Archives for category: NCLB (No Child Left Behind)
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Anthony Cody on “March Madness”: Time to Stop Teaching, Time for Test Prep

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2014 //
28

Anthony Cody makes clear how teaching has been redefined and degraded by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

March is the month when teaching ends and test prep begins.

Federal education policy is a disaster.

The Bush-Obama agenda has de skilled teachers and made testing the most important aspect of US education.

Cody quotes teachers at length. One says:

“I wish you could hear my colleagues telling me “they don’t mind this” as it gets kids “ready” or solves them having to plan actual learning. They’ve been so de-skilled they don’t even feel the connection to instructional leadership. To them the school is a rote drill factory.

“The teaching profession has been redefined. A teacher is now the manager of a workbook drill. No projects, no model making, no literature, no research, no discovery. The planning you do is taking prefab programs and administering them. Sort of as if you were giving a test like the state test ALL the TIME. Room empty, pencils out, bubble. All things arranged around test prep. No themes, no critical thinking. Really! Not to get Biblical but it really fits – they know not what they do. Because they don’t, we are talking about folks that are responding to what their perception is – they perceive this to be what’s required.”

This is not education.

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

Jan Resseger on Mike Rose’s “Why School?”

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2014 //
2

Jan Resseger writes of her delight in discovering that Mike Rose has released a revised edition of “Why School?”

Resseger writes:

“In the 2014 edition, Rose has revised, updated, and expanded Why School? It now addresses the impact of President Obama’s Race to the Top program and other federal programs that have emerged since 2009—including problems with the waivers now being granted to address the lingering effects of the the No Child Left Behind Act, long over-due for reauthorization.

“A much expanded chapter on standards and accountability now explores the goals of the Common Core Standards as well as Rose’s worries about the Common Core testing and implementation.

“Three new chapters speak to issues that have emerged since the first edition of Rose’s book. “Being Careful About Character” examines books like Paul Tough’s How Children Succeed with their thesis that schools can help overcome poverty with programs to strengthen character. “My worry is that we will embrace these essentially individual and technocratic fixes—mental conditioning for the poor—and abandon broader social policy aimed at poverty itself.”

” Another new chapter examines the wave of MOOCs and other on-line education, exploring the learning assumptions we rarely discuss and raising serious questions we ought to be asking before we thoughtlessly adopt these technologies.

“From my point of view the most important new chapter is “The Inner Life of the Poor.” “The poor,” writes Rose, “are pretty much absent from public and political discourse, except as an abstraction—an income category low on the socioeconomic status index—or as a generalization: people dependent on the government, the ‘takers,’ a problem.” “More than a few of Barack Obama’s speeches are delivered from community colleges, but the discussion of them is always in economic and functional terms… I have yet to find in political speech or policy documents any significant discussion of what benefit—other than economic—the community college might bring… To have a prayer of achieving a society that realizes the potential of all its citizens, we will need institutions that affirm the full humanity, the wide sweep of desire and ability of the people walking through the door.”

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, US Education

Peter Greene Knocks the Highly Qualified Teacher Talk Outta the Park

By dianeravitch
March 1, 2014 //
63

Peter Greene has a ball with the U.S. Department of Education’s latest fantasy plan: Every child has a civil right to a “highly qualified teacher.”

Who is a “highly qualified teacher”? Any teacher who can raise test scores or anyone who belongs to Teach for America and leaves before the third year of test scores are reported.

It is all super but here is the laugh-out-loud deconstruction of Duncan-style logic:

“Discussion of teaching as a civil right often circles back around to the assertion that poor students have more lousy teachers than non-poor students. This assertion rests primarily on a model of circular reasoning. Follow along.

“A) Teachers are judged low-performing because their students score poorly on tests.

“B) Students low test scores are explained by the fact that they have low-performing teachers.

“Or, framed another way, this argument defines a low-quality teacher as any teacher whose students don’t do well on standardized tests. The assumption is that teachers are the only single solitary explanation for student standardized test scores. Nothing else affects those scores. Only teacher behavior explains the low scores. That’s it.

“Ergo, the best runners are runners who run down hills. Runners who are running uphill are slow runners, and must be replaced by those good runners– the ones we find running downhill. Or, the wettest dogs are the ones who are out in the rain, while the driest ones are the ones indoors. So if we take the indoor dogs outside, we will have drier dogs in the yard. While it rains.

“As long as we define low-quality teachers as those who teach low-achieving students (who we know will mostly be the children of poor folk), low-achieving students will always be taught by low-quality teachers. It’s the perfect education crisis, one that can never, ever be solved.”

Categories Duncan, Arne, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Teach for America, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, U.S. Department of Education

Who Robbed the Children?

By dianeravitch
February 22, 2014 //
69

A reader comments:

“It’s rather ironic and infuriating that our schools have been robbed of necessities under the catchy phrase “No Child Left Behind” and the more straight foward one, “Race to the Top” ( or push to the bottom) I have been teaching for over 30 years and have watched as the robbing and eventual exploitation of our children has become the norm. The bad old days before any of this began were so much better. In my opinion, they have segregated education once again. Now it’s the haves and have nots. I read a phrase that describes it well, “Cookies for Corporations, Crumbs for Children” That’s how it is and now they are trying to take away the crumbs!”

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top

NCLB: The Undead Vampire Law

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2014 //
41

Remember back in 2001 when Congress passed No Child Left Behind and mandated that all children in grades 3-8 would be proficient in reading and math? Remember when President George W. Bush signed it into lain January 2002, surrounded by Senator Ted Kennedy, Congressman George Miller, Congressman John Boehner, and others who hailed a historic moment in Anerican history?

We now know that NCLB was a monumental failure. Testing doesn’t make kids smarter, doesn’t make education better.

Here is a great article by Lisa Guisbond of Fairtest, who explains why NCLB failed and how Race to the Top has preserved its failed ideas and made them even worse.

She writes:

“Unfortunately, those driving the federal school policy bus clearly haven’t learned any real lessons from NCLB’s failures. To the contrary, they’re staying the course of test-driven education reform. And they’re still trying to sell Miller’s false suggestion that the problem isn’t too much testing, it’s simply that communities can’t handle the truth being delivered by the test scores.”

But parents, educators, and students have learned the lessons of NCLB, and they are fighting back.

The question now is whether and how long big money and political power can keep their failed ideas afloat, imposed on other people’s children.

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind)

Whitehurst: Test More, Not Less

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2014 //
46

Grover (Russ) Whitehurst is worried that the public is turning against standardized testing. As George W. Bush’s director of education research, he was and is a true believer in testing. As head of the Brown Center at Brookings, once known as a bastion of liberal thought, Whitehurst wants to see the programs he tended under Bush’s NCLB survive.

Yet they are, as he puts it, “in a bit of trouble.”

He is upset to see that Néw York City elected a new mayor who does not share his love of testing, accountability, and choice. Bill de Blasio is a progressive Democrat.

He is not happy that the Texas legislature rolled back some of its testing requirements, responding to public protest.

But most of all, he is upset that Linda Darling-Hammond, who is senior advisor to one of the federally funded testing consortia, recommends testing in only a single grade in each of the three levels of schooling: elementary school, middle school, and high school.

He frets: What would that do to teacher assessment? How could growth scores be calculated?

Whitehurst’s recommendation: we should test more, not less!

I am not sure I follow the logic here.

How will more testing quell the growing rebellion against testing? There will be more angry moms and dads, more Bill de Blasio’s elected. Maybe he is on to something.

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Teacher Evaluations, Testing

A Fellow Texan Reviews “Reign of Error”

By dianeravitch
January 24, 2014 //
10

John Savage, a freelance journalist and former teacher, reviewed “Reign of Error” in the “Texas Observer.”

I liked the review for many reasons.

First, because Savage liked the book. That pleases every author.

Second, because the first article I ever published appeared in the “Texas Observer,” a gritty liberal journal that covers Texas politics. The article was called “My Ghetto and Yours,” and it was about growing up Jewish in Houston. It appeared, I think, in 1961. I think I was lamenting how little I knew of the big world outside Houston. I haven’t read it since 1961, so I can’t be certain what I wrote but I feel pretty sure I launched my writing career by stepping on toes. I think that it would be called “juvenalia” if it ever appeared in a collection.

Categories Corporate Reformers, KIPP Charter Schools, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Reign of Error, Testing, Texas

Tom Friedman Is As Clueless As Arne Duncan

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2014 //
71

Most educators and even most legislators seem to recognize that No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have failed to “reform” American education. After 13 years of test-based evaluation and school closings, no one claims success. We need what: More of the same! Congress doesn’t know what to do to change a failed status quo. Feckless Arne Duncan, having failed in Chicago, now looks for scapegoats for the failure of the Bush-Obame bipartisan consensus.

Duncan has one sure ally: Tom Friedman of the Néw York Times

They are certain that American schools are terrible, even though test scores and graduation rates are at a historic high. They want us to be just like South Korea, where exams determine one’s life (see Mercedes Schneider on examination hell in Korea).

They blame parents. They blame teachers. They blame students. They blame schools.

They blame everyone but the obvious perpetrators: failed federal policies that undermine the autonomy of teachers, principals, superintendents, school boards, and states; budget cuts that have increased class sizes and narrowed curricula, closed libraries and eliminated social workers, nurses, psychologists, and guidance counselors; the highest child poverty rate of any advanced nation; the largest inequality gap in a century; rising levels of segregation; a popular culture that celebrates instant success, not the earnest hard work required for academic success; the ubiquity of distracting electronic toys: the intrusion of philanthropic behemoths like Gates, with its own failed solutions; a media indifferent to a rapacious privatization movement that cares more about budget-cutting and profiteering than education.

They are looking for blame in all the wrong places.

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Reform, For-Profit, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Poverty, Privatization, Race to the Top, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

Time for a Laugh

By dianeravitch
December 29, 2013 //
11

Hat tip to KrazyTA for sharing this great cartoon.

Categories Humor, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Testing

G.F. Brandenburg: Words of Wisdom About PISA

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2013 //
13

G.F. Brandenburg, as you would expect, has a pithy and wise commentary about the PISA scores.

Here are his first three observations:

“1. There is a lot of evidence that being a good test-taker does not necessarily overlap with other desirable properties, either on the individual level or on the local or national or international level.

2. A lot of silly things are read into comparing how many questions they get right in one country versus another.

3. The United States has now TEN FULL YEARS in which it has based essentially ALL educational decisions on test scores, with a small but well-funded and powerful group claiming that it would produce miracles in raising American students’ test scores on every level that they can be measured.”

And here is his most brilliant, unforgettable, unassailable point:

“Arne Duncan and his ilk say that the fact that the same approach has failed for 10 straight years, means we need to keep doing it harder. Sensible people would say no, let’s forget about measuring with stupid standardized tests. Let the kids learn, remember that humans LOVE to learn stuff — it’s what we do as a species. And precisely nobody knows what knowledge of today is going to be the most useful or fun tomorrow. So let’s get rid of the idiotic focus on standardized tests and Big Data, and stop wasting so much money and time and energy on them. We’ve got all sorts of art and sports and drama and dance and music and technology and building stuff and real science and history and psychology to learn and to perform.”

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