The City University community college system released a shocking statistic last week that roughly 80 percent of New York City high school graduates fall below proficient levels of reading, writing, and math and must take remedial courses before starting any classes.
It is the latest disclosure of our school system that shows how we are creating a lost generation of kids in a sub-standard educational system. It is a disgrace that the vast majority of kids going into the community college system would not have the most basic skills required of graduates. It shows how our schools are often churning out students and “making the numbers” — and failing our students.
Nearly 11,000 kids who came from city high schools needed remedial courses to re-learn the basics.
This should be seen as a far greater threat to our national security than terrorism or economic pressures. We are educating a population that simply cannot compete on a large scale with other nations that put greater effort and support behind education. Worse yet, we are widening the gulf between classes in our society of those people who are highly educated and affluent and those who are left with a remedial level of education. The failure in our school system has now shifted basic learning to the college level. Notably, many kids never go to college, so they are left without even remedial education.
We remain a country that maintains the highest level of war-making capabilities while disregarding the low performance levels of our schools. It is a trend that can only lead to problems in the future. We will become the world’s soldiers while other nations take the lead in science and the economy. This is not to say that we do not have a highly educated elite. However, we have a large unskilled and barely educated population going into a world that demands greater and greater sophistication in the workforce.
Source: CBS
But did the kids learn not to chew a pop tart into the shape of a gun?
The Shame of “School Reform” in New York City
By Diane Ravitch
April 27, 2012
http://dianeravitch.net/2012/04/27/the-shame-of-school-reform-in-new-york-city/
Once again, a large group of New York City public schools will close their doors, their staffs will be fired and replaced, and new schools will open. Among the schools that will be closed are Flushing High School, reputed to be the oldest school in the city, and John Dewey High School, once highly regarded for its progressivism but now burdened by a steady influx of low-performing students. (http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/04/26/with-panel-vote-once-venerable-city-schools-will-close/).
Some schools were saved by last-minute expressions of interest by the Borough President of Queens, Helen Marshall, and the chair of the State Assembly Education Committee, Cathy Nolan, which apparently sufficed to save Grover Cleveland High School in their borough.
As the closing of “failing” schools becomes an annual ritual, along with the opening of brand-new schools (some of which will eventually join the ranks of “failing” schools), it is time to ask about where accountability truly lies.
I wonder if it ever occurs to anyone in the New York City Department of Education that their own policies of closing schools and shuffling low-performing students around like checker pieces on a checker board have actually created “failing” schools. Every time they close a large high school with large numbers of low-performing students, those students are then pushed off into another large high school (like Dewey) that is doomed to “fail.”
Why doesn’t the leadership of the DOE ever take responsibility for helping schools that have disproportionate numbers of students who enter ninth grade with low test scores, including students with disabilities, homeless students, and students who are English language learners? Their methods of “reform” look like 52-pickup: Just throw the cards in the air and hope that somehow you come up with a winning hand.
Instead of providing resources, technical support, extra staff, or whatever the school needs to help students, the DOE declares that the school is “failing.”
Mayor Bloomberg took control of the schools in 2002. His reforms were put in place in September 2003. We are now in the ninth year of mayoral control with no checks or balances. The students in the “failing” schools started school when the Mayor was in charge. At what point can we say that the Mayor’s reforms have worked? Every time a school fails, the responsibility and accountability belong to the New York City Department of Education, which proves each time that it has no idea how to help schools improve.
No wonder that New York City voters (and public school parents) expressed their dissatisfaction with the Mayor’s policies in the latest poll. New Yorkers are tired of the parade of school closings and openings. (http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/04/24/poll-new-yorkers-want-new-city-school-policies-from-next-mayor/)
Accountability starts at the top. If school officials don’t know how to help schools, they should get out of the way and stop wrecking what is left of the public school system.
NY principals: A ‘wrecking ball’ of reform aimed at schools
By Valerie Strauss
Posted 04/25/2012
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/ny-principals-a-wrecking-ball-of-reform-aimed-at-schools/2012/04/24/gIQAB4lifT_blog.html
Excerpt:
This is an open letter that a group of New York principals sent this week to the New York State Board of Regents about school reform and the standardized testing regime. More than 1,400 New York State principals have signed a petition asking state education officials to rethink their reform agenda. You can read about that effort at http://www.newyorkprincipals.org and @nyprincipals on Twitter.
An Open Letter of Concern Regarding High-Stakes Testing and the School Reform Agenda of New York State
The past week has been a nightmare for New York students in Grades 3 through 8, their teachers and their principals. Not only were the New York State ELA [English Language Arts] exams too long and exhausting for young students, (three exams of 90 minutes each), they contained ambiguous questions that cannot be answered with assurance, problems with test booklet instructions, inadequate space for students to write essays, and reading comprehension passages that defy commonsense. In addition, the press reported a passage that relied on knowledge of sounds and music which hearing-impaired students could not answer and Newsday reported that students were mechanically ‘filling in bubbles’ due to exhaustion. Certainly the most egregious example of problems with the tests is the now infamous passage about the Hare and the Pineapple.
On Friday, Commissioner King offered no apologies in what appeared to be a hastily written press release regarding the Hare and the Pineapple passage. In that release, Commissioner King faults the media for not printing the complete passage (many did), and passes the buck by noting that a committee of teachers reviewed the passage. In short, he distances the State Education Department from its responsibility to get the tests right. Considering the rigor and length of the exams, as well as their use in the evaluation of educators and schools, one might have hoped that the State Education Department and Pearson would have reviewed the tests with more care.
For many of us, however, this is but the latest bungle in the so-called school reform movement in New York State. More than 1,400 New York State principals have repeatedly begged the department to slow down, pilot thoughtful change and avoid using student test scores as high-stakes measures. The recent ELA test debacle was foreseeable to those of us who lead schools and know from experience that you cannot make so many drastic changes to curriculum, assessment and educator evaluation in a short period of time, especially without listening to those who lead schools. The literature on leadership is clear. Effective leadership is about the development of followership. If truth be told, however, there are fewer and fewer followers of this State Education Department every day. The Pineapple, like the ‘plane being built in the air’, is now a symbol of the careless implementation of a reform agenda that will cost billions of dollars, without yielding the promised school improvement.
There are many who disparage our public schools in New York State. Although we acknowledge that improvements are needed, there is also much of which we are proud. We are proud of our tradition of New York State Regents examinations. We are proud that New York State students are second in the nation in taking Advanced Placement exams. We are proud of our Intel winners and the number of New York high schools on national lists of excellence. We are proud that our schools are second in the nation according to a comprehensive analysis of policy and performance conducted by the research group, Quality Counts.
We also know that too many of our schools are racially and socio-economically isolated with overwhelming numbers of students who receive little opportunity and support in their communities as well as in their schools. We cannot ignore deep-seated social problems while blindly believing that new tests, data warehousing systems and unproven evaluation systems are the answer. That view, in our opinion, is irresponsible and unethical.
This ill-conceived Race to the Top, recently critiqued by the National School Boards Association, is no more sensible than the race of the Hare and the Pineapple. Yet the New York State Education Department continues to enthusiastically push its agenda. Our schools are faced with contradictory and incomplete directives regarding high-stakes testing and evaluation, our teachers are humiliated by the thought of publicized evaluation numbers and our students are stressed by the unnecessary testing that has consumed precious learning time.
Mike,
The powers that be do not want to address the real issues of poverty and unequal resources. It’s easier to blame teachers.
Having spent years visiting poverty stricken family’s at home in NYC, the truth is that children of poverty enter the school system far behind those with higher incomes. They are generally segregated into school districts where their peers come from the same income level. The difference in equipment between the economically distressed and economically privileged school districts is huge. Finally, the NYC Mayoralty has been held for almost 20 years by two men who have serviced the wealthy plutocrats and disdained the less affluent. The current one Bloomberg, is an advocate of privatizing schools and has gratuitously kept attacking the teacher’s union there.
Finally, my years with NYC taught me the valuable lesson that whenever “shocking” reports/studies are publicized, they are usually being used to promote an agenda and one should be very suspicious of the statistical validity of what is being presented.
It is far worse than this. Listen to the oral arguments from the US Supreme Court on CSPAN. Six of those Justices hail from NYC- Scalia, Ginsburg, Alito, Sotomayor, Kagan and Breyer. Listen to their speech. 33rd Street and Third Avenue is pronounced “Turdy turd and a turd”. You cant fix a place like that! If you own a business somewhere in the world and you get an applicant who speaks like that and hails from NYC, think twice unless the job is shoveling coal. You certainly do not want them in a job where th public hears them speak or where they must read, write, add or subtract. Take Jay Leno for example. Why that guy is on national television is left to the imagination. Even late at night it is is disgracefull to America. And that Congressman King. Can anyone understand him? They are so snobby and look down their noses at anything West or South of Jersey. Strange beasts.
Class Matters. Why Won’t We Admit It?
By HELEN F. LADD and EDWARD B. FISKE
Published: December 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/opinion/the-unaddressed-link-between-poverty-and-education.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Excerpt:
Durham, N.C.
NO one seriously disputes the fact that students from disadvantaged households perform less well in school, on average, than their peers from more advantaged backgrounds. But rather than confront this fact of life head-on, our policy makers mistakenly continue to reason that, since they cannot change the backgrounds of students, they should focus on things they can control.
No Child Left Behind, President George W. Bush’s signature education law, did this by setting unrealistically high — and ultimately self-defeating — expectations for all schools. President Obama’s policies have concentrated on trying to make schools more “efficient” through means like judging teachers by their students’ test scores or encouraging competition by promoting the creation of charter schools. The proverbial story of the drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost comes to mind.
The Occupy movement has catalyzed rising anxiety over income inequality; we desperately need a similar reminder of the relationship between economic advantage and student performance.
The correlation has been abundantly documented, notably by the famous Coleman Report in 1966. New research by Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University traces the achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families over the last 50 years and finds that it now far exceeds the gap between white and black students.
Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that more than 40 percent of the variation in average reading scores and 46 percent of the variation in average math scores across states is associated with variation in child poverty rates.
International research tells the same story. Results of the 2009 reading tests conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment show that, among 15-year-olds in the United States and the 13 countries whose students outperformed ours, students with lower economic and social status had far lower test scores than their more advantaged counterparts within every country. Can anyone credibly believe that the mediocre overall performance of American students on international tests is unrelated to the fact that one-fifth of American children live in poverty?
Yet federal education policy seems blind to all this. No Child Left Behind required all schools to bring all students to high levels of achievement but took no note of the challenges that disadvantaged students face. The legislation did, to be sure, specify that subgroups — defined by income, minority status and proficiency in English — must meet the same achievement standard. But it did so only to make sure that schools did not ignore their disadvantaged students — not to help them address the challenges they carry with them into the classroom.
So why do presumably well-intentioned policy makers ignore, or deny, the correlations of family background and student achievement?
Some honestly believe that schools are capable of offsetting the effects of poverty. Others want to avoid the impression that they set lower expectations for some groups of students for fear that those expectations will be self-fulfilling. In both cases, simply wanting something to be true does not make it so.
Another rationale for denial is to note that some schools, like the Knowledge Is Power Program charter schools, have managed to “beat the odds.” If some schools can succeed, the argument goes, then it is reasonable to expect all schools to. But close scrutiny of charter school performance has shown that many of the success stories have been limited to particular grades or subjects and may be attributable to substantial outside financing or extraordinarily long working hours on the part of teachers. The evidence does not support the view that the few success stories can be scaled up to address the needs of large populations of disadvantaged students.
A final rationale for denying the correlation is more nefarious. As we are now seeing, requiring all schools to meet the same high standards for all students, regardless of family background, will inevitably lead either to large numbers of failing schools or to a dramatic lowering of state standards. Both serve to discredit the public education system and lend support to arguments that the system is failing and needs fundamental change, like privatization.
U.S. Schools Have a Poverty Crisis, Not an Education Crisis
By Michael Rebell & Jessica Wolff
Posted: 02/1/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-rebell/us-schools-have-a-poverty_b_1247635.html
Excerpt:
In the 10 years since enacting the No Child Left Behind Act, we have made very little progress toward our national goal of closing the achievement gap between students from low-income families and their better-off peers. Implicitly acknowledging this lack of progress, President Obama announced last fall that his administration would grant states waivers that would, among other things, give them more time to meet the law’s goals. More time won’t help, however, unless the Obama administration and Congress acknowledge the most glaring flaw in NCLB and the educational policies of most states — their failure to recognize and mitigate the enormous impact of poverty on the chances for the school success of millions of American schoolchildren.
In America, we don’t have an education crisis; rather we have a poverty crisis. The latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores indicate that American schools that serve few low-income students rank higher than the world’s top-scoring advanced industrial countries. But when they are averaged with the scores of schools with high poverty rates, the United States sinks to the middle of the pack. At nearly 22 percent and rising, the child-poverty rate in the United States is the highest among wealthy nations in the world. (Poverty rates in Denmark and in Finland, top global performers on the PISA exams, are below 5 percent). In New York City, the child-poverty rate rose to over 30 percent in 2010. Like other aspects of the inequitable U.S. distribution of wealth, our child poverty crisis seems to fall within a national blind spot.
Childhood poverty has a profound impact on learning. Achievement gaps for disadvantaged children begin before they start school and widen throughout their school careers. But research shows that change is possible.
Most non-poor students in this country come to school equipped with the basics for success. They arrive with the preschool experiences they need to be ready for grade-level work; their health and mental-health needs are largely being met; they enjoy a range of both academic and nonacademic learning experiences beyond the school day that complement what they learn in class; and they receive the family support that ensures they are motivated and prepared to learn during the school day. Children raised in poverty cannot count on these advantages. As a result, too many are unprepared, inattentive, or chronically absent.
The Roman philosophy was ‘give ’em bread and give ’em a circus’ – that’s what’s been done here over decades. What has television done but be a baby sitter for parent too busy to raise their children – or even care to do so. Let the nanny state do it. With tax breaks for the wealthy and an uneducated working class, the middle class has taken the financial hit.
Dumbing down the population doesn’t result in the ability to sustain world leadership. It would seem some of our politicians are products of the public education system.
America’s Poverty-Education Link
By Howard Steven Friedman, Statistician/Economist for International Organization, Columbia University
Posted: 08/29/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/howard-steven-friedman/americas-poverty-education_b_1826000.html
Excerpt:
Poverty and education are inextricably linked where education is a primary means of social mobility, enabling those born into poverty to rise in society. Powerful evidence of the link include the fact that 46 percent of Americans who grew up in low-income families but failed to earn college degrees stayed in the lowest income quintile, compared to 16 percent for those who earned a college degree.
The link between poverty and education can be seen at all educational levels. From the earliest stage, pre-primary education, poorer Americans start disadvantaged. Children of parents earning less than $15,000 a year have pre-primary enrollment rates about 20 percent lower than children of parents earning more than $50,000 a year. This pre-school disadvantage for poor people has far-reaching impacts, since students who participated in preschool education were 31 percent less likely to repeat a grade and 32 percent less likely to drop out of high school. Additionally, pre-primary education reduces crime rates where children who were randomly chosen from a low-income neighborhood to attend preschool were shown to have one-fifth the chance of becoming chronic criminal offenders as the matched control group.
The educational disadvantage of those poorer students continues as they grow older. Less than 10 percent of school revenue comes from the federal government while about 90 percent comes from the state and local governments. As a result, school funding varies from state to state, and funding within a state also tends to be unequal. As of 2006, schools with the highest poverty rates received on average nearly $1,000 less per student than schools with the lowest rates, and in some states like New York and Illinois, this gap is more than $2,000 per student.
The locally driven funding (and its resulting funding gap) causes poorer students to have even more learning disadvantages. Top teachers are more likely to gravitate toward the schools that pay the most, offer the best facilities, present the safest working environments, and provide the most advanced learning environments. Consequently, poorer students are far more likely to encounter uncertified teachers, fewer resources, and substandard facilities. In the 1970s and 1980s, courts in ten states found that public education funding was unconstitutional. Corresponding court-ordered changes in state funding closed the achievement gap in states required to make changes, while the achievement gap persists in states where no such order was forthcoming.
The resulting educational disadvantage to the American poor is apparent in cross-country exams such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) exam. In this exam, the United States placed average to below average versus other developed countries in reading, science, and math, but these averages mask the influence of poverty.
The average American PISA reading score for higher-income schools exceeded that of all other developed countries while the average score for lower-income American schools was far lower. In fact, the PISA scores by America students were more influenced by their parents’ backgrounds than every other OECD country. American students who move up one socioeconomic level would earn on average 60 points more in science, while students in other developed countries who did the same would gain fewer than 40 more PISA points. While it is not surprising to learn that wealthier students outperform poorer students, this extremely large disparity in performance among American students is of great concern because of what it implies about social mobility.
This is not a danger to the 1% plutocracy, it is a danger to the 99% …
Justice Holmes,
Let us not forget Joel Klein. He was chancellor of the New York City school system for more than eight years for Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He now makes lots of money working for Rupert Murdoch’s education company.
*****
The reform movement is already failing
By Diane Ravitch
August 23, 2011
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2011/08/23/the-reform-movement-is-already-failing/
Excerpt:
In my nearly four decades as a historian of education, I have analyzed the rise and fall of reform movements. Typically, reforms begin with loud declarations that our education system is in crisis. Throughout the twentieth century, we had a crisis almost every decade. After persuading the public that we are in crisis, the reformers bring forth their favored proposals for radical change. The radical changes are implemented in a few sites, and the results are impressive. As their reforms become widespread, they usually collapse and fail. In time, those who have made a career of educating children are left with the task of cleaning up the mess left by the last bunch of reformers.
We are in the midst of the latest wave of reforms, and Steven Brill has positioned himself as the voice of the new reformers. These reforms are not just flawed, but actually dangerous to the future of American education. They would, if implemented, lead to the privatization of a large number of public schools and to the de-professionalization of education.
As Brill’s book shows, the current group of reformers consists of an odd combination of Wall Street financiers, conservative Republican governors, major foundations, and the Obama administration. The reformers believe that the way to “fix” our schools is to fire more teachers, based on the test scores of their students; to open more privately-managed charter schools; to reduce the qualifications for becoming a teacher; and to remove job protections for senior teachers.
The reformers say that our schools are failing and point to international test scores; they don’t seem to know that American students have never done well on international tests. When the international tests were first launched in the 1960s, our students ranked near the bottom. Obviously these tests do not predict the future economic success of a nation because we as a nation have prospered despite our mediocre performance on international tests over the past half century.
The last international test results were released in December. Our students ranked about average, and our leading policymakers treated the results as a national scandal. But here is a curious fact: low-poverty U.S. schools (where fewer than 10% of the students were poor) had scores that were higher than those of the top nations in the world. In schools where as many as 25% of the students were poor, the scores were equal to those of Finland, Japan and Korea. As the poverty rate of the schools rose, the schools’ performance declined.
An objective observer would conclude that the problem in this society has to do with our shamefully high rates of child poverty, the highest in the developed world. At least 20% of U.S. children live in poverty. Among black children, the poverty rate is 35%.
Reformers like to say — as they did in the film “Waiting for ‘Superman’” — that we spend too much and that poverty doesn’t matter. They say that teacher effectiveness is all that matters. They claim that children who have three “great” or “effective” teachers in a row will close the achievement gap between the races. They say that experience doesn’t matter. They believe that charter schools, staffed by tireless teachers, can close the gap in test scores.
Unfortunately, research does not support any of their claims.
Take the matter of charter schools. The definitive national study of charters was conducted by Stanford University economist Margaret Raymond and financed by the pro-charter Walton Family Foundation and the Dell Foundation. After surveying half the nation’s 5,000 charter schools, the study concluded that only 17% got better test results than a demographically similar traditional public school; 37% got worse results, and the remaining 46% were no different from the matched public school. An eight-state study by the Rand Corporation found no differences in results between charter and regular public schools. On federal tests, students in charter schools and regular public schools perform about the same.
The overwhelming majority of charter schools are non-union. They can hire and fire teachers at will, and teacher attrition at charter schools is higher than in regular public schools. Many studies have shown that charters have a disproportionately small number of students with disabilities or students who don’t speak English. Yet, despite these structural advantages, they don’t get better results. Furthermore, right-to-work states where unions are weak or non-existent don’t lead the nation in academic achievement; most are middling or at the bottom on federal tests. Brill simply refuses to acknowledge these inconvenient facts because the charter movement is a central part of the “reform” claims.
Don’t worry NY mayor Bloomberg and his possible successor Ms. Quinn have the answer: more and bigger tax breaks and subsidies for billionaire developers to build bigger and bigger and more luxurious buildings under the guise of affordable housing. “We don’t need no education.” What we need is more tax breaks for billionaires!
The title of this article should be: K-12 has now become K-14.
http://www.hermes-press.com/education_index.htm
The Destruction
of American
Education
And What We
Must Do About It
shocking statistic?!? Not really, after seeing people on TV like the Jay Walking segments…and then we have the voters that elect some of these morons in office…
Gonna get worse before it gets better…
We are not creating a “lost generation”. No, indeed. We are creating another lost generation. But why should we care? The Dow is on a record high, the Nanny State is on the run back to Loserville (aka poor, downtrodden Scandinavia), and Public Education can go hang.
More money, more money, more money is the endless cry, yet more money is not the cure. In western NY, voters approve almost every increase in school taxes. Every year school taxes increase. The suburban schools churn out rote robots and the city schools churn out barely functional “graduates”. The education industrial complex does not need more money, which usually goes to grossly overpaid superintendents and administration officials, pro-like sports facilities and other extravagant props. Responsible parenting, which includes some sort of remedial discipline, which is in very short supply in most city or suburban school districts, is key to any turnaround. The education industrial complex works hand in hand with lousy parenting; both are feeding off each other’s dysfunction.
Hearing applause from Repugnos cuz these 80% illiterates could equal 40-50% of new future GOP voters. #FauxNews @Thom_Hartmann @billmaher
Isn’t public education great? Perhaps just a few more tax dollars for our schools and this problem would go away.