The ever-dazzling Julian Vasquez Heilig here addresses the burning issue of the day: whose opinion matters?
Or stated another way: who lives in an “alternate universe”?
Archives for category: Duncan, Arne
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan blasted critics of Race to the Top and his “reforms” as “armchair pundits.”
Anthony Cody writes about his remarks here and reproduces part of his remarks (not the part where he boasts of his many “accomplishments” as Secretary of Education). I expect he made no reference to the high levels of demoralization among teachers and principals documented by the annual MetLife survey. But, hey, disruption is part of the plan, right? Pushing out the veterans is not counted a bad thing in Arne’s play book. He likes the nimble kids who stay two years, then leave.
Does Duncan think that teachers and principals are armchair pundits?
Does he think that researchers who have demonstrated the futility of value-added assessments like Linda Darling-Hammond (candidate Obama’s education advisor in 2008) are armchair pundits?
Does he think that researchers like David Berliner, who has studied the effects of poverty on academic achievement for decades, is an armchair pundit?
I guess he means me. I have studied the history and politics of American education for more than forty years. It is true that I believe what Duncan calls “reform” is a disaster that is demoralizing teachers and principals, harming communities, and doing incalculable damage to American education. I explain why I believe this in my new book, “Reign of Error.” I document everything I write.
I would like Secretary Duncan to explain why he thinks that more testing and more standardization and more charter schools is better than placing his bets on the research-based recommendations in my book.
I would like him to explain why the Obama administration’s education policies are so closely aligned–nearly identical–to the failed NCLB policies.
Looking for common ground.
Matt Bruenig has written in many journals. He also has
a blog, where this post appeared. He analyzes a fairly
straightforward question: Can schools end poverty? The column is a
commentary on the “reformers” who say that we can’t end poverty
until we fix schools, or something to that effect. We have heard
the same statement from Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan, Joel Klein,
Bill Gates, and others. Duncan says that even the President agrees.
Bruenig analyzes these three statements:
- Education is a way to end
poverty. - Education is the best
way to end poverty. - Education
is the only way to end
poverty.
He starts his short analysis with
this statement: These are all false, but since number
three is the one Rhee and Duncan and the education reformer crowd
pushes, let’s start there. It is flatly not the case that to end
poverty you need to alter education. Americans should know this.
Starting from the 1960s, we
as a society cut outrageously high rates of elderly poverty by
71%. We did that by sending old people checks called
Social Security. We also know from international data that
low-poverty countries get that way through tax and transfer
schemes, not unlike Social Security (I, II).
If you are saying nothing but education will dramatically cut
poverty, when things other than education absolutely will and have,
you are an enemy of the poor. You are contributing to a discursive
world where people ignore the easiest, most proven ways to cut
poverty. If this is true, and I think it is, all the
energy and billions expended on school reforms that are totally
lacking in evidence–like VAM and merit pay and privatization of
public funds–is a handy distraction from meaningful ways to end
poverty.
Julian Vasquez Heilig is the most creative blogger I know in terms of his brilliant combination of flashy graphics, research, and informed commentary.
Here he describes the century-long battle between the managerial elites—who believe that schools can be improved by data, management, mandates and standardization, always controlled by them–and the pedagogical crowd–who have fought the managers that the starting point in education is the students, how they learn, what they need, not the management.
It is Taylor vs. Dewey.
The Taylorites run the show for now. They ARE the status quo.
The day of reckoning is coming.
They are losing because everything they have done has failed.
This poll of DC insiders shows a deep pessimism about the prospects for Common Core and reauthorization of NCLB.
Most interesting observations:
• “Any bandwidth Congress has seems to be devoted to re‐litigating the health care act.”
• “There’s no sense of compromise and no incentive on either side to try to compromise.”
• “Arne Duncan has so mangled federal education at this point that it’s going to take a new administration and secretary to reframe the debate and offer a path forward.”
Jason Stanford has written a brilliant analysis of the efforts by state officials in Texas and California to cut back on unnecessary testing, and of Secretary Duncan’s rejection of both requests.
Just in terms of federalism, this situation shows how Washington has now taken control out of the hands of the states, which can no longer decide what is best for their students, even though they put up 90% of the funding.
In California, state officials want to drop the state tests so they can make the transition to Common Core testing, but Duncan said no. The California legislature voted to drop the state tests. This should lead to an interesting showdown between the state and the federal government. Someone might even remember the tenth amendment to the Constitution.
In Texas, state officials developed a plan to test the kids who needed testing and to reduce testing for the kids who don’t.
Stanford writes:
Meanwhile in Texas, the Department of Education rejected a common-sense reform in, of all places, Texas. Legislators and Gov. Rick Perry recognized that it wasn’t necessary to force every child to take every test every year to keep them on track. Under current law, a Texas schoolchild has to pass 17 tests to get to high school. This takes months out of the school year, costs millions of dollars, and produces data of dubious value.
For example, a child who passes a reading test one year is overwhelmingly likely to pass it the next year, according to data from the Texas Education Agency. The legislature asked for a federal waiver to let students who passed their state standardized tests in the 3rd and 5thgrades to skip the tests in the 4th, 6th and 7th grades. Teachers could focus on those kids who needed more help, students who had mastered the work would be freed up to learn new things, and taxpayers would save $13.4 million over two years.
This was a great example of government getting out of its own way, but there was a hitch. Because the Texas law conflicted with No Child Left Behind, Texas needed permission from the U.S. Department of Education to stop giving tests to kids who did not need them in order to produce data that told us nothing.
Unfortunately, Obama’s Education Department said no.
Gosh, when even Texas thinks there is too much testing, that should say something about how far we have wandered from common sense.
The New York Times magazine has a long article by Carlo Rotella about the first trial of the Amplify tablet in the schools of Guilford County, North Carolina. Amplify is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and run by Joel Klein, the former chancellor of the NewYork City public schools.
Klein is certain that public education in America is a disaster and the only things that can save it are disruptive technology and the Common Core. Those are the same recommendations made by the task force Klein co-chaired for the Council on Foreign Relations last year.
Happily for Murdoch, Klein, and other apostles of saving the schools by selling technology to them, they have a friend in Arne Duncan. He is quoted as follows:
“To keep doing the same thing we’ve been doing for the past hundred years — everybody working on the same thing at the same time, not based on competency. . . .” He sighed and let the thought trail off, then added his standard reminder that we must equip our students to compete with counterparts in India and China. He did acknowledge, though, that the fear of falling behind puts added pressure on school systems to do something, anything, which then makes them more vulnerable to rushed decisions and to peddlers of magic bullets. “There are a lot of hucksters out there,” he said.
“Duncan, whose longtime allies include Joel Klein, Bill Gates and other apostles of disruption, has a record of supporting reforms that increase the role of market forces — choice, competition, the profit motive — in education. He wants private enterprises vying to make money by providing innovative educational products and services, and sees his role as “taking to scale the best practices” that emerge from this contest.”
One of the trainers of teachers uses a phrase that we have now heard about a million times , meaning that we are experimenting on you and don’t know how things will turn out: “Another PLEF, Wenalyn Bell, told her group, “It’s like building a plane while it’s flying.”
Rotella retains a healthy skepticism. He knows that Los Angeles laid off teachers while it spent big bucks to buy iPads.
He ends with these observations from his last interview with Klein.
“Take Finland,” Klein continued, citing everyone’s favorite example of a country that puts its money on excellent teachers, not technology, and routinely finishes at the top in international assessments. “There’s a high barrier for entry into the teaching profession,” the kind that lets in the Robin Britts and keeps out weaker aspirants. Teachers there are also well paid, held in high esteem and trusted to get results without being forced to teach to the test. But America’s educational system is a lot bigger, messier, less centralized and more focused on market-based solutions than Finland’s. Also, our greater income inequality and thinner social safety net make for much wider variation in student performance, and a toxic political climate has encouraged our traditional low regard for teachers to flower into outright contempt.
“Still, if everyone agrees that good teachers make all the difference, wouldn’t it make more sense to devote our resources to strengthening the teaching profession with better recruitment, training, support and pay? It seems misguided to try to improve the process of learning by putting an expensive tool in the hands of teachers we otherwise treat like the poor relations of the high-tech whiz kids who design the tool.
“Are our overwhelmed, besieged, haphazardly recruited, variably trained, underpaid, not-so-elite teachers, in fact, the potential weak link in Amplify’s bid to disrupt American schooling? Klein said that we have 3.5 million elementary- and middle-school teachers. “We have to put the work of the most brilliant people in their hands,” he said. “If we don’t empower them, it won’t work.” Behind the talking points and buzz words, what I heard him saying was Yes.”
Our frequent commenter KrazyTA was not pleased when Arne Duncan told California it could not stop state testing while introducing Common Core testing.
This was his observation:
This latest statement by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan needs to be viewed in context.
If you read his speech to the April 2013 American Education Research Association he is: for standardized testing and against it; it is useful and not useful and somewhat useful; education is all about testing and not all about testing and somewhat about testing; tests measure and mismeasure and somewhat measure learning and teaching; and to get to the point before his distinguished audience, schools and test experts need to get their testing act together. The clincher: “Some schools have an almost obsessive culture around testing, and that hurts their most vulnerable learners and narrows the curriculum. It’s heartbreaking to hear a child identify himself as “below basic” or “I’m a one out of four.””
Link: http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/choosing-right-battles-remarks-and-conversation
What is one to make of all this ‘word salad’ that wanders all over the place and seeks to placate and deflect? Teresa Watanabe let the cat out of the bag in the LATIMES of 8-29-13, “State academic performance slips, but L.A. Unified improves.” Her first paragraph: “California public schools lost ground this year in overall academic performance for the first time in a decade, but more than half met state goals for achievement on reading and math standardized tests.”
So just how important are standardized tests in the overall scheme of things?
“The achievement ratings, called the Academic Performance Index, are based on a 1,000-point scale compiled from standardized test scores. They are widely viewed as a comprehensive marker of school quality, affecting property values and triggering penalties, among other effects.”
Link: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-api-scores-20130829,0,447246.story
In other words, the quality of schools and student achievement and teacher effectiveness = scores on high-stakes standardized tests.
Am I exaggerating? Taking him out of context? Obviously not, for even when for good reasons—within the very strictures imposed by high-stakes standardized testing!—state officials take obvious action to forego for a short time one round of the Holy Edumetrics of $tudent $ucce$$ in order to prepare for another, the Secretary of Education suddenly grows a backbone and speaks his mind plain and simple:
“If California moves forward with a plan that fails to assess all its students, as required by federal law,” Duncan said in a statement released Monday night, “the Department will be forced to take action, which could include withholding funds from the state.”
Link: [the second above in Diane’s posting]
One of the great functions of this blog: to make it possible to put such folks on the spot with their own public words and actions!
Duane Swacker: I think this is a rare instance of you and I parting company on measuring qualities by quantities. I think that blind acceptance of the all-importance of the scores of high-stakes standardized testing can give us an excellent measure of the LACK of: creativity, critical thinking, curiosity, civic-mindedness, compassion, empathy, courage, imagination, and humility [not to mention others]. [taken from Gerald Bracey, EDUCATION HELL, 2009, p. 4].
Just look at the current Secretary of Education. He passed the high-stakes standardized test of “LACK of” with flying colors! He scored a perfect 100 out of 100!
🙂
Lastly, on the misuse and overuse of standardized testing in general, from THE MISMEASURE OF EDUCATION (2013) by Jim Horn and Denise Wilburn, p. 147:
“When the right thing can only be measured poorly, it tends to cause the wrong thing to be measured, only because it can be measured well. And it is often much worse to have a good measurement of the wrong thing—especially when, as is so often the case, the wrong thing will in fact be used as an indicator of the right thing—than to have poor measurements of the right things. —John Tukey mathematician Bell Labs and Princeton University”
When California officials decided to skip its regular state tests while making the transition to the new Common Core tests, Secretary Arne Duncan warned them that he wouldn’t permit it.
California’s leaders ignored Duncan’s warnings and threats. The state legislature passed the legislation to suspend the state tests.
What a paradox! No one has pushed harder for states to adopt the Common Core (untested) standards than Duncan, yet here he was threatening to punish a state that was doing what he supposedly wanted.
Lewis Freedberg of Edsource in California commented:
“Veteran education watchers in California could not recall a presidential cabinet officer ever attempting to block state legislation and certainly not in the heavy handed way U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan attempted to do on Monday night.”
Federalism seems to be an unknown concept to Duncan.
..
Almost a year ago, I posted a letter from a sixth-grade
student in the DC public schools who wrote about herself as a data
point. She identified herself as Noa Rosinplotz. The letter was so
articulate that many readers were certain that it was not written
by a child. In time, I received letters from well-known
journalists, including her mother, attesting to the fact that Noa
exists and that she really was only 12. Now Noa is in seventh
grade, and she shared this letter.
You might want to visit her
Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Datapoints-Inc/309583325823040
Noa speaks for a generation of data points:
Dear Mr. Duncan,
I’m writing you because I got my DC CAS results in the mail.
See, I thought you might want to know what they were. I certainly don’t. I
mean, the first thing I noticed in that packet was the paper. It’s
fancy and green-a pretty light green, which sort of fades out when
it gets to the end of the paper.
I thought you might want to know,
Mr. Duncan. Your system paid for my thick pastel green paper, and
for all the ink that goes into telling me that I got a 91% on
Reading Literary Text. Oh-I forgot to introduce myself. No need-I
got Advanced, which is what you’re wondering.
I bet you’re also wondering how I feel about that. Am I happy, relieved, perhaps
surprised? But I forgot-you don’t have to know, Mr. Duncan, because
all that matters is I got Advanced.
But I’ll tell you anyway. You can’t know every child in this country and their reactions to the
pretty green paper. But at least you can know me, just one
datapoint, one spot on the chart. When I saw that green paper, I
didn’t hold it up to the light or smile or show it to my parents. I
tossed it back on the table and went to eat an August nectarine.
Let me tell you what’s on my sheet, Mr. Duncan. It says my name,
student ID, teacher, birthday (ours are barely a month apart, Mr.
Duncan), and the city I live in, Washington, DC. You live here too.
I wonder if you’ve ever seen me on the street, riding my bike or
walking with friends. Your eyes probably went right over me and you
forgot me milliseconds after remembering.
You might know me, though, in the back of your brain, as Advanced. Let’s get back to
the sheet, though. Want to hear what I can do? I can read sixth
grade informational and literary texts and analyze author’s purpose
and supporting evidence. I can use and analyze diverse
organizational structures to locate information, interpret and
paraphrase information, interpret subtle language, analyze
relevance of setting to the events and mood of a narrative, and use
stated words, actions, and descriptions of characters to determine
their feelings and relationships to other characters.
But that’s not all! I can use tables to compare ratios! I can solve problems
involving finding the whole when given a part and the percent! I
can multiply slash divide multi digit decimals! I can use order of
operations to evaluate expressions with multiple variables and
whole-number exponents, solve an inequality that represents a
real-world math problem, analyze relationships of ordered pairs in
graphs slash tables!
Aren’t you proud of me, Mr. Duncan? I can see
you, in my head, reading this and thinking: “That girl sounds like
a real charmer. I mean, how many girls who can describe overall
pattern with reference to the context in which data were gathered
are there out there?”
But I don’t care, Mr. Duncan, I don’t care. I
can fill in bubbles and I can write my name nice and neat up in the
line on my answer sheet where it tells me to do so. I can use scrap
paper efficiently and check whether a pencil is #2 with a single
glance. I know the testing procedures, I know my testing seat, and
I know how to leave adequate time for BCRs.
Aren’t you proud of me, Mr. Duncan?
Because this is what I have learned. This is what No
Child Left Behind has taught me. I have learned to be a puppet and
take their tests and get a fancy green paper every year in the
mail, except for when it’s just a gray photocopy. I am twelve years
old and I know as well as anybody that standardized tests do
nothing but cause pain and stress for everybody involved. And oh,
have I learned. I’ve learned more than I ever thought possible.
School has taught me things, and tests have taught me other things.
I can speak Spanish fluently and find palindromic numbers and write
letters to education officials and formulate a hypothesis and
everything in between. But on test days, none of that matters.
All that matters is the busy work in front of me, the math problems and
confusing passages that swim beneath my vacant gaze and leave me
thinking of anything, everything but what lies ahead in the next
two hours. And after all this is done, after we drink water and use
the bathroom and return to our daily lives, what happens?
Fancy green papers are released and people’s fates are decided. But we,
the students, we, the people, are never consulted. We care and we
take the tests and we don’t like it. Do you want facts, Mr. Duncan?
I’ve got plenty. Oh, and by the way, I looked for a student survey
to show you here. There were none. ·
For my science experiment last
year, I gave our 5th grade citywide benchmark, the Paced Interim
Assessment, or PIA, to a group of English professors at various
universities across the country. Their average was a meager 89%,
much lower than one would expect from some of the experts on the
English language in the US. Nobody got a perfect score. · According
to a survey of Indiana teachers, 85.7% of teachers disagree or
strongly disagree that standardized testing is an accurate measure
of student achievement. ·
A mere 22% of Americans “believe
increased testing has helped the performance of local public
schools”, according to a poll released by PDK/Gallup · After the
implementation of NCLB, students faired no better on the PISA,
dropping from 18th place to 31st place in mathematics
internationally. · A New Mexico high school teacher, citing his
students’ impatience with standardized tests, revealed that the
kids had started drawing designs on their bubble sheets instead of
taking the actual tests: “Christmas tree designs were popular. So
were battleships and hearts.” ·
I was going to put a test question
here, but that’s making it too easy for you. Look at one yourself.
· And you know the rest, Mr. Duncan. Ask Google. Google will tell
you more. I’m not asking for you to stop these tests, Mr. Duncan. I
know it isn’t your fault. I just want you to hear a student’s
opinion. You have kids-they can tell you. Nobody listens to the
datapoints, so we must make ourselves heard.
Your job is to support us, Mr. Duncan. Please, do so, the best you can.
Listen, and look out for me on the streets of the nation’s capital. I’ll do the
same. Maybe on the basketball court, maybe in a café or a diner.
You might be downtown, taking your kids to the movies or boating on
the Potomac. You might be on the same bus as me, or waiting at the
same stoplight. We’re both people, Mr. Duncan, and you know that.
So listen and read this. Maybe it’ll make you think, change your
mind on all this. And if you do end up reading this, I’m the
Advanced kid with a purple bracelet on her right wrist and long
curly hair. Smile at me if you see me, but I won’t smile back. Not
until the fancy green paper stops arriving at my doorstep in
August. Sincerely, Advanced with a purple bracelet on her right
wrist
Diane Ravitch's blog 