tultican

D.C. Schools: A Portrait of “Corporate Education Reform” Failure

By T. Ultican 10/21/2015

This summer the National Academy of Sciences produced a lengthy report for the city of Washington D.C. documenting the effects of their 2007 Public Education Reform Amendment Act (PERAA).[1] It describes a system that has adopted the “corporate education reform” approach to improving public education. The report is a powerful set of data and observations that damn this genre of reform.

What is “Corporate Education Reform”?

In 1995, Louis Gerstner, CEO of IBM, attended the National Governor’s Association meeting and made an impassioned speech about the crisis in education and the critical and immediate need for national standards in education. As Mercedes Schneider explained in her book Common Core Dilemma, this was not a well timed call to arms. Liz Chaney had just finished destroying Bill Clinton’s national history standards, which made the subject of national education standards radioactive.

Gerstner wasn’t deterred. He hosted the 1996 National Governor’s Association conference at the IBM conference facility in Palisades, New York. This conference with the exception of 1 Asian man was an all white, all male conference made up of 49 CEO’s and 40 governors.[2] There were no educators involved.

The main outcome of this conference was the Governors established their own non-profit and non-governmental corporation called Achieve Inc. Achieve was tasked with promoting and writing national education standards. Gerstner was named Achieve’s chairman. Achieve Inc. subsequently supervised the writing of both the Common Core State Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards. While Bill Gates’ Council of Chief State School Officers owns the copyright for Common Core, Louis Gerstner’s Achieve Inc. owns the copyright for the Next Generation Science Standards. In Dilemma, Mercedes Schneider summed it up, “No need to meaningfully involve teachers in changes that Achieve, Inc. had already decided needed to be instituted.”[3]

Former Assistant Secretary of Education, Diane Ravitch, is the first person I noticed calling this education reform movement led by super-wealthy business men with no education experience or training “corporate education reform.” It seems an appropriate appellation and as the D.C. schools report shows it is also misguided and damaging.

Key tenants of “corporate education” reform are: (1) Eliminate direct democracy (no elected school boards) (2) Evaluate teachers based on value added measures derived from standardized testing (3) privatize public education by promoting the charter school movement (4) make teaching a non-professional endeavor (5) use testing data to label public schools in poor and minority neighborhoods failures (6) use draconian turn-around models which require firing all the administration and at least 50% of a school’s staff (7) replace “failed” public schools with charter schools (8) destroy teachers unions and blame teachers and their unions for “failing” schools (9) promote standards based education and testing (10) apply merit pay schemes. This list could easily be extended.

Eliminate Local Control and Privatize

In 1995 and 1996, Bill Clinton in concert with Newt Gingrich and the Republican controlled house established charter schools in Washington D. C. and undermined the power of the elected school board. Of course the excuse was “failing” schools but that was not true. The schools might have needed some improved professional leadership, but it was the communities that were failing not the schools.

It is like the educator and commentator from Pennsylvania, Steven Singer, writes:

“Poverty is skyrocketing. It’s been on the rise for at least three decades, but since the economy collapsed in 2008, the ranks of the poor have swollen like an untreated wound left to fester and rot. …Claiming that education alone can resolve this problem is like saying all a starving person really needs is a fork and spoon. But that won’t help if he has nothing to eat!”

It is true poverty damaged students are not performing well on standards based tests, however, the Science Academy report shows that white students in the more affluent neighborhoods of D.C. are scoring above the national average. Schools in failing neighborhoods are being blamed for the fact that 73 percent of the students in D.C. live in unsafe impoverished neighborhoods.

This chart from the report shows the attack on democratic processes in D.C. from finally getting democratic control over their schools in 1968 to complete loss of parental control with the passage of Public Education Reform Amendment Act. D.C. joined the other “corporate reform” cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles and New York in establishing the mayor as czar of education significantly diminishing the effect parents and teachers have on education policy.

By 1995, D.C. schools were charging down the path of “corporate education reform” when Bill Clinton signed the D.C. school reform act introducing charter schools and establishing the charter school board. The growth of charter school privatization movement is startling with charter schools enrolling nearly 50% of D.C. students in 2015. From the report:

“… by 2014, the percentage was 44 percent. PCSB [Public Charter School Board] reports that there are approximately 100 individual charter schools, governed by 61 chartering organizations, which function as school districts, or local education agencies (LEAs). D.C. has one of the largest percentages of a city’s students enrolled in charters nationwide, and D.C. is viewed as a leader by proponents of charter schools.” Pg 31

With almost 50% of the D.C. students in charter schools governance in certain aspect of education is not possible. Originally, charter schools were supposed to be laboratories that were freed from the more stringent rules for public schools so they could try new ideas. However, when 50% of the students are in charter schools, parents, educators and administrators have no way of monitoring education practices or spending. D.C. functionally has 62 school districts. One for all the public schools and one for each of the 61 charter school management organizations that operate in private. As the report says:

“There are no standardized formats or definitions in charter schools’ budgets or audits, though the PCSB [Public Charter School Board] is making progress in this area. The adequacy study also commented on the difficulty of ascertaining charter facility costs. In addition, the charter management organizations’ accounts are not open to the public, and there have been cases of mismanagement.” (Page 72)

“Because each charter school is an independent local education agency, the charter sector did not (and does not) have any overarching strategy to improve teacher quality (or any other factor in education).” (Page 79)

This lack of accountability is costing the public schools money and at the same time there is no way to know how the charter schools are spending money especially when it comes to special education and second language learners. The structure of education in D.C. is failing special education students. From the report:

“In another DCPS [D.C. Public Schools] official’s view, the problem is that a charter school will receive all the required supplementary special education funds for a student while DCPS is still expected to provide supplements that a student requires, such as dedicated aides or home or hospital services. This official also noted that DCPS has no authority to address problems in charter schools: it can only report noncompliance to PCSB [Public Charter Schools Board] and to OSSE [Office of the State Superintendant of Education].” (Page 129)

“The U.S. Department of Education has recently reported that that D.C. is among the worst school systems in the nation in providing appropriate educational opportunities for students with disabilities, and it has the worst record of any state in the country for meeting federal special education goals.” (Page 131)

“Another city official we interviewed commented that “there is no monitoring arm for how LEAs [Local Education Agencies] serve the ELL [English Language Learners] population.” For example, this person noted, the city provides $4,200 in funds in addition to the $11,000 allocated under the uniform per student funding formula (an additional $6,000 is provided for each special education student), but there is no structure for monitoring what LEAs [Local Education Agency] do with these funds or determining whether they are addressing students’ basic needs. At the same time, charter schools have no consistent source of technical assistance or other resources, such as professional development, to help ensure that they are providing what English-language learners need. As a city official noted, “there is no way for people to know if they are doing it right.”’ (Page 133)

One of the largest problems created by the lack of cohesiveness between the charter schools and the public schools system is that students are being lost. These lost students become what Dr. Mark Naison has labeled “the Disposables.” Dr. Naison writes:

“They are the more than 90 million Americans of working age who are not in the labor force and do not have regular jobs.

“They are the millions of teenagers who dropped out or were pushed out of school in cities like Detroit and Memphis and New Orleans and Los Angeles and Chicago and have disappeared from view because the divisions between charter schools and public schools have made it impossible to develop a coherent strategy to make sure no child is lost.”

The report notes the D.C. schools have a “crisis in absenteeism” and a terrible graduation rate.

“D.C.’s public schools have had among the worst on-time graduation rates in the country. For the class of 2014, the overall rate was 61 percent, compared with the national average of 81 percent (Chandler, 2014d). For DCPS schools, the graduation rate was 58 percent—up 2 percentage points from the previous year; for the charter schools, it was 69 percent—down almost 7 points.” (Page 154)

“Nationally, for 2012-2013, the overall rate increased from 78 to 81 percent; for blacks it increased from 66 to 68 percent, and for Hispanic students it increased from 71 to 76 percent.” (Page 189)

The report also contained this nugget suggesting that charter school gains in test performance over time do not match public schools.

“The EDCORE analyses by sector also showed that, although both DCPS [D.C. Public Schools] and charter students showed improvement, the magnitude of the gains were higher for DCPS students in every year.” (Page 177)

Mayoral Control and VAM Evaluation

A central tenant of “corporate education reform” is to limit democratic processes by ending elected local school boards. Democracy is always more difficult to administer than authoritarian control from a centralized power like a mayor. Of course this means that parents and teachers will not have much of a voice (if any) in how their local school; is run, what it teaches or what its policies are. In 2007, the city of Washington D.C. completed its embrace of “corporate education reform” when the Mayor Renty assumed total control of all public schools. The report observes:

“The specific strategies that Fenty and the chancellor he appointed, Michelle Rhee, chose were prominent on the national reform agenda: an emphasis on improving human capital using recruitment, evaluation, and compensation of educators; data-driven decision making; more uniform standards across schools; and greater school-level accountability through the use of student testing and other indicators.” (Page 40)

Fenty chose a person with five weeks of Teach for America training and three years’ experience teaching first grade to be chancellor. It was an odd choice, but she was connected to the lawyer, Joel Klein, who Michael Bloomberg had selected to run New York’s schools. Mayoral control seems to always value political considerations over professional competence when selecting public school leaders. For example, in Chicago, Daly chose Duncan and in Los Angeles, Villaraigosa chose Deasy; neither man had significant professional credentials or experience in education.

The agenda chosen was straight out of the “corporate education reform” playbook. They blamed teachers and principals for poor testing and graduation results, they instituted teacher evaluations base in large part on growth models known as value added measures and they introduced merit pay for teachers and principals. Survival in the Rhee-Fenty schools would depend foremost on high stakes testing.

Education reporter, John Merrow, summed up Rhee’s tenure of just over three years running D.C.’s schools:

“Ms. Rhee made her school principals sign written guarantees of test score increases. It was “Produce or Else” for teachers too. In her new system, up to 50% of a teacher’s rating was based on test scores, allowing her to fire teachers who didn’t measure up, regardless of tenure. To date, nearly 600 teachers have been fired, most because of poor performance ratings. She also cut freely elsewhere–closing more than two-dozen schools and firing 15% of her central office staff and 90 principals.”

“For teachers, DCPS has become a revolving door. Half of all newly hired teachers (both rookies and experienced teachers) leave within two years; by contrast, the national average is understood to be between three and five years. Veterans haven’t stuck around either. After just two years of Rhee’s reforms, 33% of all teachers on the payroll departed; after 4 years, 52% left.”

For more than 100 years, political leaders have every few years proposed merit pay as a way to motivate good performance. This idea does not have a great track record in most industries, because it undermines unity of purpose. In education, it has been a total failure laced with fraud, but this does not stop “corporate education reformers” from insisting on merit pay. Rhee’s merit pay scheme, which pays bonuses of up to $25,000, led to a cheating scandal. Merrow’s report continued:

“Some of the bloom came off the rose in March 2011 when USA Today reported on a rash of ‘wrong-to-right’ erasures on standardized tests and the Chancellor’s reluctance to investigate. With subsequent tightened test security, Rhee’s dramatic test scores gains have all but disappeared. Consider Aiton Elementary: The year before Ms. Rhee arrived, 18% of Aiton students scored proficient in math and 31% in reading. Scores soared to nearly 60% on her watch, but by 2012 both reading and math scores had plunged more than 40 percentile points.”

After two decades of adopting the “corporate education reform” agenda, the D.C. schools are damaged. Curriculum has been narrowed by hyper-focus on high stakes testing, which only accurately identifies economic conditions in the neighborhood. With just 25% of students attending their local community school and many community schools closed these once pillars of community support have been toppled. Parents have no effective place to bring grievances and experienced professional educators have been pushed out in favor of new hires, many of whom are unqualified Teach for America replacements on temporary contracts.

All this disruption and still the outcomes from the D.C. schools are some of the worst in the nation. They still have an attendance crisis and a graduation crisis. Their scores on NAEP [National Assessment of Education Progress] testing is still at the bottom of the nation. The problem is not the schools or even the misguided “corporate education reform.” The problem is rampant and unaddressed poverty in the neighborhoods of our nation’s capital. The problem has never been our public schools; it has always been poverty.

“National Research Council. (2015). An Evaluation of the Public Schools of the District of Columbia: Reform in a Changing Landscape. Committee for the Five-Year (2009-2013) Summative Evaluation of the District of Columbia’s Public Schools. Board on Testing and Assessment, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press.”
Schneider, Mercedes. Common Core Dilemma “Who Owns Our Schools?” Teacher’s College Press, New York and London, ©2015 by Teacher’s College, Columbia University.
Ibid.

Tags: Bill Gate, Bloomberg, CCSS, Charter schools, Corporate Education Reform, English Language Learners, School Closing, Standardized Testing, Standards Based Education

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Categories Corporate Education Reform

Lily’s Betrayal Letter

5 Oct

Yesterday was the worst of days and best of days. In the morning as usual I checked email and social media and there was Steven Singer’s post, “Teachers Told They’re Endorsing Hillary Clinton by NEA Leadership. Membership Opinions Unnecessary.” When I finished his post I saw my friend Paula Meyers had posted the Seattle area justice fighter, Susan Dufresne’s graphic #NEADoesntSpeak4Me; that caught my emotion exactly. With this in mind, I went to the Kearny Mesa Buddhist Center for World Peace Prayer. In the afternoon, things seemed improved; the San Diego Chargers won an exciting game over the Cleveland Browns.

Then I got an email message from Lily Eskelsen-Garcia, president of the NEA. Lily has been a great disappointment to me. It is not her fault. It’s mine. I believed she was a breath of fresh air who rose to the leadership of the NEA by merit and was willing to speak truth to power. Fooled again! Then this April in Chicago she stood on stage and lied to us. She pledged to no longer take money from Bill Gates but her fingers were crossed. Now, she employed power politics to get Hilary Clinton the NEA endorsement; personal power and influence have trumped democracy, public education and the teaching profession. I will attempt to analyze her message.

“My fellow educators,
I wanted to be the first to let you know that your elected representatives to the NEA PAC Council and the NEA Board of Directors took action to recommend Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary for President of the United States. I am so proud of the thoughtful, thorough and incredibly rich discussion that your elected leaders held. It was truly what democracy looks like.”

Balderdash! I live in California, my elected representatives didn’t even vote. We have the largest delegation in the United States.
I heard that you argued against those who said there is no reason to give our endorsement this early, saying we would lose political clout if we don’t. It is also said that you felt that Bernie Sanders would never be able to mount a credible winning general election effort.

“I am also extremely proud of this decision because I know that Hillary is a strong leader who will do what’s best for the future of all of America’s students and public schools.”

Anthony Cody is correct, clear and succinct on this point: “The current field of candidates in the Democratic party is limited to Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Clinton has a close association with the Gates Foundation, which has been a major donor to the Clinton Foundation. Clinton has made it clear that she is a solid supporter of the Common Core and believes that such a testing system ‘helps you organize your whole education system.’ So if we want a change from the nation’s current trajectory in education, we need to look elsewhere.”

It is beyond my most optimistic reach to see Hilary Clinton as being more than marginally different than Barack Obama when it comes to education policy. There is a reason that Marc Tucker wrote the infamous ‘Hilary Letter’ to her. He saw a like-minded individual that would support the tenets for education reform that Diane Ravitch later labeled “corporate education reform.” This is education reform that views students as economic assets to be cultivated for the benefit of the state.

“After an extensive review of the candidates and an in-depth discussion, your leaders saw what I know – Hillary Clinton will be a champion for students and educator in the White House. She has a 30 year history of standing up for students and strong public schools and has actively engaged in conversations with educators in this campaign. Secretary Clinton told your leaders today that she won’t make a single decision about developing education policy without educators being in the room.”

This is complete prevarication. She has a close supportive relationship with both Bill Gates and Eli Broad. She was billed as co-President by her husband when he signed legislation taking power from Washington DC’s school board and authorizing charter schools. It was from that administration that we got “Goals 2000” and its call for national standards and testing. She voted for “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB). That is not a 30-year history of standing up for students and strong public schools. And her friends from her days as a member of the Board of Directors at Walmart have to be counted among the nations biggest enemies of public schools.

“As a U.S. Senator, Hillary Clinton was a champion for our cause, earning an “A” grade from the NEA for her support on the issues most important to our students, but even before serving in the Senate, Clinton was a champion of the students we educate. While every first lady has an admirable cause, Hillary chose to stand up to the for-profit healthcare industry to advocate for children’s healthcare. Her campaign ultimately led to the largest expansion of public health care in decades, when millions of American children received health coverage under the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).”

Clinton voted for the punitive anti-teacher NCLB in 2001. This March, Edweek reported: “And earlier this year, the American Federation of Teachers, which endorsed Clinton in her 2008 race, and the Center for American Progress, a think tank closely aligned with the Obama administration that also includes some former Clinton aides among its top ranks, came out with a proposal to test students every year, but only use the results for school accountability in certain grade spans.” So, did she get that NEA “A” grade for supporting testing or was it her work on health care?

“Even before running for president, Hillary championed early education and affordable college, and she sponsored efforts to ensure equal pay for equal work and to make it easier for workers to join a union.”

This sounds like pretty much what all Democrats say they stand for and it is hard to see how this makes her so much better than other Democrats vying for the nomination. Why didn’t the NEA keep its powder dry and see who was willing to save public education form greed driven reform? Get some real and substantial commitments? It appears that this endorsement is more about currying favor for national union leaders with the Clinton’s than it is about fighting for teachers and public education.

“And in 2016, the stakes for strong public schools will be too high to sit on the sidelines! Right now, there are presidential hopefuls who have made a career of attacking educators and public education to the detriment of students. They have allies like the Koch brothers, who have committed to spend $1 billion to defeat a pro-public education candidate like Hillary Clinton and taking control of the White House.

“With so much at stake, you cannot sit on the sidelines – America’s students need you today! And that is why I am asking you to join our campaign stand up for our students and make sure that we give all students the opportunity to a quality education.”

Yes, it is true that a lot of money is being spent to destroy public education in America. Unfortunately, a lot of that money is from people like the hedge fund fake democrats at the Democrats for Education Reform who support Hilary. There is nothing here that says she is clearly the champion for public education that we must support. She looks a lot more like a corporate education reformer who will continue the disastrous Obama agenda.

“Together, we can help elect Hillary Clinton as our next president and ensure that every child has the opportunity to succeed.
Gracias,
– Lily
Lily Eskelsen Garcia
National Education Association President”

Lily, you need to rethink your course. You are a smart beautiful spokesperson for the NEA. You are dumping that great opportunity to make a real difference and playing value degrading power politics that has eliminated the democratic process in our union to get this endorsement. Two other major unions – the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees – have indicated that they will take more time to consult their members about an endorsement in the primary.

Tags: Bill Gate, common core, Corporate Education Reform, Democratic Party, Eli Broad, Hilary Clinton, Lily Esckelsen-Garcia, NEA, Standardized Testing

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Categories Corporate Education Reform

Standardized Control

24 Sep

By Thomas Ultican 9/24/2015

“He had been educated only in that innocent and ineffectual way in which the Catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree of trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man but kept a child.” [1] Henry David Thoreau’s description of his visitor at Walden’s pond seems a likely description of the result of standards based education and testing. Known derisively as “test and punish” education, standards based education is a behaviorist theory. This is a philosophy that is antithetical to human growth and development; to the development of capable actors in a democratic society.

Education is a social science. Societies are so complex that cause and effect relationships are obscured. Therefore, education theories are not provable in the same way as physics theories. Our beliefs about education are necessarily driven more by philosophy than experimental result. Of course skilled social scientists observe pedagogy in action and share their observations, but it’s still only good guidance and not a proven principle like buoyancy.

During graduate school at UCSD, my chemistry buddy and I would marvel at the kind of weak evidence that was offered as proof for education theories. In my previous career, I had seen theories with substantial evidence supporting them – obliterated. There used to be a theory that the paramagnetic limit for the amount of information that could be magnetically stored was 20 gigabits in a square inch. I was on a team that demonstrated 78 gigabits in a square inch. That breakthrough has led to today’s cheap terabyte hard-drives and the abandonment of a popular theory. In social science, theories are never so clearly defeated.

Today, education is rife with unproven assertions which are often not tested at all. Such as: standards based education is good, a national curriculum is needed, common core standards are internationally bench-marked, college and career readiness standards must be implemented, international testing is producing important data proving the failure of US schools, standards based testing is meaningful, teacher evaluations should include value added measures, no-excuses charter schools are good pedagogy, public schools are failing, private business can do education better and cheaper, teachers and their unions are the biggest obstacles to improved education. The list of assertions without proof in education is seemingly endless.

It is how we think about human value that is the prism by which we must construct our education programs. Last year, two German writers, Sija Graupe and Jochen Krautz, wrote an article about the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) “From Yardstick to Hegemony.” They tell us that “ the OECD which – as initiator of the PISA assessment process – has since the 1960s and on its own account “become central, providing indicators of educational performance that not only evaluate but also help shape public policy.”

Gaupe and Krautz make their point through quoting OECD documents:

“The OECD program has declared war on the established plurality of educational goals and discourses (which have consistently reflected and renewed these goals) in order to replace it with a single novel concept: ‘Schools should lay the very foundation for the attitudes, desires and expectations motivating a nation to pursue progress and to think and act economically.’

“The OECD Conference documentation of 1961 declares unequivocally: ‘It goes without saying that the educational system must be an aggregate of the economy, it is just as necessary to prepare people for the economy as real assets and machines. The educational system is now equal to highways, steel works and chemical fertilizers”. Thus the claim can be made “without blushing and with good economic conscience that the accumulation of intellectual capital is comparable to the accumulation of real capital – and in the long range may outmatch it.'”

The OECD has it philosophically backward and that leads directly to behaviorism and dehumanized education. The OECD views citizens as state assets instead of seeing the state as existing for the benefit of its citizens. From Yardstick to Hegemony contains this clear analysis of the situation:

“The environment to which pupils and students are to adapt is not the economy of real experience but rather a mere ideal concept generated by mainstream economists, particularly those of the Chicago School of Economics who, in their pursuit of ‘economic imperialism’, have applied it to education: Its concept of a market is a purely abstract super-conscious price and coordination mechanism according to which all human activity must be aligned. What this unrealistic worldview setting in turn impedes is any critique or will to change because rather than being understood by the public as a theoretical construct it is, according to the neoliberal economist August Hayek, accepted by most as an immediately evident truth. Whether they are true or false, economic theories and all assessments based on these (such as PISA) determine reality. Those who choose criteria as a yardstick for everything else establish an arbitrary point of standardization where verification need not be feared. These ungrounded criteria then become – untested and without further thought – the defining norm for all further actions. As long as people believe having more PISA points is better than less in order to be successful economically they will, of course, do everything they can to acquire more. Education is then forced to uncritically yield to the pressure of comparative assessment, even if it is based on pure assertion.”

In 1891, the National Education Association met in Toronto, Canada. It was at this meeting that James H. Baker’s committee made its report on the need for standardizing education. It’s a natural tendency that as a movement matures people will appear who want to standardize it. The main argument for needed standardization was the difficulty high schools were having creating classes that prepared students for entry requirements at Universities because the requirements were so varied. The Baker Committee report led to the establishment of the Committee of Ten and the first curricular standards in the United States in 1894.

I wanted to read the Baker Report myself and while looking for it I found a wonderful essay called “The School of the Future” by Francis W. Parker from the Cook County Normal School, Chicago, Illinois. He was writing about the common school movement (page 82):

“It was the inspired conviction of our forefathers that common education is as essential to democratic government and growth as air is to life. Our forefathers had an inspiration and a belief; they had no prescribed plan, or no precedent for that plan. They did not have the least conception of the mighty growth of the seed which they planted.

“The common school furnishes the essential principles in the development and perpetuation of a democracy, and its growth and progress has been purely democratic; it has been and is, “of the people, for the people, and by the people.” The common school had its birth in the New England school district; and the New England school district with the town is the root from which sprung all the democratic forms of government which have developed in our country. In a word, the spirit and nourishment of the common-school system has always depended, and depends today, entirely upon the will of the majority. State and national officials are given little more than advisory influences.

“There has been no active attempt at centralization. It is exceedingly difficult for our foreign friends and critics to understand our so-called school system. They are accustomed to look upon public schools from the standpoint of centralization, which produces uniformity, conformity and evenness, so that the endless variety, the total lack of uniformity, the innumerable differences which our schools present, is to them almost incomprehensible.

“Each and every school district has a pronounced individuality. Every state and stage of progress, from the early nebulous formative period to the highest products of Oswego and Bridgewater, may now be found in adjoining districts.

“The soul seeking peace and comfort under the dominance and permanence of fixed ideals shrinks with dismay from the inevitable blunders, stupidity, ignorance and calamities that invariably accompany all democratic growth. The short road of centralization seems to reach in a day that which takes years to accomplish under the patient waiting for that slow dawning of intelligence which leads to right action on the part of democratic communities.

“Our foreign critics mistake variety and honest individual striving for chaos. That which has its birth in the desires and intelligences of the people, and is applied by the will of the people, becomes an organic, permanent factor in the progress of civilization of that people. It is rooted and grounded upon the people-‘Vox populi. Vox dei.’ But that which is imposed upon a people by any authority below heaven breaks into atoms when the intelligence and power of a people can reach and control it.

“Centralized power may be a necessity for infancy, but manhood sheds it off for the strong wings of freedom.”

The renowned historian, Arnold Toynbee established criteria for judging whether a civilization was in a stage of growth or decline. He wrote:

“We must ask whether, as we look back over the ground we have traversed, we can discern any master tendency at work, and we do in fact unmistakably decry a tendency towards standardization and uniformity: a tendency which is correlative and opposite of the tendency towards differentiation and diversity which we have found to be the mark of the growth stage of civilizations.”[2]

I believe there is a superior way. Both John Dewey and the Japanese educator Tsunesaburo Makiguchi counseled against standardized education. Dewey stated “Imposing an alleged uniform general method upon everybody breeds mediocrity in all but the very exceptional.”[3] And Makiguchi theorized that “Education integrated into the life of society will yield benefits of well-planned living, without the undesirable effect of mechanical uniformity an inherent danger in standardized education.”[4]

In 1894, when the Committee of Ten was doing its work, very few teachers were well educated. Many only had high school diplomas. It is understandable that education leaders felt the need to provide teachers with detailed curricular guidance. Today that is not the case.

Salesmen trying to advance their charter schools might claim that they are innovative but they are not. The no-excuses charter schools are little more than behaviorist test preparation institutions. It is regressive education that borders on child abuse. The charter school movement which was originally viewed as an innovation incubator, but it has devolved into a blatant scheme to enhance corporate profits at the expense of tax payers.

There is an alternative. In 2015, there is scarcely a school district that does not have multiple professionals in education with doctorates and masters degrees on staff. Our public schools are perfectly positioned to lead American education to new heights and they do not need imposed standards. We have the intellectual and human resources needed for unlimited advancement, but they are being stymied by politicians and billionaire dilettantes that have no understanding of what good education is.

Stop all this imposing standards and testing baloney and allow our highly educated, dedicated and skillful national teaching corps to once again dazzle the world. Preserve our amazing public education system and protect it from voracious profiteers and their schemes to steal public funding for education.

Thoreau Henry David, Walden, Thomas Y. Crowell Company (Apollo Edition, 1966) © 1961. Page 196
Arnold Toynbee (DC Somervell), “A study of History” abridgement Volume 1 – VI, Oxford University Press, 1946, page 555
Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan, 1916. Page 203
Ikeda, Daisaku. Soka Education. Santa Monica, California: Middleway Press. 2001 Page 18

Tags: behaviorism, Charter schools, common core, Corporate Education Reform, education, education entrepreneurs, Education Reform, High Stakes Testing, Standardized Testing, Standards, Standards Based Education

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Categories Standards

Lunch with Larry

6 Sep

I recently wrote an open message to my congressman, Scott Peters, urging him to reject the proposed rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. In it I said, “When fads like “new math”, “phonics only” or “whole word” came along, they infected many jurisdictions but not a majority of the country. As their weaknesses manifested, these fads were abandoned before serious damage occurred.” Federally centered power would end that protection from bad policy. After reading this post, Professor Larry Lawrence invited me to lunch to discuss “new math.”

I met Larry briefly in Chicago at the April NPE conference. I knew he lived in Carlsbad, California less than 30 miles north of my San Diego home. I was intrigued by his proposal to get together and discuss the “Zen of teaching math.” So I agreed to meet him at a spot between our homes.

Larry has been called a “consummate teacher of math” and has a significant pedigree. After graduating from Morningside High School in Inglewood, California, Larry did his undergraduate work at Occidental College where he was a classmate of star quarterback, Jack Kemp. Barack Obama also attended Occidental. When finished there, Larry went on to Columbia University’s Teacher’s College pursuing a Masters degree.

It was at Columbia that Larry was introduced to a more profound grasp of the principles of mathematics and how students can successfully develop mathematical thinking. In 1958, almost 30 years before California’s 1985 adoption of “teaching for understanding” also referred to as “new math”, Larry was learning from the movement’s fathers. (1)

Referring to the 1985 adoption of “teaching for understanding” Elizabeth Green tells us in her book Building A+ Better Teacher, “… the California teachers were struggling to understand students’ ideas, figure out what the students needed to know, and then use that information to respond.” (2) Larry and I agreed that this was the essential weakness with “teaching for understand” – the elementary school teachers did not have the training to do it.

On day one of his first math class at Columbia (Advance Algebra), the teacher gave an instruction for an assignment that stumped Larry. He went throughout the dorm asking everyone he could find to explain to him what “one to one correspondence” meant. No one knew! In 1958, few people apprehended the fundamental principles of mathematics.

Larry also brought along a prompt from his professor. I have shared the setup here:

Arithmetic by mail: Stan Brown had a pen pal, Al Moore, who lived in Alaska. Stan and Al corresponded quite frequently. Stan liked to receive letters from Al because he wrote about interesting things like hunting and fishing and prospecting for gold. Al enjoyed hearing about the things Stan did, especially about school, for Al had had very little opportunity to attend school. One day, Al wrote to ask if Stan would mind teaching him some arithmetic. Stan agreed but decided he needed to know how much Al already knew. So, in his next letter to Al he included a simple test, and asked Al to write in the answers and to return the test to him. Al sent the test back immediately; he said it was very easy and asked Stan to send some harder questions next time.

Take 2 away from 21. 1

What is half of 3? ͻ

Add 5 to 7. 57

Does 2 x 4 ½ equal 9? No

Which is larger, .000065 or .25? .000065

How many times does 3 go into 8? Twice

How many times does 9 go into 99? Twice

Which is larger, 3 or 23? 23

What is a number smaller than 4? 4 (written smaller)

What is a number larger than 4? 4 (written larger)

Some of Al’s reasoning follows.

Anyone can see that 3 goes into 8 twice, and pretty neatly too, without any 2 left over. You put 3 into 8 the regular way and then you turn another 3 around and put it in on the other side of the 8.

In question 4, you don’t even need a ruler to tell that 2 x 4 ½ is different from 9.

In question 8, 23 is larger than 3 because 23 already has a 3 in it and a 2 added on in front.

Larry was an early adopter of “new math” when in 1959 he returned to Morningside High School to teach mathematics. Since taking that decision, he has dedicated his life to improving education in California. In the early 1960’s, Larry may have been the first California teacher to teach calculus in high school.

His career includes a stint at UCLA working in the lab school then known as Seeds. In 1975, he received his doctorate from UCLA and went on to work as director of curriculum for the Turlock School District. He also served as the principal of an elementary school in Upland California. In 1982, he returned to UCLA to again work in the lab school training elementary school teachers how to teach mathematics.

Larry’s story is also the story of education reform gone wrong. There are many Larry Lawrence’s out there who have dedicated their lives to understanding teaching and learning. They are a treasure. They have both theoretical knowledge and practical experience, but as Elizabeth Green reports (and then praises) people like Doug Lemov and Stacy Boyd purposefully shunned people like Larry when they formulated their “no excuses” charter school movement and embraced pedagogy spiced with “disruption.”

Larry told me that in 1993 he got involved with developing a charter school. The lab school at UCLA was having a difficult time surviving and they decided to become a charter. In retrospect, Larry says that was a mistake because on the whole, charters are damaging the public education system. Whether they are good or bad, “charters harm public education.”

It was a wonderful lunch at a second floor corner table overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The drive from La Jolla along old highway 101 to the Ki restaurant in Cardiff by the Sea is among the most breathtakingly beautiful drives in America. The restaurant Larry chose had a wide variety of; wraps, smoothies, tofu dishes and teas. The staff knew Larry by name. I had the cheeseburger.

Green, Elizabeth. Building A+ Better Teacher, W.W. Norton & Company New York and London, ©2014 by Elizabeth Green – page 102
Ibid. page 105

Tags: Charter schools, Corporate Education Reform, education, education entrepreneurs, Elemetary Education, ESEA

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Categories Corporate Education Reform, School Experiences

Response to Dianne Feinstein

23 Aug

Senator Feinstein, I am responding to you via open letter to address not just you but as many leaders as possible about education policy in America. At the outset, I want you to know that I have admired you since those horrible days when Dan White killed Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone and you were called upon to lead a wounded city. This message is not an attack on you, but rather, it is an attempt to educate about a harmful and widely held misconception regarding education testing.

In the message to me you wrote:

“I recognize that standardized tests have clear limitations and are not a cure-all for our nation’s education challenges; however, I also believe testing is an important tool for measuring student and school performance in order to ensure that every child receives a quality education. Standardized testing makes it possible for parents to see the progress their child is making and teachers to know when to correct course in their instruction.”

Now, I realize that this view, though unsupportable, is and has been for some time the belief of a majority of politicians and education bureaucrats in our nation’s capital. In the past, I did not appreciate how deeply this idea had permeated political thought. It therefore left me completely confused about why both Republican and Democratic leaders abandoned their own principles when it came to education.

I wondered, “Why have Democrats adopted test and punish policies that have clearly become a key tool for destroying public schools? Why have people like Barack Obama advocated charter schools that are little more than publicly financed private schools with little accountability? Why do Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton all seem to believe that a massive testing program will protect schools in poor and minority neighborhoods?”

On the other side of the isle, it is just as strange. Since the days of Abraham Lincoln, Republicans have stood for individual rights and local control but for two decades they have authored laws transferring control of education from local communities to the federal government. George H. W. Bush signed legislation that promoted federal involvement in local schools and his son sponsored, as his signature achievement, the “No Child Left Behind” law that gave control of school policy to the federal government.

Why is Jeb Bush such a long time and until recently vocal proponent of federal standards of education (the poorly written common core and next generation science standards)? Why did Orin Hatch vote against the Murphy opt-out amendment to the “Every Child Achieves Act?” Why was even Ronald Regan’s secretary of education, Terrell Bell, an early leader promoting the federalization of public education?

A very witty blogger named Peter Greene posted a comment about the recent education policy debate by Republican presidential candidates:

“GOP pols have the message– local control is great and the American Way and they totally support it except when they have to take it away from places that suck. Parents should be free to choose from an assortment of great schools, or at least from the assortment of charter schools that we say they should have. And parents who want to exert local control by keeping their community school intact (like, say, the hunger strikers of Chicago or the protesters of Newark)– well, they can’t have it.”

I started to wonder if our entire political class had become completely corrupted by money and power. Fortunately, that did not really make sense to me. I now believe I have plumbed the essence of the dilemma. Our political leaders do not understand the limitations of testing and especially standardized testing. The truth is that standardized testing is incapable of evaluating teacher or school quality, but there is a widely held belief it can.

A book written in 1999 by the education writer Alfie Kohn points directly at the disconnection:

“… it is an open secret among educators that much of what the scores are indicating is just the socioeconomic status of the students who take them. One educator suggests we should save everyone a lot of time and money by eliminating standardized tests, since we could get the same results by asking a single question ‘How much money does your mom make?’”[1]

That is the point. Standardized testing has a tremendous correlation to the economic conditions of the neighborhood in which the students live. This is the only variable that does have a high correlation with testing results. The environmental component of test results is so strong that it completely masks inputs like quality of teaching or quality of school. For the past more than a decade we have been mistakenly destroying great schools in poor communities based on a widely held misunderstanding of what the data means.

The famed education measurement expert, Gene V Glass, announced this month that he is no longer working in education measurement, because of its misuse. He asserted:

“The degrading of public education has involved impugning its effectiveness, cutting its budget, and busting its unions. Educational measurement has been the perfect tool for accomplishing all three: cheap and scientific looking.”

Last spring I heard Professor Yong Zhao speak. In his often humorous remarks he said that American students have never compared well on international testing. He then said, “The real question is why America is still here?” This instigated much laughter. The point is that standardized testing could not elucidate the greatness of America’s schools.

Here are a couple quotes from Professor Zhao’s latest book:

“’Out of the one billion people who have been educated in Mainland China since 1949, there have been no Nobel prize winner,’ Zheng wrote in an article. ‘This forcefully testifies [to] the power of education in destroying creativity on behalf of the [Chinese] society.’”

“The only way China will win the global competition of the future is for the West to begin educating the way China does.” [2]

I realize that when the federal government spends large sums of money there must be some form of accountability. Standardized testing has no real benefit to schools and misleads governance. It does not provide meaningful feedback to parents or teachers and it does serious harm to the classroom by narrowing curriculum and encouraging drill and skill pedagogy.

It is a mistake for congress to make specifics of education policy such as requiring standards and testing, the tool of accountability. I can think of three requirements that congress could make of states receiving title I funding that would significantly improve schools:

All teachers must be fully certificated for the course they teach. (Professionalism is important for success in the classroom.)
No classes can have more the thirty-two students. (Class size is very important especially in communities suffering the ravages of poverty and these are the very communities title I is designed to support.)
All schools must successfully win accreditation by their regional accrediting association. (As I have written about this in other posts, this is real accountability by professional educators looking deeply into school function and giving important feedback.)

As we know, the “Every Child Achieves Act” (S. 1177) to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (Public Law 107-110) passed the Senate and will be conferenced with the House reauthorization bill, the “Student Success Act” (H.R. 5). Both laws enshrine federal requirements for standards, testing and remediation of schools that are judged failures by this regime. Therefore, I urge you to stop this bill until the profoundly damaging and wasteful testing requirements are removed. Please protect public education from circling vultures.

Tags: CCSS, Charter schools, common core, education, ESEA, Every Child Achieves Act, High Stakes Testing, NGSS, Students Success Act

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Categories Law

New ESEA Continues “Reign of Error”

16 Aug

In September both the house and senate versions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) are scheduled for a conference committee. Since 1965, title I of this law has provided money to schools with children living in poverty. That provision is beneficial, but it has unfortunately become the lever that congress uses to wrestle control of schools away from local communities and parents. Both proposed versions of this rewrite do exactly that.

The new ESEA should be blown up in conference and any legislator who supports the federalization of public schools should be thrown from office.

Many people I agree with most of the time say about the new ESEA proposal, “It is not perfect but it is an improvement over NCLB and it limits the power of the secretary of education.” That is all true but the proposed law still arrogates unwarranted power to the federal government; putting curricular choice and education theory in the hands of politicians and their patrons.

We already have a generation of teachers that have never seen education without standards and what Peter Greene calls the “Big Test.” This legislation ordering testing and standards will continue the real damage being done to our schools and children.

My title that says the new ESEA continues the “Reign of Error” is a tip of the hat to Diane Ravitch’s latest book. In her book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Diane recounts her journey from being an architect of standards based education and accountability as Assistant Secretary of Education in the George H. W. Bush administration to her present strong opposition to these ideas.

Diane tells of reviewing 20 years of work materials and coming to a new understanding. On page 13, she says:

“Before long, I found that I was reverting to my once familiar pattern as a friend and supporter of public education. Over time, my doubts about accountability and choice deepened as I saw the negative consequences of their implementation.”

Now, Diane’s old boss, former Secretary of Education, Lamar Alexander, is the chairman of the senate education committee. He is still very much enamored with standards and accountability. His version of the new ESEA states the purpose of title I:

“The purpose of this title is to ensure that all children have a fair, equitable, and significant opportunity to receive a high-quality education that prepares them for postsecondary education or the workforce, without the need for postsecondary remediation, and to close educational achievement gaps.”

Sounds wonderful but then the senators threaten to take away all federal money to schools with children at or below the poverty line unless they adopt the senate’s edicts on education. The house does the same.

Since more than 20% of children in the US live at or below the federal guidelines for poverty, state education budgets will be devastated if they do not comply with federal authority. States became dependent on these monies when it was originally offered in 1965 without the federal mandates about how to teach, what to teach and how to evaluate teaching.

The meat of federal control in the senate version of the new ESEA starts in section 1111. Here, senators transform local school boards into tax collectors who enact authoritarian mandates from federal and state bureaucrats. Parents and educators no longer have significant input into their own school’s policies.

From the senate bill:

Section 1111 paragraph “(B) describes how the State will implement evidence-based strategies for improving student achievement under this title and disseminate that information to local educational agencies.”
…
“(1) CHALLENGING STATE ACADEMIC STANDARDS.—

(A) IN GENERAL.—Each State shall provide an assurance that the State has adopted challenging academic content standards and aligned academic achievement standards (referred to in this Act as ‘challenging State academic standards’), which achievement standards shall include not less than 3 levels of achievement, that will be used by the State, its local educational agencies, and its schools to carry out this part. A State shall not be required to submit such challenging State academic standards to the Secretary.
…
(C) SUBJECTS.—The State shall have such standards in mathematics, reading or language arts, and science, and any other subjects as determined by the State, which shall include the same knowledge, skills, and levels of achievement expected of all public school students in the State.”
…

“(2) ACADEMIC ASSESSMENTS.—

(A) IN GENERAL.—Each State plan shall demonstrate that the State educational agency, in consultation with local educational agencies, has implemented a set of high-quality statewide academic assessments that—
(i) includes, at a minimum, academic statewide assessments in mathematics, reading or language arts, and science; and”

This language that mandates standardized education held accountable by testing goes on for many pages. Then section 1114 describes mandated intervention strategies for schools that do poorly on the “Big Test.”

The ESEA rewrite in both houses of congress orders a behaviorist approach to education driven by the terrible pedagogical theory known as standards based education. It is a mechanized approach. The problem is that young humans are not mechanisms.

Even if standards were to be adopted they should be adopted by the local communities not amateur educators serving in the United States congress who have the power to impose their will on local communities that they have never seen.

Federal control of schools by forced testing is based on the belief that the “Big Test” accurately identifies learning or teaching. It absolutely does no such thing. The “Big Test” does reflect the condition of the neighborhood from which a school’s students are drawn; however, these conditions completely mask any test derived information about the quality of the school or its teachers.

Jessica Holloway-Libell and Audrey Amrein-Beardsley released a meta-study this July which cites overwhelming evidence that schemes like Value Added Measures (VAM) are completely unsupported by research. It is the latest paper in a long string of papers that show that evaluating schools and teachers by standards based testing is folly. It does not give any information about the quality of education. The “Big Test” is USELESS as a tool to evaluate teacher or school performance.

I recently wrote a response to my congressman, Scott Peters about his involvement in the house version of the ESEA rewrite. I wrote:

“The best school accountability is performed by regional accrediting agencies which send in teams of current educators who spend a week or more evaluating each school. They interview; administrators, teachers, students, non-certified staff and parents. They visit every class room and analyze all school documents including action plans. Finally they give useful feedback with a clear idea of what they expect in the way of improvement going forward.”

The path of success in American education which has led to our great democratic social success and world leadership in: science, mathematics, literature, the arts and economics is local control. If education theories are good they will propagate. If they are bogus theories like accountability and standards which have never been adopted without coercion, they will die a natural death.

Authoritarian models always fail because they eventually adopt bogus theories by compulsion. The US congress cannot succeed as school board of America. Reject the new ESEA and its unwise usurpation of local school governance.

Tags: behaviorism, ESEA, Every Child Achieves Act, High Stakes Testing, Standardized Testing, Standards Based Education, Students Success Act

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Categories Law, Standards

No to the ESEA Re-authorization

3 Aug

By T. Ultican 8/3/2015

Whether it is the senate’s “Every Child Achieves Act” or the house’s “Students Success Act”, local control of schools is being dangerously arrogated to the federal government. The United States Congress has lost its way. They are turning local school boards into powerless tax collecting agencies that implement authoritarian mandates.

Many people that I admire say the Senate bill is an improvement over NCLB (the 2001 re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)). Saying we will never get perfect; they council embracing the improvement. These new re-authorization bills do limit the power of the Secretary of Education, but both versions continue grabbing power away from communities and assigning it to federal bureaucracies. I say it would be wiser to live with the clearly flawed NCLB and work for a better law next year than accepting 5 years of mandated bad education theory and extreme testing.

Historically, it has been difficult to institute quick national change in education. That is how American public education achieved a greatness that is envied worldwide. It was only by their own volition that local educators adopted policies and those policies became widely implemented by dint of classroom testing and approval. Education policy was informed by the wisdom of the national education community. Harmful policies were identified and shunned.

When fads like “new math”, “phonics only” or “whole word” came along, they infected many jurisdictions but not a majority of the country. As their weaknesses manifested and were identified, these fads were abandoned or the remediated before serious damage occurred.

The latest fad is standards based education and assessment. Even though graduates of American education have dominated academia, the arts and the sciences for the past century, there exists a constant constituency favoring a more behaviorist philosophy of pedagogy i.e. standards and testing. Business leaders are particularly enamored with behaviorism and the odd idea that schools should be run like businesses.

Standards based education is seductive to the uninformed. Its associated drill and skill pedagogy to ready students for high stakes testing is widely embraced by those who have no practical knowledge of good pedagogy. Although this education ideology has existed for centuries, it never appealed widely enough to spread across America. That only changed when federal lawmakers realized they could use the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act to exert federal control over local schools.

In 1978, Congressman Ronald Mottl D-Ohio 23 who trained in law at Notre Dame introduce a bill promoting education standards. It was the first time a bill was proposed that amended ESEA to promote a particular theory of education. Mottl’s bill went nowhere like bill (H.R.371) introduced the next year by his colleague who also had no education background, Tennyson Guyer R-Ohio 4.

In 1983, Ronald Regan’s Secretary of Education, Ted Bell went rogue and established a blue ribbon committee consisting of primarily business executives to report on education. They produced the infamous “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform”. It was a polemic that was neither factually nor pedagogically well founded. Serious academic research has consistently shown this non-peer reviewed writing to be a misguided amateurish analysis of a national strength. It was an ill-conceived politicization of public education and it opened the door for today’s federal takeover of education.

The Department of Education under Secretary of Education, Lamar Alexander, was very pro-standards and testing. They facilitated a growing momentum for standards based education inside the beltway. In 1991, President George H. W. Bush signed into law the first bill providing federal money to research and promote standards. This amendment to ESEA was called the Education Council Act of 1991 and was sponsored by Senator Jeff Bingaman D-NM.

Within a week of her husband Bill being elected President in 1992, Hillary Clinton received a screed of social engineering from Marc Tucker known as the “Hillary Letter.” Republican Congressman Bob Schafer from Colorado was so disturbed by the contents of this letter that he had it read into the congressional record. The federalization of public education was a central thesis of the eighteen page letter.

Among Tucker’s proposals was:

“Clear national standards of performance in general education (the knowledge and skills that everyone is expected to hold in common) are set to the level of the best achieving nations in the world for students of 16, and public schools are expected to bring all but the most severely handicapped up to that standard. Students get a certificate when they meet this standard, allowing them to go on to the next stage of their education. Though the standards are set to international benchmarks, they are distinctly American, reflecting our needs and values.”

Two years later, Bill Clinton signed the 1994 re-authorization of ESEA that required states receiving title-I money to develop education standards and standards based testing. This became the legal push and financial incentive for states to develop high school exit exams. When Liz Chaney loudly objected to proposed history standards, Clinton retreated from his all out push for standards.

By 2001, there was a substantial bipartisan agreement that the federal government should be in charge of education and furthermore, standards and high stakes testing were the path to education nirvana. Senator Ted Kennedy, Congressman George Miller D-California 11, and George H. W. Bush finalized the federal take-over of education with NCLB.

Maybe I am wrong and the politicians are right. Maybe John Dewey did not know what he was talking about when it came to effective education and we should ignore his warning against standards based education.[1] Maybe the great Japanese education thinker, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi was completely misguided when he warned about the deleterious effects of mechanized education and testing hell.[2] On the other hand, why don’t we test these ideas contradicting the pedagogy of beltway politicians and bureaucrats in the American way? Let local school districts, teachers and parents decide which philosophy of education is best for their communities.

1) Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan, 1916. Page 203
2) Bethel, Dayle M. Makiguchi – The Value Creator. New York: Weatherhill, 1973

Tags: education, Education Reform, ESEA, Every Child Achieves Act, High Stakes Testing, Standardized Testing, Standards, Standards Based Education, Students Success Act

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Categories Law, Standards

A Response to Congressman Peters

11 Jul

I received a reply from Congressman Peters (D-California 52) this April to my message against HR-5, “The Student Success Act.” The Congressman made several assertions concerning education that I discuss here in an open response.

Opening assertions by Congressman Peters:

“In an increasingly global economy, it is critical that we make educational investments that put our students in a position to compete with the rest of the world. For years, the United States has trailed countries like China and India not only in education investments, but also in student achievement. When crafting education bills, Congress should be sure that it is taking steps to close that gap, rather than broadening it.”

This paragraph states several widely held false beliefs. First of all the United States out spends India and China on education combined. According to the worldbank and a Chinese government data report for 2012, India spent less than 4% of GDP ($2.1 trillion) or about $80 Billion; China spent 4.2% of GDP ($10.36 trillion) or about $430 Billion; and the US spent more than 5% of GDP ($17.42 trillion) or about $800 Billion on education. Our education spending almost doubles India and China’s combined spending and per child we spend many times more than either country.

Student achievement measures depend upon what you want. If the goal is creative students who can innovate and lead happy lives then our system is clearly out producing India and China. One measuring stick might be Nobel Prize winners since 1949: America had 313 laureates; India 7; and China 8. Of the 8 Chinese, the Dalai Lama and Liu Xiaobo who won peace prizes both are considered criminals – Xiaobo is still in a Chinese prison; four are scientists who earned their degrees in the United States or Great Britain; and only the two literature recipients were educated in China. To recap, since 1949 two international and widely recognized citations for Chinese educated students compared to 313 such citations from our world’s best American education system.

It is common for business and political leaders to believe that standardized tests like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) that is promoted by the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation are reliable indicators of school quality and student achievement. For several reasons they are not. Walter Hahn from the University of Utah recently returned to Europe to investigate the changes in education since he left. He reports that about age eleven most students are tracked into either a university path or various non-university paths. Testing of the non-university track students is not typical. Same is true in Asia. We test everyone. Researchers also point to many other problems with international testing.

It is true that US students have never been top scorers on international testing, but large segments of our students are very competitive. However, focus on testing leads to bad pedagogy. Professor Yong Zhao of the University of Oregon has written extensively about the problem with hyper-focus on testing in China. He reports that the Chinese government has been trying since the 1970’s to reform its test focused education system. However, because of the culture steeped in millennia of testing is so ingrained, Chinese parents insure test preparation. It is normal in China to put children in test preparation private academies after school and on weekends.

Some of my colleagues have been paid to go to China and demonstrate teaching while Chinese delegations searching for education improvement have visited and observed at my high school, Mar Vista High School. They do not care that our federal government labels my school as “failing.” No one in China thinks they have a great education system. Professor Zhao recently wrote, “The only way China will win the global competition of the future is for the West to begin doing education the way China does.”[1]

Standards based testing is misleading. Professor Haladyna and associates conducted a highly regarded study that shows as soon as high stakes are tied to these tests, their validity is undermined. When institutions, teachers and students gain experience with high stakes tests they find ways to focus primarily on test preparation. I was even taught by a consultant at a teacher training, “if it is not on the test, it is a waste of time to teach it.”

Another example of how high stakes undermine test results is the SAT. For three decades, SAT scores have gone up, an industry has emerged to prepare students for the tests and the predictability of future success based on test results has gotten worse. The data is quite clear that high school grades with all their flaws are much more predictive of future collegiate success than SAT test results.

Your colleague Congresswomen, Susan Davis (D-California 53), asked me “how can schools be held accountable without testing?” This indicates a belief that standardized testing is a valid measure of school or teacher quality. Today, few people outside of the testing industry believe that to be the case. When No Child Left Behind (NCLB) forced high stakes testing on the nation, it did not enforce school accountability. Ironically, based on testing results, public schools were blamed for the result of poverty by the political and businessmen who were actually responsible. Kind of anti-accountability don’t you think?

To Congresswomen Davis’ question, the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) testing because it does not have high stakes attached is a reliable metric. The best school accountability is performed by regional accrediting agencies which send in teams of current educators who spend a week or more evaluating each school. They interview; administrators, teachers, students, non-certified staff and parents. They visit every class room and analyze all school documents including action plans. Finally they give useful feedback with a clear idea of what they expect in the way of improvement going forward.

I bring all this up because the re-write of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) has been revived. Thank you for voting against the Student Success Act this July 8. I am hoping if the Orwellian named Senate version “Every Child Achieves Act” ever comes to conference you can help improve this law.

Poverty is clearly the over arching problem in education. We have great public schools with the most educated work force American education has ever witnessed, but we have out of control child poverty and it shows up as the key driver in every statistic. Here is some data from the department of education:

In 2013, approximately 21 percent of school-age children were in families living in poverty, an increase of 4% since 1990. But that poverty is much more damaging to certain ethnicities and as this table reveals it is reflected in testing results.
Ethnicity                               White          Asian         Black         Hispanic
Living in Poverty                   13%             13%          39%            32%
NAEP 8th Grade Math           294            306           263            272
NAEP 8th Grade Reading      276             280            250            255

Pretty much all of the schools that were labeled as “failing schools” by NCLB and slated for closure or “turnaround” were in high poverty areas; while no schools in upper middle class neighborhoods were touched. Having worked in both kinds of schools, I can assure you the teaching in the wealthier neighborhoods in California is not significantly better than the teaching in poorer ones. Teachers talk disparagingly about being punished for working in the wrong zip code.

STEAM initiatives and federal test and punish programs will not solve the achievement gaps among schools as long as pervasive poverty is allowed to persist. Sending education dollars to charter schools that now have a known history of disruptive financial failure and fraud will only hurt America’s students. Please get the federal government out of the business of running schools. Give the schools back to local control. NCLB was a huge mistake and we need a course correction.

In 1910, Commissioner of Education Elmer Ellsworth Brown wrote about the genius of the American system of education:

“Our educational organization answering as it does to our federal plan of government presents peculiar advantages as regards the making of a varied flexible yet inherently unified system of instruction. It is an organization not readily understood by foreigners. It offers many obstacles to the carrying out of any plans for rapid and uniform improvement. Yet the self governing character of its several members is of itself an incalculable advantage. Whatever unity is attained must be an inner unity an agreement through conviction.”

The hugely successful public education system in America has always come from the people of their own volition adopting the education ideas that best fit their own community. Soviet style command and control education undermines the great crucible of democracy that is public education and dooms the creative American spirit. Please end the disastrous experiment in federal control of education.

Tags: Charter schools, Corporate Education Reform, education, education entrepreneurs, High Stakes Testing, School Closing, schools, Standardized Testing, testing

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Categories Justice, Law

Trekkie Standards for Science – The Standards

3 Jul

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are awful. Do not adopt these standards. Corporate “Mad Men” gave them a name conjuring up the heroic images of Gene Rodenberry’s science fiction television series “Star Trek the Next Generation,” but they are really solely about pecuniary interests and power. If your state did adopt them reverse that disastrous course immediately. These misguided science standards are the pinnacle of “corporate education reform” whose theories of pedagogy are informed by profit incentive and theories of disruption.

The worst part about these standards is that they are not the real standards. The real standards are going to be written by testing corporations when they create the summative assessments for “accountability.” The NGSS are the universe of standards from which the subset of tested real standards will be taken. Once school leaders and teachers know the tested standards that will determine their future and the survival of their schools, they will focus on them like a cat after a bird.

Paul Bruno a middle school science teacher critiqued the NGSS for EdSource in April 2013 when the final draft was released. He wrote, “The most immediately striking weakness of these new science standards is that they are difficult to read. Indeed, the standards are so difficult to decipher that at various times the drafters have released a 2 ½ minute instructional video and a 5-page set of written directions to aid in interpreting them.”

This point keeps being reinforced. On June 25, 2015 NGSS released another “evidence statement” which notes “The evidence statements are intended to identify clear, measurable components that, if met, fully satisfy each performance expectation (PE) described within the NGSS.”

In Bruno’s 2013 article he makes other cogent points about the weaknesses in the NGSS; writing:

“In reality, a student’s ability to engage successfully in a ‘science practice’ is likely to depend first and foremost on his related scientific knowledge. So while the NGSS suggest that a third grader should be able to ‘use evidence to support an explanation,’ his skill with that ‘scientific practice’ will depend mostly on his knowledge of the phenomenon he is trying to explain. A family background in gardening may allow him to proficiently marshal evidence to support an explanation about plant growth, but he may nevertheless be unable to generate well-supported explanations about electronic circuits.”

The NGSS is a new theory of science education. It divides all of science into 13 core ideas which are all addressed in grade spans; kindergarten – 2nd grade, 3rd grade – 5th grade, 6th grade – 8th grade and high school. The same core ideas are repeated at each grade span.

To Bruno’s point, each disciplinary core idea (DCI) is associated with “scientific practices” and “crosscutting concepts.” Skills are emphasized over knowledge with the inherent view that the skills will easily transfer between core ideas. This is probably wrong and of course it has never been piloted because in the Procrustean world of “corporate education reform” speed is of the essence and if a few eggs are broken so be it.

In January, 2015, Peter Bishop, physics and math teacher extraordinaire, studied the NGSS over winter break. He came to our AP physics teachers meeting with some observations and concerns. Like any Annapolis man who served as an officer in the US Navy, Peter looked unflinchingly at what we are facing and identified some issues that we should address.
He spotted this in NGSS Appendix D:

“…Successful application of science and engineering practices (e.g., constructing explanations engaging in argument from evidence) and understanding of how crosscutting concepts (e.g., patterns ,structure and function) play out across a range of disciplinary core ideas (e.g., structure and properties of matter, earth materials and systems) will demand increased cognitive expectations of all students. Making such connections has typically been expected only of “advanced,” “gifted,” or “honors” students The NGSS are intended to provide a foundation for all students, including those who can and should surpass the NGSS performance expectations. At the same time, the NGSS make it clear that these increased expectations apply to those students who have traditionally struggled to demonstrate mastery even in the previous generation of less cognitively demanding standards…”

Peter’s response to this:

“How will this affect our instruction? In the statewide 2013 CST report, 40% of Algebra students were Far Below or Below Basic. Only 16% of the Physics students fell in these categories. The numbers are similar for Chemistry (21%) and Bio (18%). If we can take performance in Algebra as a reasonable metric to predict performance in science courses which require mastery of basic Algebra skills we can expect a dramatic increase in low scoring students.”

The design of NGSS is to start the standards with kindergarten students and the next year’s standards build on to the previous year’s development. By 6th grade students are supposed to: model the hydrologic cycle, report on global warming and other issues, understand the kinetic theory of temperature, work with theories of entropy, understand kinetic energy, and more. Even if the apparent belief that the rate of human development can be altered by these awesome standards is true, high school students for nearly a decade will not have the prerequisites to succeed. Today’s students are set up to fail just like the common core has set up math and English students to fail.

There are other voices across America speaking harshly about this new theory of science education. Heather Mac-Donald writing for the National Review said:

“Those standards, developed by educrats and science administrators, and likely to be adopted initially by up to two dozen states, put the study of global warming and other ways that humans are destroying life as we know it at the very core of science education.

“The New York Times reports that the standards’ authors anticipate the possible elimination of traditional classes such as biology and chemistry from high school in favor of a more ‘holistic’ approach. This contempt for traditional disciplines has already polluted college education, but it could do far more damage in high school.”

In the spirit of Lynn Chaney, Heather seems to detect a liberal college professor type conspiracy in the standards. I always find this stuff entertaining but I do see her point about citizens losing any influence over what is taught in local schools.

Doctor Stephen Uzzo from New York is concerned with the statements in NGSS. He says:

“They make sweeping and overreaching statements like: ‘scientific knowledge assumes an order and consistency in natural systems (3-PS2-b)’ When we know that emergent systems abound in nature (we have an exhibit on this upstairs), and making believe nature is consistent and orderly ignores much of 20th century science, never mind 21st. Anyone who watches the weather report knows this is just incorrect.”

Doctor Jenifer Helms from Arkansas really does not like the NGSS:

“These new standards leave a great deal to be desired, and by that, I mean that they are abysmal. I have read the entire 103-page document; and then I compared the NGSS K-12 standards with the current Arkansas Frameworks standards that can be found here. What I discovered was not just disappointing, it was disturbing.”

Trying to write education standards is probably a little like picking color choices for repainting a condominium project. No matter what, there are going to be complaints. However, In this case, it seems that the desire for dictatorial control over education is a much bigger driver than the perceived need for national science standards.

The major attempt to establish national standards in 1894 has had a profound effect on education in America and it would be hard to argue that was not positive. In the 20th century, the American public education system produced more Nobel Prize winners than any other system in the world. The United States which was viewed as a second tier power when the century began rose to dominate the world militarily, monetarily and culturally. So, maybe there is a lesson here.

In the development of standards in 1894, the call for standards was almost exclusively from professional educators and all 110 people involved in writing the standards were professional educators. There was little political and almost no financial support for the adoption of these standards and there was no high stakes testing for accountability. These standards were more or less embraced across the country based on their merit. They were education suggestions from respected educators and were embraced by each locale according their own needs.

In the introductory remarks for the Report of the Commissioner of Education, Department of the Interior, Washington, October 1, 1910, Commissioner Elmer Ellsworth Brown beautifully states the genius of the American education organization.

By contrast the NGSS were totally the product of power politics and political influence. These standards should more correctly be called the IBM standards. In 1995 the CEO of IBM, Louis Gerstner, spoke to the National Governors Association (NGA) on the urgent need for standards in education now. Lynn Chaney had torpedoed Bill Clinton’s nascent standards drive the year before, so it was unrealistic to expect immediate movement toward national standards. (1)

The following year Gerstner hosted the NGA at the IBM conference facility in Palisades, New York. At this 1996 conference, a new non-profit organization was started by the governors and CEO’s in attendance called Achieve, Inc. (2) According to Achieve’s 990 tax forms, Louis Gerstner was either chairman of the board of Achieve or emeritus chairman from its inception until the NGSS standards were finished in 2013. Achieve has copyright ownership of NGSS.

The NGSS website says the developmental work on these standards would not have been possible without the support of: The Carnegie Foundation of New York, The GE Foundation, The Noyce Foundation, The Cisco Foundation and DuPont. According to the science framework, Carnegie Foundation gave Achieve Inc. a contract to manage the development of the NGSS, but who actually wrote these standards?

I call NGSS the pinnacle of “Corporate Education Reform.” They learned from the CCSS fiasco. The web site lists 26 states and 40 individuals as writing the standards. Instead of being written in secret by testing company employees, the 36 education professionals and four corporate scientists who are credited with writing the standards are featured. But who really put this airplane built by committee together. Could it be Sue Pimantel a CCSS lead writer? The 2011 and 2012 Forms 990 for Achieve Inc. show Pimantel received $333,791 for consulting services, but they do not advertise her involvement on the NGSS site.

Like the CCSS the NGSS is an untested new theory of education being foisted on communities throughout America by un-American means. These were not great ideas that attained “an agreement through conviction.” There is nothing about this heavy handed corporate intrusion into the life of American communities that promises greater good. It is harmful, disruptive and expensive. I know my school district would have never adopted this of its own volition.

1) Schneider, Mercedes K. Common Core Dilemma, Teacher College Press New York and London, 2015
2) Ibid.

Tags: CCSS, Corporate Education Reform, Education Reform, Louis Gerstner, NGSS, Science Standards, Standardized Education

Comments 10 Comments
Categories Corporate Education Reform, Standards

Common Core Dilemma is the Bomb

23 Jun

Mercedes Schneider’s new book is “evidence based” and damning. She concludes with “CCSS [Common Core State Standards] cannot work.” And “It is destined for the education reform trash heap, just like the punitive, test-driven No Child Left Behind (NCLB) from which it emerged.”

In Common Core Dilemma, Schneider shows herself to be a masterful researcher and clear thinker. She takes on the daunting task of making this Machiavellian episode concise, engaging and understandable. She triumphs.

If you never heard of the common core or “corporate education reform”, this book will be a difficult but necessary read and there is no choice but to educate yourself. If on the other hand you have been immersed in this issue since 2009, Common Core Dilemma will confirm your worst suspicions and demonstrate that you might have been naïve but certainly not cynical.

The opening chapters document the roots of CCSS sewed within Bill Clinton’s goals 2000 and the creation of the non-profit Achieve Inc. by the National Governors’ Association (NGA). Achieve became the corporate vehicle for producing the “state led” CCSS and goals 2000 accelerated the quest for national education standards.

Louis Gerstner, IBM CEO, is identified as the “godfather” of Achieve. As the keynote speaker for the NGA conference in 1995 Gerstner stated three urgent education goals for 1996: (1) high national academic standards with accountability, (2) the standards must happen NOW, and (3) don’t be sidetracked by academicians. Louis was well positioned to shape education policy; not only had he been to school, he had hired people who had been to school. In 1996, the governors of NGA held their Education Summit at Gerstner’s IBM conference facility in Palisades, New York.

As I read this documented history, I started wondering if Bill Gates’ personal competition with IBM and Gerstner had something to do with his decision to become an education “reformer”?

Ironically, the National Governors Association created their own non-governmental non-profit or was it really Gerstner who started Achieve? In any case the organization that wrote the CCSS was the creation of 40 governors and 49 corporate executives at the 1996 IBM meeting. No practicing educators were involved. No wonder Diane Ravitch calls this “corporate education reform.”

Mercedes sums up the attitude, “No need to meaningfully involve teachers in changes that Achieve, Inc. had already decided needed to be instituted.” After all we were warned by Gerstner, “Don’t be sidetracked by academicians.”

The precursor to CCSS, American Diploma Project (ADP), is explained. In her description, Schneider details the three principal organizations involved, Ed Trust (Kati Haycock), Fordham Foundation/Institute (Checker Finn) and Achieve Inc. These three non-profits garnered huge corporate largess while developing and promoting ADP. Schneider notes that during the ADP standards development when Achieve defined American education as failing; Achieve was repudiating its own claims of success two years earlier.

The story of how Achieve’s 2008 paper “Out of Many, One” became the central document for selling CCSS illustrates clearly that CCSS certainly was not a state led effort. It was the effort of incorporated non-profits financed by other corporations and corporate executives.

An intriguing set of relationships appear in the story of David Coleman and his Student Achievement Partners (SAP). Coleman is known as the lead writer of CCSS. It was he and the President of Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), Gene Wilhoit, who went to Seattle and convinced Bill Gates to finance the development of CCSS.

The “reformer” relationships are surprisingly intertwined. David Coleman had a previous lucrative business deal with Chicago Public Schools through his startup company Grow Network. CEO Arne Duncan gave him a $2.2 million non-compete contract to analyze testing data in 2002 and renewed it in 2003 for $2.1 million. Coleman and his partner Jason Zimba sold Grow Network to McGraw-Hill and started Student Achievement Partners (SAP) in 2007.

The lead writers of CCSS were David Coleman, Jason Zimba and Susan Pimentel all from SAP. The rest of the original 24 writers were from Achieve, College Board and ACT. Today, Coleman is President of College Board and the man who helped him sell CCSS to Gates, Gene Wilhoit, has left CCSSO and taken the lead at SAP.

The only person amongst the original group of 24 people who wrote the CCSS that had any classroom teaching experience at all appears to be Zimba. He taught physics at Bennington College for a short duration. And strangely enough the president of Bennington College while he worked there was David Coleman’s mother, Elizabeth Coleman.

Bill Gates the billionaire who dropped out of Harvard only to become the richest man in the world by means that are not entirely above scrutiny, paid for both the writing of CCSS and for insuring they get good publicity. The insane amounts of money Gates doled out to organizations that supported his education ideas such as “without measurement, there is no pressure for improvement” is thoroughly documented and explained.

Gate basically became the de facto national school superintendent or secretary of education only more powerful. It is estimated that the spending on CCSS by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation may run into the billions of dollars. It is a complete distortion of the democratic process and has led to bad and wasteful policies. Policies like mandating a nationwide change to a new pedagogy that has never been tested and demanding that all schools across America abandon their current curriculum and develop a new one immediately with no transition time.

An enlightening chapter explains the amazing CCSS Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) which was signed by 46 governors and theirs state school chiefs before the CCSS were ever written, thus locking them in to the “voluntary” standards. It explains how it came about, the implications and the need for the lock-in.

The final few chapters deal with the enormous amounts of money mega-corporations like Pearson are planning to make from CCSS. It appears the real reason all the states had to have a standardized education is to pave the way for mega-corporations to dominate the education testing and publishing industry. It allowed them to take their products to “scale” where smaller local companies could never compete. As Mercedes points out “the goal of CCSS is not excellence. It is standardization.”

Common Core Dilemma is definitely a book that anyone trying to defend public education from privatization and profiteering should have in their library. For the uninitiated to the corporate takeover of public schools it will be more than an eye opener. Finally, it’s an informational text so David Colman would surly approve of it for your high school students to read.

Tags: Bill Gate, CCSS, common core, Corporate Education Reform, David Coleman, Duncan, education

Comments 4 Comments
Categories Corporate Education Reform, Standards

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