It could get worse.

Published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, March 3, 2016

The opt-out movement has had a real impact, with more parents refusing the tests for their children (“As testing increases, so do calls for an end,” Sunday). Even President Obama has spoken out about the negative impact of over-testing.
  But the testing industry is striking back: The new plan is to replace end-of-year standardized tests with what could be daily testing. The core of education will consist of modules of programmed instruction that students will work through online and be tested on, which will drastically diminish the role of teachers and increase profits of technology companies. The new federal K-12 education law that ends No Child Left Behind announced grants for the development of these teach-and-test machines.
  The National Governor’s Association has admitted that there is little evidence supporting this major shift to what they call “competency-based education,” yet has enthusiastically supported it.
Stephen Krashen
Professor Emeritus
University of Southern California

original article: http://www.philly.com/philly/education/20160228_As_protests_rise_over_high-stakes_tests__more_students_likely_to_opt_out.html

Sources:
National Governor's Association: "Although an emerging research base suggests that CBE is a promising model, it includes only a few rigorous evaluations and analyses of current and ongoing CBE pilots and similar programs" (p. 6).  From:  "Expanding Student Success: A Primer on Competency-Based Education from Kindergarten Through Higher Education.  www.nga.org. 

Additional sources:
McDermott, M. 2015a. Reading between The Lines: Obama’s “Testing Action Plan”  http://educationalchemy.com/2015/10/25/reading-between-the-lines-obamas-testing-action-plan/
McDermott, M. 2015b. Common core and corporate colonization: the big picture. http://educationalchemy.com/2015/10/30/common-core-and-corporate-colonization-the-big-picture/
Robertson, P. 2015a. U.S. Dept. of Ed. and Educational Warfare. http://www.pegwithpen.com/2015/10/us-dept-of-ed-and-educational-warfare.html
Robertson, P. 2015b. Opt out revolution: the next wave. http://www.pegwithpen.com/2015/10/opt-out-revolution-next-wave.html
Talmage, E. 2015a. Dear Mark. http://emilytalmage.com/2015/11/14/dear-mark/
Talmage, E. 2015b. What is proficiency-based learning? http://emilytalmage.com/2015/04/26/save-maine-schools/

Corporate Tool, Margaret Spellings, Is Met with Walkouts on First Day

North Carolina students will never allow the Koch Brothers to destroy their university system:

On Margaret Spellings’ first day in office, hundreds of students and faculty members opted for a less traditional style of education — by walking out of their classes. The walkout — protesting UNC-system President Margaret Spellings’ first day on the job — was organized by the UNC-Chapel Hill BOG Democracy Coalition and Faculty Forward, among other organizations. 

 Protesters took to the steps of Wilson Library, wielding signs while select protesters spoke out about Spellings and her public record. Madeleine Scanlon, a UNC senior arrested at a Board of Governors meeting earlier this year, said the main goal of the walkout was to educate students across the UNC system about Spellings and the board. 

 “People don’t know who the Board of Governors are — they don’t understand why Margaret Spellings needs to go,” Scanlon said. Other walkouts were coordinated with other UNC-system schools. According to Ignite NC, a progressive grassroots organization, more than 5,000 students protested across six campuses. The UNC-Chapel Hill walkout focused on Spellings’ role in implementing No Child Left Behind, her tenure on the board of directors at the Apollo Education Group, Inc. — the parent company of the for-profit University of Phoenix — as well as her stance on LGBT issues and recent board policies affecting historically black colleges and universities.

Read more: http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2016/03/as-unc-system-president-margaret-spellings-walks-in-students-walk-out

What Every Urban School Needs: A Nice White Lady

Mathews Reviews His Own Book

When Jay Mathews rushed out a response to his WaPo editors before my book was even on sale, I wasn't surprised that he would disparaging in his assessment of this, or any, book that provides a critique of the segregated corporate KIPP schools.  

What did surprise me, however, is that he would post a picture of his own book, which was published six years ago as a exuberant paean to the "founders," Feinberg and Levin, as they are referred to by their acolytes.  At the end of Part 2 of his review, published yesterday, he invites the reader to read his book, as well as mine, and decide for yourself who is right and who is wrong.  The problem with this proposal is that the two books, with a couple of exceptions that Mathews seizes upon, cover very different terrain and ask very different questions. 

In fact, Jay's book asks no questions at all but, rather, sets out to tell us how, in a wooden sort of fairy tale fashion, how "two inspired teachers created the most promising schools in America." Mathews would have us believe that this sprouting and kudzu paced growth of KIPP resulted from two young geniuses inspired by a "magical" teacher godmother who sprinkled her fairy dust on them and gave them her blessing. 

The facts, however, are a bit more complicated and prosaic.  KIPP sprang from the corporate conceptual ground provided by Teach for America and its market-centered and publicly-fed neoliberal agenda, and it was fertilized and manicured by tons of tax-sheltered cash provided initially by renowned conservative GAP founder, Donald Fisher.  It did not hurt, either, that KIPP was asked to do a skit at the 2000 National Republican Convention.

As for the godmother teacher in Jay's fairy tale, Harriet Ball, her ideas were harvested by the KIPP machine, and she was left unpaid for her intellectual property.  

The questions that I ask in the preface of Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys through "No Excuses" Teaching are below (from the Preface):

As an antidote to the KIPP Foundation’s marketing and public relations outreach, which can be found in any number of examples from both print and non-print media, this book offers a critical eye and raises serious questions related to public culpability for a punitive type of tax-supported segregated schooling that our dominant culture celebrates only for children who are disenfranchised by poverty and discrimination. 

As one former KIPP teacher wondered aloud near the end of our interview, would such schooling practices that we see at KIPP be allowed for the children of white philanthropists who fund these schools.  Or would KIPP practices be allowed in the private schools attended by the supportive politicians’ children, or for the KIPP administrators and teachers who would never allow their own offspring to be subjected to a harsh, total compliance charter school like KIPP?

            Readers are asked to keep in mind this central question that I try to answer throughout this book: As a result of the spread of the No Excuses charter school teaching model exemplified by KIPP, “who wins and who loses, and by what mechanisms of power?” (Flyvbjerg, 2000).  In addition to trying to answer that core question, this book attempts to unravel a number of conundrums and apparent paradoxes:

1. How did the spread of an unsustainable boutique education intervention like KIPP reach its exemplary status among the advocates of education reform?
2. How did high achievement expectations become exemplified by total compliance enforcements that are applied only to the segregated and economically disadvantaged children?
3. How did economic and social advantages and resources become insignificant factors to school achievement only for those who don’t have such advantages and resources?
4. What rationale is used for insisting that children who are handicapped by poverty and all its attendant problems will achieve equally on standardized measures with children who have every economic and social advantage? 
5. How do the grim and punitive environments of No Excuses schools remain underreported by the media and, otherwise, ignored by policymakers and child welfare advocates?
6. What may serve as more humane, sustainable, diverse, and democratic alternatives to the No Excuses charter school teaching model?

      By presenting the firsthand facts about teaching within total compliance No Excuses schools, this book goes beyond accounts offered in news features, articles, and interviews that focus only on KIPP Model’s test scores and its goals for expanding college opportunities among economically disadvantaged children.  In short, this book offers a naturalistic palliative to the naïve and misleading portrayals of No Excuses schooling that have garnered support among political and economic elites.

      From discipline that crosses over from rigorous intent to abusive practice, and from teacher expectations that go beyond the upper reaches of possibility into the stratosphere of the absurd, this book presents accounts by former teachers who forthrightly share experiences in total compliance schools that have not been heard before and that are not likely to be soon forgotten.

Finally, Work Hard, Be Hard… examines new developments in No Excuses schooling practices that, in addition to academic remediation, now focus on psychological interventions intended to alter children’s neurological schemas in order to effect changes in their emotional and socio-cultural values and behaviors.  Fraught with potential for abuse by non-professionals who remain laser-focused on test performance and grades for “performance character,” these latest developments are explicated and then contrasted with other orientations and practices that acknowledge both the sociological and psychological sides of children’s experiences.  In doing so, I hope to reawaken the virtues of teaching and learning within the expansive boundaries of the science and art of humane pedagogy applied to children who require the most caring, qualified, and experienced teachers.

Shameless Promotion Plus a 20 Percent Discount

Click the image to enlarge.  See promotion code in bottom right.  Thank you.  jh

Jay Mathews and KIPP Journalism

-->

by Jim Horn

Before my book on teaching in KIPP Model schools went on sale yesterday, Jay Mathews and the “No Excuses” charter empire were already at work.  In fact, Jay had already delivered to his Washington Post editors a two-part response/review to my book.  Part 1 appeared yesterday.

Jay’s dubious assessment of Work Hard, Be Hard… may reassure KIPP’s corporate patrons, venture philanthropists, and the hedge funders that all is well in "No Excuses Land," but his remarks do nothing to shed light on the intent and content of my book, which was conceived and executed with the principal aim of allowing former No Excuses teachers to share their stories with the public. At the same time, I wanted to show that these grueling accounts of life inside "No Excuses" corporate charter schools reflect the realization of a paternalistic social vision and a hard-fisted privatization agenda that jointly constitute two of the greatest threats to democracy in our era.  

Because “No Excuses” charters are key to achieving this corporate-sponsored vision and mission, it is, indeed, important that Jay Mathews go all out to downplay my book and the importance of hearing former KIPP teachers’ shared experiences of life inside KIPP.  For if parents, policymakers, and prospective teachers come to understand the patronizing aims, draconian methods, and unhealthy outcomes of the KIPP Model charter schools, then a major tool of the education privatization and social control agenda could be jeopardized. 

Here is a the first clip from Jay’s Part 1 that requires a response:

I wish the book [Work Hard, Be Hard] were not so one-sided. In the great tradition of American polemics, Horn is entitled to his relentlessly anti-KIPP view. But he never satisfactorily explains how a charter network, if it is as harmful to teachers and children as he says, could attract nearly 70,000 students to 183 campuses in 20 states and the District.

I should first acknowledge my utter failure in this regard, for if there is anything I have learned from my years of sparring with the heavyweight champ of KIPP apologists, it is that there is no way to satisfactorily explain to Jay Mathews, at least, how the KIPP Model could reflect anything other than the spit-shined corporate image that he and the Washington Post editorial board have helped to carefully polish for the past decade. My book, however, explores in some measurable depth how we have come to fund thousands of these “No Excuses” charter schools that educate the brown and underprivileged in ways that the white and powerful have chosen for them.

And while Jay has remained steadfast in his support of the “no excuses” philosophy when applied to KIPP students and their teachers, he has found a litany of excuses for looking the other way when confronted with the kinds of abusive school practices that Jay would never, ever allow to be practiced on his own grandchildren. 

My book is not at all the first opportunity that Jay has had to use his position of trust to defend the indefensible.  When confronted, for instance, in 2009 with a detailed, formal state report of abusive and humiliating practices against children by one of KIPP’s school leaders (click here to read the Report in its entirety), Jay Mathews accepted the KIPP principal’s denial of the charges of abuse and illegal acts as fact. Having received an assurance from the alleged offender that student accounts, parent accounts, and school personnel accounts were all wrong, Jay was happy to pursue the story no further.

As blogger and public official, Thomas Mertz, observed in back in 2009 when the KIPP Fresno events unfolded, this kind of spin we may expect from public relations firms out to protect corporate clients, but we cannot accept this kind of unquestioning fealty from those represent themselves as journalists: “… the first step in spinning a story is to ignore any information that undermines your position; the second step is to include information that supports your biases, and throughout use every trick in the book to evoke sympathy for your cause…”

And here is a second clip that deserves comment:

…Having been refused access to KIPP Memphis two years ago, he [Horn] asked me for help. A KIPP spokesman told me the school’s staff had rejected the request because Horn had suggested in one piece that KIPP schools were like concentration camps.

I previously explained to Jay how this KIPP allegation is false in an email dated May 27, 2014, an email that followed Jay’s failed effort to get me permission from KIPP’s home office to visit a KIPP school:

KIPP’s well-financed meme that I called KIPP schools concentration camps has been around for a few years now, and it began when a KIPP fan in New Orleans asked me a question following a presentation at AERA.  I did not say at AERA or elsewhere that KIPP schools are concentration camps, even though I did reference concentration camps in response to the question as to whether or not I have ever visited a KIPP school. I said, no, in fact, I have not, nor have I ever visited a WWII concentration camp.  But the documentation is clear what it was like there in those camps (despite the Holocaust deniers), just as it is clear, thanks to evidence supplied by former teachers, what life is like in a KIPP school–despite the KIPP propaganda pieces.

And even if KIPP’s claim were true, is that enough to bar even the most skeptical researcher from access to a KIPP school?  What kind of exalted petulance are we witnessing? Or does KIPP want to keep out anyone who has looked underneath the KIPP “shine” that is reapplied with daily regularity to disguise some ugly truths?   

Even though I did not get to visit KIPP Memphis, I did find out subsequently that one Memphis KIPP school has test scores are low enough to put them repeatedly on the state's priority schools list (list here), which is comprised of the bottom five percent of test performers. Could a KIPP be shuttered for low performance?  Would the Washington Post cover the story?

Mathews ends his Part 1 with this, which cannot go unanswered:

KIPP teachers welcome into their classrooms students who have said worse things about them. KIPP schools have the power to invite Horn if they want to. Why not give it a try? The vibrant creativity of KIPP teachers refutes his dark perspective, and may persuade him to interview at least some of the many people who love those schools.

Did I say something derogatory about KIPP teachers that I missed?  What was it?  Mathews' feeble attempt to incite KIPP teachers to rush to the defense of KIPP, Inc. will surely fall short if those teachers come to read my book’s recorded accounts by former “no excuses” teachers, many of whom remain friends with teachers who are still in the “no excuses” schools. 

While many of the stories that these former teachers relate are difficult to read for their severity, there remains with most of those interviewed a solid appreciation and empathy for those who continue to struggle within a system that regularly grinds up teachers and spits them out.

Finally, despite Mathews’ clear suggestion that I intentionally avoided interviewing former KIPP teachers who had more positive accounts to share, let me repeat what I have told Mathews previously:  I interviewed every former “no excuses” teacher who contacted me and volunteered to be interviewed.  With one exception, those teachers chose to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals from a system of corporate foundation influence that reaches into every corner of the educational ecosystem.  I will continue to respect that.

Moskowitz Sought "Compassion" for Abusive Teacher

The NYTimes has the latest on the Success Academy abuse story involving a video of a Success Academy teacher berating and humiliating a young student whose work did not measure up to expectations.  This clip offers details from the perspective of the the child's mother, Ms. Miranda:

In two lengthy interviews, she [Ms. Miranda] said that she did not know what was happening in her daughter’s classroom before she saw the video. She said that she was so upset by what she saw — and by the network’s rush to rally around Ms. Dial, while showing little concern for her daughter or other students — that she took the girl out of the school in late January.

Ms. Miranda said that while Ms. Dial had apologized to her, the teacher had never apologized to her daughter. She said that a public relations specialist for Success drafted an email for her, asking The Times not to publish the video, and that at a meeting Ms. Moskowitz held at the school on Jan. 20, Ms. Moskowitz asked the parents to support Ms. Dial and to defend the school to the paper. Ms. Miranda said that when she stood up, identified herself and objected that Ms. Moskowitz was asking parents to support the teacher without even showing them the video, Ms. Moskowitz cut her off.

“She’s like, ‘You had enough to say, you had enough to say,’ and she tried to talk over me,” Ms. Miranda said. “So I just really got frustrated, and I just walked out, and the parents that were concerned followed me, and the parents who were against me and for the teacher” stayed in the auditorium.

Ms. Miranda took her daughter home that morning and did not bring her back to the school. The next week, after confirming that there was a seat in the regular public school where her younger son is in prekindergarten, she withdrew her daughter and placed her in that school.

"back to the issues"

Tennessee Leads the Way

Senator Lemar Alexander's revision of  NCLB known as  ESSA: education::

 

 a)  magpie: Beethoven

b)  Velveeta: Camembert

c)  Republican debates: etiquette

d)  the  Barrett, .50 caliber rifle, the Tennessee official gun: sanity



AP Photo/Seth Perlman, File

• Rounds from the Barrett .50 caliber rifle penetrate light armor, down helicopters, destroy commercial aircraft, and blast through rail cars.

• Rounds from ESSA  destroy public education. 

Susan Ohanian

TNReady NOTReady, Again

From the Dickson Herald, via the Tennessean:

Dickson County Schools have delayed administering the paper version of the state’s new TN Ready standardized tests until March 7 after a delay in receiving the testing materials, the schools director said.

Schools Director Dr. Danny Weeks alerted parents to the issue in a SchoolReach phone message and he also discussed the matter with the county School Board on Thursday night.

Educators and parents had prepared for administering the paper tests on Monday. However, Weeks said the school system had not yet received confirmation the print testing materials had yet shipped Thursday.

The TN Ready tests were first delayed when the online exam version experienced a technology failure Feb. 8 – the first day that online testing platform was used.

About the paper testing materials, Weeks said “because shipping could take two or three days, the school system had no confidence that the test materials would arrive in time for (Monday) testing.”

“Additionally, tests must be unboxed, labeled, and organized once they arrive at schools,” he added. “Lacking any specific information regarding test delivery, school and district leaders decided to move back the testing window to March 7-11.”

Weeks went on to say that each change in date and testing method “further complicates the already difficult transition from traditional testing to TNReady tests.”

“With online testing, students expected to have a calculator built into the test program on the computer, so the school district made no investments in calculators and trained students to use technology-based tools,” Weeks said in a statement. “Now that the test has been moved to a paper version, Dickson County Schools has had to purchase $12,000 in new calculators to make sure that every student had the necessary tools to be successful.”

Weeks said that students with learning difficulties will not have “appropriate accommodations that would have been available had schools known about paper testing earlier in the year.”