A message from Governor Cuomo: It's that time of year again!

By New Paltz based artist, Matt Maley

Come learn about threats to student privacy at NPE conference April 25-26 and much more!

The Network for Public Education is having our second annual national conference April 25-26 in Chicago.  Last year’s conference in Austin was a blast, and this year promises to be even better.  Check the NPE website , and the full schedule of events here.

You can see the keynote addresses will feature terrific speakers such as Karen Lewis, Yong Zhao, and Jitu Brown. Panels will include Nancy Carlsson-Paige Deborah Meier, Jesse Hagopian, Mercedes Schneider, Monty Neill, Dr. Kevin Welner, Carol Burris, Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig,  bloggers Jennifer Berkshire (Edushyster) and Peter Greene, and many more.

Diane Ravitch, NPE's President and co-founder, will moderate a conversation with NEA president Lily Eskelson and AFT President Randi Weingarten. I expect Diane will ask some probing questions in her inimitable fashion.

We will also discuss student privacy.  Last July, after inBloom was defeated, Rachael Stickland of Colorado and I formed a new national group called the Parent Coalition to Protect Student Privacy.  (You can join our mailing list by signing up here.) Rachael and I will be speaking on a panel about the continuing threats to student privacy and autonomy posed by the sharing of personal information with ed tech vendors, along with high school student Nathan Ringo of Minnesota, who challenged his school’s use of computers to monitor students,  and Cynthia Liu of K12 Network, who helped lead the battle against Los Angeles school’s billion dollar IPad purchase, which is still under investigation by the FBI and contributed to the departure of Dr. John Deasy, LAUSD superintendent. 

For hotel accommodations, rooms are still available at both the Drake (Hilton.com) where the conference will be held, and Residence Inn (Marriott.com) nearby.  There may be some group discounts still available.  Check the registration link here.  If that doesn't work, you can try the reservations desk at 866-596-7890, and request the Network for Public Education room block. But in any case, please come!

Flawed state budget bill gives parents more reasons to opt out

On Tuesday night, a state budget bill was approved that doubles down on high-stakes testing and removes any local input– with student "growth scores" on the state exams linked to teacher ratings in a uniform evaluation system. Teachers must do well in terms of student scores to achieve an effective rating. If not, they cannot get tenure, and they risk losing their jobs if found to be ineffective two years in a row. Teacher and student surveys cannot be used in any local evaluation system and the State Education Dept. will be tasked with creating new "student learning objectives" or assessments in all the subjects and grades that do not currently have a state exam. Schools must hire "independent" evaluators to observe and assess the teachers in addition to principals and/or school staff. If districts don't adopt this system by mid-November they will lose any increase in state funding. A good summary of the new teacher evaluation system is described here – as well as other aspects of the bill, including an aggressive receivership program, in which struggling schools can be converted into charter schools without any vote of the parents (which is what the existing state law requires.)

The entire bill is posted here, Assembly vote here, and the Senate vote here. The bill was approved despite the opposition of the NY State United Teachers, the NYC Principals Union, and the NYS PTA, (but not apparently the UFT). The Council of State Superintendents and NY State School Boards Association pointed out this is the fourth deeply- flawed teacher evaluation system to be adopted in five years: "The well-known definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result." Here is some of the angry reaction from educators after the bill passed.

Now parents are faced with a limited set of choices. The ELA exams are scheduled for April 14-16. Class Size Matters and NYS Allies for Public Education, our statewide coalition, urge all parents of students in grades 3-8 to opt their children out of these faulty, unreliable and excessive exams. Some of the reasons offered by NYSAPE as well as sample opt out letters you can use are here. NYC-based Change the Stakes offers additional reasons and opt out letters here. Lisa Nielsen, also known as Innovative Educator, lists more reasons here. Last year over 60,000 students did refuse the state exams, according to the State Education Department, and in a statewide survey of NY districts, more than 35 percent of superintendents said at least 5 percent of their eligible students opted out. Twenty-three percent of superintendents reported opt outs at 10 percent or more. Not a single school or district experienced any penalty or any loss of funding.

I would add another reason to opt out relates to serious privacy concerns, with Pearson collecting much personal student information via the exams, and as we learned recently, closely monitoring student social media during and after the tests. The new state law gives parents yet more cause to opt out: to express their vehement opposition to the way parent voices are being ignored, while our schools, teachers, and students are increasingly defined by means of one-dimensional, badly designed and unreliable high-stakes exams. If you are a NYC parent and willing to gather information on opt outs at your school, please send an email to changethestakes@gmail.com.

Other articles and blogs about reasons to opt-out of standardized tests:

Why are Teachers and Students Opting Out of Standardized Testing? -The Nation

Why my children opt-out of standardized testing- and yours should too -Quartz

4 Reasons parents want to opt kids out of standardized tests (It's not just about the Common Core)- AL.com

Ira Shor: Why You Should Opt Out Your Children from State Testing- Diane Ravitch's Blog

Why We Chose to Opt Out- The Huffington Post Blog

Is the tug of war on education policy between liberal "reform proponents" and the unions, as the NY Times argues, or the 1% and nearly everyone else?

NY Times ran a front page article on Wednesday, focused on the tug of war for Hilary Clinton’s soul, supposedly between the teacher unions and the big donors, mostly hedge fund operators, who want to privatize public schools and ramp up high-stakes testing, weaken teacher tenure and base their evaluations on student test scores. Value-added test based teacher evaluation has proved to be highly unreliable, and many expert groups, including the American Statistical Association and the National Academy of Sciences, have concluded that it could have damaging impact on morale and the quality of education.   

In the article, the hedgefunders make it clear that they will threaten to withhold their contributions if Hillary does not adopt their positions:

“This is an issue that’s important to a lot of Democratic donors,” said John Petry, a hedge fund manager who was a founder of the Harlem Success Academy, a New York charter school. “Donors want to hear where she stands.”

Yet in the process of writing about this ideological battle, the reporter, Maggie Haberman, characterizes Democrats for Education Reform, one of the principle hedge fund-backed lobby groups as a “left of center group,” which is absurd.  For some reason, DFER has managed to persuade reporters that it has any liberal credentials, despite the fact that as Diane Ravitch pointed out, the California Democratic Party has repudiated it.  

Parents Across America wrote an open letter to the NPR ombudsman in 2011, objecting to the fact that Claudio Sanchez, the NPR reporter, had called DFER a “liberal” organization, while quoting their criticism of the progressive participants in the anti-corporate reform Save Our Schools march in DC.   

We also pointed out that DFER’s founder, hedge fund operator Whitney Tilson, admitted that the only reason he put “Democrats” in the organization’s title and focused on convincing Democrats to adopt their pro-privatization agenda was that GOP leaders were already in agreement with most of their positions.  The following is an excerpt from a film made by Tilson called “A Right Denied”:

“The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…”

In addition, by characterizing the struggle on education policy as being a conflict primarily between the teacher unions and big donors, the reporter misses the boat.  Indeed, the only mention of parents in the piece implies that they are allied with the DFER privateers: “Reform proponents include donors, but also a cross section of parents and business advocates.”   

Hopefully NY Times readers and especially Hillary will smart enough to reject this claim, if they merely looked at Governor Cuomo’s plunging popularity.  Cuomo’s poll numbers are dropping like a stone, largely because his positions on education are in thrall to his big donors in the DFER/hedgefund crowd.  He has pushed hard on test-based teacher evaluation and other favorite talking points of the corporate reform contingent.   

According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, Cuomo’s approval ratings on education are at a tepid 28% - while 63% of voters reject his views on school reform.  65% of voters reject the notion that teacher tenure should be based on student test scores; 71% reject the idea that teacher pay should be based on scores, and 55% trust the teacher unions on education, compared to 28% who trust Cuomo. 

And the overwhelming rejection of Cuomo's views is shared among rural, suburban, urban voters, Republicans and Democrats alike.

Interestingly, instead of citing any of the many polls that show voters overwhelmingly reject the corporate reform/hedgefund education agenda,  the NY Times article uncritically links to a leaked “memo” from Joe Williams of DFER, to “Board members and Major Donors,” citing polling results that supposedly show that “voters agree with our policies.”  

But in the memo, Williams fails to reveal the actual questions – or what it might actually mean that 69% of voters feel that education is on the “wrong track”.  After a decade or more of increasingly severe test-based accountability, many voters are indeed weary of the focus on testing and test prep, and the disruption and damaging cycle of closing neighborhood schools, and so reject the DFER agenda that is based on more of the same.

Another recent poll from GBA Strategies, conducted for In the Public Interest and the Center for Popular Democracy went unmentioned by the NY Times. Unlike the DFER survey the full questions and answers were released, revealing that most voters do indeed reject the corporate reform agenda. Voters see lack of parental involvement as their biggest education concern, followed by too much testing, funding cuts and overly large class sizes. School choice came in last on a list of their priorities.

Let’s hope for more accurate and less biased education reporting from the mainstream media in the future.  The tug of war on education is not primarily between liberal reformers and the teachers union – but between the 1% and nearly everyone else.