The Last Straw, Again

From the Seattle Times:

Cathy Beyer just gave her students the complete opposite of a standardized test.

Her test lasted seven years. She tracked 304 University of Washington students all the way through college. She reviewed coursework. Interviewed them repeatedly about what they learned. Had them write essays to assess their critical thinking. The result is a 428-page book called "Inside the Undergraduate Experience."

Its main finding, not surprisingly, is that college-level learning is so rich, individualized and colored by the various disciplines that there's nothing standard about it.

"We didn't set out to say anything about standardized testing," says Beyer, a researcher in the UW's Office of Educational Assessment.

"But you immerse yourself for seven years in what students learn and how they learn it, and it becomes crystal clear that giving them a centralized, standardized test would be utterly meaningless."

Yet that is exactly what we seem on the verge of doing.

A federal commission has recommended testing for college freshmen and seniors, as a way of colleges proving their worth to the public. Last week, the U.S. Department of Education said it might start withholding financial aid unless colleges show results through measures like testing or how many grads get jobs.

This is the last straw for me. Our mania for standardized testing is out of control. . . .

Vallas and the Future New Orleans Schools Miracle

There could not have a more appropriate finale to National Charter Schools Week than to have diehard EMO advocate, Paul Vallas, announced as the next superintendent of the distressed New Orleans Schools.

Even though you would never know it from reading the New York Times story on Vallas's new adventure and venture, he leaves an unimpressive privatization experiment hanging by a thread in Philadelphia, where a Rand study earlier this year showed the EMO-managed schools underperforming the public schools they were to replace--even though EMOs receive $450-$750 more per student, thanks to Vallas, than the public schools. (Philadelphia officials were less impressed by the Edison-sponsored study by voucher research chef, Paul Peterson, who turned himself into a psychometric pretzel once again in order to present a partly-sunny picture for Whittle.)

With Vallas's spending authority in Philly diminished as a result of a $73.3 million deficit that he created, and with the final vote on the EMO issue there slated for the coming week, perhaps it was high time for Vallas to move on to greener pastures. And there is none greener than New Orleans, where millions of greenbacks are to be made with fewer of those busybody citizens demanding to know how school money is being spent.

With the blessing of the White House to privatize the New Orleans Schools by whatever means, what better chance could Vallas ask for? Maybe this is where Chris Whittle will finally begin to realize his vision--and our nightmare. And perhaps Jeb Bush's investment of Florida state retirement funds will finally begin to pay off. Remember that story?

November 13, 2003—Acting through a captive money management firm, the Florida Retirement System--whose members consist primarily of public school teachers and other public-sector employees--will pay off the debts and buy out the shareholders of the for-profit education firm Edison Schools Inc., it was revealed Nov. 12.

Reported price tag: $174 million.

The Florida Retirement System is chaired by Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, who supported the purchase despite vigorous objections from teacher unions and some investment experts. The decision to buy Edison, which has used school technology as a key sales point in its efforts to take over troubled public schools, is the most controversial move by the $92 billion pension fund since 2001. That's when the fund lost a reported $325 million buying plummeting shares of Enron stock.

In New York City on Nov. 12, Edison shareholders quickly approved the management-led deal. . . .

School Vouchers as Corporate Tax Write-Offs

With Florida's school voucher plan ruled unconstitutional last year, the privatizers are back with a new, old plan: allow corporations to pay for the vouchers and then have the taxpayers give them a dollar-for-dollar tax break for providing an inadequate education in a private school with no accountability. From The Ledger:

Legislation intended to revive a private-school voucher program the Florida Supreme Court struck down last year cleared the Senate.

The defunct Opportunity Scholarship Program had allowed students from failing public schools attend private schools with state-paid vouchers. The Supreme Court ruled it violated the Florida Constitution's requirement for a uniform system of free public schools. The bill (HB 7145) by Sen. Dan Webster, R-Winter Garden, would allow failing school students to obtain vouchers, instead, through another program for students from low-income families. It is financed through corporate income tax credits and was not challenged.

The Senate on Wednesday amended the voucher provision onto the House-passed bill, which otherwise would require Florida's education commissioner to develop a program for improving failing schools. The chamber voted 26-13 for the bill, sending it back to the House.

Different Meeting, Same Lies

From the Citizen-Patriot:

. . . . In attempting to dispel myths about the six-year-old school accountability law, Spellings told educations writers Thursday that NCLB is "not an unfunded mandate" or a one size fits all program.

"It's not a mandate at all," Spellings said, noting that the states set the standards. "It is not a one size fits all federal prescription."

But if state's don't got along with the law, they lose federal funding. So it's a do-this-or-we'll-shut-off-the-valve mandate?

The only mandate, Spellings said, is that Michigan and other states must produce test data and get every child at grade level by 2014.

She also said the federal law does not force teachers to teach to the MEAP test. She went on to defend that practice, though.

"There's not a thing wrong with teaching to the test," Spellings said last night during a Q&A at the Education Writers Association conference in Los Angeles that I'm attending.

Spellings added that teachers have been teaching to tests since the days of Greek philosopher Socrates.

This is the top education official in America. If it were not so embarrassing and scary, it might even be funny. Socrates considered the wise person the one who knows the extent of her own ignorance. Not a chance!

Plans for Hostile Takeover of New Jersey High Schools Continues Unabated

In March we reported on a meeting we attended in Long Branch that was designed to scare the unwary public into believing that New Jersey high schools are going to hell in a handbasket and, therefore, in need of rescue by Achieve, Inc., the Business Roundtable and the U. S. Chamber of Commerce. Now a new meeting is coming up Wednesday in Maplewood, New Jersey. Here are some reasons for you to be there.

If this national and local effort were just a harmless PR campaign to divert attention away from the accelerating exportation of American jobs, this would not be such a big deal. But what is at stake is the soul, the heart, and the legs of American public education. Will public education continue to strive to serve the diverse educational needs of a democratic republic, or will public high schools become corporate training and testing camps for the 21st Century? Be assured--nothing less than the future of the public high school is at stake here.

So this coming Wednesday when the Achieve, Inc. powerpointers begin with their song and dance about the need for more college graduates with high tech degrees, be prepared to share some of the reality. It is not the fault of the American high school that every job that is not nailed down is headed offshore, and it is not the fault of the American high school that the American jobs of the future will be mainly dead-end service work. These realities have resulted in corporate-government decisions, or indecision, as the case may be.

Some facts:
The chart at left (click it to enlarge) shows the type of job growth and job disappearance over the past 20 quarters since 2001, as more and more jobs get exported to cheaper foreign job markets. That line that spiking off the chart? Those are the most dynamic sources of American job growth--dead-end jobs requiring less than a high school education.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, eight of the top 10 fastest-growing occupations through 2014 do not require a bachelor's degree.

Even more graphic is this Table 3, Occupations with the largest job growth, 2004-14, in "Occupational employment projections to 2014," published in the November 2005 Monthly Labor Review. It shows that only five of the thirty jobs with the largest projected growth throught 2014 require a bachelors degree or above. These five jobs requiring bachelors degrees will constitute only 16% of the total number of jobs with the largest job growth. One of the top thirty, registered nurses, will require an associates degree (8% of the total number of jobs with the largest job growth).

The majority of those who are lucky enough to go to college will graduate with debt burdens to Nelnet and Sallie Mae that would choke a horse. Barbara Ehrenreich points out that this harsh reality makes for desperate, resume-padding job seekers who are willing to do anything their potential bosses may ask them to do:

Or maybe what attracts employers to college grads is the scent of desperation. Unless your parents are rich and doting, you will walk away from commencement with a debt averaging $20,000 and no health insurance. Employers can safely bet that you will not be a trouble-maker, a whistle-blower or any other form of non-"team-player." You will do anything. You will grovel.

So if you would like to join the effort to tell the real story behind this attempted hostile takeover of the American high school, be at Columbia High School this coming Wednesday evening.

To make it easy to get there, I have clipped this from the official website:

Event:	Columbia High School--South Orange-Maplewood, 17 Parker Avenue Maplewood, NJ 07040 (973) 378-5269 Fax (973) 378-7607
Description:	Our world is changing – but are New Jersey’s high schools changing with it? Join us for a conversation on our state’s high schools. At each meeting, a variety of topics relating to the future of New Jersey’s high schools will be discussed [bring your prepared notes and line up to speak--they have two microphones waiting to hear from you].
Date:	5/9/2007
Time:	7:00 p.m.
Location:	17 Parker Avenue Maplewood, NJ 07040

Click here to register for this event

Directions: Click here for customized driving directions

Will More Abusive Testing Close the Health Gap?

Perhaps a more pressing and realistic goal would be 100% child health care by 2014. From CBS:

. . . ."It's more than just insurance and lack of insurance, that are keeping children from getting medical care," says Dr. Irwin Redlener, president of the Children's Health Fund of Columbia University.

It's estimated that 9 million children are completely uninsured. But the new study says 11.5 million more kids end up without medical care for part of the year. And another 3 million can't get a ride to the doctor. That's more than 23 million children.

To close the gap, Redlener is on Capitol Hill lobbying for a dramatic expansion of the $5 billion federal Children's Health Insurance Program, or CHIP. Redlener wants to add 9 million people to CHIP, plus dental and mental health benefits and transportation.

The price tag for all that? "Really what we need is $60 billion. Between $50 and $60 billion," he says.

Getting that type of government assistance may be a long shot, but Redlener says it's cheaper than the cost of neglecting the medical needs of a generation of children.

FCAT As "Injurious Deception"

The swooning third-grade reading scores just released in Florida brought this editorial today in the Daytona Beach News-Journal (ht to Marion Brady). A clip:

What the numbers do show is the silliness -- no, the injurious deception -- of using FCAT scores as comparative tools in any way, whether across annual classes, between schools or between counties. Any such comparison would be a discredit to the teachers and the students on the receiving end of the resulting analyses, good or bad. Just as Volusia and Flagler schools have a right to regard their third graders' reading scores skeptically, they should do the same regarding their third graders' better math scores.

How, then, to explain the disparities in numbers? The biggest variable isn't intelligence, quality of teaching or environment. It is, every year by far, the test itself -- those booklets where the questions are never the same in two successive years. Writing test questions isn't an exact science. The biases inherently built into standardized testing, however unintended, have been vastly documented. This year's results strongly suggest the same.

None of those rationales changes the fact that in a few weeks schools will be "graded" individually based on these scores. None of those rationales changes the fact that across the state thousands of third graders will be held back because they failed to meet an arbitrary benchmark, while thousands of 12th graders won't be granted a diploma for failing their next-to-last FCAT chance to pass. Many of those seniors will have accomplished four years' course work well enough to earn a diploma. But they won't, based on a few hours of standardized testing. How productive is that, when it drastically diminishes the students' chance of getting a job?

Science Education is Safe Because---

70% of Republican candidates still believe in evolution.

See the video at Crooks and Liars.

By the way, Tancredo, Huckabee, and Brownback constitute the minority opinion.

The Outraged and Outrageous Thomas Sowell

Kevin Drum blogged it under the title, "Banana Republicanism."

Unbelievable--but here it is from National Review Online:

. . . .The last time I saw a Republican express outrage was 1991, when Clarence Thomas told the Senators what he thought of the smear tactics used against him. Before that, it was Ronald Reagan saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Before that, it was probably Teddy Roosevelt.

Too many people in positions of responsibility act as if these are just positions of opportunity — for themselves. The ones who simply steal money probably do less harm than teachers who propagandize their students, media who slant the news, or politicians who sell out their country’s interests in order to get reelected.

A reader wrote: “Have you ever noticed that opinion polls ask the opinions of people who have no expertise in the subject on which they are being polled and publish these opinions as if they were gospel truth instead of group ignorance?”

Judging by the polls, Republican voters’ memories do not seem to be as short as Senator John McCain may have thought. Judging by press coverage, the media’s memory does not seem to have been as long as he may have thought when he played to that gallery.

A sign of the times: A full-page ad for an Alaska cruise in the left-wing New York Review of Books says, “See Alaska’s Glaciers Before They’re Gone!” Shipmates listed include Ralph Nader and the editor of The Nation magazine.

. . . .

Our education system, our media, and our intelligentsia have all been unrelentingly undermining the values, the traditions, and the unity of this country for generations and, at the same time, portraying as “understandable” all kinds of deviance, from prostitution to drugs to riots.

. . . .

A review of one of the many environmentalist books says that even if you can’t do all you would like toward “living green,” you can at least “congratulate yourself on taking small steps to improve the planet.” That is what environmentalism — and much else on the political Left’s agenda — is really all about, self congratulation.

Just watching Suze Orman for a few moments while channel surfing is enough to make me feel exhausted.

When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.

In his book Income and Wealth, economist Alan Reynolds says that people often form “strong opinions” based on “weak statistics.” Unfortunately, that is also true of a wide range of other issues, from “global warming” to “gender bias.” . . . .

A Concise Primer on NCLB

Here is a clip from a excellent primer on NCLB pubished in the current issue of The Nation. Authors: Linda Darling-Hammon, Deborah Meier, Pedro Neguero, and Velma Cobb:

. . . .A Focus on Testing Rather Than Investing. Most centrally, the law does not address the profound educational inequalities that plague our nation. With high-spending schools outspending low-spending schools at least three to one in most states, multiplied further by inequalities across states, the United States has the most inequitable education system in the industrialized world. School funding lawsuits brought in more than twenty-five states describe apartheid schools serving low-income students of color with crumbling facilities, overcrowded classrooms, out-of-date textbooks, no science labs, no art or music courses and a revolving door of untrained teachers, while their suburban counterparts, spending twice as much for students with fewer needs, offer expansive libraries, up-to-date labs and technology, small classes, well-qualified teachers and expert specialists, in luxurious facilities.

The funding allocated by NCLB--less than 10 percent of most schools' budgets--does not meet the needs of the under-resourced schools, where many students currently struggle to learn. Nor does the law require that states demonstrate progress toward equitable and adequate funding or greater opportunities to learn. Although NCLB requires "highly qualified teachers," the lack of a federal teacher supply policy makes this a hollow promise in many communities.

At a time when the percentage of Americans living in severe poverty has reached a thirty-two-year high, NCLB seeks to improve the schools poor students attend through threats and sanctions rather than the serious investments in education and welfare such an effort truly requires. As Gloria Ladson-Billings, former president of the American Educational Research Association, has noted, the problem we face is less an "achievement gap" than an educational debt that has accumulated over centuries of denied access to education and employment, reinforced by deepening poverty and resource inequalities in schools. Until American society confronts the accumulated educational debt owed to these students and takes responsibility for the inferior resources they receive, Ladson-Billings argues, children of color and of poverty will continue to be left behind. . . .