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standardized tests and the war on teachers
For years, politicians and policy leaders have been running the nation public education system basically by fake van cleef clover necklace sale the seat of the pants, drafting and passing legislative doctrine that mostly ignores the input from classroom teachers, research experts and public school parents.
Just the latest example of this fly by night leadership came from Rand Paul, the senator from Kentucky and expected GOP presidential contender. According to the Politico newsletter, Paul is a major push on education reform, including choice, school choice, vouchers, charter schools, you name it. love the name it proposal, don you? So reassuring to parents. we enrolling your kid in the Name It program this year. Everything will be fine. an astonishing display of incoherence, he told the Politico reporter how much he, and his children, had benefited from traditional public schools grew up and went to public schools. My kids have gone to public schools and then suggested we create something that looks nothing like them.
one person in the country who is, like, the best at explaining calculus teach every calculus class in the country, he rambled, in belief, somehow, that having million people in the classroom would ensure more children a teacher that may be having a more hands on approach. Really?
Have education policies from the Democratic Party been any better?
Apparently, most teachers don think so. As Politico, again, reported, teachers are organizing at an unprecedented level. Through their unions, teachers have amassed of millions in cash and have acquired data mining tools that let them personalize pitches to voters, in an effort to a huge get out the vote effort.
convergence, observers say, is the product not only of the unions' need to assume a defensive posture in the face of legislative and legal attacks, but also of the pressure brought by internal factions that have urged the unions to take a tougher stance against market based education policies. got teachers stirred up? How real and potent is this upsurge of their activism? Why should people who identify with progressive causes care? Salon recently posed those questions, and others, to Lily Eskelsen Garca, the new president elect of the National Education Association, the nation largest teachers union, at the recent Netroots Nation conference in Detroit.
First of all, congratulations on becoming the new NEA president.
Still president elect. I take office Sept. 1. We have an incredible president, Dennis Van Roekel, who basically said a transition period should be a transition period, not go stand in the corner. So he gave me the president elect title and told me I would take the press calls, go to Netroots, meet with Arne Duncan, start establishing where you want to go and be as vocal and as visible as you can possibly be. Our members have asked NEA to step up and take things to another level. There too much at stake for us. There are policies that need addressing and we have some of the best policy expertise in the nation, but those ideas need a face to the NEA, a face for the American teacher that is channeling the voices of these 3 million educators, and when you hear the words come out of her mouth it not just her opinion it a whole lot of teachers and support staff who are saying here an important thing for the American people to hear and an important thing imitation van cleef and arpels bracelet alhambra for Arne Duncan and President Obama to hear. So he told me to start being that voice today.
The voices of these teachers are important, aren they? And too often we don really hear their stories about what it really like to teach in American schools, do we? For instance, I was just at a meeting of the American Federation of Teachers, where a teacher told us about showing up to school one morning and finding a man had been shot to death in front of the building the night before. The body was still on the sidewalk as the kids were coming to school, and the teachers had to decide how they were going to handle this with the children. So many of our teachers are really serving as first responders for kids, aren they?
That true. So how did the teachers handle this?
They quickly had to abandon all they had planned to do with the children that day and spend the day addressing what the children had experienced, how they felt about what they had seen in front of their own school.
That was very wise of them. I taught for 10 years in a regular school. I also taught for six years at a homeless shelter two different shelter schools. The needs of these students were so different. What you just described happening to that school is never going to happen at Orchard Valley Elementary School in West Valley, Utah, the fairly affluent school where I started teaching. But think about what teachers are being called on to deal with today, depending on where they are. I was teaching in the homeless school on Sept. 11, 2001, the day the twin towers fell. I was teaching students who didn know where their parents were because these were hard to place foster kids. I had to tell my students what was going on because they saw everyone was riveted to the news and couldn avert their eyes from what was going on. These were terribly frightened kids. Look what happens these days without the social workers and the counselors, and the class size going through the roof. People say that class size may not matter to the test score, but class size mattered to me being able to have a relationship to my students and being able to put my arm around them when they were having a bad day. So God bless the teachers you describing and everybody in that school. They had to come together as a family. That the kind of thing that is going to give kids nightmares. So they had to assure the kids that their school was still going to be a safe place to come to every day. You reminded us of your experience in Utah a deeply red, conservative Republican state where the electorate stood with the teachers union to defend public schools and defeat a universal voucher bill.
That true.
But we know there are politics involved. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is a sore spot for both your union and the AFT. Both NEA and AFT have asked for Duncan resignation. Your demand was unconditional, and AFT had some very interesting conditions
Yes, The Arne Duncan Improvement Program. I love it.
So what the politics of this? Why is this happening now?
The conflict has been building for quite some time, and it just spilled over. The resolutions are not new. Similar ones have been introduced ever since Race to the Top. We really expected something better from the Department of Education after living under Child Left Un Tested. For these many years, Duncan has said, going to collaborate with teachers and not do reform to teachers we going to go forward with you I have a list of beautiful things the secretary has said about not reducing a child to a standardized test score, but then insisting, we will, by demanding that students standardized test scores be used to evaluate teachers even though there no scientific research or evidence that says there any connection.
What wrong with basing teacher evaluations on test scores?
The years I taught at the homeless shelter, I had different kinds of students than the year I taught at Orchard Elementary. Also, there was the year I had 24 kids and the year I had 39 kids. You can put that in a value added formula. It doesn work. Then there was the year I had three special ed kids with reading disabilities, and I did a bang up job with them. So the next year they gave me 12. I had all of the special ed kids that year. No other teachers had any. Just me. So in a class of 35 kids, 12 had reading disabilities. Now I guessing if we had just used test scores back then to evaluate me, you maybe would have thought that I had suddenly become a really crappy teacher that year. Test scores alone wouldn have told you what happened. They wouldn have given you an analysis of why.
Other than being unfair to individual teachers, does basing evaluations and school ratings on test scores hurt students too?
Using test scores is basically saying to educators, your number or you get punished. Or even worse, your number in El Paso, if you an administrator, and we give you a bunch of money. That would encourage the administrator to use a push out program for low scoring students like those who don speak English. That what Lorenzo Garcia did as district superintendent in El Paso, and he is in jail now. He was the first person to go to jail for lining his pocket with bonus dollars because he could hit his numbers. And he made presentations about how you can a fire under lazy teachers to get those numbers up. But what really happened is he would call individual students into his office to threaten and humiliate them with deportation if they wouldn drop out or transfer. He pushed out over 400 students in his high school. It was the El Paso Teachers Association that got the community together to talk about what van cleef and arpels necklace imitation was happening and to make sure that never happened again. That NEA chapter just won a national human and civil rights award for establishing a way for parents and teachers to alert the community when they see district administration engaging in unfair practices to students.
What does Arne Duncan think about this? Why does he still insist on basing his policies on test scores?
I spoke with Secretary Duncan yesterday [July 16]. He very upset with the NEA Representative Assembly decision to call for his resignation. We had a hard conversation. He was very straightforward with me. He felt he wasn being given enough credit from NEA for advocating for expanded early childhood education and greater access to affordable college. And it true there is no light between us on those issues. So he asked why we didn explain to people all the good things he has advocated for. I said I would send him copies of speeches I give where I been supportive of the good things the Obama administration has done, and I give him position papers from the NEA addressing the need to work closely with his department.
So what the frustration for teachers?
Here the frustration and I not blaming the delegates; I will own this; I share in their anger. The Department of Education has become an evidence free zone when it comes to high stakes decisions being made on the basis of cut scores on standardized tests. We can go back and forth about interpretations of the department policies, like, for instance, the situation in Florida where teachers are being evaluated on the basis of test scores of students they don even teach. He, in fact, admitted that was totally stupid. But he needs to understand that Florida did that because they were encouraged in their applications for grant money and regulation waivers to do so. When his department requires that state departments of education have to make sure all their teachers are being judged by students standardized test scores, then the state departments just start making stuff up. And it stupid. It absurd. It non defensible. And his department didn't reject applications based on their absurd requirements for testing. It made the requirement that all teachers be evaluated on the basis of tests a threshold that every application had to cross over. That indefensible.
So any good the Obama administration has tried to accomplish for education has been offset by the bad?
For years, politicians and policy leaders have been running the nation public education system basically by fake van cleef clover necklace sale the seat of the pants, drafting and passing legislative doctrine that mostly ignores the input from classroom teachers, research experts and public school parents.
Just the latest example of this fly by night leadership came from Rand Paul, the senator from Kentucky and expected GOP presidential contender. According to the Politico newsletter, Paul is a major push on education reform, including choice, school choice, vouchers, charter schools, you name it. love the name it proposal, don you? So reassuring to parents. we enrolling your kid in the Name It program this year. Everything will be fine. an astonishing display of incoherence, he told the Politico reporter how much he, and his children, had benefited from traditional public schools grew up and went to public schools. My kids have gone to public schools and then suggested we create something that looks nothing like them.
one person in the country who is, like, the best at explaining calculus teach every calculus class in the country, he rambled, in belief, somehow, that having million people in the classroom would ensure more children a teacher that may be having a more hands on approach. Really?
Have education policies from the Democratic Party been any better?
Apparently, most teachers don think so. As Politico, again, reported, teachers are organizing at an unprecedented level. Through their unions, teachers have amassed of millions in cash and have acquired data mining tools that let them personalize pitches to voters, in an effort to a huge get out the vote effort.
convergence, observers say, is the product not only of the unions' need to assume a defensive posture in the face of legislative and legal attacks, but also of the pressure brought by internal factions that have urged the unions to take a tougher stance against market based education policies. got teachers stirred up? How real and potent is this upsurge of their activism? Why should people who identify with progressive causes care? Salon recently posed those questions, and others, to Lily Eskelsen Garca, the new president elect of the National Education Association, the nation largest teachers union, at the recent Netroots Nation conference in Detroit.
First of all, congratulations on becoming the new NEA president.
Still president elect. I take office Sept. 1. We have an incredible president, Dennis Van Roekel, who basically said a transition period should be a transition period, not go stand in the corner. So he gave me the president elect title and told me I would take the press calls, go to Netroots, meet with Arne Duncan, start establishing where you want to go and be as vocal and as visible as you can possibly be. Our members have asked NEA to step up and take things to another level. There too much at stake for us. There are policies that need addressing and we have some of the best policy expertise in the nation, but those ideas need a face to the NEA, a face for the American teacher that is channeling the voices of these 3 million educators, and when you hear the words come out of her mouth it not just her opinion it a whole lot of teachers and support staff who are saying here an important thing for the American people to hear and an important thing imitation van cleef and arpels bracelet alhambra for Arne Duncan and President Obama to hear. So he told me to start being that voice today.
The voices of these teachers are important, aren they? And too often we don really hear their stories about what it really like to teach in American schools, do we? For instance, I was just at a meeting of the American Federation of Teachers, where a teacher told us about showing up to school one morning and finding a man had been shot to death in front of the building the night before. The body was still on the sidewalk as the kids were coming to school, and the teachers had to decide how they were going to handle this with the children. So many of our teachers are really serving as first responders for kids, aren they?
That true. So how did the teachers handle this?
They quickly had to abandon all they had planned to do with the children that day and spend the day addressing what the children had experienced, how they felt about what they had seen in front of their own school.
That was very wise of them. I taught for 10 years in a regular school. I also taught for six years at a homeless shelter two different shelter schools. The needs of these students were so different. What you just described happening to that school is never going to happen at Orchard Valley Elementary School in West Valley, Utah, the fairly affluent school where I started teaching. But think about what teachers are being called on to deal with today, depending on where they are. I was teaching in the homeless school on Sept. 11, 2001, the day the twin towers fell. I was teaching students who didn know where their parents were because these were hard to place foster kids. I had to tell my students what was going on because they saw everyone was riveted to the news and couldn avert their eyes from what was going on. These were terribly frightened kids. Look what happens these days without the social workers and the counselors, and the class size going through the roof. People say that class size may not matter to the test score, but class size mattered to me being able to have a relationship to my students and being able to put my arm around them when they were having a bad day. So God bless the teachers you describing and everybody in that school. They had to come together as a family. That the kind of thing that is going to give kids nightmares. So they had to assure the kids that their school was still going to be a safe place to come to every day. You reminded us of your experience in Utah a deeply red, conservative Republican state where the electorate stood with the teachers union to defend public schools and defeat a universal voucher bill.
That true.
But we know there are politics involved. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is a sore spot for both your union and the AFT. Both NEA and AFT have asked for Duncan resignation. Your demand was unconditional, and AFT had some very interesting conditions
Yes, The Arne Duncan Improvement Program. I love it.
So what the politics of this? Why is this happening now?
The conflict has been building for quite some time, and it just spilled over. The resolutions are not new. Similar ones have been introduced ever since Race to the Top. We really expected something better from the Department of Education after living under Child Left Un Tested. For these many years, Duncan has said, going to collaborate with teachers and not do reform to teachers we going to go forward with you I have a list of beautiful things the secretary has said about not reducing a child to a standardized test score, but then insisting, we will, by demanding that students standardized test scores be used to evaluate teachers even though there no scientific research or evidence that says there any connection.
What wrong with basing teacher evaluations on test scores?
The years I taught at the homeless shelter, I had different kinds of students than the year I taught at Orchard Elementary. Also, there was the year I had 24 kids and the year I had 39 kids. You can put that in a value added formula. It doesn work. Then there was the year I had three special ed kids with reading disabilities, and I did a bang up job with them. So the next year they gave me 12. I had all of the special ed kids that year. No other teachers had any. Just me. So in a class of 35 kids, 12 had reading disabilities. Now I guessing if we had just used test scores back then to evaluate me, you maybe would have thought that I had suddenly become a really crappy teacher that year. Test scores alone wouldn have told you what happened. They wouldn have given you an analysis of why.
Other than being unfair to individual teachers, does basing evaluations and school ratings on test scores hurt students too?
Using test scores is basically saying to educators, your number or you get punished. Or even worse, your number in El Paso, if you an administrator, and we give you a bunch of money. That would encourage the administrator to use a push out program for low scoring students like those who don speak English. That what Lorenzo Garcia did as district superintendent in El Paso, and he is in jail now. He was the first person to go to jail for lining his pocket with bonus dollars because he could hit his numbers. And he made presentations about how you can a fire under lazy teachers to get those numbers up. But what really happened is he would call individual students into his office to threaten and humiliate them with deportation if they wouldn drop out or transfer. He pushed out over 400 students in his high school. It was the El Paso Teachers Association that got the community together to talk about what van cleef and arpels necklace imitation was happening and to make sure that never happened again. That NEA chapter just won a national human and civil rights award for establishing a way for parents and teachers to alert the community when they see district administration engaging in unfair practices to students.
What does Arne Duncan think about this? Why does he still insist on basing his policies on test scores?
I spoke with Secretary Duncan yesterday [July 16]. He very upset with the NEA Representative Assembly decision to call for his resignation. We had a hard conversation. He was very straightforward with me. He felt he wasn being given enough credit from NEA for advocating for expanded early childhood education and greater access to affordable college. And it true there is no light between us on those issues. So he asked why we didn explain to people all the good things he has advocated for. I said I would send him copies of speeches I give where I been supportive of the good things the Obama administration has done, and I give him position papers from the NEA addressing the need to work closely with his department.
So what the frustration for teachers?
Here the frustration and I not blaming the delegates; I will own this; I share in their anger. The Department of Education has become an evidence free zone when it comes to high stakes decisions being made on the basis of cut scores on standardized tests. We can go back and forth about interpretations of the department policies, like, for instance, the situation in Florida where teachers are being evaluated on the basis of test scores of students they don even teach. He, in fact, admitted that was totally stupid. But he needs to understand that Florida did that because they were encouraged in their applications for grant money and regulation waivers to do so. When his department requires that state departments of education have to make sure all their teachers are being judged by students standardized test scores, then the state departments just start making stuff up. And it stupid. It absurd. It non defensible. And his department didn't reject applications based on their absurd requirements for testing. It made the requirement that all teachers be evaluated on the basis of tests a threshold that every application had to cross over. That indefensible.
So any good the Obama administration has tried to accomplish for education has been offset by the bad?
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