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Mandatory Student Standardized Testing With Punishments is Cruel Privatization Power Play Against Public Schools

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Sat, 03/20/2010 - 3:22pm.

PAUL A. MOORE, PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHER IN FLORIDA, FOR BUZZFLASH.COM

The children will in some cases become sick and throw up. Others will panic and wet themselves. Still others will complain of nightmares and plead for reassurance from parents and teachers. But no excuses are countenanced in the Sunshine State. The state once again went ahead with its annual ritualistic destruction of 8 and 9-year-old children this past week through the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT).

All the children psychologically injured came from families without the means to take refuge in private schools where the FCAT is banished as junk pedagogy. Thankfully, affluent parents can protect their children from the test. Poor and working class mothers and fathers are trapped though. They watch anxiously from the sidelines on test day and hope for the best.

Unfortunately, the best does not always happen. When a child "fails" the FCAT reading in the 3rd grade, and thousands do, it is the official policy in the State of Florida to punish the child. The State has rejected the idea of extra care and remediation and embraced the incentives provided by fear and public humiliation. The "failed child" sits in the same 3rd grade class again throughout the following school year. Former friends and classmates go happily on to their 4th grade adventures in learning. They will watch each other come and go every day in nearby classrooms with the full understanding of why they are now and forever separated.

Again, the State of Florida punishes the child. No adult--not a parent, not a teacher, not a principal, not a District Superintendent, not a school board member, not a Florida Commissioner of Education, not a member of the Florida Department of Education, not a legislator, not a governor--no grown person need fear any sanction for poor FCAT performance. The State of Florida has decided to punish the 9-year-old alone.  

There is a sleeping giant in Florida's public schools. The teachers are the most powerful and potent force in the system. Those teachers made a huge mistake when they let the FCAT into the schools and into their students lives. But teachers were ambushed. They grew up in world without FCAT. They all went to school before punishment and psychological battering became official government education policy. As children today's teachers were taught that presidents and governors and legislators cared for all kids. It was before they learned a governor could be devious. 

When teachers let the wolf, the FCAT, into their classrooms it emboldened the leaders of the pack. So they're back now to destroy those very teachers. State Senator John Thrasher and other allies of former Governor Jeb Bush have proposed Senate Bill 6. It will tie the paychecks of teachers to test scores. At first the legislation will put the jobs and livelihoods of every inner city teacher and special education teacher in jeopardy but they intend in time to get to all public school teachers.

They are out to achieve the vision of a man by the name of Milton Friedman. Sixty years ago Friedman wrote, "I believe that the only way to make a major improvement in our educational system is through privatization to the point at which a substantial fraction of all educational service is rendered to individuals by private enterprises. Nothing else will destroy or even greatly weaken the power of the educational establishment--a necessary pre-condition for radical improvement in our educational system.. . .The privatization of schooling would produce a new, highly active and profitable industry. . . ."  

Senate Bill 6 is intended to work the same way FCAT did with children--batter teachers into lower pay and lesser benefits and more overcrowded classrooms through fear and intimidation. Then they will snuff out what is left of public education and install their "new, highly active and profitable industry...."   And they are counting on Florida's teachers to commit suicide.  

That remains to be seen. The only reason an FCAT booklet has ever been distributed in a Florida classroom is because a teacher has agreed to do it. They can pass Senate Bill 6 or Senate Bill 666 and it's null and void unless teachers administer their tests. They're prepared to deal with teachers lobbying and other forms of pleading for mercy. They won't even be bothered by thousands of sign carrying teachers marching through the streets of Tallahassee.

But imagine the teachers refusing to administer the tests. Pray tell, what would they do about it? Can they fired everybody and turn the children of Florida loose in the streets?   Yes, the sleeping giant may yet awake in time to save public schools and heal the children.  




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Talent

Submitted by Gregory Lynn Kruse on Mon, 03/22/2010 - 9:22am.

The ability to teach well is what we used to call a talent.  Students can identify a talented teacher in an instant.  Talent is something you start with and then develop over time.  Many teachers are not talented and only train to be teachers.  Nowadays we are training all but the most affluent and talented kids to work for corporations, and the ones they don't want will be the new poor.  Grandparents can help mitigate this situation.  Grandparents of kids who are being punished and abused by the system should be prepared to sit in school with them, help teach them, and support the teacher if the teacher is competent, or help get rid of or demote an incompentent teacher.  With such support, good teachers would be encouraged to defy the system, organize themselves again, and advocate for children and real edification (building up the character of citizens).

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Your absolutly right there a teachers ability to hold the classes attention and deliver they're message is critical. Whether it's an English teacher talking about verbs and tenses a math teach explaining algebra or a physical education expert instructing exercises, the ability to get the students to do what they should be is pure talent. There's simply no other word for it.

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Let teachers evaluate the educational process

Submitted by wrf1984 on Sun, 03/21/2010 - 8:05am.

Rightonrightonrighton!

Your message is "let teachers be teachers."  Absolutely.  This entire movement to high-stakes testing is simply a way for non-educators to, somehow, "quantify" education, like some test score can actually do that.  And yes, I totally agree that NCLB is a thinly-disguised way to delegitimize public education.  Statisticians and other "evaluators" of education can use these "test scores" to compare schools to other schools.  And they actually believe that is what they are doing--evaluating and comparing.  What a joke.  Just one example:  a school creates an after-school program for high school-level latch-key students to cover them during the "danger hours" when most teen pregnancies occur.  The program is a success.  How does it fit into the evaluative process of that school?  It doesn't because it's not "tested."

I wonder how any law will "tie teacher pay to test scores?"  PE teachers?  Home-Ec?  Computer science?  Oh, I know:  since we don't test those things we'll eliminate them from the curriculum (a teacher in my building who previously taught in Arizona said his middle school stopped teaching social studies because it wasn't tested).

Also please note that the list of educational hangers-on in paragraph 4 are the progenitors of NCLB and the Florida standardized tests.  Where was teacher input?  There was none.  The reigning philosophy is that teachers are "part of the problem," so shouldn't be consulted.

Here's the rub:  in Illinois, on average, it takes about $300,000 to fire a tenured teacher.  For my little school district that's almost 10% of our annual budget.  Therefore, bad teachers don't get fired.  In fact, those who are weakest hang on because they know they have no other employment opportunities.  We don't have very many bad teachrs, but there have been, over my 28 years of teaching, a few.  I believe, for teachers to begin to achieve the respect they deserve they are going to have to, by some method, let go of the least among us, and do so at a cost that isn't prohibitive.  I'm not saying that administrators should be allowed to simply fire since too many are far too capricious, but an effective, multi-step process that doesn't take so long or cost so much must be realized.  It works for unions.  What we do is far too important to be left to those who do a poor job.  We are professionals; we need to act as such.

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Wow, what an opportunity to feel all "generation-gappy"

Submitted by smchris on Sun, 03/21/2010 - 7:41am.

And, boy, do I hate the _tone_ of the article.  You know, sonny, back in my day, we didn't need No Child Left Behind to "punish" a child who failed.  We just called it "flunking" and blamed the child instead of the system.  If he hadn't absorbed the material, make him repeat it.  That was considered more important than making sure the kid got passed up and stayed with his buddies.  Getting a pass seems to have been the norm the last few decades and that's why we have cash registers that make sure kids don't have to enter prices much less calculate change.  And why No Child Left Behind was created. 

Does No Child Left Behind suck?  Sure, it's a federal unfunded mandate on a locally funded institution and there are a lot of things wrong with that scheme.  On the other hand, I think federal standards are long overdue.  Like universal health care, how many First World countries rely on the equivalent of the Texas School Board to set de facto curriculum standards?  How many superintendents and principals in other First World countries have to defend their jobs against their town creationists?

 

 

 

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National Standards?

Submitted by jpricher on Sun, 03/21/2010 - 9:51am.

I must take issue with your comments on a couple of points.  Efforts have been underway for a number of years to arrive at national standards.  The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics took ten years to come up with a set of standards, and I thought they did a very good job of doing so.  The mathematics section of the FCAT in Florida was based on these standards, or at least the parts of the standards which lend themselves to being assessed on a standardized test.  I was committed to teaching those standards to my students from the time they were established until my recent retirement, and my students tended to do well on the test even though I spent no extra time in preparing for it.  There are many parts of the standards, however, that do not lend themselves to being assessed this way, working in groups to solve non-rountine problems for instance.  I don't think anyone could deny that this is a life skill worth nurturing, but who is going to assess it if not the teacher who observes it happening in his or her classroom?  The difficulty with national standards as they are now being discussed has to do more with how those standards are going to be used, and who is going to decide what they are.  Personally, as an experienced teacher, I would not trust the Business Round Table to set these standards because I distrust their agenda.  Are we trying to develop a thinking public or a compliant work force?  The noble thought of establishing a standard for all students has been misused in the State of Florida to bash teachers and to penalize students who were already disadvantaged.  Why?  They refused to adjust for socio-economics, the number one indicator for test performance.  Consequently, schools with poor kids did poorly and were chastised, and schools with more affluent kids did well and were rewarded.

You also seem to imply that retaining kids was somehow a good idea.  There is no statistical data that supports this idea, even though it seems to make sense.  There is much more evidence to show that retaining kids actually harms them.  Since you brought up the other industrialized nations, I am not aware of any other country that retains students.  In fact, they think we are rather brutal and uncivilized in this regard.  I am not going to deny that in some places alternative placement is used, but they fund those alternatives with their tax dollars.  There was a time in this country when we, too, had a strong vocational education program.  That was long before the current test frenzy though.

I am all for accountability.  The trouble comes when someone decides how they are going to make decisions concerning it.  I live in the community where I was raised and where I taught for 31 years.  I cannot walk down the street or enter a store without running into someone I taught.  Whenever that happens the person can choose to engage me or they can walk away.  The fact that they engage me on almost every occasion and seem very pleased to see me tells me I did my job.  That is accountability I can live with!

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