In Case You’re Listening — Annual Blogoversary Post

SEPTEMBER 14, 2006

I started this blog while I was still teaching, in 2006. I had just begun my 31st year as an educator.

Just like in previous years, however, I was stressed out and irritated about the standardized testing situation in Indiana. I needed to vent.

This was a place where I could express my frustration about the condition of public education in Indiana and the US. I didn’t care who read it…if anyone. I just wanted to put my thoughts down and complain. I suppose I should have titled the blog “The Complaint Department” or something like that since that’s what it mostly consisted (and consists) of…complaints about how public education, and education in general, is treated in the US.

I focused the blog on testing. 2006 was in the middle of the “No Child Left Behind” unpleasantness when schools were labeled good if they catered to wealthy, upper-middle, or middle-class students and bad if they were filled with children living in poverty. This is simply because, then as now, test scores mirror a family’s economic status. Rich kids, with educated parents and well-staffed and well-supplied schools score high. Poor kids, with parents who work two or three minimum-wage jobs and understaffed and underfunded schools score low. Adding injury to insult, NCLB made punishment of the so-called bad schools part of the plan.

BAD TO WORSE

Things have gone from bad to worse in the last seventeen years. I’ve complained less, only because I’ve written less due to personal health problems (only 10 posts in 2022 and just one this year).

Testing is still misused and overused. The NAEP is regularly misinterpreted by folks who know nothing about education and testing and who conflate the terms “proficiency” and “grade level.” States still force schools to test for ranking purposes…in ignorance of the real purposes of educational testing.

Politicians, Indiana’s included, still use every excuse to whine about the sad state of our public schools, how awful teachers (and their unions) are, and how our children are being shortchanged. All that public school bashing has led to a crisis of teacher shortages around the country. It turns out that it’s hard to convince young people to enter a profession where they are insulted, their expertise questioned by people who don’t know anything about education, underpaid, overworked, called names like “groomer,” and blamed for all the ills of society.

Never mind that those same politicians are the main cause of most of the problems facing our public schools.

Never mind that the growth of vouchers and charters has sucked funding from real public schools.

Never mind that money is still inequitably spent so that the rich get richer and the poor still don’t get enough.

Testing is still a problem. Teachers and schools are still judged by their test scores despite the fact that poverty is the real problem.

Vouchers and charter schools drain money from public schools at increasing rates despite the fact that their test scores also reflect the income of their students’ families.

Teachers are still undervalued and underpaid. My anecdotal reasons for this are 1) teaching is a predominantly female career and women don’t get paid as well as men and 2) because we, as a nation, talk a good game but we really just don’t give a damn about our children and their future.

It’s almost like they (politicians, pundits, and privatizers) want to destroy public education…

MOVING FORWARD

I still regularly badger my local representatives about public education, but, being Republicans, they either are too afraid of their leadership to speak out in favor of public schools or, as I suspect is true, don’t really care about public schools. In their mind it’s “socialism” and we can’t have that, now, can we? I sometimes feel like they don’t hear me either. My state representative is (or was, I can’t recall) a board member for our local Lutheran schools (voucher recipients — no conflict of interest there!), and my state senator is a doctor who introduced a bill (currently on hold pending litigation) forbidding parents from providing gender-affirming care for their children. So much for “parental rights.”

Physically, I’m doing better so I’ll try to post more (I hope). And I’m not giving up. I’m hopeful that the young people of the nation take charge, insist that schools are fully funded, and insist that teachers are given the credit and pay they deserve.

With any luck, I’ll celebrate the successes of our nation’s support for public education over the next few years. In the meantime here are a couple of good posts to get your blood flowing…

Raising the Bar on Kindergartners: A Nation at Risk Lives On

Kindergarten has never been so high pressured, even after Covid, and it has been this way for years despite little proof children are born with evolved brains requiring faster instruction so they can grow up and beat their peers in other countries.

How must children feel while being made to carry the weight of the future economy, and if they don’t enter first grade learner ready, they could be marked for life!

And corporate remaking of kindergarten thus far, over forty years, with all its pressure, hasn’t produced a good enough child, or adult, for those who still worship A Nation at Risk.

Local Parents, Educators Face ‘Attack’ on Public Schools from Indiana Lawmakers – Limestone Post Magazine in Bloomington, Indiana

Republican legislators came to embrace the concept that state education funding should “follow the student.” If parents sent their child to a public school, a private school, or a privately operated charter school, that’s where the money would go.

This year, they expanded the private-school voucher program to families that make up to 400 percent of the limit for reduced-price school meals, $220,000 for a family of four; and they eliminated pathways that students had to follow to qualify. That makes it essentially a universal program, open to an estimated 97 percent of students.

“I’m excited to see Indiana once again stand behind our Hoosier families who want the ability to choose the best school that meets their child’s needs regardless of their zip code,” House Speaker Todd Huston, R-Fishers, said in a news release. “We’re now on our way to having the best school choice program in the country.”

As students leave public schools for private schools, however, state funding follows, leaving public schools with fewer resources. Instead of the “general and uniform system of common schools” prescribed by the state constitution, Indiana now funds three K-12 systems: traditional public schools; over 100 charter schools, most of them privately operated; and private schools that rely on vouchers.

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In which I explain why this blog has been silent since October, 2021

The Dead Collector: Bring out yer dead.
Large Man with Dead Body: Here’s one.
The Dead Collector: That’ll be ninepence.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I’m not dead.
The Dead Collector: What?
Large Man with Dead Body: Nothing. There’s your ninepence.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I’m not dead.
The Dead Collector: ‘Ere, he says he’s not dead.
Large Man with Dead Body: Yes he is.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I’m not.
The Dead Collector: He isn’t.
Large Man with Dead Body: Well, he will be soon, he’s very ill.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I’m getting better.

Scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail

NEW YEAR’S DAY, 2022

I wasn’t able to breathe and gasped for air. They moved me to the ambulance…wheeled me into the hospital…someone cut off my shirt (one of my favorite tee shirts!) and inserted an IV in my arm. I don’t remember much else for the next few days.

On January 1, 2022, I went to the hospital, was diagnosed with COVID-19, and spent the next seven weeks in the hospital and in rehab. At first, I was on a ventilator — which prompted the ER doctor to tell my spouse that she should call our kids and have them come home to say goodbye to their father. I spent about a week in the ICU, then time in the COVID-19 Unit, and then another three and a half weeks in rehab to rebuild my strength and regain some of the forty pounds I had lost (not a recommended weight loss plan!).

Drifting in and out of consciousness, I thought “if this is what dying is, it’s not so bad. I should just let go.” Of course, I had the benefit of pain-killers, sedatives, and paralytics so I didn’t really know what was happening to me.

Later, in the ICU, I couldn’t get out of bed. I was unable to move enough to get up. I was too weak to stand. I couldn’t move from the bed to a chair. I couldn’t lift my legs onto the bed. It was a helpless, and humbling experience.*

Thankfully, my body, modern medicine, and, according to the doctor, the COVID-19 vaccines, conspired to keep me alive until I could improve a bit. I decided that it was worth it to hang on so that I could experience more of life. Like the Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t in the scene above, I’m getting better!

Unfortunately (or the way 2022 is going so far, perhaps “fortunately”), I was unable to keep up with the news and unable to update my blog for the first three months of 2022, but I’m getting better…so I’m back.

CATCHING UP ON THE NEWS

One of the reasons I got so sick from COVID-19 is because I’m immunocompromised and have “underlying conditions” which make me more susceptible to illness. I was vaccinated, wore a mask everywhere, avoided crowds and unvaccinated people, and stayed out of stores. It wasn’t enough and the highly contagious variant got me (I assume it was Omicron since that was the variant that was going around at the time). There are millions of immunocompromised folks in the U.S. It’s to keep us safe that you wear a mask and get vaccinated. Maybe this will help you understand…

COLLATERAL DAMAGE — THE IMMUNOCOMPROMISED

Vulnerable to the Virus, High-Risk Americans Feel Pain as the U.S. Moves On

Millions of Americans with weakened immune systems, disabilities or illnesses that make them especially vulnerable to the coronavirus have lived this way since March 2020, sequestering at home, keeping their children out of school and skipping medical care rather than risk exposure to the virus. And they have seethed over talk from politicians and public health experts that they perceive as minimizing the value of their lives.

As Year 3 of the pandemic approaches, with public support for precautions plummeting and governors of even the most liberal states moving to shed mask mandates, they find themselves coping with exhaustion and grief, rooted in the sense that their neighbors and leaders are willing to accept them as collateral damage in a return to normalcy.

See also: The Millions of People Stuck in Pandemic Limbo

EDUCATION NEWS

Now for some of the articles…on the topics…that filled education news while I was gone…

RACISM IN SCHOOL

History of Institutional Racism in U.S. Public Schools

One of the biggest educational/political uproars this year was, and is, Critical Race Theory. It’s not being “taught” in our elementary and secondary schools, but it’s premise, that racism is inherent in our lives and intersects with the law and society is proven by our history.

Racism is part of the U.S. Constitution. It didn’t disappear with the Emancipation Proclamation, or with the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments, or with various voting rights and civil rights legislation. It still sours and poisons our nation and by extension, our schools and our children.

In modern times, “New Racism” arose; concealed, more subtle, and much harder to detect, this New Racism operates deep under the radar. The Black Lives Matter Movement and the looming Trump administration have propelled the conversation of race and racial issues to the forefront of American consciousness. It is argued, however, that while these conversations are crucial, we are not recognizing the systemic racism that has been present in our educational system for decades. Racism is so deeply innate that it is believed that racism no longer exists in our country. But in our public schools, another story is being told.

In this New Racism, blame for underachieving students of color is shifted to their parents, who are portrayed as slacking or uninvolved with their children’s education. This shifts attention away from the policies and structures in action that put a student of color at a disadvantage.

See also: Racism In Education: what we know and where we go from here

CENSORSHIP

Book-banning law is another way to keep voters focused on culture-war distractions

If books can turn kids gay, why didn’t the gay kids who read books about straight kids turn heterosexual?

The books can be burned, but the ideas will survive.

But Republican leaders in Florida are acting like books are turning children gay, socialist or whatever group they’re marginalizing or villainizing this week. The GOP-controlled Legislature passed a bill making it easier to ban books from school libraries.

In signing the measure into law last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis said “it’s going to help give parents a lot of confidence that they can send their kids to school and they’ll get an education but they’re not necessarily going to be indoctrinated into things that are very, very questionable.”

See also: The Top 10 Challenged and Banned Books of 2021

THIRD GRADE PUNISHMENT PLANS

The focus of this blog has often been directed at the misuse and overuse of standardized testing, and retention in grade. The two topics come together in laws passed by states that require schools to hold students back a grade if they don’t pass the state’s arbitrary third-grade standardized reading test.

The Harm Caused By the Third Grade Reading Ultimatum

There’s no research indicating we should be hurrying
children to read early, which started with No Child Left Behind (NCLB), or earlier. Formal reading used to begin in first grade. But with NCLB, formal reading instruction has been pushed down to kindergarten. It has become the norm.

NCLB, however, was poorly conceived. Those who wrote NCLB chose third grade as a pivotal year. Yet, studies from years ago indicated NCLB failed to increase reading achievement in fourth grade (Dee & Jacob, 2011).

Supporters of this policy promised at the time, that by following punitive accountability measures all third graders would read at grade level by 2014! That did not occur (here are excuses why) and children, who are told not to have any excuses, have been paying the price ever since.

See also: Academic Freedom Isn’t Free: Don’t Buy It: The Marketing Scam of MSM and the “Science of Reading”

TEACHER SHORTAGE

America’s Teachers Aren’t Burned Out. We Are Demoralized.

Where will tomorrow’s teachers come from? Who will staff our schools?

Often in education we hear that teachers are burned out, but that isn’t quite accurate. As teacher demoralization expert Doris Santoro says, “burnout tells the wrong story about the kinds of pain educators are experiencing because it suggests that the problem lies within individual teachers themselves.” Those outside education assume that the teacher can’t hack it in the classroom. But in reality, teachers are forced to operate in systems that aren’t functioning properly, which makes teachers feel demoralized, discouraged and overwhelmed. According to Santoro, demoralization occurs because teachers “care deeply about students and the profession, and they realize that school policies and conditions make it impossible for them to do what is good, right and just.”

See also: Missing: Future Teachers in Colleges of Education

JACKIE ROBINSON

Finally, it’s baseball season…and this season marks the 75th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s major league, barrier-breaking debut. Racism was present when the country was founded. It was present after the failure of Reconstruction. It was present during the Jim Crow era which includes the 1947 integration of Major League baseball. It’s present today (see RACISM IN SCHOOL, above).

April 15, 1947: Jackie Robinson’s major league debut

April 15, 1947: Jackie Robinson’s major league debut
This article was written by Lyle Spatz

Jackie Robinson’s major league debut was more than just the first step in righting an historical wrong. It was a crucial event in the history of the American civil rights movement, the importance of which went far beyond the insular world of baseball.

The Dodgers signed Robinson to a major league contract just five days before the start of the 1947 season. Baseball people, especially those in Brooklyn, were still digesting the previous day’s news of manager Leo Durocher’s one-year suspension (for conduct detrimental to baseball), when the story broke of Robinson’s promotion from the Montreal Royals. He would be the first black American to play in the major leagues since catcher Moses Fleetwood Walker played for the Toledo Blue Stockings of the American Association back in 1884.

*[NOTE: Thank you to all the nurses, nurses aides, and medical techs who took care of me during the first few months of 2022. You don’t get paid enough! Oh, and the doctors are appreciated, too.]

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Alabama Joins the Third-Grade Punishment Club

PUNISHING THIRD GRADERS

Twenty-Eight states have some sort of third-grade retention law according to the outdated (4/16/19) Third-Grade Reading Legislation page on the National Conference of State Legislatures website. The laws state that third-graders must pass a reading test showing that they can read at “grade level” before they will be allowed to move to fourth grade. Most have exceptions for students who are identified as learning disabled, English language learners, or have some other “rational reason” for not being failed by the adults in their school or school system.

Alabama is listed as “pending” on the website but will go into effect in the 2021-22 school year. To warn parents that this is going to happen AL.com posted an article (on Monday, June 7) that explains what the new law will mean.

There’s a lot of discussion in the article about how teachers are now going to be giving struggling students extra support in K, 1, 2, and 3 (question: Isn’t this something that should already be happening?) to make sure they can pass the test in Grade 3. This has to be done, because, apparently in Alabama, fourth-grade teachers aren’t qualified to teach reading.

What parents need to know about Alabama’s third grade reading retention law

Teachers in fourth grade and beyond expect children to be able to read subject-level content and aren’t necessarily trained themselves in interventions.

“When they encounter struggling readers,” she said, “they don’t necessarily know how to teach students to read.”

This is followed by ways that “your child” can get around the law by retaking the test if they failed, being learning disabled in reading, an English language learner in the first two years of their language acquisition, or having already been retained at least twice in their primary grades (K-3).

Oh, and the early intervention will help the child so they don’t even know they were struggling.

But when a child’s struggle to read is identified early, as is required now by law, and the child gets the support they need early, the child never knows they ever struggled.

(This last point might actually be helpful for students if they could make it happen…that is until they come up against the third-grade test and have to search around for something to use to get out of taking it.)

And how is it that someone who has already been retained twice in the first four years of their formal schooling hasn’t been referred to special services? Perhaps it’s because the U.S. Congress has never paid what they promised for Special Education.

Surely the new law which requires “individualized reading plans” for struggling students in kindergarten, first, and second grade won’t have children who will need to be retained. Here’s the rub…teachers are now required to use the “state-approved” test on students instead of their own assessments. Alabama is joining the nationwide chorus denying that teachers have expertise in teaching. Accordingly, a teacher’s professional opinion about how a child is doing in their class isn’t as good as the result of the state-approved test.

And there’s this…Shelby County Schools in Memphis, Tennessee wants to one-up the states by retaining kids in second grade before they are retained in third grade because “third grade is too late.”

But I digress…

COMMON SENSE

Common sense tells non-educators (and many educators as well) that, if a child is falling behind we need to give them a chance to “catch up.” Logically, letting a student repeat a year in school should be beneficial.

Unfortunately, education, the human brain, and young children don’t work that way. In studies going back decades, retention in grade has been found to have either no impact or a negative impact on a child’s achievement. Even studies that supposedly show a benefit to retention generally, upon closer inspection, show that without herculean efforts by the student and their teachers the child will still be behind.

The common sense is wrong.

As an example, here’s information from a 2014 study done by the researchers at Notre Dame.

New research suggests repeating elementary school grades — even kindergarten — is harmful

Common sense tells us that early retention is better than late retention. Are younger kids so much more resilient that they don’t really notice if they’re not promoted along with their peers? Most in-grade retentions in the U.S. are done in first or second grade. What did the researcher, Notre Dame’s Megan Andrews, find?

She looked at more than 37,000 children across the United States from two older multi-year surveys (NLSY 1979 and NELS 1988) and found that about 10 percent had been held back at school, most of them during the 1980s. The surveys included details of the family characteristics of the children. That allowed Andrew to create 6,500 matched pairs of students, where the retained and non-retained students had similar backgrounds. Their mothers had attained the same level of education and their families had the same household income. The students had scored the same on a pre-school cognitive test. (In layman’s terms, they started school with similar IQs). The matched students also had similar behavioral problems, as reported on the surveys. Home environment, gender and race were factored in, too. In other words, Andrew matched the held-back students with students who were equally “at risk” for being held back, but weren’t.

Then Andrew looked at whether these matched students eventually graduated from high school. And that’s where she found that the held-back children were 60 percent less likely to have graduated from high school than their matched “partners” who stayed on grade level. Andrew went one further to see if she could reproduce the results in a different way. Using the 1979 data survey, which included sibling information, she compared children who were held back with their siblings who weren’t held back. Again, she found the same result. Even in the same family, held-back kids were 60 percent less likely to graduate high school than their brothers and sisters. Astonishing!

Andrew acknowledges that held-back students often show a short-term boost in their grades and test scores, but she believes this boost “disappears” after just a few years. A sociologist by training, Andrew hypothesizes that being held back is so psychologically scarring that many students fail to regain their confidence in the long-term. In her paper Andrews argues that being held back is a one of the biggest negative events of a child’s life. “In surveys, students rank being retained in grade second only to a parent’s death in seriousness in some cases,” Andrews wrote.

The fact that this research generally backs up what others have found makes it all the more important that we end the practice once and for all. (see here, here, and here for three more examples. See my bibliography on grade retention, here.)

INSTEAD

The question then remains, what do we do when students learn too slowly or can’t keep up with their peers.

One thing we can do is use the process described in the AL.com article. Introduce intensive intervention as early as possible for students having trouble. A helpful difference would be to 1) continue the process throughout the grades where it’s needed and 2) don’t punish students for not learning. When a student needs more than intervention supplies, increase it. When special services are necessary — and I would suggest that any school that retains children more than once doesn’t know how to identify children for special services — provide it. We have to stop punishing children with the inappropriate and inadequate intervention of retention because we’re not willing to spend the money to help them.

Oh, and every fourth-grade teacher that I ever worked with (during four decades in K-6 schools) knew how to teach reading or knew where to go for help. So did the fifth and sixth-grade teachers. If Alabama’s upper elementary teachers don’t know how to teach reading then there’s something wrong with the teacher training institutions in Alabama. My guess is that the people who claim that only primary teachers know how to teach reading don’t know what they’re talking about.

And who will be the children who are punished? Research into retention suggests that they will be mostly boys and mostly black. What is it about being a black male in America…but again, I digress.

We could, and probably should adopt some of the techniques used in high achieving nations for our own schools. Finland, for example, used research from the United States to improve its school system. We don’t.

Finnish educator Pasi Sahberg, along with Timothy Walker, an American who moved to Finland to teach, have written a new book titled, In Teachers We Trust: The Finnish Way to World-Class Schools. In it they discuss ways to help children who are struggling…they use special education.

Intensified support consists of remedial support by the teacher, coteaching with the special education teacher, and individual or small-group learning with a part-time special education teacher. Special support includes a wide range of special education services, from full-time general education to placement in a special institution. All students in this category are assigned an Individual Learning Plan that takes into account the characteristics of each learner and personalizes learning according to ability.

EDUCATION ON THE CHEAP

The Alabama attempt at this, using Individualized Reading Plans without additional support. The classroom teacher is supposed to take care of the whole thing. This is typical of the U.S. — We require more from teachers without providing more support. Our children aren’t a high enough priority for us to spend the money needed to assure their success.

We’re failing our children because we’re too cheap. Then we blame the student for learning at their own rate and punish them with retention. We are shortchanging our own future.

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2021 Medley #5 – Vouchers, Testing, and Reading

Vouchers, Testing, and Reading

VOUCHERS

Scholars show how to challenge voucher discrimination

How many ways can we say it? School choice is not about parents choosing the school for their child. It’s about schools choosing which students to allow through their doors. Private schools get to choose their clients.

The law may state that private and religious schools must not discriminate in order to receive state funds, but the actual real-world actions of schools accepting vouchers shows that private schools can, and often do reject certain students based on various characteristics such as religion or sexual preference (or the sexual preference of their parents). Under other circumstances, this discrimination wouldn’t be a problem. Religious schools should be allowed to require their teachers and students to follow certain theological teachings. However, it becomes a problem when public funds are used to further such discrimination.

The simple fact is that private schools, and religious schools in particular should not be allowed to use public funds because they are not required to accept all students. Public tax dollars should go to public schools which accept all students — gay and straight, faithful and faithless, white or black. Using tax dollars to support religious schools that discriminate is contrary to the intent of the founders. Jefferson wrote,

…to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness…

Using tax dollars to support private and religious schools which discriminate based on religious beliefs is forcing taxpayers to pay for something they might not believe in. It’s “sinful and tyrannical”.

Green, the lead author, said supporters promote vouchers to expand opportunities for students and families. But, as the programs expand, state officials often enable them to deny those benefits to entire groups of students.

“Vouchers were sold as program that all could benefit from, but the anti-LGBT provisions give the lie to that statement,” Green said.

Voucher programs come in a variety of forms, but all provide ways for states to provide full or partial tuition funding to private schools for qualifying students. Indiana’s program, established in 2011, serves over 36,000 students in more than 300 private schools, nearly all of them religious schools, at a cost of $172.8 million. Lawmakers want to expand the program and extend it to upper-income families.

Vouchers Are About Abandoning Public Education, Not Freeing Parents

Public education is a public good, like roads, water systems, and libraries. It benefits everyone.

Vouchers are not about freeing or empowering parents. They are about empowering private interests to chomp away at the giant mountain of education money in this country. They are about dismantling any sort of oversight and accountability; it’s striking how many of these voucher bills/laws very specifically forbid the state to interfere with the vendors in any way, shape or form.

Think of voucher programs this way.

The state announces, “We are dismantling the public education system. You are on your own. You will have to shop for your child’s education, piece by piece, in a marketplace bound by very little oversight and very few guardrails. In this new education ecosystem, you will have to pay your own way. To take some of the sting out of this, we’ll give you a small pocketful of money to help defray expenses. Good luck.”

…Voucherization is also about privatizing the responsibility for educating children, about telling parents that education is their problem, not the community’s.

TESTING

Lawmakers Backing Standardized Tests Should Practice What They Preach

Forcing students to waste time taking standardized tests this year (and, actually, any year) is absurd. It is a waste of taxpayers’ money — even more than during normal (aka non-pandemic) times.

Educators are scrambling to teach safely and most lawmakers stand aside unsure how to help.

We can’t figure out which students to assist, they say, without first giving them all a batch of standardized tests.

It’s absurd, like paramedics arriving at a car crash, finding one person in a pool of blood and another completely unscathed – but before they know which person needs first aid, they have to take everyone’s blood pressure.

I mean come on! We’re living through a global pandemic.

Nearly every single class has been majorly disrupted by it.

So just about every single student needs help – BUT SOMEHOW WE NEED DATA TO NARROW THAT DOWN!?

Our duly-elected decision-makers seem to be saying they can only make decisions based on a bunch of numbers.

Does Education Secretary Cardona Recognize the Two Huge Problems with High-Stakes Testing?

Following the pattern of previous Democratic and Republican administrations, the Biden administration’s Secretary of Education has determined that the most important thing the Federal Government has to do for public schools throughout the country is force them to take wasteful standardized tests. Arne Duncan would be proud.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona insists that federally mandated standardized testing will go on as usual in this COVID-19 dominated year. While his decision feels particularly impractical, intrusive, complicated and disruptive in the midst of COVID-19, the decision is of much deeper concern for two reasons.

One would like to think that Dr. Cardona is familiar with the huge debate that has consumed education experts and also many parents who have been opting out for years now. But when Dr. Cardona explained why testing must go on as usual, he didn’t even bother to offer a rationale that addresses any of the reasons experts have insisted he should cancel the tests once again this year. Instead he said we need the tests so that the Department of Education can ensure that federal investment goes to the school districts that need it most. That is such a lovely thought, and if tests were designed and used to gauge needed investment in the poorest communities, it would be wonderful.

READING

The Reading Helper

Halfway through my career I moved out of my general education classroom and became, what Russ Walsh calls, a Reading Helper.

In this post, Walsh reminds us that the most important aspect of being a teacher is the relationship between teacher and student, not standardized tests…not state standards…not grades.

I have a teaching certificate that says I am a qualified Teacher of Reading, and Reading Specialist and Supervisor, but from the time I got a certain Valentine’s Day card from a student in 1993 I have thought of myself as a Reading Helper. That card was from a second grade vulnerable reader named Danielle who had been my student since that September. The cover of the hand made card was full of many colored hearts and flowers and said, of course, “Happy Valentine’s Day.” Inside was a message that I will never forget and which has defined my work ever since: “Thank you for hleping me read. Love, Danielle” Yes, exactly, “hleping.” Danielle still had some spelling reversals crop up from time to time. But the message could not have been clearer. I was being thanked for helping and it meant the world to me.

Why Do So Many Children Have Dyslexia? What is it Exactly?

The word “dyslexia” literally means “difficulty with written words”. In my experience — more than forty years as a paraprofessional, teacher, and retiree volunteer — there are as many different types of dyslexia as there are struggling readers — every child is different! Parents define it based on their own child’s (or children’s) struggles. Teachers define it by what they’ve seen in their own isolated classrooms. I’ve watched arguements between parents and teachers exposing the conflict as “that’s dyslexia,” “No, this is dyslexia”. The arguments about reading programs are even worse. There is no one perfect program that works for every single student. There is no panacea.

Nancy Bailey is absolutely correct in this post, that we need to stop worrying so much about the label and find out what works for each individual child. If a parent wants to call their child’s struggles dyslexia, so be it, but we still need to figure out what works for the child.

This post is followed by an interesting discussion in the comments. Many of the comments prove the points that Bailey makes in her article.

It’s important to continue to raise questions about reading problems and to seek school programs that help children learn to read.

But we should also be asking why so many children present such problems when they show up to school.

No matter what causes reading problems in children or what the label, schools, and teachers must continue to provide students with the individual help they need. There is no one perfect reading program for all children. Schools need to provide rich reading environments and extra phonics for students who need it.

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Don’t Punish the Students!

TESTING, TESTING, TESTING

Anyone who has been paying attention to education news knows that the Biden administration has, at least at the time of this writing (Mar 2, 2021), refused to cancel the required federal testing for this school year despite the pandemic and despite Candidate Biden’s promises to the contrary. In her blog, Diane Ravitch reminded us…

The Biden administration chose a pro-testing advocate, Ian Rosenblum of Education Trust New York, to announce the decision that states must administer the federally mandated tests this spring. Miguel Cardona has not yet been confirmed as Secretary of Education nor has Cindy Marten been confirmed as Deputy Secretary. Who made this decision? Joe Biden? Jill Biden? Ian Rosenblum, who has not yet been confirmed as Deputy Assistant Secretary? (The Assistant Secretary has not even been announced.) Is the Obama administration back?

Joe Biden said unequivocally at a Public Education Forum in Pittsburgh when he was campaigning that he would end the federal mandate for standardized testing. Denisha Jones, lawyer, teacher educator, board member of Defending the Early Years, and the Network for Public Education, asked candidate Biden if he would end standardized testing. Watch his answer here.

[Note: Cardona was confirmed on March 1, 2021]

If you’re interested, surf the internet to find other stories about how Biden has broken this particular promise…but that’s not the purpose of today’s blog post. I’m more concerned about how the results of the tests will be used.

THE PURPOSE OF THE TESTS

What’s the purpose of the state standardized tests?

Since the state tests were instituted, they have been used by privatizers to illustrate how public schools in the United States are “failing.” The truth is, however, that the tests mostly measure family income, and the concept of “failing” American schools is a myth.

During No Child Left Behind, state standardized tests were given to rank schools to determine which were worthy of praise and which were worthy of punishment. “Failing schools” — i.e. those schools with high levels of poverty which regularly scored lower on standardized tests — were punished with closure, state takeover, and replacement of staff.

During Race to the Top, the test was used to do the same as during No Child Left Behind but added “failing teachers” to the punishment list. Tests were (and in some places, still are) invalidly used to evaluate teachers. Those teachers who taught in “failing schools” were deemed to be “failing teachers” and would be subject to job loss or other punishment. In addition, Arne Duncan’s Education Department virtually abandoned so-called “failing schools” and emphasized opening charter schools.

The Every Child Succeeds Act, which we’re currently living under, has eased some of the punishments (it eliminated the requirement to evaluate teachers using state tests, for example), but the tests are still required every year in grades three through eight.

The educational reasons for testing include (but are not limited to) things like the diagnosis of students’ learning and analysis of curriculum, but there are a pile of other issues with standardized tests, however, that make their value questionable.

THIRD GRADE PUNISHMENT

One of the more damaging uses of standardized tests has been to determine whether third graders’ reading achievement is sufficient for them to be promoted to fourth grade. Currently about two-dozen states and the District of Columbia have laws that either require or allow for the retention of third-graders who fail a standardized reading test.

Third graders should be retained, the argument goes, because reading is different in fourth grade. In the primary grades, one learns to read. Beginning in fourth grade one “reads to learn.” While this might be true, depending on a school’s curriculum, there’s no evidence that retaining kids in third grade helps.

In a recent blog post, Peter Greene, at Curmudgucation, discussed another argument for third-grade retention. That is, that third graders who read well have a better chance of graduating from high school. Therefore, if we have third-graders who don’t read well, we need to retain them in third grade until they do…

…”Double Jeopardy” ties third grade reading proficiency (more or less as defined by NAEP) to high school graduation as well as tying both to poverty.

Without getting into too detail, the report finds that students who are not reading proficiently in third grade are more likely not to graduate, students who are poor for at least a year are less likely to graduate, and students who are both are even less likely to end up with a diploma. Black and Hispanic students who lagged in third grade reading skills were also less likely to graduate.

As Greene points out, they’re confusing correlation with causation.

Hernandez has identified correlations, not causations. Research might well show that third grade shoe size is a good predictor of adult height, but it does not follow that making third graders wear bigger shoes, or making them stay in third grade until their feet are big enough, will lead individual students to grow taller, nor raise the average height of adults.

Retention in grade based on the state standardized test, or for any reason, is a remediation method that doesn’t do what it purports to do. The “additional time to learn” argument has been disproven by the fact that after two or three years any academic advantage to retention disappears. Most students who are “behind” when they are in third grade are “behind” when they get to high school.

Retention in grade has been studied for more than a century and it has yet to be proven to be an effective method of helping students improve. At worst, retention increases the chance that a student will drop out of high school. At best, retention doesn’t do permanent damage to a student’s mental and emotional health.

Studies with the strongest research methods compare students who were retained with similar students who were not retained. They ask whether repeating a grade makes a difference in achievement as well as personal and social adjustment over the short run and the long run. Although individual studies can be cited to support any conclusion, overall the preponderance of evidence argues that students who repeat a grade are no better off, and are sometimes worse off, than if they had been promoted with their classmates.

TESTING DURING A PANDEMIC

You’ve probably noticed that the world is in the midst of a global pandemic. As such, schools have been closed, opened, closed again, half-open…in short, trying to find workarounds in a sometimes futile attempt to educate their students.

Some students have been on a hybrid schedule…in school part-time and at home part-time. Some students have been at home, working from a computer, for an entire year. Other students have been “lost”; their school systems have been unable to locate them. Parents often have difficulties juggling the online education of more than one child with their home and work responsibilities. Everyone wants students back in school. Students. Teachers. Parents. Everyone.

Given the problems associated with school over the past year, what do you think this year’s Spring standardized tests will show?

It’s absolutely likely that more students than usual will score below state cut scores on their achievement tests this year. It’s further likely that those students who are the most vulnerable will score the lowest. How will those test scores be used?

• Will more students be subjected to retention because they “fell behind” during the pandemic?

• Are we going to compound COVID-19 pandemic trauma with grade retention trauma?

• Will state Departments of Education fail to adjust cut scores (because those cut scores are usually arbitrary choices) so that fewer kids “fail” the tests?

• Will states continue grade retention practices despite the challenges to curriculum expectations during the pandemic?

“Yes” answers to any of the above questions are what worry me about giving this year’s mandated tests, because pro-privatization states (aka Republican-dominated) will no-doubt use the results of the tests to bad-mouth public education and public school teachers. They’ll blame the teachers unions (indeed, they already are), the Democrats, or local school boards for the low test scores. They’ll use the low scores to pass even more anti-public education bills that divert public dollars into the accounts of religious schools and charter operators. They will renew their accusations of “failing schools” and demand more “accountability” while ignoring real factors leading to low student achievement.

Instead, let’s…

Cancel federally mandated standardized tests for this year (and next year, and the next…). They don’t help and they’re a waste of time and money.

Provide resources to schools and teachers so they can meet the needs of their students. Let teachers…the education professionals…make educational decisions, not legislators.

And here in Indiana, divert public money for education back to public schools for a change.

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