Carol Burris writes about the national significance of Sheri Lederman’s victory in court against New York state’s teacher evaluation system. She proved, thanks to the advocacy of her attorney and husband Bruce Lederman, that New York’s test-based model of evaluation was arbitrary and capricious. Every teacher can follow the path she blazed.
Archives for the month of: May, 2016
Susan Ochshorn is an eloquent defender of childhood and an advocate for play-based learning for small children.
She wrote this article for CNN.Com pleading for public understanding of early childhood education. It is wonderful that there is a growing movement for universal pre-kindergarten, she says, but it would be a terrible mistake to align pre-K with the Common Core and insist on “rigor.” Little children don’t need rigor. They need to learn social skills. They need to play. They need to be children, not forced into a mold.
She writes:
Rigor for 4-year-olds? What about their social-emotional development, which goes hand-in-hand with cognitive skill-building? What about play, the primary engine of human development?
Unfortunately, it seems like we’re subjecting our young children to a misguided experiment.
“Too many educators are introducing inappropriate teaching methods into the youngest grades at the expense of active engagement with hands-on experiences and relationships,” Beverly Falk, author of Defending Childhood told me. “Research tells us that this is the way young children construct understandings, make sense of the world, and develop their interests and desire to learn.” She isn’t alone.
Early academic training has become an obsession among child development experts and teachers of young children as the Common Core standards have encroached upon the earliest years of schooling.
Kindergarten has already undergone a radical transformation. University of Virginia researchers Daphna Bassok and Anna Rorem found that in 2006, 65% of kindergarten teachers — more than double the number in 1998 — thought most children should learn to read on their watch. Meanwhile, the exposure to social studies, science, music, and art — the staples of a well-rounded early childhood education — had declined. And nearly 20% of teachers never had physical education.
All these trends have accelerated rapidly with recent education reform policies, including Race to the Top. As a result, kinetic 4-year-olds, squirming in their seats, face the prospect of having to put their noses to the grindstone in a rigorous classroom with little time for play. Never mind that they’re just beginning to get the hang of following directions, staying on task, and paying attention. We keep pushing them along, ignoring the pesky emotions that get in the way of regulation and executive function.
Bravo, Susan! Keep fighting for childhood.
The Center for Education Policy released the results of a survey of nationally representative sample of teachers, which probed their feelings about their profession and the demands made on them today.
The survey sought to “learn their views on the teaching profession, state standards and assessments, testing, and teacher evaluations. The report, Listen to Us: Teacher Views and Voices, summarizes these survey findings, including responses indicating that public school teachers are concerned and frustrated with shifting policies, over emphasis on student testing, and their lack of voice in decision-making.”
Readers of this blog will not be surprised that teachers feel burdened by mandates from the district, the state, and federal officials. They feel excluded from decision-making. They feel too much time is spent on testing. They don’t mind testing, but they think there are too many of them. They wish they had smaller classes. They teach because they like to help children learn.
But it must seem that an awful lot of politicians, bureaucrats, and consultants get in their way as they try to do their job. Is this a statement of the obvious?
What do you think?
See more at: http://www.cep-dc.org/displayDocument.cfm?DocumentID=1456#sthash.sJESMtqQ.dpuf
Paul Krugman puts the matter directly: Donald Trump is an ignoramus. His ignorance is hopeless because he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. He likes to tell people that he is smart. Anyone who says that he is smart is insecure, not smart. His ignorance is dangerous to the economy and to our national security. When he was asked in an interview who influences him on foreign policy and defense, he said he watches television. That’s scary.
Krugman writes:
“Truly, Donald Trump knows nothing. He is more ignorant about policy than you can possibly imagine, even when you take into account the fact that he is more ignorant than you can possibly imagine. But his ignorance isn’t as unique as it may seem: In many ways, he’s just doing a clumsy job of channeling nonsense widely popular in his party, and to some extent in the chattering classes more generally.
“Last week the presumptive Republican presidential nominee — hard to believe, but there it is — finally revealed his plan to make America great again. Basically, it involves running the country like a failing casino: he could, he asserted, “make a deal” with creditors that would reduce the debt burden if his outlandish promises of economic growth don’t work out.
“The reaction from everyone who knows anything about finance or economics was a mix of amazed horror and horrified amazement. One does not casually suggest throwing away America’s carefully cultivated reputation as the world’s most scrupulous debtor — a reputation that dates all the way back to Alexander Hamilton.”
Let’s bring the discussion to education. Trump has said very little about education. I watched the debates and some of his many speeches. This is all I heard. He says he will get rid of the Common Core, but the fact is that there is not much the federal government can do to roll it back. It is out there, propped up by the SAT, the ACT, Pearson, and Gates. He says he loves charters. He says he believes in local control.
I don’t believe he knows what Common Core is. I don’t believe he knows what charters are. I don’t think anyone has explained to him what public education is. I don’t think he has said anything about higher education or how to relieve the crushing student debt. I don’t think he has spent ten minutes thinking about education. Nothing he has said would lead you to think he is informed about the issues that concern readers of this blog or me.
Most of what he says seems to be off the cuff, drawn from his personal experience or observations. I don’t believe he knows anyone who went to public school or anyone who had to borrow to pay for college. I can’t be sure but his total silence on these subjects makes me think he has no views because he has never met anyone who talked about these matters. Certainly they are not part of his own privileged upbringing.
I ask myself why so many people voted in the primaries for a man who is boastful, a man who makes our-in-the-sky promises, a man who ridicules his opponents, a man who accused Ted Cruz’s father of involvement in the JFK assassination because he read it in the National Enquirer, a man who wants to make the 2016 election a referendum on Bill Clinton’s infidelities.
Trump is vulgar, crude, and childish. I recall when Anderson Cooper asked in a forum why he posted an unflattering picture of Cruz’s wife on Twitter. Trump’s response? “He did it first!” Cooper, to his credit, said, “With all due respect, sir, that’s the kind of answer I would expect to hear from a five-year-old on the playground.”
Trump lacks dignity and gravitas. He is like a carnival barker, imploring voters to buy a ticket and go inside to see impossible, unbelievable, wonderful, horrible sights. And people vote for him.
Why?
I wonder if they vote for a charlatan for the same reason they rush to sign up for charter schools. I wonder why legislators continue to pour hundreds of millions into an industry that does not produce the results that were promised. The public, the media, and the legislators are easily hoodwinked. They want to believe. They swallow empty promises. Even when presented with evidence that charters are no better and often worse than public schools, even when they learn of scandals and frauds, they believe.
Why the gullibility? Why the willingness to play three-card monte with a card shark? Why are so many so willing to be duped by a con man? Is there something in our national character that sets us up to be duped by a snake oil salesman?
Gullibility. That is why a businessman who has declared bankruptcy four times, a man who insults and ridicules anyone who challenges him, a man who will descend into the gutter whenever he wishes, is soon to be the Republican nominee for President of the United States.
Attorney Bruce Lederman represented his wife Sheri Lederman in a lawsuit challenging New York’s teacher rating system. Sheri teaches elementary school on Long Island is considered an exemplary teacher by her principal, parents, and former students.
The Ledermans won. The decision is posted here, on the NYC Parents’ blog.
Bruce Lederman writes:
“I am very pleased to attach a 13 page decision by Judge Roger McDonough which concludes that Sheri has “met her high burden and established that Petitioner’s growth score and rating for the school year 2013-2014 are arbitrary and capricious.” The Court declined to make an overall ruling on the rating system in general because of new regulations in effect. However, decision makes (at page 11) important observations that VAM is biased against teachers at both ends of the spectrum, disproportionate effects of small class size, wholly unexplained swings in growths scores, strict use of curve. It is clear that the Judge has serious problems with the Value Added Model (“VAM”) system even though he did not set aside the entire system on account of changes in regulations.
“To my knowledge, this is the first decision to overturn a teacher’s rating system which was based upon the system championed by John King, Jr., when he was chancellor of the New York Board of Regents. Mr. King is now Secretary of Education for the United States, and never wavered from his support of VAM as Chancellor. Indeed the Department of Education never backed down from fighting Sheri’s score, even when confronted with overwhelming evidence of its irrationality.
“The decision should qualify as persuasive authority for other teachers challenging growth scores throughout the County. Court carefully recites all our expert affidavits, and discusses at some length affidavits from Professors Darling-Hammond, Pallas, Amrein-Beardsley, Sean Corcoran and Jesse Rothstein as well as Drs. Burris and Lindell . It is clear that the evidence all of these amazing experts presented was a key factor in winning this case since the Judge repeatedly said both in Court and in the decision that we have a “high burden” to meet in this case. The Court wrote that the court “does not lightly enter into a critical analysis of this matter … [and] is constrained on this record, to conclude that petitioner has met her high burden.”
“I want to particularly thank the experts who contributed their time and expertise.
Bruce H. Lederman, Esq.
D’Agostino, Levine, Landesman & Lederman, LLP
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Do not underestimate the effectiveness of the Opt Out movement in New York.
Governor Cuomo, who made education policy his big issue last year, has gone off on other issues.
The Board of Regents is now led by an experienced educator who has the support of the Opt Out parents.
And Dr. Betty Rosa has not disappointed.
At a recent forum, she said that standardized testing was “abusive” for some students with disabilities and English language learners.
This is a new tone coming from New York State’s highest education official.
It conflicts rather sharply with the pro-testing, pro-Common Core, anti-opt out policies of the state commissioner MaryEllen Elia. This should be interesting.
Both the United States and the United Kingdom are embedded in what Pasi Sahlberg called “the Global Education Reform Movement” (GERM). That means privatization and high-stakes testing.
This parent in the U.K. wrote an article in The Guardian about why he is opting his child out of the crazy testing. He doesn’t use the term “opt out,” but refers instead to a boycott of the exams. The Minister of Education Nicky Morgan is mad about testing, like our own Arne Duncan and John King. (To see the links, open the post.)
Hands up who knows what a subordinating conjunction is? I’m a journalist and I had no idea what one was, nor have I ever needed to. My seven-year-old son and daughter, however, were expected to explain what one is as part of their homework recently.
This is where education is, these days – by my reckoning, pretty much where it was in the 1950s – and I’m not alone in fearing it’s going to get even worse. That is why I am taking my children out of school on Tuesday, along with many others.
It’s not a decision any parent would take lightly, especially one who strongly believes in the importance of learning (and spends five mornings a week hurrying their children into school). But it’s an act of protest against a government agenda that’s putting undue pressure on children, subjecting them to a narrow, joyless curriculum, shutting out parents’ democratic rights and, ultimately, forcing every school to become an academy, effectively putting all of state education into private, democratically unaccountable hands – or rather, pockets. If Nicky Morgan’s white paper goes through, all this will come to pass, with no democratic mandate to speak of – it wasn’t in the Conservative election manifesto.
Parents are the largest contingent in the entire education system, and yet we’ve felt powerless to do anything
“I’ve never yet been on a doorstep where education has come up as an issue,” Morgan said last month. If nothing else, she’s succeeded in making it one.
Teachers are already horrified at what’s happening, and are fighting their own battle, when they’re not too exhausted from jumping through the government’s bureaucratic hoops. Most of them are doing their best to shoehorn in the stuff that actually interests and engages children, around the subordinating conjunctions and the rest of the crashingly dull curriculum.
Kids are stressed out by the amount of hoop-jumping they’ve got to do too. In a fortnight, like every year 2 pupil in England, my seven-year-olds will do their standard assessment tests, or Sats – a week of exams prioritising things like grammar, spelling, punctuation and handwriting. Which means matters as trivial as the size of a letter s could define them as academic successes or failures at an age when children in more enlightened countries have barely started school.
On top of that, my 11-year-old daughter will be sitting her year 6 Sats, which have been made more difficult this year (you thought subordinating conjunctions were bad, try “fronted adverbials”). She’s coming off the other end of the testing treadmill that primary education has become. Literacy and numeracy are all that counts. If your child excels at art or music or dance or science or poetry or geography or history or critiquing retrograde educational dogma – tough. Doesn’t count. If there’s any evidence that any of this is a sound approach to education, I’ve yet to see it.
Why shouldn’t parents make themselves heard too? We’re the ones whose children are being affected. We’re also the ones compliantly subjecting them to it. We’re also the ones paying for a significant proportion of the education system that we’re against. We’re the largest contingent in the entire education system, and yet we’ve felt powerless to do anything. We will not be subordinated, like conjunctions!
Last Saturday, I went to the launch of Parents Defending Education in London – the name speaks for itself. “Our schools don’t belong to the government,” their launch statement reads. “They belong to our children, to the community, to the parents, to the teachers and support staff and to future generations.” Michael Rosen persuasively joined the dots of the government’s broad agenda, and others who’d been through forced academisation shared their horror stories.
That was the first time I heard about the proposed “boycott” or “pupils’ strike” on Tuesday, inaugurated by the equally self-explanatory parent group, Let Our Kids Be Kids. Few Londoners seem to be aware of the campaign (though I’m told it has more support in the north and west of England). Nobody in my school was. When I met the headteacher to discuss it, I was expecting a frosty response. It was more a gasp of relief. Teachers and schools need parents to stand alongside them. Parents can say and do things they can’t.
At a school parents’ meeting the following night, the response was overwhelmingly positive. Dozens of us are taking our children out of school. We’re planning on getting together in the park for a day of “fun learning” – painting, bug hunting, that sort of thing.
Understandably, many parents are unable to do so as they’re working. Others, ironically, felt that taking their children out of school would detract from their preparations for their Sats. A few felt it would be “politicising” their kids. But virtually all parents not taking part in the boycott still pledged to sign letters of support for the action. We’re all in this together.
Incidentally, the definition of a “subordinating conjunction”, if you’re wondering, is a conjunction (that is “a part of speech that connects words, sentences, phrases, or clauses”) that “connects an independent clause and a dependent clause, and also introduces adverb clauses.” Any seven-year-old could tell you that. For example: I’m taking my children out of school for one day so that they get a better academic future than the one Nicky Morgan is mapping out for them.
This is a wonderful story that was broadcast on NPR about an emergency situation in an airplane bound for Melbourne, Australia.
A young man with Down Syndrome was physically ill, lying in the middle of the aisle, and wouldn’t get up.
And he was really upset. He was feeling itchy. He was feeling scared, and no one could move him at that time.
The plane couldn’t land until he was in his seat and belted in.
The call went out from the cockpit, “Is there a teacher on the plane?”
Sophie Murphy, who teaches children with special needs, responded. She lay down on the floor next to the boy and talked to him. Eventually, she talked him into getting up and returning to his seat. Everyone was very quiet and listened closely as she used her skills to calm the boy. When he started vomiting, they rushed to offer sick bags, tissues, and wipes. A doctor sitting close by took notes.
Nothing fazed Sophie. She handled the situation with professionalism and kindness.
She said afterwards:
This was what teachers do. This is what they do in their classrooms every day. They problem solve, and they connect with children on a daily basis. And any one of my colleagues and friends who are teachers would have done exactly the same.
Politico reports that a former central staff member of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain alleges widespread cheating on tests, as well as high staff turnover and demoralization.
“Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz did not approve of the finding — made by an “ethnographer” she hired to study her rapidly expanding charter school network — that some teachers at the high-performing network might be responding to the enormous pressure placed on them by cheating.
“So Moskowitz, Success’s combative founder, deployed senior managers to inform the staffer, Roy Germano, that he was banned from visiting schools for the remainder of the year. Moskowitz disparaged Germano to other employees, according to a memo written by Germano in July 2015 and obtained by POLITICO New York, and he was told to halt his research projects immediately.
“Germano was fired last August, approximately a month after the report was completed, and is now a research scholar at New York University.
“Germano’s reports and memo, along with a trove of other documents obtained by POLITICO — a separately commissioned internal draft risk assessment report, a compilation of exit interviews, and internal Success staffing records, among other documents — paint a picture of a growing enterprise facing serious institutional strain in the form of low staff morale, unusually high turnover, and the kind of stress that could drive teachers to exaggerate their students’ progress.”
Success Academy is the highest scoring charter chain in New York, possibly the nation. It is also very controversial, due to its no-excuses policies, it’s attrition rates, and its claim to have cracked the code of raising test scores of low-income minority children. At its last fundraiser, last month, it raised $35 million in one night, including a gift of $25 million from one of its hedge fund admirers.
I was contacted by the president of PARCC and asked to remove copyrighted material from this post. I did so.
Professor Celia Oyler at Teachers College, Columbia University, posted a critique of the 4th grade PARCC test on her blog by a teacher who must remain anonymous.
The teacher wrote this exposé because she was outraged by the absurdly inappropriate questions. She gives examples of questions and text that are appropriate for students in grades 6-8, but they are on a test for 4th graders.
She/he writes:
“So, right out of the gate, 4th graders are being asked to read and respond to texts that are two grade levels above the recommended benchmark. After they struggle through difficult texts with advanced vocabulary and nuanced sentence structures, they then have to answer multiple choice questions that are, by design, intended to distract students with answers that appear to be correct except for some technicality.”
The test doesn’t even assess what it claims to assess, nor does it accurately reflect the standards.
Read the examples she/he includes to illustrate her argument.
She/he concludes:
[Deleted example]
“In this sample, the system is pathetically failing a generation of children who deserve better, and when they are adults, they may not have the skills needed to engage as citizens and problem-solvers. So it is up to us, those of us who remember a better way and can imagine a way out, to make the case for stopping standardized tests like PARCC from corrupting the educational opportunities of so many of our children.”
This analysis helps to exain why the PARCC consortium is shrinking. It started with 24 states and DC. It is now down to six or seven states and DC.
Parents should refuse to allow their children to sit for these exams. PARCC should be permanently parked–far from children.
Diane Ravitch's blog 