Justin Parmenter, NBCT in North Carolina, writes here about the educational malpractice inflicted on the state’s youngest readers by order of State Superintendent Mark Johnson. A TFA alum, Johnson overruled the recommendations of expert professionals in the state and decided to assess and diagnose children’s reading skill with technology instead of a teacher.
As the 2019-20 school year wound down and teachers began their well-earned summer breaks, Superintendent Mark Johnson dropped an unexpected bombshell: North Carolina schools would be scrapping the mClass reading assessment system and replacing it with the computer-based Istation program.
North Carolina schools have used mClass as the diagnostic reading assessment tool in grades K-3 since the Read to Achieve legislative initiative was implemented in 2013.
Johnson’s announcement of the change referred with no apparent irony to “an unprecedented level of external stakeholder engagement and input” which had gone into making the decision. He neglected to mention that he had completely ignored the recommendations of those stakeholders.
When the Request for Purchase (RFP) for a Read to Achieve diagnostic reading assessment first went out in the fall of 2018, a statewide committee of experts in curriculum and reading instruction was assembled largely under the direction of Dr. Amy Jablonski, then-Division Director of Integrated Academic and Behavior Services at the Department of Public Instruction, to inform the process.
This team included specialists in general education, special education, and English language learner services, school psychologists, representatives of Institutions for Higher Education, dyslexia experts, and school and district leaders. They reviewed the four vendors that were passed through to the team, including mClass and Istation, working extensively through detailed demonstrations with all four products before determining which would best serve the needs of North Carolina’s children.
The committee presented its recommendation to Superintendent Mark Johnson in December of 2018. They noted that students and teachers needed a tool which could accurately assess risk in all domains of reading. They noted the crucial importance of having a teacher actually listen to a child read and sound out words. They noted the legislative requirement of an effective dyslexia screener. And they recommended that schools continue using the mClass diagnostic tool, which they believed best accomplished all of those things.
Six months later, Superintendent Johnson completely disregarded the recommendations of those professional educators in announcing his unilateral selection of the computer-based Istation diagnostic tool.
Parmenter goes on to explain why this was a terrible decision.
Superintendent Johnson has all the earmarks of TFA. Uninformed, inexperienced, sure of himself.
Here is hoping he gets tossed out of office and replaced by someone who respects professionalism.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Our students need their love of reading and their growth as readers to be nurtured through human relationships and engaging interactions with their teachers.”
All young learners are far better off learning from caring professionals than a computer program. Nobody knows the long term impact on developing eyes and brains that sitting in front of a computer will have on young children. Part of the goal of early reading is that reading is enjoyable and engaging. Inappropriate computer instruction is deadly dull for young children. Concerned parents should form a committee and asked to meet with the superintendent to explain why they feel cyber instruction is inappropriate. If Johnson refuses to budge, they should protest and work to get rid of this minimally trained lemon.
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just those two words, cyber instruction, should be deeply scaring all parents
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Students at my school are assessed using IStation as often as monthly. Because the school is dual language, they are also tested in both Spanish and English at least three times a year. Particularly for kindergarten, it is an unreliable test and creates anxiety for the children. I see children eager to learn in the fall, disillusioned by spring. Yet it is a district mandated test.
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This is educational malpractice that is foisted on public schools by business types in collusion with administrators. Teachers should complain to the administrators about the loss of enthusiasm among the students. It would help a great deal if parents complained too. Public schools are wrongly labeled “factories,” but standardized testing is turning schools into “call centers,” not classrooms.
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Johnson was a lawyer for a technology firm in Winston-Salem – it’s a big company that does data analytics for retailers.
That was his real job outside of the 24 month stint as a TFA temp.
That may explain why he mandates that public schools spend tens of millions of dollars on faddish tech junk. It’s something like a 10 billion dollar market and obviously public schools would be (by far) the biggest buyers.
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Faddish is here. Not a reading specialist but this is visual junk The link iis to the product that received the contract, and if you have an interest, find and read the privacy policies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff6KVPViCo4
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I watched it. Blech. It promises to teach , not just assess. Teacher replacement software. I would not want my nephews using this junk.
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The Boston Globe, which can always be counted on as a cheerleader for Education Deform, just ran the following headline: “At Boston high schools, 1,900 courses — but no process for evaluating their rigor.” The use of the Deformish term “rigor’ (from rigor mortise?) is a BIG clue there.
The headline is for an article about a Boston Public Schools (PBS) study done with the purpose of exposing variation and asserting centralized control over course content, syllabi, objectives, etc. Now, a case for GENERALLY describing and enforcing the content of a course can easily be made. Here’s an example: In my high school, our reading teacher, one of our administrators, and even several of our English teachers thought that an elective course in Classical Literature would be one in which students read “classics,” like Macbeth and Great Expectations and The Scarlet Letter. They didn’t understand that the term “Classic Literature” refers to the literature of Greece and Rome.
However, overspecification of course content and objectives is also a problem, for doing so can kill innovation. Imagine, for example, a university that decides to specify, in enormous detail, the content and objectives of all of its courses–one in which, for example, only works on an approved course reading list could be taught in a survey course on the history of American and British literature, for example. Scholars teaching these courses would not be allowed to modify them to suit their particular expertise and their “take” on the subject, and the courses would suffer as a result. Overspecification would a) kill innovation and b) not provide an opening for the expertise and passions of particular instructors.
Authoritarian types LOVE top-down specification. The U.S. oligarchy, for example, thinks that everyone else should just shut up and do as they are told. But authoritarianism is antidemocratic and breeds mediocrity. There’s an important moral there:
For decades now, K-12 U.S. public schools have been subject to a top-down, authoritarian standards-and standardized testing regime that has a) narrowed and distorted curricula and pedagogy while b) not achieving its stated goals of improving test scores and narrowing achievement gaps. Those of us who oppose the Deform are sometimes asked, “Well, what’s your alternative?” Here it is:
Set broad frameworks for the goals of education in particular subjects at the various levels (elementary, secondary). Limit states and school districts to matters like ensuring funding, maintaining facilities, hiring and firing of school leaders, and ensuring equity and regulatory compliance. Leave department chairpeople free to plan curricula and pedagogy. Make available to them a nationwide wiki containing competing, alternative lesson plans, reading lists, assessments, vocabulary lists, course content descriptions, and so on, posted by classroom practitioners, researchers, and subject matter experts. Start treating teachers, again, like professionals who can make their own decisions, and encourage, by these means, competition in the marketplace of educational ideas. This is precisely what we did in the past, when decision making about curricula, pedagogy, and objectives were made at the VERY LOCAL (e.g., building) level. This might sound like a recipe for anarchy, but it isn’t. What happened, in the past, when our schools functioned in that way is that social sanction and the rules of the tribe created default, de facto plans that most people adhered to. You could count on the fact that these people would be freely choosing to teach Romeo and Juliet in grade 9. But there was also room for innovation–for experts to propose new ideas and for progressive teachers to try them out.
That’s how you get real, continual improvement. You don’t get it by instituting Orwellian, top-down mandates.
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Oops!!! I meant “rigor mortis,” of course!!! LOL. Yikes.
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The Boston Globe should promise to standardize its reporting in line with every other newspaper in America, and Orwellian NewSpeak would reign.
It is variation that makes us read different papers to hear different points of view.
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Exactly
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Seems (“seems” as in a hypothesis bordering on theory) to be a disturbing trend of installing incompetent people into positions of authority. From the local to the national/international arena. Incompetence is easily manipulated.
Citizens United plays no small part in this phenomena on a local to national level. The billionaires are there, too, and more than willing and able to spread their influence, globally.
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“Incompetence is easily manipulated.”
Especially when “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair
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Mr Sinclair was a smart dude.
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