Archives for category: NCLB (No Child Left Behind)
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Scores Down, Beatings Will Continue

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2012 //
0

The following comes from the regular posting by the Keystone State Education Coalition, a pro-public education group that is fighting for public education in Pennsylvania and against budget cuts and privatization.

You can find them here: http://keystonestateeducationcoalition.org

COMMENTARY ON RELEASE OF 2012 PSSAs
Ten years ago when NCLB was passed we talked about unrealistic targets of 100% proficiency that would one day cause all public schools to be labeled “failing”. We are reaching that point. Lower Merion High School, one of the top high schools in the state, in one of the wealthiest school districts in the state, did not make AYP this year.

No matter that the AYP targets have increased.
No matter that funding has decreased by a billion dollars.
For public school teachers, the beatings will continue.

But this year Pennsylvania’s “failing public schools” narrative has been updated: the lazy, greedy, pension-bloodsucking, incompetent union hacks who don’t care about kids are now also cheaters.

More justification for more charter schools and EITC “scholarships” to private and religious schools that are never subjected to public scrutiny and don’t have to give these damn tests to their students. More justification for increasing the taxpayer funded bailout of our parochial schools while accepting their performance as a matter of faith. More justification for doing nothing to address conditions in our high poverty schools that are required to accept ALL students.

It would be useful for the Governor, the Secretary of Education or perhaps some of the over 100 members of the statewide press corps who receive these KEYSEC emails to go and actually spend a full day (or two) shadowing a teacher in one of our high poverty public schools. Not just a whistle-stop photo op, but a hands-on, roll up your sleeves opportunity to see first hand the challenges that our teachers face every day.

Last year we posted that of 12 PA cyber charters only 2 made AYP, while 8 were in corrective action status. This year only one cyber made AYP. Coincidentally, that school, the 21st Century Cyber Charter, was created and is governed by professional educators – the Chief School Administrators from the four suburban Philadelphia counties’ intermediate units and public school districts. (what a concept!) and has made AYP for 6 out of the past 7 years.

Agora Cyber, run by K12, Inc. continued their streak of never making AYP and is now in their 3rd year of Corrective Action 2 status. A federal lawsuit filed against K12, Inc. in Virginia alleges that:
· The company did not tell investors how much their business depends on “churn,” signing up new students when others drop out. The company also did not reveal that more than half of students at some K12 school did not return the following year.
· The company listed students as inactive rather than sending them back to their home district. That allowed K12 virtual schools to continue collecting that student’s funding.
· Some teachers reported having as many as 400 students.
In 2011 Ron Packard, K12 Inc.’s CEO received $5 million in compensation. Charles Zogby, PA’s Budget Secretary and Former Secretary of Education under Governor Ridge, served as K12’s Senior Vice President of Education and Policy prior to being recruited to serve in the Corbett Administration.

Chester Community Charter, the state’s largest brick and mortar charter did not make AYP this year after being investigated for cheating in prior years. The owner of the management company under contract to run the school is still fighting pending right-to-know requests in court. The charter school reform legislation passed by the State House last June included specific language that would exempt him from the state’s right to know laws. The Philadelphia Education Notebook reports that “Chester Community’s proficiency rates plummeted about 30 points in both reading and math, and the declines were fairly uniform across all grade levels and demographic subgroups. The school, with more than 2,500 students on two campuses, …. is operated for-profit by Gov. Corbett’s single largest campaign contributor, Vahan Gureghian. Its CEO sent a letter to parents blaming the sharp drops on severe state funding cutbacks that caused “sharp declines in services.”

PA Cyber, the state’s largest cyber charter, did not make AYP this year. It’s founder and group of related companies are under investigation by the FBI and IRS.

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), On-Line Education, Pennsylvania

Obama’s Dreadful Education Agenda

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2012 //
14

The Washington Post has a good article about the aggressive way that the Obama administration has imposed its education agenda in the past three+ years.

The article notes, almost in passing, that there is no evidence for the success of any part of this agenda. No one will know for many years whether the Obama program of testing, accountability, and choice will improve education.

When reading the article, it is easy to forget that the U.S. Department of Education was not created to impose any “reforms” on the nation’s schools. It was created to send federal aid to hard-pressed districts that enrolled many poor children.

When the Department was created in 1980, there were vigorous debates about whether there might one day be federal control of the schools. The proponents of the idea argued that this would never happen. It has not happened until now because Democrats and Republicans agreed that they didn’t want the other party to control the nation’s schools.

But now that the Obama administration has embraced the traditional Republican ideas of competition, choice, testing and accountability, there is no more arguing about federal control. Republicans are quite willing to allow a Democratic administration to push the states to allow more privately managed schools, to impose additional testing, and to crush teachers’ unions.

Republicans would never have gotten away with this agenda at any time in the past three decades. The Democrats who controlled Congress would never have allowed it to happen.

Who would have imagined that it would take a Democratic President to promote privatization, for-profit schools, evaluating teachers by student test scores, and a host of other ideas (like rolling back the hard-won rights of teachers) that used to be only on the GOP wish-list?

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Federal Waiver, Merit pay, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top, U.S. Department of Education

Did President Obama Embrace the GOP Agenda?

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2012 //
23

The conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute has published a paper commending President Obama for standing up to teachers’ unions.

The paper compares President Obama’s support for school choice and evaluation of teachers by test scores as a “Nixon-to-China” paradigm shift.

In other words, the paper suggests, Obama’s education policy has done a full pivot, aligning it with the traditional GOP agenda.

Can anyone explain this?

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats, Education Industry, For-Profit, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top, Unions

Texas Workforce Commissioner Says NCLB Fails: UPDATE,

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2012 //
9

Sorry, once again, I forgot to add the link to the article. It’s here now. Please read it.

Tom Pauken is not only the Texas Workforce Commissioner, he is a prominent member of the Texas Republican party.

Read what he says about NCLB.

He says that labeling schools by test scores based on formulas written in Washington, D.C., and Austin is a sort of “abstract intellectualism” that doesn’t work.

He says there are lots of good jobs that go begging because young people aren’t prepared for them.

Here is his testimony to the state legislature.

His only error is in assuming that the demand for high-stakes testing prepares students for college.

It doesn’t. To prepare well for college, you need far more than the ability to answer bubble-test questions. You need to be well read, able to write well, able to think for yourself, able to figure out complex problems, know a goodly amount of history.

None of these things matter for NCLB–or for that matter, for the Race to the Top.

Both NCLB and RTTT are “abstract intellectualism” at their worst.

Categories Accountability, Economy, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Tennessee, Testing, Texas

Do Testing and Accountability Promote Critical Thinking?

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2012 //
29

Jan Carr, an author of children’s books, is a dedicated public school parent. She wrote a post wondering why the powerful elites in our society are so obsessed with testing and data. She wondered why they care so little for developing critical thinking.

Jan wrote: “I’ve been a scrappy public school mom for 12 years and counting, and I’ve watched the increasing encroachment of the data and accountability business, which would have our kids prepping for and taking deadening tests at every turn, and our teachers endlessly graded and derided for test results that are a meaningless distraction from real learning. A rich and full education digs deeper; it’s inextricably entwined with books, literature, writing, and the life of the mind; it develops critical thinking.”

I read her latest post and asked Mike Petrilli of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute to respond to it. I have known Mike for many years, and I hold out hope that someday he too will evolve and renounce the reforms he now champions. I think this will happen when his own children encounter them, as Jan Carr’s did.

I invite readers to comment on this discussion.

This is Mike’s commentary:

Dear Ms. Carr,

I enjoyed reading your post about critical thinking; it sounds like you and your son have been lucky to have had some very talented teachers.

l’ve never met Bill Gates, or Eli Broad, or Michael Bloomberg, or Rupert Murdoch; I can’t speak for what lies in their hearts. But I find it very unlikely that they don’t want children to “think critically” because they want to produce a generation of drones. I know that sort of rhetoric is common on the left (including from the late Howard Zinn) but to believe it you have to also believe that Barack Obama, the late Ted Kennedy, the liberal icon George Miller, and countless other liberal supporters of education reform are also out to unplug our children’s minds. That doesn’t pass the “critical thinking” test.

What motivates these folks, as I understand it, is an earnest belief that in today’s knowledge economy, the only way poor kids are going to have a shot at escaping inter-generational poverty is to gain the knowledge, skills, and character strengths that will prepare them to enter and complete some sort of post-secondary education–the pathway to the middle class. And that while reading and math scores don’t come close to measuring everything that counts, they do measure skills that have been linked to later success in college, the workplace, and life.

I suspect that all of these men would like to see students engaged in more of the kind of critical thinking that you describe, and that’s one reason many support the move to the more rigorous “Common Core” standards for English Language Arts and math. The ELA standards, in particular, are designed to push students toward this sort of complex thinking.

The testing movement has caused a lot of harm, I agree, in terms of narrowing the curriculum and encouraging bad teaching. Moving to better standards and tests is one way to address that. But by throwing out the baby with the bathwater we risk going back to the days when poor and minority kids were held to very low expectations–and their achievement plateaued as a result.

In the last two decades, poor and minority kids have made two grade levels of progress in reading and math, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The hope–and it’s really only a hypothesis at this point–is that those greater math and reading skills will help a generation of kids do much better in college and the real world than they otherwise would have. The question for educators and reformers is: How do we keep the good that’s come from testing and accountability while eliminating the bad?

Mike Petrilli

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Parents, Poverty, Students, Testing

Reverse Robin Hood Reforms in New Jersey

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2012 //
0

Bruce Baker provides clear and convincing evidence that school reform in New Jersey is heading in the wrong direction, aided by NCLB waivers.

The schools that have been identified as the “priority” schools will be targeted for aggressive interventions, including mass firing and closings. The overwhelming majority of these schools enroll poor black and Hispanic students.

The schools that are identified as “reward” schools serve few needy students. To them them hath, more shall be given.

As Baker shows, the funding formula will take from the neediest and give to those who are already doing just fine.

Reverse Robin Hood: Stealing from the poor to give to the rich.

Categories Federal Waiver, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), New Jersey

Thanks, NCLB. Thanks, Race to the Top

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2012 //
9

A reader described the start of the new school year. It began on a sad note:

School started for me yesterday.  We had twos of professional development which meant our principal and a few other suits lecturing us about what we needed to do to keep our school from closing.  At one point the principal said, “if you have a problem with what I’m telling you, maybe this isn’t the right school for you”  very nice on the 2nd day of the new school year.
Today our local superintendent came for a minute.  He seems very sad.  He looked defeated.  He came to wish us well and tell us that NY state is now deciding which schools live or die.  NYC is no longer in the loop.  He said he doesn’t agree with the state but the bottom line is that everything hinges on the results of the ELA and Math state exams.  He said it didn’t look promising.
I work in an urban school with a high percentage of challenging children.  Each year as more children go to Charters we get those who nobody wants.   The numbers of elementary students are declining while the numbers of middle school are increasing as Charters cherry pick the best students and leave us the rest.
This is not considered.  ELA and Math scores only will decide our fate.
To have our Superintendent so defeated before one child has set foot into my school this year is troubling.  He said he just wanted to be honest with us.
What a way to start a new school year.

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

What Is Ouroboros?

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2012 //
2

In response to a post defining a failing school, Paul Thomas tweeted a definition of current school reform, as exemplified by the ruinous policies of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. It is called “ouroboros.”  See here for further explanation.

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

What Is a Failing School?

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2012 //
19

After a decade of No Child Left Behind and three years of Race to the Top, officials are getting much better at identifying “failing schools.”

Now we know.

A failing school is one with low test scores and low graduation rates.

A failing school enrolls large numbers of students who are eligible for free or reduced price lunch (i.e., poverty).

A failing school enrolls large numbers of African American and Hispanic students.

A failing school enrolls large numbers of students who are English language learners and new immigrants.

A failing school has disproportionate numbers of students with disabilities.

Based on current federal policy, these are the ways to “turnaround” these failing schools.

Fire the principal; fire half or all of the teachers; turn the school into a charter school under private management; close the school.

What, specifically, is done to address the educational needs of the students? See previous sentence.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Federal Waiver, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top

The Hero Superintendent from Maryland

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2012 //
11

I am starting an honor roll for hero superintendents.

As of now, there are four.

If you know of others, nominate them with your reasons.

They deserve our thanks and praise.

Paul Perzanoski of Brunswick, Maine, stood up to a bullying governor.

John Kuhn of Perrin-Whitt Independent School District is a national model of bravery in opposition to political meddling.

Vickie Markavitch of Oakland, Michigan, spoke out against the state’s mislabeling of districts.

Here is another: Joshua Starr of Montgomery County (Md) public schools.

He did not want his district to participate in Race to the Top funding, and his board agreed.

His district refused to sign the state’s RTTT application.

He opposes the RTTT emphasis on rating teachers by test scores.

Montgomery County has a widely hailed teacher evaluation system called Peer Assistance and Review, and Starr wants to keep it.

He recognizes that NCLB and Race to the Top are a reversion to an “industrial model” of education.

Faced with the bewildering roll-out of federal and state mandates, Starr proposed a three-year moratorium on all standardized tests, “while we figure all this out.”

According to the Washington Post article about him from last April:

“Starr critiqued the growth models and rubrics being developed as contradicting research on what motivates teachers. He said Montgomery’s current system, which mentors struggling teachers for a year before decisions about termination are made, is a “hill to die on.”

And he said that singling out teachers as the culprit for education failures and shaming them is the most “pernicious part of the national reform movement.”

Accountability for student success should rightly extend to “you, me, and the entire community,” he said.

But in the midst of all the flux and change, he struck a hopeful chord. He said the transition could give Montgomery a chance to carve a distinct path.

“As No Child Left Behind is dying its slow death, it’s an incredible opportunity to fill that void with what we believe we should do for kids,” he said.”

Joshua Starr is an educational leader of the highest caliber.

He doesn’t comply and follow harmful orders.

He insists on thinking what is best for students and teachers and the community.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Common Core, Education Reform, Honor Roll, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Teacher Evaluations, Testing
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »