I opened up my mail this morning with some great articles being sent my way.
These essays deserve more than a link in the right-hand column. Peruse at your leisure.
Dora
Education Policy Should Honor the Obvious by Anthony Cody.
The Corporate Dream: Teachers as Temps by Glen Ford.
Beware of Economists Bearing Education Reforms by William Mathis.
A teacher in Kansas, David Reber, tells it like it is to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, no holds barred.
Dora
Mr. Duncan,
I read your Teacher Appreciation Week letter to teachers, and had at first decided not to respond. Upon further thought, I realized I do have a few things to say.
I’ll begin with a small sample of relevant adjectives just to get them out of the way: condescending, arrogant, insulting, misleading, patronizing, egotistic, supercilious, haughty, insolent, peremptory, cavalier, imperious, conceited, contemptuous, pompous, audacious, brazen, insincere, superficial, contrived, garish, hollow, pedantic, shallow, swindling, boorish, predictable, duplicitous, pitchy, obtuse, banal, scheming, hackneyed, and quotidian. Again, it’s just a small sample; but since your attention to teacher input is minimal, I wanted to put a lot into the first paragraph.Your lead sentence, “I have worked in education for much of my life”, immediately establishes your tone of condescension; for your 20-year “education” career lacks even one day as a classroom teacher. You, Mr. Duncan, are the poster-child for the prevailing attitude in corporate-style education reform: that the number one prerequisite for educational expertise is never having been a teacher.Your stated goal is that teachers be “…treated with the dignity we award to other professionals in society.”Really?How many other professionals are the last ones consulted about their own profession; and are then summarily ignored when policy decisions are made? How many other professionals are so distrusted that sweeping federal legislation is passed to “force” them to do their jobs? And what dignities did you award teachers when you publicly praised the mass firing of teachers in Rhode Island?You acknowledge teacher’s concerns about No Child Left Behind, yet you continue touting the same old rhetoric: “In today’s economy, there is no acceptable dropout rate, and we rightly expect all children – English-language learners, students with disabilities, and children of poverty – to learn and succeed.”What other professions are held to impossible standards of perfection? Do we demand that police officers eliminate all crime, or that doctors cure-all patients? Of course we don’t.There are no parallel claims of “in today’s society, there is no acceptable crime rate”, or “we rightly expect all patients – those with end-stage cancers, heart failure, and multiple gunshot wounds – to thrive into old age.” When it comes to other professions, respect and common sense prevail.Your condescension continues with “developing better assessments so [teachers] will have useful information to guide instruction…” Excuse me, but I am a skilled, experienced, and licensed professional. I don’t need an outsourced standardized test – marketed by people who haven’t set foot in my school – to tell me how my students are doing.I know how my students are doing because I work directly with them. I learn their strengths and weaknesses through first-hand experience, and I know how to tailor instruction to meet each student’s needs. To suggest otherwise insults both me and my profession.You want to “…restore the status of the teaching profession…” Mr. Duncan, you built your career defiling the teaching profession. Your signature effort, Race to the Top, is the largest de-professionalizing, demoralizing, sweeter-carrot and-sharper-stick public education policy in U.S. history. You literally bribed cash-starved states to enshrine in statute the very reforms teachers have spoken against.You imply that teachers are the bottom-feeders among academics. You want more of “America’s top college students” to enter the profession. If by “top college students” you mean those with high GPA’s from prestigious, pricey schools then the answer is simple: a five-fold increase in teaching salaries.You see, Mr. Duncan, those “top” college students come largely from our nation’s wealthiest families. They simply will not spend a fortune on an elite college education to pursue a 500% drop in socioeconomic status relative to their parents.You assume that “top” college students automatically make better teachers. How, exactly, will a 21-year-old, silver-spoon-fed ivy-league graduate establish rapport with inner-city kids? You think they’d be better at it than an experienced teacher from a working-class family, with their own rough edges or checkered past, who can actually relate to those kids? Your ignorance of human nature is astounding.As to your concluding sentence, “I hear you, I value you, and I respect you”; no, you don’t, and you don’t, and you don’t. In fact, I don’t believe you even wrote this letter for teachers.I think you sense a shift in public opinion. Parents are starting to see through the façade; and recognize the privatization and for-profit education reform movement for what it is. And they’ve begun to organize – Parents Across America, is one example.To save yourself, you need to reinforce the illusion that you’re doing what’s best for public education. So you play nice with teachers for one day – not for the teachers but for your public audience.You also need to reassure those who leverage their wealth – and have clearly bought your loyalties – that you’re still on their side. Your letter is riddled with all the right buzzwords and catch phrases to do just that:“…to change and improve federal law to invest in teachers” sounds like a wink-nod to TFA that federal dollars are headed their way.“…sophisticated assessment that measures individual student growth” can be nothing other than value-added standardized testing; a mill-stone for teachers but a boon to the for-profit testing industry.“…transform teaching from the factory model…to one built for the information age” alludes to systemic replacement of living teachers with virtual ones – bolstering the near monopoly of one software giant who believes the “babysitting” function of public schools is the only reason not to go 100% virtual.“…recognize and reward great teaching” is stale code for “merit pay”; which is stale code for “bribe for test scores”; which comes down to “justification to pay most teachers less.” Lower teacher salaries, in turn, will free up money for standardized tests, new computer software, and other profitable pursuits.No doubt some will dismiss what I’ve said as paranoid delusion. What they call paranoia I call paying attention. Mr. Duncan, teachers hear what you say. We also watch what you do, and we are paying attention.Working with kids every day, our baloney-detectors are in fine form. We’ve heard the double-speak before; and we don’t believe the dog ate your homework. Coming from children, double-speak is expected and it provides important teachable moments. Coming from adults, it’s just sad.Despite our best efforts, some folks never outgrow their disingenuous, manipulative, self-serving approach to life. Of that, Mr. Duncan, you are a shining example.
One would think that if little to no improvement was made from the No Child Left Behind program, that the Department of Education, specifically Arne Duncan, would reflect on that and not instead push his Race to the Top program which is simply NCLB on steroids.
The National Academy of Sciences recently published a report, Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education, on the value of high stakes testing and is discussed in an article in Education Week.
Below is an excerpt.
Dora
Nearly a decade of America’s test-based accountability systems, from “adequate yearly progress” to high school exit exams, has shown little to no positive effect overall on learning and insufficient safeguards against gaming the system, a blue-ribbon committee of the National Academies of Science concludes in a new report.
“Too often it’s taken for granted that the test being used for the incentive is itself the marker of progress, and what we’re trying to say here is you need an independent assessment of progress,” said Michael Hout, the sociology chair at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the chairman of the 17-member committee, a veritable who’s who of national experts in education law, economics and social sciences that was launched in 2002 by the National Academies, a private, nonprofit quartet of institutions chartered by Congress to provide science, technology and health-policy advice. During the last 10 years, the committee has been tracking the implementation and effectiveness of 15 test-based incentive programs, including:
• National school improvement programs under the No Child Left Behind Act and prior iterations of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act;
• Test-based teacher incentive-pay systems in Texas, Chicago, Nashville, Tenn., and elsewhere;
• High school exit exams adopted by about half of states;
• Pay-for-scores programs for students in New York City and Coshocton, Ohio and;
• Experiments in teacher incentive-pay in India and student and teacher test incentives in Israel and Kenya.
On the whole, the panel found the accountability programs often used assessments too narrow to accurately measure progress on program goals and used rewards or sanctions not directly tied to the people whose behavior the programs wanted to change. Moreover, the programs often had insufficient safeguards and monitoring to prevent students or staff from simply gaming the system to produce high test scores disconnected from the learning the tests were meant to inspire.
“I think there are some real messages for school districts on accountability systems” in the report, said Kevin Lang, an economics professor at Boston University who, during his time on the committee, also served as a district school board member in Brookline, Mass.
“School boards need to have a means for monitoring the progress of their school systems, and they tend to do it by looking at test scores,” he said. “It’s not that there’s no information in the objective performance measures, but they are imperfect, and including the subjective performance measures is also very important. Incentives can be powerful, but not necessarily in the way you would like them to be powerful.”
Gaming the System
Among the most common problems the report identifies is that most test-based accountability programs use the same test to apply sanctions and rewards as to evaluate objectively whether the system works. As a result, staff and students facing accountability sanctions tend to focus on behavior that improves the test score alone, such as teaching test-taking strategies or drilling students who are closest to meeting the proficiency cut-score, rather than improving the overall learning that the test score is expected to measure. This undercuts the validity of the test itself.
For example, New York’s requirement that all high school seniors pass the Regents exam before graduating high school led to more students passing the Regents tests, but scores on the lower-stakes National Assessment of Educational Progress, which was testing the same subjects, didn’t budge during the same time period, the report found.
“It’s human nature: Give me a number, I’ll hit it,” Mr. Hout said. “Consequently, something that was a really good indicator before there were incentives on it, be it test scores or the stock price, becomes useless because people are messing with it.”
In fact, the report found that, rather than leading to higher academic achievement, high school exit exams so far have decreased high school graduation rates nationwide by an average of about 2 percentage points.
The study found a growing body of evidence of schools and districts tinkering with how and when students took the test to boost scores on paper for students who did not know the material—or to prevent those students from taking the test at all.
Recent changes to federal requirements for reporting graduation rates, which require that schools count as dropouts students who “transfer” to a school that does not award diplomas, may help safeguard against schools pushing out students to improve test scores or graduation rates. Still, the National Academies researchers warned that state and federal officials do not provide enough outside monitoring and evaluations to ensure the programs work as intended.
AYP and Academics
For similar reasons, school-based accountability mechanisms under NCLB have generated minimal improvement in academic learning, the study found. When the systems are evaluated—not using the high-stakes tests subject to inflation, but using instead outside comparison tests, such as the NAEP—student achievement gains dwindle to about .08 of a standard deviation on average, mostly clustered in elementary-grade mathematics.
To give some perspective, an intervention considered to have a small effect size is usually about .1 standard deviations; a 2010 federal study of reading-comprehension programs found a moderately successful program had an effect size of .22 standard deviations.
Moreover, “as disappointing as a .08 standard deviation might be, that’s bigger than any effect we saw for incentives on individual students,” Mr. Hout said, noting that NCLB accountability measures school performance, not that of individual students
Committee members see some hopeful signs in the 2008 federal requirement that NAEP scores be used as an outside check on achievement results reported by districts and states, as well as the broader political push to incorporate more diverse measures of student achievement in the next iteration of ESEA.
“We need to look seriously at the costs and benefits of these programs,” said Daniel M. Koretz, a committee member and an education professor at Harvard University Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Mass. “We have put a lot into these programs over a period of many years, and the positive effects when we can find them have been pretty disappointing.”
To read the article in full, go to Panel Finds Few Learning Gains From Testing Movement.
by Kristin
The “education reform” sweeping the nation right now isn’t reform at all. It’s privatization and deregulation. Part One explained privatization and deregulation and explored the billionaires and corporations pushing for it. This section explains the strategy they’re using: using nonprofits. Part Three will show how the different aspects of “education reform” work together as a process — and how it can be stopped!
How Do They Get Power?
Billionaires and corporations exert their influence and push for privatization using a myriad of strategies, some obvious and some not. They can directly lobby the state and federal government for change. Through ownership of mass media, they can also put out PR in favor of privatization and deregulation, thereby swaying public officials and voters. Those strategies are fairly obvious.
But some of the ways that billionaires and corporations exert their influence are not so obvious. In fact, they’re deliberately hidden. The rich and powerful use a variety of strategies to influence the government (at the federal, state, local, district, and school level) and the general public. Then they hide those strategies and their influence by acting through a nonprofit or grassroots group, which they have either created out of thin air or manipulated using a grant with strings attached. The nonprofit or grassroots group then manipulates the government and the general public.
Figure 1 shows how this influence works to divert the public from its goal of improving and fully funding schools to the corporate goals of privatizing and deregulating them.
This strategy is as effective as it is despicable, because it takes advantage of our quite reasonable expectation that nonprofits work for the greater good and this influence works to divert the public from its goal of improving and fully funding schools to the corporate goals of privatizing and deregulating them.
How Billionaires and Corporations Influence the Public
Billionaires and corporations direct the activities of nonprofits and grassroots groups through philanthropic foundations. For example, the family that owns WalMart has the Walton Family Foundation, Bill Gates has the Gates Foundation, and the owner of the Gap has the Fisher Foundation. These foundations can then create or fund a nonprofit and then influence that nonprofit by making grants with strings attached or buying a seat on the board of directors. Then they use that nonprofit to push, tax-free, for policy changes. Foundations and nonprofits can also create astroturf (fake grassroots) groups that urge their constituency to lobby for policy changes.
Even worse, foundations and nonprofits contribute to existing, trusted nonprofits and grassroots groups, encouraging the group to participate in one small, innocuous-seeming “Trojan horse” activity that pushes for privatization without the members of that group knowing how the activity contributes to the bigger picture. For instance, a push to deregulate teaching can be sneaked into legitimate efforts to improve teaching.
This isn’t just hypothetical. There is direct evidence that this is currently happening in many different nonprofits and grassroots groups. Through foundations, billionaires and corporations are pushing for privatization and deregulation by:
A few examples of their activities are:
Taken together, these activities and others like them work together in order to build a larger process of privatization.
Part Three of this three-part article will show how the different aspects of “education reform” work together as a process — and how it can be stopped!
The Big Picture: Privatizing Education (Part One of Three)
By Kristin
The “education reform” sweeping the nation right now isn’t reform at all. It’s privatization and deregulation. This three-part article explains what privatization is and who benefits from it. The forthcoming Part Two will explain the strategy being used, and Part Three will show how the different aspects of “education reform” work together as a process — and how it can be stopped!
Part One: An Introduction to Privatization
Since the 1800s, public education has been free and available to everyone. It held the promise that allowed people to strive for equal education and equal opportunity for everyone. But there is now a strong push to privatize every element of our public education system, including our schools, teachers, and curriculum. By the time my children graduate high school, will it still be universally available? Will it even be called “public education” any more?
The parents, teachers, and students who support public education can fight privatization through widespread, coordinated, and sustained opposition.
But there’s one big obstacle standing in the way of this opposition: the process is big, complicated, and sneaky. It involves a lot of money going a lot of different places – including but not limited to, lobbying dollars, propaganda in the mass media, and “astroturf”, fake grassroots groups – and supporting a lot of seemingly unrelated education policies.
To fight privatization, we need a holistic understanding of the process. To that end, this article provides a short overview of the privatization efforts currently underway, who’s behind them, and how the privatization process works. The results may surprise you!
What is Privatization?
Privatization is a process of shifting the ownership and management of public services from the public sector (the state or government) to the private sector (businesses that operate for a private profit and privately funded nonprofits). Proponents claim that by encouraging competition, privatization can improve the efficiency of public services. But there can be serious drawbacks. For instance, before fire departments were publicly run, groups of firefighters sometimes set fires just to earn money by putting them out!
Another drawback is that privatization also takes away democratic public control of our public services. If government officials mismanage public services, we can vote them out of office. But when private corporations mismanage them, we can’t. Only the shareholders have the power to fire the CEOs. Even worse, privatization undermines the basic fabric of our democracy for years to come by putting rote learning ahead of critical thinking.
Yet another drawback is that privatization opens the door for deregulation, which is the lifting of restrictions that provide for health, safety, and quality control. Whenever a private corporation runs an industry, it has a strong financial incentive to lobby the government to deregulate. Recent examples include the deregulation of the mortgage industry, which led to our current financial crisis, and the deregulation of the oil industry, which led to the catastrophic Deepwater oil spill.
A final drawback is that privatized and deregulated schools are neither required nor expected to create equal opportunity for everyone, regardless of race, creed, or color. That’s why the UCLA has reported that charter schools are increasing segregation in the United States.
Charter schools can also do an “end run” around requirements to provide special education for high-need students. They can serve a special few while ignoring the greater good.
Despite these drawbacks, the rich and powerful have been pushing for privatization of a wide number of public services, such as public utilities, national parks, universities, and even social security. The push to privatize public education has been going on for decades and includes school choice, vouchers, charter schools, the privatization of curriculum, and more. There are also efforts underway to deregulate schools and teaching, replacing protections with the illusion of quality control through standardized testing.
Who Benefits from Privatization?
The business that takes over the public service benefits directly from privatization. Billionaires and large corporations also benefit, if it means the government will cut taxes for the rich. Politicians and bureaucrats with connections also benefit through kickbacks.
Who’s Pushing for Privatization?
Billionaires (such as the Walton family, the Koch brothers, Bill and Melinda Gates, and Eli and Blythe Broad) and corporations are pushing heavily for the privatization of education and other services, both for financial reasons and ideological ones.
From the point of view of billionaires, the free market is ideal. It made them rich, after all. To the extent that they want to improve education, they want to remake the system in the image of a corporation, with top-down management, competition, decreased spending, and a focus on results. Of course, the view from the top is nothing like the view from the bottom. How can billionaires who have never gone through the public education system have any idea of the challenges that teachers and students actually face?
As for corporations, they don’t “want” anything in particular. They can’t; they’re not human beings. They are essentially machines whose primary goal is to maximize profits. To further that goal, corporations have an interest in lowering taxes. They also have an interest in directly controlling exactly what is taught to tomorrow’s workforce. They do not have a need for equal opportunity in education, because not all workers in tomorrow’s economy need to think for themselves or to read beyond basic literacy.
Finally, there are companies that simply profit off education, taking taxpayer and grant dollars to produce a product. This includes charter schools, teacher preparation programs, online learning systems, standardized tests, and test prep curriculum. Privatization helps them because it creates new markets. Opening a charter school, for instance, means that brand new teachers can be hired and brand new curriculum can be sold. (Of course, this also means that existing teachers must be fired and curriculum thrown away.)
Next up:
Part Two of this three-part article will continue by explaining the strategy that billionaires are using to push for privatization and deregulation: using nonprofits.
Teach for America, Inc. was the brain child of Wendy Kopp while she was an undergraduate at Princeton in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. TFA, Inc. has turned into a multi-million dollar business. Wendy Kopp does not have a degree in education and from what I have been able to unearth, has no experience teaching in a classroom.
It started out innocently enough, or so it would seem, as an effort based on the Peace Corps model to provide schools with temporary teaching staff. Teach for America recruited graduates fresh out of college and with five weeks of training, placed them in schools in small southern towns and rural areas for two year stints where teachers were hard to come by. Something was better than nothing as far as those school communities were concerned. Since then, because the labor is cheap, TFA became the darling of the charter school industry. No unions had to be involved with charter schools and the recruits would gladly do what they needed to do to fulfill their two year stints, have their loans waived during that time and receive a $5,000 “stipend” to pay off past educational debts or pay for their educational pursuits in the future, whatever that might be. It was perfect for the charter schools because these schools are required by state law to maintain a certain level of achievement as shown by test scores. TFA, Inc. recruits teach to the test and there is little concern about learning how to manage “low-performing” students or students with special needs because the charter schools ensure that those students are either not admitted or are quickly shown the way out of the door. Now, they are here in Seattle trying to justify their existence with the financial aid of Bill Gates to the tune of $2.5M to support TFA, Inc. in opening an office in the Puget Sound area.
First let’s look at the broader picture in Seattle and this will hold true for many cosmopolitan areas in this country. In Seattle we have two universities that have colleges of education, Seattle University and the University of Washington. Both colleges enjoy excellent reputations for preparing students to become teachers. Needless to say, there is no shortage of qualified individuals who are eager to begin their careers here in Seattle. I personally have spoken to many teachers who are waiting to hear from Seattle Public Schools after providing their resumes and proof of certification. These teachers have had the experience of student teaching for one or two years, know how to develop lesson plans and want to make a commitment to our community to work with our students over the long haul. They’re prepared.
No matter how smart a TFA, Inc. recruit is or where they went to school or what they studied or how excited they are to be working, they will not be prepared to develop lesson plans, manage classrooms and the issues that come up with individual students as well as teach and it’s not fair to place this burden of their inexperience and lack of training on the students or school staff.
This is not quality teaching that the proponents of Race to the Top and all things ed reform are clamoring about. This is inadequate when compared to what a student deserves when walking into a classroom on the first day of school.
To highlight the dumbing-down aspect to TFA, Inc. as well as how it is de-professionalizing the realm of educators and education, all you have to do is see what has occurred at the University of Washington in their College of Education. Dr. Tom Stritikus, Dean of the College of Education at UW and former TFA recruit, announced last week that UW would be sponsoring Teach for America recruits after their 5 week stint of training off-site. The program at UW will be provided to TFA recruits as a one year fast track to certification. These recruits will then be certified and ready to teach our kids. Right. This announcement last week created such a furor at UW that Dr. Stitikus had a forum last Wednesday to meet with students and faculty on this new program. Students could not understand how UW could have two programs side by side, one for TFA recruits for one year and on the other hand offer a Master’s degree in education and then have both candidates on equal footing in terms of who Seattle Public Schools could hire. What a scam. This is truly scamming the system.
Dr. Stitikus did not back down from his decision but he offered a compromise. That’s right, he hadn’t compromised the system enough, he was now going to do major damage to the profession of education through his alternative solution.
He is now offering the graduate degree candidates the alternative of a fast track last year of education by allowing them to go to summer school and therefore be certified by the end of the summer and with that the opportunity to be hired for teaching in the Fall. Talk about a slippery slope. What next Dr. S? Why bother having a school of education at all when a factory will do? Going this route, Dr. Stritikus is pulling the leg out from a proud tradition of teaching professionals in this country. And what does it say about education in general when a dean of a college of education obviously doesn’t really think that education, even of his own students in preparation for their future, is that important?
And another question begs to be asked. What exactly does the PhD that Dr. Stritikus earned at UC Berkeley mean then? If degrees now do not matter, if more education for preparation for your chosen profession does not matter then what is the value of his degrees now? Continuing down that road, one could say that a former CEO of a company could “manage” a school of education or a certification mill rather, just as well as he can. And you know what? That’s exactly what people like Eli Broad of the Broad Foundation and other corporate privateers believe. Dr. Stitikus is now making the case for them and devaluing himself in the process.
Is this what our students deserve? Unprepared teachers with no depth of knowledge on child development or different approaches to education, no tools from which to draw upon?
And who is paying for this $8,000 cost per student to fast track these recruits into our public school system?
This process is not cheap. On top of the salaries that these recruits will receive when teaching, Seattle Public Schools has agreed to pay $4,000 per recruit per year to have the, what “privilege”?, of having these recruits teach our children for two years. Bargain? I think not.
So far “anonymous donors” have offered to pick up the tab for Seattle by way of the Seattle Foundation which receives funding from Bill Gates. Our schools would be so much better off if we could use those funds instead to rehire teachers and counselors who are qualified, have more to offer than “art on a cart” to many of our students, have the funding so that all schools can again have full-time librarians, enrichment programs for all schools and enough money to pay for the millions of dollars in maintenance backlog that has accrued over the years to make our schools safe.
Unless it’s another “anonymous donor” picking up the tab of each recruit to be sent through the UW mill, it will be coming out of our pockets and does that make sense? Does any of this make sense?
As parents, the best action is to speak to your principals and let them know what you think. They will be the people responsible for hiring teachers in you school. The next contact to be made would be to our interim superintendent, Dr. Susan Enfield (206-252-0180), superintendent@seattleschools.org, who sponsored the effort to get TFA, Inc. approved by the school board. She was the Chief Academic Officer at the time and it was under the direction of our former Broad-trained superintendent that she lead the charge but she is now ultimately responsible for allowing TFA, Inc. recruits into the classrooms. Dr. Enfield, if she wants to, could put pressure on the principals to hire TFA, Inc. recruits so your input to her as parents is crucial.
Will Bill Gates ultimately be responsible for dumbing down our educational system with TFA, Inc. as his tool? The irony is that his vision for education in this country is far from the reality of what he is creating and he doesn’t even know it.
Dora
Post Script:
For another viewpoint on preparing teachers, see:
The Service of Democratic Education by Linda Darling-Hammond.
For additional information on Teach for America see:
Teach for America: A False Promise
Teach for America: A Review of the Evidence
Learning from Other People’s Kids: An Important Book on Teach for America
With all of the unnecessary upheaval caused by corporate privateers trying to will the public school system into their own image, it’s easy to lose sight of the good things that are happening in the realm of public education. So today is “Good News Friday”, a positive view at the end of another crazy week.
First good news in Seattle is that Spring is here, finally, and there is nothing like Spring and Summer in the Northwest. It is spectacular and puts all Seattleites in a good mood including me.
Kate Martin
Now, for the news regarding education, first up, we have two official candidates running for school board. Why is that good news? Because they are running against two sitting board members who voted in lockstep with our former Broad-trained superintendent time after time. Unfortunately, logic never prevailed with those two. They had some corporate money behind them in their last races which were the most expensive school board races in history. This time, though, they will not have the people behind them, the rest of us, who they did not represent time after time, vote after vote in every school board meeting, and this time we are organized.
Even better news is that there is a potential candidate surfacing to run against Sundquist in District 2, the west side of Seattle.
Michelle Buetow with her family.
The candidates are Michelle Buetow who is running against Harium Martin-Morris and Kate Martin who is running against Sherry Carr in District 2.
According to the press release:
“Kate Martin would like to see the District do more of what works, less of what doesn’t, and put more of its scarce resources directly in the classrooms rather than layers of administration, excessive high stakes standardized tests and other areas that do not benefit students. She would like to see the District engage proven strategies more and ideological aspirations less. She thinks that all students need and deserve a personal learning plan (Individualized Education Program) and that schools, students and their families need to build stronger relationships in order to collaborate and work from the same playbook to ensure student success. Martin is interested in seeing the City of Seattle and Seattle Public Schools expand their collaborative efforts to make facilities work harder and smarter year-round for the benefit of kids and communities and believes that all children need and deserve Safe Routes to Schools.”
What a refreshing change from what we’ve had in the last three years.
Next up, the Rainier Beach High School Dollars for Scholars winners were announced. According to the press release that I received:
A young man who escaped southern Burma to spend years in a refugee camp in Nepal is completing his high school education in the U.S. and hopes to study computer engineering in college. A young woman whose family struggled with homelessness has resume entries that include a summer law firm internship and meeting with a legislative panel in Washington DC. A talented athlete with plans to study business chooses to take positive lessons from the challenges of childhood years spent in the foster care system. These students are among eleven Rainier Beach High School seniors who will receive a total of $24,000 in scholarships from RBHS Dollars for Scholars this year. All have inspiring stories and all have high hopes for the future. Scholarship recipients will be honored at the Rainier Beach High School Senior Breakfast on Friday June 10th at the high school.
Scholarship recipients are: Ahmed Adan, Taylor Anderson, Patricia Burgess, Michael Lu, Halimo Maie, Mya Yada Nawin, Priame Ndayishimiye, Jeff Perkins, Hari Pokhrel, Khina Poudyel, and Phi Tang
RBHS Dollars for Scholars was founded by Rainier Beach High School alumni in 2003, and is operated and funded by alumni, local community members and a network of supporters from all walks of life. It is a member chapter of Dollars for Scholars®, a program of Scholarship America®, and part of a nationwide network of grassroots community-based, volunteer-driven scholarship foundations.
Recipients of scholarships from RBHS Dollars for Scholars have a high success rate; in a recently completed survey, out of 24 recipients contacted, 3 had graduated and 19 were in school and working toward their degrees.
Now that is great news. Congratulations to the scholarship winners and all of the high school students who will be graduating in the next few weeks. This is truly a time for celebration.
While on the subject of announcements, there will be a teach-in happening tomorrow at Chase Bank at 11:00 AM.
Here is the information:
Join with Seattle Teachers to
Teach CHASE a Lesson
Sponsored by:
Social Equality Educators and
Seattle Education Association, Washington Education Association, SEIU Washington State Council,
WA-CAN, Seattle Chapter Fellowship of Reconciliation, Working Washington,
Washington Education Association, MLK County Jobs with Justice.
Saturday May 21st 11 AM
CHASE Bank, 1919 North 45th Street, Seattle, WA 98103
For more information visit www.seattlesee.org or call 206-851-4963
——————————
“There is a lot of money washing around the world, and obviously we are the beneficiary of that,”
(CHASE CEO Jamie Dimon this April)
RSVP Today!: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=209923749029962
Sponsored by:
Seattle Education Association, Social Equality Educators, SEIU Washington State Council,
WA-CAN, Seattle Chapter Fellowship of Reconciliation, Working Washington,
Washington Education Association, MLK County Jobs with Justice.
Endorsed by: Activists for a Better World, Bring Our Billions Home Campaign – FOR, Community Alliance for Global Justice, El Comité Pro-Reforma Migratoria y Justicia Social, International Socialist Organization, Moveon.org, Poets West, SNOW, USUncut Seattle, Washington Fair Trade Coalition.
Now that sounds like fun.
Final note, in the next few days this website will be going through a remodel. We’re going to go to two columns just to keep up with what is happening and accommodate press releases and contributors who we are adding to our list. As with any change, there will be adjustments made in the next few weeks to the site. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions on additional content or readability of the site, please let me know.
Have a great weekend!
Dora
A state that has found its’ way out of the Race to the Top madness is Montana, see Montana Just Says No to More Testing.
And a governor who is making sense after too many years of corporate rule in California, from Anthony Cody’s column Living in Dialogue.
Dora
California Governor Puts the Testing Juggernaut on Ice
California Governor Jerry Brown has taken a big step towards reducing the testing mania in the nation’s most populous state. Up until his administration we have been on an accelerated path towards the comprehensive data-driven system that test publishers and corporate reformers have convinced leaders is needed to improve schools. But in the May budget outline from Brown’s office, he makes it clear he is putting on the brakes.
From the Thoughts on Public Education blog comes this:
Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing to suspend funding for CALPADS, the state student longitudinal data system, and to stop further planning for CALTIDES, the teacher data base that was to be joined at the hip with CALPADS.
What is even more encouraging is the explanation Brown offers, which shows a great deal of understanding of these issues. The document states:
A number of problems have been identified with California’s state testing, data collection and accountability regime. Testing takes huge amounts of time from classroom instruction. Data collection requirements are cumbersome and do not provide timely – and therefore usable – information back to schools. Teachers are forced to cub their own creativity and engagement with students as they focus on teaching to the test. State and federal administrators continue to centralize teaching authority far from the classroom.
The (Brown) Administration proposes to deal with these issues by carefully reforming testing and accountability requirements to achieve genuine accountability and maximum local autonomy. It will engage teachers, scholars, school administrators and parents to develop proposals to
(1) reduce the amount of time devoted to state testing in schools;
(2) eliminate data collections that do not provide useful information to school administrators, teachers and parents; and
(3) restore power to school administrators, teachers and parents.
The goal is to improve the learning environment in every classroom, thereby encouraging the demanding pursuit of excellence. The May Revision proposes to suspend funding for CALPADS in 2011-12 pending this continued review of data collection requirements.
Praise be!
Jerry Brown is unusual among our nation’s governors. He got a bit more involved than most in on-the-ground school reform while he was serving as mayor of Oakland. He learned the hard way how schools are a reflection of deeper social issues. In a statement he wrote to respond to Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top a year and a half ago, while he was California’s Attorney General, he said:
You assume we know how to “turn around all the struggling low performing schools,” when the real answers may lie outside of school. As Oakland mayor, I directly confronted conditions that hindered education, and that were deeply rooted in the social and economic conditions of the community or were embedded in the particular attitudes and situations of the parents. There is insufficient recognition in the draft regulations that inside and outside of school strategies must be interactive and merged.
Even more revealing was what he wrote about federally-driven education “reform”:
The basic assumption of your draft regulations appears to be that top down, Washington driven standardization is best. This is a “one size fit all” approach that ignores the vast diversity of our federal system and the creativity inherent in local communities. What we have at stake are the impressionable minds of the children of America. You are not collecting data or devising standards for operating machines or establishing a credit score. You are funding teaching interventions or changes to the learning environment that promise to make public education better, i.e. greater mastery of what it takes to become an effective citizen and a productive member of society. In the draft you have circulated, I sense a pervasive technocratic bias and an uncritical faith in the power of social science.
To see the article in full, go to California Governor Puts the Testing Juggernaut on Hold
House Bill 2111 is now in the Senate Ways and Means Committee and will be reviewed today before a vote in the Senate. This is the most critical time to ensure that we don’t go down the path of so many other school districts and follow the models of school turnarounds just to see our schools torn apart and in disarray.
If you haven’t already, please call the Senate leaders and your district’s Senate representative listed below and let them know that firing principals, closing schools or firing half of a school staff is not the answer to providing the best educational experience for our children.
To follow is a previous post regarding House Bill 2111.
Dora
Carlyle, Santos, Pettigrew, et al are trying one more time to push through unproven education reform items by way of House Bill 2111.
First there was House Bill 1443, then Senate Bill 5914 and now this bill.
I am still wondering why how we educate our children should be determined by state or federal legislation, by many people who know nothing about education let alone public education, by politicians who unfortunately for the most part determine their course of voting based on who puts the most money in their pockets.
The course of action that a school district takes should be determined by the immediate members of the community and led by educators and parents, not by politicians. That being said, let’s look at Bill 2111.
First they want to determine what a prototypical school should look like in terms of graduation rates and funding. Prototypical for Seattle or the Tri-Cities? For Tacoma or Walla-Walla? For Garfield High School or our only alternative/option high school in Seattle, Nova High School which is at most half the size of Garfield? Whatever funds are available, they should be provided to the districts and the district should be allowed to determine where the money will go. Considering that graduation rates are usually directly related to poverty rates, it’s obvious where the money should go.
I want to see money going to our schools but let’s do this in a way that is logical and not determined by those who are not in touch with our schools on a daily basis.
But let’s get to the meat of this bill, it is the edicts of Race to the Top but without any funding. These requirements are costly in terms of dollars and disruption and have not worked so far in any other state including Chicago where these ideas were first implemented.
This is the wording of that portion of the bill:
The local district superintendent and local school board of a school district designated as a required action district must submit a required action plan to the state board of education for approval.
A required action plan must include all of the following:
Implementation of one of the four federal intervention models required for the receipt of a federal school improvement grant, for those persistently lowest-achieving schools that the district will be focusing on for required action. However, a district may not establish a charter school under a federal intervention model without express legislative authority. The intervention models are the turnaround, restart, school closure, and transformation models.
In other words, according to the requirements of Race to the Top which is no longer being funded, the intervention models are:
“Turnaround” which means firing half of the school staff and principal and hiring new staff and a principal. In any “low-performing school” I don’t see how that would make a difference. If we instead focus on what the teacher needs and ensuing that our teachers and principals are supported, that the students are ready to learn by supporting the families, then you are addressing the issues. Firing teachers and a well loved principal does nothing but disrupt a community that needs stability more than anything else. A good example of this is what happened in Central Falls last year. And what do you do in less populated communities? Where do you get qualified teaching staff to replace fired teachers? And the answer is not Teach for America recruits.
“Restart” is converting a public school into a charter school.
“School Closure” is self-explanatory and again only causes disruption in communities that need stability. In Seattle we have neighborhood schools and right now in many communities we do not have enough classroom space so this alternative would not work in addition to causing unnecessary upheaval.
“Transformation” is replacing the principal and determining performance of students, and therefore teachers, by test scores.
According to this bill, a district would have to apply for a SIG, School Improvement Grant, or another grant that is not described to pay for any of these actions.
But there’s more. According to this bill:
For any district designated for required action, the parties to any collective bargaining agreement negotiated, renewed, or extended after June 10, 2010, must reopen the agreement, or negotiate an addendum, if needed, to make changes to terms and conditions of employment that are necessary to implement a required action plan.
Renegotiating and more than likely weakening the protections and status of teachers who are a part of a union. What I have found so far with this zeal to break the backs of the unions and therefore the waning middle class in this country, is that if they, corporate interests, can’t get to these workers and professionals one way, they’ll try it any other number of ways.
Until this bill is free of ploys to implement disastrous “transformation models” it should not be passed.
This bill is in front of the Ways and Means Committee today so please contact your representatives and let them know what you think.
Specifically:
Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown:
By Phone:
Olympia Office – (360) 786-7604
Spokane District Office – (509) 456-2760
Legislative Hotline – 1-800-562-6000
By E-Mail: Brown.Lisa@leg.wa.gov
Senator Rosemary Mcauliffe, Chair of the Early Learning & K-12 Education
(360) 786-7600 mcauliffe.rosemary@leg.wa.gov
Senator Maralyn Chase (360) 786-7662 maralyn.chase@leg.wa.gov
Senator Nick Harper (360)786-7674 nick.harper@leg.wa.gov
Senator Adam Kline (360) 787-7688 adam.kline@leg.wa.gov
Senator Sharon Nelson (360) 787-7667 sharon.nelson@leg.wa.gov
An Op-Ed by Guest Contributor Jesse Hagopian:
There is a lot of talk in well-financed education reform circles about “closing the achievement gap” – the difference in academic performance between more affluent white children and underprivileged kids of color. Plagiarizing phrases from the Civil Rights movement, these politically-connected reformers talk of a “revolution” in education accountability and claim to be building a high-stakes testing “movement” to measure the needs of students who have traditionally been left behind. Education Secretary Arne Duncan even referred to the opening of the film Waiting for “Superman”– which advocates charter schools and demonizes teachers’ unions in part for opposing the accountability of testing–as a “Rosa Parks moment.”
Cribbing from these reformers, The Seattle School District, in its most recent contract negotiations with the teacher’s union, the Seattle Education Association, pushed through a provision mandating the rating of teachers based on their students’ test scores.
But can these tests improve learning and teaching?
While there can be no doubt our schools need important changes in order to meet the needs of all children, the truth about standardized tests is that they are a better indicator of a student’s zip code than a student’s aptitude. That’s because the wealthier, and predominately whiter, districts score better on tests. This is not a reflection of the intelligence of wealthier, mostly white students verses that of lower-income students of color, but of the advantages that wealthier children have—books in the home, parents with more time to read to them, private tutoring, access to test-prep agencies, coming to school healthy, well-fed and more focused, to name a few.
For these reasons, the achievement gap is better described as an opportunity gap.
As University of Washington education professor Wayne Au has written, “Looking back to its origins in the eugenics moment, standardized testing provided…ideological cover for the social, economic and education inequalities the test themselves help maintain.”
Standardized testing has from the very beginning been a tool to rank people, not to remove the barriers needed to achieve equality; testing cannot cure education anymore than a thermometer can cure a fever.
Moreover, the recent experience of high-stakes testing in New York City—long considered the national model for improving student achievement by making test scores the cornerstone of school accountability—demonstrates just how broken a thermometer such test scores really are. With the late July release of the state test results for 2010, New York’s claims of making “historic gains” for children came crashing down. Results from the newly adjusted test showed the proficiency rate in English fell from 69 percent last year down to 42 percent, while only 54 percent reached grade level in math, down from 82 percent. These wild fluctuations in scores reveal standardized testing as a profoundly inaccurate measure of student learning.
Still worse is the example of the public schools in Washington, D.C. Under Michele Rhee’s tenure as superintendent school reformers often bragged that her hard-line approach to fighting the teachers’ union, her emphasis on charter schools, and her devotion to standardized testing had raised achievement for the district. That is until USA Today broke the story that a campaign of cheating had taken place where someone–under intense pressure to show Rhee’s tactics were working–erased wrong answers and changed them to correct answers on the Districts standardized test.
Ignoring what today is vast research showing the invalidity of standardized testing as an accurate measure of student learning, the Seattle School District is quickly moving to remake our schools in the image of a production line where simple input-values are used to measure the workers’ (teachers) efficiency at producing commodities (students). Under the former Seattle Schools superintendent, Maria Goodloe-Johnson, the District adopted a test called the Measure of Academic Progress (MAP). After the District’s adoption of the test—with a $4.3 million price tag—it was revealed that Goodloe-Johnson sat on the board of the company that produced the test, a conflict of interest that should disqualify the use of the test in Seattle. Taking a bold step against the MAP test, the Seattle Education Association recently passed the following resolution:
Whereas testing is not the primary purpose of education…Whereas the MAP was brought into Seattle Schools under suspicious circumstances and conflicts of interest…Whereas the SEA has always had the position of calling for funding to go to classroom and student needs first…Be it Resolved that…the MAP test should be scrapped and/or phased out and the resources saved be returned to the classroom.
Teachers, parents, and students know a holistic education includes teaching children creativity, civic courage, leadership, teamwork and social responsibility—skills that can’t be neatly quantified by standardized tests and will cease to be taught if educators’ jobs are tied to high-stakes tests. Moreover, in this era of economic recession and ongoing war, it would seem all the more urgent to develop students who can think beyond filling-in-the-bubble to come up with innovative ideas to big societal problems.
As teachers, union members, parents and civil rights advocates we offer an opposing plan to provide a quality education for all and to close the opportunity gap: fully fund and equalize school resources, reinstate the recently abolished “Department of Race and Equity” to help ensure culturally relevant pedagogy and assessment, lower class size to provide the individualized attention that students deserve, and support the most effective form of assessment that has yet to be devised—one that can adjust to every child, evaluate results quickly, and make appropriate changes in instruction—the human educator.
The mantle of the Civil Rights movement does not belong to those who propose relegating students and teachers to the back of the education system with unscientific, curriculum narrowing tests, but rather to those who refuse to give up their position at the front of the struggle to eliminate the inequities that result in achievement disparities.
——-
- Jesse Hagopian teaches at Garfield High School and is a founding member of the Social Equality Educators, a group of progressive union teachers in the Seattle Public School district. Hagopian will be joining a panel of social justice education advocates for the forum:
“Achievement Gap or Opportunity Gap: Fighting Racism in the Public Schools”
Thursday, May, 19th, 2011—7:00 pm
Mt. Zion Baptist Church
1634 19th Ave.
Seattle, WA 98122
Featuring: James Bible, president of the King Co. NAACP
Wayne Au, editor of Rethinking Schools
Olga Addae, President of the Seattle Education Association
Dora Taylor, Parents Across America, Founding Member
Check out the Facebook page, Acheivement Gap or Opportunity Gap? Fighting Racism in Public Schools.
Posted in D.C., Dr. Goodloe-Johnson: Poster Child for the Broad, Education Reform and Race, MAP, Race to the Top, Teachers and Teaching, Testing
Tagged Dr. Goodloe-Johnson: Poster Child for the Broad, education reform, High Stakes Testing, MAP Test, Michelle Rhee, Race to the Top, Seattle Education Association, Seattle Public Schools, Wayne Au
