President Obama spoke to the National Urban League this week and defended his "Race to the Top" program, which has become increasingly controversial. Mr. Obama insisted that it was the most important thing he had done in office, and that critics were merely clinging to the status quo.
Mr. Obama was unfazed by the scathing critique of the Race by the nation's leading civil rights organizations, who insisted that access to federal funding should be based on need, not competition.
The program contains these key elements: Teachers will be evaluated in relation to their students' test scores. Schools that continue to get low test scores will be closed or turned into charter schools or handed over to private management. In low-performing schools, principals will be fired, and all or half of the staff will be fired. States are encouraged to create many more privately managed charter schools.
All of these elements are problematic. Evaluating teachers in relation to student test scores will have many adverse consequences. It will make the current standardized tests of basic skills more important than ever, and even more time and resources will be devoted to raising scores on these tests. The curriculum will be narrowed even more than under George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind, because of the link between wages and scores. There will be even less time available for the arts, science, history, civics, foreign language, even physical education. Teachers will teach to the test. There will be more cheating, more gaming the system.
Furthermore, charter schools on average do not get better results than regular public schools, yet Obama and Duncan are pushing them hard. Duncan acknowledges that there are many mediocre or bad charter schools, but chooses to believe that in the future, the new charters will only be high performing ones. Right.
The President should re-examine his reliance on standardized testing to identify the best teachers and schools and the worst teachers and schools. The tests are simply not adequate to their expectations.
The latest example of how test results can be doctored is the New York state testing scandal, which broke open this week. The pass rates on the state tests had soared year after year, to the point where they became ridiculous to all but the credulous The whole house of cards came crashing down this week after the state raised the proficiency bar from the low point to which it had sunk. In 2009, 86.4% of the state's students were "proficient" in math, but the number in 2010 plummeted to 61%. In 2009, 77.4% were "proficient" in reading, but now it is only 53.2%.
The latest test scores were especially startling for New York City, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg staked his reputation on their meteoric rise. He was re-elected because of the supposedly historic increase in test scores and used them to win renewal of mayoral control. But now, the city's pass rate in reading for grades 3-8 fell from 68.8% to 42.4%, and the proficiency rate in math sunk from an incredible 81.8% to a dismal 54%.
When the mayor ran for office, he said that mayoral control would mean accountability. If things went wrong, the public would know whom to blame.
But now that the truth about score inflation is out, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein steadfastly insist that the gains recorded on their watch did not go up in smoke, that progress was real, and they have reiterated this message through their intermediaries in the tabloids. In other words, they are using every possible rationalization and excuse to avoid accountability for the collapse of their "historic gains."
Meanwhile Secretary Duncan travels the country urging districts to adopt mayoral control, so they can emulate New York City. He carefully avoids mentioning Cleveland, which has had mayoral control for years and remains one of the lowest performing districts in the nation. Nor does he mention that Detroit had mayoral control and ended it. And it is hard to imagine that anyone would think of Chicago, which has been controlled by Mayor Richard Daley for many years, would serve as a national model.
President Obama and Secretary Duncan need to stop and think. They are heading in the wrong direction. On their present course, they will end up demoralizing teachers, closing schools that are struggling to improve, dismantling the teaching profession, destabilizing communities, and harming public education.
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Ever wonder why we revere historical figures for their abilities? Their school day was not confined to the three R's to the exclusion of everything else. We have so narrowed the curriculum to counting beans that we have forgotten that to be truly literate requires a broad education, not a narrowly confined one that can only be measured on a multiple choice test. We fabricate these tests for the ease of scoring instead of measuring the ability of students to actually produce literate and understandable work through their own effort and application, and we fail to grasp the importance of artistic expression through music, painting and drama to develop the mind. If Thomas Jefferson and his generation had to have endured what we call education these days we'd still be colonists to a well educated Europe.
I speak as a retired New York CIty teacher from the South Bronx and realize this is somewhat heretical, but we are paying for our childrens' future by starving their brains and bodies.
"... the proficiency rate in math sunk from an incredible 81.8% to a dismal 54%."
No wonder we have such a problem in education in the US. Even established writers and educators either DO NOT KNOW or DO NOT CARE about correct English usage.
FYI Ms. Ravitch: The correct form should be either "has sunk" (past participle) or "sank" (simple past).
FYI, Rookie, the simple past of "sink" is either "sank" or "sunk."
Who'd a thunk?
Lollllllll...
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sunk
Its easier to screw uneducated people than it is educated ones.
Millions of people who voted for our current president have little, if any, formal education. They were captivated by "hope & change". Look who they chose!!!!!!!!
I think the real problem with the education system is that there are so few really good teachers & millions of bad ones- but we need ALOT of teachers so the bad one's have to be used. Maybe PRESIDENT (not "Mr") Obama's plan isn't perfect but I think monitoring teachers performance is necessary to improve the education & success of every student. If not through test scores how else are we suppose to monitor every teacher in the entire country? If bad teachers aren't removed from their positions bad teaching will continue. If administrators monitor performance than they can easily be emotionally attached to the teachers & provide biased feedback. I'm not saying President Obama's plan is perfect- but its at least feasible. Yah, they could come up with a complicated & possibly more accurate way of determining teacher performance but there is no way it would be able to be implemented & properly monitored.
One problem is most adminstrators are too busy to adequately monitor teachers. You need to cut back on their duties or hire more administrators.
Further, many adminstrators aren't good at monitoring teachers because their not good teachers themselves, that's why their adminstrators!
So, no, Obama's plan is not feasible. In fact, Obama's whole education agenda has already been a proven failure.
Do some educational research reading, would ya?
Magnet schools in my community draw the best and brightest while the neighborhood high school like mine do the best we can with those left behind. PSAT scores suggest to me that 3/4 of my students are not prepared for the course work -
I just see these "special" schools/ academies/charters are draining the neighborhood of its local talent. So, our "traditional" high schools will slowly fall along the sidelines ... my high school is not just a school but a community center. We open at 6:00 AM and close somewhere around 10:00 PM depending on the various activiites that happen here daily.
As a historian, I believe that was the real intent of public schools and public education - community and neighborhood centers. Grading our educators and our schools is grading our community and neighborhood. RTTT will not just destroy our schools but our neighborhoods as well... this is really the wrong way to go....
I repeat: Everyone wants to raise the quality of our students. The only question is how.
You seem to be good at criticising others who try, would you like to go for a suggestion to solve a problem?
One factor among many is providing lunch (and even breakfast) for children who come to school from poor neighborhoods. Children cannot learn on an empty stomach, nor do they come to school ready to learn if their very survival is based on their parents or guardians scrabbling for a living just to put food on the table. So while we can correct racial imbalance in the schools artificially, only economic empowerment (jobs anyone?) can set right much of the need to have children come to school ready to learn.
Placing the entire burden for correcting society's ills on the shoulders of the teacher is misguided, and firing teachers for problems they did not create, nor can remediate, only leads to beating the bushes for people willing enough to stand the strain of trying to manage classrooms too large to educate effectively and satisfy the increasing demands for bureaucratic accountability at the expense of actual teaching time.
When we begin to require the teachers to teach, euphemistically, the "Three 'Rs". Require the children to actually learn the material. And convince the parents that this work is not the sole province of the teachers and the state. Then things will change, not because we toss gobs of money at the schools and teachers!
Heck my school district gets nearly one billion dollars for less than 100,000 student in a district populated by substantially less than 1,000,000. And that is only the property tax, add to that state and Federal funding!!! The best high school in the system has a grad rate of 50%
Excuse me!! Where do you even get this stuff? No I mean show me?
Did you not read my whole posting? I clearly showed that more money is not necessary. Under no circumstance can you show that education passes from teacher to student via the application of money. It passes between these two by judicious teaching of subjects and requiring the student to do the work required.
There is even a book out that purports to say that the Blacks were done a disservice by segregation. The biggest disservice is that they lost all of the Black role models they had in the schools. Evidence exist that in one, I know it is only one, Georgia city the number of Black educators declined by 68% in the first three years. The rise of Black youth ostracized for "acting white" when excelling in school was not evident prior to 1960s.
Of $555.3 billion spent on education, about 8% comes from the Feds ( along with 100% of the mandates). In my state that equates to, per household, a total of $4,023 for each and everyone of them - on average. If we can not educate our kids for some $10,000, or more, per year ($200,000 per room) something is seriously wrong.
Just askin'.
The simple fact of the matter is that failing schools are failing because they are being overwhelmed by poorly-parented children.
And there's not much schools can do about it. No way can schools make more of an impact on children than parents, no way.
Among other things, parents have the rule of the strap: you do as I do, think as I do . . . or else.
How do schools overcome that sort of thing?
(But we don't want to blame parents, now do we? Pity no! It's those darned teachers, right?)
Nope, schools will continue to fail so long as parents continue to fail.
And there is ever so little that can be done about it.
The encouraging fact is that the vast majority of our schools are NOT failing. Successful schools enjoy a critical mass of well-parented children. Teachers thus can do their job of teaching -- not just keeping a semblance of order.
Look it up.
There is a school system in Minnesota that has 1.5 hr classes - time for the teacher to present information and for the coaching in application process. Now, that is where learning will have some value.