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New York: The Opt Out Will Continue

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2015 //
32

This just in from the group that led New York’s historic opt out movement. One of every five students did not take the state tests last spring, over 220,000 students.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: December 15, 2015
More information contact:
Lisa Rudley (917) 414-9190; nys.allies@gmail.com
NYS Allies for Public Education http://www.nysape.org

Parents Will Continue to Opt Out Until Ed Law Repealed &
Real Change Seen in the Classrooms

The Governor’s Common Core Task Force released a list of recommendations last Thursday, Dec. 10th. The recommendations while a reflection of the parent and educator voices around the state do not alone restore trust in Albany. How the recommendations and other issues get addressed is the key and parents are watching this very closely.

Until there is a halt of the Common Core standards, repeal of the Education Transformation Act, major changes to the state tests, a reduction of unnecessary testing, protection of data privacy, and local control restored, parents will continue to Opt Out in large numbers.

The recommendations deliberately state that Governor Cuomo’s ‘signature’ legislation that enforces many of these harmful policies doesn’t need to be touched. On the contrary, this law is the prescriptive blueprint to these harmful policies that was passed by the legislature as part of the budget last spring.

One of the recommendations to put a 4-year moratorium on evaluating teachers based on the flawed Common Core state tests was officially voted into emergency regulations by the Board of Regents at today’s board meeting. Until the law is repealed, this moratorium does not reduce testing it actually does the opposite, increases testing and further puts a strain on school districts’ budgets to comply.

NYSAPE is calling on parents to Opt Out of state tests and any local tests that are linked to this corrupt and invalid evaluation system that clearly doesn’t provide value for the students, educators, or schools.

“The task force recommendations have opened the door to change. Much of these harmful policies came in through our legislature when they passed the Education Transformation Act against the will of the people they serve. Our State Assembly and Senate must now reverse this harmful legislation so that changes will be meaningful and substantial. Parents will be vigilant in following these changes every step of the way. We will continue to refuse to allow our children to participate in this system until ALL harmful reforms are removed from our classrooms,” said Jeanette Deutermann, Long Island public school parent and founder of Long Island Opt Out.

“Until specific laws and policies regarding standards, student assessment, teacher evaluation and school ranking are changed, parents will continue to boycott any system that ties high-stakes to standardized assessments.” Chris Cerrone, Erie County public school parent, educator, and school board member.

Jamaal Bowman, Bronx public school parent and middle school principal said, “Although I consider the task force recommendations to be a step in the right direction, it is merely a single step. At this point, there is too much uncertainty to get excited about where we are headed in our public schools. Until we know how the recommendations will be implemented, and by whom, and until the law tying teacher evaluations to test scores is revised or repealed, we will not be able to move forward and properly meet the holistic needs of our children.”

“How the Common Core, testing, and other education policies are revamped to be in the best interest of the children will be watched very closely by parents. I will not be opting my children into any unnecessary tests including local assessments that do not provide important feedback for my children,” said Lisa Rudley, Westchester County public school parent and founding member of NYSAPE.

“While there is much talk of high standards, there is little discussion of the non-curricular resources required to ensure that all students can succeed in the face of poverty and lack of adequate funding. It is disappointing that the task force failed to raise the question, if disadvantaged students were struggling prior to the implementation of the Common Core, how will simply raising the bar increase student achievement,” said Bianca Tanis, Ulster County public school parent, Rethinking Testing member and educator.

“After so much time and money has been wasted in forced implementation of flawed policy, students and educators of New York have been hurt and trust has been broken. We must repeal the APPR imposed by politicians who did not understand the domain. Scholars in schools of education and professional educators should design the best systems to achieve goals for public education,” said Katie Zahedi, Dutchess County, principal.

Marla Kilfoyle, Long Island public school parent, educator and BATS’ executive director said, “Teachers and parents do not trust NYSED, the ‘Tisch’ Regents’ majority, the legislature, or the Governor to be in charge of education. What they have done to our public education system and to our children is unconscionable. I have been an educator in NY for over 25 years and the mass destruction their policies have caused will take years to repair.”

NYSAPE, a grassroots organization with over 50 parent and educator groups across the state, is calling on parents to continue to opt out by refusing high-stakes testing for the 2015-16 school year. Go to http://www.nysape.org for more details on how to affect changes in education policies.

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Categories New York, Opt Out, Resistance, Standardized Testing, Teacher Evaluations

Lower Hudson Editorial: The Cuomo Task Force Got It Right, Now Let’s See if Cuomo Listens

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2015 //
12

The Journal News of the Lower Hudson Valley in New York, referred to as Lohud, has been critical of the mess that Andrew Cuomo has made with his constant meddling in education policy.

 

Today, Lohud praised Cuomo’s task force for listening to the parents who opted their children out of the Common Core testing. The number of children who opted out were about 225,000. That is a huge number of people expressing no-confidence in the state’s testing regime.

 

Lohud thinks the task force listened to parents and educators and hit all the right notes:

 

The task force released a report Thursday that accurately and even passionately captures the confusion and disarray unleashed on schools by Albany over the last several years. Consider this slap at New York’s educational leadership, which sounds like it came from a group of outside critics:

 

“The implementation of the Common Core in New York was rushed and flawed. Teachers stepped into their classrooms in the 2012-2013 school year unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the new standards, without curriculum resources to teach students, and forced to administer new high-stakes standardized tests that were designed by a corporation instead of educators.”

 

Hey, that’s what happened.

 

We messed up

 

Without naming names, the report is a pretty stunning rebuke of Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and former state Education Commissioner John King (soon to become acting U.S. education secretary), who refused to heed the legitimate and plentiful concerns of educators and parents. As a result, New York will wind up spending more than a decade rewriting education policies over and over, without any guarantee that students will be better off in the end….

 

Interestingly, the report does not explore the merits and failings of New York’s teacher-evaluation system, which is perhaps most controversial for grading teachers, in part, on student test scores. Instead, the task force recommends that test scores not be used to evaluate teachers or students until 2019-2020. (State law already bans including the test scores on student transcripts or using them to make student placement decisions through 2018.)

 

This rather vague recommendation leaves the teacher-evaluation system in place, and would likely require school districts to replace test scores with another measure for the next several years.

 

The task force did not take the next, necessary step of declaring the evaluation system a failure and calling for the development of a new system that would not only hold teachers accountable but give them the information they need to improve their performance and student achievement. But the panel covered a lot of ground in a few short weeks, and it should not be up its 16 people to solve all of New York’s problems.

 

Should Cuomo and the state Legislature move ahead with the development of new standards and testing, a new evaluation system would have to be next. Otherwise, the education wars will continue.

 

There’s no telling, at this point, whether Cuomo will endorse the task force’s work in whole or part or whether the recommendations would be carried out in such a way as to win back the loyalty of disenchanted parents and educators. We’ll likely find out where the governor stands when he delivers his State of the State address next month.

 

Unless the Legislature repeals or amends the law that was passed last June and tucked into the state budget, teachers will still be evaluated by test scores, counting for up to 50%, then local measures will not replace what the law requires. Their evaluations won’t lead to punishments, but presumably they will go onto their permanent records. Thus, for the task force’s recommendations to have any teeth, the Legislature must act to change the objectionable law. The task force’s recommendations do not trump state law.

 

Lohud credits the parents for forcing the task force to listen. Now, let’s see what Governor Cuomo does. It would be nice if he walked back his statement that he hopes to bust the “public education monopoly,” which he said right before he was re-elected.  That would be a good start, especially for the parents of more than 90% of the children in the state who attend public schools.

 

 

 

 

Categories Common Core, Cuomo, Andrew, Standardized Testing, Teacher Evaluations

Peter Greene Says the Cuomo Task Force Report is a “Nothing Sundae”

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2015 //
9

Peter Greene is not impressed with the Cuomo Task Force report on the Common Core, the tests, and teacher evaluation. He calls it a “nothing Sundae.” 

 

He goes through the recommendations one by one. But his big beef is that the report does not question the value of the CCSS, does not question the testing, and does not get to the problem of test-based accountability for teaching. The report assumes that the problem all along has been poor implementation, not that any of the fundamental ideas need to be changed or dropped or replaced.

 

 

Another blogger points out that the Task Force report includes this curious statement:

 

The Education Transformation Act of 2015 will remain in place, and no new legislation is required to implement the recommendations of the report, including recommendations regarding the transition period for consequences for students and teachers. During the transition, the 18 percent of teachers whose performance is measured, in part, by Common Core tests will use different local measures approved by the state, similar to the measures already being used by the majority of teachers.

 

The blogger writes:

 

Yes, tests will still count for 50% of a teacher’s evaluation.

 

 

Categories Common Core, Cuomo, Andrew, Education Reform, Standardized Testing, Teacher Evaluations

Nicholas Tampio: Is ESSA a Hoax?

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2015 //
13

Nicholas Tampio, a professor of political science at Fordham University, argues that the Every Student Succeeds Act is a sham. Instead of dismantling the harmful policies of corporate reform, it shifts the burden of imposing them to the states. By his reading, the warped soul of NCLB and Race to the Top was preserved with their emphasis on high-stakes testing.

The opt out movement must grow and grow until every state government and Congress recognizes that parents won’t tolerate the worship of high-stakes testing. We will not sacrifice our children and grandchildren to the gods of testing. The achievement gap is a product of standardized tests. The standardized tests faithfully reproduce family income, not the ability to learn. American students need a great education, like the one Bill Gates wants for his children at the Lakeside School, like the one Rahm Emanuel wants for his children at the University of Chicago Lab School, like the one President Obama wants for his children at the Sidwell Friends School. An education that includes the arts, foreign languages, history, science, physical education, literature, civics, time for play, time for exploration, time for projects, time for recess. NOT an “education” that is centered on standardized tests, where children are rated and ranked by their ability to mark the correct bubbles. We want an education that encourages children to ask question, not an education that prepares them to give the “right” answer.

 

He writes:

 

How can people say that the new bill is a U-turn from the education policies of the past 14 years? Under it, the federal government would not be able tell states what academic standards to adopt or how student test scores should be used in teacher evaluations. Nonetheless, states would have to submit accountability plans to the Department of Education for approval, and these accountability plans would have to weigh test scores more than any other factor. Furthermore, under the act, states would have to use “evidence-based interventions” in the bottom 5 percent of schools, determined, again, by test scores.

 

In short, states would be free to choose test-based accountability policies approved by the secretary of education or lose access to federal Title I funds that sustain schools in low-income communities across the country. In a move that belies Alexander’s claim about local control, the Department of Education has offered to establish “office hours” for states or districts that wish to meet its “policy objectives and requirements under the law.”

 

Does the bill at least permit states to escape the Common Core? It is hard to see how. According to the bill, each state would have to adopt “challenging state academic standards.” The Obama administration’s testing action plan stipulates that assessment systems should measure student knowledge and skills against “state-developed college- and career-ready standards” — which has long been code for the Common Core. So, yes, states could invest hundreds of millions of dollars to write new academic standards and make aligned tests, but there is no guarantee that the secretary of education would approve standards or tests that implicitly chastise the administration’s education policies.

 

Advocates of high-stakes Common Core testing have applauded the Every Student Achieves Act. Catherine Brown, the director of education policy at the Center for American Progress, said, “At the end of the day the bill appears to allow the department to set parameters in key areas and enforce statutory requirements.” John Engler of the Business Roundtable likewise applauded the bill for keeping test scores “a central feature” of state accountability systems. Lanea Erickson at Third Way praised the bill for throwing “some much-needed water on the political firestorm around testing.”

 

These advocates have not changed their minds about the Common Core or testing. They are just happy to shift the responsibility for administering it to the states rather than the federal government if that would help defuse parent and educator animosity. They misunderstand the justified anger that fuels the test refusal movement.

 

 

Categories Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Opt Out, Parents, Standardized Testing

Annie Paul Murphy: Fiction Helps Our Brains Develop

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2015 //
8

Annie Paul Murphy writes about neuroscience. In this article in the New York Times in 2012, she says that neuroscientists have documented how fiction helps brains develop. Reading fiction enlarges our understanding and imagination. It teaches us about a wide range of social situations that we may have never encountered. As others have written in the past, fiction is a magic carpet that allows us to enter into other worlds and other places, to walk in the shoes of people we might never meet or people that are purely imaginary. (I actually have some trouble, philosophically, with the idea that we must find a utilitarian justification for engaging with art, whether literature or music or other imaginative expression, like those who say that listening to Mozart increases your math scores, or similar claims of the connection between test scores [i.e., the Holy Grail of education] and activities whose purpose is to give people a sense of joy, to stimulate their imagination, to deepen our humanity.

 

This relates to a discussion on the blog a few days ago about how Common Core appears to be causing a decline in the teaching and reading of fiction in fourth and eighth grades, which are tested by the National Assessment of Education Progress. Brookings scholar Tom Loveless pointed out what appears to be a direct connection between the introduction of Common Core and the decline in reading fiction.

 

The Common Core standards direct that teachers in the grades K-8 spend 50 percent of instructional time on fiction and 50% on non-fiction. In the high school, teachers are supposed to spend 30 percent on fiction and 70 percent on non-fiction. This directive has no basis in research, experience, or reason. Why cut back on fiction?

 

Apparently, the drafting committee decided that the best way to prepare students to do well on the National Assessment of Educational Progress–federal tests that are given every two years to samples of students in every district across the nation–would be to incorporate the NAEP instructions to assessment developers. NAEP recommends that the developers allocate 50 percent of the test questions on the reading exams in fourth grade to fiction and 50 percent to non-fiction, and that the proportions shift in high school to 30 percent fiction and 70 percent informational text. For some unknown, unexplained reason the CCSS writing committee decided this must be the way that reading is taught in American schools, with a declining emphasis on fiction.

 

This is not only arbitrary, it is senseless. No other nation tells teachers how to allocate time between fiction and non-fiction. Both are worthy. Teachers should make their own decisions about what they think is best in their classroom.

 

When criticism of this arbitrary allocation became widely known, there was a public outcry that the Common Core was anti-literature. The advocates for the Common Core responded that the allocation applied to all subjects–including mathematics, sciences, physical education, social studies, and so on–and thus left English teachers free to teach fiction if they chose, to the extent they chose.

 

But neither textbook publishers nor teachers saw it that way. If the purpose of the 50-50, 30-70 divisions was to leave reading teachers free to choose their own assignments, what was the point of embedding the allocations in the standards? If they had no purpose other than to tell math teachers and science teachers not to assign fiction, did the allocation make any sense? Obviously not. It doesn’t take a high level of sophistication to see that the purpose of the allocation was to diminish the amount of time devoted to fiction.

 

I know of no research that says that children who read fiction are less well prepared to understand informational text than children who read informational text. The most important determinants of reading fluency and skill are not the genre read, but the students’ vocabulary, background knowledge, and interest. Government regulations are “informational text” and O. Henry short stories are fiction. Which is more likely to contribute to a students’ ability to read?

 

I am not making a case here for fiction over non-fiction. I write non-fiction, and I read non-fiction. But I would never claim that anything I write is worthier than poetry by William Blake or novels by John Steinbeck. Yes, I think students should read classic literature, including classic speeches (“the Gettysburg Address,” Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches) and classic essays (like George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”). Students should be exposed to both great literature and great speeches and essays (otherwise known as “informational text.”)

 

But I fail to see why any committee anywhere should have the right to tell English teachers whether to teach fiction or “informational text.” That is a decision that belongs to teachers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Common Core, Education Reform, Real Education, Standardized Testing

FairTest: What Comes Next in Assessment After ESSA Passes?

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2015 //
14

FairTest has posted a list of recommendations for next steps in the fight against the misuse and overuse of standardized tests.

 

The long-awaited demise of the despised and failed No Child Left Behind is gladdening, but it doesn’t end the fight against the misuse of high-stakes tests. Some states may decide to continue NCLB-ing their students and teachers because bad habits are hard to break.

 

FairTest recommends:

 

Congress will likely soon pass and President Obama sign the “Every Student Achieves Act” (ESSA). This bill is the latest version of the long-standing Elementary and Secondary Education Act and replaces the universally despised “No Child Left Behind.” The new law presents both opportunities and dangers for the testing resistance and reform movement.

 

How can the movement use the opportunities, counter the risks, and win greater assessment reform victories? The first task is to continue to build resistance to high-stakes standardized exams in every state in the nation, especially by expanding the already large numbers of test refusals. Next is to transform this movement strength into concrete victories by winning state legislation and local regulations to cut back testing, end high stakes, and implement high-quality assessments.

 

ESSA pushes decision-making power about most aspects of accountability from federal education officials to the states and localities. It will take strong and savvy organizing to win needed changes. Here are some ways activists can bring positive change and avoid the law’s dangers.

 

Push for far fewer state and local tests:

 

Movement activists should organize to win these goals:

 

– No state standardized tests beyond those mandated by ESSA.

 

– No standardized local interim, benchmark, predictive, formative, or other such tests, including those embedded in commercial on-line curricula.

 

– A ban on standardized testing in pre-K through grade 3.

 

– Transparency in the number, and uses of tests, and time spent on test preparation

 

While ESSA mandates 17 tests (grades 3-8 in reading and math, plus three grades for science), states and districts require many more. A recent study shows the average public school student takes 112. With fewer federal accountability mandates, states and districts will be under less pressure to test incessantly. ESSA also contains funding for states and districts to evaluate and reduce their testing programs.

 

Organize to end your state or district’s high-stakes testing mandates:

 

– End state requirements that students pass standardized exams to graduate or be promoted to the next grade, as many states already are. These are not required by federal law or regulations.

 

– End requirements to judge educators by student standardized exam scores. ESSA eliminated any federal mandate for test-based teacher evaluation. Now activists must incorporate this change locally by preventing states from deciding to perpetuate these dangerous policies.

 

– Fight for tests to be no more than 51% of the weight in your state’s formula for ranking schools (the minimum percentage allowed under ESSA). Ensure that other indicators are educationally sound, and that states provide assistance (including additional funding), not punishment, to schools identified as “low performers.” ESSA does require states to rank all schools and act to improve the lowest performing, but the types of interventions are no longer specified in federal law.

 

Win better assessment:

 

Push to have your state become one of the seven that will be allowed to completely overhaul their testing systems under ESSA pilot programs. Ensure that the overhaul includes primarily locally-based, teacher-controlled assessments, such as projects and portfolios. The New York Performance Standards Consortium is currently the best U.S. example of educator-controlled performance assessments.

 

Get your state to pass an opt-out law:

 

In 2015, a few more states, including Oregon [link to statute] passed laws recognizing the right of parents to hold their children out of standardized testing, while similar opt-out bills advanced in one or both houses of several other legislatures. ESSA recognizes that families can refuse testing if a state has an opt-out law. The new law does mandate 95% test participation, but leaves it up to the states to decide what to do if a school or district does not reach that threshold. At a minimum, activists should organize to block moves to punish students who opt out or schools and districts with low participation rates.

 

Use elections to raise issues:

 

Use the 2016 election cycle to hold incumbents and challengers accountable for implementing assessment reform. Groups with appropriate tax status should consider endorsing/opposing candidates based on their positions on testing. Activists, including tax-exempt groups, can use questionnaires, candidate forums, bird-dogging, and letters to the editor to force candidates to take clear positions.

 

Recognize and Block ESSA’s Dangers:

 

ESSA allows states to use federal assessment funding to revise their testing programs modestly, such as by adding tasks, portfolios and formative assessments. However, these tools are generally intended to be incorporated into standardized tests, as with the PARCC and SBAC Common Core exams. Performance assessments cannot fulfill their promise if they become mere adjuncts to current state exams. Similarly, a provision allowing districts to use a college admission test such as the ACT or SAT as the required high school exam must be treated with caution; those tests are no better educationally than existing state tests, and they have not been validated to assess high school academic performance.

 

Corporations such as Pearson and the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) are promoting a dangerous version of “performance assessments.” They have perverted ideas developed by progressive educators, and the language used to describe them, such as “performance tasks” and “embedded” and “formative” assessments, to promote centrally controlled, largely on-line testing and instruction. The movement must strenuously resist these maneuvers, not by abandoning the fight for high-quality assessments or the labels we use for them, but by distinguishing educationally helpful from harmful practices.

 

The Next Reauthorization: ESSA is due to be reviewed by Congress in 2020. It is not too early to think about what kind of federal law can be won as the movement builds more clout and wins more victories at the state and local level.

 

 

Categories Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Resistance, Standardized Testing

Steve Singer: A Truly Horrible Idea: All Testing, All the Time

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2015 //
24

Steve Singer, a teacher in Pennsylvania, writes here about the latest fad among entrepreneurs and politicians: competency-based education.

 

At long last, schools will get rid of the annual high-stakes testing that provoked parents to opt out.

 

In the new world of competency-based education, students will be assessed continuously, every day, as they work on their modules.

 

Here is how he begins:

 

Welcome to class, children.

 

Please put your hands down, and sit at your assigned seat in the computer lab.

 

Yes, your cubicle partitions should be firmly in place. You will be penalized if your eyes wander into your neighbors testing… I mean learning area.

 

Now log on to your Pearson Competency Based Education (CBE) platform.

 

Johnny, are you reading a book? Put that away!

 

Are we all logged on? Good.

 

Now complete your latest learning module. Some of you are on module three, others on module ten. Yes, Dara, I know you’re still on module one. You’ll all be happy to know each module is fully aligned with Common Core State Standards. In fact, each module is named after a specific standard. Once you’ve mastered say Module One “Citing Textual Evidence to Determine Analysis” you will move on to the next module, say “Determining Theme or Central Idea for Analysis.”

 

Johnny, didn’t I tell you to put away that book? There is no reading in school. You’re to read the passages provided by the good people at Pearson. No, you won’t get a whole story. Most of the passages are non-fiction. But I think there is a fun passage about a pineapple coming up in your module today. Isn’t that nice?…

 

Thanks to the good people at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Gates Foundation, and the Foundation for Excellence in Education, The state and federal government have mandated a much more efficient way of determining student learning. Back in the day, they forced schools to give one big standardized test in Reading and Math every year. Teachers would have to scramble with test prep material to make sure all learners could pass the test, because if students didn’t get passing marks, the teacher was out on her butt.

 

We’ve done away with such silliness now. Thankfully the government got rid of yearly high stakes standardized testing. What we do now is called Competency Based Education. That’s what this program is called. It’s kind of like high stakes standardized testing every day. So much more efficient, so much more data to use to prove you know this set of basic skills written by the testing companies with hardly any input from non-experts like classroom teachers.

 

I might be inclined to dismiss this scenario as a scare tactic, but I heard New York State Commissioner of Education MaryEllen Elia describe the coming shift to embedded assessment, which is the model of Questar, the new testing system for the state, beginning in 2016-17. Competency-based assessment occurs seamlessly, every day, without the students knowing that they are being tested as they answer questions about what they read.

 

If you love standardized testing as part of the daily life of the school, you will love CBE.

 

Categories Standardized Testing

What’s In the ESSA About Accountability?

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2015 //
13

Here is a report from the Washington Post on the accountability features of the Every Student Succeeds Act.

 

“Specifically, under the Every Student Succeeds Act:

 

“The testing regime remains in place.

 

“States would still be required, as they are now, to test students annually in math and reading in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school, and publicly report the scores according to race, income, ethnicity, disability and whether students are English-language learners.
“States get to set their own academic goals.

“Where No Child Left Behind set forth one goal for the nation — 100 percent proficiency in math and reading by 2014 — the new bill would require each state to set and measure progress toward its own academic goals.
“Test scores still matter, but how much is up to the states. States would be charged with designing systems for judging schools. Each system would have to include measures of academic progress, including test scores, graduation rates and (for non-native English speakers) English language acquisition. But it would also have to include a measure of school climate, such as student engagement or access to advanced courses. All of the academic indicators together must count for “much” more than the non-academic factor, but the definition of “much” is not clear.
“What should be done in schools that are struggling will be up to states and districts. Under No Child Left Behind, a school could get dinged if just one of its subgroups failed to meet annual testing goals, and the federal government exercised a lot of say in what happened in persistently failing schools. Under the new bill, it’s likely that fewer schools will be required to be marked for interventions, and it’s up to states and, in many cases, districts to decide what to do to improve those schools. Schools marked for the most intensive interventions would be those among the lowest-performing 5 percent in the state, those in which fewer than two-thirds of students graduate on time, and those in which a subgroup of students “consistently underperforms.” It’s up to each state to determine how long a group of students would have to lag before the school would be required to take action.
“What happens if lots of kids opt out of testing?

“Again, it’s up to the state. Under No Child Left Behind, a school automatically got a black eye if it failed to test at least 95 percent of its eligible students. The aim was to ensure that principals and teachers weren’t discouraging low performers from showing up on test day in order to boost scores. The new bill maintains the 95 percent requirement, but states can decide how participation rates should figure into their overall school rating system.”

 

 

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Standardized Testing

D.C. Test Scores Are Disastrous

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2015 //
44

The public schools of the District of Columbia began their era of radical “reform” in 2007. The City Council, desperate for a quick fix to the low test scores and bureaucratic dysfunction of the school system, believed the much-heralded claims of a “New York City miracle,” supposedly due to mayoral control. The D.C. Council adopted mayoral control, hoping for the same miracle. Hard-charging Mayor Adrian Fenty, acting on the advice of NYC Chancellor Joel Klein, hired Michelle Rhee to be the Chancellor of the D.C. school system in 2007.

 

Rhee became the national face of the new reform movement. She closed schools, despite community protests. She fired principals and teachers. She ridiculed anyone who spoke of poverty as making excuses. She negotiated a sweeping teacher evaluation system and made war with the teachers’ union. She appeared on the covers of both TIME and Newsweek. She even won plaudits from both Presidential candidates during one of their debates in 2008. According to TIME, Rhee had a plan to fix the D.C. schools. She even predicted she would make it the best urban district in the nation.

 

Rhee was a lightning rod for admirers and critics. In 2010, Mayor Fenty lost his bid for re-election; Rhee was the central issue. She resigned, and the new Mayor Vincent Gray appointed Rhee’s deputy Kaya Henderson, fearful of offending the powerful supporters of Rhee and her methods. Henderson pledged to continue Rhee’s initiatives, but with a less confrontational style.

 

So after eight years, how did D.C. students do on the new PARCC test? Recall that D.C. won a Race to the Top Grant and embraced the Common Core standards.

 

The results are in, and they are appalling.

 

“District of Columbia officials released results from a recent citywide elementary school exam Monday, and the scores are abysmal. Less than a quarter of students met expectations in either math or English.

 

“Among all eighth grade students who took the test, just 3 percent met expectations in math, while 8 percent of seventh graders met the math expectations, according to Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) test results….

 

“Of all the D.C. public school students in grades three through eight who took the test, only 25 percent met English expectations, and just 21 percent are on the correct level in math achievement.

 

“Around half of individual elementary schools didn’t have a single student who exceeded expectations in math….

 

“In October the test results for high school students showed just one in 10 sophomores is on track to be prepared for college.

 

“The vast majority of city schools scored flat zeros in math preparedness, with the 10 percent average being largely propped up by two premiere magnet schools with rigorous admission standards.

 

“Kaya Henderson, chancellor of DC Public Schools, called the test results “sobering,” and called for more “strategic investments” in the city’s failing schools.”

 

G.F. Brandenburg, retired D.C. Teacher and lose observer of the District’s schools, says the combination of all-testing-all-the-time and putting half the students in unregulated charter schools was not successful.

 

Eight years of reform and what was accomplished? D.C. reforms cost many hundreds of millions of dollars. Many professionals were fired. There was little or no benefit to students. In Wendy Kopp’s last book, “A Chance to Make History,” she points to D.C. as an example of Teach for America’s ability to reform an entire district. That story line just dissolved.

 

Who will be held accountable? Who will really put students in the District of Columbia first? If any district can be considered a full-scale trial of the new punitive, competitive, business-style approach to education, it is the District of Columbia. How sad.

 

 

 

 

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2015/11/30/less-than-a-quarter-of-dc-elementary-students-prepared-for-school/#ixzz3t2oUCY9b

 

 

 

 

Categories District of Columbia, Education Reform, Rhee, Michelle, Standardized Testing

NY Post:Those Evil Unions Control Parents

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2015 //
21

Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post hates the teachers’ union. It hates the union so much that it blames the union for whatever it doesn’t like. Today, the Post says the massive opt out in New York was controlled by the union. Imagine that: the parents of 220,000 children take orders from the union. Wow, who knew that parents were so easily manipulated?

 

As the Post sees it, the union doesn’t want teachers to be evaluated at all, so they pulled the puppet strings and the parents did as the union bosses told them. The stronghold of the union is New York City, where the number of opt outs was minuscule. Why didn’t the opt out movement succeed where the union was strongest?

 

Note to the editorial board of the New York Post: Please meet with the leaders of New York State Allies for Public Education. Let them explain to you why they led the opt outs.

Categories Education Reform, Opt Out, Parents, Standardized Testing, Unions
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