"Scientifically-Based" Teacher Preparation?

"Scientifically-based research" has been the new mantra for federal education grants since passage of NCLB in late 2001. The phrase, "scientifically-based," is mentioned in the context of reading instruction, alone, nearly 50 times in NCLB. In 2002, Grover Whitehurst, the head of the Institute of Education Sciences and final arbiter for federal grant apps, testifed before a Senate Committee about the necessity for federal funding to be based upon scientific data: "Whitehurst explains that adherence to scientifically-based research will be a critical factor in the funding decisions and endorsement of programs that fall under the purview of NCLB."

In fact, any materials purchased by principals to meet NCLB testing requirements must be validated by "scientifically-based research" before Federal dollars can be spent. (The implications of this requirement will be discussed in subsequent posts.)
The US DOE has gone so far, in fact, to write into its rules and regs requirements now that all federally-funded research must be scientifically based (Fed. Register 1/25/05):

We take this action to focus Federal financial assistance on expanding the number of programs and projects Department-wide that are evaluated under rigorous scientifically-based research methods in accordance with the ESEA of 1965, as reauthorized by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

With all of this emphasis on science for Federal spending decisions, and with all the good research by Linda Darling-Hammond and other scholars that demonstrates the value of college teacher preparation for teacher candidates, one must wonder how the US DOE came to a decision to fund a reckless venture for teacher preparation that, 1) has no research to support it, scientific or otherwise, and 2) disregards all of the scientifically-based research that clearly shows teacher retention advantages and student learning advantage when teachers have been prepared to teach by university teacher education programs.

We are not likely to see a clearer domestic case of misappropriation of Federal monies, just as we are not likely to find a more hypocritical, cynical, and selective use of policy used to drive an ideological agenda aimed at the further weakening of public schools.

ABCTE and Federal $$ Stream

Gerald Bracey, educational researcher and, otherwise, impeccable source, points out that Kathleen Madigan seems to have had it wrong: ABCTE is not mentioned in the NCLB Act. In examining ABCTE's own press releases, however, they offer that US DOE began the money flow to them in the Fall of 2001. Their October 1, 2001 press release touts the initial 5 million coming over two months before Congressional passage of NCLB.

Here is more on this interesting timeline:

• March 18, 2003. Paige promotes ABCTE at the National Press Club (3 months before they announce the development of their first credentialing tool), where he says of ABCTE, “It focuses on what teachers need to know and be able to do in order to be effective, instead of the number of credits or courses they’ve taken . . . . It demands excellence rather than exercises in filling bureaucratic requirements.”
  

• June 4, 2003. ABCTE announces it will partner with Promissor to develop the first series of rigorous exams for its Passport to Teaching certification.
  

• June 15, 2003. The Secretary of Education endorses ABCTE (two weeks after the announcement of work starting on the first series of tests) as an approved path to the Federal requirement for "highly-qualified" teachers. Some quotes from the US DOE document available here:
  

The American Board “bases its certification not on whether an applicant has come up through the traditional route, such as a college of education, but on whether that teacher knows his or her academic content and classroom management skills,” says American Board president Kathleen Madigan (2003). “That’s teacher excellence—and that’s ‘highly qualified’” (p. 26).

“Some people will argue that this change is too radical, that it’s too risky, that we should maintain the status quo,” Secretary Paige added. “Well, I agree that it’s radical. It’s radically better than the system we have now, a system that drives thousands of talented people away from our classrooms” (p. 27).

• September 25, 2003. ABCTE announces the awarding of a 35 million dollar grant from US DOE.
  

ABCTE Written into NCLB Legislation?

In poking around in the California's State website hoping to find out more on the fake credential story in the LA Times yesterday, I came across more interesting history on ABCTE, the sham operation designed to introduce "market forces" to teacher preparation. It seems the Dr. Kathleen Madigan, President of ABCTE has been pitching her goods in California as well. This report on Madigan's latest visit is from the State's website. It is interesting for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the self-reported claim that ABCTE was approved in NCLB before they ever offered their first Internet test to certify a teacher. From the California Commission for Teacher Certification (CCTC), August 2004:

PSC 4A-1
Update on the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE) Passport to TeachingSM Certification Program

Introduction

In 2003, the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (American Board or ABCTE) began offering a standards based approach using individualized learning programs and set of rigorous examinations for potential teachers seeking a national level license. The Professional Teaching Knowledge exam and the Elementary Education exam were first administered in September 2003. The English Language Arts and Math content exams were administered in February 2004. ABCTE is recognized in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) as an approved provider (Title II, Part A, National Activities Section). Teacher candidates who meet ABCTE standards are considered "Highly Qualified" by the federal government. The information provided in this item briefly describes the four exams that the American Board developed and currently administers.

The next section is key, too. Here, Madigan provides more on the timeline as to when ABCTE (or what was planned to be ABCTE) landed its first $5 million from the Federal treasury. This is consistent with her claim that ABCTE was written into NCLB, because the date of the initial Dept. of Ed. grant was Sept. 2001, before final passage of the Act. Also pointed out here in the State's summary of Madigan's informative presentation is the fact that ABCTE sucked another $35 million dollars($35,000,000) in 2003 from the US Dept. of Education to continue its fake preparation of teacher candidates for another 5 years. Where could all this money be going? To improve teacher quality? Or to maintain a website and line the pockets of the education reform profiteers in Washington? More from Madigan's to the CCTC, August 2004:

History of the American Board

Created in 2001 through a partnership between the Education Leaders Council (ELC) and the National Council on Teacher Quality, the American Board was developed to create options in teacher certification.

The National Council on Teacher Quality received a $5 million dollar, two-year grant from the United States Department of Education's (USDOE) Fund for the Improvement of Education (September, 2001) for the purpose of creating the American Board. The American Board used a standards based approach to teacher certification including preparation resources, online advisors, and computer based teacher exams.

Passing scores were adopted for the Elementary Education (K-6), English (6-12), Mathematics (6-12) and the PTK exams in 2003. In 2003-04, the USDOE awarded the American Board an additional five-year, $35 million dollar grant. This grant is intended to "implement innovative teacher recruitment strategies, expand subject area certifications, develop preparation resources, create mentoring programs using technology and fully evaluate the effectiveness of this approach" (Test Development Process: Executive Summary, June 2004). At this time, federal funding is ABCTE's primary source of revenue.

Currently four states, Florida, Idaho, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania have considered and adopted the ABCTE Passport to TeachingSM as an alternative route to certification. The Florida State Board of Education and the New Hampshire State Board of Education voted in June 2004 to accept the American Board, Passport to TeachingSM as a new route to full certification for the state's public school teachers.

Florida, imagine that!

This part of the NCLB story is consistent with the other elements of the emerging travesty and tragedy that clearly show NCLB as the manufactured problem that would be solved by the testing/textbook industry and the corporate welfare artists on the MacSchool Boards of Directors and conservative think tanks with their self-published fake research. Their advisors, too, sit on "non-partisan" and "non-profit" Boards of the Education Leaders Council (is that Gene Hickok's name I see there!), the National Council on Teacher Quality (chaired by Andy Rotherham, is it?), and other professional-sounding hack outfits who sell their services to the testing-technological complex.

Is there a real education reporter out there interested in this story? Just one?

Highly Qualified Fake Teachers in Urban Areas

There is a story today in the LA Times about the fake credentialing that is going on in L.A. for teachers who work in poor urban schools. Apparently this is being done to circumvent the "highly-qualified" teacher requirements of NCLB.

These guys should have checked out a few Web sites--there are fake ways to become "highly-qualified" that are endorsed by the U. S. Department of Education. When the NCLB wizards included their demand for highly-qualified teachers in every school by 2005, they knew, of course, that their demand would create a big problem that would be solved by offering alternate routes for teacher certification. Falling short of the bombing that NICHD Director, Reid Lyon, wanted for the colleges of education, this cynical scheme offered a chance to have teacher candidates avoid the "liberal agenda of teacher education programs," while offering a chance for some of the White House's cronies in the ed biz to engage in some real education reform profiteering. The American Board for Certification of Teacher Education is one such opportunity for teacher candidates and uncertified teachers to become credentialed and certified without ever taking an education course.

ABCTE offers certification via Internet test-taking, which is handled by Pearson Education, a division of McGraw-Hill. Credentials are offered for beginning and “master” teachers, and neither credential requires any coursework in education. ABCTE requires a Bachelors Degree and $500 for the Internet test, and 100 dollar discount coupons are often available on the Web site.

The Back to Basics Redux crowd even got the Dept. of Education to provide grant money to help set up their venture, and they did something, who knows, to get verbal support by former Sec. Paige for ABCTE. In the DOE Secretary’s 2003 Meeting the Highly Qualified Teachers Challenge (pdf), the Secretary enthused: “States could decide that individuals who pass the relevant sections of the American Board assessment would be considered fully certified to teach, regardless of where they learned the important knowledge and skills that were tested” (p. 5).

Did I say this outfit was started by by Eugene Hickok, Paige's Deputy Secretary, and other charter members of the Education Leaders Council. Hickok also happens to be a former Commissioner of Education for Pennsylvania, one of the four states that now accept ABCTE credentials to fulfill regular teacher certification requirements. Imagine that!

Drill and Kill Preschools

Here is a very good article, "A Dream of Preschool for All," from the New York Times News Service that deserves wide circulation, although Google has it only on AZ Central. Not only does it lay out a convincing argument for universal preschool, but it also provides an historical context for the predictable disagreement today on how those preschools should be conducted. Professor Zigler, Headstart's first director notes:

"Ever since Sputnik went up," recalls Zigler, decision makers have vacillated between emphasizing cognitive skills "and focusing on the whole child." The skill-and-drill mentality fostered by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which represents the most recent swing of the pendulum, has reached preschool. Many prekindergartens now stress reading readiness. And because there are only so many hours in a preschool day, they devote less time to encouraging creativity or motivating 4-year-olds to work and play well with others. It is in Head Start that this shift - away from social-emotional development and problem-oriented learning, toward decoding language and numbers - is most fiercely contested. The stakes are high. The outcome will not only mold Head Start but also affect the nature of states' prekindergarten initiatives.

What is not addressed here is the historical precedent for two both models to be used, with the choice depending upon the family income of the children who are to be enrolled. In the early development of the kindergarten, we saw the use of the more harsh and demanding model in the poor urban areas, whereas the caring, whole child approach was reserved for the middle and upper classes.

The neocon traditionalists of today want nothing more than the elite, Protestant, captitalist-patriots of old. They want a controllable work force that doesn't ask questions, they want to maintain white privilege even with the inevitability of an emerging brown majority, and they want these things more than ever. Is there any doubt, then, why this round of back-to-basics appears more like a bare-knuckled assault on the poor and working classes than it does an education reform. The most disturbing part is that many of these "reform" advocates are so ideologically blinded that they cannot see the racism that is at the heart of their social engineering plans. The enraging part, of course, is that the cynical manipulators who are pulling the political strings know exactly what they are doing.

NCLB and Military Recruiters

One little known part of the 600+ pages of the No Child Left Behind Act allows military recruiters access to high school student records, SS numbers, etc. If you have a child in high school or about to enter high school, read this advice published here in the New York Daily News.

Does Testing Children Make Adults Stupid, Too?

Evidence is now emerging that the current testing frenzy sweeping the nation is having a similar stupidifying effect on adults that it has on the children who are being tested. In Colorado, for instance, the Rocky Mountain News reports that flattening reading scores have caused some school officials to react in ways that would suggest a total loss of rationality. Here are the trends in reading (a totally predictable leveling) that have Colorado educators wringing their hands babbling to one another:

The percentage of Colorado fourth- through 10th-graders reading at or above grade level increased from 2002 to 2003, but has remained fairly flat ever since.

• 2002 58.6
• 2003 65.0
• 2004 65.1
• 2005 65.6

To boost test scores, one literacy director proposes to consciously drain any remaining joy of learning all the way down to kindergarten: "We need to prepare our students at an earlier age," DeLong said. "Even at the kindergarten level, we need to get kids to think about what they're reading or what's being read to them." Hmm, I wonder how that will work for children at this developmental level--and how that will help those stubborn scores in 4th grade.

Other signs that testing might be associated with adult literacy directors losing their minds can be seen in the belief that namby-pamby narrative literature might the culprit in these pancaking test scores. Bring on more more structure, more non-fiction, Delong says--boys like it, and boys need to raise their scores more than girls.

The article does close, however, with evidence that there may be hope for a restoration of sanity once the National Reading Panel propaganda (as documented in the book reviewed here) is put in the garbage can, along with the drill-and-kill curricula that it has inspired:

Judith Casey, the immediate past president of the Colorado Council of the International Reading Association, theorized that the more structured reading programs some districts implement with Reading First funds may have contributed to the state's flat scores.

"With older kids," she said, "I wonder if that's leading to boredom and limited student investment because they're really not given the opportunity to do thinking on their own."

Imagine that!

SemiDems and NeoCons

Susan Ohanian carries news of the latest venture by Andy Rotherham, rising star of the SemiDems, those inheritors of the decade of Clintonian kowtowing to the kinder and gentler fascism of the 1990s. Representing the best of NeoCon Lite thinking on all matters of education policy, Rotherham and other underemployed DLC advisors and former Clinton speechwriters are now elbowing their way to the educational testing trough in hopes of sustaining their own contributions to the continuing deconstruction of the American public education system.

As the Testing Results are Tabulated . . .

News stories abound this time of year with test score news, some praising, some lambasting, some mixed. As we move closer toward 2014 and the impossible dream of 100% proficiency in math and reading, we are likely to see much more lambasting than praise, which has always been a primary goal of the education privatizers now installed in the White House and the Dept. of Ed. The strategy has been from the get-go to weaken support of public education by making demands that are impossible to reach, thus throwing open the doors to corporate welfare MacSchools that will take public money to privately manage education. I take this opportunity to quote from a presentation I did recently on this subject:

No Child Left Behind is different from all the other educational reforms that have preceded it—this time the reformers are assured of a win. If schools are able to achieve the impossible and attain the 100 percent math and reading proficiency by 2014 that the legislation requires, then the reformers will have threatened and shamed their way to educational success. If the more likely scenario develops, however, and a large majority of American schools are clear failures or on the “watch-list” in 2014, then the road to school privatization will be clear sailing. By then, American parents will be shell-shocked and willing to try anything to avoid another one of those Federally-mandated letters telling them that their children are failing because their schools are failing. And state legislatures, broken financially and in spirit by then from the burdens of NCLB implementation, will be eager, perhaps, to turn the whole effort over to an education industry that will be ramped up, ready and waiting to accept public dollars to create the MacSchools of the 21st Century. And never mind that Johnny’s reading teacher will be outsourced to Ireland or Sri Lanka and connected by an Internet link.

What separates the current reform efforts from all others in American history is the degree to which millions of American children are suffering, are dropping out, are HAVING self-efficacy CRUSHED, and are being labeled as failures at an early age in ways that will forever leave them behind in disenfranchised worlds of poverty that no standard or test or crassly-disguised ideology can touch. Beyond the utter and tragic realities at Alpha and the thousands of other schools like it, there is a deeper tragedy still: for were we to achieve the impossible as required by NCLB and its 100 percent testing proficiency requirement, we will have by then narrowed the focus of the school curriculum and the purposes of school to the confines of that which is tested. Regardless of how valid those tests are likely to be, this will sadly and tragically leave us even more unprepared to deal with the changing world events and challenges that will assuredly come, more unaware and unappreciative of our own diversity and democratic potential that our future will require, and more blinded to our imaginative and critical capacities that have thus far assured our cultural and scientific eminence in the world of nations. Is this the educational success to which we aspire? If so, then what should we call failure?

There is no doubt that these continuing waves of testing reforms help to move attention away from the more powerful and more blameworthy reasons for our social, economic, or moral quandaries. As Deborah Meier pointed out recently at a Teachers College symposium, here we are demanding that schools be accountable for closing the achievement gap between the poor and the wealthy at the same time the Federal government works overtime to phase out estate taxes and to give more advantages to the wealthy. At the same time, NCLB continues to play upon the secular faith of the American people in the power of schooling, while diverting attention from the Law’s shortcomings by attacking any opponents of the Law as bigots, as exhibiting the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” If I had to subscribe (which I do not) to the binary thinking that this criticism embodies, I would certainly choose the soft bigotry of low expectations over the implacable racism exhibited by demanding the impossible from those least able to deliver and most vulnerable to the savagery that is being leveled against them.

Fair and Balanced Religious Education in Texas?

First published in 1690, the most famous of the Puritan schoolbooks, the New England Primer, starts its religious indocrination with the letter A: "In Adam's fall, we sinned all."

Over 300 years later, protestant descendants of the theocratic Puritans continue to advocate for schools that support their religious beliefs. They do not seem to notice that the Colony has grown, or that they are no living living in a Biblical Commonwealth, or that other religions resent their proselytizing in the public schools.

The latest dust-up comes from Texas, where the Odessa school board is struggling to determine the suitability of Bible course backed by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools and conservative fundamentalists such as James Dobson.

Whether or not the Bible course passes muster for non-sectarian bias, there appears to remain some factual issues, as reported in the NY Times article: "Some of the claims made in the national council's curriculum are laughable, said Mark A. Chancey, professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, who spent seven weeks studying the syllabus for the freedom network. Mr. Chancey said he found it "riddled with errors" of facts, dates, definitions and incorrect spellings. It cites supposed NASA findings to suggest that the earth stopped twice in its orbit, in support of the literal truth of the biblical text that the sun stood still in Joshua and II Kings."

I think that even John Winthrop, the Puritan leader who called democracy the "meanest form of government," would have insisted on factual accuracy to promote his cause. Religious partisans, they were; but intellectually dishonest, they were not.