Archives for category: NCLB (No Child Left Behind)
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Rothstein on Duncan: Test-Based Accountability Has Failed

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2013 //
23

Here is the transcript from the Diane Rehm show and its interview with Arne Duncan. This is the interview where Duncan said he was “not familiar’ with the Justice Department lawsuit seeking to block vouchers in Louisiana because they will undermine court-ordered desegregation.

Two others were interviewed about Duncan’s policies: Mike Petrilli of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Richard Rothstein of the liberal Economic Policy Institute.

Rothstein was asked whether Duncan was the most powerful and influential education secretary ever:

“Oh, yes, he certainly has because he’s had enormous flexibility without congressional authorization as a result of the stimulus bill and the Raise to the Top funds. The problem is that he’s got an entirely incoherent approach to education policy which, as I said, is doing enormous harm. He ended his comments before with promoting the importance of early childhood education. I fully agree with that.

“Everybody who studies student achievement knows that the one most important factors affecting student achievements is whether children come to school in the first place prepared to learn, whether they’ve had good literacy experiences in early childhood where they’ve had high-quality care. He promotes that. It’s very important. It’s wonderful that he promotes it.

“But then he turns around and advocates and implements an aggressive accountability policy which holds schools accountable for the same results whether or not their children have had high quality early childhood instruction. If early childhood is really as important as he says it is, and I think it is, how can you hold schools accountable for high standards and high accomplishment if children haven’t had those early childhood experiences?

“So, on the one hand, he advocates all the right things, early childhood. He advocates health clinics in schools. He advocates after-school programs and has promised neighborhoods program.

“But when it comes to actually implementing an accountability system, it makes no difference. It has no effect whatsoever.

“His Race to the Top program, for example, gave states no points for whether they had early childhood programs or health clinics in schools or after-school programs. And so he talks a good game when it comes to all of these important influences in education, but when it comes down to the actual accountability policies that he’s promoting, they have no effect whatsoever.”

Rothstein said earlier in the exchange:

“Well, the key point he made, which I think has been lost in the debate, is there’s a big difference between having higher standards and the consequences of those standards. Nobody objects to having higher standards, the common core or if they are higher and to the extent they are higher. The real issue is that what Secretary Duncan has been advocating is tying accountability to the tests that are based on those standards. We’ve had 10 years now of accountability tied to tests based on so-called lower standards, and they’ve completely corrupted our education system.

“They’ve made the system much worse. Teachers have had incentives to narrow the curriculum to the things that are tested. Students have been trained to take tests rather than to learn the underlying curriculum. The same thing is going to happen if we tie tests to these higher standards. Teachers will learn what kinds of things are going to be on the test. There’ll be a lot of test preparation going on. The tests will not reflect what children really know but rather how skilled they are at taking tests.

“And it won’t account for all of the other things besides classroom instruction that affect how high student achievement is. So the common core standards are one thing, but the real issue is the attempt — the misguided attempt to have very high stakes attached to tests to measure those standards. Those will corrupt education just as much as now as they have in the past, and it’s unfortunate Secretary Duncan and his colleagues haven’t learned the lessons from No Child Left Behind and are preparing now to implement the same kinds of mistakes that were done in the last 10 years.”

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Duncan, Arne, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top

New Book Analyzes Roots of Testing Movement

By dianeravitch
September 4, 2013 //
35

This is a book you should read if you want to understand
how assessments are now being misused. It sets a valuable political
and historical context for understanding the mess that is now
federal education policy. The Mismeasure of Education by Jim Horn and Denise Wilburn should be on your shelf. The publisher just dropped the price to $27.50.

 

 

With new student assessments and teacher evaluation
schemes in the planning or early implementation phases, this book
takes a step back to examine the ideological and historical
grounding, potential benefits, scholarly evidence, and ethical
basis for the new generation of test based accountability measures.
After providing the political and cultural contexts for the rise of
the testing accountability movement in the 1960s that culminated
almost forty years later in No Child Left Behind and Race to the
Top, this book then moves on to provide a policy history and social
policy analysis of value-added testing in Tennessee that is framed
around questions of power relations, winners, and
losers. In examining the issues and exercise
of power that are sustained in the long-standing policy of
standardized testing in schools, this work provides a big picture
perspective on assessment practices over time in the U. S.; by
examining the rise of value-added assessment in Tennessee, a
fine-grained and contemporary case is provided within that larger
context. The last half of the book provides a detailed survey of
the research based critiques of value-added methodology, while
detailing an aggressive marketing campaign to make value-added
modeling (VAM) a central component of reform strategies following
NCLB. The last chapter and epilogue place the continuation of
test-based accountability practices within the context of an
emerging pushback against privatization, high stakes testing, and
other education reforms. This book will be
useful to a wide audience, including teachers, parents, school
leaders, policymakers, researchers, and students of educational
history, policy, and politics.
REVIEWS “When the Obama
Administration decided to spend the billions it got for schools as
part of the stimulus package to launch the Race to the Top program
and the NCLB waivers, forcing many states to adopt teacher
evaluation based on changes in student test scores, leading experts
warned that this “value added” system did not have a reliable
scientific basis and would often lead to false conclusions. This
sobering and important study of the long experience with this
system in Tennessee (where it was invented) shows that it did not
work, was unfair, and took attention away from other more
fundamental issues.” Gary Orfield Distinguished Research Professor,
UCLA, Co-Director, Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles,
UCLA “If The Mismeasure of Education offered
only its penetrating new look at Conant and Coleman, it would be
worth the price. But that’s just the beginning. Horn and Wilburn
uncover the obsessive instrumentalist quantification and
apocalyptic rhetoric soapboxed by both liberal and conservative
political elites. Their autopsy of value-added accountability
reveals the pathology of ed reform’s claim about teachers not being
good enough for the global economy.” Susan Ohanian Educator,
Author, Activist “A well-researched (and
frightening) look at examples of shameful pseudoscience in America,
the latest manifestation of which is value-added assessment for
determining teacher competency… A well-documented and thorough
analysis, inescapably leading to the conclusion that student test
data cannot be used to determine teacher effectiveness. A must read
for policy makers enamored of the idea that value added assessments
will do what is claimed for them. They do not!….An excellent and
scholarly history of how we got to an
educational-testing/industrial complex, now promoting invalid
assessment strategies that are transforming education, but not for
the better. A scary book that should be thoughtfully read by those
who value America’s greatest invention, the public schools.” David
Berliner Regents’ Professor Emeritus, Arizona State
University “The Mismeasure of Education is a
magnificent work, an elegantly written, brilliantly argued and
erudite exposition on why the “what,” “how” and “why” of effective
teaching cannot be adequately demonstrated by sets of algorithms
spawned in the ideological laboratories of scientific management at
the behest of billionaire investors… This book will serve as a
sword of Damocles, hanging over the head of the nation’s
educational tribunals and their adsentatores, ingratiators and
sycophants in the business community… The Mismeasure of Education
will have a profound resonance with those who are fed up with the
hijacking of our nation’s education system. This is a book that
must be read by everyone interested in the future of our schools.
It is a book that advocates real educational justice, for student,
teachers, administrators and the public; it is informed by
impressive scholarship and compelling argument. It is surely to
become a classic work.” Peter McLarenProfessor, GSEIS, University
of California, Los Angeles, Distinguished Fellow in Critical
Studies, Chapman University

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

What Is a “Failing School”?

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2013 //
28

NOTE: I cross-posted this piece on Huffington Post. Be sure to leave comments there too.

Two years ago, Kevin Kosar, a former graduate student of mine, conducted an Internet search for the term “failing school.” What he discovered was fascinating. Until the 1990s, the term was virtually unknown. About the mid-1990s, the term began appearing with greater frequency. With the passage of No Child Left Behind, the use of the expression exploded and became a commonplace.

Kosar did not speculate on the reasons. But I venture to say that the rise of the accountability movement created the idea of “failing schools.”

“Accountability” was taken to mean that if students have low test scores, someone must be blamed. Since Bush’s NCLB, it became conventional to blame the school. With President Obama’s Race to the Top, blame shifted to teachers. The solution to “failing schools,” according to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, is to fire the staff and close the school.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently took this idea to an extreme by saying that he wanted a “death penalty” for “failing schools.” His believes that when schools have persistently low test scores, they should lose democratic control.

They should be taken over by the state, given to private charter corporations, or put under mayoral control. In fact, none of these ideas has been successful.

Low-performing school districts in New Jersey have been under state control for more than 20 years without turning them into high-performing districts. Mayoral control in Cleveland and Chicago has been a flop. And private charters typically do no better than public schools, except when they exclude low-scoring students.

Undoubtedly there are some schools where the leadership is rotten and corrupt. In such cases, the responsibility lies with the district superintendent to review the staff and programs, and make significant changes as needed

But these days, any school with low test scores is called a “failing school,” without any inquiry into the circumstances of the school.

Instead of closing the school or privatizing it, the responsible officials should act to improve the school. they should ask:

What proportion of the students are new immigrants and need help learning English? What proportion entered the school far behind their grade level? What proportion have disabilities and need more time to learn? What resources are available to the school? An in-depth analysis is likely to reveal that most “failing schools” are not failing schools, but are schools that enroll high proportions of students who need extra help, extra tutoring, smaller classes, social workers, guidance counselors, psychologists, and a variety of other interventions.

Firing the staff does not turn around a low-performing school. Nor does handing it over to a charter chain. Nor does mayoral control. Most of the time, what we call a “failing school” is a school that lacks the personnel and resources to meet the needs of its students.

Closing schools does not make them better. Nor does closing schools help students. It’s way past time to stop blaming the people who work in troubled schools and start helping them by providing the tools they need and the support their students need.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Closing schools, Cuomo, Andrew, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top

Duncan Tightens Federal Grip on Nation’s Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2013 //
36

Education Week reports that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has tightened the screws on states and districts that get a waiver from NCLB issued by him.

They must comply with his interpretation of teacher quality and must reaffirm their commitment to Common Core (“college=and-career-readiness standards”), while upping the ante on accountability.

Based on his experience in Chicago, Duncan seems certain that more carrots and more sticks will do the trick.

The waivers enable him to impose Race to the Top requirements on every state, even those that won no money at all.

Categories Duncan, Arne, Federal Waiver, NCLB (No Child Left Behind)

Do Civil Rights Groups Want More High-Stakes Testing?

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2013 //
66

A group called the Campaign for High School Equity made
news the other day when it criticized Arne Duncan’s NCLB waivers
and complained that the waivers might reduce the amount of
high-stakes testing for poor and minority students. Mike Petrilli
at the conservative think tank Thomas B. Fordham Institute
challenged me to admit that the civil rights groups were leading
the charge to protect high-stakes testing. I accepted his
challenge. It didn’t make sense, on the face of it, that civil
rights groups would want more testing. Every standardized test in
the world reflects socioeconomic status, family education and
income. Testing measures advantage and disadvantage. Some kids defy
the odds, but the odds strongly predict that the have-not kids will
be at the bottom of the bell curve. They will be labeled as
failures. They may get help, they may not. But one thing is sure:
standardized testing is not a tool to advance civil rights. Testing
is not teaching. Low scores do not produce more resources or higher
achievement. More testing does not improve learning. It increase
rote learning, teaching to the test, narrowing the curriculum, and
sometimes, cheating. So who is this group and why does it want more
testing. First,
the article that Mike forwarded to me. It says that the
waivers are allowing too many schools to avoid the consequences of
being low-performing. In other words, the Campaign for High School
Equity prefers the draconian consequences of No Child Left Behind
and the punitive labels attached to schools based on high-stakes
testing. Of course, their statement also makes it appear that Arne
Duncan is trying to water down punishments and high-stakes testing,
when nothing could be further from the truth. Who is part of the
Campaign for High School Equity? It includes the following groups:
National
Urban League • National
Council of La Raza • National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People • The
Leadership Conference Education Fund • Mexican
American Legal Defense and Educational Fund • League
of United Latin American Citizens •National
Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational
Fund • Alliance
for Excellent Education • National
Indian Education Association • Southeast
Asia Resource Action Center Why are they in favor of
high-stakes testing, even though the evidence is overwhelming that
NCLB has failed the children they represent? I can’t say for sure,
but this I do know. The Campaign for High School Equity is funded
by the Gates Foundation. It received a grant of nearly $500,000.
Some if not all of its members have also received grants from Gates
to support the CHSE. The NAACP
received $1 million from Gates to do so. LULAC
received $600,000 to support the CHSE. The Alliance
for Excellent Education received $2.6 million “to promote
public will for effective high school reform.” The Leadership
Conference on Civil Rights Fund received
$375,000 from the Gates Foundation to support CHSE. The
National
Association of Latino Appointed and Elected Officials is
Gates-funded, though not for this specific program. The National
Indian Education Fund received
Gates funding to participate in CHSE. The Southeast Asia
Resource
Action Center was funded by Gates to participate in CHSE. The others are not Gates-funded.

When CHSE demands more high-stakes testing,
more labeling of schools as “failed,” more public school closings,
more sanctions, more punishments, they are not speaking for communities
of color. They are speaking for the Gates Foundation.

Whoever is actually speaking for minority communities and children of color is
advocating for more pre-school education, smaller class sizes,
equitable resources, more funding of special education, more
funding for children who are learning English, experienced
teachers, restoration of budget cuts, the hiring of social workers
and guidance counselors where they are needed, after-school
programs, and access to medical care for children and their
families.

Categories Accountability, Class size, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Poverty, Race to the Top, Standardized Testing, Teacher Evaluations

What He Learned at the “Worst School in Texas”

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2013 //
18

Education debates in D.C. and the media tend to be
dominated by what economists and think tanks say. What is needed
most and seldom heard is the voice of teachers. Here is a brilliant
new voice that should get as much air time as Bill Gates, Joel
Klein, and Arne Duncan. What are the chances? In
this article at Salon, John Savage describes his
experience teaching at J.E. Pearce Middle School in Austin, Texas,
which the state education commissioner called “the worst school” in
the state. Why was it the worst school in Texas? Savage considers
the reformer thesis: Teachers with high expectations can work
miracles. This is the line from Michelle Rhee and Teach for
America. Savage quickly dashes that fantasy–or his experience
dashed it. He writes: “In the last decade a new species of
educational reformer has captured the public’s attention. Talk
show-friendly celebrities like former Washington, D.C., Schools
Chancellor Michelle Rhee, and award-winning movies like “Waiting
for Superman,” have gained fame by blaming teachers for the
achievement gap between poor students and middle-class students.
“The appeal of this educational axiom — ascribing student
achievement to teacher quality — is understandable. It suggests a
silver bullet solution: improve teaching and you improve test
scores, especially for poor students. And because test results
predict life outcomes — the likelihood of securing a job, getting
divorced, going to prison—better teaching can lift students from
poverty. Or so the thinking goes. “Some have called this narrative
the myth of magical teaching. We yearn to believe it. We yearn to
think that caring, hardworking teachers can change the world, or at
least their students’ lives. Like American Exceptionalism and
Horatio Alger stories, this supposition has become part of our
national mythology. As an idealistic young educator I, too, gladly
accepted the myth of the magical teacher as reality — that is,
before Pearce shattered my naïveté.” He discovered: “Here is the
hard truth about my experience: I didn’t have much of an impact.
Sure, I made a small part of the day more pleasant for some
students, but I didn’t change the course of any of my kids’ lives,
much less the nature of the school. A middle-class teacher coming
into a low-income school and helping poor students realize their
true potential makes for an excellent White Savior Film, but
“Dangerous Minds” isn’t real life. Real life at Pearce is
survival.” Reform after reform came and went: “We have poured money
into high-poverty schools, and we have replaced entire teaching
staffs, but to little avail. Teachers aren’t the problem, poverty
is. Moreover, segregating our poorest students in high-poverty
schools, as we often do, exacerbates the problem. “After parsing
fourth-grade math scores, education theorist Richard Khalenberg
concluded, “low-income students attending more affluent schools
scored almost two years ahead of low-income students in
high-poverty schools. Indeed, low-income students given a chance to
attend more affluent schools performed more than half a year
better, on average, than middle-income students who attend
high-poverty schools.” “If socioeconomic status is a primary driver
of academic performance, and if student achievement suffers in
high-poverty schools, why do we continue to organize schools in a
way that predetermines some for failure and then blame teachers?
“There are ways we can make education better for all students —
socioeconomic school integration, investing in early childhood
education, providing the wraparound services students need — but a
myopic focus on teacher quality won’t fundamentally improve
schools.”

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Students, Teachers and Teaching, Texas

Alfie Kohn Critiques the New York Times BookReview

By dianeravitch
August 28, 2013 //
5

Alfie Kohn here chastises the New York Times Book Review for adding its
heft to the conventional wisdom: that our schools are “mediocre”
and need to find some other nation to emulate; that test scores
define success in school and in life; that test scores determine a
nation’s economic prospects; that children must be treated like
“hamsters in a cage” so they cram in enough facts to get those
all-important test scores; and that the only reason to go to school
is to make more money one day. These are what he calls “recycled
assumptions.” They are what I call the stale conventional wisdom.
These ideas are the underpinnings of No Child Left Behind and Race
to the Top. They are ruining the lives of children and teachers.
Left in place, they will turn education into a commodity that one
buys at Walmart or on the Internet, absent any human interaction.
That way: an ugly, soulless future. Alfie Kohn makes this
prediction: “Food for thought? Listen — I’ll gladly eat the front
page of the New York Times Book
Review if it ever features a book that challenges
these premises.” Inasmuch as I have a book that will be published
on September 17, inasmuch as it challenges the dead ideas of the
past generation, I hope he has that repast.

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

Pennsylvania: Waivers Arrive, Punishments Follow

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2013 //
8

Blogger Yinzercation reports that Pennsylvania finally got its waivers from No Child Left Behind’s irrational goals of 100% success, only to face the equally punitive regime crafted by the Obama administration.

ATP (Adequate Yearly Progress) will be replaced by SPP (Student Performance Profile). Three of the four new measures are based on standardized tests. No surprise there. Love those tests

“This new SPP system will label schools without providing any real help for struggling students. If a school receives federal Title I money (based on its proportion of poor students), it will be labeled “priority,” “focus,” or “reward.” All other schools will get a profile score. It’s not clear if that score will be a number or letter grade (A – F), which is very trendy right now among corporate-style-reformers who support vouchers, charter-expansion, school closure, and other privatization efforts. Either way, the bottom line is these rating systems do not appear to work and are definitely subject to cheating.”

She points to research by Matthew Di Carlo showing that such grading systems typically identify schools serving minority communities as low-performing, setting them up for closure or privatization.

Governor Corbett boasted that the new measures would bring help to struggling schools.

Yinzercation asks, “Hello, what? Where is the money to hire back our teachers, school counselors, nurses, and librarians? How about some funding for our after-school tutoring programs we had to cut? And early childhood education? Maybe SPP should stand for Stupid Public Policy.”

And she adds: “I worry that SPP will just replace AYP: with more high-stakes-testing, more labeling-and-punishing schools, more blaming teachers, and still no results for our kids.”

Categories Federal Waiver, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Testing

Teachers Are Not Robots: Let Me Inspire Again

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2013 //
24

A teacher wrote this comment about school “reform”:

One thing I loved about teaching when I first began, 24 years ago, was the degree of inspiration and creativity I could bring to my lesson plans. It made teaching and being a teacher exciting for me. My excitement was the motivation, it was infectious to the students and learning was the natural by-product.

Now, everything is highly structured and scripted. We are told the objectives, and given a highly methodical method of lesson design and expected to do it, regardless of whether it makes sense with the content. Talk about boring “cookie-cutter”!

This is classic organizational theory (a business model) where everyone is seen as a machine that can be tweaked to increase production. We are not seen as experts or professionals, just workers who couldn’t tie our own shoes without the supervisor’s policy detailing the method.

I for one wish this corporate-management/student-consumer mentality would leave the public school system. Teachers are not like assembly-line workers putting together a widgit, and learning is not a product that can be pre-packaged and sold at market.

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Obama Proposes NCLB for Higher Education: LINK ADDED

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2013 //
112

President Obama proposed a plan to rate colleges much as
schools are rated now. Their federal assistance would be based on
performance indicators. This is supposed to save money but 75% of
college instructors are already adjuncts, working for peanuts. More
likely, the President loves Big Data and wants metrics. Next step:
technology to replace adjuncts. That will cut costs for sure. The
ideal university: a President overseeing 4,000 computers and an IT
staff to repair them.

For some strange reason, the Obama administration wants to extend federal control over the world’s greatest system of higher education. It is not as if there is evidence for anything they propose. It never occurs to them that they could break the system by Imposing the cost and burden of federal mandates.

Dare I say that I predicted this in January 2012
when speaking to the National Association of Independent
Colleges and Universities? How will they test and measure the value
of art history? Latin? Sociology? Music? Who ARE these
people?

Categories Education Industry, Higher Education, NCLB (No Child Left Behind)
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