This is incredible timing. Yesterday, voters in Mississippi turned down an initiative to increase state funding for public schools. They were urged on by Governor Phil Bryant and the Republican leadership of the Legislature, who feared that the courts would tell the Legislature what to do instead of letting the Legislature under-fund the schools all on their own.
The next day, today, former Governor Jeb Bush’s former Foundation for Educational Excellence (now headed by education expert Condoleeza Rice) saluted Mississippi for raising its standards! How cynical to think that higher standards and harder tests will improve test scores. This is like telling a student who can’t clear a 4-foot bar that you will help him by raising it to 6 feet. How cynical can one be? This is a slap in the face to every parent, teacher, and student in Mississippi.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
November 5, 2015 Contact: Press Office
850-391-4090
PressShop@excelined.org
RELEASE: Mississippi Raises Expectations for Students
State Leaders Continue Trend towards Readiness for College and Career
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Today, the Mississippi State Board of Education accepted rigorous new performance level cut scores for the state test given to students last spring. The vote signals the desire of Mississippi leaders to continue raising rigor for students and ensuring they have demonstrated a thorough understanding of grade-level content and are on track to being ready for college-level coursework or the workforce.
“This is yet another example of Mississippi’s clear commitment to raising expectations for its students. Governor Phil Bryant, Lt. Governor Tate Reeves, Speaker Philip Gunn, the Legislature, State Superintendent of Education Dr. Carey Wright, as well as the State Board of Education have revolutionized education policy in the Magnolia State, and we are starting to see some promising results for Mississippi’s students,” said Patricia Levesque, CEO for the Foundation for Excellence in Education (ExcelinEd). “Last week, Mississippi posted gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Today, the Board of Education took another crucial step toward reform, ensuring that Mississippi’s students become better prepared for college and career opportunities. I applaud the Board as well as the incredible efforts of Mississippi’s educators, parents and community leaders, who are taking ownership of these reforms to better prepare young Mississippians for life’s increasing expectations.”
Mississippi’s new proficiency expectations are aligned with student performance on the NAEP, which is considered the gold standard for measuring student proficiency. The difference between NAEP and individual states’ proficiency expectations are wide and varied. This discrepancy is called an “honesty gap.” Later this month, if Mississippi follows the lead of setting more rigorous high school expectations, the honesty gaps for elementary and middle school will also close.
“Our teachers have worked incredibly hard over the past few years to help students reach these higher standards, and they should be commended for getting our students off to a strong start on their journey to college and the workforce,” said Dr. Carey Wright, state superintendent of education.
Requiring more of students will always be harder than requiring less. But Mississippi education officials have demonstrated a strong commitment to raising their proficiency expectations and creating an education system where every child masters the knowledge and skills necessary to be successful.
Visit ExcelinEd’s website http://WhyProficiencyMatters.com/Mississippi for more facts, graphics and sharable content. Join the conversation online with #ProficiencyMatters.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Making kids read trick questions and then fill in bubbles on a scantron does not help them become proficient in anything other than hating school.
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Remember Condoleezza rice telling us that a “first strike” may come in the form of a “Mushroom cloud”? She has found the right position in life – surrounded by like people
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The Mississippi ballot language on that school issue was really confusing.
http://www.msnewsnow.com/story/30422916/voters-face-confusion-with-initiative-42-ballot
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Raising the standards – lowering the financing.
Ready, Fire, Aim.
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Gradually, the FEE has changed the way they describe the NAEP assessment… NAEP has long been called the “gold standard in student assessment” and even the FEE was calling it that until recently… now it’s “NAEP, which is considered the gold standard for measuring student PROFICIENCY.” Does NAEP measure grade level proficiency (which, BTW, states are required, by NCLB, to measure)? Uh, NO. In Florida, our Board of Education is getting ready to blindly follow the FEE and raise our cut scores so we can fail as many students as NAEP does (who admits that its proficiency level represents “mastery” NOT grade level expectations)… the BOE acts as if they are merely dangling the carrot farther away, to inspire greatness. Sadly, Florida legislators have already mandated a ton of nasty repercussions for failure to meet “proficiency”. So, as the carrot moves farther away, millions more children will be smacked with the legislator’s big stick. This is wrong. And it certainly isn’t honest.
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minimizetesting, you are right about NAEP proficiency. It is far higher than grade level. The only state where 50% of kids reached NAEP proficiency is Massachusetts. No other state has ever done that. So we have a standard that dooms most students to fail.
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Higher standards with less funding! It sounds like the the type of backwards thinking Jeb is known for. He has a cheap plan that will benefit him, but not Mississippi’s poor children. The kids can sit in front of a computer screen, and Jeb can collect the $$$.
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“Thank God for Mississippi!” has long been Arkansas education’s catchphrase. Only Mississippi can outdo our legislature for sheer self-defeating ignorance. Secession? Hell, the Union should throw them out, and let Arkansas lead the nation with something other than rice exports and obesity. Whatever became of James Meredith, anyway? He was supposed to be standing up and speaking out for public education in Mississippi.
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Rigor, rigor, rigor, rigorous, rigor-mortus. The doublespeak and rhetoric is just so repetitive. Do they never tire of cranking out the same old alice in wonderland bs?
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The number of assumptions and insinuations is mind bogglingly. They associate not having a tested expectation along with not teaching something – though we can very well teach something without making it a mandatory “prove it by test” item.
They also mention the “Honesty gap” which says basically what we are doing is a lie and the “gap” is between what these expectations say and where we are now – that is not clear at all.
Finally, they make the flying leap that raising expectations will translate into a better education. This has not been proven anywhere. It is shown that it will raise failure rates, but there is little to no proof that raising test failure rates increases success rates (presumably in life outcomes however you measure those).
Lastly (and perhaps more finally) – they associate success on the tests (and by proxy a better education) with college and career readiness.
Apparently having generations that didn’t take the CCSS left so many of us unprepared – now that we can tell the kids what losers they are in 3rd grade they’ll get driven into the American dream to persevere and become entrepreneurs!
If I wasn’t so used to seeing this type of rhetoric, would I be fooled by it? Would it still feel like slimy and cynical fear mongering and full of punditry talking points?
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So Secty Rice can bring this country into the worst war possible and make not just our country but the rest of the world terrorists targets, so it only makes sense we would trust her with education issues????
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Of courses hey celebrate. It’s part of the game plan.
There is an old Rod Serling Twilight Zone episode in which invading extraterrestrials sit back and watch humans do the dirty work of destroying their peaceful city because the monsters have gotten them to distrust and turn against, accuse, and fight their formerly getting-along neighbors. I think we are replicating this scene in public schools today, as increasingly desperate teachers, parents and students, point fingers at one another in blame as we are left to try try try to keep our increasingly-deprived public schools afloat and actually serving our children.
Oh how the privatizers and Broad’s and Waltons and Gates’ — and their servant appointed school directors and administrators and politicians — must enjoy their cocktail-party gleeful chats as they watch us in the self-destruction they have wrought. Teachers and school Counselors desperate, desperate to teach and meet the needs of children in crammed schools and crammed classrooms, blaming parents and the children themselves for the (predictable, avoidable) reactions of kids who just can’t take the stresses that hit them from all sides. Parents desperate, desperate for the things their children need and deserve, seeing their children kicked out of school or coming home distraught and seeing those on the front lines, the teachers and Counselors, not as allies but as agents of the harm being done to their children.
Oh, how the real organizers of the chaos and harm must enjoy the apocalypse they create for public education.
And oh, the job we have of building the only solution, of bringing together the huge group of those who want the best for our kids, and fighting, yes, fighting against those gleeful destroyers. This is the call we have before us. We can do it. Because we must
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And what our side does wrong, in my opinion, is having hundreds of separate grassroot organizations fighting the same thing all going their separate ways. There is power and numbers and I believe building a strong coalition, putting egos aside, and helping each other is the only answer. This way, if those in one community need support, there are people in other organizations who will come to their aid and show a force in numbers.
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Not looking good for UNO charter chain in Chicago:
“Once we file for bankruptcy, the school buildings will no longer be in UNO’s control and instead will be in the hands of the bankruptcy trustee and UNO’s creditors,” Cerda wrote. “This means that the school buildings will ultimately be sold as part of this procedure.”
http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/7/71/1076267/uno-brink-going-bust-hispanic-group-warns
Probably a good thing they left a couple of public schools open on Chicago, just as a backup for the privatized system they prefer. They may need spots for 8000 students.
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“. . . the NAEP, which is considered the gold standard for measuring student proficiency. The difference between NAEP and individual states’ proficiency expectations are wide and varied. This discrepancy is called an “honesty gap.”
So few words so much bullshit.
In the “honesty gap” “discrepancy” though it takes one to know one. Pot meet Kettle. How people can deceive themselves so much like in Nazi Germany, Mao’s cultural revolution, Stalin’s purges and many other instances throughout mankind’s history is mind boggling. Many sheeple led to the slaughter both literally and figuratively.
NAEP a “gold” standard?? Really?? Here’s the honest version of that statement “NAEP a fool’s gold standard.” When one starts with errors and falsehoods, a standardized test like NAEP, one can only end up with error and falsehood in the results and conclusions drawn. And those epistemological and ontological errors and falsehoods in the process of making educational standards and the concomitant standardized tests such as NAEP have been shown by Noel Wilson in his never refuted nor rebutted 1997 dissertation*. [Actually it has been totally ignored because it is so damaging to those who use those errors and falsehoods to promote their own (monetary usually, but also prestige) agenda and idiology–idiology: (n) an ideology based in error and falsehood, the ideology of idiots.]
“You can’t make a silk purse out of sow’s ears” holds true for NAEP and the conclusions drawn. Why anyone believes otherwise is beyond my human comprehension.
*“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
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Not everyone sticks to the ed reform “movement” line. There are a couple of dissenters in government. Very few, but they exist.
This is the Vermont State Board on the release of the CC test scores:
“We call your attention to the box labeled “scale score and overall performance.” These levels give too simplistic and too negative a message to students and parents. The tests are at a very high level. In fact, no nation has ever achieved at such a level. Do not let the results wrongly discourage your child from pursuing his or her talents, ambitions, hopes or dreams.
These tests are based on a narrow definition of “college and career ready.” In truth, there are many different careers and colleges, and there are just as many different definitions of essential skills. ”
http://jonathanpelto.com/2015/11/05/news-flash-vermont-state-board-of-education-trashes-common-core-sbac-test/
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“The tests are at a very high level.”
Says who? Someone please explain how COMPLETELY INVALID test can be at a “very high level”. By logical definition since the tests are invalid then they cannot be considered “very high level”.
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I’ve read your posts so I know what you’re saying, but baby steps Duane, baby steps. They’re questioning the use of the scores as a proxy for “success”, which is something. The Common Core was carefully marketed. The whole roll-out was larded with advertising language. CC test score = College and Career success! To question that, as Vermont is doing, is hopeful.
My son’s school is holding individual meetings with parents on their child’s CC scores if the parent requests. I signed up not because I think I need another test score (Ohio tests a lot and I have more scores for him than I know what to do with) but because I’m curious whether they’ll follow the script from the state. Our superintendent told me she isn’t using “the slogans” so that’s good 🙂
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Jeb Bush, whose campaign was on, fully-funded life-support should pull the plug. His attempts to backtrack his Dad’s panning of Dubya’s presidency, appear as weak and lame as his request that Trump apologize to Mrs. Jeb Bush.
Jeb’s failures in education echo GW’s war decisions. They’re men with bad ideas for America but, driven to fill their associates’ pockets with money.
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It’s such a shame to me that this ONE family has had such a profound effect on US public schools.
There’s something really wrong with that. Something in government or civic life is profoundly broken when such a small group of people are directing and shaping the daily lives of tens of millions of children.
We’re going on 20 years of following the Bush family theories on public education. Enough. They’re simply too powerful.
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Even if everything they claim were true (which it’s not), how could cutting education funding yield better results?
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