what i meant to say was....

Why is George Miller in such a twist about funding?

2007-11-09T12:54:00.000-05:00

"The President proved, yet again, that he is not serious about creating a world-class public education system. He thinks he can have his education legacy on the cheap. He is profoundly mistaken." --Rep. George Miller (D-CA), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee

http://www.house.gov/apps/list/speech/edlabor_dem/rel110707.html

Whoa...The man is obviously upset. But let's try to imagine why. And let's try to imagine how with everything that is WRONG about NCLB, he is so EXTREMELY upset about the funding aspect.

First, I remind you that this is a man who has consistently lent a deaf ear to the citizens who tried to appeal to him about the damages and destruction since NCLB policy began corrupting education in our classrooms.

But, that is because he probably had to protect the interests of his more powerful and wealthier friends.

You see, George Miller's "friends," or the folks he is looking after in this speech can be found at:

http://www.eliminatenclb.org/who.shtml

Contributors to the George Miller Campaign:

Jerald Barnett
Education America / Owner

Thomas Bishop
University of Phoenix / VP

Deborah Blackwell
Touro University / Provost & Dean

Cynthia Braddon
McGraw-Hill Companies / VP

Eli Broad
Broad Foundation / Founder

Kathryn Costello
Pearson Education Publishing

Larry Diamond
Hoover Institute

William Etheridge
Pearson Education, CEO

Lawrence Goodman
School Link Technologies, President

Henry Howard
US Education Finance Corp., President

John Isley
Pearson Education / Publisher

Richard Jerue
Education Mgmt Corp / VP Govt. Relat.

William Jordan
McGraw-Hill Companies / Senior Director

Joseph Kakaty
Student Loan Consolidation Center

Hendrik Kranenburg
McGraw-Hill / President Higher

Bonnie Lieberman
John Wylie & Sons Publishing / SVP

Patricia McAllister
Educational Testing Service / Govern

Lowell Milken
Knowledge Universe Ltd. / Business

Arnold Mitchem
Council for Opportunity in Educ/PR

Jacqueline Pels
Hardscratch Press / Editor / Publisher

Richard Robinson
Scholastic Inc. / President & CEO

John Sargent
Holtzbrinck Publisher / CEO

Larry Snowhite
Houghton Mifflin Company / VP Govern

And, as you can see, some of George Miller's " friends" are also, very obviously the OTHER George's friends--that is what makes this all SO INTERESTING. These are the folks who have made ENORMOUS amounts of money, riding high on the tide of NCLB. These people represent the companies that are fattened up and belching after a 6 year 12 course meal made up of spoiled opportunities for our children and their teachers.

If many people were paying attention to the waste of money, the enormous windfall into the pockets of these sleezy companies for the pathetic quality of their product, there might be an audible and national gasp; there ought to be.

I am wheezing.

Most recent letter to our local paper

2007-10-24T14:19:00.000-04:00

What can I say..I am back.

Letter to the Editor
The Capital
Annapolis, MD

The band standing and posturing of the school board and administration over the future of Public Education in our county is still regrettably off the mark. These groups could, perhaps, accomplish something remarkable, if they would stop giving speeches and listen to the voices of the people they are supposed to serve.

No dedicated professional teacher finds the current state of affairs in our schools acceptable. The demands on these teachers have been increasingly devastating and destructive to their ability to teach. Changing schools into specialized factories with fancy names won't help. We are looking at yet another marketing facade, the impact of which will add more strain to a struggling system.

Students from our youngest through high school age, of every academic caliber, race, and cultural background are cheated by our county's compliance with standardization and the testing compulsions of NCLB structure. The business model suits no child in our county or our nation adequately because children, students, teachers are not product. Our students and our teachers deserve better than to be delivered education manufactured in a model dedicated to a powerful business interest and political posturing.

It is time to stop the never ending imposition of change in our schools and examine the quality of the existing changes. It is time to understand what parents, students and teachers are experiencing. The changes since NCLB have caused a great deal more harm than good in our schools.

Governor O'Malley should remember his promises at his Inaugural Youth Forum. Parents, students, and their teachers spoke passionately about the negative impact of county and state compliance with NCLB. You said you understood. You promised to help. When?

Stop the charade and begin the process of saving our public schools.

Online with Jay Mathews on AP

2007-10-24T14:13:00.000-04:00

Here it is in case you missed it...a limited but at least it got there "discussion" with Jay Mathews.

A Smart Parent Criticizes AP

By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 23, 2007; 8:06 PM

Last week Pomona College president David Oxtoby tried to educate me in this column about what he sees as the flaws of the Advanced Placement program, the college-level courses and tests given in high school of which I am American journalism's biggest supporter. This column will look at AP from the perspective of a well-informed parent in Anne Arundel County, Md., who thinks the program has fallen prey to the worst aspects of the movement to make public schools accountable through regular testing.

I was pretty aggressive with Oxtoby, since I know him well and figure he is used to being disrespected by self-important reporters. In the discussion below, I am much more polite to Anne E. Levin Garrison, since she is under no obligation to talk to me and has a very personal perspective that even a know-it-all like me has to respect. Part of this column's role as asource of information on AP, International Baccalaureate and other efforts to improve our high schools is my insistence that it be the most important forum for criticism of AP and IB. So I am thankful to both Oxtoby and Garrison for helping me fulfill that obligation and hope other critics will email me when they have something to say.

Garrison is a contributing guest editor at susanohanian.org, the Web site of one of my favorite tormentors, the irrepressible Susan Ohanian, and a freelance writer on issues in education and modern culture. Garrison has two daughters, lives near Annapolis and has been studying the impact of evolving local and federal policy on public schools for more than 14 years. Her areas of special interest include the effects of what she refers to as the No Child Left Behind-endorsed AP explosion on public school education; the destructive impact of NCLB policy on public school curriculum, teaching and learning; and the results and impact of NCLB policy on the emotional health and academic welfare of public school teachers and their students.

Here we go. Mostly I am asking her questions about her point of view, with a bit from me on my contrary opinions toward the end of the column.

Mathews: So, Annie, tell me what first happened with your girls that inspired your concern about AP?

Garrison: Thanks for inviting me into this conversation, Jay.

My eldest daughter signed up for AP European History, at that time still the first AP class a sophomore could take. The class was as large as every other class and included every kind of student. Over the summer, many weeks of reading and identification assignments (defining important terms and concepts and people) were required.

The teacher was newly recruited to teach the class to accommodate the school's expanded AP offerings. She had little knowledge of European history and little training prior to the class. I cannot fault this teacher for not being adequately prepared to handle this assignment. But the class, as you can imagine, was a very poor substitute for the lofty experience described on the College Board Web site.

The class did not satisfy our goal to provide our child with an "advanced learning opportunity" but rather operated in almost total devotion to the test. That meant that my daughter's desire to actually "learn" the content of a European history class was destroyed. In the process, while she juggled the painful demands of endless homework for this class, she struggled to meet similar demands of the rest of her schedule.

Mathews: Are you saying students did not suffer from having novice, under-trained teachers before there was AP and IB?

Garrison: Nope...But what I am saying is this: Since the NCLB-mandated AP expansion, the numbers of students "encouraged" to take AP classes and the number enrolled have both rapidly grown. The first year our county expanded AP, the number of students in AP in our school alone doubled. The push to expand has since grown faster and larger. The numbers in IB programs have gone from zero to 3 times that in our county in 3 years. With a mounting teacher shortage, the number of AP qualified teachers by the law of averages is compromised.

What I am also saying is this: The quality of the AP class is compromised by the amount of teachers recruited to accommodate the growth of the expansion who are not adequately trained nor experienced to teach a college level class. There might always be novice and untrained teachers, but a reasonable expectation would be to use experienced, trained and seasoned professionals to teach an advanced class.

By the way, when did AP or IB become the only game in town for advanced opportunity in public school? A hint: since NCLB. Again, you cannot dissect out the issue of quality; and there is a lot to question on the quality of many AP classes.

Mathews: And you think No Child Left Behind was one of the reasons why the AP course was so weak?

Garrison: Absolutely. The expansion of AP classes was built into NCLB. That fact is no surprise as the overall impact of NCLB is a generalized devotion to high stakes testing. The focus of AP classes rarely varies from instruction on test content, test format and test preparation. AP classes, in the context of NCLB are more likely to teach basic skills, and underemphasize problem-solving and complex thinking skills that are not well assessed on standardized tests.

Understanding that NCLB has colored every aspect of how our public schools operate in five short years is key. The rapid expansion of the AP program is one more casualty of the act.

Mathews: Was there any Document-Based Question work at all in this history class?

Garrison: Keep in mind, Jay, that teachers who have been teaching AP classes for a while, especially if they started before the NCLB-precipitated expansion, have had the time and experience to prepare and execute a learning opportunity for a prepared classroom of students.

With the expansion came a rapid influx of teachers and students with varying degrees of interest, skills and preparation. Programs have been quickly developed to accommodate the impact of the expansion and one of the more successful ones is a parallel seminar to teach skills such as how to answer Document-Based Questions (DBQ.)

Mathews: Exactly how many hours did your daughters meet each week with their AP teachers, and how many of those hours were devoted, as you say, to test taking? And who was keeping count?

Garrison: In seminar, the students met two to three days a week for an hour and a half and my daughter estimates that nearly 100% of that time was spent on test-taking skills. On alternate days she attended the AP class where the class was devoted primarily to content, because nearly all of the students were in seminar.

Mathews: What does she mean by "test taking skills." Paint us a picture. Tell us exactly what was going on. Was the teacher putting up sample questions and asking for answers? Was she giving them DBQs and asking them to answer, then having students read their answers? One person's test prep is another person's well-thought out review, so we need to know what exactly happened.

Garrison: Simpler than that; they were primarily taking review tests from the College Board Web site. They do that all semester long.

Mathews: So they each sat at a computer and had the questions scored automatically, or did the teacher hand out printouts? Were the questions discussed in class, or was this all silent work?

Garrison: Mostly they worked on sample DBQ's. They wrote answers and compared them with already scored tests. This particular teacher does a good job of presenting discussion to increase test scores.

But again, the focus is on becoming better at answering tests in a manner that reflects the generally assumed style of the test scorer. What is taught is that content is not the priority if you can use a certain set of test tricks or methods that appeal to the test-scorers methods.

Mathews: Are you saying that a good answer to an AP Document-Based Question is nothing but a bunch of tricks, and requires no knowledge of the subject matter, no experience in writing clear sentences, and no practice in analyzing complex materials?

Garrison: A good answer on an AP test DBQ is more of a trick than you would like to believe. It requires little depth of knowledge of the subject, not too much writing ability beyond the basic BCR or ECR format that is taught almost universally in our public schools, and requires LOTS of practice.

The practice, unfortunately, in the current expanded version of AP is not really about learning to analyze complex materials. There is hardly time for that; it is rather about getting used to the style of testing and test scoring and making an effort to follow a formulaic response that is generally graded favorably by the scorers.

Mathews: So how would you like to change things?

Garrison: I will give you my ideal. In the best of worlds, without the pervasive interference of NCLB, AP classes would exist as an opportunity for students who desire an accelerated or advanced academic experience. It would not be built into a federal intrusion to triple enrollment in math and science courses or increase AP attendance in general. In this manner, AP would exist once again as one option of several and it could spark an interest by the College Board to improve on and fix some of the characteristic problems endemic to the expansion and monopoly.

The schools might consider an accelerated academic track for students wishing to take advanced classes. In this way, students would have the opportunity to become prepared with a foundation class. As it is now, and according College Board data, almost half of all AP physics test takers had no prior experience with physics before enrolling in the AP course. Thus, the AP course had to cover both a year of high school physics and a year of college physics, making in-depth examination of any topic nearly impossible.

Mathews: How would you change AP?

Garrison: The goal and purpose of AP should satisfy either college preparatory goals or college credit goals, not both. If the purpose is to provide college credit, the test should be aligned with the school year so that the last 2 weeks to a month of class time is not wasted. Accommodations should be made to realistically match the general graduation requirements of the school so that students are not taking an impossible load of classes. In college, students generally take a load of four classes, in high school, they generally take seven or eight. One or two college-level classes would provide an appropriate challenge for a high school student, and accommodations could include a separate study skills class to provide appropriate preparation and the skills for college-level mastery.

I would like to see the offerings at our high schools reflect the real needs of the students, not the artificial needs of a business or corporate ideal. Flexibility is key for any good high school program. If students left out of the college prep programs are to be encouraged to participate, these students deserve accommodations targeted for their level of skills and preparation. AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) is a good example of such a program. Students are given the skills and support to effectively encourage them to rise to higher levels of mastery and can ultimately participate in advanced study.

Not all high school students fit the model of preparation or readiness for a college-level class, but all students could be given the opportunity in high school to prepare themselves for the experience of future college classes.

Mathews: I was at an AVID conference on Sunday. They were delighted to hear that the strengths of their program, now in 3,500 middle and high schools across the country, is something you and I agree on. AVID could be called, in a way, AP prep. So how would you improve the teaching of the actual AP courses, given your daughters' experience?

Garrison: The current AP class, since expansion, necessitates superficial treatment of most topics, with the emphasis on memorization of terms and facts rather than in-depth exploration and understanding, and the AP exam tests rote memorization more than in-depth understanding. This is a liability for teachers as well as students. Teaching is reduced to a race to prepare students with a limited scope of content prescribed by the test. Teachers require adequate training, experience, and preparation, as well as ongoing support in order to provide the best quality college-level or college-prep experiences for their students. Appropriate decisions should be made on a district or county level to deal with the overall shortages of teachers as well as the rarity of specialized teachers with an advanced degree in subject areas. It is common sense that an advanced or college-level course should be taught by a thoroughly prepared teacher. If the school does not have the ability to find appropriate resources, such as credentialed teachers, the menu should reflect that reality.

Your concept of raising the bar to encourage growth could apply here. If schools want to become premier institutions for early college-level credit, administrative dedication to a quality program could create an inspirational opportunity for appropriately trained teachers to take these positions. And if the College Board wants to continue to be the premier provider for quality academic advancement in high schools, it would benefit them to make adjustments to their existing programs to reflect both the reality in the high schools and the quality of these courses. The possibilities are endless.

Mathews: Thanks very much. Many of these are good ideas, but I am afraid you are wrong, based on not having the time or opportunity to see how AP works in other schools, on two points. First, the rise of AP has almost nothing to do with NCLB. Indeed, the Bush administration put some AP incentives in the act, but Democratic senators like Jeff Bingaman had won approval of similar legislation years before NCLB. The vast majority of high school principals would laugh at you if you suggested their AP numbers were climbing because the Bushies told them to pump up AP. They are climbing because AP teachers are welcoming more kids into their classes, having seen the good their classes do even for average kids, and because the most selective colleges are virtually requiring some AP or IB. Once you have time to visit other schools that will be clear to you.

Second, I am sorry that your daughters had such a poor experience in their AP classes, but based on visits to more than 100 AP schools over the years, and interviews with hundreds of AP teachers, what happened to them is very uncharacteristic. The teachers I have seen in action are imaginative, thoughtful and would be as angry as you are at any teaching style that promoted memorization rather than understanding. The college professors and high school teachers who write and grade the AP exams would reject your notion that those exams are all about rote memorization, and that writing a DBQ is little more than learning some tricks that have not much to do with content and concepts. The way the European history exam is set up, for instance, a student can get the highest grade, a 5, if she does well on the free response questions, even if she misses more than half of the multiple choice questions which are thought to be so dependent on memorization.

Garrison: Don't misunderstand me. My daughters have had wonderful teachers in high school. What students and teachers are experiencing here since the AP expansion is not rare or unique. Misuse of statistics and false presumptions are tools used to support the current implementation of NCLB policy. The general compromise of quality and the narrowed focus on test-based accountability changed our classrooms. Our experiences are the reality behind the statistical "measures of progress" in our schools.

NCLB is at the root of this expansion. AP has suffered in quality, as every aspect of teaching and learning has suffered.

My daughters have had some good experiences in AP classes too. The problems are built into the structure of the AP class and worsened by expansion. These teachers do rally to give students an advanced academic experience despite the shallow breadth, broad scope, and prescript format of these courses. Teachers struggle to prepare hundreds of variously capable students to pass tests which dually function as data for "accountability" as well as for college admission. The teachers are angry at the quality of these advanced classes but they have no control, no flexibility and no alternatives, so they do the best they can.

Thank you for this opportunity to contribute.

More on AP

2007-10-24T13:42:00.000-04:00

One of my friends had an experience that lends a lot of insight into the pressures the teachers feel under these ridiculous and desperate initiatives developed to give the appearance of "progress" but with no REAL substance...

Not unique, unfortunately, but this is true: the student received A's on her report cards straight through the year. Evidentally, the pressure to "prove" herself has the teacher giving A's to everyone who shows any effort. The downside of the generous grading for the classroom overall is that the A has no meaning when it is used to qualify such a broad range of effort, depth, etc...

BUT, to the parent and student, THIS is confusing and frustrating since by the end of a straight A year, the student was only able to earn a very LOW test score on the AP exam.

Whoa--Now, this class, remember, is taught, TAUGHT with ONE goal in mind: THE TEST. And, at Back to School Night there are PROMISES that parents will save THOUSANDS of dollars because their kids take these classes...And they are PROMISED that there kids will get a 3 or better on the exams...

BUT evidentally, and really quite tellingly, MANY students DO NOT get the grades they wanted....Now, the debate about this is complex--but don't buy the crap about "just taking the class is going to make a difference.." because that is a sales pitch. My feeling is: either the class merits having the moniker of ADVANCED and is carried out with adequate preparation to be called advanced or it is not...

And don't underestimate the results of scamming the student in this manner...The student DOES understand what is going on and "learns" some very important lessons about dishonesty, about honor, about economics, and about the value of children in a business-based political structure...

Here's a report in the press:

www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/annearundel/bal-ar.ap09sep09,0,2673439.story

baltimoresun.com

More taking the AP tests
Percentage scoring high enough to get college credits declines, however
By Ruma Kumar

sun reporter

September 9, 2007

Significantly more Anne Arundel County high school students are taking Advanced Placement tests, but a smaller proportion of them are scoring high enough on the rigorous exams to earn college credit, according to numbers released by the school system.

The number of students who took AP tests in the spring jumped 22 percent, but the percentage scoring 3 or higher on the 5-point scale fell at 11 of the 12 high schools.

The data released last week reflect the school system's effort to boost the number of college-level courses offered and the enrollment in them, along with critics' concerns that unprepared students are forcing teachers to water down the material.

Superintendent Kevin M. Maxwell said that whether or not students earn high scores on the AP tests, the increased participation is laying the groundwork for success in college.

"Data shows that students who take the exams, even if they score a 1 or a 2, are more successful in college than those students who don't take the exams or who don't take AP courses at all," Maxwell said Friday in a statement. "I am very, very encouraged by the increases we've seen."

The number of students taking AP courses and tests has increasingly become a measure of high school quality and rigor and is part of a mathematical formula used in national indices to rank high schools.

Some high schools have beefed up their AP offerings to 30 courses, said Barbara Zelley, the system's coordinator of gifted, talented and advanced programs.

Across the system, the number of test-takers in the 2006-2007 school year rose by 719, to 3,952. The biggest increase was at North County High, where 205 students took the test, compared with 135 last year.

"Everything that we know about the global economy and world markets and what students need to know and be able to do in the 21st century requires us to equip them with better math, science and technology," Zelley said. "It's all about rigor."

With a national military base realignment process expected to bring thousands of high-tech jobs to the area, school officials have encouraged greater enrollment in higher-level math and science courses. The system also has coaxed more students to take the test by setting aside $250,000 to help families afford the exams, which cost $83 apiece. With each push, officials mention data showing that those who take AP courses and tests are more likely to finish college in four years than those who don't.

"I think part of [the system's] goal is to force kids to do more work, get more actively involved in their own education, take risks they might not have taken," said Tim Menutti, president of the Teachers Association of Anne Arundel County.

Among students, AP tests are popular because the students can earn college credits and speed up their freshman year. Yet the most recent data show that a smaller percentage of Anne Arundel students are scoring high enough to do so. The tests are graded on a 1-to-5 scale, with a score of 3 or higher allowing students to earn college credit.

At Chesapeake High School, 58 percent of the students scored 3 or higher, compared with 75 percent in the previous school year.

At Severna Park High, 66 percent of students scored 3 or higher, compared with 78 percent the year before.

The lower scores have caused concern among parents and other critics who say the system's push for AP courses and test-taking has filled the classes with students who aren't prepared to do college-level work.

In the spring, top-ranked students at Severna Park High School said the pressure to take AP tests and courses even when they didn't feel ready contributed to a "culture of cheating" at the acclaimed school. The school was placed on probation this year after three students cheated on an AP U.S. history test May 11.

"If you're even slightly above average and motivated, you don't have any real option other than to go into an AP class, where you're shoved in with students who are not prepared, not capable of following through on the demands of an AP class," said Anne E. Levin Garrison, a South River High parent and a freelance writer and editor on education issues. "It completely defuses the intent, changes the meaning of quote-unquote 'advanced placement' when every type of student is allowed in that class."

Garrison has two daughters, one who graduated from South River in May and another who is a junior at the school. Her elder daughter had a senior year packed with AP courses and high marks on AP tests that would have allowed her to opt out of her freshman year in college, Garrison said.

"But to her credit, she's taking those courses again because she just doesn't feel like she got the foundation she needed, the depth that college-level courses offer," Garrison said.

ruma.kumar@baltsun.com

Copyright © 2007, The Baltimore Sun

THIS is interesting....

2006-12-21T08:18:00.000-05:00

The leadership at NEA takes a stand AGAINST freedom of speech...

REG WEAVER, leader of the NEA, is sounding a lot like the oppressive and controling voice that teachers are coming together to resist.

Read more from the comments on the petition. Teachers are just plain sick of the inferior quality of a standardized plan. Our teachers want to teach. And our students want to learn.

Parents are beginning to see the reality behind the labels and rhetoric of NCLB.

What Reg doesn't seem to get is that you can't "teach" with your hands shackled and your mouth taped closed.

What on earth is he thinking?

If the leadership at the NEA had any intention of representing the teachers, they would solicit, NOT CENSOR, their voices.

Reg Weaver should go back to school.

Reg Weaver’s Memo and Educator Roundtable’s Response

The Memo

From: Anderson, Melinda [NEA] [mailto:MAnderson@nea.org]
Sent: Wed 12/13/2006 12:37 PM
To: State-Presidents [AFF]; State-Executive-Directors [AFF]
Cc: State-GR-Directors [AFF]; State_Affiliate_Comm_Liaison; VanRoekel, Dennis [NEA]; Eskelsen, Lily [NEA]; NCUEA President [NEA]; NCHE President [NEA]; NCESP President [NEA]; Daniels, Anthony [NEA]; NEAR President [NEA]; Executive Staff [NEA]; FieldOps [NEA]; GR.Allstaff [NEA]; PR.AllStaff; Billirakis, Mike [NEA]; Cebulski, Mark [NEA]; Crowder, Carolyn [NEA]; Marks, Michael [NEA]; Pringle, Becky [NEA]; Smith, Marsha [NEA]

Subject: Message from Reg Weaver & John Wilson: NEA *Does Not* Endorse NCLB Petition

Memorandum

TO:
State Affiliate Presidents
State Affiliate Executive Directors

FROM:
Reg Weaver
John Wilson

RE:
Beware: NEA Does Not Endorse Online NCLB Petition

We have important information to share about a group of education advocates/activists calling themselves the "Educator Roundtable." (www.educatorroundtable.org ) This new organization has posted online a new anti-NCLB petition -- A Petition Calling for the Dismantling of the No Child Left Behind Act. The group has just issued a press release (see text below) to officially launch its effort to obtain signatures for the petition.

Information about the petition and calls for signing it have been circulating on many email lists. Affiliates, NEA staff, and others are asking questions about the petition and whether or not NEA endorses it.

The short answer? Absolutely not.

While the initiators of the petition are well-meaning and share many of the same concerns we have with NCLB, the petition does not represent our views. It calls for the dismantling of NCLB and does not propose any positive changes or alternatives.

Please get the word out in your state that:

• Some of the petition's initiators have been critical of NEA and our efforts around NCLB.

• The petition is not consistent with NEA's Positive Agenda for ESEA or our messaging (see www.nea.org/esea for details).

• We would not want NEA affiliates to sign the petition or promote it. Instead direct our members and local affiliates to http://www.nea.org/lac/esea/index.html so they can email members of Congress about our Positive Agenda.

Have questions or need more information? Contact Joel Packer, Director, Education Policy and Practice Department, (202) 822-7329.

Thanks for all you continue to do to ensure great public schools for every child!

cc: State Affiliate Government Relations Directors
State Affiliate Public Relations Directors

Dennis Van Roekel
Lily Eskelsen
NEA Executive Committee
NEA Board of Directors

NCUEA President

NCHE President

NCESP President
Chair, NEA Student Program
NEA-R President

NEA Executive Staff
State ESEA Contacts

NEA Field Operations
NEA-GR Staff
NEA-PR Staff

The Response:

An Open Letter to the Rank and File Members of the National Education Association

Dear Fellow Educators,

On November 21, 2006 the Educator Roundtable launched an online petition drive to repeal the 2002 reauthorization of ESEA, the so called No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The response to the petition has been exceptional; in less than 30 days more than 20,000 signatures have been collected, all via the Internet without media support.

Unfortunately, the national leadership of the NEA has come out against our efforts to repeal this disastrous legislation, legislation that diminishes the professionalism of teachers, cedes local control of classrooms to federal and corporate manipulation, and, most distressingly, subjects our children to an endless regimen of high-stakes tests that provide little, if any, benefit to their lives.

Aside from being an ineffective way to educate children, the new educational culture of NCLB is patently destructive. Our children, in lieu of being prepared for contributive citizenship in our democracy, or even being prepared for the world of work, are being reduced to nothing more than passers of minimum competency tests. Your teaching is being judged only on whether you can bring your lowest performing students to meet the lowest of expectations on simplistic reading and mathematics tests, at the expense of all else -- including your best and brightest. For what purpose then does public schooling exist? Do we school to help all children develop into critical, reflective, engaged participants of their communities, or do we school to try to meet the expectations of ill-informed legislators and lobbyists who clearly have no interest in your children?

Considering the dire consequences unfolding for public educators, students, their families, and the communities housing them, one would think that the NEA would be the foremost voice of opposition to NCLB. Instead of demanding that America's classrooms be free from corporate intrusion, the NEA's leadership offers a watered-down approach seeking only to mitigate a few of the law's more egregious effects.

For the past four years the NEA leadership has failed to see the proverbial forest for the trees and, in so doing, has failed the very teachers it purports to represent. Now, when concerned educators and their supporters organize themselves to oppose reauthorization of the law, we are denied out of hand by the leaders of an organization that should be our greatest ally. Sadly, we have arrived at a time when the leadership that once protected our interests is willing to dismiss them in order to protect its own.

In contrast to their policy, the members and supporters of the Educator Roundtable, now 20,000 strong, are acting in the original spirit of unionism, organizing many small voices into a meaningful wave of self-advocacy. The Educator Roundtable asks teachers and their supporters to speak openly about the impact of the No Child Left Behind Act. We encourage everyone with a stake in public education—and that is everyone—to begin “a ferocious national debate that doesn’t quit” about what we want for public education and what we want for our children and our future.

In order to allow this broad debate to carry forward towards real education reform, we seek to end the current format of ESEA. We do not want to simply and stubbornly oppose the law without proposing “any positive changes or alternatives,” as the NEA leadership accuses us, but we must establish an environment where open debate is possible—an environment free of NCLB—to move beyond the original ESEA to the betterment of our children rather than the destruction of public education. The key to this effort is, of course, openness, amongst ourselves, with the public, and with the millions of disenfranchised educators both within and without the NEA.

While it appears that openness is not the policy of the NEA leadership at present, we hold faith that the rank and file members of the NEA are able to think for themselves, and we encourage them to read our public statements and to sign our petition. It might comfort them to know that many union members are sitting at our roundtable; several have been paying dues since the late 1960s. We hope you recognize that when leaders make mistakes, their supporters must make tough decisions, holding leadership accountable for the paths they choose.

It would be a different country if more Americans learned to do so.

The NEA has chosen to initiate a national campaign to discredit our organization, urging their members not to sign the petition. We believe that teachers, union members or not, are tired of being told what to do, when to do it, and how it is best done. If you share our belief, we urge you to join us by signing the petition calling for and end to NCLB.

The Educator Roundtable is an organization made up of teachers, parents, students, and educators with a shared vision for our public schools that preserves the ideals of vibrant and meaningful teaching and learning. We join the thousands of teachers who find it impossible to stay silent in the face of the destructive path of NCLB, and we will not be deterred by the leadership of an organization that ignores the voices of its own members.

Please direct all inquiries to Dr. Philip Kovacs, Director of the Educator Roundtable, at www.educatorroundtable.org.

A Petition Calling For the Dismantling of the No Child Left Behind Act

2006-11-28T17:55:00.000-05:00

Here it is...it is our time to speak.

SIGN IT, SIGN IT, SIGN IT...

To: U.S. Congress

We, the educators, parents, and concerned citizens whose names appear below, reject the misnamed No Child Left Behind Act and call for legislators to vote against its reauthorization. We do so not because we resist accountability, but because the law's simplistic approach to education reform wastes student potential, undermines public education, and threatens the future of our democracy.

Below, briefly stated, are some of the reasons we consider the law too destructive to salvage. In its place we call for formal, state-level dialogues led by working educators rather than by politicians, ideology-bound "think tank" members, or leaders of business and industry who have little or no direct experience in the field of education.

THE NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT:

1. Misdiagnoses the causes of poor educational development, blaming teachers and students for problems over which they have no control.

2. Assumes that competition is the primary motivator of human behavior and that market forces can cure all educational ills.

3. Mandates data driven instruction based on gamesmanship to undermine public confidence in our schools.

4. Uses pseudo science and media manipulation to justify pro-corporate policies and programs, including diverting taxes away from communities and into corporate coffers.

5. Ignores the proven inadequacies, inefficiencies, and problems associated with centralized, "top-down" control.

6. Places control of what is taught in corporate hands many times removed from students, teachers, parents, local school boards, and communities.

7. Requires the use of materials and procedures more likely to produce a passive, compliant workforce than creative, resilient, inquiring, critical, compassionate, engaged members of our democracy.

8. Reflects and perpetuates massive distrust of the skill and professionalism of educators.

9. Allows life-changing, institution-shaping decisions to hinge on single measures of performance.

10. Emphasizes minimum content standards rather than maximum development of human potential.

11. Neglects the teaching of higher order thinking skills which cannot be evaluated by machines.

12. Applies standards to discrete subjects rather than to larger goals such as insightful children, vibrant communities, and a healthy democracy.

13. Forces schools to adhere to a testing regime, with no provision for innovating, adapting to social change, encouraging creativity, or respecting student and community individuality, nuance, and difference.

14. Drives art, music, foreign language, career and technical education, physical education, geography, history, civics and other non-tested subjects out of the curriculum, especially in low-income neighborhoods.

15. Produces multiple, unintended consequences for students, teachers, and communities, including undermining neighborhood schools and blurring the line between church and state.

16. Rates and ranks public schools using procedures that will gradually label them all "failures," so when they fail to make Adequate Yearly Progress, as all schools eventually will, they can be “saved” by vouchers, charters, or privatization.

While any one of these issues is serious enough to warrant discarding No Child Left Behind, the law suffers from all of them. The number of signatures on this petition should be a clear indicator to state and national policy makers that it is time to move beyond this harmful, highly restrictive law.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

more thoughts on testing...

2006-10-20T12:17:00.000-04:00

Here is an excellent essay and reference on testing issues, also posted on Susan Ohanian's wonderful website at: www.susanohanian.org

Ohanian Comment: I've sat in on classes at Dan Drmacich's school, and I've talked to parents and students. It's a school that nurture's students and teaches them well.

Comments from Annie:

This thoughtful review of the NY Regents test and supporting education process pertains to every state in compliance with NCLB policy.

Simply substitute your state’s name for “Regent” and the following list (excerpts from the essay by Dan Drmacich, principal, School Without Walls in the Rochester School; Standardized tests can send students who fail into tailspin) provides a perfect data sheet for advocacy against NCLB reauthorization.

From the essay:

The purpose of testing should be to help students grow academically, not to coerce higher test performances through public scrutiny and humiliation.

Volumes of research prove that subjective teacher assessment is a much more accurate predictor of student success than any single standardized test score.

The goal of having all students score above average on any standardized test is impossible.

Ironically, the very tests used by our state to measure student results prevent equality of performance.

Standardized test scores do not give the public an accurate picture of how well schools are preparing students as citizens and leaders.

The emphasis on high-stakes standardized testing is creating a culture of failure among many students, especially in urban areas.

Students who are poor, who are from English-as-a-second-language families, who have special education needs, who desire to have a vocational education or who have unique interests or learning styles, have suffered under the one-size-fits-all Regents education process. Even those students who do well on Regents tests suffer because they are often denied the opportunities to focus their studies on areas of personal interest, citizenship and other lifelong-learning skills.

Standardized tests can send students who fail into tailspin

by Dan Drmacich

The drumbeat of our state Regents testing policy and our federal No Child Left Behind Act echoed loud and clear in the Democrat and Chronicle's Sept. 22 and Oct. 12 stories on test results. Reading between the lines of the scoring data and accompanying stories of how schools are focusing their curricula to help students pass Regents tests leads me to several critical conclusions:

Students in families with higher family incomes generally have higher test scores than those from poorer families. One of the many critical reports substantiating this conclusion is the 2003 Metropolitan Life Teacher Assessment that low-income children have at least 16 critical variables to deal with that negatively impact test scores. These include family dysfunction and children entering kindergarten with low vocabulary levels.

Instead of requiring the same levels of testing performance from all students and publicly ranking schools that have minimal control over testing outcomes, wouldn't it make more sense for the state and federal governments to promote individual student growth and development? This change could be partially accomplished by never making test results public. The purpose of testing should be to help students grow academically, not to coerce higher test performances through public scrutiny and humiliation.

State and federal education departments also need to rely on more authentic, valid assessments, such as the number of books students comprehend, oral presentation results and portfolio demonstrations. Volumes of research prove that subjective teacher assessment is a much more accurate predictor of student success than any single standardized test score.

The goal of having all students score above average on any standardized test is impossible. Few educators, politicians and even Board of Regents members understand that test writers construct standardized tests for the purpose of creating a wide range of scores, with roughly half the test takers scoring above average and the other half below. One might conclude that the public has been snookered into believing that education reform through testing will lead to more students scoring above average on state tests. Ironically, the very tests used by our state to measure student results prevent equality of performance.

Standardized test scores do not give the public an accurate picture of how well schools are preparing students as citizens and leaders. Many New York state citizens who were poor test-takers have had successful college careers and hold prominent professional positions. Others have gone on to successful vocational careers and demonstrated success as leaders, parents and neighbors. Research has shown that success is not so dependent on IQ as it is upon an individual's EQ (emotional quotient). Characteristics, impossible to measure on standardized tests, such as leadership, perseverance, listening skills and compassion, are far more accurate predictors of success. More than 700 colleges have recognized this research, and consequently made the Scholastic Aptitude Tests optional for student admission.

The emphasis on high-stakes standardized testing is creating a culture of failure among many students, especially in urban areas. Imagine for a moment how a student might feel with a curriculum dominated by test preparation, a routine many students find not very interesting. Also, consider how some students might feel after their low test scores are shared and compared publicly to those of higher-scoring students. Some students may be learning to feel hopeless.

Students who are poor, who are from English-as-a-second-language families, who have special education needs, who desire to have a vocational education or who have unique interests or learning styles, have suffered under the one-size-fits-all Regents education process. Even those students who do well on Regents tests suffer because they are often denied the opportunities to focus their studies on areas of personal interest, citizenship and other lifelong-learning skills.

Each person who agrees should voice his or her concerns to school district officials, state and federal representatives. Only through active citizenship can we create an education system that truly meets the needs of our students and our society.

Drmacich is principal, School Without Walls in the Rochester School District.E-mail him at Daniel.Drmacich@RCSDK12.org.

— Dan Drmacich
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
2006-10-18

it's back to school night...already?

2006-09-16T11:49:00.000-04:00

As usual, nothing has changed and everything has changed....

Walking into my daughter's new principal's opening speech, the one that sets the tone for the year to come was a little bit creepy...He was at that moment telling the audience how by putting their children into AP classes, they are cashing in on a SIXTY THOUSAND DOLLAR savings in their future college costs.

I considered going directly to him and asking for a check since nothing of the kind is true in reality for my daughter or her friends, all new freshman students this year. As a matter of fact, and with a great deal of good sense, my daughter is enrolled in several classes she could have "skipped over" but it is not like her to want to lose out on the opportunity to study subjects she feels are important in a manner that offers depth, and with a knowledgable, prepared, and enthusiastic teacher...

The teachers have changed...There is a huge influx of shiny new faces. They are bright, enthusiastic, new, young teachers. My daughter loves them. And I can see why. For that, I am grateful...but I can't help but worry how they will fare. I am selfish enough at this point to hope they at least fare the year.

My soul still aches for the teachers who surrendered; the veterans. I never seem to shake off the memory of a teacher going to a Board of Education meeting here several years ago, holding up a white flag, and quitting on the spot...it still bothers me. I miss seeing the carriers of light--the kind of teacher who boldly speaks up, even if it is provocative or controversial; they are gone now, fired.

The teachers who stick around look sort of wounded, really. It saddens me to know how reluctantly they keep their jobs to survive mortgages and raising families, keeping retirement plans intact, but how much they have given up and given over... The changes robbed them of their joy....

A few veteran teachers seem okay; they have obviously convinced themselves that working within the present oppression is yet another educational trend. They might have convinced themselves that they can work around the policies, or that it is okay to work within them. I dunno, I know my child's perception is that "adequate" is not enough. And I agree, naturally.

Our new superintendent is busy "visiting every school in the district." He already seems to have engaged his team of people who never seem to have any of the complaints crucial to me or the other parents or kids or teachers I know. He is already armed with his head-nodding, invisable to me, clan of such people in firm agreement with how great things are going and how much the policies of standardization and beefed up testing have proven "progress" in our schools.

Ugh...

I still mourn our loss of opportunity; we could have hired a superintendent who would refuse to engage in such a horrid, destructive policy. We could have done better. We were so close....

With one child out of this stressful experience and one child right in the middle of it, I search for positives. The high-schooler is remarkably insightful and hard-working. Her teachers really see and respond to her and her fine qualities. As usual, most of her time outside of school will be devoted to endless worksheets and test-prep. The little remaining time, I hope, will be spend with an eye on her sister and the wonderful experiences she is having after high school. There is still a lot to look forward to. And we will steal her away from her burden with distraction and opportunities to learn with joy and purpose...and help her to choose sleep when enough is enough late at night...

So soon it will be autumn. Time to mark the phases of our lives with the sights and sounds and smells of another season...

I stare at the pictures of them when they were little...the girls have grown from beautiful babies, into amazing children, into wonderful teens, so quickly, it now seems...and so much has changed...and so much has not.

The Not Welcome Mat On Our School Doorstep

2006-06-26T17:14:00.000-04:00

In the few days since I wrote this essay, another school board member has announced his intentions to run for a political office. I expect that in the future, other board members intend to cash in on their experience and resulting name recognition and, perhaps, favors owed, and also enter the political arena.

None of this is surprising, but all of this is disheartening. There is a certain flair and stained dimension to the decisions made by a public representative when they are tied to a political goal.

In our case, the decisions to move ahead toward expansion of IB and AP programs, supported by elite parents who believe the programs are the key to a better experience for their public school children, is an example of this. This decision is not informed. It lacks the perspective of research that questions the academic value of these programs.

In a frantic quest to seek out popularity, and possible future votes, our school board ignores the less vocal, less prominent citizen and their input. Perhaps a less powerful potential lobby would rather see these portions of our budget go toward improvement of our school infrastructure. Perhaps we would like to see money directed toward teachers, toward smaller classrooms, toward lessening the financial burden of parents to fund supplies and books and fieldtrips. Maybe we want the funds directed toward the development of quality learning choices that are not owned and monopolized by the College Board or McGraw Hill or Houghton Mifflin.

Something to ponder, if you are at all inclined, is this--no matter who you are--we are all being hurt by this merger of politics, business, and education, and so are the children, their teachers, our schools. And it will be a much easier trip back up the mountain now than if we allow them to take us all the way down....

Let's say "no" together. Think about it....

The Not Welcome Mat On Our School Doorstep

I have to step outside of my usual line of comments occasionally and write from the mind of my very own spirit. I am but one little voice in a small community on the eastern seaboard. This is my heritage, this is my soul; this is my place on this earth. I will tell you why I preface this essay this way. It is because I do not want you to think that I speak from any where else but my heart, which is composed, primarily, of the salt and sand and marsh and lush green farms and heron and crustaceans which decorate my life of rich color and beautiful earth banking up against the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.

Although our immediate community is small and surrounded by a mostly rural but also growing suburban sprawl, our towns are small, including our downtown, which happens to be the capital of the state. Our county is large and it is as diverse as the land that it covers. We have a population that grew out of the city shipyards just outside of Baltimore city and we spread all the way toward the influence of Washington, DC, our county line drawn maybe 20 miles at most from its heartbeat. And in between, and to the east, our little communities and towns curl all through the coastal regions of the bay and our rivers. In the southern part, which is where I live, the towns grew up around the waterways and bay, lots of farming, lots of boatyards, lots of water-based industry. And by industry, I mean salty fishermen and crabbers and oystermen, who spend their lives out on the water, season after season, providing us with the food that the ever abundant bay has delivered to our tables for generations.

The humorous description of our little downtown is this: Annapolis is a drinking town with a sailing problem. The handmade sign at the foot of the bridge over our very own South River in my little town says: “A Riva Derci.” That’s because we live in a place called Riva.

I had to bring you here to tell you my thoughts.

Our little appointed school board is remarkably representative of the variety of citizens who have found their homes here in this region. We have the representative from the very urban feel of the part of our county closest to Baltimore and the representative from the very rural feeling, southern parts of our county. And we have representatives from the many flavors of our regions in between them.

I have not found a “friend” in my community representatives on our school board. Why is that? I don’t know if I can explain why that is, and this is why, perhaps, I am moved to write about it. I think that there is a divide that is created, for one thing, by the process of their appointment by the governor. There is a process of community input and candidate selection but honestly, it seems to me to mimic an election. With this process, many voices are left out, candidates too. Because, here, it is likely that although you might be part of a community association, or civic group, or church, you may, like me, not feel exactly welcomed by the type of member the group attracts. Does that make sense to you?

I guess what I am saying is that it feels, from the start of this process, that the average Joe or Annie is excluded.

The political atmosphere of the board members selection goes through a nominating convention and then finalists are presented for appointment. In our local paper, the coverage makes it clear who the candidates are by identifying their political affiliation; no, not directly, but it is clear. Although the governor is not tied to these candidates in his appointments, it is often quite clear, by popular reputation and by local information, who, based upon the political party affiliation of the current governor, he will choose.

Is this so different from your town?

And so, from the beginning, the citizen, who will help color the choices and doctrine and policies in our schools is usually not my gal or guy; they are not my representative. These are the people who will in time select our school superintendent. And I can bank, likewise, on the choice they make not feeling like my choice. So, when I visit my child’s school, or have an area of interest for discussion or debate over the policies of our community schools, I deal with an administrative staff that is governed and controlled by the leadership not of my choice or selection.

This is part, I think, of a growing apathy for the directions of our community schools. The schools do not feel like they belong to us. And the greater the involvement of the higher, more remote government and politicians, the greater the gap becomes; our schools no longer represent our ideals, our perspective, our choice or our satisfaction. We are no longer a part of the decision-making process.

Now, I read in my local paper that our school board president has decided to enter the race to become our district delegate. This, of course, is no surprise. The school board, as an entity that has evolved in the political arena as a stepping stone into local politics, is not a new occurrence. What is new to me, though, is the announcement that he is running on the Democratic ticket. Why I should be surprised, is unsettling to me. There are several reasons. He was appointed several years ago by our Republican governor, he is recognizably influenced, heavily, by our business community, and he has followed through with unquestioning devotion to the policies of NCLB.

Traditionally, in our region, there has long been a Democratic stronghold. That, of course has changed as we now have a Republican governor. But, I have to tell you that all the boundaries that I thought I knew have blurred in perhaps a transition of culture and folk life that once defined not just our little place but lots of other regions and locales across our nation. Now, I can’t recognize the politicians through the forest of the politics. And now, I can’t tell who is competent to make decisions in our schools or who is there to campaign for a future career in politics. And now, I can’t feel comfortable that anything that happens in our schools is not in part being driven by a political campaign or goal or power.

So, that is how it feels in little Riva these days. My children go to schools that are stages on which political theater is showcased. Our meetings are political soap boxes. Our policies are political doctrine. Our children are only commodities, and their performance is simply another political chip to bargain with.

This is not Lake Woebegone, not at all. This is small-town America high-jacked by a powerful political agenda. And, even if you pay attention, and I promise you that I do, whatever you thought you knew may very much turn inside out before you realize it. It happened here. It will happen there too.

I will not say that I have lost the will or the spirit or the intention to fight this destructive force on our schools and on our sacred, special place on this earth where life should be brimming in opportunity, steeped in history and open to the future; I have not yet lost hope. But I do know, that without the voices of my neighbors, without the voices of our teachers, without the courage and drive to recapture a place where we all should feel comfortable and included, in our schools, we will not , perhaps, have this chance for long.

...here we go again

2006-06-12T11:26:00.001-04:00

With only days left at her interim post, our temporary superintendent has made a decision to facilitate a massive reorganization. The timing seems suspicious since our newly chosen superintendent starts on July 1st...

Specific to our high school, our principal, Dr. James Hamilton has been at this position for 19 years. To include him in this upheaval seems cruel and uncalled for in light of the probability that this coming year would, perhaps, by his own choice and schedule be his last before retirement.

But in a temporary tenure marked by her preference toward the appearance of "status quo" and following press reports that her resigning predecessor was the master of too much change, too fast, Dr. Mann has announced this change, effective in only 3 more days...

http://www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/2006/06_08-26/TOP

Mann shakes up leadership at county's high schools

RYAN BAGWELL, Staff Writer

June 8,2006

Interim county schools Superintendent Nancy M. Mann transferred scores of principals yesterday in one of the largest personnel shake-ups the system has seen in years. Sixty administrators were either transferred or promoted by the school board and Mrs. Mann, including half the principals of the county's 12 high schools.

Robert Ferguson, president of the union that represents county principals, said the moves seem like good matches.

"Change just to make change isn't good, but change to make an improvement is," said Mr. Ferguson, a Chesapeake High School assistant principal who will move to Old Mill High.

Mrs. Mann's directive swapped Severna Park Principal William Myers with South River's James Hamilton, two longtime administrators who are highly regarded in the school system.

School board President Konrad M. Wayson said Mr. Myers' transfer gave some board members "heartburn." But school officials said it was an amicable move.

"I'm sorry to see him go in Severna Park, but I'm sure the folks at South River will be happy to see him," school board member Michael Leahy said.

In another swap, Northeast High Principal George Kispert will lead Old Mill High next year, and Kathy Kubic,Old Mill's Principal, will head to Northeast.

Mrs. Mann said Old Mill's growing diversity and recent problems - including a gun brought to the school in April - prompted her to swap Mr. Kispert's longtime experience for Ms. Kubic's two years at Old Mill.

"I would say I have grown quite fond of the Old Mill High School community," Ms. Kubic said. "We were moving in the right direction, but I look forward to Northeast High."

North County High Principal Patricia Plitt will take over for Chesapeake High Principal Harry Calender, who is retiring. And Frank Drazan, an assistant principal at Broadneck High, will replace Ms. Plitt as principal of the struggling school in Glen Burnie.

"There are a lot of challenges, but there are a lot of real positives, and that's what I'm hoping to do, is to bring people to work toward those challenges," he said.

Mr. Drazan is a 30-year veteran educator who has been at Broadneck for the past five years. He said yesterday he'll try to raise parent involvement when he starts at the school next week.

Ms. Plitt, who taught for years at Chesapeake High and sent her own kids to the school, had wanted to return there for some time, Mrs. Mann said.

"We make these changes yearly," said Mrs. Mann. "It's nothing new."

Lisa Leitholf, Annapolis Elementary's principal, will lead Folger McKinsey Elementary in Severna Park. The school was named a national Blue Ribbon School of excellence last year.

Alison Lee will leave Folger McKinsey to head Broadneck Elementary. And Susan Myers, an assistant principal at Brooklyn Park's Park Elementary will take the reigns of Annapolis Elementary.

All of the administrative personnel appointments will officially take effect June 15, the day after the last day for teachers.

Mrs. Mann will step down at the end of this month to make way for incoming superintendent Kevin M. Maxwell, a community superintendent with Montgomery County schools. He'll start a four-year contract July 1.

The transfers end a relatively stable time for principals in Anne Arundel schools that administrators enjoyed under former superintendent Eric J. Smith's tenure.

Under Dr. Smith, 43 principals were shuffled around at this time last year, 16 were handed new jobs in 2004 and 29 were moved around in 2003.

School board members were cautiously supportive of yesterday's moves.

"I'm relying on her to know what's best for the system," school board President Konrad M. Wayson said. "Where she sees deficiencies in some areas, she's moving strong candidates in there."

the finalists have been chosen...

2006-04-28T17:36:00.000-04:00

here they are...the 3 finalists for our next superintendent...

many thanks to our effective school board for your committment to the community. once again, you are right, this is very much a trio who represents our ideals.

...a little something to consider

2006-04-21T13:31:00.000-04:00

A little known factoid: Margaret Adams Spellings grew up in a very unusual family. Said to have come by her slightly unearthly appearance naturally, or super-naturally, it is rumoured that she often was the object of relentless teasing by her brother over her strong family resemblance to Lerch, the butler.

Commenting on her childhood personality and perhaps the hallmark of her adult demeanor, her brother, Pugsley said that she "was a bit sickly, very bossy, and never smiled."

this is a very sad time for our county....

2006-04-21T13:15:00.000-04:00

Here's the latest on our school board's selection of candidates for the next superintendent. I don't have the heart to deliver more of my opinion just yet.

My comments: The first candidate (Schiller) seems to have some history of impropriety and a strong affiliation with a conservative interest group. I am concerned that the schools and our next superintendent not be a theater of political bandstanding. The other two candidates (Bedden and Maxwell) have no real experience with a county school district of this size nor comparable leadership responsibility. I am also concerned that several of these candidates abandoned their contracts or positions prematurely. Bedden, in particular, has chosen to seek this position very early in a committment and contract with his current employer. And Maxwell, according to my research, is a part of a consortium that has committed to programs due to begin or expand this coming fall. Of course, I am concerned about any of these candidate's ability to commit to a contract here. Although, I admit to my own sense of enormous dissappointment over the lack of community-based input reflected in this boards choices overall, I see, for instance, no candidate who distinguishes himself by voicing any awareness of the destructive forces of NCLB policy on the professional volition of teachers.

Three finalists chosen for Arundel schools superintendent

Former interim head of Baltimore schools among those up for job; candidates to be interviewed in county next week

By Anica Butler
sun reporter
April 20, 2006

The three finalists for Anne Arundel County schools superintendent, announced yesterday, include a former interim CEO of Baltimore schools whose last two leadership posts ended in controversy; the chief of a 5,500-student school district in Pennsylvania; and a midlevel Montgomery County administrator.
From a field of 20 applicants, the school board selected Robert E. Schiller, retired state schools superintendent of Illinois; Dana Bedden, superintendent of William Penn District, Pa.; and Kevin Maxwell, community superintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools. Each will spend a day in the county next week, meeting with selected parents and community members and interviewing with the board.

"I'm excited to have them coming in town and going through the public forums," said Konrad Wayson, president of the board of education.

The board hired the Maryland Association of Boards of Education for $27,000 to conduct a search to replace Eric J. Smith, who abruptly departed in November. Nancy M. Mann is serving as interim superintendent of the 74,000-student system until her contract ends in July.

Wayson said the fact that only one candidate has experience leading a large school district is not an issue.

"The president was never president before he was elected," Wayson said.

The candidate with the longest resume is Schiller, 59. During a state takeover, he was brought in as interim chief executive of Baltimore schools from 1997 to 1998 to stabilize and reorganize them.

Before then, Schiller was a deputy superintendent in Delaware and the state superintendent in Michigan. More recently, he has been a superintendent in New Jersey and Louisiana and, most recently, was state superintendent in Illinois before resigning in 2004. That year, he was among the finalists for the top job in Washington, D.C.

According to news reports, Schiller left his Illinois post amid a state board shake-up orchestrated by Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich.

Wayson said the situation did not concern him, because it was political.

Schiller came to Illinois from the Caddo Parish School System in 2002. According to reports by the Associated Press, a 2003 Louisiana legislative audit found that Schiller orchestrated a land deal during his tenure that cost $130,000 more than it was worth, and he was awarded nearly $30,000 in "improper" payments when he resigned.
But the attorney for the school board in Caddo said yesterday that the school board never agreed with the findings of the audit.

Schiller could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Bedden has been superintendent in Lansdowne, Pa., since 2004. Twenty-one percent of the school system's students are in special education, and 60 percent are classified as low income, according to its Web site. William Penn District has one high school, two junior high schools and eight elementary schools.

Bedden, 39, points to his experience as a principal in Washington, D.C., and Fairfax, Va., and as an assistant superintendent in Philadelphia as preparation to take over Anne Arundel's system.

"I think it's big enough to have some significant impact in the lives of children but not behemoth so you can't get your hands around it," Bedden said.

Bedden said that if hired, he would work to maintain the performance of schools and students who are succeeding and to close the gap between them and students who are not doing as well.

The third finalist, Maxwell, 54, received his doctorate from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and is a community superintendent in Montgomery County, overseeing 39 schools and about 27,000 students.

Before that, Maxwell was a principal in Montgomery County and a chief educational administrator and a principal in Prince George's County.

"I believe it's a wonderful opportunity, and I've been well-prepared for that position," he said of the Anne Arundel job.

Though he has never held the top job in a school system, he said that he has been in leadership roles for most of his 28-year career, and that the cluster of schools he oversees in Montgomery County is larger than many school systems.

Two of his daughters are graduates of Arundel High School, adding to his familiarity with Anne Arundel.

"The challenges are a lot similar to what most school systems face," Maxwell said. "There's a lot of work that needs to be done with closing the achievement gap."

anica.butler@baltsun.com

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Link to the article: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/education/bal-md.ar.search20apr20,0,3119501.story?coll=bal-education-k12

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an open letter to teachers....

2006-04-10T13:50:00.000-04:00

(this was submitted to the Baltimore Sun as an OP/ED piece 3-31-06)

Every single teacher who still values their profession must act now to stop the systematic destruction of our public school system. Your strength is in your knowledge and passion, and in the sheer numbers of you. You alone understand the defeat of policy that ties your hands and then tells you to perform. The testing model, as you know, does not substitute for teaching, does not address the academic needs of any community. You have stoically conformed to the restrictive policies of what you believed was yet another trend, and many of you believed that this too would pass. Now you realize the magnitude and intent of this coercive trend. This is not going to pass; not without your help.

Organize now.

The NEA has itemized the following serious shortcomings of the NCLB law:

It imposes invalid one-size-fits-all measures on students, failing to recognize that different children learn in different ways and with different timelines.

Its vision of accountability focuses more on punishing children and schools than on giving them the support they need to improve.

It favors privatization, rather than teacher-led, family-oriented solutions.

As educators you know that the measurement of student achievement should not be based solely on the results of standardized tests. In counties where living conditions are better, students generally enter the educational system with higher skill levels. Consequently they test better.

You are told to teach lower-performing students to pass tests of basic skills, and you know what has been lost in the process of compliance with these policies. What has been lost is the opportunity to learn meaningful important lessons; lost to a standard that in the end will be the demise of our public schools.

In neighboring counties, there is greater flexibility in a number of statistical manipulations to "adjust" for “adequate yearly progress” (AYP). In Baltimore City, with large numbers of disadvantaged students, schools are labeled "failing" for not meeting statewide proficiency targets even if their students are making dramatic progress. The rhetoric of equal opportunity has been corrupted to benefit of communities which would not accept the kind of dramatic measures being considered in Baltimore City.

As teachers, you understand that by forcing lower-performing students to focus on "basic skills," you are perpetuating the poverty of knowledge that already exists. You are told to participate in the oppression of the already disadvantaged, furthering their alienation from society, and finally you are told to accept the manipulations of corporate opportunists who will finish the job. Who will stand up for these students and their community? You, as their teachers, know that they are the least prepared to fight the oppressive powers of their own demise.

Unfortunately, NCLB has left you no time to educate low-income students about the concepts of economic and political repression. The students hardly have the skills to ponder their own demise. They and you are the victims of this atrocity and only you have the ability to speak out about it.

Anne E. Levin Garrison

Advocate for the survival of our public schools.

how the current accountability method is failing our ailing urban schools....

2006-04-04T09:46:00.000-04:00

Yes, our urban schools are in trouble. That is no surprize to anyone. But, as the student in this article reports about the horrors of behaviors and incidents faced by students in the urban school setting, the politicians still want to talk about test scores....Look at what the students said-- when adults showed enough compassion and interest to simply re-paint the decaying schools, the children sensed that they "mattered" to somebody.

Read it again...'Well, they really do care about us,'" said Brandi, who failed seventh grade last year but has made up enough work to move on to high school in the fall.

And again--Adrienne Hall, the student government president at Douglass, asked at a news conference outside city school headquarters last week why the state doesn't give the school the money it needs to, among other things, hire more teachers.

"We have 40 students in one class," she said.

It is time to do something. But, time to do something tangible and lasting; it is time to stop treating urban kids like cattle, attend to their physical environment, give them the resources they need....It is due time for the children in Baltimore City and it is, thankfully, time to recognize the underlying flaw of a policy that pretends to help the situations it hurts and leaves the farthest behind.

More tests, more poverty of curriculum, more lackluster, morale-robbing test-prep. won't make a difference in the lives or education of these students. What will make a difference is the dedication of adults who rehumanize the schools for these kids.

These are children...These are children...These are our children too....

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/education/bal-te.md.schools03apr03,0,4438329.story?coll=bal-education-top
From the Baltimore Sun

Few deny schools need change
11 in city targeted for takeover have low test scores

By Sara Neufeld
Sun reporter

April 3, 2006

La'Chelle Alston, 14, stood before the Baltimore school board in late February and asked for help at her school, Chinquapin Middle.

"During this present school year," the eighth-grader said, "there have been numerous incidents occurring involved in all three grade levels. For example, food fights, fistfights, setting fires, pulling the fire alarm, smoking in the hallways and stairwells, group fights, robberies and parents attacking teachers, just to name a few."

Chinquapin is one of 11 Baltimore schools with failing test scores that are being targeted by the State Board of Education for an outside takeover. Mayor Martin O'Malley says the 10,000 students at those schools are being used as "political pawns" and has vowed to do whatever is necessary to prevent the takeovers. In Annapolis, lawmakers rushed through legislation to stop the action.

Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. supports the state board, insisting the takeovers are not politically motivated and are "about a system that continues to receive more dollars and becomes more dysfunctional."

Despite all the political sparring, one thing is clear: Many Baltimore schools are in chaos. And though the public is divided over how to fix the schools and who should fix them, there's little doubt that a major fix is needed.

La'Chelle told the school board about Chinquapin administrators not evacuating during fires. She told of the elimination of many extracurricular activities and said that as a result, "all of the energy is being used in negative ways. The pupils are being influenced by gangs, and are selling drugs and engaging in other violent activities."

Of the seven middle schools targeted by the state, the best pass rate on last year's eighth-grade state math test was at William H. Lemmel, where 25 percent of pupils demonstrated proficiency. Of the four high schools, Patterson had the highest pass rate on last year's state algebra test, which students will soon need to pass to get a high school diploma. That pass rate was 10 percent.

"The facts are the facts," said education activist Tyrone Powers. "The schools' test scores are abysmal. ... Clearly, these children are not being prepared for any kind of future."

Powers said he is troubled by the high graduation rates at some schools despite low academic performance, indicating that "we may be graduating students who aren't prepared." For example, Northwestern High had a 2005 graduation rate of 78 percent, despite an 8.8 percent pass rate on the state algebra exam.

Unless she is stopped by legislative or judicial action, state Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick is planning to take control of four high schools - Patterson, Northwestern, Frederick Douglass and Southwestern No. 412 - and contract with companies or nonprofits to run them. She is leaving seven middle schools under the jurisdiction of the city school system but requiring that the system contract out to manage them. All 11 schools have been on a state watch list for low test scores since at least 1997.

The city schools' chief executive, Bonnie S. Copeland, said she's not trying to excuse the schools' weak performance but that her administration has been planning significant changes in all 11 schools. Plans are under way, she said, to break up Patterson, Northwestern and Douglass into smaller, more personalized environments. Southwestern No. 412 is slated to close in 2009. All seven middle schools got new principals at the start of this school year, she said.

At three of the schools, however, the new principals came from other failing city middle schools. Last year's Chinquapin principal went to Dr. Roland N. Patterson Sr. Academy. The Roland Patterson principal went to Diggs-Johnson Middle. The Pimlico Middle principal went to Chinquapin. All schools involved in the shuffle - except Pimlico, where test scores last year were equally low - are on the takeover list.

"They don't have quality principals at the middle schools, so they just shuffle them around," said James Williams, president of the PTO at Roland Patterson, which is also scheduled to be closed, either this summer or in 2008.

Copeland acknowledged that the system has trouble attracting principals, as well as teachers, to work in middle schools, a problem faced by school systems around the country. She said it is easier to recruit for elementary and high schools, but the system is hoping that its partnership with New Leaders for New Schools will result in more principals for middle schools. The national nonprofit has set out to train 40 principals for all types of Baltimore schools over three years.

"I have to tell you," Copeland said, "we are struggling to identify people who want to be middle school principals."

The principals of Chinquapin, Roland Patterson and Diggs-Johnson did not return calls Friday.

Student behavior at two of the seven middle schools does appear to have improved under new leadership, though it is not clear whether that will translate into higher test scores. Staff, parents and pupils at Calverton and Hamilton middle schools say the environment is far more orderly than it was a year ago.

Calverton eighth-grader Brandi Colbert, 14, said the fix was simple: New adults at the school showed pupils that they care. In addition, money was spent to improve the physical plant.

"Since there are new things happening at the school - there's a new paint job and everything - we're like, 'Well, they really do care about us,'" said Brandi, who failed seventh grade last year but has made up enough work to move on to high school in the fall. Last year, she said, there were so many fights that "people were pretty much getting hurt every day."

Students and staff from many of the 11 schools came together last week to show their support for keeping local control. At the same time, they note concerns, including high teacher absenteeism and turnover, and large classes.

Adrienne Hall, the student government president at Douglass, asked at a news conference outside city school headquarters last week why the state doesn't give the school the money it needs to, among other things, hire more teachers.

"We have 40 students in one class," she said.

Douglass was placed at the center of a political firestorm in February when Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele visited its West Baltimore campus and said control of the school should be turned over to Coppin State University - a plan Grasmick says is viable.

During Steele's visit to Douglass, students told him they have no Advanced Placement courses. They talked about inadequate science labs and a class with one book for every four students. Principal Isabelle Grant said scores on the state's standardized tests were low last year in part because there were vacancies all year for an English teacher and a math teacher.

At Thurgood Marshall Middle, another of the 11 schools, PTA President Kenya Lee said the school system is constantly sending students expelled from other schools there, thwarting attempts to quell violence. Thurgood Marshall is one of six city schools designated "persistently dangerous" by the state last year because of its high suspension rate for fighting and other offenses.

Lee fears the violence will worsen when Dr. Samuel L. Banks High School moves into Thurgood Marshall's campus, which it shares with Thurgood Marshall High. She said school system officials ignored a gang conflict between Banks and Thurgood Marshall students.

"Some of the students said to me, 'We're going to be fighting every day,'" she said.

Of the state intervention, Lee said: "I really don't care for the strategy. I don't care for the politics of it, but I think it's long overdue. I don't see how the city was allowed nine years to keep on just putting our kids through the same cycle of inequality. ... They've had years and years and years to do something, and they just have not."

Michael Hamilton, president of the Baltimore Council of PTAs, said he hopes parents will start fighting to keep politics out of education, because "our children will be the ones who take the brunt of this battle."

But Powers said he is pleased the schools are getting so much attention.

"At least now," he said, "someone will have to do something."

sara.neufeld@baltsun.com

more on this story....

2006-04-04T09:42:00.000-04:00

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/education/bal-te.md.grasmick02apr02,0,7348368.story?coll=bal-education-k12
From the Baltimore Sun

Schoolyard brawl

Grasmick mingles politics, accountability

City and state leaders stand on opposing sides of the debate over how to improve public education in Baltimore

By Liz Bowie
Sun reporter

April 2, 2006

Nancy S. Grasmick took perhaps the greatest gamble of her 15-year career as Maryland's schools chief by being the first state superintendent in the nation to seek a takeover under federal law.

Critics immediately called her move political, an election-year shot designed to help her ally the governor keep his job. And within two days, she lost her first round in Annapolis when the General Assembly approved a one-year moratorium putting her bold attempt to seize control of 11 Baltimore schools on indefinite hold.

While the impetus for Grasmick's audacious stand may be politics, both her critics and supporters say, her decision is also consistent with her long-held determination to make schools more accountable.

"The superintendent has really been an activist for much of her tenure," said Marion Orr, a political science professor at Brown University and author of Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore. "This move really is not inconsistent."

However, some say Grasmick clearly has been less cooperative with and more aggressive toward Baltimore in the last couple of years, perhaps as her level of frustration with the city schools grew and she was emboldened by working under a governor and a president who embraced her philosophy.

She sees her takeover bid as something she had to do for the children.

"My belief is that for all our students, in the world they face, education is the ticket," Grasmick said.

"If we are not measuring, then we have denied students a lifelong opportunity."

In some ways, Grasmick has been headed toward this moment since she took the job.

In 1991, the state school board, then headed by Robert C. Embry Jr., was looking for a new superintendent who would change the direction of education in Maryland.

Across the nation the accountability movement was just beginning.

In Maryland, a blue-ribbon commission had issued a report that called for state-run tests that measured what children knew.

Grasmick was a Baltimore native and graduate of the city's elite Western High School. She had dedicated herself to education, beginning as a city special education teacher and moving on to high-level administrative jobs for the state and other systems.

Grasmick had the edge to get the state superintendent's job, Embry said, because she believed in the accountability movement. And Gov. William Donald Schaefer liked her.

"She was a local person. She was articulate and smart ... a woman," said Embry, who now heads the nonprofit Abell Foundation.

She was also politically adept - she has survived through three governors and many changes in the state board. The 67-year-old is now the longest-serving state superintendent in the country.

During her tenure, she launched the state tests known as the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program. The unpopular tests were tough exams given in the third, fifth and eighth grades. Individual student scores were never reported. Rather, MSPAP was designed to measure how well schools were teaching.

Each year, Grasmick would announce the results personally.

Those scores for the first time exposed the depth of the problems of Baltimore students. Some schools were miles behind their suburban counterparts, it turned out. Armed with the new data, two groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, sued the state to try to get more money for city schools.

City-state partnership
By 1997, those lawsuits were culminating in a partial state takeover of the city school system - which Grasmick helped to craft. She was part of the negotiations when Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke agreed to give up some control of his city's schools in return for more state funding.

Schmoke said recently that in his first years as mayor, he had a cool relationship with Grasmick because of her closeness to Schaefer, his predecessor. But Schmoke's respect for her grew as he got to know her better. "I came to appreciate her interest and her sincerity," he said.

Grasmick happily took on a greater role in the Baltimore system under the new city-state partnership.

She helped draw up the list of candidates for the new school board appointed jointly by the governor and the mayor. She interviewed the candidates being considered for the chief executive officer's job.

By 2000, the abysmal performance documented by Grasmick's tests allowed her and the state school board to take over three city elementary schools. The state contracted with Edison Schools to operate them.

When George W. Bush was elected, he brought the accountability movement to a national stage with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Largely because of Grasmick's efforts, Maryland was years ahead of most other states. It was used to the idea of testing, of making lists of failing schools public and of taking action to try to improve poor schools.

Turning point
The turning point in Grasmick's attitude toward the city schools, some people believe, came when the schools faced a severe financial crisis two years ago. The system was on the verge of bankruptcy.

Some in Annapolis began pointing fingers at Grasmick, who seemed angry to be blamed.

"It seems that is when her attitude changed and she became less collaborative," said Bebe Verdery, education director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Maryland.

"I think the relationship really deteriorated dramatically at the point the deficit hit the press in a big way."

Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. announced that the state would bail out the school system but was taking more control. His effort was trumped by Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, a political rival, who came through with a last-minute deal to close the financial gap.

Grasmick began to chastise the city system more and more frequently.

But something else was happening, too.

Though both Democrats, Grasmick and her husband, Louis, a lumber company magnate and developer, began to ally themselves with Ehrlich and contributed to his campaign. She flirted with the idea of becoming Ehrlich's lieutenant governor but ultimately declined.

In addition, she became more of a figure on the national education scene, serving on commissions and making trips to Washington to confer with the Bush administration's Education Department - which shares her enthusiasm for testing and accountability.

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said last week, "I am president of the Nancy Grasmick fan club."

"It seems to me she has become more aggressive in pushing school reform in the past few years," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington-based nonprofit. Jennings speculates that Grasmick may feel she might be coming to the end of her career and doesn't want to leave without having turned around the city schools.

"She was in effect half of the partnership. She is to a degree responsible for Baltimore," he said.

Grasmick and her staff portray the decision-making process that led to last week's action as apolitical.

During many meetings over several months, Grasmick and 20 to 25 staff members sat in a conference room around a large table on the eighth floor of the state department headquarters in Baltimore. They were poring over the details of the city school system's plan for improving its worst schools, trying to decide whether the plan was sufficient.

Ultimately, they decided to take control of four high schools and to require that seven middle schools be put in the hands of independent operators. Some details of the action were decided only within the past two weeks, according to Ronald Peiffer, one of Grasmick's top aides.

Actions questioned
To many across the city, the actions seemed unusually harsh.

"I think people are legitimately asking questions. It seems like a far-reaching act," said Patricia A. Foerster, president of the Maryland State Teachers Association.

Grasmick had other options that were not as extreme.

"It seems like an odd move for a superintendent to make, particularly with her political acumen," Orr said. He wonders if she might have miscalculated how swift and strong the response could be.

Embry believes that Grasmick might have accomplished what she wanted - getting outside groups to run some problem schools - without conflict if she had simply sat down with city school officials and worked out an agreement. Six small high schools are already being run by outside groups, he pointed out, and there has been a lot of support for charters in the city.

"You may say that she is taking a risk that needed to be taken," Embry said. "Or you may say that the things she wants to order could have been accomplished with negotiation."

liz.bowie@baltsun.com

the future is upon us, like a school of pirhanna....

2006-03-31T15:00:00.000-05:00

lots of interesting stuff here...some beneath the surface. in other maryland counties, secretary spellings accepted pitches for leniency plans. in one of the highest performing counties, highest in terms of AYP, the county simply reworked a few numbers and boosted special ed students up into the regular student category and BINGO, the disaggregated statistical outcome was miraculously changed. in (our) neighboring county, a committee set up to evaluate this statistical miracle decided, hmmmmmmmmm, this operation looks mighty interesting....

assuming that superintendent grasmick intends to begin her election campaign for lt. governor in md, she certainly has the beginning of a nice, fat, portfolio of support from the current administration.

but no one in the public political spotlight get's their back scratched for free-- and this time, and in deference to her newly formed warrior "fan-club" and her warrior president, madam spellings, i have to hope that the baltimore city folks are going to see that being the very first school system to be sold out, bought, and operated by corporate pirhannas is not the deal they'd prefer...the price of her campaign strategy is way too high....

the scary thing for all of us is, if we allow this to happen, even once, even this once, it will be repeated all over our nation. don't sell out the urban schools-- we will all be in the same boat when reckoning day is here...

U.S. education secretary applauds state move

By Liz Bowie
Sun reporter
March 31, 2006

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings expressed her support yesterday for the Maryland school board's decision to take over 11 failing middle and high schools in Baltimore.

"To sit idly by with the kind of data and results and chronic failure that has been demonstrated is educational malpractice," Spellings said. "Accountability is meaningless if there is no end of the line."

Spellings said she supports Maryland schools chief Nancy S. Grasmick's attempt to help the schoolchildren of the city. "She is a warrior on No Child Left Behind on behalf of the kids," Spellings said.

Grasmick is the first superintendent in the country to seek the takeover of schools under the four-year-old federal No Child Left Behind Act.

The state board voted Wednesday to approve Grasmick's plan, which calls for four large high schools to be managed by companies or nonprofits that report to the state. The city schools would be given the choice of turning seven middle schools into charters or establishing contracts for a third party to operate them.

Within hours of the vote, Spelling's department issued a statement backing the decision, but her comments yesterday indicated the degree of support for Grasmick in Washington as she battles a barrage of criticism from legislators, politicians and the community.

"I am president of the Nancy S. Grasmick fan club," Spellings said. Grasmick has worked on national commissions and makes regular trips to Washington.

In addition, Spellings, who has been in her job a little more than a year, has made several trips to Maryland schools.

She previously worked on education policy in Texas and helped draft the NCLB before replacing President Bush's first education secretary, Rod Paige of Texas.

National response to Maryland's groundbreaking action came from other camps yesterday as well. The Council of Great City Schools, a national group representing urban districts, issued a statement saying it was "skeptical" of the move.

"State takeovers and other dramatic changes in school governance have not proven to be the silver bullet," the statement said.

The council noted that Baltimore's test scores in the past few years have shown improvements in reading and math in elementary and middle schools.

liz.bowie@baltsun.com

i am going to consider this a statistical gift in favor of a decent pick

2006-03-14T14:30:00.000-05:00

18 Apply for School Superintendent Job in Anne Arundel

By Daniel de Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 14, 2006; B05

Eighteen people have applied to be superintendent of schools in Anne Arundel County, fewer than a third of the number who sought the top education job in neighboring Prince George's County this year.

The number could change, as some people may yet apply and others could withdraw, said Bea Gordon of the Maryland Association of Boards of Education, which is conducting the search. Applicant screening began at the end of last month, after several weeks of recruiting. Anne Arundel school board members will see a list of qualified applicants March 25. The new superintendent is to start in July.

The response is on the low side, compared with some recent searches in area school systems. The Prince George's search attracted 66 people to replace the departing Andre J. Hornsby. A search in Prince William County last year netted 44 applicants to succeed Edward L. Kelly. Twenty-two people applied last year for the job in St. Mary's County. The Prince George's system is larger than 75,000-student Anne Arundel; Prince William and St. Mary's are smaller.

Carl W. Smith, executive director of the state school boards group, said a superintendent search turns more on quality than quantity. The Anne Arundel pool, he said, has "18 applicants who are serious candidates for the position."

Some of the Anne Arundel school board's critics have predicted that the well-publicized disputes with the previous superintendent, Eric J. Smith, who resigned at Thanksgiving after a critical internal audit, would scare away potential candidates to replace him.

Konrad M. Wayson, school board president, said he didn't know what to make of the applicant pool: "I haven't seen names or qualifications of any of them yet."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/13/AR2006031301678.html

...what happens when a country falls for the soft bigotry of low expectations.

2006-03-13T17:49:00.000-05:00

read me...

2006-03-08T13:49:00.000-05:00

"To the extent that students succeed in real learning and teachers in teaching and parents in raising their children to be thoughtful and considerate, they succeed in spite of the education system, not because of it.

The remarkable thing about the public schools isn't that some teachers become demoralized and "burned out," or that some students drop out or do poorly, but that so many teachers and students achieve so much in the face of a system designed to fail."

--Dave Stratman

the above quote is from: YOU'LL NEVER BE GOOD ENOUGH: SCHOOLING AND SOCIAL CONTROL by Dave Stratman from New Democracy, Sept.-Oct. 1998

http://newdemocracyworld.org/control.htm

and now, from the High School Valedictorian:

(Annelise Schantz delivered this speech at a Hudson, MA. high school graduation. Governor Cellucci, a supporter of high stakes tests, was on the stage at the time as Annelise received a long standing ovation led by her fellow graduates.)

***

Umm yeah, so I'm the valedictorian. Number one. But, what separates me from number 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 50, or 120? Nothing but meaningless numbers. What really is the difference between 3.8, 2.9, and 1.5? All these randomly assigned numbers reflect nothing about the true character of an individual. They say nothing about personality. Nothing about desire or will. Nothing about values or morals. Nothing about intelligence. Nothing about creativity. Nothing about heart.

Numbers cannot and will not ever be able to tell you who a person really is. Yet in today's society we are sadly becoming more and more number oriented. Schools today are being forced to teach to the numbers. Children are no longer learning because it is interesting and fun; they are learning to pass the test so that the school will continue to be funded. New mandates across the country and in our own state incorrectly correlate test scores with the worth of teachers and schools. Not once do these new mandates take into account that schools in low income areas will never have as many books, long term students, parent volunteers, or state of the art facilities. How can anyone call these tests fair? Just as class rank and SAT scores say nothing about the true worth of a person, a child's or school's score on a test says nothing about the worth of the school or teachers.

It is disturbing enough that throughout high school, GPA and grades are pushed as the most important things, while learning, the real reason we are in school, falls by the wayside. The MCAS serve as just another set of meaningless numbers that add one more reason to focus on scores and forget learning.

The already teetering learning process, made difficult by the social dynamics of school cliques, disrupted by a constant lack of funding and misplaced values, has been further torn apart by a few meddling politicians and yuppies who were bored and felt the need to create what they call a standard. Who cares that it is completely biased against those with learning disabilities and those in ESL programs. Who cares that the test itself is frighteningly ethnocentric in its rigid definition of what we should be learning. Who cares that all these numbers and standards only help to stamp out independent thought. All that matters is that the head honchos want some numbers that they can spew to the public to prove that they are so helpful to today's school children. Numbers, useless meaningless numbers. I doubt that a single one of these politicians has ever stopped to consider that we are not numbers. We are individuals. How dare they restrict us once more into useless categories of failing, proficient, advanced. Judging us by our competency on a biased test is perhaps the biggest injustice that the state could ever inflict upon us.

Useless information about the double helix shape of DNA or the square root of negative one will not help anyone to survive. Last time I checked, the properties of diffusion and osmosis were interesting but they still were of no help in reality. The battle of 1812 cannot help you prepare a healthy meal and common error C cannot help a jurist in a murder trial. Instead of realizing this, the bureaucracy that claims to be for the people continues to push for the advancement of uniform mediocrity in schools. Learning rote information never taught anyone to think. History, Science, Math, and English won't do you any good if you can't apply them. Formulaic thinking might help one to get good scores on tests but it doesn't do jack in reality.

When will society realize that the only useful skill that high school could ever teach us is the art of using our brain to think independently and express our ideas coherently? With the use of one's brain anything is possible, any problem solvable, any question answerable, any goal reachable. Unfortunately, it is the one thing that many students never learn because they are too busy trying to pass the tests.

Schools are being turned into factories churning out brainless, mindless, opinion-less hacks year after year. Any student that challenges the system is labeled a difficulty. Any teacher that pushes the limits and forces their students to actually use their brains is chastised and labeled extreme. In my five years, I have seen too many wonderful teachers lost or restricted to the box. I have seen too many extraordinary kids give up on school. But no one cares.

The idea of MCAS testing is similar to putting a band-aid on a severed limb. Not only is it pointless, it is a waste of time that could be much better spent. The solution to the poor education of children is not a uniform curriculum and it is certainly not a test. The solution lies in equal and adequate funding for all schools. So that teachers are paid what they are actually worth and budgets don't have to choose between paper for the copy machine or books for the students. Perhaps it is the grand old elected officials' education that needs to be questioned. Public officials that can unflinchingly spend a third of the national budget on an unnecessary army and billions on the Big Dig to please commuters, but cannot hack up enough money to adequately fund schools and social service programs.

How are we supposed to grow up to be thinking individuals when the examples set for us are those of greedy politicians bought out by money in a corrupt democratic system where only the rich are allowed to participate? A corporate world where our parents whore themselves out to heartless companies that are only out to make a buck. A clothing and manufacturing industry that moves to the third world so that it can freely underpay and abuse its workers in order to make the most profit. A world where our education is reduced down to GPA, SAT, and MCAS. Maybe our society should worry less about the three R's and more about the morals of future generations, and leave the teaching to the teachers.

There are some who have managed to grow beyond the memorized facts and formulaic thinking. Those who were in Seattle at the WTO conference. Those that are in Harvard Square today protesting the Gap's labor and environmental policies. Those that will be protesting at this year's republican and democratic national conventions. Those that are trying to make a difference. But they are a miraculous few. They could be and should be so many more. We do community service and plant a few flowers but are never given the chance to truly understand what a community is. We participate in a student government but never learn what it truly means to be an activist. We are taught history but are never truly taught about the history that we have the chance to make.

We hear GPA, class rank, SAT, test grade, midterms, finals, scholastic achievement but never once do we hear "never mind the grades, think about the learning, think about activism, think about life." We celebrate those who have earned good grades but don't bother to consider if they are at all worthy of the praise. Does anyone care about the human beings behind the numbers?

Perhaps I am bitter, but I have every right to be bitter and angry about the world that I see around me. My responsibility lies in that I must do something constructive with my anger. And I suppose that in the end I have school to thank for making me so unhappy, inadvertently giving me the fuel to take a stand in life and do something with what I have been given. And so I stand here today and forever, and refuse to be defined as a number.

Annelise Schantz

http://newdemocracyworld.org/annelise.htm

clever, incredibly funny, so aware, irresistable...

2006-03-03T11:36:00.000-05:00

here is my alltime highest recommendation for news and opinion...

http://jonswift.blogspot.com/

here is a sample:

"I decided to read up on Dubai, which I had never heard of before, and the more I read about it the more I began to doubt this country even existed. Supposedly, it's a desert paradise where alcohol and Eastern European prostitutes are plentiful. It sounded like a made-up place to me. But then I saw that Dubai is also spelled Dubayy and I had a revelation. I rushed to confirm my suspicions with an Arabic man who runs the local grocery store near me (on whom I am keeping a watchful eye for any suspicious activity) and he confirmed what I discovered. The Arabic spelling of Dubai (right) is exactly the same as the Arabic spelling for "Dubya." Suddenly, I understood why Bush wanted "Dubai" to control our ports and make the terrorists believe that they were actually under the control of a friendly Arabic government. At that moment, I got down on my knees and said, "Mr. President, how could I have ever doubted you?" Now you see why President Bush is so adamant about this deal. Shhh! Don't tell the terrorists." --Jon Swift

http://jonswift.blogspot.com/

a most important essay...

2006-02-27T08:45:00.000-05:00

"The increasingly massive and far-reaching use of conventional standardized tests is one of the most effective, if unintentional, vehicles this country has created for suppressing creativity."
-- Robert J. Sternberg

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2006/02/22/24sternberg.h25.html?querystring=Robert%20Sternberg&levelId=1000

Published: February 22, 2006
Commentary

Creativity Is a Habit
Robert J. Sternberg

The increasingly massive and far-reaching use of conventional standardized tests is one of the most effective, if unintentional, vehicles this country has created for suppressing creativity.

Creativity is a habit. The problem is that schools sometimes treat it as a bad habit. And the world of conventional standardized tests we have invented does just that. Try being creative on a standardized test, and you will get slapped down just as soon as you get your score. That will teach you not to do it again.

It may sound paradoxical that creativity, a novel response, is a habit, a routine response. But creative people are creative largely not by any particular inborn trait, but because of an attitude toward their work and even toward life: They habitually respond to problems in fresh and novel ways, rather than allowing themselves to respond in conventional and sometimes automatic ways.

Like any habit, creativity can either be encouraged or discouraged. The main things that promote the habit are (a) opportunities to engage in it, (b) encouragement when people avail themselves of these opportunities, and (c) rewards when people respond to such encouragement and think and behave creatively. You need all three. Take away the opportunities, encouragement, or rewards, and you will take away the creativity. In this respect, creativity is no different from any other habit, good or bad.

Suppose, for example, you want to encourage good eating habits. You can do so by (a) providing opportunities for students to eat well in school and at home, (b) encouraging students to avail themselves of these opportunities, and then (c) praising young people who use the opportunities to eat well. Or suppose you want to discourage smoking. You can do so by (a) taking away opportunities for engaging in it (by prohibiting smoking in various places, or by making the price of cigarettes so high people scarcely can afford to buy them), (b) discouraging smoking (advertisements showing how smoking kills), and (c) rewarding people who do not smoke (with praise, or even preferred rates for health- and life-insurance policies).

This may sound too simple. It's not. Creative people routinely approach problems in novel ways. Creative people habitually: look for ways to see problems that other people don?t look for; take risks that other people are afraid to take; have the courage to defy the crowd and to stand up for their own beliefs; believe in their own ability to be creative; seek to overcome obstacles and challenges to their views that other people give in to; and are willing to work hard to achieve creative solutions.

Educational practices that may seem to promote learning may inadvertently suppress creativity, for the same reasons that environmental circumstances can suppress any habit. These practices often take away the opportunities for, encouragement of, and rewards for creativity. The increasingly massive and far-reaching use of conventional standardized tests is one of the most effective, if unintentional, vehicles this country has created for suppressing creativity. I say "conventional" because the problem is not with standardized tests, per se, but rather with the kinds of tests we use. And teacher-made tests can be just as much of a problem.
Conventional standardized tests encourage a certain kind of learning and thinking, the kind of learning and thinking for which there is a right answer and many wrong answers. To create a multiple-choice or short-answer test, you need a right answer and many wrong ones. Problems that do not fit into the right answer-wrong answer format do not lend themselves to multiple-choice and short-answer testing. Put another way, problems that require divergent thinking are inadvertently devalued by the use of standardized tests.

This is not to say knowledge is unimportant. On the contrary, we cannot think creatively with knowledge unless we have the knowledge with which to think creatively. Knowledge is a necessary, but in no way sufficient, condition for creativity. The problem is that schooling often stops short of encouraging creativity. Teachers and parents are often content if students have the knowledge.

Examples of ways to encourage creative thinking are legion. If students are studying American history, they might take the opportunity to think creatively about how we can learn from the mistakes of the past to do better in the future. Or they can think creatively about what would have happened, had a certain historical event not come to pass, such as the Allies' defeat of the Nazis in World War II. But there is no one "right" answer to such questions, so they are not likely to appear on a conventional standardized test. In science, students can design experiments, but here again, such activities do not fit neatly into a multiple-choice format.

In literature, alternative endings to stories can be imagined, or what the stories would be like if they took place in a different era. In mathematics, students can invent and think with novel number systems. In foreign languages, they can invent dialogues with people from other cultures. But the emphasis in most tests is on the display of knowledge, often inert knowledge that may sit in students' heads, yet be inaccessible for actual use.

Essay tests might seem to provide a solution to such problems, but as they are typically used, they don't. Increasingly, essay tests can be and are scored by machine. Often, human raters of essays provide ratings that correlate more highly with machine grading than with the grading of other humans. Why? Because they are scored against one or more implicit prototypes, or models of what a "correct" answer should be. The more the essay conforms to one or more prototypes, the higher the grade. Machines can detect conformity to prototypes better than humans, so essay graders of the kind being used today succeed in a limited form of essay evaluation. Thus, the essay tests that students are being given often do not encourage creativity, rather, they discourage creativity in favor of model answers that conform to one or more prototypes.

Oddly enough, then, the very "accountability" movement that is being promoted as fostering solid education is, in at least one crucial respect, doing the opposite: It is discouraging creativity at the expense of conformity. The problem is the very narrow definition of accountability involved. But proponents of this notion of accountability often make it sound as though those who oppose them oppose any accountability, whereas they in fact may oppose only the narrow form of accountability conventional tests generate. The tests are not "bad" or "wrong," per se, just limited in what they assess. But they are treated as though they assess broader ranges of skills than they actually do.

Why is creativity even important? It is important because the world is changing at a far greater pace than it ever has before, and people need constantly to cope with new and unusual kinds of tasks and situations. Learning in this era must be lifelong, and people constantly need to be thinking in new ways. The problems we confront, whether in our families, communities, or nations, are novel and difficult, and we need to think creatively and divergently to solve these problems. The technologies, social customs, and tools available to us in our lives are replaced almost as quickly as they are introduced. We need to think creatively to thrive, and, at times, even to survive.

But this often is not how we are teaching children to think; quite the contrary. So we may end up with "walking encyclopedias" who show all the creativity of an encyclopedia. In a recent best seller, a man decided to become the smartest person in the world by reading an encyclopedia cover to cover. The fact that the book sold so well is a testament to how skewed our conception has become of what it means to be smart. Someone could memorize that or any other encyclopedia, but not be able to solve even the smallest novel problem in his or her life.

Encouraging the creativity habit does not mean forsaking evaluation. Essays, projects, and performances can be evaluated for creativity in terms of how novel they are (originality), how good they are (quality), and how appropriate they are to the assignment that was given. Research by Teresa Amabile at the Harvard Business School, as well as by my own group at the Center for the Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise, currently at Yale and soon moving to Tufts, shows that raters can be trained to assess creative thinking reliably and validly.

If we want to encourage creativity, we need to promote the creativity habit. That means we have to stop treating it as a bad habit. We have to resist efforts to promote a conception of accountability that encourages children to accumulate inert knowledge, with which they learn to think neither creatively nor critically. Rather, we should promote the kind of accountability in which students must show they have mastered subject matter, but also can think analytically, creatively, and practically with it.

Robert J. Sternberg, a psychologist, is the dean of the school of arts and sciences at Tufts University, in Medford, Mass. He also directs the Center for the Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise, now located at Yale University, but soon to move to Tufts.

Vol. 25, Issue 24, Pages 47,64

it gets lonely when you are waiting for responses...

2006-02-22T12:55:00.000-05:00

I decided to compose a letter to the teachers.

( the problem is, I have no way to get it to them....)

A letter to the Teachers

Dear Teachers:

I am most concerned about the selection of the next superintendent and would like to know about and support your active interest in this process.

As a parent of two students in our public schools and as an advocate for meaningful policy in our schools, my interests include my determination to see the teachers’ opinions, knowledge, and participation reflected in the core decisions made about curriculum and course development. The policies of the previous superintendent excluded teachers’ voices in issues of their expertise. The progressive disregard for teachers’ volition and professional input damaged the spirit of many seasoned professionals. My interest currently is engaged by the prospect of a candidate who has demonstrated abilities in support and encouragement of teachers.

Without a public, strong, and unified voice from the teachers about their experiences, I am afraid that the selection committee will choose a candidate who reflects their loyalty to our county school board and will overlook the importance of a candidate who has devoted efforts to a sound curriculum and has supported teacher-initiated classroom instruction and creative development in all school-related issues and all the other practical aspects that necessitate daily collaborative efforts between teachers and administrators in our schools. I am interested in hearing from the teachers about the importance of being treated honestly, with dignity and respect, by a candidate who will include them in planning and decisions about policies that affect their professional lives and in turn affect the lives and learning of our students.

If we take a stand and become involved in this important selection, I believe we can make our best efforts count, and we can be heard if the teachers and the parents can become informed and focused on the issues of greatest urgency. I believe it is crucial for the future of our school system, our teachers, and our students that we begin a dialogue and invest our energies in making known the impact of NCLB in our classrooms. Our last superintendent’s allegiance and adherence to the principles of this act were basic to his goals. His rapid changes in curriculum and assessment protocol and his demands for standardization and the systematic exclusion of teachers’ input were all, in part, results of his allegiance to this act. NCLB will extinguish the profession of teaching at its basic level of creativity and individuality if we do not act to expose its damage.

We have this opportunity now, I believe, to make a better choice. Including the voices of the teachers is so important now. If you agree that having a say in the selection of our next superintendent is a priority, and if you believe that the teachers’ voices must be included in that selection, I am in full agreement with you and will lend my support and my energy toward that goal.

Thank you for your time and devotion at this crucial time.

i return to this...often

2006-02-22T11:32:00.000-05:00

Leaving Public Schools Behind

Stan Karp

IT IS A MEASURE of how far the right is reaching that the left today finds itself defending the very existence of public education from the forces of privatization, commercialization, and even federal policy. Just four years after 1996 Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole campaigned on a platform of abolishing the Department of Education, the Bush administration came into office with a massive expansion of the federal role in education as its number one domestic priority. This time, however, the goal was not to extend the federal government's historic role as a promoter of educational access and equity, but to replace it with a conservative agenda of punitive high stakes testing, privatization, and market "reforms." The euphemistically named Bush education bill, the No Child Left Behind Act, was passed in December 2001 with overwhelming Republican and Democratic support (381-41 in the House, 87-10 in the Senate.). While the bipartisan coalition that supported passage of NCLB has since fragmented, its initial creation reflected the bill's merger of the corporate-centrist agenda of standards and tests with the right's agenda of vouchers ("choice"), and privatization.

Like most effective political strategies, NCLB rhetoric also spoke to real concerns held by large numbers of people, particularly those that have been badly served by public education. These concerns included persistent racial gaps in student achievement, a lack of institutional accountability, and seemingly intractable school failure in low-income communities of color. These very real problems have provided a platform for school reformers of all shapes and sizes to posture as champions of the underserved and underprivileged. For Bush, education reform has always been an "outreach" issue. He came into office as a dubiously elected president with historically low levels of support among African Americans and a well-deserved anti-poor, pro-business image. Education is one of the few areas that allow a Republican president to posture, however disingenuously, as an ally of poor people of color. By focusing on the lowest performing schools and the racial dimensions of the achievement gap (e.g., the "soft bigotry of low expectations"), Bush has given his education rhetoric an edge and an urgency it would otherwise lack. However, he has used this rhetoric, both as Texas governor and later as president, to frame policy proposals that have reinforced the "hard bigotry" of institutional racism in education, for example, by promoting higher dropout rates and perpetuating funding inequities. (Combining rhetorical concern for the victims of inequality with policies that perpetuate it may be an operative definition of "compassionate conservatism.")

But the common ground that really gave birth to NCLB was the standards movement. And this traces back to the first "education president," George Bush the elder, and to the Governors' Education Summits promoted by then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton. The standardize-and-test strategy, now enshrined in NCLB and raised to new and absurd heights by the "adequate yearly progress'" (AYP) formulas that NCLB is currently imposing on your local neighborhood school, was made possible by a decade of promoting standards and tests as the key to school improvement. Standardized curricula imposed through ever-more suffocating layers of standardized testing have become the primary instruments of mainstream, business-led school reform. They are tools used to impose external political and bureaucratic agendas on local schools and districts and to push more democratic approaches to school reform aside.

The standards and testing movement has done even more than the privatization schemes of the voucher supporters to move school power away from teachers, classrooms, schools, and local districts, and to put it in the hands of state and national politicians. Such uses of standards and testing in the service of larger policy objectives is exactly what a number of Republican strategists have been proposing for years. As Nina Shokraii Rees, a former Heritage Foundation researcher who is now an official in the Department of Education wrote before Bush took office, "Standards, choice, and fiscal and legal autonomy in exchange for boosting student test scores increasingly are the watchwords of education reform in America. The principle can be used in programs that apply to whole districts as well as entire states. Importantly, it lays the groundwork for a massive overhaul of education at the federal level in much the same way that welfare reform began."

Currently, the No Child Left Behind Act has schools across the country reeling as its impact unfolds in numbing bureaucratic detail. As many as 80 percent of the nation's public schools may find themselves labeled as schools "needing improvement," on the narrow basis of annual test scores and unreachable performance targets. The scheme uses achievement gaps among up to 10 different groups of students to label schools as "failures," without providing the resources or support needed to eliminate them. It includes an unfunded mandate that by 2014, 100 percent of all students, including special education students and English-language learners, must be proficient on state tests. Schools that do not reach increasingly unattainable test score targets face an escalating series of sanctions up to and including possible closure and the imposition of private management on public schools.

Instead of an appropriate educational strategy, NCLB's test and punish formula is part of a calculated political campaign to leave schools and children behind as the federal government retreats from the nation's historic commitment to improving universal public schooling for all children. The sanctions that NCLB imposes have no record of success as school improvement strategies, and in fact are not educational strategies at all. They are political strategies designed to bring a kind of market reform to public education. They will do little to address the pressing needs of public schools but they will create a widespread perception of systemic failure, demoralize teachers and school communities, and erode the common ground that a universal system of public education needs to survive. The privatization agenda in NCLB is reflected most clearly in its provisions for school transfers and supplemental services. (A straightforward voucher program was taken out of the original proposal as part of the legislative compromise that got it passed, though the administration continues to pursue vouchers through separate means.) Instead, NCLB has provisions that require a district to spend up to 20 percent of its federal funds to support transfers from failing schools to schools that meet their AYP targets or that don't receive Title I funds. And each state is supposed to prepare a list of approved supplemental tutorial providers for students who remain in schools needing improvement.

So far, over 60 percent of these providers are private companies. Both the transfer and the tutorial provisions have lots of complications, but there will be several overall effects: 1. The 20 percent figure will come nowhere near to covering the costs of providing transportation and tutorial services to all those eligible for them. 2. There are nowhere near enough alternative school placements for the growing numbers of students eligible to transfer. 3. The funds used to support individual tutorial services and transfers will reduce the sums available for whole school improvement in those same schools. One key part of this effort to open the public system to privatization involves a special appeal to parents, particularly in poor communities, to support NCLB's federally required tests and, especially, to utilize the law's "choice" and "supplemental tutorial" provisions.

The idea is to create pressure for more privatization of the public system. In their voucher campaigns, conservatives have learned how to repackage market "reforms" that privatize public services as a form of "parental choice." Similarly, NCLB encourages parents to leave public schools behind and appeals to them as individual consumers of educational services as part of an effort to replace local control of institutions like schools with marketplace reforms that substitute commercial relations between customers for democratic relations between citizens. NCLB, however, does not guarantee parents any new places to go. In districts where some schools are labeled "failing" and some are not, the new law is actually forcing increased class sizes by transferring students without creating new capacity. NCLB does not invest in building new schools in failing districts. It does not make rich suburban districts open their doors to students from poor districts. And it doesn't give poor parents any more control over school bureaucracies than food stamps give them over supermarkets.

The transfer regulations are a "supply-side" fraud designed to manufacture a demand for alternative school placements and ultimately to transfer funds and students to profit-making private school corporations through vouchers. The link between NCLB's "options for parents" and the administration's voucher and privatization plans is clearly reflected in the Department of Education's implementation efforts. The DOE has given multi-million dollar grants to pro- voucher groups like the Black Alliance for Educational Options, the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options, and the Greater Educational Opportunities Foundation to encourage parents to utilize the tutorial and transfer provisions of NCLB. The grants are just another example of how the federal agencies charged with overseeing and improving public education are now run by people intent on dismantling it.

Similarly, NCLB's obsessive overreliance on standardized tests in the name of accountability is more than bad education policy. It is a political effort to push other more democratic approaches to school improvement aside. When schools become obsessed with test scores, they narrow the focus of what teachers do in classrooms and limit their ability to serve the broader needs of children and their communities. Overreliance on testing diverts attention and resources from more promising school improvement strategies, like smaller schools and class size, multicultural curriculum reform, and collaborative, school-based professional development.

High-stakes tests push struggling students out of school, promote tracking, and encourage schools to adopt developmentally inappropriate practices for younger children, special needs students, and English Language Learners in an effort to "get them ready for the tests." Overuse of testing can also encourage cheating scandals and makes schools and students vulnerable to inaccurate and, at times, corrupt practices by commercial testing firms. Standards and testing, especially as they have been implemented in recent decades, are not designed to make schools accountable to students, their families, or their communities, or even to educators. They are designed to increase the ability of external political and educational bureaucracies to impose top-down, "systemic" control on curriculum, instructional practice, and other matters of educational policy.

Even if the goals did include real educational accountability, standardized tests are of limited value. Assessing the effectiveness of a particular school or program requires multiple measures of academic performance, including classroom observations, portfolios of student work, and dialogue with real teachers and students, as well as a range of indicators from attendance and drop-out rates to graduation rates and post-graduation success, measures of teacher preparation and quality, surveys of parent participation and satisfaction and similar evaluations. Legitimate assessment strategies would also measure "opportunity to learn" inputs and equity of resources so that the victims of educational failure were not the only ones to face "high stakes" consequences. Moreover, while inequality in test scores is one narrow indicator of school performance, test scores also reflect other inequalities that persist in the larger society and in schools themselves.

About 12 percent of white children live in poverty, while over 30 percent of black and Latino children live in poverty. The richest 1 percent of households has more wealth than the bottom 95 percent. Students in low-income schools, on average, have thousands of dollars less spent on their education than those in wealthier schools. About 14 percent of whites don't have health insurance, but more than 20 percent of blacks and 30 percent of Latinos have no health insurance. Unemployment rates for blacks and Latinos are nearly double what they are for whites. In October 2003, the Educational Testing Service released a study on the achievement gap concluding, "The results are unambiguous. In all 14 factors, the gaps in student achievement mirror inequalities in those aspects of school, early life, and home circumstances that research has linked to achievement." Yet we do not hear NCLB's supporters demanding an end to this kind of equality. Nor do we hear the federal government saying that all crime must be eliminated in 12 years or the police will be privatized, all citizens must have good health care in 12 years or we will shut down the health care system.

Many organized groups representing parents and people of color have seen through NCLB's rhetorical promises and joined efforts to reform it. The Boston-based advocacy group FairTest has spearheaded a reform campaign that has won support from the NAACP, the Children's Defense League, and the Hispanic advocacy organization, Aspira. Parents have also been slow to embrace the transfer option, with only a small fraction of those eligible so far seeking to move to new schools. But a portion of the traditional civil rights coalition and a significant sector of popular sentiment in poor communities remain susceptible to the power of NCLB's rhetoric. Nourished by decades of school failure, which has reached desperate levels in urban and rural communities where less than half of black and Latino freshmen typically graduate from high school, some in these communities are understandably less concerned with the looming dangers of privatization than they are with finding ways to use NCLB to pressure schools to make good on their promises to serve all children well.

These attitudes were in striking evidence last summer at a conference of the National Coalition of Education Activists, a multiracial network of parents, teachers, and community activists that works to promote equity and reform in public education. NCEA's conferences are typically an exercise in cross-constituency political dialogue among people with long-term common goals and interests, but not necessarily common experience or even a common language when it comes to discussing education reform. Along with Monty Neill of FairTest, I helped organize several conference sessions on NCLB. True to NCEA form, the sessions attracted a diverse and energetic group: school board members from San Francisco wrestling with NCLB's crushing bureaucratic and financial burdens, Philadelphia teachers facing the takeover of their schools by private for-profit education management companies, Latino activists concerned about the law's erosion of bilingual education programs. The participants also included a good number of African-American parents, some from northern urban centers like Chicago and New York, others from the rural south, including Tennessee, North Carolina and Mississippi.

While few disagreed with the sharp political critique we offered of NCLB's hidden agendas and negative impact, many parents were less interested in working to expose or repeal it, than they were in finding ways to use it to put pressure on schools to improve. A Mississippi parent activist described a district where black parents historically had virtually no opportunity to question school board or administrative policies, where teacher unions were nonexistent, and where educational inequality was an unchallenged way of life. In NCLB, she saw public reporting mandates that put a focus on gaps between black and white student achievement, demands that schools respond to the these gaps effectively or face penalties, and options for parents to get access to "better schools" and tutorial services for their kids. She, and other parents who echoed her concerns, were not blind to the problems of standardized testing or the inadequacy of NCLB's proposed remedies. But for many, the central issue was how to use the pressure that NCLB put on schools to make them more effective and more responsive institutions.

BRIDGING THE GAP between educators who see NCLB as an attack and parents who see it as an opportunity is a formidable challenge. It requires finding common ground that begins with a recognition of the ways in which, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, our dual school system continues to provide a separate and unequal education to students from different racial and class backgrounds. It requires that teachers, and their unions, use their power not just to narrowly defend the system as it now exists, but to advocate for radical reform and urgent expansion of educational opportunity for all children.

To prevent the gaps between educators and parents from being filled by aggressive political campaigns to promote standards, tests, vouchers, and privatization will require effective, sustained public efforts to explain why these "remedies" hold out absolutely no hope of solving the problems of public education. Supporters of public schooling need to do a better job of showing how privatization and market reform promise to do for education what they've done for housing, health care, and other sectors of the economy: provide profit-making opportunities for a few well- financed investors and reproduce the class and racial inequalities that exist in the larger society. Finally, building a pro-education coalition requires developing a credible alternative program of reform that combines equity and accountability for all schools, that focuses on the supports needed to improve teaching and learning in classrooms, and that puts schools reform in the context of a larger national effort to promote local democratic institutions and reorder social priorities.

NCLB is the culmination of a very active conservative mobilization around schools over the past several decades. While the "wedge issues" that previously dominated the rightwing education agenda have been eclipsed by larger policy ambitions, they are still there. Using schools to promote military recruitment, school prayer, and even homophobia (a special NCLB provision guarantees the Boy Scouts access to school facilities despite its history of antigay discrimination) are all part of the toxic NCLB mix. A political attack on the independence and objectivity of scientific research is also a central part of the law's "Reading First" provisions, which misrepresent research about the teaching of reading and restrict the use of funds to certain commercial curriculums and instructional packages that favor scripted, test-driven, phonics-based approaches.

Today, federal education policy has become part of a larger political agenda that seeks to erode and privatize the public sector. Though the federal government provides only about 8 percent of school funding, the administration is using federal regulation to drive school policy in conservative directions at the state, district, and school levels. What's changed is not a new federal commitment to "leave no child behind," but the ideological commitment of some politicians to reform public education out of existence through a strategy of "test and burn." As commentator Danny Rose put it, "NCLB is not the answer to a crisis in public education. NCLB is a tool for creating crisis." Or as researcher Gerald Bracey has put it, NCLB "is a weapon of mass destruction and its target is the public schools."

The fallout from NCLB has begun to generate a growing resistance. In some places, students and parents are actively boycotting the imposition of high stakes testing. Both major teacher unions, the NEA and AFT, are looking for ways to modify the worst NCLB provisions. Advocacy groups like Rethinking Schools (www.rethinkingschools.org), FairTest (www.fairtest.org) are trying to promote alternative accountability systems and approaches to reform that engage educators and communities in collaborative school improvement. Parent-community advocacy groups like ACORN (www.acorn.org) are pressing politicians to make good on NCLB's rhetorical promises of better educational services for poor communities without gutting or privatizing the public system. Together these efforts prefigure a movement that could project a vision of a democratic school reform that truly serves both children and society as a whole, and that works to transform public education instead of destroying it. With NCLB making its noxious presence felt in a school district near you, it is a good time to find this resistance and join it.

http://www.wpunj.edu/%7Enewpol/issue38/karp38.htm

a teacher speaks out...

2006-02-03T11:43:00.000-05:00

I happened to see this blog entry on Susan Ohanian's website ( www.susanohanian.org ) and I am so impressed by the clarity of this teacher's (following) thoughts...

Historically, teachers speaking out in our county are awarded a nightmare. From the highest level of our administration, a Social Studies teacher who wrote to the local paper about harrassment she received after expressing her opinion on school policy and questioning her freedom of speech rights, had to walk the plank out of her job. The superintendent at that time, just 2 years ago, didn't see the value of free speech, even in a Social Sudies classroom.

Other teachers who questioned school policy have quietly endured more local harrassment from their school administrators. A teacher in an over-sized classroom full of middle school students accelerated by county demands into Algebra a year earlier regardless of their individual aptitudes or abilities, which "functioned" in free-form chaos and disruption, preventing the teacher from reaching even the most ambitious and capable students in her class, was shackled to similar protocol, courtesy of the principal. Rather than assisting her in any way to manage the nightmare, she was told to cope...silently! Any questions about whether or not she surrendered her teaching position at the end of the school year? Oh, and by the way, her area of expertise was Science, but, she was "recruited" to teach Math.

The message is clearly sobering: that there is absolutely no room for the teacher's perspective or opinion. For example, our county-supplied Science curriculum, comes packaged with Pacing Guides (to ensure a specific order is followed and a standard schedule of testing and course work is dispensed)and a Script. Actually, this is the standard for almost all of the classes now-- the pacing guides and scripts are delivered in neatly packaged boxes at the beginning of the year.

In Science, the guides and scripts are so universally flawed that the teachers have repeatedly complained to the Curriculum Office who has responded that they are revising them. But, and in the meantime the teachers are told to continue to use them in the flawed form, even if the guides ignore a rational order for teaching and learning, and even though the tests are flawed.

The same goes for Math. Teachers are unable to make sense of tests that they are asked to dispense. What is their choice but to provide the students with "correct" answers, even if they are nonsense, when the student outcome on the flawed tests will provide results that will become part of a teacher's performance evaluation and represent the overall "progress" of the school.

In Foriegn Language, as in Science, if the teacher is unable to make supersonic progress through the pacing guide, and material is left uncovered by the time a "benchmark" test is demanded, the teacher is, likewise, "forced" to cover those weeks of material in the few days prior to the test. This is handled, not surprisingly, by supplying the students with the questions and answers from that portion of the test yet un-covered. There is no clearer example, is there, of "teaching to the test."

What does this do to the teachers? It embarrases them, certainly. They are living a nightmare of personal and professional dishonesty and unethical behavior, which is not invisable to their students, and they are being asked to sacrifice their own ethics in front of students whose respect they also sacrifice.

What does it do to the students? They, at best, learn the answers to questions and supply statistical measurments of "progress" or "proficiency" BUT, don't believe for a moment that the process doesn't effect them. First, they lose the educational benefit of learning the material. And, second, they learn the moral and ethical lesson of the charade; the lesson of dishonesty.

The AP classes endure the very same indignities of this teacher's special ed. classes. NCLB policy dictates that even students who have no foundation, nor aptitude, nor interest or ability to take a given AP class, should enroll because of (poorly supported causal) "statistical" evidence of their future performance in college. The AP classes, taught by teachers of varied interest and preparation, to students of diverse potential and ability, promotes the same corrupted results.

AP Courses once developed to challange the advanced student are staged to provide a diversity of students with a successful test-outcome. And if the outcome does not deliver results that meet the demands of the federal marketing campaign of "progress," reporters who make their living selling books and writing papers that support this ridiculous theory of "opportunity" or "quality" education for all students, inherit another royalty check for re-writing the premise. The NCLB marketing directors, in turn, make a minor change and low and behold, it is NOT the TEST that counts, in this case, it is simply the EXPERIENCE of having taken this testoutcome-based class.

The students who take these classes see right through to the fact that they are being used. And the teachers are, once again, mortified.

As I read the words of this teacher, I am struck by the obvious, ridiculous, destructive policies of a school who demands this:

"I gave the test to my English 9 special education students, the same test the honors classes took."

and this:

"I’m afraid I can’t “teach to the test” well enough for them to earn a high school diploma."

And I am rattled by the destructive forces of our federal "educational" policy which produces this:

"I passed the Social Studies content Praxis test before I entered the classroom. But I still didn’t know much specific information about World Civilization or US History – I learned the content along with the students as I began to teach it. I know teachers who have been in the classroom for several years, who are considered among the best in our school, who know the material, but have not yet passed their Praxis exams so are in danger of losing their jobs. Am I a better teacher because I am a better test taker?"

I am encouraged by this teacher's voice and her honesty.

I am afraid that if we wait for the parents to find the time to understand what is happening in our schools, if we wait for something, somehow, a miracle, a voice, a light, a new administration to step in, we will have waited in vain. We could wait a long, long time and still the momentum of this law will grow. We might wait and wait for Godot while our students and teachers are systematically sacrificed by a growing policy of destruction.

I applaud your energy and your integrity, Ms. Denney.

Lets raise some hell!

By Hanne Denney

Hanne Denney, a 47-year-old “career-changer,” is in her second year as a special education and social studies teacher at Arundel High School in Gambrills, Maryland. Hanne entered teaching through an alternative-certification program. In her previous life, she operated her own child-care center. In this blog, she’ll reflect on the challenges and rewards of starting over in teaching.

January 29, 2006

Teaching and Testing

I have tested and been tested. Last week was final exam week for the first semester, and I tested over 100 students in four different subjects. Some of the exams were specific to my students, meaning I wrote the exams. Other exams were taken by all students taking that class, with some modifications for level of ability. One test, the English 9 Assessment, was given to all ninth graders in our county. It’s that last one that troubles me. You could say I’m “testy” about it.

This assessment is a “benchmark” exam, designed to monitor the progress of our students as they move towards taking the state-mandated high school assessment in English 10. They must take and pass that exam in order to graduate from high school, along with Biology, Government, and Algebra. It’s a policy of one size test to fit all size students. I think it’s the way it is in most school districts now.

I gave the test to my English 9 special education students, the same test the honors classes took. I prepared the test on the computer system for the students who can’t read. Of course, the day of the exam, the system didn’t work and I read the exam aloud to two students. I read it to them, but I couldn’t explain it or help with answers, of course. Reading the exams to the two students meant I could closely watch their effort. I could see what confused them, which words they asked me to repeat, and which answers they put down first and then erased. I could see the pressure in their eyes and the tension in their hands. I could see how hard they worked. None of my students did well on the test, but most tried very hard. They have to keep trying, because they must pass it next year in order to earn a diploma. I’m afraid for them. It’s not just that they can’t read, but that they struggle with in-depth comprehension and analysis. I don’t know if I can teach them what they need to be successful. I’m afraid I can’t “teach to the test” well enough for them to earn a high school diploma. But I am going to try hard again this semester.

I myself have taken a lot of standardized tests. I have earned my “highly qualified” status in English, Social Studies, and Special Education through success on the Praxis exams. I passed the Social Studies content Praxis test before I entered the classroom. But I still didn’t know much specific information about World Civilization or US History – I learned the content along with the students as I began to teach it. I know teachers who have been in the classroom for several years, who are considered among the best in our school, who know the material, but have not yet passed their Praxis exams so are in danger of losing their jobs. Am I a better teacher because I am a better test taker?

Are my students poorer students because they are poor test takers?

Do we judge student success only by their scores on eight hours’ worth of exams? If you can’t pass these four exams, you can’t have a diploma. I was judged worthy of teacher status because I passed ten hours’ worth of tests. The best part is this – if I pass any other Praxis exams, I’ll be certified to teach that subject. I’ve taken five and passed, so I’m thinking about Biology, and Art. Those are subjects I like, too. Perhaps Early Childhood – that’s my previous career. I think I could even pass Algebra, definitely not Geometry. These passing scores don’t mean I could teach these subjects. Do they? How can we really measure the potential ability of a teacher?

This is the critical test for education today. Do we keep using standardized tests that measure knowledge in relation to 60 questions to judge our teachers? Do we keep testing students with unit tests and semester exams and benchmark assessments and exam-dependent diplomas? Is that how we will determine success?

Or can we consider other ways of measuring progress, and ability, and worth? For students and teachers? A lot of questions.

Sorry to test you like that.
— Hanne Denney
Teacher Magazine blog
2006-01-29

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/hdenney/

tabulating my responses...

2006-02-03T11:37:00.000-05:00

So far, and oddly enough, I haven't heard from the Post, from Beacon Press or Heinemann, from the Legislative Education committee, or my own county BOE.

The upside is: I can still do my own statistical analysis...

getting NCLB on the agenda

2006-01-29T11:22:00.000-05:00

It just makes sense when you look at the mission and goals of Beacon Press that they would want to participate in and support a movement that informs the public about the effects of NCLB on the public school system...Doesn't it?

So far...I haven't heard back from them.

Here's my letter:

After reading many books published by Beacon Press and reviewing the website, I am encouraged to find your strategic goals section. I am especially interested in number 4 (cited below.)

STRATEGIC GOALS

1) To publish books that passionately and effectively advocate these principles while engaging readers with high literary quality

2) To strive to disseminate these ideals through a broadening readership for our books and diverse audience for our authors, as well as an ever-increasing outreach through print and electronic media coverage of the books and their authors

3) To set standards of excellence in the publishing community, in terms of the content and production values of our books, in terms of our business policies and practices, and in the responsible use of natural resources

4) To grow steadily more prophetic in identifying areas of need, concern, and interest and addressing them with the most progressive and effective interventions

I also write with a particular interest in the book: Many Children Left Behind: How the No Child Left Behind Act is Damaging Our Children and Our Schools, Edited by Deborah Meier and George Wood. The Beacon review of the book includes the following passage:

This is an agenda that takes the intent of "no child left behind" from a slogan to reality. An agenda that pulls together the civil rights organizations that applaud no longer hiding our schools' failure to educate poor and minority children, the educators who work for school reform, the parents and civic groups that want better schools, and the legislators who work hard for what is best for their constituents. A movement that springs not from mandates and measurement, punishment and penalties, sanctions and closures, but rather, a movement that grows from hope and wisdom—hope that we can have the public schools our democracy requires, based on the wisdom that we have gained from schools that serve our children well regardless of race, class, gender, handicaps, or geography.

The authors of this book aim to add to this movement, as they agree with the premise that no child should be left behind, yet recognize that in NCLB many children will not only be left behind, but will be damaged as well—in ways we are just now beginning to understand.

I am writing to you, in response to your unique mission and stated goals, and to inquire about your goals and intentions to help promote the philosophy and knowledge of these particular authors on such an urgent matter as NCLB and its resulting damage in our nation's public schools.

At the fourth anniversary of the NCLB, and as the damage and destruction in our school system expands, the media's coverage of dissent is virtually nonexistent. According to Kappan's most recent survey, American parents remain largely uninformed about the rapid and dramatic changes in our schools as a result of this act. The teachers, struggling with their own energy and morale, likewise, barely have had the time to be informed about the act as many choose to simply leave the profession rather than suffer the indignities of a school "reform" dedicated to a testing industry rather than an academic or educational atmosphere. The political strength and power of the act continues to pad the pockets of educational enterprises and has, according to the academic community, (largely unread in mainstream culture,) made the educational environment for minority and other compromised subgroups worse rather than better. When legislators from all 50 states released a report critical of NCLB, it was largely ignored, buried in a brief, one paragraph notation, in a nationally acclaimed and widely read newspaper and then forgotten. Newspapers with financial relationships to television networks, to national magazines, and many with ties to auxiliary educational enterprises, no longer feel compelled to cover opinion or information which might compromise their political affiliations or financial interests. But, the media continues to supply the rhetoric and politically-motivated contention that the NCLB act has grown in success and will continue to strengthen our public schools.

I am writing to you to ask if a campaign of public and community information, which would include the voices from your published books, and other notable educational researchers and writers could be arranged to balance the information offered to the parents, the teachers and administrators, and the local politicians who also need to be informed. As I read your mission and goals, I request that you understand that the authors and advocates whose words you say you support, do not have the ability, apparently, to stage such a campaign of information, without the financial and active support of organizations, such as yours, which state that their intentions are to help identify areas of urgent need and facilitate effective interventions.

I ask you to acknowledge how urgent the situation is presently in our public schools, and ask you to imagine the future without an all out effort to promote a clear understanding of NCLB and the proposed interventions and directions to take to ensure that a progressive and adequate public education remains in place-- for our future, for our students, for our teachers, for our democracy.

Thank you for your consideration.

...and the same goes for Heinemann...(sorry for the redundancy)

Dear Publishing Staff:

After reading several books published by Heinemann's Press and reviewing the website, I am encouraged to find your company mission statement section.

Heinemann's Philosophy and Company Mission Statement
Heinemann is a publisher of professional resources and a provider of educational services for teachers, kindergarten through college. We strive to give voice to those who share our respect for the professionalism and compassion of teachers and who support teachers' efforts to help children become literate, empathetic, knowledgeable citizens. Our authors are exemplary educators eager to support the practice of other teachers through books, videos, workshops, online courses, and most recently through explicit teaching materials. Our commitment to our work and customers' enthusiastic response to our offerings has made us the leading publisher in this area. Our passion for publishing works by professionals for professionals also informs our trade publishing, which includes books for theatre professionals, general books on education, and quality works of world literature.
I am most interested in your stand on the federal NCLB act and it's impact on educators, parents, students, and communities across the country. As I am sure you are aware, a reform movement is growing that springs not from mandates and measurement, punishment and penalties, sanctions and closures, but rather, a movement that grows from an interest in the survival of public schools.

Can you afford to ignore such an urgent matter as NCLB and its resulting damage in our nation's public schools?

At the fourth anniversary of the NCLB, and as the damage and destruction in our school system expands, the media's coverage of dissent is virtually nonexistent. According to Kappan's most recent survey, American parents remain largely uninformed about the rapid and dramatic changes in our schools as a result of this act. The teachers, struggling with their own energy and morale, likewise, barely have had the time to be informed about the act as many choose to simply leave the profession rather than suffer the indignities of a school "reform" dedicated to a testing industry rather than an academic or educational atmosphere. The political strength and power of the act continues to pad the pockets of educational enterprises and has, according to the academic community, (largely unread in mainstream culture,) made the educational environment for minority and other compromised subgroups worse rather than better. When legislators from all 50 states released a report critical of NCLB, it was largely ignored, buried in a brief, one paragraph notation, in a nationally acclaimed and widely read newspaper and then forgotten. Newspapers with financial relationships to television networks, to national magazines, and many with ties to auxiliary educational enterprises, no longer feel compelled to cover opinion or information which might compromise their political affiliations or financial interests. But, the media continues to supply the rhetoric and politically-motivated contention that the NCLB act has grown in success and will continue to strengthen our public schools.

I am writing to you to ask if a campaign of public and community information, which would include the voices from your published books, and other notable educational researchers and writers could be arranged to balance the information offered to the parents, the teachers and administrators, and the local politicians who also need to be informed. As I read your mission, I request that you understand that the authors and advocates whose words you say you support, do not have the ability, apparently, to stage such a campaign of information, without the financial and active support of organizations, such as yours, which state that their intentions are to help identify areas of urgent need and facilitate effective interventions.

At least two of the following authors are local to the Washington/Baltimore metro area. I wonder if it is likely that as activists, they would be interested in promoting their books as well as informing the public at a regional forum with your support.

I ask you to acknowledge how urgent the situation is presently in our public schools, and ask you to imagine the future without an all out effort to promote a clear understanding of NCLB and the proposed interventions and directions to take to ensure that a progressive and adequate public education remains in place-- for our future, for our students, for our teachers, for our democracy.

Thank you for your consideration.

Reading for Profit: How the Bottom Line Leaves Kids Behind
Bess Altwerger
Paperback / Grade Level: K-6

Why is reading instruction so often focused on the mechanical transmission of skills rather than on the development of meaningful literacy? To understand why, we need to know who: who decides how children will be taught, and who benefits from that decision? Reading for Profit demonstrates conclusively that the pedagogical is political.
Alfie Kohn, Author of The Case Against Standardized Testing and The Schools Our Children Deserve

Filled with teachers' voices and an eye-opening analysis, this timely book reveals the corporate assault on schools, children's reading education, and teachers' effectiveness.
Gerald Coles, Author of Reading the Naked Truth and Misreading Reading

The Manufactured Crisis and The War Against America's Public Schools were angry books. This is a furious book. The extensive evidence it mounts to describe this attempt renders it an accurate book.
Gerald W. Bracey, Author of Setting the Record Straight, Second Edition

This book documents the corporate connections and exposes their motivations, documents the fear and frustration that experienced and highly competent teachers feel, and repeatedly and thoroughly documents the failings of the programs. These are the voices the public needs to hear.
Stephen Krashen, Author of The Power of Reading, Second Edition

Kudos to Bess Altwerger for this remarkable collection.... This book arms us to fight back.
Susan Ohanian, Author of Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools? and One Size Fits Few

On the Death of Childhood and the Destruction of Public Schools: The Folly of Today's Education Policies and Practices
Gerald W. Bracey
Paperback / Grade Level: K-12

"No matter what he's called, Gerald Bracey IS public schools' best defender. And in this book, he uses his considerable writing and research skills on their behalf. With authority, sensitivity, and a good sense of humor, he dismantles the negative PR our public education system has endured and does it with hardcore data, not phony "science."

Bracey delivers the statistics and skillful analysis needed to win the numbers game that plays out daily in the popular press. Drawing on data from a variety of reputable sources, he proves that public schools are doing much better than critics claim, some indicators even showing record highs. He takes on the testing movement in numerous chapters, offers data that provide different perspectives than usually seen, and reviews the history of public schools, showing how they have included more and more students while raising achievement levels, too. He questions the so-called "failing schools," discusses the phenomenon of "summer loss," provides international comparisons, and presents data to argue that investing in universal quality preschool pays off in the long run. He even attempts to enter the mind of the father of American public education, Horace Mann, to see what he might think about the "nuttiness of today's policies."

Bracey believes that our only hope to save the public school system is for teachers, teacher educators, and administrators to help speed up the needed perspective transformation. And they can begin to do it by reading this book and resuming their rightful position in educating students.

getting NCLB on the list

2006-01-29T11:03:00.000-05:00

January 25, 2006

Harold Meyerson
meyersonh@washpost.com

Dear Mr. Meyerson:

(Harold Myerson, “Bush the Incompetent,” [editorial], Washington Post, Jan 25,2006, A19)

In keeping with the theme of incompetence, the basis of your editorial piece (“Bush the Incompetent”), I would like to suggest that missing from your list of “screw-ups” is his co-incompetent failure at policy for educational reform. I hope you will agree that this issue belongs on the list of the “big things” he botched.

Here is a review of the key issues of the NCLB act of 2002 that are well known to state and local leaders, parents, teachers, students and educational researchers nationally:

• NCLB is an unprecedented federal intrusion into an area historically reserved to the states;
• NCLB's one-size-fits-all approach ignores the realities of good teaching and learning;
• Under NCLB, valuable class time is diverted to test preparation and away from real teaching and learning;
• NCLB is too narrow in its substantive focus because students need to master the basics such as reading and math, as well as the new basic skills of communication, creative problem solving, and collaboration in order to succeed in the 21st Century economy;
• NCLB relies too heavily on standardized testing to the exclusion of other valuable measures of mastery such as portfolio reviews and performance;
• NCLB's punitive approach distracts and undermines educators and administrators; an approach that includes incentives and technical assistance to aid struggling schools is more likely to yield positive results over the long term;
• NCLB is underfunded, placing significant financial strain on states and districts and forcing them to divert funds away from programs that they know work to help struggling students such as smaller class size, early learning and after school programs and others.
In addition to numerous academic papers and statements by education researchers and administrators reporting how severely compromised the public schools have become in attempting to comply with this mandate, there are many personal experiences from teachers and students who are struggling to comply. These in particular are horrific stories of spirits snuffed out and looming despair.

I can provide you with more about this and other information if you are interested.

But, for a handy illustration of the “mind-boggling incompetence,” take a look at another article from the Post (Nick Anderson, “The ‘No Child’ Law’s Flexible Enforcer,” Washington Post, Jan 24, 2006, A10). I will show you what catches my eye and saddens my heart about the “education” act and hope that I convince you that it too deserves to be on you’re A list (or “I” for “incompetence” list).

Early in the article, you will find that Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings says: “The department fined Texas nearly $900,000.00 for non-compliance with the law.” I ask you to consider the consequences that such a sizable penalty would have on a school system that otherwise might benefit from the use of this money. This is exceptionally mind boggling when you consider that the penalty is aimed at schools that are found to be struggling! Think about it….

A few paragraphs below that gem, Spellings says she will “not waiver on holding states to a target that many educators call virtually unattainable” (my emphasis). But, when you read that sentence, please tell me if you find any logic behind ignoring the input of the educators.

Later in the article, we find her joking that many of the questions she received were about educational law, issues unknowable to anyone but “a wonk.” I suppose I can appreciate the macabre humor of an educational insider getting down and wonky, but I have to add that I find this state of the public’s lack of information devastating and even more insidious because certain newspapers are doing the community a grave disservice by selectively excluding the information. (More on that if you want it…)

Further along, Spellings refers to the state of Maryland, about which she happens to have cozy feelings, since our State superintendent, Nancy Grasmick, is in avid compliance with NCLB and “moved rapidly” into testing requirements. Personally, I am prepared to speak long and thoroughly about what this rapid change has done to my children and their teachers’ morale (let me know if you want to hear the results…). It has been an awful experience for the students and teachers in our Maryland county, as a result of our State Superintendent’s adherence to NCLB policy on testing (standards and measurements.)

Next, Secretary Spellings says she learns about the quality of her own child’s school from the test results. I am extremely well-prepared to disagree with that counter-intuitive thought, but, many people have written eloquently and at length about the idiocy of such a statement.

Then Spellings addresses the “success” of accelerated math programs. Look at recent results in neighboring Prince Georges county for evidence of the poor results of this policy. The same thing happened in our county several years ago—the kids were pushed into Algebra earlier, and the results of this push in our county schools was enough to simultaneously kill our students’ interest in math and in school, and it also moved an enthusiastic, veteran teacher to walk out of the school…forever.

Ms. Spellings describes Ms. Grasmick like this: “She is very experienced and builds consensus around tough things.” Mind you, I have no idea what “tough things” are but, I can tell you that Ms. Grasmick has never answered a single piece of e-mail I have sent to her, and I know of no one whom she has answered, particularly if the message was critical of the changes in our schools over the last four years. Recall that several years ago, when Baltimore City found itself in an urgent budget situation of millions of dollars in over expenditure and staff members repeatedly pleaded for help, Ms. Grasmick’s response was one of complete disinterest; she ignored them. You can read about this situation in the Baltimore Sun newspaper, but I would have to say her idea of consensus building and mine is vastly different.

Next comes my all-time favorite quote. I will refrain from any comment and hope that you too will see the absurdity of Spellings’ words: “When you’ve got conservative Republicans and the PTA working together in the same direction about how to best involve parents, that’s a win.” (This is comedy of the absurd, is it not?)

Then there is Spellings describing the D.C. schools: “They have a ton of work to do on curriculum reform, especially in reading.” Again, I am almost ready to laugh but for the damages done by such a statement. Would toilet paper and hand-soap in the bathrooms help? Would taking an active stand on the numerous suffocating, crucial social and medical and economic issues, needs that are primary and urgent above and before a school curriculum for many of the city’s children, come to mind for consideration?

And if that’s not enough, she tells us that the District schools, along with schools in the state of Virginia and Prince Georges and Baltimore counties in Maryland, are all getting ready to face “corrective action” or “restructuring.” Yeah—that’s the ticket. If they don’t measure up, let’s destroy them! But let’s look at her words for this: “Having schools called out, spotlighted, tended to when they are not working is what this law is about.” Wait a minute, I forgot whether I was reading about schools or jails…

There are several last comments about expanding the AP program with NCLB funds, which has been discussed thoroughly by the National Research Council as an inferior and flawed approach and which has been identified as a policy that interferes with the development of real academic benefit. But why beleaguer a well-made point.

I end this discussion of the NCLB according to the Secretary with her own summary, which closes the article by describing why raising the bar is what our public schools need to make progress: “[T]his is what real grown ups do; real college students do this, and this is what matters.” I can’t even bear to give this ridiculous thought any more words.

Learning, as most people know, cannot be fabricated by a political mandate; it is an art, an opportunity, a challenge graced by the dedication, talent, and ingenuity that a teacher brings to the classroom. It is individual and it is unpredictable. Measured by tests that dole out punishment for failure, NCLB invites desperate measures to comply with its standards; it places blame where blame is not productive. Learning that is reinforced by positive reward, practiced with proven methods, and informed by appropriate assessment is the practical dispersal of hope and opportunity for a generation of students who are growing up in a rapidly changing, increasingly demanding, and complicated world. Learning that is attached to realistic, individual goals and allowed the freedom to vary and expand in depth and breadth and that is dependent on the expertise of the teacher, as well as the accurately evaluated potential of the student encourages creativity and enthusiasm; it promotes a life-long desire to learn.

We can do better for our teachers and our students than to standardize away attention to the variety of styles, interests, and abilities of both. We can design a better vision than one that holds a minority child or group accountable for the failure of a school. We can create a better plan than to have our brightest students in a program of study that is geared for minimal "proficiency" and memorization on standardized tests, which excludes the expansive spontaneity of creative debate and discovery. And, we can do much better than to spend hours training our least able children to bubble answer sheets to cheat the system as well as the child. We can use new and creative methods to help stimulate a joyful quest for knowledge and resist the boring, rote, and meaningless learning that is geared toward a limited and small-minded outcome that substitute for real learning. Yes, our students need to learn basic skills, but more importantly, they need to learn to think independently, to reason, to be honest and thoughtful, and to decipher and apply the principles and values of our democracy. These are the skills they will need to become informed citizens in a society that will require their participation.

With the imposition of and adherence to the NCLB act, neither the rhetorical nor statistical manipulation can recover the many losses suffered by our students, our teachers, and our system of public education.

Anne E. Levin Garrison

the faux community-based selection process

2006-01-27T11:22:00.000-05:00

CLOSED “QUALITY” SELECTION PROCESS FOR SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT

How it works in Maryland

While I wait with growing dread for the selection committee (hired by our BOE) to pre-screen their choices, I am most perplexed that the Maryland Association of Boards of Education (MABE) staged a series of community-based forums to determine just the characteristics that would qualify our next superintendent of schools and fit the needs of our county. The results of this charade are just what you would expect: the responses given at the forum were “rehabilitated” into a list of ideals that are the voice of a partisan agenda.

Reading over the selection requirements for two very different counties, Dorchester and Anne Arundel, both seeking to fill the position of superintendent (which can be found at www.mabe.org), I am struck by the similarities in answers to each community’s questions. Let's ignore for discussion purposes the crucial cultural differences between each region and focus on the given information.

Having charted and rearranged the selection traits, I find that, although they were heralded as the collective results from community discussions, the nearly identical ideas could not possibly have been generated independently by the two vastly different communities. From my experiences at public forums, such a consensus, even with a small group is nearly impossible. These results, a consensus that is reached twice and identically, are ridiculous to consider.

I attended one of three of these forums and can recall no such mention, even by a stretch of imagination, of any of these stated “ideas from the community.” I would say that, in fact, not a single comment voiced at the community forum I attended is included in any shape that resembles the comments on this list. And in hearing accounts from others who attended the second and third forum, I have seen nothing on the list that is at all representative of their experiences.

Accountable only for my own input, I know that I said that the ideal candidate would have, as a priority, a devoted and solid, positive relationship with the teachers. BUT, as he struggled to document my idea using his laptop, the MABE selection committee member spoke aloud as he typed:

“Holds teachers accountable,” he said as he typed, “excellent point…”

“NO!” I corrected: “Gives teachers back their professional volition; develops rapport, a relationship, includes them in the educational process…” I repeated.

“Yes, teachers do need to be held accountable for the progress of the students on state standards and measurements…”

(…sound of footsteps as several people promptly left the room in frustration and disgust.)

Now, let me point to a few coincidences. Take a look at the following chart for comparison purposes. Clearly, the same points are made in the selection requirements for both counties. In the original format of job specifications, the qualities appeared to have been shuffled a bit. I have re-ordered them to demonstrate how precisely they match up.

Anne Arundel County: Pre K-12 District -- 73,992 Students, Minimum Salary -- $200,000

Dorchester County:Pre K-12 District -- 4,788 Students, Salary minimum -- $115,000

A visionary who is passionate about public education; holds student achievement as the top priority; and makes decisions based on the best interests of the children of Anne Arundel County.
A visionary who will include stakeholders in the development and implementation of a focused strategic plan, in which all children learn at high levels.

An open and inclusive communicator who values input from all stakeholders; is visible and active in the schools and community; and is effective building strong relationships with and among the board, staff, students, and community.
A consensus builder who works with and balances the needs of diverse groups; involves all segments of the community; has excellent communication skills and can foster trust in the system.

A skilled educator who understands curriculum development, instruction, and assessment; can accept and build on current successes; is experienced meeting the requirements of NCLB and current educational trends; and has been successful addressing the needs of diverse student populations and closing the achievement gap.
A proven instructional leader with a thorough understanding of curriculum development and delivery; who is able to analyze data and implement needed instructional changes that will ensure a rigorous instructional program for all children; has success addressing NCLB; and can create a positive climate throughout the school system.

A politically savvy advocate who can work effectively with state and local officials; understands state funding; is not afraid to make changes to benefit the system; and is able to build support for Anne Arundel County Public Schools.
An experienced advocate who is passionate about public education, possesses excellent political skills, and builds positive working relationships with local government, the board, staff and the community.

An ethical leader who holds high standards of integrity, honesty, compassion, courage, and flexibility and expects those traits in staff and students.A decisive administrator who has system-wide experience with budget, finance, technology, and school construction; is successful working with and supporting central and school based staff; and has collective bargaining experience:
An excellent manager with strong administrative, budget and financial experience and growth and facilities management who respects all staff and can support and motivate employees; and is an effective negotiator with excellent collective bargaining skills.Must hold or qualify for Maryland superintendent license and have a minimum of 3-5 years experience in a senior administrative position.
Candidates MUST qualify for Maryland Superintendent License. It is the responsibility of applicants to provide proof of qualifications from the Maryland State Department of Education prior to interviews.

The preferred candidate will have knowledge of the Maryland education system, law, funding, and curriculum and assessment; and will become an active member of the Dorchester County community.

The only prerequisites that don’t seem to match up, really, and I guess this accounts for the 100k difference in salary, are that while in Anne Arundel county, the community preferred “A politically savvy advocate” and one who is “An ethical leader,” evidently, all they really needed in Dorchester county was an “experienced advocate,” one who has “collective bargaining experience,” and this was repeated twice for emphasis.

Now, I am truly struck by the sophistication of the community in Dorchester County, because in all of the years that I have attended meetings and forums and community discussions, I have NEVER heard ANYONE, let alone a parent speak like that.

For instance, I would be baffled to hear the following statement at a school-oriented meeting:

“As parents, we believe that, in our children’s best interest, the candidate will certainly NEED to have “collective bargaining experience…”

And, now for emphasis, we hear from parent number two.

“Yes, and by way of underscoring our commitment to this cherished ideal, I would repeat our desire for the next superintendent to ABSOLUTELY have collective bargaining experience.”

(NO way, I am NOT buying it…)

Let me say that while I sort of see the connection of politics to Anne Arundel county, it being the State capital, actually, I was hoping that the position of Superintendent would, at least in print, have been held true to a loftier ideal than that of a politically savvy advocate---but let’s give the selection committee the benefit of the doubt on this call. Maybe someone’s Mom or Dad works for the comptroller or something….

Unfortunately for Dorchester County, the community apparently disqualified the traits of “high standards of integrity, honesty, compassion, courage, and flexibility” and did not see the merit of these ideal for their next superintendent, nor did they want to encourage “those traits in staff and students.”
Well, I might question whether the Dorchester community would agree on these omissions---but you never know. They may have made a timely point about the lack of need for these qualities when you have a strong contingency for collective bargaining.

Also, in Dorchester County, perhaps what sets them apart or what makes the chosen candidate cheaper is: “The preferred candidate will have knowledge of the Maryland education system, law, funding, and curriculum and assessment; and will become an active member of the Dorchester County community.” So, if you do happen to know much about the Maryland school system or Maryland law, perhaps in Anne Arundel county you would be at once disqualified, or worse, asked to apply somewhere where that kind of knowledge places you in the lower salary range….

“Oops, this candidate knows too much, dock his salary…”

Finally, the candidate in Anne Arundel County need not be an “active community member.” Goodness, I certainly wouldn’t want my ideal candidate to be discouraged from residing in our county of inflated real estate and expensive, luxury-oriented, select interest, or politically based group participation; our teachers, with their bottom-end salary ranges, are already excluded from making the county their home.

Oh, and about the endorsement for NCLB, here was my set of ideals for the right candidate:

Q: What are the characteristics, qualities, and skills you would like to see in a new superintendent?

Thinks independently and creatively about public school education.

Does not buy into the NCLB act or it's insistence on participation in the standards and testing industry.

Endorses a curriculum that is sensitive to the needs of the individual child.

Solicits the professional input of teaching staff.

Endorses an awareness of and dedication to current knowledge about learning.
Believes that smaller classrooms, varied assessment tools, creative curriculum and competitive salaries for teachers belong on a priority agenda.

Dedicates resources, not only to minority and special needs students, but also to real and varied academic opportunities for the entire range of students.

Is willing to research and consider other avenues for students advancement besides AP, IB or other overused, academically disputed recipes.

Will hope to foster community and parental interest, input, and support for our schools, our teachers, and our students.

Has no financial claims or interest in contributing to the growing financial returns of academic test, textbook or tutoring industries.

With no particular political agenda, still believes that our public schools present an opportunity to prepare and educate our students for a better future.

Is an honest, intelligent person who thinks like an educator, a human who still values and develops relationships with teachers, students, and parents.

Q: What issues will a new superintendent need to know about in order to be successful in the County?

The block schedules do not work for many reasons.

Neither does standardization of curriculum, pacing guides, an onslaught of county tests, state tests, federal tests, generic "advanced" or accelerated plans to boost statistics, treatment of children without attention to their own individual strengths, lack of true accelerated learning opportunities, overuse of exams, worksheets, programs not open to the judgment or volition of teacher.

The students are alternately bored, stressed with impossible loads of homework and their opportunity to learn useful information at an appropriate measure has been extinguished.

The teachers felt so oppressed by the resigning superintendent that they organized to express their outrage with a vote of "NO CONFIDENCE" even after he decided to leave.

Of utmost importance in consideration of this position and out of a sincere desire to make our schools better in every way for our students, this candidate has to have the intelligence, the passion and the heart to work at a good professional relationship of mutual respect with our teachers. That is of primary and most critical importance.

So, maybe it’s me, but I am worried every single time I think about this selection process. Is it good policy to maintain the selection as a closed process? Is it fair or accurate that the newspapers refer to the selection process as anchored in the community voice? I’d have a hard time with that piece of “balanced reporting.”

And back to that mention of NCLB. I have never once, with the exception of me and my spouse, heard the act mentioned by a parent at a school-related meeting. As a point of great discouragement for me and to anyone who tries in earnest to encourage an advocacy on the issues of importance in our public schools, PARENTS, as Kappan intimates in its annual surveys, do NOT talk about NCLB.

educationGATE...and other mysteries

2006-01-23T12:49:00.000-05:00

Interesting idea--too bad the Post didn't take the issue to an interesting depth...BUT-- I am still intigued by the continued interest of McGraw-Hill company in Eric Smith. I like the second paragraph where, instead of Smith being remembered for the "miracle in A.A. county," he is simply identified for his "magical senior staff incentives program"...and associated with the likes of another good friend of educational buisiness...

Searches for Superintendents Hang on a Pivotal Decision, Officials Weigh Effects of Going Public or Staying Private
By Ian Shapira
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 22, 2006; Page C07

(an excerpt)

"Public searches, Domenech said, often burn very good superintendents. "Take a guy like Eric Smith. When he was superintendent of Anne Arundel County and applied for the Miami job and didn't get it, it was public knowledge," said Domenech, a senior vice president at McGraw-Hill Education. "And then bad feelings emerged."

Ultimately, however, no search guarantees a successful superintendent. Smith, the Anne Arundel schools chief from 2002 to 2005, was forced out after an internal audit alleged that he awarded senior staff members exorbitant pay raises and bonuses. In Prince George's, Andre J. Hornsby was hired as schools chief after a round of public forums. But he quit halfway into a four-year contract amid an ethics controversy and a federal probe of school system purchases and other management issues."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/21/AR2006012101196.html

SO--I wrote to the guy....

Interesting article on the issue of open vs closed school superintendent selection process--In Anne Arundel County, although a skillful charade was staged to "obtain community feedback" for the M.A.B.E selection team, the ultimate description of the forum results did not match the feedback I heard and delivered at one of three ( moderately attended) such forums.

A thorough, interesting, investigative report would be timely right now to enlighten the public about the reality of the selection process and ask the question of how a school board, appointed by a governor, as is the case in Anne Arundel County, with obvious ties to special interest groups ( the business community, the military community, partisan political affiliations,) has the power to make a decision which will have such a huge impact on our schools' future, with absolutely no community input, and by way of a volunteer panel (the school board members) who have probably as little time invested in research about the outcomes of NCLB and it's effects in our classrooms as the community overall.

Another interesting question: Why does McGraw-Hill educational co. have a stake in the selection process?

Thanks for your time,

SO--he wrote back....

Hi Annie -- Thanks for your email. McGraw Hill doesn't have a stake in the
process. It's just the place where a former Fairfax superintendent works. I
thought it would be useful for the story to have interviewed a former
superintendent who went through these various searches and get his
perspective.

Your story idea sounds good. I'll check into it and see what I come up
with...
Ian

SO--I replied....

Thanks for your quick response...I tend to differ with your opinion...With millions of dollars of school budgets going directly to the McGraw-Hill company, I am sure they do maintain a close interest in the selection of the folks who control those budgets. For example, your guy in Fairax who was given a job there--he must have done a great job when he was superintendent ( especially in terms of budget for testing and educational materials purchased from McGraw-Hill) ...and Eric Smith, he did such a "great job," McGraw-Hill became his publicity manager after he left AA county, (for questionable hiring and raise practices, and other serious results of an audit)--when a video on his pro-NCLB tactics in N.C. came out on PBS.

No, I don't agree at all that the connections are coincidental--and I do believe that there could possibly be a relationship of interest.

Thank you for your interest in the selection process. Anything that helps the community to understand the process is helpful...

ANYHOW--I am SURE that a POST investigation will quickly follow, about the relationship between Educational Testing and Textbook, Curriculum and other supplimental educational service Companies AND the Superintendents (or CEO's) of high profile, BIG BUCKS, BIG STAKES school systems...

what? you don't think so??? (me either....)

my thanks to Sue Allison at MAHST for her endless energy and intelligence

2006-01-17T11:50:00.000-05:00

...And from Massachusetts http://www.citizensforpublicschools.org./

44 GROUPS LAUNCH "CAMPAIGN FOR THE EDUCATION OF THE WHOLE CHILD;"
Seek Overhaul of Outmoded Mass. "School Reform" Policies; Replacement of State Board of Education

Charging that current state policies have led to an increase in dropouts, narrow drilling for the MCAS tests and a failure to provide high-quality learning for low-income children, a coalition of more than 40 organizations today launched the "Campaign for the Education of the Whole Child." (The list of signers is attached.)

The Alliance for the Education of the Whole Child kicked off its drive with the release of a 47-page report calling for a change in the direction of Massachusetts school reform efforts.

"We propose a comprehensive plan for high-quality education for every girl and boy in Massachusetts public schools," explained Ruth Kaplan, Chair of the Alliance. "Schools must meet each child’s individual needs and must provide a full range of academic, artistic and vocational opportunities in an environment that is both challenging and supportive. Unfortunately, current policies are pressuring educators into teaching the test instead of educating the whole child."

"We think we have a vision, a master plan based on collaboration among educators, parents and community. It addresses real educational needs based on better information than just test scores," added Marilyn Segal, of Citizens for Public Schools. "The Board of Education needs to be responsive to the public, not to privatizing corporations, test companies and those who would profiteer from education reform."

Among other recommendations, the report proposes:

- implementing improvement efforts cooperatively with schools, districts and educators;

- using multiple measures for evaluating students and schools, instead of just MCAS tests;

- passing already filed legislation that would strengthen schooling for English language learners, students with disabilities, and vocational students

- repairing the child social services safety net; reversing the trend toward increased racial segregation; and adequately funding needed school improvements.

"Ten thousand students a year are dropping out of our schools; a rate that has increased due to MCAS," said Jean McGuire, Executive Director of METCO, Inc. "If education policy doesn’t work for all of the children, it doesn’t work for any of them. The students we fail are not going to live on Mars, they will live in our own communities, alongside those with whom we succeed. The future of democracy depends upon protecting the legacy of public school education in America while guarding its birthplace in Massachusetts."

"The status-quo approach to school reform has failed to close the achievement gaps between the Dover-Sherborns and the Lawrences," said Lisa Guisbond, the report’s lead author. "Evidence from across the nation as well as Massachusetts demonstrates we cannot test our way to equity. Instead of high-quality teaching tied to strong standards, our kids are getting standardized, one-size-fits-all test prep."

"Governor Romney and Mass Insight's so-called reform proposals will only make things worse," explained Paul Phillips, a Quincy educator. "They have no program to actually improve schools that serve our most needy children, only plans to attack the teachers who work every day with children who are homeless, hungry, have disabilities, and do not yet speak English. Our educators need real support, not schemes for so-called 'merit pay' and more knee-jerk decisions made almost entirely on the basis of test scores. The legislature should reject Romney and Mass Insight's proposals, and as a first step toward real improvement, pass the legislation recommended in the Alliance report."

- The full report, The Campaign for the Education of the Whole Child, and an executive summary will be is available online at www.citizensforpublicschools.org.

TAKE A LOOK AT THIS LIST

The Report has been endorsed by the following organizations:

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Massachusetts, American Jewish Committee, Black Educators' Alliance of Massachusetts (BEAM), Boston Teachers Union (BTU), Brookline Educators Union, Brookline School Committee, MassCARE (Massachusetts Coalition for Authentic Reform in Education), Center for Collaborative Education, Chicopee Education Association, Citizens for Public Schools (CPS), Council for Fair School Finance, Educators for Social Responsibility (ESR), FairTest (National Center for Fair & Open Testing), Global Institute for Student Aspirations at Endicott College, Greater Boston Civil Rights Coalition (GBCRC), Harvard Progressive Advocacy Group (HPAG), Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action (JALSA), Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law of the Boston Bar Association, Lexington Education Association, Mass Association for Bilingual Education , Mass Association of School Superintendents (MASS), Mass Jobs with Justice, Massachusetts Administrators for Special Education (ASE), Massachusetts Association of School Committees (MASC), Massachusetts Association of Special Education Parent Advisory Councils (MASSPAC), Massachusetts Association of Teachers of Speakers of Other Languages (MATSOL), Massachusetts Association of Vocational Administrators (MAVA), Massachusetts Coalition for Equitable Education (MCEE), Mass English Plus Coalition, Massachusetts Federation of Teachers (MFT), Mass Parents for Education not MCAS, Massachusetts Teachers Association, Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO), Multicultural Education, Training, and Advocacy (META), NAACP, Boston Chapter, NAACP, New Bedford Branch, NAACP, South Middlesex Branch, National Catholic Center for Student Aspirations at Assumption College, New England Association of College Admission Counseling, Quincy Education Association, Springfield Education Association, Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts, Work-4-Quality/Fight-4-Equity, Yesodot

absolutely amazing stuff...

2006-01-17T11:47:00.000-05:00

Colorado Coalition for Better Education Press Release
http://www.thecbe.org/

On behalf of the Coalition for Better Education, its founder Don Perl, its hundreds of members from around the state, and the tens of thousands of students, teachers, parents, and average citizens all over the country who are rising up in spontaneous and democratic opposition to high stakes standardized testing, I would like to bring to your attention the CBE's latest educational effort.

Beginning on January 16th, the CBE will be unveiling bus bench ads around the metro area and Greeley (locations enclosed below). The ads will be highlighted by our increasingly recognizable logo of a slash through CSAP and will say, "Parents: We CAN do something about this injustice. Opt out letters available at www.thecbe.org."

The January 16th rollout of our ads, and their location on bus benches, is particularly appropriate given that that is the date for this year's celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. Opposition to high stakes standardized testing, with its well documented biases in the areas of ethnicity, gender, and especially socioeconomic status, is a civil rights issue. High stakes standardized testing is one of the primary factors in the ongoing resegregation of America's schools, with some studies showing that our schools are now more segregated, i.e. have more nonwhite children attending majority nonwhite schools, than in the era before Brown vs. Board of Education.

Parallels to the civil rights struggle also exist in terms of the responses of authority to those who are challenging their policies. Just as governments all across the nation instituted the most draconian punishments against students who protested segregation in the nineteen fifities and sixties, so are they now punishing those who would now stand up in opposition to the resegregation of our schools. The Bennett School District has threatened to fail those students who exercise their legal right to opt out of the test, while the Wiggins School District has threatened to exclude them from extracurricular activities and field trips.

Despite these abuses of power, more than three thousand students, including my daughter, "Just Said No to CSAP" last year ("Denver Post", 3/30/05). They honor the memories of Dr. King and Rosa Parks with their courage and set a shining example that we urge all of the people of Colorado, students, teachers, parents, and the citizenry in general to follow.

Tim Babbidge
Treasurer, CBE
Aurora

Please visit the website at: http://www.thecbe.org/ and look at the editorial statements of Don Perl and the teacher's letters of resignation.

"How did we stray so far from nurturing our children to requiring their slavish surrender to a contrived testing regimen? The trail starts with McGraw-Hill Publishing Company. Their profits have gone from $49,000,000 in 1993 before the advent of high-stakes standardized testing to a staggering $321,500,000 in 2003. They manufacture not only CSAP and similar high-stakes programs, but also the preparatory material. Which do you think is more important to them, the needs, talents and interests of our children, or corporate profits? Do you think that CEO's at McGraw-Hill have read and digested the literature that educators know about the myriad abilities children possess? And who suffers more in this greed motivated scheme - schools like Christa McAuliffe or schools like Billie Martinez? Billie Martinez recently lost much of its effective bilingual education program at the CSAP altar.
An educational agenda founded on corporate greed is shameful! WE THE PEOPLE not only need to prepare our children for the world, but we also need to prepare the world for our children."--Don Perl

Also the statement links. From: Exposing the myths:

"Ironically it is not just standardized tests and the CSAP that is at issue here; performance standards, and evaluating schools based entirely on test scores have all hindered educational improvement. The problem lies in the fact that we have transferred the crucial responsibility of informing, guiding, and monitoring the educational system to test publishers who have no accountability. Business leaders and policy makers, distantly removed from the students, have superseded the role of the professional educators in making vital school and classroom decisions that impact our children.

Parents are evaluating the quality of schools on “data points” instead of doing the necessary work of observing, asking questions, and participating in the efforts of our schools to instill wisdom, integrity, and courage in our growing future. Teachers and administrators have too willingly signed away both their rights and responsibilities in promoting learning that is personalized, rigorous, and meaningful and now have all of the liability and none of the authority.

Instead of educational improvement today’s current reform system has reduced opportunities for disadvantaged children, demoralized our schools, narrowed the range of thought, paralyzed the imagination of a generation, and impeded our children’s intrinsic motivation and the natural will to learn. Our educational institutions are the best hope for our future; when we as a nation ignore individualism and restrain intellectual freedom, we have diminished our capacity for greatness and limited our potential for the extraordinary."--Angela Engel, 2005

here's a real live crock of b.s.

2006-01-09T22:40:00.000-05:00

This CRACKS me up!!! Saluting Open Court and Eric Smith for this miracle!!!!! WOW!!!
Who buys this stuff?

President Bush salutes Glen Burnie school on No Child anniversary
By RYAN BAGWELL Staff Writer

With an entourage that filled five Marine helicopters, President Bush roared into Glen Burnie this morning to celebrate the fourth anniversary of his No Child Left Behind education initiative.

The backdrop was a county elementary school that has closed the gap in test scores between African American and white students -- one of the major goals of the president's education plan.

Flanked by first lady Laura Bush and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, the president lauded the 100 students and teachers gathered in North Glen Elementary's multi-purpose room,

"This is a school that believes any child can learn, not just certain children," Mr. Bush said.

The school last year significantly narrowed its achievement gap, the disparity on state test scores between African American and white students.

Before his remarks, the president met briefly with Laneie Taylor's fifth-grade class after stepping off his helicopter, which landed behind the school just after 10 a.m.

"Is anyone reading more than they're watching TV?" Mr. Bush asked students, followed by a few hands raised high into the air.

Closing the achievement gap is a cornerstone of No Child Left Behind, which requires states to make all students proficient in math and reading by 2014. Mr. Bush signed the bill into law in 2002.

The change in North Glen's achievement gap was dramatic. In 2003, 30 percent more white third-graders scored proficiently on state tests than their African-American peers. Last year, more African-American third-graders reached proficiency than whites.

For the school's progress, Maurine Larkin, North Glen's former principal who now heads Odenton Elementary, credited the district's Open Court reading curriculum and math curriculum put in place by former superintendent Eric J. Smith in 2003.

But in the end, hard work was the key."Programs are programs, but people make that program, and we really looked at each child, and the teachers made an instructional decision on a daily basis about what that child needed," Ms. Larkin said.

The gap between third-graders across the county also has improved. In 2003, 24 percent more white students were reading at proficient levels than African Americans. Last year the gap was 19 percent.

Across the nation, the achievement gap has improved only marginally. On the National Assessment for Education Progress, the annual test billed as the "nation's report card," the disparity in reading scores between African American and white fourth-graders has decreased only 3 points since 1992. In math, the disparity between scores for African American and white fourth-graders only improved 8 points.

In his remarks, Mr. Bush defended his law against critics who said it is too heavy on accountability and results in too much testing.

"They said it was discriminatory to test," he said. "I said it was discriminatory not to test."

Not everyone supports Mr. Bush's education initiatives. In a first-of-its-kind lawsuit, 10 states and the National Education Association filed a lawsuit against Ms. Spellings last year, alleging No Child Left Behind created an unfunded mandate on local schools districts. Maryland was not among them.

U.S. Rep. Benjamin Cardin, D-Baltimore, said No Child Left Behind was intended to make the federal government a partner in improving education.

Instead, it has become an unfunded mandate and created more problems than it has solved, said Mr. Cardin, who is running for Senate.

"It was a promise made and not kept," he said. "It's disappointing that the federal government has not stepped up to the plate to make education a priority."

But Mr. Bush defended the initiative.

"I don't think you want the federal government funding all public schools," Mr. Bush said. "But I do think you want the federal government focusing money on certain aspects of public education."

Security in and around North Glen was tight all morning. Students passed through metal detectors to get to class; parents were not allowed to enter. Music lessons were canceled. Satellite trucks for television reporters lined up next to the school.

County police surrounded the school, and men and women wearing dark suits with ear pieces roamed the hallways throughout the president's visit

A few curious onlookers made their way to the school, only to be stopped on the quiet street corner by police.

"I never in the world would have thought a president of the United States would have come within 20 feet of me," said Jan Suite, a Glen Burnie resident who lives in a townhouse adjacent to the school. "I think it's great."

The five Marine helicopters landed behind the school, carrying White House staff, reporters and the president himself.

White House staff considered several schools for the president to visit today. For weeks, presidential aides visited North Glen and checked up on administrators while only telling them a "domestic policy" official was interested in visiting.

"It's a boost for morale - for our school staff throughout the system, that we have made that kind of progress that we would have a visit from the president," interim Superintendent Nancy M. Mann said.

The students were mostly excited to meet the nation's leader.

"It was very exciting, because it's a once in a lifetime opportunity to meet the president," fourth-grader Corey Martin said.

http://www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/2006/01_09-27/TOP

Published January 09, 2006, The Capital, Annapolis, Md.
Copyright © 2006 The Capital, Annapolis, Md.

recovering from the holidays...

2006-01-06T23:33:00.000-05:00

True to form, my youngest daughter, class of 2009 if she makes it, the class that holds the honor of the first to be fully oppressed by our county educational factory, came to our holiday "break" armed with a thick wad of worksheets and homework to be completed in the week they had "off."

The two of them, her senior sister replete with the requisite school-induced viral invasion, a complimentary feature of every vacation we have known, dissappeared into their bedrooms for hour after hour of lost and deprived sleep and emerged regularly to eat and hammer away at the academic prison walls...

I am resigned to the way the senior will finish off her year; nothing is going to change soon enough for her situation to improve before she is on to bigger and better, and DEFINITLY PRIVATE--an institution of higher learning...

Perhaps I can convince her to skip the exams (for the FIVE AP classes she is taking) once she is accepted at a school she is happy with and the "senior fever" takes over her rigorous devotions to her studies.

It's her sister's situation that has me preoccupied because she has the burden of these next years to contend with and for her sake, I am worried. I can already see the effects on her psyche as she struggles to remain an ambitious student while she is buried in deadlines and tension.

She just turned 14. She is quite bright, quite ambitious, and like her sister, has quite an array of interests she would like to pursue. But, because of her homework, and the relentless schedule of tests and worksheets demanded perpetually, she has barely enough time to sleep and no time for anything else but schoolwork.

Both girls participate in Band, since it is still an option as an elective, but the extra rehersals, competitions and concerts really strain their limits. And although both would gratefully accept offers to participate in more music programs, they fell that they can not afford the time. Neither has time to practise their instrument as it is and both feel guilty about that.

Both interested in Art, I have them in classes outside of school but both feel the pressure and it weighs on them heavily when they are so burdened by schoolwork facing them on days when an hour or two is subtracted from homework time. And the younger worries about finding the time to train for her fitness aspirations; time just doesn't exist for the many plans she has for her 14 year old life.

Friends are fit in combined with homework and sleep deprivation often cancels out the best made social and extra-curricular plans.

Maybe it is partially because her sister is so excited about the fact that her "childhood is ending" as she continually levels that fact on our dinner table discussions, but I look at my younger daughter's tension and fatigue and agony and feel so very sad about the quality of her life as we face more of the same, and worse, in the next few years for her at school.

I can not understand how any parent is missing the results of the changes in our schools over the last several years and the toll it takes on their children. And I can not understand how our school leadership intends to continue to comply as this horrid act grows more invasive.

I am driven to whittle away at the misinformed and uninformed and I do not intend to hand another child over without a fight.

Here's another nightmare...

Jo Rupert Behm: Exit exams unfair to students

Jo Rupert Behm
Marin Independent Journal

THE JOY and excitement high school seniors normally share over their last major holiday has been marred for many by the worst example of failed public education policy to ever befall the state of California and metastasizing over the nation.
The California High School Exit Exam legislation, written and passed at warp speed in 1999 as last-ditch, school reform to meet former Gov. Gray Davis' campaign promises.

Backfiring, high-stakes testing usually reserved for graduate school or law/medical school admissions or professional licensing exams, has now been adopted to keep high school students from ever graduating, beginning with the class of 2006. Even though they will meet or exceed all other requirements amassed over 12,000 hours, 2,000 days, and 13 years in K-12 classrooms, students who fail the exam will not receive high school diplomas.

Even undergraduate colleges, graduate and professional schools do not base graduation entirely on a single test. Diplomas in higher education never rely on one antiquated pencil/paper multiple choice test and a cold-turkey, surprise topic essay written longhand under stress, without any modern technology, drafts, edits, or reference materials.

Such a set-up is grossly unjust and intolerable public policy that works to sabotage life prospects for post-secondary education, lucrative trades, public sector jobs, scholarships, financial aid, and access to sustainable living wages for students of color and with disabilities.

With our affluence, Marin County is in better shape than most, but still 256 Marin seniors in the class of 2006 started this senior year needing to pass one or both sections of the exam.

Eighty-four of these students are seniors with disabilities (mild disabilities, enabling them to be on track to graduate) and 130 are socio-economically disadvantaged, overlapping with 114 English-language learners.

Students who returned for senior year are persevering - some taking the exit exam the fourth, fifth or sixth time this year so the 220 to 230 credits they acquire of English, math, science, social studies, economics, geography, history, performing/visual arts, computers, and electives will not be in vain.

Ironically, required courses include passing about 14 semesters of math and English courses based on the identical rigorous academic standards as the exam. Furthermore, these courses have distinct and preferred advantage over snap-shot tests because courses employ multiple measures, such as projects, presentations, research, reports, and exams, to measure academic achievement. Multiple measures also provide evidence of vital non-testable virtues (i.e., work ethic, determination, public speaking, teamwork, task management, computer skills) that are far more essential and more reliable for predicting success in the real world.

Statewide, 116,496 seniors started this school year still needing to pass the math exam and 113,038 needing to pass the English language arts. A staggering 139,104 seniors (if they bothered to return senior year) still need to pass one or both sections to receive a diploma in June. Between drop-outs and anticipated low pass rates for seniors repeating the exam only about half of the original 522,116 freshmen who started high school together in 2002-03 will walk across graduation stages in California next June and be handed a real diploma.

Many districts are warning seniors who have not passed the exam that they are not welcome at graduation or any senior events. They won't even be allowed to pretend to graduate in front of camera-toting parents, grandparents and younger siblings.

With just 22 weeks of school left, this looming graduation crisis and 11th-hour funding is a public policy spectacle. This month, $44.7 million will be distributed to all 120 special education programs throughout the state with priority to help seniors with disabilities pass the exam.

Three pieces of legislation that would have helped disadvantaged subgroups work around the punitive exit exam requirement and restore confidence in the integrity of teachers and local school officials who know their seniors best got all the way to the governor's desk. But the state ssuperintendent, as author and unrelenting owner of the exit exam legislation, persuaded the governor to veto all three bills.

This supremacist testing policy illustrates woeful disregard for the diversity of California students and callous willingness of education top brass to punish students with life-limiting, irreparable consequences. This, in spite of California's rock-bottom educational infrastructure over which individual students have no control.

There should be no California courtroom left behind if this cruel testing policy is not overturned. Email jobehm@behmer.us for information on two class-action lawsuits now underway.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jo Rupert Behm of Novato is a consulant on state and federal health and education policy and is a past president of the Learning Disabilities Association of California.

http://www.marinij.com/marinvoice/ci_3373835

let the games begin....

2005-12-26T22:22:00.000-05:00

State and county optimistic about superintendent hunt
Inquiries begin coming in a week after job ad was posted

By Anica Butler
Sun reporter

December 23, 2005

With a wish list completed and advertisements running nationally, the search for Anne Arundel County's next superintendent is under way.
Bea Gordon of the Maryland Association of Boards of Education is leading the hunt and says that inquiries about the job are already coming in, a week after the job posting was placed in a national education publication and on the association's Web site.

Gordon said 150 community and staff members attended three community forums and another 150 submitted written responses to help Gordon and her associates from MABE figure out what the school system is looking for. The input was the most Gordon has seen in a superintendent search in Maryland, she told the Anne Arundel board of education at its meeting Wednesday night.

Board Vice President Tricia Johnson said it wasn't just the quantity of responses that wowed her. "I'm impressed with the depth of input you got," Johnson told Gordon at the meeting.

While culling the feedback and responses, Gordon said she and her colleagues "looked for overall themes, recurring comments people made."

With that information, Gordon met with the board, and a description of the ideal candidate was created.

The Maryland Association of Boards of Education Web site lists the ideal candidate as a visionary who is passionate about public education; an open and inclusive communicator; an experienced educator; a manager with administrative, budget and financial experience who works well with others; a politically savvy advocate; and an ethical leader. Applicants are asked to write a narrative on each of the criteria as it relates to their personal experience.

The advertisement lists the minimum salary as $200,000.

Gordon told the board that a brochure about the job also is being worked on. She doesn't think it will be very difficult to find a new superintendent because Anne Arundel County has a lot to offer, she said.

"We do have a lot of issues, but I don't think they're insurmountable," she said. "It's a matter of finding the right match."

Screenings of the applicants are scheduled to begin in February.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/education/bal-ar.schools23dec23,1,6136477.story?coll=bal-education-top

a very eloquent message for our county:

2005-12-14T15:55:00.000-05:00

Superintendent and School Board Parent Forum

Annapolis High School

December 12, 2005

Superintendent Mann and members of the AA Co. School Board:

Following are the remarks I read aloud at the forum. The points in italics were added for this letter.

I commend the interim superintendent and members of the school board for initiating this forum. For more than 3 years, I have anxiously followed the darkening cloud that has fallen over the schools, the teachers, and my children. I appreciate the opportunity to voice my concerns; and I hope the school board will continue to host these forums on a regular basis and publish the proceedings and follow-up.

I have two daughters at South River HS; one is a senior and the other is a freshman. As a way of listing my concerns, I will outline some of the issues that they endure on a daily basis.

My freshman daughter stands 4 feet 8 inches tall and weighs 95 lbs. Every day, she carries a pack that weighs about 50 lbs---a feat no one in this room could accomplish for more than half an hour. She carries this enormous burden because she does not have time to go to her locker. So, my first concern is: why can't the school day be extended by 15 minutes, to give her a chance to go to her locker to exchange books, or, for that matter, to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water?

· The myth popularized at Back-to-School night was that the students do have time to go to their lockers and bathroom. The reality is that, with 2700 or so students rushing madly through the hallways at the same class-change time or having to walk the length of the building to get to the next class, there is no time---or space---to go to the bathroom or locker.

Every day, the girls get up at around 5:30 a.m., to catch a bus at 6:30, to start school at around 7 a.m. Why must the day start so early? I have read that changing the daily school start and end times would cost $2-3 million dollars; I believe that making this change is a matter of will, and the threat of additional costs is a convenient excuse to avoid making changes.

My other serious concerns are all encapsulated within the collateral damage caused by the No Child Left Behind mandate, an educationally empty and insidious program, which, among other issues, has resulted in more tax dollars spent for little gain, relentless testing for little purpose, scripted pacing guides that have turned teachers into robots, and volumes of homework for which little guidance or real teaching preparation can be made. Here's a rhetorical question: If, on the one hand, we celebrate diversity, how, on the other hand, can we create a military-style, lock-step, cookie-cutter approach to education?

Voluminous statistical evidence for the sheer wrong-headedness of NCLB by respected educational authorities is available elsewhere

NCLB was a partisan dictate created by an educational administrator with no classroom experience and a questionable reputation and a lawyer---not by educators

NCLB promises to pay districts for opting in, but the amount is only 8% of the school's budget, which does not cover the cost of the required testing; in AA Co., this is a mere pittance and certainly not worth the false values of educational achievement it claims

NCLB's ultimate value is the enormous profit it affords to the educational industry by allowing the industry to establish educational standards, unchecked and unproven, and then sell the teaching materials to achieve those standards

NCLB, in addition to imposing an educational regime, also directs high schools to turn over students' personal information for military recruitment purposes

A highly structured curriculum is appropriate for some students (eg, special education and underachievers) and specific courses (eg, math, science, and grammar); it is inappropriate for higher level learning and enrichment

My daughter, who entered high school with wonder and curiosity and energy, has become cynical about school; her spirit has been crushed

With the volume of work as it is and the rigid, arbitrarily devised make-up policy (dictated by the pacing guide) that work must be completed by the next class period, my daughter is afraid to attend field trips and even take a day off when she is sick.

My daughters each spend 6 hours or more each night doing work that may or may not be reviewed, in some cases has not been presented or explained (because the teacher did not have time, because of the relentless pacing guide), and may require resources that must be bought or the internet, which not every child has access to.

My senior daughter was assigned 9 weeks of AP biology material (nine chapters) over the summer---with no assistance from a teacher---and no subsequent review when classes started; were told later that the students were assigned this summer home work because the curriculum did not allow time to cover it during the year

With the millions of budget dollars spent on books, still we have had to buy books: we paid $54.00 for an AP English text (not a book of literature but a classroom textbook) for my senior daughter---which did not arrive until the end of October---and approximately $7.00 for a literature text for my freshman daughter.

Block scheduling, which was originally intended as a class time period in which to extend and enrich learning, has been reduced to a means of covering more material but only superficially. The teachers and students have no time to enrich or extend because the pacing guide dictates the schedule---educational content has been reduced to bucket lists of factoids: children don't learn literature or history, they learn language to pass tests.

Block scheduling and the AB- or ABC-day is, albeit confusing, a great opportunity for real learning---if the blocks are used as intended
Not every subject should be scheduled for 86 minutes; the arts, a lab, literature, and history lend themselves to large blocks of time; short, intensive blocks of time (eg, 45-50 minutes) may be better for math and skills
The definition of "rigor," has been co-opted by partisan rhetoric; a rigorous education is not a military-style, one-size-fits all, lock-step process of cramming information for a test
All children must be appropriately challenged; standards without purpose or meaning serve only to teach children about duplicity and cynicism

Between marking period tests, benchmark tests (which generally are flawed), and state proficiency tests, my daughter now takes eight major exams each year, in addition to unit tests and quizzes. The pressure she experiences is not in proportion to the value of these major tests.

Educational research has shown that testing is:

Only one, narrow means of measuring learning

Superficial because knowledge and retention are developmentally specific

Not an accurate measure of higher-level thinking and reasoning

Other research-tested methods, such as portfolios, are far more revealing about learning and achievement

Going forward, I would like to see

· AA County, and in fact, the entire state of Maryland, opt out of NCLB

· A shift away from the philosophy of education as a business model

· The control of public education returned to the teachers, who have been trained to teach, and restricted from the influence of special interest groups, including the business community, the politicians, the military, and religious proselytizers

· A shift away from huge, factory-like regionalized schools toward smaller schools

Opting out of NCLB is not only possible, many states and districts in states across the country already have opted out, and more continue to withdraw

Thank you for your attention. I look forward to your published responses and follow-up.

Sincerely,

Mike Pittard

several thoughts and ideas...

2005-12-13T10:22:00.000-05:00

Our interim School Superintendent and our Board of Education hosted a community forum for input and ideas on the future of our schools. The following are comments I delivered.

Ideas on modifications in policy and practices for our county schools:

The recent campaign to standardize textbooks purchased in our county have resulted in books which are no longer in line with the classroom curriculum. In honors Biology, the county endorsed curriculum includes worksheets and homework assignments on information not provided in the the textbook. To refer students to the Internet to supply the additional resources and references adds demands on a student's time and assumes that all homes have updated technological resources. Assignments based on web resources can be frustrating to the student if the capabilities at home or the capabilities of the software or website are not totally consistent and adequate.

We have been asked to purchase the English Textbook in our student's AP Literature class and numerous novels for use in the English Honors class. Along with the many fees and costs of field trips, the calculator, supplies and dues, the costs associated with sending our children to school has sky-rocketed.

Re-evaluate the use of severely flawed county-developed curriculum (pacing guides and scripts) and tests in core subjects. The organization of Math and Science in particular has been of great concern to the teachers. The tests are often clumsily written, confusing and often incorrect.

The current testing program has inhibited a great deal of both teaching and learning opportunity. The county has most recently been asking for county tests (benchmarks) in Science to apply as half of the student's grade. With so many tests, the curriculum and classroom experience has become a race to measure diluted and abbreviated learning, extinguishing discussion, analysis and creative thinking.

The practice of expanded AP and IB programs have extinguished the opportunity for other, perhaps more useful classes and courses for students of individual and varied ability. In freshman year, the choices for Science are limited to Earth Science, at a lower level or Honors Biology. By the next year, the choices for these students will similarly include AP or nothing much. By their Senior year, the kids have few choices at our children's levels academically but to take course loads of all AP classes. The real goal of this program is the thrust to prove the school's "progress" statistically and not to publicize the many flaws of this program which include a growing group of students with poor preparation causing performance and a growing teaching staff with poor preparation to teach these classes.

The teachers have to be treated as professionals. Their credentials and training should very certainly be evaluated as to quality but to remove them professionally from the process and volition in curriculum development, test development, choice in instructional materials, choice in organization of classes, distribution of students in ability level, etc. leaves the classroom atmosphere often impoverished of creativity and ineffective and mechanical for students and teachers.

Beginning with the class of 2009, the students are required to pass a state exam in each core subject. The quality of the exam is questionable and reduces the teaching to a directed goal toward the test, period. The mentality of such testing-based educational policy has marginalized the experience for teacher and student alike and has attached itself relentlessly to the core foundations of our schools. The value and even reliability of these tests has been a carefully guarded secret and the results of such an expanded testing protocol on our classrooms are on the way to destroying the learning environment entirely.

Block scheduling in Middle and High School reduces the class time and increases class load for the teachers. It is argued by the National Research Council that the reduction in class time gives an already shallow-in-scope AP or IB program further reduced value. Other schedules exist that offer varied course choice but do not compromise the student or teachers class time as greatly. The use of a flexible block schedule could provide, in coordination with departments and individual teachers, the ability for a more appropriate use of time within an overall block schedule. http://books.nap.edu/books/0309074401/html/index.html entitled: Learning and Understanding: Improving Advanced Study of Mathematics and Science in U.S. High Schools (2002).

Rethinking county participation in NCLB:

NCLB requires states to develop, administer, and assess standardized tests in grades 3,4,5,6,7, and 8 in reading and math and soon in science. It
also requires states to develop, administer, and assess standardized tests in high school in reading, math, and science. Developing, administering, and assessing these tests takes money. A lot of money. The research that has been done by the federal General Accounting
Office (GAO) estimates that from 2002 to 2008, states will spend approximately $3.9 billion to $5.3 billion simply on developing and
administering the annual assessments required under NCLB. This number does not include the funds required to develop, administer, and assess special education students and English language learners. NCLB does not say that states must use standardized tests to show Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). However, standardized tests are cheaper and easier to develop, administer, assess, and report on. Given the fact that NCLB is already under funded, there's no way that states can develop more comprehensive systems of assessment without more funding. AYP does not track the progress of individual students over time. The solution, then, is to provide a growth model which demonstrates over time what the accomplishments are for each student in relation to a set of goals and standards. Student accomplishments are measured in a
number of different ways, including -- but not limited to -- scores on standardized tests. ( http://www.fairtest.org/arn/links.html )

Test standards and major research groups such as the National Academy of Sciences clearly state that major educational decisions should not be based solely on a test score. High-stakes testing punishes students, and often teachers, for things they cannot control. It drives students and teachers away from learning, and at times from school. It narrows, distorts, weakens and impoverishes the curriculum while fostering forms of instruction that fail to engage students or support high-quality learning. In a high-stakes testing environment, the limit to educational improvement is largely dictated by the tests - but the tests are a poor measure of high-quality curriculum and learning. In particular, the emphasis on testing hurts low-income students and students from minority groups. Testing cannot provide adequate information about school quality or progress. High-stakes testing actively hurts, rather than helps, genuine educational improvement.

There is a large body of evidence that says that the move towards accountability is having unintended consequences. In some cases, these consequences are disastrous: data that shows that untested subjects are not being taught, the Council of Basic Education report that social studies instruction is down. In our own county teachers are quoted as stating that information not tested or organized into rote learning for regurgitation in prefabricated 5-paragraph format has disappeared. Writing skills have suffered as students learn to rewrite prefab essays and are no longer challenged to find or experiment with a style or a voice of their own. (http://www.fairtest.org/arn/Packer_Transcript.html, http://www.lessonplans.com/commentary.htm , http://www.sptimes.com/2002/07/14/news_pf/Perspective/Formula_writing_teach.shtml, http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/2001-08-22-ncguest1.htm)

Test preparation is on the rise and it's a multi billion dollar market now that shares growing revenues with other opportunistic educational industries of tutoring and "support services" to testing. Our students are learning the skills for test-taking and the educational researchers have coined a new phrase to describe them; they are the "bubble kids." Many academic and research papers have provided information on the many destructive forces of a testing-orientation to school reform. http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/EPRU/epru_2002_Research_Writing.htm

The Government Accounting Office, the Center for Research in Evaluation, Student Standards and Testing, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Education all rejected the NAEP proficiency measure as "fundamentally flawed." And yet, we continue to offer the scores for evaluation of our school progress...why? No research supports NCLB’s contention that the way to improve schools is to test every child every year research argues against the use of such high-stakes testing as an instrument of school reform. Tests that serve as useful monitors lose their credibility, validity and value when high stakes are attached. As researcher Donald Campbell noted many years ago, the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more the indicator and the users are likely become corrupted.

Anne Arundel County:

With change, comes an opportunity to step out of our former structure of thought and practice. With the resignation of our former Superintendent, we have a new day, a new opportunity, a new chance to evaluate the "progress" we have made in our schools and apply what we have learned and experienced to a new, better vision for the education of students in our county.

a most comprehensive and intelligent statement

2005-12-02T13:25:00.000-05:00

The following 10 points made by the National Council of Churches echo a growing national concern over a destructive path for our schools when we naively go along with a political plan which has enormous entrepreneurial interests and profoundly damaging academic practices.

( the highlights are mine. )

Thursday, December 01, 2005

National Council of Churches on NCLB
Click here for a pdf copy of the NCC's ten “moral concerns” about NCLB:

Ten Moral Concerns in the Implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act

A Statement of the National Council of Churches Committee on Public Education and LiteracyChristian faith speaks to public morality and the ways our nation should bring justice and compassion into its civic life. This call to justice is central to needed reform in public education, America’s largest civic institution, where enormous achievement gaps alert us that some children have access to excellent education while other children are left behind. The No Child Left Behind Act is a federal law passed in 2001 that purports to address educational inequity. Now several years into No Child Left Behind’s implementation, as its hundreds of sequential regulations have begun to be triggered, it is becoming clear that the law is leaving behind more children than it is saving. The children being abandoned are our nation’s most vulnerable children—children of color and poor children in America’s big cities and remote rural areas—the very children the law claims it will rescue.

We examine ten moral concerns in the law’s implementation.

1. While it is a civic responsibility to insist that schools do a better job of educating every child, we must also recognize that undermining support for public schooling threatens our democracy. The No Child Left Behind Act sets an impossibly high bar—that every single student will be proficient in reading and math by 2014. We fear that this law will discredit public education when it becomes clear that schools cannot possibly realize such an ideal.

2. The No Child Left Behind Act has neither acknowledged where children start the school year nor celebrated their individual accomplishments. A school where the mean eighth grade math score for any one subgroup grows from a third to a sixth grade level has been labeled a “in need of improvement” (a label of failure) even though the students have made significant progress. The law has not acknowledged that every child is unique and that thresholds are merely benchmarks set by human beings. Now, four years into implementation, the Department of Education has stated it will begin experimenting with permitting 10 states to measure student growth. Too many children will continue to be labeled failures even though they are making strides.

3. Because the No Child Left Behind Act ranks schools according to test score thresholds of children in every demographic subgroup, a “failing group of children” will know when they are the ones who made their school a “failing” school. They risk being shamed among their peers, by their teachers and by their community. The No Child Left Behind Act has renamed this group of children the school’s “problem group.” In some schools educators have felt pressured to counsel students who lag far behind into alternative programs so they won’t be tested. This has increased the dropout rate.

4. The No Child Left Behind Act requires children in special education to pass tests designed for children without disabilities.

5. The No Child Left Behind Act requires English language learners to take tests in English before they learn English. It calls their school a failure because they have not yet mastered academic English.

6. The No Child Left Behind Act blames schools and teachers for many challenges that are neither of their making nor within their capacity to change. The test score focus obscures the importance of the quality of the relationship between the child and teacher. Sincere, often heroic efforts of teachers are made invisible. While the goals of the law are important—to proclaim that every child can learn, to challenge every child to dream of a bright future, and to prepare all children to contribute to society—educators also need financial and community support to accomplish these goals.

7. The relentless focus on testing basic skills in the No Child Left Behind Act obscures the role of the humanities, the arts, and child and adolescent development. While education should cover basic skills in reading and math, the educational process should aspire to far more. We believe education should help all children develop their gifts and realize their promise—intellectually physically, socially, and ethically. The No Child Left Behind Act treats children as products to be tested, measured and made more uniform.

8. Because the No Child Left Behind Act operates through sanctions, it takes federal Title I funding away from educational programming in already overstressed schools and uses these funds to bus students to other schools or to pay for private tutoring firms. A “failing” school district may not be permitted to create its own public tutoring program, but it is expected to create the capacity to regulate private firms that provide tutoring for its students. One of the sanctions provided is to close or reconstitute the “failing” school or to make it into a charter school, but in many places charter schools are unregulated.

9. The No Child Left Behind Act exacerbates racial and economic segregation in metropolitan areas by rating homogeneous, wealthier school districts as excellent, while labeling urban districts with far more subgroups and more complex demands made by the law as “in need of improvement.” Such labeling of schools and districts encourages families with means to move to wealthy, homogeneous school districts.

10. The late Senator Paul Wellstone wrote, “It is simply negligent to force children to pass a test and expect that the poorest children, who face every disadvantage, will be able to do as well as those who have every advantage. When we do this, we hold children responsible for our own inaction and unwillingness to live up to our own promises and our own obligations.” The No Child Left Behind Act makes demands on states and school districts without fully funding reforms that would build capacity to close achievement gaps. To enable schools to comply with the law’s regulations and to create conditions that will raise achievement, society will need to increase federal funding for the schools that serve our nation’s most vulnerable children and to keep Title I funds focused on instruction rather than on transportation and school choice. Christian faith demands, as a matter of justice and compassion, that we be concerned about public schools. The No Child Left Behind Act approaches the education of America’s children through an inside-the-school management strategy of increased productivity rather than providing resources and support for the individuals who will shape children’s lives.

As people of faith we do not view our children as products to be tested and managed but instead as unique human beings to be nurtured and educated. We call on our political leaders to invest in developing the capacity of all schools. Our nation should be judged by the way we care for our children.

so long, farewell...thank goodness

2005-11-22T13:11:00.000-05:00

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/education/bal-te.smith22nov22,1,2535418.story?coll=bal-home-headlines

Arundel superintendent putting in his last day
Achievements of school system chief are acknowledged, along with friction

By Anica Butler
Sun reporter

November 22, 2005

More than three years after arriving in Anne Arundel County as one of the state's highest-paid educators, schools Superintendent Eric J. Smith steps down today, amid public discord, to take an unpaid job and face an uncertain future.

"The reason I decided to resign is there obviously is a difference of opinion about where the school district is headed," said Smith, 55. "I was hired by one board and it's a very different board today. ... I'm not a superintendent that molds myself to the political whims."

Smith, a nationally known educator, is credited with raising test scores in Anne Arundel, narrowing the achievement gap between white and black students, and boosting participation in advanced placement courses.

But Smith faced a rapid erosion of support last summer, publicly feuding with school board members over a critical audit of the schools' human resources practices. He announced his resignation a day before the county teachers union, upset about workload issues and his management style, was to decide on a no-confidence vote. Even after Smith quit, the union passed the motion of no confidence in him this month.

Smith said he plans to stay in the Annapolis area, commuting to Boston occasionally for a yearlong position with Harvard University's Urban Superintendents Program starting next month. He also plans to consult. He doesn't discount the possibility of one day serving as superintendent somewhere else.

"Anything's possible," he said, shrugging. Then, more pointedly, he added: "The thing that drives me is working to build systems that provide greater opportunity for all children."

Smith arrived in Anne Arundel in the summer of 2002 from Charlotte, N.C., where he also received high marks for raising test scores, including among low-income and minority students.

The board gave Smith a $197,000 annual salary, plus a bonus and benefits valued at $100,000. He was charged with turning around an underperforming, system of 75,000 students - Maryland's fifth-largest.

From the beginning, he shook things up. Within months, Smith and the board set specific goals for student achievement and higher academic expectations, to be reached by 2007. Last September, school leaders and civil rights activists resolved a federal discrimination complaint against the system by agreeing to extend those goals to all students.

Under Smith, the rigorous International Baccalaureate program was introduced at two county high schools; the number and selection of Advanced Placement courses was expanded; and uniform curriculum and textbooks, along with block scheduling, were put in place. He also emphasized the teaching of phonics.

Asked what he considered his top successes, Smith pointed to increased expectations and improved academic achievement. For example, all elementary schools met state targets on standardized tests this year, including a previously "underperforming" school.

"He is someone with lots of vision and academic insight," said Sam Georgiou, a parent who heads the county's citizens advisory council. "And I think he brought forth lots of change that may not have occurred if the board had not opted to seek out someone so aggressive."

But getting there wasn't always smooth. Accused of being dictatorial by some, uncommunicative and unreasonable by others, he admits he ruffled some feathers.

"Radical change, like we've done here, you don't do that without some pretty lively discussion," Smith said. "That's to be expected. That's healthy."

One of Smith's most vocal critics has been Sheila Finlayson, president of the Teachers Association of Anne Arundel County.

"I respect what he's done as far as programs are concerned, and new textbooks," she said. But Finlayson said that teacher turnover is considerably higher than it was three years ago, in part because of changes instituted by Smith.

She said the union still held its no-confidence vote because Smith was "still causing harm to teachers."

Anne Levin Garrison, a parent of two South River High School students, echoed those concerns.

"His ongoing and rapid changes have caused good teachers to leave in droves," she said. "That, coupled with the lack of communication and lack of relationship with them, left teachers very unhappy."

Smith doesn't deny he has asked teachers to do more. But everyone, he said, is being expected to work harder, including students, parents and school administrators.

Criticism from the teachers union is not what prompted Smith to leave, he has said.

A rift between Smith and some school board members opened this summer over an internal audit of human resources practices that described missing background checks on school system employees. The report also highlighted inconsistent compensation policies. Board members - only one of whom remained from the board that hired Smith - fumed that he didn't adequately communicate with them.

By early September, Smith had announced his plan to resign, citing "recent public disputes" that had distracted from work.

The depth of the breakdown was evident at Smith's last board meeting.

Smith said he planned to say very little. But as the board discussed an expansion of the International Baccalaureate program - a program that Smith brought to the county three years ago - Smith interjected with a lecture, then an admonishment of the board for its inaction.

That led to sniping, raised voices and one board member refusing to address Smith directly.

Konrad Wayson, the board president, said he "absolutely" agrees with Smith on what he has accomplished here. But, he said, he doesn't agree with Smith's characterization of his departure.

"I don't know where the different opinions occurred. Every time he put something before us he always got it, except this last thing, the I.B. expansion ..." Wayson said. "I'm not going to say there weren't any differences, but it was not anything that couldn't be worked through."

Smith said last week that the board is a good one and that he wishes them well. He also said he would encourage others to apply for his former job.

"I've learned a great deal here," Smith said. "I learned that a large school district does have the capacity to make dramatic and radical transformation in a short period of time."

Asked whether he had any regrets, Smith initially said that he did not. But later, he said, "I regret I can't retire here. I regret I won't be here to see this through completely."

an incredible piece...and perfect for Thanksgiving....

2005-11-21T16:22:00.000-05:00

Paul Beare / Kremen School of Education and Human Development, California State
University, Fresno
(Updated Saturday, November 19, 2005, 6:05 AM)

Teachers have been under continual assault from federal and state government. A
refreshing and learned response came from David Berliner in his presidential
address to the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

Berliner's research has done an excellent job of debunking the value of
high-stakes standardized testing and demonstrating that testing does not result
in improved achievement for students based on any of our traditional measures but
does lead to dramatically increased dropout rates and drastically lowered
graduation rates.

His address meticulously verified that school achievement problems, while not the
result of "too little accountability" are also not the result of a teaching force
that is poorly trained or insufficiently motivated. The true culprit is poverty.
According to the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF),
of the 26 richest nations in the world, the United States is 25th in the
percentage of children living in poverty with 21.9% so classified.

Sticking point

This is a disgrace. This figure stands in comparison with 2.4% in Denmark, 7.5%
in France, 8.8% in Hungary and 13.3% in Spain. These figures apparently do little
to either upset or motivate the policy makers in control in Washington. The
UNICEF report also points out that there is a charter about the rights of
children to which 192 of the 194 U.N. members have agreed, all but Somalia and
the United States. The sticking point is that our current administration does not
"recognize the right of every child to a standard of living adequate for the
child's physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development."

Data successfully demonstrate that our teachers can teach effectively. When you
rate children's achievement across countries, our children are near the top in
reading, math and science, when you consider only children above the poverty
level. Our teachers know how to teach, but they cannot be expected to overcome
the devastating effects of childhood poverty, a lack of nutrition, medical care
or even shelter.

Pork projects

Instead of addressing poverty, policy makers blame teachers, give enormous
contracts to political contributors such as McGraw-Hill, or fund pork barrel
projects such as the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence ($40
million) to develop an alternative test to credential teachers without training
them in pedagogy.

Instead of addressing poverty, the administration proposed cutting food stamps by
$86 a month. Cutting food for hungry children while further enriching the
super-rich has the same logic as most federal education policies. It is time for
policy makers to address the real problems instead of blaming the group trying
most to help children.

The Smithsonian American History Museum currently has a display celebrating the
50th anniversary of the Brown vs. Topeka Supreme Court desegregation decision.
This is ironic, for as Jonathan Kozol aptly demonstrates and describes in his new
book, "The Shame of the Nation," absolute apartheid now prevails in thousands of
our schools. The segregation of black children has reverted to a level that the
nation has not seen since the 1960s. Instead of a rounded education, children in
public schools receive a regimen of test preparation in reading and math,
followed by testing, followed by more test preparation. The result is a lack of a
real education.

Health problems

Poverty's foremost effect is on children's health and environment. Directly
related to poverty are rates of asthma, lead and mercury poisoning, birth weight
and brain volume, hearing and vision problems and lack of resultant treatment or
remediation. Poor children live in poor neighborhoods. Research data has
demonstrated that neighborhood deprivation has serious effects on educational
attainment. Gang membership, street crime, negative role models and a lack of
mentors for impoverished youth depress achievement, while exposure to higher
expectations, expanded educational/career options and the positive peer culture
found in more affluent neighborhoods accelerates learning.

Schools alone cannot do what is needed to help all children achieve at high
levels. Instead of finger-pointing and blaming those who try the hardest to help,
business must provide employment and communities must fight the concentration of
poverty in a single area.

Fresno, according to the Brookings Institute, is the single worst city in the
nation on this measure. Policy makers must be sure no child is hungry or without
health care. Teachers should be allowed to teach as they have been trained and as
they know best, not forced to teach meaningless standardized tests. We will not
achieve the ideal, currently given only lip service by Washington, unless
everyone takes responsibility for children and their learning.

Paul Beare is dean of the Kremen School of Education and Human Development,
California State University, Fresno.

broadening your dedication

2005-11-18T14:15:00.000-05:00

The following are excerpts from an academic (electronic) discussion. Every single one of these eloquently spoken individuals understands the urgency of setting a course of change in our schools.

Who is it up to to follow the goals set forth by this group who have already defined the issues ten-fold times to each other and in print and in research in acdemic journals...

OKAY, let's say it is up to the parents...

WOW...what a great idea. Funny thing is--the parents have no way to understand as completely and astutely as these academics do WHAT EXACTLY THE ISSUES ARE AND WHAT EXACTLY THE FACTS AND SUPPORT OF THE ISSUES ARE....THEY HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IS GOING ON...You read the Kaplan survey, you KNOW the reality of the media reports, you know the strength of the business community....

You educated and accomplished people who have devoted your careers to these issues now, have forgotten that you need to BRANCH OUT from your own captive and private clublike places and enter into the real world....

WELCOME TO THE FRONTLINES...welcome to ground zero.

I am asking, no pleading, in my following letter to give it a try back in the places that need your voices right now...Come home to the towns and cities that NEED YOUR VOICES, NEED YOUR KNOWLEDGE...You have already reached agreement among yourselves.....

Here are your words:

A campaign to get members to educate parents would be a good
idea - some of that has probably been done. But that also leads to, what
will people do? It is a lot easier to get people to pay attention if they
believe there is action connected to it - otherwise it is often just
depressing or overwhelming.

Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 15:43:49 -0600
arn2-strategy
Subject: How to Talk to Parents About NCLB

We need to spend more time on helping teachers take appropriate action
against NCLB. The problem is, of course, that they risk being fired.
Ultimately, I believe teachers need to educate parents on the facts of
NCLB. It's up to parents to get pissed off and take action in relation
to administrators, school board members, and state legislators.

With that in mind, how about putting together a kit for teachers on
"How to Talk to Parents About NCLB"? It would provide suggestions for
communication strategies as well as specific language they can use to
talk about the law without getting into trouble.

Thoughts?

Peter

Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 18:18:10 -0500
Subject: Re: [ARN-state] How to Talk to Parents About NCLB

I would start from various existing things:

FairTest has 1 and 2-page fact sheets on our website.

PURE in Chicago combined some of their stuff with FairTest stuff into a
packet.

Harvard Civil Rights project has a guide - dvd/VHS and booklet - not sure
they have anything short.

Advancement project has stuff. PEN has OK descriptive stuff but lacks
critical analysis. Center for Community Change.

NEA probably has stuff - could look at their website.

I think NCTE does as well.

In short, there is a lot of stuff out there; perhaps none perfect - but much
I would say that is pretty good and pretty accessible, ranging from very
short things that get those without deep interest, to progressively more
detailed and complex materials for those with progressively greater
desire/need for ideas, facts, etc.

But a critical problem is how to disseminate - Harvard CRP is having
trouble, for example. We do get quite a few hits to our NCLB stuff on the
web, but we've no other vehicle for mass dissemination.

In theory the PTA would - but they are staying hands off on NCLB.

The NEA can disseminate widely to teachers - what I do not know since I do
not get it, is what have they done especially in NEA Today which goes to
every member. A campaign to get members to educate parents would be a good
idea - some of that has probably been done. But that also leads to, what
will people do? It is a lot easier to get people to pay attention if they
believe there is action connected to it - otherwise it is often just
depressing or overwhelming.

The AFT can also, and they are taking some steps, certainly as compared with
a year ago - and I've no detailed knowledge on what they are doing or how.

CCE just published their fall Education Organizer newsletter - it is not yet
on their website - and it has a strong piece on local organizing linking
NCLB, high-stakes testing, privatization and gentrification.

Any means to get on widely-listened to TV or radio would be a great hook -
but how to do that?

Monty
_________________________________

Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 17:32:22 -0800
Subject: Re: How to Talk to Parents About NCLB

I have done a bunch of such workshops, but mostly as an "expert
outsider" who was invited in by teachers or parents, or who did the
contacting myself and got myself invited. It was safe for me because
I was not a district employee. We usually did the presentations in
non-school facilities or in private houses in order to avoid school
district interference or harassment directed at the teachers or
parents. I have overheads I can send as attachments to private
individuals. They're pretty self-explanatory. Nothing
complicated. Mostly about the bogus nature of the "scientific"
research on reading and the invalidity of using single measures to
evaluate teachers.

My recommendation: we academics must do some "praxis" by providing
such workshops as invited experts where teachers are scared or
intimidated. Lots of folks are still unduly impressed by the PhD, so
we might as well serve as hired guns for the downtrodden teachers.

Pete Farruggio

Here are mine:

This is an interesting but frustrating conversation to read. Especially since I have written this recent e-mail to fairtest and received no response, not even automated...

"I am fighting a battle that I am afraid I can not win without help. What would it take to have the opportunity to have members of your organization come to our community to alert and inform the community about the urgency of the harm being done in our schools.

Please respond,"

I have also written to several more of you on this list...but it seems to me that you are so busy in the debate of the issues that you have gotten lost in a place where you reach a closed audience of other like-minded academicians and although your editorials and opinions are eloquent and absolutely crucial, they are being read by your peers and have little chance of reaching the very people who need convincing...

My children are schooled in a large county system just outside of Washington, DC. The superintendent, who is a perfect inoculate and example of the manner in which this very edu-cancer in discussion metastasizes, has resigned. The county board of education seems squashed between the very strong voice of the business community and the very fragmented desires of an uninformed public.

The public or the parents are innocently stranded by the media-perpetuated statistical campaign; the only way they half-way know ( if they even know, ) how to discuss school issues is in the language of the NCLB. That is, they are stuck on debates of proof of progress with details of expanded advanced placement enrollment and ayp scores and standard test scores. They have no reference with which to leap into understanding that tests are unsound or teachers are asked to manipulate their outcomes or that testing limits the scope of learning or curriculum. They have no way to understand or accept the rapid destruction being perpetrated in our schools by all of the details and issues we understand; and I understand because I spend hours making a point of understanding, you understand because it is your career...

As you well know, the teachers are pertrified. They also have no time or energy left after accomplishing the mandated requirements of meeting goals and battling test and measurement protocol. Their unions and associations are busy with the often defeated battles of salary increase and work load and disciplinary crisis'.

The time is here and ripe, it seems to me, to come into a community in such an opportune moment and at such a crucial regional presence in relation to Washington and apply some of your academic passion to a real-life situation calling out with opportunity.

I am one voice, I am one parent. Tell me how you will help me. This is our chance...

the long and the short-sightedness of it...

2005-11-14T16:49:00.000-05:00

As it turns out, no one even called us. So, we called and met with the Vice Principal...( why does it matter who we speak with, really.) As is sadly the case more often than not, he knew exactly what our concerns were based on and underscored the total control of the county, their policy, their curriculum, their tests, their utter and complete control over the teachers and administration. IE: "We understand and agree but there is not a thing we can do."

Tonight the scheduling person called to provide an offer from the principal. They would change our daughter's schedule. Amazing, isn't it. I have to be thankful that they did try to offer something but good grief, in our county and with the state and county demands, the teachers are simply interchangable; nothing at all would change but the worker-bee who reads the script...

The teachers are not at fault here, I clearly feel their pain and dissatisfaction. Collecting my daughter's homework, one of them whispered her own pressing goal: " I am looking for any way out of teaching..." And, I am guessing the feeling is a reality for any teacher experiencing this horror...

So, where, how does it go from here? When is it safe for the teachers and administrators who obviously share our urgent concerns to speak out?

I am tapping my fingers--we HAVE to do SOMETHING....

more of our nightmare

2005-11-14T16:46:00.000-05:00

Nov. 14, 2005

Dear Ms. Director of Science Curriculum:

Below you will find a copy of the letter I sent to our HS principal. I have not yet heard back from him. We would like to get to the school today to find a reasonable manner to resolve the horror that has been my child's experience in this class. If you would like to be a part of a cooperative effort to examine the effects of this curriculum and its demands on the students, and teachers, and plan to join us in a dedicated plan focussed on action to stop the suffering, please contact us immediately.

RE: XXXX
Nov. 13, 2005

Dear Dr. Principal:

I have been in regular contact with my daughter XXXX's honors biology teacher Ms. Biology teacher this year. I am extremely concerned about the amount of work, especially homework, that this class demands. I realize that these demands are a function of the county determined science curriculum, the pacing guide, the testing mandates of the county, and state, and the county mastered course. I understand also that under this control neither the teachers nor the students are allowed any leeway for professional input nor individual needs.

I am writing to you now to request your assistance. My daughter is a bright and ambitious student who maintains a determined and regular dedication to her schoolwork, her homework and her studies. I am appealing to you to take seriously and stand up for her and her teacher's need for some adjustment to the pace and demands of this class.

I am asking you to understand that the volume of work has my child pushed beyond her limits to cope. It is not that she has one difficult class at all or that she is not interested or willing to do her best. It is rather that on top of the demands of this class, my daughter has 3 other honors classes, band, art and other activities that she wants and needs to do well in. Last week, my daughter went on the freshman field trip. She also went on a required band trip. Missing the classes has her workload crushing. This is a regularly occurring event. Several weeks ago, asked to go on a field trip because of her exceptional dedication, she declined. She was fearful of the extraordinary load that would result if she missed another day. Her situation was a catch 22. The teacher left piles of work for the students who did not attend the field trip.

My daughter worked hours on end to meet the demands of this class and also continued her efforts toward her other classes. As a result, she has been hours every single night on her homework and there is no chance that this pace will lessen. My daughter begins her day at 5:30 a.m. and is consistently up until midnight doing her school work. This situation is stressful and is having a negative effect my daughter's health. She is also very sad.

My daughter was asked to join the Orchestra this year, an honor and certainly something she wanted to consider. She cannot fathom adding yet another 2 hour rehearsal to her week because of homework. She hardly has time to practice her instrument as it is. My child, Dr. Principal, is not unique in her sense that her time and her life and the demands of her school work are impossible and endless. We are aware that the stress and demands have several of her friends pushed beyond their tolerance as well. The children are choosing to miss school now because of the stress and impossible grind and then struggle as additional work piles up.This has to stop.

Today, my daughter worked the entire morning on her Science Fair project. With the exception of meals, she has worked on nothing else but the required homework, completion of schoolwork, and additional demands of Biology. It is now 12 hours since this child began her day. I estimate that if she worked 12 more hours, she might be prepared to begin her week, having all of her work completed. This, again, is too much.

Please consider this request for you to investigate the value of this kind of stress on a 13 year old child. My child who is extremely healthy and sound has already experienced the impact of this amount of stress on her health. We are asking you to talk with the teachers and investigate for yourself the exact conditions of this course and it's toll on these students. This is not by any means personal to our daughter alone, it is a condition of every student in this class and the teachers as well.

With the standardization of curriculum, the county pacing guides, their test schedule, and the state testing demands, the nature and process of the teacher's position has changed dramatically. I am aware that this has been a source of frustration and stress for the teachers. I hope that with the changes in administration at the county level, you will soon have an opportunity to advocate for changes where policy has interfered with quality. And I hope that when you consider the impact of these dramatic changes in our school over several short years, you will think about my daughter, her friends, her teachers, and calculate whether what they gained statistically was really worth what they lost in reality.

This situation is urgent. I am asking you to provide us with a plan to resolve the impossible amount of work and resulting stress for our child. She is not willing, neither is it appropriate for this child to move into the Matter and Energy science class and there is no alternate Biology class for her this year. This student, I remind you, is ambitious and capable; the problem is the curriculum, and the teachers, should you consult with them, surely can support that analysis.

I would like to meet with you as soon as is possible so that these concerns can be discussed and a plan implemented to deal with them. I am available Monday and Friday this week before, during, or after school, and Tuesday, before or during school. I am also prepared to address these issues with the county department of science curriculum staff.

I would like to hear from you today.

Sincerely,
Ms. XXXX

Teachers make their voices heard...

2005-11-08T09:28:00.000-05:00

ARNOLD -- The Teachers Association of Anne Arundel County has voted no confidence in outgoing Superintendent Eric J. Smith, the union president said.

About half of the union's 4,200 members weighed in on the decision made at Severn River Middle School Wednesday night, union President Sheila Finlayson said. About 70 union representatives personally voted for the no-confidence motion.

"He is still putting things in place that are causing harm to teachers and students," Ms. Finlayson said.

Dr. Smith, who's leaving the school system Nov. 23, declined to comment on the vote. He pointed to a survey of parents and staff members last spring that indicated increasing satisfaction with his work and with the Board of Education.

Even though he's leaving in a matter of weeks, the vote was still needed, Ms. Finlayson said.

"Anyone who calls this petty doesn't understand what teachers do every day," she said.

http://www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/2005/11_04-26/TOP

read the whole stunning piece

2005-11-04T18:56:00.000-05:00

This is an excerpt from:
The Education Reformation of NCLB and the Crusade to Kill Public Schools
Jim Horn, PhD

"To those who continue to support an educational policy of false promises that threatens psychological and intellectual genocide against our children, and thus our future, let me ask you to go into the schools and see what has already happened there before you continue down this road. Ask elementary teachers and students about what has happened to the joy of teaching, learning , and of coming to school. Ask principals about what has happened to recess and field trips and civic purpose. Ask curriculum coordinators what has happened to the social studies, health, and the arts. Ask counselors about student behavior and teacher morale. Ask the public what it means when their local schools’ Title I dollars are used to pay private tutoring firms who are accountable to no one except their own Washington lobbyists and the insiders at US DOE that shovel them their millions. Ask parents about what it means when their children pass their subjects and are left behind because they did not pass a test. Ask them and listen, and you will begin to hear a rumble, steady and getting stronger, moving upward—signaling that the American public will not go so gentle into that night of the corporate socialists."

http://schoolsmatter.blogspot.com/2005/10/education-reformation-of-nclb-and.html

what have they done????

2005-11-04T18:45:00.000-05:00

Understanding the elite schools...

2005-11-02T13:17:00.000-05:00

From Sunday's Post, a book review:

The Ivy Curtain
How meritocracy in higher education arose from a system built to keep WASPs in and Jews out.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kittay

(Sunday, October 30, 2005; Page BW03)

THE CHOSEN

The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton

By Jerome Karabel

(Houghton Mifflin. 711 pp. $28)

an excerpt from the review:

Proof of extracurricular activities, leadership qualities, letters of recommendation -- we take all these as natural, necessary and even enlightened elements of the college application process, though they cause us endless anxiety. Actually, they don't resemble in the least the way people in Europe or Japan get into college. They're a result of a particular American challenge at the turn of the 20th century, which President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard then characterized as follows: how to "prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews."

Prior to the 1920s, Harvard, Princeton and Yale accepted all applicants who met their academic requirements. Adjusting the size of each university's incoming class was not a problem since there were very few such qualified candidates, mostly because only a handful of elite northeastern private schools -- such as Groton and Andover and St. Paul's -- provided the kind of classical education (including Latin and some Greek) that the universities required. Since admissions were not "selective" in any substantial sense, none of the Big Three needed an admissions department.

The Chosen is an exhaustive account of how we got from that efficient and cozy arrangement to where we are today. It's particularly fascinating because there is such a growing stake -- and so many stakeholders -- in the process of selecting who gets access to higher education in general and elite education in particular.

But beware and rejoice. Beware because this story, alas, is not one about a group of presidents and deans steadily becoming enlightened to the virtues of equal opportunity. And rejoice in the details that Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel reveals and the patient analysis that he deploys; he shows how, in spite of an applicant's proven academic performance, the Big Three favored in overwhelming numbers the sons of the Protestant moneyed class because the institutions determined that it was in their self-interest to do so. The way these universities have sometimes answered but mostly resisted societal demands to open their doors turns out to be a juicy story indeed. And "juicy" is not the kind of adjective one customarily uses to describe a book with 557 pages of text and almost 3,000 footnotes.

By the end of the 19th century, Harvard, Yale and Princeton were committed not primarily to refining the intellect but to welcoming the well-bred, athletic, public-spirited and sociable scions of the privileged -- young men who may not have performed well academically but were destined to be the leaders of the next generation. "By the 1890s, 74 percent of Boston's upper class and 65 percent of New York's sent their sons to either Harvard, Yale, or Princeton," Karabel notes. Things took a new turn when Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, concerned that his school was educating just the wealthy, and his successor, A. Lawrence Lowell, took measures to attract more boys from good public schools. Though hardly egalitarians, Eliot and Lowell modified the university's entrance requirements -- including dropping Latin and Greek requirements -- to encourage more schools to prepare their students to compete for Harvard slots.

The result of such measures, at Harvard and elsewhere, was a horrific surprise: too many Jews! Jewish enrollment jumped to then historic highs of 4 percent at Princeton (1918), 9 percent at Yale (1917) and a distressing 20 percent of the freshman class at Harvard (1918). Though most of these students were more than academically competent, they didn't fit the usual definition of "gentlemen." And their numbers were continuing to increase. A meeting of New England deans in 1918 put the question squarely: How could they limit the growing Jewish presence?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/27/AR2005102701733.html

and a live online discussion with the author:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2005/10/31/DI2005103100369.html?sub=AR

When standardization is engaged, everyone suffers the same indignities

2005-11-02T12:09:00.000-05:00

As heart-breaking as Peter Campbell's report (A Visit to a Corporate Welfare School ) is..I would like to point out, that in many districts that are clamoring to meet the mandates of their district and state's compliance with NCLB, the atmosphere is very similar.

The environment in our public school classrooms is similarly regimented and oppressive, the teachers are under pressure and, even if they recognize the horror of what they are required to accomplish, they have little choice but to comply...Do you think they are often irritable and short with the students--You bet!

Are the students beat down by such a system? In my daughter's AP lit. class, class discussions are non-existent; How in the world does one learn about literature without an opportunity to discuss it? It doesn't really matter anymore, since the objective is locked in by the standard test.

What do the parents understand about these suburban classrooms and schools? For the most part, they are simply responding to surface, media-dispensed statistics about state or district "progress" and they are bought into the "lake woebegone" myth of advanced placement and other programs providing their child-product "accelerated" opportunity.

The fact that the movement is so tied in with other voices of propaganda--the business world, the faith-based groups, the military...creates a lobby strong enough to pre-empt any voice of dissent...

Sometimes, it seems like an adult version of The Lord of the Flies, and the steady growth of this mentality will leave only the shrewdest, most cold-blooded warriors intact.

I have to say that this article has my attention because I believe that it is an accurate, informative and important look at the life inside of a school and classroom. I understand and agree that the indignity of teaching a minority child or ANY child in the manner described is horrid. I have to correct several passages because I believe that these accurate corrections are the other half of the story. You see, more of the truth has to be included in this very important narrative.

In the following section, I will follow the author's words with my comments, in red. I have used numerals to label each excerpt for the purpose of this discussion.

excerpt I: "This is even more troubling given the fact that no white, wealthy, suburban district would ever consent to a school that controlled its students and its teachers in this way. Indeed, these schools pride themselves in their individuality, their creativity, and the professional autonomy of their teachers, who are viewed as experts in assessing what is best for each student."

comment: My children are schooled in a "wealthy, white, suburban neighborhood." Although I would not call it "consent," because I am alarmed about the extent to which parents are unaware, the dynamics described in the paper closely follow the dynamics in our public school classrooms. In fact, while "these schools pride themselves in their individuality, their creativity, and the professional autonomy of their teachers, who are viewed as experts in assessing what is best for each student," the school board, appointed by the governor in our state, has employed a superintendent who created scripts, pacing guides and a grueling testing program, in compliance with our state and federal mandates and in accord with the NCLB act. Our teachers have no autonomy and, as experts, have no ability or time to assess anything of the kind; no individual student matters to any extent, except to the degree that they will support a desirable statistical outcome on tests.

excerpt II:..."he's being taught to read through Open Court. In Reading the Naked Truth, Gerald Coles writes, "Putting an excessive emphasis on word skills might result in beginning readers not achieving competence in a variety of additional strategies of reading, strategies especially necessary for high-level material in later grades. An excessive skills emphasis that encourages children to see reading as 'word work' rather than as an experience that informs and excites them and fires their imagination could discourage enthusiasm for reading and thereby encourage aliteracy, that is, students who know how to read but have no interest in reading."

excerpt III: "In classrooms such as these at Edison, I see this deadening effect at work. Low-income minority children are being given the lowest of the low when it comes to a rich curriculum. The reading program is designed for one thing: to help kids pass the state standardized test. The rationale is understandable: these kids need help in "the basics" because they don't get it at home. But this then leads to the creation of a curriculum that is nothing but the basics. No white, wealthy school - not a single one in the country - uses the Open Court curriculum."

comment on excerpts II and III: "No white, wealthy school - not a single one in the country - uses the Open Court curriculum." Ours does.

excerpt IV: "It's little wonder why this is the case: no wealthy, white parent would stand for these dumbed-down curricula. Not for a minute."

comment on excerpt IV: "It's little wonder why this is the case: no wealthy, white parent would stand for these dumbed-down curricula. Not for a minute." Ours do.

excerpt V: "If he lived in my suburban district, he would have a different educational experience, thus a different life, and thus a different future."

comment on excerpt V: "If he lived in my suburban district, he would have a different educational experience, thus a different life, and thus a different future." If he lived in ours, he might have a nicer house, more open space to run and play in, more personal safety, and more opportunity to grow up healthy, but don't believe for a moment that his educational experience, at this moment in time, would even be marginally different from the oppressive and lackluster atmosphere that was so accurately described in this article.

I include the following log to substantiate my comments about our "white, wealthy, suburban" school district and hope to illustrate that while the rhetorical phrases are in place, (Advanced Placement, Honors,) the application of these "opportunities" are corrupt.

I have identified my children as 1a=first child, and 1b=second child...
this way, no child is number 2.

Back-to-school night this year:

I went to "back to school night" last night at our childrens' high school. Let me tell you what a dramatically changed situation this is over the course of three years time.

In biology, for example, and 1a is in AP and 1b is in honors, these two teachers are incredibly dedicated to their craft and their specialty, BOTH expressed outrage over the scripted, limited, test-oriented, handicapping of the county control of their classrooms. The honors teacher held up the pacing guide and apologized profusely and said she could no longer accept being forced to follow a program that insists she race through material in a classroom where they can not learn. She also picked up a huge manual and said: "and look at this: this is my SCRIPT." She was not expressing a reaction to change; she was expressing a tangible fact of her classroom. She is 5 days "behind" and her entire class already failed one test, which she planned to exclude. The depth of teaching that takes place under these restrictions is, as you can imagine, quite compromised. Racing through sections of material, important concepts covered only by a demanding, abbreviated worksheet with contents dictated by the selected references from the test is not the kind of learning experience I had in mind for my children.

1b, being the super-type-a student that she is, got a 50 something on the test and she is only one of several very capable students in the class. You see, the pacing guide and testing program just doesn't work! ( and if it doesn't work for students of 1b's ability, you should just imagine for a minute what is going on in classrooms of children who are at lower levels.) I happen to talk to them too; it breaks these teacher's hearts and my heart. They showed me their pacing guides and stood there, eye's brimming sometimes, and asked me how in the world these kids can be expected to deliver on these inappropriate curriculum guides. The point is that they can't. The children are falling farther behind and the teachers' spirits are dying. No one is learning. Everyone is miserable.

My children are robbed of hour after hour of time outside of school with endless, mindless, worksheets and assignments that have them up until midnight before they slump into a mere 5 hours of sleep and wake up to do it all over again. They race to their school busses in the dark of the morning and wake up to yet more of the endless looming standards and measurements that will hallmark their academic careers and continue to leave them little time to read a book for enjoyment or participate in an art or music class for enjoyment or personal growth.

In 1a's AP science class, the teacher happened to love her science and teaching and had basically the same remarks, except, in this case, it was all about the college board approach to the classroom: the entire class is dedicated to the test. The good teacher, the good scientist, can't possibly function with this sort of harness...But their principal and most importantly, their superintendent demands that these courses be taught this way; IE: the goal is the test score ( the statistic that the press will more than likely write an article about. ) The AP class has a guidebook and a test-orientation just like the other classes. The difference is, this time we buy it from a vendor that has a phenomenal monopoly on the educational services circuit. Do you get my point?

1a is taking 5 AP classes. She did that because these were classes she really wanted to take, subjects that she wanted to learn about. Learning in our schools now means learning what is on the test. Apply that to 5th year french. This class is only taught as an AP class now. This entire class is devoted to test taking skills. I have to tell you that the teachers, bound by the superintendent's pacing guides and scripts, his dedication to expanding AP, his block schedules, have destroyed the teaching and learning that could be the legacy and essence of our schools for the teachers and for the students.

1b is miserable, and so are her teachers. She is working for hours on assignments and worksheets the teachers have to get done, even if the material being delivered is way too complicated for homework, and even if it is a waste of time; there just isn't time in class for it all and the county dictates the plan; period. The teachers know it, 1b knows it, but the papers continue to report the "progress." neither 1b nor 1a, or their teachers experience it as progress; do you?

1b is 13 years old. Her life right now is full of dread.

Conclusion:

The situation is horrendous; definitely. Be aware, however, that this time, it is bad for ALL of us.

A Visit to a Corporate Welfare School: Peter Campbell, instructional designer and reform activist, visited an Edison School today. Assessment Reform Network listserv.( accessed Oct. 25, 2005 at http://schoolsmatter.blogspot.com/ http://schoolsmatter.blogspot.com/2005/10/visit-to-corporate-welfare-school.html )

what I NEVER meant to say....

2005-11-01T09:21:00.000-05:00

We have an epidemic here...The newspapers have it. The community members who consistently speak at our school board meetings have it. Our key school administrators have it. Matter of fact, most everyone who merits the attention of the news industry has it.

I am considering catching it.

It is called the I SPEAK FOR EVERYONE syndrome.

It goes like this: Someone wants to make a strong statement about the success of our schools under NCLB; they buy into the test-mill approach to beefing up academic progress and the general "how can you expect improvement without placing a high-powered weapon at someone's head" method of compliance and progress evaluation.

...and they proceed to inform you.

The "truth" is delivered like this: "As president of ( insert: the local PTO, the Business Coalition, the Military alliance, etc.) I speak for the entire community ( or the parents, or the nation) in support of the progress we have made in our schools. They go on to quote rising test scores, or describe expanding AP programs or accelerated math policies...and blah, blah, blah...

...you read and hear it a lot.

The problem is: they DON'T speak for me. Neither do they speak for my children, their peers, or their teachers. They hardly speak for my neighbors or my community when according to my own unofficial tabulations, and Kappan's formal survey, over 50% of parents and various community-members don't even know what NCLB is about yet, ( and why on earth would they NEED to understand it, since they are already "spoken for," ) let alone understand the insidiousness of the resulting changes in our community schools.

The "universal speaker's virus," it occurs to me, opened with the file containing various financial opportunities created for entrepreneurial and political development in the master NCLB file. Suddenly, and the HIGH STAKES moniker applies here, it is not just children and our future we are talking about here, it is MONEY and POWER and INFLUENCE.

...such esteemed potentials require the creation of imaginary support.

For instance, when my children are in tears over nightly continued editions of the torturous county-inspired curricular demands to do more worksheets and reading and prepare for the next onslaught of testing ( which is the core of their classroom experiences and the pacing guides that define them, ) can it be that the businessman who eloquently spoke at the last board of education about the success and progress in our schools be the representative of our voice? Is the pain really worth the dollars and influence he will cash in on? Does he really "speak for us?"

Well, let me see...how much money, since he is proposing a partnership, would make my childrens torment acceptable...

And the president of the PTO, or the CAC, or various other "representative voices" in my community...they do get their names in the paper a lot. Okay, how much notoriety would equal the value of the sleep and laughter and pursuit of enjoyable activities lost in this treadmill approach to academic progress. I am at a loss for what they might owe the children and me...power? popularity?

Certainly I have a right to speak for everyone too. And I have to say, speaking for everyone, that I don't appreciate the way my children's ( or their teacher's ) lives are being ravaged by the rapid changes and delivery of the imposed, harmful, academically lacking, destructive forces mandated by this act. As a matter of fact, and I speak for everyone again, I want to have our lives and our volition back.

I want my children to stop hurting...and I want it owing no one a penny.

The problem is, and I am speaking for us all again, the microphone has (coincidentally) been disconnected.

This information will be on the test...

2005-10-26T11:29:00.000-04:00

Sadly, standards extinguish many learning opportunities...If it isn't tested, it surely doesn't need to be offered. Do you buy that?

Our children are in 96 minute classes now, slots deemed neccessary for intensive devotion to a menu of pre-selected courses. The courses are taught by scripts and are harnessed by pacing guides. Curriculum is based directly on county and state and federal testing, except for Advanced Placement, which is likewise controlled by the guides and tests owned and sold by the College Board company. Many of the other "learning" opportunities are purchased from other federally endorsed Educational vendors.

Thirteen year olds, in their freshman year of High School are given the first indoctrination to the PSAT exam, also owned by the College Board company. Although the accelerated math schedule now has a growing percentage of students taking advanced math classes earlier, they still have not had the opportunity to experience much of what is tested on these grueling high stakes exams. Nevermind that, we are led to believe, the students are benefiting, once again, from the testing experience itself; goodness knows they will have many, many more tests to take before they are finished their public school careers, it just makes sense to get them used to it...

Doesn't it?

a.) I feel nauseous.
b.) My child is stressed, tired and sick of this.
c.) Maybe we need to rethink this whole "reform" movement.
d.) Someone is making a whole lot of money at my child's expense and making unauthorized charges on our future.
e.) all of the above...

Philadelphia Grapples with History Mandate

Despite overwhelming agreement that high schools need to teach more African-American history, the Philadelphia School Reform Commission's decision to mandate such a history course as a graduation requirement has stirred debate inside the state.

Philadelphia's poor performance on the PSSA standardized tests has raised the concern that reading and writing should take precedence over the new history class. "If 75 percent of eleventh-grade students are below basic standards, how can we expect students to learn such comprehensive material when they don't have a grasp of basic reading skills?" asks Beth Williams, spokeswoman for John Perzel, the speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. "You wouldn't go to graduate school right after high school."

Gregory Thornton, Philadelphia's chief academic officer, answers critics by saying the number of students testing below PSSA's standard level has decreased during the past three years. "Just because a kid can't read at a great level doesn't mean he can't understand. You keep raising the bar and instead of saying kids need less, we say they need more," he says.

Just the Facts

The African-American history course under scrutiny was created in the 1960s in response to student-led protests demanding the school board include a class to reflect Philadelphia's growing African-American population. The in-depth course begins with a study of African civilizations and then examines the African-American experience in the U.S., exploring themes such as civil rights. Philadelphia, the first state to make the course a graduation requirement, created a standardized curriculum to be used in all of its schools.

http://www.districtadministration.com/page.cfm?p=1272

what we have failed to preserve in the process of "improvement"...

2005-10-26T11:21:00.000-04:00

Beverly Enns, a faculty chair for curriculum and instruction and reading/literacy at Capella University in Minneapolis, says secondary classroom teachers need to understand the fundamentals of reading instruction and integrate this knowledge with content acquisition. Sarah Mahurt, associate professor of literacy and language at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., offers these strategies to help teachers get started:

Engage the student in dialogue Instead of asking students to just give an answer, encourage them to explain their understanding of the material and how they arrived at the answer.

Assign more writing on the reading By slowing down the thinking process, writing allows students to explore and articulate their own connection to the material.

Avoid worksheets Students learn more by generating their own questions that engage the student in dialogue, rather than filling in blanks.

Categorize the text Help students identify different types of text, like narratives and research papers, so that as they process the material they can determine which information is the most relevant.

On the fast-track with my little girl...

2005-10-26T09:52:00.000-04:00

Dear Teacher:

I am writing to you to share my daughter XXX's workload as of today. Maybe you could re-think the amount of classwork and assigned homework you left for this particular class today while you were out.

I have highlighted the work she still has facing her and, as you can see, it is 7:15 p.m.

When XXX is finished this work, which I expect will be some time after midnight, she will be lucky to get 5 hours of sleep before it is time to get up, run for her bus in the dark, and do it all over again, except that tomorrow night, she has band practice for 3 hours, so XXX will not be home until 7:30.

I have to add, just for your knowledge, that XXX has been feeling ill ( she is exhausted and run down..) but has refused to miss classes to rest or possibly see her Doctor because she DOESN'T WANT TO HAVE THIS WORKLOAD PLUS MAKE-UP WORK TOO.

I also would like to remind you, that XXX is 13 years old. She has been an excellent, successful student. Her standards have her working very hard and she takes every assignment in every subject seriously. This is her first year of High School and she is taking 4 HONORS courses, is in Marching Band, county soccer and has joined a club at school.

XXX was invited to attend the field trip that you went on today but worried about missing classes, so she declined the offer. I understand that the children who did go, are excused from the assignments.

I know that we have spoken before about the relentless demands of the county pacing guides, county demanded testing schedule, and the compounding problems of the block schedule. I can only ask of you, that you continue to act as an advocate for our students and our schools and continue to be the voice of reason. Maybe this letter will help you to lobby on behalf of what you already know to be true. I wonder if there is any way to bring the unrelenting demands of the county endorsed Biology plan back to a comittee for reconsideration.

But in the meantime, I wonder if you might reconsider the assignment of such heavy amounts of homework. I am quite concerned about this workload and wonder if something more reasonable can not be considered.

Thank you in advance for your time and consideration,

BIOLOGY:
(AFTER COPYING 2 pages of NOTES FROM THE OVERHEAD--)

I:FINISH THE DRILL:
(XXX has already completed the reading and the questions.)
a.)complete reading of pg. 14-20
b.)answer questions 1-5
c.)list the scientific method
d.)complete the data lab
e.) answer questions 1-5 for the data lab
f.)complete a formal lab report.

II: COMPLETE VOCABULARY:
(XXX FINISHED 30 WORDS in class...)
a.) look up the next 40 words
b.) define them, hand written on note cards

III:NOTEBOOK REFLECTION:
a.) 1-2 pages of writing, providing an analysis of the notebook, suggested improvements, areas of proficiency.
b.) provide a parent summary of the above.

(XXX FINISHED THE WORKSHEET IN CLASS)
( XXX FINISHED THE STUDY GUIDE IN CLASS)

IV: STUDY FOR TEST

GOVERNMENT:
a.) finish a worksheet
b.) do a crossword for extra credit

ENGLISH:
a.) create an illustration of similie from the text for class presentation
b.) finish explaining similies and examples in words

BAND:
a.) practice instrument
b.) prepare for parade and game this weekend
c.) attend rehearsal for 3 hours tomorrow (4-7pm.)

IN ADDITION:

GEOMETRY:
a.) complete 29 problems from the textbook
b.) STUDY FOR TEST TOMORROW

...and i was just gonna charge them for my electric fees....

2005-10-21T09:35:00.000-04:00

Board to pay $27,000 to help find new school chief

RYAN BAGWELL, Staff Writer

The county Board of Education will pay a Maryland nonprofit organization $27,000 to guide the search for a new superintendent.

In an executive session leading up to last night's school board meeting, board members settled on hiring the Maryland Association of Boards of Education to find Superintendent Eric J. Smith's replacement.

The board plans to hold public forums in mid-November at four locations around the county to determine what kind of skills, qualities and experience they want in the next superintendent.They'll have specific meeting dates by sometime next week, board President Konrad Wayson said.

After the forums, there will be little public involvement until the spring while the search is conducted."Until you present the applicants in March, I don't know what else we can do out in the public," Mr. Wayson said.MABE, a nonprofit organization which all Maryland school boards voluntarily belong to, offers support services and lobbying efforts for its members.MABE executives said in September they'd have to start the process in October and November in order for the board to appoint a superintendent by July 1, the date which state law says superintendents must start.

The law also says superintendents must be given a four-year contract."We've got no choice but to have it done in time," Mr. Wayson said. "Board members have to make a priority to make the meetings and get this done, so we can have a superintendent in place July 1."

Debbie Ritchie, president of the county council of Parent-Teacher Associations, sharply criticized the board for dragging its feet on the search during a public comment period. A month had gone by since MABE's original presentation without any search plan implemented by the board."If you consider that presentation as your plan, your communication skills need to be improved," she said.

After the meeting, she still felt they didn't have a plan, and that might deprive the community of a voice in the superintendent choice, she said."I'm afraid that a lack of parent involvement in the process isn't going to be because parents aren't concerned, its because it happens quickly," she said.

Sam Georgiou, chairman of the countywide Citizens Advisory Committee, has also strongly criticized school board members for not having a plan."It's a start," he said. "But more details need to be forthcoming.

"The school board did not look at other search firms, Mr. Wayson said. They were running out of time, and MABE has a good reputation, he said."I got to meet them at orientation training, and I was very impressed," school board member Enrique Melendez said after the meeting.MABE will charge considerably less than the $70,000 school board members said the district spent to find Dr. Smith.

The board did not vote on the contract, Mr. Wayson said. There was a general consensus to hire MABE and no objection among board members, he said.

http://www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/2005/10_20-36/TOP

...selective exclusion and the Newspapers

2005-10-19T20:56:00.000-04:00

Excerpts below from a piece that most graciously explains why most of the best letters and papers written to newspapers about issues in education will never be printed in them.

Its research base was Virginia, and although it is directed by a particular interest (in the issues of charter schools, home schooling, vouchers, and tuition tax credits,) the article does a damn good job of decribing the "big" newspapers' resistance to including the "little" voices of advocates, parents, and other "outsiders" on educational issues.

I know that our little local paper and our big Washington Post have followed the recipe, excluding the voices that radically differ from their own agenda or interest.

The following are excerpts from:

Society's Watchdogs

http://www.choices-k12.org/Society's_Watchdogs.htm

Americans today rate daily newspapers less “believable” than local and national television news, and a majority think newspaper reporters are out of touch with mainstream society.This study, based on telephone surveys of education print reporters and analysis of 403 education-related articles published over eight months by four daily news publishers in Virginia, suggests the criticism may be warranted when it comes to daily newspaper coverage of elementary and secondary education.

Newspapers’ education news coverage is largely a conversation of, by, and for the public school industry.

• 65% of published articles related to topics of foremost interest to the public school industry, namely,
public school funding, public school staffing, and public school wage and benefit proposals (261 of
403 articles).

Other topics of public interest received substantially less attention:

• 22% addressed student achievement/state Standards of Learning performance (88 articles);

• 7% discussed the federal No Child Left Behind Act (28 articles);

• 3% were related to miscellaneous matters such as school boundary proposals (14 articles);

• 3% addressed public education reforms and innovations such as charter schools, home
schooling, vouchers, and tuition tax credits (12 articles).

• 95% of all sources cited in all articles were government/public school-affiliated sources (1,364 of
1,438 sources); 5% were non-government/public school-affiliated sources (74 articles).

Newspapers disenfranchise other constituencies with a stake in the public education service and an interest in reforms and innovations to deliver the service more cost-effectively and better.

Taxpayers who bear the cost of the public school service received scant attention from newspapers.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), arguably the most complex and least understood federal accountability initiative ever undertaken,10 was the subject of 28 news articles (7%).

(10 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup’s 2004 annual poll reports that 68% of Americans say they know “very little” or “nothing at all” about the federal NoChild Left Behind Act (www.pdkintl.org)

Asked what most commonly triggers an education story by their news organization, nearly two-thirds of the journalists surveyed (63%) said “an announcement/press release by a federal, state, or local education agency.”

Yet taxpayers rarely have a voice in newspaper coverage of school funding issues. Of 938 sources cited in 261 funding-related articles, public school officials were quoted 535 times (57%) and public school advocacy groups were cited 154 times (16%). Individual taxpayers were
quoted six times (less than 1 percent), and taxpayer advocacy groups were never cited.

Newspapers generally look to public school Parent-Teacher Associations (PTA) for parents’ perspectives on education-related issues, but no one organization can adequately represent the diverse perspectives of all public school parents.

....unlikely to see her viewpoint reflected in the news pages of her local paper—or ever have a reporter ask why she thinks the way she does—may help to explain why Americans believe newspaper journalists are out of touch with mainstream society and newspaper readership
continues to decline. She is invisible to them. Newspapers can blame readers, as Columbia Journalism Review publisher Evan Cornog suggests, for no longer caring about traditional community and civic institutions that newspapers cover so effectively. Or they can see readers as victims, as Cornog does, of changing political winds that seek to “reduce government’s role in American life” and of public school reforms that place too much attention on raising achievement for a competitive marketplace and too little attention on raising good citizens for a consensus society.23

Such an assessment, writes blogger Tim Porter, leaves “newspapers not as chroniclers of the community but as curators of a civic museum without patrons,” and fails to consider “the leadership newspapers can play in defining, supporting, and engaging new communities—communities of interest.”24

Those new communities of interest exist. They may be less sophisticated in media relations than the public school industry, but they are citizens whose conversations about education practices, policies, reforms and innovations are progressing. Engaging in those conversations should come naturally to a newspaper industry that built its reputation publishing complex, contentious policy ideas at the dawn of a new nation.

(23 Evan Cornog. “Let’s Blame the Readers: Is it possible to do great journalism if the public does not care?” Columbia Journalism Review,
January/February 2005 http://cjr.org/issues/2005/1/cornog-readers.asp)

(24 Tim Porter. “Should We Blame the Readers? Not If We Want to Survive,” First Draft, January 21, 2005 www.timporter.com/firstdraft/)

Journalists’ First Loyalty--“We should expect proof that the journalists’ first loyalty is to citizens …This means stories should answer our needs as citizens, not just the interests of insiders, or the political or economic system.”-- Citizens Bill of Journalism Rights, Project for Excellence in Journalism

Newspaper coverage is largely a closed conversation of, by, and for the public school industry, which disenfranchises other constituent groups and citizens with a stake in the public education service and an interest in improving that service.

Newspapers look to public school and government sources to set the education news agenda, while the public’s views are increasingly influenced by reformers and innovators.

Society’s Watchdogs
Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute
Spring 2005

And now, a word from our superintendents...

2005-10-18T10:57:00.000-04:00

"The No Child Left Behind Act is the most damaging, intrusive piece of legislation to enter education in my 32 years as a public school administrator. "
—Bill Powell, Superintndent, Strasburg School District, Colorado

"The [NCLB] law is sounding the demise for public education as we know it. . . . the law was enacted to grease the skids for vouchers."
—Elizabeth Grouse, Ludlow , KY Schools Superintendent, in Sunday Challenger

"I think the whole [NCLB] rating system is deceiving and doesn't reflect all the factors. If you want to talk about destroying the motivations of both students and staff, the state and federal governments are doing a great job of that. "
—Robert Andrzejewski, Red Clay, Delaware Superintendent of schools

" I think the very first quality that a good teacher has is that they care deeply for children and they want to see them learn; they want to see all children learn and succeed and realize their potential. They have to have the heart, the caring."
—Lea Alpert, school superintendent, in Hawaii Advertiser

"We need to stand up for what we are supposed to be doing in public education."
—Tom Kelly, Westchester superintendent

"There does seem to be a campaign against public education in this state"
—Washington Township (IN) Schools Superintendent Eugene White

"The implicit message from the state to local schools [in their aiding and abetting NCLB] is 'send away your moderately to severely disabled students, don’t include them in regular classes, and do everything in your power to discourage immigrants, minorities, and the poor.' A message of disgrace."
—William C. Cala, Superintendent , Fairport, NY Central School District

"This is an artificial score, and I don't think it accurately judges a school system at all. No urban system is going to do well with No Child Left Behind. It's a joke."
—Bert Bleke, Grand Rapids Superintendent

"What if we say to Sammy Sosa, ‘We will base your contract on how you bat on July 5,’ and what if he has a bad game that day? The problem is the NCLB system is based on a single, high-stakes test, and it does not even test what we are teaching. "
—Tom Jobst, Ottawa Township (ILL) Superintendent

"We're now in the brave new world of No Child Left Behind and multiple tests at every grade level. In order to figure out if we're leaving kids behind, that means we test them till the cows come home."
—Tony Evers, Wisconsin Deputy State Superintendent of Schools

"We moved so quickly. We did ready-fire-aim. We never should have given $1 billion in rewards [to schools making high scores on standardized tests]. . . . It was a waste of money.''
—Delaine Eastin, former California Superintendent of Public Instruction

"NCLB: I want superintendents to stand up and say they aren't going to do this to our children. If one does it, he would be looking for work the next day. But if we can get all 501 to do it, they would have no choice but to listen and understand the problems."
—Jerry Oleksiak, Pennsylvania teacher

"In March, I traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, to help honor a brave group of individuals, who dare to stand up to test-driven oppression in that city's public schools, at a school rightly named the World of Opportunity. While there, thirty educational activists from around the country formed a new organization, ACT NOW--- Advocates for Children and Teachers National Organizing Workshop. One of our activities at this first annual gathering was to visit the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. Among the examples of successful activism and life-changing struggle was a small piece of encouragement to our fight here in Washington. On a table, there was a stack of paper, an announcement of a bus boycott. How simple and effective! Don't ride the bus. Don't drink the tea. Don't take the test."
—Juanita Doyon, candidate WA state superintendent of public instruction

http://susanohanian.org Susan Ohanian and her website are the Library of Congress of information about education, schools, policy, resources, nclb, research, media, commentary, etc, etc, etc...Her quotes section is a place of magic for me. Her spirit, her energy, and her encouragement are endless treasures. Get on her e-mailing list and you will not be sorry.

SCHOOL REFORM AND THE ATTACK ON PUBLIC EDUCATION
by David G. Stratman(a few excerpts)

The following speech was delivered as the Keynote Address to the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents Summer Institute, 1997. The audience included about 275 school superintendents and assistant superintendents.

"...the process of formulating positive reforms should begin with a far-reaching dialogue at the local and state levels, involving administrators, teachers, parents, and students, about the goals of education. This dialogue should examine present educational policy and practice to find what things contribute to self-confidence and growth and healthy connections among young people, and strengthen the relationships of schools to communities, and what things attack this self-confidence and growth and undermine these relationships. A similar dialogue should be organized in every community and at every school. It might include public hearings, at which parents and teachers and others are encouraged to state their views on appropriate goals for education, and to identify those things in their local school which support or retard these goals. Superintendents would have to be both leaders and careful listeners at such hearings."

"The most important thing to do is to reach out to the community with information explaining the attack on public education. We should remember that the community begins with us--that is, with all the many people involved in public education: teachers, administrators, parents and students. If we can educate and mobilize this great community force, we can achieve a great deal."

"We are called to a great purpose. We are called to build a movement capable of defending our institutions from corporate attack and capable too of transforming them, to lead them in a more democratic direction. We must build a movement to take back America from the corporate powers and the masters of great wealth, to place our country truly in the hands of the people."

http://newdemocracyworld.org/edspeech.htm

David Stratman was the Director of Governmental Relations of the National PTA from 1977-79, and directed the National Coalition for Public Education in its defeat of the Tuition Tax Credit Act in 1978. He works now as a consultant to education organizations and school districts.

...a letter from an irate parent (guess who); you won't find it in the Post

2005-10-17T10:40:00.000-04:00

Although my letters have occasionally merited responses from the Washington Post Ombudsman or individual reporters, reporting and perspective on the topic of education is predictably narrow.

Dear Sir:

I am outraged by the Post editorial ( Mr. Smith goes to Harvard. ) I have excerpted ( in red ) the lines that are particularly slanted and unsubstantiated and have responded briefly to them below.

This editorial clarifies the unbalanced position that the Post takes when it comes to the unfortunate and rampant destructive forces of a federalized public school system. It is clear that the revenues the Post Corporation enjoys from educational enterprises ( Kaplan Inc ) outweighs their conscience and their honesty when it comes to fellow supporters of a bad plan ( NCLB. )

Mr. Smith's departure is a setback for Anne Arundel schools, which made impressive strides during his three years at their helm.
Only if you buy into the concept that standardized curriculum based on standardized testing measures success or progress.

Having come from Charlotte, where he was lionized as an educational wunderkind for having narrowed the racial achievement gap between black and white students,
In Charlotte, Smith received the very same reactions to his arrogance, his improprieties and his master plan. Meanwhile, the drop out rate during his tenure grew and the teachers morale diminished.

He was clear on his priorities: to raise standards across the board while also righting decades of wrongs by insisting that the least advantaged kids be pushed, coaxed and cajoled into the same demanding, quality courses available to more affluent students.
He has a catchy slogan; how does this distinguish him?

After three years, his program achieved plenty. Black high school students' scores rose on standardized tests;
participation in Advanced Placement courses more than doubled; and every county elementary school met state testing targets
But their scores on SAT's did not. Neither did they in our county.
Again, the catchy slogan...does anyone but Jay Mathews and the Post/Kaplan/CollegeBoard/McGrawHill/et al family of "educational" investors really buy the AP explosion as anything but a great market? The current applications of this once advanced program in our schools lacks everything the rest of the standard practises lack and in application and delivery, suffers the same limited outcomes.

Parents liked him
Where do you get the information to make such a statement. If you want to make a sweeping statement about parents, why don't you qualify how you can substantiate it. It is a fabrication and a stretch of facts to imply that the parents of Anne Arundel County have a singular voice in support of Smith.

the headaches outweighed the rewards
Smith's headaches happened to be the realities highlighted in a second audit which pointed to many new and more of the same improprieties that were part of Smith's legacy during his tenure in A.A. County. He was also facing a vote of no confidence from the teacher's association following the very negative results of their survey.

He took a job at Harvard University
The position he took at Harvard is an internship of sorts, not a paid position as you imply. And the suggestion that Harvard is the ideal that everyone holds in such monumental esteem is elitist and ridiculous at best.

Here it is, short and eloquent:

2005-10-17T09:37:00.000-04:00

Everything I have read by Alfie Kohn has been thoughtful and informative. The combination of his wisdom, his knowledge, and his talent, showcased in his writing, have his books sharing places of easy access, bedside, beside my most cherished literature....

A WORD ABOUT "NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND"

Alfie Kohn

(an excerpt)

...We must quit confining our complaints about NCLB to peripheral problems of implementation or funding. Too many people give the impression that there would be nothing to object to if only their own school had been certified as making adequate progress, or if only Washington were more generous in paying for this assault on local autonomy. We have got to stop prefacing our objections by saying that, while the execution of this legislation is faulty, we agree with its laudable objectives. No. What we agree with is some of the rhetoric used to sell it, invocations of ideals like excellence and fairness. NCLB is not a step in the right direction. It is a deeply damaging, mostly ill-intentioned law, and no one genuinely committed to improving public schools (or to advancing the interests of those who have suffered from decades of neglect and oppression) would want to have anything to do with it.

Ultimately, we must decide whether we will obediently play our assigned role in helping to punish children and teachers. Every in-service session, every article, every memo from the central office that offers what amounts to an instruction manual for capitulation slides us further in the wrong direction until finally we become a nation at risk of abandoning public education altogether. Rather than scrambling to comply with its provisions, our obligation is to figure out how best to resist.

-- from "Test Today, Privatize Tomorrow," April 2004

http://www.alfiekohn.org/standards/rationale.htm

What I have learned and believe...

2005-10-16T16:15:00.000-04:00

This is a request for teachers, administrators, policy makers, legislators, parents, students and citizens to look into the political and personal and financial gains for the people who support NCLB; this mandate and its movement are neither altruistic nor honorable.

Know that the rhetoric, the statistics, the premise and the structure of this law is wrong. The schools, the teachers, and our children are suffering.

Let's take back our schools.

The current emphasis on testing forces teachers to “teach to the test” when their real job should be to inspire our students to love learning. Rather than improving teaching, our current county pacing guides undermine the profession by taking away the teacher's ability to engage students using a variety of techniques and strategies depending on the needs of the students in the class.

In order to ensure that all children thrive, schools need to be places of active and engaged learning, with a curriculum designed to maximize success for every child.

In a thriving learning community, multiple assessment tools, including tests, written work, performances, oral presentations, and peer and teacher-reviewed portfolios, can be used to gauge the progress of individual students, the effectiveness of teachers, and the overall success of a school as a place of engaged learning.

There are many powerful ways to improve education in this country. We can strengthen the ability of parents, communities, and informal learning institutions to be equal partners with teachers, educators, and administrators. The best way to ensure high standards and accountability in every school is to give parents a meaningful role in the leadership of their school and a voice in shaping education policy.

We can do this one child, one school, and one county at a time...

It is time for a new era of parental involvement in which parents are actively engaged in the governance of their local school and have a powerful voice in education policy.

Make your voices heard. Read. Listen. Think.
Before it is worse.

THE HISTORY:
Here is how it was in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, NC, where our resigning superintendent's leadership and legacy continues to be in evidence.

September 06, 2004

Talented Teacher Leaves for NASA

Caryn Long, a science teacher who reached for the stars, is leaving Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools to work for NASA.

As a teacher at Winterfield Elementary, Long won a prestigious NASA fellowship and applied to become a teacher-astronaut.

Long won't be suiting up for space travel. But later this month she'll move to Mississippi to work at the Stennis Space Center, helping other teachers learn how to get students engaged with math, science and technology.

She leaves with warm memories of students and colleagues, but with bitterness toward a school district she says has become too test-driven and bureaucratic to support innovative teachers.
"CMS is a big machine," Long, a 37-year-old new mom, said from her Union County home Thursday. "I don't think they're doing what's best for kids. The only thing that counts is the test scores; it's the only measure of achievement."

CMS hired Long when she graduated from Queen's College -- now Queens University of Charlotte -- in 1988. In 1999 she came to Winterfield, an east Charlotte elementary school where most kids are black or Hispanic and come from low-income homes.
She loved seeing children's faces light up when she taught.
She started pulling in honors, including a 2001 Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching.

But Long saw things that disturbed her. North Carolina's ABC program was driving testing to the forefront of education. Students' scores on state exams were shaping school ratings, teacher bonuses and children's chances of promotion.

She saw third-graders throwing up on test days. She saw a fifth-grader fall to the floor in tears of relief when a teacher told her she'd passed her exams.

"Why are we doing this to an 11-year-old?" Long wondered last week.

In its quest to boost performance, CMS uses standardized test-prep lessons and "pacing guides" that tell teachers what material to cover on what days. That tends to squeeze out the creative exploration that sparks a true love of learning, Long says.

In 2002, Long won an Einstein Fellowship for outstanding math and science teachers. It meant she would spend a year working with NASA in the nation's capital, using space exploration to spark kids' interest in math and science.

Long says she got enthusiastic support from Winterfield Principal Donna Parker-Tate.
But from central offices, she says, she got hassles. She had to fight to get pay-scale credit for the year she spent in Washington, and had to use her fellowship stipend to pay for health insurance.
Louise Woods, who chairs the school board's personnel committee and helped Long with details of her fellowship, acknowledges it was complicated and frustrating. She said she doesn't know why Long decided to leave CMS, but she's sorry to lose her.
"She's a wonderful teacher," Woods said Thursday.

CMS tries to balance freedom and standardization for teachers, Woods said. Federal and state laws force the emphasis on test scores. And the district set up pacing guides when it became clear that some schools -- often those with high poverty levels -- weren't covering the required material in a year.

But flexibility and support for star teachers are "something we do need to work on," Woods said.
Another talented teacher has left the profession to pursue a more lucrative and rewarding career in the private sector.

And while she packs her bags, the Administration scratches their heads with all those unused rulers and wonders, "Why?"

The answer is simple, good teachers are no longer allowed to actually teach. They are "instructors," told to cover X amount of material in Y amount of time if they want to keep their low-paying jobs and manage to get a meager raise.

And the material that they are given is not information that is potentially useful to the students. It is a curriculum that is designed to achieve high scores on the standardized tests that are used to rate the school systems and therefore the school administration.

What we have here is a system in which school administrations are pushing children to score high on a test, so they can themselves garner a higher salary for improving education' in their respective districts. And in a few years, after they have made a name for themselves, they pack up and move to yet another area and begin the same dance.

Meanwhile, we are giving students ulcers worrying about test scores that mean nothing to anyone except the school boards and department of education.

Back in the classroom, we see a teacher who has been in the profession for 16 years and has won numerous awards for her abilities. After winning the Einstein Fellowship, for being such an excellent science teacher, she was sent to work with NASA on developing studies that would help children get more involved in math and science programs. And what did she get for her trouble? She was forced to use the stipend that she received during this year to pay for medical insurance and had to fight to even get her standard yearly salary.

But NASA recognized talent when they saw it, and they made her an offer of a larger salary and even more importantly, the chance to actually influence the education direction of the nation's young people.

Now Caryn Long is truly an educator and a teacher, not just an instructor.

http://www.mac-con.com/christweb/archives/2004_09_06.html

THE PRESENT:

Eric J. Smith, Superintendent of Anne Arundel County Public Schools, has resigned. The county residents now have a new opportunity to evaluate and apply their knowledge about his policies and dedication to the federal No Child Left Behind Act by educating themselves and overseeing the board of education's choice for our next superintendent.

In his testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce, June 2004, Smith stated: "This law [NCLB] has fundamentally transformed the debate about public education in this country by changing the discussion from one about the lack of student achievement and issues beyond the control of schools and school systems to one about using research-proven strategies to ensure that each child can read, compute, and write on grade level."

Smith's standard approach to "excellence" in our schools has been to invest heavily in the programs of the top financial magnates in the educational industry, pouring increasing proportions of our budget into specific programs and high-stakes tests of questionable educational value. As is his style, he did not engage in any dialogue, he simply sprang forth with dramatic change, and invested in programs and a system of testing that ultimately has replaced curricula. Early in his tenure, after his dramatic changes became obvious to parents and notable in the trauma perceived by both the teachers and students, he held "community forums" at several schools, which served as misinformation campaigns, as he handled parental and community concern about pacing guides with the cunning admonition that: "these are GUIDES...not restrictions...." and that teacher's KNEW that they DID NOT have to follow them, but that they were meant simply as loose frameworks, or standards, but not scripts (insert appropriate fable here). Asked to account for the figures on expenditures to specific vendors during the three year tenure of Smith in our county, our county offices have explained that "that is a lot of research" because they do not keep the figures on specific expenditures by vendor.

Thanks to him, what is being taught in our schools is a scripted, measured, time-locked schedule of county endorsed "clips." Each day a certain page of information is presented (called pace guides), and information is abbreviated to conform to the time constraints (called block schedules), culminating in examinations that meet county, state and federal requirements of "proficiency" measurement. Teachers are frantic to keep up with "the pace," and although by the end of the year they previously were left with time to review some of the information, to perhaps strengthen the learning opportunity or even support a little abstraction from the year's academics, they now test; they now struggle to finish the clips; they now bite their nails to nubs worrying about the statistical regurgitate that will be the measure of their and their students' worth. Now, every subject is managed by this mestastisizing policy, which means by the end of the year in a given class, the students are tested daily, weekly, monthly, and by semester for the PSAT, SAT, HSA, and AP, and since THAT is still not enough, they will have course finals too (and I mean in Phys. Ed. too).

The other half of Smith's "nationally acclaimed success" is the Advanced Placement explosion. Classic examples of how his dedication to the rapid expansion of AP classes have faired are the roots of hilarious dinnertime discussions at our house. The teachers, forced to accommodate the doubled AP classes offered, have not been adequately prepared either. The subject matter and abstraction of concepts is difficult, even with a guidebook, and certainly, no one has the time, to read, let alone "learn" the material or assimilate the overall subjects that these "advanced" classes are supposed to offer. In European History, our daughter's lectures included such substanceless information as: "this movement, referred to as the "whatchamacallit"..." because the teacher did not have the experience, the training, or the time to learn the material herself. Without time to debate this detail, the textbook and workbook provided by the College Board, material presented in a parrallel and measured goal of test-outcome, basically negated the use for a teacher, except as a test-dispensing machine.

In middle school, covering the topic of democracy, ( during her half-year allottment of Social Studies, after her half-year allottment of Science,) my younger daughter presented with the following question: "We were told that communism is bad, but what makes it bad." My other daughter reported that her 8th grade social studies teacher admonished her class during the election of our state governor by writing "Vote Republican" on the blackboard. My daughter's question to us was: “Was I born a Democrat?” She told us that the majority of her classmates "were Republican" as informed by the results of a quiz the teacher gave them with questions such as: “Would you agree to provide a free breakfast to needy students in the public school?" (Apparently, the popular answer was "NO!" ) End of lesson.

Europe, its geography, economic history, and political system was reduced, for times sake, to two weeks, in middle school. And in AP chemistry, all questions as to "why" or "how" are fielded robotically with "because." There is no time for picky little details. The entire AP Physics program has been reduced to the teacher's promise, on back to school night, to prepare your child to get a passing grade on the AP exam. This orientation to align curriculum with the exam contributed to the National Research Council's concern over the reduction of breadth and scope in science classes lost to a shallow, rote delivery and memorization of "facts" instead of an analysis of theory and the use of scientific method. And to add insult to parent's confusion, children are bribed into taking more than 4 AP classes a semester, with no required prerequisit basic courses, in earlier grades, with inaccurate descriptions of college and university application of their grades, and promises of savings in college fees with scores of 3 or better on AP exams. For everyone's information, with a score of 3 on an AP exam and $3.50, you can probably still buy a gallon of gas, but "no go" on skipping fees for the college-level class. Information about the test results have been "managed" and are misleading to the public. If you really have the determination to find the figures supporting Smith's campaign of "success" consider this: you will need to review the figures on how many students did NOT take the exams, failed them, or scored a grade of 3 or below on them; good luck, these figures are carefully hidden from public view.

Our Superintendent recently received a dismal report from the teacher's survey. He is facing a vote of no confidence from the Teacher's association of Anne Arundel County (TAAC). He has had the results from recently disclosed human resources audit reveal his practice of delivering irresponsible bonuses to high level administrators. It revealed raises to his closest cabinet members, pre-employment bonuses, other budgetary indiscretions, (remember the $300,000 security evaluation he surprised us and the boe with?). It revealed malfunctioning hiring and screening practices going back to the last audit, and major communication lapses, culminating in a damaged relationship with the board of Ed, the teachers.

Am I sad that he is leaving? I am not at all. And the news that he is leaving to join a seminar at Harvard's Graduate School of Education only keeps my nerves on edge. Because, unfortunately, for people like him, the "master" plan is to treat colleges and universities to the same tests and measurements principals that have been on our schools like termites for the last three years. Secretary of Education Spellings has already announced the NCLB plan to invade our universities. She will find a dedicated soldier in Eric J. Smith.

My child has a name, a personality and her very own potentials. She is not a number, nor a group. She deserves much more than the clips of information delivered to her at jet-speed with a bureaucratic eye on her regurgitated data product. She deserves the time and attention to her questions and her pace, even if it conflicts with the schedule of predetermined disbursement mandatory in our school system.

And as for the teachers, my children's teachers can do without the county-created and mandated script. They are professionals, educated, and willing to engage in an historically noble calling. They are individuals too, with interests and talents and specific unique areas of academic expertise. Take away their volition and you take away their passion. Take away their passion and...well, just look at them leaving.

What is at stake in our schools when our children become pawns for the far-reaching tentacles of politically driven principles, and merely data for professional credibility? The experiences we deliver, during the 13 years a child attends our public schools, will shape their identity and establish our societal identity for the future. This is far more important than the career or political aspirations of one self absorbed educational bureaucrat. The time is now for us to use this opportunity to evaluate the changes taking place in our schools.

We can do better.

Desperately Seeking School Superintendent

2005-10-10T12:44:00.000-04:00

HELP WANTED:

School superintendent who meets the following criteria:

Thinks independently and creatively about public school education.

Does not buy into the NCLB act or it's insistence on participation in the standards and testing industry.

Endorses a curriculum that is sensitive to the needs of the individual child.

Solicits the professional input of teaching staff.

Endorses an awareness of and dedication to current knowledge about learning.

Believes that smaller classrooms, varied assessment tools, creative curriculum and competitive salaries for teachers belong on a priority agenda.

Dedicates resources, not only to minority and special needs students, but also to real and varied academic opportunities for the entire range of students.

Is willing to research and consider other avenues for students advancement besides AP, IB or other overused, academically disputed recipes.

Will hope to foster community and parental interest, input, and support for our schools, our teachers, and our students.

Has no financial claims or interest in contributing to the growing financial returns of academic test, textbook or tutoring industries.

With no particular political agenda, still believes that our public schools present an opportunity to prepare and educate our students for a better future.

Enjoys shellfish.

Although I possess no official authority to recruit or hire such an individual, I will provide you with the information to seek this position, which becomes available in November this year.

( this is a huge district )