Were you encouraged by this
year's significant improvement in school performance scores? Very few
Louisiana public schools are rated “F” and many schools have moved
up to “B” or “A”. The new SPS system combined with a huge
push by local school administrators and teachers to improve student
performance seems to have finally paid off. Educators should enjoy it
while they can. They certainly have worked very hard and deserve the
better ratings.
Unfortunately that will all
change very soon with the implementation of the PARCC testing for the
Common Core. Our state superintendent knows very well that Louisiana
has been set up for failure. Soon we will experience a huge unfair
blow to the image of our public schools and to the teaching
profession in Louisiana. How will this happen? Please read on. . . .
The proponents of school
privatization and the standardized testing craze have perfected the
art of telling politically correct lies about our public education
system as a way of promoting their schemes. These changes in public
education, particularly in Louisiana are expected to produce enormous
profits for the reformers at the expense of children and educators.
Almost none of this "reform" is based on scientific fact. Here are the
assumptions driving the destruction of our public education system:
American students are far behind students in other industrialized nations in academic achievement.
All children can and
should perform at least at grade level in certain basic skills.
All children have the
same potential for learning math and language skills.
Artistic talent,
vocational-technical skills, and service skills are not important
enough to be encouraged and developed in our public schools.
The mandating of
rigorous standards for our schools by politicians will result in
higher student achievement.
Government can set a
goal for achievement for all students and expect educators to
produce it.
Louisiana students
should do just as well as students in other states.
Poor teaching is the
primary reason for low student performance.
Poverty is not
important in determining student performance.
Annual standardized
testing of all students is necessary to insure quality education.
All schools should be
expected to produce the same average level of student achievement.
All employment
decisions for teachers and administrators should be made based on
student test scores.
Teacher credentials and
professional training are not important for producing the best
teachers.
Free enterprise and the
profit motive are the best ways to improve school performance.
Most of these seemingly
politically correct myths have been thoroughly discredited by Diane
Ravitch's new book titled: Reign of Error; The Hoax
of the Privatization Movement and
the Danger to America's Public Schools.
I believe every professional educator and all parents of public
school children should read this book to get the facts about how our
educational system is being undermined for profit by mostly
non-educators. Unfortunately Louisiana is right at the leading edge
of this destructive movement. (My readers can be assured that I
receive no benefit or profit of any kind for recommending this book.
I only recommend it to my readers because it is the most
authoritative and factual explanation of a movement which represents
a huge danger to public education.)
On
the issue of American student performance compared to other nations:
Ravitch shows in her book that America is doing better than ever, not
worse than ever. She explains that the US average student achievement
has never ranked near the top of International testing. However, if
our students attending comparable poverty level schools were compared
to all other industrialized countries, they would score tied with
Singapore, and above Finland. Also, our students and our school
systems produce the most successful workers in the world, probably
because our education system has always encouraged more innovation
and creativity. Other
so called “high achieving” countries are now trying to emulate
our creative system just at the time that the US is putting emphasis
on imitating their
outdated standardized education systems! Our
greatest problem, particularly in Louisiana, is low performance by our high
poverty students. We should put maximum effort into improving high
poverty schools, not closing them down, taking them over by the
state, or criticizing their teachers.
All children should perform
on grade level: One
of the most misleading assumptions of our education reformers
is that they want us to believe that all children have identical
brains and that they are all ready to learn the same material at the
same rate. Professional
educators know that this seemingly politically correct assumption is
absolutely false.
Students' academic abilities and motivation vary as much as their
physical abilities. To try to force all children to learn exactly the
same material at exactly the same rate is pedagogically incorrect. Grade level
performance just happens to be the average performance of a
standardized sampling of children nationwide. There are huge numbers
of students who naturally perform both above and below grade level.
No amount of standardizing of education will ever make all students
learn at the same rate and at the same level of proficiency.
Requiring that they all learn at the same rate is setting our
educational system up for failure.
Only academic skills are
important: Putting
all the emphasis of our educational system on only language skills
and math guarantees that our educational system will ignore other
important training goals that are very important to our children and
our economy. In Louisiana there is a huge demand for
vocational-technical and even artistic skills that are now being
ignored by our so called “reformed” educational standards. The
Common Core standards do not include training in many of these vital
skills.
Adoption of rigorous
standards results in higher student achievement: Our
politicians have been led to believe that by just setting rigorous
academic standards for all students, they are improving education.
This is the theory behind the Common Core State Standards. Standards
do not educate children. Good
teachers with a varied curriculum using different methods for
different children are the most effective ways of educating children.
It is stupid to use the same standards to educate autistic children
(I have an autistic grandchild so I know what I am talking about) as
for all others. I also have two grandchildren who are very precocious
at math and science and I appreciate that their public school system
allows and encourages them to progress at a faster rate than their
grade level.
Louisiana
students should do just as well on Common Core as students in other
states: John
White loves to say: “Our students in Louisiana are just as smart as
kids in other states.” With this statement he is knowingly setting
up our Louisiana teachers for a monumental failure in the eyes of the
public. John White knows very well that the results of the PARCC
testing will rank our Louisiana public school student performance
pretty much where we are ranked according to the NAEP testing. That
is about two or three places from the bottom of the rankings of the
states. White also knows (by now) that this is not because of
inferior teaching but because of the demographics of our student
population. Louisiana public schools have one of the poorest, most at
risk, student populations in the country, which is exacerbated by the
fact that we have the largest proportion of our students attending
private and parochial schools. Because of a historically strong
parochial school system, our state diverts many of our wealthiest and
most motivated students out of our public schools thereby reducing
the average performance of those remaining. White recently assured
the local superintendents in a conference call that he will soften
the blow of the PARCC testing and protect our teachers and students
from being denigrated by using a lower scale for student proficiency
than was used recently in New York state. (Over 70% of New York
students were rated as non-proficient in the first round of Common
Core testing) But he knows that the newspapers will still compare
Louisiana public school student performance with students in other
states, and our
state will look very bad
because of the factors I mentioned above. This very unfair comparison
of our public schools and our public school teachers to other states will be just
what the privatizers want to see: another seemingly good reason to
turn our public school students over to the for-profit charter and
voucher market.
Only educators should be
held accountable: One
of the greatest injustices of the accountability movement is that all
the accountability has been placed on the shoulders of teachers and
school administrators and none on parents, students, or state
departments of education. There is absolutely no way that educators
can guarantee that all students will perform at grade level. All
children nationwide were required to perform at grade level by the
year 2014 by the federal No
Child Left Behind law.
This was completely unattainable because it violated the rules of
statistics, so now all states are being given waivers from the requirement. All legitimate studies show that the level of poverty of
students in a school is the dominant determiner of student
performance. Consensus by credible researchers is that teacher
influence on student achievement is at most 20%. By far,
out-of-school factors are more important in determining student
performance. So to expect teachers and schools to produce the same
result with all students is insanity that leads to all sorts of
damaging attacks on good educators and does not benefit children. So
called failing schools have been closed and children sent to other
schools where their performance has not improved. But their lives are
often disrupted with negative results. Educators, particularly in
Louisiana, are being demoralized by the unfair attacks on them
resulting from such policies.
Over emphasis on
standardized testing: Finland,
one of the most successful countries at educating its children, does
very little standardized testing. Teachers have great freedom on what
and how to teach. They are not expected to teach all students the
same standards and their lives are not dominated by the results of
student testing. Yet in Louisiana and in many other states, constant
standardized testing is now being used to drive instruction. This is
exactly the practice being discredited by the Asian countries that
have used them for so long. Common Core testing will only get worse.
Basing all educator
employment decisions on student performance is a recipe for disaster:
Good teachers are already shunning high poverty schools because they
do not want to have their careers destroyed by the relatively low performance.
This policy will inevitably result in the students who most need
stability and the strongest teachers and administrators getting only
neophyte educators.
Teacher credentials are not
important: When
teacher credentials are ignored and when educators are hired and
promoted using only student test scores, we will see more regimented
teaching to the test, cheating by some educators, and a general
deterioration of teaching as a profession. Those who want to
eliminate education credentials mainly want only the flexibility to
hire the cheapest teachers. The administrators who run these schools
usually make extremely high salaries. The leading countries in
education are doing exactly the opposite of what Louisiana and the US
is doing to the teaching profession.
Free enterprise and
privatization will produce better education results: Educational
free enterprise based on test scores is a sure way of encouraging
cheating by greedy individuals and by companies who will manipulate
the educational system for profit. If we substitute the profit
motive for the desire to educate the whole student many charter and
voucher school operators will learn to beat the system for profit. We
are seeing much of this in Louisiana. Every way possible of
manipulating and falsifying records of schools for profit are being
used. In addition, students who are potentially low performers and
who need the most attention are being shunned by those operating on
the profit motive. It is ironic that thousands of the neediest
students are being left behind by No
Child Left Behind, Race to the Top,
privatization. and Common
Core.
According to Diane Ravitch, the status quo in American education has
now become the incessant push for privatization, standardization and
the resulting destruction of one of the most successful educational
systems in the world.
Educators and parents who care can simply not allow this trend to
continue. We must unite and insist that reason and compassion for
children and the need to address diversity rather than
standardization must once again guide public education policy. We can
only do this by getting involved politically where we will demand support of our legislators for true public schools.
Please participate in our
Defenders of Public Education!
Just send me you name, your email and your zip code to louisianaeducator@gmail.com so you too can
help us fight the important battles for public education. I promise
your information will be kept confidential and our purposes will be
only the proper education of children and support of the teaching
profession.
Thanks,
Michael Deshotels
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