Archives for category: NCLB (No Child Left Behind)
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The Evil Spawn of NCLB in Ohio

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2012 //
18

The state auditor in Ohio found 10 schools in Columbus where thousands of students had mysteriously been removed from the school’s rolls to inflate the scores.

This is the predictable result of high-stakes testing, which has incentivized cheating, score inflation, and gaming the system. This is not the first instance where a district or a state has tried to puff up its results to meet its targets. NCLB has created an era of institutionalized fraud, not better education.

The article says:

In all, the 10 schools had no supporting documents to validate their claims that more than 300 students total had withdrawn that school year. Auditors could not locate supporting files, document the dates that students supposedly left or confirm that students transferred to other districts, were expelled, were truants, were being home-schooled or withdrew for other reasons.

In each of those 10 schools, between 20 percent and about 28 percent of students were excluded from the school’s report-card data for the 2010-11 school year.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Ohio

Ten Years of NCLB: A Student Says, “How Sad.” Her Teacher Agrees

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2012 //
50

Paul Karrer teaches fifth grade in Castroville, California.

He is doing his best to educate parents and the public about the destructive farce called “reform” that is ruining education for his students.

A student returned to his classroom and asked him why he was no longer teaching as he had when she was a student.

He explained to her that a federal law called No Child Left Behind had changed the way he is allowed to teach.

Last year, he wrote a letter to President Obama that went viral. I am reprinting it here.

A Letter to My President — The One I Voted for…
Paul Karrer | Education Week | 02.02.2011
Dear President Obama:

I mean this with all respect. I’m on my knees here, and there’s a knife in my back, and the prints on it kinda match yours. I think you don’t get it.

Your Race to the Top is killing the wrong guys. You’re hitting the good guys with friendly fire. I’m teaching in a barrio in California. I had 32 kids in my class last year. I love them to tears. They’re 5th graders. That means they’re 10 years old, mostly. Six of them were 11 because they were retained. Five more were in special education, and two more should have been. I stopped using the word “parents” with my kids because so many of them don’t have them. Amanda’s mom died in October. She lives with her 30-year-old brother. (A thousand blessings on him.) Seven kids live with their “Grams,” six with their dads. A few rotate between parents. So “parents” is out as a descriptor.

Here’s the kicker: Fifty percent of my students have set foot in a jail or prison to visit a family member.

Do you and your secretary of education, Arne Duncan, understand the significance of that? I’m afraid not. It’s not bad teaching that got things to the current state of affairs. It’s pure, raw poverty. We don’t teach in failing schools. We teach in failing communities. It’s called the ZIP Code Quandary. If the kids live in a wealthy ZIP code, they have high scores; if they live in a ZIP code that’s entombed with poverty, guess how they do?

We also have massive teacher turnover at my school. Now, we have no money. We haven’t had an art or music teacher in 10 years. We have a nurse twice a week. And because of the No Child Left Behind Act, struggling public schools like mine are held to impossible standards and punished brutally when they don’t meet them. Did you know that 100 percent of our students have to be on grade level, or else we could face oversight by an outside agency? That’s like saying you have to achieve 100 percent of your policy objectives every year.

It’s not bad teaching that got things to the current state of affairs. It’s pure, raw poverty.
You lived in Indonesia, so you know what conditions are like in the rest of the world. President Obama, I swear that conditions in my school are akin to those in the third world. We had a test when I taught in the Peace Corps. We had to describe a glass filled to the middle. (We were supposed to say it was half full.) Too many of my kids don’t even have the glass!

Next, gangs. Gangs eat my kids, their parents, and the neighborhood. One of my former students stuffed an AK47 down his pants at a local bank and was shot dead by the police. Another one of my favorites has been incarcerated since he was 13. He’ll be 27 in November. I’ve been writing to him for 10 years and visiting him in the maximum-security section of Salinas Valley State Prison.

Do you get that it’s tough here? Charter schools and voucher schools aren’t the solution. They are an excuse not to fix the real issues. You promised us so much. And you want to give us merit pay? Anyway, I think we really need to talk. Oh, and can you pull the knife out while you’re standing behind me? It really hurts.

Sincerely yours,

Paul Karrer

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

More Standardized Testing for Kindergarten

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2012 //
31

Testing children in kindergarten is becoming common practice. Oregon will begin testing all 5-year-olds next fall to assess their “readiness” for kindergarten. It is never too soon to test children, and some states have drafted standards for pre-schoolers.

How did this happen? An article by Stephanie Simon in Reuters explains it all.

“Testing young children is not a new concept. In the 1980s, many states assessed children to determine whether they were ready to enter kindergarten or first grade. Experts in child development denounced the practice as unfair and unreliable and it faded out.

In recent years, however, the federal law known as No Child Left Behind has put pressure on schools to raise scores on the standardized reading and math tests given to students starting around age 8. Schools that post poor scores are labeled failing; principals and teachers can lose their jobs.

With the stakes so high, many administrators have decided to start testing in the earlier grades, to give kids practice and to identify students who need help.

The Obama administration accelerated the trend in 2011 with a $500 million competitive grant to bolster early childhood education. States that pledged to assess all kindergarteners earned extra points on their applications.”

So now state after state is falling into line, testing the littlest students to find out what they know and what they don’t know. The experts are strangely silent about whether this is developmentally appropriate. It is never too soon to start compiling data, it seems.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Testing

Why Is the South So Easily Fooled?

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2012 //
29

When I lectured in Chattanooga last week, I noticed a strange phenomenon. When I said things bluntly, people gasped. At one point, for example, I responded to a question by saying that the Legislature should not cut education to give tax breaks to corporations. The audience noticeably gasped. There were several moments like that. It occurred to me that the politicians in Tennessee are so eager to attract corporate investment, that it is a sacrilege to question the strategy of cutting education to fund corporate tax breaks.

A thoughtful comment by an educator in Tennessee:

Thanks for the visit. It sparked much needed conversation around these issues. The South seems so willing to sell out to invading corporate giants…perhaps b/c of our long history of poverty. Last to industrialize, means last to unionize, means furtile ground for the invaders. We are the third world the Romneys used to have to go abroad to find and exploit. But, as the Chicago strike indicates, we are not alone in the fight to protect our basic negotiation rights. Unfortunately, I fear that we in the south will be dependent upon the outrage of our northern counterparts who have historically had more practice protesting against those who would sell our souls to the company store. The Rhees of the world will have more traction here for all the reasons the now insulted 47% here still vote Republican: poverty, ignorance, and prejudice. However, nothing feuled the privatization of education in the south like desegregation. As a teacher here for the last twenty-five years, I can attest it is still the prime mover. I’m pretty sure this is true nationally. NCLB is just a clever way to come into this effort through the back door…undetected apparently even by our first black president.

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Poverty, Tennessee

The Power of Magical Thinking

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2012 //
18

No Child Left Behind is widely considered a disaster.

The law mandated that 100% of all students would be proficient, as measured by the standards in each state, by 2014. We now know that no state will meet that requirement. Schools have been closed all over the nation because of this idiotic law. Principals and teachers who were doing their best to meet unrealistic expectations, were fired.

NCLB is the Death Star of American education.

When Secretary Arne Duncan offered waivers from the 2014 deadline, most states asked for them, knowing that they would never meet the law’s deadline.

But NCLB still has one stalwart supporter, one diehard fan who will never say die. She will defend NCLB no matter how many schools die. That is Margaret Spellings, who was one of the law’s architects; she served as Secretary of Education in the George W. Bush administration, following Rod Paige.

She believes. She will never waver. There is no evidence that will ever persuade her that she was wrong.

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind)

Don’t Mess with Texas. The Revolution Begins Here.

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2012 //
12

Texas brought No Child Left Behind to the nation.

Remember that candidate George W. Bush said that Texas had figured out how to fix the schools. He said test every child every year, post the results, reward the schools where scores go up, humiliate those where scores go down. And, wow, a miracle: the scores go up, up, up; the achievement gap closes; graduation rates go up. Win-win-win-win.

Except it didn’t happen. And now the whole country is stuck with a testing regime that is sucking the life out of education.

This report from Texas describes a growing revolution against testing. The schools are up in arms: 77% of the school boards enrolling 86% of all Texas students have passed a resolution opposing high-stakes testing. The Houston superintendent said that 65 days (out of 180) are consumed by testing.

Now a group known as “Moms Against Drunk Testing” has joined the fray. They are mad as hell and they are not going to take it anymore. Last year, the state cut the school budget by $5.4 billion, while handing a fat contract to Pearson for $468 million. Meanwhile the state wants more and more and more testing.

(A few hours after this post appeared, I received the following message: So glad we have support around the country! Our real name is TAMSA (Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment) and we have a facebook page and a website. Please “like us” and “join in” on our website! The more members and “likers” we have, the stronger we will be in the upcoming legislative session.

website: http://tamsatx.org/
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tamsatx)

Go, Texas, go! If the testing vampire is slain, the whole facade of faux reform collapses. No test scores, no merit pay, no evaluation by test scores, no closing schools by scores.

Don’t mess with Texas!

I am speaking on Sunday morning to a joint convention of the Texas School Boards Association and the Texas Association of School Administrators at the Austin Convention Center.

On Sunday from 2-4, I am meeting with parents and teachers to talk about the kind of stuff we discuss on this blog. Eastside Memorial High School. Y’all come!

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Testing, Texas

About Those Pennsylvania Test Scores

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2012 //
1

Scores dropped in Pennsylvania.

Many respected and some not-so-respected schools failed to make AYP.

School officials attributed the drop to budget cuts and anti-cheating measures.

The state Commissioner of Education said that deep budget cuts, loss of programs and personnel, had nothing to do with it.

Categories Budget Cuts, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Pennsylvania

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
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