Why Biden should focus on vaccinating all school staff ASAP instead of making students take pointless stressful tests

On Monday, Ian Rosenblum, appointed as Deputy Asst. Sec. of the US Dept. of Education announce
d that states would NOT be given a waiver from administering standardized exams this year – though ten states had already requested them, including New York. 

His letter is here; articles in Chalkbeat  and in Diane Ravitch’s blog here.  Rosenblum’s letter does say that the tests could be shortened, given over the summer (!) or even next fall. 

It is somewhat surprising and quite depressing that a relatively junior staffer would make this announcement before Biden’s choice for Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has even taken office – and in the midst of a pandemic no less.  Check out the video here where Biden promised at an AFT forum last year that he would eliminate all federally-mandated standardized testing.   Makes you wonder who is really running the show! at the Dept of Education.

Or perhaps not.  Ian Rosenblum, who signed the official letter, came to the US Department of Education from running the NY branch of the pro-testing outfit Education Trust, now headed by our former and highly controversial pro-testing NY State Education Commissioner John B. King.   

Before that, Rosenblum was the top education advisor to the formerly pro-testing Gov. Cuomo, until Cuomo decided that this was not a popular political stance i, given vocal parent protests against the lengthy and highly flawed Common Core-aligned exams, leading to a 20% opt out rate. 

Interestingly, Ed Trust spearheaded a letter just a few weeks ago, urging the US Dept of Education to reject state requests for waivers.  The letter was signed onto by many inside-the-Beltway groups that have received a minimum of $200M in Gates funding over the last ten years or so:

National Urban League [$18M since 2011]
National Action Network [not listed]
UnidosUS [$11.5M since 2011]
League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) [not listed on Gates Foundation site but cited on LULAC site as “partner” and cited here and here]
Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC) [$3.9M since 2011]
National Center for Learning Disabilities [$5M since 2014]
Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates (COPAA) [not listed]
National Center for Special Education in Charter Schools [$1.9M since 2019]
The Education Trust [$49.1M since 2012]
Education Reform Now [$1M since 2016]
Alliance for Excellent Education [$22.8M since 2010]
Data Quality Campaign [$26 M since 2009]
Teach Plus [$23M since 2012]
Educators for Excellence [$12.4M since 2011]
Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendents (ALAS) [not listed]
National Alliance for Public Charter Schools [$21.5M since 2009]
National PTA [$5M since 2009]
KIPP [$18.4M since 2019]
Collaborative for Student Success [not listed but funded by Gates according to its website]

The push back from teachers and parents to the waiver rejection letter has been immediate and intense, saying how unfair it is to make students take these tests at this time.  Said one New Jersey teacher & mom: "Parents don't want this. Educators don't want this & scientifically impossible that these tests will yield reliable, valid, usable data. Who is being served by this?" 

If states have to give these exams remotely, watch out for the unreliable and highly biased surveillance spyware schools will ask to install on your children’s devices.  Best advice is to refuse and opt out of these exams altogether.

Even our DOE Chancellor this morning said the following:

Carranza this morning, when asked what sort of state tests would be feasible at this point in NYC: "As an educator I would say to parents, there is an opt out. And if there is ever a time to consider whether that opt out makes sense for you, this is the time."

— Reema Amin (@reemadamin) February 25, 2021

https://twitter.com/reemadamin/status/1364977654097657861?s=20

Instead of mandating standardized testing, the Biden administration should focus on getting all teachers vaccinated as soon as possible, as this oped convincingly argues.  Biden has said that teachers should be prioritized for the vaccine, but he has left this up to states to decide on how this would be achieved and over what time frame. This is a mistake.

The evidence over whether it is safe for all teachers and students to attend schools in person at this time is contradictory and confusing, and different people have understandably different estimations of the benefits and risks involved.  

But two polls have come out in the past week, one from Morning Consult and the other from Pew, showing that the majority of voters believe that teachers should be vaccinated before schools are re-opened in full.  Morning Consult found that 55% of voters held this view:

Pew’s results were even more resounding, showing that 59% of voters say that reopening schools should wait until all teachers who want the vaccine have received it:

Here in NYC, though teachers are on the huge priority list to be vaccinated,  thousands of teachers and other school staff are still on waiting lists, according to a statement put out yesterday by the UFT :

“The UFT represents more than 120,000 teachers, guidance counselors, paraprofessionals and other school-based members. Even putting the most positive spin on the city's numbers, there are tens of thousands of staff who have not yet had access to the vaccine," said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers.

As of this week, the UFT vaccination program has matched 23,000 UFT members who want the vaccine with health care providers. Based on the number of doses the providers have had available, roughly 8,000 have already been vaccinated. We do not receive names, only total tallies, of those who received an appointment through the UFT program.

We have encouraged our members to also apply for vaccines through other city and state sources.  We have no way of knowing how many have been successful in getting vaccinated through these sources.

The Mayor claimed yesterday that about 30,000 of the DOE’s 120,000 total school staffers have now received the COVID-19 vaccine via the city program.  Even assuming this figure is accurate, it clearly isn’t enough.

The Trump administration sent separate shipments of vaccines to pharmacies that were supposed to be used  in an expedited fashion exclusively for nursing home residents, to ensure that they would be vaccinated as soon as possible; why couldn't President Biden do the same for schools?  

For the sake of our teachers, our students and schools, not to mention his own popularity, Biden should make this his mission, instead of requiring that students take stressful and pointless exams that will yield highly unreliable and inequitable results, especially during the current crisis.

John Oliver features the Pineapple on his takedown of standardized testing

Check out last night's hilarious take-down of the insanity of standardized testing in this country by John Oliver; including the infamous
"Hare and the Pineapple" passage, which was  part of the NY 8th grade ELA exam in 2012.  This passage was exposed first on this blog the day after the exam was given and quickly went viral.  

But the real scandal is that before that, this  absurd passage and its associated ridiculous questions had been used by Pearson in their standardized exams in Florida, Illinois, Delaware, New Mexico, Arkansas, Alabama and other states for at least seven years before the New York media picked up on the story. Every time, students had been confused, teachers and parents complained, and yet Pearson kept recycling the questions, over and over again.


Below is the video from last night's how; to the right is a screenshot of our blog.

NYC Teacher supports parents opting their children out of standardized testing and wishes she could as well!

As we have spoken out against high-stakes testing this year, after our family was first directly affected by it through our third-grade son, we have had the wonderful experience of connecting with like-minded parents in New York and across the country who are also determined to put education back into the hands of educators.

We have also heard from many teachers who, unlike parents, are often under the direct threat of being fired for speaking out against run-away testing in our schools. We would like to put forward, with her permission, the thoughts of one such teacher working in Brooklyn. What follows are her words, taken from our recent correspondence with her, with comments from us interspersed in italics.

We wish this teacher’s experiences were unusual. But increasingly this is the norm in our public schools. Professional educators across the country are being prevented from exercising their best professional judgment and are actually punished for responding to children as individuals --all in the name of “standards” and “accountability.”

Our position is simple: we want our children to be educated by teachers like this one, who care about children and learning, who recognize and protest counterproductive teaching methods that are forced on them by the state. We will not rest until parents and teachers are once again in charge of education policy, and teachers are free to use their knowledge and expertise to make learning the joyous experience it should be for all our children.

If you are interested in this issue, please attend the forum Tuesday night, April 17, at 5:30 pm, on the new teacher evaluation system and high-stakes testing at Murry Bergtraum HS; more info at the Changes the Stakes website. – Anne Stone and Jeff Nichols

Dear Mr. Nichols and Ms. Stone,

I would like to thank you for speaking out against standardized testing and making the courageous choice to opt-out of the tests. In my eight years as a NYC Public School teacher, I have seen that the tests are patently unfair and detrimental to real learning. I have half-jokingly said many times that the ELA tests are a part of a conspiracy to make kids hate reading. Make eight-year-olds sit at a desk for an hour and a half without talking or getting up, reading "passages" that may or may not be relevant or interesting to them, and answering questions they are told have only one correct answer - even when those questions are subjective ("which detail is the most important?") or debatable ("why did the author include dialogue in the fourth paragraph?"). Ever since my school made me attend the most recent "Test Prep Workshop" at Teachers College, I have fantasized about all of my students committing an act of civil disobedience and handing in blank tests. I doodle print/web ad campaigns targeted at kids across the city to discourage them from taking the tests ("STATE TESTS CAUSE COOTIES! PENCILS DOWN, KIDS!").
I am still weighing the potential for change against the probable loss of my job and teaching license, but if there is anything that I can do to help your cause, or any suggestions that you can offer me to help mobilize parents in my school, please let me know.

After this initial contact, she shared with us a letter she sent out to friends of hers, referring to her having joined our parent group:

Never content to "leave things be," I've become involved with a group of parents in NYC who feel that the over-reliance on standardized testing is both dumbing down education and perpetuating socioeconomic inequality. These parents have chosen to protest the tests by keeping their children home on test days or by asking their children to hand in blank tests. They feel that since punitive measures for noncomplying or underperforming teachers and schools are built into the premise of high-stakes testing, the responsibility to change the system lies first and foremost with the parents. When I asked them how I can help, they suggested that I share my story with any non-educator friends who will listen, and hope that they will speak out since - unlike me - they have nothing to lose. So, here goes nothing: 

At my own school, the Extended Day enrichment programs in Art, Music, and Social Studies were recently put on hiatus for eight weeks so that students and teachers could conduct mandatory "test prep" during that time. This decision was made by the administration without consulting teachers, students, or parents. The groupings for these test prep periods were created and assigned based on the results of ONE predictive assessment. So, for example, a 3rd grader who reads above grade level but has oppositional defiance disorder and filled in all the wrong bubbles on purpose, was placed in the same group as another 3rd grader with multiple cognitive delays who reads at a Kindergarten level.

Even more egregiously, the "learning objectives" during these test prep periods were mandated by the administration based on this same data, with no input from teachers or consideration of how the question was asked. For example, I was told that based on the data I MUST teach my group of students how to identify details in a text that support a main idea, because "they all got question 10 wrong" - never mind that question 10 asked students to write a full essay based on a nonfiction article, something that has never been taught in 3rd grade and is not part of the state standards OR the Common Core Learning standards for that grade level. (Our staff developer from Teachers College said that it was most likely included as a "pilot" question for future years' tests). It's unlikely that none of these kids know how to identify supporting details and far more likely that these kids had no idea what to do when they were confronted with two full blank lined pages. 

This year's New York State English Language Arts test asks students as young as seven years old to sit for 90 minutes straight reading passages and answering multiple-choice questions. Students are allowed one five-minute break, during which they may not talk or look at each other, and are to be strongly discouraged from using the restroom (this information was shared by a staff developer who had spoken to people on the state level). Even more absurd, the state strongly recommends that students with disabilities who receive extended time as a testing accommodation take the full time completing the test, and proctors should not end the testing period early even if students claim to be finished - which means that students with autism, ADHD, dyslexia, cognitive delays, and/or emotional disturbance are being subjected to a three-hour block of testing, three days in a row, for two successive weeks.

This last observation speaks to a major issue parents and teachers are raising: the testing “accommodations” for special-education students have the perverse result that children with attention problems are compelled to concentrate for twice as long as their neurotypical peers. But for “typical” kids the testing experience can also be overwhelming. In a subsequent letter, this teacher shared with us an anecdote that says it all:

The topic of the test came up during a reading lesson a few weeks ago, before "test prep" officially began. One boy in my class put his head down and started crying. I took him out of the room to talk to him after the lesson. He said that he doesn't like talking about the test because he's worried he might fail. This boy is highly intelligent, reads above grade level, and qualified for a g/t program. I told him that there was no reason he had to worry - that the test is just a reading test and he's an excellent reader. Unfortunately the principal was in the vicinity and she chewed me out the next day for the way I responded to the boy. She told me that I needed to tell him that it's up to him whether he passes or fails - whether he takes the test seriously or chooses to fool around!