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Jonathan Pelto: Pearson’s War Against Bloggers

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2016 //
46

Jonathan Pelto recounts here the story of PARCC’s efforts to stifle hundreds of bloggers.

 

Can a multinational corporation stifle free speech?

 

Can teachers and parents speak about and criticize the tests that children are required to take?

 

Can Pearson/PARCC hide behind copyright law to prevent any open discussion of the quality and developmental appropriateness of the tests they create?

 

When a conscientious teacher writes that the test her students took in fourth grade were written in language appropriate for sixth and seventh grade, isn’t this information that parents and the public need to know?

 

Is the copyright law being used to hide the shoddy quality of Pearson’s work?

 

Does the “fair use doctrine,” which permits limited quoting from copyrighted material, pertain to standardized tests?

 

Is it possible to give a test to millions of children and expect that none of the questions will be discussed at home, on social media, or in teachers’ lounges?

 

 

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Freedom of Speech, Pearson, Testing

Peter Cunningham Comes to the Defense of Campbell Brown

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2016 //
81

Peter Cunningham, former deputy to Arne Duncan, accused Carol Burris and me of “attacking” Campbell Brown. He says we “attack” anyone who disagrees with us. Peter now runs a website called Education Post, where he received $12 million from various billionaires (including Walton and Bloomberg) to defend the corporate reform movement of high stakes testing, VAM, and privatization of public schools.

 

Anyone who reads my post about Campbell will see that there was no attack. I was doing my best to educate her about what grade level means and why NAEP proficient is not and should not be used as a “passing mark.”

 

Carol tweeted with Campbell. So did Tom Loveless of Brookings, who told her that she was wrong and urged her to correct her error. For some reason, Peter did not include Tom in the list of people who were “attacking” Campbell.

 

Obviously, neither she nor Peter bothered to read the links to scholarly studies and government websites included in my post.  They should. They might learn something and stop bashing American public schools and their teachers. I served seven years on the NAEP governing board. I could help them if they are willing to learn.

 

As for calling Campbell “telegenic,” that’s no insult, that’s a compliment. If you call me telegenic, I would say thank you.

 

 

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Testing

Did PARCC Take Down Your Tweet or Post?

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2016 //
39

Here is a list of the complaints filed by PARCC to take down statements on social media that PARCC claims are a violation of their copyright.

 

In some cases, they demanded the severing of links to posts they didn’t like. In others, they objected to descriptions of test passages. The passages are copyrighted, the descriptions are not.

 

There is a legal question about fair use: Under copyright law, it is legal to quote from copyright material if the quotation is short and relevant to public discussion. Whether this is applicable to standardized tests has not been determined.

 

From the point of view of what is reasonable, parents and teachers should know what their students have been asked by a testing corporation. How else can they learn from the tests if they don’t know their contents? The infamous “Pineapple” question of a few years back was revealed by leaks, not by disclosure. The item was so ludicrous that it became an embarrassment for Pearson. #pineapplegate became a media sensation, written up in every major newspaper, and parodied on the John Oliver show.

 

Without disclosure, Pineapple stories may proliferate, to the detriment of our students.

Categories Education Industry, Testing

Andy Hargreaves: Why England’s Schools are in Trouble

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2016 //
9

Andy Hargreaves, Professor at Boston College and recipient of many honors, including the Grawemeyer Award, writes here about the problems of English schools, which he attributes to its reckless pursuit of free-market policies, akin to those now dominant in the U.S. In this article, which appeared in the Times Education Supplement (U.K.), Hargreaves blames the free-market  strategy of “reform,” which demoralizes teachers and damages the profession.

 

He writes:

 

Britain has a teacher recruitment crisis. But it is not truly British. The complaint is much more spectacular in England. In Scotland, teaching is an attractive profession and while recruitment levels are disappointing, the issue is not as profound. The Scottish system is creaking; the English system has fallen over. What explains the difference?

 

 

The answer is simple. Scotland values a strong state educational system run by 32 local authorities that is staffed by well-trained and highly valued professionals who stay and grow in a secure and rewarding job. Teachers serve others, for most or all of their working life, in a cooperative profession that supports them to do this to the best of their abilities.

 

 

England no longer values these things. About half of its schools are now outside local authority control. England offers a business capital model that invests in education to yield short-term profits and keep down costs through shorter training, weakened security and tenure, and keeping salaries low by letting people go before they cost too much.

 

 

By comparison, Scotland models what is called professional capital: bringing in skilled as well as smart people; training them rigorously in university settings connected to practical environments; giving them time and support to collaborate on curriculum and other matters; and paying them to develop their leadership and their careers so that they can make effective decisions together and deliver better outcomes for young people.

 

 

In December, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published its review of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence. I was one of four people on the review team. Like any system, Scotland’s isn’t perfect. But there is a strong foundation to build on – with a priority placed on valuing and developing teachers’ professional judgment.

 

 

The defenders of the status quo of market reform claim that teachers are overpaid; that they don’t improve over time; and that collaboration is over-rated.

 

All of this sounds very familiar to Americans. We have heard the same buzzwords of efficiency and outcomes and metrics used to demean the teaching profession, and now we are surprised when experienced teachers leave and new teachers do not appear to take their place. Perhaps this is the intended effect, because the manufactured teacher shortage creates market opportunities for vendors of technology to replace the missing classroom teachers.

 

 

 

 

 

When first minister Nicola Sturgeon opened the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement in Glasgow in January, she underlined the importance of the “professional judgment” of teachers. From Glasgow to Stornoway, teachers told our team that teaching today had been like a “breath of fresh air”, which replaced a system of “counting minutes and percentages” that had offered “no room for movement”.

 

 

While Scotland is in the vanguard of global educational improvement, England is in the guard’s van, at the back. Worldwide, England’s business capital view is now on the run. The evidence of high-performing nations such as Canada, Singapore and Finland hasn’t been on its side, and countries like Sweden that followed the free-school business model, and saw their results collapse, are reversing course.

Categories Education Reform, International, Teacher Shortage, Teachers, Testing

Mercedes Schneider: EdWeek Dredges Up 7-Month-Old Study of PARCC to Prove Its “Validity”

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2016 //
16

Mercedes Schneider noticed that Education Week published an article about a study that was released in October 2015. The study claimed that the PARCC test predicted success in college. Our new not-best friend Laura Slover, the CEO of PARCC, tweeted that the study demonstrated the sucess of the PARCC test at showing who was prepared for college.

 

Except, Mercedes says, it doesn’t and it didn’t.  She points out that the participants in the study were already enrolled in college, so the tests predicted nothing about their college readiness.

 

She writes:

 

Moreover, even though there exists no study concerning the predictive validity of PARCC, some states have bypassed this astounding fact to make passing PARCC a graduation requirement. (There is a lawsuit over PARCC as a graduation requirement in New Jersey, where SAT and ACT are currently acceptable options. Maryland also uses PARCC as a graduation requirement “for students enrolled in PARCC-aligned courses.” Rhode Island is facing using PARCC as a 2017 graduation requirement, though the commissioner of education does not seem to want to do so.)

 

A PARCC spokeswoman said that the consortium plans to conduct a longitudinal study in the next two years.

 

Mercedes responds:

 

High-stakes sale first, then validation research in the years to follow.

 

 

Categories Common Core, Education Industry, Testing

Education Expert Campbell Brown Offers Advice to the Next President

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2016 //
80

The rheeform leadership has changed. Michelle Rhee was once the cover girl for test-and-punish reform, and now it is Campbell Brown. The telegenic Brown used to read the news on television but now she has taken Rhee’s place in the reformy firmament. Since she launched her career as an education expert with an op-ed attacking the teachers’ union in New York City for protecting sexual predators, Brown has become increasingly active in the world of education punditry. She received $4 million from various billionaires to launch a news site called “The 74,” which was supposed to refer to the number of school-age children in the United States. However, there are 50 million school-age children, but then why quibble? Brown organized candidate debates for both parties last fall. Three Republicans showed up, and no Democrats. Yesterday, she moderated a panel at the Harvard Graduate School of Education at a symposium on poverty and schooling.

 

Now Brown, having established her bona fides as an expert on education, has prepared a memo for the next president. 

 

Unfortunately her memo begins with a false statement. She starts by saying that 2/3 of American students in eighth grade are “below grade level” in reading and math. Apparently she refers to the National Assessment of Education Progress, the only national assessment of student skills. She confuses NAEP proficiency, a specific achievement level, with grade level.

 

To begin with, “grade level” is a median. Fifty percent are always above grade level, and fifty percent are always below.

 

But the NAEP achievement levels do not measure “grade level.” They are defined in the NAEP reports thus: “basic” represents partial mastery of skills; “proficiency” represents mastery; “advanced” represents extraordinary performance. “Below basic” is very poor performance.

 

Here are the definitions on the NAEP website:

 

 

Achievement Level Policy Definitions
Basic

 

Partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at each grade.
Proficient

Solid academic performance for each grade assessed. Students reaching this level have demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter, including subject-matter knowledge, application of such knowledge to real-world situations, and analytical skills appropriate to the subject matter.
Advanced

 

Superior performance.

 

Here is a statement on the U.S. Department of Education (National Center for Education Statistics) website:

 

https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/studies/statemapping/faq.aspx

The statement, “Proficient is not synonymous with grade-level performance.”

 

The NAEP website says that the Governing Board thinks that the goal should be “proficient,” not “basic,” but the reality is that these achievement levels have been in place since 1992, and in no state or district has 100% of students ever achieved NAEP proficiency. In only one state, Massachusetts, has as much as 50% of students reached proficiency. If you believe, as Campbell Brown and the NAGB board does, that 100% of students should reach proficiency, then you believe that somewhere there is a baseball team that never loses a game, or an entire school district in which all children get grades of all As. It has never happened, not even in the wealthiest, most successful schools and districts. When elephants can fly, that is when “all” students will reach NAEP proficiency. Be it noted that the standard (the passing mark or cut score) for the Common Core tests is aligned with NAEP proficient, which is why 65-70% of students consistently “fail.”

 

I was a member of the National Assessment Governing Board for seven years. I read questions before they were administered to samples of students across the nation and in every state. The greatest number of students are scored as “basic,” which I consider to be the equivalent of a B or C. Those who register as “proficient” are the equivalent of an A performance. Advanced is for superstars. Typically, only 5-10% of students are “advanced.” About a third are proficient or advanced. The remaining 65% are basic or below basic. (These are my definitions, not the government’s or the NAGB board.)

 

To expect that most students will score the equivalent of an A is nonsensical.

 

Ms. Brown has been engaged in a Twitter debate with Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution. Loveless, a real expert with years of teaching experience (elementary school) and a doctorate, has been studying and writing about NAEP and student performance for many years. He chastised Brown on Twitter for saying that 2/3 of students are “below grade level.” He encouraged her to check her facts, because he assumed that her journalistic background had taught her to do so. Carol Burris, director of the Network for Public Education, and veteran educator, jumped into the exchange.

 

Just yesterday, Brown responded with this comment:

 

Campbell Brown ‏@campbell_brown 
@carolburris @tomloveless99 this is why parents dont listen to u. U play semantics while 2/3 kids arent where they should be. I call BS

 

Since Brown thinks that NAEP proficiency is the same as “grade level,” she would profit by reading this report on the meaning of NAEP achievement levels. It gives a good overview of them and points out that they do not refer to grade levels. The report also usefully reviews the numerous critiques of the achievement levels, by experts who consider them “fundamentally flawed” and an inaccurate measure of student achievement.

 

I can only hope that Ms. Brown, education expert, gets a quick tutorial about what NAEP achievement levels are.

 

And I invite her to take the NAEP eighth-grade test, composed of released questions in reading and math, and release her scores. In a supervised setting, of course. I think she will be surprised. I will be interested to see if she is “proficient,” since she believes that anyone who is not proficient is a failure.

 

 

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

Arthur Goldstein: How Can I Get Away from Michael Bloomberg?

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2016 //
15

Arthur Goldstein has taught in the New York City public schools for more than 30 years. His blog is NYC Educator. He has been a frequent critic of the disruption and turmoil of the past fifteen years in the schools.

 

Michael Bloomberg is everywhere I look. A few weeks ago I went to see NYS Regents Chancellor Betty Rosa at George Washington Campus, nee George Washington High School. “Campus” means it’s been broken up into four smaller schools. If your test scores weren’t high enough for Mayor Mike, you got broken up. If they were good, like in my school, you got filled to 300% capacity.

 

 

Two miles south of my school is the Jamaica Campus, a building that looks exactly like the George Washington Campus. It used to be Jamaica High School, and it had, for my money, the smartest and best UFT chapter leader in New York City, James Eterno. It had a long history, and photos in the halls of the doughboys who’d attended, of the bowtie clad principal on the David Susskind Show, and a million things in between. Michael Bloomberg closed it based on false stats. James sent the corrected stats to then-Chancellor Joel Klein, and as far as I know, they’ve never even been disputed.

 

 

Michael Bloomberg renamed the Board of Education the Panel for Educational Policy (PEP). He controlled the majority of votes on the PEP, and when a couple of his appointees disagreed with him, he simply replaced them. Despite Patrick Sullivan’s persistent voice of sanity, they approved every school closing, every new school, every charter that Michael Bloomberg wanted. Mayoral Control is very much favored by prominent reformies like Bill Gates because it sidesteps all that messy, time-consuming democracy stuff.

 

 

Bill de Blasio wants mayoral control too, though I have no idea why. At first I was glad to see mayoral control in the hands of someone who appeared not to be insane, but I was quickly disappointed. Once de Blasio decided not to approve a few Moskowitz Academies, Andrew Cuomo moved to change the law. Now de Blasio had to pay Eva’s rent even if he doesn’t want her school. It was like the spirit of Michael Bloomberg had taken over Andrew Cuomo, who took to calling himself a “student lobbyist.” (Curiously, he hasn’t bothered lobbying for the billions of dollars the state owes NYC from the CFE lawsuit.)

 

 

Every time I look at the car I bought in May 2014 I think about Michael Bloomberg. By 2009, just about every union but teachers got an 8% raise. After a few years it adds up. In fact, by that time that raise would have more than paid for that car. But Mayor Mike passed it off to Bill de Blasio, who isn’t paying until 2020. The Mazda dealer was a nice guy, but would not agree to wait that long.

 

 

Many of Michael Bloomberg’s friends and cronies still sit at Tweed. Even Chancellor Carmen Fariña once worked for him. In fact, her predecessor, Dennis Walcott, was an alumni of my school. Our principal named our college office for him and now I feel like I have to wash my whole body with Brillo pad every time I set foot in there.

 

 

Mayor Bloomberg, with what was in effect mayoral dictatorship, used our city as a laboratory for reforminess, and used our children as guinea pigs. He gave no-bid contracts to all his pals, and if they left young children outside waiting hours for buses freezing days, well, too bad for them. He spent 95 million dollars on a computer system no one used. He boasted of being a regular guy, taking the subway to work, but had two SUVs pick him up at his townhouse because he didn’t like the stop closest to it.

 

 

But where we really feel his presence is in the tests. They are everywhere, and they mean everything. And though much of the state is rebelling against them, NYC lags far behind. Why? Because Michael Bloomberg set up a system, and this system has everything to do with Michael Bloomberg and nothing to do with community.

 

 

In Michael Bloomberg’s NYC, if you want to send your kid to a particular middle school, it may use test grades as criteria for admission. So if you opt your kid out of a test, too bad for you, and too bad for your kid. The city turns the wheel of fortune, and wherever your kid lands, that’s it.

 

 

This is in stark contrast to the rest of the state. Where I live, in Freeport NY, my kid goes to the same middle school no matter what grade she gets and whether or not she takes the test. We have a community, and we have a community school. Not only that, but we, the community, elect our school board and have genuine input into how it is run.

 

 

Michael Bloomberg wanted what he wanted, and he had all that money, so he was entitled to it. Old-fashioned democracy wasn’t efficient enough for him. Better that he should make all decisions, and if the voters twice voiced their preference for term limits, he’d change the law and buy himself another term anyway.

 

 

Thank God his polling must have revealed all his money couldn’t buy the presidency. Only one question remains.

 

 

What on earth do we have to do to exorcise his reformy ghost from New York City once and for all?

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, New York City, Testing

Mercedes Schneider Writes an Open Letter to PARCC CEO Laura Slover

By dianeravitch
May 16, 2016 //
24

Mercedes Schneider, high school teacher, blogger, and Ph.D. in research statistics wrote an open letter to Laura Slover, CEO of PARCC, to ask for documentation of Slover’s efforts to suppress critical articles and tweets about the PARCC test. She invited Slover to respond and promised to post her letter in full.

 

Mercedes reviewed Slover’s response to Teachers College Professor Celia Oyler. She wondered why the threat of legal action came from Slover, not a lawyer.

 

She wondered why PARCC didn’t add the three items in Oyler’s post to the 800 items that have already been released. Wouldn’t that be simpler than trying to silence the dozens of bloggers who reposted Oyler’s post?

 

She noted Slover’s claim that every PARCC item had been created and reviewed by educators. She asked Slover to release the names and credentials of those who wrote and reviewed the questions.

 

Let’s see if Laura Slover answers Mercedes’ letter.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Industry, Testing

The Power of Our Voice: We Will Not Be Silenced

By dianeravitch
May 16, 2016 //
31

Over the past few days, the leadership of the PARCC Common Core consortium moved forcefully to threaten bloggers with legal action who dared to describe the contents of its fourth grade tests. Even tweets were taken down, based on PARCC’s complaints to Twitter. One of my own posts was hacked late Friday night.

 

 

One of the board members of the Network For Public Education, Bertis Downs, is an attorney who represents the rock group REM and deals often with issues of copyright and intellectual property. He wrote to Laura Slover of PARCC to tell her that the testing company’s position had little merit. Most of what she objected to was descriptions of the test questions, which is not copyrighted. There is an issue as to whether the copyrighted material is subject to the fair use doctrine, which permits the reprinting of a limited amount of copyrighted material (up to 300 words) without violating the copright.

 

 

As the hacking and bullying and removal of innocuous tweets continued, we realized that we are not powerless. Leonie Haimson, another  board member of NPE, posted the original post that PARCC objected to on her blog. That post was sent to NPE’s Education Bloggers Network, which consists of more than 300 bloggers. (Jonathan Pelto administers the Education Bloggers Network; contact him if you blog and want to join. He can be reached at jonpelto@gmail.com.)

 

 

Instead of being suppressed or redacted, the post on Celia Oyler’s blog is getting wide distribution.

 

 

They have the money. We have the numbers. There is power in our numbers.

 

 

Categories Freedom of Speech, Network for Public Education, Testing

BATs Write a Letter to New Chancellor of New York State Board of Regents

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2016 //
18

The following is an excerpt from a letter written by the BATs to Chancellor Betty A. Rosa.

 

 
Dear Chancellor Rosa,

 

Congratulations on your well-deserved chancellorship. Students, parents, educators and taxpayers across NY state have sorely missed out on guidance from experienced practitioners in the challenging conditions of the real world. We also applaud your prioritization of the CFE state funding ruling because the state has avoided compliance for too long.

 

NY BATs are vocal members of our communities working to inform state and local policymakers on the in-classroom consequences of Albany’s policies. Allied with parent groups, we foster public engagement in education and electoral debates via a resolved grassroots presence.

 

STATE OF CONTROVERSY: NY’s test refusals show a deep, sustained rejection of top-down standardized testing. Those most impacted have experiences to share as well as scientific and scholarly research which needs a close read. Free from some federal mandates, the battle has come to fifty state houses. In Albany, well-established networks of monied corporations and private consultants drive privatization policies, greatly exaggerating actual educator or local input.

 

Public discourse is also changing, with media spending, advocacy and spin failing to use the Common Core’s requirement to source claims and show critical rigor. If we ask students to contrast and respond to differing viewpoints, why does our “adult” communication consist of exaggeration, distortion and people talking past each other?

 

TIME LOST: We haven’t seen open debate of snapshot-based assumptions or hidden formulas used to define and weigh ‘growth’. Nor a debate of data integrity following post-testing manipulations and 700 different implementations. These “comparative” results, already skewed badly are turned into “swiss cheese” once the opt-out families refuse participation. These experimental attempts at standardization have cost us time we can never have back.

 

STUDENT SUPPORT? We need the best evidence in policymaking, media, and even in the courts. The stated purpose of the tests is to identify need in order to send in support. The test results have purported to show major, widespread need of improvement. But where has the support been? Instead of in-classroom resources, we have seen a changing of standards and steady expansion of testing, receivership policies and charter schools, all actions that displace funding to support students.

 

THE BIG CONTOURS: The most basic fallacy driving NY’s testing lumps all learners into a one-year age-based range of assessment – only in two subjects – calibrated to the highest third of a bell curve, and then ponderously backwards-mapped to benchmarks that mandate conformity to a single, consistent pace of physical, cognitive and emotional development.

 

In struggling schools, students losing the opportunity to learn on their functioning level, all year long. Today we still see testing benchmarks driving curriculum rather than student need.

 

CONSTITUTIONAL ARGUMENT: Could a test case ask the Supreme Court whether there was ever any federal authority to impose testing, let alone the testing criteria? The NYS Board of Regents should consider this question in interpreting whether age-based benchmarks are appropriate for every learner in every circumstance across the state. If so, evidence of efficacy or reliability is paramount.

 

STANDARDIZATION WHY? The “cookie cutter” approach conflicts with best practices in education, where teachers are specifically trained to exercise autonomy in recognizing and meeting student need. Each year, NY districts struggle to comply with ever-changing tweaks, reinventions and overhauls of policies built on unproven theories of assessing learning.

 

Diverting millions per year, local educators’ ability to meet need is hampered, with individualized attention at the school level sacrificed for tests and macro-comparison. NY’s homegrown portfolio-based models, such as those used in the Performance Standards Consortium, have proven better suited to meet student need and value individual student ability.

 

BACKROOM, TOP-DOWN DEALS: NY’s closed door process gives us decrees without transparency or inclusiveness. Educators who know best what works in schools are shut out as special access is given to connected lobbyists and consultants. But their corporate ideas have failed to deliver improvement or support, year after year, showing that we need a shift to research-based, piloted and proven teaching methods.

 

We were told annual testing in ESSA was renewed because “civil rights groups” demanded it. More accurately, it was the leadership of these groups, awash in influence from reformers. We recognize the desperation to level the playing field for underserved schools, disproportionately located in communities of color, but we do not buy that standardized test-based accountability works. We believe wraparound services and removal of obstacles to whole-child learning are what’s needed.

 

NARROW MEASURES: The belief cognitive ability can be measured and compared in a vacuum is inherently unscientific, fraught with oversimplification that denies important real world variances. Can student growth legitimately be boiled down to annual test scores in just two subjects? Do “norming” controls for language, disability and poverty cover the true range of issues affecting outcomes? Even farther removed, can these scores be used across the state in a flat numeric percentage purporting to capture the impact of teacher practice?

 

DOJ and CDC research suggests measures of non-cognitive development are more accurate predictors of future success and societal costs. If ever we were looking to optimize the search for “red flags” to direct support and early intervention, it is the social-emotional markers that more directly tell the story.

 

MORATORIUM NOT ENOUGH: NY’s version of VAM is APPR, assailed by study after study before being hauled into court. The six-Regent position paper published last June requested that APPR should be suspended for reexamination. The Board passed a moratorium, but we still await the review, including overdue responses to the 2014 report by the American Statistical Association or the report by the American Educational Research Association.

 

Opt-out leader Jia Lee has suggested that the 4-year moratorium is designed to outlast parents whose kids will age out of testing, as younger teachers also proliferate. Perhaps it’s “kicking the can down the road” during an election year, but we hope that a transparent process to expose VAM will lead to decisions based on technical merit and efficacy.

 

NY TRUSTS ITS EDUCATORS: Who shapes these policies is also germane to the debate. Should we entrust the officials coming and going through the “revolving door” whose track record led us to this moment? Can we recognize that the professionals most familiar with the students had it right from the start? The NY Principals Paper on APPR was signed by over a third of NY’s principals back in 2011, showing that NY’s top field practitioners weighed in on this – apolitically – long before public trust was compromised, hoping to avoid costly waste and social experimentation.

 

In 2013, teachers organized – outside of unions – activating a process of learning, sharing and speaking out against testing and evaluation policies we found were hatched by a sprawling network of “philanthropists”, hedge fund managers and billionaire PAC bundlers.

 

In 2015, NY parents statewide finally forced the media and political class to notice, building on gains made in 2014 centered in Long Island. The more parents learned, the more likely they became to refuse the tests. But deliberately off-putting technical jargon ensured most New Yorkers wouldn’t question the validity of tests. NYBATs asked incoming Commissioner Elia to explain or source the state’s reliability evidence in an open letter last July……

 

TEACHER TINKERING: We anticipate ESSA provisions concerning teacher recruitment, licensing, training and mentoring to be problematic based on any top-down federal approach. We suspect these will be new avenues for privatization and usurpation of local control and stakeholder input. Competitive grants increase inequity, politicization, and federal interference in education, introducing perverse incentives. We ask the Board to put NY’s proven teacher-training practices ahead of federal standardization incentivizes.

 

Deference to market-based approaches instead of basic, equal distribution of resources has led your predecessors astray, and the damage has awakened a concerned public. The continually botched implementations of privatization policy in our state have hurt, not helped learning in classrooms, directly illustrating how money-in-politics affects children.

 

NY’s educators have already developed alternatives to federal standardization strictures. We hope to support you in the effort to treat kids as individuals and restore sensible, democratically accountable and transparent decision-making to NY schools.

 

So signed,

 

 
NY BATS
badassteacher.org

Categories BATS, Common Core, Education Industry, New York, Privatization, Testing
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