Grading Texas

Is a struggling student a challenge for a teacher, or a liability that a school administrator must unload? In a blog linked below, veteran educator Anthony Cody makes a strong argument that the highstakes standardized testing mania has encouraged many administrators to treat their failing students as “risky assets” to be jettisoned for the sake of their schools’ accountability ratings and their own professional careers.

Cody compares these school administrators to business managers who seek to get rid of poorperforming investments that weigh down their portfolios. Public schools aren’t supposed to be profitmaking ventures, but Cody argues that No Child Left Behind and other “accountability” requirements have prompted school officials to treat improved test scores as profits and failing scores and those students who make them as liabilities.

“The ideology driving this is rooted in the belief that public schools and their employees must, like businesses, suffer bad consequences if they are ‘unprofitable.’ But in the world of education, the bottom line of dollars and cents has been replaced by data tables that show rates of graduation and standardized test scores,” Cody writes.

In extreme cases, superintendents and principals cheat. Just this month, former El Paso ISD Superintendent Lorenzo Garcia pled guilty in federal court to cheating the accountability system to inflate 10th grade test scores. He did that by moving students who were likely to score poorly on the exam into other grades.

Even in lessextreme cases, the overfocus on test scores can deprive students of other important educational opportunities. And, morally, that is something of a crime too.

-From Education Week

Unless policymakers start listening to teachers, the standardized testing mania is going to get even crazier. Some districts around the country already are conducting standardized tests in art, music and physical education. And, according to the article linked below, one of the pioneers of this expansion has been Mike Miles, the new superintendent at Dallas ISD.

While Miles was still superintendent of a Colorado Springs school district, the district launched a standardized testing program in the visual arts, music and PE as part of its teacher evaluation program. Firstgrade art students, for example, had to write a paragraph about a Matisse painting. And, secondgrade gym students were required to “Draw a picture of how your hands look while they are catching a ball that is thrown above your head.” (Sad to think that somebody actually was paid for coming up with that one.)

I don’t know if Miles has similar ideas for Dallas ISD. But given the furor over the new STAAR testing program and other pressing issues facing that district, I can’t imagine that many Dallas parents would have much patience for more standardized tests. That doesn’t mean, however, that some legislators – the ones who would rather order up more tests than adequately fund the public schools – won’t invite Miles to Austin during next year’s session for a presentation of his “innovative” ideas.

“Race to the Top has promoted this movement to test every subject,” education historian Diane Ravitch recently wrote in her blog. “Arne Duncan (the secretary of education) brandished $5 billion to encourage states and districts to judge teachers by the rise or fall of their students’ scores.”

She added: “The fact that there is no evidence for this method of judging teachers doesn’t matter. Bad ideas backed by big money have a way of catching on, no matter how mindless they are.”

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/06/standardized_tests_for_the_arts_is_that_a_good_idea_.single.html

Maybe the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has more money than it knows how to spend. Or, maybe classroom technology skipped a few generations while I was on vacation. But here is a report, linked below, that the Gates Foundation is spending $1.4 million on the development of a bracelet to measure students’ emotional responses to instruction.

The socalled “engagement pedometer” supposedly would gauge how students are responding to instruction by sending small electric currents across the skin to measure how the kids’ nervous systems are responding to stimuli. There obviously are some “bugs” (an old fashioned term) to be worked out yet, if ever. But, according to this report, the Gates Foundation also suggests these devices could be used in teacher evaluations.

Now, who is evaluating the Gates Foundation?

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2012/06/the_student_engagement_bracelet.html?cmp=ENLEUNEWS2

Now that Mitt Romney has secured the Republican presidential nomination, he no longer has to convince a majority of Republican primary voters that he is a Neanderthal who believes the Earth really may be flat. Now, he feels the need to convince a majority of Americans that he cares what they care about – a quality public education system. (Call it an EtchaSketch moment.)

But he is falling flat on his face.

So far, Romney’s “education policy” consists of attacks on teachers’ unions and President Obama and endorsements of longstanding, pieinthesky proposals to privatize education through expansion of charters and diversion of tax dollars to private schools through “school choice” vouchers. He is perpetuating the myth that charter schools are the magic solution for educational ills when, in truth, charters on the whole are no better or no worse than traditional public schools. Instead of improving the public schools, Romney would tear them down in order to enrich charter and private school operators.

I don’t care how many presidential candidates, governors and entrepreneurial education “experts” (holding out their hands for tax dollars) laud these cherrypicking alternatives. The vast majority of children will continue to be educated in traditional public schools, and that’s where our tax dollars need to be spent.

Romney’s antipublic school stance now should be no surprise. As governor of Massachusetts, he cut education funding and student aid. He and Rick Perry share a dim view of the public schools and have little empathy for young people of modest means trying to make it through college.

Romney’s education budget cuts in Massachusetts had the same effect as Perry’s education budget cuts in Texas. Teaching jobs were lost, class sizes increased and educational quality suffered. As president, Romney would take the same ax to the federal public education budget.

Like Texas’ budgetslashing governor and legislative majority, Romney says he doesn’t believe that class size matters, despite an overwhelming amount of research to the contrary. (Check it out by clicking on the link at the end of this post.)

Class size does matter. And, so do elections. As president, Romney would be for public education on a national scale what Rick Perry is for public schools in Texas – bad news.

http://www.classsizematters.org/researchandlinks2/