Peter Greene reports here on a sad tale of education policy in Florida, where stupidity grows faster than citrus fruit.
As you may recall, Florida is one of the states with a third grader retention law, declaring that third graders cannot move on unless they pass the Big Standardized Test for reading. This is a dumb law, without a lick of evidence to support it, and several licks to suggest that it’s actually counter-productive. However, the legislature, in one of its rare lucid moments, opened the door to local districts substituting a portfolio display of reading skills in place of a BS Test score, and sixty-ish Florida county districts walked through that door into a land of sense and clarity.
A few other districts, however, decided to be dopes about the whole thing.
Mind you, I generally try to be semi-respectful here and remember that the people I disagree with are still human beings with families and lives. But what the hell is there to say about a grown adult who declares that an eight year old child must be held back a year, even if that child got straight A’s and demonstrated exemplary reading ability? That grown adult, even if she is a professional superintendent of schools, should be ashamed. She should be ashamed of visiting such abuse on any of her young charges, and she should be ashamed that she has so blatantly announced that she is not really concern3ed about that child’s reading skills at all, but is only interested in forcing that child to comply and take the Holy BS Test. (Or at least “participate,” which in Florida means breaking the seal and signing their names, which at least some of the plaintiffs did.)
But it just got worse. Initially, the state ed department threw the local districts under the bus, saying, “Well, it’s their choice.” But by summer’s end, the education department lawyers were arguing in court that the grades given by teachers on student report cards didn’t really mean anything.
And so about a dozen opt-out students were dragged into the Florida public square to be made an example of. Because nothing makes school superintendents and state lawyers and departments of education feel more validated than putting a beat-down on some third graders.
But just in time for September to roll in, Florida Judge Karen Gievers not only ruled in favor of the opt out kids, but used some pointed-yet-judgely language to point out that the state was acting like a giant asshat.
That should have been the end of things. Properly slapped, education officials should have come to their senses and exclaimed, “Holy smokes! We got so caught up in this we were more concerned in making sure that opt out families obeyed us than finding ways to see if students are really learning.” Instead, some local districts decided to keep being jerks to the children, and the case went back into the next level of court on appeal. “Dare to sue us for the right to advance a grade just because you have straight A’s,” they said. “We will not rest till we can put some hurt on your tiny ten year old frame.” I don’t want to know what the children are going to learn about being a responsible adult from this whole sorry mess.
But now the Appeals Court has weighed in and reversed the decision, declaring that Florida has a compelling state interest in forcing third graders to take and pass the third grade reading test. Even if their test scores were perfect all year, it matters not at all. The test trumps all.
Greene asks:
The ruling, which threw out all of the August court decisions, raises so many questions. Since this buttresses the state argument that report cards don’t matter, does this mean a child who flunks every class but gets satisfactory scores on the BS Test is legally entitled to advance to the next grade? Does this mean that Florida schools should abandon report cards entirely? Will Florida state troopers be sent into the sixty-ish other counties and force them to ignore portfolios and hold test scofflaws back in third grade? Will families with young children avoid these counties like the plague? Has Florida just found one more clever way to undermine public schools and drive families toward charters?
I can see why tRump goes to Florida regularly.
Remember when we had a President who spoke in complete sentences and made sense? I long for those days again.
……………
Dear America, Donald Trump is completely insane
By Mark Sumner Daily Kos
…I don’t mean that Donald Trump is a jackass … or rather, it’s not that he’s only a jackass. He’s also nuts, unglued, screwy, crazed, cracked, and potty. Open up the thesaurus and select a term. Not an exaggeration….
TRUMP: Yeah, it’s a cool story. I mean it’s, the concept is right. I predicted a lot of things, Michael. Some things that came to you a little bit later. But, you know, we just rolled out a list. Sweden. I make the statement, everyone goes crazy. The next day they have a massive riot, and death, and problems. Huma [Abedin] and Anthony [Weiner], you know, what I tweeted about that whole deal, and then it turned out he had it, all of Hillary’s email on his thing. NATO, obsolete, because it doesn’t cover terrorism. They fixed that, and I said that the allies must pay. Nobody knew that they weren’t paying. I did. I figured it. Brexit, I was totally right about that. You were over there I think, when I predicted that, right, the day before. Brussels, I said, Brussels is not Brussels. I mean many other things, the election’s rigged against Bernie Sanders. We have a lot of things.
Trump: Now remember this. When I said wiretapping, it was in quotes. Because a wiretapping is, you know today it is different than wire tapping. It is just a good description. But wiretapping was in quotes. What I’m talking about is surveillance. And today, [House Intelligence Committee Chairman] Devin Nunes just had a news conference. Now probably got obliterated by what’s happened in London. But just had a news conference, and here it is one of those things. The other one, election, I said we are going to win, we won. And many other things. And I think this is going to be very interesting.
TRUMP: I’m not saying—no, I’m not blaming. First of all, I put Mike Pompeo in. I put Senator Dan Coats in. These are great people. I think they are great people and they are going to, I have a lot of confidence in them. So hopefully things will straighten out. But I inherited a mess, I inherited a mess in so many ways. I inherited a mess in the Middle East, and a mess with North Korea, I inherited a mess with jobs, despite the statistics, you know, my statistics are even better, but they are not the real statistics because you have millions of people that can’t get a job, ok. And I inherited a mess on trade. I mean we have many, you can go up and down the ladder. But that’s the story. Hey look, in the mean time, I guess, I can’t be doing so badly, because I’m president, and you’re not. You know. Say hello to everybody OK?
The problem with Florida is that it is run by the same type of authoritarian opportunists as the president. To them might makes right. These authoritarian posers give the impression that they are serving the public. Once you scratch away the official veneer, many representatives are small minded and greedy like the “godfather” Jeb Bush. There are so many conflicts of interest in the legislature, it is shocking. They pass laws without fully understanding consequences. Then, they have to either defend “stupid” or back peddle.
The problem is that many people who make these decisions have no sense of adequate evaluation methods because they don’t have any scientific based research skills, which is really what student evaluation is about. Assesment should provide information about program, teaching, curriculum, student achievement strategy effectiveness. If report cards are no indication of effectiveness, what the (excuse me) hell are we using them for?
They don’t care about evidence. They operate from a position of bias and self interest.
I know! That needs to be addressed. I work in college ed and they come up with ways to “gather student learning info” all the time without even knowing exactly which variable they are attempting to isolate. It’s disgusting.
There are certain states I avoid, particularly after reading Maziar Bahari’s “Rosewater.” Florida is at the top of the list; I worry that if I went there, given my political and social proclivities, I might end up in jail with little hope of exit.
They are just CALVIANISTIC at heart and very greedy and self-serving. So SAD that we have yahoos in charge.
Flori-DUH is that Dump’s forte.
You might like this article from Bill Moyers. Writer Neal Gabler tries to explain why conservative policies are so mean. He explains it through Calvinism and social Darwinism. http://billmoyers.com/story/has-the-trump-budget-blown-republicans-cover/
I live in Florida and I am making the difficult decision on where to send my son to kindergarten. He has a choice of public, charter or Montessori. The advantage of Montessori is that they do not give these lovely tests. However I want to support the local public schools. I do not want to take money from them. I am in a bind, however articles like this are leaning me away from public schools and toward Montessori.
The read-by-grade three legislation in Florida and elsewhere is the result of a campaign initiated by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The campaign has been funded by 14 major foundations and a very long list of national and local supporters. The aim of the campaign is to ensure that all students, by 2020, are proficient at reading, at grade level, or above. From the Casey Website:
“The Campaign focuses on an important predictor of school success and high school graduation—grade-level reading by the end of third grade. Research shows that proficiency in reading by the end of third grade enables students to shift from learning to read to reading to learn, and to master the more complex subject matter they encounter in the fourth grade curriculum. Most students who fail to reach this critical milestone falter in the later grades and often drop out before earning a high school diploma. Yet two-thirds of U.S. fourth graders are not PROFICIENT readers, according to national reading assessment data. This disturbing statistic is made even worse by the fact that more than four out of every five low-income students miss this critical milestone.”
Here are two keys definition from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Fourth-grade students performing at the PROFICIENT level should be able to integrate and interpret texts and apply their understanding of the text to draw conclusions and make evaluations.
Fourth-grade students performing at the ADVANCED level should be able to make complex inferences and construct and support their inferential understanding of the text. Students should be able to apply their understanding of a text to make and support a judgment.
Almost all of the activity on behalf of read-by-grade-three comes from a single 2011 correlational study by Donald J. Hernandez, “Double Jeopardy: How Third-Grade Reading Skills and Poverty Influence High School Graduation.”
This study is not peer reviewed. It was funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. An abstract as well as a complete pdf is available at https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED518818
The Annie E. Casey Foundation also has publications that point to many factors other than reading at grade level that correlate with high school graduation.
One of the most important being present or being absent from school.
As a retired teacher with almost 40 years of teaching…Florida.has definitely not been kind to public school system…Staring back in the 90’s with “No Child Left Behind “…And now with children being over tested and curriculm developmently inappropriate..Standard Testing mandates definitely putting more unnecessary emphasis on whether a child is learning from one test alone…Our state definitely needs better leadership…
Someone -parents, teachers, public school advocates need to litigate against the testing companies. Unless they are willing to say their test is an instrument for retention it is being used illegally. I haven’t read about any testing companies dying on that hill.
Marco Rubio introduced legislation last week that is remarkably similar to a plan from the Center for American Progress described in Forbes, Nov. 18, 2016. ” It’s time for a quality alternative to college accreditation”. Authors are Marcella Bombardieri.and Ben Miller. Miller was formerly with New America Foundation (funded by Gates).
If the plan facilitates organizations like Relay, it will create a profound adverse change in universities as we know them.