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Sue Peters: A Hero of American Education

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2013 //
6

Sue Peters is a parent activist who had the courage to run for election to the Seattle school board. The big money bet against her. They were wrong. Sue won, and she won decisively. I am happy to say that she was endorsed by the Network for Public Education, and I hope that our endorsement got her a few extra votes.

Sue wrote a letter to thank the board of the NPE and to describe the tough campaign in which she prevailed. Her victory gives heart to all of us who are pushing back against the corporate reform movement. We will make our public schools stronger and better for all, not by handing them off to private management, but by engaging the public in the work of supporting them.

Dear Diane and members and supporters of the Network for Public Education,

Once again, I am pleased to extend my thanks to you and NPE for your invaluable support and endorsement of my grassroots candidacy for Seattle School Board. I am thrilled to announce that we won – convincingly!

On Election night, we led by 51-48 percent, and that lead has only grown with every new vote tally. We are now approaching a 9-point margin, at 54-45 percent. That is nearly a 14,000-vote lead.

Why Our Win Matters:

This is a victory not only for my campaign, but for communities, families, and educators everywhere who are the key stakeholders in public education, but whose voices are not always heard in the national debate over education reform, or in our own local school district.

This is also a victory for authentic, grassroots democracy. Seattle voters did not allow a small group of moneyed interests to buy this election.

My opponent’s campaign and political action committee (PAC) spent a record-breaking $240,000+, much of it on negative campaigning, most of it bankrolled by a small group of wealthy proponents of corporate ed reform and charter schools.

The PAC attacked my candidacy four times throughout the campaign with progressively more mendacious and offensive mailers. The attacks focused almost entirely on defending the Gates Foundation, in a bizarre and unsuccessful attempt to discredit me, and completely ignored the important issues facing our school district like overcrowding, inequity of resources among our schools, excessive testing and low teacher morale.

This amount of money and such tactics are unprecedented not only in Seattle but Washington State for a school board race.

Thankfully, voters were not fooled by the distortions and diversions.

I am proud of my authentic, fiscally responsible, volunteer-driven campaign, which remained focused on the issues and maintained its integrity.

I am also grateful to everyone who helped us counter the barrage of misinformation, and to those of you who promoted my candidacy personally. I want to particularly thank Dr. Diane Ravitch, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education and national education historian, who recognized that my campaign represented a national battle over the integrity and future of public education. Her support gave important legitimacy to our campaign and to my efforts over the years to engage on education issues, as both a journalist and parent.

I believe my near decade of experience with the Seattle Public School District resonated with voters, as well as my clear commitment to keeping the public in public education.

Thank you again.

Sincerely,

Sue Peters
Parent, journalist, public education advocate,
and Seattle School Board Director-Elect

Categories Honor Roll, Parents, Supporting public schools, Washington, DC

An Inside Look at the Opt-Out Movement

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2013 //
12

Robert Kolker has written an excellent analysis of the anti-testing movement. The central figures are not “white suburban moms,” but a family from the Dominican Republic. Young Oscar, who loved school, loses interest when his favorite subjects and activities are replaced by test prep. The larger the test looms, the less Oscar cares about school.

Into this vivid story, Kolker weaves an overview of the opt out movement. For years, it was small but noisy. With the advent of Common Core testing, which failed 70% of students in New York State, the movement is flourishing. The more disgusted the students and parents are, the more their education is turned into endless testing, the more the movement finds new converts.

Categories Common Core, Parents, Standardized Testing, Students

Chicago Parents to CPS: We Prefer Teacher Grades to Standardized Tests

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2013 //
9

The Chicago parent organization PURE (Parents United for Responsible Education) called on Chicago school officials to de-emphasize standardized testing and pay greater attention to teachers’ judgment.

PURE issued this press release today:
Parents give district a “D” for its test-focused policy

Chicago, IL: Today, tens of thousands of Chicago Public Schools (CPS)
parents will flock to their children’s schools to pick up student report
cards and meet with teachers. They look forward to these meetings as an
important step in strengthening the home-school connection. Report card
pick-up day is the best opportunity most parents have to learn how to
help their children succeed in school from the people that know the most
about how to do that – their children’s teachers.

Parents take the report cards home and study them. They discuss them
with their children – sometimes those are happy discussions, sometimes
not so happy! Parents sign the back of the report card and slide the
cards into their children’s backpacks, often taking that moment to
resolve to do more to help their children learn and improve in the weeks
ahead.

This process has been meaningful to parents for decades, but it’s been
increasingly pushed aside as school districts like CPS give standardized
test scores more and more power over students, teachers and schools.

Parents from the Chicago group More Than a Score disagree with this
trend, and have presented CPS with an alternative promotion policy

http://chicagotestingresistance.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/promotionproposal10-13.pdf

that relies primarily on report card grades and uses standardized test
scores in the way they were intended to be used, as diagnostic tools and
not high-stakes “gotcha” measures.

More Than a Score parents give CPS a “D” grade for a promotion policy
that continues to focus too much on test scores and ignores the value of
report cards.

“Report cards are the only evaluations that look at the students’ work
over time and across all areas of learning. They are the only
evaluations done by experienced, qualified adults who personally observe
and assess each student’s progress,” said CPS parent Julie Fain.“That’s
the kind of information that makes sense to parents and actually helps
children. When we get our children’s standardized test scores at the end
of the year, we don’t get to see the questions or their answers. We have
no idea whether they missed a certain concept or were just distracted
for part of the test. In any case, our children are so over-tested that
these results have become less and less useful to parents.”

“The CPS promotion policy begins and ends with the state test score,”
said Julie Woestehoff, head of Parents United for Responsible Education
(PURE). “Most of the information from report cards is ignored by CPS
when end-of-the-year promotion decisions are made.”

“I believe standardize testing is a harsh way to keep a child from
thinking outside the box. All our children have different needs, speeds,
and challenges. I have witnessed up close and personal the emotional
stress testing causes – creating a lack of self-esteem while labeling my
children as dumb only because they did not meet your standardized laws.
I support my children by opting them out of testing,” said Rousemary
Vega, a CPS parent.

Parents who have opted their children out of standardized tests are also
confused and concerned because the new promotion policy just swapped one
high-stakes test (the SAT-10), for another (NWEA), making opting out
more difficult.

Since the promotion policy was first implemented in 1996 by Paul Vallas,
it has focused on test scores on the Iowa test, then the IGAP, ISAT, and
SAT 10. The new proposal substitutes the NWEA, which CPS officials say
is just temporary until they replace it with the PARCC Common Core
tests.

“How are we supposed to keep track of this alphabet soup of tests?” asks
Linda Schmidt, a CPS parent who notified her child’s school at the
beginning of this school year that she does not want her student to take
the NWEA. “Will my child be held back next August because I made a
decision last September?”

Policymakers often cite the subjective nature of teacher grades as a
reason for giving them less weight than standardized tests scores.
However, test questions are written by subjective human beings, too, and
test makers consistently state that their tests should not be used to
make high-stakes decisions about children. The manual for the SAT-10,
which CPS used last year to retain students, states that test scores
“should be just one of the many factors considered and probably should
receive less weight than factors such as teacher observation, day-to-day
classroom performance, maturity level, and attitude” – just the kind of
information in report cards.

“What’s wrong with report cards?” asked Wanda Hopkins, the parent of a
CPS high school student. “If CPS does not trust teacher grades, they
need to explain why and what they are doing to fix it. I trust my
child’s teacher more than I trust for-profit test companies.”

Parents with More Than a Score believe that our proposed promotion
policy

http://chicagotestingresistance.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/promotionproposal10-13.pdf

offers an alternative to the CPS test-based promotion policy that
respects input from teachers, avoids the pitfalls of standardized test
misuse and retention, makes sense to parents, and – most importantly –
provides a higher quality evaluation of each student’s progress and
needs.

Notes to the proposed alternative promotion policy here

http://pureparents.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/PromotionPolNotes10-13.pdf

Link to this post on MTAS web site here:

http://morethanascorechicago.org/2013/11/12/chicago-parents-to-cps-use-report-card-grades-not-test-scores-for-promotion/

Categories Accountability, Chicago, Education Reform, Parents, Testing

Castle Bridge Parents Speak Out Against Standardized Testing

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2013 //
7

The parents of Castle Bridge Elementary School said no to state testing. They refused to allow their little children in grades K-2 to take a standardized test. The test was canceled.

The parents drafted the following statement, which was sent to me by a parent leader, Dao Tran:

Statement of Castle Bridge School Parents on New State-Mandated K–2 Testing

October 28, 2013

When we first heard in September that the New York State Education Department was requiring some schools to give high-stakes, multiple-choice (bubble-in) tests for kindergarten through second-grade students, many of us were stunned. Tellingly, the tests are only given in English and we are a dual-language (Spanish/English) school.

We discovered (although we received no communication from our school district) these tests have nothing to do with identifying areas in which our children need help and support and everything to do with measuring their teachers’ supposed “value added,” in order to evaluate them.

However, we already have a “data system” that is far superior to anything a commercial bubble-test provider can offer.

Our children’s teachers provide us with rich, insightful narratives telling us how our children are responding to their thoughtfully designed curriculum, what progress they are making, and what challenges they are working to meet. They might include a story about how a child helped a classmate, overcame a fear, or showed a passion for an activity or experience. This gives us a much better sense of the value their teachers are adding than knowing which quartile a child falls into on a standardized test.

In a school such as ours, where the sounds of happy children engaged in hands-on projects, serious problem- solving, play, and singing is often heard, the threat of a multiple-choice test—bringing with it fear, stress, and the testing protocols that penalize collaboration—could not go unchallenged. Our children are not data points!

We knew even if a few individuals opted their individual children out, if teachers were forced to administer these tests, class instruction time would nevertheless be impacted. We prefer teachers use school time to encourage children to be curious and love learning—teaching to the child, not to the tests.

Opting our children out in large numbers was the only way to protect them while sending a strong message to policymakers that excessive testing is not in our children’s—or school’s—best interests.

As of this writing, families have opted out 93 of the 97 students who would have been subject to the tests and we know of none who want their child tested. Our principal Julie Zuckerman, having a supportive approach to parental input, heard our concerns and canceled the test.

Over the last decade, there has been a shift in public school instruction to support test preparation and erodes the quality of education. Using the scores from exams to determine the effectiveness of teachers elevates the importance of these exams—which give only a snapshot of a student’s ability to perform—to a level of absurdity.

The K–2 high-stakes tests take excessive testing to its extreme: testing children as young as four serves no meaningful educative purpose and is developmentally destructive.
Imagine if all the resources spent on test development, administration, and scoring were allocated to fund enrichment programs, school infrastructure, and staffing, we would be closer to meeting the actual needs of school communities. By refusing these tests, the message we sent was threefold:

1. To the city and state Departments of Education: testing K–2 children is not acceptable and developmentally inappropriate, excessive, and destructive.

2. To our children’s teachers and principal: we know that you can evaluate our students and help them learn and grow better than any test and we want no part of punitive evaluations of your work.

3. To other families of children in the NYC public school system: Your voice matters and you have the power to prevent your children from having to prepare for and take these unsound tests.

We hope that by saying no to these standardized, high-stakes tests we will embolden others to do the same and that together, we can reverse the tide of excessive testing in our public schools. Schools should not resemble machines that seek to track and sort children or to surveil and punish teachers.

Rather they should be caring communities of joy and learning where teachers, administrators, and parents work together to ensure a high- quality education for all children—who to us mean much more than a score.

Categories New York City, Parents, Principals, Resistance, Teachers, Texas

Parent: “These Reforms Are Not About Education”

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2013 //
10

This parent testified at the state’s public hearing in Portchester, Néw York. She concluded that John King must resign. Read her explanation:

“Dear Diane,

Last night I attended the Common Core Forum in Port Chester, NY. I was number 6 to speak.It was an incredible feeling to finally be able to look Commissioner King in the eye and say what I have been wanting to say to him for the past 6 months, and to know that this time, he would have to hear me. But that’s the thing, he didn’t hear me or anyone else for that matter.

I brought my almost 80 year old father to the forum. Before last night he was only peripherally aware of education reform. As we left, he was holding back tears, overwhelmed by the pain that he heard parents and teachers expressing and moved by the dozens of parents, teachers and administrators who had spoken so eloquently on behalf of children. I too was moved but I was also angry.

Despite being forced to listen to dozens of parents, superintendents and teachers say over and over again that the current education reform is hurting children and public education, Commissioner King was unmoved. King had not heard me or anyone else for that matter. Despite his 12 stop mea culpa tour, King is going full steam ahead with his corportate, hostile takeover of education.

Back when I was a 28 year old mother of 2 children on the Autism spectrum, I worked hard to return to graduate school and become a teacher. During my teacher training I lost my little brother to cancer and watched my son undergo numerous surgeries. Through it all I continued my graduate work and maintained a near perfect GPA. I don’t tell you these things because I want sympathy or accolades, but to make the point that I know perseverance, I know struggle…the qualities that commissioner king believes that 8 and 9 year olds should experience as the means of motivating them to achieve career and college readiness. And part of what has helped me to persevere and to push through the tough times is my ability to stop and reflect, to change course when one paradigm no longer works. I am saddened and angered that public education is led by someone who is willing to do neither.

I have attached my testimony from the forum below. This is what our commissioner of education didn’t hear.Commissioner King must resign because as parents and educators, we deserve better.

Sincerely,
Bianca Tanis
Parent, educator and co-founder of New York State Allies for Public Education

“My son has autism and your reforms have hurt him. You mandate schools to share sensitive student data. You force students with disabilities to submit to inappropriate and humiliating testing. Only now, 5 months later, after you have had to endure public outcry, are you willing to consider changes. Where was common sense and decency 5 months ago when parents begged to for their children to be exempt and when children with disabilities were being tortured. You should be ashamed.

“These reforms are not about education. They are about the agenda of billionaires with no teaching experience. The fact that your close advisors are the mysterious Regents Fellows, individuals with little to no teaching experience, who are paid 6 figure salaries with private donations by Bill Gates and Chancellor Meryl Tisch, speaks volumes. Private money comes with a price tag and that price tag is influence. We reject leadership that allows public education to be bought. That is not democracy. By the way, the Regents Fellow job description does not mention teaching experience as a requirement.

“It has been said that parent opposition is typical when change is introduced. There is nothing typical about the present response. The incompetent roll out of the common core and the naked disregard that has been shown for developmentally appropriate and educationally sound practice is unacceptable. Your recent concessions are disingenuous and a case of too little too late. They do nothing to reduce the hours of testing or the inappropriate level of test difficulty. They do nothing to make cut scores reasonable or address serious problems associated with high stakes testing.

“In addition to hurting children, your policies promote social inequality. Private school parents, such as your self have the opportunity to say to no to harmful testing and data sharing while public school parents are not afforded the same rights. Are you afraid of what would happen if you gave all parents a choice?

“The inadequacy of our schools is a manufactured crisis. Poverty is the number one indicator of student achievement. When you factor in poverty, US schools are at the top. New York deserves real leadership that addresses real issues. If you won’t provide that leadership, we need someone who will.”

Categories Common Core, New York, Parents, Testing

New Mexico: Parents Organize to Boycott State Tests

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2013 //
8

Across the nation, parents are organizing to fight the corporate takeover of their children and their schools. The first step: organize to boycott the state tests. Without your child’s data, the machine stops running.

As parents, you have the power.

The latest report from Néw Mexico:

“Hi Diane,

As I’m sure you know, New Mexico has one of the masters of Chiefs for Change, Hanna Skandera, in the chief’s seat of our education department. We are under her thumb and trapped under her policies, which she brought with her, straight outta Florida and straight from Jeb.

This week, Albuquerque BOE member Kathy Korte organized and held a rally there to ask that she stop the reckless testing and punitive measures against our kids and schools. She responded that she was “disappointed” that we aren’t all towing her line.

It’s time to get the parents educated, motivated, angry, and active. That’s why NM Refuse the Test is pushing for New Mexico to follow New York’s lead and put parents in the driver’s seat of both boycotting the tests and taking back our schools.

You can find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/635451629832910/
and on the Web: http://nmrefuse.weebly.com/

I would truly appreciate your posting this on your blog to help get the word out to your New Mexico readers who may not be on social media.

Thanks so much. And congrats on your Jon Stewart invite!

Cheers!

—
Kris L. Nielsen”

Categories Chiefs for Change, Parents, Testing

Teacher to Parents: Join Us, We Need You, It Is All About Your Children

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2013 //
6

A teacher left this comment on the blog:

 

I am a teacher and PARENTS have everything to do with joining the dialogue on education (http://parentsacrossamerica.org/ ). And the teachers I see day in and day out want to know what parents think, what they see and hear from their children outside the school environment… we desperately want parents to understand what “reforms” are requiring of teachers nowadays… and that we teachers have not been part of the process at all! Any teachers (as well as “corporate ed reformers” like John King demonstrated in Poughkeepsie) who do not want your observations should be suspect! As far as setting policy, current “ed reformers” have worked hard to “sell their product” to parents via a very tight and highly organized PR machine that works relentlessly through the media and they have worked equally hard at keeping public school teachers away from policy setting dialogue. Someone commented that everyone always brings up the “medicine analogy”… i.e. just because we go to a doctor does not mean we should be setting medical policy etc… Well, everyone has a role to play in setting medical policy – some roles are direct and some less so. A patient can certainly let the medical community know things that do not work so well from a patient perspective and this will help set policy as to how patients should be dealt with so they feel comfortable. But do we want the patient to determine how the MRI machine is operated? Or how much anesthesia should be given to a patient? Sure hope not! Bill Gates, David Coleman, Eli Broad and a host of others have way over-stepped their bounds by creating and implementing education policy!

As a teacher, I dream of parents, students, teachers and fed up administrators joining hands and putting a stop to the “educational” abuse of our nation’s youth through “corporate ed reform” policies. If your child used to love school but no longer is excited about it, if your child is throwing up the night before a high stakes test or getting sick and not wanting to go to school during high stakes testing season… or is afraid to express an opinion on something for fear of “being wrong” or spending way too much time on a take home “vacation packet” designed to help them do better on high stakes tests thus having a stressful “vacation week” at Christmas etc…, join teachers in fighting the nonsense of corporate “ed reform” and find ways to get fellow parents to join in. I sure wish the middle and upper class parents whose students are failing under common core would realize and join hands with low income parents whose students have been suffering a lot longer due to the high stakes tests pre “common core” that their students struggle to pass.

So LT in addition to the cite referenced above http://parentsacrossamerica.org … also take a look at this cite:http://unitedoptout.com/

Categories Parents, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Los Angeles Parent: Who Runs Our Schools?

By dianeravitch
October 27, 2013 //
20

As parent activist Karen Wolfe explains here, Los Angeles is in the district of a power struggle over control of its public schools.

Wolfe says the voters elected school board members to reflect the will of the people.

Superintendent John Deasy has threatened to resign as his way of pressuring the elected board to do what he wants and to get the business community to demand that the board let Deasy take charge. Even the new mayor has told the board to leave Deasy alone and stay out of his way.

This is an extraordinary situation. The power elite of Los Angeles wants the elected board to hand control over to Deasy. You can be sure that in every one of their corporations, the CEO serves at the pleasure of the board, not the other way around.

What is the purpose of having a board election if real power is vested in the superintendent, not the board?

John Deasy was hired to carry out the will of the elected board, not to cow it into submission.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Los Angeles, Parents

NY Principal: “Reforms” Kill Love of Learning

By dianeravitch
October 27, 2013 //
22

Tim Farley is a brave man and a fearless educator. He wrote the following letter and he also testified in a similar vein to State a commissioner King.

Tim Farley is a principal in New York state and his wife Jessica is a teacher. In addition, they are parents of four school-age children. They have been participants in the most disastrous, mandate-driven, top-down experimentation on students, teachers, and administrators in our nation’s history. These experiments demoralize teachers and destroy children’s love of learning. The Farley’s have become so disheartened that they are considering homeschooling their children. Is this the goal of the reformers? Do they want to destroy public confidence in public education? It seems that way.

Tim Farley wrote:

My wife and I are the proud parents of four school aged children. They are in grades K, 3, 5, and 7. I happen to be a building Principal in the district my children attend. I have been in education for 22 years. My wife was a teacher for 12.

The transformational changes to public education over the past few years has been quite alarming, not only from an educator’s perspective, but from a parent’s perspective as well.

We have observed a change in how our children are perceiving their educational experience. A couple of years ago, all of them were excited about school and all the wonderful things they would learn. My wife and I no longer observe this. Our children have lost their love of school.

Every week, at least two of our children have meltdowns over the developmentally inappropriate homework assignments, the poorly worded questions, the amount of homework that comes home, repetitive and inane assignments, etc.

We cast no blame on our children’s teachers. They are the kind of teachers every parent would want for their children. They are doing their jobs to the best of their abilities even though the great majority of teachers knows that the reforms they are implementing are truly harmful to children. However, they have no choice because their jobs are literally at stake. Administrators are terrified to speak out publicly because SED is quick to intimidate those who do not comply with their dictates.

My wife and I cast the blame exactly where it belongs: John King, Merryl Tisch, Andrew Cuomo, Arne Duncan, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, the Board of Regents, et al.

These corporate reformers did an excellent job in denigrating teachers and the profession. They systematically manufactured a crisis that US schools are not competitive internationally (e.g. – the PISA study, which Dr. Gerald Tirozzi [of NASSP] wrote about, correcting the fallacy that our schools are failing). Our educational system isn’t perfect, but it is far from being in a crisis. Actually, we should be proud of our achievements. But accolades do not sell expensive data systems that deprive our students of their privacy. Accolades do not sell software that “fixes” the students who do not achieve at the same rate as their peers.

My wife and I are quite frankly disgusted. We can no longer tolerate the abuse of our children. We will likely pull our children out of a school district that we hold most dear; a district in which we have made our home for the past nine years. We will likely homeschool our children unless drastic changes to these reforms take place.

My feeling is that we will not be the only parents making a decision of this magnitude. Fortunately, my wife has many years experience as a teacher, so our children will do well. But I feel badly for the parents who would like to do the same thing but due to their individual circumstances cannot.

I’m tired. My wife is tired. My kids are tired. My teachers are tired. When will this insanity end? When will the parents rise up and take back their schools from the billionaires?

Signed,

Tired dad, educator, administrator

Categories Corporate Reformers, New York, Parents, Principals, Students, Teachers

New York Regents Prove They Are Tone Deaf, No Changes Planned

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2013 //
37

Faced with a widespread parent rebellion against the Common Core testing, the New York Board of Regents declared they have no intention of making any changes. It’s full steam ahead!

Stay tuned. Rough waters, unseen obstacles, captain not at the helm.

Categories Common Core, New York, Parents, Testing
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