Thank you, Carl Chew

Seattle public school teacher Carl Chew has refused to administer the WASL test to his students. You can find his story and other links here.

Thank you sir for acting upon the strength of your convictions. May the floodgates open to further acts of civil disobedience against the oppression, malpractice, and corporate-serving opportunism of high-stakes testing in our children's public schools. Like so many, I wish I could join you but I'm in no position to risk my job. Still, if enough of us band together...I long for the day and I believe the storm is gathering....

Faith is taking the first step, even when you don't
see the whole staircase. Martin Luther King, Jr.

WHERE ARE THE HEADLINES, DEAR CORPORATE-CONTROLLED MEDIA?

Who will listen?? As you read this study, know that the consequences of high-stakes testing are occurring all over the country and that these consequences were entirely predictable.

High-stakes testing is a national scourge and it is educational malpractice in the extreme. Accountability? You bet. It is time to hold our nation's policymakers accountable.

Link to the study is here.


L. M. McNeil, E. Coppola, J. Radigan, J. Vasquez Heilig

Executive Summary

A new study by researchers at Rice University and the University of Texas-Austin, finds that the Texas public school accountability system contributes directly to low graduation rates. Each year Texas public high schools lose at least 135,000 youth prior to graduation. A disproportionate number of these are African American, Latino, and English Language Learners. This study has serious implications for the nation’s schools under the federal No Child Left Behind law, which was modeled on the Texas accountability system.

By analyzing data from more than 271,000 students in a large urban district the researchers call Brazos City, the study found that 60 percent of the African American students, 75 percent of Latino students and 80 percent of ESL students did not graduate within five years. The researchers found an overall graduation rate of only 33 percent.

The accountability system uses student test scores for rating schools and rewarding principals. The logic behind the system was that holding adults in the system accountable for student achievement would lead to improved test scores. The requirement to disaggregate and report student test scores by race, with no school permitted to rise in the ratings without increases in the scores of Latino and African American youth, had the stated intent of narrowing the persistent gap between the scores of these historically underserved subgroups and their Anglo counterparts.

“Avoidable Losses” investigates the disparity between these claims of improving achievement and closing the achievement gaps, and the persistent losses of thousands of young people from the system under the high-stakes accountability system.

The study finds that high-stakes test-based accountability leads not to equitable educational possibilities for youth, but to avoidable losses of thousands of youth from the schools. These losses occur not as administrators cheat or fail to comply, but as they comply with the system as it was designed: that is, in the production of rising test scores for their schools. The study shows that as schools came under the accountability system, which uses test scores to rate schools and reward or discipline principals, large numbers of students left the school system. The exit of low-achieving students created the appearance of rising test scores and of narrowing the achievement gap between white and minority students, thus increasing schools’ ratings.

Methods: The study steps outside the system’s own indicators, the student scores on the state test and the school ratings. The study’s shift away from reliance on school-level data to student-level data across multiple years permitted analysis of the effects of the accountability system on the youth themselves. The research employed multiple methodologies in order to track the policy through the system to the children. The studyanalyzed student-level data on more than 271,000 students in a large urban district over a 7-year period. It included analysis of the accountability policy and its implementation down through the system to the school level; extensive observations in high schools in the Brazos City school district; and interviews with administrators, teachers, and students, including students who had left school prior to graduating. It also included a multi-year case study of a high school attempting to comply with standardized accountability while undertaking reorganization and curricular reforms, and its resulting inability to hold onto many of its students.

Findings:

* Losses of low-achieving students help raise school ratings under the accountability system, thus accruing rewards to their principals in the form of bonuses and job security.

* The statistical analysis of a sample of high schools serving poor and minority youth revealed a pattern of rising school ratings in schools that retained a large percentage of their students in 9th grade. Many of those retained in grade did not go on to complete high school.

* This pattern of 9th grade retention (often up to 30 percent of the class) was traced to a legal waiver that allowed principals to adjust grade promotion standards to retain in grade students deemed to be at risk of reducing the school’s scores on the state test; this practice has become commonplace, beyond the waiver provision.

* The reporting of student test scores by racial categories resulted in the singling out of the lowest-achieving students in these historically underserved subgroups as potential liabilities to the school ratings, increasing the incentives for school administrators to allow these students to quietly exit the system, rather than to provide them with the quality education necessary for them to succeed.

* The case study revealed the difficulty of undertaking substantive, long-term improvements under the pressure to produce immediate spikes in test scores to raise school ratings and achieve acceptable Annual Yearly Progress.

* The degradation of the curriculum into test drills, which have little relevance beyond the state test, distances students who otherwise wish to persist to graduation, exacerbating the likelihood they will leave school.

* The accountability system’s zero tolerance rules for attendance and behavior, including rigid regulations which shift youth into the court system for minor offenses and absences, alienate students and increase the likelihood they will drop out.

* Students experience the degradation of curriculum, zero tolerance policies and 9th grade retention as confusing and arbitrary, each which multiplies and magnifies the potential negative impact of the other on student decisions to persist or leave.

In summary, the study found that there is a strong association between high-stakes accountability and dropping out. This is in large part owing to the system’s internal administrative incentives, which reward increased school ratings, even if they are produced at the expense of youth whose test scores are not likely to contribute positively to the production of these indicators. In such a system, students come to be seen as assets or liabilities to their schools’ ratings. The triaging of thousands of youth out of our schools becomes not a side effect of standardized accountability, but an avoidable loss to make the system look successful.

There are many causes behind students’ dropping out of school, from poverty and unstable families, to pregnancy or the need to earn money. What this study shows is that standardized accountability not only does not aid in overcoming those barriers to school completion; it adds to them. Unreliable official statistics on student mobility and transfers, as well as understated official dropout figures (often reported as only 2-3 percent), make it difficult to assess the exact losses from our schools. Even if the figures generated in this study (for example, 75 percent of Latino youth in Brazos City not graduating) were adjusted downward by 10 percent to include possible transfers to other educational settings, the scale of the losses would still be unacceptable, and the numbers attributable to the impact of the accountability system would bear serious reconsideration of its claims.

This study has serious implications for the nation’s schools under the NCLB law. It finds that the higher the stakes and the longer such an accountability system governs schools, the more school personnel view students not as children to educate but as potential liabilities or assets for the school’s performance indicators, their own careers, or their school’s funding.

U.S. Department of Education Joining Forces with Department of Homeland Security

(spoof)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

U. S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, joined by Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff, announced today the creation of a new strong-arm agency of the Department of Homeland Security to be charged with the task of protecting and defending the security and accuracy of the nation's standardized test data. The Test Security Operations Center will train security officers to patrol our nation's K-12 schools during the administration of standardized tests.

The agency will be headed by former drill sergeant and part-time mud wrestler Brunhilda Briarballs. "She'll serve us well," mused Spellings, noting that Briarballs is notorious among military insiders as having 'scared the crap' out of many strapping young military recruits. "They don't call her Bulldozer for nothing," quipped Spellings, "and there's no doubt we can expect her to take a hard nosed approach when addressing testing irregularities which can potentially impact the security of the tests or the accuracy of the data."

Any event which might be construed as having the potential to compromise the security or accuracy of the test data will constitute a security breach and will result in a school's failure to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) toward the federally mandated target of 100% proficiency of all students by the year 2014. A teacher who is involved in a compromising event, such as administering an encouraging pat on the back to a struggling student during testing, will be subject to stern disciplinary measures. Spellings explained that such a gesture, while seemingly innocent to the untrained eye, could actually be a signal to the student that they have answered an item incorrectly.

As part of her dual capabilities, Briarballs will also head the Office of Testing Emergency Preparedness. In the event of a natural disaster or terrorist attack occurring during the administration of The Tests, first responders will be dispatched to herd and guard students and teachers while the tests are being gathered and propelled to underground shelters for safekeeping.

Spellings became visibly irritated when a reporter asked if the practice of high-stakes testing itself didn't actually encourage cheating, given that educators' jobs and the survival of their schools depend on their reaching a goal that is neither mathematically nor humanly possible to achieve. She responded, "We know that the very vast majority of teachers do not cheat. However, only with the implementation of these measures can we be guaranteed that we have objective proof of whether public schools are doing their job of ensuring that all children are average or above by 2014."

Excerpt from President's State of the Union - Revised

"Too many public schools are getting away with not failing ...with failing," said the President. (laughter) "We must close all AYP loopholes to make sure all our nation's poor children, regardless of income or life circumstance, is reading and doing math at grade level. It's not right for there to be an achievement gap between some children and some other children."

Waiting List: Question #2

inconvenient questions for our nation's corporate/politicos

If there is a tight link between what takes place in our public school classrooms and our nation's economic competitiveness and productivity, why haven't you been singing the praises of public education for decades? And why aren't you singing them right now?

But we see how the great wealth being created manages to defy gravity.

Yours truly,
the nation's scapegoat

WE'RE NUMBER ONE!!! (um....in childhood poverty)

Sadly, it is to the everlasting shame of our nation's leadership that the United States, the richest nation on earth, has the highest rate of childhood poverty of all the wealthy, industrialized nations. But alas, we can breathe a huge sigh of relief and ease our collective conscience, for a solution has been found. What is it? Why, it's for our nation's teachers to "try endlessly until the magic works"!! But of course! No, I did not make up that quote.

The solution to childhood poverty offered by authors Delia Stafford-Johnson and Vicky Dill appeared online today, 1/26/08, at EducationNews.org under the title "Empowering Children Through Effective Education". However well intended Johnson and Dill may be, their solution could have easily been taken right from corporate America's executive manual on how to discredit and dismantle public education.

Johnson and Dill wrongly assert:

Equal and excellent education for all means access to high status jobs for those from poverty backgrounds.

No it doesn't. While we must indeed strive for excellent education for all, and while more equitable education for our nation's poor children is a national imperative, in order for better education to achieve better jobs for our nation's poor, there have to be decent paying jobs available. Lots and lots of them for lots and lots of poor people and our dwindling middle class. There aren't.

They're being outsourced and rendered obsolete by the same corporate elite who work relentlessly to discredit public education, the same corporate elite who would have the nation believe that public schools and teachers are responsible for the societal inequities that afflict innocent children, the same corporate elite who benefit mightily from cheap labor and that Golden Goose of profiteering and opportunism called the achievement gap.

As Jean Anyon, author of "Ghetto Schooling" recently pointed out in her article, No Child Left Behind as an Anti-Poverty Measure:

For more education to lead to better jobs, there have to be jobs available. However, there are not now, nor have there been for more than two decades, nearly enough jobs for those who need them...the jobs the U.S. economy now produces are primarily poverty-wage jobs ---and only a relative few highly paid ones --- making it increasingly less certain that education will assure that work pays well. Seventy-seven percent of new and projected jobs in the next decade will be low-paying. Only a quarter of these are expected to pay over $26,000 a year (in 2002 dollars).

And how deceptive are statements from Bill Gates and his 60 million dollar ED in '08 campaign:

Two thirds of new jobs being created require higher education or advanced training.

And there is this many times repeated claim from corporate crony and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, whose most noteworthy qualification for the job is that she doesn't have one:

Eighty percent of the fastest growing jobs require a college degree.

What they and the Business Roundtable conveniently fail to tell the American people is that these "fastest growing" jobs hire very few people, as one can easily find out by checking the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Educational researcher Gerald Bracey notes:

Spellings' assertion...slides past the fact that rates and numbers often paint extremely different pictures of what is going on. "Fastest growing" is a rate. If I make $1 today and double that for each of the next 4 days, my rate of increase in rapid, but at the end of the week I've only made $31. The fastest growing jobs do not account for very many jobs. In the BLS projections from 2004 to 2014, the number of retail sales clerk positions totals more than the top ten fastest growing jobs combined.

If one looks at sheer numbers of jobs, one sees what we might call the "Wal-Martization of America." The occupations with legions of jobs are mostly in the low-skilled, low pay sectors. Nineteen of the 30 occupations with the largest numbers of jobs are in the "low" or "very low" pay categories such as retail sales, janitors, food prep workers, waiters, home health aides, office clerks, etc.

And Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute nails it too in his article, Schools as Scapegoats:

American middle-class living standards are threatened, not because workers lack competitive skills but because the richest among us have seized the fruits of productivity growth, denying fair shares to the working- and middle-class Americans, educated in American schools, who have created the additional national wealth. Over the last few decades, wages of college graduates overall have increased, but some college graduates -- managers, executives, white-collar sales workers -- have commandeered disproportionate shares, with little left over for scientists, engineers, teachers, computer programmers, and others with high levels of skill. No amount of school reform can undo policies that redirect wealth generated by skilled workers to profits and executive bonuses.

Johnson and Dill rightly seek to elevate the issue of childhood poverty in our national conscience. However, their stated position that our nation's school teachers are the solution to childhood poverty and the poor academic achievement that so often accompanies poverty and its deprivations is unbelievably simplistic. And it continues to place an enormously disproportional responsibility on schools and teachers alone:

Graduating every student with an excellent education is the solution, and effective teachers and principals are the key to achieving this goal.

Not only this, it serves to divert national attention away from social and economic policy changes that are desperately needed to help these children. I do not mean to diminish the importance of quality teaching and quality schools. It's part of the needed mix. I believe the number one IN SCHOOL factor affecting academic achievement is the quality of the classroom teacher. It's critical. However, when it comes to factors impacting academic achievement, especially the achievement of our nation's most disadvantaged students, we know that circumstances outside the classroom over which educators have no control dwarf what takes place in the classroom.

Until this nation stops using our nation's public schools and teachers as the national scapegoat for poverty and societal ills, until social and economic injustices are confronted and ameliorated directly, we will see little change in achieving a more just and equitable society for all of our nation's children. Can we please stop pretending?

ED in '08 and Puppy Dog Tails

Educational researchers, economists, and research scientists in the area of human behavior, working in collaboration with canine behavior specialists, have completed a groundbreaking study, the policy implications of which are likely to cause hair to stand on end among the Strong American Schools/ED in '08 folks who compose a 60 million dollar public awareness and action campaign funded by billionaire philanthropists Bill Gates and Eli Broad. The stated mission of ED in '08 is to make education a top priority in the 2008 presidential election.

The findings exposed by the study and the preliminary recommendations being set forth by its authors are considered long overdue by frustrated teachers on the ground charged with carrying out misguided corporate/politico policies guaranteed to leave many children behind. Extensive documentation demonstrates irrefutably that much of the fear-mongering now being disseminated by ED in '08 is virtually identical to the years of "failing public schools" propaganda that paved the way for the No Child Left Behind Act, now aptly re-named the No Corporation Left Behind Act.

Remarkably, the study was inspired by a simple observation frequently noted by exasperated teachers, an uncanny similarity between the tight frenzied circle of unproductive tail chasing activity that certain dogs engage in and the endless revolving circle of resurrected myths about public schools perpetuated by powerful business interests --- myths which scapegoat already heavily burdened schools and teachers while conveniently neglecting the elephants in the classroom.

The examination of likenesses between corporate behavior and obsessive/compulsive disorders in dogs may lead to treatments and policies which will bring blessed relief to children, teachers, and schools. Canine behavior specialists have long known that dogs afflicted with obsessive compulsive disorders commonly develop a fixation on their tails. Many scientists believe compulsive tail chasing derives from dogs' natural predatory instincts. Corporate obsession with public school accountability is likewise predatory.

While scientists acknowledge that dogs bear no particular hostility or ill will toward our nation's public schools, the same cannot be said of their corporate counterparts, who in sum evoke images of an animal of behemoth proportions, lumbering in large figure o-eights around our nation's struggling schools, waiting to devour them.

Recommendations are under consideration for treating the corporate compulsion to control our nation's public schools. Teachers are favoring the securing of rigor wraps (electric shock collars) around the necks of offenders. Every time the word "rigor" is invoked as a solution for the childhood poverty and deprivations largely responsible for poor academic achievement, a succession of harmless but exceedingly unpleasant electrical jolts will be administered into the necks of offenders by highly qualified teachers carrying remote control devices. Though actual implementation of the remedy is not a certainty, teachers have already affectionately dubbed the devices "rigor triggers". In the most extreme cases of obsessive/compulsive school bashing, even shock therapy may not significantly reduce the problem . In these cases, muzzling may have to be considered.