Bernie Sanders: Standardized tests have failed America's students

Bernie Sanders: Standardized tests have failed America's students

Bernie Sanders: America must end high-stakes testing, finally invest in public education
Across the country, teachers, parents and students are pushing back against an ineffective and punitive standardized tests regime. I stand with them.

Wednesday marks 18 years since the signing into law of No Child Left Behind, one of the worst pieces of legislation in our nation’s history. In December 2001, I voted against NCLB because it was as clear to me then, as it is now, that so-called school choice and high-stakes standardized testing would not improve our schools or enhance our children’s ability to learn. We do not need an education system in which kids are simply taught to take tests. We need a system in which kids learn and grow in a holistic manner. 

Under NCLB, standardized tests were utilized to hold public schools and teachers “accountable” for student outcomes. As a result, some schools that underperformed were closed and their teachers and unions blamed. 

The long-term effects of this approach have been disastrous. NCLB perpetuated the myth of public schools and teachers as failing, which opened the door for the spread of school voucher programs and charter schools that we have today. Some of these charter schools are operated by for-profits; many of them are nonunion and are not publicly accountable.

NCLB also undermined the profession of teaching and hurt our students. Now, educators are routinely forced to teach to the test rather than encouraged to draw on their expertise. Students spend hours each year taking tests, and that doesn't include the hours it takes to prepare for them. This burden of testing has CONTINUE READING: Bernie Sanders: Standardized tests have failed America's students

A Personal Message to Bill & Melinda Gates | Diane Ravitch's blog

A Personal Message to Bill & Melinda Gates | Diane Ravitch's blog

A Personal Message to Bill & Melinda Gates

Hi, Bill and Melinda,

We have never met but I feel that I know you because I am so familiar with your education projects.

I have tried in the past to meet you and have a candid conversation but have never had any luck.

You were always too busy or out of town.

But I am trying again.

I will be in Seattle on February 3-4.

I arrive on the afternoon of the 3rd and am speaking at a public event on February 4 at Town Hall. The wonderful teacher-leader Jesse Hagopian is introducing me.

I have some down time and wondered if we might be able to meet at last.

Are you available to meet in the late afternoon or evening of February 3 or during the day on February 4?

Please let me know if you can make time on your busy schedule.

My partner will be with me.

I hope you can do it!

We have a lot to talk about!

Diane

A Personal Message to Bill & Melinda Gates | Diane Ravitch's blog

In 2020, Black People Must Demand a Black Education Agenda

In 2020, Black People Must Demand a Black Education Agenda

In 2020, We Must Demand a Black Education Agenda

As a black woman, mother and grandmother, the words I want to hear from presidential candidates on “public education” are this: How do we innovate for, build true academic progress around and save trapped black students from dysfunctional education systems?

Full stop.

Instead, what I’ve heard as candidates discuss education on the campaign trail—like what they did last month during a major forum on the topic—is that Democratic presidential “hopefuls” are eager to just carry out business as usual.

Now, here we are in 2020, and there are still few signs the “leaders” of the education conversation are really prioritizing it. Amid all the ambitious talk of wealth tax increases, funding formula fixes, teacher and para-educator pay increases, student debt loan reductions, fully funded IDEA, Title I tripling, universal pre-K, and CTE pathways, we haven’t yet heard candidates share a plan that eliminates present inequities and race-based disparities. We have learned, however, that candidates are paying little attention to black children, K through 12, trapped inside toxic buildings, school-to-prison pipelines and worsening achievement gaps—with no plans to remedy that list and more anytime soon.

It’s true that we need a public education conversation. But, you can’t have that conversation by ignoring America’s very destructive black student crisis. Maybe we’d have one if we considered or included the voice of black parents who know all about that. Instead, no one is sounding alarms about National Assessment of Educational Progress 12th Grade Reading Level Assessments showing just 17 percent of black high school seniors at or above reading proficiency—the lowest CONTINUE READING: In 2020, Black People Must Demand a Black Education Agenda

The Criminal Miseducation of Black Students in the LAUSD - LA Progressive

The Criminal Miseducation of Black Students in the LAUSD - LA Progressive

The Criminal Miseducation of Black Students in the LAUSD

If African American students in the Los Angeles Unified School District were a single district, that district would be the eleventh largest in California. This stat comes from a recent analysis of LAUSD test results that unsurprisingly confirms the district’s systemic failure of Black students. Over half of South L.A. schools with the largest concentration of Black students were rated “poor” in academic achievement. These schools received a red rating. By contrast, only fifteen schools were rated red for white students. District-wide, only two out of ten African American students are proficient or on grade level in math, while only three out of ten are proficient in English. For Black students transitioning to college, the implications are dire.

District-wide, only two out of ten African American students are proficient or on grade level in math, while only three out of ten are proficient in English. For Black students transitioning to college, the implications are dire.

Yet, where is the outrage??

Although African American high school graduation rates have increased, only half of Black LAUSD graduates have the grades and A-G (or college preparation) classes required for admission to UCs and CSUs. This combination of low access to college readiness resources, minimal access to college and guidance counselors, as well as high quality instruction, after school enrichment and tutoring programs, is informed by the systemic criminalization of African American students. While the LAUSD phased out willful defiance as an “offense” that students can be suspended for, Black students continue to be suspended at higher rates than non-black students.

Moreover, widespread district practices such as random searches (which the board voted to phase out in July after community organizing by student activist coalitions like Students Deserve and the Students Not Suspects campaign) and over-policing by school resource officers further undermine student learning, safety, and engagement.

The dwindling number of Black students at traditionally African American campuses is another factor. For the most part, faculty of all ethnicities are not trained to be culturally responsive to the needs and communities of Black students. Despite the millions poured into professional CONTINUE READING: The Criminal Miseducation of Black Students in the LAUSD - LA Progressive

Did Tennessee Learn Any Lessons From Its Failed School Reform Plan?

Did Tennessee Learn Any Lessons From Its Failed School Reform Plan?

Did Tennessee Learn Any Lessons From Its Failed School Reform Plan?

Tennessee’s Achievement School District, a plan to rescue the state’s worst schools, is not yet a decade old. But according to a proposal obtained by Chalkbeat, the ASD will not live to see the ten-year mark— at least not in its present form.

Kevin Huffman was a lawyer who had spent a couple of years in a Teach for America classroom placement pre-law school, then came back to TFA on the management side. In 2011, Governor Bill Haslam brought him on as Tennessee state Commissioner of Education. It was the most high-profile example of someone parleying TFA experience into a high-level leadership role in education. He quickly fell in step with the Duncan-Obama reform program, signed Tennessee on for Race to the Top, and in 2011, he launched the Achievement School District.

The ASD concept was simple; the state would pluck schools from those ranked in the bottom 5% of the state and lump them into a separate school district that would be overseen by state officials rather than a local school board. Focus resources on your most challenging cases and try to learn some turnaround techniques that CONTINUE READING: Did Tennessee Learn Any Lessons From Its Failed School Reform Plan?

2020 Teachers’ New Year’s Resolutions: 2. Teach your students, not “the test” | Live Long and Prosper

2020 Teachers’ New Year’s Resolutions: 2. Teach your students, not “the test” | Live Long and Prosper

2020 Teachers’ New Year’s Resolutions: 2. Teach your students, not “the test”

2020 Teachers’ New Year’s Resolutions
2. Teach your students, not “the test”

It’s a new year and as is our custom here in the USA, we make resolutions which, while often broken, can be redefined as goals toward which we should strive.

[Updated and slightly edited from 2018]

NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION #2

• Teach your students, not “The Test.”

NO, DON’T TEACH TO THE TEST

I taught third grade in the mid-1970s. At that time the State of Indiana didn’t require standardized testing for evaluation of teachers or promotion of third graders. Nevertheless, my school system used standardized tests in grades three, six, eight, and ten. The purpose of the test was to see how our students were progressing and to diagnose any specific problems. We were specifically told by the administration not to “teach to the test.” It wasn’t professional!

When the results came back (always within a couple of weeks) we were able to see how each of our students was doing in particular areas, and plan our instruction accordingly.

10 years later, Indiana started the ISTEP. We were still told to remain professional and not to “teach to the test.”

NCLB — YES, TEACH TO THE TEST

In 2001 everything changed. No Child Left Behind shifted the attention from students to test scores. No longer were we told not to teach to the tests. Teaching to the tests was now encouraged because, we were told, the test covered CONTINUE READING: 2020 Teachers’ New Year’s Resolutions: 2. Teach your students, not “the test” | Live Long and Prosper

2020 Teachers’ New Year’s Resolutions: 1. Read aloud | Live Long and Prosper - https://wp.me/pUgLi-1rM

NYC Educator: On Teacher Morale

NYC Educator: On Teacher Morale

On Teacher Morale

Our school is generally a good place to work. Sure, there are things to complain about, and I spend a good portion of my time complaining about them and/ or trying to fix them. Nonetheless, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that, having gotten rid of two really insane supervisors recently, we haven't got any more of them. Of course, that could change at any moment, but for now I'd say we're beating the odds.

What are the odds? I'd say maybe one in three you get some lunatic telling you what to do. Of course it's not completely their fault. There's a whole lot of trickle-down crap from the geniuses in Albany, and it's all you can do these days to get in there and teach anything that students actually need to know. Making a jump from one school to another, though, is risky business.

I've long maintained that "getting out of the classroom" is just not a worthy goal. Anyone harboring such a goal doesn't love teaching and likely as not doesn't know how to do it well. The most efficacious way to get out of the classroom is to go into supervision. Sure, you have to go through the C30 process, but there's no guarantee the person the C30 board likes will get the gig. You know, if you happen to be spending Wednesday afternoons with the superintendent over at the Comfort Inn you might have the inside track. If your mommy works at Tweed that wouldn't hurt either.

Yesterday I was discussing so-called emergency sixth classes with a supervisor. The supervisor said, "I used to get a hundred applications for every opening, but now it's really tough to find people." That kind of amazed me. The supervisor theorized that perhaps people, comfortable with whoever is Danielsoning them, don't want to take a chance with CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: On Teacher Morale

Slaying Goliath: Diane Ravitch’s New Book Traces a Quarter Century of Public Education Disruption | janresseger

Slaying Goliath: Diane Ravitch’s New Book Traces a Quarter Century of Public Education Disruption | janresseger

Slaying Goliath: Diane Ravitch’s New Book Traces a Quarter Century of Public Education Disruption

In her new book, Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools, Diane Ravitch summarizes, defines, and humanizes the widespread attack that has threatened public education across the United States in the past quarter century. And she tracks an encouraging backlash, a growing resistance led by dogged individuals, community organizations, and organized schoolteachers.

What’s been called corporate-accountability-based, test-and-punish school reform is something we’ve all watched over the years—nationally in No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top—statewide as school budgets have been stretched to pay for privatized charters or vouchers—and locally as our children began taking too many standardized tests, our local schools began receiving letter grades on state report cards, or students left the local public school for a nearby charter school.

With only scanty newspaper coverage to guide us, however, we may have struggled grasp the ideology behind this war on public education or see how all the lines of attack were converging to discredit public schools and the work of local teachers.  Diane Ravitch, the education historian, has done us all an enormous favor with this new book.

Ravitch defines the ideology of the war being waged on public education by a giant army. Ravitch names the so-called “school reform” movement a Goliath-sized experiment in disruption.  Goliath’s work can be seen in “the wreckage that the so-called ‘reform’ movement had created by demonizing teachers as if they were adversaries of their students and treating them as malingerers who required constant evaluation lest they fail to do their duty…. (in) the damage inflicted on public schools, their students and teachers, by heedless billionaires who had decided to disrupt, reinvent, and redesign the nation’s public schools…. (in) the work of  CONTINUE READING: Slaying Goliath: Diane Ravitch’s New Book Traces a Quarter Century of Public Education Disruption | janresseger

Jersey Jazzman: Hoboken, NJ Charter Schools: An Update for 2020

Jersey Jazzman: Hoboken, NJ Charter Schools: An Update for 2020

Hoboken, NJ Charter Schools: An Update for 2020

Long time readers know I have always thought one of the most interesting charter school sectors in New Jersey, if not the United States, is in Hoboken. A small city across the Hudson from Manhattan, Hoboken has undergone a period of extraordinary gentrification over the last several years. As detailed in a great book by Molly Vollman Makris --  Public Housing and School Choice in a Gentrified City; Youth Experiences of Uneven Opportunity -- Hoboken's charter schools have become an alternative system of schooling for affluent parents in a city that still has large numbers of children living in public housing and experiencing economic disadvantage.

I interviewed Molly back in 2015, and she made an important point: segregation is not an issue that can be laid entirely at the feet of Hoboken's charter schools. There are, in fact, many factors involved in why Hoboken's schools enroll the student populations they do. But the charters, as Molly put it, are part of the reason the city hasn't been able to adequately address the realities of segregation:"So I don’t think the charters and intra-district school choice are creating segregation so much as inhibiting desegregation. I think we all could do a better job."

Other than a few visits with family, I haven't been back to Hoboken much since I did that interview. But I've kept my eye on the city, if only because I think it's a unique case study in CONTINUE READING: Jersey Jazzman: Hoboken, NJ Charter Schools: An Update for 2020

Wash Met Closing on Jan 9 Education Town Hall – Education Town Hall Forum

Wash Met Closing on Jan 9 Education Town Hall – Education Town Hall Forum

WASH MET CLOSING ON JAN 9 EDUCATION TOWN HALL

On our January 9 show, the first of 2020, Education Town Hall will be talking with four current students at DCPS’s Washington Metropolitan high school about their journey, and that of their fellow Washington Met students, since learning right before Thanksgiving that DCPS proposed closing their school.

Listen at 11 a.m. EASTERN on Thursday, January 9, via TuneIn or by visiting We Act Radio and clicking on arrow at upper left (NOTE: Not all “listen” buttons are working at present).

Guests:

• Lyric Johnson: 16 years old and on the DCPS chancellor’s cabinet; came to Wash Met in middle school
• Na’Asia Hawkins, 18 years old, arrived at Wash Met after 2 years out of school; has 2-year-old son
• Travius Butler, 17 years old, arrived at Wash Met after leaving Woodson HS; hopes to enter the military
• Angel, 19 years old, has been at Wash Met for 3 years; has 5-month-old baby

Washington Met is one of four opportunity academies within DCPS, ensuring that students who have not found academic success at other schools will have a pathway to graduation. But citing poor attendance, low enrollment, and poor test scores, the DCPS chancellor has proposed closing Washington Met. effective next school year.

For these students, and a host before them, however, the school has provided a safe and welcoming haven away from difficulties of their lives, including serious trauma. For many, the school’s small classes and personal attention have been critical in their educations, something that other schools could not provide them.

Yet, years without a gym, library, day care for students’ children, and substantive career training, Washington Met. appears to have been poorly provisioned by the city—a reality not lost on its students.

As a result, these students have begun a difficult, but brave, journey in advocating for their school in the face of incredible odds against both them and their school.

The Education Town Hall with Thomas Byrd
broadcasts from Historic Anacostia
in Washington, DC, on We Act Radio,
Thursdays at 11:00 a.m. Eastern
New programming 2nd and 4th Thursdays, alternating with classic shows.
Listen live via TuneIn.
Shows are archived for convenient listening shortly after broadcast.

After years of weekly broadcasts, the program now focuses one show each month on local CONTINUE READING: Wash Met Closing on Jan 9 Education Town Hall – Education Town Hall Forum

Keeping Progressive Schools Alive | Deborah Meier on Education

Keeping Progressive Schools Alive | Deborah Meier on Education

Keeping Progressive Schools Alive

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Happy New Year and a special thanks to those who respond to past blogs about choice, et al. I always mean to respond to each comment.

They helped my thinking a lot. And, I have decided to start a new political tendency: “The ‘It Depends’ Party.” I find it is my answer to so many of the issues facing us in life, and in schools.

For example, school choice can be very useful, or very dangerous, it depends. Ditto for small schools, although I worry less about its misuse.

But self-governance, my third principle, I think holds up best. (However, I can think of examples of where I would be against it and that is why in some cases we need a law against any “it”).

Watching helplessly as some of our wonderful New York City small, self-governing schools of choice have been destroyed, I have learned a lot. But not yet how we could have avoided it. Rereading Seymour Sarason’s last book, The Predictable Failure of Educational: can we change reform before it’s too late, I wish I could confer with him. At the time I just thought that if I understood him right I could avoid the mistakes. I didn’t. I thought, for example, that in the absence of a strong movement behind us I would have to rely on powerful allies. It worked for 30 years. But that was not enough.

Some of those schools we started in the 1970s and 80s have survived. So we need to explore how they did it. In some cases their original leaders are still there, hanging on tenaciously for fear that they to will fall prey.  Some have succeeded perhaps by being so invisibly unnoticeable that they made no enemies. In contrast, many of us were very noisy about our beliefs hoping to encourage a movement.

In Boston, the Pilots were protected for a while by the local union’s support and our existence in the labor-management contract. But Boston has gone through several leadership changes since the Boston Pilots began and each time we are nervous. And the original idea was that the autonomies offered the Pilots would expand over time to the whole system. We had modest success in a few areas.

At the heart of the failure is our weak belief in democracy, the absence of a larger CONTINUE READING: Keeping Progressive Schools Alive | Deborah Meier on Education

NANCY BAILEY: Students with Disabilities: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Students with Disabilities: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Students with Disabilities: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Parents with students who have disabilities are troubled by the problems their children face in public schools. They may turn to charter schools believing they will finally get the services they find lacking in public school.

But charter schools are not an acceptable answer in most cases. We’ve known for years that students with disabilities are often excluded from charter schools where there’s inclusion. In schools where there’s segregation (only students with disabilities) children may not have qualified teachers. Nor do they get to socialize with their non-disabled peers.

This is especially disturbing since parents of students with disabilities are supposed to have a legal right to appropriate services. Their children should have access to the least restrictive environment with appropriate Individual Educational Plans in their public schools.

While charter schools are not viable, underfunded public schools are plagued with overcrowded inclusion classes, unsympathetic district and school administrators, CONTINUE READING: Students with Disabilities: Between a Rock and a Hard Place