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A Hero Principal: Every Principal Should Be This Honest

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2012 //
19

Several readers, including parents in this district, have sent me a copy of this letter written by Don Sternberg of Wantagh Elementary School in Long Island, New York.

Sternberg wrote a letter to the school’s parents at the start of the school year telling them about how the politicians and bureaucrats at Albany were messing up their child’s education.

He wrote:

What we will be teaching students is to be effective test takers; a skill that does not necessarily translate into critical thinking – a skill set that is necessary at the college level and beyond. This will inevitably conflict with authentic educational practice – true teaching.
Unfortunately, if educators want to survive in the new, Albany-created bureaucratic mess that is standardized assessments to measure teacher performance, paramount to anything else, we must focus on getting kids ready for the state assessments. This is what happens when non-educators like our governor and state legislators, textbook publishing companies (who create the assessments for our state and reap millions of our tax dollars by doing so), our NYS Board of Regents, and a state teachers’ union president get involved in creating what they perceive as desirable educational outcomes and decide how to achieve and measure them. Where were the opinions of teachers, principals, and superintendents? None were asked to participate in the establishment of our new state assessment parameters. Today, statisticians are making educational decisions in New York State that will impact your children for years to come.

Standardized assessment has grown exponentially. For example, last year New York State fourth graders, who are nine or ten years old, were subjected to roughly 675 minutes (over 11 hours) of state assessments which does not include state field testing. This year there will be a state mandated pre-test in September and a second mandated pre-test in January for all kindergarten through fifth grade students in school. In April, kindergarten through fifth grade students will take the last test [assessment] for the year.

Excessive testing is unhealthy. When I went to school I was never over-tested and subsequently labeled with an insidious number that ranked or placed me at a Level 1, Level 2, Level 3 or Level 4 as we do today. Do you want your child to know their assigned ‘Level’? What would the impact be on their self-esteem and self-worth at such a young age?

Inevitably, he said, teachers would look at students as more or less desirable because what the students do will affect the teachers’ evaluation scores.

He urged parents to do their part, but he laid the blame for this massive distortion of educational purpose where it belongs: on the State Commissioner of Education, the Governor, and the Legislature.

The new system is a mess. It is an outrage. It is a crime against education and against children. Parents need to know what the state (and federal government) is doing to their children. They need to know how good schools and good teachers are being demoralized.

Donald Sternberg is a hero of public education. He joins our honor roll.

If every principal explained to the parents what the state is doing to their children and the harm being inflicted on them, we would turn this nation’s failed corporate education policies around and let our educators educate.

Categories Accountability, Cuomo, Andrew, Education Reform, Honor Roll, New York, Parents, Principals, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, US Education

Waiver Madness

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2012 //
8

Washington, D.C., has announced that it will set different testing targets for children of different racial groups. According to a story in the Washington Post, this is now common practice among the states that have obtained waivers from No Child Left Behind.

The District and the states are acknowledging that children of color are so far behind their white and Asian peers that they will need more time to catch up. Actually, in D.C., black students will be expected to make more progress than white students so they can catch up with white students.

The story says:

Officials say the new targets account for differences in current performance and demand the fastest progress from students who are furthest behind. The goals vary across much of the country by race, family income and disability, and in Washington, they also vary by school.

At Anacostia High, which draws almost exclusively African Americans from one of the District’s most impoverished areas, officials aim to quadruple the proportion of students who are proficient in reading by 2017, but that would still mean that fewer than six out of 10 pass standardized reading tests. Across town at the School Without Walls in Northwest Washington, a diverse and high-performing magnet that enrolls students from across the city, the aim is higher: 99.6 percent.

Meanwhile, at Wilson Senior High, 67 percent of black students — and 88 percent of Asians and 95 percent of whites — are expected to pass standardized math tests five years from now.

Setting different aspirations for different groups of children represents a sea change in national education policy, which for years has prescribed blanket goals for all students. Some education experts see the new approach as a way to speed achievement for black, Latino and low-income students, but some parents can’t help but feel that less is being expected of their children.

The absurdity of this scenario is that D.C. and the states expect that all children will reach proficiency on normed tests. Normed tests have a bell curve. On a normed test, half will always be above and half below the mean. No matter how hard you try, a bell curve is still a bell curve. There is no district in the nation where 100% of the children are proficient. The children who are most advantaged cluster in the top half; those who are least advantaged cluster in the bottom half. This is true of the SAT, the ACT, state tests, federal tests, and international tests.

And, if you step back, you must wonder why the standardized tests–whose flaws, inaccuracies, and statistical vagaries are well known–have become the measure of all education.

No private school in the nation is subjecting its children to this mad scramble to live up to the demands of Pearson and McGraw Hill’s psychometricians.

Maybe all this seeming madness is just part of the larger scenario to declare US education a failure and find more schools ripe for privatization.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, Federal Waiver, For-Profit, Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing, US Education

How Testing Reduces Instructional Time

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2012 //
12

A veteran teacher explains how the testing process affects kindergarten students:

I taught Kindergarten for 23 years. In addition to using imbedded assessment practices during instruction (listening, watching, asking, redirecting, challenging, etc.) I also conducted individual interviews with kids, when needed, to find out what they knew so that I could diagnose problems and plan individual instruction. In recent years my assessment practices became less and less valued by people in charge. Everyone wanted standardized test results that spawned digital graphs about kids. This did not bother me until I found out how much instructional time was lost.

Here’s the reality: You begin the year by testing to obtain baseline scores. One might think this is useful because by testing again at the end of the year you could have a nice graph showing growth. But unfortunately this is not how it is done. Local districts want to see data showing progress along the way so they want tests to be done in between. And most significantly, if a student does not meet the benchmark, you are asked to set up a program to test that child more often, perhaps every month or every two weeks.

When a teacher is testing, there is no instruction going on for that student or any students in the class. Keep in mind that real instruction involves the imbedded assessment practices I mentioned above and must be done by the teacher not a substitute. If someone simply shows kids or tells kids something that is to be learned, this is not teaching. A teacher has to engage with students in a way that will reveal to the teacher what the children are thinking or able to do. Then the instruction moves forward based on this information. Throughout instruction meaning is constantly being negotiated among participants.

Although no child learns anything while taking a test (because the teacher is not permitted to ask questions, challenge or give guidance in any way) the children who need the most instruction end up getting less. They not only lose instructional time when they are being tested, they also lose it when others in the class are being tested. In a typical year, my students lost about 9 weeks of instruction due to testing, perhaps more. Remember, classroom teachers do not test during lunch, recess, specials, special projects, assemblies and other events. We do not test children beyond the school day or year. We test during prime instructional time and therefore it takes days and weeks to complete.

It addition, top performing students who are able to read well beyond grade level take longer to test (passages were longer, responses more in-depth, etc.). So, while spending days and days to obtain scores for exactly how far above grade level these children are, the struggling readers receive no instruction. When struggling readers miss daily instruction their learning degrades rapidly. Also it is important to note that struggling students are absent from primary instruction more than other students for a multitude of reasons.

Teaching really does make a difference and instructional time should be our number one priority. Instead, we are constantly whittling away precious instructional time and then blaming teachers when learning does not happen. So it’s not just about the time spent “teaching to the test” that bothers me, it’s also about the actual time it takes to do the testing that concerns me. It’s a huge problem that should be studied and resolved.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Reform, Testing

More Standardized Testing for Kindergarten

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2012 //
31

Testing children in kindergarten is becoming common practice. Oregon will begin testing all 5-year-olds next fall to assess their “readiness” for kindergarten. It is never too soon to test children, and some states have drafted standards for pre-schoolers.

How did this happen? An article by Stephanie Simon in Reuters explains it all.

“Testing young children is not a new concept. In the 1980s, many states assessed children to determine whether they were ready to enter kindergarten or first grade. Experts in child development denounced the practice as unfair and unreliable and it faded out.

In recent years, however, the federal law known as No Child Left Behind has put pressure on schools to raise scores on the standardized reading and math tests given to students starting around age 8. Schools that post poor scores are labeled failing; principals and teachers can lose their jobs.

With the stakes so high, many administrators have decided to start testing in the earlier grades, to give kids practice and to identify students who need help.

The Obama administration accelerated the trend in 2011 with a $500 million competitive grant to bolster early childhood education. States that pledged to assess all kindergarteners earned extra points on their applications.”

So now state after state is falling into line, testing the littlest students to find out what they know and what they don’t know. The experts are strangely silent about whether this is developmentally appropriate. It is never too soon to start compiling data, it seems.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Testing

California Passes Law to Reduce Emphasis on Test Scores

By dianeravitch
September 27, 2012 //
10

The California Legislature passed a bill to reduce the importance of test scores in calculating school quality, and Governor Jerry Brown signed it into law. Until now, the Academic Performance Index was based 100% on test scores. Now it will count for 60%.

Hope, hope, hope that future legislation will reduce it to 25%.

Categories Accountability, California, Testing

Analyzing President Obama’s Education Interview with NBC

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2012 //
52

Yesterday I posted an interview in which President Obama expressed his views about education.

I wanted you to read it in its entirety without my comments.

Here are my comments.

First, the President acknowledged that he was not a very good student when he was in school. He said that he was “mediocre.” Several readers have asked: Does the President think that his teachers should have been fired because he didn’t try? Did he have bad teachers? Were they responsible for his poor performance or was he?

Second, the President lauded the idea of merit pay, paying teachers more if the test scores of their students go up (and firing them if they don’t). No one has told him that merit pay has failed wherever it was tried. No one has told him that it failed in Nashville in 2010, it failed in New York City in 2010, it failed in Chicago last year. Yet his administration has allocated $1 billion for more merit pay. Why doesn’t someone tell him?

Third, the President said that teachers in Denver are very happy to be paid more for performance. No one explained to the President that the Denver ProComp plan contains extra pay for taking on harder assignments, and that the Denver teachers opposed the pay-for-scores legislation that was imposed on them by the faux reformers two years ago. But Denver has little to show for its “reforms.” Denver is no national model. Read Gary Rubinstein’s post on the unimpressive results in Denver. The scores in Denver (which is what the President means by “results”) remain well below the state average.

Fourth, the President referred to class size. He said that he talked to teachers in Las Vegas who were unhappy that their classes at the opening of school had 42 students, and it took a few weeks to get them down to 35-38. The President didn’t say whether he thought that it was okay to have 35-38 students in an elementary school class. I wish the reporter had asked whether any of the classes at Sidwell Friends have 35-38 students.

Fifth, the President lauded his administration’s Race to the Top as he talked about “results,” but he seems unaware that it has no evidence to show that it will produce results. States and districts are now spending hundreds of millions of dollars to tie teacher evaluations to test scores, and not one of them can show that schools are better or kids are learning more because of this unproven method. Where are the successes? Not in DC, which has been practicing Rhee-form since 2007 and is still one of the nation’s lowest performing districts; not in Chicago, where teachers recently struck over poor working conditions and lack of necessary resources for students; not in New York City, where the scores collapsed in 2010 after the state acknowledged that it had gamed the testing system; and not in New Orleans, where an almost all-charter system is ranked 69th of 70 districts in the state and 79% of the charters are rated D or F.

Sixth, the President says he really likes charter schools. But nowhere does he acknowledge that charters are recreating a dual system of publicly funded schools in the nation’s cities and are now starting to expand their “market” into affluent districts where there are no “failing” schools. Nor does he acknowledge that numerous studies find that charters don’t get different results than public schools if they serve the same students. Why does he want two systems, one regulated, the other deregulated? I wish the reporter had asked those questions.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

The President has many more pressing issues to think about, both foreign and domestic. He wants to win the election.

But he is woefully misinformed about his own education policies, about the absence of evidence for them, about the lack of results, about the harmful effect they are having on students and teachers and the quality of education, about the shared assumptions of Race to the Top and the failed No Child Left Behind. He doesn’t seem aware that his own policies require “teaching to the test,” which he says he opposes.

He has not heard the voices of teachers and parents. He is not changing his policies. They will fail as No Child Left Behind has failed because they are based on flawed assumptions about teaching and learning, and because they are based on carrots and sticks.

Carrots and sticks work for donkeys, not for professionals.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats, Education Industry, Education Reform, Merit pay, Obama, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, US Education

Don’t Mess with Texas. The Revolution Begins Here.

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2012 //
12

Texas brought No Child Left Behind to the nation.

Remember that candidate George W. Bush said that Texas had figured out how to fix the schools. He said test every child every year, post the results, reward the schools where scores go up, humiliate those where scores go down. And, wow, a miracle: the scores go up, up, up; the achievement gap closes; graduation rates go up. Win-win-win-win.

Except it didn’t happen. And now the whole country is stuck with a testing regime that is sucking the life out of education.

This report from Texas describes a growing revolution against testing. The schools are up in arms: 77% of the school boards enrolling 86% of all Texas students have passed a resolution opposing high-stakes testing. The Houston superintendent said that 65 days (out of 180) are consumed by testing.

Now a group known as “Moms Against Drunk Testing” has joined the fray. They are mad as hell and they are not going to take it anymore. Last year, the state cut the school budget by $5.4 billion, while handing a fat contract to Pearson for $468 million. Meanwhile the state wants more and more and more testing.

(A few hours after this post appeared, I received the following message: So glad we have support around the country! Our real name is TAMSA (Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment) and we have a facebook page and a website. Please “like us” and “join in” on our website! The more members and “likers” we have, the stronger we will be in the upcoming legislative session.

website: http://tamsatx.org/
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tamsatx)

Go, Texas, go! If the testing vampire is slain, the whole facade of faux reform collapses. No test scores, no merit pay, no evaluation by test scores, no closing schools by scores.

Don’t mess with Texas!

I am speaking on Sunday morning to a joint convention of the Texas School Boards Association and the Texas Association of School Administrators at the Austin Convention Center.

On Sunday from 2-4, I am meeting with parents and teachers to talk about the kind of stuff we discuss on this blog. Eastside Memorial High School. Y’all come!

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Testing, Texas

News About GERM in Australia and New Zealand

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2012 //
6

Our bad ideas about testing, bad teachers, and failing schools have infected Australia and New Zealand. NZ plans to open “independent public schools,” aka charter schools.

Never mind that Australia and New Zealand have higher scores on the international tests than most other nations, including the US.

Only one nation can be number one, and in the case of PISA, it’s Shanghai, which is not even a nation. Shanghai is not representative of China, but an unusual city whose schools have mastered test prep.

Now every nation in the world is supposed to engage in outrage and flogging a of teachers, because only one can be first.

That’s what it means to Race to the Top.

One wins, everyone else fails.

GERM–the global education reform movement–is spreading.

Read here:

The Treehorn Express
Treehorn’s story : Open attachment.
http://treehornexpress.wordpress.com
[Maintained by NZ educator Allan Alach]

NAPLANISM JUST GETS STUPIDER & STUPIDER

WHAT IS NAPLANISM? NAPLANISM is a belief that learning is best in school classrooms when the following conditions prevail :-

* Testing is the essential element.
* Fear is the best motivator for achievements in learning.
* Manipulation of a school’s daily time table for more time to be spent on NAPLAN preparation is essential and is officially encouraged.
* Cheating through extensive daily repetition of test-taking is ignored. This kind of cheating has high-level approval.
* Children must be denied access to other essential elements of child development during preparation for NAPLAN testing.
* Established professional ethics of the teaching profession and of school leadership have to be suspended during the NAPLAN period.
* Normal teacher compliance and willingness to work with authorities has to be exploited. Teachers are nice people. Use them.
* Teachers, principals, all school personnel and P&C members are forbidden to discuss the crippling effects of NAPLAN.
* Testimony from outstanding educators, statisticians, academics and practitioners must be hidden, silenced or ignored.
* No choices are offered to parents for their children to participate in the tests or test preparation. No mention allowed on enrolment forms or on websites or newsletters.
* If scores aren’t high, teacher ability has to be denigrated. They can’t spell, numerate, teach, always want to strike. Useless lot.

It is a cruel, nasty, shady system.

There are so many other essentials to be in place for the test publishers and their political fans to have their way:-
+ Semantic manipulation, especially with the word “OUTCOMES”. For politicians and education journalists, this means ‘test results’. e.g. C.Pyne : “Certainly student outcomes have gone backwards during the past ten years .” For teachers, “outcomes” means ‘identifiable improvement across the curriculum’. Quite different. See. It has a real meaning. ‘Outcomes” has become a colloquialism that is used when you don’t know what you are talking about.

+ Other uses of semantic subterfuge include the hood-winking use of words like…
“REFORM” to mean ‘forcing better test results on a testing program’ on measureable maths and grammar items with nothing to do with other school learnings;
“PERFORMANCE” to mean ‘test results’ and not ‘challenges to a beneficial activity’ ;
“IMPROVEMENT” to mean ‘better temporary results on the tests’ and not ‘gains in general ability’;
“FUNDING” to mean ‘we don’t what we are doing, so we’ll bribe everybody to get on our side.”

+ TEACHER QUALITY refers to those who get better results on the tests than others. The higher the scores, the better the teacher.

+ The list of the best and worst schools and school authorities must be printed and noted for derision and applause.

These conditions are relatively easy to establish and maintain once the compliance of principals, teachers’ unions and educational societies has been obtained by fair or foul means; and corporate Australia has been frightened by a manipulated and false scenario. This teacher compliance and corporate encouragement was a first step for the establishment of NAPLANISM in 2008-9 and was embodied in Klein’s advice to Gillard. It was too easy. She went about her duties for Klein and his testing firms with zeal and found the victims to be quite pliable. They remain so.
STOP PRESS Her Immenseness is in New York this week. ‘London to a brick’ she will contact her mentor Joel Klein for further advice and encouragement. Hang in there, kids.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0

Part of the silliness is evident in the quoted extract at the heading to this Treehorn Express in this childish response from Peter Garrett, composed no doubt by one of his expert testucators, to an inquiry from a respected, former High School principal, who had quoted Treehorn. Of course the Treehorn newsletter is proudly based on opinion and anecdotal evidence, with far more substance than does any NAPLANistic score. The opinions and evidence are based on over 40 years of
chalk-dust and primary schooling face-ups gathered by a once testing-fixated primary school principal who did a complete 180 when he realised, during one school testing period, that he was destroying children‘s love for learning by his thoughtlessness; and later came to realise that achievements in all school subjects are higher and more permanent than anything that any national testing can do, if evaluation of effort is carried on hand-in-hand with learning and by sharing the ‘outcomes’ [see above]. There is ample ‘anecdotal evidence’ for this stance.

Not only that, but the Treehorn opinions and anecdotes are shared by hundreds of Australia and New Zealands’ greatest educators, academics and statisticians who are familiar with NAPLAN and NZ’s National Standards. There’s Margaret Wu, Brian Cambourne, David Hornsby, Kelvin Smythe and those 100+ academics who signed that petition to “Say NO to NAPLAN”. All of these and Treehorn are on the same page as the world’s greatest known educators overseas : Diane Ravitch, Marion Brady, John Goodland, Neil Postmann, Sir Ted Robinson and so on, who challenge their own politically-based GERM viruses….and Pasi Sahlberg who doesn’t have to. Then there’s those thousands of anti-GERM articles, a few of which are provided by Allan Alach each week. Treehorn, typical of so many school children whose intellectual property is being invaded and fracked, would welcome a challenge to any one of the Treehorn Express statements or opinions, from any one of the ACARA testors, NAPLAN supporters or St. Custard ‘experts’. Try it.
saynotonaplansaynotonaplansaynotonaplansaynotonaplanaynotonaplanaynotonaplansaynotonaplansaynotonaplan
ALSO
1. Mr. Pyne, alternative Minister for Education has yet to answer my letter of 9 September concerning ‘outcomes’, ‘robust curriculum’, ‘principal autonomy’ and ‘teacher’ quality. I have faith in him. He seems to be a thinker.

2. Can anyone from anywhere provide a comment or opinion on the embargo of news from the APPA-NZPF conference held last week? Please read the Treehorn Express article “What Happened? Why?” on http://treehornexpress.wordpress.com and use the comment section. I am quite bewildered as any normal parent or grandparent would be; and I sincerely hope that our New Zealand guests and O.S. speakers are not offended by the snub. I, for one, just don’t understand. If it was deliberate, it is totally non-ANZAC I’m a little bit suspicious, of course, that the Murdoch lobbyists have been busy. Your comment?
____________________________________________________
MUST READ

Bridging the Ditch


This is a letter to co-editor Allan Alach of New Zealand, summarising the week on this side of the ditch : 1. Naplan Results Released. 2. McCharter Schools for Queensland. 3.APPA-NZPF Conference. 4.Teacher Strike. 5. Peter Garrett Responds. 6. No Pyne Reply.
It’s been quite a week.
____________________________________________________________________

“If they’re [Queensland] endemic as cellar-dwellers, it’s pretty serious systemic problem.”
[Christopher Bantick, Education Expert, Trinity Grammar, Melbourne. Courier Mail 4 18-09-12]
_____________________________________________________________________
LINKS http://www.dianeravitch.net http://www.literacyeducators.com.au http://leading-learning.blogspot.co.nz http://www.networkonnet.co.nz http://saveourschools.com.au
http://primaryschooling.net http://www.marionbrady.com http://susanohanian.org http://alfiekohn.org http://www.essential.org http://optoutofstandardizedtests.wikispaces
http://www.essential.schools.org http://www.joebower.org http://treehornexpress.wordpress.com/bridging-the-ditch/ http://allthingslearning.wordpress.com

Phil Cullen AM, FACEL,FACE,FQIEL
41 Cominan Avenue
Banora Point 2486
Australia
07 5524 6443
cphilcullen@bigpond.com

FOREWORD

Categories Accountability, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International, Testing

Another Louisiana Embarrassment

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2012 //
14

John White, the TFA Commissioner of Education in Louisiana, put out a press release celebrating the state’s increased numbers taking AP exams.

Gary Rubinstein looked at the press release and thought it was a joke. The number taking the exam went up, but the scores did not. As Gary writes:

“In this latest press release they call their AP results a ‘surge’ because the number of students ‘taking’ the AP went up by 17% while the NUMBER of students (NOT the percentage) getting a 3 or better went up by 18%. Do they realize that this is meaningless? Those percentages are basically the same number, which is what you’d expect.”

In fact, the SAT scores of black students dropped in all three sections of the test.

How embarrassing! Don’t the folks in Baton Rouge know that people can read and might read more than the press release?

Categories Louisiana, Testing

How to Opt Out of Testing

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2012 //
11

In response to other posts, Peggy Robertson of United Opt Out offers this advice to parents and teachers:

My advice is to take action. Currently we are asking people to begin to canvas neighborhoods and share the word of opt out. WE are going to have to do this. No one will do it for us. And while we sit around and wait for some corporate politician to change policies in our favor we have kids suffering – they do not have time to wait. Imagine how many childhoods will be lost this year at the hands of corporate education reform. I am angry – most angry because we have the ability to stop this – and instead we keep hoping that someone will share our message in mainstream media or we hope that Obama will hear us. The truth is this – the ball is rolling fast and it will take years to stop it IF we rely on politicians to do this for us. We cannot wait on the media to help us. Corporate media share what they want when they want – they toss us around like a cat playing with a mouse. We are quite capable of spreading the word of opt out. What are we waiting for? Share this link far and wide. Last year my main form of exercise was swimming. This year it will be walking. http://unitedoptout.com/liberator-call-to-action-time-to-canvas-the-neighborhoods/

Categories Accountability, Parents, Testing
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