The Daily Howler notes that most of the mainstream media completely ignored the Atlanta events or barely mentioned them.
Only Chris Hayes had a panel on the subject, and two of the three panelists were a waste of air time.
One was a clueless parent, and the other was a paid mouthpiece for the hedge fund billionaires of New Jersey.
Believe it or not, the Chicago Tribune published one of the best articles I have read about the disaster that is called education “reform,” but in fact is education destruction.
I say, believe it or not, because the Tribune has been one of the nation’s loudest cheerleaders for the policies that this column decries.
Robert C. Koehler is a syndicated columnist, not an education specialist, but he sees clearly the damage that the education destruction movement–NCLB and Race to the Top–is doing to students and our society.
His column is titled “The Warping of Public Education.”
He writes:
“…high-stakes testing, in tandem with “zero tolerance,” militarized security and sadistic underfunding, has succeeded in warping public education beyond recognition, especially in low-income, zero-political-clout neighborhoods. And the result is kids in prison, kids on the streets, kids with no future.”
And he concludes:
“The time has come to declare an end to this entire era — of militarized racism, violent solutions to everything, the ever-widening schism between “us” and “them.” Any politician who kowtows to this simplistic agenda, or “bargains” with it, has made himself or herself irrelevant to a sustainable and healthy future, and should be declared thus.
“We have to undo the damage that has turned public education into a crisis. That means dumping the pretend science of high-stakes testing and valuing rather than criminalizing students of color; it also means moving from punishment- to healing-based systems of maintaining order, taking police and armed security guards out of the hallways and learning to value and respect young people more than we value metal detectors and surveillance cameras.
“Before we can do anything else, we have to get our future out of the pipeline.”
This is an unintentionally hilarious story in the New York Times.
Reformers are upset to discover that an astonishing proportion of teachers are getting high marks on the new evaluation systems that have just been set up. The evaluations were supposed to identify the best teachers (to get bonuses, even if no one has any money for bonuses) and most importantly to weed out the “bad” teachers who were causing so many students to get low test scores.
But look at these shocking statistics:
In Florida, 97 percent of teachers were deemed effective or highly effective in the most recent evaluations. In Tennessee, 98 percent of teachers were judged to be “at expectations.”
In Michigan, 98 percent of teachers were rated effective or better.
Advocates of education reform concede that such rosy numbers, after many millions of dollars developing the new systems and thousands of hours of training, are worrisome.
Needless to say, the National Council on Teacher Quality–whose board (as this blog knows well from the posts of Mercedes Schneider) includes such experienced teacher experts as Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and Wendy Kopp–is upset.
So is the Brookings Institution expert Grover Whitehurst, who was in charge of the Bush administration’s education research. He says that any system that can’t find 5% ineffective teachers must be flawed.
Think of all the hoopla, not to mention the billions of dollars spent by Race to the Top, the Gates Foundation, the states, and the districts, and now what? Where did all those ineffective teachers go? Where are they hiding? Why can’t we find them?
Sort of feels like the T-shirt that says, “My grandma went to Miami and all I get was this lousy T-shirt.”
My government spent billions to find teachers to fire, and all we got was confusion.
A story today in the New York Times gives an overview of the rapid advance of voucher programs, now found in various forms in 17 states.
What is missing from the article is context. The defenders of unlicensed education quoted are the heads of the unions and spokesmen for LLC school boards. The advocates for vouchers are referred to as “nonpartisan,” like the far-right American Federation for Children. AFS was created by the wealthy DeVos family in Michigan and has been pushing the demolition of public education for many years.
Also unmentioned is the power behind the scenes: ALEC, the far-right organization that has drafted model legislation for the voucher and tax-credit laws, using their 2,000 state legislators to promote them.
Nor does the article raise the obvious questions: where is President Obama? Where is Arne Duncan? Did Race to the Top, with its promotion of choice to “escape failing public schools” (and go to privately managed charters) aid and abet the voucher movement?
Who will be held accountable for these assaults on a basic institution of our democracy?
A teacher writes to ask how test scores might be used wisely if his district gets Race to the Top funding.
My advice: RTTT funding will cost your district far more than it receives from the federal government. Your district will have to increase class sizes, lay off teachers, and cut programs to meet all the demands of the mandates. Some fine teachers will get bad ratings because they teach kids with disabilities or are ELL. The ratings will bounce around from year to year.
Just say no.
Here is the comment:
“I suspect this conversation is timely for many of us: my district is considering applying for a Race to the Top grant (and I’m quite worried about it). I’d love to hear reactions to this idea: since the grant application requires some “significant” incorporation of test scores into the evaluation process (which is probably just a bad idea, but is required) do any of you think that it might be possible to incorporate them in a “formative” phase? What if teachers got “test score feedback” early in the process, and administrators worked with teachers to use those scores to plan goals, etc. Then the actual “summative” evaluation (also required by the grant) was done using a system of standards and rubrics, similar to the system this teacher describes above (our district uses the Danielson model). I bet there are many things wrong with this idea, but it’s the only thing I can come up with that might (might) satisfy the requirements of the grant that doesn’t completely horrify me.”
Kris Neilsen wrote the most amazing post I have ever posted.
It was called “N.C. Teacher: I Quit.”
It went viral.
On one day, it was opened over 66,000 times.
It went around the world and was reprinted on many other blogs.
Here is one of his latest posts.
Kenneth Bernstein is an award-winning NBCT who recently retired as a teacher of government. He is now caring for his wife, who is recovering from a major illness. He usually blogs at the Daily Kos but has taken the time to share his insights here as a comment. Thank you, Ken.
He writes:
We have had a decade of the “reforms” of No Child Left Behind. The approach embodied therein actually is traceable back 30 years, to the release of A Nation at Risk, continued through Goals 2000 which claimed that it would result in America being first in the world in math and science by that date, has seen policy doubling down through Race to the Top and the proposals in the Obama administration’s “Blueprint,” and now we continue the insanity through Common Core and the common assessments. In each of these cases what was excluded in the making of education policy were the voices of those expected to implement the policy choices, professional educators – teachers and principals.
Instead we have had think tanks, we have had politicians, we have had organizations that stand to profit from the decisions – and that includes ostensibly non-profit organizations such as the College Board and ETS among others.
The results to date have not been as promised.
We have failed to address many of the real issues affecting our students, starting with the high percentage (compared to other industrialized democracies) of children in poverty, children who do not get proper nutrition or health care, whose teeth may be rotting, who need glasses but do not have them.
We have had imposed policies that have already been tried and found wanting – turning schools over to “educational management” organizations, converting them to charters, turning to mayoral control – or not yet piloted and evaluated – here the Common Core is one of the best examples. The “data” that has been produced is often either incomplete or in fact downright manipulated – such as graduation rates in Texas, from which we got No Child Left Behind. We ignore contradictions in policies – we have too many students dropping out so to fix that we are going to raise the bar and impose “standards” that are not based on what we know about brain development and differential development rates.
Unfortunately too often the media organizations which should serve to explain things jumps on board the bandwagon. Perhaps it should be expected when the corporation which owns one of the major national newspapers, The Washington Post, gets most of its profits from a for-profit educational venture, Kaplan, which benefits from policies such as increased emphasis on tests.
Fortunately modern means of communicating and organizing are allowing pushback – by parents, students, teachers, administrators, even school boards.
Slowly Americans are beginning to realize that the emperor of educational “reform” is naked – that is, what is being forced upon America’s public schools is less concerned about real learning by students and more concerned about political and economic power.
Perhaps it is time for major media organizations to be far more transparent in their presentations on education, to give equal voice to the voices that have not been heard.
I once had a conversation with a sitting governor, close to a decade ago. The governors had just had a conference on education. Each governor had brought a business leader, which he acknowledged. I asked why each governor had not brought a teacher, or some other educator. He was shocked and acknowledged he at least had never considered the possibility. That is symptomatic of what is wrong in how we make educational policy.
It is also why so many educators – principals as well as teachers – are so demoralized. They are excluded from the making of policy, they are demonized when they object and try to raise the issues that should be discussed. Meanwhile they continue to see the conditions necessary for serving their students disappear, what protections they had to enable them to do their jobs correctly are being taken away from them.
I once told Jay Mathews that I might not object to having my students assessed by quality tests at the end of a course, but I refused to be held accountable if you told me how I had to teach them, because then I had no ability to shape my instruction according to what I knew of my students, and how they were learning.
Increasingly we are trying to tell our teachers not only what to teach but also how to teach it. Sometimes we are even imposing scripted lessons.
Should not the real evaluation be of the results of what has been imposed by those who are not educators, who are not attempting to address the individual needs of the students in their classes, in their schools? And were we to evaluate that way, would w not find almost all of the “reforms” to be failures?
Except the ‘reforms’ have not failed in their other purposes
– increasing profits for testing and curriculum companies (often the same)
– breaking the power of teachers unions
– diminishing the professionalism of teachers, principals and superintendents
– effectively privatizing one of the most important public functions
– removing democratic control of public education and politicizing it in places where it becomes easier to impose the corporatizing agenda.
You know all this.
You have written and spoken out about this.
We need more voices speaking out, loudly.
Thanks for being an important voice.
There will be a demonstration at the U.S. Department of Education from April 4-7.
One of the speakers will be Mark Naison, who teaches African-American studies at Fordham University.
Here he explains why he will be there:
I am coming to Washington because our public education system is being systematically dismantled by people whose power derives solely from the unprecedented concentration of wealth in a small number of hands. Without the Gates, the Broads, the Waltons, the Bloombergs and the hedge fund executives, the three bulwarks of current Education Reform policy- privatization, universal testing and school closings- would have never gained traction because they are unsupported by research and are abhorred by most educators.. What we are facing is not onlythe degradation of the teaching profession and the transformation of the nation’s classrooms into zones of child abuse, but an attack on what little democracy we have left in this country. Therefore, I am not only coming to Washington defend the integrity of the profession I have dedicated my life to, but to join a movement which is one of the most important fronts of resistance to Plutocratic Rule
I also come to Washington, as a scholar of African American History, and a long time community activist, to strip the false facade of “Civil Rights” legitimacy from policies which promote increased segregation, push teachers of color out of the profession, open our schools to profiteering by test companies,and promote narrow workforce preparation as a substitute for the creation of active citizens who can change the world. So I will not only be calling out the billionaires and those who are directly on their payroll, but those who call themselves “progressive- who give aid and comfort to those policies, either because of the hope of political gain or a deficit of courage.. ,
It is rare to see a high-ranking leader of a major association speak hard truths to power. For her courage and candor, Joann Bartoletti joins the honor roll as a champion of public education.
In the March 2013 issue of NASSP’s “News Leader,” Bartoletti, the executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, blasted the new teacher evaluation systems that were foisted on the nation’s schools by Race to the Top and its highly prescriptive waivers.
She notes that these dubious, non-evidence-based evaluation systems are coming into use at the very time that the Common Core is being implemented. Common Core–untested, never validated, whose consequences are unknown, arriving with not enough time or money for implementation or adequate technology for the computer-based testing–is widely expected to cause test scores to fall. It would be hard, she writes, to “come up with a better plan to discredit and dismantle public education.”
What motives should one attribute to policymakers who wreak havoc on their’s nations public schools and who blithely ignore all warning signs? Bartoletti won’t speculate.
Malice or stupidity? You decide.
She writes:
• A perfect storm is brewing, and it will wreak havoc on the collaborative cultures that principals have worked so hard to build. New teacher evaluation systems have begun making their way into schools, and over the next three years, more than half of states will change the way they assess teachers’ effectiveness. The revised systems come as the result of Race to the Top and NCLB waivers. To be eligible for either, states had to commit to developing new teacher evaluation systems that use student test scores to determine a “significant proportion” of a teacher’s effectiveness. In a January survey of NASSP and NAESP members, nearly half of respondents indicated that 30% or more of their teacher evaluations are now tied to student achievement.
There is no research supporting the use of that kind of percentage, and even if the research recommended it, states don’t have data systems sophisticated enough to do value-added measurement (VAM) well. Still, the test-score proportion on evaluations will increase at a time when we predict that test scores will decrease.
These evaluation systems will be put in place just as the Common Core State Standards assessments roll out in 2014. This volatile combination could encourage many teachers and principals to leave the profession or at least plan their exit strategies. I don’t want to attribute a malicious intent to anyone, but if policymakers were going to come up with a plan to discredit and dismantle public education, it’s hard to think of a more effective one.
Identity Crisis?
One of the most troubling issues, as Jim Popham describes in this month’s Principal Leadership, is that the overhauled evaluations are being designed to serve dual purposes.
Principals want to believe that the evaluations are formative and are inclined to give constructive feedback to teachers to help them improve their instructional practice. Lawmakers, on the other hand, see the evaluations as being summative—a way to identify weaknesses and fire ineffective teachers. Principals are caught in the middle: they want to offer frank feedback but are all too aware that any criticism is a black mark that can be used to deny a teacher’s con- tract renewal or tenure. In this case, killing two birds with one stone—when those birds have about as much in common as a penguin and a pigeon—is extraordinarily ineffective.
And so, principals tread lightly. Although the days when 99% of tenured teachers earned “satisfactory” ratings are long gone, emerging data shows that even with the new evaluations in place, the majority of teachers are still being deemed “effective.” Education Week noted in a February 5 article that at least 9 out of 10 teachers in Michigan, Tennessee, and Georgia received positive reviews under the new measurements.
With little difference in outcomes, it’s hard to justify the extensive training and time com- mitment that the new systems demand. In some districts in Rhode Island, a popular off-the-shelf model requires principals to view 60 hours of video training and pass a test before administer- ing the evaluation tool. If they fail, they’ll have to wait three months to take it again. Other states are developing their own systems that dramatically increase the hours spent assessing teachers.
Tennessee principal and NASSP board member Troy Kilzer devotes nearly six hours to a single teacher’s evaluation, not counting the time spent observing that teacher in the class- room. This figure is similar to the respondents’ answers in the NASSP survey. Almost all (92%)
said they spend anywhere from 6 to 31 or more hours evaluating each teacher.
These evaluations are simply trying to accomplish too much. What’s even worse, principals must apply them across the board—66% of the survey respondents are required to use one instrument for all teachers and staff, includ- ing those in non-tested subjects. School nurses, athletic directors, and school psychologists are expected to be assessed with the same tools. Since when can a nurse’s capacity for empathy be measured by a student’s ability to factor polynomials?
High Anxiety
Although only some states have fully imple- mented the new models, exhausted teachers are showing signs of wear. The “teach-to-the- test” frenzy is compounded by the fact that their evaluations will rely on scores over which teachers have limited control. NASSP’s Breaking Ranks tells about the importance of a positive culture, yet the atmosphere that the new evalua- tion systems create is anything but positive.
Shawn DeRose, an assistant principal in Virginia, said that since the implementation of his state’s new evaluation system this past fall, many teachers in his school have indicated that they feel additional stress. It’s no wonder. Fifth-grade teacher Sarah Wysocki was fired at the end of her second year with the DC Public Schools because her students didn’t reach their expected growth rate in reading and math under the city’s new value-added model. Never mind that she received positive ratings in her observations and was encouraged to share her engaging teaching methods with other district educators. This is hardly an isolated event.
The anxiety levels raise an even more acute challenge for principals in urban, high-poverty schools. No teacher wants to teach in a school with a traditionally low-performing population. Add test scores as a part of their evaluation, and it now becomes impossible to recruit teachers for high-needs schools. But regard- less of a teacher’s placement, the onus is still on principals to ensure that evaluations are fair and meaningful—and that they improve teachers’ capacity to enhance student learning.
NASSP is regularly delivering this message to Congress and the
Department of Education. In meetings with Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education Deb Delisle, I’ve shared NASSP’s recommendations and have reinforced that teacher evaluations should serve their intended purpose: to help teachers improve their instructional practice. NASSP is making it glaringly clear to policymakers that if they want to push out inef- fective teachers, there are other ways to go about it. Throwing the entire profession into a tailspin is not only ineffective and mis- guided, but it’s a poor way to play the long game as well.
Please read this article that appears in the latest issue of the journal of the New York State School Board Association.
It describes how many teachers, principals, and superintendents are feeling overwhelmed by the changes raining down on them.
Then comes these paragraphs:
“John King is on the wrong side of history,” author and blogger Diane Ravitch told On Board. “He is acting like a petty dictator, threatening to hurt the children to retaliate against the adults who did not do his bidding.”
“On the other hand, “If you don’t put teeth into the system, no change is going to happen,” said Allison Armour-Garb, who served as chief of staff to former Education Commissioner David Steiner and is one of the architects of New York’s accountability system.
“Although the Obama administration’s approach is research-based, the RTTT states are the first to take it to scale, Armour-Garb noted. “I’m confident that the Common Core, data-driven instruction, and teacher and principal evaluation are going to lead to improvement in student outcomes – over time.”
“Armour-Garb has a personal interest in school accountability because she is the mother of two children, 10 and 12, who attend public schools.
“In her school community, Armour-Garb tends not to bring up her professional background, which includes working on New York’s RTTT application and being a point person in developing regulations that defined New York’s APPR system. “Change is hard,” she said. “And testing and accountability are provocative topics that don’t lend themselves to a quick conversation.”
Notice that Armour-Garb is careful not to let anyone in her school community know her role in developing the onerous regulations for the state’s educator evaluator system. A wise decision. More than a third of the principals have signed a petition opposing that system, and if people were not afraid for their jobs, the petition may well have been signed by more than 90% of the state’s principals.
She is right to hide her role in this tightening of the testing noose around the necks of the state’s teachers and principals. She is a lawyer and public-policy consultant, not an educator.
While she asserts that Race to the Top is “research-based,” she fails to mention what part of it is research based. Certainly not the educator evaluation system, which has never been applied successfully anywhere. John King described it as “building a plane in mid-air.” That is not research-based.
Diane Ravitch's blog 