John King's Law: 'Test & Punish'

Test-and-punish enforcer John King (right) with predecessor Arne Duncan. 

As he did while he was in New York, Ed. Sec. John King continues to play the enforcer on high-stakes, standardized test scores as the primary measure for rating schools under ESSA.

Now he's trying to force CA Gov. Jerry Brown to use a discredited, simplistic A-F grading system to rank schools or districts as  “very low performing,” “low performing,” “high performing,” or “very high-performing,” based mainly on students' standardized test scores. It's what he calls a “single summative rating”.

He acts as though Gov. Brown is committing treason by advocating the use of multiple measures.

King claims it has to be a "simple" rating system so that parents can understand it. He thinks parents are too stupid to understand that there's more than one way to tell how their schools and their children are doing. His approach is what led to the mass parent opt-out revolt in N.Y. under his administration.

This is the same line we heard under Bush's No Child Left Behind. It turned out that NCLB testing madness was just another form of social reproduction. Or more simply put, a way of replicating and enforcing existing inequalities by punishing schools and districts with the neediest kids. Testing mania only reinforced school segregation and hurt poor kids and children of color the most.

Not to mention the discredited role of the use of standardized tests as a valid measure when it comes to evaluating teachers or schools.

Some pinned their hopes on ESSA as a way of giving states and local districts more flexibility and easing the pressures of federally-enforced, top-down school "reform." I was even worried that the new law would just shift more power to southern segregationist states like Mississippi and Alabama. I still am.

But when Brown, the nation's most progressive Democratic governor, tried even the slightest departure from King's Law, he was called on the carpet. I say King's Law because there is nothing in ESSA to prevent a state from using multiple measures, just as California is already doing. King made it up.

When I tweeted about this yesterday, the first one to leap to King's defense was Arne Duncan's former flack, Peter Cunningham.

@mikeklonsky Not true. King is pushing for a simple rating so parents can understand. Doesn't have to be based only on test scores.

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) July 1, 2016

Yes, of course "not only." But mainly.

Yes, should have said, test score as PRIMARY measure instead of single measure. Just as discredited. Shame on King. https://t.co/7WXraNaUuD

— Mike Klonsky (@mikeklonsky) July 1, 2016

@mikeklonsky That's in the law. That's not King's call.

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) July 1, 2016

First of all, it's not "in the law." as even the law's co-sponsor, Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander points out. He asks King,

“I’d like you to think about where in the law you get the authority to provide for a single summative rating.” 

King has no answer.

Then Alexander tells King:

“You’ve invented out of whole cloth a so-called summative rating system that’s nowhere in the law that would essentially require all states to come up with an A through F system for all of their schools based primarily on test scores on federally mandated tests in math and reading."

The great irony here is that when Arne Duncan ran the DOE, with help from Peter Cunningham, NCLB was "the law."  That didn't stop Duncan from imposing Duncan's Law, otherwise known as the now-discredited Race To The Top.

There are no big surprises here, especially when you consider King's history in N.Y.  As AFT Prez Randi Weingarten succinctly put it:

 ...his tenure as New York state’s education commissioner created so much polarization in the state with parents and educators alike that even Gov. Andrew Cuomo is finally doing a mea culpa over the obsession with testing. We can only hope that King has learned a thing or two since his tenure in New York.”

He hasn't.

No, don't leave minimum wage, testing, or school deseg to the states

Just got a robocall from CTU organizer Brandon Johnson reminding me to call my state senator (Iris Martinez) and push for passage of HB557, the elected school board bill. So I did. Thanks Brandon.

Donald Trump now says, he supports a raise in the minimum wage. Good thing I'm wearing my flood pants. The campaign bullshit is already ankle-deep.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, Trump told Chuck Todd, “I don’t know how people make it on $7.25.” Soon after, on ABC’s “This Week,” the Republican added, “I haven’t decided in terms of numbers, but I think people have to get more.”

 TODD: Right. You want the fed– but should the federal government set a floor, and then you let the states– 

TRUMP: No, I’d rather have the states go out and do what they have to do. And the states compete with each other, not only other countries, but they compete with each other, Chuck. So I like the idea of let the states decide. But I think people should get more. I think they’re out there. They’re working. It is a very low number. You know, with what’s happened to the economy, with what’s happened to the cost. I mean, it’s just– I don’t know how you live on $7.25 an hour. But I would say let the states decide.

I haven't heard so much states-rights pandering since the Supreme Court ruled on Brown vs. Board of Ed in '54,  when the big scare in Dixie was that the federal gov't was going to force school desegregation at gun-point upon the states. That sure as hell didn't happen. Did it?

Ironically, it was Pres. Obama's right-hand man in education, Arne Duncan, who undercut the Justice Dept's own move against Louisiana's use of vouchers and charter schools to promote re-segregation. Duncan's argument against "forced integration" echoed those of AR Gov. Orville Faubus and AL police chief "Bull" Conner in the '50s.

Trump says, let the states compete over minimum wage with corporate-tool govs like Bobby Jindal in LA, Bruce Rauner in IL, Scott Walker in WI, or John Kasich in OH leading the charge. Great plan, Trumpf. Isn't that what we have now? MW will be down to a dollar a day.

As a direct result of the Fight For 15 Movement, several cities have already passed $15/hr. minimum-wage ordinances on their own. And guess what? The Golden Gate Bridge hasn't fallen into the bay. In fact, biz is booming wherever the MW is the highest. Companies are not fleeing San Francisco, Pittsburgh, L.A., or N.Y.  A federal minimum-wage floor would ensure that they can't.

But Trump isn't the only one raising up the new states-rights banner. After all, isn't that the gist of the new national education law that even the teacher unions are raving about?

Pres. Obama signs new ESSA law. 

ESSA supposedly ends the years of testing madness imposed by the DOE (good) and greatly limits the federal government’s control of education policy that began in 1965 when the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) passed as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.

I guess the war is over. Poverty won.

But there's no indication that leaving testing (or poverty) in the hands of the states will eliminate or reduce testing madness or improve learning outcomes.

Arguments for or against federal power mean little without content. Yes, keep big gov't (state and federal) hands off our cell phones, churches and out of our bed rooms. Cut the Pentagon war machine, yes.

But on things like environmental protection, federal lands and national parks, enforcement of civil rights law, gun control, and protection of our drinking water (Flint, MI) -- hands on.

As for unrestricted states power over education, take a look at what's going on in IL.

Chicago Public Schools are now 10 months without a budget. Gov. Rauner continues to hold the budget hostage, hoping for a pro-business, "grand bargain" with Boss Madigan that includes draconian cuts to social services and the neutering of the state's teacher unions. State colleges universities like Chicago State, are on the brink of collapse and corrupt charter school networks like UNO are laughing all the way to the bank.

Where are you feds?

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

The mayor of San Francisco is sworn in — to boos and arrests

Valerie Jarrett on #RahmResign

“So I really shouldn’t comment on Chicago in particular because it’s under that investigation of [Loretta Lynch] hers.” In the interview with BuzzFeed at the White House Friday, Jarrett praised the protests, giving them credit for the current focus on the Chicago police.

“We’ve seen so many peaceful demonstrations. I don’t think we get sufficient credit to the demonstrators who are out there in the cold in Chicago — all over — demonstrating, trying to say we want change." -- BuzzFeed

Community activist Jared Steverson

 "As you can see, [Mayor Emanuel] is going to black colleges. He's going to places where black people and Latino people are because he wants to get us back before election time comes in the next three years," Steverson said. When asked if that could happen, Steverson said, "not at all." -- ABC7

Pedro Noguera

[ESSA] is not addressing the real issues related to poverty that are contributing to why those schools are struggling... Students respond well to teachers they know, believe in them, care about them, but also who teach in a matter that elicits a more active approach to learning, rather than just sitting and listening. -- Mother Jones

David Kirp

Mr. Cerf and Raz Baraka, who succeeded Cory Booker as mayor, recently announced that up to $12.5 million of the Zuckerberg gift will be invested in a network of “community schools” — sunrise-to-sunset schools that offer health care and social services, located in the city’s most troubled neighborhoods. -- N.Y. Times

Lonnie Scott, executive director of Progress Michigan

"Families in Flint were forced to drink lead-tainted water while the administration scoffed at their concerns and cries for help. An entire generation of Michiganders now face an uncertain future because of Republican cuts to essential and life-giving services." -- Common Dreams

Even under new law, Common Core still impacts curriculum

Abandon the notion of subject-matter as something fixed and ready-made in itself, outside the child's experience. -- John Dewey

Remember back a couple of years ago when Common Core critics were being raked over the coals by Arne Duncan, Peter Cunningham and others for calling CCSS a curriculum?

Here's Duncan in 2013:

The Common Core has become a rallying cry for fringe groups that claim it is a scheme for the federal government to usurp state and local control of what students learn. An op-ed in the New York Times called the Common Core “a radical curriculum.” It is neither radical nor a curriculum. … When the critics can’t persuade you that the Common Core is a curriculum, they make even more outlandish claims.

"It's not a curriculum," they scolded. "It's merely standards." Such a dichotomy! Supposedly, Common Core wouldn't tell schools what, when, or how to teach. Rather, it would only create performance goals and, of course, the battery of tests to go with them.

Well, Duncan was right about Common Core not being "radical." But Common Core sure as hell is curricular. If not, why, for example is there something called Common Core algebra as opposed to just algebra? Or Common Core U.S. History?

A year later, it was Duncan's former deputy, Peter Cunningham, now writing for Eli Broad-funded Education Post, rendering Arne even more profound.

Standards are set at the state level and define learning goals. Curriculum is the actual content that is taught and is usually chosen and developed at the local level, often by the teachers themselves.

Let's leave aside, for a moment at least, the question of whether or not teachers have the power to decide curriculum, and get to Cunningham's main point -- the supposed wall between standards and curriculum.

Bureaucratic non-educators like Duncan and Cunningham don't know a curriculum from a corral. They look at it as simply a technical process.

But curriculum encompasses the entire process and content of teaching/learning. It defines the educational foundations, the experience of the child and teacher, goals and contents, their sequencing in relation to the amount of time available for the learning experiences, the learning environment inside and outside of the classroom, the methods to be used, the resources for learning and teaching (e.g., textbooks and new technologies), evaluation and more.

Fast forward to today... EdWeek reports that Algebra 1 is a much tougher course under the Common Core and that students are now being introduced to algebraic concepts earlier in middle school. As a result, Algebra has become more of a gate-keeper and sorting mechanism than it already was. In New York, this puts even more students in peril of not graduating or going to college, widening the already vast chasm between students from affluent households, and poor, black, Latino and white students.

The percentage of N.Y. students who passed the test this year dropped precipitously: Just 63% of test-takers passed the common-core-aligned exam. That was down from 72% who passed the previous year's "Integrated Algebra" test.

That's thousands of kids who won't be able to graduate high school on time.

Why should Algebra be the gate-keeper as opposed to science, social-studies, or the arts? Who decides what's most worthwhile for all students to learn? Answer: Under Common Core, now re-ratified under the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) signed by President Obama this month, it's still not educators who decide -- despite Cunningham's claim.

More from EdWeek...

Common-core implementation has been fraught in New York. Many teachers denounced the speed with which they were expected to shift to the new standards, saying they lacked sufficient training and resources. 

True, some authority has been shifted from the D.O.E. to the states -- an admission that the feds had overplayed their role under Duncan's regime -- but what is tested, either by the states or the feds, is still what's being taught.

ESSA supporters, including the AFT and NEA leadership, say the new law gives states the right to reject the standards, which they say should help end any controversy over top-down control.

But is giving more power to Mississippi or Alabama pols over curricular decisions a good thing? Not in my mind. And besides, despite claims by Republicans like ESSA co-author Sen. Lamar Alexander, that the new law gets rid of Common Core, it's just not true.

No, under the ESSA, the U.S. Department of Education retains regulatory powers, including the final say on how and when states determine schools are low-performing. The law also maintains annual testing requirements for grades 3-8 and in high school. And it will still be the giant textbook and testing companies who have the real power in driving curriculum.

.@arneduncan says foes of Common Core = white suburban moms who find their "child isn’t as brilliant as they thought" & "that's pretty scary

— Stephanie Simon (@StephanieSimon_) November 15, 2013

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

John Dewey, founder of the Lab School where Mayor Emanuel sends his children, on DuSable librarian. 

17-year-old DuSable senior Sabaria Dean

“The librarian is like a mentor to me, a resource. She's dedicated her entire life to DuSable and the children in it. She deserves to be here...“Libraries are essential to all CPS schools, not just Dusable. Without resources and reliable people, such as librarians, our resources are limited. Being on the South Side of Chicago is already a huge disadvantage."” -- DNAinfo

John Kass

Rahm Emanuel has lost the city and he can't get it back. -- Tribune

Peniel E. Joseph

The ugly truth—that historically affirmative action has been exclusively reserved for privileged white Americans (mostly male until the civil rights revolution)—is rarely, if ever, acknowledged.Certainly not by Justice Scalia. -- Newsweek

 Barack Obama on ESSA

Referred to the bipartisan bill-signing as “a Christmas miracle.” -- New York Times