April 27, 2015--Testing One, Two, Three

All over America school kids are being tested. Some are taking tests that derive from what their states require while others are being tested to see how well they have absorbed the material associated with the controversial Common Core curriculum which 44 states have adopted.

And then there are the hundreds of thousands of children not taking any tests at all. This, for many, to protest the importance assigned to tests that supposedly call for rote learning or have high-stakes consequences. Consequences for the kids, their schools and districts, and for their teachers.

Let me be clear that in virtually all instances it is the parents lodging these protests by keeping their children home, not the kids themselves making these decisions. Sort of like the anti-vacine parents.

There are many layers that require unpacking in order to understand what is going on. It is not as simple as it may seem.

First, whose fault is it that we have all these tests? Some say it's former president George W. Bush's since he allegedly wanted to break teachers' unions by holding them accountable for the results. And Teddy Kennedy's, who wanted to show he could work in a bipartisan way and made a deal with Number 43 when he signed off on Bush's signature school reform program, No Child Left Behind that required universal testing and meet certain standards in order for states to leverage federal funds. And, of course, like everything else people do not like, it's Barack Obama's fault since he has a radical agenda for the federal government to snatch authority from the states and take over the education of our children, very much including indoctrinating and testing them. Some feel, through the imposition of Common Core.

If you live in New York and watch TV, you are being flooded with ads paid for by the state's teachers' unions that claims it's governor Andrew Cuomo's fault. He's doing a Scott Walker, they say, by showing how tough he can be on teachers, using testing as a way to fire teachers he doesn't like. All this presumably to get ready to run for president if Hillary Clinton continues to falter.

And then there are those (me included) who feel requiring some forms of achievement testing is one way, one way, to see if kids are learning and to use what the tests show as part of the mix, part of the mix, of evaluative tools available to hold everyone involved accountable for how well students are faring--individual teachers, school principals, school districts, states, and the children themselves.

Then there is the matter of using test results to distinguish between the achievement of individual students. This is very complicated business in a society that conservatives sees as guided by meritocratic values--that there is a natural hierarchy based on talent, hard work, and success--while at that same time to others, progressives, there is the belief in human equality and thus call for polices to assure not just equality of opportunity but equality of results.

This in a society that often overpraises children, awarding trophies to all, including to those who come in last. Awards for showing up and trying. Or maybe just for showing up.

Often the anti-testing people are the very ones seeking advantages for their own children at all levels of schooling, especially those that can afford to supplement what is available even in private schools to assure their own children's ultimate advantages.

Some years ago when the arguments about testing first roiled discourse about schooling and its outcomes, I had a colleague at the very progressive Ford Foundation, actually the vice president to whom I reported, who was a fierce critic of traditional forms of testing and a strong advocate of what was thought to be "authentic assessment." Approaches that called for more nuanced and three-dimensional methods to measure student achievement. Including non-traditional forms of assessment where student outcomes would be evaluated by things such as portfolios of their work. It was felt that this was a fairer approach than the usual testing and would thus contribute to narrowing the achievement gap.

She at the time had high-school-age twins who attended a selective private secondary school. At that school, as you might imagine, they emphasized authentic assessment. One Saturday mornings we ran into my colleague on lower Broadway. We stopped to chat. It turned out that she was there, far from where she lived, to take her daughters to an SAT-prep workshop.

I not-so-innocently asked her how come, if she rejected the validity and fairness of tests such as the SAT, she was paying for her daughters to prep for it.

"Because I want them to do as well as possible," she said, "So they can get into good colleges."

I asked, "Then in your Ford Foundation role how come you resist funding programs that would help low-income students have the same test prepping opportunities?"

She stammered something I couldn't quite hear and ran off to an appointment.

I am still waiting for her answer.

August 27, 2014--Off the Hook

At the heart of Barack Obama's education reform initiative, Race to the Top, are various ways to hold school districts, administrators, and especially teachers accountable for student learning. This approach is actually an extension of George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind.

From day one, back in Bush's day, teachers unions offered lip service support for these efforts, feeling that though their main agenda is protecting teachers' jobs, even incompetent ones, they could not publicly oppose approaches designed to enhance student learning, especially those that address the achievement gap that separates minority students from more affluence white students.

But first with NCLB and more recently with Race, the unions quietly and increasingly more openly have been chipping away at the accountability provisions of both programs.

Most recently they have criticized the results of high-stakes academic achievement testing as the primary way to measure teacher performance, claiming that with the introduction of the new Common Core curriculum in nearly 40 states, a product of the National Governors Association, there has not been enough time for teachers to be orientated to carrying it out effectively.

Until just recently the Obama administration, led by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, has been holding the line, saying there in fact has been enough time for states and school districts to help teachers master the new content and the use of testing would continue to be used when evaluating individual schools and individual teachers.

This is quite a big deal because not only can there be consequences for low-performing teachers (they might not get tenure or, rare, even be let go) but also federal education dollars to states and districts are largely contingent on how schools and districts perform.

Under considerable pressure from teachers unions that historically have provided significant support for Democratic candidates, and because in June Duncan stepped into the current teacher tenure debate, offering his strong endorsement for a judge's decision to dramatically limit tenure in California, Duncan last week said that the DoE would allow another year to pass before using student test scores when evaluating teachers.

He said, "I believe testing issues are sucking the oxygen out of the room in a lot of schools" and thus teachers needed more time to adapt to the new standards and the tests pegged to those standards.

What he might have said is that oxygen is being sucked out of schools because students in unacceptable numbers are not learning and teachers and school administrators must be held accountable for that. Not in another year, but now.

May 28, 2014--Bedfellows

"Here's something else you won't believe." I was all agitated.

"What is it now?" Rona asked, immediately exasperated with me. It was still the three-day weekend and we had promised each other we would restrain ourselves from reading about or watching the news.

"You saw that Obama paid a surprise visit to Afghanistan where he spent . . ."

"Four hours," Rona completed my thought.

"To spend millions and millions to get him there so he could have a few pictures taken with the troops. What is really making me crazy is that while he was there some White House official released the names of those meeting with Obama and included the name of the head of the CIA there. The station chief. To 6,000 journalists."

"Can't anyone do anything right?" Rona was sounding even more exasperated.

"If Obama wanted to show support for the military on Memorial Day he should have gone to the VA hospital in Phoenix where screw-ups led to the deaths of maybe 40 veterans. To look into the issue himself and as a way of taking responsibility. But, no, there were better photo-ops available in Afghanistan. Where, by the way, the president refused to meet with Obama."

"You sound as if you're ready to join the Tea Party."

"No kidding. I understand their frustration and anger about the government. It's too big and much of it doesn't know how to get anything worthwhile done."

"More evidence of how wide discontent is with government, all government, are the results of this past weekend's elections across Europe."

"Yeah, where right-wing extremists who masqueraded as Populists won major victories. From England to France to Denmark and of course Greece."

"They are an unholy alliance. Half of them are out-of-the-closet anti-Semites and most of the rest are either neo-fascists, anti-European Union, anti-foreigner, or violently anti-immigrant."

"Very anti everything."

"Almost sounds like the situation in the U.S.," Rona said.

"We haven't seen too much anti-Semitism."

"Yet," Rona added.

"Touché. But look at this." I held up the first section of the Times. "Look at this other unholy alliance."

"Between?"

"Progressives and conservatives over their shared antipathy for the widespread movement in public education to bring a common curriculum to kids and, as part of that, to hold teachers accountable for how well their students do on standardized tests."

"I saw that. How teachers unions are opposing the so-called Common Core approach while our version of states-rights Populists are wanting to block any kind of federal role in public schooling. Especially any that Obama supports."

"Even though this movement didn't start with him but, ironically for these states-rightists, with governors and state legislators even in Red States.

"But don't expect these coalitions to hold together," Rona said, "At the moment they're in bed with each other. In America, as soon they together get rid of the Common Core and teacher accountability, they'll resume fighting amongst themselves. And don't forget, most of the conservatives who have joined with the teachers unions are the very same folks who have been agitating to get rid of teachers unions altogether."

"And in some places like Wisconsin, they've succeeded."

"So expect them to be at each other's throats before too long. But in the meantime . . ."

I winked, "I'll have something to keep me agitated."

"Which you love."