Another week, and more snow is expected in the northeast. There’s more over the PARCC testing storm as well, but this time, there is a ray of sane sunshine.
Here in New Jersey, State Assemblyman Patrick Diegnan Jr. (D-Middlesex), chairman of the Assembly’s education committee, has introduced a bill that would detail a procedure for how parents could opt out of the tests. He’s working on another bill that would delay the use of the tests to evaluate students and teachers for up to three years. Not that using tests for such evaluation is ever a good idea, whether it’s now or in 2018, but a delay might give testing opponents, which include most educators who work in classrooms, an opportunity to put the movement out of our misery.
The other good news is that another bill sponsored by state Assemblyman David Rible (R-Monmouth) would put limits on how student data is used and disseminated. The Christie administration has said that student privacy protections are in place, but that’s quickly becoming the most laughable line in any industry, much less in education. See Target, Home Depot, and anyone involved in The Interview. Plus, Christie can’t even keep his political operatives from talking about their political contretemps. How is he going to safeguard the privacy of all the schoolchildren in New Jersey?
New FAQs about the PARCC tests released by the state Department of Education do say that the tests are not mandatory even though many districts are sending the implicit message that they are. Other districts and organizations are sponsoring evenings where members of the community can come and take a sample test to see what their children will experience. These evenings are being presented as informational sessions, but clearly if parents don’t like what they see, they could take action.
Right now, the opt-out movement is small, but it is growing. As we get closer to the March administration, I would expect that more parents will take their children out of the tests. There might even be more opt-outs after the March tests once students go home and tell their parents/caregivers about their experiences. The final administration is in late April or early May.
For all the talk about the procedural aspects of PARCC, the real issue is what the tests actually measure and whether students are doing their best, either because they’ve decided that they don’t want to bother or are flummoxed by technology issues.
These are high stakes tests for only one group: teachers, because student scores can determine whether one is retained or fired. The ultimate irony is that the people who will be most affected will be the ones with the least amount of control on test day.
Educators, are you getting excited? No, not about the next snowstorm, which looks like a whopper, but about the PARCC tests? You’d better be, because they are on the way and the impact will be measurable and unpredictable.
For those non-educators, the PARCC tests are the standardized tests that students in grades 3-11 will take in two administrations; March and April/May. They are tied to the Common Core Curriculum Standards and claim to be the newest, latest, greatest, most bestest tests to evaluate teacher performance and to prepare our students for further leaning, college, and the working world. Parents, teachers, administrators and politicians have debated whether these new tests, and the Common Core, are appropriate or will even measure what they purport to measure. Some states adopted the Common Core and the tests, then un-adopted them.
The bottom line, though, is that they are almost here.
I’ve taken some sample tests, and so can you. Go ahead and give it a try. Notice what students are being asked to do and how they are being asked to do it. My assumption is that it’s different from what you were asked to do in school. This is the point: The standards and tests are asking educators and students to approach education from a different perspective. In some ways, it’s a more productive, intuitive approach, and in others, it’s downright confounding.
One of the main issues in New Jersey and, I suspect, in most other states, is the availability and reliability of the school’s technology. All of the tests are taken on computers and all of the students will probably log on to their school’s systems at the same time. This will probably cause some networks to slow down and/or crash. Also, many schools do not have enough computers for all of their students, which will result in significant disruptions to the school schedule as students will need to test in shifts.
And as much as adults like to fool themselves into thinking that children are all adept at using computers, the facts are that many students can’t keyboard quickly, do not understand how technology works, or how to manipulate the screens as these tests require. There is a section of the high school language arts test where students will need to read and manage three sources on three different windows with three different scroll bars and write an essay using all of the readings. That can be a challenge. For younger students, actual keyboarding will be a problem. There are no computer bubble sheets or booklets on these tests. A slow typist will have trouble.
The actual testing, though, is still only part of the issue. These tests will be used to evaluate teachers, which is, and always has been, a terrible idea. Using any high-stakes test, especially one given for the first time on unpredictable technology by students who haven’t had a full school year of Common Core instruction, is folly.
Besides, the tests really are only high-stakes for the teachers, not the students. How’s that for sound policy? If a student decides the test is too difficult or they can’t type or didn’t eat a good breakfast that morning, then a teacher could get fired. This is what you get when know-nothing politicians decide, without significant teacher input, what’s best for education.
The producers of Selma have teamed up with Black business leaders from around the country for an unprecedented initiative to give students free access to the Oscar-nominated film. So far, nearly 100,000 middle schoolers have taken advantage of the program in cities like New York, Atlanta, Miami and New Orleans, BET reports.
Due to popular demand, many more cities have been added to the program and nearly 120,000 tickets made available. To get their free ticket, students in the 7th, 8th or 9th grade can show their student ID or report card at any of the participating theaters. For a complete list of cities and theaters, visit SelmaStudentsTickets.com.
The expansion has been inspired by the overwhelming success of the program in New York City, in which 27 African-American business leaders created a fund for 27,000 of the city’s 7th, 8th and 9th grade students to see the film for free. That effort sold out in the very first weekend.
Yes, I know it’s the holiday break and students and teachers across the country are off, but really, this is just the calm before the storm. There are only two more months until the new PARCC tests are administered. Then there’s a 6 to 8 week break. Then more PARCC tests will be administered.
These tests will wreak some serious havoc on school district calendars and teacher’s lesson plans nationwide. They will cause anxiety across the student population and will result in hand-wringing and head-shaking amongst the parents and caregivers. In many states, the tests will determine, artificially of course, who is an effective teacher and whether schools are doing all they can to teach students the 21st century skills they’ll need to succeed in college and work.
But the biggest effect of the tests is that they will redefine smart for a new generation.
Prior to the Common Core and the new tests, it was enough for smart students to be able to read, memorize, manipulate and give back facts on an examination. The educational model was based on teachers giving students information or coaching them through their learning as the local curriculum dictated. There were some major modifications in the 1990s and the first decade of this century, but most of them addressed how the information was imparted to students, such as cooperative learning, differentiated instruction and directed learning, that was based on the corporate model of education and teamwork that was then in vogue in the working world.
Even the modifications that teachers were legally required to implement to satisfy students who had classifiable learning disabilities, such as giving out notes, providing word banks, redirecting students who had trouble paying attention, or modifying test questions, were only meant to address content delivery. The skills that students needed remained the same.
That’s all changed now. The new Common Core standards require that students know how to read on a more sophisticated level and to master themes rather than discrete facts. They require that students explain how they arrived at an answer, either in written or verbal form, in order to justify and support their thinking. The new standards reward students who can analyze a reading excerpt, any excerpt, and identify the main idea and bias behind the writing. If a student can’t do these things, then they will not do well on the tests.
Many students who have been doing well in school will find that their skills are not valued anymore. Others who had trouble memorizing and recalling, but could spot larger themes and issues, will be rewarded. I suspect that this was the real intent of Education Secretary Arnie Duncan’s unfortunate remarks about why people are opposed to the Common Core. He didn’t help himself by saying that “white suburban moms who realize — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.” The truth, though, is that many parents will find that their child doesn’t respond well to the new standards because they ask the children to manipulate information in different ways. Students will need to be taught how to do that, and once they are, many will succeed. For the first year, though, scores will not be what some people expect them to be. And even if the PARCC tests went away tomorrow, the Common Core standards won’t, so students would still need to master the new academic skills. We’re not going back to the old ways. Bank on that.
It happened in London, but the same thing can easily happen here, where our government has been infiltrated by Teapartiers and backward Republicans.
The 10 year old decided to pose a math question to the Minister of Education, Nicky Morgan. But Morgan, equipped with her education position in the government, was no match for Leon’s question.
“What’s the cubed route of 125?” Leon asked on live television.
Bet she didn’t see that coming!
“I think it’s probably better that politicians don’t do maths or spelling on air,” the Education Secretary replied.
Leon asked again, but got the same response from the politician.
Sidenote: The answer is of course, 5. A number multiplied by itself three times gives a cubed value, so 5×5×5 =125
Thirty years ago today, I walked into York Preparatory School on New York’s Upper East Side for my first day as a high school history teacher. I had no formal training as a teacher except for my degree in History from Syracuse University. I had been working in advertising for a Madison Avenue firm that no longer exists using the other major I completed at Syracuse, in Telecommunications Management from the Newhouse School of Public Communications. I liked the work, liked the atmosphere, liked the potential for advancement and economic gain.
And yet.
From the time I was about 15 or 16, I had thought about teaching and knew that I could be successful at it, but I didn’t pursue it for all of the logical reasons: low pay, lack of societal respect, and low pay. I loved history, and obviously still do, and had fun taking courses. I went into acting and stand-up comedy, worked in television in New Jersey and advertising in New York. The turn to teaching came, as many great things in life, by happenstance.
I had a friend from college who was a teacher and she told me there was an opening at the private school where she taught, and she also said that you didn’t need a teaching certificate to teach in private schools. I called and was able to schedule an interview. Turns out the headmaster went to graduate school with my father. He was a nice guy. The head of the history department wanted someone with more experience. I figured I had come to the end of the string.
Four months later, a different headmaster called me and said he’d gotten my name from this other headmaster, who happened to be his brother-in-law. It turned out that one of the teachers wasn’t working out and was I interested in teaching? I interviewed. The headmaster was a very nice guy, and so was the department chair. We talked history for an hour. They hired me.
I wore a three piece suit with Allen Edmonds wing tips on the first day. Reported at 8:00, while my first class wasn’t until 11:30. During that crucial three hour stretch, I received my teaching degree from the Ronald P. Klein School of Teacher Preparedness. Ron was a fellow history teacher and over the four years I was at York Prep we became very good friends. They were probably the most productive hours in teacher training I’ve ever spent. He told me to focus on classroom management and to engage the students at every turn. He said to be respectful, but not to smile before January. He said to make students think and write, write, write. It was terrific advice. I still follow it, except maybe for the smiling part.
But the best part was that I loved it, as I thought I would. Loved being with the students studying history. Loved the energy and inquisitiveness that most of the students exhibited. Loved the atmosphere. Loved the schedule. Loved it.
And I still do. Yes, I have written over the years about how teachers aren’t as respected in American society as they need to be, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. And yes, pay increases are not keeping up with the cost of living in New Jersey, and many teachers are actually taking home less pay despite some salary increases because they are paying more for their health and pension benefits.
Oh, and then there is the constant, cyclical adoption of trendy educational ideas that are supposed to guarantee student success in the classroom and in life. Back-to-basic education, Whole Language instruction, Reading in Context, Cooperative Education, Differentiation, Phonics, New Math, Self-Esteem, Learning Clusters, and now Common Core Standards. I’ve missed many, but they’re all fads including the new teacher evaluation system in many of the states. These too will be replaced soon because they don’t do what they promise to do, and that’s to improve both teacher and student performance.
What will guarantee education excellence is to have excellent teachers in the classrooms. So far we’ve done a good job of that, but we need to do more to ensure that the next generation of teachers is more widely respected, paid according to their societal worth and make sure phony politicians have as little to do with what happens in schools as possible.
I consider myself lucky to be able to say that I still enjoy getting up at 5:30am to teach history. Still enjoy being in the classroom interacting with students. Still enjoy the give-and-take of academic discourse. Still enjoy the positive comments I receive about the work I’ve done.
After two weeks of student protests and a fierce backlash across Colorado and beyond, the Jefferson County School Board backed away from a proposal to teach students the “benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights,” while avoiding lessons that condoned “civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.”
So far, so good. The students and staff did a masterful job leading a peaceful protest against the proposed alterations and even shut two high schools down with a sickout last week. This paragraph ends, however, with a rather chilling sentence:
But the board did vote 3-to-2 to reorganize its curriculum-review committee to include students, teachers and board-appointed community members.
Which is then followed by the hammer blow:
The Jefferson County schools superintendent, Dan McMinimee, who suggested the compromise, said it represented the “middle ground” in a fevered debate that pitted the board’s three conservative members against students, parents, the teachers’ union and other critics who opposed the effort to steer lessons toward the “positive aspects of the United States and its heritage.”
You see, the dispute has not been solved. The Superintendent and the conservatives have merely made their viewpoint a position that needs to be debated and taken seriously as an opening gambit in a larger attack on public school curricula. The other side, which includes students, educators and parents, now has to come up with a counter-argument for a discussion that doesn’t have a counter-argument. Cutting out events you don’t like or that don’t satisfy your agenda is not how history should be taught. There is no “middle ground” when it comes to school boards injecting politics into what’s taught in the classroom.
Even worse, the school board made this decision originally without the input of teachers, who should be the first ones consulted on any change to the curriculum, and the larger community, which clearly opposes the board’s agenda.
There is a larger issue at work here that’s operating under the radar of many citizens. There has been a heady debate over the past 10 to 15 years in education about whether the curriculum should focus more on teaching students skills or academic content. The Common Core Curriculum Standards and the Advanced Placement curriculum that’s the basis of the Colorado argument, have sided demonstrably on the side of skills. The reasoning is that if students are taught how to conduct research, write coherent essays, solve equations and theorems, and apply experimental designs to scientific problems, then they will be able to use those skills for any educational endeavor. After all, the argument goes, middle and high school teachers are not training historians or mathematicians or research scientists.
I beg, humbly, to differ.
I’m a content guy. I can teach anyone how to structure an essay or to read a historical document and apply step-by-step analyses that will render a deeper understanding of its message, and the over 3,000 students, now adults, who have been in my classroom over the past 30 years can attest to my abilities and their growth. But if you don’t have the knowledge, the “conceptual capital,” as my former Rutgers University Graduate School Professor Wayne Hoy used to say at every turn, then you got…nothing. I am training budding historians because students need to see how history is written and debated and for that they need a detailed body of evidence, facts, conjecture and sources that will allow them to debate, judge, interpret and synthesize what they’ve learned. THEN, they can write an essay with a specific and relevant thesis and support their assertions with solid historical evidence. The same goes for every academic discipline. Unfortunately, the trend is towards skills at the expense of content.
A colleague and I wrote the new Advanced Placement United States History curriculum this past summer and I am now teaching my school’s two section of that AP class. The College Board, which administers the AP program, has done a fine job re-imagining much of the new course. It’s broken down into historical themes and focuses on the requisites skills that historians need to use to decipher the meaning of the past. There are content outlines that divide U.S. History into nine historical periods and tests that use documents and sources as the basis for evaluation and assessment.
At an AP seminar my colleague attended last spring, though, the leader could not adequately answer the question of what content knowledge the students would need to master in order to score well on the AP test. The best he could say was that students would need to know the usual facts. I think if you put 20 history educators in a room they could give you a rough outline of what the usual facts are, but this is the AP. They should be more specific. And the reason they can’t be more specific is that the skills have won.
So how does that relate back to Jefferson County, Colorado, or any other mischief-making school board that wants to create more patriotic children who avoid conflicts and always respect authority (remember, we’re talking teenagers here)? According to the article above, the AP has warned Jefferson County not to alter the curriculum because if they did then they can’t call it Advanced Placement, but in the end, that won’t matter. Why? Because now the content can be subtly manipulated to reflect anyone’s agenda. When content and facts matter less, what people are actually taught can be chopped, rearranged or simply dropped while skills are used to fill the void. That’s the danger, and as a nation, we have embarked on a new educational paradigm that will result in the striking contradiction of students practicing more, but learning less.
The Common Core makes the same skills-based assumption, and for me, that’s a far more dangerous problem than the time lost for testing or the fear of the federal government injecting itself into state education standards. I cannot abide the thought of a generation schooled on how to perform tasks, but taught less content with which to provide context or relevance. We need to create analytical thinkers who know a specific body of knowledge. Then we can teach skills.
A lawsuit has been filed against an Alabama middle school that accuses teachers and administrators of directing a girl to put herself into a dangerous situation in order to “catch” her predator in the act. Instead of protecting her, they abandoned her to be sexually assaulted.
The middle school allegedly tried to use a young student as “bait” for an older student who was suspected of being a sexual predator. After forcing the girl to lure him into the bathroom, the teacher in charge of this amateur (and highly illegal) sting operation left the school for the day, leaving the student with the boy who proceeded to rape her.
The boy’s threat of violence and sexual assault was not unknown to school staff. According to CNN:
“School administrators knew the student’s extensive history of sexual and violent misconduct and were alerted to the substantial risk he posed” to other students, according to the brief.
About a week before the alleged rape, Sparkman Middle School vice principals Jeanne Dunaway and Teresa Terrell received a complaint that the boy had touched a female student inappropriately and was assigned in-school suspension, according to federal attorneys. A few days later, June Simpson, a teacher’s aide at the Huntsville-area school, told the principal, Ronnie Blair, that the boy had “repeatedly tried to convince girls to have sex with him in the boys’ bathroom on the special needs students’ corridor” and had actually had sex with one student, according to the brief.
The school did nearly everything wrong upon learning that a girl was being continually sexually harassed by this boy. According to a lawsuit, rather than move immediately to put an end to the victimization, the girl’s teacher up an elaborate sting operation to “catch him in the act.” This involved asking the girl, who is described as having special needs, to lure her attacker into a school bathroom while her teacher watched from a distance. “Don’t do anything. Just get him to meet you and we’ll catch him,” the teacher allegedly instructed the student.
According to police records, the teacher even told school administration about her plan, and while they didn’t actively encourage it, they also didn’t tell her no.
Unfortunately, the terrible plan was even more poorly executed. The teacher said she watched the bathroom for a while during the agreed upon time, but didn’t see the girl or the boy enter so she simply shrugged and left school. Meanwhile, the girl had gone to a different bathroom and while in there, she was assaulted by the boy.
A doctor confirmed that the girl showed signs of having been raped, but the teacher felt no responsibility for what happened. The school even tried to defend itself by saying the student probably consented to the sex, despite the clear evidence that she had approached a teacher beforehand and asked for help.
Having been informed that the girl was assaulted, the school still did nothing. According to CNN, Dunaway testified that the girl “was responsible for herself once she entered the bathroom.” It was her fault because she put herself in that bathroom. The place, if you recall, she was only in because the teacher had told her to go there or the harassment wouldn’t stop.
Amazingly, not only did the “sting operation” backfire and lead to further victimization, the school didn’t see anything wrong with what had happened. The girl dropped out of the school and her family eventually moved out of the state, but the boy was hardly punished.
Aside from the December holiday season, the back-to-school late August and early September rush has the most profound effects on the United States. Shopping patterns change, traffic gets worse, and the general tenor of every community shifts to accommodate the children and adults who work in education.
Welcome to this year’s edition. Some things have changed, and other have stayed the same.
In most polls, a majority of Americans say that they respect their school’s teachers and consider them, aside from parents, to be the most influential voices their children will encounter every day. The problem is that the evaluation systems that most states have set up do not accurately measure how effective the teachers are. Standardized tests have not proven to be reliable and systems that use Value Added measures, such as in California, are notoriously unstable. In addition, most Americans don’t like the tenure system as it is applied to teachers and we’ve had one court weigh in and declare the California system to be unconstitutional. In Wisconsin, Indiana and a host of other states, teachers, and other public employees, have lost significant contract negotiation rights that impact their pay, benefits and work rules. Add all of these up and you get a picture of an education system that wants to change, but is ignoring or minimizing the very people who can affect that change most specifically. Teacher morale is low nationally. That’s not good.
Most Americans also value education and consider education to be the major stepping stone to a better economic, social and democratic life. But the truth is that just below that surface, a roiling debate is under way about how much money schools should spend and on what materials, and what should schools actually teach anyway. This year is no different.
The most pressing issue in the poll is the reaction to the Common Core Curriculum Standards which is opposed by most of the respondents. A good deal of that opposition is related to the idea that Americans are wary about a national curriculum, especially one that seems to be prescriptive about what teachers can teach, and that local communities will have little say in what their children will learn. The Common Core is also the basis for national tests, which are anathema to many parents and strike most teachers as a waste of good instructional time.
While the standards are new, they are not as dangerous as many people would make them out to be. They do focus more on having students read nonfiction and analyzing in greater depth what they read, but otherwise, they give schools and teachers the leeway to choose reading materials and to tailor instruction to address local concerns. They ask that all students be conversant in research tools and to determine the reliability of sources, an especially important skill in the electronic era.
The mathematics standards are proving to be especially vexing since they ask students to explain their answers in both numbers and words. My experience with younger students is that they have a difficult time explaining how they came to an answer. Some do the calculations in their heads and others are not as articulate with explanations. This has lead to some famous YouTube videos of parents excoriating school board members for turning their child off to school and making homework time a tear-filled exercise in screaming and running away from the table.
As with anything new in education, and there have been many new programs in the thirty years that I’ve been teaching, the Common Core Standards will need some alterations, but in the long run, they will provide a useful map for student progress. The other advantage is that as students move from one town to the other, the standards will remain the same. That hasn’t happened in the United States, and it’s a major step forward.
We’ll have to wait until October for more polling answers on questions relating to teacher evaluation and spending.
I’ve said this before, but it’s worth saying again: The United States succeeds because its teachers succeed in educating generations of children with the resources we have available. Where schools do not have the resources or community support or high levels of social dysfunction, the job becomes that much more difficult. If we can equalize the curriculum, we should be able to equalize the educational opportunities for every child in this country.
And so to my teaching colleagues I say, have a wonderful school year. You do one of the most important paid jobs in this country and you deserve respect and appreciation.
Last year, my personal investments provided over a 19% return and I paid no investment or broker fees.
Under Chris Christie’s dysfunctional fiscal management, the New Jersey Public Pension fund returned 15.9% (2014) but paid $398.7 million dollars in fees (fiscal 2013). Since his term in office began in 2009, the pension fund had paid billions in fees, has underperformed the market, and the governor has not made a full payment to the system.
There’s fiscal management for you. Imagine what he’d do to the country as president. On second thought, let’s not.
All of this economic tomfoolery, detailed in a new report in the International Business Times, tell you all you need to know about why Chris Christie is not only unsuited to be president, but why his tenure would be a disaster for the United States’ economy. He is steeped in the old trickle down theory that brought us the Great Recession and the Billionaire’s Recovery. He’s warming up in New Jersey by soaking the middle and working classes with higher payments, property taxes and fees, while insulating the wealthy by refusing to even entertain the idea of more revenue for needed state services.
And his latest gambit, a state commission to look into how to reform the state pension program, is led by a Christie campaign contributor and former Reagan Administration economist, Thomas J. Healy, who says that the commission is not political. Should I be skeptical?
President Obama used his weekly address to talk about the start of a new school year and the importance of preparing for an education beyond high school.
Said the president;
And so today, I want to talk directly with students and parents about one of the most important things any of you can do this year — and that’s to begin preparing yourself for an education beyond high school.
We know that in today’s economy, whether you go to a four-year college, a community college, or a professional training program, some higher education is the surest ticket to the middle class. The typical American with a bachelor’s degree or higher earns over $28,000 more per year than someone with just a high school diploma. And they’re also much more likely to have a job in the first place – the unemployment rate for those with a bachelor’s degree is less than one-third of the rate for those without a high school diploma.
But for too many families across the country, paying for higher education is a constant struggle. Earlier this year, a young woman named Elizabeth Cooper wrote to tell me how hard it is for middle-class families like hers to afford college. As she said, she feels “not significant enough to be addressed, not poor enough for people to worry [about], and not rich enough to be cared about.”
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