Sheila Resseger – RI Future

August 10, 2016August 10, 2016

Public input needed on proposed changes to RI diploma system

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Hopefully many parents, teachers, and concerned RI residents are aware that the RI Council on Elementary and Secondary Education has proposed changes to the high school diploma system. They will host four public hearings in late August and early September, and also are accepting public comment in writing. Here is the link to the draft changes.

The meetings will be held Monday, August 22 at the Cumberland Public Library; Monday, August 29 at the Newport Public Library; Tuesday, September 6 at the Warwick Public Library; and Monday, September 12 at URI’s Providence Campus.

In addition to the dates and venues for the public forums, this document says that written comments can be submitted to Sonya Barbosa at Secondary@ride.ri.gov. One week ago, on August 1, I submitted the following email with my questions and concerns. I re-sent them two days later, when I realized that Ms. Barbosa might not have read through to the end of my email and not have realized that I requested a confirmation that my comments had been received and forwarded to the members of the RI Council on Elementary and Secondary Education and the members of the RI Board of Education. It is now August 8, and I still have not received an acknowledgement. Therefore, I am making my concerns public. I hope that this will inspire others to read the proposed changes, consider their impact, and provide a statement in person at a forum and/or in writing. The future of our students is too important to leave to the educrats to decide.

To: Sonya Barbosa, RIDE
Email: Secondary@ride.ri.gov
To the Members of the RI Council on Elementary and Secondary Education, and the Members of the RI Board of Education:

Thank you for the opportunity to express my thoughts on the proposed changes to the graduation requirements. As a retired teacher from the RI School for the Deaf, I have read through the proposed changes and considered how they would affect my former students and students in general across the state. I have several questions and concerns.

• As many of you may know, I have been an outspoken critic of the Common Core State Standards and the PARCC assessments, for many reasons. I was surprised to see on lines 70-73 of the proposed regulations that the definition of Common Core Standards had a strike-through of the entire paragraph. What does this mean, since the PARCC tests are based on the CCSS (and so are the PSAT and SAT), and students in grades 3-9 will still be expected to take the PARCC annually?

• Lines 305-307 state that as of 2017 LEAs may choose to include the state assessment or other standardized assessment as a graduation requirement. How does this mesh with the latest announcements from RIDE that 10th and 11th graders will no longer take the PARCC, and may optionally take the PSAT and SAT? This is purportedly for the purpose of guarding against over-testing.

Some districts have already made participation in the PARCC a graduation requirement as of 2017. Many RI parents and parents across the country have researched the PARCC ELA and Math assessments and decided that it is not is the best interest of their children to participate. Will RIDE accept the situation that students who have fulfilled all other requirements for graduation will not receive a diploma for not taking this flawed test? Will an exemplary student be denied a diploma in 2021 for refusing to participate in the PARCC Algebra 1 test in 8th grade, or the PARCC ELA test in 9th grade? We are soon entering the 2016-2017 school year. There is so much confusion around the diploma requirements across the state. RIDE keeps changing the recommendations, people assume that the RIDE recommendations are state-wide regulations, but districts can still decide otherwise. This situation is untenable.

• The major proposed changes to the current Proficiency Based Graduation Requirements seem to involve the Optional Commissioner’s Seal and the Optional Pathway Endorsement. These are alluded to in lines 446-464 as Council Designations. Yet the Commissioner’s Seal and Pathway Endorsements are not described in detail in the proposed changes. According to the “Proposal for a Revised Rhode Island Diploma System: Overview and Frequently Asked Questions,” developed as of May 20, 2016: http://www.ride.ri.gov/Portals/0/Uploads/Documents/Diploma-System/Regs_FAQs_v%202_5%2020.pdf

“6. Why don’t I see a reference to the Commissioner’s Seal or Pathway Endorsements in the proposed Secondary Regulations?

“The Commissioner’s Seal and Pathway Endorsements would be allowed under the proposed section L-6-3.3, which outlines the criteria for Council Designations. [L-6-3.4 says “Council designations” but does not outline them.] In order to stay current with innovative practices in the field, the proposed Secondary Regulations create the structure for the Council on Elementary and Secondary Education to name, define, and allow the Commissioner’s Seal and Pathway Endorsements at a later time than the initial vote on the regulations, and to review and revise these designations as necessary.”

It seems quite problematic to leave the specifications of these endorsements to the Council to determine at a later time. Will there be public input?

• Lines 466-479 discuss the alternate recognition of high school accomplishment, defined as a Certificate, which is not considered a high school diploma. It states that students with an IEP and modified proficiency standards [i.e. students who take the alternate assessment] may, at LEA discretion, be awarded a diploma. From my experience teaching at the RI School for the Deaf, students who took the alternate assessment had to meet very stringent criteria, and those criteria included significant cognitive impairment. Very few students at the school were eligible for the alternate assessment. Yet many of the students who had in actuality been successful throughout their academic careers at the school, but whose reading levels were considerably below typical for their grade level, were not eligible for the alternate assessment. Many students have additional learning disabilities, live in families who do not speak English, live in families who do not fluently communicate with them in sign language, and/or live in poverty. These students are capable of post-secondary level work, but might be denied a diploma depending on how the proficiency levels are set.

According to the Frequently Asked Questions mentioned above, the proposed diploma system is intended to be flexible enough to help students with disabilities and any students academically at risk by allowing schools and districts to set the proficiency levels for their students. Yet the schools are to be held accountable for preparing their students for post-secondary education and the workplace.

Who is to decide if the proficiency levels as determined by individual schools are reasonable and fair to all students with varying special needs, when this decision is left to the districts? Will there be comparability of proficiency levels from school to school within a district and between districts?

• At the RI Board of Education meeting on May 17, 2016 Commissioner Wagner discussed the menu of standardized assessments that might be approved for the Commissioner’s Seal endorsement. He said that these would be nationally recognized assessments and nationally recognized cut scores. Again, as a retired teacher from the RI School for the Deaf, I am deeply concerned about this. In my many years of experience teaching deaf and hard of hearing middle school and high school students, we had numerous students graduate and go on to post-secondary programs. Many went to Gallaudet (four year liberal arts college for the deaf) or to the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, affiliated with the Rochester Institute of Technology.

These programs for the deaf required the ACT as a college entrance test. However, cognizant that mastery of academic English is a challenge for many students deaf from birth or early childhood, these institutions set the cut scores for entrance considerably below that for non-deaf students entering post-secondary programs. This did not mean that the students had inferior aptitude, but considered their challenges, anticipating the appropriate supports they would be provided at the post-secondary level. Many of our students completed college and went on to satisfying careers. A nationally recognized cut score for the general population is not an appropriate hoop for all students to jump through to be recognized as prepared for college level course work.

At the same Board of Education meeting, the Commissioner explained that RIDE can factor into the districts’ accountability system the % of students that earn a Commissioner’s Seal or a Pathway Endorsement. If the RI School for the Deaf were to be evaluated by how many students achieve the Commissioner’s Seal as currently described, the evaluation would not accurately reflect the quality of the teaching and learning at the school.

• When asked by a Board of Education member at the same Board of Education meeting, “What resources will be provided to districts to accomplish all this? [i.e. the proposed diploma system], the Commissioner’s answer was: districts can adjust with advanced notice. The Commissioner is expecting an awful lot from districts if they are to accomplish personalized systems of pathways for every middle school and high school student with no additional resources. I hope that the Council will further consider the impact on districts of such a sweeping overhaul of the diploma system.

Thank you for considering my concerns. I would appreciate an acknowledgement that my concerns have been forwarded to the Members of the Council on Elementary and Secondary Education, and the Members of the Board of Education.

Sincerely,
Sheila Resseger, M.A.
Retired teacher, RI School for the Deaf

November 23, 2015November 23, 2015

What is ‘competency based education’?

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Something sinister has been happening to public education in America for the last decade or more. Billionaires such as Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton family have poured their fortunes into remaking our public schools and our public school students into what they envision will be good for multi-national corporations such as Pearson, Microsoft, McKinsey, and IBM. We saw this clearly with the Common Core State Standards and accompanying testing, with the bulk of the funding for the drafting, promoting, and implementing of the Common Core coming from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Now that there has been an (unexpected?) hue and cry about the over-testing of our students, here comes the antidote: competency/proficiency based education, aka personalization, aka student-centered education, and community partnerships. While this sounds on the surface like a welcome relief to the one-size-fits-all standardization of curricula and high-stakes standardized testing, it comes with its own pitfalls.

A perusal of the new “RI Strategic Plan for Public Education: 2015-2020” (http://media.ride.ri.gov/BOE/BOE_Meeting_102815/Encl6a.pdf), recently approved by the RI Board of Education, turns up a number of appealing-sounding but troubling buzzwords: personalized instruction, one-to-one computer technology, blended learning, online learning, community partners outside of the school, and particularly, proficiency-based instruction and assessment. In an ideal world, these buzzwords could be a refreshing approach to teaching and learning in a dazzling world of opportunity through technological advances. Very unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world.

We need only look as far as the state of Maine to see what the ugly reality of competency/proficiency based education looks like in real schools with real students and teachers. Maine has plunged ahead with this agenda, helped along with money from the Nellie Mae Education Foundation (a grantee of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), though there is no research (peer-reviewed or otherwise) that justifies transforming teaching and learning into a digital/online enterprise. Emily Kennedy Talmage is a teacher in Maine who has researched the roots of this agenda and written extensively about it in her blog, and it is unnerving. (http://emilytalmage.com/2015/04/26/save-maine-schools/) My take is that the PR for so-called proficiency based, personalized learning is riddled with code words that translate into outsourcing education to ed-tech vendors and “community partners,” marginalizing classroom teachers, holding students accountable to pre-determined, inappropriate standards (Common Core or Core-like), not allowing them to progress until they have achieved “mastery” of these inappropriate standards, feeding them game-like academic programs that foster zombie cognitive processing rather than real learning, and using extrinsic motivation like rewards and badges, all the while scooping up reams of sensitive data that will go who knows where and be used for who knows what.

While co-opting the language of the Civil Rights Movement with terms such as Equity and Opportunity, those pushing this digital innovation agenda are not sending their children to this brave new educational world. Private school students will still have small classes valuing interaction between teachers and students and students with peers, and rich curricula with the arts, languages, history, and social studies. Other people’s children will be seated at computer terminals, isolated from each other, eyes focused (or not) on screens which will be adjusted second by second to their keystrokes, the data siphoned off into cyber-space. (By the way, the federal Department of Education, the supposedly secure place where all public school students’ personally identifiable information will be channeled via the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems, recently received a very poor grade for data security from the Office of the Inspector General.)

We need to ask Cui bono? Is this rush to digital learning truly for the benefit of the overwhelming majority of the children in America who attend public schools? Or is it a bonanza for the hedge funders and edtech entrepreneurs who will rake in an exorbitant amount of money directly or indirectly on learning modules of dubious quality?

September 24, 2015September 24, 2015

Common Core, PARCC are destroying public education

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The Rhode Island Council on Elementary and Secondary Education had a meeting on September 21 and other than the council members and RI Department of Education staffers, it was not well attended. These meetings are open to the public, and there is an open forum section on the agenda in which anyone from the public can speak on a topic related to the agenda. (It is suggested that people call ahead and request to be put on the list of speakers.) At this meeting meeting I was the only person from the public who spoke. Remarks are limited to two minutes. What follows is the unedited version of my public comments from that meeting.

What is the basic unit of our society? the family—parents and children.
What is the basic public institution that serves the family? the public school system.

There is a misguided agenda that has been sweeping across our country and our state. In the name of the civil rights issue of our time, in the name of equity, in the name of 21st century competitiveness, and in the name of inclusiveness, we now witness officials obsessed with compliance to misguided policies who are intimidating parents to act against their conscience and against what they perceive and know to be in the best interests of their children. Of course I’m speaking of the Common Core curriculum, the PARCC aligned testing, and the massive data collection that goes along with them. Can you name one independent testing authority who has determined that these PARCC tests are reliable (i.e. would result in the same score if taken at another time), and valid (i.e. measure what they purport to measure)? Such an expert would be impossible to find, in my opinion.

These tests are fatally flawed, as are the standards to which they are aligned. The standards were developed by a cabal of well-connected people, primarily from the college testing industry. (If you need a refresher on the word “cabal,” here is Wikipedia’s definition: “A cabal is a group of people united in some close design together, usually to promote their private views or interests in a church, state, or other community, often by intrigue, usually unbeknownst to persons outside their group.”) This cabal had little to no knowledge or understanding of child development, nor did they care about it.

They cared nothing for the vast variation in backgrounds, interests, aptitudes, and struggles of our diverse students. All have to be held to the same standards at the same pace. This is not equity—it is delusion.

What happens to the many children who for a variety of reasons, and from a very young age, get the message that they don’t have what it takes to be successful? What happens to the few who are told they do have what it takes, based on a measure that idolizes a limited type of cognitive proficiency? Will the privileged few assume as the elite graduates of colleges like Harvard and Yale have been doing, that they are entitled to prescribe the fate of the “lesser” people? This is not democracy. This is oligarchy. This educational regime is feeding the inhumane process of sorting and ranking our children. People need to become aware and say NO. Children need life-affirming education, not standardized education producing compliant workers for the corporate machine.

For elaboration on the points made here, see: A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who in the Implosion of American Public Education by Mercedes K. Schneider

“‘Corporate reform’” is not reform at all. Instead, it is the systematic destruction of the foundational American institution of public education. The primary motivation behind this destruction is greed. Public education in America is worth almost a trillion dollars a year.

“Whereas American public education is a democratic institution, its destruction is being choreographed by a few wealthy, well-positioned individuals and organizations. This book investigates and exposes the handful of people and institutions that are often working together to become the driving force behind destroying the community public school.” (from the Amazon.com synopsis)

For further elaboration, see Diane Ravitch: The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education

Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools

Sheila Resseger, M.A.
Retired teacher, RI School for the Deaf

August 4, 2015August 4, 2015

Dr. Wagner on developmental appropriateness

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Dr. Ken Wagner, Rhode Island’s new commissioner of public education, was asked what strategies he would propose to address the achievement gap between students of color and their Caucasian counterparts at the July 13 joint meeting of the Board of Education and Council on Elementary and Secondary Education at which his nomination was confirmed. (video available here)

What is essential for closing the achievement gap, he said, is to have the same “high learning expectations for all students.” In using this phrase, he is referring to the Common Core State Standards. These standards, along with the EngageNY curriculum aligned to them, a curriculum which Dr. Wagner has taken credit for developing in NY State, have been declared developmentally inappropriate for young children by many experts on early childhood education. (See Joint Statement of Early Childhood Health and Education Professionals on the Common Core Standards Initiative)

In his remarks, Wagner disparaged these authentic voices by claiming that ideas on developmental stages by the esteemed child psychologist Jean Piaget are passé. According to Wagner, “Now the consensus seems to be much more that students can achieve things never thought possible, provided the right supports.”

I am curious to know which experts on early childhood development Wagner was referencing. There is an article by cognitive psychologist Dr. Daniel Willingham that seems on the surface to corroborate Dr. Wagner’s point. (“Ask the Cognitive Scientist: What Is Developmentally Appropriate Practice?”(AMERICAN EDUCATOR, SUMMER 2008) Willingham does indeed critique Piaget’s developmental stages and finds them wanting. However, he also states: “… changing strategies and experimenting with different methods of presenting and solving problems may be a more effective way to improve instruction than trying to match instruction to children’s developmental level.”

If you substitute the Common Core Standards/EngageNY rigid pacing for the words “developmental level,” you have an argument for not following scripted lessons paced according to grade level, which is what EngageNY provides. Scripted lessons means that teachers are provided with specific questions and explanations they are to use to teach each lesson, and students are expected to respond in predictable ways. For anyone who has spent any time with children, it should be clear that their responses are and should be unpredictable—effective teachers are open to the teachable moment, and this is a crucial tool for reaching and engaging students.

Declaring that young children can handle more difficult concepts than we have given them credit for does not translate into saying all children in the same grade should be held to the same content at the same pace, which the Common Core, EngageNY and accompanying testing essentially require. Why are Dr. Wagner and other adherents of lock-step learning using an anti-Piaget argument as an excuse for what actually amounts to what many veteran teachers consider educational malpractice? What comes to mind is how convenient this argument is for stifling objections to the scripted materials that state departments of education and districts want teachers to follow.

I found it ironic that when questioned by the student representative at the Board of Education meeting, who asked if the Common Core Standards truly allow teachers to address individual students’ learning, Dr. Wagner responded: “So the standards are not prescriptions. … I do not see this work as scripted. … It’s about justice.” Numerous experienced teachers and others knowledgeable about young children disagree.

According to the testimony of Dr. Walter Schartner, Sayville School Superintendent with 41 years of experience in education, and 26 years as an administrator:
“The NY State modules and domains that script what teachers—very, very successful, highly effective teachers–do is the problem. … I hope everybody else has a chance to go onto EngageNY, and look on how scripted these modules are, in terms of the first two minutes do this, the next eight minutes do this. It’s an insult to our teachers ….”

Programs serving young children need highly trained, autonomous teachers who are aware of the developmental appropriateness of content and process for the growth of the individual children in their charge. Those who are obsessed with a rigidly paced, standardized-test/data informed approach see value in “outcomes” and “accountability” rather than in respecting the lived experience of children.

When will sanity be restored to teaching and learning? Our children deserve it, and the clock is ticking.

July 13, 2015July 14, 2015

Will Ken Wagner’s past in New York shape his future in Rhode Island

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This spring Governor Raimondo held meetings with various stakeholder groups to find out what characteristics they would want in an education commissioner. According to the Providence Journal article of July 7, “Common themes emerged, with each group calling for a leader who listens and is collaborative, thoughtful, and student-centered.”

In my view, the choice of Ken Wagner, currently senior deputy commissioner for education policy in New York state, does not meet these criteria.

According to the information that the Governor’s office put out about him, Dr. Wagner “led the development of EngageNY, a free curriculum aligned with new [Common Core] learning standards.” The rest of the story is that EngageNY has become an expensive fiasco in NY State. The NY State Education Department had originally contracted with three groups to create scripted module lessons for schools across New York at a cost of $12.9 million dollars of Race to the Top money. As educators began using the modules they found numerous errors, gaps, editing mistakes, and other problems. Is this the work of a thoughtful leader?

Dr. Wagner believes in the value of high stakes testing, and considers the Opt Out movement to be misguided. The failure rate across NY State on their Pearson developed Common Core Tests continues to be about 70%, with much higher failure rates for students with disabilities and English Language Learners. Since these tests were not independently validated, and many authorities who examined the practice tests and released items believe the questions to be developmentally inappropriate and unnecessarily confusing, how can a “failing” label be trusted? How concerned was he about the well-being of the students who were labeled failures?

New York state is one of the major areas of the country to see significant opposition to Common Core-related testing. Several hundred thousand students were opted out of the testing in April. Did Ken Wagner listen thoughtfully to the articulate and passionate parents in NY state who determined that these tests were not in their children’s best interest? Apparently not, since Wagner told New York Magazine, “we really believe that these tests are not only important but irreplaceable.” (By the way, NY state recently jettisoned Pearson for a different test developer.)

Of significance to parents concerned about the privacy of their children’s personally identifiable information, is the fact that Wagner was a stalwart defender of NYSED’s connection with inBloom, despite tremendous backlash from parents. inBloom was a company created and funded by the Gates and Carnegie Foundations with $100 million, and was designed to collect confidential, potentially personally identifiable student and teacher data from school districts and states throughout the country. There was the real risk that even de-identified student data could be re-identified when shared with software companies and other for-profit vendors, a practice allowed by a weakened federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

After much turmoil and several legislative hearings, the state legislature decided it had no option but to make inBloom illegal in order to stop it. Is this the way to collaborate with those who hold a deeply held and reasonable position different from your own?

Governor Raimondo’s introduction of Ken Wagner to RI stated that “Education is a ladder to the middle class, and investing in education will grow our economy because businesses want to locate near a pipeline of well-educated, well-trained workers.” Presumably Ken Wagner agrees. Is this really what RI parents and communities want from their public education system—workforce development? What about education for self-empowerment and for participation in a diverse and vibrant society?

I am distressed but not surprised at the governor’s choice. It is impossible not to consider potential influence from her husband Andy Moffit, who has worked in education reform for the global consulting firm McKinsey and Company. He also collaborated with Sir Michael Barber (formerly at McKinsey, now at Pearson) in the writing of Deliverology 101. This is troubling in that this book is a manual for consultants and managers to perpetrate a testing, data, and accountability mind-set, which is adopted from a soulless economics/finance/micro-managing paradigm misapplied to the most human of tasks–nurturing the next generation of self-actualized members of our society. The ultimate result, whether intentional or not, is the dismantling of public education as we know it and delivering it up to privateers.

Rhode Islanders need to do some serious homework and then express displeasure with this choice for commissioner and what it will inevitably mean for Rhode Island public school students, teachers, families, and communities.

June 3, 2015June 3, 2015

School voucher bill wording lifted from ALEC model legislation

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Before the ink was dry on the highlights of the conference Transforming and Democratizing Public Education: An Activist Summit, Rhode Islanders concerned about the survival of public education were confronted with a threat from the General Assembly.

Senate bill 607, benignly titled THE BRIGHT TODAY SCHOLARSHIP AND OPEN ENROLLMENT EDUCATION ACT, was heard in the Senate Education Committee on May 20, and the companion bill (H 5790) was heard in the House Finance Committee on May 27. This egregious bill would provide state education tax dollars to any family in Rhode Island that believes their child would benefit from any other school than the one designated by their residence—any other public school in or out of their district, a private school, religious school, online virtual school, or home school. The scholarship that the family could obtain would have a cap of $6,000 (except for special needs students), but would be awarded according to a sliding scale of family income.

All families deserve fully funded and resourced neighborhood public schools with well-prepared and experienced teachers who make teaching their career. Families who choose to do so certainly have the option to send their children to private schools, religious schools, or to home school their children. But the overwhelming number of children attend public schools. Public schooling, though beset with many problems, is the foundation of a just and civil society. Public schools are overseen by local school boards, whose actions and decisions are accountable to the public. It is antithetical to our shared values to have public money siphoned off to private schools, particularly if the schools are religious in nature. Providing “scholarships” for students to attend non-public schools will wreak havoc on the public system, particularly at a time when public schools are already under assault from the neoliberal, free-market approach to schooling, with the expansion of charter schools, incessant standardized testing, and evaluating and sanctioning students, teachers, and schools by test scores on invalid standardized tests such as the PARCC.

The bill includes “scholarships” for students to participate in virtual, online schools, which have had an abysmal record in other states. This bill also includes “scholarships” for students with special needs. These students are entitled to a free and appropriate PUBLIC education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Unfortunately, under-resourced public schools have not always provided the full range of supports that these students need and deserve. Sending them to private schools that likely do not have the resources to meet the plethora of diverse needs of students with learning challenges will make this situation worse.

This bill is being heavily supported and promoted by the RI Center for Freedom and Prosperity. This group has made a number of rosy claims about the bill’s benefits not only to families but also to taxpayers and to public schools. I have read some of their reports and did not see any evidence that they have been peer-reviewed or critiqued by qualified authorities. The impetus stems from the Milton Friedman ideology of free-market/privatization reforms that have been devastating to education in other countries. Further, a few minutes of Googling turns up the undeniable fact that parts of this bill have been lifted almost word for word from “model bills” from the playbook of the American Legislative Exchange Council, also known as ALEC.

For those who are unaware of ALEC, this insidious group promotes the collusion of legislators and corporate moguls to write model legislation to be stealthily introduced into state houses across the country. This goes against the most fundamental rights of Americans to live in a country of the people, by the people, and for the people. Please see this great clip from an Atlanta, GA TV station that exposes how ALEC operates:

As evidence of ALEC’s influence on the wording of this bill, please check this link. If you scroll down the list of “Bills Affecting Americans’ Rights to a Public Education,” you will see two bills that are represented in the language of the RI bills. The first is 2D16 The Parental Choice Scholarship Program Act Part 1 Exposed. The second is 2D21 The Special Needs Scholarship Program Act Exposed. The yellow highlights that you will see are in the original from ALEC Exposed, provided by the Center for Media and Democracy.

During the Senate Hearing, Senator Sheehan clearly stated the reason that I believe proves that this bill needs to die in committee: This bill is for the purpose of the privatization of public schools, he said.

May 28, 2015

An activist summit for children and public schools

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Earlier this month I wrote about an event that would address the shameful state of public education caused not by bad teachers and low expectations as often claimed, but by a decades long, relentless regime of standardized curricula and incessant testing in order to measure, rank, and sort children for a new world order amenable to manipulation by corporate interests.

The event was held as planned– TRANSFORMING & DEMOCRATIZING PUBLIC EDUCATION: An Activist Summit, at the Southside Cultural Center on Broad Street in Providence, sponsored by the Coalition to Defend Public Education (Providence) and the Southeast MA/RI Coalition to Save Our Schools.

This event was planned as a participatory conference. As each of the topics was presented, people discussed the issues in small groups, and then reported back to the larger group. Much of value was shared, and many ideas were proposed for next steps.

Each of the participants had their own expertise, experience, and passion to share. Dannie Ritchie, MD, Founder of Community Health Innovations of Rhode Island and a member of CDPE opened the day with a powerpoint overview of the harm to public education from the privatization agenda.

Here are some of the highlights:

Monty Neill, executive director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest), and a long-time advocate for valid alternatives to high stakes testing spoke of the long history of sorting children for the work force with the use of standardized tests. He also discussed positive examples of public schools that are truly successful without resorting to the use of standardized tests to measure achievement. He informed the group about schools in NYC and New York state that are performance based schools. (website: performanceassessment.org) The students in these schools, demographically similar to other public schools in their areas, do significantly better than the typical public schools. They build community, students have a real say in their education, and they depend on the professionalism of the teachers and engagement of the community.

Jose Soler, director, UMass Dartmouth Arnold M. Dubin Labor Education Center and a member of the SE MA/RI Coalition to Save our Schools, said the corporate reform/privatization agenda is also an attack on public sector unions, which is an attack on African Americans, other people of color, and all women. This includes the attacks on public education where teachers of color have been hit the hardest by school closings in urban areas, such as Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and New Orleans (AFT local majority Black teachers).

My daughter Hannah Resseger, site coordinator at the Mount Hope Learning Center in Providence, along with Allyiah Benford, a member of the After School staff there, presented a short documentary they had made interviewing elementary and high school students about their experiences taking the PARCC (or Refusing). Most of the students had negative reactions to the length and boring/”stupid” nature of the tests.

Barbara Walton-Faria, a teacher in Newport, a former RI Teacher of the Year, and chair of the RI Teacher Advisory Council, discussed the charge of RITAC: to report to the RI Board of Education, informing them how their policies are affecting students and teachers. Despite the fact that this group was created by the RI General Assembly and was required to report to the Board quarterly, the former chair of the BoE, Eva Mancuso, was dismissive of the Council after their first presentation, which had provided evidence against the use of high stakes testing. Barbara is hopeful that the group will have a better relationship with the new chair of the BoE and the new Commissioner of Education.

Jean Patricia Lehane, a parent from Portsmouth, RI and administrator of the Stop Common Core in RI facebook page spoke of the effective efforts of parents in many RI communities to inform others of the harm of the Common Core standards, curricula, and PARCC testing, and the power that parents have to Opt Out their children.

I spoke on the failings of the Common Core Standards themselves, and PARCC testing, explaining that they claim to foster critical thinking, but that the type of neuro-cognitive processing that is required for performing well on this type of assessment is a caricature of critical thinking, and ignores the valuable human proficiencies of perceptiveness in human interaction, aesthetic sensibility, empathy, and authentic voice.

Hillary Davis, Policy Associate at the RI ACLU discussed the bills on school suspensions that are currently in the General Assembly. She explained that suspensions have dire consequences for the students themselves and the community at large. She encouraged people to write and call their representatives and senators to support these bills: H 5383 in the House Health, Education, and Welfare Committee and S 299 in the Senate Education Committee.

Ruth Rodriguez, a United Opt Out National Leader, Save Our Schools leader, and member of the SE MA/RI Coalition to Save Our Schools talked about the attitude toward schools and teachers in the Hispanic community. These parents hold the schools in very high esteem, value the teacher’s pronouncements about their children, and have high hopes for their children. For these reasons, it has been relatively easy for the corporate reformers to exploit this community’s goals for their children by convincing them that charter schools are the best option, rather than neighborhood public schools.

Many more vital issues were discussed, and much energy was created to continue the struggle on behalf of a quality public education that meets the needs of all children and their communities.

May 7, 2015

How to end corporate education reform

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Mark your calendars! An event May 16 will address the shameful state of public education that is due not to bad teachers and low expectations, but to a decades long, relentless regime of standardized curricula and incessant testing in order to measure, rank, and sort children for a new world order amenable to manipulation by corporate interests.

The struggle to wrestle power out of the hands of the billionaire technocrats who have a dystopian vision for public schools is ongoing and gaining steam. Those who are determined to transform and democratize public education for the benefit of our children, our schools, our communities, and our democracy have a herculean task ahead of us.

The maxim attributed to Gandhi comes to mind: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win! True public education advocates are now engaged in fighting against the faux-reformers, those who use their money, power, and influence to make the lives of children and teachers miserable in the name of lifting all boats and preparing all children for their slot in the glorious technocratic future – a future that exacerbates the obscene wealth inequality in the United States of America.

Rhode Island as well as states across the country have been witnessing the awakening of the group of people who have the most personal stake in the outcome of public education—the parents. As parents become informed about the true nature of the education reforms of the Common Core State (sic) [Stealth] Standards and the incessant testing (PARCC here in RI, SBAC in other states), as they see the poor quality of the class work and home assignments that their children come home with, compared to the enriching materials and activities their older children had in the past, they know something is terribly amiss. Opting their children out of the PARCC is the first and best strategy for now to bring attention to the flaws with the Common Core/PARCC agenda, as well as to deny the state and numerous ed tech companies the data that would flow from this test.

Now that Opting Out/Refusing is catching on, thanks to the tremendous work of many education activists doing the research and informing the public, the federal DoE and RIDE are scratching their heads and figuring out vindictive ways to squash this rebellion that after all, upsets their apple cart and stands to lose money for global corporations like Pear$on. Imagine—threatening to lower the rating of a school because more than 5% of the parents determine that the PARCC is counter-productive for their children and Opt them out. These parents should be applauded for engaging in their child’s education and using the means at their disposal to make a strong statement about a policy that is wrong for children, wrong for teachers, and wrong for communities.

The Coalition to Defend Public Education (Providence) and the SouthEast MA/RI Coalition to Save Our Schools will be hosting an education activist summit: Transforming and Democratizing Public Education on May 16 at the Southside Cultural Center, 393 Broad Street in Providence from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. (lunch included!) There will be no expert presentations, though the activists in attendance will come with tremendous expertise and drive. This event will begin with a sharing of struggles and successes among parent, teacher, and community activists discussing the following topics:

Testing refusal – empowering curriculum
Parent Organizing/ Communities of Color
Charter schools
Teachers unions
Student organizing
Higher education

The afternoon session will focus on a vision for the future—brainstorming on strategies to transform and democratize our public education system so that it truly provides the well-rounded, well-researched curriculum and inspiring environment that our children so desperately need and deserve, and our democracy depends upon. Come join us and be a part of those bravely standing up to the corporate education juggernaut that reduces and dehumanizes unique human beings to a single digit.

April 13, 2015April 13, 2015

Pro PARCC post in Gist memo is propaganda piece

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In her recent field memo of April 3, 2015 Commissioner Gist took the unusual step of quoting an entire blog post.

“I’m a mom,” it begins. “And the happiness of my children, now and in the future as they go on to start careers and families of their own, is on my mind all the time.”

The post was written by a mother from Florida who is in support of the Common Core State Standards and the accompanying testing. She is also an attorney and president & CEO of the Multicultural Education Alliance.

The blog on which it appeared is put out by the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a Jeb Bush creation, which states on its website: “The 21st century economy is the most competitive in world history. It is an economy that requires a growing number of educated and skilled workers. Yet, on international assessments, American students rank 21st in science and 26th in math, behind their peers in countries like Singapore, Japan and Canada. We need to reverse this trend if America is to continue its dominant role.”

In other words, the goal of education is to provide a workforce with the skills to meet the needs of the global corporate economy and maintain America in a dominant world position. Does this goal resonate with most parents of preK-12 students?

The website for the EdFly blog has as its web address ExcelinEd.org. According to the 2014 donor page for ExcelinEd, those at the top of the donor list include (no surprises here):

Greater than $1,000,000:

Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust

Walton Family Foundation

Between $500,001 and $1,000,000:

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

GE Foundation

News Corporation

Charles & Helen Schwab Foundation

Between $250,0001 and $500,000:

Laura and John Arnold Foundation

Bloomberg Philanthropies

Between $100,001 and $250,000:

Eli & Edythe Broad Foundatio

Jeb Bush & Associates

It is no coincidence that Commissioner Gist herself as a Chief for Change, a group also created by Jeb Bush, would choose this particular blog post to send to all RI superintendents. That she has used her position of authority to single out this one blog post, which can reasonably be assumed to be propaganda for the position she has espoused since assuming the role of commissioner, is very unfortunate and does a disservice to the hundreds of RI parents and other concerned citizens who have researched the Common Core and PARCC testing in depth and decided they are not in the best interests of our children.

While it is true that many prominent civil rights groups, including the National Council of La Raza, do support the allegedly “rigorous” Common Core Standards and testing for accountability of students, teachers, and schools, one can only wonder whether the members of these groups have confronted the reality of the harm this agenda is actually having on traditionally under-served children and youth. It is understandable that those concerned about children of color, children from diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, children with special learning needs, and children living in poverty, should be alarmed by the very real lack of advancement of many of these children in the public schools.

This is a complex issue and needs to be addressed comprehensively. The starving of financial resources to the schools that serve these children is one culprit. The steady diet of reading and math test prep for the past dozen years of NCLB is another. For an excellent and thorough explanation of why civil rights advocates should reject market-based (i.e. corporate pushed) reforms, please read “Why People of Color Must Reject Market- oriented Education Reforms: A Compilation of the Evidence” by United Opt Out National.

Commissioner Gist continues to defend her stance on the Common Core Standards and PARCC testing, and chooses not to truly listen to the voluminous concerns that have been raised by parents, teachers, and administrators both here in RI and across the country.

Even so, the Opt Out movement is growing. Parents who have become aware of the big picture of the ramifications of the full corporate agenda for public education in America will continue to stand up for their children and their children’s future by rejecting the scripted learning of the Common Core and the meaningless accountability of the PARCC testing that drain public funds and jeopardize children’s full flowering as unique members of a diverse society.

America does not need cohorts of test-takers to march into corporate slots for the sake of global competitiveness. America needs self-actualized adults with civic-mindedness and the knowledge and ingenuity to tackle the very real challenges we all face. The Common Core rhetoric of fostering critical thinking and problem-solving is Orwellian double-speak, not reality.

Hopefully the general public will wake up to this before it is too late. Will the Commissioner take the time from her double duties in RI and in Tulsa to respond?

April 2, 2015April 3, 2015

Amore bill would guarantee opt-out process for PARCC test

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The RI House Health, Education, and Welfare Committee took testimony last night on legislation that would mandate the Department of Education to provide uniform guidance across the districts that would guarantee parents the right to opt their children out of the PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) assessment.

Parents have always had that right, but the recent guidance from RIDE to superintendents has been misleading and resulted in confusion and turmoil for parents across the state. The bill also stipulates that no student shall face disciplinary action for not participating in the testing and that no student shall have his or her academic record adversely affected for not participating.

RIDE’s Mary Ann Snider, and others, tried to defend the necessity of this testing, though even Ms. Snider admitted that students are being over-tested. Parents, retired teachers, and concerned citizens rebutted the value of this particular test and its ramifications.

Sponsored by Representative Gregg Amore, along with reps Canario, Regunberg, Keable and O’Brien, the bill is one step in the right direction to bring to light a situation that is menacing our public schools in the name of the “civil rights issue of our time.”

Our children, our families, our neighborhoods, our public schools, and our democracy itself have become pawns in a vast and inter-connected scheme to undermine public institutions for private profit. The vehicle for this travesty in public education is the Common Core State (sic) [Stealth] Standards and their accompanying high-stakes standardized testing—PARCC. This incessant test prepping and testing, orchestrated to be taken on computers, intensifies the myth that 21st century teaching depends on the innovation of software programs that “personalize” education for each child. Nothing could be further from the truth. The entrenched belief that accounting/accountability, i.e. data collection, is the answer to lagging scores on standardized tests as compared to other nations is a travesty.

Human beings learn from other human beings. Human beings are inspired to learn in trusted relationships. The factory model of standardization and culling of the defective is antithetical to a diverse, democratic society. This is a travesty of the extreme right wing (e.g. ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council), the Democrats for Education Reform and the White House, the Chamber of Commerce, ed tech entrepreneurs/corporatists like Bill Gates, and mega-corporations like Microsoft and Pearson, which have the willing collusion of the federal Department of Education. The critics of this so-called “innovative” strategy come from across the political spectrum – from libertarians to liberals, progressives, and socialists.

Critics of these reforms are accused of perpetuating the status quo. It is true that the status quo is unacceptable in important ways, but the remedies of the corporatists and their ilk are making the situation infinitely worse. And “cui bono” (for whose benefit)? For the benefit of edupreneurs, hedge fund managers, global corporations, and those bent on the gentrification of trodden down neighborhoods.

Consider the stealthy way the drafters of the Common Core standards were selected. Why were primarily representatives from the college testing industry, like the SAT and ACT, included when k-12 classroom teachers, specialists in early childhood education, teachers of special needs students, and authorities on students learning English as a second language were excluded? These standards and accompanying curricula have been developed with blinders on.

They reflect a narrow, technocratic vision of teaching and learning, which is at odds with decades of authentic research into children’s cognitive development, first and second language development, and literacy development. They ignore all aspects of education that promote healthy psychosocial development, and even physical health. They ignore or downplay the significance of the humanities—history, literature, drama, music, art, dance, philosophy—all of the attributes that contribute to a humane society.

Why has a monolithic curriculum in English Language Arts and Math been created to align with these ill-begotten standards, to then be aligned with the incessant testing that accompanies them? Why have state departments of education been essentially bribed by Race to the Top money and then waivers to the failed No Child Left Behind law to swallow these poorly constructed standards, curricula, and tests? Who will benefit from the massive amounts of personal student data being collected not only from the testing process, but from every keystroke of every student on every Chrome book stocked with every poor quality but snazzy program, adjusted by algorithm to the individual student’s responses?

These are questions that are serious in the extreme. They must be confronted by all segments of our society. Instead, school administrators and teachers are asked by PARCC to sign security agreements that hearken back to the McCarthy era under the guise of test security and “fairness.” Teachers, under pain of losing their jobs and even their teaching licenses, are being intimidated into not expressing their concerns about the inappropriateness of the Common Core and PARCC testing to the parents of the children in their classrooms. This is unacceptable and must be challenged.