Pennsylvania’s test scores dropped again. Rigor!
The curriculum is developmentally inappropriate, the tests are two grade levels above grade level. Class sizes are growing because of budget cuts. Money has been sucked out of public schools to fund privately managed charters.
Rigor was designed to fail more students and pave the way for privatization. It is working.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The fallout from Corbett’s Disaster Capitalism approach to the commons …
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Quoting from the article:
“A bill that would tie teacher furloughs to the new teacher evaluation system has passed the state House of Representatives.
Another bill that would push back the state’s standardized-test graduation requirement until 2019 has passed the Senate.
In concert, if advanced, these bills would give students less motivation to perform well on tests while holding teachers more accountable for student results.
“It’s almost like a perfect recipe to attack teachers in many ways,”…
We are fortunate in Pennsylvania that we have a governor, Tom Wolf, who doesn’t believe in this garbage. And I am fortunate to be teaching a non-tested subject and to be looking forward to retirement in two years. But how sad for young teachers trapped in this anti-education system, and for those idealistic high school grads who will now have to think twice and three times before deciding to commit to our once great profession.
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It is important to read the Peter Greene article to understand the dishonest and politically motivated manipulation of cut sores:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-greene/pennsylvania-manufactures-massive-test-failure_b_7775658.html
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“The Rigor Trigger”
Rigor trigger
Falling scores
Failing bigger
Hitting floors
Firing teachers
Closing schools
Hiring charters
Private rules!
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Brilliant!
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My hope is that Tom Wolf will comprehend that this is “disaster by design” and act accordingly. He should move to change or eliminate rigged tests. There are still many forces of evil working to destroy public schools.
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Amen!
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“Money has been sucked out of public schools to fund privately managed charters.”
May I add:
Along with the money that was sucked out of public schools to fund privately managed charters, some children were also sucked out from the public schools with the end result being the public schools are left with more money per student.
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No, that’s not how it works, as you would know if you would bother to read around here.
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I agree with Dienne. Raj needs to do some homework.
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Raj
What you said isn’t even common sense – it sure does make lots of sense ( or cents) for charter schools!
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“Money has been sucked out of public schools to fund privately managed charters.”
To all of you above here is some data from state of Pennsylvania for year 2011. Includes state and local expenditures averaged for the whole state. In this modern world it is amazing that one if not biased can obtain data from legitimate state database.
Charter school expenditure per student: $12670
Public School expenditure per student: $14095
It does work the way I said it and understood. Public schools suck up more money than charter schools on a per student basis. By the way the word “suck” was originally used by Diane Ravitch.
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All children are not the same, Raj, and the more expensive to educate students tend to remain in the public schools.
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And explain this, Raj: In Utah, if the funding scheme gets changed for charter schools, charters will lose 6 million dollars. However, if the public schools were counted as charters are, they would gain 65 million dollars. Also, districts often have to pay for transportation and food services for the charters as well as public schools, meaning that charters do not need the same amount of funding as public schools.
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Link for the charters vs. public schools in Utah: http://www.sltrib.com/news/2729901-155/utah-lawmaker-solve-charter-funding-issues
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“To all of you above here is some data from state of Pennsylvania for year 2011. Includes state and local expenditures averaged for the whole state.”
Ah – statewide averages!
But averages include the higher amounts spent in affluent districts, which skews the average upwards. Poor districts, like York, where charters typically locate to siphon off the easier and cheaper to educate students, don’t have the resources say, Yardley, does.
So charters are sucking resources from the schools which have few resources to begin with, then saddling them with food and transportation costs, too. And then they send back their discards after funding has been distributed for the year. Neat trick.
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Watch out Pennsylvania! In New York we got that same , “don’t worry about the big drop in scores – this is just to establish a new baseline” thing in the Spring when cut scores were set. By the Fall, we had Governor Cuomo saying ” How can the majority of our teachers possibly be effective if the scores are so low? We need a new evaluation system that fires more people!” (We also got Campbell Brown chomping on the low score numbers because they proved that tenure was protecting bad teachers who weren’t giving their students a good education.) If scores are lowered through some (perhaps legitimate) rationale, they will be used as weapons by people who will feign ignorance of how they got that way. All that matters are the appearances.
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I don’t think so. In Pa. we have a governor who ran and was elected on a platform of full and fair funding of public schools, charter school accountability, and two of his first acts as governor this year were to stop the charter takeover of the York City schools and to appoint an urban public school superintendent and former active Union member in the Philadelphia schools as Education Secretary. He vetoed the Republican passed budget that did nothing to address school funding and a Republican bill to destroy teacher pensions.
Gov. Wolf is on record as wanting fewer tests and an overhaul of the state’s evaluation system that does not use test scores to fire teachers but applies them solely as an aid in curriculum development and for teacher improvement. I do think that, as in NY and NJ, now that the common core has been rolled out here a real parents opt out movement will finally take hold in Pennsylvania, and I hope that the PSEA leadership will follow the lead of the NJEA and get on the airwaves across the state soon with effective ads critical of the testing regime and encouraging more opting out.
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That’s why opt-out is important. Don’t subject your children to meaningless, rigged tests and give the state ammunition to declare schools a “failure.”
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Utah also did the “don’t worry, this is a baseline” speech, BUT the media sure made it look like more schools were “failing.”
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The tests seem to show us that adult test makers are good at making hard multifaceted questions, and children are not good at answering them. Did we really need to drop a billion dollars to know that? I could have told you that for free.
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Beatings shall continue until morale improves!
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The US DOE finally fined Heald College $30 million after a long, long delay in identifying the toxic fusion of business and education.
How long will it take DOE Undersecretary Mr. Ted Mitchell (in his words) “to know the facts and act upon them”?
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R. Teacher, bear in mind that Undersecretary Mitchell supports for profit education
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
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Class action suits against legislators, politicans and others for child abuse and irresponsible legislation. When is “enough already” enough? Someone who is good at this stuff needs to identify all the schools with their curricula attended by the children of these “leaders” in one cohesive place. And, oh yes, who contributes to support them and with how much money.
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