Emma Brown of the Washington Post has a good article about the Murphy amendment, which Democrats favored and Republicans opposed.
The chamber voted 54 to 43 against the amendment, which aimed to give the federal government more say in defining which schools are low-performing and require intervention.
Instead, the bill allows states to decide not only how to judge schools’ success, but which schools don’t measure up and what to do to improve them.
The proposed amendment’s lead sponsor, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), said that could return the country to the days when states and school districts could ignore achievement gaps and allow poor, minority and disabled children to languish.
“This law is an education reform law, but it has to be a civil rights law as well,” said Murphy, invoking the law’s original passage in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.
The measure was opposed by many Republicans who want to rein in the federal government’s influence over education, which they say ballooned under the Bush and Obama administrations.
“Instead of fixing No Child Left Behind, it keeps the worst parts of it,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate education committee.
Democratic lawmakers in both chambers are sure to continue pushing for stronger accountability provisions before sending the legislation to the White House. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said that the Obama administration would not support the legislation unless it strengthens the federal role in school accountability. But he stopped short of saying whether the president would veto it.
Why do Democrats believe that the U.S. Department of Education has the capacity or knowledge to identify “failing” schools or to intervene to improve them? Nothing in the past decade suggests that this is a realistic expectation.
Democrats have now almost completely bought into the assumption that more testing=more equity, when it is a well-established fact that standardized tests always have a disparate impact that disadvantages students and adults of color. For many decades, the same civil rights groups that now defend standardized tests for students have litigated to block the use of standardized tests as decisive measures, whether in school or in employment. But for reasons that are hard to discern, certain leading civil rights groups now insist that without testing every child every year, children of color will be overlooked and neglected. Of course, if standardized tests could meet the needs of children of color and children in poverty, these children would be in far better shape today than they are because they have been taking standardized tests every year since 2003, when NCLB was implemented. That is an entire generation of children. What are the results? Where are the benefits of the billions spent to test every child every year? How many children have lost access to courses in the arts, history, science, civics, geography, physical education, and foreign languages because they took time away from test preparation?
NAEP already documents the achievement gaps every other year for every state and for many urban districts by scientific sampling. No other nation tests every child every year. The cost of testing and the instructional time lost to test prep actually hurts the children it is supposed to help.
Why don’t the Democrats listen to other civil rights groups, such as the Journey for Justice Alliance, which opposes high-stakes testing. Is it because they don’t have lobbyists? Here is part of their open letter to the leaders of the Senate:
The Journey for Justice Alliance, an alliance of 38 organizations of Black and Brown parents and students in 23 states, joins with the 175 other national and local grassroots community, youth and civil rights organizations signed on below, to call on the U.S. Congress to pass an ESEA reauthorization without requiring the regime of oppressive, high stakes, standardized testing and sanctions that have recently been promoted as civil rights provisions within ESEA.
We respectfully disagree that the proliferation of high stakes assessments and top-down interventions are needed in order to improve our schools. We live in the communities where these schools exist. What, from our vantage point, happens because of these tests is not improvement. It’s destruction.
Black and Latino families want world class public schools for our children, just as white and affluent families do. We want quality and stability. We want a varied and rich curriculum in our schools. We don’t want them closed or privatized. We want to spend our days learning, creating and debating, not preparing for test after test.
In the Chicago Public Schools, for example, children in kindergarten through 8th grade are administered anywhere between 8 and 25 standardized tests per year. By the time they graduate from 8th grade, they have taken an average of 180 standardized tests! We are not opposed to state mandated testing as a component of a well-rounded system of evaluating student needs. But enough is enough.
We want balanced assessments, such as oral exams, portfolios, daily check-ins and teacher created assessment tools—all of which are used at the University of Chicago Lab School, where President Barack Obama and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel have sent their children to be educated. For us, civil rights are about access to schools all our children deserve. Are our children less worthy?
High stakes standardized tests have been proven to harm Black and Brown children, adults, schools and communities. Curriculum is narrowed. Their results purport to show that our children are failures. They also claim to show that our schools are failures, leading to closures or wholesale dismissal of staff. Children in low income communities lose important relationships with caring adults when this happens. Other good schools are destabilized as they receive hundreds of children from closed schools. Large proportions of Black teachers lose their jobs in this process, because it is Black teachers who are often drawn to commit their skills and energies to Black children. Standardized testing, whether intentionally or not, has negatively impacted the Black middle class, because they are the teachers, lunchroom workers, teacher aides, counselors, security staff and custodians who are fired when schools close.
Standardized tests are used as the reason why voting rights are removed from Black and Brown voters—a civil right every bit as important as education. Our schools and school districts are regularly judged to be failures—and then stripped of local control through the appointment of state takeover authorities that eliminate democratic process and our local voice—and have yet so far largely failed to actually improve the quality of education our children receive.
Throughout the course of the debate on the reauthorization of ESEA, way too much attention has focused on testing and sanctions, and not on the much more critical solutions to educational inequality.
So it seems reasonable to assume that Gates and his ilk have donated to the civil rights groups that used to oppose standardized tests in order to get their support. Sort of like what happened to the NEA & AFT/UFT.
Yes, exactly, Gates bought them off: “Corporate Funding of Urban League, NAACP & Civil Rights Orgs Has Turned Into Corporate Leadership”
http://www.blackagendareport.com/corporate-funding-urban-league-naacp-civil-rights-orgs-has-turned-corporate-leadership
In LA, Broad owns most of the non profits who pander to him for his donations and protection…kinda like the Mafia, and has his people on all their boards. United Way is the worst. Marion Wright Edelman (big pal of Billary) gave her plum spot in Oakland to the United Way manipulator who worked closely with Deasy (who may yet be indicted following the FBI and SEC investigations), which was fairly concurrent with Deasy leaving LAUSD and segueing instantly to work for Broad. La rounde…follow the cash. It is like Alice in Wonderland. The inmates have taken over the asylum.
Broad is also a big supporter and friend and donor of Billary. Who is there left to vote for who is not tainted?
As I’ve stated many times before on this blog, the biggest problem our country faces is the extraordinary concentration of wealth and income. The super rich are controlling our government and leading the charge to replace institutions for the public good (Like public school) with private ones in order to further increase their “desperately needed” profits.
Democrats keep pushing on the short ineffective end of the improvement lever. There are more powerful solutions than testing, merit pay and charter schools. Here are some the policies for which they need to advocate: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arthur-camins/the-k12-education-speech-_b_7755854.html
Your speech sounds like sounds of the sixties when the quest for equality meant something. Today’s leaders have lost sight of the common good as they legislate myopic selfishness and pursuit of greed. They don’t even understand the value of quality public education, or appreciate what public education has done for this country. They don’t seem to care about our future voters; they are too busy pandering to billionaires and corporations. I would love to hear Democrats make your speech, but I doubt it will happen in my life time.
Another strange input…for the last few weeks all our TV stations have been bombarding the public every few minutes with advertising Michael Milken’s K – 12 online charters, and touting them as ‘no tuition” public schools. Wonder it there is a connection and the insiders colluded with this surprising vote? One hand, the billionaire privatizers (both Broad and Milken are Dems as in DFER), washing the other, the Dem legislators.
Our country is in trouble if a convicted felon gets more consideration than thousands of poor children, although now he’s known for his charity work.
In addition to the failure of the Democratic party to actually address racial discrimination in the American public education system, now I have to wrap my head around this apparent blindness on our side. Outcome-based accountability is a lie and a fraud, a statistical trap all along, guaranteed to target children of poverty and color.
Why aren’t these “civil rights” kingpins clamoring for a real law to reverse real racial discrimination?
FIGHT FOR THE NEA OPPORTUNITY DASHBOARD
The original Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 brought federal assistance to children suffering racial and economic discrimination in the availability of education resources.
But today we see racial and economic injustice against children of color documented in every state, and most especially in areas that have fallen under the domination of corporate education groups because of NCLB. Instead of responding to the racist oppression of children in under-resourced schools, corporate accountability hucksters have shifted the conversation to the lower performance of those children on profitable measuring instruments they control. They disenfranchise communities, and declare children in poverty unworthy of the promise of a free and equal public education.
Bernie Sanders voted for the NEA Opportunity Dashboard Amendment. It failed by a few votes, but the fight isn’t over. It can’t be. It needs to be the focus of a real revision of the ESEA, and we can also fight to replace the false “reform” laws forced on our sate by RttT and NCLB waiver blackmail with real measures of education opportunity.
Here are some of the education resource INPUT measures that the NEA says we owe all our children. The asterisks indicate that data showing racial discrimination is available through the Office of Civil Rights or other federal data bases.
Students’ access to modern
materials, facilities, technology,
books, and libraries
**Students’ access to class sizes that
allow for one-on-one attention
Students’ access to health and
wellness programs, including social
and emotional well-being
*Students’ access to high-quality
early education programs
*Students’ access to full-day, fiveday-a-week
kindergarten
Family and community engagement
*Students’ access to and success in
advanced coursework (AP/IB,
honors, dual enrollment)
**Students’ access to fine arts,
foreign language, daily physical
education, library/media studies,
and career technical education
Click to access NEA-Opportunity-Dashboard.pdf
Why does everyone leave out history and geography in these lists of classes? They’re vital for informed citizenship, but they get forgotten in the STEM and reading rush, and they’re forgotten again even on lists like the one above. I’m sick of it. I’m not saying you left it off the list, Chem Teacher, just that NEA did. Again.
I’m with you on this question, threatenedoutwest.
I am by no means sure the NEA dashboard is entirely free of corporate input. There are for-profit vendors of “wraparound services” wrapping their tentacles around schools here in Massachusetts, for instance. Thet are hired by the non-profit Turnaround partners receivers hire when a district is seized against the community’s will, for low test scores. They call somebody a social worker and put them in an office. They hire a community liaison and parent outreach organizer to screen parents and choose some to be trained as administration mouthpieces. They contract for invasive character training programs, with built-in measurements of student growth in “grit” and compliance behavior. The result is hell for the kids, and an untracked profit windfall in laundered money for the public-private partnership.
All “accountability” language subverts community control, and as long as it’s hanging over us, even geography can be weaponized against children.
One of the most disturbing aspects of ESEA reauthorization is bipartisan support for charter schools, while ignoring or encouraging their undermining effect on public education. There are better choices than school choice to improve education: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arthur-camins/post_9646_b_7638398.html
Diane,
The big issue I see about shifting to the state level right now is precisely what is happening in New York and a few other places.
Namely that the governors are dictating education policy via budget and either vetoing things they don’t like or forcing legislatures to adopt policies they favor (though Cuomo took a notable beating in the Educational Tax Credit, he still walked away with a victory though a smaller one than he wanted).
The next front is going to be fighting gubernatorial capture and local legislatures.
The good news is that it spreads the fight out to be on so many fronts with so many politicians that not all the elections could be bought at all levels. The downside is that the chief executive has so much power that they become the battle ground.
We know at that level many governors have people with billions doling out their campaign cash. Our democracy is now faced with the conundrum of how we don’t govern by everyone voting on everything, but having one person represent everyone means that even if the majority feels strongly about one issue, that representative can represent themselves and not the people who put them there, and can do that for several years after their election.
M, you raise an important point. The resistance movement made no headway against the Bush administration, the Obama administration, or the Congress. But angry parents and educators can mobilize and affect legislators in their home states. Glenda Ritz beat privatizer-in-chief of Indiana, Tony Bennett. Now she has a chance to beat Mike Pence for governor. The strongest place to fight the destruction of public education is in communities and states. Especially the Governor and legislature.
Precisely…
Bernie Sanders for President.
Zephyr Teachout for Governor of New York.
Kasich just slithered though a bill in Ohio that replaces superintendents with CEOs, voids contracts, and abolishes elected school boards in favor of boards appointed by a mayor. Pretty much what they are trying in Cleveland now, but probably targeted at Youngstown, Akron, Toledo, maybe Columbus.
That is the Broad Academy business model. Wasn’t Chicago’s Byrd-Bennett in Cleveland imposing that same model before Rahm plucked her up to maneuver in Chicago? How is the legal case against her doing?
Yes, we should focus on rectifying the main issues affecting students of color: http://cepa.stanford.edu/educational-opportunity-monitoring-project/achievement-gaps/race/#fifth
It’s too bad that the Republicans (and some Democrats) won’t even engage in a serious discussion about this problem and its deleterious impact on academic achievement.
Since one of the main variables, NAEP data, is corrupt/invalid then every conclusion, by definition is invalid/corrupt.
People keep using totally invalid data sources-standardized test scores-in these “studies”. People keep producing invalid conclusions. It ain’t rocket science that concept.
Democrats have now almost completely bought into the assumption that more testing=more equity
What Democrats have completely bought into is that more testing = more campaign donations from corporate ed.
Elected officials neither know nor care about the real world consequences of the programs they enact. They only have two rules: get elected, get re-elected.
I;m certainly open to the idea of campaign donations driving what they do, but what if it’s worse than that?
What if they simply have no other approach? Democrats keep returning to testing/sanctions because that’s all they got?
Republicans have “kick it back to the states” and Democrats have “NCLB approach, tweaked” and that’s just the whole of the debate of in DC?
We may be giving them too much credit for complex manipulation and grand schemes. I listened to some of the Senate debate and it was REALLY narrow on the Democratic side- with the exception of ONE Democratic Senator it was all technocratic fixes and tweaking.
That may arise out of campaign donations, they simply don’t hear from anyone who disagrees with their broad approach, but it could also just be that they’re out of gas. This is what they got, so they keep pushing it.
Chiara, I think you are right on target, and thank you for telling us what you found form listening to the debate. I think you are right that testing and sanctions is all Democrats have now, which is too bad.
These are narrowly technocratic policy ideas that fit into a political environment that is stalemated over more direct state action on environment, welfare, labor, education, etc. Instead of regulating, this kind of policy just measures and punishes.
It’s much harder to make policy that will actually help people. In part this is because the ability of people to take advantage of policy will differ, based largely on their initial assets of money, knowledge, etc. So there need to be federal agencies that make specific rules, which gets complex, intrusive, and politically risky.
There is a tragic side to NCLB under Arne Duncan. Whatever ability the federal government might have had to improve education may have been lost because he’s so bad. The ability of the federal government of improve education might be limited, but I don’t want to become a reactionary who says it can’t help at all.
Personally, I think government (both parties) is being classically lazy on this issue. Republicans want to shift the responsibility for a failing educational system to another entity in order to keep getting votes. And Democrats are stopping short of actually dealing with the issue by capitulating to the GOP’s demands that “failing” schools be closed down.
Neither side is using (or even collecting) real information in way that does our kids any good, and neither seems to be willing to take a logical stance. The GOP wants to make sure this remains solely a state’s issue and the Dems don’t want to alienate voters who actually agree.
I think that the issue has to be approached with a combination federal, state, and local solutions. The federal side would specify that every child in the country is taught the exact same core subject matter. The states would then oversee the performance of every school. The local systems would implement that policy uniformly and focus on the job of actually teaching. Deficiencies would then be worked on in the exact reverse. Local districts would work to find solutions to boost performance of individual schools, states could then provide assistance to under-performing districts, and the federal government could target individual states.
This doesn’t mean if a state or a local district wanted to teach additional subjects that they would not be permitted to. It also doesn’t permit the federal – or even the state – government to dictate HOW children are taught. But it surely would provide a basis for understanding the exact cause of under-performance and would allow for a method to correct issues at a very fine-grained level tailored to specific problems without closing more schools or firing an entire school district’s teaching force.
Maybe this is too logical. Or maybe our politicians simply fear the issues that this approach could bring to light and force them to deal with.
Keith,
You wrote: “The federal side would specify that every child in the country is taught the exact same core subject matter. The states would then oversee the performance of every school. The local systems would implement that policy uniformly and focus on the job of actually teaching.”
What you suggest is the ultimate Sovietization of American Community Public Schools. Top down overseer approaches are the worst form of government/management control that is known to mankind.
Tell me, show me where and when in the history of this supposedly great country has community public education been so standardized in curriculum. How did this country get to where it is without such “common” curriculum? Your suggestion is utter nonsense.
It’s very disingenuous for people who claim to be all about civil rights to have no desegregation protections in the law. In fact, lawmakers are promoting segregation by supporting the expansion of charter schools, which are highly segregated.
True…Democrats are also deceived into thinking that identifying the problem schools means anything positive will be done to help kids. The only result will be to fire teachers and close schools.
I don’t really understand how to take the Democrat’s vote. Were they trying to block the Republicans with marching orders from POTUS? Do they really want to crush public education without really understanding the consequences? I am baffled by such behavior.
Democratic Congresspersons are just as much a part of the 1% as Republican Congresspersons. ALL of them have forgotten the rest of us. In the hothouse environment that is in the Beltway, all they hear are the rich and the sycophants. Accidentally, or on purpose, they forget to represent anyone. It’s all corrupt.
It’s a good piece but since the claim from Democrats is that it’s a new approach from NCLB what about a point by point comparison with NCLB?
NCLB is broadly unpopular with the public, or, alternately, Democrats believe NCLB is broadly unpopular with the public. Democrats (including Obama) have been running against NCLB for years.
So I would think what the public needs is a comparison with NCLB so they can determine if Democrats have any coherent, consistent “new direction” on public schools that is a departure from NCLB or if they simply run against NCLB because that’s politically convenient while actually supporting it.
Most people won’t follow this as closely or understand the history as well as people in education do. One would probably have to explain it to “us” (I include myself in this group) and a point by point comparison might be the best way to do that.
My sense reading what looked like a draft of the Murphy amendment was it was basically NCLB but limited to the bottom-scoring 5% of schools (plus some other identifying factors- graduation rates, and some other lower-weighted factors).
Is that a fair, broad description? Democrats are changing NCLB only in the sense that they’re limiting the NCLB approach to the lowest-scoring 5% of schools? Because obviously that will be politically easier to swallow. 5% of schools is a much smaller group of voters than 100% of schools and the vast majority of people won’t even know that 5% of schools are subject to this scheme. Is that (broadly) accurate?
Kids are never central. This is about $$$$$ and control. Our young is being USED for PROFIT.
Joseph Stiglitz “How Inequality In Today’s Society Endangers Our Future”
I need an IV, stat!
Illegalize VAM!
Join the real IV league!
Supporting VAM is fraud!
There oughta be a law against that! . . .
There appear to be two IV Leagues. Three if you include the one where all this VAM crap (forgive the redundancy) gets its most influential support.
“Testing in the IV League”
The IV League prepares the youth
In intravenous testing booth
The “drip drip drip” of testing prep
Is like a water-torture rep
We need to galvanize the resistance to privatization to a new level. We need to take a play from the civil rights movement. We need an alliance of parents, teachers, students and civil rights groups, all groups that support public education to picket both conventions. They need to feel the heat of a large group of unhappy citizens. They will only respond if they think they will lose votes and seats. We need greater organization, visibility and an articulate, charismatic leader.
Julie Cavanagh
All legislators should be required to read this blog, daily.
“Standardized tests are used as the reason why voting rights are removed from Black and Brown voters”
This is a red herring and an illogical equivalence.
If all kids in all states are taught the exact same things, then there would be no need for standardized testing. A preponderance of low test scores would indicate a failing school. The fact, however, is that they are not. As a result, we have no basis for comparison – no way to reasonably assess the performance of any school whether nationwide or at the district level.
Does it not occur to anyone else that we have a mountain of excuses for our poor education system – teachers losing their jobs, kids not eating when they get home, fundamentalist morals aren’t being taught, fundamentalist morals are required learning, teacher don’t get enough pay, not enough schools, too many kids in each school… but when it comes down to it, we reject the notion of ever obtaining any evidence at all that any of those excuses really mean anything?
So you want all teachers to teach the same thing, at the same time, exactly the same way, all over the country? And there’s plenty of evidence that these “excuses” you reference mean a great deal. Do your homework.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
I sent this to Senators Boxer and Feinstein:
Dear Senator,
As one of your long-time supporters, I was very disappointed to see that you voted in favor of the Murphy amendment to the new ESEA rewrite. I have taught in California public schools for 25 years, and the Federal government’s intrusion since NCLB was introduced has been a disaster. Please reconsider your stand on this or any future legislation that would give the USDOE any power over state and local use of testing, curriculum or instruction.
As you know, that was never the intent of the 1965 ESEA; rather, the original bill was intended to narrow inequities. Arne Duncan’s heavy-handed and wrong-headed enforcement of the ideas of himself and a few wealthy neo-liberals has been ruinous for public school children,especially the alternative education and ELL students I have always taught. Please step up to champion equal resources for these students, and to stop the poisonous over-reach of testing by the USDOE and the Obama administration.
Thank you for your concern for the children, parents, teachers, and their communities.
Sincerely,
Mark Kennedy