Archives for category: Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)
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Leonie Haimson: Why Is NYC Chancellor Carranza Sending Struggling Schools into a Death Spiral?

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2019 //
13

 

Leonie Haimson questions why NYC Chancellor Carranza sent a letter to every parent in schools rated CSI (Comprehensive Support & Improvement) by the state to let them know that they could transfer to another school. 

Although he claimed otherwise, he was not required to do so.

Some schools are on the list because of opt outs.

Carranza is destroying schools instead of supporting them. No school ever improved by closing it.

After I wrote this, I heard that Carranza “might” withdraw his threatening letter. True or not, why was it his response and Commissioner Elia’s response to threaten schools instead of helping? Why do they think that any school needs threats and intimidation? Where do they get these attitudes? Was NCLB their textbook?

Categories Closing schools, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), New York, New York City

Tom Ultican: IReady: Is This the Worst Education Program Ever Marketed? Maybe, Maybe Not.

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2019 //
12

 Tom Ultican discovered a program called iReady that has magnificent marketing, but he says it is awful. If he spoke Yiddish, he would say it is “schlock” or “dreck.” Worse than the program is that stuff like this is pushed by the federal government. They like to waste your money. Ultican posted this entry a year ago but it has taken on a life of its own. One mother who reviewed it called it not iReady but “iSCAM.”

 

iReady is an economically successful software product used in public schools, by homeschoolers and in private schools. It utilizes the blended learning practices endorsed by the recently updated federal education law known as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). iReady employs competency-based education (CBE) theory which is also advocated by ESSA. The outcome is iReady drains money from classrooms, applies federally supported failed learning theories and undermines good teaching. Children hate it.

Public education in America contends with four dissimilar but not separate attacks. The school choice movement is motivated by people who want government supported religious schools, others who want segregated schools and still others who want to profit from school management and the related real estate deals. The forth big threat is from the technology industry which uses their wealth and lobbying power to not only force their products into the classroom, but to mandate “best practices” for teaching. These four streams of attack are synergistic.

Profiting from Education Law

A group of billionaires with varying motives are using their vast wealth to shape America’s education agenda to their own liking. The last rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 called ESSA was larded up with provisions like the big money for technology which is listed in Title’s I and IV. It also specifies generous grants to promote both “blended learning” and “personalized learning.” (See page 1969 of the official law.) Charter schools, vouchers and social impact bonds are promoted in ESSA. All these initiatives drain money from the classroom and none have been credibly shown to improve education outcomes.

Read his post to learn the history of iReady, which started innocently enough as a workbook series in 1969. Then an equities investor took over, and all of a sudden the whole spectrum of money-grabbing hedge funders and know-it-all billionaires get into the picture. Even Jeb Bush.

A cautionary tale that begins with money and ends with money.

Categories Common Core, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), For-Profit, NCLB (No Child Left Behind)

Laura Chapman on the Triple Disasters of Federal Policy: NCLB, RTTT, and ESSA

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2018 //
15

Laura Chapman responded to this post about the nil effects of NCLB:

She writes:

“The biggest lie was NCLB. The second biggest lie was Race to the Top. The third biggest lie is ESSA.”

NCLB was the template for what followed. I wrote about that jargon-filled fiasco as a heads up to colleagues working in arts education who did not know what hit them.

Race to the Top was the double whammy with a propaganda mill called the “Reform Support Network” designed to intimidate teachers who failed to comply. USDE outsourced the problem of compliance to people who did not know what to do with this fact: About 69% of teachers had job assignments untethered to statewide tests. The hired hands working for the Reform Support Network offered several absurd solutions. Among these were the idea that teacher should be evaluated on school-wide scores for subjects they did not teach (e.g., math, ELA) and that a writing assignment called SLOs (student learning objectives) should function as a tool for evaluation.

The SLO writing assignment required teachers to specify and predict gains in the test scores of their students from the beginning to the end of the year. Teachers were graded on their SLOs and up to 25 criteria had to be met for writing a “proper” SLO. That absurdity has been marketed since 1999, first in a pay-for-performance scheme for Denver conjured by William Slotnick (Master’s in Education, Harvard). There is no evidence to support the use of SLOs for teacher evaluation. Even so, this exercise is still used in Ohio, among other states.

ESSA is like NCLB in that the high stakes tests are still there, but they are surrounded with legalese about state “flexibility.” Some parts of ESSA calls for de-professionalizing the work of teacher education (see Title II, Section SEC. 2002).

ESSA became the federal law before our current ten-yacht owner and avowed Christian missionary, Betsy Devos, was appointed to be in charge of the Department of Education.

Devos’ incompetence delayed and then mangled the “approval” of required ESSA “state plans“ for this school year, 2018-2019. In the meantime, groups that championed NCLB and Race to the Top publicized their own ratings of ESSA plans (e.g., Bellwether Education Partners, Achieve, and the Collaborative for Student Success). The Collaborative for Student Success is funded by the Bloomberg Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, ExxonMobil, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation–none friends of public education.

I think that compliance checks on ESSA, if any, will be outsourced and that the still pending federal budget will confirm the ten-yacht Education Secretary’s’ real priorities—choice and some of the increasingly weird things recently on her mind.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Education Industry, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Stupid, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Hess and McShane: Why Did the Bush-Obama Reforms Fail to Achieve Their Goals?

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2018 //
42

Rick Hess and Michael McShane of the AMERICAN Enterprise Institute bring a fresh perspective from their perch on the right. Writing in the conservative journal Education Next, they speculate on the reasons for the disappointing results of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, the twin policies of Bush and Obama.

Policy makers in Washington loved the ideas of testing, accountability, choice, and national standards. Yet, we now know that these policies were controversial and ultimately ineffective. NAEP scores flatlined, and there is little or no evidence that these policies succeeded.

They write:

“Within a few years, though, those Obama administration efforts—especially its support for teacher evaluation and the Common Core state standards—would themselves turn controversial, breeding backlash that rivaled the dissatisfaction with NCLB. Obama’s reforms would get mired in bitter debates about their emphasis on test scores and whether they constituted federal overreach.

“The results of all this activity were decidedly mixed. There’s some evidence that NCLB’s accountability push led to modest test score gains, at least early on (though one can reasonably ask how much of those gains was evidence of schools “getting better” and how much might have been due to teachers shifting time and energy from other subjects to reading and math instruction). Over the past decade, however, the National Assessment of Educational Progress has shown an unprecedented flat-lining of achievement growth. Research suggests that ambitious efforts to remake teacher evaluation did not lead to meaningful changes in how candidly teachers are actually evaluated, and that the $7 billion in the federal School Improvement Grant program did not, on average, improve achievement in participating schools. The Common Core and many of these other efforts may yield benefits down the road, but the results have certainly not been revolutionary and are widely perceived to be disappointing.

“This brief recap prompts a simple query: What happened? Why did each of these initially promising, seemingly popular efforts at federal leadership ultimately lose its luster? Were the high-profile initiatives of the Bush-Obama years a much-needed kick-start that forced America to get serious about school improvement, or a recipe for slipshod policymaking and rushed implementation that ultimately undermined reform? Did these reforms reflect a gutsy commitment to putting students first or political gamesmanship that yielded a counterproductive series of distracting mandates?”

There is no reason to believe that the latest version of these policies—the Every Students Succeeds Act—Will fare any differently.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing

New York Releases Tests, Six Months After Students Took Them

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2018 //
34

The New York Board of Regents and the New York State Education Department remain firmly committed to the testing regime that has aroused so much parent rebellion and produced no gains on NAEP for 20 years. The state always finds good news in the test scores, but NAEP has been consistently flat.

Opt outs declined by a percentage point, but still nearly one of every five eligible students did not take the tests.

Long Island continues to be the epicenter of the opt out movement. About 50% of the students in Nassau and Suffolk counties did not take the tests.

Federal law (the “Every Student Succeeds Act”) says that parents have the right to opt out if their state permits it, but at the same time requires that every school must have a 95% participation rate or face sanctions–a flat contradiction.

New York has not yet clarified how it intends to punish the high-performing schools on Long Island where half the students didn’t take the tests.

This article appeared in Newsday, the main newspaper on Long Island.

The number of students boycotting state tests has declined slightly statewide, but Long Island remains a stronghold of the opt-out movement, state officials announced Wednesday.

The state Education Department, in a media advisory, said the percentage of students in grades three through eight opting out of exams last spring dipped to 18 percent, down from 19 percent in 2017 and 21 percent in 2016. Tests, which are mandated by federal law, cover English Language Arts and mathematics.

The advisory provided no specific percentage for Nassau and Suffolk counties, but did note that the bicounty region “remains the geographic area with the highest percentage of test refusals in both mathematics and ELA.” Newsday’s own surveys of Island districts last spring found boycott rates of nearly 50 percent.

Among students who took the tests statewide, 45.2 percent scored at the proficient level in English, and 44.5 percent in math, the education department reported. Agency officials said results could not be compared with those from prior years because the format of last spring’s tests was sharply revised.

Total testing days in the spring were reduced to four, down from six in prior years, in an effort to provide some relief for parents and teachers who had complained the assessments were too stressful.

New York’s opt-out movement has proved the biggest and most enduring in the nation. The movement first appeared on Long Island in 2013, then exploded statewide two years later, and has remained especially strong in Nassau and Suffolk, and in some suburbs of Westchester County and the Buffalo area.

On the Island, more than 90,000 students in grades three through eight refused to take the state English Language Arts exam in April, representing nearly 50 percent of those eligible, according to Newsday’s survey of Island districts at the time.

Across New York, the number of students boycotting the state tests from 2015 through 2017 has hovered near 200,000 of 1 million eligible pupils in each of the past three years.

Categories Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), New York, Opt Out, Parents, Standardized Testing, Students

New Study Finds That NCLB Got Small and Diminishing Returns

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2018 //
27

No Child Left Behind will be recognized in time as the most colossal failure in federal education policy, whose disastrous effects were amplified by Race to the Top.

Its monomaniacal focus on test scores warped education. RTT just made it worse and left a path of destruction in urban districts.

And the gains were, as a new study reports, modest and diminished over time.

Anyone familiar with Campbell’s Law could have predicted this result. Social scientist Donald T. Campbell wrote:

“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

Campbell also wrote:

“Achievement tests may well be valuable indicators of general school achievement under conditions of normal teaching aimed at general competence. But when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways. (Similar biases of course surround the use of objective tests in courses or as entrance examinations.)”

Scores on NAEP rose modestly for a few years but went flat in 2015 and again in 2017.

Arne Duncan is traversing the country and TV boasting of his success and asserting that American education is built on lies. He should know. The biggest lie was NCLB. The second biggest lie was Race to the Top. The third biggest lie is ESSA.

The belief that threats and rewards will produce better education is not just a lie. It is stupid.

Categories Campbell's Law, Duncan, Arne, Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Lies, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Stupid

Mercedes Schneider: DeVos Denies Utah Parents their Right to Opt Out

By dianeravitch
June 8, 2018 //
16

Betsy DeVos claims to be an advocate for parental rights. She is not.

Utah passed a law recognizing the right of parents to opt their children out of state testing. The US Department of Education rejected the Utah ESSA Plan because it respects parents’ rights.

I want to remind every reader to recognize that the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed parental rights in a 1925 decision called “Pierce v. Society of Sisters.”the right of parents to make decisions about their child.” That decision rejected an Oregon law that required every child to attend public schools, not private or religious schools. The court said, in a decision that was never reversed and has often been cited, that the child is not a “mere creature of the state,” and parents have the power to make decisions for their children, excepting (I believe) where their health and safety are concerned.

Given DeVos’ advocacy for school choice and parental rights, it is shocking that she has agreed to punish the schools, the children and families of Utah for recognizing the rights of parents to refuse the state test.

In New York State, education officials are threatening financial punishments and other more drastic actions for schools that don’t meet the 95% participation rate. Very few schools in the state did. We will see a state takeover of 90% of the schools in the state?

ACLU, where are you?

Categories Accountability, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), New York, Opt Out, Parents, Students, Testing, U.S. Department of Education, Utah

Peter Greene: EdNext and the Beanstalk

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2018 //
5

Peter Greene retired as a teacher but, happily, not as a blogger. He continues to eviscerate hot air balloons and pretensions.

In this post, he examines the questions raised by the conservative journal Education Next: Have states maintained high expectations and does it matter?

Daniel Hamlin and Paul Peterson “note that ESSA gave states license to dump the Common Core, either in its actual form or under whatever assumed name they hid it behind. For accountability hawks, this raises the concern that we’ll have a Race to the Bottom, as states make it easier for schools to clear the performance bar (yes, for the six millionth time, this blurs the barely-existing line between the standards and the tests used to account for them). Will the political expediency of being able to say, ‘All our kids are Proficient (as we currently define it)!’ be too much for politicians to resist?”

They write:

So, has the starting gun been fired on a race to the bottom? Have the bars for reaching academic proficiency fallen as many states have loosened their commitment to Common Core? And, is there any evidence that the states that have raised their proficiency bars since 2009 have seen greater growth in student learning?

In a nutshell, the answers to these three questions are no, no, and, so far, none.

Peter responds: “So nobody has loosened up requirements to– hey, wait a minute. Did they just say that raising proficiency bars hasn’t actually increased student learning?”

Yep. States still have high standards, but the states with those high standards did not see “greater growth in student learning.”

Peter observes: “We are now only one third of the way through the article, and yet the next sentence is not “Therefore, there really is no purpose in continuing to fret about how high state standards are, because they have nothing to do with student achievement.” But instead, the next sentence is “While higher proficiency standards may still serve to boost academic performance, our evidence suggests that day has not yet arrived.” And sure, I understand the reluctance to abandon a favorite theory, but at some point you have to stop saying, “Well, we’ve now planted 267 magic beans in the yard and nothing has happened– yet. But tomorrow could be the day; keep that beanstalk ladder ready.”

Peter thinks those magic beans will never grow into a giant beanstalk.

You would think that after almost 20 years of pursuing high standards and rigorous tests, there might be more discussion of the meager results of these policies.

I have to use this discussion as an opportunity to say a few words about the subjectiveness of the term “proficiency.” Setting the dividing line between “basic” and “proficient” is an arbitrary process. A group of people, some educators and non-educators, meet together to decide what children of a certain grade should know and be able to do. On different days, the same panel might draw a different line. A different panel might choose a different cut score. The decision about where the cut score falls is not objective. “Proficient” is not an objective term.

When I served on the NAEP board, it was understood that “Proficient” was a high bar that most students were unlikely to reach. I thought of it as equivalent to an A. Somehow it has been transformed into a goal that all students should reach. On NAEP, Massachusetts is the only state where as many as 50% of students have reached Proficient.

It is not reasonable to complain when students don’t reach an arbitrary goal that is out of reach, like the NCLB goal that 100% of students would be Proficient by the year 2014. Making tests harder doesn’t make students smarter.

Categories Accountability, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Massachusetts, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Testing

Testing: A Modest Proposal

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2018 //
90

 

To my knowledge, the United States is the only nation in the world that requires students to take standardized tests every year from grades 3-8. I believe that it is surely the only advanced nation that requires annual testing in these grades. The tests are required by federal law, a hangover from George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, and the requirement was re-enacted in the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015.

This testing regime has been in place since 2002, when the law was signed by President Bush the first. The consequences attached to the tests have been harsh in many states, which use them to stigmatize students, teachers, and schools. Teachers have been fired, and schools have been closed based on test scores. That is called test-based accountability, and there is growing evidence that TBA is ineffective. NAEP scores have been flat since 2013. The number of people entering teaching has declined sharply. Schools have cut back on the arts, physical education, and other subjects that are not “counted” in the test score calculus. It is difficult to find any real benefits to our national investment in high-stakes testing.

Why do our policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels continue to require and enforce annual testing, despite the non-existent benefits? I believe that testing survives for two reasons: One is that there is a lobby that loves testing, composed of testing corporations and groups like Democrats for Education Reform, the hedge fund managers organization. The other is that our policymakers are still inhaling the stale fumes of NCLB and the non-existent “Texas Miracle.” It is hard to break away from a practice, even a bad practice, that has become ingrained. Annual testing began with NCLB, became more punitive with Race to the Top, and survived in ESSA. Bad habits are hard to change.

Testing authorities have a general rule. Tests should not be used for any purpose other than the one for which they are intended. Tests are supposed to be diagnostic; they are supposed to provide teachers with information to help them improve instruction. They never do, because the results are reported long after the student has left the teacher who administered the test and they never provide enough detail about the strengths and weaknesses of individual children to be useful.

Standardized tests should not be used for high school graduation or for firing teachers or closing schools. Yet they are. Obviously, they are misused on a regular basis.

So, I have a modest proposal.

I am not aware of any legal requirement that the annual tests required by Congress must be offered in the spring.

Why not give the tests in the first week of school and use only a test whose results may be returned within a month? Let machines score the standardized questions, and let teachers score the constructed responses. The testing vendor would know that they would be chosen only if they could report the results in a month, in a format that informs teachers what students do and do not know. That way, the teacher can find out where students are as they begin the year and tailor instruction to address the needs of the students.

That way, tests would no longer be high-stakes. They would be expressly designed for diagnostic purposes, to help teachers help students. The results would come too early to misuse the tests to stigmatize students, punish teachers, and close schools. There would be no punishments attached to the tests, but plenty of valuable information to help teachers.

How would we know how schools are doing?

We could rely on the National Assessment of Progress, which reports on states and many districts and is disaggregated by race, gender, disability, and other categories. It reports on achievement gaps as well.

With this fairly simple but drastic change, we could put testing in its proper place. We could stop terrorizing students and teachers.

We could let teachers gain at least a month, maybe two, for instruction instead of test prep.

Tell me what you think.

Some of you, I know, will tell me why all testing is a waste of time.

But so long as the requirement for annual testing is in the law, there must be a good faith effort to comply.

Why not comply in a way that is not harmful to students, teachers, or schools, but that might actually provide useful information?

Categories Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Testing

Rick Hess: The Pendulum Is Swinging Against the Bush-Obama “Reform” Era

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2018 //
45

 

Although I often disagree with Rick Hess, I think he is the most insightful of the reformers and the nicest as well. He has a code of civility, and he never descends into mud-slinging or name-calling, unlike others in the reform camp.

In his latest article, I was surprised and delighted to see his acknowledgement that the pendulum is swinging away from the Bush-Obama reforms. He tacitly admits, as few other reformers do, that the era of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top has failed, and (as John Merrow said in his latest post) “the air is humming,” and something great is coming. The current federal law (Every Student Succeeds Act) is a stripped-down version of NCLB, still insanely test-focused, in my view. Under ESSA, despite its grandiose name, there is no hope, none, that “every student will succeed.”

Rick looks at the wave of teachers’ strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Kentucky (with more likely to happen) and draws five lessons.

First, “Teachers are immensely sympathetic actors. For all the gibes, harsh rhetoric of the accountability era, and tsk-tsk’ing occasioned by polls in which people say they don’t want their kids to be teachers, the reality is that people really like teachers. In surveys, no matter how much talk there is about “failing” schools and problems with tenure, teachers are trusted and popular.” Although he doesn’t say it, I will: People trust teachers more than hedge fund managers or billionaires.

Second, “The Trump era has made it tougher for GOP officials to plead “fiscal restraint.” For years, GOP governors and legislators have said there is no more money, but the national GOP has just added billions to the defense budget, over a trillion dollars to the national deficit, and cut taxes for corporations by more billions.

Third, the reform movement must shoulder a significant part of the blame for demonizing teachers, demoralizing them, and building a reservoir of rage. “Along the way, teachers came to look and feel like targets, rather than beneficiaries, of “school reform,” which may be why bread-and-butter demands from teachers are ascending as the guts of Bush-Obama school reform are sinking to the bottom of the “discarded school reform” sea.”

Fourth, teachers’ strikes and walkouts are succeeding because they have broad appeal.

Fifth, he sees the current moment as a good time to rethink compensation, pensions, and staffing. In the minds of reformers, this could be converted into their usual mindset: merit pay, performance pay, replacing pensions with savings plans, etc. As the Kentucky walkout showed, teachers will not sit still while their retirement benefits are whittled away. Part of the appeal of teaching is the expectation that one will not retire to a life of penury after a career of low-paid service.

This is one of the most hopeful articles I have recently read about the pendulum swing that almost everyone knows is coming.

 

 

Categories Corporate Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Failure, Hope, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Resistance, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Pay, Teachers
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