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DeVos Thinks She is Promoting the “Common Good” by Attacking Public Schools

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2017 //
87

I am writing this post for the journalists who cover education. Please fact-check every word that DeVos says. She literally doesn’t know what she is talking about.

This is the New York Times’ report on Betsy DeVos‘ press conference at Brookings.

She claims that the Bush-Obama policies of test-and-punish failed because throwing money at the problem doesn’t work. Any teacher could have told you that NCLB and Race to the Top were failures, not because they threw money at the problems, but because they spent money on failed strategies of high-stakes testing, evaluating teachers by test scores, closing schools, and opening charters.

She is so ill-informed that she would be well advised never to speak in public.

Her comparison of selecting a public school to hailing a taxi is offensive: schooling is a right guaranteed in state constitutions, taking a cab or car service is a consumer choice. She was echoing her mentor Jeb Bush, who compared choosing a school to buying a carton of milk, when he addressed the GOP convention in 2012.

As you will see if you read the account in the story, she has the unmitigated gall to say that her crusade for consumer choice in education–whether charters, vouchers, homeschooling, cyberschooling, whatever–serves the “common good.” What an outrage! Providing a high-quality public school,in every zip code serves the common good. Tossing kids to the vagaries of the free market subverts the common good. Anyone who has been reading this blog for any period of time has learned about the entrepreneurs who open charter schools to make money, about the sham real estate deals, about the voucher schools that teach science from the Bible, about the heightened segregation that always accompanies school choice. Wherever George Wallace and his fellow defenders of racial segregation are, they are rooting for DeVos.

Furthermore, she is utterly ignorant of the large body of research showing that charters do not get better results than public schools, voucher schools get worse results, and cybercharters get abysmal results.

Then she makes a crack about how America’s scores on international couldn’t get worse. She is wrong, and Grover Whitehurst should have told her so. Our scores on the international tests have never been high. Over the past Hal century, we have usually scored in the middle of the pack. Yes, our scores could get much worse. We could follow the Swedish free-market model and see our scores tumble.

Grrr. It is frustrating to see this kind of ignorance expressed by the Secretary of Education, although Arne Duncan should have lowered our expectations.

Please read “Reign of Error” and learn that test scores are the highest ever for whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians (although they went flat from 2013-2015, probably in response to the disruptions caused by Common Core); graduation rates are the highest ever; dropout rates are the lowest ever. When our students took the first international test in 1964, we came in last in one grade, and next to last in the other. But in the years since, our economy has surpassed all the other nations with higher scores. The test scores of 15-year-olds do not predict the future of the nation.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, School Choice, Teacher Evaluations, Vouchers

Peter Greene: What Two Decades of Testing Have Produced

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2017 //
10

http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-lost-years.html?m=1

Peter Greene asks a crucial question: What have we gained–or lost–because of our society’s obsession with standardized testing for at least the last two decades?

When did it start? Before No Child Left Behind was signed into law in January 2002, but not with the same intensity or the high-stakes that took hold since 2002, when the power of the federal government was used to pummel state’s and districts to comply with federal mandates.

This is one of Peter Greene’s most powerful posts. I urge you to read it.

Greene writes:

“After years of hearing how kindergarten has been turned into the new first grade, you’d think at the other end of the K-12 pipeline we would find highly advanced students. And yet– not so much

“I am not going to report a ton of research on this, because the available research is bogus and part of the actual test-centric problem. What I can tell you is what I, as an actual real live classroom teacher who knows actual real live classroom teachers, see and hear.

“This is the result of accelerated early instruction done primarily in the service of test-centric schooling (“We have to get them started early– otherwise how will they be ready for the Big Standardized Test??”)

“It is lost years.

“By the time these same start-em-early push-em-hard students arrive at high school classrooms, they are behind compared to the students that we saw twenty-five or fifteen or even ten years ago. They know fewer things, have fewer skills, and express lower academic aspirations.

“Why? I can offer a couple of theories.

They have learned to hate reading.

“They have learned that reading is this thing you do with short, disconnected, context-free selections, and when you read, you are not looking for something that sparks interest or enjoyment or curiosity or wonder or the pleasure of feeling your brain expanded and grown. You read so that, in a moment, you’ll be able to answer the questions that someone else wrote– and by “answer” we mean from the potions given the one answer that someone else has decided is “correct.” There will be no expression of your own personal insights, and never the possibility that there’s more than one way to understand the text. It is a stilted, cramped way to approach reading, and it means that students grow up with a stilted, cramped notion of what reading even is, or why human beings actually do it.

“With some luck, some students will still discover the joy and, yes, utility of reading– but they will discover outside of school, and they will not expect that the kind of reading that they love has anything to do with the test-centered “reading”: they are required to do in school. That higher level course has additional “reading”? Then I surely don’t want to sign up for that. And since the real task here, the real point of the whole exercise is not the reading, but the answering of questions about the reading– well, I bet I can find a time-saving way to cut that corner. Because after enough years of this, many students conclude that “reading” is something to actively avoid.

“There’s no pleasure there, no discovery, no ideas to mull and discuss, no characters who help us pick apart the thorny questions of how to be human in the world. Just clues for answering the BS Test questions.

“Their years are shorter.

“The school year is now shorter. It is shorter by the number of days involved in the BS Test. It is shorter by the number of days spent on pre-testing and practice testing. It is shorter by the number of days spent on instruction that is only being implemented because it will help get them ready for the test.

“By the time we’ve subtracted all those days, the school year is a few weeks, a month, maybe even more than a month shorter. It was only 180 days to begin with. The test-centric school has amped up a feature of education that has always frustrated teachers– the 180 day year is a zero sum game, a bathtub full to the absolute rim with water. You cannot add something without removing something else. A really feisty or frustrated teacher might turn to an administrator who just said “Add this to your class” and say, “Fine– what exactly do you want me to stop teaching?” But mostly we’re expected to just make do, to perform some sort of miracle by which we stuff ten more rabbits into the hat.

It doesn’t work. Every year students get less actual instruction than they used to, which means their teacher next year finds them a little bit behind, so the school year that used to start on Day One now starts on Day Thirty after the students are caught up– and then it ends on Day 160 because, you know, testing. So the following year those students are that much more behind. And so on, and so on, and so on.

“In the end, kindergarten may be the new first grade, but for many students, twelfth grade is the new eleventh grade.

“There are certainly students who escape this effect, and there are certainly clever teachers who mitigate it. But mostly the injection of toxic testing into the bloodstream of US education has had the predictable effect– it has weakened and damaged the entire body…We have wasted over fifteen years of education; some students have seen their entire schooling consumed by test-centric baloney.

“Yet we keep plowing on, keep committing to Testing Uber Alles. We are losing students, losing education opportunities, losing the chance to awaken some young humans to what they could be and could become– instead, we are still trying to mash their spirits flat under the heavy testing hand. We are losing years that we cannot get back, cannot give back, and this is not okay.”

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Testing

Leonie Haimson Is Collecting Comments on the New York ELA

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2017 //
6

The state Common Core tests that children in grades 3-8 in New York are supposed to take are shrouded in secrecy.

Last year, a teacher posted a couple of items to show how confusing and tricky they were, and the testing company went on a tear, threatening legal action against the teacher and against the blogger who posted the questions. They went to Twitter and had tweets referring to the post deleted. They went to WordPress, which hosts this blog, and removed my description of the events.

Nonetheless, Leonie Haimson has invited teachers, parents, and students to comment on the tests. You can find her invitation and responses here.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Testing

Ralph Ratto: Today I Am Ashamed to Be a Teacher

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2017 //
47

Ralph Ratto is an elementary school teacher in New York and a frequent blogger.

He describes yesterday as “one of the darkest days in education.”

Testing started yesterday. Now that the tests are untied, some children will struggle for six hours a day for six days to satisfy some adult idea that they need to be compared. Their ordeal has nothing to do with education.

“Our children will struggle with questions that have more than 1 plausible answer. They will have to select the best plausible answer. Questions will ask them, for example, to analyze paragraphs 3, 14 , 24 & 26 and then choose the answer that best describes their relationship. They will be forbidden to give their opinion in an essay as they regurgitate details to fulfill the task at hand.

“When we look at past tests, we can almost guarantee some passages will be purposely confusing due to the use of names and customs they are not familiar with. This makes it extremely difficult for them to utilize their own schema to decode the information provided. Some passages are above grade level and there are also field questions that are not counted are part of these tests.

“Teachers must sit by as our students struggle for hours. We will observed children get physically and emotionally ill taking these tests. We are forbidden to assist or even discuss the tests…

“Folks, this is institutional child abuse! I have written about this and about how this is the time of year that I am ashamed to be a teacher. We all should be ashamed, when we make these children take these tests to fulfill a political agenda and provide absolutely no valid data that helps children excel.”

Categories Childhood, Common Core, Testing

To New York Parents: A Warning about the Common Core Tests

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2017 //
14

Students in New York sat for the ELA Comin Core tests on Tuesday. The test will continue for three days, an ordeal lengthier than graduate school exams.

Leonie Haimson invited teachers and parents to share their stories about the test, which is otherwise blanketed in deep secrecy.

Testing expert Fred Smith sent this comment:

Thank you, Leonie for inviting the comments of observers who otherwise have been silenced by SED and DOE from breathing a word about the exams.

I’m sure we will find that the improved 2017 ELA exams have the same flaws as the ones Pearson has produced since 2012.

To me, the following exchange on your blog concerning field testing is particularly important because it succinctly describes what is wrong with field testing—both embedded and stand-alone field testing—which continue to plant the seeds that perpetuate bad exams. Yet, SED has run interference for the publisher, selling our kids out so tests can be developed on their backs.

”

Anonymous said…

Field testing questions embedded within today’s test hurt students. Fifth grade students deal with 5 passages. The entire third passage and the seven questions that followed were different across the various test forms, indicating that the whole text and question set will not count towards student scores. Why waste students’ time with it on an ACTUAL exam? Field test questions are notoriously ambiguous because their validity is still being assessed. My students struggled with the third passage and expended a lot of stamina on it, which hurt them on the last two passages. If we must field test passages, can we not at least place those questions LAST. I had a boy still testing at 2 pm. He spent an hour on the third text (which gained him no points) and was forced to randomly fill in bubbles for the last two stories (which do count!) in order to finish by day’s end. Where’s the logic? Why don’t we do separate field testing like a few years ago?”

Blogger Leonie Haimson said…

“The problem with separate field testing is that students don’t take it seriously and thus the results aren’t as reliable. However, having really hard questions as embedded field test questions on some exams and others easier is unfair to the students struggling with the hard questions. And the tests shouldn’t be so long! This tests endurance more than comprehension.”

Fred Smith continues:

Each year since 2012, the core-aligned test years, questions have been tried out without informing parents that their children were being used as unknowing subjects for commercial purposes. SED and DOE have gone out of their way to leave parents out of the loop for fear they would object—and say NO! And they might exercise their right to OPT OUT.

Note: Educational Testing Service, a testing giant, recently acquired Questor which had been awarded a 5-year contract in 2016 to succeed Pearson in furnishing the statewide exams. It now appears that Questor merely served as a pass-through window, allowing Pearson to exit and be replaced by ETS. Both companies have played a major role in promoting the Common Core and the riches it opens up to them in marketing related educational material. (Yet, even ETS, which administers the SAT, makes test-takers aware that parts of that exam are experimental.)

Leonie, please include the following link to an opinion piece I wrote on the grim reality of a state testing program that has been abetted by SED and DOE through their efforts to suppress information. They treat parents with disdain. Diane Ravitch ran it yesterday.

Fred Smith: The Pathetic Lies of the New York State Education Department, in Service of the Testing Regime

It expands on the above.

Fred

__,_._,___

Categories Common Core, New York, Testing

New York Opt Out Leaders Prepare for Renewal of Common Core Test Boycotts

By dianeravitch
March 26, 2017 //
6

The epicenter of New York’s historic test refusal movement is gearing up for a repeat performance when testing begins on Monday.

The state is hoping that the introduction of computer-based testing will mollify parents but it shouldn’t. Numerous studies have shown that students get lower scores on computer-based tests than on tests that require pencils. Some children–especially in younger grades–are not adept with keyboard skills. Others find that scrolling up and down the online format is confusing as compared to using pencil-and-paper.

But the fundamental problems remain. Many parents and educators don’t like the Common Core. The results are reported far too late to help teachers because their students have moved to another grade. Students are not allowed to discuss the test questions or to learn what they answered right or wrong. In short, the tests have no instructional value. They are simply a way of ranking students without helping them.

They are pointless.

Enough parents understand this, which feeds the opt out movement.

If the Regents and the State Education Department can’t address the genuine concerns of parents, they should stop the testing. Until they do, parents should not allow their children to take the tests.

“Public school districts across Long Island and the state are bracing for what many educators and parents expect to be a fifth consecutive year of Common Core test boycotts in grades three through eight, even as eight districts in Nassau and Suffolk counties and dozens elsewhere introduce computerized versions of the exams.

“The state’s time window for the English language arts test starts Monday and closes a week later, both on the Island and statewide. Extra days were added, as compared with last year’s schedule, to allow flexibility in giving the computer-based exams. The traditional pencil-and-paper tests will be given Tuesday through Thursday.

“Officials in some Long Island districts put estimates of opt-outs at 40 percent to 70 percent of their eligible students.

“Brian Conboy, superintendent of Seaford schools, said he expects the boycott of English exams in his district to run close to last year’s 67.8 percent.

“I’m a firm believer in assessment,” Conboy said. “However, assessment has to be developmentally appropriate for students. In the case of how these assessments rolled out, all trust was lost.”

“Cheryl Haas, who lives in the Hauppauge district and is keeping her twin daughters out of the eighth-grade English test, also predicted that refusals would equal last year’s local rate of 71.9 percent. Haas, a former teacher, agreed that tests must be developmentally appropriate — that is, not beyond students’ age and skill levels.

“Until then, parents will stand united to do what is best for their children,” Haas said.

“Some boycott organizers noted that opt-out rates are difficult to project in advance, because many parents wait until the first week of testing to file refusal forms with their districts.

“More than a year has passed since the state Board of Regents moved to ease anxieties over testing by declaring a moratorium, until the 2019-20 school year, on using test scores in any way that might reflect poorly on students’ academic records or as a component in teachers’ job evaluations.

“The nation’s largest test-resistance movement, with Long Island as its epicenter, has emerged in New York State since 2013. Last April, the number of students in grades three through eight in the two-county region who skipped the English assessment reached 89,036, or 51.6 percent of the total eligible, based on data from 108 districts that responded to a Newsday survey.

“Reasons behind the phenomenon: outrage and anxiety among teachers, parents and students over a series of educational reforms pushed by state and federal authorities, without adequate time for teachers and students to prepare.

“Into the mixture this year add the introduction of computer-based tests.

“Schools in five districts in Suffolk County and three in Nassau are going with the electronic versions: Bridgehampton, Franklin Square, Islip, Massapequa, Mineola, Mount Sinai, Longwood and Remsenburg-Speonk.

“Districts on the Island that are administering tests electronically will do so only in selected schools or on selected grade levels. Other students in those districts will take traditional paper-and-pencil tests, as will students elsewhere.

“Computer-based testing also is scheduled in three nonpublic schools — Our Lady of Lourdes in West Islip, St. Patrick’s in Huntington and St. William the Abbot in Seaford — as well as in three special-education centers run by Eastern Suffolk BOCES.

“State math tests for grades three through eight are scheduled May 1-8.
Both kinds of tests, computer-based and paper-based, require three consecutive days for completion within the Education Department’s specified time periods.

“Statewide, about 150 districts will offer computerized testing in English, and 136 will do the same in math, according to the state Education Department. The state has about 700 districts in all.”

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Industry, New York, Opt Out, Parents, Technology, Computers, Testing

Mercedes Schneider on Hanna Skandera, Felled by the Common Core

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2017 //
7

Mercedes Schneider comments here on the Senate GOP decision not to move forward with Hanna Skandera as Assistant Secretary of Education for Elementary and Secondary Education because of her Common Core love.

Skandera is a protege of Jeb Bush. She was deputy commissioner of education in Florida.

Since she took the job in New Mexico, despite lacking the statutory requirement of real education experience, she tried to impose the “Florida model” of charters, virtual charters, A-F grading, high-stakes testing and VAM. COmmon Core was part of the Florida model.

There is something ironic here.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, New Mexico, Privatization, Testing

GOP Nixes Hanna Skandera for Top Job Because of Her Fervent Support for Common Core

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2017 //
7

Politico reported this morning that Hanna Skandera, the Commissioner of Education in New Mexico, cannot be confirmed because of her advocacy for Common Core. Skandera is a protege of Jeb Bush. Although she has never been a teacher or a principal, she does have some practical experience in education, unlike DeVos. Skandera is also a proponent of high-stakes testing and VAM. Best not to give her the power to push Arne Duncan’s failed ideas nationally.

SCOOP: SENATE GOP SCUTTLES SKANDERA NOMINATION: Wondering when those Education Department vacancies will be filled? Well, the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education may still be up for grabs after the Trump administration recently reversed plans to nominate New Mexico Education Secretary Hanna Skandera for the assistant secretary job, POLITICO has learned. The administration’s decision to pull back an offer came after Republicans raised concerns about Skandera’s support for the Common Core standards. The offer appears to have been extended before Hill Republicans were consulted.

– “About a dozen Republican offices were skeptical that they could ever vote yes” on Skandera because of her embrace of the standards, said a senior GOP aide. Those English and math standards are reviled by conservatives as a symbol of federal overreach. Republicans also weren’t interested in another fight over an education nominee after Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ bruising confirmation process. Skandera, who sits on the governing board for the Common Core-aligned PARCC test, declined to comment.

– Skandera has about a year and a half left on the job in New Mexico and many believed that her extensive K-12 and higher education experience made her a good bet for a federal job. Continued lack of top staff at the Education Department could hamper the Trump administration’s priorities and ability to work with states on the Every Student Succeeds Act. “Hanna was as good a candidate as they were ever going to get and they do need someone of that intelligence and stature as part of that team,” said one advocate. Caitlin Emma has the story.

http://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning-education/2017/03/senate-gop-scuttles-skandera-nomination-219385

Categories Accountability, Alternate Route To Certification, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Testing

Andrea Gabor: Joel Klein Spends an Evening with His Friends at TFA, Berating Public Schools

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2017 //
20

Andrea Gabor recently attended an invitation-only event in New York City to meet Joel Klein at Teach for America headquarters in lower Manhattan, where he reflected on his legacy.

She writes:

How did Klein feel about his legacy—what was he most proud of, what would he do differently—especially in light of the policies of his successor?

This would be the second question of the evening posed to Klein. And the former schools chancellor’s response, at first, surprised me.

What he most regretted: “We never got teachers on our side. We didn’t communicate and listen well enough.”

However, Klein quickly followed with what he was most proud of: Opening 200 charter schools.

And, where he saw the biggest problem in New York City schools: The teachers union “polarized” the teachers.

Here, in a nutshell is the contradiction—even the tragedy—of the Bloomberg/Klein regime: Klein, a child of a “dysfunctional inner-city home”, who saw public school as his refuge and claims that his teachers made the difference in transforming his life, sees the proliferation of charter schools, not the improvement of public schools, as his most important legacy. (A biography, incidentally, not unlike that of former Education Secretary John King, another reformer who prioritized privatization and carrot-and-stick policies for teachers.)

It is hard to remember now how disliked Klein was by teachers, not just the union. He turned the schools into a test-and-punish experiment where teachers were expendable. He closed many schools, closed almost every large high schools, fired most of the city’s principals or drove them away, including some of the best veterans. He gave preferential treatment to charter schools, especially Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academies.

It is hard to know why Klein dislikes public schools as much as he does. It wasn’t based on his experience as chancellor. He came into the job with a strong conviction that the public schools were a disaster and it would take business thinking to fix them. He reorganized the system at least four times. He brought in Michael Barber (Sir Deliverology, now the Chief Academic Officer at Pearson) to advise him. He boasted about “reforms” on the day he launched them, then overlooked them when they silently disappeared. He surrounded himself with young business school graduates and lawyers, not educators, and invented new titles to enable them to serve (“chief talent officer,” “chief knowledge officer,” etc.)

After he left the school system, he joined Rupert Murdoch and urged him to buy Wireless Generation, a tech company that had worked for the Department of Education. Murdoch bought it for $300 million or so, and invested about $1 billion in Klein’s tech company called Amplify. Amplify planned to revolutionize education through technology, and it built its own tablets and curriculum. I hear the curriculum was good, but the tablets had many technical problems (the screens cracked, the plugs caught fire, etc.) A few years ago, haviglost hundreds of millions, Murdoch dumped the company, which was bought by allies of Klein. Klein soon was pushed out, and he is now at an online healthcare business called Oscar, owned by Jared Kushner’s brother.

After he left the NYC schools, Klein continued to rail against public education. He wrote articles decrying the high cost of teacher pensions (but when he left office, he immediately filed to collect a pension of $34,000 a year for life based on his eight years as chancellor).

The piece-de-resistance of his anti-public school activism was a report that he and Condoleezza issued, under the sponsorship of the Council of Foreign Relations, claiming that America’s public schools are so dreadful that they are a risk to national security. Their cures: Everyone should adopt the Common Core, and every state needs charter schools and vouchers.

Why does he hate public schools so? He often claimed that his own life was changed by his public schools and teachers. But he wanted to move in a world of elites where no one ever went to public schools and where it was conventional wisdom that public schools stink. He reflected not his own experience, but the class into which he aspired to belong.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Klein, Joel, New York City, Privatization

What Reformers Don’t Understand: “The Process of Little Things”

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2017 //
6

Reformers have grand ideas for shaking up the system. Blowing it up. Changing everything. Blowing up teacher education. Imposing national standards overnight. Turning schools into teacher-proof institutions. Teaching children the habits of highly effective scholars (age 7).

But, writes David Greene and Bernie Heller, teachers understand that real change is not in the Big Things. Real change happens because of “the process of little things.”


The reform of education is focused on the big changes as opposed to understanding that change is a step by step process. The educrats are playing for the big moment, yet they fil to understand that they can’t pull big moments out of thin air, consequently, their “big moments” exist in vacuums, totally disconnected and disembodied from reality.

From teaching students to be better writers, better students and better thinkers, to mentoring teachers to be better at teaching, to helping players to become better hitters or shooters, it was and is always about starting at step one and moving forward, step by step.

The reformers and the experts want to be able to say they did big things, that they changed everything, the only problem is, you can’t start out “big” – you have to start with the little things, and string them all together.

Are there poor teachers? Of course there are. There were bad teachers when I went to school, there were bad teachers when you went to school. If I were to ask you how many good or great teachers you had all the way through your college career, how many would you be able to list? I’d guess three or four- if you were lucky. Despite that fact, you are still successful today, you still survived. Good and great teachers don’t grow on trees and they are not “developed” or created in special teaching programs or institutes.

Good or great teachers grow and develop through experience and experience takes time and patience. Step by step. Slowly, based on little things strung together. When you marry that time and patience to extraordinary passion, you have a good or great teacher. Perhaps that is why there are so very few of them….

Reformers are impatient. It is good to be impatient. But it is even better to understand the consequences of what you propose and preferably to live with them.

Making education work is NOT as hard and as complicated as it is being made out to be. Education used to be about asking students to reach a little further than they would be comfortable reaching for on their own. It used to be about making sure that when a student received a passing grade, it was clear that grade honestly represented a percentage that symbolized that he/she had completed in that class as opposed to that grade representing a percentage identifying a teacher as competent or incompetent- it still is. It used to be about how graduation symbolized the preparation to move forward as opposed to an empty symbol that “proves” the reform being enacted is valid and viable.

The truth is that long before common core learning ever occurred, there was learning and that learning produced the computer, iTunes, iPhones, innumerable apps, Kindle, space travel, HIV medicines, etc., etc. The truth is we must look to what has always worked- not just for a year or two, or until it could make some corporation or hedge fund a profit- but what has been true about education since Socrates and Aristotle- that education must be respected, and not simply treated as some political exclamation point inserted into some campaign speech, that everyone must see and recognize its value.

We must return to the idea that learning is extremely dependent on the desire or curiosity of the learner to want to go further, to want to know more, to challenge him/herself. We need to stop “looking for the next magic bullet” or the “next big thing”.

I suppose the reformers mean well, (but like they say, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”). The fact of the matter is that just because they mean well doesn’t mean what they are doing is right, just as simply because people disagree with what the reformers are doing doesn’t make those who disagree the anti-education or anti-student devil.

As former public school students and an educators with close to four decades of experience, we know the value of education. We know schools matter in students’ lives. We know education is the great equalizer, and we know PUBLIC schools work. They are not perfect- they never were. Nothing is. We also know that many public schools work quite well, and that those labeled as dysfunctional or failing can again. The people criticizing and castigating them must put in the same amount of energy and effort and enthusiasm in looking at all thelittel steps necedssary in fixing them as they spend trying to shut them down.

Stop looking at the next big thing and look at the elephant in the room: The process of little things.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Teachers and Teaching, Testing
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