Not a Jobs Program, Either

A lot of the concern about state and PARCC/Smarter Balanced testing is expressed as anger that test companies are raking in the bucks hand over fist. That's why this message from Chuck came as a bit of a surprise. Pearson laid off 200 back in 2013, but it was hard to tell whether those layoffs were testing related. These clearly were.

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Testing in Texas

Texas is one of four states that never, ever signed on to the Common Core State Standards. That has something to do with Texas's independent streak and a lot to do with the power of the Texas Board of Education and its desire to retain that power.

In 2012, Texas replaced its famous Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) with the new State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR). From the state website:

The STAAR program includes annual assessments for

Reading and mathematics, grades 3–8

Writing at grades 4 and 7

Science at grades 5 and 8

Social studies at grade 8

End-of-course assessments for English I, English II, Algebra I, biology and U.S history.

Beginning in 2016, TEA will voluntarily administer STAAR EOC assessments for English III and Algebra II.

So it is possible to have a boatload of tests without any connection whatsoever to the Common Core. In comparison, NYS has reading and math at 3-8, science at 4 and 8, social studies to come, plus Regents in a variety of courses at the HS level.

Want to criticize testing? Criticize testing. Just don't blame testing on the Common Core.

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R.I.P.

A total loss in today's fire. We shall miss you.

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Dear Senators

Dear Senators Gillibrand and Schumer:

As the Senate takes up discussion of the Alexander-Murray revision of No Child Left Behind, I encourage you to consider a couple of things. The revision maintains testing at grades 3-8 but strips away consequences of that testing. If testing now only exists so that the public may see achievement gaps, it seems to me that the sort of grade-span testing we had before NCLB is adequate. Testing cohorts at grades 4, 8, and high school will clearly indicate those gaps.

What to do about those gaps is a civil rights question, and this nation has a bad track record when civil rights issues are left up to the states. And by ceding control over standards that the states create to meet new guidelines for rigor, the Senate bill ensures that we once again will have 50 sets of disparate standards, and that students moving from one state to another or vying for jobs or college placements will once again find themselves far behind or far ahead of their peers, depending on their ZIP codes.

Nations that compete successfully with us have national standards and fewer tests. Yes, those students beat ours overall in science, math, and even reading at times. But those nations don't educate all students. We do. To address achievement gaps, we need to deal with issues of urban and rural poverty, mental health, and absenteeism. We need universal pre-K, before- and after-school programs, and culturally competent teachers. We need multiple pathways to graduation. We need help from our teachers unions to mentor and monitor their members. We need funding streams that are reliable and equitable. We need better teacher training and support.

We don't need 3-8 tests to tell us what we need. We already know. I encourage you to support a bill that addresses schools' needs rather than one that continues to hunt for and publicize their deficits.

Sincerely,

K.A. Zahler

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Opting Out

Call me cynical. Just do. Now the Ithaca Teacher's Association has published a statement in the Ithaca Voice encouraging parents (I mean "informing parents of their rights") to opt their kids out of the "high stakes New York state ELA and Mathematics tests for 3rd through 8th grade students" that will "begin on April 14, 2015." Imagine it! "Commercially prepared state tests"!

Well, I guess if you have young kids in school or have lived under a rock for a decade and a half, you don't realize that we've had "commercially prepared state tests" for grades 3 through 8 since No Child Left Behind (a federal law, not a state law) was implemented. Other states have had them, too. In NYS, the tests, created by CTB McGraw-Hill, were first presented in January 2006, which was the very last possible time states were allowed to introduce them, according to NCLB.

Mind you, prior to 2006, NYS had plenty of testing, just not at every grade. Fourth and eighth graders had state tests, and we've always had the Regents tests for graduation purposes. So-called "state tests" were created by McGraw-Hill, or by Pearson, or by McGraw-Hill, or by Pearson—and both companies were busily creating state tests for the other 49 states as well.

Along the way, there were complaints about the quality of tests, or the meaninglessness of tests, and those of us in the textbook business complained that we were testing too much and teaching too little.

So what changed? Well, with the development of Common Core State Standards, there was no longer a need for 50 different tests. Some states chose to get their tests from one of two consortia, PARCC or Smarter Balanced. PARCC tests were designed by Pearson. Smarter Balanced were designed by CTB McGraw-Hill. NYS, being persnickety, decided not to go with either one but rather to keep overseeing the design of their own tests—by Pearson.

So that's not really much of a change, is it? Okay, the real change is this: In a decision completely divorced from Common Core, which includes no such directive, NYS teachers were told that they personally—not just their schools or districts—would be held accountable for student improvement, as based on test results. And now we have Opt Out.

"High-stakes testing" is testing whose outcome has great consequence for the test-taker. By that definition, these are not "high-stakes tests," whatever the union might think. Or rather, they are "high-stakes" for the teachers and districts, not for the students, whose graduation or even promotion is never determined by the 3-8 state tests. The most that ever happens to a student based on a test score is that the student might receive extra help—and that usually only happens if the school has carefully done a gap analysis of the data to determine where each student had difficulty.

I don't have any objections to parents standing up and saying "We're testing too much and teaching too little." I've been saying that for a long, long time. I think testing at 4 and 8 and disaggregating those data is probably good enough for determining where the gaps lie in a district. (Disaggregation helps you to see equity in a district—whether a school is as competent at teaching its students with disabilities, ESL kids, students in poverty, and students of different races and ethnicities as it is at teaching any other student.) I do object to unions using parents' ignorance about educational history to their advantage. I do object to teachers and parents transferring their hysteria onto children for whom these tests should mean little to nothing at all.

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Suing Schools

The Ithaca Voice reported on a case in Vestal, where a teacher was accused of separating a kid's shoulder and the mother's photos of the injury went viral. (At that age, my brother could do that with his shoulder at the drop of a hat, which isn't to say that the kid wasn't injured.) The teacher was exonerated by the DA, who could not find evidence to support the claim.

Lots and lots and lots of people commented that the teacher should be fired, hanged from the nearest tree, etc. But those of us who've worked in and around schools mostly went, "Uh oh."

It happens, of course. Teachers abuse kids and have to be fired. Lawsuits happen, too. I have no objections to Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, for example. Some grievances can only be settled in court.

When I googled "number of lawsuits vs. public schools," I found no actual figures, but I did find a slew of sites on "How to Sue a School." You wouldn't think that schools were deep-pocket litigants, but apparently they are deep-pocket enough, because most schools I know annually face a number of suits that affect their bottom lines. This article from 2004 claims that 60 percent of principals back then had faced a legal challenge. I don't have any reason to think that number has dropped.

I firmly believe that there are lawyers—not local, but not far away—whose metier is suing public schools, and who actively seek out clients in the region. They often find suitable clients in the parents of special education students, because it seems particularly easy to find that schools have not completed paperwork accurately, held appropriate numbers of meetings, or otherwise lived up to the letter of the extremely specific laws that guide special education. Suing for compliance issues is easy and common. And the poorly-kept secret is that schools settle lawsuits, however frivolous they might seem, because it's usually cheaper than going to court.

So suing schools is a profitable business. But the constant threat of lawsuits clearly has a dampening effect on schools, thwarting creativity as it takes up time and energy and costs taxpayers thousands and thousands of dollars.

Bad stuff happens in schools, and sometimes, where there's smoke, there's fire. Just not always. Sometimes there's just a lawyer blowing on the embers.

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Predicting Outcomes on April Fool's Day

I wonder what it means that the NYS Budget is due on April Fool's Day. I wonder why legislators who never much cared before are so terribly eager to have an on-time budget now.

Here's what we got: A pretty comfortable increase in monies for schools, primarily based on restoration of a good sized percentage of the money taken away by the gap elimination adjustment. No new charter schools. A lot more oversight of bad graduate level teacher programs. A longer tenure probationary period. A whole bunch of steps, including the establishment of a "community engagement team," before a school may be put in receivership. And a teacher evaluation system based on observations and tests at grades 3-8 plus Regents exams, in a plan to be put together by the Board of Regents.

NYSUT's reaction was to call for a mass opting out of exams, with a fact sheet right on their website about how parents can do it.

So here's my prediction: Parents who are involved in their kids' schooling will do the paperwork to opt their kids out of exams. Because there are strong correlations between parental involvement and student success, the remaining kids who take the test will be those most likely to do poorly. Because there is not (yet) any required percentage of a class sitting for tests, a whole slew of previously fine teachers will suddenly find themselves rated ineffective. In year two, teachers will find themselves in the awkward position of begging parents to let their children sit for tests, lest those teachers get another ineffective rating, labeling them incompetent. Three ineffective ratings, should things go that far, lead to a 3020-a hearing in which the teacher must prove fraud or risk dismissal.

Now, NYSUT may assume that a statewide test boycott will cause the system to implode, and maybe it will—very slowly. But my prediction is that a bunch of teachers, administrators, and even whole districts will be caught in that slow-motion implosion. Do you really think we have a governor who will say, after a year, "Oops, my bad; let's reverse this foolish plan"? Or legislators who will confess, "Well, I didn't really have time to read the whole thing, so I didn't understand what the results might be"?

There is a chance that the Regents might recognize the possibilities and build in a failsafe switch, saying, for example, that if 30 percent of students opt out, the test won't count toward teacher, administrator, or school evaluation. I hope New Yorkers are willing to bet their favorite teacher's career on that.

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