How the Bad Old Third Grade Guarantee May Be Reborn to Hurt Children in the Post-COVID Era | janresseger

How the Bad Old Third Grade Guarantee May Be Reborn to Hurt Children in the Post-COVID Era | janresseger

How the Bad Old Third Grade Guarantee May Be Reborn to Hurt Children in the Post-COVID Era

On Friday, the Washington Post‘s Valerie Strauss republished an article about learning loss, an article that raises some very serious concerns about what will happen next fall when we can presume that most children will be back in school.

The article is by a former teacher, now an editor at a website called Edutopia.  Steven Merrill writes: “It’s perfectly sensible to worry about academic setbacks during the pandemic… But our obsessive need to measure academic progress and loss to the decimal point—an enterprise that feels at once comfortably scientific and hopelessly subjective—is also woefully out of time with the moment… If there’s a pressing need for measurement, it’s in the reckoning of the social, emotional, and psychological toll of the last 12 months.  Over 500,000 Americans have died.  Some kids will see their friends or favorite teachers in person for the first time in over a year…  Focusing on the social and emotional needs of the child first—on their sense of safety, self-worth, and academic confidence—is not controversial, and saddling students with deficit-based labels has predicable outcomes… (I)f we make school both welcoming and highly engaging… we stand a better chance of honoring the needs of all children and open up the possibility of connecting kids to topics they feel passionate about as we return to school next year.”

We know that Education Secretary Miguel Cardona is requiring states to administer the usual, federally mandated standardized tests for this school year. Cardona says he doesn’t intend for the tests to be used for school accountability, but instead to see which schools and school districts need the most help—a strange justification because the tests were designed for and have always been used for holding schools and teachers and even students accountable. And the punitive policies these tests trigger in schools across the country are well established. What if state legislatures and state departments of education merely use the test scores in this CONTINUE READING: How the Bad Old Third Grade Guarantee May Be Reborn to Hurt Children in the Post-COVID Era | janresseger

NANCY BAILEY - Education Secretary Cardona, End Third Grade Retention and High-Stakes Standardized Testing!

Education Secretary Cardona, End Third Grade Retention and High-Stakes Standardized Testing!

Education Secretary Cardona, End Third Grade Retention and High-Stakes Standardized Testing!

The Biden administration chose a real educator to be education secretary. Now Dr. Cardona should move to end third-grade retention, a procedure that would be especially cruel administered with this pandemic. Many alternative plans are available to help children do better in school that won’t involve the humiliation of retention.

Cardona should withhold federal funds to school districts that flunk third graders. He could accomplish this better if he’d cancel the high-stakes tests.

Educators and parents are furious about the Biden administration going forward with high-stakes testing. Repeatedly Americans are told that children have mental problems and are depressed because they’re not in school, not learning with their favorite teachers, or socializing with their friends. It’s disingenuous to claim one cares about a child’s emotions and send them to school to take a high pressured test during this pandemic!

Worse is to tell a child they failed the test and will stay in the same grade! Or to say they didn’t do well on the test, but if they don’t want to fail, they can retake the test!

This rotten practice got momentum in the State of Florida under former Governor Jeb Bush. If Bush had wanted to do right by children, if he’d been a savvy leader for CONTINUE READING: Education Secretary Cardona, End Third Grade Retention and High-Stakes Standardized Testing!

Missing the Mark – Tennessee Education Report

Missing the Mark – Tennessee Education Report

MISSING THE MARK

Superintendents in Shelby County are raising concerns about recently-passed legislation that would make retention the default option for a significant number of third grade students. One Superintendent even noted the effort “misses the mark” of its intent and instead of being helpful, will actually have a harmful effect on students.

The Daily Memphian has more:

“I have never seen anything that will hurt students as bad as what they are proposing,” Germantown Municipal School District Superintendent Jason Manuel told the suburb’s Board of Education in a recent meeting.

The response from Manuel comes as his district sent a letter to Gov. Bill Lee and local lawmakers raising concerns about this issue and the insistence on in-person TNReady testing this year.

Meanwhile, it has been pointed out that TNReady is NOT a literacy test and using it for this purpose is ill-advised.

“The legislation is attempting to address third graders who can’t read at grade level, but the TCAP test doesn’t test to see if students can read at grade level,” Lakeland Superintendent Ted Horrell said.

Unsurprisingly, the leadership over at SCORE suggests this idea is a really good one – even though actual educators stand in strong opposition to it. Here’s SCORE CEO CONTINUE READING : Missing the Mark – Tennessee Education Report

Letter to the Editor: Tennessee Poised to Fail Students – radical eyes for equity

Letter to the Editor: Tennessee Poised to Fail Students – radical eyes for equity

Letter to the Editor: Tennessee Poised to Fail Students

In response to Third grade retention law causing suburban superintendents angst, I submitted the following letter to the editor:

While it is increasingly popular across the US to pass third-grade retention laws as part of larger reading policies, often under the guise of the “science of reading,” there are decades of research showing that grade retention is extremely harmful to children, especially minoritized students and students living in poverty.

The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the largest organization of English teachers in the US, “oppose[s] legislation mandating that children, in any grade level, who do not meet criteria in reading be retained” and “oppose[s] the use of high-stakes test performance in reading as the criterion for student retention.”

As well, the National Education Policy Center (Boulder, CO) has issued a policy brief warning that states “[s]hould not adopt ‘ends justify the means’ policies aimed at raising reading test scores in the short term that have longer-term harms (for example, third-grade retention policies).” Further, states “[s]hould not prescribe a narrow definition of ‘scientific’ or ‘evidence-based’ that CONTINUE READING: Letter to the Editor: Tennessee Poised to Fail Students – radical eyes for equity

CURMUDGUCATION: Third Grade Reading Retention: Still A Bad Idea

CURMUDGUCATION: Third Grade Reading Retention: Still A Bad Idea

Third Grade Reading Retention: Still A Bad Idea

A former colleague of mine, a math teacher, used to say, "Don't even teach primary students math. Just teach them to read. By the time they get to me, if they can read well, I can teach them all the math you want."

That was many years ago, long before the rise of third grade reading retention laws. But those laws, while (usually) well-intentioned, are a terrible, rotten, no good, really bad idea.

Sixteen states require third graders to pass a standardized reading test in order to be promoted to fourth grade. Most of them allow for some exceptions, but not all, and not all the time.  It's long been conventional wisdom that fourth grade represents a new style of learning--that primary students learn to read, but once they hit fourth grade, they read to learn. But why turn that into a testing barrier.

Matt Barnum, the Chalkbeat reporter who occasionally decides to track down sources of conventional wisdom, traces the big push to some research from 2011. Authored by Donald J. Hernandez (Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and Foundation for Child Development) on behalf of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, "Double Jeopardy" ties third grade reading proficiency (more or less as defined by NAEP) to high school graduation as well as tying both to poverty. 

Without getting into too detail, the report finds that students who are not reading proficiently in CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Third Grade Reading Retention: Still A Bad Idea

Schools Matter: Gov. Bill Lee to Sacrifice Third Graders to Help Him in 2024

Schools Matter: Gov. Bill Lee to Sacrifice Third Graders to Help Him in 2024

Gov. Bill Lee to Sacrifice Third Graders to Help Him in 2024

Prior to this week, the last time a Tennessee governor brought the General Assembly into Special Session to pass education legislation was January 2010, and it was all about getting more federal money to pay for the schools that state politicians are unwilling to support.  

Responding to call by Gov. Phil Bredesen (D), the TN legislature quickly met in January 2010 and passed into state law the necessary policies that would make the state a shoo-in for a half-billion dollar federal grant to be provided by Obama's Race to to the Top (RttT).  A core component of Tennessee's half-baked program was to use the money for a test score based teacher evaluation scheme, which added to Tennessee's reputation as an educational laughingstock.

Just this week, Governor Bill Lee (R), has ridden herd over another special session on education, this one ostensibly to address 1) what educational snake oil salesmen call the Covid-related "learning loss," and 2) the reading proficiency emergency at Tennessee's elementary schools.

Since "learning loss" scam is covered in this recent post, let me focus for a moment on Bill Lee's other manufactured crisis, reading literacy. 

Less than two years ago, Lee's Commissioner of Education, Penny Schwinn was providing this spin on recent NAEP CONTINUE READING: Schools Matter: Gov. Bill Lee to Sacrifice Third Graders to Help Him in 2024

Third-Grade Punishment Laws – Revisited | Live Long and Prosper

Third-Grade Punishment Laws – Revisited | Live Long and Prosper

Third-Grade Punishment Laws – Revisited

ONE SIZE FITS SOME

A post on Diane Ravitch’s blog has raised the topic of grade retention.

Laura Chapman: Who Is Behind the “Read by Third Grade or Be Retained” Campaign?

There is a national read-by-grade three campaign. The practice of holding students back a grade is not new, but in the olden days it was never based on test scores alone and certainly not based on scores from national tests. I am no expert in reading, but I have learned to question how questionable policies proliferate.

Right now, The Annie E, Casey Foundation is a source of the national “Read by Grade 3” campaign. It is financed by about thirty other foundations and corporations. You can read about the investors here: http://gradelevelreading.net/about-us/campaign-investors

The Annie E. Casey Foundation is also the source of widely cited and dubious research about reading. For example, the Foundation sponsored “Double Jeopardy: How Third-Grade Reading Skills and Poverty Influence High School Graduation (2010, updated 2012)” by Dr. Donald J. Hernandez, sociologist at Hunter College (more recently at the University of Albany, CONTINUE READING: Third-Grade Punishment Laws – Revisited | Live Long and Prosper

Laura Chapman: Who Is Behind the “Read by Third Grade or Be Retained” Campaign? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Laura Chapman: Who Is Behind the “Read by Third Grade or Be Retained” Campaign? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Laura Chapman: Who Is Behind the “Read by Third Grade or Be Retained” Campaign? 

Laura Chapman recently wrote about the policy of holding third grade students back if they didn’t pass the third grade reading test. One result of this initiative is to raise fourth-grade reading scores on state tests and NAEP.

She writes:

There is a national read-by-grade three campaign. The practice of holding students back a grade is not new, but in the olden days it was never based on test scores alone and certainly not based on scores from national tests. I am no expert in reading, but I have learned to question how questionable policies proliferate.

Right now, The Annie E, Casey Foundation is a source of the national “Read by Grade 3” campaign. It is financed by about thirty other foundations and corporations. You can read about the investors here: http://gradelevelreading.net/about-us/campaign-investors

The Annie E. Casey Foundation is also the source of widely cited and dubious research about reading. For CONTINUE READING: Laura Chapman: Who Is Behind the “Read by Third Grade or Be Retained” Campaign? | Diane Ravitch's blog