Almost everything you need to know about “reform” in New York State is explained in this fable by Arthur Goldstein, who blogs at NYC Educator.
As usual, Arthur is very funny trying to decipher the mysteries of reform and the personalities of reformers.
Governor Andrew Cuomo likes to say that the problems in New York are not about money, because the state spends enough already.
Governor, please read this analysis by Bruce Baker.
Despite years of promises, New York State has one of the most inequitable school finance systems in the nation.
We may be spending enough, but the funding is highly inequitable.
And the state’s neediest children have the least funding and the largest class size.
These disparities are inexcusable.
A student in a gifted program wrote this piercing analysis of the state tests he and his classmates just endured.
The tests he took had many brand names and registered trademarks. He realized this is product placement.
He wrote:
“Non-fictional passages in the test I took included an article about robots, where the brands IBM™, Lego®, FIFA® and Mindstorms™ popped up, each explained with a footnote. I cannot speak for all test takers, but I found the trademark references and their associated footnotes very distracting and troubling.
“According to Barbara Kolson, an intellectual property lawyer for Stuart Weitzman Shoes, “The fact that the brands did not pay Pearson for the ‘product placement’ does not mean that the use is not product placement.” To the test-takers subjected to hidden advertising, it made no difference whether or not it was paid for. The only conclusion they (and this test-taker) made is that they could not be coincidental.”
When I served on the NAEP governing board, there was. Flat prohibition on any reference to brand names. I studied the guidelines of every publisher a decade ago when writing “The Language Police,” and all of them specifically banned brand names.
What gives here? Why the marketing in the new Common Core tests?
Yesterday I received an email from a reporter from the New York Daily News asking for my reaction to a bootleg copy of the Pearson-made fifth-grade exam for English Language Arts. This is part of the first tests of the Common Core in the state, administered in recent weeks to students in 3rd through 8th grades. Students spent about 90 minutes per day for three days on the ELA tests and repeated the process the next week in math.
I read the passages and the questions based on them. My reaction was that the difficulty level of the passages and the questions was not age-appropriate. Based on test questions I had reviewed for seven years when I was a member of the NAEP board, it seemed to me that the test was pitched at an eighth grade level. The passages were very long, about twice as long as a typical passage on NAEP for eighth grade. The questions involved interpretation, inference, and required re-reading of the passage for each question.
I suppose that is what the test-makers think of as critical thinking, and it may be, but there are also issues of what is appropriate for fifth-graders, as well as recognition that this is a timed test.
When the article appeared, I was not quoted but others agreed that the exam was above fifth-grade level. Aaron Pallas at Teachers College said the vocabulary was sixth grade. But it was not the vocabulary that was disturbing to me: it was the cognitive load, the expectation that fifth-graders could read and interpret long passages on a timed test. It would be interesting to put this test alongside released items from eighth grade NAEP. I tried doing that yesterday afternoon, and to my eye, most of the questions would be rated as “medium” or “hard” for eighth graders.
Very high-performing students may find the exam easy. I suspect it was beyond the comprehension of average fifth grade students, and extremely hard for students in the bottom half.
If this test is indicative of what is in store, It reinforces my concern that the Common Core will widen the achievement gaps. Struggling students will fail.
And by the way, read the smug, arrogant editorial in the Daily News. The editors think it is just great that many kids will fail. They are sure that the tests will reveal the poor quality of education in the city’s schools. They forget that every student in the city has been educated under mayoral control, for which this editorial board has been a consistent cheerleader. Do they understand the contradiction? Not likely.
Testing in New York has turned into the Monster that Ate the Children.
Teachers plan to rally at the state capitol in Albany on June 8 to support public education and protest the deluge of high-stakes testing.
This was written by the leader of the teachers’ union in the Averill Park school district in upstate New York.
TOP TEN reasons to March on Albany in the Rally for Public Education:
10. You have realized public education is being hi-jacked by for profit organizations.
9. You are tired of reading about how ineffective you are at your own profession by people who know nothing about education.
8. You believe high stakes testing is out of control in NY.
7. You believe you have not had enough time to learn the Common Core yourself, let alone have your students tested on it!
6. You believe your students’ personal information, including their state assessment results and their IEPs and other personal data should be kept confidential.
5. You believe your effectiveness rating should be kept confidential, and don’t want a link on the district web page to this information or directions given to get this information.
4. You believe that NYS should report to the public the amount of tax payer money spent on developing, administering, grading and reviewing state assessments.
3. The word PEARSON makes your skin crawl.
2. You work in Averill Park (Insert your own school district.)and have lost about a quarter of your faculty due to unfair state budget cuts!
AND THE NUMBER ONE REASON….
1. You are a caring professional who wants the BEST public education for your own students, children, and grandchildren and you know this isn’t it!
Michelle Smead
Averill Park Teachers’ Association
Arthur Goldstein is a teacher-blogger who terrifies corporate reformers like State Commissioner John King. That is because Goldstein is a career teacher who knows what he is talking about; also, he writes lucidly and has a dry sense of humor. King, on the other hand, taught for two years in a “no excuses” charter school with a high suspension rate (at the same time that he miraculously earned both a law degree from Yale and a doctorate in education from Teachers College). King has one big advantage over Goldstein: He was a classmate of Merryl Tisch in one of TC’s QuickTime doctorate programs, and Dr. Tisch is now Chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, which hired the inexperienced King to be State Commissioner.
In this post on his marvelous blog, Golstein describes the sheer absurdity of the New York State evaluation plan.
Listen to this:
“I’m hearing stories all over about the DOE’s agents doing practice observations with administrators. Armed with their adapted Danielson rubrics, with the three domains they have determined are inevitable, they do 15-minute observations. During these 15 minutes, they determine whether teachers are highly effective, effective, developing, or ineffective. The fact that the evaluation system does not yet exist deters them not at all. The fix is in, they figure, and Reformy John (King) will grant them whatever they ask.”
It just goes downhill from there.
Fourth-grader Joey Furlong was in the hospital in New York, hooked up to intravenous tubes and preparing for brain surgery, when a stranger arrived in his room. It was a teacher with a test. She said it was time for him to take the test. It turns out that the hospital has five full-time teachers on staff to make sure that any child who is in the hospital for more than three days receives instruction and testing.
No child escapes testing. Even while they are waiting for brain surgery.
Parents in Rochester, New York, filed a federal class action lawsuit against the state and their son’s school, which punished him for refusing to take the tests in accordance with his parents’ wishes.
The school not only punished the boy, but sent the sheriff’s office to the ballfield to make sure he was not allowed to play baseball.
Good for them! I would sue too.
The story says:
“New York has no policy on “opt-out” protests, so students in one district may be disciplined for “insubordination” while students in a neighboring district can sit out “without fear of reprisal,” lead plaintiffs Melissa and Craig Barber say in the complaint.
” They sued the state, its Department of Education, the Rush-Henrietta Central School District and School Board, its superintendent and the principal of Burger Middle School.
“The Barbers say they told their son’s school by letter that they did not want him to take the test. But not only did the school punish him for being “insubordinate,” it called the sheriff’s office to send officers to a ball field to be sure he did not play baseball while the school was punishing him, the parents say in the complaint.”
There is good reason for separation of church and state.
America was founded by religious dissidents. Our Founding Fathers wrote into the First Amendment that Congress was not permitted to establish a religion. They wanted all people of all faiths–or none–to live in peace.
Some states had an established religion for a time, but religious diversity made established religion untenable.
One of the great things about public school is that it is separate from religious practice. Everyone, regardless of the religion they hold dear, may learn together.
But what happens when the town itself is controlled by a single religious group? What happens when that sect controls the public schools while its own children attend religious schools? What happens to the public schools?
Here is what happens. It is not a pretty story: They gut them.
From the story:
“Midway through her junior year, something seemed to give way. The school’s deans, who had handled discipline, had been laid off, and many students started arriving at school very late or skipping it entirely. The security staff was also cut, and so fights became more frequent, and students often stayed shut in their classrooms until the halls cleared. Clubs were eliminated, as well as sports teams and the drama program, until the communal life of the schools disappeared and it seemed to Olivia Castor, another Spring Valley High School student, that the school board’s vision of education consisted of little more than “reading, writing, and arithmetic.”
“Then those were cut, too. Last year, the kindergarten school day was reduced by half. AP classes and ESL programs fell by the wayside. In the high schools, so many teachers have been laid off that students can’t fill their schedules: Some have five lunch periods and study halls in an eight-period day. This year, the district floated a proposal to eliminate kindergarten altogether and shorten the school day for everyone else. Jean Fields, the principal of Ramapo High School, told me that if that measure were adopted, not a single student would qualify for the Advanced Regent’s Diploma, considered essential for getting into competitive colleges. Almost half of her 1,400 students would no longer be able to graduate in four years, because they simply will not be able to amass enough credits in time. Last week, the district pulled the most draconian cuts off the table, and suggested firing 50 additional teachers and staff members instead. Even this will mean more students who can’t fill their schedules with classes. “It’s not that we don’t care about graduating,” says Castor. “It’s that the tools for us to graduate are being taken away. We don’t have the classes that can give you a chance to compete.”
Two websites have been created to allow students, teachers, principals, and parents to register their comments about the Common Core assessments created by Pearson for students in New York.
One was created to discuss the English language arts exam. If you open the link, you will see numerous comments about the ELA exams. The comments are varied and interesting. The site was set up by by Professor Lucy Calkins at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Despite the efforts of the New York State Education Department to shield the exams in the deepest secrecy, those who took the exams have plenty to say about them. I didn’t see disclosure of any confidential information, but a great deal of concern about the lack of time to complete the exam.
Another website was created to collect reactions to the math tests.
Once again, social media may be the best source of information for parents, students, and teachers, and the mainstream media.
Ask the experts, those who took the test and those who administered them.
Diane Ravitch's blog 