Seattle Schools Community Forum

Update: read this blog thread below from Wait What and then appreciate that the Seattle School Board recently passed a resolution, 5-1 (with Director Blanford voting no and Director Geary not at the meeting), to ask the state to allow districts to be able to select/create an alternative summative assessment framework to show academic mastery.  (Their discussion is in Part Two of the video of the board meeting. Here's the cue-up from the Seattle Education blog .) end of update From the Wait What? blog by Connecticut writer, Jonanthan Pelto with Wendy Lecker, news that PARCC is not as advertised.   (bold his) In the most significant academic study to date, the answer appears to be that the PARCC version the massive and expensive test is that it is an utter failure. William Mathis, Managing Director of the National Education Policy Center and member of the Vermont State Board of Education, has just published an astonishing piece in the Washington Post. ( Alice in PA...

Update 2: this story falls into the category of the "Streisand effect" which is a meme I had not heard of before. From Know Your Meme : Streisand Effect refers to the unintended consequence of further publicizing information by trying to have it censored. Instead of successfully removing the information from the public, it becomes even more widely available than before as a backlash against the censorship attempt. end of update Update: the great public ed researcher/writer Mercedes Schneider penned a letter to the head of PARCC, Laura Slover.  I'd say it hits the mark brilliantly. end of update Jonathan Pelto is a fellow public ed blogger out of Connecticut who writes the blog, Wait What ?  He writes about an event that happened recently when another blogger,  Professor Celia Oyler at Teachers College, Columbia University posted a blog thread at her blog, Outrage on the Page, from an anonymous teacher writing quite openly about the 4th grade PARCC tes...

N.J. school gave students the wrong PARCC test Students in the gifted program knew they do well in math but thought this test was way too easy. That's because the algebra test they were supposed to take wasn't what they got.  Among the other tidbits of info from this story. Christiana said he doesn't think it's fair to the students that they wasted an afternoon on the wrong test. "Now they are told their test was nonsense and they have to take another one," Christiana said. "I am frustrated, and they are not giving us any answers." Less than a week earlier, students were locked out of PARCC testing because of an error by an employee at Pearson, the company that provides the exams. Teachers are instructed not to look at student's computer screens during PARCC testing, even if a student has a question, said Matthew Stagliano, a spokesman for the New Jersey Education Association, the state's largest teachers union. So the kids can tell s...

Update: some common sense from one of my favorite education writers, Jersey Jazzman, and his "The PARCC Silly Season. end of update It's just hard to know where to start. First, the new thought from ed reformers is that parents just don't understand what they are doing when they opt their children out.  Thanks for patronizing them as if they are not thinking adults.  There are also new pro-testing groups springing up and many of them are funded by the Gates Foundation.  It's the same thing, over and over, with the Foundation. Create faux parent groups, data use groups and even media groups. 

 An op-ed from school board members from the Orange County Register on Common Core and data mining: The California Department of Education last week informed school parents of a federal judge’s decision to release up to 10 million student records to a plaintiff’s attorney. The case, Morgan Hill Parents Association v. California Department of Education, could allow student records to be released that contain “names, addresses, phone numbers and Social Security numbers, as well as sensitive information on behavior, academic performance and health.” The future of this legal case remains unclear What is generally unknown by parents, and far more egregious than the data release requested in the Morgan Hill lawsuit, are similar data-mining requirements by federally and state-authorized Common Core programs. Parents want their children to learn academic material without the psychological conditioning, data mining, tracking and analyzing of behavioral patterns. These fed...

An elementary school principal in Brooklyn apparently went overboard in her zeal to prevent students from opting out . After finding a fifth-grader handing out opt-out fliers at her Williamsburg elementary school this week, a principal confiscated the materials, pulled the student into her office and then hastily convened a meeting for students, parents told DNAinfo New York. Principal Sereida Rodriguez-Guerra of P.S. 84 chastised the fifth-grader, sending the student into tears, before telling an auditorium full of third- through fifth-graders, “You’ve got to get this opt-out stuff out of your head,” according to multiple parents of students pulled into the impromptu tirade against refusing to take next month's state English and math tests. Rodriguez-Guerra went on to lecture the students about the controversial opt-out movement, telling them not to believe what their parents tell them and that the state exams given to third- to-eighth-graders were good for them...

Fortune Magazine Fortune magazine has a special report that came out this week on Common Core - Business Gets Schooled. It provides a window into the thinking of big business and public education and folks, it is, by turns, sad and horrific.  This being Fortune, they kind of "tsk tsk" but more over the naviete of some (see Bill Gates) than what these titans of industry say about children and learning. Please - if you don't read the article, don't read my entire thread - scroll down to read what Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil has to say to you as parents about your children. (I'll highlight it in red.) What's equally fascinating is that any dissent mentioned in the article by ordinary folks gets the "blogger moms" attitude with a complete brush-off of what noted education experts have said about CC.  It's like all the dissenters are just the anonymous, ignorant and unwashed masses.  You know, the little people. They also chose to l...

(Editor's note: I seem to recall that some were saying that "Common Core was here to stay." Read on.) This reads like it's from The Onion but nope, it's from the NY Times regarding a taskforce that Governor Cuomo of New York created around Common Core:

My apologies for taking so long to get to this.  Our discussion on SBAC will take three threads.  One, an overview.  Two, what was said at Superintendent Dorn's press conference last week on the results.  Three, some topline impressions from looking at the scores.  (If anyone has been looking at the scores in-depth, let me know.  I'm probably not going to be able to deep-dive them myself so any impressions you have would be helpful.) Overview The most basic takeaway - both from Dorn and others touting the Washington state scores - is a big fat WHEW.   The scores were not nearly as bad as they could have been.  We can debate why that might be later on.

From Diane Ravitch: Rick Hess directs education studies at the conservative, free-market American Enterprise Institute. We often disagree but I am often impressed that he doesn’t follow “the party line” of free-marketeers. This article is a good example of Hess demonstrating his sharp intellect and his willingness to stray from the right-wing corral. I absolutely echo Ravtich's comments.  Hess may be a right-wing thinker but he's an honest one.  He is willing to call out BS on BOTH sides.  He is also willing to say it like it is which probably makes a lot of people on the right wring their hands. His piece is long but worthy reading.  In a nutshell:

Update:  there was also a measure that would simply allow parents to opt-out of testing (as opposed to the amendment that did pass that notifies parents whether their state allows opt-outs).  It was defeated, seemingly on the premise that local control over opting out should be left to states.  Both Senators Murray and Cantwell voted no on the measure.  It is legal in Washington State to opt out. End of update. From the Atlanta Journal Constitution about the revamped NCLB/ECAA: The U.S. Senate passed an amendment by Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., to the “Every Child Achieves Act” that aims to inform parents about opting out of standardized testing. Isakson’s amendment, which was passed by a unanimous vote Tuesday, would require any local educational agency that receives federal Title I funds to notify parents of each student attending school that they may request information regarding any state or local policy, procedure, or parental right regarding p...

How does once in elementary, once in middle school and once in high school sound for state testing for federal reports?   Because honestly, the overwhelming majority of teachers can tell how a child is doing in school so why the time, cost and lack of real help for teachers/parents with multiple year testing.  FairTest has this link to send a letter in support of Senator Jon Tester's amendment (yes, that's his name) to limit testing to three times in a student's K-12 academic career.   (This would not preclude district assessments.) Congress is taking up NCLB on July 7th.  From Diane Ravitch, PARCC is Falling Apart with the Departure of Ohio:

From Diane Ravitch: A reader shares this information with us. The state will administer assessments to children in kindergarten but parents have the right to opt out. Will the parents know? If you live in Washington, make sure you inform parents of their right to opt out their children from this unnecessary assessment. Let the children play.

The New York Times' Motoko Rich today explains who is scoring the PARCC assessment. So the standardized tests given in most states this year required fewer multiple choice questions and far more writing on topics like this one posed to elementary school students: Read a passage from a novel written in the first person, and a poem written in the third person, and describe how the poem might change if it were written in the first person.   But the results are not necessarily judged by teachers. Some are retired teachers with extensive classroom experience, but one scorer in San Antonio, for example, had one year of teaching experience, 45 years ago.

From Politico : Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) will reintroduce a bill today aiming to better protect student data. Like the bill that House Education and the Workforce Committee leaders Reps. John Kline and Bobby Scott have been putting together, the Markey-Hatch bill would change data privacy by updating the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.   The bill [ http://1.usa.gov/1obyAzv ] would take several steps to bring the long-outdated FERPA into the digital age, including prohibiting tech companies from using student data to target ads. It would also give parents the right to access records about their children held by private companies — and change that information if it’s incorrect. Districts would have to keep lists of outside vendors that hold information on students and make those lists accessible to parents.  There are now two bipartisan bills targeting student privacy, Markey-Hatch and the bill reintroduced recently by Reps...

From the Parent to Parent Grassroots website, a local parent education and advocacy group, some worksheets for students who opt-out so they will have something to do while waiting for other classmates to finish testing.  Also, from Crunchy Moms website, Eleven Reasons to Refuse Standardized Testing for Your Children.  I particularly like these (partial):

From Diane Ravitch: A teacher wrote this little essay and dedicated it to Governor Andrew Cuomo: “There is a man in Albany, who I surmise, by his clamorous paroxysms, has an extreme aversion to educators. He sees teachers as curs, or likens them to mangy dogs. Methinks he suffers from a rare form of psychopathology in which he absconds with our dignity by enacting laws counterintuitive to the orthodoxy of educational leadership. We have given him sufferance for far too long. He’s currently taking a circuitous path to DC, but he will no doubt soon find himself in litigious waters. The time has come to bowdlerize his posits, send him many furlongs away, and maroon him there, maybe Cuba? She added: I’m not supposed to say this, but all these insanely hard words appeared on the 4,6, and 8th grade tests last week. Ridiculous? Or just hard? Hard? Or just ridiculous? I can say, with no embarrassment, that I did not know at least half those words until high school (a fe...

First up, apparently poor Minnesota got hit by an overloaded processor AND some kind of hacking which lead to a shutdown of their testing on Tuesday.  Minnesota is using PARCC and that means our friends at Pearson had some explaining to do.  Pearson got it back and running but the Minnesota ODE was not quite prepared to say all was well.  From MPR : "We still need to hear from Pearson exactly what the issue is, how they have resolved it, and receive an assurance that testing can resume smoothly," department spokesman Josh Collins said. The department hopes to restart testing on Thursday if it gets those assurances, he added. The hacker attack went away after about 30 minutes. I'm just going to interject at this point.  Look, even without opt-outs, multiple states had to shut down testing.  ANYONE who knows how testing goes at a school, knows that it is a carefully planned event and anything that changes, throws the whole thing out of whack. My poi...

Update:  a third view from a NY parent: “ Whatever test, the results need to be teacher, student and parent friendly. They should impact instruction and be understandable for parents and students,” Salazar added. “It should be like a cholesterol test, most of us don’t know the science but we do understand the results.” end of update One view comes from two Long Island superintendents with Long Island being the epicenter of opt-outs in NY state.  It is thoughtful and cogent.  From the Suffolk Times Review : At first glance, the current, heated, conflict over state testing and the “opt-out” movement appears to be a dispute between those who believe in and those who dispute the value of state tests. But this conflict goes deeper. It is a conflict about what is good for children and adolescents, about how children learn and thrive, and about how to raise young people to enter into and contribute to their communities as mature members of a democratic socie...

From Chalkbeat New York :   U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Tuesday that the federal government is obligated to intervene if states fail to address the rising number of students who are boycotting mandated annual exams .   “We think most states will do that,” Duncan said during a discussion at the Education Writers Association conference in Chicago. “If states don’t do that, then we have an obligation to step in.” Federal law requires all students in grades three to eight to take annual tests, and officials have said districts could face sanctions if fewer than 95 percent of students participate.  And yet he also said this: Duncan also said that students in some states are tested too much, and acknowledged that the exams are challenging for many students. But he argued that annual standardized exams are essential for tracking student progress and monitoring the score gap between different student groups.  He seemed to also forget that for...