Educational Policy
With Margaret Spellings getting in a final safari in Africa before she turns in her keys, and as the rest of the incompetent Bush cronies at ED are cleaning out their desks and working on their resumes, the White House has simply side-stepped the Departent of Education and issued its own propaganda response to a recent New York Times piece by Sam Dillon on the impossible testing targets that NCLB uses to undercut the public schools.
In a Letter to the Editor published yesterday, Domestic Policy Director, Karl Zinsmeister, both lied and dissembled in making claims regarding reading scores during the NCLB reign of terror:
Over the last five years, 9-year-olds in the United States have made more progress in reading than in the previous three decades combined. Achievement gaps between white and black students in reading and math are now the narrowest they have ever been.
The first sentence by Zinmeister is simply a bald-faced lie. Here is NAEP's own chart showing average reading scores for 4th grade students. It shows a 2 point gain since 2002. Before NCLB became law, between 2000 and 2002, there was a 6 point gain. (Click to enlarge chart).
And here is the NAEP chart on 8th grade reading averages, and the picture is even worse. It shows scores actually dropping a point since 2002. (Click to enlarge chart).
In terms of the achievement gap being the narrowest it has "ever been," the final chart from NAEP shows the reality. In 2002, there was a thirty point gap in 4th grade reading scale scores. That gap for 4th grade reading has narrowed by 2 points since 2002, even with the draconian full-time test prep chain gang teaching that has replaced caring teachers and balance curriculums in schools with mostly minority and/or poor students. (Click to enlarge chart).
It is long past time that these liars, dissemblers, and epistemological thugs be run out of Washington on a rail.
From the Bolivar News in Bolivar, MO:
Bolivar R-1 Board of Education members unanimously threw their support behind a board resolution supporting the No Child Left Behind “Recess Until Reauthorization” Act at the board’s monthly meeting Thursday.The NCLB Recess Until Reauthorization Act, or House Resolution 6239, is sponsored by Congressman Sam Graves and would call on the U.S. Congress to reform the NCLB Act. The resolution expresses the board’s support for Graves’ proposal, which would suspend the NCLB until it can be reformed and provide relief to school districts such as Bolivar facing penalties under the law.
“I feel strongly that we should go ahead and do it,” board member Mona Coleman said.
“I don’t think we should consider not doing it, we just need to do it,” J.R. Collins said.
Superintendent Dr. Steve Morgan said the board was not giving up on the children who were meant to be helped by NCLB, but that they were recognizing the demands of NCLB need to be re-evaluated and changed.
The resolution was proposed by the Missouri School Boards’ Association, which sent out a mailing about it to its members across the state. Brent Gann, communications director at MSBA in Columbia, said, “What we’re wanting to do is collect these resolutions, and when we have all of them that we think we’re going to get, we’re going to send them to our congressional delegation.” . . . .
Here is my latest article to be published in a forthcoming edition of The Creative Educator magazine.
No one remembers that the SAT was designed to predict the success of college applicants. It is now simply an "objective instrument" used to justify the expansion of privilege and status for those who can afford it. Most have even forgotten that NCLB was billed as a tool to give extra help to struggling schools, while everyone can see that it now functions as a "scientifically-based" tool to shutter the public schools and segregate the poor in prison-style testing camps run by zealots with tons of tax-deductible corporate cash.
Now the College Board is rolling out a new product to do for the 8th grade what the SAT did for the senior year: turn the final year of middle school into a testing hell camp for the pushy parents who can afford the tutoring needed to prepare their Caitlins and Seths to ReadiStep their way up the backs of less financially-endowed classmates whose high school expectations will be mailed to them in a College Board envelope before they ever enroll in a high school. Thus we become able to separate even earlier the human capital from the human liabilities, which was the point of the old school eugenics movement as well.
Amid growing challenges to its role as the pre-eminent force in college admissions, the College Board on Wednesday unveiled a new test that it said would help prepare eighth graders for rigorous high school courses and college.The test, which will be available to schools next fall, is intended only for assessment and instructional purposes and has nothing to do with college admissions, College Board officials said.
“This is not at all a pre-pre-pre SAT,” Lee Jones, a College Board vice president, said at a news conference. “It’s a diagnostic tool to provide information about students’ strengths and weaknesses.”
The College Board, which owns the SAT and PSAT, made its announcement when an increasing percentage of high school students are taking the rival ACT and amid mounting concern over what critics call the misuses of the SAT and ACT and other standardized tests in college admissions.
Those critics dismissed the new test for eighth graders as just what Dr. Jones said it was not: “a pre-pre-pre SAT.” . . .
A clip from a sad, yet insightful, commentary by high school teacher, Demitrious C. Sinor, at truthdig:
. . . .Amid perhaps the most important presidential election since 1932, the statements about education by our presidential and vice presidential candidates, even in the face of our current economic crisis and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, stuck with me more strongly than any other utterance in the debates. There is no secret why: I am a high school teacher. The night of the final debate, I was exhausted. My feet were aching—a consequence of standing on the job for the better part of 10 hours every day as a teacher of United States history. I wanted to relax, but my mind was racing; there is a lot to think about these days.We have seen a “bailout” of corporate and Wall Street swindlers, with the working class being forced to pick up the tab. The administration has continued to escalate defense spending while cutting taxes, never seeming to consider the dire social, international and economic consequences. With all the burdens being loaded upon Americans today, we deserve a break. Struggling homeowners deserve a break, not the devastation of foreclosure. Hardworking families deserve a break, not the shock of unemployment. And public educators deserve a break, not the damaging mandates of program improvement and the threats of state takeover that have fallen on my high school and countless others like it due to the draconian quotas of the No Child Left Behind Act.
Sadly, NCLB doesn’t care about strong relationships in the classroom; NCLB cannot measure smiles, teamwork, camaraderie or the overcoming of adversity. It doesn’t allow for creative and authentic assessments and engaging activities in the classroom. And, tragically, it has demanded that we educators check our hearts and souls at the classroom door. . . .
Kohn takes on the anti-culturalists in the reddest of the red states. From the Salt Lake Tribune:
Rising test scores are no reason to celebrate, author Alfie Kohn told teachers at the Utah Education Association (UEA) convention on Friday.Schools that improve test scores do so at the expense of other subjects and ideas, he said.
"When the scores go up, it's not just meaningless. It's worrisome," Kohn told hundreds of educators on the last day of the convention. "What did you sacrifice from my child's education to raise scores on the test?"
Kohn, who's written 11 books on human behavior, parenting and schools, spent nearly two hours Friday morning ripping into both established and relatively new education concepts. He slammed merit pay for teachers, competition in schools, Advanced Placement classes, curriculum standards and testing - including Utah's standards and testing system - drawing mixed reactions from his audience.
"Considering what we hear a lot, it was pure blasphemy," said Richard Heath, a teacher at Central Davis Junior High School in Layton.
Kohn called merit pay - forms of which many Utah school districts are implementing this year - an "odious" type of control imposed on teachers.
"If you jump through hoops, we'll give you a doggie biscuit in the form of money," Kohn said.
He said competition in schools destroys their sense of community. Advanced Placement classes, he claimed, focus more on material but don't do much to deepen students' understanding. He said standardized tests are designed so that some students must always fail or they're considered too easy, and often the students who do poorly are members of minority groups.
"We are creating in this country before our eyes, little by little, what could be described as educational ethnic cleansing," Kohn said. He called Utah's standards too specific and the number of tests given to Utah students "mind-boggling."
He called on teachers to explain such problems to parents and community members.
"The best teachers spend every day of their lives strategically avoiding or subverting the Utah curriculum," Kohn said. . . .
Vanity Fair writer and widow of Tom Russert, Maureen Orth, wrote a charming article about a small school she built in the Colombian Andes while a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s. Last week she returned to the school to present the school named for her by the local villagers with 230 XO laptops from the One Laptop Per Child Foundation.
From Orth's article, The Long-Term Dividends of Volunteering:
Today, seeing how excited the children are about their small, green-and-white computers, which they are allowed to take home every night, is one of the greatest rewards I have ever had. I walked into the first grade classroom and had never seen kids so eager to learn. Their teacher, who had pooh-poohed the whole idea of computers and was on her way to retirement, was plunging right in.
I have long been fascinated by experts, expertise and the commonalities between them. I have learned much about learning by being in the presence of people who are great at what they do. In fact, I believe that reality TV is a manifestation for our basic human desire to engage in apprenticeship experiences.
