NJ State Board of Ed Fails. Again.

 Photo credit: Jesse Turner

In a business as usual move, the NJ State Board of Education (NJSBOE) voted this morning to use the PARCC exam, or, rather, multiple exams, as New Jersey's official requirement for graduation beginning with the class of 2020-21. A move that has been fiercely contested for a couple of years by parents, students, teachers, and local school boards. The vote was Yes (6): Mark B., Joe F., Andrew M., Jack F., Arcelio A., and Dorothy S. Abstained (1): Edithe F. Absent: 3 members. 

It should be noted, and probably screamed from the mountaintops, that high school exit exams are NOT a requirement of the old federal education law, No Child Left Behind, nor are they a requirement of the new federal education law, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). 

I'm sorry to say the vote was completely unsurprising. When NJSBOE released the agenda for today's meeting, they included the New Jersey Department of Education's (NJDOE) response to testimony on Standards and Assessments (item C) since April 6th.

There were 194 individual testimonies provided from students, parents, teachers, university professors, and local board of ed members. NJDOE responded to 96 comments (synopses), and with very few exceptions, disregarded the public's testimony. The overwhelming majority of testimony was against using PARCC as a graduation requirement and, in the end, was ignored. (more on that in another post)

Save Our Schools New Jersey, a grassroots, statewide parent organization, submitted a petition against the use of PARCC as a graduation requirement with 6,000 signatures. They were ignored.

On May 14, 2016, 88% of school boards at the New Jersey School Boards Association (NJSBA) Delegate Assembly adopted a resolution stating there should be multiple pathways to graduation. They were ignored.

27 individual school boards adopted resolutions asking the state NOT to make PARCC the only exit exam. You can find most of them compiled here. Highland Park, Hopewell Valley, Bloomfield, Washington Township (Gloucester), Clifton, East Windsor, Paterson, Middlesex Regional Educational Services, Princeton, Collingswood, Bridgewater Raritan, Livingston, East Brunswick, Wall Township, Montclair, Bordentown, Ocean Township (Monmouth), Linden, Palmyra, Bernards Township, Marlboro, West Windsor-Plainsboro, Watchung Hills Regional High School, Cranford, Montville, Teaneck, and Monroe (Middlesex County). They were ignored.

If any of this sounds familiar, it should. Earlier this year, with yet more testimony against PARCC, the public was ignored. I wrote about that here.  

Going back further, NJDOE assembled a Study Commission on Assessments in late 2014. There were over 200 public testimonies taken at three different hearings around the state in the early half of 2015. The final report has been removed from the NJDOE website. I'll post it when I get my hands on a copy. Again, the point is, the overwhelming majority of stakeholders said, "No." They were ignored also. 

The pattern is really clear. The public has little to no influence over what happens inside NJDOE. While they regularly pat themselves on the back for acquiring stakeholder input, they appear incapable of processing and utilizing information from outside their walls. They operate in a dangerously closed echo chamber and it shows, not only in the quality of their own work, but in their blatant disregard for what is actually happening inside our schools. 

This is hardly the end of this fight. However, it is also clear that playing nice and pretending their calls for public input is genuine, is a farce. Personally, I will be at every call for public input that is made available to us, because I refuse to be silent. I refuse to give them an opportunity to say, "But no one objected." The reason I refuse is because there is nothing less than the future of our public education system, and by extension, our democracy, at stake. 

The next NJSBOE meeting is on September 7th. There will open public testimony on that date. Probably would be a good idea to let them know just how awful you think this decision is. 

I leave you with Save Our Schools New Jersey's statement on today's vote to make proficiency on PARCC 10th grade ELA and Algebra 1 exams a requirement for graduation, for the class of 2021 and beyond.

"Despite unified opposition from parents, school board members, and teachers, the State Board of Education has chosen to endorse a graduation requirement so inappropriately difficult that it would fail 60% of New Jersey students.

As the Education Law Center and ACLU NJ noted, these new regulations also violate New Jersey laws and our state constitution.

Save Our Schools NJ's 31,000 members will be working to ensure that New Jersey's next governor:

- Eliminates the high school graduation standardized testing requirement, which hurts students and does not improve educational outcomes. Only 15 states still have this requirement.

- Reforms the process for selecting New Jersey State Board of Education members, so that they are accountable to the people of New Jersey rather than to the Governor who appointed them."

New Jersey's Former Standards Are Better Than Common Core State Standards

Drs. Chris Tienken and Eunyoung Kim from Seton Hall University and Dr. Dario Sforza, a high school principal in East Rutherford, NJ, recently published, “A Comparison of Higher-Order Thinking Between the Common Core State Standards and the 2009 New Jersey Content Standards in High School”. You can read their article in AASA Journal of Scholarship and Practice here. There has been "no qualitative analytical research…done to test the assumption that the CCSS are superior to previous state standards in the development of higher order thinking and creativity at the high school level.” 

For those of you unfamiliar with the history of the development of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and why we and many other states bothered to adopt them has been written about by many people. Among the most in-depth research has been from Louisiana teacher and education researcher, Mercedes Schneider. Read here, here, here, here, and here.   

The basics of the Why are simple. Under NCLB, all students (yes, really, ALL) were required to be proficient in grade level reading and math by 2014. Of course, that’s not possible. It never should have been put into law. Congress should have fixed that long before the looming deadline for compliance. Epic failures all around. 

Essentially circumventing federal requirements, USDOE introduced waivers to NCLB. In exchange for adopting the Common Core State Standards, having testing aligned to those standards, and development of teacher evaluations based on those standardized test scores, states could avoid NCLB penalties. New Jersey signed on, sight unseen. Feeling sick yet?  

Let's be really clear about this. The development of the standards was NOT driven by educational need. It was driven by political need. 

If you take a look at the composition of the work groups who developed the standards, you’ll find only five K-12 teachers out of 101 participants. You will find NOT ONE early childhood development or special education specialist either. You will find lots of people who worked for testing and publishing companies. The final insult was when Sandra Stotsky and James Milgram, both, served on the Validation Committee and are content experts in ELA and math respectively, refused to sign off on the final product. Read about them and their objections here, and listen here.

NJDOE has invested a lot of time and money into pushing CCSS. They have made incredible claims about their value and how much it would propel the children of New Jersey to “college and career readiness,” a term that is still without definition. PARCC, the CCSS-aligned test, was allegedly so good, that when Dr. Tienken asked Bari Erlichson from NJDOE, "Is the test worth teaching to?" Ms. Erlichson replied, "Yes...How many days does it take to get ready for the PARCC exam? 180. That is the length of the school year." This exchange happened at an event in Ridgewood, NJ, in November 2014, hosted by The League of Women Voters. See the entire panel discussion here, their exchange begins at 1:18:34.  

That was incredibly high praise for the assumption of good curricula based on standards that still hadn't been vetted and for a test that NO ONE had seen. 

Last year, Governor Christie announced the creation of a task force to study the Common Core State Standards. They were given a very short period of time to take public input, review each standard, and return recommendations for change. The end result was, as expected, a sham. It’s not a reflection of the time parents and teachers on the task force spent reviewing and revising the standards. It certainly was not a reflection of the testimony provided to the task force, but rather the insufficient time frame for producing standards, a report, and the Commissioner's insistence that it would likely be a just a "tweak." The task force came back with a 15% change in the standards, which, magically, coincides with the requirements of PARCC…anything more than a 15% change in standards would require dropping PARCC assessments. 

I wrote about the composition of the task force here. I still have not gotten an answer to my question regarding PTO participation, in spite of help from State Board of Education President, Mark Biedron. So much for transparency from NJDOE.

So, how did Tienken, Kim, and Sforza evaluate and compare the standards? They used Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK) and you can find an in-depth description of their methodology beginning on page 14, and a description of the four levels of DOK on page 10. Link to their article, again, is here.

DOK levels are described in the article as:

Level 1 Recall: requires “recall a simple definition, term, or fact, or replicate procedure, or algorithm. 

Level 2 Skill/Concepts: students develop some mental connections and make decisions about how to set up to approach a problem or activity to produce a response, apply a recalled skill, or engage in literal comprehension. 

Level 3 Strategic Thinking: engage in planning, reasoning, constructing arguments,making conjectures, and/or providing evidence when producing a response and require students to do some original concepts or draw conclusions. 

Level 4 Extended Thinking: engage in complex planning, reasoning, and conjecturing, and to develop lines of argumentation. Items at this level require students to make multiple connections between several different key and complex concepts, inferencing, or connecting the dots to create a big picture generalization. 

What did the study show? Hope the reformy cheerleaders are sitting down. Keep in mind, they only compared the high school level standards: CCSSe vs. NJCCCS. Are you ready? From page 18:

"Overall, the high school Common Core State Standards in ELA and M contained fewer standards rated at DOK Levels 3 and 4 than the 2009 New Jersey high school standards in ELA and math. That is, the standards that NJ had in place prior to adopting the Common Core provided more of the Level 3 and 4 higher order skills cited in mainstream business and education publication as necessary capabilities for competing in a global economy."

To summarize their findings, pages 18-23:

	Level 1	Level 2	Level 3	Level 4
CCSS ELA	37%	35%	26%	2%
NJCCCS ELA	22%	40%	33%	5%
CCSS Math	19%	71%	10%	Zero
NJCCCS Math	8%	54%	38%	10%

Hmmm...those numbers hardly suggest the far superior product we've been sold. Perhaps most damning in the article is this paragraph on page 26. 

"The results suggest that the previous versions of the NJ high school ELA and math standards included more complex, higher-order thinking and provided more opportunities to practice the types of thinking valued in the mainstream education reform literature as necessary to compete in the global economy. Although some have noted the CCSS as being more difficult than some previous states’ standards, difficulty is not a proxy for creativity and strategic thinking (e.g. Porter, McMaken, & Hwang, 2011). Convoluted prompts and questions and unclear portions of some standards do nothing to foster creative or strategic thinking (Wiggins, 2014)." 

Hard to say where I feel most disappointed. At the local level, I'm really tired of the Kool-Aid laden pep talks from supposed "experts" and "coaches". At the state level, NJDOE and State Board of Education, I'm tired of the gerbil wheel of spin that constantly comes out of their building. I'm tired of them having no accountability. I'm tired of parents and students having no voice. At the federal level, I'm tired of pretty much the same thing as the local and state levels. At state and federal levels I'm appalled at the amount of "philanthropic" money being tossed around and its influence on public policy, none of which addresses the most basic needs of many students.

In March 2014, Kevin Welner from the National Education Policy Center, had this to say about the adoption of CCSS in an article, The Lost Opportunity of the Common Core State Standards: 

"But the unfortunate reality is that whatever its potential benefits, the actual Common Core package will almost certainly exacerbate the policy failures of the past decade. Further, the linking of the Common Core to accountability regimes is a feature, not a bug. It is what was intended from the outset.

Importantly, the status quo approach involves a choice of one set of policies to the exclusion of another. When politicians opt for accountability and market-based privatization policies, they supersede policies that are grounded in best practices — evidence-based reforms that have succeeded in enhancing opportunities to learn.

In doing so, politicians seem willfully ignorant of the direct connection between opportunity and achievement. Our national opportunity gaps lead inexorably to our achievement gaps. Yet the test-based accountability policies still advocated by politicians disregard the opportunity side of the equation. Capacity building and supports are relegated to a small footnote within a long diatribe about mandated performance. The Marie Antoinettes of today proclaim, “Let them take tests,” callously brushing aside the needs of our children for intellectual nourishment."

The machine that churns out the This Is The Best Thing Ever! has to be stopped. Some really basic questions have to be answered. Maybe most important for parents is, at what point did you cede your voice and reason to the snake oil salesmen of college and career readiness? And then, what are you going to do about it? 

Those will be difficult questions for some. I can help with the second question. That one is easy. Opt Out of standardized testing. Stop feeding the machine. Force our legislators and departments of education, and our local districts, to truly create environments where our children can thrive. Please. Our children deserve so much better than this.

The End of Special Education Part II

In the add insult to injury category, on 16th November, USED sent a "Dear Colleague" letter to clarify that all IEPs must be aligned to state academic content standards (Common Core for most of us) for the grade level of the student. Let that sink in for just a sec. Realize that this letter is for "guidance" and is not actually a change to IDEA, which, for probably a very short while, is the law of the land. 

At the bottom of page one (the missive is seven pages long), in tiny type, is a clarification, or as I call it, weaseling out of any responsibility for any harm done, directly or indirectly, to a student with a disability because of this asinine, if not illegal, "guidance." Here is a tidbit: "The Department has determined that this document is a “significant guidance document” under the Office of Management and Budget’s Final Bulletin for Agency Good Guidance Practices...The purpose of this guidance is to provide State and local educational agencies (LEAs) with information to assist them in meeting their obligations under the IDEA and its implementing regulations in developing IEPs for children with disabilities. This guidance does not impose any requirements beyond those required under applicable law and regulations. It does not create or confer any rights for or on any person." Right. Thanks for letting parents know (oh wait, they didn't receive this letter) that in one paragraph you ignore IDEA and in the small print excuse yourself from culpability. <insert expletive of your choice>

The letter then goes on to discuss FAPE and how an IEP is the vehicle through which a student has access to FAPE. Ok, I'm good with that, but (seems there's always a "but") the paragraph before provided guidance that is the exact opposite of what an IEP actually is! Please, tell me. How are districts to provide FAPE while following USED's guidance (for which it takes no responsibility)? 

The next several pages are devoted to the interpretation of "general education curriculum" (read: state standards) and how USED thinks students with disabilities will magically be able to meet grade level standards, or at the very least close their own achievement gap year to year. I have no trouble with challenging students with disabilities, nor with attempting to close academic gaps. I do, however, have big issues with only allowing a small number, as yet undefined, to have modified standards and assessments that are appropriate for those individual students. That is the spirit of IDEA. To give access to an education, to the extent possible, to all students. Making it exponentially more difficult, just because (or because you have no idea what the hell you're talking about - which seems to be the case with USED), is cruel. Thank you, Nancy, for that word. That is exactly what it is. 

The example for implementation includes what must be the only idea the USED folks think special education is all about, that is using audio to help students who are reading significantly below grade level. If only it was as simple as subscribing to the reformy Audibles to cure significant reading deficits. Gee, wish I had thought of that. 

Are you seeing a trend here? Put changes up on the Federal Register. Ignore or blow off two years worth of comments and questions about the abject stupidity of the changes and the "supporting research." Then send "guidance" directly to district personnel which, as far as I can see, is directly in opposition to IDEA. 

Are you mad yet? 

Michael Yudin and Melody Musgrove from USED are hoping for feedback. Please give it to them: If you are interested in commenting on this document, please e-mail your comments to iepgoals@ed.gov or write to us at the following address: US Department of Education, 550 12th Street SW, PCP Room 5139, Washington, DC 20202-2600. Mostly they want to hear how well their guidance is working, but hey, probably better to just tell them the truth. 

Jumping Into the Fray

It's taken me a long time to get to this point. There were a few editorial incidents that almost got me here earlier this year. A very generous friend with a well-established following has allowed me space on her blog over the years. So, here I am because the issues of special education, testing, and the claim that without high-stakes standardized testing, students with disabilities -- along with economically disadvantaged and students of color --couldn't receive a good education, know how they are doing versus their peers, and are having their civil rights violated. Let's also throw in that white suburban moms were ruining their chance at equal educational opportunities just because they didn't want their own precious children stressed.

Yeah, time to call bullshit. I am one of those suburban moms. I am also the mom of teenaged daughter with traumatic brain injury. During our K-10 experience, the annual standardized testing, brought to us by No Child Left Behind, has been a disaster. I've been asking child study teams for years what the purpose of testing a student who is not educationally operating anywhere near grade level is. What exactly does anyone expect to get out of that that her teachers don't already know? The answer, in grades 3 through 7 were all the same. Let me know if any of  these sound familiar. "NJASK provides valuable data." "NJASK is required by law. Everyone has to take it." "NJASK is an excellent test and your daughter should try her best." "Don't worry, NJASK doesn't count for anything." "We will make sure your daughter is in a separate testing room and will be given lots of breaks." And so on. Anyone with a child with an IEP has heard some version of one or all of those. Anyone not living under a rock in NJ this past testing season will recognize the same arguments made for the PARCC exam.

Let me tell you the truth. Are your ready? A report that says "not proficient at grade level" is not helpful in any way, shape, or form -- either for you or for your child's teachers. It does not reflect the hard work done by both your child and their teachers. It does not reflect actual progress made throughout the year. And, just for good measure, if your child is like mine and fully understands her disabilities vs. her friends' abilities, it is the ultimate slap in the face. So, once again, what exactly is the purpose of giving this test to someone like my daughter and the thousands like her?

Thanks to a friend I finally figured out that I could opt my daughter out of NJASK. And that's exactly what I did. No semantic games of "refusing." Just relieved teachers and administrators who had all seen years of demoralized students and were powerless to do anything to help them.

Fast forward a couple of years and parents are catching on in droves. The entire education "reform" movement and the crazy testing that goes with it has finally woken them up. The landscape they have found is "reformers" who are incredibly well funded and have been carefully crafting and controlling the message of US education policy.

When I see a press release from The Leadership Conference, like the one from 5 May 2015, condemning "anti-testing efforts," I have to wonder why. Why do they and the members who signed (some organizations I have belonged to) believe that giving unproven tests to children of color, children who live in poverty, and children with disabilities, will level the proverbial playing field? If the same claims made by NCLB were true, then why didn't it work?

After the steam stopped coming our of my ears, I did what I usually do. I went to The Gates Foundation website and sure enough, The Leadership Conference had received over $1.7 million "to educate, inform, convene and communicate with its national coalition of civil rights advocates about the [Gates] US Program's Education Strategies." I find it hard to believe that money would have been taken if the leadership of The Leadership Conference didn't already buy into the testing crap. In my eyes, it sure explains the tone of the release. You can read the press release here. The signatories are an interesting mix of civil rights and special education groups.

That evening I wrote to Wade Henderson, Esq., President and CEO of The Leadership Conference. I'll post the full text of the letter below. Needless to say, I have not heard a peep from Mr. Henderson.

There have been other posts and letters to The Leadership Conference. I'll bet they did not expect any response at all. Here is the response from Jesse Hagopian and the Board of Directors of Network for Public Education. Here is the response from Julian Vasquez Heilig. And, here is a response, published in The Washington Post, from Wayne Au.

If you've made it this far, thanks for hanging in there. Here is my letter to Wade Henderson:

5 May 2015

Wade Henderson, Esq.

President and CEO

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

1629 K Street NW, 10th Floor
Washington, DC 20006

Dear Mr. Henderson,

I very rarely take the time to respond to press releases by organizations such as yours. However, the release dated today, 5^th May, has left me wondering who exactly you’re representing, because it certainly is not me or my disabled daughter.

Please allow me to explain why the current testing, and its abysmal 14-year track record, are not in the best interests of students with disabilities (SWD), for persons of color, or those who are economically disadvantaged.

As a parent and a parent advocate, I am in a position to see, on the ground, how the effects of NCLB, and now the implementation of Bill Gates’ vision of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the accompanying tests, have grossly underserved those LCCHR represents.

It’s easy to understand the draw of the notion that a student’s progress or a teacher’s effectiveness can be quantified. I have a corporate background. I get it. But, this is people we are talking about, and more specifically, people who for whatever reason have challenges that deserve much more than the idea that a test score will help them overcome those challenges.

NCLB did not close achievement gaps. It did not lead to better and innovative curriculum. It did not improve US scores on PISA.

What NCLB did do is create a really clear map of where the deepest pockets of poverty are in this country. It did demonstrate that attaching “high stakes” (someone’s profession, their livelihood) to a number made for a narrowing of curriculum as everyone was forced to teach to a test. Race to the Top is that program on steroids.

For the last 14 years, tax-payer money has been going to support a program that is not focused on raising up students, no matter what their situation. Special education, as I have lived it, in some of the wealthiest areas of this country, has been cut short by the insipid notion that having “higher expectations” and doing well on a test that takes none of my daughter’s disabilities into account, will somehow, magically produce better students, now called “college and career ready.” Anyone with the most basic background or exposure to SWD’s knows this is not true. We also know that all the money spent on testing and on remediation because a single test reported that students are “failing,” has not resulted in desperately needed funding reaching the populations most in need – students with disabilities, students of color, and students who are economically disadvantaged. 

Those scoring low on tests were labeled “failing” and punished with the loss of funds! Those “failing” scores translated into “failing schools” that were then closed and/or sold off to charter school companies. Imagine the very heart of your neighborhood being cut out. The effects are devastating – on the fired teachers, on the displaced school children, on loss of neighborhoods. This method is called “test and punish.”

Now, with the onset of CCSS testing -- here in New Jersey it is PARCC -- we have had to deal not only with the complete overhaul of CCSS-aligned curriculum, but also with whatever districts have had to purchase in order to administer this fully online test – infrastructure, hardware (laptops, tablets, etc.), new technology staff to manage all of this, professional development to administer the test, and so on. Districts, already strapped for money, have still had to find it somewhere. There has been no accountability for the money spent on CCSS or the testing. Do you think special ed programs didn’t suffer because of this? Do you think in areas with poverty that money could not have been spent on more meaningful things such as - textbooks, art supplies, and afterschool programs? What exactly was wrong with the grade span testing pre-NCLB? And why are you not advocating alternative assessments, such as NYC’s Performance Standards Consortium, which allow students like my daughter to show what they can do rather than simply fail a standardized test.

It is disheartening to hear organizations like yours, and the ones that comprise your membership, speak out against the one action that has actually gotten attention after years of parents being ignored. It is astonishing that your civil rights group doesn’t recognize civil disobedience when you see it, and what’s more, you condemn it!

Please, I implore you, take the time to understand what these standardized tests provide in terms of usable data. Receiving a “not proficient at grade level” designation is not even remotely helpful, especially when true diagnostic tests are available. Speak to parents. Speak to teachers.

I would be happy to have a discussion with you about testing, about special education, and how organizations like yours can help those of us living through this morass called public education.

Sincerely,

Julie B.

 If I ever hear from Mr. Henderson I'll let you know.

P.S. If anyone wants to talk about civil rights and special education rights let's start talking about equitable funding for schools, about properly funding special education programming, about well trained teachers, about alternative routes to graduation, and let's expel the myth that everyone has to be college and career ready.