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More NY School Districts Withdraw from Race to Top

By dianeravitch
November 15, 2013 //
20

The number of suburban districts in New York State dropping out of the state’s Race to the Top program continues to grow, largely because of parent concern about the data-mining of their children’s private records. These districts received relatively small amounts of money in exchange for accepting many mandates.

This article sums up the current situation:

Twenty-eight school districts in the Lower Hudson Valley have dropped out of the Race to the Top program in recent weeks, largely due to state plans to share student records with a privately run database, a survey has found.

Four more districts will consider the move within a week, and several others may do so in time.

The Lower Hudson Council of School Superintendents surveyed 76 districts, including special act districts, in Westchester, Rockland, Putnam and Dutchess counties. Of the 53 districts that responded, more than half have pulled out of Race to the Top since last month — forfeiting mostly small federal grants. Another 10 districts never took part in the program.

“Our concerns have to do with how the state can guarantee thedata will be secure in the future,” said South Orangetown Superintendent Kenneth Mitchell, president of the superintendents group.

The state Board of Regents wants to send about 400 categories of student records, starting with names, to inBloom, a nonprofit group, so that educators can better analyze student needs. But local school officials and parents have expressed grave concerns over how the encrypted data — from disciplinary to health to income records — could be used down the line.

In addition, the following information comes from the Lower Hudson Council of School Superintendents:

Opting out

Districts that dropped out of Race to the Top: Bedford, Brewster, Byram Hills, Carmel, Croton-Harmon, Dobbs Ferry, Eastchester, Elmsford, Garrison, Greenburgh Graham, Hastings, Hendrick Hudson, Hyde Park, Irvington, Lakeland, Mahopac, Mamaroneck, Mount Pleasant, Pearl River, Pelham, Pleasantville, Pocantico Hills, Rye Neck, Somers, South Orangetown, Spackenkill, Tuckahoe and Yorktown.
Districts that never joined RTTT: Ardsley, Blind Brook, Briarcliff Manor, Bronxville, Chappaqua, Edgemont, Harrison, Putnam Valley, Rye City and Scarsdale. 
Source: Lower Hudson Council of School Superintendents

Twenty-eight school districts in the Lower Hudson Valley have dropped out of the Race to the Top program in recent weeks, largely due to state plans to share student records with a privately run database, a survey has found.

Four more districts will consider the move within a week, and several others may do so in time.

The Lower Hudson Council of School Superintendents surveyed 76 districts, including special act districts, in Westchester, Rockland, Putnam and Dutchess counties. Of the 53 districts that responded, more than half have pulled out of Race to the Top since last month — forfeiting mostly small federal grants. Another 10 districts never took part in the program.

“Our concerns have to do with how the state can guarantee the data will be secure in the future,” said South Orangetown Superintendent Kenneth Mitchell, president of the superintendents group.

The state Board of Regents wants to send about 400 categories of student records, starting with names, to inBloom, a nonprofit group, so that educators can better analyze student needs. But local school officials and parents have expressed grave concerns over how the encrypted data — from disciplinary to health to income records — could be used down the line.

“We haven’t gotten real clear answers,” said Hendrick Hudson Superintendent Joseph Hochreiter, whose district opted out Wednesday night. “In the absence of certainty, districts are opting out and losing trust.”

On Wednesday, lawyers representing a dozen New York City parents filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the state from shipping records to the inBloom.

Illinois is the only other state fully committed to inBloom, which is struggling to find support for a national database of student records.

Districts have dropped out of Race to the Top to avoid having to choose a state-sponsored data “portal” that will connect to inBloom’s database. But state officials insist that districts have to contribute much of the same data.

“There is a sense that the student privacy issue has awoken a sleeping giant in parents, even more so than testing,” said Susan Elion Wollin, president of the Bedford school board, which withdrew Wednesday, and president of the Westchester-Putnam School Boards Association. “We all want what’s best for the kids, but people need to hear what the state is doing to accommodate concerns.”

Districts that dropped out of Race to the Top still have to use the Common Core learning standards and tests.

Source: Lower Hudson Council of School Superintendents

 

Categories New York, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Race to the Top

More Districts in New York Drop Out of Race to the Top

By dianeravitch
November 10, 2013 //
24

More than 20 school districts in the Lower Hudson Valley region have announced that they are dropping out of New York state’s Race to the Top, due to concerns about student privacy.

“Officials say there is no way to know how the data, which identifies students and includes disciplinary and health records, will be used in the future. They say they are concerned about colleges and employers seeking childhood records, the involvement of private interests like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in inBloom, and a state document that outlined plans for various agencies to share information for an individual’s “lifetime.”

“This is a watershed moment,” Pleasantville Superintendent Mary Fox-Alter said. “We are seeing distrust breed among parents.”

The state Education Department has started sending general information to inBloom and is scheduled to begin uploading student information this winter.

More than 20 districts in the Lower Hudson Valley have pulled out of New York’s participation in the federal Race to the Top initiative, hoping that doing so will allow them to withhold certain data. Since the state has said that this strategy will not work, districts are now writing to inBloom directly and requesting that their student records be deleted.

The superintendents drafted a model letter to inBloom asking to withdraw their student data. Their spokesman said that if inBloom refused, they would consider other strategies.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, New York, Race to the Top

A Teacher in New Jersey Reacts to Maya Angelou’s Criticism of Race to Top

By dianeravitch
November 10, 2013 //
24

This anonymous teacher liked Maya Angelou’s criticism of Race to the Top.

She wrote:

“She states, “Race To The Top feels to be more like a contest… not what did you learn, but how much can you memorize.” “Writers are really interested in forming young men and women,” she said. “… ‘This is your world.’ ‘ This is your country.’ ‘ This is your time.’ And so I don’t think you can get that by racing to the top.”

Yes and more…Race To The Top is segregating schools. It is designed to fail and it is destroying public schools, the teaching profession and the hearts and souls of our public school teachers. NCLB set benchmarks that ensure that every school will eventually fail systematically underfunded the most needy schools. RttT is throwing wrenches into working school systems with high stakes testing, SGOs and teacher evaluation systems that are designed to find failure.

In NJ the State requires that teachers receive 3-4 observations/year. That may not sound bad – but this is what it looks like in our school district – each administrator has to perform 65 observations, which include a pre and post conference. There are 180 days in our school year. Do the math. This does not include APR reports that range from 10-20 pages per employee. Administrators are shut behind closed doors, taking days off of work to write reports – they are not running schools. Teachers are not being trained in the new requirements and then being held accountable for the results of them. It is feels like a perpetual train wreck in action. And for what? New Jersey Public Schools rank #2-3 in the nation. We are not failure factories…but may soon be.

Categories Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations

Maya Angelou to Obama: Stop the Standardized Testing

By dianeravitch
November 10, 2013 //
49

Maya Angelou, the Pulitzer-Prize winning author, was one of 120 writers and illustrators who called on President Obama to cut back on the deluge of standardized testing promoted by his administration.

The 120 authors and illustrators issued the following statement to the President:

We the undersigned children’s book authors and illustrators write to express our concern for our readers, their parents and teachers. We are alarmed at the negative impact of excessive school testing mandates, including your Administration’s own initiatives, on children’s love of reading and literature. Recent policy changes by your Administration have not lowered the stakes. On the contrary, requirements to evaluate teachers based on student test scores impose more standardized exams and crowd out exploration.

We call on you to support authentic performance assessments, not simply computerized versions of multiple-choice exams. We also urge you to reverse the narrowing of curriculum that has resulted from a fixation on high-stakes testing.

Our public school students spend far too much time preparing for reading tests and too little time curling up with books that fire their imaginations. As Michael Morpurgo, author of the Tony Award Winner War Horse, put it, “It’s not about testing and reading schemes, but about loving stories and passing on that passion to our children.”

Teachers, parents and students agree with British author Philip Pullman who said, “We are creating a generation that hates reading and feels nothing but hostility for literature.” Students spend time on test practice instead of perusing books. Too many schools devote their library budgets to test-prep materials, depriving students of access to real literature. Without this access, children also lack exposure to our country’s rich cultural range.

This year has seen a growing national wave of protest against testing overuse and abuse. As the authors and illustrators of books for children, we feel a special responsibility to advocate for change. We offer our full support for a national campaign to change the way we assess learning so that schools nurture creativity, exploration, and a love of literature from the first day of school through high school graduation.

In addition, Maya Angelou specifically condemned the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program. She said “it is ‘a contest’ that doesn’t help children learn to love to read and get a better understanding of the world.

“She states, “Race To The Top feels to be more like a contest… not what did you learn, but how much can you memorize.” “Writers are really interested in forming young men and women,” she said. “… ‘This is your world.’ ‘ This is your country.’ ‘ This is your time.’ And so I don’t think you can get that by racing to the top.”

Categories Education Reform, Race to the Top, Testing

District in New York Votes to Opt Out of Race to Top

By dianeravitch
November 7, 2013 //
14

At the recommendation of its superintendent, Dr. William M. Donohue, the board of education of the Byram Hills School District in New York unanimously passed a resolution to withdraw from the state’s Race to the Top. Dr. Donohue demonstrated his willingness to think independently, to express his candid views without fear, and to act in the best interest of the students who are in his care. He deserves to be recognized for his integrity and clear thinking. I am happy to add Dr. William M. Donohue to our list of champions of public education.

Here is Dr. Donohue’s recommendation to his board:

Superintendent’s Recommendation Re: Race To The Top (RTTT)

Board of Education Meeting of November 5, 2013

 

 

Race To The Top has been much in the news lately, and the frustrations with how it is being implemented by the Commissioner, Chancellor, and State Education Department are surfacing from the public, much as they already have with school boards and superintendents. The Commissioner’s last two public meetings reflected general dissatisfaction with his initiatives, as was widely reported in the press. 

At the current time, districts in RTTT are required to select a Data Dashboard, which has brought to light concerns about security, especially with regard to what kind of student information is being stored, by whom, and how it is to be used and released to third parties. I attended a meeting on October 24 with the state’s data experts and RTTT administrators that was demanded by 36 of our region’s superintendents. The state officials could not, or would not, answer most of our questions; asking to get back to us. I found they were surprised by the strong stance of superintendents, who view protecting student data as a primary responsibility, and they were somewhat incredulous that security of data is a concern. When they got back to us, the answers were direct and provided helpful information. They also acknowledged that their answers were edited by SED counsel. The bottom line seems to be that student data will go to InBloom, a private data storage company, regardless of participation in RTTT. However, the next phase of RTTT data collection involves providing even more sensitive information, including student discipline records. This is a major concern, and it is not clear if all districts will be required to participate in that phase. It is clear that either the district or the state can unilaterally authorize the data to be released to third parties for various reasons. State officials have privately acknowledged that contracts already exist with commercial enterprises, including Amazon.com.

 

There are other outstanding issues of concern with RTTT, of course, including: excessive testing of students; the rush to implement Common Core and high stakes Common Core based Regents Exams for high school students; the validity of using test scores for teacher evaluations; the micro-management of districts’ teacher and principal evaluation systems; the exclusion of school boards and superintendents from any planning or input; the apparent commercialization of public education at taxpayer’s expense; and the ever-increasing costs of implementation, including computer based testing for every student. It really should be no surprise that by reducing local control, RTTT threatens to make Byram Hills less able to achieve academic excellence, less able to meet our students’ individual needs, less able to select appropriate programs for our students and community, more costly to operate, and ultimately less attractive to home buyers.

 

Given all of the above, I recommend that the Board vote to “opt-out” of our RTTT agreement with the State. I base my recommendation on my immediate practical concern about the upcoming demands for more sensitive information about student data, and the fact that we will have, at best, limited control over how the data is released, mined, and used by others who have no relationship to our students or the school district. Although it is not clear that opting out of RTTT will actually affect our participation, it will send notice to the state that we, like many others, are not satisfied with their security plan. Beyond practical matters, I think it is appropriate that we opt-out of RTTT because we can no longer, in good conscience, be part of such a misguided and poorly executed plan. The recommendation is not without costs, as we will not be eligible for our final payment of about $3,500 from New York’s share of the Race To The Top federal grant. About half of that amount will be made up by expenses we will forgo by not having to implement the data dashboard. Nevertheless, I think it behooves us to assert that we have no confidence in the way the state is implementing Race To The Top, that we view it as counterproductive to our goal of achieving excellence, and that we can no longer be party to it. Let me add that since the superintendents meeting with the state officials, more than twenty districts in our region have reported that they intend to pull out. At least eight others have already pulled out, or never joined. It seems likely that districts on Long Island will soon follow suit. And so, I think our message will be heard, if only for the strength of numbers and for the threat it poses to the state’s plan to apply for a follow-up grant extending its commitment to RTTT. 

 

 

 

Categories Honor Roll, New York, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Race to the Top

Race to the Top=A Pig in a Poke

By dianeravitch
October 31, 2013 //
28

When states won millions in Race to the Top funding, they
found themselves required to spend more than they received from the
federal government. One
careful study reported that school districts in New York
had to spend almost $11 million, in exchange for $400,000 from the
federal government.

School districts are spending billions to offer and test the Common Core standards, which have until recently been untested. Now that they were tested in Kentucky and New York, we know that the Common Core tests cause a dramatic score decline.

This, Race to the Top offered $4.35 billion to 11 states and DC but will cost the nation tens of billions that might have been spent to build health clinics or support pre-K or the arts.

As it happens, few of RTTT’s costly mandates
have any evidence to support them. So districts are forced to spend
more at the same time they are getting budgets cut–or in the case
of New York–at the same time that the legislature enacted a tax
cap that prevents them from finding. New revenues unless they get a
popular vote of at least 60%. The result: larger classes, program
cuts, less money for everything schools need in order to satisfy
Washington’s evidence-free mandates.

What is a pig in a poke?

This is the Wikipedia definition: “The English colloquialisms such as
turn out to be a pig in a poke or buy a pig in a poke mean that
something is sold or bought without the buyer knowing its true
nature or value, especially when buying without inspecting the item
beforehand. The phrase can also be applied to accepting an idea or
plan without a full understanding of its basis. Similar expressions
exist in other European languages, most of them referring to the
purchase of a cat in a bag. The advice being given is ‘don’t buy a
pig until you have seen it’. This is enshrined in British
commercial law as ‘caveat emptor’ – Latin for ‘let the buyer
beware’. This remains the guiding principle of commerce in many
countries and, in essence, supports the view that if you buy
something you take responsibility to make sure it is what you
intended to buy. A poke is a sack or bag. It has a French origin as
‘poque’ and, like several other French words, its diminutive is
formed by adding ‘ette’ or ‘et’ – hence ‘pocket’ began life with
the meaning ‘small bag’. Poke is still in use in several
English-speaking countries, notably Scotland and the USA, and
describes just the sort of bag that would be useful for carrying a
piglet to market. A pig that’s in a poke might turn out to be no
pig at all. If a merchant tried to cheat by substituting a lower
value animal, the trick could be uncovered by letting the cat out
of the bag. Many other European languages have a version of this
phrase – most of them translating into English as a warning not to
‘buy a cat in a bag’. The advice has stood the test of time and
people have been repeating it in one form or the other for getting
on for five hundred years, maybe longer.”

Categories New York, Race to the Top

Melissa Harris Perry: Fabulous

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2013 //
90

Friends, I was interviewed this morning on MSNBC by Melissa Harris Perry and was incredibly impressed by her. Unlike most TV journalists, she had actually read the book.

She asked smart questions. She really gets it.

This was the best conversation I have yet participated in on national TV, including the panel that followed. No “Gotcha” questions, just a thoughtful effort to assess some important issues.

Here is the link: http://www.msnbc.com/melissa-harris-perry/watch/the-case-against-school-privatization-57195587667

Diane

Categories Corporate Reformers, Poverty, Race to the Top, Reign of Error

Pleasantville Schools Withdraw from Race to Top to Protect Student Privacy

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2013 //
26

The superintendent of schools in Pleasantville, New York, announced that the district was returning its Race to the Top funding and withdrawing from Race to the Top.

The reason: the district wants to protect the privacy of its students. New York is one of the few states that has agreed to turn over all student data to inBloom, the Gates-funded data mining operation whose software was developed by a company owned by Rupert Murdoch . Since New York is not allowing parents to refuse permission to remove their names from this mammoth database in the “cloud,” the whole district has opted out of RTTT.

“Superintendent Mary Fox-Alter said the district will return grant funds in favor of protecting student privacy. Citing a desire to “protect student privacy,” Pleasantville Union Free School District Superintendent Mary Fox-Alter said she thinks it’s “a really big deal” that the Board of Education voted to withdraw from the federal Race to the Top program.

“The district’s Board voted on a resolution at Tuesday’s meeting to return the $6,000 in grant funds—distributed over the course of four years—that would require Pleasantville to “comply with a number of New York State requirements, including participation in an electronic data portal—a data dashboard,” according to a statement from the schools.”

Apparently, many other districts have also dropped out of Race to the Top:

“In an interview with Patch Friday, Fox-Alter said the “data dashboard” would remotely host student information that ranges from academic programs to immunization records, disciplinary records and attendance.

“This dashboard has the potential to collect over 400 data elements that have been identified in the State Education Department’s data template dictionary,” according to the statement.

“Many of the student-tracking data is already collected—and protected—by the district, according to Fox-Alter.

“Pleasantville already has a password-protected system that provides student information to parents and protects student privacy; the data dashboard required by the State Education Department is both redundant and, through inclusion of personally identifiable information such as discipline flags, immunization shots, attendance, and more, could violate students’ privacy rights,” the statement said.

“Fox-Alter added other area school districts have taken similar measures in the name of protecting student privacy, including Hastings-on-Hudson, Mount Pleasant, Pocantico Hills, Pelham, Rye Neck and Hyde Park.

“The potential for data mining is staggering,” Pleasantville’s Superintendent added. “It is frightening that corporations such as Pearson and EScholar are involved in this data cloud and are forecasting great profit in the K-12 public education market.”

I wonder if this means that the districts do not have to judge their teachers by student test scores or open charter schools?

Imagine: the Pleasantville district was wrapped up in federal mandates and massive invasion of student privacy for only $1500 a year. What a bad deal!

Categories New York, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Race to the Top

Jeff Bryant on “The Empty Harvest” of School Reform

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2013 //
7

Jeff Bryant of the Education Opportunity Network surveys the wreckage of “test-and-punish” methods of reform. Such methods lead not to “reform,” but to bullied teachers, who are demoralized by their situation. Some leave, some hang on, but the results have been unimpressive.

Bryant sees a slow-motion collapse of the coercive “reform” movement, as its bold promises turn out to be empty. The reformers’ day on the hill is coming to an end.

As Bryant writes:

With the advent of No Child Left Behind, the accountability had its mechanism for targeting individual schools, but with the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, the accountability arsenal aimed at individual classroom teachers too.

With Michelle Rhee as its celebrity cheerleader, the school accountability movement became the perfect PR campaign promising a way forward to ever increasing education “effectiveness.”

But all those years of promises for this: Studies can prove that teachers are capable of being manipulated by coercive management systems, but the wealth of improvement stemming from expensive new assessment systems has yet to fill the account left barren by the nation’s reluctance to invest in our children’s education.

Michelle Rhee-like accountability systems that have been in place a substantial amount of time have done no better than the one in D.C. A long-standing system in Tennessee, for instance, has done nothing to improve academic achievement and has revealed “almost nothing about teacher effectiveness.”

The most ardent reform enthusiasts now admit to “overselling, and underthinking [sic]” their cause, even as they try to dispel whatever is being proposed as a positive alternative.

Parents and public officials in places as diverse as rural Virginia and uptown New York Cityare more boisterously questioning the whole premise of ramping up more tests on students to determine the value of their teachers.

As the education reform movement’s empty harvest leads us into a winter of discontent, what’s needed are more proposals from multiple sources for a more positive way forward.

Far beyond the media spotlights focused on reform celebrities like Rhee, other credible voices are calling for a different course for accountability and an agenda based on opportunity and support for learning. No wonder more people are listening.

Categories Corporate Reformers, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Andy Spears: 20 Years of Value-Added Assessment in Tennessee, No Improvement, Zip, Nada

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2013 //
12

Race to the Top placed a $4.45 Billion bet that the way to improve schools was to tie teachers’ evaluations to their students’ test scores.

As it happens, the state of Tennessee has been using value-added assessment for 20 years, though the stakes have not been as high as they are now.

What can we learn from the Tennessee experience. According to Andy Spears of the Tennessee Education Report, well, gosh, sorry: nothing.

Spears has a list of lessons learned. Here are the key takeaways:

“4. Tennessee has actually lost ground in terms of student achievement relative to other states since the implementation of TVAAS.

Tennessee received a D on K-12 achievement when compared to other states based on NAEP achievement levels and gains, poverty gaps, graduation rates, and Advanced Placement test scores (Quality Counts 2011, p. 46). Educational progress made in other states on NAEP [from 1992 to 2011] lowered Tennessee’s rankings:

• from 36th/42 to 46th/52 in the nation in fourth-grade math[2]

• from 29th/42 to 42nd/52 in fourth-grade reading[3]

• from 35th/42 to 46th/52 in eighth-grade math

• from 25th/38 (1998) to 42nd/52 in eighth-grade reading.

5. TVAAS tells us almost nothing about teacher effectiveness.

While other states are making gains, Tennessee has remained stagnant or lost ground since 1992 — despite an increasingly heavy use of TVAAS data.

So, if TVAAS isn’t helping kids, it must be because Tennessee hasn’t been using it right, right? Wrong. While education policy makers in Tennessee continue to push the use of TVAAS for items such as teacher evaluation, teacher pay, and teacher license renewal, there is little evidence that value-added data effectively differentiates between the most and least effective teachers.

In fact, this analysis demonstrates that the difference between a value-added identified “great” teacher and a value-added identified “average” teacher is about $300 in earnings per year per student. So, not that much at all. Statistically speaking, we’d call that insignificant. That’s not to say that teachers don’t impact students. It IS to say that TVAAS data tells us very little about HOW teachers impact students.”

Read the whole article.

It is one of the best, most sensible things you will read on value-added assessment. It is a shame that Tennessee has wasted more than $300 million in search of the magic metric that identifies the “best” teachers. It is ridiculous that Congress and the U.S. Department of Education wasted nearly $5 billion to do the same thing, absent any evidence at all. Just think how many libraries they might have kept open, how many health clinics they could have started, how many early childhood programs initiated, how many class sizes reduced for needy kids.

But let’s not confuse the DOE with actual evidence when they have hunches to go on.

Categories Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Tennessee, Testing
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