July 18, 2010

from The New York Times

A Popular Principal, Wounded by Government’s Good Intentions

By MICHAEL WINERIP

BURLINGTON, Vt. — It’s hard to find anyone here who believes that Joyce Irvine should have been removed as principal of Wheeler Elementary School.

John Mudasigana, one of many recent African refugees whose children attend the high-poverty school, says he is grateful for how Ms. Irvine and her teachers have helped his five children. “Everything is so good about the school,” he said, before taking his daughter Evangeline, 11, into the school’s dental clinic.

Ms. Irvine’s most recent job evaluation began, “Joyce has successfully completed a phenomenal year.” Jeanne Collins, Burlington’s school superintendent, calls Ms. Irvine “a leader among her colleagues” and “a very good principal.”

Beth Evans, a Wheeler teacher, said, “Joyce has done a great job,” and United States Senator Bernie Sanders noted all the enrichment programs, including summer school, that Ms. Irvine had added since becoming principal six years ago.

“She should not have been removed,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview. “I’ve walked that school with her — she seemed to know the name and life history of every child.”

Ms. Irvine wasn’t removed by anyone who had seen her work (often 80-hour weeks) at a school where 37 of 39 fifth graders were either refugees or special-ed children and where, much to Mr. Mudasigana’s delight, his daughter Evangeline learned to play the violin.

Ms. Irvine was removed because the Burlington School District wanted to qualify for up to $3 million in federal stimulus money for its dozen schools.

And under the Obama administration rules, for a district to qualify, schools with very low test scores, like Wheeler, must do one of the following: close down; be replaced by a charter (Vermont does not have charters); remove the principal and half the staff; or remove the principal and transform the school.

And since Ms. Irvine had already “worked tirelessly,” as her evaluation said, to “successfully” transform the school last fall to an arts magnet, even she understood her removal was the least disruptive option.

“Joyce Irvine versus millions,” Ms. Irvine said. “You can buy a lot of help for children with that money.”

Burlington faced the difficult choice because performance evaluations for teachers and principals based on test results, as much as on local officials’ judgment, are a hallmark of the two main competitive grant programs the Obama administration developed to spur its initiatives: the stimulus and Race to the Top.

“I was distraught,” said Ms. Irvine, 57, who was removed July 1. “I loved being principal — I put my heart and soul into that school for six years.” Still, she counts herself lucky that the superintendent moved her to an administrative job — even if it will pay considerably less.

“I didn’t want to lose her, she’s too good,” Ms. Collins said, adding that the school’s low scores were the result of a testing system that’s “totally inappropriate” for Wheeler’s children.

Justin Hamilton, a spokesman for the United States Department of Education, noted that districts don’t have to apply for the grants, that the rules are clear and that federal officials do not remove principals. But Burlington officials say that not applying in such hard times would have shortchanged students.

At the heart of things is whether the testing system under the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 can fairly assess schools full of middle-class children, as well as a school like Wheeler, with a 97 percent poverty rate and large numbers of refugees, many with little previous education.

President Obama’s Blueprint for Reform says that “instead of a single snapshot, we will recognize progress and growth.” Ms. Collins says if a year’s progress for each student were the standard, Wheeler would score well. However, the reality is that measuring every student’s yearly growth statewide is complex, and virtually all states, including Vermont, rely on a school’s annual test scores.

Under No Child rules, a student arriving one day before the state math test must take it. Burlington is a major resettlement area, and one recent September, 28 new students — from Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan — arrived at Wheeler and took the math test in October.

Ms. Irvine said that in a room she monitored, 15 of 18 randomly filled in test bubbles. The math tests are word problems. A sample fourth-grade question: “Use Xs to draw an array for the sum of 4+4+4.” Five percent of Wheeler’s refugee students scored proficient in math.

About half the 230 students are foreign-born, collectively speaking 30 languages. Many have been traumatized; a third see one of the school’s three caseworkers. During Ms. Irvine’s tenure, suspensions were reduced to 7 last year, from 100.

Students take the reading test after one year in the country. Ms. Irvine tells a story about Mr. Mudasigana’s son Oscar and the fifth-grade test.

Oscar needed 20 minutes to read a passage on Neil Armstrong landing his Eagle spacecraft on the moon; it should have taken 5 minutes, she said, but Oscar was determined, reading out loud to himself.

The first question asked whether the passage was fact or fiction. “He said, ‘Oh, Mrs. Irvine, man don’t go on the moon, man don’t go on the back of eagles, this is not true,’ ” she recalled. “So he got the five follow-up questions wrong — penalized for a lack of experience.”

Thirteen percent of foreign-born students, 4 percent of special-ed students and 23 percent of the entire school scored proficient in reading.

Before Mr. Obama became president, Burlington officials began working to transform Wheeler to an arts magnet, in hopes of improving socioeconomic integration.

While doing her regular job, Ms. Irvine also developed a new arts curriculum. She got a grant for a staff trip to the Kennedy Center in Washington for arts training. She rented vans so teachers could visit arts magnets in nearby states. She created partnerships with local theater groups and artists. In English class, to learn characterization, children now write a one-person play and perform it at Burlington’s Very Merry Theater.

A sign of her effectiveness: an influx of new students, so that half the early grades will consist of middle-class pupils this fall.

Ms. Irvine predicts that in two years, when these new “magnet” students are old enough to take the state tests, scores will jump, not because the school is necessarily better, but because the tests are geared to the middle class.

Senator Sanders said that while the staff should be lauded for working at one of Vermont’s most challenging schools, it has been stigmatized.

“I applaud the Obama people for paying attention to low-income kids and caring,” said Mr. Sanders, a leftist independent. “But to label the school as failing and humiliate the principal and teachers is grossly unfair.”

The district has replaced Ms. Irvine with an interim principal and will conduct a search for a replacement.

And Ms. Irvine, who hoped to finish her career on the front lines, working with children, will be Burlington’s new school improvement administrator.

“Her students made so much progress,” Ms. Collins said. “What’s happened to her is not at all connected to reality.”

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In an article posted to his blog on April 30, 2010, Education Minister Dave Hancock attempts to answer the question, "Are Diploma Exams Fair to Students?" It is an important question that is also being asked by teachers and many students on a number of groups on Facebook.

While there is some very valuable information contained in the post, many of the arguments advanced by the minister deserve a response. The question of fairness needs to be judged relative to the experiences of students writing diploma examinations, and the minister's blog does not accurately represent their experiences.

Hancock misses the mark when he discusses the high stakes nature of the exams. He argues that "it is entirely appropriate to check that students have learned what they are expected to learn over the course of their time in school," but ignores the fact that this check for understanding is a one sitting three-hour test. There is no way that the amount of learning can be accurately represented by this one exam. It is simply too much content, being assessed by one small assessment which is weighted way too heavily. Furthermore, the single shot opportunity to prove a year's worth of study is taken with no regard for other stressors that might be affecting the student that day. Hancock's assertions that this practice prepares students for further high stakes testing in university ignores sound practice, insinuating that K - 12 assessment practices should be diminished to bring them in line with first year post-secondary education practices. Finally, teachers of courses with diploma exam teachers know that high achieving students are more likely to stress out and ignore their health needs as opposed to being "overconfident and not study[ing] enough prior to the test" as the Minister claims.

Another questionable aspect of the program is the equating process and efforts to "maintain consistent standards over time." As a result of this process, the grade achieved by a student on the test is not necessarily the same as the grade they are awarded. The story of a student from Calgary recently demonstrated that students who sit an exam that is deemed to be easier than those previously administered will automatically be deducted marks before they even bubble in their first answer. One might ask why, with all the people employed by the department to develop tests (including test item writers, psychomatricians, editors, exam managers and more), Alberta Education cannot insure that the few dozen secured tests it must develop in the course of a year are consistent with each other and representative of the curriculum before being administered. Could it be that these tests are not nearly as reliable as advertised?

Which brings us to some interesting questions about funding. The government has never been completely clear about the amount of money that is being spent on provincial testing. Even this week, the minister released two pieces that reported two separate figures for spending on provincial testing. His blog post reports expenses of $14.5 million in testing while his update for educators, Thinking Outside the Books, reports that $22 million was spent. The fact is that expenses related for testing are not reported categorically in any readily available financial document from the government.

The minister states that we do not "have standards of assessment of a sufficiently high caliber that are widely understood by teachers" and that teachers may not be "marking students on a common consistent basis." He uses these arguments to justify the emphasis of diploma exams. While the Alberta Teachers' Association doesn't necessarily agree with the assertions, we do recognize that the solution to such issues should not be an emphasis on standardised testing, but rather a commitment to teacher professional development. Imagine how education could be improved for our students, if $22 million per year (over $600 per teacher in the province) was devoted to professional development instead of testing.

If the department chose to focus the time, energy and financial resources it devotes to standardised testing to improving instruction and the classroom learning instead, we could make real meaningful change for students that mattered. It might be different if the government actually chose to be informed by the test results it takes so seriously. For example, the minister wonders why there is a "serious decline in writing skills over the past five years." Could it be that graduates writing these tests since 2005 have demonstrated declining writing skills because they are the victims of irreparable education cutbacks implemented through the mid 1990s when this cohort was entering Kindergarten?

Further points of contention on the blog post relate to the design and administration of the diploma exams themselves.

There is a lot of confusion about the difference between norms based assessment and standards based (criterion referenced) assessment. Criterion referenced assessment looks at the knowledge, skills and competencies that a student is expected to know and compares the progress of the student to those standards. With a criterion referenced assessment, it is possible for every single student who writes the exam to receive 100 per cent, so long as every student demonstrates competency. A norms based assessment is designed to compare each student with his or her peers (often referred to as "The Curve"). In this case the mark tells more about how the student deviates from the normal student as opposed to how much of the curriculum they have mastered. The Diploma examinations are highly engineered and designed, when the developers get it right, to have an average of 65 per cent and to discriminate the weaker students from the stronger students. In actuality they are highly effective norm-based assessments, but they are not "a tool for identifying attainment of standards" as the minister purports.

The removal of written response questions in mathematics and science has further degraded the value of the examinations. Students who are more able to demonstrate their knowledge using an open format are constrained to one of four choices - three of which are designed to exploit common student errors. Hancock's praise of the new Physics 30 which requires students to "explain why they used a specific calculation to solve a problem" is negated because the students can no longer explain that knowledge in their own words; they can, however, bubble in a, b, c or d-not much of an explanation. There is no doubt that the removal of written components had little effect on the averages, but this does not mean that individual students were not harmed by that change in policy and it is cold comfort to writers for the minister to claim that in the average justice is done.

The emphasis that is being placed on the exams and the pressure put on teachers is not imagined, even if it is only implied. Unfortunately parents do read the Fraser Institute reports ranking schools based on test results and school jurisdictions and principals pay a great deal of attention to the Accountability Pillar results released every year. Even having Alberta Education Learner Assessment staff at teachers' conventions and specialist councils places unnecessary emphasis on standardised testing as opposed to student instruction, which is why the Association has decided not to host sessions that promote increased reliance and attention to these flawed instruments. It is this emphasis and these stressors that are most damaging to student learning, as the system gets distracted from the important and valuable curriculum in favour of even more "teaching-to-the-test."

Above all else our students would be best served for a successful 21^st century future if the entire system returned its focus on student learning and the responsibility for assessment was returned to competent classroom teachers where it rightfully belongs.

Eliminating EQAO and letting teachers teach would save money, produce results - ETFO.

by Sam Hammond, President, Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario - Origjnally published in ETFO Voice and on publicvalues.ca

Originally conceived as a way to ensure accountability in the system and ostensibly improve education, Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) tests are in fact an obstacle to quality education. EQAO tests are based on a very narrow definition of accountability: student achievement on one day on one written test. Today this narrow and limited assessment is used to rank individual schools, students, and ultimately teachers. EQAO test results are inappropriately used to compare schools and neighbourhoods and, in some cases, serve to affect real estate values.

Because of EQAO tests we have schools where excessive emphasis on literacy and numeracy limits students' exposure to a full range of much-needed knowledge and skills. EQAO tests reward seat work and the ability to do well on pencil and paper tests to the exclusion of creativity, the ability to work with others, independent thinking, and real critical problem solving. The emphasis on improving test scores has taken Ontario education back decades, to a time when students sat at desks in rows and regurgitated material on demand. Finally, the money spent to maintain EQAO could be put to far better use in classrooms across this province.

This is what we heard when we polled ETFO members for your opinions on provincewide testing and gave you an opportunity to detail your experiences. (Read the findings reported on page 11.) Overwhelmingly you told us that it's time for the government to take action and eliminate or at least modify the EQAO and the testing it administers. It is time to let you do what you do best - TEACH! You also told us loud and clear that change is needed at its sister organization, the Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat (LNS). Together the two agencies account for over $100 million in government spending. On your behalf, we told the government in our pre-budget brief that these are two places where it could cut spending and actually improve our schools.

We stated that our preference would be the outright elimination of provincewide tests for grade 3 and 6 students. We provided alternatives: - adopting a two-year moratorium on the tests - testing on a two-or three-year cycle - moving to random sample testing.

We also had useful advice for the government about the $77.5 million spent each year on the LNS. In a phrase: eliminate, suspend, or reduce - in that order. - The 80 student achievement officers, who work with schools and boards, cost $14.1 million annually and duplicate the work of school board consultants. These positions should be eliminated. - The Ontario Focused Intervention Partnership (OFIP) costs $33 million and is an effort to raise EQAO scores. We told the government to get rid of it. - The School Effectiveness Framework costs $12 million. We suggested that it be dismantled immediately.

The government could save even more money by taking down the School Information Finder website. This government site, which highlights EQAO scores, allows people to compare and shop for schools. The website trivializes your hard work and your students' achievements. All education stakeholders - teacher federations, parent groups, principals, and school boards - have been united in their opposition to it.

So far the government has not heard the message. For that reason, we have posted a video on our website, www.etfo.ca, and a link that encourages members, parents, and the public to send letters to their MPPs requesting that the site be dismantled. I urge you to use it. Let the government hear your voice.

We are working hard to make the government aware of the negative impact of its focus on testing, test scores, and the unwarranted and demanding focus on literacy and numeracy. We call on this government to act immediately and take steps to improve our schools and save money at the same time. With the concerns about the deficit mounting, now is the time to take advantage of a unique opportunity.

On March 24th in question period, St Albert MLA Ken Allred asked Education Minister Dave Hancock about the differences between education in Alberta and Finland after hearing Finnish education expert Pasi Sahlberg speak at a Real Learning First event. The following is a transcript of the exchange copied from the March 24, 2010 printed transcripts of the Legislative debate and discussion.

Question Period

Mr. Allred (St. Albert PC): Mr. Speaker, one of the best ways to enhance Alberta’s competitiveness is to maintain our world-leading standing in education. Other countries recognize the extraordinary importance that education will play in their economic future, and their students are leaping ahead of Alberta students. I was pleased the other evening to go to hear an educational consultant from Finland speak in St. Albert. To the Minister of Education. Finland has what is, very simply, the best education system in the world. Notably, unlike Alberta, they have no state testing or school ranking lists. When will Alberta follow their lead?

The Speaker: We have to get a response from the minister.

Mr. Hancock (Edmonton-Whitemud PC): Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In fact, Pasi Sahlberg has been on a tour around Alberta a number of times and is quite an expert on education and well worth listening to, and I’ve heard him a number of times. Finland is actually recognized as one of the best systems in the world, but it’s more than just a question of not having tests. In fact, in the opportunity I had to meet with six jurisdictions from around the world who are rated among the top 25 in the world, the common thing that we found about all jurisdictions that are excellent is excellence in teaching. All the rest of the things that they have are quite different, and we can be strong in different areas, but it’s excellence in teaching which draws them together. [interjections]

The Speaker: The hon. member.

Mr. Allred: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. To the same minister: given that Finnish students are in school for far fewer hours than Alberta students yet their achievement is much higher, are you considering reducing the number of hours Alberta students spend in school?

Mr. Hancock: Well, Mr. Speaker, it’s not actually a question of hours. Yes, Finland does have a lot shorter number of hours for their students. Also, their students start later. They start at age 7, which develops a maturity that has worked very well for them. Of course, as the Member for Edmonton-Strathcona has been shouting at me, they have child care and other things at the earlier ages, which is supported. Suffice it to say that Finland does very well. They have many different things in their system which are different from ours and different from other successful places in the world, and they have some things that other places do which do not give them the results.

The Speaker: The hon. member.

Mr. Allred: Thanks, Mr. Speaker. Again to the same minister: why does Alberta’s education system not follow the Finnish model, where teachers spend more time collaborating with each other than anywhere else?

Mr. Hancock: Well, in fact, Mr. Speaker, that’s a very good question. Again, when I had the opportunity to be in Singapore to look at the Singapore system and meet with ministers of education from around the world, one of the things that became very apparent: professional development, selecting the best teachers, educating them appropriately, making sure that they’re well inducted into the profession, and making sure that they have good, solid opportunities for professional development throughout their professional life is what helps to create excellence in teaching. That amount of time that they have in Singapore and in Finland for teachers to get together to learn from each other and to build their professional practice enhances their education system, and we should be looking very closely at that. (668 – 669)

Thanks to the Public School Boards' Association of Alberta Legislature Watch Blog for this.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/education/03ravitch.html

March 2, 2010

Scholar’s School Reform U-Turn Shakes Up Debate

By SAM DILLON

Diane Ravitch, the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators and served in the first Bush administration’s Education Department, is in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling.

Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education. She resigned last year from the boards of two conservative research groups.

“School reform today is like a freight train, and I’m out on the tracks saying, ‘You’re going the wrong way!’ ” Dr. Ravitch said in an interview.

Dr. Ravitch is one of the most influential education scholars of recent decades, and her turnaround has become the buzz of school policy circles.

“What’s Diane up to? That’s what people are asking.” said Grover J. Whitehurst, who was the director of the Department of Education’s research arm in the second Bush administration and is now Dr. Ravitch’s colleague at the Brookings Institution.

Among the topics on which Dr. Ravitch has reversed her views is the main federal law on public schools, No Child Left Behind, which is up for a rewrite in coming weeks in Congress. She once supported it, but now says its requirements for testing in math and reading have squeezed vital subjects like history and art out of classrooms.

Dr. Ravitch’s new posture has angered critics.

“She has done more than any one I can think of in America to drive home the message of accountability and charters and testing,” said Arthur E. Levine, a former president of Teachers College, where Dr. Ravitch got her doctorate and began her teaching career in the 1970s. “Now for her to suddenly conclude that she’s been all wrong is extraordinary — and not very helpful.”

Admirers say she is returning to her roots as an advocate for public education. She rose to prominence in the 1970s with books defending the civic value of public schools from attacks by left-wing detractors, who were calling them capitalist tools to indoctrinate working-class children.

“First she angered the Marxist historians, and later the fans of progressive education and the multiculturalists,” said Jeffrey E. Mirel, a professor of education and history at the University of Michigan. “But she’s always defended public schools and a robust traditional curriculum, because she believes they’ve been a ladder of social mobility.”

Dr. Ravitch was born in Texas and graduated from Wellesley. She gained formidable influence during the Republican-dominated 1980s. In her meticulous office on the top floor of a 19th-century Brooklyn brownstone hangs a photograph of herself, seated next to Vice President Bush during a visit to the White House, directly across from President Ronald Reagan.

In 1991, Lamar Alexander, the first President Bush’s secretary of education, made her an assistant secretary, a post she used to lead a federal effort to promote the creation of state and national academic standards.

Since leaving government in 1993, Dr. Ravitch has been a much-sought-after policy analyst and research scholar, quoted in hundreds of articles on American education. And she has written five books, including “Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform” (2001) and “The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn” (2003), an influential examination of the censorship of school books by left- and right-wing pressure groups.

In her new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” she describes the bipartisan consensus that took root in the early 1990s, with her support, and has held sway since.

“The new thinking saw the public school system as obsolete, because it is controlled by the government,” she writes. “I argued that certain managerial and structural changes — that is, choice, charters, merit pay and accountability — would help to reform our schools.”

In January 2001, Dr. Ravitch was at the White House to hear President George W. Bush outline his vision for No Child Left Behind, which Congress approved with bipartisan majorities and which became law in 2002.

“It sounded terrific,” she recalled in the interview.

There were signs soon after, however, that her views were changing. She had endorsed mayoral control of New York City schools before Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg obtained it in 2002, but by 2004 she had emerged as a fierce critic. Some said she was nursing a grudge because close friends had lost jobs in the mayor’s shake-up of the schools’ bureaucracy.

In 2005, she said, a study she undertook of Pakistan’s weak and inequitable education system, dominated by private and religious institutions, convinced her that protecting the United States’ public schools was important to democracy.

She remembers another date, Nov. 30, 2006, when at a Washington conference she heard a dozen experts conclude that the No Child law was not raising student achievement.

These and other experiences left her increasingly disaffected from the choice and accountability movements. Charter schools, she concluded, were proving to be no better on average than regular schools, but in many cities were bleeding resources from the public system. Testing had become not just a way to measure student learning, but an end in itself.

“Accountability, as written into federal law, was not raising standards but dumbing down the schools,” she writes. “The effort to upend American public education and replace it with something that was market-based began to feel too radical for me.”

She said she began to feel estranged intellectually from close colleagues.

One she heard criticize the No Child law was Chester E. Finn Jr., a former assistant secretary of education with whom she had written a book and worked at two conservative research groups, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

They were ideological soul mates and just plain chums. Often over the last decade, they were on the phone together or exchanging e-mail messages half a dozen times a day. But although Mr. Finn had become critical of the No Child law, he remained an advocate of charter schools and school choice.

By 2008, Mr. Finn said, “there were more and more issues where the staff and everybody else on the Fordham board would say, ‘Let’s do A,’ and Diane would say, ‘Let’s do B.’ ”

Finally, she recalled, “I told everybody at a dinner meeting at Koret that I was going to resign, and they all said, ‘Come on, stay — we need somebody to argue with us.” Dr. Ravitch stayed on for a time, but left both organizations last spring.

Mr. Finn has done his own rethinking, and he said he shared many of her disappointments.

“Standards, in many places, have proven nebulous and low,” he writes in a coming essay. “ ‘Accountability’ has turned to test-cramming and bean-counting, often limited to basic reading and math skills.”

But Mr. Finn has reached sharply different conclusions from Dr. Ravitch.

“Diane says, ‘Let’s return to the old public school system,’ ” he said. “I say let’s blow it up.”

But Dr. Ravitch is finding many supporters. She told school superintendents at a convention in Phoenix last month that the United States’ educational policies were ill-conceived, compared with those in nations with the best-performing schools.

“Nations like Finland and Japan seek out the best college graduates for teaching positions, prepare them well, pay them well and treat them with respect,” she said. “They make sure that all their students study the arts, history, literature, geography, civics, foreign languages, the sciences and other subjects. They do this because this is the way to ensure good education. We’re on the wrong track.”

The superintendents gave Dr. Ravitch a standing ovation.

“We totally agreed with what she had to say,” said Eugene G. White, superintendent of the Indianapolis Public Schools. “We were amazed to see that she’d changed her tune.”