E Wayne Ross

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.

“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.

Iowa teachers Dave O’Connor and Alan Young recently published an op-ed in the Des Moines Register that illustrates how the rhetoric of “rigorous standards” in education spawns rigid, inflexible, standardized approaches to to learning rather than opportunities for students to delve into the “messy world of critical thinking.”

In addition, O’Connor and Young note how the call for is “an expensive, bureaucratic system of state-controlled content enforced through a testing regime” in Iowa will cost of up to $125 million to initiate, just so it can be determined how successful Iowa students are at recognizing right answers on multiple choice tests. A shift of resources that will line the pockets of corporate test makers at the direct expense of lowering class size, enhancing access to technology or professional development.
desmoinesregister.com

April 21, 2008

How to improve education? Resist straitjacket of standards; make efforts learner-centered

Dave O’Connor and Alan Young

The Register’s April 9 editorial, “Help Iowa Aim High: Set Rigorous Standards,” used the word “rigorous” five times in an 11-paragraph piece. Princeton University’s Word Net defines rigorous as “rigidly accurate; allowing no deviation from a standard.”

The same online dictionary defines “rigid” as “inflexible: incapable of adapting or changing to meet circumstances.” Are rigidity, inflexibility and an inability to adapt to changing circumstances really the characteristics the Register believes Iowa should be looking to instill in its 21st century citizens?

As Register editors call for “more rigorous state content standards and mandatory core curriculum,” they should be honest with Iowans. What they are really calling for is an expensive, bureaucratic system of state-controlled content enforced through a testing regime. New standardized state assessments to replace the ITBS/ITED will then be implemented at an initial cost of up to $125 million to determine how successful our students become at recognizing right answers on multiple choice tests.

External nonprofit education organizations will come onto the state payroll to review our new standards and assessment to ensure that they are rigorous enough. An additional array of end-of-course assessments and practice tests will then appear to help make sure our students are ready for the state test.

Before you know it, millions of our limited tax dollars that could have been spent on class-size reduction, technology, professional development and other proven initiatives that directly impact student learning will instead have gone into the creation of a testing bureaucracy. This approach will drown district efforts to develop more important thinking and communication capacities Iowa students need to thrive in a democratic society or compete in the global marketplace.

As Professor Linda Darling Hammond of Stanford University has noted, “…Almost nothing we do in the world of work requires recognizing one of several pre-selected responses to questions about a single fact or piece of information. Most jobs in today’s knowledge-based economy require that we find, assemble and analyze information, write and speak clearly and persuasively; and work with others to solve messy problems that don’t have predetermined answers.”

Others have argued that focusing on standardized testing and centralized curriculum squelches creativity and innovation, “…the very things that our competitors in Asia are trying to copy in their own educational reforms.”

When state-controlled curriculum is implemented to support state-mandated standards, the focus is on what is most easily tested, not what is most valuable to learn. Education evolves into a race to cover a pre-determined list of facts in time for students to regurgitate them on cheap-to-grade bubble tests. Pennsylvania, for example, has one seventh-grade science and technology class with 178 state-mandated objectives that teachers must teach. Real, inquiry-based learning – where students play a role in choosing what to explore and teachers can develop curriculum that is responsive to student interests and real-world events – takes a back seat to test preparation.

There is scant evidence to prove that this approach is effective. Professor Gerald Bracey of the Center for Education Research, Analysis and Innovation found “absolutely no correlation” between states with rigorous standards and improved standardized test scores. And the testing companies themselves, after 60-plus years, still provide virtually no evidence that standardized tests improve student learning.

The Register’s editorial criticized Iowa’s current standards as “so broad they are almost meaningless.” Iowa’s current standards, when combined with a voluntary model core curriculum, provide teachers and districts with both the direction and the flexibility they need to teach students what they need to know to be active and engaged members of our democracy. At the same time, they allow students to delve into the messy world of critical thinking that rigidly accurate and inflexible standards documents ignore.

There are many ways we can and must improve education in Iowa. But they should be learner-centered, not subject-centered, and they should be made by those closest to the children. Moving curricular decision-making even farther away from the classroom and creating a system of mandatory compliance will not yield learning communities of excellence.

Mandating top-down, simplistic rigor as reform may satisfy some legislators and editorial writers that they have “done something,” but in reality it will subvert ongoing district efforts to create even better, higher-quality, learner-centered curricula and assessments.

Our children deserve better than this kind of failed “standard” educational reform.

DAVE O’CONNOR is a teacher at Merrill Middle School and ALAN YOUNG is a teacher and president of the Des Moines Education Association.

Seattle Times: Seattle teacher, suspended for refusing to give WASL, calls test “bad for kids”

A Seattle teacher is spending two weeks on leave without pay for refusing to give the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) to his sixth-graders this month at Eckstein Middle School.

Carl Chew, 60, who teaches science, wanted to take a stand against a test he considers harmful to students, teachers, schools and families.

“I did it because I think it’s bad for kids,” he said.

He said he knew he would face consequences, and might even be fired.

“When you do an act of civil disobedience, you gracefully accept what happens to you,” he said.

Before the WASL started at Eckstein last week, Chew said he told Eckstein administrators that he would not give the exam. He said they tried to talk him out of it.
He said he spent the first few days of WASL testing working at the district’s Science Materials Center, preparing student science kits, as district officials decided what to do.

He then was suspended without pay from Monday through May 2, the day WASL testing ends.

“He failed to follow his duties as teacher,” said Seattle Public Schools spokeswoman Patti Spencer.

The district, she said, understands there are debates over standardized tests such as the WASL, but it expects teachers to fulfill all their responsibilities, which include giving state-mandated exams.

Teachers are put on unpaid leave as a form of discipline. Paid leave occurs, district staff said, when an investigation into allegations of misconduct is under way.

The WASL is given each year to students in grades 3-8 and Grade 10, and covers reading, writing, math and science. It is used to determine whether Washington schools are meeting the goals of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. And starting this year, students must have passed reading and writing on the 10th-grade exam to graduate from high school.

The WASL given to sixth-graders includes just reading and math. Chew was to proctor those subjects for some of his students, but they have had a substitute instead.

Chew may be the first teacher in Washington state to refuse to give the test. The Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction and the Washington Education Association (WEA), the state’s largest teachers union, said they didn’t know of any similar cases.

Juanita Doyon, director of the Parent Empowerment Network, an anti-WASL group, says she’s heard of only one teacher in the nation who has refused to administer a high-stakes test. That teacher works in Colorado.

Chew, she said, “has taken a brave stand.”

Supporters see the WASL as an important way to ensure students gain vital skills they’ll need to succeed in college and the workplace. Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson has long said that the state does students no favors if it doesn’t set high standards and make sure students reach them.

Critics, however, question the WASL’s value as a measure of student learning and as a way to improve instruction.

Chew issued a two-page, single-spaced statement listing all of his concerns about the WASL. It includes his contention that many questions on the test are unclear, notes its costs, and says teachers get little information about how to help students improve. The letter also says the WASL focuses too much attention on just a few subjects.

“I think it’s good for students to have basic skills in reading, writing and math,” he said. “But also to have good skills in P.E. and art and music and public speaking.”

The WASL, he said, needs to be scrapped and replaced with a “gentler, kinder way of finding out what our students know and helping teachers educate them better.”

Chew’s action is “reflective of a general sense of frustration and dismay that our members feel about the WASL,” said Mary Lindquist, president of the WEA.

Chew has been teaching for eight years. He’s also been an artist for decades.

This is his first act of civil disobedience, he said, except when he was working as a substitute before he landed a full-time teaching position. He continued to take his fifth-graders out for afternoon recess, he said, even after the principal told him not to do so.

The Parent Empowerment Network is encouraging supporters to send money to Chew to replace his lost wages.

Chew, however, said he won’t accept that money, and requests that the dollars instead go to local groups that oppose high-stakes, standardized testing.

He said he didn’t tell his students about his plans.

“I simply let them know that I had something important to do during the WASL time, and expected them to treat the guest teacher with respect,” he said. “And I told them to do well on the WASL.”

And next year?

“I have let them know I’m never going to give the WASL again,” Chew said. At the same time, he added, “next year is a long way off.”

In the meantime, he said, he plans to think about what might be a “win-win situation.”