Reality Check

Posted on July 30, 2015 by Victoria M. Young

How many Americans care about preserving the institution of public education?

REALITY: Not enough!

******Reality******

Proof? No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was Introduced in the House by John Boehner on March 22, 2001 and its destruction of public schools has gone on, and on, and on for 14 years — even though its faults were immediately recognized.

UPDATE: December 5, 2015— NCLB was changed after 15 years to another faulty law – ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act). Everything here STILL APPLIES – unfortunately.

Recognition of the major flaw in the laws has not deterred lawmakers, or the education system, from putting detrimental “reform” practices into our schools and system. That is the reality as demonstrated in this September 2001 article by Gary Ratner, Director of Citizens for Effective Schools.

“Its approach— increasing accountability — does not address the fundamental need: providing effective teaching, challenging curriculum and family support for all students.”

What is NCLB?

“[NCLB]…is essentially just federal reinforcement of the states’ decade-old ‘standards, assessments and accountability’ movement…

…But history shows that approach is wholly inadequate…

…More of the same will not work…”

And Ratner and his organization developed a coalition of other like-minded organizations and individuals. They tried to draw attention to the problems with NCLB and to offer better solutions. One attempt was a full-page open letter to President Bush and Congress.

“The current Act fails to remedy the underlying problem: the need to dramatically improve the level and quality of Industrial Age teaching and family support for the millions of students the system never previously expected to perform well academically.”

Gary’s efforts, and those of many others, have continued. But the thing about Gary Ratner is that he actually organized and presented better ideas to Congress in 2004, wrote a better critique of NCLB than congressional members ever attempted, and even went so far as to take a chance on working with me at the grassroots level. That’s gutsy!

His efforts have been never-ending. Scroll down to the beginning of his news page and see for yourselves the long history of his involvement in this fight.

REALITY: Critical thinking, intelligence, knowledge, persistence,….dare we say “grit”….are what we want to see in American students but we ignore those characteristics in our citizens when it comes to lawmaking.

REALITY: Congress doesn’t give a damn what any of we minions want or what we need in education reform laws.

“No Child Left Behind” failed to live up to its name…period.

After experimenting with the theory of standards, testing, and accountability, or as Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE) wrote, after…

“…experimenting with our children — a whole generation of children, we know we left children behind”…

…the reality is, it’s time to STOP.

REALITY: We have never offered quality-learning opportunities to all children. No Child Left Behind only made that reality worse for children in low-income communities because it focused dollars on a standards-based system not on providing what children need in order to be able to take advantage of learning opportunities —when they are offered. Instead, competition created a race for scores. It produced scores without skills and instilled temporary knowledge in students without offering all of them opportunities to apply their knowledge. And NCLB once again proved that enforcement of “higher standards” is not the best first step in school improvement.

So in 2007 as the OFFICIAL deadline for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) approached —when NCLB should have been laid to rest—Ratner continued the effort to draw public attention to the real issues with NCLB. So what are we doing now?

REALITY: We are pretending to turnover control of school improvement back to the states while insisting we still follow standards, testing, and accountability as the guiding principles for school improvement. We continue to ignore longstanding research on Effective Schools.

Should we expect that anyone in Congress has read and understood Gary Ratner’s attempt to assist in public development of skilled leadership, producing leaders knowledgeable in the common elements of effective schools, or have reviewed the 45 page University of the District of Columbia Law Review article on restructuring this broken law?

REALITY: We have set really, really low expectations for Congress.

Realistically, we are not going to agree with every aspect of any one person’s view. But, there is so much here to work with and, tragically, identifying problems and solving them is not how Congress has approached ESEA reauthorization at all. Congressional representatives —many of whom were in Congress for the signing of NCLB—should be able to explain why the law failed and how what they have now written fixes the problems. They haven’t.

REALITY: They don’t get it, so they can’t get it right.

The children in public schools need the public to support them. They are not represented by Congress. Children can’t win the war against the influential in public education let alone hold the line against those behind the scenes who are the REALLY BIG movers and shakers in the lawmaking process. Those people are the ones that had no qualms about experimenting on the children who became the modern-day Lost Generation. That generation, who are now young adults, are the “product” of both NCLB’s education policy and financial policies that created the deep money pit of the Great Recession. Together, those policies created by Congress undercut the future for our youth.

REALITY: The influential are not looking out for our future.

Will we? We can. #MakeESEArightWe didn’t get ESEA (The Elementary and Secondary Education Act) right. Knowing the major flaw of NCLB is still the basis of ESSA (The Every Student Succeeds Act), let’s do the right thing and end the era of education reform insanity.

#MakeESEAright #ESEAreauthorization2020

The Child Left Behind

Posted on July 28, 2015 by Victoria M. Young

The child left behind isn’t always obvious.

The obviously educationally deprived children have been well documented—repeatedly. They are represented by the demographic categories (disaggregated data) of No Child Left Behind in an attempt to bring attention and resources to those groups to correct their education deficit. But in this plan, have we stopped to observe what we have created, to assess what is happening and ask, who is the child left behind and why should I care?

History, experiences, research, and common sense tell us that well-educated people are better able to resist political oppression, live longer and healthier lives, and are less likely to be incarcerated or require long-term social services.

We obviously believe health care is an issue worthy of our attention.
We all have heard that our country throws more people in jail on a per capita basis that most others.
We talk about the importance of an educated, informed electorate.

We seem to comprehend educations’ importance to issues important to us. Yet on the subject of our education system, we fail to be up in arms when we most definitely should be.

2007 is when No Child Left Behind should have been updated or trashed. That date came and went with people across the country complaining —but no wide-spread action was taken en-mass. Our inaction spoke volumes. It told the Powers-That-Be to do with this law what they will. They did nothing.

And worse still, they continued to use a very narrow set of statistics to decide the fate of children across this country. But what if yours wasn’t or isn’t “statistically significant”?

The child left behind is the child that falls through the cracks. And during the Great Recession, our economic decline in most states translated to budget cuts for education. The cracks got wider. In the past, today, or in the future, there is a very good chance the child left behind is in some way related to you.

And we, as a society, we have failed to provide safety nets for children in far too many instances. So in addition to asking who we are leaving behind, we have to ask “Why?” We can not remedy a problem when we won’t face the causes. There are many but none of them are so huge and impossible that they defy our understanding—if we care enough to try. None of them are so costly that we can’t afford to fix them. We have reached the point where we can’t afford not to be successful in improving public education.

As individuals, we must rethink our priorities given the fact that the child left behind may not be who you think it is.

The child left behind can be in any demographic group. The child could be white, middle-class, and English-speaking. If this child is also quiet and well-behaved, the possibility of falling through the cracks is very real and likely. Many a child cursed with being “nice” and “average” has gone that way. This is the child that will be “statistically insignificant” and these cracks are widened by larger class sizes and less individual attention.

That is a fact. It isn’t stated to take anything away from the dire need to address the children on whom the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) focused. That law meant to supply additional funding for impoverished children targeted specifically for teacher development, instructional materials, support programs, and parental education.

The No Child Left Behind version of ESEA established a very different aim — closing the achievement gap. The result has been more funds spent on tests and data collection leaving less money for individual educational needs. And that is why we should all care about getting ESEA right.

It is only through addressing individual needs that we will offer access to quality education for all children. In other words, offering equal educational opportunity means truly leaving no child behind.

Closing the achievement gap is a standards and testing across-the-board attempt to give us the “right” numbers. Offering equal opportunity is the promise of America. Fulfilling that promise is the right thing to do and now is the right time to do it.

#SunsetNCLB Stop the damage. End the Bush era weapon of educational mass destruction.

Sunset No Child Left Behind; Roll Back ESEA.

Target for change 2020!

UPDATE: No Child Left Behind was renamed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) on December 10, 2015. The problems with the law remain. It’s not right.

What Debate?

Posted on July 20, 2015 by Victoria M. Young

The marketing campaign to FIX No Child Left Behind began back in January with announcements that there would be debate.

A draft of the Every Child Ready for College or Career Act of 2015 was released and many newspapers and education associations picked up the story including the American Educational Research Association.

“The draft bill contains several provisions related to research. If enacted, the bill would task the Institute of Education Sciences with evaluating Title I activities. In addition, state plans submitted to the Department of Education would be approved unless the department presented “substantial high-quality education research” that demonstrated that a plan would be ineffective or inappropriate. The bill does not define high-quality education research.

Alexander has made it clear that he hopes to have a substantial discussion about ESEA.”

Discussion? Debate? Both are important and citizens should have been included to help shape and direct the debate about “fixing” the law. After-all, we were the ones who were subjected to the consequences of bad ideas being passed by congress and signed into law, in this case, by then President Bush. And there was never an official parental complaint process!

But instead of the anticipated discussion, Senator Alexander immediately directed “the debate” to the topic of Testing and Accountability while avoiding the topic of national standards themselves by pacifying people with his standard “no national school board” meaningless rhetoric. And the marketers changed the law’s name to get away from the identifying language of the controversial Common Core Initiative (College or Career Ready). The Every Child Achieves Act proved to be more palatable.

How did the so-called debate go? Both the House and Senate bills to replace NCLB maintained the yearly standardized testing for accountability purposes in math and language arts just like in NCLB. What they did do, to sell this fallacy of test-based accountability again, was shift the responsibility for accountability mechanisms to the States. Does that change the problem with high-stakes testing? No. Resources focused on testing are spent. They can’t be used for other things.

But to appease the arts groups, the Senate threw them a bone.

“By naming music and arts as core subjects in the Every Child Achieves Act, the Senate has acknowledged and begun to address the national problem of the narrowing of the curriculum that has taken place under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) for more than a decade now.”

How that will “work” in already underfunded and under-performing schools is questionable but these groups base their feeling of success right now on hope. And they now feel their voices have been heard —one group appeased.

The next topic Alexander approved for a “hearing” was that of Supporting Teachers and School Leaders. Afterwards, Senator Murray delivered statements that sounded much like what we have heard for years —expressing things upon which we generally agree.

But in the bill itself, although teacher residency programs are prominent in the “definitions” section, it is other elements of teacher and school leadership development and evaluation that dominate the law. Federal “incentives” for teacher and school leader certification and licensing (aligned with challenging standards), alternative routes to teaching, and “reforming” tenure systems are all included. These things are not supported by research as being effective “to ensure that ever child achieves” —the purpose of the law.

And looking at the bigger picture, both the House and Senate versions claim to be shifting the control to the States. In the very real world of D.C. politics, certain organizations that represent the States stand to greatly increase their influence. Take the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO, chief creators of the Common Core Standards System) for example.

CCSSO has a teacher and principal preparation program ready to go. They have included multiple new elements requiring the expansion of technology and data collection systems including….and…They have it under CONTROL. Kept in mind, CCSSO is a non-governmental organization that has no responsibility for being responsive to the public’s desires. They are in no way accountable to us. And they have had their sights set on ESEA reauthorization for years —the same number of years as the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

They have a “new deal” for us and for themselves it looks like. We should debate who’s goals they represent.

Did we get to debate any of this? No, it was set in motion years ago with no public participation. Remember, there was no official complaint process for No Child Left Behind and these actions don’t fix that.

No record; no accountability. No debate, only a very controlled dog-and-pony show.

The House and Senate bills passed their respective houses proving that On The Hill, “We mean business on K-12 education.” Those in the education industry know that to be the truth!

Here’s how the market-based reformers see it….

Expanding charters and retaining annual testing ARE in both bills. But wasn’t that federal mandate at the heart of the problem?

Charters? Never debated. Never research proven to be an improvement over existing public schools. Not a reform.

“Streamlining” is a questionable term since programs are actually being CUT and we can’t debate whether or not that is a good thing since we don’t know specifically which ones are being cut other than the School Improvement Grants (which had some useful but never openly discussed results).

Transparency? Increased transparency? I don’t see it. Do they mean like we saw with Common Core<sarc>? Do they mean like we might get if the media covered what is really happening instead of what information is released? Do they mean transparency like we might develop if topics were openly debated in public and the alternative view WAS allowed to be heard?

Have we even had public officials openly debate what was wrong with No Child Left Behind? How do they know if they “fixed” it if the problems was never fully exposed?

Obviously the marketers know what people want to hear; on that, they did their research.

We want to hear that education reform was honestly discussed and debated. But, the question remains…

…what debate?

Wrong is Wrong: Lamar Alexander’s Path of Destruction

Posted on July 12, 2015 by Victoria M. Young

Senator Alexander believes in making “the Bush-era law work.” He stated that, “How well our children are learning is much more important than any political game” but his actions have not matched his rhetoric.

The truth is that education reform has been nothing more than one BIG political game. A major part of Lamar Alexander’s life was spent in the political arena and his vision of reform has affected the education of the nation’s children.

Here’s how the game “worked”; the influential set our course for education reform 32 years ago. The nation’s schools, teachers, parents, and children have taken the brunt of their mistakes while those in power marched on never wavering from their goal despite evidence of their mistakes.

The influential were wrong in theory and in action.

And given his history, Lamar Alexander has to be counted as one of the most influential players in this game.

As Secretary of Education, Alexander not only led us in the wrong direction, he also helped put blinders on us. In this politically influential position, he found multiple ways to pull the strings to get the country dancing to his tune.

“America 2000” was unveiled in April 1991 shortly after Alexander replaced Lauro Cavazos as Bush’s education secretary. Alexander was prime architect of the program, which included the proposed creation of national standards and voluntary national tests in English, math, science, history, and geography to be administered in grades 4, 8 and 12.”

And,….

“…voucher legislation first prepared in 1992 by Mr. Alexander, as secretary of education in the Bush administration, has been the basis for Mr. Dole’s “opportunity scholarship” proposal in an election in which voters say education is at the top of their agenda.”

And there were things he chose not to do.

Secretary Alexander chose to ignore the Sandia researchers report stating that the idea of school choice is in direct conflict with support for troubled schools.

“In early 1991, the Sandia team prepared a report, asserting that ‘evidence of decline used to justify system-wide reform is based on misinterpretations or misrepresentations of the data.’

The Sandia researchers have been muzzled. The Department of Education complained that the report was biased because ‘data shown are consistently supportive of a picture of U.S. education in a positive light.’ The report, Secretary of Energy James Watkins charged, ‘is a call for complacency at a time when just the opposite is required. The Department of Energy will not permit publication of the study as presently drafted.’ It has still not been released.” From the Myth of Public School Failures, Richard Rothstein, 2001

Secretary Alexander chose to ignore the warning of the Special Study Panel on Education Indicators…A nation misled will eventually be lost…unless we self-correct. We have that freedom.

Lamar Alexander has exercised his freedom of choice and executed his political agenda with fidelity while keeping much of the country veiled in ignorance.

“Mr. Alexander, a former governor of Tennessee, became a co-director of Empower America in 1994.”

“…the Washington-based outfit has provided funding, staffing, and organization to help Messrs. Kemp, [former Reagan Secretary of Education] Bennett, and Alexander refine their policy ideas–including school choice and the devolution of federal education programs–and expand their political bases after departing from public office.”

“Empower America plans to continue promoting school choice, and Mr. Alexander is expected to take a lead role….We’re planning on [Mr. Alexander] coming back and being a part of a big school-choice initiative.”

Empower America is now called Freedom Works. Freedom Works’ motto for education reform is…

“Bring competition to public education and give kids and parents real opportunity.”

Real opportunity? Words, words, and more words. But….

Senator Alexander has managed to dodge explaining the failures of his theories. He has failed to put forth any evidence-based reasons for the federal government (the government of us) to financially support an ideologically driven, market-based, outcome-based, standards-based (test-based) reform law that sponsors privatization of public schools — replacing what once was an anti-poverty law (ESEA). It’s wrong.

The Every Child Achieves Act (S. 1177/ESSA) has it wrong for the very same reasons that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was wrong. (NOTE: the name was changed to Every Student Succeeds Act ESSA & made into law, Dec. 2015)

Instead of factual reasons why NCLB was so devastating to public schools, Senator Alexander reaches for his standard political game-ball.

“The problem has been that, starting with No Child Left Behind, we’ve created in effect a national school board and Washington has started requiring the standards and that’s created a huge backlash — first with the teachers’ union because they don’t like teacher evaluation from Washington or anywhere else, and second from conservatives who don’t like federal overreach.”

That was dodge ball Lamar Alexander-style.

“Alexander uses the nonexistent ‘national school board’ as a catchphrase… ‘What states need is not centralized support for the new policies and procedures dictated by the national school board, but freedom from Washington …,’”

If the nation wants national standards, who do they want to put in charge of them? The non-profit who currently holds the copyright to the Common Core? The powers that be? Answers Senator Alexander?

He rallies his troops with empty rhetoric. Freedom, freedom, freedom works!

Three decades after the plot was set, the plans laid by Alexander and company are coming to fruition. They have convinced a nation (with the help of some of the best marketing firms in the world, plus some deception) that standards and testing are an essential first step in education reform. They’re wrong.

Wrong is wrong no matter how you dress it up, talk it up, or mark it up in law. NCLB/ESSA is wrong and as a nation we’ve been wronged.

Consider this: The influential pulled the strings of government to do their bidding.

“Our guiding principle in the design of a choice system is this: Public authority must be put to use in creating a system that is almost entirely beyond the reach of public authority.”

Please, read that guiding principle again. That is the principle followed by the politically powerful designing our school choice system. We always assumed the game was rigged against us. And it was boldly stated out loud.

So much for ACCOUNTABILITY! This is FLEXIBILITY with our tax dollars to the extreme. CHOICE served up in law all because the country didn’t know the facts and marketers did a number on us.

No Child Left Behind was a bad law because its guiding principles are “accountability, flexibility, and choice.” We should not try to make it work. Its guiding principles are dead wrong.

Wrong is wrong. There is no making this education law right, unless…..we go back to the guiding principles of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)— supporting quality education and equality in opportunity by focusing on the children from low-income families. It’s the only way to make this right.

“Education is the business of the American people.” Francis (Frank) Keppel

We jump in now or let the big players finish the game. You can see how it’s done. Just look at Senator Alexander and the position he is in today —- the vote on his law is coming in the next couple of days. (NOTE: He pushed ESSA into law. Then he dragged Betsy DeVos over the finish-line.)

Playing politics has been Lamar Alexander’s game of choice (pun intended).

Stop playing follow the leader and take independent actions to hold lawmakers accountable. Make them do the right thing for the right reasons.

(Update: The only way to make this right now is to demand ESEA be reauthorized on time – TARGET 2020. We need federal education law with the right focus.)

A Declaration of Devotion

Posted on July 3, 2015 by Victoria M. Young

Are Americans ready to declare their devotion to ensuring that the public education system continues to exist and prosper? We have rallied to support our troops, but, failed to consistently support our public schools. We have questioned why we always have money for war, but, we have not demanded the same for education.

Have we ever made a declaration of devotion to a national goal for public education? In the 1960’s, Francis (Frank) Keppel, the architect of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act wrote something similar to what follows here, but his words were never heard nationwide.

∞∞∞∞

A Declaration of Devotion to Educational Excellence

We the People of the United States, in Order “to strengthen and improve educational quality and educational opportunity in this Nation’s elementary and secondary schools” will act in accordance with the principles and practices that will guide and support our efforts to ensure excellent education for all.

Our goal is to achieve and maintain an education system that offers maximum opportunities for all students to learn while holding the highest expectations for the individual pupil and all those that are responsible for supporting students. This system will continuously strive to improve public educations’ role in serving the needs of our free, fair, and democratic republic.

To accomplish our goal, the expectation set for the system is that all those governing, employed by, and voluntarily supporting our public schools will function based on mutual respect for each other and all stakeholders in an effort to earn and maintain the trust of the People.

We Recognize that it is in the best interest of the nation to assure equal opportunity to be educated to the fullest of an individual’s potential and that goal can best be realized by maintaining a strong and effective public education system.

→ Action → Provide equitable and adequate resources with the knowledge, guidance, and oversight to use those resources wisely to solve problems.

We Recognize that to improve means we must consistently and accurately assess current conditions of our schools based on appropriate data that aligns with our national goals.

→ Action → Establish a report card for the nation that uses indicators of what the public deems important and make the findings know in an annual State of the Nation’s Schools with corresponding State of Our State schools reports.

We Recognize that to ensure the strengthening and improvement of local schools requires a strong and capable Department of Education nationally and in every state.

→ Action → Reaffirm the commitment of the U.S. Department of Education to its original purposes, identify the states seen as chronically low-performing, and support the training of those state department personnel in effective school improvement processes.

We Support community organizing efforts to engage parents and the community in youth support activities, programs, and their schools.

→ Action → Enlist the Cooperative Extension Service to educate and train volunteers, disseminate proven practices, and assist in coordinating efforts to use locally available resources more efficiently and effectively.

We Support research, development, and diffusion of effective practices.

→Action → Invest in our existing public institutions of higher education focusing on improving teacher, counselor, and leader education; and reinvest, reclaim, and refocus the function of regional education laboratories to maintain integrity, relevance, and responsiveness in research aimed at seeking solutions for communities’ education problems; and establish the outreach and extension of research findings to ensure their use in educational improvement practices.

We Support those schools that have been identified as chronically low-performing by providing federal emergency assistance, immediately, in cooperation with state and local education agencies.

→ Action → Provide a federal support team (also called “success teams”) to help facilitate school and community members in a guided improvement process.

We will:

maintain local responsibility shared through the democratic governing of schools,
depend on state accountability with shared knowledge of measurable results and costs,
and, rely on federal oversight, guidance, and support through the practices of the U.S. Department of Education and through responsive and responsible federal policy set by Congress and the President of the United States.

Federal education law must be written with the understanding that effective execution of the law depends on local education personnel with public participation and support. In order for all who wish to assist their schools in fulfilling the promise of maximum educational opportunities with the highest expectations, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act must be reduced, simplified, and made to once again address the needs of the educationally deprived children of this nation.

I hope all of you will take the time this July 4th holiday to reflect on what is important in your lives and crucial to the life of this nation.

Happy Independence Day, America!

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Monthly Archives: July 2015