Spot-on article and comments in Daily Kos on teacher burnout

Excellent article on why many teachers are retiring early or just quitting.

I recommend the comments as well. (I am so glad I was able to retire in 2009!)

 

A quote or two:

Last fall, Kris Nielsen, who had moved to North Carolina specifically for a teaching job after years teaching in New Mexico and Oregon, wrote, “I am quitting without remorse and without second thoughts” because:

I refuse to be led by a top-down hierarchy that is completely detached from the classrooms for which it is supposed to be responsible.

I will not spend another day under the expectations that I prepare every student for the increasing numbers of meaningless tests.

I refuse to be an unpaid administrator of field tests that take advantage of children for the sake of profit. [...]

I’m tired of watching my students produce amazing things, which show their true understanding of 21st century skills, only to see their looks of disappointment when they don’t meet the arbitrary expectations of low-level state and district tests that do not assess their skills.

In spring 2012, the “worst eighth-grade math teacher in New York City” decided to leave teaching. Not much of a loss if she was the worst, right? Yeah, well, Carolyn Abbott was teaching at a gifted-and-talented school, where:

The material covered on the state eighth-grade math exam is taught in the fifth or sixth grade at Anderson. “I don’t teach the curriculum they’re being tested on,” Abbott explained. “It feels like I’m being graded on somebody else’s work.”

The math that she teaches is more advanced, culminating in high-school level algebra and a different and more challenging test, New York State’s Regents exam in Integrated Algebra. To receive a high school diploma in the state of New York, students must demonstrate mastery of the New York State learning standards in mathematics by receiving a score of 65 or higher on the Regents exam. In 2010-11, nearly 300,000 students across the state of New York took the Integrated Algebra Regents exam; most of the 73 percent who passed the exam with a score of 65 or higher were tenth-graders. [...]

How do her students perform on the content that she actually does teach? This year, the 64 eighth-graders at Anderson she teaches are divided into two groups, an honors section and a regular section. All but one of the students in the honors section took the Regents Integrated Algebra exam in January; the other student and most of the regular-section students will take the exam in June. All of the January test-takers passed with flying colors, and more than one-third achieved a perfect score of 100 on the exam.

Are Kaya Henderson, Wayne Ryan, and Michelle Rhee Afraid of Going to Jail?

If we had a secretary of Education who actually knew something about education and learning, and not the dishonest idiot we have now (Arne Duncan), then there would be a real investigation into all the cheating in school system after school system across the country, aided and abetted by the likes of DC’s Henderson, Ryan, and Rhee.

And if we had such an investigation, including forensic statistical analyses of the wrong-to-right erasure pattterns, then not only would those three individuals be facing serious time for monetary fraud, then in addition, our DC Inspector General, Charles Willoughby should be facing public disgrace for whitewashing an enormous crime against the children of DC.

Monetary fraud? you may ask.

Yes, I reply.

Read Adell Cothorne’s complaint about the cheating scandal at Noyes and you will see a cogent monetary estimate.

(DC financial “czar” Natwar Gandhi also needs to go to jail for turning a blind eye to theft after theft from the DC public treasury.)

However, unless Obama dumps Duncan during his second term, Henderson, Ryan and Rhee won’t need to be wondering how they will look in orange jump-suits.

But we can dream.

What Exactly is Measured in Michelle Rhee’s Bogus State Report Card?

What Michelle Rhee and her billionaire buddies measured in their ridiculous, recently-released report card is a very Brave New World-type Orwellian fantasy. Words are twisted to mean exactly the opposite of what most people think they mean.

http://edref.3cdn.net/9e8505b2c4ad5ec0e8_u6m6ikky8.pdf

I quote from the report in black, bold, and add some comments in red italics. 

Objectives combined for SPRC Scoring :

■ Reduce legal barriers to entry into teaching profession and permit alternate certification programs to provisionally place teachers in the classroom  (In other words, make a 5-week summer program like TFA, or no program at all, the legal equivalent to a traditional one- or two-year professional teaching license system.)

■ Pay structures based on effectiveness and performance pay (In other words, make teachers’ pay dependent on the score from an arcane mathematical algorithm that no one understands (VAM) and which jumps around widely and wildly from year to year for the same teacher; and which correlates with nothing else. BTW, none of the many studies conducted on performance pay has yet shown that ‘performance pay’ for teachers does anything to help students. What’s more, many teachers in jurisdictions that have bonuses for teachers who score high on these formulas refuse to accept the bonuses, because of the ‘poison pills’ attached to the bonuses.)

■ Parental notification and parental consent for student placement with ineffective teachers (in other words, public shaming of teachers who happen to end up on the short end of the VAM yardstick; this is part of Rhee’s Orwellian use of the phrase “Elevate the Teaching Profession”

■ Remove arbitrary caps on public charter establishment and establish alternative authorizing and fast-track process for high-performing public charters (We now know that charter schools are frankly aimed at destroying public education, not improving it. We also know that in 5/6 of the cases, charter schools do the same as OR WORSE THAN their peer public schools. We also know that the few charter schools that have good student achievement records do so by winnowing out all of the problem students — who are sent back to the public schools — and by having longer days, longer years, and summer programs, all of which cost more money.)

■ Provide comparable funding and prohibit authorizers from charging fees from public charter schools for oversight and administration (In other words, make sure that charters get MORE money per pupil than the regular schools, since just about all charter schools receive large private donations. My administrator friends in DCPS and elsewhere tell me that private donors essentially refuse to give anything to regular public schools these days, no matter how worthy the program.)

And in case you wanted to see their actual, numerical rankings, here they are:

 

Your thoughts?

Diane Ravitch: A List of Good News on Education for 2012

Here is a link to Diane Ravitch’s collection of good news on the education front for the year that just ended:

http://dianeravitch.net/2013/01/01/a-good-year-for-supporters-of-public-education/

However, the news wasn’t all good, as you may remember. Not only did the bad guys win a few elections, but an insane gun nut stole his mother’s guns and committed mass murder of young students and their teachers and principal in Newtown, CT not three weeks ago. To which, as I predicted, uber gun-nut Wayne LaPierre called for even more guns in schools.

How the US press continues to parrot the ‘party line’ that American students suck, despite the facts

This excellent post on how perhaps US schools aren’t so bad after all comes from The Daily Howler by Bob Somerby. He does a great service by putting together the points I was trying to make when I showed graphs and figures from the TIMMS report showing how well the US did. His summary is much better put-together than mine. Good job, Bob!

FOOLED ABOUT SCHOOLS: Fools for Finland!

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2012Part 5—Good news outscored by script: How well did American students do on last year’s international tests?That can’t be easily answered. In reading, American students scored very near the top of the world. Among the large nations which took part, only Russia outscored the U.S.

In reading, American students outscored the vast bulk of the world! Unless you read major American papers, where this success was largely obscured.

In math, American students did somewhat less well—and without any question, a fairly small group of Asian nations tend to outscore the world by significant margins in math. That said, here’s a surprise:

In fourth-grade and eighth-grade math, American scores were “not measurably different” from the scores of students in Finland.

We mention Finland for an obvious reason. In the past decade, this small, middle-class, unicultural nation has been all the rage in America’s low-scoring press corps. Its strong performance on international tests has been a constant source of commentary from journalists who don’t have the slightest idea what they’re talking about.

That’s why you might think it would count as news when the U.S. came close to matching Finland on last year’s international tests. Indeed, Finland was walloped by some U.S. states—states which took part in last year’s testing as independent “education systems.”

Continue reading …

More on PIRLS international assessment of nations in reading

It’s utterly amazing:

Twelve minutes after twelve noon on December 12, 2012, (that is, 12:12 on 12/12/12 has come and gone, and somehow the sky still hasn’t fallen.

American fourth-grade students actually did quite well in comparison to about 50 nations in reading and literacy, according to the most recent PIRLS data. Here are two more graphs that I will share with you, which I took from pages 68 and 69 of that report.

This graph is packed full of information!

First of all, notice that the USA is #7 out of all the 40+ nations when ranked by what percentage of students in each country attained scores deemed “advanced”.  We beat nations like Ireland, Israel, NZ, Canada, Taiwan, Denmark, Australia, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, France, Austria, and many more. That’s not bad.

Further, if you look at the middle, vertical blue line that I drew, you notice that the US has the sixth highest rate in the WORLD of students reaching the “high” benchmark as defined by PIRLS.

Finally, if you look at the median percentages, shown at the very bottom of the page and circled in blue by me, you see that the American rankings are way higher (farther to the right) than any of them.

My next graph shows how a few regions did. I’m going to take this with a bit more salt, however:

 

According to this table, Florida alone is #2 in the entire world. Is that really true? I don’t know; it doesn’t appear to be so highly ranked in reading on the NAEP; it’s tied for 12th place with Delaware, Kentucky, and Montana.

But I think it’s fair to say that American kids aren’t doing as poorly as many pundits and politicians keep saying.

 

 

The Sky Is Not Falling

Two things are for sure when you read the tables and graphs in the latest TIMMS report, released today:

(1) The sky is NOT falling;

and

(2) This report gives no evidence of a major educational crisis in math education in the USA. On the contrary.

In fact, of all the many countries listed, US students’s average scores rank among the top 20-30%  of all the countries listed. If the long-term trends mean anything at all, American students are consistently improving, going back to 1995, well before the current round of top-down, billionaire-backed educational “rephorms’ began being imposed on American public schools.

If you don’t believe me, then look at these tables, copied directly from the TIMMS report, and see for yourself.

In all of them, I drew a red line around the scores of US students to make it easier to find.

This first table shows the distribution of math scores for 4th graders, ranked from high to low.

Notice first of all that the US is #11 out of about 50, which puts it at the 78th percentile, or definitely in the top quarter of all nations participating.

If you look carefully at the smeared-looking band to the right of the names of the countries, and if you read the legend, you see that EVERY SINGLE NATION has a significant gap between its best-achieving students and its lowest-achieving students. Including the USA. It does not seem like our gap is particularly wide or particularly narrow in comparison with the gaps in other countries. It looks to me like Romania’s might be the widest, and the gap in the Netherlands between the top and bottom students appears to be the narrowest.  We also ‘beat’ a lot of supposedly high-achieving, wealthy countries: Germany, Australia, Austria, Sweden, Norway, New Zealand…

So, not too bad, overall. No sign of crisis here.

 

In this next graph, the US is #9 out of the same 50 countries in performance at various benchmarks in 4th grade math. We have 13% of our fourth graders reaching something that the TIMMS calls their ‘advanced’ benchmark; 47% of our students reaching a ‘high’ benchmark; 88% of the students reaching the ‘intermediate’ benchmark; and 96% of our students passing the ‘low’ benchmark. As you can see, while there are some countries scoring better than the US, we beat the vast majority of them.

 

This next graph/chart shows how 4th grade students in the USA and a few other countries are doing over time, going back to 1995. As you can see, American fourth graders’ scores have been going up as assessed by this test, modestly but significantly, during the past 16 years, but there was not much change from 1995 to 2003. BTW: Finland’s scores fell by quite a bit, and there is sure to be some head-scratching there.

 

 

 

 

The next two graphs show how 4th-grade math students in of the nations with enough prior scores have been doing over time. Note that in the US, we went from 9% of our fourth-grade students being ‘advanced’ in 1995, to only 7% ‘advanced’ in 2003, to 10% in that category in 2007, to 11% ‘advanced’ last year. The percentages of American fourth-grade math students reaching the ‘high’ benchmark went from 37% to 35% to 40% to 47% — which seems pretty decent to me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This last graph is a continuation of the last one, but it shows what percentage of students in the various countries reached or exceeded the ‘Intermediate’ and ‘low’ benchmarks.

Again: The sky is not falling, and if we look at these results, there is no sign of a crisis in US elementary math education.

[Let me know (via comments) if you need more explication of what these graphs imply.]

A Few of Diane Ravitch’s Contributions

This is from Richard Hake, who apparently is paraphrasing what David Denby at <http://nyr.kr/RPfOkF> wrote (paraphrasing; supplemented by references to Ravitch’s critiques in “The New York Review of Books”:

Diane Ravitch has emerged as one of the leading opponents of the education-reform movement. She has:

1. Written a series of scathing rebuttals of reform measures in “The New York Review of Books”:
a. “The Myth of Charter Schools” <http://bit.ly/h0Lx8Q&gt;;
b. “School ‘Reform’: A Failing Grade”<http://bit.ly/TclFCY&gt;;
c. “Schools We Can Envy” <http://bit.ly/QqtdTi&gt;;
d. “How, and How Not, to Improve the Schools” <http://bit.ly/RPBDAO&gt;;
e.  “Do Our Public Schools Threaten National Security?” <http://bit.ly/10hxmth&gt;;
f. “In Mitt Romney’s Schoolroom” <http://bit.ly/TcmHxS&gt;; and
g. “Two Visions for Chicago’s Schools” <http://bit.ly/SKjkeA&gt;.

2.  Written some two thousand posts on a blog <http://dianeravitch.net/ > she started in April, which has received almost a million and a half page views.

3. Published “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education”[Ravitch (2010a)] at <http://amzn.to/pAjeZU&gt;.

4. Barnstormed across the country giving speeches berating the reform movement, which, in addition to test-based “accountability,” also supports school choice and charter schools (public institutions that often receive substantial private funding and are free from many regulations, such as hiring union teachers in states that require it), and which she calls a “privatization” movement. The reform movement has the support of President Obama and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan; it is also championed by the Republican Party; by many governors, mayors, and schools chancellors; and by a variety of wealthy entrepreneurs and fund managers, including Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Whitney Tilson. It has changed educational thinking in states such as Florida, Wisconsin, and Louisiana, and in cities such as Washington, D.C., New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

5. Argued that the reform movement is driven by an exaggerated negative critique of the schools, and that it is mistakenly imposing a free-market ethos of competition on an institution that, if it is to function well, requires cooperation, sharing, and mentoring.

What a Delaware Politician Really Meant

A very funny critique of what a Delware Edu-Political boss actually meant:

http://transparentchristina.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/last-week-i-posted-a-letter-sent-by-secretary-murphy-to-all-of-delawares-teachers-today-i-will-parse-it-netde/

A Roundup of Articles on Real Education Reform

   - this is by Bob Schaeffer of Fair Test

With the 2012 election now history, we can return to the hard work of making politicians see the light about the need for real assessment reform.

FairTest offers several new columns and fact sheets as resources for that ongoing campaign along with links to a number of good pieces by our allies

Why So Many People Are Saying “Enough is Enough” to High-Stakes Testing
 http://www.takepart.com/article/2012/10/31/why-so-many-people-say-enough-enough-high-stakes-testing

Better Alternatives to Standardized Testing
 http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2012/11/02/an-alternative-to-standardized-testing-for-student-assessment/

A Better Way to Evaluate Teachers
 http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-darling-teacher-evaluations-20121105,0,650639.story

High-Stakes Testing Promoter Booted as Indiana Super; Replaced by Teacher
  http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20121107/ELECTION01/311079919/1002/LOCAL

An Open Letter to President Obama
  http://www.good.is/posts/an-open-letter-to-president-obama-from-bill-ayers/

Another Educator Calls on Obama to Change Course
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2012/11/07/a-call-for-president-obama-to-change-course-on-education/

Parents Complain About Too Much Testing to Oklahoma Super, Who Agrees
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=11&articleid=20121108_19_A15_CUTLIN194727

Common Core Tests = More Taxpayer $$$  — this is a national issue (see FairTest fact sheet at: http://fairtest.org/common-core-assessments-more-tests-not-much-better)
  http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/local-education/school-district-needs-to-spend-12-million-on-compu/nSsxw/

Closing the Achievement Gap: Have We Flat-Lined?  — more evidence that test-driven schooling is a failure
http://eyeoned.org/content/closing-the-achievement-gap-have-we-flat-lined_379/

Is Test-Mania Killing Interest in Science Teaching?
  http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/11/is_test_mania_killing_interest.html

Philadelphia Suspends Faulty School Rating System — hard data got in the way of another faith-based evaluation system
  http://thenotebook.org/blog/125293/philly-district-suspends-school-rating-system-seeks-fix

Pearson Pays Out $623K for Test-Scoring Error That Blocked Graduation
  http://www.clarionledger.com/article/20121025/NEWS01/310240052/Pearson-North-America-scoring-error-prevented-5-Mississippi-students-from-graduating-affected-121-others

Bob Schaeffer, Public Education Director
FairTest: National Center for Fair & Open Testing
ph-   (239) 395-6773    fax-  (239) 395-6779
cell-  (239) 699-0468