Category: APPS Media Articles

Corp ed fails the test – Lisa Haver @ Philadelphia Daily News

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How  long do you keep a failed experiment going before you pull the plug – especially when you are using children as its subjects?

About 20 years ago, the seed of corporate education reform – the idea that education should no longer be a cooperative endeavor governed by school district residents, but an experiment in free-market economics overseen by millionaires and billionaires from afar – was planted.

Investors and lobbyists spun the narrative that schools were failing and that teachers and their unions were to blame. Budgets were slashed while standardized testing was ramped up; test results were used to justify handing over neighborhood schools to charters or closing them permanently. The untested Common Core standards were adopted in every state. And in cities including Philadelphia, local school boards were replaced by state appointees. Lasting decisions on the mission and direction of entire districts were being made in the corporate boardrooms of reform heavy-hitters, including The Bill and Melinda Gates and Walton foundations. Their grants came only with mandates to “turn around” schools – by forcing out faculty, converting to charter or closing permanently.

But after all of the billions spent and all of the laws passed to institute these reforms in every major city in the country, those vastly improved school systems, meeting the needs of children and communities, have yet to appear on the horizon.

Yet disasters like New Orleans are still held up by reformers as models for other cities. Before the flood waters had receded 10 years ago, with many thousands of residents still displaced, the New Orleans public school system was dismantled and replaced by a web of privately managed charter schools. The firing of more than 7,500 unionized teachers contributed to the further destruction of the city’s black middle-class. And because there is no longer one district office, thousands of young people who should be enrolled in school are still unaccounted for.

But it seems now that the bloom is of the rose of corporate education reform.

The findings of the 47th annual PDK-Gallup Poll show that a cross-section of Americans and parents believe that the biggest problem in education today is not teacher quality or unions, but underfunding. Only 14 percent of public school parents rated standardized testing as “very important”; in fact, 47 percent believe they should have the right to opt-out their children from standardized tests. The majority of Americans reject the need for national standards or the idea that it is crucial to use tests aligned to those standards to compare test results across states. Most want an end to more federal control in general, having seen the failures of both the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind and President Obama’s Race to the Top.

What has education reform done for us? Philadelphians have lost over 30 neighborhood schools, and ongoing charter expansion threatens the future of those remaining. Imposition of the Common Core standards and the accompanying test-prep curriculum has sucked the joy and creativity out of teaching and learning. And we are stuck with a School Reform Commission which seems to have better things to do than explain its decisions to the public. Could anyone make the case that this experiment in corporate reform has delivered a more thriving public school system?

What would real reform look like in Philadelphia? Every school with a librarian, music and art teacher; aides in all kindergarten and special education classes; lower class size; full-time nurses and counselors; proven reading programs taught by reading specialists; sufficient security to keep schools a safe haven for all children.

The corporate model creates winners and losers. It diverts public resources to create profits for private entities. It has not worked in education and it never will. Time to pull the plug and give our schools back to the people.

Lisa Haver is a retired teacher and co-founder of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools.

The Op Ed is posted at:

Corp ed fails the test 

Philadelphia Daily News – September 18, 2015

PSSA state tests are failing Pennsylvania’s children. It’s time for parents to act.

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by Alison McDowell

Students, teachers, and parents deserve to savor the exciting possibilities of a new school year without the dark shadow of standardized testing hanging over their heads. Labeling nearly half the students in the state “failures” during the first weeks of school only discourages children from seeing themselves as capable, curious, engaged learners. What’s surprising is not that nearly 50% of Pennsylvania students “failed” the new PSSAs, but that the percentage of failure wasn’t even higher. In states where “rigorous” standardized tests aligned to the Common Core have been implemented­­-including New York, Washington, and Connecticut-failure rates of 70% have become routine.

Local administrators will feel pressured to boost PSSA and Keystone results that were manufactured via manipulated cut scores, questions on complex texts that sometimes required students to select multiple correct or incorrect answers (Scroll to presentation that starts at 2:20. Screen will initially be black), and questions covering content that may not have been aligned to the curriculum that was being taught. (Scroll to timestamp 14:00) Many Districts will be expected to achieve improvements under austerity budgets caused by ongoing underfunding by the state. At the same time, Governor Wolf’s proposed budget allots $58.3 million for administering and grading state assessments, the same amount allocated by Governor Corbett last year.

Non-tested subjects like social studies, art, music, and foreign languages become more vulnerable as additional minutes for test-prep and benchmarks are demanded. Lower grades, where testing must be done one-on-one, could see a significant loss of instructional time to interim testing. A review of the 2015-16 Philadelphia School District calendar of standardized assessments shows that testing will interrupt many days of teaching and learning at all grade levels. With so many standardized tests queued up, will children even have time for recess? All this bubble-filling would be enough to overwhelm an average student, but imagine you’re among the thousands of students in the state whose primary language is not English, who have an Individualized Education Plan, or who experience test-taking anxiety. For them, these tests are traumatic.

School and teacher evaluations are now tied almost exclusively to “growing” test scores on assessments that have been engineered to ensure students do worse. Members of the Pennsylvania School Board Association publicly expressed their reservations about new PSSA cut scores this summer, noting they had serious concerns about using the results for accountability purposes. Child-centered, inquiry-based learning has gradually become the domain of private schools whose freedom from state-mandated testing is increasingly touted in advertising campaigns.

Many Pennsylvanians have come to realize one-size-fits-all, high-stakes assessments that cannot be reviewed by parents, teachers, or administrators, and are graded by non-educators, should not hold such considerable power over the futures of our children. Why should taxpayer funds continue to pad the bottom line of corporations when students in underfunded districts desperately need reduced class sizes and school libraries, things that actually improve student outcomes? Even superintendents in well-funded districts like the West Chester Area School District are finding it fiscally draining to manage remediation for Keystone Exams.

Seeds for the opt-out movement were sown last year in Philadelphia and its suburbs. Parents are starting to realize something is very, very wrong-not with their child, or their child’s teacher, or their child’s school, but with a testing industry that profits when children are “failing.” Proponents of market-based reforms use test scores to rank and sort school “portfolios.” When organizations like the Philadelphia School Partnership want districts to “dump the losers,” test scores are their tools of choice.

Real education is not about high-performing seats. Our children are neither test scores nor data points. They are individuals. Standardized tests don’t create engaged citizens or contributing members of society. Rather, they create profits-profits for testing companies and those selling test-related hardware and software. Parents have the legal right to opt their children out of standardized testing. If done in sufficiently high numbers, we can begin to return our schools to places of creative teaching and learning.

Alison McDowell is a Philadelphia public school student and Chair of the Opt-Out Committee of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools. Email her at optoutphilly@gmail.com.

This Op Ed was published in the Philadelphia Daily News on August 9, 2015, but without links.