Please read Leonie Haimson’s description of student testimony against New York state’s ESSA plan.
Commissioner of Elia represents the old discredited model of NCLB, RTTT, and Test-based accountability. Isn’t 17 years of failure enough?
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Looking for innovation? Check out your public schools, where the entire district can collaborate to develop new ideas and sustain them, and where districts can exchange and incubate good ideas and practices.
On June 5, the Southold Independent School District honored high school students engaged in broadcast journalism. Representatives of schools from across Long Island gathered for the inaugural Broadcast Awards for Senior High, or B.A.S.H. It is believed to be the first event of its kind, recognizing students for their achievements in broadcasting.
Thirty-eight videos made by students were judged by a panel of experts from the broadcasting industry.
“A special lifetime achievement award [was] presented to the students and staff at Great Neck South Middle School in recognition of their longstanding commitment to such programs, which began at their school 65 years ago; Great Neck South Middle School is believed to have been the very first public school to offer a professional broadcasting program for students, circa 1952.”
Awards were given in categories such as “Best Opening Segment,” “Best Anchor Team,” “Best Sports Package,” “Most Entertaining Package,” “Best School News Package,” “Best Public Service Announcement,” and “Best Broadcast.”
The format of the event was akin to the Emmy Awards, with a red carpet and celebrity guests.
Superintendent David Gamberg said:
“In a society that grapples with how to teach young people to be responsible digital citizens, navigating the news and entertainment landscape is an important challenge faced by schools and communities throughout the United States. This program helps to recognize and celebrate how students can learn this important civic responsibility, as well as recognize various skills involved in media, journalism and the broader field of communications.”
New York State Allies for Public Education represents more than 50 parent and teacher organizations. It has led the Opt Out movement, in which 20% of the eligible children have refused the state tests year after year, including 50% on Long Island. Their members regularly attend legislative hearings in Albany and meet with legislators. They attend meetings of the Board of Regents. They follow the actions of the New York State Department of Education with care.
Every state should have its own version of NYSAPE.
PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE JUNE 6, 2017
Contact: Kemala Karmen 917-807-9969 | kemala@nycpublic.org
“Another Squandered Opportunity”:
Parents, Students, and Educators Slam NY State Education Department’s
Flawed ESSA Proposal & Process
Brooklyn, NY—Frustrated public school students, parents, activists, and educators gathered in front of the Prospect Heights Education Complex this evening to protest the New York State Education Department’s new schools accountability proposal and the sham process that supposedly generated it. Inside the building, department officials were setting up for one of several hearings scheduled across the state in order to gain feedback on the proposal, which was created to comply with recent federal legislation.
The federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is the successor legislation to the Bush-era No Child Left Behind (NCLB) bill. While ESSA preserves much of NCLB, including an onerous and misguided annual testing requirement for all children in grades 3-8, it also gives states more latitude in defining their school accountability systems than did NCLB, primarily through the inclusion of an additional “school quality indicator.”
For this reason, New York’s families and educators were looking forward to the state creating an accountability system that incentivized schools to provide children with a high quality, well-rounded education. ESSA also includes a statement that explicitly recognizes a parent’s right to opt their child out of testing without consequences for the school or district, a point that is crucial in a state where hundreds of thousands of parents have boycotted the tests as developmentally inappropriate and deleterious to their children’s educations.
Instead of benefiting from the flexibility of the legislation, New York State Education Department, under Commissioner MaryEllen Elia, let down New York’s children, parents, educators, and schools, by submitting an accountability proposal for Board of Regents approval that squanders the opportunities that ESSA confers. Its proposed accountability system doubles down on testing, counts opt out students as having failed the exams for the purpose of school accountability, and guarantees the continuation of narrowed test-prep curriculum that has spurred the nation’s largest test refusal movement.
Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters and a member of the NYSED ESSA Think Tank’s Accountability work group, said, “Even though the largest number of people who responded to the NYSED survey wanted an Accountability system that would include elements of a well-rounded, holistic education providing the Opportunity to Learn, including small classes, and sufficient instruction in art, music, science and physical education, their input was ignored. Many schools in New York City and elsewhere have already narrowed the curriculum because of the over-emphasis on state exams. Instead, NYSED proposes to add only a very few high-stakes indicators, such as student attendance and, in high school, access to advanced coursework. This may have the unwanted effect of making schools offer even less art and music in favor of more AP courses. It is time that the State took account of what matters in providing children with a quality education. This is their chance to do so by incorporating an Opportunity to Learning index in their formula.”
Johanna Garcia, NYC parent of public school students, contended that the proposal’s use of chronic absenteeism as the sole additional indicator for elementary and middle schools, along with test scores and ESL proficiency, meant that the accountability system would disproportionately punish high-poverty and high-immigrant school populations, while doing little to level the playing field among schools. “It is disheartening to see NYSED once again fail to take the opportunity to finally do right by students who have been ignored, penalized, and re-victimized by the very institution entrusted to lift them out of poverty. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that schools with high chronic absenteeism are suffering from concentrated numbers of homelessness, children in foster care, undocumented immigrant status, economic instability and special health and developmental needs. The proposed policies will further the inequities in our children’s education, while giving credence to the misconception that students from low income neighborhoods are less competent. This disconnect continues to be inexcusable and can no longer be accepted as the status quo.”
Kelley Wolcott, a teacher at South Brooklyn Community High School, a transfer school that serves over-aged, under-credited students–at least a dozen of whom spoke movingly during the hearing about the lifesaving role the school played–agreed. “The proposed accountability measures would devastate our ability to serve the needs of diverse learners. For true accountability, the state needs to focus on and incentivize supplying the resources necessary for students to thrive, including small class sizes, less emphasis on high-stakes testing, fair funding, and a vastly reduced student-to-counselor ratio for students with a history of trauma. Very few schools in NYC still have nurses, let alone a real school-based support team. Without these things–and with the change in graduation requirements mandated by ESSA–we’ll see the destruction of the safety net provided by transfer schools for students who are pushed out of charter schools or drop out of large underfunded public schools where they are no more than an OSIS number.”
Kemala Karmen, the parent of children who attend a 6-12 school in New York City, served on the Standards and Assessments work group of the Think Tank. “NYSED seemed intent on perpetuating the narrow strictures of NCLB. The nonpunitive plan (i.e., ask districts to analyze participation to ensure that students had not been systematically excluded, as per the intent of the law) that the majority of my work group proposed to address ESSA’s 95% testing participation mandate was rejected by the NYSED group leader who said it wouldn’t align with the Commissioner’s expectations. This decision to reject the plan was not reflected in the official notes sent later. Leadership insisted that parents just needed to be ‘educated’ about the assessments, rather than acknowledging that the test refusal movement grew out of legitimate concerns with how testing is reshaping classrooms. Moreover, I couldn’t believe that research-based evidence was never shared or apparently considered during our deliberations.”
Jeanette Deutermann, Nassau county parent and founder of Long Island Opt Out, expressed particular consternation for the way that opt-out students will be figured into the accountability system. “It is clear that the option exists to leave opt out students out of the test score accountability formula. To choose instead, and arbitrarily, to count these students as having received low scores, solely for the purpose of rating schools, would make the entire accountability system invalid. While we understand SED’s temptation to discourage test refusals, accountability regulations will not change a parent’s decision to protect their child from an unfair and unreliable testing regime.”
Eileen Graham, Rochester City School District parent advocate and founder of Black Student Leadership, sent a statement to be read: “Accountability needs to flow not only from the school to the state, but from the state to the schools. In order to succeed, the students of Rochester need the state to deliver well-resourced school facilities, prepared professional educators, and opportunities for teacher-created relevant curriculum. They should be ensuring that parents’ voices are heeded and that capable leadership is at the helm. Regrettably, Commissioner Elia’s current ESSA proposal is just a continuation of the test-based accountability that we’ve had for decades and that has done little to lift Rochester City School District out of a state of educational emergency.”
Lisa Rudley, Ossining public school parent and founding member of NYSAPE, said, “As long as Commissioner Elia is steering the ship, the winds of discredited former Chancellor Tisch and NY Education Commissioner John King will remain. If real significant and meaningful change is going to occur, the Board of Regents needs to replace Elia with someone who represents what’s in the best interest of the children. Otherwise, New York’s education policies will remain punitive and harmful to children and schools.”
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Bob Braun, veteran New Jersey reporter, just tweeted:
“BREAKING NEWS–Newark public school students have seized the offices of the Newark School Charter Fund and are staging a sit-in.”
Newark students are amazing. Eight of them staged a sit-in in Superintendent Cami Anderson’s office for four days in February 2015, vowing to stay until she quit. People from across the nation sent pizzas to them. In June 2015, Anderson quit.
Leonie Haimson and Rachael Stickland of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy created a toolkit for parents to defend against the invasion of children’s privacy by commercial and governmental interests. The toolkit was devised in collaboration with the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.
Haimson and Stickland explain why they developed the free toolkit and why parents should use it.
They write:
“Despite a clear desire among many parents to protect their children’s sensitive data, few resources exist to help them navigate the confusing patchwork of laws and regulations that govern student privacy. Most guidance is aimed at schools and districts, not parents, and what has been produced is often filled with legal and technical jargon. To compound the problem, most widely available student privacy resources are often written by organizations funded or supported by the growing ed-tech industry and who advocate for increased data sharing rather than reducing it.
“In fact, millions of student data points are currently soaked up every day by schools or their vendors and shared with third parties, including for-profit companies, government agencies, and researchers, without parental knowledge, and with few or uncertain security protections. The personal data collected from children may include students’ names, email addresses, grades, test scores, disability status and health records, suspension and discipline data, country of birth, family background, and more. Other digital data collected may include internet search history, videos watched, survey questions, lunch items purchased, heart rate and other biometric information measured during gym class, and even classroom behavior, such as being off-task or speaking out of turn.
“This information, whether collected by schools directly or by contractors supplying online learning platforms, classroom applications and websites, are often merged together and analyzed via algorithms to profile a student’s skills, strengths, abilities and interests, and to predict future outcomes. How this sensitive data may be used, with whom it can be shared, and how it can be protected are questions on many parents’ minds. Finding answers can be hard; schools often find themselves caught in the middle.”
They developed the parent toolkit to help parents protect their children.
“Our toolkit, available on the PCSP [Parent Coalition for Student Privacy] website, offers clear guidance about what student privacy rights exist under federal laws and what steps parents can take to ensure these laws are enforced, suggests questions they can ask to learn more about their schools’ data policies, and recommends best practices that parents can urge their school and district officials adopt, all with the goal of protecting and securing this data. We also suggest tips that parents can use at home and sample opt out forms to minimize the risk that their children’s privacy will be breached or abused.”
Texas Southern University canceled Senator Jon Cornyn’s commencement speech, due to student opposition.
Trump gave the commencement address at Liberty University, Jerry Falwell’s university, where he knew he could expect a friendly reception.
It appears that neither Trump nor DeVos will be giving many commencement addresses, except at small evangelical colleges. Students are not passive, and they know that this administration cares more about the student debt collectors than students. They know that this administration will do nothing to reduce their debt burden. They know that this administration wants to take away their family’s health insurance.
The cancellation of Senator Cornyn’s speech suggests that campuses will not be friendly environments for anyone supporting the mean policies of the Trump administration.
Michael Hynes is the superintendent of the Patchogue-Medford School District on Long Island in New York. He has a progressive vision of what schools should be, and he is implementing it in the schools of his district, with the support of the elected board.
Take a few minutes and watch his TED talk, where he explains how to transform our schools and make them schools of thoughtfulness, learning, and joy.
The New York Times published a lengthy article about New York City’s complicated and byzantine high school admissions process, which was launched 14 years ago to give choice to every student. With few (if any) exceptions, neighborhood high schools were a thing of the past. Students went to school fairs and scanned a lengthy catalogue to review the offerings of hundreds of high schools across the city. Zip code mattered not at all. Some schools had specific entry requirements, such as a difficult entrance examination or a talent audition. Most were open admissions. Now, a generation later, the results are in:
Under a system created during Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s administration, eighth graders can apply anywhere in the city, in theory unshackling themselves from failing, segregated neighborhood schools. Students select up to 12 schools and get matched to one by a special algorithm. This process was part of a package of Bloomberg-era reforms intended to improve education in the city and diminish entrenched inequities.
There is no doubt that the changes yielded meaningful improvements. The high school graduation rate is up more than 20 points since 2005, as the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio has built on Mr. Bloomberg’s gains. The graduation gap between white and black or Hispanic students, while still significant and troubling, has narrowed.
But school choice has not delivered on a central promise: to give every student a real chance to attend a good school.
Fourteen years into the system, black and Hispanic students are just as isolated in segregated high schools as they are in elementary schools — a situation that school choice was supposed to ease.
The average black or Hispanic student attends an elementary school where 80% of his or her classmates are black or Hispanic.
The average black or Hispanic students attends a high school where 79% of his or her classmates are black or Hispanic.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
Within the system, there is a hierarchy of schools, each with different admissions requirements — a one-day high-stakes test, auditions, open houses. And getting into the best schools, where almost all students graduate and are ready to attend college, often requires top scores on the state’s annual math and English tests and a high grade point average.
Those admitted to these most successful schools remain disproportionately middle class and white or Asian, according to an in-depth analysis of acceptance data and graduation rates conducted for The New York Times by Measure of America, an arm of the Social Science Research Council. At the same time, low-income black or Hispanic children like the ones at Pelham Gardens are routinely shunted into schools with graduation rates 20 or more percentage points lower.
While top middle schools in a handful of districts groom children for competitive high schools that send graduates to the Ivy League, most middle schools, especially in the Bronx, funnel children to high schools that do not prepare them for college.
The roots of these divisions are tangled and complex. Students in competitive middle schools and gifted programs carry advantages into the application season, with better academic preparation and stronger test scores. Living in certain areas still comes with access to sought-after schools. And children across the city compete directly against one another regardless of their circumstances, without controls for factors like socioeconomic status.
Ultimately, there just are not enough good schools to go around. And so it is a system in which some children win and others lose because of factors beyond their control — like where they live and how much money their families have.
The New York City public schools are highly segregated. The demographics are challenging. According to a report from The Century Foundation, the city school system is predominantly black and Hispanic (and has been since 1966, when whites became a minority): As of 2015, citywide student demographics2 were 27.1 percent black, 15.5 percent Asian, 40.5 percent Hispanic, 14.8 percent white, and 2.1 percent identified as “other.” Nearly 77 percent of students were classified as living in poverty, while 12.5 percent were identified as English language learners, and 18.7 percent as students with disabilities. With a total enrollment of 1.1 million students, of whom only 14.8% are white, it is hard to see racial balance, except in isolated instances, because the opportunities are limited.
The choice system is difficult to maneuver, even with the help of a guidance counselor. Eighty thousand students apply to 439 schools, broken up into over 775 programs. When Michael Bloomberg took office as mayor, the city had 110 high schools, most of them enrolling thousands of students. Most students went to their zoned high schools. Bloomberg eliminated zoned high schools and embraced small high schools, with the support of the Gates Foundation.
Rare is a 13-year-old equipped to handle the selection process alone.
The process can become like a second job for some parents as they arm themselves with folders, spreadsheets and consultants who earn hundreds of dollars an hour to guide them. But most families in the public school system have neither the flexibility nor the resources to match that arsenal….
The citywide graduation rate for all kinds of high schools is 72.6 percent, according to the Education Department. But that average masks sharp variations between schools based on their admissions methods. When Measure of America analyzed the rate for each method, it found that selectivity and graduation rates declined essentially in lock step, and that as graduation rates fell, the students were more likely to be poor and black or Hispanic…
Kristen Lewis, one of the directors of Measure of America, said the data revealed, in essence, two separate public school systems operating in the city. There are some great options for the families best equipped to navigate the application process. But there are not enough good choices for everyone, so every year thousands of children, including some very good students, end up in mediocre high schools, or worse…
An analysis by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School found that half of all students who got top scores on state tests came from just 45 middle schools out of more than 500. And 60 percent of students who went to specialized high schools came from those same 45 schools. None of those middle schools are in the Bronx.
The Times’ article focused on a middle school in the Bronx called Pelham Gardens. About 95 percent of the middle school’s students are black or Hispanic, many of them the children of Jamaican immigrants or immigrants themselves. Most of them come from poor families…
Last year, 146 seventh graders at Pelham Gardens took the state tests. On the English exam, 29 passed, which requires a score of at least 3 out of 4. Fifteen did that well in math. Only seven scored at least a 3 on both tests.
This means that a majority of the children had no real chance of getting into the most selective schools, like Manhattan/Hunter Science High School or Townsend Harris High School in Queens, where students must have a 3 or higher on the tests. The high school directory lists 29 programs in the city that did not accept anyone with a score lower than 3 on the math exam.
In a system with 1.1 million students, change is difficult. School segregation tends, inevitably, to mirror housing segregation. Housing segregation tends to reflect family income ad deliberate government policy decisions made decades ago when locating large housing projects. The choice plan assumed that students would be freed form the constraints of their zip code and that choice would promote desegregation. As the article shows, it has not.
Ralph Ratto teaches fifth grade in New York. The state math tests are ending today. His students spent nine (9) hours being tested about math and reading. This is child abuse. Why should students spend more than an hour on a math test or a reading test?
The tests, he says, are ridiculously hard for fifth graders. He thinks that most members of Congress could not pass the tests.
He can’t post any of the actual questions but he offers a question comparable to those on the test:
Here is a general idea of what one of these questions looks like.
A factory produces 4,861 items in 30 days. They then package them in crates hold 8 each. These crates are delivered to 26 distributers daily. How many are delivered each week to each distributer?
Ten year old children must be able to answer this question correctly, otherwise their teacher may be labeled ineffective.
Diane Ravitch's blog 