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The place to be is Bunker Hill Community College, 250 New Rutherford St., on Saturday, October 16 for the Citizens for Public Schools Annual Fall Issues Conference. Come, listen, learn, and share your ideas for moving the CPS agenda forward. Program to be announced. Sheila Decter, CPS board member and Executive Director of the Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action, posted this about Judge Richard Welch III’s decision in the Gloucester Charter School case:
Anthony Cody taught science in Oakland, CA, for 18 years and now blogs regularly on teaching and education in Education Week. I wanted to share his Aug. 15 post, “This is How a Tipping Point Feels,” for its note of optimism and thoughtful analysis of the opportunities we face as we try to push the education policy pendulum back toward something reasonable and helpful for our children. It’s worth reading the whole thing, which mentions a recent oped by influential Washington Post writer Dana Milbank, which calls out President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan for expanding “the importance of standardized testing to determine how much teachers will be paid, which educators will be fired and which schools will be closed — despite evidence that such practices are harmful. In the process, he’s offended just about all the liberals involved in or advocating for education without gaining much support from conservatives.” Here’s more from Cody:
and then there’s this:
It’s up to us to make it so. Let’s keep working! –Lisa Guisbond Three timely and significant reports have been released in the past few weeks that signal a promising change in the public debate on education. A coalition of major national civil rights groups and another of community-based organizations have issued statements and recommendations strongly critical of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top initiative, signaling a growing consensus that it’s time for a change in direction from the education policies initiated by President Bush and continued by Duncan and President Obama. And a new MCAS study reported in Commonwealth Magazine undermines the idea that we simply need to get rid of bad teachers to turn around “failing schools.” All three are worth reading and supporting. The civil rights groups’ statement, titled ““Framework for Providing All Students an Opportunity to Learn” says, in part:
and there’s this:
A news release and the full civil rights group report are here. A link to their web site is here. The Communities for Excellent Public Schools web site describes their report this way:
Finally, I recommend a new article in Commonwealth Magazine by Edward Moscovitch, titled “Teachers are not to Blame.” The author looked at MCAS scores in more and less affluent schools and found that low-income students in both settings continue to struggle, despite the overall higher or lower performance of the schools, as always, tied to demographics. So the “good” teachers who are succeeding with most of the kids in the affluent schools, often look more like “bad” teachers when it comes to the low-income children in their classes.
He concludes the answer is not to “broom out” the “bad” teachers, as the Globe and so many others often suggest. The answer is to develop the current work force, as you so wisely suggest, so that all teachers have better strategies and knowledge about working with the most challenging students.
Education Week reports on June 29, 2010 on a new national study of charter middle schools. The report begins:
The full article is here. The study is here. Pauline Lipman is Professor of Policy Studies in the College of Education, University of Illinois-Chicago. Professor Lipman presented a powerful keynote at Saving Our Schools: Defending Public Education, a March 27 conference co-sponsored by Citizens for Public Schools and the Public Higher Education Network of Massachusetts (PHENOM). Coming from Chicago, former home of U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Lipman described the devastating consequences of Duncan’s privatization efforts as CEO of Chicago public schools. She exhorted the audience to keep at the forefront a vision of what we want for our public schools:
For an updated version of her full keynote address, click here. CPS Board Members Louis Kruger and Ann O’Halloran were invited to Bristol Community College in Fall River to speak to a group of teachers about the MCAS and show Lou’s film. Herald News Reporter Will Richmond covered the meeting. Northeastern professor blasts MCAS systemDave Souza|Herald News
Louis Kruger, a psychology professor at Northeastern University, recently spoke against MCAS exams during a talk entitled “Children Left Behind” at Bristol Community College.
 By Will Richmond
Herald News Staff Reporter
 From left, retired teacher John Cummings, Ann O'Halloran, Lou Kruger, Rep. David Sullivan. As the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exam continues to grow, so does support for removing the tests as a graduation requirement. With a group made up primarily of current and retired teachers in attendance, Louis Kruger, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, recently spoke about how the MCAS exam is impacting students during a presentation titled “Children Left Behind” at Bristol Community College. Kruger said the exam — which has increased to include a science component and future social science questions in addition to the existing math and English language arts problems — are an unfair way to measure a student’s academic preparedness. “Every professional organization that has anything to do with testing says the same thing: that it shouldn’t use one test to determine ability,” Kruger said. “Every test has it flaws, and if you rely on one test some people who are very capable won’t be able to pass the test.” The full article is here. The report that almost 3,000 Massachusetts high school seniors will be denied diplomas based on Science MCAS scores reveals once again the deep flaws of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education’s (BESE) high-stakes testing policies. These are students who have completed four years of high school and satisfied the requirements of their school districts. Many of them overcame significant obstacles such as learning disabilities, economic hardship, or learning the English language in addition to their academic subjects. These students will have difficulty continuing their education and are likely to be derailed from productive futures, at great cost to themselves and our social fabric. Failure to earn a high school diploma means these young people will earn far less, have less stable families, and are more likely to land in prison. We can ill afford a public policy that puts thousands of Massachusetts students on a path to failure because of a few points on a single standardized test. Massachusetts high school students come from a wide variety of home and school backgrounds. The facilities and resources for authentic science education vary greatly from community to community across the Commonwealth. Many of our schools remain underfunded and ill-equipped for science and engineering education. The Board of Education’s fundamental assumption, that a paper and pencil test covering an arbitrary list of topics truly captures student progress, is deeply flawed. It is particularly flawed in the area of science, in which an understanding and an interest in the scientific methodology is more important than memorizing any single body of information. When the BESE instituted the science MCAS requirement, it was against the recommendations of leading Massachusetts scientists and science educators, as well as the authoritative National Academies of Science recommendations that standardized test results should not be used for high stakes decisions such as graduation. The pressure on teachers to get their students past this barrier requires test prep instruction. This drives creative teaching and instruction out of the classroom and replaces it with drill-and-kill in which students focus on lists of questions drawn from previous tests. Prominent national figures such as Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, have sounded an alarm about the way high-stakes tests affect science education. Albert said science tests often focus on recall of vocabulary, stressing “excruciatingly boring material,” failing to judge the capacity of students to think, and ultimately discouraging many of them from choosing a career in the field. These consequences are independent of the quality of the standardized tests and independent of whether students are able to pass the tests. As is typically the case with standardized tests, we are asked to accept the reliability of the tests without evidence. Was there any assessment by a committee independent of the test vendors and DOE of the quality of the tests? Do we know that they are aligned with the state standards? Who set the cutoff scores and what were their criteria? Should we continue to ignore the major critiques of the MCAS science exam, in particular its failure to encourage or support authentic inquiry-based learning and teaching. We need to invest in more extensive science and technology education in our high schools: well-trained teachers, laboratory facilities, budgets for projects, field trips and science fairs. These would be a far better use of public resources than purchasing standardized tests and test services from private vendors. When Mrs. Obama was on the campaign trail with her husband she said the following about the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind Program:
Many agree with her criticism. If you do, ask her to help end the reliance on high-stakes standardized tests. Our friends at Time out From Testing, FairTest, Rethink Learning Now, and other groups are urging parents, teachers, students, and anyone else interested to send a postcard to Michelle Obama with this simple, clear message: Dear Mrs. Obama: We want to provide the best high-quality education for our public school children, just as you want to provide the best for Malia and Sasha. Children are not test scores. Encourage the President to end the use of high-stakes standardized tests! Sincerely, Name Address Signature Mail to: First Lady Michelle Obama The White House Ask your friends, family, and co-workers to do the same! For more information on this campaign and how to maximize its impact, go to the Time Out from Testing web site. In the April 8, 2010 Daily Hampshire Gazette, Aline Gubrium and Tim Scott, CPS partners in our March 27 conference at UMass/Amherst, have an excellent oped about the impact of charters on public schools in Western Massachusetts. A stacked deck on school ‘choice’by Daily Hampshire Gazette The full article is here. |
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