Posted In The Washington Post at 04:00 AM ET, 04/25/2012

NY principals: A ‘wrecking ball’ of reform aimed at schools

By Valerie Strauss

This is an open letter that a group of New York principals sent this week to the New York State Board of Regents about school reform and the standardized testing regime. More than 1,400 New York State principals have signed a petition asking state education officials to rethink their reform agenda. You can read about that effort atwww.newyorkprincipals.org and @nyprincipals on Twitter.

An Open Letter of Concern Regarding High-Stakes Testing and the School Reform Agenda of New York State

The past week has been a nightmare for New York students in Grades 3 through 8, their teachers and their principals. Not only were the New York State ELA [English Language Arts] exams too long and exhausting for young students, (three exams of 90 minutes each), they contained ambiguous questions that cannot be answered with assurance, problems with test booklet instructions, inadequate space for students to write essays, and reading comprehension passages that defy commonsense. In addition, the press reported a passage that relied on knowledge of sounds and music which hearing-impaired students could not answer and Newsday reported that students were mechanically ‘filling in bubbles’ due to exhaustion. Certainly the most egregious example of problems with the tests is the now infamous passage about the Hare and the Pineapple.

On Friday, Commissioner King offered no apologies in what appeared to be a hastily written press release regarding the Hare and the Pineapple passage. In that release, Commissioner King faults the media for not printing the complete passage (many did), and passes the buck by noting that a committee of teachers reviewed the passage. In short, he distances the State Education Department from its responsibility to get the tests right. Considering the rigor and length of the exams, as well as their use in the evaluation of educators and schools, one might have hoped that the State Education Department and Pearson would have reviewed the tests with more care.

For many of us, however, this is but the latest bungle in the so-called school reform movement in New York State. More than 1,400 New York State principals have repeatedly begged the department to slow down, pilot thoughtful change and avoid using student test scores as high-stakes measures. The recent ELA test debacle was foreseeable to those of us who lead schools and know from experience that you cannot make so many drastic changes to curriculum, assessment and educator evaluation in a short period of time, especially without listening to those who lead schools. The literature on leadership is clear. Effective leadership is about the development of followership. If truth be told, however, there are fewer and fewer followers of this State Education Department every day. The Pineapple, like the ‘plane being built in the air’, is now a symbol of the careless implementation of a reform agenda that will cost billions of dollars, without yielding the promised school improvement.

There are many who disparage our public schools in New York State. Although we acknowledge that improvements are needed, there is also much of which we are proud. We are proud of our tradition of New York State Regents examinations. We are proud that New York State students are second in the nation in taking Advanced Placement exams. We are proud of our Intel winners and the number of New York high schools on national lists of excellence. We are proud that our schools are second in the nation according to a comprehensive analysis of policy and performance conducted by the research group, Quality Counts.

We also know that too many of our schools are racially and socio-economically isolated with overwhelming numbers of students who receive little opportunity and support in their communities as well as in their schools. We cannot ignore deep-seated social problems while blindly believing that new tests, data warehousing systems and unproven evaluation systems are the answer. That view, in our opinion, is irresponsible and unethical.

This ill-conceived Race to the Top, recently critiqued by the National School Boards Association, is no more sensible than the race of the Hare and the Pineapple. Yet the New York State Education Department continues to enthusiastically push its agenda. Our schools are faced with contradictory and incomplete directives regarding high-stakes testing and evaluation, our teachers are humiliated by the thought of publicized evaluation numbers and our students are stressed by the unnecessary testing that has consumed precious learning time.

We understand that change is important for school revitalization. We have years of collective experience successfully leading educational improvement in our schools, often as partners with the State Education Department. Unfortunately, our voices have been ignored and marginalized during the past year. Nevertheless, we believe that we have an ethical obligation to speak out. It is often said about educational change that it is a pendulum that swings. We are now watching the pendulum of school reform swing dangerously, and we fear that this time it is a wrecking ball aimed at the public schools we so cherish.

The following principals respectfully submit this open letter to the New York State Board of Regents:

Anna Allanbrook

Brooklyn New School, New York City Public Schools

Carol Burris

South Side High School, Rockville Centre School District

Gail Casciano

Nassakeag Elementary School, Three Village Central School District

Carol Conklin-Spillane

Sleepy Hollow High School, Tarrytowns School District

Sean Feeney

The Wheatley School, East Williston School District

Sharon Fougner

Elizabeth Mellick Baker School

Great Neck School District

Andrew Greene

Candlewood Middle School, Half Hollow Hills Central School District

Bernard Kaplan

Great Neck North High School, Great Neck School District

Harry Leonardatos

Clarkstown High School, Clarkstown Central School District

Michael McDermott

Scarsdale Middle School, Scarsdale School District

Shelagh McGinn

South Side Middle School, Rockville Centre School District

Sandra Pensak

Hewlett Elementary School, Hewlett-Woodmere School District

Elizabeth Phillips

PS 321 William Penn, New York City Public Schools

Donald Sternberg

Wantagh Elementary School, Wantagh Public Schools

Katie Zahedi

Linden Avenue Middle School, Red Hook Central Schools

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What the U.S. can’t learn from Finland

Posted in the Washington Post April 17, 2012

As the United States is looking to reform its public school system, education experts have increasingly looked at other countries for examples on what works and what won’t. The current administration has turned its attention strong performing foreign school systems. As a consequence, recent education summits hosted in the United States have given room to international education showcases. This commitment to think outside of the box was illustrated two years ago, when Education Secretary Arne Duncan asked for a report titled “Strong Performers and Successful Reforms: Lessons from PISA for the United States,” prepared by a team of analysts — I was one of them — with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). One of the strong performers that is gaining increasing interest in the United States is my home country, Finland.

During the last decade, Finland has become the go-to place for education reformers all around the world. The main reason is its success in the international survey comparing 15-year-olds in reading, math and science learning called PISA (Program for International Student Assessment). Since that OECD report, I have been privileged to meet legislators, administrators, teachers, and parents here in the United States. Anywhere I go, people are eager to hear about Finnish education and its accomplishments. Especially, they want to know what they can learn from it.

What I have to say, however, is not always what they want to hear. While it is true that we can certainly learn from foreign systems and use them as backdrops for better understanding of our own, we cannot simply replicate them. What, then, can’t the United States learn from Finland?

First of all, although Finland can show the United States what equal opportunity looks like, Americans cannot achieve equity without first implementing fundamental changes in their school system. The following three issues require particular attention.

• Funding of schools: Finnish schools are funded based on a formula guaranteeing equal allocation of resources to each school regardless of location or wealth of its community.
• Well-being of children: All children in Finland have, by law, access to childcare, comprehensive health care, and pre-school in their own communities. Every school must have a welfare team to advance child happiness in school.
• Education as a human right: All education from preschool to university is free of charge for anybody living in Finland. This makes higher education affordable and accessible for all.

As long as these conditions don’t exist, the Finnish equality-based model bears little relevance in the United States.

Second, school autonomy and teacher professionalism are often mentioned as the dominant factors explaining strong educational performance in Finland. The school is the main author of curricula. And the teacher is the sole authority monitoring the progress of students.

In Finland, there is a strong sense of trust in schools and teachers to carry out these responsibilities. There is no external inspection of schools or standardized testing of all pupils in Finland. For our national analysis of educational performance, we rely on testing only a small sample of students. The United States really cannot leave curriculum design and student assessment in the hands of schools and teachers unless there is similar public confidence in schools and teachers. To get there, a more coherent national system of teacher education is one major step.

Finland is home to such a coherent national system of teacher education. And unlike in the United States, teaching is one of the top career choices among young Finns. Teachers in Finland are highly regarded professionals — akin to medical doctors and lawyers. There are eight universities educating teachers in Finland, and all their programs have the same high academic standards. Furthermore, a research-based master’s degree is the minimum requirement to teach in Finland.

Teaching in Finland is, in fact, such a desired profession that the University of Helsinki, where I teach part-time, received 2,300 applicants this spring for 120 spots in its primary school teacher education program. In this teacher education program and the seven others, teachers are prepared to design their own curricula, assess their own pupils’ progress, and continuously improve their own teaching and their school. Until the United States has improved its teacher education, its teachers cannot enjoy similar prestige, public confidence and autonomy.

Third, many education visitors to Finland expect to find schools filled with Finnish pedagogical innovation and state-of-the-art technology. Instead, they see teachers teaching and pupils learning as they would in any typical good school in the United States. Some observers call this “pedagogical conservatism” or “informal and relaxed” because there does not appear to be much going on in classrooms.

The irony of Finnish educational success is that it derives heavily from classroom innovation and school improvement research in the United States. Cooperative learning and portfolio assessment are examples of American classroom-based innovations that have been implemented in large scale in the Finnish school system.

Those who are looking at Finland’s education system as a possible model for reform in the United States point out, quite correctly, that our two countries are very different. In these comparisons, one critical difference is often overlooked that is also essential to understanding what our two countries can or cannot learn from one another.

In the United States, education is mostly viewed as a private effort leading to individual good. The performances of individual students and teachers are therefore in the center of the ongoing school reform debate. By contrast, in Finland, education is viewed primarily as a public effort serving a public purpose. As a consequence, education reforms in Finland are judged more in terms of how equitable the system is for different learners. This helps to explain the difference between the American obsession with standardized testing and the Finnish fixation on each school’s ability to cope with individual differences and social inequality. The former is driven by excellence, the latter by equity.

Quality and equity in education must be conceived as concomitant. Based on its global data, the OECD recently drew precisely this conclusion: “The highest-performing education systems across the OECD countries are those that combine quality with equity.”

What Finland can show to others is how equity and equal opportunity in education look like. However, school reformers in the United States need to be careful when considering equity-based reform ideas to be imported from Finland. Many elements of Finnish successful school system are interwoven in the surrounding welfare state. Simply a transfer of these solutions would add another chapter to already exhausting volume of failed education reforms.

Talking Pineapple Question On 8th-Grade 

New York State Exam Confuses Everyone 

(UPDATE)

The Huffington Post  |  By Laura Hibbard 

see original article at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/20/ridiculous-talking-pineapple-question-on-state-exam_n_1440942.html#s890786&title=Superintendent_In_KKK

Posted: 04/20/2012 1:47 pm Updated: 04/20/2012 6:09 pm

New York students, teachers, and parents were utterly bewildered by a question on an eighth-grade state reading exam, the New York Daily News reports.

(Scroll for the question.)

While most found the question comical and simply nonsensical -- with one student even making a "pineapples don't have sleeves" t-shirt -- City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott issued a statement saying improvements will be made in the future.

(Scroll for udpate)

"We expect to see much more rigor and complex reading passages on next year’s tests," he said, according to New York 1.

The New York Daily News staff sent the question to Jeopardy! wizard Ken Jennings... who responded with similar confusion.

"Is this a joke? The story makes no sense whatsoever," Jennings told the paper. "The narrative has no internal logic, the “moral” is unclear, and the plot details seems so oddly chosen that the story seems to have been written during a peyote trip ... A ninja and toothpaste? What does that even mean?"

(The passage appears below)

The Pineapple and the Hare, h/t to the New York Daily News:

In the olden times, animals could speak English, just like you and me. There was a lovely enchanted forest that flourished with a bunch of these magical animals. One day, a hare was relaxing by a tree. All of a sudden, he noticed a pineapple sitting near him. The hare, being magical and all, told the pineapple, “Um, hi.” The pineapple could speak English too. “I challenge you to a race! Whoever makes it across the forest and back first wins a ninja! And a lifetime’s supply of toothpaste!” The hare looked at the pineapple strangely, but agreed to the race. The next day, the competition was coming into play. All the animals in the forest (but not the pineapples, for pineapples are immobile) arranged a finish/start line in between two trees. The coyote placed the pineapple in front of the starting line, and the hare was on his way. Everyone on the sidelines was bustling about and chatting about the obvious prediction that the hare was going to claim the victory (and the ninja and the toothpaste). Suddenly, the crow had a revolutionary realization. “AAAAIEEH! Friends! I have an idea to share! The pineapple has not challenged our good companion, the hare, to just a simple race! Surely the pineapple must know that he CANNOT MOVE! He obviously has a trick up his sleeve!” exclaimed the crow. The moose spoke up. “Pineapples don’t have sleeves.” “You fool! You know what I mean! I think that the pineapple knows we’re cheering for the hare, so he is planning to pull a trick on us, so we look foolish when he wins! Let’s sink the pineapple’s intentions, and let’s cheer for the stupid fruit!” the crow passionately proclaimed. The other animals cheered, and started chanting, “FOIL THE PLAN! FOIL THE PLAN! FOIL THE PLAN!” A few minutes later, the hare arrived. He got into place next to the pineapple, who sat there contently. The monkey blew the tree-bark whistle, and the race began! The hare took off, sprinting through the forest, and the pineapple ... It sat there. The animals glanced at each other blankly, and then started to realize how dumb they were. The pineapple did not have a trick up its sleeve. It wanted an honest race — but it knew it couldn’t walk (let alone run)! About a few hours later, the hare came into sight again. It flew right across the finish line, still as fast as it was when it first took off. The hare had won, but the pineapple still sat at his starting point, and had not even budged. The animals ate the pineapple.

Here are two of the questions:
1. Why did the animals eat the pineapple?
a. they were annoyed
b. they were amused
c. they were hungry
d. they wanted to
2. Who was the wisest?
a. the hare
b. moose
c. crow
d. owl

According to a New York Public Schools Parents blog, this isn't the first time this head-scratch-worthy question has surfaced in a state exam.

Apparently, the same reading passage and associated questions have been recycled by Pearson for standardized exams in Florida, Illinois, Delaware, New Mexico, Arkansas, Alabama, and perhaps other states, causing huge confusion among students for at least the last seven years.

The blog notes there is even a Facebook page for the question, with more than 11 hundred likes.

This crazy test question harks back to equally unexplainable schoolwork questions which arose at the Center City Public Charter School's Trinidad campus in Washington D.C. back in March. The questions, which had school officials up-in-arms, featured morbid, mature, and violent content. 
For example, question number 2 in the worksheet stated:

"My 3 friends and I were caught and tied up by 1023 screaming cannibals in a jungle last night. Soon we were feeling terribly itchy because of the mosquitoes. We begged the cannibals to scratch us. 219 cannibals refused because they were busy cutting vegetables. The rest of them, however, surrounded us in equal numbers and began to scratch us with their teeth, just like dogs. It felt good! How many cannibals scratched me?"

The unnamed teacher was terminated after the questions where brought to the attention of school officials.

UPDATE, 5:57 P.M.:

The Huffington post received a statement from New York Education Commissioner John B. King, Jr.:

First of all, the "passage" printed in the media is not complete. Although the questions make more sense in the context of the full passage, due to the ambiguous nature of the test questions the Department has decided it will not be counted against students in their scores. It is important to note that this test section does not incorporate the Common Core and other improvements to test quality currently underway. This year’s tests incorporate a small number of Common Core field test questions. Next year’s test will be fully aligned with the Common Core. This particular passage, like all test questions, was reviewed by a committee comprised of teachers from across the state, but it was not crafted for New York State. It’s a passage that has been used in other states and was included by Pearson Inc., the test vendor, to provide a comparison between New York students and students from other states.1The passage and related questions are not reflective of the precision of the entire exam. The accuracy and efficacy our state assessments are crucial to our reform efforts and measuring student academic growth. We will, as always, review and analyze all questions on every assessment we administer.

Other controversial school-related documents from around the country:

Dear Reformers: Teachers Are Neither Heroes Nor Zeroes

poste in TEACHER'S DIARY in the New York Times

April 18, 2012, 3:32 p.m.

By TIM CLIFFORD

As an argumentative writing challenge, I recently paired students and assigned them a fictional text. They were given the task of composing a persuasive letter to their partner about the main character.

Tim Clifford

One student had to stake a claim that the character was a Hero, and the other had to claim that the character was a Zero. Students had not only to prove their own side, but anticipate the counter-arguments of their partners.

The results were gratifying, because most students began to see that things are rarely as clear-cut as they first appear. Heroes sometimes have dirty faces, and even the most nefarious villains may act nobly at times.

I got to thinking about all this after I had read yet another hatchet job on teachers in a newspaper that shall not be named (no, not the one affiliated with this blog).

Every day, some education reform pundit who has never set foot in a classroom decries the state of education, with teachers as the primary whipping boys (and girls). So I decided to take on my own assignment and write the reform folks a letter explaining to them why teachers are not the Zeroes they are making us out to be.

Dear Ed Reformers,

Not all teachers can be life-savers like Cassandra Byrd-Scolaro, who teaches fourth grade at Public School 17 Henry D. Woodworth in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and who recently resuscitated a woman she found lifeless in a bathroom stall during her lunch break.

When revived, the stricken woman, who had apparently overdosed, gave Ms. Byrd-Scolaro the finger. I think most teachers can relate.

If judged solely through media coverage, one would be forced to conclude that teachers are the greatest plague on society today, collectively eroding democracy and leading this country down an inexorable path toward third world status.

To prove our villainy, many news outlets recently chose to risk the public shaming of teachers by publishing highly flawed Teacher Data Reports. Our names (and some teachers’ pictures) were smeared all over the papers as if we’d gotten D.W.I.s rather than T.D.R.s.

In your zeal to “reform” schools, you have, wittingly or not, excoriated teachers. Your mantra has been that the essential step towards building better schools is the ability to fire all of the “bad” teachers out there.

Even President Obama, an alleged union supporter who vowed to don comfortable shoes and march alongside us should collective bargaining rights ever be threatened, applauded the firing of the entire faculty of a school in Rhode Island.

While it is true that some teachers are better than others, and everyone can improve, the myth of the bad teacher is just that — a myth. I’ve taught for more than two decades and I can truthfully assert that I have only seen a handful of teachers who were so awful that they needed to be bounced from the classroom.

Of that handful, many were weeded out in the tenure process, and others were either forced out or exited voluntarily because they couldn’t cut it.

Speaking of tenure, let me remind you that administrators have as many as five years to decide whether teachers deserve tenure. Before that, teachers can be fired for any reason, or no reason at all.

Isn’t five years sufficient? If a teacher makes it that far — no mean feat in itself — doesn’t he or she deserve the right to the fair hearing that tenure affords them prior to termination?

And as for the oft-repeated meme, perpetuated in ed reform hit pieces like the movie “Waiting for Superman,” that once granted tenure, teachers stick their feet up on their desks and read the sports section for the next 20 years, I invite you all to spend even one period in a classroom with your feet up.

You will quickly learn why teaching cannot be performed while sitting on one’s posterior. Good luck combing the spitballs out of your hair.

Some of you reformers out there have even begun blaming teachers for the bad economy. You claim that greedy teachers are wrecking local and state budgets with our “exorbitant” pensions.

In truth, salary and benefits, including pension, are part of our total compensation package which is negotiated with local governments. In other words, we earn them.

Many states, such as New Jersey, were utterly irresponsible in underfunding their pension obligations, but that’s hardly the fault of teachers. And much of the shortfall is due to the near-crash of the stock market brought on by the irresponsible behavior of banks, and yes, even some of the hedge-fund billionaires who are at the heart of the education reform/charter school movement.

So, my dear education reformers, I humbly submit that teachers are not the Zeroes you make us out to be.

Are we Heroes? Well, perhaps not. We rarely confront fire-breathing dragons, but we do face off against hormone-engorged adolescents on a daily basis.

We don’t pull swords from stones, but we do pull thoughtful answers from reluctant learners.

And while the villains we face rarely wear black masks, we do square off against thinly disguised poverty, hunger, discrimination, abuse, bullying and neglect on a regular basis. Sometimes, we even win.

Maybe we’re just heroes with chalky faces. We can’t all be like Ms. Byrd-Scolaro. Still, it would be nice if, after we’re done with our minor acts of classroom heroism for the day, you would refrain from giving us the finger.

Sincerely,
Tim Clifford

Tim Clifford is the author of several education books, as well as children's fiction and non-fiction. He teaches English in Queens.