Archives for category: Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)
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Tell Your Members of Congress to Fix the New ESEA!

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2015 //
19

The Network for Public Education and the NPE Action Fund believe in transforming public education so that it works to meet the needs of all children. Both organizations oppose high-stakes testing and privatization.

 

The NPE Action Fund has watched closely as Congress works to revise the federal law called No Child Left Behind and to correct the destructive assaults on education and educators found in Race to the Top. We hope both NCLB and Race to the Top will be consigned to the dustbin of history, for historians to dissect as a classic example of why politicians should respect the work of educators and not assume that they know more than teachers and principals. We believe that the current legislative proposal can be greatly improved. We urge you to contact your Senators and members of the House of Representatives about some serious flaws in the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (aka NCLB).

 

Here are some of the key issues that should be revised:

 

Unfortunately the bill continues the annual mandate for testing in grades 3-8, and a waiver will still be needed if states want to give alternative assessments to more than one percent of their students with disabilities and English Language Learners after one year. The reality is many state exams are neither valid nor diagnostically useful for many of these students.

 

The Network for Public Education has consistently opposed annual testing, a practice not found in any of the world’s high-performing nation. In earlier statements, we supported grade-span testing–once in elementary school, once in middle school, and once in high school. We would prefer that teachers control testing and decide how much is just right, with little or no use of standardized testing except for diagnostic purposes, not for ranking and rating students, teachers, principals, or schools.

 

In addition, there are some new provisions that we are very concerned about:

 

The bill appears to require that “academic standards” including proficiency rates and growth based on state test scores, must count for at least 51% of any state’s accountability system. Some observers say that the bill would allow the Secretary of Education to determine the exact percentage of each factor in a state accountability system. This is not acceptable. Every state should be allowed to decide on its own system, including what percent to give standardized tests.

 
The bill would also allow states to use Title II funds, now meant for class size reduction and teacher quality initiatives, for Social Impact bonds, which amount to another profiteering scheme for Wall Street to loot our public schools. Recently, the New York Times reported on how Goldman Sachs helped fund a preschool program in Utah with Social Impact bonds. Goldman Sachs will now make hundreds of thousands of dollars, based on a flawed study that purported to show that 99 percent of these students will not require special education services – a far higher percent than any previous study. We vehemently oppose the inclusion of this provision in ESEA. If preschool is worth funding, and we believe that it is, it should be paid for by public funds and not provide another way for Wall Street profiteers to drain resources from our public schools.

 

We would also like Congress to strengthen federal protection for student privacy, which were weakened by changes in the regulations governing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) in 2011. Students’ personally identifiable data should not be released to third parties without the consent of his or her parents.

 

As I previously explained, the Network for Public Education has split into two separate organization: The Network for Public Education is a tax-deductible, charitable organization that will soon have its own c(3) status and is currently hosted by Voices for Education in Tucson, which does have c(3) status. Carol Burris, who recently retired as Principal of South Side High School in Rockville Center, Long Island, New York, is the executive director.

 

The other organization, the NPE Action Fund, was created to endorse candidates and engage in political activity on behalf of public education. It will be a c(4), and contributions to it will not be tax-deductible. The NPE Action Fund does not have money to give to candidates, but we vet candidates and endorse those we believe to be sincerely devoted to the improvement of public schools, not their privatization. Any candidate for state or local school board or any office should apply to its executive director, Robin Hiller, to learn how to obtain the NPE endorsement. rhiller@voicesforeducation.org.

 

Categories Accountability, Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund

Why FairTest Supports ESSA

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2015 //
12

FairTest has been the staunchest, most persistent critic of standardized testing for decades. Monty Neill explains here why FairTest supports ESSA, with full recognition of its faults.

 

He writes:

 

“From an assessment reform perspective, FairTest is convinced that the “Every Student Succeeds Act” (ESSA) now before the House and Senate, though far from perfect, improves on current testing policy. The bill significantly reduces federal accountability mandates and opens the door for states to overhaul their own assessment systems.

 

“Failure to pass this bill in 2015 means NCLB and waivers will continue to wreak havoc for at least another several years.

 

“The primary improvement would be in “accountability.” The unrealistic “Adequate Yearly Progress” annual test score gain requirement would be gone, as would be all the federally mandated punitive sanctions imposed on schools and teachers. States will be free to end much of the damage to educational quality and equity they built into their systems to comply with NCLB and waivers. Waivers to NCLB would end as of Aug. 1, 2016. (Other provisions of the bill would take effect over the coming summer and fall.)

 

“Another modest win would be federal recognition of the right for parents to opt their children out of tests in states that allow it. While a 95 percent test-participation provision remains, states will decide what happens to schools that do not meet the threshold. (The feds had already backed down from enforcing this dictate.)….

 

“A dangerous requirement to rank schools continues. Worse, rankings must be based predominantly on student scores. High school rankings must include graduation rates, and all schools must incorporate English learners’ progress towards English proficiency. This data must be broken out by “subgroup” status. However, states must incorporate at least one additional indicator of school quality (such as school climate or student engagement) and can include multiple such indicators….

 

“Meanwhile, up to seven states will be able to fundamentally overhaul their assessments right away, with additional states allowed to join this pilot program after three years. States could design systems that rely primarily on local, teacher-developed performance assessments (as does the New York Performance Standards Consortium). New Hampshire already has a waiver from NCLB to do that, starting with allowing pilot districts to administer the state test in only three grades. For all grades, the pilots employ a mix of state and local teacher designed performance tasks, an approach with great potential.

 

“The new law also bars the U.S. Secretary of Education from intervening in most aspects of state standards, assessment, accountability and improvement. Given Secretary Arne Duncan’s history (and the track record in New York state of his soon-to-be acting successor, John King), that seems a good thing.”

 

The law is not ideal. But it is far better than NCLB or the failed Race to Nowhere. And we can keep fighting for a better law and resisting at the local level by opting out.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Opt Out, Race to the Top

What’s In the ESSA About Accountability?

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2015 //
13

Here is a report from the Washington Post on the accountability features of the Every Student Succeeds Act.

 

“Specifically, under the Every Student Succeeds Act:

 

“The testing regime remains in place.

 

“States would still be required, as they are now, to test students annually in math and reading in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school, and publicly report the scores according to race, income, ethnicity, disability and whether students are English-language learners.
“States get to set their own academic goals.

“Where No Child Left Behind set forth one goal for the nation — 100 percent proficiency in math and reading by 2014 — the new bill would require each state to set and measure progress toward its own academic goals.
“Test scores still matter, but how much is up to the states. States would be charged with designing systems for judging schools. Each system would have to include measures of academic progress, including test scores, graduation rates and (for non-native English speakers) English language acquisition. But it would also have to include a measure of school climate, such as student engagement or access to advanced courses. All of the academic indicators together must count for “much” more than the non-academic factor, but the definition of “much” is not clear.
“What should be done in schools that are struggling will be up to states and districts. Under No Child Left Behind, a school could get dinged if just one of its subgroups failed to meet annual testing goals, and the federal government exercised a lot of say in what happened in persistently failing schools. Under the new bill, it’s likely that fewer schools will be required to be marked for interventions, and it’s up to states and, in many cases, districts to decide what to do to improve those schools. Schools marked for the most intensive interventions would be those among the lowest-performing 5 percent in the state, those in which fewer than two-thirds of students graduate on time, and those in which a subgroup of students “consistently underperforms.” It’s up to each state to determine how long a group of students would have to lag before the school would be required to take action.
“What happens if lots of kids opt out of testing?

“Again, it’s up to the state. Under No Child Left Behind, a school automatically got a black eye if it failed to test at least 95 percent of its eligible students. The aim was to ensure that principals and teachers weren’t discouraging low performers from showing up on test day in order to boost scores. The new bill maintains the 95 percent requirement, but states can decide how participation rates should figure into their overall school rating system.”

 

 

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Standardized Testing

Mercedes Schneider Provides More Details about Proposed ESSA Law

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2015 //
30

Mercedes Schneider is one of the few people who have read all (or almost all) of the 1,000 page plus behemoth that is the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015. Her latest post provides valuable new information. This legislation was passed out of the Senate-House conference committee and is likely to move swiftly for full approval by both houses in the next few days or weeks. ESSA would replace No Child Left Behind, which should have been reauthorized eight years ago. It also kills off Race to the Top by stripping the Secretary of any power to impose his ideas about how to reform schools on districts and states.

 

The big change is the reduction in the role of the federal Department of Education (ED). This is the first big downsizing of the federal role since the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was passed. There are strict limitations on the power of the Secretary to meddle in state or local education matters. The shrinking of the federal role is Arne Duncan’s legacy.

 

Mercedes points out that the law is still mired in the testing-and-accountability mindset but oversight and responsibility shifts is from the federal ED to local and state governments. She says the bill is “test-centric.”

 

But there are some very good things in the bill. It puts an end to the hated No Child Left Behind and the failed Race to the Top. The bill eliminates AYP and Duncan’s waivers. States can drop out of Common Core without any penalty. No more teacher evaluation by test scores unless the states want to do it. Bill Gates will no longer have the Department of Education mandating his latest ideas. No more federal mandates about how to reform schools.

 

I know that many readers would like the law to go farther. I would like to see an end to annual testing, a practice unknown in the high-performing nations of the world. I would like to see stipulations about charter accountability and transparency. But that’s not there.

 

Nonetheless, I support the bill because it gets rid of a terrible, failed law and a terrible, failed program. The Bush-Obama era is over. Now the fight for a humane education system shifts to the states. In some states, that may seem like a herculean task. But the fact is that parents and educators have a greater chance of being heard by their state legislators than by the White House and Congress.

 

So what next? Organize, mobilize, agitate, wake the town and tell the people. Stop the privatization of public schools. Stop the testing madness. Join with organizations in your state and community that are fighting to transform the schools to places where learning, character, ethics, imagination, creativity, citizenship, and kindness are valued. Join the Network for Public Education. Find out how to make alliances with people who share  your values. We have a long way to go. The time to start is now.

 

 

Categories Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top

The New ESEA: Warning to Parents About Your Child and Military Recruiters

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2015 //
30

A colleague just pointed out to me that the current Elementary and Secondary Education Act (aka NCLB) allows schools to turn over the names and addresses of students to military recruiters and institutions of higher education.

 

The same practice is continued in the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Parents of high school students, please note that you may opt your child out if you don’t want them to hear from military recruiters or others. (I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but I hate the name of this new act. Why can’t they just call it the Elementary and Secondary Education Act? Who will be held accountable if every students does NOT succeed?)

 

 

 

From page 847:

‘‘(1) ACCESS TO STUDENT RECRUITING INFOR2
MATION.—Notwithstanding section 444(a)(5)(B) of
3 the General Education Provisions Act (20 U.S.C.
4 1232g(a)(5)(B)), each local educational agency re5
ceiving assistance under this Act shall provide, upon
6 a request made by a military recruiter or an institu7
tion of higher education, access to the name, ad8
dress, and telephone listing of each secondary school
9 student served by the local educational agency, un10
less the parent of such student has submitted the
11 prior consent request under paragraph (2).
12 ‘‘(2) CONSENT.—
13 ‘‘(A) OPT-OUT PROCESS.—A parent of a
14 secondary school student may submit a written
15 request, to the local educational agency, that
16 the student’s name, address, and telephone list17
ing not be released for purposes of paragraph
18 (1) without prior written consent of the parent.
19 Upon receiving such request, the local edu20
cational agency may not release the student’s
21 name, address, and telephone listing for such
22 purposes without the prior written consent of
23 the parent.
24 ‘‘(B) NOTIFICATION

Categories Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Opt Out, Parents

Mercedes Schneider: Here is the Proposed Federal Law

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2015 //
4

Mercedes Schneider here offers the latest version of the new federal law that will replace No Child Left Behind. Prepare yourself. It is over 1,000 pages. Look for the titles that interest you. Any law that is so long has all sorts of political compromises tucked into it, and all sorts of favors to lobbyists and special interests. It is a Christmas tree, just in time for Christmas.

 

In this post, Mercedes analyzes the latest draft, the one that came out of the House-Senate conference committee and will likely be made law.

Categories Education Reform, Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind)

Farewell, NCLB, We Won’t Miss You

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2015 //
41

The House-Senate conference committee overwhelmingly (39-1) endorsed an overhaul of the No Child Left Behind, which was the latest (and worst) revision of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The new ESEA, which still must be approved by both houses of Congress, is called the Every Student Succeeds Act.

 

The ESSA limits the federal role, a direct rebuke to Arne Duncan’s belief that he was the national superintendent of schools. The law retains a large chunk of George W. Bush’s legacy, including annual testing, a practice not found in any high-performing nation. The law no longer requires teacher evaluation by test scores.

 

The Republicans wanted to restore state and local control, while the Democrats ironically defended Bush’s accountability emphasis. The outcome is a compromise.

 

Most everyone seems to have forgotten that the original purpose of ESEA was equity for the neediest students, meaning federal dollars to high-poverty schools. Don’t you long for the day when laws were given descriptive titles, rather than aspirational ones? “Every Student Succeeds” is the flip side of “No Child Left Behind.” What was wrong with “the Elementary and Secondary Education Act”?

 

I don’t want to sound cynical, but I’m prepared to wager any sum that 7 years, 10 years, or 15 years from now, no one will say that every student is now succeeding. So long as nearly a quarter of our nation’s children live in poverty, “success” will remain elusive. So long as experienced teachers are underpaid and disrespected, so long as the anti-teacher lobby files lawsuits to strip teachers of their rights, “success”will escape our grasp. So long as jobs continue to be outsourced and eliminated by technology, we must continue to worry about whether and how young people will be motivated to “succeed.”

 

But for the moment, let’s celebrate the demise of a terrible law that saw punishment as the federal strategy for school reform. Let’s celebrate that no future Secretary of Education will have the power to impose his or her flawed ideas on every public school and teacher in the nation. Let’s thank Senator Lamar Alexander and Senator Patty Murray for finally ending a failed and punitive law.

 

 

Categories Education Reform, Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Equity, NCLB (No Child Left Behind)

Mercedes Schneider: Why There Will Be No Federal Sanctions for Opt Out

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2015 //
7

Mercedes Schneider has followed the development of the new federal legislation to replace the failed No Child Left Behind. She is one of the few people in the U.S. who has actually read every word of both the Senate bill and the House bill.

She concludes in this post that there will be no federal sanctions for opting out. The Congress has made clear–in both houses–that it does not want the federal Department of Education to take an activist role in punishing states. Will states punish school districts where parents rise up in rebellion against high-stakes testing. Schneider thinks not.

However, I now think that if the House and Senate conference committee whose task it will be to merge SSA and ECAA into a single bill decide against the SSA blanket opt-out and go with the state-level opt-out provision in ECAA, the federal government will not sanction states, regardless of state-level opting out.

In other words, if according to the future ESEA revision, states are supposed to set their own opt-out policy and include as much in the future ESEA Title I funding application, and if a state includes no opt-out provision in its future ESEA application yet dips below the 95 percent of students completing federally-mandated annual tests, the federal government is not likely to strong-arm states with federal sanctions.

I believe the federal government knows it has gone too far in strong-arming states via conditions attached to federal tests. For example, both the SSA and ECAA revisions include language to limit the role of the US secretary of education. The current US secretary, Arne Duncan, has actively promoted and defended Common Core and its annual tests; with the backing of President Obama, Duncan has lured states into adopting Common Core sight unseen with the lure of Race to the Top (RTTT) funds; he has paid for two Common Core testing consortia, PARCC and Smarter Balanced; he has made it a condition of states’ RTTT funding to use student standardized tests to evaluate teachers, and via his NCLB “waivers,” he has cornered states into agreeing to institute Common Core and its associated annual tests as well as testing teachers using test results as a condition for avoiding having the almost all schools in all states declared “failing” according to NCLB.

So, the fact that major news outlets such as the Washington Post and New York Times are doing their best to chastise those who support opting out of standardized tests is not enough to conceal what is obviously a federal blunder to make annual testing the end-all, be-all of American public education.

In its August 15, 2015, editorial, the New York Times points to possible federal penalties for New York State’s failure to test 95 percent of its students. It also notes that parents’ opting out of tests “could damage educational reform… and undermine the Common Core standards….”

Gee, that would be terrible.

It seems that the plan in New York is for state officials to put the squeeze on superintendents and principals to encourage participation in future annual tests– and to not encourage opting out. But the opt-out movement is not driven by superintendents and principals. It is driven by parents who are tired of the toll that test-centric education is taking on their children, including the artificially branding of their children as failures and the state’s allegiance to this branding…

The reality is that opting out of federally-mandated testing is not going away and likely will only continue to gain momentum across years as increasingly more children are branded American public school failures.

Test-centered American public education has had its day, and based upon the growing appeal to parents of opting their children out of mandated tests, that day has more than passed.

There was no opt-out movement throughout the heyday of test-and-punish NCLB, but there certainly is one now.

Federal and state officials need to take the hint as they formulate a non-test-centered Plan B.

Categories Accountability, Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Testing, U.S. Department of Education

Mike Petrilli: How Arne Duncan Turned the Federal Role into a Disaster

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2015 //
72

Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation/Institute has been a strong supporter of school choice and the Common Core. On the whole, he and TBF have applauded Arne Duncan’s move to promote charter schools, to ignore the voucher proliferation, and to push Common Core on the states (as if they were “state-led,” which they were not).

However, Petrilli now has had a change of mind. (For the record, I support those who are willing to rethink their views and change their minds.) He now recognizes that Arne overreached and caused a counter-reaction. The most atrocious action by Duncan was to force test-based teacher evaluation on the states, with no evidence that it would improve education. It was a disaster. It hasn’t worked anywhere, and it has increased teaching to the test and teacher demoralization. If you are looking for the cause of the widespread teacher shortage, look to the policies of the U.S. Department of Education since 2009.

Petrilli writes, with humility, that he was wrong.

It’s not just that the Department of Education usurped power from Congress and the states; it’s that they used that power to push bad policy. Nobody today can creditably argue that mandating statewide teacher evaluations as a condition of ESEA flexibility was a good idea. Nobody can say that the teacher evaluation efforts are going well. This was an unforced error of enormous magnitude—one that has sparked a significant backlash to accountability policies writ large and also destroyed whatever credibility the feds may have had….

So yes, both the Senate and House versions of ESEA reauthorization are “looser” than No Child Left Behind, or than the Fordham proposal from 2011. If this renewal processes gets across the finish line (and I think it will), the federal government will have much less power than it does today. Folks like Chad who don’t like that will only have Arne Duncan to blame.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Duncan, Arne, Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Teacher Evaluations, U.S. Department of Education

My Interview with KPFK Pacifica Radio on Reauthorization of ESEA/NCLB

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2015 //
3

In case you want to listen, here is my interview with Sonali Kolhatkar on KPFK Pacific radio about the possible reauthorization of the vile NCLB, which is a failed version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.

Categories Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)
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