Deshotels writes that the suspension of recess so that students could have more time for test prep led to lower test scores!
He writes:
Why isn’t constant drilling on test taking skills at the expense of recess, PE, art, music, vocational education, and other “less important” instruction producing higher test scores? Maybe because the current trend to ignore fundamental child development principle’s is harmful in every way, including killing the joy of schooling for both children and teachers! Teachers in Finland, whose students perform at the top of the rankings on international achievement tests, routinely take young children outdoors where they can play, investigate nature and develop normally as they are programmed by their genes to do. Why do American reformers insist on counteracting nature and instead have transformed our education system to motivation killing test drudgery?
It was equally stupid to remove teachers from the decision-making process and leave it to legislators and the state education department. What a bad idea!
This outrageous trampling on the rights and critical input of the teaching profession in education decisions has actually resulted in the opposite of what our non-educator reformers said they wanted to do. Do you think our government can stop the Corona virus by ignoring the recommendations of the highly trained experts in disease prevention? The same is true of refusing to listen to real teachers about education reform. Do you believe, as the reformers would have you believe, that education reform in Louisiana is really working in preparing students for college and careers? Are you willing to ignore the most recent devastating revelation by our own Board of Regents that after all the reforms imposed on K-12 education in Louisiana, only 18 out of one hundred of our students will attain a college degree of any kind. Not even a two year associate’s degree! These are the worst results I have ever seen! Don’t blame the teachers. Teacher attended the legislative committee proposing these changes by the thousands to protest these untested ideas, only to be scolded for having the nerve to come to Baton Rouge on a school day (but that was the only time the Education committee was meeting!). Now the chickens are coming home to roost and thousands of our most dedicated teachers have left the profession.
Who has been making decisions? The Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, exactly the worst people to decide how to educate the state’s children.
The stranglehold over control of public education by the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry promises even more failure with the upcoming appointment of John White’s replacement.
Make no mistake about it, LABI has had almost total control over K-12 education for over 4 years since they used Michael Bloomburg’s and Walton family contributions to totally purchase all the BESE elected positions. They have made nothing but bad decisions with all this power. The school privatization they pushed has been almost a total failure with data showing that students who stay in their public schools do significantly better than they do when they move to a voucher or charter school.
Now LABI is preparing to pick the state’s next superintendent to succeed the failed John White, who mastered the art of spinning data to make it look good when it wasn’t. Of course, they are pushing White’s loyal assistant.
Let’s look at some of the real results of LABI supported reforms. On their web site, LABI claims that Louisiana is closing the achievement gap between privileged and underprivileged students. Data demonstrates instead that the exact opposite is true. They are also dead wrong claiming that ACT scores are improving. LABI is now down to apparently basing its education policies on wishful thinking rather than evidence.
The same is true of teacher evaluations based on student test scores using our defective state tests. LABI has insisted that Louisiana evaluate its teachers partially on student test scores. But all the data proves that the VAM system used is unstable and inaccurate. So a couple of years ago I got thrown off of a state committee studying changes to VAM because I had the nerve to state on my blog that LABI was like the dog that caught the truck with this whole VAM fiasco. They don’t have any idea what to do with VAM but they will never admit they were wrong. Meanwhile some very competent and dedicated teachers have had their careers ruined by VAM and thousands of great teachers have left the profession.
Louisiana has been fully in the grips of the Disruption Machine. It has fallen to the bottom of NAEP, which John White hailed as “proof” that the state had enacted higher standards. More failure like that and Louisiana will fall below Alabama and New Mexico, the lowest performing states.
Louisiana has bought into all the favorite remedies of “reform” (aka disruption), and there is nothing to show for it but failure, propaganda, and lies.
Why? This is our Puritan inheritance. Read any post on this blog by B.A. (“The beatings will continue until morale improves.”)
Or this from the alphabet included in the first texstbook published on U.S. shores:
F
The idle fool
Is whipt in school.
a modern day version: creating idle fools by repeatedly testing them in schools
“Who has been making decisions? The Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, exactly the worst people to decide how to educate the state’s children.”
They’ve done the same thing in Ohio. It’s all business and industry lobbying groups and DC ed reform orgs. The people who actually use public schools in this state and public school leaders have been completely excluded from policy making.
Complete capture – it’s an echo chamber and no dissenting voices are permitted. There’s no investment or effort expended on existing public schools or public school students. It’s a shame. 90% of students and families in the state are not represented. We somehow ended up with hundreds of public employees who contribute absolutely nothing other than public school criticism. They’re professional public school critics. No positive ideas or effort, no practical assistance- just charter and voucher promotion and cheerleading and constant bashing of public schools. It’s a living I suppose although I’m not clear why we insist on hiring people who don’t value public schools to run public school policy.
Need more articles like this. White has managed to secure glowing articles from The 74 and other papers in Louisiana.
Also all roses and garlands for John White at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_White_(Louisiana_politician)
White has also landed at Ridge-Lane Impact Investors with this bio:
JOHN C. WHITE is a Venture Partner. He has been Louisiana State Superintendent of Education for eight years. He resigns on March 11, 2020. He adopted the Common Core Standards, backed charter school and vouchers, and emphasized test scores as the measure for school and teacher accountability. He previously managed the state’s post-Katrina Recovery School District. Before his tenure in Louisiana, White served as Deputy Chancellor for the New York City Department of Education under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein. He also served as Executive Director of Teach For America in Chicago and New Jersey. He is former chairman of Chiefs for Change, co-founder and chairman of Propel America, He is former chairman of the independent non-profit advocacy organization Chiefs for Change, co-founder and chairman of Propel America (career prep in Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island). White’s market-centric views on education are evident in his Congressional testimony on NCLB, ESSA, the Higher Education Act, early childhood care and publications such as Wall Street Journal, and the Brookings Institution’s “Evidence Speaks.”
John White is PROUD of his record. Now he intends to cash in on this history and he will profit from pushing more of his horrible policies. The education mission of Ridge-Lane LLP is not much different from White’s.
And one of his top assistants — head of accountability and analytics — wants to replace him: https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2020/02/28/one-time-two-year-teacher-jessica-baghian-wants-to-be-las-next-state-superintendent/
“Torkelson took a private jet to Tampa in November to meet with U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to discuss “education philanthropy,” records show. He was the only passenger on the jet, which holds nine people.
“We have no reason to believe that this person used federal funds to pay for private airline travel,” Angela Morabito, an education department spokeswoman, said in an email. “The use of federal education funds for private airline travel would not be permitted, because it would not be ‘reasonable and necessary’ ” as required by law.”
This is being treated as a scandal for the charter chain, but the real scandal is that the US Department of Education lavishes attention on charter chains and CEO’s and excludes public schools from these top level meetings.
It’s ridiculous that the federal education agency we are all paying for refuses to serve public school students and families because they object ideologically to the existence of our schools. I don’t want to pay for this. They can promote charters and vouchers on one of their billionaires money- they do not serve public school students or schools.
The problem with ed reformers isn’t their fact-free cheerleading of charters and vouchers- that’s their ideology and it’s a belief system and they’re entitled to it- it’s that they don’t expend ANY EFFORT on behalf of the public schools 90% of students attend. They return no value to public schools, students, or families. They accept public paychecks but don’t serve public schools. Public school students deserve better and they could have better. We could hire people who value public schools and public school students and intend to perform some work on their behalf.
https://texasmonitor.org/charter-school-company-spends-big-on-luxury-travel/
There is one worse atrocity then the failure of a system allowing children to be harmed, neglected, and abandoned by those in place to protect children.
One worse is the magnitude of those humans who protect the system and not the children/humans. Teacher seem to have this prehistoric privilege believing that they should not be accountable in the presence of children. That’s a red flag.
Surveillance all public schools Ensuring and protecting district accountability. Respectfully and peacefully to my elders You (in general) can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect different results maybe that’s what you’re looking for I m not sure however, Humanity is not your stepping stones.
The self-appointed hedge funders and tech tyrants behind reform aren’t known for their humanity. They’ve been joined by the religious, about which Jefferson said, “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot abetting his abuses in return for the protection of his own.” The major religions in the U.S., Catholic, evangelical, Latter Day Saints,… signed an amicus brief for Espinosa against Montana in the case currently before SCOTUS.
Relative to homeschooling, read Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated, in which her religious leader advised her not to return to her abusive home and told her to apply for government aid to enable her to get schooling. That same hypocritical clergyman votes Republican, a party that makes women second class citizens and plots against government aid for citizens.
In the U.S. House, there are 186 male Republican representatives and 13 Republican women.
“One worse is the magnitude of those humans who protect the system and not the children/humans.”
I may be your elder, but have been saying pretty much the same thing for years now. I call them GAGA* Good German teachers and adminimals who willingly implement invalid, unjust and unethical malpractices like the standards and testing regime.
However, “Teacher seem to have this prehistoric privilege believing that they should not be accountable in the presence of children.” I can’t agree with. Teachers have no problem in being held accountable if the evaluation system/process is fair and equitable, and it most certainly is not now.
Sounds like you, Donna (and anyone else) might be interested in my book “Infidelity to Truth: Education Malpractice in American Public Education” Email me at dswacker@centurytel.net with book in the subject line and I send you an e-copy.
In it I discuss the purpose of American public education and of government in general, issues of truth in discourse, justice and ethics in teaching practices, the abuse and misuse of the terms standards and measurement which serve to provide an unwarranted pseudo-scientific validity/sheen to the standards and testing malpractice regime and how the inherent discrimination in that regime should be adjudicated to be unconstitutional state discrimination no different than discrimination via race, gender, disability, etc. . . .
GAGA = Go Along to Get Along
Scandal?
Promoting reform, state Catholic Conference directors cite the papers of an “evangelist professor at a public university, an ordained Assemblies of God evangelist”.
Notre Dame’s ACE holds its education summit in New Orleans, a city that recently closed its last remaining public school. The parental “choice” – charter schools with short-term, high turnover TFA’s or religious schools.
& New Orleans thanks you, Paul Vallas, who is constantly on Progressive (?!) Talk Radio shows, & always introduced as “our fiend”–er, sorry, “friend.”
He is (like Rahm E., only R.E. is not on Progressive Talk Radio–he has the lucrative, national gigs) being considered a pundit.
Vallas in 1998
“We’ve got every other private organization running charter schools — why not the archdiocese?”
The USCCB signed an amicus brief for Espinosa against Montana in the court case currently before SCOTUS.