E Wayne Ross – Page 92 – Critical Theories in Education

Dismantling NCLB and Refocusing Accountability

Refocusing Accountability: Using Local Performance Assessments to Enhance Teaching and Learning for Higher Order Skills, a Briefing Paper Prepared for Members of The Congress of The United States, by George Wood, Linda Darling-Hammond, Monty Neill and Pat Roschewski, is on the FairTest website.

You can link from it to legislative language to change NCLB in line with the recommendations of the paper. These recommendations are very consistent with the legislative proposals of the Forum on Educational Accountability, based in turn on the Joint Organizational Statement on NCLB. The FEA recommendations and the Joint Statement are also at www.edaccountability.org.

The text of the executive summary of “Refocusing Accountability” follows:

Executive Summary

Refocusing Accountability:
Using Local Performance Assessments to Enhance Teaching and Learning for Higher Order Skills

By George Wood, Linda Darling-Hammond, Monty Neill and Pat Roschewski

Performance based assessments, often locally controlled and involving multiple measures of achievement, offer a way to move beyond the limits and negative effects of standardized examinations currently in use for school accountability. While federal legislation calls for “multiple up-to-date measures of student academic achievement, including measures that assess higher-order thinking skills and understanding” (NCLB, Sec. 1111, b, I, vi), most assessment tools used for federal reporting focus on lower-level skill that can be measured on standardized mostly multiple-choice tests. High stakes attached to them have led schools to not engage in more challenging and engaging curriculum but to limit school experiences to those that focus on test preparation.

Performance assessments that are locally controlled and involve multiple measures assist students in learning and teachers in teaching for higher order skills. These tools engage students in the demonstration of skills and knowledge through the performance of tasks that provide teachers with an understanding of student achievement and learning needs. Large scale examples involving the use of such performance-based assessments come from states such as Nebraska, Wyoming, Connecticut and New York, as well as nations such as Australia and Singapore. The evidence from research on these and other systems indicate that through using performance assessments schools can focus instruction on higher order skills, provide a more accurate measure of what students know and can do, engage students more deeply in learning, and provide for more timely feedback to teachers, parents, and students in order to monitor and alter instruction.

Research evidence suggests that in order for performance assessment systems to work, governments must make significant investments in both teacher development and the development of performance tasks. However, this investment is often no greater than the cost of standardized measures. More important, it strengthens teacher quality and student learning. Performance assessment systems can be reliable and valid, having both content and predictive validity when appropriately utilized.

Based on the evidence that performance based assessment better meets the federal agenda of teaching for higher-level skills, reauthorization of NCLB should support and encourage state and local education agencies in developing performance assessments. Congress can amend Section 1111 (b)(3) of NCLB with a new paragraph (D) that authorizes and encourages states to move to performance based assessments and multiple measures incorporated into a system combining state and local assessments. Authorization for adequate funding to support this move should be included in the legislation.

America’s Founding Fictions

America’s Founding Fictions
The Washington Post

By Karen Ordahl Kupperman
Sunday, May 13, 2007; B02

The colonists landed, short of food and supplies, after a long and harrowing transatlantic voyage. The initial exploring party stole a large quantity of corn that the Indians had carefully stored away for the hard winter. They then dug up some graves, looted items that had been buried with the dead and ransacked Indian houses. Furious fighting with the natives soon ensued. Once they had selected a site for their settlement, the migrants endured a winter of death in which they lost more than half their number.

Ah, of course, you’re thinking — Jamestown. All that looting and fighting and stealing and death. It’s the creation story from hell. But think again.

That description is not of the troubled Virginia colony settled by a group of men popularly derided, then and now, as the scum of the Earth. Rather, it depicts the arduous first days of Massachusetts’s Plymouth colony, our favorite myth of the nation’s founding.

These aren’t the kinds of events we remember the Pilgrims by, even though the description is drawn from their own words. Instead, our national mythmakers have accentuated the positive to carve the story of the pious Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving out of Plymouth’s more complicated, less pure beginnings. In contrast, the earlier Jamestown colony, whose 400th anniversary we commemorate tomorrow, is depicted as a saga of unrelieved degradation and failure, relegated to second-tier status in the history books. But it shouldn’t be.

American history today begins with the Pilgrims because their experience in Plymouth has been molded to offer a more acceptable foundation story than the exploitative dog-eat-dog world of the early Chesapeake. The Puritans’ arrival in Boston, where they built John Winthrop’s “city on a hill,” clinched it for Massachusetts.

The Pilgrim story took over as our founding fiction after the Revolutionary War, when New England and the South began to pull in different directions. The Massachusetts colonists were labeled the Pilgrim Fathers in the 1790s, and the agreement they signed on arrival became the Mayflower Compact about the same time. Because Puritanism had come to be seen as repressive (think of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter”), early American leaders such as Daniel Webster brought the Plymouth colonists forward as the kinder, gentler Puritans.

This is the origins story we prefer and the one we promote. We prefer it because we like to think that we are descended from a humble and saintly band, religiously motivated and communal in organization, who wanted nothing more than the freedom to worship God. The individualistic, grasping capitalists of Virginia offer much less appealing antecedents.

Encasing our national founding in a myth of immaculate conception feeds the assumption that the United States is unlike other nations, that it acts in the world only to serve the greater good. Sometimes it even makes the connection directly. Two days before Thanksgiving 2004, U.S., Iraqi and British troops began a major offensive south of Baghdad. The name chosen for the campaign? Operation Plymouth Rock.

But America’s true founding story is much more interesting and much more real. All early colonies had tremendous difficulties becoming established. The reports sent home from Jamestown were overwhelmingly dismal; it was all harder than anyone had expected, and everyone had different ideas about how to proceed.

Dismayed by the high death rate and the disorder of Jamestown’s first couple of years, the colony’s London sponsor, the Virginia Company — a kind of early venture-capital outfit — decided to compel the settlers to be virtuous. It imposed the most severe martial law, regulating every aspect of life to force the men to work for the collective interest. The death penalty was ordered for almost any infraction. If civic virtue could be achieved by force, the Virginia Company was going to do it.

In fact, martial law did stabilize the colony (although many ran away to take up life with the Chesapeake Algonquins). But it couldn’t foster true community development or create a thriving economy. Yet over the next several years, some colonists and backers came up with a different approach — and laid the foundations for what America is today. They substituted incentives for iron control. The land was divvied up among the colonists; a representative assembly gave landowners control of taxation; women were recruited as wives for planters; and the professional soldiers were removed.

And voila. The colony began to grow. To get a stake in this new society, young men and women were willing to take on the burden of working as indentured servants for a number of years.

The new design was in place by 1619, 12 years after the first colonists arrived. Life was still hard and major conflict with the Indians soon came, but the essential elements of success were in place. Every colony from that point forward followed the Jamestown pattern. The Pilgrims, who came in 1620, began as a communal experiment, but within four years, they, too, demanded division of the land and began to disperse into family groups.

Americans ever since have moved across the country in pursuit of the dream of land ownership, the innovation inaugurated on the James River. And they have prided themselves on the ingenuity that also surfaced first in Jamestown, where John Rolfe defied the odds by learning how to produce a marketable tobacco crop that became the colony’s gold.

Of course, there was a tragic downside, as there is to many success stories. As colonists north and south hacked their farms out of the wilderness, they ruined the Indians’ agricultural and hunting economy and forced the natives off their land. And ownership of property soon extended to ownership of labor, as Native Americans and imported Africans were enslaved in both New England and the South.

The truth of our history is that it produced winners and losers. Our founding is not a storybook Pilgrim fable. It’s something hardier and more complicated. And it’s reflected in Jamestown’s great accomplishment: that it was the place where English men and women worked through the messiness of real life in dire circumstances and found the secret to success in building a society — giving everyone a stake in the outcome.

Karen Ordahl Kupperman is a professor of history at New York University and the author of

“The Jamestown Project.”

Rouge Forum Update

Dear Friends,

The Rouge Forum No Blood For Oil Profits is updated at www.rougeforum.org.

Those good for our lifetimes posters attacking the perpetual oil wars are on sale, cheap!

But this week we want to call attention to a key appeal for support. Susan Ohanian’s web page has been a vital resource for educators and community people. With a handful of others, she initiated a petition against the NCLB which drew 30,000 plus signatures, and was quickly attacked by the president of the National Education Association, Reg Weaver (now busy trying to dismantle the NEA employees’ own pension fund).

Susan need some financial help to keep her web page going. Send what you can to:
Susan
P. O. Box 370
Charlotte, Vermont 05445

And remember to subscribe to Substance News, the best hard-copy material being published on educational and social issues today. Just 16 dollars a year!

Substance
5132 W. Berteau
Chicago, IL 60641-1440

In addition, radical educator Michael Baker was recently removed from his Nebraska classroom, never to return, for showing the film, Baghdad ER—and probably for creating his radio program, Room 101. The story of his dismissal is here.

and a link to the radio program “Room 101” is here…subscribe to the podcast.

Given that there may be another California Grocery Strike, readers might want to forward this piece analysing the last strike to their favorite grocer workers.

Our peace and justice coalition in San Diego is slowly moving toward a discussion on strategic planning, using several rubrics, this among them. Suggestions from educators and community workers in other groups are welcomed!

We are also working hard to block the invasion of the mercenary company, Blackwater, into San Diego County. Here is a web site of interest.

Here’s to Doug and Jan’s trip across the USA, Big Al’s red wedding, and thanks to Bob, Tommie, Susan H and O, Kerry N, Laura C., Sharon Agopian, Candy D, Bonnie Macintosh, Sandy Stone, Greg, Bill, Michael, Gerry, and Alan and Sarah.

All the best,

Why does the US government mislead the public about educational achievement?

Well, Jerry Bracey—a fellow with policy groups at Arizona State University and the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation—says the numbers reported in international comparisons of student achievement “are useful as scare techniques. If you can batter people into believing the schools are in awful shape, you can make them anxious about their future — and you can control them.”

In short, test scores are used for fear-mongering (among other things) and, as Bracey points out in his May 3 Washington Post op-ed:

If the fear-mongers can scare you sufficiently (how many times have you heard the phrase “failing schools” in the past five years?), you might permit them to do to your public schools things you would otherwise never allow.

A Test Everyone Will Fail
By Gerald Bracey

The world of education is a world of tests these days. But why should tests be only for students? Here’s one for policymakers, politicians and adults in general. Bet you don’t pass.

The National Assessment Governing Board defined the “proficient” rating on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the nation’s report card, as the level that “all students should reach.” (The other levels are “basic” and “advanced”; the proficient and advanced levels are often reported together as “proficient or better.”) Given that, and given that Sweden was the top-ranked country among 35 in the most recent international reading study, answer the following:

1. If Swedish fourth-graders sat for our National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test, what proportion of them would be labeled “proficient or better”?

2. If Singaporean eighth-graders sat for our NAEP science test, what proportion would be labeled “proficient or better”?

3. In the Third International Mathematics and Science Study of 1995, where did American fourth-graders rank in science among the 26 participating nations?

4. What percentage of American fourth-graders were labeled “proficient or better” in the 1996 NAEP science assessment?

5. What indicators of achievement have been rejected by the Government Accountability Office; the National Academy of Sciences; the National Academy of Education; and the Center for Research on Evaluation, Student Standards and Testing?

6. What are the first words in set-off text that one encounters in the “Leaders and Laggards” report released in February by the Center for American Progress and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce?

Here are the answers:

1. Thirty-three percent.

2. Fifty-one percent.

3. Third.

4. Twenty-nine percent.

5. The NAEP achievement levels: basic, proficient and advanced.

6. “The measures of our educational shortcomings are stark indeed; most 4th and 8th graders are not proficient in either reading or mathematics.”

By comparing the results of foreign students and American students on tests administered in both nations, and then examining the American students’ scores on the U.S. NAEP, it is possible to reliably estimate how well foreign students would perform on the NAEP.

And it turns out that only one-third of those high-flying Swedish kids would be considered proficient readers; the NAEP figure for U.S. fourth-graders was 29 percent. The great majority of the remaining countries would have fewer proficient students than the United States. Using the NAEP standard, no country comes close to having a majority of proficient readers.

Under the NAEP standard, Singapore is the only nation in the world to have a majority of its students be proficient in science, and that by a scant 1 percent. Only a handful of countries would have a majority of students proficient in mathematics.

All those august organizations have rejected the NAEP achievement levels because the process is confusing to the people who try to set the levels and because the results are inconsistent: Children can’t answer questions they should be able to and can answer questions they shouldn’t be able to. The levels also give what the National Academy of Sciences called “unreasonable” results, including the fact that only 29 percent of U.S. fourth-graders were considered proficient or better by NAEP, yet America ranked third among 26 participating nations.

Other evidence is easy to come by. In 2000, 2.7 percent of American high school seniors scored 3 or better — the score at which colleges begin to grant credit for the course — on Advanced Placement calculus. Almost 8 percent of seniors (including those who did not take the test) scored above 600 on the math SAT; nearly a quarter (24 percent) of those who took it scored over 600. Yet NAEP said that only 1.5 percent of the nation’s seniors reached its “advanced” level.

So why does the government continue to report such misleading information? The “Leaders and Laggards” report illustrates why: The numbers are useful as scare techniques. If you can batter people into believing the schools are in awful shape, you can make them anxious about their future — and you can control them.

In the 1980s, the “schools suck” bloc used such numbers to make us fearful that Japan, now emerging from a 15-year period of recession and stagnation, was going to take our markets; today, India and China play the role of economic ogres.

Recently, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in The Post that constant references to a “war on terror” “stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of policies they want to pursue.” Happens all the time in education. The most recent phony alarm comes from Eli Broad and Bill Gates, who are putting up $60 million hoping to “wake up the American people.” If the fear-mongers can scare you sufficiently (how many times have you heard the phrase “failing schools” in the past five years?), you might permit them to do to your public schools things you would otherwise never allow.

How BC Libs Aim to Reinvent Higher Ed

In the latest issue of The Tyee, Crawford Kilian, a prof at Capilano College, does an interesting analysis of the the plan to reinvent higher education in British Columbia. The plan is called Campus 2020 and it’s yet another example of how the neoliberalism is reducing teaching and learning into commodities for sale on the “free market.”

Empowering Those at the Bottom Beats Punishing Them From the Top

In a commentary for Education Week, San Diego’s school superintendent, Carl A. Cohen, presents a straight-forward, non-ideological critique of No Child Left Behind.

Key points include:

If the goal of establishing impossible targets is to exaggerate and overidentify failure in public education to provide a rationale for untested theories of reform, then the law has been a spectacular success.

I believe there is a place where no child is left behind, where all children achieve grade-level proficiency and there is no achievement gap. It is called heaven…I have a strong suspicion that it will not be achieved on earth for all of this nation’s children by the law’s target date of 2014 without divine intervention. It is even more unlikely to be achieved when this earth for many children living in our urban neighborhoods is far closer to hell. This is not a defeatist attitude or an excuse to avoid making the hard decisions necessary to address educational inequities. It is a fact. Acknowledging it and establishing ambitious, yet reasonable, targets and methods for determining progress will not diminish the desire of education leaders to improve student achievement. It will empower us.

Published Online: April 24, 2007
Published in Print: April 25, 2007

Commentary
Empowering Those at the Bottom Beats Punishing Them From the Top
An urban superintendent looks at No Child Left Behind.
By Carl A. Cohn

Some education historians argue that American cycles of school reform have been preoccupied with either the declining wit or the deteriorating character of students. This current “wit” cycle of reform, ushered in by the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, is now approaching a quarter-century in duration. It shows no obvious signs of winding down. Barely a day passes without another critique of public education that repackages the concerns of A Nation at Risk about the negative impact of public schools on the minds of our children.
—Jonathan Bouw

Sometimes, however, a body appears deceptively strong just before death. During my 38 years in public education, I have witnessed enough cyclical changes to suspect that the strength of this current cycle of reform has passed its peak, and that the body now suffers from a terminal illness.

This is the legacy of the No Child Left Behind Act. Beginning with the legislation’s title, federal lawmakers succeeded in codifying the good intentions and misconceptions of a generation of education reformers. For the past five years, those of us on the front lines of education have lived in a world governed by the law’s idealistic goals of achieving 100 percent proficiency for all students and eliminating the achievement gap.

As a school superintendent, I understand the symbolic power of high aspirations. I am responsible for inspiring those engaged in the difficult work of improving public education. Yet I am also keenly aware of the danger of asking educators to achieve impossible, nebulous goals. While initially inspiring, such goals eventually become debilitating.

This is where I am with No Child Left Behind: Rather than supporting my efforts to improve student achievement, the law’s unreasonable mandates and dependence on punishment are among my largest obstacles.

Since the No Child Left Behind law’s passage, educators willing to occupy this middle ground of praising its principles while pointing out its practical flaws have been guaranteed the educational equivalent of a “swiftboating.” Their motives are questioned. They are attacked as pro-union or anti-accountability and criticized for placing the needs of adults ahead of the needs of children.

Two years ago, I came out of retirement to become the superintendent of the San Diego Unified School District in California. I inherited a district in which the driving philosophy over the previous six years had, similarly, been to attack the credibility of any educator who spoke out against a top-down education reform model. These attacks allowed those in charge to portray themselves as the defenders of children, to justify any means to promote their model of improving student achievement, and to view their critics through the same apocalyptic lens of good and evil that has characterized many of our recent national debates.
If the goal of establishing impossible targets is to exaggerate and overidentify failure in public education to provide a rationale for untested theories of reform, then the law has been a spectacular success.

At any level of governance, this perspective is counterproductive. In San Diego, it produced a climate of conflict that is only now beginning to improve. On a national level, it has had a chilling effect on open discussion and prevented a genuine national debate on the goals of the No Child Left Behind legislation.

Now that I have reached my 60s, I have become far more outspoken when I encounter unreasonable targets and frustrating micromanagement from afar. As the former longtime superintendent of a district (Long Beach, Calif.) that succeeded in improving student achievement and reducing the achievement gap between minority and white students, I understand the enormity of the task and the impracticality of the progress required by this federal law.

I believe there is a place where no child is left behind, where all children achieve grade-level proficiency and there is no achievement gap. It is called heaven. As a former seminary student, I have a strong suspicion that it will not be achieved on earth for all of this nation’s children by the law’s target date of 2014 without divine intervention. It is even more unlikely to be achieved when this earth for many children living in our urban neighborhoods is far closer to hell. This is not a defeatist attitude or an excuse to avoid making the hard decisions necessary to address educational inequities. It is a fact. Acknowledging it and establishing ambitious, yet reasonable, targets and methods for determining progress will not diminish the desire of education leaders to improve student achievement. It will empower us.

If, on the other hand, the goal of establishing impossible targets is to exaggerate and overidentify failure in public education in order to provide a rationale for untested theories of reform, then the No Child Left Behind law has been a spectacular success.

If a given set of parents knew that their child would be labeled a failure for missing just one of 19 targets, they would call the system unfair. If we punished their child on the basis of such a contrived failure, it would be grounds for a lawsuit. If we then told the parents that, in the name of accountability, we were going to find that child other, better parents, I would fear for my personal safety.

Yet, the No Child Left Behind Act applies the same logic to public school systems. If one of my district’s schools misses just one of 19 federally mandated targets, I must label it a failing school. Once this school is labeled a failure, I am required to sanction it. These sanctions include offering untested private tutoring to all students, regardless of their performance or whether the services have any benefit; busing students to other schools, regardless of whether those schools are better; and closing, restructuring, or transforming the school into a charter school, regardless of whether that process will improve it.

Some states have avoided this chain of events by establishing such low standards that any school can achieve the state’s easy targets. But when a state such as California, with an accountability system that predated the No Child Left Behind law, establishes high-quality standards of performance, achieving all of No Child Left Behind’s targets on the federal government’s timeline becomes impossible. In this Alice-in-Wonderland context, enforcing the federal accountability system becomes an exercise in absurdity, where nearly all urban public schools are subjected to the same shout of “Off with his head!”

In my lifetime, I have experienced the large-scale application of so many theories of school reform. Each of these theories—from class-size reduction to whole-language reading instruction—has failed to live up to the expectations of reformers. In some cases, they have caused extensive harm. The lesson of these failures is that there are no quick fixes or perfect educational theories. School reform is a slow, steady, labor-intensive process. It is heavily dependent on harnessing the talents of individuals such as Erin Gruwell, the Long Beach teacher currently portrayed in the movie “Freedom Writers,” for transforming the lives of at-risk students, rather than punishing them for noncompliance with bureaucratic mandates and destroying their initiative.

Whether a school is public, private, or charter, ground-level solutions, such as high-quality leadership, staff collaboration, committed teachers, and clean and safe environments, have the best chance of success. These solutions are not easily quantified. They cannot be experimented on by researchers or mandated by the federal government. Their success is dependent upon empowering those at the bottom, not punishing them from the top.

Carl A. Cohn served as a teacher, counselor, central-office administrator, and superintendent before coming out of retirement in 2005 to become the superintendent of the San Diego Unified School District, California’s second-largest public school system. He had previously been the superintendent in Long Beach, California’s third-largest district, winning the Broad Prize for Urban Education and becoming the longest-serving superintendent of a large urban school district in the nation. He is portrayed in the new movie “Freedom Writers” by actor Robert Wisdom.

Vol. 26, Issue 34, Pages 32-33

Teenage shock troops of the religious right

In Rolling Stone issue 1024 (April 19, 2007), Jeff Sharlet reports on the “teenage holy war” being waged by Ron Luce’s BattleCry, a Christofascist organization that attracts thousands to “Acquire the Fire” rallies held in stadiums in the US and has sent 53,000 teenage “missionaries” around the world to preach spiritual “purity” (e.g., chastity, sobriety) and a commitment to capitalism.

Luce rejects what he calls “cultural Christianity” and the “pigpen” of secularism.

He considers evangelical Christians as soft and bland, instead he wants “stalkers” who will bring criminal passion to the their pursuit of godliness. Luce says that he and his teenage apostles are involved in a real, not a metaphorical, war and building a “attacking church.”

Sharlet quotes him as saying “We gotta be ready to fight and not be these passive little namby-pamby, kum-ba-yah, thumb-sucking babies that call themselves Christians.”

To reach his goals, Luce entices youth to stadium-size rallies with Christian rock bands like P.O.D., Skillet, Pillar, and Casting Crowns where he tells them to make lists of secular pleasures they will sacrifice for the cause and then has kids toss their lists into a garbage truck.

The final spectacle of the Acquire the Fire events has Luce acting out the Biblical story of the Levite and his concubine , from the Book of Judges,

in which a man who, after he gives over his concubine to be gang-raped, kills the disgraced woman and cuts her into twelve pieces, then sends one to each of the tribes of Israel as a reminder of what happens to the ungodly…[Then] Luce or one of his junior pastors dissects a mannequin labeled with the sins of secularism and then—to the cheer “Cut up the concubine!”—sends his assistants into the crowd to distribute the pieces.

Messages at the rallies include claims such as obedience to God matters more than education. And that seems to be a guiding principle at BattleCry’s “Honor Academy” in Texas, where the shock troops in-training engage in “emotionally stretching opportunities of a lifetime,” and are taught media and PR skills, but the library at this “school” is never open.

But there is hope for American culture and Rolling Stone is obviously optimistic, because the article that follows the expose of Luce and BattleCry is an interview with Iggy Pop.