Arne Duncan: “Testing Issues Are Sucking the Oxygen Out of the Room in a Lot of Schools”!

Dear Commons Community,

In what has to be one of the greatest conversion stories since St. Paul on his way to Damascus, Arne Duncan announced on his blog yesterday a new USDOE stance on standardized testing.  Here are excerpts from his posting:

“There are three main issues I’ve heard about repeatedly from educators:

  1. It doesn’t make sense to hold them accountable during this transition year for results on the new assessments – a test many of them have not seen before – and as many are coming up to speed with new standards.
  2. The standardized tests they have today focus too much on basic skills, not enough on critical thinking and deeper learning.
  3. Testing – and test preparation – takes up too much time.

I share these concerns. And I want our department to be part of the solution.

To those who are reading the last sentence with surprise, let me be clear: assessment is a vital part of teaching and learning, but it should be one part (and only one part) of how adults hold themselves responsible for students’ progress. Schools, teachers and families need and deserve clear, useful information about how their students are progressing…

But assessment needs to be done wisely. No school or teacher should look bad because they took on kids with greater challenges. Growth is what matters. No teacher or school should be judged on any one test, or tests alone – always on a mix of measures – which could range from classroom observations to family engagement indicators…

But the larger issue is, testing should never be the main focus of our schools. Educators work all day to inspire, to intrigue, to know their students – not just in a few subjects, and not just in “academic” areas. There’s a whole world of skills that tests can never touch that are vital to students’ success. No test will ever measure what a student is, or can be. It’s simply one measure of one kind of progress. Yet in too many places, testing itself has become a distraction from the work it is meant to support.

I believe testing issues today are sucking the oxygen out of the room in a lot of schools – oxygen that is needed for a healthy transition to higher standards, improved systems for data, better aligned assessments, teacher professional development, evaluation and support, and more. This is one of the biggest changes education in this country has ever seen, and teachers who’ve worked through it have told me it’s allowed them to become the best teachers they’ve ever been. That change needs educators’ full attention.

That’s why – as I shared in a conversation with dozens of teachers at Jefferson Middle School in Washington, D.C. earlier today – we will be taking action in the coming weeks that give states more flexibility in key areas that teachers have said are causing worry.

States will have the opportunity to request a delay in when test results matter for teacher evaluation during this transition. As we always have, we’ll work with them in a spirit of flexibility to develop a plan that works, but typically I’d expect this to mean that states that request this delay will push back by one year (to 2015-16) the time when student growth measures based on new state assessments become part of their evaluation systems – and we will work with states seeking other areas of flexibility as well…

I’m concerned, too, when I see places where adults are gaming tests, rather than using them to help students.

And we also need to recognize that in many places, the sheer quantity of testing – and test prep – has become an issue. In some schools and districts, over time tests have simply been layered on top of one another, without a clear sense of strategy or direction. Where tests are redundant, or not sufficiently helpful for instruction, they cost precious time that teachers and kids can’t afford. Too much testing can rob school buildings of joy, and cause unnecessary stress. This issue is a priority for us, and we’ll continue to work throughout the fall on efforts to cut back on over-testing.

There’s plenty of responsibility to share on these challenges, and a fair chunk of that sits with me and my department.”

Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

Dare I say that it remains to be seen whether Duncan and his USDOE staff of corporate and private foundation allies have really seen the light.

Tony

 

Ferguson, Missouri Educators Helping Out While the Public Schools are Closed!

Ferguson Teachers

Dear Commons Community,

The racially charged protests entered their 11th day yesterday, following the fatal shooting of unarmed black teen Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9. Since then, there have been dozens of arrests and numerous confrontations between protesters and police. As a result, the first day of school was delayed more than a week for the Ferguson-Florissant School District, until next Monday.

To help the children in the Ferguson schools, teachers and administrators have been organizing support activities including conducting teaching sessions in public libraries, volunteering to do clean-up work in and around the schools, and providing meals for students who normally rely on school lunch programs. Here are excerpts from The Huffington Post describing these activities.

“School is out for many Ferguson students, but teachers are still holding classes at local public libraries. On Tuesday, teachers stood outside of Ferguson Public Library holding signs that said “here to teach” and “students welcome.” Inside the library, teachers helped students with reading, science, art and math. “We’re trying to provide a positive and productive place for students,” said Ferguson-Florissant art teacher Carrie Pace to local outlet the Riverfront Times. “A place for them to come and do something educational and meet up with other students.”

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On Tuesday, hundreds of educators took to the Ferguson streets to clean up debris left over from days of protest, according to the St. Louis Post-Dipsatch.

We’re building up the community,” Tiffany Anderson, the Jennings School District superintendent, told NPR. “Kids are facing challenges. This is unusual, but violence, when you have over 90 percent free and reduced lunch, is not unusual. … Last week, I met with several high school students, some of whom who are out here helping clean up. And we talked a little bit about how you express and have a voice in positive ways.”

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Because many low-income Ferguson children rely on meals provided by schools for sustenance, days without school can leave some students hungry. As a result, some closed schools are providing lunches to students in need, or opening up their cafeterias, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

“School is still thinking about you,” parent Chavonne Robinson told the outlet. Robinson brought her three sons to a school that had an open cafeteria for lunch. “It’s thinking about us, the whole family.”

Let’s hope that Ferguson can get past its crisis as soon as possible.

Tony

 

Stanford University’s Hoover Institute: Common Core Losing Support among Teachers and Republicans!

Common Core Opposition

Dear Commons Community,

Teachers and Republicans are losing faith in the Common Core State Standards, the national education guidelines adopted by a majority of states. As reported in The Huffington Post:

According to a poll out today by Education Next, a quarterly education journal from Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, 40 percent of teachers said they opposed the Common Core — more than triple the 12 percent who said they were against the standards in 2013.

Public opposition to the Common Core also has increased. While 65 percent supported the Common Core in 2013, a slim majority — 53 percent — expressed approval in 2014. Broken down by party lines, Republicans were much more likely to have switched their opinion than Democrats.

The standards were developed in an effort to make sure students around the country are being held to the same guidelines. While the federal government encouraged states to adopt higher standards in 2010 with Race to the Top money, many states adopted them without incentives. Conservatives have taken to calling the standards an example of federal overreach.”

There is an interesting dynamic evolving around the country concerning teachers/their unions and political parties. The NEA and AFT have traditionally supported the Democratic Party both at national, state, and local levels. The Common Core as well as several other issues such as charters schools and teacher tenure are creating wedges between teacher unions and the Democrats. For example, the NEA has called on the resignation of Arnie Duncan, President Obama’s secretary of education.

And earlier this month, the New York State United Teachers decided that it was not endorsing Democrat incumbent Andrew Cuomo for governor — even while backing the two other statewide Democrats running for re-election, Comptroller Tom DiNapoli and Attorney General Eric Schneid­erman.

The union was upset at the governor for his new teacher-evaluation system, which initially tied teacher evaluations to the state’s controversial Common Core standardized tests. Cuomo’s championing of charter schools also didn’t go over well with the union.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. It is not likely to push teachers unions around the country en masse to the Republicans but in close elections especially at the state and local level, there can be some concerns for Democratic candidates who favor the Common Core.

Tony

 

Big Data: Doing the “Janitorial Work”!

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has an article today entitled, “For Big-Data Scientists, ‘Janitor Work’ Is Key Hurdle to Insights”, that describes the efforts needed in cleaning up large amounts of raw digital data in order to realize any benefits. Specifically, it examines what data scientists call “data wrangling,” “data munging” and “data janitor work” . Here is an excerpt:

“The field known as “big data” offers a contemporary case study. The catchphrase stands for the modern abundance of digital data from many sources — the web, sensors, smartphones and corporate databases — that can be mined with clever software for discoveries and insights. Its promise is smarter, data-driven decision-making in every field. That is why data scientist is the economy’s hot new job.

Yet far too much handcrafted work — what data scientists call “data wrangling,” “data munging” and “data janitor work” — is still required. Data scientists, according to interviews and expert estimates, spend from 50 percent to 80 percent of their time mired in this more mundane labor of collecting and preparing unruly digital data, before it can be explored for useful nuggets…

“It’s an absolute myth that you can send an algorithm over raw data and have insights pop up,” said Jeffrey Heer, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington and a co-founder of Trifacta, a start-up based in San Francisco.

Timothy Weaver, the chief information officer of Del Monte Foods, calls the predicament of data wrangling big data’s “iceberg” issue, meaning attention is focused on the result that is seen rather than all the unseen toil beneath.”

As someone who has followed and written about data-driven decision making and the use of big data in education, the comments provided in this article are very much on target and should be heeded for any organization planning to invest in big data applications.

The article goes on to describe several small start-up companies that are trying to develop software to ease some of the big data janitorial work issues but acknowledges that much progress is still needed. “We really need better tools so we can spend less time on data wrangling and get to the sexy stuff,” said Michael Cavaretta, a data scientist at Ford Motor, which has used big data analysis to trim inventory levels and guide changes in car design.

Tony

 

CUNY Graduate Center: Fastest Growing Public Doctoral Granting Institution in the Country!

Graduate Center Ranking Growth in Enrollment

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has just released its annual Almanac of Higher Education 2014-2015 (subscription required) which provides data on a host of education measures. In terms of the fastest growing colleges for the ten-year period 2002 – 2012, our own CUNY Graduate Center led the country in the category of public doctoral institutions. The data indicated the Graduate Center grew from 3,874 (2002) to 6,812 (2012) students for a gain of 75.8%.

Congratulations to the Graduate Center and especially to its administrators during this period who steered the ship.

Tony

 

The Disappearing Volunteer Firefighter!

Disappearing Volunteer Firefighter

Dear Commons Community,

In most places in America, when a fire breaks out, a volunteer shows up to put it out. But the ranks of volunteers are dwindling. What was once an iconic part of American life is losing its allure, in part because the work — some would say the calling — is a lot less fun than it used to be. A New York Times article yesterday describes the plight of volunteer fire companies around the country. Here is an excerpt:

“There are still more than twice as many volunteers as career firefighters. But the number of volunteers has dropped by around 11 percent since the mid-1980s, while the number of career firefighters has grown more than 50 percent, according to the National Fire Protection Association. The allure has diminished because fund-raising now takes up roughly half the time most volunteers spend on duty. It’s also harder to fit in volunteer work. The rise in two-income households often means that there is no stay-at-home parent to run things so the other can dash off for an an emergency. Urbanization and the aging of the rural population are taking their toll as fewer young people are available to replace firefighters who retire.

Federal, state and local officials would like to attract new volunteer recruits. The stakes are particularly high because volunteers save not only lives but money — more than $139.8 billion annually for local governments, according to the fire protection association. The time and training needed to become a certified firefighter have also increased. Federal standards enacted to save firefighters’ lives have unintentionally created a barrier for volunteer service: It now takes hundreds of hours to be certified, and new firefighters often must cover the cost of training.

Other costs are also contributing to the dwindling of the ranks. Since the 1980s, the price of a single self-contained breathing apparatus has jumped to over $5,000, from $900. A fire engine costs $400,000 more than it did 30 years ago. In surveys, firefighters consistently cite the endless burden of fund-raising, which takes up to 60 percent of their work time, as one of the biggest deterrents to staying on the job.”

I have been a volunteer fireman for thirty-two years and have held all of the firematic officer positions from lieutenant through chief and currently am a fire commissioner involved with the business side of a our fire company. When I joined the volunteers in 1982, there were 30-35 active firefighters who could respond to emergencies. Not there are fewer than 15. This scenario as the article states is playing itself out all over the country. Sadly, a great American institution is fading away.

Tony

Teaching is Not a Business OR Nature Wants Children to Be Children before They Are Men and Women!

Dear Commons Community,

David L. Kirp, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has a New York Times op-ed piece today, entitled, “Teaching is Not a Business“. He posits that the so-called school-reform movement of the past dozen years, has failed mainly because it has pushed aside the teacher-student human relationship focus of schooling and replaced it with a business model based on high-stakes testing, competition, and technology. His position has been sounded many times in recent years but is worth repeating so as to minimize the harm being done to a generation of public school students who attend humorless, factory model schools promoted by school reformers such as Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Bill Gates, and others. Here is an excerpt:

“TODAY’S education reformers believe that schools are broken and that business can supply the remedy. Some place their faith in the idea of competition. Others embrace disruptive innovation, mainly through online learning. Both camps share the belief that the solution resides in the impersonal, whether it’s the invisible hand of the market or the transformative power of technology.

Neither strategy has lived up to its hype, and with good reason. It’s impossible to improve education by doing an end run around inherently complicated and messy human relationships. All youngsters need to believe that they have a stake in the future, a goal worth striving for, if they’re going to make it in school. They need a champion, someone who believes in them, and that’s where teachers enter the picture. The most effective approaches foster bonds of caring between teachers and their students.

Marketplace mantras dominate policy discussions. High-stakes reading and math tests are treated as the single metric of success, the counterpart to the business bottom line. Teachers whose students do poorly on those tests get pink slips, while those whose students excel receive merit pay, much as businesses pay bonuses to their star performers and fire the laggards. Just as companies shut stores that aren’t meeting their sales quotas, opening new ones in more promising territory, failing schools are closed and so-called turnaround model schools, with new teachers and administrators, take their place.

This approach might sound plausible in a think tank, but in practice it has been a flop. Firing teachers, rather than giving them the coaching they need, undermines morale. In some cases it may well discourage undergraduates from pursuing careers in teaching, and with a looming teacher shortage as baby boomers retire, that’s a recipe for disaster. Merit pay invites rivalries among teachers, when what’s needed is collaboration. Closing schools treats everyone there as guilty of causing low test scores, ignoring the difficult lives of the children in these schools — “no excuses,” say the reformers, as if poverty were an excuse.”

The school reform movement of big business, venture capitalists, and their crony foundations has failed. Let’s truly put students first and treat them as developing young individuals who need nurturing and support more so than carrots and sticks. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau said:

“Nature wants children to be children before they are men [and women]. . . Childhood has ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling, peculiar to itself, nothing can be more foolish than to substitute our ways for them.“ (Emile, 1762)

Tony

 

Governor Rick Perry Indicted in Texas for Abuse of Power!

Dear Commons Community,

Governor Rick Perry of Texas and Republican presidential candidate hopeful was indicted by a grand jury yesterday for allegedly abusing the powers of his office by carrying out a threat to veto funding for state prosecutors investigating public corruption.

A special prosecutor spent months calling witnesses and presenting evidence that Perry broke the law when he promised publicly to nix $7.5 million over two years for the public integrity unit run by the office of Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg. As reported in The Dallas Morning News:

“Gov. Rick Perry was indicted on two felony counts for abuse of official capacity and coercion of a public servant late Friday by a Travis County grand jury.

The case stems from Perry’s vetoing the $7.5 million biennial funding for the Travis County Public Integrity Unit last year. He threatened to withhold the money unless District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg resigned.

In announcing the indictment, special prosecutor Michael McCrum of San Antonio said he felt confident of the charges brought against the governor and was “ready to go forward.”

Mary Anne Wiley, general counsel for the governor, said that Perry is being charged for exercising his rights and power as governor.

“The veto in question was made in accordance with the veto authority afforded to every governor under the Texas Constitution. We will continue to aggressively defend the governor’s lawful and constitutional action, and believe we will ultimately prevail,” Wiley said.

Abuse of official capacity is a first-degree felony with punishment ranging from five to 99 years in prison, and coercion of a public servant is a third-degree felony with a penalty of two to 10 years.

The indictment immediately fueled partisan fighting. Perry is a conservative Republican indicted by a grand jury in a Democratic county. Regardless, the charges could cripple any chance of a second presidential campaign, which had been gathering some momentum in recent months.

In announcing the indictment, McCrum said that he weighed the duty he had in looking at a sitting governor.

“I took into account the fact that we’re talking about the governor of a state and the governor of the state of Texas, which we all love,” he said.

“Obviously, that carries a level of importance. But when it gets down to it, the law is the law,” McCrum said.”

Regardless of the outcome of this indictment, Rick Perry’s ambitions for the Republican nomination will be hurt and maybe derailed.

Tony

 

New York State/New York City Common Core Test Results Released – Little Change!

Common Core NYS NYC Math 2014

Common Core NYS NYC ELA 2014

Click to enlarge.

Dear Commons Community,

The New York State Education Department released the scores on this year’s statewide English language arts and math exams yesterday. New York State students in grades 3 through 8 had taken the tests in April and May. The results showed a slight improvement from 2013, the first year the exams were aligned with the Common Core State Standards. Overall, most students are still not reaching proficient levels in math or English.

In New York City, students made little headway on both exams. The number of students passing the reading exam increased to 29 percent, from 27 percent, while in math, the city’s rate rose about four percentage points to 34 percent from last year, when 30 percent passed. Black and Hispanic students improved slightly, but there remained a significant gap between their scores and those of white and Asian students.

New York was one of the first states to introduce tests aligned with the Common Core, and the sharp decline in students’ test scores last year contributed to a statewide backlash against the new standards. In 2012, the last year of the easier tests, 55 percent of the state’s students passed the reading test, and 65 percent passed in math.

The teachers’ union charged that educators had not been adequately trained, and some parents asked whether the tests were simply too hard.

In response to urging from the union, the State Legislature in June passed a bill to mitigate the effect of the scores on teachers’ evaluations, preventing educators from being fired or denied tenure in the coming school year based on their students’ scores.

In the city, more charter school students — over 42 percent — passed the math tests than in the public schools over all. Charter school students, however, performed somewhat less well than public school students over all on the English exam, with only 27 percent passing.

As I have stated before on this blog, the Common Core Curriculum is not the problem. The problem is that it was poorly implemented in New York and there was too much emphasis on testing the Common Core rather than developing  curriculum materials and training teachers to use them effectively.

Tony

 

Michelle Rhee Leaving CEO Job At StudentsFirst!

Dear Commons Community,

Michelle Rhee confirmed The Huffington Post’s Tuesday article about her departure from StudentsFirst in a blog post on the group’s website, as well as in a statement to the Sacramento Bee, late Wednesday. Rhee did not provide a date for her departure. As reported in The Huffington Post:

“While I remain 100 percent committed to the success of StudentsFirst, it’s time for a shift in the day-to-day management of the team and our advocacy work,” Rhee wrote in the blog post. “We’ll be sharing more of the nuts-and-bolts details about that in the coming weeks…”

StudentsFirst has not been as effective as she wanted,” said a former prominent StudentsFirst staffer, who declined to be named, wanting to preserve relationships in education reform. “It’s been frustrating. It’s not totally shocking that eventually even she would decide to step away.”

“If Rhee steps aside, the organization would be without its main attraction. StudentsFirst has recently pulled out of states such as Minnesota and Florida, and its relationship with a New Jersey partner organization ended about a year ago. It’s unclear whether StudentsFirst will draw as much attention without its famous founder.

“In practice, this has always been about Michelle,” said the former staffer.

Ms. Rhee is leaving at a time when the school “reform” movement that she helped promulgate is waning. the country has in some ways moved on from the movement’s agenda, or at least its hard-charging rhetoric. This shift has been evident in the election of candidates such as New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D), who staked his campaign on fighting against the Rhee-like education policies of his predecessor, Michael Bloomberg. Even one of the movement’s greatest proponents has noted the political sensitivity around it, saying he sought to avoid the word “reform.” But Rhee’s rhetoric has pervaded the messaging of several education reform groups, politicians and pundits, who still make the case for reforming tenure and judging teachers in accordance with their students’ standardized test scores.”

Ms. Rhee is leaving the sinking ship of school “reform” and we say good-bye.

Tony