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Credibility of Florida’s Accountability System Near Collapse

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2012 //
12

The roiling controversy about the legitimacy of Florida’s testing regime is growing by the day.

Many school boards have passed their version of the Texas anti-high-stakes testing resolution.

FAIRTest says that Florida may be the worst “misuser” of testing of any state in the nation. Students spend 38-40 days each year preparing to take tests and taking tests. That is a bit more than 20 percent of the school year. What reasonable person would want their child to spend 20 percent of his or her school life on testing? That time should be reallocated to instruction, to physical education, to art and singing and play, to activities that stimulate the mind and body, not to the arcane skill of bubble guessing.

When the Florida School Boards Association passed their own resolution and voiced their disapproval of the state’s obsession with testing, State Commissioner Gerard Robinson accused them of giving up “hope.” Somehow, he suggested, they were giving up on the children.

This is such errant nonsense that one hardly knows where to begin or when to stop sputtering. The children of Florida don’t get “hope” by taking more tests and spending more time preparing to take tests. The FCAT mania is solely for the benefit of the adults, who parade around the country boasting of the test scores that “they” increased by turning up the pressure on children and teachers.

Commissioner Robinson should take the Florida high school tests and publish his scores.

You gotta wonder if these people even care about children.

The good news, as blogger Coach Sikes predicts, is that public confidence in the accountability system is rapidly declining. He says it is near collapse. I hope he is right.

The idea of giving letter grades to schools is absurd. Schools are complex institutions. They do some things well, some things poorly. A letter grade cannot capture their quality or their challenges. And the whole testing enterprise is highly political. The passing score is set by the State Department of Education, which works for the governor. The standards are politically derived, not based on some objective scientific measure.

The sooner the public realizes this, the sooner this whole child-abusing structure should collapse. And good riddance!

Once the debris is cleared away, Florida can begin to improve its public education system and aim to make it good for all children.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Florida, Testing

Report from Florida: Fight Them or Join Them?

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2012 //
13

A reader reflects on the rapid advance of privatization in Florida, which has been abetted by the hard demands of the state’s high-stakes testing regime:

Having been in education in FL for over 30 years, it is gut wrenching to me to watch what is going on. Jeb Bush and his band of merry men (and women) have taken over public education in FL. Some of the best and most innovative public educators I have known are now working for him or one of his groups. I am beginning to think folks in FL have decided the privatization of public education in FL is inevitable, and our best shot at helping kids is to get involved now in that transition to make sure there will be some folks in those private enterprises that actually care for kids. The climate and culture in the public schools has become toxic to people who believe in the duty of the state to provide a free quality education to our kids (that’s actually in the FL Constitution).

I observed in a summer school class today for students who didn’t pass the third grade FCAT. Their only shot at fourth grade is to pass a similar test this summer. The teachers in those classes are some of the best in our county. And most of the summer has been spent in quality reading instruction. But the final two to three weeks is totally focused on test prep and testing, teaching ‘strategies’ to use to pass the test. “Remember, next Wednesday, use all these strategies so you can pass the big test.” You can see the stress in the faces of these eight year old children. They get one more chance to bubble in the right answers, or they get to spend another year in third grade.

What are we doing? Have we all lost our minds?

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Florida, Privatization

Not Such Good News from Florida

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2012 //
9

I said in a post this morning that there was “a glimmer of hope” in Florida because the state board had upheld Miami-Dade’s decision to turn down three virtual charter schools.

But Florida parent leader Rita Solnet wrote to correct me. She attended the state board meeting, and she says the state board offered no glimmer of hope, as I thought, because the Puppetmaster was behind the curtain, pulling the strings. The state board overturned the decision of the Palm Beach County school board to reject four charter applications. It is startling to realize–as Solnet mentions below–that the city of Miami already has 122 charter schools!

Thanks to Rita Solnet for reminding us that nothing will change until there is new leadership in the state of Florida, leadership that is willing to stop the rampant privatization of the state’s public schools.

At that same meeting, the State Board of Ed over-turned Palm Beach County’s decision to deny applications for four (4) charters.

One must understand that Jeb Bush owns Miami. He runs the FL BOE. He controls the Ed Commissioner. The education staff are hand-picked loyalists of Jeb. If Jeb wanted the Miami-Dade charter approved, they would have been approved.

Did I mention that Miami-Dade already has 122 charter schools?  122!

I attended this meeting. I’m an optimist at heart. I missed the glimmer of hope.

Instead I heard impending doom.  A lengthy discussion on blended learning which is the Jeb Bush method of introducing more reliance on virtual charters. (ease them into it)

I heard scripted questions come flowing from board members with a purpose during a masterfully well-orchestrated Agenda..

I heard the Digital Learning speaker, Deirdre Flynn, discuss 270 students and 6 teachers in blended learning classes. (Oh, did I mention Flynn is Deputy Director for Jeb’s Foundation? No, the Board didn’t mention that either.)

I heard FL BOE member Chartrand request “a McKinsey study to see if we are doing this blended learning thing right.”  (Former McKinsey education leader, Michael Barber, is the Pearson Education Adviser.)

I heard BOE member Chartrand ask to inject language into a new vision/mission statement which specified “highly effective teachers” only.

Later I spoke at length with FL Commissioner Robinson.

No, not yesterday. I saw no glimmer of hope at the FL BOE meeting. Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings but yesterday was not a hopeful day. Yesterday reinforced how much work we have ahead of us.  Yesterday reinforced that we need a new regime at the top.

 
Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Florida, For-Profit, Privatization

A Bipartisan Consensus for Bad Ideas

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2012 //
17

If you want to see a demonstration of the bipartisan consensus around bad ideas, read this interview with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

Bush talks about his great success in Florida and his strong support for Governor Rick Scott, who has been wreaking havoc with the lives of Florida’s public school teachers. Of course, Bush is thrilled with this and is probably pulling the strings as the Legislature cracks the whip on their backs.

He is a strong supporter of the Common Core state standards and acknowledges that he intervened with ALEC, the far-right group of state legislators, to persuade them not to denounce the national standards. He defends ALEC and tries to paint the group as a group of “center-right” legislators, not the anti-government, pro-privatization lobby that became famous for promoting “Stand Your Ground” laws and voter suppression laws.

He is very happy with President Obama’s Race to the Top, and why shouldn’t he be? Race to the Top contains everything that pleases rightwing Republicans like Bush. It green-lights more testing and more privatization. And it hammers teachers by tying their fate to test scores.

And of course he is enthusiastic about the “reforms” passed by Governor Jindal in Louisiana, Governor Daniels in Indiana, and others on the far-right.

In your wildest dreams, did you ever imagine a consensus that stretched from Obama to Jindal? Did you ever dream that education would be the issue that would be common ground for a Democratic President and the rightwing of the Republican party?

Categories Bush, Jeb, Common Core, Education Reform, Florida, Jindal, Bobby

Note to Jeb Bush: Florida Loses Its Bragging Rights

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2012 //
6

Coach Bob Sikes blogs about Florida, where he teaches.

He just sent me his latest post, which shows that Florida has lost ground in its national rankings in both business and education under Governor Rick Scott.

Of course, Governor Scott listens closely to whatever former Governor Jeb Bush says, since he is now seen as a national authority on the subject of choice and educational excellence. But, somehow, those two big guys together blew it.

In CNBC’s rankings of the best states to do business, Florida fell from #18 to #29. Governor Scott likes to boast that he will make it #1, but the state seems to be headed in the wrong direction.

CBNC also ranked the states for their education, and Florida’s ranking fell from #35 to #42. It seems that businesses not only want to find a pool of well-educated workers, they also want to find good schools for their families. Florida, the home of school choice, is not doing such a good job on that score.

But don’t expect Jeb Bush to stop bragging about the Florida miracle. It just seems to have been a bubble, or like most miracles, a mirage.

Categories Bush, Jeb, Education Reform, Florida

A Charter Battles for Right to Remain Open

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2012 //
15

In Florida, where charters spring up like wildflowers in shopping malls, the Miami-Dade School Board voted to close down Rise Academy charter school.

Rise appealed to the state board, and the state board reversed the local board’s decision.

The Miami-Dade board went to court, and the court overturned the state board’s decision. That is, the court ruled that the local board was right to cancel Rise Academy’s charter. The charter school plans to sue the Miami-Dade board for damages.

I recall reading in an article in the Economist that I wrote about earlier that one of the great virtues of charter schools is that it is easy to shut them down for poor performance, malfeasance or other reasonable grounds.

This one won’t go without a fight, and the fight isn’t over.

According to the story in the Miami Herald, Rise Academy was closed because of:

unsanitary bathrooms and food storage, a shortage of textbooks, and questionable spending by administrators. The school had no science, social studies, art or writing programs, no student computers, no library — and recess was held on an asphalt parking lot, Miami-Dade officials found.

“The school was a dump,” school district lawyer Mindy McNichols told state officials at a 2010 hearing. “They refused to follow any of the requirements.”

But none of these conditions was a problem for the majority on the state board. Now that the Appeals Court has upheld the decision of the local board,  the fight goes on.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Florida

Governor Scott: Is Florida Testing Too Much?

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2012 //
13

Good grief! I knew that the anti-high-stakes testing movement was making headway, but this is unbelievable.

Governor Rick Scott of Florida now wonders if the state is testing too much.

Parents in Florida have been complaining for years that their children are over-tested, that too much instructional time is wasted on test prep, that too many millions are thrown away on testing instead of teaching.

And now the governor is wondering too.

Will wonders never cease?

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Florida, Testing

How Idiotic Is VAM? Very.

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2012 //
21

One of my favorite bloggers is Anthony Cody. Anthony is an experienced teacher of science in California. I always learn by reading his blog “Living in Dialogue.” He recently offered his column to a teacher in Florida to explain how his or her evaluation was affected by “value-added modeling” or VAM.

The idea behind VAM is that teachers should be evaluated based on the rise or fall of their students’ test scores. Arne Duncan made VAM a requirement of the Race to the Top program, despite the lack of any studies or research validating this practice and despite ample warnings that it was invalid and would mislabel teachers as effective or ineffective. Nonetheless, many states pushed through legislation requiring that teachers be evaluated in part by their students’ changing scores. If the scores went up, they were a good teacher; if they did not, they were an ineffective teacher.

This idea was embraced most warmly by very conservative Republican governors like Rick Scott in Florida, where VAM accounts for fifty percent of a teacher’s evaluation. In the column cited here, the Florida teacher explains how it works and how absurd it is. This teacher teaches social studies to students in the 9th and 10th grades. When he/she went to get his evaluation, it turned out that the administrator had no idea how VAM would work, especially since the Florida test does not test social studies for 9th and 10th graders. At first, the teacher was told that his/her evaluation would be based on the whole school’s scores–not just the students in his/her classes–but then he/she convinced the administrator that the evaluation should be based only on those in his/her particular classes. That took a while to figure out. The teacher got the FCAT scores in May, but it took the district or state three months to prepare the teachers’ VAM using those scores.

By the end of the blog, it is obvious that the calculation of VAM is confusing, non-scientific, and inherently unrelated to teacher performance. It will be used to take away teachers’ due process rights and any protection for their freedom of speech. It is a weapon created to harass teachers. As this teacher concludes:

As someone who is not comfortable living life on my knees with duct tape over my mouth (you may have figured this out by now if you have been reading this blog for any length of time), I am not comfortable working on an annual contract. Teachers must be able to voice their concerns about administrative decisions that harm students without fear of losing their jobs. Eliminate continuing contracts and a culture of complacency, sycophants and fear will rule the schools. Senate Bills passed in state after Race to the Top state have included VAMs as a major portion of teacher evaluations all in the name of “Student Success” and “Educational Excellence” when in reality they have been immaculately designed to end the teaching profession as we know it and free state and districts from career teachers with pension aspirations. Some may brush me off as your typical history teacher conspiracy nut, but my daddy didn’t raise no sucker. VAM is a scam.

Diane

Categories Accountability, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Florida, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure

Why Test the Arts and PE?

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2012 //
24

As I read Dana Goldstein’s article about the advance of standardized testing into subjects like the arts and physical education, I began to get a queasy feeling. “This isn’t right,” I mumbled to myself. I thought of my grandchildren taking standardized tests in music and gym, and I shook my head. This isn’t right.

Race to the Top has promoted this movement to test every subject. Arne Duncan brandished $5 billion to encourage states and districts to judge teachers by the rise or fall of their students’ scores. The fact that there is no evidence for this method of judging teachers doesn’t matter. Bad ideas backed by big money have a way of catching on, no matter how mindless they are.

South Carolina has developed online tests for the arts, multiple-choice, of course. Florida is building tests of music and other pervormance arts that can be scored by machine, that is, by artificial intelligence. The vendors of these tests lobby to make them permanent, regardless of their quality.

Are they doing this at Sidwell Friends or the University of Chicago Lab School or Dalton or Exeter or Deerfield Academy? Of course not.

Is this what they do in Finland? Of course not.

What is the reason for testing the arts and physical education? It’s not to help students take joy in singing or playing a musical instrument or running fast or shooting baskets.

No, the purpose of all these tests is to collect data to evaluate the teachers! Wasting the students’ time with stupid questions and pointless activities and trivial measurements is just a way of gathering information so teachers of the arts and physical education can get a value-added score, just like teachers of reading and math.

Sometimes Americans do really foolish things. Sometimes they do these things because it is so easy to follow the crowd. Sometimes it’s because no one is thinking clearly. Sometimes they get caught up in nutty fads because someone is making a profit and buying legislators. Usually it’s because the people who launched these bad ideas have no moorings. They have lost touch with their own values. They do to other people’s children what they would never do to their own. They don’t listen to teachers. They don’t listen to parents.

History is not kind to people who do foolish, nay harmful, things and fail to exercise independent judgment. That’s why it’s best to say “no” when your conscience tells you to.

Diane

Categories Arts Education, Education Reform, Florida, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Calling Jeb Bush! Calling Arne Duncan! Talk to this teacher! Revised!

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2012 //
12

Here is a comment from a first-year teacher who knows more than the “reformers” who wrote the laws in Florida.

I can go one better — in my district here in southwestern Florida 50% of my final evaluation for the year will be based upon the test scores of children in grades 4 and 5. I taught 2nd grade this year. This is my first year at this school.So, in effect, half of my ‘effectiveness’ as a teacher is to be determined by test scores from students I’ve NEVER taught and most of whom I’ve NEVER even met.How anyone could keep a straight face and maintain any moral integrity while telling me that this is a ‘fair system’ is beyond my understanding yet this is the program that my betters in the district office produced, the state of Florida approved, and the U.S. Dept. of Education accepted as meeting the requirements of Race to the Top.How could I have added ‘value’ or subtracted ‘value’ to students I’ve never even spoken to or been with in a classroom? Osmosis?He later sent me this correction:Diane, I’m flattered that you chose to highlight my comment. Thanks! Just a slight correction — I’m not a first year teacher, just new to this school. I’ve actually been teaching for 15 years, always in Title I schools.I’m National Board Certified, hold 2 MA’s (one from NYU) and was named Social Studies Teacher of the Year for my district last year.

I fully expect my final rating to be “Needs Improvement” or “Ineffective” though, when the test scores are added in to my ‘value’, since the state saw fit to raise the bar so high for passing and they made the FCAT test far more difficult this year. My principal actually rated me ‘highly effective’ based upon her numerous formal and informal observations and review of my teaching portfolio but that only counts for half so . . . .

Looks like the writing is on the wall and it’s time to start looking for employment outside the school system. That makes me very sad and sick at heart but I don’t see anything changing for the better any time soon. After 2 years of low ratings in Florida now you lose your professional teaching certificate and can be fired at will. Everyone who can is retiring or has retired. Those of us in the middle or just starting out are just stuck.

Where are our professional organizations and unions? Why aren’t they fighting hard to help us? Inquiring minds would like to know.
Categories Bush, Jeb, Duncan, Arne, Florida, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching
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