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A Hero Educator Who Heads a Private School in Manhattan

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2013 //
24

What does it take to be a hero educator? It takes brains, courage, integrity, and a deep understanding of education and children.

Steve Nelson, headmaster of the Calhoun School in Manhattan, is a hero educator because he has all these qualities. He wrote a brilliant article about why the Common Core won’t work.

He knows that David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core, now heads the College Board. He knows that Coleman wants to align the SAT to the Common Core, so no one can escape his handiwork, not even students in prestigious private schools.

Here is a sample of Nelson’s article.

“Actual children, as opposed to the abstraction of children as seen in policy debate, are not “standard.” Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of child development knows that children learn in different ways and different times. Some children “read” (meaning a very limited ability to recognize symbols) at age 3 or 4. I have known many students who did not read well until 8, 9 or, rarely, later. The potential (or ultimate achievement levels) of these children does not correlate with the date of reading onset.

“It is rather like walking. Children who walk at 9 months do not become better runners than children who walk at 15 months. “Standardizing” the expectation of reading, and setting curricula and tests around this expectation, is like expecting a child to walk on her first birthday. If she doesn’t, shall we get our national knickers in a knot, develop a set of walking tests, prescribe walking remediation, and, perhaps inadvertently, make her feel desperately inadequate? In the current climate, Pearson is ready to design walking curriculum and its companion tests. The Gates and Broad Foundations will create complementary instructional videos.”

And he also writes:

“If policy makers and test writers had even rudimentary knowledge of rich individual differences, they would know that any standard test is unfair and, ultimately, useless. Just as children learn in very different ways, they express mastery in many different ways. The Common Core tests (and I’ve suffered the experience of wading through the many samples provided in the media) assume that all its takers process information in the same way, have the identical mix of cognitive and sensory abilities, and can, therefore, “compete” on level ground. This is nonsensical and damaging. Some of the most brilliant people I know would grind to a suffocating halt after trying to parse the arcane nonsense in a small handful of these questions. Even the math questions assume a homogeneous ability to understand the questions and a precisely common capacity for reasoning and concluding.

“I could go on: Stress inhibits learning, so we design stressful expectations; dopamine (from pleasurable activities) enhances learning, so we remove joy from schools; homework has very limited usefulness with negative returns after an hour or so (for elementary age kids), so we demand more hours of work; the importance of exercise in brain development is inarguable, so we eliminate recess and gym; the arts are central to human understanding, but we don’t have time.

“I have been accused of complaining but not offering solutions, so here’s a solution: Properly fund schools and allow good teachers to select the materials and pedagogy that serve the actual students in their care. The rest will take care of itself.

“And we can take the billions we’re wasting on NCLB, RTTT, Common Core and other nonsense and spend it to improve the lives of the shameful number of children who live in poverty in the “richest nation on Earth.”

Steve Nelson, welcome to the honor roll as a hero of American education.

Please someone, anyone: send this article to Bill Keller and Paul Krugman at the New York Times.

Categories Arts Education, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Common Core, Education Industry, Honor Roll, Students, Testing

Please Help the Brilliant Paul Krugman Understand the Problems with Common Core

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2013 //
60

Paul Krugman posted this commentary about the Common Core standards. Clearly he has never read them and has no idea about the legitimate concerns that teachers and principals have. Instead, he echoes the claim by Times’ writer Bill Keller that the opponents are nearly all rightwing extremists. I just left a short comment, which has not been moderated and approved yet. I expressed my concern about the lack of field testing and the now evident increases in achievement gaps. Raising the bar does not help kids clear it; it just increases the numbers who can’t clear it. You should add yours.

Categories Common Core

The New York Times Hearts Common Core: Susan Ohanian Calls Foul

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2013 //
34

This morning the New York Times published a lengthy defense of the Common Core standards by Bill Keller, previously executive editor of the paper.

Keller asserts that opposition to the Common Core comes from extremists on the far-right fringe. (He does say that there are critics on the left, and adds a link to my blog, but not to the post explaining my reasons for not supporting the Common Core.  My main reason: They have never been field tested and we have no evidence how they will work and whether they will do what they claim, and what their effects will be on real children in real classrooms).

Please take the time to read Keller’s article and add a comment, if you are so moved.

Susan Ohanian went postal when she read Keller’s article.

She titles her response: “Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire: War on the New York Times Embrace of the Common Core.”

She begins thus:

“Well, at least New York Times editorial remains consistent, proving once again that you can lead a reporter to evidence but can’t make him think. Keller was executive editor at the New York Times from 2003–2011, where he was a leading supporter of the Iraq invasion. Although he has since returned to his status as writer, he remains infected by the Times editorial bias on education policy. It seems significant that Keller’s father was chairman and chief executive of the Chevron Corporation. 

Keller employs a deliberate strategy of welding opponents of the Common Core with the lunatic fringe. Note that no progressive who opposes the Common Core is mentioned. No superintendent of schools opposing the Common Core is mentioned. No researcher opposing the Common Core is mentioned. No parent opposing the Common Core is mentioned.”

Keller says that the Common Core implies no curriculum, just standards. He quotes E.D. Hirsch, Jr., whose K-3 curriculum has been adopted by New York state as its official Common Core curriculum. Keller obviously didn’t know that Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify division (run by Joel Klein) bought the rights to the Core Knowledge curriculum for 20 years, meaning that every school in the state will pay a royalty to Rupert Murdoch whenever they buy the resources to teach the state curriculum.  Amplify and Core Knowledge plan to expand the curriculum to cover grades four and five. So this is quite a goldmine!

Categories Common Core, Klein, Joel, New York

Paul Thomas: Common Core and the Gravy Train

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2013 //
11

Paul Thomas points out that standardized test scores correlate closely with family income. He notes the lack of any evidence that more testing makes students smarter.

The driving force behind the demand for Common Core and more testing is profit.

Categories Common Core, For-Profit, Pearson, Testing

Anti-Testing Movement Grows in NY Suburbs and Towns

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2013 //
44

The collapse of test scores in New York following the first
tests of the Common Core standards is fueling the growth of the
anti-testing movement. A huge protest took
place in Port Jefferson Station on Long Island on Saturday.

Fifteen hundred people turned out to denounce the Common
Core and the tests that labeled most children as “failures.” To get a turnout of this size on a Saturday in August in a small town signals big trouble for Common Core and its cheerleaders in the State Education Department.

Hero educator Dr. Joseph Rella was one of the speakers.

Newsday, the most widely read newspaper on populous and politically
powerful Long Island, published a vivid photograph of the rally
(open the link) and wrote as follows: “Protesters carried signs and
cheered as they waited to hear from Comsewogue Superintendent
Joseph Rella, a vocal curriculum critic.

“All of us have been passengers on a plane being built in midair,” Rella said to the
crowd. “Today, we are canceling our flight reservations.” “He urged
the group to use social media to spread the word and demand that
state legislators re-evaluate the potential effects of Common Core
standards. “Stop it, fix it or scrap it,” Rella chanted with the
crowd.”

A blogger noticed this great sign held by a child: “I should be blowing bubbles, not filling them in.”

Meanwhile, the Suffolk Times and Riverhead News-Review, the
main newspaper for the North Fork of Long Island, ran
a blistering editorial denouncing the Common Core and the
tests, predicting that state officials would end up
dropping them and admitting their error.

The victims of the Common Core, he warned, “will likely be the poorest among us.”

Michael White, editor of the Suffolk Times and Riverhead News-Review,
understands that the engineers of the standards and tests are
detached from reality.

He wrote: “Consider that many children in
poverty-stricken areas will still be living in single-parent or
no-parent households in our new, Common Core world. They still
won’t be eating or sleeping properly. They won’t be getting proper
medical attention for physical or emotional issues that interfere
with school. They won’t be getting help with homework, or even
having their homework checked at home. In fact, extra attention for
such students will be increasingly funneled away from them, as the
focus shifts to teaching to the Common Core assessments.

“For these kids, school’s simply getting harder, with no significant amount of
funding set aside to provide them better access to school supplies,
computers and internet access, or any plans to expand the school
day or school year or bulk up after-school enrichment programs.
With higher test failure rates, there’s also sure to be a huge
spike in students in need of additional support through mandated
programs such as academic intervention services. Where does that
money come from?

“State officials keep arguing that we must adopt
Common Core because America’s education system lags behind those of
other industrialized nations. But they never acknowledge that much
of the disparity is accounted for by the performance of students in
poor and non-English-speaking immigrant communities, which aren’t
as prevalent in more homogeneous nations like Finland and South
Korea.”

White sagely concluded: “Locally, it was revealed by the
state last week that for the 2012-13 year, 74.7 percent of
Riverhead School District students in grades 3 through 8 failed to
meet the state’s math proficiency standard and 73.8 percent failed
to meet the ELA standard. “Those numbers will change very little
moving forward (at least not after some initial curriculum
adjustments). Here’s why. In Riverhead, scores will increase
somewhat for wealthier students but will fall at about the same
rate, with potentially disastrous results, for those who don’t have
the same support systems at home. Those in the middle will break
one way or the other. “When these disparate results between
wealthier districts and the rest of the state become apparent —
especially in New York City — the backtracking on these
numbers-driven policies will begin.

“Yes, it’s my prediction Common Core will be reversed. But it’s also my hope. My fear is that so
much money will be tied up in pricey books, testing materials and
other increasingly entrenched funding sources for this initiative
that the politicians and policymakers won’t ever budge. Meanwhile,
our teachers will remain handcuffed and will continue teaching to
tests, and more and more students who lack either a natural
aptitude for learning or parental support will disengage from the
classroom and the educational process in general.

“Eventually, we’ll be wondering how we slipped even further behind Finland and
South Korea.”

Wow.

When suburban parents have the visionary
leadership of men like Joseph Rella and Michael White, they will
not fall for the lie that three-quarters of their children are
failures. They will catch on: the kids did not fail. The tests were
designed to label them as failures. Suburban parents will see this,
rightly, as an assault on their children, not “reform.” And they
will tell their elected officials to stop these crazy policies that
hurt children.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, New York, Testing

Shepherd: Instead of Mandatory Standards for All

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2013 //
23

Robert D. Shepherd answers a fundamental question about the Common Core:

“Question: What should we have instead of a single set of mandatory standards for all?

“Answer: Competing, voluntary standards that can serve as guidelines to be followed, or not, by independent, site-managed schools in which teachers make their own decisions about what should be taught, when, and to whom.”

Categories Common Core

Who Should Go to College?

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2013 //
79

In a recent article in the New York Times about the Common Core, I was quoted saying that some kids don’t need to go to college. I was trying to explain to the reporter that the New York Common Core tests used absurdly high standards that resulted in a 70% failure rate. Not every child will make an A, I told her, and we should not fail B and C students.

This was the printed summary of our interview:

“Some critics say the new standards are simply unrealistic. “We’re using a very inappropriate standard that’s way too high,” said Diane Ravitch, an education historian who served in President George W. Bush’s Education Department but has since become an outspoken critic of many education initiatives. “I think there are a lot of kids who are being told that if they don’t go to college that it will ruin their life,” she said. “But maybe they don’t need to go to college.”

I have since heard that my remarks were elitist because everyone should go to college.

So, it is time to clarify what I believe.

Who should go to college? Everyone who wants to.

What prevents them from doing so? The cost of college today puts it out of reach for many students, and those who get a degree spend years paying back their student loans.

Education is a basic human right. Every state should have free community colleges for anyone who wants to go to college. In recent years, states have increasingly shifted the cost of higher education to students, when it should be paid for by taxation.

Does everyone “need” to go to college? No, and not everyone wants to go to college. Some people choose to go several years after high school, and some get on-the-job training.

Last week, a terrific auto mechanic fixed my car. He had not gone to college. He loves his work.

When my refrigerator broke down, two expert mechanics arrived, diagnosed the problem, and fixed it. They were proud of their skill. They were not college graduates.

In my professional life, everyone I interact with has one or several degrees. In my real life, where things break down and someone has to do work that is essential to my daily life, many–most–do not have a diploma. Should they? That should be their choice, not my compulsion.

In my ideal world, higher education would be tuition-free for those who can’t afford it. Then everyone who wants to go to a college would not be kept out by high tuition.

So to those who want a higher rate of college attendance and participation, I say “demand tuition-free colleges, open to all.”

Categories Common Core, Economy, Higher Education

Sandra Stotsky: What Does “College-Readiness” Mean?

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2013 //
45

Sandra Stotsky has emerged as a leading critic of the Common Core standards, based on her experience in Massachusetts in setting academic standards. Here, she takes issue with David Steiner, the former commissioner of education in New York.

New York State Test Results: Uninterpretable But a Portent of the Future

 

In the original version of David Steiner’s talk on the meaning of the drop in test scores in New York State (http://roosevelthouse.hunter.cuny.edu/ciep/test-scores-in-nys-its-on-all-of-us/), he says: 

 

“The truth we are now trying to tell, for the first time, is relative to something called college- and career-readiness, roughly equivalent to the ability to enter a community college without the need for remediation.”

 

That statement is also in the version appearing in his Education Next blog (http://educationnext.org/test-scores-in-nys-it’s-on-all-of-us/). 

 

Something happened to this truth in his op-ed in the New York Post on August 8, 2013.  The truth is still relative to something called college-and career-readiness, but that concept is now “roughly equivalent to the ability to enter and succeed in college.”  Not “community college.”   (http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/painful_but_necessary_process_teQvo0ptYRggOyHymASc4M). Two very different meanings and educational goals.

 

The “truth” is at the heart of the problem most critics have with Common Core; it tries, unsuccessfully, to straddle both meanings and goals.  Steiner believes that “if we are going to reduce the vast gap between high-school graduation standards and college- and career-readiness,…high-school graduation standards will have to rise.”  But when grade 11 tests based on Common Core’s standards are given across this country, low scores will not mean that high school graduation standards are rising or that Common Core’s standards are rigorous.

 

First of all, schools will be using a “college readiness” level that is “minimal” and for “non-selective colleges.”  That is the way Common Core’s level was described by Jason Zimba, the lead writer for Common Core’s mathematics standards (http://www.doe.mass.edu/boe/minutes/10/0323reg.pdf).  That level is not very different from the level for high school graduation today.  What will be different is that students deemed “college ready” will get credit for whatever freshman courses they take in that non-selective college even when they know no more than freshmen today who are placed in remedial coursework.   Second, without knowledge of the quality of the test items and the cut scores used in the past decade on high school end-of-course or exit tests, we can’t tell if low student scores on a college readiness test reflect more rigorous standards or the shock of a sudden change to higher cut scores.

 

We can have a meaningful rise in high school graduation standards only after we separate high school graduation standards from college admission standards. The latter should mean in mathematics that freshmen are capable of taking calculus and majoring in science, finance, economics, and other mathematics-dependent fields if they wish.  In fact, a mathematics professor who teaches at the University of Massachusetts/Lowell, Charles Ormsby, has recently proposed trigonometry as the college readiness level for credit-bearing freshman courses (see http://www.deseretnews.com/article/765635383/What-to-expect-of-Common-Core.html).  College readiness should also mean that students read at the high school level—the result of an intellectually appropriate secondary English curriculum.

 

Many will argue that such a level in mathematics and reading is unreasonably high and that a large number of students won’t be able to attend a real college. But maybe students who can’t meet a mathematics or reading standard that means authentic college-readiness should have alternative high schools and high school curricula to choose from, as in Massachusetts with 30 regional career/technical high schools available.  This country doesn’t need more college graduates; it needs academically stronger schools from K-12 and choices among different kinds of high schools.

Categories Common Core

Alan Singer: What’s Missing from Common Core

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2013 //
22

Alan Singer of Hofstra University has written positively about the Common Core. But he realizes that something very important is missing from them: Any interest in education for democracy. The a core is heavily focused on skills, not content. The skills of citizenship are not among them.

Categories Common Core

How Albany Hurts ELLs

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2013 //
47

State Commissioner John King, Regents’ Chancellor Merryl Tisch, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Chancellor Dennis Walcott are proud of the Common Core tests that failed 70% of the children of New York State. They say it is “”very good news” that the tests got much harder. They don’t care that the achievement gaps between the advantaged and disadvantaged grew larger. They bask in children’s defeats.

El Diario/La Prensa newspaper, written primarily for the Hispanic population in New York City, ran the following editorial, which reported the devastation to children who are not fluent in English, mostly Spanish-speaking. Only 11.4% of the English language learners were proficient in math. Only 3.4% were proficient in English.

Why are the state’s policymakers so pleased with these terrible results? Are they serial child abusers?

Here is the editorial:

The mayoral candidates have participated in many debates and forums and campaigned all over New York City. But to date, most of them have not discussed or offered plans to improve bilingual education.

In New York City’s public school system, there are 159,162 students who are known as English-language learners (ELL’s). Of them, 100,933 are Latinos.

Among ELL high school students the four-year graduation rate is below 50%, well below the average rate of 62% for non ELL students.

While all results were expected to be low, the outcomes of the most recent student testing under the new Common Core standards paint a bleaker picture. ELLs had proficiency rates of 11.4% and 3.4% in math and English, respectively.

These wide gaps in academic achievement need to be closed, for the sake of these students and the future of this city’s workforce. When strong leadership, teaching and adequate resources are in place, ELL’s are more successful and score higher.

The next mayor must make bilingual education a top priority. And this is a mission not only for the incoming chief executive but also for elected officials, community groups and state government. Among the critical steps needed:

The state must monitor and ensure that the city meets the requirements tied to the funds it receives. There are resources for ELL’s, but distribution is up to the city and whether they are reaching students in need is a big question.

The city’s Department of Education must properly train and qualify teachers and principals to meet the needs of ELL students.

Taking into account that 50% of ELL children in pre-K and kindergarten don’t speak English fluently, bilingual early childhood programs should be created.

The language of tests must match the educational level of the students. Currently, English-language learners must take standardized tests in English, which doesn’t allow for a real gauge of their academic progress. A transition process that is adjusted according to the student’s skills should be considered.

For too long, the challenge of delivering a quality education to ELL’s has been inadequately addressed and put on a backburner. The next mayor must ensure that New York City rises to a first-class public educational system and that begins with making sure all of our kids have access to excellent learning and support

Categories Common Core, New York, Testing
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