FINLANDS SCHOOLS, AMERICAN MISSTEPS

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/07/25/five-u-s-innovations-that-helped-finlands-schools-improve-but-that-american-reformers-now-ignore/

Five U.S. innovations that helped Finland’s schools improve but that American reformers now ignore

 

(Bloomberg)

Finnish educator and scholar Pasi Sahlberg is one of the world’s leading experts on school reform and educational practices. The author of the best-selling “Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland?”and a former director general of Finland’s Center for International Mobility and Cooperation, Sahlberg is now a visiting professor of practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has written a number of important posts for this blog, including “What if Finland’s great teachers taught in U.S. schools,” and “What the U.S. can’t learn from Finland about ed reform.”

In this post Sahlberg writes about what constitutes real education innovation, a topic that was the subject of a recent eport by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, about which I wrote and questioned here. Sahlberg notes how U.S. innovation has helped many successful education systems around the world even as Americans ignore those very same reforms. This is important reading.

By Pasi Sahlberg

An intriguing question whether innovation in education can be measured has an answer now. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development in its recent report “Measuring Innovation in Education: A New Perspective, Educational Research and Innovation” measures Innovation in Education in 22 countries and 6 jurisdictions, among them the U.S. states Indiana, Massachusetts and Minnesota.

One conclusion of the OECD’s measurement of innovation between 2003 and 2011 is that “there have been large increases in innovative pedagogic practices across all countries … in areas such as relating lessons to real life, higher order skills, data and text interpretation and personalization of teaching.” The United States did not do very well when compared to other participating countries overall. “Not surprising,” some commented, pointing to tougher accountability measures and an obsession with standardized testing in most parts of the country.

It was surprising, however, to see the OECD’s list of the top five U.S. “innovations in pedagogic practice”: 1) more observation and description in secondary school science lessons; 
2) more individualized reading instruction in primary school classrooms;
 3) more use of answer explanation in primary mathematics;
 4) more relating of primary school lessons to everyday life; and
 5) more text interpretation in primary lessons. “Innovation in organizational policy and practice” included mostly different aspects of student assessment and testing. Good innovation sometimes means doing less of something in order to make time for experimentation with new pedagogical strategies.

An interesting observation that anyone interested in what current high-performing school systems have in common is that they all, some more than the others, have derived critical lessons from abroad. Singapore, one of the most successful reformers and highest performers in global education, has been sending students to study education in U.S. universities and encouraged university professors to collaborate in teaching and research with their American colleagues. Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea have done the same. More recently China has also benefited from education innovation from the United States and other Western education systems. Even those running school systems above the 49^th parallel in North America admit that U.S. research and innovation have been instrumental in making education in Canada world-class.

Finland is no exception. If you want to discover the origins of the most successful practices in pedagogy, student assessment, school leadership, and school improvement in Finland, you only need to visit some schools there and have a conversation with teachers and principals. Most of them have studied psychology, teaching methods, curriculum theories, assessment models, and classroom management researched and designed in the United States in their initial teacher education programs. Primary school teacher education syllabi in Finnish universities include scores of books and research articles written by U.S. scholars. Professional development and school improvement courses and programs often include visitors from the U.S. universities to teach and work with Finnish teachers and leaders. So common is the reliance on U.S. ideas in Finland that some have come to call the Finnish school system a large-scale laboratory of American education innovation.

The relatively low overall rating of “innovation in education” in the United States raises an interesting question: Where are all those great ideas in the United States that other countries have been able to utilize to improve the performance of their school systems during the last century? It is interesting that, according to the OECD, the United States exhibits only modest innovation in its education system but, at the same time, it is the world leader in producing research, practical models and innovation to other countries.

Five significant American educational ideas have been instrumental in accelerating Finland’s success in teaching and learning:
John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education

The roots of Finland’s pedagogical ideas date back to the 1860s when Uno Cygnaeus, who is sometimes referred as the father of basic education in Finland, said that in an ideal classroom, pupils speak more than the teacher. He was also a fan of practical aspects of education and insisted that both boys and girls must learn all the practical skills that people need in everyday lives. It is understandable that the pragmatic, child-centered educational thinking of John Dewey has been widely accepted among Finnish educators. Dewey’s philosophy of education forms a foundation for academic, research-based teacher education in Finland and influenced also the work of the most influential Finnish scholar professor Matti Koskenniemi in the 1940s. All primary school teachers read and explore Dewey’s and Koskenniemi’s ideas as part of their courses leading to the master’s degree. Many Finnish schools have adopted Dewey’s view of education for democracy by enhancing students’ access to decision-making regarding their own lives and studying in school. Some visitors to Finland, among them the late Seymour Sarason, have observed that the entire Finnish school system looks like John Dewey’s laboratory school in the U.S.

2. Cooperative Learning

Unlike in most other countries, cooperative learning has become a pedagogical approach that is widely practiced throughout Finnish education system. Finland’s new 9-year comprehensive launched in early 1970s was built on an idea of regular small-group learning of students coming from different family backgrounds. But it was the national curriculum reform in 1994 that brought cooperative learning as it is known now to most Finnish schools. Before that, all the main researchers and trainers of cooperative learning, including David Johnson, Roger Johnson and Elizabeth Cohen, had visited Finland to train trainers and teachers on their methods of teaching. Their books and articles were translated into Finnish and shared openly with all schools. The 1994 National Curriculum included a requirement that all schools design their own curricula in a way that would enhance teaching and learning according to constructivist educational ideas. Although cooperative learning was not mentioned as an obligatory pedagogical practice in schools, there were several recommendations for teachers to include elements of cooperative learning into their regular teaching. Ever since, cooperative learning has become an integral part of initial teacher education in Finland and one of the most popular themes in professional development of teachers and school leaders in Finland.

3. Multiple Intelligences

The spirit of 1970s school reform in Finland included another idea that derives from U.S. universities and scholars: development of the whole child. The overall goal of schooling in Finland was to support child’s holistic development and growth by focusing on different aspects of talent and intelligence. After abolishing all streaming and tracking of students in the mid-1980s, both education policies and school practices adopted the principle that all children have different kinds of intelligences and that schools must find ways how to cultivate these different individual aspects in balanced ways. Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences became a leading idea in transferring these policy principles to school practice. Again, the 1994 National Curriculum emphasizes that school education must provide all students with opportunities to develop all aspects of their minds. As a consequence, that curriculum framework required that all schools have a balanced program, blending academic subjects with art, music, crafts, and physical education. This framework moreover mandated that all schools provide students with sufficient time for their self-directive activities. Gardner’s influence has also been notable in the Finnish system by conferring a broader definition of “talent.”. Today, Finnish teachers believe that over 90 percent of students can learn successfully in their own classrooms if given the opportunity to evolve in a holistic manner.

4. Alternative Classroom Assessments

Without frequent standardized and census-based testing, the Finnish education system relies on local monitoring and teacher-made student assessments. A child-centered, interaction-rich whole-child approach in the national curriculum requires that different student assessment models are used in schools. Furthermore, primary school pupils don’t get any grades in their assessments before they are in fifth grade. It was natural that Finnish teachers found alternative student assessment methods attractive. And it is ironic that many of these methods were developed at U.S. universities and are yet far more popular in Finland than in the United States. These include portfolio assessment, performance assessment, self-assessment and self-reflection, and assessment for learning methods. Teacher education programs in Finland include elements of study of educational assessment and evaluation theories and also provide all students with practical knowledge and skill of how to use alternative student assessment methods in the classroom.

5. Peer Coaching

Another surprising aspect of Finnish education is that it lacks much of that change knowledge that is normally expected to guide policy-makers and education authorities in planning and implementing desired reforms in education. Research and development of system-wide educational reform and change hasn’t belonged to the academic repertoire of Finnish academia. The number of research papers related to that field has therefore remained minimal. Instead, Finnish education experts have relied on foreign sources of expertise and knowledge. A good example of an innovation designed in the U.S. is peer coaching that evolved in the 1980s and 1990s as a result of research and development work of Bruce Joyce and his colleagues. He also visited Finland to train trainers and education leaders on how the impact of professional development of teacher can be enhanced. Peer coaching—that is, a confidential process through which teachers work together to reflect on current practices, expand, improve, and learn new skills, exchange ideas, conduct classroom research and solve problems together in school—became normal practice in school improvement programs and professional development in Finland since the mid-1990s.

For me, just like for many of my Finnish colleagues, the United States is home to a great deal of educational research and innovation. Why doesn’t this show in international comparisons, like the recent review of innovation in education by the OECD? We visitors to the United States often wonder why innovations that have brought improvement to all successful education systems have not been embedded in the U.S. school system. One reason may be that the work of the school in the United States is so much steered by bureaucracies, test-based accountability and competition that schools are simply doing what they must do in this situation. Many visitors from the United States to Finland conclude their observations by saying that Finnish education looks like the U.S. education in the 1970s and 1980s.

My message to my colleagues in the United States is: This is the only education system in the world that is self-sufficient in terms of ideas, knowledge, research and innovation—and financial resources. All others, more or less, depend on knowledge and ideas generated in the United States. It is hard to accept the conclusion of the OECD’s measurement that the greatest American innovation in organizational policy and practice is student assessment, including standardized testing.

The question should not be: “How to have more innovation in education?” The real question is: “How to make the best use of all existing educational ideas that are somewhere in American schools and universities?” The answer is not to have more charter schools or private ownership of public schools to boost innovation.

The lesson from the most successful education systems is this: Education policies should not be determined by mythology and ideology but guided by research and evidence from home and abroad.

Sent from my iPhones

Common Core and the New SAT

http://m.nationalreview.com/corner/373283/common-core-and-new-sat-lindsey-burke

Common Core and the New SAT

The hugely controversial Common Core initiative is at least partly responsible for the latest revamp of the SAT college entrance exam. This puts great pressure on non-Common Core states, private schools, and homeschoolers to comply with national standards to keep students from doing poorly on the new Common Core–aligned SAT.

There have been many changes made to the SAT since its creation in 1926, such as the elimination of antonym questions in 1994 and the addition of the essay portion in 2005. More recently, the use of calculators has been permitted. The changes announced last week are just as specific; they include reverting back to the 1600 scoring scale and making the essay portion optional.

One of the goals of College Board president David Coleman is to more closely align the test with current high-school curricula. And the curriculum the folks over at College Board are referring to is Common Core. Coleman was one of the architects of Common Core, and took over the presidency of the College Board in May 2012. “The Common Core provides substantial opportunity to make the SAT even more reflective of what higher education wants,” Coleman said.

As the Washington Post reported: “The SAT’s writers appear to be doing two things: changing what it tests; and making it easier. . . . It’s no accident that this push comes from a College Board President who helped produce the K-12 Common Core standards, which aim to establish a national grade-school curriculum.”

The “making it easier” component is consistent with the standardization of mediocrity that Common Core national standards and tests represent. AEI’s Rick Hess calls it the Common Core-ification of the SAT. One of the major new changes to the SAT includes eliminating difficult words. Hess gives examples such as “punctilious” and “phlegmatic.” “I’m not sure,” Hess writes, “I regard these words as all that ‘obscure.’ And, in any event, I don’t know how you make a test more rigorous by dumbing down expectations for vocabulary.”

This is precisely the type of dumbing-down Dr. Sandra Stotsky warned about in her many critiques of the literary content — or lack thereof — of Common Core. Stotsky warned that college readiness will decrease as a result of Common Core English Language Arts (ELA) standards, which include a marked shift from fiction in favor of informational texts. That decrease in college readiness, she argues, is due to the simplicity of such informational texts. “By reducing literary study,” Stotsky notes, “Common Core decreases students’ opportunity to develop the analytical thinking once developed in just an elite group by the vocabulary, structure, style, ambiguity, point of view, figurative language, and irony in classic literary texts.” 

Common Core includes an implicit reduction in the variety and difficulty of vocabulary by over-emphasizing informational texts (70 percent of a teacher’s instructional materials must be derived from informational texts by the end of high school). The new SAT revamp is explicitly reducing the level of vocabulary it expects college-aspiring students to grasp.

There is massive opposition to Common Core from parents, teachers, and taxpayers. Even the teachers’ unions have voiced opposition to the assessments and implementation. With colleges increasingly questioning the efficacy of the SAT (it has lost market share to the ACT, colleges report it fails to reflect student ability, etc.), perhaps this alignment to Common Core will further motivate universities to disregard the test altogether, or to discard it in favor of other assessment instruments. 

Whatever happens, one thing is sure: The homogenizing of American education continues.

— Lindsey M. Burke is the Will Skillman Fellow in Education at the Heritage Foundation.

BILL GATES' DECEPTIVE DRIVE TO CONTINUE COMMON CORE WILL WEAKEN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/09/07/Stotsky-Gates-Deceptive-Drive-to-Continue-Common-Core-Will-Weaken-Public-Schools/

STOTSKY: BILL GATES' DECEPTIVE DRIVE TO CONTINUE COMMON CORE WILL WEAKEN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

The Gates Foundation has been very busy trying to figure out ways for governors, state boards, and commissioners of education to pretend they are giving up Common Core’s standards or tests, while ensuring these states still have warmed-over versions in place to satisfy Bill Gates’ ambitions.

We now have many examples of states that have gone through the motions to placate the still-growing army of parents, teachers, state legislators, and other citizens demanding a stronger, not weaker, public school system. But, instead of developing stronger alternative standards in place of Common Core’s misbegotten standards, some elected and appointed officials have deliberately played a trick on all of them by keeping Common Core’s tentacles in place while they use less toxic labels to describe the octopus strangling the education system. 

Why so many seemingly rational people want to believe that Common Core’s standards and the tests based on them are worth keeping is a subject for an in-depth psychological study. Why have so many, including reporters and others in the media, been so willingly fooled by a few Professor Harold Hills when they all must know they are harming the economic future of all children in our public schools, including the minority children they profess to care about the most?  

By now, five years after the release of Common Core’s final version of its mathematics and English language arts standards, it is quite clear to those who can read English that these standards cannot make our students ready for authentic college-level work -- and that they were not intended to. It should be clear by now that they were intended to get underperforming students into college (and then out with a diploma) in order to close the education “gaps” between students who are willing to spend some of their time paying attention to academic schoolwork and students who are not. 

Instead of letting young adolescents enroll in a course of studies they prefer in secondary school, Bill Gates, with the eager help of all the organizations he has funded to promote his image as an education saint, prefers to make our teachers accountable for young adolescents’ unwillingness to pay attention to what he thinks is good for them. The irony is that even he doesn’t think his own children should be enrolled in a Common Core-based curriculum.    

His scheme for doing an end-run around state legislators, parents, and local school boards was bought hook, line, and sinker by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as well as by most state commissioners and boards of education -- and many governors. Didn’t they wonder why the Gates Foundation still refuses to fund discussions of the actual quality of the standards? And the meaning of college readiness? 

The “gaps” will be closed under Common Core, not by teaching all students more but by making sure that the most able students learn less at the high school level so that the Gates-funded and self-appointed policy wonks at Achieve, Inc. and the Fordham Institute can boast of equal (but equally low) expectations for all of them.

The latest problem for the Gates Foundation is the current implosion of Common Core even faster than it was hoodwinked into place in 2010 by unwitting state boards and commissioners of education. What should the new party line be: That states really don’t want demanding standards? That their teachers are afraid of more demanding standards? That those “white suburban” parents want only A’s for their brilliant offspring?

The issue for parents, of course, is that they won’t accept a system rigged to assess their progeny in a way that discredits discipline-based knowledge.

It’s tough to come up with a new party line that will keep Common Core in place. But maybe the latest ploy being pushed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will do the trick: put out “loss leaders” from an inventory of Common Core-aligned lessons and get teachers to buy 50%-off “bargains” before school starts.  

Sandra Stotsky, Ed.D. is Professor Emerita, University of Arkansas.

Test scores plummet — so Florida drops passing grade

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/test-scores-plummet--so-florida-drops-passing-grade/2012/05/21/gIQAzopIeU_blog.html

Test scores plummet — so Florida drops passing grade

Posted at 03:29 PM ET, 05/21/2012

Here’s the latest disaster in Florida’s standardized test-based school accountability system, which has been touted as a model for education reform around the country since it was developed by former Gov. Jeb Bush.

Florida gave a new standardized writing test to students in various grades and the scores were worse than awful. Only 27 percent of fourth-graders had proficient scores on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), which was down from last year’s 81 percent. Eighth graders and 10th graders also had dramatically lower scores than last year.

State education officials panicked, and at an emergency meeting last week, the Florida Board of Education decided in a 4-3 vote that the best thing to do was to lower the passing score on this exam.

Let me repeat that: In order to make sure that students succeeded on the test, the passing grade was lowered.

The passing score does not just affect individual student scores; Florida public schools are given grades A-F based on these scores, part of Bush’s “Florida model” that has been copied by like-minded governors in recent years. What’s more, test scores in Florida are now used as a significant factor in teacher evaluations.

These governors apparently haven’t been reading newspapers in Florida, which for years have been chronicling one mess after another with the FCAT system. This paragraph is from a new editorial in the .Tallahassee Democrat:

“It’s not as if this is the first time problems with the FCAT — and the school grades closely associated with the FCAT — have made accountability impossible. Just look through some Tallahassee Democrat headlines going back 10 years: “State may see more ‘F’ schools: Changes in system may net more failures” (2002); “FCAT-grade criteria to get tougher” (2003); “New FCAT issues raised: Some say tests easier” (2004); “FCAT reading scores on the decline” (2005); “Florida schools granted leeway: It may mean more public schools pass” (2005); “School grading system may change” (2008); “FCAT audit to delay school grades” (2010); “FCAT writing scores drop across Florida” (2012).”

So what actually happened this spring? Are we to think that Florida students suddenly can’t write with any proficiency? Here’s what the education board’s press release issued last Tuesday said in part:

The Florida State Board of Education today adopted a new performance level standard for FCAT Writing. The performance level standard used for the purpose of calculating school grades for the 2011-12 school year will be a 3.0 on a scale of 6.0.

Today’s action was a result of reviewing preliminary scores that indicated significantly lower student performance based on an increased focus on writing conventions, such as grammar, and the quality of details provided as support when writing an essay.....

...The sequence of events that led to today’s vote follows:

* In spring 2010 the Florida legislature required that the Florida school grade writing standard be a score a student can earn.

* In May 2011, on the recommendation of a previous Commissioner of Education the State Board of Education set the school grade standard for FCAT Writing at 4.0 up from 3.5 since there was only one scorer and it was not possible to earn a half point.

* The State Board asked that the legislative budget request include a return to two scorers for each essay, which was implemented in 2012.

* In July 2011, school districts were notified of a change in the scoring of FCAT Writing for school year 2012 regarding the correct use of standard English conventions and the quality of details provided as support. The Department also posted sample writing papers illustrating the change in expectations and in August 2011 posted scoring guides for school district use at http://www.fldoe.org/arm.” 

So the board, in fact, is saying that when scoring standards for grammar, capitalization, etc., were raised, students failed. But does this mean that all of those kids who flunked can’t properly write? Not likely.

The place to look for problems is with the test themselves, the scoring mechanism, and the fact that teachers — understanding the high stakes attached to the results — had not adjusted their test preparation to the new standards.

Lowering passing scores or making tests easier so that more kids pass is not singular to Florida of course. In New York City,Joel Klein resigned in 2010 as public schools chancellor after an eight-year tenure around the time it was discovered that the standardized test score improvements that Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Klein had touted for years were inflated because the actual exams had become easier and easier to pass.

Across the country opposition is growing to test-based reform among parents, teachers, principals, superintendents, students and concerned citizens. Protests to the standardized test regime are being noticed everywhere — except, it seems, at the White House and the U.S. Education Department. It’s past time President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan took a look at how their own federal policies are contributing to this dangerous testing obsession.

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SCHOOL JUST ISN'T FOR CHILDREN ANYMORE

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/05/teacher-no-longer-can-i-throw-my-students-to-the-testing-wolves/

Teacher: No longer can I throw my students to the ‘testing wolves’

Veteran teacher Dawn Neely-Randall and Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown look at a post Neely-Randall wrote for The Answer Sheet about the reform movement. (Photo by Tom Traut)

Dawn Neely-Randall, who just started her 25th year of teaching, is sick and tired of the effects that obsessive standardized testing is having on her students. She is a member of the Badass Teachers Association,  a national group of more than 51,000 educators who came together to organize resistance to school reform that focuses on using standardized test scores for high-stakes accountability purposes and that ignores the role that poverty plays in student achievement.

In this powerful post she explains how her work as a teacher has been skewed by mandated standardized testing and how students are reacting. One child, she wrote, “sobbed” because she cared so much about her test score, and “it became blatantly obvious how one high-stakes standardized test had just negated the year’s worth of reading confidence and motivation she had worked so hard to attain.”  And, she wrote, “I can no longer be a teacher who tries to build these 10-year-olds up on one hand, but then throws them to the testing wolves with the other.”

Here’s the whole post.

By Dawn Neely-Randall

I’m not a celebrity. I’m not a politician. I’m not part of the 1 percent. I don’t own an education testing company. I am just a teacher and I just want to teach.

My life changed dramatically after a Facebook lament I wrote was published on The Answer Sheet last March. I was explaining how weary I was from the political addiction to mass standardized testing and how educationally abusive it had become to so many of the students in my care.

Last spring, you wouldn’t find the fifth-graders in my Language Arts class reading as many rich, engaging pieces of literature as they had in the past or huddled over the same number of authentic projects as before. Why? Because I had to stop teaching to give them a Common Core Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) online sample test that would prepare them for the upcoming PARCC pilot pre-test which would then prepare them for the PARCC pilot post test – all while taking the official Ohio Achievement Tests. This amounted to  three tests, each  2 ½ hours, in a single week, the scores of which would determine the academic track students would be placed on in middle school the following year.

In addition to all of that, I had to stop their test prep lessons (also a load of fun) to take each class three floors down to our computer lab so they could take the Standardized Testing and Reporting (“STAR”) tests so graphs and charts could be made of their Student Growth Percentile (SGP) which would then provide quantitative evidence to suggest how these 10-year-olds would do on the “real” tests and also surmise the teacher’s (my) affect on their learning.

Tests, tests, and more freakin’ tests.

And this is how I truly feel in my teacher’s heart: the state is destroying the cherished seven hours I have been given to teach my students reading and writing each week,  and these children will never be able to get those foundational moments back. Add to that the hours of testing they have already endured in years past, as well as all the hours of testing they still have facing them in the years to come. I consider this an unconscionable a theft of precious childhood time.

One parent sent me her district’s calendar showing that students would complete 21 mandated (K-3) assessments before a child would even finish third grade.  When I asked an Ohio Department of Education employee about this, she insisted there were not that many tests. When I read them to her one by one from the district’s calendar, she defended her position by saying that some of them were not from her department, but from another one. “But it’s the SAME kid!!!” I told her.

Indeed, it sure seems that school just isn’t for children anymore.

As I sat in my recliner writing about my frustrations all those months ago, I felt that I was sitting alone in a darkened theater watching a horror movie with my students in the starring roles. After it was published, however, it seemed as if the lights had been switched on and I found that the room was full of people from across the nation and they were just as traumatized as I.

Many Ohio teachers told me they were afraid to speak out because it might hurt their rating based on the new Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES) framework for scoring (now House Bill 362).  When I, for example, worked through this process last year, I was evaluated based on my students’ test scores as well as the evidence of “teacher performance” my principal had collected on me. One 40-minute lesson alone took me over seven hours to write up.

Since OTES also evaluates teachers based on their “positive rapport” as well as their “active volunteer, community, and family partnerships,” of course, teachers were afraid to speak out against harmful test practices and risk sounding negative and, of course, they worried about not being perceived as a team player if they didn’t want to be a part of test pep rallies or hosting parent PARCC information nights.

When teachers are being rated based on student test scores as well as their own attitudes about such, speaking out becomes a very risky business.

Principals too are afraid to speak out. Why? What if their disgruntlement empowers their staff to rally against all the testing and parents started opting their children out of taking the tests?  In Ohio, a zero is given in place of a score if a student does not take a standardized test. This zero is then averaged into the school’s rating on the state report card, which then affects the district’s rating. Administrators don’t have a union backing them to give them the freedom to advocate on behalf of students; most of them only have term contracts.

Parents were afraid to speak out because they are worried that school officials might consider them trouble makers or, worse, hold it against their child. And parents have no idea how their child’s teacher feels because — back to the beginning — many teachers are afraid to speak out.

One parent told me recently that she asked her daughter’s teacher if she thought her 10-year-old could handle the stress of the new PARCC pilot test and the teacher said she had been advised to say “no comment” when it came to either topic of the Common Core curriculum or testing. (What country do we live in, anyway?!)

Many students didn’t speak out as much as they acted out. Cried. Gave their parents a hard time about going to school. Disengaged in class. Got physically sick. Or became a discipline problem. Struggling students struggled even more.

Last school year, one of my fifth-grade below-level readers was working hard and making great gains. However, during the big Ohio Achievement Assessment in reading at the end of April, when she had already put in about an hour and a half of testing with an hour to go, the stress became too much and she had a total meltdown. As much as I had already reminded her “this is just one test on one day in your life” and “just do your best,” this student was smart enough to know that this “one test” would determine the class she would get into in middle school and I knew she was worried about being pulled out of class for remediation (again).

This child sobbed because she cared so much and watching her suffer became a defining moment for me. It became blatantly obvious how one high-stakes standardized test had just negated the year’s worth of reading confidence and motivation she had worked so hard to attain. I can no longer be a teacher who tries to build these 10-year-olds up on one hand, but then throws them to the testing wolves with the other.

My student had trusted me and jumped through hoops for me all year long, but then in her greatest moment of testing distress, all I could do was hand her some tissues.

A lot of people in our Buckeye state (and country) are making nutty decisions that aren’t at all good for children; ones I feel sure teachers could prove are harmful in a court of law (don’t even get me started with the testing that’s going on in kindergarten classes with 5-year-olds).

And most disconcerting of all, in my entire 24-year career, not one graded standardized test has EVER been returned to the students, their parents, or to me, the teacher.  Also, for the past three years here in Ohio, released test questions have no longer been posted online. In addition, teachers have had to sign a “gag order” before administering tests putting their careers on the line ensuring they will not divulge any content or questions they might happen to oversee as they walk around monitoring the test.

This lack of transparency seems very suspicious to me and many educators and parents alike are beginning to agree that testing companies have been given a “full faith” free pass for way too long.

Aren’t schools supposed to be in the business of teaching and learning? If we’re forced to stop instruction to give state tests, shouldn’t a student’s results at least be used to help further that student’s academics?  Just how exactly is my student taking a high-stakes standardized test at the end of the year, the test questions of which I never see, the scored tests and essay questions which are never returned to the child, helping that fifth-grader to learn?

If you are still with me, let’s talk about Ohio’s 8-year-olds who are getting caught right in the middle of the madness. Our state legislature has mandated a Third Grade Reading Guarantee that fails an 8-year-old an entire school year even if he or she is only one point off from passing a  2 ½-hour standardized reading test (the same amount of time as a tenth-grader taking an Ohio Graduation Test), which is first administered in October.

That same 8-year-old must try to pass yet another 2 ½-hour reading test again in the spring. If the child fails again, the child must take yet another (shorter) test to try to get into fourth grade.

So, apparently, a third grader is going to fail a school year based on tests that the teacher and parents have never seen, neither the questions nor the answers, and yet, the test company held the key to the specific errors the student made and could have learned from all along the way, after the very first test was given in October?  In my opinion, this is complete and utter education malpractice.

Are the third graders failing the test or is the test failing the third graders?

Let’s add to that all the test-scoring nightmares that have been reported in state after state after state (students receiving zeros due to scoring errors, missed graduations due to erroneously failed tests, parents receiving incorrect scorecards, blank pages found on tests, appealed scores found to have been miscalculated, etc…) and what does our nation do?  It keeps shelling out millions upon millions of dollars for standardized testing.

Shouldn’t our country demand accountability from the testing company? Is simply accepting phantom test scores from assessors even good business?

One Ohio School Board member shared with me that although she asked, the testing company would not allow board members to take the same PARCC tests the students would soon be mandated to pass.  Shockingly, she was told that board members could not see a sample test in its entirety until the students piloted them. She said the legislature had, indeed, mandated that Ohio third-graders pass a reading test that not one legislator or Ohio School Board member had even seen; one that had not yet even been written.

Also, please note: If so many of our schools are seen as “failing,” yet so many of our students are using a test company’s test prep materials ($$$) which are being reported to the state via the test company’s computerized program ($$$) and then taking the test company’s multitude of standardized tests ($$$), which are then assessed by the test company’s evaluators ($$$), and then remediation is done with students using, again, the test company’s intervention materials ($$$); and are then taking the same test company’s own graduation test ($$$) that the test company has prepared the K-12 materials for in the first place……. then, just exactly who, or what, is really failing that child?  But have no fear, dropouts can later take a GED ($$$) administered by the same testing company.

As for my language arts classroom, just give me some uninterrupted time with my students, some paper and pencils, and a great book and I’ll show you what amazing things my fifth-graders can do.

I’m just a teacher, but I do propose that we (myself included) stop the education bickering, the lawsuits, the union bashing, the political polarization and the spinning of our wheels and all take a moment to at least start SOMEWHERE to be the adults in the room and start a patriotic, non-partisan revolution for lasting, real school reform on behalf of our students who are already getting slammed by way too many societal woes.

Let’s all come together to find one area, at least ONE, in which the majority of our citizenship (legislators and constituents alike) can agree will be in the best interests of our nation’s youth.

I think I know one starting place that not one person could dispute would benefit students and their learning.  I can’t imagine how anyone, other than a test company executive, could say this request is unreasonable. I hope you agree so our country can then move on and figure out a Reform #2.

So, may I, just a teacher, speak?

Transparency in Education Reform #1 : No student, in the United States of America, will be given a high-stakes standardized test by any state or testing company unless said standardized test is returned scored, and in its entirety, to the parents, teacher, and child in an efficient and timely manner.

Can we at least start there? Let’s just then see how “failing” our schools really are. Let’s publicly lay the tests out, in full K-12 panoramic view, and evaluate how many tentacles of testing are being inflicted upon the psyches of our children.  Let’s analyze if these tests are truly measuring what we would like and if these tests are, indeed, an appropriate measurement tool to be used to determine “good” or “bad” teachers or to label, or flunk, our children.  Let’s just see what exactly is wrong with the answers our students are giving, anyway. And let’s do it quickly, because we might just be failing an entire generation.

However, in the meantime, beware.  Remember that the current climate of education bashing will keep wafting down into the ears of our children until they take to heart that in those failing schools sitting in the classroom of those “bad teachers” can be found them, the “failing” students.

Is this the way we do education today in the United States of America?  Is this the way we treat the children on our watch?

Members of the Badass Teachers Association during a demonstration in Washington D.C. against corporate school reform this past July (Photo by Dawn Neely-Randall)

MATHEMATICIAN DR. JIM MILGRAM WARNS COMMON CORE WILL DESTROY AMERICA'S STANDING IN TECHNOLOGY

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/09/01/Common-Core-Blockbuster-Mathematician-Dr-Jim-Milgram-Warns-Common-Core-Will-Destroy-America-s-Standing-in-Technology/

COMMON CORE BLOCKBUSTER: MATHEMATICIAN DR. JIM MILGRAM WARNS COMMON CORE WILL DESTROY AMERICA'S STANDING IN TECHNOLOGY

During a Friday conference call sponsored by Texas-based Women on the Wall, Stanford mathematician and former member of the Common Core Validation Committee Dr. James Milgram, told listeners that if the controversial standards are not repealed, America’s place as a competitor in the technology industry will ultimately be severely undermined.

“In the future, if we want to work with the top level people, we’re going to have to go to China or Japan or Korea… and that’s the future we’re looking at,” Milgram said during the call that was part of a day-long Twitter campaign to target Indiana Gov. Mike Pence’s (R) decision merely to “rebrand” the Common Core standards in his state, even though he has a Republican supermajority in the legislature and an appointed state board of education.

Pence was in Dallas Friday for Americans for Prosperity’s Defending the American Dream summit, considered to be an essential stop for presidential hopefuls.

In less than 40 minutes, Milgram floored listeners with information about the Common Core standards, how they will affect the nation’s students and, ultimately, the country itself, and what parents and citizens can do to try to stop them. Listen to the podcast in full below:

Milgram began by addressing the reason why he was on the call: to let Pence know that his “rebrand” of the Common Core was a betrayal of Indiana’s citizens.

Born and raised in Indiana himself, Milgram that it was important to him as a fellow Hoosier that the state do a decent job with replacement standards after repealing the Common Core.

“The state actually paid me to evaluate new standards,” he said about his involvement in the review process.

The Stanford professor then explained to listeners a key reason why the Common Core standards will prevent students from moving into STEM careers.

Milgram said he was “incredibly disappointed that the drafts I was reading [of Indiana’s new standards] looked so much like the Common Core,” but was nevertheless happy to see that advanced math classes like pre-calculus, calculus, and trigonometry were left into the replacement standards.

“These were very well-done and absolutely impossible to teach if all these kids had were Core standards,” Milgram explained. “It was a complete disaster because even the things that they added—that were of high quality—were added to standards that couldn’t support them.”

Milgram described his experience in the 1990s when he was asked to assist with a project that would replace California’s “disastrous” education standards. The mathematician said he strongly recommended that students in the 8th grade take Algebra and that his recommendation was heeded.

From the time the new standards were put in place and until the time of the adoption of Common Core standards in California in 2010, Milgram said two-thirds of the students in the state were taking Algebra in the 8th grade and doing well, with over half of them at least proficient or above.

Milgram said this piece of information is critical because it showed that it was possible for almost every student to handle Algebra in the 8th grade.

“The group that made by far the most progress were the minorities – blacks and Hispanics – who had essentially been written off by the system,” Milgram explained, and then went on to reveal how the fact that challenging minority students – resulting in their increased performance – was a threat to faculty in universities.

“So, their numbers were increasing dramatically and I frankly think that the… faculty in the education schools throughout the country actually got extremely scared by this,” he continued, “because it contradicted everything that they’ve been telling us for the past hundred years about how education works and what one can expect and how one should train teachers.”

Milgram asserted that a strong education in mathematics is essential for success.

“If you don’t have a strong background in mathematics then your most likely career path is into places like McDonald’s,” he said. “In today’s world… the most critical component of opening doors for students is without any question some expertise in mathematics.”

Milgram explained that in the high-achieving countries, where about a third of the population of the world outside the United States is located, about 90 percent of citizens have a high school degree for which the requirements include at least one course in calculus.

“That’s what they [sic] know,” he said. “If we’re lucky, we [sic] know Algebra II. With Algebra II as background, only one in 50 people will ever get a college degree in STEM.”

Milgram warned that with the Common Core standards, unless U.S. students are able to afford exclusive private high school educations that are more challenging, they will be disadvantaged.

“This shows that, from my perspective, Common Core does not come close to the rhetoric that surrounds it,” he continued. “It doesn’t even begin to approach the issues that it was supposedly designed to attack. The things it does are completely distinct from what needs to be done.”

Milgram said, in California, they were able to deal with the problem of their poor academic standards in the 1990s because the curriculum was controlled by the state and the high-tech industry in Silicon Valley threatened to move all its research and manufacturing elsewhere if the problem was not addressed.

“The curricula we were fighting then… they’re back!” he announced. “We are hearing exactly the same kind of things now with Common Core as we heard back in the '90s!”

“How can you have mathematics problems that don’t have a single answer or correct answer – any answer is correct?” Milgram asked. “Well, of course the answer is mathematically you can’t, and all of this is just a repeat of what went on 20 years ago in California – but this time, it’s national.”

“This time I don’t see any uniform or systematic way of getting rid of it,” Milgram said. “The only way you’re going to get rid of it is state by state and parent group by parent group. And if you’re lucky, industry will join you because high tech is ever a more important part of our economy.”

The bad news, according to Milgram, is that, returning to his experience in California in the '90s, if students had been in that system with the older, poor standards for three or four years, “the damage couldn’t be undone,” he said.

“All of this should really make you angry at the people who are responsible,” Milgram said, directing himself squarely to the parents listening to him. “And the people who are responsible – I’m going to be blunt about it – are the people in the education schools – they’re the ones who had the ultimate say about all of this and they’re the ones whose beliefs are driving it.”

Milgram explained that a uniform perspective exists on issues in education and what is important to achieve among a vast majority of the faculty in schools of education. Because of this, he said, the same types of standards always come back.

“You must go after the schools of education and the faculty of these schools,” Milgram urged.

Asked about the fact that many industrial giants and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce actually support the Common Core standards, Milgram responded that in the '90s, research centers in this country were still very much needed. Now, however, he noted that most of the research in top-level firms has moved out of the U.S. IBM’s main research center, he observed, is in India, and other companies have moved their research centers to Russia, Korea, and China.

“Even Microsoft has moved its software development to Beijing,” Milgram noted. The founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, is the primary source of private funding of the Common Core standards.

“Production and manufacturing has also moved out of this country,” Milgram added. “The longer this continues, the more we’ll see our major industry move over to other countries and the jobs they generate will go with them.”

SPELLING AND THE BRAIN

http://youtu.be/s0YjAN-UbCY