Archives for category: Testing
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Nancy Bailey: Nineteen Ways to Save Public Schools from Greedy Billionaires in 2019

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2019 //
13

This is a great post by Nancy Bailey, offering 19 ways you can save public schools from the clutches of the billionaires in 2019!

Here are the first six, keep reading to learn about the other thirteen and see her links:

1. Kindergarten NOT The New First Grade

Kindergartners should be treated like the four and five-year-old students that they are and not pushed to be first graders. The activities and instruction for this age group are well established.

Real educators should take charge and ensure that there’s much free play and age appropriate activities.

2. School Systems NOT “Portfolio of Schools”

For years, corporate reformers have unfairly claimed that school systems fail. They want privatization through a portfolio of schools involving charters, private schools and choice. This will end public education.

We need efficient school systems for traditional public schools only, that serve all children.

Taxpayers don’t need to fund unproven portfolio schools they don’t own or control.

3. School Boards NOT Privatization Partners

School boards are critical to keeping public schools public. Elected officials must listen to the voices of those in the community that elect them. The school board is democracy at its finest.

However, school board members have signed on to unproven initiatives by the Gates, Broad, and Walton foundations and others. Newer groups like School Board Partners encourage school boards to carry out a privatization agenda. Outside groups include Stand for Children and The City Fund.

Ask those running for school board about their goals for schools before they are elected. Demand transparency.

4. Teachers NOT Teach for America

Teachers choose teaching as a career. Teach for America is a substandard turnaround teaching pool. Sending young college graduates into the classroom as real teachers makes no sense.

Here are the businesses and individuals that donate to this group. What if they donated to real teachers and smaller classrooms, or other school needs?

Renew the focus on teachers, their credentials, their preparation, and their support. Elevate their professional status to the importance teachers richly deserve.

5. Principals NOT New Leaders

Next to teachers, principals fulfill the critical job of running the school. Their jobs should be to support and evaluate good teaching fairly and compassionately. No one should become a principal unless they have classroom experience and adequate university preparation.

New Leaders was created to weaken the principalship. Individuals from outside education with no classroom experience are placed in school leadership positions. Like Teach for America, New Leaders weakens the structure of public education. They follow the privatization directives of philanthropists who seek school privatization.

Hire principals with long-term experience working with students. Ensure that they have the support and know-how to lead their schools in what matters.

6. Superintendents NOT CEO’s

Many state superintendents have little educational experience, or they have been through Teach for America. Often they are seen as CEOs overseeing a business. But schools are not businesses. Children are not products. Most of these superintendents have little to no experience with the children they are supposed to serve.

Many come from The Broad Academy where they learn how to collect data and transform schools to choice and charters. They are about school privatization.

Ensure that those who lead America’s schools have the right intentions and backgrounds to serve the needs of students.

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Teach for America, Testing

GREAT NEWS from New Jersey SOS: State Court Strikes Down PARCC as Graduation Requirement!

By dianeravitch
December 31, 2018 //
19

This just in from Save Our Schools New Jersey, from its Facebook page:

BREAKING!!! BREAKING!!! BREAKING!!! BREAKING!!!

NJ Appeals Court strikes down NJ’s PARCC-based high school graduation rules!!!

From Education Law Center and ACLUNJ

NJ Appeals Court: “We hold, therefore, that to the extent the [NJDOE] regulations required testing of non-eleventh-grade students, they are contrary to the Act and are invalid.”

NJ Appeals Court: “However, the [NJDOE] regulations violate the Act to the extent they specifically authorize multiple tests administered in grades other than the eleventh grade.”

“the Act compels DOE to provide for alternative methods of assessing proficiency other than through PARCC testing or any other standardized testing process.”

“We hold N.J.A.C. 6A:8-5.1(a)(6),-5.1(f) and -5.1(g) are contrary to the express provisions of the Act because they require administration of more than one graduate proficiency test to students other than those in the eleventh grade, and because the regulations on their face do not permit retesting with the same standardized test to students through the 2020 graduating class. As a result, the regulations as enacted are stricken. To avoid disruption in
any ongoing statewide administration of proficiency examinations, we stay our judgment for thirty days to permit DOE to seek further review in the Supreme Court.”

Full opinion available here: https://www.njcourts.gov/attorneys/assets/opinions/appellate/unpublished/a0768-16.pdf?cacheID=tmUepTY&fbclid=IwAR1ifXkDTOAOuplr8lI6cnVQNncJ9xdkNoER9LkXHjEYPHPwD-pLS7KF9bU

We will post additional information as it becomes available.
Happy New Year!!

THANKS TO THE EDUCATION LAW CENTER FOR FIGHTING AND WINNING THIS CASE.

Standardized tests should never be used as a graduation requirement as they are based on a bell curve and those at the bottom of the bell curve will always fail, and they will always be the most disadvantaged students.

New Jersey is one of only six states that still uses PARCC. This test has standards more rigorous than NAEP. It is designed to fail most students. DUMP PARCC!

Categories Accountability, New Jersey, Resistance, Testing

John Kuhn: A Tale of Two Districts

By dianeravitch
December 24, 2018 //
7

Texas Superintendent John Kuhn tells the story of two districts in adjacent districts, which are unequally funded but held to the same standards. Who should be held accountable? Look to the folks at the top, who make the crucial decisions about have and have-not schools and districts.

This video came out a year ago and has been viewed nearly two million times.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Testing

Eric Blanc: The Blue State Teachers’ Revolt Is On! L.A. Teachers Plan to Strike on January 10!

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2018 //
9

Eric Blanc has covered the teacher revolts in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and every other state where teachers said “Enough is enough.”

He writes for Jacobin.

Now, he says, the Blue State Teachers’ Revolt is on!

It’s official: Los Angeles teachers just announced they are going to strike on January 10. They’re challenging not just public education privatizers, but the Democratic Party establishment.

After months of contract negotiations, Los Angeles teachers have announced that, unless the LA school district leadership gives a dramatic set of last-minute concessions, they will begin a strike on January 10. The stakes of the struggle could hardly be higher. In the second-largest school district in the country, educators have thrown down the gauntlet against the forces of big business, gentrification, and privatization — including those within the Democratic Party.

The teachers’ revolt sparked by West Virginia has now spread to the “bluest” state of them all, California. LA’s schools show why the crisis of public education can’t be blamed only on Republicans. Huge class sizes, low per-pupil funding, rampant charter schools, over-testing, a lack of counselors, nurses, and librarians — these are the fruit of years of Democratic rule in the city and the state capitol.

“Corporate Democrats are getting money from the same billionaires and corporations as the Republicans,” explains United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) Secretary Arlene Inouye, “so essentially all public educators in this country are targets.” In Los Angeles, deep-pocketed pro-charter ideologues recently installed Austin Beutner — a billionaire investment banker with zero educational experience — as superintendent. Their plan is straightforward: drastically downsize the school district to push students into privately run charter schools.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Los Angeles, Privatization, Teachers, Testing, Unions

Reader: How to Manipulate Test Scores

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2018 //
24

A reader has collected the ways that test scores can be manipulated to make a school or a district look better or worse:

How to Manipulate Test Scores

1) Manipulate the standards

2) Manipulate the test items

3) Manipulate the cut scores

4) Manipulate the test takers

5) Manipulate the responses (i.e., change the answers, also referred to as, “The DC Rheeform Miracle” a tactic so successful that Atlanta gave it go.)

6) Manipulate the media

Number five is the only overt form of cheating, however, all the other methods are forms of de-facto cheating. Number 1, 2, 3 were used by reformers to prove that our schools were failing; numbers 4, 5. 6 are used by reformers to prove that the charter experiment is working. Six reasons why Common Coercion test-and-punish reform was a criminal enterprise.

Categories Atlanta, Cheating, District of Columbia, Testing

Laura Chapman on the Triple Disasters of Federal Policy: NCLB, RTTT, and ESSA

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2018 //
15

Laura Chapman responded to this post about the nil effects of NCLB:

She writes:

“The biggest lie was NCLB. The second biggest lie was Race to the Top. The third biggest lie is ESSA.”

NCLB was the template for what followed. I wrote about that jargon-filled fiasco as a heads up to colleagues working in arts education who did not know what hit them.

Race to the Top was the double whammy with a propaganda mill called the “Reform Support Network” designed to intimidate teachers who failed to comply. USDE outsourced the problem of compliance to people who did not know what to do with this fact: About 69% of teachers had job assignments untethered to statewide tests. The hired hands working for the Reform Support Network offered several absurd solutions. Among these were the idea that teacher should be evaluated on school-wide scores for subjects they did not teach (e.g., math, ELA) and that a writing assignment called SLOs (student learning objectives) should function as a tool for evaluation.

The SLO writing assignment required teachers to specify and predict gains in the test scores of their students from the beginning to the end of the year. Teachers were graded on their SLOs and up to 25 criteria had to be met for writing a “proper” SLO. That absurdity has been marketed since 1999, first in a pay-for-performance scheme for Denver conjured by William Slotnick (Master’s in Education, Harvard). There is no evidence to support the use of SLOs for teacher evaluation. Even so, this exercise is still used in Ohio, among other states.

ESSA is like NCLB in that the high stakes tests are still there, but they are surrounded with legalese about state “flexibility.” Some parts of ESSA calls for de-professionalizing the work of teacher education (see Title II, Section SEC. 2002).

ESSA became the federal law before our current ten-yacht owner and avowed Christian missionary, Betsy Devos, was appointed to be in charge of the Department of Education.

Devos’ incompetence delayed and then mangled the “approval” of required ESSA “state plans“ for this school year, 2018-2019. In the meantime, groups that championed NCLB and Race to the Top publicized their own ratings of ESSA plans (e.g., Bellwether Education Partners, Achieve, and the Collaborative for Student Success). The Collaborative for Student Success is funded by the Bloomberg Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, ExxonMobil, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation–none friends of public education.

I think that compliance checks on ESSA, if any, will be outsourced and that the still pending federal budget will confirm the ten-yacht Education Secretary’s’ real priorities—choice and some of the increasingly weird things recently on her mind.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Education Industry, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Stupid, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Lisa Eggert Litvin: Teen Suicide and High-Stakes Testing LINK ADDED

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2018 //
24

I’m reposting this because it was inexplicably cut off. Here is the full original…..

A decade ago, California parent Vicki Abeles created a documentary called “Race to Nowhere” about the toxic effects of high-stakes testing. She did it after a friend of her teen daughter committed suicide. Vicki took the show on the road and showed it in hundreds of communities. She wanted to start a grassroots rebellion against high-stakes testing, for the sake of the children. Instead, NCLB continued, unchanged, and Race to the Top ratcheted up the pressure on students and teachers to get higher scores than they did the year before–or face certain shame and punishment.

No matter how many times we tell children “you are more than a score,” our words count less than our actions.

Now Lisa Eggert Litvin explains yet again that high-stakes testing is harmful to the mental health of students.

The transformation of public education isn’t the only factor of course. Parents still get divorced and families still struggle financially and children still bully, with social media making it all worse. But when those issues are coupled with a high-intensity school environment, enforced by tests, with little room for down time, then the hard issues become insurmountable, and children collapse. It makes sense that the AAP report shows suicide and self-harm rates were lowest in the summer, and highest in the fall and spring.

Perhaps worst of all, this test-centric accountability model doesn’t even work. The “achievement gaps” between underserved groups and their peers still exist. In New York City, the gap has increased for African-American and Hispanic students.

It’s time to admit that the testing-based model of the NCLB law and its progeny was a mistake. The early opponents were right: the law is downright dangerous. Let’s press the restart button and re-examine how to help all students achieve. Let’s finally honestly address the roles poverty and family income play. Can it really be any surprise that school districts in affluent neighborhoods have higher test scores than their less affluent counterparts?

So was my childhood perfect? Far from it. But it was emotionally healthier for sure. There is nothing more important than making sure our children are healthy and aren’t filled with anxiety and aren’t harming themselves. Right now, let’s stop the madness of high-stakes testing. Our children are suffering — physically and mentally — and it has to end.

The writer is president of the Hastings-on-Hudson Board of Education and president emeritus of the Hastings-on-Hudson PTSA.

Maybe we have to insist on accountability. Create a score card of teen deaths and pin it on the door of every member of Congress and every legislator who voted to mandate annual testing and high-stakes for students, teachers, and schools. Insist that they take the tests they mandate and publish their scores. If they fail, they must resign.

https://www.lohud.com/story/opinion/contributors/2018/04/04/high-stakes-testing-has-emotional-consequences-too/486105002/

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Testing

Peter Greene on Chris Cerf and the Privatizers’ Discomfort with the Word “Reformer”

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2018 //
11

There has always been a problem with using the word “Reformer” to describe those who wanted to impose privatization on public education and strangle the public schools with high-stakes testing and mandates up the kazoo while deregulating the privately managed schools.

Now there is a small but growing number of former reformers who say they are not “reformers.” Robin Lake was one (she ran the Center for Reinventing Public Education for many years). Then along comes Chris Cerf.

Peter Greene analyzes Cerf’s discomfort with the language, mainly because for some reason, the word “reform” now is in bad repute. Whose fault was that? Maybe too many people began to understand that “reform” meant closing public schools and replacing them with unaccountable privately managed charter schools.

Cerf continues to believe all the reformer ideas were swell–charter schools, high-stakes testing, etc.–but misunderstood.

Greene writes:

Look, lots of ed reform figures have taken a moment to examine their choices and programs. Some, like Rick Hess, have pressed for uncomfortable truths all along, and some are just showing up at the party. But if reformsters like Perf think the solution is to insist that their ideas were awesome and they were just thwarted by a vast conspiracy of naughty public ed fans, they are going to stay stuck right where they are, the reformy equivalent of that fifty-year-old paunchy guy on the porch who is still telling anyone who will listen how he should have won that big football game in high school.

You guys screwed up. In some big ways, and some small ways. In avoidable ways, and in ways that are baked into your ideas. In lots of ways related to your amateur status coupled with your unwillingness to listen to trained professionals. You can face all of that, or you can just keep stamping your feet.

I recommend the former. Look, in public ed we confront our failures all the time, often in real time as we watch a lesson plan crash and burn right in front of us. Being able to face failure is a basic survival technique in the classroom. I recommend that Cerf and those like him try it out, because this kind of whiny self-justification with a touch of moral one-upmanship is not abroad look on anyone. I offer this advice in the spirit of the season because, really, if they ignore it, they will only disappear from view that much faster, which would not be the worst thing for those of us who support public ed.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing

Fred Smith: The Testing Expert Who Fights the Testing Combine

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2018 //
7

Fred Smith is a genuine Testing Expert. He has the technical expertise to dig deep into the numbers and understand what they mean and what they don’t mean. He spent most of his career at the New York City Board of Education. Now he is a valued consultant to the Opt Out Movement in New York. He knows fraud in testing and he’s not afraid to call it out.

Fred Smith is a hero of American education, and he here joins the honor roll.

Read this article about him, which contains links to his latest work.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud, Honor Roll, New York, Opt Out, Parent Groups, Standardized Testing, Testing

Caleb Rossiter Reviews Arne Duncan’s Book About “Lies” and the Liars Who Tell Them

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2018 //
36

Caleb Rossiter taught in both the charter schools and public schools of Washington, D.C.

In this post, he reviews Arne Duncan’s recent book about his seven years as Secretary of Education.

He came away from the experience convinced that everyone lies.

Rossiter wonders what he learned.

“”Duncan says he first encountered school lies 30 years ago, when during college he tutored at his mother’s after-school program in a poor black neighborhood in Southside Chicago. Duncan, who is white, also lived on the Southside, near his father’s job as a professor at the elite University of Chicago. His tutee was a black high school basketball star who assumed that his “B” average guaranteed a college scholarship. Duncan soon realized that the boy’s pathetic academic level meant he had no hope of even getting into college.

“The memoir makes it clear that schools are still at it, hiding from poor parents their children’s low effort, achievement, and readiness for college or work, which will keep them trapped in the underclass. That’s a depressing conclusion coming from someone who presided over a generation of accountability policies as head of the Chicago schools and then as President Obama’s secretary of education.”

Apparently, he sees nothing wrong about the high-stakes Testing and accountability regime that he promoted and has no regrets. Reflection is not his thing. He remains all in for the principles behind No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »