8 Reasons To Opt Out

My children are grown now. If I had school age children, they would not be taking the Big Standardized Test. Here's why.

Burden of proof.

If your senator calls you into the office and says he wants you to have your doctor cut off both your legs, you are entitled to demand convincing proof that the amputation will be good for you.  "There's a big problem with widget production in America" is not proof unless it is accompanied by evidence that your loss of legs will fix the widget problem. You certainly have no obligation to answer questions like, "What limbs do you want to get cut off instead" or "Don't you care about widgets."

The burden of proof is not on you. It is on the people who say your child "must" take the test, and after years of this testing, they still have not met that burden.

No actual benefits to teachers. 

Your child's test results will not help me. I am not allowed to know what questions were asked, which questions she missed, or how she answered them. Depending on the state, I may not see anything except one word and one number. It doesn't really get much better than that. Depending on the state, I will probably not see these "results" until next fall-- for students whom I have only just met, and so have no context in which to put the limited information.

No actual benefit to students.

What will your student get out of taking the test? Nothing. Well, perhaps fear and anxiety. But in terms of analyzing her strengths and weaknesses, there is not enough data returned from the test to mean a single thing, particularly since that data was collected by a single standardized test. Even multiple standardized tests will not tell as much as daily contact with a live, trained human being who sees the student as a real, live, multifaceted human being.

This is not life.

Standardized testing is not an important part of regular life. There's no standardized testing in finding your mate, loving and caring for your children, worshipping in the church of your choice, collaborating with your co-workers, being an important member of your community. There are certainly people who think that standardized tests should be a regular part of life, and they are working hard to inject standardized testing into places it does not belong. This is one of those places.

It's tiny.

I know it takes up a lot of time and care and worry, but the BS Test measures just a narrow sliver of the entire child. It's like creating an entire profile and evaluation of your entire child based on your child's toenail clippings.

Be heard.

Were you bothered by how much of your child's year has been devoted to testing preparation and the test itself? Your local school administration may be committed to the BS Test, or they may just be running scared. You can certainly try to talk to them and to the politicians and bureaucrats in your state, but the most powerful message you can send is for the opt out numbers to get bigger and bigger. The parents of New York made themselves heard last year, resulting in state government pretending to address their concerns. True, the state did not actually address those concerns, but the attempt at PR gloss represented at least an acknowledgement that parents need to see change. Now, when this year's opt out numbers go up, the state will have to realize that this is an issue they can't PR their way out of.

For the children.

I'm not even talking about the horror stories of vomiting or children with disabilities forced to take the test.

What does it do to raise a generation to think that "educated person" means "someone who scores well on Big Standardized Tests." What does it do to a generation to be raised thinking that the central purpose of school is the BS Testing. Even children who can take the tests calmly and do reasonably well need to know that there are things far more important to their education, to their lives, than the BS Test. 

Sometimes enough is enough

Here is a practice that has produced no benefits, helped no students, and improved no schools. At the same time, it has sucked up mountains of tax dollars, taken time away from actual education, and damaged schools across the country by narrowing their focus to only what is On The Test.

To insist that Big Standardized Testing is somehow a critical part of education is nonsense. It is way past time to say so, and nothing says so like refusing the test. 

ICYMI: This Week in Edubloggery

The blogging news of the week is actual twitter news-- the indispensable Mercedes Schneider is on twitter at last. Catch her at @deutsch29blog. Now for your reading...

The Weird Hypocrisy at the Heart of the Case Against Unions

At The Week, Jeff Spross looks at the peculiar attempt to redefine what qualifies as "political activity" in the Friedrichs case.

Campbell Brown: The New Leader of the Propaganda Arm of School Privatization

Kali Holloway takes a long, detailed look at just how thoroughly the forces of school privatization have lined up the media behind them. This is very complete and kind of discouraging, but if you only read one thing I recommend to you, read this.

Chicago Is Everytown USA

Daniel Katz takes a look at the Chicago strike and asks why it isn't happening in more cities-- and looks at just how bad things have gotten in some cities.

Proposed Pennsylvania School Code Is Massive Giveaway to Charter Schools

I was going to write about this, but tireless blogger Steven Singer already is on the case. Pennsylvania is just barely emerging from the mess that was our nine-month budget fiasco, and now here comes a revised school code that looks like a big fat Christmas party for PA charters (including our chronically sucky cyber charters).

Does Harlem Need Diddy or Educational Equity

Jose Luis Vilson reacts to the news that Diddy and Steve Perry are going to team up to fix education in Harlem.

10 Reading Instruction Non-Negotiables

Russ Walsh is an experienced reading instruction expert who has a gift for making education policies and programs comprehensible for regular civilians. This is a great example of Russ in action-- plain words about what a reading program has to have in place.

It's 2016 and PARCC Still Sucks 

Sarah Blaine with some plain language about opting out in 2016. Good luck, testing folks, in the week ahead.

Classics and Trash

My apologies to anyone who clicked on this for an informative or splenetic rant about some education issue. But my niece has a writing question, and I hate posting long notes on Facebook, so I'm just going to put it here. This is far more than she asked for and certainly not what anyone not-my-niece signed up for. TL;DR.

So Paige-- here's the question you asked.

Very serious question- what distinguishes a classic/timeless romance novel from a nicholas sparks, or a harlequin romance?...what are examples of books that I should read to maybe find that more obvious difference? Or is it just the right marketing and publisher?

This is my niece.  Doesn't she look like someone you should hire as a super-vp of marketing or some other equally zillion dollar job?












Categories of Written Stuff

I learned this from Mike Eichholtz, and with some modifications, I've used it ever since. I have no idea if he borrowed it from somewhere else.

There are three four categories of writing.  Good trash, bad trash, and classics. I add great works to that list.

Trash is written to make a buck and pay the bills, and it is meant to be commercial. But there is good trash and bad trash, and the difference between good and bad trash is the level of craft, skill, and quality (I will get back to that). Twilight is a good example of bad trash-- actually, terrible awful no-good very bad trash. It's poorly written on every level, from the badly constructed sentences to the artless images and plot to the flat and unbelievable characters all the way up to the romantization of behavior that checks off every item on the "Are you hooked up with an abuser" checklist. So, bad,  but clearly highly lucrative.

Harry Potter, on the other hand, is good trash. Well constructed, well-written, well-drawn characters, compelling stories. Stephen King- good trash. John Green- arguably good trash. Hunger Games- arguably bad trash.

Classics, of course, are works that stand the test of time. They have a universal quality, something recognizable and relateable over time. Nobody knows whether something is a classic or not until a few decades have passed.

The dirty secret of classics is that they mostly started out as good trash. Take Shakespeare-- he was not trying to create genius work for the ages, but was just trying to make a buck and do his job. He just happened to do it very, very well, with genius command of the language and a full understanding of how human beings work, so that centuries later we can recognize his characters as real people and the themes and concerns of his work as still with us.

Good vs. Bad

Characters that are  recognizable as human beings. Concerns that connect to deepest human motivators. Themes that offer ideas and insights that are both specific and broad. Good command of the language. Good control of organization, structure and materials of the work. Does the writer say what she has to say effectively.

Great Works

Works that have large or important qualities but for one reason or another, can't quite transcend their time and place, and may, in fact, have value because they are a window on their time rather than having a universal, timeless quality. Moby Dick. Maybe the Great Gatsby. Their characters are recognizable and real in the sense that you can think, "Yeah, if I was shoehorned into the societal boxes of those specific circumstances in that particular time and place, I might turn out like that."

I suspect that Austen is at least partly a Great Work writer-- her characters are recognizable and human, but they live in a world that is so strictly defined by its rules that it's hard to relate to some features of it. On the other hand, great fantasy and SF creates entire worlds that nobody lives in and still manages to create legit classics.

So, Romance

Your aunt wondered if romance and classic are mutually exclusive, and that might be a good question-- "romance" is so culturally defined, along with the gender roles that feed into it, that it might be a super challenge to come up with something that's universal. Romance itself is arguably pretty specific-- that your dream relationship is specific to you, and then how that plays out in the actual world is very specific to your own situation. But I have to believe there are universal elements in there that somebody ought to be able to capture in literature.

Romance novels seem similar because (at least this used to be true) the publishers literally handed writers a chapter-by-chapter outline of how the romance would play out. Nicholas Sparks is the king of recycling certain story elements in different ways ("Where will I insert the tragically dead character this time?") but these kinds of writing, whether they're good or bad trash, are aiming to evoke emotions rather than explain or explore anything. In other words, instead of saying, "Let me show you something about how the world works," the writers are saying, "I want to show you something that will make you cry." Maybe there's an argument for calculated emotional manipulation as a worthy literary goal, but I'm doubtful.

The really challenge about romance writing is that while the story may seem to be about a couple, it is almost always one person's story. Titanic the movie is Rose's story; Jack is just a prop for her growth. Your beloved OC was Ryan's story and Seth's story. Romance can be a critical element of how the character changes and grows, but ultimately it's all about how the character changes and grows, not about the romance. Writers of continuing fiction like soap operas, tv series, and comic books have all struggled with showing how a character can grow within a relationship-- generally speaking, when the couple finally get together, the writers can't figure out how to not be boring and show characters that continue to change and grow, and do so as part of a couple.

The need to have a narrative center (a point of view character) is also problematic for writing about romance because it makes the romance appear one way-- we look at what the relationship means just to the main character, which feeds some people's desire to see their prospective partner in terms of "What that person means to me and what I get out of this" instead of a more complicated two-person thing. Now you've got me wondering about how well any literature portrays relationships at all. 

So as with a travel novel or a fantasy adventure novel or a war novel, the "genre" is not so much the thing as it is the bucket that the thing is carried in.

So can you be a trashy romance novelist without hurting your brand? I'm no expert in branding, but I do think you can probably write trashy romance novels that are also great pieces of writing. I would imagine you do it by honoring both the tropes and traditions of the romance novel while filling it up with real characters, well-observed behavior, and a world that is real and recognizable. And it doesn't hurt to have sold something-- book publishers seem to ask "Is this a great work of literature" far less often than they ask "Can we get a bunch of people to give us money for copies of this?"

Your great grandmother did indeed say on more than one occasion that she liked Harlequin romances because she could fall asleep reading them and they were so light that they wouldn't wake her up when they fell on her. As readers, we might want something more, but maybe not a a great romance novel so much as a great novel about a character who finds a way to be in the world and as part of that finds a way to be with another person. If I were trying to write a romance novel, I would try to write that.

Chicago Schools Raise Baloney Bar

The managers of the Chicago Public School system (it may be too much of a stretch to call them leaders) have managed to set a new standard in high-grade baloney with their reaction to the one-day teacher strike on April 1.

CPS has filed a complaint with the Illinois Labor Relations Board against the Chicago Teachers Union for its one-day strike on April 1. CPS CEO Forrest Claypool has characterized the strike as "illegal" but mostly he wants Chicago teachers to understand who is the real boss here.

“We think it’s important that it be clearly established that whether children are in school and being educated is not subject to the whims of the Chicago Teachers Union leadership,” Claypool said during a news conference Friday afternoon. “It is subject to clear, unambiguous state law.”

There's no particular reason to think that Claypool is correct in calling the strike illegal, but that's not the ballsy part of his action. That's the part where Claypool also announced that he wants CTU to reimburse the district for the costs of the strike. This is not just bizarrely audacious in its refusal to take any responsibility for the issues in Chicago schools. It is not just strikingly wrongheaded because CPS should have been out on the street with the teachers, demanding that the state provide Chicago schools with the resources they're supposed to have. It's not just a plate of unvarnished baloney because CTU could head off its labor issues by dealing with its teachers fairly and decently.

No, what raises the baloney bar here is that April 1st is not the first "unscheduled" day off in the past several weeks, because CPS has instituted a series of three "furlough" days-- days on which it will shut down schools, dock teachers pay, and leave students and families to their own devices. In other words, a furlough day is exactly like a strike day-- only called by the district instead of the union.

The first of these furlough days was Good Friday-- exactly one week before the one-day strike.

Why call a furlough day? To save money-- about $30 million in all.

So the cut day on March 25 saved the district a bunch of money, so teachers should suck it up and take the pay cut. But the cut day on April 1st cost the district very much money, so teachers should pay them back.

CPS managers could not do a better job of displaying exactly what kind of baloney-slinging, control-freaky, honesty-impaired goons the teachers of Chicago have to deal with. No wonder they have to strike for a day just to get a point across. Yes, in labor disputes there are maneuvers and spin and ways to leverage the powers involved. But it's hard to deal with someone whose go-to move is "making ridiculous shit up." Good luck to the Chicago union leaders who have to deal with these guys.

Moskowitz Hearts the BS Test

“I really believe in the tests – I seem to be the only one left standing,” Moskowitz said Friday afternoon, immediately after addressing roughly 2,300 Success Academy students who gathered for a “slam the exam” pep rally at the City College of New York in Harlem.

Alex Zimmerman at ChalkbeatNY talked to Eva Moskowitz about her love of testing and the horrible horridness of opting out, and what ensued was a quick medley of testocrat talking points. Let's see how many she can check off the list.

Achievement gap. The rich kids have to take the test so that we can tell if the poor kids are doing as well on the test. This assumes that the test is measuring anything worth measuring, and that getting poor students to score as high as rich students will somehow erase the effects of their poverty. This seems unlikely.

Preparation. Moskowitz wants you to remember that if your child will not be able to opt out of the SAT or the Common Application. Of course, the Common Application is not a test. And you can already opt out of the SAT by applying to one of 850+ colleges and universities that don't require SAT or ACT scores. Beyond that, does anyone seriously think that taking the Big Standardized Test in elementary school is preparation for the SAT?

Zimmerman notes that Moskowitz's Success Academies have been noted for a text-centered culture as well as "draconian" discipline and pushing out of students. Moskowitz said that SA is absolutely not a test-centered culture, but making that point in the middle of a massive pep rally for testing is a long reach. SA is famed for its high BS Test scores; less widely noted (and Zimmerman doesn't note it, either) is that SA grads don't do well enough on placement tests to get into NYC top high schools.

Moskowitz needs test scores because they remain the top marketing pitch of Success Academy. She certainly can't sell the school as a school that your child may or may not be allowed to finish, or as a place run by the highest paid school administrator in NYC-- including the head of the entire NYC school system.

How Eli Broad Operates

This would be an easy story to miss, a niche piece of coverage of interest to people who have been wondering what really happened to Kansas City schools almost five years ago.

There's a lot to sort out in Joe Robertson's story for the Kansas City Star. School board politics, a reformy superintendent, an unexpected departure. John Covington had begun overhauling the district, and then, without warning, he was out. His allies and opponents were both caught flatfooted. Accusations were made, relationships were broken, and the district was left, as Robertson puts it, "on the brink." Covington moved on immediately to Michigan to head up the EAA, the Michigan version of an achievement district, a state run (or at least state-handed-to-charter-operator) collection of "failed" schools (which is now itself doomed).

But I don't want to get into the details of Kansas City, messy as they were, because we now know why Covington left. Covington was "trained" by the Broad Academy, billionaire Eli Broad's personal pretend superintendent training program, and if you wondered how that network of graduate operates, here's the critical moment from Robertson's story.

Then came a call from one of Covington’s contacts at The Broad Foundation. Covington was a graduate of the foundation’s Superintendents Academy. Be ready, his contact told him, to receive a call from the foundation’s founder — Eli Broad.

The call came from Spain, Covington said. “He (Broad) said, ‘John, I need you to go to Detroit.’ ”

That, Covington says, is the reason he left.

Eli Broad made a phone call, and that was it. Eli Broad can pick up the phone, give the word, and one of his people packs up, breaks professional and personal relationships without a word of explanation, and leaves town.

This is the reformster approach at its most naked and ugly. Our Betters, the men with money and power, want to be free to operate our education system like their own personal fiefdom, managed by people who answer to one authority and one authority only. This is a school system run by a shadow government, and a shadow government that is run by a godfather, an emperor, an autocrat. This is the opposite of democracy, the opposite of transparency, the opposite of a system that worries for one nano-second about the concerns of the little people, the Lessers.

This is the guy who wants to take over LA schools. This is the guy who is funding dozens of charter policy initiatives. And this is how he operates. Pick up a phone. Make a call, and his will is done.

Testing Has a Mascot

The first hurdle that the Big Standardized Test must clear is getting students to actually care about the Big Standardized Test. Some schools attack this hurdle with pep rallies to get the students all psyched up for the BS Test. Some of these involve badly rewritten pop songs, while on at least one Really Bad Day, it involved watching a man accidentally set himself on fire. 

But if your school is looking for a way to get the students all pumped up for the PARCC or PSSA or SOL (best/worst test name ever), you have one other option.

Meet YoJo. The name (according to its creator) means absolutely nothing (though I do now know that Yojo is a band, a piece of Asian holistic culture, and a place you do yoga. You're welcome.) You can scan the YoJo's website for lots of info, but I'll warn you right now-- the whole thing is done in Comic Sans.

YoJo (originally named Fuzzball, so a nonsense name is a step up) premiered in March of 2000. He's the brainchild of Bromley Lowe, whose previous work included a stint as the Baltimore Oriole Bird (Lowe's best friend is, apparently, the Philly Phanatic guy, and YoJo takes an annual trip to the Mascot Hall of Fame gathering which, yes, is a thing. You're welcome.). YoJo is also an indirect result of the 1994-95 Major League Baseball strike; you can read Lowe's whole story here (in comic sans).

Lowe's wife was an Assistant Principal, and Lowe set out to bring the mascot art to school assemblies. And Lowe is not afraid to set his personal bar high. The website lists a mission of being the "#1 professional entertainer for elementary school age children" and names seven larger goals including making a living at this work and getting on tv. Did I mention that Lowe has been at this for sixteen years?

YoJo has four programs, including shows about reading, treating your body right, bullying and his absolutely most popular bit, a program entitled "Ace Your Test." Here's the promo for the PARCC (there are also versions for Virginia's SOL and Pennsylvania's PSSA).

 

 YoJo doesn't just get the excitement up and the nerves under control. YoJo also teaches test-specific test prep test-taking strategies. 

Yes. To all the testocrats who insist that the new improved BS Tests are impervious to test prep, here is a video of a man doing test prep while dressed in a large furry mascot costume. You're welcome.

YoJo has loads of accolades, including statements like this one from a Maryland principal: "When other principals ask how we got some of the highest test scores in the city, I tell them that YoJo is our secret." And if you check out YoJo's Facebook page, you'll see that the big blue testing mascot has been busy.

I stumbled across YoJo because someone was on line complaining about having a big blue muppet coming to their school to sell the PARCC. But after reading up on the guy, I came away with two conclusions.

One is that this is a guy who is just responding to a market that somebody else has created. I am not excited about living in a world where you can make a living going from school to school trying to help small children cope with the stupidities of BS Testing.

But I was also struck by Lowe's professionalism. This is a guy who has spent his adult life in big furry suits, networking with other suit wearers, and learning how to work a crowd and how best to do his thing. You can see him on a local MD tv show in 2010, talking about his work-- while he clearly enjoys his work, he is not just some case of arrested development goofing around (and in sixteen years he has never set himself on fire).

In short, this is a guy who actually approaches his work with children more seriously and professionally than the edu-amateurs who are busy trying to use BS Testing to break down and sell off the pieces of public education. Given the choice, I would rather have YoJo in my school than David Coleman. Though the idea of watching YoJo wrestle with Coleman and take him to the mat in a big mascot pratfall-- well, let's end with that image. You're welcome.