/CCSS overreach as the basis for arguing that STATES should define standards and develop accountability models…. and if that is the case I dread seeing what happens in NJ, MI, IN, WI, OH, and NYS when it comes to deciding how much input to receive from teachers and parents and how much standardized tests will play a role in teacher evaluations. I’m also skeptical and fearful about what the science standards will look like in States where evolution and global warming are called into question. And I’m MOST skeptical and fearful about what will happen when vouchers are offered in states (like NY) where the governor’s have convinced voters that the “government run public school monopoly” needs to be replaced with something that gives the parents a choice. That “choice” idea started in the South during the 1950s when Brown v.Board of Education was filed. I urge everyone who reads this to write your Federal legislators expressing your thoughts on the reauthorization of ESEA.
But we still have a problem at the local level and that is that it is no longer the elected school board members who are setting policy and running the show, it is the Superintendents. In turn, they have been conditioned to look to the state the tell them what to do. Getting rid of NCLB will help return local control to the states, but if you are describing it as control by the local school board, we will still have some work ahead of us to get to that scenario. Only eleven states have elected state education boards. Most of the rest are appointed, usually by the governor. So long as those folks all belong to the NGA, we face the potential of getting rid of unwanted federal control only to be replaced by unaccountable NGO control at the state level.