One of the things that constantly amazes me about non-stop standardized testing is that it has never been proven that standardized testing means anything more than that student can perform well on a test, remember when we used to have good old report cards to show how a student was doing?  I have predicted this before but will do it again: The constant attacks on teachers will serve to drive good young teachers away from the profession.  This is at a time when hundreds of thousands of baby-boomer teachers will be retiring, in other words, this isn’t a good time for public school students who are the ones who will ultimately suffer.

By MARY ANN GIORDANO

The public schools may be closed all week for February Break, but critics and other writers are busy examining the new teacher evaluation agreement that was reached last week.

The education historian and writer, Diane Ravitch, paints a picture of the teacher evaluation system that offers a sobering contrast to the giddiness that greeted the announcement of the agreement with the city, state and teachers’ unions.

On The New York Review of Books blog, NYR, in a post titled “No Child Left Untested,” Ms. Ravitch calls it “madness” to rely on a system of teacher accountability based on student test scores.

The new evaluation system pretends to be balanced, but it is not. Teachers will be ranked on a scale of 1-100. Teachers will be rated as “ineffective, developing, effective or highly effective.” Forty percent of their grade will be based on the rise or fall of student test scores; the other 60 percent will be based on other measures, such as classroom observations by principals, independent evaluators, and peers, plus feedback from students and parents.

But one sentence in the agreement shows what matters most: “Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective over all.” What this means is that a teacher who does not raise test scores will be found ineffective over all, no matter how well he or she does with the remaining 60 percent. In other words, the 40 percent allocated to student performance actually counts for 100 percent. Two years of ineffective ratings and the teacher is fired.

She goes on to say:

No high-performing nation in the world evaluates teachers by the test scores of their students; and no state or district in this nation has a successful program of this kind.

Compounding the problem, she writes, is the inability of the United Federation of Teachers to block a legal push by the media to publish the data reports of teachers a few years ago that issued grades based on improvements in student test scores, known as “value-added.”

The consequences of these policies will not be pretty. If the way these ratings are calculated is flawed, as most testing experts acknowledge they are, then many good educators will be subject to public humiliation and will leave the profession. Once those scores are released to the media, we can expect that parents will object if their children are assigned to “bad” teachers, and principals will have a logistical nightmare trying to squeeze most children into the classes of the highest-ranked teachers. Will parents sue if their children do not get the “best” teachers?

Ms. Ravitch does not defend unsuitable teachers. But she objects to doing it based so extensively on test scores.

Of course, teachers should be evaluated. They should be evaluated by experienced principals and peers. No incompetent teacher should be allowed to remain in the classroom. Those who can’t teach and can’t improve should be fired. But the current frenzy of blaming teachers for low scores smacks of a witch-hunt, the search for a scapegoat, someone to blame for a faltering economy, for the growing levels of poverty, for widening income inequality.

In The Daily News, the columnist Juan Gonzalez takes on the same subject, saying the combination of the new evaluation system and the public release of teacher ratings signals “a new low” for the public schools.

Pointing out flaws in the system, and the city’s failure to react to critics’ objections to the implementation of many of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s education initiatives, he writes:

This fixation on rating of teachers by test scores is a diversion concocted by the city’s political elite. That elite doesn’t want to admit that 10 years of mayoral control of our schools has been a failure. Still, a recent poll found 57 percent of voters believed it was; only 24 percent thought Bloomberg’s policies have been a success.

Mr. Gonzalez quotes Aaron Pallas, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

And in his own essay in Gotham Schools’ Community section, Mr. Pallas repeats his concerns about using student testing results to evaluate teachers without taking into consideration their flaws.

So here’s a challenge, and a proposal. The challenge is to state education policymakers across the country who have hitched their teacher-evaluation systems to measures that seek to isolate teachers’ contributions to their students’ learning: Develop clear and consistent guidelines for assigning teachers to rating categories that take into account the inherent uncertainty and errors in the value-added measures and their variants.

You can read more on SchoolBook later today about how the new teacher evaluation system may work in New York City, based upon the framework reached last week.

Schools remain closed through Friday. Public school people, enjoy the week off.

Meanwhile, does anyone have an answer for Shilpa Spencer, who posted the following question on the SchoolBook page for Public School 29 John M. Harrigan page in Brooklyn:

Zone for Ps 29

How can I figure out the zone that PS 29 covers? I can see how you can plug in an address on the DOE website and figure out your zoned school, but to try to move into a good zone, how do you figure out the school’s zone parameters?

You can answer right on the P.S. 29 page, so that everyone in the community can see the response.

As policymakers zero in on the role of teachers in public schools, the U.S. Department of Education has launched the RESPECT Project, an initiative to change the teaching profession and raise its status in American society.

In some 100 schools nationwide, small groups of teachers have weighed such proposals as making teaching colleges more selective, offering apprenticeships for teachers-in-training and creating career paths for teachers.

Joanne Weiss, the chief of staff for U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, said the department aims to hold events for 5,000 more teachers in the coming months. She said classroom teachers will be key to the success of the project, which stands for Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching.

“If it’s not led and driven by the people who are doing this every day, it’s not going to take off,” Weiss said.

If fully funded, the new initiative might include a $5 billion grant competition for states and groups of school districts to try out certain ideas.

Genevieve DeBose, who taught in Oakland and Los Angeles before moving to a school in the Bronx, N.Y., facilitated nearly a dozen round-table talks last week, including in Oakland, Newark and Los Altos. At Lighthouse Community Charter School in East Oakland, she typed notes on her laptop as teachers dissected the language and the principles contained in a 10-page discussion document from the Education Department.

DeBose said she applied for the U.S. Department of Education’s teacher ambassador fellowship, in part, because she was frustrated by the disconnect between the reality in her classroom and the policies coming out of Washington.

She said she has heard a wide range of reactions to the document, from anger to enthusiasm, and that she felt the feedback would be a valuable “reality check” for policymakers.

As DeBose prepares to return to her school, she hopes some of the proposals become reality — such as a career ladder that allows successful, experienced teachers to stay in the classroom as they take on more responsibilities, with higher compensation.

“It’s exciting for me to think that if these things do happen, I could be a lifelong teacher,” DeBose said.

Marciano Gutierrez, a social studies teacher at Alta Vista High School in Mountain View, believes such changes are long overdue. “Teaching is a profession. The only way it works is if it’s treated as a profession,” he said.

As a teacher fellow for the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization Hope Street Group, Gutierrez helped lead some of the Bay Area discussions. He said some teachers expressed “policy reform fatigue,” saying they’d heard such promises many times. But, he said, those he met didn’t disagree with the ideas.

Alice Mercer, a teacher from Sacramento who has participated in a national “Save Our Schools” movement against the U.S. Department of Education’s policies, has reservations.

Mercer said some of the proposals sound appealing but that she will wait to see what the administration actually does.

For instance, she said, she is against the use of student test scores for teacher compensation and evaluation — and that she’ll be surprised if the department provides funding for projects that do not include that particular reform.

Weiss acknowledged some of the ideas the department has proposed are more popular than others. Still, she said, a common vision has begun to emerge.

“The question is how to get there,” she said.

I have written many times that teachers need to be politically active, right now, our very livelihoods depend on us picking the right candidates who will protect public education and the students and teachers who inhabit it.

I think you will find a lot of wisdom and common sense in the questions posted below:

1. Both Republican candidates and President Obama are enamored of charter schools – that is, schools that are privately managed and deregulated. Are you aware that studies consistently show that charter schools don’t get better results than regular public schools? Are you aware that studies show that, like any deregulated sector, some charter schools get high test scores, many more get low scores, but most are no different from regular public schools? Do you recognize the danger in handing public schools and public monies over to private entities with weak oversight? Didn’t we learn some lessons from the stock collapse of 2008 about the risk of deregulation?

2. Both Republican candidates and President Obama are enamored of merit pay for teachers based on test scores. Are you aware that merit pay has been tried in the schools again and again since the 1920s and it has never worked? Are you aware of the exhaustive study of merit pay in the Nashville schools, conducted by the National Center for Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt, which found that a bonus of $15,000 per teacher for higher test scores made no difference?

3. Are you aware that Milwaukee has had vouchers for low-income students since 1990, and now state scores in Wisconsin show that low-income students in voucher schools get no better test scores than low-income students in the Milwaukee public schools? Are you aware that the federal test (the National Assessment of Educational Progress) shows that – after 21 years of vouchers in Milwaukee – black students in the Milwaukee public schools score on par with black students in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana?

4. Does it concern you that cyber charters and virtual academies make millions for their sponsors yet get terrible results for their students?

5. Are you concerned that charters will skim off the best-performing students and weaken our nation’s public education system?=

6. Are you aware that there is a large body of research by testing experts warning that it is wrong to judge teacher quality by student test scores? Are you aware that these measures are considered inaccurate and unstable, that a teacher may be labeled effective one year, then ineffective the next one? Are you aware that these measures may be strongly influenced by the composition of a teacher’s classroom, over which she or he has no control? Do you think there is a long line of excellent teachers waiting to replace those who are (in many cases, wrongly) fired?

7. Although elected officials like to complain about our standing on international tests, did you know that students in the United States have never done well on those tests? Did you know that when the first international test was given in the mid-1960s, the United States came in 12th out of 12? Did you know that over the past half-century, our students have typically scored no better than average and often in the bottom quartile on international tests? Have you ever wondered how our nation developed the world’s most successful economy when we scored so poorly over the decades on those tests?

8. Did you know that American schools where less than 10% of the students were poor scored above those of Finland, Japan and Korea in the last international assessment? Did you know that American schools where 25% of the students were poor scored the same as the international leaders Finland, Japan and Korea? Did you know that the U.S. is #1 among advanced nations in child poverty? Did you know that more than 20% of our children live in poverty and that this is far greater than in the nations to which we compare ourselves?

9. Did you know that family income is the single most reliable predictor of student test scores? Did you know that every testing program – the SAT, the ACT, the NAEP, state tests and international tests – shows the same tight correlation between family income and test scores? Affluence helps – children in affluent homes have educated parents, more books in the home, more vocabulary spoken around them, better medical care, more access to travel and libraries, more economic security – as compared to students who live in poverty, who are more likely to have poor medical care, poor nutrition, uneducated parents, more instability in their lives. Do you think these things matter?

10. Are you concerned that closing schools in low-income neighborhoods will further weaken fragile communities?

11. Are you worried that annual firings of teachers will cause demoralization and loss of prestige for teachers? Any ideas about who will replace those fired because they taught too many low-scoring students?

12. Why is it that politicians don’t pay attention to research and studies?

Add end And another question that came to mind after the initial posting of this article:

13. Do you know of any high-performing nation in the world that got that way by privatizing public schools, closing those with low test scores, and firing teachers? The answer: none.

It is long, but it is really good.  In the second paragraph Diane talks about how it is always teachers who are held “accountable” if a child doesn’t do well on his/her standardized tests.  Diane asks what about district leadership, or politicians who are chronically under-funding and cutting school programs for the neediest of children.

In recent years, elected officials and policymakers such as former president George W. Bush, former schools chancellor Joel Klein in New York City, former schools chancellor Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C., and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have agreed that there should be “no excuses” for schools with low test scores. The “no excuses” reformers maintain that all children can attain academic proficiency without regard to poverty, disability, or other conditions, and that someone must be held accountable if they do not. That someone is invariably their teachers.

Nothing is said about holding accountable the district leadership or the elected officials who determine such crucial issues as funding, class size, and resource allocation. The reformers say that our economy is in jeopardy, not because of growing poverty or income inequality or the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, but because of bad teachers. These bad teachers must be found out and thrown out. Any laws, regulations, or contracts that protect these pedagogical malefactors must be eliminated so that they can be quickly removed without regard to experience, seniority, or due process.

The belief that schools alone can overcome the effects of poverty may be traced back many decades but its most recent manifestation was a short book published in 2000 by the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., titled No Excuses. In this book, Samuel Casey Carter identified twenty-one high-poverty schools with high test scores. Over the past decade, influential figures in public life have decreed that school reform is the key to fixing poverty. Bill Gates told the National Urban League, “Let’s end the myth that we have to solve poverty before we improve education. I say it’s more the other way around: improving education is the best way to solve poverty.” Gates never explains why a rich and powerful society like our own cannot address both poverty and school improvement at the same time.

Yes, Gates also doesn’t explain why his foundation is constantly giving money to foundations which seek to undermine many of our excellent public school systems.

For a while, the Gates Foundation thought that small high schools were the answer, but Gates now believes that teacher evaluation is the primary ingredient of school reform. The Gates Foundation has awarded hundreds of millions of dollars to school districts to develop new teacher evaluation systems. In 2009, the nation’s chief reformer, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, launched a $4.35 billion competitive program called Race to the Top, which required states to evaluate teachers by student test scores and to remove the limits on privately managed charter schools.

Remember, this is the same Arne Duncan who was on Jon Stewart the other night and mentioned how great RttP was and that he was all for supporting teachers.

The main mechanism of school reform today is to identify teachers who can raise their students’ test scores every year. If the scores go up, reformers assume, then the students will enroll in college and poverty will eventually disappear. This will happen, the reformers believe, if there is a “great teacher” in every classroom and if more schools are handed over to private managers, even for-profit corporations.

The reformers don’t care that standardized tests are prone to measurement error, sampling error, and other statistical errors.¹ They don’t seem to care that experts like Robert L. Linn at the University of Colorado, Linda Darling-Hammond at Stanford, and Helen F. Ladd at Duke, as well as a commission of the National Research Council, have warned about misuse of standardized tests to hold individual teachers accountable with rewards or sanctions. Nor do they see the absurdity of gauging the quality of a teacher by the results of a multiple-choice test given to students on one day of the year.

They don’t see this because they don’t want to see it.  If they were to recognize the simple truths that Ms. Ravitch just wrote in the above paragraph, they would have to reexamine their entire view on education.  They, essentially, would have to retract much of what has “made” them in prior speeches and interviews.

Testing can provide useful information, showing students and teachers what is and is not being learned, and scores can be used to diagnose learning problems. But bad things happen when tests become too consequential for students, teachers, and schools, such as narrowing the curriculum only to what is tested or cheating or lowering standards to inflate scores. In response to the federal and state pressure to raise test scores, school districts across the nation have been reducing the time available for the arts, physical education, history, civics, and other nontested subjects. This will not improve education and is certain to damage its quality.

I haven’t witnessed cheating like in Rhee’s Washington D.C., or in Atlanta.  But I can tell you for CERTAIN, curriculum is now and has been completely narrowed in order for teachers to focus on raising test scores.

No nation in the world has eliminated poverty by firing teachers or by handing its public schools over to private managers; nor does research support either strategy.² But these inconvenient facts do not reduce the reformers’ zeal. The new breed of school reformers consists mainly of Wall Street hedge fund managers, foundation officials, corporate executives, entrepreneurs, and policymakers, but few experienced educators. The reformers’ detachment from the realities of schooling and their indifference to research allow them to ignore the important influence of families and poverty. The schools can achieve miracles, the reformers assert, by relying on competition, deregulation, and management by data—strategies similar to the ones that helped produce the economic crash of 2008. In view of the reformers’ penchant for these strategies, educators tend to call them “corporate reformers,” to distinguish them from those who understand the complexities of school improvement.

The corporate reformers’ well-funded public relations campaign has succeeded in persuading elected officials that American public education needs shock therapy. One is tempted to forget that the United States is the largest and one of the most successful economies in the world, and that some part of this success must be attributed to the institutions that educated 90 percent of the people in this nation.

Faced with the relentless campaign against teachers and public education, educators have sought a different narrative, one free of the stigmatization by test scores and punishment favored by the corporate reformers. They have found it in Finland. Even the corporate reformers admire Finland, apparently not recognizing that Finland disproves every part of their agenda.

I think the “reformers” are relying on the fact that they think most Americans are ignorant of the facts with regard to how a socialistic society like Finland works.  Whether it be their social safety net or their public schooling which is really a part of that safety net.

It is not unusual for Americans to hold up another nation as a model for school reform. In the mid-nineteenth century, American education leaders hailed the Prussian system for its professionalism and structure. In the 1960s, Americans flocked to England to marvel at its progressive schools. In the 1980s, envious Americans attributed the Japanese economic success to its school system. Now the most favored nation is Finland, and for four good reasons.

First, Finland has one of the highest-performing school systems in the world, as measured by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which assesses reading, mathematical literacy, and scientific literacy of fifteen-year-old students in all thirty-four nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), including the United States. Unlike our domestic tests, there are no consequences attached to the tests administered by the PISA. No individual or school learns its score. No one is rewarded or punished because of these tests. No one can prepare for them, nor is there any incentive to cheat.

Second, from an American perspective, Finland is an alternative universe. It rejects all of the “reforms” currently popular in the United States, such as testing, charter schools, vouchers, merit pay, competition, and evaluating teachers in relation to the test scores of their students.

Third, among the OECD nations, Finnish schools have the least variation in quality, meaning that they come closest to achieving equality of educational opportunity—an American ideal.

Fourth, Finland borrowed many of its most valued ideas from the United States, such as equality of educational opportunity, individualized instruction, portfolio assessment, and cooperative learning. Most of its borrowing derives from the work of the philosopher John Dewey.

In Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?, Pasi Sahlberg explains how his nation’s schools became successful. A government official, researcher, and former mathematics and science teacher, Sahlberg attributes the improvement of Finnish schools to bold decisions made in the 1960s and 1970s. Finland’s story is important, he writes, because “it gives hope to those who are losing their faith in public education.”

If they can do it in Finland, we can do it here.  First, we have to make politicians understand that NCLB, and RttP are two laws that need to be changed if not dismantled altogether.

Detractors say that Finland performs well academically because it is ethnically homogeneous, but Sahlberg responds that “the same holds true for Japan, Shanghai or Korea,” which are admired by corporate reformers for their emphasis on testing. To detractors who say that Finland, with its population of 5.5 million people, is too small to serve as a model, Sahlberg responds that “about 30 states of the United States have a population close to or less than Finland.”

Sahlberg speaks directly to the sense of crisis about educational achievement in the United States and many other nations. US policymakers have turned to market-based solutions such as “tougher competition, more data, abolishing teacher unions, opening more charter schools, or employing corporate-world management models.” By contrast, Finland has spent the past forty years developing a different education system, one that is focused on

improving the teaching force, limiting student testing to a necessary minimum, placing responsibility and trust before accountability, and handing over school- and district-level leadership to education professionals.

To an American observer, the most remarkable fact about Finnish education is that students do not take any standardized tests until the end of high school. They do take tests, but the tests are drawn up by their own teachers, not by a multinational testing corporation. The Finnish nine-year comprehensive school is a “standardized testing-free zone,” where children are encouraged “to know, to create, and to sustain natural curiosity.”

I met Pasi Sahlberg in December 2010. I was one of a dozen educators invited to the home of the Finnish consul in New York City to learn about the Finnish education system on the day after the release of the latest international test results. Once again, Finland was in the top tier of nations, as it has been for the past decade. Sahlberg assured the guests that Finnish educators don’t care about standardized test scores and welcomed the international results only because they protected the schools against conservative demands for testing and accountability.

Finnish teachers, Sahlberg said, are well educated, well prepared, and highly respected. They are paid about the same as teachers in the United States in comparison to other college graduates, but Finnish teachers with fifteen years’ experience in the classroom are paid more than their American counterparts. I asked Sahlberg how it was possible to hold teachers or schools accountable when there were no standardized tests. He replied that Finnish educators speak not of accountability, but of responsibility. He said, “Our teachers are very responsible; they are professionals.” When asked what happens to incompetent teachers, Sahlberg insisted that they would never be appointed; once qualified teachers are appointed, it is very difficult to remove them. When asked how Finnish teachers would react if they were told they would be judged by their students’ test scores, he replied, “They would walk out and they wouldn’t return until the authorities stopped this crazy idea.”

Sahlberg invited me to Finland to tour several schools, which I eventually did in September 2011. With Sahlberg as my guide, I visited bright, cheerful schools where students engaged in music, dramatics, play, and academic studies, with fifteen-minute recesses between classes. I spoke at length with teachers and principals in spacious, comfortable lounges. Free from the testing obsession that now consumes so much of the day in American schools, the staff has time to plan and discuss the students and the program.

Before I left Finland, Sahlberg gave me a book called The Best School in the World: Seven Finnish Examples from the 21st Century,³ about the architecture of Finnish schools. The book is based on an exhibition presented at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2010. When we visited one of the featured schools, I thought, how delightful to discover a nation that cares passionately about the physical environment in which children learn and adults work.

To be sure, Finland is an unusual nation. Its schools are carefully designed to address the academic, social, emotional, and physical needs of children, beginning at an early age. Free preschool programs are not compulsory, but they enroll 98 percent of children. Compulsory education begins at the age of seven. Finnish educators take care not to hold students back or label them as “failing,” since such actions would cause student failure, lessen student motivation, and increase social inequality. After nine years of comprehensive schooling, during which there is no tracking by ability, Finnish students choose whether to enroll in an academic or a vocational high school. About 42 percent choose the latter. The graduation rate is 93 percent, compared to about 80 percent in the US.

Finland’s highly developed teacher preparation program is the centerpiece of its school reform strategy. Only eight universities are permitted to prepare teachers, and admission to these elite teacher education programs is highly competitive: only one of every ten applicants is accepted. There are no alternative ways to earn a teaching license. Those who are accepted have already taken required high school courses in physics, chemistry, philosophy, music, and at least two foreign languages. Future teachers have a strong academic education for three years, then enter a two-year master’s degree program. Subject-matter teachers earn their master’s degree from the university’s academic departments, not—in contrast to the US—the department of teacher education, or in special schools for teacher education. Every candidate prepares to teach all kinds of students, including students with disabilities and other special needs. Every teacher must complete an undergraduate degree and a master’s degree in education.

Because entry into teaching is difficult and the training is rigorous, teaching is a respected and prestigious profession in Finland. So selective and demanding is the process that virtually every teacher is well prepared. Sahlberg writes that teachers enter the profession with a sense of moral mission and the only reasons they might leave would be “if they were to lose their professional autonomy” or if “a merit-based compensation policy [tied to test scores] were imposed.” Meanwhile, the United States is now doing to its teachers what Finnish teachers would find professionally reprehensible: judging their worth by the test scores of their students.

Finland’s national curriculum in the arts and sciences describes what is to be learned but is not prescriptive about the details of what to teach or how to teach it. The national curriculum requires the teaching of a mother tongue (Finnish or Swedish), mathematics, foreign languages, history, biology, environmental science, religion, ethics, geography, chemistry, physics, music, visual arts, crafts, physical education, health, and other studies.

Teachers have wide latitude at each school in deciding what to teach, how to teach, and how to gauge their pupils’ progress. Finnish educators agree that “every child has the right to get personalized support provided early on by trained professionals as part of normal schooling.” Sahlberg estimates that some 50 percent of students receive attention from specialists in the early years of schooling. Teachers and principals frequently collaborate to discuss the needs of the students and the school. As a result of these policies, Sahlberg writes,

Most visitors to Finland discover elegant school buildings filled with calm children and highly educated teachers. They also recognize the large amount of autonomy that schools enjoy: little interference by the central education administration in schools’ everyday lives, systematic methods for addressing problems in the lives of students, and targeted professional help for those in need.

The children of Finland enjoy certain important advantages over our own children. The nation has a strong social welfare safety net, for which it pays with high taxes. More than 20 percent of our children live in poverty, while fewer than 4 percent of Finnish children do. Many children in the United States do not have access to regular medical care, but all Finnish children receive comprehensive health services and a free lunch every day. Higher education is tuition-free.

Sahlberg recognizes that Finland stands outside what he refers to as the “Global Education Reform Movement,” to which he appends the apt acronym “GERM.”GERM, he notes, is a virus that has infected not only the United States, but the United Kingdom, Australia, and many other nations. President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law and President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program are examples of the global education reform movement. Both promote standardized testing as the most reliable measure of success for students, teachers, and schools; privatization in the form of schools being transferred to private management; standardization of curriculum; and test-based accountability such as merit pay for high scores, closing schools with low scores, and firing educators for low scores.

In contrast, the central aim of Finnish education is the development of each child as a thinking, active, creative person, not the attainment of higher test scores, and the primary strategy of Finnish education is cooperation, not competition. I will consider the Teach for America organization—the subject of Wendy Kopp’s A Chance to Make History—in comparison to the Finnish model in a second article.

Well, if there is one area where I have seen teachers unite it is around the detestable testing regime that we must submit our students to.  For those of you who aren’t in classrooms let me just say that students are not just taking state standardized tests, they are also taking many district standardized tests which are designed for probing for potential weaknesses prior to the state standardized tests, so teachers can know what areas of the test to “teach to.”

This teacher in New York has written a letter to the New York State Department of Education discussing the issue of testing.  Maybe more of us teachers should write letters like this:

To Whom it May Concern:

I firmly oppose any initiative that continues (or expands) the current regime of standardized testing.  As an educator, I know that standardized tests are not humane, nor developmentally appropriate.

We are currently studying and writing non-fiction in my second grade classroom.  It is beautiful to hear students teach all about topics that they know and love, like ice cream, outer space, insects and more.  As part of the study, I decided to invite two of my students from last year into my classroom to share their work.  I first had to walk to my school’s satellite location (because we don’t have enough space in our school to house all of our students) and pick up the girls.  “Rianna and Jen!  Chris is here to bring you to his class!”  their teacher announced.  Their faces brightened, as they pulled on their hats and mittens and zipped up their jackets. 

As we were walking and discussing life in third grade I hear Jen say, “I’m nervous about the test,” under her breath.  I asked her why, “I just want to do ok.  My mom wants me to do ok.”  Jen  added, “Yeah, my mom got me lots of test prep books.  I want to do ok too.”  In that moment, I did not know how to respond to my former students, who moments before were excited about coming to share their work, and now were anxious.  I think I managed to say something like, “It will be ok.”  I regret saying that because it is not ok that they are feeling that level of anxiety at just 8 years old.

This anxiety is felt by families, educators, and the students.  Students have thrown-up, wet themselves, and ran out of the testing room because of their anxiety.    Educators say, “It’s a fight trying to get students to take the test.”  Anxiety and pressure do not drive learning, in fact, anxiety prevents learning. You cannot force someone to learn.

I brought Rianna and Jen’s attention back to their forthcoming visit to my classroom, even though I knew that anxiety still loomed behind their smiles.  I thought one of the most interesting parts of the whole experience (because I’ve never tried an exercise like this before) was when the girls were looking at their work from a year ago.  “Chris, I was reading this and it doesn’t totally make sense!”  Jen said.  “Yeah!  When I was re-reading, I saw so many mistakes!”  Wanda added.  Through their own reflection, the girls were noticing their own progress as writers.  I said, “Wow!  You’re noticing how much you’ve grown as writers!  You’re able to notice your mistakes because you’ve learned so much more about writing since last year!”  Both girls’ lips turned way up into wide smiles.  This assessment is not quantifiable with numbers, but it is authentic.  Further, the girls have agency throughout the entire process, instead of some external authority.  This is meaningful assessment that helps the girls and all students develop as independent and critical thinkers.

As an educator and a citizen of this country, I keep asking myself, “What is the larger goal of my teaching?  How am I helping kids to reach that goal?”  I believe my larger purpose is to help kids become independent and critical thinkers able to independently take action to change their world for the better.  I know that the current regime of standardized testing does not add to the realization of this goal, instead, it runs counter.  Students are anxious, families are spending scarce money on test-prep materials, and teachers are giving up their precious little free time for test-prep on weekends.  Rianna and Jen are worried about “doing ok,” but what are they learning?  How are they able to reflect meaningfully on simple test scores?  Where are their smiles?  Where is the joy of childhood?  Where is their voice?

Please reconsider the passage of the ESEA waiver and convene a committee of educators, education graduate school professors, families, concerned community members and students to talk about the state of education in the state.  There is no one easy solution to the problem of improving education and a truly public conversation must be opened because the current regime is just not working, it is not humane, and it is not developmentally appropriate.

Sincerely,

Chris Whitney, M.Ed.

Second Grade Teacher

Bronx Community Charter School

Valerie Strauss over at the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog has more on this interview.

Jon Stewart tried to engage Education Secretary Arne Duncan on “The Daily Show” Thursday night, but the effort was an exercise in the futility of conversing with someone who won’t deviate from his talking points.

Duncan was so programmed that Stewart was even unable to get the basketball-playing secretary to have some fun talking about the New York Knicks’ new hero, Jeremy Lin.

When Stewart jokingly asked Duncan whether, having graduated from Harvard, it was “a disappointment” that he “ended up as just the secretary of education” and not as an NBA superstar, Duncan’s only response was about how great a role model the hard-working Lin was for young people.

Stewart surely knew at that point he would get nothing from Duncan, but he made a polite effort anyway, because he had time to fill and, perhaps, because he knew his mother, a teacher who apparently can’t stand Duncan’s policies, would be watching.

Stewart told Duncan that his mother tells him that the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative is exacerbating the standardized testing obsession of No Child Left Behind and making it harder for teachers to creatively do their jobs.

This is happening because the administration’s policies encourage states to link teacher evaluation to standardized test scores, which not only has lead to more “teaching to the test,” but also an expansion of standardized testing into areas besides the traditional math and reading areas. I ran a guest post last year from a high school student who wanted to know why he had to take a standardized test in his yearbook class as his district field-tested 52 such tests in all kinds of subjects so that teachers in all subjects could be evaluated by the results.

That’s the kind of thing teachers are complaining about, but Duncan gave no indication that he has heard them.

Duncan didn’t deviate at all from his talking points, it was as if he simply didn’t understand what Stewart was talking about, or he did understand but chose to ignore the realities Stewart presented to him, I choose the latter.

When Stewart said that a lot of the rhetoric about Race to the Top centers around innovation and creativity but that the reality is the opposite, and that teachers shouldn’t be teaching to the test, Duncan said: “I actually agree with that.” Huh?

My jaw dropped when I heard Duncan say that too.

Duncan then quoted President Obama as saying recently that “we have to stop teaching to the test,” betraying not a hint of irony that it is the administration’s policies that are continuing this dynamic in public schools.

This is why I said above Duncan was like a dichotomy.  Is it that he is controlled by multiple masters?  The testing industry and the last vestiges of pubic schools?

Stewart tried again and again to get Duncan to have a real conversation, but Duncan seemed to never directly respond to a question, always coming back to one of his talking points.

He even said that “teachers have been beaten down,” again without betraying any recognition that many teachers blame his policies for this state of affairs.

What we learned from this exchange (the part that was televised) is that Stewart displayed a great grasp of the issues and the consequences of Race to the Top, and Duncan, well, not so much. I don’t need to say that something is wrong with this picture, so I won’t.

The Miami Herald makes clear what they are doing in an article titled: Florida charter schools: big money, little oversight.  This is where the shift from traditional public schools to charter schools gets ugly.  It is the natural consequence of transforming public schools into for-profit charters.  I think you will find this piece very interesting if you are a teacher.  I would also venture to guess that many good teachers will be leaving Florida if they are able to.

Preparing for her daughter’s graduation in the spring, Tuli Chediak received a blunt message from her daughter’s charter high school: Pay us $600 or your daughter won’t graduate.

She also received a harsh lesson about charter schools: Sometimes they play by their own rules.

During the past 15 years, Florida has embarked on a dramatic shift in public education, steering billions in taxpayer dollars from traditional school districts to independently run charter schools. What started as an educational movement has turned into one of the region’s fastest-growing industries, backed by real-estate developers and promoted by politicians.

But while charter schools have grown into a $400-million-a-year business in South Florida, receiving about $6,000 in taxpayer dollars for every student enrolled, they continue to operate with little public oversight. Even when charter schools have been caught violating state laws, school districts have few tools to demand compliance.

Charter schools have become a parallel school system unto themselves, a system controlled largely by for-profit management companies and private landlords — one and the same, in many cases — and rife with insider deals and potential conflicts of interest.

In many instances, the educational mission of the school clashes with the profit-making mission of the management company, a Miami Herald examination of South Florida’s charter school industry has found. Consider:

• Some schools have ceded almost total control of their staff and finances to for-profit management companies that decide how the schools’ money is spent. The Life Skills Center of Miami-Dade County, for example, pays 97 percent of its income to a management company as a “continuing fee.” And when the governing board of two affiliated schools in Hollywood tried to eject its managers, the company refused to turn over school money it held — and threatened to press criminal charges against any school officials who attempted to access the money.

• Many management companies also control the land and buildings used by the schools — sometimes collecting more than 25 percent of a school’s revenue in lease payments, in addition to management fees. The owners of Academica, the state’s largest charter school operator, collect almost $19 million a year in lease payments on school properties they control in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, audit and property records show.

• Charter schools often rely on loans from management companies or other insiders to stay afloat, making charter school governing boards beholden to the managers they oversee. Loans to two Pompano Beach schools were disguised as gifts in financial documents to avoid scrutiny from the school district and make struggling schools appear solvent, the schools’ former managers said in court papers.

• At some financially weak schools, tight budgets have forced administrators to cut corners. The cash-strapped Balere Language Academy in South Miami Heights taught its seventh-grade students in a toolshed, records show. The Academy of Arts & Minds in Coconut Grove went weeks without textbooks. Schools have also been accused of using illegal tactics to bring in more money — charging students illegal fees for standard classes, or faking attendance records to earn more tax dollars, court records show.

We read this sentence a couple of paragraphs into the article from the Christian Science Monitor: “the RESPECT Project (Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching), would be structured like another version of Race to the Top.”  Mr. Duncan has never been a teacher, he has been in classrooms but he has never been in them for more than a photo-shoot, or to hold some type of hokie town-hall meeting.  He is NOT a teacher, so when he makes proposals using the word RESPECT without realizing that he is one of the major reasons why teachers have lost respect in recent years, it is frustrating.

I have some comments interspersed below as well:

The Obama administration is focused on teaching again – but this time it’s hoping to reform the entire profession itself.

On Wednesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncanspoke to teachers at a town-hall meeting to launch a $5 billion proposal that would try to improve the teaching profession at every level, from the recruitment and training process to the career ladder and pay and tenure systems.

“Our goal is to support teachers in rebuilding their profession – and to elevate the teacher voice in shaping federal, state, and local education policy,” Secretary Duncan told the teachers, according to prepared remarks. “Our larger goal is to make teaching not only America’s most important profession – [but also] America’s most respected profession.”

This is a good goal and I am sure teachers would support this idea.

The program, dubbed the RESPECT Project (Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching), would be structured like another version of Race to the Top: a competitive grant program that would ask states to submit proposals.

Here is where Duncan again goes off the rails by modeling RESPECT after RttP.  RttP pits state against state in some sort of Romanesque competition in which Caesar himself (Duncan) gets to decide who has jumped through enough hoops to receive extra and badly needed money.  He realizes many states are broke and need the money, it is a form of legalized blackmail which is why many states are rejecting RttP

The details would be hammered out in discussions with Congress, but Duncan has promised that it would look comprehensively at the teaching profession, touching on a few main areas:

• Reforming teacher colleges and making them more selective.

• Reforming compensation – including tying earnings to performance, paying teachers more for working in tough environments, and making teacher salaries more competitive with other professions.

• Creating new career ladders for teachers (in which they could develop some leadership and administrative skills but still be in the classroom).

What does this mean?

• Reforming tenure.

Reforming tenure how?  This is a little detail that can prove to be disastrous for hard-working middle class teachers.

• Improving professional development, giving teachers more time for collaboration, and giving some teachers more autonomy.

• Building teacher evaluation systems based on multiple measures.

What are these multiple measures?

At this point, the project is just a proposal – and it is couched inside President Obama’s American Jobs Act proposal, which Republicans declared a non-starter. It’s thus difficult to imagine it becoming a reality anytime soon.

But, despite the uncertain nature of the proposal, it’s jump-starting a conversation on what the teaching profession needs – and is getting buy-in from diverse corners, in part because it includes tough new accountability standards for the profession as well as increased pay, support, training, and respect for teachers.

“They’re focusing on both higher standards and better rewards for teachers,” says Timothy Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, which recruits and trains teachers for high-needs schools. “You can’t do one but not the other.”

Mr. Daly also lauds the structure of the proposal, saying that a competitive grant program will give incentives to states to “do the difficult stuff.”

The program has also received early praise from unions.

“This proposal represents a critical first-step in ensuring that all students have access to a range of high-quality resources, including qualified and licensed teachers who are empowered to innovate and inspired to take on ever-growing challenges,” said Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, in a statement. “We are particularly pleased that others beyond our organization are beginning to acknowledge the comprehensive set of supports that schools need to improve and to recognize that there is no ‘silver-bullet’ when it comes to transforming schools.” 

Some of what the administration is proposing – including better teacher evaluations, more accountability in exchange for tenure, and a compensation system more closely tied to student performance – has been on its agenda for a while and has been part of Race to the Top or other federal programs.

But this is the first time the administration has taken such a comprehensive look at the overall teaching profession – including the teacher-training programs that feed into it.

“Many of our schools of education are mediocre at best,” Duncan said Wednesday. “Many teachers are poorly trained and isolated in their classrooms.”

Others agree that the quality of teacher training is a major problem.

Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and former president of Columbia University’s Teachers College, says that in a study he did a few years ago, he identified a few strong teacher-training programs in most parts of the country. “But most of the programs I saw were mediocre to poor,” Mr. Levine says. “We need fundamental changes to teacher education in America.”

Some of the problems with existing programs: low admissions and graduation standards, academic and in-classroom components that are disconnected from each other, not enough time spent in schools, and curricula that are dated and theoretical.

“If universities are given incentives, we can get them to make the changes,” says Levine, citing huge improvements at teacher-prep programs in some of the states where he’s been working in recent years.

One possibility that could make a big impact: simply collecting and publishing data on how graduates of various teacher-training programs do.

“We’ve built this system, and … it isn’t focused on outcomes,” says Timothy Knowles, director of the Urban Education Institute at the University of Chicago. More than anything, Mr. Knowles wants to see education schools held accountable for the performance of their graduates – though he believes they will protest – and he hopes that Duncan’s proposal could help launch such an effort.

Without those kinds of data, Knowles says, “the teacher-training industry is really like a cartel – not accountable for what it delivers, has a total corner on the market, and the places that actually hire teachers can exert no control over the supply.”

Despite Duncan’s harsh words for some of the current teaching colleges, the Education secretary had nothing but praise for teachers in his meeting. And he’s framed this proposal as a way to improve not only the quality of teaching, but also the attractiveness and stature of the profession.

“We need to change society’s views of teaching – from the factory model of yesterday to the professional model of tomorrow, where teachers are revered as thinkers, leaders, and nation-builders,” Duncan told teachers. “No other profession carries a greater burden for securing our economic future. No other profession holds out more promise of opportunity to children and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. And no other profession deserves more respect.”

Duncan, is of course, correct when he states that society’s views on teachers needs to change.  What he doesn’t mention is that HE HIMSELF is a major reason for the current societal views on teachers existing in the public domain.  He has on many occasions labeled teachers and schools as FAILING!  He has wreaked havoc on our profession in the past few years.

It would be difficult to imagine achieving such ambitious goals for just $5 billion, Knowles and others note, if the program were to get approved (although, as with Race to the Top, the competitive structure might help leverage more change). But if a portion of what’s proposed takes place, he believes it would be a crucial improvement.

“Ensuring accountability for those that deliver teachers, and then getting the incentives and accountability systems right when teachers start teaching, is one of the most important things we can do to improve the quality of American schooling,” Knowles says

The Obama Administration’s approval last week of 10 state applications for waivers from NCLB was another missed opportunityto learn from a decade of policy failure. Instead of changing the disastrous direction of federal education policy, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s waiver process allows states to reproduce some of the worst aspects of NCLB’s “test and punish” approach while continuing to ignore real issues, like reducing concentrated poverty or providing equitable funding and high quality pre-K for all schools.

Stan points out what is so glaringly true in that this policy allows states to “reproduce some of the worst aspects of NCLB’s test and punish approach…”  That is what is so frustrating about all of this.  Why can’t we just have a sensible education policy in this country?  Everything is so wrapped up in politics and money that simple common sense is consistently given a back seat to big money when it comes to what our education policy is.

Most media coverage framed the legally dubious waiver process as giving states “flexibility.” But the waivers gave states—and more importantly schools, students, educators, and parents—no flexibility at all in the area they need it most: relief from the plague of standardized testing. When NCLB was passed in 2002, 19 states gave annual tests in reading and math. Today, under federal mandate, all 50 do and the waivers will mean more testing. As with the Administration’s Race to The Top, states applying for waivers had to commit to implementing another generation of standardized tests based on the “common core” standards that states were also forced to adopt. New Jersey, one of the states getting a waiver, is promising to replace NCLB’s absurd adequate yearly progress (AYP) system with “annual measurable objectives.” It’s a shell game only testing companies will win.

I have a feeling that the testing companies are deeply connected to Arne Duncan, and that when / if he leaves his current post (stifling a hurrah) we will see him hit the revolving door of Washington D.C. to highly paid lobbyist in the exact area of U.S. Education policy.

There will be more tests in more subjects, and the tests will be used not only to abuse students, but to rate and impose sanctions on teachers and the schools of education they came from. This is another set of wrong answers to the wrong questions.

The waivers will also turn up the pressure on schools serving the highest need populations. States must identify the 5 percent of schools with the lowest test scores and turn them into charters or “turnarounds” or close them down. Another 10 percent with low graduation rates or wide achievement gaps must be targeted for similar intervention. This is not a school improvement strategy, it’s a blank check to experiment on poor kids and create chaos in our most vulnerable communities.

Exactly!  This is because the poor communities don’t complain as loudly as the wealthy ones.

The absurdity of closing schools and imposing “disruptive reform” on the poorest communities was underscored the same day the waivers were announced when a study was released showing that “the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students had grown by about 40 percent since the 1960s, and is now double the testing gap between blacks and whites.” The continued punishing of schools for the inequality that exists all around them is not reform; it’s a cynical political exercise.

It’s also a continuation of the bipartisan corporate ed reform strategy that has reinforced the state-by-state attack on teacher unions and public sector workers across the country. Here’s what my own Governor, Chris “1 percent” Christie—who has made war against public education and teacher unions the centerpiece of his administration—had to say when New Jersey was named one of the 10 waiver states: “The Obama Administration’s approval of our education reform agenda contained in this application confirms that our bold, common sense, and bipartisan reforms are right for New Jersey and shared by the President and Secretary Duncan’s educational vision for the country.”

As someone who was born and bred in New Jersey, I consider Chris Christie to be a disgrace to my home state.

NCLB is such a bad law it’s not hard to see why 30 more states are considering filing waiver applications this month. But teachers and parents would do better if their states took a pass on the hollow promise of NCLB waivers and lobbied for a different piece of paper: a pink slip for Arne Duncan.