Are Children Falling Behind?

What Shall We Do About the Children After the Pandemic Teresa Thayer Snyder  December 12, 2020 Diane Ravitch's . I sincerely plead with my colleagues, to surrender the artificial constructs that measure achievement and greet the children where they are, not where we think they “should be.” Students line up to have their temperature checked before entering PS 179 elementary school in the Kensington neighborhood, Sept. 29, 2020 in Brooklyn, AP Photo/Mark Lennihan // Politico   Dear Friends and Colleagues: I am writing today about the children of this pandemic. After a lifetime of working among the young, I feel compelled to address the concerns that are being expressed by so many of my peers about the deficits the children will demonstrate when they finally return to school. My goodness, what a disconcerting thing to be concerned about in the face of a pandemic which is affecting millions of people around the country and the world. It speaks to one of my biggest fears for the children when they return. In our determination to “catch them up,” I fear that we will lose who they are and what they have learned during this unprecedented era. What on earth are we trying to catch them up on? The models no longer apply, the benchmarks are no longer valid, the trend analyses have been interrupted. We must not forget that those arbitrary measures were established by people, not ordained by God. We can make those invalid measures as obsolete as a crank up telephone! They simply do not apply.  When the children return to school, they will have returned with a new history that we will need to help them identify and make sense of. When the children return to school, we will need to listen to them. Let their stories be told. They have endured a year that has no parallel in modern times. There is no assessment that applies to who they are or what they have learned. Remember, their brains did not go into hibernation during this year. Their brains may not have been focused on traditional school material, but they did not stop either. Their brains may have been focused on where their next meal is coming from, or how to care for a younger sibling, or how to deal with missing grandma, or how it feels to have to surrender a beloved pet, or how to deal with death. Our job is to welcome them back and help them write that history. I sincerely plead with my colleagues, to surrender the artificial constructs that measure achievement and greet the children where they are, not where we think they “should be.” Greet them with art supplies and writing materials, and music and dance and so many other avenues to help them express what has happened to them in their lives during this horrific year. Greet them with stories and books that will help them make sense of an upside-down world. They missed you. They did not miss the test prep. They did not miss the worksheets. They did not miss the reading groups. They did not miss the homework. They missed you. Resist the pressure from whatever ‘powers that be’ who are in a hurry to “fix” kids and make up for the “lost” time. The time was not lost, it was invested in surviving an historic period of time in their lives—in our lives. The children do not need to be fixed. They are not broken. They need to be heard. They need be given as many tools as we can provide to nurture resilience and help them adjust to a post pandemic world. Being a teacher is an essential connection between what is and what can be. Please, let what can be demonstrate that our children have so much to share about the world they live in and in helping them make sense of what, for all of us has been unimaginable. This will help them– and us– achieve a lot more than can be measured by any assessment tool ever devised. Peace to all who work with the children! [Teresa Thayer Snyder was superintendent of the Voorheesville district in upstate New York. She wrote this essay on her Facebook page.]

 

Sen.Rand Paul Criticizes Common Core History Standards- duh There aren't any

Cailin Macneal. Talking Points Memo.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) tore into Common Core in a fundraising email on Thursday, lambasting the way the standards portray American history.
The senator claimed the standards contain "anti-American propaganda" and a "revisionist history that ignores the faith of our Founders," according to Bloomberg News.

However, Common Core only sets standards in english language arts/literacy and math, as ThinkProgress pointed out.
Critics of Common Core take issue with its alleged required reading list, which Bill Bennett, former Secretary of Education for President Ronald Reagan, described as a "myth" in a September op-ed.
The only texts Common Core requires students to read are the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and President Lincoln's second inaugural address, according to NPR.

Should California Drop Common Core?

When will California drop Common Core? 

Of the 24 people selected to write the Common Core standards, none of them were working K-12 classroom teachers, and two-thirds had no K-12 teaching experience. No one had experience at the elementary level. The standards were not based on any existing successful standards, and they were never pilot tested. 

It is not surprising that both child development researchers and experienced teachers have found that the standards are developmentally inappropriate. For the first time in history, the state standards are frozen by a copyright protection held by a private entity, and they provide no provision for changing them. The only way to fix them is to drop them. Five states have already done just that and more are certain to follow this year. How long will it take California? 

BRAD CLARK,  Teacher. SACRAMENTO

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/article7758762.html#storylink=cpy

RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

Crenshaw School Community (Los Angeles) fights for real school improvement

Crenshaw School Community Fights For Real Improvement and Against LAUSD Superintendent’s Scorched-Earth Approach

By:

Christina Lewis, Crenshaw High Special Education Teacher

Irvin Alvarado, Crenshaw High Alumni, Coalition for Educational Justice Organizer

Alex Caputo-Pearl, Crenshaw High Social Justice Lead Teacher, UTLA Board of Directors

Eunice Grigsby, Crenshaw High Parent, Crenshaw High Alumna

On October 23, LAUSD Superintendent Deasy announced he intends to reconstitute Crenshaw High School.  This scorched earth “reform” that is destructive for students, communities, and employees has been used at Fremont, Clinton, Manual Arts, and more in LAUSD, despite courageous push-backs at those schools.

The Crenshaw school community is determined to fight back.  The slogan that permeated the emergency 150-person Crenshaw Town Hall Meeting at the African-American Cultural Center on October 4 crystallizes the struggle -- “Keep Crenshaw: Our School, Our Children, Our Community.”

In an attempt to disarm the push back and win public support, Deasy is combining the reconstitution with a full-school magnet conversion.  Crenshaw stakeholders are, of course,  open to conversations about changes that will improve conditions and outcomes for our students -- but those must be collaborative, well-resourced, and must serve all students.  That said, it is clear that Deasy’s main objective is not magnet conversion – it is to take top-down control of the school and reconstitute (which means removing all faculty and staff from the school, with an “opportunity to re-apply”). 

The school community says NO to any form of reconstitution, and YES to school improvement that includes stakeholders and holds LAUSD accountable for its years of neglect and mismanagement. 

The National Standards Scam

The National Standards Scam

Panel Proposes Single Standard for All Schools

By SAM DILLON, NY Times. March 10,2010.

“A panel of educators convened by the nation’s governors and state school superintendents proposed a uniform set of academic standards on Wednesday, laying out their vision for what all the nation’s public school children should learn in math and English, year by year, from kindergarten to high school graduation.

The new proposals could transform American education, replacing the patchwork of standards ranging from mediocre to world-class that have been written by local educators in every state.”

 So, the professional edu wonks ( not teachers) have again found the solution.  How nice. The effort will have little effect in California.  California has some of the nation’s highest standards, and lowest test scores in reading and math ( about 47 out of the 50 states depending upon the  year).

This is the politicians ( and their consultants) approach to school improvement and it will not teach a single child in California  to read or do math.

Standardized testing hurting U.S. education 

EAST LANSING, Mich. — America’s increasing reliance on standardized testing as a yardstick for educational success is a flawed policy that threatens to undermine the nation’s strengths of creativity and innovation, according to a provocative new book from a Michigan State University scholar.
By grading student success on government-set standards in a limited number of subjects such as math, reading and science, Yong Zhao argues the United States is eager to “throw away” one of its global advantages – an education that respects individual talents and does not dictate what students learn or how teachers teach.
Zhao’s book, due out in late September and published by ASCD, is called “Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization.” He acknowledges his thesis is “diametrically opposed to the more popular view of what American education should be like in the 21st century.”
“Right now we seem to be stuck with the idea of standards as the panacea to fix all of America’s education problems,” said Zhao, University Distinguished Professor of education. “I don’t deny that the U.S. education system has problems, but I don’t feel the problems can be solved by standards and high-stakes testing. Rather, standards and high-stakes testing run the risk of ruining the advantages and great tradition of the system.”

National Standards?

Posted in Education Week.

To the Editor:

The national-standards- development timeline of the Council of Chief State School Officers, the National Governors Association, and Achieve Inc., a key player in the endeavor, is a dead giveaway to the closed, predetermined nature of the process ("Openness of Common-Standards Process at Issue," Aug. 12, 2009).

July 2009: Work groups are named.
July 2009: Three weeks later, draft college- and career-readiness standards are complete.
December 2009: The entire draft K-12 standards in language arts and math are complete.
January 2010: The standards are approved, and the effort to blackmail the states into signing on begins.

Anyone who has ever done curriculum- or standards-developme nt work knows immediately that this timetable signals a process in which the end product has already been decided upon at the beginning.
This project is entirely closed off from educator and citizen engagement. And, as usual, there is not a single person on either development team who actually interacts with children or adolescents—just a bunch of directors, managers, and associates.

It is typical of the arrogance and stupidity of American educational policy development in our time that we have the policy developed exclusively by people who have no personal engagement with the institutions of schooling, people who are bureaucrats and paper-pushers and wouldn’t know how to engage a child if their ample salaries depended on it.

Of course, this is the logical conclusion of modernist consciousness, to which living wisdom is irrelevant. And this negation of wisdom is one of the key reasons that all of our modernist institutions are collapsing.

No doubt national standards and national tests will be shoved through, which will lead inevitably to ever-greater efforts to transform our schools from places with real educative purposes into test-prep factories.

David Marshak
Bellingham, Wash.

Only 48% of California Schools meet federal standards

Only 48% of California high schools meet federal standards, even with easier measure
New results show about 300 of the schools met the goals only because their marks were based on the exit exam, much less demanding than tests that help determine the state Academic Performance Index.
By Howard Blume and Ben Welsh
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

September 5, 2008

Hundreds of California high schools met this year's federal academic targets released Thursday only because the state uses easier standards for high schools than for elementary and middle schools, a Times analysis has found.

But even with this boost, just 48% of the state's high schools met the federal standard of "adequate yearly progress" in this year's results.

The Times analysis identified about 300 high schools that were reported as meeting all federal standards even though their combined proficiency scores in math or English language arts on the California standards tests fell below proficiency levels required for federal compliance this year. Their passing marks were based on much higher scores registered on the easier high school exit exam.

In practical terms, this means that high schools are not being consistently evaluated on what their students are supposed to be learning. The situation exemplifies California's complex, uneven and often competing state and federal accountability systems.

State education officials emphasized the positive Thursday: an incremental narrowing of the achievement gap that separates the much higher performance of white and Asian students from that of blacks and Latinos.

State officials also pointed to widespread gains on California's Academic Performance Index, which the state developed to evaluate schools and set improvement goals.

But there's also a second rating system that the state developed to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind law. And within that framework, high schools get a break.

Unlike elementary and middle schools, high schools are not rated on whether students master course work intended for their grade level. Instead, the accountability measure is the high school exit exam. It's one of California's high school diploma requirements, designed as a minimum standard for confirming what students have learned. The exam's math section, for example, is based on seventh-grade standards with portions of first-year algebra.

Improving student achievement in California

O’Connell’s proposal ( below) calls for more sensitivity training for teachers to reduce the achievement gap. There is simply no evidence that sensitivity training for teachers improves student achievement.
What then is needed?
Failure, drop outs, low performance occurs in specific schools – those with large populations of poor and minority students. In these schools, the cde and others should assist to create a positive culture of success for students and teachers. (Teachers working conditions are student learning conditions). The STAR testing does not contribute to creating this culture of success.
Creating successful schools requires adequate resources, effective leadership, and teacher in-service among others. The legislature and the governor have consistently refused for 30 years to provide the needed resources. Tests and standards have not change that. Unfortunately most leadership is currently focused on standards and testing, not upon creating a culture of success for students and teachers.
When the above is initiated, then teachers could benefit from in-service training which might include sensitivity training. I doubt its values. Training in multicultural education and English language learning would be more helpful.
There is much more on what needs to change in my book; Choosing Democracy: a practical guide to multicultural education. (2004) The new edition has been submitted to the publisher.

California and Algebra standards

The California State Board of Education has recently decided that all 8th. graders in the state should take Algebra. See prior posts on this topic.

By setting goals and standards and refusing to consider the resources needed to achieve these standards and to improve low performing schools elected officials and other policy makers create an appearance of responding to the school crisis . In reality they refuse to adequately fund the schools and to make real changes in the financing of those schools that systematically fail a substantial portion of our children, particularly poor students and students of color. By passing lists of standards without allocating sufficient resources, elected officials avoid the issues of raising taxes and spending money that any serious effort to provide equal opportunity would require.

Anyone serious about democratic school reform should first address their concerns to teachers. Teachers are the major resource available for improving schools. Unfortunately few legislatures recognize this. Teachers’ salaries are the largest part of any school budget. It is teachers—not administrators—who conduct the basic education process. Most teachers want to do better and would welcome an opportunity to help more students succeed. Reformers interested in improving the education opportunities for students should first look to help teachers perform their jobs better. Nothing in the State Board policy recognizes this reality.