Archives for category: Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)
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Tom Loveless: Billions Have Been Spent on Standards Based Reforms: Was It Worth It?

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2018 //
25

 

Tom Loveless taught fifth grade in California, then earned a doctorate in educational policy, taught at Harvard, then landed at Brookings where he wrote reports on the condition of American education and analyzed international assessments. He recently retired from Brookings but continues to write.

He is one of the few original thinkers in the education think tank world. Neither the right nor left claims him. He is a straight shooter and brings a fresh perspective. He was one of the first to knock down the Great Shanghai Myth by pointing out that the student population of that city is not typical of China. Meanwhile the media and Arne Duncan ranted and raved about the superiority of Shanghai, as proven by its ranking on the international tests, which Loveless debunked.

I recently learned that Loveless had written a new paper evaluating the value of standards-based reform, the approach that is central to No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Every Student Succeeds Act.  

He presented his findings at a conference sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative D.C. think tank.

It is, as I expected, original and important.

Unless there is breaking news today, this will be the only post.

Please read the paper and feel free to comment.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), International, NAEP, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Testing

NAEP Results: Scores Mostly Flat, Gaps Widen

By dianeravitch
April 10, 2018 //
18

 

Education Week reports that NAEP results are flat, with few exceptions. The billions squandered on annual testing and Common Core Gabe produced meager change, especially for those already at the bottom. Achievement gaps widened.

With so little change, it is time—past time—to give serious attention to rethinking the federal testing juggernaut that began with No Child Left Behind, intensified with Race to the Top, and continues with the so-called Every Student Succeeds Act. The latest national results show that many children have been left behind, we are nowhere near “the top,” and every student is not succeeding.

In short, the federal policy of standards, testing, and accountability is a train wreck.

It is past time to stop blaming students, teachers, and schools, and place the blame for stagnation where it belongs: On nearly 20 years of failed federal policy based on failed assumptions.

 

Education Werk reports:

“Across the board, struggling American students are falling behind, while top performers are rising higher on the test dubbed the “Nation’s Report Card.”

“A nationally representative group of nearlyt Behind,  585,000 4th- and 8th-graders took the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2017, the first time the tests were administered digitally. The results, released Tuesday, show no change at all for 4th grade in either subject or for 8th graders in math since the tests were last given in 2015. Eighth graders on average made only a 1-point gain in reading, to 267 on the NAEP’s 500-point scale.

“That meager gain in reading was driven entirely by the top 25 percent of students. During the last decade, 8th grade reading was the only test in which the average score for both high and low performers rose. By contrast, in math, the percentage of students performing below basic (30 percent) and those performing at the advanced level (10 percent) both increased significantly since 2007. The same pattern emerged in 4th grade math and reading.”

 

 

 

Categories Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Failure, Inequity, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top

DeVos Launches “Backpack” Trial to Spur School Choice

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2018 //
21

You have to hand it to Betsy DeVos. She never gives up on a bad idea, no matter what the evidence shows. With clear findings that vouchers don’t produce better results, with increasing numbers of charter frauds, and declining enthusiasm for charter schools, she does not waver in her commitment to destroy public education. No matter how much damage she inflicts on children, she pushes forward with her failed libertarian theories because she is “doing it for the kids.”

And now, DeVos puts Backpack funding in place in a federal pilot:

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2018/02/essa_weighted_student_funding_pilot_devos.html

“DeVos and her team have been especially interested in the pilot, pretty much from the time they took office. That could be because, in theory, adopting a weighted student funding formula could make it easier for districts to operate school choice programs, since money would be tied to individual students and could therefore follow them to charter or virtual public schools. Importantly, though, districts that opt to participate in the pilot don’t necessarily have to use it to further school choice.”

My advice: if you get the money, spend it where kids have teachers are certified to meet the needs of children with disabilities and children learning English.

Choice that busts up the public schools does not help children. Itcadvances the long term goals of libertarian zealots like the DeVos family and the Koch brothers.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Failure, Fraud, School Choice

A Proposal: What to Do About Testing So It Is Used Appropriately

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2018 //
109

Since the passage of No Child Left Behind, we have allowed standardized testing to swamp our schools, stigmatize our students, and demoralize teachers. For years, test publishers warned against the misuse of tests. Tests should be used only for the purpose for which they are designed. They should be used diagnostically, to help students, not to label them or rank them.

But federal law requires that the tests be misused. Educators are frustrated because they feel helpless. They are forced to teach to the tests, which used to be considered unethical. The current tests cannot be used diagnostically, because teachers are not allowed to review the questions and answers with students after the tests. Those are considered the “intellectual property” of the test publisher. From a diagnostic perspective, the tests are useless. All they can do is rank and sort students, based on a criterion that is completely subjective and arbitrary.

Here is what John Dewey wrote about testing in Democracy and Education, p. 222:

How one person’s abilities compare in quantity with those of another is none of the teacher’s business. It is irrelevant to his work.

What is required is that every individual shall have opportunities to employ his own powers in activities that have meaning.

I have a suggestion.

How about giving the tests in September, when school starts? No one would be judged by test results. No student would be stigmatized, no teacher would be given a low rating, no school would be closed. Whatever information can be gleaned from the test at a point when teschers might find it useful. If there is nothing useful to be gained, it would be clear from the outset, and the tests would do no harm.

Furthermore, states and districts should require the testing companies to reveal the questions that students answered correctly and incorrectly. That way, the teachers would learn what the students need to spend more time on. Without that information, the tests are useless.

The states are the consumers. If they jointly insisted that test publishers release the diagnostic information for every student, the test publishers would comply. If the test publishers refuse to do so, the states should seek different vendors and find those willing to supply the necessary information.

Categories Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Students, Testing

My Review of Daniel Koretz’s “The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.” No More Paywall.

By dianeravitch
January 11, 2018 //
21

I reviewed Harvard Professor Daniel Koretz’s “The Testing Charade” in “The New Republic.” It was behind a paywall until a few days ago. The paywall has been lifted.

Here are the main points.

Koretz demolishes the test-and-punish regime of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. He says in no uncertain terms that they failed. He says they ignored Campbell’s Law, which declares that attaching high stakes to tests distorts both the measure and distorts the process they were meant to measure. The emphasis on testing led to inflation of scores, so any rise in scores as a result of pressure is of little or no significance and surely does not mean that students are better educated. I enjoyed reading the book, and my reservation is that Koretz is not at all sure what to do about accountability. I am not either. I wish that the leaders of Congress understood what a complicated subject of accountability is. I would like to see greater accountability at the top, where decisions are made about funding and autonomy. We have a wacky system where teachers, principals and students are held accountable without the power to change the conditions under which they Labor.

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

National Grange Calls on Congress to Reduce High-Stakes Standardized Testing

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2017 //
36

The National Grange, which represents rural communities across America, released this resolution. The Grange moves deliberately and thoughtfully before it takes a position. Its resolutions are initiated locally, then reviewed at the state and national levels before adoption.

The resolution says:


WHEREAS, our nation’s future well-being relies on a high-quality public education system that prepares all students for college, careers, citizenship and lifelong learning, and strengthens the nation’s social and economic well-being; and

WHEREAS, our nation’s school systems have been spending growing amounts of time, money and energy on high-stakes standardized testing, in which student performance on standardized tests is used to make major decisions affecting individual students, educators and schools; and

WHEREAS, the over-reliance on high-stakes standardized testing in state and federal accountability systems is undermining educational quality and equity in U.S. public schools by hampering educators’ efforts to focus on the broad range of learning experiences that promote the innovation, creativity, problem solving, collaboration, communication, critical thinking and deep subject-matter knowledge that will allow students to thrive in democracy and an increasingly global society and economy; and

WHEREAS, it is widely recognized that standardized testing is an inadequate and often unreliable measure of both student learning and educator effectiveness; and

WHEREAS, the over-emphasis on standardized testing has caused considerable collateral damage in too many schools, including narrowing the curriculum, teaching to the test, reducing love of learning, pushing students out of school, driving excellent teachers out of the profession and undermining school climate; and

WHEREAS, high-stakes standardized testing has negative effects for students from all backgrounds, and especially for low-income students, English language learners, children of color, and those with disabilities; and

WHEREAS, the culture and structure of the systems in which students learn must change in order to foster engaging school experiences that promote joy in learning, depth of thought and breadth of knowledge for students; therefore be it

RESOLVED, that the National Grange lobby the U.S. Congress and administration to overhaul the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (currently known as the “Every Child Succeeds Act”), reduce the testing mandates, promote multiple forms of evidence of student learning and school quality in accountability, and not mandate any fixed role for the use of student test scores in evaluating educators.

Categories Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Resistance, Rural Schools, Testing

Ethan Siegel: How to Break Public Education

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2017 //
56

Astrophysicist and author Ethan Siegel writes in Forbes magazine about the way that federal policies have disrespected and demoralized passionate teachers. No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Every Student Succeeds Act have been disasters for teaching and learning.

Every sentence in this short article is priceless, and I hate to abridge it. You will have to open the link and read it yourself in its entirety.

He writes:

The ultimate dream of public education is incredibly simple. Students, ideally, would go to a classroom, receive top-notch instruction from a passionate, well-informed teacher, would work hard in their class, and would come away with a new set of skills, talents, interests, and capabilities. Over the past few decades in the United States, a number of education reforms have been enacted, designed to measure and improve student learning outcomes, holding teachers accountable for their students’ performances. Despite these well-intentioned programs, including No Child Left Behind, Race To The Top, and the Every Student Succeeds Act, public education is more broken than ever. The reason, as much as we hate to admit it, is that we’ve disobeyed the cardinal rule of success in any industry: treating your workers like professionals.

Everyone who’s been through school has had experiences with a wide variety of teachers, ranging from the colossally bad to the spectacularly good. There are a few qualities universally ascribed to the best teachers, and the lists almost always include the following traits:

*a passion for their chosen subject,
*a deep, expert-level knowledge of the subject matter they’re teaching,
*a willingness to cater to a variety of learning styles and to employ a variety of educational techniques,
*and a vision for what a class of properly educated students would be able to know and demonstrate at the end of the academic year.

Yet despite knowing what a spectacular teacher looks like, the educational models we have in place actively discourage every one of these.

The first and largest problem is that every educational program we’ve had in place since 2002 — the first year that No Child Left Behind took effect — prioritizes student performance on standardized tests above all else. Test performance is now tied to both school funding, and the evaluation of teachers and administrators. In many cases, there exists no empirical evidence to back up the validity of this approach, yet it’s universally accepted as the way things ought to be…

If your goal was to achieve the greatest learning outcome possible for each of your students, what would you need to be successful? You’d need the freedom to decide what to teach, how to teach it, how to evaluate and assess your students, and how to structure your classroom and curriculum. You’d need the freedom to make individualized plans or separate plans for students who were achieving at different levels. You’d need the resources — financial, time, and support resources — to maximize the return on your efforts. In short, you’d need the same thing that any employee in any role needs: the freedom and flexibility to assess your own situation, and make empowered decisions…

Like any job involving an interaction with other people, teaching is as much of an art as it is a science. By taking away the freedom to innovate, we aren’t improving the outcomes of the worst teachers or even average teachers; we’re simply telling the good ones that their skills and talents aren’t needed here. By refusing to treat teachers like professionals — by failing to empower them to teach students in the best way that they see fit — we demonstrate the simple fact that we don’t trust them to do a good job, or even to understand what doing a good job looks like. Until we abandon the failed education model we’ve adopted since the start of the 21st century, public education will continue to be broken. As long as we insist on telling teachers what to teach and how to teach it, we’ll continue to fail our children.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Tom Ultican: Personalized and Blended Learning Are a Money Grab by the Tech Industry

By dianeravitch
November 7, 2017 //
28

Tom Ultican left the high-tech industry to teach math and physics in high school in California.

He reports with outrage that the 2015 education law called the Every Student Succeeds Act is larded with millions of dollars for the tech industry.

He reviews the evidence and can’t find support for this massive investment in digital learning. The tech lobby prevailed in Washington, D.C.

He writes:

“Bad Education Philosophy is the Source of “Personalized Learning” Failure

“The behaviorist ideology of B.F. Skinner informs “competency based education.” CBE is the computer based approach that replaces the failed 1990’s behaviorist learning method called Outcome Based Education. Outcome Based Education is a renamed attempt to promote the 1970’s “mastery education” theory. Mastery education’s failure was so complete that it had to be renamed. It was quickly derided by educators as “seats and sheets.” These schemes all posit that drilling small skills and mastering them is the best way to teach. It has not worked yet.

“Today’s proponents of behaviorist education hope that technology including artificial intelligence backed by micro-credentials and badges will finally make behaviorism a winner. It will not because little humans are not linear learners. Non-alignment with human nature is a fundamental flaw in this approach. In addition, behaviorism is not known as a path to creativity or original thinking. Those paths are created between teachers and students through human contact; paths undermined by “digital education.”

“Artificial intelligence is more science fiction than reality. Computer scientist Roger Schank, a pioneering researcher in artificial intelligence notes,

“The AI [artificial intelligence] problem is very very hard. It requires people who work in AI understanding the nature of knowledge; how conversation works; how to have an original thought; how to predict the actions of others; how to understand why people do what they do; and a few thousand things like that. In case no one has noticed, scientists aren’t very good at telling you how all that stuff works in people. And until they can there will be no machines that can do any of it.”

“With no unbiased positive proof of concept, hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars which were earmarked for education are being spent on technology. It is likely that much of this spending will cause harm and that schemes like “personalized learning” will not deliver benefit to anyone who is not in a hi-tech industry.

“These dollars could have been spent on better facilities, smaller classes, and better teacher education. Instead, the money is wasted on dubious theories propounded by leaders in hi-tech industries.”

Categories Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Technology

John King: High-Stakes Testing Is Necessary for Equity and Civil Rights

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2017 //
167

John King, who served as Secretary of Education after Arne Duncan departed, went to the Cleveland City Club to praise high-stakes testing as the route to equity and civil rights. He spoke highly of No Child Left Behind and its successor, the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.

He is so wrong. Not just wrong, but misinformed, misguided, and ignorant of facts and evidence about the injurious effects of high-stakes testing on children, teachers, schools, and education. When you read things like this, you remember how the Obama administration sold public education out and paved the way for Betsy DeVos.

All that testing, he said, raises test scores.

Clearly, he never read the report of the National Academy of Sciences (2011) “Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education.”

I recommend that King read Daniel Koretz’ new book: “The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.” Koretz shows that high-stakes testing produces score inflation, teaching to the test, cheating, and loss of instructional time for non-tested subjects.

Someone should explain Campbell’s Law to John King. Whenever high stakes are attached to a measure, it corrupts the measure as well as the social process that is being measured. That means that when you attach high stakes to tests, you can no longer trust the test results and you mess up what is being measured.

Tests are normed on a bell curve. Every bell curve has a top half and a bottom half. The most advantaged kids cluster in the top half. The most disadvantaged kids cluster in the bottom half. Could someone explain to John King that standardized tests never produce equity? That they measure gaps without reducing them? That they discourage children who are told year after year that they didn’t meet the standard? How does it promote equity to rely on a tool that is designed to measure and reproduce inequity?

Categories Accountability, Campbell's Law, Civil Rights, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Equity, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Testing

Washington Post Calls on Democratic Candidate for Governor in Virginia to Stick with Failed NCLB “Reforms”

By dianeravitch
October 18, 2017 //
73

The Washington Post editorial board chastised Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam for admitting that the NCLB reforms have failed, and Virginia needs to find a new paradigm for school improvement.

Lt. Governor Northam’s opponent, GOP functionary Ed Gillespie, is running on a Trump kiss-up platform, calling for the protection of Confederate statues and accusing Northam of having ties to a violent gang of Latinos, MS-13.

No doubt Gillespie will endorse the NCLB approach beloved by the Washington Post editorial board.

The Post is dead wrong. A new book by the eminent Harvard testing expert Daniel Koretz says in no uncertain terms that NCLB test-based accountability was a failure that seriously damaged American education. It is titled “The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.” The high-stakes testing mandated by NCLB and now the Every Student Succeeds Act, produced, in Professor Koretz’s words, score inflation, cheating, and teaching to the tests. Any “gains” are an illusion, because they represent test prep, not learning. (My review of the book will appear in “The New Republic” in the next few weeks.)

Lt. Gov. Northam is right. The Washington Post is seriously out of step on education. It supported Michelle Rhee’s punitive, test-focused regime and never admitted its error, long after John Merrow revealed the D.C. cheating scandal and long after Rhee slipped quietly into oblivion.

What’s the ideal accountability system? Northam admitted to the editorial board that he doesn’t know. Professor Koretz admitted he doesn’t know either. He throws out some ideas drawn from Finland, the Netherlands, and Singapore. There may be others as well, but frankly no one knows. For sure, the Washington Post editorial board doesn’t know, and the little it knows is wrong.

What doesn’t work is one-size-fits-all standards like Common Core. What doesn’t work is promising rewards or threatening punishment to teachers and principals, tied to test scores. Yet that is what the Washington Post advocates: Test-based accountability has failed, but the Post says, “stick with it.” The Post is wrong.

If you live in Virginia, vote for Northam for Governor, not the guy who has wrapped his arms around Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos and the others in the Trump Clown Car.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Testing
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