Progressive News, Opinion, and Analysis
In case you missed progressive education activist Diane Ravitch at URI Tuesday night, you can watch the entire event here thanks to the University Honors Colloquium, which hosted the former Bush education official-turned-activist against the so called “education reform” movement.
Ravitch was introduced by Cauldierre McKay of the Providence Student Union, who was last seen on NBC’s Education Nation. (He starts at about 4.20) His speech is highly worth watching.
Angel Taveras is often hailed as the prototypical progressive political candidate. But if there exists a chink in this armor it is his support for the so-called “education reform” movement.
Today Taveras travels to Denver to meet with other mayors who, like him have pushed for more charter schools, less experienced Teach for America-style educators and promoted Common Core guidelines that will result in more teaching to the test.
WPRI reports: “Providence Mayor Angel Taveras is joining the mayors of Denver, San Antonio and Sacramento, Calif. for a tour to promote education reform and highlight the work being done to improve public schools in each of their communities.”
Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson is not only a former NBA player, he’s also married to Michelle Rhee, a godmother of the ed. deform/high stakes test/ student accountability movement who mentored Deborah Gist. KJ was also fined for not reporting political donations his education reform charity solicited.
The good news is Taveras told WPRI he will introduce Johnson and the other mayors to the members of the Providence Student Union when the group visits the Ocean State in January.
Taveras also co-authored an op/ed in Politico yesterday with the three other mayors he meets with today. Of Providence’s efforts to fix urban education, the post says:
Providence is focused on the strategies necessary to dramatically raise the percentage of students reading on grade level by the end of third grade. Working with a coalition of community partners, the city is placing hundreds of high-impact volunteers in classrooms, boosting kindergarten readiness, expanding meaningful summer learning opportunities and working to address chronic absenteeism. Providence’s comprehensive plan to invest in young people and improve third-grade reading proficiency has earned national recognition, including designation by the National Civic League as a 2012 All-America City for Grade-Level Reading and the $5 million grand prize in Bloomberg Philanthropies’ inaugural Mayors Challenge.
Of course, this isn’t all Providence has done to address public education. Early in his tenure, Taveras fired every Providence teacher. According to WPRI, the layoffs were “part of a cost-cutting strategy, a decision [Taveras] now calls a ‘mistake.'”
Taveras also supported the highly-controversial corporate-style charter school Achievement First, a chain of charters that currently operates in New York in Connecticut. The AF proposal was rejected by Cranston, because that community thought it would be siphon too many resources from traditional public schools, before Taveras openly courted it to come to Providence.
Charter schools and the so-called “school choice” movement have – at best – proven to be beneficial for the few and costly for the vast majority of students in the public school system. Continuing to support this strategy will result in fewer Providence students being in a position to go from “Head Start to Harvard.” To that end, I hope Mayor Taveras looks for a better way to eradicate the achievement gap in public education between affluent suburbs and struggling cities. The education reform status quo has proven entirely ineffective at addressing this issue.
If Deborah Gist’s op/ed in the Providence Journal were a high stakes graduation test, the commissioner of education would be in danger of not graduating.
Gist poses six questions that have been raised about the very highly-charged, statewide debate about using the NECAP test as a graduation requirement. In each, she says the detailed research and dissident opinions offered by opponents of the NECAP and/or high stakes tests in general are all incorrect.
For Rhode Island’s edification. Like a teacher should do for a wayward student, RI Future corrects her Q&A with herself, but as in life and politics (but not in Gist’s rhetoric) there are no absolutes. So we don’t grade, we offer insight.
Classical High School student and Providence Student Union member Cauldierre McKay has gone national. He and other members of Student Unions from around the country appeared on MSNBC’s Education Nation this Sunday.
“Education reform has become a prominent debate across the country, but the students who are impacted by its result are rarely invited to weigh in,” according to the MSNBC blog. “This year, there has been a surge of students determined to disrupt that standard and make their voices heard to advocate for education reform that makes sense based on their own experiences with hot-button issues like high-stakes testing.”
Here’s the post from the Providence Student Union blog.
Here’s a great segment of McKay talking explaining how the PSU parlayed a zombie march, it’s first direct action, into an adult test taking session and national notoriety:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
And here’s the first segment of the special:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Enter the arts community into the ever-escalating debate over high stakes testing in Rhode Island. The Providence Student Union is holding a “talent show” in front of the Department of Education on Friday, and several prominent artists are supporting the student group’s effort.
“The Providence Student Union’s Citywide Talent Show is a great venue to show the world that young people aren’t the leaders of tomorrow, they are leaders today,” said Elia Gurna, executive director of the New Urban Arts. “While the current educational culture seems to value only that which is easily measured by scores and grades, PSU is giving young people a chance to find and raise their voices through collaboration and creativity, which we should value just as much (or more) as any academic skills or achievements.”
The show starts at 4 pm on Westminster Street across from the Department of Education. According to a press release, members of the Board of Education have been invited, as well as other public officials.
“Providence students will take an afternoon off from standardized test‐taking to appreciate another important component of education: the arts. The Providence Student Union will hold a free variety show adjacent to the Rhode Island Department of Education to showcase the talents of students from across the city. The event, held in the middle of three weeks of NECAP testing, features more than twenty performances by Providence public school students.”
What do the arts have to do with high stakes testing, you ask? Well, this is what AS220 founder and artistic director Bert Crenka said:
“Art is about self expression, a sure path to self realization. We need more of it in our schools, not less. Enough said.”
Coaching a fantasy sports team is much different from being at the helm of a real club. One deals solely with statistics while the other has to factor in people. In addition, fantasy sports are guided by yesterday while real teams have to confront the here and now. If you believe that folks running fantasy teams are ready for the National Football League, you may be disappointed. The same argument is in play when it comes to standardized tests and educating young people. Are we running a fantasy league here where points mean more than people? Are we on the verge of drafting superintendents whose districts have the highest NECAP scores for our fantasy school systems? This might be fun for some, but for many kids it’s a disaster.
On Wednesday, October 2nd a number of folks from around the state met at Warwick City Hall to participate in a forum concerning the NECAP and standardized testing. Opinions were offered, PowerPoints were discussed and there was plenty of passion to go around.
But the big thing that occurred was that the general public got to participate. No two-minute time limits and audience members actually got responses to their questions. This allowed for lively discussion and an opportunity to hear both sides of the issue.
And guess what? We’re not done. Following the forum, numerous people came forward and requested that additional forums be conducted around the state. Sounds good to us.
At this time, Providence and Newport will be sites for future discussions and others will be added as requests come in. The Providence Student Union, the RI ALCU and other advocacy groups have done a wonderful job bringing this issue to the forefront. We believe that their concerns need to be discussed on a statewide level. In short, we are looking to take the discussion out of the Board room and bring it to Main Street. Stay tuned for further details.
A widespread critique of high-stakes testing – regardless of the test involved – is that it distorts the incentives of educators, from system leaders down to teachers. One particularly well-documented phenomenon is the practice of redirecting (scarce) resources towards those students on the threshold of whatever arbitrary bar has been deemed the cutoff for the test’s high-stakes sanction.
The ability to use data to diagnose and target students’ needs is important. But from a pedagogical or scientific perspective, there is no reason to give threshold students any more focus and assistance than those who scored below them – who may need help even more urgently – or than those who scored a few questions above them but whose skills may be at a very similar level. Certainly, focusing on threshold students does not help establish “high standards” for every child. But given the perverse incentives created by a system of high-stakes testing, in which the outcome that matters is how many students cross a particular cutoff point, it is simply rational resource allocation for administrators and teachers to zero in on those students who are right on the edge of clearing the bar. In the case of the new NECAP graduation requirement, in which the cutoff for a diploma is a line between a score of 1 and 2, we are talking about the students who scored a “high 1.”
On Wednesday night, at a forum focused on the NECAP graduation requirement, a representative of the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) may have inadvertently admitted that encouragement for these practices can be found even at the highest levels of the system.
Andrea Castaneda, Chief for Accelerated School Performance at RIDE, was defending the new testing policy when she spotlighted the remedial math/college credit program RIDE organized at CCRI for 100 at-risk students this summer. The crux of her comments was that this was a great service that RIDE was able to deliver thanks to the urgency created by placing over 4,000 students at risk of not graduating from high school; in other words, “Look, good things are happening because of this policy.”
We have heard this story before. It seems to be one of RIDE’s main talking points in support of the NECAP graduation requirement, and at the Board of Education’s August retreat it constituted Ms. Castaneda’s closing pitch after a long presentation focused on selling the policy to on-the-fence Board members.
From what I have heard, the CCRI program was a good one. Certainly, a class for 100 students is not a real response to a crisis facing thousands, but it definitely seems like a positive program and we should be glad it was offered.
What I had not heard before, however, was who was targeted to participate in these classes. On Wednesday, Ms. Castaneda let this information slip, explaining that RIDE asked local districts to identify, and I quote directly, “high 1s” to join the CCRI program.
High 1s. The threshold kids.
Clearly, the “high 1s” do need extra supports and assistance to fill gaps in their math skills. But then again, so do the “low 1s,” and so, presumably, do the “low 2s.” What is so worrying about this statement from a high-ranking RIDE official is that it calls into question the basic talking point that the NECAP graduation requirement is ensuring all students have the skills and knowledge they need to succeed. It suggests that instead of helping all students cross the bar of proficiency (which would welcome all 1s, if not 2s as well), RIDE targeted their extra training to those falling just an inch short. To learn that these statistical games may be happening in a program administered at the state level is very concerning.
Of course, when I spoke with Ms. Castaneda after the forum she backtracked. What she had really meant, she said, was that RIDE asked districts to identify students on the higher-performing end of the at-risk population. The really low scorers, she explained, probably did not have enough math skills to be able to learn from the remedial math classes offered at CCRI anyway. But she said all that would have taken too long to explain, so she had simply used the shorthand “high 1s.”
Whatever the case may be, we should take this as a reminder that the distorting effects of high-stakes testing continue to crop up. Education should not be about getting students to jump arbitrary hurdles. RIDE is absolutely right when they say we should be working to ensure every student has the supports they need to succeed, starting in pre-kindergarten and continuing until high school and beyond. But if a policy sets an arbitrary bar as an obstacle to graduation at the eleventh hour, RIDE must be ready to deal with the perverse ways this incentivizes educators to game the system. And RIDE should certainly not be engaging in these practices itself. There are already enough games playing themselves out in Rhode Island classrooms every day because of this policy, and not to the benefit of our students.
With regard to high-stakes testing, Massachusetts is often offered as a barometer of success. But when the Bay State implemented its oft-cited education reform law in 1993, it also invested $2 billion new dollars into its system. And even in spite of the new funds, education activists say the 20-year-old graduation requirement has one of the widest achievement gaps in the nation.
“The evidence we have gathered strongly suggests that two of the three major ‘reforms’ launched in the wake of the 1993 law — high-stakes testing and Commonwealth charter schools — have failed to deliver on their promises,” according Citizens for Public Education, a Mass.-based group that put together this must-read report for anyone interested in the highly-charged political issue of using the NECAP as a graduation requirement. “On the other hand, the third major component of the law, providing an influx of more than $2 billion in state funding for our schools, had a powerfully positive impact on our classrooms.”
While education reformers often note that Mass has the highest test scores in the nation, they don’t often add that the achievement gap is among the worst in the nation.
Here are some of the highlights from the report:
Rhode Island’s achievement gap continues to get wider, and for Latino students is one of the widest in the nation. Education officials have said addressing the achievement gap is among the state’s highest priorities.
Sam Zurier, a Providence City Councilor and education attorney, said the state’s failure to implement a fair funding formula is one of the reasons using the NECAP test as a graduation requirement targets poor and minority students for failure. Zurier is representing the school districts of Pawtucket and Woonsocket, who say the new education funding formula is unfair to their communities.
“RIDE’s current message is that Massachusetts demonstrates that high stakes testing causes student achievement to improve,” he said. “This has it exactly backwards. You have to invest the resources to improve the system before you impose high stakes testing.”
He continued:
Before instituting the NECAP, Massachusetts approved the Education Reform Act of 1993. The Act included a significant increase of State aid so that it would amount to 48% of the total budget, versus around 35% in RI. (In recent years, the Mass. state share has been reduced to 40%-45%, but they are still reaping the benefits of several decades of higher investments.) The Massachusetts funding formula is superior to RI’s in a number of ways, including funding the entire education program, not just the “market basket” of selected services. The 1993 Act also increased the resources the State Department of Education had to provide technical support to local school districts that needed help.
Tonight Rhode Island will discuss the NECAP graduation requirement. Supporters will be in Providence with Deborah Gist and the young Republicans while the loyal opposition is holding a panel discussion at Warwick City Hall at 6:30. While the timing is coincidence, it is a nice metaphor for what happens when the state decides it doesn’t want to host the debate: the debate still happens, it just becomes fragmented.
Eva-Marie Mancuso’s recent (9/18/13) op-ed piece in the Providence Journal “Testing helps R.I. students achieve” offers a disingenuous rational for not discussing the current NECAP testing requirement. Her piece attempts to build a case for the Board’s exit-test policy by stringing together a series of misleading and vacuous statements that do not hold up to critical review. Here are some of the most blatant:
“We want to prepare all of our students for success, and we want to make Rhode Island’s public schools and higher-education institutions among the best in the country.”
No one engaged in the current debate about the exit-testing requirement disagrees with this goal. The disagreement is around the policies that determine how Rhode Island will use its scare resources and regulatory authority to achieve this goal. And, it should be noted that Mancuso does not have a Board united behind the current policies. On September 9 that Board voted 6-5 not to accept a petition that would have opened up the testing policy to discussion and public examination.
“The vote [by the Board not to discuss the graduation requirements] was not about the merits of any of our battery of state assessments; it was about starting the debate again about whether or not to have state assessments.”
In fact, the debate has all along been, in part, about the merits of the eleventh grade math test. This test fails a far higher proportion of students than the 11 of reading and math assessments, whether it be the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) or the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) shows such a huge disparity between the performance standards for reading and math. So the debate has included fundamental questions about the performance standards the Board has endorsed for graduation.
“the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP), is not the be-all, end-all — but it is one valid measure”.
I don’t know what evidence she uses to assert the NECAP is a valid measure because the NECAP technical report does not provide any credible validity study. Consequently, we do not know whether the NECAP predicts college or career readiness any better than family income, mother’s education, or number of books in the household. And, if it doesn’t, which is very likely, it is a huge waste of very scarce resources.
“[the NECAP] shows us that too many students…have not attained the knowledge and skills they will need upon graduation.”
Yet, RIDE already knows this—they know, for example that many students taking the NECAP math test have not had a geometry course and, since geometry is required on the NECAP, how could these students pass the NECAP? Making sure all schools provide the curriculum necessary to pass the NECAP is a prerequisite to implementing an exit-test requirement and one of the things Massachusetts did in their ten-year preparation phase. By rushing to implement “high standards”, the Board is already harming students unfairly.
“We don’t have to look far for support for a state assessment. Massachusetts implemented an even more stringent standard more than a decade ago, and, though assessments alone do not account for the improvements in Massachusetts, today Massachusetts ranks first among states in student achievement.”
I agree that assessments alone do not account for the improvements we see in Massachusetts. It is far more likely that they reflect a decade-long preparation, adequately financed by a state funding formula that built capacity in the poorest districts. Adequate funding means a district can conduct intense professional development, build its infrastructure, and provide supportive programming for its vulnerable students. It also means the district can maintain courses in art, music, and vocational training. Lacking a funded formula, these are things Rhode Island’s poorest districts cannot provide.
“every high school in Rhode Island offered students additional instruction and support during the school year and over the summer, in a commitment to improve mathematics achievement”.
Not true. Most high schools only passed along the state sponsored ‘math module’ which was an online test prep course with a ‘virtual’ teacher. Most students did not receive any additional instruction from the schools last year or over the summer – unless they were enrolled in those test prep courses. Already, one of the concerns of those of us who question the wisdom of this policy has become reality–districts have been forced to dedicate extremely scarce resources to providing test-prep courses that have almost no lasting impact on students’ learning.
“I have been moved and troubled by the concerns many students, educators and family members have raised regarding our diploma system.”
Perhaps, but Mancuso has remained steadfastly unresponsive to the concerns raised by parents and advocates for students with Individual Education Plans (IEPs). The NECAP failure rate of these students in math is astoundingly high—over 80% failed. Furthermore, ten years of exit testing in Massachusetts has resulted in more students with IEPs failing to get diplomas, not fewer. This long-term failure of a testing policy to close achievement gaps in Massachusetts is reflected in their being ranked as having among the worst NAEP achievement gaps. Since Rhode Island is having no success in reducing achievement gaps, the exit-exam policy seems like a bad choice.
Finally, Mancuso concludes with a plea for support, “Let’s take all of the energy that has gone into opposing statewide testing and focus it where it belongs — on improving opportunities and outcomes for our students.”
Yet the policies Mancuso asks us to support have not been defended in transparent public discussion that addresses the relevant evidence. It will do our students no good for us to blindly support a policy based primarily in ideology.
Eva Mancuso is to be commended for finally addressing the highly-charged concern over high stakes testing in Rhode Island public schools, though it’s unfortunate she did so as a pundit instead of a public official. The chairwoman of the Board of Education has rebuffed widespread appeals from parents, students and activists to address the NECAP test and instead penned an op/ed in today’s Providence Journal about it.
“We need to change the outcome of the test,” Mancuso wrote, “not the tests.”
The truth is that Rhode Island needs to change both the outcome AND the test – this is demonstrable by the fact that Rhode Island is changing the test, next year.
I can’t think of any reason not to hold off on implementing this very controversial state mandate until at least the state’s preferred test is in place – other than that it may put federal funding in jeopardy. In other words, the NECAP graduation requirement isn’t about testing or math. It’s about budgets.
UPDATE: A spokesperson for the Department of Education tells me there are no Race to the Top implications tied to using the NECAP test as a graduation requirement … In that case, I can think of NO reason not to hold off on implementing this controversial policy!!
The Providence Student Union, a group of inner city high school students who have made national news organizing against high stakes testing, have begged Deborah Gist to engage them and she has systematically rebuffed their requests. She’s even has gone so far as to publicly encourage others to ignore them.
On the other hand, she’ll gladly make time for the Rhode Island Young Republicans.
Ignoring student activists and engaging conservative politicians is just one of the many ways Gist continues to be a divisive force in public education. On Friday, she claimed to have not read a report that was critical of teacher evaluations, a major initiative of hers and, not to mention, the subject of her PhD thesis.
Yesterday on Twitter her disdain for her detractors was more subtle but still present. Providence mayoral candidate Jorge Elorza said he disagreed with the NECAP but not high stakes tests in general. Gist felt that was “Excellent news!” for her. It was disturbingly more political than that of the candidate’s. More worrisome is that Gist missed the gist of the tweet – yet another public voice against the NECAP test. She’s seemingly deaf when it comes to any and all disagreement.
The Rhode Island Progressive Democrats and/or the Young Democrats of Rhode Island ought to ask her to come talk to their groups as well.
I believe the best thing happening in Rhode Island recently is the public debate about the education reform/deform movement and, in particular, using the NECAP test as a high stakes graduation requirement.
Eva Mancuso may think this is the sideshow, but I think this is the main event.
This morning there were several very constructive discussions among journalists, teachers, candidates, experts and concerned citizens about how high stakes tests play into education disparity as well as a host of other education-related issues. Noticeably absent was anyone from our government, which has in no uncertain terms communicated it doesn’t want to discuss this issue any longer.
That’s too bad, for us and them. Prior to the NECAP flap, both the Board of Education and Deborah Gist have – at best – flawed reputations with students, teachers and the public. And the ACLU announces another lawsuit over this matter on Monday. Hosting a discussion about high stakes tests is not only in everyone’s best interest, but it would also be a great opportunity to repair some of that damage to their collective credibility with the community.
Congressman Jim Langevin recently won the respect of many liberals and hard-line progressives not be acquiescing to the left, but rather by engaging with us. He took an unpopular position on NSA spying and then called together a town hall and listened and engaged with his detractors. Eva Mancuso and the Board of Education should follow his good example and engage the community about its concerns.
Should Rhode Island use the NECAP test as a high school graduation requirement? We know Eva Mancuso and Deborah Gist don’t want to have this debate, but 10 News Conference does.
I argue that using a one high stakes test as a graduation requirement for the entire state is patently unfair after generations of inequity in education experiences. “We’re having a race to the top here in Rhode Island and towns like East Greenwich and Barrington are starting on third base and towns like Central Falls and Pawtucket are starting with two strikes against them.”
Meanwhile, Justin Katz argues that high stakes tests are good because it treats students more like Pavlov’s dogs. No wonder Mancuso and Gist don’t want to have this debate….
On Sunday and Monday, the Rhode Island Board of Education held its annual retreat to discuss, among many other topics, the high school graduation requirements. This was a hot topic because it includes using the NECAP as an up-or-down requirement for graduation: a student must get a 2 or more on both math and reading to graduate.
As anyone following this issue knows, there are are over 4,000 students who did not score a 2 on the last NECAP. This staggering number, representing about 40% of the students in the state, has caused considerable concern among students, their families, teachers, advocate groups, and politicians. In addition to numerous protest rallies, the city council and mayor of Providence have officially voiced doubts about this use of the NECAP and the General Assembly passed a resolution asking the Board of Education to reconsider its graduation policies.
In the midst of this mounting pressure, the Board announced plans to discuss the test related graduation requirements at its annual retreat, which it scheduled in the pleasant, and secluded, location of Alton Jones.
Initially, the Board intended to conduct this retreat in private until the ACLU and other concerned parties (including me) pointed out that this discussion amounted to conducting Board business and therefore fell under the open meetings law. The Board did not see it that way, but a judge did, and the retreat was held, open to the public, at Rhode Island College.
The retreat was keynoted by Aims McGuinness, an outside expert, who said a few interesting things to the Board. First, he emphasized the unique nature of their responsibility—creating policy that maximizes the effectiveness of the educational pipeline that moves students from earliest pre-kindergarten edu-care to successful entry into the labor market. Despite the heavy labor market emphasis, I appreciated his spelling out the big picture–and his warning that, if the Board doesn’t keep the big picture in mind, it will “get lost in the weeds.”
Aims had less to say about the elementary/secondary section of the pipeline than he did about the postsecondary section. In our colleges and university, too many students don’t make it through, degrees are not granted in economically strategic areas, and affordability for students is low. Interestingly, he DID NOT say our biggest problem was the number of unqualified high school graduates showing up on employer’s doorsteps.
Another big point Aims made is that, while many of our average numbers are good (numbers graduating, educational attainment of graduates, etc.), when you begin to disaggregate these numbers by income, race, or family education, you see “about six Rhode Islands”, areas defined by large inequalities in wealth and opportunity. These inequalities, Aims stated, will drag the state backwards as it tries to build an education pipeline that feeds an improving economy. During his presentation, he came back to this point repeatedly: inequality is a ball and chain that will drag this state down.
The final point from Aims was the need for a system—educational and economic–that promotes innovation. This makes sense to me—innovations become established ways of doing things and lose their effectiveness, so we need a system that continually promotes innovation. This is a pretty thoroughgoing project—you can’t develop innovative students in a system with conventional teaching, and you can’t promote innovative teaching with conventional administrations operating under conventional policies.
My big takeaway? The Board of Education needs to develop policies that create an educational pipeline that promotes equality and innovation. I was pretty happy with the way Aims set the stage.
But then reality struck—the Department of Education began to go to work to convince the Board that the NECAP graduation requirement was crucial to the success of education reform in Rhode Island.
A big part of their argument was that it worked in Massachusetts, so it will work here. In order to make this argument, they brought in Don Driscoll, the former Commissioner of Education in Massachusetts who implemented the 1993 Education Reform Act. That legislation resulted from the state losing a lawsuit that required them to put in an adequate and equitable public education funding system. You might recall Rhode Island lost a similar lawsuit (under Judge Needham) but then it won it (under Judge Lederberg). So Rhode Island was never required to adequately or equitably fund its education system.
But Massachusetts was. The new law required that, after a seven-year phase-in, every local school district spend at least a state-mandated, minimum amount per pupil, for which the law provided much of the funding. This minimum “foundation budget,” is supposed to cover the costs of adequately educating different categories of students (regular, limited English proficient, special education, low income, etc.), and consequently varies by district.
In addition to creating a testing requirement for graduation, Massachusetts provided a seven-year ramp-up in state funding to beef-up poor districts and their schools. I emphasize all this because Driscoll barely mentioned it and I think it probably has a lot to do with whether Rhode Island will meet with the same success Driscoll proudly described achieving in his state.
So, a seven-year ramp-up of state funding and a ten-year period of professional development preceded the implementation of the test requirement, but Driscoll treated these as unimportant, saying nothing much happened until the test requirement kicked in and people started to focus.
In my arrogance, I’d like to contradict Driscoll on the point that nothing was happening in Massachusetts before the testing requirement kicked in; NAEP testing shows that educational attainment in Massachusetts was on the rise even before the state kicked in significant new money. Some myths—such as the test is the only thing that matters–just don’t stand up to the evidence.
The other point that got swept under the rug by Driscoll was how stubborn gaps in educational inequality are. The following excerpts are from Twenty Years After Education Reform: Choosing a Path Forward to Equity and Excellence for All (French, Guisbond and Jehlen, with Shapiro, June 2013):
What is interesting about these facts—besides that they were never mentioned—is that they should give pause to a state Board just charged with promoting equity as a top priority. In fact, a Board truly concerned with equity would see these indicators as huge red flags standing in the way of adopting the NECAP as a graduation requirement.
Finally, I am compelled to mention another difference between Rhode Island and Massachusetts that is relevant to expecting the same level of success in Rhode Island as Massachusetts experienced.
Massachusetts has a population that is significantly wealthier and more educated that Rhode Island. While I do not subscribe to the idea that wealth and education pre-determine educational attainment, it would be blindly foolish not to recognize that these factors tilt the playing field: wealth tends to provide opportunities and education tends to replicate the values and skills that produce educational attainment.
Depending on the indicators of wealth and education you choose, a plausible argument can be made that Massachusetts is, on average, the wealthiest and best educated state in the country: no such argument can be made in Rhode Island. But in RIDE, where teachers are the only factor that matter for educational quality, wealth and education are not considered when making policy.
For me, the highlight of the day was a skyped in interview with Tony Wagner, a Harvard professor with lots of experience educating urban students. Tony said a lot of important things, but the heart of what he said was that if we want to be successful with urban students and close the achievement gaps that are dragging us down, we need to figure out the problem of motivating students.
His answer, in simplified form, is to build on what students know and are interested in, using this as the beginning point for teaching. In Tony’s approach, students would work with teachers, who would function as much as mentors as advisors, to educate themselves in the areas they are interested in. Tony advocated that students undergo continual evaluation of their work and that this evaluation cumulate in an electronic portfolio.
While this abbreviated description does no justice to the power of Tony’s approach, it almost didn’t matter because the Board showed little interest in the only presentation that addressed the issue of inequality, closing performance gaps, and education that promotes innovation.
Instead, it showed an intense interest in the speakers who affirmed the valued of using the NECAP as a graduation requirement. These speakers included the President of Measured Progress, a contractor that works for RIDE. You can be sure these guys will tell you what you want to hear.
On Monday, one member of the Board, a swing vote, was reported in the Journal as saying the presentation had convinced her that using the NECAP was the way to go. Luckily, I was there to witness how policy gets made. Otherwise, no one would know they are deep in the weeds.
Members of the Providence Student Union are staging a sit in at the Department of Education until they get a meeting with Commissioner Deborah Gist, according to Aaron Regunberg.
UPDATE: The students saw Gist and they scheduled a meeting for Thursday, said Regunberg.
Here’s the full release:
Around forty Providence students have sat down in the front office of the Rhode Island Department of Education, saying they are willing to wait as long as necessary until Commissioner Gist will come down to talk with them. They have been waiting close to two hours. “We’ve come here today to share with the Commissioner some new information regarding the economic impact of the NECAP graduation requirement on students,” said Tim Shea, a Providence high school student. “We only wanted a few minutes of her time. But when she refused to come down and even speak with the students she’s supposed to be representing, we decided to just sit down and wait for her.” Students, members of the youth group the Providence Student Union, say they have asked for the Deputy Commissioner, the RIDE Chief of Staff, and other RIDE officers and none are willing to give even a few minutes of their time.
Developing….
Pawtucket and Woonsocket school districts are appealing a joint lawsuit to the state supreme court which argues that “the State’s 2010 funding formula leaves a severe funding gap.”
The suit contends that because Rhode Island for years operated with a state education funding formula, that it is now implementing the recently-enacted formula too slowly and to the detriment of students and education in these two poor urban school districts.
“There is not enough money for children to take their own textbook home, and the textbooks in question are decades old,” according to the brief. “Children come to school with issues they are dealing with at home, but the schools cannot afford to have enough school psychologists, guidance counselors or other support resources to help children be ready to learn.”
Jason Becker, a former RIDE analyst who helped craft the new formula, says Pawtucket and Woonsocket have themselves, not the state, to blame if students are not receiving an adequate education. On Twitter this morning, he said a Carulo Action, a proceedure in which a school committee can appeal to the state for more education funding from its corresponding town/city council.
The filing lays out in very stark terms the achievement gap so prevalent in Rhode Island public education. You can read the entire filing here. But the introduction gives a great sense of the social implications that the lawsuit is trying address:
Imagine it is a Spring morning in 1996. Two mothers with healthy newborn baby girls rest in adjacent rooms at Womens and Infants Hospital. Mother A and Baby A are part of a middle-class family in Narragansett. Mother B and Baby B are from a Pawtucket family that lives in poverty and does not speak English. In the hospital, Baby A and Baby B receive the same, high quality medical care, and each has the same prospect of a healthy life.
Once the babies leave the hospital, however, their future prospects will diverge sharply. Baby A will receive the best public education money can buy, in a program that spends more $15,000 per child of State and local funds each year, $2,000 above the State average. contrast, Baby B, who has greater needs due to her poverty and lack of spoken English at home, will attend overextended programs in decaying and demoralizing facilities, in a learning environment continually compromised by inadequate resources of less than $11,000 of combined State and local funds ($2,000 below the State average) even while Pawtucket’s tax rate for public schools is higher than Narragansett’s.
Today (in the summer of 2013) Girl A is 17 years old and probably looking forward to her senior year at Narragansett High School, where she will earn a diploma and go on to college. In contrast, if Girl B has not yet dropped out of school, the odds are she will not receive a diploma, even if she passes all of her high school courses. Girl B will face these added risks because of the introduction of “high stakes testing,” which the great majority of Pawtucket 11 grade students failed this year. In many ways, each girl’s future was determined at the time she left the hospital in 1996. To add to the tragedy, the two girls’ diverging futures would have been exactly reversed had the hospital mistakenly sent Baby A home with Mother B, and vice versa.
This imagined story reflects an underlying reality in Rhode Island today. Every day, the children with the greatest needs in Pawtucket and Woonsocket strive to get the best education they can under desperate conditions. The privations that ravage the Pawtucket and Woonsocket public schools are far from inevitable; in fact, many Rhode Island public schools offer a vastly superior learning environment. Wealthier communities offer superior public education because education is a basic right, and because they have sufficient local resources to guarantee that right.
In contrast, Woonsocket and Pawtucket are two of the State’s four poorest communities, and the State’s funding, even under the much-celebrated 2010 school aid funding formula, does not come close to providing what their children need.
In this way, Rhode Island’s public education today fails to meet our most deeply held values, both as Americans and as Rhode Islanders.
Dr. Diane Kern, a well-respected URI education professor, thinks using the NECAP test as a high stakes graduation requirement doesn’t prepare students well for college.
“Higher educators are looking for creative, curious, critical thinkers who will succeed at our institutions, not fill-in-the-bubble students who have achieved partial proficiency on the NECAP,” she said in a statement released today. Her statement comes as the Board of Education plans to begin discussing this issue it monthly meeting, Monday, July 15, 5:30 at Rhode Island College.
She went on:
“As the entire University of Rhode Island Equity Council has publicly stated, instead of using high-stakes test scores to determine college and career readiness, we must employ a research- and evidence-based assessment system that fairly and adequately utilizes multiple measures. Such a system needs to be similar to college and university admissions, in which we examine grades, class rank, results of standardized exams like the SAT, work ethic, multi-disciplinary achievements, evaluations by teachers, and what students have done in life.”
Kern has a Ph. D in education and has been a professor at URI since 2005. Prior to that she was a RIC professor. She is also a certified RI teacher who has taught in Barrington, South Kingstown and Block Island, according to her resume.
Kern joins the litany of locals who have voiced issues with using the NECAP standardized test as a graduation requirement, most recently the General Assembly. The ACLU and groups representing special needs students have said it is a civil liberties violation. Others, such as Tom Sgouros, have made the case that NECAP test isn’t designed to assess individuals. The Providence Student Union has brought national attention to the issue by holding high-profile actions such as zombie protests and an adult-version of the test.
Here’s Kern’s entire press release:
Days before the Board of Education is set to meet, a range of voices from the Rhode Island higher education community and college readiness experts have made a new call for the Board to rethink Rhode Island’s new make-or-break standardized testing graduation requirement, citing the policy’s potentially damaging effects on students’ preparation for college.
Diane Kern, an Associate Professor of Education at the University of Rhode Island, said she is concerned about how the state’s NECAP requirement may affect future populations of students in her classes. “Higher educators are looking for creative, curious, critical thinkers who will succeed at our institutions, not fill-in-the-bubble students who have achieved partial proficiency on the NECAP,” she said. “As the entire University of Rhode Island Equity Council has publicly stated, instead of using high-stakes test scores to determine college and career readiness, we must employ a research- and evidence-based assessment system that fairly and adequately utilizes multiple measures. Such a system needs to be similar to college and university admissions, in which we examine grades, class rank, results of standardized exams like the SAT, work ethic, multi-disciplinary achievements, evaluations by teachers, and what students have done in life.
While dozens of student, parent, community, and other organizations have protested against the new testing requirement – and the General Assembly recently passed a near-unanimous resolution calling on the Board of Education to delay and consider changing the policy – the higher education community has been seen by some as relatively supportive of the regulation.
But this is not the case, according to Earl N. Smith III, a scholar-activist and an alum of URI’s Talent Development Program. “I have been able to achieve tremendous success throughout the course of my 20 year career in higher education; success that I may have never accomplished had my opportunities rested entirely on my test scores. Pursuing higher education is a fundamental freedom, and this NECAP requirement is another obstacle which – like the Black Codes of another era – will disproportionately impact people of African descent, as well as people with learning challenges, thus depriving our higher education institutions of all that these students could bring to them.”
Other experts on college readiness have also begun voicing their concerns about RIDE’s policy. “The Annenberg Institute’s national college readiness work with districts demonstrates that college preparedness depends on a strong set of student supports and services at the classroom, school, and district level,” said Angela Romans, Principal Associate with the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. “For RIDE to create a high stakes test requirement without the proper school- and district-based supports places the burden solely on the backs of young people and teachers without holding the system and the broader community accountable. The Department of Education would be wise to take a more balanced approach to accountability for high school graduation that broadens the responsibility for improvement and recognizes that career readiness is measured through multiple outcomes that are weighted equitably based on students’ access to learning.”
Concerns about the NECAP’s accuracy in measuring college readiness were echoed by students like Sol Camanzo, an alum of Cranston East High School who just finished her second year at McDaniel College. “I graduated from high school with honors back before the NECAP was being used as a graduation requirement. Although I did well with the reading and writing portions of the NECAP, I scored below proficient on the math portion,” Sol said. “This did not prevent me from getting my high school diploma, nor did it prevent me from getting accepted to an institution of higher education. Today, I am proud to say that I am a biology major and I am doing well in all of my classes – including all of the math-based courses. My hopes are to one day go to medical school and become a pediatrician. I am living proof that this policy is premised on false assumptions.”
Last month, a coalition of 17 organizations representing youth, parents, the disability community, civil rights activists, college access organizations and other constituencies filed a formal petition with the Board of Education to initiate a public rule-making process to rescind the high-stakes testing graduation requirement. Under the law, the Board has thirty days from the groups’ June 24th filing to respond to the petition, either by denying or it by initiating a public rule-making process.
As the recent legislative session wound down on Smith Hill, the General Assembly passed resolution H5277, which asked the Board of Education not to use the high-stakes, standardized NECAP test as a graduation requirement.
It said, in part:
“…this General Assembly hereby urges the Board of Education to reconsider the current graduation requirements including the use of the state assessment and examine using a weighted compilation of the state assessment, coursework performance, and senior project or portfolio; and be it further
RESOLVED, That this General Assembly respectfully requests that the Board of Education delay the state assessment portion of the graduation requirement to allow for adequate time for students to be immersed in the common core curriculum;”
Now the ball is in the Board’s court. Newly constituted and charged with a broader set of responsibilities than either of it predecessor boards, how they react to this resolution will be an indicator of how seriously they take their responsibility to re-examine a policy not of their making. Will they, elect for a “quick fix”, or will they take the opportunity to consider what is best for meeting the needs of the Rhode Island public education system?
Anticipating this question, I wrote to a noted critic of standardized testing, Diane Ravitch. In my email, I said I was interested in measuring learning “using instruments that look like the kinds of challenging performances schools and businesses require.”
Ravitch replied:
“The best example I know is the NY Performance Standards Consortium
20 years old
Great results”
So I looked up the New York Performance Standards Consortium and was amazed by what I found—it was as if I had entered a different world from the one that is being put in place here. Before I describe that world—at least partially—let me back up and review the reasons why finding an alternative world is so important, just sticking with issues related to testing students.
Many arguments have been advanced against using the NECAP as a graduation requirement. To my mind, the most significant are:
All three of these problems are related—the NECAP tends to create classroom environments that are narrowly focused and these are environments where students with less support fail.
The challenge then is to find an assessment system that keeps curriculum broad, pushes learning and teaching to be challenging and thoughtful, and supports weaker learners. The response to this challenge, as exemplified by the New York Performance Standards Consortium (NYPSC), is to develop tests that assess performance according to the New York standards. A performance assessment is distinguished from a standardized test by requiring a student to think about, and do something with, academic content beyond memorizing it.
As soon as you begin to test thinking, the idea of scoring a performance as right or wrong becomes nonsensical because thinking is seldom completely correct or completely wrong. Instead, the meaningful performance standards that can be applied to thinking include qualities such as completeness (did the student include the relevant facts, information, evidence, etc.), coherence (did the student assemble the evidence into an internally consistent argument), persuasiveness (did the student address other perspectives in this/her argument), and other similar criteria. As the consortium literature explains:
“The tasks require students to demonstrate accomplishment in analytic thinking, reading comprehension, research writing skills, the application of mathematical computation and problem-solving skills, computer technology, the utilization of the scientific method in undertaking science research, appreciation of and performance skills in the arts, service learning and school to career skills.”
If these are the criteria that students need to meet, then it is easy to see why performance assessments avoid the trap described in item 3 above, lowering the depth of instruction. By making explicit, and describing, the kinds of thinking students need to be able to do within content, these assessments serve as constant reminders of the appropriate depth at which learning and teaching should be conducted.
Because performance assessments are embedded in courses and do not test abstract “reading” and “math”, they do not tend to narrow the curriculum. Instead of eliminating courses because they do not teach math or reading, states, schools districts and schools can make decisions about what students need to know in order to graduate. They could, for example, decide that every student needs to demonstrate proficiency in a set of core courses, but then allow the student freedom to demonstrate proficiency in an elective area of interest. All of a sudden, the system becomes much less “one size fits all”. It does not take a lot of imagination to think up ways that graduation requirements based on performance can be elaborated in ways that intrigue, incent, and reward students in a wide variety of ways.
In order to be more concrete, let’s take a look at what performance assessments in English/Language Arts and math look like in the NYPSC:
Literary Essays That Demonstrate Analytic Thinking:
Problem-Solving in Mathematics That Demonstrates High Level Conceptual Knowledge
As I look at this list, it becomes a lot harder to think of performance assessments as fluff—they are the real deal and a serious challenge to the NECAP. They have been in use for twenty years in the consortium (it was formed in 1997). In the consortium, school and district professional development is focused on promoting the ability of teachers to get students to think well—that is, to pass the assessments. Somehow, I don’t have a negative reaction to this version of teaching to the test.
The integrity of the assessments is maintained by an outside Performance Assessment Review Board, which does what most school districts do in the other English speaking countries—England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where the testing system is much closer to this form of performance assessments than it is to NECAP. Those countries, by the way, tend to perform better than we do on international measures of reading and math. You can argue why that is the case for any number of reasons, but it’s hard to argue their performance assessment system is holding them back.
But what about the first objection to the NECAP that I listed—that the NECAP, as a graduation requirement, has a negative impact on the most vulnerable students in the system?
I’ve already argued that performance systems hold out the possibility of vitalizing teaching and learning for everyone, which would help these students. I also believe that assessing knowledge in context, not as isolated facts, is also a more natural way to think, so that would also help. But I see the issue of the 4,000 students who would loose their diplomas in the name of “high standards” as an issue of responsibility related to the use of the NECAP rather than an educational issue related to the nature of the NECAP.
It is very easy to use a test—any test—to draw an arbitrary line in the sand that separates one group of students from another. But who takes responsibility for the students on the wrong side of that line? Who changes the classrooms, develops the teachers, revises the curriculum, and puts in the support programs these students need to get over the line? And if the line consigns many more children to failure than we can get over the line, then it is irresponsibly destructive to draw the line.
The Providence Student Union, the ACLU, the RI Disability Law Center and 14 other organizations with a vested interest in equitable public education in the Ocean State are formally asking RIDE to stop using the NECAP test as a graduation requirement.
“The new Board of Education has never had the opportunity to fully discuss, much less take a position on, the actions of its predecessor – the Board of Regents – in approving high stakes testing,” said RI ACLU Executive Director Steve Brown, a frequent contributor to RI Future. “Through this petition, we are hopeful that the Board will take a stand and agree with the many organizations signing this petition that high stakes testing is bad policy.”
Board of Education Chairwoman Eva Mancuso told RI Future in May that the new board would reconsider the policy.
“I think that’s an important issue to come before the board,” she told me in May. “I certainly want to look at that issue.”
She also said: “I don’t think it’s the best test.” And added, “40 percent of kids are not going to not graduate from high school if I have anything to do about it.”
Using the NECAP test as a graduation requirement has emerged as one of the most controversial initiatives of Deborah Gist’s embattled tenure as education commission of Rhode Island.
Not only has using high stakes tests as a graduation requirement become more controversial across the country, the issue is further strained in Rhode Island because there are unanswered questions about the validity of the NECAP test in particular to measure individual student performance.
Tom Sgouros, Rick Richards and other RI Future contributors have painstakingly detailed how it is designed to measure school, not individual aptitude. The Providence Student Union made national news when it challenged adults to take a version of the NECAP test.
Here’s the full press release sent from the Providence Student Union today:
A coalition of 17 organizations representing youth, parents, the disability community, civil rights activists, college access organizations and other constituencies have filed a formal petition with the state Board of Education to initiate a public rule-making process over a proposal to rescind Rhode Island’s controversial new high-stakes testing graduation requirement. Under the Administrative Procedures Act, the Board will have 30 days to respond to the petition.
“The clock is ticking, and the futures of literally thousands of Rhode Island teens are hanging in the balance,” said Steven Brown, ACLU of RI Executive Director. “The new Board of Education has never had the opportunity to fully discuss, much less take a position on, the actions of its predecessor – the Board of Regents – in approving high stakes testing. Through this petition, we are hopeful that the Board will take a stand and agree with the many organizations signing this petition that high stakes testing is bad policy.”
Questions about the validity of high stakes testing as a graduation requirement have been a source of great concern and debate in recent months. In a cover letter accompanying the petition, the organizations echoed the views of many students and teachers that, rather than educating students, the policy has led to too much time being spent teaching to the test. In fact, earlier this month RIDE supported legislation that explicitly authorizes school districts to pull students out of core classroom instruction to prep for the test, if doing so is deemed to be in the student’s “best interest.” The groups also point to RIDE’s own failure to meet 32 of 33 goals it set for itself in improving achievement for traditionally vulnerable students as “ample proof of the validity of our concerns.”
RIDE has repeatedly assured worried parents that many students at risk of not graduating need not fear the testing requirement. But the signatories, like many citizens across the state, remain concerned – especially for the significant cohort of ELL and special education students.
“Use of high-stakes testing has a disproportionate impact on students with disabilities and is counter to what we know works best for these students,” said Anne Mulready, supervising attorney at the RI Disability Law Center. “Our state and school districts have made significant investments in building the capacity to provide individualized instruction for students with disabilities that focuses on individual student strengths and learning styles, as required by federal and state law. But these investments are being needlessly squandered by the use of a high-stakes test to determine who gets a high school diploma.”
The Board of Education has been in existence for six months, but has never formally discussed or voted on this controversial requirement, despite the extensive public comment the subject has received at Board meetings. Under the Administrative Procedures Act, the Board has thirty days to initially respond to the petition, either by denying or it by initiating a public rule-making process, where testimony will be accepted and the Board can, as the groups note, “consider in a timely but deliberate manner whether to accept, modify, or reject this proposal.”
As Hector Perea, a member of the Providence Student Union noted, “The petition does not make the Board take a stand on high-stakes testing. It just pushes the Board to start a public process where they have to, at the very least, think about whether to debate the issue. We think the thousands of concerned students and parents of Rhode Island deserve at least that.”
Among the groups signing the petition are The Autism Project, Children’s Policy Coalition, College Visions, NAACP Providence Chapter, Providence Student Union, ACLU of Rhode Island, Rhode Island Disability Law Center, Rhode Island Teachers Of English Language Learners, Urban League of Rhode Island, and Youth in Action.
