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Ohio: A Great New Organization Has Been Launched to Fight Privatization, Theft, and Greed

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2018 //
19

I learned from Bill Phillis’s posts about a great new organization that has just been launched in Ohio.

If you live in Ohio, join it.

The organization, called Public Education Partners, was inspired by Jan Resseger’s post: https://janresseger.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/my-public-education-platform/

Every candidate running for public office, whether school board, state legislature, the governorship, or Congress should be asked to take a stand: Do you support this platform?

Preamble to PEP’s Public Education Platform

The Ohio Constitution (Article VI, sections 2 and 3) requires the state to secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools and provide for the organization, administration and control of the system. School district boards of education have the constitutional and statutory responsibility to administer the educational program. Boards of education have the fiduciary duty to ensure the educational needs of all resident students are met in an equitable and adequate manner.

The state’s first obligation is to ensure that a thorough and efficient system is established and maintained. The state has no right under the Ohio constitution to fund alternative educational programs that diminish moral and financial support from the common school system. Ohio’s system of school was declared unconstitutional more than two decades ago, yet since that time $11 billion have been drained from the public school system for publicly- funded, privately-operated charter schools. This egregious flaw in state policy must be addressed.

Jan Resseger of Cleveland Heights has aptly defined state and local responsibility for education as follows:

A comprehensive system of public education that serves all children and is democratically governed, publicly funded, universally accessible, and accountable to the public is central to the common good.

The education platform premised on the constitutional responsibility of the state of Ohio as stated in the preamble is:

A comprehensive system of public education that serves all children and is democratically governed, publicly funded, universally accessible, and accountable to the public, is central to the common good.
~Jan Resseger

Ohio Public Education Platform

This education platform is premised on the constitutional responsibility of the state of Ohio:

 Provide adequate and equitable funding to Ohio school districts to guarantee a comparable opportunity to learn for ALL children. This includes a quality early childhood education, qualified teachers, a rich curriculum that will prepare students for college, work and community, and equitable instructional resources. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WLdVez25ZjDzzd2irSUwUggj-GflNQuO/view?usp=sharing

 Respect local control of public schools run by elected school boards. There are different needs for different schools of different sizes, and each local school board knows what its students, families, and community values. http://www.nvasb.org/assets/why_school_boards.pdf

 Reject the school privatization agenda, which includes state takeovers, charter schools, voucher schemes, and high-stakes testing. The school privatization agenda has proven to be ineffective at bringing efficiency and cost savings to our schools. https://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/Privatizing_Public_Education,_Higher_Ed_Policy,_and_T eachers

 Do away with the state takeovers of school districts imposed in House Bill 70. State takeovers of school districts (HB 70), followed by the appointment of CEOs with power to override the decisions of elected school boards and nullify union contracts, is undemocratic, unaccountable, and without checks and balances. http://www.reclaimourschools.org/sites/default/files/state-takeover-factsheet-3.pdf

 Promote a moratorium on the authorization of new charter schools while gradually removing existing charters, which take funding and other valuable resources from public school districts. Charter schools remove funds and other resources from public school districts and need to be phased out. For-profit charter schools should be eliminated – tax dollars should never be transferred into private profits. https://knowyourcharter.com/

 Eliminate vouchers and tuition tax credit programs. Voucher schemes take desperately needed dollars out of education budgets and undermine the protection of religious liberty as defined by the First Amendment. https://educationvotes.nea.org/2017/02/08/5-names- politicians-use-sell-private-school-voucher-schemes-parents/

 Encourage wraparound community learning centers that bring social and health services into Ohio school buildings. These wraparound services ensure that the public schools are the center of the neighborhood, and they include health, dental, and mental health clinics, after school programs, and parent support programs. Cincinnati Public Schools has a very successful program: https://www.cps-k12.org/community/clc

 End the test-and-punish philosophy, and replace it with an ideology of school investment and improvement. The tests have narrowed the curriculum to the tested subjects. If national standardized testing is to continue, testing should be limited to the federal minimum guidelines, and there should be no state standardized tests beyond those mandated by ESSA. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer- sheet/wp/2017/01/06/how-testing-practices-have-to-change-in-u-s-public- schools/?utm_term=.45d28f77dcb0

 Remove high stakes mandates from schools, and abolish the practice of punishing schools, teachers, families, and students for arbitrary test scores. Do away with mandatory retention attached to the 3rd Grade Reading Guarantee and high school end-of-course state tests. If parents choose to opt their children out of testing, no one should be penalized. http://www.fairtest.org/sites/default/files/Dangerous-Consequences-of-high-stakes- tests.pdf

 Restore respect for well-trained, certified teachers, and return educator evaluation systems to locally elected school boards. Dismiss Teach for America, which is funded by the Eli Broad Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. https://progressive.org/public-school-shakedown/went-wrong-teach-america/

Eliminate the practice of judging teachers by their students’ scores – research has proven it unreliable. http://www.fairtest.org/sites/default/files/TeacherEvaluationFactSheetRevisionJanuary201 6.pdf

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Ohio, Privatization, School Choice, Supporting public schools, Testing, VAM (value-added modeling), Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

DFER Will Spend Millions to Support Pro-Charter, Pro-High-Stakes Testing Candidates

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2018 //
25

If you like high-stakes testing and charter schools, you will love “Democrats for Education Reform.”

DFER, as it is known, was condemned by resolution by the Democratic party conferences in Colorado and California for using the word “Democrat” to promote a corporate agenda that is hostile to public schools. DFER is also hostile to public school teachers and unions, but loves TFA and merit pay. All the usual Corporate Reform failures. Real Democrats, like the parties in Colorado and California think that DFERs are Republicans pretending to be Democrats.

Democrats for Education Reform is a group funded by Wall Street hedge fund managers who despise public schools. They never support candidates who are opposed to privatization or those who are fully committed to public schools. They only support candidates who want to siphon money away from public schools to support charter schools. They support candidates who love high-stakes testing. They never look at evidence that shows the damage that charters do to public schools or the evidence that shows the total failure of high-stakes testing to make any difference other than demoralizing students and teachers. They don’t care that a decade of their policies driven by the U.S. Department of Education has led to stagnation of NAEP scores.

In New York State, hedge funders supporting charter schools are pouring millions of dollars into races for the State Senate, both to support the charter school industry and to make sure that Republicans retain control of the State Senate, thus fending off higher taxes and protecting charter schools. Another DFERite dumping big money into New York State campaigns is Paul Tudor Jones, who gave $150,000 to something called “Parents Vote,” which seems to be controlled by StudentsFirst (hard to tell the Astroturf organizations apart). The treasurer of “Parents Vote” is the attorney for StudentsFirst. Jones may be a parent, but he lives in Connecticut, not New York, and you can bet your bottom dollar that he does not send his own children to public schools or charter schools. This outpouring of money is meant to keep the State Senate firmly under GOP management, to make sure that charters continue to operate without oversight and do their own thing.

You may or may not remember that Paul Tudor Jones is one of the nine billionaires who determined that it was up to them to remake the public schools of New York, although no one elected them to do so.

Just five years ago, Forbes ran a big article about Paul Tudor Jones and his plan to “save American education.” While busy saving American education, Jones also served on the board of Harvey Weinstein’s company and fought to save Harvey’s battered reputation.

Please note that the following story misidentifies DFER and treats them as a legitimate “reform” group when DFER acts only in the interest of Corporate Reform, high-stakes testing and privatization. The story also errs in not acknowledging that many DFER members are not Democrats.

From Politico:


FIRST LOOK: EDUCATION REFORM GROUP BETS BIG ON GOVERNOR’S RACES: Democrats for Education Reform plans to spend $4 million on campaign contributions and advertising this election cycle, boosting Democratic candidates who want to support public schools but are open to reform-minded ways of improving them.

— The organization — which advocates for a host of school reform policies nationwide like strong test-based accountability and high-quality public charter schools — through its political action committee is prioritizing gubernatorial races in Colorado, Connecticut and New York, in addition to the California state superintendent’s race and some state legislative races. DFER exclusively detailed its spending and campaign plans with Morning Education in an interview late last month. Asked the source of the $4 million, a spokeswoman the figure comes from their “supporters” and “contributors.”

— In Colorado’s battle for governor, DFER is backing Rep. Jared Polis, a House education committee Democrat who’s running against state Treasurer Walker Stapleton, a Republican.

— The race to replace term-limited Gov. John Hickenlooper has proven divisive for Colorado Democrats — the state teachers union backed another Democrat, Cary Kennedy, during the primary. Allies of Kennedy sought to tie Polis to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her support for private school vouchers. Polis founded two charter schools, but hasn’t shown support for vouchers or federally funded private schools in Congress. When Kennedy lost to Polis, the state teachers union released a statement that didn’t even mention Polis’ name.

— In Connecticut, DFER is supporting Ned Lamont, the Democratic hopeful looking to replace Gov. Dannel Malloy, who’s not seeking reelection. And the organization is pushing for Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s reelection in New York.

— In California, DFER wants to lift Marshall Tuck to victory as state schools superintendent. Tuck is an education reform advocate who has run both charter schools and district schools in Los Angeles. In 2014, he narrowly lost a bid for state schools chief to Tom Torlakson, the current superintendent, who had the support of teachers unions. Tuck will face another Democrat, state Assemblyman Tony Thurmond, in the general election this fall.

— DFER in addition is launching a social media campaignon what it means to be an “education progressive.” The group defines that term as fighting to spend more money on public education while embracing “new ideas” to bring about faster improvement. Some of those ideas, like stronger test-based accountability measures, have faced staunch opposition from progressive groups like teachers unions. But DFER is pushing new polling results that President Shavar Jeffries says illustrate strong support. More on that polling here.

— Jeffries, who recently sat down with Morning Education, stressed that more than half of Democratic primary voters, African American voters and Hispanic voters don’t think public schools are changing or improving fast enough. The poll also found broad support for public school choice — a divisive issue for the Democratic Party — and more equitable funding for public schools, particularly disadvantaged ones. The results stem from two nationwide phone polls of more than 1,000 voters each between May and July of this year. The poll was conducted by consulting firms Benenson Strategy Group and 270 Strategies.

Would it be asking too much to hope that Caitlin Emma and the crack reporters on the Politico team might consider interviewing a critic of billionaire “Reformers.” Maybe a teacher? Say, someone like Steven Singer or Peter Greene or Mark Weber, or other well-informed critics of the intrusion of billionaire know-nothings into education policymaking? Maybe Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education?

Categories Charter Schools, Colorado, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Industry, New York, Privatization, School Choice, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, Unions

Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider: Fear-Based “Reform” Doesn’t Work

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2018 //
46

In this podcast, Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider interview business journalist Andrea Gabor about the lessons of her new book, “After the Culture Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform.”

“Gabor argues that business DOES offer lessons for schools – but that the education reform industry has learned all of the wrong ones.”

This is the book to read this summer.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing

Larry Cuban: Today’s Reformers and the Revival of Taylorism and the Cult of Efficiency

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2018 //
8

Larry Cuban wrote an insightful post about the Reformers’ revival of the ideology of social efficiency that was popular a century ago.

He writes:

“The current incarnation of “Taylorism” and focus on student outcomes can be seen in the standards, testing, and accountability movement launched over three decades ago in the wake of A Nation at Risk report. The application of business practices and lingo under the umbrella of scientifically acquired evidence reappeared anew albeit with different labels.

“Since the 1980s, reforms that called for uniform curriculum standards and increased testing while holding districts and schools responsible for student outcomes aimed to harness education to a stronger economy. With the increased power of computers to gather and analyze data, new techniques to prod schools to teach more, better, faster, and cheaper appeared (see here, here, and here) *

“The frequent gathering and parsing of test data, school-by-school, district-by-district, state-by-state, and nationally became a major enterprise. The lure of increased productivity and efficiency through evidence-based decision-making in light of huge (and available) data-sets has led to increasing use of algorithms to grade performance of individual schools, evaluating teacher performance, and customizing online lessons for each student (see here and here).

“States and districts now evaluate the performance of schools based on test scores, growth in achievement, graduation rates, and other measures and then assign rankings by issuing a grade to each school ranging from an A to a F, awarding one to five stars, or similar systems. Such grades signal parents which schools are high-performing and attractive to enroll their children and which schools are to be avoided—an efficient way of sorting out schools especially since parental choice in public schools has expanded.

“Determining which teachers are productive, i.e., “effective,” using students’ test scores has occurred in many states and big city districts. Such outcome measures should not shock anyone familiar with the spreading influence of the business model (e.g., earning profits, market share, and return on investment) upon schooling.

“Policymakers’ concerns over inefficiency in sorting effective from ineffective teachers (most districts graded 90-plus percent of teachers satisfactory) led to an embrace of an economic model of providing incentives to increase organizational productivity and efficiency.

“Within classrooms, both effectiveness and efficiency have come to the fore in customizing lessons for individual students. Earlier efforts to introduce “teaching machines” in the 1920s and later in the 1950s testify to the history of educators seeking ways to tailor teaching and learning to fit individual students. With the spread of faster and cheaper technologies since the 1990s, new classroom models of integrating devices and online programs took hold in many schools. The growth of huge data-sets of information on student performance in math, reading, and other school subjects also segued into a Niagara of software spilling over schools in the past two decades. The rationale for extensive buying and distributing of new devices and software has been to make teaching and student learning faster, better, and individualized.”

This mode of thinking, mandated and imposed as federal policy, threatens to extinguish childhood and the joy of learning.

What works in an automated warehouse is not what should be applied to a schoolroom.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Data, Education Reform, Testing

Louisiana: State Test Scores are Invalid

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2018 //
12

Blogger Michael Deshotels (Louisiana Educator) compares state test scores to NAEP scores. The state scores are up, the NAEP scores are flat. What’s going on?

He writes:

School reform in Louisiana was supposed to eliminate social promotion and the awarding of worthless high school diplomas.
Superintendent John White has staked his entire career as an education reformer on improving state standardized test scores of Louisiana students. To reformers like White, test scores are everything. In their philosophy of education, you can’t trust teachers to tell us and parents whether students are learning and progressing and are going to be ready for college or careers when they graduate. Reformers believe that Louisiana needs an objective way of finding out if our students are getting diplomas that indicate that they are ready to compete with students from other countries for the best jobs in the world economy.

John White was selected by former Governor Jindal to be our State Superintendent at the beginning of 2012 with the mission of implementing new laws that would evaluate, reward and fire teachers based on student test scores and to implement the replacement of many public schools with independent charter schools. The charter schools would live and die based on the attainment of high student test scores.

From the very beginning of our Louisiana education reforms, the reformers announced that they wanted to eliminate diploma mills that turned out graduates that had no real education and were not going to be fit for the job market or college. Corporate education reform was no longer going to allow diplomas to be awarded to functionally illiterate young people. Reformers believed that it was time to eliminate social promotion, whereby children were automatically promoted to the next grade even though they had not achieved satisfactory results on their math and ELA courses. The gate keepers would be cut scores on state tests that would indicate proficiency or failure.

Well, that didn’t work.

Everything in the White administration revolves around increasing student test scores. The school rating system installed by White and his TFA cronies applies maximum pressure on school administrators and teachers to do almost nothing but attempt to raise student test scores.

Louisiana state law requires that our state tests be compatible with the National NAEP test so that our student performance can be compared to other states.
The education reform laws also required that the new Louisiana standardized state tests must be compatible to nationally recognized tests including the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). In other words, a student rating of proficient on the state tests should be the same as proficient on the NAEP test. It was decided that a rating of Mastery on the state tests should be equivalent to a rating of Proficient on the NAEP.

So how reliable are our state LEAP and End-of-Course tests, compared to the NAEP? Does the progress of our students from year to year on LEAP match the progress measured by NAEP? Are we finally moving our students to proficiency and awarding them diplomas that future employers can trust are indications of real academic skills? Since the legislature had decided at the beginning of the reforms that we couldn’t trust the teachers to tell us whether a student was worthy of getting a diploma, did they also insist on a check-up system to see if we could trust the State Department of Education and their standardized tests to certify that a student was worthy of a diploma?

Oops, it looks like the legislature forgot to set up an independent check on our Department of Education to see if they were faithfully holding up their end of the bargain to end social promotion and grant real diplomas. There is no one officially checking to see if the LDOE tests are really measuring proficiency as comparable to the NAEP tests. But there is a way of checking the validity of our state tests compared to NAEP. There just is no law requiring anyone to make the comparison. So here is my effort to provide a legitimate comparison of the two testing systems.

On the state tests, students made dramatic improvements. On NAEP, no dice. No gains, some decline.

According to state testing, John White is a big success. Louisiana’s public school students are improving dramatically, and are well on their way to achieving Mastery or Proficiency by 2025. But according to national testing, achievement scores have barely improved in three areas and have dropped in 8thgrade math. Louisiana is near the bottom of the NAEP rankings. Most independent agencies now rate Louisiana as the lowest performer out of all the states in the measures of school performance.

Common core standards may be not be teachable for at least half of our students.
My opinion, which I can’t prove, is that the lack of progress in student proficiency is really a result of implementing the common cores standards which are basically unteachable for at least half of our students.

Louisiana is allowing the same abuses that have resulted in charges of fraud in the reported graduation rate of the Washington D.C. school system.
Now, not only are Louisiana students being promoted who demonstrated unsatisfactory test performance, but schools are allowed to waive the attendance requirement for promotion and graduation. Now students in high school who missed much more than the allowed absences and who failed their state tests, often still get a diploma by just taking a few hours of credit recovery courses. For example, students can now pass their Algebra I EOC test by scoring only 23.5% correct answers. This is exactly the same situation that caused the graduation rate in the Washington DC schools to be declared fraudulent. But here in Louisiana, no one in an official position is blowing the whistle.

So if you think there were illiterate students getting diplomas in the old days, that’s nothing compared to the rampant awarding of diplomas to anyone with a pulse today. I certainly do not believe that the state tests are valid enough to be used as the promotion standard. I have much more faith in the judgement of teachers. Unfortunately the law that is supposed to prevent the pressuring of teachers on promotion decisions is also being ignored in the push to boost the graduation rate at all costs.

As Arne Duncan used to say, again and again, they are lying to our children.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Louisiana, Testing

Gary Rubinstein: A Short and Powerful History of the Rise and Fall of the Corporate Reform Movement

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2018 //
5

Gary Rubinstein gave a delightful talk about education reform and its distortions at his alma mater, Tufts University, in April.

It is very enjoyable. Please watch.

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

Meet the New Director of FairTest, Andre Green

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2018 //
2

Andre Green is the new executive director of FairTest.

ANDRE GREEN TO BE NEW FAIRTEST EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
WHEN DR. MONTY NEILL RETIRES THIS SUMMER

The National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest) has announced that Andre L. Green will become executive director of the country’s leading assessment reform organization. Dr. Monty Neill, FairTest’s long-term leader, is retiring this summer.

As the grandson of sharecroppers, the child of a single mother, a product of Louisiana public schools, and the first person in his family to earn a bachelor’s degree, Andre Green knows the power of a quality education. He brings almost 20 years of experience in education policy, operations, technology, data analysis and advocacy to FairTest.

After graduating from Bard College at Simon’s Rock, a test-optional school, at age 19, Andre moved to Somerville, Massachusetts to teach fifth grade. After teaching, he was a juvenile detention center case manager. He then worked at YouthBuild USA, helping disadvantaged young people earn high school credentials while developing job skills.

Most recently, he was the first Political Director at MASSCreative, Massachusetts’ statewide arts advocacy group, serving as its primary liaison to elected officials. For the past year, he has consulted with FairTest on development of a new strategic plan.

Andre was elected to the Somerville (MA) School Committee in 2015 and currently serves as its Chair. He was the lead author of a resolution calling for a three-year moratorium on high-stakes testing.

Andre is a past champion on the television game show “Jeopardy!” He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Jessica, and daughter Madelynn.

On Thursday evening, November 8 , 2018, FairTest will sponsor a special event to honor Monty Neill and welcome Andre Green. The program will take place at the Multicultural Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 6:00pm to 8:30pm. FairTest will present its “Deborah W. Meier Hero in Education Award” to Dr. Neill for his decades of work for assessment reform. Details about the event will be posted at http://www.fairtest.org.

Founded in 1985 and based in metropolitan Boston, FairTest runs campaigns for assessment reform policies such as test-optional college admissions. It also opposes misuses of standardized exams in making educational decisions.

Green wrote the following letter to Education Week, in response to their assertion in an article that test resistance is slowing down or dying:

Assessment reform movement is alive, strong — and winning – at the state and local level. When it comes to public education, it has always been state capitals and local governments where key decisions are made, not Washington, DC. With ESSA the law of the land, the fight to make real progress in reducing standardized exam misuse and overuse will take place in state legislatures, boards of education and school committees.

And we’re making that progress; not “slowing to a crawl.” The number of states that require an exit exam to graduate has dropped from more than two dozen to 12–with Indiana eliminating their test just this summer. We’re seeing interest in reducing state testing from the new Governor of New Jersey, and from gubernatorial candidates in states like Georgia. Several states, such as New York, New Hampshire and Massachusetts are piloting alternative assessments that may prove to be national models. Organizations like the NAACP are speaking out more strongly about the need to replace flawed tests.

Make no mistake, when a future President and Congress take up ESEA again in several years, testing reformers will be there. And we’ll be joined by allies from school districts, states and community groups where better assessment policies have already been adopted and implemented.

Andre Green
Executive Director, FairTest

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Testing

Is Anti-Testing Movement Over or Just Resting?

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2018 //
14

Alyson Klein reports in Education Week that the anti-testing movement has slowed to a crawl. With testing requirements locked into federal law (the so-called “Every Student Succeeds Act”), activists are discouraged or waiting for another chance to attack the testing regime that has obsessed federal policymakers since the passage of No Child Left Behind, and even earlier, going back to Bill Clinton’s Goals 2000, which encouraged every state to develop their own standards and tests with an infusion of federal dollars. You can trace the testing movement even earlier, but it was not until Goals 2000 that there was real federal money offered to states to get the testing going.

She writes:

Just a few short years ago, there were real questions about whether Congress would ditch annual, standardized assessments as part of a makeover of the nation’s main K-12 education law. At the same time, parents were increasingly choosing to opt their children out of standardized tests.

But the Every Student Succeeds Act ultimately kept the tests in place. And since then, at least some of the steam has gone out of the opt-out movement in states such as New Jersey and New York, considered hotbeds of anti-testing fervor.

Some of the biggest skeptics of annual, standardized testing have taken a break from what was a big push to reduce the number of federally required tests. And they don’t expect there will be another opportunity to roll back federal testing mandates for quite awhile.

“Nobody is fighting on it now,” said Monty Neill, the executive director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, or FairTest, who has spent decades engaged in the national fight to pare back assessments and has recently announced his retirement. “It’s too early for the next round. On the consequences of the tests, the lengths of the tests, the nature of the tests, [the debate’s] continuing. It’s not on any state table now because there’s nothing they can do about it.”

Neill is grateful that some states took opportunities in ESSA to broaden accountability beyond test scores and shift teacher evaluation away from test results, although most state ESSA plans don’t go as far as he’d like.

On the other side of the coin, organizations that see annual standardized testing as a key equity principle are also taking note of a break in the anti-test action.

“I think it is much quieter, whether that’s because ESSA plans [are mostly approved] and [the] federal law is not going to be opened up for awhile,” said Patricia Levesque, the chief executive officer of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a think tank started by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. But, she said, she doesn’t expect that the debate is dead forever. “A lot of things are cyclical. That’s just the way that policy is.”

ESSA, like its predecessor, the No Child Left Behind Act, requires states to test students in reading and math in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school. But the new law says states must use other factors—such as chronic absenteeism—in identifying schools for extra support. And it gives states wide latitude to figure out how to intervene in struggling schools and evaluate teachers.

NCLB required states to test all their students. Schools that assessed fewer than 95 percent of their students were considered automatic failures.

Under ESSA, states must somehow account for low test participation, but just how to do that is up to them. And states can continue to have laws affirming parents’ right to opt their students out of tests, as Oregon does. ESSA also requires states to mark non-test-takers as not proficient.

There are a few things to say about the testing movement.

First, there were some gains initially on NAEP as a result of the introduction of test prep, the biggest gains occurring in the late 1990s.

Second, NCLB has been a major disappointment, with billions spent on testing and meager gains since 2003, when the high-stakes testing began. Even some of its biggest supporters acknowledgement that the gains since 2007 have been meager to non-existent. Apparently, the low-hanging fruit has been picked with test prep. For most states, NAEP scores have been flat since 2007, yet the testing continues.

Third, the U.S. stands alone in its demand for annual testing. Among the high-performing nations of the world, not one of them tests every student every year. Most have a single test at transition points, from elementary school to middle school, from middle school to high school. Finland has no standardized tests at all until the end of secondary school.

Fourth, the NAACP broke ranks with other civil rights groups recently and released an issue brief opposing high-stakes standardized testing.

Last, standardized tests are NOT a way of advancing civil rights; they are normed on a bell curve, and the neediest kids always end up in the bottom half of the bell curve. Being told year after year that you have failed does not encourage students to try harder.

Testing corporations are in D.C. and important state capitols, lobbying to keep the testing regime in place. The Gates Foundation funded numerous organizations to demand the continuation of high-stakes annual testing, a practice unknown in private schools like the one where the Gates children are students.

The billions spent on testing should have been spent to reduce class sizes, raise teachers’ salaries, and affect real change.

Annual standardized testing is a hustle and a fraud.

It is the Golden Calf of education. Our policymakers and members of Congress worship the Golden Calf. The gold, however, is available only to the test corporations, not students.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Fraud, Hoax, Testing

Voucher Advocate: Test Scores Don’t Matter

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2018 //
19

For years, for decades, we have been told that the answer to low-scoring public schools was School Choice.

That was until we learned that most charters don’t get higher scores than public schools, and voucher schools actually lead to lower scores.

So school choice advocates now claim that test scores don’t matter, at least not for non-public schools. They are still absolutely essential for public schools, and can be used to stigmatize them and close them down.

But for schools of choice, they just are not all that important. They don’t matter. They only matter for public schools.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Testing, Vouchers

Whatever Happened to Common Core and What Happened to Classic Literature?

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2018 //
52

I am happy to see that our friend Peter Greene, recently retired from teaching, just published an article in Forbes. This makes me hopeful that business folk might learn from his wisdom.

In this article, he explains the conundrum of the Common Core. It was supposed to save the world, lift education to new heights, and achieve other miracles but it suddenly became so toxic that states started claiming they had dropped it—even when they hadn’t.

As usual, what matters most are the tests, not the standards. In a time-honored, inevitable practice, teachers have revised them to fit their own classrooms.

But, lo, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute discovered a huge difference that everyone but TBF attributes to Common Core. Teachers are dropping classic literature. For one thing, the CORE prioritizes non-fiction Over fiction. For another, students are expected to do close reading, which prepares them for the snippets of text on a standardized test.

TBF says “teachers should take another look at their ELA curriculum to make sure they aren’t overlooking classic works of literature. Although it’s encouraging that ELA teachers are assigning more informational texts and literary nonfiction, as the CCSS expect, it’s concerning that they seem to be doing so at the expense of “classic works of literature.””

TBF received millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation to advocate for the adoption of the Common Core, even in states where the English curriculum was far superior to the Common Core, with Massachusetts as the prime example.

They are hardly in a position now to disown the consequences of the Core, which many English teachers predicted.

Jamie Gass at the conservative Pioneer Institute bemoans what Common Core has done to the teaching of classic literature, which used to be the Crown Jewels of the Massachusetts English language arts curriculum. (FYI, I totally detest the Pioneer Institute on charter schools, but like to read Jamie Gass on literature.)

Gass refers to “The Count of Monte Christo” as a novel that belongs in the curriculum but has been banished by the fetishes of the Common Core.

He writes:

“Since 2005, Massachusetts, with K-12 English standards that were rich in classical literature, has outperformed every other state on the reading portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), “the nation’s report card.” Reading books like “The Count of Monte Cristo” helped students achieve this distinction.

“The author’s father, Thomas-Alexandre (Alex) Dumas, son of a scoundrel French marquis and a black slave woman, is the subject of Tom Reiss’s 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, “The Black Count.” Alex’s life was something beyond improbable: ascending from slavery in the Caribbean sugar colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) to command 50,000 men in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies. General Dumas was the heroic inspiration for his son’s adventure novels.

“Alexandre Dumas’s intriguing plots elevate our understanding of history, geography and culture. Few authors can use swashbuckling action to ignite students’ imaginations, while simultaneously teaching about the glory and treachery within human nature.

“Sadly, in 2010 the Bay State abandoned its literature-rich English standards for inferior national ones, the Common Core, which slashed fiction by 60 percent and stagnated NAEP reading scores. Marginalizing great books deprives schoolchildren of legendary stories that can transform young lives.

“The Count of Monte Cristo” is Dumas’s most thought-provoking novel. This revenge thriller features an innocent, uneducated French sailor, Edmond Dantes. His naiveté allows him to be manipulated by scheming Machiavels, who unjustly imprison him for 14 years in the notorious dungeon fortress, Chateau d’If.

“While incarcerated, Edmund is befriended by a wise, aging inmate, Abbe Faria, who teaches him to understand timeless writings, dissect conspiracies, and become a skillful swordsman. Abbe also reveals to Edmund the whereabouts of a buried treasure. Once Edmund escapes, wealth and knowledge transform his identity into the calculating Count of Monte Cristo, who shrewdly exacts his revenge on the malicious villains.

“Dumas’s enduring lessons also apply to K-12 education policy: Wily and self-serving adults would sooner consign unschooled young people to futures of intellectual solitary confinement than teach them the classic texts and ideas that might ensure their survival in the world.

“How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid?” Dumas asked prophetically. “It must be education that does it.”

“Decades of research report that “boredom,” which another writer called “the shriek of unused capacity,” is the major reason one million students annually drop out of high school. Eighty percent of America’s minority-majority prison population are dropouts. Education bereft of great stories like Dumas’s will only exacerbate this crisis.”

Mike Petrilli, meet Jamie Gass.

Don’t tell teachers to teach classic literature when you pushed standards that diminished their value.

The Common Core killed classic literature, except for those daring teachers that defy the district and state mandates of the Common Core standards.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching, Testing
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