Testing resistance in Colorado takes to the road
From Susan Ohanian's NCLB Cartoons: "Every year, the Coalitition for Better Education raises grassroots funds to put up these billboards. You can contribute. You can go forth and do likewise in your state."
Dr. Diane Ravitch, former Assistant Secretary of Education for Research, said at her blog:
The corporate types who hate teachers' unions and public schools have been running a billboard and mass media campaign in New York and New Jersey.
But they are not the only ones who know how to frame a message.
Here is a fabulous billboard posted on a major highway in Colorado by critics of the nutty testing regime imposed by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.
Leave a Comment »	| Education, Education assessment, No Child Left Behind Act, Testing	| Tagged: Colorado, Education, NCLB, No Child Left Behind, Testing	| Permalink
War on Teachers and Education, Part 1: Prof. Ravitch's emotion-touching call for a cease-fire on teachers
This is the first of five parts needed to document and lay the background for what unfortunately promises to be a pitched public relations battle, if not a serious battle to rescue a California school from being crushed by a corporation making a hostile takeover of a school using California's "parent trigger" law. Follow-ups may be needed.
Diane Ravitch in Dallas, April 28, 2010 – Copyright 2010 Ed Darrell (you may use freely, with attribution)
If you've followed education issues, you know Dr. Diane Ravitch is a professor of education at Columbia, one of the most respected schools of education in the world. Her work on education reform was popular with the Reagan administration in the period after the Report of the Commission on Excellence in Education in 1983, and particularly with education reformers at the time I was tapped to work at the Department of Education, in the old Office of Educational Research and Improvement. Dr. Ravitch was appointed to head that arm of Education in the administration of George H. W. Bush, but after I had left government for the private sector.
More recently, Dr. Ravitch has looked hard to find evidence that the testing regimes imposed by the "No Child Left Behind" Act (NCLB) actually produce benefits to the education of students.
Finding no such evidence, Dr. Ravitch has called for an end to unproven methods of destruction of schools and school systems in pursuit of foggy, unattainable goals.
Recently, big-dollar guys have backed efforts to kick out teachers and trained educators from schools, and in particular with "parent-trigger" laws, which allow a group of parents to petition for the removal of professionals at a school, and for a group of parents to then take over the management of that school.
Oddly, the first places these laws have been applied is against teachers in schools where parental involvement has been historically abysmal. A closer look shows that in these cases professional organizers, well-financed by businessmen who fancy themselves education reformers, did the load-carrying to get the petitions signed, and to get the educators ousted.
One of the schools where this process is moving is Weigand Avenue Elementary School in Watts, that troubled, poverty-ridden section of Los Angeles more famous for riots and gangs than educational attainment.
Dr. Ravitch wrote on her blog on May 25:
Parent Revolution Force Out Excellent Principal
The billionaire-funded Parent Revolution flexed its muscle and got enough parent signatures to force the resignation of a highly effective principal.
Please read the story.
This is the principal who was ousted by Parent Revolution:
"Third-grade teacher Kate Lewis said Irma Cobian is the best principal she's had in nine years at Weigand Avenue Elementary School in Watts.
"Joseph Shamel called Cobian a "godsend" who has used her mastery of special education to show him how to craft effective learning plans for his students.
"Los Angeles Unified Supt. John Deasy praised a plan developed by Cobian and her team to turn around the struggling campus — where most students test below grade level in reading and math — calling it a "well-organized program for accelerated student achievement." He thanked Cobian for her commitment and hard work."
21 of the school's 22 teachers have requested transfers because of Cobian's ouster.
Parent Revolution is a malevolent organization funded by Walton, Gates, and Broad.
There is a special place in hell reserved for everyone who administers and funds this revolting organization that destroys schools and fine educators like Irma Cobian.
Dr. Ravitch has a good sense of justice, and injustice in my opinion. This situation got her thinking, and she had more comments later.
Wondering About Ben Austin
Earlier today, I posted an article that appeared in the Los Angeles Times about Parent Revolution forcing the ouster of an excellent principal, Irma Cobian.
I keep thinking about it. I think about the way her staff admired and respected her, how 21 of 22 teachers requested a transfer when she was targeted by the phony Parent Revolution.
Ben Austin is loathsome. He ruined the life and career of a dedicated educator. She was devoted to the children, he is devoted to the equally culpable foundations that fund his Frankenstein organization–Walton, Gates, and Broad. His biggest funder is the reactionary Walton Family Foundation [line added here], which spends $160 million every year to advance privatization.
Ben Austin is Walton's useful idiot. He prattles on about his liberal credentials, but actions speak louder than words.
Here is my lifelong wish for him.
Ben, every day when you wake up, you should think of Irma Cobian. When you look in the mirror, think Irma Cobian. Your last thought every night should be Irma Cobian.
Ben, you ruined the life of a good person for filthy lucre. Never forget her. She should be on your conscience–if you have one–forever.
W. Edwards Deming,Wikipedia image. Oddly, few, if any, education reform efforts work to incorporate any of Deming's rules for running high-efficiency, highly-productive, championship-quality organizations; its as if there is a different agenda being pursued.
Ravitch makes a good point. Organizational turnarounds rarely work when they start with mass firings. It didn't work in the French Revolution, it didn't work in Russian in 1917. Management experts like W. Edwards Deming, the most famous of the tough-reorganization management consultants in the drive for high quality organizations, bluntly warn that such efforts generally are destructive — the people fired are not the problem, nor do they have the authority to fix the problems, most often. People on the front line know the problems better than anyone else, and can provide the leadership to turn organizations around, however — and for those reasons, you don't get rid of them, if your goal is to effect an organizational turnaround.
Mr. Austin should have a framed photo of Mrs. Cobian on his desk so he must see her, every day.
Mr. Austin disagrees.
See part 2.
This series, on the dustup between Prof. Diane Ravitch and Ben Austin in California:
War on Teachers and Education, Part 1: Prof. Ravitch's emotion-touching call for a cease-fire
War on Teachers and Education, Part 2: Ben Austin of Parent Revolution attacked Prof. Ravitch
War on Teachers and Education, Part 3: Prof. Ravitch's response
War on Teachers and Education, Part 4: The fight gets a little weird
More, different views, and resources:
How to survive our education battles (educationviews.org)
My Vicious Attack: Sad Educators vs. Poor Parents (scholasticadministrator.typepad.com)
Popular principal's dismissal leaves a South L.A. school divided (latimes.com)
The parent revolution and the ancien regime (educationviews.org)
Why The Business Model is Not an Appropriate Way to Improve US Schools (pdfadown.wordpress.com)
6 Comments	| Education, Education quality, Education reform, History, No Child Left Behind Act, Teachers, Teaching, War on Education, War on Teachers	| Tagged: Ben Austin, Diane Ravitch, Education, Education reform, History, Irma Cobian, Los Angeles, NCLB, War on Education, War on Teachers, Weigand Avenue Elementary School	| Permalink
A Seussian fable, about how tests ruin school reform
Look, you really need to go to TeacherSabrina's blog, Failing Schools, where she first posted this, and take a look at many of her posts.
But I can't resist putting the video here, because I know a few old-timers would be confused by the link, and some people will think they don't have the time to make two clicks instead of one.
So, here, in its Seussian glory and demand for Flash Animation, is TeacherSabrina's story of D.C.'s late Queen of the Schools, Michelle Rhee, and her desire to get D.C.'s kids to score well on an increasing battery of tests [Got a good joke about assault and battery we can insert here?]: "Rhee the Reformer: A Cautionary Tale."
Tip of the old scrub brush to Accountable Talk.
1 Comment	| Education, Education blogs, Education quality, Education reform, No Child Left Behind Act, Teaching, Testing	| Tagged: Education, Education reform, Michelle Rhee, No Child Left Behind, Teachers, TeacherSabrina, Teaching, tests, Washington D.C.	| Permalink
No, race isn't the cause of our economic and education woes
Just when you think the conservatives can't possibly sound any more like fascists of the 1930s . . . I mean, can we just repeal Godwin's law and call a racist fascist argument, a racist fascist argument?
Paul Krugman, whose Nobel Memorial Prize for economics galls conservatives more than left turns bothered J. Edgar Hoover, noted the other day that Texas is in a series of fixes. This is important because Texas is what Wisconsin's governor claims Wisconsin should be: Shorn of union interference in almost all things, especially in public service sectors including education. Krugman wrote in his column, "Leaving Children Behind":
Texas likes to portray itself as a model of small government, and indeed it is. Taxes are low, at least if you're in the upper part of the income distribution (taxes on the bottom 40 percent of the population are actually above the national average). Government spending is also low. And to be fair, low taxes may be one reason for the state's rapid population growth, although low housing prices are surely much more important.
But here's the thing: While low spending may sound good in the abstract, what it amounts to in practice is low spending on children, who account directly or indirectly for a large part of government outlays at the state and local level.
And in low-tax, low-spending Texas, the kids are not all right. The high school graduation rate, at just 61.3 percent, puts Texas 43rd out of 50 in state rankings. Nationally, the state ranks fifth in child poverty; it leads in the percentage of children without health insurance. And only 78 percent of Texas children are in excellent or very good health, significantly below the national average.
But wait — how can graduation rates be so low when Texas had that education miracle back when former President Bush was governor? Well, a couple of years into his presidency the truth about that miracle came out: Texas school administrators achieved low reported dropout rates the old-fashioned way — they, ahem, got the numbers wrong.
It's not a pretty picture; compassion aside, you have to wonder — and many business people in Texas do — how the state can prosper in the long run with a future work force blighted by childhood poverty, poor health and lack of education.
But things are about to get much worse.
A few months ago another Texas miracle went the way of that education miracle of the 1990s. For months, Gov. Rick Perry had boasted that his "tough conservative decisions" had kept the budget in surplus while allowing the state to weather the recession unscathed. But after Mr. Perry's re-election, reality intruded — funny how that happens — and the state is now scrambling to close a huge budget gap. (By the way, given the current efforts to blame public-sector unions for state fiscal problems, it's worth noting that the mess in Texas was achieved with an overwhelmingly nonunion work force.)
Krugman was too easy on Perry. In his campaign last year, Perry claimed that Texas had plenty of money, a surplus, even. In debates with Democratic candidate Bill White, Perry pooh-poohed the notion that Texas had a sizable deficit, certainly not the $18 billion deficit White named.
No, the Texas deficit actually is north of $25 billion. (Linda Chavez-Thompson, the defeated Democratic candidate for Lieutenant Governor, addressed Perry's denial in a line that very few reporters bothered to report (or report accurately): "Do you know how many zeroes there are in 18 billion?" Chavez-Thompson said. "11, when you count Perry and Dewhurst.")
But blogger Iowahawk would hear none of that — no, the issue isn't bad government and poor fiscal management. Texas loses out in education because its got more racial minorities, he wrote at some length.
Other bloggers who should know better, or at least should be struck by the repugnance of the claim that race is the problem, spread the claim, including Paul E. Peterson at EducationNext and Mark at Pseudo-Polymath.
Krugman's original point was untouched by any of these guys. Texas is in deep trouble, on many, many fronts. One of the more common comments on Texas education is, "Thank God for Mississippi!" Mississippi's having closed down its education system rather than integrate, and continued underfunding and mismanagement since the federal government forced the reopening, keeps Mississippi at the bottom of almost all state rankings regarding children. That means Texas isn't dead last. Texas's very real problems will affect racial disparities in achievement, but they are in no way caused by racial disparity, or race of the students.
Notice, too, how Iowahawk changed the comparison. Krugman noted dropout rates. Unable to muster a direct rebuttal to Krugman's point, Iowahawk switched to comparing scores in NAEP. It's not the same thing by any stretch.
No Texas teacher would say Texas performs better than any other state in stopping dropouts. While we might brag a bit on how we've increased scores on the ACT and SAT, it's not across the board, and it's not enough. (It's a miracle with the stingy funding, and it will likely stop with the proposed budget cuts — but we're proud of our ability to make improvement despite obstacles carefully placed by state policy makers.)
Notice, too, that dropouts tend to perform more poorly on standardized tests. If one wishes to screw around with the statistics for spin, one might note that by forcing students to drop out, Texas raises its scores on NAEP. I seriously doubt any Texas educator conducts a campaign to get dropouts to boost NAEP scores, but let's be realistic. (Which is not to say that there is not a lot of action to mask the dropout problem; a Texas high school is responsible for the academic achievement of kids who drop out, or more accurately, the lack of academic achievement. Dropouts count against a school's performance rating, and count hard. Every school on the cusp of "Exemplary," or "Recognized," or "Unacceptable," has a campaign to track down dropouts to find that they have enrolled in another school to whom blame can be passed, or that they have left the state or the nation, and so don't count in Texas at all. One wishes one could school administrators and legislators in Deming's Red Bead Experiment.)
It's impossible to claim Wisconsin union teachers are to blame for any Wisconsin woe, when Texas, with it's strong anti-union stands and ban on unionizing among teachers, performs worse, on average.
Will busting the unions put Wisconsin in the black? It didn't work for Texas.
Will busting the unions help Wisconsin schools? You can't make that case based on the information from Texas. In fact, Angus Johnson conducted a more serious analysis of statistics that may provide a better view into the issue, and they tend to show that unionized teachers improve education performance.
Surely these guys understand where their argument ends up. It is absolutely untrue that Texas's minorities dragged the state into deficits.
We know where Texas deficits came from. Several years ago Texas cut property taxes, a key source of education and other funding for the state, promising to make up the difference with corporate tax reforms. But the corporations blocked significant reform. Texas has been running on empty for six years, and now the deficits are simply too big to hide.
Unwise tax cuts, made for political gains, that put Texas in the dumper.
It wasn't unions, and it sure wasn't the large population of hard-working, tax-paying, union-needing Hispanics and blacks and Native Americans who got Texas in trouble. They didn't get the tax cut benefits, for the most part.
Race is not the cause of our education and budget woes, except in this way: Racists, especially the latent, passive-aggressive sort, will not hesitate to cut programs that they see benefiting minorities. Those education programs that have done the most to reduce the achievement gaps between the races, boosting minority achievement, are the first to go under the Republican budget meat cleavers. The proposed cuts are not surgical in any way, to preserve education gains.
18 Comments	| Dropouts, Education, Education reform, History, No Child Left Behind Act, Politics, Racism, Texas, War on Education	| Tagged: Dropouts, Education, Education reform, labor, No Child Left Behind, Paul Krugman, Politics, Racism, Rick Perry's $25 Billion Deficit, Texas, War on Education	| Permalink
Can't fire the bums to make a quality school: Principals division
Be sure to see the story in the New York Times today. Obama administration "Race to the Top" money went to states who proposed to replace principals in failing schools. A problem in the strategy threatens the program: Not enough qualified people exist to replace all the "bad" ones.
Wrong-headed education "reformers" keep talking about "firing the bad ones," teachers, administrators, or janitors. Without significantly raising the pay for teachers, without greatly increasing the number of teachers and administrators in the pipeline from teaching colleges or any other source, reformers can't attract anyone better qualified than the people they wish to replace.
President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan took questions from a 6th grade class at Graham Road Elementary School in Falls Church, Virginia, January 18, 2010 – photo credit unknown
Maybe, just maybe, it's time these reformers took a step back and did some study, perhaps from the quality gurus, Deming and Juran and Crosby, or from the heights of championship performance, in basketball, football, soccer, sailing (try the America Cup), horse racing or politics: No one can use firing as a chief tool to turn an organization around, nor to lead any organization to a championship. Threatening people's jobs does not motivate them, nor make the jobs attractive to others.
How can we tell the fire-the-teachers-and-principals group is on the wrong track? See the article:
"To think that the same leader with a bit more money is going to accomplish tremendous change is misguided," said Tim Cawley, a managing director at the Academy for Urban School Leadership, a nonprofit group that began leading turnaround efforts in Chicago when Mr. Duncan was the superintendent there.
"This idea of a light-touch turnaround is going to sully the whole effort," Mr. Cawley added.
Tell that to Steve Jobs, who turned Apple around. Tell it to Jack Welch, the tough-guy boss from GE (who had his own peccadilloes about firing, but who emphasized hiring and pay, at least, as the way to create a succession plan for the vacancies). Tell it to any CEO who turned around his organization without falling on his own sword.
Any competent quality consultant would have foreseen this problem: Nobody wants to train for a job with little future, less money to do the job right, little authority to get the job done, and the sole promise that the exit door is always open.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan should know better, intuitively. He used to play basketball, professionally. Surely he knows something about team building and team turnarounds. What caused his astounding, expensive amnesia?
Part of the issue identified in the article is training:
Because leading schools out of chronic failure is harder than managing a successful school — often requiring more creative problem-solving abilities and stronger leadership, among other skills — the supply of principals capable of doing the work is tiny.
Most of the nation's 1,200 schools, colleges and departments of education do offer school leadership training. "But only a tiny percentage really prepare leaders for school turnaround," said Arthur Levine, a former president of Teachers College who wrote a 2005 study of principal training.
That only contributes to the larger problem, that people in the positions are, often, the best ones for the job already; firing them damages turnaround efforts.
In Chicago, federal money is financing an overhaul of Phillips Academy High School. Mr. Cawley's nonprofit trained Phillips's new principal, Terrance Little, by having him work alongside mentor principals experienced at school makeovers.
"If we're talking about turning around 700 schools, I don't think you can find 700 principals who are capable of taking on the challenge of this work," Mr. Little said. "If you could, why would we have this many failing schools?"
Education's problems are many. Few of the problems are the result of the person at the chalkboard in the classroom. Firing teachers won't help. W. Edwards Deming claimed that 85% of the problems that plague front-line employees, like teachers, are management-caused. Firing their bosses won't solve those problems, either, but will just push the problems around. (What? "Deck chairs?" "Titanic?" What are you talking about?)
Did you hear? Texas plans to cut state funding to all education by at least 25% for next year, due to Gov. Rick Perry's $25 billion deficit, which he worked so hard to conceal during last year's election campaign.
Santayana's Ghost just dropped by to remind us, suitably the day after Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday anniversary, of the Report of the Commission on Excellence in Education, the report that saved Reagan's presidency and got him a second term:
Our nation is at risk. The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity. If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament. History is not kind to idlers.
When do we get political leaders who will swim against that tide instead of trying to surf it?
Dan Wasserman, Boston Globe
See a small collection of Dan Wasserman's cartoons on Race to the Top, here.
22 Comments	| Business, Education, Education quality, Education reform, Education spending, Motivation, No Child Left Behind Act, Public education, Race to the Top, Rampant stupidity, Teacher Pay, Teachers, Teaching	| Tagged: Arne Duncan, Business, Education, Education reform, Excellence in Education Report, Motivation, No Child Left Behind, Principals, Race to the Top, Rampant stupidity, Santayana's ghost, Teaching	| Permalink
Where does your state, or nation rank? Advanced level of math proficiency
I had to turn the graphic on its side to fit it in here big enough that you can read it. Where does your state, or nation, rank in percentage of students achieving an advanced level of math proficiency? For U.S. citizens, this is not a pretty chart.
Source: The Atlantic, "Your Child Left Behind" and acccompanying charts, "Miseducation Nation," November 2010.
Where does your state, or nation, rank?
Hey, at least we're ahead of Tunisia and Kyrgyzstan. Can your students find those nations on a map? Do they know what continents to look in?
Tip of the old scrub brush to McLeod's Cartoons.
8 Comments	| Economics, Education, Education assessment, Education quality, Mathematics, No Child Left Behind Act, Testing	| Tagged: Economics, Education, Education Achievement, Math Proficiency, No Child Left Behind, Testing, The Atlantic	| Permalink
Race to the Top: What's a good job for a great bubble-guesser?
Education issues suffered here at the Bathtub over the past several months. Confession: I don't like to write while angry, and thinking about education generally gets me there quickly. When I write in anger, I like to sit on the stuff and edit when I'm cooled down. But when I get back to edit, I get angry again.
If you watched the follies from the Texas State Soviet of Education over social studies standards, you might understand some of my anger. I'm fortunate in some ways that my students don't track the news more closely — they tended to miss the Soviet's gutting of Hispanic history from Texas history standards, and so they didn't get angry. More than 85% of my students are Hispanic, many related to the Texas heroes dropped from the standards because they were brown ("What's Hispanic Heritage Month for, anyway?" the Soviet probably wondered.)
Power of Bubbling -- for a scary story, click on the image and go read it at TweenTeacher
Plus, time for thinking about these issues evaporated during the school year. Summer isn't much better, though a bunch of us had eight great days with members of the history department at UT-Arlington focusing on the Gilded Age, Progressive Era, Age of Imperialism . . . even though reminded every day that the Texas Soviet doesn't want us to teach that period as it is recorded in the history books. (No, there are not plans for a translation into Texas Soviet Speak, at least not soon. Teachers will have to make do.)
In one of our (too) many testing/oath-signing sessions this spring, a colleague cynically wondered what would be a good job for a kid who does well on the tests, a kid who has "demonstrated mastery of bubble-guessing."
Bubble-guessing. Wow. Is that an apt description for what many schools teach these days!
I have a few days to put up the periscope and see what is going on out there. A couple of things I've noticed, that you may want to follow:
Yong Zhao noticed that the Race to the Top criteria shouldn't be etched in stone, and that small changes result in different winners. He's actually more critical than that — he's not just saying that the criteria can change. He's saying the criteria are lousy.
Education has a new god: data. It is believed to have the power to save American education and thus everything in education must be about data—collect more data about our children, evaluate teachers and administrators based on data, and reward and punish schools using data.
Zhao points to serious analyses of the Race to the Top applications and rejections which show, among other things, Pennsylvania was penalized for focusing on early childhood education, instead of collecting data.
Why was it we got into this swamp in the first place, and where did all these alligators come from?
Go read Zhao's analysis, and maybe cruise around his blog. It's worth your while. He's a professor at Michigan State — University Distinguished Professor of Education. (One thing you should read there: Zhao's slides from a recent speech. E-mail the link to your principal. Somebody find a YouTube version of that speech, please.) [Checker Finn, do you ever get over to this backwater? Zhao's on to something. Zhao's on to a lot of things.]
Race to the Top is the worst thing the Obama administration has done, in my opinion. It is aimed, or mis-aimed to give us a nation of bubble-guessers. My guess is that aim is unintentional. But the road to hell, or a Republican majority . . .
While we're looking around, pay some attention to David Warlick's 2¢ worth. That's where I found the links to Zhao.
Warlick has a couple of points worth pondering today: First, has the technology train left the station, and so it's no longer acceptable for teachers to use old tools? He's got a rant on trying to figure out if we're teaching the "right stuff":
I could have shared some of these new ideas with her, but it would not have helped. The last time I helped my daughter prepare for a test, it was 8th grade and the unit test on the Civil War. When she walked into that classroom, she could talk about and write about the reasons for the war, what the North and the South wanted to achieve, the advantages that the North held and those of the South, as well as their disadvantages. She could tell you who won and who lost and why.
She made a 52 on the test because she couldn't give the dates of the major battles of the war.
One of our mantras in the old Transportation Consulting Group at Ernst & Young was to understand that "You're always ready to fight the last war." For what we were doing, generally we had to change the technology for each assignment.
That's doubly true in education, in social studies, I think. I constantly remind myself that my students don't need the same things I got in high school. We shouldn't equip students to fight the last war, but instead prepare them to understand they need to get ready for the next one.
And what about your tags? Warlick wonders. No answers, but good wonderings.
5 Comments	| Brain learning, Education, Education assessment, Education blogs, Education quality, Leadership, Learning, Learning styles, No Child Left Behind Act, Race to the Top, Technology, Technology in the classroom, Testing	| Tagged: Data, David Warlick, Education, Education assessment, Learning, Race to the Top, Technology, Testing, Yong Zhao	| Permalink
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