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Mercedes Schneider: Louisiana Court Orders Release of Data to Qualified Researchers

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2015 //
3

Mercedes Schneider reports on an important court case in Louisiana.

In 2010, a research group called “Research on Reforms,” which is skeptical of privatization, was denied access to state data by the Louisiana Department of Education. The same decided student data was released by the state agency to CREDO, which studies charter school performance.

ROR sued for access to the data available exclusively to CREDO. A lower court rejected their request, but last month a state appeals court ruled that ROR should have access to the data.

Let the data wars begin!

Categories Charter Schools, Data and Data Mining, Louisiana, Testing

The Senate ESEA Bill and Students with Disabilities

By dianeravitch
April 8, 2015 //
40

A reader wrote to ask whether the Senate revision of No Child Left Behind would permit states to develop alternate curricula and assessments for students with disabilities, and whether the bill will eliminate Secretary Duncan’s mandate that only 1% of children with disabilities could be allowed alternate assessments.

My inside source on the Senate committee staff told me that the authors of the bill wanted to permit states to have more flexibility but the “disability community” insisted on the status quo. They want all children, except the 1% who are most severely disabled, to take exactly the same tests. He suggested that if there were disability groups and parents who thought differently and who wanted greater state and local flexibility, they should make their voices heard.

In New York, when the first Common Core tests were given, only 5% of children with disabilities reached proficient, as compared to 30% of children without disabilities.

Contact the staff of Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and/or Senator Patti Murray of Washington State if you disagree with the lobbyists who want the stays quo.

In 2010, I visited with Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, who was the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee at that time. Along with Richard Rothstein, we explained the damage that No Child Left Behind was doing to children and education. He responded that “the disability community” loves NCLB. We were baffled.

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Special Education, Testing

Merryl Tisch Says Opting Out Hurts Neediest Children; Celia Oyler Disagrees

By dianeravitch
April 8, 2015 //
65

Merryl Tisch is the Chancellor of the New York Board of Regents. She has been a Regent for 20 years. She is a strong supporter of high-stakes testing. In this article, she criticizes those who opt out and who encourage others to opt out. She says they are hurting the kids who need help the most. She thinks the schools would neglect the neediest children if they were not tested every year. Since no high-performing nation tests every child every year, they must be overlooking their neediest children.

 

She writes:

 

“It used to be easy to ignore the most vulnerable students. Without assessments, it was easy to ignore the achievement gap for African-American and Latino students. Without an objective measure of their progress, it was easy to deny special education students and English Language Learners the extra resources they need. Obviously we still need to do more for those students, but now is not the time to put blinders back on.

 

“Without a comparable measure of student achievement, we risk losing track of the progress of all of our students in all of our schools. This risk applies not only to students of color, urban and rural students, and students with special learning needs. Many students from affluent districts do not make the year-to-year progress necessary in today’s world and need early support to get back on track. It’s far better to find that out while they’re still in the classroom than wait until they’re out of school and faced with real world challenges in college or the work place without the skills they need to overcome those challenges.”

 

One would think after a dozen years of high-stakes testing that there might be evidence that the children she names have benefitted, that poverty has decreased, but she fails to mention any evidence of the benefits of high-stakes testing.

 

Celia Oyler, a faculty member at Teachers College, Columbia University, read Chancellor Tisch’s letter and drew different conclusions. She wrote the following comment to The Hechinger Report, where Tisch’s article appeared:

 

Professor Celia Oyler wrote:

 

“Very few parents would be refusing the New York State Pearson tests if they were decent measures of learning. And if they were decent measures of learning from year to year there would be no Teachers of Conscience movement of teachers who are refusing to administer the high stakes tests. There are so many flaws with what Chancellor Tisch and Commissioner King have done:

 

“(1) These tests are not measures of what an individual student has learned from year to year: they are not vertically aligned. State Ed has created what they call growth scores, but calling something by a name does not make it real. In fact, these scores do not measure growth from year to year, but measure the score on the test one year and the score on a different test the next year.

 

“(2) The NYS tests are too blunt to measure learning of the students Chancellor Tisch proclaims to care most about: the children who do not do well on standardized measures (whether due to horrible stresses that often accompany poverty and affect learning, or from a print or language or intellectual disability, or because they are learning English as an additional language). And we also know from numerous adequately designed studies that a teacher accounts for only about 10-15% of test score variance on any child: to hold one teacher 50% responsible for a single test score is scientifically unjustifiable. And doing so damages the chances for such children to receive the education they need. Children who struggle with school tasks do not need more test prep curriculum (which is what they are mostly getting — get out to schools more, Chancellor Tisch!), they need more rich, integrated, experiential, three-dimensional learning that is organized around meaning and not memorization. Punishing children, their schools, and their teachers for poor scores on poor tests is not the way to promote the rich learning environments they desperately need.

 

“(3) The misuse of so called Value Added Models or Measures takes lousy tests and then puts them through a formula not even designed to measure one teacher’s influence on the score from year to year: VAMs have greatest reliability when used on groups of teachers across multiple years. To make matters worse, most all researchers continually agree that a teacher accounts for about 10-15% of any standardized score variance. So teachers in NYS are punished by giving them a score that was not even designed to measure what Chancellor Tisch has made it measure. Study after study after study demonstrates that VAM has confidence intervals of as much as 60%! This is utterly insane and has enraged educators who understand what is being done to them.

 

“(4) Chancellor Tisch has just announced that some districts and schools should be exempt from this high stakes bad math folly that she and her cronies have wrought upon the children and teachers of New York State. This is an abomination. We have decades of research demonstrating the link between wealth and standardized test scores. Yes, there are exceptions: we have schools where children from low-income schools have learned to do well on a high stakes test. We need to learn more from these anomalies. But even within the anomalies researchers continually find that doing well on one high stakes test does not transfer to other high stakes tests. This means that students can be taught how to do well on a high stakes test. It does not mean they are learning content, concepts, and skills of value, that transfer. This raises the question: Do we want learning, or do we want achievement test scores?

 

“It is apparent to many parents who are refusing the tests, and to many teachers who are taking up activism against these brutal educational “reforms,” that Chancellor Tisch and her ilk care way more about a reductive number on a spreadsheet than they care about real learning and about actually improving the possibilities for the most marginalized children in our society. New York State teachers and children deserve support and assistance, particularly in economically distressed communities. Tisch and her millionaire friends can do much better than punish us all with their willful ignorance.”

 

—
Celia Oyler, PhD
Box 31 Teachers College
525 W. 120th Street, NY, NY, 10027
office phone: 212.678.3696
office location: 312 Zankel Hall

Categories New York, Opt Out, Students, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Colorado: “Reformers” Fight Opt Out Bill, Defend Testing

By dianeravitch
April 7, 2015 //
6

The Colorado legislature is considering legislation permitting parents to opt their children out of state testing. The legislation is opposed by corporate reformer State Senator Michael Johnston and corporate reform groups like Colorado Succeeds.

Johnston, drawing on his experience in Teach for America and a brief stint as a principal, was author of legislation passed in 2010 that made test scores count for 50% of teacher evaluations.

I was in Denver the day his dreadful legislation came to a vote, and we were supposed to debate before about 100 civic leaders. Johnston waited outside the room for me to finish my presentation, so he heard nothing to contradict his love of high-stakes testing. As soon as he entered the room, he told the audience about the passage of his “great schools, great teachers” bill.

I was happy to see this part of the AP story about legislation in Colorado:

“Several more testing-related bills await hearings this week, including proposals to reduce social studies testing and to eliminate all statewide tests not required by the federal government. Another bill would dismantle a 2010 requirement that teacher evaluations rely at least 50 percent on student test scores.”

That last item is Mike Johnston’s “historic” bill.

Categories Colorado, Corporate Reformers, Opt Out, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Montclair, New Jersey: 42.6% of Students Opt Out of PARCC Testing

By dianeravitch
April 6, 2015 //
45

The final figures for opt outs were released in Montclair, New Jersey. 42.6% of students did not take the PARCC test.

 

That is quite a protest against Common Core and high-stakes testing, against the Bush-Obama agenda.

 

The opt-out totals were most pronounced at Montclair High School, where 68 percent of students refused to take the test. In contrast, at the low end of the scale, only 7.5 percent of students at Watchung Elementary School chose to opt-out of the PARCC.

 

 

Categories Common Core, New Jersey, Opt Out, Resistance, Testing

New York Times: Inside the High Scores of Success Academy Charter Schools: Rules and Rigidity: UPDATE!

By dianeravitch
April 6, 2015 //
205

Kate Taylor of the New York Times got a rare look inside a Success Academy charter school and reported on a stressful, competitive, joyless environment. The photograph that accompanies the story is worth a thousand–or more–words. Little children, walking in straight lines, not a smile in sight. OOPS! THE TIMES REMOVED THE PHOTOGRAPH THAT WAS POSTED WITH THE ORIGINAL STORY. IT SHOWED TWO ROWS OF CHILDREN IN UNIFORMS, LOOKING DEPRESSED AND GLUM. IN THE WHOLE GROUP, THERE WAS NOT A SINGLE HAPPY FACE. WHEN THE STORY APPEARED IN PRINT, THE PHOTOGRAPH WAS GONE, REPLACED BY CHEERFUL CLASSROOM SCENES.

Its founder, Eva Moskowitz, now has 43 schools in her chain; with Governor Cuomo’s help, she will soon have 100. The goal of her schools is high test scores, and she gets them. Whatever it takes, including humiliating children in front of their peers. That works.  Not every one can deal with the stress. Not even teachers. Teacher turnover is high.

In a rare look inside the network, including visits to several schools and interviews with dozens of current and former employees, The New York Times chronicled a system driven by the relentless pursuit of better results, one that can be exhilarating for teachers and students who keep up with its demands and agonizing for those who do not.

Rules are explicit and expectations precise. Students must sit with hands clasped and eyes following the speaker; reading passages must be neatly annotated with a main idea.

Incentives are offered, such as candy for good behavior, and Nerf guns and basketballs for high scores on practice tests. For those deemed not trying hard enough, there is “effort academy,” which is part detention, part study hall.

For teachers, who are not unionized and usually just out of college, 11-hour days are the norm, and each one is under constant monitoring, by principals who make frequent visits, and by databases that record quiz scores. Teachers who do well can expect quick promotions, with some becoming principals while still in their 20s. Teachers who struggle can expect coaching or, if that does not help, possible demotion.

Nothing matters but test scores on the state test. Two successive cohorts of eighth-grade students have applied for entry to New York City’s selective high schools, like Bronx Science and Stuyvesant, and not one was able to pass the admissions test despite years of test prep.

Jasmine Araujo, 25, who joined Success through the Teach for America program, quit after half a year as a special-education teacher at Success Academy Harlem 3. She now teaches at a charter school in New Orleans. “I would cry almost every night thinking about the way I was treating these kids, and thinking that that’s not the kind of teacher I wanted to be,” Ms. Araujo said.

If test scores matter more to you than anything else, this is the place to send your child.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Harlem Success Academy, Privatization, Testing

Can Your 3rd Grader Read 300 Words a Minute?

By dianeravitch
April 5, 2015 //
38

Kevin Glynn, who blogs as Lace to the Top, teaches elementary school. In this post, he describes the extraordinary demands of the third grade Common Core in Néw York.

“Can your 8 year old read 300 words per minute? Mine can’t. In fact, I don’t know anyone who can. Yet, that is exactly what Common Core state tests require.

“In looking through samples of Common Core state tests on engageNY for third graders, I find myself once again puzzled by what they are asking our children to do.

“The typical Common Core passage is 600 words in length. During the first day, (of a 3 day test) students are required to read a minimum of 5 passages and answer 30 questions. Students have 70 minutes to complete day one of the test.

“If a student spends only 1 minute reading and analyzing each of the 30 questions, they will have to read passages that are 2-3 years above grade level at a pace of 75 words per minute. Some would argue that is not too difficult a task and at first glance, I might agree.”

He then demonstrates the absurd expectations that guarantee most children will fail.

Categories Common Core, Testing

Jersey Jazzman Tries to Make Sense of Cuomo’s Teacher Evaluation Law

By dianeravitch
April 5, 2015 //
21

Across the river in New Jersey, teacher-scholar Jersey Jazzman watched the shenanigans. Perhaps he saw one Democratic member of the Assembly after another stand up to recount his sad feelings, her heavy heart, his misgivings, and then vote “yes” to a cockamamie scheme that will be a nightmare to implement and that will be an enormous unfunded mandate, all meant to discover, identify, and remove those BAD TEACHERS who are dragging down test scores. He refers to the controversy as “New York’s Absurd Debate about Teacher Evaluations and Test Scores.”

 

That’s putting it mildly.

 

Governor Cuomo, he says, has made a bad system worse.

 

He writes (and this is only a small part of his analysis):

 

APPR, like New Jersey’s AchieveNJ, is predicted on the idea that the educator — and only the educator — is responsible for the “growth” of his or her students. It ignores the impacts of funding inequities or district-level curriculum decisions or inadequate facilities or non-random assignment of students or any of the many factors that impact student learning that are completely out of the control of teachers and/or principals.

 

In New Jersey, the test-based components of AchieveNJ also ignore student characteristics, even though SGPs — Student Growth Percentiles, the test-based measures of student achievement used in teacher evaluations — are clearly biased against teachers who work in high-poverty, low-resourced schools.

 

New York’s growth model at least attempts to account for differences in student characteristics. According to the state’s Technical Report, the bias against teachers and schools serving high-needs students has been significantly reduced compared to earlier versions of the model.

 

But that doesn’t make New York’s growth measures any less statistically noisy or invalid. According to the Technical Report, one-third of New York’s teachers changed ratings from 2012-13 to 2013-14 (p. 43). The report crows that this is relatively stable compared to other growth measures, but in reality, it only means that the measures are merely the best of the worst.

 

Think about it: does it make any sense whatsoever that a full one-third of New York’s teachers significantly changed in their “effectiveness” within the span of a year? Should a high-stakes decision be compelled by a measure that is this unstable?

 

Here are the Technical Report’s growth ratings for teachers in “tested grades” over the last two years. If we add together all of the teachers who had at least two consecutive “Developing” or “Ineffective” ratings, we are only dealing with the bottom 5 percent of the teaching corps.

 

I know that the reformy line is these 5 percent are keeping us from competing with Singapore and Finland, but let’s get real: this small number is not worth Angry Andy’s disproportionate response. Yes, we need to remove bad teachers from classrooms, but does anyone really think the vast majority of these teachers couldn’t be identified through their classroom practices?

 

Angry Andy doesn’t think so; he is convinced that large numbers of administrators are, for reasons known only to Andy, fudging their observations so they can retain poor teachers. That’s why Andy wants to impose a huge unfunded mandate on school districts and require them to bring in outside observers to evaluate teachers.

 

It never occurs to Angry Andy that it may be possible administrators retain less-than-optimal teachers simply because there are not enough qualified candidates standing ready to replace them. Angry Andy has actually helped to create this situation in his own state, imposing “financially crippling” exams on teacher candidates (more on this later).

 

Even more foolishly, Angry Andy Cuomo thinks his demonization of teachers won’t have an effect on the number of bright young people willing to enter the profession. He believes his own inability to properly fund New York’s schools has no effect on the quality of teachers; no, it must be all these deceitful, lazy administrators, handing out phony high marks to lazy, ineffective teachers.

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, New York, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

This Is Genius! Listen to This Student

By dianeravitch
April 5, 2015 //
6

This is a video of a spoken word poem by student Ryan Lotocki. It is genius. In fact, the poem is titled “This Is Genius,” and it shows all the different ways that students excel. Not just on a standardized test, but in living good lives that engage their interests and passions.

 

Can we show this to a joint meeting of Congress, or at least to the committees now rewriting No Child Left Behind? Or how about our state legislatures, who assume the power to decide that teachers by the test scores of their students?

 

Students have power. They are the primary victims of the disruption and distorted values that NCLB and Race to the Top and uninformed politicians have made of our education system.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Students, Testing

Paul Karrer: Can We Trust Hillary?

By dianeravitch
April 4, 2015 //
50

Paul Karrer teaches fifth grade in California. He writes frequently about education.

 

 

Don’t Let Hillary Do An Obama On Public Education

 

I write to the leaders of our many education organizations. The time has come for educators collectively to push back.

 

If you are honest, you must admit we have not fared well politically. In fact it would be fair to say we have been vilified, punished, and demoralized. Teachers must face the ugly fact that President Obama has done the institution of public education and educators irreparable, long-term damage with his shocking warm embrace of “Ed Reform Inc.”

 

In the previous election the many arms of education threw their weight, money, and support behind President Obama far too early. Hillary Clinton was one of the few candidates to come out against No Child Left Behind. No Child Left Behind was the seminal poisonous blueprint for the destruction and financial demolition of our democratic public schooling institutions.

 

We received no return on our support for President Obama. Incredibly just the opposite occurred. He made Arnie Duncan his hatchet man and Arnie started chopping. President Obama became wedded to Wall Street, hedge funders, school privatizers, technocrats, and initiated the cannibalism of our educational system. Who would have conceived that the greatest educational betrayal in contemporary history would be by a Democrat and a minority member to boot? His Race To The Top, leveraged with more charter schools, was the ugly stepchild of NCLB. Strategically we thought we had to support Obama. He could only be better than any Republican we chanted. Sadly, in retrospect this is no longer a certainty.

 

We find ourselves in a similar juncture in the political road. Hillary seems to be our candidate BUT…she has said some very disturbing things of late. Things which make many of us a little questioning of her new leanings. I say this as an ardent Hillary supporter. She claims that the most important book she has ever read was the bible. No problem with that except she’s never mentioned this previously. Also, she’s made a very sharp right turn regarding Syria and probably Iran. She is now a big proponent of invasion – to show she’s tough. Both of these moves reek of pandering to polls. And they indicate a throwing out of previous values. Scary question is…will she throw public education and teachers under the bus for votes too?

 

We need Hillary, if she is to be our candidate, to be supportive of us in deeds not platitudes. Not just because of our power, and strength but also because we are the good guys. We believe in public service. That is why we teach.

 

Hillary needs to understand she does not automatically have our support and resources unless she guarantees the death of NCLB, teachers evaluated on testing, and the end of excessive testing. We need a presidential candidate who restarts a public schooling system based on what is good for children – not what is good for: politicians, hedge funders, Pearson, or charter school corporations.

 

So you our education leaders at the top of the food chain need to have a little sit-down with Hillary. She can’t do An Obama on us. An Obama is where he meets with a few teachers, tells them how great they are. Parades them on T.V. and blathers how society needs great teachers. And adds that we shouldn’t test too much.

 

And then he promotes industries many harmful reforms. That’s An Obama.

 

Don’t let Hillary do a Hillary on us.

 

 

Paul Karrer
5th grade teacher

Castroville Elementary School
2009 North Monterey LULAC Teacher of The Year
Monterey, California
93940

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats, Obama, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Testing
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