AFT Calls for Abolishing NCLB

Some great reporting here by George Schmidt at the AFT Convention for Substance:

Outgoing AFT president Ed McElroy calls for abolition of No Child Left Behind

By George N. Schmidt

CHICAGO. NAVY PIER AT THE NATIONAL CONVENTION OF THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS. JULY 11, 2008.

In a major address to the 3,000 delegates to the national convention of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), outgoing AFT President Ed McElroy announced that the union was no longer in favor of tinkering with the federal "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) law and called for the abolition of NCLB.

According to the press release summarizing McElroy's remarks: "McElroy pledged that the AFT would work with the next president to move beyond the No Child Left Behind Act (which he called 'an idea whose time has gone') to 'create a new education law that respects the knowledge of classroom professionals and helps teachers and paraprofessionals provide our students with the high-quality education they deserve."

To the loudest cheers of his valedictory speech, McElroy repeated that No Child Left Behind cannot be repaired, and had to be replaced. He reminded the delegates that their duties includes electing an even greater majority of Democratic Party candidates to the House and Senate in Washington in November, and to replacing George W. Bush with Illinois Senator Barack Obama, who received the endorsement of the AFT executive council in June and who will receive the backing of the convention later this weekend. . . .

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What George Wood Learned

HT to Monty Neill. From Forum for Education and Democracy:

For one of the few times this year, I am alone at school. It is the weekend after all the reports were due for state accountability, after the final requests for next year’s materials were sent to the treasurer’s office, and after I sent off my final report to the school board. Time to clean up my desk, catch up on some reading, write some notes to faculty members—and think about what I learned in school this year.

Working both in a school and with The Forum provides an opportunity to feel the juxtaposition between the rhetoric of policy debates and the reality of the day-to-day lives of our children, their teachers, and their families. Here are a few things I learned this year working in both worlds:

Parents trust the judgment of their child’s teachers above all other measures of student or school success. I have yet to have a parent enter my office and ask for her child’s test scores to see how s/he is doing in school. I have fielded requests to meet with teachers, to review graded work, to observe a classroom, or to discuss with the teacher how the child can do better. This should not be a surprise, given the recent AP poll that showed nearly 70% of parents (and the general public) think classroom work and homework, as compared to standardized tests, are the best measures of student learning and engagement.

What’s missing from this equation is a policy environment that honors the judgment of teachers, supports that judgment, and engages parents in the process. Instead, policy makers tend to rely on large-scale, standardized measures of achievement in which the public has very little trust. The good news is that, among my friends and colleagues at the state and federal level, there is a growing awareness that something is amiss in how we judge our schools. We are using measures in which the public has little faith, measures that are not serving our students’ developmental learning needs .

The question is this: Can we have standards without standardization? If we pay attention to the performance assessments used in places like Rhode Island and other parts of the world, the answer is yes. (See our report on this here.) So maybe the real question is whether or not the reality on the ground can influence the policy made at the top.

There is much to be learned from educators around the world and the policies that support them. When The Forum released its report, Democracy At Risk, it was with a fair amount of internal discussion around the issue of international comparisons of schools. Many critics have pointed out that international test scores unfairly paint all of our schools as failing and are used to alarm the general population. There is also the question of what types of measures these comparisons rely upon. Fair enough. Our intention is to encourage debate about these things and see what we can learn from examining them.

What I learned from looking at these far-from-perfect numbers is that the nations that do well on these comparisons do things I wish we did, including:
Funding their schools equitably, often nationally, and refusing to allow the disparities we see in this nation;
Taking care of their children by providing national health care, early childhood education, safe neighborhoods, and quality housing;
Supporting a professional teaching corps by providing financial support to become a teacher, ensuring mentoring programs, and investing in ongoing professional development;
Making sure there is a supply of well-prepared and well-supported teachers for every child and every school;
Relying upon performance assessments, and assessments of learning at the school and classroom level, to gauge how schools are doing;
Using assessments that engage students in higher order thinking processes to solve real-world problems; and
Refusing to use standardized assessments for high-stakes decisions.

Every time I mention this list to policy-makers they seem astounded. What I have learned this year is that we have a mythological notion of what is going on in schools around the world. We believe something like this: In other nations kids go to school all the time, study primarily math, take tests almost daily, and are subjected to a great deal of drill and memorization work. In fact, nothing could be further from the case and to pursue a policy agenda based on this mythology will deeply damage our schools.

Education is still not an election issue—and maybe that is a good thing. Again, according to polling, education is not an issue very high on the charts when it comes to national elections. According to the Public Education Network’s survey, education follows well behind gas prices and employment when respondents are asked about crucial issues. And when it comes to a presidential candidate, only 10% of respondents indicate that his/her stand on education is of most importance.

That is not to say there are not significant differences between the two major party candidates when it comes to education. What it does indicate is that local schools are, for the most part, seen as just that—local. The public knows they carry the responsibility for their schools. But they also want the federal government to help carry out this responsibility—as opposed to a ‘scolding nanny’ who seems to do nothing but demand better results on measures of limited value while carrying out the task with fewer and fewer resources.

We know our schools have a national impact; most importantly on the type of citizens we provide our democracy. As such, they should be part of our national policy debates--which takes me back to the two other things learned this year. What we need is a system of national policy supports for schools that insures every child, regardless of condition, has equal access to a good school, with good teachers, where what they learn is judged by what they can do on complex tasks.

That may be too much to wish for by the time I get back to this desk in August. But what I have learned is that we know how and what to do—I do not yet know if we have the will to do it.

New FairTest Ad

SAT: No Benefit, Big Harm

From Stan Katz at the Chronicle Review:

The Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley has quietly been doing some of the most significant higher education policy research I know of. Spurred by the vote in California in 1996 to end affirmative action in the state’s colleges and universities, and blessed with a vast database on student performance in the huge UC system, researchers at CSHE have been asking the Big Question about college admissions — what are the most reliable objective predictors of success in college for high-school students? When the first results were published several years ago, I found them both troubling and significant, for the researchers found that the best predictor of college success (measured by course grades) was grades in high-school college preparatory courses. They also argued that using grades as the criterion for
admissions had the least adverse effect on the success of poor and minority college applicants. And, significantly, high-school grades were not just predictive of success in the freshman year, but of cumulative GPA over four years, and four-year graduation rates.

An important follow-up report by Saul Geiser of CSHE was published a few days ago. It is entitled Back to the Basics: In Defense of Achievement (and Achievement Tests) in College Admissions (click here), and it is a strong confirmation of the earlier findings. It is, in particular, a criticism of the usefulness of the SAT I examination as a general predictor of college success. But it is even more critical of the assumption
that the SAT I will identify promising poor and minority students more adequately than high-school GPA — the theory was that if one could test for ability to learn rather than actual learning outcomes, one could discount the negative impact of the poor secondary schools to which the poor and minorities were assigned. But the California data, we are told, shows that the achievement test adds nothing to the predictive value of course grades and achievement tests. They show, in fact, that the SAT “has a more adverse impact on poor and minority applicants than high-school grades and achievement tests.” The report finds that AP courses (though not AP scores) are “good predictors of student success in college,” but AP courses are limited by their availability across high-school systems nationally.

I am not a testing expert, but I have been following the CSHE data analysis with great interest and increasing conviction. I share the center’s concern both with accuracy of prediction of college success, and the relationship of prediction to equity in admissions. These data seem to me to add tremendous force to the growing lack of confidence in the reliability of aptitude tests. And most important, in an era in which affirmative action in college admissions seems to be rapidly disappearing, tests that disadvantage the poor seem particularly objectionable, given the relationship between higher education and life outcomes. I have to confess that the CSHE conclusions reinforce my teacher’s bias for subject-matter mastery as the criterion of achievement. And, if nothing else, it should be reassuring to students to know that some fair measure of what they have actually learned will be the primary criterion upon which admissions decisions are based — rather than the black box of achievement tests. If nothing else, we should be grateful to CSHE for providing a solid statistical basis for public discussion of what is too often more an emotional and political than a policy debate.

Obama, McCain, and the Disappearing Light Between Them on Education

There are two policy issues that threaten the creation of quality public schools for all who choose them, and Barack Obama and John McCain support both of them: corporate charter schools and teacher raises based on test scores.  

There are many liberals who believe that they, themselves, support charter schools for the promised innovation that such schools of the imagination, well, promise.  As the liberal script goes, charter schools offer the opportunity for parents and teachers to form innovative programs that serve various niches within communities by focusing the school environment and curriculum on things that matter to the constiutents who come together to learn and teach, all the while forgoing the control and bureaucracy of local school boards.

Sounds great, right?  Power to the people!  Well, to the anti-public school wing of American school reform--the wing with the money--this kind of liberal blather sounded the dinner bell for a new feeding line for the ed industry's corporate welfare artists and the religious welfare scammers who believe the solution to urban poverty is a uniform scripted curriculum for uniformed children who are fed a Spartan diet of behavior modification with their boiled reading and math.  

These KIPPster schools, and the corporate charters that emulate them, have an effective PR machine (the American media) that boasts the high percentages of their graduates who attend college.  What is not talked about are the large numbers of children and parents who cannot hack the regimentation or cognitive decapitation on which these schools build their mindless parrot learning programs. Many urban parents desperate for something besides the demoralized poverty schools that have been blown up by NCLB look to these newly-painted child workhouses with a hope and a prayer.

So much for liberal dreaming.  Not only have the privatizers coopted a good figment of liberal imagination and operationalized it for their own economically-driven ends, but they have used the same idea to attack humane teaching, teacher tenure, collective bargaining, and retirement plans.  What about school libraries and librarians?  Who needs them in the small-school chain gangs?  Who has time for the library--if there were one?  

So while both liberal and conservative politicians rub their chins and consider the 20% payroll savings that the charterizers promise by cutting teacher pay in the charter detention camps, they have arrived at a scheme by which teachers in these "schools" may earn back the pay they will have lost through charterization:  higher pay for test scores.  The vortex tightens, and the dizzying spin of mindlessness accelerates.  

Such visionary planning leads me to conclude at this point in "yes, we can" campaign of 2008 that any real audacity of hope came from those audacious enough to believe that the new boss will be any different on education than the old boss.  Read 'em and weep.

We, the People

Sign up to save the Constitution. HT to Susan Ohanian for information on People's Campaign for the Constitution.

Michelle Rhee Using Gates and Broad $$ to Bribe Teachers Out of Tenure and Seniority

What happens when public officials team up with corporations to use tax-exempt corporate foundation money in an attempt to crush teachers' rights and to further the agenda of societal segregation based on test scores?

We're about to find out in DC. From WaPo:

By V. Dion Haynes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 3, 2008; B01

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee is proposing a contract that would give mid-level teachers who are paid $62,000 yearly the opportunity to earn more than $100,000 -- but they would have to give up seniority and tenure rights, two union members familiar with the negotiations said yesterday.

Under the proposal, the school system would establish two pay tiers, red and green, said the union members, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are confidential. Teachers in the red tier would receive traditional raises and would maintain tenure. Those who voluntarily go into the green tier would receive thousands of dollars in bonuses and raises, funded with foundation grants, for relinquishing tenure.

Teachers in the green tier would be reviewed yearly and would be allowed to continue in their jobs only if they passed an evaluation and boosted students' test scores, the union members said.

Under Rhee's proposal, raises to the green tier would be more than the 19 percent increase over five years she is proposing for all teachers, the union members said.

They said teachers are opposed to giving up seniority and tenure, no matter the size of their raise, and probably would reject such a proposal.

"You may be trading off your future, your tenure, your job security," a union member said. "When you trade that, it seems to me you're not getting much."

. . . .

The two union members said Rhee wants to use donations from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation and the Broad Foundation, in part, to pay for the raises and bonuses. Officials from the Gates and Broad foundations would not comment on proposed future funding. . . .

Slavery By Another Name

HT to Jerry Bracey for this interview link at Bill Moyers Journal:

Bill Moyers interviews Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief of the WALL STREET JOURNAL, about his latest book, SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME, which looks at an "age of neoslavery" that thrived from the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II.

Watch the interiew here.

And read about the same era in industrial education from educational historian, James Anderson.

Reading First: "unproven magnet of corruption"

From USA Today:

WASHINGTON — Is the federal government getting out of the reading business?

The Senate Appropriations Committee voted last week to eliminate funding for Reading First, the groundbreaking but controversial Bush administration program that has given states $1 billion a year since 2002 to teach low-income elementary schoolers to read. A House committee also had voted to eliminate funding; if money is not restored before the federal budget is approved in the fall, the program could end.

Democrats in Congress say the program was an unproven magnet for corruption. House hearings last year focused on financial ties between its top advisers and major textbook publishers, who account for a large share of materials schools use. A U.S. Justice Department investigation, begun last year, is still pending. . . .

Obama-Samia

At a rare moment in history when the backwards-gazing, morally bankrupt social antiquarians of the Right are rocking on their heels ready to topple over, at a time when we have a President who is so profligate, reckless, and ignorant that the Bubbas of America would seriously consider a Black man for the White House, we have a candidate who has chosen to stick with the playbook of propping up the the losing policies that the rest of America is ready to knock over.

Whether it is school privatization by charter, open discrimination through "faith-based" religious welfare programs of dubious legal standing, or telecom immunity for illegal spying on citizens, Obama appears to have stepped in to make sure these losing propositions remain on the front burner. One can only guess that the geniuses who are advising him would like to turn him into that rarest of commodities, a black Republican who can win by making McCain's campaign unnecessary.

This is certainly not what so many of us hoped for (remember that word?) when we saw Obama talk about change, audacity, standing up, democratic principles, fairness, equity, the Constitution, and all the other forgotten values that once formed the ideological core of the other party.

What Obama has managed to do since the primary is to prove that he doesn't cower like the Democrats of old, mildly trying to maintain some integrity by deflection and glad-handing. Rather, he bravely proclaims as his own what the most of America is ready put in File 13. If this rightward maneuvering continues, it will surely lead enough of those who were inspired for awhile during the primaries to stay home, thus making a contest out of what was sure to be a blowout.