Archives for category: Race to the Top
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Peter Greene: What Two Decades of Testing Have Produced

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2017 //
10

http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-lost-years.html?m=1

Peter Greene asks a crucial question: What have we gained–or lost–because of our society’s obsession with standardized testing for at least the last two decades?

When did it start? Before No Child Left Behind was signed into law in January 2002, but not with the same intensity or the high-stakes that took hold since 2002, when the power of the federal government was used to pummel state’s and districts to comply with federal mandates.

This is one of Peter Greene’s most powerful posts. I urge you to read it.

Greene writes:

“After years of hearing how kindergarten has been turned into the new first grade, you’d think at the other end of the K-12 pipeline we would find highly advanced students. And yet– not so much

“I am not going to report a ton of research on this, because the available research is bogus and part of the actual test-centric problem. What I can tell you is what I, as an actual real live classroom teacher who knows actual real live classroom teachers, see and hear.

“This is the result of accelerated early instruction done primarily in the service of test-centric schooling (“We have to get them started early– otherwise how will they be ready for the Big Standardized Test??”)

“It is lost years.

“By the time these same start-em-early push-em-hard students arrive at high school classrooms, they are behind compared to the students that we saw twenty-five or fifteen or even ten years ago. They know fewer things, have fewer skills, and express lower academic aspirations.

“Why? I can offer a couple of theories.

They have learned to hate reading.

“They have learned that reading is this thing you do with short, disconnected, context-free selections, and when you read, you are not looking for something that sparks interest or enjoyment or curiosity or wonder or the pleasure of feeling your brain expanded and grown. You read so that, in a moment, you’ll be able to answer the questions that someone else wrote– and by “answer” we mean from the potions given the one answer that someone else has decided is “correct.” There will be no expression of your own personal insights, and never the possibility that there’s more than one way to understand the text. It is a stilted, cramped way to approach reading, and it means that students grow up with a stilted, cramped notion of what reading even is, or why human beings actually do it.

“With some luck, some students will still discover the joy and, yes, utility of reading– but they will discover outside of school, and they will not expect that the kind of reading that they love has anything to do with the test-centered “reading”: they are required to do in school. That higher level course has additional “reading”? Then I surely don’t want to sign up for that. And since the real task here, the real point of the whole exercise is not the reading, but the answering of questions about the reading– well, I bet I can find a time-saving way to cut that corner. Because after enough years of this, many students conclude that “reading” is something to actively avoid.

“There’s no pleasure there, no discovery, no ideas to mull and discuss, no characters who help us pick apart the thorny questions of how to be human in the world. Just clues for answering the BS Test questions.

“Their years are shorter.

“The school year is now shorter. It is shorter by the number of days involved in the BS Test. It is shorter by the number of days spent on pre-testing and practice testing. It is shorter by the number of days spent on instruction that is only being implemented because it will help get them ready for the test.

“By the time we’ve subtracted all those days, the school year is a few weeks, a month, maybe even more than a month shorter. It was only 180 days to begin with. The test-centric school has amped up a feature of education that has always frustrated teachers– the 180 day year is a zero sum game, a bathtub full to the absolute rim with water. You cannot add something without removing something else. A really feisty or frustrated teacher might turn to an administrator who just said “Add this to your class” and say, “Fine– what exactly do you want me to stop teaching?” But mostly we’re expected to just make do, to perform some sort of miracle by which we stuff ten more rabbits into the hat.

It doesn’t work. Every year students get less actual instruction than they used to, which means their teacher next year finds them a little bit behind, so the school year that used to start on Day One now starts on Day Thirty after the students are caught up– and then it ends on Day 160 because, you know, testing. So the following year those students are that much more behind. And so on, and so on, and so on.

“In the end, kindergarten may be the new first grade, but for many students, twelfth grade is the new eleventh grade.

“There are certainly students who escape this effect, and there are certainly clever teachers who mitigate it. But mostly the injection of toxic testing into the bloodstream of US education has had the predictable effect– it has weakened and damaged the entire body…We have wasted over fifteen years of education; some students have seen their entire schooling consumed by test-centric baloney.

“Yet we keep plowing on, keep committing to Testing Uber Alles. We are losing students, losing education opportunities, losing the chance to awaken some young humans to what they could be and could become– instead, we are still trying to mash their spirits flat under the heavy testing hand. We are losing years that we cannot get back, cannot give back, and this is not okay.”

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Testing

Peter Greene: ESSA is Now Officially a Big, Hot Mess

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2017 //
18

At the end of 2015, Congress finally replaced No Child Left Behind–ten years late–with a new law called Every Student Succeeds. The two names actually mean exactly the same thing, and mean nothing at all. Does anyone really believe that a federal law will cause “no child” to be “left behind,” or that “every student” will “succeed”? Washington ships out some money and some mandates, and therefore what? Hyperbole.

No Child Left Behind introduced an unprecedented level of federal control of education, a function traditionally left to the states. The federal contribution of about 10% of overall education funding enabled the government via NCLB to set conditions, specifically to require that every child in grades 3-8 must be tested in reading and math every year. Based on test scores, teachers and principals have been fired, and schools have been closed for not reaching unrealistic targets. NCLB was an intrusive, misguided, evidence-free law that was uninformed by knowledge of children, communities and pedagogy.

Arne Duncan twisted the screws on schools with his absurd Race to the Top. Education is not a race, and there is no top. But once again, the standardized tests became the measure and the purpose of education.

After 15 years of NCLB and RTTT, there is a great deal of wreckage, demoralized teachers, and widespread teacher shortages. And if the point of all that testing was to reach the top of international tests and/or close the achievement gaps among groups, it didn’t happen.

ESSA attempted to heal some of the harm done by NCLB and RTTT. It limited the power of the Secretary of education, to prevent another out-of-control Duncan. But it left in place the federal mandate for annual testing of all children in grades 3-8. This mandate has warped education for nearly two decades but civil rights groups became convinced by the the Gates Foundation that these norm-referenced tests were the pinnacle of civil rights protection. This was the height of absurdity: black and Latino children, as well as students with disabilities, are disproportionately ranked in the bottom half of the normed curve because these tests accurately reflect family income and education. Normed tests, by definition, have a top and a bottom, and the gaps never close, by design.

Pushed by DC think tanks, Democrats became convinced that the testing regime introduced by George W. Bush was the linchpin of the civil rights movement. They fought to retain Bush’s testing mandates, which themselves were based on the hoax of the fraudulent “Texas miracle.” Testing did not make Texas #1, but this fraud was the foundation of NCLB.

So Democrats insisted that the new law had to include annual testing because the civil rights groups wanted it. What a coalition: civil rights groups, Democrats, Republican accountability hawks, and Republicans eager to prove the phony claim that public schools are subpar.

And now we have ESSA. The Senate just voted to kill the accountability regulations of ESSA drafted by the Obama regulations. This post at a Education Week explains what was killed and what remains. It’s complicated. Not surprisingly, it turns out that the Obama administration staffer who wrote the defunct regulations now works for Jeb Bush’s accountability-crazed, privatization-loving “Chiefs for Change,” the most rightwing state and local superintendents.

Peter Greene explains here that it is a mess because it is a collection of generalities. No one agrees how it should be interpreted. Former Secretary John King wanted it to mean that nothing had changed with the replacement of NCLB, but Senator Alexander was not having that.

Greene says there are no heroes here, just confusion.

In the meantime, ESSA sits there, uninterpreted and unclear, a stunning example of how badly top-down rules can go wrong– if the people at the top can’t get their act together and figure out what they want the rules to mean, all you get is top-down confusion and paralysis. States, districts and schools have no way of knowing which sets of bad federal rules we’ll have to cope with, but in the meantime we have to keep doing our day to day work. Best of luck to us all.

Categories Every Student Succeeds Act, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top

Peter Greene: Betsy Drew the Wrong Lesson from the Failure of Obama and Duncan

By dianeravitch
February 26, 2017 //
17

Peter Greene read Betsy DeVos’s speech to CPAC and realized that she totally misunderstood why Obama and Duncan’s reforms failed. It wasn’t because they spent money. It was because they spent money on bad ideas. Now she proposes to spend money on vouchers, which have failed miserably, and on charters, which Obama and Duncan promoted. What is new about her approach? She is candid: she wants to destroy public education. Obama and Duncan either believed or pretended that public education would get better because of high-stakes testing, punishments, and charter schools. They were wrong. DeVos is wrong too. The difference is that we already know she is wrong, but she doesn’t.

Greene writes:

“School improvement grants were like food stamps that could only be spent on baby formula, ostrich eggs, and venison—and it didn’t matter if the families receiving the stamps lived on a farm with fresh milk and chicken eggs, or if they were vegetarians, or if they lived where no store sells ostrich eggs, or if there were no babies in the family. The Department of Education used the grants to dictate strategy and buy compliance with their micro-managing notions about how schools had to be fixed.

“As with many classic reform moves, plenty of folks on the ground level could have told the reformers what was wrong with their plan. But as DeVos’s comments show, the damage of School Improvement Grants is not only in wasted money, it’s also in convicting the wrong suspect and discrediting a whole reform approach.

“DeVos and other conservative reformers are taking the real lesson of the grant program’s failure: “spending money on the wrong thing for schools doesn’t help,” and shortening it to a far more damaging assessment: “spending money on schools doesn’t help.”

“The Obama-Duncan-King program didn’t just fail, they say, but it also helped discredit the whole idea of funding schools at all. Thanks Obama.”

Given the miserable failure of school choice in Michigan and Detroit, you would think DeVos was open to reflecting on the error of her ideas. But don’t make that mistake. Her ideas of school “reform” are based on ideology and theology. They won’t change. They can’t be proved or disproved. They are set in stone. Evidence doesn’t matter.

If allowed to do her wishes, public schools will be defunded (they are “godless”), unions will disappear, for-profit entrepreneurs will cash in, and a million weeds will bloom.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Funding, Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top, Vouchers

Valerie Strauss: Democrats Paved the Way for Betsy DeVos

By dianeravitch
January 21, 2017 //
41

 

 

Valerie Strauss wrote an excellent article about the hypocrisy of Democrats who now loudly oppose Billionaire Betsy DeVos, but spent the last eight years bashing teachers, unions, and public schools while pouring billions of dollars into the proliferation of privately-managed charter schools. Once Democrats became cheerleaders for school choice, they abandoned the principle that public schools under democratic control are a fundamental public responsibility.

 

I urge you to read this article, which recounts the perfidy of Democrats who fell for privatization and betrayed public education. In many cases, support for charter schools opened the door to billionaires and hedge funder donations, to groups like Democrats for Education Reform and Education Reform Now and Families for Excellent Schools. Think Corey Booker, Andrew Cuomo, Dannell Malloy. Think of the silence of the Democrats as the U.S. Department of Education spent more than $3 billion on charter schools. How do they now express opposition to DeVos’s love for charters (and vouchers). She has exposed their hypocrisy.

 

Both of my last two books are about this theme–how the Democrats embraced privatization and opened the door to vouchers.

 

So I have to add a couple of points to her accurate summary:

 

In March 2011, President Obama and Secretary Duncan were in Miami with Jeb Bush to celebrate the “turnaround” of Miami Central High School. At the same time, thousands of working people were protesting the anti-labor policies of Scott Walker in Madison. Neither Obama nor Duncan ever showed up in Madison to show support for the teachers and union members who support Democrats.

 

The other point that needs to be added is that a month after Obama, Arne, and Jeb met to toast the turnaround of Miami Central, the state education Department in Florida listed it as a “failing” school that should be closed. I reported this in “Reign of Error.” The press never did report it. Why were Obama and Arne burnishing Jeb’s “credentials” as a “reformer?” Paving the way for Jeb’s good friend Betsy DeVos.

 

Let’s see if Democrats rediscover the importance of public education, where all kids are welcome, no lottery, no exclusion of kids with disabilities. In public schools, not every child can get admission to every school, but every child must be served and enrolled. Not some, but all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

have to add

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing, Vouchers, Walker, Scott, Wisconsin

Study Finds that $3.5 Billion Spent by Duncan on “School Improvement Grants” Had No Effect

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2017 //
39

A new evaluation published by Mathematica Policy Research concluded that the School Improvement Grant strategies promoted by former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan were ineffective.

 

Schools that received School Improvement Grants (SIG) to implement school intervention models used more of the practices promoted by these models than schools that did not receive grants. However, the SIG-funded models had no effect on student achievement, according to a new report released by the U.S. Department of Education. Through $3.5 billion dollars in grants in 2010, the SIG program aimed to improve student achievement in the nation’s lowest-performing schools. This is the final report from the multiyear SIG evaluation led and conducted by Mathematica Policy Research, with partners American Institutes for Research and Social Policy Research Associates, for the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences.

 

These schools implemented one of four strategies recommended by the U.S. Department of Education:

 

  1. Transformation: replace the principal, use student test scores to evaluate teachers, use data to inform instruction, and lengthen the school day or year;
  2. Turnaround: replace the principal, replace at least 50% of the staff, use data to inform instruction, lengthen the school day or year;
  3. Restart: convert to charter school;
  4. Closure: close the school and send students to higher-achieving schools.

 

“There are several possible reasons why the SIG program had no impact on student achievement,” says Lisa Dragoset, a senior researcher at Mathematica and director of the evaluation. “One possible reason is that the program did not lead to a large increase in the number of SIG-promoted practices that schools used. It is also possible that the practices were ineffective or not well implemented.”

 

Wow! $3.5 billion down the drain. $3.5 billion that might have been used to reduce class sizes for struggling students, that might have been used to create health clinics for needy students, that might have been used to fund orchestras and teachers of the arts.

 

While we are all shaking our heads over Betsy DeVos and her evangelical agenda, we have to save a few shakes of the head for the disastrous education legacy of the Obama administration, which spent billions on testing, privatization, closing schools, invalid teacher evaluations, Common Core, and other ineffective strategies.

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing

Owen Davis: How Pearson Made a Killing from the US Testing Mania

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2017 //
17

Journalist Owen Davis explains in this article how the giant British education publisher Pearson made a killing as American politicians went gaga for standardized testing.

it is important to bear in mind that annual standardized testing is neither necessary nor customary. No other nation requires every child in grades 3-8 to take standardized tests every year. The US didn’t do it either until after the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001. NCLB was a bonanza for Pearson and other testing companies. They beefed up their lobbying operations to make sure that the testing industry was well protected in DC and in state capitols. One of the architects of NCLB, Sandy Kress, went home to Dallas and became a well-paid lobbyist for Pearson.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Pearson, Race to the Top, Standardized Testing, Testing

Alan Singer: Education Policy from Obama to Trump

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2016 //
20

Alan Singer greatly admires President Obama, as do I, except for his disastrous education policies, which laid the groundwork for privatization and deprofessionalization of teaching. Public school educators were scolded again and again by Arne Duncan for their alleged failings and their alleged low standards.

 

Singer here reviews the Obama record and tries to find something positive to say about the “reform” agenda of the past 15 years. Try as he might, he can’t find much to praise.

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing

Another Bad Report Card for Race to the Top

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2016 //
55

Back in 2009, when Arne Duncan announced the Race to the Top competition, he said we as a nation would literally be “racing to the top” of international competition by adopting his favored ideas: expanding charter schools, evaluating teachers to a significant degree by the test scores of their students, “turning around” low-scoring schools by radical measures such as closing them, creating state and national data storehouses to track students, and adopting “college and career-ready standards” (aka, the Common Core). Almost every state fell in line, because they had to do what Arne wanted in order to be eligible for a share of $4.35 billion.

 

But the report cards have not been kind to these “reforms.” When the National Assessment of Education Progress issued its regular report in 2015, test scores were flat or declining in most states.

 

Now the latest international test scores are out, and the U.S. has made no gains. We are not racing to the top. We are standing still. Why? Because Race to the Top did not address the root causes of academic failure: poverty and racial segregation. Charter schools have produced marginal gains at best, with some far worse than public schools. Evaluating teachers by test scores has been an abject failure, criticized by the nation’s leading scholarly organizations, including the American Statistical Association, which is not an arm of reformer-dreaded teachers’ unions or the “status quo.”

 

Here is today’s report from politico.com:

 

PISA RESULTS: BAD NEWS IN MATH: American 15-year-olds are getting worse at applying their math skills in the real world, when compared to their international peers. The 2015 Program for International Student Assessment results are out and they show a drop in “mathematics literacy” scores for U.S. students since 2012 and 2009. “Of particular concern is that we also have a higher percentage of students who score in the lowest performance levels … and a lower percentage of top math performers” compared to the international average, said Peggy Carr, acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which released the results. The disappointing numbers come after results on another international study – the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study – recently showed gains made by U.S. fourth and eighth graders in math since 1995.

 

– U.S. science and reading literacy scores weren’t much different from previous years. Boys outperformed girls in science and math, while girls outperformed boys in reading. Scores for Massachusetts, North Carolina and Puerto Rico were broken out for international benchmarking purposes, and revealed that Massachusetts students, on average, are outperforming students in the U.S. and worldwide in all three subjects. North Carolina students were comparable with U.S. average scores and Puerto Rican students fared worse. PISA measures the performance of 15-year-olds every three years in three subjects across dozens of education systems worldwide. Check out the results here .

 

– Education Secretary John B. King Jr. is in Massachusetts today to hail the state’s success with PISA – while noting that the nation as a whole is “losing ground.” According to prepared remarks, King will say that it’s “a troubling prospect when, in today’s knowledge-based economy, the best jobs can go anywhere in the world. Students in Massachusetts, Maryland, and Minnesota aren’t just vying for great jobs along with their neighbors or across state lines, they must be competitive with peers in Finland, Germany, and Japan.” King will say that Massachusetts embodies the importance of perseverance. “The PISA results announced today for Massachusetts didn’t happen instantly or by accident,” he’ll say. “It has taken years of people showing courage – principals, teachers, parents, students, and state and district leaders. It has taken years of overcoming challenges. It has taken years to make real and meaningful change happen. And it will take time to see the work we are continuing to do today truly pay off for students.” More on King’s visit.

 

– Other noteworthy highlights: U.S. students value a career in science and have high expectations of having a science career, but they’re falling short when it comes to skills. Countries like Finland, Germany, Switzerland and Japan are also seeing better student outcomes than the U.S., while investing fewer hours in actual teaching – giving teachers more time for professional development and advancing their careers.

 

As I have often written before, the international test scores do not predict the future of our economy or anything else. Scores on standardized tests measure family income and income inequality. If you want to know more, read my chapter in “Reign of Error” on international tests and what they mean and do not mea.

Categories Duncan, Arne, Failure, International, Race to the Top

Arthur Camins: U.S. Schools Don’t Fail at Test Scores, They Fail at Teaching Citizenship

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2016 //
28

Arthur Camins, director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, writes frequently about education issues.

In this post, written a year ago, he warned that the real problem in education is that we fail to prepare our students for the challenges of citizenship. The post was prophetic.

The phrase college and career readiness has become ubiquitous in education debates, but as a slogan without significant transformational direction. Of course, students should leave K-12 education with the knowledge and skills to succeed in the next phase of their lives. Of course, students’ experiences should open rather than restrict their choices and opportunities when they graduate. Of course, they should all graduate. Of course, young people need to develop the knowledge, skills and dispositions to be successful in the world of work. Ignoring that would be an irresponsible abdication, especially for students whose parents already struggle to make a decent living. It’s not that that these are misplaced goals. They are just insufficient.

We need an education system intentionally designed to engage students to understand their values and to learn how to become effective citizens. Which questions teachers ask or do not ask influences how their students understand the world and their role in it.

There are ways to teach that promote passivity, he writes. And there are ways to teach that encourage active engagement:

In the past, how have people worked together to improve the human condition in different societies? What has supported and thwarted those efforts? What features of governments support or impede peaceful resolution of conflicts? How do scientists make discoveries? How do engineers design solutions that improve people’s lives? How do literature and the arts help us understand and value one another and our environment? How can mathematics be used to help make better decisions? What changes are you interested in investigating? These are change-oriented questions that affirm students’ capacities and encourage them to imagine themselves as agents of improvement. These are engaging motivational questions. When student engage in such action-directed learning they can develop the values, confidence and mindset to make things better.

We need a rebirth in the teaching of history and civics. We need more than ever to teach students the importance of living together with others in peace and mutual respect. We need to teach them to respect the humanity and individuality of others.

Perhaps this is the state we are in after 16 years of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, focused exclusively on test scores, standardized testing, basic skills, and getting the right answer.

Civics is about asking the right questions, and questioning why those questions are “right,” not picking a bubble and saying it is the “right answer.”

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

Mike Klonsky: Did Arne Duncan Help Trump Win the Election?

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2016 //
31

Mike Klonsky wonders whether Arne Duncan’s patronizing comments about parents and critics of high-stakes testing helped Donald Trump win the election.

When 20% of the parents in New York opted out of the state testing, he sneered at them and said they were white suburban parents who found out that their child wasn’t so bright after all. This was rank condescension.

When Duncan used Race to the Top billions to bribe states into adopting Common Core, he continued to insist that Common Core was a project of the states. He became the nation’s leading cheerleader for Common Core, and he ridiculed the critics. The critics were vociferous, especially in the Midwest.

Throughout his time in office, Duncan celebrated the successes of charter schools, wherever he could find them, and barely noticed public schools. Last month, before Massachusetts voted on Question 2, Duncan turned up in Boston to argue that expansion of charters was unquestionably a good thing. Despite his ringing endorsement, Question 2 was soundly defeated in almost every district in the state.

I don’t know whether Duncan helped Trump win by making public school parents angry, but he most certainly paved the way for the full-throated privatization that Trump is now pressing. Who would have thought that Arne Duncan and Donald Trump would be on the same team, cheering for more school choice, more charters, more privatization? Trump took it to the next level and threw in vouchers. Once you endorse school choice and launch an assault on the very principle of public education, it is hard to walk it back.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Race to the Top, School Choice, Testing, Trump, Vouchers
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