A new federal evaluation of the DC voucher program finds that students who used vouchers lost ground in math.
Watch as school choice advocates change the goal posts. Test scores don’t matter.
In the photo, Betsy DeVos appears delighted.
Here is the study:
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they tried to claim that test scores don’t matter, Diane.
But only for private schools and charter schools. They will still matter for public schools. After all, they need excuses to keep closing public schools.
😦
” If anything, the math gap has only grown, weakening arguments that declines in scores were simply a short-term effect as has been seen in some other voucher programs.”
Why are we pouring public money down the drain on religious schools with worse academics? We need to look at high school graduation rates and college attendance. Why don’t we do this for public schools instead of testing them ad nauseam. If students attend an unaccredited school, most colleges do not accept them. How is this better than public education?
C’mon, academics-shmocademics, it is not important. What is important is citizenship, patriotism, um… what else? Ah, the sense of belonging to a higher cause. The ability to go anywhere the Fatherland sends and do anything you are ordered without asking questions.
They don’t care. It’s an ideological goal, not an educational goal.
The US Congress has spent months- months!- on ONE private school voucher program for military families.
Meanwhile, they have not accomplished one thing for any public school student in the country. The whole ed committee will spend endless time and energy on several thousand children in private schools, while utterly ignoring the 50 million in public schools.
They take our children and our families for granted. The assumption is they don’t have to offer public school families any value at all and we will keep returning them to DC.
Another DC session where the unfashionable public school students got the shaft. They can’t be bothered.
The Congress has spent some time, but hardly “months” on the proposal to extend choice in schooling for military families. see
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/03/22/congressional-legislation-seeks-to-fund-school-vouchers-for-military-families-despite-major-opposition-from-military-families/?utm_term=.4424a7a324ca
The federal government does not have any mandate to run, support, finance, or operate K-12 schooling in this nation. The states/municipalities have traditionally operated/financed K-12 public schools.
I have never seen a survey, but I would surmise that local school principals/teachers would like to see less federal intervention in the classroom. More federal money, perhaps, but most professional educators would prefer that the Washington bureaucrats would just “butt out”.
Congress enjoys a 90+% re-election rate, because less than half of the citizens vote.
It is time for the feds to just get out of K-12 public education altogether, and devolve all educational policy and responsibility back to the states/municipalities. And abolish the federal dept of Education.
Cririsizing testing and scores, yet using scores to point to deficiencies in private schools? Oh, I see, these were “low-stake tests”, these are ok. It is the high-stake ones, where the teachers’ job is at stake, are invalid.
In any case, I would not take this as a sign of public schools’ superiority, rather I see it as a sign as an overall slump in math instruction thanks to NCTM-supported constructivist integrated math programs. Charter and private schools use the same programs, they don’t know of any magic methods of instruction, so all schools will see slump in the scores. The only solution is self-prep using either older, more sensible textbooks or textbooks from outside of the U.S.
Posted the original article at https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/D-C-s-private-school-vouc-in-General_News-Education_School-Reform_Testing-180530-681.html#comment701951
with 2 comments which have embedded links at Oped News.
COMMENT ONE
So allt he testing didn’t do a thing to improve math skills, but they sure made the testing publisher rich.
Evaluation and & assessment is a tool for a classroom teacher to use, to know what each student is doing, and what each still needs to master. Standardized testing was created to show failure of a school, so it could be privitized.
Dr Ravich points out: https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Testing-A-Modest-Proposal-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Accountability_Diane-Ravitch_Education_Education-Costs-180501-601.html “The US is the only nation requiring standardized tests yearly from grades 3-8. The consequences attached to them stigmatize students, teachers, and schools. Teachers have been fired, &schools have been closed based on these test scores despite growing evidence that ‘test-based accountability’ is ineffective.There is a lobby that love$ testing — testing corporations & the Hedge Fund managers organization (Lots of money in test$!). The other is that our policymakers are still inhaling the stale fumes of No Child Left Behind. It is hard to break away from a practice, even a bad one that has become ingrained– and making money for privateer$ who take over ‘failing schools.’ Standardized tests should not be used for high school graduation or for firing teachers or closing schools. Yet they are. Obviously, they are misused on a regular basis. So, I have a modest proposal. ”
Here is the link to the search field at the Ravitch site, where I entered “Standarzized Testing Failure”.: https://dianeravitch.net/?s=Tests
COMMENT 2
Below is one link of many that discuss thsee tests which are the ‘ploy’ responsible for making our public schools appear to be failing so they can be privatized.
“Chris Churchill:For Better Schools, Ditch Standardized Testing ” https://dianeravitch.net/2018/05/01/76350/
“It’s easy to think of things our kids would be better off doing. Learning reading, writing and arithmetic. Learning Urdu. Learning anything.
“The tests are a time suck for teachers, too. They’ll be watching over spiritless and possibly anxious classrooms of test-taking students when they should be, crazy thought here, teaching. We should want our schools alive — with passion and joy, with laughter and curiosity, with play and learning.”
“Even if we swallow that baloney, there’s remarkably little evidence that the national rise of high-stakes standardized testing has done anything to improve schools and learning. As far as I can tell, the only beneficiaries are the big bureaucracies that want more control over classrooms and the big corporations that provide the tests. The tests certainly haven’t benefited our kids, who, in many districts, are getting shorter recesses so teachers can spend more time in service to the looming tests. Or who, as many parents can attest, view testing days with anxiety and dread.”
“If the tests were just tests, they might be relatively harmless. But they epitomize something bigger: The madness that applies a production mentality to education. Everything can be neatly quantified, yes siree, not to mention automated, regulated and homogenized!”
“But children aren’t widgets and schools aren’t factories. You can’t measure the success of a classroom with data points. Standardized testing tells us nothing important about how children experience school.
As most every parent and teacher knows, learning is about small moments and quiet victories. It’s about relationships built on trust and even love. There are things that can be measured. Teaching and caring for children are not among them.”
Submitted on Wednesday, May 30, 2018 at 4:59:00 PM
One of the comments to this post at Oped was this one, which has uninteresting link!
Dr. Flanagan is the father of testing for NDEA and Project Talent.
“Testing never was to improve anything… It was developed to skim the cream of the crop off the top of the students and re-route the cream into military created STEM education and leave the rest to public schools.”
“I was one!”
For the true history of testing… try this link: PROJECT TALENT https://www.projecttalent.org/about/history/
that was AN interesting link… I hate auto correct.
But test scores will continue to matter when it comes to using them to close traditional, unionized public schools. They just won’t count for voucher schools and private sector corporate charter schools where the money, not the children and teachers, is the only thing that counts.
They may try selling children – quick cash and smaller class size, doubleplusgood.
Before they can sell children into servitude, they have to repeal The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which for the first time set national minimum wage and maximum hour standards for workers in interstate commerce, also placed limitations on child labor. In effect, the employment of children under sixteen years of age was prohibited in manufacturing and mining.
Trump already wants to roll back that law so younger adults can work in risky and dangerous professions.
“The Trump administration wants to unwind child labor laws”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-administration-wants-unwind-child-labor-laws-194638209.html
“It amounts to a blow to school choice advocates like U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, whose department released the report; at the same time, as test scores of private school choice programs have soured, supporters have increasingly argued for judging the initiatives by other means, including high school graduation rates and college enrollment.”
High school graduation rates and college enrollment rates are easily manipulated. Somehow, college completion rates need to be elevated above other statistics, if statistics need to be used at all.