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Jeff Bryant: Why Democrats Erred by Embracing the GOP Agenda

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2014 //
54

Jeff Bryant of the Education Opportunity Network writes in Salon that voters are increasingly disenchanted with the bipartisan Bush-Obama education policies of high-stakes testing, Common Core, and privatization.

He points out that the attacks on public education are not playing well at all in the political arena. The overwhelming majority of parents are very happy with their local public schools and respect their teachers. The public is beginning to see through the lies they have been told about their schools. So much of the rhetoric of the “reformers” sounds appealing and benign, if not downright inspirational, but it ends up as nonstop testing, the closing of local public schools, merit pay, union-busting, the enrichment of multinational corporations, and standardization.

Bryant predicts that Democrats will suffer at the polls for their slavish espousal of hard-right GOP doctrine.

He writes:

“The only overriding constants? People generally like their local schools, trust their children’s teachers and think public school and teachers should get more money. Wonder when a politician will back that!

“Many observers, including journalists at The Wall Street Journal, have accurately surmised that the American public is currently deeply divided on education policy. But that analysis barely scratches the surface.

“Go much deeper and you find that the “new liberal consensus” that Adam Serwer wrote about in Mother Jones, which propelled Obama into a second term, believes in funding the nation’s public schools but has little to no allegiance to Obama’s education reform policies.

“Outside of the elite circles of the Beltway and the very rich, who continue to be the main proponents of these education policies, it is getting harder and harder to discern who exactly is the constituency being served by the reform agenda.

“Most Americans do not see any evidence that punitive measures aimed at their local schools are in any way beneficial to their children and grandchildren. In fact, there’s some reasonable doubt whether the president himself understands it.

So is Arne Duncan making education policy on his own? Or is the policy agenda of the Obama administration indistinguishable from that of rightwing Republicans like Bobby Jindal, Rick Scott, Scott Walker, John Kasich, Mike Pence, and Tom Corbett?

Categories Democrats, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing, Unions, Vouchers

An Opt Out Letter for Parents in New York

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2014 //
11

A reader submits a model opt out letter for parents in New York:

“If anyone is interested in refusing the state assessments or know someone who is:

REFUSAL LETTER:

Dear Board of Education, Superintendent, Principals, and Teachers of ________________ school district,

We are writing today to formally inform the __________ school district of our decision to refuse to allow our child _____________ to participate in any local assessments tied to APPR for the 2013-2014 school year. My child will be scored as a “refusal”, with a final score of “999” and a standard achieved code of 96, on all State testing including ELA, Math and Science as described in the NYS Student Information Repository System (SIRS) Manual on page 63.

Our refusal should in no way reflect on the teachers, administration, or school board. This was not an easy decision for us, but we feel that we have no other choice. We simply see these tests as harmful, expensive, unfair, and a waste of time and valuable resources.

This year we will show effort to eliminate unnecessary and harmful assessments in our public schools. Our child will not participate in any assessments other than those solely for the use of the individual classroom teacher.

We refuse to allow any data to be used for purposes other than the individual teacher’s own formative or cumulative assessment. Any assessment whose data is used to determine school ranking, teacher effectiveness, state or federal longitudinal studies or any other purpose other than for the individual classroom teacher’s own use to improve his or her instruction will not be presented to our child.

To be clear, our children will not participate in the following:

➢ Any so-called “benchmark” exams whether they are teacher-designed or not, since these exams are imposed by entities other than the individual teacher.
➢ Pre–assessments connected to “Student Learning Objectives”.
➢ Any progress-monitoring or RTI assessments such as AIMSweb, MAP, or STAR
➢ Any exam used to formulate an evaluation or score for our children’s teachers or their school.

We believe in and trust our highly qualified and dedicated teachers and administrators. We believe in the high quality of teaching and learning that occurs at _____________ School. We hope our efforts will be understood in the context in which they are intended: to support the quality of instruction promoted by the school, and to advocate for what is best for all children. Our school will not suffer when these tests are finally gone, they will flourish as they have in the years previous. ________ school should have a unified policy in place to address children who are refusing these assessments.

We do apologize in advance for the inconvenience this decision may cause the administration, the school, and staff.

Sincerely,”

Categories New York, Parents, Testing

Breaking News: Another School Committee in Massachusetts Allows Parents to Opt Kids Out of PARCC Tests

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2014 //
9

The school committee  of Tantasqua, Massachusetts, voted to permit parents to opt their children out of the PARCC tests.

In doing so, Tantasqua joins the school committees of Worcester and Norfolk, which reached the same decision.

The state department of education has opposed opting out, but the school committees are not following orders.

The Tantasqua vote was close, 8-7, and the deciding vote was cast by the chair of the committee, Michael J. Valanzola.

He said:

“It reaches the point of exhaustion, relative to the mandates from the state. Every time you turn around, there are new requirements on our school district but no money to back them up,” Mr. Valanzola said after the meeting. “And, for me, this sends a message that we are tired of the mandates and, ultimately, we are a School Choice district that believes in choice. Choice should rest with the parents and their right to be engaged in the process.” 

On Feb. 11, the Norfolk School Committee sent the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education a letter saying it would let parents decide for their children whether they will participate in the PARCC test. On March 6, the Worcester School Committee agreed to send a letter to the state similar to Norfolk’s. 

 

Categories Massachusetts, Testing

Richard Hake Defends Testing with No-Stakes

By dianeravitch
March 16, 2014 //
23

From a reader:

“You might be interested in a related discussion list post “The Defiant Parents: Testing’s Discontents – Response to Hunt” [Hake (2014)]. The abstract reads:

***************************************************

ABSTRACT: In a post “Re: The Defiant Parents: Testing’s Discontents” [Hake (2014)], I pointed to the “vigorous leadership, voluminous messaging, and pro-public-/anti-private-education positions of (a) Diane Ravitch and (b) FairTest .

Then I commented that neither appeared to be informed regarding the virtues of rigorous measurement of students’ higher-order learning by means of zero-stakes formative evaluation “designed and used to improve an intervention, especially when it is still being developed” [JCSEE, copied onto p. 132 by Frechtling et al. (2010) at .

In response, Russ Hunt (2014) at wrote: “The virtues of rigorous testing aren’t really the point: it’s how the tests are administered and what uses they’re put to that Ravitch and FairTest (and I) are concerned with.”

However, it IS to the point for many of those who wish to enhance students’ higher-level learning. Modesty forbids mention of these examples:

1. “Lessons from the Physics Education Reform Effort” [Hake (2002)] at ;

2. “The Physics Education Reform Effort: A Possible Model for Higher Education” [Hake (2005)] at ;

3. “Should We Measure Change? Yes!” [Hake (2007a)] at (2.5 MB);

4. “Re: pre-to-post tests as measures of learning/teaching” [Hake (2008a)] at ;

5. “Design-Based Research in Physics Education Research: A Review” [Hake (2008b)] at (1.1 MB);

6. “The Impact of Concept Inventories On Physics Education and Its Relevance For Engineering Education” [Hake (2011a)] at (8.7 MB);

7. “SET’s Are Not Valid Gauges of Students’ Higher-Level Learning #2” [Hake (2011b)] at ;

8. “The NRC Finally Comes to Its Senses on Improving STEM Education” [Hake (2013a)] at ; and

9. “Can the Cognitive Impact of Calculus Courses be Enhanced?” Hake (2013b)] at (2.7 MB).

***************************************************

To access the complete 66 kB post please click on .

Regards,
Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University; Honorary Member, Curmudgeon Lodge of Deventer, The Netherlands; President, PEdants for Definitive Academic References which Recognize the Invention of the Internet (PEDARRII); LINKS TO: Academia ; Articles ; Blog ; Facebook ; GooglePlus ; Google Scholar ; Linked In ; Research Gate ; Socratic Dialogue Inducing (SDI) Labs ; Twitter .

“Physics educators have led the way in developing and using objective tests to compare student learning gains in different types of courses, and chemists, biologists, and others are now developing similar instruments. These tests provide convincing evidence that students assimilate new knowledge more effectively in courses including active, inquiry-based, and collaborative learning, assisted by information technology, than in traditional courses.” – Wood & Gentile (2003).

REFERENCES [URLs shortened by and accessed on 31 Jan 2014.]

Hake, R.R. 2014. “The Defiant Parents: Testing’s Discontents – Response to Hunt,” online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at . The abstract and link to the complete post are being transmitted to several discussion lists and are on my blog “Hake’sEdStuff” at with a provision for comments.

Mead, R. 2014. “The Defiant Parents: Testing’s Discontents,” New Yorker, 23 January; online at .
Wood, W.B., & J.M. Gentile. 2003. “Teaching in a research context,” Science 302: 1510; 28 November; online as a 213 kB pdf , thanks to Ecoplexity .”

Categories Testing

Burris and Aja: The Myth of “Equity” and Common Core

By dianeravitch
March 16, 2014 //
6

Carol Burris, principal of South Side High School in Rockville Center, New York, and Alan A. Aja, assistant professor of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College (City University of New York) here explore and explode the claims that the Common Core Standards will promote equity for the most disadvantaged students. The assertion is often made that these standards, because they are common and because they are rigorous, will lead to higher performance by all students. The theory is that students will learn more and try harder if the standards are made “harder.”

What Burris and Aja show is that the Common Core testing to date has widened the achievement gap between haves and have nots.

They write:

In New York for example, one of the first states to roll out the new curriculum, scores from Common Core tests dropped like a stone—and the achievement gaps dramatically widened. In 2012, prior to the Core’s implementation, the state reported a 12-point black/white achievement gap between average third-grade English Language Arts scores, and a 14-point gap in eighth-grade English Language Arts (ELA) scores. A year later enter the Common Core-aligned tests: the respective gaps grew to 19 and 25 points respectively (for Latino students the eighth grade ELA gap grew from 3 to 22 points). The same expansion of the gap occurred in math as well. In 2012, there was an 8-point gap between black/white third-grade math scores and a 13-point gap between eighth-grade math scores. In 2013, the respective gaps from the Common Core tests expanded to 14 and 18 points.

Despite these dismal results, the New York State Education Department and the Board of Regents decided to go full steam ahead:

Rather than heeding the warning that something is very wrong, New York’s Board of Regents adds the highest of stakes for students—their very ability to graduate high school. In February, the New York State Board of Regents established the college-ready scores that students will need for graduation, beginning with the class that enters high school in four years. These scores, which up until now have been known as “aspirational” measures, have been reported by the state in the aggregate and by sub-group for the past several years. If these scores were used last year, the New York four-year graduation rate would have plummeted to 35 percent. This low rate masks even worse outcomes for students with disabilities (5 percent), as well as black (12 percent), Latino (16 percent) and English Language learners (7 percent). New York Education Commissioner John King even told reporters that he was disappointed that the scores were not phased in sooner because the delay means more students would leave high school “unprepared.” He need not worry. With his preferred cut scores, most students—especially students of color, poverty and disability–will not leave high school at all.

The current path that is mistakenly called “reform” but might as well be called “destruction” will have terrible consequences for students, educators, schools, and communities, they warn:

In the meantime, the Common Core aligned-tests will be used to justify the continuance of market-based education reforms. This means firing teachers and principals based on test scores, closing urban schools with higher low-income populations and the proliferation of charters as punishment (which ironically scored worse in language arts and the same in math as New York City public schools in the latest round of Common Core-aligned tests). These strategies, straight from what economist Naomi Klein calls the “shock doctrine” school of economics, lead to further gutting and pseudo-privatization of the most necessary of our public goods, while continuing the false narratives that teachers and their unions are the problem or that racism, poverty and inequitable resource distribution are merely excuses.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Privatization, Students, Testing

A Reader Comments: Will Changes in the SAT Matter?

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2014 //
20

A frequent contributor to the blog’s discussions calls himself or herself “Democracy.” Here is the comment left by this reader in response to the announcement about changes that will be made to the SAT:

******************

“Democracy” writes:

I’ve noted this point multiple times on this blog but it bears repeating.

College enrollment specialists say that their research finds the SAT predicts between 3 and 15 percent of freshman-year college grades, and after than that nothing. Shoe size would work as well, or better. The ACT, the SAT’s big competitor, is only marginally better. The “new, improved” SAT will be no different. (though in a perverse twist, the SAT changes suggest that it will now make an attempt to enhance citizenship…don’t believe it).

The real story is that both the ACT and the College Board (purveyor of the PSAT, SAT, and the AP program) were major players in the development of the Common Core standards – and its massive testing regimen – which are about to be unleashed on public schools across the nation.



The Common Core was funded by Bill Gates, and it was largely the work of three main groups: Achieve, ACT, and College Board. Toss in the Education Trust. All of these groups are tied tightly to corporate-style “reform.”



Achieve, Inc.’s board includes Louis Gertner, who’s bad-mouthed public education for decades. It also includes Tennessee Republican governor Bill Haslam, a pro-life, anti-gay, corporate friendly politician. The board also includes Prudential executive (and former big banker) Mark Grier (Prudential has been fined multiple times for deceptive sales practices and improper trading), and Intel CEO Craig Barrett (who keeps repeating the STEM “crisis” myth). Intel has laid off thousands of workers and is masterful and aggressive at avoiding tax payments and seeking subsidization, much like Boeing, and Microsoft, and GE, and IBM, and Chevron, and AT & T. These are some of the biggest tax cheaters in the country. There’s a reason that Achieve’s main publications never mention democratic citizenship as a mission of public education.



Achieve’s funders include – not surprisingly – Boeing, Intel, GE, IBM, Chevron, JP Morgan Chase, Microsoft, Prudential (and State Farm, MetLife and other insurance companies), and the Gates Foundation. The Education Trust is funded by MetLife, State Farm, IBM, and by the Broad, Gates and Walton Foundations, among others.



The “leaders” at the College Board include president David Coleman, who was instrumental in writing the Common Core standards, and who was a former McKinsey consultant and treasurer of disgraced former DC chancellor Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst. It includes policy chief Stefanie Sanford, former policy director for Texas Governor Rick Perry and “director of advocacy” for the Gates Foundation. It includes assessment chief Cyndie Schmeiser, who is now in charge of the PSAT, SAT, and AccuPlacer (worthless academic measures), and who was previously the chief operating officer at ACT. And it includes Amy Wilkins, formerly of the Education Trust.



Slide on over to charlatan Wendy Kopp’s Teach for America, and one finds that the big contributors are the right-wing Arnold Foundation (which wants to privatize public pensions), the arch-conservative Kern Foundation (which even wants to inculcate ministers into the belief that unregulated “free enterprise” is a “moral system”),
the Broad and Gates and Walton Foundations, Cisco, State Farm, and big banks –– Bank of America, Barclays, Credit Suisse, Wells Fargo –– that have paid billions and billions in penalties and fines (with a very hefty dose yet to come) for ripping off consumers and rigging “markets.”

The very same groups who seek to “reform” American public schooling so that no child is left behind, are selling snake oil that will –– and already does –– deny millions of kids a decent education. They perpetuate a corrupted system that marginalizes workers and citizens, that off-shores millions of jobs, that creates enormous inequities in income and wealth through transfers of money from public treasuries to private coffers, and they tell us that the solution lies in better teachers, more “rigorous” standards, and “accountability.”



These people and groups tout the importance of “transformative reform.” They all recite the same jargon, and they all seem to believe that teachers (especially those deemed the “best and brightest”) hold the key to restoring American “economic competitiveness,” which is the foundational rationale for the Common Core.

It’s all unmitigated foolishness. Nonsense. But you won’t read about any of that in mainstream press accounts of the SAT changes. And that’s a dire shame.

Categories Education Industry, Testing

How Testing Regime Drives Out Our Best Teachers

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2014 //
47

Wherever I go, I hear stories about the exodus of teachers from the profession. The same story is told everywhere: I am sick of the non-stop testing. I didn’t become a teacher to administer tests, I became a teacher to make a difference in the lives of children, I became a teacher because I love history and want to share my love. The testing regime is crushing my kids and crushing me too.

Our nation is losing talented and experienced teachers. They are literally being driven out of the profession by federal and state mandates attached to No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Many states now administer tests not to measure student progress, but to measure teacher “effectiveness,” despite the fact that there is no research base for this practice.

Why would any nation want to drive teachers out of a profession that is under-paid, under-respected, and constantly criticized by non-educators? Enrollments in education programs are dropping. The federal government, abetted by extremist legislatures and governors, are literally attacking the teachers of our nation. Who will take their place? Certainly not Teach for America. It sends 10,000 young, inexperienced, ill-trained college graduates to teach for two years, into a profession of more than 3 million teachers.

Does anyone think that the teaching profession is getting better as a result of the relentless attacks on teachers?

The modal year of teacher experience dropped dramatically in the past generation from 15 to 1 (see page 10). Do we want most of our doctors and airline pilots to be novices?

Here is the story of one teacher, Ron Maggiano, an award-winning Virginia teacher who quit after 33 years.

Valerie Strauss wrote about him here. She wrote:

Ron Maggiano is a social studies teacher at West Springfield High School in Fairfax County. In 2005, he won the Disney Teacher Award for innovation and creativity, and in 2006, he won the American Historical Association’s Beveridge Family Teaching Prize for outstanding K-12 teaching. Now, after a 33-year teaching career, he is resigning, just four years away from full retirement.

Why? He’s had enough of the high-stakes testing obsession that he believes has undermined public education.

Maggiano wrote:

I have taught history at West Springfield High School for the past 19 years. I have been a successful classroom teacher for more than thirty years, but now I have had enough. As a result of the obsessive emphasis on standardized test scores in FCPS and across the educational landscape, I have decided to retire at the end of the current academic year. I have made this decision, because I can no longer cooperate with a testing regime that I believe is suffocating creativity and innovation in the classroom. We are not really educating our students anymore. We are merely teaching them to pass a test. This is wrong. Period.

As for myself, I won the Disney Teacher Award for innovation and creativity in education in 2005 and the American Historical Association’s Beveridge Family Teaching Prize for outstanding K-12 teaching in 2006. I am four years away from full retirement, so my decision to retire was not made lightly. It will cost me. Our school newspaper, The Oracle, just ran a story on my retirement and why I am leaving the classroom and the job that I love.

The student newspaper wrote an article about his retirement. Maggiano told the student writer:

“I don’t think I’m leaving the education system. I think the education system left me,” said Maggiano.

In another article, he wrote:

It was a difficult decision, but I am confident that it was the correct one. For me this was a moral choice. I believe that our current national obsession with high-stakes testing is wrong, because it hurts kids and deprives students of an education that is meaningful, imaginative, and relevant to the demands of the 21st century.

Research shows that today’s students need to be prepared to think critically, analyze problems, weigh solutions, and work collaboratively to successfully compete in the modern work environment. These are precisely the type of skills that cannot be measured by a multiple-choice standardized test.

More significantly, critical thinking skills and analytical problem solving have now been replaced with rote memorization and simple recall of facts, figures, names, and dates. Educators have been forced to adopt a “drill and kill” model of teaching to ensure that their students pass the all-important end-of-course test. Teaching to the test, a practice once universally condemned administrators and educators alike, has now become the new normal in classrooms across the country.

If teaching to the test was wrong 30 some years ago when I first entered the classroom, it is just as wrong today as I leave my classroom for the final time. The fact is that we are not really educating our students. We are merely teaching them how to pass a test.

And we are not preparing them for success at the college level or in the workplace. If we were, colleges and universities would not have to require remediation courses for incoming freshmen, and businesses and corporations would not have to spend millions to reteach skills their employees should have mastered after twelve years of education.

Categories Teachers and Teaching, Testing

My Interview with Salon about Education Reform Today

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2014 //
9

This is a wide-ranging interview with Salon that started as a discussion of the Network for Public Education, then went on to discuss budget cuts, high-stakes testing, Common Core, Race to the Top, privatization, and much more.

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Chicago, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Testing, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. education, Unions

Paul Thomas: The SAT Redesign Is Nonsense, All Nonsense

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2014 //
5

Paul Thomas is not impressed by the ballyhoo over the redesign of the SAT.

He predicts that it will continue to be a test that stratifies students by family income and that means far less than the students’ grade point average. He says that the SAT is “possibly the oldest and longest running education scam.”

He writes:

“…this reboot is just another publicity move by the College Board/SAT that falls in line with recent history: the mid-1990s re-centering (scores were dropping due to the testing pool changing and thus the SAT was getting bad press), the expansion in 2005 (the University of California caused a stir by calling for opting out of the SAT and thus the SAT was getting bad press), and now the 2016 reboot (the ACT surpassed the SAT in number of students taking the exam and thus the SAT was getting bad press).

“There simply has never been and will never be a way to justify the time and expense needed to implement single-sitting standardized tests in pursuit of doing something for which we already have rich, credible, and free data (GPA) to guide decisions about students entering higher education.

“The relentless faith in the SAT (and ACT) in the U.S. is trapped inside a misguided belief in objectivity—even though standardized tests have been shown repeatedly to perpetuate biases related to class, race, and gender.”

Categories Testing

Bipartisan Bill Proposes Curbing Federal Testing Mandates

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2014 //
137

Two Congressmen–a Democrat and a Republican–proposed legislation to cut back on federally mandated testing.

This is great news!

The legislation was immediately endorsed by the NEA.

“Today the National Education Association endorsed HR-4172, introduced last week by Reps. Chris Gibson (R-NY) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ). The bill would amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to change the number of federally mandated standardized tests state would be required to administer under the current law, eliminating annual testing and replacing it with grade-span testing (or testing once over a certain span of grades.)

“According to Rep. Gibson: “In the decade since No Child Left Behind was signed into law the focus in education has shifted from teaching to testing. But data shows the current testing regime established in No Child Left Behind has not led to higher standards. Teachers are spending more time preparing students to take tests and less time educating, while students are spending more time taking tests and less time learning.”

“The NEA’s leadership agrees. The organization today issued a lengthy endorsement of the legislation, praising the bill’s sponsors and slamming high-stakes standardized testing as harmful to students and detrimental to education.”

Write or call or email your Congressman and Senators and urge them to support HR-4172.

End the failed mandates of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

Categories Testing
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