Occupy the Ed Department starts Friday

By Valerie Strauss

A group of activists is planning a four-day protest event starting next

week called “Occupy the DOE in D.C.” that is aimed at alerting the

Obama administration to growing unhappiness with its education

reform policies.

The event includes seminars, led by professors, activists and others, a

s well as marches and speeches that together are designed to express

opposition to the education policies of President Obama and Education

Secretary Arne Duncan, which critics say have, among other things,

increased the importance of high-stakes tests and promoted charter

schools at the expense of traditional public schools.

Unlike some other Occupy protests, the organizers of this one got

the required permits to stage all of the planned events.
“Occupy the DOE” is being organized by United Opt Out, an

organization of parents, educators, students and social activists seeking

to end the high-stakes testing regimen in public education today and create

a balanced accountability system.

United Opt Out encourages parents to use “opt out” rules in their school

districts that allow students to stay home when standardized tests are given.

They say that the focus on high-stakes standardized testing in the No Child

Left Behind era — and now the Race to the Top program — has failed to

improve student achievement and instead has narrowed curricula,

wasted public resources and caused anxiety and fear for students

and teachers.

It remains unclear just how big a crowd “Occupy the DOE in D.C.”

will draw, but it is worth noting that people from different walks of life

who oppose federal education policy are taking increasingly public

stances against it.

Last summer, a protest march called “Save Our Schools” was held

near the White House; thousands of teachers from across the country

attended and listened to speakers including Diane Ravitch and Matt

Damon. More recently, there have been other public displays of dissatisfaction

with the path of school reform, which many see as promoting corporate

interests. In New York, for example, school principals organized a protest

the state’s new educator evaluation system, which ties the evaluations

and pay of teachers and principals to students’ performance on

standardized tests. Currently more than 1,418 principals in New

York and nearly 5,000 other people have signed an open letter of

concern about the assessment system.

In California, Gov. Jerry Brown said in his 2012 State of the State address

in January that he wants to reduce the number of standardized tests

students take. And in Texas, the state education commissioner,

Robert Scott, cheered anti-testing activistswhen he said last month that

the notion that standardized testing is the “end-all, be-all” is a “perversion”

of what a quality education should be. And school districts by the score are

passing a resolution calling for more balance in assessment and a move

away from the high-stakes testing that now consumes as many as 45 days

of a high school student’s 180-day school year.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has inspired the “Occupy the DOE

in D.C.” event, about which you can find details here .

Why I Decided to Become a Private School Teacher by Nadia Zananiri

by Nancy Flanagan posted in EDWeek

This is a guest post from Nadia Zananiri, who teaches AP World History at Miami Beach Senior High School, and serves as AP World History mentor teacher for Miami Dade county. She is founder of the Facebook group Florida Parents

and Educators for Legislative Change.

I am not a private school teacher yet; but I am planning on becoming one. I have taught at a wonderful public school with a college prep program that allows all students access to a world class education for my entire teaching career.

I teach in an urban area with a mix of students. In the Advanced Placement classes I teach, I have students from some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country, to some of the poorest. Families that have been here for generations, to families who are recent immigrants and the parents don't speak English. Regardless of their background, my principal likes to always say "we have the best students in the world," and we do.

Many of my students' parents are wealthy and could easily afford to send their children to exclusive private schools, yet they choose to send their children to their local public school because they believe in public education. They have not bought into the hype that all of our public schools are in crisis. That all public school teachers are lazy and incompetent and that they cower in their classrooms scowling at their students, all the while waiting to collect their larded pensions.

During the nine years I have been teaching at my public school, the school has received grades of D, C, B and finally this year we achieved an A. Next year, due to the state of Florida changing the grading standards (which they have done every year since they decided to grade schools) we are projected to become a C school. The State Board of Education has reached the absurd conclusion of expecting special education students and English language learners to reach the same proficiency levels as regular students; and that out of date science test scores should be used as data (doesn't sound very scientific to me). Whichever grade the state decides to assign my school, I will know the truth, we are still an A school.

So why am I planning on leaving such a wonderful public institution for a private school? Well, I wasn't. Even after the state Legislators decided to exempt Advanced Placement classrooms from the twice voter approved class size amendment, and my student work load ballooned to 190 students without any extra pay, I was planning on staying.

But after the last faculty meeting, the state dealt the final blow to my teaching career in Florida public schools. We were told about the wonders of a magical algorithm that would be able to predict student growth. It's called the "value-added model." I refer to it as voodoo mathematics. If teachers do not meet the predictions of student growth projected by the algorithms in relation to their peers, they will be rated "ineffective." Teachers are ranked on a curve, thus a certain percentage will always be considered failures.

When the value added ratings were published in New York newspapers last week, many were surprised to see talented teachers ranked in the lowest percentiles. I was not surprised. One teacher of the gifted was ranked in the 6th percentile after her students' mean score dropped from a 3.97 to a 3.92. Students are placed in gifted and Advanced Placement classrooms because they have scored at the top range of state tests. If they are scoring high already, they will have a difficult time showing growth and statistically they are more likely to regress towards the norm.

Good teachers can now be fired because of bad math. As mandated by Race to the Top and the NCLB waivers imposed under current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, which require districts and states to use standardized test scores as a significant portion of teacher evaluations, the Florida Senate passed bill 736 last spring. Under Race to the Top and Senate Bill 736, teachers with two years of "ineffective" rankings will be fired and their teaching license will be revoked by the state of Florida, thus banning them from teaching in any other public school in the United States.

Well, not exactly. These fired and banned teachers will probably be able to find work at a charter school where teachers don't have to have professional teaching licenses and are not subject to this new teacher evaluation system, despite the fact that charter schools also receive public funds. The exemption of charter school teachers from both the state and federal mandates, leads one to believe that politicians are less interested in accountability than they are in busting unions and making sure no teacher lasts long enough to collect a pension. In the name of firing the worst teachers, we will be firing some of the best.

I refuse to be a victim of the Russian roulette nature of value added models. I will not let myself be labeled an "ineffective" teacher after continuously striving to improve my instruction, my knowledge base, my relationship with my students and parents. I will not be labeled an ineffective teacher after spending hours on the phone, in person and over email contacting parents over skipping students, sick students, struggling students, amazing students....I will not be labeled an ineffective teacher after spending hours on my weekend and evenings grading student papers when I should be reading to my own young children.

I can't play by the rules of your game. It has reached the point where I know that I will inevitably end up a loser, no matter how hard I work. Private schools have become the Promised Land. Small class sizes, no government testing, unscripted curriculum and only accountability to my students, parents and administrators. I am a proud product of public schools from elementary to university, but the policies imposed in recent years by politicians are destroying the same system politicians claim to be saving.

Mr. President: Improving the U.S. Education System Is Not a Competitive Sport

Imagine if before March Madness started, individual teams and athletes competed for additional pots of money. The winning applicants would receive extra funds to do things like hire more coaches or purchase cutting-edge training equipment. Would we think this was a system that was fair and beneficial to the quality of league play as a whole? Do we think the most deserving scholar athletes would benefit? Would we see it as a fair system for less-resourced colleges?

Of course not. Yet this is the kind of approach that the Obama Administration has taken with education. In no other area has the president striven harder to make his mark as a reformer by signaling that he is unafraid to shake up the education establishment, challenge old assumptions and dramatically step up the federal government's role as a catalyst for change. And if one area stands out as the hallmark of this approach, it's the emphasis on competitive grant programs rather than on programs that target the nation's least advantaged children.

Although the large majority of federal education dollars are still spent on formula-funded and other targeted programs, these programs have not captured the Administration's imagination or attention. Rather, acting more like a private foundation than a national government, the Administration has shown that its passion and budget priorities lie with competitive grant programs. The best-known examples are the U.S. Department of Education's various Race to the Top initiatives for K-12 education, the "First in the World" initiative for higher education programs and the competitions surrounding community colleges.

I certainly believe in the value of competition in getting the most out of people and have felt the thrill when my children, and now grandchildren, make the winning touchdown or bring home exceptional test results. But competition has its time and place, and what this Administration sees as a powerful lever to impose their ideas I view as a troubling trend that moves us away from the basic rule that the federal government's investment in education should be precisely targeted on assuring that all children have the opportunity to receive a quality education.

In accepting the Democratic nomination back in 2008, then-candidate Obama noted,

America, now is not the time for small plans. Now is the time to finally meet our moral obligation to provide every child a world-class education, because it will take nothing less to compete in the global economy.

I hope that moving forward, the President can recapture that sentiment and shift away from thinking about improving our education system as a competitive sport.

Arnold L. Mitchem, president of the Council for Opportunity in Education (COE) since its founding in 1986, has been a voice for low-income, first-generation students and individuals with disabilities his entire career. COE supports and advocates for federally funded TRIO Programs, which are the largest discretionary program in the U.S. Department of Education and now serve more than 872,000 students at 1,200 colleges and universities.

CMS scraps controversial tests, teacher ratings

Originally posted in the Charlotte Observer at http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/02/15/3013398/cms-scraps-controversial-tests.html

By Ann Doss Helms
ahelms@charlotteobserver.com

Posted: Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2012

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is scrapping 52 controversial year-end exams, including one-on-one testing for children as young as kindergarten, and the "value-added" test-score ratings that had teachers up in arms last spring.

Interim Superintendent Hugh Hattabaugh emailed CMS employees about the reversal Tuesday night, saying that the CMS efforts duplicate state programs paid for with federal "Race to the Top" money. Some critics raised that concern last year, but Hattabaugh said Tuesday night that the duplication "wasn't clear yet" when CMS pushed ahead.

He told the board that abandoning the CMS tests and ratings in favor of state ones represents "a change in procedure but not direction."

CMS spent $2 million developing end-of-year tests for all subjects in all grades that are not covered by state exams. That included reading, math, social studies and science tests for grades K-2, which had to be administered one child at a time, and tests for an array of high-school electives.

To read the whole article or to read all comments associated with this article go HERE.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/02/15/3013398/cms-scraps-controversial-tests.html#storylink=cp
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LI schools opting out of Race to the Top

School districts across Long Island say the cost of implementing the federal Race to the Top initiative outstrips the monetary awards.

Some are opting out, rejecting the funding to free themselves of the obligation.

Neil Lederer, interim superintendent of the Three Village district, said it just didn't make sense to take the money. His district, with about 7,400 students, was to get $30,176, spread over four years. (read more click here)