South Carolina: Parent Opposition and Resistance on Ed Reform Initiatives

For Immediate Release
March 27, 2012

Contact Person: Sarah Johnson
Phone: (803) 920-4058, (843) 819-8933
Email: CVedu20@gmail.com

Local Parent/Teacher Advocacy Group Welcomes US Secretary of Education to Town

Charleston, SC – Charleston Area Community Voice for Education, an affiliate of Parents Across America, extends a welcome to US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, who will be participating in a local round-table discussion on educational reform and touring James Simons Elementary School on Friday. The advocacy group is excited that local leaders and educators will be participating in the event.

Sarah Shad Johnson, a parent of children in Charleston County Schools and co-founder of Community Voice, says, “The timing of Secretary Duncan’s visit comes at a critical time when our state legislators are discussing whether or not to support the adversarial Common Core State Standards, as well as bills regarding school choice, charter school expansion, and tax credits for private schools; our State Superintendent of Education seems to be embracing a controversial stand on the teaching profession; and the focus here in Charleston County appears to be only on experimental, questionable, and expensive initiatives, as opposed to goals of increased learning opportunities.”

Peter Smyth, a retired educator and administrator, and also a co-founder of Community Voice, says, “After a career in education and research into educational reform, I have come to these conclusions: while South Carolina Superintendent Zais has applied for a waiver to No Child Left Behind, his proposals reflect those of Secretary Duncan and the current and previous administrations, policies which have not achieved their goals and have made raising test scores and graduation rates, rather than meaningful learning, the default goals of American education. These are policies that are not found in any other high performing countries. To paraphrase another leader, the Duncan/Zais reforms are not the solution to the problems; they are the problem. I believe that teachers’ and parents’ seats at the table have been replaced by philanthropists, corporations, highly paid consultants, and politically-driven think tanks. Most importantly, I do not believe the current reforms bode well for my granddaughter, about to enter public school in Charleston.”

Secretary Duncan’s visit also coincides with an organized national demonstration at the US Department of Education in Washington, D.C., opposing Duncan’s educational reforms. Currently, there is significant national concern over the direction of Secretary Duncan’s leadership. With thousands of parents, educators, state legislators, school districts, and superintendents across the country protesting U.S. Department of Education policies, Community Voice is concerned about the pressure Duncan has placed on South Carolina, including a verbal lashing of state leaders who have considered dumping the Common Core State Standards.

Community Voice supports:

• effective reforms, such as reduced class size


• experienced teachers


• increased time for teacher professional development and planning


• relevant content supporting critical thinking


• sufficient and equitable funding


• diversity in schools


• appropriate use of technology


• meaningful parent involvement

Community Voice opposes:

• privatization of public schools


• punitive high-stakes standardized testing


• school closings


• ignoring the influence of poverty

Community Voice is committed to moving education forward rather than maintaining the status quo policies of the last ten years. For more information about Community Voice, contact (843) 819-8933 or CVedu20@gmail.com. For more information on Parents Across America, please visit www.parentsacrossamerica.org .

Anti-Common Core Resolution questions constitutionality, evidence, and costs

ALEC is a controversial organization that draws ire from public school advocates for its support of vouchers and charter schools. Recently, Jeb Bush, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Achieve, all supporters of common core initiatives, seemed to have "gained ground" with the organization. However, this month its educational task force considered a document signed by 350 prominent education policymakers, researchers, teachers and parents titled Closing the Door on Innovation, which opposes Common Core initiatives. The result was an approved resolution that could be as model legislation to be introduced in state legislatures. This effort was sponsored by the American Principles Project, The Goldwater Institute, and the Washington Policy Center.

The model legislation can be found in The Growing Tide Against National Standards is not difficult to read and understand. Here is one highlight:

WHEREAS, when no less than 22 states face budget shortfalls and Race to the Top funding for states is limited, $350 million for consortia to develop new assessments aligned with the CCSSI standards will not cover the entire cost of overhauling state accountability systems, which includes implementation of standards and testing and associated professional development and curriculum restructuring; and

According to Ed Week coverage, although the education task force approved the resolution, the ALEC board must take action.

But it's not final, or official ALEC policy, unless it is approved by the organization's board of directors. No word yet on when there might be a decision on that. If the board approves it, the package is the sort of thing that would would join other types of model legislation ALEC has crafted for states' use.

This resolution stands as irrefutable evidence of the widespread disagreement regarding common core initiatives, irrespective of ideology, and an event that should be followed.

Who pays? Who benefits?

Florida's Charter School "Boom"

According to Charter Schools USA, new Florida legislation "has sparked a 38 percent increase in charters applying to open, or nearly 100 more this year over last year’s 252. The state has more than 400 charter schools, the third highest number in the country. More than 130,000 Florida students, or 5 percent of its public-schooled students, attended charters in 2009-2010." This new law provides an easier process for opening new charters for those who have demonstrated academic and financial success.

Nevertheless, elected county school boards are still responsible for determining how many and which charter applications will be accepted. Some disagree with this process and suggest that an independent body should replace local control in these determinations. One proponent of such a change is Charter School USA CEO John Hage, who was an advisor to former Governor Jeb Bush and participated in the drafting of Florida law creating charter schools in 1996. Local school boards express concerns over further erosion of local control.

Polk County rejected Charter School USA's request to open a charter school citing a failure to demonstrate compliance with "the state's new law for duplicating the programs of other high-performing charter schools." Charter School USA has decided to appeal this rejection to the State Board of Education.

Clay County schools is the largest county without any charter schools citing its existing quality programs as the reason. The Clay County school board is unconvinced that charters will exceed what the traditional schools already offer. However, School Board chairman Frank Ferrell worries that "lawmakers would further erode the limited oversight school districts have over charters."

“I think some of that authority is being taken away,” Ferrell said.

Read more in School Board's Getting Tough on Charter Applications.

Resolution proposed to NCTE to oppose common core standards...

This resolution was submitted to the National Council of Teachers of English for their consideration.

Schools Matter: Resolution: NCTE will oppose common core standards...: Resolution on National Standards and Tests Submitted to National Council of Teachers of English, Committee on Resolutions...

20 Things Students Want the Nation to Know About Education

NBC sponsored Education Nation is billed as a national summit on education. Panel after panel discussed and debated a wide variety of topics. Perhaps I am one more in the pool of parents, community members, or taxpayers who never heard of it. Could it be this important pool remains at the fringes of the national discussion?

Thanks to Lisa of the Innovative Educator blog, I learned that there was at least a student panel. This insightful blog is reposted below.

20 Things Students Want the Nation to Know About Education

It's rare for education reformers, policymakers, and funders to listen to those at the heart of education reform work: The students. In fact Ann Curry who hosted Education Nation's first student panel admitted folks at NBC were a little nervous about putting kids on stage. In their "Voices of a Nation" discussion, young people provided insight into their own experiences with education and what they think needs to be done to ensure that every student receives a world-class education. After the discussion Curry knew these students didn't disappoint. She told viewers, "Students wanted to say something that made a difference to you (adults) and they did. Now adults need to listen."

Below are the sentiments shared by these current and former students during the segment.

1. I have to critically think in college, but your tests don't teach me that.
   
2. We learn in different ways at different rates.
   
3. I can't learn from you if you are not willing to connect with me.
   
4. Teaching by the book is not teaching. It's just talking.
   
5. Caring about each student is more important than teaching the class.
   
6. Every young person has a dream. Your job is to help bring us closer to our dreams.
   
7. We need more than teachers. We need life coaches.
   
8. The community should become more involved in schools.
   
9. Even if you don't want to be a teacher, you can offer a student an apprenticeship.
   
10. Us youth love all the new technologies that come out. When you acknowledge this and use technology in your teaching it makes learning much more interesting.
    
11. You should be trained not just in teaching but also in counseling.
    
12. Tell me something good that I'm doing so that I can keep growing in that.
    
13. When you can feel like a family member it helps so much.
    
14. We appreciate when you connect with us in our worlds such as the teacher who provided us with extra help using Xbox and Skype
    
15. Our teachers have too many students to enable them to connect with us in they way we need them to.
    
16. Bring the electives that we are actually interested in back to school. Things like drama, art, cooking, music.
    
17. Education leaders, teachers, funders, and policy makers need to start listening to student voice in all areas including teacher evaluations.
    
18. You need to use tools in the classroom that we use in the real world like Facebook, email, and other tools we use to connect and communicate.
    
19. You need to love a student before you can teach a student.
    
20. We do tests to make teachers look good and the school look good, but we know they don't help us to learn what's important to us.

The students are ready to talk to us. How are we going to make time to listen and incorporate their voices into the policies and decisions that affect them?

*Panelists:
Nnamdi Asomugha, Cornerback - Philadelphia Eagles
Shadrack Boayke - Brentwook, NY
Colton Bradford - Mobile, AL
Ron Daldine - Auburn Hills, MI
Rayla Gaddy - Detroit, MI
Katie Oliveria - Las Vegas, NV

ED WEEK: In Common Core, Little to Cheer About

Andrew C. Porter has been an education reform advocate, supporting common core standards and assessments; however, he has changed his mind and expressed his current assessment in a recent Education Week article.

"In short, I hoped that new national curriculum standards would be better than the state standards they replaced, and that new student assessments would be better, too."

"I wish I could say that our progress toward common-core standards has fulfilled my hopes. Instead, it seems to me that the common-core movement is turning into a lost opportunity."

Common Core Standards

Using a "recognized content analysis tool," Porter participated in an analysis of the common core standards comparing them to existing math and English language arts standards in over 20 states. The resulting findings were "unexpected and troubling."

"The common-core standards do not represent a meaningful improvement over existing state standards."

When comparing these standards to those countries who are described as beating U.S. students and international exams, he finds other countries focus more on basic skills and less on higher order thinking skills. He wonders if the standards fail to achieve the "right" balance.

Common Core Assessment

Porter finds equally troubling concerns with regard to the common core assessments:

"But what I know so far about the work of the two multistate consortia developing the assessments isn’t promising. It sounds as if the new assessments may ignore state-of-the-art research and technological advances, settling for tests that are much like the ones we already have. Meanwhile, innovative work on assessments that’s been going on in the states has ground to a halt while everyone waits to see what the consortia come up with."

Porter concludes the common core et al may end up "much ado about nothing." He is, however, one more in a mounting number of voices questioning the effort.

From a taxpayer's point-of-view - who pays, who benefits?

Washington's Role in Education

Since some folk are "confused" over what the public is saying to federal mandates, here's a simple presentation.




"It’s time to reduce the federal role in education. How will the story end?"

http://blog.heritage.org/2011/08/04/washingtons-role-in-education-made-simple/

NUT Report: Parents Head to D.C. in July

Save Our Schools (SOS) was covered in the Washington Post by Valerie Strauss:

Rita Solnet is a Florida businesswoman, parent and education activist. She is a co-founder of the nonprofit Parents Across America.

Why, as a parent, are you involved with the SOS March?

As a business owner and as a 15 year volunteer in the school system, I’ve had a front row seat and witnessed our public education system in decline. I attribute it to NCLB’s fixation on high stakes tests and the obsession with privatizing public education. NCLB has robbed all children of a solid curriculum inclusive of arts, music, literature, language, PE, history along with reading, math and sciences in favor of drills and prep for mindless bubble tests. I’m angry.

Education cannot be treated as a corporate business. It is that simple. Children’s minds are not commodities to be bought, sold, and exchanged. I frankly don’t see policy makers or many legislators grasping the totality of this destruction. With those I’ve met, most have little knowledge of what is truly happening inside classrooms.

As a result of making decisions in a vacuum, they are not making the best possible decisions. In fact, they are illogical decisions.

The past two years I’ve witnessed multi billion dollar testing & technology companies being the sole beneficiaries of policy makers’ decisions — not our children. And I see children as collateral damage in a control struggle, it seems, with unions and political parties.

They must take this conflict into a conference room to devise workable contracts to resolve that situation. They must stop meddling in the classroom with desperate, ill-fated attempts to fix those issues.

As a parent, I’ve concluded that if we don’t step up and take action to ensure we are heard, who else will do so?

I am also a co-founder of Parents Across America. Our motto is: Our children. Our schools. Our voices must be heard. I believe this with all my heart.

What do you think this SOS March will accomplish?

This rally and March will accomplish a few goals.

1) It will open up a candid and genuine dialogue once and for all. No longer can a news network air a week of one-sided perspective.

2) It will send a message to Congress that NCLB must end as it stands today. It failed our children miserably for 9 years. It devastated public education unintentionally but undeniably.

3) It will heighten the awareness that this goes beyond “disgruntled teachers.” Participation of parents and business men and women will demonstrate this goes beyond the worn out rhetoric that this is merely a union issue or a band of whiny teachers. These are real issues facing millions of voters. We are fed up.

4) It will help to raise a red flag on reckless spending of federal education dollars on ill-fated reforms which all research shows have proven to fail.

SANDRA IN BREVARD SUPPORTS THE EVENT AND WISHES SHE COULD ATTEND.

I AM A NUT.

Education Reform: Basic Questions Go Unanswered

Billionaires donating their wealth to causes that are intended to improve the quality of life for humankind is not bad, evil, or conspiratorial. However, it is anti-democratic when those billionaires, in a highly organized effort, push out parents, the public, all critical views, and the taxpayer from any role whatsoever in shaping or reshaping the educational landscape. In an extraordinarily dramatic federal education reform policy, fueled by a multitude of non-profits funded by unending stream of dollars from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others, parent and local control has been lost.

News outlets have failed to provide basic descriptions, commentary, analysis, and critique. A few hundred articles have been published on the subject By and large, critical voices have been shut out completely. Questions that demand answers regarding elevated testing requirements, complex longitudinal data systems, and serious privacy concerns go unanswered, ignored, or trivialized. I do not recall electing non-profits to legislative and regulatory roles. Is the May 22 New York Times article a sign that current policies will finally get the media attention the public rightly deserves? Looks like the Times article got the attention of the Tampa Gradebook, so at least one Florida newspaper covered the story. Will the topic make it to Meet the Nation, Fox News, or talk radio in ways that ordinary people can understand? In the end, we are stuck with the goods.

In the the blogosphere, I found smart fact-based Conservative and liberal, Republican and Democrat, parents, community members, and education experts voicing legitimate and reasonable concerns. On the heels of the NY Times article, long-time blogger Susan Ohanian fills in significant details regarding the players and extent of the Gates Foundation influence. There are some surprises. Read the list of players and their funding sources here.

Ohanian also describes the apparent news blackout:

Wanting to see which "independent experts" reporters called upon to explain Race to the Top and the Common Core standards, I examined over 700 articles published between mid-May 2009 and mid-July 2010. I eliminated cites from state ed officials, union officials and politicos. This left me with 152 outside experts quoted in 414 articles. Of the 23 experts quoted five times or more, 15 have connections with institutions receiving Gates funding and 13 with strong charter advocacy institutions. Who doesn't gets cited, raised very troubling questions.

Frederick M. Hess, American Enterprise Institute Resident Scholar and Director of Education Policy Studies writes a blog for Education Week, is quoted in the NY Times article:

Mr. Hess, a frequent blogger on education whose institute received $500,000 from the Gates foundation in 2009 “to influence the national education debates,” acknowledged that he and others sometimes felt constrained. “As researchers, we have a reasonable self-preservation instinct,” he said. “There can be an exquisite carefulness about how we’re going to say anything that could reflect badly on a foundation.”

“Everybody’s implicated,” he added.

Something must change in this regard. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced that it was starting another foundation, called Teaching First and covered by Washington Post blogger Valerie Strauss.

The plan includes campaigns to reach out to parents, teachers, students, business and civic and religious leaders, and to build “strong ties to local journalists, opinion elites, and local/state policymakers and their staffs.” The plan explains how the organization will ensure “frequent placement ... in local media coverage of issues related to teacher effectiveness and equitable distribution of effective teachers” in accordance with the Gates approach.

The proposal calls for supporting local groups that promote the value-added evaluation systems, and who even get involved in unions so they can demand this approach in collective bargaining for teachers contracts.

The motives of billionaire venture capitalists are really not the issue in my opinion. The issue is a lack of critical analysis and inclusion of the public on the massive education reform initiative underway right now. Hess wrote an interesting blog titled "What We've Got Here Is...Failure to Communicate" stepping over the Gates controversy into the policy itself.

Even mainstream conservatives are being radicalized. Last weekend, standards guru Sandra Stotsky, a longtime champion of standards-based reform and generally regarded as an NCLB supporter, blasted the very notion of federal involvement in schooling. In an e-mail exchange regarding the Common Core, she wrote, "I've tried to think of sound federal policies in education (with positive effects on student achievement), and the closest I've come are the Land Grant Acts of the 19th century...In my lifetime, I can't think of ONE federal policy that has improved student achievement."

It's kind of amusing, really. The self-proclaimed reformers just can't imagine that, confronted with data showing that many children are poorly served, any sensible adult could look askance at their favored policies. When confronted with skepticism that the measures will work as intended, the would-be reformers ask with wide-eyed shock, "Are you willing to just let those children fail?" If a conservative House staffer suggests that maybe the feds lack the ability or purview to solve the problem, would-be reformers seem to think they've stepped through the looking glass.

The problem is deeper than a failure to communicate.

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