Archives for category: International
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First Impressions: Arriving in Hanoi

By dianeravitch
January 24, 2018 //
8

 

we flew today from Siem Reap, Cambodia, to Hanoi on Vietnam Airlines. The airplane was new, and most of the signage was in English. Every seat had a head rest that said “Vietnam Airlines.”

We arrived at Hanoi’s super modern new airport. Again, plenty of English signage. The entry hall had a Burger King and Popeye’s. We were whisked to the Intercontinemtal, a splendid hotel. The guide explained on the way to the hotel that Russian was a required second language until 1993. That year, English became the mandatory second language, starting at age 8. However, he said, most children already know English from watching the Disney Channel and playing video games. He described the economy as “capitalistic.”

The sinks in the bathroom are made by “American Standard.”

We tour tomorrow and will learn more.

 

Categories International

Pasi Sahlberg Moving to Australia to Battle GERM

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2018 //
3

 

Pasi Sahlberg, the great Finnish educator, has accepted a major research post at the well-funded Gonski Institute of Education in Australia. He will have a wonderful platform to continue his research into major education issues and his advocacy for wholesome, child-friendly schooling.

Pasi’s Award-wining book, Finnish Lessons, has been translated into many languages. If you have not read it, you should. He coined the term GERM to describe the Global Educational Reform Movement, a movement that places standards and test scores above the needs and interests of students.

In this article, Pasi describes the terrible effects of high-stakes testing. 

This is an opening shot to introduce him to Australians.

He explains that unnecessary emphasis on competition for test scores has caused the loss of more important activities, including the arts and play. A childhood without play is no childhood at all.

When children learn because they are eager to learn, their comprehension is far greater than when they learn because of compulsion.

Australia is lucky to have this great man to lead educational thought on behalf of the health, creativity, and well-being of children.

 

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

Peg Tyre Nominated for Prestigious Journalism Award for Her Story about For-Profit Education in Africa

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2018 //
8

 

 

Veteran journalist Peg Tyre has been nominated for the prestigious George Polk Award for her story about for-profit Bridge International Academies, which seeks to make money by taking over the schooling of students in Africa.  

The teachers have a script and an iPad. The lessons are written in the U.S. The kids get higher scores but the costs  far exceed what the government spends for education.

Now if only she would write about the depredations of the for-profit education industry in the U.S., which succeeds by making campaign contributions to politicians and then avoids accountability.

Categories For-Profit, International

Second Day in Vietnam: Learning about the New Fulbright University Vietnam

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2018 //
9

 

 

The highlight today was meeting two key figures in the development of a new American-style University, which will be the Fulbright University Vietnam.

A reader of this Blog put me in touch with the university vice-president, Ted Osius, who served as Ambassador to Vietnam for three years and speaks fluent Vietnamese. We met today, along with the chief academic officer, and they discussed their plans to open a new University next year, incorporating critical thinking, multidisciplinary projects, and academic freedom. One of their models is the multidisciplinary undergraduate program at Colorado College. They have been interviewing faculty, aiming for a 2019 opening. They have already had great interest from students, many of whom have participated in faculty interviews.

During his years as a career foreign service officer, Osius fell in love with Vietnam and its people. He wants to do what he can to develop a new leadership group of people to build the country. He pointed out that eight of the 18 people on the national governing council were graduates of a Fulbright economics program started in Vietnam by Harvard after the war. Today, Vietnam has a vibrant and growing economy.

The Vietnamese Government has provided land. The US government and individual Americans have contributed funding. It is an exciting venture.

Categories International

Who Won the MacArthur Foundation’s $100 Million Prize?

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2017 //
33

Read the press release.

$100 million smackeroos.

https://www.macfound.org/press/press-releases/sesame-workshop-and-international-rescue-committee-awarded-100-million-early-childhood-education-syrian-refugees/

Categories International, Philanthropy

Carol Dweck of Stanford Wins $3.9 Million Prize in China for Her Work on Growth Mindset

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2017 //
54

Congratulations to Carol Dweck of Stanford University for winning the first annual Yidan Prize, which is a prize of $3.9 million. She won for her work on “growth mindset,” which I tended to think was akin to “The Little Engine Who Could,” who climbed a difficult mountain by saying “I think I can, I think I can,” and he did. That was, as I was growing up, the optimistic spirit of the 1940s and 1950s, as seen by a child.

I like what Dweck said in Hong Kong as she received the prize. She told her Chinese hosts to get rid of the “cram culture” that is common in their schools.

From the South China Post:

“Children’s learning should be joyful and focused on understanding and inquiry – rather than the drilling that Hong Kong schools have become known for – a renowned psychologist, recently in the city to receive the world’s biggest education prize, has said.

“Professor Carol Dweck’s remarks come as the city’s government prepares to announce whether a standard test often associated with high-pressure rote learning will continue next year.
Dweck, from Stanford University in the US, was in Hong Kong last week to collect the inaugural Yidan Prize for Education Research, for her groundbreaking research on the power of the “growth mindset”, based on the belief that intelligence is not fixed and can be developed over time, given the right approach.

“The prize was started in 2016 by Charles Chen Yidan, co-founder of mainland tech giant Tencent. It comprises one award for education research and another for education development. Each laureate receives a gold medal and HK$30 million (US$3.9 million)…

“After years of research, Dweck – whose findings have been implemented in countries such as the US, Norway and Peru – found that children with a “fixed mindset” would worry whether they were smart and would succeed in life and stop caring about learning. Those with a “growth mindset”, she found, could joyfully learn and develop their abilities.

“But Dweck noted that the concept was not about telling children to work hard, which is common in Hong Kong, where many parents view academic success as paramount to their children’s future.
“Chinese culture is already telling children to work hard. That’s not growth mindset because they’re working hard for the product, not for the growth or the joy of learning,” she said.

“The professor also warned against “tiger parenting” – referring to demanding parents, particularly in Asian cultures, pushing their children to attain high grades using methods such as relentless drilling.

“She said these students could be extremely anxious, and feel worthless and depressed if they did not succeed at something.

“She said the “growth mindset” should instead be about focusing on understanding, questioning and thinking, and results would follow after that.

“The Hong Kong government is expected to announce in the next two months whether the Primary Three Territory-wide System Assessment will continue next year. Originally designed to enhance learning and teaching by providing the government with data to review policies, the assessment has become associated with a drilling culture in Hong Kong.

“This has led parents and educators to call for the test to be scrapped, ending the pressure it puts on pupils, and for the curriculum to be reviewed as a whole. The government recently began a review of primary and secondary school curriculums.“

Carol Dweck could be a huge force in prodding the authorities in China to renounce the cram culture, and that would benefit the world. She just might help to save the next generation from the Testocracy.

Congratulations, Professor Dweck!

Categories Grit, International

David C. Berliner on the Latest International Test Scores: It’s Poverty, Not Common Core, That Matters

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2017 //
15

A few days ago, I wrote a post speculating about whether Common Core had caused the decline in forth grade reading scores on the latest international test.

David C. Berliner, one of our nation’s most distinguished social scientists, wrote to say that Common Core is not the culprit; demographics is.

I stand corrected.

He writes:

It may be, as you posit, that the introduction of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) had its effects on our PIRLS scores. But before you or any others of us worry about our latest PIRLS scores, and the critics start the usual attacks on our public schools, remember this: Standardized Achievement Tests are quite responsive to demographics, and not very sensitive at all to what teachers and schools accomplish.

With that in mind, let’s ask first what the average score for the USA was in comparison to a few other nations that we often think of as high performing nations. On the paper and pencil version of PIRLS 2016 the USA achieved a score 549. (There was also an e-version of the test reported separately, but nothing in that analysis contradicts anything I say below) Singapore, however, scored 576, Hong Kong scored 569, and Finland scored 566. Clearly these other nations exhibited considerably higher scores than did the USA. Our public schools would seem to be doing something wrong. Perhaps it is related to the introduction of the CCSS. But since demographics are powerful influences on Standardized Achievement Test scores, let’s break down the US PIRLS scores by some of the demographic information that we have available to us.

First, we can note that Asian Americans scored 591. That is, our Asians beat the hell out of Asian Asians! Since the vast majority of Asian Americans go to public school it would appear that there isn’t much of anything wrong with the public schools they go to, nor can the curriculum in use in those schools be bad, even if it is the CCSS. And from Asian American achievement in literacy, we must acknowledge that the skills of their reading teachers appear to be more than adequate.

White kids in the USA, taken as a group, are generally wealthier than non-whites. How did white kids do on PIRLS? They scored 571, close to Singapore, and better than Hong Kong and Finland. Since white kids make up something like 50% of the public school population of the USA, we can say that about half of our school kids, about 25 million or so, are, on average, high performing students in the area of reading—whatever the method chosen to teach them.

How do kids in schools where there is little poverty do on PIRLS? The data tell us that in schools where there are fewer than 10 percent of the students on free and reduced lunch, students had a score of 587—handily beating Singapore, Hong Kong, and Finland. In fact, even higher average scores were found in in schools that cater to upper middle-class kids, schools where the poverty rate is between 10 and 24 percent. That very large group of American public school kids scored 592, handily exceeding the schools that serve even wealthier families, and easily beating the two Asian nations and Finland. Furthermore, there was also a group of kids from schools where 25 to 50 percent of the kids were considered to be in poverty because they were eligible for free and reduced lunch. These were schools that clearly do not cater to the very wealthy. Yet they scored 566, the same as Finland, a nation we always look up to and one with childhood poverty rates of about 4%.

So why did the USA, overall, look mediocre in score and rank on this test? I think it is for the same reason that we always look mediocre in score and rank on PISA! It’s our social and economic systems, not our schools, that cause lower scores than is desired by our nation.

Poor kids in general, but often Black and Hispanic kids in particular, do not grow up in the same kinds of stable families and secure neighborhoods that are more likely to nurture higher levels of school achievement. It’s not America’s schools that are a problem: its America’s social, economic, and housing policies that are our educational problem. While Singapore and Hong Kong both have disturbingly high poverty rates, compared to Finland, both are so small that poor and rich live in proximity to each other. Thus, there is a lot more mixing of children from different social classes and ethnicities than is true in the USA, where income determines housing and housing determines schooling. Here, schools that predominantly serve poor and minority kids, and schools that predominantly serve wealthier kids, are the rule, not that exception. It seems clear to me that those demographic realities are the predominant determinants of scores on Standardized Achievement Tests—be they domestic (NAEP, ACT, SATs) or international (PISA, PIRLS).

So, if we want better scores on such tests, we need to get off the backs of teachers and schools. Our teachers and schools are presently educating a high percentage of our kids to very high levels of literacy. But that is not true for another high percentage of our kids. What we need to help those kids is to exert a lot more influence on our nations politicians to give us the equitable society that will promote higher achievement for all our citizens.

David C. Berliner
Regents’ Professor Emeritus,
Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College,
Arizona State University,
Tempe, AZ 85287

Categories Equity, International, Testing

Did U.S. Performance on PISA Decline Because of Common Core?

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2017 //
28

Every time that international test scores are released, there is a predictable clamor to “do something.”

President Obama said that our ranking on an international test was “a Sputnik moment” and reason to push harder for the “remedies” in Race to the Top. We now know that Race to the Top was a failure that had no positive results. Schools were closed, teachers were fired, many new charter schools opened, and performance on the NAEP in 2015–five years after the launch of Race to the Top–went flat.

Now we have the results of the latest international test, the Progress in International Literacy Study (PIRLS), and the news for fourth graders in the U.S. was not good.

The United States tumbled in international rankings released Tuesday of reading skills among fourth-graders, raising warning flags about students’ ability to compete with international peers.

The decline was especially precipitous for the lowest-performing students, a finding that suggests widening disparities in the U.S. education system.

The United States has traditionally performed well on the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, an assessment given to fourth-graders in schools around the world every five years. In 2016, however, the average score in the United States dropped to 549 out of 1,000, compared to 556 in 2011. The country’s ranking fell from fifth in the world in 2011 to 13th, with 12 education systems outscoring the United States by statistically significant margins. Three other countries roughly tied with the United States; they scored higher, but the differences were not ­notable.

What happened?

The Common Core (aka Common Core State Standards) was introduced across the nation in 2010-2011. The students now in fourth grade were the first cohort to get Common Core, starting in kindergarten.

Their reading scores went down, and it appears that the children who were likeliest to see declines were the lowest performing students.

The Common Core standards were written hurriedly, funded entirely by one man (Bill Gates), and rushed into implementation without any field testing whatsoever. Gates not only paid the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the writing of Common Core, but he spent many more millions (some have estimated as much as $2 billion) to persuade advocacy groups and education organizations to support the adoption and implementation of the standards.

Would the FDA approve a drug for national use without field testing?

Of course not.

Our children were guinea pigs, and the experiment failed.

Almost every state in the nation has adopted Common Core. Some have rebranded it, but it is still Common Core.

What will states do now?

One of the most prominent advocates for Common Core was Jeb Bush, who is close to Betsy DeVos. They loved Common Core, because they expected it would cause widespread failure and hasten support for the privatization of public schools.

DeVos reacted to the declining scores on PIRLS by advocating for more school choice, more charters and vouchers.

In 2012, Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice wrote a report claiming that public schools were so awful that they endangered national security. Their recommendations: more charters, more vouchers, and Common Core.

Friends, we can’t let these nihilists destroy our democratic system of public education.

Schools improve when they have adequate funding, not competition. Schools improve when students live stable lives, with access to food, medicine, and decent living conditions. Schools improve when they are staffed with professional teachers, not temporary, untrained teachers.

Common Core has failed our nation and our students. So have the privatizers.

Since the passage and signing of No Child Left Behind on January 8, 2002, the U.S. has been on the wrong track.

Can the “reformers” please admit their errors and change their ways? Or are they determined to keep pushing the same failed strategies without regard to evidence?

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, International, Privatization, Testing

The Horror: Here Comes Baby PISA, Testing 5-Year-Olds

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2017 //
19

The testing monster is coming for our children.

Helge Wasmuth of Mercy College in New York writes here about the full-steam-ahead plan for international testing of five-year-Old children. As he reports, the planning has excluded experts on Early Childhood Education and has been shrouded in secrecy.

This is the latest and most disgusting manifestation of what Pasi Sahlberg dubbed GERM (the Global Education Reform Movement).

Wasmuth predicts that Baby PISA will lead to:

“increased standardization, high-stakes accountability, predetermined learning outcomes, control over teachers, business-based management models, and privatization.

“The goal of the study is to gather information on children’s cognitive and social-emotional skills as well as characteristics of their home and early education environments. Direct assessment, including actual samples of student work, will measure the domains of emerging literacy and numeracy, executive function, and empathy and trust. Children will be expected to do their work on a tablet, devoting approximately 15 minutes to each domain over a period of two days. Indirect assessment—parents’ and staff reports and administrator observations—will focus on cognitive and social-emotional skills. By participating in the study, OECD asserts, member nations will have access to the primary factors that drive or thwart early learning, developing a common framework and benchmarks.

“The study is now underway. A pilot that was originally planned, which would have provided a valuable opportunity for meaningful feedback and fine-tuning, has been scrapped. The organization has moved forward with data collection, to be conducted from the end of 2017 through 2019. This will be followed by so-called “quality control” and analysis, and the release of a report in 2020.

“While the original plan called for participation by three to six countries in the northern and southern hemispheres, a number of early childhood communities have already successfully registered protest, urging their governments to abstain. (Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, and Denmark are among them.) The only outliers are England—Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are not taking part—and the United States…

“Critique of the IELS has been fierce, and numerous concerns have been raised. Most egregious is the marginalization of the wider early childhood community. “The entire IELS project has been shrouded in secrecy from day one,” Mathias Urban, director of the Early Childhood Research Centre at the University of Roehampton in London, told me. Respected researchers and scholars in the field were not consulted, their input unwelcome. As has long been the case with early education policy, decades of research have been ignored.

“The OECD values objectivity, universality, predictability and that which can be measured. The organization seems to be oblivious to alternative ideas about educating and caring for young children. Nor have local contexts and traditions for this process been part of the conversation…

“So, why is all of this shrouded in secrecy? Why are we kept in the dark? Why are the experts and the field’s knowledge marginalized? One needs to ask: Who really benefits from such a study? The children? Will it really inform policymaking and improve educational practices in a meaningful way? Or is it another piece to open up public education sectors to corporate interests?

The disregard of the early childhood community is concerning enough. Don’t even get me started on the collection of child-based data on a global scale without the consent of children, parents, or practitioners. Or with assessing five-year-olds on a tablet. How flawed and meaningless are the results. How do you assess trust and empathy, or the complexities of learning and development?

“The impact on our field will be disastrous—maybe not immediately, but soon enough. OECD is a powerful and influential institution. Everyone should be clear about their goals of creating a common framework with benchmarks and assessing learning outcomes. Early childhood education will be reduced to what can be measured: literacy and numeracy.

“Ultimately, the field will fall even deeper into the clutches of GERM. Many countries will feel compelled to do well on the IELS, and the easiest way to do that is to align the curricula to what is measured. Pedagogical compliance will follow, along with teaching to the test—especially in countries, such as the U.S., with many private providers of early education, who will use their outcomes to win new customers. As in the case of the Common Core, a new market will be created, “Aligned to IELS” the new trademark.

“The quest for predictable outcomes leaves no place for the hallmarks of early childhood—for uncertainty, experimentation, surprise, amazement, context, subjective experiences. OECD values and measures what can be measured, but not necessarily what is important.”

Baby PISA opens a Pandora’s box. Out of it flies standardization, conformity, inappropriate pedagogy. Trapped in the box will Be Children, yearning to play.

Categories Childhood, Early Childhood Education, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International

After 17 Years of “Reform,” International Test Scores Stagnant

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2017 //
50

In 2000, when George W. Bush ran for President, we heard about “the Texas Miracle.” We were told that testing every child every year would produce high test scores and close the achievement gaps. Believing in the claim, Congress passed No Child Left Behind, which required testing every child every year from grades 3-8.

Then came “Race to the Top,” which ratcheted up the testing punishments, requiring that teachers be evaluated by student test scores.

In 2011, the National Research Council warned that test-based accountability was not working and was unlikely ever to work.

Congress ignored its report. In 2015, Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, continuing the practice of annual testing, a practice not known in other nations.

What has 17 years of high-stakes testing produced? Narrowing of the curriculum to what is tested. Cheating scandals. Gaming the system. Teacher demoralization. Teacher shortages.

Billions spent on testing instead of teaching.

But nowhere closer to the “top.” Even the NAEP scores went flat in 2015, the first reversal in many years.

The latest international test results show no gains in reading. None.

This failure belongs to Reformers.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2017-12-05/other-countries-surpass-us-students-in-international-reading-comprehension-test

Categories Education Reform, International, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top
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