Six on Schools: Larry Cuban: Why Is Incremental Change in Schooling Typical?; Opt-Out Remains Strong Despite the Former Commissioner’s Scare Tactics; How DeBlasio Protects the Charter Industry in NYC; Back to School Reform; Schools Invest Zillions in
panaritisp
"The short answer is that conservatism is built into the purpose of schools and both teachers and students share that innate conservatism–at first.
Tax-supported public schools have two purposes. The first is to change students, imbue them with knowledge, skills, and values that they would use to gain personal success and make America a better place to live in. The duty of public schooling as an agent of individual and societal reform took off in the early 20th century as Progressivism and has been in the educational bloodstream ever since.
The second obligation was for the tax-supported school to actively conserve personal, community and national values ranging from inculcating traditional knowledge, obeying authority including that of teachers, show respect for religious beliefs, practicing honesty, and displaying patriotism.
Often conserving such values can be seen in rules posted in nearly every classroom across the nation at the beginning of the school year. For example:
Teachers are agents of that conservatism insofar as they have been students for 16-20-plus years and know first-hand what happens in classrooms and schools. When faced with reforms that expect major changes in classroom practices, they adapt such policies to fit the students they face daily, their content and skills expertise, and what they believe they should teach and students should learn. They do this, of course, piece=by-piece. Incrementally. You want 180 degree changes in what happens in classrooms, it won’t happen. You want 10 degrees or 20 degrees of change, with teacher understanding, capacity, and willingness, such changes will occur."
After decades of testing, there remain significant gaps in results between Black and Hispanic students and their White and Asian peers, between economically disadvantaged and economically advantaged students, and between students with disabilities and nondisabled students. Continuing for another few decades on the same exact path of expensive and excessive tests hoping for different outcomes is a disservice to children and our society.
Although the outgoing Commissioner was able to slightly reduce the rate at which parents refused participation in the assessments, she accomplished this through fear and intimidation, urging district administrators to use whatever tactics necessary to increase participation rates. We documented these abhorrent tactics as we learned about them, here. In the end, these tactics didn’t work as most schools did not meet the 95% participation rate.
“The gap is still growing after far too many years. It’s time to own this and admit that annual testing in two subjects with draconian stakes attached haven’t helped the kids whom the tests are supposed to help. Instead let’s look to create real ways to help kids in underserved groups — with proven actions, backed by research. Let’s take the enormous taxpayer funds spent on destructive testing and invest instead in what we know works: food programs, after school care and programs, small classes, fully staffed school health offices—and so much more,” says Lisa Litvin, parent, former President Hastings-on-Hudson Board of Education and former Co-President Hastings-on-Hudson PTSA
Kemala Karmen, a founding parent member of NYC Opt Out, adds, “Not only does the so-called achievement gap remain, the whole notion is controversial and backward. To quote Ibram X. Kendi, historian and author of How to Be an Antiracist, ‘What if different environments actually cause different kinds of achievement rather than different levels of achievement? What if the intellect of a poor, low-testing Black child in a poor Black school is different—and not inferior—to the intellect of a rich, high-testing White child in a rich White school? What if the way we measure intelligence shows not only our racism but our elitism?’ Our state would do better to focus on ensuring that all students start with equal opportunities rather than annually trot out test scores that merely reflect an uneven starting line.”
Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters points out that “with all the considerable money and time spent on these tests, and the anxiety they have provoked in children, the state hasn’t been able to devise a valid or reliable assessment that gives any useful information either to districts or teachers about how to improve instruction or the conditions of learning.”
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"When Mayor Bill DeBlasio was on the Democratic debate stage, he lashed out at the charter industry and vowed to fight the privatizers.
But as mayor, he is protecting them.
As Leonie Haimson explains, DeBlasio’s Department of Education routinely hands over the lists of public school students to the charters, despite the protests of parents.
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No other city, she says, voluntarily gives charters the names and addresses of public school students.
Now he says parents may ask to remove their names, but that is not good enough.
This is the official statement from DeBlasio’s Department of Education. If you want to take your child’s name off the charter mailing list, it is your responsibility to ask to remove his or her name. If you do nothing, your child’s name and address will be handed over to vendors working for the charter industry.
What happened to the charter school wait lists? Do they exist?
Haimson writes:
After vehement parent protests and a FERPA privacy complaint submitted to the US Department of Education, the DOE announced they will allow parents to opt out of charter mailings in the future, as the Daily News reported today. This is NOT good enough, either from a policy or privacy standpoint."
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"The current clashes over the New York City school system, which has been undergoing reform since its founding, are shot through with questions of race and equity."
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See for example the hyperbolic headline of NY Times article saying these changes would create "seismic changes" and a tweet from the reporter, Eliza Shapiro, that it would "blow up the system." A headline in the NY Post claims, even more hysterically, that "De Blasio is out to destroy public schools."
The reality is that only about four percent of NYC public elementary grade children are attending gifted classes right now, and in many districts there are practically none. ...
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This is not to reject the compelling points made by the adherents to eliminating these programs. There is no research to support the validity or accuracy of using high-stakes tests to assess kids as young as four years old for "giftedness," as in the current system; and some parents do indeed enroll their children in expensive test prep programs to game the exam.
It is also true that many studies show that separating out students by ability -- "tracking them" - does little to improve overall achievement, even for the highest scoring kids; and instead tends to depress learning among those struggling the most.
Yet reaching students with a wide range of abilities can also be exceedingly difficult for teachers, especially given the large class sizes in most NYC public schools. As Shino Tanikawa, a member of the SDAG and I pointed out in a Daily News oped, if you are going to integrate classrooms, lowering class size is even more critical. Indeed, increasing diversity and class size reduction should go hand in hand.
When the government in Finland wanted to stop tracking in the elementary grades, the national teacher union came back to them and said, we will consent but only if you lower class size at the same time. The same process then occurred in the middle and upper grades. As a result, Finnish students have uniformly small classes across the country, do not separate out students by ability or achievement, and surpass most every other country in international comparisons."
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