Archives for category: Education Reform
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

David Gamberg: A New Vision is Needed Now for Education!

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2020 //
11

David Gamberg recently retired as superintendent of schools in two adjoining towns on New York’s Long Island—Southold and Greenport—where he was beloved for his child-centered approach to schooling. In this article, he calls for new thinking and the courage to break free of the obsession with standardized testing and punitive accountability. He announced his retirement in January, not knowing what was about to happen to schools across the nation and the world.

He understands that the status quo of high-stakes testing and demoralizing punishment has failed.

He writes:

I argue that the emphasis must be on capturing the hearts and minds of our students, and not primarily seeking to make up for lost ground academically as noted by education author Alfie Kohn. We must abandon any pretense that the metrics used in recent years to judge, sort, and separate students, teachers and schools through a ranking system based on data that focused on math and ELA standardized testing will serve them well in the near future.

Therefore, the first step is an immediate cessation of the current accountability system, based primarily on the use of high stakes, standardized testing in grades 3-8 that has preoccupied students, teachers, administrators, Boards of Education, families, and school communities since the No Child Left Behind legislation of 2002.

Will our educational leaders have the courage and wisdom to change their focus to students, not their test scores? To humans, not rankings?

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Real Education, Standardized Testing, Students

Peter Greene: Will Biden Revive the Failed Obama Education “Reforms”?

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2020 //
65

Peter Greene assures is that Trump and DeVos are a disaster for education. We know that. No one could be worse. They want to blow up public schools. No question.

But he’s worried that Biden will bring back the staffers from the Obama era of high-stakes testing, charter love, and Commin Core. In particular, he’s worried about Carmel Martin, a perennial favorite of Democratic neoliberals.

My one encounter with Carmel occurred at a panel discussion at the progressive Economic Policy Association in D.C. about one of my books. I lacerated charters, vouchers, and high-stakes testing, as well as the continuity between NCLB and Race to the Top. Carmel vigorously defended all that I criticized.

Like Peter Greene, I’m worried that Obama-era education staffers will return to restore the failed ideas of NCLB and Duncan’s disastrous reign.

Trump must go, and we must keep up the pressure to insist that Biden produce a fresh vision for federal education policy that discards the failures of the past 20 years.

More of the same is unacceptable.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Trump

Nancy Bailey: Who Should Be the Next Secretary of Education?

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2020 //
49

Veteran educator Nancy Bailey has some very clear ideas about the next Secretary of Education. All her proposals are premised on Trump’s defeat, since billionaire Betsy DeVos would want to hang on and finish the job of destroying public schools and enriching religious and private schools.

Let’s hope that the next Secretary of Education has the wisdom and vision to liberate children and teachers from the iron grip of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Every Student Succeeds Act, High-stakes testing, privatization, and a generation of failed federal policies.

Bailey begins:

During this critical time in American history, that individual should be a black or brown woman, who has been a teacher of young children, and who understands child development. She should hold an education degree and have an additional leadership degree and experience that will help her run the U.S. Department of Education.

Children deserve to see more teachers who look like they do, who will inspire them to go on and become teachers themselves. A black female education secretary will bring more diverse individuals to the field and set an example. This will benefit all students.

Many individuals, including accomplished black men, have brilliant minds, and understand what we need in the way of democratic public education. Leadership roles should await them in the U.S. Department of Education, in schools, universities, or states and local education departments.

But with the fight for Black Lives to Matter and for an end to gender inequality, a knowledgeable black woman with a large heart to embrace these times should take this spot. The majority of teachers have always been women, and while men are critical to being role models for children and teens, it is time for a black woman to lead.

We have had eleven education secretaries, and only three of them have been women, including Shirley Hufstedler, Margaret Spellings, and Betsy DeVos. None of these women were educators or had experience in the classroom. Only two African American men have been in this role, and neither of them could be considered authentic teachers and educators. Both had the goal to undermine public schools.

The time is now for a black female education secretary who will set a positive example and be the face of the future for children from all gender and cultural backgrounds.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Betsy DeVos, Biden, Courage, Creativity, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Standardized Testing, U.S. Department of Education

Mercedes Schneider: Standardized Testing Is Indispensable to Those Who Are Not Subjected to It

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2020 //
11

Mercedes Schneider has written an indispensable post about standardized testing: She noticed that the annual testing mandated by the federal government is beloved by those who are farthest from the classroom and have nothing to do with teaching and learning.

Perhaps she is responding to the recent report that Betsy DeVos will not allow waivers from the mandated testing next year, since the tests are so vital, and her announcement was cheered by the Center for American Progress (a neoliberal think tank), Education Trust (led by former Secretary of Education John King), the Council of Chief State School Officers, Senator Patty Murray (ranking Democrat on the Senate HELP Committee), and Rep. Bobby Scott (chair of the House Education Committee).

Schneider writes:

This is what standardized testing has been in public schools across America ever since No Child Left Behind (NCLB):

It’s like some president-backed, bipartisan Congress decided that we need to measure student physical health based on student weight. Of course, student physical health is by far too complex a concept to be captured by student weight, but let’s just put that reality aside in favor of the appearance of being able to pack a huge, complex package into a matchbox by getting those kids on the scale and putting the onus on teachers and schools to make students weight what the state (answering to the federal government in exchange for funding) decides those students should weigh.

Now, it is ridiculous on its face to hold teachers and schools responsible for student weight– which is why no bathroom scale company will guarantee that their scales are meant to be used to determine anything beyond the weight of the person standing on the scale. However, that president-backed, bipartisan Congress has decided that schools and teachers must ensure that their students achieve some predetermined optimal weight.

So. Weight-prep programs are instituted for students at risk of not achieving their state-determined optimal weights, the point of which is to drill students in scale-optimizing strategies (i.e., where to stand on the scale in order to make the weight appear higher or lower; how to push down on the scale to “weigh more”). In order to make time in the school day for these at-risk weighers to be drilled and redrilled, they must miss lunch, group sports, and playtime, but what is important to the school and to the teacher is achieving the optimal weight number so that we can tout that number, tag the student as physically healthy, keep our jobs, and collect federal dollars.

Surely we also congratulate the hungry and lethargic student for achieving that state-determined weight number. And if anyone points out that the student is hungry and lethargic, supporters of the process ignore the child and tout the number.

Be it noted that the annual standardized testing mandated by NCLB has led to cheating scandals, narrowing of the curriculum, and teaching to the test. For the past decade, there has been no change in NAEP scores.

NCLB failed. Why not admit it and move forward? Why continue to inhale the stale fumes of past policies that failed?

Why won’t prominent Democrats stop embracing NCLB and develop a vision of their own that actually helps students and teachers?

Categories Accountability, Democrats, Education Reform, Failure, Standardized Testing

Where Do You Buy “High Quality Seats”?

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2020 //
8

In my daily reading, I have often come across references to “high quality seats.” [HQS]

See here. 

See here.

While googling, I saw pictures of “high quality seats,” but they looked mostly like lounge chairs, and I could not imagine a classroom filled with them unless the teacher-student ratio was 8:1, which would be a very effective classroom.

I confess that I don’t know what an HQS is.

in my naïveté, I assumed that learning requires teachers teaching and students exerting effort.

Now I see that the “high quality” learning is in the chair.

it seems to be reformer-speak for a seat in a school that is not a public school.

But since there are so many failed and closed charter schools, an HQS can’t be synonymous with a seat in a charter school. Many children in charters are in LQS (low-quality seats).

Where does one go to find a HQS? is there a store?

Do they sell them in Walmart? Not likely.

Do you know where to find the HQS that districts are searching for?

is that the simple answer to every problem?

When I googled, I inadvertently found the answer to my question. Jan Resseger wrote it in 2016. She said that the blather about HQS was a way of dodging the crucial question of paying for a good education for all children.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Will District 1 on Long Island Send a Scientist to Congress?

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2020 //
3

I am very excited because the Democratic nominee for Congress is Nancy Goroff, a chemistry professor at Stony Brook University on Long Island. Dr. Goroff bested three opponents to win the nomination and will face Lee Zeldin, the incumbent member of Congress who is one of Trump’s most faithful lap dogs.

Here is an interview with Dr. Goroff. She is articulate and well informed and will be a powerful advocate for an evidence-based approach to the critical issues of our day, like climate change and pollution.

I have lived on the North Fork of Long Island for more than 20 years, and I am very excited by the possibility that a brilliant scientist might represent this ecologically-challenged area of bays and waterfront in Congress.

I will do whatever I can to help her win election to Congress. Her knowledge, experience, and wisdom are needed.

Categories Education Reform, New York, Politics, Science

Canada: “Individualism Run Amok”

By dianeravitch
September 4, 2020 //
8

This is an article based on an interview of me conducted by Carolyn Bassetti of the Canadian publication Alberta Views.

I have recently been emailing with public education advocates in Canada who are alarmed by their government’s drift towards consumerism in education. They are as concerned as we are about the constant attacks on public education.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, International, Privatization

Nancy Bailey: Bill Gates and the Deprofessionalizing of Education

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2020 //
61

Nancy Bailey has discerned a pattern in the education grant making of the Bill& Melinda Gates Foundation: the deprofessionalizing of education. We are familiar, of course, with Teach for America, which peddles the wacky idea that any college graduate can be a successful teacher with only five weeks of training.

Gates has pushed that line of unreasoning into an attack on school counselors. The more training they have, the more ineffective they seem to be, goes Gates-thought. Why not try completely non-professional counselors.

Bailey sees this animus as a recurrent them in Gates’ philanthropy. Why pay a professional when a bright person with no professional training can do the job?

My response: Next time you need surgery, ask for a college graduate with a scalpel, not a surgeon.

Categories Education Reform

Peter Greene: The Brookings Institution is in Charter School La-La Land

By dianeravitch
August 31, 2020 //
28

Peter Greene reviews a new charter school study from the Brookings Institution that exhibits near total ignorance of the perils of privatization. Any time that a study rests its case on DFER data, its a clue that it should not be taken seriously. DFER (Democrats for Education Reform) is an organization created by hedge fund managers to lobby for charter schools. Their “studies” and polling data supply talking points to advance their cause. Similarly, when a study cites Albert Shanker’s initial advocacy for charter schools but fails to acknowledge that he abandoned charters and concluded they were indistinguishable from vouchers, the author has done a slipshod job.

Charter schools began thirty years ago. The research on them has repeatedly demonstrated that some get higher test scores, some get lower test scores, but on average they have produced no amazing innovations, no secret sauce. The Brookings author doesn’t know that. She seems to think that charters have discovered remarkable innovations and those innovations should be replicated by public schools.

Her grand notion that charters will teach public schools how to succeed, he argues, is absurd.

He writes:

Since the [charter] movement is largely premised on the notion of unleashing free market forces–well, in that context, this proposal makes as much sense as telling MacDonald’s that they have to show Wendy’s how to make fries.

And:

There is zero reason to think that the charter world, populated primarily by education amateurs, knows anything that public school systems don’t already know. Charter success rests primarily on creaming student population (and the families thereof), pushing out students who won’t comply or are too hard to educate, extending school hours, drilling tests like crazy, having teachers work 80 hour weeks, and generally finding ways to keep out students with special needs that they don’t want to deal with. None of these ideas represent new approaches that folks in public education haven’t thought of.

And:

If charters were pioneering super-effective new strategies, we would already know. There is a well-developed grapevine in the public education world. If there were a charter that was accomplishing edu-miracles, teachers all over would be talking about it. Teachers who left that charter would take the secret sauce recipe with them, and pretty soon it would be being shared across the country. After decades of existence, charters do not have a reputation in the education world for being awesome–and there’s a reason for that. Puff pieces and PR pushes may work on the general public and provide fine marketing, but that’s not what sells other teachers.

Short answer– if charters knew something really awesome and impressive, public school teachers would already know and already be copying it.

Maybe the author of this paper should meet with Andre Perry, who led charters in New Orleans and left disillusioned. He is also at Brookings.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Research

Politico: Trump’s Schedule This Week

By dianeravitch
August 30, 2020 //
15

Trump’s schedule for this week is a reminder that Michael Cohen, his former “fixer,” now a felon, wrote in the foreword to his new book Disliyal that Trump has no friends. It’s also a reminder that Trump never works. He watches TV, he golfs, he tweets, he lunches with lackeys.

SNEAK PEEK … THE PRESIDENT’S WEEK AHEAD: Monday: TRUMP will have lunch with VP MIKE PENCE and will meet with Attorney General BILL BARR and acting DHS Secretary CHAD WOLF. Tuesday: TRUMP will travel to Kenosha, Wis. Wednesday: TRUMP will travel to Wilmington, N.C., to speak about “designating Wilmington, NC as an American World War II Heritage City.” Thursday: TRUMP will have lunch with Secretary of State MIKE POMPEO.

Categories Education Reform
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »