Vic’s Statehouse Notes #154 – September 18, 2013

Dear Friends,

Power grab.

The Governor has created a new bureaucracy to make the State Board independent of State Superintendent Ritz. This has never been done before in the history of the State Board of Education.

Past governors have imposed their will by influencing the votes of their appointees on the State Board. That approach was not sufficient for Gov. Pence. He now has a new bureaucracy to run things that for years have been run by the State Superintendent.

Creating costly new bureaucracies is generally not what conservatives do, but Gov. Pence in the name of partisanship is apparently ready to spend extra taxpayer dollars to duplicate what has been done for years within the Indiana Department of Education.

New Staff for the State Board of Education

About 4:05pm at the end of an unexpectedly long State Board meeting on September 4th, State Board Member David Freitas read a resolution calling for the hiring of three staff members to serve the State Board: an executive director, a technical advisor and a budget specialist. The resolution passed 9-1 with only Glenda Ritz, who commented that she had been given only one day notice of this move, voting nay.

No one cited the cost of this new bureaucracy, but it doesn’t take much to see that it will not come cheap to taxpayers. Salary plus benefits for an executive director is probably in the neighborhood of $80,000 and salary plus benefits for a technical advisor and budget specialist is likely to be around $60,000. That would total $200,000 for staff to do things that current IDOE staff have been doing for years and could easily continue to do. Those are your tax dollars at work funding an overtly partisan move to diminish the control of Superintendent Ritz.

Diminishing the Office of State Superintendent

Over 1.3 million voters in the 2012 election cast their ballot for Glenda Ritz, more than voted for Gov. Pence, and the conclusion has to be that these voters favored the policies of Glenda Ritz over the policies of Tony Bennett. Gov. Pence and the members of the State Board in setting up an independent staff are trying to minimize and undermine the role of Glenda Ritz, an effort which many have likened to stealing the election.

At the September 4th meeting a friend made the first reference I had heard to “the rogue State Board.” Others have called the Governor’s new agency “the new IDOE.” What is not clear is whether this situation represents a strong Governor taking control of education or a weak Governor unwisely submitting to a few extremely vocal members of the State Board who want to take control of education in Indiana away from Glenda Ritz. This clearly could come back to haunt Gov. Pence politically, especially since for the sake of partisanship it negates his stance against extra unnecessary bureaucracy.

The legislative branch had nothing to do with this new bureaucracy. These moves were made without General Assembly debate or new legislation. The State Board of Education as created by the General Assembly years ago was designed to be a non-partisan policy board. The law says that no more than six of the eleven members can be of the same political party. Clearly, the intent of the law creating the State Board was to take politics out of education policy. This Governor and this board have changed that.

Hear Glenda Ritz on September 21st

Glenda Ritz will be the featured speaker at the Indiana Coalition for Public Education fall membership meeting in Indianapolis this Saturday, September 21st at 2:00pm. You can come to hear her comments on this issue and other key issues: voucher implementation, a new A-F system and the settlement with CTB McGraw Hill on ISTEP+ testing and many others. Please join us in this meeting for all ICPE members and prospective members at the Dean Evans Community and Education Center in Washington Township, 86th and Woodfield Crossing Blvd, from 2:00 to 3:30pm.

If you can come on Saturday to show support for Glenda Ritz and ICPE, please RSVP by replying to this message.

Glenda Ritz will speak at a similar ICPE meeting in Lafayette on October 5, 2pm, at the Tippecanoe County Public Library.

Please join us on Saturday to help support public education in Indiana!

Best wishes,

Vic Smith

ICPE is working to promote public education and oppose privatization of schools in the Statehouse. We hope all members and prospective members will come to the membership meetings this fall, the first of which is Saturday, September 21st, 2-3:30pm at the Washington Township Central Office, 86th & Woodfield Crossing. Glenda Ritz is the featured speaker. At the meeting you can renew your membership for the 2013-14 membership year which began July 1st if you have not done so already.

One way to RSVP for the September 21st meeting is simply to reply to this message. Please join us!

To all who have recently renewed or supported our fundraiser in Bloomington, we say thank you! We need additional support to carry on our advocacy for public education. We need additional members and additional donations. We need your help!

Go to www.icpe2011.com for membership and renewal information and for full information on our three ICPE membership meetings this fall. Thanks!

Some readers have asked about my background in Indiana public schools. Thanks for asking! Here is a brief bio:

I am a lifelong Hoosier and began teaching in 1969. I served as a social studies teacher, curriculum developer, state research and evaluation consultant, state social studies consultant, district social studies supervisor, assistant principal, principal, educational association staff member, and adjunct university professor. I worked for Garrett-Keyser-Butler Schools, the Indiana University Social Studies Development Center, the Indiana Department of Education, the Indianapolis Public Schools, IUPUI, and the Indiana Urban Schools Association, from which I retired as Associate Director in 2009. I hold three degrees: B.A. in Ed., Ball State University, 1969; M.S. in Ed., Indiana University, 1972; and Ed.D., Indiana University, 1977, along with a Teacher’s Life License and a Superintendent’s License, 1998.

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Vic’s Statehouse Notes #153 – September 12, 2013

Dear Friends,

The Grew/Sheldrake Report on the A-F controversy issued last Friday (September 6th) found that:

1. until the new A-F system is implemented, Dr. Bennett’s system should not be used to subject a school to state intervention;
2. Dr. Bennett’s IDOE “underestimated administrative and technical challenges” of the new system and did not have sufficient pilot tests;
3. IDOE consistently applied the changes prompted by Dr. Bennett’s concern about Christel House Academy to schools in similar circumstances, changing over 180 grades;
4. Dr. Bennett’s desire was “to treat a recognized good school fairly” but in the words of the report: “any further motivations underlying these actions are beyond the scope and documentation of this report.”

The report was silent on the question of why other “recognized good schools” were not singled out for corrective action as was Christel House Academy.

At the Sept. 6th press conference, as reported by Tom LoBianco of the Associated Press, the authors declined to say their report exonerated Dr. Bennett: “Grew and Sheldrake said Friday that the report does not ‘exonerate’ or ‘vindicate’ Bennett, nor condemn him. They said it only explains how his team changed the grading formula.”

Here are the details on the four points above.

1. Recommending a Hiatus on State Interventions

In a key recommendation that clearly questions the validity of Dr. Bennett’s system, the authors wrote:

For the 2012-13 school year and subsequent years until the new accountability system required by HEA 1427-2013 is implemented, state policymakers should consider not subjecting a school to state interventions described in IC 20-31-9-4 due to a sixth consecutive year of placement in the lowest category or designation of school performance. (p. 19)

One of five charges to the authors written by Speaker Bosma and President Pro Tem Long asked the authors “to examine the previous A-F metric … determining its validity.” The authors provided logs of concerns that others had raised about Dr. Bennett’s metrics and noted that over 30 speakers testified against the system in the only public hearing held in January, 2012. They did not provide, however, a narrative conclusion about the overall validity of Dr. Bennett’s A-F system except for their clear discomfort with using it for state intervention. While they use gentle language, their recommendation cited above clearly finds Dr.Bennett’s metrics invalid for use in state intervention, a powerful statement on their part.

One must ask: If the grades are not valid for state intervention purposes, why should the public think they are valid for any other purpose?

I have advocated that Dr. Bennett’s system never be used again due to the tremendous public distrust that remains and the inherent flaws that it had in the first place using growth statistics based on measuring students against their peers. Such statistics tend to assign low grades to a predictable fixed percentage. The system should be restored to criterion-referenced metrics in which any student that does well can show growth, without regard to the growth of other students.

2. Inadequate Staff and Quality Control Pilot Testing

The authors, while using calm language, were very clear that Dr. Bennett’s IDOE was not up to the task of administering the A-F grading system. Consider Findings 1, 6 and 7 on pages 17-18:

1) The authors found that IDOE under-estimated administrative and technical challenges associated with developing the new administrative rule, computer programming and testing necessary to implement the new rule, and obtaining feedback relative to 2011-12 grades. (p. 17)

6) Due to the staff turnover discussed in the subsection above, there were limitations to IDOE’s technical capability, including computer program code development, to complete work necessary to produce grades for 2011-12. IDOE’s ability to finalize the accountability system, perform quality control simulations, and to produce final output was clearly compromised by the loss of several key technical staff beginning in summer, 2011 through summer, 2012. (p. 18)

7) In part due to the loss of key IDOE technical staff, there was also inadequate time for final implementation of the accountability system from final adoption of the administrative rule in spring, 2012 to the October 30 release of 2011-12 academic year grades. There simply needed to be more time to complete final programming and perform quality control work, prior to release of each school’s final grades. Some of the quality control work was still being performed after the release of embargoed data on September 19. Thus, this work was ongoing while schools were reviewing and submitting questions and appeals. (p. 18)

This description of administrative disarray is certainly not an exoneration of Dr. Bennett.

3. Changing Grades at the Last Minute

While the authors found that last minute changes which helped Christel House Academy were applied consistently to other schools, the thought that the system was being given a drastic revision only a few days before issuing the grades is hard to fathom. It leaves any observer wondering why the system wasn’t pilot tested in a better way.

The report found that two changes were made which lifted the Christel House grade from C to A. One was to ignore high school data which was incomplete. The report found that 16 other schools, most of which were charter schools, were given the same treatment. Secondly, in studying the Christel House grade at Dr. Bennett’s request, the staff discovered what they said was a computer programming error in capping the bonus points for elementary and middle schools. Under the final rule passed in February, they said the cap was to be removed but the computer program erroneously left it in place.

Steve Hinnefeld in his School Matters blog of Sept. 9th (Detail still missing from Indiana grade-change story) has written a well-documented challenge to Dr. Bennett’s staff’s assertion that caps were not supposed to be used under the rule and that it was all a computer error that was conveniently discovered in time to help Christel House Academy. The Grew/Sheldrake report, however, has accepted the IDOE claim that the caps were imposed in error and has printed a list of 165 elementary and middle schools that were given a higher grade by removing the caps. Of the 165, 130 were public schools, 32 were private/parochial schools and 3 were charter schools. Three public high schools (Northview, Rossville and Speedway) also gained a letter grade when the caps were corrected.

4. Treating Recognized Good Schools Fairly

The report’s finding that Dr. Bennett desired “to treat a recognized good school fairly” leaves significant questions: Why did he limit his concern to Christel House Academy? Why didn’t he listen when other “recognized good schools” claimed unfair treatment in the appeal process? Why didn’t he listen when, in a documented appeal, a student got perfect scores two years in a row and yet was marked as “low growth” leaving a negative mark against the school?

MacArthur Elementary in Crown Point was a recognized good school, but it was not treated fairly. Dr. Bennett nominated MacArthur for a National Blue Ribbon award from the US Department of Education in early 2012 due to high test scores and a superb record in a mixed demographic area serving 46% on free or reduced lunch. The school’s pass rate in English was 95% in the past two years, up from 74% in 2005. The pass rate in math has exceeded 90% for the past three years (92%, 96% & 91%), up from 69% in 2005. There is no question the school is a good school and deserves the award, but Principal Marian Buchko had to write the following appeal on October 11, 2012:

“Douglas MacArthur Elementary … recently received the devastating news that our school was graded a “B”. I almost cannot put into words how demoralizing and deflating this announcement was to our entire team. Bluntly speaking, as a collective group we still have not recovered from the sting of this slap from the State. The timing of this announcement has robbed us of our intense sense of pride at being named one of the eight National Blue Ribbon Schools in the state of Indiana.” After restating the high achievement marks of MacArthur, she asked: “How can a school achieving at this level be labeled a “B” school?”

Dr. Bennett ignored the appeal, even though Superintendent Teresa Eineman reminded him in her written appeal that when Dr. Bennett was in Crown Point in January 2012 he had told them that “schools achieving above the state goal of 90-25-90 would not have to worry about their exemplary/A category being threatened by fluctuations in the 90’s for any reason.”

Dr. Bennett’s claim that he wanted to “get it right” did not apply to MacArthur Elementary.

Many school districts have a good school that was not treated fairly. The Grew/Sheldrake report did not address the question of why Christel House was reviewed and upgraded while MacArthur and others were ignored.

Conclusion

Nothing in this report has convinced me that Dr. Bennett’s metrics should be used again this fall to grade schools for 2012-13. I urge you to contact legislators and members of the State Board to let them know that restoring public confidence in the letter grading system requires that the new system due under the law by November 15, 2013 should be used for 2012-13 grades. We should not revisit a flawed formula for letter grades even one more time.

The Grew/Sheldrake Report is well worth reading it is entirety and can be found at

http://www.in.gov/legislative/pdf/Accountability_Model_Exam.pdf

Keep up your good work for public education!

Vic Smith

ICPE is working to promote public education and oppose privatization of schools in the Statehouse. We hope all members and prospective members will come to the membership meetings this fall, the first of which is Saturday, September 21st, 2-3:30pm at the Washington Township Central Office, 86th & Woodfield Crossing. Glenda Ritz is the featured speaker. At the meeting you can renew your membership for the 2013-14 membership year which began July 1st if you have not done so already.

One way to RSVP for the September 21st meeting is simply to reply to this message. Please join us!

To all who have recently renewed or supported our fundraiser in Bloomington, we say thank you! We need additional support to carry on our advocacy for public education. We need additional members and additional donations. We need your help!

Go to www.icpe2011.com for membership and renewal information and for full information on our three ICPE membership meetings this fall. Thanks!

Some readers have asked about my background in Indiana public schools. Thanks for asking! Here is a brief bio:

I am a lifelong Hoosier and began teaching in 1969. I served as a social studies teacher, curriculum developer, state research and evaluation consultant, state social studies consultant, district social studies supervisor, assistant principal, principal, educational association staff member, and adjunct university professor. I worked for Garrett-Keyser-Butler Schools, the Indiana University Social Studies Development Center, the Indiana Department of Education, the Indianapolis Public Schools, IUPUI, and the Indiana Urban Schools Association, from which I retired as Associate Director in 2009. I hold three degrees: B.A. in Ed., Ball State University, 1969; M.S. in Ed., Indiana University, 1972; and Ed.D., Indiana University, 1977, along with a Teacher’s Life License and a Superintendent’s License, 1998.

~~~

Writing to Newspapers in Northern Indiana

This page has links and information for writing Letters to the Editor of newspapers in the Indiana cities of Fort Wayne, the Northwest Indiana Region (Gary, Hammond, Merrillville), and South Bend.

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Writing to Newspapers in Southern Indiana

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Not Ready to Exonerate Tony Bennett in School Grading Scandal

The following op-ed, written by Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Education (NEIFPE) and the Monroe County Coalition for Public Education (including Monroe County coalition member and public school parent, Jenny Robinson) appeared on Anthony Cody's Living in Dialogue blog titled Indiana Grassroots Groups Not Ready to Exonerate Tony Bennett in School Grading Scandal. It was also posted on the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette's Learning Curve blog, written by Karen Francisco, under the title Reputation rewrite, ed-reform style.

In his article in the September 9, 2013 Education Week, Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, claims that the recent report on the Tony Bennett grading scandal, commissioned by leaders of the Indiana state legislature, has exonerated Bennett and his staff. Many of us here in Indiana would respectfully disagree.

Most of the state news reports indicated that Bennett’s claims were plausible, which was a curious word choice. There are many ways to interpret the word plausible, which seems to imply there is an appearance of truth, which may or may not be accurate.

Having said that, Steve Hinnefeld states that while acknowledging plausibility, Bennett has NOT been exonerated.

“Grew and Sheldrake said Friday that the report does not ‘exonerate’ or ‘vindicate’ Bennett, nor condemn him. They said it only explains how his team changed the grading formula...”

The only people who would consider the report "exoneration" are those who agreed with Bennett in the first place. To the best of our knowledge, Bennett was never in favor of "grading on the curve" before Christel House didn't get its "A." Perhaps the question that should be asked is this: Would Tony Bennett have made any changes if the supposed error was discovered in any of the large urban public schools like Indianapolis or Ft. Wayne? The answer is absolutely not.

While no one really seems to understand the A-F system, under the revised standards, school wide performance and improvement are predominantly based on standardized tests. At the elementary and middle school level a preliminary score is based on the percentage of students passing several state tests. The high school accountability formula gives significant weight to graduation percentages, incorporates college and career readiness (which is determined by the number of students who pass AP and IB tests or by earning at least 3 college credits, or by receiving industry certification. School districts had complained about the A-F system when Bennett first pushed it through.

While all of this may sound plausible in theory, in practice it does not take into account the variables of school demographics or of poverty levels or of any of the intangibles which work together to create a school environment. Recognizing this, in April lawmakers mandated that Bennett’s system needed to be overhauled and a new grading system be created in its place. These actions came before the grading scandal erupted in July. Currently, the Accountability System Review Panel, a review committee composed of teachers, principals and superintendents, will review the system and create a new one.

Whether what Bennett did was plausible or not is really irrelevant to those of us who are still dealing with the damage that Tony Bennett did to public schools and public school teachers in this state. Bennett’s IDOE issued punitive policies and grades with warp speed and with little transparency. The abrasive attitudes displayed by Dr. Bennett and his IDOE team were both mind boggling and sickening. Mr. Hess indicates in his article that Indiana voters sent Bennett packing because of his style. However, we would argue that Bennett's style was only a part of why we voted him out; his damaging policies were the major reason. His leadership style left little room for discussion or for debate or for field testing. His push to privatize, voucherize, and charterize Indiana public schools has left them reeling financially and has left educators dispirited as they have tried to jump through policy hoops which they knew in their hearts were educationally unsound.

Unfortunately, one of the worst of these initiatives was the A-F grading system, and this and the rest of his agenda is still being carried out by the Indiana reformers that he has left behind. When we look at that grading system, we need to ask what is the purpose of giving schools a letter grade? Is it meant to help improve how a school functions, how children learn, and how teachers teach, or it is meant to label and devalue a school community? If grades are used to label rather than to improve learning outcomes, then perhaps that system itself deserve an F.

Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Education and Monroe County Coalition for Public Education

You can access NEIFPE's blog here, and Monroe County Coalition Public Education's blog here.
http://icpe-mcsci.blogspot.com

An additional comment from a parent, Jennifer Robinson, who is a member of Monroe County Coalition Public Education:

I'm a parent of young children, not an educator, and I'm just going to talk about elementary through 8th grade here. Bennett wanted a system where absolute scores on ISTEP, combined with some degree of scoring for growth, was equated with the quality of our schools. It all came down to standardized test performance. In other words, school culture did not matter. Whether children got science and social studies, in the grades which have no ISTEP test for that subject, didn't matter. Whether they had access to school libraries staffed by certified media specialists did not matter. Art, music, P.E., didn't matter, and increasingly in southern Indiana schools lack certified teachers in those areas. Clubs, field trips, community connections didn't matter. Recess didn't matter. Class sizes didn't matter. Whether the teachers had extra knowledge of the subjects they were teaching didn't matter. (It is my understanding that funding for professional development was eliminated in the Bennett years.) Whether kids enjoyed learning and wanted to go to school didn't matter. Whether your child's teachers talked with you didn't matter (our district no longer pays teachers to hold conferences with parents). And if you had a problem with Bennett's system, or felt it was unfair to your school, he didn't want to hear about it. He rejected two pleas from Indianapolis Public Schools that the grading would be unfair to them for the same reasons that Christel House didn't do well. When such pleas came from public school administrators, in his eyes, those were mere excuses.

In my own district, the two schools that had the highest proportion of free-and-reduced-cost lunch both received "F's." In one of these schools, with the economic downturn, there were twenty-eight homeless children. There were kids coming to school who needed to sleep for two hours, and eat, before they could even begin to learn. And Bennett's grades penalized these schools for working with vulnerable children, and they made those children a liability to the school.

But it turned out that his own rules, which he wouldn't have even considered modifying for other schools, could be rearranged at the last minute in the special case of a donor's charter school, a school that he had held up as an example. This was proof for teachers in public schools across Indiana that the deck was indeed stacked against them. Bennett just knew (and it was to his political advantage to believe) that Christel House was a good school, and the whole grading system had to be altered to fit reality as he knew it. It was a grading system that worked on a curve, with a guaranteed percentage of losers. It was to be linked to teacher's evaluations and pay. It had punitive consequences for individual children (who would want to be the valedictorian of an "F" school?) and for neighborhoods branded with failure. And it had been developed with so little care that it could be thrown into disarray and totally rearranged for one school's grade.

If you want to know why Bennett and co. changed the grade, read the e-mails. Thanks to AP reporter Tom Lobianco, they are online for all of us to see.

Tony Bennett emails batch 1

Tony Bennett emails batch 2

Tony Bennett emails batch 3

Tony Bennett emails batch 4

Tony Bennett emails batch 5

Jennifer Robinson, Monroe County Coalition Public Education.

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"Charterland" Infographic

...from the National Opportunity to Learn Campaign.

Click on the image to see the (larger) original at the National Opportunity to Learn Campaign.

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For Some, Democracy Only Counts When You Win

In a thinly veiled power-grab, Daniel Elsener, a member of the Indiana State Board of Education, has, with the help of his colleagues on the State Board and Indiana Governor Mike Pence, attempted to invalidate the 1.3 million Indiana votes that helped Glenda Ritz defeat Tony Bennett for Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Pence and Elsener seem to have a philosophy of "If your candidate can't win an election, do everything you can to deny the winner the ability to do her job."

The Indiana Coalition for Public Education--Monroe County and South Central Indiana posted a summary of yesterday's State BOE meeting from one of their members today. In a post titled Does Democracy Not Count When Your Candidate Loses? Jenny Robinson wrote,

The arrogance and contempt that the appointed members of the State Board of Education are showing toward the elected state superintendent are well on their way to becoming a political liability. In the meeting on September 4, board of education member Dan Elsener sprang a proposal on Ritz in the board comment period--a proposal to give a committee headed by himself the power to do strategic planning for the Department of Education. He presented it in an aristocratic mumble, without making eye contact, as if he couldn't be bother to enunciate clearly. He nested it inside generic accolades for Indiana's academic achievements and couched it in terms of giving the state superintendent the support she deserves. Right. That's support like a dagger in the back. Should we give Elsener some credit for not pretending too hard, or was the thinly veiled insolence part of his strategy? He brushed away Ritz's objection that the rushed motion violated protocol. Board members promptly passed it.

...How did he get the authority to set the agenda for public K-12 education in the state of Indiana, instead of the superintendent of public instruction elected by 1.3 million Hoosiers? He's committed to all the reforms that Ritz ran against--the A-F system, IREAD3, the sanctity of ISTEP and testing regimens in general. Republicans need to think about how to explain this to their constituents, because it doesn't look good. What it looks like, frankly, is spitting in voter's faces.

Be sure to read the whole post...

Common Core Assessment Myths and Realities

The following Fact Sheet is being reprinted from Fairtest:

Common Core Assessment Myths and Realities: Moratorium Needed From More Tests, Costs, Stress

Submitted by fairtest on September 3, 2013 - 12:55pm accountability assessment authentic assessment fact sheets k-12 news whats new
NOTE: FOR A PRINT FORMATED PDF COPY OF THIS FACT SHEET INCLUDING ACTIVE LINKS CLICK HERE.

Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), each state set its own learning standards and developed tests to measure them. But NCLB’s failure to spur overall test score gains or close racial gaps led “reformers” to push for national, or “common,” standards. With millions in federal Race to the Top money and NCLB “waivers” as incentives, all but a few states agreed to adopt Common Core standards. Two multi-state consortia — the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) — won federal grants to develop Common Core tests, which are due to be rolled out in 2014-15. Here are the realities behind major Common Core myths.

Myth: Common Core tests will be much better than current exams, with many items measuring higher-order skills.
Reality: New tests will largely consist of the same old, multiple-choice questions.
Proponents initially hyped new assessments that they said would measure – and help teachers promote – critical thinking. In fact, the exams will remain predominantly multiple choice. Heavy reliance on such items continues to promote rote teaching and learning. Assessments will generally include just one session of short performance tasks per subject. Some short-answer and “essay” questions will appear, just as on many current state tests. Common Core math items are often simple computation tasks buried in complex and sometimes confusing “word problems” (PARCC, 2012; SBAC, 2012). The prominent Gordon Commission of measurement and education experts concluded Common Core tests are currently “far from what is ultimately needed for either accountability or classroom instructional improvement purposes” (Gordon Commission, 2013).

Myth: Adoption of Common Core exams will end NCLB testing overkill.
Reality: Under Common Core, there will be many more tests and the same misuses.
NCLB triggered a testing tsunami (Guisbond, et al., 2012); the Common Core will flood classrooms with even more tests. Both consortia keep mandatory annual English/language arts (ELA) and math testing in grades 3-8 and once in high school, as with NCLB. However, the tests will be longer than current state exams. PARCC will test reading and math in three high school grades instead of one; SBAC moves reading and math tests from 10th grade to 11th. In PARCC states, high schoolers will also take a speaking and listening test. PARCC also offers “formative” tests for kindergarten through second grade. Both consortia produce and encourage additional interim testing two to three times a year (PARCC, 2012; SBAC, 2012). As with NCLB, Common Core tests will be used improperly to make high-stakes decisions, including high school graduation (Gewertz, 2012), teacher evaluation, and school accountability.

Myth: New multi-state assessments will save taxpayers money.
Reality: Test costs will increase for most states. Schools will spend even more for computer infrastructure upgrades.
Costs have been a big concern, especially for the five states that dropped out of a testing consortium as of August 2013. PARCC acknowledges that half its member states will spend more than they do for current tests. Georgia pulled out when PARCC announced costs of new, computer-delivered summative math and ELA tests alone totaled $2.5 million more than its existing state assessment budget. States lack resources to upgrade equipment, bandwidth and provide technical support, a cost likely to exceed that of the tests themselves (Herbert, 2012). One analysis indicates that Race to the Top would provide districts with less than ten cents on the dollar to defray these expenses plus mandated teacher evaluations (Mitchell, 2012).

Myth: New assessment consortia will replace error-prone test manufacturers.
Reality: The same, incompetent, profit-driven companies will make new exams and prep materials.
The same old firms, including Pearson, Educational Testing Service and CTB/McGraw-Hill, are producing the tests. These firms have long histories of mistakes and incompetence. The multi-national Pearson, for example, has been responsible for poor-quality items, scoring errors, computer system crashes and missed deadlines (Strauss, 2013). Despite these failures, Pearson shared $23 million in contracts to design the first 18,000 PARCC test items (Gewertz, 2012).

Myth: More rigor means more, or better, learning.
Reality: Harder tests do not make kids smarter.
In New York, teachers witnessed students brought to tears (Hernandez & Baker, 2013), faced with confusing instructions and unfamiliar material on Common Core tests. New York tests gave fifth graders questions written at an 8th grade level (Ravitch, 2013). New York and Kentucky showed dramatic drops in proficiency and wider achievement gaps. Poor results hammer students’ self-confidence and disengage them from learning. They also bolster misperceptions about public school failure, place urban schools in the cross hairs and lend ammunition to privatization schemes. If a child struggles to clear the high bar at five feet, she will not become a "world class" jumper because someone raised the bar to six feet and yelled "jump higher," or if her “poor” performance is used to punish her coach.

Myth: Common Core assessments are designed to meet the needs of all students.
Reality: The new tests put students with disabilities and English language learners at risk.
Advocates for English language learners (Maxwell, 2013) have raised concerns about a lack of appropriate accommodations. A U.S. Education Department’s technical review assessed the consortia’s efforts in July 2013 and issued a stern warning, saying that attempts to accommodate students with disabilities and ELLs need more attention (Gewertz, 2013).

Myth: Common Core "proficiency" is an objective measure of college- and career-readiness.
Reality: Proficiency levels on Common Core tests are subjective, like all performance levels.
Recent disclosures demonstrate that New York State set passing scores arbitrarily (Burris, 2013). There is no evidence that these standards or tests are linked to the skills and knowledge students need for their wide range of college and career choices (Ravitch, 2013). In addition, school officials have often yielded to the temptation to cheat and manipulate test results to bolster the credibility of their favored reforms. Examples include Atlanta, New York, Washington, DC, Indiana, Florida, and more (FairTest, 2012).

Myth: States have to implement the Common Core assessments; they have no other choice.
Reality: Yes they do. Activists should call for an indefinite moratorium on Common Core tests to allow time for implementation of truly better assessments.
High-quality assessment improves teaching and learning and provides useful information about schools. Examples of better assessments include well-designed formative assessments (FairTest, 2006), performance assessments that are part of the curriculum (New York Performance Standards Consortium), and portfolios or Learning Records (FairTest, 2007) of actual student work. Schools can be evaluated using multiple sources of evidence that includes limited, low-stakes testing, school quality reviews, and samples of ongoing student work (Neill, 2010). It’s time to step back and reconsider what kinds of assessments will help our students and teachers succeed in school and life.

References

• Burris, C. 2013. “How come officials could predict test score results?” Blog post, Answer Sheet.

• FairTest. 2006. “The Value of Formative Assessment.”

• FairTest. 2007. “The Learning Record.”

• FairTest. 2012. Confirmed Cases of Test Cheating (2008-2012).

• Gewertz, C. 2012. “Questions Dog Design of Tests,” Education Week.

• Gewertz, C. 2012. “Will the Common Assessments Be Used as a Graduation Requirement?” Education Week.

• Gewertz, C. 2013. “Ed. Dept. Panel Says Test Consortia Need Sharper Focus on Accessibility,” Education Week.

• Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment in Education. 2013. “A Public Policy Statement.”

• Guisbond, L., Neill, M., and Schaeffer, R. 2012. NCLB’s Lost Decade for Educational Progress: What Can We Learn from this Policy Failure? Boston: FairTest,

• Herbert, M. 2012, July/August. “Common Core Testing Online Without Constant Connectivity?” District Administration.

• Hernandez, J. and Baker, A. “A Tough New Test Spurs Protest and Tears,” New York Times.

• Maxwell, L.A. 2013, August 5. “ELL Advocates Call for PARCC Tests in Spanish,” Education Week.

• Mitchell, Kenneth. 2012. “Federal Mandates on Local Education: Costs and Consequences – Yes, it’s a Race, but is it in the Right Direction?” CRREO Discussion Brief #8.

• Neill, M. 2010. “A Better Way to Assess Students and Evaluate Schools,” Education Week.

• Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. Item and Task Prototypes. 2012.

• Ravitch, D. 2013. “Punishing kids for adult failures,” Daily News.

• Ravitch, D. 2013. “The Biggest Fallacy of the Common Core Standards: No Evidence.”

• Singer, A. 2013. “What Does a Common Core/Danielson Lesson Plan Look Like?” Huffington Post.

• Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. A Summary of Core Components. 2012.

• Strauss. V. 2013. “A brief history of Pearson’s problems with testing,” Answer Sheet.

• Ujifusa, A. 2013. “Tests Linked to Common Core in Critics’ Cross Hairs,” Education Week.

Vic’s Statehouse Notes #152 – September 4, 2013

Dear Friends,

The State Board will meet this morning for the first time since Gov. Pence’s power move on August 23rd to put the State Board in a new state agency. The full implications of this move are not clear. This seismic change in state education policy was camouflaged by focusing the announcement on career education, but the real change is putting the State Board under the new agency and removing it from the Department of Education and State Superintendent Ritz. The fact that Superintendent Ritz was not informed in advance of this major change appears to confirm that this is one more step by the Governor to reduce the influence of State Superintendent Ritz.

Budget Appropriations

The magnitude of this story has clearly been underreported by the press. One story that appeared after Gov. Pence’s press conference on August 23rd said that the new agency would have a budget of $5 million and a staff of 16. In the budget passed last April, the State Board was given $3,010,716; the Education Roundtable was given $750,000; and the Works Councils were given $1,000,000. That adds up to just under $5 million.

Past Governors have asserted their control over the State Board by controlling the votes of individual members. It is not clear why this Governor felt the need to go beyond these past practices to change the relationship between the State Board and the State Superintendent. Key questions linger about the future:

1) What will the Governor gain by putting the State Board in an agency separate from the Department of Education?

2) How will this impact the working relationship between the Department of Education and the State Board?

3) Did legislators who control the purse strings and oversee education policy for Indiana have any input into this major change?

4) Will this either speed up or slow down the policy work related to Common Core and the new A-F system?

5) If the Education Roundtable is controlled by the new agency, will the legal role of the State Superintendent as co-chair be diminished?

6) If the State Board is independent, will the State Superintendent’s role as chair of the State Board be diminished?

A Clash of Visions for Education

The importance of this change was underscored by the fact that Glenda Ritz was not informed in advance about this new agency. When the story broke and the snub of Glenda Ritz became a big part of the story, I was told that Gov. Pence himself walked down to the State Superintendent’s office in the early afternoon, presumably to smooth over the slight. Superintendent Ritz was out visiting a school. She and the Governor had conversed at length a few days earlier at the Career Council meeting. Nothing was said about the new agency.

The other indicator of importance was the timing. Released on a Friday when news gets the least attention, the announcement succeeded in getting very little notice in the media world.

The move to marginalize Superintendent Ritz is based on a fundamental clash of visions between Gov. Pence and Superintendent Ritz. She wants to focus public money on public schools to make every school a great place to learn. He wants to give public money to private schools to give parents more choices. She wants to focus public money on non-sectarian public schools. He wants public money to go to sectarian private schools. During his first General Assembly last spring, public school advocates were extremely disheartened that the Governor pushed so hard to expand private school vouchers and then backed a recession-level budget for public school funding of only 1% in the second year of the budget. The previous low in recent decades when Indiana was not in recession was 2.4%.

This is hardball educational politics, and the one million public school students are losing while private schools are expanding.

Keep up your good work for public education!

Best wishes,

Vic Smith

ICPE is working to promote public education and oppose privatization of schools in the Statehouse. We need all previous members of ICPE to renew their memberships for the 2013-14 membership year which began July 1st. Please join us! To all who have recently renewed, we say thank you! We need additional support to carry on our advocacy for public education. We need additional members and additional donations. We need your help!

Go to www.icpe2011.com for membership and renewal information.

Some readers have asked about my background in Indiana public schools. Thanks for asking! Here is a brief bio:

I am a lifelong Hoosier and began teaching in 1969. I served as a social studies teacher, curriculum developer, state research and evaluation consultant, state social studies consultant, district social studies supervisor, assistant principal, principal, educational association staff member, and adjunct university professor. I worked for Garrett-Keyser-Butler Schools, the Indiana University Social Studies Development Center, the Indiana Department of Education, the Indianapolis Public Schools, IUPUI, and the Indiana Urban Schools Association, from which I retired as Associate Director in 2009. I hold three degrees: B.A. in Ed., Ball State University, 1969; M.S. in Ed., Indiana University, 1972; and Ed.D., Indiana University, 1977, along with a Teacher’s Life License and a Superintendent’s License, 1998.

Save the Date: NEIFPE Meetings on September 23rd

Because it has been a while since we introduced our group (Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Education) and since so much has happened in public education, we will be hosting two informal meetings on September 23rd at the ACPL (Allen County Public Library).

The meetings will be from 1:00-3:00 p.m. or 7:00-9:00 p.m. Please save the date so that you can plan to attend whichever meeting will be more convenient for you.

At that time we would like to bring you up to date with what we have accomplished. Additionally, we can all share ideas about future action steps. For those of you who would like to be involved with letter writing groups, bring your laptop or some writing paper, and we can get started right away.

Save the Date

Monday, September 23

Main Library Downtown, Room A

Your choice of times: 1-3 p.m. or 7-9 p.m.

We look forward to seeing you again.