Archives for the month of: January, 2015
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I Endorse Jesus (Chuy) Garcia for Mayor of Chicago

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2015 //
9

I am endorsing Jesus (Chuy) Garcia for Mayor of Chicago. You might well ask why I, a resident of the state of New York, am making an endorsement in a Chicago election. I figure that if the Koch brothers can spend $889 million to influence the election of the next President of the United States, I should be able to endorse anyone anywhere. And so can you. All I have is my voice, and if it convinces someone to vote for Chuy (pronounced Chewy), then so be it, that’s democracy. Buying elections doesn’t sound democratic. It should be illegal. When two billionaires can spend more than either the Republican party or the Democratic party, that seems to me to be a threat to democracy. Endorsements are not.

 

I gave the following statement to my friends in the Garcia campaign to use as they see fit:

 

Many of my Chicago friends have asked me to endorse a candidate in the race for Mayor. I have watched events in Chicago very closely, and I believe strongly that it is time for a change in direction. I endorse Jesus (Chuy) Garcia for Mayor of the great city of Chicago.

 

I endorse him because it is time to end the destructive policies of the past 20 years. It is time to stop closing schools. It is time to give the public school children of Chicago the resources they need to have a good education, a great education, one that prepares them to be independent and responsible citizens and lifelong learners.

 

I endorse Garcia because he has pledged to bring Chicago an elected school board; he voted against mayoral control when he was in the Legislature. It is wrong that Chicago is the only district in the state whose public schools are controlled by the Mayor, not the people. The Mayor has used this power to close an unprecedented number of public schools, despite the protests of students and parents. He has used this power to cut essential programs and services. He has used this power to do what he wants regardless of public opinion. Chicago should have democracy in education, just like every other district in the state.

 

Garcia has pledged to limit testing to the minimum required by law. He understands that testing is not teaching, and that testing consumes time and resources that should be devoted to instruction. The children of Chicago need more time for the arts, for learning foreign languages, for civics, and for science, not for testing. Garcia knows that parents, students, and teachers are tired of seeing the tests–which are a single measure–used to label students and to grade teachers and schools. The tests now have far too much power in the lives of children, and they distort the real meaning of education.

 

I am very impressed by Chuy Garcia’s deep understanding of the needs of education today. He is a real reformer. His reforms will restore democracy in education; will restore true education–not test scores–as the center of school life; and prioritize the needs of children, not data.

 

Because I believe so deeply in the pledges he has made–and the actions he has taken to support his promises–I endorse Chuy Garcia with enthusiasm. If Chicagoans elect him, it will send a signal to the entire nation that the bold and misguided effort to privatize our public schools has failed, and that the people of Chicago intend to reclaim public education to its true purpose: equal opportunity for all the city’s children to learn and succeed.

Categories Chicago

Forbes: Common Core Testing Is Taking Away Recess–and It Is Wrong

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2015 //
53

Arthur L. Caplan and Lee H. Igel of the NYU Sports & Society Program warn that many American schools are reducing or eliminating recess in order to make more time for Common Core testing, and they explain why this is a terrible idea. NCLB testing started the race to narrow the curriculum, then Race to the Top raised the stakes. Now, Common Core testing–which will cause large numbers of children to be labeled “failures”–makes the testing even more decisive for students, teachers, and schools. Thus, recess and physical education fall victim to the pressure to spend more and more time preparing to take the tests, which will decide the fates of everyone, even the school itself.

 

In an article in Forbes, Caplan and Igel explain that recess is necessary for children’s healthy development.

 

They write (the links are in the original post in Forbes):

 

For those committed to keeping kids in the classroom, which keeps them away from the playground, consider the following:
Rates of childhood obesity have more than doubled in children during the past 30 years and about 18% of children in the U.S. are obese, according to both a report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association;
Countries that are internationally regarded as having the best education systems, such as Finland, schedule time for students to have unstructured breaks throughout the day;
Activities—physical, emotional, cognitive, and social—that children regularly engage in during recess are essential to development and well-being, in childhood and throughout the lifespan.
Kids eat better and healthier when they get recess.

 

“Preparing America’s students for success” is one of the slogans often trumpeted by the Common Core initiative. It is a terrific aspiration—and an even better objective. But if you ask most parents, teachers and students, they will tell you that, under current conditions, it is closer to imprisonment than education.

 

With physical education classes now almost non-existent in our schools, recess needs to be a part of the school day. Students—and teachers—need occasional, repeated breaks from their work. It’s how the human body and mind get repaired and recharged.

 

What do we mean by success? What are we willing to sacrifice to get it? We should not sacrifice children’s health in pursuit of getting a higher score on a commercial test.

Categories Education Industry, Students, Testing

Moody’s Investor Advice: Charters Draining Public Schools’ Budgets

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2015 //
9

Moody’s Investors Servicrs paints a gloomy picture of the effects of charter schools on public schools in Pennsylvania.

 

Moody’s writes:

 

“Some fiscally stressed Pennsylvania public school districts have come up with new approaches for combating a primary pressure point: competition from charter schools, Moody’s Investor Service says in a new report. Some of the plans would be transformative, such as a proposal to send all students to other school districts and pay tuition, or to operate a public school district as all-charter.

 

“Some financially stressed districts have offered recovery proposals that fundamentally alter the nature of their public school district operations,” says Moody’s Assistant Vice President — Analyst, Dan Seymour. “The bold plans face near-term execution challenges, but are positive in the long run as some of these districts would continue to deteriorate without significant structural changes. The strong measures are more likely to lead to long-term financial and operational soundness than continuing on the existing course.”

 

While charter advocates assert that competition will cause public schools to improve, this is not what is happening in Pennsylvania. Charters make alluring promises and drain away students and funding. The public schools, with less resources, goes into a tailspin, soon finding that it must cut programs and services, making it less able to compete with charters.

 

The Legislature passed a law in 2012 allowing the Governor to appoint an emergency manager to take over the district, suspending local control. Four districts currently are in receivership: York City, Duquesne, Harrisburg, and Chester-Upland.

 

The Moody’s report sees the state takeover as a plus because it overrides local opposition to strong remedies. One of those strong remedies, as we have seen in York City, is to turn the children and schools over to an out-of-state for-profit charter chain.

 

Do you hear the canary in the mine? The competition with charters, which have an inexperienced and low-wage staff, increases the financial pressure on districts. The more students leave for charters, the less able is the district to compete because of fixed costs and experienced teachers who are paid as professionals, not temps. The business answer: shut down the district, turn all the schools into charters, or send the students to other districts.

 

The end result is the same: the replacement of community public schools by privately managed charters staffed by temps. If the chain can’t make a profit, it will close its doors and leave. What happens then?

 

Is this a way to “improve” education? Not for students. Not for communities.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Pennsylvania

Georgia’s New State Superintendent Criticizes Federal Testing Mandates: A Must-Read!

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2015 //
24

Georgia’s recently elected State Superintendent Richard Woods wrote a terrific letter to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, explaining patiently why federal testing mandates are defective. The letter was printed in Maureen Downey’s blog at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

 

Superintendent Woods sounds like a veteran educator, which he is. He pulls no punches. This is what he wrote:

 

Dear Secretary Duncan,

 

With the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) comes an opportunity to address the valid concerns of students, parents, teachers, and communities regarding the quantity and quality of federally mandated standardized tests.

 

As Georgia’s School Superintendent, I have a constitutional duty to convey those concerns and provide ideas on how to move my state and our nation forward. Georgia recently entered into a $108 million contract to deliver federally mandated standardized tests to our students. That figure does not include the millions of dollars spent to develop and validate test questions and inform the public about the new tests.

 

This adds to the need for an audit to provide information on the number of tests and loss of instructional time our children endure, as well as a cost/benefit analysis on our current national testing model. As a nation, we have surrendered time, talent, and resources to an emphasis on autopsy-styled assessments, rather than physical-styled assessments. With the reauthorization of ESEA comes an opportunity for a real paradigm shift in the area of assessment.

 

Instead of a “measure, pressure, and punish” model that sets our students, teachers, and schools up for failure, we need a diagnostic, remediate/accelerate model that personalizes instruction, empowers students, involves parents, and provides real feedback to our teachers.

 

We need greater emphasis for a federally supported but state-driven formative assessment model that identifies the strengths and weakness of students, coupled with a less intrusive, student-sampled or grade-staggered summative assessment model for the purposes of state-tostate comparisons and world rankings.

 

Our broken model of assessment is too focused on labeling our schools and teachers, and not focused enough on supporting our students. Our current status quo model is forcing our teachers to teach to the test. We need an innovative approach that uses tests to guide instruction, just as scans and tests guide medical professionals. Oftentimes, we hear teachers called professionals because they have the knowledge and skill set to reach the needs of their individual students, yet in our accountability measures we have not supported or given value to diagnostic tools and tests that teachers need to fully utilize that knowledge or those skills. We must find a balance between accountability and responsibility.

 

We must give our teachers the tools and trust to be successful or our current path to hyper-accountability will continue to set our students and teachers up for failure. Teachers should not view tests as tools that tie their hands as professionals, but as tools that help them grow in their profession. Students should not view tests as tools that can strengthen barriers to be promoted or to graduate, but as tools that help them overcome those barriers. Schools should not view tests as tools that can doom them to failure, but as tools that serve as a compass pointing them down the path of success.

 

Testing must be a tool in our toolbox, but we need more rulers and fewer hammers. As Georgia’s School Superintendent, but more importantly as someone with 22 years of Pre-K through twelfth grade experience in education, I strongly urge you to take this moment in history to listen to the concerns of your constituents – parents, teachers, and community members – and reform the federal standardized testing requirements for the betterment of our children. I look forward to working with you to move education forward.

 

 

Categories Georgia, Testing

Time Is Running Out: Please Comment

By dianeravitch
January 27, 2015 //
31

You have until February 2 to post your comment about whether the US Department of Education should impose VAM on teacher education. Test-happy DOE wants to evaluate colleges of education by the test scores of students taught by their graduates.

http://thewire.k12newsnetwork.com/2015/01/27/value-added-teacher-preparation-regulations-changes-your-comments/

Categories Teacher Education, U.S. Department of Education, VAM (value-added modeling)

Oklahoma PTA Urges Parents to Opt Out of Field Tests

By dianeravitch
January 27, 2015 //
6

Jeffery Corbett, president of the Oklahoma PTA, released the following statement today:

 

Oklahoma PTA Encourages Parents to Opt-Out of Field Test

 

 

January 27, 2015: In an effort to keep the parents, guardians and students of Oklahoma’s public schools informed about the administration of field test questions in standardized tests, Oklahoma PTA has asked the Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE) to release specific information regarding a field test writing prompt included in both the 5th grade and 8th grade writing assessments for 2015.

 

“Parents are frustrated by the overwhelming use of standardized tests,” stated Jeffery Corbett, President. “Oklahoma PTA believes that parents have the right to make informed decisions regarding whether or not their child provides unpaid research to the billion-dollar testing industry. They deserve the opportunity to opt their child out of the field test.”

 

The state department has informed districts that these tests will contain two writing prompts: one that is operational and one that is a field test. A prompt provides the student with one or more passages to read, followed by a question to which an essay response is generated. A field test prompt was part of these tests as recently as 2013.

 

The OSDE did not inform districts which prompt is for the field test, so parents are not able to obtain that information from their school.

 

In July 2014, members of Oklahoma PTA unanimously adopted a resolution objecting to the mass administration of field tests, stating that students should not be expected to conduct corporate research for any testing company.

 

Information obtained through the scoring of field tests is not provided to the student, parent, teacher or school district. The testing company, however, obtains valuable data to help develop tests that will then be sold back to the State of Oklahoma for a profit. This, of course, comes after public tax dollars are spent not teaching students, but instead administering tests to them, creating a meaningless loss of instructional time.

 

“By calling for an opt-out of the field test prompt, we are taking a strong stand against testing as education,” Corbett stated. “Our future, our children, deserve more than to be great test takers.”

 

The response to the field test inquiry will be shared with PTA members and made available to the public at http://www.okpta.org once it has been received from the OSDE.

###

Categories Oklahoma, Testing

My Review of “The Interview”

By dianeravitch
January 27, 2015 //
14

The Sony picture “The Interview” created an International brouhaha. From what we know, the North Korean government hacked into Sony’s computer system and caused massive damage to protest the release of the movie. As you know, movie theater chains refused to show the movie, fearing terrorism, and Sony decided not to release it.

 

Within a matter of days, the film was widely available on the Internet and in a few hundred independent theaters. I saw it on the Internet, downloaded from an on-demand.

 

The basic plot line: the host of a late night celebrity-gossip show and his producer manage to get an interview with the dictator of North Korea, who loves his show. The CIA asks them to assassinate the North Korean leader to prevent him from threatening the world with nukes.

 

What did I think?

 

It is the kind of adolescent movie I would customarily never see. The target audience must be young men. It is a buddy movie, two guys embarked on a wacky adventure. It is also the most vulgar movie I have seen in my limited experience, with countless uses of the F word and raucous, wild scenes of sexual encounters. It is also hilarious. I laughed myself silly. The vulgarity is so innocent that it was not offensive. It should be rated RR.

 

See it if you can.

Categories Personal

Superintendent Blasts Cuomo Plan: LINK REPLACED!

By dianeravitch
January 27, 2015 //
30

William Cala, superintendent of schools in Fairport, Néw York, wrote a scathing critique of Governor Cuomo’s plan to increase charter schools, fund “tax credits” for private and religious schools (vouchers), and increase the importance of test scores in teacher evaluations.

 

This is what he wrote:

 

Dr. Bill Cala
Superintendent, Fairport Central School District

 
Good Morning!
This week’s State of the State address by Governor Cuomo was what most of us expected. It was an all-out assault on public education, teachers, children, families and local control. It appears that breaking teachers is his solution to poverty, income inequality and inadequate school funding.
As we have experienced on a first-hand basis over the past few years, the APPR system is indeed a fatally flawed proxy for genuine evaluation done at the local level. The governor’s solution is to up the ante by increasing the tenure period to 5 years and making state test scores 50% of a teacher’s evaluation. Given the already bogus cut score setting process for the state exams, we are assured of a whole new wave of unreliable ratings designed to crush teachers, close schools and open the door to his other “reforms,” such as lifting the cap on charter schools and creating a tax credit for private schools and charters and increasing the amount the state gives charters per pupil. This last item of increasing charter aid is especially interesting as there are no strings attached. The regular public schools will only get an increase in aid if the legislature approves all of his draconian measures mentioned above. Two major studies have demonstrated with great clarity that charters perform worse than public schools and only 17% of charters perform equal or better to publics (CREDO 2013). Apparently, that’s fine….they get increases in spite of their failing performance.
Let’s be clear that the governor’s agenda has nothing to do with what is good for kids. Far from it. It is what is good for his financial supporters: the corporations who are making billions of dollars on the tests, the texts, the technology, the corporate professional development and the data collection, retrieval and distribution.
As this country gets poorer and poorer and the few get richer and richer the pride of our nation, its public schools, are being disassembled while Bill Gates, The Walton’s, The Koch Brothers, Eli Broad and other scavengers are feasting at the table of greed.
While the situation may seem hopeless, I believe parents are able to bring this tyranny to a screeching halt. Assessments should be used only for the benefit of students…..nothing else. Last year over 60,000 parents in New York refused the 3-8 tests. This year it is expect that number will triple. The refusal movement will indeed collapse the evaluation system and the governor’s plan to dismantle public education.
Parents will play a critical role. What role will we play? How will we speak out? This is our profession. These are our children. This is our responsibility.
Action and activism takes courage. Last week I spoke of my hero Rosa Parks. Let her courage and actions inspire us. I will close with the wisdom and inspiration of Frederick Douglass.
Where justice is denied; where poverty is enforced; where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress,; rob and degrade them; neither persons nor property will be safe.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.
Time to start plowing.
Peace,
Bill

Categories Charter Schools, Cuomo, Andrew, New York, Teacher Evaluations

WFSU: We Do Not “Partner” with Jeb Bush’s Foundation

By dianeravitch
January 27, 2015 //
16

This comment arrived in response to a Florida reader’s complaint:

 

I work at WFSU in Tallahassee and your comments that PBS has partnered with Jeb Bush’s Foundation just floored me. Where did you get that idea and in what way do you mean? I know for us we work hard to help local teachers have access to resources whether PBS Learning Media and its repository of content or how to use our children’s programs with teachers and parents so that children are ready for school. This hatred of PBS just shocks me knowing how hard we work to support educators. Yes we fight hard for our funding that is constantly threatened. Two years ago all of our funding was cut in FL and we fought back and it was put back in the budget but not after a lot of hard work including a statewide reading research project proved our effectiveness. If the blog isn’t posting ideas that appeal to you, please make suggestions offering other topics. Kim Kelling, director of content and engagement at WFSU.

Categories Florida

Anthony Cody: Is There a New Humility at the Gates Foundation?

By dianeravitch
January 27, 2015 //
22

Anthony Cody has been a persistent critic of the hubris of the Gates Foundation. Not long ago, he managed to get an agreement from the foundation to engage in a debate about the foundation’s agenda, what it is and what it should be. That debate became the basis for Cody’s recent book The Educator and the Oligarch. Cody wants the foundation to pay more attention to experienced educators, not so much to economists and theoreticians who don’t know much about the realities of classrooms today.

 

In this post, he holds out hope that the foundation might display a new humility because of the recently expressed views of its new CEO, Sue Desmond-Hellman, who taught for two years in Uganda. She was quoted saying,

 

On a very practical level, that time in Uganda was a lesson about what it takes to work successfully in a different culture. “I learned about what it really takes to work at scale in a poor country. As a western academician, as a Gates Foundation person, the first thing you should be doing is listening and learning. And have a huge sense of humility about what you don’t know,” she said.

 

I googled Dr. Desmond-Hellman, and I must say, she has an extraordinarily impressive resume. I think her appointment signals that the Gates Foundation will review and increase its investments in public health, especially in impoverished nations.

 

It is not clear where she might take the foundation’s top-down, heavy-handed education agenda, which has so far produced no results and tremendous hostility towards the foundation. Bill Gates said in 2013 that “It would be great if our education stuff worked, but that we won’t know for probably a decade.” It seems that the many teachers and principals who have been fired, the wreckage caused by the foundation’s love of standardized testing and data, are simply collateral damage while Mr. Gates waits to figure out, a decade from now, whether “our education stuff” is working.

 

I am betting on Sue Desmond-Hellman. Something tells me that her life experience is broad enough and deep enough to warn her away from evidence-free experimentation with people’s lives. I may be wrong, but I will take a wait-and-see attitude and hope for the best. Sue, I’m counting on you.

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations, Testing
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