‘No Pineapple Left Behind’ and the Politics of American Education

Reposted from engadget:

Seth Alter was a teacher for all of six months before quitting his job and going indie to make video games full-time. No Pineapple Left Behind, his second PC title, is more or less the story of why he left his students at a Boston charter school. As a special education math teacher, his sixth graders were expected to meet the same behavioral standards and educational expectations as their mainstreamed counterparts thanks to 2001’s controversial No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which ties school funding to standardized test scores. Alter says that teacher evaluations are drawn from those scores as well. And because most charter schools are non-union, they can fire teachers for almost any reason, including low test scores from special-needs students who should have been held to modified standards in the first place. It doesn’t take a genius to realize just how flawed that logic is: It’s a system built to fail.

“A month before I quit, I was talking to a friend about my job and how it was getting me down,” Alter says. “I said that the main problem is that the school assumes that all of my [special education] kids are statistics. If I treat them as statistics, everything’s fine. But as soon as I start thinking about them as people, all of a sudden there’s a problem and I don’t have sufficient resources.”

In Pineapple, you play the role of a principal in charge of a school and your ultimate goal is to earn as much funding as possible. To do that, you need to ensure it produces the highest standardized test scores throughout a dozen different scenarios. By dehumanizing kids and turning them into pineapples (read: statistics) that makes it easier because “pineapples,” as they exist here, excel at testing and nothing else. Children are a bit more complicated: They each have their own individual learning styles and interests. “There’s just no management sims I’m aware of that consider the human implications of treating the workers as moneymaking tools,” he says.

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Testing: Fight, Flee or Fake It?

Reposted from Voices of Change:

We all deal with adversity in life in different ways. Frankly, at this point we all have to choose whatever path works to keep our sanity. Teaching high school students, and being a generally outspoken and passionate advocate for issues I believe strongly in, I am choosing to fight.

I’m also choosing not to fake it with my kids. I have been brutally honest with my students, telling them exactly how I feel about the barrage of tests now required, and why I think they are unnecessary and take too much time away from actually engaging with each other in discussions about literature and writing and current events … you know, from actually LEARNING.

But, I have also told them that we must jump through this hoop. And we must do our best on the tests, on my part preparing them for the tests, and on their part taking them seriously and persevering even when they seem too hard or too frustrating or too pointless. Because in life and certainly in any job, there are times when you have to do things you don’t want to do.

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A State-Led ESEA Compromise

Reposted from the Flypaper:

A few weeks ago, I used a graphic to show the four dimensions of federal accountability, each of which has a range of options. I then used this graphic to show the consensus for preserving NCLB testing. Here I used it to show how eleven major ESEA reauthorization proposals address the other dimensions (remember, minimum federal accountability is on the left; maximum on the right). The total picture is as confusing as subway map.

The best chance for ESEA reauthorization can be found in the approach taken by the nation’s governors, legislatures, and state superintendents. Their proposals, which I have labeled Accountability for Results, hew to one of the key principles of management and leadership—and the heart of the charter school bargain: Set clear goals and give people the freedom to reach them. They would set performance targets but then give states wide latitude in designing school categories and interventions. In other words, tight on ends, loose on means.

It’s essential to underscore that the very state leaders who will be responsible for leading the post-NCLB era are the ones recommending Accountability for Results Moreover, this compromise keeps faith with those demanding we give K–12 authority back to the states and those demanding we continue protecting disadvantaged kids. It would merely require the Right to agree to include explicit performance targets and the Left to agree to give states greater flexibility in tackling challenges. Important details would still need to be worked out (e.g., the role of the education secretary in approving state plans, the consequences for a state’s failure to improve results). But state leaders may have shown us the path to reauthorization.

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Annual Testing, Common Core Hot-Button Issues in NCLB Debate

Reposted from U.S. News & World Report:

Outnumbered by Republicans, Democratic lawmakers are jockeying to get their views heard as Congress moves ahead on revising the much-maligned No Child Left Behind education law. With votes anticipated in the House and Senate, House Democrats plan their own Capitol Hill forum on Thursday for changing the law — a protest of Republicans’ handling of the issue.

In the Senate, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, came out against a provision in a draft bill circulated by the panel’s chairman, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., that would allow federal dollars to follow low-income students to a different public school. Annual testing requirements, Common Core standards and school choice expansion are all hot-button issues wrapped into the debate. Both sides heartily agree that the landmark law needs to be fixed, but tension centers on the level of federal involvement in classifying and fixing schools.

Complicating the issue, allegiances don’t clearly fall along party lines. Among Republicans, for example, some members want to essentially eliminate the federal role in education, but GOP-friendly business groups side with civil rights groups in support of a strong federal role. Teachers’ unions, historically aligned with Democrats, have criticized the Obama administration’s handling of education policy as having too much of an emphasis on testing.

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Lamar Alexander: Federal Accountability Of Schools and Teachers A Failure

Reposted from Time:

Sen. Lamar Alexander, the new chairman of the Senate committee on education, walked into Congress this month with guns a-blazin’. Twelve years after the passage of George W. Bush’s signature education bill, No Child Left Behind, and eight years after that troubled law was supposed to be revised and updated, the Tennessee Republican says now is the time for its long-neglected makeover. He plans to take a revised version of the law to the Senate floor by the end of February, with hopes of pushing it through Congress “in the first half of this year.”

The primary issue at stake is testing. Under No Child Left Behind, students are required to take a raft of standardized exams, each of which are used to assess whether schools are succeeding or failing, and, increasingly, to hold individual teachers accountable for their performance in the classroom. Critics of No Child Left Behind—and there are lots and lots of them—generally hate the testing mandate. Conservatives and Tea Party activists decry it as “government overreach,” while liberals, local teachers unions and parents lament the reliance on “high-stakes testing.” Even Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that too much testing can “rob school buildings of joy.”

“The thing that worked with No Child Left Behind is to take tests results, break them down and aggregate them so that we know that children really aren’t being left behind,” Alexander explains, “So you can’t have an overall average for a school that’s pretty good, but still leave all the Latino kids in a ditch somewhere. But what’s increasingly obvious to me is that the biggest failure of No Child Left Behind has been the federal accountability system – the effort to decide in Washington whether schools or teachers are succeeding or failing. That just doesn’t work. But I think the jury’s still out on the tests.”

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21st Century Child Labor

Reposted from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

In a last-ditch effort to force us (parents, K-12 educators, teacher educators, students, and citizens) to quietly comply with standardized testing that has turned into U.S. 21st century child labor, as well as ruining childhood and real learning, they are pinning Colleges of Education against the wall: Make your graduates’ future students’ test scores improve, or else.

The American Statistical Association has conducted research and insists the impact of teachers on their students’ standardized test scores is a mere 1% – 14% of the total score. That means 86% – 99% of the variables impacting students’ standardized test scores include things beyond a teachers control: the income level of parents, the education level of parents, access to regular and healthy food, access to stable housing, etc.

Indeed, standardized tests have long been criticized for their biases and non-objectivity, the “value-added” economic model does not work for measuring teachers’ effectiveness relative to standardized tests, and unchanged SAT scores indicates that the militant testing agenda and implementation has not improved “college readiness” one iota. Even though an individual teacher impacts only 1% to 14% of a child’s standardized test score, under these new regulations the College of Education where that teacher earned her degree will be held accountable for the child’s standardized test score. Stop the madness. Everyone knows the testing regime is a farce.

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Let’s Try a New Bold Experiment

Reposted from Janine’s Blog:

The testing of every child every year began as a bold experiment in 2001 as part of No Child Left Behind. The theory of action was that if we could expose the truth about student achievement and provide appropriate “carrots and sticks” for success and failure, we could improve education for all children. The goal was for all children to reach proficiency within 12 years. That has not happened. Our bold experiment has failed. We are now in the midst of a new bold experiment as we begin using new standardized testing aligned with the Common Core State Standards. This time, for the first time, states are making these test results integral to teacher evaluation. But there are some huge problems with our new experiment.

Student assessment is an important part of the educational process. Teachers need to understand how students are progressing toward their educational goals so they can adjust instruction accordingly. What if we were to only allow assessment that would provide teachers with actionable information regarding student progress? Forget the high stakes. Let’s build systems with more frequent assessments, that are part of the instructional process, and give teachers the information they need to move students forward. Teacher evaluation would focus on HOW teachers understand their students’ needs and HOW they use this information. Students would advance in grade levels and programs based on this information. If we are interested in understanding the performance of a school or district as a whole, we can look at what students are doing in terms of advancing from one level to another. 

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