NEWS
- Don’t do away with school testing
- Hillary Clinton makes a promise to union leaders: I’ll listen to teachers
- Public versus private schools: Who goes where, by state
- OSSE Employees Need Committee Approval Before Sending Emails
Don’t do away with school testing
The Washington Post
Editorial Board
June 8, 2015
COMPLAINTS ABOUT public school testing have been on the rise, centered on the amount of time devoted to the assessments and preparation for them. Concern about excessive testing that detracts from learning and distorts the school experience is understandable. But the solution is not to do away with tests; they are far too valuable in providing information on student achievement. The answer lies in better, smarter tests; that’s why the move to streamline assessments aligned with the Common Core State Standards should be applauded.
The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), the consortium that developed the tests used in the District, Maryland and 10 other states, voted last month to shave 90 minutes off the approximate 10-hour annual tests and to shift the testing to later in the school year. This was the first year for the tests, and while they were generally praised as a more effective measure of student learning, there were complaints about the length of time they took and disruption caused by spreading the tests over two months, one in early spring and one in late spring. The revamped tests will take effect with the 2015-2016 school year, and officials say the changes won’t diminish the ability to gauge student achievement.
The move by PARCC — using real-life experience and intelligent feedback from parents, students and educators to tweak the tests without abandoning their core function — should serve as a model in what promises to be the nation’s continued debate about testing. If there is a problem with over-testing, it lies not with the once-a-year annual assessments mandated under the federal No Child Left Behind Act but with the multitude of advance and prep tests ordered by local school districts. Some states have taken steps to limit the total hours of testing. The Maryland General Assembly this past session created a commission to collect data on how much time districts spend giving standardized tests and to look at ways to reduce it.
Any examination of testing must be premised on the fact that schools need to assess student learning systematically. It’s the best way to get objective and timely information on student achievement to let parents know how their children are doing, help school officials identify where to put resources and show taxpayers what they are getting for their tax dollars. Shortening and limiting tests may be in order — but only if the changes don’t compromise the ability to measure how well a child is learning.
Hillary Clinton makes a promise to union leaders: I’ll listen to teachers
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
June 8, 2015
Hillary Rodham Clinton told the president of the National Education Association that she would listen to teachers if elected president, a simple promise Monday that impressed the president of the nation’s largest labor union.
“She used the most important word that I was personally looking for, the word ‘listen’,” said Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the NEA, which represents mostly K-12 teachers and paraprofessionals and has 3 million members.
Garcia met privately with Clinton, a Democrat who is running for president, at NEA headquarters as part of the union’s endorsement process for the 2016 campaign. The NEA has invited both Democratic and Republican candidates to complete a 34-question survey, sit for a videotaped interview with Garcia and attend the union’s annual meeting at the end of the month.
The union released excerpts from the Clinton interview but did not release the videotape. It also did not provide Clinton’s answers to the questionnaire, which sought her opinion on a range of topics, including whether she would curtail the use of competitive grant programs such as Race to the Top, which the Obama administration has used to push states to adopt its favored education policies.
The Clinton campaign did not immediately respond to questions about the interview and the NEA survey.
The NEA will make its candidate videos and questionnaires available to its members, according to Carrie Pugh, the union’s political director. NEA leaders have not decided if the union will make an endorsement before the primaries, Garcia said.
The NEA’s endorsement is helpful to candidates not only for the campaign cash the union is likely to spend in 2016 but for the ground troops it can field: Close to one out of every 100 U.S. residents is an NEA member.
Garcia has pushed back against the federal requirement that schools test students every year in math and reading from grades 3 through 8 and once in high school, calling it “toxic testing” that has turned schools into test-prep factories. In most states, standardized test results are used to make personnel decisions about teachers, a situation that Garcia calls “test and punish.”
The questionnaire asked Clinton if she would urge Congress to reduce the number of “federally-required high stakes standardized tests.” The union declined to share her answer.
Clinton pledged to examine standardized testing from the perspective of the teacher, Garcia said.
“She said ‘I think we have to question how we’re testing, how we’re using the tests’,” Garcia said. The candidate said she wanted to know whether annual tests give teachers and parents good information about a student’s strengths and weaknesses, and whether they help educators improve instruction.
Clinton was the first candidate the NEA has interviewed.
“She basically said ‘What kind of fool would be making public policy without listening to the people who live in those communities, the people who know the names of the kids’?” Garcia said. “I loved that.”
Clinton has to negotiate a schism within the Democratic Party over education policy. Teachers unions want a reduced emphasis on testing and more investment in public schools, including social services for the increasing number of students living in poverty. Others in the party want market-based policies, including teacher evaluations based partly on student test scores, the expansion of charter schools, merit pay, and weakening of tenure rules and seniority protections.
The NEA endorsed President Obama twice but has grown increasingly at odds with the Obama administration over testing and teacher evaluations, among other issues. Last summer, the NEA — historically the more reticent of the two major teachers unions — demanded Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s resignation while the AFT called for Duncan to be put on an “improvement’ plan.
Last week, Clinton met with AFT leadership as part of its vetting process.
“It’s just dead wrong to make teachers the scapegoats for all of society’s problems,” Clinton told the AFT, according to selected quotes released by the union. “Where I come from, teachers are the solution. And I strongly believe that unions are part of the solution, too.”
The AFT also met with Clinton’s rivals for the Democratic nomination, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Public versus private schools: Who goes where, by state
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
June 8, 2015
The proportion of children who attend public school ranges widely from state to state, from a low of 79 percent in the District of Columbia and Hawaii to 93 percent in Wyoming and Utah, according to the Education Law Center’s annual school funding report, released Monday.
And in every state, private school students on average come from wealthier families than public school students. In some cases, much wealthier: In the District, private school families’ income is more than three times that of public school families’ income, on average.
None of this is particularly surprising, but private school enrollment rarely comes up in discussions about public school funding. The Education Law Center argues that it’s an important factor because when wealthy families opt out of public education, schools are left with higher concentrations of poor children, and there is less political will to boost funds for public schools.
The graphic below, reproduced from the report, offers a snapshot of private school enrollment and family income for each state. The relatively few Wyoming families who choose private schools, for example, aren’t much wealthier than the average public school family.
The graphic is based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. The blue bars show the percent of children in public schools; the orange bars show the difference in wealth between private and public school families.
OSSE Employees Need Committee Approval Before Sending Emails
Washington City Paper
By Will Sommer
June 8, 2015
If you've been waiting for an email from someone at the Office of the State Superintendent for Education, LL might know what's behind the hold-up. Under new rules, some emails from OSSE employees need to be approved at a weekly committee meeting before they can be sent out.
OSSE employees looking to send any email to more than one "stakeholder" outside the agency needs to submit it to the "communications review team" beforehand. OSSE "stakeholders" means any organization outside of OSSE itself, including charter school operators, government agencies, and the D.C. Public Schools system, according to OSSE spokesman Briant K. Coleman. That's a whole lot of emails.
OSSE employees still interested in sending their emails (or reports, presentations, or letters) need to submit the drafts by 10 a.m. Monday for the communications committee's weekly meeting on Tuesday. Anyone who misses that Monday deadline faces a potentially days-long wait to send their emails, although Coleman tells LL that OSSE can review "unanticipated" communications quickly.
"We do not believe that this new process will make OSSE slow to communicate with [local education agencies]," Coleman writes in an email.
Not convinced: the people who work with OSSE and have griped about the new policy to LL. Via an email that presumably lacks the committee's sanction, one OSSE employee complains that the new rules reflect an "obvious level of distrust of staff."
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