More than 600 school districts are suing the state of Texas for equitable funding. Two Houston students filed an amicus brief on behalf if other students. Here, one of them–Zaakir Tameez– explains why they decided to get involved.
Zaakir is now a freshman at the University of Virginia. He attended one of Houston’s best public schools but he realized that many other students did not have the same quality of education. He thought it was wrong.
Paul Karrer teaches fifth grade in Castroville Elementary School in Southern California, where most of the children are poor. He writes here about the irrelevance of standards to the children he teaches, other than to label them as failures.
He writes:
“The latest education mantra, chant, and canard thrust upon the herds of educators before they are joyously led to the steep walls of the cliff is … “high standards.”
“As with most populist war cries, initially it seems obvious that the maxim is without a doubt unarguable correct. Who, for example, could make any headway promoting the opposite chant? “I’m for low standards.”
“No one.
“But what happens if the mantra is unnecessary? What if the chant rings untrue? How can one fight such a hypnotic zombie tide?”
Karrer decries the idea that “high standards” will solve the problems of his students:
“It is a bamboozle. A fraud. Snake oil sold as gold in the guise of a false solution to the wrong problem.
“Why, pray tell, does the following real hard fact exist? Carmel’s education scores are high, Monterey’s are nearly as high, and North Monterey’s scores are the lowest. Is it because of standards?
“No.
“The answer is parent income and poverty. Wealthy cities have children with wealthy outcomes. Desperate communities have desperate outcomes. Nothing to do with higher standards in this place or that.
“The real issues in communities of poverty are: unemployment, underemployment, lack of entrepreneurial traditions, living hand-to-mouth, early birthing, generational established gang influence, lack of printed matter in households, parental incarceration, second-language issues, lack of medical care, drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, trauma, etc.
“Many kids in areas of high poverty are in survival mode. Before they can even focus on a computer screen, get to school on time or even entertain the idea of completing homework – they need wraparound services – doctors, nurses, psychologists, therapists. Smaller classes would help too.
“High standards are a sickening joke – a money-making bandwagon. A distraction from what is needed. Once again a top-down phony solution.”
No reformer would agree with Karrer. They would say he has low expectations. Maybe he is a “bad teacher.”
Maybe he is right.
Carol Burris, the executive director of the Network for Public Education, writes here about the ruinous, failed policy of closing schools because of their test scores.
This odious, undemocratic practice started with No Child Left Behind, where it was adopted as a sanction for “failing schools.” Any school that couldn’t raise test scores for five years in a row was labeled a failing school, without regard to its needs and struggles. No matter how loudly the community protested, the school was closed.
Race to the Top continued this practice, even though there was no record of success. Frequently, the school closures cleared the way for charters, which didn’t enroll the children with disabilities and the English language learners. Those children were shunted off to another “failing school.”
Nothing so fully epitomizes the failure of corporate reform as closing schools instead of helping them improve.
Osamudia R. James is a law professor at the University of Miami School of Law. She is a scholar of race and equity. She has written a scholarly article that was published in the Iowa Law Review titled “Opt-Out Education: School Choice as Racial Subordination.” I hope that readers of this blog will take the time to read it. It is an important legal analysis of the social inequities caused by school choice.
As more children are induced to leave the public school system, the public schools are less able to provide a decent education for those who remain behind. Many of those who leave will attend charter schools and voucher schools that are no better and possibly worse than the public school they abandoned. The harm done to children by this strategy is powerful, and the harm done to society is incalculable.
James advocates for limitations on school choice “to prevent the disastrous social consequences–the abandonment of the public school system, to particularly deleterious consequence for poor and minority schoolchildren and their families–that occur as the collective result of individual, albeit rational, decisions. I also advocate for limitations on school choice in an attempt to encourage individuals to consider their obligations to children not their own, but part of their community all the same….The actual impact of school choice cannot be ignored. Given the radicalized realities of the current education system, choice is not ultimately used to broaden options or agency for minority parents. Rather, school choice is used to sanitize inequality in the school system; given sufficient choices, the state and its residents are exempted from addressing the sources of unequal educational opportunities for poor and minority students. States promote agency even as the subjects supposedly exercising that agency are disabled. Experience makes clear that school choice simply should not form an integral or foundational aspect of education reform policy. Rather, the focus should be on improving public schooling for all students such that all members of society can exercise genuine agency, initially facilitated by quality primary and secondary education. Ultimately, improving public education begins with preventing its abandonment.”
Our regular contributor KrazyTA offers the following advice:
“It is easy to get tired and feel beaten down by the edubullies and edufrauds as they use their bludgeons of sneer, jeer and smear on all those for a “better education for all.”
“They say it is often darkest before the dawn.
“The beginning of a speech of 1854 by William Lloyd Garrison:
[start]
“I do not know how to espouse freedom and slavery together. I do not know how to worship God and Mammon at the same time. If other men choose to go upon all fours, I choose to stand erect, as God designed every man to stand. If, practically falsifying its heaven-attested principles, this nation denounces me for refusing to imitate its example, then, adhering all the more tenaciously to those principles, I will not cease to rebuke it for its guilty inconsistency. Numerically, the contest may be an unequal one, for the time being; but the author of liberty and the source of justice, the adorable God, is more than multitudinous, and he will defend the right. My crime is that I will not go with the multitude to do evil. My singularity is that when I say that freedom is of God and slavery is of the devil, I mean just what I say. My fanaticism is that I insist on the American people abolishing slavery or ceasing to prate of the rights of man ….
[end]
Link: http://www.blackpast.org/1854-william-lloyd-garrison-no-compromise-evil-slavery
Remember: not that many years before the start of the Civil War, things looked pretty bleak for the abolition of chattel slavery. And nowadays, not a day passes that some new development might make folks think that things look pretty bleak for ensuring a “better education for all.”
As the old saying going, it’s darkest before the dawn. If you feel you can’t go on, just remember:
“Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.”
Harriet Tubman. She didn’t say it would be easy. But she did say we could do it.
And the tide has been turning, albeit slowly and painfully, for a while.
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” [Mahatma Gandhi]
As I see it, we are in stage 3.
Arthur Camins, director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., has a warning for Democrats that school choice is a bad choice.
He omits Republicans because they have become the party of school choice and privatization.
School choice is an alluring term, but the reality is far different from the rhetoric.
He writes:
“In our culture the “the right to choose” suggests an almost inalienable individual right, making for powerfully resonant political rhetoric. However, behind the easy-to-swallow positive connotation of choice, there is underlying message in its use in the context of education. If stated explicitly, the message might cause a little indigestion: Be out for yourself and don’t worry so much about your neighbors or community…
“However, what is moral or sensible for an individual does not make for sound or just education policy for a society. The moral burden falls not on parents, but on those who knowingly advance the wellbeing of the few at the expense of the many….
“Supporters of equity and democracy must depend upon and develop agency and hope for community solutions because when there is only despair, the only rational course of action is individual survival. Ideological supporters of privatization understand this and actively undermine democratic participation and the promise of collective solutions. That is why since the 1980’s they have followed an explicit starve-the-beast strategy to defund public institutions in order to undermine quality, public trust, and confidence. That is why they favor private charter boards over elected school boards.
I have come to believe that the struggle for equity must include a tandem strategy of opposition and advocacy.
Friends of equity need to oppose funding charter school, not because choice is inherently a bad idea but because the spread of charter schools is morally corrosive and drains money from other local schools. Since funds are always limited, the opportunities for the few come with the sacrifice of others. “They are stealing your child’s future,” might be an appropriate opposition slogan. …
“Progress requires an opt-in campaign for local public schools based on community rather than individualist values. Advocacy should highlight the fundamental characteristics of effective public schools both in the U.S. and abroad and contrast these with prevalent market-based solutions….
“Candidates need to hear from the public: There are better choices than school choice to improve education.”
In this post, EduShyster interviews Andre Perry. In 2013, he became Founding Dean of Urban Education at Davenport University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Before that, he was a leader in the charter school movement in Néw Orleans. As I read this interview, I heard echoes of my own thinking from about a decade ago. I didn’t care who was sponsoring the schools so long as they were good schools. By 2009, I realized that it did matter, because many charters were skimming the best students and needed resources from the poorest districts, this left the public schools, which enroll most children, even worse off than they were before. We will see how Dr. Perry’s rethinking evolves.
Here are Jennifer Berkshire’s first questions:
“EduShyster: You were involved in the education reform experiment in New Orleans from its inception. But you’ve become increasingly critical of the direction reform has taken. Why?
“Andre Perry: The goal of education has to be build the capacity of local residents. It has to be—and I’m talking about from top to bottom. Our goal is not to improve a school in spite of the community. Our goal is to improve a community using schools. And it’s not just to give students the skills to get a job—that’s one small part. It’s to make sure they have sustainable communities to live in. You’re not going to fire your way to improving community. You have to do the hard work of building capacity and training people and becoming a member of the community. That’s how you do it. That wasn’t happening and it’s not happening. In addition, and this is where I am clearly biased, New Orleans is 60% Black. If we don’t have Black leaders in the mix, we’re just reinforcing a power structure that helped cause the situation we were in.
“EduShyster: Was there anything specific that caused you to start to question what was happening in New Orleans?
“Perry: I became very critical because I saw a script that folks had to follow. There was a clear bias against New Orleanians, some of which was predicated on race, some on folks’ affiliation with the prior system. But there was a clear bias. Around 2008 and 2009, I sat on some of the charter authorizing committees. I would see Black and local charter applications just passed on, and I would see white applications that had clearly been written by someone else, and yet the odds were stacked for their acceptance. I remember in the beginning, it was really about quality and making sure we found new voices. Then it became about *scaling up.* There was a big transition, and I said *whoa—that is not the move.* The goal is to bring in different voices and new, innovative perspectives. It’s not to give the same people more schools. I didn’t get into reform for that. I got in it to build the capacity of local residents.
“EduShyster: People should also know that you’re very critical of the critics of education reform in New Orleans. I’ve heard you use words like *crass,* *silly,* and *camp-ish* to describe some of the anti-reform arguments. And can we acknowledge that merely typing those words makes my fingers hurt?
“Perry: I’m very critical of the anti-reform narrative because it lacks any form of nuance. These labels—sometimes I don’t even want to say them out loud—and if I hear the word neo-liberal again… There are no complicated scenarios posed; it’s completely ideological. Let’s be real. We have to be very pragmatic about change. There’s no one way to bring about change. It typically comes from young people who aren’t wedded to any particular brand, and it will come from a commitment to making sure that the lives and outcomes of those communities are improved by any means. That’s what’s frustrating to me on the anti-reform side. Black people have never had the luxury to do things one way. We need good schools across the board—public, charter, private—and delivery systems that really speak to our existence. This idea that we can’t have multiple players in the same space is ridiculous. But when you’re in these settings where the rhetoric is so intense, you completely miss that there is good work happening in the charter space, or good *reformed* work happening in the traditional space. And what you also don’t see is how privilege and class are pervasive in all of these systems.”
I know I am missing something. Nuance is important but too much nuance, and you get rolled by those who know exactly what they want and go for it.
It is indisputable that standardized tests have a disparate impact on members of minority groups. Asian students perform exceptionally well on math tests. White and Asian students have higher scores than black and Hispanic students.
The same disparate impact is found on teacher tests as on student tests. Occasionally, an African-American teacher will sue, claiming test bias. They usually win. New York State’s teacher licensing exam attempted to be “more rigorous,” but making them harder to pass cemented the gap between the pass rates of different racial groups.
“On a common licensing exam called Praxis Core, a new test given in 31 states or jurisdictions that was created to be more rigorous than its predecessor, 55 percent of white candidates taking the test since October 2013 passed the math portion on their first try, according to the preliminary data from the Educational Testing Service, which designed the exam. The passing rate for first-time African-American test takers was 21.5 percent, and for Hispanic test takers, 35 percent. A similar gap was seen on the reading and writing portions.
“In New York, which now has four separate licensing tests that candidates must pass, an analysis last year of the most difficult exam found that during a six-month period, only 41 percent of black and 46 percent of Hispanic candidates passed the test their first time, compared with 64 percent of their white counterparts.”
This is a paradox, as two policy goals conflict: to diversify the teaching force and to make teacher certification exams more difficult to pass. It seems likely that aligning teacher exams with the Common Core will worsen the problem.
Read Alan Singer here on the uselessness of standized tests for teacher certification. He writes that such tests are notoriously unable to predict who will be a good teacher and who will be a bad teacher.
He recommends remedies, beginning with FIRE PEARSON.
He concludes:
“There is no foolproof way to evaluate prospective teachers or anybody else for that matter. People have bad hair days and perform below expectation. Life also interferes with work and sometimes people do not develop as expected. Just look at some of the high draft choices in professional sports. There needs to be support and evaluations along the way and alternative career paths. There is no inoculation or test that can be administered at the start of someone’s career that will ensure people will be great teachers down the road.”
From: The Network for Public Education
To: Members of the United States Senate
Re: The Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
To the Senate:
We, the below undersigned organizations oppose high-stakes testing, because we believe these tests are causing harm to students, to public schools, and to the cause of educational equity. High-stakes standardized tests, rather than reducing the opportunity gap, have been used to rank, sort, label, and punish Black and Latino students, and recent immigrants to this country.
We oppose high-stakes tests because:
As the Seattle NAACP recently stated, “Using standardized tests to label Black people and immigrants as lesser—while systematically underfunding their schools—has a long and ugly history. It is true we need accountability measures, but that should start with politicians being accountable to fully funding education and ending the opportunity gap. …The use of high-stakes tests has become part of the problem, rather than a solution.”
We agree.
Yours sincerely,
Network for Public Education
50th No More (Florida)
Action Now
Alaska NAACP
Alliance for Quality Education
Badass Teachers Association
Better Georgia
Chicago Teachers Union
Class Size Matters
Community Voices for Education
Defending the Early Years
Delaware PTA
EmpowerEd Georgia
FairTest
HispanEduca
Indiana PTA
Indiana Coalition for Public Education
Indiana State Teachers Association
Journey for Justice
More Than A Score
Newark Parents Union
Newark Students Union
NJ Teacher Activist Group
NY State Allies for Public Ed
Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Education
Opt Out Orlando
Oregon NAACP
Parents Across America
Providence Students Union
Rethinking Schools
Save Our Schools March
Save Our Schools NJ
Seattle King County NAACP
Students United for Public Ed
Texas Kids Can’t Wait
The Coalition for Better Education
The Opt Out Florida Network
United Opt Out
Voices For Education (Arizona)
Washington State NAACP
We Are Camden
Young Teachers Collective
[Readers: If your organization wishes to add its name to this statement, please contact NPE executive director Robin Hiller at rhiller@voicesforeducation.org
In one of his eloquent essays, Paul Thomas puts standardized tests into perspective: They cannot be tools for equity. They were designed to sort and rank, and they are biased towards those who start with the most advantages.
He writes:
High-stakes, standardized tests are, as Audre Lorde stresses, “the master’s tools.”
For those of us seeking educational and social equity and justice, then, we must heed Lorde’s call:
For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change….
The essential flaw with continuing to cling to high-stakes standardized testing is two-fold: (1) the tests are race, class, and gender biased, and (2) the demand that we raise test scores keeps all the attention on outcomes (and not the policies and practices that create the inequity).
Read it all. It is thoughtful and important.
Diane Ravitch's blog 