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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

NAISON: DO NOT WATCH THIS VIDEO!

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2013 //
15

Mark NAISON, professor of African-American studies at Fordham University, co-founded the BATs.

BATs are everywhere. They think high-stakes testing is child abuse. They think that evaluating teachers in relation to student test scores is nonsense.

Mark Naison here posts a hilarious parody of New York’s educator evaluation system, untested, being built in mid-air, that old airplane cliche.

If you are angry about high-stakes testing, watch it.

If you are upset about the loss of teacher autonomy and professionalism, watch it.

If you want to laugh out loud, watch it.

If you work for the New York State Education Department, DO NOT WATCH IT.

Be careful, laughter is dangerous.

Categories Common Core, Education Industry, Humor, New York, Parents, Race to the Top

Brock Cohen: Schools That Fell into the Rabbit Hole

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2013 //
3

Brock Cohen taught for a dozen years in the public
schools and is now pursuing a graduate degree. Here
he tries to explain the madness of local, state, and
federal mandates that crush teachers, principals and schools as
they labor under the burden of being labeled a “failing school.”
Here is a sample of how these mandates destroy schools instead of
helping them: “Most of my 12-plus years as a high school teacher
have been spent in a Title I Los Angeles-area public high school
that is perennially labeled with Program Improvement (P.I.)
probationary status. Being branded as such means continually having
to grapple with a host of federal, state, and local sanctions that,
at best, cast pall of shame over the entire school and at worst
cause direct harm to student learning outcomes. “Program
Improvement,” incidentally, is bureaucratic vernacular for
“failing,” which is ironic, since many of the California schools
designated with this term have actually been meeting or exceeding
their school-wide Academic Performance Index (API) goals for years.
I know: I don’t get it either. So what gives? “Here’s a hint: the
fundamental problem of “failing” schools isn’t lurking within the
decaying brick and mortar of dilapidated school walls. It does,
however, lurk within a dilapidated system that stubbornly refuses
to transform itself into what it should – or could – be. This
autocratic paradigm tries to paper over outdated or incoherent
curricula, abysmally low organizational capacity and scripted
“test-best” instructional mandates with a new generation of
high-stakes tests and massive rollouts of iPads. It also includes
the cynical but rosy rhetoric of school leaders and media pundits
who call for teachers and principals to work their way through this
manufactured crisis – to Teach Like a Champion! – as if balling
one’s fists and punching a concrete wall harder, harder, HARDER!
could ever serve as a template for reconstituting a building’s
framework. “The problem also lurks within an ethos that continually
fails to realize that our hallowed learning and achievement targets
actually descend into an abysmal rabbit hole. Without delving too
deeply into this abyss, let’s just say that data collection isn’t
inherently a bad thing. But the performance indicators on which
we’ve chosen to fixate have rendered the whole process pointless
and fantastically detrimental to the cognitive growth of a
generation of students. That leaders and practitioners have been
somehow coerced into believing that learning indicators are
something that can be reflected in the crudeness of high-stakes
standardized test scores reveals the extent to which intellectual
atrophy has devolved into an institutionalized norm.” Read it all
and weep for the children and those who are trying their best to
educate them.

Categories Accountability, Closing schools, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top

Resmovits: Texas Gets NCLB Waiver, But–Gasp!–Obama Goals Equally Impossible

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2013 //
19

I confess I have not followed all the twists and turns of the proposals to reauthorize the failed No Child Left Behind law. Almost everyone except its original sponsors agrees that it failed, yet Congress is locked into the same stale assumption that the federal government is supposed to find a magical formula to measure test scores and punish teachers, principals, and schools. Congress, in its wisdom, has forgotten that this school-level “accountability” didn’t exist until January 2002, when NCLB was signed into law by President George W. Bush. Having learned nothing from the failure of NCLB, they can’t now agree on what comes next.

In this story on Huffington Post, Joy Resmovits notes the irony that even Texas–yes, Texas–has asked for a waiver from the disastrous law that was foisted on the nation’s school by not only George W. Bush, and not only his advisers Margaret Spellings and Dandy Kress, but also Democrats George Miller of California and Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts.

Now, everyone laughs at the idea that 100% of students were going to be proficient by 2014. What a dumb idea to set an impossible goal. And how cruel to fire teachers and close schools that could not reach an impossible goal.

But look at this:

“Under the waiver, Texas will no longer subscribe to the much-derided “Adequate Yearly Progress” system that measures school performance and requires all students to demonstrate proficiency in reading and math by the 2013-2014 school year. Instead, it will use a new accountability system that expects 100 percent of students to be proficient in reading and math by the 2019-2020 school year.”

What’s this? The Obama administration expects “100 percent of students to be proficient in reading and math by the 2019-2020 year”?

Here we go again.

No nation in the world has 100% proficiency. Doesn’t anyone in DC have a fresh idea? Like one that has some connection to common sense.

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Obama, Race to the Top, Texas, U.S. Department of Education

Arne Duncan’s Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad Day

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2013 //
29

Are the supporters of corporate reform coming unglued?

Mike Klonsky thinks so. Of a sudden, Secretary Arne Duncan says his critics are “inhabitants of this alternative universe.” What has happened to make him angry? Why would he mischaracterize critics as people who insist that we can’t fix the schools until we fix poverty. I don’t know anyone who makes that claim. Duncan, au contraire, seems to think that the way to “fix” the schools  is with more testing, more merit pay, more charters, more test-based evaluation of teachers, more school closings. No one, including Duncan, has ever explained how his way will fix the schools or someday fix poverty.

Jersey Jazzman says that Duncan’s rant reached “new depths of sanctimony.” He writes: “No one is saying schools shouldn’t be improved. Perhaps someone should draw a warm bath for the SecEd so he can rest his weary, weary arms after the toil of building so many straw men. The plain fact is that no one here in the “bubble” has ever said our schools are “just fine.”

The Jazzman offers a simple list (created by Rutgers’ Bruce Baker) of the determinants of low-performing schools. These are the factors that stand out: high proportions of low-income students; high proportions of minority students; high proportions of English language learners; larger class sizes.

Here, says Jersey Jazzman, is what Secretary Duncan doesn’t know or refuses to acknowledge:

The link between poverty and learning is the most obvious thing in the world. It is ridiculous to pretend that firing a few more teachers based on student test scores or starting a few more charter schools or giving out vouchers or implementing merit pay will overcome the challenges facing a child living in poverty.
 
I, and everyone else in the “bubble,” do believe well-resourced schools can help ameliorate the effects of poverty — to a degree. But the problems of chronic poverty and inequity in this country have far more to do with a regressive tax code, a capital market that is little better than a rigged casino, a lack of a living minimum wage, a monetary policy that puts full employment on the back burner, and a whole host of other public policies that have nothing to do with public schools.
Wendy Lecker, a civil rights attorney writing in the Stamford (CT) Advocate, says that Arne Duncan is living in an “alternate universe.” She says that Duncan insists that standardized tests are necessary to tell us the truth about our students’ poor performance, but Lecker points out that state officials game the system to tell us whatever they want about the test results. In some states, they set the bar high, to produce failure, while in others, they adjust it downward to make themselves look better. She writes:
These test scores are not objective. Student success, school quality and teacher effectiveness are all political moving targets, set by officials far removed from students and schools. Secretary Duncan is the one in an alternate universe, and our students, teachers and taxpayers are paying the price.
Secretary Duncan is angry because his narrative, his claim that our schools are failing, and only his plans can save them, is falling apart. Teachers and principals are angry and demoralized. The backlash against high-stakes testing gets larger every day. The opt out movement is growing. Education Week reported that Duncan has spent $100 billion, and what results are there?
According to the same story:
In contrast to the early years of the Obama administration, Mr. Duncan is now “wildly unpopular,” said Maria Ferguson, the executive director of the Center on Education Policy at George Washington University. “He’s got three years to secure his legacy and defend his record,” she said. “I’m not sure he’s going to have the ammo to do that.”It is easy to be popular when you are handing out $100 billion. Not so easy when all you have left is a bully pulpit to urge people to keep doing what doesn’t work.

Categories Race to the Top, Testing
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