Below is the testimony I gave today in front of the NYC Council Education Committee, in favor of the
resolution opposing the Governor’s proposal on receivership -- the state taking over our struggling schools.
I
am here to testify in support of the resolution against the Governor’s proposal to expand state receivership of allegedly low-performing public schools. The state has no track record of improving
schools in receivership. When the State
Education Department took control of the Roosevelt school district in 2002, and
ran it for over a decade, there was little or no improvement, as reported in a
Newsday 2013 article:
Albany's
intervention ends Monday, after 11 years and more than $300 million in extra
state spending. The period -- marked by limited scholastic progress and
memorable mistakes by state officials and their appointees -- was the first and
only time the state ever managed a local school system.
"I
can tell you right off the bat that the state Education Department has no
capabilities to run a school district," said Roger Tilles of Great Neck,
who is Long Island's representative to the state Board of Regents. "We
need other alternatives, if we're ever going to turn around other districts
that are really not succeeding."[1]
As Michael Petrilli of the Thomas Fordham Institute, a big supporter of the Common Core standards just wrote:
Some education reformers and media outlets are already using the results of the new, tougher tests to brand schools as “failing” if most of their students don’t meet the higher standards. Note, for instance, the Daily News’s special report, “Fight for their Future,” which leads with the provocative headline “New York City is rife with underperforming schools, including nearly two-thirds of students missing state standards.” This line of attack closely resembles the talking points of Eva Moskowitz and Jeremiah Kettridge of Families for Excellent Schools, who both promote the notion that in New York, “800,000 kids can’t read or do math at grade level” and “143,000 kids are trapped in persistently failing schools.”
These statements are out of bounds, and reformers should say so. They validate the concerns some educators voiced all along: that we would use the results of the tougher tests to unfairly label more schools as failures.[2]
The results of the new Common Core
exams are essentially unreliable. They
were designed to find two thirds of students failing, and did so, not just in
New York City but in the rest of the state as well. The reports by Families for
Excellent Schools claiming a “crisis” of failing schools were put out by an
organization that has received considerable funding from hedge funders and Wall
Street financiers, as well as more than $700,000 over the past two years
from the Walton Foundation, an organization that has an aggressive
privatization agenda.[3]
The unreliable figures and claims of an
education crisis cited by this organization were echoed in a report from the
Governor’s office that has been described as “sometimes
indistinguishable from the eight reports on struggling schools F.E.S. has sent
reporters since the summer.”[4] Not surprisingly, Cuomo himself has received
huge sums from some of the same pro-privatization hedge funders and financiers.
[5]
Yet Carol Burris, award-winning
principal in the Rockville Centre School District, has shown how
unreliable these figures are, based on cut scores imposed by the state that
purport to show which students will be college and career ready.[6] For example, while only half of the students
in her district were said to be proficient in ELA and Math based upon their
state test scores in grades 3-8, 100% of them graduate with a Regents diploma
and 85% with an advanced designation. Over
92% of the these students not only go to college, but persist and are still
there two years after their high school graduation.
Another such district is Oceanside,
Long Island where 96 percent
of students graduate with a Regents diploma, 58 percent with advanced distinction,
and 92 percent go onto college (70 percent to four year colleges and 22 percent
to a two year colleges). Yet more than two thirds of the district’s 8th
graders were labelled as not making the standards in math, according to the
state’s Common Core exams.[7]
When
Michael Bloomberg was running for re-election in 2009, the state test
scores purported to show that two-third of the city’s students had achieved
grade standards in English, and 82 percent in math.[8] Now the state says only about one third of
them do. Clearly the cut scores were set
for political reasons then and are just as politically motivated now. They were
pre-ordained to fit the ideological goals of those who are intent on dismantling
and privatizing our schools.
A few years ago, Rick Hess, a
conservative commentator at the American Enterprise Institute, revealed the
motives behind the Common Core exams in an eerily prescient column called the Common Core Kool-aid:
First, politicians will actually
embrace the Common Core assessments and then will use them to set cut scores
that suggest huge numbers of suburban schools are failing. Then, parents and
community members who previously liked their schools are going to believe the
assessment results rather than their own lying eyes… Finally, newly convinced that
their schools stink, parents and voters will embrace "reform."
However, most of today's proffered remedies--including test-based teacher
evaluation, efforts to move "effective" teachers to low-income
schools, charter schooling, and school turnarounds--don't have a lot of fans in
the suburbs or speak to the things that suburban parents are most concerned
about….Common Core advocates now evince an eerie confidence that they can scare these voters into embracing the
"reform" agenda. [9]
If these scores aren’t ready to be used to judge students, they aren’t adequate to judge our schools or deem them “failing” either. They are certainly not reliable enough to ask the State Education Department to take over our public schools – which has had NO record of success in doing so.
thank you for keeping us informed.
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