Thousands of students refused the PARCC test in Néw Jersey, including 1,000 students at Governor Christie’s alma mater, Livingston High School.
In one district, 30% of the students refused to take the test.
Archives for category: Common Core
Hundreds of high school students walked out of Common Core tests in New Mexico, despite administrators’ threats that they may not be able to graduate. Many carried hand-lettered signs with statements like “We are not a test score.” U.S. News reports on the walkout here.
State Commissioner of Education Hanna Skandera, who previously worked for then-Governor Jeb Bush in Florida, is an avid supporter of Common Core and the PARCC tests. She is a member of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change and previously worked for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in California. The Senate in New Mexico delayed her confirmation because she has never been a teacher, which is a requirement for her post.
Earlier, Chicago Superintendent Barbara Byrd-Bennett said the city schools were not ready to give the PARCC test. She planned to give the test to only 10% of students. Federal and state pressure was applied, and the city caved to threats. It’s not about what’s best for children. It is power politics, and Arne Duncan’s demand that no child go untested.
NEWS RELEASE
IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Stephanie Gadlin
March 2, 2015 312-329-6250
CTU Statement on Chicago Public Schools’ Decision to Cower to Federal Threats and Administer PARCC Assessment
CHICAGO—The Chicago Teachers Union is extremely disappointed in the decision of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s handpicked Chicago Board of Education to administer the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) throughout the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) district in the wake of intimidation by the Illinois State Board of Education and U.S. Department of Education. The district’s choice to back down from state and federal threats to withhold education funding if the PARCC was not administered throughout CPS allows for continued policy measures to disrupt the lives of students, handcuffs classroom educators and holds the sword of disinvestment over children and communities who need resources the most.
“This has the potential to blow up and be a tremendous failure, because CPS itself has said the district may not be able to handle a proper rollout at this time due to technical issues and frustration among students, teachers and administration over administering the test properly,” said CTU President Karen Lewis. “But instead of understanding those issues, the state and the feds decided to threaten to withhold resources from a district that’s one of the most poorly resourced in the nation.”
By changing course on a previous decision to limit the PARCC to just 10 percent of CPS schools students, the district will continue to burden elementary school students with the inhumane pressure of over-testing, valuable time away from classroom instruction. A number of CPS teachers who have taken the sample PARCC test have stated that the assessment is inappropriate for the target 3rd through 8th grades, and is coyly designed for students to fail.
The district’s decision to administer the PARCC test comes nearly a year to the day after the boycott of the now-defunct Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) by teachers at Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy on March 3, 2014.
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Bob Braun posts an eloquent letter written by 35 teachers at Science Park High School in Newark, one of the top schools in New Jersey.
The teachers write:
To Whoever Will Listen:
We are teachers at Science Park High School in Newark, New Jersey, and we are deeply disturbed by the thirty days of disruption being forced on our school. In the coming weeks, like the rest of New Jersey, we will be forced to administer the PARCC exam. A few weeks ago we saw the schedule: three weeks of testing in March, followed by three weeks of testing in May. This total does not include the additional week of make-up testing following each of the three-week periods. This total does not include the days of mandatory test preparation to familiarize students with the exam’s very specific computer interface. This total does not include the thousands of hours of training of teachers and administrators to plan, schedule, and execute this exam. We honestly believe that The State of New Jersey, by forcing us to administer this time-devouring test, is engaged in behavior destructive to the educational well being of our students.
We believe that the thirty days of disruption could just as easily be called the thirty days of destruction. Science Park High School is a Blue Ribbon school. We, like many teachers in Newark and throughout New Jersey, have dedicated huge parts of our lives to making certain that our students receive an excellent education. We come in early. We stay late. We give up our weekends. We wouldn’t change our dedication because we love what we do. We love the students we teach. Our love forces us to say something.
We do not believe that parents and administrators who work for the State of New Jersey understand the destructive impact this testing will have on our ability to teach students. Some teachers will be removed from their classes for a week. The second week that same teacher may not have any students because they are being tested. In the third week they may have only partially filled classes. The disruption will continue with some students still absent from class during the fourth week of make-up exams. Then we have spring break, three weeks of teaching in April, and in May we test for a second three-to-four week period. We say again, in May we test for a second three- to four-week period!
We value our time in the classroom with our students. Teachers are important to the educational process. It is wrong to stop the educational process for close to 17 percent of the year to administer an exam. We could talk about further objections, like the use of a confusing computer interface, or the use of an exam that many highly educated and successful people have difficulty completing. But thirty days of testing is sufficiently outrageous and — we believe — indefensible.
There are three questions this schedule raises that demand answers:
1. Why is 30 days of testing disruption more beneficial than 30 days of classroom instruction? We have never heard a pedagogical justification for this and could not imagine what one would be. Explain to us how this is about the education of our children.
2. How much are the State of New Jersey and private foundations spending on the creation, training, execution, and grading of this exam, and who is financially benefitting from this? There is so much in education that we cannot afford, that we must fund out of our own pockets. There are so many teachers and clerks and drug counselors and attendance counselors who have been laid off, in our own building, in our district, in our state. What is the financial bottom line?
3. If this PARCC exam is so valuable and good, how many of New Jersey’s top private schools have adopted it? Is Delbarton or Newark Academy or Pingry subjecting their students to the “educational benefits” of this exam?
Although we, the undersigned education workers, do not represent the entire faculty at Science Park High School, we are confident that every member of our faculty shares our critique of this exam. We are even confident that many principals and superintendents not brought in by the current regime share our critique. Yet many are afraid to speak out because they fear retaliation against themselves, their principal, or even the entire staff or school if they dare voice their honest, professional opinion.
We who have signed this letter cannot live in fear. We are offended by the situation in which we find ourselves, in which education policy is dictated by billionaires who never taught a day in their lives, while our patiently gained professional expertise is ignored. Even worse, we are offended by a situation where many honest, hard-working education workers feel afraid to voice their professional opinion for fear of backlash.
What type of teachers would we be if we taught our students about the First Amendment, yet did not voice our professional opinion? What type of teachers would we be if we taught our students about civil rights movements, yet neglected to defend them from this exam? With these questions in our conscience, we are not afraid to issue this clear statement.
We love teaching. We love our students. Our collective educational opinion is that PARCC’s thirty days of disruption is bad for our schools and bad for our children.
[Bob Braun’s note: Due to technical difficulties, I was unable to reproduce the signature pages of this statement. However, these are the names appended to the statement. Because the names were hand-written, I may not spell some correctly. Corrections are requested and will be made ASAP. My apologies for any mistakes. Here is the list of names in the order they appear on the statement:]
Branden Rippey
Hubert McQueen
Filip Spirovski
Kim Schmidt
Jose Gomez-Rivera
Anthony Moreno
Luan Goxhaj
Patrick Farley
Ana Serro
Cheryl Bell
Jonathan Alston
Randy Mitchell
Claudia Amanda Pecor
Justin Mohren
Cristiano Liborio
Carolina Parasiti
Doretta Sockwell
Aziz Kenz
Marta Ilewska
Veronica Naegele
Richard R. Selander
Chaunte’ Killingsworth
Jim McMahon
Marcellus D. Green
Michelle Benjamin
Peter Wang
Mario McMiller
Ben Patiak
Lisa Bento
Lorenzo Cruz
Jeanina Perez
Pamela Cole
Ana Aranda
Joseph Okil
Philip Yip
Florida has a bigger problem than opt outs: early this morning many districts experienced major technological problems with the state exams.
Miami-Dade (the largest district in the state), Palm Beach County, Pasco County, and Okaloosa County have suspended testing due to computer failures.
Look for updates here on the Facebook page of Parents Across Florida.
https://www.facebook.com/ParentsAcrossFlorida?ref=hl
Jeb Bush, the father of Florida’s punitive testing and accountability system, was expecting to get a big boost for his campaign from the Common Core testing. He is the leading proponent of computer-driven everything; his Foundation for Educational Excellence (now headed by Condaleeza Rice) is funded by major tech corporations who are heavily invested in educational software and hardware.
Here is the first story about the breakdown of state testing in major school districts.
Michael Elliott is an excellent film-maker whose children attend public schools in New York City. He understands the fight against high-stakes testing. Here is a short video he created to tell the story about how parents feel about PARCC.
Neil McClusky of the libertarian CAT Institute blames advocates of Common Core for the public’s confusion about them.
They say it is not a curriculum, but others admit it is a curriculum.
They say it contains specific content that all children should know, but simultaneously say it has no specific content.
They say it was written by teachers. They say it was written by governors (who knew they had the expertise or time?) They say 45 states voluntarily endorsed the standards (before they were finished!). They say the federal government had no role in Common Core (and fail to mention that states were not eligible for billions of Race to the Top dollars unless they pledged to adopt college-and-career-ready standards, of which there was only one choice.
Of course the public is confused. They (we) have been fed a steady diet of lies about the origin, valdity, and efficacy of Common Core.
Ira Shor writes:
I refused PARCC for my 5th grade son in Montclair, NJ, and refused all PARCC test prep. AP at his school said that an alternate learning session will be available for him. My exchanges with AP and Principal have always been cordial; it’s the Broadie Supt. hired by the reactionary Board of Ed appointed by our developer Mayor which has created hostile turmoil and aggressive punishment here. Despite their fight to silence and suppress parent criticism and opting-out, the movement grows all around them. We parents have the power to shut down PARCC, CCSS, Gates, Pearson, Duncan, and their paid cronies in govt and media if we refuse to let them experiment on our kids with nonstop testing and refuse to let them waste our precious school moneys on endless tech buys, consultants, bandwidth, software, etc. We are gaining ground and soon will be an idea whose time has come, overtaking the bullies and the billionaire boys club with our multitude of concerned parents allied with all those brave enough to join against the abuse of our kids and the wreckage of our public schools.
The Education Writers Association held a panel discussion on the future of the Common Core. The panel included strong advocates for the controversial standards but no equally strong critic.
Is EWA afraid of a genuine debate?
“DENVER, Colorado – The Common Core needs to avoid an internet catastrophe with its new tests for the country to embrace the new multi-state education standards, a panel of experts agreed Thursday,
“It will need to survive the release of low test scores in late summer, just as Republican Presidential debates begin.
“And it will have to overcome ongoing “misinformation” – as supporters call it – before the public will fully accept it.”
Very likely there was no discussion of the millions of dollars spent by the Gates Foundation to sell the standards. Some of those millions went to EWA panelists.
It would not have been difficult to find a credible critic, like Anthony Cody, Carol Burris, Stephen Krashen, or other qualified voices.
Denny Taylor is Professor Emerita of Literacy Studies at Hofstra University. She has won many awards for her writing about literacy and literature. She is also the founder and CEO of Garn Press, which published the book I am reviewing (and also published Anthony Cody’s The Educator and the Oligarch).
Save Our Children, Save Our School, Pearson Broke the Golden Rule is a political satire about the current education “reform” movement. It takes place in an imaginary “Cafe Griensteidl” in New York City, at 72nd Street and Broadway, where the author and a friend meet for coffee. In this comedy, the leading players in the “reform” movement appear at the cafe and get into discussion or debate with the author. Nine powerful men happen to be in the cafe, including Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Joel Klein, and Michael Barber (of Pearson). They banter with the author and her friend. She makes clear that these nine powerful men know nothing about education yet are taking control of the American public school system.
The men leave, and in the last “Act” of the book, twelve eminent female scholars (living and dead) talk about what is happening and the need to resist. The chapter is headed by this statement: “In which twelve venerable women scholars with more than 500 years of teaching experience refuse to capitulate to the demands made by nine rich men who have no teaching qualifications or teaching experience.” Hannah Arendt, Virginia Woolf, Simone Weil, Adrienne Rich, Yetta Goodman, Toni Morrison, and more are there. As the wise women speak, people come into the cafe and make YouTube videos, Tweet, or just listen. Yetta begins to rap. Horns honk. Traffic jams form at the corner of 72nd Street and Broadway. The women at the table clap along with Yetta’s rapping. The women talk about how to stop the corporate takeover of U.S. education.
Denny Taylor, sitting at the table with the great women, says, “Children have a right to a free and public education. For the pursuit of human knowledge and understanding that is free of corporate greed.”
“We should not have to ask permission for teachers to teach in developmentally appropriate ways that inspire and excite, and enhance our children’s incredible capacity to learn–
“–for the sheer joyfulness of their lives and for their lightness of being.”
The great women agree: We are and always will be defenders of every child’s right to a childhood free of despots and demons, except those they imagine when playing with friends….”
The author says, “Dump Pearson….Barber and Pearson are taking our children in the wrong direction,” she says. “His Whole System of Global Education Revolution is a global social catastrophe, a total system failure.”
Others ask how to stop this recklessness. The author responds, “The madness will stop if we refuse to participate. The struggle for democracy is always ground up….Make it a crime for oligarchs to interfere with democratic social systems. It’s vote tampering on a national scale.” She adds, referring to Bill Gates, “He’s violating the rights of fifty million children, jeopardizing their future. Send him to jail.”
“Tell Gates we choose decency and democracy and not the indecency of his oligarchy. He does not have the power to dictate how our children are taught in public schools.
“Tell him we refuse to participate in his Common Core experiments. Ban the use of galvanic skin devices in affective computing trials that he’s funded.
“Tell him to stop wasting his money. To spend it for the Common Good. Build new public schools. Create parks in poor urban neighborhoods. Make sure there are health centers. Medical care for everyone in the community.
“Tell him to put his money into Earth-friendly low-income housing.
“Libraries. Media centers.
“Work with local leaders. Make sure they’re not exploited…
“Pearson could too. Tell Barber we take back our independence. That US public schools are no longer under Pearson’s colonial rule.”
The book is funny, learned, and zany. If you want to order it, go to http://www.garnpress.com.
Diane Ravitch's blog 