Archives for the year of: 2015
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Helen Gym Wins City Council Seat in Philadelphia

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2015 //
6

Congratulations, Helen Gym!

Helen is an eloquent advocate for public education in Philadelphia. She fights for students, teachers, and better public schools.

She won!

Statement, Helen Gym, Councilwoman-Elect

“Today, the voters have spoken. I am humbled and proud to enter office with a vote of confidence from a diverse coalition of Philadelphians from every neighborhood, big and small, and to those nationwide who paid attention to and supported this race. My campaign finished how it started, as a grassroots movement for change, knocking on 6,000 doors, making 27,000 phone calls and raising more money through small donations than any Council or Mayoral candidate during the primary.

“Everywhere I went in this campaign, voters demanded a City Council that focused on public education and a growing, sustainable economy for all Philadelphians, especially our most vulnerable. Those voices were heard.

“These communities that carried me on their shoulders to victory will be walking through the doors of City Hall with me in January. Our work has only just begun.”

Categories Education Reform

Mike Klonsky: Illinois Governor Rauner Determined to Crush Unions; Will Democrats in Legislature Cave?

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2015 //
11

Mike Klonsky describes the parallel paths of Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in their ambition to rid their states of public sector unions.

Rauner refuses to pass the state budget unless the Democratic legislature bows to his demands.

Klonsky remembers how former Governor Pat Quinn (D) folded when Stand for Children and DFER (Democrats for Education Reform) insisted on anti-union, anti-teacher legislation.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is planning to fire as many as 5,000 teachers, disrupting the lives of teachers and students.

Klonsky says that Rauner can lose if the Dems stand their ground. Will they?

Categories Illinois

Norm Scott: Eva Moskowitz as Nurse Ratched?

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2015 //
13

Norm Scott is an education activist and retired teacher who was the cameraman and producer of “The Inconvenient Truth about ‘Waiting for Superman.'” He blogs regularly. In this post, he writes about his personal theory that Eva Moskowitz is the Nurse Ratched of American education.

He writes:

For those not aware, Nurse Ratched, as Wikipedia states, “is the head administrative nurse at… a mental institution where she exercises near-absolute power over the patients’ access to medications, privileges, and basic necessities such as food and toiletries. She capriciously revokes these privileges whenever a patient displeases her. Her superiors turn blind eyes because she maintains order, keeping the patients from acting out, either through antipsychotic and anticonvulsant drugs or her own brand of psychotherapy, which consists mostly of humiliating patients into doing her bidding.” Nurse Ratched engages in an epic battle with rebel inmate Randall McMurphy (Jack Nicholson in the movie). In polls, Nurse Ratched came in 2nd to The Wicked Witch of the North as the most evil female character in movie history.

I saw a Halloween photo of a teacher dressed as the Wicked Witch of the North wearing an Eva Moskowitz mask. This was not an exaggeration. People have termed conditions for some children at Eva’s schools as verging on child abuse.

Moskowitz has staunchly denies that students were pushed out, counseled out, or pressured to withdraw.

But Scott adds this point:

A comment left on my blog by an anonymous parent stated: “They decided to start with younger and younger kids, so the communication of abuses would be harder to decipher. They decided to tell the parents one thing, and do another to the child. I once stood in the hall and listened to a dean yell so violently at a student (behind closed doors) that I couldn’t even discern the infraction. The child was thoroughly convinced he had committed a sin so unspeakable based on her threats, that he was too afraid to report the incident to his parents, hoping that she wouldn’t either. When you get detention for squeaking the rubber soles on the floor, or coughing. or sneezing in a disingenuous way; when you are taught that asking for help when you are told not to talk, is a level 4 “disrespect of a teacher” your world begins to change. Twilight Zone comes to mind.”

Twilight Zone or asylum?

Categories Charter Schools, Discipline and Suspensions, Harlem Success Academy

Arts Education in Los Angeles: A Victim of Misguided Reforms

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2015 //
23

The Los Angeles Times reports that arts education has been shortchanged in the Los Angeles Unified School District in recent years, even as the district leadership was pouring millions of dollars into testing, test-prep, and technology. Former superintendent John Deasy was willing to allocate $1.3 Billion to buy iPads for Common Core testing, but at the same time, many schools across the district had no arts teachers.

Under the philosophy that test scores are the only measure that matters, that low scores lead to school closures, the district neglected the arts.

Normandie Avenue Elementary Principal Gustavo Ortiz worries that he can’t provide arts classes for most of the 900 students at his South Los Angeles school.

Not a single art or music class was offered until this year at Curtiss Middle School in Carson.

At Carlos Santana Arts Academy in North Hills, a campus abuzz with visual and performing arts, the principal has gone outside the school district for help. A former professional dancer, she has tapped industry connections and persuaded friends to teach ballroom dancing and other classes without pay until she could reimburse them.

Budget cuts and a narrow focus on subjects that are measured on standardized tests have contributed to a vast reduction of public school arts programs across the country. The deterioration has been particularly jarring in Los Angeles, the epicenter of the entertainment industry.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is discovering the extent of those cuts as it seeks to regain the vibrancy that once made it a leader in arts education. For the first time, L.A. Unified in September completed a detailed accounting of arts programs at its campuses that shows stark disparities in class offerings, the number of teachers and help provided by outside groups.

Arts programs at a vast majority of schools are inadequate, according to district data. Classrooms lack basic supplies. Some orchestra classes don’t have enough instruments. And thousands of elementary and middle school children are not getting any arts instruction.

A Los Angeles Times analysis that used L.A. Unified’s data to assign letter grades to arts programs shows that only 35 out of more than 700 schools would get an “A.” Those high-performing schools offered additional instruction through community donations, had more teachers and a greater variety of arts programs than most of the district’s campuses.

State policy is strong in support of arts education, but LAUSD doesn’t have the money to support the arts. Instead, the money has been spent on testing and implementing the Common Core.

Eight out of every 10 elementary schools does not meet state standards in the arts. The students least likely to engage in the arts are in the high-needs, low-income schools. In schools where there are parents with resources and contacts, they are able to supplement what the school does not provide.

Only four elementary schools — West Vernon, Magnolia, Bonita Street and 49th Street Elementary — had an arts teacher five days a week, according to district data.

“I feel real guilty because my kids go to schools where an art teacher and a music teacher are there five days a week,” said Ortiz, who pointed to Normandie’s limited budget. “I come here and I can’t give the kids what my own kids get. It just tears me up. It’s such an inequity.”

Arts education was not meant to be a luxury in California.

State law requires that schools provide music, art, theater and dance at every grade level. But few districts across the state live up to the requirement.

According to a story in the Wall Street Journal today, the state has allocated $4.8 Billion to the implementation of the Common Core standards and testing. This is a matter of priorities: What matters most: The joy of learning or standardized test scores?

It is ironic that billionaire Eli Broad, who just opened a new museum to house his own collection, wants to spend $490 million to open 260 new charter schools, but can’t find it in his heart to subsidize the arts in the schools of his adopted city.

Which will matter more to these children? The joy of performance, the discipline of practice, the love of engagement promoted by the arts or taking the Common Core tests that most will fail again and again?

You decide.

Categories Arts Education, Broad Foundation, Common Core, Los Angeles

Peter Greene on the WSJ Analysis of Common Core’s Death Spiral

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2015 //
36

Peter Greene read the WSJ article that was just posted on the blog, and he saw it as confirmation of what he long ago predicted: the dream of national standards and tests is dead. Whatever you may call the Common Core, there will not be one big set of standards and one big standardized test for all (or even two big standardized tests for all).

In other words, the dream that Common Core would be the single educational vision of the entire country– that dream is dead. Dead dead deadity dead.

But Rothfeld’s piece lays out a not-always-recognized (at least, not by people who don’t actually work in education) culprit for the demise. He lists the usual suspects– politics, testing, federal overreach. But the article is most interested in another malefactor– finances.

“The total cost of implementing Common Core is difficult to determine because the country’s education spending is fragmented among thousands of districts. The Wall Street Journal looked at spending by states and large school districts and found that more than $7 billion had been spent or committed in connection with the new standards.”

That’s billion-with-a-B (and that rhymes with P and that stands for “Probably still underestimating the total cost”). WSJ looked at all sorts of records and figures that still doesn’t count things like the training budgets that have been turned into Common Core training budgets.

So it isn’t working, states are dropping out of the tests and the standards too.

And he allows Vicki Phillips to repeat her claims about the awesomeness of Kentucky without being challenged. In fact, Rothfeld doesn’t really challenge anything about the Core, and in a way, that’s what makes this article so brutal– whether the Core is any good or not is beside his point, which is that the whole business just isn’t working, and it’s costing a ton of money to boot.

Will historians in the future look back and review the short life and rapid death of the Common Core standards as the educational equivalent of the Edsel? New Coke? There must be a Museum of Failed Educational Experiments and Fads somewhere. If there is, a special place should be reserved for CCSS, because it not only was imposed by the federal government and the Gates Foundation without any deference to democratic process, but it wasted billions of dollars that might have been better spent on reducing class sizes, restoring arts education, promoting desegregation.

I confess that I once believed in the value of national standards. The experience of Common Core has proven that national standards are a waste of time and money, that we will best improve education by improving the conditions of teaching and learning and by reducing poverty and segregation. These are hard but achievable goals. They will change the lives of children across the nation for the better. National standards and tests might be imposed, but even if they were, they would do nothing to improve the lives of children or communities or our society.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Testing

WSJ: Common Core in Jeopardy Due to Costs of Implementation

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2015 //
23

Michael Rothfeld of the Wall Street Journal has written the best, most balanced account that I have seen of the perilous condition of the Common Core standards. The article fails to explain adequately why 46 states adopted the standards, as if everyone was waiting and hoping for the chance to endorse untested national standards; it happened because of the $4.35 billion offered as a state competition, but only to states that agreed to do what the Obama administration wanted them to do, which included embracing the standards.

Rothfeld documents why states are dropping out. A few have repealed the Common Core standards. Half of the 46 states that signed on to one of the two federally-sponsored tests have backed out. It wasn’t simply the political controversy from right and left, from parents and educators. The cost turned out to be a deal-breaker.

Some states couldn’t afford the cost of retraining teachers. Some could not afford the technology. Some could not afford the new tests.

But the standards and tests arrived at a time when districts and states were strapped.

“The total cost of implementing Common Core is difficult to determine because the country’s education spending is fragmented among thousands of districts. The Wall Street Journal looked at spending by states and large school districts and found that more than $7 billion had been spent or committed in connection with the new standards. To come up with that number, the Journal examined contracts, email and other data provided under public-records requests by nearly 70 state education departments and school districts.

“The analysis didn’t account for what would have been spent anyway—even without Common Core—on testing, instructional materials, technology and training. Education officials say, however, that the new standards required more training and teaching materials than they would otherwise have needed, and that Common Core prompted them to speed up computer purchases and network upgrades.

“Much more money would be needed to implement Common Core consistently. Some teachers haven’t been trained, and some schools lack resources to buy materials. Some states haven’t met the goal of offering the test to all students online instead of on paper with No. 2 pencils….

“Common Core advocates hoped to make standards uniform—and to raise them across the board. Their goals were to afford students a comparable education no matter where they were, to cultivate critical thinking rather than memorization, to better prepare students for college and careers, and to enable educators to use uniform year-end tests to compare achievement. They wanted to give the tests on computers to allow more complex questions and to better analyze results.

“The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which signed on to the effort in 2008, so believed in the cause that it has spent $263 million on advocacy, research, testing and implementing the standards, foundation records show. Vicki Phillips, a Gates education director, says its Common Core-related funding of new curriculum tools developed by teachers has led to student gains in places such as Kentucky.

“But after a burst of momentum and a significant investment of money and time, the movement for commonality is in disarray.

“Some states, including South Carolina, Indiana and Florida, have either amended or replaced Common Core standards. Others, including Tennessee, Missouri, Louisiana, New Jersey and North Carolina, are in the process of changing or reviewing them. A total of 21 states have withdrawn from two groups formed to develop common tests, making it difficult to compare results.

In California, the costs of implementation are staggering.

California has allocated $4.8 billion to local school districts that they can use for Common Core implementation, but some have asked a state commission to order more funding for giving the Smarter Balanced test.

“For some urban districts struggling to pay for basic educational needs, preparing for the standards has been challenging.

“The Philadelphia school district unveiled a plan in 2010 to implement Common Core and won a $500,000 grant from the Gates Foundation. But a budget crisis the next year resulted in nearly 4,000 layoffs, including of some putting the plan in place.”

There is something bizarre about pouring billions into untested standards and tests at a time when districts like Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and many others are struggling to maintain basic services in their schools and at a time when privatizers are targeting the very existence of public schools.

Categories Budget Cuts, Common Core, Education Reform

If You Live in Mississippi, Get Out and Vote for Initiative 42

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2015 //
0

Please vote today to support and fund the public schools of Mississippi.

Vote for Act 42. Do not vote for the alternative intended to confuse voters.

Read this to understand why Initiative 42 matters. It was written by a kindergarten teacher in Mississippi.

In 1997, the Mississippi Legislature passed a law promising to provide each public school district in Mississippi enough financial support to furnish an adequate education to every K-12 student. That law is called the Mississippi Adequate Education Program (MAEP), and has only been followed twice since it was passed. This has resulted in a shortfall of over a billion dollars since 2009. That is a billion dollars that would have provided textbooks, technology, and certified teachers. Instead, Mississippi’s students have just had to do without.

In 2014, nearly 200,000 Mississippians from every county and both political parties took a stand and signed petitions to have Initiative 42 added to the ballot on November 3, 2015. This would amend the state constitution in a way that makes public education a priority instead of an afterthought. Initiative 42 closes a loophole that has allowed the Legislature to break the MAEP law for so long.

If you want to have a better future in your state, invest in education now.

Categories Funding, Mississippi

John Richard Schrock: Any External Assessment Is Too Much

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2015 //
14

John Richard Schrock teaches science to future science teachers in Kansas. This is his view of what is needed to improve assessment.

He writes:

President Obama’s proposal to cap external assessments at two percent of student class time is seven years late and two percent too much. It does not end the educational disaster of 14 years of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) over-testing. It does not bring back the art and music classes that were lost because they were not tested and therefore did not count. Nor does it address the concerns of growing number of parents who are opting their child out of testing. And it does nothing to re-professionalize teaching.

Every rural Kansan knows that the more time you spend weighing them, the less time you have to feed them. But reducing testing to two percent does not mean that a teacher will have 98 percent of class time for teaching. While the last 14 years of assessments only consumed a week each spring, the months before the test were often filled with pre-tests, practicing for the tests, and every form of coercion imaginable to get students to score higher. With teachers and administrators still under-the-gun to raise test scores, this teaching-to-the-test will continue. Indeed, in most states the current mandated assessments only take up 2.7 percent of class time. But preparation for that test consumes the months beforehand. Reducing the actual testing to two percent of class time does nothing to eliminate the test-prep.

To weigh the effect of NCLB on the teaching profession, consider what it would do to the medical profession if this standardization was imposed on doctors. Previously, physicians treated each patient who came in with unique needs and left with individualized cures. And teachers taught students who came in unique and left unique.

But teachers are restricted to scores on language arts and math. That is like forcing doctors to only use temperature and blood pressure to rate a patient’s health. As a result, patients get no attention to lung and kidney and other problems. And students are shortchanged in art, music, science and social studies.

With temperature and blood pressure the only indicator of health, and heavy penalties on doctors and hospitals that don’t improve those measures, physicians would load their patients up on aspirin and blood pressure medicine. Similarly, teachers have to teach-to-the-past-tests and raise assessment scores. Of course, the overall effect is sicker patients. And despite increased assessment scores, the genuine measurements of student abilities on the NAEP, SAT and ACT go down.

The ACT and SAT have been around far longer than the NCLB testing mania. So why weren’t they just as bad as current assessments? The ACT and old SAT are aptitude tests, not achievement tests. They measured a students aptitude or general ability. Generally, a teacher cannot teach-to-the ACT or SAT tests, so it did not distort their classroom teaching. These tests do not promote memorization and drillwork.

But the government-mandated assessment tests are achievement tests that do respond to memorization and drillwork. State boards of education latch onto standards that profess fanciful creative-thinking goals. But teachers under pressure don’t teach-to-the-standards; they await the release of the first round of tests and they teach-to-that-test.

To treat patients as unique patients, physicians must have the total professional judgement call on what tests to use—period.

And to treat our students as the unique students they are, teachers must regain their professional right to be the sole testers of their students. There should be no external test that requires them to teach-to-that-test. Not two percent, Mr. President. Zero percent.

Ivory tower educationists rail that math and English are universal across the U.S. and therefore the tests must be universal. But teaching is about students as much as about the subject. City kids do not have the same experience base as rural students.

American teachers were unique in the world because we had the professional right and responsibility to teach different students differently. To restore our profession, we must regain that right. Our students come to us unique; they should leave our classrooms unique.

No more standardization means no more external testing.

Categories Testing

Another Essential Reading about the Common Core: Thomas Newkirk

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2015 //
26

thanks to a reader who sent this link to an excellent article by Thomas Newkirk about the defects of the Common Core standards. Newkirk is a professor at the University of New Hampshire. His critique of the Common Core is a classic of reasoned criticism.

He understands that the standards were rolled out with a massive and subtle PR campaign. From the outset, the public was told that the standards were written by governors and experts. The public was told that the CC was a done deal. From day one, it was too late to object. The train had left the station, even though few people were aware that there was a train or that it was in the station. “Resistance is futile,” said the well-paid corps of CC cheerleaders. 

Newkirk writes: 

“The Common Core initiative is a triumph of branding. The standards are portrayed as so consensual, so universally endorsed, so thoroughly researched and vetted, so self-evidently necessary to economic progress, so broadly representative of beliefs in the educational community—that they cease to be even debatable. They are held in common; they penetrate to the core of our educational aspirations, uniting even those who might usually disagree. We can be freed from noisy disagreement, and should get on with the work of reform.
This deft rollout may account for the absence of vigorous debate about the Common Core State Standards. If they represent a common core—a center—critics are by definition on the fringe or margins, whiners and complainers obstructing progress. And given the fact that states have already adopted them—before they were completely formulated—what is the point in opposition? We should get on with the task of implementation, and, of course, alignment.”

Newkirk proceeds to diagnose the flaws of the CC, starting with the conflict of interest of the testing companies whose representatives helped to write the standards. He criticizes the developmental inappropriateness of the standards. 

He writes: 

“The CCSS has taken what I see as exceptional work, that of perhaps the top 5 percent of students, and made it the new norm.” The work once expected of fourth graders has shifted to the second grade.”

The standards give extraordinary power to standardized tests. Not surprising since test publishers played such a prominent role in writing them.  

“The central question is this: Are standardized tests compatible with the more complex goals of twenty- first-century literacy? Or are they a regressive and reductive technology (ironically, many of the countries we are chasing in international comparisons do not share our belief in these tests)?”

Newkirk says: 

In a democracy it is never too late to speak back, to question, to criticize. As Martin Luther King Jr. argued in his“Letter from a Birmingham Jail,”it is never“untimely.” We simply cannot give up our democratic birthright and settle into compliance, not on something this important. We need to pierce the aura of inevitability that promoters have woven around the Common Core. We have to“follow the money”and ask who benefits financially from this initiative (especially important considering the financial scandals that occurred with Reading First several years ago). We need to ask about the role of unaccountable think tanks, testing agencies, and foundations in driving this initiative—have we  outsourced reform? We have to determine what value to place on local control and teacher decision making. We have to ask about the usefulness of the“data”that tests provide and whether these data may be crowding out the richer, contextual observations of teachers. And we have to look at the limitations of tests them- selves, what they can illuminate and what they must ignore. Can they test the complex, integrated, and creative skills that students will truly need—not only to be better workers but more fully realized human beings?

All in all, this is a very satisfying essay that raises important questions. 

 

Categories Common Core, Education Reform

Nickolas Butler: What Is Happening to My Beloved Wisconsin?

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2015 //
10

Nickolas Butler, a writer in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, remembers the Wisconsin of his childhood and wonders why the current political leadership wants to destroy everything that was beautiful about the state. The schools, the dedicated teachers, the world-class university, the precious environment and landscape. 
He writes: 
“I remember, my days and years in Eau Claire’s public schools, well-kept buildings populated by teachers that I truly adored and admired, like heroes. My parents stood in lockstep with these educators and on those days when I arrived home with a substandard report card (and there were many such dismal report cards), I never thought to blame my teachers, nor would have my parents entertained such nonsense.
“When I left for college in Chicago, I volunteered at an inner-city elementary school. The furnace often malfunctioned, and the school was very cold in winter. One day, I waited on the school’s front steps for a bus to take me back to campus. The principal ran out of the building and taking me by the arm, escorted me back inside. 
“Why, I asked, couldn’t I sit outside? Because, I was told, I might be shot. Likewise, the playground was a dangerous place for the children to play, strewn with needles and broken glass, and the chain-link fence no defense for errant bullets.
“Well, I thought, this is Chicago.
“I remember, for example, the first time I heard about mountaintop-mining in the Appalachian Mountains. Such a notion was so profoundly brutal, so antithetical to the manner in which I had been raised, that I could not comprehend the “effiency” of it all. But psychologically I distanced myself from that reality, by dismissively thinking, Well, that only happens in West Virginia, or Kentucky. That would never happen in Wisconsin. We would never scalp our landscape, our home.
“I remember, as a Boy Scout exploring Wisconsin’s network of state parks. Listening to the news or Garrison Keillor on Wisconsin Public Radio each weekend. I remember a popular Republican governor who introduced recycling during my childhood, and often voraciously fought for a public train system.
“I remember that my church invited foreign refugees into our community. I remember my years attending UW-Madison, and the elite, world-recognized professors I had the privilege to study under. I remember a childhood where every vocation, every passion, was encouraged — not just those that made “sense”/​cents.
“Now, every one of those institutions is on the chopping block or threatened with fiscal starvation. And when they fail, as they will, profiteers will buy for a pittance what were once invaluable jewels in a commonwealth we all owned, as Wisconsinites, unified and unseparated by politics.
“I believe I share the same qualities as almost all Wisconsinites, conservative or liberal. I believe in kindness and hard work and decency and respect. But these are all qualities that are in diminishing supply right now in Wisconsin. It is as if we have exhausted all the kindness in our state, and all the decency. 
“We quickly loot our natural resources, stripping the land of what topography there is. We insult our teachers. We allow our university system to decay, our educators to be stolen by other states and schools. Our legislators regularly give no time for public comment or feedback before thrusting a new bill upon us. It is as if they don’t care about what once was. They seem interested in conserving nothing, plowing maniacally ahead with little heed to their so-called love of institutions, history and incremental change.”

Categories Education Reform
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