You know I'm a huge fan of the Ask Arne video series, because who doesn't enjoy seeing their tax dollars used to produce little pieces of high tech advertising for failing policies? You can read about previous Ask Arne videos here, here, here, and here.
Today's entry was put up on December 9, but seems linked to the baloneyfest that started with CCSSO and CGCS announcing they were really looking at testing, with "looking at" meaning "trying to fix how it's playing in Peoria" and not "considering substantive changes." Then Arne said, "Me, too" in a Washington Post op-ed that dodged the issue of federal responsibility for testing issues. All of that happened back in October, but it appears to be in the recent past for the making of this video.
This video represents a real change in style for the Ask Arne franchise, which usually depends on a "conversation" between the Secretary of Education and ordinary civilians (hand picked by the Dept. of Education). Today's host is my personal favorite-- Emily Davis, on loan from her job teaching middle school Spanish in St. Augustine, FL-- but beyond her intro (filmed in what is below-standard lighting for this series), her function is to ask basically just one question.
Her intro sets us up. "Lately we've heard a lot of questions from educators, principals and teachers, as well as parents and students around the current climate of testing in schools." It's a nicely shaded choice of verbage, suggesting a more generalized curiosity ("So, how's that testing business shaping CURMUDGUCATION: Ask Arne: Testing and Accountability:
Barack Obama is a pretty smart guy, so it is amazing that even his efforts to compromise on high-stakes standardized testing are so far off. On testing he keeps failing the test.
After six years of pushing high-stakes testing as part of his Race to the Top education initiative, Obama decided there is now too much testing in American schools. This decision is a response to intense push back by parents and teachers against the testing regime.
It seems that the average student in some United States big-city schools now takes over 100 hundred hours of mandatory standardized tests during their school career. Eighth grade students are the most tested. They sit through between 20 and 25 hours of standardized tests, which makes up about 2.3% of school time. The Obama Administration proposed that Congress cap standardized testing at 2% of instruction time when it votes on reauthorizing federal legislation governing elementary and secondary schools.
Why 2% test time? How did this become the magic number? Nobody knows. Must have been the algorithm.
But wait kids before you celebrate. First, the highly partisan divided Congress has not been so good at passing anything. Second, the Obama proposal does not mean students will not have to take traditional teacher-made, school, and district tests which somehow did not figure into their hourly calculations.
Outside groups disappointed over LA Unified’s search process
Sure, they can go to any of the communitymeetings. Sure, they can fill out asurvey online. But, ultimately, outside groups say they want a seat at the table when deciding the next LA Unified school superintendent.
At a special session after a closed session on Tuesday, the school board voted against a proposal to create a separate community panel of seven people, each school board member appointing one. The proposal by MónicaGarcía, who was lobbied heavily by many of the groups, was voted down 5-2.
“We are very disappointed the board turned down another opportunity to let community organizations have a say in picking the next superintendent,” said Sarah Angel, the managing regional director of the California Charter Schools Association. “We proposed a plan that wasn’t quite as harsh as the one Móníca Garcia proposed, and we still hope there is a way to be move involved.”
The board faced a more open proposal by board member MónicaRatliff that would have allowed the entire community to meet the finalists of the superintendent search. That was voted down by a 4-3 vote.
“We think that something in between those two ideas would work the best,” said Angel, whose group was one of the signatories to the CLASS (Communities for Los Angeles Student Success) letter that originally asked for wider community participation in the search. Some of the groups, like CCSA, had to request to be included to give their input into the search.
Sara Mooney, of United Way LA, said, “The school board made a non-welcoming vote for community involvement. They are against sharing responsibilities for the community to be involved in the choice of the next superintendent. We are disappointed.”
Like some of the other community organizations, Mooney said the United Way had to ask to have a meeting with search firms and was not among the groups picked by the school board members to be involved in the process. Mooney said she has spoken to parents who feel as if they have no say in the process “and feel like they already have a list and what their input is makes no difference.”
A few coalitions of educational groups have appealed to keep the search confidential but include a committee of community groups to help screen the finalists. Several board members said they feared that such a process would diminish responsibilities that the board was elected to carry out.
But what exactly do these scores tell us? It turns out that much depends on which scores one chooses to focus on, what time frame one looks at, and whether one looks at growth in scores rather than at scores at fixed points in time.
For now, the community outreach appears lacking, say some of the groups.
“I have been disappointed in the student turnout for some of these sessions,” saidMelanie Kimes, the youth organizer of the Community Coalition. “I was in a group where only 15 students showed up.”
More than 5 million children in the U.S. have had a parent in jail. That’s roughly 7 percent of the nation’s kids 17 and under, or one out of every 14 children.
Findings from Child Trends — a nonprofit based in Maryland — explores “the prevalence of parental incarceration and child outcomes associated with it.” Data from 2011-2012 showed that children in poverty were three times more likely to experience a parent in incarceration, and the percentage rate among black children was twice as high as that of white children.
Child Trends found that of those children who had a parent in jail:
More than 50 percent had lived with someone with a substance abuse problem.
Roughly three in five had encountered parental divorce or separation.
More than one-third had seen violence between parents or guardians.
More than one in four had lived with a mentally ill or suicidal individual.
Nearly one in 10 experienced the death of a parent.
The data may very well be an “underestimate,” Child Trends reports, as it does not include children with a non-residential incarcerated parent.
Merrow vs Moskowitz: What Happens to Those Who Speak Out?
By John Thompson.
While I disagree with PBS’s ombudsman, Michael Getler, I believe we should take his statement on John Merrow’s News Hour finale as a learning experience opportunity for education activists. Then we can make it a teachable moment for the non-education press.
Merrow closed his illustrious career with a hugely important report on suspensions at Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy. Getler doesn’t seem to understand how big of a story it is.
PBS News Hour acknowledges that as the story unfolded there was a miscommunication with Merrow, the News Hour, and Moskowitz about student privacy laws. Getler doesn’t seem to understand the complexity of those laws — and how inappropriate Moskowitz was in flouting them. If Merrow had done something wrong, I sense Getler would have said so explicitly. Instead, he focuses on a new issue – the use of confidential sources.
The ombudsman recognizes that “Merrow is a highly-experienced, well-respected specialist in this field of reporting, so what he reports and says may be absolutely true and very important in disclosing questionable activities of a high-profile school system and the impact on young children.” He further admits, “I have no special insight into education procedures, can’t evaluate the battle that still rages over the accuracy of the statistical analysis used in this segment, and can’t really tell who is right and wrong on the substance of school policy and procedure.”
Getler’s complaint was that Merrow had to use too many sources who would not go on the record. I wonder if he has the same complaint with the New York Times Magazine’s coverage of Moskowitz. Daniel Bergner watched Moskowitz for months and says her, “impatience with dissent emerged as one part of a furious and almost crazed passion.” He cites two unnamed sources to support the seemingly noncontroversial statement that Moskowitz is “downright imperious.” When reporting on another charge that is intertwined with the battle over her Success Academy, the Times’s wording is very similar to Merrow’s on suspensions, “In talking to dozens of current and former Success Academy employees and parents, the critique with the most staying power involved the schools’ overly heated preparation for the state exams.” (emphasis mine) The names of those dozens of sources were not revealed.
Getler understands that the use of confidential sources is often necessary but, “This is not a big national security issue or something like that when sources frequently decline to be identified. This is charter schools and policies that we are talking about, a big universe and surely not everyone out there with a supportable case to make is afraid of Eva Moskowitz. Or are they?”
The college-admissions test is being restructured as an extension of the controversial public-school reading and writing standards.
High-school students who enjoy obscure vocabulary and puzzle-like math problems might want to sign up for the SAT now, before the 89-year-old college-admissions test is revamped this March to better reflect what students are learning in high-school classrooms in the age of the Common Core.
While other standardized tests have also been criticized for rewarding the students who’ve mastered the idiosyncrasies of the test over those who have the best command of the underlying substance, the SAT—with its arcane analogy questions and somewhat counterintuitive scoring practices—often received special scorn.
Even David Coleman—the president of The College Board, a nonprofit that designs and administers the SAT—readily admits that for far too long students who could afford special classes and tutoring on the test’s tricks (programs that could cost tens of thousands of dollars in some parts of the country) had an unfair advantage. Coleman, who is often called the architect of the Common Core, arrived at the nonprofit in 2012 and has since been on a campaign to make an SAT test that would incentivize students to take rigorous high-school classes and not just the best How the New SAT Test Is Taking Cues from Common Core - The Atlantic:
For American-Israeli Teacher, Death Came on the No. 78 Bus
BEIT SHEMESH, Israel — Richard Lakin’s funeral on Wednesday was touching in the tiny, usual ways. His grown son tearfully recalled a man who began every morning with a banana and a chuckle. His teenage granddaughter thanked him for teaching her to ride a bike and, barely able to get the words out, “for watching ‘Charlotte’s Web’ endless times with me.”
There were also hints at the unusual circumstances of his death. The United States ambassador to Israel sitting in the chapel’s last row, the former member of Israel’s Parliament helping fill the grave with dirt. And the son, Micah Avni, asking in his eulogy, “How is it that such a beautiful person is struck down in such a brutal and horrific manner?”
Mr. Lakin, 76, was shot in the head and stabbed in the face and chest byPalestinian assailants on a public bus in Jerusalem at the height of this month’s violent uprising. An American who moved to Israel three decades ago, he died after two weeks in the hospital, where he had much surgery and a parade of visitors, including Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations and students from Hand in Hand, Jerusalem’s joint Arab-Jewish school.
Photo
Richard LakinCreditCourtesy of the Lakin Family, via Associated Press
He was one of nine Israeli Jews killed byPalestinians since Oct. 1. One of the two bus attackers was among more than 25 Palestinian suspects shot dead by Israelis during the same period; some 35 other Palestinians have been killed in clashes with security forces.
Each, undoubtedly, is a story in itself. Mr. Lakin’s is one of a teacher slain by young men who could have been his students, of a social media devotee whose family is now suing Facebook over posts they say incite violence, of a man who stood up for coexistence being felled by its failure.
“He was just a deeply optimistic and hopeful person, and refused to be deterred by the grim political reality here,” said Rabbi Levi Weiman-Kelman of Kol Haneshama, the Jerusalem synagogue where Mr. Lakin was a longtime member. “He wasn’t oblivious to the reality, but it didn’t affect his basic existential nature. He could not imagine a solution wasn’t possible and that people couldn’t learn to live together.”
A civil rights activist and Connecticut elementary school principal, Mr. Lakin moved to Jerusalem with his family in 1984. He taught English to Israeli and Palestinian children, performed in musicals and, according to Rabbi Weiman-Kelman, never missed a peace rally.
After a routine doctor’s appointment on Oct. 13, Mr. Lakin called his ex-wife (and still best friend), Karen, to say he was taking the No. 78 bus rather than walking home because he thought it would be safer amid the spate of stabbings on Jerusalem streets. When news broke that a No. 78 had been attacked, she and her son started frantically dialing Mr. Lakin’s number.
“Eventually, one of the nurses in the operating room answered his phone,” recalled Mr. Avni, 46, who works in finance and had walked out of a meeting in his Tel Aviv office to drive to Jerusalem. “She said, ‘Come to Hadassah Ein Karem as soon as possible.’ ”
Hadassah and Jerusalem’s other hospitals are rare oases of the Arab-Jewish coexistence Mr. Lakin promoted. A Palestinian nurse in the emergency room recognized him as he was wheeled in: Her two sons had taken his classes. The surgical team that struggled to stitch together his injured organs included Dr. Abed Khalaileh, an Arab from East Jerusalem, like the attackers on the bus.
“When I talked to the family, I had tears in my eyes — this is a man and he didn’t do anything. What did he do to deserve such a punishment?” Dr. Khalaileh said later. “I am not political here, my goal is not to judge, and I try and disconnect. But still, you live with a sensation that isn’t good, that after all, the person who carried out this attack is from your people.”
One of the attackers, Bilal Abu Ghanem, had surgery in the same hospital, at the same time.
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Shachar Boteach, center, at 16 the oldest of Mr. Lakin’s eight grandchildren, during his funeral in the town of Beit Shemesh, Israel.CreditBaz Ratner/Reuters
“I had the auspicious pleasure of holding my father’s hand and looking that man straight in the eye as he woke up in the intensive-care unit,” Mr. Avni recalled. “And it sounds like he’s doing O.K. — as opposed to my father.”
Mr. Avni, who Hebraicized his last name, said he soon learned that the slain attacker, Bahas Alian, had announced his plans on Facebook. While sitting vigil in the hospital, the family was incensed to find on social networks a re-enactment of the bus attack “to encourage others to take the same action,” Mr. Avni said, and “specific instructions on how to slice someone’s chest open and cut their intestines like what was done to my father.”
Mr. Lakin’s own Facebook page had as its cover a photo of a boy in a Jewish skullcap and one in a Palestinian kaffiyeh under a “Coexist” logo made from religious symbols. The morning of the attack, he posted an article about a long-ago discovery regarding diabetes, but the days before, his page was filled with links regarding the uprising. Mr. Lakin had also made 38,000 Twitter posts since joining in 2009, and had 4,634 followers.
“My father had been a great beneficiary of social media. He used Facebook and Twitter to express his thoughts on education and on peace,” Mr. Avni said. “He also became the victim of a tremendous amount of incitement and hate on those vehicles.”
Now, Mr. Lakin is the lead plaintiff in a suit filed this week in New York by a conservative Israeli antiterrorism group that seeks an injunction to force Facebook to block posts that call for violence against Jews.
None of this was mentioned at Wednesday’s funeral, where Karen Lakin read from Robert Frost and described her ex-husband as the grandson of a Yiddish-speaking socialist farmer.
One group among the hundreds of mourners recalled his roles in the Jerusalem English Speaking Theater’s productions of “The Music Man,” “Pajama Game,” “South Pacific” and “Annie.”
“He was a wonderful, warm, compassionate President Roosevelt,” said Brian Negin, who played Harold Ickes in that “Annie” back in 1998.
“Just like Richard,” added Mr. Negin’s wife, Susan Lazinger.
Shachar Boteach, at 16 the oldest of Mr. Lakin’s eight grandchildren, told the crowd it felt “like the air has been taken out of my lungs.”
“I know you would want me to always try to be a better person and do the right thing. You would want me to spread love and happiness everywhere I go,” she said, speaking directly to his body wrapped in a Jewish prayer shawl. “I think you wouldn’t want me to have not even one ounce of hate in my body, even though what has been done to you.”For American-Israeli Teacher, Death Came on the No. 78 Bus - The New York Times:
Richard Lakin's Thanks2Teachers.com - A Wellspring of Teacher Appreciation and Teacher Inspiration > Home > Home http://bit.ly/1Lly9iQ
Teaching as an Act of Love: Thoughts and Recollections of a Former Teacher ... - Richard Lakin - Google Books http://bit.ly/1LlyimB
Richard Lakin's Thanks2Teachers.com - A Wellspring of Teacher Appreciation and Teacher Inspiration > Home > Home http://bit.ly/1Lly9iQ
Teaching as an Act of Love: Thoughts and Recollections of a Former Teacher ... - Richard Lakin - Google Bookshttp://bit.ly/1LlyimB
The Drug War: A Brilliant Strategy to Divide People Along Racial Lines When All Boats are Sinking
During the last thirty years, working class incomes in the US have fallen sharply The vast majority of income gains in the US during those years have accrued to people in the top 20 percent of earners and in the last ten years to people in the top 1 percent. The once proud US industrial economy has become a shadow of itself. A starting auto worker now makes half of what his ( or her) counterpart did in 1947 and 51 percent of all jobs now pay $30,000 or less. More than 2/3 of new jobs being created are at or slightly above minimum wage and many Americans have to package together several jobs to pay rent or support a family. There are few low or moderate income communities in the country where people are not living doubled or tripled up, or renting out rooms because the expense of living space has outpaced incomes
This decline in living standards has been remarkably broad based, affecting rural areas and small towns as well as cities, and affecting whites and Asians as well as Blacks and Latinos.
But rather than creating unity among America's diverse racial and cultural groups, this decline in living standards seems to have increased tensions.
One reason for this is the emergence of the drug war as form of police state surveillance and control for some and a jobs program and economic development strategy for others, largely though not exclusively along racial lines.
A well financed war on drugs, largely focusing on drug sales in urban Black and Latino communities, has led to a significant expansion of the nation's police organizations, and a huge expansion of its prison population which grew from 330,000 in 1980 to over 2 million by 2000. To hold this new inmate population, state and federal government financed a wave of prison construction, much of which was concentrated in depressed, largely white, rural areas. To put it bluntly, prison construction became a job creation strategy for rural whites whose economic prospects had been shattered by factory closings and the destruction of family farming by agribusiness.
What political elites had created, through this policy initiative, was a
NAEP Scores Stagnate; Test-and-Punish Flops; But Duncan’s New Plan Fails to Change Course
The biennial NAEP scores were released yesterday. Diane Ravitch knows a lot about the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the NAEP. Appointed by President Bill Clinton, she served on the National Assessment Governing Board for seven years. She describes what this test is: “NAEP is an audit test. It is given every other year to samples of students in every state and in about 20 urban districts. No one can prepare for it, and no one gets a grade. NAEP measures the rise or fall of average scores for states in fourth grade and eighth grade in reading and math and reports them by race, gender, disability status, English language ability, economic status, and a variety of other measures. The 2015 NAEP scores showed no gains nationally in either grade and in either subject… The best single word to describe NAEP 2015 is stagnation.”
Ravitch describes what she believes is the meaning of this year’s scores, and I agree with her: “For nearly 15 years, Presidents Bush and Obama and the Congress have bet billions of dollars—both federal and state—on a strategy of testing, accountability, and choice. They believed that if every student was tested in reading and mathematics every year from grades 3 to 8, test scores would go up and up. In those schools where test scores did not go up, the principals and teachers would be fired and replaced. Where scores didn’t go up for five years in a row, the schools would be closed. Thousands of educators were fired, and thousands of public schools were closed, based on the theory that sticks and carrots, rewards and punishments, would improve education.” But it hasn’t worked.
Carol Burris, the retired NY high school principal and now executive director of the Network for Public Education, interprets the 2015 NAEP scores: “NAEP is a truth teller. There is no NAEP test prep industry, or high-stakes consequence that promotes teaching to the test. NAEP is what it was intended to be—a national report card by which we can gauge our national progress in educating our youth. During the 1970s and ’80s, at the height of school desegregation efforts, the gap in scores between our nation’s white and black students NAEP Scores Stagnate; Test-and-Punish Flops; But Duncan’s New Plan Fails to Change Course | janresseger:
Education Reform and the Failure to Fix Inequality in America
An abridged history of the misleading connection between classroom opportunity and economic mobility
As the U.S. continues to reckon with a widening income gap between the wealthiest Americans and marginalized communities, politicians and advocates have often cited education access as one of the greater contributors—and potential solutions—to the problem.
Improving educational opportunities to shrink income disparities depends on increasing the resources available to school districts. But funding alone is not enough to equalize access to a quality education. Schools need new and innovative approaches to turn resources into student results that beget success in the world beyond the classroom. A look back at historical challenges to education access demonstrates how far the U.S. has come, and highlights the obstacles facing students today compared with those of prior generations.
Access to education in the U.S. has improved for demographic groups across four important categories: race, class, ethnicity, and gender. But progress on these fronts has been slow and contentious. Historically, local, state, and federal leaders have instead used education as a tool to control minority populations.
Consider the forced assimilation of Native American children during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These children were sent to boarding schools to acculturate them into a dominant white American society. They were forbidden from speaking in native tongues and were renamed for heroic historical figures like Philip Sheridan and Ulysses S. Grant. Meanwhile, Chinese and Latino children were denied equal access to education in many parts of the country as school systems, spurred on by communities’ xenophobic fears, pushed for laws or found loopholes that allowed them to segregate public schools.
These experiences extended to larger immigrant groups as well, such as theWWI-era pressure on German-American parochial schools in Texas, California, the Midwest, and major cities throughout the Northeast to forgo their ties to German culture. This discrimination grew to include forbidding non-English instruction to students of German descent, as politicians and the American public questioned whether schools founded by ethnic religious orders could be loyal to the U.S. in a time of war.
Minority ethnic groups pushed back against the restrictions as they were imposed, calling on the U.S. government to address inequalities in education access. Progress took time, accumulating in piecemeal gains for minorities.
Building on other education-related legislation throughout the 20th century, Congress took a significant step forward in 1974 with the passage of the Equal Educational Opportunities Act, which required schools to accommodate bilingual students, among other measures. In most states today, instead of shutting out non-English speaking students, K-12 schools and universities now offer Increasing Access to Education Hasn’t Fixed America’s Inequality - The Atlantic:
OPINION: AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH ABOUT PRESIDENT OBAMA’S TESTING PLAN
Capping standardized testing at 2 percent of instruction time should overjoy the opt-out movement. So why are they outraged?
On Saturday President Obama proposed a “Testing Action Plan” (TAP) that urges states to cap student standardized testing at no more than 2 percent of instructional time per year.
Media outlets greeted his proposal as news, forgetting, perhaps, that the White House actually proposed the same plan this past summer, as did the Council of Chief State School Officers, the group that developed the Common Core State Standards.
But redundancy isn’t the point. Instead, the president has successfully undermined a set of dynamics that have produced the opt-out movement, which draws its constituency from teacher unions, suburban parents, and local-control adherents. The proof is in anti-testers’ uniformly negative reaction to sensible constraints on the impact of assessments on instructional time.
Counterintuitive? Perhaps. Why, after all, would many of those who feign concern about overtesting greet a proposal for testing reduction with fearful jibes? Because much of the opt-out movement has nothing to do with student welfare and everything to do with teacher job security. If we strip the pretense from the presumption that state-led efforts toward higher standards and accountability have led to an epidemic of student stress, then the opt-out movement, even among its primary constituency of wealthy suburban parents, loses its vigor.
First, the facts: let’s look at what TAP does and doesn’t do in New Jersey:
It does not overturn current federal mandates for annual standardized testing on course standards. The 2 percent cap -- and, remember, this is a recommendation, not a mandate -- has no impact on New Jersey’s use of PARCC assessments. Do the math: for the typical 180-day school year, 2 percent of the time is 3.6 days, or about 21 hours. As newly configured, PARCC is nine to 10 hours, or less than half the recommended time for test-taking.
It has no impact on the New Jersey Department of Education or the state Legislature, although either could propose such a policy or law. Last year, for example, New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a law that placed a 2 percent cap on instructional time devoted to test preparation; New Jersey could follow suit.
Here’s what the Testing Action Plan does do:
It places the burden for finding the proper balance between instruction and assessment on local school boards and districts because overtesting is a local problem, not a federal one. Just as Princeton Public Schools recently limited homework, school boards have always had the prerogative to cap time spent on locally developed tests or direct superintendents to examine test redundancies, especially at the secondary level.
It puts extra burdens on school administrators and teachers to integrate testing into instruction, as well as integrate testing hours into instructional days. During this nascent year of PARCC testing, some districts reported that although the test itself lasted only 45 minutes, teachers and students still sacrificed a full day. That’s a management problem, not a testing problem.
As Charlie Barone points out, “on average, federal policies account for seven hours of testing per year -- roughly 0.6 percent of an average school year.” And as indicated by the recent Education Post poll, a plurality of parents believe that “fair and periodic standardized testing allows parents to know that their child is learning what they need to succeed.” (Disclosure: I’m part of the Education Post network.) But these facts belie the sentiments that draw testing opponents. Hence, the jibes and resentful reactions that greeted the President’s proposal.
Just listen: Peter Green of the National Education Policy Center: “Obama’s Testing Action Plan Sucks.”
Badass Teachers Association board member Dr. Denisha Jones: “Although this is a step in the right direction I feel we need to see what the policy is before we count this as a win. Given his actions in New York, I have no reason to trust John King [Obama’s new secretary of education], and I'm concerned that this is a ploy to get teachers on the side of Democrats aka Hillary Clinton.”
Diane Ravitch’s Network for Public Education: “NPE is disappointed by the limited response to what it views as a national education crisis … Limiting testing to 2 percent is a symbolic gesture that will have little impact so long as these tests are used for high-stakes purposes.”
And, more locally, the NJEA: "We are pleased that President Obama has acknowledged that overtesting our students is counterproductive to a healthy school-learning environment. His call to limit time spent on testing to no more than two percent of total instructional time is a good first step. However, that does not go far enough to address the negative impact that these high-stakes tests have on classroom instruction.”
This fear of accurate information among testing opponents is palpable. If parents realize that standardized assessments don’t, in fact, consume untoward amounts of instructional time, then they’re less likely to refuse tests for their children. If Tea Partiers and state rightists realize that the bulk of student testing is locally controlled, then their resentment of federal oversight is diminished. If the primary motivation of groups like Opt Out United, the NEA, and the AFT is unveiled as resentment towards changes in tenure law and teacher evaluations, then the momentum of the anti-testing movement is drained off.
There’s a proper balance between instruction and assessment, and school districts have struggled this past year to achieve equilibrium. As results on newly calibrated assessment results aligned with higher standards trickle in, parents are confronted with news that our children aren’t as academically proficient as we thought. Teacher evaluations are evolving in order to elevate the profession and, as with testing, we strive to strike the right balance. Change is hard. But no one is well-served when we cloak fear of accountability in a mantle of convolution about testing. Let’s keep the focus on children, not labor leaders.
Prepared Testimony for the People’s Budget Town Hall
The City of Seattle’s newly created Department of Education and Early Learning will spend $235 million over the next seven years on various education initiatives. This money gives the city a lot of leverage to pursue its vision of what it wants public education to look like in Seattle.
The purpose of the people’s budget is to create a participatory budgeting process where citizens decide what programs and initiatives should be funded with their tax dollars.
Many parents feel they aren’t being heard when it comes to education policy. Creating a people’s budget at the city and district levels would give parents, teachers, and principals an opportunity to have more of a say on where our education dollars are spent. Below is prepared testimony from the People’s Budget Town Hall which took place October 27th, 2015.
-Carolyn Leith
Most of us who have dedicated our work lives to public education do not think it’s ok that the Gates billionaire and millionaire cabal should be able to toss tax-deductible big money around to ruin and disrupt public education.
Every bit of progress we’ve made in pushing for progressive public education; for anti-racism, multicultural and alternative education models are being pushed back harder and harder. The most frequently heard lament from the school administrators is lack of funding. There is a lack of funding, of course. It is part of the plan. There is also a lay-down on the tracks mentality among these administrators who welcome this private money train.
We know now none of this corporate ed reform works. We’ve had too many years learning how much it does not work and how it hurts. We see it in the schools and in the whole fabric of society.
The school-to-prison pipeline is a deep, systemic problem. The part that public
