Archives for category: Parents
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Deborah Meier: Am I Part of the Problem or the Solution?

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2013 //
19

Deborah Meier has been blogging recently with Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Deb is known as a progressive, Mike as a conservative. Deb was one of the founders of the small schools movement and a leader of opposition to standardized testing through her involvement in Fairtest. Mike strongly supports standardized testing, charter schools, and competition a drivers of change.

In his previous post, Mike asked Deb whether she was part of the problem (because of her opposition to standardized testing and her general skepticism towards what is called “reform” today, I.e., No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top).

This is a good exchange. I wonder if they can bridge their differences.

Deborah answered here. I won’t begin to summarize what she said. Let me just say that she is at her best and what she wrote about children, about the shrinking middle class, and about what schools can and cannot do. Please take the time to read what she wrote.

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

Miami Herald: “Parent Trigger” Supporters Create Fake Video, Fake Petition

By dianeravitch
April 27, 2013 //
3

The so-called parent trigger bill will likely come to a vote in the Florida Senate on Monday. It has already passed the House.

The bill would allow parents to turn their community school over to a charter operator. Florida has more than 500 charter schools, many run by for-profit chains that contribute to legislators’ campaign funds.

The big problem for the bill is that no Florida parent groups support it.

The Miami Herald reports that a video is circulating that pretends to represent Florida parents but is likely a fake created by an out-of-state group. Similarly, a fake petition is also making the rounds. The question raised in the article is whether the phony endorsements come from the Walton-funded Parent Revolution of Florida or from Jeb Bush and Michelle Rhee.

Hopefully, an investigative reporter will get to the bottom of this deception.

Meanwhile, let’s keep fingers crossed that the Florida Senate listens to the parents of Florida.

Categories Florida, Parent trigger, Parents

What Do Students and Teachers Say about the Pearson Common Core Exams in New York?

By dianeravitch
April 25, 2013 //
18

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.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, New York, Parents, Pearson, Students, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Did John White Pull Out of inBloom or Not?

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2013 //
2

Mercedes Schneider tries to figure out what John White did or did not do in relation to Louisiana’s agreement to share confidential student data with the Gates-Murdoch inBloom project. It appears that the state board of education never knew about this arrangement and that it was a secret deal made by John White.

Is there some kind of secret government-corporate group that makes these deals about students without bothering to inform democratically elected officials?

Categories Louisiana, Parents, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Students

Investigative Reporter: The Stories Behind the “Parent Trigger” UPDATE

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2013 //
34

Yasha Levine is an investigative reporter. He became interested in the “parent trigger” and wanted to see what was going on in Adelanto, California, the only place in the United States where the parent trigger has been “fired” to turn a public school over to a charter operator.

Just as an aside, I find the rhetoric of a “parent trigger” to be loathsome after the Newtown massacre. But that’s just me.

This article is now behind a pay wall. With this kind of investigative reporting, you might consider subscribing. We need more digging by smart journalists instead of the regurgitated press releases that we so often read and see in the major media.

Regretfully, I cannot post the full text onmy website.

This story deserves wide attention. If you have to pay to read it, please do.

Here goes:

When NSFWCORP sent me to Victorville this January, I little expected that the neighboring town of Adelanto would become ground zero for a fight between billionaires like Anschutz on one side, and poor, vulnerable minority parents and children on the other.

I first heard about the fight through the local right-wing paper, the Victorville Daily Press, which gleefully announced on its front page that a local school, Desert Trails Elementary, had just made history as the first school in the nation to be privatized under California’s new “parent trigger” law. The paper described the takeover as “promising a fresh start to the failing elementary school,” and claimed it had received widespread support from parents.

The national press gushed in similarly glowing terms. The LA Weekly described the Adelanto privatization as an “historic moment for the education-reform movement picking up steam across the nation.” The New York Times dutifully compared the takeover of Desert Trails to “Won’t Back Down.” An “issues” movie starring Face of Indie Maggie Gyllenhaal, “Won’t Back Down” promotes the parent-trigger law as a panacea for America’s public-education problems, one that “empowers” parents to fight back against self-interested public school teachers and their union.

All in all, everyone agreed that this takeover of Desert Trails Elementary represented a triumphant moment for parents and their children, a victory for the people over rapacious elementary school teachers and their unions.

But something didn’t seem right about this story — it was too pat, too much like a triumph-of-the-spirit Disney tale, too much like Maggie’s movie. So I made some calls and started spending some time in Adelanto, to find out what really went on there…….

* *

* *
I would spend several weeks talking to the parents of children enrolled in Desert Trails Elementary, meeting with them in local taco joints and strip mall diners and talking about what happened. As I had suspected, their version of events turned out not to match the Disney version in national papers.

The parents told me that a Los Angeles-based group calling itself “Parent Revolution” organized a local campaign to harass and trick them into signing petitions that they thought were meant for simple school improvements. In fact those petitions turned out to be part of a sophisticated campaign to convert their children’s public school into a privately-run charter — something a majority of parents opposed. At times, locals say, the “Parent Revolution” volunteers’ tactics were so heavy-handed in gathering signatures that they crossed the line into harassment and intimidation. Many parents were misled about what the petition they signed actually meant. Some told me that the intimidation with some of the undocumented Latino residents included bribery and extortion.”

.

Categories California, Charter Schools, Parents, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Mother Crusader Opted Out! LINK ADDED

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2013 //
49

News from parent activist Mother Crusader:

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

I’ve Opted Out And You Can Too!

This morning I spoke with the Assistant Superintendent of my district, and was told it’s no problem to opt my 1st graders out of the NJPASS. This is not a mandated test, and the results are not reported to the state. It is given mostly to prepare students for taking the NJASK in 3rd grade – so in my estimation, it’s all but useless for my kids and a waste of money for the district.

The OK to opt out this year came with a warning that once my girls hit 3rd grade this would not be such a cake walk. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

For now, I feel an incredible sense of relief.

Relief that my girls won’t lose almost 7 hours (I was told it sucks up 2 hours and 15 minutes on 3 consecutive days – they’re SIX!!) to a standardized test that has next to no meaning for them or their teacher. Relief that my district was accommodating (they can spend the time at home or will be invited into a Kindergarten classroom). Relief that I have taken the first step to giving my daughters a K-12 education without the stress and burden of high-stakes standardized tests.

Here’s a generic version of the letter I sent to my district. I took out identifiers and specifics, so if you are inspired to join me, feel free to cut and paste parts that resonate for you and create your own letter. Or steal the whole thing.

It’s my gift to you for taking the brave step to tell the powers that be, “You can’t sort and label our children! We opt out!!”
I have been informed that first graders will take the NJPASS on May 7, 8 and 9. It is also my understanding that these scores will not be reported to the state, and do not have high stakes attached to them. However, I fail to see the benefit of starting my child(ren) on a standardized testing path that I know is leading to their class being the first group of 3rd graders to take the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Carriers (PARCC) assessments in the 2014/2015 school year.

In the current education reform culture, standardized test scores are used less often to improve outcomes for students by reinforcing skills that have not been mastered, and more to evaluate teachers, schools and districts. Student test data provides the state false justification to take over districts, close schools, and open charters; all “reforms” that have not been shown to significantly improve student outcomes and instead serve to further weaken traditional public schools and the communities they serve.

Starting next year, AchieveNJ will be implemented statewide, and education advocates and legislators are still debating with Education Commissioner Chris Cerf how much of a teacher’s evaluation will be based on their student’s standardized test scores. These tests were never created to evaluate teacher performance, and the use of Student Growth Percentiles (SGP) and similar Value Added Modeling (VAM) to evaluate teachers has proven highly controversial in other states.

This is not the only way student data is being misused. Testing companies have begun collecting student data, including “information about the children’s hobbies, attitudes, and interests” as well as “(d)isciplinary records, attendance records, special-needs records, testing records.” This information is then shared with other testing and educational companies without parental consent. Parents have not been given the opportunity to opt-out of the database, and the data will be used to tailor educational products to parents.

And as you well know, standardized testing creates a financial burden for districts across the state. The infrastructure needed for the coming PARCC assessments is as of yet undetermined for our district, but is anticipated to be quite onerous. As PARCC is administered entirely online, it will require large purchases of technology and increased bandwidth, in addition to the cost of the test itself. Paired with the loss of almost $5 million in state funding our district has suffered since Governor Christie took office, the additional expense could be devastating.

For all these reasons and more (teaching to the test, narrowing of curriculum, cheating scandals, etc.) I am ardently opposed to the testing culture that has been inflicted upon public schools, and the over reliance on data driven instruction in a never ending quest for evidence that students are “college and career ready.” To be clear, I am not implying that our district is engaged in ANY of these practices. These are my observations of the national discussion on standardized testing, and the impact the overreliance on test scores has had on public education nationwide.

I trust my daughters’ teachers to make sound judgments regarding their education, and the district has my full support in administering any teacher or district created assessments as deemed necessary. I whole-heartedly object however to any state-wide standardized tests the district chooses to administer, or must administer according to state mandates.

Therefore, my husband and I respectfully inform you that we have decided to opt our child(ren) out of the NJPASS. We have decided to join the growing number of parents across the state that have similarly decided to opt their children out of high stakes standardized tests.

Ours is a progressive district committed to public education. I would love to see a broad conversation in our schools, purposefully framed to include parents, teachers, administrators and board members, about the effects this nation’s obsession with standardized testing is having on the education of our children.

Thank you for your time and attention to this matter.

Respectfully,

Darcie Cimarusti

If you are interested in the opt out movement, reach out to me in the comments. A group of New Jersey parents and educators have already started a supportive Facebook group that you can join, and you can also find information at United Opt Out.

The NJDOE is using our kids’ tests scores as the basis for their attempts to privatize and take over our public schools. Opting out is the best way to tell the state we want nothing to do with the destructive war they’ve waged against our schools, and we won’t allow them to use our kids as a weapon to fire their teachers and close their schools.

Parents and teachers know that standardized tests are antithetical to learning. We need to stand up for what we know.

In solidarity,
Darcie

Categories New Jersey, Parents, Testing

Washington Post: Anti-Testing Movement Grows

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2013 //
21

From the local school boards in Texas to the teachers at Garfield High School in Seattle to the Providence Student Union, the movement against high-stakes testing is growing everyday.

The Washington Post reports here that the public is rising up against the Bush-Obama education agenda.

Across the nation, students, parents, and teachers have had it.

Officials keep pouring millions into testing while cutting the budget for everything else.

Categories Parents, Students, Testing

The Man Who Launched the Anti-Testing Movement in New York

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2013 //
9

Who deserves credit for creating the anti-testing movement in New York State?

Governor Andrew Cuomo.

He is so devoted to standardized testing that students in third grade in New York will have “six straight days of tests, 90 minutes a day.”

Cuomo loves standardized testing and high stakes, though not for his own children, of course.

Mark Naison also credits State Commissioner John King, who shares Cuomo’s devotion to tests and punishments and regularly displays a “contemptuous attitude…towards parents, teachers, and principals who question the usefulness of so much testing.”

Friends, we do not have to tolerate what we know is wrong for children.

Opt out.

Categories Cuomo, Andrew, New York, Parents, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

New York Parents Are Opting Out

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2013 //
31

The movement to opt out of state testing is spreading in Néw York. State leaders are threatening parents and schools with loss of funding; teachers are threatened with disciplinary action if they encourage parents.

PARENTS, DO NOT BE INTIMIDATED.

It is your choice.

If everyone stands together, the petty tyrants in Albany can’t do anything.

Here is an email from a parent in Long Island:

*****

I want to make you aware of a movement happening on Long Island, NY.

The NYS ELA standardized tests are are set to begin this Tuesday, and there are many parents who are choosing to opt their children out of the tests.

NYSED is trying to bully the schools into bullying the parents by saying that schools will lose funding if more than 5% op out. Some districts are playing along with the state, but many are cooperating with parents and making accommodations for children who will not take the test. One district even issued a resolution condemning the tests. Isn’t that great?

It would be great if you and your readers would support us. We are on Facebook at “Long Island Opt-out Info.”

https://www.facebook.com/groups/141680156005331/

Categories New York, Parents, Testing

Why Texas Is Sick of The Testing Mania

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2013 //
4

Texas is fed up with the testing obsession. The state has handed over nearly a billion dollars to Pearson in recent years, even as the Legislature cut $5.4 Billion from public education.

For an insiders’ view of the revolt against high-stakes testing in Texas, read Jason Stanford.

He says only two people in the state still defend the testing deluge, and one of them is paid to lobby for Pearson.

That would be Sandy Kress, the same man who is widely acknowledged as the architect of No Child Left Behind. In recent years, he has served on state advisory commissions, testified in favor of more and more testing, written opinion pieces in favor of testing.

But now the game is up. 86% of school boards across the state have said no to high-stakes testing. Moms have organized to fight it. The Legislature is listening. Texas is the place where the testing vampire (as former state commissioner of education Robert Scott called it) gets a stake through the heart.

Categories Parents, Pearson, Testing, Texas
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