Arne Duncan, same old Arne.
Mike Klonsky quotes an opinion piece that Arne wrote praising Rahm Emanuel’s proposal to withhold diplomas from seniors in high school unless they have a definite commitment for college, a job or the military.
Arne says that kids drop out because school is too easy. Mike has a few choice words on the subject.
If they had rigor…if they had grit…if they were faced with higher expectations…etc.
Miles Kampf-Lassin writes in The Chicago Reader that Rahm Emanuel’s plan to deny high school diplomas to students who don’t have a definite commitment from a college, the military, or a trade school is a farce.
He writes:
On its face, this may seem like just the kind of bold, innovative, and results-driven solution Emanuel has often said is needed to address the city’s pressing problems. But viewed within the context of a school system struggling to stay afloat, in reality it comes off as more of a Swiftian proposal that threatens the very students it’s aimed at serving.
Emanuel and CPS are calling the proposal “Learn. Plan. Succeed.” They tout it as way to get students to focus on their continued education post-high school. “If you change expectations, it’s not hard for kids to adapt,” the mayor said at a press conference Wednesday morning.
What Emanuel left out was that it’s a bit more difficult to adapt when your school is chronically underfunded and under-resourced, as is the case for the more than half of CPS students who live in predominantly African-American and Latino neighborhoods on the south and west sides. This disparity has helped create a massive, 37-point gap in student achievement between black and white students in the city’s public schools.
Nowhere in the new initiate is there a plan to tackle this disparity, or to increase funding for crumbling schools—many of which are in such decrepit shape that principals complain about rat infestations while teachers are forced to buy basic supplies such as text books, pencils, and toilet paper.
And if their schools being mired in poverty isn’t enough motivation for students, there’s also the fact that CPS is now threatening to cut the school year short by three weeks. This follows a continued increase in furlough days in 2016-2017.
For all of the mayor’s self-praise for extending the amount of time students spend in the classroom, he never followed through on adequately funding the added time, which contributed to the growing budget crisis facing CPS. Now the system could be on the brink of taking a huge step backwards by cutting the school year nearly a month short….
While the mayor claims this will serve as motivation, it could also easily drive up drop-out rates by students who don’t have the support system they require to plan for secondary education while still in high school. CPS already has already seen a rise in layoffs of counselors due to budget cuts. Why stay in school if you might not even get a diploma upon graduating anyway?…
The plan is all but sure to be approved by the mayor’s hand picked board, another reason it’s a good idea to push for an elected school board.
But if the mayor really wants to help students succeed, he’d drop this initiative in favor of one that actually strengthens the city’s public schools. That’s something teachers, parents and students could all get behind.
I reported earlier today that Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants to require all students to have specific plans or they won’t be allowed to graduate.
Here is Peter Greene’s take on the same proposal.
That’s it– Choose college, trade school, internship, or military, or else Rahm will hold your diploma hostage.
Janice Jackson, CEO of Chicago Public Schools, pointed out that any student who graduates from CPS is automatically accepted into the City College community college program. So I suppose we could see this not as a draconian, one-size-fits-all intrusion on the lives of young adults and instead see it as a really, really aggressive recruiting program for the City Colleges.
Or maybe just an aggressive recruiting program for Chicagoland charter schools.
My mind is still reeling from trying to compile the full list of life paths that Rahm Emanuel has now declared Not Good Enough.
Steady job that’s not a trade? Working musician? Stay-at-home mom? Person who just needs to spend a year or two working at a crappy minimum wage job while they figure out what they want to do next? Manage the family business? All of that and more have passed through my classroom and gone on to successful, productive, happy lives. Are you telling me we shouldn’t have given them a diploma because they didn’t do what we wanted them to after graduation?
Sarah Blaine, a lawyer and parent in New Jersey, calls on the legislature to block the use of PARCC as a graduation requirement for students in the state.
As she notes in this article, the New Jersey Assembly voted overwhelmingly to block the State Board of Education from imposing this nutty requirement.
The bill now moves to the State Senate, and she urges senators to vote for the bill.
She writes:
On March 16, the New Jersey Assembly overwhelmingly passed ACR-215, which is a resolution declaring that the state Board of Education’s new regulations requiring students to pass the PARCC Algebra 1 and the 10th grade PARCC English Language Arts tests to graduate from high school are “inconsistent with legislative intent.”
The existing law requires a comprehensive 11th grade test (which these two PARCC tests, neither of which is generally administered in 11th grade, are not). The resolution will not stop New Jersey’s schools from having to offer PARCC each year, but if adopted by the state Senate as well, it is a step toward ensuring that students will not have to pass PARCC to graduate from high school.
With this resolution, the Assembly took the first step in one process by which our New Jersey legislators can check the authority of our governor and his appointees (in this case, the state Board of Education): invalidating regulations that our Legislature determines are “inconsistent with legislative intent.” In English, that means that if the Legislature passes a law, and the executive branch decides to ignore the law and do something different, the Legislature can tell the executive branch: “No, you’re wrong, please go back to the drawing board.” Because this is a check on the executive branch’s authority, the governor’s signature is not required.
As at least 180,000 New Jersey students demonstrated by refusing to take PARCC tests in 2015 and 2016, opposition to PARCC testing is widespread. But leaving the substantive issues surrounding the PARCC test aside, important as they are, ACR-215 and its senate companion resolution, SCR-132, are about governance. That is, in considering these resolutions, the key question our legislators must decide is whether they are willing to allow Gov. Chris Christie and the Christie-appointed Board of Education to openly ignore New Jersey law.
Blaine writes about the issue as an open conflict between the executive and the legislative branches.
But the substantive issues are worth reviewing.
The PARCC test was created by Pearson as a test of the Common Core standards in grades 3-8.
PARCC was never intended to be a graduation test. Most states that signed up to use it as a test of annual student performance in grades 3-8 have dropped it. New Jersey is one of the very few states that still require this test.
No standardized test should be used as a high school graduation test. Standardized tests are normed on a bell curve, and they are designed to differentiate from best to worst scores. They are designed to have a certain proportion of students who will fail, no matter how hard they try.
The state of New Jersey should not substitute the SAT or the ACT or any other standardized test for PARCC, because they all suffer the same fatal flaw.
There are many ways to set graduation requirements and make them rigorous for some, but reasonable for all. It is not reasonable to establish a high bar that some students will clear, but most will not, or that a substantial minority will not. There must be a reasonable path towards winning a diploma, especially for students with cognitive disabilities, and students who for other reasons will never ever pass the PARCC.
It is a basic rule of psychometrics (the study of testing) that tests should be used only for the purpose for which they were designed.
The legislature should force the governor and the state board to drop PARCC as a graduation requirement and give thought to reasonable standards that match the diverse needs of the state’s students.
If the state keeps
Teacher Matt Jablonski writes that Ohio is about to hit a full crisis in its graduation rates: 30% or more of high school seniors will be denied diplomas, as will 60-70% of students in urban districts.
This is a crisis created by the state, which has changed its tests again and again and set unrealistic standards.
What will Ohio do about the kids who don’t graduate?
Jelani Cobb graduated from Jamaica High School, as did many other distinguished Americans. In a powerful story that appeared in The New Yorker, Cobb tells the history of Jamaica High School as a paradigm for the clash between race and reform. Jamaica High School was long considered one of the best high schools in New York City in the 1980s. As the city adopted reform after reform, the school went from an integrated model to a highly segregated school; it enrolled growing numbers of students who were learning English or had disabilities. Other schools lured away top-achieving students. When the Bloomberg-Klein regime took over, Jamaica’s days were numbered. The staff and the local community fought for the survival of the school, but Bloomberg-Klein gloried in closing large high schools and stuffing them with multiple small schools with multiple principals. The school that once enrolled over 3,000 students held its last graduation ceremony in 2014, with a graduating class of only 24 students. This is a very sad story about the abandonment of schools that suffered from the reformer conceit that low scores=bad schools. Jamaica in its final years was serving the neediest of the city’s students; it was put to death by the authorities.
Cobb writes:
Underscoring the indignities that attended the school’s last days was a difficult irony: for much of its time, Jamaica was a gemstone of the city’s public-education system. In 1981, the schools chancellor, Frank Macchiarola, decided to take on the additional role of an interim high-school principal, in order to better appreciate the daily demands of school administration. He chose Jamaica, and was roundly criticized for picking such an easy school to lead. Four years later, the U.S. Department of Education named it one of the most outstanding public secondary schools in the nation. Alumni include Stephen Jay Gould, Attorney General John Mitchell, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Walter O’Malley, Paul Bowles, and three winners of the Pulitzer Prize: Gunther Schuller, Art Buchwald, and Alan Dugan. Bob Beamon, who set a world record for the long jump in the 1968 Olympics, graduated with the class of ’65. The school’s closure felt less like the shuttering of a perennial emblem of stagnation than like the erasure of a once great institution that had somehow ceased to be so.
Jamaica had become an institution of the type that has vexed city policymakers and educators: one charged with serving a majority-minority student body, most of whose members qualified as poor, and whose record was defined by chronic underachievement and academic failure. Even so, word of the school’s closure angered students and their families, the community, and alumni. I was among them—I graduated with the class of ’87—and for me, as for many former students, the school was a figment of recollection, frozen in its academic glory. George Vecsey, the former Times sports columnist and a member of the class of ’56, accused Joel Klein, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s schools chancellor, of “cooking the books,” to make schools slated for closure appear worse than they were, and compared the Department of Education’s closure policies to the nihilism of Pol Pot. Vecsey later apologized for having slighted the suffering of Cambodia, but he held to his contention that Klein ruled by dictatorial fiat. He wrote, in a blog, “The city destroyed a piece of history because of its own failure.”
Good news from the Education Law Center: Several civil rights groups in New Jersey are suing to stop the state from using PARCC as a high school graduation requirement.
Several New Jersey civil rights and parent advocacy organizations have filed a legal challenge to new high school graduation regulations recently adopted by the State Board of Education. The new rules make passing the controversial PARCC exams a requirement for a New Jersey high school diploma and will also prevent students who opt out from graduating.
The lawsuit was filed in New Jersey Superior Court, Appellate Division, on October 21st on behalf of the Latino Action Network (LAN), the Latino Coalition of New Jersey (LCNJ), the Paterson Education Fund (PEF) and the Education Law Center (ELC). ELC and the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey (ACLU-NJ) are co-counsel.
The lawsuit says the new regulations violate the NJ graduation statute and other applicable laws in several ways:
The state law requiring a graduation test, originally passed in 1979, explicitly requires an 11th grade test that assesses state standards in English Language Arts (ELA) and Math. Instead, the State Board designated the PARCC ELA10, a tenth grade exam, and the PARCC Algebra I test, which is given across a wide range of middle and high school grades, as the primary high school graduation tests.
The new rules undermine important protections established by the Legislature, such as eliminating retesting opportunities required by the graduation statute.
The designation of a 10th grade graduation test deprives English Language Learners (ELLs) of an extra year to develop their language ability.
The use of fee-based tests like the SAT and ACT as “substitute competency tests” through 2020 will restrict low-income students’ access to diplomas. Because NJ’s at-risk students are more likely to be members of racial minority groups or ELLs, use of fee-based assessments will have a negative, disparate impact on these student groups, a violation of their civil rights.
The substitute assessments are also not 11th grade tests and, as the Department has acknowledged, are not aligned with state standards. The lawsuit alleges these provisions violate the state constitution’s Education Clause and state anti-discrimination law.
Under the new rules, the substitute assessments will be eliminated after 2020, and students who do not pass PARCC ELA10 and Algebra 1 will have only one other option to graduate: the NJ Department of Education’s time-consuming “portfolio appeals” process. Access to the portfolio appeal will be restricted to students who took all PARCC exams during their high school years.
If these new rules had been in effect for the class of 2016, more than half of the senior class—50-60,000 students—would have been at risk of not graduating. In 2015, the passing rate on the PARCC ELA10 was 37 percent and on the PARCC Algebra I it was 36 percent. In 2016, the rates were 44 percent and 41 percent, respectively. Passing rates on the previous graduation test, the High School Proficiency Assessment, were above 90 percent.
Preparing tens of thousands of portfolio appeals for seniors who do not pass PARCC would be a major new burden for staff and students, particularly in high needs districts. Last year, about 11,000 seniors needed portfolios to graduate. Students who needed portfolios after multiple rounds of testing faced more lost instructional time, increased stress and disrupted senior plans. Districts using the portfolio process incurred extra costs for staff time, additional test administrations, and after-school and Saturday sessions devoted to preparing portfolios for review.
“Setting high school graduation standards is an important public policy issue,” said Christian Estevez, President of the LAN. “It’s also important to protect the rights of students to the opportunities that a high school diploma represents.”
PEF’s Executive Director Rosie Grant added, “NJ has sustained one of the highest graduation rates in the country, in part because we’ve always had multiple ways for students to earn a high school diploma. We want to make sure students continue to have multiple opportunities to succeed.”
The decision to tie high school diplomas to specific test scores is a state policy decision, not a federal mandate. Currently, fewer than one-third of all states use high school exit tests, and several states have used the transition to new assessment systems to eliminate them. Many states continue to give tests for diagnostic and accountability purposes without using the scores to make graduation decisions for individual students. A bill now pending in the NJ Legislature (S2147/A3849) would allow for that alternative.
“The State Board of Education is going full-steam ahead with a plan that breaks New Jersey law and, more disturbingly, disproportionately harms the most vulnerable students,” said ACLU-NJ Legal Director Ed Barocas. “The state knows about the PARCC’s high failure rates, extreme racial disparities, and deep economic divisions in passing scores, and yet officials decided to use this test as a key criterion for graduation despite the glaring problems. The New Jersey Board of Education has put New Jersey students on the wrong course.”
PARCC, a federally-funded consortium that produced the new tests, once had 25 state members. But today only six remain, and just three use PARCC at the high school level. Only NJ and New Mexico currently use PARCC exams as a high school graduation requirement.
“Ultimately, the legislature needs to revisit NJ’s exit testing policies,” said Stan Karp, Director of ELC’s Secondary Reform Project. “Until then, this lawsuit seeks to safeguard the rights of students and families, particularly in high need districts and schools.”
Jonathan Pelto writes that Rhode Island may impose the SAT as a high school exit examination, despite the fact that the SAT was not designed for this purpose. One of the most basic rules of the testing industry is that tests should be used only for the purpose for which they were designed. The SAT was not designed to be a high school exit exam. The SAT, like all standardized tests, is tightly correlated with family income. Studies continue to show that grade-point-average is a better predictor of college academic performance than the SAT. Back in the old days, before standardized testing became a major industry, the test developers would warn districts and states not to misuse the tests.
Meanwhile, growing numbers of colleges and universities no longer require that applicants for admission submit standardized test scores, neither the SAT nor the ACT.
FairTest reports:
HALF OF “TOP 100” LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGES DO NOT REQUIRE ACT/SAT
SCORES FROM ALL OR MANY APPLICANTS;
MORE THAN 240 “TOP TIER” SCHOOLS IN 2017 U.S. NEWS GUIDE
NOW HAVE TEST-OPTIONAL OR TEST-FLEXIBLE ADMISSIONS POLICIES
A record number of colleges and universities now have test-optional admissions policies. Half of the national liberal arts schools ranked in the “Top 100” by the recently published U.S. News “Best Colleges” guide do not require all or many applicants to submit ACT or SAT scores. The National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest) released the new tally.
“Top 100” liberal arts colleges with test-optional policies include Bowdoin, Smith, Wesleyan, Bates, Bryn Mawr, Holy Cross and Pitzer. Test-flexible policies, which allow applicants to submit scores from exams other than the ACT or SAT, such as Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate results, are in place at Middlebury, Colby, Hamilton and Colorado College.
U.S. News ranks more than 240 test-optional and test-flexible colleges and universities in the top tiers of their respective categories, according to FairTest. For example, the top three regional universities in the north, Providence College, Fairfield University, and Loyola University, are test-optional. So is the number two university in the south, Rollins, the third ranked school in the Midwest, Drake, and Mills College, fifth ranked among western regional universities.
Bob Schaeffer, FairTest Public Education Director, explained the new tally. “Admissions offices increasingly recognize that they do not need ACT or SAT scores to make good decisions. That’s why more than 70 schools have adopted test-optional policies in the past three years. We are particularly pleased by the sharp growth at both selective liberal arts colleges and access-oriented institutions.”
Schaeffer continued, “The test-optional surge gives applicants more control in the admissions process. Teenagers regularly tell us that they are attracted to schools where they will be treated as ‘more than a score.’”
Overall, more than 870 colleges and universities are test-optional for all or many applicants (http://fairtest.org/university/optional). The test-optional pace accelerated after the “redesigned” SAT was unveiled (http://www.fairtest.org/sites/default/files/Optional-Growth-Chronology.pdf).
– FairTest’s new list of top-tier colleges and universities that de-emphasize the ACT and SAT:
In a shocking story in Reuters, we learn that the newly redesigned SAT will have negative effects on many students–especially those who are neediest–because of the mathematics portion of the exam.
The story is part of a series.
Renee Dudley writes for Reuters:
In the days after the redesigned SAT college entrance exam was given for the first time in March, some test-takers headed to the popular website reddit to share a frustration.
They had trouble getting through the exam’s new mathematics sections. “I didn’t have nearly enough time to finish,” wrote a commenter who goes by MathM. “Other people I asked had similar impressions.”
The math itself wasn’t the problem, said Vicki Wood, who develops courses for PowerScore, a South Carolina-based test preparation company. The issue was the wordy setups that precede many of the questions.
“The math section is text heavy,” said Wood, a tutor, who took the SAT in May. “And I ran out of time.”
The College Board, the maker of the exam, had reason to expect just such an outcome for many test-takers.
When it decided to redesign the SAT, the New York-based not-for-profit sought to build an exam with what it describes as more “real world” applications than past incarnations of the test. Students wouldn’t simply need to be good at algebra, for instance. The new SAT would require them to “solve problems in rich and varied contexts.”
But in evaluating that approach, the College Board’s own research turned up problems that troubled even the exam makers.
About half the test-takers were unable to finish the math sections on a prototype exam given in 2014, internal documents reviewed by Reuters show.
The problem was especially pronounced among students that the College Board classified as low scorers on the old SAT.
A difference in completion rates between low scorers and high scorers is to be expected, but the gap on the math sections was much larger than the disparities in the reading and writing sections.
The study Reuters reviewed didn’t address the demographics of that performance gap, but poor, black and Latino students have tended to score lower on the SAT than wealthy, white and Asian students.
In light of the results, officials concluded that the math sections should have far fewer long questions, documents show. But the College Board never made that adjustment and instead launched the new SAT with a large proportion of wordy questions, a Reuters analysis of new versions of the test shows.
The redesigned SAT is described in the College Board’s own test specifications as an “appropriate and fair assessment” to promote “equity and opportunity.” But some education and testing specialists say the text-heavy new math sections may be creating greater challenges for kids who perform well in math but poorly in reading, reinforcing race and income disparities.
Among those especially disadvantaged by the number of long word problems, they say, are recent immigrants and American citizens who aren’t native English speakers; international students; and test-takers whose dyslexia or other learning disabilities have gone undiagnosed.
“It’s outrageous. Just outrageous,” said Anita Bright, a professor in the Graduate School of Education at Portland State University in Oregon. “The students that are in the most academically vulnerable position when it comes to high-stakes testing are being particularly marginalized,” she said.
College Board CEO David Coleman, the chief architect of the redesign, declined to be interviewed, as did other College Board officials named in this article.
Read the rest of the article, which contains more detail.
Some states plan to use the SAT as a graduation exam, which should not happen because the test was not designed as an exit exam but as a measure of college readiness. In the past, testmakers would warn states against misusing their test, but this is apparently not happening now. The College Board is supposed to be a nonprofit, but the SAT is its biggest money maker. Now that nearly 900 colleges and universities are test-optional, meaning that students seeking admission to not need to supply either SAT or ACT scores, the College Board has to maintain its revenues and does not warn about the misuse of the SAT.
What will those states that use the SAT as a high school graduation test do when half the seniors can’t “pass” it? What will the young people who can’t get a high school diploma do?
Sarah Blaine, former teacher and current lawyer, blogs at Parenting the Core. She is the parent of two children in New Jersey’s public schools. She prepared testimony in opposition to the proposal to use the PARCC test as a high school graduation requirement.
In her testimony, she reviews what New Jersey law says about the responsibility of the New Jersey state board of education. She maintains that its action to raise the high school graduation requirement to “college and career ready” is in direct conflict with state law.
So what do the statutes the Board’s regulations seek to implement require? N.J.S.A. 18A:7C-1 et seq. require that the Commissioner develop a graduation exit test to be approved by this Board in order to obtain a State-endorsed high school diploma. Id. at 7C-1, 7C-2, 7C-4. The Statewide assessment test must be administered to all 11th grade students. Id. at 7C-6 and 7C-6.1. It must measure those minimum basic skills all students must possess to function politically, economically and socially in a democratic society: specifically, the test must measure the reading, writing, and computational skills students must demonstrate as minimum requirements for high school graduation. Id. at 7C-1, 7C-6.1. Further, if a student uses a comprehensive assessment option instead – i.e., the portfolio option – the student’s use of the portfolio option must be approved by the Commissioner of Education. Id. at 7C-4.
The problem is that the graduation requirements enshrined in the proposal for the Class of 2021 forward do not meet the requirements set forth in the statute.
First, the Statewide assessment test must be administered to all 11th graders. See N.J.S.A. 18A:7C-6; 7C-6.1. Under the Class of 2021 forward regulations, however, the tests that students will be required to obtain passing scores on to earn their high school diplomas, however, are the 10th grade ELA test and the Algebra I test. By definition, the 10th grade ELA test will not be administered to all 11th graders statewide.
The Algebra I test is even more problematic, as many students across the state take Algebra I (and therefore the Algebra I PARCC End-of-Course test) as early as 7th or 8th grade. It also, of course, makes no sense to tell children as young as 12 that their high school graduation depends on their performance on a test they’re taking now. Further, making obtaining a Proficient score on the End-Of-Course test for a course often taught in 7th or 8th grade a high school graduation requirement might well have the unintended consequence of discouraging districts from offering accelerated math programs to qualified students.
Second, I’ve scoured the PARCC consortium website in detail, and nowhere does it say that the PARCC ELA 10 and PARCC Algebra I tests were designed to measure whether students have achieved those minimum basic skills all students must possess to function politically, economically, and socially in a democratic society. Instead, PARCC is focused on assessing college and career readiness – a laudable goal, but a much higher standard than the minimal basic skills standard the Board is authorized to employ in approving a test to determine which public school students in the state will be denied high school diplomas.
Read her testimony in full. She links to the relevant statutes.
The bottom line is that the state board has created a disastrous situation. Students in New Jersey have taken the PARCC tests. Most have failed the tests. Most students will not qualify for a high school diploma. If they fail, as most will, they will have to get the permission of the state commissioner to submit a portfolio of work instead. This is a recipe for chaos and demoralization.
This is nonsense. The sooner New Jersey gets a new governor who cares about students and public schools, the better off the state will be.
The best development now would be a lawsuit to force the state board of education to comply with state law and common sense.
Diane Ravitch's blog 