A Challenge

reposted from A Teacher's Fight.

We Need to Talk...

Now. Let me be more specific. We, the parents, educators, and concerned citizens, need to have a conversation via social media or in person about education in our communities. We will listen to each other and have a civil debate. No personal attacks. Put your personal agendas aside and any allegiances you may have to particular organizations. But we have to start talking. We all have to start asking questions and seeking the truth. We need to look at the research for ourselves. Then we need to look at who is doing the research and examine the context.

Beware. I'm purposely going to ruffle some feathers to get the conversation started.

Let's look at charter schools. If you are an educator in a charter school and your school does not meet the needs of children by providing the resources and opportunities that, as professionals, we know are important for addressing the academic, social, emotional, and physical needs of children, WHY ARE YOU STILL TEACHING THERE OR WHY ARE YOU NOT CHALLENGING THE INEQUALITY?

Listen, it's one thing to be teaching in a traditional public school that has been forced to make incredible cuts to important programs and opportunities for children, and another to be teaching in a charter school that just doesn't provide what students need. I'm just going to say it....you are enabling educational inequality and possibly racial inequality as well. You need to speak up for children and families. Go to the school board meetings. If your CMO or EMO is for-profit, demand that that they take less profits in order to fund what students need. Of course, be prepared to be fired.

There are some big questions that we need to answer. Look at the local statistics below. What questions arise from this data?

Fort Wayne Charter School ISTEP Percentages of Students Passing Both Math and English/Language Arts for Each Year Since Opening

Imagine MASTer Academy - 50.8% 53.6% 54.7% 53.6% 60.3% 51.7%
Imagine Schools on Broadway - 23.4% 29.8% 31.1% 36.6% 36.8%
Timothy L. Johnson - 25.8% 20.3% 35.9% 25.6% 37.8% 28.2% 41.3%

I have more important stats to share, but we'll just start out with this. Please respond or ask questions. Post a comment anonymously if you need to or e-mail me for a private conversation. (eileenrdoherty@gmail.com)

Let Them Eat Tests

The following appeared on the United Church of Christ web site. It was written by Jan Resseger, a lay minister for Public Education and Witness for the United Church of Christ.

Let Them Eat Tests

Written by Janice Resseger
June 25, 2012
Click here to support Justice and Witness Ministries

The blogosphere went wild recently when Reuters reported that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has granted $1.4 million to university researchers to investigate the use of biometric, galvanic skin response bracelets to measure whether teachers are engaging students’ interest.

This is one more step in the move to de-professionalize teaching, part of the idea that it doesn’t help teachers to go through the college certification process. Today’s “so-called” education reformers believe we need to replace “qualified” (certified) teachers with “effective” teachers, as measured by students’ standardized test scores or perhaps galvanic skin responses. We’ve come to trust counting and measuring instead of our judgment and our hearts.

I like to browse among college bookstore shelves stocking the required books for students studying to be professional, certified school teachers—books like Mike Rose’s Possible Lives and Gloria Ladson-Billings’ The Dream-Keepers.

Just read the titles. They are books of hope, the stories of excellent school teachers. Ladson-Billings, whose book is subtitled “Successful Teachers of African American Children,” describes professionals who honor their students’ home culture, help children understand their world and equip them to improve it. She celebrates teachers who understand themselves as members of their communities and simultaneously lifelong professionals called to nurture children steadfastly, creatively and thoughtfully.

For four years Rose traveled the United States, visiting classrooms where fine teachers in cities, towns and even a one-room school in Montana’s Grasshopper Valley inspire children to explore and work together. Rose begs us not to look for a one best measurable way to replicate good teachers: “Though the chapters offer a number of portraits of good teachers, there is no single profile of the Good Teacher.... I recommend no final list of good practices…. Such profiles and lists have value…but they also have a tendency to be… reduced to slogan or commodity.”

These books, published in the mid-1990s, have become classics. I encourage you to read them because, although the students learning to be school teachers still read The Dream-Keepers and Possible Lives, many of us outside the colleges of education no longer understand teaching as the kind of profession these books present. Our understanding of teaching has changed as our understanding of public education itself has narrowed.

In a recent graduation address at Teachers College, Columbia University, Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University expert on teaching, declared, “The new scientific managers… like to rank and sort students, teachers and schools—rewarding those at the top and punishing those at the bottom…. while issuing multimillion-dollar contracts for testing and data systems to create more graphs, charts and report cards on which to rank and sort…. And the new scientific managers cleverly construct systems that solve the problem of the poor by blaming the teachers and schools that seek to serve them, calling the deepening levels of severe poverty an ‘excuse,’ rewarding schools that keep out and push out the highest-need students.” “The United States now has a far higher poverty rate for children than any other industrialized country… Our leaders do not talk about these things. They simply say of poor children, ‘Let them eat tests.’”

Education Issues 2012 #3

Changing Direction, Teaching as a Career, Investment in Education, VAM in Teacher Training

(Click on the titles below to read the complete articles.)

NSBA President’s letter to Obama: please change direction!

We want for each American child the same things that you and Michelle want for Sasha and Malia—inspiration, aspiration, creativity. I know you don’t want an overemphasis on testing. I have heard you say it. Experience in schools and communities, supported by research, tells us that relentlessly focusing on standardized tests erodes our national competitiveness and deadens curiosity and drive. Clearly, we need some testing to gauge student learning, and we have no problem with appropriate accountability. But we have swung to a far extreme that is significantly hurting children. “Students are numbing over testing for testing’s sake…. We can’t test this country into excellence.” (Sonny Savoie, LA)

...the present narrow focus on accountability and trend of demonizing those in public education, arrogantly focusing on “failing schools,” is diametrically opposed to fostering excellence.

Mr. President, public education in the U.S. is on the wrong track. As we have moved decision-making farther from teachers and children, we have jeopardized our competitive edge and keys to our national success: our ingenuity, our openness to innovation, and our creativity.

The Hardest Job Everyone Thinks They Can Do

Are there billionaires who insist on making public policy for professions other than teaching? Does money qualify one as an expert in public education? How about attendance? Does having attended school give one the expertise needed to improve public education?

Can anyone be a teacher? Does it take any special training or development?

I realize now how little respect teachers get. Teaching is the toughest job everyone who’s never done it thinks they can do. I admit, I was guilty of these delusions myself. When I decided to make the switch from “doing” science to “teaching” science, I found out that I had to go back to school to get a teaching credential.

“What the f—?!?,” I screamed to any friends willing to put up with my griping. “I have a Ph.D.! Why do I need to go back to get a lousy teaching credential?!?”

I was baffled. How could I, with my advanced degree in biology, not be qualified to teach biology?!

Well, those school administrators were a stubborn bunch. I simply couldn’t get a job without a credential. And so, I begrudgingly enrolled in a secondary teaching credential program.

And boy, were my eyes opened. I understand now.

Teachers deserve our trust

No other profession is as readily dismissed in debates about their work. Politicians, businesspeople, parents, Treasury - we all know better how to "fix" the education system. Teachers matter, everyone agrees; but mostly when we're looking to apportion blame for education failure.

No Funds Left Behind

Why is it that those people who send their children to expensive private schools or well funded public schools are the ones who cry the loudest that money doesn't matter in education?

Last spring, as the Texas Legislature debated massive cuts to public schools—one of many desperate measures to close a $27 billion biennial budget deficit—10,000 protesters massed in Austin for a “Save Our Schools” rally. In the end, the damage to the state’s already-underfunded schools added up to $5.4 billion, forcing districts to lay off tens of thousands of teachers and staffers. In the city of Austin, public schools with rapidly growing enrollment found themselves facing a 5.5 percent cut in the 2011–2012 school year and 8.5 percent the next year. The quandary was far from extraordinary—37 states spent less on education in 2011 compared to 2010. Neither was one of the Austin schools’ solutions: seeking grant money from the world’s largest philanthropic organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Ed Dept seeks to bring test-based assessment to teacher prep programs

We know that using Value Added Method (VAM) to evaluate teachers -- evaluating teachers using student test scores -- isn't valid. Why would the US Department of Education want to extend that use to evaluate teacher training institutions?

The Education Department just tried — and failed — to persuade a group of negotiators to agree to regulations that would rate colleges of education in large part on how K-12 students being taught by their graduates perform on standardized tests. As part of this scheme, financial aid to students in these programs would not be based entirely on need but, rather, would also be linked to test scores.

The department’s plans assume that standardized test scores can reliably and validly be used for such accountability purposes . Most researchers in this field say they can’t — for a number of reasons, including the limitations of the tests themselves — and therefore shouldn’t be used for any high stakes decision in education anywhere. They say that making test scores so important is one of the negative consequences of the last decade of No Child Left Behind, and shouldn’t be continued.

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