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Why Test the Arts and PE?

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2012 //
24

As I read Dana Goldstein’s article about the advance of standardized testing into subjects like the arts and physical education, I began to get a queasy feeling. “This isn’t right,” I mumbled to myself. I thought of my grandchildren taking standardized tests in music and gym, and I shook my head. This isn’t right.

Race to the Top has promoted this movement to test every subject. Arne Duncan brandished $5 billion to encourage states and districts to judge teachers by the rise or fall of their students’ scores. The fact that there is no evidence for this method of judging teachers doesn’t matter. Bad ideas backed by big money have a way of catching on, no matter how mindless they are.

South Carolina has developed online tests for the arts, multiple-choice, of course. Florida is building tests of music and other pervormance arts that can be scored by machine, that is, by artificial intelligence. The vendors of these tests lobby to make them permanent, regardless of their quality.

Are they doing this at Sidwell Friends or the University of Chicago Lab School or Dalton or Exeter or Deerfield Academy? Of course not.

Is this what they do in Finland? Of course not.

What is the reason for testing the arts and physical education? It’s not to help students take joy in singing or playing a musical instrument or running fast or shooting baskets.

No, the purpose of all these tests is to collect data to evaluate the teachers! Wasting the students’ time with stupid questions and pointless activities and trivial measurements is just a way of gathering information so teachers of the arts and physical education can get a value-added score, just like teachers of reading and math.

Sometimes Americans do really foolish things. Sometimes they do these things because it is so easy to follow the crowd. Sometimes it’s because no one is thinking clearly. Sometimes they get caught up in nutty fads because someone is making a profit and buying legislators. Usually it’s because the people who launched these bad ideas have no moorings. They have lost touch with their own values. They do to other people’s children what they would never do to their own. They don’t listen to teachers. They don’t listen to parents.

History is not kind to people who do foolish, nay harmful, things and fail to exercise independent judgment. That’s why it’s best to say “no” when your conscience tells you to.

Diane

Categories Arts Education, Education Reform, Florida, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Do Not Accept the New Normal

By dianeravitch
June 10, 2012 //
14

Since No Child Left Behind began its reign of error a decade ago, the American public has slowly but surely changed its understanding and expectations of schools.

We have come to think that every school must “make” every student proficient, and if it cannot, then the school is a “failing” school.

We have come to look on schools as “failing” if they enroll large numbers of students who don’t perform well on standardized tests, regardless of their personal circumstances, their language ability, or their disability.

We have come to believe that teachers alone can bring every student to high test scores. And if we don’t believe this is possible, we are accused of defending the status quo or not caring about students or not believing they can succeed.

In pursuit of impossible goals, goals that no nation in the world has reached, we have come to accept (with glee, if you are a corporate reformer, or with resignation, if you are informed by reality) that schools must close and staff must be fired en masse in pursuit of that evanescent goal of “turnaround” from failure to success.

And here is the latest small and barely noticed episode in the continuing assault on common sense and public education.

The Los Angeles Times reported that students and parents demonstrated to protest the planned layoff of at least of the staff at Manual Arts High School. This school has been run for four years by a private group called L.A.’s Promise.

It is no longer unusual to see students and parents protesting the mass dismissal of teachers, so they will be ignored. That’s the new normal.

What is odd here is that L.A.’s Promise laid off about 40% of the staff last year. 50% last year, 40% this year.

It seems that this organization will just keep firing teachers until they finally get a staff that knows how to raise test scores and graduation rates higher and higher.

Such punitive actions display a singular lack of capacity on the part of leadership to build and support a stable staff.

Such heavy-handed measures surely demoralize whoever is left.

We have become so accustomed to mass firings and school closings that we have lost our outrage, even our ability to care.

Another school reconstituted, another school closed, more teachers fired. Ho-hum.

That’s the new normal. That is what is called education reform today.

So normal are such crude and punitive measures that the events at Manual Arts High School didn’t even merit a real story in the Los Angeles Times. It was posted in a blog.

Destroying public schools is called reform. Mass firings of staff are called reform.

It’s the New Normal.

Don’t accept it. Don’t avert your eyes. It’s not supposed to be this way.

Schools need a stable staff. Schools need continuity. Schools need to be caring and supportive communities.

Schools need to be learning organizations, not a place with a turnstile for teachers, administrators and students.

Don’t lose your own values. What is happening today is wrong. It is not education reform. It is wrong.

It does not benefit children. It does not improve education. It is wrong.

Diane

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

Long Arm of Federal Control Reaches Districts

By dianeravitch
May 31, 2012 //
5

In what must be the most startling development of the past month, year, and perhaps decade, the U.S. Department of Education is now launching a Race to the Top competition for districts. It has nearly $400 million to award, but as we have seen in the state-level competition, the amount of money was sufficient to compel almost every state to rewrite its laws so as to be eligible.

So with this relatively small amount of federal discretionary money, Arne Duncan has set the stage to impose his will and his flawed ideas on districts across the nation.

Districts will have to show that they have the data to track students from pre-k through post-secondary education, as well as to tie test results to individual teachers. The data systems will be elaborate and they will track everyone from age 3-21. And teachers will be held accountable!

What is worse, as the article in Education Week cited above noted, is that “districts will have to promise to implement evaluation systems that take student outcomes into account–not just for teacher and principal performance, but for district superintendents and school boards. That’s a big departure from the state-level Race to the Top competitions, which just looked at educators who actually work in schools, not district-level leaders.”

Think of it. Who will evaluate superintendents and school boards? Will they be evaluated by test scores? Will the federal government fire school boards if test scores are flat? Will it fire district superintendents and replace them? Will Arne Duncan tell school boards and superintendents to raise test scores or resign? Did anyone in Congress approve this bizarre program of federal over-reach?

Even conservative blogger Rick Hess was taken aback. As he put it, “My only reaction to reading the info on this new Race to the Top-District was, “You have…got…to…be…kidding.” It’s like they read all their admiring press clips from RTT, strenuously tuned out any criticism or lessons learned from the, um, uneven track record when it comes to implementation, and wanted to see whether they could take the hubris meter up to 11 (with apologies to Spinal Tap).”

Hess disapproves because he thinks that the new competition will result only in vague promises and punch-list compliance. I am appalled because the U.S. Department of Education should not be in the business of telling districts how to do their job. They lack the competence to do so, and by doing so they ignore decades of history, tradition, and precedent. Is it really appropriate for Arne Duncan to take control of the nation’s schools?

Has anyone at the U. S. Department of Education ever heard of the principle of federalism? Does Arne Duncan think he was appointed the national Superintendent of Schools? Is there no limit to his desire to impose his bad ideas on others? His belief in the value of standardized testing is startling, to say the least. One might even say it is faith-based.

Diane

Categories Duncan, Arne, Race to the Top, U.S. Department of Education

Why the Gates Compact?

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2012 //
6

As I was researching the story about the closing of Allan elementary school in Austin, which will be replaced in the fall by an IDEA charter school, I came across this story about the Gates compact.

What is the Gates compact? Austin was the 16th district to apply for $100,000 from the Gates Foundation to sign a compact with the charter schools, agreeing that charter schools and public schools would receive equal treatment. By signing the compact, a district then becomes eligible to win millions of funding from the Gates Foundation. But of course, it may never win anything more.

So what’s the deal? Charter schools win recognition and are treated henceforward as if they were public schools, entitled to equal funding. This legitimates their status. So, rather than being experimental, or even laboratories of innovation, their inroads are made permanent thanks to the generosity of Bill & Melinda Gates.

The Gates compact works sort of like Race to the Top. By competing for funding they may never win, the districts agree to commit millions of their own dollars to equalize funding for charter schools.

Meanwhile, the charter schools continue to pursue policies that skim the best students from the public schools and to take disproportionately small numbers of students who are English language learners and have special needs. The public schools are left with the most expensive students to educate, and the charters get equal funding. The charters have fewer regulations and get extra resources while the public schools get budget cuts and are daily rebuked that they are failing, failing, failing.

The Gates compact cements the gains of privatization.

Worse, it persuades the leaders of the  public schools to endorse a plan that undermines the future of public education.

How embarrassing that so many public education leaders call press conferences to acknowledge what they have done when they should be embarrassed.

Diane

Categories Charter Schools, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Race to the Top

BLOCK THAT EUPHEMISM!

By dianeravitch
April 30, 2012 //
4

I wonder why our policymakers in Washington, D.C., love euphemisms. Ten years ago, Congress passed No Child Left Behind, and by now, is there anyone in the United States who takes seriously the idea that “No Child” has been “Left Behind”? Since Congress can’t agree on how to change the law, maybe they could just rename it and call it “Many Children Left Behind” (MCLB) or “No Child Left Untested” (NCLU). When the name of a federal law is so clearly at odds with its actual results, either we must rename the law or declare it a failure or both. But, please, no euphemisms, no flowery predictions in the title of the legislation.

Then there is Race to the Top. No one has explained what it means to “race.” Does it mean that with more and more pressure on teachers, their students will get higher test scores? Surely, a “race to the top” has nothing to do with equality of educational opportunity. And what, exactly, is “the top”? Does that mean that if we just test everyone with greater frequency, then student scores will rise to the top of the world? Where is the evidence for that? Another deceptive euphemism.

The euphemisms that are most annoying, however, are “turnarounds” and “transformations.” When we think of a turnaround, we are likely to think of a charming little dance, perhaps one where we all hold hands and circle the Maypole, with rosebuds fluttering around the heads of the children. But “turnaround” means something dark and sinister, not a happy dance. It means that if you get the money, you must fire the principal, fire half or all of the staff, close the school, give it a new name. That’s harsh medicine, not a turnaround. Whether the new school will be better or worse than the old one is by no means clear. What is it about closing a school that promises that the achievement gap will close or that children who don’t read English will now learn English and speak it fluently? I don’t see the logic or the sense.

Honesty is the best policy. If the federal government really wants to fire the principals and teachers in the 5,000 schools with the lowest scores, why don’t they call it the Close Bad Schools policy? Or something that approximates the brutal reality? Why don’t they explain the mechanism by which mass firing leads to better education?

Just call it what it is.

Diane

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