Teacher World

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made a stop this past Wednesday in Cleveland, Ohio, as part of a week-long tour of the Midwest, where he is scheduled to make stops in Michigan, Indiana, Milwaukee, and Chicago.

In his 45-minute discussion, he first emphasized the need for community development in our cities’ schools, urging people to step up and help to guide or mentor students in city schools.

“There has to be an entire city rallying behind the effort. We’re either going to sit on the sidelines and watch them drown or we’re going to step up and help,” Duncan told the audience in Cleveland’s East Technical High School auditorium, where he repeated the challenge for people to help every child, especially those who were most in need.

Next, he and other panelists talked about several education issues, such as graduation rates, measures of student progress, specific challenges which face urban districts, and future revision of No Child Left Behind. 

Duncan stated that the nation must work to reduce the high dropout rate and low graduation rates if we hope to survive economically, stressing that the days of being able to walk into a job which pays well without a high school diploma are obsolete.

Along with executive director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, Joshua DuBois, and the acting head of the Corporation for National and Community Service, Robert Velasco II, Duncan encouraged churches, nonprofits, and other community groups to provide afterschool activities as well as mentors that could give those kids who don’t have strong family support a positive relationship with adults.

One such church which volunteers at Cleveland’s Marian Sterling Elementary School is Trinity Cathedral. Nikki Gentile, a teacher at the school said that the help the school has received from volunteers, who either work directly with the students or raise money or donate clothes, has been a tremendous help to the school and its students.

And Duncan’s statement that No Child Left Behind holds schools to unreasonable standards was met with applause from the audience. Both he and President Obama have been asking Congress to make changes to this legislation.

One such revision would be to measure schools based on how much its students learn in a year, rather than by whether they reach a certain level. He explained that NCLB describes schools as failing when students start at a lower point and advance, while it rewards schools that make insignificant gains with students who are already successful.

He restated his intent to announce a plan whereby states can apply to be exempt from NCLB requirements as long as they have their own evaluation method in place and can prove that they are able to turn around schools which are classified as failing.

“I’m not prepared to go through another school year with a broken law,” Duncan told the crowd.

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With Congress apparently too busy trying to settle economic matters in our country, it seems that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s request to make changes to No Child Left Behind is falling on deaf ears, so some states are taking matters into their own hands, apparently with permission from the U.S. Department of Education.

Take Idaho for example. According to an article in Education Week by Michelle McNeil, Idaho’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Luna wrote a letter to Arne Duncan in June stating that he did not intend to comply with NCLB mandates that require states to steadily increase proficiency targets in math and reading. In a gutsy move, Luna stated in his letter that he was taking matters into his own hands since Congress was not acting on any reauthorization plans. Rather than ask for a waiver, as other states have done, he simply informed the Department of Education of what he planned to do.

Now, one would think that this kind of rebellious action would lead to a strong reprimand at the very least, but instead, the Department of Education gave Luna formal permission to keep the same annual proficiency targets in math and reading for the third year in a row.

Other states, such as Tennessee and Michigan, were some of the latest to officially seek waivers from NCLB asking for a reprieve from the 2014 deadline which states that all students must be proficient in both math and reading. With 2014 right around the corner, many districts are legitimately concerned as more schools across the U.S. are not making adequate yearly progress. Schools have reason to be worried, because those that don’t make AYP face sanctions which get more punitive as targets are not met.

Montana was actually the first state to tell the Department of Education that it would not be raising its proficiency targets. But, instead of being granted permission, as Idaho was, state officials in Montana were told to come up with a plan that complied with NCLB by August 15 or face consequences, one of which is to lose federal Title 1 money, which is governed by NCLB.

So, why did Montana get slapped on the wrist while Idaho got permission? The main difference between these two states was that Montana was going for four years in a row with no change in targets instead of three years. Duncan’s letter to Superintendent of Public Instruction Denise Juneau stated that these “flat expectations” weren’t acceptable.

South Dakota is another state that has contacted the Department of Education for a freeze of proficiency targets for three years in a row. They are still waiting for permission.

In Arne Duncan’s letter to Idaho’s Tom Luna, he stated, “States had hoped the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind would allow for a growth model by now, but the reauthorization is now four years overdue. Therefore, Idaho will keep its current proficiency targets in place and begin implementing a new model of accountability so we can direct the state’s limited resources to those schools that are truly struggling academically.”

So, in response to the stillness in Washington concerning some revamping of NCLB, states are anxiously waiting for details regarding Duncan’s plan which would create a formal waiver process for many of the current requirements of NCLB.

Some wait, but clearly some states have decided that action is better than inaction. These states are pushing for waivers, and most have received them. My guess is that we will see more states becoming more daring and demanding waivers as we get closer to 2014, unless NCLB gets some much-needed modifications.

It’s about time, don’t you think?

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This will be my last blog specifically addressing the widespread cheating that occurred over the last ten years in Atlanta Public Schools. In order to avoid more of these scandals in the future, it is important to understand why this one occurred. This blog will delve into the GBI report and its conclusions as to the motivation behind the madness and what it may foreshadow.

First, it is clear that things began to change in 1999, when Dr. Beverly Hall became the superintendent of APS. How could one person be blamed for jump-starting the madness? Well, Hall was all about data and reaching targets. And she set up a “target” program which held principals and teachers responsible for their students’ achievement. According to the report, “These targets were used to quantify expectations so that academic progress was measurable, based primarily on the prior year’s CRCT results.”

According to the report, “The unreasonable pressure to meet annual ‘targets’ was the primary motivation for teachers and administration to cheat on the CRCT in 2009 and previous years. Virtually every teacher who confessed to cheating spoke of the inordinate stress the district placed on meeting targets and the dire consequences for failure. Dr. Hall articulated it as: ‘No exceptions. No excuses.’ If principals did not meet targets within three years, she declared, they will be replaced and ‘I will find someone who will meet targets.’ Dr. Hall replaced 90% of the principals during her tenure. Principals told teachers that failure to improve CRCT scores would result in negative evaluations or job termination. The unambiguous message was to meet targets by any means necessary.”

Under the target program used in APS, schools were expected to move students test scores in two ways: from the bottom to the middle, and from the middle to the top, which means focusing on both the lower and higher performing students.

Targets were set each year by the administration working with outside consultants, which were then approved by the Board of Education. These targets were set for the district, for each school, and for each grade based on percentages of expected improvement, which were naturally higher for low-performing schools.

Keep in mind that as schools met their targets, those targets would increase each year. And the new targets weren’t based upon the new students coming into a grade level, but the scores achieved by the previous year’s students.

If you are a teacher, you know that each year’s students have their own strengths and weaknesses and have different levels of motivation. This target program makes no accommodations for those differences; instead the expectation is that each year there is a certain percent increase in student progress no matter what each group’s strengths or weaknesses might be.

Teachers and administrators at APS told investigators that “this element of targets, combined with the fact that the targets increase every year, makes them unreasonable. For instance, if last year’s fourth graders were mostly high-performing students, but the fourth grade class this year contains more low performers, the fourth grade targets are still set based on last year’s high performing students’ scores.” As teachers reported to investigators, it was like comparing apples to oranges.

As targets continued to increase each year, teachers reported that it was harder to attain the required results, and many resorted to cheating rather than risk disciplinary action or termination. It became that proverbially snowball effect; each year it required more cheating in order to go beyond the level of cheating the previous year in order to meet the new unreasonable target. And “the gap between where the students were academically and the targets they were trying to reach grew larger.” The cheating, once started, took on a life of its own.

While some of those who cheated were motivated by bonuses (schools that met 70% of their targeted goals received bonuses for all of their employees ranging anywhere from $50 to $2000 per employee) most of them seemed to be more motivated by their fear of recrimination if they were unsuccessful in meeting their targets. (A little sidebar from the GBI report that you might find interesting: Dr. Hall received tens of thousands of dollars based on her district’s doctored CRCT results.)

And to sweeten the pot a little more to motivate staffs, the district held a celebration annually at the Georgia Dome to honor and recognize those schools which had made their targets. At the Convocation, attendance from all schools was mandatory, and those who were being recognized for a job well-done got to “make the floor,” that is, they got to sit in a prominent place on the floor of the Dome, while those who did not reach their targets were forced to sit in the uppermost sections.

The report noted that for many it became very important to “make the floor,” especially for principals. For these individuals, the means by which this was accomplished became unimportant; the recognition, even if it was a fabricated sham, was so much better than the humiliation of sitting in the nose-bleed section.

Those schools who failed to meet their targets were usually placed on PDP’s, professional development plans. The original purpose of a professional development plan was to provide a tool for helping a staff to improve areas of weakness, in other words, to provide a low-performing school some strategies and professional development which would enable it to turn around and achieve success.

However, under Dr. Hall’s leadership, a PDP brought negative performance evaluations, threats of termination, and for some, outright termination. She made it clear that if these low-performing schools did not reach their targets in three years, she would replace the principal with someone who would find a way to meet those targets. (Her poster boy, Principal Waller, is a fine example of the kind of principal she hired to replace those principals who couldn’t make the grade.)

It comes as no surprise that those principals who feared that they would lose their jobs reciprocated in kind, putting that same negative pressure with its unreasonable expectations and demands on their teachers. And the pattern of threats and humiliation and termination became acceptable at all levels of this school district, which operated more like the mafia than a school system.

It is hard to say how any of us, placed in this hostile and vicious work environment would have reacted. I would like to think that the majority of us would have stood our ground and refused to be a part of this criminal behavior against children. But in this educational environment in which test scores have become more important than the children we teach, should we be so surprised when it creates a monster?

What is wrong with education? The scandal in Atlanta makes it very clear, and they are not the only school district to resort to cheating to improve test scores. No Child Left Behind has done more damage to our public schools than any doctrine or educational reform I have ever seen as a veteran teacher. If Congress doesn’t wake up and heed Arne Duncan’s warnings to rewrite NCLB legislation, than what we have seen here over the past week is just the tip of the iceberg.

If nothing else, APS has proven what can happen when you are sailing in troubled waters. The 2014 iceberg is looming, and unless Congress reroutes this ship, we will all be witnesses to the tragic sinking of our public education system. 

S-O-S!

Bullying, low-performing schools, No Child Left Behind, state achievement tests, Teacher-World's Blog Atlanta Public Schools, Dr. Beverly Hall, Georgia Bureau of Investigations, NCLB, state achievement tests

Am I the only one who is getting tired of studying test data? Almost every meeting I have attended since NCLB was introduced has been about Proficiency Tests, OAT’s, or OAA’s. We have debated everything from the best techniques for prepping students to interventions for students who did not pass. This year, we are meeting weekly to study assessment results at each grade level.

Every week, teachers meet with the other teachers from their grade level to discuss their students’ progress in reading and/or math. This involves one to two meetings a week. On top of these regular meetings, we are being asked to keep ongoing records for all cumulative and formative assessment tests detailing every missed item, question by question. Then we study the most frequently missed questions to determine why we think they were so difficult for our students and how we can prepare them for these kinds of questions in the future. We will collaborate as a grade level, sharing techniques that have been effective with our students in order to improve our opportunities to be successful on this year’s OAAs. Then more testing, more evaluating, more intervening, and yada, yada, yada…

In conclusion, we spend hours looking at test questions instead of spending hours looking at students and what they really need to be successful. I have to ask myself if this is the best use of our time. Wouldn’t our time be better served looking at ways to improve our teaching, to explore creative techniques to push our children to be life-long problem solvers, to develop units that would challenge our students to use higher level thinking and develop their creativity, to share teaching strategies which have been successful in motivating our students to go above and beyond in academic areas? I resent the time we spend teaching our students to pass one test a year. Is it reasonable or reprehensible to let this one test dictate how and what we teach all year and how we spend our meeting times?

I have always contended, and I’m sure most teachers would agree, that this test is not an accurate measure of a student’s ability to be successful. But when so much emphasis is placed upon these tests, we send the message that we believe in the validity of these tests as opposed to the validity of what our students show us they can do daily.

I, for one, am tired. Tired of giving in to the demands that I believe are crippling our public schools, our teachers, and our children. Yet, if I want to keep my job, I am bound by this system, as we all are. So, I keep doing what I am told to do, but I am beginning to feel as though I am caught in a nightmare, and I can’t seem to wake up. What about you?

Changes in Teaching, No Child Left Behind, state achievement tests, Teacher-World's Blog NCLB, OAA, state achievement tests

This is the last in my series on Diane Ravitch. I have been blogging about her recent article from the August/September issue of neatoday magazine. In her article, “Stop the Madness”, she explains why she no longer supports NCLB, and she ends her article discussing how we can improve our schools.

According to Ms. Ravitch, “We must first of all have a vision of what good education is.” We should be asking what constitutes a well-educated person, what we want students to learn before they graduate, what we want them to accomplish, and why we educate students. In other words, we need to agree on what education is, what it looks like, and why we want to be a part of it as teachers.

Second, she says we need to look beyond reading and mathematics and decide what other qualities are synonymous with a well-educated, well-rounded student. We want to turn out students who are able to think for themselves, have good character, are able to make good decisions, have courage and humor, and who treat others with compassion and fairness. And we need to teach students to be responsible citizens who make educated decisions by rationally studying different points of view.

Finally, she states that we need to send out academically well-rounded students who are able to use both math and science to understand and solve real problems in their communities and in their world and who can also appreciate and participate in their artistic and cultural heritage. In other words, we need students who participate in  significant ways, who enjoy the world around them, and who are willing and able to work to improve it. We need to teach them about the world in which they live and help them to find their niche within it.

What kind of test could ever adequately measure these truly important things? There is no such test because the true test of these qualities is life and the purposeful living of it. As Diane Ravitch states, “If these are our goals, the current narrow, utilitarian focus of our national testing regime is not sufficient to reach any of them. Indeed, to the extent that we make the testing regime our master, we may see our true goals recede farther and farther into the distance.” She concludes by stating that, if we continue on this current path, we are likely to produce a generation who equate learning with the drudgery of “worksheets, test preparation, and test-taking”.

In her final plea to turn the current tide by doing away with NCLB in the hopes of saving our public schools, Ms. Ravitch wraps up with this eloquent, heart-felt statement: “As we seek to reform our schools, we must take care to do no harm. In fact, we must take care to make our public schools once again the pride of our nation. To the extent that we strengthen them, we strengthen our democracy.”

(Diane Ravitch’s article was based on her book entitled The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education,)

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I have been blogging about Diane Ravitch’s article in the August/September issue of neatoday magazine, entitled “Stop the Madness”. If you have read my previous blogs, you know that Ms. Ravitch has held a number of prestigious positions in the education field and was a staunch supporter of Bush’s NCLB until she began to study the results of these policies and what it has done to public education. Because she is so knowledgeable and makes such valid points, I have been spending intensive time discussing some of her most critical points. So here goes my third blog on what this remarkable woman has to say about NCLB.

One of Ms. Ravitch’s strongest arguments against NCLB states, “NCLB assumed that shaming schools that were unable to lift test scores every year-and the people who work in them-would lead to higher scores. It assumed that low scores are caused by lazy teachers and lazy principals. Perhaps, most naively, it assumed that higher test scores on standardized tests of basic skills are synonymous with good education. Its assumptions were wrong.”

I love this statement because it resonates with truth. Public educators and principals are being shamed to improve test scores. Our results are publically displayed every year and compared to other districts’ scores. Even within school systems, individual schools are compared to each other, and those schools that did not produce excellent scores are made to feel inferior in comparison with those who did. In reality, those differences probably had more to do with the difference in the neighborhoods surrounding these schools, which make up each school’s population, than differences in the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the schools’ staffs. I have seen it in my own district. For three years in a row now, my elementary school has gotten higher test scores than our sister elementary school. The competition and fear that this has created between our two principals has been extremely unhealthy for both staffs. This is only one sad example of the result of “shaming” schools into achieving higher test scores. Anyone who believes that creating this level of competition and frustration is an educationally sound practice needs to spend some time in schools that are panicked over raising test scores.

I applaud Diane Ravitch for admitting that the policy she initially supported whole-heartedly is flawed and is not “synonymous with good education”. When I look back over my years of teaching, and this will be my 31st, I feel such sadness for young people just starting out in the teaching profession who think that what we are being asked to do is excellent teaching. Somewhere along the way, teachers have metamorphosed from well-rounded, creative lovers-of-passing-on-the-excitement-for-knowledge to test-taking trainers. And while I still love working with kids, and I love being involved in co-teaching and the strategies of co-teaching, I have lost some of the wonder of teaching. As we fast approach 2014, and the ridiculous expectation to achieve 100% passage of state achievement tests, I dread the panic that is going to become synonymous with “good education”.

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Let’s discuss what Diane Ravitch calls “the danger of the culture of testing” that has been created as a result of NCLB, as reported in the August/September 2010 issue of neatoday magazine. Feel free to say a few “amens” and “you’ve-got-that-right-sister” as you read her critical points.

Ms. Ravitch states that “one of the unintended consequences of NCLB” has been the “shrinkage of time available to teach anything other than reading and math”. Since these are the only test scores used to calculate a school’s adequate yearly progress, she claims that teachers feel forced to put much more time into the teaching of these subjects, leaving less time for science, social studies, and the arts. She goes on to say that many schools have even done away with recess in order to better prepare students for math and reading tests.

In our district this year, we are required to attend grade level team meetings which will meet twice a week. Guess what we are discussing and brainstorming in these meetings? We will be looking at formative assessments for (you guessed it) reading and math to identify areas of weakness and collaborate as a grade level to improve upon these skills in order to bring up test scores. What are conspicuously lacking from this list are science, social studies, and the arts. My guess is that most teachers out there would agree that they are spending more time and effort teaching reading and math than in teaching other subjects. And we all know why we are.

Diane voices legitimate concerns too that our focus as teachers has also shifted, due to the emphasis on test scores, from thorough knowledge of the subject matter to test-taking skills and strategies. She cites the use of previous tests, which are available on the Department of Education website, to prepare students and claims that “in urban schools, where there are many low-performing students, drill and practice became a significant part of the daily routine” as a result of NCLB.

Ms. Ravitch, thank you for bravely stating what every teacher out there knows. We teach differently, but we don’t teach better. We teach differently because instead of trying to educate our children, we are trying to get them to pass tests that make our schools look good. And, as a result, we are doing our children a disservice; a disservice we are forced to continue to do because our jobs are on the line. Don’t you just wish we could get back to being real teachers preparing our students for real life and real careers, to be responsible citizens and real community leaders, and to love learning simply for the sake of learning, not to pass a bubble test? Do I hear an “Amen, sister”?

Changes in Teaching, Educational Reform, No Child Left Behind, state achievement tests, Teacher-World's Blog Diane Ravitch, NCLB, standardized tests, students, teachers

Wow! Have you read anything written by Diane Ravitch? The latest neatoday magazine had a lengthy article written by her which answers a lot of questions about NCLB and Obama’s policies to “reform” NCLB. Over the next few blogs, I will be going over some of the interesting facts she presents regarding what has become, for most teachers and principals, a very heated issue.

Diane Ravitch is an educational historian who was appointed to public office under both Presidents Bush and Clinton and is a former United States Assistant Secretary of Education. As such, she was a strong proponent of NCLB when it was originally proposed, but her opinion about Bush’s educational reform has dramatically reversed itself in recent years. This is important for us to keep in mind: she was not against it from the start but has become disillusioned with it over time. This gives her comments, in my opinion, far more credibility.

In this article, Ms. Ravitch discusses how recent educational reform was born. She points a finger at “The Billionaire Boys’ Club”; foundations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation that have taken a keen interest in failing schools and low test scores leveraging their way into a position of influence in American education. As she says, “There is something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society’s wealthiest people. These foundations, no matter how worthy and high-minded, are not subject to public oversight or review, as a public agency would be. They have taken it upon themselves to reform public education, perhaps in ways that would never survive the scrutiny of voters in any district or state.”

She continues to point out that, while public schools and teachers are being held to an incredible degree of scrutiny and accountability, these foundations have no accountability whatsoever. This means that there is no consequence to them if a policy they have advocated should fail, but the schools that had to administer that failed policy may face consequences.

The goal of these foundations seems to be to privatize public education as much as possible. They point to the few charter schools that were successful in 2009, as the role models for educational reform. (Interestingly, out of the 4,600 charter schools operating in 2009, only about 300 were visibly successful.) Now, Diane makes a good point. If more charter schools are introduced into urban areas where poverty abounds, these schools “will enroll the motivated children of the poor, while the regular public schools will become schools of last resort for those who never applied or were rejected. The regular public schools will enroll a disproportionate share of students with learning disabilities and students who are classified as English-language learners; they will enroll the kids from the most troubled home circumstances, the ones with the worst attendance records and the lowest grades and test scores.”

Ms. Ravitch makes the point that privatizing public schools is as ludicrous as privatizing police and fire departments. And she predicts the demise of public education if we do not stand up to politicians and these wealthy “reformers”. She closes this section of her article with a valid argument for public schools when she states, “As we lose neighborhood public schools, we lose the one local institution where people congregate and mobilize to solve local problems, where individuals learn to speak up and debate and engage in democratic give-and-take with their neighbors.”

A sobering thought in sobering economic times. Just think back to your public school education and all of the community events that were inspired by your school: band, choir, school plays, athletic events, science fairs, art shows, etc. These are the kinds of things that tests can’t measure, but they most assuredly build character and dedication, and for some, lead to eventual careers. And these are the kinds of things that build community.

I, for one, will continue to be vocal about my love for and dedication to public education, as Diane Ravitch is doing. What about you?

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As I mentioned in a previous blog, the U.S. Department of Education will by holding meetings to look at a variety of educational issues. I would like to address another one of the issues they will be discussing: assessing students with disabilities. This is an issue that has become extremely problematic since the introduction of NCLB, which has created the impossible expectation that all students, including those in special education, are expected to pass their state achievement tests. Teachers everywhere shook their heads in disbelief when this was added to the list of expectations by our government.

Before NCLB, we administered achievement tests to all students, but SPED scores were usually not factored into overall school’s scores because, for most of these students, the tests were extremely difficult and tedious. Through no fault of their own, this population of students struggle with the regular education curriculum and require accommodations and modifications, which are delineated in an IEP, in order to be successful in the classroom. Now, with the push for inclusion and co-teaching, most of these students are in a regular education classroom all or most of the day. Let me be clear that I am all for inclusion and for pushing these students to participate in as much of the regular education curriculum as they can. But even with my higher functioning SPED students, curriculum needs to be adjusted regularly to allow them to experience success. Accommodations and modifications range from shorter assignments, extended time to complete assignments, tests and selections read to them, etc. So we make all of these provisions for them knowing that it would be difficult or impossible for them to be successful without them, and then we sit them down in the spring and make them take the same test that the regular education students will take with no reduction in length, and the only modification they have is that the directions and questions can be read to them. The numerous selections on the reading test cannot be read to them, and calculators cannot be used on the math test. Then we take their results and include them with those of the regular ed population. Does this seem reasonable or fair?

Why don’t we test and evaluate these students in a more meaningful manner? What if we looked at their progress to determine if they have achieved AYP? Isn’t that a more meaningful measure of success for these students than expecting them to somehow miraculously perform on tests in a way that their IEP would collaborate is not their most effective way of performing? When I think of the stress we place upon these students to pass these tests, it seems preposterous to me. Wouldn’t we better serve them by striving for yearly progress in their educational journey, and setting realistic and attainable goals to help them be successful in that endeavor? Don’t get me wrong! If a SPED student is capable of passing these tests, let their scores by factored into their school’s scores. But for those who can’t, let’s evaluate them fairly and not make them feel any less able than they already do.

Educational Reform, state achievement tests, Teacher-World's Blog Add new tag, evalutions, NCLB, special education, SPED, state achievement tests, U.S. Department of Education