Archives for category: International
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Michael Hynes and William Doyle: What American Schools Can Learn from Finland

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2018 //
48

Michael Hynes, the progressive superintendent of the Patchogue-Medford school district on Long Island in New York, and William Doyle, an author who has lived in Finland, recently returned from a trip to that nation’s schools and wrote this article.

They offer a twelve-step program for American schools, based on what they learned in Finland.

Here are three of the steps they recommend. To learn about the other nine, open the link.

They write:

We were stunned by what we observed: A society that selects and respects teachers like elite professionals; a world-class network of vocational and technical schools; a school system that reveres and protects childhood and encourages children to experience joy in learning — where teachers shower children with warmth and attention; where children are given numerous free-play breaks; where special-education students are supported; and where children thrive.

In Finland, we heard none of the clichés common in U.S. education reform circles, like “rigor,” “standards-based accountability,” “data-driven instruction,” “teacher evaluation through value-added measurement” or getting children “college- and career-ready” starting in kindergarten.

Instead, Finnish educators and officials constantly stressed to us their missions of helping every child reach his or her full potential and supporting all children’s well-being. “School should be a child’s favorite place,” said Heikki Happonen, an education professor at the University of Eastern Finland and an authority on creating warm, child-centered learning environments. His colleague Janne Pietarinen explained, “Well-being and learning are intertwined. You can’t have one without the other.”

In short, we glimpsed an inspiring vision of an alternative future for American education, a future that we believe that all of our children deserve right now.

How can the United States improve its schools? We can start by piloting and implementing these 12 global education best practices, many of which are working extremely well for Finland:

1) Emphasize well-being. Make child and teacher well-being a top priority in all schools, as engines of learning and system efficiency.

2) Upgrade testing and other assessments. Explaining why he doesn’t need standardized tests to evaluate his students, one Finnish teacher said: “I am assessing my students every second.” Stop the standardized testing of children in grades 3-8, and “opt-up” to higher-quality assessments by classroom teachers. Eliminate the ranking and sorting of children based on standardized testing. Train students in self-assessment, and require only one comprehensive testing period to graduate from high school.

3) Invest resources fairly. Fund schools equitably on the basis of need. Provide small class sizes.

Categories Class size, Education Reform, Innovation, International, Play, Testing

Are the PISA Education Tests Rigged?

By dianeravitch
October 25, 2018 //
13

There has long been concern that the PISA international tests are “fixed.” Years ago, Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution criticized PISA for ignoring the selection of Chinese students that are tested. Loveless pointed out that students in Shanghai are in no way representative of students in China.

In this article, Gary Sands reviews the problems of sampling from each country and how some countries can “rig” the samples, which invalidate the results.

Read the article for the details.

Sand concludes:

At face value, the PISA results appear to be a huge propaganda victory for the educational systems of Asians and the Chinese. But the real danger in widely circulating the PISA results lies not in fooling thousands of headline readers around the world, but in the complicit cover-up of the huge disparities in education among Asian provinces. Almost two-thirds of all Chinese children live in rural areas, where school attendance rates can be as low as 40%. A survey by the China Association for Science and Technology showed only 6.2% of the Chinese people held basic science literacy in 2015.

By allowing countries to potentially rig the test, the OECD is failing in its mandate to help governments foster prosperity by providing information. In the case of the bizarre B-S-J-G grouping, PISA administrators have again made another exception for China—just as many foreign businesses have been forced to do—in the hope that the nation will eventually play by the rules. Perhaps the OECD’s intention in allowing cities and groups of cities/regions to compete is to coax China and others into eventually releasing nationwide results.

But in so doing, the OECD is merely kowtowing to Beijing, acquiescing in the samples submitted by other countries and sending a message to our children that bending the rules is acceptable.

Categories International, Testing

Pasi Sahlberg: GERM Is In Retreat

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2018 //
12

The great Finnish scholar Pasi Sahlberg coined the term GERM to represent the Global Education Reform Movement. GERM is the advance of markets, standardization, choice, and rankings, which began in England and the U.S. and spread to other nations. GERM is corporate education reform, and no one has been more effective at countering the virus on the international stage than Pasi.

His presentation and my own appear in the same session. His begins at 27 minutes into the tape. He posted his slides and visuals on Twitter @pasisahlberg.

Pasi, the author of Finnish Lessons and Finnish Lessons 2.0, gave a brilliant talk about the history, the advance, and the stunning setbacks for GERM.

It is a remarkable talk, which follows my presentation in the first session of the NPE Conference in Indianapolis on October 20.

Pasi is currently working in a major education research Institute in Australia. He reports that New Zealand has ditched its national standards and will soon drop national testing. Watch for Australia to follow suit.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International, Privatization

Alan Singer: Beware the World Bank and Its Alliance with Pearson

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2018 //
17

Alan Singer writes here about the alliances of the World Bank with the leaders of global greed.

The World Bank transmits What Pasi Sahlberg Calls GERM (the Global Education Reform Movement).

He writes:

Just because you call yourself the “World Bank” does not mean you care about the world. The bank was created after World War II by the United States and Great Britain to ensure their economic influence over countries devastated by the war and domination over former colonies.

While the World Bank claims one of its goals is to reduce global poverty, the way it goes about doing it manages to keep poor countries in perpetual debt to pay for questionable capital improvement projects and for refinancing debt they already owe to wealthy nations.

Critics of the World Bank, and there are many, include Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, Peter Hardstaff of the World Development Movement, and writer Naomi Klein. Stiglitz argues that World Bank loans to developing countries emphasize quick upticks rather than long-term benefits to a country. Hardstaff claims that conditions placed on World Bank loans benefit dominant capitalist nations by ensuring that poor countries repay debts as a condition for the new loans. Klein documents specific World Bank projects that manipulate Third World countries and calls the bank’s credibility “fatally compromised.” The World Bank forced Ghana to charge public school students and their families school fees, pushed to eliminate food subsidies in war-torn Iraq, and required Tanzania to privatize its water system.

More recently, David Edwards, General Secretary of Education International, questioned the World Bank’s new Human Capital Index (HCI). The bank will use the index to decide on loan applications from poor countries and it says it wants them to invest more heavily in health and education programs. HCI supposedly will measure the “human capital” that a newborn will acquire by the time it completes secondary school through an algorithm that combines the probability of survival to age five, the availability of healthcare, and levels of education determined by standardized test scores. In other words, to receive debt relief, the World Bank will force Third World countries to adopt the kind of packaged curriculum and curriculum-aligned high-stakes testing being promoted by edu-companies like Pearson.

Edwards has three key complaints about the World Bank’s HCI. First, he objects to education being treated as a capital investment rather than as a human right. For Edwards and Education International, “Merely churning out workers for the capitalist economy is not the purpose and value of education.” It should be about achieving a “more just, peaceful and sustainable world.”

Second, Edwards questions the need for another metric for measuring poverty. The HCI is a device for promoting the World Bank and demonstrating its concern for the poor, rather than something that will actually help poor nations.

Edwards’ third point is something that directly concerns parents and teachers in the United States where students are battered by high-stakes standardized assessments that turn schools into test prep academies. The HCI ranks countries “based solely on admittedly imperfect test-scores.” Edwards charges that the World Bank’s ability to use loans to dictate government policy will mean that instead of strengthening education systems, HCI ratings will encourage “teaching to the test and a narrowed curriculum.”

Waiting in the wings to benefit from the World Bank HCI loans are corporate vultures like British-based Pearson Education. Pearson is targeting what it euphemistically calls “emerging markets” as its textbook and testing business in North America reports multi-year declining profits. Egypt is currently seeking a large funding package, estimated at $2 billion, from the World Bank to finance their latest educational reform strategy. No surprise, Pearson is in line to provide the hardware, infrastructure, and training for the “reforms” new digital testing system and a “bank” of exam questions.

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

Educational International Demands Accountability for “More Than Me” in Liberia

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2018 //
10

Education International is an organization of teachers’ unions. It just released the following statement about the American-created girls’ school in Liberia that was the subject of an investigation by ProPublica. Its report alleged that the co-Director of the school raped many of the children, then died of AIDS. Crimes were committed against children. No do-overs.

The following statement has been endorsed unanimously by the Executive Board of Education International at its meeting today, 16 October, in Brussels in response to the crimes against children documented in the PROPUBLICA story – UNPROTECTED

Education International is shocked and appalled by recent reports documenting horrific crimes perpetrated against children in Liberia, in the care of a charity operated school, More Than Me.
Crimes committed and, it appears, ignored, itself constituting a crime, by those meant to be looking after and guaranteeing the well-being of children.

Governments compel children to attend school. That brings with it an obligation to ensure their safety.

The horrific events exposed last week serve as a lesson about what can happen when a government outsources education to unqualified, unaccountable individuals.

Given these horrific incidents, More Than Me’s contract should be immediately terminated and a thorough investigation instigated.

The Liberian government must take over administration of all of its schools and resume its duty of care to children and their educational well-being. Governments must be the guarantors and providers of education systems.

Let those found guilty of having breached their duty of care have the full weight of the law fall upon them.

Angelo Gavrielatos
Project Director – EI

Categories Accountability, International

An American Started a School in Liberia, Which Turned into a Nightmare for Its Students

By dianeravitch
October 12, 2018 //
45

ProPublica published this long story about how good intentions go bad. The story was also published in TIME magazine.

An idealistic young American woman goes to Liberia, wants to save young girls from poverty and sexual exploitation, and opens a school called “More Than Me.”

Her Liberian partner works diligently by her side to publicize the school and raise money. She wins an award of $1 million from J.P. Morgan Chase for her charitable work in Liberia. The founder was feted at the Forbes 400 awards, where she met some of the nation’s eminent philanthropists.

Meanwhile, her Liberian partner is indulging in his pleasure, which is raping the young girls enrolled in the school. He eventually dies of AIDS, having infected several children with the disease.

A very sad story.

Categories Accountability, International

Global Groups Collaborate to Introduce Free Market Education Investments in Africa and Middle East

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2018 //
27

Education International, which represents teachers unions around the world, sent out notice of a disturbing new development. International groups have determined to introduce Marley forces and payment for test scores as their response to educational needs in Africa and the Middle East. The Business-School graduates discovered a “crisis” that has existed since time began: children in impoverished countries are not getting a decent education—or, in some cases, no education at all. Yes, it is outrageous. Why are these great minds not using their brainpower to promote economic development? Asia is booming. Why not transfer some lessons learned to reduce poverty and create good jobs, rather than bring in the hedge funds and social impact investors to monetize education?

Angelo Gavrielatos of Educational International writes:

A new financing facility, the Education Outcomes Fund (EOF) for Africa and the Middle East is in development – with plans to become operational in the coming year. The fund commercialises and commodifies education, using tax-payer aid budgets to support private actors and investors to profit from education provision. Similar funds are being developed targeting India and Latin America.

EI responds

EI has responded directly to the EOF and publicly.

Mobilisation of Member Organisations

Education International is mobilising our Member Organisations in potentially targeted countries, which include Burkina Faso, Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Liberia, Morocco, Nigeria, Palestine, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe, recommending that they take action to pressure their governments not to engage with the EOF.

What is the EOF and how does it work?

EOF is an initiative of the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity (the Education Commission) and the Global Steering Group for Impact Investment (GSG).

As a so-called innovation in education financing, the fund aims to raise $1 billion in development impact bonds (DIBs). DIBs work by employing investment capital to pay services, in this case education provision or education related services, offered by private actors in Africa and the Middle East. If ‘outcomes targets’ are met by the service providers, investors and providers receive a return, financed in part by bilateral donors through national aid budgets.

Putting private actors in the driving seat, disregarding democracy
EOF disregards democratic governance of education by choosing to directly fund private education providers rather than strengthening public systems through the elected national government. Giving investors control and influence over their investments is given precedent over governments’ sovereignty to define their own priorities.

What is more, as reporting systems for outcomes are geared to the needs of private funders, it becomes more difficult for educators, their unions and the broader community to hold their government to account to fulfil their obligation to provide quality education for all.

Funding outcomes narrows education
The EOF argues that its model’s strength lies in the fact that it will only pay for outcomes achieved. However, results-based financing actually negatively distorts quality teaching and learning processes by focusing on narrow outcomes rather than the development of the whole child.

With funding based on students’ test score outcomes, teachers are encouraged to teach to the test. Furthermore, results-based financing creates perverse incentives to invest in short-term gains rather than long term system strengthening. Outcomes in education are not immediate, but take time to manifest, such as its contribution to social, cultural, democratic and economic development.

Apart from the fact that the commodification of education by incentivising private providers and investors by profit-making is highly unethical and in disregard of the right to education, there is no substantial evidence of DIBs in the education sector.

Outcomes bonds leave the vulnerable behind
Importantly, a quest for outcomes and the involvement of profit-making organisations in the education sector leads to the further marginalisation of the most vulnerable groups in society. Evidence shows, when funding depends on test scores, private actors’ student selection processes can discriminate against less able students or alternatively encourage certain students not to participate in tests.

In clear contravention of the global commitment made through SDG4 to leave no-one behind, students from disadvantaged backgrounds, students from minority groups, refugees, students with disabilities or special needs and students living in remote areas lose out.

Proliferation of education privatisation and marketisation

To achieve SDG4, public systems must be strengthened and education must be universally embraced as a human right and a public good, not a market commodity.

Education financing must be sustainable and predictable, there are no shortcuts. It is only through well-funded public education that we will achieve quality education for all, not through attempting to establish new finance mechanisms that undermine the right to education.

Rather than strengthening public systems in regions where increased public financing for education is desperately needed, EOF will finance non-state actors, including for-profit companies and so-called ‘low-fee’ private schools that charge poor families for education of questionable quality.

‘Prime contractors’ will be commissioned by EOF to lead ‘whole-community based interventions’, suggesting that the fund will operate as a massive market creation scheme. Public-private partnerships will also be supported, with Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL), Liberia’s disastrous experiment with outsourcing education to private providers, held up as a model.

Education is a public responsibility. The SDGs are about assuming those responsibilities. They are essential to the future and cannot be contracted out or sacrificed to the market. And, yes, they require political will to ensure a sufficient and sustainable source of public funding. We cannot rely on charity or the private sector.

If we believe that all children, regardless of their background or circumstances, regardless of the community, country or continent in which they live have a right to quality education, governments and the international community must invest in the expansion and strengthening of quality, free, universally accessible public education.
More information

Education Outcomes Fund (EOF) for Africa and the Middle East: Is it a Game Changer? by Keith M Lewin, Emeritus Professor of International Development and Education, University of Sussex, provides a detailed critique of the EOF.

Angelo Gavrielatos
Project Director – EI

Angelo Gavrielatos​
Project Director
Email: Angelo.Gavrielatos@ei-ie.org
Tel: +32 2 224 06 11
Fax: +32 2 224 06 06
5 bd du Roi Albert II | 1210 Brussels | BELGIUM
http://www.ei-ie.org

Categories Accountability, Economy, Education Reform, For-Profit, International

The Obsolete and Costly American Faith in Testing

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2018 //
74

Alyson Klein wrote a useful overview of emerging critiques of our national obsession with standardized testing. As Marc Tucker points out, we are likely the only country that tests every child every year. As Daniel Koretz says in the article in Education Week, human judgement should be part of any consequential decision about school quality.

More to the point, and she doesn’t mention this, our massive spending on standardized tests has brought diminishing returns. How many more years will we wait before policymakers and legislators conclude that the Testing Charade (Koretz’s term) has exhausted its value and has become a costly burden?

Because she writes as a journalist, not an expert, she includes contrary views from spokesmen for assessment corporations who make a living selling the same old tests, the more the better for the bottom line.

She begins:

It’s a spring ritual: Every year in the U.S., millions of schoolchildren take annual, standardized state tests to get a sense of how well their states, districts, schools, and even teachers are helping them learn.

Another sampling of students take the National Assessment of Educational Progress—or NAEP, better known as the Nation’s Report Card. Those results, released periodically, fill in the gaps to show how students in a particular state are performing relative to their peers.

That’s how accountability and assessment have worked in the United States at least since the advent of the No Child Left Behind Act back in 2002 and continuing with its replacement, the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015.

And in fact, NAEP and Advanced Placement tests are prime components of Quality Counts’s Achievement Index, which grades and ranks states in this politically fraught category.

The United States is unique among countries in subjecting students so often to standardized tests, but as testing experts note, the resulting deluge of data comes with significant trade-offs on exam quality. And despite a few innovations under ESSA, plenty of them also wonder whether the road-not-taken might have produced a more nuanced and useful, if less frequent trove of information.

Testing every student every year is a costly prospect, said Marc Tucker, the president and CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy, a research and policy organization in Washington. Tucker’s research has focused on the policies and practices of the countries with the best education systems.

And the expense means that the tests are often lower quality than tests used in other countries, and a poor gauge of the higher-order critical thinking skills that students need in college, the workforce, and life, he added.

We’ve made it virtually impossible to have the quality of tests that other nations that are far ahead of us are using to determine how well their own kids are doing,” Tucker said. “So what we’ve done is to deprive ourselves of tests that will enable us to measure the things that are the most important about whether or not are kids are going to be ready for what’s coming. That’s a very poor trade. A very poor trade.”

By contrast, very few of the highest-performing countries test students every year, Tucker said. And when they do test, they often use deeper assessments that include performance tasks or writing prompts, giving educators a richer understanding of what students know and are able to do.

Singapore, for example, outperforms the U.S. on international measures such as the Program for International Student Achievement, or PISA, in average reading, math, and science performance. It tests students only about three times in the course of their careers—once at the end of elementary school, once in middle school, and once in high school, Tucker said.”

Someone should calculate the billions spent on standardized testing over the past 20 years, and we could then imagine how that same money might have been used to improve the conditions in schools.

But then, the standardized testing industry has lobbyists, and the children don’t.

Categories International, Testing

And the World’s Biggest Prize in Education Goes to….

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2018 //
41

Last year, Carol Dweck received the Yidan Prize of nearly $4 million for her work on “growth mindset.”

This year the prize went to statistician Larry Hedges and India’s Anant Agarwal, for his “innovative open source online platform.”

Were these bold choices? Safe choices? Relevant choices? Choices likely to change the life chances of millions of children around the world?

What do you think?

Categories International

Andy Hargreaves: It’s Time to Scrap Mandatory Testing

By dianeravitch
September 4, 2018 //
16

Andy Hargreaves recently retired as a professor at Boston College. In this article, which appeared in the Toronto Star as part of a debate, he advises Canada to abandon mandatory testing. Canada tests every student in grades 3 and 6.

If you open the article, you can vote for or against mandatory testing.

Don’t you wish our students were tested only in grades 3 and 6?

He writes:

“Finland uses samples. Israel samples a different subject every year in three-year cycles. Provinces and countries are already compared by samples on national and international assessments. Streamline the work of the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) around samples and this government will meet its accountability requirements and also save a big chunk of more than $130 million over four years that can go straight into the classroom.

“Bigger data is no substitute for better leadership. Some experts believe sampling makes it hard to pinpoint problems in small sub-groups in a school or board, like equitable achievement for a particular ethnic minority. Statisticians have an answer for this – that you can vary the nature or size of the sample to include and protect these groups. But an even better answer is that when subgroups get very tiny in small schools or boards, we don’t need more data about everybody. We just need better feedback from and relationships with the people right in front of us.

“The side effects outweigh the benefits. If you have an illness and try some drugs to ease it, you don’t want the negative side effects to outweigh the benefits. The negative side effects of testing a whole population in any grade are immense. Test results are known to the media and to real estate agents. Some school board administrators put excessive pressure on their schools and teachers in high-poverty areas to hit the numbers. Principals will then do almost anything to get the scores up. The stakes and stress are incredibly high.”

Categories Accountability, International, Testing
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »