Leonie Haimson and Rachel Stickland are warriors for student privacy. Together, they mobilized parents in state after state to oppose inBloom, the massive data-mining project funded by the Gates and Carnegie Corporations for $100 million with software developed by Rupert Murdoch’s education division; thanks to their efforts, inBloom folded.
But the data mining hasn’t stopped. Vendors are eager to get your child’s name, address, grades, records, interests, and hundreds of other personally identifiable bits of data. We thought our children’s data was confidential and protected by federal law, but as Haimson and Stickland explain in this article, this is no longer the case because the U.S. DOE revised regulations in 2008 and 2011 to make data mining possible without parental consent.
Now Congress is revising the privacy law, but it is inadequate to protect children’s privacy. Haimson and Stickland explain what needs to be done to stop the commercial…
Decades of research now reveal that charter and private schools do not produce student achievement superior to existing public schools.
Since politicians and education reformers are fully committed to charter and private schools, we have reason to be optimistic that existing public schools now provide the market pressure necessary for charter and private schools to improve:
Public school provide community-based education guaranteed to all students in that community, rendering the need to choose or wait for that choice to create the sort of education children deserve unnecessary.
Public schools by law fully serve English language learners, high-poverty students, minority students, and special needs students—those students under-served and even denied access to charter and private schools.
Public schools seek and foster experienced and certified teachers.
Public schools respond to local control and directly to tax-payers those schools serve.
Public schools are committed for decades to the communities they serve.
This post will compare the qualifications it takes to become a public school teacher to what it takes to qualify to run for a political state or national office and end up in the White House as president or a member of the U.S. Congress.
TEACHERS
Kindergarten and elementary school teachers must have at least a bachelor’s degree. In addition, public school teachers must have a state-issued certification or license.
The 2011–12 Schools and Staffing Survey: First Look
In 2011-12, on average, both public and private school teachers had about 14 years of experience. On average, teachers in traditional public schools had more teaching experience (14 years) than teachers in public charter schools (9 years).
The percentage of public school teachers with a master’s degree as their highest degree was larger in traditional public schools (48 percent) than in public charter schools (37 percent) and private schools (36 percent).
“As a group, teachers score relatively high in prose, document, and quantitative literacy; there are no significant differences in scores between male and female teachers or between elementary and secondary teachers. About half of teachers score at Levels 4 and 5 (the two highest levels) on the three literacy scales, compared to about 20 percent of other adults nationwide. … The NALS data present teachers as a labor market bargain, comparing favorably with other professionals in their literacy skills, yet earning less. And we need to recognize that we pay teachers considerably less than other professionals with comparable capacities for dealing with prose, document, and quantitative literacy tasks.” – ets.org
ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES
As you read this section, you might notice that there are no literacy or education requirements to run for a public office. It’s possible to be a high school dropout and be illiterate and become President, a state governor or a member of the U.S. Congress.
In the United States, a person must be at least 35 to be President or Vice President, 30 to be a Senator, or 25 to be a Representative, as specified in the U.S. Constitution. Most states in the U.S. also have age requirements for the offices of Governor, State Senator, and State Representative. Some states have a minimum age requirement to hold any elected office (usually 21 or 18).
How Elected Officials Scored On American Civics Literacy
In each of the following areas, for example, officeholders do more poorly than non-officeholders:
79% of those who have been elected to government office do not know the Bill of Rights expressly prohibits establishing an official religion for the U.S.
30% do not know that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are the inalienable rights referred to in the Declaration of Independence.
27% cannot name even one right or freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment.
43% do not know what the Electoral College does. One in five thinks it either “trains those aspiring for higher political office” or “was established to supervise the first televised presidential debates.”
54% do not know the Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. 39% think that power belongs to the president, and 10% think it belongs to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Only 32% can properly define the free enterprise system, and only 41% can identify business profit as “revenue minus expenses.” – Fellowship of the Minds.com
And in the education wars, who is telling whom how to do their job?
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
This website, called “KnowYourCharter” is powerful. It dispels the myth that charter schools are superior to public schools. A few are, but most are not. Even in some of the lowest-performing, most impoverished districts in the state, the public schools outperform many charter schools.
You can plug in the name of any school district in the state and see how the public school district compares to individual charter schools. They are compared by such factors as state funding per pupil, overall state performance rating, average teaching experience of teachers, and how much money the charters extract from the public system.
It takes only a moment to click the button. Open the link and you will learn more in a few minutes than by reading tomes about charters.
Some while ago, a reporter contacted me and asked if I would comment on the stellar, incredible, miraculous results achieved by KIPP in Newark. I referred her to Bruce Baker and Jersey Jazxman, who have studied charter schools in Néw Jersey. I sensed that she wanted to write a positive story and nothing I said would cause her to stop and question her presumptions
;
It turned out that nothing said by BB or JJ would dissuade her from finding a miracle at KIPP.
Nine corporations get to keep the state income taxes paid by all of their employees. No money for children, the elderly, the disabled, our infrastructure?
Yes. Nine of the largest corporations in Illinois get to keep the state income taxes they collect from their employees. Elected officials approved this.
Illinois claims that it is too broke to pay for:
mental health clinics
Medicaid extensions for the poor and disabled
public schools and career teachers
special education services
infrastructure repairs
contracted earned compensation to retired employees (pensions)
and more – many more – necessary services.
The state is also cutting the state income tax from 5% to 3.75%. Yes, cut state revenue because the state lacks sufficient revenue as the state declares that the state is broke.
While this self destructive activity is going on, the largest Illinois corporations will continue to keep the state income taxes that their employees…
Like many of you, I spend a great deal of time thinking about education. Once I started blogging, I was always thinking about things to write about and what I wanted to say. After 50-some posts, I still don’t have a system for deciding what I want to write about. Sometimes I think it’s going to be one thing, and then I sit at the keyboard and it turns to something else.
This post was going to be about the Tennessee Achievement School District and their intent to further invade Nashville. How that’s what happens when you get kicked out of one community and you have to go find another to annoy. Then I was going to write about Charter School Week which, coincidentally, is the same week as Teacher Appreciation Week. But there was one thing that just kept sticking in my head, and so this time, I’m going to go local…
On May 5, 2015, twelve civil rights groups led by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights issued a statement “opposing anti-testing efforts.” In short, these groups are confronting the growing strength of the Opt Out/Resist the Test movement.
These groups are the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the American Association of University Women (AAUW), Association of University Centers on Disabilities (AUCD), Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, Inc. (COPAA), Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), NAACP, National Council of La Raza (NCLR), National Disability Rights Network (NDRN), National Urban League (NUL), Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC), and TASH.
When I first read the May 5, 2015, statement by these 12 civil rights organizations that are defending annual testing even in the face of nationwide standardized-testing overuse…
American students face a ridiculous amount of testing. In the video, John Oliver explains how standardized tests impact school funding, the achievement gap, and how often kids are expected to vomit from the stress caused by these high stakes tests that can destroy a child’s life, get teachers fired and public schools closed.
Ask yourself this, who profits?
In addition, Assessment Around the World (to read the complete article, click the link. The rest of this post is a summary of a piece published by Educational Leadership) reveals how NCLB and its high stakes testing fit in an international context. Here’s what’s happening in the rest of the world.
“Standardized testing is controversial everywhere, regardless of its purpose. Most countries use testing for tracking and for selecting students for admission into academic secondary schools or universities, but generally not for holding educators accountable. Many countries don’t even administer standardized tests until the later grades. In fact, most Canadian universities don’t require the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) or other standardized admissions tests—except for students applying with a U.S. high school diploma!” (Ghosh, 2004)
Testing Practices in Other Countries (from Educational Leadership)
The following examples from England, Turkey, Germany, Singapore, Japan, China, and Finland illustrate how these countries manage these issues.
England
Like the United States, England holds educators accountable for students’ scores on standardized tests, although major differences exist between the two countries’ accountability systems.
Only England—home to the mighty testing giant, Pearson (a profit based, private-sector corporation) that started investing heavily in the U.S. market the year before NCLB mandated the impossible—holds teachers accountable for students’ scores on standardized tests. The test-based accountability policy remains highly controversial and raises issues similar to those currently discussed in the United States. A major question is the validity of using test scores, which are strongly influenced by students’ socioeconomic status, to evaluate the quality of education. This problem is endemic in national and international test score comparisons.
In fact, “Because in every country, students at the bottom of the social class distribution perform worse than students higher in that distribution, U.S. average performance appears to be relatively low partly because we have so many more test takers from the bottom of the social class distribution.” – Economic Policy Institute (Conclusion: Teachers in the US and UK—thanks to lobbyists from Pearson influencing elected representatives—are being punished for children who live in poverty. The more high stakes tests, the more profits Pearson robs from taxpayers who support the public schools in these two English speaking countries.)
Turkey
Turkey’s heavily bureaucratic and centralized education system is modeled after the French system.
Examinations in Turkey are first administered at the end of basic education, although they influence what schools teach long before that. These exams determine admission into the prestigious Anatolian and science high schools, which accept approximately one-quarter of the students who take the exam. Students who wish to enter a university must take another nationwide exam at the end of high school; but because demand outweighs available spaces, acceptance rates are low (around 20 percent). Because of these conditions, Turkish students experience “some of the world’s worst exam anxiety” (Simsek & Yildirim, 2004, p. 165).
Germany
Germany has a highly stratified education system that tracks students, generally beginning in grade 5, into three types of schools: … Teachers and parents—not an examination—determine a child’s placement.
Singapore
In Singapore, educators are only held accountable for their students’ test scores in the sense that secondary schools and junior colleges are ranked in publicly reported “league tables”; the 40 highest-ranked secondary schools receive cash awards. But this “accountability” system bears little resemblance to NCLB in the United States.
The main purpose of testing in Singapore is to determine student placement in the education system and access to elite academic programs—not to evaluate teachers.
Japan
Japan has a highly competitive examination system, but it doesn’t hold educators accountable for students’ scores on standardized tests.
China
For many centuries, the Chinese have viewed their country’s examination system, which dates back to the Shui dynasty in 603 CE, as the main route out of poverty for a child from a low income family. However, like Singapore and Japan, China is attempting to reduce its reliance on rote learning. Realizing that examinations inevitably drive classroom practice, China has revised its highly competitive university entrance exams by requiring students to integrate knowledge from a wide range of fields.
Chinese students face a highly competitive and stressful examination system that doesn’t hold teachers accountable for student test scores.
Finland
In high-ranking Finland, the national ministry of education plays no role in teacher evaluation. Instead, broad policies are defined in the contract with the teachers’ union. Teachers are then typically appraised against the national core curriculum and the school development plan. Finland, of course, is known for having no standardized testing, obviously then making it impossible for it to be used as a tool for teacher evaluation. – NEA Today.org
Note: None of the nations surveyed by OECD use standardized tests to measure teacher effectiveness as bluntly as the United States does. Wariness over the misuse of test scores runs throughout the school systems in most nations – an acknowledgment that they cannot provide a complete picture of teaching quality and that multiple sources of evidence are required (many countries include parent and student surveys as well as classroom observations, and peer and principal assessment).
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
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Here’s what I find absurd with high stakes tests designed to fail children and punish teachers: I taught in low achieving schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005) where the childhood poverty rate was 70% or higher and less than 8% of the children were white.
How do these high stakes test going to measure the effects of street gang violence, poverty and hunger?
For instance, every year I asked my students how many had breakfast before coming to school and maybe two or three hands went up in a classroom with 34 children in it. Further probing discovered that most of the kids had a 64 ounce soda (Coke or Pepsi) for breakfast, because it was cheaper than food, filled their belly and gave them short term energy. The second most popular breakfast was a bag of cheap greasy French fries from the fast food place across the street from the high school. Finding kids who actually ate a nutritious breakfast was almost impossible. When I assigned homework, if even five of those 34 kids did it, that was good. When we worked on an assignment in class, if even half of the children did it, that was good.
Street gang violence, drugs and killings were also common. Who in their right mind could possibly claim that high stakes testing that fails children and punishes teachers is going to solve all of the problems I dealt with on a daily basis as a classroom teacher in an area plagued by poverty, street violence and crime? How does one of these tests erase the impact of seeing a drive by shooting in the streets outside of the school as school is letting out?
As I write this post, I have in front of me my permanent education record from kindergarten through eighth grade. It is by way of an unusual set of circumstances that I have this file. The short of it is that the records clerk at the first high school I taught at gave it to me in 1992.
It includes my standardized test scores for grades K, 1, and 4-8.
Yes. I took standardized tests beginning in kindergarten. My first was the Metropolitan Readiness Test, Form B (1973). It assessed my readiness for first grade, in six areas: word meaning, listening, matching, alphabet, numbers, and copying.
My teacher used it to help determine whether I should advance to first grade.
The test was not misused to grade my teacher or school.
None of the other six tests were used to grade my teachers or my school. They were used for…
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 