Parent Across America submits proposals for ESEA reauthorization

Parents Across America wrote to Senator Harkin, starting the letter this way:

Dear Senator Harkin,

Your proposed revisions to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act show that you and the HELP Committee have listened to some of the concerns voiced by parents and others about the problems with No Child Left Behind.

The letter was followed by a list of proposals Parents Across America wish to see excluded in the new legislation as well as items that they recommend be included.

Below are three of the listed recommendations for inclusion:

• Less emphasis on standardized testing and more reliable accountability and assessment practices including local, teacher-designed assessments supplemented with teacher and parent surveys and site visits.

• A full range of parent involvement opportunities including a stronger parent voice in decision making at the school, district, state, and national levels.

• The right of parents to opt their children out of standardized tests.

Grumpy Educators hopes that Senator Harkin, the full committee, and the U.S. Congress pays attention to the concerns of parents, community members, and taxpayers.

Parents Across America Reject Conditional Waivers

Among the growing number of groups, Parents Across America issued the following press release indicating their rejection of Secretary of Education Duncan's plan to offer states conditional waivers from NCLB regulations.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 10, 2011

Contacts:
Natalie Beyer, (919) 382-2823
Pamela Grundy, (704) 806-0410
Leonie Haimson, (917) 435-9329
Karran Harper Royal, (504) 722-8174
Rita Solnet, (561) 289-7333

National organization Parents Across America rejects Duncan’s “waiver” proposal and calls for complete overhaul of No Child Left Behind

The national organization Parents Across America opposes the proposal by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan to offer “waivers” to states, exempting them from provisions of the law known as No Child Left Behind if they adopt education policies favored by Duncan.

While Parents Across America (PAA) agrees that No Child Left Behind is an unrealistic, rigid and punitive law, the waivers that Duncan has now proposed are likely to be equally bad, if not worse. The Department of Education could force more states to adopt the Common Core Curriculum thus continuing to ignore the fact that it is illegal for the federal government to impose a national curriculum. The proposal is also likely to expand the destructive agenda of over-testing, school closings, and privatization, despite the fact that these policies have no scientific evidence to support them and are causing tremendous distress in communities across the nation.

Natalie Beyer, school board member in Durham NC, says: “Parents agree that American students are spending too much class time on standardized testing, but these new proposals would do nothing to help. Instead, proposed waivers would further extend federal control over local school issues. We request a study from the General Accounting Office of how much No Child Left Behind has already cost states and local districts and the estimated costs of implementing Common Core Standards under Race to the Top. We implore Congress to include parents, teachers and students in an immediate thorough overhaul of NCLB before going any further down this dangerous road.”

Adds Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters, “Duncan’s heavy-handed and prescriptive approach would only continue the trend of spending billions to build up the bureaucracy and provide excessive profits to testing companies and consultants, while teachers are being laid off and class sizes are growing throughout the country. Whether the system of rewards and punishments will be based on value-added test scores instead of absolute goals, the result is the same for our schools and our children: more money and time spent on testing and test prep instead of real learning.”

Says Karran Harper Royal of the Pyramid Community Parent Resource Center in New Orleans, where more than 70% of students now attend charter schools, “Race to the Top has been far worse than NCLB and has done little to help our most academically needy students. Yet what Arne Duncan is now proposing through these “waivers” could produce even worse outcomes for our children.”

Rita Solnet of Palm Beach County School District Curriculum Council agrees: “Numerous studies conclude that incentives linked to high stakes tests do not increase learning. In fact, long term studies conclude this leads to a climate of cheating and gaming the system to survive. Every month we read of another major cheating scandal created by high-stakes testing. Stop wasting taxpayer money on failed policies. I am pleased Secretary Duncan acknowledged the destructive flaws within NCLB. NCLB is a train wreck. Let’s not replace it with another one. Let’s do this the right way so every child, regardless of disability, ELL status, family income level can be assured a high quality public education delivered by respected professionals.”

Pamela Grundy of Mecklenburg Area Coming Together in Charlotte, NC concludes, “We need real reforms based on evidence, and partnerships with parents, teachers and communities, not a unilateral and autocratic agenda imposed from above. As parents watching our children’s education suffer, we are saying, “Enough.”

NUT Report: Who's confused?

Parents, community members, non-educators, and taxpayers across the nation have concerns that go ignored or trivialized by State and federal entities driving so-called education reform and by mainstream media. Kudos to Florida's The Gradebook for the interview with Rita Solnet, co-founder of Parents Across America.

Grumpy Educators supports Parents Across America, a grassroots movement, which calls into question expensive federal and state initiatives including those that link expanded standardized testing starting in preschool and a national student longitudinal database, with an urgent need to reform the nation's schools. Parents Across America has chapters in 26 states. Read the interview here.

NUT = No Unnecessary Testing

Parents Across America: Stop wasting our tax dollars on failed reforms

Rita Solnet is a co-founder of Parents Across America and a parent and businesswoman from Florida. She spoke at the SOS March on Washington D.D. rally in a speech titled: "Stop wasting our tax dollars on failed reforms."

"I’ve witnessed how this obsessive focus on standardized tests converted schools to test prep factories. Schools no longer have time for Music, Arts, Literature, PE, Social Studies, Languages, Civics. So don’t talk to me about Innovation. No, you can’t fool me.

I don’t want to burst your bubble test, but this is not good education!

I’ve watched how we now teach our children how to guess at bubble tests– as if the answer to all life’s problems will be placed in front of them to choose.

I see how everything rides on these scores–teachers salaries, their jobs, whether the school remains open–it all falls on the shoulders of that one child taking that one test on that one day. Is that what you mean by Game Changer? You can’t fool me.

We are abandoning entire segments of our nation for the sake of collecting useless data — that’s right –useless. The children nor the teacher never see the results. Right answers, wrong answers, where they need to improve–who knows? They never see it. Does that make sense to any of you here?

I’m here today to add my voice to yours to appeal to common sense in education.

I’m here today to say stop wasting my tax dollars on failed reforms. NCLB never worked–it put us in this mess.

I’m asking this Administration and Capitol Hill to listen with a Capital L. Listen to those in the trenches — Listen to informed parents — Listen to your constituents.

I’m not alone. There are many parents here today. We’re here today to give the Dept of Education a Robo Call of our own! Right?

I’m the co founder of Parents Across America and we are here today in full force.

Our members scrimped and saved for months to be here. We lobbied all day Thursday in appointments on Capitol Hill. Parents Across America are here today — not just from DC–not just from Maryland or Virginia–we are here today from:

Seattle, Spokane, from San Francisco and Los Angeles—from Phoenix, Denver, Madison, Wisconsin and from Chicago, Portland, Oregon and New Orleans– from North Carolina, from Pennsylvania, from New Jersey, from New York and from Florida."

Read her speech in its entirety here.

NUT Report: Photos from SOS March on D.C.

Rally at the Ellipse followed by a march to the White House. Speakers at the rally included Linda Darling-Hammond from Stanford, Diane Ravitch, Matt Damon, and Rita Solnet, one of the co-founders of Parents Across America (Florida) and others.

CNN reports on Matt Damon's participation here.

No news if the White House has accepted a rescheduling of their meeting request. More details on this event as they emerge.

SOS March in D.C.: Supported nationally by parents, community members, and taxpayers

I found the handful of posts on the SOS March on Washington found in Alexander Russo's blog interesting. Is it possible that journalists are completely misinformed about the reactions in communities across the nation to federal education reform initiatives? Or are these views part of a continuing pattern in the narrative by education reform advocates to trivialize and diminish the extent of public concerns over federal education reform initiatives. Instead of fact-based analysis, one journalist follows the "getting personal" track, commenting on Diane Ravitch and Whitney Tilson, two individuals I had never heard of until recently; whatever their "disagreement," it has no relevance to an examination of current reform initiatives. A few of the journalists/bloggers suggest the SOS March is a teacher event, and ignore the thousands of parents and community members who support it. Then, other commenters are clearly misinformed when they write that those who attend the event should have some solutions to offer. Solutions have been offered, supported by research and evidence and ignored.

Since there are many layers to the federal education reform initiatives, Grumpy Educators has focused on the following:

1) Increased federally imposed standardized testing is unnecessary. There are sufficient assessments in place to provide data on student achievement. The so-called formative assessment is a wasteful effort. Now there is an initiative to have standardized data for preschoolers. Schools are already centers for test preparation and test-centric instruction. Simply stated, testing should not be increased and testing should not be the purpose of the classroom.
2) Accountability matters, but it must be reasonable and rely on the plentiful research and evidence that exists. The last decade of high stakes assessment did not yield the promised results. What benefit is there to continue this mandate that has a track record of negative results?
3) The use of student data to build a national longitudinal database on students from preschool through college is another expensive initiative with insufficient rationale. FERPA was enacted by the U.S. Congress to protect student information. A recent regulatory proposal by the U.S. DOE removes parental consent from the sharing of with some agencies. Is it reasonable for the public to voice concerns over privacy, security, and potential use of data on the nation's children?

Tweet, fax, or call your federal legislator today and tell them these policies do not advance an educated population.

NUT Report: Funding for pre-school testing announced

With the debt-ceiling debate raging and the urgency to cut spending, the rationale and priority for a new Race to the Top pre-school standardized assessment initiative go unexplained. States will compete for $500 million in funds to develop tests that are intended to measure "academic performance but also children’s social, emotional, physical and artistic readiness for kindergarten." This assessment is intended to assist Kindergarten teachers in preparing targeted learning opportunities and are not to be used for any rewards or punishments for students, teachers, or schools.

Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post noted that in 2003 when President Bush suggested giving all children in Head Start programs a standardized test, reaction seemed different:

Critics howled. Early childhood development experts said preschoolers are too young to be evaluated by standardized tests in part because they don’t have sufficient ability to comprehend assessment cues. The plan was shelved.

A recent article in The Nation notes concerns about this initiative.

The kindergarten-entry assessments are “probably the most radical part of the [Race to the Top early learning] program,” acknowledges Sara Mead, a pre-K expert and senior associate partner at Bellweather Education Partners, a nonprofit Washington, DC, consulting firm. “It would drive a big shift towards much more measurement of early learning program outcomes, which parts of the early-childhood education community have traditionally opposed.… But these are not intended to be assessments to determine whether or not an individual child is ‘ready’ for kindergarten, and they never have high stakes for kids, in terms of denying them entry into kindergarten.”

Laura Bornfreund, a policy analyst at the New America Foundation’s Early Learning Initiative, has written that pre-K assessment remains controversial:

Concerns over inappropriate assessments of young children are rampant, so it bears repeating that appropriate kindergarten readiness assessments are not “tests” in the way adults might think of them. They do not require children to sit down with a bubble sheet and number-two pencil. Often they are based on teachers’ observations of children’s drawings or playtime interactions. For many literacy assessments teachers conduct them by sitting down with students, one by one, to ask them questions about sounds and letters or to point to pictures. The idea is to create a low-pressure experience. But there are still many questions in the research community about how to ensure that assessments are administered in ways that are sensitive to a child’s age and stage of development.

Pop Quiz

1) What is the problem this new assessment will solve?
2) Will the data collected become part of the State Longitudinal Database Systems?
3) Will the data be made available to other agencies and researchers without parental consent in accordance with the proposed regulatory changes to Family Education Rights and Protection Act?

Answers:
1) No one knows, but it's expensive.
2) No one knows, change is hard.
3) No one knows, we have to do something.

I am not an educator, not a policy wonk, nor a pre-K expert, but I am taxpayer and a NUT - No Unnecessary Testing. Peanuts anyone?

States Where Parents Oppose Excessive Testing

Click on the image to see it larger. More states identified. Concern and action increase.

The NUT Report: Florida Parents Raise the Roof

Parents, extended family members, and members of communities across the nation are on the same page: No Unnecessary Testing (NUT). The opposition to the classrooms as centers for test prep and testing rather than centers of learning continues to grow in numbers and in volume. Last night, U.S. Representative Ted Deutch and U.S. Department of Education representative Michael Yudin got an earful from "hundreds of angry parents and teachers from Palm Beach and Broward counties."

A report on the Parents Across America website describes a recent event at Princeton University where Secretary of Education Arne Duncan addressed U.S. education policies. A student asked about the risks and challenges of the national assessment effort. His response is included in the article:

“...there are risks in everything” and “we shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” There is a healthy “competition” between the two consortia developing these assessments; and states can opt out of one group and join another. Though there may be “a couple of choppy years till we get it right, and “mistakes” will be made, there is a “level of thoughtfulness” behind this effort that is extraordinary, and we must get “to this point as soon as possible” if we want to compete with other advanced nations. (Why? Has any other nation in the world adopted these highly expensive and complex computer-based performance assessments – and so quickly and on such a massive scale?).

According to the same report, he got frustrated and said "You're not listening to me."

Who is not listening?


http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/schools/parents-teachers-rail-against-weight-given-to-students-1424196.html