Archives for category: Race to the Top
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When Teachers Said “NO” to Race to the Top

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2012 //
23

Anthony Cody reports that teachers in Sacramento and Fresno rejected participation in Race to the Top.

They reject the program’s heavy emphasis on testing and basing their evaluation on test scores.

Cody wonders why President Obama insists that Race to the Top is not “top down.” Of course, it is top down. It reflects what the Obama administration wants, not what teachers believe is right for their students.

Why does President Obama says he opposes “teach to the test” when his signature program compels teachers to teach to the test?

Why does President Obama claim that Race to the Top is “working” and getting results?

It is not working, it is being imposed. And it has no results other than demoralized teachers.

Categories Federal Waiver, Obama, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Hey, Arne, Read This

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2012 //
16

In an earlier post, a parent expressed frustration that her child’s teacher never explained how awful the testing is, how it was stealing time from instruction and was of little or no value.

Many teachers wrote to say that without tenure, they can’t take any risks, can’t upset administrators, can’t speak up without endangering their jobs.

This parent has a different take. I wish Arne Duncan would read this and realize that he is destroying teacher morale and professionalism in schools across the nation. His policies are misguided at best, deceptive and harmful at worst.

I spoke to the teachers at my sons’s school. They are EXHAUSTED. They hate the testing, they are fearful for their jobs but they are even more fearful that their beloved principal will be replaced if they don’t follow these crazy mandates. They are on a watch list now due to NCLB mandates ( special ed failure rate had dipped). This is the BEST school in the whole district- national ranking for newspaper, mock trial, debate, the highest SAT scores in the district, the highest number of AP passing exams score in the district and is ranked in the country. These fantastic teachers, who are dedicated to special needs students and needs of special students, are being crucified by the weekly lesson plans, the state oversight by under-aware and under trained ‘professionals’. These teachers HATE the tests being implemented by this VAM measure that is their prize for winning RTT. They are ridiculous tests that have no merit but the teachers who give their all to the kids in the class and before and after are flat out EXHAUSTED by these VAM measures.

Burning out teachers, who are seasoned and fantastic professionals, for no educational reason at all. That is why parents don’t know.

Categories Duncan, Arne, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure, Teachers and Teaching

Arne Duncan Feels Your Pain

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2012 //
27

In a speech at the National Press Club, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan reached out to the nation’s teachers to assure them that he understands how they feel.

He understands that change is hard, especially when almost every state and district is imposing untested, experimental and possibly destructive methods of evaluation on them.

The end game, he is sure, will be higher test scores.

Of course, no one should be evaluated by a single score.

Truly, he understands. Message: I care.

Categories Accountability, Democrats, Duncan, Arne, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations

Make the Best of It?

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2012 //
20

Carol Burris has valiantly rallied her fellow principals in New York to oppose the state’s test-based evaluation system created in response to Race to the Top.

Carol is principal of an exemplary high school in Rockville Center, New York.

Some readers responded to her latest post by saying, “look, it’s over. They won. Live with it. Make the best of it.”

I hear this all the time: Stop fighting. The train is leaving the station. Resistance is futile.

Carol answers here:

I will continue to put my energies into bringing this awful system down even as I seek to protect my teachers from it as best I can. There is nothing that the creators of this system would like more than for us to ‘make the best of it’. The ‘make of the best of it argument’ was what inspired MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. I am so glad that King wrote that remarkable letter and did not take the advice to slow down and make the best of segregation.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Education Reform, New York, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations

Principals Give Flunking Grade to NY Teacher Evaluation Scheme

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2012 //
12

New York had the bad luck to win $700 million in Race to the Top funding.

The politicians thought it would help balance the budget, not realizing that the grant would not be available to plug budget holes.

Now we know that principals think the costly, time-wasting evaluation system is useless. Eighty percent find it inaccurate.

Money will be wasted on this invalid system even as budgets are cut.

Some day we will look back at Race to the Top and wonder, “What were they thinking? $5 billion for that?”

Was it intended to demoralize teachers or was that an unintended consequence?

Categories Education Reform, New York, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations

Ten Years of NCLB: A Student Says, “How Sad.” Her Teacher Agrees

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2012 //
50

Paul Karrer teaches fifth grade in Castroville, California.

He is doing his best to educate parents and the public about the destructive farce called “reform” that is ruining education for his students.

A student returned to his classroom and asked him why he was no longer teaching as he had when she was a student.

He explained to her that a federal law called No Child Left Behind had changed the way he is allowed to teach.

Last year, he wrote a letter to President Obama that went viral. I am reprinting it here.

A Letter to My President — The One I Voted for…
Paul Karrer | Education Week | 02.02.2011
Dear President Obama:

I mean this with all respect. I’m on my knees here, and there’s a knife in my back, and the prints on it kinda match yours. I think you don’t get it.

Your Race to the Top is killing the wrong guys. You’re hitting the good guys with friendly fire. I’m teaching in a barrio in California. I had 32 kids in my class last year. I love them to tears. They’re 5th graders. That means they’re 10 years old, mostly. Six of them were 11 because they were retained. Five more were in special education, and two more should have been. I stopped using the word “parents” with my kids because so many of them don’t have them. Amanda’s mom died in October. She lives with her 30-year-old brother. (A thousand blessings on him.) Seven kids live with their “Grams,” six with their dads. A few rotate between parents. So “parents” is out as a descriptor.

Here’s the kicker: Fifty percent of my students have set foot in a jail or prison to visit a family member.

Do you and your secretary of education, Arne Duncan, understand the significance of that? I’m afraid not. It’s not bad teaching that got things to the current state of affairs. It’s pure, raw poverty. We don’t teach in failing schools. We teach in failing communities. It’s called the ZIP Code Quandary. If the kids live in a wealthy ZIP code, they have high scores; if they live in a ZIP code that’s entombed with poverty, guess how they do?

We also have massive teacher turnover at my school. Now, we have no money. We haven’t had an art or music teacher in 10 years. We have a nurse twice a week. And because of the No Child Left Behind Act, struggling public schools like mine are held to impossible standards and punished brutally when they don’t meet them. Did you know that 100 percent of our students have to be on grade level, or else we could face oversight by an outside agency? That’s like saying you have to achieve 100 percent of your policy objectives every year.

It’s not bad teaching that got things to the current state of affairs. It’s pure, raw poverty.
You lived in Indonesia, so you know what conditions are like in the rest of the world. President Obama, I swear that conditions in my school are akin to those in the third world. We had a test when I taught in the Peace Corps. We had to describe a glass filled to the middle. (We were supposed to say it was half full.) Too many of my kids don’t even have the glass!

Next, gangs. Gangs eat my kids, their parents, and the neighborhood. One of my former students stuffed an AK47 down his pants at a local bank and was shot dead by the police. Another one of my favorites has been incarcerated since he was 13. He’ll be 27 in November. I’ve been writing to him for 10 years and visiting him in the maximum-security section of Salinas Valley State Prison.

Do you get that it’s tough here? Charter schools and voucher schools aren’t the solution. They are an excuse not to fix the real issues. You promised us so much. And you want to give us merit pay? Anyway, I think we really need to talk. Oh, and can you pull the knife out while you’re standing behind me? It really hurts.

Sincerely yours,

Paul Karrer

Categories Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top

Waiver Madness

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2012 //
8

Washington, D.C., has announced that it will set different testing targets for children of different racial groups. According to a story in the Washington Post, this is now common practice among the states that have obtained waivers from No Child Left Behind.

The District and the states are acknowledging that children of color are so far behind their white and Asian peers that they will need more time to catch up. Actually, in D.C., black students will be expected to make more progress than white students so they can catch up with white students.

The story says:

Officials say the new targets account for differences in current performance and demand the fastest progress from students who are furthest behind. The goals vary across much of the country by race, family income and disability, and in Washington, they also vary by school.

At Anacostia High, which draws almost exclusively African Americans from one of the District’s most impoverished areas, officials aim to quadruple the proportion of students who are proficient in reading by 2017, but that would still mean that fewer than six out of 10 pass standardized reading tests. Across town at the School Without Walls in Northwest Washington, a diverse and high-performing magnet that enrolls students from across the city, the aim is higher: 99.6 percent.

Meanwhile, at Wilson Senior High, 67 percent of black students — and 88 percent of Asians and 95 percent of whites — are expected to pass standardized math tests five years from now.

Setting different aspirations for different groups of children represents a sea change in national education policy, which for years has prescribed blanket goals for all students. Some education experts see the new approach as a way to speed achievement for black, Latino and low-income students, but some parents can’t help but feel that less is being expected of their children.

The absurdity of this scenario is that D.C. and the states expect that all children will reach proficiency on normed tests. Normed tests have a bell curve. On a normed test, half will always be above and half below the mean. No matter how hard you try, a bell curve is still a bell curve. There is no district in the nation where 100% of the children are proficient. The children who are most advantaged cluster in the top half; those who are least advantaged cluster in the bottom half. This is true of the SAT, the ACT, state tests, federal tests, and international tests.

And, if you step back, you must wonder why the standardized tests–whose flaws, inaccuracies, and statistical vagaries are well known–have become the measure of all education.

No private school in the nation is subjecting its children to this mad scramble to live up to the demands of Pearson and McGraw Hill’s psychometricians.

Maybe all this seeming madness is just part of the larger scenario to declare US education a failure and find more schools ripe for privatization.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, Federal Waiver, For-Profit, Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing, US Education

More Standardized Testing for Kindergarten

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2012 //
31

Testing children in kindergarten is becoming common practice. Oregon will begin testing all 5-year-olds next fall to assess their “readiness” for kindergarten. It is never too soon to test children, and some states have drafted standards for pre-schoolers.

How did this happen? An article by Stephanie Simon in Reuters explains it all.

“Testing young children is not a new concept. In the 1980s, many states assessed children to determine whether they were ready to enter kindergarten or first grade. Experts in child development denounced the practice as unfair and unreliable and it faded out.

In recent years, however, the federal law known as No Child Left Behind has put pressure on schools to raise scores on the standardized reading and math tests given to students starting around age 8. Schools that post poor scores are labeled failing; principals and teachers can lose their jobs.

With the stakes so high, many administrators have decided to start testing in the earlier grades, to give kids practice and to identify students who need help.

The Obama administration accelerated the trend in 2011 with a $500 million competitive grant to bolster early childhood education. States that pledged to assess all kindergarteners earned extra points on their applications.”

So now state after state is falling into line, testing the littlest students to find out what they know and what they don’t know. The experts are strangely silent about whether this is developmentally appropriate. It is never too soon to start compiling data, it seems.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Testing

The Pattern on the Rug

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2012 //
6

A reader sees how the pieces of the reform movement fit together:

I think that all the double-speak is just to divert attention away from the major process of dismantling education that has been taking place across the country, and the smoke and mirrors is to conceal the intention to ultimately declare brick and mortar schools obsolete and teachers expendable and unnecessary. Effectively, the goal is to not have teachers anymore.

One online teacher I work with put it this way recently, “We’re just glorified graders now.” Honestly, for a teacher, there is no glory when your job boils down to just grading. But politicians, corporate reformers and companies like Pearson and K-12 seem to think that education can be reduced to presenting material on a screen and testing, and that they can train virtually anyone to be graders.

Actually, online, you can set it up so that tests are self-administered and automatically generate grades, so currently instructors are grading papers, class discussions, group projects, participation, etc. and I can see how that might one day be considered superfluous to the powers that be.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, On-Line Education, Parent trigger, Privatization, Race to the Top, Stand for Children, Teach for America TFA, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, Technology, Computers, Unions, US Education

Will Race to the Top Reduce Poverty?

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2012 //
1

This is an excellent analysis by economist Laura D’Andrea Tyson about poverty and educational opportunity. She provides excellent links to up-to-date statistics about children living in poverty. She understands that their opportunities are shadowed by the circumstances of their lives.

But at the end of this otherwise excellent article, she concludes that President Obama’s Race to the Top program is addressing the problem of poverty and limited opportunity.

I am guessing she has no idea what the Race to the Top consists of. I wonder if she knows that it is designed to cater to the “no excuses” crowd at the NewSchools Venture Fund that believes that poverty is no obstacle if public schools are turned over to private management, if students take more tests, if teachers are evaluated by their students test scores, and if kids are taught to walk in straight lines and drilled to take tests.

I left a comment, something I seldom do. You should too.

Categories Poverty, Race to the Top
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