Archives for the month of: March, 2015
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Politifact Says George P. Bush Is Wrong

By dianeravitch
March 16, 2015 //
17

George P. Bush, son of Jeb Bush, was elected Texas Land Commissioner last fall, starting his political career as the third generation of the family. He spoke at a school choice rally in January and said that “a majority of our students are trapped in underperforming schools.”

Charles Johnson of the Pastors for Texas Children asked Politifact to check the facts. They did and said young Bush was wrong.

Apparently he assumed that Texas needed a waiver from NCLB because very few schools had 100% proficiency. He didn’t know that every other state had the same problem. By NCLB metrics, almost every public school is a failing school.

Categories Charter Schools, Texas, Vouchers

Anthony Cody: High-Stakes Testing Requires High Levels of Surveillance

By dianeravitch
March 16, 2015 //
25

Anthony Cody posted yesterday that the high-stakes of the new testing system inevitably leads to high surveillance. Add to the high stakes the fact that the two tests are national, and you have a scenario in which the testing corporations are expecting teachers and administrators to help them spy on students’ social media. Apparently Pearson (and not Pearson alone) has a means of monitoring millions of students’ postings on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere, using key words as alerts.

 

Cody writes:

 

By creating a state-sponsored “accountability” system that attaches heavy consequences to student performance on tests, the state and its corporate test-making partners have created a compelling need for extensive surveillance of everyone that accountability system touches. Teacher and administrator evaluations and thus jobs depend on these scores. Schools may be closed. Funding to schools is increased or reduced. And the tests are supposed to determine which students are ready for college.

 

All these consequences create reasons for people to game the system – and this has been the hallmark of NCLB from its inception. The “Texas Miracle” that inspired NCLB was based on the creative practice of holding back the 9th graders whose scores would make the schools look bad. Result? A miraculous rise in scores, a Texas governor who bragged he was an “education governor” on his way to the White House, and brought us a whole system of accountability based on test scores. And NCLB has made test-based accountability a part of the basic contract between the Federal government and the schools that receive federal funding.

 

Any system that imparts heavy consequences for success or failure must have intense security. How do you impose test security on a system that must test as many as fifty million school children every year, when many millions of these students have smart phones and Facebook accounts? You MUST have a surveillance apparatus. You must also have local District personnel act as your deputies in monitoring these activities, and in meting out consequences for those who violate your rules. It is all an inescapable outgrowth of creating a system that rewards and punishes people based on student test scores.

 

So, we should not be surprised that the testing corporations are protecting their “intellectual property” by not allowing students to write about the test questions or even discuss them (how do they monitor discussions?).

 

Frankly, we should be even more concerned that the vaunted “test security” extends even to teachers. When the tests are over, they are not allowed to see any information about how their students performed on the test questions. They get a score, but nothing of diagnostic value. It is like going to a doctor feeling ill, taking tests, then learning that you won’t get the test results for four months or more, that the doctor won’t tell you what is wrong or give you any treatment, but he will give you a score comparing you to patients with similar symptoms across the state and nation. That’s crazy. But that is what is happening. Billions of dollars for tests with no diagnostic value.

 

 

Categories Privacy and Privacy Rights, Standardized Testing

Cynthia DeMone: What Are the Rights of Children?

By dianeravitch
March 16, 2015 //
4

This statement was posted as a comment on the blog:

 

 

The Rights of the Children

 

An education is the right for us, the children

And even now here in the USA

More than half of us don’t have enough clothes or food

Please don’t test our educational rights away

Don’t fire those teachers who are on our side

Please don’t make them go away

Just because we couldn’t get those very high scores

Testing us doesn’t help us learn more

Testing us more doesn’t increase our scores

An education is our ticket to our future lives

So our kids won’t come home to what we do now

An empty home, an empty house

No one to help us study or do homework

Because our parents have to work hard and long

They do not care about tests, but they care what we learn

Please don’t test our educational rights away

Don’t fire those teachers who are on our side

Please don’t make them go away

Just because we couldn’t get those very high scores

Testing us doesn’t help us learn more

Testing us more doesn’t increase our scores

An education is our ticket to our future lives

Cynthia DeMone

Categories Childhood, Education Reform, Standardized Testing, Students

Network for Public Education Endorses Chuy Garcia

By dianeravitch
March 16, 2015 //
1

The Network for Public Education enthusiastically endorses Jesus (Chuy) Garcia for Mayor of Chicago.

The election has national significance. NPE believes it will send a message that closing public schools en masse and replacing them with private charters is unacceptable; that the public schools are a public responsibility and should be fully funded to meet the needs of students.

If you live in Chicago, please vote, volunteer, and help turn a new page for the students of Chicago by electing Chuy Garcia.

Categories Chicago, Emanuel, Rahm, Network for Public Education

Max Brantley: Follow the Walton Money in Arkansas

By dianeravitch
March 16, 2015 //
10

Max Brantley, regular columnist for the Arkansas Times, tells the sorry tale of the likely Walton takeover of the Little Rock school district. Read here and here.

 

Six of Little Rock’s 48 public schools have low test scores. Instead of bringing help to those needy schools, Walton-funded lobbyists are promoting a state takeover of the entire district. That way, all the schools can be turned into charters with private managers. This eliminates the elected school board; reformers don’t like school boards. They like state control and mayoral control.

 

In the second link, Brantley writes:

 

“Following the money on the Walton-Hutchinson takeover of Little Rock schools

 

“It’s not yet clear when the final House Education Committee battle will be fought on HB 1733 to allow the state to privatize any or all of a public school district judged to be in academic distress.

 

“It’s monumental legislation that would make all school teachers and administrators fire-at-will employees without due process rights. It would destroy the last remaining teacher union contract in Arkansas. It allows for the permanent end of democratic control of a school district or those portions of it privatized. It would capture property tax millage voted by taxpayers for specific purposes, including buildings, and give them to private operators. It would allow seizure of buildings for private operators at no cost. CORRECTION: Fort Smith classroom teachers still negotiate with the Fort Smith School District. An anti-union organization they fund, the Arkansas State Teachers Association, has spent a great deal of money trying to solicit members in Fort Smith, a teacher there reports.

 

“This bill is the work of the Walton Family Foundation. People the Walton money supports — lobbyists Gary Newton of Arkansas Learns, Scott Smith of the Arkansas Public School Research Foundation, Kathy Smith of the Walton Family Foundation and Laurie Lee of Arkansas Parents for School Choice — are the leading lobbyists. Smith has been quoted by others as saying he’s the primary author (his organization gets $3 million a year from the Waltons), but it follows similar legislation introduced in other states, with poor to disastrous results (New Orleans).

 

(Concurrently and coincidentally, the Walton Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation are sponsoring a school study in Little Rock by the Boston Consulting Group, an outfit that has studied and recommended mass privatization in other cities.)

 

The goal is to make the Little Rock School District a laboratory for the pet education aims of the Waltons, who own the University of Arkansas, particularly the department ginning out propaganda in behalf of this bill. Gov. Asa Hutchinson is fully on board. He’s been resisting a solid plan to put competent people in charge in Little Rock and moving on fixing the six schools on which the entire district of 48 schools was placed in academic distress. His plan is to pass a law to overcome Johnny Key’s lack of a teacher certificate, master’s degree and 10 years education experience and become state Education Commissioner. Key would then find a Walton-favored outfit to run the six schools at issue and be poised to take over as many others as the Waltons deem necessary.

 

It’s been a long battle, but money does tend to win out.

 

UPDATE:….

 

Many tentacles. Lots of money….

 

If you think Johnny Key, who used Nick Wilson-style special language chicanery to increase the virtual charter school enrollment from 500 to 3,000 will stop at six Little Rock schools in the privatization scheme, I’ve got a Little Rock school to sell you for $1, subject to Walton approval.

 

The simmering pot full of Little Rock School District frogs (otherwise knowns as voters, taxpayers, parents, students and teachers) will soon be fully cooked, with no life left to jump out.

Categories Arkansas, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Reader to #Pearson, #PARCC, and #SBAC: Please Monitor Me Too!

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2015 //
64

A suggestion from a very creative and imaginative reader:

 

Someone suggested attaching hashtags #PARCC and #Pearson, or just using those words, in all tweets. Sharing your Aunt Celia’s mac and cheese recipe? #Pearson. Tweeting about the next big storm coming? #PARCC Congratulating your cousin on his promotion? “Great job, Cousin Joe! You worked hard for this. PARCC!”

 

Their monitoring system would be overloaded with hits.

 

Why not add #SBAC and other hashtags that will draw attention from the overseers??

Categories Education Reform, Pearson, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Standardized Testing, Students

Frank Breslin: Police States Spy on Children

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2015 //
71

Reacting to the news that testing corporations are “monitoring” the social media accounts of children during and after testing, and forbidding even verbal discussions of the tests, retired educator Frank Breslin is outraged. He wrote to me:

“Pearson is encouraging educators to spy on their students’ privacy, thereby trying to undermine the integrity of the relationship that students have with their teachers. This is vitiating the entire tradition of student/teacher trust that has been a sacred tradition between them for thousands of years. They’re making educators complicit in this illegal and immoral spying on children, so that teachers are becoming adjuncts of a Police State.

“This is what the Nazis did to teachers during the Reich — having teachers spying on parents by having children report back to them what parents were saying against the Reich. This is diabolical! ”

I know that some readers object to any analogy that references Nazis, but Breslin might just as well have referred to the Stasi in East Germany or any other police state in which teachers are expected to inform the Authorities about the private communications of their students, and family members are expected to inform on each other.

Categories Data and Data Mining, Education Industry, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Standardized Testing

Bob Braun: The Brave Néw World of Testing and Spying

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2015 //
26

Bob Braun says that Pearson closely monitors students during and after testing, to protect test security. They expect educators to collaborate with the state contract with Pearson.

“Another New Jersey school district–Hanover Park Regional in East Hanover–was notified by state officials that “monitoring”–spying?– by the British test publisher Pearson revealed at least one student had used a social media account to post a forbidden message regarding the PARCC tests. No surprise, really–it’s happening everywhere, including Maryland where a state official said he gets daily reports from Pearson on what students are saying about testing on their social media accounts.

“PARCC has a very sophisticated system that closely monitors social media for pretty much everything (comments like the one you shared, test item questions that students use cell phones cameras and take),” said Henry Johnson, the state assistant education commissioner in Maryland. The state, like New Jersey, has a contract with Pearson.

“We get those reports daily.”

Let’s run that one by you again:

“PARCC has a very sophisticated system that closely monitors social media for pretty much everything….”

The phrase “pretty much everything” aptly describes the broad reach of how this brave new world of testing and cooperation with government works. Pearson will say–as it told the Washington Post–that it is doing it for “security” reasons.

But security is itself a broad term. Here is what the State of New Jersey and Pearson agreed encompassed the idea of security and its possible breach–it’s codified in the testing manual developed by the state and sent out to all the districts:

“Revealing or discussing passages or test items with anyone, including students and school staff, through verbal exchange, email, social media, or any other form of communication.”

Another opportunity for repetition for emphasis here–discussing? Any other form of communication?

So, if children come home from school and their parents ask–”How was your day, sweetheart?” and the children talk about a really dumb question on the PARCC, they will be violating the rules and be subject to whatever punishment is meted out for cheating–as a blogger did who learned from a child who hadn’t taken the test that there was a passage on it about The Wizard of Oz.”

New Jersey is paying Pearson $108 million to run its PARCC testing program

Meanwhile Breitbart reports that a Superintendent in New Jersey confirmed Bob Braun’s initial story about spying on students.

Categories Common Core, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Students, Teachers, Testing

Texas Kids Can’t Wait!

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2015 //
6

I love Texas. I love it because it’s my home state but I also love it because so many people there are wonderful, sometimes wacky, often fascinating, and downright real. (I don’t love the politicians who think that greed is good and that no one has any obligation to help anyone else.) But my first thought when I recently skyped in to the dinner of the Friends of Texas Public Schools was that I miss the sound of Texas voices. Twangy, like me.

 

I love the Moms Against Drunk Testing (aka Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment). I love Community Voices for Education in Houston. I love the courage and persistence of the Texans fighting to save their public schools.

 

Another great Texas organization is Texas Kids Can’t Wait. Their goals are mine. They truly put children first. Lots of times people on our side can’t explain their goals clearly. This is what Texas Kids advises friends to do as they reach out to their legislators:

 

1. Adequate and equitable funding for public schools, according to Judge Dietz’s ruling. They are not required to wait for the Supreme Court ruling.

2. An end to the draconian testing and assessment programs, which have taken the joy out of both teaching and learning and which are doing far more harm than good. Texas has been testing since the late 1970’s. If testing were the “cure” for low achievement or “gaps,” then the problems would have been solved long ago. It is truly insane to keep on doing something that so clearly does not work!

3. Let them know that charters are the gateway drugs for the end to public schools, and we need to stop them now. Evidence is piling up that charters do not perform better than public schools and, in fact, in many cases perform worse than the worse. Also let them know that we in Texas do not support vouchers for private schools or home schools. Those funds need to be allocated to the 5 million Texas children in public schools. Schools that focus on profit and not the needs of kids are not what we want.

Three points. Understandable goals. Thank you, Texas Kids Can’t Wait!

Here is their current issue: Stopping an ALEC-style corporate takeover of low-performing schools:

Texas Kids Can’t Wait

Dear Friends,

Another bill to facilitate the corporate take-over of public schools has been filled by Democratic Senator Royce West of Dallas.

Senate Bill 520, authored by Sen. Royce West, was filed, and it is one we must do everything we can to defeat.

It establishes the Texas Opportunity School District, which is exactly the same thing as last session’s proposed Texas Achievement School District and New Orleans’s Recovery School District. There is ZERO credible research that such a strategy works for any kid anywhere.

SB 520 would take out of school district local control all low-performing schools (that is, schools with high rates of poverty, as we all know) and turn them over to a charter school management company under the “supervision” of the Commissioner.

Local taxpayers have to continue paying for this great gift to charter companies; the buildings are turned over to the Charter companies; and the local taxpayers must maintain them. What a deal, huh? Yeah, for the charter companies. But a terrible thing to do for kids, families, neighborhoods, and communities.

High schools in urban areas will be the biggest losers of this proposed scheme since disproportionate numbers of high schools are on the low-performing list. But there would also be many middle schools and many elementary schools in the scheme as well.

See why we call the charter schools the gateway drug for school privatization? There will never be enough charter schools for the privatizers. And they want taxpayers to foot the bill for this nonsense at increasing rates since they are determined to cut and eliminate business taxes.

You can read the bill here: http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/…/84R/bill…/pdf/SB00520I.pdf…

Please contact Sen. West, plus your own representative and senator asap and let them know that we expect them to base policy on solid research and on what is best for kids.

We thank you for your continued support and activism on behalf of Texas children. We have come a long way in the past two and one-half years in making people more aware of the issues and providing them information about how they can make a difference. Stay involved. Share information with your friends and family. Stay in touch with your elected representatives, beginning with local school board members, but including state legislators, statewide office holders, and congressional representatives. Be prepared to vote in every election. Keep the kids at the center of the discussion.

Sincerely,

Bonnie and Linda

Texas Kids Can’t Wait
Twitter: @TxKidsCantWait
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/texaskidscantwait
Email: texaskidscantwait@gmail.com
Call us at either 254-855-0594 or 254-709-2912

Texas Kids Can’t Wait | Texas Kids Can’t Wait | Waco | TX | 76712

Categories Privatization, Resistance, Testing, Texas

Teachers: Time for Civil Disobedience

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2015 //
37

Never have the stakes attached to testing been higher. If a student doesn’t reach proficient on a Common Core test where most students will not reach proficient (a passing mark set artificially high), the student is a failure, her teacher is ineffective, and the school is stigmatized. How to counter this madness?

Consider the following comments by teachers, posted on this blog:

“I would encourage all of my students to post pics of the questions or tweet the questions as they remember them. I did this several years ago when Indiana had just one graduation qualifying exam. I got reprimanded and transferred to a terrible inner city school, but the action did have some impact because the state had to admit that a great deal of the exam questions were wrong or too poorly worded to make sense. I realize that in today’s testing-mania culture I would probably have been fired, lost my license or maybe even jailed, but this stuff is so terrible we need to start some civil disobedience.”

And another:

“Two years ago, a teen in NJ committed suicide after learning that he failed to get a passing grade on the standardized test that would allow him to graduate. He tweeted his despair over the test. I wonder if his Twitter account was monitored by the NJ DOE.”

I wonder if the test had absurd questions and wrong answers. Who was accountable?

Categories Resistance, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers
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