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Ann Cronin on Connecticut’s Cliche Goals for Education

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2019 //
8

 

The Connecticut State Board of Education hired a new state commissioner who pledged to raise the graduation rate, close the achievement gap, and “Ensure that all students have increased access to opportunities and advantages that they need to succeed in life.”

What’s wrong with that? Isn’t that what every new commissioner promises? Has any new commissioner in any state achieved those goals?

Ann Cronin, veteran educator, explains why these are tired cliiches and what a visionary approach would look like. 

First, would be to change the term “graduation rate”  to something like the graduating of well-educated high school students. Currently, graduation rates make good headlines but can mean very little in terms of student learning.

“Credit retrieval” is a common practice in public schools with low graduation rates. “Credit retrieval” allows students to make use of often dubious computer programs that, in no way, equal courses in academic subjects, yet  the students get credit for the academic courses. In doing so, students increase the graduation rate for their schools but do not have adequate learning experiences.

Charter schools have another way to increase their graduation rates. They “counsel out” students who are likely to not graduate before they get to be seniors which leaves only a pre-selected group as seniors and, unsurprisingly, they all graduate. And lo and behold, the charter school has a high graduation rate. For example, one year at Achievement First’s Amistad Academy in New Haven, 25 students out of 25 in the senior class graduated, but 64 students had been in that class as ninth graders.

A visionary way to increase the number of students who receive a high school education is to not count the number of students who receive high school diplomas but rather count how many of the students who begin a school as ninth graders complete the coursework necessary for graduation. For example, some innovative public high schools hold Saturday classes with actual teachers instead of plugging kids into commuter programs. The applause should be given to high schools who deliver a quality education to all the students who begin their high school education in the school not to the schools who either give credits without the academic content and skills or who dismiss those who won’t make for a good statistic.

Read her essay to see her critique of “closing the achievement gap,” which is impossible when the gap is based on standardized test scores which are designed to have a gap.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Connecticut, Education Reform, Graduation rates, Real Education, Testing

Bernie Sanders Speaks to UTLA leadership Conference about His Agenda

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2019 //
37

Bernie Sanders recently was invited by the United Teachers of Los Angeles to speak to its Leadership Conference.

I was invited to make a tape introducing him. I did but you won’t see it or hear it. Technical problems. Just wait. You will hear Bernie loud and clear. He is still the only candidate with a thoughtful education agenda.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Privatization, Testing

John Merrow: The Public Purpose of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2019 //
64

 

John Merrow here examines the public purpose of public schools, which has been corrupted by forty years of treating standardized tests as the measure of school success.

He writes:

What exactly is the public purpose of school?  Why do communities invest in the education of all their young, instead of simply leaving the task of education to families?  We know that parents send children to school for a host of reasons, but the larger purpose–the communal goal–is worth considering.

Let me assert my hypothesis: the public education system has been highjacked by people obsessed with measurement,  so much so that children are reduced to their test scores.  For about 40 years most school reform efforts have been directed at symptoms, such as low graduation rates, low test scores, or “the achievement gap.” While these s0-called reforms sound great and may even produce temporary improvements, they inevitably fail because they are not addressing the root cause of our educational problems: an approach to schooling that is mired in the past and cannot fulfill the needs of the twenty-first century…

It’s not clear to me that Secretary of  Education Betsy DeVos believes that schools have a public purpose; her actions suggest that she believes a child’s education is the family’s responsibility–full stop, end of story.

Despite that, it’s my hope that, even in these sharply polarized times, we can agree that the purpose of schools is to help grow American citizens. Consider the four key words: help, grow, American, and citizens.

“Help”: This acknowledges that schools are junior partners in this. They exist to help—not replace—families.

“Grow”: Schooling is a process, sometimes two steps forward, one back. It’s akin to a family business, not a publicly traded stock company that lives and dies by quarterly reports.

“American”: E Pluribus Unum. We are Americans….an observation that bears emphasizing today, as we see Donald Trump playing racial politics with a vengeance.

“Citizens”: Here we need to put flesh on that term and figure out what we want our children to be as adults. Good parents and neighbors? Thoughtful voters? Reliable workers? And what else?

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, Testing

Justin Parmenter: Mega-Corporation Threatens Legal Action Against 3 North Carolina Teachers

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2019 //
26

 

Under normal circumstances, when a teacher disagreed with the state educatuon department’s decision to switch from one test to another, it would be called a difference of opinion. Under normal circumstances, when teachers called attention to the state chief’s decision to ignore the recommendations of his evaluation team and pick a different assessment, it would be treated as criticism and grounds for debate.

When NBCT teacher Justin Parmenter and two other teachers in North Carolina called out their state superintendent for disregarding the recommendation of his evaluation committee and for choosing a product they rejected, the corporation owning the winning product threatened legal action to silence the teachers. 

The superintendent in this instance is Mark Johnson, ex-TFA. His classroom experience was limited to two years. His failure to defend his state’s teachers reveals his character.

Shame on the owners of iStation.

Shame on Mark Johnson.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, Testing

John Thompson: The Cruel Policy of Punishing Little Children to Raise Their Test Scores

By dianeravitch
July 20, 2019 //
30

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, posts frequently about education in his state.

 

Last week, National Public Radio’s Alexandra Starr first reported on Florida’s mandatory retention of 3rd graders who don’t pass a reading proficiency test. Even though it is stigmatizing for children to be retained, and “multiple studies have found that flunking a grade makes it much more likely students will fail to graduate from high school,” the high stakes testing law has spread to about 40 percent of states.

States Are Ratcheting Up Reading Expectations For 3rd-Graders

NPR’s Starr draws on experts like Pedro Noguera, Nell Duke, and Diane Horm, while explaining how short-term benefits of 3rd grade retention “dissipate over time.” She also cites Marty West, a Big Data researcher who sidesteps the anxiety imposed on children and pressure on teachers to increase pass rates through ill-conceived instructional practices, and says that Florida’s well-funded mandatory retention law doesn’t hurt students’ graduation rates. Neither does West address states like Oklahoma, with chronic underfunding of education.And that leads to the first slippery slope created by Florida’s willingness to scale up punishments for young children and their teachers in order to improve student performance. At least it invests more than $130 million per year on its reading sufficiency act. When Oklahoma legislators, who were often persuaded by Jeb Bush’s public relations campaign, passed its reading act, they intended to invest $150 per struggling reader, but they only came up with $6 million, which was enough for only about $75 per student. It took six years to find money for about $153 per student.

For First Time, ‘Read or Fail’ Law Is Fully Funded. Will It Reduce Retentions?

In NPR’s second report focusing on Tulsa Ok., Starr shows the benefits of well-funded, holistic pre-kindergarten instruction. Oklahoma and edu-philanthropists fund such classes for 4-year-olds; nearly 3/4ths of Oklahoma students enroll in pre-k. And, next door to a comprehensive pre-k partnership, the majority-Hispanic Rosa Parks Elementary School illustrates the promise of partnerships for improving public schools. It is a part of the Tulsa Union community school system which so impressed David Kirp that his New York times article that featured Rosa Parks was entitled “Who Needs Charters When You Have Schools Like These?”  Oklahoma Among States Setting Higher Reading Expectations For 3rd-Graders

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/01/opinion/sunday/who-needs-charters-when-you-have-public-schools-like-these.htmlA Rosa Parks elementary teacher explained the dilemma schools face regarding kids who aren’t on track to pass the high stakes 3rd grade test, “Very early on, we have to put them on a plan if we think that they’re going to be held back in third grade for a test.” Unfortunately Starr didn’t have time to dig into those plans the way that Oklahoma Watch’s Jennifer Palmer has done. It leads to the second slippery slope created by high stakes testing for 3rd graders.

Palmer cites a librarian who explained, “‘RSA allows two years of retention, and two years in third grade would be worse,’ she said. ‘They would be completely destroyed.’” And that raises the question about the risks educators can/must take in order to not completely destroy their students.

The Oklahoma Watch’s study of federal data showed that 2,533 3rd graders were retained in 2015-16. Worse, she found that “repeating a grade is actually more common in kindergarten and first grade,” and “the high-stakes third-grade test appears to drive many of the early retentions.”  Oklahoma retained 3,977 kindergarteners, and a total of 10,345 students in the kindergarten through 2ndgrades.

These retentions were not evenly spread across the state. Next door to Tulsa Union, the Tulsa Public Schools, for instance, has about 2-1/3rds as many students as Union. The TPS retained 823 students through kindergarten and second grade, or more than 4-1/3rds as many. We can only hope that the edu-philanthropists who fund worthy early education programs, as well as their opposite – the corporate reform policies of Deborah Gist’s TPS – will realize how and why those two approaches are the antithesis of each other..

Palmer also touched on the third slippery slope when she explained the benchmark assessments that are used in predicting failure on the end-of-year tests. She writes, “Schools also rely on computerized benchmarking programs to glean more information on students’ skillsets and how they compare to other students their age.” But, to say the least, they are “not an exact science.” This leads to crucial, potentially life-changing and risky decisions being made by parents and teachers using data on a computer screen that they acknowledge they don’t understand.

Lastly, the dehumanizing slide down into systems where the punitive is seen as normal, even for our youngest students, might or might not have been predictable. Twenty years ago, the reward and punishment of kindergarteners would have seemed despicable. Market-driven reform may have begun as a way to force teachers to comply. Then it was dumped on teenagers. Now, when such stressful incentives and disincentives are imposed on 5-year-olds, it doesn’t seem surprising to read Big Data studies that claim that those who fail tests in the states with the most funding for competition-driven reform may not be damaged as much as previously thought …     

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Cruelty, Early Childhood Education, Florida, Oklahoma, Testing

Leonie Haimson: The Other Side of New York State Commissioner Elia’s Resignation

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2019 //
5

Leonie Haimson expresses her view of the tenure of New York Commissioner MaryEllen Elia. 

Her conclusion: The state needs a fresh start with a commissioner who is willing to listen to parents and who is not in love with testing and Big Tech.

I attended the meeting with Elia that she describes, held a few weeks after she arrived in New York. When members of NYSAPE expressed their opposition to the state’s Common Core tests, Elia responded that the day would come when there was no more annual testing because the tests would be online and students would be continuously assessed, every hour,  every day, whenever they logged on.

That was not a comforting thought!

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, New York, Technology, Testing

Peter Greene: The Essential Foolishness of the Fordham-CAP “Moonshot”

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2019 //
17

 

Peter Greene writes here about the “moonshot” to transform American education, co-sponsored by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the allegedly liberal Center for AMERICAN Progress. Peter points out that this collaboration demonstrates that both sides of the DC Establishment endorse corporatedceducarion reform (despite its manifest failure for the past 25 years).

He compares their competition to education’s version of the self-driving car.

He writes:

Do you mean something that’s promoted relentlessly but is still far off in the future? Or do you mean a program that faces major obstacles that tech-cheerleaders just sort of gloss over?

Perhaps you meant a tech-based solution that strips all participants of power and agency and gives it instead to a bunch of programmers? Or did you mean a new tech initiative that promises to make a bunch of people rich?

Or do you mean something that can fail with really catastrophic results?

All their goals are stated as measurable results.

And he notes:

These goals are all about changing numbers; they are an open invitation to apply Goodhart’s or Campbell’s Laws, in which focus on a measurement leads to that measurement being rendered useless. This is about coming up with ways to make better numbers. Yes, one way to improve numbers can be (though not always) to improve the underlying reality those numbers are supposed to represent. But those techniques are hard to scale, expensive and not easy to devise. There are always simpler methods.

If you want a piece of this action, the group is open to submissions of 500 words until the end of the month. But remember– this is not about coming up with a self-driving car. It’s about coming up with a marketing package that makes it look like a self-driving car has been perfected. It’s about doing a good job of using modern CGI to fake your presence on the moon without all the hard work, expense and challenge of actually getting a rocket up there.

Categories Accountability, Campbell's Law, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Data, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing

Gary Rubinstein: Success Academy’s Curious Test Scores

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2019 //
9

 

Gary Rubinstein tries to decipher the paradoxical test scores At Eva Moskowitz’s controversial Success Academy.

For years, the No-Excuses charter chain has posted sky-high test scores, which skeptical observers attribute to the chain’s practices of exclusion and attrition.

However, Gary has noted this strange contradiction: SA students get high scores on state tests but low scores on high school Regents exams and on the exams for selective high schools in New York City.

Could it be that they do test prep for the 3-8 grade tests but have not cracked the code for the high school tests?

He writes:

Last year I wrote about how the top charter chain in New York City, Success Academy, only managed to have three students get between 52% and 72% of the questions correct on the Algebra II Regents…

Success Academy had 130 9th graders in the 2017-2018 school year.  Presumably most, if not all, would be taking the Geometry Regents, yet according to the records they had zero students even attempting that test.  For Algebra II I wrote about how in 2016-2017 they only had 13 students out of 16 pass and only 3 of them with grades above 72%.  Well, after seeing this recent story about their 8th graders and Algebra I, I looked that their Algebra II scores for last year (this year’s scores are not out yet on the data site).  Despite having 161 10th graders last year, 31 11th graders, and 17 12th graders, Success Academy had only 22 students even take the Algebra II Regents.  And their scores were the same as they were the previous year with 68% of the students getting between 30% and 52% of the possible points and 14% of the students getting between 52% and 72% of the possible points.

The meat of the story is between the ellipses. Read it.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Harlem Success Academy, New York City, Testing

Bob Shepherd: This Is What a Generation of “Standards and Testing” Has Done to ELA Teaching

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2019 //
117

 

Bob Shepherd—teacher, author, textbook writer, assessment developer, etc.—posted the following here as a comment while discussing the negative effects ofCommon Core and other efforts to standardize the curriculum:

This is what an entire generation (20 years) of standards-and-high-stakes testing has done to the field of the English language arts. Department chairpersons now make comments like, “We don’t teach content in English, only skills.” Imagine a so-called “teacher of English” who knows nothing of and has not experienced, himself or herself, the value of having content knowledge of particular great authors and works in the literary canons of the world (British, American, European, Asian, African, etc); of literary techniques, structures, periods, and genres–their characteristics and historical development; of literary history; of the relations of literary history to the history of ideas and events; of prosody; of rhetoric; of approaches to literary works (i.e., the varieties of literary criticism and the methods of each); of syntax and semantics and phonology; of the elements of speech; of dialects; of literary archetypes; of the varieties of folk orature; and so on. Knowledge enables one to see what’s there. If I teach you about the varieties of grasses and other plants on your lawn, then it will not longer seem like an undifferentiated mass of green to you. You will see communities interacting. Let’s consider something that people typically think of as “a skill”–public speaking. If I’m serious about making you into a better public speaker, then I will teach you descriptive knowledge of the elements of speech–pitch, or intonation, and range; stress, or accent; length; rhythm; pace; volume; timbre; tone; articulation and enunciation; diction; respiration; facial expressions; eye contact; gestures; stance; proximity; silences and pauses; register; movement; dialect; dress; paralinguistic vocalization; body language; and resonance. And I will teach you procedural knowledge about how you can use that descriptive knowledge: If you vary the pitch of your voice, this produces melody, and your voice will be more attractive to listen to; most people vary their pitch a tiny bit around an average pitch that is too high; by lowering your average pitch and varying your pitch around that center, you can make your voice much more melodious to an audience. And so it is with each of these bits of descriptive knowledge–they make it possible to learn procedural knowledge that will empower you. But the person who does not possess that descriptive knowledge cannot use it to teach procedural knowledge. And so the student does not grow.

It would be an altogether good thing for the English language arts if people stopped using the term “skills” altogether and instead spoke in terms of “procedural knowledge,” for then they would have a clue that knowledge is key to being able to do things. The woodworker needs to have knowledge that there is something called grain and that it runs in a particular direction. If he or she knows this, then it becomes possible to plane a piece of wood to make it smooth–one works in the direction of the grain. Knowledge is KEY.

People who think that they are teaching “skills” in the absence of content, or knowledge, are totally confused. There is, for example, no general “finding the main idea skill” or “inferencing skill.” These are as fictional as were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fairies. Let me give another example. One of the very few actual texts mentioned anywhere in the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave from the Republic. Is one going to have any clue what this is about based on applying some general “finding the main idea” skill? Of course not. Understanding what’s going on there requires a lot of background knowledge about what Plato was concerned with and how he thought. Plato was highly influenced by Greek mathematics. He recognized that perfect forms, like a point or a triangle, don’t exist in the world but that they can be conceived of in the mind. In Greek, the word psyche meant both “mind” and “spirit.” The fact that people can conceive of perfection, of perfect forms, led him to think that there exists a separate spiritual world of perfect forms, of which the psyche partook, and that simply by thinking carefully enough, one could discover these perfect forms–the real meaning of “truth” and “virtue” and so on. If you are a student and know all that, then the allegory will make sense to you. Otherwise, good luck trying to apply your general finding the main idea “skill.” LMAO!

Categories Common Core, Testing

Jersey Jazzman: Do Test Scores Go Up When Tests Are Harder?

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2019 //
18

 

Jersey Jazzman untangles a simpleminded assertion by New Jersey Reformers: Harder Tests Make kids smarterand Cause scores to go up.

We have been hearing this claim since NCLB was enacted.

And we must ask, what’s the connection between scores going up and learning more?

Test prep can drive scores higher too.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Jersey, Privatization, Testing
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