Archives for category: Race to the Top
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My Review of Daniel Koretz’s “The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.” No More Paywall.

By dianeravitch
January 11, 2018 //
21

I reviewed Harvard Professor Daniel Koretz’s “The Testing Charade” in “The New Republic.” It was behind a paywall until a few days ago. The paywall has been lifted.

Here are the main points.

Koretz demolishes the test-and-punish regime of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. He says in no uncertain terms that they failed. He says they ignored Campbell’s Law, which declares that attaching high stakes to tests distorts both the measure and distorts the process they were meant to measure. The emphasis on testing led to inflation of scores, so any rise in scores as a result of pressure is of little or no significance and surely does not mean that students are better educated. I enjoyed reading the book, and my reservation is that Koretz is not at all sure what to do about accountability. I am not either. I wish that the leaders of Congress understood what a complicated subject of accountability is. I would like to see greater accountability at the top, where decisions are made about funding and autonomy. We have a wacky system where teachers, principals and students are held accountable without the power to change the conditions under which they Labor.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Testing

Today is the Anniversary of the Worst Education Law Ever Passed by Congress

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2018 //
51

On January 8, 2002, President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind into Law.

NCLB, as it was known, is the worst federal education legislation ever passed by Congress. It was punitive, harsh, stupid, ignorant about pedagogy and motivation, and ultimately a dismal failure. Those who still admire NCLB either helped write it, or were paid to like it, or were profiting from it.

It was Bush’s signature issue. He said it would end “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” It didn’t.

When he campaigned for the presidency, he and his surrogates claimed there had been a “Texas miracle.” There wasn’t.

All that was needed, they said, was to test every child in grades 3-8 every year in reading and math. Make the results for schools public. Reward schools that raised scores. Punish schools for lower scores. Then watch as test scores soar, graduation rates rise, and achievement gaps closed. It didn’t happen in Texas nor in the nation.

The theory was simple, simplistic, and stupid: test, then punish or reward.

Congress bought the claim of the Texas miracle and passed NCLB, co-sponsored by leading Republicans and Democrats, including Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Congressman George Miller of California.

Congress mandated that every student in every school must be proficient on standardized tests of reading or math or the school was a failure, facing closure or privatization by 2014. NCLB was a ticking time bomb, set to destroy American public education by setting an impossible goal, one that almost every school in every state would ultimately fail.

It was the largest expansion of the federal role in history. It was the largest intrusion of the federal government into state and local education decisiomaking ever.

It was the stupidest education law ever passed.

Bush’s original proposal was a 28-page document. (I was invited to the White House ceremony where it was unveiled; at the time, I was a member in good standing of the conservative policy elite). By the time the bill passed, the new law exceeded 1,000 pages. A Republican Congressman from Colorado told me that he thought he was the only member who read the whole bill (he voted against it.)

NCLB took the place of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, a component of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” Program. The primary purpose of ESEA was to send federal funds to the poorest districts. (During the Clinton administration, ESEA was renamed the Goals 2000 Act and incorporated the lofty education goals endorsed by the first Bush administration.

To learn more about this history and why NCLB failed, read my book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” To learn more about the negative effects of NCLB, read Daniel Koretz’s new book, “The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.” To learn more about the unintended negative effects of accountability, google Richard Rothstein’s monograph “Holding Accountability to Account.”

This is what we got from NCLB: score inflation, cheating, narrowing the curriculum, obsession with test scores, more time devoted to testing, less time for the arts, physical education, history, civics, play, and anything else that was not tested. Among other consequences: demoralization of teachers, a national teacher shortage, more money for testing companies, and less money for teachers and class size reduction.

We also got a load of “reforms” that had no evidence to support them, such as closing schools, firing teachers and principals because of low scores, handing schools with low scores over to charter operators or the state.

NCLB, in turn, led to its ugly spawn, Race to the Top, which was even meaner and more punitive than NCLB. Race to the Top turned up the heat on test scores, making them the measure of teacher quality despite decades of social science that refuted that policy. More teachers and principals were fired,  more public schools were closed, enrollments in professional education programs plummeted across the country.

NCLB was the Death Star of American education. Race to the Top was the Executioner, scouring the land with a giant scythe in search of teachers, principals, and schools to kill if student scores didn’t go up.

When the law was passed, I went to an event at the Willard Hotel in D.C. where key senators discussed it. One of them was Senator Lamar Alexander, former governor of Tennessee, former U.S. Secretary of Education (for whom I worked as Assistant Secretary of Education in charge of the Office of Education Research and Improvement). At the end of the panel, when it was time for questions, I asked Senator Alexander whether Congress really believed that every student in the nation would be proficient by 2014. He said that Congress knew they would not be, but “it’s good to have goals.”

So NCLB demanded that schools meet goals they knew were impossible. People were fired, lost their careers and reputations. Schools were closed, communities destroyed. Because “it’s good to have goals.”

Sixteen years ago, NCLB became law. It was a dark day indeed for children, for teachers, for principals, for public education, and for the very nature of learning, which cannot be spurred by incentives or mandates or punishments or rewards.

“You measure what you treasure,” I was told by Arne Duncan’s Assistant Secretary for Thinking.

“No,” I replied, “that’s exactly what cannot be measured.” Love, honor, kindness, decency, compassion, family, friends, courage, creativity. No standardized test measures what matters most. I do not treasure what standardized tests measure.

Farewell, NCLB. May you, your progeny, your warped understanding of children and learning disappear from our land, never to be recalled except as an example of a costly failure.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Standardized Testing, Testing, U.S. Department of Education

Ethan Siegel: How to Break Public Education

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2017 //
56

Astrophysicist and author Ethan Siegel writes in Forbes magazine about the way that federal policies have disrespected and demoralized passionate teachers. No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Every Student Succeeds Act have been disasters for teaching and learning.

Every sentence in this short article is priceless, and I hate to abridge it. You will have to open the link and read it yourself in its entirety.

He writes:

The ultimate dream of public education is incredibly simple. Students, ideally, would go to a classroom, receive top-notch instruction from a passionate, well-informed teacher, would work hard in their class, and would come away with a new set of skills, talents, interests, and capabilities. Over the past few decades in the United States, a number of education reforms have been enacted, designed to measure and improve student learning outcomes, holding teachers accountable for their students’ performances. Despite these well-intentioned programs, including No Child Left Behind, Race To The Top, and the Every Student Succeeds Act, public education is more broken than ever. The reason, as much as we hate to admit it, is that we’ve disobeyed the cardinal rule of success in any industry: treating your workers like professionals.

Everyone who’s been through school has had experiences with a wide variety of teachers, ranging from the colossally bad to the spectacularly good. There are a few qualities universally ascribed to the best teachers, and the lists almost always include the following traits:

*a passion for their chosen subject,
*a deep, expert-level knowledge of the subject matter they’re teaching,
*a willingness to cater to a variety of learning styles and to employ a variety of educational techniques,
*and a vision for what a class of properly educated students would be able to know and demonstrate at the end of the academic year.

Yet despite knowing what a spectacular teacher looks like, the educational models we have in place actively discourage every one of these.

The first and largest problem is that every educational program we’ve had in place since 2002 — the first year that No Child Left Behind took effect — prioritizes student performance on standardized tests above all else. Test performance is now tied to both school funding, and the evaluation of teachers and administrators. In many cases, there exists no empirical evidence to back up the validity of this approach, yet it’s universally accepted as the way things ought to be…

If your goal was to achieve the greatest learning outcome possible for each of your students, what would you need to be successful? You’d need the freedom to decide what to teach, how to teach it, how to evaluate and assess your students, and how to structure your classroom and curriculum. You’d need the freedom to make individualized plans or separate plans for students who were achieving at different levels. You’d need the resources — financial, time, and support resources — to maximize the return on your efforts. In short, you’d need the same thing that any employee in any role needs: the freedom and flexibility to assess your own situation, and make empowered decisions…

Like any job involving an interaction with other people, teaching is as much of an art as it is a science. By taking away the freedom to innovate, we aren’t improving the outcomes of the worst teachers or even average teachers; we’re simply telling the good ones that their skills and talents aren’t needed here. By refusing to treat teachers like professionals — by failing to empower them to teach students in the best way that they see fit — we demonstrate the simple fact that we don’t trust them to do a good job, or even to understand what doing a good job looks like. Until we abandon the failed education model we’ve adopted since the start of the 21st century, public education will continue to be broken. As long as we insist on telling teachers what to teach and how to teach it, we’ll continue to fail our children.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

After 17 Years of “Reform,” International Test Scores Stagnant

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2017 //
50

In 2000, when George W. Bush ran for President, we heard about “the Texas Miracle.” We were told that testing every child every year would produce high test scores and close the achievement gaps. Believing in the claim, Congress passed No Child Left Behind, which required testing every child every year from grades 3-8.

Then came “Race to the Top,” which ratcheted up the testing punishments, requiring that teachers be evaluated by student test scores.

In 2011, the National Research Council warned that test-based accountability was not working and was unlikely ever to work.

Congress ignored its report. In 2015, Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, continuing the practice of annual testing, a practice not known in other nations.

What has 17 years of high-stakes testing produced? Narrowing of the curriculum to what is tested. Cheating scandals. Gaming the system. Teacher demoralization. Teacher shortages.

Billions spent on testing instead of teaching.

But nowhere closer to the “top.” Even the NAEP scores went flat in 2015, the first reversal in many years.

The latest international test results show no gains in reading. None.

This failure belongs to Reformers.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2017-12-05/other-countries-surpass-us-students-in-international-reading-comprehension-test

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

Gary Rubinstein: Louisiana and the Hoax of Growing AP Performance

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2017 //
7

As Gary Rubinstein writes, Louisiana is one of the most “reformed” states in the nation. It’s superintendent John White is a TFA alum and a graduate of the unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy. It has an all-charter city. It has vouchers. It received a Race to the Top grant. What could possibly go wrong?

Rubinstein writes here about a seeming paradox: Every year, Louisiana State Superintendent John zwhite boasts about an astounding increase in the proportion of students passing AP exams. Yet, Louisiana has pretty awful performance on the AP exams.

Paradox solved!

Louisiana moved from fourth worst to third worst in the nation on AP performance. It was recently overtaken by North Dakota.

Read his post and ask yourself why anyone would boast about such low performance. Is that what they teach at the Broad Academy?

Categories Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Louisiana, New Orleans, Privatization, Race to the Top

Helen F. Ladd: The Failure of NCLB

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2017 //
12

Professor Helen F. Ladd is professor of public policy and economics at Duke University.

In this paper, she analyzes the merits and demerits f No Child Left Behind and concludes that it failed in reaching the ambitious (and unrealistic) goal that all children would be proficient by 2014.

She calls NCLB “a deeply flawed federal policy.”

She writes:

“NCLB relied instead almost exclusively on tough test-based incentives. This approach would only have made sense if the problem of low-performing schools could be attributed primarily to teacher shirking, as some people believed, or to the problem of the “soft bigotry of low expectations” as suggested by President George W. Bush. But in fact low achievement in such schools is far more likely to reflect the limited capacity of such schools to meet the challenges that children from disadvantaged backgrounds bring to the classroom. Because of these challenges, schools serving concentrations of low-income students face greater tasks than those serving middle class students. The NCLB approach of holding schools alone responsible for student test score levels while paying little if any attention to the conditions in which learning takes place is simply not fair either to the schools or the children and was bound to be unsuccessful.”

I hope that Professor Ladd applies her sharp analytical skills to reviewing Race to the Top.

At some point, we can begin to calculate the billions spent for 13 years of punitive test-based accountability.

Categories Accountability, Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Testing

Gary Rubinstein: The Collapse Of Tennessee’s Achievement School District

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2017 //
22

Gary Rubinstein has been tracking the progress—and the hubris—of the Tennessee Achievement School District. The ASD was created with millions drawn from Tennessee’s $500 Million Race to the Top Grant, the first in the nation. The basic idea was that the ASD would create a special district for the state’s lowest performing schools, turn them over to charter operators, and within precisely five years, these schools would be “catapulted”into the top 25% of the schools in the state.

The first cohort of six schools were in the bottom 5% of schools in the state.

“Two years into the five-year mission, the superintendent at the time, TFA alum Chris Barbic, declared in an interview that of the original six schools, two were on target to get to the top 25% in five years while one of the six schools, Brick Church Elementary, was on a trajectory to reach the goal after just four years.

“Three years into the five-year mission, the improvements that he had based these projections on did not continue and Barbic was saying that they underestimated how difficult this would be, even admitting that the ‘immigrant poverty’ he worked with as a charter school founder in Houston is very different than the ‘generational poverty’ he works with in Tennessee.

“Four years into the five-year mission, Barbic resigned from the ASD, citing among other things, his health as he had recently had a heart attack. He soon got hired by the John Arnold foundation to work on education issues for them.”

In the fifth year, the state testing system was messed up by technical glitches, so there were no scores. So the ASD got six years to work its magic.

Now the scores are out, Gary analyzed the results, and one thing is clear: the ASD was an abysmal failure.

Of the original 6 ASD schools, one is in the bottom 7%, the rest are still in the bottom 5% with two of them in the bottom 1%.

This is what is called a total and complete failure. It was not “for the kids.” It was for the ego-gratification of arrogant deformers.

Gary writes:

“There are actually other states considering starting their own ASDs, I just read that Mississippi is working on it. Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada already have them in the works. There was one in Michigan which folded and there is still the original one in New Orleans which continues to post awful test results.”

Most of the ASD schools were in Memphis. Jeannie Kaplan reported earlier today that author David Osborne was in Denver touting Memphis as a reform Success. Six out of six of the state’s lowest performing schools are still the state’s lowest performing schools. If this is success, what does failure look like?

The definition of a reformer today: Never look at evidence, never admit failure, never learn anything new, just keep pushing privatization, lower standards for teachers, and high-stakes testing. Fail, fail, fail, and do it again.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Memphis, Privatization, Race to the Top, Tennessee

Mercedes Schneider: The Collapse of PARCC and SBAC

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2017 //
8

Mercedes Schneider reports on the near total collapse of the two Common Core testing consortia created by Arne Duncan at a cost of $360 million.

Iowa Contracts with AIR as Smarter Balanced Testing Consortium Quietly Dwindles

Categories Common Core, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Race to the Top, Testing

Vox: The Resegregation of Our Schools and What Might Have Been

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2017 //
29

I recently was invited to write a chapter for a book of essays on the 50th anniversary of the Kerner Commission report. The Kerner Commission was created by President Lyndon B. Johnson in response to an outbreak of civil rebellions concentrated in urban districts. Its report, published in 1968, highlighted racism, segregation, and police brutality. My chapter on education focused on the arc of desegregation that was led by a determined U.S. Office of Education and the federal judiciary, followed by the abandonment of desegregation by the federal courts.

This article traces the erosion of desegregation to the present..

I have often thought that the one big chance we had to stem the tide of resegregation in our society occurred in 2009. Congress reacted to the economic meltdown of 2008 by allocating $100 billion to the U.S. Department of Education. $95 million was allotted to states to keep their public schools functioning. $5 billion was set aside (of the $100 billion) as discretionary funding for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to use as he saw fit to advance reform.

Duncan decided to double down on the carrot-and-stick approach of No Child Left Behind. His Race to the Top program made standardized testing even more consequential than NCLB. If scores were low, he believed that teachers must be held responsible, blamed, named, and shamed. If scores were low, he wanted schools to close. He wanted teachers and principals fired. He wanted more charter schools. He wanted everyone evaluated by test scores. We now know that NCLB and Race to the Top failed. Many children, the same children, are still left behind. We did not reach “the Top.”

What if Duncan had used that $5 billion to offer a competition for states that came up with actionable plans for desegregation. New district lines, new zoning patterns, whatever would achieve the result of more actual integration. That $5 billion might have reversed the tide of resegregation. It might have changed the face of our society. But it didn’t happen.

This is a dream deferred. But it should not die, not even in the age of Trumpism.

Categories Duncan, Arne, History, Race to the Top, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

Mark Naison: How the Democratic Party Fatally Damaged Itself by Attacking Public Education

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2017 //
81

Mark Naison and I agree. When the Democratic Party joined the campaign to impose high-stakes testing, accountability, and privatization, it attacked a key element of its own base. He says it began with Bill Clinton’s advocacy for standards, testing, and accountability. Then, the Democrats threw their support behind George W. Bush’s disastrous No Child Left Behind. Then Obama brought in Arne Duncan to bribe the states with $5 billion for the disastrous Race to the Top program, which demoralized teachers, made them scapegoats, and closed thousands of schools in impoverished communities while favoring privately managed charter schools. I argued in The New Republic that the Democratic Party paved the way for Betsy DeVos and her crusade to replace public schools with anything other than public schools. Charters under private management are the gateway drug leading to vouchers to replace public schools.

Mark wrote that Democrats have no one to blame but themselves.

He writes:

Ever since the Clinton Presidency, the Democratic Party has been an advocate of top-down school reforms whose goal has been to make the nation more economically competitive and reduce inequality. Not only have these policies failed to achieve their stated objectives, they have destabilized communities where Democrats have traditionally found support, created widespread distress among teachers and parents, and given credence to the conservative critique of the DP as the province of technocratic elites who impose policies on people without really listening to them

Every Democratic politician who has promoted the following education policies, I would argue, has been complicit in the Party’s decline

1. Promotion of national testing and test based accountability standards for public schools.

2. Closing of schools which are deemed “failing” and removal of their teachers and administrators.

3. Preference for charter schools over public schools, especially in high poverty areas.

4. Support for programs like Teach for America which de-professionalize the teaching profession.
These four principles have been pillars of the Democratic Party’s education policies on a national level, pushed by President Obama and supported by virtually every major Democratic politician in the nation including figures on the left of the Democratic Party such as Elizabeth Warren, Patti Murray and Al Franken.

What have been the results of these policies?:

1. They have inspired a national parents revolt against excessive testing

2. They have produced a sharp decline in teacher morale and inspired the creation of teacher activist groups like Save Our Schools, BATS, and the Network for Public Education

3. They have promoted an mass exodus of the most talented veteran teachers and led to a sharp decline in the percentage of Black teachers in cities like Chicago, New Orleans, Washington DC, San Francisco and Los Angeles, where teacher temps from programs like Teach for America have become the predominant labor force in the newly created charter schools.

4. They have accelerated the gentrification of the nation’s major cities and diluted the political power of working class people, immigrants and people of color.

5, The have accelerated the shrinking of the Black and Latino middle class, and the weakening of the nation’s unions.

If you are looking for an explanation of why the power of the Democratic Party has declined sharply in a state and local level during the past eight years, the promotion of these disastrous education policies has to be part of the explanation.

No better example can be found of the Party’s adherence to the voice of billionaire contributors and technocrats over its traditional constituency into working class and middle class Americans than its disastrous foray into School Reform.

And unfortunately, the current leadership of the Democratic Party shows no willingness or ability to change course on these issues

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing
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