Reading Aid Seen to Lag in ELL Focus
By Mary Ann Zehr
Educators and experts across the country who work with English-language learners are moving toward a consensus that the federal Reading First program needs to be refined to become more effective for children acquiring English.
Administrators in several big-city districts with large numbers of such students are stepping up their training of teachers on how best to teach second-language learners to read under the No Child Left Behind Act’s flagship reading program, which serves grades K-3.
Last school year, the 410,000-student Chicago public school system established a new position at the district level for a bilingual specialist to coach teachers at the city’s 17 Reading First schools with large numbers of ELLs on how to tailor reading instruction to such students.
The Los Angeles Unified School District, where 38 percent of the 708,000 students are ELLs, started an institute for Reading First teachers this school year on reading strategies for ELLs.
And since last school year the 1.1 million-student New York City school system has been providing workshops and coaching to Reading First teachers and administrators on the same topic.
The U.S. Department of Education’s 11-member Reading First Advisory Committee has enough concerns about whether ELLs are getting what they need under the $1 billion-a-year program that it set up a subcommittee to look into the issue last week, according to Kris D. Gutiérrez, a committee member and a professor of social-research methodology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“My opinion is we have a long ways to go to meet the needs of English-language learners under the current policies and practices of Reading First,” Ms. Gutiérrez said. Among the program’s problems, she said, are that students’ reading skills are tested before they learn English, the literacy curriculum is too narrow, and teachers are not prepared to work with ELLs.
Education Department officials, asked last week if Reading First is working for ELLs, said “state-reported annual performance data show that many Reading First sites are showing improvements in reading fluency and comprehension for their English-language-learner students,” according to an e-mail message from Elaine Quesinberry, a spokeswoman for the department.
New Language
Concern about how to refine reading instruction for English-language learners also has spread to Capitol Hill.
A draft bill to reauthorize the NCLB law, put forth by the House Education and Labor Committee, calls for Reading First programs to be “linguistically appropriate”—a term not included in the current federal education law.
Rep. Rubén Hinojosa, a Texas Democrat and a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, was one of the lawmakers who helped get the phrase into the draft, according to Elizabeth Esfahani, his press secretary. The phrase is mentioned 11 times in the draft.
A number of reading experts and educators said that even though “linguistically appropriate” is a vague phrase, its addition to the law would likely be beneficial for English-learners.
“The advantage of the new [legislative] language is it’s going to nudge states and districts, as they submit their plans, to stress more how teacher training and coaching will lead to teaching English-language development better,” said Russell Gersten, the executive director of the Instructional Research Group, an educational research institute in Long Beach, Calif.
Mr. Gersten headed a panel for the Education Department to write a“practice guide” for education of English-language learners , released in July, and has been a consultant for Houghton Mifflin Company’s reading textbooks.
Margarita Calderón, a professor and research scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, agrees with others who say Reading First has not worked well for ELLs. The additional language “would be an improvement,” she said, “because schools will have to be accountable and show they are doing this in a linguistically appropriate way.”
But, aside from agreeing on the need for more teacher training, educators’ views of how Reading First needs to be improved sometimes contradict each other, particularly on whether students’ native languages should be used to teach reading.
Mr. Gersten said teachers should teach English structures, such as “compare and contrast” or “cause and effect,” and help students practice them. It’s also helpful for teachers to preview reading lessons with students to ensure that they know what a story is about, he said. Pictures or Web sites can be useful for previewing, Mr. Gersten noted.
But he said it would be a mistake for the words “linguistically appropriate” to steer schools to use students’ native languages for reading instruction. He hasn’t found studies concluding that bilingual education is more effective than English-only methods to be persuasive.
On the other hand, Miriam Calderón, who is not related to Margarita Calderón and is a policy analyst at the Washington-based National Council of La Raza, said her group lobbied members of Congress to add linguistically appropriate to Reading First particularly for that purpose.
And Johns Hopkins’ Margarita Calderón believes that including the term “linguistically appropriate” in the law could encourage the teaching of reading to ELLs through their native languages at the same time they are learning English.
Varying State Policies
While reading experts favored the proposed changes in Reading First for ELLs, state education officials in several states with large populations of English-learners were indifferent. Officials in Arizona, California, and New Jersey all said they already are implementing Reading First in a linguistically appropriate way.
Their approaches, all approved by the Education Department, differ widely, however.
New Jersey, for instance, requires that Reading First schools provide instruction to ELLs in Spanish, while Arizona requires that all Reading First instruction be in English. California permits schools to use Spanish instruction for Reading First in bilingual classrooms that meet state restrictions for using that educational method.
New Jersey also requires schools to select Reading First materials from an approved list that includes core materials in Spanish or English and has separate materials for teaching English-language development to ELLs.
But California has not adopted separate materials for ELLs, and the state board of education’s refusal to enable such an adoption is controversial. In the state’s next adoption process, however, textbook publishers will have to meet specified criteria to address the needs of ELLs. For example, they will need to provide ideas for teachers to preview reading lessons for ELLs.
Shelly Spiegel-Coleman, the executive director of Californians Tomorrow, a coalition of 17 groups that advocate in behalf of ELLs, said the increasing gap in reading achievement in California between native speakers of English and ELLs demonstrates that the nearly 6-year-old Reading First program isn’t working.
As evidence, she said the achievement gap in reading between native speakers of English and ELLs in Los Angeles schools, the state’s school system with the most ELLs, has stayed the same or widened from last year to this year at every grade level tested. Ms. Spiegel-Coleman, who just retired as director of the multilingual-academic-support unit of the Los Angeles County Office of Education, criticized the Open Court Reading materials used for the program, and also said the instruction gave students little chance to practice English. The core language arts series is published by SRA/McGraw-Hill.
Julie Slayton, the executive director of strategic planning and accountability for the Los Angeles school district, said the Open Court materials are high-quality, but noted that the quality of instruction “varies widely.”
David L. Brewer III, the superintendent for LAUSD, said in an e-mail message that, like any other materials, Open Court “gets results when skillful teachers use it properly.” He said the Open Court program “will need to be modified somewhat to better accommodate ELL students, especially teacher professional development,” which he expects to happen in the next textbook-adoption cycle.
The addition of the phrase “linguistically appropriate” to the federal education law, Ms. Spiegel-Coleman believes, would force California officials and school districts to do more for ELLs.
“California has a reading initiative, and Reading First is just more of the same—more assessments, coaches, more intensity, more monitoring.” She added, “You can’t do the same old thing. If you have kids who don’t speak English in Reading First who aren’t doing well, you have to do something else.”
Monday, October 22, 2007
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Resistance to NCLB; Ken Goodman
It’s time to Resist NCLB: A Post- reauthorization Strategy
Noted educator Ken Goodman says we can and must resist NCLB. The politicos are not going to do the right thing. WE must bring it down.
by Ken Goodman
October 8, 2007
The time has come for educators, parents and the general public to develop a post NCLB reauthorization strategy. We’ve essentially lost the fight to modify NCLB in any significant way or get rid of it. It’s time for an organized campaign of resistence. We must resist NCLB at every level in every practical way we can to save our students from its terrible effects and to save public education.
Within the next few weeks the House Education Committee will send to the floor of the House its revision of NCLB. Some time thereafter the Senate committee will send its revision to the floor of the Senate. They are likely to face only token opposition and little debate. The press will continue to largely ignore and misrepresent the real threat continuing NCLB poses to public education and American democracy.
What will result, as it now appears, is a slightly softer version of NCLB. It will provide a little more flexibility in how the law impacts English language learners and those with special needs.
But it will not change in any fundamental ways. And so far there is no indication that the Department of Education will make other than cosmetic changes in the way it interprets and enforces the law. Just last week, for example, a new review panel rejected the Reading First proposal of Puerto Rico because it didn’t conform sufficiently to DOE mandates.
In particular the Reading First section (Title X) will continue to define reading and reading research in such a way that the DOE will continue to impose absurdly narrow methods, materials and tests on states and local school districts. And the contracts illegally imposed on the states according to the Office of Inspector General reports will remain in force. The consultants who the OIG said have made obscene profits from imposing their own materials and tests on states and districts will not only go unpunished but their profits will continue. The astrologists of reading will continue in charge of the reading space program.
There is little reason to suspect that a change in the White House or an increased Democratic majority in Congress will further modify or abandon NCLB. Democrats George Miller and Edward Kennedy have committed themselves too deeply to NCLB to admit that it is a failure. Both have accepted the false and exaggerated claims of Bush and Spellings that NCLB and Reading First are working.
Though there has been a notable demand that NCLB be discontinued and ESEA revert to its pre-NCLB form, and a few members of Congress have agreed, getting rid of the law never got real consideration. Attempts at informing the decision making in Congress to produce the basic changes needed in NCLB to change it from a negative punitive law destructive of public education into a real reform have largely failed. The unions failed to rally their members and the public: AFT was coopted to support NCLB from the beginning and NEA was too timid in using its potential political strength to make any real difference. Movement conservatives with massive financial and tactical support from the National Business Round Table and rich right wing foundations have successfully kept NCLB out of the presidential campaign as they did in 2004.
For seven more years terrible things will happen to children as young as 5 as a result of NCLB and Reading First. And as every independent study has shown by 2014 virtually every school and school district will be failing. In the meantime huge numbers of students will drop out as the hand writing on the wall is clear that they won’t be able to graduate with a diploma from high school. And in a time when a teacher shortage is growing many teachers are leaving the profession and young people are being discouraged from entering. And the campaign will increase its attack on teacher education and higher education in general. Blaming teacher educators for the failures of NCLB.
Legal basis for resistence
There is a strong legal basis for resisting NCLB. The investigations of the Inspector General have laid out in explicit detail the ways in which those given the power in the Department of Education to implement NCLB and Reading First violated the NCLB law itself and the original law establishing the Department of Education. Both clearly prohibited the imposition of curriculum and methodology on states and local education agencies. That means that every state contract under NCLB is null and void. It means that contracts establishing assistance centers to advise the states and LEAs on implementation are void and those centers must be replaced.
And in addition to that the processes were illegal because staff and consultants were and still are involved in blatant conflicts of interest.
Legally, states and LEA’s have every reason to refuse to enforce their NCLB and Reading First contracts and have the grounds, if necessary, to sue the DOE and the offending consultants. Parents, individually and collectively, also have the right to sue on behalf of their children to get rid of the onerous and destructive effects of NCLB on their children’s lives and education.
There is ample documentation both for the illegality of the implementation of NCLB and for the damage it is doing to children.
Pedagogical Basis for Resistence
>From a point of view of scientific pedagogy NCLB is riddled with absurdities:
1. It is punitive. Instead of providing financial and professional support for schools with low achieving students it punishes them. It has already led to transferring authority over schools and school districts from professionals and local authorities to politicians. Already many public schools have been handed over to profit makers.
2. In the name of putting “highly” qualified teachers in classrooms it has undermined state teacher certification programs and made it impossible for rural schools and middle schools to retain experienced teachers and recruit professionally educated teachers.
3. It has perverted science by using the phrases “scientifically based research” and “scientifically based reading research” to describe unproven commercial materials and methods which are absurd in design and unteachable. And it has marginalized a wide range of alternate approaches.
4.It has set absurd goals. Ultimately it requires that all students and all sub groups be “proficient” in reading math and science by 2014. Because “proficient” is essentially undefined. Both the press and politicians including President Bush and Secretary Spellings have freely equated that with having all children above grade level by 2014. That makes the goal absurd since by definition only half of the pupils in any grade can be above grade level, which is the mean score achieved on a particular test. Even Diane Ravitch, along term supporter of NCLB has called this goal absurd. In the National Assessment of Educational Progress the term proficient is used to name an arbitrary level above basic and below excellent. Only about 20% of those taking NAEP achieve the proficient level currently.
5. NCLB deprofessionalizes teaching. It limits the ability of experienced, professional teachers to make decisions on how best to serve each pupil. In enforcement, a hierarchy is established by NCLB which subjects effective teachers to interference by inexperienced and unqualified staff members empowered to slavishly enforce NCLB.
6. It distorts and narrows the curriculum to reading, math and starting in 2007 science and limiting or eliminating everything else including physical education and recess. It’s absurd that our officials are taking fast foods and sugary drinks out of schools but eliminating physical exercise.
7. NCLB diverts kindergarten and even pre-school from their historical purposes to academic pre-first grades. What is more absurd than five year olds being labeled as failing in the first week of kindergarten because of their performance on absurd tests? And what is more absurd than having children repeat kindergarten as academic failures?
8. In the guise of having high expectations for all young people NCTE has required that children with special needs and English language learners to take the same tests and be subjected to the same curricula as all other children. Further, it punishes the whole school or LEA when either of these subgroups inevitably fails to achieve the unachieveable,
Moral basis for resistence
Framed as a reform which would eliminate differences between ethnic and economic populations of students in school success, NCLB has imposed an immoral, one-size fits all set of mandates which hurt all students but hurts those it claims to help the most.
It measures success by learners and teachers entirely by scores on tests of questionable validity. That devalues any learning that isn’t easily testable by simplistic tests and it narrows the curriculum to what is being tested.
It is robbing children of their childhood imposing tedium and guilt on them and making them personally responsible for the failures of the system. It has made successful learners feel they are failures and taught them that conformity is more important than thoughtful response.
NCLB has turned teachers from committed guides and mentors into automotons powerless to do what they know is best for their students. It has corrupted the moral obligation of teachers to protect their pupils from harm.
It has substituted governmental absolutes for the responsible choices of parents.
Methods of resistance
Educators, their unions and professional associations, educational decision makers, parents, interested citizens and the students themselves all have a range of ways of resisting NCLB.
Only massive resistance can bring it down and get the attention of the politicians.
Teachers and administrators are of course vulnerable. Often taking an overt stand can jeopardize their jobs. On the other hand they are the ones who see most clearly how NCLB is hurting their pupils. Some teachers and administrators will be confident enough to make public acts of resistance. As a profession, educators have tended to self-censor themselves more than is necessary. But as a result of NCLB teachers and administrators will reach a point beyond which their consciences will not let them go. They will refuse to administer certain tests, use certain texts, grade their pupils unfairly. Rather than simply leaving their jobs when they become untenable they will commit acts of resistance and dare their districts to fire them. Groups of teachers in individual schools and districts will of course be more successful if they act together and support each other.
There are ways that teachers and administrators can resist in private ways. Teachers can resist, in the time honored way, by closing their doors and doing what they feel is best for their kids, minimizing the use of absurd tests and materials. And they can keep parents aware of the real progress of their kids and help them to understand why they deviate from mandates. Informed parents are their best defense.
Administrators can protect teachers from some impositions and support their professional decisions for the benefit of their pupils. They can document the effects of aspects of NCLB for parents, school board members and the public. And they can establish a positive atmosphere in their schools that can neutralize some effects of NCLB interventions.
Unions and professional organizations have a responsibility to organize resistance. In Canada, England, Australia and New Zealand teachers unions have had a tradition of including methods and curriculum in their concerns. There are numerous examples of successful campaigns by unions to refuse to administer tests and support their members in their refusal to conform to unprofessional impositions. NEA’s California affiliate went beyond NEA’s position recently and called for abolition of NCLB. They need to take the next step of organizing their members to resist NCLB and supporting them when they do. The unions and professional organizations need to take the lead in organizing local, state, and national demonstrations against NCLB. They are probably the only ones who could bring a million teacher to Washington to show the politicians the professionals care about what happens to their students.
Administrators’ unions and organizations have taken strong positions against NCLB but they haven’t been public enough. They need to call for and support resistance to NCLB.
Parents have a wide range of ways to resist NCLB. They should inform themselves by visiting their children’s classes and observing what NCLB is doing to them. They can talk about NCLB with school administrators and school board members when they see their children being hurt by NCLB. Parents can use the existing PTA to resist NCLB or they can organize parents within schools and school districts to fight use of absurd tests and materials and decisions by school boards that limit the curriculum or eliminate play time. There are a number of specific actions parents can take:
1. They can boycott the tests by keeping their children home when tests are announced or demanding that their permission be obtained for each test. With absurd tests such as DIBELS parents can insist that their children not be tested and that no results be transmitted beyond the school without parental permission. NCLB requires that 95% of each sub group be tested so a few boycotting parents can have a major effect.
2. They can support acts of resistance by teachers and administrators
3. They can contact news media and school board members documenting how NCLB is hurting their children.
4. They can educate themselves and other parents of the political process for electing school board members and support candidates pledged to resisting NCLB.
5. They sue on behalf of their children to protest illegal implementation of NCLB.
Students of course feel the negative impact of NCLB the most. Even young children can, with the support of their parents, resist NCLB. They can write letters and circulate petitions about tests and school policies. For example they can petition the principal to reinstate recess or write to the school board about absurd materials. Children have rights and parents can help them to know how to assert their rights.
Older students in middle school and high school can organize their resistance to NCLB through letters, petitions and demonstrations. It was demonstrations by high school students that eventually brought down the apartheid system in South Africa. Students have the right to a voice in how their schools and classrooms will run.
NCLB came about through the clever manipulation of the democratic system to control Congressional decision making. United, educators, students, parents and the informed public can use the democratic system to resist NCLB and bring it down.
Ken Goodman
Noted educator Ken Goodman says we can and must resist NCLB. The politicos are not going to do the right thing. WE must bring it down.
by Ken Goodman
October 8, 2007
The time has come for educators, parents and the general public to develop a post NCLB reauthorization strategy. We’ve essentially lost the fight to modify NCLB in any significant way or get rid of it. It’s time for an organized campaign of resistence. We must resist NCLB at every level in every practical way we can to save our students from its terrible effects and to save public education.
Within the next few weeks the House Education Committee will send to the floor of the House its revision of NCLB. Some time thereafter the Senate committee will send its revision to the floor of the Senate. They are likely to face only token opposition and little debate. The press will continue to largely ignore and misrepresent the real threat continuing NCLB poses to public education and American democracy.
What will result, as it now appears, is a slightly softer version of NCLB. It will provide a little more flexibility in how the law impacts English language learners and those with special needs.
But it will not change in any fundamental ways. And so far there is no indication that the Department of Education will make other than cosmetic changes in the way it interprets and enforces the law. Just last week, for example, a new review panel rejected the Reading First proposal of Puerto Rico because it didn’t conform sufficiently to DOE mandates.
In particular the Reading First section (Title X) will continue to define reading and reading research in such a way that the DOE will continue to impose absurdly narrow methods, materials and tests on states and local school districts. And the contracts illegally imposed on the states according to the Office of Inspector General reports will remain in force. The consultants who the OIG said have made obscene profits from imposing their own materials and tests on states and districts will not only go unpunished but their profits will continue. The astrologists of reading will continue in charge of the reading space program.
There is little reason to suspect that a change in the White House or an increased Democratic majority in Congress will further modify or abandon NCLB. Democrats George Miller and Edward Kennedy have committed themselves too deeply to NCLB to admit that it is a failure. Both have accepted the false and exaggerated claims of Bush and Spellings that NCLB and Reading First are working.
Though there has been a notable demand that NCLB be discontinued and ESEA revert to its pre-NCLB form, and a few members of Congress have agreed, getting rid of the law never got real consideration. Attempts at informing the decision making in Congress to produce the basic changes needed in NCLB to change it from a negative punitive law destructive of public education into a real reform have largely failed. The unions failed to rally their members and the public: AFT was coopted to support NCLB from the beginning and NEA was too timid in using its potential political strength to make any real difference. Movement conservatives with massive financial and tactical support from the National Business Round Table and rich right wing foundations have successfully kept NCLB out of the presidential campaign as they did in 2004.
For seven more years terrible things will happen to children as young as 5 as a result of NCLB and Reading First. And as every independent study has shown by 2014 virtually every school and school district will be failing. In the meantime huge numbers of students will drop out as the hand writing on the wall is clear that they won’t be able to graduate with a diploma from high school. And in a time when a teacher shortage is growing many teachers are leaving the profession and young people are being discouraged from entering. And the campaign will increase its attack on teacher education and higher education in general. Blaming teacher educators for the failures of NCLB.
Legal basis for resistence
There is a strong legal basis for resisting NCLB. The investigations of the Inspector General have laid out in explicit detail the ways in which those given the power in the Department of Education to implement NCLB and Reading First violated the NCLB law itself and the original law establishing the Department of Education. Both clearly prohibited the imposition of curriculum and methodology on states and local education agencies. That means that every state contract under NCLB is null and void. It means that contracts establishing assistance centers to advise the states and LEAs on implementation are void and those centers must be replaced.
And in addition to that the processes were illegal because staff and consultants were and still are involved in blatant conflicts of interest.
Legally, states and LEA’s have every reason to refuse to enforce their NCLB and Reading First contracts and have the grounds, if necessary, to sue the DOE and the offending consultants. Parents, individually and collectively, also have the right to sue on behalf of their children to get rid of the onerous and destructive effects of NCLB on their children’s lives and education.
There is ample documentation both for the illegality of the implementation of NCLB and for the damage it is doing to children.
Pedagogical Basis for Resistence
>From a point of view of scientific pedagogy NCLB is riddled with absurdities:
1. It is punitive. Instead of providing financial and professional support for schools with low achieving students it punishes them. It has already led to transferring authority over schools and school districts from professionals and local authorities to politicians. Already many public schools have been handed over to profit makers.
2. In the name of putting “highly” qualified teachers in classrooms it has undermined state teacher certification programs and made it impossible for rural schools and middle schools to retain experienced teachers and recruit professionally educated teachers.
3. It has perverted science by using the phrases “scientifically based research” and “scientifically based reading research” to describe unproven commercial materials and methods which are absurd in design and unteachable. And it has marginalized a wide range of alternate approaches.
4.It has set absurd goals. Ultimately it requires that all students and all sub groups be “proficient” in reading math and science by 2014. Because “proficient” is essentially undefined. Both the press and politicians including President Bush and Secretary Spellings have freely equated that with having all children above grade level by 2014. That makes the goal absurd since by definition only half of the pupils in any grade can be above grade level, which is the mean score achieved on a particular test. Even Diane Ravitch, along term supporter of NCLB has called this goal absurd. In the National Assessment of Educational Progress the term proficient is used to name an arbitrary level above basic and below excellent. Only about 20% of those taking NAEP achieve the proficient level currently.
5. NCLB deprofessionalizes teaching. It limits the ability of experienced, professional teachers to make decisions on how best to serve each pupil. In enforcement, a hierarchy is established by NCLB which subjects effective teachers to interference by inexperienced and unqualified staff members empowered to slavishly enforce NCLB.
6. It distorts and narrows the curriculum to reading, math and starting in 2007 science and limiting or eliminating everything else including physical education and recess. It’s absurd that our officials are taking fast foods and sugary drinks out of schools but eliminating physical exercise.
7. NCLB diverts kindergarten and even pre-school from their historical purposes to academic pre-first grades. What is more absurd than five year olds being labeled as failing in the first week of kindergarten because of their performance on absurd tests? And what is more absurd than having children repeat kindergarten as academic failures?
8. In the guise of having high expectations for all young people NCTE has required that children with special needs and English language learners to take the same tests and be subjected to the same curricula as all other children. Further, it punishes the whole school or LEA when either of these subgroups inevitably fails to achieve the unachieveable,
Moral basis for resistence
Framed as a reform which would eliminate differences between ethnic and economic populations of students in school success, NCLB has imposed an immoral, one-size fits all set of mandates which hurt all students but hurts those it claims to help the most.
It measures success by learners and teachers entirely by scores on tests of questionable validity. That devalues any learning that isn’t easily testable by simplistic tests and it narrows the curriculum to what is being tested.
It is robbing children of their childhood imposing tedium and guilt on them and making them personally responsible for the failures of the system. It has made successful learners feel they are failures and taught them that conformity is more important than thoughtful response.
NCLB has turned teachers from committed guides and mentors into automotons powerless to do what they know is best for their students. It has corrupted the moral obligation of teachers to protect their pupils from harm.
It has substituted governmental absolutes for the responsible choices of parents.
Methods of resistance
Educators, their unions and professional associations, educational decision makers, parents, interested citizens and the students themselves all have a range of ways of resisting NCLB.
Only massive resistance can bring it down and get the attention of the politicians.
Teachers and administrators are of course vulnerable. Often taking an overt stand can jeopardize their jobs. On the other hand they are the ones who see most clearly how NCLB is hurting their pupils. Some teachers and administrators will be confident enough to make public acts of resistance. As a profession, educators have tended to self-censor themselves more than is necessary. But as a result of NCLB teachers and administrators will reach a point beyond which their consciences will not let them go. They will refuse to administer certain tests, use certain texts, grade their pupils unfairly. Rather than simply leaving their jobs when they become untenable they will commit acts of resistance and dare their districts to fire them. Groups of teachers in individual schools and districts will of course be more successful if they act together and support each other.
There are ways that teachers and administrators can resist in private ways. Teachers can resist, in the time honored way, by closing their doors and doing what they feel is best for their kids, minimizing the use of absurd tests and materials. And they can keep parents aware of the real progress of their kids and help them to understand why they deviate from mandates. Informed parents are their best defense.
Administrators can protect teachers from some impositions and support their professional decisions for the benefit of their pupils. They can document the effects of aspects of NCLB for parents, school board members and the public. And they can establish a positive atmosphere in their schools that can neutralize some effects of NCLB interventions.
Unions and professional organizations have a responsibility to organize resistance. In Canada, England, Australia and New Zealand teachers unions have had a tradition of including methods and curriculum in their concerns. There are numerous examples of successful campaigns by unions to refuse to administer tests and support their members in their refusal to conform to unprofessional impositions. NEA’s California affiliate went beyond NEA’s position recently and called for abolition of NCLB. They need to take the next step of organizing their members to resist NCLB and supporting them when they do. The unions and professional organizations need to take the lead in organizing local, state, and national demonstrations against NCLB. They are probably the only ones who could bring a million teacher to Washington to show the politicians the professionals care about what happens to their students.
Administrators’ unions and organizations have taken strong positions against NCLB but they haven’t been public enough. They need to call for and support resistance to NCLB.
Parents have a wide range of ways to resist NCLB. They should inform themselves by visiting their children’s classes and observing what NCLB is doing to them. They can talk about NCLB with school administrators and school board members when they see their children being hurt by NCLB. Parents can use the existing PTA to resist NCLB or they can organize parents within schools and school districts to fight use of absurd tests and materials and decisions by school boards that limit the curriculum or eliminate play time. There are a number of specific actions parents can take:
1. They can boycott the tests by keeping their children home when tests are announced or demanding that their permission be obtained for each test. With absurd tests such as DIBELS parents can insist that their children not be tested and that no results be transmitted beyond the school without parental permission. NCLB requires that 95% of each sub group be tested so a few boycotting parents can have a major effect.
2. They can support acts of resistance by teachers and administrators
3. They can contact news media and school board members documenting how NCLB is hurting their children.
4. They can educate themselves and other parents of the political process for electing school board members and support candidates pledged to resisting NCLB.
5. They sue on behalf of their children to protest illegal implementation of NCLB.
Students of course feel the negative impact of NCLB the most. Even young children can, with the support of their parents, resist NCLB. They can write letters and circulate petitions about tests and school policies. For example they can petition the principal to reinstate recess or write to the school board about absurd materials. Children have rights and parents can help them to know how to assert their rights.
Older students in middle school and high school can organize their resistance to NCLB through letters, petitions and demonstrations. It was demonstrations by high school students that eventually brought down the apartheid system in South Africa. Students have the right to a voice in how their schools and classrooms will run.
NCLB came about through the clever manipulation of the democratic system to control Congressional decision making. United, educators, students, parents and the informed public can use the democratic system to resist NCLB and bring it down.
Ken Goodman
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
California schools fail : again. How the Right wing sees it
An interesting essay, even though I do not agree with the solution.
Back to Article
When state proficiency standards are lowered, there will be NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND
California's test scores hit a plateau - not good news
Liam Julian
Sunday, October 14, 2007
California's state test scores leveled off in 2007, after having jumped seven percentage points in the previous two years. This may be worse news than many Californians think.
Why? Because from 2003 to 2006, California's state test has become easier for the kids taking it. If achievement remains stagnant while the tests are getting easier, that means California's students actually know less today than they did a year ago. In fact, the previous test-score gains reported by the Golden State from 2003 to 2006 may have not actually occurred.
At the heart of the No Child Left Behind Act is the call for all American schoolchildren to become "proficient" in reading and mathematics by 2014. Yet the law allows each state to craft its own definition of proficiency, and to craft the tests that will measure it.
Until now, Californians had to believe that their state's idea of proficiency was a rigorous one - they had to trust that their state officials in Sacramento were going to hold all students to consistently high standards. Unfortunately, it seems that trust may have been misplaced.
Researchers for a new report, "The Proficiency Illusion," compared the test scores of California students on the state test, with their scores on a national assessment, Measures of Academic Progress. Then, in order to measure their consistency over time, California's cut scores (the score needed to reach "proficient" on its tests) were compared to their equivalent scores on the MAP test.
Why not just compare cut scores on the CST to cut scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress, a national test commonly called the nation's report card (although it's not part of any accountability system)? A few reasons: That national test assesses at only three grade levels (4, 8 and 12), and results are not recorded at the individual or school level (which may diminish test-taker motivation). Overall, the MAP shares more in common with California's state test than the other test does.
Despite the fact that California's 2006 cut scores were among the most challenging of the 26 states evaluated, since 2003 the Golden State's cut scores in reading decreased substantially in fourth, seventh and eighth grades.
The test has been getting easier for those who take it. That means that even if California's students made no real academic progress, their test scores would have nonetheless increased - in fourth and eighth grade, stagnant progress would have yielded a gain of 12 percentile points.
From 2003 to 2006, California reported a 10-point gain for fourth-graders and an 11-point gain for eighth-graders. Which means that those student abilities actually declined over that time. (Indeed, from 2003 to 2007, the percentage of the state's eighth-grade students at or above proficient on the national assessment test did decline.)
The same thing occurred on mathematics assessments. Looking at the data, one could fairly say that California's seventh-grade math tests were easier to pass in 2006 than in 2003.
Thankfully, California's state tests remain tougher than most others in the country. Parents of students scoring well above the proficient level can be relatively confident that their children are sound academically.
But for students on the bubble, those who just squeaked over the proficient hurdle, California's tests are much less reliable.
Johnny just reaches the proficient level in fourth grade. He continues to barely hit that mark over the next four years. While it looks like Johnny is making normal progress, he's not - the test is getting easier, and Johnny is falling behind (albeit, invisibly).
If the proficiency label is changing, it's impossible to gauge whether individual students (not to mention the state's education system) are making any academic progress.
These findings should make California citizens furious. Parents led to believe that their public-school students were making progress were fed incorrect data - the definition of progress may have changed. If it didn't, then students are surely being fed test prep strategies that would get them over the "proficient" mark in California's particular assessment, but wouldn't help them on another test. In other words, students still aren't actually learning anything but how to game the system.
Regardless of how it has happened, the dumbing down of proficiency has certainly undercut educational accountability in California. All citizens need to now reassess how well the state is running its schools - how well it's running its schools in reality, that is.
What's the solution? A rigorous national test (one that's part of an accountability system) would be best. It's crazy for a 21st century nation to struggle with the discrepant patchwork of assessments that the United States now has.
But more immediately: State policymakers should determine why, exactly, their test is getting easier, and then stop it. And in the meantime, California parents must make sure that their schools are not teaching to the test.
Learning isn't about teaching kids how to memorize the format of the state test; it's about teaching them a broad and challenging curriculum. When that happens, the test scores take care of themselves.
Liam Julian is associate writer and editor at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/14/INDOSMBFB.DTL
© 2007 Hearst Communications Inc. | Privacy Policy | Feedback | RSS Feeds | FAQ | Site Index | Contact
Back to Article
When state proficiency standards are lowered, there will be NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND
California's test scores hit a plateau - not good news
Liam Julian
Sunday, October 14, 2007
California's state test scores leveled off in 2007, after having jumped seven percentage points in the previous two years. This may be worse news than many Californians think.
Why? Because from 2003 to 2006, California's state test has become easier for the kids taking it. If achievement remains stagnant while the tests are getting easier, that means California's students actually know less today than they did a year ago. In fact, the previous test-score gains reported by the Golden State from 2003 to 2006 may have not actually occurred.
At the heart of the No Child Left Behind Act is the call for all American schoolchildren to become "proficient" in reading and mathematics by 2014. Yet the law allows each state to craft its own definition of proficiency, and to craft the tests that will measure it.
Until now, Californians had to believe that their state's idea of proficiency was a rigorous one - they had to trust that their state officials in Sacramento were going to hold all students to consistently high standards. Unfortunately, it seems that trust may have been misplaced.
Researchers for a new report, "The Proficiency Illusion," compared the test scores of California students on the state test, with their scores on a national assessment, Measures of Academic Progress. Then, in order to measure their consistency over time, California's cut scores (the score needed to reach "proficient" on its tests) were compared to their equivalent scores on the MAP test.
Why not just compare cut scores on the CST to cut scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress, a national test commonly called the nation's report card (although it's not part of any accountability system)? A few reasons: That national test assesses at only three grade levels (4, 8 and 12), and results are not recorded at the individual or school level (which may diminish test-taker motivation). Overall, the MAP shares more in common with California's state test than the other test does.
Despite the fact that California's 2006 cut scores were among the most challenging of the 26 states evaluated, since 2003 the Golden State's cut scores in reading decreased substantially in fourth, seventh and eighth grades.
The test has been getting easier for those who take it. That means that even if California's students made no real academic progress, their test scores would have nonetheless increased - in fourth and eighth grade, stagnant progress would have yielded a gain of 12 percentile points.
From 2003 to 2006, California reported a 10-point gain for fourth-graders and an 11-point gain for eighth-graders. Which means that those student abilities actually declined over that time. (Indeed, from 2003 to 2007, the percentage of the state's eighth-grade students at or above proficient on the national assessment test did decline.)
The same thing occurred on mathematics assessments. Looking at the data, one could fairly say that California's seventh-grade math tests were easier to pass in 2006 than in 2003.
Thankfully, California's state tests remain tougher than most others in the country. Parents of students scoring well above the proficient level can be relatively confident that their children are sound academically.
But for students on the bubble, those who just squeaked over the proficient hurdle, California's tests are much less reliable.
Johnny just reaches the proficient level in fourth grade. He continues to barely hit that mark over the next four years. While it looks like Johnny is making normal progress, he's not - the test is getting easier, and Johnny is falling behind (albeit, invisibly).
If the proficiency label is changing, it's impossible to gauge whether individual students (not to mention the state's education system) are making any academic progress.
These findings should make California citizens furious. Parents led to believe that their public-school students were making progress were fed incorrect data - the definition of progress may have changed. If it didn't, then students are surely being fed test prep strategies that would get them over the "proficient" mark in California's particular assessment, but wouldn't help them on another test. In other words, students still aren't actually learning anything but how to game the system.
Regardless of how it has happened, the dumbing down of proficiency has certainly undercut educational accountability in California. All citizens need to now reassess how well the state is running its schools - how well it's running its schools in reality, that is.
What's the solution? A rigorous national test (one that's part of an accountability system) would be best. It's crazy for a 21st century nation to struggle with the discrepant patchwork of assessments that the United States now has.
But more immediately: State policymakers should determine why, exactly, their test is getting easier, and then stop it. And in the meantime, California parents must make sure that their schools are not teaching to the test.
Learning isn't about teaching kids how to memorize the format of the state test; it's about teaching them a broad and challenging curriculum. When that happens, the test scores take care of themselves.
Liam Julian is associate writer and editor at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/14/INDOSMBFB.DTL
© 2007 Hearst Communications Inc. | Privacy Policy | Feedback | RSS Feeds | FAQ | Site Index | Contact
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
NCLB A failed system for failing schools
October 16, 2007
Failing Schools Strain to Meet U.S. Standard
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
LOS ANGELES — As the director of high schools in the gang-infested neighborhoods of the East Side of Los Angeles, Guadalupe Paramo struggles every day with educational dysfunction.
For the past half-dozen years, not even one in five students at her district’s teeming high schools has been able to do grade-level math or English. At Abraham Lincoln High School this year, only 7 in 100 students could. At Woodrow Wilson High, only 4 in 100 could.
For chronically failing schools like these, the No Child Left Behind law, now up for renewal in Congress, prescribes drastic measures: firing teachers and principals, shutting schools and turning them over to a private firm, a charter operator or the state itself, or a major overhaul in governance.
But more than 1,000 of California’s 9,500 schools are branded chronic failures, and the numbers are growing. Barring revisions in the law, state officials predict that all 6,063 public schools serving poor students will be declared in need of restructuring by 2014, when the law requires universal proficiency in math and reading.
“What are we supposed to do?” Ms. Paramo asked. “Shut down every school?”
With the education law now in its fifth year — the one in which its more severe penalties are supposed to come into wide play — California is not the only state overwhelmed by growing numbers of schools that cannot satisfy the law’s escalating demands.
In Florida, 441 schools could be candidates for closing. In Maryland, some 49 schools in Baltimore alone have fallen short of achievement targets for five years or more. In New York State, 77 schools were candidates for restructuring as of last year.
Some districts, like those in New York City, have moved forcefully to shut large failing high schools and break them into small schools. Los Angeles, too, is trying small schools, along with other innovations, and David L. Brewer III, its schools superintendent, has just announced plans to create a “high priority district” under his direct control made up of 40 problem schools.
Yet so far, education experts say they are unaware of a single state that has taken over a failing school in response to the law. Instead, most allow school districts to seek other ways to improve.
“When you have a state like California with so many schools up for restructuring,” said Heinrich Mintrop, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “that taxes the capacity of the whole school change industry.”
As a result, the law is branding numerous schools as failing, but not producing radical change — leaving angry parents demanding redress. California citizens’ groups have sued the state and federal government for failing to deliver on the law’s promises.
“They’re so busy fighting No Child Left Behind,” said Mary Johnson, president of Parent U-Turn, a civic group. “If they would use some of that energy to implement the law, we would go farther.”
Ray Simon, the deputy federal secretary of education, said states that ignored the law’s demands risked losing federal money or facing restrictions on grants. For now, Mr. Simon said, the department is more interested in helping states figure out what works than in punishment. “Even a state has to struggle if it takes over a school,” he said.
A federal survey last year showed that in 87 percent of the cases of persistently failing schools, states and school districts avoided wholesale changes in staff or leadership. That is why, Mr. Simon said, the Bush administration is proposing that Congress force more action by limiting districts’ options in responding to hard-core failure.
In California, Jack O’Connell, the state superintendent of schools, calls the law’s demands unreasonable. Under the federal law, 700 schools that California believed were getting substantially better were counted last year as failing. A state takeover of schools, Mr. O’Connell said, would be a “last option.”
“To have a successful program,” he said, “it really has to come from the community.”
Under the No Child law, a school declared low-performing for three years in a row must offer students free tutoring and the option to transfer. After five years, such schools are essentially treated as irredeemable, with the law prescribing starting over with a new structure, new leadership or new teachers. But it also gives schools the option of less sweeping changes, like reducing school size or changing who is in charge of hiring.
Those in charge of troubled schools in Los Angeles admit that the absence of serious penalties coupled with the growing number of schools branded as low-performing is breeding bitterness. But they are not sure what to do.
Carmen Schroeder, the superintendent of District 5 — and Ms. Paramo’s boss — has taken over hiring decisions and keeps a close watch on the lowest performing schools. Ms. Schroeder said she would like to go further and shut some down if there were any place to transfer the students.
That is not so easy when 59 of the 91 schools in her district, the largest of eight in this sprawling city, consistently fall short of standards.
Beyond that, the federal law does not trump contract agreements, and so teachers have generally not lost their jobs or faced transfer when schools stagnate.
In Los Angeles, as the law’s 2014 deadline draws nearer, the promised land of universal high achievement seems more distant than ever.
Schools that serve low-income students are packed, despite new construction. In poor neighborhoods, students are on staggered schedules, starting school in different months and scattering what was once summer vacation into smaller breaks.
Students lose momentum, forget lessons and come out with 17 fewer days of instruction a year. “That’s why our kids are not passing the high school exit exams,” said Ms. Johnson of Parent U-Turn.
Not all states are facing huge numbers of failing schools. Some were late establishing testing systems, and so lack results over five or more years. Others may have small poor populations, better teaching or easier exams.
But the tensions voiced here are echoed by parents elsewhere, as well as by school officials.
At Woodrow Wilson High one recent morning, teachers broke into small groups over coffee studying test scores for areas of weakness. But there were limits to what they would learn.
The teachers analyzed results for the entire school, not for their own students. Roberto Martinez, the principal, said he had not given teachers the scores of their own students because their union objects, saying the scores were being used to evaluate teachers.
“And who suffers?” asked Veronica Garcia, an English teacher at Wilson. “The kids suffer, because the teacher never gets feedback.”
A. J. Duffy, president of United Teachers of Los Angeles, said the union supported test score reviews provided they did not affect teachers’ jobs. Mr. Duffy said the federal law glossed over the travails of teaching students living in poverty. “Everyone agrees that urban education needs a shot in the arm, but it is not as bleak as the naysayers would have it,” he said.
That is not a view shared by many parents. Martha Sanchez, whose three children attend public schools here, said that as students grew older, the schools seemed to give up.
Her eldest, Gonzalo, attends eighth grade at John Adams Middle School, where only 22 percent of students passed the state exams in English and math this year. It is not hard for Ms. Sanchez to see why.
When Gonzalo struggled over equations, she said, his teacher called him slow rather than going over the material again. Ms. Sanchez said that she had complained, but that the teacher had denied the comment. It was only through the private tutoring, available under No Child Left Behind that he managed to pass seventh grade math, she said.
The principal, Joseph P. Santana, said he did not recall Ms. Sanchez’s complaining, but could not rule it out. “There are 1,600 of them,” he said, referring to the students, “and only one of me.”
Still, Ms. Sanchez is not a big fan of the law. Just weeks into the school year, she said, teachers are focusing almost solely on material likely to appear on state exams. Forget about igniting a passion in children, she said.
“Maybe the system is not designed for people like us,” she said.
Failing Schools Strain to Meet U.S. Standard
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
LOS ANGELES — As the director of high schools in the gang-infested neighborhoods of the East Side of Los Angeles, Guadalupe Paramo struggles every day with educational dysfunction.
For the past half-dozen years, not even one in five students at her district’s teeming high schools has been able to do grade-level math or English. At Abraham Lincoln High School this year, only 7 in 100 students could. At Woodrow Wilson High, only 4 in 100 could.
For chronically failing schools like these, the No Child Left Behind law, now up for renewal in Congress, prescribes drastic measures: firing teachers and principals, shutting schools and turning them over to a private firm, a charter operator or the state itself, or a major overhaul in governance.
But more than 1,000 of California’s 9,500 schools are branded chronic failures, and the numbers are growing. Barring revisions in the law, state officials predict that all 6,063 public schools serving poor students will be declared in need of restructuring by 2014, when the law requires universal proficiency in math and reading.
“What are we supposed to do?” Ms. Paramo asked. “Shut down every school?”
With the education law now in its fifth year — the one in which its more severe penalties are supposed to come into wide play — California is not the only state overwhelmed by growing numbers of schools that cannot satisfy the law’s escalating demands.
In Florida, 441 schools could be candidates for closing. In Maryland, some 49 schools in Baltimore alone have fallen short of achievement targets for five years or more. In New York State, 77 schools were candidates for restructuring as of last year.
Some districts, like those in New York City, have moved forcefully to shut large failing high schools and break them into small schools. Los Angeles, too, is trying small schools, along with other innovations, and David L. Brewer III, its schools superintendent, has just announced plans to create a “high priority district” under his direct control made up of 40 problem schools.
Yet so far, education experts say they are unaware of a single state that has taken over a failing school in response to the law. Instead, most allow school districts to seek other ways to improve.
“When you have a state like California with so many schools up for restructuring,” said Heinrich Mintrop, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “that taxes the capacity of the whole school change industry.”
As a result, the law is branding numerous schools as failing, but not producing radical change — leaving angry parents demanding redress. California citizens’ groups have sued the state and federal government for failing to deliver on the law’s promises.
“They’re so busy fighting No Child Left Behind,” said Mary Johnson, president of Parent U-Turn, a civic group. “If they would use some of that energy to implement the law, we would go farther.”
Ray Simon, the deputy federal secretary of education, said states that ignored the law’s demands risked losing federal money or facing restrictions on grants. For now, Mr. Simon said, the department is more interested in helping states figure out what works than in punishment. “Even a state has to struggle if it takes over a school,” he said.
A federal survey last year showed that in 87 percent of the cases of persistently failing schools, states and school districts avoided wholesale changes in staff or leadership. That is why, Mr. Simon said, the Bush administration is proposing that Congress force more action by limiting districts’ options in responding to hard-core failure.
In California, Jack O’Connell, the state superintendent of schools, calls the law’s demands unreasonable. Under the federal law, 700 schools that California believed were getting substantially better were counted last year as failing. A state takeover of schools, Mr. O’Connell said, would be a “last option.”
“To have a successful program,” he said, “it really has to come from the community.”
Under the No Child law, a school declared low-performing for three years in a row must offer students free tutoring and the option to transfer. After five years, such schools are essentially treated as irredeemable, with the law prescribing starting over with a new structure, new leadership or new teachers. But it also gives schools the option of less sweeping changes, like reducing school size or changing who is in charge of hiring.
Those in charge of troubled schools in Los Angeles admit that the absence of serious penalties coupled with the growing number of schools branded as low-performing is breeding bitterness. But they are not sure what to do.
Carmen Schroeder, the superintendent of District 5 — and Ms. Paramo’s boss — has taken over hiring decisions and keeps a close watch on the lowest performing schools. Ms. Schroeder said she would like to go further and shut some down if there were any place to transfer the students.
That is not so easy when 59 of the 91 schools in her district, the largest of eight in this sprawling city, consistently fall short of standards.
Beyond that, the federal law does not trump contract agreements, and so teachers have generally not lost their jobs or faced transfer when schools stagnate.
In Los Angeles, as the law’s 2014 deadline draws nearer, the promised land of universal high achievement seems more distant than ever.
Schools that serve low-income students are packed, despite new construction. In poor neighborhoods, students are on staggered schedules, starting school in different months and scattering what was once summer vacation into smaller breaks.
Students lose momentum, forget lessons and come out with 17 fewer days of instruction a year. “That’s why our kids are not passing the high school exit exams,” said Ms. Johnson of Parent U-Turn.
Not all states are facing huge numbers of failing schools. Some were late establishing testing systems, and so lack results over five or more years. Others may have small poor populations, better teaching or easier exams.
But the tensions voiced here are echoed by parents elsewhere, as well as by school officials.
At Woodrow Wilson High one recent morning, teachers broke into small groups over coffee studying test scores for areas of weakness. But there were limits to what they would learn.
The teachers analyzed results for the entire school, not for their own students. Roberto Martinez, the principal, said he had not given teachers the scores of their own students because their union objects, saying the scores were being used to evaluate teachers.
“And who suffers?” asked Veronica Garcia, an English teacher at Wilson. “The kids suffer, because the teacher never gets feedback.”
A. J. Duffy, president of United Teachers of Los Angeles, said the union supported test score reviews provided they did not affect teachers’ jobs. Mr. Duffy said the federal law glossed over the travails of teaching students living in poverty. “Everyone agrees that urban education needs a shot in the arm, but it is not as bleak as the naysayers would have it,” he said.
That is not a view shared by many parents. Martha Sanchez, whose three children attend public schools here, said that as students grew older, the schools seemed to give up.
Her eldest, Gonzalo, attends eighth grade at John Adams Middle School, where only 22 percent of students passed the state exams in English and math this year. It is not hard for Ms. Sanchez to see why.
When Gonzalo struggled over equations, she said, his teacher called him slow rather than going over the material again. Ms. Sanchez said that she had complained, but that the teacher had denied the comment. It was only through the private tutoring, available under No Child Left Behind that he managed to pass seventh grade math, she said.
The principal, Joseph P. Santana, said he did not recall Ms. Sanchez’s complaining, but could not rule it out. “There are 1,600 of them,” he said, referring to the students, “and only one of me.”
Still, Ms. Sanchez is not a big fan of the law. Just weeks into the school year, she said, teachers are focusing almost solely on material likely to appear on state exams. Forget about igniting a passion in children, she said.
“Maybe the system is not designed for people like us,” she said.
Friday, October 12, 2007
NCLB in more trouble
Talks Stall on No Child Left Behind
October 11, 2007
By Steven T. Dennis,
Roll Call
Efforts to reach a bipartisan deal on revamped No Child Left Behind legislation have broken down, with Republicans charging that House Education and Labor Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) has refused to compromise.
Republicans said Wednesday that Miller has shown little to no willingness to accommodate their concerns about an erosion of accountability measures and a host of other issues with the bill and say that unless Miller shows new flexibility, Republicans will vote en masse to kill it.
“We’re still better off with current law,” said Education and Labor ranking member Howard McKeon (R-Calif.).
McKeon said his staff and Miller’s staff have been working together all year to try to work out a deal, but he said there are about 15 issues that have yet to be worked out.
A meeting last week between McKeon, Miller, Rep. Dale Kildee (D-Mich.) and Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) yielded little progress, McKeon said. McKeon said Miller took a hard line and McKeon got the sense that “we could talk until we’re blue in the face and there aren’t going to be any changes.”
McKeon said without major changes to the bill, “I would not be able to support it, [Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio)] doesn’t support it, Castle doesn’t support it, the White House doesn’t support it. He has to pass it with Democratic votes.”
McKeon said that passing a bill with Democratic votes alone would seem doubtful given the attacks No Child Left Behind has gotten from some groups on the left — particularly teachers’ unions — and would not become law.
“Maybe when we get to markup, maybe he’ll show some willingness to work with us,” McKeon said of Miller. “He wants to bring it to the floor and I don’t see how it passes.”
Boehner, one of the architects of the original No Child Left Behind Act, said Wednesday that there has been no progress toward an agreement. “The accountability provisions in the draft are basically going to sell out poor children,” Boehner claimed. Boehner also said he objects to 28 new education programs he said Democrats have sought to add to the bill.
Miller said he remains hopeful that a bipartisan compromise can be reached that will improve the program while providing more flexibility for states, but he said he has been unable to get a meeting with Boehner to work out differences.
“I’ve been asking for a meeting with Mr. Boehner and Mr. McKeon for three weeks,” Miller said, adding that he was surprised at their comments. He said the Republicans know that he wants to move a bill to the floor before the end of the year and time is running short.
“We’re making that effort, but whether we’ll be successful remains to be seen,” Miller said of reaching a compromise.
Miller and Boehner bumped into one another a few weeks ago and Miller casually mentioned getting together for a meeting but didn’t follow up, according to Boehner spokesman Brian Kennedy. Kennedy also noted that Boehner sent Miller a long letter over a month ago and has yet to receive a response.
“Pointing the finger at the Minority Leader for the lack of progress on a bill that still has yet to be written, introduced, or even given hearing in committee is somewhere between absurd and comical,” Kennedy said. “Whether it was three weeks ago — or five months ago when Democrats started promising the introduction of an NCLB reauthorization bill — Leader Boehner would have accepted a meeting invitation had one actually been extended to him. That has not been the case, and the chairman’s time might be better spent achieving some consensus among his own committee members for starters.”
The sniping over the bill came a day after President Bush called on Congress to reauthorize No Child Left Behind, but without weakening accountability or the emphasis on math and reading.
But Miller said President Bush’s decision in past years not to fully fund No Child Left Behind has undermined support for the legislation. “I don’t think the president has a lot of credibility on this one,” Miller said.
“Clearly if you travel in the country and in the education community, they don’t feel this law is fair, flexible and funded,” Miller said.
No Child Left Behind is one of the few pieces of legislation that likely will require a bipartisan vote in the House and faces significant opposition in each party. More than 50 Republicans have backed a bill that would essentially gut the legislation and turn it into a block grant program, with House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (Mo.) the most prominent opponent of the law.
Republicans and Democrats generally agree that the original law has flaws that unfairly penalize some schools. Both sides want to incorporate a “growth” model that will test how much a particular student learns over the course of a year rather than giving one test. Schools with large turnover each year can be penalized if someone with relatively little time in that school counts against their results, and inadequate or no credit can be given to significant improvements in scores that don’t quite reach a passing grade.
Miller also has sought to expand the ability of states to use other tests beyond math and reading to show improvement, arguing that No Child Left Behind is too narrowly focused.
“This is a serious effort to fix the flaws in No Child Left Behind,” Miller said.
But McKeon said Republicans don’t want to weaken the accountability rules that focus on math and reading to include tests on other subjects.
“Either you can read or you can’t,” McKeon said. “Either you can do simple math or you can’t. The main purpose of No Child Left Behind was to make sure kids can read and do basic math. It’s starting to work.”
McKeon also objects to giving union bosses in each state a veto over controversial new merit pay provisions for teachers, among other issues.
Meanwhile, the political clock is ticking.
McKeon acknowledged that there is a concern that if the bill doesn’t get out of the gate this year, it’ll be killed next year during the heat of the presidential elections. But McKeon said that shouldn’t be the chief concern, explaining, “I’m more concerned about getting it done right than rushing to meet an artificial deadline.”
October 11, 2007
By Steven T. Dennis,
Roll Call
Efforts to reach a bipartisan deal on revamped No Child Left Behind legislation have broken down, with Republicans charging that House Education and Labor Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) has refused to compromise.
Republicans said Wednesday that Miller has shown little to no willingness to accommodate their concerns about an erosion of accountability measures and a host of other issues with the bill and say that unless Miller shows new flexibility, Republicans will vote en masse to kill it.
“We’re still better off with current law,” said Education and Labor ranking member Howard McKeon (R-Calif.).
McKeon said his staff and Miller’s staff have been working together all year to try to work out a deal, but he said there are about 15 issues that have yet to be worked out.
A meeting last week between McKeon, Miller, Rep. Dale Kildee (D-Mich.) and Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) yielded little progress, McKeon said. McKeon said Miller took a hard line and McKeon got the sense that “we could talk until we’re blue in the face and there aren’t going to be any changes.”
McKeon said without major changes to the bill, “I would not be able to support it, [Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio)] doesn’t support it, Castle doesn’t support it, the White House doesn’t support it. He has to pass it with Democratic votes.”
McKeon said that passing a bill with Democratic votes alone would seem doubtful given the attacks No Child Left Behind has gotten from some groups on the left — particularly teachers’ unions — and would not become law.
“Maybe when we get to markup, maybe he’ll show some willingness to work with us,” McKeon said of Miller. “He wants to bring it to the floor and I don’t see how it passes.”
Boehner, one of the architects of the original No Child Left Behind Act, said Wednesday that there has been no progress toward an agreement. “The accountability provisions in the draft are basically going to sell out poor children,” Boehner claimed. Boehner also said he objects to 28 new education programs he said Democrats have sought to add to the bill.
Miller said he remains hopeful that a bipartisan compromise can be reached that will improve the program while providing more flexibility for states, but he said he has been unable to get a meeting with Boehner to work out differences.
“I’ve been asking for a meeting with Mr. Boehner and Mr. McKeon for three weeks,” Miller said, adding that he was surprised at their comments. He said the Republicans know that he wants to move a bill to the floor before the end of the year and time is running short.
“We’re making that effort, but whether we’ll be successful remains to be seen,” Miller said of reaching a compromise.
Miller and Boehner bumped into one another a few weeks ago and Miller casually mentioned getting together for a meeting but didn’t follow up, according to Boehner spokesman Brian Kennedy. Kennedy also noted that Boehner sent Miller a long letter over a month ago and has yet to receive a response.
“Pointing the finger at the Minority Leader for the lack of progress on a bill that still has yet to be written, introduced, or even given hearing in committee is somewhere between absurd and comical,” Kennedy said. “Whether it was three weeks ago — or five months ago when Democrats started promising the introduction of an NCLB reauthorization bill — Leader Boehner would have accepted a meeting invitation had one actually been extended to him. That has not been the case, and the chairman’s time might be better spent achieving some consensus among his own committee members for starters.”
The sniping over the bill came a day after President Bush called on Congress to reauthorize No Child Left Behind, but without weakening accountability or the emphasis on math and reading.
But Miller said President Bush’s decision in past years not to fully fund No Child Left Behind has undermined support for the legislation. “I don’t think the president has a lot of credibility on this one,” Miller said.
“Clearly if you travel in the country and in the education community, they don’t feel this law is fair, flexible and funded,” Miller said.
No Child Left Behind is one of the few pieces of legislation that likely will require a bipartisan vote in the House and faces significant opposition in each party. More than 50 Republicans have backed a bill that would essentially gut the legislation and turn it into a block grant program, with House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (Mo.) the most prominent opponent of the law.
Republicans and Democrats generally agree that the original law has flaws that unfairly penalize some schools. Both sides want to incorporate a “growth” model that will test how much a particular student learns over the course of a year rather than giving one test. Schools with large turnover each year can be penalized if someone with relatively little time in that school counts against their results, and inadequate or no credit can be given to significant improvements in scores that don’t quite reach a passing grade.
Miller also has sought to expand the ability of states to use other tests beyond math and reading to show improvement, arguing that No Child Left Behind is too narrowly focused.
“This is a serious effort to fix the flaws in No Child Left Behind,” Miller said.
But McKeon said Republicans don’t want to weaken the accountability rules that focus on math and reading to include tests on other subjects.
“Either you can read or you can’t,” McKeon said. “Either you can do simple math or you can’t. The main purpose of No Child Left Behind was to make sure kids can read and do basic math. It’s starting to work.”
McKeon also objects to giving union bosses in each state a veto over controversial new merit pay provisions for teachers, among other issues.
Meanwhile, the political clock is ticking.
McKeon acknowledged that there is a concern that if the bill doesn’t get out of the gate this year, it’ll be killed next year during the heat of the presidential elections. But McKeon said that shouldn’t be the chief concern, explaining, “I’m more concerned about getting it done right than rushing to meet an artificial deadline.”
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Tested: NCLB
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/10/AR2007101002117_pf.html
A 'No Child' Law for All Children
There's a Better Way To Handle Special Needs
By Linda Perlstein
Thursday, October 11, 2007; A19
While at an elementary school doing research for a book about the impact of standards and testing on American education, I spent a lot of time watching a girl I called Whitney. Among other disabilities, Whitney had mild mental retardation. Although she was in fourth grade, she could sound out words only on the level of a first-grader, and her ability to comprehend what she read and heard seemed no more advanced.
I once saw a teacher spend 15 minutes, as the rest of the class worked independently, trying to explain to Whitney that when you sell something you get money for it, a concept crucial to understanding the story at hand. Teaching homonyms was exhausting, if not futile, because at least one word of every pair (dew, grate) was something Whitney had never heard before and could not grasp once she did. When a special education teacher told Whitney that synonyms have the same meaning, she asked, inexplicably, "Like a science experiment? Like a dinosaur?"
As Congress considers revisions to the No Child Left Behind Act, I hope lawmakers think about children such as Whitney. While many elements of the landmark education law are up in the air, one provision almost certain to be included is the "growth model": assessing the "adequate yearly progress" of schools not by calculating how many fourth-graders passed a test compared with the previous year but by measuring the progress made by each child. This is a welcome change and if executed properly may yield far more useful information.
But a large problem remains: Under the versions of the law under discussion, Whitney will still be given the fifth-grade test in fifth grade, the sixth-grade test in sixth grade and so on. She will probably fail these tests -- no surprise to her teachers -- and whatever progress she makes, unless it is so miraculous as to wipe away her deficiencies altogether, will go uncredited. Worse, her time and her teachers' time will be badly misused.
Under the law, a small minority of disabled students are allowed to take a test of more basic skills. Whitney's problems aren't severe enough for her to qualify. Like other special education students, she is entitled to "accommodations" during testing. For many students, these services -- extra time, a quiet room away from the distraction of classmates, a teacher who reads the exam aloud -- level the playing field enough for them to succeed. For others, accommodations can't come close to making the difference between passing and failing.
It's not just that Whitney's progress can't be properly measured by a test that's way above her head. It's that by taking to heart the law's mandate of every student in a grade working toward the same target, administrators are making bad instructional decisions that permeate classrooms nationwide. Teachers follow pacing guides that tell them what to teach each day, no matter where their students are. Students take benchmark exams each quarter and unit tests each week that correspond to how much time has passed, not what those particular children need to learn. Watching a new immigrant I called Mateo struggle with a quiz that asked whether colonization meant an armed invasion, peaceful revolution, settling of new land or control of goods -- English terms he had never heard before -- simply because that was the quiz fifth-graders were taking that day in preparation for their state test, I felt like I was witness to nothing more than a waste of precious time.
That students such as Whitney and Mateo are getting more individual attention is easily the best outcome of the law so far; that this attention is directed toward the wrong goals is negligence. Educators talk about the importance of teaching children as individuals, and they are right. In the classroom, though, they're not following through. You can blame No Child Left Behind, the climate it's induced or the questionable choices people make in its name. Whichever way, as long as students are judged only on grade-level tests, no matter their needs, and as long as the education they get the rest of the year hews to that goal, they will lose out.
Politicians say that anything less than holding fourth-graders accountable for fourth-grade work amounts to leaving children behind, and challenging that notion has become taboo. "For the vast majority of students, grade-level learning is not too much to ask," Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said last month. The only time I saw Whitney make progress was the hour she spent each day with a specialist who guided her in blending letters to make sounds -- hardly a skill in the fourth-grade curriculum. Is it too much to ask that children such as Whitney be taught what they need to learn in order to make their own adequate yearly progress?
Linda Perlstein, who covered education for The Post from 1998 to 2004, is the author of "Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade."
A 'No Child' Law for All Children
There's a Better Way To Handle Special Needs
By Linda Perlstein
Thursday, October 11, 2007; A19
While at an elementary school doing research for a book about the impact of standards and testing on American education, I spent a lot of time watching a girl I called Whitney. Among other disabilities, Whitney had mild mental retardation. Although she was in fourth grade, she could sound out words only on the level of a first-grader, and her ability to comprehend what she read and heard seemed no more advanced.
I once saw a teacher spend 15 minutes, as the rest of the class worked independently, trying to explain to Whitney that when you sell something you get money for it, a concept crucial to understanding the story at hand. Teaching homonyms was exhausting, if not futile, because at least one word of every pair (dew, grate) was something Whitney had never heard before and could not grasp once she did. When a special education teacher told Whitney that synonyms have the same meaning, she asked, inexplicably, "Like a science experiment? Like a dinosaur?"
As Congress considers revisions to the No Child Left Behind Act, I hope lawmakers think about children such as Whitney. While many elements of the landmark education law are up in the air, one provision almost certain to be included is the "growth model": assessing the "adequate yearly progress" of schools not by calculating how many fourth-graders passed a test compared with the previous year but by measuring the progress made by each child. This is a welcome change and if executed properly may yield far more useful information.
But a large problem remains: Under the versions of the law under discussion, Whitney will still be given the fifth-grade test in fifth grade, the sixth-grade test in sixth grade and so on. She will probably fail these tests -- no surprise to her teachers -- and whatever progress she makes, unless it is so miraculous as to wipe away her deficiencies altogether, will go uncredited. Worse, her time and her teachers' time will be badly misused.
Under the law, a small minority of disabled students are allowed to take a test of more basic skills. Whitney's problems aren't severe enough for her to qualify. Like other special education students, she is entitled to "accommodations" during testing. For many students, these services -- extra time, a quiet room away from the distraction of classmates, a teacher who reads the exam aloud -- level the playing field enough for them to succeed. For others, accommodations can't come close to making the difference between passing and failing.
It's not just that Whitney's progress can't be properly measured by a test that's way above her head. It's that by taking to heart the law's mandate of every student in a grade working toward the same target, administrators are making bad instructional decisions that permeate classrooms nationwide. Teachers follow pacing guides that tell them what to teach each day, no matter where their students are. Students take benchmark exams each quarter and unit tests each week that correspond to how much time has passed, not what those particular children need to learn. Watching a new immigrant I called Mateo struggle with a quiz that asked whether colonization meant an armed invasion, peaceful revolution, settling of new land or control of goods -- English terms he had never heard before -- simply because that was the quiz fifth-graders were taking that day in preparation for their state test, I felt like I was witness to nothing more than a waste of precious time.
That students such as Whitney and Mateo are getting more individual attention is easily the best outcome of the law so far; that this attention is directed toward the wrong goals is negligence. Educators talk about the importance of teaching children as individuals, and they are right. In the classroom, though, they're not following through. You can blame No Child Left Behind, the climate it's induced or the questionable choices people make in its name. Whichever way, as long as students are judged only on grade-level tests, no matter their needs, and as long as the education they get the rest of the year hews to that goal, they will lose out.
Politicians say that anything less than holding fourth-graders accountable for fourth-grade work amounts to leaving children behind, and challenging that notion has become taboo. "For the vast majority of students, grade-level learning is not too much to ask," Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said last month. The only time I saw Whitney make progress was the hour she spent each day with a specialist who guided her in blending letters to make sounds -- hardly a skill in the fourth-grade curriculum. Is it too much to ask that children such as Whitney be taught what they need to learn in order to make their own adequate yearly progress?
Linda Perlstein, who covered education for The Post from 1998 to 2004, is the author of "Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade."
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
NCLB: in trouble
Note: in the important story below, Mr. Bush meets with "Civil Rights leaders" as an important support for NCLB. What Mr. Bush has done all along is to select a few "Civil Rights leaders" who support his viewpoints. Notably, the Education Trust claims to be a Civil Rights organization.
Mr.Bush and his team made the same effort in trying to pass immigration reform, inviting a very select group of "civil rights leaders" to work with him. The facts are there are a number of groups funded by corporations and beholding to conservative think tanks who claim to be "civil rights" leaders. This claim should always be questioned. Are they really civil rights leaders?
Duane Campbell
October 10, 2007
Bush Prodding Congress to Reauthorize His Education Law
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
WASHINGTON, Oct. 9 — With his domestic agenda in tatters, President Bush tried Tuesday to prod Congress into reauthorizing his biggest domestic achievement, the 2001 No Child Left Behind education law. But lawmakers have yet to come to terms on the legislation, and prospects for a deal this year appear dim.
Mr. Bush invited civil rights leaders, who are among the bill’s staunchest backers, to a meeting in the White House Roosevelt Room on Tuesday afternoon to discuss the prospects for renewal. Then, in a bit of theater designed to pressure lawmakers — especially Democrats, for whom civil rights advocates are a core constituency — the president took his guests into the Rose Garden, where he issued a public call for Congress to act.
“We don’t necessarily agree on every issue, but we do agree that education is a basic civil right,” Mr. Bush said, adding that the nation “has reached a defining moment in our struggle to secure a good education for every child.”
It was the second time in as many weeks that Mr. Bush has used his presidential platform to draw attention to the education bill, an intensifying effort that suggests he is concerned that his signature domestic achievement could come undone before his term is out.
The bill would remain in effect even if it is not renewed, but the administration is seeking changes to it, and some opponents would like to see it thoroughly revamped. If Congress reauthorizes the bill with its basic components intact, it would be a welcome, and rare, legislative victory for Mr. Bush on Capitol Hill, one that could help cement his legacy in education policy, an issue he has cared about since he was governor of Texas.
The president wants a bill by the end of the year, but administration officials do not sound entirely confident. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said after the Rose Garden ceremony that she was “cautiously optimistic.”
At least one of the civil rights leaders in attendance, Wade Henderson, said he feared that the reauthorization effort could collapse amid challenges from Republicans, in much the same way that the president’s immigration proposal was brought down by his own party. Mr. Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, said Mr. Bush seemed determined to see the bill through.
“He committed to using his personal capital to see to it that the bill is reauthorized this year,” Mr. Henderson said. “This is his signature achievement, and I think he wants to extend that.”
But as with the immigration bill, there are questions on how far the president’s capital can take him. Mr. Bush is in the thick of a series of veto fights with Congressional Democrats, many of whom accuse the administration of failing to finance the original education measure fully. At the same time, the bill faces challenges from some Republicans, who say it tramples on local control of schools.
“Every day that goes by, the likelihood becomes less that they’ll be able to get a bill passed this year,” said Jack Jennings, a former general counsel for the House education committee and president of the Center on Education Policy, a nonprofit group that advises many states on the federal education law.
First passed in 2001, No Child Left Behind created new, specific standards for student achievement, demanding that all schools test students in Grades 3 to 8 in reading and math every year, with the goal of having all students demonstrate proficiency in those subjects by 2014. Mr. Bush said Tuesday that he would not “compromise on the basic principle” that every child must read and do math at or above grade level.
Ms. Spellings said: “It’s a strong law, a hawkish law and a good law. We can make it better, but we don’t need to risk making it worse.”
House Democrats have been working much of the year to draw up legislation to renew the law, but have yet to produce a bill. A “discussion draft” has come under attack from backers and opponents of the original measure.
In the Senate, the lead Democratic sponsor of the original bill, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, plans to introduce legislation to renew it by the end of the month. On Tuesday, Mr. Kennedy chided the White House for making the reauthorization effort “far more difficult by its failure to fully fund and implement it.”
Civil rights advocates said they used Tuesday’s meeting to press Mr. Bush to support substantial increases in federal spending on No Child Left Behind, saying the money was needed to help schools meet the law’s demands and to develop better, more sophisticated ways to measure student progress.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
Privacy Policy
Mr.Bush and his team made the same effort in trying to pass immigration reform, inviting a very select group of "civil rights leaders" to work with him. The facts are there are a number of groups funded by corporations and beholding to conservative think tanks who claim to be "civil rights" leaders. This claim should always be questioned. Are they really civil rights leaders?
Duane Campbell
October 10, 2007
Bush Prodding Congress to Reauthorize His Education Law
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
WASHINGTON, Oct. 9 — With his domestic agenda in tatters, President Bush tried Tuesday to prod Congress into reauthorizing his biggest domestic achievement, the 2001 No Child Left Behind education law. But lawmakers have yet to come to terms on the legislation, and prospects for a deal this year appear dim.
Mr. Bush invited civil rights leaders, who are among the bill’s staunchest backers, to a meeting in the White House Roosevelt Room on Tuesday afternoon to discuss the prospects for renewal. Then, in a bit of theater designed to pressure lawmakers — especially Democrats, for whom civil rights advocates are a core constituency — the president took his guests into the Rose Garden, where he issued a public call for Congress to act.
“We don’t necessarily agree on every issue, but we do agree that education is a basic civil right,” Mr. Bush said, adding that the nation “has reached a defining moment in our struggle to secure a good education for every child.”
It was the second time in as many weeks that Mr. Bush has used his presidential platform to draw attention to the education bill, an intensifying effort that suggests he is concerned that his signature domestic achievement could come undone before his term is out.
The bill would remain in effect even if it is not renewed, but the administration is seeking changes to it, and some opponents would like to see it thoroughly revamped. If Congress reauthorizes the bill with its basic components intact, it would be a welcome, and rare, legislative victory for Mr. Bush on Capitol Hill, one that could help cement his legacy in education policy, an issue he has cared about since he was governor of Texas.
The president wants a bill by the end of the year, but administration officials do not sound entirely confident. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said after the Rose Garden ceremony that she was “cautiously optimistic.”
At least one of the civil rights leaders in attendance, Wade Henderson, said he feared that the reauthorization effort could collapse amid challenges from Republicans, in much the same way that the president’s immigration proposal was brought down by his own party. Mr. Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, said Mr. Bush seemed determined to see the bill through.
“He committed to using his personal capital to see to it that the bill is reauthorized this year,” Mr. Henderson said. “This is his signature achievement, and I think he wants to extend that.”
But as with the immigration bill, there are questions on how far the president’s capital can take him. Mr. Bush is in the thick of a series of veto fights with Congressional Democrats, many of whom accuse the administration of failing to finance the original education measure fully. At the same time, the bill faces challenges from some Republicans, who say it tramples on local control of schools.
“Every day that goes by, the likelihood becomes less that they’ll be able to get a bill passed this year,” said Jack Jennings, a former general counsel for the House education committee and president of the Center on Education Policy, a nonprofit group that advises many states on the federal education law.
First passed in 2001, No Child Left Behind created new, specific standards for student achievement, demanding that all schools test students in Grades 3 to 8 in reading and math every year, with the goal of having all students demonstrate proficiency in those subjects by 2014. Mr. Bush said Tuesday that he would not “compromise on the basic principle” that every child must read and do math at or above grade level.
Ms. Spellings said: “It’s a strong law, a hawkish law and a good law. We can make it better, but we don’t need to risk making it worse.”
House Democrats have been working much of the year to draw up legislation to renew the law, but have yet to produce a bill. A “discussion draft” has come under attack from backers and opponents of the original measure.
In the Senate, the lead Democratic sponsor of the original bill, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, plans to introduce legislation to renew it by the end of the month. On Tuesday, Mr. Kennedy chided the White House for making the reauthorization effort “far more difficult by its failure to fully fund and implement it.”
Civil rights advocates said they used Tuesday’s meeting to press Mr. Bush to support substantial increases in federal spending on No Child Left Behind, saying the money was needed to help schools meet the law’s demands and to develop better, more sophisticated ways to measure student progress.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
Privacy Policy
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Testing, testing, testing
Op-Ed Columnist
High-Stakes Flimflam
October 8, 2007
by Bob Herbert
It’s time to rein in the test zealots who have gotten such a stranglehold on the public schools in the U.S.
Politicians and others have promoted high-stakes testing as a panacea that would bring accountability to teaching and substantially boost the classroom performance of students.
“Measuring,” said President Bush, in a discussion of his No Child Left Behind law, “is the gateway to success.”
Not only has high-stakes testing largely failed to magically swing open the gates to successful learning, it is questionable in many cases whether the tests themselves are anything more than a shell game.
Daniel Koretz, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, told me in a recent interview that it’s important to ask “whether you can trust improvements in test scores when you are holding people accountable for the tests.”
The short answer, he said, is no.
If teachers, administrators, politicians and others have a stake in raising the test scores of students — as opposed to improving student learning, which is not the same thing — there are all kinds of incentives to raise those scores by any means necessary.
“We’ve now had four or five different waves of educational reform,” said Dr. Koretz, “that were based on the idea that if we can just get a good test in place and beat people up to raise scores, kids will learn more. That’s really what No Child Left Behind is.”
The problem is that you can raise scores the hard way by teaching more effectively and getting the students to work harder, or you can take shortcuts and start figuring out ways, as Dr. Koretz put it, to “game” the system.
Guess what’s been happening?
“We’ve had high-stakes testing, really, since the 1970s in some states,” said Dr. Koretz. “We’ve had maybe six good studies that ask: ‘If the scores go up, can we believe them? Or are people taking shortcuts?’ And all of those studies found really substantial inflation of test scores.
“In some cases where there were huge increases in test scores, the kids didn’t actually learn more at all. If you gave them another test, you saw no improvement.”
There is not enough data available to determine how widespread this problem is. “We know it doesn’t always happen,” said Dr. Koretz. “But we know it often does.”
He said his big concern is where this might be happening. “There are a lot of us in the field,” he said, “who think that if we ever really looked under the covers, what we’d find is that the shortcuts are particularly prevalent in lower-achieving schools, just because the pressure is greater, the community supports are less and the kids have more difficulties. But we don’t know.”
One aspect of the No Child Left Behind law that doesn’t get enough attention is that while it requires states to make progress toward student proficiency in reading and math, it leaves it up to the states themselves to define “proficiency” and to create the tests that determine what constitutes progress.
That’s absurd. With no guiding standard, the states’ tests are measurements without meaning.
A study released last week by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Northwest Evaluation Association found that “improvements in passing rates on state tests can largely be explained by declines in the difficulty of those tests.”
The people in charge of most school districts would rather jump from the roof of a tall building than allow an unfettered study of their test practices. But that kind of analysis is exactly what’s needed if we’re to get any real sense of how well students are doing.
Five years ago, President Bush and many others who had little understanding of the best ways to educate children were crowing about the prospects of No Child Left Behind. They were warned then about the dangers of relying too much on test scores.
But those warnings didn’t matter in an era in which reality was left behind.
“No longer is it acceptable to hide poor performance,” said Mr. Bush, as if those who were genuinely concerned about the flaws in his approach were in favor of poor performance.
During my interview with Dr. Koretz, he noted that by not rigorously analyzing the phenomenon of high-stakes testing, “we’re creating an illusion of success that is really nice for everybody in the system except the kids.”
That was a few days before the release of the Fordham Institute Study, which used language strikingly similar to Dr. Koretz’s. The study asserted that the tests used by states to measure student progress under No Child Left Behind were creating “a false impression of success.”
The study was titled, “The Proficiency Illusion.”
Even newspaper pundits are beginning to recognize the problem. Next, the really slow learners; politicians.
Duane Campbell
High-Stakes Flimflam
October 8, 2007
by Bob Herbert
It’s time to rein in the test zealots who have gotten such a stranglehold on the public schools in the U.S.
Politicians and others have promoted high-stakes testing as a panacea that would bring accountability to teaching and substantially boost the classroom performance of students.
“Measuring,” said President Bush, in a discussion of his No Child Left Behind law, “is the gateway to success.”
Not only has high-stakes testing largely failed to magically swing open the gates to successful learning, it is questionable in many cases whether the tests themselves are anything more than a shell game.
Daniel Koretz, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, told me in a recent interview that it’s important to ask “whether you can trust improvements in test scores when you are holding people accountable for the tests.”
The short answer, he said, is no.
If teachers, administrators, politicians and others have a stake in raising the test scores of students — as opposed to improving student learning, which is not the same thing — there are all kinds of incentives to raise those scores by any means necessary.
“We’ve now had four or five different waves of educational reform,” said Dr. Koretz, “that were based on the idea that if we can just get a good test in place and beat people up to raise scores, kids will learn more. That’s really what No Child Left Behind is.”
The problem is that you can raise scores the hard way by teaching more effectively and getting the students to work harder, or you can take shortcuts and start figuring out ways, as Dr. Koretz put it, to “game” the system.
Guess what’s been happening?
“We’ve had high-stakes testing, really, since the 1970s in some states,” said Dr. Koretz. “We’ve had maybe six good studies that ask: ‘If the scores go up, can we believe them? Or are people taking shortcuts?’ And all of those studies found really substantial inflation of test scores.
“In some cases where there were huge increases in test scores, the kids didn’t actually learn more at all. If you gave them another test, you saw no improvement.”
There is not enough data available to determine how widespread this problem is. “We know it doesn’t always happen,” said Dr. Koretz. “But we know it often does.”
He said his big concern is where this might be happening. “There are a lot of us in the field,” he said, “who think that if we ever really looked under the covers, what we’d find is that the shortcuts are particularly prevalent in lower-achieving schools, just because the pressure is greater, the community supports are less and the kids have more difficulties. But we don’t know.”
One aspect of the No Child Left Behind law that doesn’t get enough attention is that while it requires states to make progress toward student proficiency in reading and math, it leaves it up to the states themselves to define “proficiency” and to create the tests that determine what constitutes progress.
That’s absurd. With no guiding standard, the states’ tests are measurements without meaning.
A study released last week by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Northwest Evaluation Association found that “improvements in passing rates on state tests can largely be explained by declines in the difficulty of those tests.”
The people in charge of most school districts would rather jump from the roof of a tall building than allow an unfettered study of their test practices. But that kind of analysis is exactly what’s needed if we’re to get any real sense of how well students are doing.
Five years ago, President Bush and many others who had little understanding of the best ways to educate children were crowing about the prospects of No Child Left Behind. They were warned then about the dangers of relying too much on test scores.
But those warnings didn’t matter in an era in which reality was left behind.
“No longer is it acceptable to hide poor performance,” said Mr. Bush, as if those who were genuinely concerned about the flaws in his approach were in favor of poor performance.
During my interview with Dr. Koretz, he noted that by not rigorously analyzing the phenomenon of high-stakes testing, “we’re creating an illusion of success that is really nice for everybody in the system except the kids.”
That was a few days before the release of the Fordham Institute Study, which used language strikingly similar to Dr. Koretz’s. The study asserted that the tests used by states to measure student progress under No Child Left Behind were creating “a false impression of success.”
The study was titled, “The Proficiency Illusion.”
Even newspaper pundits are beginning to recognize the problem. Next, the really slow learners; politicians.
Duane Campbell
Monday, October 08, 2007
Media campaign
On Monday, Oct. 8, 4 major newspapers carried news stories or editorials bemoaning the risisng costs of education at the U.C. ( See below).
the Los Angeles Times on Sunday, the Sacramento Bee, the Ventura County press, and the San Diego Union- among others.
This convergence is not likely to be an accident. There is a campaign here.
The Sacramento Bee editorial rebukes Treasurer Bill Lockyer- for his description of alternatives. Fair enough.
here is another alternative not mentioned in the MSM.
If Lockyer, Schwarzenegger and others wish to privatize the U.C.,
we should insist that the new private owners repay the people’s investment.
Lets see. 120 years of investment + interest.
And then, we have legislators educated at U.C. Pete Wilson paid $50 per semester for law school. The present cost is $24,000 per year. So, , each of these legislators should repay 24,000 per year ( the current cost) X 3 years. And, add interest.
And a similar bill for each medical graduate and MBA graduate.
And then, there is the value of the property.
To do any less would be “ a gift of public funds”, and illegal.
Duane Campbell
the Los Angeles Times on Sunday, the Sacramento Bee, the Ventura County press, and the San Diego Union- among others.
This convergence is not likely to be an accident. There is a campaign here.
The Sacramento Bee editorial rebukes Treasurer Bill Lockyer- for his description of alternatives. Fair enough.
here is another alternative not mentioned in the MSM.
If Lockyer, Schwarzenegger and others wish to privatize the U.C.,
we should insist that the new private owners repay the people’s investment.
Lets see. 120 years of investment + interest.
And then, we have legislators educated at U.C. Pete Wilson paid $50 per semester for law school. The present cost is $24,000 per year. So, , each of these legislators should repay 24,000 per year ( the current cost) X 3 years. And, add interest.
And a similar bill for each medical graduate and MBA graduate.
And then, there is the value of the property.
To do any less would be “ a gift of public funds”, and illegal.
Duane Campbell
The moderate faculty
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/08/politics
The Liberal (and Moderating) Professoriate
Faculty members identify as liberals and vote Democratic in far greater
proportions than found in the American public at large. That finding by
itself won't shock many, but the national study released Saturday at a
Harvard University symposium may be notable both for its methodology and
other, more surprising findings.
The 72-page study - "The Social and Political Views of American
Professors" - was produced with the goal of moving analysis of the
political views of faculty members out of the culture wars and back to
social science. The study offers at times harsh criticism of many of the
analyses of these issues in recent years (both from those hoping to tag
the professoriate as foolishly radical and those seeking to rebut those
charges). The study included community college professors along with
four-year institutions, and featured analysis of non-responders to the
survey (two features missing from many recent reports).
The results of the study find a professoriate that may be less liberal
than is widely assumed, even if conservatives are correctly assumed to
be in a distinct minority. The authors present evidence that there are
more faculty members who identify as moderates than as liberals. The
authors of the study also found evidence of a significant decline by age
group in faculty radicalism, with younger faculty members less likely
than their older counterparts to identify as radical or activist. And
while the study found that faculty members generally hold what are
thought to be liberal positions on social issues, professors are divided
on affirmative action in college admissions.
More: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/08/politics
__._,_.___
The Liberal (and Moderating) Professoriate
Faculty members identify as liberals and vote Democratic in far greater
proportions than found in the American public at large. That finding by
itself won't shock many, but the national study released Saturday at a
Harvard University symposium may be notable both for its methodology and
other, more surprising findings.
The 72-page study - "The Social and Political Views of American
Professors" - was produced with the goal of moving analysis of the
political views of faculty members out of the culture wars and back to
social science. The study offers at times harsh criticism of many of the
analyses of these issues in recent years (both from those hoping to tag
the professoriate as foolishly radical and those seeking to rebut those
charges). The study included community college professors along with
four-year institutions, and featured analysis of non-responders to the
survey (two features missing from many recent reports).
The results of the study find a professoriate that may be less liberal
than is widely assumed, even if conservatives are correctly assumed to
be in a distinct minority. The authors present evidence that there are
more faculty members who identify as moderates than as liberals. The
authors of the study also found evidence of a significant decline by age
group in faculty radicalism, with younger faculty members less likely
than their older counterparts to identify as radical or activist. And
while the study found that faculty members generally hold what are
thought to be liberal positions on social issues, professors are divided
on affirmative action in college admissions.
More: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/08/politics
__._,_.___
Sunday, October 07, 2007
U.C. on the road to privatization?
Less to bank on at state universities
Educators fear a 2004 funding deal has schools sliding toward mediocrity
By Richard C. Paddock
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 7, 2007
SANTA BARBARA — Library assistant Linda Snook isn't usually someone to stand up in front of hundreds of people and discuss her personal finances. But when the UC Board of Regents met here this summer, she pleaded for help.
Snook told the regents that she makes $26,000 a year working full time at UC Santa Barbara and pays more than half of that in rent. Her supervisors have recommended her for raises, she said, but there is never enough money in the budget. She'd like to enroll in graduate school at UCSB, but, on her pay, that's a distant dream.
"I am barely making it," she told the regents. "We're not paid what the private sector would make. We desperately, desperately need help. Please."
These days, such appeals are commonplace. Students, custodians, campus police, clerical workers, faculty and administrators regularly beseech the regents to give them more money.
But soaring student fees, huge fundraising drives and controversial corporate donations have not made up for a sharp decline in the state's commitment to higher education. UC administrators and faculty fear that waning commitment is eroding the 10-campus system's reputation for excellence and will trigger a slide toward mediocrity. Already, the salaries of professors and workers lag behind comparable institutions while faculty posts remain open and more classes are taught by teaching assistants.
Administrators and faculty also worry that the University of California and the 23-campus California State University will become de facto private institutions, where most of the costs are paid by students.
Officials at UC and CSU say that each institution needs about $1 billion more in annual funding to match their level of quality in 2001, the last time the universities were in relatively good fiscal health.
University leaders say the two public institutions are the state's engine of long-term growth and its main supplier of highly skilled workers. But the universities' importance to state policymakers is declining, at least as measured in tax dollars.
In 1970, the state spent 6.9% of its budget on the University of California. Today it spends 3.2%. In 1965, the state covered 94.4% of a UC student's education. Last year it paid 58.5%.
This year, California will spend an estimated $3.3 billion to operate UC. It will spend three times as much -- $9.9 billion -- to run the state's prisons.
Unlike other state-sponsored programs -- such as health, schools and community colleges -- UC and CSU have no level of state funding guaranteed by law. Will the two huge university systems, with 665,000 students, become the equivalent of private institutions?
"I worry about it every day, because we must continue to look for other sources of support," said UC President Robert C. Dynes. "And the question is, do we end up becoming a private institution to get those resources?"
In May 2004, Dynes and his CSU counterpart, Chancellor Charles Reed, traveled to Sacramento to meet privately with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The state was facing a $14-billion shortfall and the new governor was threatening the universities with major cutbacks for the third consecutive year.
The two university chiefs struck a deal with the governor: They agreed to slash spending that year by hundreds of millions of dollars in exchange for a funding formula lasting until 2011. Titled the "Higher Education Compact," the agreement calls for modest annual increases in state funds, private fundraising to help pay for basic programs, and large student fee hikes, especially for graduate and professional students.
There was no hearing on the pact; no legislative discussion; no vote. Many UC regents were not told of the deal until it was done. Richard C. Blum, who became the regents' chairman this year, called the lack of disclosure "an error in judgment."
Reed and Dynes, who will step down by June, say the compact stopped the universities' bleeding and gave them fiscal stability. But critics say the pact has left UC and CSU chronically underfunded and locked the universities into a steady decline.
"Bob Dynes and Charlie Reed fundamentally changed the nature of higher education in California without any public debate," said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco who chaired a faculty committee that analyzed the agreement.
"The effect of the compact is a permanent substantial reduction in the quality of the university."
The compact itself acknowledges that the universities have "significant unmet funding needs. . . and insufficient funding of programs critical to the academic enterprise."
Among its many provisions, the compact set a little-noticed precedent by calling for the use of private fundraising to pay for core university operations. "UC will continue to seek additional private resources and maximize other fund sources available to the University to support basic programs," it says.
Long gone are the days when Californians were willing to pay taxes to build three new UC campuses in a five-year span and subsidize annual student fees of less than $250.
"There is this myth out there that citizens can get better roads, cleaner air, get their garbage picked up twice a week, be protected by police and fire and it won't cost them anything," Reed said. "People have been singing that song for 20 years."
Reed predicts that within five years the state will be spending more on prisons than on UC, CSU and the community colleges combined.
"That will be a real tragedy in this state," he said. "It will send out the signal that California has world-class prisons and second-class universities. If we had better-prepared citizens, a better-prepared workforce, we would have less need for prisons."
When Schwarzenegger took office in November 2003, the state faced a fiscal crisis. At UC, enrollment had risen 18% even as then-Gov. Gray Davis cut its budget by 14%, breaking his own pact with the universities.
To reorganize the state's finances, Schwarzenegger recruited Donna Arduin, an advocate of privatizing government services who had been Florida budget director under Gov. Jeb Bush. As California finance director, she soon became known as Schwarzenegger's "bad cop."
Her budget plan for UC and CSU called for hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts for the third consecutive year, major student fee hikes, a reduction in enrollment and a plan to steer thousands of students to community colleges instead of the universities.
Dynes and Reed quietly began negotiating with the popular Republican governor.
At stake was California's tradition of maintaining low student fees, which have helped keep the universities accessible to the poor and promoted ethnic diversity. CSU has the lowest fees of any public university in the nation, Reed says, and 54% of its students are nonwhite.
Supporters of more privatization argue that the universities' main beneficiaries are the individual students, who greatly increase their earning power by obtaining a degree. But public education advocates argue that the universities provide a major social benefit in preparing California's workforce and developing technology that helps power the economy.
In announcing the compact on May 11, 2004, Schwarzenegger said that he, Dynes and Reed had "found a compromise that will protect the quality of our world-renowned higher-education system."
But much of Arduin's agenda for the universities survived, including more budget cuts, major student fee hikes and shifting freshmen to community colleges.
"Behind the scenes we had great cooperation," recalled Arduin, who left California after 11 months. "The universities were one of the first to the table, and they proposed a comprehensive approach. It was a very amicable agreement among all the parties."
The compact is similar to deals worked out with the previous three governors. But critics accuse Dynes and Reed of undercutting the Legislature and negotiating a bad deal.
Democratic Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, who like Schwarzenegger sits on the governing boards of both institutions, calls the pact a disaster.
"This compact is a formula for the diminution of both UC and CSU," he said. "It's a formula that ratchets down the state's funding."
A study by UC's Academic Senate concluded that during the life of the compact, UC will never return to the spending level of 2001, before the Davis and Schwarzenegger administrations' cuts.
During previous budget cycles, state spending cuts made in bad years were at least partly restored when the economy improved. But critics say the compact has locked in the reduced funding.
At UC, the spending gap means that faculty salaries lag nearly 15% behind comparable institutions, while salaries for campus workers like library assistant Snook trail the market by at least 10%. Needed seismic retrofitting and building improvements are delayed. And fewer top graduate students are choosing to attend UC, a key indicator of a research university's decline.
UC's spending gap is now $1.1 billion, the faculty study found, and will steadily grow for the duration of the compact despite modest increases provided by the agreement.
Similarly, Reed said, CSU faces an annual shortfall of $800 million to $1 billion.
"The compact permanently reduces the fraction of core funds the state provides," UCSB professor Christopher Newfield, chairman of the faculty Senate's planning and budget committee, told the regents in July as he presented the faculty findings.
Private fundraising, he said, cannot offset the loss in public funds. For UC to return to its 2001 spending level without an increase in state funds, he told the regents, would require raising the basic annual undergraduate fee from $6,366 to at least $15,000 in three years, with large increases thereafter.
"We're at a crossroads in public investment," Newfield said in an interview. "California had a good record in the past, but I think we have lost our memory of what we did. We're living on our past investment."
Though defenders of the compact acknowledge the budget gap, they say the universities would be in even worse shape without the pact. Their mantra: The compact sets a floor for state spending, not a ceiling.
In some years, they point out, Sacramento has given the universities more than the compact requires, including last year -- an election year -- when the governor and Legislature absorbed an expected 8% student fee hike.
"I think that the compact is a very good thing," Reed said. "What people don't have a great appreciation for is how the compact has protected UC and CSU from a stability standpoint."
This summer, when Republican legislators proposed cutting higher education below the level of the compact, Schwarzenegger weighed in on the side of the universities. The lawmakers backed off. "Thank goodness for the compact right now," Reed said.
CSU trustee Jeff Bleich agreed that the compact had kept the university from suffering larger cutbacks.
"The reason to do it is to establish some commitment from the governor for a floor," he said. "As long as you believe the governor means what he says, you can have some confidence for planning the growth of these massive institutions."
Under the compact, the need to find new money sources is most evident in UC's professional programs, especially including its renowned law and business schools. After the compact was signed, average fees at UC's 34 professional schools soared 30% in 2004 alone.
"We wound up having to take huge cuts in law and business, and they have been reeling ever since," said Larry Hershman, a former vice president for budget at UC who helped negotiate the compact. "This was the Donna Arduin view, to make these schools self-supporting, the students paying much more and the public paying much less."
Supporters of the fee hikes say that students in law, business and medicine can afford to pay more because they will be able to command large salaries later. They argue that the burden of paying for an education should fall more heavily on students.
Dynes said that some state institutions, such as the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia, have led the way in raising tuition and luring higher-paying students from other states and countries.
"If you look at Michigan and the number of out-of-state students, you realize they have privatized," Dynes said. "It's not a criticism. They have just chosen a different path."
But critics say higher fees deter underprivileged students from applying and make it harder for newly graduated lawyers, doctors or other health professionals to enter a life of public service.
The compact calls on UC to develop multiyear plans for fee hikes at the professional schools that take into account market factors and fees at comparable institutions, including Michigan.
In September, the regents approved a three-year plan to increase fees at the professional schools by 7% to 15% a year. At UC Berkeley's business and law schools, fees will rise to more than $40,000 a year.
Undergraduates have fared better, but have seen fees rise by 90% over the last six years.
Earlier this year, the UC regents and the CSU trustees voted to raise undergraduate fees 7% and graduate fees 10%. Some expressed frustration that they had no choice in the matter.
"Every year when fee increases come up, it's treated as a big crisis, but it's programmed into the compact," Glantz said. "Students are paying more and getting less."
Glantz, a tobacco researcher who has spent years fighting the industry, says UC's need for corporate money has contributed to its reluctance to ban tobacco industry research grants, including $16.6 million that Philip Morris USA is giving to researchers at seven UC campuses.
"People are desperate for cash because the infrastructure of the university is coming unglued as we watch," Glantz said.
Other grants also have stirred controversy, including a $500-million donation by oil giant BP to form a joint UC-BP research laboratory at UC Berkeley to develop biofuels. BP researchers will work alongside UC professors, and the company will have exclusive rights to some of the expected discoveries.
"The compact is driving the UC and CSU systems to seek funds from corporations at an unprecedented rate," said John Simpson, an advocate with the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights. "What we are witnessing is the corporate privatization of what was once the nation's greatest public education system."
Educators say that maintaining competitive faculty salaries is the key to preserving the quality of the universities. But during hard times, pay raises have been the first thing to go.
The pay disparity has left UC open to raids by elite private universities. To help shore up the faculty at UC Berkeley, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation announced in September that it would give the campus $113 million -- the school's largest gift ever -- to endow 100 faculty chairs.
Both UC and CSU have adopted plans to raise salaries to market levels over the next four years.
"The No. 1 goal is to get the faculty more money," said Blum, the regents' chairman, who in August called for overhauling UC's administration in hopes of saving many millions of dollars.
Whether Blum can solve UC's financial problems by restructuring its operations remains to be seen.
Linda Snook, the library assistant, wasn't the only university employee to ask for help at the July meeting in Santa Barbara. Victor Vincent, a custodian at UCLA for 17 years, told the regents: "We can't even afford to send our kids to the university, and we don't understand why you don't understand that. We are suffering, and we need somebody to help us."
William Schlitz, political and communications director for the American Federation of County, State and Municipal Employees, says UC is shifting more of its costs to campus employees, including doubling healthcare fees for some. UCSB, he said, has begun charging custodians who work the midnight shift $150 a month to park in an otherwise empty lot.
"At some point there needs to be a frank discussion: Is this the public's university or not?" Schlitz said. "It's scary. These are great institutions, but it's an uncertain future, and it's an uncertain future for the employees."
richard.paddock@latimes.com
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.
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partners:
Educators fear a 2004 funding deal has schools sliding toward mediocrity
By Richard C. Paddock
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 7, 2007
SANTA BARBARA — Library assistant Linda Snook isn't usually someone to stand up in front of hundreds of people and discuss her personal finances. But when the UC Board of Regents met here this summer, she pleaded for help.
Snook told the regents that she makes $26,000 a year working full time at UC Santa Barbara and pays more than half of that in rent. Her supervisors have recommended her for raises, she said, but there is never enough money in the budget. She'd like to enroll in graduate school at UCSB, but, on her pay, that's a distant dream.
"I am barely making it," she told the regents. "We're not paid what the private sector would make. We desperately, desperately need help. Please."
These days, such appeals are commonplace. Students, custodians, campus police, clerical workers, faculty and administrators regularly beseech the regents to give them more money.
But soaring student fees, huge fundraising drives and controversial corporate donations have not made up for a sharp decline in the state's commitment to higher education. UC administrators and faculty fear that waning commitment is eroding the 10-campus system's reputation for excellence and will trigger a slide toward mediocrity. Already, the salaries of professors and workers lag behind comparable institutions while faculty posts remain open and more classes are taught by teaching assistants.
Administrators and faculty also worry that the University of California and the 23-campus California State University will become de facto private institutions, where most of the costs are paid by students.
Officials at UC and CSU say that each institution needs about $1 billion more in annual funding to match their level of quality in 2001, the last time the universities were in relatively good fiscal health.
University leaders say the two public institutions are the state's engine of long-term growth and its main supplier of highly skilled workers. But the universities' importance to state policymakers is declining, at least as measured in tax dollars.
In 1970, the state spent 6.9% of its budget on the University of California. Today it spends 3.2%. In 1965, the state covered 94.4% of a UC student's education. Last year it paid 58.5%.
This year, California will spend an estimated $3.3 billion to operate UC. It will spend three times as much -- $9.9 billion -- to run the state's prisons.
Unlike other state-sponsored programs -- such as health, schools and community colleges -- UC and CSU have no level of state funding guaranteed by law. Will the two huge university systems, with 665,000 students, become the equivalent of private institutions?
"I worry about it every day, because we must continue to look for other sources of support," said UC President Robert C. Dynes. "And the question is, do we end up becoming a private institution to get those resources?"
In May 2004, Dynes and his CSU counterpart, Chancellor Charles Reed, traveled to Sacramento to meet privately with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The state was facing a $14-billion shortfall and the new governor was threatening the universities with major cutbacks for the third consecutive year.
The two university chiefs struck a deal with the governor: They agreed to slash spending that year by hundreds of millions of dollars in exchange for a funding formula lasting until 2011. Titled the "Higher Education Compact," the agreement calls for modest annual increases in state funds, private fundraising to help pay for basic programs, and large student fee hikes, especially for graduate and professional students.
There was no hearing on the pact; no legislative discussion; no vote. Many UC regents were not told of the deal until it was done. Richard C. Blum, who became the regents' chairman this year, called the lack of disclosure "an error in judgment."
Reed and Dynes, who will step down by June, say the compact stopped the universities' bleeding and gave them fiscal stability. But critics say the pact has left UC and CSU chronically underfunded and locked the universities into a steady decline.
"Bob Dynes and Charlie Reed fundamentally changed the nature of higher education in California without any public debate," said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco who chaired a faculty committee that analyzed the agreement.
"The effect of the compact is a permanent substantial reduction in the quality of the university."
The compact itself acknowledges that the universities have "significant unmet funding needs. . . and insufficient funding of programs critical to the academic enterprise."
Among its many provisions, the compact set a little-noticed precedent by calling for the use of private fundraising to pay for core university operations. "UC will continue to seek additional private resources and maximize other fund sources available to the University to support basic programs," it says.
Long gone are the days when Californians were willing to pay taxes to build three new UC campuses in a five-year span and subsidize annual student fees of less than $250.
"There is this myth out there that citizens can get better roads, cleaner air, get their garbage picked up twice a week, be protected by police and fire and it won't cost them anything," Reed said. "People have been singing that song for 20 years."
Reed predicts that within five years the state will be spending more on prisons than on UC, CSU and the community colleges combined.
"That will be a real tragedy in this state," he said. "It will send out the signal that California has world-class prisons and second-class universities. If we had better-prepared citizens, a better-prepared workforce, we would have less need for prisons."
When Schwarzenegger took office in November 2003, the state faced a fiscal crisis. At UC, enrollment had risen 18% even as then-Gov. Gray Davis cut its budget by 14%, breaking his own pact with the universities.
To reorganize the state's finances, Schwarzenegger recruited Donna Arduin, an advocate of privatizing government services who had been Florida budget director under Gov. Jeb Bush. As California finance director, she soon became known as Schwarzenegger's "bad cop."
Her budget plan for UC and CSU called for hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts for the third consecutive year, major student fee hikes, a reduction in enrollment and a plan to steer thousands of students to community colleges instead of the universities.
Dynes and Reed quietly began negotiating with the popular Republican governor.
At stake was California's tradition of maintaining low student fees, which have helped keep the universities accessible to the poor and promoted ethnic diversity. CSU has the lowest fees of any public university in the nation, Reed says, and 54% of its students are nonwhite.
Supporters of more privatization argue that the universities' main beneficiaries are the individual students, who greatly increase their earning power by obtaining a degree. But public education advocates argue that the universities provide a major social benefit in preparing California's workforce and developing technology that helps power the economy.
In announcing the compact on May 11, 2004, Schwarzenegger said that he, Dynes and Reed had "found a compromise that will protect the quality of our world-renowned higher-education system."
But much of Arduin's agenda for the universities survived, including more budget cuts, major student fee hikes and shifting freshmen to community colleges.
"Behind the scenes we had great cooperation," recalled Arduin, who left California after 11 months. "The universities were one of the first to the table, and they proposed a comprehensive approach. It was a very amicable agreement among all the parties."
The compact is similar to deals worked out with the previous three governors. But critics accuse Dynes and Reed of undercutting the Legislature and negotiating a bad deal.
Democratic Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, who like Schwarzenegger sits on the governing boards of both institutions, calls the pact a disaster.
"This compact is a formula for the diminution of both UC and CSU," he said. "It's a formula that ratchets down the state's funding."
A study by UC's Academic Senate concluded that during the life of the compact, UC will never return to the spending level of 2001, before the Davis and Schwarzenegger administrations' cuts.
During previous budget cycles, state spending cuts made in bad years were at least partly restored when the economy improved. But critics say the compact has locked in the reduced funding.
At UC, the spending gap means that faculty salaries lag nearly 15% behind comparable institutions, while salaries for campus workers like library assistant Snook trail the market by at least 10%. Needed seismic retrofitting and building improvements are delayed. And fewer top graduate students are choosing to attend UC, a key indicator of a research university's decline.
UC's spending gap is now $1.1 billion, the faculty study found, and will steadily grow for the duration of the compact despite modest increases provided by the agreement.
Similarly, Reed said, CSU faces an annual shortfall of $800 million to $1 billion.
"The compact permanently reduces the fraction of core funds the state provides," UCSB professor Christopher Newfield, chairman of the faculty Senate's planning and budget committee, told the regents in July as he presented the faculty findings.
Private fundraising, he said, cannot offset the loss in public funds. For UC to return to its 2001 spending level without an increase in state funds, he told the regents, would require raising the basic annual undergraduate fee from $6,366 to at least $15,000 in three years, with large increases thereafter.
"We're at a crossroads in public investment," Newfield said in an interview. "California had a good record in the past, but I think we have lost our memory of what we did. We're living on our past investment."
Though defenders of the compact acknowledge the budget gap, they say the universities would be in even worse shape without the pact. Their mantra: The compact sets a floor for state spending, not a ceiling.
In some years, they point out, Sacramento has given the universities more than the compact requires, including last year -- an election year -- when the governor and Legislature absorbed an expected 8% student fee hike.
"I think that the compact is a very good thing," Reed said. "What people don't have a great appreciation for is how the compact has protected UC and CSU from a stability standpoint."
This summer, when Republican legislators proposed cutting higher education below the level of the compact, Schwarzenegger weighed in on the side of the universities. The lawmakers backed off. "Thank goodness for the compact right now," Reed said.
CSU trustee Jeff Bleich agreed that the compact had kept the university from suffering larger cutbacks.
"The reason to do it is to establish some commitment from the governor for a floor," he said. "As long as you believe the governor means what he says, you can have some confidence for planning the growth of these massive institutions."
Under the compact, the need to find new money sources is most evident in UC's professional programs, especially including its renowned law and business schools. After the compact was signed, average fees at UC's 34 professional schools soared 30% in 2004 alone.
"We wound up having to take huge cuts in law and business, and they have been reeling ever since," said Larry Hershman, a former vice president for budget at UC who helped negotiate the compact. "This was the Donna Arduin view, to make these schools self-supporting, the students paying much more and the public paying much less."
Supporters of the fee hikes say that students in law, business and medicine can afford to pay more because they will be able to command large salaries later. They argue that the burden of paying for an education should fall more heavily on students.
Dynes said that some state institutions, such as the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia, have led the way in raising tuition and luring higher-paying students from other states and countries.
"If you look at Michigan and the number of out-of-state students, you realize they have privatized," Dynes said. "It's not a criticism. They have just chosen a different path."
But critics say higher fees deter underprivileged students from applying and make it harder for newly graduated lawyers, doctors or other health professionals to enter a life of public service.
The compact calls on UC to develop multiyear plans for fee hikes at the professional schools that take into account market factors and fees at comparable institutions, including Michigan.
In September, the regents approved a three-year plan to increase fees at the professional schools by 7% to 15% a year. At UC Berkeley's business and law schools, fees will rise to more than $40,000 a year.
Undergraduates have fared better, but have seen fees rise by 90% over the last six years.
Earlier this year, the UC regents and the CSU trustees voted to raise undergraduate fees 7% and graduate fees 10%. Some expressed frustration that they had no choice in the matter.
"Every year when fee increases come up, it's treated as a big crisis, but it's programmed into the compact," Glantz said. "Students are paying more and getting less."
Glantz, a tobacco researcher who has spent years fighting the industry, says UC's need for corporate money has contributed to its reluctance to ban tobacco industry research grants, including $16.6 million that Philip Morris USA is giving to researchers at seven UC campuses.
"People are desperate for cash because the infrastructure of the university is coming unglued as we watch," Glantz said.
Other grants also have stirred controversy, including a $500-million donation by oil giant BP to form a joint UC-BP research laboratory at UC Berkeley to develop biofuels. BP researchers will work alongside UC professors, and the company will have exclusive rights to some of the expected discoveries.
"The compact is driving the UC and CSU systems to seek funds from corporations at an unprecedented rate," said John Simpson, an advocate with the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights. "What we are witnessing is the corporate privatization of what was once the nation's greatest public education system."
Educators say that maintaining competitive faculty salaries is the key to preserving the quality of the universities. But during hard times, pay raises have been the first thing to go.
The pay disparity has left UC open to raids by elite private universities. To help shore up the faculty at UC Berkeley, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation announced in September that it would give the campus $113 million -- the school's largest gift ever -- to endow 100 faculty chairs.
Both UC and CSU have adopted plans to raise salaries to market levels over the next four years.
"The No. 1 goal is to get the faculty more money," said Blum, the regents' chairman, who in August called for overhauling UC's administration in hopes of saving many millions of dollars.
Whether Blum can solve UC's financial problems by restructuring its operations remains to be seen.
Linda Snook, the library assistant, wasn't the only university employee to ask for help at the July meeting in Santa Barbara. Victor Vincent, a custodian at UCLA for 17 years, told the regents: "We can't even afford to send our kids to the university, and we don't understand why you don't understand that. We are suffering, and we need somebody to help us."
William Schlitz, political and communications director for the American Federation of County, State and Municipal Employees, says UC is shifting more of its costs to campus employees, including doubling healthcare fees for some. UCSB, he said, has begun charging custodians who work the midnight shift $150 a month to park in an otherwise empty lot.
"At some point there needs to be a frank discussion: Is this the public's university or not?" Schlitz said. "It's scary. These are great institutions, but it's an uncertain future, and it's an uncertain future for the employees."
richard.paddock@latimes.com
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.
Article licensing and reprint options
Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service
Home Delivery | Advertise | Archives | Contact | Site Map | Help
partners:
Saturday, October 06, 2007
A progressive agenda for public schools
Presentation: The Crisis of Our Democracy. Progressive Forum 2007. Oct. 4, 2007. CSU Sacramento
We gather at a very interesting time.
We are witnessing the apparent collapse of the conservative agenda which has dominated U.S. and often California politics for the last two decades. We are witnesses to the exhaustion of Imperialism in Iraq.
A question for us:
What can we do, what can we create to move a progressive agenda.
The U.S. is one of the most capitalist nations in the world. And, we have the highest level of child poverty of modern nations. And, we are the only modern industrialized nation without a system of health care for all.
My argument is to include a Progressive Economic Agenda within the struggles of the various anti war and political movments.
There are a number of issues for a Progressive Agenda. ( handout)
In the 2: 40 PM session we will hear about health care.
Until we get our democracy back, we will be unable to improve our schools.
I am going to focus on creating a decent public education system.
Currently we have a crisis in some of our schools. K-12.
Quality public education for all is a cause well worth fighting for. We have inherited our present schools from the efforts of prior generations to provide all children with the preparation needed for economic opportunity and active citizenship.
Critics of public education repeat and repeat a message of school crisis. And there is a crisis, but some of our schools are working quite well. More and more of our citizens are completing high school and college than ever before. The percentage of high school graduates completing a core academic curriculum – including four years of English and three years each of math, science and social studies – grew from 14 percent to 57 percent from 1982 to 2000. And, many students in high schools are completing for advanced math and science courses.
The percentage of high school graduates completing advanced math courses climbed from 26 percent in 1982 to 45 percent in 2000. A similar growth has occurred in the sciences. (CEP, 2005, The Condition of Education, 2004.NCES)
Schools are working reasonably well for the middle class and many schools serving the poor and ethnic minorities are in crisis (Kozol,2005). Most urban schools, and some rural schools, as currently organized and funded, are not able to offer an education which will overcome the problems of poverty in our society.
Students in low income areas often have fewer qualified teachers, fewer counselors, inadequate textbooks and teaching materials. Although teaching conditions vary from state to state and district to district, the drop out rates are high and the college attendance rates are low for African American and Latino students. With only a few exceptions, these conditions have remained the same for over thirty years.
We have a crisis in some schools- not all- and it is precisely these low income schools where there are the most openings for new teachers. Lets look into this crisis.
Inadequate funding is a major issue in the school crisis in low incom areas. Governments spent $426.6 billion on public education k-12 in 2005. The problem of funding is well illustrated in the following case from California:
Governors, Senators, and Assemblymembers , and the State Superintendent of Public Instruction have given many speeches, but as of last year they had not provided more funds for the schools. This makes for large class sizes. The results of their budget decisions are in.
The NAEP Reading Scores for California give an average score of 209; we rank right along with Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, and the District of Columbia.
The NAEP results are important because schools and teachers can drill for the state tests, but NAEP measures against a national standard of whether children can actually read (NAEP, 2007). California has remained with these poverty stricken states for the last 12 years. Remember when the ideologues all claimed that by switching to phonics reading scores were going to go up? Or, others claimed that by eliminating bilingual education would produce dramatic gains. Well- where is the data?
Scores are similarly shameful for 8th. Graders with even Alabama out scoring California.
So, what do you do if you are an elected official, responsible for providing adequate resources but failing to do so? Well, you change the subject. You talk about state tests, where teaching to the test is possible, and the “achievement gap”. Stressing the achievement gap –which is real- places the responsibility and the blame on teachers and parents and shifts the focus away from the resource gap created by inadequate budgets.
This year new money began to be sent to low performing schools. It will take several years of consistently improved funding to overcome the reading deficits imposed upon our children in the last decade.
On the national level, the reading scores are essentially stable for the last decade. That is, there was no progress produced by No Child Left Behind. (perhaps because in part it was under funded by 52 Billion). You have to read the scores carefully since the U.S. Dept. of Education has become skilled at the process of claiming great progress for a one or two point gain. But, compare the scores over the last ten years and you will find very little change.
Duane Campbell
We gather at a very interesting time.
We are witnessing the apparent collapse of the conservative agenda which has dominated U.S. and often California politics for the last two decades. We are witnesses to the exhaustion of Imperialism in Iraq.
A question for us:
What can we do, what can we create to move a progressive agenda.
The U.S. is one of the most capitalist nations in the world. And, we have the highest level of child poverty of modern nations. And, we are the only modern industrialized nation without a system of health care for all.
My argument is to include a Progressive Economic Agenda within the struggles of the various anti war and political movments.
There are a number of issues for a Progressive Agenda. ( handout)
In the 2: 40 PM session we will hear about health care.
Until we get our democracy back, we will be unable to improve our schools.
I am going to focus on creating a decent public education system.
Currently we have a crisis in some of our schools. K-12.
Quality public education for all is a cause well worth fighting for. We have inherited our present schools from the efforts of prior generations to provide all children with the preparation needed for economic opportunity and active citizenship.
Critics of public education repeat and repeat a message of school crisis. And there is a crisis, but some of our schools are working quite well. More and more of our citizens are completing high school and college than ever before. The percentage of high school graduates completing a core academic curriculum – including four years of English and three years each of math, science and social studies – grew from 14 percent to 57 percent from 1982 to 2000. And, many students in high schools are completing for advanced math and science courses.
The percentage of high school graduates completing advanced math courses climbed from 26 percent in 1982 to 45 percent in 2000. A similar growth has occurred in the sciences. (CEP, 2005, The Condition of Education, 2004.NCES)
Schools are working reasonably well for the middle class and many schools serving the poor and ethnic minorities are in crisis (Kozol,2005). Most urban schools, and some rural schools, as currently organized and funded, are not able to offer an education which will overcome the problems of poverty in our society.
Students in low income areas often have fewer qualified teachers, fewer counselors, inadequate textbooks and teaching materials. Although teaching conditions vary from state to state and district to district, the drop out rates are high and the college attendance rates are low for African American and Latino students. With only a few exceptions, these conditions have remained the same for over thirty years.
We have a crisis in some schools- not all- and it is precisely these low income schools where there are the most openings for new teachers. Lets look into this crisis.
Inadequate funding is a major issue in the school crisis in low incom areas. Governments spent $426.6 billion on public education k-12 in 2005. The problem of funding is well illustrated in the following case from California:
Governors, Senators, and Assemblymembers , and the State Superintendent of Public Instruction have given many speeches, but as of last year they had not provided more funds for the schools. This makes for large class sizes. The results of their budget decisions are in.
The NAEP Reading Scores for California give an average score of 209; we rank right along with Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, and the District of Columbia.
The NAEP results are important because schools and teachers can drill for the state tests, but NAEP measures against a national standard of whether children can actually read (NAEP, 2007). California has remained with these poverty stricken states for the last 12 years. Remember when the ideologues all claimed that by switching to phonics reading scores were going to go up? Or, others claimed that by eliminating bilingual education would produce dramatic gains. Well- where is the data?
Scores are similarly shameful for 8th. Graders with even Alabama out scoring California.
So, what do you do if you are an elected official, responsible for providing adequate resources but failing to do so? Well, you change the subject. You talk about state tests, where teaching to the test is possible, and the “achievement gap”. Stressing the achievement gap –which is real- places the responsibility and the blame on teachers and parents and shifts the focus away from the resource gap created by inadequate budgets.
This year new money began to be sent to low performing schools. It will take several years of consistently improved funding to overcome the reading deficits imposed upon our children in the last decade.
On the national level, the reading scores are essentially stable for the last decade. That is, there was no progress produced by No Child Left Behind. (perhaps because in part it was under funded by 52 Billion). You have to read the scores carefully since the U.S. Dept. of Education has become skilled at the process of claiming great progress for a one or two point gain. But, compare the scores over the last ten years and you will find very little change.
Duane Campbell
Friday, October 05, 2007
Clarence Thomas and Rupert Murdoch
Clarence Thomas and Rupert Murdoch
Jon Wiener
The long-awaited publication of Clarence Thomas's memoir, "My Grandfather's Son," out Monday, makes you wonder: how come none of the presidential candidates have said a word about the Supreme Court in any of their debates? Three sitting justices are expected to resign in the next four years--and they're all on the liberal side: John Paul Stevens, David Souter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The publication facts behind Thomas's book ought to be discussed by all the candidates: he received an advance of $1.5 million in 2003 from HarperCollins, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch. If you thought the Court dealt with any issues of relevance to Murdoch, you might call it a conflict of interest for Thomas to accept that payment--far more than any sitting justice ever received from any single source. At least you might mention the fabled "appearance of impropriety." You might call the $1.5 million a thank-you gift from Murdoch for services rendered. You might even wonder if it might be a subtle suggestion to other justices who will be ruling on Murdoch-related issues in the future.
Of course Thomas could avoid that "appearance of impropriety" by recusing himself for the rest of his career from any case raising issues concerning Murdoch, Fox, the First Amendment, copyright law, libel, or any other issues in media or communications law. That would give him a lot of time off.
Yes, it was the first President Bush who nominated Clarence Thomas to succeed civil rights legend Thurgood Marshall - but it was Democrats in the Senate who put him on the court. The teeth-gnashing facts about Clarence Thomas's confirmation can be found in the new book by Washington Post reporters Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher, "Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas." The vote in the Senate on Thomas was 52-48 - the smallest margin for any justice in more than a century. A shift of three votes would have kept Thomas off the court.
Here's the horrible part: at least four senators who voted for Thomas came to regret their vote within a year or two. Merida and Fletcher report that the senators who changed their mind about Thomas after voting for him include David Boren, Democrat of Oklahoma; John Breaux, Democrat of Louisiana; Fritz Hollings, Democrat of South Carolina, and Warren Rudman, Republican of New Hampshire.
Even some of Thomas's most avid defenders stopped saying he told the truth about Anita Hill; Orrin Hatch told Merida and Fletcher that, even if Anita Hill told the truth, what she said about Thomas sexually harassing her wasn't really all that bad.
As for Thomas's memoir, it's a long howl of outrage against the liberals who opposed his confirmation 16 years ago. The book was treated by HarperCollins as if it were the next Harry Potter - "embargoed" until Oct. 1, the first day of the Supreme Court's fall term -- a total clampdown that made it impossible for anyone to buy the book until Monday morning. I tried to buy it at my local Barnes and Noble Sunday night at 10 pm, and was told by a nervous manager that if they sold it to me even two hours before the "embargo" ended, "the publisher would see it on the computer and we'd be fined."
Yet somehow Rush Limbaugh managed to get hold of a copy - Thomas appeared on his show for a full ninety minutes Monday morning. (Maybe the fact that Thomas presided at Rush's wedding was a factor here - an unprecedented act for a sitting Justice.) Murdoch's Fox News was next in line, with a Sean Hannity interview Tuesday.
On the other hand, Nina Totenberg, NPR's Supreme Court reporter, who broke the sexual harassment story during Thomas's confirmation hearing back in 1991, did a piece on the book on Saturday. She's one of Thomas's nemeses; somebody will definitely be in trouble for the fact that she beat the embargo.
the Nation.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has a new book out giving his views on his rise to power. As judged by his interview on 60 Minutes, it is well worth reading. Above all, he accuses feminism and abortion rights advocates concerned with Roe V. Wade with promoting the attack on him by Anita Hill. He claims to be just an honest conservative acting upon the law as provided in the Constitution.
It is a good story. However, what about the presidential election of 2000, the critical Florida balloting was seriously marred by tactics which kept over 200,000 African Americans from voting? (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, June 8, 2001)
For Clarence Thomas to make his case as a victim of racism, you have to accept his claim that there was a conspiracy against him because he was independent and Black. Well, no. There was efforts against him because well informed people assumed that he would vote to establish conservative power – such as the tainted election of a president in 2000- without respect for democracy or the constitution. We should not forget this action by Clarence Thomas – and four other justices- which gave us George Bush as President and all that has followed it.
Duane Campbell
Jon Wiener
The long-awaited publication of Clarence Thomas's memoir, "My Grandfather's Son," out Monday, makes you wonder: how come none of the presidential candidates have said a word about the Supreme Court in any of their debates? Three sitting justices are expected to resign in the next four years--and they're all on the liberal side: John Paul Stevens, David Souter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The publication facts behind Thomas's book ought to be discussed by all the candidates: he received an advance of $1.5 million in 2003 from HarperCollins, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch. If you thought the Court dealt with any issues of relevance to Murdoch, you might call it a conflict of interest for Thomas to accept that payment--far more than any sitting justice ever received from any single source. At least you might mention the fabled "appearance of impropriety." You might call the $1.5 million a thank-you gift from Murdoch for services rendered. You might even wonder if it might be a subtle suggestion to other justices who will be ruling on Murdoch-related issues in the future.
Of course Thomas could avoid that "appearance of impropriety" by recusing himself for the rest of his career from any case raising issues concerning Murdoch, Fox, the First Amendment, copyright law, libel, or any other issues in media or communications law. That would give him a lot of time off.
Yes, it was the first President Bush who nominated Clarence Thomas to succeed civil rights legend Thurgood Marshall - but it was Democrats in the Senate who put him on the court. The teeth-gnashing facts about Clarence Thomas's confirmation can be found in the new book by Washington Post reporters Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher, "Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas." The vote in the Senate on Thomas was 52-48 - the smallest margin for any justice in more than a century. A shift of three votes would have kept Thomas off the court.
Here's the horrible part: at least four senators who voted for Thomas came to regret their vote within a year or two. Merida and Fletcher report that the senators who changed their mind about Thomas after voting for him include David Boren, Democrat of Oklahoma; John Breaux, Democrat of Louisiana; Fritz Hollings, Democrat of South Carolina, and Warren Rudman, Republican of New Hampshire.
Even some of Thomas's most avid defenders stopped saying he told the truth about Anita Hill; Orrin Hatch told Merida and Fletcher that, even if Anita Hill told the truth, what she said about Thomas sexually harassing her wasn't really all that bad.
As for Thomas's memoir, it's a long howl of outrage against the liberals who opposed his confirmation 16 years ago. The book was treated by HarperCollins as if it were the next Harry Potter - "embargoed" until Oct. 1, the first day of the Supreme Court's fall term -- a total clampdown that made it impossible for anyone to buy the book until Monday morning. I tried to buy it at my local Barnes and Noble Sunday night at 10 pm, and was told by a nervous manager that if they sold it to me even two hours before the "embargo" ended, "the publisher would see it on the computer and we'd be fined."
Yet somehow Rush Limbaugh managed to get hold of a copy - Thomas appeared on his show for a full ninety minutes Monday morning. (Maybe the fact that Thomas presided at Rush's wedding was a factor here - an unprecedented act for a sitting Justice.) Murdoch's Fox News was next in line, with a Sean Hannity interview Tuesday.
On the other hand, Nina Totenberg, NPR's Supreme Court reporter, who broke the sexual harassment story during Thomas's confirmation hearing back in 1991, did a piece on the book on Saturday. She's one of Thomas's nemeses; somebody will definitely be in trouble for the fact that she beat the embargo.
the Nation.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has a new book out giving his views on his rise to power. As judged by his interview on 60 Minutes, it is well worth reading. Above all, he accuses feminism and abortion rights advocates concerned with Roe V. Wade with promoting the attack on him by Anita Hill. He claims to be just an honest conservative acting upon the law as provided in the Constitution.
It is a good story. However, what about the presidential election of 2000, the critical Florida balloting was seriously marred by tactics which kept over 200,000 African Americans from voting? (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, June 8, 2001)
For Clarence Thomas to make his case as a victim of racism, you have to accept his claim that there was a conspiracy against him because he was independent and Black. Well, no. There was efforts against him because well informed people assumed that he would vote to establish conservative power – such as the tainted election of a president in 2000- without respect for democracy or the constitution. We should not forget this action by Clarence Thomas – and four other justices- which gave us George Bush as President and all that has followed it.
Duane Campbell
Neo cons turn against NCLB
Here's a new article by two former NCLB supporters, Frederick M. Hess and Chester E. Finn, Jr., "Can This Law Be Fixed? A Hard Look at the No Child Left Behind Remedies" --
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.26716,filter.all/pub_detail.asp
The authors continue to place great (and, in my view, unwarranted) confidence in "standards-based reform." But, to their credit, Hess and Finn are open to rethinking their pro-NCLB position on the basis of real-world evidence, which foreshadows the chaos likely to ensue without fundamental changes in the law. If only the so-called "civil rights" groups were willing to do that, the politics of reauthorization would look quite different.
Here are Hess and Finn's concluding paragraphs:
"A Looming Wreck?
"NCLB began with the noble yet naïve promise that every American student will attain proficiency in reading and math by 2014. While there is no doubt that the percentage of proficient students can and should increase dramatically from today's approximately 30 percent level, no educator believes that universal proficiency in seven years is a serious goal; only politicians promise such things. The inevitable result is cynicism among educators and a compliance mentality among public officials.
And, an opinion piece by Diane Ravitch.
Get Congress Out of the Classroom
New York Times Op. Ed. Column -- October 3, 2007 by Diane Ravitch
Despite the rosy claims of the Bush administration, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 is fundamentally flawed. The latest national tests, released last week, show that academic gains since 2003 have been modest, less even than those posted in the years before the law was put in place. In eighth-grade reading, there have been no gains at all since 1998.
The main goal of the law — that all children in the United States will be proficient in reading and mathematics by 2014 — is simply unattainable. The primary strategy — to test all children in those subjects in grades three through eight every year — has unleashed an unhealthy obsession with standardized testing that has reduced the time available for teaching other important subjects. Furthermore, the law completely fractures the traditional limits on federal interference in the operation of local schools.
I did find them interesting.
This is not about supporting Chester Finn nor Diane Ravitch.
Note what the say. Finn says NCLB is a "civil rights manifesto", it threatens hard won accountability gains - so it should be amended.
Ravitch apparently wants a better test, a single nation wide test. She is not opposed to the current over testing, just stop those states from being too easy in their own testing.
The Forum for Education and Accountability offers a better response: the "NCLB's rigid, mechanistic, sanctions-based approach is doing more harm than good. The modest changes in the House Education Committee's discussion draft and those apparently under consideration in the Senate HELP Committee will not solve the problems. Minor tinkering won't fix the law's reliance on high-stakes testing, unrealistic achievement targets, and punitive mandates.
This brand of accountability sets up a majority of American schools for failure. Repeated studies have shown that most schools in most states will not make AYP (see link to report, below). Over the next few years, the result will be to weaken public support for public education. It could pave the way for privatization schemes that will leave increasing numbers of children behind. More generally, the chaos created by NCLB will intensify voters' cynicism about the federal government's ability to play a constructive or even competent role in social policy."
So, for me no cheers that Finn and Ravitch have taken a critical stand. They want to be consulted as insiders to write a more rigid accountability stand.
This reminds me of Ravitch's pernicious role in California. She was one of three who wrote the History /Social Science Framework in 1987, and currently in use. She defined what multiculturalism is, a neo con version, very Euro centric.
That is what these three are doing here. They are joining the chorus in opposition to NCLB in order to be selected to sit on the panels to draft a new bill or new language.
Duane Campbell
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.26716,filter.all/pub_detail.asp
The authors continue to place great (and, in my view, unwarranted) confidence in "standards-based reform." But, to their credit, Hess and Finn are open to rethinking their pro-NCLB position on the basis of real-world evidence, which foreshadows the chaos likely to ensue without fundamental changes in the law. If only the so-called "civil rights" groups were willing to do that, the politics of reauthorization would look quite different.
Here are Hess and Finn's concluding paragraphs:
"A Looming Wreck?
"NCLB began with the noble yet naïve promise that every American student will attain proficiency in reading and math by 2014. While there is no doubt that the percentage of proficient students can and should increase dramatically from today's approximately 30 percent level, no educator believes that universal proficiency in seven years is a serious goal; only politicians promise such things. The inevitable result is cynicism among educators and a compliance mentality among public officials.
And, an opinion piece by Diane Ravitch.
Get Congress Out of the Classroom
New York Times Op. Ed. Column -- October 3, 2007 by Diane Ravitch
Despite the rosy claims of the Bush administration, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 is fundamentally flawed. The latest national tests, released last week, show that academic gains since 2003 have been modest, less even than those posted in the years before the law was put in place. In eighth-grade reading, there have been no gains at all since 1998.
The main goal of the law — that all children in the United States will be proficient in reading and mathematics by 2014 — is simply unattainable. The primary strategy — to test all children in those subjects in grades three through eight every year — has unleashed an unhealthy obsession with standardized testing that has reduced the time available for teaching other important subjects. Furthermore, the law completely fractures the traditional limits on federal interference in the operation of local schools.
I did find them interesting.
This is not about supporting Chester Finn nor Diane Ravitch.
Note what the say. Finn says NCLB is a "civil rights manifesto", it threatens hard won accountability gains - so it should be amended.
Ravitch apparently wants a better test, a single nation wide test. She is not opposed to the current over testing, just stop those states from being too easy in their own testing.
The Forum for Education and Accountability offers a better response: the "NCLB's rigid, mechanistic, sanctions-based approach is doing more harm than good. The modest changes in the House Education Committee's discussion draft and those apparently under consideration in the Senate HELP Committee will not solve the problems. Minor tinkering won't fix the law's reliance on high-stakes testing, unrealistic achievement targets, and punitive mandates.
This brand of accountability sets up a majority of American schools for failure. Repeated studies have shown that most schools in most states will not make AYP (see link to report, below). Over the next few years, the result will be to weaken public support for public education. It could pave the way for privatization schemes that will leave increasing numbers of children behind. More generally, the chaos created by NCLB will intensify voters' cynicism about the federal government's ability to play a constructive or even competent role in social policy."
So, for me no cheers that Finn and Ravitch have taken a critical stand. They want to be consulted as insiders to write a more rigid accountability stand.
This reminds me of Ravitch's pernicious role in California. She was one of three who wrote the History /Social Science Framework in 1987, and currently in use. She defined what multiculturalism is, a neo con version, very Euro centric.
That is what these three are doing here. They are joining the chorus in opposition to NCLB in order to be selected to sit on the panels to draft a new bill or new language.
Duane Campbell
Thursday, October 04, 2007
NCLB: A bad fix
Of all the things we expected Congress to fix when reauthorizing NCLB, the over-reliance upon standardized tests to measure both student learning and school success was first on the list. Maybe taking seriously the federal government’s historic and proper role in insuring equal educational opportunity for all our children was too much to ask. (See the previous edition of this newsletter for our hopes on that agenda). But given the overwhelming evidence of how the testing craze was dumbing down curricula, narrowing teaching and limiting the educational experience of our most school-dependent children, fixing this part of the law seemed obvious.
But the obvious has seemed to escape our representatives, so time for some more editing on the incomplete drafts of NCLB reauthorization we have seen so far.
There is an abundance of evidence of the harm that the NCLB-mandated regime of tests to be taken at least seven times by every child in America’s schools. Reports from the Center for Educational Policy , the Council for Basic Education, and even the usually administration-friendly Fordham Foundation illuminate what is going on. We have outlined these concerns in an earlier post. Unfortunately, while these and other reports have diagnosed the disease, the cure they often suggest—more testing in other areas, just spreads the illness around.
If you have any doubt that the press for more and more tests is hurting not helping schools, a front-line exposé leaves no doubt of what is going on. If you have not yet picked up a copy of Tested by Linda Perlstein get to your bookstore and order it now. And when you are done with it, march straight to your congressperson or senator’s office and insist they read it before voting to reauthorize NCLB. Perlstein spends over a year in a school struggling to make AYP, and they do. But the cost in terms of the school experience for both children and their teachers makes it clear the battle is not worth it. Perlstein pulls no punches, both pointing out that some teachers like the new packaged reading programs they use to jack up test scores because “now I don’t have to think” and chiding parents who send kids to school lacking sleep and supplies. But she saves her most important points for the policy makers that have put in place the test-driven accountability of NCLB.
Following the day to day experiences of real kids and real teachers she shows how the focus on tests is, as one teacher put it, making students “learn the (writing) formula but forget how to think.” Science kits are left unopened in the back of the classroom, engaging chapter books are left unread, school assemblies are only cheerleading efforts for test day, and district specialists plot out ways to have teachers concentrate on the ‘bubble kids’ (the ones who may just inch up their scores enough to pass and make the school look good). All of this in the name of getting more points on the mandated tests so the school meets the federal AYP goals.
It is stories like these that are probably behind the growing public dissatisfaction with NCLB and with our reliance on standardized tests to tell all there is to know about our schools and children. But even when, in the recent reauthorization bill put forth by Congressman Miller, chair of the House Education Sub-Committee, a small experiment allowing non-standardized assessments to be utilized is put forth the usual shouting and name calling begins. In hearings on the Hill so-called student advocate groups called such provisions a roll back on accountability and an abandoning of our commitment to equity.
This too is more of the same when it comes to NCLB. To date there has been no fair and honest discussion of fundamental assumptions that underlie the law and the issues that bedevil it. To wit: What evidence is there that the test scores the law sanctifies actually tell us anything about student success after school? What has been lost in our schools due to the focus on testing? How have we ignored students that are certain to pass or fail tests while schools focus on ‘bubble kids’? Why have perfectly good alternatives to such tests, as used both here and abroad, been attacked by the federal government? And, who benefits (or profits) from the over $570 million to be spent this year on standardized tests by our states—money that could have put almost 16,000 more teachers into classrooms this year?
Unless the reauthorization of NCLB addresses these issues, we will have to continue to return the draft legislation for revision. In the spirit of helping young writers improve on their craft, I want to suggest three resources they could consult in improving their work.
• The Forum has published a research brief on performance-based assessments that illustrates what could be done instead of the current focus on standardized testing.
• Senators Feingold and Leahy have introduced the “Improving Student Testing Act of 2007” which reduces the number of tests given, allows for and funds performance assessments, and holds off the date when all student must be proficient until NCLB is fully funded.
• And The Forum’s original “Guiding Principles for ESEA Reauthorization" presents the changes we feel are necessary.
The Forum remains committed to educational policies that provide for equitable, engaging, and community centered educational opportunities for every child. As federal policy, NCLB fails on all of these counts. It is time that was admitted and a serious discussion of how to support our public schools is undertaken. As Perlstein puts it: “An honest airing (about where the accountability movement is taking our schools) would acknowledge how little the test tells us about students, and it would address the failure of accountability rules to do anything about some of the root causes of poor performance in schools: lack of preschool, lack of medical care, poor parent education, impoverished communities.”
Given the unwillingness of those inside the beltway to take on this discussion, it is unlikely that NCLB will be restructured in ways that will help every child learn or every teacher teach. It is time for something new.
From: The forum on education and democracy.
Call your Congressperson today. Write a letter tonight.
Duane Campbell
__._,_.___
But the obvious has seemed to escape our representatives, so time for some more editing on the incomplete drafts of NCLB reauthorization we have seen so far.
There is an abundance of evidence of the harm that the NCLB-mandated regime of tests to be taken at least seven times by every child in America’s schools. Reports from the Center for Educational Policy , the Council for Basic Education, and even the usually administration-friendly Fordham Foundation illuminate what is going on. We have outlined these concerns in an earlier post. Unfortunately, while these and other reports have diagnosed the disease, the cure they often suggest—more testing in other areas, just spreads the illness around.
If you have any doubt that the press for more and more tests is hurting not helping schools, a front-line exposé leaves no doubt of what is going on. If you have not yet picked up a copy of Tested by Linda Perlstein get to your bookstore and order it now. And when you are done with it, march straight to your congressperson or senator’s office and insist they read it before voting to reauthorize NCLB. Perlstein spends over a year in a school struggling to make AYP, and they do. But the cost in terms of the school experience for both children and their teachers makes it clear the battle is not worth it. Perlstein pulls no punches, both pointing out that some teachers like the new packaged reading programs they use to jack up test scores because “now I don’t have to think” and chiding parents who send kids to school lacking sleep and supplies. But she saves her most important points for the policy makers that have put in place the test-driven accountability of NCLB.
Following the day to day experiences of real kids and real teachers she shows how the focus on tests is, as one teacher put it, making students “learn the (writing) formula but forget how to think.” Science kits are left unopened in the back of the classroom, engaging chapter books are left unread, school assemblies are only cheerleading efforts for test day, and district specialists plot out ways to have teachers concentrate on the ‘bubble kids’ (the ones who may just inch up their scores enough to pass and make the school look good). All of this in the name of getting more points on the mandated tests so the school meets the federal AYP goals.
It is stories like these that are probably behind the growing public dissatisfaction with NCLB and with our reliance on standardized tests to tell all there is to know about our schools and children. But even when, in the recent reauthorization bill put forth by Congressman Miller, chair of the House Education Sub-Committee, a small experiment allowing non-standardized assessments to be utilized is put forth the usual shouting and name calling begins. In hearings on the Hill so-called student advocate groups called such provisions a roll back on accountability and an abandoning of our commitment to equity.
This too is more of the same when it comes to NCLB. To date there has been no fair and honest discussion of fundamental assumptions that underlie the law and the issues that bedevil it. To wit: What evidence is there that the test scores the law sanctifies actually tell us anything about student success after school? What has been lost in our schools due to the focus on testing? How have we ignored students that are certain to pass or fail tests while schools focus on ‘bubble kids’? Why have perfectly good alternatives to such tests, as used both here and abroad, been attacked by the federal government? And, who benefits (or profits) from the over $570 million to be spent this year on standardized tests by our states—money that could have put almost 16,000 more teachers into classrooms this year?
Unless the reauthorization of NCLB addresses these issues, we will have to continue to return the draft legislation for revision. In the spirit of helping young writers improve on their craft, I want to suggest three resources they could consult in improving their work.
• The Forum has published a research brief on performance-based assessments that illustrates what could be done instead of the current focus on standardized testing.
• Senators Feingold and Leahy have introduced the “Improving Student Testing Act of 2007” which reduces the number of tests given, allows for and funds performance assessments, and holds off the date when all student must be proficient until NCLB is fully funded.
• And The Forum’s original “Guiding Principles for ESEA Reauthorization" presents the changes we feel are necessary.
The Forum remains committed to educational policies that provide for equitable, engaging, and community centered educational opportunities for every child. As federal policy, NCLB fails on all of these counts. It is time that was admitted and a serious discussion of how to support our public schools is undertaken. As Perlstein puts it: “An honest airing (about where the accountability movement is taking our schools) would acknowledge how little the test tells us about students, and it would address the failure of accountability rules to do anything about some of the root causes of poor performance in schools: lack of preschool, lack of medical care, poor parent education, impoverished communities.”
Given the unwillingness of those inside the beltway to take on this discussion, it is unlikely that NCLB will be restructured in ways that will help every child learn or every teacher teach. It is time for something new.
From: The forum on education and democracy.
Call your Congressperson today. Write a letter tonight.
Duane Campbell
__._,_.___
Monday, October 01, 2007
Crisis in Democracy: October Conference
The Crisis in Our Democracy
You are invited:
Progressive Forum 2007
Orchard Suite. University Union. CSU –Sacramento
Oct.4, 2007. 9 Am – 4 Pm. Free
Join us for a dialogue on current issues facing the progressive movements and their allies in our region. The Progressive Forum seeks to bring together scholars, students, social justice and union activists, and policy makers to nurture a new kind of conversation from within the campus and the social movements. We seek to move beyond the overly fragmented movements each competing with each other to find ways to cooperate and support each other’s work. This forum aims to enhance personal and organizational ties between those engaged in ongoing workplace and community organizing efforts.
Themes for this year include:
Immigration, the War, the Democratic Party, Media and Democracy, Race and Ethnicity in Political Organizing, the Decline of Public Universities, the Crisis in K-12 Education, Working class life and culture, New Struggles for Feminism; the State of Our Unions, Collapsing Health Care System, Student Organizing and more.
Sponsors:
Bilingual/multicultural education. CSU-Sacramento, Peace and Conflict Resolution Studies, Democratic Socialists of America, Sacramento Progressive Alliance, Progressive Student Alliance. Teach Peace Foundation, Labor Studies:
Ethnic Studies Department.
For more information http://www.ProgressiveForum07.blogspot.com
contact Duane Campbell, campd@csus.edu. Parking. Use daily pay lots. Buy a one day pass.
You are invited:
Progressive Forum 2007
Orchard Suite. University Union. CSU –Sacramento
Oct.4, 2007. 9 Am – 4 Pm. Free
Join us for a dialogue on current issues facing the progressive movements and their allies in our region. The Progressive Forum seeks to bring together scholars, students, social justice and union activists, and policy makers to nurture a new kind of conversation from within the campus and the social movements. We seek to move beyond the overly fragmented movements each competing with each other to find ways to cooperate and support each other’s work. This forum aims to enhance personal and organizational ties between those engaged in ongoing workplace and community organizing efforts.
Themes for this year include:
Immigration, the War, the Democratic Party, Media and Democracy, Race and Ethnicity in Political Organizing, the Decline of Public Universities, the Crisis in K-12 Education, Working class life and culture, New Struggles for Feminism; the State of Our Unions, Collapsing Health Care System, Student Organizing and more.
Sponsors:
Bilingual/multicultural education. CSU-Sacramento, Peace and Conflict Resolution Studies, Democratic Socialists of America, Sacramento Progressive Alliance, Progressive Student Alliance. Teach Peace Foundation, Labor Studies:
Ethnic Studies Department.
For more information http://www.ProgressiveForum07.blogspot.com
contact Duane Campbell, campd@csus.edu. Parking. Use daily pay lots. Buy a one day pass.
G.O.P. Electoral Vote Scheme Blows Up – Spreading Egg All Over Faces of Republican Operatives, Shills
Over on the California Progress Report.
http://www.californiaprogressreport.com
G.O.P. Electoral Vote Scheme Blows Up – Spreading Egg All Over Faces of Republican Operatives, Shills
http://www.californiaprogressreport.com
G.O.P. Electoral Vote Scheme Blows Up – Spreading Egg All Over Faces of Republican Operatives, Shills
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