Archives for category: Global Education Reform Movement (GERM)
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

UK Teacher: Target-Driven Schooling Drives Cheating

By dianeravitch
January 24, 2014 //
9

A teacher in the UK describes what happens when superiors demand that he or should hit their predicted targets, without respect to reality.

It begins:

“The Secret Teacher

“Some years ago I was called by my head of department to discuss the grades I’d predicted for a year 11 class. They were aspirational and realistic. I was told to change them. My forecast was not in line with school targets for A*-C so if I didn’t change them I would be “targeting failure”. I changed them.

“I’ve got young kids, a mortgage and could do without the stress of a capability procedure. Morals don’t pay the bills. The class achieved close to my original prediction. I was admonished over my underperformance and the inaccuracy of my predictions – the predictions which weren’t actually mine at all.

“Following so far? Good. Because that’s target-driven education; a farce.
This September, Birendra Singh, who spent five years observing science teaching in three unnamed London schools, told BBC News that “the rate of cheating suggested in [my] small study may be indicative of a bigger picture”. He was right. It’s epidemic.

“We’ll go to epic lengths to fiddle controlled assessment. We’ll enter whatever number we need to make the spreadsheet turn green regardless of whether a kid has done the work. Until recently, we’d lie about pupils’ speaking and listening scores (easy pickings – nobody ever checked) to boost them to a C. In short, we remove every last scrap of accountability from the pupil and pull every trick in the book to make sure “they achieve their potential”.

“The result? There’s a demographic of our children with little cognitive link between hard work and achievement – that hard work leads to achievement. It doesn’t matter if you work hard or not, you’ll get the grade anyway and we’ll parade you under the banner of “improving standards”.

Categories Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International, Testing

Reader: GERM in Spain

By dianeravitch
December 27, 2013 //
4

A reader describes the impact of GERM in Spain, where she teaches. The Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg coined the term GERM in his book “Finnish Lessons.” It refers to the Global Education Reform Movement. GERM refers to interlocking strategies of testing, choice, competition. PISA spreads GERM. GERM turns education into a competition for test scores, instead of a process of human development.

“Thanks for your blog I have just discovered two months ago.

“Here in Spain we are having lot of troubles in schools and as teachers, due to the policy of our new goverments whose only aim is to reach higher figures in school results without paying any attention to the needs of our students or the increasing difficulties of budgets. During the last year, they have been cutting our budgets and criminalised teachers, they have only paid attention to PISA results, but not in order to solve real problems. So reading your posts makes me see we are not mistaken, and our fight for a public and democratic school is legitimate.”

Categories Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International

European Scholars: PISA Rankings Are “Utterly Wrong” and “Meaningless”

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2013 //
16

Professor Svend Kreiner, a prominent statistician and psychometrician at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and Dr. Hugh Morrison of Queens University in Belfast have published studies blasting the reliability and validity of the PISA league tables. They describe PISA’s rankings as “useless,” “utterly wrong,” and “meaningless.”

According to TES (London),

“Professor Svend Kreiner, a statistician from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, said that an inappropriate model is used to calculate the Pisa rankings every three years. In a paper published this summer, he challenges their reliability and shows how they fluctuate significantly according to which test questions are used. He reveals how, in the 2006 reading rankings, Canada could have been positioned anywhere between second and 25th, Japan between eighth and 40th and the UK between 14th and 30th.

“Dr Hugh Morrison, from Queens University Belfast in Northern Ireland, goes further, saying that the model Pisa uses to calculate the rankings is, on its own terms, “utterly wrong” because it contains a “profound” conceptual error. For this reason, the mathematician claims, “Pisa will never work”.

“The academics’ papers have serious implications for politicians, including England’s education secretary Michael Gove, who justified his sweeping reforms by stating that England “plummeted” down the Pisa rankings between 2000 and 2009.

“The questions used for Pisa vary between countries and between students participating in the same assessment. In Pisa 2006, for example, half the students were not asked any reading questions but were allocated “plausible” reading scores to help calculate their countries’ rankings.

“To work out these “plausible” values, Pisa uses the Rasch model, a statistical way of “scaling” up the results it does have. But Professor Kreiner says this model can only work if the questions that Pisa uses are of the same level of difficulty for each of the participating countries. He believes his research proves that this is not the case, and therefore the comparisons that Pisa makes between countries are “useless”.

“When the academic first raised the issue in 2011, the OECD countered by suggesting that he had been able to find such wild fluctuations in rankings only by deliberately selecting particular small groupings of questions to prove his point. But Professor Kreiner’s new paper uses the same groups of questions as Pisa and comes up with very similar results to his initial analysis.

“He is sceptical about the whole concept of Pisa. “It is meaningless to try to compare reading in Chinese with reading in Danish,” he said.

“Dr Morrison said that the Rasch model made the “impossible” claim of being able to measure ability independently of the questions that students answer. “I am certain this (problem) cannot be answered,” he told TES.”

To read Dr. Kreiner’s studies, google his name.

Categories Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International, Testing

Pasi Sahlberg Speaks Tuesday in Rhode Island

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2013 //
4

The great Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg will speak at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston on Tuesday evening. He is a delightful, charismatic speaker who has a deep understanding of education around the world.

Don’t miss it!

Categories Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International

Pasi Sahlberg: How Should PISA Scores Affect Finnish Education?

By dianeravitch
December 3, 2013 //
10

Finland was not at the top of the PISA league tables in the latest assessment. So what does this mean for the future?

Here, Pasi Sahlberg explains that Finland never cared about being first.

What it wanted most was to have the kind of education that was best for youth development.

What will happen now that its scores have dropped?

Sahlberg writes:

Finland should not do what many other countries have done when they have looked for a cure to their ill-performing school systems. Common solutions have included market-based reforms, such as increasing competition between schools, standardization of teaching and learning, tougher test-based accountability and privatization of public schools. Instead, Finns must protect their schools from the Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM) that has failed to help schools to get better in other countries.  The better way for Finland is to ensure that schools are able to cope with increasing inequality, that teachers have tools to help students with individual needs, and that all schools get support to succeed.

PISA results are too often presented as a simple league table of education systems. But there is much more that the data reveal. The Finnish school system continues to be one of the most equitable among the OECD countries. This means that in Finland, students’ learning in school is less affected by their family backgrounds than in most other countries. Schools in Finland remain fairly equal in learning outcomes despite the rapid growth of non-Finnish speaking children in schools.

Finland should also continue to let national education and youth policies — and not PISA — drive what is happening in schools. Reading, science, and mathematics are important in Finnish education system but so are social studies, arts, music, physical education, and various practical skills. Play and joy of learning characterize Finland’s pre-schools and elementary classrooms. Many teachers and parents in Finland believe that the best way to learn mathematics and science is to combine conceptual, abstract learning with singing, drama, and sports. This balance between academic and non-academic learning is critical to children’s well-being and happiness in school. PISA tells only a little about these important aspects of school education.

Categories Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International

Yong Zhao on Finland’s “Decline” on PISA and East Asian “Success”

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2013 //
27

Yong Zhao is a brilliant, articulate scholar who was educated in China but is now a professor at the University of Oregon. He has written two books that I highly recommend: “Catching Up or Leading the Way” and “World-Class Learners.”

In this post, he reveals some inside information about PISA: Finland has slipped out of the top tier. He says this is not because the quality of education declined in Finland, but because so many test-centric Asian nations (and cities) participated.

He writes:

“While the Finns are right to be concerned about their education, it would be a huge mistake to believe that their education has gotten worse. Finland’s slip in the PISA ranking has little to do with what Finland has or has not done. It has been pushed down by others. In other words, Finland’s education quality as measured by the PISA may have not changed at all and remains strong, but the introduction of other education systems that are even better at taking tests has made Finland appear worse than it really is.”

And he adds:

“While the East Asian systems may enjoy being at the top of international tests, they are not happy at all with the outcomes of their education. They have recognized the damages of their education for a long time and have taken actions to reform their systems. Recently, the Chinese government again issued orders to lesson student academic burden by reducing standardized tests and written homework in primary schools. The Singaporeans have been working reforming its curriculum and examination systems. The Koreans are working on implementing a “free semester” for the secondary students. Eastern Asian parents are willing and working hard to spend their life’s savings finding spots outside these “best” education systems. Thus international schools, schools that follow the less successful Western education model, have been in high demand and continue to grow in East Asia. Tens of thousands of Chinese and Korean parents send their children to study in Australia, the U.K., Canada, and the U.S. It is no exaggeration to say that that the majority of the parents in China would send their children to an American school instead of keeping them in the “best performing” Chinese system, if they had the choice.”

Categories Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International, Testing

Jersey Jazzman: “‘Twas the Night Before PISA Day!”

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2013 //
7

Please read Jersey Jazzman’s hilarious spoof on “The Night Before Christmas.”

He anticipates not the joy of Christmas and Santa, but the much-anticipated release of PISA scores, when Arne Duncan gets to tell the nation once again how terrible American education is and how we are losing the global competition and why we are still a nation at risk.

He will conveniently overlook the fact that he is Secretary of Education and has now been in charge for nearly five years. No accountability for him!

He will surround himself with Beltway insiders who agree that our schools are dreadful despite 11 years of No Child Left Behind and nearly five years of Race to the Top.

How many more years must we wait until we declare these programs failures?

This is how JJ’s poem begins:

“‘Twas the night before PISA Day, when all through the foundations
The wonks were all dreaming about Bill Gates’s donations;

The rankings were crafted for each nation with care,
In hopes that more grants would come from billionaires;

The children were tested and stressed at their desks;
While visions of bubble sheets made them feel quite grotesque;

Suburban moms in their ‘kerchiefs, and dads in their caps,
Hoped on test day their children’s brains wouldn’t collapse,

When out at the DOE there arose such a clatter,
I looked up from Klein’s tablet to see what was the matter.”

Categories Duncan, Arne, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), Humor, International, Testing

Lecker: Toxic Stress Hurts Children

By dianeravitch
November 24, 2013 //
52

When I visited Finland, which is widely recognized as one of the top performing nations in the world, every educator spoke of their goals. They want their students to be happy, healthy, and enthusiastic learners. They did not care about test scores. The years from the beginning of school (at age 7) to high school graduation are considered a “standardized-testing-free zone,” as Pasi Sahlberg put it in his book “Finnish Lessons.”

In the U.S., our leaders want to turn schools into pressure cookers. They want to keep the students and teachers in a constant state of stress. Students worry if they will pass or fail. They worry if their performance on the test might cause their teacher to lose his or her job. Teachers worry that their students’ scores might ruin their chance of staying employed. They worry about keeping their job. They worry that their test-based evaluation might put them out of work, and they won’t be able to pay their mortgage or feed their family.

Corporate reformers think that stress is good. They think that teachers have a cushy job, and students are slackers. They want to see more stress.

But stress is not good for children or adults. Wendy Lecker wrote this article, summarizing the warnings of professional associations. She says that the current obsession with high-stakes testing has created an unhealthy climate in the schools. She calls it “state-sanctioned child abuse.” Fear breaks children. It does not make them joyful learners.

The current so-called reforms, she writes, “has created a school environment that is devastating to our children’s development and mental health.

“Our most vulnerable children often suffer “toxic stress:” prolonged activation of the body’s stress response system brought on by chronic traumatic experiences. Toxic stress disrupts the development of the areas of the brain associated with learning and can have lifelong consequences.”

How much longer must we endure the consequences of truly disastrous policies shaped by people who have no understanding of children, learning, or the conditions necessary for education to flourish?

I think the end is in sight. This house of cards will fall because it hurts children. And we are not a mean nation. Kindness and generosity will eventually prevail over harmful policies. The parents of this nation will demand an end to policies that not only hurt their children but ruin education.

Categories Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), Race to the Top, Testing

What Do International Test Score Comparisons Mean?

By dianeravitch
October 24, 2013 //
29

Uh-oh! Another study has appeared warning that we are falling behind other nations on international standardized tests.

The National Assessment Governing Board released the results of a study comparing the performance of U.S. states to nations that participated in the 2011 TIMSS.

Students in most US states were above the international average but the nations known for their test-taking culture dominated the results. That is, the top performing nations were Singapore, Korea, Chinese Taipei, and Japan.

The usual hand-wringers were wringing their hands about how awful we were, how terribly we compare to those at the top.

The reporters from the New York Times and the Washington Post tried to reach me but I was at an all-day event in Vermont-New Hampshire and did not see their messages.

If I had responded, I would have said this: International test scores do not predict the economic future. Once a nation is above a basic threshold of literacy, the numbers reflect how good that nation is at test-taking. They are meaningless as economic predictors.

In 1964, when the first international test was offered in two grades to twelve nations, we came in last and next to last in the two grades but went on to have a stronger economy in the next half century than the other 11 nations that were tested.

In 1983, a federal report called “A Nation at Risk” warned that our international test scores were a symbol of a “rising tide of mediocrity” and that we were losing our major industries to Japan and Germany because of our terrible schools. As it happened, we lost our automobile industry to Japan not because of our schools or test scores but because of our short-sighted auto executives, who did not anticipate the demand for fuel-efficient cars.

Meanwhile, despite those test scores, our country continued to grow its economy, to be the most militarily powerful and technologically innovative nation in the world, and Japan went into a prolonged period of economic stagnation.

In the latest round of international test scores, Japan outscored us. So what? Singapore, Korea, and the other Asian tigers have cultures that put incredible pressure on young people to get high test scores.

The Washington Post had a sensible comment by someone who studies labor markets:

“Hal Salzman, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University, said hand-wringing over international tests is misguided.

“What’s really peculiar about the whole test-score hysteria is that they use it as a proxy for the U.S. ‘competitiveness and innovation’ as though we don’t have actual measurements,” said Salzman, an expert in science and engineering labor markets and the globalization of innovation. “The country continues to lead on innovation, economic performance and all the results that these things are supposed to indicate.”

There are more than enough strong math and science students in U.S. classrooms to fill future jobs in this country, he said.

“It doesn’t mean we don’t want to improve education,” Salzman said. “But the fear that’s driving it is unfounded. The problem we have is not at the top or at the middle. It’s at the bottom. That’s what gets lost in averages and rankings.”

Professor Salzman is right.

The international test scores are poor economic barometers.

What matters most in the decades ahead is the extent to which we cultivate creativity, ingenuity, curiosity, innovation, and thinking differently. These qualities have been the genius of American culture. These traits are not measured by standardized tests.

The students who learn to select the correct box on a multiple-choice question are not the inventors and innovators of the future. They are the clerks of the future.

Categories Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International

The Two Nations That Learned From Us

By dianeravitch
September 8, 2013 //
21

Two nations were influenced by our thinkers and example:
Finland and Chile. Finland learned its lessons from John Dewey. Its
schools are child-centered. It prizes the arts and physical
education. It has no standardized testing. Its schools are noted
for both excellence and equity. It is a top performer on
international tests. Chile learned its lessons from Milton
Friedman. It has vouchers and testing. Its schools are highly
segregated by social class. The quality of education is highly
dependent on family income. Students in Chile are rioting to demand
free public education. No one considers Chile a model. Which
direction are we going? Why? Whose ideas are dominant
today?

Categories Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »