Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Register NOW - Voice your concerns about the District's budget
Thursday – March 8, 2012 – Second Public Hearing on the District’s budget for public education, the mayor has added an additional date for input on the DCPS budget, this is a good opportunity for parents and community members to voice their priorities before the final budget is submitted to the council. The location for this hearing is to be determined but if you would like to register to testify contact Joshua Thompson from the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education at 202-701-9289 or Joshua.thompson@dc.gov
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
The Side Effects of Standardized Testing
originally found at http://teachers.net/gazette/wordpress/howard-seeman/the-side-effects-of-standardized-testing/2/
By Howard Seeman, Ph.D.Proponents of using standardized tests are pushing these as if they are good “medicine” for the delivery of a better education for our students. “Standardized testing has become central to education policy in the United States. After dramatically expanding in the wake of the No Child Left Behind Act, testing has been further enshrined by the Obama administration’s $3.4 billion “Race to the Top” grants.” [Truthout(http://www.truth-out.org), The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Test Scorer, Dan DiMaggio, 12/1 /2010.]
This push of standardized tests not only receives funding from the federal government, but from billionaire private sources: the Gates-Broad-Walton triumvirate, Ford, Hewlett, Annenberg, Milken, to name just a few – to decide: funding charter schools, merit pay, firing teachers and closing schools. But, besides using these tests, private foundations should not be setting public policy! Also, these measures often have 20 to 30 percent error rates. [“Who’s Bashing Teachers and Public Schools and What Can We Do About It?” Stan Karp, Spring 2011, Rethinking Schools.]
Standardized tests are not a valid measure of agood education. Instead, they usually just predict future school success, which is a tautological begging of the question about “a good education”. And besides: standardized testing has many “side effects” harmful to our children, teachers, administrators, schools, and our whole society. Let me explain.
Standardized tests do not test whether our students are getting a good education.
A good education is, and was supposed to be [as Socrates wisely taught] for living the “good life” before we die; and as W.E.B. Du Bois rightly prescribes: for learning to be a valuable citizen of society. [Du Bois, W.E.B., The Souls of Black Folk(Boston: Bedford Books, 1903.]
But, we have redoubled our effort while we have lost sight of these goals. Instead, our goals are: better cognition, objective descriptions, calculating, deducing, counting, compiling facts, predicting, to control things, to have more material wealth, , to be more efficient at all of these, faster and faster. However, though the “good life” and being “a valuable citizen” needs some of these, emphasis on these is not only insufficient for these goals but takes us off track to achieve the other abilities necessary:
- *How to better identify and constructively deal with emotions, anger, stress
- *Non-verbal communications, intention
- *Distinguishing facts from feelings/values
- *Detecting fallacious thinking
- *Asserting oneself constructively
- *How to make supportive, lasting relationships
- *Using imagination, creativity, intuition, the aesthetic sense for the arts
- *Increasing empathy and tolerance
- *Detecting our own prejudices, biases
- *Learning ethical reflection
- *Improving listening skills, the neglected other half of effective communication
- *Negotiating
- *Understanding the value of diversity in our culture, and other points of view
- *Treating others as ends not means
- *Resisting immediate material gratification- not only in our diets, but in how we use the resources of our planet
- *The facilitating humor
- *The whole right side of our brains!
Standardized tests do not, cannot, measure the above essential learnings. They measure what is measurable. Or worse, if not measurableprime facie, they bastardize/reduce these to be measurable/quantifiable numbers, e.g. scoring student essays. As a result, only the “measurable” is counted. And, if it is not “measurable”, it does not count, is not supported by these tests to be placed into the curriculum, is not taught by teachers, [e.g., music, art, emotional education]. Then, these non-measurables are not used to train, evaluate, hire or fire teachers, do not count for most funding sources – bankrupting schools that are not teaching the measurable. Thereby, our society’s institutions of transfer of learning, schools, only bolster the transfer of learning of one side of our brains.
Standardized tests can’t measure: initiative, creativity, imagination, curiosity, effort, irony, affective judgment, commitment, nuance, good will, ethical reflection – a host of other valuable dispositions. What they can measure and count are isolated skills, specific facts and functions, the least interesting and least significant aspects of learning. [Alfie Kohn, The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising The Scores, Ruining The Schools (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000), p.11.] Instead, they encourage storing information in our heads, an outmoded skill – when in many areas, computers can store this information with also the needed accessibility. [Marion Brady, “Unanswered Questions About Standardized Tests”, The Washington Post 27 April 2011.]
Also, “…in inner-city schools, testing anxiety not only consumes about a third of the year, … every minute of the school day… to be directed to a specifically stated test-related skill. Very little art is allowed into these classrooms; little social studies, really none of the humanities. .” [Truthout, 12/1/2010]
Also, these tests de-motivate risk-taking. [Collins and Halverson, Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology, Teachers College Press, 2009, p. 120.] A student is pressured to look for and give the “right answer” on both the test and in class. S/he is not given time or encouragement to think off “track”; the pressure and approval given is to stay on “track” to score the best answers. Such promotes a culture of conformity.
Also, the pressures of standardized testing is a major cause of losing some of our best teachers: “By measuring the success of teachers almost exclusively by the test scores of their pupils, it has rewarded the most robotic teachers, and it’s driving out precisely those contagiously exciting teachers…so hard to recruit…. As Einstein put it, “It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”[Ibid.]
And, to make matters worse, the language in these tests often reflect an elitist, racist/white.
understanding of what counts – to the detriment of working class, multi-ethnic values and perspectives -impoverishing the rainbow of our cultural diversity.
Our society is not suffering from inefficient cognitive learning, which these tests test and encourage. It is suffering from the retardation of emotional learning, the inability to deal with feelings; drug and alcohol abuse, obesity, teen pregnancy, divorce, loneliness, depression, stress, suicide, and the loss of support for the wisdom of artistic creativity. What is said in, e.g., poetry can often be more valuable to our lives than what is solved in scientific descriptions; “I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing, than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.”[ e.e. cummings]
“…creativity among U.S. children has been in decline since 1990, with a particularly severe drop among those currently between kindergarten and sixth grade…No points are given for creativity on these tests…. An entire education policy that thrives on repetition, monotony… is being enacted, stunting creativity and curiosity under the guise of the false idol of accountability.” [Truthout, 12/1/2010]
(A word to the skeptics: There is an entire literature, and there was a movement in the sixties, called “humanistic education”, and currently: “character education” – that shows educators how these skills can be taught. [Seeman, Preventing Classroom Discipline Problems, (Rowman and Littlefield, 3rd Ed., 2000), p. 399 for a short bibliography on this area; “character education” at: http://www.goodcharacter.com/ . For talks/workshops on this area, email Prof. Seeman at: Hokaja@aol.com . ] )
Let’s keep in mind that as early as age 3 till 22, children spend more than 6 hours a day with teachers, not their parents, even more if you count the homework these teachers give them. Teachers have a powerful influence on our children, as we all know from noticing this in our own lives. Children see them as role models, substitute parents; they learn how to be in a group from them, social procedures, rules, emotional reactions, handling conflict, sharing, organization, Almost everything we need to learn about life, e.g., sharing, taking turns, being with others cooperation, listening skills, drawing…. Most of what comes from inside us – we began to learn in kindergarten. Teachers transfer learnings that are not just cognitive. They influence hearts, attitudes, self concept, aspirations, the “whole child”, who we are, and become.
“…a message from a former student came to our school’s website…: that he was now a father and Cub Scout leader and taught his children what I had taught him: … to be of value to the community, one must first feel valued. I only teach eight students at a time. But, now I realize that each of them grows up and influences others, which affects their children, families, and communities….” [Seeman, pp. 418-420.]
Teachers are the custodians and life guards of our society. They transfer our entire culture to each generation. There should be statues of teachers, not just soldiers, in all our parks. And notice: this is not because they taught to the tests. However, if we keep applying the pressure of standardized testing, these teachers will be “buried” by these and have little time to educate the “whole child”. Then, we may only have more statues of soldiers in our parks! Countries that de-emphasize standardized tests, out-perform U.S. schools. [Randi Weingarten, “What Matters Most”, New York Times, Dec., 19, 2010]
But, teachers are too much under the gun to get student scores up on measurable curriculum or they may lose their job, and their school may lose funding. Teachers are wrongly made to be the scapegoats of a failing education system.
Also, learning is best accomplished when it has connections to students’ concerns. [Edward J. Meade Jr., Mario D. Fantini, Gerald Weinstein, Toward Humanistic Education: A Curriculum of Affect (Praeger, 1970).] But if teachers do not have time to make these connections, if they are too worried about teaching for the test, such narrow teaching may temporarily boost a score, but will not help a student’s real education for his life. Some 1.2 million public high school students drop out of school every year. [Barry Grey, “High school drop-out rate in major US cities at nearly 50 percent”, www.wsws.org , April 3, 2008.] Is our push for higher scores making the drop-out rate higher?
Teachers feel these pressures, and thus cannot find the time to relate to students emotionally; they often get “burnt out” by this pressure. As a result, our caring, tender, warm teachers are swamped with the anxiety of standardized testing. Half of our teachers leave the profession every five years. [Truthout, 12/1/2010]
This obsession with standardized testing is fueled not just by the supposed well intention of “accountability” but by two underlying all too human motives: a) the vested interests of those who now make a huge profit at this industry; b) human nature’s need for an opiate to deal with the “Heraclitian flux” of life itself.
a) Here’s a salient comment from those who make a living scoring these tests:
“Test scoring is a huge business, dominated by a few multinational corporations, which arrange the work in order to extract maximum profit” [Truthout, 12/1/2010].
As with most profit-businesses this size, diminishing their influence is very hard [like the oil companies]; testing supports/feeds many ancillary businesses, e.g. test makers, test evaluators, Kaplan-like test prep companies, test textbooks, test tutors, test prep. software, even paper makers – that all have a vested interest in keeping this consumer project growing –all with the rationale of helping “accountability”. Standardized testing and the computer industry synergistically promote each other: tests are made that can be practiced and scored best by computer software; the software restricts the skills and knowledges that can be practiced and scored.20 Also it is very hard to argue to diminish the influence of standardized testing, as promoters of these present themselves as “do-gooders” with too few ever questioning the assumed “good” they are doing, and the “side-effects”.
b) This obsession with standardized testing is also fueled by human nature’s need for an opiate to deal with the “Heraclitian flux” of life itself. Western philosophy has always denigrated the emotive/aesthetic/affective as a transient low level epistemological ghost – and honored, instead, the cognitive [Plato’s eternal Forms] as the avenue to what is lasting, real and true. We are told that what we feel is merely subjective consciousness, always in flux, not lasting; we are told that the “merely subjective is false”. Thereby, our personal reality itself is given a low status. Our experience, how things feel phenomenologically, [and thus a major part of our meaningful lives] is devalued and shunted. The scientific bias –pushed, is usually for the cognitive; here supposedly truth can be found, the world can be held still, named,temporary-ness, the death of everything can be thwarted.
Thus, we teach, push, measure mostly “cognitive knowledge”. It is then coerced via standardized testing onto our schools as the measure of progress. We are mainly evaluating teachers as to whether they are making our children “head-strong”, improving mainly the left side of their brains.
How should we evaluate teachers?
“If I thought they gave accurate information, I would take them [standardized tests] more seriously,” the principal of P.S. 321, Elizabeth Phillips, said about the rankings. “But some of my best teachers have the absolute worst scores,” … adding that she had based her assessment of those teachers on “classroom observations, talking to the children and the number of parents begging me to put their kids in their classes.” [Sharon Otterman , Hurdles Emerge in Rising Effort to Rate Teachers, NYTimes, December 26, 2010.]
We should use “multiple measures.” We must go back to trusting non-mathematized evaluations, and resist our attraction to the non-ambiguity of numbers [like Ulysses resisted the Sirens]. We must remember that “accuracy” is not validity. Accurately measuring the taste of an apple with a ruler does not give us the evaluation we want.
We must face the fact that we are evaluating quality, not quantity. To reduce quality to numbers is to be seduced into the fallacy of reductionism. We need to trust more the gestalt perceptions of experienced teachers and administrators as they observe teachers. Teachers need to be evaluated not by just the cognitive learning they can transfer, but by the affective-social knowledges and skills they give to students:, e.g., the relationship they have with their students, that they feel comfortable volunteering, are motivated, feel cared about, feel respected, trust this teacher, believe what s/he promises or warns, is authentic and a role model, can engage/motivate students use differentiated instruction, manage a classroom, assess progress [utilize remediation], and collaborate with other teachers and parents. [Dr. Ann Hart, Arizona Dept. of Ed. Deputy Associate Superintendent, Phoenix, AZ.]
Also, we can require students to compile portfolios of their work, where astute administrators and teachers can see, not only the assignments of teachers, but teachers’ comments on these assignments. [Julie Fraad, Assistant Principal Secondary School for Law, NYC.]
We need to have consensual rubrics, e.g., the C.S.T.P, for these evaluations of humans by other humans [as when we try to weed out the pollutants in jury selections]. We need to protect these evaluations from politics, nepotism, prejudices, and peer pressure. To fear using these human evaluations of human qualities – is to let this fear steer us away from what really needs to be counted [not in numbers]. [This fear is similar to the fear that goes too far in wrongly inculcating teachers to “never touch a child”, so that teachers go so far as to never pat a kid on the back!]
We can also rely more on student and parent evaluations. We do, in colleges; student evaluations of teachers [done rightly, in a confidential, systematic way] tell administrators a lot about the quality of a teacher. Sure, in the lower grades such student evaluations are more difficult –but we can design such evaluations specifically for the lower grades. [Dr. Rose, http://teachers.net/gazette/wordpress/robert-rose/merit-pay-proposal/3/]
We can also lean more on parent evaluations. Yes, we will again have to protect these evaluations from politics, nepotism, prejudices, and peer pressure. But it is hard to distrust the evaluation of, e.g., 100 parents over years [reliability increases as the cohort size increases], especially if these evaluations correlate with other evaluations.
Standardized testing is not a cure for what ails our schools, but, instead, an overdose of the wrong medicine with grave, unhealthy side effects. “Though the odds might seem slim, our collective goal, as students, teachers, parents—and even test scorers—should be to liberate education from this farcical numbers game [Truthout, 12/1/2010].”
* Howard Seeman, Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus of Education, City University of New York, and education consultant at: www.ClassroomManagementOnline.com, author of two books on Preventing Disruptive Behavior, K-12, and Colleges, with a training video cued to these texts, and many other articles on teacher training, philosophy, counseling and emotional education. He also works with individuals as a Consultant for Personal and Professional Development in person or online at: http://echponline.com/index.html. He is available for school workshops and talks at: Hokaja@aol.com
Friday, February 24, 2012
NYC releases teachers’ value-added scores — unfortunately
This takes some kind of special nerve: New York City’s Education Department publicly released the rankings of 18,000 public school teachers based entirely on student standardized-test scores — after pleas from educators not to do it because it would be unfair and disparaging. And then it told the news media not to use the results to disparage teachers.
City education officials, after many months of pleas from educators and a legal case seeking to keep the scores private, released reports on individual teachers that show their schools and their ranks based on the gains that students made on math and English standardized tests over five years, through the 2009-10 school year.
The reasons that it is just plain wrong to make this information public — or use these results to actually evaluate teachers — are many. Among other things, standardized tests don’t generally measure high-order thinking processes, are often culturally biased, open to accidental scoring errors and deliberate cheating that skews scores, reduce teacher creativity and do not dependably predict student achievement.
Furthermore, teachers should not be held accountable for a bad test score by a student who comes to class hungry, sick, exhausted, mentally disturbed, distracted, unable to focus or a host of other conditions that have nothing to do with the classroom.
And there’s this: The methodology used to transform student test scores into assessments of teachers, called “value-added formulas,” are still new, unsophisticated and often unreliable. What these formulas purport to do is strip out all of the factors that go into a student’s test score and determine how much “value” a teacher added to the student’s achievement.
In a detailed critique of value-added models, John Ewing, president ofMath for America, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving math education, warned: “Making policy decisions on the basis of value-added models has the potential to do even more harm than browbeating teachers.”
According to the New York Times, even one of the economists at the University of Wisconsin who designed the city’s ranking system, Douglas N. Harris, said that releasing the data right now “strikes me as at best unwise, at worst absurd.”
But why should anybody listen to the guy who actually built the ranking system?
This all helps explain why nearly 1,360 principals and more than 4,400 educators and concerned citizens from around the country signed onto a paper that attacks the state’s new teacher evaluation system — which requires that up to 40 percent of a teacher’s assessment be based on student standardized-test results.
The truth is that according to a new deal just reached by state education officials and the teachers union, some teachers’ assessments will be based entirely on standardized test scores.
This is a quote from a Feb. 16 release from the New York State Department of Education announcing that agreement:
“Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall. Teachers who are developing or ineffective will get assistance and support to improve performance. Teachers who remain ineffective can be removed from classrooms;” (emphasis is mine)
As noted by education historian Diane Ravitch in her New York Review of Books article titled “No Student Left Untested,” the fact is that for some teachers, “[t]he 40 percent allocated to student performance actually counts for 100 percent. Two years of ineffective ratings and the teacher is fired.” A teacher could have exemplary ratings for all other measures, but if the test scores are terrible, the teacher is rated terrible.
Today, people in New York smart enough to know better — people like, for example, Chancellor Dennis M. Walcott, who went ahead and released the scores anyway. In fact, Walcott had the chutzpah to say upon the release of the rankings, according to the New York Times:
“I don’t want our teachers disparaged in any way, and I don’t want our teachers denigrated based on this information. This is very rich data that has evolved over the years.... I don’t want our teachers characterized in a certain way based on this very complex rich tool that we have available to us.”
Rich data? Who is he kidding other than himself?
Meanwhile, people in the Obama administration who should know better, including President Obama himself, have pushed for test scores to be a part of teacher assessment. And now states around the country are adopting these methods.
The U.S. Education Department likes to say that it actually supports “multiple measures” in teacher evaluation. But a system of “multiple measures” that includes standardized test scores and makes them important — and in some cases, as we’ve seen, exclusively important — is neither fair nor necessary.
There are high-performing school districts, such as in Montgomery County, Md., and Fairfax County, Va., where teachers are evaluated on a range of measures without standardized test scores in the mix — and the system somehow managed to get rid of ineffective teachers anyway. But these systems, under federal and state pressure, are nearing the day when they will have to change their educator evaluation systems to include test scores, even though these systems work just fine without them.
Segments of public education had enough trouble before standardized testing became the be-all and end-all of assessment in the era of former president George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, and now, Obama’s Race to the Top.
With apologies to Neil Young, “Ooh, ooh, the damage done.”
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Thursday, February 23, 2012
Shame Is Not the Solution
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/opinion/for-teachers-shame-is-no-solution.html?_r=1&src=recg
By BILL GATES
Published: February 22, 2012
LAST week, the New York State Court of Appeals ruled that teachers’ individual performance assessments could be made public. I have no opinion on the ruling as a matter of law, but as a harbinger of education policy in the United States, it is a big mistake.
I am a strong proponent of measuring teachers’ effectiveness, and my foundation works with many schools to help make sure that such evaluations improve the overall quality of teaching. But publicly ranking teachers by name will not help them get better at their jobs or improve student learning. On the contrary, it will make it a lot harder to implement teacher evaluation systems that work.
In most public schools today, teachers are simply rated “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory,” and evaluations consist of having the principal observe a class for a few minutes a couple of times each year. Because we are just beginning to understand what makes a teacher effective, the vast majority of teachers are rated “satisfactory.” Few get specific feedback or training to help them improve.
Many districts and states are trying to move toward better personnel systems for evaluation and improvement. Unfortunately, some education advocates in New York, Los Angeles and other cities are claiming that a good personnel system can be based on ranking teachers according to their “value-added rating” — a measurement of their impact on students’ test scores — and publicizing the names and rankings online and in the media. But shaming poorly performing teachers doesn’t fix the problem because it doesn’t give them specific feedback.
Value-added ratings are one important piece of a complete personnel system. But student test scores alone aren’t a sensitive enough measure to gauge effective teaching, nor are they diagnostic enough to identify areas of improvement. Teaching is multifaceted, complex work. A reliable evaluation system must incorporate other measures of effectiveness, like students’ feedback about their teachers and classroom observations by highly trained peer evaluators and principals.
Putting sophisticated personnel systems in place is going to take a serious commitment. Those who believe we can do it on the cheap — by doing things like making individual teachers’ performance reports public — are underestimating the level of resources needed to spur real improvement.
At Microsoft, we created a rigorous personnel system, but we would never have thought about using employee evaluations to embarrass people, much less publish them in a newspaper. A good personnel system encourages employees and managers to work together to set clear, achievable goals. Annual reviews are a diagnostic tool to help employees reflect on their performance, get honest feedback and create a plan for improvement. Many other businesses and public sector employers embrace this approach, and that’s where the focus should be in education: school leaders and teachers working together to get better.
Fortunately, there are a few places where teachers and school leaders are collaborating on the hard work of building robust personnel systems. My wife, Melinda, and I recently visited one of those communities, in Tampa, Fla. Teachers in Hillsborough County Public Schools receive in-depth feedback from their principal and from a peer evaluator, both of whom have been trained to analyze classroom teaching.
We were blown away by how much energy people were putting into the new system — and by the results they were already seeing in the classroom. Teachers told us that they appreciated getting feedback from a peer who understood the challenges of their job and from their principal, who had a vision of success for the entire school. Principals said the new system was encouraging them to spend more time in classrooms, which was making the culture in Tampa’s schools more collaborative. For their part, the students we spoke to said they’d seen a difference, too, and liked the fact that peer observers asked for their input as part of the evaluation process.
Developing a systematic way to help teachers get better is the most powerful idea in education today. The surest way to weaken it is to twist it into a capricious exercise in public shaming. Let’s focus on creating a personnel system that truly helps teachers improve.
Monday, February 20, 2012
Community organizer Tina Hone aims to amplify the voices of underserved kids in Fairfax County
By Emma Brown,
Tina Hone built a reputation during her tenure on the Fairfax County School Board as an ally of parents battling the superintendent over issues ranging from discipline code reform to later high school start times.
Those whose causes Hone championed, however, were not the people she had envisioned representing — low-income and minority parents whose voices are often missing from public debate over school policy. Instead, they were savvy advocates who knew how to tussle for the concessions they wanted.
“I ended up accidentally empowering people who were already empowered,” she said.
So, 12 days after leaving office last year, she returned to the boardroom to announce the creation of the Coalition of The Silence — a group dedicated to organizing and amplifying the voices of black kids, Latino kids, poor kids and kids with disabilities.
“Too often, in the four years I served on the School Board as its only African American member, decisions were made that impacted these students without input from their communities,” Hone told her former colleagues last month. “The silence will be silent no more.”
Hone, 49, said she recognizes herself in the kids she aims to help. She grew up with her mother on the south side of Chicago. She saw her father, a Yugoslavian immigrant, on weekends. His side of the family pitied her as a poor black kid, the product of unwed parents.
“Everyone in his family described me as a tragedy,” Hone said. “They dismissed me.”
But she excelled in school, eventually graduating from law school at the University of California at Berkeley. She ran for the School Board in 2007 to help other kids write similar success stories — and to make sure no one forgot the needs of poor and minority families, even if those families didn’t attend meetings.
Several of her former board colleagues say she succeeded. She was a passionate and sometimes tearful advocate on issues ranging from summer school cuts to admissions policies at the prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, where black and Latino students account for less than 4 percent of students.
But she took a central role in other fights, too, and expressed outrage so often that some board members sometimes seemed to tune her out, said Michael Hairston, president of the Fairfax Education Association. He said Hone might be more effective now, with a tightly focused mission and an army of parents behind her.
“She has clout in the community,” he said. “That may help the cause.”
The nascent Coalition of The Silence has attracted special-education advocates, members of the NAACP, Urban League and the school system’s Minority Student Achievement Oversight Committee. It also includes parents who have never been politically active in the school system but see the coalition as an opportunity to speak out.
Among them was Rhonda Mustafaa, a mother of three who moved to Fairfax last year. She said it took six months and a “lot of sweat and tears” to persuade school officials to allow her sons to enroll in gifted and talented classes, despite documentation from their previous school.
“It shouldn’t have been that hard,” she said, adding that she hoped the coalition would “highlight these issues that often go unnoticed.”
A decade ago, the School Board had three African American members and one Latino. Now the only minority member is Ilryong Moon (At Large), a Korean immigrant who came to the United States at 17.
Fairfax County, meanwhile, has become more racially diverse, with a greater proportion of low-income families. Arthur Lopez, an advocate for Latino schoolchildren, said he hopes the coalition can offer perspectives to reflect the range of realities that Fairfax students experience.
Chief among the coalition’s goals is bringing new urgency to achievement gaps — between black and Latino students on the one hand and whites and Asians on the other, and between poor children and their middle-class peers.
Those gaps have narrowed in recent years, but there are still disparities in almost every measure, from Advanced Placement exam scores to high school graduation rates. Latino students in the Class of 2011 were nine times more likely to drop out than white students, for example. Black students were four times more likely to do so.
“What do we think — poor children are just genetically stupid?” Hone said. “Fairfax County ought to be big enough and bad enough to take a kid from nothing and educate him into the highest levels of academic achievement.”
The coalition will advocate for the restoration of programs cut during the recession that are particularly important for kids from poor families, including summer school and year-round schooling.
The group will press for closer examination of what it says is the disproportionate suspension and expulsion of minority students and students with disabilities. And it will campaign for new measures to ensure that all kids can read by the end of third grade, a powerful indicator of future academic success.
They will also aim to dismantle subtle barriers that make it difficult for some parents to chime in on public debates.
For example: People who want to speak before the School Board are asked to register in advance. Sign-up is online and begins at 6 a.m. three days before each meeting. There are 10 slots available for public testimony, and sometimes they’re filled in minutes by savvy advocates who set their alarm clocks.
Hone and her supporters don’t begrudge the work of those more established activists.
But “let’s take a step into reality,” said Lolita Mancheno-Smoak, an Ecuadorean immigrant who heads the coalition’s Latino working group. “How many parents that are holding two or three jobs can do this?”
Families who don’t have an Internet-connected computer at home can’t compete with networks of organized advocates, she said. Unless that changes, she said, “Who are you going to hear? Only certain voices.”
to go to site of origin click HERE.
Tim King: With You When You're Right: The Anti-Deficit View of Black Male Achievement
Whenever my father passionately agrees with something I say, he shouts, "I'm with you when you're right!" After reading the recent report byShaun R. Harper, Director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for the Study of Race & Equity in Education titled Black Male Student Success in Higher Education, I've come to see a deeper meaning in my father's catch-phrase. The report examines Black male college success in an effort to learn what works, what's right, and to then replicate those factors more broadly. Harper calls this an anti-deficit approach. I call it a change in focus that is long overdue.
Educators love to debate about whether targeted interventions can help at-risk populations, or if factors like poverty and being raised in a single parent household are too powerful to be overcome by schools alone. Some believe there is little to nothing that schools (K-12 as well as colleges) can do to prevent one third of Black men born this decade from spending time in prison; or to keep half of them from dropping-out of high school; or even to address that fact that just one in forty Black males will earn a bachelor's degree by the time they are twenty-five.
This view, however, is wrong. There is much and more that schools and colleges can do to boost high-school and college achievement levels for Black males, and we can start by changing our focus. When we speak solely of deficit-model statistics, we risk flattening the landscape and obscuring the successes of students who are able to achieve in spite of all of the obstacles facing Black males. We also risk perpetuating systems of inequality by turning observation into expectation. Ultimately, our conception about what it means to be a young Black male doesn't just limit our focus, it can limit that of our students as well. The innovation of Harper's research has been to turn this data upside down and, instead of asking what's wrong with the students who are failing, to ask what's right with the Black males who see success. According to many of the subjects of Harper's study, it was the first time anyone had bothered.
In interviewing 219 Black male "achievers" who were either attending or had graduated from college, Harper found the most common thread was that successful Black males are supported, both within their families and in their schools/communities, with relationships characterized by high expectations. Successful Black males often spoke of at least one extremely influential teacher who helped instill belief in their potential, whether or not the young men believed it themselves. These individuals, writes Harper, helped students seek out "educational resources to ensure their success -- tutoring and academic support programs, college preparatory initiatives, and summer academies and camps." According to Harper's study, these commitments to education were solidified in high school and college when Black males joined student organizations -- particularly when they took on leadership roles -- that anchored them to academic communities.
The idea that strong relationships impact student success shouldn't be anything new to educators. But the implication -- that race, background and gender are not destiny, and that focused interventions produce tangible results -- is enormous. Specifically, by taking an anti-deficit approach, we light the way towards discovering and implementing educational interventions targeted to meet the specific needs of Black male students. When the dominant presentation of Black males shows them dropping out of school and spending time in prison, students who might already be unsure of their place within an educational environment feel further pressure to follow the expectation and disengage. This isn't to say that we should ignore or sugar-coat the issues facing poor Black males today. But instead of fixating on these negative factors, we should balance them by holding up as examples young people who have successfully completed their education and earned degrees.
Perhaps the most remarkable finding in Harper's report is that the majority of the Black male graduates he interviewed stated that the biggest factor separating them from peers who didn't make it through college was serendipity. In other words, the achievers didn't view themselves as smarter, more persistent, harder working, or more economically advantaged than their friends back on the block. The achievers felt they were just lucky. Lucky to have people in their lives who were with them when they were right. Everyone should be so lucky. And, with the right kinds of schools, everyone can be.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Education Organizing – The Path to Real Reform?
Posted February 19, 2012 at NEA Today at http://neatoday.org/2012/02/19/education-organizing-the-path-to-real-reform/
By Amy Buffenbarger
Many current reform efforts focus on a system of rewards, sanctions and narrow test-based accountability, leaving little room for family and community input. A new guide, however, demonstrates how “community organizing offers an alternative vision for school reform.”
In local communities across the country, NEA members and leaders are working closely with parents, families, and community members to close achievement gaps, improve low-performing schools, and transform relationships between schools and their communities. Sixteen of these partnerships are profiled in the NEA’s Family-School-Community Partnerships 2.0 report, and more through the Priority Schools Campaign.
Community organizations surrounding lower-performing schools are also getting involved with school improvement efforts. A new guide from the Center for Education Organizing, part of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, highlights strategies and resources for groups considering organizing around education issues. The Center for Education Organizing has been assisting community groups trying to improve neighborhood schools in New York City for the past 15 years.
As the guide states, “organizing begins with the premise that the people closest to the local schools – parents, students and teachers – are in the best position to make schooling decisions and to sustain educational improvement.”
Education organizing is an extension of community organizing already in progress around other issues, such as neighborhood safety and local economic development, according to the Center for Education Organizing. While the premise of free public education is to provide opportunity for all students to succeed, income gaps and the inequities that result are only growing between wealthy and poor school districts.
“Rather than leveling the playing field, under-funded and low-quality schools reproduce and reinforce the very problems communities organize themselves to tackle – poverty, lack of access to decent jobs, over-incarceration, etc.,” the guide explains.
Research shows that family and community engagement are critical components of school improvement success.Kit Carson Elementary School in Las Vegas is one example of how family engagement and community partners can help boost achievement.
To read this in site of origin go HERE.
Friday, February 17, 2012
How to stop cheating on standardized tests
In light of repeated cheating scandals on standardized tests in school districts across the country, the Education Department recently asked members of the public for ideas on how to prevent, detect and respond to irregularities on completed tests.
The idea is for the department to collect the information and share it with school districts around the country. Here’s a response just sent to the department by the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, or FairTest, a non-profit organization dedicated to ending the unfair use and misuse of tests.
Response to U.S. Department of Education
Request for Information to Gather Technical Expertise Pertaining to Testing Integrity
February 16, 2012
Over the past three academic years, the National Center for Fair & Open Testing has confirmed cases of standardized test cheating in 32 states and the District of Columbia (see attached list). The root cause of this epidemic is clear from in-depth investigations into some of the most egregious scandals. Misuse of standardized tests mandated by public officials has created a climate in which increasing numbers of educators feel they have no choice but to cross ethical lines.
If the U.S. Department of Education is serious about its commitment to assessment integrity, it must act to reduce test cheating by stopping promotion of test score misuse.
Despite their high-sounding statements about assessment reform, President Obama and Secretary Duncan are adding incentives for cheating by ratcheting up the emphasis on standardized exams scores through initiatives such as “Race to the Top” and their criteria for states to receive waivers from “No Child Left Behind.” The continued emphasis on annual high-stakes annual testing in these programs and, especially, new requirements to assess teachers based on their students’ scores virtually guarantees even more cheating will take place.
The administration’s favored policies also contradict the findings and recommendations of “Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education,” the important report released last year by the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science. That study’s distinguished panel of experts concluded that high-stakes testing has not improved educational quality.
Widespread cheating is an inevitable consequence of overuses of high-stakes testing, as predicted by renowned social scientist Donald Campbell. In 1976 he wrote in what is now called Campbell’s Law, “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. . . when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways.”
Recent examinations of major outbreaks of cheating confirm the accuracy of Campbell’s prediction. In Atlanta, Georgia, for example, the Governor’s Bureau of Investigation found that test score misuse was amajor reason for why cheating occurred. They wrote, “The targets . . . were often unreasonable, especially given their cumulative effect over the years. Additionally, the administration put unreasonable pressure on teachers and principals to achieve targets. . . ultimately, the data and meeting ‘targets’ by whatever means necessary, became more important than true academic progress.”
In their report on the Dougherty County System, the Georgia Special Investigators identified similar causes. In the section titled “Why Cheating Occurred,” the investigators cite No Child Left Behind’s “pressure to meet AYP targets” as “a significant motivation for cheating” finding, “This pressure drives some individuals to cross ethical lines.” They concluded, “Since the enactment of NCLB, standardized testing has become more about measuring the teachers, principals and schools than accurately assessing the children’s academic progress.”
In terms of “best practices” for detecting and responding to testing irregularities, there is no need for a massive federal study. The reports by the Georgia Office of Special Investigators examining cheating in Atlanta area schools are a model for policy-maker response. A comprehensive review by independent law enforcement professionals — not politicians or bureaucrats who may have vested interests in protecting current policies and personnel — is necessary. Combined with the use of the full range of forensic detection tools — including analyses for high numbers of erasures, unusual score gains, and patterns of similar responses — this approach has proven most likely to root out the full truth.
More policing and better after-the-fact investigations will not, however, solve the many problems caused by the politically motivated misuses of standardized exam scores. Instead, high-stakes testing requirements must end because they cheat students out of a high-quality education and cheat the public out of accurate information about school quality.
FairTest National Center for Fair & Open Testing
CONFIRMED CASES OF TEST-CHEATING
(2008-2012)
According to FairTest’s records, in the past four school years one or more cheating cases have been documented in the following jurisdictions.
The key:
# Included in March 2011 USA Today/Gannett investigative series
* Multiple reports or apparent systematic pattern
Arizona #
California #
Colorado #
Connecticut
District of Columbia # *
Florida #*
Georgia *
Indiana *
Illinois
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan #
Minnesota
Missouri
Mississippi
Nevada
New Jersey *
New York *
North Carolina
Ohio #
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania *
Rhode Island
South Carolina
Tennessee
Texas *
Virginia
Washington
Wisconsin
see article in site of origin HERE.
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