Archives for category: Race to the Top
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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

Obama’s Dreadful Education Agenda

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2012 //
14

The Washington Post has a good article about the aggressive way that the Obama administration has imposed its education agenda in the past three+ years.

The article notes, almost in passing, that there is no evidence for the success of any part of this agenda. No one will know for many years whether the Obama program of testing, accountability, and choice will improve education.

When reading the article, it is easy to forget that the U.S. Department of Education was not created to impose any “reforms” on the nation’s schools. It was created to send federal aid to hard-pressed districts that enrolled many poor children.

When the Department was created in 1980, there were vigorous debates about whether there might one day be federal control of the schools. The proponents of the idea argued that this would never happen. It has not happened until now because Democrats and Republicans agreed that they didn’t want the other party to control the nation’s schools.

But now that the Obama administration has embraced the traditional Republican ideas of competition, choice, testing and accountability, there is no more arguing about federal control. Republicans are quite willing to allow a Democratic administration to push the states to allow more privately managed schools, to impose additional testing, and to crush teachers’ unions.

Republicans would never have gotten away with this agenda at any time in the past three decades. The Democrats who controlled Congress would never have allowed it to happen.

Who would have imagined that it would take a Democratic President to promote privatization, for-profit schools, evaluating teachers by student test scores, and a host of other ideas (like rolling back the hard-won rights of teachers) that used to be only on the GOP wish-list?

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Federal Waiver, Merit pay, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top, U.S. Department of Education

Did President Obama Embrace the GOP Agenda?

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2012 //
23

The conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute has published a paper commending President Obama for standing up to teachers’ unions.

The paper compares President Obama’s support for school choice and evaluation of teachers by test scores as a “Nixon-to-China” paradigm shift.

In other words, the paper suggests, Obama’s education policy has done a full pivot, aligning it with the traditional GOP agenda.

Can anyone explain this?

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats, Education Industry, For-Profit, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top, Unions

Chicago Teacher Strike Ends

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2012 //
34

You have heard the news by now that the strike is over. I was lecturing in Chattanooga and meeting with leaders of the community from 2 pm until now. My brother tweeted to ask why I was behind the curve. Oops, offline.

Pundits and commentators will be poring over the Deep Meaning of all this for weeks and months to come. There will be countless articles about Lessons Learned.

Personally, I think we have a good idea already about why the teachers went on strike. No, it wasn’t greed or money. The compensation piece was more or less settled before the strike. Pundits and talk-show hosts who take home hundreds of thousands a year will express outrage that teachers–teachers!–might make $80,000. I ask you, who adds more social value–a first grade teacher in Chicago or a talk show host on national radio or TV?

Why did they strike? After 17 years of reform and disrespect, they were fed up with the bullying. They were tired of the non-educators and politicians telling them how to teach and imposing their remedies. Reform after reform, and children in Chicago still don’t have the rich curriculum, the facilities, and the social services they need.

They were sick of the incessant school closings. They were sick of seeing charter schools open that get wildly uneven results yet are praised to the skies by Arne Duncan and now Rahm Emanuel. They knew that the charter schools are non-union and that the Mayor will use them to break the union.

In the end, the union pitted itself against Rahm Emanuel, Arne Duncan, Chicago’s business and civic leadership, and the Race to the Top. It took on the most powerful forces in the city, and yes, even President Obama, who remained neutral.

And by taking a stand, by uniting to resist the power elite, these teachers discovered they were strong. They had been downtrodden and disrespected, but no longer. They put on their red T-shirts and commanded the attention of the nation and the admiration of millions of teachers. Powerless no more, they showed that unity made them strong. 98% voted to authorize the strike, and 98% voted to end it.

The union was fortunate in having Karen Lewis as its president. She was one of them. She had taught chemistry in the Chicago public schools for more than 20 years. She is one of the few–perhaps the only–union leader in the nation who is Nationally Board Certified, a mark of her excellence as a teacher.

Not only is she a teacher through and through, she is a graduate of Dartmouth. She is neither impressed nor intimidated by the elites who flaunt their Ivy League credentials. Hers are as good as theirs. Maybe better. She is a woman of valor.

Karen Lewis gave courage to her members, and they gave courage to her.

The strike is one of the few weapons available to the powerless. Without the union, the teachers would have been ignored, and the politicians would be free to keep on reforming them again and again and again.

The strike transformed the teachers from powerless to powerful.

The teachers said, “Enough is enough. With us, not to us.”

Regardless of the terms of the contract, the teachers won.

Thank you, CTU.

Categories Charter Schools, Chicago, Race to the Top, Teachers and Teaching, Unions

Race to the Top or Crawl to the Bottom?

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2012 //
4

This reader sees ominous signs as his school complies with the demands of Race to the Top:

Race to the Top is diverting teacher know-how, skill, talent, passion, etc to numbers crunching and reporting. taking valuable time away from figuring out how to teach well. We are heading rapidly to where the only people who will be able to get a deep enough education to be capable of being in charge of anything in the world will be those who can go to private schools.

Race to the Top is a misnomer – it is Crawl off the Bottom because it does not allocate any”measurable” value to AP classes, college credit offerings. art or music. Our numbers are measured by scores on academic tests. To comply with Race to the Top, we have to give our students a “pre-test” at the beginning of our classes this September, a test designed for students to fail because it is similar to what they will take as final exams at the end of the year. the point being to show improvement, but it means students all over NYS are starting off their year by massively taking tests they will fail miserably on, per requirement of NyS’ compliance with RTT.Every teacher I know learned in their earliest classes & experiences, that testing to show failures is VERY bad pedagogy.

And to keep things in perspective, 60% of the federal budget goes to war & defense, compared to 2% to education. The rest of the cost of public schooling is carried by state & local governments. is that the kind of support that will allow this generation to run the country any better? I don’t think so.

Categories New York, Race to the Top, Teachers and Teaching

Why the “Nixon-to-China” Tactic in Education?

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2012 //
13

John Thompson has a good article at Huffington Post asking why President Obama did a “Nixon-to-China” maneuver with education.

That phrase “Nixon-to-China” comes up again and again, and Thompson makes a telling point: It describes a political decision, not an education policy. The President’s education policy is indeed very little different from that of the GOP. As Thompson puts it, “It is a political gamble designed to beat up on two of the Democrats’ most loyal constituencies, teachers and families with children in urban schools, to show the “Billionaires Boys Club” that the administration could be tough on its friends.”

Is this a wise political strategy? “Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s “reforms” opened the door to Scott Walker’s and John Kasich’s attacks on collective bargaining. Worse, Duncan and President Obama mostly stayed silent as workers fought back in Wisconsin and Ohio. Had the administration joined with workers, perhaps the Wisconsin recall election would have been won. Regardless, if the administration remains silent in Chicago, fed-up teachers could stay home in droves. That would be a case of chopping our noses to spite our faces, but it would be understandable if teachers allowed our outrage to rule.”

Hopefully, the President has told the Mayor to settle, and to do so without humiliating the teachers.

But the question will remain: Why is the Obama administration wedded to the carrot-and-stick policies of the GOP? Why is it so devoted to handing public schools over to private management despite the lack of evidence that private managers in non-union schools are more successful than public ones?

Categories Chicago, Corporate Reformers, Democrats, Duncan, Arne, Obama, Race to the Top
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