Choice – No Choice

PARENTAL PERMISSION NEEDED

I was a reading specialist in my school for the last 15 years of my career. Each time I wanted to screen a student using aptitude, diagnostic, or achievement tests I had to get written parental permission. Most times parents signed the permission to test because they were as anxious as we were to figure out how to best help their children. Sometimes they didn't. Sometimes they wanted a conference to gather more information.

Those tests were used to diagnose a child's learning issues...sometimes to refer them for further psychometric testing (which also need parental permission), but ALWAYS to help the classroom teacher and other support staff figure out how to tap into the child's learning potential. In other words we used the tests to help the child.

The tests I gave were only given to a handful of students each year, and once we purchased the test materials all we had to do was to order additional forms to continue using the test.

Standardized student achievement tests, on the other hand, are given to all students and must be purchased each year. Parental permission is not needed. In fact, the tests are required by federal law. Students (and their parents) who choose to opt out are often punished, depending on which state they live in. Instead of helping students, the tests are (mis)used to retain students in grade, to evaluate teachers and schools, and to reward and punish school stakeholders based mostly on the neighborhood they work in. They were developed to measure student achievement, but they actually measure the socio-economic status of students.

A SIMPLE, LOGICAL QUESTION

Peter Greene, author of Curmudgucation, asks

...if I have to ask permission to give an IQ test, why not the same for the [Big Standardized] Test?

In his blog post titled Opting In (which you should read), he writes,

...you can't give a child an IQ test without parental permission...

...Imagine if we did that with the Big Standardized Test in every state. Imagine if we recognized parental authority when it came to administering Big Standardized Tests to children. Imagine if the state and the school had to get parental permission before administering to your child the PARCC or SBA or PSSA or WhateverTheHellAnagramYourStateIsPlayingAt. Imagine if the people fighting so hard against opt out had to fight to get everyone to opt in.

"Reformers" are all for giving parents "choice" when it comes to "choosing" a private or charter school, but not when it comes to high stakes achievement tests.

We must get parental permission to test when we are using psychometric or individual tests, but no permission is needed when mass produced group tests are misused to evaluate teachers and schools.

When there are consequences for students, teachers, and schools, not only do parents not get a chance to give their permission, but they are allowed absolutely no "choice" at all.

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2016 Medley #8

Lead: Poisoning Our Future,
Response to "reform," Teacher Shortage, Standards, Charters, Vouchers, Testing,
Competency Based Education

POISONING OUR FUTURE

Schools Nationwide Still Grapple With Lead in Water

The lie that America cares about its children is exposed yet again.

When the children of Flint, Michigan were found to have been poisoned by lead in the water the news media was all over it. The Republican governor and his apologists continue to blame someone else – most notably, the victims – even while the governor's own investigative task force placed the blame on state government, including him.

Now that the Flint water crisis has been relegated to "page 2" of the news (except, of course, in Flint) most Americans can once again ignore the fact that thousands of black and brown children have had their health and cognitive development stunted by the neglect of politicians who don't really give a sh*t about them.

Lead poisoning is still a serious problem for urban school districts throughout the country.

Lead poisoning doesn't go away by itself and its impact is permanent. There is no cure. Once a child is damaged by lead poisoning's effect on their nervous system, intellectual development, and behavior, it never goes away. Think Freddie Gray.

Lead poisoning rates have fallen dramatically since the 1990s because of stronger laws and increased testing in areas of high-risk. However, a large number of children are still negatively affected because they "fall through the legislative cracks".

There are still places where lead hurts children either because they live in places where lead is ubiquitous, like Flint, or their schools are the source. Take Jersey City, for example. When lead was discovered in the public schools' drinking water did the city and state rush to protect their children from the devastating impact of lead poisoning?

Yes...seven years later.

The Jersey City Public Schools district discovered lead contamination in eight schools’ drinking fountains in 2006, and in more schools in 2008, 2010 and 2012. But not until 2013 did officials finally chart a comprehensive attack on lead, which by then had struck all but six schools.

PUSHING BACK AGAINST "REFORM"

Ignore Insults and Falsehoods About Public Education? Or Push Back?

Read comments on the internet and you'll learn that the general public still believes that public schools are hell-holes filled with failing students and incompetent teachers. The accepted knowledge is that we spend excessive amounts of money and that most of it gets sucked up by the evil teachers unions whose lazy members only went into teaching for the summers off and the high salaries.

Is it worth fighting back with calm, reasoned arguments? Is it worth telling the truth about the effects on schools of poverty and racial isolation? What will it take to educate Americans as to the actual problems facing public education?

Because blaming public education for things over which it has zero control is now thoroughly woven into the national discourse on a myriad of issues. Stupid voters? Blame the schools. Lazy workers and economic downslope? Public education's fault. Anti-intellectualism? They must have learned it at school.

TEACHER SHORTAGE

Teacher Pipeline Still Drying Up

The teaching profession has been seriously damaged by the "reform" movement. Policy makers across the nation have worked hard to make teaching into mindless test-prep with no future. The anti-union push from the right-wing, coupled with the systematic starving of public education by privatizers has meant that becoming a teacher is no longer the secure career it used to be.

If you want to buy a Lexus for $7.95 and nobody will sell one to you for that price, that is not a sign of a automobile shortage. If you want to hire a surgeon to cut your grass for $1.50 an hour and nobody will apply for the job, that is not a surgeon shortage. If you want people to become teachers under the current job conditions (and that is a large-ish if because it's possible that some folks think it would be easier to run education if teachers would all just go away), and fewer and fewer people are biting, that is not the sign of a teacher shortage-- it's a sign that you need to make your job more attractive. This seems obvious to me. We'll see if anybody in power can figure it out.

Hiring Non-Certified Teachers No Way to Address Teacher Shortage, Say Experts

Now that the "reformers" have damaged the teaching profession they have worked with policy makers to make it legal to hire more and more (and cheaper and cheaper) non-certified teachers.

The long term way to weaken the teachers union, and increase profits by lowering personnel costs:

• Create a teacher shortage by making the profession less desirable.
• Then claim that "there aren't enough teachers" so "we have to hire anyone with a pulse" – at low salaries. 

It's a twofer – bust the union and make a profit at the same time. Guess which neighborhoods will have the bulk of the non-certified, inexperienced teachers?

Historians (if there are any left) will look back on this time in American history as a time when the nation abandoned intelligent thought for a quick buck.

“We shouldn’t shoot for short-term solutions and just push warm bodies in the classroom,” Shields says. “Investing in teacher recruitment and training and improving working conditions for school staff can increase the number and diversity of fully-prepared teachers.”

STANDARDS

Texas Ed Board Chair Ignores a Key Problem in Discussion about Textbooks

Why do politicians make decisions on academic standards? Even the Fordham Institute, a conservative "think tank" understands that Texas standards are so politicized as to be useless.

Texas, of course, is the home of textbook standards for the nation. Textbook publishers don't want to publish too many versions of their books and Texas standards, being for one of the largest markets in the country, have an impact on the books that are available for the rest of us.

Do we want standards which downplay and cover up the truth? Do we want our nation's children growing up thinking that slavery had nothing to do with the civil war, or that Moses was instrumental in writing our nation's founding documents?

This is just one more area where educators, rather than politicians, need a voice.

Moreover, remember that even the conservative Fordham Institute has sharply criticized the curriculum standards as a “politicized distortion of history” plagued “misrepresentations at every turn.” How do those politicized standards affect classroom instruction, regardless of what the textbooks say?

Here’s the reality: the state board’s awful curriculum standards make it more likely that Texas students will learn a flawed and politicized distortion of history. We’re confident that the state’s many good teachers try to find ways to work around this problem. But state board members more interested in promoting their own political agendas than educating Texas kids have made those teachers’ jobs much harder.

The solution? Fix the standards by taking out the political agendas.

PRIVATIZATION: CHARTERS

Charters Can Always Quit

A neighborhood public school provides stability and community identity.

A charter school can come into a community, draw higher achieving students away from the public schools, and then, if it doesn't make enough money, can decide to close up shop and abandon its neighborhood.

By switching to a charter school, a family gives up the promise that their child, as a US citizen, is entitled to a free education no matter what. The irony is that the onslaught of charters is forcing some public schools to imitate charters in this one way-- to turn their back on the mission of pubic education to educate every child.

PRIVATIZATION: VOUCHERS

Our Idiotic Conversation About School Vouchers

The more tax money legislatures provide for vouchers, the higher the cost of private schools will rise.

Public funds should go to public schools.

The idea that private school vouchers can expand opportunities for students currently enrolled in urban public schools is transparently foolish. And yet, time and again, reformy types keep bringing it up, making comparisons to elite private schools that are utterly laughable -- especially when voucher funds will actually be going to schools that are nothing like St. Benedict's.

TESTING

ISTEP is dead, but what’s next?

More talk about what we will replace ISTEP with...more lack of understanding of the basic use of tests and measurements.

Indiana’s leadership class may not be able to get their heads around what constitutes a quality education, but the sharp practice of political advantage is practically second nature to them. The ISTEP test, in its various bungled iterations, has been used as a club to beat teachers with, a way of undermining professionalism in the classroom in the name of accountability.

“We are going to have accountability in our testing,” said Gov. Pence as he repealed ISTEP. “But we are going to find a better way.”

Naturally, he added that “we” would “look to our teachers.” But so long as testing serves as little more than a teacher union-busting tool, who is going to want that job?

COMPETENCY BASED EDUCATION

Here are three articles about Competency Based Education. The first, by Peter Greene at Curmudgucation, the last two by Stephen Krashen.

What's So Bad About Competency Based Education?

The premise of CBE is that all learning can be reduced to a collection of performance tasks. This is fine for simple, concrete skills. Identify grammatical sentence parts? Change a tire? Find the measurement for one side of an isosceles triangle? Bake a cake? Sure-- if you can perform each of the separate tasks involved, you can be said to have mastered the larger learning.

But more complex skills don't succumb to merit badge breakdown so easily. You may pass the dribbling test, the passing test, the shooting test, the jumping test, and the blocking test, but does that mean you have achieved mastery of basketball? And does mastery mean that you can play on a YMCA pick-up team, or that you're ready to go head to head with LeBron James? And were the basketball competencies, both the content and the minimum level required to pass them-- did those come from somebody who is knowledgeable about basketball, or from someone who is knowledgeable about designing CBE systems?

And that's talking skills. When we talk knowledge, CBE goes right out the window. How do we reduce an understanding of the critical realist movement in American literature to a series of competencies? We can't-- so we have to bake in two huge mistakes. First, we reduce it to performance tasks-- behaviors-- that somebody somewhere believes are the signs of understanding. The competency is literally not "understand the material" but "act as if you understand the material." Assessing this kind of learning is already a huge challenge for a regular classroom teacher, but CBE adds the element of saying that we will use exactly the same measure for every single student.

Second, using CBE for knowledge learning means that the competencies will always be measured in terms of things we already know. If you are earning your competency badge for "understanding the causes of the Great European War," what you really have to understand is what the people who wrote the competency measure believe were the causes. In other words, CBE demands inside the box thinking-- even for fields in which the box is under considerable debate.

Take a closer look at competency-based education.

Competency-based education is not just a testing program. It is a radical and expensive innovation that replaces regular instruction with computer "modules" that students work through on their own. It is limited to what can be easily taught and tested by computer, and is being pushed by computer and publishing companies that will make substantial profits from it.

Pearson: Competency-based education will replace standardized testing

This will make testing fever worse than ever. We can expect daily reports about schools, school districts, states and countries announced on radio, television, newspapers, and on dedicated internet websites, just like sports news, announcing how much progress has been made in mastering modules. This will result it even more testing pressure on the schools. We can look forward to daily reporting like this:

"Fourth graders in Thailand have completed an average of 43 programs this month, compared to Spain's 42, moving Thailand into 39rd place internationally. Spain did not improve its rankings because of poor performance in several classrooms in Madrid, especially one taught by Estela Garcia at the Academica Arriba in which children completed only six programs this month."

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The Test is Dead. Long Live The Test

THE TEST IS DEAD

ISTEP+ is officially history, after 2017, that is, which is the last year that the ISTEP will be given to Indiana students.

Gov. Pence signs ISTEP’s death warrant, kicks off two-year rush to replace exam

With the stroke of his pen today, Gov. Mike Pence put an end to the Indiana’s decades-old standardized ISTEP exam and officially started the clock on a plan to replace it.

The ISTEP will be administered just one more time — in 2017 — giving the state a little more than 700 days to figure out something new.

“We’re going to make a new test that works better for our kids, better for our teachers, better for our families,” Pence said. “I think there’s just been a growing sense that we can do better than ISTEP. This is a test that has been around in Indiana for more than a generation.”

Signing the bill at Eagle Elementary School in Zionsville, Pence told the children gathered for the bill ceremony that they shouldn’t get too excited about ISTEP’s departure.

The “good news” was that ISTEP would be no more, he said, but the “bad news,” is that there will still be a test. That comment was met with groans from the kids.

It's interesting that Indiana's Democratic Superintendent of Public Instruction has been fighting against Republican Governor Pence over ISTEP (and nearly everything else) since she took office. Now that it's an election year, and the public has turned against ISTEP, Pence is eager to "find something better."

Indiana governor signs bill eliminating unpopular ISTEP

After years of tinkering with the state’s education policy, including withdrawing from the national Common Core standards, the decisions by the GOP-majority Legislature now pose a political liability, because parents and educators have become increasingly weary of high-stakes testing. And ISTEP scores plummeted about 20 percent in 2015 when compared to the previous year due in part to a hastily rolled out test that was based on Indiana-specific standards for math and science instead of the Common Core.

While Democratic State Schools Superintendent Glenda Ritz has long called for student testing to be rethought, the idea to scrap the ISTEP did not gain currency until recent months with Republicans, who have supported school accountability measures that use student performance on the standardized test to determine school grades and help award teacher merit pay.

LONG LIVE THE TEST

Romeo and Juliet
Act II, Scene II

What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;

Pardon me for not celebrating the demise of ISTEP, but the worst aspects of it will remain. We're not getting rid of high-stakes testing. We're not getting rid of the abuse and misuse of a test on students, teachers, and schools. We're simply going to change from ISTEP to some other standardized test.

The governor said we're going to "make a new test that works better."

On what basis should we expect the State of Indiana, which "made" the ISTEP to suddenly be able to "make" something better? Testing is a complicated process and questions have to be carefully chosen to remove biases and errors. Now that ISTEP is gone, how is the state suddenly going to provide the expertise to make a "better" test? Hire Pearson? CTB? Are there any "test experts" left who aren't just trying to increase the company's bottom line?

Then there's the possibility of getting an "off the shelf" nationally normed test, but that wouldn't necessarily be aligned with Indiana's standards. Would it be fair to require teachers to teach certain standards and then test students using an instrument that didn't reflect those standards? Does the legislature care about fair at all when it comes to students, teachers, or schools? And, as long as we're asking questions, why is it that the legislature is micromanaging Indiana's testing program to begin with? Isn't that a job for educators? Of course, when the purpose of testing has changed from assessing student progress and helping students learn, to "accountability" in order to bust unions and privatize education, it all makes sense.

Test misuse in Indiana isn't going away with the demise of ISTEP. If we're still using some standardized achievement test as a high-stakes measure to determine student placement, teacher effectiveness, or a school's letter grade, then we're still misusing the test, no matter what that test is.

Standardized achievement tests accurately measure a student's knowledge of the material covered on the test – and nothing else. But we're going to take a different achievement test which was developed and field-tested (hopefully) to measure children's academic achievement in specific areas and we're going to use it to evaluate teachers and to punish or reward schools. That's akin to using a blood test to determine if your leg is broken.

In Measuring Student Achievement: A Study of Standardized Testing and its Effect on Student Learning, the authors wrote [emphasis added],

...the weakness is that assessment tests are not able to account for the wide range of variables, besides student knowledge, that could affect test results. In the pursuit of expediency and efficiency, combined with a trust in the objectivity of tests, the data acquired from test results are often inappropriately applied to different education policies and curricular reforms. A significant example was shown in the inability for test results, to accurately determine education quality. Drafters of education policy and developers of school curriculum primarily reference assessment test data to solve problems the data does not relate to.

In other words, to quote Linda Darling-Hammond for the umpteenth time,

The problem we have with testing in this country today is that, number 1, we're using the wrong kinds of tests, and number 2, we're using the tests in the wrong kinds of ways. We are the only country that tests every child, every year with these kinds of measures and then attaches all of these stakes to them -- whether a kid gets promoted to the next grade, whether they graduate, whether a teacher gets a merit pay bonus, whether they even keep their job, whether schools get rewarded or sanctioned or even closed down. The tests were never designed to support these kinds of decisions. They don't even measure the things you would need to measure to be valid for those purposes, in ways that would inform you.

Getting rid of ISTEP won't improve education in Indiana. Getting rid of inappropriate high-stakes testing, and the politicians who continue to support it, will.

See also Say No to Standardized Tests

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2016 Medley #7

AADHD and Recess, Privatization,
Charters, Teacher Evaluations,
"Reform" Fail, Politics

ADHD KIDS

10 Ways We'd Change the U.S. School System If We Could

The importance of recess for young children, and children with ADHD especially, can't be overemphasized. The Finns, with the highest academic scores in the world, make sure that young children have frequent breaks. We should do the same.

Lunch and recess are, for more grade­ school students, as essential as reading, writing, and math. Time spent playing kick ball or running the bases teaches our kids valuable social skills. Plus exercise releases chemicals into the brain that promote focus, sequencing, and working memory once the bell rings again.

"Kids need a break," says Stewart Trost, assistant professor of kinesiology at Kansas State University. "They can focus better in the classroom when given that break."

“Kids who have recess display an improved ability to stay on task,” says Dr. Larry Silver a regular ADDitude contributor. That means less fidgeting, more focusing. It also means building friendships and giving teachers and administrators a chance to see who is being bullied, isolated, or teased.

Yet many schools cut recess to add more classes, or take it away as a punishment – even though the CDC says, “Exclusion from recess for bad behavior in a classroom deprives students of physical activity that can contribute toward improved behavior in the classroom."

WALMARTIZING PUBLIC EDUCATION

How the Cutthroat Walmart Business Model Is Reshaping American Public Education

The privatization of public education will lead to the same sorts of community devastation that Walmart is famous for.

Stories about local communities being devastated by business decisions made in distant headquarters have become a staple of this era. Time and time again, the nation has witnessed whole towns being hollowed out when big companies uproot local manufacturing plants to move to cheaper labor markets in Mexico or China.

The cause of the trauma and grief is always the same: “strictly business.” “Fiscal sense.”

But what if that story isn’t just about businesses anymore? What if instead of a closed factory or shuttered store, the story is about a closed public school? What if the consequence of these types of “business decisions” isn’t a grown man having to look for another job or an elderly woman having to figure out a new way to pick up her prescriptions, but a child having his or her education significantly disrupted or a whole community left without convenient access to schools?

That question is becoming increasingly urgent as more and more government officials turn to publicly funded but privately run charter schools to compete with and upend local public schools—an education option, it is worth noting, that the family behind the Walmart empire has played a huge role in promoting and funding nationwide.

CHARTERS

What can happen when a neighborhood school is forced to share its space with a charter

Co-locations are all the rage in Charter-crazed New York.

We don't block off parts of public parks so private entities can set up for-profit park facilities. We don't cram all the public library's books into one area so a private vendor can set up shop at public expense. But for some reason it's ok to do this to our children...

"Choice," when there is any, belongs to the private, for profit, corporate owners, not the community or parents.

Imagine this. You get a call telling you that another family will now occupy the second floor of your home. After you recover from your initial shock, you complain. “Outrageous,” you say. That is where I have my office, our second bathroom and the guest bedroom for when my mother comes to stay.” You quickly learn the decision is not yours to make. This is a top-down order, and you must comply.

As far-fetched as the above might seem, the above is what principals in New York City and other cities around the country face when charter schools demand space. And although principals may not “own” their schools, the community that surrounds the school surely does. Yet, no matter how strongly they protest, community voices are nearly always ignored.

Kamenetz v. Skeels: Are Charter Schools “Public” or “Private”?

When it comes to collecting public tax dollars, charters are "public." However, when students demand their rights, those same schools suddenly become "private businesses." The "choice," once again, belongs to the private, for-profit, corporate owners, not the students.

“The structures that allow charter schools to exist are marked by the absence of protections that are traditionally guaranteed by public education, protections that only become apparent and necessary when families and students begin to face a denial of what they were initially promised to be their right.” (American Bar Association)

TEACHER EVALUATIONS

John Thompson: The Utter Failure of Standardized Teacher Evaluation

VAM doesn't work, yet states are forcing school systems to include "accountability" measures (aka student test scores) in evaluation systems...especially after the Duncan Education Department pushed it on the states without sufficient research.

Bottom line: It doesn't work. It's inaccurate. It's an invalid use of student achievement test data.

With all the outcry and brouhaha about "bad" teachers, the VAM-based evaluations have made a mockery of actual teacher evaluations.

“Now that these hurried, top-down mandates are being retrospectively studied, even pro-VAM scholars have found minimal or no benefits, offset by some obvious downsides. I wonder if they will try to tackle the real research question, try to evaluate IMPACT and similar regimes, and thus address the biggest danger they pose. In an effort to exit the bottom 5% or so of teachers, did the test and punish crowd undermine the effectiveness of the vast majority of educators?”

Cami Anderson Speaks Out Against Teacher Tenure, Due Process and Unions

Why are we still blaming teachers and unions for low student achievement? The appeal of the Vergara trial brings this up again...tenure doesn't protect bad teachers. Certainly there are ways to improve the system, but denying teachers of due process doesn't help anyone. Much of the blame for low student achievement can be laid at the feet of politicians and policy makers.

...the Vergara trial did not show any damage to the plaintiffs. One of the accused teachers was Pasadena’s “teacher of the year.” Two of the student plaintiffs were enrolled in charter schools, where none of their teachers had tenure. Some of the other teachers did not have tenure.

"REFORM" FAIL

Reader: A Short List of Corporate Reform Failures

Be sure to check out this post by Diane Ravitch...and the comments as well. Why are our legislators and policy makers still backing failed "school reform?"

Spoiler alert: Corporate donors.

One of the many utter FAILURES:

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND: FAIL
ADEQUATE YEARLY PROGRESS: FAIL
RACE TO THE TOP: FAIL
COMMON CORE: FAIL
PARCC: FAIL
SBAC: FAIL
VALUE ADDED MEASUREMENT: FAIL
EdTPA: FAIL
TEACH FOR AMERICA: FAIL
COMPETENCY BASED EDUCATION: FAIL
USDOE: FAIL
JOHN KING: FAIL
ARNE DUNCAN: FAIL
DAVID COLEMAN: FAIL
ANDREW CUOMO: FAIL
MICHELLE RHEE: FAIL
BILL GATES: FAIL

POLITICS

Obama: Texas Leaders "Aren't Interested" in Higher Voter Turnout

The apparent determination of one particular Party to restrict citizens' voting rights irks me.

It is much easier to order pizza or a trip than it is for you to exercise the single most important task in a democracy, and that is to select who’s going to represent you in government

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