Guest post at Atlanta Journal Constitution. The 'bizarro" state of American education today.

[madfloridian]

Maureen Downey of the AJC hosts an education writer's post about Arne Duncan's policies.

Jim Arnold is a former superintendent of Pelham City Schools. He's written several guest pieces for the Get Schooled blog and has his own blog.

Here is Dr. Jim Arnold's blog.

The 'bizarro" state of American education today. More Joker than Superman?

Education seems to have entered its own Bizarro World with Arne Duncan’s policies and beliefs. President Obama’s appointee to head the U.S. Department of Education, second only to Bill Gates as the most powerful force in US educational policy, believes strongly in the Bizarro theory of educational improvement; whatever research says, do the opposite.

....In the category of “you can’t make this stuff up,” Duncan recently noted the performance of special education students in several states was not meeting his lofty expectations. His solution, again meeting Bizarro requirements, was to raise expectations and subject SPED students to more standardized testing by using National Assessment of Educational Progress as an indicator of their progress.

Even though NAEP was not designed to measure this, Bizarro reasoning says it’s OK because “it’s the best we have.” Parents of students with a learning disability will be happy to know their concerns, fears and worries can be erased with the amazing combination of higher expectations and more testing. Who knew?

...If standardized testing were an effective measure of teacher performance and student academic achievement, why haven’t private schools and post -secondary institutions jumped on the bandwagon so their students would not, so to speak, be left behind. That there is no such groundswell seems to indicate the benefits of standardized testing presented by accountabullies in the name of accountabalism only accrue to public school students.

Isn’t it a shame that the children of those making the rules almost always attend schools exempt from those policies?

Posted at Twitter

[madfloridian]

1. Dr. Arnold's letter to Arne Duncan. Good to see administrators speaking out also.

http://www.drjamesarnold.com/#!blogger-feed/c48f/post/4526412707198826305

Doctors, Dentists, insurance companies, police officers, lawyers and every other profession you can name are not only allowed but required to take into consideration pre-existing conditions, prior service, previous records and personal history of their clients when computing recommendations, outcomes, professional services, treatments and payments. If you truly consider teaching a profession, can you offer them less? To hold teachers or members of any other profession accountable for things they cannot control is reprehensible.

One of the first things every teacher does at the beginning of a new school year is learn about his/her students. It is incumbent upon administrators to follow that example. Learn about teachers, learn about your profession, learn about those things that motivate teachers to help students succeed at higher and higher academic levels. Learn also the difference in motivations for professional teachers and for corporate reformers. Teachers, as you noted in the past, are indeed members of a profession of “nation builders and societal leaders dedicated to our highest ideals.” Please do not confuse teaching, as you seem to have done, with social engineering and misguided corporate reform for financial gain. We cannot fix every student and we cannot save them all, but we will save every child that we can. You must be the leader out of the wilderness of blame and the wrong headedness of equating student progress to a score on a standardized test. Talk to real teachers. Learn from real teachers. Be a teacher. Lead.

[madfloridian]

2. Arnold also co-posted at WP better use of money than testing.

http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/06/24/better-ways-to-use-millions-of-dollars-now-spent-on-testing/

Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent by states and school districts on standardized tests every year, money that could be used for purposes far more helpful in improving student achievement. What are those purposes? Here are some suggestions, from Jim Arnold and Peter Smagorinsky. Jim Arnold recently retired from the superintendent’s position of the Pelham City Schools in Georgia and he blogs at drjamesarnold.com. Peter Smagorinsky is Distinguished Research Professor of English Education at the University of Georgia. His essays are archived here.

While halting repairs on schools, what the state did invest in was accountability for teachers. No one was accountable for the conditions of the schools until a citizen uprising and news coverage forced a building initiative that fortunately will provide the people of Trenton with a modern facility. But while dodging chunks of falling ceilings, treading cautiously around scurrying rats, and attempting to teach through building-induced illnesses, teachers remained accountable to the standards that Education Secretary Arne Duncan believes can determine their fitness for the classroom.

We live in Georgia, another state in which schools are grossly underfunded yet consultants and testing corporations are living large off the investment of state funds in holding teachers accountable, regardless of their work conditions or the life conditions of their students. Most schools cannot afford to run a full year, with roughly two-third cancelling 10-30 days every year and requiring teachers to take “furlough” days to make budget. Further, schools in our state have 20th century connectivity infrastructures and technology affordances, limiting the degree to which kids can learn what they’ll need to know to navigate and thrive in our emerging, digitally driven society.

[FloriTexan]

3. Kicking for Exposure n/t

[madfloridian]

4. Thank you. It really disappeared quickly.

[woo me with science]

5. K&R