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Phil Cullen: New Zealand Leads the World!

By dianeravitch
October 27, 2017 //
24

Phil Cullen of Australia is a zealous critic of his nation’s national testing and accountability regime.

He wrote about this important news from New Zealand, whose new government has decided to abandon the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM).

He wrote:

“New Zealand leads the world.

“New Zealand leads the way down under and maybe across the world in caring about kids.

“Its determination to return to sanity, humanity, progress, initiative and competence for its schooling system, which itself determines national progress in the long run, is now being unpacked and, I am told that the new coalition government contains a few former teachers and school-active parents around as heavyweights who can talk school and lead the conversion for a better world down under.

“There’s dynamic Tracey Martin, former School Board chair; Kelvin Davis, highly respected former principal and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party; and Winston Peters of NZ First and, Deputy PM who trained as a teacher. In Australia we only have legal eagles.

“Parent groups in NZ are claiming that now, teaching will be returned to the teaching profession and democracy will be returned to schooling in New Zealand soon. The isles are shaking with joy for kids.

“It’s a country that has always been to the forefront of school improvement but then, the take-over by the irrational managerialists and corporate heavy-weights circa 1990, and the addition of GERM in 2008, has had a detrimental impact that has lasted for a decade. They’ve had enough, now. We still tolerate it to our shame and academic deterioration.

“How come New Zealand leads the world now in the decontamination of the establishment’s unworthy, useless, immoral, unethical, unprofessional testucation procedures in schools? Well, there’s been a number of factors.

“Fortunately, during this period, it has had its crusaders for kids who just don’t give in too easily. It’s been a long and arduous battle, of the kind that must continue next door, in Australia.

“There’s Kelvin Smythe, former Chief Inspector and Allan Allach, energetic, thoughtful former primary school principal, reader and writer and Bruce Hammonds, former principal, consultant and writer – a valiant trio that has been unafraid to have their say. They set the pace.

“There’s Chris Hipkins, in particular, who has been the shadow Minister for Education whose inspirational speeches and talks have been based on a sound knowledge of schooling and who has been unequivocal in his aim to rid the country of testucation and de facto schooling.

“There’s the Primary Principals’ Association which kept its administrative distance from the government testucrats and compliant GERMans, never properly complying .

“While “The Government will never listen and nothing will change and we are just one little country.” Some timorous principals said, there were others of the association, especially the leader of the organisation, Whetu Cormick, described as “The greatest teacher organisation leader of our time,:” by Kelvin Smythe. We didn’t hold back, “At the other extreme are those like me,” he said “who will continue to fight to the end. We know that National Standards and all the ‘reforms’ that go with them are bad for our young people. Our young people have faith in us to protect their futures by continuing to fight for the best education that our young people deserve.” Looking directly into the face of Nikki Kay, the then Minister, he said, “Let’s wait no longer to get our young people on the road to success. Let’s put up a big STOP NATIONAL STANDARDS.” The organsation has always been fearless…

Click to access opinion_piece_nzpf_presidents_column_on_ns_may_31_2011_.pdf

“There’s Diane Kahn and the Save Our Schools organisation whose prime target has always been the elimination of ‘national standards’ and was heavy and constant with dynamic opposition. [ https://saveourschoolsnz.com/ ]

“There’s an influential Kiwi sciolist [aka schooliolist – one who pretends to be well informed about schooling] and academic testucator who played a significant role in the introduction of testucation into NZ…..who left the country at the right time.

___________________________________________
“There are some messages for Australia. In world schooling terms, it is the boondocks of failed political schooling, the backward West Island of learning progress, the most over-tested country in the world.

“A political party needs to think. Does it believe in providing the best schooling possible, or doesn’t it give a damn as Aussie political parties do?

“Listening to schooliolist academic know-alls, qualified testucators, loud-mouth politicians, corporate unions [like IPA, BCA and Farmers] inhabited by conservative capitalists, neo-libs and delcons, which still rule the roost on the west side of the ditch, continues to lead Australian schooling in the wrong direction. New Zealand has now told these cocky roosters what to do with their distasteful attitude to children.

“Australian schools are in dire need of some Finnish-ing tactics.” said Wendy Knight in The Age….and we can now add: ‘and some Kiwi tactics’. What really happens in a good school system? Why don’t we look around and learn?
An example of off-the-hip, loud-mouth political interference is contained in suggestions made in Treasurer Morrison’s Shifting the Dial, another imported kind of measurement.

“It presumes that the hiring of skilled subject specialists like mathematicians will improve standards in schools. It overlooks the reality that real teachers teach real pupils….real people! The secret is in the interaction. They teach them about mathematics, to like mathematics. They don’t get up in front of a class and pontificate about what they themselves know. Effective teachers of anything operate from the learner’s level. Socrates was a better teacher of Maths than Einstein and a better teacher of literature than Shakespeare. His pupils learned how to learn.

“A strong and outspoken principals’ association can be truly influential as they are in NZ. Protection of children and their future as well as the provision of a rich holistic curriculum, undaunted by fearful interruptions to positive learning, should dominate the spirit of every principal’s personal professional code. Laxity, timidity, compliance and silence have no place in their organisations when the chips are down for kids….as they are now in Australia.

“It’s looking more evident every day that the lower half of the existing Lib-Lab delcon group viz. Labor under Shorten, will be the government after the next federal election in Australia. The lib-lab neo-con conventions will probably continue as they did in the passing of klein deforms from Labor to Liberal. Neither political group, Labor nor Liberal, ever expresses any thoughts about the continuance of the Klein system of schooling, now almost a decade old ; and which should go because it is proving useless.

“Neither party knows much about schooling and hides its ignorance by talking only Gonksi and funding and teacher quality. For them, the plight of children lies in the dollar sign, not in compassion and humanity and learning and in experience and excellence. Each remains ultra-complacent by making do, making silly schooling decisions, maintaining the mediocre, and supporting private schools before helping public schools.{Remember DOGS – Defence of Government Schools?} A country that treats its children the way that Australia does, is in for big trouble….really big trouble.

“It just won’t be able to handled itself in world affairs.

“It relies on the cockeyed Gillard Theory of Testucation, using Kleinism to control operatives and operations, to no end except to gather data; then ignores the basic laws of administrative order and effectiveness [Campbell, Goodhart, Lucas and Common Sense] and treats the electorate as if everyone is a dill or doesn’t care what happens to kids. The present government will go while it maintains these attitudes to schooling and doesn’t have the capacity to think. The Labor Party will replace it and not do any better. Both need to think seriously about schooling…very, very seriously.

ooo000ooo

“I’m deliberately apolitical and have voted informal at the last few federal elections because I’ve been offered only lower-order policies in general and crazy views about schooling. …nothing that really suggests that there is a healthy future for this wonderful country. Schooling is the most important issue of this century for Aussie citizens. If it is not rejuvenated, Australia has some big problems coming up. I’ll vote for any party -Pauline’s, Bob’s, Nick’s, Jacqui’s, anybody who says that it will get rid of NAPLAN.

“I’ll know by its standard of advocacy that such a party likes kids, that it is thinking and will do something about our future. Our present klein system relies on child abuse.

“I’ll study the detail of course, but no party can be so blithely ignorant of schooling as our major parties are at present. Their mentors can only bark Gonski, data, scores, testing, funding, teacher quality with schooliolist pedantry and no regard for the real spirit of learning at school.

“Seriously – rejuvenation of schooling from the mess of mass testucation will be very difficult. Unscrambling an egg always is. Since New Zealand will have to do the job before Australia wakes up, it might be wise to locate some observers there to learn how to go about it.

“We need to do what New Zealand has done :

“DECLARE OURSELVES

“It’s rejuvenation time down under!

“THANKS NEW ZEALAND”

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

John King: High-Stakes Testing Is Necessary for Equity and Civil Rights

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2017 //
167

John King, who served as Secretary of Education after Arne Duncan departed, went to the Cleveland City Club to praise high-stakes testing as the route to equity and civil rights. He spoke highly of No Child Left Behind and its successor, the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.

He is so wrong. Not just wrong, but misinformed, misguided, and ignorant of facts and evidence about the injurious effects of high-stakes testing on children, teachers, schools, and education. When you read things like this, you remember how the Obama administration sold public education out and paved the way for Betsy DeVos.

All that testing, he said, raises test scores.

Clearly, he never read the report of the National Academy of Sciences (2011) “Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education.”

I recommend that King read Daniel Koretz’ new book: “The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.” Koretz shows that high-stakes testing produces score inflation, teaching to the test, cheating, and loss of instructional time for non-tested subjects.

Someone should explain Campbell’s Law to John King. Whenever high stakes are attached to a measure, it corrupts the measure as well as the social process that is being measured. That means that when you attach high stakes to tests, you can no longer trust the test results and you mess up what is being measured.

Tests are normed on a bell curve. Every bell curve has a top half and a bottom half. The most advantaged kids cluster in the top half. The most disadvantaged kids cluster in the bottom half. Could someone explain to John King that standardized tests never produce equity? That they measure gaps without reducing them? That they discourage children who are told year after year that they didn’t meet the standard? How does it promote equity to rely on a tool that is designed to measure and reproduce inequity?

Categories Accountability, Campbell's Law, Civil Rights, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Equity, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Testing

New Study: New SAT is Biased Against Females

By dianeravitch
October 25, 2017 //
33

Testing companies typically invest in an in-depth review of test questions to assure that the questions are not biased against any group or subgroup. The testers are very concerned about bias, even hidden ones.

A new study asserts that the “new SAT” is gender biased.

Here is Mercedes Schneider’s take on the SAT’s disadvantaging of girls.
The “new SAT” is David Coleman’s latest project, following the Common Core fiasco.

I wrote a book about the process by which test publishers use “bias and sensitivity reviews” to identify and screen out questions and test items that disadvantage groups. I was critical of the way that the reviewers went overboard, eliminating any word or phrase, or image that anyone might consider insensitive. Feminists wanted to delete any word that identified anyone by gender, religious fundamentalists wanted to remove any reference to witches, pumpkins, Halloween, disobedient children. The book is called “The Language Police,” and it looked at censorship from left and right.

So, knowing that the SAT is subject to analysis for every sort of bias and disadvantage, what gives?

Any advice for David C?

Categories Accountability, Bias, Education Industry, Testing

At the NPE Conference, I Explain Who We Are and What We Do

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2017 //
1

The Network for Public Education just held its fourth annual conference in Oakland, California, on October 14-15.

It was a fabulous conference, with great speakers, roundtables, panels, and camaraderie.

I opened the conference on October 14. I introduced our wonderful board and staff (we have 1.5 staff members and hundreds of amazing volunteers).

I described what we are for and what we oppose.

If you agree with us, please join, donate whatever you can, and help us continue our grassroots efforts to strengthen and support public education.

In the days ahead, I will post all the keynote addresses. They were fantastic.

If you knew how inspiring these two days were, you will want to join us next year. I can’t give the location yet, but we will meet in the Midwest.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Childhood, Corporate Reformers, Dark Money, Data and Data Mining, Education Industry, Education Reform, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Privatization, Testing

Washington Post Calls on Democratic Candidate for Governor in Virginia to Stick with Failed NCLB “Reforms”

By dianeravitch
October 18, 2017 //
73

The Washington Post editorial board chastised Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam for admitting that the NCLB reforms have failed, and Virginia needs to find a new paradigm for school improvement.

Lt. Governor Northam’s opponent, GOP functionary Ed Gillespie, is running on a Trump kiss-up platform, calling for the protection of Confederate statues and accusing Northam of having ties to a violent gang of Latinos, MS-13.

No doubt Gillespie will endorse the NCLB approach beloved by the Washington Post editorial board.

The Post is dead wrong. A new book by the eminent Harvard testing expert Daniel Koretz says in no uncertain terms that NCLB test-based accountability was a failure that seriously damaged American education. It is titled “The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.” The high-stakes testing mandated by NCLB and now the Every Student Succeeds Act, produced, in Professor Koretz’s words, score inflation, cheating, and teaching to the tests. Any “gains” are an illusion, because they represent test prep, not learning. (My review of the book will appear in “The New Republic” in the next few weeks.)

Lt. Gov. Northam is right. The Washington Post is seriously out of step on education. It supported Michelle Rhee’s punitive, test-focused regime and never admitted its error, long after John Merrow revealed the D.C. cheating scandal and long after Rhee slipped quietly into oblivion.

What’s the ideal accountability system? Northam admitted to the editorial board that he doesn’t know. Professor Koretz admitted he doesn’t know either. He throws out some ideas drawn from Finland, the Netherlands, and Singapore. There may be others as well, but frankly no one knows. For sure, the Washington Post editorial board doesn’t know, and the little it knows is wrong.

What doesn’t work is one-size-fits-all standards like Common Core. What doesn’t work is promising rewards or threatening punishment to teachers and principals, tied to test scores. Yet that is what the Washington Post advocates: Test-based accountability has failed, but the Post says, “stick with it.” The Post is wrong.

If you live in Virginia, vote for Northam for Governor, not the guy who has wrapped his arms around Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos and the others in the Trump Clown Car.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Testing

Arizona May Revise Phony School Letter Grades, and They Will Still Be Phony

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2017 //
7

Giving letter grades to schools is a fraud.

In New York City, the Department of Health gives letter grades to restaurants, and almost every restaurant gets an A unless there are unhealthy, unsanitary conditions discovered by inspectors, like mouse droppings in the kitchen.

School letter grades attempt to grade schools largely by test scores, whether performance or growth. The scores largely reflect the affluence or poverty of the students. If you want to understand how stupid it is to judge schools by test scores, read Daniel Koretz’s new book, “The Testing Charade: Pretending to Improve Education.” Give a copy to your superintendent and the school board.

A school is a complex institution with a complex mission, far more complex than a restaurant.

Arizona has decided to recalculate it’s fraudulent school grades.

Could it be because the charter school in Snowflake, Arizona, got an F? That is the Charter beloved by Sylvia Allen, chair of the State Senate Education Committee?

However they are recalculated, they will still be fraudulent.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Education Reform, Failure, Fraud, Testing

What Are We Doing to Our Children? Pressure, Competition, Anxiety, Broken Spirits

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2017 //
25

This is a powerful and very disturbing article about the teenagers who crack under the pressure to succeed.

Why Are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering From Severe Anxiety?

Read this and ask yourself, why are we putting young people into pressure cookers?

Isn’t it possible to recognize many ways to succeed?

The current obsession with standardized testing guarantees winners and losers. Whose child should be sacrificed at the alter of high-stakes testing? Which will crack because they are fearful of being losers?

“Over the last decade, anxiety has overtaken depression as the most common reason college students seek counseling services. In its annual survey of students, the American College Health Association found a significant increase — to 62 percent in 2016 from 50 percent in 2011 — of undergraduates reporting “overwhelming anxiety” in the previous year. Surveys that look at symptoms related to anxiety are also telling. In 1985, the Higher Education Research Institute at U.C.L.A. began asking incoming college freshmen if they “felt overwhelmed by all I had to do” during the previous year. In 1985, 18 percent said they did. By 2010, that number had increased to 29 percent. Last year, it surged to 41 percent.

“Those numbers — combined with a doubling of hospital admissions for suicidal teenagers over the last 10 years, with the highest rates occurring soon after they return to school each fall — come as little surprise to high school administrators across the country, who increasingly report a glut of anxious, overwhelmed students. While it’s difficult to tease apart how much of the apparent spike in anxiety is related to an increase in awareness and diagnosis of the disorder, many of those who work with young people suspect that what they’re seeing can’t easily be explained away. “We’ve always had kids who didn’t want to come in the door or who were worried about things,” says Laurie Farkas, who was until recently director of student services for the Northampton public schools in Massachusetts. “But there’s just been a steady increase of severely anxious students.”

How important are test scores as compared to mental health?

Are they more important than life itself?

Categories Competition, Students, Testing

Denisha Jones: When All Else Fails, Save Childhood

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2017 //
24

Denisha Jones, a professor of early childhood education at Trinity Washington University, gave this talk at Sarah Lawrence College this past summer. Please read her talk in her entirety.

An excerpt:

I inspire my teachers—regardless of the label they give themselves—to be advocates or activists for their profession. I don’t want them to spend the next several years in survival mode until they burn out and leave the field altogether. Advocacy and activism serve as nourishment for the soul. They can sustain you even when things look bleak and the future is uncertain.

As I move forward, determined to protect public education as a right, what drives me is the acceptance of our failure. I am ready to declare our efforts, and the efforts of those who came before me, as failures. This may seem harsh, but as we know, failure is essential for success. “Failure is instructive,” John Dewey once said, “The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.”

We know that protecting children from the experience of failure is not good for their development. Failure can be a tool for learning how to get it right. Without failure, how do we know that we have even really succeeded? This doesn’t mean that education activists haven’t won some important battles. But they’ve tended to benefit one school or one community, and haven’t reached the national or state levels. Our attempts to stop the spread of the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) have failed.

Before we examine our failures more closely, I want to quickly review what I mean by GERM so that we are all on the same page. Pasi Sahlberg notes that the movement emerged in the 1980s and consists of five global features: standardization; focus on core subjects; the search for low-risk ways to reach learning goals; use of corporate management models; and test-based accountability policies. Although none of these elements have been adopted in Finland, where he does most of his research, they have invaded public education in the U.S. and in other countries.

Here, education activists typically refer to GERM as the privatization of public education, driven by neoliberalism, which favors free-market capitalism. Under this scenario, there are no public schools: public services are turned over to the private sector. Healthcare, prisons, even water, are now being put in the hands of corporations, whose sole desire is to make a profit. When profit is the goal, the needs of human beings are discarded, unless they can generate a measurable return on investment.

We can see how GERM has infected U.S. education policy and reforms. The Common Core drives standardization and aligns with a narrow focus on math and literacy. The use of scripted learning programs, behavior training programs, and online learning is evidence of the search for low-risk ways to reach learning goals. While charter schools claim to be nonprofit, most are managed by companies with CEOs and CFOs who apply corporate models to education.

Teach for America and other fast-track teacher preparation programs also use a corporate model, developing education leaders who get their feet wet teaching before moving on to become policymakers or head up charter schools.

Pearson’s PARCC and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium are drowning public education in test-based accountability. Systems that punish and reward schools and teachers based on student achievement on standardized tests are the norm today.

While the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) includes language that protects the right of parents to opt out—a movement that has been growing in recent years—it also maintains the requirement that 95 percent of students participate. Test-based accountability is here to stay and rapidly evolving into competency-based and personalized learning, in which assessments occur all day every day as students are glued to computer screens.

We have failed to stop the expansion of choice, which threatens the existence of public schools through the proliferation of charters and vouchers. In the U.S., most school-age children are educated in traditional public schools, but we can expect to see this trend reversed under the administration of Betsy DeVos. We have failed to stop the assault on public education through school closures in communities of color.

And then there’s the inexorable push down of developmentally inappropriate standards onto young children. The Common Core, adopted by most states, imposes expectations on young children that are out of step with their development, not to mention the research. Empirical data confirm that kindergarten is the new first grade, and preschool the new kindergarten.

On top of this, we have failed to stop racist school discipline practices that suspended 42% of black boys from preschool in the 2011-2012 academic year. This failure stems from our inability to address the systemic and institutional racism that is prominent in public education but often masked by teachers with good intentions who lack an understanding of culture, bias, and systems of oppression.

We must acknowledge these failures so we can understand the limits of our collective efforts and decide how we can refocus our energies toward a future that will lead to more successful outcomes. We need to change the narrative. Attacking the push for accountability and tougher standards has proven to be a losing strategy. Our insistence that these measures harm student development and learning has branded us unwilling to be held accountable for ensuring that all students can achieve.The more we resist test-based accountability and inappropriate reforms, the more we are seen by the corporations, policymakers, and privateers as resistant to innovation.

We must make the protection of childhood a nonpartisan issue. We need to revise our message. The assault on public education is not just a conservative attack by Republicans against progressive education. Democrats are also aligned with many aspects of GERM, including choice, privatization, and test-based accountability.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Childhood, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), Privatization, Resistance, School Choice, Testing

Denver: Jeanne Kaplan on the District’s Pathetic Lies about Academic Performance

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2017 //
14

Jeanne Kaplan served for two terms as an elected board member in Denver.

Since she retired from the board, she has watched with a combination of disgust and rage as the district statisticians spin the data to make it appear that students are making dramatic progress

In the last board election, Dark money poured in to buy all seven seats on the school board for friends of corporate reform. Education Reform Now and Stand for Children brought in large sums to secure control.

This is the way the game is played: make a big deal out of growth and try not to talk about current performance.

She writes:

“If you have an important school board election coming up in less than a month and you want to protect your incumbent candidates and your “reform” agenda, and

“If community meeting after community meeting implores you, the District, NOT to close any more schools but rather put real time and resources into the schools with very high concentrations of students living in poverty and not speaking English as their first language and these schools are located in Board Districts where the seats are being contested, and

“Even if you have been warned repeatedly from both sides of the philosophical education debate that so much emphasis on GROWTH over STATUS is misleading, and

“If all of these decisions are determined by high stakes test scores where proficiencies are terrible (39% in reading and 30% in math) and achievement gaps enormous (the highest in the state and among the highest in the nation),

“WHAT WOULD YOU DO? Answer: Change how you calculate school success and rankings, and then put all your public relations minions to work to tout the importance of growth and to downplay the importance of grade level competency.”

Categories Accountability, Denver, Lies, Testing

Marion Brady: Test-Based Accountability is Dumbing Us Down

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2017 //
14

Marion Brady, veteran educator and author, sent the following:

Old joke, also known by research scientists as “The Streetlight Effect.”

A drunk is on hands and knees, under a streetlight, obviously searching.

Cop: Lose something?

Drunk: Yeash. My keys.

Cop joins hunt. No keys found.

Cop: You sure you lost them here?

Drunk: No, I think I lost them across the street.

Cop: Then why are you looking here?

Drunk: The light’s better.

As the current, corporately engineered “standards and accountability” education reform fiasco makes clear, non-educators assume schooling’s bottom-line purpose is to maximize learner understanding of the core curriculum.

So “core knowledge” gets taught and tested.

However, schooling’s bottom-line purpose isn’t to maximize learner understanding of the core curriculum, but to maximize learner ability to think—to abstract, adduce, analyze, anticipate, articulate, apply, categorize, compare, contrast, coordinate, correlate, describe, empathize, envision, extrapolate, imagine, infer, integrate, interpret, intuit—just to begin a much longer list.

So, why don’t standardized tests test learner ability to think?

Because they can’t. Of the dozens of identifiable thought processes, only two—recalling, and to a limited extent, applying—are simple enough to quantify and measure with sufficient precision to produce a meaningful number.

Inescapable conclusion: Today’s test-based reforms are dumbing kids and country down.

Solution: Give responsibility for evaluating learner performance back to classroom teachers, along with classes small enough for them to listen to what kids say and read what they write.

Categories Accountability, Real Education, Testing
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