Indiana voters booted out State superintendent Tony Bennett because of a strange coalition: Democrats who disliked his all-out assault on teachers and public education, allied with Republicans who disliked his fierce advocacy for the Common Core.
Now the struggle against the Common Core continues in that state, as advocates like the rightwing Stand for Children run an advertising campaign to support the actionable standards, while locals continue to oppose them.
John Stoffel went to his school board in Indiana and delivered this message. Would you do the same in your district?
Stoffel said:
A little over two months ago, tragedy unfolded at Sandy Hook Elementary. By the next school day, my school had safeguarded every reasonable security measure. Today, our district is still hammering out policy to best ensure our children’s safety.
In years of teaching elementary here, I have always believed our children are nestled safely inside the walls of our schools. However, this year I have become greatly concerned that, while physically safe, we are suffocating each child’s innate curiosity and natural love of learning through excessive, high-stakes testing.
This exponential growth of high stakes testing has created a frenetic, stressful, and wasteful environment that is not conducive to learning. For example, my students took two hours of interim, predictive tests over the last two weeks. By the time we get results and remediation could occur, the ISTEP applied skills testing window will already be upon us. Further, even if remediation was possible, no research supports interim, predictive tests, except research done by the vendors who sell them.
In fact, with the feverish pace we have started assessing our students; we have actually ignored sound research that the testing is harmful.
Last week I had to administer to students a test of 40, multi-digit multiplication problems which were to be attempted in one minute. Brain research shows that these math tests actually result in the altering of neurological pathways as a protective avoidance to stressful, mathematical problems, even later in real life applications. Still, the need to collect data trumped the maxim: “First, do no harm.”
Perhaps even more demoralizing, as a teacher, is that excessive testing has spirited-away the ability to meet the needs of the whole child. Recess has been cut to a bare minimum. Most social studies and science has been axed. Classroom meetings and current events have gone extinct. Even reading aloud to students, with all its richness in virtue, cannot fit in to the demand of many testing or test-prep days.
Last fall, my school received a “D” rating from then State Superintendent Tony Bennett. No one in Bennett’s Department of Education (DOE) could explain exactly how our school received a “D”. Now, everyone from the statehouse to current State Superintendent Glenda Ritz has expressed the A-F grading system is flawed.
I have voiced my concern about the current educational practices to which our grade of a “D” has led. I have been told our school still must show evidence to the state that we are attempting interventions to improve ISTEP scores.
Under those same pretenses, then, let me ask this:
Can you imagine a doctor diagnoses your child with cancer, though he has no evidence, then recommends and demands immediate, intense chemotherapy? Can you imagine being forced to purposely intervene with toxins to slowly poison your child even though you know the diagnosis is wrong?
Now, back to my school – how are we attempting to “cure” our “D” letter grade from the state? More testing. More data-analysis. As a teacher, let me assure you these interventions are toxic.
Current State Superintendent Glenda Ritz must adhere to the detrimental laws put in the books during Tony Bennett’s regime. She has asked current legislators to rework these laws to makes schools accountable in a manner that supports, not forsakes, or schools.
Let me conclude with handing you a copy of a Resolution on High-Stakes testing, which appeals for a drastic reduction to high-stakes testing. I would appreciate our school board’s consideration of such a resolution at some future date to send a message to legislators to work with our current state superintendent. This would serve as the beginning point to eliminating all unnecessary testing as a means to improve our schools.
Thank you.
Karen Francisco, one of our nation’s best education writers, cares about the future of public education. Writing for the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, she has closely watched the games that privatizers play.
In this article, she describes a startling decision by a state board to authorize Carpe Diem, an unproven charter school, in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
As it happens, Fort Wayne has excellent community public schools. I visited some of them when I was there a year ago.
But Indiana is a red, red state and the legislature and governor are determined to introduce charters and vouchers wherever possible to undermine public schools.
So here is what happened:
That sound you heard Wednesday? That was the sound of the Indiana Charter School Board rubber-stamping a real estate deal to benefit a politically connected Fort Wayne business owner.
How else to explain a 5-1 vote to “replicate” an unproven school that has drawn few students in Indianapolis and met strong resistance from the Fort Wayne community during a public hearing held just 7 business days after local school officials and were notified? The application was approved less than 24 hours after the hearing.
Daryle Doden’s Ambassador Enterprises has been looking to draw a charter school tenant to The Summit, its education center at the former Taylor University campus, for more than a year. Another charter school applicant, Sun Academy, proposed leasing space there in a charter school application last year, but withdrew its bid. (Sun Academy has submitted a letter of intent to offer another application this spring, along with Global Village International Inc., so as many as three new charter schools could be opening in Fort Wayne next fall.)
Doden is the father of Eric Doden, a former GOP candidate for mayor and Gov. Mike Pence’s newly appointed director for statewide economic development. Daryle Doden and his wife contributed $15,500 to Pence’s campaign. Daryle Doden’s company will be paid $1,000 per student up to 550 students, plus “associated property costs”, for providing space for Carpe Diem charter school.
The school hasn’t been successful to date in Indianapolis: It attracted only 87 students and has no test scores yet, but the powers-that-be decided it has to be located in Fort Wayne, despite community opposition. The community understands the score: The property owner is in “the unique position of serving not only as landlord, but also in marketing the school. The more students it draws, the more it collects in rent, given the $1,000 per-head fee.” And every one of those dollars will be subtracted from an existing public school.
And what is Carpe Diem? It relies heavily on online instruction.
As it sucks dollars out of public schools, the loss of those dollars “reduces the ability of the existing schools to offer comprehensive programs – well-stocked libraries, guidance counselors, science labs, drama and music, sports programs and more. Carpe Diem’s computer instruction model includes none of those features. The Indianapolis school has only five teachers for grades 6-10. Its Arizona school at one time had one math teacher for 240 students in grades 6-12.”
This is reform?
There is an expression in Yiddish: What a shonda.
Many people signed a petition calling on the Indiana legislature not to dilute the powers of newly elected state superintendent Glenda Ritz.
This just in:
“Both of the bills mentioned in this petition, HB1309 and HB1251, died in the legislature! As did a few others that diminished the power and job of the elected Supt. of Public Instruction and/or the DOE – some without a hearing. HB1342 DID get a committee hearing. IFT presented more than 2800 petition signatures to Chairman Behning during the hearing supporting Supt. Ritz. HB1342 was NOT called for a second floor reading.
Coincidence?
I think not. This is a direct result of your work on this issue. Thank you all for signing this petition and organizing on behalf of public educators and the public education system.
We hope you stay involved in this discussion. Please like us on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/IndianaFedOfTeachers and follow us on twitter @AFTIndiana
Thanks again for your support and your hard work.
This message is from Indiana Federation of Teachers who started the petition “Indiana General Assembly: Stop the attempts to dilute the authority of Supt. Glenda Ritz’s office.,” which you signed on Change.org.”
BUT: a reader cautions not to celebrate yet. She says, “Not dead just not in the original bills. As long as Ed bill are still moving they are alive.”
The letter-grading system that is spreading across many states originated in Florida during Jeb Bush’s tenure as governor. His goal was to show how poorly public schools were doing and to blame schools if students had low test scores, thus diverting attention from the social and economic causes of poor performance in school. Red states love letter grades, as does Mayor Bloomberg in New York City, who has advanced privatization as much as he could during this three terms in office.
This reader writes about the sham of the Indiana letter grade system:
Can you imagine taking your child to a doctor who knowingly and willfully misdiagnoses your child with cancer and recommends immediate, intense chemotherapy?
Further, even though you questioned the doctor and he could not explain how he came up with the diagnosis; he could not point to any direct source of cancer; he demanded you subject your child to intense chemotherapy anyway? Can you imagine being forced to purposely intervene with toxins to slowly poison your child even though you know the diagnosis is invalid?
So it goes in many Indiana schools today.
From the IDOE to the Statehouse, everyone admits the current A-F grading system is invalid and unreliable. No one at the state can explain exactly how the grades were calculated. Yet those schools doing great work and still receiving D’s and F’s, must give evidence to the state that they are attempting major interventions to improve student test scores.
How are they doing this? More testing. More data-analysis. They are purposefully increasing toxic interventions that are poisoning the natural desire to learn in our most vulnerable students.
Do you know how demoralizing it is for teachers in these buildings to witness such malpractice?
When will this madness stop?
The Indiana State Senate voted to halt implementation of the Common Core standards until there had been hearings across the state. The action was brought about by the fervent opposition of two angry moms.
These days, parents and educators often feel powerless in the face of the powerful forces that are steamrolling them.
In Indiana, two moms started a campaign against he Common Core standards. They started with small groups, then organized large ones, and eventually made their voices heard in the state legislature.
The battle is far from over, but hey made an important point. This is still a democracy. Two informed citizens can make a difference.
The Republican controlled Senate Education Committee voted unanimously to abandon Tony Bennett’s prized A-F grading system for schools.
Researchers have found that such grading systems are unreliable and unfair.
Undoubtedly Republican legislators heard from principals and teachers in their own districts.
Superintendent Glenda Ritz will get a chance to remake the state’s way of evaluating school performance, hopefully with more intelligence and judgment than the Bush-Bennett system.
A reader sent the following information about the planned destruction of public education in Indianapolis:
Unfortunately the Neighborhoods of Educational Opportunity/Indianapolis Mayor’s Office plan (NEO) presentation which has been made public is just the tip of the iceberg. There is a well documented, more detailed plan that select groups (The Mind Trust, Stand for Children, Teach for America, The New Teacher Project) are meeting about in private and making plans while they await the possible receipt of a Bloomberg grant of $5 mil to get this plan off the ground in Indianapolis.
This plan will not be publicly unveiled in Indianapolis until it is a done deal.
Certain members of the Indianapolis Board of School Commissioners were strategically placed there by the powers that be to weaken Indianapolis Public Schools and prime it for takeover.
Also, watch legislation in Indiana. The Mayor’s office is slowly taking powers away from other branches of government. For example, they now have oversight of four former IPS schools taken over under Tony Bennett’s watch.
There is legislation pending that would allow those schools to become “independent” schools at the end of the takeover period.
We now have a parent trigger law.
There is also legislation which would remove the involvement/oversight of the city county council in approving new Charter schools.
Another bill takes a funding source from public schools (proceeds from auctioned properties due to non-payment of taxes) and gives it to Mayor-sponsored charter schools.
Other legislation forces the sale or lease of closed public schools to Charter schools and other private entities.
All of this collusion is no accident. If you happen to believe it is a bunch of coincidental things, non-related, happening all at the same time, then I feel sorry for you.
A member of the Fort Wayne, Indiana, school board writes:
They are coming after Fort Wayne next. Please, all come to the faux public hearing on Carpe Diem application on Tuesday, 26th at 5:30, Taylor campus. I need a couple hundred.
Diane Ravitch's blog 