Well, that gave everybody something to talk about, didn’t it?
State education officials released school-district scores on standardized tests last week, and the news was awful. Only 31 percent of the state’s students met or exceeded the “proficiency” standard for math. And only 31.1 percent of them met the English standard.
And among the large urban school districts, Rochester brought up the rear: only 5 percent of the district’s students met the standard for math. Only 5.4 met the English standard.
City Council President Lovely Warren, who is running for mayor, held a press conference, deriding incumbent Tom Richards for accepting the endorsement of the Rochester teachers union. Warren tried to avoid blaming teachers (“It isn’t teachers who are failing our children,” she said), and instead attacked their union and its long-time president, Adam Urbanski, for, in her words, blocking “efforts to improve and reform.”
Urbanski fired back, challenging Warren to “a public debate on the role of the union in educating children.” (She declined.)
Education-reform activists lashed out at the test itself, and at standardized testing.
And in opinion pieces in the Democrat and Chronicle on Sunday, a variety of school board candidates attacked the tests, Superintendent Bolgen Vargas, the teacher’s union, parent engagement, the new curriculum… you name it.
Look, folks: we already knew that we have a crisis in urban schools, not just in Rochester but in urban school districts throughout the nation. These latest test scores don’t indicate that things have gotten worse. As State Education Commissioner John King said when he released the results, the state is simply using a different kind of test to measure what students have learned.
And not only are the tests different but so is the school curriculum. New York, like many other states, has decided that schools aren’t teaching children what they need to know. So we have a new curriculum, which teachers themselves are still learning.
The good thing is that Rochester’s stunning 5 percent statistics got everybody’s attention. And the school district and its problems are certainly an essential topic for the current political campaigns. But despite all of the outrage last week, nobody was talking about doing the really hard things that we have to do. And until we do them, little will change.
For instance: I don’t know how we let children get to third grade unable to read. Roc the Future, a two-year-old community effort to address that problem, has been slow to get off the ground.
And I don’t hear anybody talking about ending the social promotion policy that passes children through grade after grade, headed toward high school with minimal reading and math skills.
Nobody will touch the issue of metropolitan schools, despite the evidence that poor children do worse in high-poverty schools.
And how shocking do the statistics have to get before we agree that the concentrated poverty of our inner-city neighborhoods has a profound effect on children? How do we expect children with few language skills and serious emotional or disciplinary problems to do well in school? The most important thing we can do to help them succeed is to make sure that they’re ready for school when they start. That will take extensive support for parents and their children, from infancy on. That will take a lot of money. And nobody’s coming up with it.
And we haven’t even talked about teachers: how to train them well and pay them well (as opposed to yelling at them).
It’s so easy to be shocked by test scores, so easy to single out small pieces of the problem, froth at the mouth about them, and point fingers. It’s harder to pull together, agree on the complexity of the urban education problem, and commit the resources to make some progress.
The test scores we saw last week told us nothing new.
Neither, unfortunately, did the community’s response.
“Despite all of the outrage last week, nobody was talking about doing the really hard things that we have to do.”
This article appears in Aug 14-20, 2013.
You are right that no one is discussing the “hard things” but I have to challenge you and City Newspaper as well. Why in the world have you not gotten a small group of experts together in one room and hammered out productive and doable solutions. This is extremely realistic and if your paper promoted (weekly) the ideas of this group-maybe, just maybe the Grinch would return the gifts to Whoville. The media has a big role to play and it is disappointing that you are all letting these decisions makers off the hook.
More of a concern than test scores should be the “new curriculum” that is being introduced. It is written, developed and implemented by people who are young, idealistic go-getters with PhDs, but who have little or no public school classroom experience. What they do have are hefty salaries, funded by College Board, Pearson, ETS, and other educational consulting and testing companies in an incestuous relationship with the Departments of Education. In 2011, NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman launched an investigation against Pearson to determine if they had acted improperly to influence NY State education. In fact, the chief honcho of Common Core, David Coleman, now works for College Board.
When students do poorly on standardized tests , there may be rage, but there is also money to be made by selling curriculum, test prep materials, enrichment materials, remedial materials, teacher training seminars…and the companies like College Board, Pearson, ETS are there to do just that. The problem is that selling materials AND profiting by also providing -and then grading the tests- seems like a conflict of interest. To paraphrase Hamlet: something’s rotten in NYS Education.
City Newspaper has long advocated for improving public education in Rochester. However, rather than focusing on distractions like test scores and charter schools, take the mythological advice from Watergate’s Deep Throat: Follow the money.
Contrary to Editor, Mary Anna Towler’s, comment that in response to the latest low test-score fiasco, nothing new has been presented by the community on the “hard things” that need to be done, the Coalition for Justice in Education (CJE) has made several research-based, “hard proposals” to the Board of Education, which despite some Board support, have not moved forward. And, why not, given te lack of improvement based upon corporate and standardized test-based reforms over the last 15 years ? Consider the following CJE proposls:
– Given the link between low student academic engagement and the concentration of poverty, lobby the county, state and federal governments for redistribution of tax funding to lower poor, urban school student/teacher ratios to 12:1. (See Class Size research.)
– Again, given the concentration of poverty link to student engagement, lobby with county, state and federal governments for suburban district incentives to create metropolitan school districts, at which no school would have more than 40% of its students from poverty backgrounds. (See Wake County, NC, research.)
– Replicate schools based on the NYS Performance Standards Consortium model, of which Rochester’s School Without Walls is a member. This Regents-approved alternative model, requires small school populations, a student-centered curriculum with standards that exceed the Regents and Common Core, performance-based assessment vs. high-stakes standardized tests, strong teacher training for inquiry-based teaching an democratic decision-making. (See Performance Standards Consortium research.)
– Focusing on personalized vs. standardized standards, thereby following the research tenants that honor individualized learning styles, student interest and needs, as well as the professional judgment of teachers. Students would also, no longer be compared to each other or to other school populations. (See Consortium and Eight Year Study research.)
These changes would not be easy to achieve, but would completely revolutionize the system, since corporate and political interests would no longer be driving education policy and practices.
Perhaps a first step for moving in this diection would be to vote for those BOE candidates in the September primary who would support these efforts, rather than “more-of-the-same.” Who are they??
Dan Drmacich, Chairman
Coltion for Justice in Education, and
former School Without Walls Principal
The American education system just doesn’t get it. Schools are forcing reading and math before kids are ready and as a result we have an adult population whose reading skills are limited. Too many people recognize words but can’t comprehend complex ideas in writing.
Try this out — Hungry children don’t learn so well. Feed them real food for breakfast as well as lunch and even after school. Now they’re nourished. Then figure out that before children learn to read and do math, they need to have a desire to read. So instead of forcing them to sit at desks when their young bodies need to move, provide them with a resource center instead of a school until they are eight or ten years old. Let them learn through play. Provide them with people to read to them — provide activities that pique their curiosity — think children’s museums and science museums. Provide cooking classes where they can learn simple computation that means something. And let there be opportunities for plenty of physical activity.
Many of them will start learning to read without prodding and without tedious exercises. If they are ten years old and not reading, then start thinking about formal lessons.
I write as an unschooling mother whose children were not forced to read before they were ready and who all are adults who read complex material with understanding.