There's a huge amount of discussion about how the New ESEA will affect policy and the flow of money and the new ways that privateers can grub for that money and just how big a hash states will make out of education, anyway etc etc etc,
But over at the Fordham blog, Robert Pondiscio has put a bit of focus where focus ought to be-- the new bill's effect on content.
Pondiscio is a reform fan who has always been willing to see what we see in the classroom-- that an emphasis on high stakes reading tests is destructive to the teaching of reading. I've made the same argument. The current theories about reading embedded in both the Common Core and in Big Standardized Tests is that reading is a set of free-floating skills unrelated to content, prior knowledge, or the engagement of the reader. The BS Tests have focused on short excerpts specifically chosen to be boring and weirdly obscure so as to guarantee that students will have no prior knowledge and will not find the excerpts interesting. All this because some reformsters believe that reading is a set of skills that has nothing to do with content, which is kind of like trying to imagine waves that exist independent of any matter through which they move. As Pondiscio puts it:
Years of treating reading as a discrete subject or a skill—teaching it and testing it that way—have arguably set reading achievement in reverse.
You don’t build strong readers by teaching children to “find the main
idea,” “make inferences,” and “compare and contrast.” You do it by
fixing a child’s gaze on the world outside the classroom window.
It has been, and continues to be, a dumb and counterproductive way to approach reading. For one thing, it means that the best way for me to increase student achievement would be to never teach anything but daily three-paragraph excerpts from anything at all. Throwing out my anthology of American literature and replacing it with daily newspaper clippings would be an excellent way to get test scores up-- and a complete abdication of my responsibilities as a professional English teacher.
And professional English teachers know that. But for the past many years, we have also known that our school and professional ratings rest on those scores. So we have made compromises, or we have been commanded by state and/or local authorities to commit educational malpractice in the name of "student achievement" (the ongoing euphemism for "test scores").
This, more than anything else, is why the federal decoupling of teacher evaluation and school ratings from the BS Tests is good news.
Under the new ESEA, states will still have to test students annually,
including in reading. But they have a lot more control over the way the
results from those tests are turned into grades for schools. This could
offer an opportunity to restore some sanity to schooling.
Exactly. States have the chance now to put an end to questions like, "Well, that's a lovely unit, but how will it prepare students for The Test?" It gives us the chance to get back to teaching students that reading (and writing and speaking and listening) are ways to engage with and unlock the wonders of the world.
Whether states will take the opportunity remains to be seen. But if they screw this up, they can no longer blame it on the feds. And if we sit in our schools and let them screw this up without raising a fuss in our respective state capitals, shame on us. The federal defanging of tests gives us the opportunity to put reading (and writing and listening and speaking) back in its rightful place, taught properly and properly used to empower student discovery of a million amazing things. No matter how I feel about the rest of the ESSA, I feel good about this.
Showing posts with label Robert Pondiscio. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Pondiscio. Show all posts
Thursday, December 3, 2015
Monday, November 23, 2015
Clinton-Induced Charter Freakout Continues
Man, just thirty little words can cause sooooo much fuss.
Most charter schools – I don’t want to say every one – but most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them.
These have been quoted over and over and over again. Sometimes they are quoted by folks who are excited that Clinton said something supportive of public schools. But they've also been quoted by charter supporters who are absolutely freaking out.
Reformsters Robert Pondiscio and Richard Whitmire also made attempts to raise some dudgeon high over Clinton's thirty-word assault, and while I think they're wrong, they at least showed a little rhetorical and intellectual rigor. Not so some of the other defenders of the charter cause.
The Washington Post editorial board scolded her by citing bogus data from a report written by the Center for Education Reform, a group that exists strictly to push charter schools and crush teacher unions. That's high order journalistic sloppiness, like turning to the Tobacco Institute for your "facts" about smoking. The Wall Street Journal also rushed to the defense of the hedge fundies who profit from charter schools, citing more fact-free facts.
But nobody has leaned on the Panic Button with hands any heavier than Juan Williams today on The Hill. Williams is a Fox News "Analyst," a position he moved into after being fired by NPR for either A) some impolitic remarks about Muslims on planes or B) because he was buddying up to Fox. Take your pick of explanations.
All the features of the High State of Charter Dismay are here in this piece.
It starts with the headline (which, it should be noted, is probably not Williams' call)-- "Hillary betrays charter schools." Betrays?? As in double-crosses? Did they have some claim to her? Are they offended because they thought Clinton was their BFF, or because their ethical standards say that when a politician is bought, she should stay bought?
Next, Williams opens by invoking children:
My 5-year-old grandson goes to a big city charter school. But Eli and his classmates do not belong to a union. They do not give money to politicians. They can’t vote.
That is unquestionably true of Eli and his classmates. It is probably not true of the people who own and operate Eli's school. I bet those people have plenty of money to give to politicians.
Williams throws in the word "flip-flop." He calls her thirty word backstab an act of "political expediency." He accuses her of running over Eli. He says her words sound like a script written by the teachers union (to whom? and what exactly is that sound?) And then he starts in with some of the same old non-fact facts.
By law, almost all charter schools get their students from a lottery. They do not cherry-pick their students.
Yeah, no. The very act of a lottery is a creaming process, as it automatically selects out those parents who are able to navigate the lottery system and are willing to do so. When charters start taking randomly selected students from the public school system-- including students who didn't even express interest in attending a charter-- then you'll have a point. And the widespread evidence of push-outs, as exemplified by Success Academy's got-to-go list, is one more example of how charters make sure they are working with a select group of students-- unlike public schools.
Williams says he has talked to parents who see charters as "a great stride towards improving public education by providing competition and pioneering teaching techniques that offer a model for all schools." And yet, charters have done none of those things. Name one educational technique, one pedagogical breakthrough that has come from a charter.
Williams quotes the Washington Post quoting the Center for Education Reform in saying that charters take on a higher percentage of poor and minority students than public schools. No, that's not true, either, unless I suppose you are comparing charter schools to all the public schools in the country, including all the public schools that serve very white communities. But if we start looking city by city, we find things like the charter schools of Massachusetts that serve no non-English speaking students at all. Or you can check out some of the legitimate actual research done in New Jersey about exactly what populations charters serve. Or you can just keep reading copy from the ad fliers put out by the Center for Education Reform.
The Post also cited research that shows “charter schools produce greater student learning gains than traditional public schools, particularly for poor and minority students.”
It takes an extraordinary amount of laziness not to locate the research that shows that charters do no better than public schools, and often do worse. Heck, the writers at the Washington Post could have just looked through the reporting in the Washington Post to see that they were missing a point or two.
Williams moves on to a recounting of Clinton's flip-floppery, and then, of course, we have to spend some time indicting the Evil Unions.
The unions do not appreciate the Obama administration’s effort to have public school districts compete for grants given to districts with improved student achievement. They opposed holding teachers accountable for their students’ success or failure.
That's because "improved student achievement" just means "higher test scores on a crappy standardized math and reading test." Do you, Mr. Williams, have any hopes for Ele beyond that he just learn to do well on a Big Standardized Test on math and reading? I'll bet you do. Welcome to the club.
And for the gazillionth time-- teachers do not oppose being held accountable for what we actually do. Let me put it this way-- would it have pissed you off if NPR had fired you over something to do with the actual quality of your reporting instead of some baloney about saying the wrong thing whiel talking to the wrong people? Do you think it was fair that your job security suffered for something unrelated to your job performance? Because-- again-- welcome to the club.
You want to evaluate me, come on ahead. I welcome it. But evaluate me on my actual teaching skills, and not some random trumped up fake-science VAM baloney that is neither valid nor reliable.
But Williams is not done unloading his big truck full of bovine fecal matter. This next sentence is sitting all by itself, just for impact.
In the name of protecting failing teachers and bad schools, they are the number one opponents of school reform.
Bullshit, sir. Bull. Shit. We have opposed "school reform" because it is and has been bad for education and bad for children, and because, after over a decade, it hasn't produced a single success.
The Wall Street Journal fears that future Clinton ed department will be a wholly-owned union subsidiary, which brings me to what I find most hilariously ironic about all this Clintonian pearl clutching.
The charter folks take Clinton's words far more seriously than I do. Clinton has always been a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street, and I fully expect her to behave as such should she be elected (which, if it happens, won't be because I voted for her). So Clinton said something vaguely mean (and painfully accurate) about charter schools, one time. Hell, Clinton says a lot of things. And since both unions threw support to her without making her so much as curtsy in their direction, I don't think there's much of a deal there. Nor do I think that union coffers will, this one time, outweigh the vast mountains of money that Wall Street has thrown at her over the years. And since it is Wall Street that ultimately backs the charter industry, I don't think charters have the slightest thing to worry about.
Heck-- almost immediately, a Clinton staffer walked back the terribly ouchy thirty words and re-assured charters that Clinton still thinks of them as Very Important Public Schools.
So the irony here is that while charter fans are freaking out because they think Clinton might start telling the truth about them and they might not be able to hoover up tax dollars with impunity any more, I'm thinking those thirty words are pretty meaningless. You guys really need to take a deep breath and get your blood pressure down; this is going to be a long haul.
Most charter schools – I don’t want to say every one – but most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them.
These have been quoted over and over and over again. Sometimes they are quoted by folks who are excited that Clinton said something supportive of public schools. But they've also been quoted by charter supporters who are absolutely freaking out.
Reformsters Robert Pondiscio and Richard Whitmire also made attempts to raise some dudgeon high over Clinton's thirty-word assault, and while I think they're wrong, they at least showed a little rhetorical and intellectual rigor. Not so some of the other defenders of the charter cause.
The Washington Post editorial board scolded her by citing bogus data from a report written by the Center for Education Reform, a group that exists strictly to push charter schools and crush teacher unions. That's high order journalistic sloppiness, like turning to the Tobacco Institute for your "facts" about smoking. The Wall Street Journal also rushed to the defense of the hedge fundies who profit from charter schools, citing more fact-free facts.
But nobody has leaned on the Panic Button with hands any heavier than Juan Williams today on The Hill. Williams is a Fox News "Analyst," a position he moved into after being fired by NPR for either A) some impolitic remarks about Muslims on planes or B) because he was buddying up to Fox. Take your pick of explanations.
All the features of the High State of Charter Dismay are here in this piece.
It starts with the headline (which, it should be noted, is probably not Williams' call)-- "Hillary betrays charter schools." Betrays?? As in double-crosses? Did they have some claim to her? Are they offended because they thought Clinton was their BFF, or because their ethical standards say that when a politician is bought, she should stay bought?
Next, Williams opens by invoking children:
My 5-year-old grandson goes to a big city charter school. But Eli and his classmates do not belong to a union. They do not give money to politicians. They can’t vote.
That is unquestionably true of Eli and his classmates. It is probably not true of the people who own and operate Eli's school. I bet those people have plenty of money to give to politicians.
Williams throws in the word "flip-flop." He calls her thirty word backstab an act of "political expediency." He accuses her of running over Eli. He says her words sound like a script written by the teachers union (to whom? and what exactly is that sound?) And then he starts in with some of the same old non-fact facts.
By law, almost all charter schools get their students from a lottery. They do not cherry-pick their students.
Yeah, no. The very act of a lottery is a creaming process, as it automatically selects out those parents who are able to navigate the lottery system and are willing to do so. When charters start taking randomly selected students from the public school system-- including students who didn't even express interest in attending a charter-- then you'll have a point. And the widespread evidence of push-outs, as exemplified by Success Academy's got-to-go list, is one more example of how charters make sure they are working with a select group of students-- unlike public schools.
Williams says he has talked to parents who see charters as "a great stride towards improving public education by providing competition and pioneering teaching techniques that offer a model for all schools." And yet, charters have done none of those things. Name one educational technique, one pedagogical breakthrough that has come from a charter.
Williams quotes the Washington Post quoting the Center for Education Reform in saying that charters take on a higher percentage of poor and minority students than public schools. No, that's not true, either, unless I suppose you are comparing charter schools to all the public schools in the country, including all the public schools that serve very white communities. But if we start looking city by city, we find things like the charter schools of Massachusetts that serve no non-English speaking students at all. Or you can check out some of the legitimate actual research done in New Jersey about exactly what populations charters serve. Or you can just keep reading copy from the ad fliers put out by the Center for Education Reform.
The Post also cited research that shows “charter schools produce greater student learning gains than traditional public schools, particularly for poor and minority students.”
It takes an extraordinary amount of laziness not to locate the research that shows that charters do no better than public schools, and often do worse. Heck, the writers at the Washington Post could have just looked through the reporting in the Washington Post to see that they were missing a point or two.
Williams moves on to a recounting of Clinton's flip-floppery, and then, of course, we have to spend some time indicting the Evil Unions.
The unions do not appreciate the Obama administration’s effort to have public school districts compete for grants given to districts with improved student achievement. They opposed holding teachers accountable for their students’ success or failure.
That's because "improved student achievement" just means "higher test scores on a crappy standardized math and reading test." Do you, Mr. Williams, have any hopes for Ele beyond that he just learn to do well on a Big Standardized Test on math and reading? I'll bet you do. Welcome to the club.
And for the gazillionth time-- teachers do not oppose being held accountable for what we actually do. Let me put it this way-- would it have pissed you off if NPR had fired you over something to do with the actual quality of your reporting instead of some baloney about saying the wrong thing whiel talking to the wrong people? Do you think it was fair that your job security suffered for something unrelated to your job performance? Because-- again-- welcome to the club.
You want to evaluate me, come on ahead. I welcome it. But evaluate me on my actual teaching skills, and not some random trumped up fake-science VAM baloney that is neither valid nor reliable.
But Williams is not done unloading his big truck full of bovine fecal matter. This next sentence is sitting all by itself, just for impact.
In the name of protecting failing teachers and bad schools, they are the number one opponents of school reform.
Bullshit, sir. Bull. Shit. We have opposed "school reform" because it is and has been bad for education and bad for children, and because, after over a decade, it hasn't produced a single success.
The Wall Street Journal fears that future Clinton ed department will be a wholly-owned union subsidiary, which brings me to what I find most hilariously ironic about all this Clintonian pearl clutching.
The charter folks take Clinton's words far more seriously than I do. Clinton has always been a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street, and I fully expect her to behave as such should she be elected (which, if it happens, won't be because I voted for her). So Clinton said something vaguely mean (and painfully accurate) about charter schools, one time. Hell, Clinton says a lot of things. And since both unions threw support to her without making her so much as curtsy in their direction, I don't think there's much of a deal there. Nor do I think that union coffers will, this one time, outweigh the vast mountains of money that Wall Street has thrown at her over the years. And since it is Wall Street that ultimately backs the charter industry, I don't think charters have the slightest thing to worry about.
Heck-- almost immediately, a Clinton staffer walked back the terribly ouchy thirty words and re-assured charters that Clinton still thinks of them as Very Important Public Schools.
So the irony here is that while charter fans are freaking out because they think Clinton might start telling the truth about them and they might not be able to hoover up tax dollars with impunity any more, I'm thinking those thirty words are pretty meaningless. You guys really need to take a deep breath and get your blood pressure down; this is going to be a long haul.
Saturday, March 28, 2015
Help for the Failing Schools
This is newest reformster talking point-- the Big Standardized Test is a big boon to poor and minority students, and to ask them to opt out is to ask them is to ask them to become invisible. Robert Pondiscio was pushing it again at the Fordham's blog this week. It's a nice rhetorical move, but it's limited by the degree to which it doesn't actually reflect reality.
Pondiscio makes a few side points before he gets to the main event, suggesting that the New Jersey numbers on how many actual opt-outs are perhaps somewhere between fuzzy and wrong. But then he breaks down the numbers and the opt-out sales pitch to make another point-- as a battleground, Opt Out is shaping up as rich white suburbanites vs. poor brown and black urban dwellers.
I'm going to leave that point alone. Sarah Blaine turned over her blog space to Belinda Edmondson, a mom in Montclair, NJ, who is surprised to discover that she's white and pleased to inform her family that they're wealthy. Edmondson deals with that part of Pondiscio's point pretty well.
Instead, let's move on to Pondiscio's larger point, which is that BS Tests have been a force for positive change in "non-affluent non-white" communities.
Blacks, Latinos, and low-income kids have generally benefitted from test-driven accountability, particularly in the increased number of charters and school choice options...
Okay, if you think charters have actually benefited those students over and above any benefits they would have experienced from public school, I can see believing this point is valid. But first, the case that charters have benefits greater than public schools is a case that has not been effectively made. What we do know is that charters accept only a portion of the students in a community, stripping resources from the schools where all of the rest of the students remain. Are the gains (ranging from arguable to non-existent) for the few charter-accepted students worth the costs to all the other students?
Nor is it clear that BS Tests really had anything to do with these "benefits." Are there really pockets of bad, run-down, under-resourced schools out there that existed in some sort of unseen, unheard reverse Shangri-La and not a soul knew about them until test results came out? Because I haven't heard a convincing story of that yet.
“Kids who are not tested end up not counting,” observed Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust
This is one of those lines that sounds good, but what are we really saying here. Specifically, those untested kids end up not counting to whom? Surely not their parents. To their schools? To their state and federal representatives? If that's the case, are we really saying that in the face of poverty and want and crumbling buildings and lack of resources and students crying out for dignity, support and education that it's a score on a standardized test that's our best idea of how to move the needle?
"It could be a race problem but it's definitely a respect problem,” says Derrell Bradford, the African American executive director of NYCAN. “There is a pretty strong undertow beneath the opt-out wave. And the force of it is one where some people don't think testing, or Common Core, is the right fit for their child, so they don't think it's the right fit for anyone's child.”
Fair point. Of course, the door swings both ways. If the testing is the right fit for your child, should all children take it? But I think Bradford is missing the point-- we get closer to it with this quote from Pondiscio:
But I’m equally sympathetic to the low-income parents who think that testing reveals how badly they have been failed.
There's room to disagree about part of this sentences. Regular readers know what I think standardized testing reveals (hint: nothing useful at all), but even if we accept that the test reveal "how badly they have been failed," the sentence ends too soon.
Failed by whom?
We could look at test results and declare, "These students have been failed by their state and federal government, left to deal with the kind of poverty that we know leads directly to these sorts of low test results. We must marshall the resources of our society and country to bring and end to this poverty."
We could look at the tests and say, "The education establishment has failed these students by sending such tiny, narrow measures of achievement that have no proven connection to future success and which ignore the full breadth of human achievement that students in more affluent environments take for granted."
We could even say, "Somebody has failed these children, and we will not rest until we have performed the studies and research and in-the-earth examinations that tell us how these children have been failed. It's not an easy question, and we don't know the exact answer, but we will find it."
Instead, we've settled quickly and easily on, "Oh, they were failed by their teacher" and let it go at that.
You tell me that testing has pinpointed communities that need assistance and intervention, and I ask you-- show me school districts where the reaction to low test scores has been to send more resources. Show me five. Show me one!
Even when test scores are used to send in the charters, there's no increase in resources, no attempt to get these students all the help they need. Because we open second and third school systems without increasing resources, we're just shuffling resources around to less and less affect. We're like a painter trying to paint an entire house with one gallon of paint who, instead of buying more paint, just tries using more brushes to push the same amount of paint around.
What is undeniable is that those most likely to be negatively effected by the opt-out impulse are low-income children of color, for whom testing has been a catalyst for attention and mostly positive change.
I'm pretty sure that's deniable. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's completely unproven and without any basis. Testing has not been a catalyst for attention; it has been a catalyst for opening up markets to charter operators, a source of billion dollar paydays for test manufacturers, and an excuse not to invest any more resources or money in the students who need them the most.
This is one of those times when I really wish I were wrong. I wish I already knew stories from places like Philly and Chicago and Detroit and New Orleans where state governments said, "These tests make it clear-- we can no longer give our poorest students inadequate levels of support. We must find the will and the money to build these districts up, to create buildings so beautiful filed with resources so top-of-the-line that suburban parents will fight to send their children into the city to go to school."
But of course, that hasn't happened anywhere. Instead, we get scenes like New York State where a court order to fund poor schools equitably is gathering dust as the Governor says, "You can;t make me" and blames every low test score on teachers. We get New Jersey, where the state first starves then dismantles the school systems that serve brown and black children.
Reformsters make all this big talk about how the tests will be like a signal. "Take this flare gun," they tell our poorest students as they're left out in the desert. "If you feel like you're about to starve, just fire it off and we'll send someone to help." Then the reformsters drive away in cars spacious enough to carry many children, and they wait. And when they see the flare, instead of sending help, they send vultures.
I can imagine an assessment system that would help target schools in trouble (it would involve, among other things, listening to parents no matter how rich they weren't) and get them the sort of financial and resource help they needed. I would support a system like that. We keep talking about the BS Tests as if they were part of a system like that. But they aren't.
Pondiscio makes a few side points before he gets to the main event, suggesting that the New Jersey numbers on how many actual opt-outs are perhaps somewhere between fuzzy and wrong. But then he breaks down the numbers and the opt-out sales pitch to make another point-- as a battleground, Opt Out is shaping up as rich white suburbanites vs. poor brown and black urban dwellers.
I'm going to leave that point alone. Sarah Blaine turned over her blog space to Belinda Edmondson, a mom in Montclair, NJ, who is surprised to discover that she's white and pleased to inform her family that they're wealthy. Edmondson deals with that part of Pondiscio's point pretty well.
Instead, let's move on to Pondiscio's larger point, which is that BS Tests have been a force for positive change in "non-affluent non-white" communities.
Blacks, Latinos, and low-income kids have generally benefitted from test-driven accountability, particularly in the increased number of charters and school choice options...
Okay, if you think charters have actually benefited those students over and above any benefits they would have experienced from public school, I can see believing this point is valid. But first, the case that charters have benefits greater than public schools is a case that has not been effectively made. What we do know is that charters accept only a portion of the students in a community, stripping resources from the schools where all of the rest of the students remain. Are the gains (ranging from arguable to non-existent) for the few charter-accepted students worth the costs to all the other students?
Nor is it clear that BS Tests really had anything to do with these "benefits." Are there really pockets of bad, run-down, under-resourced schools out there that existed in some sort of unseen, unheard reverse Shangri-La and not a soul knew about them until test results came out? Because I haven't heard a convincing story of that yet.
“Kids who are not tested end up not counting,” observed Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust
This is one of those lines that sounds good, but what are we really saying here. Specifically, those untested kids end up not counting to whom? Surely not their parents. To their schools? To their state and federal representatives? If that's the case, are we really saying that in the face of poverty and want and crumbling buildings and lack of resources and students crying out for dignity, support and education that it's a score on a standardized test that's our best idea of how to move the needle?
"It could be a race problem but it's definitely a respect problem,” says Derrell Bradford, the African American executive director of NYCAN. “There is a pretty strong undertow beneath the opt-out wave. And the force of it is one where some people don't think testing, or Common Core, is the right fit for their child, so they don't think it's the right fit for anyone's child.”
Fair point. Of course, the door swings both ways. If the testing is the right fit for your child, should all children take it? But I think Bradford is missing the point-- we get closer to it with this quote from Pondiscio:
But I’m equally sympathetic to the low-income parents who think that testing reveals how badly they have been failed.
There's room to disagree about part of this sentences. Regular readers know what I think standardized testing reveals (hint: nothing useful at all), but even if we accept that the test reveal "how badly they have been failed," the sentence ends too soon.
Failed by whom?
We could look at test results and declare, "These students have been failed by their state and federal government, left to deal with the kind of poverty that we know leads directly to these sorts of low test results. We must marshall the resources of our society and country to bring and end to this poverty."
We could look at the tests and say, "The education establishment has failed these students by sending such tiny, narrow measures of achievement that have no proven connection to future success and which ignore the full breadth of human achievement that students in more affluent environments take for granted."
We could even say, "Somebody has failed these children, and we will not rest until we have performed the studies and research and in-the-earth examinations that tell us how these children have been failed. It's not an easy question, and we don't know the exact answer, but we will find it."
Instead, we've settled quickly and easily on, "Oh, they were failed by their teacher" and let it go at that.
You tell me that testing has pinpointed communities that need assistance and intervention, and I ask you-- show me school districts where the reaction to low test scores has been to send more resources. Show me five. Show me one!
Even when test scores are used to send in the charters, there's no increase in resources, no attempt to get these students all the help they need. Because we open second and third school systems without increasing resources, we're just shuffling resources around to less and less affect. We're like a painter trying to paint an entire house with one gallon of paint who, instead of buying more paint, just tries using more brushes to push the same amount of paint around.
What is undeniable is that those most likely to be negatively effected by the opt-out impulse are low-income children of color, for whom testing has been a catalyst for attention and mostly positive change.
I'm pretty sure that's deniable. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's completely unproven and without any basis. Testing has not been a catalyst for attention; it has been a catalyst for opening up markets to charter operators, a source of billion dollar paydays for test manufacturers, and an excuse not to invest any more resources or money in the students who need them the most.
This is one of those times when I really wish I were wrong. I wish I already knew stories from places like Philly and Chicago and Detroit and New Orleans where state governments said, "These tests make it clear-- we can no longer give our poorest students inadequate levels of support. We must find the will and the money to build these districts up, to create buildings so beautiful filed with resources so top-of-the-line that suburban parents will fight to send their children into the city to go to school."
But of course, that hasn't happened anywhere. Instead, we get scenes like New York State where a court order to fund poor schools equitably is gathering dust as the Governor says, "You can;t make me" and blames every low test score on teachers. We get New Jersey, where the state first starves then dismantles the school systems that serve brown and black children.
Reformsters make all this big talk about how the tests will be like a signal. "Take this flare gun," they tell our poorest students as they're left out in the desert. "If you feel like you're about to starve, just fire it off and we'll send someone to help." Then the reformsters drive away in cars spacious enough to carry many children, and they wait. And when they see the flare, instead of sending help, they send vultures.
I can imagine an assessment system that would help target schools in trouble (it would involve, among other things, listening to parents no matter how rich they weren't) and get them the sort of financial and resource help they needed. I would support a system like that. We keep talking about the BS Tests as if they were part of a system like that. But they aren't.
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