Test your public education savy

This was written by Susan Ohanian and Stephen Krashen who are advocates for progressive, public education. Ohanion blogs here and tweets here. Krashen's website is here and tweets here. This post was originally found here.

Despite my disdain for multiple choice tests, I have to admit that this may be the only meaningful way to use them.

by Susan Ohanian and Stephen Krashen

1. Who said “Hurricane Katrina was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans. That education system was a disaster.”

a) Rush Limbaugh
b) Pat Robinson
c) Editor at The Onion
d) Bill O’Reilly
e) U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan

2. US international test scores aren’t at the top of the world because:

a) we lack common standards and valid tests.
b) many teachers are not doing their job.
c) nearly 25% of American children live in poverty.
d) American children are not interested in hard study.
e) parents don’t take an interest in children’s education.

3. A notable feature of education in Finland, the country scoring highest on international tests, is:

a) universal pre-school emphasizes an early start in skill development.
b) children in grade school have a play break every 45 minutes.
c) a system of annual national standardized tests informs teachers of every child's skill attainment.
d) there are no teacher unions to cripple reform.
e) corporate leaders have taken a leadership role in school policy.

4. Middle class American students who attend well-funded schools

a) achieve high scores on international tests, among the highest in the world.
b) don’t read as much as kids used to.
c) aren’t learning enough math and science.
d) don’t do enough analytical writing.
e) lack competitive drive.

5. 1.6 million children in the U.S.

a) have teachers who are not highly qualified.
b) are overweight.
c) live in single-parent families.
d) should be held back in school.
e) are homeless.

6. Children who live in poverty in the US

a) are protected by a comprehensive social welfare safety net.
b) need a very structured curriculum.
c) are more likely to attend a school with poorly supported libraries than are middle class children.
d) have the same chance for school success as other students—if their parents support education.
e) need vouchers to attend better schools.

7. Common Core Standards were developed because

a) parents worry that US children score far below other countries on international tests.
b) teachers lack the skills to craft adequate curriculum and wanted help.
c) state departments of education asked for them.
d) of grass-roots concern that children need special tools to compete in the Global Economy.
e) the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation paid for them.

8. Common Core Standards in literacy were written by

a) classroom teachers.
b) child psychologists.
c) university researchers.
d) business leaders.
e) a lawyer who specializes in "standards-driven reform" and someone whose background is in Management Consulting, who once tutored children while studying at Yale.

9. The new Common Core tests

a) let the teachers know exactly what each student needs to learn next.
b) give parents evidence teachers are doing their job.
c) ensure that standards are being met.
d) give principals a fair way to evaluate teachers.
e) make fiscal demands many districts cannot meet.

10. The new online feature of Common Core testing

a) will reduce administration costs.
b) will streamline student evaluation.
c) offers new opportunities for creativity.
d) will lead to more individualized learning.
e) means students will be tested many more times each year.

ANSWERS

1. E

“Duncan: ‘Katrina was the best thing for New Orleans school system,’” Jan. 29, 2010
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2010/01/duncan-katrina-was-the-best-thing-for-new- orleans-schools/

2. C

“Measuring Child Poverty,” UNICEF, May 2012
http://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/rc10_eng.pdf

3. B

“Finland Schools Flourish in Freedom and Flexibility,” The Guardian, Dec. 5, 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/05/finland-schools-curriculum-teaching

4. A

“PISA 2009 Reading Test Results: The US does quite well, controlling for SES. And maybe
American scores are “just right.”
http://www.sdkrashen.com/articles/PISA_2009-US_Scores_Just_Right.pdf

5. E

http://www.familyhomelessness.org/children.php?p=ts

6. C

Di Loreto, C., and Tse, L. 1999. Seeing is believing: Disparity in books in two Los Angeles area public libraries. School Library Quarterly 17(3): 31-36; Duke, N. 2000. For the rich it's richer: Print experiences and environments offered to children in very low and very high-socioeconomic status first-grade classrooms. American Educational Research Journal 37(2): 441-478; Neuman, S.B. and Celano, D. 2001. Access to print in low-income and middle-income communities: An ecological study of four neighborhoods. Reading Research Quarterly, 36, 1, 8-26.

7. E

“Is the Gates Foundation Involved in bribery,” July 23, 2010
http://prorevnews.blogspot.com/2010/07/is-gates-foundation-involved-in-bribery.html

“JoLLE Forum--Rotten to the (Common) Core,” Nov. 1, 2012
http://www.susanohanian.org/core.php?id=364

8. E

David Coleman bio; Susan Pimentel bio
http://about.collegeboard.org/leadership/president

http://www.nagb.org/who-we-are/members/bios/b_pimentel.html

9. E

“Federal Mandates on Local Education: Costs and Consequences--Yes, it's a Race, but is it in the Right Direction?”
http://www.newpaltz.edu/crreo/brief_8_education.pdf

10. E

“Common Core Assessments”
http://truthinamericaneducation.com/common-core-assessments/

http://dianeravitch.net/2012/07/25/stephen-krashen-how-much-testing/

An Open Letter to President Obama from Bill Ayers

This was written by Bill Ayers is an American elementary education theorist and a retired professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. This open letter first appeared here.

by Bill Ayers

Dear President Obama: Congratulations!

I’m sure this is a moment you want to savor, a time to take a deep breath, get some rest, hydrate, regain your balance, and take a long walk in the sunshine. It might be as well a good time to reflect, rethink, recharge, and perhaps reignite. I sincerely hope that it is, and I urge you to put education on your reflective agenda.

The landscape of “educational reform” is currently littered with rubble and ruin and wreckage on all sides. Sadly, your administration has contributed significantly to the mounting catastrophe. You’re not alone: The toxic materials have been assembled as a bipartisan endeavor over many years, and the efforts of the last several administrations are now organized into a coherent push mobilized and led by a merry band of billionaires including Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Sam Walton, and Eli Broad.

Whether inept or clueless or malevolent—who’s to say?—these titans have worked relentlessly to take up all the available space, preaching, persuading, promoting, and, when all else fails, spreading around massive amounts of cash to promote their particular brand of school change as common sense. You and Secretary Arne Duncan—endorsed in your efforts by Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, and a host of reactionary politicians and pundits—now bear a major responsibility for that agenda.

The three most trumpeted and simultaneously most destructive aspects of the united “school reform” agenda are these: turning over public assets and spaces to private management; dismantling and opposing any independent, collective voice of teachers; and reducing education to a single narrow metric that claims to recognize an educated person through a test score. While there’s absolutely no substantive proof that this approach improves schooling for children, it chugs along unfazed—fact-free, faith-based reform at its core, resting firmly on rank ideology rather than any evidence whatsoever.

The three pillars of this agenda are nested in a seductive but wholly inaccurate metaphor: Education is a commodity like any other—a car or a refrigerator, a box of bolts or a screwdriver—that is bought and sold in the marketplace. Within this controlling metaphor the schoolhouse is assumed to be a business run by a CEO, with teachers as workers and students as the raw material bumping along the assembly line while information is incrementally stuffed into their little up-turned heads.

It’s rather easy to begin to think that “downsizing” the least productive units, “outsourcing” and “privatizing” a space that was once public, is a natural event. Teaching toward a simple standardized measure and relentlessly applying state-administered (but privately developed and quite profitable) tests to determine the “outcomes” (winners and losers) becomes a rational proxy for learning; “zero tolerance” for student misbehavior turns out to be a stand-in for child development or justice; and a range of sanctions on students, teachers, and schools—but never on lawmakers, foundations, corporations, or high officials (they call it “accountability")—is logical and level-headed.

I urge you to resist these policies and reject the dominant metaphor as wrong in the sense of inaccurate as well as wrong in the sense of immoral.

Education is a fundamental human right, not a product. In a free society education is based on a common faith in the incalculable value of every human being; it’s constructed on the principle that the fullest development of all is the condition for the full development of each, and, conversely, that the fullest development of each is the condition for the full development of all. Further, while schooling in every totalitarian society on earth foregrounds obedience and conformity, education in a democracy emphasizes initiative, courage, imagination, and entrepreneurship in order to encourage students to develop minds of their own.

When the aim of education and the sole measure of success is competitive, learning becomes exclusively selfish, and there is no obvious social motive to pursue it. People are turned against one another as every difference becomes a potential deficit. Getting ahead is the primary goal in such places, and mutual assistance, which can be so natural in other human affairs, is severely restricted or banned. It’s no wonder that cheating scandals are rampant in our country and fraudulent claims are commonplace.

Race to the Top is but one example of incentivizing bad behavior and backward ideas about education as the Secretary of Education begins to look and act like a program officer for some charity rather than the leading educator for all children: It’s one state against another, this school against that one, and my second grade in fierce competition with the second grade across the hall.

You have opposed privatizing social security, pointing out the terrible risks the market would impose on seniors if the voucher plan were ever adopted. And yet you’ve supported—in effect—putting the most endangered young people at risk through a similar scheme. We need to expand, deepen, and fortify the public space, especially for the most vulnerable, not turn it over to private managers. The current gold rush of for-profit colleges gobbling up student loans is but one cautionary tale.

You’ve said that you defend working people and their right to organize and yet you have publicly and noisily maligned teachers and their unions on several occasions. You need to consider that good working conditions are good teaching conditions, and that good teaching conditions are good learning conditions. We can’t have the best learning conditions if teachers are forced away from the table, or if the teaching corps is reduced to a team of short-termers and school tourists.

You have declared your support for a deep and rich curriculum for all students regardless of circumstance or background, and yet your policies rely on a relentless regimen of standardized testing, and test scores as the sole measure of progress.

You should certainly pause and reconsider. What’s done is done, but you can demonstrate wisdom and true leadership if you pull back now and correct these dreadful mistakes.

In a vibrant democracy, whatever the most privileged parents want for their children must serve as a minimum standard for what we as a community want for all of our children. Arne Duncan attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (as did our three sons); you sent your kids to Lab, and so did your friend Rahm Emanuel. There students found small classes, abundant resources, and opportunities to experiment and explore, ask questions and pursue answers to the far limits, and a minimum of time-out for standardized testing. They found, as well, a respected and unionized teacher corps, people who were committed to a life-long career in teaching and who were encouraged to work cooperatively for their mutual benefit (and who never would settle for being judged, assessed, rewarded, or punished based on student test scores).

Good enough for you, good enough for the privileged, then it must be good enough for the kids in public schools everywhere—a standard to be aspired to and worked toward. Any other ideal for our schools, in the words of John Dewey who founded the school you chose for your daughters, “is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy.”

Sincerely,

William Ayers

Arne Duncan's To Do List

Arne Duncan's To Do List:

1. Undermine public confidence in teachers and schools via standardized test scores. 

2. Get on Twitter and praise teachers.

Mr. Duncan, your walk does not match your talk.

Testing and teaching are at odds

I will look at any additional evidence to confirm the opinion to which I have already come.

 --Lord Molson, British politician (1903-1991)

The Washington Post ran a piece On Leadership July 18 and 19, 2011, that featured responses to the Atlanta cheating scandal from Dan Ariely, Arne Duncan, Howard Gardner and Steven Pearlstein.

Despite the evidence mounting against high stakes, standardized testing, Arne Duncan and many other advocates for test and punish accountability want to stay the course with their "despite cheating scandals, testing and teaching are not at odds" mantra. So powerful is Duncan's need for consonance, his reaction to disconfirming evidence is to criticize, distort and dismiss cheating as the sole responsibility of those individuals who did the cheating.

In other words, Duncan is saying "mistakes were made, but not by me." This mental jockeying is known as confirmation bias, and at the moment Duncan is its poster boy.

False dichotomies make choosing easy. Duncan frames his argument very carefully -- either you are for accountability (with him) or you are against accountability (against him). But in reality, the situation is far from this simple.

In her book Willful Blindness, Margaret Heffernan writes about "the ostrich instruction":

We all recognize the human desire at times to prefer ignorance to knowledge, and to deal with conflict and change by imagining it out of existence... In burying our heads in the sand, we are trying to pretend the threat doesn't exist and that we don't have to change... A preference for the status quo, combined with an aversion to conflict, compels us to turn a blind eye to problems and conflict we just don't want to deal with.

Sometimes it's the leaders with the most power and responsibility who are the most blind because they believe they know what they were doing -- or feel like they have to look like they know what they are doing.

In their book Mistakes Were Made but not by Me, Carol Tavris Elliot Aronson write:

In a study of people who were being monitored by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) while they were trying to process dissonant or consonant information about George Bush or John Kerry, Drew Westen and his colleagues found that the reasoning areas of the brain virtually shut down when participants were confronted with dissonant information, and the emotion circuits of the brain lit up happily when consonance was restored. These mechanisms provide a neurological basis for the observations that once our minds are made up, it is hard to change them. 

Indeed, even reading information that goes against your point of view can make you all the more convinced you are right.

In light of this, it's not surprising that when test and punish accountability supporters like Arne Duncan are faced with evidence that shows cheating as an inevitable and inherent characteristic of high stakes testing, they simply turn to discrediting the facts and become even more committed to their own argument. At this point, I'll be fair to Duncan and say that this behavior is as predictable as it is unfortunate, especially if he believes staying the course is his only option. Because people become more certain they are right if they can't undo it, nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it's the only one you have.

At this point, I'm reminded of what Edward De Bono meant when he said:

If you never change your mind, why have one?

This is precisely why we need to listen to people like Bob Schaeffer from Fairtest who say:

The failure of NCLB and its state-level clones cannot be reversed by “staying the course,” “raising the bar” or any of the other faith-based notions frequently invoked by high-stakes testing true-believers.

Two tales of personalization and technology

Personalization and technology can be read as a dream or a nightmare -- it all depends on who is telling the story.

If Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Arne Duncan or Michelle Rhee are perpetrating the plot then personalization is about using technology for union busting, test score analytics and the marketization of our children's minds. In this story, the poor get a computer, while the rich get a computer and a teacher. Technology is a trojan horse that carries an army of economists and shadow industries who have been stalking public education for a very long time. In this story, technology and personalization isn't about learning -- it's about money.

If Sir Ken Robinson, Alfie Kohn, Yong Zhao, Linda Darling-Hammond or Diane Ravitch are the narrators, then personalization is about student excitement, creativity, intrinsic motivation, curiosity and citizenship. In this story, even when supplying children with their own computer becomes cheaper than providing them with a teacher, we have the courage to give all kids both. Ultimately, personalization isn't about technology -- it's about learning.

Personalization and technology can be about collaborating to discover our passions but it can also be about competing over profits. Some versions of (hyper) personalization can be about pilotless flying, surgeonless surgery and teacherless teaching -- this version of hyper-personalization is less about how a learner uses technology and more about how the technology uses the learner. Communications expert Marshall McLuhan told us this in 1964 when he said, "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us."

Seymour Papert, an expert on children and computing, may have summarized the two stories of personalization via technology with this:

I am no Pollyanna about technology. The record of how society took up earlier technologies is frighteningly bad. We first made automobiles in the hundreds of millions and then worried about how to mend the damage done by deforming our cities, polluting our atmosphere and changing the lives of our teenage children. Why should we as a society do better this time? 

I don’t know whether digital technology can hurt the atmosphere. But I do know that it could make a dramatic difference for the better or for the worse in the lives of children, and that there is no guarantee that it will be for the good. Quite the contrary, if one goes by what one sees happening today, it is almost guaranteed that the technology will be used mindlessly or for the profit of corporations rather than for the benefit of children.

In which story of personalization and technology are you a character?

Raising class sizes, Ruining the schools

There are dangerous education deform templates in America that run the risk of establishing a horrific precedent for others all over the world.

The latest comes from Kansas City, Missouri's Public School District superintendent John Covington. The Parents Across America Blog explains:

Last week at a school board meeting, Kansas City, MO School District superintendent John Covington told the school board that there is no research that supports reduced class size linked to increased student achievement. During the meeting, Covington cited the views of Bill Gates, who has minimized the importance of class size and suggested that teachers be paid more for teaching larger classes.

Covington went on to say that his staff had identified the “best” teachers in the district and would be giving them additional students. This was less than a week before school was scheduled to begin. The day after this announcement, teachers in the early grades received their class lists. Some first grade teachers were assigned 37 students per class, and some kindergarten teachers had 25-30 – compared to other teachers in the same schools, who had twenty students per class. Interestingly, some of these larger classes were staffed with brand new Teach for America recruits.

Then on August 19, Covington hosted a breakfast for eight elementary classroom teachers from about six schools out of 23, in grades 3-5th, whom he identified as “the best in the district.” He did not explain how he determined that they were the best. He told them that if they were willing to take 6 to 8 additional students, he would give each of them them $10,000. This would mean they would have class sizes in the mid to upper thirties.

For the first year ever, principals were not allowed to assign teachers or kids to classes within their own buildings. Covington’s staff did all of that. They decided who would teach what grade level and which kids would be assigned to each teacher. Before, this has ALWAYS been handled by each principal for his/her school.

This is yet another example of how the suits have hijacked our education system to enact their own reforms that meet their needs. In this case the argument goes something like this:

• Explicitly talk about student achievement while meaning nothing more than high scores on standardized tests.
• Down play outside of the classroom factors (poverty and family) as mere excuses and over-emphasize the importance of inside of the classroom factors (teacher quality)
• Show the public that student achievement (test scores) does not rise with lower class sizes nor fall with high class sizes
• Define good teaching as producing high test scores.
• Bribe teachers with merit pay and bonuses to increase test scores and willingly take on more students.

The result is that opportunistic superintendents like John Covington can save money and garnish large financial bonuses while padding their resumes in an intensive campaign wrought with shameless self-promotion -- all on the backs of our children.

Rod Paige orchestrated the Texas Miracle which was later reported to be nothing more than a mirage, but not before George W. Bush named him Secretary of Education.

Arne Duncan's record in Chicago has also proven to be at best troublesome, but that didn't stop him from being awarded the opportunity to do what didn't work in Chicago to the entire nation.

Beverly Hall won national praise and lavish bonuses during her 11 year tenure as Atlanta's Public School superintendent only to resign in 2010 because of a city-wide cheating scandal.

If John Covington in Kansas City, MO plays his cards right, he can cram real children into less classrooms while fabricating progress in the name of furthering his career.

When we go to Wall Street economists for our educational advice, we get what we pay for. When we allow Bill Gates to influence experiments on our children, we allow our children to be subjected to misguided theories that have already been proven wrong. Be wary of anyone who professes that class size doesn't matter. The research is clear: as long as you define student achievement as more than just high test scores then class size matters.

Until teachers, parents and students refuse our cooperation with these test and punish, control from afar corporate deformers, our children's education will continue to service the best interests of others.

Raising the Bar

Raising the bar and simply demanding higher standards is hardly innovative or creative. Elevator speeches and interviews such as Duncan's above will only take him down.

This interview reminds me of an excerpt from Getting Change Right by Seth Kahan:

One of the fundamental problems in communicating change is quite simply that most professionals don't know how to hold an engaging conversation, much less teach their supporters how to do the same. The traditional approach is to take a great idea and turn it into a slogan, an elevator speech, and a campaign. This amounts to one-way communication and sabotages engagement. There may be discussions, town hall meetings, and coffee chats, but unless you're spending more time listening than you are talking, you're creating three results that are taking you backward instead of forward.

First, any educator who has a clue about real learning and real children knows that Duncan wouldn't know either if he tripped over them. Second, Duncan sounds so precooked that it is evident to even the most unsophisticated listener that he's left reality in the dust of his cliches - and if it weren't for the billion dollar carrot and stick Duncan is waving around, the nation would have been more than willing to abandon Bush's No Child Left Behind. Thirdly, Duncan is ensuring that he is the primary and sole source of change, and when education historians write about this period of reform, I believe they will identify the Bush/Obama policies as one of the most profoundly undemocratic movements in American education history.

Seth Kahan concludes by speaking directly to Duncan:

This is hard to swallow for those who believe they can succeed by simply mapping out a project and then executing it. Real change is about growing a successful reception and including many players in the dreaming and the realization of new ways of thinking.

Arne Duncan is neither an educator or a listener... this is proving to be a cancerous combination.

civil rights movement for our time

Politics tends to polarize issues. There is no shortage of topics that the left and the right are all to willing to engage in political duals.

But have you noticed that whether you are speaking with a liberal or a conservative, a Democrat or a Republican, or reading the Washington Post or Globe and Mail, almost everyone who may be progressive in other areas are indistinguishable from Fox News?

Have you noticed that Obama's education policy's simply took Bush's No Child Left Behind and added...

...more testing.

But this time the tests carry with them even more bribes and threats (read as Race to the Top and mass firings like Central Falls and Rhode Island). It all brings new meaning to Maslow's Maxim:

He that is good with a hammer tends to think everything is a nail.

When Tony Blair said the three most important fields for government to concern themselves with should be education, education and education, he was profoundly correct; however, when it comes to education, far too many people are simply ignorant towards what it means to provide excellent, progressive education for all.

The gaping void that exists between policy makers like Arne Duncan and real educators like Linda Darling-Hammond are inescapably gargantuan.

And the gap isn't getting any smaller.

Hence why many people are calling the issues around education reform the civil rights movement for our times.