Elia's Unprincipled Path

Commissioner Elia unveiled changes to the testing that students will be facing this March, April, and May. She claims that these tests will be better. I personally doubt it.

First: A new company will be handling the tests. Pearson (owned by a British Company) is , for the most part, out and a new organization, Questar Assessment, is in. Two words. Big deal. The questions are still Pearson's questions. It's just the organization responsible for administering the tests is different. The students are being tested.

Second: There will be fewer questions (with the same amount of time) so that students will have more time to answer the questions. From the viewpoint of someone that proctors these exams – this means absolutely nothing. I've watched students blow through the exam (taking them seriously) in 30 minutes. The students are still taking an exam that they either stress out over or don't care about at all. Two words: Big deal.

Third: The Commissioner wants to reduce the number of days being tested next year. If she's not reducing them to zero, then you can guess my answer to her statement.

Fourth: Teachers are supposedly collaborating with Questar to make sure the questions are correctly constructed and appropriate. No questions with multiple answers or confusing questions. Like the pineapple question. Teachers need to boycott this activity. It gives legitimacy to the tests and to testing. It will eventually comeback to bite them in 2019 when test scores become part of the teacher evaluation process again. Plain and simple – no collaboration and no testing.

The problem with testing – There is no proof that it shows what the students know or are capable of. The so called “Texas Miracle” was found to be a hoax. Students that were performing poorly on the exams were dropping out of school and pursuing GEDs (Graduate Equivalence Diplomas). These students were typically the under-performing and low achieving students. Basically the minorities and the poor. What was left behind was the higher achieving students. Any mathematician will tell you that an average will rise when lower numbers are cut out of the equation. That is what happened in Texas. The way No Child Left Behind was written, drop-outs count against the failure rate – thus the “Texas miracle” can not be repeated.

Furthermore, test results are not available until summertime – after students have either been promoted or failed, so there is no way for teachers to use the data in an effective manner .

My favorite one comes from an ELA (English Language Arts) teacher that basically taught her students how to take the test. I was told that for many questions that the students had to (literally) copy from the text word for word what was written. There was no interpretation or anything involved. Read and regurgitate. This is learning?

That is an insult and a waste of taxpayers' money and teachers and students' time.

Socialists demand an end to useless testing that turns students off from learning and turns teachers away from teaching.

That and a refund of all the money that has been wasted on all these useless tests.

We'll never get back the time or opportunity.

1 in 10.....

I've seen this article several times and I'm finally going to comment on it.

According to the NY Times 1 in 10 high school graduates are capable of completing high school and college level classwork.  This is in spite of graduating from high school.  Later in the article it claims under 40% are capable of doing college level work.  I wish they would make their minds up and get their numbers straight.

In any event,  this is a basis for the corporate attack on teachers.

Let's face the truth - we are seeing the results of 15 Years of the No Child Left Behind" - the corporate written, Republican passed, President (sic and sick) George W Bush authorized law that imposed testing on every student. And, if that weren't enough,  teacher evaluations are based in part on these tests.

The tests have several standards applied to them:

1. Nobody can see the tests or all the test questions after the exam.  Teachers become aware of what is on them on the day of the exam.  The public is not allowed to see them at all after the exam is given.

2.  The tests will always have mistakes on them.  The questions will be developmentally inappropriate.  My favorite is the "more than one correct answer" that confuses students, teachers, and administrators.  This leaves everyone running for cover as the state has to figure out what to do and then the tests have to be checked again to give credit to the students that chose the other correct question.  Or there is the famous "let's just invalidate the question" and re-calibrate the scoring rubric.  More of a mess, but it has happened.  More than once.

All this leads to student burnout - the very people that are supposed to be helped by all this are this side of giving up.  It's "I need to know this for the test" not "I'm going to be an engineer so I need to know algebra, physics, calculus because....." or "I'm going to be a doctor/nurse and I need to know this biology/chemistry because..."  I need to know this for the test.

Students do not care about tests.

No employer that I have spoken to cares about how some student did on a test.

Properly done,  and these are far from, tests give students, teachers, administrators, and parents important information about the student's abilities and achievements.  It also gives everyone a potential snapshot of what a student's future might be.  And their future is our future.

The way I see it,  the architects of our future are getting burned out and turned off of reading, writing, mathematics, science, anything that matters or can be tested.

And,  according to the NY Times, 90% are being left behind.

That's a 10% success rate.

When I was growing up,  that was an F in the grade book and on the report card.

So the way I see it,  the system is failing us.

No the students.  Not the teachers.  Not the administrators.

The system and our leaders that are running it.

The system needs to go and we need socialism.  Now.

The Buffalo News Flawed Analysis

The Buffalo News bias is showing. Very badly at that.

First: Article on Wednesday December 30, 2015 “Elia grants Cash more latitude to force change.” (Italics mine.)

Note that word. Force. Like a parent forcing a child to clean their room. Is it teaching the child to be neat and responsible or, if the child does not comply, a punishment will be applied that, according to psychologists, will do very little to nothing to bring the desired change about.

I have never heard of a teacher that wants their students to fail. And whatever Superintendent Cash applies, I am highly skeptical that it will bring about the desired results.

From my reading of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People top down change is a recipe for disaster. People, in this case the teachers, rarely buy into it. Superficially and structurally, yes. Heart and mind, no. They never do and it always blows up in the leader's face.

Look at Dr. Williams. We are headed down that path again. With worse results.

The teachers need to be at the table and respected. I hear time and time again the old adage of the “Golden Rule,” karma, or whatever you want to call it – Whatever you send out, comes back to you. The disrespect that Commissioner Elia and Superintend Cash are sending out to the teachers is going to blow up in their faces with failure – students not achieving and teachers leaving. Experienced teachers retiring or going to other districts and newer teachers burning out and dropping out. Cash will be driven out, Elia will talk, and Buffalo's schools will still be burning.

The average career of a teacher, according to Kim Marshall, is around 5 years before they leave the profession. What are we doing to our teachers? And by default, to our children.

When we make teachers out to be the problem, they give the involution of leaving. In droves. Run a hospital, fire department, police force, or newspaper with a staff that has on the average 5 years experience.

What would you have?

Second: Editorial Comment on January 2, 2015 titled “Get on with it.”

Yes, the News commits an epic fail here. It's like the doctor that removes the cancerous tumor but never tells the patient to “stop smoking.”

Our students are graduating and are not ready for college. Correct.

Why?

The analysis must begin in 2000-2001 when President (sic) George W Bush pushed through the No Child Left Behind Act. We have had all this standardized testing since 2001 and now we see the results of test driven instruction: students that can not perform. Add to that President Obama's Race to the Top, and, well, you have students that can not perform at the high school or college level.

Yes. We had top driven change and look at the results.

Face the facts – the problem comes from the following:

1. A faulty law. NCLB has been found to be a lie. Yes – a lie. There was never any proof that all the testing that Texas did worked. What researchers discovered was that all the testing drove low achieving students into GED work and out of the system, leaving the higher achieving students behind and the state educational system looking better, This is a failure at the highest level. Only some students were achieving – not all.

2. NCLB is premised on a faulty report – A Nation at Risk. Just ask Diane Ravitch. (Check name spelling). The report was written by members of the Reagan (sick) administration with a foregone conclusion – American students were not as good as their European and Asian counterparts. Then the researchers cherry picked data to support that claim. Logical fallacy on multiple levels. Hello? Take the time to read the independent writing of Dr Ravitch and you will find a different opinion because she realized the damage that she helped inflict upon the American education system.

3. The Common Core: The standards are under evaluation for rewriting. We are trying to teach students skills that they are not developmentally ready for. I have heard that time and time again from fellow teachers. But the standards were not written by experienced classroom teachers – they were written by ivory tower ideologues that are far removed from educational practice. By that I mean they do not teach in the K-12 environment as a professional duty and responsibility on a day to day basis.

Plain and simple: The standards need fixing and the state wants to punish teachers for teaching bad standards?

4. Flawed tests: How many tests have had questions removed because there were too many problems with the question and the possible answers? Go count pineapples. I'm still waiting for a test without problems to be issued.

I can't count the number of times that I have had a fellow teacher state that the students are going to be tested on material that they have not even been taught in our school. And the teachers are going to be held accountable for that.

The tests are done at the wrong time of the year – spring. They should be held at the end of the year – during Regents examinations – in order to accurate assess what the students know. That is, if testing were the only way to assess knowledge.

It isn't and it only can test certain knowledge and specific learning styles and personality types excel at tests. I was one of them. I had and have friends that are brilliant. Their bosses will tell you that. They just are bad test takers. No amount of “drill and kill” is going to change that.

So the Buffalo News has jumped on the wrong band wagon and at the end of the day, nothing will have changed because they started with the wrong premise – our students aren't achieving.

They needed to examine the system – No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top and critique the laws. Neither one of the top-down methodologies has a track record of doing anything.

Well, yes they do.

Destroying children's' lives.

Is that what they are advocating?

Sure sounds like it to me.