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Parents and Students Demonstrate Against Tests at Dozens of NYC Schools

By dianeravitch
April 11, 2014 //
30

Today, parents and students rallied against the state tests at dozens of schools across New York City, unassuaged by State Commissioner John King’s claims that the tests were better this year and consumed less than 1% of the year. Little children that had sat for three hours of reading tests did not take comfort in his words, and parents demanded transparency.

“The protests, which drew hundreds of people to some schools before the start of classes, followed a speech Thursday by New York State Education Commissioner John King, in which he fiercely defended the state’s education initiatives, including the new standards and tests.

“He described recent debates over those efforts as “noise” and “drama,” and attributed some of the outcry to “misinformation.” And while acknowledging that some schools spend too much time preparing for tests, he insisted that the state had worked to reduce testing time. He added that the new Common Core exams “are better tests” than previous ones.

“His comments struck a nerve with some of the principals, who usually avoid getting involved in education’s political fights, but felt impelled to refute the notion that misinformed members of the public were stirring up unrest about the tests.

“P.S. 59 Principal Adele Schroeter said the hundreds of parents and students who filled the streets around her Midtown school Friday morning were “more than noise and drama, in spite of what John King might say.””

Tomorrow, dozens of Manhattan principals plan their own protests. One of them wrote in a letter to parents: ““I have never seen a more atrocious exam.”

“Echoing criticisms of the exams that other educators have posted online, the Manhattan principals said the tests did not measure the type of analytical reading and writing they associate with the Common Core standards. They also argued that the tests were too long and many of the multiple-choice answers were bafflingly similar.

“I have a double masters and some of them could be A or C,” said Medea McEvoy, principal of P.S. 267 on the Upper East Side, one of the schools planning to protest.

“The principals also said that confidentiality rules shield the test maker, publishing giant Pearson, from public scrutiny. And because only a portion of the test questions are eventually released, they said, teachers cannot rely on them as instructional tools.
The school leaders added that, considering all the flaws they found in the exams, they do not trust the state’s new evaluations that rate teachers partly on their students’ test scores.”

Categories Common Core, New York, Parents, Principals, Students, Testing

Eleven Million Page Views in Less than Two Years!

By dianeravitch
April 1, 2014 //
24

Dear Friends,

Today this blog reached the unbelievable number of eleven million page views!

I had no idea this would happen when I wrote the first post on April 26, 2012.

Thank you for reading. More than that, thank you for participating.

Many of you contribute regularly to what must be the liveliest discussion about education on the Internet. I read your comments and pick out some that are the most interesting, the most thoughtful, the most informative, and the most provocative and post them. It may be the same day or weeks later. The important thing is that I have tried to make this blog a place where the voices of parents, students, teachers, principals, and superintendents are heard, unedited.

The rules of the blog are limited and simple. Be civil. Avoid certain four-letter words which I will not print. Do not insult your host. There are plenty of other forums for all of the above. Just not here.

As you know, the blog has a point of view, because I have a point of view. I care passionately about improving the education of all children. I care passionately about showing respect for the dedicated men and women who work hard every day to educate children and help them grow to be healthy, happy human beings with good character and a love of learning. I care passionately about restoring real education and rescuing it from those who have dumbed it down into preparation for the next standardized test. I care passionately about restoring to all children their right to engage in the arts, to play, to dream, to create, to have a childhood and a youth unburdened by fear of tests. I care passionately about protecting the public schools from those who seek to monetize them and use them as a source of profit and power.

I am in my end game. I will fight to the last to defend children, teachers, principals, and public education from the billionaires and politicians who have made a hobby of what is deceptively called “reform.” What is now called “reform,” as the readers of this blog know, is a calculated plan to turn public schools over to amateurs and entrepreneurs, while de imaging the teaching profession to cut costs.

The people who promote the privatization and standardization of public education are the StatusQuo. They include the U.S. Department of Education, the nation’s wealthiest hedge fund managers, and the nation’s largest foundations. They include ALEC, Democrats for Education Reform, Stand on Children, ConnCAN, and a bevy of other organizations eager to transfer public dollars to private organizations. Their stale and failed ideas are the Status Quo. Their ideas have been ascendant for a dozen years. They have failed and failed again, but their money and political power keep them insulated from news of the damage they do to Other People’s Children.

We will defeat them. We will outlast them. Who are we? We are the Resistance. We are parents and grandparents, teachers, and principals, school board members, and scholars. We will not go away. They can buy politicians, but they can’t buy us. They can buy “think tanks,” but they can’t buy us. Public schools are not for sale. Nor are our children. Nor are we.

Categories ALEC, Arts Education, Charter Schools, Childhood, Parents, Principals, Privatization, Students, Teachers, U.S. Department of Education

Chalkbeat: NYC Charter Principal Has a Long History of Faking His Résumé

By dianeravitch
February 21, 2014 //
19

Chalkbeat reports that the principal of a NYC charter school has gone from one position to the next, touting fake credentials.

Despite the fact that he had been forced out of other schools, despite the fact that he made numerous other unsubstantiated claims about jobs he had held, he was hired to run a charter for transfer students, a school for students at risk of not graduating.

His résumé is impressive:

“He claimed to have been a senior adviser to Barack Obama as a senator and a consultant to Hillary Rodham Clinton. He said he had served as a deputy chief of staff for Carrie Meek, then a U.S. Representative. He claimed to have a doctoral degree. And he said he was the principal of a school in Washington, D.C. where he was actually a teacher….”

“From Feb. 2009 to June 2010, Thomas worked as a program director for Phase 4 Learning Center, a nonprofit that operates alternative education centers in Pennsylvania. The company’s CEO, Terrie Suica-Reed, said that Thomas’s deception while working for her company “was enough that he had to be released from all duties and all association with Phase 4.”
“I would listen to the warning signs,” Suica-Reed said.

In New York City, Thomas served as a “principal-in-residence” for New Visions for Public Schools from March to June 2011. The nonprofit then tapped Thomas to be the principal of its first high school, the New Visions Charter High School for the Humanities.
New Visions spokesman Tim Farrell said that Thomas was a part of the school’s “start-up team” but left before it opened that fall, and would not comment further on his departure.

The article suggests that charters may have to e more careful about hiring principals.

Of course, when public funds flow to unregulated schools that are not required to comply with state law governing credentials and qualifications, problems will arise.

Categories Charter Schools, New York City, Principals

Are the Members and Staff of the NY Board of Regents Effective?

By dianeravitch
January 30, 2014 //
12

This statement was written by Katie Zahedi and Bianca Tanis.

Katie Zahedi is principal at Linden Avenue Middle School in Red Hook, NY, and serves on the administrative panel for NYSAPE.
Bianca Tanis is a public school parent in the Hudson Valley as well as an elementary special education teacher and a co-founder of NYS Allies for Public Education.

“We ask that the New York State Education Department (NYSED) Board of Regents act to reform hiring and appointment procedures for employees and new regent members. The lack of professional and scholarly input has produced many of the problems with the failed Regents Reform Agenda. Constituencies in education have historically guarded against governmental involvement in education, yet there are unprecedented requests of the legislature for protection from the corporatized dismantling of public education by NYSED leadership.

Our comments embody attempts to advocate for a secure future for public schools and do not represent their respective school districts.
_________________________________________________________________________________

Bianca Tanis and Katie Zahedi, a teacher and a principal are asking that the New York State Education Department (NYSED) Board of Regents reform hiring and appointment procedures for employees and new regent members. A lack of professional and scholarly input has produced many mistakes and a failed Regents Reform Agenda. Constituencies in education have historically guarded against governmental involvement in education, yet there are unprecedented requests of the legislature for protection from the corporatized dismantling of public education by NYSED. Their comments constitute advocacy for a secure future for public schools and do not represent their respective school districts.

_________________________________________________________________________________

NYSED has been enforcing standards based evaluations for teachers and principals, despite the absence of consistently used standards and protocols for hiring or evaluating NYSED. The current commissioner’s performance program is not public, though it was under Commissioner Mills. As such, schools are held accountable to increased standards under a department that is violating the state labor contract. The commissioner was hired without a formal search or established criteria. There are unqualified “fellows” hired as “consultants” who are doing work not appropriately linked to approvable expenditures for consultants or accountable to any public entity because they are privately funded. There are postings for temporary employees to evaluate APPR plans, with a pre-requisite “one year of relevant professional experience”.  The Regents’ appointment process is in need of review, while the NYSED has allowed corporate know-nothings to design curriculum that is being forced on our schools.

 

Are these inappropriate hiring practices at NYSED upholding flawed policies that waste time, public money and hurt students?  Are we comfortable leaving implementation of education reform to unproven methodologies managed by private consultants who are unaccountable to the public? The two images depicted here include: 1) an advertisement for temporary employment seeking applicants with minimal qualifications (one year of relevant experience) to evaluate the compliance plans of New York School districts to the SED’s directives, and 2) a FOIL submitted by the Professional Employees Association (PEF) at the NYSED for what they believe may be the illegal relocation of their work, which is currently being done by others in private offices under the direction of the questionably hired fellows.

Some professionals are rendered speechless at the chagrin of what is happening in full public view. Those who are able to respond to the overbearing conditions have written to leadership, requested meetings, spoken at forums all over the state, and pleaded with elected officials to intervene in the troubling course.  Has the time yet come to turn the APPR (teacher and principal evaluation system) around?  If so, we encourage policy makers on the Board of Regents and SED executive staff to reflect and consider their performance on a state HEDI band. In case you don’t know what we mean, are they “Highly Qualified”; “Effective”; “Developing”; or “Ineffective” as leaders of the NYSED?

 

The Regents oversee education but the board is presently populated with few individuals possessing experience or expertise relevant to educational governance at the state level. With four seats open on the board, we encourage hiring and selection criteria for all appointments based on professional expertise and related criteria.  The best candidates will have backgrounds in education, with increased representation from stakeholder groups such as experienced K-12 practitioners, parents and advocates of students enrolled in public schools and scholars of education history, policy and practice.

 

The NYSED has only grudgingly listened to educators. They have resisted input from scholars who have sought to assist with analysis of reform efforts and systems of implementation now under review. NYSED leadership’s almost fetishistic obsession with data in the absence of substantive analysis of the efficacy of high-stakes tests and test scores vis-à-vis their meaning or relevance to school improvement and student learning has effectively obscured any focus on reforms that might actually work. Innovation, at the heart of American success, doesn’t appear to be tightly coupled with an ability to answer fact-based questions correctly. What if social emotional learning, creativity and relationships are more relevant to success than test rankings? Who will be accountable for RTTT if it cripples student progress?

 

While NYSED is preoccupied with unreflective implementation, even scant effort would yield local assistance.  For example, at the Department of Education Administration and Policy Studies at SUNY Albany, within a half an hour of the commissioner’s office, are experts who can assist them with a better understanding of the macro-factors contributing to comparatively lower scores of US students on the Program for International Students Assessment (PISA) league tables.  Lower international rankings are driving RTTT, so understanding causality is critical to the design of appropriate solutions. Perhaps the Board Secretary might order a few copies of Pisa, Power, and Policy and the Globalization of Educational Governance, written by experts at SUNY, Albany.  Editors, Meyer and Benavot, scholars at the State University of New York (Albany), may be willing to drive across town to help them understand faulty assumptions driving RTTT that has shaped the policies that are creating havoc in New York schools.

 

APPR and CCLS, as formulated, are crumbling.  We suggest that APPR with number grades for teachers that are tied to student test scores, be scrapped and the CCLS be left to the states and districts for review. Meanwhile, SED mandates should cease until our leadership is properly reviewed and a higher standard is applied to their hiring and evaluation.  The public will soon be asking who is going to be accountable for the billions of dollars wasted on systems that were imposed on schools against the earnest advisement of professionals in the field.

 

We want to acknowledge that the Regents are public-minded in their service as volunteers and thank them all for their efforts. Commitment and devotion are respected, but we call for standards guiding the Regents selection process.  While it may be difficult, we are asking for decision makers to vote for what is best for schools and children even if it means that the calls for “change” that have been enacted on schools are now applied to themselves. They will know what is best by speaking with actual school leaders, not policy entrepreneurs!

 

Heinz-Dieter Meyer & Aaron Benavot. Introduction. PISA and the Globalization of Education Governance: some puzzles and problems. OXFORD STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE EDUCATION

PISA, Power, and Policy. The Emergence of Global Educational Governance
Edited by HEINZ-DIETER MEYER & AARON BENAVOT (Benavot, 2013)

Categories New York, Principals, Teacher Evaluations

A Veteran Principal Eloquently Denounces Common Core and Race to the Top

By dianeravitch
January 30, 2014 //
34

This powerful speech was written and delivered by Frank Sutliff to a crowd of concerned citizens and educators at the Oneonta (New York) Forum on January 18, 2014. Sutliff is a Principal and is also the President of SAANYS (School Administrators Association of New York State).

He said:

​I appreciate the opportunity I have been given to speak here today. Although I am the President of the School Administrators Association of New York State, better known as SAANYS, I am not here today representing this organization of over 7000 administrators. Instead, I am here as a veteran Principal with 26 years of experience running a junior-senior high school, as well as having been in education over 30 years.

​”here is one main issue for me with the APPR, the common core, and what I call the corporate takeover of American public education. That issue is the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on something that is of questionable benefit to children in any way, shape, or form. This hysteria over college and career readiness is a manufactured crisis based on data that compares apples to oranges, a crisis designed to enrich the coffers of publishing companies. The illusion that children in the United States are ill prepared and that they will never be competitive in a world market has manifested itself in many ways. I will concentrate on three of these issues today- the corporate takeover of education, high stakes testing, and the questionable data gathering in New York State via InBloom.

“Recent announcements out of the Governor’s office state how students are being “put first” in improving and reforming education and that education funding has been increased by $1.8 billion over the last two years.

​Let me talk about how students are being “put first” in my district the last two years. I am sure that many of you here in the audience have seen the same thing.

• Is cutting 14 courses so that some students sit in so called “study halls” or the senior lounge for five periods a day “putting students first”? We no longer offer Computer Graphic Design, Construction Systems, World War II, or History and Digital Media just to name a few courses lost to cuts to teaching positions.

• Is the end of all professional development, including curriculum mapping and data analysis “putting students first?”

• Is cutting a guidance counselor as students’ academic and emotional needs increase “putting students first”?

• Is the cutting of numerous sports, clubs, and activities “putting students first”?

In this state and across the country, where we have been sold a bag of goods with Race to the Top, we are supposedly “putting students first”. In my district, we could “put students first” by providing them with needed and desired courses, providing their teachers with professional development, and providing these students with services and activities. Instead, on the Friday before Christmas, I received yet another huge shipment of common core modules where kindergarten students can learn about Mesopotamia, fifth graders can do close reading of passages from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and high school students can close read documents from the Federal Reserve Bank. As I sorted and distributed these boxes of material, I could see my senior lounge where students sit period after period due to the lack of course offerings. However, the millions and millions of dollars for Expeditionary Learning and Common Core Inc. continue to flow unabated.

“I am encouraged by the efforts of groups such as yours and I feel that grassroots efforts such as those done by the “Oneonta Area for Public Education” are well worth the effort in trying to effect change.

“I would like to share an email that I wrote about these issues and then sent to my teachers a few months ago. I believe my email sums up where we now are in this fight to restore sanity to our schools and how groups such as yours came to be.

“As the wasteful APPR system came into being with hundreds of millions foolishly allocated through Obama’s Race to the Top, there was little public outcry against it. Any objections were mainly from educators and the public could have cared less due to the disdain spewed against teachers and administrators by our governor and others. When the common core came in with it, there was little outcry against it, as no one understood the implications- a few “shifts” here and there and a few billions for testing and publishing companies. Again, no one outside of education really cared as criticisms were viewed as just those of whiny teachers and self serving administrators.

During this time, various educational groups formed to fight back against these initiatives, particularly on Long Island and in Western New York. However, these were isolated pockets and the public took little or no interest, nor did the legislators.

However, when students returned to school and began to have hours and hours of homework with the expectation that parents would help with things they did not know and when young elementary students started saying that they hated school, things began to change quickly. The final straw was when the test results were sent home; parents who had previously been told that their children were above average and doing well found out that their children were instead, barely achieving and in need of AIS. This is when the heat got turned up, resulting in common core forums where parents (“special interest” groups according to Commissioner King) got involved and heatedly voiced their opinions. As we know, this resulted in the cancellation of these forums by King and a public outcry.

What Commissioner King does not understand and has not dealt with in his limited experience as a school administrator is the vehemence of parents when it comes to defending their children. Any administrator with experience understands this and this is when the top down and forced compliance of the APPR/common core debacle thankfully went off the track. When parents got involved because their children were treated as lab experiments and started to voice their opinions as well as contact their legislators, the “revolt” against this nonsense found its voice.”

​This is the voice with which you are all now speaking- speaking out against all of the testing, all of the squandered resources, and the decisions being made by corporate leaders with no experience in public schools. I look at my own district and try to find one positive thing about the APPR and the common core and I find none. However, when I look at the negative impact it has brought us, I see morale at an all time low, teachers reluctant to share their practices with colleagues due to concerns about their “score” and money spent on purchasing tests that could be spent on students. This is my own experience; to be fair, I know colleagues in other districts and within my own professional organization who appear to be quite pleased with the so called reform agenda, particularly the common core. My question to them would be the same- could these hundreds of millions have been better spent by providing services and opportunities to students instead of being spent in a top down experiment?

​I would like to take a few minutes to talk about the testing. I have been giving 3-8 assessments (in my case 7-8), as well as Regents exams for years and years. I never had a problem with these tests before, other than a few blips along the way (a 2004 fiasco with Algebra being a prime example). Overall, it was an excellent system with tests of relatively high quality administered from district to district. What we did at my school with the 3-8 assessments in particular was to invite K-12 teachers as a group to scrutinize and study them in the following year. We looked for strengths and weaknesses, not to get better test scores, but to inform instruction. In fact, leading these data groups was one of the highlights of my professional career- to have 3rd grade teachers discussing math standards with the trig teacher is a wonderful use of educators’ time. However, with no money for professional development and the secretive nature of the tests now, this activity no longer occurs.

​Now as part of “putting students first” and the mantra of college and career readiness, we give 3-8 tests that are longer than the law boards and include concepts and topics never taught. This is part of the now famous State Ed analogy of “building the plane in the air.” However, as we “build the plane in the air”, we not only fail children, we fail their teachers in the quest to make teaching an activity that can be assigned a number.

​Another thing associated with testing that I find truly disingenuous is the notion put out from Albany that all of the additional SLO testing is the fault of districts and the APPR plans they adopted. The fact that we spend money purchasing these tests for the so called non-core courses and then waste students’ time giving them came directly from State Ed as they instituted the APPR. This testing, given for no other reason than to give teachers who do not get a NYS growth score a number, comes right out of Albany’s directives and their inability to answer simple APPR questions with one consistent and correct answer. To suggest otherwise and to blame districts for this is disingenuous.

​I am not going to go into specifics about the common core due to time limitations today; I will leave that better said by others. However, as a former librarian, it is hard to see the little regard with which fiction is held as we are given mandated acceptable levels of nonfiction. As a child growing up in Gloversville, my books came from the Gloversville Free Library and so did much of my education. I know that I loved reading due to the worlds that it opened; I also know that our so called close readings of prescribed documents and passages will not open up that same love of literature in today’s students.

​Everywhere I turn the common core rears its head. One of the most disappointing recently was on the Kindle Free Time product that Amazon.com offers. My soon to be four year old granddaughter enjoys this feature of the Kindle with all of its games, activities, books, and videos; it really is a wonderful product. Recently Amazon tweeted out “Kindle Free Time launches Learn First and Bedtime Educational Features.” I saw the tweet and thought great, a good product getting even better. I clicked on the link and saw the following- “Now with thousands of educational titles- hundreds of common core aligned level readers and supplemental readers.” Enough is enough- preschool?- can’t kids just have fun?

​Finally, I want to discuss one other area of Race to the Top that is very concerning to me and should concern you as parents and educators- InBloom. This is the data system New York State has bought into where students’ confidential information is stored by private companies in the cloud. In fact, this data system is so concerning that some districts are returning Race to the Top funds in an attempt to not have their children’s private data stored in this way. One example is the Pearl River School system; on October 31 they voted to opt out of Race to the Top, due to concerns about privacy. Their Superintendent, Dr. John Morgano, was quoted as saying “However, we learned from the State Education Department that they will be collecting individual student discipline data and sending it to InBloom. There is no need for a private company to possess a child’s disciplinary history so that it is potentially available to prospective colleges and employers. I will not be a party to this infringement of privacy rights.” Kudos to Superintendent Morgano and I second this, as should each of you. I have handled all the student discipline in my school for the past 26 years. I send a form or letter or a certified letter home, depending on the incident, and then put a copy in my desk for future discarding, never in the student’s permanent file.

​Although I know my way around data, computers, and student systems, I do not put discipline in digital form in our student system for just that reason. I have no problem reporting out to State Ed that I suspended 20 students out of school last year; however, I can think of no reason why they or a private company needs the name of these students. This assault on privacy, which is all too commonplace in our country today, should concern each of you.

​In closing, I received a memo dated October 24, 2013 from our Education Commissioner, as did most of you working in schools. This memo detailed changes in testing, continued the illusion of our failures as educators, and ended with the statement “Teaching is the core.”

​Of course, “teaching is the core” but making a difference in the life of a child should be more of the core. Learning and motivating children to develop their full potential is the core art of teaching. I could stand here the rest of the afternoon as could each of you and mention a teacher or adult who has impacted our lives. For me it was Zane Peterson from Gloversville High School, Dr. Wayne Mahood at SUNY Geneseo, and Esther Tasner, Children’s Librarian at the Gloversville Free Library. For you, the names are different but the idea is the same.

​An anonymous public school teacher in Delaware wrote the following which appeared in a blog site on Washington.com; it was then quoted in an article by Valarie Strauss and I would like to share it with you. “They assume the best teaching and best learning can be quantified with tests and data. Yet I’ve never once had a student compliment me on my academic knowledge or my data collection skills. I’ve never had a student thank me for writing insightful test questions or staying up late to write a stunning lesson plan. But students HAVE thanked me for being there, for listening to them, for encouraging them, for believing in them even before they could believe in themselves.”

​In our field of education, these stories happen every day. Just a few weeks ago, my ninth grade English teacher spent hours of each day helping a young lady who had previously met with very little academic success in her life. This teacher worked with her as she prepared her speech for a local oratorical contest, and this same student placed and went on to the next levels. To see the hugs and the high fives for this girl’s success and to see her beaming with pride is really what it is all about. This young student, years from now, won’t recall her close reads or the scripted lessons that have resulted from the state’s fabricated illusion of our failing students and failing educators. However, she will recall the kindness of this teacher helping her to be successful; this kindness is not quantifiable, data driven, or able to be reported to the state. Really, at the end of the day and at the end of a career, isn’t it all about helping a child to be successful?

​Thank you for allowing me to share some thoughts with you this afternoon and I thank you for your efforts on behalf of all of our children.

Categories Common Core, New York, Principals, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Race to the Top

5 Newark Principals Sue for Freedom of Speech

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2014 //
24

The five Newark principals who were suspended for daring to question Superintendent Cami Anderson’s plan to close their schools have sued her for violating their First Amendment rights. They were joined by a Parent-TeCher organization whose president was barred from his child’s school.

Anderson was appointed by Governor Chris Christie’s administration.

Newark has an elected school board but has been under state control since 1995.

Categories Charter Schools, Closing schools, New Jersey, Parents, Principals

Principal of Troubled School is a Graduate of “Leadership Academy”

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2014 //
26

The principal of PS 106 in Far Rockaway, now in the news for its lack of curriculum or books, is a graduate of New York City’s vaunted Leadership Academy.

When Joel Klein took charge of the New York City schools in 2002, one of his earliest “reforms” was the creation of the Leadership Academy, a fast-track program for new principals. Originally, it was funded for three years with $75 million from the business community. Its inspiration was Jack Welch, the legendary tough guy from GE, who sometimes gave speeches to LA recruits and imbued them with his philosophy of stack-ranking and firing the bottom 10% of workers.

In the “bad old days,” pre-Klein and Bloomberg, educators became principal by first spending several years as classroom teachers, then several years as assistant principal. Only after they had deep experience were they eligible to apply for the important job of principal.

Klein had no regard for experience in education; he possibly thought it was a handicap that locked educators into old ways of thinking. It was innovation he wanted, so the Leadership Academy was created. Its first CEO was a businessman from Colorado who brought his large staff with him and commuted to Denver on weekends. When he left after a few years, the program was handed over to a professor at Baruch College who taught leadership classes but had never been a principal. Joel Klein was chairman of the board of the Leadership Academy.

After the three years were over, the Department of Education had a competitive bidding process for an organization to run leadership training, and–wonder of wonders–the Leadership Academy won $50 million for five years.

Meanwhile, the pre-Klein educators scoffed at graduates of the Leadership Academy. Some schools and districts were told they had to hire them. To career educators, their lack of experience was a minus, not a plus. Imagine how assistant principals with a dozen or more years in the system reacted when they learned that their new principal had been a teacher for only one or two or three years.

Yet, outside of New York City, the Bloomberg PR machine told about the amazing principals its Leadership Academy created in only one year. Other districts and states began copycat programs.

In the dying days of the Bloomberg administration, the Leadership Academy got a new contract for $45 million.

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, Klein, Joel, New York City, Principals

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

New York Principals: Why the Common Core Tests Failed Our Students and Your Children

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2013 //
14

This is a very important letter from the New York principals who have led the fight against high-stakes testing and the state’s invalid educator evaluation system.

Here is an important excerpt. Read the letter in its entirety.

 

Here’s what we know:

1)    NYS Testing Has Increased Dramatically: We know that our students are spending more time taking State tests than ever before. Since 2010, the amount of time spent on average taking the 3-8 ELA and Math tests has increased by a whopping 128%! The increase has been particularly hard on our younger students, with third graders seeing an increase of 163%!

2)    The Tests were Too Long: We know that many students were unable to complete the tests in the allotted time. Not only were the tests lengthy and challenging, but embedded field test questions extended the length of the tests and caused mental exhaustion, often before students reached the questions that counted toward their scores. For our Special Education students who receive additional time, these tests have become more a measure of endurance than anything else.

3)    Ambiguous Questions Appeared throughout the Exams: We know that many teachers and principals could not agree on the correct answers to ambiguous questions in both ELA and Math. In some schools, identical passages and questions appeared on more than one test and at more than one grade level. One school reported that on one day of the ELA Assessment, the same passage with identical questions was included in the third, fourth AND fifth grade ELA Assessments.

4)    Children have Reacted Viscerally to the Tests: We know that many children cried during or after testing, and others vomited or lost control of their bowels or bladders. Others simply gave up. One teacher reported that a student kept banging his head on the desk, and wrote, “This is too hard,” and “I can’t do this,” throughout his test booklet.

5)    The Low Passing Rate was Predicted: We know that in his “Implementation of the Common Core Learning Standards” memo of March 2013, Deputy Commissioner Slentz stated that proficiency scores (i.e., passing rate) on the new assessments would range between 30%-37% statewide. When scores were released in August 2013, the statewide proficiency rate was announced as 31%.

6)    The College Readiness Benchmark is Irresponsibly Inflated: We know that the New York State Education Department used SAT scores of 560 in Reading, 540 in Writing and 530 in mathematics, as the college readiness benchmarks to help set the “passing” cut scores on the 3-8 New York State exams. These NYSED scores, totaling 1630, are far higher than the College Board’s own college readiness benchmark score of 1550. By doing this, NYSED has carelessly inflated the “college readiness” proficiency cut scores for students as young as nine years of age.

7)    State Measures are Contradictory: We know that many children are receiving scores that are not commensurate with the abilities they demonstrate on other measures, particularly the New York State Integrated Algebra Regents examination. Across New York, many accelerated eighth-graders scored below proficiency on the eighth grade test only to go on and excel on the Regents examination one month later. One district reports that 58% of the students who scored below proficiency on the NYS Math 8 examination earned a mastery score on the Integrated Algebra Regents.

8)    Students Labeled as Failures are Forced Out of Classes: We know that many students who never needed Academic Intervention Services (AIS) in the past, are now receiving mandated AIS as a result of the failing scores. As a result, these students are forced to forgo enrichment classes. For example, in one district, some middle school students had to give up instrumental music, computer or other special classes in order to fit AIS into their schedules.

9)    The Achievement Gap is Widening: We know that the tests have caused the achievement gap to widen as the scores of economically disadvantaged students plummeted, and that parents are reporting that low-scoring children feel like failures.

10) The Tests are Putting Financial Strains on Schools: We know that many schools are spending precious dollars on test prep materials, and that instructional time formerly dedicated to field trips, special projects, the arts and enrichment, has been reallocated to test prep, testing, and AIS services.

11) The Tests are Threatening Other State Initiatives: Without a doubt, the emphasis on testing is threatening other important State initiatives, most notably the implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Parents who see the impact of the testing on their children are blaming the CCSS, rather than the unwise decision to implement high stakes testing before proper capacity had been developed. As long as these tests remain, it will be nearly impossible to have honest conversations about the impact of the CCSS on our schools.

 

 

Categories New York, Principals, Students, Testing

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
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