Archives for the month of: January, 2016
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Peter Greene on the Joys of Teaching Five-Year-Olds to Love Testing

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2016 //
24

Peter Greene writes here about a scary article in Catalyst Chicago by a teacher who explains how she taught her five-year-olds to love testing. It should not surprise you to learn that this teacher is teaching in a charter school and that she hails from Teach for America and Teach Plus.

 

He writes:

 

Well, we can at least thank Bailey Reimer for giving us one more look at how reformsters think, and a chance to confront just how wrong-headed that thinking is.

 

Reimer is the author of “How Bailey Reinmer’s kindergartners came to love testing” (nothing about if they stopped worrying), and the piece in Catalyst Chicago is every bit as bad as you would imagine.

 

Reimer loves the Test, and her love leads her to say some astonishing things. She loves it, and she opens with the astonishing story of how much her students love it too– so much that they are sad when they learn they won’t be taking one tomorrow. “They love the uninterrupted work time and comparing their new score to their old one.” Because, yes, five year olds are famous for their long extension spans and their desire to do seatwork.

 

Reimer correctly points out that ESSA has cemented the Big Standardized Test into schools, and so her school figures why not just get started practicing with kindergartners (because apparently her charter school is run by people who don’t know much about child development). As Reimer tells her story, she throws in this set of non sequitors:

 

“To get to a point where my students appreciate and understand testing, I had to first appreciate it myself. I love tests that give me relevant, timely information about how my students are doing, from how many letter names they know to how many words per minute they read. According to reports by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, children who read proficiently by the end of 3rd grade are four times more likely to graduate from high school.”

 

If you need regular daily testing to tell how your kindergarten students are doing, you do not belong in a kindergarten classroom. And before one cites research, one should be clear on the difference between correlation and causation. However, Reimer might want to check out the research that shows that early “head starts” in learning pretty much disappear within a few years.

 

But that’s not the most astonishing thing she says.

 

“Of course, 5-year-olds don’t come to school automatically loving testing. As educators, it’s our job to build that appreciation and understanding.”

 

No. No no no no no no no no no, no. No, Ms. Reimer, that is most decidedly NOT our job. It is our job to build appreciation and understanding for reading, art, math, running and playing, and learning in general. It is not our job to make them love the test. It is certainly not our job to teach that school is a place we go to take tests and get ready to take tests.

 

Read on. This article by Bailey Reimer is one of the most horrible statements I have ever read. She needs help in learning about the purposes of education.

 

Categories Charter Schools, Testing

Florida: Testing and Accountability System is in Disarray

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2016 //
20

Florida led the way in creating a system where schools and students are judged by test scores. Florida has seen some test score gains, but it is nowhere near the top of the national field in national examinations. How many hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on testing, accountability, grading, and choice, with little to show for it?

 

Now parents and educators are at odds about how to straighten out a system that few have faith in. Jeb Bush may say on the campaign trail that he modernized education in Florida, but not many in Florida would agree with him.

 

The state board of education just agreed to make tests harder to pass, but easier for a school to get an A.

 

On one side is the business community, demanding higher standards and harder tests. On the other are parents and educators, complaining about the “test-and-punish” strategy. Educators are calling for a total overhaul.

 

But the biggest problem is:

 

“the growing lack of confidence in the 16-year-old education accountability system.

 

“We still contend that our accountability system needs to have another look-see,” said Pasco County school superintendent Kurt Browning, echoing the state superintendents association’s position. “We need to review it in total, not just pieces.”

 

Groups promoting tougher standards expressed dismay after the board’s vote, suggesting the outcome presents a too-rosy picture of student and school performance. Those who see the current model as “test and punish” were equally disappointed, saying the board stuck to the status quo rather than looking for ways to improve beyond “raising the bar.”

 

Even board members acknowledged their effort was incomplete. Lacking learning gains data, they asked Stewart to restart the conversation in the summer, after students have completed their spring FSAs.

 

“New standards, a new assessment, rollout challenges, and an absence of learning gains all impact the results in ways that we can’t predict,” board member Rebecca Fishman Lipsey said. “It seems responsible for us to wait for a second set of more complete data … then step back and ask ourselves if our grading system is set correctly.”

 

The question of whether school grading accomplishes its stated task of improving schools has long been a focal point of Florida education politics. It came into stark relief in 2013, though, when former education commissioner Tony Bennett — one of the nation’s biggest promoters of accountability and grading — resigned his Florida post over a school grades scandal in his home state of Indiana.

Categories Accountability, Florida, Testing

Harold Meyerson: Why Did the Supreme Court Turn Hostile to Public Sector Unions?

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2016 //
49

Harold Meyerson, editor of the American Prospect, notes that the Supreme Court ruled unanimously when they last considered public sector unions. In the Abood case in 1977, they ruled that unions could not charge members to pay for their political activities, but that they could require members and non-members to pay for collective bargaining that improved their pay, working conditions, pensions, etc.  Even the conservative members of the High Court agreed that it was legal and fair to expect even non-members to contribute to the cost of labor unions that advocate for them.

 

What changed from 1977 to 2016? The Supreme Court now has judges appointed by Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. That’s one thing but not the only difference.

 

Meyerson writes:

 

When the Court held oral arguments on Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a case that could overturn Abood, the five conservative justices made fairly clear that they were inclined to scrap their predecessors’ handiwork. Whatever faint hopes the labor movement had entertained that it might retain the support of Antonin Scalia, who’d upheld the judgment of Abood in previous opinions, were made fainter still by Scalia’s comments apparently embracing the argument that collective bargaining with government agencies is inherently political, thereby absolving non-members from having to pay any union dues at all.

 

What’s changed is the conservative justices’ assessment of unions—reflecting, I’d argue, the changed assessments of both business and Republican elites.
A look back at the opinions in Abood shows that the court was considering the same questions four decades ago that it is considering today. What’s changed is the conservative justices’ assessment of unions—reflecting, I’d argue, the changed assessments of both business and Republican elites.

 

What has changed is not just the composition of the Court, but the political climate. In today’s politics, unions do not command the political clout they had in 1977, and the Friedrichs case will reduce it even more.

 

Meyerson writes:

 

What’s changed since 1977, I suspect, is the regard in which conservatives now hold collective bargaining itself. In acknowledging that pure collective bargaining, if such a thing were even ascertainable, might justify fees from nonmembers, and simply by the act of concurring, Powell was bowing to the reality that collective bargaining was an established American institution that conservatives couldn’t frontally attack. Today, in the private sector, it’s a disestablished institution. Over the past 60 years, the rate of unionization in the private sector has fallen from roughly 40 percent to just 6.6 percent. In the public sector, it’s at 35 percent, but some key states that had long afforded collective-bargaining rights to public employees—most notably Wisconsin and Indiana—have effectively repealed them in recent years at the behest of Republican governors who are far more anti-union than Republican governors in the years when the Court ruled on Abood. Time was when not just the Rockefeller liberals but the Nixon centrists in the GOP chose not to attack unions (well, most unions); when Republican members of Congress from the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast had tens of thousands of union members in their districts, a number of whom voted Republican.

 

Meyerson sees the Friedrichs case as a double whammy, one that will diminish the power of the unions and the Democratic party. It will also weaken one of the key institutions that built the American middle class. If the unions get slammed by this case, income inequality and wealth inequality will only grow worse. And that’s bad not just for unions, but for our society.

Categories Unions

Joel Klein Joins Health Insurance Start-Up

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2016 //
23

Joel Klein, former chancellor of the New York City schools, leader of the failed education company Amplify, has taken a job with a health insurance company called Oscar.
One less reformer.

Categories Education Reform

Michael Moore: Arrest Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2016 //
28

Just received this email. If you open the link, you will see a photograph of Michael Moore leaning forward with a pair of handcuffs and a sign that says “Arrest Governor Snyder.” By the way, I posted last night that Governor Snyder had called out the National Guard to distribute water to the people of Flint. A Michigan blogger commented that as of today, only seven members of the National Guard are in Flint. Seven!

 

 
Have you heard the disastrous news out of Flint, Michigan — my hometown and the community at the forefront of my first major documentary film “Roger & Me”? If you haven’t, or even if you have, please take a moment to read this important message.

 

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, along with the premeditated actions of his administrators, has effectively poisoned the children of Flint by allowing lead and other toxins to enter their drinking water. The consequences are devastating now and will be for generations to come.

 

For this outrageous catastrophe, Gov. Snyder must resign — and go to jail.

 

To poison all the children in an historic American city is no small feat. Even international terrorist organizations haven’t figured out yet how to do something on a magnitude like this.

 

I want to be absolutely clear here: If we don’t attract national attention to what Gov. Snyder did, what happened in Flint could happen in all of our communities. That’s why I need your help to bring Rick Snyder to justice.

 

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder must resign — and be arrested — for his role in poisoning the water of children in Flint. Please join me and sign this important petition I am launching with my friends at Democracy for America.

 

Gov. Snyder and his staff and others knew that the water in the Flint River was poison — but he decided that taking over the city and “cutting costs” to “balance the budget” was more important than the people’s health (not to mention their democratic rights to elect their own leaders).

 

So he cut off the clean, fresh glacial lake water of Lake Huron that the citizens of Flint (including myself) had been drinking for decades and, instead, made them drink water from the industrial cesspool we call the Flint River — a body of “water” where toxins from a dozen General Motors and DuPont factories have been dumped for over a hundred years.

 

And then he decided to put a chemical in this water to “clean” it — which only ended up stripping the lead off of Flint’s aging water pipes, placing that lead in the water and sending it straight into people’s taps. State officials who tried to report this problem were ignored.

 

Gov. Snyder’s callous — and reckless — decision to do this has now, as revealed by the city’s top medical facility, caused “irreversible brain damage” in Flint’s children, not to mention other bodily damage to all of Flint’s adults.

 

The federal prosecutor in Flint, after many of us had called for months for action, finally opened up an investigation into the matter. Now we need Gov. Snyder to resign and face arrest, prosecution and conviction.

 

Rachel Maddow and other reporters have done great work drawing attention to this awful crisis. The facts are clear for the whole country to see. It’s time for justice. It’s time for Gov. Snyder to go.

 

Will you join me and DFA to fight for the children of Flint? Sign our petition to demand that Gov. Snyder resign — and be arrested — for his awful crime of poisoning an entire city’s drinking water.

 

Thank you for joining me and DFA in standing up for justice in Flint.

 

 

Michael Moore
Filmmaker and Flint native

Categories Michigan

Indiana: State Testing is a Complete Mess–and Worthless, Too

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2016 //
16

Parents and teachers have been complaining about Indiana’s state testing, called ISTEP. But now David Rutter chimes in to support them in a scathing column printed in the Chicago Tribune. The state tests are worthless, he says, and Indiana is a national joke because of handing control of education over to politicians.

 

 

Public education. Sorry. We apparently can’t do that in Indiana. It’s too hard. And it’s even worse. Not only might Hoosiers parents fret if their public schools are any good, even basic student competence can’t be tested because Indiana can’t figure out a useful academic test.

 

It’s all too hard.

 

The yearlong embarrassing battle over ISTEP is not merely recreational political fisticuffs. It cost the state $65 million to produce an off-the-cuff test that measures nothing verifiable. Public school teachers who put their 400,000 students through the 12-hour torture are not even sure what the test was supposed to measure….

 

If the test were accurate, the state’s entire student body went from marginally intelligent to totally dumb in one year.

 

Don’t worry, though. The state now acknowledges this test was pointless. It’s not even apparent what the point was supposed to be.

 

The idea that any one test can measure 400,000 unique, distinct young human minds seems preposterous on its face….

 

 

Indiana misplaced the point of public education. It’s about children.

 

When schools are transformed into partisan political war zones, predictable devolution always damages the higher good.

 

The Indiana Legislature has decided its function is to punish bad schools and bad teachers by taking money and resources away from the spendthrift offenders. Of course, holding resources hostage hardly ever makes a school better.

 

As occurred this week when 2015 ISTEP results were revealed tardily, the effect is a statewide battery of badly designed tests mandated by amateurs whose only knowledge of public education is the instinct to impose “accountability…..”
Here’s a short chronology on how we reached this particular disaster:

 

1: First, Gov. Mike Pence ditches the reviled Common Core standards and orders “Indiana-specific” standards that are remarkably similar. And do it now.

 

2: Then he does not give state educators enough lead-time to write the standards and pilot-study the resulting test. ISAT is not a pop quiz. The state has constructed a test that students must study for weeks to take.

 

3: Then he fails to realize until it’s too late that changing tests on the fly blows up the testing process and create a large, ugly ripple in every state classroom. It’s the sort of misjudgment that amateurs make.

 

4: Then, finally, he grasps his favorite political excuse by blaming Superintendent of Public Education Glenda Ritz for a botch that mostly is beyond her control but clearly within Pence’s realm. She warned him. He ignored her.

 

At its intellectual heart, Statehouse denizens just played a $65 million joke on Indiana taxpayers, parents, teachers and students.

 

It seems that Indiana’s political leaders want to destroy public education and drive students into charters and voucher schools. The testing mess may have been part of that plan, or I may be crediting them with more forethought and calculation than they can muster.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Indiana, Privatization, Testing

Amy Moore: Why Won’t Iowa Fund Its Public Schools?

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2016 //
8

Amy Moore teaches fifth grade in Newton, Iowa, and writes often for the Des Moines Register. In this article, she chastises Governor Terry Branstad for promising to make education his top priority, then spending his time in office refusing to fund the schools.

 

She writes that educators will tell the Legislature how much money the schools need and legislators will lecture teachers and administrators about how greedy they are and why they need to do more with less. She says about Governor Branstad, “If this is how he handles his top priority, then I’d like to beg him to put us lower on his list.”

 

The way I see it he has reached into our pockets to steal millions of dollars set aside for our children. He put locks on our school doors until a date that he — and his business partners who care only about squeezing every last cent of profit from Iowa families — deemed appropriate. He plans to mess with school monies to try to help agricultural businesses get off the hook for water they polluted. He allowed for a push to implement Smarter Balanced assessments, which will make huge money for testing companies coming from our state, and is being dropped by other states that have found it to be problematic to say the least. The only real school improvement plan he has focused on is his teacher leadership initiative, which sends the clear and incorrect message that teachers are the main problem with our schools.

 

Aren’t Republicans supposed to believe in less government intrusion? I’d like governor to stay true to his party and trust local districts to spend the allocated state money. Districts have a strong track record of knowing what is needed to serve our local communities, and the diversity of school populations across the state makes one-size-fits-all mandates nonsensical.
With talk of next year’s budget there is inevitably the constant assertion that “just throwing money at it won’t help.” I wonder if the millions of Americans purchasing Powerball tickets this week would agree with that?

 

I have to admit there are times when having extra money cannot help. For example, if you’re being attacked by a grizzly bear, I don’t believe throwing money at him will help. Or if you’re grieving the loss of a loved one, no amount of money can take away the pain.

 

But when it comes to children, having more money can almost always improve lives. More money can mean more books to read in the home and better quality clothes. It can mean more available time from a parent who doesn’t have to work three jobs to make ends meet. It can mean superior health care, child care and healthier foods.

 

It is the same with children in a classroom. Money means smaller class sizes with more individualized instruction. It means updated materials and technology. It means well paid, high quality teachers who feel appreciated to be compensated for their professional skills. It means fully staffed art, counseling, music, preschool and health departments. It means safe and comfortable school environments. It means the ability to offer courses to reach the interests and abilities of more students. It means field trips, extracurricular clubs and non-dilapidated textbooks.

 

Amy insists that the Governor and the Legislature must appropriate the funding that the children of Iowa need and hold the lectures about austerity.

Categories Accountability, Funding, Iowa

Steve Singer: A Parable about the Friedrichs Case

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2016 //
26

The Friedrichs case before the U.S.Supreme Court will decide whether teachers can be “forced” to pay dues to unions that bargain on their behalf. The case is not about paying for unions’ political advocacy; no one has to. Those who don’t want to get a refund. The case is about paying for collective bargaining for salaries, pensions, and working conditions. If Friedrich wins, teachers can refuse to join or pay dues but enjoy the benefits that unions win. Those are called “free riders.” They hitch a ride without sharing the cost. They are also free-loaders.

 

Steven Singer wrote an apt fable about Friedrichs. He also includes some excellent cartoons.

 

 

Categories Education Reform, Unions

When Leonie Haimson FOILed John King–and Got No Answer–Then Found Out the Truth about inBloom

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2016 //
9

As readers of this blog know, Leonie Haimson is an intrepid activist. Apparently, she neither slumbers nor sleeps (if there is in fact a difference between slumbering and sleeping) when the rights of parents or children are abused.
In this multi-part series, Leonie tells the story of her quest to gain access to New York State Education Department emails and the various entities involved in the authorization of inBloom. That initiative involved public officials, the Gates Foundation, and many others. Its goal was to release personally identifiable information about students without their parent’s consent. The data would be stored in a “cloud” created by Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless Generation (run by Joel Klein), with no guarantees that the data could not be hacked.

 

In the first entry, Leonie tells how she and allies filed Freedom of Information Law requests (FOIL), in an effort to obtain the emails among the parties that collaborated to bring inBloom to New York. The requests were delayed again and again. One man stood in the way: State Commissioner of Education John King, now the Acting Secretary of Education. On the day after King’s resignation, a large batch of the FOILed emails were released.

 

In the second entry, Leonie reviews the emails from 2011, when inBloom was in the formative stage.

 

She begins:

 

When my FOIL was finally responded to I received hundreds and hundreds of pages with printed out emails to and from NYSED and the Gates Foundation mostly; offering all-expense trips for various meetings about teacher evaluation, data collection, and other issues, as well as a pile of contracts and agreements. It took weeks just to sort them and start to look through them. Sadly there were no emails from Merryl Tisch’s account, as I had asked for; and no emails from most of the state officials whose communications we had FOILed. But we did find out some juicy details….

 

Her third entry reviews the highlights of 2012. You might think you were in an episode of Downton Abbey, as you observe the rich and powerful planning how to gather and use the data of New York’s children, without their parents’ permission.

 

She writes:

 

NYSED’s emails to the Gates Foundation about inBloom and Wireless Generation from 2012 are below; highlights include a dinner party at Merryl Tisch’s home, to which Commissioner King invites an array of corporate reform leaders — to the dismay of Joe Scantlebury of the Gates Foundation. Also amusing is their account when I crashed a Gates-sponsored ” SLC Learning Camp” designed to lure software developers into designing products to take advantage of the wealth of personal student data to be gathered and shared by inBloom.

 

Her fourth entry details the controversy roiling inBloom and its final death throes.

 

She introduces this last entry:

 

This post, the final one with excerpts from the emails I FOILed from NYSED, documents the rise and fall of inBloom; through their communications to officials at the Gates Foundation and assorted consultants and allied organizations. inBloom was formally launched as a separate corporation in Feb. 2013 and died in April 2014, after little more than one year of existence. These fourteen months were marked by myriad public relations and political disasters, as the Gates Foundation’s plans for data collection and disclosure experienced national exposure for the first time and fierce parent opposition in the eight inBloom states and districts outside NY.

 

Once parents in the rest of the country learned through blogs and news articles of the Foundation’s plans to upload onto a data cloud and facilitate the sharing of their children’s most sensitive personal information with for-profit vendors, their protests grew ever more intense, and inBloom’s proponents were powerless to convince them that the benefits outweighed the risks. Though the Gates Foundation had hired a phalanx of communications and PR advisers, they were never able to come up with a convincing rationale for inBloom’s existence, or one that would justify this “data store”, as they called it, that cost them more than $100 million dollars to create.

 

The Foundation started the 2013 with a plan to promote inBloom through the media and at the large SXSWedu conference, and to expand the number of inBloom “partners” beyond the original nine states and districts that they said were already committed; instead they watched as every one of these nine states and districts withdrew or claimed they had never planned to share data with inBloom in the first place.

 

The ending is not surprising: The project failed, but everyone involved got promoted.

Categories Data, Education Reform, Privacy

Shocker: Los Angeles School Board Votes 7-0 for Resolution Opposing Eli Broad Takeover

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2016 //
24

Will wonders never cease!

 

The LAUSD school board voted 7-0 for a resolution that rebuffs Eli Broad’s plan to take control of half the students in the district and enroll them in privately managed charter schools. After a lively discussion, the board passed a resolution that made clear it would oppose any effort to weaken the LAUSD public schools. This is a startling development, since some of the members were elected with Eli Broad campaign funds.

 

The focus of the discussion was a resolution put forward by Scott Schmerelson, strongly in opposition to a corporate takeover of the public schools. Some of the members openly acknowledged that the expansion of charter schools put the public schools at risk by diminishing their resources and programs. The Los Angeles Times noted with surprise that the board had selected its new superintendent by unanimous vote, and now voted to support the public schools by unanimous vote. The resolution directed Superintendent Michelle King “to analyze how the outside plan, which was developed by the Broad Foundation, will “affect the district’s enrollment, fiscal viability and ability to provide an outstanding public education.”

 

The Times writes:

 

Board member Scott Schmerelson, who authored the resolution, agreed to make changes proposed by other board members to soften some of the language describing charter schools, such as removing the word strangulation from a sentence describing the plan.

 

Schmerelson said he struggled to understand why Eli Broad and others did not work to improve traditional public schools by investing in successful programs.

 

“The point is that we have thrown the glove down to big business and they know they’d better be very careful how they work with LAUSD,” he said. “We’ll accept their help in limited forms, but they will not take over our district.”

 

Sarah Angel, managing director of regional advocacy with the California Charter School Assn., told board members that the resolution was polarizing. But board discussion settled some of her concerns. (I had to laugh when I saw that she called the resolution “polarizing,” because that was the same comment that the CCSA wrote in response to an opinion piece I wrote for the Los Angeles Times in support of public schools. According to CCSA, if you support charter schools, you are “for the children.” But if you support public schools, you are “polarizing.”)

 

Board president Steve Zimmer deserves credit and high praise for uniting the board behind a resolution in support of the public schools. Member Scott Schmerelson deserves credit and high praise for boldly and clearly opposing privatization and for laying out the disastrous consequences if the Broad plan were allowed to move forward.

 

My observer in Los Angeles watched the school board meeting and reported:

 

There was some pontificating, but basically, not one board member would say they were against the resolution. Just before the vote, Steve Zimmer spoke eloquently and signaled what I hope is the dawn of a new day at LAUSD. I want to send you his statement. When it was declared to have passed unanimously, the audience went crazy. In fact, a rhythmic chant of extreme support for Schmerelson and the resolution followed. While the camera was focused on the whole board and not specifically on Schmerelson, you could see his reaction. His body language was unmistakable. It was as if an extreme burden had been lifted from him. There is little doubt that he must have suffered greatly from attacks by the charter industry. In fact, you will hear Zimmer complain bitterly about nasty public comment from charter advocates made during the morning session and apparently before the resolution came up for a vote in the afternoon (I wasn’t watching at that time).

 

I would say that Schmerelson provided the board with a jump start to take the battle against privatizing education to a higher level.

 

When the video is available, I will post it.

Categories Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Los Angeles, Privatization
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