If you are on Facebook, express your views about standardized testing now:
The Today show is doing a survey on Facebook asking whether standardized testing is the best way for kids to learn. https://www.facebook.com/questions/10152328881051350/?qa_ref=pp
The latest tally–as of this writing–was 4,300+ against, 37 for.
Vote!
This just arrived in my email from parents in Williamsburg, Brooklyn:
This was sent to all D14 Principals and Parent Coordinators. Feel free to share in your districts.
———–
Dear Principals, Parent Coordinators, PTA presidents and school communities,
At the recent Town Hall sponsored by the CEC14, it was requested that we distribute information on opting out of the upcoming NYState high stakes tests to D14 parents in grades 3-5 and grades 6-7.
Speakers at the Town Hall included:
Brooke Parker, former CEC14 member, parent activist, WAGPOPS rep
David Dobosz, long-time NYC public school teacher and respected education activist
Janine Sopp, parent activist, Change the Stakes rep
Brian DeVale, Principal PS 257 and D14 CSA Rep
Esteban Duran, community organizer – El Puente, CB1
It is because we have the utmost respect for our Superintendent, our district, our schools, our principals, and our teachers, that we are building a movement to get our classrooms and schools wrested back into your deserving hands. The only way to do this is to get as many students to opt out of the high stakes state tests as possible. We believe in the promise of public education. We believe in our teachers, our principals, and our schools. NOW is the time to show the courage of our convictions.
Based on parent interest, Superintendent Winnicki is preparing for larger numbers than ever of our students opting this year.
We understand that schools are concerned about the impact of going beyond the 5% threshold. We have been in conversation with our city, state, and federal elected officials to protect our schools from punishments. The movement to opt out of high stakes testing has grown considerably.
No school (not even a Title 1 school) will stand alone in opting out.
This is a 100% parent led effort taking place district wide, city wide, and state wide.
It is our parents’ Supreme Court guaranteed civil right to opt their children out of these tests. It is also every person’s Supreme Court guaranteed right to Freedom of Speech (including school staff’s). You have the right to disseminate information regarding parents’ civil right to opt out of state tests.
Council Member Steven Levin’s office is working on proposing legislation to get the NYC Department of Education to provide an FAQ for parents on how to opt out of state tests, reaffirming our rights.
We want to make it clear that we are not telling you to tell your parents to opt out, but asking you to disseminate this information and allowing parents to make this decision on their own. We do not encourage 4th and 7th grade parents who are interested in their children applying to screened middle schools or screened high schools to opt out of the state tests because it could impact those students’ admissions to middle and high schools.
City Council Member Steven Levin is also developing a proposed resolution that would affirm the following:
1) It is the Supreme Court guaranteed civil right of every parent to opt out of the high stakes tests. Parents can choose to refuse their children taking these tests for any reason.
2) No teacher, school, principal, or district should be punished as a result of parents exercising their civil right to opt out of state tests. Any punishments related to opting out should be considered unconstitutional as those punishments hinge upon the violation of parents’ civil rights.
3) Every teacher, school, principal, and district has the Freedom of Speech to inform parents of their civil right to opt out of state tests.
4) Children whose parents have opted them out of state tests will be given appropriate educational activities and not be required to “sit and stare” at a desk during the test-taking time.
We anticipate our state and federal elected officials following suit in protecting our students, our teachers, our principals, and our schools.
Please distribute the enclosed information to your 3rd to 5th graders or 6th through 8th graders (in English and Spanish) about opting out as well as the letter template that parents can fill out and return to you. We ask that you keep track of the number of parents opting out. We need to keep track of this information.
Additionally, we will give parents who choose to opt-out of the high stakes tests a templated letter for them to send to elected officials at all levels and the media on the first day of testing. The letter will state that they support their school and teachers, but are opting out in opposition to loss of control at the local level, as well as the punitive measures that high stakes tests impose on children and teachers. The letter will also clearly state that this is a 100% parent-led effort.
Please share this letter far and wide, including to your colleagues, coworkers and friends outside of D14.
We thank you for all your hard work!
WAGPOPS!
Williamsburg and Greenpoint Parents: Our Public Schools!
representing public school parents across D14
I am really sorry to have to publish posts like this. I don’t want to see any teacher quit, especially the veteran teachers who are needed to help new teachers learn the ropes. And yet, there is a massive outflow of teaching talent from our public schools, caused by the soul-deadening testing regime that has throttled creativity and independent thought among teachers and students like. The spirit of standardization is alive in the land, and teachers feel they are under assault if they do not conform and comply. Some just can’t do it. I urge them to stay and fight, for the sake of the children, but for many teachers the conditions have become intolerable. I know that the modal year of teaching experience has dropped from 15 in 1988 to only one or two today; that is a frightening statistic. I have been in schools where no one had more than five or six years of experience. That is awful. Some education schools report a dramatic decline in enrollments. At some point, we must attribute the deliberate attacks on the teaching profession to the so-called reform movement that holds teachers “accountable” for everything wrong in the lives of children. Researchers state without question, even conservative researchers like Eric Hanushek, that the influence of family far exceeds that of the teacher, yet reformers have turned teachers into their targets while doing nothing to improve the lives of children or families.
This article was published on Valerie Strauss’s blog “The Answer Sheet” at the Washington Post. As Strauss writes, “Susan Sluyter is a veteran teacher of young children in the Cambridge Public Schools who has been connected to the district for nearly 20 years and teaching for more than 25 years. Last month she sent a resignation letter ( “with deep love and a broken heart”) explaining that she could no longer align her understanding of how young children learn best in safe, developmentally appropriate environments with the testing and data collection mandates imposed on teachers today.”
Read Sluyter’s entire letter. It begins like this:
When I first began teaching more than 25 years ago, hands-on exploration, investigation, joy and love of learning characterized the early childhood classroom. I’d describe our current period as a time of testing, data collection, competition and punishment. One would be hard put these days to find joy present in classrooms.
I think it started with No Child Left Behind years ago. Over the years I’ve seen this climate of data fascination seep into our schools and slowly change the ability for educators to teach creatively and respond to children’s social and emotional needs. But this was happening in the upper grades mostly. Then it came to kindergarten and PreK, beginning a number of years ago with a literacy initiative that would have had us spending the better part of each day teaching literacy skills through various prescribed techniques. ”What about math, science, creative expression and play?” we asked. The kindergarten teachers fought back and kept this push for an overload of literacy instruction at bay for a number of years.
Next came additional mandated assessments. Four and five year olds are screened regularly each year for glaring gaps in their development that would warrant a closer look and securing additional supports (such as O.T, P.T, and Speech Therapy) quickly. Teachers were already assessing each child three times a year to understand their individual literacy development and growth. A few years ago, we were instructed to add periodic math assessments after each unit of study in math. Then last year we were told to include an additional math assessment on all Kindergarten students (which takes teachers out of the classroom with individual child testing, and intrudes on classroom teaching time.)
Every year, the mandates grew more academic and less child-friendly. The demand for standards and assessments grew more insistent, more detailed, more onerous:
There is a national push, related to the push for increased academics in Early Childhood classrooms, to cut play out of the kindergarten classroom. Many kindergartens across the country no longer have sand tables, block areas, drama areas and arts and crafts centers. This is a deeply ill-informed movement, as all early childhood experts continuously report that 4, 5 and 6 year olds learn largely through play. Play is essential to healthy development and deep foundational learning at the kindergarten level. We kindergarten teachers in Cambridge have found ourselves fighting to keep play alive in the kindergarten classroom.
Last year we heard that all kindergarten teachers across the state of Massachusetts were to adopt one of a couple of in-depth comprehensive assessments to perform with each kindergarten child three times a year. This requires much training and an enormous amount of a teacher’s time to carry out for each child. Cambridge adopted the Work Sampling System, which is arguably a fine tool for assessment, but it requires a teacher to leave the classroom and focus on assessment even more, and is in addition to other assessments already being done. The negative impact of this extensive and detailed assessment system is that teachers are forced to learn yet another new and complicated tool, and are required to spend significantly less time in the classroom during the three assessment periods, as they assess, document evidence to back up their observations, and report on each child. And it distracts teachers yet again from their teaching focus, fracturing their concentration on teaching goals, projects, units of study, and the flow of their classroom curriculum.
Conditions for teaching kindergarten children grew increasingly oppressive. Finally, on February 12, Susan Sluyter submitted her resignation letter. She concluded it in this way:
I was trying to survive in a community of colleagues who were struggling to do the same: to adapt and survive, to continue to hold onto what we could, and to affirm what we believe to be quality teaching for an early childhood classroom. I began to feel a deep sense of loss of integrity. I felt my spirit, my passion as a teacher, slip away. I felt anger rise inside me. I felt I needed to survive by looking elsewhere and leaving the community I love so dearly. I did not feel I was leaving my job. I felt then and feel now that my job left me.
It is with deep love and a broken heart that I write this letter.
The so-called reform movement is destroying the lives of teachers and hurting children. It must be stopped. Soon, our classrooms will be filled with temps who come to teach for a few years, knowing only one thing: test scores matter most. None of the reformers would do this to their own children. Why do we let them do it to Other People’s Children–and to ours? This madness must end.
Yong Zhao posted the first of five blogs about the faulty claims of PISA, the international test that false reformers love to cite as evidence that our schools are failing and our kids don’t work hard enough. The five blog posts are drawn from Zhao’s much awaited new book. If you have not read his other books, order them now. Catching Up or Leading the Way and World Class Learners. You will enjoy them.
Zhao calls PISA “one of the most destructive forces in education today. It creates illusory models of excellence, romanticizes misery, glorifies educational authoritarianism, and most serious, directs the world’s attention to the past instead of pointing to the future. In the coming weeks, I will publish five blog posts detailing each of my “charges,” adapted from parts of my book “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China has the Best (and Worst) Education.”
In this post, Zhao demonstrates one of the misleading claims made by Andreas Schleicher, who runs PISA.
Zhao writes:
“Andreas Schleicher has on many occasions promoted the idea that Chinese students take responsibilities for their own learning, while in “many countries, students were quick to blame everyone but themselves.” France is his prime example: “More than three-quarters of the students in France … said the course material was simply too hard, two-thirds said the teacher did not get students interested in the material, and half said their teacher did not explain the concepts well or they were just unlucky.” Students in Shanghai felt just the opposite, believing that “they will succeed if they try hard and they trust their teachers to help them succeed.” Schleicher maintains that this difference in attitude contributed to the gap between Shanghai, ranked first, and France, ranked 25th.”
Zhao shows by citing PISA rankings that this claim by Schleicher does not withstand scrutiny. It is false.
He writes:
“What’s intriguing is that the countries whose students are least likely to blame their teachers all have a more authoritarian cultural tradition than the countries whose students are most likely to blame their teachers. On the first list, Singapore, Korea, Chinese Taipei, Shanghai-China, Japan, and Viet Nam share the Confucian cultural tradition. And although Japan and Korea are now considered full democracies, the rest of the countries on the list are not[3]. In contrast, the list of countries with the highest percentage of students blaming their teachers for their failures ranked much higher in the democracy index. Norway ranked first; Sweden ranked second, and Switzerland was number seven. With the single exception of Italy, all 10 countries where students were most likely to blame their teachers ranked above 30 on the Democracy Index (and Italy ranked 32nd).
“One conclusion to draw from this analysis: students in more authoritarian education systems are more likely to blame themselves and less likely to question the authority—the teacher—than students in more democratic educational systems. An authoritarian educational system demands obedience and does not tolerate questioning of authority. Just like authoritarian parents [2], authoritarian education systems have externally defined high expectations that are not necessarily accepted by students intrinsically but require mandatory conformity through rigid rules and sever punishment for noncompliance. More important, they work very hard to convince children to blame themselves for failing to meet the expectations. As a result, they produce students with low confidence and low self-esteem.
“On the PISA survey of students’ self-concept in math, students in Japan, Chinese Taipei, Korea, Viet Nam, Macao-China, Hong Kong-China, and Shanghai-China had the lowest self-concepts in the world, despite their high PISA math scores[4]. A high proportion of students in these educational systems worried that they “will get poor grades in mathematics.” More than 70% of students in Korea, Chinese Taipei, Singapore, Viet Nam, Shanghai-China, and Hong Kong-China—in contrast to less than 50% in Austria, United States, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands—“agreed” or “strongly agreed” that they worry about getting poor grades in math[5].”
And he concludes:
“In other words, what Schleicher has been praising as Shanghai’s secret to educational excellence is simply the outcome of an authoritarian education.
“As discussed previously, Chinese education has been notoriously authoritarian for thousands of years. In an authoritarian system, the ruler and the ruling class (previously the emperors; today, the government) have much to gain when people believe it is their own effort, and nothing more, that makes them successful. No difference in innate abilities or social circumstances matters as long as they work hard. If they cannot succeed, they only have themselves to blame. This is an excellent and convenient way for the authorities to deny any responsibility for social equity and justice, and to avoid accommodating differently talented people. It is a great ploy that helped the emperors convince people to accept the inequalities they were born into and obey the rules. It was also designed to give people a sense of hope, no matter how slim, that they can change their own fate by being indoctrinated through the exams.”
Our policymakers wish our students and teachers would think, act, study, and behave like their counterparts in Singapore and Korea. But first they will have to change America’s irreverent, anti-authoritarian culture. Good luck with that!
Comedy Central, are you listening?
Finnish students almost never take a standardized test. They take tests written by their teachers.
There is one test, however, that students take at the end of high school. It is the same for all students but the quality of the questions is far more complex and interesting than the questions found on the SAT or the ACT.
Here Pasi Sahlberg explains the kinds of questions that Finnish students are expected to answer.
The structure of the exams sounds amazingly like the old essay-style “College Board examinations” that were offered from 1901-1941, when they were replaced by the SAT for the sake of efficiency and speed (the decision to make the switch was made on Pearl Harbor Day). The Finnish exams are written and scored by teachers and scholars, not computers.
There are no bias and sensitivity guidelines to screen out controversial topics. Indeed, the tests include controversial topics.
Here is a typical question:
“Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels predicted that a socialist revolution would first happen in countries like Great Britain. What made Marx and Engels claim that and why did a socialist revolution happen in Russia?”
Students don’t pick a box. It is not a multiple-choice question. Students have to know what they are writing about. No guessing. No SAT, no ACT, no Pearson. .
Kyle and Jennifer Massey in Waco, Texas, wrote a respectful letter to their child’s principal explaining why they would not permit him to take the state STAAR tests or to engage in test prep for STAAR testing. As his parents, they care more about their child than the Legislature or Governor Perry or Pearson. They clearly, in this instance, know more than the legislators who are influenced by lobbyists to keep piling on more testing without regard to the best interests of children or our society. They want for their child what “the best and wisest parent ” wants for his own children: a full, rich, creative, liberating education, one that prepares him for life in a democracy, not endless drill and practice for tests that are prepared thousands of miles away, whose sole purpose is to rate their child, his teachers, his principal, and his school.
The Masseys write:
“This letter is to respectfully inform you that our fourth grade child XXXXXX will need to be excused
from all mandated standardized testing (e.g. STAAR test) during the remainder of the school year. This is also
to include classroom activities that are intended as STAAR test preparation, such as practice tests and test-
taking training exercises. As we are morally and ethically opposed to these school activities, we are making this
decision with recognition of our parental rights and obligations under the due process clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment of the United States Constitution and the Texas Education Code (Title 2, Subtitle E, “Students and
Parents, Section 26, “Parental Rights and Responsibilities”).
“We maintain that it is our parental right to choose to opt our children out of school activities that are harmful to
children as stated in the Texas Education Code CHAPTER 26. PARENTAL RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES
Sec. A26.010.EXEMPTION FROM INSTRUCTION. A parent is entitled to remove the parent’s child
temporarily from a class or other school activity that conflicts with the parent’s religious or moral beliefs if the
parent presents or delivers to the teacher of the parent’s child a written statement authorizing the removal of
the child from the class or other school activity. Please consider this letter to be our written statement of
authorization.
“We want our children to become critical and creative thinkers, not subservient test-takers.
We do not want XXX or his teachers shackled to a faulty testing product such as the STAAR test, or any standardized test for that matter. High-stakes standardized testing is not the education experience we want for our children, and thus we are choosing to opt XXXX out of all STAAR testing activities.
“Public education in this country has been the victim of thirty years’ worth of neoliberal hegemonic attacks in the form of political and
economic policies. These corporate attacks have negatively altered the structures, pedagogical practices, and
intended democratic goals of public education. As we reflect on the intended goals of public schools in a liberal
democracy – to prepare citizens for active civic participation, and indeed for global citizenship, for example –
we believe it is morally wrong to put children through the ordeal of standardized testing which has no benefit to
their personal education or development as citizens.
“The following summarizes some of our reasons for our belief that the practice of high stakes standardized
testing is morally wrong:
“AFFECTS SOCIO-EMOTIONAL WELL-BEING: This system of constant testing seems designed to
produce anxiety and depression. Evidence has accumulated over the last few decades of the
detrimental effect of frequent testing on students’ enjoyment of school, their
willingness to learn, other than for the purpose of passing tests or examinations, and their understanding of the process of
learning. A well-documented direct impact of testing regimes is that they induce test anxiety in young
learners and that perceived low scores negatively affect students’ self-esteem and perceptions of
themselves as learners. Any negative impact on motivation for learning is clearly highly undesirable,
particularly at a time in a young person’s life when the importance of learning to learn and lifelong
learning is widely embraced.
“KILLS CURIOSITY AND LOVE OF LEARNING: High-stakes standardized testing actually limits and
reduces the amount of QUALITY learning experiences. Rather than focusing on a child’s natural curiosity, testing emphasizes (and drills in) isolated facts limiting teacher’s ability to create
environments that stimulate a child’s imagination.
“REDUCES A CHILD’S CAPACITY FOR ATTAINING NEW KNOWLEDGE: If children cannot actively
make connections between different topics of study, they don’t remember what they learn from day to
day. Most standardized tests are still based on the recall of isolated facts and narrow skills.
“REPLACES HIGHER ORDER THINKING WITH SKILL, DRILL AND KILL: Most tests include many
topics that are not important, while many important areas are not included on standardized tests
because they cannot be measured by such tests. Teaching to the test does not produce real and
sustained gains on independent learning measures.
“NARROWS THE CURRICULUM: The loss of a rich curriculum has been documented in research and
in teacher testimony. The use of high-stakes tests is universally found to be associated with teachers
focusing on the content of the tests, administering repeated practice tests, training students in the
answers to specific questions or types of question, and adopting transmission styles of teaching. In
such circumstances teachers make little use of assessment formatively to help the learning process.
High-stakes tests are inevitably designed to be as ‘objective’ as possible, since there is a premium on
reliable marking in the interests of fairness. This has the effect of reducing what is assessed to what
can be readily and reliably marked. Generally this excludes many worthwhile outcomes of education
such as problem-solving and critical thinking.
“REDUCES SOCIALIZATION AS A CENTRAL CORE OF LEARING: The reduction of opportunities to
learn to socialize through and collaborative classroom activities reduces children’s opportunities to
develop healthy social skills. Being seated alone at a desk taking a test all day, or for a significant
portion of the day, isolates children from learning how to develop community-based problem solving
skills they will need as adults.
“WASTES VALUABLE EDUCATIONAL TIME SPENT TAKING TESTS: Texas Public Schools will
spend one of every five days or nearly 20% of the school year conducting tests. According to the
Texas Education Agency, Texas public schools will spend 34 out of the 185 day long year conducting
tests mandated by the state government. This does not include the regular testing in schools such as
six-weeks tests, quizzes, and final exams.
“VIOLATES ALL CHILDRENS’ RIGHTS TO A FREE AND APPROPRIATE EDUCATION: High-stakes
testing leads to under-serving or mis-serving all students, especially the most needy and vulnerable,
thereby violating the principle of ‘do no harm’. For example, students living in poverty, who already lack
critical access to books and free reading, are condemned to test prep instead of having opportunities
to read. Monies desperately needed for vital school resources such as clean drinking water, supplies
and roofs that don’t leak are being spent on testing materials. Texas spends $44 billion per year on
public education, of that $1 billion is spent just on testing days!
“LIMITS THE EDUCATION DECISION-MAKING POWER OF COMMUNITIES: Largely though
standardized testing, neoliberal reforms have transferred the control of schools away from the local
school boards, where control has resided since the founding of public schools, to the state and federal
levels, which create policies about which communities have little input but are mandated to implement.
States and the federal government have managed to gain control in part by adopting a discourse of
civil rights and equity, and by not imposing specific curricula on schools but, instead, leaving it to the
local school districts to implement curricular policies to achieve the test score goals, what can be
described as steering from a distance. In this way, the state and federal governments are able to take
credit for whatever perceived improvements result from their policies, and, conversely, whenever their
policies produce negative results, they can blame someone else, usually teachers. Teachers have
suffered the brunt of the blame since the publication of a Nation at Risk (1983) thirty years ago.
Consequently, the negative portrayal of public school teachers in the USA has demoralized many
educators.”
There is more. Go to the link and read the letter.
A lawsuit
was filed against the SAT and ACT for selling
confidential data of students to colleges. Some states mandate that
all students must take one of these tests, whether they are college
bound or not. Students assume that their names and scores will be
shared with colleges to which they apply, but it turns out that far
more is disclosed about students, and it is sold, not just shared.
It appears that ACT and SAT are in the data-mining business for
their own gain. A lawsuit filed this week contends
that the College Board, which runs the SAT,
and ACT,
Inc., sell identifying information
about the hundreds of thousands of teenagers who take the exams
each year without the students’
consent. The test
companies are “masking the sale” of personal details about the
students “under the
guise of ‘sharing'” the teens’
information with other
agencies, the suit says. It says
the companies don’t disclose to students that their
personal information will be sold for profit.
The companies collect data from test-takers, then sell
the teenagers’ names and personal details to colleges. The
universities use the information to market themselves to potential
students. Across the country, more
than 1.6 million students in this
year’s high school graduating class — including 101,368 in
Pennsylvania and 83,489 in New Jersey — took the
SAT. Nearly 1.8 million graduating high
school students — including 26,171 in Pennsylvania
and 24,202 in New Jersey — took the
ACT. The lawsuit says the companies
collect details about those students — such as their
names, home addresses, birth dates,
phone numbers and social security
numbers — and sell it at a price of 33
cents per student, per buyer, but “at no time disclosed” to
test-takers that their information would be sold “to third parties
for monetary gain.” On its
website, the College Board tells students it provides
information to educational organizations “looking for students like
you” but says the students’ scores, Social Security numbers and
phone numbers aren’t given to other parties.
Last month, the College Board increased
its fees for student information to
37 cents per name; the ACT now charges 38 centsper
name.
Bad news for the All-New, Revamped SAT: Only 27% in the most recent Rasmussen poll think that the SAT should be a major factor in college admission.
Actually, it may be even less than 27%.
According to Rasmussen,
“…most Americans don’t think the SATs are an accurate reflection of a student’s abilities, nor do they believe they should be a major factor in college admissions.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 21% of American Adults think that, generally speaking, the results of standardized tests like the SATs are an accurate reflection of a student’s knowledge and intelligence. Sixty-two percent (62%) disagree, while18% are not sure.
Somehow the American people have figured out what scholars and even the College Board, sponsor of the SAT, acknowledge: High school grades are a better predictor of success in college than the one-shot admissions tests.
And since so many affluent parents are able to pay for tutoring, the SAT strongly reflects family income.
This comment came from “Albany Mom”: I
agree with the writer that “if parents do not advocate for their
children, who will?” However, I need help
knowing how to advocate for my child. Who is going to
help? My husband and I have struggled with the
demons of Common Core this year, watching our 9 year old son sink
into what looks like depression. We can’t afford private school, so
I have coerced, offered rewards, and tried everything to encourage
him. He has developed sleep problems, moody and irritable, and
hardly eats. He has impulsive aggression with his younger sister.
He has lost his previous love of creative play, especially with
Legos, and now is chronically bored unless he has a video game. I
have banned video games since I think it is an escape and he is
becoming addicted. He is withdrawing from me, just as he is from
school. When his father is home on weekends, he tries to talk to
him, but it is more like “you don’t have a choice, just man up and
do your best”. It seems like we can’t change the school
environment, so we have to change our son to adapt to
it. Every morning is a struggle just to get
him out the door, and every night is another dismal episode of
boring homework (always worksheets with the “common core” logo at
the bottom). He cries frequently at home, and even broke down two
times at school this year when he became frustrated. I know that
caused a loss of dignity for him, and I met with his teacher to ask
for help. I can sense the teacher feels pressured too, and is
concerned about his test scores. He says son daydreams in class. I
was referred to take him to a child guidance center for counseling,
but that is not helping. A therapist can’t change the school
either, so is just trying to help him adapt to it.
I recognize it is not possible for me to make him like
school, and forcing him to go makes me feel like a bully. He may be
more sensitive than some children, but I think public schools need
to be happy welcoming places for children, and not like “work
camps” that make them feel worthless and trapped. This has caused
our family ongoing stress and fear, and it seems to be getting
worse. This is indeed a “psychological plague”
that is taking my child’s spirit, and I think there
are millions of other children out there experiencing
similar emotional distress from CC. Now I ask
this question to Arne Duncan: “Is it healthy
and realistic to expect the nation’s children to adapt to an
environment that is obviously causing them psychological
distress?”
Mercedes Schneider came across a speech
that Bill Gates gave to state legislators in 2009. It
lays out the blueprint for everything that has happened in
education since then. Forget what you learned in civics class.
Gates gave legislators their marching orders. Duncan already had
his marching orders. Gates laid out $2.3 billion to create and
promote the Common Core standards. His buddy Arne handed out $350
million to test Bill’s standards. All the other pieces are there:
Charter schools should replace failure factories. He is a true
believer in charter magic. (We now know that charters get the same
results when they have the same students.) Longitudinal data
systems should be created to track students. (A parent rebellion
seems to have put this on the back burner for now, although
everyone seems to be mining student data, from Pearson to the SAT
to the ACT.) The teacher is the key to achievement (although real
research says the family and family income dwarfs teacher effects).
Here is the man behind the curtain, the man who loves data and
measurement, not children. Lock the doors, townspeople. Bill Gates
wants to measure everything about your children! Ask yourself, if
this guy made $60,000 a year, would anyone listen to him?
UPDATE:
After this blog was posted, two privacy activists–Allison White
and Leonie Haimson advised me that the collection of confidential
data about children is going forward, thanks to Arne Duncan’s
loosening of privacy rights under FERPA, the legislation designed
to prevent data mining. They write: “Actually at least 44 states
including NY are going forward with their internal P20 Longitudinal
data systems – as required by federal law – which will track kids
from cradle to the grave and collect their personal data from a
variety of state agencies.” Leonie Haimson is leader of Class Size
Matters and Prvacy Matters Allison Breidbart White is Co-author,
Protect NY State School Children Petition Please sign and share the
petition http://bit.ly/18VBvX2
ALSO: I transposed the numbers describing what the Gates Foundation spent on Common Core: it was $2.3 billion, not $3.2 billion. A billion here, a billion there, soon you are talking real money (I think I am paraphrasing long-gone Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, but who knows?)
