This poll of DC insiders shows a deep pessimism about the prospects for Common Core and reauthorization of NCLB.
Most interesting observations:
• “Any bandwidth Congress has seems to be devoted to re‐litigating the health care act.”
• “There’s no sense of compromise and no incentive on either side to try to compromise.”
• “Arne Duncan has so mangled federal education at this point that it’s going to take a new administration and secretary to reframe the debate and offer a path forward.”
When should children get on track for college and careers? Is third grade too late? How about kindergarten? Or pre-kindergarten? Or in the womb? It is never too soon, according to those with products you must buy now.
This teacher describes the latest sales pitch:
“The other day I received an email from Pearson promoting their PreK curriculum: OWL: Opening the World of Learning (2011). While the program may be good (I have not seen it to review it), the promotional materials on the website just set me off: “College and Career Readiness Starts in Pre-K”. That section heading infuriated me.
“I am so sick of hearing how we preschool teachers have to prepare kids for Common Core in kindergarten. All of my students need intensive support for their developmental delays in communication, motor, readiness, and/or behavior.
“I am more focused on assisting them in their play explorations, language and counting development. The LAST thing I need to be reminded of is that they are on the track to college and career readiness!”
Heather Vogell, a stellar reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has done in-depth investigative reporting on the standardized tests that now are used to determine the fate of students, teachers, principals, and schools.
She has found a surprising number of errors, though not surprising to those familiar with the testing industry.
Read this article. How should a student respond to questions where all the answers are wrong?
What does it do to students when they realize the questions or answers are wrong?
Here is an idea for this tireless reporter: investigate how much money the testing industry spends to lobby Congress and the states to maintain their hold over the minds of our students and the very definition of education.
Readers, after you read Heather Vogell’s excellent articles, please read Todd Farley’s eye-popping exposé of the testing industry called “Making the Grades.”
You will never forget his description of how student constructed responses are scored and who is doing it (minimum wage temps).
This letter was posted as a comment: “I just sent the
following post to the White House: Dear David Simas, I have
supported President Obama and the Democratic Party for some time.
However, I’m totally fed up and dismayed by Arne Duncan and the US
Department of Education’s assault on Public Education in America.
There are a lot of subjects I don’t have much in-depth knowledge
about. However, I have been a science teacher for the past 27 years
and I believe that I do know a little about educating children. I
want to tell you that the Race To The Top and it’s predecessor, No
Child Left Behind along with the excessive emphasis on Standardized
Testing are KILLING PUBLIC EDUCATION. “There are a lot of
experienced, knowledgeable, and well educated, respected educators
who are screaming at you to please stop this nutty policy which
includes Pay for Performance and the Common Core Curriculum. It is
certainly true that public education in America can be improved,
but not with the solutions that are now being implemented (without
documentation that they will actually work). “These thoughtless
policies are destroying communities, families, children and
teacher’s lives–all in the name of “improving education”. I now
believe that RTTT, NCLB, and the associated standardized testing
that now drives instruction throughout the country is doing greater
harm to our nation that George Bush’s War in Iraq. In its simplest
terms, children cannot be effectively educated by a top down,
force-fed curriculum. They hate it, get bored, and don’t see the
relevance of this test driven education to their lives. “Teachers
are not given the freedom to teach to the kids where they are and
build on their knowledge base. Curriculum content is dictated from
on high. This is the same concept that Joseph Stalin had in Russia
with his 5-year central economic plans. Didn’t work then, won’t
work now. “Educating children is a complex undertaking. It requires
two way, personal interaction between a teacher and student. If
class sizes are too large, that just can’t happen. If a teacher
cannot get his/her students interested and excited about learning,
educating the child is not going to be effective. There are 4 basic
ingredients to a good education: 1) Well trained and dedicated
teachers, 2) small class sizes, 3) adequate resources and a decent
environment to teach in, and 4) giving the teachers freedom to
teach. “Some will argue that this will just cost too much money and
that there are cheaper ways to educate kids. But it just ain’t so.
“Education is not about the money, it’s about the kids. It’s not
about international competition on standardized tests. Those tests
actually measure the wrong things anyway and cost waaaay too much
money. Public education is perhaps the most important bedrock
pillar that makes our nation great. Policies now being put in
place, including RTTT and Common Core Curriculum are destroying it.
Our children and our nation deserve better from you. I will no
longer support this President or the Democratic Party if they
continue on this self destructive path. “Al Tate
altate1122@gmail.com”
The Broader Bolder Approach released
a 100-page report in conjunction with the American
Association of School Administrators lambasting the Obama
administration’s Race to the Top program. RTTT’s goals are
“impossible” and may even be damaging schools, the report said.
RTTT handed out $4.35 billion to 11 states to implement changes for
which there was no evidence, like test-based teacher evaluation.
Critics of the report said that it was too soon to make a judgment
but RTTT funding runs out in one year. “The 100-page report,
released Thursday, argues that policies should tackle the effects
of poverty while simultaneously making schools better. By not
targeting out-of-school factors like nutrition and parental income,
the report says, and by focusing on teacher evaluation systems that
often result in harsh consequences without much useful feedback,
Race to the Top goals are severely mismatched with its
policies.”
For another analysis of the report, see Valerie Strauss’s summation here.
Arthur Camins is director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. When Camins read Paul Thomas’s latest commentary about the lack of evidence behind reform strategies, he wrote the following:
“Over the past several years I have read countless articles and books all saying basically the same thing: The foundations of current education reform – competition, reward, sanctions and consequential testing – are not supported by evidence. In fact, they are contraindicated. Their use as policy levers promotes competition rather than collaboration, teaching to the test rather than deeper sustainable learning and increased school segregation. Many have expressed incredulity that reform supporters ignore evidence. Maybe it is not so surprising.
I think there are two explanations.
The first is the power of ideological blinders and hubris or what I called in an earlier article, The Fog of the Education War. (http://www.arthurcamins.com/?p=36)
The second explanation is different goals and values. I, and many other critics of current reform strategies place high value on education for democratic participation and responsible citizenship, educational equity for all and deeper learning. We have argued that charter schools, merit pay and over-testing undermine those goals. Maybe “reformers” know this too, but do not object. Maybe they want different things. Maybe they accept inequality as a fact of life. And, some may be just out to make a buck.
The question is which road will we choose – improvement for all or just a few. (http://www.arthurcamins.com/?p=191)”
This is a terrific new book with essays showing what a farce the current test-based evaluation of teachers is.
It includes the work of several distinguished scholars who understand that it is farcical to judge teacher “quality” by using the scores on standardized tests.
I was happy to write the introduction.
Read the description and you will want to read the book.
One major finding: No state is using the teacher evaluations to improve instruction, only to punish and reward teachers.
This is a hugely valuable book that will help push back against dumb ideas.
Now here is a first for this blog. A comment that appeared
on the blog by Robert Rendo was picked up and posted by blogger
Jonathan Pelto. It was indeed a brilliant statement, and somehow I
failed to turn it into a post. So
I am taking the post from Jonathan Pelto’s blog and
posting it here so everyone can read it. Rendo explains how Common
Core and the high-stakes testing mandated by No Child Left Behind
and Race to the Top have degraded schooling and education. Here is
a sample: In fact, we have stepped a long way back into a
new epoch of factory style education, where every student is a
widget, and every widget is hyper-inspected along the conveyor belt
to see if its frame will hold up once sold to the consumer, who is
now the future employer. And if the person hired to do the assembly
messes up just a few times, they are fired and replaced. This
process happens knowing full well the conveyor belt is moving at 45
MPH, up from 10 MPH several years ago. Who can
really produce that many widgets when the belt is rolling by so
quickly? It conjures up the imagery of the classic factory
chocolate making scene from “I Love Lucy”. But
it’s anything but cute or funny. Students are
not widgets. Teachers are not robots. The process of teaching and
learning is a humanistic endeavor. There are bonds to be forged,
even while measuring situations and outcomes with data. The data
used to help contribute indispensably to that human bond.
Presently, the bonding has been devalued, thrown aside, and the
data has become the new humanism.
Here is the transcript from the Diane Rehm show and its interview with Arne Duncan. This is the interview where Duncan said he was “not familiar’ with the Justice Department lawsuit seeking to block vouchers in Louisiana because they will undermine court-ordered desegregation.
Two others were interviewed about Duncan’s policies: Mike Petrilli of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Richard Rothstein of the liberal Economic Policy Institute.
Rothstein was asked whether Duncan was the most powerful and influential education secretary ever:
“Oh, yes, he certainly has because he’s had enormous flexibility without congressional authorization as a result of the stimulus bill and the Raise to the Top funds. The problem is that he’s got an entirely incoherent approach to education policy which, as I said, is doing enormous harm. He ended his comments before with promoting the importance of early childhood education. I fully agree with that.
“Everybody who studies student achievement knows that the one most important factors affecting student achievements is whether children come to school in the first place prepared to learn, whether they’ve had good literacy experiences in early childhood where they’ve had high-quality care. He promotes that. It’s very important. It’s wonderful that he promotes it.
“But then he turns around and advocates and implements an aggressive accountability policy which holds schools accountable for the same results whether or not their children have had high quality early childhood instruction. If early childhood is really as important as he says it is, and I think it is, how can you hold schools accountable for high standards and high accomplishment if children haven’t had those early childhood experiences?
“So, on the one hand, he advocates all the right things, early childhood. He advocates health clinics in schools. He advocates after-school programs and has promised neighborhoods program.
“But when it comes to actually implementing an accountability system, it makes no difference. It has no effect whatsoever.
“His Race to the Top program, for example, gave states no points for whether they had early childhood programs or health clinics in schools or after-school programs. And so he talks a good game when it comes to all of these important influences in education, but when it comes down to the actual accountability policies that he’s promoting, they have no effect whatsoever.”
Rothstein said earlier in the exchange:
“Well, the key point he made, which I think has been lost in the debate, is there’s a big difference between having higher standards and the consequences of those standards. Nobody objects to having higher standards, the common core or if they are higher and to the extent they are higher. The real issue is that what Secretary Duncan has been advocating is tying accountability to the tests that are based on those standards. We’ve had 10 years now of accountability tied to tests based on so-called lower standards, and they’ve completely corrupted our education system.
“They’ve made the system much worse. Teachers have had incentives to narrow the curriculum to the things that are tested. Students have been trained to take tests rather than to learn the underlying curriculum. The same thing is going to happen if we tie tests to these higher standards. Teachers will learn what kinds of things are going to be on the test. There’ll be a lot of test preparation going on. The tests will not reflect what children really know but rather how skilled they are at taking tests.
“And it won’t account for all of the other things besides classroom instruction that affect how high student achievement is. So the common core standards are one thing, but the real issue is the attempt — the misguided attempt to have very high stakes attached to tests to measure those standards. Those will corrupt education just as much as now as they have in the past, and it’s unfortunate Secretary Duncan and his colleagues haven’t learned the lessons from No Child Left Behind and are preparing now to implement the same kinds of mistakes that were done in the last 10 years.”
This is a book you should read if you want to understand
how assessments are now being misused. It sets a valuable political
and historical context for understanding the mess that is now
federal education policy. The Mismeasure of Education by Jim Horn and Denise Wilburn should be on your shelf. The publisher just dropped the price to $27.50.
With new student assessments and teacher evaluation
schemes in the planning or early implementation phases, this book
takes a step back to examine the ideological and historical
grounding, potential benefits, scholarly evidence, and ethical
basis for the new generation of test based accountability measures.
After providing the political and cultural contexts for the rise of
the testing accountability movement in the 1960s that culminated
almost forty years later in No Child Left Behind and Race to the
Top, this book then moves on to provide a policy history and social
policy analysis of value-added testing in Tennessee that is framed
around questions of power relations, winners, and
losers. In examining the issues and exercise
of power that are sustained in the long-standing policy of
standardized testing in schools, this work provides a big picture
perspective on assessment practices over time in the U. S.; by
examining the rise of value-added assessment in Tennessee, a
fine-grained and contemporary case is provided within that larger
context. The last half of the book provides a detailed survey of
the research based critiques of value-added methodology, while
detailing an aggressive marketing campaign to make value-added
modeling (VAM) a central component of reform strategies following
NCLB. The last chapter and epilogue place the continuation of
test-based accountability practices within the context of an
emerging pushback against privatization, high stakes testing, and
other education reforms. This book will be
useful to a wide audience, including teachers, parents, school
leaders, policymakers, researchers, and students of educational
history, policy, and politics.
REVIEWS “When the Obama
Administration decided to spend the billions it got for schools as
part of the stimulus package to launch the Race to the Top program
and the NCLB waivers, forcing many states to adopt teacher
evaluation based on changes in student test scores, leading experts
warned that this “value added” system did not have a reliable
scientific basis and would often lead to false conclusions. This
sobering and important study of the long experience with this
system in Tennessee (where it was invented) shows that it did not
work, was unfair, and took attention away from other more
fundamental issues.” Gary Orfield Distinguished Research Professor,
UCLA, Co-Director, Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles,
UCLA “If The Mismeasure of Education offered
only its penetrating new look at Conant and Coleman, it would be
worth the price. But that’s just the beginning. Horn and Wilburn
uncover the obsessive instrumentalist quantification and
apocalyptic rhetoric soapboxed by both liberal and conservative
political elites. Their autopsy of value-added accountability
reveals the pathology of ed reform’s claim about teachers not being
good enough for the global economy.” Susan Ohanian Educator,
Author, Activist “A well-researched (and
frightening) look at examples of shameful pseudoscience in America,
the latest manifestation of which is value-added assessment for
determining teacher competency… A well-documented and thorough
analysis, inescapably leading to the conclusion that student test
data cannot be used to determine teacher effectiveness. A must read
for policy makers enamored of the idea that value added assessments
will do what is claimed for them. They do not!….An excellent and
scholarly history of how we got to an
educational-testing/industrial complex, now promoting invalid
assessment strategies that are transforming education, but not for
the better. A scary book that should be thoughtfully read by those
who value America’s greatest invention, the public schools.” David
Berliner Regents’ Professor Emeritus, Arizona State
University “The Mismeasure of Education is a
magnificent work, an elegantly written, brilliantly argued and
erudite exposition on why the “what,” “how” and “why” of effective
teaching cannot be adequately demonstrated by sets of algorithms
spawned in the ideological laboratories of scientific management at
the behest of billionaire investors… This book will serve as a
sword of Damocles, hanging over the head of the nation’s
educational tribunals and their adsentatores, ingratiators and
sycophants in the business community… The Mismeasure of Education
will have a profound resonance with those who are fed up with the
hijacking of our nation’s education system. This is a book that
must be read by everyone interested in the future of our schools.
It is a book that advocates real educational justice, for student,
teachers, administrators and the public; it is informed by
impressive scholarship and compelling argument. It is surely to
become a classic work.” Peter McLarenProfessor, GSEIS, University
of California, Los Angeles, Distinguished Fellow in Critical
Studies, Chapman University
