Random Quotes – March, 2016

THE RIGHTS OF SCHOOL CHILDREN

A Bill of Rights for School Children

I included this in a post from February, as well as in my last Medley, but I can't seem to let this excellent post by Russ Walsh go without one more comment.

This quote reminds us, yet again, that there is more to the education of our children than school. Targeting teachers or "failing" schools ignores the main source of learning difficulties children have. Blaming parents or teachers unions doesn't take into account the social aspects of a child's life. Politicians and policy makers would do well to look in the mirror when they're looking for reasons children struggle in school.

From Russ Walsh

It seems obvious that if we are going to improve public education in the economically struggling inner cities, we must take a holistic view. We must attack poverty with as much vigor and energy as the education reformers bring to their lobbying efforts in support of opening more charter schools. We must provide children in the inner cities with more services than schools in affluent areas because these children need more help to become proficient learners. This means wrap around services like medical and dental screenings, increased availability of counselors to help children navigate the trauma of their daily lives, home-school counselors that assist struggling families in providing experiences for their young children that will help them when they get to school, and professionally run and developmentally appropriate pre-school programs. All of these things will help and they will help much more than sending a child across town to a new charter school that has promised to raise student test scores.

WHERE DOES THE EXPERTISE LIE?

TEACHERS NEED TO SPEAK UP

As Long As We’re Silent, Nothing Will Change

Teachers need to find their voices.

There are consequences when teachers speak up. Sometimes they get push back from administrations and school boards. Sometimes they are treated unfairly.

But there are consequences when teachers don't speak up. Our students lose. We are our students' only political voice.

From Edushyster

As Long As We’re Silent, Nothing Will Change

REALISTIC EXPECTATIONS

TESTING

New Jersey’s Bad Idea: Using PARCC as a Graduation Requirement

The so-called "accountability" of using tests to rank communities, schools, teachers, and students, is an inappropriate and invalid use of those tests. Simply put...

From Diane Ravitch

...a cardinal rule of testing is that tests should be used only for the specific purpose for which they were created.

Badass Teachers Association: Thank You to The National Opt Out Movement!

The "choice" crowd insists that public tax revenue pay for their "choices" of charter or voucher supported parochial schools, but when parents "choose" to opt their children out of developmentally inappropriate, and generally invalid standardized tests, those same "reformers" demand "accountability."

from Denisha Jones of the Badass Teachers Association

"Parents, students and teachers must remember that opting out is a form of civil disobedience. You are not asking for anyone's permission. You are informing the school of the decision you made as a student, as a parent with your child, or as a teacher of conscience, who can no longer sit back and allow the test-and-punish system to destroy public education. By denying the testocracy the data they need to rank and label children as worker bees or managers, you reclaim public education as a system that educates all children to use their full potential to make the world a better place."

Less Resources, Harder Tests: Common Core in the Last Days of Obama

"Raise standards."

"Make the tests harder."

As Alfie Kohn said in 1999, "We're Confusing Harder With Better."

If children have trouble reading at what is currently considered "grade-level," a lexile level of 450 for third grade for example, it doesn't mean that they will learn more if we increase the difficulty of material for their grade. President Bush (2) decried the "soft bigotry of low expectations," but he, and most "reformers" apparently, don't understand the hard bigotry of inappropriate expectations.

from Steven Singer

Impoverished students have traditionally had a harder time scoring as well [on standardized tests] as their wealthier peers. But the policy response has been to make things MORE difficult. How does that help?

Consider this: If a malnourished runner couldn’t finish the 50 yard dash, forcing him to run 100 yards isn’t raising standards. It’s piling on.

Do Aurora Public School Parents Know they can REFUSE the PARCC and/or CMAS test?

The number one enemy of education is still on the loose in our schools: high stakes testing.

From Peg with Pen

[emphasis in original]

Next week our children will be subjected to a racist, classist test (PARCC/CMAS) that will be used to rank, sort, and order our children - ONCE AGAIN - to prove that our school is "failing" (not so - we are UNDER-RESOURCED). Once again we will subject ourselves to a vicious game that is meant to fail everyone - the children, the teachers, the district and the community. Our brilliant, creative children, many who speak two languages, many who come from homes lacking books, adequate nutrition, and health care, will be asked to "persevere" on a test that is developmentally inappropriate and demands that they sit for hours each day staring at a screen (7 days for 3rd/4th and 10 days for 5th). The children are not allowed to read when the test is done; this is educational malpractice upon education malpractice. How this decision was made I am unsure, as I am not a part of the testing team. I do hope that this decision will be abandoned before testing begins on Tuesday. These children deserve to read a book when this horrific test is done - and to require them to sit/stare rather than read, is denying them their right to learning time during the school day. I wonder if the parents know this is happening?

The fights and the battles to do what is best and right and just for children are never ending. Exhausting. And crushing.

POLITICAL "REFORMERS"

TEACHER PRIVILEGE

The Obligations of Wealth

A thoughtful and insightful piece...

As teachers, we are often privileged in ways our students aren't...and will never be...and it's often the case that we owe that privilege to the children we teach and their families.

From Peter Greene

I know there are teachers who feel once they've put in the school work that they've been paid to do, they are entitled to shut themselves up at home and that they owe the community nothing. I respectfully disagree. I have resources that many people in my community do not, and I have those resources precisely because those people gave some of their resources up. I owe them.

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2015 Medley #36

Speaking Out, Poverty, "reform," Charters, Finland, Choice, A Teaching Career, 
Teacher Burnout

A SUPERINTENDENT SPEAKS OUT

A Note from Dr. Downs

A local superintendent speaks out to reassure parents whose children are going to bring home lower test scores. While the scores of Indiana students on the NAEP test have never been higher, the fools in Indianapolis have overseen a circus surrounding the ISTEP test...a more difficult (and age inappropriate) test complete with screwed up technological problems and screwed up scoring, and higher cut scores.

A principal at a local school explained it as follows. "Imagine that last year you took a test and 70% was a passing score. Now imagine that this year you're given a harder test, and then, to add insult to injury, you're told, after you took the test, that more people need to fail, so we're raising the passing score to 90%." That's what the State of Indiana has done to its children.

This is the test that will be used to grade students, schools (and by proxy, their communities) and evaluate teachers. More principals and superintendents need to speak out against the continuing test-based abuse of our children, teachers, and our public schools.

We have a system where schools are graded based on their performance on one highly flawed test. These grades have a profound and wholly unfair effect on the reputation of the school district and the residents of those districts, not to mention the children of those districts. Also, we have laws on the books that require teachers’ pay to be tied to the consistent performance of children on these flawed tests. An endearing trait of children is their desire to please. I do not care what the rhetoric on teacher merit pay says, children feel responsible for test scores in ways they should not, and that is not healthy for them.

POVERTY

New Study: Hungry kids score lower on tests. Shocking news?

In the "this isn't news any more" category, we find out that students who are hungry have trouble concentrating on learning. Not just in the US, but world wide.

Here's a shocker for you. Latest research coming out of Cardiff University confirms that kids who come to school hungry score lower on standardized tests than kids who are fed well. The latter group of the study's 11-year-olds scored twice as high as the hungry students.

More evidence that basing teacher evaluations on student test scores is bogus. What the tests are mostly measuring is student/family poverty -- not so-called "student achievement". Of course, by now nearly everyone in the field realizes this. Thus the growing movement of resistance to testing madness that have forced some small retreats in federal and state testing policies. Or maybe just lip service to change?

"rEFORM"

The Tide is Turning: TeachStrong has Backfired

I've already written about how I thought it was foolish of NEA to join with "reformer" groups in TeachStrong. Mitchell Robinson goes a step further giving me hope that the "reform" is starting to lose its luster.

It's becoming clear that recent events in the education reform movement, like the bungled rollout of the #TeachStrong initiative, are actually the first vestiges of the death knells of the reform agenda.

For those unaware of TeachStrong, its an initiative that brings together the two national teachers unions (i.e., NEA and AFT) with over 40 of the leading organizations from the corporate reform movement, including Teach for America, the National Center for Teacher Quality, Education Post, and the CCSSO--the good folks who helped spawn the Common Core. (For a comprehensive review of TeachStrong's 9 Step Plan, please read Peter Green's excellent essay here.)

If you think this sounds like an unlikely alliance, then you are seeing the issue more clearly than the leaders of the 2 unions, who are either denying that a partnership actually exists (Lily Eskelen: "These are not the Droids you are looking for."), or trying to unionsplain it all away as "just good policy" (introducing Randi Weingarten: your new Secretary of Education).

...It has also become increasingly clear that the reformers' efforts have had no positive impact on anything other than their investors' bank accounts...

Mom to governor: ‘Please buy my child a teacher’
Will the governor read this excellent letter? I doubt it.

Please transfer my taxes from the purchase of things to the purchase of people.
Spend less on assessment and more on relationships.
Spend less on hardware and more on hearts.
Spend less on worksheets and more on wisdom.
Spend less on standards and more on students.
Buy my child a person.
Buy my child a teacher.

CHARTERS

Study supports assertion against charters

Will this new study be buried or will it start a discussion which will lead to changing the way Indiana's charter schools operate?

Despite the fact that charter schools are publicly funded, I will never consider charters "public schools" until they are all non-profit, until they provide the same information regarding their operation and finances as real public schools, and until they are required to enroll all students and provide a free, appropriate, public education.

...a new federal study confirms that charter schools, indeed, educate fewer special education students.

Civil rights data collected by the National Center for Special Education in Charter Schools find that, on average, charter schools enroll proportionally fewer students with disabilities than traditional public schools. That holds for Indiana schools, where 14.86 percent of students in traditional public schools have disabilities, compared with 12.9 percent of charter-school students.

FINLAND

First Grade Math Tests in American and Finnish Classrooms

How is it possible that Finland's students achieve so well when they don't take standardized tests every year?

Burris made a startling observation as she studied this first grade math test. The publisher of the first grade math curriculum (where the test comes from) is Pearson. This is the same company that designs standardized tests for most New York students in grades three through eight. In 2010, Pearson inked a 5-year contract with the state of New York for 32 million dollars (US).

Can you see the conflict of interest here? The same company that is being paid to design standardized tests for New York students is also being paid to design curriculum for New York students. It’s in the interest of Pearson to design curriculum that will help students to succeed on their standardized tests.

This conflict of interest doesn’t exist here in Finland. There is just one high-stakes standardized test. Students are only eligible to take this matriculation exam after passing their high school courses. The exam is not designed by a publishing company; it’s created by an external board that’s nominated by the Finnish Ministry of Education.

In theory, this means that commercial curricular programs in Finland are designed to maximize student-learning; succeeding on standardized tests is a non-factor when curriculum is created.

CHOICE

The frightening implications of school choice

Choice, in Chicago's public schools, means Mayor Emanuel's choice to close public schools and use public funds to open privately operated charter schools. It means choosing to fund city schools so that many don't have libraries. It means choosing to fire career teachers and replace them with novices. It means choosing to eliminate the arts and physical education from some schools. It means choosing to ignore the needs and wishes of citizens so that cronies can reap the profits from privatization.

I don't care what anyone tells me about competition among schools making them all better, or how being able to pursue individual preference is paramount to all Americans. I don't care. The real impact of choice is entirely, 100% negative on our neighborhoods, on our communities, our cities. All of them.

Because "choice" of this kind quietly diminishes the real power of our democratic voice while it upholds the promise of individual consumer preferences above all else...

...Most of us are savvy enough to know that the future goal and end game of "school choice" is the breakdown of a fully funded public school system in favor of full privatization. But there's more going on here, and it has to do with the breakdown of our democratic voice as we are spoon-fed false promises of individual consumer preference. Is this a trade we're really willing to make?

IN NO OTHER PROFESSION

Let's play teacher

Many politicians, pundits, policy makers, and "reformers" seem to believe that everyone who has ever been to school is qualified to be a teacher, pontificate about education policy, or know everything there is to know about education.

People like this don't stop to think that their knowledge of education entered their memories through immature eyes and brains. They didn't know all the background work that teachers had to do in order to plan a lesson or grade a set of essays. When you were 8 years old, did you know where your third grade teacher got the construction paper for you to make turkeys at Thanksgiving? When you were 14 did you think about where your science teacher got the idea to have you dissect a frog? When you were 17 did you stop to imagine how long it took your English teacher to grade your research paper (and 120 others)?

Have you ever noticed how star athletes make their jobs look easy? In the same way, excellent teachers make teaching look easy. Policy makers who have no clue about public education remember the "good" teachers from their childhood and youth who made education look easy. They have no idea how much hard work, time, and effort goes into preparation and grading. They have no idea how much a teacher's education and experience gives them insight into how children behave,  how children think, or how children learn. Instead they seem to believe that anyone who has ever been to school can be an education "expert."

No other profession sees anything quite like it.

Sure, we occasionally see stories about a guy who declares himself a doctor and sets up a practice with no real qualifications. Or a person who just opens a law office without benefit of a legal degree. Or a person who finds ordination documents on line and declares himself a preacher.

We have names for these people. Charlatan. Faker. Con artist. And they generally keep a low profile because everyone understands that such behavior is wrong.

...These folks want to play teacher without understanding what it actually means. Being a teacher does not mean delivering a script, it does not mean focusing on BS Tests as a measure of success, it does not mean [sending] the weakest "teachers" into the neediest classrooms, and it does not mean aligning slavishly to a set of mediocre amateur-hour national standards.

Humor Interlude

Bill Maher claims that there is another profession that, like education, has people believing that anyone can do it...and he proves it with the current crop of presidential candidates.

The following link takes you to a video which is definitely NSFW. Maher uses vulgar language and may offend some readers.

Bill Maher -- what other job...

...85% of Iowa Republicans say they find the total lack of government experience to be his biggest selling point...

TEACHER BURN OUT

Burnt out: teachers overwhelmed and resigning

"Reformers" have done their best to make teaching difficult, if not impossible. Why are teachers leaving?

Amanda is not alone. Numerous teachers across the country and in Lake County [Florida] are leaving the education field because of the implementation of the standards, an impossible work load and lack of support from administration.

“About 30 percent of new teachers flee the profession after just three years and more than 45 percent leave after five,” according to the George Lucas Educational Foundation.

Further, a survey of 4,400 current and former public school teachers found about 51 percent who left teaching in 2012-13 reported their work load was better in their current position than in teaching, according to the National Center For Education Statistics...

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Support Teachers of Conscience

The narrow pursuit of test results has sidelined education issues of enduring importance such as poverty, equity in school funding, school segregation, health and physical education, science, the arts, access to early childhood education, class size, and curriculum development. We have witnessed the erosion of teachers’ professional autonomy, a narrowing of curriculum, and classrooms saturated with “test score-raising” instructional practices that betray our understandings of child development and our commitment to educating for artistry and critical thinking. And so now we are faced with “a crisis of pedagogy”–teaching in a system that no longer resembles the democratic ideals or tolerates the critical thinking and critical decision-making that we hope to impart on the students we teach.

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Stop the Testing Insanity!

~~~

A Manifesto for a Revolution in Public Education
Click here to sign the petition.

For over a decade...“reformers” have proclaimed that the solution to the purported crisis in education lies in more high stakes testing, more surveillance, more number crunching, more school closings, more charter schools, and more cutbacks in school resources and academic and extra-curricular opportunities for students, particularly students of color. As our public schools become skeletons of what they once were, they are forced to spend their last dollars on the data systems, test guides, and tests meant to help implement the “reforms” but that do little more than line the coffers of corporations, like Pearson, Inc. and Microsoft, Inc.

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2015 Medley #29: Teachers

Why We Need Public Schools, Why Teachers Quit, The Teaching Profession in Crisis

THE IMPORTANCE OF PUBLIC EDUCATION

Jan Resseger has helped define the importance of public education...something which has been taken for granted for so long that the reasons for its importance seem to have been forgotten.

We all benefit from public education; An educated workforce and educated voters make for a better society. But we seem to have given up fixing public education in favor of tearing it down.

The following article is about a book called Possible Lives, by Mike Rose. Resseger links to an article Rose wrote for Valerie Strauss's Answer Sheet blog. Both articles are worth reading.

The Civic Importance of Public Education: Valuing What We Take for Granted

How can we learn to value what we take for granted?

Public schools are institutions we have taken for granted for so long that it’s hard to imagine they could disappear. In Cleveland’s saddest neighborhoods, I am jarred every time I drive by an empty lot where I used to see a school that has now been torn down. I still remember the names of each of the elementary schools in my small Montana town. Schools are the institutional anchors by which I define neighborhoods. But when people attack public education, as lots of people do these days, I struggle to know how to put into words my defense of this core civic institution.

EXPERTS NOT INVITED TO PARTICIPATE

And now we come to the gist of today's topic. Americans want great public schools but we're not willing to work for them...or pay for them. We want perfection and if we don't get it we need to blame someone. When it comes to public schools, we scapegoat teachers. We don't blame parents who ignore their children's education as long as nothing goes wrong. We don't blame elected officials for not solving the problems of poverty, urban blight, and economic failures (or if we do, we don't connect them to schools).

In this article we learn what we already knew: that teachers are rarely included in decisions about public school policy. Teachers are the experts at education, but Americans distrust "experts." Anti-intellectualism runs deep in this country...many people seem downright proud of their ignorance. Others don't seem to realize who the experts are...

Irony, Education Reform and Teacher Shortages

Reformster Andy Smarick has a low irony quotient as well. In a recent article on the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s blog Flypaper, Smarick quotes Founding Father, John Dickinson. ““Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us.” He goes on to say that education reformers need to park the ideology and pay attention to experience. He is concerned that ideology is driving too many reforms and that these reforms are failing because they have not been rooted in experience. Who does he recommend that reformers turn to for such experience? Why non-other than older reformsters like Checker Finn and Bruno Manno, who discovered some of the problems that attend to relying on market forces to control school quality.

What Smarick misses is that the Dickinson quote might suggest that if reformers wanted to get things right, they could have tried asking veteran teachers and career educators rather than non-educators of like mind. Smarick says listen to the voice of experience, but those teachers? Well, no, never mind; let’s just keep talking to each other.

TEACHERS ARE QUITTING...

Why are teachers leaving the classroom? The answers have been obvious for over a decade.

Readers React Why the 'children first' mentality is making teachers quit

There is a reason the airline safety videos instruct parents to affix their own oxygen masks before they help their children. A teacher's oxygen mask is composed of adequate time to plan, read, grade, think and reflect; enough money to live decently; and the respect a well-educated professional deserves.

Instead, bureaucrats put “children first,” as if the teachers have nothing to do with their success, and then hold teachers accountable for everything, whether within their scope of influence or not.

Give teachers the oxygen they need and everyone will breathe easier.

...AND THEY ARE BEING DRIVEN OUT

Why Good Teachers Quit

Overworked, underpaid, under appreciated, ignored: teachers who are treated like hourly, fast-food workers will quickly find teaching too emotionally draining to stay...and so they leave.

She’s Not Given Time to Adjust to the Newest Teaching Styles...

She’s Swimming in Work at Home and At School

She leaves her house at 7am most mornings. She teaches until 3pm and stays at school to do paperwork, cleaning and preparing for the next day until 5:30-6pm. She usually does a few hours of grading and lesson plan preparation each evening...

She’s Struggling to Learn Each New Program Introduced

This year she has had multiple new programs to learn: a new gradebook program, a new online lesson planning program, and a new reading series...

She Does Not Feel Valued

All of the above would not feel so deflating if she felt valued. If the extra time she invested felt appreciated by her administration. Instead, the push is to do more, do it faster, improve the student’s grades and, more importantly, their standardized test scores...

Her Family (and husband) Misses Her...

Paperwork, Paperwork, Paperwork

My friend is required to keep a binder for, well, just about everything...

WORKING FOR FREE

Hopefully you have heard about the Chester Upland school district in Pennsylvania...they've been struggling to stay open under the onslaught of pro-charter school, pro-privatization laws coming from the state legislature. Money for the Chester Upland public schools has been systematically diverted to charters...and now there's none left to keep the schools open.

The teachers are working for free...

Next Time You Hear Someone Bashing A Teacher, Ask Them This

Michele Paulick, President of the Chester Upland Educational Association, stated that if the teachers failed to show up, they would risk termination because they would be seen to have "terminated their contract with the District." So in effect these teachers are forced to work without pay, even though many, such as Mr. Shelton, have indicated they would voluntarily do so anyway:

Shelton...said he and his colleagues are willing to sacrifice because the students rely on the schools. “Some of our children, this is all they have as far as safety, their next nourishing meal, people who are concerned for them,” he said. “We are dedicated to these children.”

Teachers and support staff are working pro bono.

...These teachers and school employees haven't been paid throughout the summer so it's very, very difficult for them to meet a family budget without a paycheck in September. The Republican Party has eagerly embraced teacher-bashing as part of their 2016 agenda. So the next time you hear a Republican blame teachers for the state of public education, you should ask them to describe the last time they were forced to come to work without expecting to be paid.

The answer, I suspect, is "never."

Teachers Shouldn’t Teach for Free

Despite the pressure to work for free, the Chester Upland teachers and staff claim they would do it anyway. Here's someone who doesn't think they should.

Until we raise teacher pay, it’ll be hard to raise the status of teaching, despite the fact that we put our faith in the education system to cure society of every conceivable ill, from institutional racism to income inequality and lack of economic mobility. Teachers’ pay exposes what we think teachers are really worth. There's no way to break down that mode of thinking if teachers agree to work for nothing.

If you were one of those teachers would you come to school even though you haven't been paid? Or would you stay home?

If you want to help Chester Upland's teachers read this: If You Want To Help Chester Uplands...

TEACHERS NEED TO SPEAK OUT

It's time for teachers to stand up for themselves...a task which is getting harder and harder to do as more and more rights and privileges are taken away by state legislatures. Do you stand up for your profession and your students at the risk of getting fired? Or do you keep quiet, do your job as best you can even though you know that there are things happening which are not good for students?

Teaching is Not a Charity, It's a Profession

Do not apologize for the fact that education is expensive. Do not apologize for the fact that you deserve a better salary. Do not apologize for the benefits you still have left.

Do not apologize for the fact that, although school might only be in session from 8 AM to 3 PM, your workday begins and ends much earlier and much later. Do not apologize for the fact that you have summers off, because by God you're not paid for that time and even you, dear Teacher, work a second job to make ends meet.

Do not apologize for the fact that we, the taxpayers, have to find the political courage to force this question: do we want lower taxes or better schools?...

reserve an ounce or two of the passion you normally spend on the poetry of cellular mitosis or the Louisiana Purchase or the quadratic equation and remind the people of your community that YOUR CLASSROOM IS NOT ON THE AUCTION BLOCK. Your job is not to be done by the lowest bidder. TEACHING IS NOT A CHARITY, it's a profession, and we'll soon be damned if we don't start treating it as such.

FROM AN EXPERT

A few months ago I posted some comments about ISTEP+ and teaching in Indiana by an anonymous Indiana third grade teacher. The article was read by hundreds...and passed on via Facebook and Twitter to hundreds more. Here are some further comments by the same teacher...

It’s just so disheartening to see what’s happening from the position of ‘teacher’. As resilient and adaptive as children are, it’s impossible for even them to shrug off all the craziness, stress, pressure, and a constantly changing schedule that has to morph itself around the constant testing regimen. [How much of our time is spent in testing and test prep?]...4-5 weeks of echool with nothing but tests to account for what’s now required? Additionally, they’ve done nothing but add requirements that have no direct benefit to children, yet they’ve taken nothing off what teachers must do...with the expectation of even better results [from the students]. I can’t think of a more contradicting formula that undermines itself...as least at ground level. The disconnect between legislators and children is astounding. I fear that by the time the proverbial pendulum swings, we’ll have come so far and done so much damage to the profession, that it will take decades to fix. I sincerely hope I am wrong about that.

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Support Teachers of Conscience

The narrow pursuit of test results has sidelined education issues of enduring importance such as poverty, equity in school funding, school segregation, health and physical education, science, the arts, access to early childhood education, class size, and curriculum development. We have witnessed the erosion of teachers’ professional autonomy, a narrowing of curriculum, and classrooms saturated with “test score-raising” instructional practices that betray our understandings of child development and our commitment to educating for artistry and critical thinking. And so now we are faced with “a crisis of pedagogy”–teaching in a system that no longer resembles the democratic ideals or tolerates the critical thinking and critical decision-making that we hope to impart on the students we teach.

~~~

Stop the Testing Insanity!

~~~

A Manifesto for a Revolution in Public Education
Click here to sign the petition.

For over a decade...“reformers” have proclaimed that the solution to the purported crisis in education lies in more high stakes testing, more surveillance, more number crunching, more school closings, more charter schools, and more cutbacks in school resources and academic and extra-curricular opportunities for students, particularly students of color. As our public schools become skeletons of what they once were, they are forced to spend their last dollars on the data systems, test guides, and tests meant to help implement the “reforms” but that do little more than line the coffers of corporations, like Pearson, Inc. and Microsoft, Inc.

~~~

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More Random Quotes - August 2015

THIS JUST IN: REPUBLICANS STILL HATE TEACHERS...

Republicans' deep hatred for teachers can't be denied and they're not trying
from Steven Thrasher

If you've been listening to the Republican candidates you've probably heard some nasty things about teachers. Thrasher tells us why.

Teachers’ unions are made up of groups Republicans always love to bash: government workers with lady parts.

Just to be fair, the author also wrote about Democrats...

Republicans have always hated teachers’ unions for obvious reasons. They reliably support the Democratic party, even though Democrats routinely go to war against teachers as well, particularly alumni from the Obama administration.

...AND DEMOCRATS ARE NOT MUCH BETTER

Teacher evaluations at the schools that Obama, Duncan picked for their kids
from Valerie Strauss

Democrats are just quieter about it. All states have to comply with Arne Duncan's proclamations about VAM...they could lose their federal funds or get stuck having to deal with No Child Left Behind. If using test scores to evaluate teachers was such a good idea you'd think that the Secretary of Education, and his boss, would send their precious children to a school run by "reformers."

Think again...

These comments were delivered when Duncan sent his children to Arlington public schools. They are now going to attend the University of Chicago Lab School...which is full of unionized teachers and devoid of "reformer" education. When they lived in Chicago, the Obamas sent their daughters to the Lab School. They now attend Sidwell Friends.

“What did the president and the secretary seek and obtain for their own kids, where the important issue of teacher evaluation was concerned? The answers recently arrived in two e-mails:

“Arlington school district teacher, March 31, 2011: ‘We do not tie teacher evaluations to scores in the Arlington public school system.’

“Sidwell Friends faculty member, April 1, 2011:

“ ‘We don’t tie teacher pay to test scores because we don’t believe them to be a reliable indicator of teacher effectiveness.’ ”

IT'S THE "OTHER" SCHOOLS THAT ARE "FAILING"

Groundhog Day: Parents Again Rate Local Schools Higher than Schools of the Nation
from Stephen Krashen

Year after year parents rate their own children's schools high...but it's "those other public schools" that are bad.

Seventy percent of parents said they would give the public schools their oldest child attended a grade or A or B, but only 19% would give public schools in the nation an A or B.

An obvious explanation: Parents have direct information about the school their children attend, but their opinion of American education comes from the media. For decades, the media has been presenting a biased view. 

WHERE DOES THE BUCK STOP?
from a teacher friend

Contrary to "reformer's" beliefs, teachers don't like to make excuses. The charge of "making excuses" gives "reformers an "out." When teachers cry "poverty" "reformers" and their legislator friends can claim "excuses" instead of actually dealing with a very real problem. As the late Gerald Bracey said,

Poverty is not an excuse. It's a condition. It's like gravity. Gravity affects everything you do on the planet. So does poverty.

The school administration blames the central office...who blames the state DOE...who blames the legislature...who are only doing what their donors demand.

Teachers must speak out!

Part of the problem is that teachers are caught in the proverbial “Rock and a Hard Place’ scenario. We can’t really turn to the public because in many cases they really don’t want to hear about it, and the state and administration simply blame someone else for the current state of affairs.

One of the things I remind my coworkers who aren’t outspoken...that if we remain entirely submissive and say yes, yes, yes to everything without defending students and teachers, we are just signing up for more of the same treatment.

TEACHER SHORTAGE

Blackmon: In Georgia, 'reform' aims to destroy public schools
from Myra Blackmon

Here is a pretty good summary of what "education reform" is all about...

This is how the self-selected “education reformers” operate. Their motive is profit and personal advancement. They love the idea of schools run by private organizations, staffed with uncertified teachers, cherry-picking the easy students and leaving the most vulnerable students behind. Unproven, invalid standardized tests drive every decision.

It is disgusting. It is immoral. It is repugnant to every American ideal of community, mutual support and benefit and democratic rule. It defies the values of local control in favor of centralized, easily managed power — all the while claiming “it’s for the children.”

It’s high time we kicked them all out and made them earn an honest living — as far from our schools as we can get them.

Education Roars Back
from Bob Grundfest

If you keep telling the nation that teachers are to blame for everything bad in our society...and you continue to cut salaries and benefits...and you close schools, cut staff, and, in general, trash public schools in favor of private charters and private parochial schools...and if you publicize all of this so high school and college students see how poorly teachers, and public schools are treated...

...why would a young adult, right out of high school, choose to make education his or her career...and why would anyone think that young adults would want to go into teaching?

Given the years of blame and economic hardship that teachers have had to endure, it's no wonder that there's a shortage. And given the attitude that many national and state leaders have about teachers, it's no wonder that qualified students are looking at other fields of endeavor. The truth is that we pay a great deal of lip service to wanting a highly qualified, well-trained teaching staff at every school, but the best and brightest are not stupid; they see what's going on in education and are increasingly turned off to it. And since we don't have the best and brightest going into government, the solutions will be doubly difficult to come by.

MONEY FOR EDUCATION OUGHT TO GO TO EDUCATION

It's common for legislators to complain that so much money is spent on education, but an important question is how it is spent. We use billions of tax dollars nationally to support testing and test prep and that's money that should be going to instruction, materials, and student support.

...and what about all the money diverted from public schools to for-profit charters and voucher accepting parochial schools?

@TCBGP

TEACHERS ARE MORE THAN JUST TEST-JOCKEYS

'Teachers want to change the world'
from John Kuhn

Relationships are greater than pedagogy. If you deliver flawless instruction but haven't nurtured relationships with your students — even the challenging ones — then you might as well teach to an empty room.

DREAMS OF THE FUTURE

Neil DeGrasse Tyson quoted a young man in his book, Space Chronicles

There are lots of things I have to do to be an astronaut. But first I have to go to kindergarten -- Cyrus Corey, age four.

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Support Teachers of Conscience

The narrow pursuit of test results has sidelined education issues of enduring importance such as poverty, equity in school funding, school segregation, health and physical education, science, the arts, access to early childhood education, class size, and curriculum development. We have witnessed the erosion of teachers’ professional autonomy, a narrowing of curriculum, and classrooms saturated with “test score-raising” instructional practices that betray our understandings of child development and our commitment to educating for artistry and critical thinking. And so now we are faced with “a crisis of pedagogy”–teaching in a system that no longer resembles the democratic ideals or tolerates the critical thinking and critical decision-making that we hope to impart on the students we teach.

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Stop the Testing Insanity!

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Vermont State Board of Education: Statement and Resolution on Assessment and Accountability, Adopted August 19, 2014

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Random Quotes - July 2015

VOTING

“Everybody Blogs. Nobody Reads.” True or False?

Elections matter.

From Diane Ravitch

If every teacher and principal voted, things would change faster. If every parent who wants a neighborhood public school voted, things would change even faster. We have the numbers, we have the power, we must use it to support democracy.

SPEAKING OUT

2013 Principal of the Year Resigns in Protest of NY State Education Reforms

Not every educator has the luxury of being able to quit their job and leave the system rather than participate in forced education "reform." Those who can, however, should stand up and speak out like Carol Burris.

From Carol Burris

I cannot be part of reforms that eat away at the moral fabric of our schools. I cannot be part of a system that puts test scores based on a set of flawed standards before the interests of the whole child.

PROFITABLE NON-PROFITS

Privatization Primer

Until there is adequate public oversight of charter schools there will be corruption and chaos. Public school systems run by publicly elected school boards are not perfect, but the right of the people to speak via the election process is a better safeguard than the unregulated "market."

From Peter Greene

It makes no difference whether the charters bill themselves as for-profit or non-profit. They are always profitable. Non-profits know many tricks for still turning a profit (eg, hiring themselves to run the school, or leasing the building back form themselves). A non-profit charter is just a for-profit charter with a money-laundering department.

POVERTY

Fear and Learning In America: Bad Data, Good Teachers, and the Attack on Public Education

We're still judging schools, teachers, and students by test scores. The so-called accountability is nothing more than an economic ranking system. Schools with lots of money, and the students and teachers who work in them, do well. Schools in high poverty neighborhoods, and the students and teachers who work in them, do poorly.

by John Kuhn

The school accountability competition wasn't really a contest at all. It was more like a children's tale, with schools starring as the Three Little Pigs and the test as the Big Bad Wolf. The schools that had bricks did well; the schools that had straw did poorly.

Poverty's enduring hold on school success

This quote refers to Illinois, but it is applicable to every state in the union. Test score data is an indication of the level of poverty. Despite school "reforms" like closings, charters, higher standards, evaluating teachers by student scores, and "better" tests, low scores still correlate with poverty.

From WBEZ Radio, 91.5, in Chicago.

...poverty remains a frustratingly accurate predictor of how well schools will perform. Schools full of middle-class kids rarely perform below average on state tests; schools made up of low-income kids rarely score above.

IGNORANCE AND DOUBLE STANDARDS

Appalled and Disheartened. Governor Christie, How Dare You?

From Sarah Mulhern Gross in the Reading Zone

Two quotes here. The first is from New Jersey Governor Chris Christie talking about public education. In the video embedded in this post Christie shows his massive ignorance of what teachers actually do and what schools are actually like. The vast majority of teachers work more than the 6 hours a day which Christie imagines. Christie also adds up all the time in which teachers are not in school and comes up with teachers being "off" four months a year. This assumption is faulty as well. Teachers work when students are not in school (see here and here). If Christie spent any time talking to teachers instead of just bullying them he would know this...

"It's the same as it was in the 1800's for God's sake...It's a row of desks facing forward to a black board or a white board...a person standing in the front of the room...talking to the people at the desks...

"And they do so from roughly 8:30 to roughly 2:30 or 3 o'clock, and they're off four months a year."

In her response, Sarah Mulhern Gross said...

You know where else I see those dreaded rows? In charter schools. In fact, I see that in your friend Eva Moskowitz’s Success charter schools, where students are routinely humiliated and the teacher turnover rate is astronomical. You know what I do not see in her charter schools? Students with disabilities and students with behavior issues. Charter schools like Success usually achieve their test scores because they do not serve our neediest populations, while our public schools do.

TEST SCORES VS. GRADES

Standardized tests versus grades

Krashen gives evidence (complete with references) that high school grades are a good predictor of college success. Where is the evidence that standardized tests predict success?

From Stephen Krashen

[There is] research evidence showing that high school grades in college prep courses are an excellent predictor of college success, and that standardized test scores (the SAT) do not provide much more information than grades alone.

FORCING FAILURE

U.S. DOE Continues to Force Test Failure on Children with Special Needs and ELL Students

The Democratic administration in Washington D.C. is no better than the previous Republican administration. The goal is to defund public education, make public schools look bad, and privatize.

From Nancy Bailey

It is amazing the lengths high ranking authorities at the U.S. Dept. of Education will continue to go to make public schools, teachers and their students look bad, all while they are breaking up special education and converting public schools into charters.

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Support Teachers of Conscience

The narrow pursuit of test results has sidelined education issues of enduring importance such as poverty, equity in school funding, school segregation, health and physical education, science, the arts, access to early childhood education, class size, and curriculum development. We have witnessed the erosion of teachers’ professional autonomy, a narrowing of curriculum, and classrooms saturated with “test score-raising” instructional practices that betray our understandings of child development and our commitment to educating for artistry and critical thinking. And so now we are faced with “a crisis of pedagogy”–teaching in a system that no longer resembles the democratic ideals or tolerates the critical thinking and critical decision-making that we hope to impart on the students we teach.

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Stop the Testing Insanity!

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Vermont State Board of Education: Statement and Resolution on Assessment and Accountability, Adopted August 19, 2014

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2015 Medley #15

Testing, Poverty, "Reform,"
Charters, Play, Gifted

TESTING

...from Diane Ravitch. Let your senator know that it's time to end the abusive, misuse and overuse of high stakes tests. Click the link in the text below to write to your senator.

As you probably know, No Child Left Behind saddled the schools with a heavy dose of annual testing from grades 3-8, and Race to the Top required states to use those test scores to evaluate teachers. Testing is out of control. The curriculum is narrowed, especially in schools that enroll low-income students, where the scores are lowest. Educators have cheated to save their jobs, and some lost their jobs, their reputations, and their freedom for cheating.

No high-performing nation in the world has annual testing or evaluates teachers by test scores.

The current revision of NCLB retains annual testing unfortunately. However, Senator Tester (ironic name) has written an amendment to change annual testing to grade span testing: once in elementary school, once in middle school, once in high school.

Learn here how to support his sensible proposal. Write your Senator now. There is no time to waste.

Those who say that annual tests are needed to protect children of color, children with special needs, and English language learners have not looked at the racist history of standardized tests. These are the children most likely to be on the bottom half of the normal curve that governs standardized tests. They are the very children most likely to be labeled and stigmatized by the tests. What children need most are reduced class sizes, a rich curriculum, experienced teachers, fully resourced schools, and the opportunity to learn. This is what they need, not more testing. A test is a measure, not the goal or purpose of education. And it is a flawed measure.

Opinion: Who’s Grading The Kids’ Standardized Tests?

The fact that required tests are high stakes makes everything worse. We're using inadequate and inappropriate assessments to determine the futures of children, teachers, and schools.

In Indiana, these test results form the basis for a letter grade for their school and their district. Schools’ reputations hang in the balance, along with funding.

Incredibly, the people grading these exams, which require more than simple multiple choice answers, are not testing experts, and may not even have a background in education.

Rather, they are $12 an hour temporary workers hired by testing corporations like CTB McGraw Hill, which operates Indiana’s test, and Pearson, which oversees Illinois’ Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC).

POVERTY

Poverty, family stress are thwarting student success, top teachers say

Research shows it...educators have been saying it for years...now, the best of the best are saying it: The problem with our schools is poverty, not "bad teachers," "failing schools," or unions.

Will anyone listen?

The greatest barriers to school success for K-12 students have little to do with anything that goes on in the classroom, according to the nation’s top teachers: It is family stress, followed by poverty, and learning and psychological problems.

Those were the factors named in a survey of the 2015 state Teachers of the Year, top educators selected annually in every U.S. state and jurisdictions such as the District of Columbia and Guam.

Why Do Poor Students Lag Behind Rich Students in Reading Development?

Various popular theories abound in attempting to answer this question. For the longest period of time, the parents were thought to be the problem. More recently, it is teachers of low-income children who have been identified as the problem. That is, teachers in high-poverty schools are either not as talented as teachers in suburban schools or teachers in high-poverty schools simply do not work as hard as teachers in suburban schools. This line of hypothesizing has led to schemes whereby all teachers will be paid (or retained in employment) only when their students make good progress with reading development.

The problem with these popular theories is that they have both been proven wrong by the evidence we already have available.

REFORM

Education “reform’s” big lie: The real reason the right has declared war on our public schools

The practice of excluding practicing K-12 educators from public education policy isn't new. From the first day on the job at the U.S. Department of Education, the nation's schools have been led by lawyers, politicians, and business tycoons. Jimmy Carter set the tone by appointing as the first Secretary of Education, Shirley Hufstedler, an attorney, judge, and college professor. Since then, only two Secretaries of Education, Terrell Bell and Rod Paige, have had experience at K-12 teaching, but none were practicing teachers when they were tapped for the position of Secretary.

It isn't like teachers haven't been talking about this for years. Finally, though, as evidenced by the mobilization of teachers in Chicago, Washington state, and elsewhere, educators' voices are loud enough so that the politicians can hear the sound of votes coming from the public schools...where 90% of America's children spend their educational years.

It's time voices of teachers are heard.

The current age of education reform can be traced to the landmark 1983 report A Nation at Risk, subtitled “The Imperative for Educational Reform.” Future dictionaries may mark this report as the turning point when the definition of reform changed from cause to a curse. In 1981 Ronald Reagan’s first Secretary of Education Terrel H. Bell appointed an 18-person commission to look into the state of US schools. He charged the commission with addressing “the widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” The commission included 12 administrators, 1 businessperson, 1 chemist, 1 physicist, 1 politician, 1 conservative activist, and 1 teacher. No students or recent graduates. No everyday parents. No representatives of parents’ organizations. No social workers, school psychologists, or guidance counselors. No representatives of teacher’s unions (God forbid). Just one practicing teacher and not a single academic expert on education.

It should come as no surprise that a commission dominated by administrators found that the problems of U.S. schools were mainly caused by lazy students and unaccountable teachers. Administrative incompetence was not on the agenda. Nor were poverty, inequality, and racial discrimination. A Nation at Risk began from the assumption that our public schools were failing. Of course our public schools were failing. Our public schools are always failing. No investigative panel has ever found that our public schools are succeeding. But if public schools have been failing for so long—if they were already failing in 1983 and have been failing ever since—then very few of us alive today could possibly have had a decent education. So who are we to offer solutions for fixing these failing schools? We are ourselves the products of the very failing schools we propose to fix.

Have We Wasted Over a Decade?

The crisis in education is not low test scores, "failing schools," "bad teachers," or any other "reformer" bogeyman. The crisis in education is privatization. American schools do good work and need to be improved not privatized.

...when poverty characteristics are taken into account, the accomplishment of US students and schools is even more impressive. Students in schools with between 10-25% of students eligible for free or reduced lunch scored 584, which is higher than the national average for top performing Singapore, a city state where roughly 1 in 10 households earns an income below the average monthly expenditure on basic needs and whose actual poverty rate may be higher. At the same time, United States students whose schools have 75% or more students qualifying for free or reduced lunch, scored 520, roughly the same as African American students, and “tied” with France, 18 places behind the U.S. average.

The PIRLS data tells us something that we’ve known for some time. United States testing data, much like United States educational funding, is tightly coupled with the poverty characteristics of the community tested. Dr. Stephen Krashen, Professor Emeritus at University of Southern California, concluded that the unspectacular scores on U.S. students on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) are largely attributable to our 21% child poverty rate and the impact that has on communities and individual children. PIRLS results tell a similar story, and the persistent connection between race and poverty in America similarly explains the score gap between African American students and other ethnic groups.

PRIVATIZATION: CHARTERS

Feds Spent $3.3 Billion Fueling Charter Schools but No One Knows What It's Really Bought

Lack of oversight for charter schools is a feature...not a bug. That's how they want it.

Charter scandals are getting more and more press, yet the U.S. Department of Education wants to keep pouring money into the charter industry with no additional safeguards.

Despite the huge sums spent so far, the federal government maintains no comprehensive list of the charter schools that have received and spent these funds or even a full list of the private or quasi-public entities that have been approved by states to "authorize" charters that receive federal funds. And despite drawing repeated criticism from the Office of the Inspector General for suspected waste and inadequate financial controls within the federal Charter Schools Program - designed to create, expand, and replicate charter schools - the U.S. Department of Education (ED) is poised to increase its funding by 48% in FY 2016.

REAL EDUCATION: PLAY

Let the Kids Learn Through Play

Real educators understand that learning is more than just testing, paperwork, and data collection. Real learning happens through life.

...a growing group of scientists, education researchers and educators say there is little evidence that this approach improves long-term achievement; in fact, it may have the opposite effect, potentially slowing emotional and cognitive development, causing unnecessary stress and perhaps even souring kids’ desire to learn.

One expert I talked to recently, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a professor emerita of education at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., describes this trend as a “profound misunderstanding of how children learn.” She regularly tours schools, and sees younger students floundering to comprehend instruction: “I’ve seen it many, many times in many, many classrooms — kids being told to sit at a table and just copy letters. They don’t know what they’re doing. It’s heartbreaking.”

The stakes in this debate are considerable. As the skeptics of teacher-led early learning see it, that kind of education will fail to produce people who can discover and innovate, and will merely produce people who are likely to be passive consumers of information, followers rather than inventors. Which kind of citizen do we want for the 21st century?

REAL EDUCATION: GIFTED

The Common Core “Deep Learning” Message that All Students are Gifted is Wrong

Giftedness is an exceptionality, and by definition, that means that it's the "exception" not the rule. Every child has positive attributes that can be nurtured. Every child has abilities which can be developed, but not every child is gifted.

...not every child is gifted.

The myth that all students are gifted is wrong, and the idea that all children can blend together with just the right dose of deep learning will destroy any hope for special programming for gifted students in the future.

To blend students together implying that everyone can be gifted with deep learning is both naive and dangerous. It is not unheard of that students who are gifted, without identification, drop out of school and never have their qualities recognized.

Many gifted children currently languish in classrooms. They complete tasks that do nothing to help them achieve all they are capable of doing. Students who come from poverty are especially at risk, because their parents might not have the means or the insight to get their child tested. Gifted children might act out and appear to be anything but gifted!

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Support Teachers of Conscience

The narrow pursuit of test results has sidelined education issues of enduring importance such as poverty, equity in school funding, school segregation, health and physical education, science, the arts, access to early childhood education, class size, and curriculum development. We have witnessed the erosion of teachers’ professional autonomy, a narrowing of curriculum, and classrooms saturated with “test score-raising” instructional practices that betray our understandings of child development and our commitment to educating for artistry and critical thinking. And so now we are faced with “a crisis of pedagogy”–teaching in a system that no longer resembles the democratic ideals or tolerates the critical thinking and critical decision-making that we hope to impart on the students we teach.

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Stop the Testing Insanity!

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Vermont State Board of Education: Statement and Resolution on Assessment and Accountability, Adopted August 19, 2014

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