Even as CPS opens more new schools, children with special needs have a tougher time finding options. Placements in private therapeutic schools are scarce, and some charters are reluctant to enroll them.
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National Standards & The Gates Foundation
By: Alexander Russo / November 12, 2008
People ask me all the time whether the big education foundations --
Gates, Broad, et al -- have too much influence over the districts where
they are funding initiatives, and my usual response has been "no." But
if Gates develops national standards and tests, which is apparently itsnext big move, that might change things.
I support national standards and tests, and I'm as impatient as
everyone else. But Gates-made national standards creep me out a little
bit. I'd rather the states or the USDE develop the tests than the
Gates Foundation do it. Give the Obama administration a chance to do
something. (Or at least have Achieve do it.)
Then again, I'd rather
have standards than the current mishmash of uneven and generally
low-level state standards.
Cross-posted from TWIE.
National Standards & The Gates Foundation
In January 2008, Gates's people in Chicago announced they were funding "turnaround" and when I asked about "small schools" they didn't answer the question. Then Arne Duncan announced that Orr would be subjected to "turnaround" and it was reconstituted by a vote of the Board of Education (February 2008) and its teachers and principals fired (June 2008), with many of its students purged by AUSL (September 2008) so that the AUSL "turnaround" numbers will be good (in May 2009).
If Gates is still supporting "small schools", it's not in Chicago, as Mike Klonsky knows. In fact, the Gates money now is going to the people (AUSL) who are dismantling small schools as they actually existed in Chicago high schools. Orr in 2008. South Shore in 2009? And Bowen in 2010?
Just how is Gates supporting "small schools" where they actually exist here in Chicago, Mike? Giving $9 million to Arne for "turnaround" (which is, as has been noted, simply reconstitution by a new corporate name)?
Be specific.
National Standards & The Gates Foundation
It seems the chamber of commerce and folks like the big $$$ have plenty of influence in education policy. I know we need to really invest in building high performance schools in CPS via truly developing distributed teacher leadership in our schools. It is about treating teachers as professionals. The CPS daily instructional time is too short. This works against both the students and teachers. In any high performance business, the members of the organization have time to reflect on performance and plan. This kind of planning time is necessary. For some reason CPS does not have the backbone to support such a plan. We need to treat our teachers as professionals, to be redundant, since they are in the classroom. The time is now for CPS to support and listen its teachers instead of Bill Gates, et al.
National Standards & The Gates Foundation
All of the posts have interesting points and should be considered, however I am against any national testing agenda that will be used against students and teachers. I am alarmed at how many of my students have been "wounded" by the testing agenda. I cannot tell you how many of my students tell me "I do not test well". So they are defeated before they even make an attempt. They freeze up and panic even when they know the material.
I do agree with the idea of making Colleges of Education highly competitive and developing a salary structure that is comensurate with said education. Relevant, significant and subject-specific continuing professional development is sorely lacking. I cannot tell you how many meetings I've sat through that were complete wastes of time.
Teachers also need to get more politically active so that we are not always on the receiving end of mandates. We should either seriously consider running for public office or be prepared to lobby our elected officials so that we can have a place at the table when decisions that affect us are made.
We also need to insist that our neighborhood schools have the same resources, qualified teachers, etc as the "selective" schools - charters, contracts, etc. If the Board of Education has abrogated its responsibility to educate the children of Chicago and purposely sabotaged neighborhood schools in union-busting, teacher bashing attempts, then why aren't we as educators up in arms?????
There are variety of ways to make our schools better, but if we throw in the towel, hope someone else will do it, then we are all part of the problem. We can no longer sit in our rooms, doing what we believe to be good work and not help our colleagues who struggle. It is so easy for us to criticize others, but we all must look inward and see what can we do. Bill Gates should not be the arbiter of what public education should look like. We should.
National Standards & The Gates Foundation
People keep forgetting that no where in the Federal Constitution is education mentioned. Never has it been read into the penumbra of rights the Constitution bestows upon U.S. citizens. If people want the feds involved in what as always been a state concern, begin by amending the U.S. Constitution.
National Standards & The Gates Foundation
I support national standards/national tests for students AND teachers if made predominantly by teachers. Why not update (or use the old?) NAEP with only "state-specific" govt content tests for students and Social Studies teachers. Aside from that, algebra's algebra, reading's reading.
I'd add national teacher certification (and upgrade universities’ teacher prep programs) and national salary formulas (adjusted by cost of living "zones") to the mix. And, for the cherry on top, make teachers' experience portable no matter what new district/building they join at any point in their career for whatever reason. After all "teacher quality" is the #1 predictor of student achievement which I believe can be most directly achieved through teacher job satisfaction or “happiness.â€
Call me crazy.
National Standards & The Gates Foundation
National Standards and a national test would be the best and possibly the most effective improvement to NCLB. Maybe then we can reset the clock to give the states that have been b.s.ing their state tests a chance to come clean and work on actual improvement. All the comparisons on this message board, to McDonalds to China/Microsoft are just silly, if not dumb. Mississippi, for example, the last I heard claims most of their students are at grade level, while according to NAEP the majority are below. There are only one or two states whose tests accurately reflect their students' ability. Allowing states to test their own students is as dumb as letting teachers proctor the tests.
National Standards & The Gates Foundation
First of all, Gates didn't say he was "abandoning" small schools. Schmidt made that up. Gates did say that "structural change is not sufficient." Big difference. Why this is a surprise, or why it should bring such joy to those who have oppose the very idea of school reform, is beyond me. But this is always the way it goes. Isn't it. First, the foundations and DOE make standardized test scores the only measure of success. Then that declare the past reform effort a failure or insufficient when test scores do rise. Since nothing is done to change or improve conditions in the community, the test-score gap doesn't close and then comes a new foundation project. It's interesting how the anti-reform views of the right ("reform is impossible, we need to privatize") and the left "(reform isn't necessary, schools are fine, we hope it fails") seem to merge at times like these.
National Standards & The Gates Foundation
To Schmidt, everyone he disagrees with (most everyone in the world) is "a mouthpiece" for someone or other. Now Catalyst has joined the "mouthpiece" brigade. Only Schmidt is a mouthpiece for the proletariat. The problem is that he likes schools the way they were, big, overcrowded and 20th century. He thinks Austin High was great the way it was, violent,60% dropout rates, lots of uncertified teachers, teaching out of subject, were fine by George. As long as we don't try any reforms or OMG, have those "small boutique" corporate mouthpiece schools for black kids.
National Standards & The Gates Foundation
Gates was one of the main outfits behind the "Small Schools" experiment in Chicago. Last January, when Gates announced it was abandoning "Small Schools" to fund "Turnaround", I was the only reporter present (at the media event at Sherman) to ask how "Small Schools" had failed.
They stopped the press conference and never even tried to answer the question.
Instead they fired most of the teachers at Orr "campus" (where Mayor Daley had pranced around for five years -- during "Small Schools" -- as "Principal for a Day") and moved without blinking into the next fashion -- "Turnaround."
Last month, at the Board meeting, CPS approved millions of dollars (not just to AUSL) to "manage" "Turnaround."
But in February, what CPS actually voted to do to the six schools facing "Turnaround" was to Reconstitute them. Read the Board Reports. Illinois law doesn't have anything in it about "Turnaround" because "Turnaround" is a silly corporate stunt that has -- often as not -- been used (as with Al Dunlap, and Sunbeam Corporation) to destroy corporations, not to revive them.
Gates dollars often blind people to the nonsense Gates funds and preaches. To this day, nobody in public has challenged Bill Gates's silly attack on American High Schools that launched a lot of this nonsense (at the National Governors' Conference five years ago).
And it will be a hot day in January on Lake Michigan before anyone is willing to report, in detail, just how many dollars Gates has wasted on teacher bashing and union busting nonsense over the past decade. From Gates's promotion of Chicago International Charter School "Northtown Campus" as a "model for urban school reform" through "small schools" (but not smaller classes) now to "Turnaround" Gates money is being poured in behind a corporate agenda that is an attack on public high schools.
These tests will be utilized for the same purpose.
But along the way a lot of people will make a lot of money provided they simply suck up to Bill Gates and the people he hires to warp the public education agenda by manipulating as much as possible with millions of dollars.
National Standards & The Gates Foundation
An administrator with a vision provides a healthy environment for teachers to teach. You're right that all standardized tests do is to say "Amen" to the socioeconomic status of the student. If tests aren't used as appropriate tools to provide increased resources to the students they assess, then they are a huge waste of time & money. You're also right that private companies who benefit from the testing YADAYADA should have no place in any nationwide test. Fugeddaboudit!!
National Standards & The Gates Foundation
"Bill O'Reilly likes to say that when he went to school with 40+ kids in a class, everybody learned."
To Karen: I'm surprised we're giving him as much credit as believing what he's saying is remotely near the truth. In any case, I agree that the hostility between teachers and administrators seriously impedes learning. That's the most common complaint I hear from teachers, and I suspect we'd see improvement if the interests of teachers and administrators were brought into closer alignment. I'm not sure it'd show up in test scores significantly, but the school environment would be a lot healthier.
But I don't think we should imply that "fixing" the professional environments within schools will solve the various social problems afflicting many low-performing students. Teachers can't read to their students when they're little; they can't force them to keep a healthy diet; they can't keep them stress-free outside of class, etc. Most of the factors that affect performance - poverty, genetics, and especially early-life experiences - are out of teachers' hands, and society cannot reasonably expect them to solve those problems by themselves. So just as a thought, educators really should shy away from the idea that the schools will fix all of society's growing ills. Promise too much and laymen will just be more angry with you when the changes they expect don't happen.
On the thread topic, the main argument I see for national testing is actually financial - it would probably save money to administer one nationwide test rather than an amalgam of state tests, and at the very least results would be (somewhat) comparable across state lines. But if the national test is just another norm-referenced, shrouded-in-secrecy, unresponsive farce of a test, I see absolutely no reason to waste money designing it.
A poorly designed test will only succeed in giving cover to the idiots who run this country for political stunts pulled at students', parents', and teachers' expense. Do we trust Gates to design a good test? I don't.
Oh yeah, and I like the whole "democracy" thing. I'm not comfortable with a private organization, which has no responsibility to voters or citizens, designing a test without any input from the public. Not that it would be so different from state tests, but hey, let's do this right if we're gonna do it.
National Standards & The Gates Foundation
What Retired Principal forgot to mention that excellent administrators also have the trickle-down effect. We also don't call attention to the fact that the "best and the brightest" among us cannot afford to enter the teaching profession until something erupts in corporate America. Teaching salaries have not kept pace with salaries in the private sector. In 1970 the average first year teacher earned only $3,000 less than the average first year associate attorney. Care to examine the differences now? There was a time when in order to become a teacher one had to speak, write, and analyze with a high degree of proficiency. Now, anyone without a criminal record can show up and be hired by a private educational provider.
Why can't Bill Gates and the rest of the "accountability" types tell the truth? That real learning goes on when teachers have the resources, support (administrative and parental) and reasonable class sizes to provide for all students. I'm tired of the teacher bashing and union-busting strategies that all the so-called reformers espouse. Bill O'Reilly likes to say that when he went to school with 40+ kids in a class, everybody learned. What he fails to say is that; that teachers and parents were on the same page when it came to discipline and that administrators backed their teachers 100%
National Standards & The Gates Foundation
Just to be sure we are getting exactly the same curriculum at every school, I think we should have McDonald's write the national standards. Then our kids can be as educationally malnourished as they are physically wrecked on a diet of Big Macs.
National Standards & a national test -
I have a question:
Why wouldn’t a national test be open to the same sort of grade inflation than the state tests are now?
With rampant test prep, cheating, narrowing of the curriculum, and all the rest – as predicted by Campbell’s Law?
I have written about this on our blog at
http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com; what am I missing?
National Standards & The Gates Foundation
Good teachers + good instruction= good students! Excellent teachers + excellent instruction= excellent students!
National Standards & The Gates Foundation
If you believe in Unicorns, you can devote all of your billions of dollars to Unicorn Studies, the financing field studies on unicorns, and to promoting the understanding of unicorns, including high-stakes tests to measure success of failure in Unicornology.
You may "believe" in both "national standards" and national secret multiple-choice computer scored high-stakes test thingies, Alexander, but no matter how much belief you put into that project, the impossibility of it still stands in the way. As virtually every legitimate study of the tests themselves (and their long term impact on everything else about schooling) shows, you can't achieve whatever "standards" you claim to be trying for by these methods.
I guess there are more dangerous things Gates could be spending his (and Warren Buffett's) educational billions on, but I can't think of many ("Turnarond" being one).
These debates have been over for a long time among those of us who have examined the narrow band of reality accessible to these types of "assessments" and this type of defining of "accountability". Just because people with billions of dollars and global power keep repeating the same silly nonsense (amplified by "journalists" determined to ignore the most obvious stupidities in these arguments) doesn't make them more true.
If Gates wants to do some "paradigm shifting" (that ubiquitous mantra of test-based corporate reformers; Kuhn must be rolling in his grave) he should fund the complete publication of every high-stakes test every used (from the IQ tests that were once the "standards" in Chicago and most other places) and a critical look at what they actually measure. This would be followed -- only after everyone can see every test used on every child -- by public discussion of how this solution fits the supposed problems it is designed to solve.
But that's not what will be done with those billions of dollars, so we're still looking at the latest expensive high-tech version of Unicorn Studies.
National Standards & The Gates Foundation
While not a fan of national standards, I could tell you one of the arguments: People like E.D. Hirsh would argue that national grade by grade standards & curricula would prevent the duplication that goes on so much in school.
With all the transience/mobility in schools, it is not uncommon for students to leave one school, go to another and be taught the material the following year in a new school. An example he likes to use is: How many years do students learn the planets in the solar system?
Prevention of duplication will only come about, he argues, through a national curriculum/national standards.
Can someone help me out with the math problem before I can post?????
National Standards & The Gates Foundation
[i]"Then again, I'd rather have standards than the current mishmash of uneven and generally low-level state standards"... [/i]
Really? [i]Really[/i], Alex?
You're expecting higher standards from the manufacturer of the continuously worst software on the planet? He's like the China of the technology sales industry.
Trust me, if his standards are as high as the ones set for unleashing Vista on an unsuspecting public, we are golden.
National Standards & The Gates Foundation
it's basically like NAEP -- a national, uniform set of standards and tests -- except administered to everyone and used by all states.
National Standards & The Gates Foundation
I think the tsts should go national because some states have easier standards than other and some states have harder standards. It puts both groups at a disadvantage. What a 3rd grader should know in Illinois is what a 3rd grader should know in Mississippi, etc. One state could be creating a bunch of students who know nothing while another state could be producing all of the geniuses. Isn't this the reason that the ISAT has the SAT10's? The SAT10's are suppose to tell us where our children rank compared to others in the country. How is it a child can exceed the state standard and only have a percentile of 75%?
National Standards & The Gates Foundation
It is improper and inappropriate for tests to be utilized as a high stakes affair whether they are developed by the state, non-profits, philanthropists, or private corporations. Relying solely on tests, as so many do now, does not offer a reasonable or even vaguely complete assessment of student knowledge and skills. Students are far more than their ability to perform on standardized tests which are demonstrably biased against minorities, the poor, and English language learners. Any legitimate national standards must incorporate a variety of assessment strategies, not just a big honkin' high stakes test like all the rest.
I know it might sound crazy, but maybe (just maybe, mind you) teachers themselves, from an expansive range of education environments, ought to create national standards, not politicians, administrators, and foundations.
Also, what purpose would a national standardized test serve? What purpose would national standards themselves serve? What would they do? What would be their function? I admit, it's not at all clear to me.
National Standards & The Gates Foundation
We desperately need national standards and testing by any means necessary. The state formulated tests under NCLB have been misleading and dangerous. How do make sure everyone can dunk a basketball by 2014? You lower the rim 6 inches every year until it's about 3 feet high. Central office, principals, and teachers have all used the bogus ISAT scores to justify and validate any curricular reform that has come down since 2001. It is so misleading. A national test would lead to a huge "correction" (as they say on Wall Street).
National Standards & The Gates Foundation
It seems according to Vicki Phillips the Gates Foundation director for education that the national standards are all based on what students need to enter and succeed in college. It appears that the presumption is that if you cannot qualify to attend college you do not make standards and may be denied a high school diploma. Doesn’t that seem absurd since only about 29% of Americans ever graduate from college.
But more importantly we all might want to contemplate the economic implications of the Gates national standards if they were in fact successful. What would this nation look like? We may already have more college graduates than the economy can absorb, so if Gates were successful then the market would be so overloaded with college graduates that the market value, i.e. salary levels, would drop like rocks. In fact we could see what we call now jobs requiring a college education lowered to the pay scale of retail jobs that currently do not require college educations. This would of course lower the cost factor for owners of businesses and other consumers of the labor of college graduates. But who in the world would remain to buy the products with so many people being paid so little? Could you imagine what the starting salary of a teacher would decline to if the nation had massive college attendence and very high numbers of graduates.
I think the truth is that neither Vicki Phillips nor Gates really expect higher levels of college attendance and graduation. They hope to get more bang for the buck out of just plain and simple high school graduates who can replace more expensive college graduates in a variety of job functions.
We can also be sure that if national standards were raised to the level Gates is talking about very few students with disabilities would ever be granted standard diplomas based on those standards. This has already happened in a few states where standards based graduation tests have blocked the big percentages of students with disabilities from getting standard diplomas.
Rod Estvan
National Standards & The Gates Foundation
I don't see anything wrong with Gates jump-starting the process by developing national standards and tests. I have no reason to believe that the Department of Education would do any better job than the Gates foundation, and it is obvious the bureaucracy and politics within the federal government will probably keep the USDE from ever doing this on their own.
Besides, the USDE would just sell the rights to develop a national test to ACT or someone who would then have a monopoly on standardized assessment across the entire country. Gates is willing to develop the standards and test and allow states to use it for free.
I know it seems too good to be true and we're all worried that Bill Gates will use the test to make us all PC-buying zombies who never question why Windows shuts down so much, but, and I know again I'll be tagged as naive and idealistic, but have you ever thought that maybe he really just wants to improve education in this country (and that of course one product of that would be to provide companies like his with a more competent workforce) and that his motives aren't as sinister as some would like to think.