Carol Burris: Common Core tests widen achievement gap in New York

The time to “reform the reform” is long overdue.....In the coming months, the fruits of the poisonous tree will be much examined, sorted and discussed.  But the fruit is rotten and parents are warning their children not to bite. The opposition to testing grows and soon the tree will finally fall.
Carol Burris at The Answer Sheet

Another wallop at ed deform from Carol with Valerie's assistance.

Common Core tests widen achievement gap in New York

By Valerie Strauss, Published: August 26 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/08/26/common-core-tests-widen-achievement-gap-in-new-york/

Here’s the latest post from award-winning Principal Carol Burris of South Side High School in New York, who for more than a year on this blog has chronicled test-driven reform in her state (here, and here and here and here, for example). Burris was named New York’s 2013 High School Principal of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York and the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and in 2010,  tapped as the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State. She is the co-author of the New York Principals letter of concern regarding the evaluation of teachers by student test scores. It has been signed by more than 1,535 New York principals and more than 6,500 teachers, parents, professors, administrators and citizens. You can read the letter by clicking here. 
 
By Carol Burris
The New York Common Core test results are the fruit of a poisonous tree — what should be useful evidence of student learning is, instead, data without value.  Commissioner John King refers to the Common Core test results as  “baseline data.”  Producing baseline data was never the intent.  Chancellor Merryl Tisch said that if we educators were not prepared for the Common Core, we were “living under a rock.”  Since the results were published, however, her tone has changed.  At a recent public forum, Tisch remarked,  “We need to do a great job communicating why these new test scores that we’ve just seen are not an indicator that there’s been no learning or teaching going on.” If one muddles through the double negative, the takeaway is that the results of the tests for third-to-eighth graders are meaningless.

They may be meaningless, but they are not inconsequential.  The results expanded the black/white achievement gap.  In 2012, there was a 12-point black/white achievement gap between average third grade English Language Arts scores, and a 14-point gap in eighth grade ELA scores.  This year, the respective gaps grew to 19 and 25 points.  In 2012, there was an 8-point gap between black/white third-grade math scores and a 13-point gap between eighth-grade math scores.  The respective gaps are now 14 and 18 points.  The gap expansion extended to other groups as well. The achievement gap between White and Latino students in eighth-grade ELA grew from 3 points to 22 points.  Students who already believe they are not as academically successful as their more affluent peers, will further internalize defeat.

The percentage of black students who scored “below basic” in third-grade English Language Arts rose from 15.5 percent to 50 percent. In seventh-grade math, black students labeled “below basic” jumped from 16.5 percent to a staggering 70 percent. Nearly one-third of all New York children scored “below basic” across the grade level tests. Students often score “below basic” because they guess or give up. Principals and teachers cannot get accurate feedback on student learning.  Although Ms. Tisch may say that “this does not mean there’s no learning going on,” what will parents think? Students will now need to be placed in remediation, or Academic Intervention Services.  Schools that serve a predominately minority, poor student body will be fiscally overwhelmed as they try to meet the needs of so many children.  Those who truly need the additional support will find that support is watered-down.

You don't hear deformers talking very much about the old AG anymore. Note how they shift the ground as each deform fails. Now it's teacher effectiveness (which used to be teacher quality but when the holes in that were pointed out they moved the ball.)

When all those anti-union states get rid of every teacher they can and the old AG stays stuck or drops where do they go next? We ought to have a contest. Carol, the Rational Educator, continues:

Experienced educators understand why the reform agenda is not working. Reformers “wish” their unrealistic goals and expectations to be attainable, and then “whip” educators and schools using test scores, in order to make their wishes come true.  But the “wish and whip” strategy of school reform simply does not work. Michael Fullan, a scholar of school reform, has continually warned that test scores and punishment cannot be successful strategies to transform schools.

The time to “reform the reform” is long overdue. The first step in that process will be a difficult one for reformers to accept. They must re-examine their belief that college readiness is achieved by attaining a score on a test, and its corollary — that it is possible to create college readiness score thresholds for eight year olds.  It is, at its essence, an absurd assumption that is wasting a fortune in tax dollars while leading us down a fool’s path.

As I explained in my last blog post, the cut scores for Common Core tests are based, in great part, on finding correlations with other tests’ so-called “college readiness” scores. Here are three reasons why this strategy is folly.

READ all the reasons here

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Classy: AFT leader Randi Weingarten cuts off 9-year-old kid at March on Washington event; Updated

I watched C-span last night half asleep after a full day in the Poconos. Asean read a statement. He paused then said something like Oh one more thing. Randi pulled the like out of his hand, patted him on the shoulder and gently turned him away as she started her screaming diatribe. It just made me gasp... Pat D.

Oh, what fun this is turning out to be.

One tweet:

Omar Moore @popcornreel

Kind of ironic that Randi Weingarten, pres. of the Amer. Fed Of Teachers, takes the microphone from Asean Johnson. AJ's only 9. Geez. #MOW50

Loads more comments here:

http://twitchy.com/2013/08/24/classy-aft-leader-randi-weingarten-cuts-off-9-year-old-kid-at-march-on-washington/

See

Perdido Street School

Randi Weingarten Grabs Microphone From 9 Year Old So She Can Speak - 

who points out this is an anti-union blog but Randi gave them the opening.

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I Get Bar Mitzvahed (Again)

Rescued from the storm, my Bar Mitzvah album. Each pic pulled from the plastic and dried (unfortunately, not done with the wedding album which had a shot if I had done the same -- Freudian slip? -  then ended up gone), handed over to cousin Howie Levitz (Photog supremo, Williamstown MA --TGL Photoworks - Williamstown, MA - Film Processing and Output) where he created a you tube video. I'm the guy with the cigar. And the money.
Try to find the great Marty Needelman still leading Williamsburg Legal Services and the skunk who got me activated and into this mess.

http://youtu.be/CycHZPMC1J0

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Howard Schwach: What in the world was the state thinking?

What in the world was the state thinking? NYS exams highly flawed; people in charge have little or no classroom experience & don’t know what they’re doing.

It is good to see my former editor at The Wave still plugging. Howie went from a teacher doing a column which he turned over to me when he became managing editor at The Wave. Howie with me supplementing education coverage put The Wave at the forefront of coverage of the ed deform movement from the beginning -- probably the only community newspaper doing so. Howie deserves enormous credit for leading that and giving me as much space as I needed.

The Sandy storm caused enough disruption inside The Wave that
 Howie left, leaving me to do a column every 2 weeks. Howie's work will be missed in Rockaway but it is good to see him working out at his new job at the Long Island Herald.

http://shar.es/zvsG5  

What in the world was the state thinking?

Howard Schwach Herald File Photo

By Howard Schwach

8/15/13

From the first moment that I looked at some practice tests for the English Language Arts tests that were given recently, I knew that the kids and their teachers were in trouble.
Let me say first of all, that I am something of a test expert. For several years, I wrote test items for the eleventh grade American History Regents exam, travelling to Albany each year to work with a team of teachers from all over the state. In addition, I was a staff developer for the New York City system and the managing editor for the city special education division’s Curriculum Development Unit.
And, as a classroom teacher for more than 25 years, I developed thousands of tests for my own students.
Throughout all that time, there was one guiding principal: never test students on skills or material that you have not taught and practiced.
To do so not only would have been unfair to the students, but it would have made the tests unreliable and downright useless at a measure of student ability and knowledge.
That is why, when I looked at the practice test, my first thought was that the questions were in the deep end of the pool when the kids were just learning how to swim.
One that stuck in my mind was a passage from a 1920’s magazine about aspirin.
Because the source article was written nearly 100 years ago, it contained some archaic language and syntax that would have been confusing to today’s adults, nonetheless eleven-year-olds.
So the kids were at a disadvantage right away, trying to figure out the words they had never seen before, working them out through context. Then, the question called for skills that have never been tested before, nor taught by the teacher who showed me the sample questions. She admitted that she had been “teaching to the old test” for the past several years, trying to keep her kid’s all-important test scores up while trying to keep her job.
“Education has nothing to do with what we have been doing for the past couple of years,” the teacher admitted with a nervous laugh. “It has been all about the numbers.”
“The only skill we have taught is how to answer a four part multiple answer test question.”
After reading the page-long article, which talked about the development of aspirin and why the new drug could be important, students had to answer a series of questions.
The first question asked students to find two words used by the author that showed he thought that the new drug would have a positive impact and then defend their answer in writing. Since the two words that I found to fit the answer were archaic and no longer used, I found it hard to believe that 11-year-olds would know enough about the meaning of those words to answer the question.
There was another question in the sequence that clearly had two right answers and it was a crapshoot as to which one the state would mark as correct.
I knew then, and do did the teacher, that the test would dissolve those kids who care into tears and lead teachers to pull their hair out.
The state’s ed department and Board of Regents, of course, do not care about that. They needed to force the test on the kids in order to qualify for money under the draconian Race to the Top program that is nothing more than a bribe to get states to do the bidding of President Barack Obama and his acolyte, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, an old New York hand whose ideas were discredited when he worked for the city but who then became a genius when he was promoted to national status.
Educators do his bidding not because he is right, but because he has all the chips in the game.
I have nothing against standards. I have nothing against the Core Curriculum, although I would like to see it field-tested somewhere prior to the state’s being forced to adopt it whole hog. The fact that it has never shown to be successful in helping kids reach either college of career goals is sort of left in the wind. I would like to ensure that it works before we all dive in.
Under Race to the Top, that is impossible. Every state has to just accept on faith that Duncan and his minions know what they are doing. That’s a laugh.
Both the state and the federal bureaucracies are made up of Phd’s from Penn State and Ohio State, Yale and Harvard. They are chosen directly after getting their degrees and have little or no classroom experience.
I know from experience, after meeting with they for years in the World Trade Center (does that now date me) that they have little idea about the problems faced by classroom teachers, nor do they care. The trick is to use all that high-tech learning theory they just acquired whether it works or not.
To understand what is going on, you have to turn to a real expert like Dianne Ravitch. Since the 1960s, she had been involved with education and in writing about education. Her first book, “The School Wars,” detailed the long 1967 New York City three-month teacher’s strike, in which I served as the chapter chairman in a large junior high school in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the neighboring district to Ocean Hill-Brownsville, the community that sparked the strike by firing all of its Jewish chapter leaders.
Ravitch, who was deeply involved in writing the “No Child Left Behind” law with its testing component as an member of the federal department of education, said that she realized in 2004 that the high-stakes reliance on testing was bad for education and became an opponent of the law and the testing programs that was its most important component. In 2010, she wrote a highly-acclaimed book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Undermine Education.”
“Did the students suddenly become stupid,” Ravitch asks, referring to the results on the most-recent test. “Did their teachers become suddenly incompetent overnight? Did schools fail en masse? None of the above. The state Board of Regents, having decided that the old tests were too easy, changed the tests and raised the passing mark. Three years ago, they did something similar — raising the passing grade on the grounds that the tests were too easy, the bar too low. This time, however, the state has aligned the tests with a set of ostensibly national standards known as the Common Core, which have been heavily promoted by the Obama administration as a measure of college and career readiness. But Common Core has never been subject to trial or field-testing anywhere. No one knows whether it measures or predicts readiness for college and career readiness. Nobody has explained why eight-year-old students in America should be tested to see if they are on a path for college. As for careers, most of them probably want to be cowboys, police officers or astronauts.”
She added, “The scores should not be taken seriously. There is no science involved in setting the passing mark. It is a judgment call. It is subjective. State Education Commissioner King and Regents Chancellor Tisch could have set a passing mark wherever the chose. They chose to set the bar so high that most students would fail. This is like raising the hoop higher in a basketball game or pushing the wall further back in a baseball game to make it harder to score.”
One last comment, this one from New York City principal Carol Burris, who was recently named the state’s teacher of the year.
Recently, in her blog, Burris wrote, “The chapter is a chilling and uncanny allegory for the data-driven, test-obsessed reforms that are now overwhelming our schools. This week, New York’s “hard times” measures were made public. There was no surprise when the new definition of “proficiency” was about 30 points below the old one. That’s what the system was designed to do. Yet the new, imperious Gradgrinds will predictably use the results as the rationale to propel their reforms. They have built their careers, reputations and, in some cases, their fortunes, coming up with inventive ways to show public school teachers as inept and to present the vast majority of public school students as below par. “Their failure, of course, was preordained. This drop was predicted by Deputy Commissioner Ken Slentz in March before the last test was sealed in its packet. If a teacher in my school told me that he designed a test that was so hard that the passing rate would drop by 30 points and the majority of his students would fail, I would walk him to the door.”
Enough said.

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NYC Parent Urges: Consider opting out of the tests next year as a way of resisting corporate education reform and the monetizing of our children's school experiences

Dear Parents and Guardians,

Your child's scores are now available on ARIS Parent Link. For what it is worth, there are a few things that I think we should all do:

1) Ignore the test results and do not tell our children what their "number" is, no matter how high or low;

2) Know that these tests are part of a movement to privatize public education by convincing parents that our children are underperforming, compared with other countries, and a massive restructuring of the public education system is the only thing that will save the future of the US; this would involve higher standards, better teachers (which requires a de-unionized teaching force), more charter schools, vouchers for private schools, and market-based methods to make parents consumers of "public" education; they say that this is needed because of the "new" US economy, where because of economic and labor policies, we have an increasingly bimodal distribution of jobs (you are either a Walmart Greeter or a Scientist, with few solid working- and lower-middle class options left);    

3) Recognize that no elite NYC private schools use high stakes standardized tests in this way and that the country that is held up as a model of universal, high quality public education, Finland, also does not use test scores in this way; 

4) Know that our state has purposefully set up our children to fail in order to "shock" us into submission and turn on our children's teachers and their unions;

5) Resist the urge to pressure our children's teachers and schools to do better on these tests; this will only totally eliminate the arts, sports, sciences, recess and other activities that have been diminished in the pursuit of high scores and that children desperately need; these are the things that keep some of our most vulnerable children in school;

6) Be aware also that our children's test scores are being given by the state to inBloom, a private company that will store all of children's data in a "cloud" and offer it to other private companies to make more educational "products" that are typically "personalized" and computer-based and designed to further undermine face-to-face instruction, classrooms and human teachers.  See here for inBloom: https://www.edsurge.com/inbloom-inc  See here for criticisms of it: http://www.classsizematters.org/inbloom_student_data_privacy/

7) Consider opting out of the tests next year as a way of resisting corporate education reform and the monetizing of our children's school experiences.

So that is what I think we should do; feel to agree or disagree!

Best,

(D6 parent)

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Rhee, Ravitch, Randi Too Upcoming in Philly

Ken Derstine from Philadelphia sent this to his email list.

People should be aware that Michelle Rhee's Town Hall in Philadelphia on September 16th (the day before Diane Ravitch's author event at the Free Library) will be a full scale assault on rank and file teachers in the midst of the crisis in the District.

According to this Politico report "Michelle Rhee invites teachers union reps to new town halls":

"Rhee will have company on her cross-country tour, which includes stops in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Birmingham, Ala.,Steve Perry, who founded and runs the Capital Preparatory Magnet School in Connecticut and former Washington Teachers’ Union President George Parker will both join her at each event.

Also invited — but not yet confirmed: the brass from teachers unions city or state chapters, as well as their rank-and-file membership. An invitation from Parker was sent to those union leaders on Wednesday."

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/michelle-rhee-invites-teachers-union-reps-to-new-town-halls-95539.html#ixzz2ciaFFS4r

Some background on former Washington DC union president George Parker. I went into his history in my February 24th  article "Who is Eli Broad and why is he trying to destroy public education?"  http://www.defendpubliceducation.net/

In the section "The Broad Foundation and the unions" I said:

"On June 3, 2010, at their union leader’s urging, the Washington D.C. Teachers Union ratified a contract with the Washington D.C. School District, headed by Chancellor Michelle Rhee, which included performance pay linked to test score growth, and a weakening of seniority and tenure. Union President George Parker called the ratification of the contract “a great day for teachers and students.” On November 10, 2010, Parker was voted out of office by the union rank-and-file. On May 20, 2011, Michelle Rhee announced that Parker was joining her corporate reform organization StudentsFirst. Rhee had resigned as Chancellor of Washington D.C. schools on October 13, 2010, and started StudentsFirst soon after. Rhee’s Deputy Chancellor and chief negotiator of the 2010 teachers’ contract, Kaya Henderson, replaced her. Henderson recently announced the proposed closing of 20 schools due to “under enrollment”."

*********************

On Friday, August 23 Randi tweeted this about Diane's author event:

Randi Weingarten        ✔ @rweingarten

@ParentsUnitedPA @DianeRavitch -i will be there introducing Diane.

**********************

National teachers union leader points to St. Louis as model
St. Louis Post- Dispatch - August 14, 2013 

School Standards' Debut Is Rocky, and Critics PounceThe New York Times - August 15, 2013

Teachers at Green Dot Charter Schools OK Merit Pay
(See immediately preceding article.)
Diane Ravitch's blog - July 11, 2012

These are the Philadelphia School District "contract proposals" to the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers

http://home.earthlink.net/~stwriley/CBA%20Teacher%20Proposals%20-1.pdf

 

 

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Ed Notes Redux: Why I Left New Action by James Eterno

I should not be surprised that the newer activists who are teaching 15 years and less often don't have a full understanding of the historical context behind many issues. Recently there has been some discussion inside MORE about New Action and I see the need to connect some of the dots. I am going back into the Ed Notes print archives for some stories and here is one from James at the founding point of ICE where he left NA to help create ICE and wrote this piece for the January 2004 edition of Ed Notes.

Ed Notes: Jan. 2004

New Action/Unity in Corrupt Bargain
Why I Left New Action!!!
by James Eterno, UFT Executive Board

Since 1824, historians have debated and criticized an alleged corrupt bargain that made John Quincy Adams President of the United States, even though he had fewer votes in the general election than Andrew Jackson.  In exchange for the presidency, Adams supposedly agreed to dole out a patronage job to Henry Clay if he would prevent Jackson from securing the White House. Adams was elected President by the House of Representatives where Clay was a leader, and soon after Adams appointed Clay as his Secretary of State.  This little bit of presidential history is being repeated in UFT politics, except now the corrupt bargain is being made before the union’s presidential election.

A deal between the two main caucuses (political parties) has been reached.  New Action has agreed not to run a candidate for president against Randi Weingarten in next spring’s UFT Election but they will run a slate for other positions.  How can a political party (NAC) run in an election and not run for the top office?   Would any citizen vote for the Democratic Party’s Vice Presidential candidate next year if the Democrats decided not to run a candidate for president against Bush, but a Democrat ran for VP?  If NAC is not opposing Randi, why run at all?  What will be their slogan?  “Randi and New Action. Perfect Together.”  Anyone who votes for NAC will be voting for a fraudulent opposition and essentially supporting Weingarten. 

In return for not running against Weingarten, Randi’s Unity Caucus has agreed to open up part time union jobs for New Action (NAC) members and to not run candidates against NAC’s six High School Executive Board candidates in the upcoming election.  Unity also agreed to have an organizing committee that includes NAC members to organize weak chapters and to have a bipartisan UFT Action Committee formulate an action plan. Finally, Unity will support a change to the UFT Constitution to allow a caucus to replace its UFT Executive Board members if seats become vacant between elections. These cosmetic changes will not exactly alter the Union’s fundamentally undemocratic structure.

This modern UFT version of the corrupt bargain has convinced me to end my eight year association with New Action.  I joined NAC in 1995.  NAC leader Michael Shulman helped me a great deal when I became chapter leader of Jamaica High School in 1996.  Furthermore, since 1997 I have been elected three times by the high school teachers, with NAC’s endorsement, to the UFT Executive Board.  My resignation may cost me my Executive Board seat, but I would rather lose my seat than to be involved in a sham election.

Shulman, NAC Co-chair David Kaufman and their cohorts believe that the UFT is in a war with Bloomberg/Klein and we all have to pull together and support our president to fight the common enemy at City Hall.  Shulman is half correct.  We are under attack from the city, but NAC’s leaders are wrong because we have an obligation to challenge a UFT president who might not even try to truly fight City Hall.

Bloomberg/Klein have: eliminated the Education Evaluators, virtually ended sabbaticals, laid off paras, imposed double period block programming without our input, imposed 50 minutes of extended time in most schools twice a week in violation of our Contract as well as State Law, deprived us of the right to choose the best approach to how we teach in many classrooms, and they are refusing to hear safety grievances.  These are just a few of the many indignities that have been heaped upon us.  The UFT has filed grievances, had a rally and gone to court but meanwhile Klein continues to abuse us.  Weingarten is not winning the war and I wonder if she really wants to clash with the city.

Ask yourself the following fundamental question.  Do you think Weingarten/Unity will risk dues check-off (the union’s right to automatically deduct $37 in UFT dues from each of our paychecks)?  Automatic dues check-off could be lost if we have a real job action.  A job action could deprive the Union of the funds that support its huge patronage system.  I hope my fears are unfounded; however I seriously question whether the UFT leadership will encourage anything more from the membership than symbolic actions, and without a full scale mobilization, Bloomberg/Klein can continue to mistreat us.  Therefore, it is crucial that we have a real choice for UFT president in 2004.

Had Britain followed New Action’s logic and backed its prime minister during World War II, when they were not winning in 1940, Neville Chamberlain (appeasement’s great champion) would have remained at the helm and Winston Churchill would never have ascended to power.  The UFT needs a Churchill now and not a Chamberlain.  At least we should have the option to vote for a different line of attack.

Traditionally, New Action took a militant approach to unionism.  Strong, valid criticism of Unity/Weingarten for allowing our union to be weakened to its current state was what led to NAC winning the high schools in the last four UFT Elections.  However, since the last UFT Election in 2001, NAC has moved closer to Unity, although there have been bitter disagreements within New Action.  At some point last summer [2003], Shulman and Weingarten met and the corrupt bargain was proposed.  Later in the summer a majority of New Action’s Executive Board, despite a great deal of strong dissent, agreed not to run a candidate for president in the upcoming election.  With the corrupt bargain in place, Unity and New Action are now virtually interchangeable.  Hundreds of rank and file New Action members never heard about this deal.  I resigned from NAC as I could not conceive of supporting such a bogus election scam.

Unfortunately, the biggest losers in the corrupt bargain are the members of the UFT.  We could be deprived of a serious choice for UFT president in 2004, an election that will determine the future direction of the Union.  That is of course unless some rank and file group can come together and save the day by nominating a viable alternative to Weingarten to run for president.

This modern UFT version of the corrupt bargain has convinced me to end my eight year association with New Action.  I joined NAC in 1995.  NAC leader Michael Shulman helped me a great deal when I became chapter leader of Jamaica High School in 1996.  Furthermore, since 1997 I have been elected three times by the high school teachers, with NAC’s endorsement, to the UFT Executive Board.  My resignation may cost me my Executive Board seat, but I would rather lose my seat than to be involved in a sham election.

In the UFT election held in March 2004, James Eterno, running for HS Ex Bd on the newly formed ICE/TJC slate won the HS seats from New Action (as part of the corrupt bargain, Unity did not run) thus ushering in a 3 year era of militant opposition to Unity/New Action policies on the EB led by James and Jeff Kaufman. In the 2007, 10 and 13 elections, Unity and New Action cross endorsed candidates to make sure this would not happen again. But in the 13  election, MORE got within a few hundred votes of capturing the 7 HS EB seats from the NA/Unity slate.

Don't think there isn't some heavy worry going on over at NA/Unity HQ over this possibility and developing strategies to counter the possibility that MORE could win any EB positions in the next election.

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