E Wayne Ross – Page 74 – Critical Theories in Education

High-School Exit Tests Do Not Improve Academic Achievement, Study Finds

Here’s the bottom-line from these studies: the tests “produce adverse outcomes for educational attainment for a substantial minority of students while providing no estimable labor market or achievement benefits for others.”

The Chronicle: State High-School Exit Tests Do Not Improve Academic Achievement, Study Finds

A new study has found that state requirements that students pass exit tests to graduate from high school appear to do nothing to improve achievement on federal reading and mathematics tests.

The study, the results of which have been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in the journal Educational Policy, compared the reading and math scores of children in states with exit examinations to the scores of children elsewhere in the United States and concluded that there was no evidence that requiring passage of such tests improved academic achievement in those subject areas.Even the most rigorous versions of the exit tests failed to produce significant improvements in the reading and math performance, according to the report on the study’s findings written by Eric Grodsky, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California at Davis, with Demetra Kalogrides, a graduate student in sociology at that campus, and John Robert Warren, an associate professor of sociology and a director of undergraduate studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

The researchers derived their conclusions from an analysis of the scores of 13- and 17-year-olds on a version of the National Assessment of Educational Progress used to measure long-term trends in student achievement. In addition to looking at average scores on the federal tests, they examined trends at various score thresholds to make sure the state exit tests were not, for example, resulting in fewer students doing very poorly or very well on the national assessment.

Their report is one of a series in which Mr. Grodsky and Mr. Warren have questioned the benefits of the high-school exit examinations that have been adopted by 23 states, accounting for about two-thirds of the nation’s high-school seniors.

In study results published in January in the journal Sociology of Education, the two researchers and Jennifer C. Lee, an assistant professor of sociology at Indiana University at Bloomington, found that people who earned their diplomas in states with high-school exit tests did not earn higher incomes than people who earned their diplomas elsewhere, and were no more likely to complete college or be employed. The analysis was weighted to exclude the effects of class, race, state education spending, and other potentially confounding variables.

Taking that study into account, along with other research finding that such tests result in declines in high-school graduation rates, the latest report takes the bottom-line view that the tests “produce adverse outcomes for educational attainment for a substantial minority of students while providing no estimable labor market or achievement benefits for others.”

The report says, “The cumulative evidence on these policies is clear: They should either be substantially revised to provide the benefits supporters claim they provide, or they should be abandoned.”

In a videotaped interview distributed on Monday along with his latest studies’ findings, Mr. Warren says the failure of the tests to produce marked increases in learning may be due the states’ decisions to make the tests easier in response to the political resistance triggered by high failure rates.

“It is a double-edge sword,” Mr. Warren says. “If you raise the standards, you risk lots and lots of kids not getting diplomas. If you don’t raise the standards, you risk kids not learning much more.”

Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a Washington-based group that promotes high academic achievement, said in an interview on Monday that high-school exit exams have never really been widely regarded as “good vehicles to promote high achievement or college-ready achievement.”

Barry Bonds the Leon Trotsky of Baseball?

David Zirin, the best sportwriter in the USA, on the Barry Bonds boycott:
Boss’s Boycott: The Bonds Vanishes
By Dave Zirin

The Commissar Vanishes is a coffee table book for only the dourest of coffee tables. The hard-covered volume is a photographic compilation of the way that Josef Stalin systematically erased his chief political opponents, Leon Trotsky and his followers, from the history of the Russian Revolution.

Page after glossy page plainly displays the desecration of memory at the service of dictatorship. It shows before-and-after photos of people either airbrushed to invisibility or crudely vandalized, their faces blacked out with an ugly scribble.

Meet Barry Bonds, the Leon Trotsky of Major League Baseball. In 2007 Bonds broke the most hallowed record in sports, passing Henry Aaron’s record for home runs. When he wasn’t injured, this maestro of the batter’s box packed San Francisco’s ballpark, despite a team that stank like cottage cheese left on a radiator. At season’s end, the Giants refused to re-sign him, with owner Peter Magowan saying, “We’re going in a new direction; that would not be going in a new direction. The time has come to turn the page.” That is surely his right, but the page hasn’t just been turned, it’s been raggedly erased.

All traces of Bonds, the greatest player in baseball history, have vanished from the Bay. The left-field wall no longer carries an image of Bonds chasing Hank Aaron for the crown. There is no marker of where Bonds hit home run number 756. There is no reminder that Bonds ever even wore a Giants uniform.

But it’s not just Magowan trying to “disappear” Barry Bonds. He has been blackballed in a blatant and illegal act of Major League collusion, a bosses’ boycott. Yes, Bonds’ fielding has become painful to watch in recent years, as the seven time gold glover limped around the outfield on knees grinding together without cartilage. But despite the agony of movement most of us take for granted, Bonds still hit 28 home runs in 340 at bats, led the NL in walks, and had an on base percentage of .480. Since 1950, only Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, Norm Cash, and Bonds himself have recorded higher OBP’s. [Cash’s epic season was an anomaly in an otherwise middling career. That a player could have a brilliant year out of nowhere, used to be one of the charms of baseball. Today they would be accused of sprinkling steroids on their corn flakes.]

Maybe Bonds can no longer roam the outfield, but there are at least a dozen AL teams that could use a designated hitter with a .480 OBP, not to mention a player whose every game would sell tickets and every at-bat would provoke baited breaths and empty bathrooms.

In this case of blackballing so obvious it would shame a Dartmouth frat house, one would think the media would be raising hell. But they have largely been yipping collusion lackeys. Bill Simmons, ESPN.com’s Sports Guy, wrote,

“Opening Day came and went without Bonds for the first time in 22 years, and nobody seemed to notice. I didn’t think about him for more than two seconds all spring. Did anyone? Can you remember being a part of a single “I wonder where Bonds is going to end up?” conversation? Did you refresh ESPN.com incessantly in hopes of a Bonds update?…Of course not. No one cared. The best hitter since Ted Williams is gone and forgotten. We wanted him to go away, and he did.”

There is one problem. Bonds doesn’t want to go gently into that good night and is pushing his union to fight back. He has asked the Players Association to file collusion charges on his behalf and the union has served Commissioner Bud Selig with papers. [There is a certain irony here as Bonds was hardly Big Bill Haywood during his career. In 2003, he became the first player in thirty years to not sign the Player’s Association’s group licensing agreement.]

The Player’s Association’s efforts on Bonds behalf have also met with high profile derision. Newsweek’s Mark Starr wrote “The union approaches new heights of absurdity when it bothers to investigate whether collusion has ended the career of baseball’s all-time home run king, Barry Bonds, who can’t attract an offer to play anywhere this 2008 season. What the union sees as possible collusion, once an honored practice among ownership, I see as a rare display of common sense.”

Bonds, according to Starr, is “widely regarded as a cancer in the clubhouse.”

This is moralistic spew. The idea that baseball owners would ruin their own team’s chances because they have collectively agreed to “turn the page” is a violation of Bonds’ rights and the unwritten social contract they have with fans. And when one considers the absence of saints on Major League Baseball teams, even on the God Squad in Colorado, it is all the more drenched in hypocrisy.

Mike Gimbel, who is a former adviser on player trades and acquisitions to the GM’s of the Boston Red Sox and the Montreal Expos, wrote it well.

“Bonds has been accused of not telling the truth to a grand jury investigating BALCO [the Bay Area Lab Company, implicated in steroid distribution]. He does not own BALCO and does not distribute steroids on behalf of BALCO. Why was the grand jury investigating Bonds? Weren’t they supposed to be investigating BALCO? How did that ‘investigation’ of BALCO turn into a witch hunt directed against MLB players?”

Good questions. Bonds deserves far better than to be forced into retirement and have his history coarsely expunged. The overriding ethos of the sports world is that of the meritocracy. If you are good enough, then you get to play. Yet a man who can get on base 48% of the time, has been told to go home and a new generation of fans will never see the Mozart of the batting cage. This is about more than a baseball player. It’s about people in power deciding on utterly unjust grounds, who gets to take the field, who gets to be heard, and even who gets to be remembered. Somewhere, Stalin smiles.

Rouge Forum Update—Happy Birthday Karl Marx

Dear Friends,

Can you teach about Marx? If not, why not?

Karl Marx: (May 5, 1818 – March 14, 1883)

Here are some images of Marx.

Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach can be found here.

Marx still stands far above his inheritors, all of them. And, per Lenin, one cannot fully understand Marx without understanding Hegel, especially the “Science of Logic,” but the entire body of work. Lukacs’, “The Young Hegel,” is a good pathway back to Hegel himself.

Here is Lenin writing on Hegel’s Science of Logic, a vast improvement over Lenin’s earlier Materialism and Empiro Criticism.

And, given the current election spectacle, we might remember what Marx and Engels wrote on the question of capitalist democracy, “The state is nothing but an instrument of oppression of one class by another–no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.”

The crux of Marxism, if there can be such a thing, is revolution, the negation of the negation: abolishing, retaining, moving to a higher level. Things change.

The question of class consciousness remains largely unresolved. Here is Bertell Ollman addressing the problem of why it is so many people are so easily turned into instruments of their own oppression, while others do resist

A podcast of Michael Baker’s radio interview with Seattle test resister Carl Chew can be found here: http://www.kzum.org/. You can also read a full interview with Chew by subscribing to Substance News.

We note, without envy, that Randi Weingarten, soon to be president of the American Federation of Teachers, will hold two jobs inside the AFT, and make about $600,000 a year, representing people being laid off in droves, people who often live in house trailers. NEA”s Reg Weaver, soon to be replaced by Dennis Van Roekel, makes about $450,000 a year and can live on his expense account.

School workers hold terrific potential power. In late April, 200,000 educators in the UK shut down the nation’s school system in protest against the government’s wage cutting plans. They were joined by 100,000 other workers striking in solidarity. More than a million people missed school.

Ken Goodman writes on the corrupt Reading First Phonics Education project, now clearly failed, at SusanOhanian.org.

We are still in the process of notifying nominees for the Rouge Forum Steering Committee, and awaiting word from others. That should be finalized by next week. We will also offer an analysis of why it is the anti-war, immigration rights, and anti-high-stakes testing movements are losing ground, despite a rise of apparent resistance.

Thanks to Melissa, Ido, Amber, Wayne, Sean, Tommie, Bob, Karen. Betty, Ann, Della, Candace, Erin, Beau, Sherry, Susan, Ken, Gerry, Georgia, Terry Ray, Elvira, Tony, Sandy, Sally, Adam, and Gina. Break up the Padres (sic)!

all the best

Happy May Day from the Rouge Forum!

Dear Friends,

It is May Day, the international workers holiday. Since the massive 2006 immigrant rights marches, what amounted to the biggest general strike in the last seventy years, May Day is finally restored to the US, where it began. For far too many years, it was replaced by Law Day (imposed in the fifties), a day when people were supposed to celebrate the tyranny of property laws.

Now around the US students, kids, workers, educators, community people, and organizers will hit the streets and rally again. School workers can support the kids who are likely to take the lead in walking out of school, joining the many scheduled marches in the struggle for equality and social justice. And we can join them.

This describes the San Diego action and this outlines actions around the country.

The Rouge Forum has celebrated Mayday for the last eleven years. Here is our traditional flyer.

And an update for our current context can be found here.

And a link to the music and lyrics of the “The Internationale”.

best
r
Life travels upward in spirals.
Those who take pains to search the shadows
of the past below us, then, can better judge the
tiny arc up which they climb,
more surely guess the dim
curves of the future above them.

Give me the lesson without the spin

From the Los Angeles Times
Give me the lesson without the spin

A high school student finds conservative bias in his American government textbook.
By Matthew LaClair

April 27, 2008

Throughout my life, my teachers have told me that school is a neutral environment where my classmates and I can count on teachers and textbooks to provide us with the factual and unbiased information that will equip us for life. Lately, though, I’ve begun to wonder whether they really mean it.

In my junior year of high school in New Jersey, my U.S. history teacher used the first week of class to preach his religious beliefs. He told students, among other things, that they “belong in hell” if they reject Jesus as their savior, that evolution and the Big Bang are ridiculous and unscientific theories, and that there were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark.

When I confronted him in the principal’s office, he denied making the remarks. What he didn’t realize was that I had recorded the classes. But even after I informed school officials what had happened, they ignored my concerns. So after more than a month, my parents and I took the news to the media.

At first, I was harassed and intimidated by other students. School officials ignored the harassment and even a death threat I received.

Only after the story became national news did the school district begin to take us seriously. After lengthy negotiations (and against continuing opposition from the school board), we finally persuaded the district to address the teacher’s false and inappropriate remarks. The Anti-Defamation League was brought in to teach the faculty about the separation of church and state, and experts in the fields of church-state separation, evolution and cosmology came to our school to conduct assemblies.

After that, I thought I was done with controversy for a while. But now, in my senior year, I am back in the midst of it. In one of my classes, we use the 10th edition of “American Government” by James Q. Wilson, a well-known conservative academic, and John J. DiIulio, a political scientist and former head of President Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. (2005). The text contains a statement, repeated three times, that students may not pray in public schools. In this edition of the text, the authors drive the point home with a photograph of students holding hands and praying outside a school. The caption reads: “The Supreme Court will not let this happen inside a public school.”

I knew this was false. In fact, students are allowed to pray in schools; courts have ruled many times that a student’s right to pray may not be abridged. What’s generally impermissible is state-sponsored prayer, in which school officials lead prayer or students are called on or required to pray. It seemed clear to me that the purpose of the discussion in the textbook was to indoctrinate, not to educate.

Continued reading revealed numerous other instances of bias, as well as erroneous and misleading statements. For example, the section on global warming begins with a few well-chosen words to set the tone: “It is a foolish politician who today opposes environmentalism. And that creates a problem because not all environmental issues are equally deserving of support. Take the case of global warming.”

The authors neglect to mention the growing scientific consensus on this subject. They dismiss those who are concerned about global warming — that is, the overwhelming majority of scientists — as “activists” motivated not by data but by “entrepreneurial politics.” Those who deny or downplay it are described as “skeptical scientists.”

Pointing out dissent within the scientific community is appropriate. Suggesting that the majority, but not the minority, is politically motivated is not appropriate. If a controversy truly exists, then the authors should not instruct students which side to “support.”

I contacted a not-for-profit group called the Center for Inquiry. It enlisted support from scientists, including James Hansen, NASA’s top climate scientist, and organizations, including Friends of the Earth and People for the American Way, to address concerns about the textbook.

What is most distressing is not that some public school teachers preach their religion, or that some authors put politics ahead of education. It is that it is so rare for anyone to call them on it. This text is widely used. Yet to my knowledge, no one has challenged these incorrect and misleading statements.

As Americans, we should stand up for our common values. We should champion education and settle for nothing less than the best. Our teachers should do the same and should not misuse their positions to promote their personal agendas.

Matthew LaClair is a high school student in Kearny, N.J.

Rich Gibson and E. Wayne Ross discuss resisting “No Child Left Behind” on Michael Baker’s “Room 101” along with co-host Richard Hargesheimer

On this edition of “Room 101” (broadcast yesterday on KZUM 89.3 in Lincoln, Nebraska), Rich Gibson and Wayne Ross discuss the recent Rouge Forum conference in Louisville, Kentucky and the how educators are resisting the oppressive effects of high-stakes testing in North American classrooms. Rich and Wayne also discuss their recent article in CounterPunch magazine in which they define the role of schools and the bipartisan “No Child Left Behind” law in the rotting, militarized, imperial system.

This is only a test: How two hours determine the future of a school

“So due to a simple law, the entire staff at Joseph Gallagher may soon be fired because some 11-year-old named Nzeyimana can’t use the word “prowl” in a sentence.”

Here’s a story from the Cleveland Scene, which does a nice job of conveying the perversion foisted on schools by the No Child Left Behind law, where if such schools don’t make “adequate yearly progress,” (including year-to-year test score increases for non-English speaking and cognitively disabled students), the state has the right to fire the principal, teachers, and staff and shut down the school.