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OECD Sponsors School Level Tests to Foster Test Mania and Its Own Control

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2014 //
20

The OECD has created tests that schools can administer to their students in order to compare them to the nations of the world.

Some schools have gleefully administered the tests, happy to discover how their students compare to children of the same age in the rest of the world.

Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg, a visiting professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education this year, warned that it was not valid to compare schools to national systems.

The OECD test has sponsors now but it will eventually be a money-maker:

“Although these early administrations have been partly subsidized by private philanthropies, most districts will have to pay $11,500 per school in order to participate starting next year, according to Peter Kannam at America Achieves, a nonprofit that has been recruiting new schools and coordinating exchanges among participants.”

http://www.americaachieves.org/oecd#faq

“The development of this new diagnostic tool by the OECD was made possible by America Achieves, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Carnegie Corporation of New York, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Kern Family Foundation. Additional support was provided by the Craig and Barbara Barrett Foundation, National Public Education Support Fund, the Stuart Foundation, and the Rodel Charitable Foundation of Arizona.”

Many educators can’t resist the temptation to administer yet another test. What would they do without data? Would they know how to diagnose children’s needs and plan for education without external tests to guide them? Surely, they cannot trust teachers to write their own tests or evaluate student needs.

In the ideal world of the future, school will be devoted entirely to testing, preferably to tests created solely by Pearson and/or the OECD. All learning will be standardized, and all children will be test-taking machines, programmed to find the right answer to every question. Th questions and the answers will be the sole property of Pearson and/or OECD.

Any learning not on the test will be considered a waste of time. Those who choose to think for themselves will be considered outliers, rebels, outcasts, possibly dangers to society. All “knowledge” will be strictly monitored by the Pearson/OECD bureaucracy.

The rules of life in this new society will be:

“We measure what we treasure.”
“You can’t control what you can’t measure.”
“Whatever cannot be quantified does not matter.”
“All problems can be solved by measurement and data.”
“Test scores determine one’s life potential.”
“Test scores are the best measure of students, teachers, and schools.”

Welcome to our Brave New World.

Categories Data and Data Mining, Education Industry, International, Standardized Testing, Testing

Letter Protesting PISA Over-Emphasis on Standardized Tests Now Translated into Other Languages

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2014 //
5

I just received notice from the organizers of the letter opposing the league tables of PISA that the letter has been translated into Swedish and German.

 

Hopefully, it will be picked up and translated worldwide.

 

If you are in Korea or Japan or South America or anywhere else where the local language is not English, please translate the letter, send it to the local news media, and let me know about it.

 

OED has created an international competition for test scores that no one asked for and that encourages the establishment of destructive policies like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, both of which have diverted billions and billions of dollars to testing corporations, taking that money away from classroom instruction as well as the services that students need.

 

If you have not done so yet, please take the time to read the letter and if you agree, please sign.

Categories Education Reform, International, Testing

Sign This Open Letter to Andreas Schleicher of OECD Against Too Much Testing!

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2014 //
17

Nearly 100 educators from around the world signed a letter warning that the over-emphasis on testing inspired by PISA was killing the joy of learning. This unelected, unaccountable organization is driving international competition and bad education policies. It is time for parents, educators, students, and researchers to join together and say “Enough is Enough.” Focus on access to education; focus on opportunity to learn; focus on the needs of children, teachers, and schools. But stop with your league tables. Stop the international Race to a mythical top. Let teachers teach. Stop enriching Pearson. Stop the ranking and rating that serves no purpose other than to corrupt education.

Please add your name to the signers of this letter. Here is the link:

http://oecdpisaletter.org/

An Open Letter: To Andreas Schleicher, OECD, Paris
Heinz-Dieter Meyer and Katie Zahedi, and signatories – 5th May 2014

Dear Dr. Schleicher,

We write to you in your capacity as OECD’s director of the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA). Now in its 13th year, PISA is known around the world as an instrument to rank OECD and non-OECD countries (60+ at last count) according to a measure of academic achievement of 15 year old students in mathematics, science, and reading. Administered every three years, PISA results are anxiously awaited by governments, education ministers, and the editorial boards of newspapers, and are cited authoritatively in countless policy reports. They have begun to deeply influence educational practices in many countries. As a result of PISA, countries are overhauling their education systems in the hopes of improving their rankings. Lack of progress on PISA has led to declarations of crisis and “PISA shock” in many countries, followed by calls for resignations, and far-reaching reforms according to PISA precepts.

We are frankly concerned about the negative consequences of the PISA rankings. These are some of our concerns:

-while standardized testing has been used in many nations for decades (despite serious reservations about its validity and reliability), PISA has contributed to an escalation in such testing and a dramatically increased reliance on quantitative measures. For example, in the United States, PISA has been invoked as a major justification for the recent “Race to the Top” program, which has increased the use of standardized testing for student-, teacher-, and administrator evaluations, which rank and label students, as well as teachers and administrators according to the results of tests widely known to be imperfect (see, for example, Finland’s unexplained decline from the top of the PISA table);

-in education policy, PISA, with its three-year assessment cycle, has caused a shift of attention to short-term fixes designed to help a country quickly climb the rankings, despite research showing that enduring changes in education practice take decades, not a few years to come to fruition. For example, we know that the status of teachers and the prestige of teaching as a profession has a strong influence on the quality of instruction, but that status varies strongly across cultures and is not easily influenced by short-term policy;

-by emphasizing a narrow range of measurable aspects of education, PISA takes attention away from the less measurable or immeasurable educational objectives like physical, moral, civic, and artistic development, thereby dangerously narrowing our collective imagination regarding what education is and ought to be about;

-as an organization of economic development, OECD is naturally biased in favor of the economic role of public schools. But preparing young men and women for gainful employment is not the only, and not even the main goal of public education, which has to prepare students for participation in democratic self-government, moral action, and a life of personal development, growth, and well-being;

-unlike United Nations (UN) organizations such as UNESCO or UNICEF that have clear and legitimate mandates to improve education and the lives of children around the world, OECD has no such mandate. Nor are there, at present, mechanisms of effective democratic participation in its education decision-making process;

-to carry out PISA and a host of follow-up services, OECD has embraced “public-private partnerships” and entered into alliances with multi-national for-profit companies, which stand to gain financially from any deficits—real or perceived—unearthed by PISA. Some of these companies provide educational services to American schools and school districts on a massive, for-profit basis, while also pursuing plans to develop for-profit elementary education in Africa, where OECD is now planning to introduce the PISA program;

-finally, and most importantly: the new PISA regime, with its continuous cycle of global testing, harms our children and impoverishes our classrooms, as it inevitably involves more and longer batteries of multiple-choice testing, more scripted “vendor”-made lessons, and less autonomy for our teachers. In this way PISA has further increased the already high stress-level in our schools, which endangers the well-being of our students and teachers.

These developments are in overt conflict with widely accepted principles of good educational and democratic practice:

-no reform of any consequence should be based on a single narrow measure of quality;

-no reform of any consequence should ignore the important role of non-educational factors, among which a nation’s socio-economic inequality is paramount. In many countries, including the United States, inequality has dramatically increased over the past 15 years, explaining the widening educational gap between rich and poor which education reforms, no matter how sophisticated, are unlikely to redress;

-an organization like OECD, as any organization that deeply affects the life of our communities, should be open to democratic accountability by members of those communities.

We are writing not only to point out deficits and problems. We would also like to offer constructive ideas and suggestions that may help to alleviate the above mentioned concerns. While in no way complete, they illustrate how learning could be improved without the above mentioned negative effects:

-develop alternatives to league tables: explore more meaningful and less easily sensationalized ways of reporting assessment outcomes. For example, comparing developing countries, where 15-year olds are regularly drafted into child labor, with first world countries makes neither educational nor political sense and opens OECD up for charges of educational colonialism;

-make room for participation by the full range of relevant constituents and scholarship: to date, the groups with greatest influence on what and how international learning is assessed are psychometricians, statisticians, and economists. They certainly deserve a seat at the table, but so do many other groups: parents, educators, administrators, community leaders, students, as well as scholars from disciplines like anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy, linguistics, as well as the arts and humanities. What and how we assess the education of 15 year old students should be subject to discussions involving all these groups at local, national, and international levels;

-include national and international organizations in the formulation of assessment methods and standards whose mission goes beyond the economic aspect of public education and which are concerned with the health, human development, well-being and happiness of students and teachers. This would include the above mentioned United Nations organizations, as well as teacher, parent, and administrator associations, to name a few;

-publish the direct and indirect costs of administering PISA so that taxpayers in member countries can gauge alternative uses of the millions of dollars spent on these tests and determine if they want to continue their participation in it;

-welcome oversight by independent international monitoring teams which can observe the administration of PISA from the conception to the execution, so that questions about test format and statistical and scoring procedures can be weighed fairly against charges of bias or unfair comparisons;

-provide detailed accounts regarding the role of private, for-profit companies in the preparation, execution, and follow-up to the tri-annual PISA assessments to avoid the appearance or reality of conflicts of interest;

-slow down the testing juggernaut. To gain time to discuss the issues mentioned here at local, national, and international levels, consider skipping the next PISA cycle. This would give time to incorporate the collective learning that will result from the suggested deliberations in a new and improved assessment model.

We assume that OECD’s PISA experts are motivated by a sincere desire to improve education. But we fail to understand how your organization has become the global arbiter of the means and ends of education around the world. OECD’s narrow focus on standardized testing risks turning learning into drudgery and killing the joy of learning. As PISA has led many governments into an international competition for higher test scores, OECD has assumed the power to shape education policy around the world, with no debate about the necessity or limitations of OECD’s goals. We are deeply concerned that measuring a great diversity of educational traditions and cultures using a single, narrow, biased yardstick could, in the end, do irreparable harm to our schools and our students.

Sincerely,

Heinz-Dieter Meyer Katie Zahedi
State University of New York (SUNY Albany) Principal, Red Hook, New York

Signatories as of May 4, 2014:

Andrews, Paul- Professor of Mathematics Education, Stockholm University

Atkinson, Lori – New York State Allies for Public Education

Baldermann, Ingo, Professor of Protestant Theology and Didactics, Universität Siegen, Germany

Ball, Stephen J. – Karl Mannheim Professor of Sociology of Education, Institute of Education, University of London

Barber, Melissa – Parents Against High Stakes Testing

Beckett, Lori – Winifred Mercier Professor of Teacher Education, Leeds Metropolitan University

Bender, Peter – Professor, Fakulty of Elektrotechnik, Informatik und Mathematik, Universität Paderborn, Germany

Berardi, Jillaine – Linden Avenue Middle School, Assistant Principal

Berliner, David – Regents Professor of Education at Arizona State University

Bloom, Elizabeth – EdD, Associate Professor of Education, Hartwick College

Boland, Neil – Senior Lecturer, AUT University, Auckland, New Zealand

Boudet, Danielle – Oneonta Area for Public Education

Burchardt, Matthias – Academic Council; Society for Education and Knowledge, Vice-Chair, Cologne University, Germany

Burris, Carol – Principal and former Teacher of the Year, Co-Founder of New York Principals.

Cauthen, Nancy – Ph.D., Change the Stakes, NYS Allies for Public Education

Cerrone, Chris – Testing Hurts Kids; NYS Allies for Public Education

Ciaran, Sugrue – Professor, Head of School, School of Education, University College Dublin

Conneely, Claire – Programmes Director, Bridge21, Trinity College Dublin.

Danner, Helmut – Private Docent, Nairobi, Kenya

Deutermann, Jeanette – Founder Long Island Opt Out, Co-founder NYS Allies for Public Education

Devine, Nesta – Associate Professor, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand

Dodge, Arnie – Chair, Department of Educational Leadership, Long Island University

Dodge, Judith – Author, Educational Consultant

Farley, Tim – Principal, Ichabod Crane School; New York State Allies for Public Education.

Fehlmann, Ralph – Coordinator, Forum for General Education, Switzerland

Fellicello, Stacia – Principal, Chambers Elementary School

Fleming, Mary – Lecturer, School of Education, National University of Ireland, Galway

Fransson, Göran – Associate Professor of Education, University of Gävle, Sweden.

Giroux, Henry – Professor of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University

Glass, Gene – Senior Researcher, National Education Policy Center, Santa Fe, NM

Glynn, Kevin – Educator, co-founder of Lace to the Top

Goldstein, Harvey – Professor of Social Statistics, University of Bristol

Gorlewski, David – Director, Educational Leadership Doctoral Program, D’Youville College.

Gorlewski, Julie – PhD, Assistant Professor, State University of New York at New Paltz

Gowie, Cheryl – Professor of Education, Siena College

Greene, Kiersten – Assistant Professor of Literacy, State University of New York at New Paltz

Gruschka, Gruschka – Professor, Educational Sciences, Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Germany

Haimson, Leonie – Parent Advocate and Director of “Class Size Matters”

Hannon, Cliona – Director, Trinity Access Programmes, Trinity College Dublin

Heinz, Manuela – Director of Teaching Practice, School of Education, National University of Ireland Galway

Hoefele, Joachim – Department of Applied Linguistics, University for Applied Sciences, Zurich, Switzerland

Hopmann, Stefan Thomas – Professor, Institute for Educational Sciences, Universität Wien

Hughes, Michelle – Principal, High Meadows Independent School

Jahnke, Thomas – Institute of Mathematics, Universität Potsdam, Germany

Jury, Mark – Chair, Education Department, Siena College

Kahn, Hudson Valley Against Common Core

Kastner, Marie-Theres – President of League of Catholic Parents, Germany

Kayden, Michelle – LOTE Teacher, Linden Avenue Middle School Red Hook, NY

Kempf, Arlo – Program Coordinator of School and Society, OISE, University of Toronto

Kilfoyle, Marla – NBCT, General Manager of BATs

Kissling, Beat – Psychologist and Education Science, Gymnasium and University Instructor, Zürich, Switzerland

Klein, Hans Peter – Chair, Didactics of Bio-Sciences, Goethe Universität Frankfurt

Kraus, Josef – German Teacher Association, President, Germany

Krautz,Jochen – Professor, Department of Art and Design, Bergische Universität Wuppertal

Labaree, David – Professor of Education, Stanford University

Lankau, Ralf – Professor, Media Design, Hochschule Offenburg, Germany

Leonardatos, Harry – Principal, High School, Clarkstown, NY

Liesner, Andreas – Professor, Educational Sciences, Universität Hamburg

Liessmann, Konrad Paul – Professor, Institut für Philosophie, Universität Wien

MacBeath, John – Professor Emeritus, Director of Leadership for Learning, University of Cambridge

McLaren, Peter – Distinguished Professor, Chapman University

McNair, Jessica – Co-founder Opt-Out CNY, parent member NYS Allies for Public Education

Meyer, Heinz-Dieter – Associate Professor, Education Governance & Policy, State University of New York (Albany)

Meyer, Tom – Associate Professor of Secondary Education, State University of New York at New Paltz

Millham, Rosemary – Ph. D., Science Coordinator, Master Teacher Campus Director, SUNY New Paltz

Millham, Rosemary – Science Coordinator/Assistant Professor, Master Teacher Campus Director, State University of New York, New Paltz

Oliveira Andreotti, Vanessa – Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequality, and Global Change, University of British Columbia, Canada

Mitchell, Ken – Lower Hudson Valley Superintendents Council

Mucher, Stephen – Director, Bard Master of Arts in Teaching Program, Los Angeles

Naison, Mark – Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University; Co-Founder, Badass Teachers Association

Muench, Richard – Professor of Sociology, Universitaet Bamberg

Nielsen, Kris – Author, Children of the Core

Noddings, Nel – Professor (emerita) Philosophy of Education, Stanford University

Noguera, Pedro – Peter L. Agnew Professor of Education, New York University

Nunez, Isabel – Associate Professor, Concordia University, Chicago

O’Toole-Brennan, Kathleen – Programmes Manager, Trinity Access Programmes, Trinity College Dublin

Pallas, Aaron – Arthur I. Gates Professor of Sociology and Education, Columbia University

Parmentier, Michael – Museum Pedagogy, Göttingen, Germany

Peters, Michael – Professor, University of Waikato, Honorary Fellow, Royal Society New Zealand

Pongratz, Ludwig – Professor, Institute for Pedagogy, Technische Universitaet Darmstadt, Germany

Pugh, Nigel – Principal, Richard R Green High School of Teaching, New York City

Radtke, F.O. – Professor (em), Education Sciences, Goethe-Universitaet Frankfurt

Ravitch, Diane – Research Professor, New York University

Reitz,Tilman – Junior Professor, Sociology, Universitaet Jena

Rekus, Juergen – Institute for Vocational and General Pedagogy, Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT), Germany

Rivera-Wilson, Jerusalem – Senior Faculty Associate and Director of Clinical Training and Field Experiences, University at Albany

Roberts, Peter – Professor, School of Educational Studies and Leadership, University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

Rougle, Eija – Instructor, SUNY Albany

Rudley, Lisa – Director: Education Policy-Autism Action Network

Saltzman, Janet – Science Chair, Physics Teacher, Red Hook High School

Schirlbauer, Alfred – Professor, Institute for Education Sciences, University of Vienna, Austria

Schniedewind, Nancy – Professor of Education, Suny New Paltz

Schopf, Heribert – Professor, School of Pedagogics and Education, Vienna, Austria

Silverberg, Ruth – Associate Professor, College of Staten Island – CUNY

Sperry, Carol – Professor of Education, Emerita, Millersville University

Sjøberg, Svein – Professor (em), Science Education, University of Oslo, Norway

Spring, Joel – Professor, Education Policy, City University of New York

St. John, Edward – Algo D. Henderson Collegiate Professor, University of Michigan

Suzuki, Daiyu – Teachers College at Columbia University / Co-founder Edu 4

Swaffield, Sue – Senior Lecturer, Educational Leadership and School Improvement, University of Cambridge

Tangney, Brendan – Associate Professor, School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin

Tanis, Bianca – Parent Member: ReThinking Testing

Thomas, Paul – Associate Professor of Education, Furman University

Thrupp, Martin – Professor of Education, University of Waikato

Tobin, KT – Founding member, ReThinking Testing

Tomlinson, Sally – Emeritus Professor, Goldsmiths College, University of London; Senior Research Fellow, Department of Education, Oxford University

Tuck, Eve – Coordinator of Native American Studies, State University of New York at New Paltz

VanSlyke-Briggs, Kjersti – Associate Professor, SUNY Oneonta

Vohns, Andreas – Associate Professor of Mathematics Education, School of Education, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt

Wilson, Elaine – Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

Wittmann, Erich – Professor of Mathematics Education, Technical University of Dortmund

Wrigley, Terry – Honorary Senior Research Fellow, University of Ballarat, Australia

Zahedi, Katie – Principal, Linden Ave Middle School, Red Hook, New York

Zhao, Yong – Professor of Education, Presidential Chair, University of Oregon

Categories International, Resistance, Testing

The Netherlands: Not a Model for Chile or for the U.S.

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2014 //
19

A reader from the Netherlands noticed  the recent post by Mario Waissbluth in Chile. Waissbuth said that Chileans were looking to the Netherlands as a possible model as Chile tries to extricate itself from decades of privatization. The privatization was launched by the dictator Pinochet, whose advisors admired the libertarian ideas of Milton Friedman.

 

Our reader from the Netherlands commented:

 

In The Netherlands, the situation has changed in the past 15 years. It used to be the case that about 60% of all schools were privately owned. The umbrella term for these schools was, and is, ‘Bijzonder Onderwijs” and this includes all schools on a religious basis (either Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim or any other denomination) as well as schools with a special educational denomination (such as Montessori, Jenaplan, Dalton, Democratic etc.). The remaining 40% of schools used to be governmental, i.e. really ‘public’.

All of these schools were (and still are) paid for by public money. Parents are asked a small yearly fee (about 25 to 100 dollars) in order for a number of extracurricular activities.

Then came the neolib overhaul. All school boards were privatized, which is merely a legal construction by which private non-profit foundations took over the former public schools. Now all Dutch primary, secondary or tertiary schools are part of some private Foundation of Union. They are not marketed, and don’t have shareholders. They receive about 8000 dollar of public money for each subscribed student. School boards can do with that money what they like, within very, very wide limitations. The ‘freedom of education’ has turned into an increased freedom for school boards, and a decreased freedom for teachers (who have to obey the boards’ working orders) and limited freedom for parents (who can send their children to a limited number of schools).

The neolib privatization overhaul was sold to the Dutch public by the usual pretexts: ‘more quality for a lower price’. As the sceptics expected, the result turned out exactly the other way. The public expenses have more than doubled in 13 years time (the cumulative inflation being less than 30%), salaries for non-teaching staff have increased hugely, as have their number. Teaching staff, however, receive lower pay, and both teaching hours and class size have increased. PISA comparisons show that results have steadily decreased, compared to similar countries, as have the qualifications of newly arrived teachers.

I find it a bit ironic that Chile would consider The Netherlands an example in order to fight segregation. The neolib overhaul and the government-forced ‘concurrency’ between schools has resulted in dramatic segregation in urban areas. The percentage of either ‘black schools’ and ‘white schools’ has increased from 25% to 75% in only two decades, and is still growing.

I used to be proud of Dutch education. That was when I started my career as a teacher, and researcher. At present, I see very little in my country’s education system or policy that can make me proud. And I certainly would not recommend it as an example to other nations.

Categories Education Industry, International, Privatization

Chile: Dismantling the Most Pro-Market Education System in the World

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2014 //
39

The following post was written by Mario Waissbluth, President of Educación 2020 Foundation, a Chilean citizen’s movement founded in 2008. Its latest reform proposals (in Spanish) are called “La Reforma Educativa que Chile Necesita”, and were published in April 2013. A book on this subject (in Spanish) is also available. These proposals were mostly adopted by and included in the educational program of the recently elected government of Michelle Bachelet, and are starting to be implemented now.

Valentina Quiroga (32) was one of the student founders of this organization and is now Undersecretary of Education.

Although Educación 2020 remains as a fully independent movement, the positions stated thereon are in many ways similar to those of the current government.

Chile: Dismantling the most pro-market education system in the world

Mario Waissbluth

In August 2013 I wrote in this blog a three piece series, called “Chile: The most pro-market system in the world.” The first described the origins and structure of the system. The second explained its educational and social results, good and bad. The third pointed the way Chile should choose to get out of this mess. If the reader wants to fully understand this situation (the most “Milton Friedmanish” in the world), incomparable with any other country, it is advisable to read those beforehand.
Although some might disagree, from both extremes of the political spectrum, we are happy to inform that the proposals we made are very similar to those being implemented now. However, the political, financial and cultural obstacles will be formidable.

Bachelet was elected by a large margin of voters and has a majority in both the House and the Senate. Nonetheless, positions within the government’s coalition are not fully homogeneous. In addition, there is an impending tax reform that is vital for funding these reforms, costing no less than 2% of gross national product in gradual increments.

Of course, many powerful companies, with strong lobbying capability, are not happy about that. The educational reforms will include dozens of new laws and budgets, covering from preschool to tertiary education.

A warning for American readers. I am fully aware that many of you are criticizing charter schools, profit, teaching to the test, skimming, and the destruction of the teaching profession. I myself have cited Diane Ravitch’s books many times. But you have to be aware that, after 30 years of neoliberal schemes in Chile, charter schools subsidized by government are a majority (55%). One third of them are religious. Two thirds of them are for-profit, and one half of them charge anywhere from US$ 10 to US$ 180 a month on top of the subsidy, therefore skimming quite efficiently.

Teaching to the test, with consequences, has been taken to the greatest extreme imaginable. Policies to destruct public education are too numerous to mention here, and the result is that this system is in acute crisis financially, managerially and emotionally. The teaching profession is in far worse condition than in the US, by any statistical criteria.

In this situation, it is simply not possible to pretend now that charter schools could vanish. Less so if millions of parents have chosen to send their children to highly segregated charters, in a country whose social inequalities are far worse than those in the US, which I know are ugly by themselves.

In short, if the US is navigating towards hell, we are already there and are trying to get out without sinking the ship. It is a very different situation.

The most difficult hurdle in front of us is not legal, political or financial, but cultural. Parents have been led to believe, for decades, that the “best” school is that which is segregated, both academically and socioeconomically. We have a true cultural and educational apartheid. Therefore, the changes will have to be gradual and careful. At the same time, the government is sending strong signals: this is not going to be a minor adjustment but a major change in the overall orientation of the school system; not to make it fully state owned, but simply to resemble the vast majority of OECD countries, probably in a way similar to that of Belgium or The Netherlands. The whole strategy is described in more detail in the above mentioned entries of this blog,

Recently, the Education Minister, Mr. Nicolás Eyzaguirre (with a powerful political and financial experience and profile) has announced the first wave of legislation, to be sent to Congress in May, whose details are now being drafted. They include, amongst other things, the radical ending of academic selection and skimming, the gradual elimination of cost-sharing (to reduce social skimming), the phasing out of 3,500 for-profit schools (to be converted into non-profits), the radical pruning of the standardized testing system, the strengthening and expansion of the public network of schools (so that they can compete in a better way with the charters) and a major reform to the teaching profession, from its training (completely unregulated so far), to improving salaries and working conditions.

This is an evolving situation. I will be most happy (if I can) to answer questions through this blog, and also to inform you about new developments in the future.

Categories International, Privatization, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers and Teaching, Vouchers

Swedish Experiment in Privatizing Schools Floundering

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2014 //
14

Scholars such as Henry Levin have earlier warned that the Swedish experiment in privatization is promoting greater social segregation and not improving education.

 

Reader Chiara Duggan adds this recent Reuters article, with her comment on the failure of market-based reform. Will anyone tell Arne Duncan or will he continue to follow the guidance of (Sir) Michael Barber of Pearson?

 

Duggan writes:

 

“http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/10/us-sweden-schools-insight-idUSBRE9B905620131210

 

“Good piece on Sweden’s experiment with privatizing education:

 

“In a country with the fastest growing economic inequality of any OECD nation, basic aspects of the deregulated school market are now being re-considered, raising questions over private sector involvement in other areas like health.

 

Two-decades into its free-market experiment, about a quarter of once staunchly Socialist Sweden’s secondary school students now attend publically-funded but privately run schools, almost twice the global average.

 

Nearly half of those study at schools fully or partly owned by private equity firms.

 

Ahead of elections next year, politicians of all stripes are questioning the role of such firms, accused of putting profits first with practices like letting students decide when they have learned enough and keeping no record of their grades.

 

The opposition Green Party – like the Moderates long-time supporters of privately run schools but now backing the clamp-down – issued a public apology in a Swedish daily last month headlined “Forgive us, our policy led our schools astray”.

 

“I give the Greens huge credit for that.

 

“Can you IMAGINE a US political party writing “forgive us, our policy led our schools astray”? 🙂

 

“Never, ever happen.

 

“In 20 years when there are no public schools left we’ll get “mistakes were made”- by some unidentified person or group of people. :)”

Categories International, Privatization, Vouchers

More on Chile’s Education Reforms

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2014 //
4

I wrote to Professor Mario Waissbluth, who has previously written for the blog, about the new turn of events in Chile.

In his previous posts on the blog, Professor Waissbluth explained that Chile’s free-market system had been an educational disaster.

In his last post, before the recent elections, he wrote:

 

Previously,
I wrote in this blog a 3-part sequence describing the Chilean
educational system, its consequences, proposing some ways to run
away from this malignant design. Recently, Universidad de Chile
published the results of a survey on adult literacy and numeracy
skills, following the exact methodology of SIALS, the Second
International Adult Literacy Survey published in
1998. Within
the survey data, it is shown that 15 years ago, 45% of young people
in the segment between 15 and 24 years, i.e., the generation that
was graduating or recently graduated from high school, had no
comprehension of language and arithmetic… whatsoever, not even
the ability to read and understand a very simple text or balance a
checkbook. Today, this same age segment shows, tragically and
exactly, the same results. With one of the highest high school
attendances in the world, we now find that these young people spent
12 years sitting passively at a desk, not achieving improvement
even in their most basic skills.
Even worse, in the segment of higher
education graduates, only 10% show adequate or complete
understanding of prose and numeracy, similar to what happened 15
years ago. This is the result of market system debauchery and
completely unregulated exploitation of students who pay and/or get
indebted to obtain these spurious titles. So far, only 20% of
higher education programs, most of them for-profit, have some sort
of voluntary accreditation.
This does not happen by chance, it
is the result of a market-based educational model, with extreme
segregation based on academic and socioeconomic skimming,
curricular overload, with students spending most of their time
training as parrots to answer standardized tests, with public
education and the teaching career virtually demolished.The basic
organizational and financial rules of our model do not exist
anywhere in the world and are full of perverse incentives.

 

Happily, the anti-privatization reformers won the election, and changes are in store.

 

Professor Waissbluth has promised to write a longer description of what is happening in Chile.

 

The leadership of the new government, he says, comes from the student protest movement.

 

The rollback of privatization is beginning, but there will not be a sharp break. The privatized charters continue to receive government subsidies, but other forms of privatization will be ended.

 

All of this is very good news indeed.

 

Chile’s love affair with privatization has ended, and the reform movement to restore a healthy and equitable education system in Chile has begun.

 

Professor Waissbluth sent this response in the middle of last night:

 

Hi Diane:
We are happy that the educational reform program is, almost to the letter, the one we, Educacion 2020, proposed a year ago 🙂
The new Undersecretary, 32 years old, is one of the student founders of our movement, she is the lady that drafted the program, and the Minister’s staff includes several former presidents of student federations… plus some key members of our own organization, and I run some risk of it being somewhat dismembered 😦
The program does not end government subsidies to private schools (charter, which constitute almost 55% of the system) but it does end (gradually) the fact that a) most schools charge a copayment to parents, of differing amounts, thus effectively segregating and skimming socioeconomically b) that some of them are for profit c) that they do all types of academic skimming, this last practice including many public high schools. There are yet no specific details,( and they will be complex pieces of legislation) and we shall know them in a month, and these are only a few samples of future reforms. The fights in Congress wil be awesome, but the gov has a slight majority in both House and Senate. I can write a column for you, probably linking it with my three former columns to make it more understandable, or as you wish. Or maybe it should be again a series, since the reforms will be coming gradually, from preschool to tertiary level, and they will be most complex. It is not easy to “change course” radically in the most market oriented system in the world without sinking the ship.
I am happy to say that my 2013 book “Cambio de Rumbo” (Change of Course) is now on its 2nd edition, and the previous one, from 2010 “Se acabo el recreo” (School Break is Over) just entered its 5th edition 🙂

 

Mario Waissbluth

 

And he added this comment this morning on the blog, in response to a reader:

 

We are fully aware that non-profit charters have many spurious practices as well. But you have to be aware that a) 55% of students are enrolled in for profit and non profit charters (far far more than in the US), b) after 30 years of systematic demolition policies, our public education system has virtually gone down the drain, seriously mismanaged (far far worse than in the US). A whole program for the rebirth of public schooling is being designed, it will take a few years to materialize, and for the time being this is the only practical solution. You do not revert 30 years of the most commercialized school system in the world by the stroke of one law, without breaking havoc on the system (beggining with the 55% of parents which have their kids in charters). Today, our key policy is to combat skimming, teaching to the test, and segregation, which are the worst in the world. If you wish, we are trying to go “the dutch way” and we honestly do not see any other solution. If you have a better one, we will be happy to hear about it.

 

As you read his comments, you can see the goal of the privatizers here: to create a critical mass of privately managed charters that will destroy public education, turning our public schools into dumping grounds, and making it difficult if not impossible to reverse the damage.

Categories International

BREAKING NEWS: Chile to End Public Funding of Private Education!

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2014 //
37

Under the dictator Pinochet, Chile became devoted to the free-market theories of libertarian economist Milton Friedman. It adopted a voucher system and embrace choice.

Over the years, the schools experienced growing social segregation and little or no improvement.

A vigorous and outraged student movement in Chile demanded changes.

Just today, a news story appeared saying that Chile intends to end public subsidies for private schools. (Oddly enough, the story is from Shanghai!)

We will keep watch on this breaking story.

The story says:

Chilean Education Minister Nicolas Eyzaguirre Thursday reaffirmed the government’s commitment to ending private education.”The pursuit of profit is not a good objective for educational institutions. It is not a good ally of a good education,” Eyzaguirre told a press conference.

The administration of President Michelle Bachelet, who took office in March, has proposed an ambitious overhaul of the education system to provide affordable, quality education, as demanded by a national student movement launched in 2011.

The government’s proposed reforms basically call for greater public spending on education, free primary education, and an end to state-subsidies of private schools and to profit-oriented universities.

“The state needs to withdraw from many productive activities, but not those that are considered a social right,” said Eyzaguirre.

The current educational system, which was increasingly privatized by the previous pro-business administration, creates more tension between the nation’s privileged and working classes, the minister said.

State support for universities will have to be phased in slowly, the minister indicated, as many of the centers of higher education have not been certified.

“We can’t be throwing around public money without ensuring quality,” he said.

To finance the education reform, Bachelet has proposed increasing the corporate tax rate from 20 percent to 25 percent, an initiative opposed by the business and conservative political sector, but expected to be adopted by the country’s legislature.

 

 

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, Higher Education, International, Privatization

L.A. Times: Cheating Rampant on High-Stakes Exams in India

By dianeravitch
April 18, 2014 //
20

The Los Angeles Times tells us what we should already know: The higher the stakes on exams, the more bad consequences will follow.

In India, there are crucial exams, and cheating is a persistent problem. Ingenious students us their ingenuity not to answer the questions, but to find ways to get the right answer, either electronically by remote device or by sneaking in old-fashioned crib sheets.

In the United States, we have seen numerous examples of cheating by administrators and teachers, as in El Paso, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. We have also seen narrowing of the curriculum to make time for more test preparation and loss of the arts, libraries, physical education, and even recess. We have seen teaching to the test, a practice once considered unprofessional. We have seen states game the system, dropping the pass score to artificially boost the passing rate.

The story in the L.A. Times describes a business that sells electronic devices to text exam questions to someone outside who responds with the correct answer. Officials are aware of the problem:

“At a test center in northern India’s Bareilly district, state-appointed inspectors making a surprise visit last month found school staff members writing answers to a Hindi exam on the blackboard. When the inspectors arrived, the staff members tried to throw the evidence out the window.

“Sometimes the stories are horrifying. A 10th-grader in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, accused his principal last month of allowing students to cheat if they each paid about $100. The student’s impoverished family could barely manage half the bribe. Distraught, he doused himself with kerosene and set himself on fire in the family kitchen. He died the next day.

“At the well-regarded Balmohan Vidyamandir school in central Mumbai, 10th-grade teacher Shubhada Nigudkar didn’t notice the math formulas written on the wall in the back of the classroom in a neat, tiny script until days after the exams concluded.
“There is nothing we can do at that point,” the matronly, bespectacled English teacher said. “I can’t prove anything. So we move on.”

“The problems have prompted education officials to take preventive measures that at first blush might seem worthy of a minimum-security prison. Some schools installed closed-circuit cameras to monitor testing rooms. Others posted armed police officers at entrances or employed jamming devices to block the use of cellphones to trade answers.”

The problem is high-stakes testing. Our own officials in the United States can’t get enough.

The best antidote would be to require them to take the exams they mandate. If they can’t pass them, they should resign.

Someday, in the not distant future, when the history of this era is recorded, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top will be recalled among the biggest policy failures of our times. They will be remembered as policies that undermined the quality of education, demoralized educators, promoted the privatization of schools, and destroyed children’s love of learning.

http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-c1-india-cheating-20140416-dto,0,165573.htmlstory#ixzz2z3whGNKt

Categories International, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

David Berliner on PISA and Poverty

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2014 //
10

Since there is always a lot of chatter about what international tests scores mean, I invited David Berliner to share his views. Berliner is one of our nation’s pre-eminent scholars of education.

 

 

Dear Diane,

 

A few weeks ago you asked me a question about recent PISA test results and the role that is played by poverty in the scores of the USA and other countries. As I understand it PISA doesn’t compute the poverty-test score relationships in quite the same way we might in the USA, but the results they get are similar to what we get.

 

Investigations of the poverty-test score relationships in PISA 2012 (OECD, 2013) relied on two variables, each of which was a composite. First, they used a family social class measure that was supposed to capture the income and cultural resources of a family. They combined three factors to get one composite index of family social standing: the highest occupational level of either parent; the highest educational level of the parents; and home possessions (particularly, books in the home). This family index of social class standing is not income, and it is also not always a good measure of social class standing (for example, think of highly educated immigrants who hold low wage jobs). Nevertheless, it is this composite indicator of social standing that was used to examine the scores each nation attained in tests of mathematics, science, or reading. The relationships between social standing and achievement were quite similar on all three tests of subject matter.

 

When we ask what percent of the variance in US students’ PISA scores was accounted for by this composite of family social class variables, the answer is around 20% (OECD, 2013, Fig ll.2.3). Twenty percent explained variation in PISA scores that arise from differences in socioeconomic factors related to families is low enough to suggest that “poverty is no excuse,” or that, “demography is not destiny.” Such maximssound reasonable because it appears at first that about 80% of the variation in student test scores is still to be accounted for. Thus, if we just had great teachers and great school leaders every child would be successful. But this interpretation is completely misleading.

 

For example, PISA also informs us that the test score difference attributable to moving up or down one place on the social class measure is 39 points. That works out to nearly one year of schooling on the PISA scale. So, if in the recent great recession your family was hurt and you move down the social class scale one unit, the prediction from PISA data is that children of such families are likely, eventually, to be scoring one full year lower than they might have had their family just stayed at their more advantaged social level. So the “20% variance accounted for” estimate is not a trivial figure when we look at the score points that are involved in having only slightly different social class standing. The data convincingly suggests that social status variables are quite powerful and not quite as easily overcome as the maxims we hear that suggest otherwise.

 

This becomes even more apparent with some additional information collected by the PISA designers. The 2012 study used information obtained from school principals about the school attended by each child in the sample. Thus, schools were categorized on the basis of the wealth and the poverty of the student body, along with the housing patterns and values in the school catchment areas, the qualities of the teachers assigned to the schools the children attend, the funding of the schools, and a number of other school level variables that are correlated strongly with the incomes of students’ families. This is the second large composite variable used in understanding the relationship of poverty to PISA test scores.

 

The relevant data is given as the percent of the test score variance that is attributable to differences between schools because of the population they draw. Together the family and the school level variables related to social class account for 58% of the variance we see between schools. This is quite close to the data we usually cite in the USA, namely, that about 60% of the variance we see among schools is the result of outside-of-school factors, not inside-of-school factors. (It is generally agreed that in the USA we often have 20% of the variance in test scores accounted for by school variables, maybe half of which is a teacher effect. So, in the USA, the outside-of-school variables count for about 3 times the effect of the inside-of-school variables, and they count for about 6 times the effect of teachers on the aggregate scores of classes and schools.)

 

Thus the international data support the estimate of poverty’s effects on test scores that we have obtained from studying internal US test data. In fact, the 2012 PISA data provides a similar estimate to what was found in the Coleman report of the 1960s. The historical record, therefore, tells us that if we want to fix schools that are not now performing well on achievement tests, we might do well to work on the out-of-school factors that influence educational achievement, and not put all our efforts into trying to improve inside-of-the school factors, as the President and Secretary of Education continue to do. Our elected officials and numerous misguided individuals and corporations keep failing to interpret the extant data in a credible way.

 

To those who say “poverty is no excuse,” I would then ask how they account for poverty’s potency in explaining so much of the variance in achievement test scores in the USA and elsewhere? Indeed, poverty may not be an excuse for poor performance, but it sure is a quite reasonable hypothesis about the origins of student, school, and school district differences in achievement test scores. And, of course, it may not be poverty per se that is the causal factor in the low achievement seen on so many different tests. Rather, it may be poverty’s sequelae that is the culprit. That is, the wealth of families determines such things as housing, and it is housing that determines the types of neighbors one has, the mental health and crime rates in your neighborhood, the availability of role models for children, the number of moves a family makes while children are young, the stability of family relationships, low birth weight, teen pregnancy rates, Otitus Media rates in childhood, and so forth. Discussing “poverty” and “achievement” is a simple way of expressing the relationships we find between dozens of the sequelae associated with poverty and the many forms of achievement valued by our society.

 

PISA provides still more evidence that poverty is a strong factor in shaping students’ lives, supporting the contention that it is really quite common for demography to determine destiny. PISA looked at “resilient students,” those who are in the bottom quartile of the social class distribution, but in the top quartile in the achievement test distribution. These are 15-year-olds who seem to beak the shackles imposed by family and neighborhood poverty. In the USA, about 6% of the children do that. So 94% of youth born into or raised in that lower quartile of family culture and resources do not make it into the top quartile of school achievers. Admittedly, poverty is hard to overcome in most countries. But why is it that Belgium, Canada, Finland, Turkey, and Portugal, among many others, produce at least 40% more “resilient kids” than do we? Could it be because the class lines are more hardened here in the USA? Whatever the cause, given these data, the mantra that “Poverty is no Excuse” seems weak, and easily countered by the more rational statement that comes directly from the PISA data, namely, that family poverty and its sequelae severely limit the life chances of most children in the lower quartiles, quintiles, and deciles on measures of social class standing.

 

More evidence of this is also found in the PISA data. Housing patterns seemed to matter a lot in determining scores on the PISA 2012 assessments. There were striking performance differences observed between students in schools with socially advantaged students and those in schools with socially disadvantaged schools. Students attending socioeconomically advantaged schools in OECD countries outscore those in disadvantaged schools, on average, by more than 104 points in mathematics! This is of course quite a common finding in the USA where Jonathan Kozol once described our housing patterns as “Apartheid-Lite.” We should note, too, that a reanalysis of the Coleman report by Borman and Dowling (2010) broke out the variance in test scores attributable to individual background (like variable 1 in PISA) and the social composition of the schools (like variable 2 in PISA). Borman and Dowling say their reanalysis provides “very clear and compelling evidence that going to a high-poverty school or a highly segregated African American school has a profound effect on a student’s achievement outcomes, above and beyond the effect of his or her individual poverty or minority status. Specifically, both the racial/ethnic and social class composition of a student’s school are more than 1 3/4 times more important than a student’s individual race/ethnicity or social class for understanding educational outcomes. In dramatic contrast to previous analyses of the Coleman data, these findings reveal that school context effects dwarf the effects of family background.”

 

Many other nations have the same pattern of housing and schooling that we do: wages determine housing, and housing determines the characteristics of the student body and the quality of the school attended by children. This all suggests that there is a lot of support for the statement that demography, in too many instances, really does determine destiny.

 

The clearest case of this comes from analyses of other, earlier PISA data, by Doug Willms (2006). His analysis suggests that if children of average SES attended one of their own nations high performing schools, or instead attended one of their own nations’ low performing schools, the difference at age 15, the age of PISA testing, would be equivalent to about 4 grade levels. Thus a 10th grader of average SES who can attend a high performing school is likely to score at about the 12th grade level (a grade level approximation from PISA data). And if that same child were to attend a low performing school, he or she would score at about the 8th grade level. It’s the same hypothetical child we are talking about, but with two very different lives to be lead as a function of the makeup of the schools attended. It is not the quality of the teachers, the curriculum, the computers available, or any number of other variables that are often discussed when issues of school quality come up. Instead, the composition of the school seems to be the most powerful factor in changing the life course for this hypothetical, average child. PISA data from an earlier assessment in Australia documents the same phenomena (Perry and McConney, 2010). In science, the score of a low income student in a low income school averages 455. But the score of similar low income students at schools that serve upper income children is over half a standard deviation higher—512. And a high income student in a school serving low income students scores 555, but high income students enrolled in schools with high income peers score half a standard deviation higher—607. Note what is most impressive here: the low income student in a school with low income families scores 455, while a high income student in a school with high income families scores 607. That is about a standard deviation and a half apart! These are 15 year olds that are worlds apart in both housing patterns, school quality, and in measures of cognitive ability. In short, PISA data overwhelmingly supports the belief that demography and destiny are closely related, a terrible embarrassment for democratic countries that pay so much lip service to the principal of equality of opportunity. Apparently, the chant that “poverty is no excuse” can easily become a reason for doing nothing about poverty’s effects on many social variables that consistently, and cross nationally, affect both school outcomes and life chances. Horatio Alger may have never been fully believable, but a few decades ago it looks like Horatio simply died, mostly unnoticed.

 

References

 

Borman, G. D. & Dowling, M. (2010). Schools and Inequality: A Multilevel Analysis of Coleman’s Equality of Educational Opportunity Data. Teachers College Record, 112 (5), 1201–1246.

 

OECD (2013), PISA 2012 Results: Excellence Through Equity: Giving Every Student the Chance to Succeed (Volume II), PISA, OECD Publishing.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264201132-en

 

Perry, L. B. & McConney, A. (2010). Does the SES of the school matter? An

examination of socioeconomic status and student achievement using PISA

2003. Teachers College Record 112 (4), 1137–1162.

 

Willms, J. D. (2006). Learning divides: Ten policy questions about the performance and equity of schools and schooling systems. Montreal, Canada: UNESCO Institute for Statistics.

 

 

 

 

Categories International, Poverty, Testing
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