The testscores came in and Rhode Island got bad scores.
RI still uses PARCC, which is guaranteed to faiil most students.
First the State Commissioner of Education Ken Wagner resigned. Now the Providence Superintendent is stepping down.
Will that raise scores?
https://www.providencejournal.com/news/20190226/providence-schools-superintendent-to-step-down
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Rhode Island adopted the incredibly over-hyped “personalized learning” fad:
“Rhode Island is accepting applications for its new Lighthouse program, giving schools the opportunity to apply—through a challenge process—to serve as school-wide personalized-learning models. Already in that pipeline are the Rhode Island Mayoral Academies, a public charter-school network that uses the Summit Basecamp learning platform at its Blackstone Valley Prep. The free digital-learning platform, created by Summit charter schools and Facebook, provides curriculum, student projects, and teacher resources and support to some 130 schools, 1,100 teachers, and 20,000 students.”
Maybe they should try NOT swallowing every fad and gimmick ed reformers sell. That might work.
They should also consider hiring a couple of people outside the ed reform echo chamber:
“Could you do some of this stuff before ESSA?” asks Richard Culatta, Rhode Island’s chief innovation officer and the former director of educational technology at the U.S. Department of Education. “Certainly it would have been possible, but it would have been harder to do. With our additional flexibility, we are up at the front of the line taking advantage of it.”
Musical chairs. They all hire fellow echo chamber members.
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Apparently the US Department of Education will be spending yet another work week promoting private schools and vouchers.
Could we hire a couple of public employees who have some interest in serving students in public schools?
Maybe we could start by finding a couple of applicants for these positions who actually attended one. 90% of Americans did. Why can’t we find any public school graduates or parents to hire at the US Department of Education?
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So true, Chiara.
My BS test is: Did that person ever attend a public school?
When only the oligarchs make rules, we are well SCR***ed.
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It’s weird and it seems to get worse every year. Why are all our professional public school critics graduates of private schools and what are we paying them for, exactly? We’re incapable of criticizing our own schools? How did this become a job?
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Chiara,
It’s more than weird. It’s called “Marketing LIES to a country where people don’t take seriously their voting rights.” SPIN those LIES. CONFUSE the people.
I think people don’t vote because those ballots are gobble-de-gook with
” Lawyer-ese “language.
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It became a job when opportunists realized they could make a lot of money bashing and attacking public education.
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Ohio’s scores all went down with the more difficult test too. Despite assurances ed reformers made to public schools that the more difficult tests wouldn’t be used to bash public schools and promote charters and vouchers, they all immediately used the score drop in their various political campaigns.
Most parents don’t understand why the scores dropped, because no one in ed reform bothered to explain it to anyone outside their echo chamber, so the net result is harm to public school students. The public are (understandably) wondering why the same schools with the same students and teachers all of a sudden dropped one or two letter grades.
It will remain a mystery, making the ridiculous and completely arbitrary grading system even less credible than it already is.
Ed reformers literally could have achieved this goal by simply bumping up the cut scores on the old tests 20%, but I suppose then the 10,000 adult consultants who got paid big bucks for this scheme wouldn’t be needed.
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Chiara,
I have WATCHED how people maneuver themselves into positions of influence re: the USDoE. It’s actually quite a “SIGHT” to see. I always walk away with a feeling of SLIME on me. But, I say nothing and just tuck that “occurrence” in my head for future reference. .
People have their own hidden agendas, and unfortunately, often not in the best interest of our young, though they spout they actually care … when they don’t.
The power plays people “DO” is alarming to me. We saw that “full blown” re: Cohn and the House Oversight hearings. I can only imagine what goes on behind closed doors.
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They never explained that these tests, administered to students on their frustration level, are rigged because the intention is to make public schools appear as though they are “failing” in order to hasten privatization. The tests are a tool to undermine public education.
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and thus the game of making massive money by arguing that when kids fail one test they need to retest, try a new test, get a revamped test, be forced to take supplemental tests….the testing companies have been allowed to grow so very big and so very powerful
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Didn’t too know? Testing is the cure for low test scores.
Next time you go to the doctor, ask him if taking your temperature as often as possible will make you get better.
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BINGO
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Given the number of tests that most doctors and hospitals give (even when they are not warranted), i’d have to say that doctors also believe that tests make you better (that they also make them richer is merely a coincidence)
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Most tests your doctors order are performed at facilities owned and operated by others. Overtesting relates to litigiousness. Despite being paid well as opposed to being underpaid, clinicians are parallel to teachers. They make the same for seeing a patient or performing a procedure whether they’re rookies or veterans. They carry a huge load of student-loan debt. In healthcare, it’s insurance, pharma & legal industries making out like bandits. Similar to teachers vs admins, ed-industry & the pols they support.
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The failed Providence superintendent’s hallmark ideas:
Blended learning (i.e. have kids get the content via computer at home; teacher tries to become a 1:1 tutor to 35 kids during class time)
Restorative justice.
No wonder he failed. No wonder test scores are plummeting.
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Fire Away!
“Fire your way to higher score!”
Theory of Obama
Fire the teachers you deplore
That’s Rhode Island drama
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Make Schools Great Again
Teachers should be fired
Soon instead of later
If greatness is desired
Then nothing could be greater
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“The message [of Raj Chetty, John Friedman and Jonah Rockoff’s Chetty picked VAM study] is to fire people sooner rather than later– John Friedman, quoted in NY times article
To which Chetty added “Of course there are going to be mistakes — teachers who get fired who do not deserve to get fired.”
Of course, but no big deal, right?
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Where are the superior replacement teachers supposed to come from? Any replacement will have been trained in the same bad ideas (or absorbed them through osmosis): “Common Core is salvation”, “discipline doesn’t work”, “the sages should get off the stages”… They’re going to get the same bad results. They going to have the same burn-out and despair. Until America gets its educators on sound intellectual foundations (especially with respect to curriculum), the misery and failure will continue.
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Chetty and Friedman (and others like Obama and Duncan) cleary never devoted a single microsecond to thinking about where replacement teachers would come from for all the teachers who were fired or simply left because of VAM, Common Core and other stupid policies.
Of course, based on a reading of the ridiculous conclusions from their VAM study, I’d have to say that thinking is not their forte, at any rate.
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“discipline doesn’t work” (restorative justice)
One of the most damaging philosophies (practices) of the 21st century education reform period. I could add “no retention” (at the secondary level) to the list of really bad ideas that have completely backfired.
I am amazed that the adults in charge of children and adolescents believe that disciplinary “codes of conduct” should include no limits on disruptive behaviors. And they wonder why bad behaviors become limitless.
Both of these failed policies and practices have worked to the detriment of the vast majority of reasonably well behaved and reasonably serious students in favor of a tiny minority that wreak havoc in their schools on a daily basis.
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Re: retention. In recent years I’ve encountered a couple of adults who are angry that teachers just passed them along year after year. They feel they were allowed to drift along without learning anything.
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If we really want to avoid disasters at the policy level, then people like Friedman and Chetty should be fired sooner rather than later, or better yet never hired to begin with.
Those two should certainly never have received tenure. They are an embarrassment to Harvard.
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One can not help but wonder.
Are these students who complain about being allowed to drift along among those who made zero effort and did close to nothing — or at least nothing but disrupt class and give their teachers and other students a hard time?
In my opinion, accountability goes in both directions and it has swung too far in the direction of accountability for teachers but not students and their parents.
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You have hit the railroad spike on the head. Lost in the Fog of Testing, has been the student/parent accountability. This reality takes the claims of “rigor” and flushes them down Arne Duncan’s toilet.The only federal education pressure regarding students has to do with graduation rates. Yet this pressure has fallen on schools to produce an endless string of programs, options, and opportunities for students to graduate high school. Some claim that these alternate paths have resulted in a watered down diploma that carries little weight.
The nut of the problem is that family/community cultures is the limiting factor in student efforts, motivatioin, and achievements.
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Please read and re-read Campbell’s Law.
Google it.
When test scores are the target, they get corrupted.
When graduation rates are the target, they get corrupted.
The politicians should get out of the way and let teachers teach and students learn.
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Poet and Rage,
I am with you in deploring our inattention to student sloth (and the deep-seated familial/cultural anti-intellectualism behind much of it). There is no quick cure. That said, I think schools are remiss in not giving jolts that could possibly rouse slothful students from their torpor. The dancing, affable, buddy teacher dangling tech gizmos, games and “engaging” cooperative learning probably helps somewhat, but it has not lived up to its billing. Credible threats (Oh, horrors! For children??) of having to repeat a grade or attend hard-core summer school stand a better chance of breaking the bad habits of never paying attention, never studying and never doing homework.
The education intelligentsia is remiss in not having to the courage to look this fact in the face: learning takes work and there are many kids who never, ever even try to learn. The problem is often worst with the kids who are furthest behind. Those who need to work extra hard are precisely the ones who are not working at all. Imagine a sports team filled with players who don’t deign to get off the bench. That describes many classrooms. What’s the remedy? Or will we just pretend the problem doesn’t exist? Or just keep exhorting the teacher to be more engaging? Why must negative consequences be taken off the table?
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Diane
A few years ago I tried to get a “conscientious objector” bill passed for teachers who strongly opposed test-and-punish reform. I met with my state legislator in Albany and she declined on the grounds that teachers had to have “accountability”. The politicians just can’t give up the testing/accountability ghost. The evidence for Campbell’s Law can be found in a generation of children who’s one chance at a well rounded, enriched curricula was stolen by this misguided belief.
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The number of kids that use our classrooms as their personal playgrounds without a whiff of serious effort is alarming. The politicians, policy makers, and reformers that only know and understand their own children of privilege who were primed from birth to take school seriously is one of the reasons for the disconnect between their ideas and the reality that marginal, disaffected students bring into our classrooms. The fact is, combative, uncooperative, belligerent, and apathetic adolescents who spend their days just sitting, socializing, playing, laughing, and not caring one bit to even try, predominate many schools.
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You put your finger on an invidious form of elite ignorance: their ignorance of the lower-classes and of what really goes on in many public schools. Their preference for a gauzy, romantic view of poor children over the reality of poor children. Don’t get me wrong: I adore many of these kids who never do their homework. And I sympathize with them. But I also know they’re squandering an opportunity and that it doesn’t have to be this way. We won’t fix it if we cling to our utterly false Waiting for Superman caricature of poor kids yearning to learn only to be thwarted by dim, hard-hearted, and lazy teachers. But telling the self-proclaimed defenders of the kids any inconvenient truths is a bit like telling an evangelical that the Bible is bunk. Kids, especially poor kids, are their angels and adults are their demons.
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“a gauzy, romantic view of poor children”
“poor kids yearning to learn only to be thwarted by dim, hard-hearted, and lazy teachers.”
This is the same fairy tale crowd that claims tough, “failing” inner city schools are “pipelines to prison”. The toughest teaching jobs in America are found in these dysfunctional zones and the best these
“ignorant elite” can offer are trendy unworkable plans and insults.
They can’t even begin to imagine how limited our teaching toolboxes really are in some schools. They can’t comprehend a 7th grade classroom where the social studies teacher cannot even ask her students to read silently for five minutes in order to discuss an historical event. Most of the activities that call for a modicum of decorum and self discipline, and maturity are off limits for many teachers.
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Well-put. It’s refreshing to see these truths put into print. They are not usually uttered.
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Wagner (Ed Comm soon to leave) says there’s no point searching for a new Supt until Providence cleans up its “layers of governance that impede the superintendent from making changes that are nimble and necessary. Standing between the superintendent and the schools is a mayor, a city council, a school committee, an education commissioner and a legislature.”
I thought maybe he was exaggerating & just looking for a power grab until I realized it’s a mayor-run district. When does that go well? In another article, Wagner quotes the previous Supt Susan Lusi (who also left prematurely in 2015): “the city has created a ‘very complex, time-consuming and redundant system’… small changes to the school dept’s org chart often have to be approved by the city council… all contracts worth more than $5000 have to be approved by the council and the board of contract and supply…” & many other issues detailed in another article:
http://www.providenceri.gov/providence-schools-central-office-must-transformed-according-independent-analysis/
But here’s the spin [Head of RI’s school board assoc says]: “what’s really critical, now that we’re dealing with the fallout from the RICAS results, is that we develop a course of action and we stay the course, and the leaders of our educational systems have to be there and consistent and reinforce that message.”
Shows the degree to which ed-deform has warped the conversation around school governance. It does look as tho Providence district has issues that would make it hard to get things done. But it’s hard to tell. Each of the several articles I read expressed the difficulties as: ed governance is not aligned w/ current “goals” — i.e., raising standardized test scores . What form of school district governance could makethat happen, pray tell?
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