Parents and advocates speak out against appointment of John King as SUNY Chancellor

See also stories from Politico, Daily News and NY Post that took quotes fro the press release. 

For immediate release: December 5, 2022

Contact: Lisa Rudley, nys.allies@gmail.com; 917-414-9190

 

Parents and advocates speak out against appointment of John King as SUNY Chancellor

 

Parents and advocates from throughout the state criticized the appointment of John King as SUNY Chancellor based upon his dismal record as NY State Education Commissioner.

Said Jeanette Deutermann, founder of Long Island Opt­­­ Out, “As Education Commissioner, John King was a disaster,  pushing the invalid Common Core standards and redesigning the state tests to be excessively long, with reading passages far above grade level, and full of ambiguous questions. He worked to ensure that the majority of kids would fail the state tests and be labelled not college-ready, including in many districts where nearly every student attends college and does well there.  His actions led directly to massive opposition among parents and the largest testing opt out movement in the country.  Many schools are still dealing with the destructive impact of his policies; I would be very sorry if SUNY students are faced with a similar fate.”

Lisa Rudley­­, the executive director of NY State Allies for Public Education, said, “SUNY Faculty and students should be forewarned! John King consistently ignored the legitimate concerns of parents and teachers regarding the policies he pursued as NY State Education Commissioner, by rewriting the standards, imposing an arduous high stakes testing regime, and basing teacher evaluation on student test scores, none of which had any research behind it and all of which undermined the quality of education in our public schools.  This led to a no-confidence vote of the state teachers union, and if the state’s parents had been able to carry out such a vote, you can be sure they would have done so as well.“

Leonie Haimson, the co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, explained, “Under John King, New York State was the worst state in the country in its failure to protect student privacy and the last state to pull out of inBloom, the hugely invasive data-collection and data-sharing corporation created with $100 million of Gates Foundation funds.  New York was the only state whose Commissioner refused to listen to the outraged cries of parents concerning the plan to share the most intimate details of their children’s educational records with inBloom, which in turn planned to share the data with other ed tech corporations to build their programs around.  New York was also the only state in which an act of the Legislature was required to prohibit this plan from going forward.  Has John King learned his lesson regarding the importance of protecting student privacy?  For the sake of SUNY students, I surely hope so.” 

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Latest Talk out of School: Tom Loveless on the failure of the Common Core

My WBAI radio show, Talk out of School, has switched its day and time and will from now on be broadcast live Saturdays at 1 PM EST, on WBAI 99.5 FM or online at wbai.org, to allow more teachers, parents and students to listen and/or call in.  I will be alternating weeks with a new co-host, Daniel Alicea, a NYC teacher, who had a fascinating show last week on the controversy surround Critical Race Theory in schools.  Check it out if you haven't already here.

This Saturday, after a brief recap of the latest education news, including the Mayoral primaries and the final city education budget deal, I interviewed Tom Loveless, who has written a new book, Between the State and the Schoolhouse, Understanding the Failure of Common Core. Tom is a former director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, and before that, was a sixth-grade teacher and Harvard policy professor.

One of the interesting issues we discussed is how the magical thinking of No Child Left Behind, in which all schools were mandated to have all students reach proficiency by 2014 or be deemed failing,  was replaced by the magical thinking of the Common Core, which assumed that if all schools, teachers and students were held to specific, higher standards in English and math, they would achieve them -- regardless of the learning conditions, curriculum, pedagogy or other issues that may disadvantage students, based on their background or abilities. 

We also discussed some of the many reasons the Common Core failed as a result of its original design and implementation, including quirky elements, such as the demand for non-contextual "close reading" and quota for informational text.

Resources:

Gotham Gazette, In Mayoral Primary, Spending in Support of Adams More Than Combined Total for Garcia and Wiley on how the Eric Adams campaign benefited from millions spent by a pro-charter school PAC.

Chalkbeat, NYC’s budget deal pilots smaller class sizes, dedicates millions to COVID learning loss

NYC DOE summary of their Academic Recovery Plan

Tom Loveless’ book, Between the State and the Schoolhouse, Understanding the Failure of Common Core. [Use code BSSS21 to get 20% off when ordering from Harvard Education Press; offer expires 8/13/2021.]

His blog is at https://tomloveless.com/.  You can also follow him at @tomloveless99

 

What's really behind the city, state and national drop in NAEP scores

The results of the biennual national tests called NAEPs were released on October 30, showing stagnant or declining test scores in reading and math in nearly all states in the decade since 2009. 

“Over the past decade, there has been no progress in either mathematics or reading performance, and the lowest-performing students are doing worse,” said Peggy Carr, the associate commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP. “In fact, over the long term in reading, the lowest-performing students—those readers who struggle the most—have made no progress from the first NAEP administration almost 30 years ago.”

The poor results are most likely a consequence of several factors, including the damaging double whammy experienced by schools in 2009-2011 – when the great recession hit, which led to thousands of teacher jobs lost and class sizes increasing sharply, and the imposition of the Common Core standards.

Concerning the recession, see the chart below from the Economic Policy Institute, showing a current shortfall of more than 300,000 public education jobs starting in about 2010:

Many states and districts, including NYC, still have not recovered from the sharp increase in class size that occurred starting in 2008.   Just as class size reduction benefits students of color and from low income families the most, increases in class size hurt their opportunities to learn the most, helping to explain the widening achievement gap over this period.

In addition, the corporate-style policies that proponents claimed would help narrow the achievement gap, including the Common Core standards and state exams aligned with those standards, adopted in nearly all states starting in 2010, likely contributed to the decline in performance on the NAEPs as well.

The Common Core emphasizes informational text rather than literature, and  “close reading” strategies, with students assigned to analyze short passages, often excerpts from literature, in isolation from any larger context.

In essence, Common Core led to a curriculum designed for test prep, but devoid of engaging relevance and content for many students. To make things worse, the assigned texts are often two or three Lexile grade levels above the actual reading level of the students to whom the reading is assigned, in a misplaced intent to provide more “rigor.”

Close reading involves analyzing and re-analyzing individual passages, focusing on details and interpreting the author’s particular choice of words, structure, and intent, without any reference to anything in the student’s own experience or prior knowledge: “Students go deeper in the text, explore the author’s craft and word choices, analyze the text’s structure and implicit meaning” etc..  It is a process that is more suited to a graduate seminar in literary criticism than elementary or even high school English classrooms, and has been imposed upon classrooms throughout the United States in a misguided effort to sharpen their analytic “skills”.  It is hard to imagine anything more boring, and more likely to turn off a young reader.

Here are some recent tweets from teachers around the country, in discussing the Common Core in relation to the latest NAEP scores.

From a second grade teacher in Louisiana:

In Louisiana,we have to use only Chapters 16-18 of Charlotte’s Web, a 4th grade level book, in SECOND grade. So they start a book missing 15 chapters of getting to know that Charlotte is a spider, Wilbur is a pig, and Fern is a girl and loving the characters.

— Vicky Johnston (@VickyJohnston61) October 31, 2019

And a special ed teacher in New York:

Schools push 2-3 page passages in the name of "close reading" because that's IMO aligned to high-stakes testing. Kids are made to read and reread and "cite" "text evidence" to answer Qs, and from personal experience kids come out just hating reading. Kids need to read BOOKS! Ugh!

— Annie Tan (@AnnieTangent) October 31, 2019

Strangely enough, the NY Times story on the NAEPs mentioned neither the recession nor the Common Core in attempting to explain why there has been no  progress since 2009. In a Twitter exchange with one of the reporters, she said no one had mentioned Common Core to her in years.   

I don’t doubt that few if any of its original proponents now mention Common Core  – given its abysmal failure to improve results in our schools -- but that doesn’t mean that millions of students and teachers aren’t still wrestling with its flaws every day in classrooms throughout the nation, as evidenced by the above tweets.

In any case, the last quote in the Times article was from Jim Cowen, the executive director of the Collaborative for Student Success, an organization established to promote the Common Core standards, decrying how the state tests -- those explicitly aligned with the standards -- have become too easy and there was a need for "accountability" -- but not apparently for those who promoted the flawed standards themselves.

Moreover, the other experts quoted decried the emphasis on short passages rather than allowing students read longer books with richer meanings and larger contexts, without specifically mentioning the Common Core.

Peter Afflerbach, an expert on reading and testing at the University of Maryland, called the eighth-grade declines “troubling” and “precipitous,” especially for the lowest-achieving students saying that  "too many schools have assigned elementary students short passages instead of challenging them with longer, thematically rich texts and books.The new eighth-grade results show the students haven’t developed the reading comprehension to deal with text complexity."

Compounding the bad news was a just-released report from the ACT, showing that College Readiness levels in English, reading, math, and science have all decreased since 2015, with English and math seeing the largest decline.  

A recent study has provided further evidence for the negative impact of the Common Core. In those states whose original standards differed significantly from the Common Core, the adoption of the new standards had a significantly depressing impact on test scores which has grown over time, with the sharpest negative effect on fourth grade reading scores and especially on the achievement of students with disabilities, English Language learners, and Hispanic students.

Altogether, the falling NAEP scores, the ACT report, and this study represent a devastating indictment of the Gates/David Coleman/Arne Duncan reform agenda -- and yet despite all the evidence against them, and the fervent critiques from teachers, most states are sticking with the standards and the flawed pedagogy they impose.  As Susan DuFresne, a teacher in Washington state, proclaimed:

#CommonCore has done more damage to a generation of students than #NCLB did, by far. We predicted this well before implementation. @arneduncan and @BillGates didn’t listen. Neither did @BarackObama. Still we are stuck with Common Core. Why? pic.twitter.com/zUOjVjMdKd

— Susan DuFresne (@GetUpStandUp2) November 1, 2019

One more trend may have contributed to the decline in reading scores over the last few years. There has been a sharp increase in the use of digital reading programs across the country – with a survey from Common Sense Media revealing that 94 percent of English/language arts teachers say that they used them for core curriculum at least several times a month. This is despite a wealth of research that suggests that reading comprehension suffers when reading is done on screens. 

An Ed Week analysis of the just-released NAEP data found that in both grades 4 and 8, students who spent more time on digital devices in English class scored lower on these exams. Look at this astonishing graphic - showing that 65% of students who scored below basic on the NAEPs spent four hours or more of classroom time on screens per day.  Whether this association is due to correlation or causation, it is a highly disturbing trend:

As for NYC in particular, the much ballyhooed upward trend in state scores has now been proven to be illusory, as I argued last year, as was the Mayor's claim that the achievement of NYC students has  matched or surpassed average achievement in the rest of the state.  
  
According to the more reliably scaled NAEPs, in no subject or grade do the NYC scores come close to the average in the rest of the state – even though the state scores too have stagnated over the last decade.  Also confirmed was my prediction in 2016 that we have entered yet another era of state test score inflation.

And while in 2003, NYC students scored  above the large city average in all four NAEP exams, we have now slipped behind that level in three out of the four categories– and only equal it in one: fourth grade reading.  The same pattern exists with NY state’s NAEP scores, which were once ahead of curve nationally and have now fallen below it. 

What’s especially disconcerting, though, is how little seems to have been learned from the failures of the past.  A few days after the NAEPs were released, the NY State Education Department announced it was hiring Achieve.org to summarize the research and the public feedback on whether and how to revise the state’s high school graduation requirements, which rely on students passing five high-stakes exit exams.  Achieve.org has been one of leaders in the Gates-funded push for the Common Core,

In addition, the NYSED public engagement process, which will involve a Commission and multiple forums, will be funded by the Gates Foundation, which has spent more than $400 million since 2009 on financing and goading states to adopt the Common Core, with hundreds of millions more spent to encourage the expansion of online learning.   

Eleven states out of 27 have in recent years dropped their high school exit exams, and many of them now allow high school diplomas to be retroactively awarded.  This trend follows research showing that the practice of requiring students to pass these exams leads not to higher achievement or college readiness, but instead to higher drop-out and incarceration rates.    

And yet for some inconceivable reason, the NY State Education Department has chosen to work with the primary funder of the Common Core, as well as  one of the organizations that set our nation’s schools on the wrong path, to help guide their deliberations on this important issue. 

Highlights of 2018 in books, education policy and political activism

Here is my collection of bests from 2018 – in books, education policy, and politics.  This is far from an exhaustive or authoritative list but merely one from my perspective, sitting here in NYC and glimpsing encouraging and even inspiring events elsewhere across the nation and the world.

Books:

First, I’d like to highlight three terrific books I read this year, each with special relevance to education:

Adequate Yearly Progress,  a novel by Roxanna Elden, a veteran teacher, is set in a struggling Texas high school and is  a hilarious satire of the all the trendy buzzwords and supposedly innovative transformational “reforms” that teachers and schools have been subjected to since NCLB.  Check out the review by Gary Rubinstein here and an interview with the author here.

Ghosts in the Schoolyard, a brilliant study of school closings by Eve Ewing.  It tells the story of how students, teachers and whole communities were devastated by the closing of 50 plus schools in Chicago by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2013. Diane Ravitch writes about this amazing book here.  Many of Ewing’s findings were also reported in a more purely academic way by a report from the University of Chicago Consortium, which confirmed how students from closing schools experienced long-term negative educational effects.  As to Ewing’s book, I can only read a little at a time because it makes me relive in my mind the traumatic hearings on the 100 plus NYC school closings carried out during the Bloomberg years and now the de Blasio administration.  It also makes me regret that with all the scholars and authors in the NYC area, no one has written a similar book about the damage down by the NYC school closings.

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou was probably the most enthralling work of non-fiction I read this year, about Theranos, the start-up blood testing company, whose worth was estimated at one time at a billion dollars – an evaluation built solely on exaggeration, fraud and outright lies.  Though not about education per se, the book reveals how much of the corporate culture in Silicon Valley is based on hype and overly credulous reporting by the media.  This unearned hype is similarly reflected in the popularity of online or “personalized learning” ed tech products in schools throughout the country, despite the lack of any independent research showing they work to improve student outcomes, the risk to student privacy involved, and the growing evidence that they undermine the essential human relationships necessary for real learning.

 Education policy:

The corporate education reform movement in retreat.  All their so-called solutions to the problems of struggling schools have failed, including teacher evaluation based on test scores, the implementation of the Common Core, and charter school expansion.

The recent RAND report on the massive Gates-funded teacher evaluation project in  three school districts and four charter management organizations (CMOs) showed that despite spending millions in taxpayer funds to evaluate and compensate teachers based in part on their students’ test scores, these initiatives showed no positive results.  In one district in particular - Hillsborough County school – these policies led to near bankruptcy of the district,  lower achievement and less access to effective teachers for low-income and minority students.

The Common Core standards have been shown to be a disaster as well.  The standards have led to a “lost decade” in which student achievement has not increased for the first time since the NAEPs have been administered.  Even the Fordham Institute, the chief Gates-funded cheerleaders for the Common Core, released the results of a national teacher survey, showing that, as many of us warned would happen, the Common Core has indeed driven out classic works of literature, including novels and plays, from the English curriculum, in favor of a rigid quota of “informational texts” .  In addition, teachers report that students’ writing skills have worsened,  and the Core’s emphasis on “close reading”, with teachers told  to refer solely to the assigned text rather provide any factual or historical context, has caused curriculum with real content to be sacrificed to hours of content-free test prep. Their conclusion:

“Between 2012 and 2017, the percentage of teachers who said they organized their instruction around “reading skills” increased from 56 to 62 percent, while those who said they organized their instruction around “specific texts” declined from 37 to 30 percent. That’s no way to systematically build students’ content knowledge. It’s high time that teachers (and preferably schools) adopt content-rich curricula.” 

Sorry, guys, you and Bill Gates should have thought of that first, before pushing these deeply flawed so-called standards on the nation.

The Pushback against charter schools strengthened as a result of widespread corruption, too frequently push out students and violate their civil rights, drain public schools of critical resources, and exacerbate segregation. 

 
Student Privacy as a dominant concern:  From being ignored by most policymakers, student privacy has emerged as one of the  most important issues in education since the defeat of inBloom in 2014.  With the continued spread of unsafe and unproven data-mining ed tech products, the proliferation of data breaches and the continued lax security practices of schools and districts, even the FBI released a public service announcement in September, warning how the “rapid growth of education technologies (EdTech) and widespread collection of student data could have privacy and safety implications if compromised or exploited. …and could result in social engineering, bullying, tracking, identity theft, or other means for targeting children.” 

 In October, our Parent Coalition for Student Privacy released an Educator Toolkit for Teacher and Student Privacy in collaboration with the Badass Teachers Association that’s already been downloaded more than 1500 times. A plug: we’ll be holding a webinar on the Toolkit with Marla Kilfoyle of the BATs and Rachael Stickland of PCSP on Jan. 20 at 6 PM EST, sign up here.

Teacher activism:  From West Virginia to Oklahoma, from North Carolina to Arizona, teachers made their voices heard in grassroots strikes and walkouts, fed up with a decade or more of  low salaries, cuts to pensions, large class sizes, and the lack of respect provided  to the profession. Wearing “red for ed”, they created a sea of crimson in protests throughout the country, and emerged as a vital force for real education reform.

Politics:

The Blue Wave sweeping the midterms.  So many new progressive candidates were elected in November, so many of them with young women of color, committed to strengthening rather than dismantling public education.  In New York state in particular, we now have a majority of progressive Democrats in the Senate for the first time in decades, who joining with the Assembly, will be pushing the education policy envelope in many ways – on school funding, stronger accountability for charter schools, and hopefully by ensuring stronger checks and balances to Mayoral control.

Inspiring youth movements –as brilliant and eloquent young people, with endless energy and commitment, increasingly take charge and lead the way.

From the amazing Parkland High School students leading a national movement against gun violence after the mass shooting at their school, to the Brooklyn students from the Secondary School of Journalism walking out in protest against Summit online learning and writing a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, asking him to stop stealing their personal data, to the Sunrise Movement – an organization seemingly appearing out of nowhere and achieving prominence in the halls of Congress and Capitol Hill, advocating for an ambitious “Green New Deal” to stem climate change, these young activists have shown the rest of us the changes that must be made.

The best speech: Finally, I wanted to share with you what I think was the most eloquent address of the year, made by 15 year old Greta Thunberg, a Swedish climate activist who also happens to be on the autism spectrum.  At the UN climate conference last month in Poland, she exhorted world leaders to take action before we run out of time to prevent the most catastrophic effects of global warming.  Greta’s own protests outside the Swedish Parliament each Friday have inspired student walk-outs throughout the world.

Thanks to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now for broadcasting Greta’s speech – and for an interview with Greta and her father, Svante Thunberg, who are coincidentally descendants of Svante Arrhenius, the first scientist to estimate how increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide would increase global temperatures, more than a century ago. Take a look.