When You’re Told to Shut Up, You Must be Doing Something Right, Part II:  A Lesson I Learned in Houston 

And that’s where the letter you see here comes in:  As Anna Werner, the award-winning investigative journalist who uncovered the Firestone tire hazard, took our findings seriously, her national reputation could give these academic studies a wide audience and considerable credibility.  Thus, I personally had to be discredited.  The district’s press secretary (HISD’s Sean Spicer!) took the time to write a 4-page letter advising Channel 11 reporters not to listen to me because I had “an ax to grind,”  was “a paid critic of the Texas accountability system” who “frequently attacks the Texas accountability system and HISD.” 

Yes, I gave testimony as an expert witness in a discrimination lawsuit on behalf of Hispanic and African American students who had fulfilled all graduation requirements but been denied a diploma because they did not pass the state test.  My research was independent, conducted prior to the lawsuit. I was paid for my time in depositions and at trial, a standard practice (I had planned to donate my time but was advised by other women scholars that if a woman expert witness is not paid, the court or opposing counsel often discounts her expertise).

The Ch. 11 reporters did not silence me or my data, nor that of other researchers, nor did they discredit the experiences of the students and their parents who came to them for help.  They did the ethical thing of providing me with the school district's letter, thus notifying me of the attempt to prevent my findings from being made public.

Principals also received a “don’t talk with Linda McNeil and don’t answer questions from reporters about the testing system” email, which several showed to me, grateful for my concern for the ethical dilemmas they faced every day in the conflict between producing test scores (thus keeping their jobs) or taking the risks needed to educate kids well.   My colleagues and I in the Rice University Center for Education had since 1988 been working closely with Houston public schools in our innovative teacher development programs to enhance the teaching of science, writing, early childhood, and such specialized areas as Asian studies. Our grant-funded programs created opportunities for teachers to update their knowledge of their subjects, of children’s learning and of the cultures of the children and their families. Our credibility was hard-earned over decades.  When principals told us they knew the kids they were holding back would likely dropout, they trusted us to make public through our research the perverse incentives the accountability system placed on them.

Central office had no such desire for the public to know what tricks lay behind the production of rising test scores.  The HISD press secretary’s letter challenges a story Anna Werner and her Ch. 11 investigators were about to run:  “We urge KHOU to produce a fair and balanced story on this issue rather than simply allowing disgruntled employees such as Bob Kimball (featured on Bill Moyers NOW as a whistle-blower) and apologists for the failed education policies of the past such as Linda McNeil to say whatever they want without challenge.”  [Note, scholarly findings are challenged through rigorous peer review.]

The press secretary’s admonition went on:  "We also urge that if KHOU airs an interview with Linda McNeil that you also report that Texas officials say that McNeil and others oppose the Texas accountability system because 'they have an ax to grind, because they were paid witnesses against the state in a Hispanic civil rights group’s failed lawsuit alleging school bias.' (The district judge who found the testing system to be discriminatory but not to a ‘constitutional level,’ would soon be appointed by Bush to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.) 

Especially grating to HISD was my comment to the Washington Post that “It [the testing system] is all phony; it’s just like Enron. Enron was concerned about appearances, not real economic results.  That pretty much describes what we have been doing to our children in Houston.”  The HISD letter to the reporters noted graduation rates for several of the district’s high schools as rising (citing percentages that did not match actual grade-level enrollments) and argued that not holding kids back would deprive them of an extra chance to learn, though many who were held back had already passed all but one class in that grade and had earned sufficient credits to be promoted to their correct grade.  Details few policymakers would pay attention to so long as test scores appeared to be rising.

So HISD and the State of Texas continued to produce and publicize “alternative facts,” hyping test scores and hiding dropout rates.  Bush got Democrats in Congress to go along with NCLB on the Texas claims of closing racial achievement gaps, Paige got to be Secretary of Education, the testing companies and their lobbyists kept raking in the big bucks, and Obama and Duncan compounded the assault on our teachers and kids with Race to the Top, shifts of tax dollars to charter chains, and other misguided deeds.

I take no pleasure in knowing our research findings were right: the standardized accountability system was harmful to the children and their teachers then, it has been used since as an excuse to further under-fund and even close schools with low test scores, and it has enriched privatizers at the expense of the public’s schools. Its greater legacy may be in the legitimation of false numbers and phony indicators as a proxy for the public’s right to know what is happening to our children.

Thomas Jefferson was speaking not as an idealist but as a harsh realist when he said that an educated citizenry is essential to the health of a democracy. An informed populace is the only effective protection against a demagogue.  Misinformation can be dangerous.

If you’re a researcher or teacher, take heart from my “silencing” experience to stay in touch with reporters and reliable social media:  make sure they have all the information they need to keep the public informed. Stay in touch with your school board and legislators and members of Congress, making sure they hear more than the official claims.  Use clear language – call charters for what they are: outsourcing companies, corporate chains, not “public” schools.  Don't let test scores displace meaningful, authentic, robust assessments of children's learning.  Don't let corporate charter chains call themselves "public" just because they capture our tax dollars.  Don't let a nice-sounding word like "choice" give a pass to people who want to dismantle the public's schools, making democracy all that much more fragile.

Today’s silencing seems more draconian, the fake claims more obvious and outrageous in their audacity – but even the smallest silencing shifts our common culture away from the truths we need to counter tyrannies and protect the public good.  Speak up, speak out.

Please comment on my post here

GRIT(S):  NOT JUST FOR BREAKFAST?


Anyone who grew up in the oil patch of West Texas or eastern New Mexico, as I did, can only find all this talk about "grit" hilarious!  Grit as the key to students' learning? Grit as the cure for the "achievement" gap?  Oh, my!  When I hear "grit," I feel tiny grains of sand in my teeth, I smell a dust storm sandblasting my cheeks (I was in my twenties before I found out some people pay to have their skin evened out by sandblasting -- we got smooth skin by walking across the playground), and I see the tenacious line of grit coming in around windows -- seeping through weather-stripping and the ugly, added seals of masking tape.

Stinging eyes, sandy eye lashes, having to dust the furniture every day -- sometimes more than once and always with a wet cloth, not a fancy polish:  grit everywhere everyday.

"Grit" as the latest "cure" to what ails US education is silly at best, tragic at worst when it diverts our attention -- and, as Politico reports below, our dollars and our policies away from what we really need to be doing for kids:  addressing poverty, investing in teachers' salaries and on-going education, and dismantling the harmful testing systems and corporate "reforms" that are sucking the life out of learning.

And as for measuring grit, easy:  brooms full, buckets full, hands full, windowsills full, eyes full.  Instead of romanticizing grit, let's call it for what is is: "Grit:  what you need when you don't have a trust fund."

Thanks to Diane Ravitch for sharing this from Politico.com:

THE TYRANNY OF TESTING:
WHEN WILL THEY EVER LEARN?

Data-driven
Data files
Data-philes
Data walls
TweedleDee and 
TweedleDatum
Data-
Driven
Crazy

Data are indicators, signifiers, proxies.  Representations.  What is being represented?  A test score is not a child. A test score is not a child’s knowledge or growth.  A child’s test score is no signifier of a teacher’s caring or guiding of the intellect or openness to curiosity and questions.

Then why are these headlines not entirely good news?

“GRADES 5, 8 GET PASS ON STAAR”

Citing “glitches” in the computerized administration of the test for some children in some grades, in the loss (seriously, the loss!) of scores for students in one entire district, and other “reporting” issues, the Texas Commissioner of Education, Michael Morath, declared that scores on the STAAR test, a product of the Educational Testing System, would not be used this year to determine grade retention or promotion for students in 5th and 8th grades – a waiver from this legislated state requirement.  

http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2015-12-25/
abbott-appoints-new-education-commissioner/

 The Commissioner promises to “hold the Educational Testing Service accountable.”  Does that mean the failure to fulfill contractual obligations will require ETS to refund our tax dollars?  Does the contract, in fact, have a penalty clause for non-performance?  And if not, does “accountable” mean that everyone in the Texas Education Agency or other state offices who had anything to do with negotiating and authorizing the contract will be fired?  What is “accountable” when children’s education is at stake?

We wish the headline had read “Commissioner Admits STAAR Useless, Apologizes to Teachers and Children.”  We wish the story explained that the Commissioner called a press conference to admit that the “emperor of standardized testing wears no clothes.”  He would go on to say that for more than 20 years the test scores had been indicators of not much (family wealth as an exception), that the school ratings they produced were proxies for a real investment in our children’s education.  

Good news that this year’s scores will not have “high stakes” for 5th and 8th graders.   Bad news that the reasons given are superficial, themselves poor substitutes for admitting it’s time to move beyond “data-driven” schooling and get back to educating all our children.

“NO MORE EVAAS FOR HOUSTON”

The Houston Independent School District’s board voted earlier this month not to renew its $680,000 contract with SAS Institute Inc for the EVAAS system of teacher evaluation based in large part on the students’ scores on the state-mandated standardized tests.  Teachers and parents, and many principals have known for years the system is a hoax, its claims completely phony, and its entire logic flawed: there has never been a test of children’s learning designed to measure teacher “performance” nor the “impact” of a teacher on a child’s learning.   It is, in fact, unethical to use a test for a purpose it was not designed, piloted and validated for – thus even using children’s test scores to determine the “value” a teacher “adds” to even one child’s learning, is unethical.   

Here's what SAS says it can do with your kids' data:

http://www.sas.com/en_ph/software/analytics.html

Did the HISD board reject the test because the district faces huge budget shortfalls left by the prior superintendent as well as requirements to share tax revenue with poorer districts?  Is the HISD board trying to get out ahead of the lawsuit brought by a group of Houston teachers challenging its validity and citing its harmful effects on many of our best teachers?  Is there another vendor lurking, circling, lobbying with even grander claims for improving learning through their system of measuring teachers?

SAS Institute Inc markets its expertise in “analytics,” tracking and analyzing corporate data, from shipping logistics, to health care data, to casinos and the military, to “education.” (Be sure to click on their "Industries" tab for a sense of how education appears as one among many industries they serve.) Our children aren’t shipping containers and their learning can’t be captured by “metrics” and “analytics.”  

When will they ever learn?

See Audrey Amrein-Beardsley’s analysis of EVAAs, including her study of its use in Houston.
see Diane Ravitch’s comments on this decision by her hometown school board. 

THE TYRANNY OF TESTING:  
TIME TO TEX-IT FROM TESTING!

David Cameron put his credibility behind keeping the UK in the European Union.  He lost the vote: he has announced he will resign. 

When will Commissioner Morath resign? Will he be fired? What about the other TEA officials who approved the ETS contract? 

Congratulations to Patrick Michels for another strong piece of reportage on behalf of Texas children and their education.  We've had more than 20 years of standardized-test-based "accountability," and many of us have documented its harmful effects on children, teachers, the quality of instruction, the possibilities for children's learning and the very survival of the public's schools -- with no academic improvement or equity to show for the billions spent on testing.  After reading Patrick Michels' listing of fraud, failures and folly in this year's test fiascos, Texas taxpayers will say, Enough! It's time to "exit" this system!

Michels' next article needs to be a list of the names and faces of everyone involved in this scam, along with the dollar amount ETS has to refund to Texas taxpayers. ETS also needs to compensate local school districts -- with interest -- for their additional costs in staff time and dollars.

Then Texas must scrap the "accountability" system. It cannot be justified. Period.

TYRANNY OF TESTING COMPANIES:  PRIVACY OR PROPRIETARY?

My last post was an alert to parents about the ways the “educational” uses of technology are gathering data on our kids, not (as claimed) to advise their teachers on better ways to teach them, but to make it easier to market to kids – not just to sell to them, but to shape their ideas about what they want .   “Learning to be Watched,” the new study out of the National Education Policy Center at Boulder, documented in all too chilling detail the way “education” softwares (including those required for daily assignments as well as for testing) collect very personal data on children – on minors – to build a “data” base of their social contacts for the benefit of corporations who can profit from having your child’s profile in its hands.

The authors of “Learning to be Watched” do not write in generalities: they name specific companies (Google and Nike, for example) and provide real examples of the ways schools – often knowingly – are complicit in this capture of children’s personal information. They also show how difficult it is to protect children’s privacy when privacy laws – even those protecting children – come up against the corporate claims that their information is “proprietary –  that is, a product they own, an essential part of their business plan, thus not open to outsiders.

Corporations – from testing companies to third-party marketers to unknown (and perhaps international) vendors – can scoop up personal information on young children and teenagers to use for their own profit.    And parents have few ways to find out what these strangers know about their children and how the data collected from year to year will be used to manipulate their children lives.

So are the testing companies advocates willing to have their “data” open to outsiders?  It would seem the answer is a clear and resounding NO!

Photo Credit:  Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Smart)

We’re learning that questioning the tests can put the questioner in jeopardy.  Anyone – including teachers – who wants more public scrutiny of the mandated standardized tests that so dominate our schools these days, may be “surveilled.”  A teacher or blogger who raises questions about the tests is in danger of being threatened by – yes, the testing companies that have no problem gathering and selling data on young children but do not want anyone to know what they are doing.  

Yes, this sounds far-fetched.  But thanks to Diane Ravitch’s blog, more of us are learning how this works.  Ravitch’s blog has become a kind of town square for sharing information about our children and their schools.   

Several of her recent posts show how diligently teachers are raising serious concerns about these mandated tests – from the claimed levels of difficulty, to the accuracy of content, to the many problems in giving and scoring the tests.  All instructionally important for the children and the ways these tests are used to govern their education.  

But apparently off-limits as “proprietary information” that can put the questioners in danger of reprisal.  Absurd? Yes.  Dangerous? Yes?

But so threatening to the testing companies that teachers and bloggers doing their professional duty to look out for the children are themselves being threatened with legal action.

Here are just some of Diane Ravitch’s recent blog posts that shed light on this growing threat, in the teachers’ own words.  When you read these, and follow the links back to the original writers’ blogs, you may wonder as I do, How are teachers’ and bloggers’ being surveilled? Who is monitoring their writing and capturing their words to use against them?  Who controls the metrics and “analytics” of teacher correspondence? And who said they could? Who gave them the power to traffic cop communications among educators who are looking out for the children? Is this something else our tax dollars are paying for?

One teacher's questions
Who owns the [test] copyright? 
The testing company's complaints
Who's censoring correspondence critical of testing?
How can Twitter disappear a controversial message?

I invite you to read these for yourself, think about your own kids, and add to the conversation with your Comments.

“Learning to be Watched”:  What You Wish You Didn’t Need to Know about Who’s Tracking Your Kids


Do you let strangers into your home to go through your kids’ closets or toy boxes?  If someone just happens to come to the door and wants to ask your child nosy questions, do you welcome her in?  What about that person lurking on the edge of the playground—aren’t you supposed to call security?

If you’re a careful parent, you find these questions absurd: of course you protect your child from strangers.  Or do you/?

A powerful new study shows in vivid detail the many ways our children are being watched and profiled, not by a stranger we could identify in a line-up, but by the very tech companies our schools have contracted with to provide the software that is becoming the course content, the assignments, and the assessments in too many of our classrooms.    

This study gives chilling details of the way individual students just doing their homework online, shifting across different social media, are being tracked and exploited for commercial purposes.  It also brings to light the complex surveillance and marketing networks behind what appear to be respectable "educational" vendors.

The paper is full of detail and smart in an analysis that follows the money.  Every parent should read it and forward it to their child's principal, school board member and state legislator.  Parents concerned about their children's privacy as well as who is making decisions that allow strangers to prey on our kids so blatantly yet so covertly should start a conversation about who's tracking their kids.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"In the National Education Policy Center’s 18th Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercialism Trends, Learning to be Watched: Surveillance Culture at School, Faith Boninger and Alex Molnar describe how schools facilitate the work of digital marketers. Google, for example, subscribes over 30 million students and educators to its Google Apps for Education (GAFE) and tracks students when they shift to Google applications not explicitly part of the GAFE suite (e.g., YouTube). Facebook tracks whenever its users browse to any page housing a “like” button, and uses that tracking information in its ad targeting systems."

Find Learning to be Watched: Surveillance Culture at School, by Faith Boninger and Alex Molnar, on the web at:

http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/schoolhouse-commercialism-2015

The Tyranny of Testing:  Houston Parents Resist!

Here in Houston, where we're embarrassed to admit all this high-stakes test-based accountability started (remember when W was governor and Rod Paige was superintendent of schools here?), parents are organizing against high-stakes testing and FOR reclaiming the mission of the public's schools:  to teach all our children well.

Community Voices for Public Education unites parents, teachers and friends of the public's schools to resist the harmful effects of the testing system (not just "the test," but the whole toxic system).  Knowledgeable about teaching and learning, astute about the power politics and big money behind the testing, and tireless in bringing people together from across this huge city, CVPE offers a forum for discussing the personal and the political in testing. 

Parents gather to strategize how to best protect their children while not making their children's good teachers and principals even more vulnerable if high-scoring children are the ones whose tests scores are "absent" from the accountability calculations. They make common cause with teachers in getting smarter about the legislative process.  And they've encouraged the creation of an OPT OUT Academy as a creative and educationally rich alternative to choosing among multiple choice answers for hours and hours on test days.

If you're in Houston, find a way to add your voice, and expertise, to Community Voices for Public Education.  And if you're not in Houston, find a way to organize with the parents and teachers who are kindred spirits where you live -- we have a legislative session coming up in January 2017 and bills are already being written.   And an election between now and then. The pro-testing, anti-public school folks are very organized and already at work looking for ways to cut funding for schools and teachers, shift our tax dollars to the charter chains and use kids' test scores to justify all these bad policies.   Opting Out takes away the data that keeps the "accountability system" going; organizing on behalf of real, equitable educational schools needs everyone who cares about our kids.

CVPE will be hosting another Opt Out Academy May 9-13 and provides an opt-out guide on their website as well.  Check out all their resources for parents and community resisting standardized testing of our children.

The Tyranny of Testing:  TEA Says the Tests Don't Matter Anyway!

photo credit: http://calicospanish.com/testing-standards-changes-impact/

Well, the Texas Education Agency didn’t exactly say in so many words that the STAAR test doesn’t matter, how else to explain their statement that the 14,220 students whose answers “disappeared” because of computer glitches will not be required to re-take the test.  And Commissioner of Education Michael Morath told the members of the State Board of Education that local districts could “decide” whether the 8,778 special education students and remaining more than 5,000 students tested as English Language learners would need to be re-tested.  He said these students’ tests, which he blamed on the testing company, would not be factored into the school ratings.

Ok, let’s think about this a minute.  The state has claimed that the tests are essential for measuring student learning. If that’s true, does that mean the state thinks these special education and English language-learner students don’t “count,” or that, in fact, their teachers know how and what they are learning from all they have done in class all year.

The state has claimed that the mandated STAAR test is a valid measure of the quality of a teacher’s work and can be used to determine if a school is “failing” and needs to be closed – perhaps to have its children outsourced to a charter chain.  If 14,220 students’ scores don’t matter, if we can assess the value of a school’s academic program, the quality of its teaching, the adequacy of its resources without these scores, then why test all those other millions of kids?

If you read the words of the Commissioner and TEA’s official spokesperson, you’ll note that they seem much more concerned about whether the testing company is “responsible” for these glitches, whether it is fulfilling its contract, than whether the tests serve any educational purpose.   The state of Texas spends hundreds of millions of dollars on these tests—somehow not getting blamed for betting on the  wrong testing company looms larger for our Commissioner than what these tests (even when the answers don’t “disappear” into cyberspace).

The message for parents:  if you choose to opt your children out of the state tests, you will not be alone: The Commissioner has already “opted out” of the claims that the tests matter.    

See my next posts to find out who in Texas is opting out and why (and what their children do on test days), and to see the extraordinary national movement away from expensive, meaningless (and harmful) standardized tests and toward courageous advocacy for real teaching and learning.   Our bureaucrats may not yet understand the exciting possibilities that await our children when the testing dollars get put back into classrooms, but parents are getting and sharing that message and it’s a powerful one.

SOMETIMES THE TRUTH COMES OUT

The spring season of standardized testing shuts down teaching and learning, turning schools into “secured” sites of test score production. Little factories producing “indicators” for rating schools and teachers, with the children as the conscripted labor in the testing machine. This year the testing season brought an unexpected gift to parents: a kind of “Mitt Romney moment” of unintended truth. And it’s all because of the parents.

Whole weeks of testing (the STAAR, the Iowa, End of Course…..) are preceded by months and months of test drills, “benchmark” and “snapshot” tests, then more drill on answers missed. Not much time for teaching and learning.

Opposition to the tests – and their use in rating schools and teachers – has for years been voiced to Congress and to the legislators who voted for these expensive – and unproductive – testing systems, with little result. But every time, the testing company lobbyists easily drown out the voices of parents and teachers.

Parents aren’t waiting any longer. Across the country, even here in Texas where this whole thing began, parents are saying “no more.” “Not my child.” “You can’t have my child’s test score for your school rating.” They are ‘opting out,” keeping their kids home on test days.

The “opt out” movement has spread exponentially as more and more parents realize their power to act.

So how does Mitt Romney fit into this story? Remember the “47%” video? The disdain in Romney’s voice as he spoke to his rich donors about “those other people.”

Parents opting out produced a “Romney” moment of truth: it came in the form a letter from a high official in the Houston Independent School District, the district where high-stakes testing began. That letter, sent to schools and parents in the middle of the testing season, that said parents have no right to keep their kids out of testing. The writer warned of dire consequences – mandatory summer school, the risk of not being promoted to the next grade, and more.

And that “47%” connection? The district’s letter makes very plain there is no option to opt out; in fact, “Not participating in the assessments has negative consequences for the student, the school, and the district” (HISD’s emphasis). The district needs your kids’ scores.

Thanks to the Houston Chronicle’s Pulitzer-winning columnist Lisa Falkenberg and education writer Ericka Mellon, the opt out families and the district’s pushback became public news. And Margaret Downing, tireless editor of Houston Press, showed the district’s scare tactics to be just that: a score of “zero” won’t be reported for children who opt out, no child will “automatically” be denied promotion, mandatory summer school is not an automatic punishment. I urge you to read the letter for yourself, the writer’s subsequent “clarification,” and Downing’s very well informed refutation of the letter’s claims.

Sometimes the truth comes out. The “accountability” system “works” only if there are enough “data points” for rating schools and teachers. No parent wants her child to be a mere data point in the testing machine. The system has been held together by fear: fear the school scores will be low and the principal will lose his job; fear the kids scores won’t be high enough to keep the school from being outsourced to a charter chain; fear that teaching a really robust, interesting lesson won’t match the multiple choice test questions.

No longer. The David Gohl letter shows the fear has gone up the system: the fear that parents will realize they have choices. They can fight for their children.