10 Ways to Gather Letters for Congressional #TESTHearingsNow The Network For Public Education

The Network For Public Education | 10 Ways to Gather Letters for Congressional #TESTHearingsNow:

10 Ways to Gather Letters for Congressional #TESTHearingsNow

May 20, 2014 Testing / Opting Out, Uncategorized

As the school year starts to wind down, instead of talking about all the great things they’ve learned most students are still in the middle of testing, testing, and more testing.  So what can you do? Help us collect letters calling on Congress to hold hearings on the overuse and misuse of standardized tests.  Here are 10 quick ways you can gather letters:

1. Every time someone you know complains about the amount of tests our children are subjected to, email them this link or hand them this letter.  Ask them to fill it out and mail it in.
2. Neighborhood b-b-q? End of year party?  Bring your pot luck item and copies of the letter.  Offer to collect them back and mail them in to our partners in DC at the Institute for America’s Future, 1825 K St. NW, Suite 400 Washington, DC 20006.
3. Ask your child’s teacher(s) what they think about the amount of testing.  Odd are they too are frustrated and would be interested in sending in a letter.
4. Take a look at the list of Congressional members who could make this hearing a reality.  Do you know any of them or are they from your district?  Then contact them and ask them to hold the hearings now.  Our Grassroots Toolkit will give you suggestions for a personalized letter.
5. What about your School Board Member or Superintendent?  Are any of them sympathetic to the artificial stress the overuse of standardized testing is putting on children?  We need our school leaders to stand with us, but we’ll never know if they will unless we ask them.
6. Bring up the discussion at your end of year PTA / PTO meeting.  These are other parents concerned and involved with volunteering.  Do they have concerns about overtesting too?  Print out some letters and share with parents at your school.
7. Do your children participate in activities or clubs after school?  Most people working with children are seeing the effects of the current obsession with testing?  Ask the mentors, instructors, coaches & leaders what they think & if they’ll support our call by mailing in our letter.
8. What about your state legislator?  Don’t laugh.  Each state has champions for public education in office.  Do you know yours?  It’s a good relationship to build if you don’t and an easy call to make if you already know them.  We need our state legislators to join our call and ask Congress to hold these hearings now.
9. Are you on twitter?  Facebook?  Spread the word with this link http://bit.ly/1eRdpj5 to our online letter signing campaign and use #TESTHearingsNow.
10. Here’s the easiest way.  Email 10 friends and ask them to sign the letter and email 10 of their friends.  We’ve all received those silly chain letters.  Here’s one that can actually help our children and save our schools.  Email today!

Any letters you collect can be sent to:
NPE Call for Hearings
c/o Institute for America’s Future
1825 K St. NW, Suite 400
Washington, DC  20006

Thanks for your continued support of NPE.

Paris ISD superintendent explains his startling STAAR letter | Dallas Morning News

Paris ISD superintendent explains his startling STAAR letter | Dallas Morning News:

Paris ISD superintendent explains his startling STAAR letter

By Jeffrey Weiss
JWeiss@dallasnews.com
1:31 pm on May 20, 2014 | Permalink

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A couple of days ago, I posted about Paul Jones, the superintendent of Paris ISD and the remarkably blunt letter he sent to parents about the upcoming release of STAAR data. It’s fair to say that Jones has little use for the current Texas school accountability system. Here’s a representative nugget from the letter:

“These assessments do not reflect the quality of teaching or learning in our classrooms. Instead, they reflect a punitive; one size fits all test-driven system. Our students are much more than a once-a-year pencil and bubble sheet test. Your child means immeasurably more than just a number generated in Austin. There is no test that can assess all of what makes each child unique. The state mandated assessments are used by the state to score and rank our campuses and our district, however, this is not the only assessment we use for Paris ISD students. We have higher standards. Your child’s achievements must be measured by a multitude of accomplishments throughout the year.”

The letter was posted to the district website early Friday evening. By Saturday, it was a thing bouncing around the Internet. And on Monday, Jones said, he came in to the office to find emails from as far away as Thailand. I think it’s fair to say that Jones was a little naive as to the power of social media in 2014: He said he was shocked that anybody outside Paris noticed, much less that he’d become an instant hero for the ranks of the testing pushback movement.

He’s received about 75 emails from teachers, parents and other education professionals. Subject lines include a lot of “thank yous” and “wish I could work for yous.”

Before giving Jones the floor, some context: Paris ISD is a district that has been testing challenged. It’s managed not to dip below the minimum acceptable ratings on the state accountability radar. But its students pass most of the STAAR tests at rates below the state average. While its graduation rate is high, significantly more of its graduates emerged with a minimum plan diploma than the state average. It’s not likely that the release of this year’s STAAR data scheduled for this week will change that record.

So Jones’ letter could be viewed as a combination of “sour grapes” and the sort of pep talk a coach gives a team that’s just taken a bad loss: You worked hard, you can be proud of what you accomplished. I asked Jones about that. Where did that letter come from?

He said he’s not assuming bad news.

“We’re going to celebrate if we knock the roof off, but we know that’s not what it’s all about,” he said.

He’d been thinking about sending a letter out for about a week. On Friday, with the release of the new scores looming large, he decided to write his thoughts down. Initially, he sent it to his principals so they could put it into their weekly newsletters. And then the district tech guy put it on the home page.

Like so many superintendents I’ve talked to in the past couple of years, Jones says he’s in favor of accountability. But the current system, he says, is overly punitive and puts too little emphasis on growth. A student who starts the year a year behind and makes more than a year of progress is a success story, Jones said. But that student still won’t pass the STAAR.

“If we had a test that measures student growth, we’d probably be above the state average,” he said.

Maybe so, though the ability of STAAR (or any standardized test) to measure growth with any precision is a matter of some controversy amongst education professionals.

Jones is not the only superintendent to take a shot at the state system recently. Hudson ISD’s Mary Ann Whiteker sent out a “new vision update” last month that included this:

The results should be considered benchmarks, not the end-all to learning for the year. These exams do not reflect the quality of teaching or learning in our classrooms. Our students are more than one test. Their achievements must be determined by a multitude of accomplishments throughout the year, celebrating academic growth as well as mastery of skills, co-curricular and extra-curricular accolades, experiencing new opportunities/challenges.

But Whiteker has been public and vocal about the state system for a while. Not so, Jones. Before coming to Paris in March 2013, he’d been in tiny Saltillo ISD for 17 years. And unlike Paris ISD, Saltillo Paris ISD superintendent explains his startling STAAR letter | Dallas Morning News:

Pearson Allows Me to Quote 400 Board-meeting Words | deutsch29

Pearson Allows Me to Quote 400 Board-meeting Words | deutsch29:

Pearson Allows Me to Quote 400 Board-meeting Words

May 20, 2014

At the American Enterprise Institute in March 2014, billionaire Bill Gates explained why the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are necessary above and beyond individual state standards that might be better:

You get more free market competition. Scale is good for free market competition.Individual state regulatory capture is not good for competition. [Emphasis added.]

In economics, “scale” involves decreasing costs as a result of the ability to mass produce.

Gates sees “scale potential” in the national standardization of public education– i.e., CCSS.

He believes such is “good for free market competition.”

Not true.

The national standardization of public education does not promote economic health for small (local) businesses. Instead, it feeds monopolies– like bloated, incompetent Pearson.

I have read and written much about Pearson. My conclusion: Pearson is very bad for American public education.

Pearson has an established history of finding itself on the defendant end of lawsuits, including those related to copyright infringement, misuse of a nonprofit, and faulty reporting of results.

Nevertheless, Pearson is involved in all aspects of American public education. It is tied to curriculum, assessment (including assessment of teachers in training),professional development, and data collection (and here).

Pearson is huge (“consisting of three worldwide businesses”), and becomes even larger by acquiring smaller companies– companies that one might be Pearson Allows Me to Quote 400 Board-meeting Words | deutsch29:

Schooling in the Ownership Society: A handful of Common Core text/testing publishers buying up everything in sight

Schooling in the Ownership Society: A handful of Common Core text/testing publishers buying up everything in sight:

A handful of Common Core text/testing publishers buying up everything in sight

Captive audience marketing to kids on Channel 1 

Boston-based Houghton Mifflin Harcourt just acquired Channel One and Curiosityville. HMH is one of the biggest text/testing publishers cashing in on the booming Common Core market, along with Pearson and McGraw-Hill.  In  2007, Pearson acquired Harcourt Assessment and Harcourt Education International.

Channel One News, founded in 1989 by school privatizer and captive-audience marketing guru Chris Whittle, produces daily news programs along with paid ads that are broadcast to nearly 5 million students in upper-elementary, middle, and high schools across the United States. The shows are delivered online and via satellite. On April 17, Channel One News devoted nearly one third of its program  to a “news story” about the U.S. Army.

Adding the video-production capabilities of Channel One to the publishing company will help it market its Go Math! program.

From Channel One's vantage point, the acquisition will mean the digital-content company "can leverage HMH's leading K-12 market position and its deep  relationships with school districts across the U.S. to offer innovative digital content and resources on an evenSchooling in the Ownership Society: A handful of Common Core text/testing publishers buying up everything in sight: 

Russ on Reading: Creative Stability: A Better Plan for Public Schools

Russ on Reading: Creative Stability: A Better Plan for Public Schools:

Creative Stability: A Better Plan for Public Schools

Education reformers love the concept of "creative disruption." Applying a business model to public education, they argue that the way to improve schools is through disrupting the system by closing under-performing schools, firing under-performing teachers and introducing competition for students in the form of charter schools and school vouchers. Only by disrupting the system and exposing it to market forces can we hope to improve teaching and learning, or so the reformer narrative goes.

Let's set aside for a moment that all this "creative disruption" ignores the root cause for the struggles of public education - poverty. Leave aside also that the only way reformers seem to be able to identify "failing schools" and "failing teachers" is through standardized tests. Let's focus on the fatal flaw in the concept of "creative disruption." That fatal flaw is that disruption does not further student learning, indeed it interferes with learning on every level. Turmoil is anathema to learning. The turmoil created by closing public schools, high staff turnover (read TFA recruits), the opening and closing of charter schools will all only exacerbate the learning challenges of urban children.

What we need is not creative disruption, but creative stability. Creative stability would focus on providing children with an adequately financed, well-resourced, professionally-staffed, local neighborhood school.

Every teacher knows that children learn best in a stable environment. That is why teachers spend the first several days of school establishing routines and norms for the smooth functioning of the classroom. I like to think of it as setting the children up for success. Children are learning machines. The first job of the teacher then, is to establish rituals in the classroom that help the children get out of their own way to learn.

Literacy educator Lucy Calkins at Columbia Teachers College put it this way:

 I have finally realized that the most creative environments in our society are not the kaleidoscopic environments in which everything is always changing and Russ on Reading: Creative Stability: A Better Plan for Public Schools:

NYC Public School Parents: Our letter to the Chancellor about class size, and what she said in response last night

NYC Public School Parents: Our letter to the Chancellor about class size, and what she said in response last night:

Our letter to the Chancellor about class size, and what she said in response last night

Last night, at the District 2 Town Hall meeting with Chancellor Farina, I read aloud excerpts from a letter co-signed by 15 Community Education and Citywide Council presidents, including several members of the DOE's Blue Book and Space sharing Committees, urging her to adopt and implement a class size reduction plan that included smaller classes in all grades, as the Contracts for Excellence law requires.



I mentioned how at a District 15 town hall meeting on May 6, she had responded to the concerns of a parent by saying that a class size of 30 in her child’s third grade was “not outrageous.”  In the letter, we summarize the court decision in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit that class sizes in NYC were too large to provide kids with their constitutional right to a sound basic education, and that reducing class size is the number one priority of parents; we also mentioned her participation on one of the CFE expert panels,  whose consensus view urged class sizes of 14-17 students in elementary schools.



The video of her statement at the Brooklyn town hall is below; below that is the video of my reading of the letter and her response, summarized here:



Chancellor Fariña: “I wish it were possible.  Also keeping with the fact that we have UPK in our schools makes it difficult to keep two promises simultaneously.  But you never ever heard me say that those class sizes I would go for; I have a particular feeling there’s such a thing as too small a class size. I feel sometimes class sizes creates cliques, other kinds of non-social relationships .  I dare you to find a place where I said 14-16.  [the letter said 14-17 as the consensus view; for more on this below.] 



“Certainly PreK is 18; early childhood I would say 22-25 is much more reasonable because otherwise we would have to build buildings on top of buildings .  Not to say we shouldn’t have reduced class size.  I also think right now one of my concerns is that middle school is a little too high in some places.  So do I want reduced class size, yes. But there is a limit beyond which I think too small actually hurts kids as much as too big.”



The New York Adequacy Study, Exhibit 2-10 on p. 33 of this report includes the specific class sizes recommended by the Professional Judgement Panels, that were costed out and became the basis for the CFE funding requests.  The chart shows that 14 students per class were recommended for high poverty elementary schools, and 16.8 students per class for low poverty elementary schools.  For middle schools, the recommended class size was 22.6  students, and high schools at 18.4 to 29.1, depending on the poverty level of the school.



The fact that Carmen Fariña served on one of the Professional Judgment Panels is on p.49 and p. 52 of Volume II of the report.The task of these panels was to “design an instructional program that will provide all students in the school a full opportunity to meet the Regents Learning Standards, and to attain a Regents’ diploma.”  Of course, the recommended class sizes cited above were the consensus view of these panels, as we wrote in our letter, not what she may have personally supported.



In any case, in the letter, we urged her to follow up with the mayor’s campaign promise (which he made in response to a NYC Kids PAC survey) to comply with the city’s original C4E plan to lower class sizes to an average of no more than 20 students per class in grades K-3, 23  in 4-8 grade, and 25 in high school. 



Bill de Blasio also promised at a candidate forum on June 14 to reduce class size, and if necessary to raise revenue to do so.  A copy of his signed promise is here.   At the same time, he made it clear he was going to provide expanded preK, and never mentioned that this would conflict with his promises on class size.

As to the Chancellor’s claim that cliques are more pervasive in smaller classes, I had never heard that statement before. Most research seems to indicate that there are better social relationships and less stereotyping in a small class.  Today, I found this study by social psychologist Maureen Hallinan, summarized in the book, The Development of Children's Friendships,  concluding that the larger the class size, the size and number of cliques modestly increases.  This  seems a reasonable finding and one that is neither argues for or against the wide ranging benefits of reducing class size – including its significant impact on narrowing the achievement gap, which Farina went on to say was one of her primary goals.  (The full video of last night’s Town Hall is here.)

In any case, the wide ranging benefits of reducing class size are well-known– including its significant impact on narrowing the achievement gap, which the Chancellor went on to say was one of her primary goals.  (The full video of last night’s Town hall is here.) 



Of course, most elite private schools cap class sizes at about 15-18 kids per class, and the Icahn charter chain caps class sizes at 18 per class in grades K-8. If you are a CEC member and would like to sign onto this letter, please let me know by emailing info@classsizematters.org ; you can also email her directly atcgfarina@schools.nyc.org

We will also have an online petition that anyone can sign soon. According to the state’s schedule, districts are supposed to be consulting with parents and other stakeholders about their proposed C4E plan now, before posting it on June 13.  -- thanks, LeonieNYC Public School Parents: Our letter to the Chancellor about class size, and what she said in response last night:

Letter to Carmen Fariña on Class Size 5.19.14