The testing rebellion & opt-out movement in NYC has a supporter -- inside Tweed

Lisa Nielsen

A nationwide backlash has erupted against the obsession with standardized testing.  In February 2012, the Texas Commissioner of Education, Robert Perry, announced that testing had become a "perversion of its original intent.” Over the last year, 86 percent of Texas school boards representing 91 percent of the state’s students, have passed resolutions against the use of high stakes testing. The view is now so mainstream that in his introductory remarks before the Legislature, Joe Straus, the new, conservative GOP Speaker of the Texas House recently announced,

"By now, every member of this house has heard from constituents at the grocery store or the Little League fields about the burdens of an increasingly cumbersome testing system in our schools…Teachers and parents worry that we have sacrificed classroom inspiration for rote memorization. To parents and educators concerned about excessive testing: The Texas House has heard you."

Joining the movement is Joshua Starr, the superintendent of Montgomery County, Maryland, who has called for the nation to “stop the insanity” of  evaluating teachers according to student test scores, and has proposed a three year moratorium on all standardized testing.  Starr has joined forces with Heath Morrison, the newly-appointed superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, a Broad-trained educator no less, who calls testing “an egregious waste of taxpayer dollars” that won’t help kids.  

Then last week, the movement jumped into the headlines when teachers at Garfield High School in Seattle voted unanimously to boycott the lengthy computerized MAP exams, which take weeks of classroom time to administer; the teachers were supported by the school’s PTA and the student government.   Other Seattle schools have now joined the boycott, and yesterday, more than sixty educators and researchers, including Diane Ravitch, Jonathan Kozol, and Noam Chomsky, released a letter of support for the boycott, noting that "no student's intellectual process can be reduced to a single number." [Full disclosure: I was among the letter's signers.]

Even before this, more than one third of the principals in New York State had signed onto a letter, protesting the state-imposed teacher evaluation system, which will be largely based on test scores, and Carol Burris, a Long Island principal and the letter’s co-author, has more recently posted a petition that has now over 8200 signatures from parents and educators, opposing all high-stakes testing. 

Though many NYC teachers and principals have spoken out against the particularly onerous brand of test score-based accountability imposed by DOE, with decisions over which children to hold back, what schools to close and which teachers to deny tenure to, based largely on the basis of test scores, no one inside the halls of Tweed, DOE’s headquarters, has up to now been brave enough to speak out publicly against the system.

Until now.  As reported in yesterday’s NY Post, Lisa Nielsen, the  newly-appointed digital guru at Tweed, has not only stated that she believes that high-stakes testing is severely damaging our children and schools, she has also offered creative suggestions of activities that parents can offer their children rather than allow them to be subjected to the state tests.  On her personal blog, the Innovative Educator, she writes:    “There are so many ways kids can learn on opt out of state standardized testing days.  All it takes is community coming together to take back our children’s freedom to learn.”

Lisa also runs the Facebook NY State Opt out of Testing page, and has pointed out the “12 Most Unconventional Reasons to Opt Your Child Out of Standardized Testing,” including the fact that they are a “horrific waste of money”, and cause unneeded anxiety and stress.  She adds: 

“Instead of spending billions of dollars on funding testing this money could go toward providing resources for children or lowering class size. Let the teachers do what they were trained to do — teach and assess. Keep big business out of the equation. Keep the billions of dollars out of the pockets of publishers and let it remain in the classroom.”

We now have our own anti-testing advocate at Tweed, and  we should all celebrate Lisa’s honesty and her courage in speaking the truth. 
 

Pasi Sahlberg, expert on Finland’s renowned educational system, had said that if his government decided to evaluate their teachers on the basis of test scores, the “teachers would probably go on strike and wouldn’t return until this crazy idea went away.” 

It’s time for all our educators to join the movement, follow the inspired leadership of Lisa Nielsen and the teachers in Portland, go public with their opposition, and refuse to participate in this oppressive system any longer.

Jonathan Kozol on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., poverty and class size

Every year on Martin Luther King Jr. birthday, I try to honor this man’s great memory on this blog.  Today I watched Obama’s inauguration; he gave a great speech, particularly on issues like climate change, and probably the most progressive since he was elected; except for a gaping hole when it comes to education. 

During the last campaign, Obama spoke about cuts to public schools and the need to reduce rising class sizes; yet this wasn’t mentioned today.  All he said today about education was the vague need to “harness new ideas…to reform schools” and hire more “science and math teachers.”  

I suppose it could have been worse; he could have pushed Race to the Top and charters, but it is not wholly satisfying when we see how public education is being absolutely decimated by budget cuts, the over-emphasis on testing, the wholesale closing of neighborhood schools, the expansion of privatization, and online learning—with several of these negative trends actually encouraged by the policies of Education Secretary Arne Duncan.  How can a man as thoughtful as Obama support these policies? The cognitive dissonance his speech evoked in me today, as before, is extreme. 

So instead, I am posting the video below of a panel discussion, hosted by Tavis Smiley aired two days ago on CSPAN, in which Smiley and notable guests, including Jeffrey Sachs, Cornel West, Jonathan Kozol, Rep. Marcia Fudge, and many others discussed the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and the continuing scourge of inequality and poverty in America. 

 [Spoiler alert:  Newt Gingrich recounts how he toured schools with Al Sharpton and Arne Duncan, saying he would support 15 kids per class and more funding for education if only schools could be privatized through the expansion of vouchers and charter schools.]

The entire program is well worth watching, but especially from minute 27 on, when Jonathan Kozol speaks about the link between poverty and class size.   Here is an excerpt from his eloquent remarks:

 “I get so angry every year on Martin Luther King’s birthday when I hear politicians who turn their back totally on everything he lived and died for; never lifted a finger to bring an end to apartheid schooling….Doctor King did NOT say someday in canyons of our cities north or south we will have test-driven, anxiety-ridden, separate and unequal schools.  We’ve ripped apart his legacy and then we use his name in vain….

“The only tried and proven avenue of exit for the poorest children in this country from the destitution of their parents is to give them absolutely terrific, exciting and expensive public education, and to fund it not simply at the same high level as the richest levels of the suburbs but at a higher level because those children need it more….

In the past few years, class size has been soaring in our schools because they’ve been laying off teachers.  I walk into public schools in New York where I find 36 children in a 4th grade class, right back to the 1960's.  I walk into a high school in Los Angeles with 40 kids in a 10th grade social studies class...

“There are a lot of factors that go into terrific education, but one thing I know for sure is that the size of a class a teacher teaches is one of the most important factors in the entire pedagogic world.  I’ve heard plenty of old time conservatives – Pat Buchanan once yelled at me on TV and said, that’s nonsense, I had 50 in my class, it didn’t hurt me.  I said, well, I’m not sure. 

“But the fact of the matter, let’s be blunt about it.  I have rich friends, and these are people who read my book, and say to me, Jonathan, does class size really matter for those children?  And I always ask them where their kids go to school, and how many children in their classes, and typically if they’re in a lovely suburb its 16, 18.  Parents panic when it gets to 21.  And if they go to lovely private schools like Sidwell Friends here in Washington, it’s more like 15.  And then I see these kids packed into classrooms where there are more children than chairs. 

“If very small class size and the intimate, affectionate attention this enables a good teacher to give to every little girl and boy; if that’s good for the son of a prosperous physician or a successful lawyer or the daughter of a Senator, or the President himself, then it’s good for the poorest child in America.”

Amen.

Parents beware! NY and eight other states plan to share your child’s confidential school records with private corporations without your consent!

New York is one of five states that have agreed to share confidential NYC student and teacher data in Phase I with the “Shared Learning Collaborative” or SLC, a project of the Gates Foundation.

•  The other  states and districts in Phase I include North Carolina (Guilford Co.), Colorado (Jefferson Co.), Illinois (Unit 5 Normal and District 87 Bloomington) and Massachusetts (Everett). Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, and Louisiana are in Phase II, according to the Gates Foundation, intend to start piloting the system in 2013. 

• The data to be shared will include the names of students, their grades, test scores, disciplinary and attendance records, and likely race, ethnicity, free lunch and special education status as well.

•  These records are to be stored in a massive electronic data bank, being built by Wireless Generation, a subsidiary of News Corporation. News Corporation is owned by Rupert Murdoch and has been found to illegally violate the privacy of individuals in Great Britain and in the United States. 

•  Over the next few months, the Gates Foundation plans to turn over all this personal data to another, as yet unnamed corporation, headed by Iwan Streichenberger, the former marketing director of a company called Promethean that sells whiteboards, based in Atlanta GA.

• This new corporation intends to make this confidential student information available in turn to commercial enterprises to help them develop and market their “learning products.”  This new corporation is supposed to be financially sustainable by 2016, which means either states, districts or vendors will have to pay for its upkeep and maintenance.  All this is happening without parental knowledge or consent. 

• There are serious questions as to whether this plan complies with the federal law protecting student privacy, called FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act), which allows states or districts to disclose  students' personally identifiable education records without parental consent only in very limited circumstances and under stringent conditions, none of which apply in this case.

•  Moreover, we have learned that this confidential information is to be put on a cloud managed by Amazon.com, with few if any protections against data leakage.  

• After our press conference with our attorney, Norman Siegel in October, the NY State Education Department finally released its contract with the Gates Foundation.  As we feared, it only reaffirmed our concerns about the lack of privacy for children, the weak protections against data leakage, and the denial of the parental right to consent.  Here is a letter from our attorneys expressing our concerns.

We believe that any state that enters into an agreement with the Shared Learning Collaborative, or its successor corporation, should at the very least be obligated to:

1. Release its contract with the Gates Foundation, notify all parents of the impending disclosure of their children's confidential records, and provide them with the right to consent;  
2.  Hold public hearings for parents to be able to express their concerns about the plan’s potential to risk their children’s privacy, security and safety; 
3. Explain how families can obtain relief if their children are harmed by improper use or accidental release of this information, including who will be held financially responsible; 
4.  Affirm that they will respect the privacy rights of public schoolchildren more than the interests of the Gates Foundation, News Corporation, or any other company or vendor with whom this confidential information may be shared.

Please see below; video of Khem Irby, parent activist in North Carolina, speaking before the Guilford school board about this issue last week.   

Here is a fact sheet with this information you can download and distribute. You can also leave a comment on the Gates website here, if you think parents should have the right to consent.   

For more information, please email us at info@classsizematters.org or call us at 212-674-7320.

Autopsy of the failed teacher evaluation deal

In all the conflicting accounts between the city and the UFT about the collapse of the teacher evaluation negotiations, there is one clear point of agreement:  the Mayor refused to accept a two year sunset for the plan. In this, he was deeply wrong for disallowing the city to pilot what is essentially an experiment that could go badly, for both teachers and children.  Meanwhile, 90 percent of the districts in the rest of the state, appropriately, have a one year sunset on their teacher evaluation systems.  As I commented on the Schoolbook site, this insistence that the plan should be set in stone, with no sunset, shows Bloomberg as an arrogant wannabe Mayor-for-life. 

• On the UFT site, Edwize, Leo Casey posts what appears to be a DOE document, showing that the two year sunset had been accepted by the DOE before the Mayor blew the deal out of the water.  This evidence further contradicts Bloomberg's claim that it was the UFT who tried to slip the sunset provision in at the last minute. His claim is also inconsistent with what Ernie Logan has revealed, that the DOE had already agreed to an even shorter sunset of one year with the principals union, before Bloomberg blew up their evaluation deal as well.

•  Casey also reveals that towards the end, DOE tried to change “numerous scoring tables and conversion charts” that would incorporate the different components of the evaluation plan, including the growth scores based on student test scores, and that the DOE and the UFT then agreed to form a committee that would work on the scoring tables after the agreement was signed.  This suggests that even before the mayor rejected it, the deal was not really complete but could have faced serious conflicts in the future.

• There’s a good piece in the Village Voice with lots of quotes from Bruce Baker of Rutgers, about the fact that the state still owes NYC billions of dollars in funds through the CFE decision, and  that the Governor should not be allowed to cut $250 million, as he has threatened, because of the city's failure to come to an agreement.  If so, he will merely be hurting the children of NYC who deserve these funds no matter whether there is a new teacher evaluation system or not.  The article also contains links to Baker’s analysis, showing that the growth scores that would be included in the plan, required as part of Race to the Top,  are particularly unreliable, and the problem with “[these] policy prescriptions is they're trying to do it in a particularly dumbass way."

• Yoav Gonen reveals in the NY Post that the man who was primarily responsible for these dumbass prescriptions, Arne Duncan, called the Bloomberg and the UFT to urge them to make a deal.

• Meanwhile there is NY State Education Commissioner  King’s statement that the city and the UFT still have a “legal obligation to continue to negotiate,”  I suppose because the State promised this in return for getting RTTT funds, but whether anyone will take this seriously is doubtful.

Who is to blame for the failed negotiations over teacher evaluation?

If the Governor goes ahead with punishing NYC children for the failure to reach a deal over teacher evaluation by subtracting $250 million from state aid, it will be terribly unfair.  Yet there is little doubt that most parents will blame Bloomberg for this latest fiasco, as the just-released Quinnipiac poll shows that NYC voters trust the UFT by 53 to 35 percent over the mayor. And 63 percent of those polled believe that the mayor should share power, compared to only 13 percent who say he should continue to have complete control, without any checks and balances. 

In response to  bills introduced in the Legislature to undo mayoral control last year, the mayor’s spokesperson said that no one should want to return to “those bad old days of dysfunction and corruption.”  These bills have just been re-introduced.

Actually the "bad old days" look pretty good compare with the collapse of negotiations over a new teacher evaluation system,  the bus strike, the largest class sizes in 14 years, and million dollar contracts awarded vendors who have been shown to  have stolen millions in the past.  (The latest beneficiary of the DOE’s largesse is Champion Learning, which was awarded $4.5 million by the Panel for Educational Policy in November, despite having found to have overbilled DOE by many millions and being under federal investigation.)

The legislature should take note, and refrain from punishing NYC students, by insisting that their schools are fully funded and that no future mayor has the unilateral ability to damage our schools and hurt our kids again.

Quinn's speech on education: high and low points

Speaker Christine Quinn, thought to be the frontrunner in the race to replace Mayor Bloomberg, gave a major speech on education yesterday at the New School. The full transcript is here; there’s also a Video, including a brief Q and A by Clara Hemphill of InsideSchools.   

I highly recommend people read the speech and watch the video of the entire event.

Some observations:  The speech was pretty comprehensive and its strengths were that she did express skepticism on many of the worst of Bloomberg policies: rampant school closings and obsessive testing, and she at least implied we don’t need any more charter schools, though she said she wouldn’t make them pay rent when they occupy space in school buildings.  (When she said that would mean the end of charter schools, some in the audience shouted “Good!”)

Yet her speech was disappointingly thin on practical positive proposals to improve our schools, especially in the area of parent input.

• Though she said she was “proposing a package of reforms called "Parents Matter,”  she  focused on the idea of an  online “Parent University” for parents to learn about nutrition and academic subjects; expanding a “College Readiness Initiative” developed by New Visions that helps inform parents how to ensure their kids are prepared for college by sharing data, and announced a new effort with InsideSchools to “launch an online tool to help simplify the complicated school choice system.”  In all, she seemed to regard parents as Bloomberg does: consumers and passive recipients of information rather than partners in decision-making.  She even compared the need to improve DOE’s “customer service” to Zappos online shoe store.

• She made a big push on replacing textbooks with tablets, which will be very expensive, if the cost of E-books are included.  (And will allow for-profit companies like Murdoch’s Amplify, run by Joel Klein, to make a lot of money.)

• She proposed keeping kids in the most high-poverty schools in “structured learning environments” until 6 PM, which many parents (and students) do not support, and which has little research to back it up. 

• Quinn, like other many of the other candidates, promoted the idea of community schools, including wraparound services such as medical clinics, which is the UFT’s current pet proposal.  Yet this idea, as well as expanding preK which she also supports, will be difficult in most neighborhoods given the overwhelming overcrowding and critical shortage of space in our schools that in many cases has worsened because of enrollment growth and co-locations.   The city council has a legal role in approving the capital plan and yet under Quinn, has never used its authority to require any improvements in its DOE’s faulty enrollment projections, its misplaced priorities, or its underfunding of school construction.

• On testing, she came out for expanding the portfolio schools and against the current overemphasis on testing and test prep, which she said was an immense waste of time; this part of the speech got the most positive response from the audience.   She even criticized Pearson by name. Yet her one specific proposal, to end the Pearson field tests, is up to the state not the mayor. 

• Finally, and most grievously, she did not mention class size, the top priority of parents and a critical precondition for improving the quality of NYC schools.  Instead, she called for yet another research study, to be done by Columbia University, to determine what  “best practices” should be replicated.

In the Q and A section, when asked about giving parent-led Community Education Councils more authority, she compared them to Community Boards and maintained that without any change in their current advisory role they could and should be listened to more; but CBs have more influence, in large part, because the City Council gets final vote on land use issues, which it doesn’t on most education policies like school closings or co-locations.  Even so CBs have been overruled on many critical issues like Yankee Stadium and the expansion of Columbia University.

She also expressed confusion and ambivalence when asked about the networks, which most parents detest and many teachers I’ve spoken to think are useless.  Anyway, that's my (admittedly biased) perspective. Here are some news clips; please watch or read the speech and leave your comments below!   

·  In Speech, Quinn Spells Out Education Platform - Metropolis - WSJ

·  Council Speaker Quinn Gives Education Policy Speech - NY1.com

·  Quinn seeks to build on Bloomberg's education legacy - Crains ...

·  Christine Quinn Wants to Model NYC's School System on Zappos  -Politicker...

·  Quinn Outlines New York City Education Policy - Epoch Times

·  Quinn says city schools need collaboration, not competition – Gotham Schools

·  Christine Quinn Wants to Replace Textbooks with Tablets - DNAinfo ...

·Christine Quinn's education speech proposes axing textbooks, extending school until 6 pm;   Metro.us ‎