The North Carolina General Assembly believes that the only thing that matters in judging the quality of a school is its test scores. As teacher Justin Parmenter explains here, public schools are graded solely by their test scores. The grades accurately reflect the income level of the families enrolled. The state could save money by just checking family income instead of giving tests.
But wait! For voucher schools, test scores don’t matter. Voucher schools, most of which are evangelical, are not required to take the state tests.
Why? The General Assembly is afraid of seeing the results.
Maybe if the scores showed that the voucher schools are failing, they would have to send the kids back to public schools, where they would have certified teachers who have passed criminal background checks.
Hypocrites.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s because ed reformers take public school families for granted. We’re the disfavored “status quo” so they can dump all their negative policies on us and never even offer any positives.
Listen to the language they use around public schools- it’s ALL negative. It’s all scolding and sanctions and threats. My God, to listen to DeVos and the US Department of Education one would think all public school students are violent, low achieving thugs. They’ve gone from trashing public schools as an entity to attacking the children who attend public schools. Every DeVos speech is about how some charter or private school student “escaped” their horrible, dangerous public school.
They don’t see any political risk from public school families – none of this is designed to attract our political support. They simply don’t consider us part of their constiuency. The assumption is we’ll continue to return them to office whether they offer any benefit to children who attend public schools or not. They don’t value our schools, hence they don’t value our opinions or concerns. They don’t even pretend to care about the public schools in their districts. The ed reformers in the Ohio legislature spend 90% of their time on the charters and private schools that 10% of Ohio children attend. When they DO address public schools it’s only to 1. cut funding or 2. add a new gimmicky mandate.
We can do better. We could hire people who value public schools and public school students to run public schools. We should do that.
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The words “failing” and “school” are associated in the above post. While I understand this is just using reformer phrasing to describe reformer policy, it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Grading schools by performance on tests is silly. Grading one system with testing while allowing a parallel system freedom from these strictures is obviously a double standard designed to destroy public education, a point that has been made on this blog irrefutably. Still, even when the label is applied to a voucher school, I hate that label: failing school.
Failure at a school certainly exists, but it exists on a personal and relative level. When I was in high school, I failed to learn Spanish or German. I guess I must have attended a failing school. I also failed to learn how to look at litmus paper to determine acidity even though I recall studying that in chemistry class. Failing school? No I am color blind, especially where pink is concerned.
We need to get the conversation away from that phrase. Any discussion of failure at all needs to be specific. We failed to teach World History in that curriculum (it was not offered). John Doe failed to demonstrate that he can factor a binomial. Sister Jane failed to hit a free throw in gym class.
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Roy, you are reiterating a point that I used to make with the students. I’d tell that them that the four-letter “F” word was not allowed in class, and that the four-letter “F” word that I was talking about didn’t end in a “K” but with an “L”.
Why is it that only one of the 5 letter grades has a word associated with it?
Telling a student that he/she is failing, that their work is a failure, as we do using arbitrary cut points is an abomination.
“Oh, but but we have to prepare them for ‘real life’.”
Horse manure! The stigma attached to labeling students as a “failure’ can have devastating effects on the child that last well into adulthood.
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“The grades accurately reflect the income level of the families enrolled.”
Yes, because those “grades” (what an insanity of malpractice, eh) are based on standardized test scores with correlate quite significantly with family wealth and income.
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All of so-called reform is heavy on hypocrisy and light on substance. While there may have been a few legitimate ideologues at the start, there are few of them left. Most of what has been proposed has been a failure. What we see today is a smash a grab for public money, and monetized students are not the primary consideration.
Our best argument for halting irresponsible privatization is that it has failed. We need to refuse state tests, and demand that states stop abrogating their responsibility to educate our children. We need to drive home the message that an investment in public education offers a collective benefit to a community. Privatization is mostly about destroying a public asset to create wealth for some billionaire or corporation. Charters and vouchers represent a disinvesting in local democratic leadership and the local community. Most of all parents and members of the voting public need to show up and unseat the complicit and corrupt politicians.
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yes. yes. And yes. Everything called reform is failed, dead man walking.
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“We need to refuse state tests. . .”
Amen, rt, amen!
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The tests are a weapon aimed at the public schools — not the corporate charters or voucher schools. After all, in a war, you don’t shoot yourself with a weapon designed to destroy who you have declared as your enemy.
These tests are a missile with a warhead designed and built to destroy traditional public schools. That is the “real” purpose of these tests. After all, North Korea will not use its own nuclear weapons they build on North Korea, will they?
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Like!
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