Delaware’s Example We Are On The Wrong Path

The entire nation was set on the course of Common Core … Delaware raced to be first… Filling out applications to “Race To The Top” it was accepted first and there Common Core had an extra year of implementation.  Therefore seeing how Delaware is functioning is good for showing how the rest of the nation shall fare when it too reaches that level Delaware now is …

Fact is, in very many areas, solely because of Common Core, Delaware is less better than it was before “Race To The Top” became a priority. We as the first state, are now fighting for survival in a race to the bottom because of our state’s enthusiasm to embrace an untried, untested, and unproven strategy to implement better learning processes….

This can be seen no better than our failure to improve ELL in Hispanics here in Delaware…

Again charts show this better than do words…..

One can see from the above grade 4 score-chart, gains have been made nationally on the NAEP since 2005 to 2015, a rather impressive achievement, and something which would be celebrated if it were not completely overshadowed by the current focus on achievement gaps.

Same with the national Grade 8 scores on the NAEP. All segments trend upward over ten years, an amazing feat worthy of celebration.  Meaning we are doing a much better job in taking children who have never heard English and do not have it reinforced at home, and giving them the ability to survive in our English speaking country.

But instead of celebrating this good thing, we beat up ourselves over a self-imposed restriction called “the achievement gap”…

So we are complaining and trying to develop a process which makes children who don’t know English and don’t have it reinforced at home, catch up and surpass those who grew up learning English and always have it reinforced everywhere they go…

It is pretty silly really, isn’t it?   Shouldn’t we concentrate on the big picture and improve the reading rates for all Hispanics and ignore the fact that the achievement gap will always be there and possibly grow larger due to natural selection?   The only way to REALLY improve the Hispanic achievement gap is to pull them out of their families and put them in English speaking ones of higher incomes… Something that will never happen.

It should also be acknowledged here, that before we were worried about testing, Hispanic scores rose much higher than after we began to worry about them.  This should be no surprised to anyone who’s followed what goes on in education lately because of the testing requirements placed on teachers and students.

Because WE are focusing only on closing achievement gaps, we are teaching only the test to our Hispanic students.   All they learn is how to take the tests. This readily explains the slumps from 2013 to 2015 in the charts above.  This slump comes about because of pressure top-downward.  Teachers are told they have to get scores up on their Hispanic children.  And the only way to do that is to teach them how to fill in the bubbles of the test, how to accurately guess the right answers, and when and when not just skip a question.  Strategy outranks knowledge of language….

And make no mistake!  All children are suffering from this strategy that Common Core forces on every single school required to be evaluated by these tests. It is just that with students who learn one language at school and another at home, the differences are wider and more pronounced.  One can immediately see the impact without  other issues clouding the picture.

And so if you are astute, (I’m very lucky, most of MY readers are) you are probably putting two and two together and saying to yourself that 1) if the national average score has risen for all Hispanics over the past ten years, that 2) if Common Core and its tests negatively impact the learning process for all students, that if 3) Delaware has a year more of Common Core under its belt than other states, then probably Delaware is near the NAEP’s bottom rank of all states when one compares the gains or losses Hispanics have faced during the Markell administration’s second term.  If you are astute, that is what you should be thinking right now…..

Delaware, 2nd to last of all 50 states in gains made by Hispanic 8th graders ….. Thanks, Jack Markell and Mark Murphy.

WE went the wrong direction in Race To The Top and corporate reform… Today it is very obvious that the test has got to go.  We already have great overall accountability in the NAEP… These calls from lobby shills saying we need to keep the Smarter Balanced to make schools accountable, are exactly who and what is ruining education for all of 130,000 + of Delaware’s children in public schools.

Nothing wrong with accountability.. it worked very well until we started focusing on the Smarter Balanced Assessments.  Again, don’t take my word. Just look at the charts.

 

Race To The Top Review

Kevin at Exceptional Delaware has already done a review of the 76 page report released today…. It is the official US Department of Education’s own assessment of its own program:  Race To The Top.

One should expect a glowing endorsement.  But even though that would be the normal expectation, that  is not what was gotten… Of course, omissions were there as well.

Let’s begin with the total Race To The Top number..   $4.3 billion….

That stretched out is $4,300,000,000 or roughly 1% of the USA’s non military discretionary budget for one year.

Of that, Delaware got $119,000,000 of that wicked amount of money or in percent….. 2.7% . What did we get?

Delaware got the largest percentage of new students entering college…

Graph courtesy of US Dept of Ed.

Delaware also got an increase in AP scores….

Graph courtesy of US Dept of Ed.

“Delaware, Massachusetts, and Tennessee also get shout-outs for relying on teams of teachers and administrators to provide ongoing feedback. Delaware teachers and state leaders allegedly teamed up to create “rigorous and comparable” measures of growth in non-tested subjects…”

Isn’t this a lie?  We know that some task forces were created but we also know they were handpicked so only those who previously registered support of Common Core (long before its details were made public) were allowed to be on those panels and even then, their recommendations were completely ignored.  If anyone can prove this is not so, please respond in the comments below.

Whether inclusive or exclusive of RTTT funding, independent sources outside the US Dept of Education has reported that spending per child increased in our state by $475 during the RTTT window…. This is in comparison to 4 other states which had not brought per student spending even up to pre-recession levels.  Of those RTTT state increasing, Delaware was at the top.

Courtesy of CBPP

But the report leaves out, or only touches on briefly, several controversial issues where states stumbled or backtracked. That’s especially true with respect to teacher evaluations and policies linked to the Common Core State Standards, especially assessments.

The report seemed to focus less on measurable improvement and more on the new relationships the grants have helped to create between teachers, administrators, and others, and how the grants have refined and enhanced their energy.  Translated into corporate speak that is the equivalent of a CEO requesting down the pipeline if we had achieved his goals for the quarter, only to receive the answer that  “no we haven’t but  we have good news!  Nadine in insurance is dating Jonathan in Finance, which means they are talking to each other a lot,” and expecting that to assuage the expected bosses ire.

Essentially we spent $4.3 billion just to create more urgency and more cooperation…

Today, Arne Duncun admitted as much in his speech on Race To The Top… “My administration, recognizing the urgency of change for today’s students, pushed a lot, fast. We haven’t gotten everything right, and we’ve seen unintended consequences that have posed challenges for educators and students.” 

BUT WHAT WERE THOSE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES AND HOW SERIOUSLY HAVE THEY DAMAGED AMERICAN EDUCATION?

All of the Race to the Top states struggled with  teacher evaluations that took into account student outcomes. Many experienced serious political blowback to the standards, in some cases causing major consequences for state leaders. Plus, indicators of student achievement in the report don’t paint a uniformly glowing portrait. Duncan himself acknowledged in his remarks that declining scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress aren’t encouraging…..

Here is how that $4.3 Billion was divvied up. (all graphs can be clicked on to enlarge)…

Courtesy of Ed Week.

Shifting to new tests to measure students’ grasp of the common core has been difficult. That huge issue is ignored in this report…  Instead  highlights of cooperation between teachers in different states are expounded.  It is like praising the recruitment and training of little boys to fight Russian tanks while ignoring the total collapse of Berlin and the Third Reich.  The newest NAEP results represent Berlin in that scenario.

“The Education Department sunk $360 million into two testing consortia, funded by a second RTTT grant. But four of the states that received the grants the report focuses on (Florida, Georgia, Ohio, and Tennessee) decided to ditch the PARCC exam for either 2014-15 or 2015-16, while Massachusetts is still undecided about whether to officially adopted PARCC as its state exam. New York has no plans to use that test and  it’s no longer listed as a consortium’s member on PARCC’s website. North Carolina, meanwhile, is still a member of Smarter Balanced, but has so far held off on using the exam.” EdWeek

Today three Race to the Top states—New York, North Carolina, and Tennessee—are formally reviewing the standards as required by their General Assemblies.  Florida and Georgia also made changes to their common core, (Plus a large number of non-RTTT states have ditched or drastically modified Common Core from its original perception.)  No mention in the report, of course.

Unmentioned as well, was the damage RTTT did to top state chiefs… The exalted “chiefs for change” got changed out… It might have gotten hottest for former Tennessee chief Kevin Huffman, who left his post nearly a year ago. But it also made life difficult for John Barge, who is no longer Georgia’s chief.  Delaware’s Mark Murphy mysteriously resigned in the middle of a gigantic all-encompassing state-wide controversy over the right of parents to opt out and not have their schools punished by doing so, and Rhode Island’s former head, Debbie Gist, has downshifted to being in charge of a single district of Tulsa’s school system. Only two Race to the Top states (Massachusetts and North Carolina) and the District of Columbia have the same chief as they did when the program began, by all accounts, a failure…..

The report almost ignores the turmoil surrounding tying teachers performances to the test.  Instead as mentioned above, it applauds areas of cooperation and ongoing feedback, including Delaware’s infamous TELL survey…  Imagine if that was the only true accomplishment of $4.3 billion and Common Core?

Three cheers for RTTT!  We got  teachers to take a survey on their phones…

It’s worth stressing outside this report that it was evaluations  which was perhaps the toughest hurdle many states have faced both internally and with the Education Department. Almost all have argued that tying student test scores to teacher evaluations at the same time that states were shifting to new standards and assessments was misguided. The Department has recently acknowledged this through giving its waivers postponing the implementation of the Accountability piece 2,3,4 years into the future.

Most  astute people can deduce that by having the US Department of Education ignore the problems of Common Core and Race To The Top in its analogy of how their pet project was doing, it becomes obvious by its omission  that in achieving its aims, this program is not working.  This proves once again that you can’t throw money and snap your fingers and make problems go away…

It takes trained people.  And forcing them through constant irrational change-ups to move out of education into other fields, …is something that is not good for America’ s education, …… period.

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